I still don't understand what makes algorithms and software OBVIOUSLY not patentable.
I don't know that anybody is saying that no software invention ever will meet the requirements for patentability. The real problem is that as the rules have been interpreted to date patents have been allowed for many things that occurred and were destined to occur in ordinary course of software development. Out of every 10,000 software patents there is maybe one that genuinely has the level of invention making it appropriate to patent. Because of the scale of abuse of the patent system in the software industry - where the damage caused by abuse far outstrips the benefits reaped from legitimate patents - the most obvious solution is to scrap them.
Some interesting passages for software from the syllabus:
"Granting patent protection to advances that would occur in the ordinary course without real innovation retards progress and may, for patents combining previously known elements, deprive prior inventions of their value or utility" (page 5). This is what the LPF has been saying for years.
"... a person of ordinary skill often will be able to fit the teachings of multiple patents together like a jigsaw puzzle" (page 5). This sounds exactly like software development. I would also note that you could substitute "literature", "prior works" or a whole range of other things for "patents" in this sentence.
"When there is a design need or market pressure to solve a problem and there are a finite number of identified, predictable solutions, a person of ordinary skill in the art has good reason to pursue the known options within his or her technical grasp" (page 6). This one is huge. Patent applicants, especially in the software industry but also in other industries, have been patenting entire problem spaces by patenting all of the predictable solutions. This decision will put a stop to that.
Also the patent office has been very lazy about assessing industry knowledge by assuming that if the industry knows something somebody will have patented it. They will not be able to assume that anymore.
The Court has phrased this as a minor correction to lower courts, but this minor correction is going to see massive numbers of patents invalidated. If you get attacked by a patent troll your defence just became a whole lot easier. It's not a complete solution to the problem of meritless patents, but it will help.
If you earn Linden Dollars, and sell them for real-world dollars, you're earning income, and are subject to paying income tax on those earnings.
Actually, if you're earning significant numbers of Linden Dollars your earnings may already be taxable even without converting them to hard currency. This will almost certainly be the case for anybody operating as a real estate mogul in SL - each transaction will be a tax event. It will depend on a lot of factors, but if you're setting out to make money out of SL your earnings there will be taxable and they will be taxed according to the time of each transaction, not according to when you convert the assets to hard currency.
When calling the number for tech support - they say it's due to the laser on the machine getting old
Actually this is a huge problem with optical drives - the laser/receptor assembly deteriorates over time and when it does deteriorate it will start failing to read DVDs at the margins of readability. You ought to be able to just return the DVD for a new one unless there was a problem with the master. Depending on how bold you are you might also open up the unit (disconnect it from the mains and everything else before you do this) and clean the lenses with a Q-Tip (or Cotton Bud as we call them in Australia) and rubbing alcohol. If some dust or grime has accumulated on the lens this may improve your ability to read marginal DVDs.
check out the Bush speech where he uses this saying
Ah, I don't think that got played on the major media in Australia. Actually I used to think the send-ups of Bush on "Saturday Night Live" (we get it on cable) were hysterical. Then I visited the US a couple of years back and saw one of his press briefings live to air, and suddenly the send-ups didn't seem so funny anymore. Perhaps that is his strategy - avoid being sent up by making the reality so bad that you leave the satirists nowhere to go?
They swapped it for a second brand new model. The second brand new model came with a 3 year warranty, and we're not up to the 2 years, 6 months mark yet.
I forgot to mention the real sweet part. The cost of the new player is always lower than the old player, but the way Philips do the replacements is this: they tell the store to do the old player as a defective return and refund the purchase price, then sell you the new player (Presumably Philips reimburses the store for the full cost of doing so). Each time the DVD player breaks down within the warranty period, Philips actually pays me to get a new DVD player.
The best DVD player I ever bought was a Philips. It came with a 3 year warranty, and broke down after 2 years, 6 months. They swapped it for a brand new model. The brand new model came with a 3 year warranty, and broke down after 2 years, 6 months. They swapped it for a second brand new model. The second brand new model came with a 3 year warranty, and we're not up to the 2 years, 6 months mark yet.
Just thinking about it, if they're selling them using the DVD label identifying it as a dvd, doesn't it legally have to be playable in dvd compatible players?
