Ford is making a valid trademark claim, not a patent or copyright claim as the summary, tags, and category would suggest. Ford does not claim to own the pictures, and it is certainly not making a patent claim. What Ford is doing is claiming trademark and trade dress rights in its name, logo, and the stylistic features of its vehicles. Ford is alleging that the Club's calendar trades on the good will that people associate with the Ford name, logo, etc, which is not allowed under state and federal trademark laws.
Furthermore, trademark law requires trademark owners to respond to such acts of potential trademark infringement. If they do not so act, then later infringers may point to the inaction and claim that Ford has abandoned their trademark. Note that this is unlike copyright and patents, which give the rightsholder more discretion in pursuing individual cases.
None of this is to say that this is a good business decision. In its current financial state, Ford should be working with its few remaining fans to produce properly licensed calendars, shirts, etc that maintain Ford's intellectual property rights. That way, everybody wins. This sort of knee-jerk "shut 'em down" response does both the company and its fans a disservice in the long run.
The energy density may be poor, but the fast recharge time may make up for it. Let's assume a pure EV using these batteries got a range of 150 miles, which is pretty lousy by most standards. The average commute is about 20 miles each way, or 200 miles a week. If the average commuter has to charge up twice a week instead of once a week, that's probably bearable if the charge time is 5 minutes instead of 30 minutes or overnight. Similarly, on longer trips, a 150 mile range is still bearable if it only means making a 5-10 minute pit stop every 2 hours or so.
Actually, this is a good example of something that would not be helped by the open source development model. How many hobbyists do you think have a multi-million dollar vehicle outfitted with all the necessary sensors and computers? And of those, how many do you think have a large testing area? And of those, how many have a team of people to prep the car and testing area for each test run?
Most of the teams in the UC spent more on their car than was offered in prize money. They still profit because a lot of that spending was subsidized by corporations (note the logos all over the cars). Nonetheless, the money has to come from somewhere. Without the car, sensors, and testing area, an open source contributor could only look for the most obvious bugs.
Now, what they should release are their algorithms and design methods. But making the actual source code development open source would not help the state of the art progress "gigantically." Remember also that these machines are often purpose built using some amount of custom hardware. What works with one setup and for one car type will not necessarily work for another. It's like saying Open Darwin helps Microsoft. It could, in theory, help a few things, but most are so inherently incompatible that it's more trouble than it's worth.
Quoth the blogger: "With hundreds of languages and API's out there, is anyone really dumb enough to think "yet another one" will fix our parallel programming problems?"
Yet Intel touts its Threading Building Blocks library as just such a fix to many parallel programming problems. Now, TBB is a very nice product, and in many ways it is superior to a lot of existing libraries, APIs, and languages, but one gets the sense that maybe the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing at Intel.
I might also draw an analogy to the open source world, where there are often dozens of solutions to both simple/mundane problems (text editors, media players, command line shells, etc) and more complex ones (window managers, Linux distributions, etc). I wonder if the free and open source software world wouldn't also benefit from a "culling of the herd," so to speak.
The full press release notes that the maximum acceleration would be a mere.6 G's or so, which is more than Mars but obviously less than Earth. This is unlikely to result in any unknown physiological changes. In fact, the at least occasional exposure to g-forces would probably be beneficial compared to continuous micro-gravity.
Anyway, a 100 metric ton craft would be pretty wimpy. That's 5% of the Space Shuttle's mass, for instance. I suspect this would be an unmanned mission. (For reference, the Apollo Service Module & Lunar Module together were about 40 metric tons and the longest Apollo missions only lasted 12 days).
Also, the 'ignition mass' for the fastest version would be a whopping 1300 metric tons of plutonium. Using uranium prices as a stand-in, that's about $300 million in fuel. That's an awful big price tag for just getting a larger probe to Mars faster.
LJ's own ToS contains a clause denying LJ's responsibility for external links:
The Service, or relevant third parties, may provide links to other web sites or resources. Because LiveJournal has no control over such sites and resources, you acknowledge and agree that LiveJournal is not responsible for the availability of such external sites or resources, and does not endorse and is not responsible or liable for any content, advertising, products, or other materials on or available from such sites or resources. You further acknowledge and agree that LiveJournal shall not be responsible or liable, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with use of or reliance on any such content, goods or services available on or through any such site or resource.
Why would they deny their users the same legal protection? Or maybe users should simply put a modified version of this clause on their blogs. That way, if LJ wants to deny that a user's ToS is valid, it would be shooting itself in the foot.
TFA says that the systems run Microsoft Office, not StarOffice. Unfortunately, their video doesn't show any office software, so it's hard to tell. Maybe someone will hack up a version of portable OpenOffice capable of running on the systems.
First off, the linked article doesn't actually contain the quote given in the article summary. But, assuming what the article summary says is accurate...
The relevance, admissibility, or incriminating character of the mere fact that a defendant hid something (i.e., as separate from the hidden content) is a legal question. In general, the absence of evidence is irrelevant with a few exceptions (obviously it's highly relevant to charges of destroying evidence!). The most important one is that of an absence of regularly kept business records. So, if a business regularly kept records of, say, who entered a building, and an employee were suspected of stealing something from the business, and the records for that night were missing, then perhaps that could be used as evidence against the employee on the theory that the employee had erased the record to cover his or her tracks. The same would be true if the record, rather than being deleted, had been encrypted when the others were unencrypted or encrypted in a different way/with a different key.
