iPods support CD quality Apple Lossless, but they do not support higher sample rates. So while you can create a 24/96 Apple lossless from a flac, you have to downconvert it to play it on an iPod. This would be less annoying if iTunes were better at managing multiple versions of a particular file.
Quite possibly not exactly what the previous poster was complaining about though.
I certainly hope that terrorists and even would be terrorists end up dealing with the legal system. However, I think it is important that they end up dealing with the fuzz for the right reasons. Encouraging people to commit a crime, coordination of crimes - these are actions which are understandably illegal. Factual instruction on how to produce bang? That falls under what I would expect to be covered by the first amendment. There are too many chemistry books to outlaw and at some point chemists do need to know what happens when you mix glycerin with certain acids.
If you talk to somebody who has taken a real fluid dynamics/aerodynamics course the situation is understood, but confused questions can lead to confused answers. The Bernoulli "effect" is a relationship between speed and pressure. And yes, the pressure on various top parts of a wing will be lower than the pressure on various bottom parts, and yes the relationship (mostly) holds, and so this means that there is more speed on the top part. However, this is also true for the thin curved fan blades, paper airplanes and maple leaves. The question that you should ask is "Why is the speed and pressure different between the top and the bottom of the wing?". The Bernoulli effect does not provide an answer to this question. The equal transit time fallacy purports to answer this question but does not come close to providing meaningful numbers.
In fact, the actual answer to this question is complex. By analyzing the Navier-Stokes equation using technical concepts such as vorticity and big computers it is often possible to get reasonable numbers for actual lift. However, various limitations to these techniques mean that experimental tests are still an important part of designing aircraft.
From the US copyright act: "Works Made for Hire. -- (1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment; or..."
There are various caveats which can matter, but if you are on a salary and do work at home on your own equipment to solve a problem that is part of your job, then that is a work for hire and owned by your employer. As a result, if you are a salaried employee of a software company, and you do programming at home, they might well try to make the argument that this work was done "for" them and therefore belongs to them. This is why the FSF, for example, requires that professional programmers who contribute to their projects include a sign off from the contributor's employer. Even if the contributor is sure that it wasn't done as part of his work, they don't want to deal with the legal hassles if the employer disagrees.
Individual employment agreements, and state restrictions on employment agreements can further refine this. For example, in California an employment agreement forcing you to hand over work done for your own purposes on your own time is considered unenforceable.
I hope you're not serious. Expecting teenagers to read Newton is a great way of putting them off physics for life. He is quite possibly the most dull and convoluted writer ever to abuse the English language. A grounding in the history of a subject is important, but reading Newton is a terrible idea.
English? Why ever would you expect a book with the tittle "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica" to be written in english? Images of the text seem to match the tittle.
So if music transcription and chord theory had some practical everyday purpose, would we be justified in making students learn to do these things without even trying to show them how to play?
Engineers use computer models. Accountants use spreadsheets. How many other professions even come close to using math?
This wasn't always the case. I hear of today's law students avoiding tax class because the math is difficult. Abraham Lincoln carried a copy of Euclid's Elements in his saddle bags because he thought reading it improved his ability to argue and demonstrate as a lawyer.
Today more than ever before, the important part of mathematics in today's world is the ideas and the ability to connect the ideas. Not the ability to perform, say, those arithmetic computations which computers do so many millions of times faster. Now, a certain amount of practicing such things does contribute to the study of mathematical ideas, but if every question you study is better answered with a calculator then that is all you are training to be, and the calculator will always be better than you.
Specialists in every field complain that educators get their field wrong or don't stir the passions of kids for their field as much as they ought to. What they fail to understand is that they're coming at the whole problem from the perspective of someone who is obviously gifted at and highly passionate about the field. They don't seem to get that most people don't pick up their field as easily as they do, and don't care enough to put in the effort it would take to get even half as good at it as the specialist.
Do musicians complain that the typical high school band teachers don't understand the basics of music? This is a specific example from the TFA and it is very well chosen. People don't expect high school band teacher to world class musicians. They do however expect high school band teacher to have a feel for what music is. They expect high school band teacher to know the difference between in tune and out of tune. They expect high school band teachers to drill notation and teach counting different times, but the also expect to be connecting these things to actual music at every step of the way.
