I don't know for sure, but I believe that some or all of the items you mentioned are (or should be) covered by design patents. Design patents have different standards of originality and non-obviousness than normal utility patents.
Most software patents are utility patents. The problem is that patents are designed to protect an implementation, not an idea. Herein lies the problem.
For example, compare the patent on the first steam engine to the LZW patent. If I remember my history correctly, the first practical steam engine was not invented by James Watt. Someone else invented it and patented it, something like "Method and apparatus for converting steam pressure into mechanical energy". Watt wanted to build steam engines, but was blocked by this patent. So he modified the design a bit and ended up developing a better engine and dominated the market. This is the patent system at its best, protecting an implementation and simultaneously promoting an idea.
Contrast this with the LZW patent, something like "Method and apparatus for compressing and decompressing a stream of bits". Suppose I came up with a program which can decompress an LZW bitstream. Suppose further that my decompressor software is significantly different from that which was patented. Say for instance, that it reuires only 1/10th the memory and runs twice as fast on the same hardware as the patented implementation. I should be able to do this.
However, Unisys interprets its patent as covering the bitstream format, and any program I write which works with the format infringes. This is like saying that any machine which uses steam pressure infringes on the original steam engine patent. This is obviously (patently) incorrect.
A software patent should be like any patent on any physical object, IE a protection of the implementation, not the idea. A program which does the same thing in a different way should not infringe. This concept of software patent is sounding more and more like conventional copyright. Any program which is sufficiently similar to the patented program to infringe the patent also infringes on the copyright.
Patents exist to protect physical objects, since you can't copyright an object, only a document. Copyrights offer equivalent protection to documents as patents do to objects. Therefore, software patents are redundant and should be disallowed.
This is an interesting thing I had not heard before. Everything I have read on GR that talks about "speed of gravity" and speed of propagation of gravity waves mentions c. I guess I thought someone had done the integration and showed that the observed effects on orbits (like perihelion advance) are either not affected by gravity speed or show that this speed is c.
If what you say is correct, you could in theory send a signal by gravity wave much faster than c. This of course would revolutionize the communications industry when we have sufficiently sensitive gravity wave detectors.
Also, the speed of any wave is the product of its wavelength and frequency (c=lambda*nu). The generator of the wave can only affect the frequency, since the speed is dependent on the medium and the wavelength is therefore determined. So, if the speed of gravity wave propagation is dramatically higher than predicted, the wavelength must be dramatically longer, not shorter. This won't help LIGO out any, since it is sensitive to wave amplitude, not wavelength.
Can you provide any details or links about this effect?
17 USC Sec. 117. - Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs
(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy. -
Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or
(2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful. US Code at Cornell University
So the law is explicit that you have the right to copy the program into RAM to use it. You do not need a license to use a program which you have legally acquired.
Thanks for the reference! It was always obvious to me that using a product for its intended purpose is fair use, but it is nice to know that there is a specific legal foundation for this.
If I had a mod point, I would give it to you. I don't, so I am replying.
Maybe all the libertarians, small government conservatives and their ilk should consider that the purpose of government is to serve the people; to provide widely accessible services (health? education? public services?).
That's just the point. A libertarian (and I suspect the majority of the autohrs of the Constitution) would say that the purpose of government is to protect ourselves from eachother. Once our inalienable rights are protected, the government's job is done. It has no business providing health, education, or any other kind of service.
Ok, maybe we need a better definition of random. Suppose I use my client mostly to look for anime, or some other small segment of the universe of content that is out there. There is still a continuous wash of search terms coming into my client based on the combined interests of all the users inside my horizon.
Now, my client mixes and matches terms from the influx of searches to generate its random validation searches. It just needs to make sure not to match any of the searches I actually entered. Since my validations will match up with the general flux of searches, there is no way for a person, let alone a program, to distinguish my validation searches from my real ones, unless the person or program knows me personally.
Combined with the other ideas mentioned, I think this is sufficient to find the malicious servers and ignore them. I might just build this into the open-source client I use.
It doesn't seem to me that making a cell phone jammer or wire tap hardware is or should be illegal. It is the use of those devices that would be illegal, in the first case for breaking FCC frequency regulations, in the second case for tresspass and damaging phone company property to install the tap.
Once you combine otherwise harmless chemicals into meth, it becomes a controlled substance, and is no longer the original chemicals anymore. In most cases mere posession of a controlled substance is illegal. This does not mean that the ingredients should be regulated.
