Now you're just making stuff up. Using base 30 doesn't make you a patent infringer. Using base 30 to represent lat/lon in URLs is a different question.
Show me where in history humans have used base 30 for latitude/longitude descriptions, let alone in URLs. We've used base 60 for lat/long since the invention of the second. I believe the second itself was invented because of longitude, and not the other way around. So, lets represent your coordinates as 37.892799 x -85.948905, or as 37 degrees, 53 minutes, 34 seconds north by 85 degrees 56 minutes 56 seconds west. In URLs, they might be http://host/lat=37.892799?lon=-85.948905. In your mobile phone, it'd be http://host/lat=1hqd3?lon=c9d8q. It's shorter by 9 keystrokes, which is a lot of keying on a mobile phone.
And as for the egg example, Edison was making the point that claiming a solution is obvious is impossible from a hindsight point of view. Hindsight makes it seem obvious, but it's the foresight that made it valuable.
I'd say this is probably as patentable as any other form of compression, such as LZH. Again, whether algorithms or software should be patented is a different question, but that's not the current question, nor is it what the examiners are looking for: they're looking for novelty. And I think this qualifies.
Except for one not-so-little thing: I don't think this is an "obvious" patent. I think this one is worth patenting, as far as any legitimate "software" patents go.
Using base 30 to represent lat/lon in 10 digits is extremely clever, and I wish I'd thought of something that smart. For example, Japan's street numbering system is absolutely useless for navigation (buildings are numbered in date-of-construction order rather than a Western north-to-south system.) Many Japanese print lat/lon on their business cards, and people commonly use GPS receivers to find them. So they have a huge need for a lat/lon system that has easy-to-remember values, and 10 digits is right at the edge of what humans can reliably deal with. This patent solves that problem.
Thomas Edison is reputed to have explained the "non-obviousness" of patents to a congressional committee with this story: He placed an egg on the table in front of each congressman, and said "Make this egg stand on end." They all fooled around with the eggs for a minute or so, until they agreed that it was impossible to get an egg to stand on end. Mr. Edison took his egg and crunched the end of the shell down onto the table top, where it stood. The congressmen cried, "well it's obvious you can do it that way," to which Mr. Edison replied, "Less than a minute ago you agreed that it was impossible, and now you claim it's obvious." That's the nature of a patent.
Please don't hold it against me if you still don't care for it. But the graphics and physics have probably improved dramatically since the last time you saw it.
It's certainly not as pretty as Far Cry, and I imagine most people don't think it compares favorably with UT 2K4, but it's the gameplay that'll hook you (if you get past training:-)
I know game playing is surely fun. You don't need a book to tell you so.
-1, Wrong.
Proof? Daikatana.
Just because someone writes and/or sells a game doesn't mean it's going to be fun. Books like this need to exist, and will hopefully help alleged "games" like Daikatana from getting as far as they do.
You also forgot the "mysterious floating weapons mods", where the engine refuses to forget where the player holding the weapon actually died. I have no idea why they haven't fixed that bug yet, it's been there since 2.0.
Oh, and don't forget the "I can't run until I drop and pick up my weapon" bug.
But since 2.2.1 the only true client-side crashes I get have been obersving when either a sniper and/or a SAW is involved. And there are still some server issues where they'll bog down and eventually crash.
OK, so maybe there are a lot more bugs than I'm willing to admit to myself. Hey, I'm a big fanboi, can you blame me?:-)
Good point. I suppose the game's not free if you have to buy your pre-trained account on eBay:-)
I never minded the training much. Yes, the SF training was tedious, and in no way related to gameplay, but once it was done it was done.
Maybe that's what makes it a better game (in my mind): knowning that your opponents had to be the sort of gamers who were willing to endure the training, too. At least it keeps the number of lamers down...
Two things: First, the graphics engine in CounterStrike has remained the same (but I honestly haven't really checked out the newest mod since HL2 came out) which is to say "ugly." Most all of the HL mods were of similar caliber graphics. America's Army started much the same, but has constantly pushed improving the graphics, and kept more current than CS.
Second, and the point about CounterStrike that bothers the most, is that someone has to be the "terrorists." I don't want to play the terrorist side, and I don't want to play with someone who wants to play the terrorist side. In America's Army, you're always on the "good guys" team. Yes, I know the whole chestnut about "one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist." But it's the whole attitude that it gives you, that nobody is thinking of themself as a bad guy. That attitude is a huge part of it for me.