This will depend very much on the local laws. In Australia a DVD that fails to play in a significant number of DVD players meets the statutory definition of unmerchantability, which requires goods to be suitable for every purpose for which they are normally bought (unlike other places where they have to be suitable for just one of the purposes for which they are normally bought). This will give the consumer the right to a refund, but won't lead to any penalty. There is also an argument that applying the label "DVD" to the product (or even selling it in a manner that makes it seem like it is a DVD) is misleading conduct for which anybody could apply to the Federal Court to get an injunction to prevent the product from being sold in that way.
Spammers started doing something very much like this shortly after captchas became popular. I don't know if they continued doing it, but for a while some porn sites were presenting captchas from other sites, asking the user to provide the answer, and then the porn site would use the user's input to respond to the captcha at the target web site.
It's probably a good thing that corporations can't get married.
I don't know about that. If they were married then at least they'd commit to only screwing their one partner. Right now they try to screw everybody they possibly can.
I also assume you have sent your concerns to ECMA and Microsoft so that the specification can be improved if required.
Why would I do that when we have a perfectly good, genuinely open standard? I'm not interested in spending any of my time helping Microsoft be evil by producing a competing "standard" that's designed to promote continued lock-in. Quite frankly if they're determined to do that they really have no business expecting others to help when they screw it up.
Isn't Office implemented with a different version of the schema (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?f amilyid=15805380-f2c0-4b80-9ad1-2cb0c300aef9&displ aylang=en/)
Ah, the irony. A purported "standard" that is itself wrapped in a Microsoft proprietary format (in this case, CHM).
Rubbish. Post your evidence. Hopefully it will be substantiated with your own investigation, rather than giving support to yet more questionable 'research' on the topic.
Since I've actually done it, I have all the evidence I need. To get it to work I literally had to deviate from the documented standard, and not just in small ways. There are attributes and namespaces that Office expects to be different to what is in the documented standard. Sometimes it's just an error in case (which is still an error since XML is case sensitive) or a missing (or additional) letter. Sometimes it's a completely different string. Sometimes (in the case of a namespace) there's a path component in a URI that is in the spec but if you don't take that component out Office can't read the document. Sometimes the description of a tag is just blatantly wrong.
their new XML is as poorly defined as any of their formats
It's actually much worse than the/. article you linked to would suggest. That article merely suggests there are undocumented bits, but the truth is that a substantial portion of the documentation is flat out wrong. If you follow the documentation, I guarantee you that your file will not be readable in any version of Microsoft Office.
Before you can call it a socialist system, you'd need to demonstrate that a command economy is possible.
Socialism, properly so called, does not involve a command economy. Read up a little on Marx and Engels' positions (particularly Engels) and you'll find they actually claim that once socialism is correctly implemented and entrenched the State will wither away because it will have no purpose - that there will be no reason to have an all-encompassing power to make rules for people. Stated that simply it sounds absurd, but the reasoning is quite complex and it would be a mistake to conclude from this brief summary that it's a load of BS - read some of their work and then some of more recent jurisprudential scholars and then you can conclude (if you still think so) that it's BS.
Real socialists actually do look at the open source movement and say "see, this is what we have been talking about the whole time, it can work." One of Australia's most prominent socialists has said this to me in so many words. Nobody is forcing open source developers to do what they do, but open source does closely model what Marx and Engels believed would eventually happen to society as a whole.
there's no way for a thread to block on whichever happens first of a file descriptor being readable or a condition variable being signalled
This is not quite true - you can always use a pipe, for example, to select and write a byte to the write side of the pipe when the condition variable is changed.
FYI, Rumsfeld is out. Robert Gates is the secretary of defense.
You know that, and I know that, but does he know that? He still thinks invading Iraq was a pretty good idea and that everything that has happened since has been a delightful success, so delusion doesn't seem to be something he lacks.
Add to this that the networks stop shows mid-season without explanation (most of the time they don't even tell you it won't be on next week let alone when it will be on next), then move them to another time slot without ever advertising the new time slot to viewers. When you find out that 6 episodes of one of your favourite shows have aired at 2:30am before you found out about it, you can either pick up the season with some badly lost context (not an attractive option), wait until it comes onto Foxtel (actually not a bad option - Foxtel are pretty good about these things and treat their audiences far, far better than the networks), drop the show altogether, or download it illegally. If you don't have Foxtel, the only viable options are ditching the show or downloading it. Ditching it doesn't help the network or the producer, so in such cases having the customer download it may be in their best interests if it means the customer is catching up and will continue watching the free to air version - when they actually know it's on.