This is a very glossed over view of a complicated topic, but on the narrow question of the mere fact of the use of encryption, I would tend to say that would generally not be incriminating. Certainly the prosecution cannot simply point to your TrueCrypt or FileVault encrypted drive and say "look! everything on that computer is encrypted, therefore we can't know what it is, therefore it could be evidence of wrongdoing." That is tremendously weak circumstantial evidence and falls far, far below the reasonable doubt standard.
Note: I am not a lawyer and this is a layman's opinion, not legal advice.
The Apollo missions got 47,900 kg to the moon for $2.75 billion in today's money. That's $57,411/kg. Let's say the Indians can do it vastly cheaper: $25,000/kg.
Let's say the robot weighs the same as Spirit and Opportunity (the current Mars rovers): 175kg. So the cost to get the robot to the moon would be $4,375,000, completely discounting the cost of the rocket itself, the payload container, the landing mechanism, support personnel, etc, etc.
Practical upshot: they could easily spend 10 times as much on the robot and only increase the cost of the mission 11%. And once the real costs are taken into account, the increase would probably be negligible ( 1%).
That's why NASA spends so much on the robot: a) it's incredibly expensive just to get the robot anywhere and b) if the robot screws up once it's there, the bulk of the money was completely wasted, so making the robot robust & reliable is very important.
One counterpart to this kind of study is this argument: If you think $21.50 is a lot, just imagine how much it would cost each individual customer to negotiate and license all of the patents in question? By centralizing the negotiation and licensing, Microsoft greatly reduces the total transaction costs.
That said, I'm sure a lot of these patents are absurd software patents that Microsoft decided it was cheaper or easier to license than defeat in court.
In a perfect world, perhaps the reforms you suggest could be put in place. Unfortunately, I don't think many of them are practical.
1. "Change USPTO pay scale to make patent examiners much higher paid people than senior industry people." I will assume that you mean a salary substantially north of $100k/year. Very, very few government employees make that much (think Congress, President, and the Supreme Court). The PTO has over 4000 examiners. That's a very expensive proposition.
2. "Introduce a new category of patent rejections: blatantly obvious (with attendant fine)." This would be an essentially unprecedented thing for a government agency to do. Fining an corporation millions of dollars for wasting a few hours of a PTO examiner's time (as would be the case if the invention were blatantly obvious) is pretty hard to justify. As for rejecting the blatantly obvious, examiners do sometimes give a piece of prior art and state that the claimed invention is an obvious improvement, so that's close.
3. "Make patents vary in length depending upon industry." This I agree with, but it's extremely unlikely. First, the world has just finished more or less agreeing on a 20 years from time of filing standard for patent terms, so deharmonizing the US law would encounter a great deal of opposition here and abroad. Second, it would be difficult to empirically determine what the various categories and their durations should be.
4. "Simplify application process. Make USPTO write patent claims and search for prior art." The PTO does currently search for prior art, although their search is generally limited to existing patents and patent applications. As for "the patent applicant would just be required to explain what the invention is," that's exactly what the claims are. The claims are the invention. Having the applicant tell the PTO the "gist" or "heart" of the invention is precisely what the current Patent Act (the 1952 Act) was designed to eliminate.
5. "Making litigation cheaper is another topic." Fair enough, though I certainly agree that it's absurdly expensive and stands in the way of the patent system's Constitutional purpose of promoting the useful arts and sciences.
As for this presumption that patent applications are presumptively valid, I have no idea where that comes from. PATENTS, not applications, are presumed valid. 35 U.S.C. 282.
As the article summary says, applications submitted under the new accelerated process are presumptively patentable. Issued patents are, of course, patentable, and that's what my rant addressed. I'm not sure where your confusion came from.
A lot of posters are scoffing at the notion that applicants would do a very good job of finding prior art to submit along with their accelerated application. This is not actually the case, however, and the reason it isn't is why the accelerated patent program hasn't gotten much use yet.
See, imagine that the putative lazy (or evil) attorney doesn't do a very good job of finding prior art and submits an application to patent something otherwise well known in the art. Sure, the PTO may grant the patent on the presumption that the attorney did a thorough search. But if the case gets litigated (which it likely will if the patent is really all that bad), then the other side will easily be able to point out the prior art that the attorney didn't submit. When the patent is invalidated as a result, that attorney is going to get sued into oblivion for malpractice. If the attorney omitted the prior art on purpose in order to get the patent issued, it's even possible that he or she could be censured or disbarred.
That brings us to why the new program isn't getting much use. Because the patent will issue only a few months after filing the application, the attorney only has a very short amount of time to search for and find any relevant prior art the PTO needs in order to determine which claims to allow and which ones not to. Most attorneys don't feel like they can search the many millions of US and overseas patents in that amount of time (to say nothing of the countless other 'printed publications' that may be prior art as well). So the program isn't getting used very much.