We expect this of high school band teacher because most people know what music is supposed to sound like. Most people have enough sense for how it actually works to recognize somebody who can't play, or who cannot teach how to play.
Teaching math, science, or anything else is HARD. Teaching it to people who don't care and don't want to be there is even harder. Teaching kids to love the field when the only metric used to judge your performance is pass rates on a standardized test is harder still. It's all well and good for professional mathematicians to bitch and moan about the state of education, but until they're ready to step in with some realistic and implementable ideas that don't presuppose that all kids have some inherent interest in these things that just needs to be tapped into, it's not helpful in the least.
If you tried to teach a music class based on transcribing notation and chord theory, rather than listening and/or playing you'd find it hard also. Teaching kids to love music using a such a curriculum wouldn't just be hard, it would border on the absurd. Even if a few people did enjoy the raw mindless diligence to do such a thing out of context, there is no particular reason to believe that this would produce great musicians.
I'd like to add that science education in the US seems to me to be much closer to math education than music education. I remember learning to play lip service to the scientific method, but I don't remember ever being asked to sit down with some lab equipment and figure out what some relationship is. If you are given the equation, and given the experiment to "test" some particular aspect of the equation, you've removed the science, you've removed what is important.
Assuming sufficient and sufficiently geeky parental involvement, there are lots of cool things from United Nuclear. http://www.unitednuclear.com/
A collection of the smaller magnets and some ferrofluid are a pretty good combination. Ferrofluid has aproximatly the same danger and potential for mess as old engine oil, so depending on the kid you might need to supervise it. A variety of magnets also add variety to a ROMP set. http://scientificsonline.com/product.asp?eid=EID02&pn=3082172
It is described that way, and at the top level I'm sure it is an accurate description. However, there is little doubt that a lot of work went into pruning the tree. A pure Monte Carlo simulator isn't hard to write, but they do not exhibit the performance demonstrated by either the supercomputer version or the downloadable version.
There is actually a stage in the game at which go becomes mathematically solvable (quickly). It is slightly sooner than a typical strong amateur finds things solved, but still rather late in the game.
I'm not sure this is effectively so different than an endgame database. Certainly as the game progresses the moves become smaller and the game becomes more certain... well, except when you have a couple of dragons chasing each other across the board.
Current administration? What about the administration after that, and the one after that? The current administration we at least know something about. What about when your personal political bogeyman gets elected in a few cycles, whoever it is.
While not as exciting, the simple auction method that I like is: Sealed bid, the high bidder gets the item, but he pays what the next highest bidder bids. Bids remain sealed after the auction, though the winner and the price he paid is announced. In the case of multiple identical items, the winners all pay the amount bid by the highest non-winner.
The reason that forth is such a great choice for firmware and embedded systems is twofold. First of all, it is fairly fast. There can be a lot of indirection, but it is localized to a small amount of memmory.
Second of all, and very importantly, you can fit an entire forth development environment into a few k. Might need 5-10 on these new fangled 32 bit machines. That is the whole thing, no separate compiler, runtime libraries, nothing like that. So, in the time it takes to study the gcc source enough to start porting it to a new architecture, you can write a complete forth interpreter in assembly, burn it to an eprom, and start talking to your new architecture over a serial line.
And as you might expect, much like C, the bare metal is open to you. ! and @ are the commands to store and fetch variables. But they don't just work for variables, they work for any address you want to pass them.
Wow, what a lesson. The letter of the law is meaningless, only the spirit matters. Especially when an authority figures are there to interpret what the spirit is. Simply a wonderfull, cheerfull lesson for their little creative and adventurous minds.
You've plenty of time, if you are behind a firewall, or even a basic home NATing router. If you don't have one, I'd consider getting one, or visiting a friend who has one to get patches.
I think that what you describe illustrates quite clearly the limitations of an MRI as a lie detector. Nervousness isn't the only thing that an attacker can work to adjust.
