I remember being the first to publish the basic decoder for the CueCat... got a nice little writeup in Wired, which led to a nice little writeup from a Kenyon & Kenyon lawyer in the form of a C&D.
Their patent claim is interesting -- launch a web browser when an item is scanned. Sounds like it shouldn't meet the non-trivial requirement to me, but I'm not in IP law anymore...
It does. "The beginning," "the second day," "the third day," "the beginning," etc. It's a rather simplistic calendar, but it is indeed rather specific as well.
I'm a touch late to this story, but the state of use of both upper- and lower-case figures in English is the result of a relatively interesting story. Much simplified:
Original writing samples in Europe consisted of carvings in rocks, and folks who are carving into rocks only bothered themselves to use a single case. This developed into the Roman lowercase alphabet, which has stood the test of time as the benchmark for almost all the fonts we westerners currently use regularly.
This also included numerals. Numerals were initially lowercase, just like the numerals in the popular Georgia font, and had descenders that fell below the line, just like the letters 'j','y','g', etc.
Over time, scribes began to ornament initial characters, and these ornamentations became the uppercase. It eventually became standard practice to use uppercase characters in certain situations (depending on your language, it could be the beginning of a sentence, beginning of a noun, etc). Numbers followed, and uppercase numerals were created to be used in situations where uppercase letters would be used.
This was the popular model for hundreds of years, straight up into the 19th century, which was perhaps the bane of typography's existence. During this time, modernism was the rule, and if there is no other guiding principle, modernism drives for radical simplicity. This fed over to typography, where many new forms of communication were prepared without any lowercase characters whatsoever (the telegraph, morse code, etc.), all in the name of simplicity.
While the crusade for a single case was not completely successful when it came to letters, it was quite successful when it came to numbers. The typewriter keyboard became popular with only a single case for numbers and the ever-popular caps-lock key. Since the typewriter keyboard was the model for computer keyboards, we are still stuck with an interface that has only one case for numerals.
Coming to today, the case for a single case of characters is largely a relic. The instances where one needs caps lock are growing fewer and futher between, and clearly there is a movement to do away with the key entirely. Perhaps we might want to take this a step further and provide people with a way of using numbers as they did successfully for hundreds of years, and take back a practice from which the 19th century has deprived us.
Comments from people who actually create Creative?
on
Beginning GIMP
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· Score: 4, Insightful
While I can buy the notion that The GIMP is suitable for many tasks that programmers might require, does anyone on here who considers him/herself first and foremost a designer use The GIMP as their daily composition tool?
I've always seen it (rightly or wrongly) as a tool made by programmers for programmers who want to make/modify and image here and there, but I'd like to be shown to be wrong about this.
When I watch the news over here in the US on CSPAN or the Sunday morning politics shows, this newspaper is usually cited verbally as "The Times London," by which they probably mean, visually, The Times (London) or The Times, London. That seems to offer both clarification and respect for the given name.
Except that your case isn't actually skewing any statistics. It's still an accurate representation of users, like yourself, who have older versions.
While default firefox versions in linux distros may be a large percentage of the pre-1.5 users on slashdot, that doesn't make the statistics skewed, nor does it mean that those users shouldn't upgrade.
While we all love Google and everything it produces over here on slashdot, I don't think that they are going to crash PayPal's party in the too near future.
This is what they said when Blockbuster started competing with NetFlix, but NetFlix is doing quite alright by themselves, and PayPal is, in my opinion, in better shape in their space than NetFlix was. PayPal and eBay are pretty good bed buddies, and PayPal is already accepted on thousands of other websites. People know the name, people have used it before, people know it works.
Regardless of how great the product Google produces turns out to be, people will still use PayPal as long as PayPal remains competitive, which I imagine it will. I mean, for all the people who rave and rant about how amazing Gmail is, the mailing list that my mom's quilt shop has accumulated is saturated with yahoo, hotmail, and aol addresses, with not a single gmail address to be found out of a few thousand names.