These are just my opinions. Hey, if you like CS, more power to you!
The gameplay is brilliant: no "instant respawn". You die, well, you get to sit there and watch your buddies try to complete the mission. Since your opponents are also equally motivated to stay alive, they're usually much more challenging. The weapons and ammo aren't unlimited, you don't find Big Kegs O' Health laying on the ground, and you don't get powerups. There's no such thing as turning friendly fire on or off -- don't shoot your buddies or you'll get booted from the server and wind up in Leavenworth (worth exploring in cheat mode once or twice, by the way.) The graphics (especially since the 2.x release) are among the best in the industry -- great attention to detail. Most of the maps are fairly well balanced. And while you don't play an ongoing "character", your performance is still tracked, and counts for a little bit in selecting your position on each squad.
Relatively few bugs, and PunkBuster to keep the cheating reduced to a playable level. All that and it's free -- you don't even have to sit through a "Join the Army" lecture to get it.
I've played all the other FP shooters, and I keep coming back to AA for every one of those reasons above. I've not played it on Linux, so I can't swear to the performance on that platform, but if it can run on a crappy Windows box, it should run fine for you.
Heh. There's the answer then: buy your house in a crappy neighborhood where it's not likely you'll have a lot of neighbors that can SPELL 802.11g, much less own any.
And I did. A Teletype 100, with a 110 baud acoustic modem and a funky resistor setup to convert 50ma current loop to RS-232. We connected to the state's CDC Cyber 72. I was definitely the "weird know-it-all kid"
"Chugga-chugga-ding!-ding!" I loved that old teletank. I still have a few scrolls of yellow pulp paper with old emails to my girlfriend in a box somewhere, and I know I have a few rolls of paper tape programs in the basement. Not that I've seen a paper tape reader in the last 8 years...
My high school teacher refused to let me take the computer class because I knew far more about computers and programming than he did.
I suppose it's for the best, I would have been bored and slacked off in the class anyway.
As it was, I discovered how to get the computer to allocate me raw memory without zeroing it out first, so I would print off giant sections of raw data, take them home and look for login IDs and the strings that inevitably followed them. Got lots of regular logins and even a few admin logins that way.
For the PC, Float's Mobile Agent is a tremendous GPL'd program that does all sorts of Bluetooth phone management. The very extensible scripts it comes with all are available to the phone automatically, including out-of-the-box support for using the phone as a remotely controlled mouse, volume control, plus specific controls for other applications including WinAmp.
One of the really cool things about it is the "proximity" feature. When I walk away from my desk, it locks automatically. Now, if it could only reacquire my phone when I return, that would be something.
A restaurant we went to last week (Grizzly's) had one speaker out of sync by about a second or so. It turned every song into Row, Row, Row your Boat, and was that ever annoying. My wife asked how that was possible, and the only answer I had was that the speakers had to be receiving a digital stream.
I don't know where you can purchase a speaker system like it, but it sounds like your answer (minus the bugs, of course.) Perhaps you could google for restaurant speaker systems, and see what turns up?
I can also highly recommend Between Silk And Cyanide (no referral tags in that link.) Marks is a brilliant writer, and it reads far more like an entertaining work of fiction than a historical narrative.
It wasn't just you. All the IBM DeathStars (especially those made in Hungary) were crap from the moment they hit the assembly line. I had the misfortune of purchasing three (a 45GB and two 60GB) units about two or three years ago, and it took less than 3 months for the first of them to die. When I called the shop I bought it from they offered me a replacement right over the phone. Apparently, 3 months was on the long side of their lifetimes -- half the people had already gotten replacements. It took a bit longer for the other two drives to die, but die they both did.
They were the first pieces of IBM equipment I've owned that were of obvious poor design. Everything before those drives (and that means starting with a 16KB 8088 machine in 1980) has been absolutely rock solid. Sure, I've lost a few drives along the way, but only after years of performance. (Mind you, that was never "stellar" performance, IBM never pushed the performance envelopes of any of their equipement.)
Kind of makes me wonder if those IBM DeathStars were counterfeits. IBM has never tolerated crap-quality equipment before.