<rant> What would be a good change? Eliminating the presumption of patent validity and making the PTO into a simple time stamping/registration body like the Library of Congress. As it stands now, virtually all patents with any value end up at least being inspected by opposing lawyers if not litigated outright, and a great many of them are found to be worthless or of substantially less worth than they appear at first glance. Eliminating the presumption of validity would get rid of the massive delay and cost of being granted a patent while also pushing the initial burden of proof on to the plaintiff/patentee to show that his or her patent is valid. The loss of this presumption would make a patent less inherently valuable and the number of issued patents would likely actually decrease. Because the cost of initiating patent litigation would go up, the number of suits would go down as well. </rant>
Work Product Privilege
on
SCO Vs. Groklaw
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· Score: 5, Insightful
A lot of people are asking why SCO would want to do this or would care. My theory is that SCO hopes to get access to IBM's attorneys' work product.
Normally an attorney's work product (memos, notes, theories, etc created as part of the attorney's work for a client) cannot be discovered by the opposing side. It works like attorney-client privilege.
However, just like the attorney-client privilege, the work product privilege can be waived intentionally or unintentionally if the attorney (or client) shares the information with someone outside the attorney-client relationship. SCO's theory may well be that if an IBM lawyer posts to Groklaw an analysis of the case that amounts to a summary of IBM's theory on the case, then SCO should be allowed access to all of the attorney's related work product. Depending on the judge, SCO may even be granted access to all of the work product of every attorney at that firm assigned to the SCO v. IBM case, although that's pretty unlikely unless the judge has some pet peeve about attorneys commenting to the media/public about ongoing cases.
So, while this may seem like just another last-ditch delay tactic by SCO (and it probably is), there may well be a not-entirely-unreasonable legal basis for it.
(Note: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.)
I wrote: The named inventor on the patent application is a developer who doesn't know anything about BlueJ because of the aforementioned sanitizing. As such, there's no perjury or fraud on the patent office.
AC wrote: The named inventor on a patent must be the inventor or co-inventor, otherwise the patent isn't legally valid.
I don't see how that matters. The named inventor (in my scenario) is the developer who found a way to implement the idea. He is the inventor, so far as he and the legal staff know. Now, he isn't the true inventor (that would be the BlueJ folks), but that doesn't matter for the purposes of my scenario. I was just trying to explain how the legal staff could think they were doing 'the right thing,' whether by accident or design.
There already is such a system: the Statutory Invention Registration. Basically, it has all the same information as a patent but doesn't confer any rights on the submitter the way a patent grant does. Once it's submitted, it joins the PTO's database, which is the one place a patent examiner is guaranteed to look when reviewing a patent.
This is also one reason why "defensive patents" are complete hokum. If a company really wanted to get a patent just to make sure no one else could, they would just file a SIR: it has all the same information, it gets searched by examiners, and it's a public record. But of course SIRs are actually very rare: it's so easy to get a patent that companies would rather get the patent 'just in case' they need to sue anyone later.
Note: I'm not going to take Microsoft's side on this. Whether or not this was an innocent mistake, they should own up to it now and withdraw their patent application.
That said, here's what I think might have happened.
A group of people at Microsoft collects suggestions for the next version of Visual Studio: one of the suggestions is for BlueJ-like functionality.
The feedback group sanitizes this information (i.e., removes any explicit references to BlueJ), then passes it on to the devs.
The devs implement the BlueJ functionality, and (as is probably standard practice) a patent is applied for.
The named inventor on the patent application is a developer who doesn't know anything about BlueJ because of the aforementioned sanitizing. As such, there's no perjury or fraud on the patent office.
That's my theory, anyway. It goes to show that there's a perverse incentive for large corporations to have a system of information hiding so that it can later have plausible deniability about this kind of thing.
Anyone has used player/stage will recognize this as sort of the 'default' robot that the simulator uses. It's a two wheel differential-drive base that uses sonar for range finding and object detection. On top you can mount all manner of sensors and actuators.
I have no idea if they really cost that much, though. By implication from this page and this page, though, the P3-DX costs something like $10,000 with an educational discount.
Except the videos are at QVGA resolution (320x240). That's substantially less than even analog TV, much less DVD or HDTV. Don't count on a lot of people ditching their Tivos just yet. Or ditching bittorrent, for that matter. The videos are really just meant to play on the video-capable iPods. Frankly I think they really missed the boat. Knowing Apple, I expect what happened is that ABC/Disney (whom they still have a quasi-relationship with via Pixar) is just testing the waters, rather than Apple not having the foresight to go whole hog with legal TV show downloads. Note, for instance, that the only videos available are ABC/Disney shows and Pixar shorts.
If it works out, I would hope to see full-res shows on offer from all sorts of networks.
Also, I wonder...with iTunes you can burn CDs of music, right? Can you burn a DVD of the show? I expect you probably can't, but they ought to make it so you can. Would short-circuit the 'must buy a Mac mini or a new G5 in order to have a media center' thing, though. Hopefully Apple will choose the option that gives its users more freedom to use what they've bought.
Alright, so admittedly the trailer site does mention that a powerful computer is needed to play the high-res version of the trailer.
So. I have an Athlon 64 3400+, 1GB of RAM, a 10K RPM SATA harddrive, and a GeForce 6800GT on a recent Windows XP install. The only extra programs I have running are Gaim and anti-virus software. I keep my computer up to date and swept for spyware using Ad-Aware and use Firefox for browsing.