IANAL, blah, blah. I AM an engineer, and I depend on having the tools I need to do my job. What makes me mad is people regulating the use of tools because they lack the imagination to see alternate uses for those tools. Companies are too lazy, and go after us poor engineers for making tools which might be used for some illegal purpose, instead of prosecuting the actual criminals, the users who intentionally do the illegal thing.
That's ridiculous. How complicated can a pacemaker be? It's a clock connected to a heart-zapper-thingie. It doesn't need to be a turing-complete device capable of running arbitrary programs.
Just because it's electronic, doesn't mean its a computer.
OK, try to construct an angle of exactly 1 radian, to the same precision you can construct a right angle or 60 degree angle.
Sounds like it would be more useful to use semicircles. Semicircles have all the advantages of radians without the pi factor. Whenever you want to do trig (where radians are a natural unit) then you multiply by pi. You get all the advantages of using fractions, and if you wanted you could talk about percent of a semicircle (for all you decimal freaks.)
The GPS broadcast ephemeris and almanacs already use semicircles.
Would it be prudent for $GOVERNMENT_AGENCY to use software that thousands of unknown programmers have intimate knowledge of for something this critical?
I guess not, so they should not trust the thousands of unknown programmers at M$.
ok, then why is it that open source Apache is hacked much less than proprietary IIS?
There is a company called eEye (I think) whose main product is a program for automatically finding holes in executables. This is done without benifit of source code, and it is the way the Code Red hole was discovered.
Instead of building factories, tear them down. Instead of cutting down trees, plant some new ones. Replace your car with a horse and buggy, your GAP clothes with furs and skins, your television with books and sex. Instead of a Cold War, have a Cold Peace!
Instead of having billions of people, kill 95% of them.
Go ahead. Roll a D20. If you get 20, you get to live. otherwise, kill yourself.
Lawyers CAN spontaneously create lawsuits. Lawsuits may be filed on behalf of clients, but often clients are advised by their attorney to sue when they would not have on their own accord. A primary example is evident on daytime television commercials where Dewey, Cheetham, & Howe, ambulance-chasers-at-law, tell how they can "Fight for Justice" by having people sue their insurance companies for larger claim settlements. My subject is the tagline of a lawyer commercial played with monotonous regularity in Los Angeles.
Slashdot Mirror
Hitler: Kill all the jews! (Mein Kampf)
Marx: Kill all the capitalists! (Communist Manifesto)
Why is one hate speech and the other isnt?
I don't know for sure, but I believe that some or all of the items you mentioned are (or should be) covered by design patents. Design patents have different standards of originality and non-obviousness than normal utility patents.
Most software patents are utility patents. The problem is that patents are designed to protect an implementation, not an idea. Herein lies the problem.
For example, compare the patent on the first steam engine to the LZW patent. If I remember my history correctly, the first practical steam engine was not invented by James Watt. Someone else invented it and patented it, something like "Method and apparatus for converting steam pressure into mechanical energy". Watt wanted to build steam engines, but was blocked by this patent. So he modified the design a bit and ended up developing a better engine and dominated the market. This is the patent system at its best, protecting an implementation and simultaneously promoting an idea.
Contrast this with the LZW patent, something like "Method and apparatus for compressing and decompressing a stream of bits". Suppose I came up with a program which can decompress an LZW bitstream. Suppose further that my decompressor software is significantly different from that which was patented. Say for instance, that it reuires only 1/10th the memory and runs twice as fast on the same hardware as the patented implementation. I should be able to do this.
However, Unisys interprets its patent as covering the bitstream format, and any program I write which works with the format infringes. This is like saying that any machine which uses steam pressure infringes on the original steam engine patent. This is obviously (patently) incorrect.
A software patent should be like any patent on any physical object, IE a protection of the implementation, not the idea. A program which does the same thing in a different way should not infringe. This concept of software patent is sounding more and more like conventional copyright. Any program which is sufficiently similar to the patented program to infringe the patent also infringes on the copyright.
Patents exist to protect physical objects, since you can't copyright an object, only a document. Copyrights offer equivalent protection to documents as patents do to objects. Therefore, software patents are redundant and should be disallowed.
Well... that's the way it should be.
This is an interesting thing I had not heard before. Everything I have read on GR that talks about "speed of gravity" and speed of propagation of gravity waves mentions c. I guess I thought someone had done the integration and showed that the observed effects on orbits (like perihelion advance) are either not affected by gravity speed or show that this speed is c.
If what you say is correct, you could in theory send a signal by gravity wave much faster than c. This of course would revolutionize the communications industry when we have sufficiently sensitive gravity wave detectors.