The next stage of evolution won't be long now... In a few years scientists will discover the monkeys have learnt how to lash these sticks together to make chairs.
Nah, in the next stage the chimps will learn to trade the spears with gorillas to get food. Then they will trade spears with a rival tribe of gorillas for more food. Then they will sit back, watch the gorillas kill eachother, then eat the gorillas.
After all, if Ronald Regan can do this with gorillas* in South America, the chimps can do it with gorillas in Africa.
If that were true, wouldn't they have just chosen Linux/OSS to start with and avoid the possibility of being caught?
No. The point is most people don't know how easy Linux is to install and use for basic tasks that cover most people. Forcing them to learn this is probably not to Microsoft's advantage.
If Microsoft upsets these people into turning to OSS, then there's no lost revenue.
That's not entirely true, since it will mean 250 people are now getting familiar with Linux who otherwise would not be. When they discover that 95% or more of them can do everything they need under Linux with an out-of-the-box configuration, they're more likely to consider Linux when they move to other jobs. As a software vendor, my position is that if the customer is going to install unlicensed software anyway I want them installing mine because that may lead to revenue down the track. I don't want them being used to the competitor's stuff when either they grow to the point that they want to legitimise everything or they move to another employer and get to choose a software package.
As a side note, KDE 3.5 with udev (and all the bits in between) handles ad-hoc device connection so well now that in some respects it's now better at it than Windows. There's still room for improvement, but the complaint that "it's hard to set up devices under Linux" is diminishing.
if you put a couple Xeons in there, you'll need some seriously loud fans.
Or you could use an airflow device without moving parts. I can't be certain since I haven't seen one in operation, but intuitively they ought to be quieter.
They claim that you can get the datasheets etc, but in reality I have asked them several times and never got an response.
Did you ask them by email? I have found it much more effective to telephone hardware vendors when asking for datasheets. If an email goes to the wrong person it's likely to get dropped on the floor. It's harder to do that to somebody who is at the other end of the phone seeking a response.
Slashdot Mirror
I still don't understand what makes algorithms and software OBVIOUSLY not patentable.
I don't know that anybody is saying that no software invention ever will meet the requirements for patentability. The real problem is that as the rules have been interpreted to date patents have been allowed for many things that occurred and were destined to occur in ordinary course of software development. Out of every 10,000 software patents there is maybe one that genuinely has the level of invention making it appropriate to patent. Because of the scale of abuse of the patent system in the software industry - where the damage caused by abuse far outstrips the benefits reaped from legitimate patents - the most obvious solution is to scrap them.
Some interesting passages for software from the syllabus:
Also the patent office has been very lazy about assessing industry knowledge by assuming that if the industry knows something somebody will have patented it. They will not be able to assume that anymore.
The Court has phrased this as a minor correction to lower courts, but this minor correction is going to see massive numbers of patents invalidated. If you get attacked by a patent troll your defence just became a whole lot easier. It's not a complete solution to the problem of meritless patents, but it will help.
If you earn Linden Dollars, and sell them for real-world dollars, you're earning income, and are subject to paying income tax on those earnings.
Actually, if you're earning significant numbers of Linden Dollars your earnings may already be taxable even without converting them to hard currency. This will almost certainly be the case for anybody operating as a real estate mogul in SL - each transaction will be a tax event. It will depend on a lot of factors, but if you're setting out to make money out of SL your earnings there will be taxable and they will be taxed according to the time of each transaction, not according to when you convert the assets to hard currency.
You don't get Letterman across the ditch?
As far as I know only on the Comedy Channel, which I rarely watch.