I'll admit that my machine isn't quite the fastest in the world. I could have slightly faster (4000+) dual processors and more RAM. However, I still think my machine is pretty stinkin' fast by today's standards.
That said, the trailer (using the Quicktime 7 for Windows beta) played like crap, even at half-size. So...what the heck? Is it the player? Have people had better luck with other software? Or is HD really -that- hard to decode?
For a relative velocity of 400mph you get an observed frequency of 2.39999856GHz.
Now, looking at the 802.11b spec available at the 802 working group site I see that it operates in the 2.4 - 2.4835GHz range.
So the Doppler effect at 400mph introduces a difference in frequency equal to.0017% of the total frequency range. Unfortunately, I don't know what the tolerances for 802.11b are, but I have difficulty believing that.0017% would cause much trouble.
Now, backfiguring for a more common 5% tolerance, we get something like 500,000m/s or 1.1 million mph. So, yes, 802.11b probably won't work between passing spaceships. Aside from that, we're probably safe.
Tripp Hawkins was also the CEO of 3DO, and we all know how well that worked out. I'd say his credibility in terms of prediction was pretty much shot since he thought the 3DO would take over the world. As opposed to, you know, being a wildly overpriced system with a handful of lame, FMV-laden titles.
The Handyboard is a favorite of robot hobbiests and researchers. We use them in our Mobile Robotics class at Uni. The full-on Handyboard is about $299, though. A somewhat reduced version of the Handyboard, the Handy Cricket is available for $99 from Gleason Research with a sensor/motor kit included. If you check the Handyboard page, there are several other vendors, including ones that sell unassembled kits for less, if you're not afraid of a little (okay, a fair bit of) soldering.
I recommend using Lego to build the body of the robot as it's highly reconfigurable, cheap, and fun to play with even without the robot parts.
1. He owns Photoshop, LightWave, and Maya. A cursory look at pricing reveals that buying those programs would cost about $3200 total (assuming he buys Maya Complete and not Maya Unlimited).
2. He only needs some icons or sprites.
3. He can't pay an artist to make those things.
I haven't priced custom artwork latetly, but assuming it's -anything- like custom software, I have a damned hard time believing he can't get what he needs for much, much less than $3200. I think it's much more likely that he is using illegal copies of those programs, in which case I think he needs to get out of the commercial software business if he's not willing to respect the copyright of other programmers. In any case, if he's willing to infringe software copyright, he might as well just copy some artwork, too.
Sorry for the harsh language, but this guy is either an idiot not to have done the math or a crook for copying software illegally.
(note: I'm not a native german speaker, but this is probably better than the fish would do.)
"Table tennis from the computer Stone-age"
A Berlin art student has reverse-engineered the classic videogame 'Pong' as an electro-mechanical device. He spent hundreds of hours assembling the monstrosity, that realistically pings and pongs via two wood blocks. In an interview with Spiegel Online the builder, Niklas Roy, explains was motivated him to do it.
Spiegel Online: How did you come up with the idea to build such a curious toy?
Roy: I wanted to react against what's happening these days in the games and film special effects industries. There virtual realities are made which copy the real world. My goal was to turn the tables and transport a virtual world into reality.
Spiegel Online: How much work is inside this big box?
Roy: A whole lot. From the idea to the finished machine took about a year. In total the project took about 900 hours of work.
Spiegel Online: Why of all things did you pick this Ping-Pong game?
Roy: Because it's a symbol. It's one of the first computergames, and definitely the first commercially successful one. And it's a virtual world that's calculated by a computer in real time. Although it's an imitation tennis game, it's nevertheless immediately recognizable as a video game. At the same time it's simplicity was well suited to my purposes.
Spiegel Online: Did you buy (new) all the parts from which you built it?
Roy: Yes, everything but the telephone relays. Those are from an Internet auction. I got them from an auction of a 50s telephone system. The parts together cost about 2500 Euros.
Spiegel Online: Where is the game now?
Roy: At the moment at my house. But it was exhibited at the 'Garage' festival in Stralsund this summer. Pongmechanick will probably be shown at the 'Viper' art festival in Basel and definitely at the hacker congress of the Chaos Computer Club in December in Berlin.
Spiegel Online: Was were the greatest technical challenges?
Roy: Without a doubt the mechanical parts. The whole thing consists of two parts: the relay controls and the mechanical display with collision detection. The mechanical part was the most complicated because it's naturally the most error-prone.
Spiegel Online: You tried several approaches for the mechanics before it worked...
Roy: In the beginning I wanted to set the moving parts on coasters and move them on carts. DC motors would've pulled the carts back and forth with strings. But it didn't work like I'd imagined. So I used chains instead of strings, and they move gliders instead of carts. The gliders simply slide along rails.
Spiegel Online: You hear it when the ball hits the flipper. How was that solved technically?
Roy: The original Pong had just two sounds: one high and one low beep. I wanted a one-to-one translation as much as possible. So I bought two wood blocks from a percussion store, one high and one low sounding. These are hit by electromagnets that came from door bells.
Spiegel Online: Where did your affinity for computer games and tinkering with relays come from?
Roy: Wenn you're 30 years old, like I am, then Pong is almost certainly the first video game that you played. And as a child I always tinkered a lot. I built an alarm system for my room and experimented with electricity. I always had a knack for it.