You need to read the referenced research paper for details on the algorithm. That was the most interesting part: rather than violate an end-user agreement and reverse engineer the algorithm from an.EXE, they chose instead to break it by studying the published details of the algorithm (which were not completely correct) and by testing a live device.
The paper is the detail, the article is just the marketing.
It's not a stupid question at all. If you read any of the recent research by Bruce Schneier, you'll find he presents this same concept under the name of "attack trees". Basically he says that if there are a set of known attacks on a system, the bad guys will go for the cheapest one that will give them success (or easiest or fastest, depending on their motives.) SpeedPass forging certainly is harder than any of the other mechanisms out there, so your common criminals are still likely to try the other mechanisms first.
A real-world application of your suggestion is called the "Bear Theory*" and can be seen at any retailer: the stores don't have to be "100% shoplifter proof", they just have to make shoplifting harder at their store than it is at the store down the street. Get the bad guys to stay away from you, and you're saving the money. (* The Bear Theory states that you don't have to outrun the attacking bear, you just have to outrun the slowest guy you're with.)
One advantage to attacking through SpeedPass, though, is the possibility that Mobil might not be "watching" SpeedPass transactions as carefully as they do others because they may have an innate faith that SpeedPass cannot be cracked. If your bad-guy goals include "don't get suspected", then SpeedPass hacking would be the way to go.
The grandparent poster is correct, though, in that SpeedPass wasn't first designed to make your life easier: that's a byproduct of how the system works. I believe SpeedPass was first designed as a replacement for insecure, easy-to-forge credit cards. But being different, it turned into a marketing tool; something that made Mobil "more cool" than Amoco. Finally, speeding up the transaction at the pumps didn't hurt them any. But it really doesn't gain them any financial benefit except in terms of marketing.
Replacing the existing mag stripe system is very important. Credit card theft losses today involve absolutely staggering amounts. Forging credit cards is almost child's play (or it would be if I were a child:-) There are professional crime rings that collect mag swipe data from dishonest restaurant employees, for example. And gas pumps are the perfect victim for forged cards. With no human to validate the little foil dove on the Visa card, any chunk of plastic with a mag stripe will do the trick.
RFID was sold to Mobil as "difficult to forge." (Actually, it was probably sold as "impossible to forge", but that's sales lingo.) This is just the first public demonstration of a counter example.
By the way, regarding time spent in lines: given a choice at Home Depot, I evaluate the lines this way: my first choice is self-checkout ONLY if no one's ahead of me; second choice, a cashier who knows what they're doing; and my dead-last choice is self-checkout waiting behind four idiots who collectively can't figure out how to put their barcodes under the lasers.
Biometrics are not security. Biometrics are only about authentication.
Your biometric information is not secret. The police or your parents might have a copy of your fingerprints, for example. It's theoretically difficult to duplicate biometric data, but certainly not impossible: Cryptome has a copy of the research paper where researchers used $20 worth of common kitchen items to successfully fool every commercial fingerprint reader on the market.
Assuming forgery is tougher than that, the problem really is in the "interface" -- at some point the information stops being "biometric" and has been converted by circuitry into digital data. Digital data, of course, can be sniffed, copied, and modified. That's the real weak point of the biometric systems. If you can replace real biometric data with spoofed data, the computer systems downstream aren't going to know the difference.
Lots of companies have had the problem mentioned in the article. While it's not exactly "censoring", ours has set up Exchange server to DELETE email older than 30 days, and called it a policy.
Nobody can pull out the old emails and pull a trick like this if they've been deleted. And if you save them, you're violating policy, so you're screwed either way.
Talk about a clusterfsck. My problem is I get documentation in emails, and that doc gets wiped after 30 days if I forget to save it somewhere.
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It's like the lawyers: 99% of them have bad reputations that are spoiling the reputations of the other 1%.
Show me where in history humans have used base 30 for latitude/longitude descriptions, let alone in URLs. We've used base 60 for lat/long since the invention of the second. I believe the second itself was invented because of longitude, and not the other way around. So, lets represent your coordinates as 37.892799 x -85.948905, or as 37 degrees, 53 minutes, 34 seconds north by 85 degrees 56 minutes 56 seconds west. In URLs, they might be http://host/lat=37.892799?lon=-85.948905. In your mobile phone, it'd be http://host/lat=1hqd3?lon=c9d8q. It's shorter by 9 keystrokes, which is a lot of keying on a mobile phone.