When calling the number for tech support - they say it's due to the laser on the machine getting old
Actually this is a huge problem with optical drives - the laser/receptor assembly deteriorates over time and when it does deteriorate it will start failing to read DVDs at the margins of readability. You ought to be able to just return the DVD for a new one unless there was a problem with the master. Depending on how bold you are you might also open up the unit (disconnect it from the mains and everything else before you do this) and clean the lenses with a Q-Tip (or Cotton Bud as we call them in Australia) and rubbing alcohol. If some dust or grime has accumulated on the lens this may improve your ability to read marginal DVDs.
check out the Bush speech where he uses this saying
Ah, I don't think that got played on the major media in Australia. Actually I used to think the send-ups of Bush on "Saturday Night Live" (we get it on cable) were hysterical. Then I visited the US a couple of years back and saw one of his press briefings live to air, and suddenly the send-ups didn't seem so funny anymore. Perhaps that is his strategy - avoid being sent up by making the reality so bad that you leave the satirists nowhere to go?
They swapped it for a second brand new model. The second brand new model came with a 3 year warranty, and we're not up to the 2 years, 6 months mark yet.
I forgot to mention the real sweet part. The cost of the new player is always lower than the old player, but the way Philips do the replacements is this: they tell the store to do the old player as a defective return and refund the purchase price, then sell you the new player (Presumably Philips reimburses the store for the full cost of doing so). Each time the DVD player breaks down within the warranty period, Philips actually pays me to get a new DVD player.
The best DVD player I ever bought was a Philips. It came with a 3 year warranty, and broke down after 2 years, 6 months. They swapped it for a brand new model. The brand new model came with a 3 year warranty, and broke down after 2 years, 6 months. They swapped it for a second brand new model. The second brand new model came with a 3 year warranty, and we're not up to the 2 years, 6 months mark yet.
fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again.
I always thought it was "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
Just thinking about it, if they're selling them using the DVD label identifying it as a dvd, doesn't it legally have to be playable in dvd compatible players?
This will depend very much on the local laws. In Australia a DVD that fails to play in a significant number of DVD players meets the statutory definition of unmerchantability, which requires goods to be suitable for every purpose for which they are normally bought (unlike other places where they have to be suitable for just one of the purposes for which they are normally bought). This will give the consumer the right to a refund, but won't lead to any penalty. There is also an argument that applying the label "DVD" to the product (or even selling it in a manner that makes it seem like it is a DVD) is misleading conduct for which anybody could apply to the Federal Court to get an injunction to prevent the product from being sold in that way.
Spammers started doing something very much like this shortly after captchas became popular. I don't know if they continued doing it, but for a while some porn sites were presenting captchas from other sites, asking the user to provide the answer, and then the porn site would use the user's input to respond to the captcha at the target web site.
Maybe some women should try for this to achieve notoriety and advance the cause of science...
Does Freddy Krueger count?
It's probably a good thing that corporations can't get married.
I don't know about that. If they were married then at least they'd commit to only screwing their one partner. Right now they try to screw everybody they possibly can.
I also assume you have sent your concerns to ECMA and Microsoft so that the specification can be improved if required.
Why would I do that when we have a perfectly good, genuinely open standard? I'm not interested in spending any of my time helping Microsoft be evil by producing a competing "standard" that's designed to promote continued lock-in. Quite frankly if they're determined to do that they really have no business expecting others to help when they screw it up.
Isn't Office implemented with a different version of the schema (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?f amilyid=15805380-f2c0-4b80-9ad1-2cb0c300aef9&displ aylang=en/)
Ah, the irony. A purported "standard" that is itself wrapped in a Microsoft proprietary format (in this case, CHM).
Rubbish. Post your evidence. Hopefully it will be substantiated with your own investigation, rather than giving support to yet more questionable 'research' on the topic.
Since I've actually done it, I have all the evidence I need. To get it to work I literally had to deviate from the documented standard, and not just in small ways. There are attributes and namespaces that Office expects to be different to what is in the documented standard. Sometimes it's just an error in case (which is still an error since XML is case sensitive) or a missing (or additional) letter. Sometimes it's a completely different string. Sometimes (in the case of a namespace) there's a path component in a URI that is in the spec but if you don't take that component out Office can't read the document. Sometimes the description of a tag is just blatantly wrong.
their new XML is as poorly defined as any of their formats
It's actually much worse than the /. article you linked to would suggest. That article merely suggests there are undocumented bits, but the truth is that a substantial portion of the documentation is flat out wrong. If you follow the documentation, I guarantee you that your file will not be readable in any version of Microsoft Office.