Spiegel Online: Do you believe that mechanical games in general have a future?
Roy: I can imagine that (note: I'm not a native speaker, but this is probably better than the fish would do.)
"Table tennis from the computer Stone-age"
A Berlin art student has reverse-engineered the classic videogame 'Pong' as an electro-mechanical device. He spent hundreds of hours assembling the monstrosity, that realistically pings and pongs via two wood blocks. In an interview with Spiegel Online the builder, Niklas Roy, explains was motivated hi
Slashdot Mirror
Ford is making a valid trademark claim, not a patent or copyright claim as the summary, tags, and category would suggest. Ford does not claim to own the pictures, and it is certainly not making a patent claim. What Ford is doing is claiming trademark and trade dress rights in its name, logo, and the stylistic features of its vehicles. Ford is alleging that the Club's calendar trades on the good will that people associate with the Ford name, logo, etc, which is not allowed under state and federal trademark laws.
Furthermore, trademark law requires trademark owners to respond to such acts of potential trademark infringement. If they do not so act, then later infringers may point to the inaction and claim that Ford has abandoned their trademark. Note that this is unlike copyright and patents, which give the rightsholder more discretion in pursuing individual cases.
None of this is to say that this is a good business decision. In its current financial state, Ford should be working with its few remaining fans to produce properly licensed calendars, shirts, etc that maintain Ford's intellectual property rights. That way, everybody wins. This sort of knee-jerk "shut 'em down" response does both the company and its fans a disservice in the long run.
The energy density may be poor, but the fast recharge time may make up for it. Let's assume a pure EV using these batteries got a range of 150 miles, which is pretty lousy by most standards. The average commute is about 20 miles each way, or 200 miles a week. If the average commuter has to charge up twice a week instead of once a week, that's probably bearable if the charge time is 5 minutes instead of 30 minutes or overnight. Similarly, on longer trips, a 150 mile range is still bearable if it only means making a 5-10 minute pit stop every 2 hours or so.
Actually, this is a good example of something that would not be helped by the open source development model. How many hobbyists do you think have a multi-million dollar vehicle outfitted with all the necessary sensors and computers? And of those, how many do you think have a large testing area? And of those, how many have a team of people to prep the car and testing area for each test run?
Most of the teams in the UC spent more on their car than was offered in prize money. They still profit because a lot of that spending was subsidized by corporations (note the logos all over the cars). Nonetheless, the money has to come from somewhere. Without the car, sensors, and testing area, an open source contributor could only look for the most obvious bugs.
Now, what they should release are their algorithms and design methods. But making the actual source code development open source would not help the state of the art progress "gigantically." Remember also that these machines are often purpose built using some amount of custom hardware. What works with one setup and for one car type will not necessarily work for another. It's like saying Open Darwin helps Microsoft. It could, in theory, help a few things, but most are so inherently incompatible that it's more trouble than it's worth.
Quoth the blogger: "With hundreds of languages and API's out there, is anyone really dumb enough to think "yet another one" will fix our parallel programming problems?"
Yet Intel touts its Threading Building Blocks library as just such a fix to many parallel programming problems. Now, TBB is a very nice product, and in many ways it is superior to a lot of existing libraries, APIs, and languages, but one gets the sense that maybe the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing at Intel.
I might also draw an analogy to the open source world, where there are often dozens of solutions to both simple/mundane problems (text editors, media players, command line shells, etc) and more complex ones (window managers, Linux distributions, etc). I wonder if the free and open source software world wouldn't also benefit from a "culling of the herd," so to speak.
The full press release notes that the maximum acceleration would be a mere .6 G's or so, which is more than Mars but obviously less than Earth. This is unlikely to result in any unknown physiological changes. In fact, the at least occasional exposure to g-forces would probably be beneficial compared to continuous micro-gravity.
Anyway, a 100 metric ton craft would be pretty wimpy. That's 5% of the Space Shuttle's mass, for instance. I suspect this would be an unmanned mission. (For reference, the Apollo Service Module & Lunar Module together were about 40 metric tons and the longest Apollo missions only lasted 12 days).
Also, the 'ignition mass' for the fastest version would be a whopping 1300 metric tons of plutonium. Using uranium prices as a stand-in, that's about $300 million in fuel. That's an awful big price tag for just getting a larger probe to Mars faster.
Why would they deny their users the same legal protection? Or maybe users should simply put a modified version of this clause on their blogs. That way, if LJ wants to deny that a user's ToS is valid, it would be shooting itself in the foot.
TFA says that the systems run Microsoft Office, not StarOffice. Unfortunately, their video doesn't show any office software, so it's hard to tell. Maybe someone will hack up a version of portable OpenOffice capable of running on the systems.
First off, the linked article doesn't actually contain the quote given in the article summary. But, assuming what the article summary says is accurate...
The relevance, admissibility, or incriminating character of the mere fact that a defendant hid something (i.e., as separate from the hidden content) is a legal question. In general, the absence of evidence is irrelevant with a few exceptions (obviously it's highly relevant to charges of destroying evidence!). The most important one is that of an absence of regularly kept business records. So, if a business regularly kept records of, say, who entered a building, and an employee were suspected of stealing something from the business, and the records for that night were missing, then perhaps that could be used as evidence against the employee on the theory that the employee had erased the record to cover his or her tracks. The same would be true if the record, rather than being deleted, had been encrypted when the others were unencrypted or encrypted in a different way/with a different key.