I'm trying to remember the name of this movie with the cop prepping to go undercover. So much time spent repeating his cover story. So much time being asked to respond to questions "in character". So much time spent visualizing what "happened".
We don't think of terrorists being so smart and sophisticated. But then, they haven't had to be. I suppose that these security measures with such visible work arounds might buy a little time, or convince the terrorists to find a different place to attack, but I can't imagine that they do much to convince terrorists not to attack.
Depends on the product. Or at least, I think that it should. It would make sense to have a proffesional certification required to validate software products that are critical to safety or privacy. That is, we could have software certification that companies would be expected to acquire when deploying such a system. If a system is deployed without such certification, then the deploying company would be have additional liability. On the other hand, if a software professional signed off on a project or installation and problems were found, then he would risk his ability to certify, along with personal and corporate liabilities as above.
This would require though that the person signing off have much input/control over installation, upgrades and the like. You can't realy certify an executible file, only a complete system.
In other engineering fields it has been determined that it is in the best interest of the public to make it impossible to sign away certain liabilities. With companies letting hundreds of thousand credit card number escape their systems, it might well be time to apply similar reasoning to software developers.
This will increase costs, not just because of slower processes but also because it would make it harder to be a software engineer. This might slow the outsourcing movement.
If you get good digital cell phone reception, I'd expect it to work fine. Otherwise not, obviously. Just go to the local retailer and explain that you want to try before you buy. The salesperson assured me that I could a 30 day no obligation trial, given that coverage wasn't certain.
I had to take him up on it, and spent a few minutes explaining this trial to cingular when I came in to return the phone. Apparently, it isn't standard operating procedure. They buckled nicely after a few firm words. Given that their employee did promise, I didn't feel bad about it.
I said that I was feeling fiesty, and I didn't say that I was trying to be entirely non-trollish. Sorry about that. I can only apologize and assure you that it is not my usual style. At least, I hope not. And I do appreciate your attempts to educate us wild slashdotters.
I've been a bit sloppy, perhaps even more than a bit, and I stand corrected regarding references and spelling. I believe that the argument deserves better, and I'm not sure I've had the time to do it justice.
I am willing to believe that justification for a vibrating desklamp is all that is required to patent it. I don't believe that this point of law is a useful characteristic, and in fact consider it to be something worth trying to fix.
Why do we require an implementation in the patent? For what reason?
My impression has always been that that the requirement is there to encourage innovation by focusing on implementations. You cannot patent the one line product specification summary "a machine to clean cotton". This allows competition to design products with similar specifications while at the same time discouraging the copying of novel implementations. This pits inventors against each other in that they need to devise novel solutions to the same technical problem. A focus on the implementation rather that the specification ensures this competition.
The desirability of the above may be the core of our disagreement, and we may have to agree to disagree. I'm perfectly willing to do this, but then I'm starting to feel less fiesty. This is probably for the best.
Just for completeness, the only other possible justification for this limitation that I can think of, is that it is to limit the patenting of concepts to things which are implementable with today's technology. But if this were the case, why would choosing a different implementation avoid violation of the patent? If a specification sheet is patentable so long as it has an implementation attached, then any vibrating controller violates the non-obvious part of the patent.
Regarding maturity, I've been in a rather fiesty mood recently, but I do try not to be too trollish. You don't seem like a bad fellow. Such a pitty you don't see things my way. On a related note, if you cannot make a joke without a smiley, you need to work on your writing skills.
With the apparent partial exception in biotechnology, patents at least notionally must be on implementations of devices, not on general ideas.
The cotton gin was a clever (for it's time) implimentation of a device with an obvious product requirements sheet. Even if you say to yourself "I need a way to clean cotton mechanically", the cotton gin is not a particularly obvious design. I mean, it might be the first one that you think up, but it will likely take more than 10 minutes. Especially if you only have past attempts at cotton cleaners to work from.
On the other hand, if you say "I need a way to make a controller vibrate", or even "I way to make a joystick provide feedback" then the 2 bit spinning eccentric mass is likely to come to mind in such a timeframe. Especially if you count other small vibrating things as prior art. And yes, the patent does seem to include the case of multiple spinning eccentric masses, and this is aproximatly the second thing on the list I'd make of cheap ways to vibrate a controller.