And as for the egg example, Edison was making the point that claiming a solution is obvious is impossible from a hindsight point of view. Hindsight makes it seem obvious, but it's the foresight that made it valuable.
I'd say this is probably as patentable as any other form of compression, such as LZH. Again, whether algorithms or software should be patented is a different question, but that's not the current question, nor is it what the examiners are looking for: they're looking for novelty. And I think this qualifies.
Using base 30 to represent lat/lon in 10 digits is extremely clever, and I wish I'd thought of something that smart. For example, Japan's street numbering system is absolutely useless for navigation (buildings are numbered in date-of-construction order rather than a Western north-to-south system.) Many Japanese print lat/lon on their business cards, and people commonly use GPS receivers to find them. So they have a huge need for a lat/lon system that has easy-to-remember values, and 10 digits is right at the edge of what humans can reliably deal with. This patent solves that problem.
Thomas Edison is reputed to have explained the "non-obviousness" of patents to a congressional committee with this story: He placed an egg on the table in front of each congressman, and said "Make this egg stand on end." They all fooled around with the eggs for a minute or so, until they agreed that it was impossible to get an egg to stand on end. Mr. Edison took his egg and crunched the end of the shell down onto the table top, where it stood. The congressmen cried, "well it's obvious you can do it that way," to which Mr. Edison replied, "Less than a minute ago you agreed that it was impossible, and now you claim it's obvious." That's the nature of a patent.
You shouldn't anthropomorphize household objects. They don't like to be anthropomorphized.
It's certainly not as pretty as Far Cry, and I imagine most people don't think it compares favorably with UT 2K4, but it's the gameplay that'll hook you (if you get past training :-)
See you on SF Hospital!
-1, Wrong.
Proof? Daikatana.
Just because someone writes and/or sells a game doesn't mean it's going to be fun. Books like this need to exist, and will hopefully help alleged "games" like Daikatana from getting as far as they do.
Oh, and don't forget the "I can't run until I drop and pick up my weapon" bug.
But since 2.2.1 the only true client-side crashes I get have been obersving when either a sniper and/or a SAW is involved. And there are still some server issues where they'll bog down and eventually crash.
OK, so maybe there are a lot more bugs than I'm willing to admit to myself. Hey, I'm a big fanboi, can you blame me? :-)
I never minded the training much. Yes, the SF training was tedious, and in no way related to gameplay, but once it was done it was done.
Maybe that's what makes it a better game (in my mind): knowning that your opponents had to be the sort of gamers who were willing to endure the training, too. At least it keeps the number of lamers down...
Second, and the point about CounterStrike that bothers the most, is that someone has to be the "terrorists." I don't want to play the terrorist side, and I don't want to play with someone who wants to play the terrorist side. In America's Army, you're always on the "good guys" team. Yes, I know the whole chestnut about "one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist." But it's the whole attitude that it gives you, that nobody is thinking of themself as a bad guy. That attitude is a huge part of it for me.
These are just my opinions. Hey, if you like CS, more power to you!
The gameplay is brilliant: no "instant respawn". You die, well, you get to sit there and watch your buddies try to complete the mission. Since your opponents are also equally motivated to stay alive, they're usually much more challenging. The weapons and ammo aren't unlimited, you don't find Big Kegs O' Health laying on the ground, and you don't get powerups. There's no such thing as turning friendly fire on or off -- don't shoot your buddies or you'll get booted from the server and wind up in Leavenworth (worth exploring in cheat mode once or twice, by the way.) The graphics (especially since the 2.x release) are among the best in the industry -- great attention to detail. Most of the maps are fairly well balanced. And while you don't play an ongoing "character", your performance is still tracked, and counts for a little bit in selecting your position on each squad.
Relatively few bugs, and PunkBuster to keep the cheating reduced to a playable level. All that and it's free -- you don't even have to sit through a "Join the Army" lecture to get it.
I've played all the other FP shooters, and I keep coming back to AA for every one of those reasons above. I've not played it on Linux, so I can't swear to the performance on that platform, but if it can run on a crappy Windows box, it should run fine for you.
I prefer Tenne-C, and was disappointed to see it missing.
Needs more cowbell.