Just because the sentence structure is similar doesn't mean it's an apt analogy. You shoot the gun-- you take an active role in this chain of events. We know that filesharers often don't realize that they're sharing their music, as popular P2P programs often say "Do you want to search for music? Yes/No?" and many people just click yes out of habit, if they even need to do anything at all.
The analogy should perhaps be more like when someone runs a red light-- someone might hit them, but it's not the hitting person's fault. It was their fault for running the light.
Not that I completely disagree with what you're saying, but one can be both partial and disinterested, or interested and impartial.
Also, disinterested can be used as a verb, as happens when referring to partners or parties as related to privately-held companies: "John sabotaged the dealmaking process, and so was disinterested by the Board." In the verb sense, the word means precisely what you'd infer from its parts.
By using the phrase "begs the question" ignorantly, people are depriving the language of a term that has few other real synonyms, if any, that can be used in the same way-- unlike the "popular" use of "begs the question" which is perfectly adequately served by "raises the question," "poses the question," and myriad other variations.
It's like the word "disinterested" which specifically means that one is not invested in an issue in a monetary sense, as opposed to "uninterested" which basically means that one doesn't care. People using "disinterested" to mean "uninterested" are stripping the language of a word that has few synonyms, if any.
But for a school district that receives a large portion (say, 40-70%) of its revenue from state funds, it takes only a short step for the CIO to mandate that the state's Department of Education (or whatever it is in Mass) require local schools to adhere to state technology standards as a matter of "accessibility" or something like that. If the schools don't comply, then they don't get their 40-70% from the state. In short, schools might put up a fight, but they'd comply.
When I was in high school, my school district briefly considered ignoring a state regulation and giving up its state funding, but in that case it was a much smaller percentage -- 15% or so if I recall. Nonetheless, they decided that the issue wasn't worth losing that 15%, and they went along with it.
The same is basically true of the Federal Government's control on schools... they only provide 1-10% of a school's budget, but not many schools are willing to give it up...
That's an erroneous request. You don't show what makes something legal, as it's presumed (in the US, etc) that your actions are legal until it's demonstrated that you have broken some law. So you don't request to be shown why something is legal, but instead why something isn't.
The US Government can't hold copyrights by statute... if it's a government production, it can either be classified or it is freely available for use. If a work is a "work for hire," basically meaning that it was commissioned by someone else, then that someone else who commissioned the work owns the copyright. If the US Government paid the sculptor to make this, then it would be a work for hire, and would not be copyrighted.
Not sure if this is the case with Krpytos, but I'd suspect that it is.
Remember that patents take years to issue. This one was filed in 2001, and just issued now, more than five years later.
That said, I'm sure it does relate to the parent's link, and Google decided that, at the moment, there's not much of a market for search results via telephone. Not that they can't apply it in other ways now that VOIP is becoming more of a reality.
Remember that patents take years to issue, and this just looked like a list of issued patents. They could have applied for many more since that most recent one, which was filed in 2003. Especially since they've gone public since then, the number might be substantially higher than 15.
Joint registration is certainly acceptable in a limited type of cases, but one good example is when two companies jointly produce a single product, and both have a continued interest in it.
Consider the IEEE standards committees/documents, like 802.11 or C38. C38's committee and standards are jointly maintained by the IEEE and NEMA, and so they hold joint ownership of the C38 trademark.
Consider in this case the (unresearched) possibility where two companies jointly begin using a distinctive term, but only one of them registers the trademark. The other company can either sue and show prior use or something like that and risk the mark being nullified and declared either common, descriptive, or something else. Alternatively, they can enter into an agreement with the registrant, and become a co-registrant, and then both companies get the benefits of the mark.
Forbes is a big magazine, though. This is the difference between you telling your significant other that you don't like your job, and you telling the New York Times that you don't like it.
This Forbes interview will make business-types who know nothing about software, but recognize Linus's name and think him a genius think that the GPLv3 is bad news, and they won't read any RMS rant on some random blog that gives the other side of the argument.