In the case of the cotton gin, the non-obviousness is in the implementation - not the thumbnail sketch of the product specification. We require patents to be on implimentations, and the very best reason I see for this is to avoid the patenting of product specifications.
My guess is that Sony used the aformentined vibration "technology" because when starting with the specification, the design was so obvious that they couldn't imagine the design would be patented.
Attempting to remove thought from the definition of "obvious" is, I think, doomed to failure. But that clearly hasn't kept somebody from trying.
On a related note, none of the few patents that I've looked at have had non-patent references. This speaks of a myopia on the part of the patent office. Budgetary considerations may be a reason for this, but that is no justification when they are removing our rights to design and build things.
I remember a comment made, I believe, by a USPTO head in a Slashdot interview. Something along the lines of "The patent office doesn't have much prior art on file for software patents, but this is self correct as more are filed." That is Hubris, not hubris, and these are our rights to invent being eroded.
I already responded once, but realized that my core point could perhaps be made even more clear.
It isn't possible to patent the idea of a vibrating controller. This is explicitly forbidden, and IMNSHO, for good reason.
However, given this idea, the ME problem is sufficiently simple and well understood that it is possible to enumerate the most reasonable solutions. Given an afternoon or two, I could probably write descriptions at the level of this patent which covers pretty much all reasonable implimentation strategies. Mass moving linearly, driven by x, y or z. Mass moving in a pattern not linear or circular, mass moving, mass moving. If I hired an actual ME for a brainstorming session, we could probably do even better. A spinning eccentric mass would be first on the list, but apparently somebody beat me to it.
Where I to do so and acquire patents, companies might still be able to build vibrating controllers. However, without liscensing my patents, they would need to use more esoteric methods of vibration creation. Such methods are esoteric because they are more expensive and/or less inheriently reliable.
If I did a sufficently good job, I would have effectively subverted the restriction that ideas are not patentable. The current patent system does not effectively impliment this restriction. Perhaps patent officers thoughtfully and intelligently impliment certain standards. But these standards in aggregate allow the patenting of ideas. It just takes a bit more time and money.
Apparently, you can attach an idea too general to be patented to an implimentation too obvious to be patented, and get a patent. I find this absurd, and believe it demonstrates a certain lack of thought on the part of the patent office. Come to think of it, maybe I need to go patent some ideas...
35 U.S.C. 103 (a): "A patent may not be obtained though the invention is not identically disclosed or described as set forth in section 102 of this title, if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains."
If I had hired a random controller engineer in 2000(or rather a random engineer of any sort) and asked him to design a vibrating controler, I'd fire him for stupidity if he didn't think up the possibility of an eccentric mass. Especially if he had seen or heard of, well, a vibrator. Not exacty hard to investigate prior art, and one that has been advertised since 1910. Or wait! maybe it isn't obvious in a legal sense to examine other vibrating devices when desiging a vibrating controler! Such clever people those IP lawyers.
The closest thing to a non-obvious aspect is the idea of creating a vibrating controller. Given that idea as a design goal, I stand by my claim that the implimentation is stupidly obvious. So just what is the patent on again? The idea of a vibrating controller? or a particular implimentation? This contrast is why I think the patent office needs to be overhauled.
I read the patent. One of them at least: 6,424,333. Stupidly obvious. Suppose I took a random person with a slight amount of mechanical engineering experience, and asked him or her to design a vibrating controller. What sort of dope wouldn't think of a spinning eccentric mass. Especially in 2001 when the same design has be used in vibrators at least since, oh, what, 1950 or something? But I suppose that if you cannot patent the idea of a vibrating controller, then patenting the one particularly obvious implimention is second best.
The patent office does need overhauled, because the examiners are either idiots or they assume that everybody else is. This patent is a perfect example of the fact.
First of all, verbal agreements aren't entirely meaningless. Especially if the verbal agreement was made after the written one, you might have a (small) leg to stand on.