Also, the speed of any wave is the product of its wavelength and frequency (c=lambda*nu). The generator of the wave can only affect the frequency, since the speed is dependent on the medium and the wavelength is therefore determined. So, if the speed of gravity wave propagation is dramatically higher than predicted, the wavelength must be dramatically longer, not shorter. This won't help LIGO out any, since it is sensitive to wave amplitude, not wavelength.
Can you provide any details or links about this effect?
Well, let's see here...
116230.5/299792458
=3.877e-4
<0.5
Well whaddaya know? It is less than half!
Bad math! BAD! You divided by zero! no donut for you.
(a-a)=0 for all values of a
So the law is explicit that you have the right to copy the program into RAM to use it. You do not need a license to use a program which you have legally acquired.
Thanks for the reference! It was always obvious to me that using a product for its intended purpose is fair use, but it is nice to know that there is a specific legal foundation for this.
If I had a mod point, I would give it to you. I don't, so I am replying.
That's just the point. A libertarian (and I suspect the majority of the autohrs of the Constitution) would say that the purpose of government is to protect ourselves from eachother. Once our inalienable rights are protected, the government's job is done. It has no business providing health, education, or any other kind of service.
Ok, maybe we need a better definition of random. Suppose I use my client mostly to look for anime, or some other small segment of the universe of content that is out there. There is still a continuous wash of search terms coming into my client based on the combined interests of all the users inside my horizon.
Now, my client mixes and matches terms from the influx of searches to generate its random validation searches. It just needs to make sure not to match any of the searches I actually entered. Since my validations will match up with the general flux of searches, there is no way for a person, let alone a program, to distinguish my validation searches from my real ones, unless the person or program knows me personally.
Combined with the other ideas mentioned, I think this is sufficient to find the malicious servers and ignore them. I might just build this into the open-source client I use.
It doesn't seem to me that making a cell phone jammer or wire tap hardware is or should be illegal. It is the use of those devices that would be illegal, in the first case for breaking FCC frequency regulations, in the second case for tresspass and damaging phone company property to install the tap.
Once you combine otherwise harmless chemicals into meth, it becomes a controlled substance, and is no longer the original chemicals anymore. In most cases mere posession of a controlled substance is illegal. This does not mean that the ingredients should be regulated.
IANAL, blah, blah. I AM an engineer, and I depend on having the tools I need to do my job. What makes me mad is people regulating the use of tools because they lack the imagination to see alternate uses for those tools. Companies are too lazy, and go after us poor engineers for making tools which might be used for some illegal purpose, instead of prosecuting the actual criminals, the users who intentionally do the illegal thing.
This patent was filed under the old rules, which still apply to old patents. 17 years after filing is correct.
That's ridiculous. How complicated can a pacemaker be? It's a clock connected to a heart-zapper-thingie. It doesn't need to be a turing-complete device capable of running arbitrary programs.
Just because it's electronic, doesn't mean its a computer.
Interesting... I would like to read more about it. Do you have a source for this?
OK, try to construct an angle of exactly 1 radian, to the same precision you can construct a right angle or 60 degree angle.
Sounds like it would be more useful to use semicircles. Semicircles have all the advantages of radians without the pi factor. Whenever you want to do trig (where radians are a natural unit) then you multiply by pi. You get all the advantages of using fractions, and if you wanted you could talk about percent of a semicircle (for all you decimal freaks.)
The GPS broadcast ephemeris and almanacs already use semicircles.
Maybe there is something wrong with your hardware?
grep "xercist" /dev/random ...you'll find me in there someday :)
now that is a truly interesting waste of computer time...
Would it be prudent for $GOVERNMENT_AGENCY to use software that thousands of unknown programmers have intimate knowledge of for something this critical?
I guess not, so they should not trust the thousands of unknown programmers at M$.
ok, then why is it that open source Apache is hacked much less than proprietary IIS?
There is a company called eEye (I think) whose main product is a program for automatically finding holes in executables. This is done without benifit of source code, and it is the way the Code Red hole was discovered.
Security through obscurity is dead.
Instead of having billions of people, kill 95% of them.
Go ahead. Roll a D20. If you get 20, you get to live. otherwise, kill yourself.
Lawyers CAN spontaneously create lawsuits. Lawsuits may be filed on behalf of clients, but often clients are advised by their attorney to sue when they would not have on their own accord. A primary example is evident on daytime television commercials where Dewey, Cheetham, & Howe, ambulance-chasers-at-law, tell how they can "Fight for Justice" by having people sue their insurance companies for larger claim settlements. My subject is the tagline of a lawyer commercial played with monotonous regularity in Los Angeles.
In theory it could... translate Bochs (An x86 system emulator) into its language and then run linux on that.