This is a very glossed over view of a complicated topic, but on the narrow question of the mere fact of the use of encryption, I would tend to say that would generally not be incriminating. Certainly the prosecution cannot simply point to your TrueCrypt or FileVault encrypted drive and say "look! everything on that computer is encrypted, therefore we can't know what it is, therefore it could be evidence of wrongdoing." That is tremendously weak circumstantial evidence and falls far, far below the reasonable doubt standard.
Note: I am not a lawyer and this is a layman's opinion, not legal advice.
The Apollo missions got 47,900 kg to the moon for $2.75 billion in today's money. That's $57,411/kg. Let's say the Indians can do it vastly cheaper: $25,000/kg.
Let's say the robot weighs the same as Spirit and Opportunity (the current Mars rovers): 175kg. So the cost to get the robot to the moon would be $4,375,000, completely discounting the cost of the rocket itself, the payload container, the landing mechanism, support personnel, etc, etc.
Practical upshot: they could easily spend 10 times as much on the robot and only increase the cost of the mission 11%. And once the real costs are taken into account, the increase would probably be negligible ( 1%).
That's why NASA spends so much on the robot: a) it's incredibly expensive just to get the robot anywhere and b) if the robot screws up once it's there, the bulk of the money was completely wasted, so making the robot robust & reliable is very important.
One counterpart to this kind of study is this argument: If you think $21.50 is a lot, just imagine how much it would cost each individual customer to negotiate and license all of the patents in question? By centralizing the negotiation and licensing, Microsoft greatly reduces the total transaction costs.
That said, I'm sure a lot of these patents are absurd software patents that Microsoft decided it was cheaper or easier to license than defeat in court.
In a perfect world, perhaps the reforms you suggest could be put in place. Unfortunately, I don't think many of them are practical.
1. "Change USPTO pay scale to make patent examiners much higher paid people
than senior industry people." I will assume that you mean a salary substantially north of $100k/year. Very, very few government employees make that much (think Congress, President, and the Supreme Court). The PTO has over 4000 examiners. That's a very expensive proposition.
2. "Introduce a new category of patent rejections: blatantly obvious (with attendant fine)." This would be an essentially unprecedented thing for a government agency to do. Fining an corporation millions of dollars for wasting a few hours of a PTO examiner's time (as would be the case if the invention were blatantly obvious) is pretty hard to justify. As for rejecting the blatantly obvious, examiners do sometimes give a piece of prior art and state that the claimed invention is an obvious improvement, so that's close.
3. "Make patents vary in length depending upon industry." This I agree with, but it's extremely unlikely. First, the world has just finished more or less agreeing on a 20 years from time of filing standard for patent terms, so deharmonizing the US law would encounter a great deal of opposition here and abroad. Second, it would be difficult to empirically determine what the various categories and their durations should be.
4. "Simplify application process. Make USPTO write patent claims and search for prior art." The PTO does currently search for prior art, although their search is generally limited to existing patents and patent applications. As for "the patent applicant would just be required to explain what the invention is," that's exactly what the claims are. The claims are the invention. Having the applicant tell the PTO the "gist" or "heart" of the invention is precisely what the current Patent Act (the 1952 Act) was designed to eliminate.
5. "Making litigation cheaper is another topic." Fair enough, though I certainly agree that it's absurdly expensive and stands in the way of the patent system's Constitutional purpose of promoting the useful arts and sciences.
As for this presumption that patent applications are presumptively valid, I have no idea where that comes from. PATENTS, not applications, are presumed valid. 35 U.S.C. 282.
As the article summary says, applications submitted under the new accelerated process are presumptively patentable. Issued patents are, of course, patentable, and that's what my rant addressed. I'm not sure where your confusion came from.
A lot of posters are scoffing at the notion that applicants would do a very good job of finding prior art to submit along with their accelerated application. This is not actually the case, however, and the reason it isn't is why the accelerated patent program hasn't gotten much use yet.
See, imagine that the putative lazy (or evil) attorney doesn't do a very good job of finding prior art and submits an application to patent something otherwise well known in the art. Sure, the PTO may grant the patent on the presumption that the attorney did a thorough search. But if the case gets litigated (which it likely will if the patent is really all that bad), then the other side will easily be able to point out the prior art that the attorney didn't submit. When the patent is invalidated as a result, that attorney is going to get sued into oblivion for malpractice. If the attorney omitted the prior art on purpose in order to get the patent issued, it's even possible that he or she could be censured or disbarred.
That brings us to why the new program isn't getting much use. Because the patent will issue only a few months after filing the application, the attorney only has a very short amount of time to search for and find any relevant prior art the PTO needs in order to determine which claims to allow and which ones not to. Most attorneys don't feel like they can search the many millions of US and overseas patents in that amount of time (to say nothing of the countless other 'printed publications' that may be prior art as well). So the program isn't getting used very much.