Next, the product is a derived work from IBM's GPL'd code. Your agreement may well give them copyright ownership of your additions, though at least in some states (CA I'm pretty sure) such agreements are illegal to whatever extent that they apply to anything not a direct result of working for them. However, as a company they only have use of the portion released under IBM's GPL. As a copyright owner, IBM might want to take some action on this point.
Finally, patents can only be applied for by the
true inventor. Patents cannot be applied for by companies and an application by someone other than the inventor is (presumably) easy to invalidate. If they cannot dispute that you were the inventor, I don't see how they'd have a legal leg to stand on.
It seems to me therefore that the company cannot acquire a patent on your invention without going through you. I would expect their agreement to require you to assign them any patents resulting from inventions made while working for them. I don't know if it is likely to require you to file a patent or what recourse they might have with you if you don't.
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iPods support CD quality Apple Lossless, but they do not support higher sample rates. So while you can create a 24/96 Apple lossless from a flac, you have to downconvert it to play it on an iPod. This would be less annoying if iTunes were better at managing multiple versions of a particular file. Quite possibly not exactly what the previous poster was complaining about though.
I certainly hope that terrorists and even would be terrorists end up dealing with the legal system. However, I think it is important that they end up dealing with the fuzz for the right reasons. Encouraging people to commit a crime, coordination of crimes - these are actions which are understandably illegal. Factual instruction on how to produce bang? That falls under what I would expect to be covered by the first amendment. There are too many chemistry books to outlaw and at some point chemists do need to know what happens when you mix glycerin with certain acids.
In fact, the actual answer to this question is complex. By analyzing the Navier-Stokes equation using technical concepts such as vorticity and big computers it is often possible to get reasonable numbers for actual lift. However, various limitations to these techniques mean that experimental tests are still an important part of designing aircraft.
From the US copyright act: "Works Made for Hire. -- (1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment; or ..."
There are various caveats which can matter, but if you are on a salary and do work at home on your own equipment to solve a problem that is part of your job, then that is a work for hire and owned by your employer. As a result, if you are a salaried employee of a software company, and you do programming at home, they might well try to make the argument that this work was done "for" them and therefore belongs to them. This is why the FSF, for example, requires that professional programmers who contribute to their projects include a sign off from the contributor's employer. Even if the contributor is sure that it wasn't done as part of his work, they don't want to deal with the legal hassles if the employer disagrees.
Individual employment agreements, and state restrictions on employment agreements can further refine this. For example, in California an employment agreement forcing you to hand over work done for your own purposes on your own time is considered unenforceable.
I hope you're not serious. Expecting teenagers to read Newton is a great way of putting them off physics for life. He is quite possibly the most dull and convoluted writer ever to abuse the English language. A grounding in the history of a subject is important, but reading Newton is a terrible idea.
English? Why ever would you expect a book with the tittle "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica" to be written in english? Images of the text seem to match the tittle.
So if music transcription and chord theory had some practical everyday purpose, would we be justified in making students learn to do these things without even trying to show them how to play?
Engineers use computer models. Accountants use spreadsheets. How many other professions even come close to using math?
This wasn't always the case. I hear of today's law students avoiding tax class because the math is difficult. Abraham Lincoln carried a copy of Euclid's Elements in his saddle bags because he thought reading it improved his ability to argue and demonstrate as a lawyer.
Today more than ever before, the important part of mathematics in today's world is the ideas and the ability to connect the ideas. Not the ability to perform, say, those arithmetic computations which computers do so many millions of times faster. Now, a certain amount of practicing such things does contribute to the study of mathematical ideas, but if every question you study is better answered with a calculator then that is all you are training to be, and the calculator will always be better than you.
Specialists in every field complain that educators get their field wrong or don't stir the passions of kids for their field as much as they ought to. What they fail to understand is that they're coming at the whole problem from the perspective of someone who is obviously gifted at and highly passionate about the field. They don't seem to get that most people don't pick up their field as easily as they do, and don't care enough to put in the effort it would take to get even half as good at it as the specialist.