Before you can call it a socialist system, you'd need to demonstrate that a command economy is possible.
Socialism, properly so called, does not involve a command economy. Read up a little on Marx and Engels' positions (particularly Engels) and you'll find they actually claim that once socialism is correctly implemented and entrenched the State will wither away because it will have no purpose - that there will be no reason to have an all-encompassing power to make rules for people. Stated that simply it sounds absurd, but the reasoning is quite complex and it would be a mistake to conclude from this brief summary that it's a load of BS - read some of their work and then some of more recent jurisprudential scholars and then you can conclude (if you still think so) that it's BS.
Real socialists actually do look at the open source movement and say "see, this is what we have been talking about the whole time, it can work." One of Australia's most prominent socialists has said this to me in so many words. Nobody is forcing open source developers to do what they do, but open source does closely model what Marx and Engels believed would eventually happen to society as a whole.
there's no way for a thread to block on whichever happens first of a file descriptor being readable or a condition variable being signalled
This is not quite true - you can always use a pipe, for example, to select and write a byte to the write side of the pipe when the condition variable is changed.
FYI, Rumsfeld is out. Robert Gates is the secretary of defense.
You know that, and I know that, but does he know that? He still thinks invading Iraq was a pretty good idea and that everything that has happened since has been a delightful success, so delusion doesn't seem to be something he lacks.
Add to this that the networks stop shows mid-season without explanation (most of the time they don't even tell you it won't be on next week let alone when it will be on next), then move them to another time slot without ever advertising the new time slot to viewers. When you find out that 6 episodes of one of your favourite shows have aired at 2:30am before you found out about it, you can either pick up the season with some badly lost context (not an attractive option), wait until it comes onto Foxtel (actually not a bad option - Foxtel are pretty good about these things and treat their audiences far, far better than the networks), drop the show altogether, or download it illegally. If you don't have Foxtel, the only viable options are ditching the show or downloading it. Ditching it doesn't help the network or the producer, so in such cases having the customer download it may be in their best interests if it means the customer is catching up and will continue watching the free to air version - when they actually know it's on.
The next stage of evolution won't be long now... In a few years scientists will discover the monkeys have learnt how to lash these sticks together to make chairs.
Nah, in the next stage the chimps will learn to trade the spears with gorillas to get food. Then they will trade spears with a rival tribe of gorillas for more food. Then they will sit back, watch the gorillas kill eachother, then eat the gorillas.
After all, if Ronald Regan can do this with gorillas* in South America, the chimps can do it with gorillas in Africa.
* Yes, I know you don't spell it that way.
If that were true, wouldn't they have just chosen Linux/OSS to start with and avoid the possibility of being caught?
No. The point is most people don't know how easy Linux is to install and use for basic tasks that cover most people. Forcing them to learn this is probably not to Microsoft's advantage.
Seriously? Or is this just a case of "I bet this would happen...", since what you described would be a violation of the fourth amendment.
It can happen and it's all legal. It's called an Anton Piller order.
If Microsoft upsets these people into turning to OSS, then there's no lost revenue.
That's not entirely true, since it will mean 250 people are now getting familiar with Linux who otherwise would not be. When they discover that 95% or more of them can do everything they need under Linux with an out-of-the-box configuration, they're more likely to consider Linux when they move to other jobs. As a software vendor, my position is that if the customer is going to install unlicensed software anyway I want them installing mine because that may lead to revenue down the track. I don't want them being used to the competitor's stuff when either they grow to the point that they want to legitimise everything or they move to another employer and get to choose a software package.
As a side note, KDE 3.5 with udev (and all the bits in between) handles ad-hoc device connection so well now that in some respects it's now better at it than Windows. There's still room for improvement, but the complaint that "it's hard to set up devices under Linux" is diminishing.
if you put a couple Xeons in there, you'll need some seriously loud fans.
Or you could use an airflow device without moving parts. I can't be certain since I haven't seen one in operation, but intuitively they ought to be quieter.
They claim that you can get the datasheets etc, but in reality I have asked them several times and never got an response.
Did you ask them by email? I have found it much more effective to telephone hardware vendors when asking for datasheets. If an email goes to the wrong person it's likely to get dropped on the floor. It's harder to do that to somebody who is at the other end of the phone seeking a response.