<rant>
What would be a good change? Eliminating the presumption of patent validity and making the PTO into a simple time stamping/registration body like the Library of Congress. As it stands now, virtually all patents with any value end up at least being inspected by opposing lawyers if not litigated outright, and a great many of them are found to be worthless or of substantially less worth than they appear at first glance. Eliminating the presumption of validity would get rid of the massive delay and cost of being granted a patent while also pushing the initial burden of proof on to the plaintiff/patentee to show that his or her patent is valid. The loss of this presumption would make a patent less inherently valuable and the number of issued patents would likely actually decrease. Because the cost of initiating patent litigation would go up, the number of suits would go down as well.
</rant>
A lot of people are asking why SCO would want to do this or would care. My theory is that SCO hopes to get access to IBM's attorneys' work product.
Normally an attorney's work product (memos, notes, theories, etc created as part of the attorney's work for a client) cannot be discovered by the opposing side. It works like attorney-client privilege.
However, just like the attorney-client privilege, the work product privilege can be waived intentionally or unintentionally if the attorney (or client) shares the information with someone outside the attorney-client relationship. SCO's theory may well be that if an IBM lawyer posts to Groklaw an analysis of the case that amounts to a summary of IBM's theory on the case, then SCO should be allowed access to all of the attorney's related work product. Depending on the judge, SCO may even be granted access to all of the work product of every attorney at that firm assigned to the SCO v. IBM case, although that's pretty unlikely unless the judge has some pet peeve about attorneys commenting to the media/public about ongoing cases.
So, while this may seem like just another last-ditch delay tactic by SCO (and it probably is), there may well be a not-entirely-unreasonable legal basis for it.
(Note: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.)
I wrote: The named inventor on the patent application is a developer who doesn't know anything about BlueJ because of the aforementioned sanitizing. As such, there's no perjury or fraud on the patent office.
AC wrote: The named inventor on a patent must be the inventor or co-inventor, otherwise the patent isn't legally valid.
I don't see how that matters. The named inventor (in my scenario) is the developer who found a way to implement the idea. He is the inventor, so far as he and the legal staff know. Now, he isn't the true inventor (that would be the BlueJ folks), but that doesn't matter for the purposes of my scenario. I was just trying to explain how the legal staff could think they were doing 'the right thing,' whether by accident or design.
There already is such a system: the Statutory Invention Registration. Basically, it has all the same information as a patent but doesn't confer any rights on the submitter the way a patent grant does. Once it's submitted, it joins the PTO's database, which is the one place a patent examiner is guaranteed to look when reviewing a patent.
This is also one reason why "defensive patents" are complete hokum. If a company really wanted to get a patent just to make sure no one else could, they would just file a SIR: it has all the same information, it gets searched by examiners, and it's a public record. But of course SIRs are actually very rare: it's so easy to get a patent that companies would rather get the patent 'just in case' they need to sue anyone later.
That said, here's what I think might have happened.
That's my theory, anyway. It goes to show that there's a perverse incentive for large corporations to have a system of information hiding so that it can later have plausible deniability about this kind of thing.
This is what you get: Pioneer P3DX
Anyone has used player/stage will recognize this as sort of the 'default' robot that the simulator uses.
It's a two wheel differential-drive base that uses sonar for range finding and object detection. On top you can mount all manner of sensors and actuators.
I have no idea if they really cost that much, though. By implication from this page and this page, though, the P3-DX costs something like $10,000 with an educational discount.
Except the videos are at QVGA resolution (320x240). That's substantially less than even analog TV, much less DVD or HDTV. Don't count on a lot of people ditching their Tivos just yet. Or ditching bittorrent, for that matter. The videos are really just meant to play on the video-capable iPods. Frankly I think they really missed the boat. Knowing Apple, I expect what happened is that ABC/Disney (whom they still have a quasi-relationship with via Pixar) is just testing the waters, rather than Apple not having the foresight to go whole hog with legal TV show downloads. Note, for instance, that the only videos available are ABC/Disney shows and Pixar shorts.
If it works out, I would hope to see full-res shows on offer from all sorts of networks.
Also, I wonder...with iTunes you can burn CDs of music, right? Can you burn a DVD of the show? I expect you probably can't, but they ought to make it so you can. Would short-circuit the 'must buy a Mac mini or a new G5 in order to have a media center' thing, though. Hopefully Apple will choose the option that gives its users more freedom to use what they've bought.
Alright, so admittedly the trailer site does mention that a powerful computer is needed to play the high-res version of the trailer.
So. I have an Athlon 64 3400+, 1GB of RAM, a 10K RPM SATA harddrive, and a GeForce 6800GT on a recent Windows XP install. The only extra programs I have running are Gaim and anti-virus software. I keep my computer up to date and swept for spyware using Ad-Aware and use Firefox for browsing.
I'll admit that my machine isn't quite the fastest in the world. I could have slightly faster (4000+) dual processors and more RAM. However, I still think my machine is pretty stinkin' fast by today's standards.
That said, the trailer (using the Quicktime 7 for Windows beta) played like crap, even at half-size. So...what the heck? Is it the player? Have people had better luck with other software? Or is HD really -that- hard to decode?
So I looked up the relativistic Doppler effect and plugged in some numbers.
.0017% of the total frequency range. Unfortunately, I don't know what the tolerances for 802.11b are, but I have difficulty believing that .0017% would cause much trouble.
For a relative velocity of 400mph you get an observed frequency of 2.39999856GHz.