Do musicians complain that the typical high school band teachers don't understand the basics of music? This is a specific example from the TFA and it is very well chosen. People don't expect high school band teacher to world class musicians. They do however expect high school band teacher to have a feel for what music is. They expect high school band teacher to know the difference between in tune and out of tune. They expect high school band teachers to drill notation and teach counting different times, but the also expect to be connecting these things to actual music at every step of the way.
We expect this of high school band teacher because most people know what music is supposed to sound like. Most people have enough sense for how it actually works to recognize somebody who can't play, or who cannot teach how to play.
Teaching math, science, or anything else is HARD. Teaching it to people who don't care and don't want to be there is even harder. Teaching kids to love the field when the only metric used to judge your performance is pass rates on a standardized test is harder still. It's all well and good for professional mathematicians to bitch and moan about the state of education, but until they're ready to step in with some realistic and implementable ideas that don't presuppose that all kids have some inherent interest in these things that just needs to be tapped into, it's not helpful in the least.
If you tried to teach a music class based on transcribing notation and chord theory, rather than listening and/or playing you'd find it hard also. Teaching kids to love music using a such a curriculum wouldn't just be hard, it would border on the absurd. Even if a few people did enjoy the raw mindless diligence to do such a thing out of context, there is no particular reason to believe that this would produce great musicians.
I'd like to add that science education in the US seems to me to be much closer to math education than music education. I remember learning to play lip service to the scientific method, but I don't remember ever being asked to sit down with some lab equipment and figure out what some relationship is. If you are given the equation, and given the experiment to "test" some particular aspect of the equation, you've removed the science, you've removed what is important.
Assuming sufficient and sufficiently geeky parental involvement, there are lots of cool things from United Nuclear. http://www.unitednuclear.com/
A collection of the smaller magnets and some ferrofluid are a pretty good combination. Ferrofluid has aproximatly the same danger and potential for mess as old engine oil, so depending on the kid you might need to supervise it. A variety of magnets also add variety to a ROMP set. http://scientificsonline.com/product.asp?eid=EID02&pn=3082172
You might also try throwing some mechanical puzzles at him. One that I particularly like can be found at http://stores.brilliantpuzzles.com/-strse-212/Internal-Combustion-Metal-Puzzle/Detail.bok but there are many.
It is described that way, and at the top level I'm sure it is an accurate description. However, there is little doubt that a lot of work went into pruning the tree. A pure Monte Carlo simulator isn't hard to write, but they do not exhibit the performance demonstrated by either the supercomputer version or the downloadable version.
There is actually a stage in the game at which go becomes mathematically solvable (quickly). It is slightly sooner than a typical strong amateur finds things solved, but still rather late in the game.
http://math.berkeley.edu/~berlek/cgt/gobook.html
I'm not sure this is effectively so different than an endgame database. Certainly as the game progresses the moves become smaller and the game becomes more certain... well, except when you have a couple of dragons chasing each other across the board.
Current administration? What about the administration after that, and the one after that? The current administration we at least know something about. What about when your personal political bogeyman gets elected in a few cycles, whoever it is.
While not as exciting, the simple auction method that I like is: Sealed bid, the high bidder gets the item, but he pays what the next highest bidder bids. Bids remain sealed after the auction, though the winner and the price he paid is announced. In the case of multiple identical items, the winners all pay the amount bid by the highest non-winner.
The reason that forth is such a great choice for firmware and embedded systems is twofold. First of all, it is fairly fast. There can be a lot of indirection, but it is localized to a small amount of memmory.
Second of all, and very importantly, you can fit an entire forth development environment into a few k. Might need 5-10 on these new fangled 32 bit machines. That is the whole thing, no separate compiler, runtime libraries, nothing like that. So, in the time it takes to study the gcc source enough to start porting it to a new architecture, you can write a complete forth interpreter in assembly, burn it to an eprom, and start talking to your new architecture over a serial line.
And as you might expect, much like C, the bare metal is open to you. ! and @ are the commands to store and fetch variables. But they don't just work for variables, they work for any address you want to pass them.
Wow, what a lesson. The letter of the law is meaningless, only the spirit matters. Especially when an authority figures are there to interpret what the spirit is. Simply a wonderfull, cheerfull lesson for their little creative and adventurous minds.