It's working for me, anyway... :-)
Crap, sorry, it was an ASR-33 TeleType.
"Chugga-chugga-ding!-ding!" I loved that old teletank. I still have a few scrolls of yellow pulp paper with old emails to my girlfriend in a box somewhere, and I know I have a few rolls of paper tape programs in the basement. Not that I've seen a paper tape reader in the last 8 years...
I suppose it's for the best, I would have been bored and slacked off in the class anyway.
As it was, I discovered how to get the computer to allocate me raw memory without zeroing it out first, so I would print off giant sections of raw data, take them home and look for login IDs and the strings that inevitably followed them. Got lots of regular logins and even a few admin logins that way.
One of the really cool things about it is the "proximity" feature. When I walk away from my desk, it locks automatically. Now, if it could only reacquire my phone when I return, that would be something.
A restaurant we went to last week (Grizzly's) had one speaker out of sync by about a second or so. It turned every song into Row, Row, Row your Boat, and was that ever annoying. My wife asked how that was possible, and the only answer I had was that the speakers had to be receiving a digital stream.
I don't know where you can purchase a speaker system like it, but it sounds like your answer (minus the bugs, of course.) Perhaps you could google for restaurant speaker systems, and see what turns up?
I can also highly recommend Between Silk And Cyanide (no referral tags in that link.) Marks is a brilliant writer, and it reads far more like an entertaining work of fiction than a historical narrative.
They were the first pieces of IBM equipment I've owned that were of obvious poor design. Everything before those drives (and that means starting with a 16KB 8088 machine in 1980) has been absolutely rock solid. Sure, I've lost a few drives along the way, but only after years of performance. (Mind you, that was never "stellar" performance, IBM never pushed the performance envelopes of any of their equipement.)
Kind of makes me wonder if those IBM DeathStars were counterfeits. IBM has never tolerated crap-quality equipment before.
The paper is the detail, the article is just the marketing.
A real-world application of your suggestion is called the "Bear Theory*" and can be seen at any retailer: the stores don't have to be "100% shoplifter proof", they just have to make shoplifting harder at their store than it is at the store down the street. Get the bad guys to stay away from you, and you're saving the money. (* The Bear Theory states that you don't have to outrun the attacking bear, you just have to outrun the slowest guy you're with.)
One advantage to attacking through SpeedPass, though, is the possibility that Mobil might not be "watching" SpeedPass transactions as carefully as they do others because they may have an innate faith that SpeedPass cannot be cracked. If your bad-guy goals include "don't get suspected", then SpeedPass hacking would be the way to go.
Replacing the existing mag stripe system is very important. Credit card theft losses today involve absolutely staggering amounts. Forging credit cards is almost child's play (or it would be if I were a child :-) There are professional crime rings that collect mag swipe data from dishonest restaurant employees, for example. And gas pumps are the perfect victim for forged cards. With no human to validate the little foil dove on the Visa card, any chunk of plastic with a mag stripe will do the trick.
RFID was sold to Mobil as "difficult to forge." (Actually, it was probably sold as "impossible to forge", but that's sales lingo.) This is just the first public demonstration of a counter example.
By the way, regarding time spent in lines: given a choice at Home Depot, I evaluate the lines this way: my first choice is self-checkout ONLY if no one's ahead of me; second choice, a cashier who knows what they're doing; and my dead-last choice is self-checkout waiting behind four idiots who collectively can't figure out how to put their barcodes under the lasers.
Your biometric information is not secret. The police or your parents might have a copy of your fingerprints, for example. It's theoretically difficult to duplicate biometric data, but certainly not impossible: Cryptome has a copy of the research paper where researchers used $20 worth of common kitchen items to successfully fool every commercial fingerprint reader on the market.
Assuming forgery is tougher than that, the problem really is in the "interface" -- at some point the information stops being "biometric" and has been converted by circuitry into digital data. Digital data, of course, can be sniffed, copied, and modified. That's the real weak point of the biometric systems. If you can replace real biometric data with spoofed data, the computer systems downstream aren't going to know the difference.
Nobody can pull out the old emails and pull a trick like this if they've been deleted. And if you save them, you're violating policy, so you're screwed either way.
Talk about a clusterfsck. My problem is I get documentation in emails, and that doc gets wiped after 30 days if I forget to save it somewhere.