Now, looking at the 802.11b spec available at the 802 working group site I see that it operates in the 2.4 - 2.4835GHz range.
So the Doppler effect at 400mph introduces a difference in frequency equal to
Now, backfiguring for a more common 5% tolerance, we get something like 500,000m/s or 1.1 million mph. So, yes, 802.11b probably won't work between passing spaceships. Aside from that, we're probably safe.
Tripp Hawkins was also the CEO of 3DO, and we all know how well that worked out. I'd say his credibility in terms of prediction was pretty much shot since he thought the 3DO would take over the world. As opposed to, you know, being a wildly overpriced system with a handful of lame, FMV-laden titles.
The Handyboard is a favorite of robot hobbiests and researchers. We use them in our Mobile Robotics class at Uni. The full-on Handyboard is about $299, though. A somewhat reduced version of the Handyboard, the Handy Cricket is available for $99 from Gleason Research with a sensor/motor kit included. If you check the Handyboard page, there are several other vendors, including ones that sell unassembled kits for less, if you're not afraid of a little (okay, a fair bit of) soldering.
I recommend using Lego to build the body of the robot as it's highly reconfigurable, cheap, and fun to play with even without the robot parts.
This guy basically claims three things:
1. He owns Photoshop, LightWave, and Maya. A cursory look at pricing reveals that buying those programs would cost about $3200 total (assuming he buys Maya Complete and not Maya Unlimited).
2. He only needs some icons or sprites.
3. He can't pay an artist to make those things.
I haven't priced custom artwork latetly, but assuming it's -anything- like custom software, I have a damned hard time believing he can't get what he needs for much, much less than $3200. I think it's much more likely that he is using illegal copies of those programs, in which case I think he needs to get out of the commercial software business if he's not willing to respect the copyright of other programmers. In any case, if he's willing to infringe software copyright, he might as well just copy some artwork, too.
Sorry for the harsh language, but this guy is either an idiot not to have done the math or a crook for copying software illegally.
(note: I'm not a native german speaker, but this is probably better than the fish would do.)
"Table tennis from the computer Stone-age"
A Berlin art student has reverse-engineered the classic videogame 'Pong' as an electro-mechanical device. He spent hundreds of hours assembling the monstrosity, that realistically pings and pongs via two wood blocks. In an interview with Spiegel Online the builder, Niklas Roy, explains was motivated him to do it.
Spiegel Online: How did you come up with the idea to build such a curious toy?
Roy: I wanted to react against what's happening these days in the games and film special effects industries. There virtual realities are made which copy the real world. My goal was to turn the tables and transport a virtual world into reality.
Spiegel Online: How much work is inside this big box?
Roy: A whole lot. From the idea to the finished machine took about a year. In total the project took about 900 hours of work.
Spiegel Online: Why of all things did you pick this Ping-Pong game?
Roy: Because it's a symbol. It's one of the first computergames, and definitely the first commercially successful one. And it's a virtual world that's calculated by a computer in real time. Although it's an imitation tennis game, it's nevertheless immediately recognizable as a video game. At the same time it's simplicity was well suited to my purposes.
Spiegel Online: Did you buy (new) all the parts from which you built it?
Roy: Yes, everything but the telephone relays. Those are from an Internet auction. I got them from an auction of a 50s telephone system. The parts together cost about 2500 Euros.
Spiegel Online: Where is the game now?
Roy: At the moment at my house. But it was exhibited at the 'Garage' festival in Stralsund this summer. Pongmechanick will probably be shown at the 'Viper' art festival in Basel and definitely at the hacker congress of the Chaos Computer Club in December in Berlin.
Spiegel Online: Was were the greatest technical challenges?
Roy: Without a doubt the mechanical parts. The whole thing consists of two parts: the relay controls and the mechanical display with collision detection. The mechanical part was the most complicated because it's naturally the most error-prone.
Spiegel Online: You tried several approaches for the mechanics before it worked...
Roy: In the beginning I wanted to set the moving parts on coasters and move them on carts. DC motors would've pulled the carts back and forth with strings. But it didn't work like I'd imagined. So I used chains instead of strings, and they move gliders instead of carts. The gliders simply slide along rails.
Spiegel Online: You hear it when the ball hits the flipper. How was that solved technically?
Roy: The original Pong had just two sounds: one high and one low beep. I wanted a one-to-one translation as much as possible. So I bought two wood blocks from a percussion store, one high and one low sounding. These are hit by electromagnets that came from door bells.
Spiegel Online: Where did your affinity for computer games and tinkering with relays come from?
Roy: Wenn you're 30 years old, like I am, then Pong is almost certainly the first video game that you played. And as a child I always tinkered a lot. I built an alarm system for my room and experimented with electricity. I always had a knack for it.
Spiegel Online: Do you believe that mechanical games in general have a future?
Roy: I can imagine that (note: I'm not a native speaker, but this is probably better than the fish would do.)
"Table tennis from the computer Stone-age"
A Berlin art student has reverse-engineered the classic videogame 'Pong' as an electro-mechanical device. He spent hundreds of hours assembling the monstrosity, that realistically pings and pongs via two wood blocks. In an interview with Spiegel Online the builder, Niklas Roy, explains was motivated hi