You've plenty of time, if you are behind a firewall, or even a basic home NATing router. If you don't have one, I'd consider getting one, or visiting a friend who has one to get patches.
I think that what you describe illustrates quite clearly the limitations of an MRI as a lie detector. Nervousness isn't the only thing that an attacker can work to adjust.
I'm trying to remember the name of this movie with the cop prepping to go undercover. So much time spent repeating his cover story. So much time being asked to respond to questions "in character". So much time spent visualizing what "happened".
We don't think of terrorists being so smart and sophisticated. But then, they haven't had to be. I suppose that these security measures with such visible work arounds might buy a little time, or convince the terrorists to find a different place to attack, but I can't imagine that they do much to convince terrorists not to attack.
Depends on the product. Or at least, I think that it should. It would make sense to have a proffesional certification required to validate software products that are critical to safety or privacy. That is, we could have software certification that companies would be expected to acquire when deploying such a system. If a system is deployed without such certification, then the deploying company would be have additional liability. On the other hand, if a software professional signed off on a project or installation and problems were found, then he would risk his ability to certify, along with personal and corporate liabilities as above.
This would require though that the person signing off have much input/control over installation, upgrades and the like. You can't realy certify an executible file, only a complete system.
In other engineering fields it has been determined that it is in the best interest of the public to make it impossible to sign away certain liabilities. With companies letting hundreds of thousand credit card number escape their systems, it might well be time to apply similar reasoning to software developers.
This will increase costs, not just because of slower processes but also because it would make it harder to be a software engineer. This might slow the outsourcing movement.
If you get good digital cell phone reception, I'd expect it to work fine. Otherwise not, obviously. Just go to the local retailer and explain that you want to try before you buy. The salesperson assured me that I could a 30 day no obligation trial, given that coverage wasn't certain.
I had to take him up on it, and spent a few minutes explaining this trial to cingular when I came in to return the phone. Apparently, it isn't standard operating procedure. They buckled nicely after a few firm words. Given that their employee did promise, I didn't feel bad about it.
An Indian man comes to San Francisco from Bombay. He looks around, and says, "I've never seen such well fed beggers."
I've been a bit sloppy, perhaps even more than a bit, and I stand corrected regarding references and spelling. I believe that the argument deserves better, and I'm not sure I've had the time to do it justice.
I am willing to believe that justification for a vibrating desklamp is all that is required to patent it. I don't believe that this point of law is a useful characteristic, and in fact consider it to be something worth trying to fix.
Why do we require an implementation in the patent? For what reason?
My impression has always been that that the requirement is there to encourage innovation by focusing on implementations. You cannot patent the one line product specification summary "a machine to clean cotton". This allows competition to design products with similar specifications while at the same time discouraging the copying of novel implementations. This pits inventors against each other in that they need to devise novel solutions to the same technical problem. A focus on the implementation rather that the specification ensures this competition.
The desirability of the above may be the core of our disagreement, and we may have to agree to disagree. I'm perfectly willing to do this, but then I'm starting to feel less fiesty. This is probably for the best.
Just for completeness, the only other possible justification for this limitation that I can think of, is that it is to limit the patenting of concepts to things which are implementable with today's technology. But if this were the case, why would choosing a different implementation avoid violation of the patent? If a specification sheet is patentable so long as it has an implementation attached, then any vibrating controller violates the non-obvious part of the patent.
With the apparent partial exception in biotechnology, patents at least notionally must be on implementations of devices, not on general ideas.
The cotton gin was a clever (for it's time) implimentation of a device with an obvious product requirements sheet. Even if you say to yourself "I need a way to clean cotton mechanically", the cotton gin is not a particularly obvious design. I mean, it might be the first one that you think up, but it will likely take more than 10 minutes. Especially if you only have past attempts at cotton cleaners to work from.
On the other hand, if you say "I need a way to make a controller vibrate", or even "I way to make a joystick provide feedback" then the 2 bit spinning eccentric mass is likely to come to mind in such a timeframe. Especially if you count other small vibrating things as prior art. And yes, the patent does seem to include the case of multiple spinning eccentric masses, and this is aproximatly the second thing on the list I'd make of cheap ways to vibrate a controller.
In the case of the cotton gin, the non-obviousness is in the implementation - not the thumbnail sketch of the product specification. We require patents to be on implimentations, and the very best reason I see for this is to avoid the patenting of product specifications. My guess is that Sony used the aformentined vibration "technology" because when starting with the specification, the design was so obvious that they couldn't imagine the design would be patented.
Attempting to remove thought from the definition of "obvious" is, I think, doomed to failure. But that clearly hasn't kept somebody from trying.
On a related note, none of the few patents that I've looked at have had non-patent references. This speaks of a myopia on the part of the patent office. Budgetary considerations may be a reason for this, but that is no justification when they are removing our rights to design and build things. I remember a comment made, I believe, by a USPTO head in a Slashdot interview. Something along the lines of "The patent office doesn't have much prior art on file for software patents, but this is self correct as more are filed." That is Hubris, not hubris, and these are our rights to invent being eroded.
It isn't possible to patent the idea of a vibrating controller. This is explicitly forbidden, and IMNSHO, for good reason.
However, given this idea, the ME problem is sufficiently simple and well understood that it is possible to enumerate the most reasonable solutions. Given an afternoon or two, I could probably write descriptions at the level of this patent which covers pretty much all reasonable implimentation strategies. Mass moving linearly, driven by x, y or z. Mass moving in a pattern not linear or circular, mass moving, mass moving. If I hired an actual ME for a brainstorming session, we could probably do even better. A spinning eccentric mass would be first on the list, but apparently somebody beat me to it.
Where I to do so and acquire patents, companies might still be able to build vibrating controllers. However, without liscensing my patents, they would need to use more esoteric methods of vibration creation. Such methods are esoteric because they are more expensive and/or less inheriently reliable.
If I did a sufficently good job, I would have effectively subverted the restriction that ideas are not patentable. The current patent system does not effectively impliment this restriction. Perhaps patent officers thoughtfully and intelligently impliment certain standards. But these standards in aggregate allow the patenting of ideas. It just takes a bit more time and money.
Apparently, you can attach an idea too general to be patented to an implimentation too obvious to be patented, and get a patent. I find this absurd, and believe it demonstrates a certain lack of thought on the part of the patent office. Come to think of it, maybe I need to go patent some ideas...
If I had hired a random controller engineer in 2000(or rather a random engineer of any sort) and asked him to design a vibrating controler, I'd fire him for stupidity if he didn't think up the possibility of an eccentric mass. Especially if he had seen or heard of, well, a vibrator. Not exacty hard to investigate prior art, and one that has been advertised since 1910. Or wait! maybe it isn't obvious in a legal sense to examine other vibrating devices when desiging a vibrating controler! Such clever people those IP lawyers.
The closest thing to a non-obvious aspect is the idea of creating a vibrating controller. Given that idea as a design goal, I stand by my claim that the implimentation is stupidly obvious. So just what is the patent on again? The idea of a vibrating controller? or a particular implimentation? This contrast is why I think the patent office needs to be overhauled.
The patent office does need overhauled, because the examiners are either idiots or they assume that everybody else is. This patent is a perfect example of the fact.
Next, the product is a derived work from IBM's GPL'd code. Your agreement may well give them copyright ownership of your additions, though at least in some states (CA I'm pretty sure) such agreements are illegal to whatever extent that they apply to anything not a direct result of working for them. However, as a company they only have use of the portion released under IBM's GPL. As a copyright owner, IBM might want to take some action on this point.
Finally, patents can only be applied for by the true inventor. Patents cannot be applied for by companies and an application by someone other than the inventor is (presumably) easy to invalidate. If they cannot dispute that you were the inventor, I don't see how they'd have a legal leg to stand on.
It seems to me therefore that the company cannot acquire a patent on your invention without going through you. I would expect their agreement to require you to assign them any patents resulting from inventions made while working for them. I don't know if it is likely to require you to file a patent or what recourse they might have with you if you don't.