I've sent several telegrams over the last few years... it's a great way to acknowledge a special event (birthday, anniversary, whatever) on short notice, it gets hand-delivered, it's not as corny as most greeting cards, it's relatively inexpensive, it shows some effort, and, most importantly, it's relatively unique these days.
I'll miss having that option, as I always got responses like "wow, that's so cool-- I'd never gotten a telegram before!"
Hopefully, someone else will pick it up, acknowledging its novelty value and marketing it effectively as such, but Western Union really had the old-school image that made it especially attractive for me.
Obviously that's true, but they haven't been as overt about all of it as would be the case if they started offering a scanner for a fee.
If you get hit by a car, and need to take a cab to the hospital to get checked out, you're not going to think twice about paying. But if the cab driver who hit you charged you, you'd be outraged. Charging for a virus scanner would be Microsoft hitting you with a car, and then charging you for the trip to the hospital.
If they could ship an anti-virus product, why couldn't they just patch the issues that allow the viruses in the first place? I, for one, would be up in arms if a company took such an overtly-passive approach to the security of their software.
It would be like parachute makers/packers offering body padding in case their parachutes malfunction. Yeah, maybe it'd work (), but it displays a distinct lack of confidence and effort with regards to the quality and reliability of their product.
So, you're saying that any government interactions with Google are now due to Google's holdout?
And you're saying that the government cares so much about this issue that they're willing to sacrifice other executives and companies who have complied?
Wow, just give Google another reason to go along with this government anti-pornography campaign-- apparently, they can still get screwed even if they do cooperate.
Tossing around completely baseless conspiracy theories is nothing if not counterproductive.
Your local property taxes aren't the only things paying for education. In many cases (and I'm speaking from a Pennsylvania perspective right now, so YMMV), the State/Commonwealth contributes over 50% of a given school district's budget, and in a large number of cases that percentage is closer to 75%. The Federal government can contribute as much as 20% in certain cases, with 7-10% seeming to be a more common figure. In most cases, the local taxes pay for less than 50% of the education costs in your local district.
So if you're paying $2500 toward education through local taxes, and you're in a situation where that is less than 50% of the education costs, the GP would suggest that you would futhermore get the applicable state and federal taxes back as well, which would put you over $5k or $6, and likely more in the $6k to $8k range.
Certainly, that alone is not sufficient to allow a parent to stay home in most cases, but it can be sufficient to provide for a decent private education.
He was overselling it, but there are points to this general perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember being the first to publish the basic decoder for the CueCat... got a nice little writeup in Wired, which led to a nice little writeup from a Kenyon & Kenyon lawyer in the form of a C&D.
Highlight of my sophomore year in HS: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7222&cid=835493
Their patent claim is interesting -- launch a web browser when an item is scanned. Sounds like it shouldn't meet the non-trivial requirement to me, but I'm not in IP law anymore...
It does. "The beginning," "the second day," "the third day," "the beginning," etc. It's a rather simplistic calendar, but it is indeed rather specific as well.
Hah, that's an interesting perspective. Thanks for that :)
I'm a touch late to this story, but the state of use of both upper- and lower-case figures in English is the result of a relatively interesting story. Much simplified:
Original writing samples in Europe consisted of carvings in rocks, and folks who are carving into rocks only bothered themselves to use a single case. This developed into the Roman lowercase alphabet, which has stood the test of time as the benchmark for almost all the fonts we westerners currently use regularly.
This also included numerals. Numerals were initially lowercase, just like the numerals in the popular Georgia font, and had descenders that fell below the line, just like the letters 'j','y','g', etc.
Over time, scribes began to ornament initial characters, and these ornamentations became the uppercase. It eventually became standard practice to use uppercase characters in certain situations (depending on your language, it could be the beginning of a sentence, beginning of a noun, etc). Numbers followed, and uppercase numerals were created to be used in situations where uppercase letters would be used.
This was the popular model for hundreds of years, straight up into the 19th century, which was perhaps the bane of typography's existence. During this time, modernism was the rule, and if there is no other guiding principle, modernism drives for radical simplicity. This fed over to typography, where many new forms of communication were prepared without any lowercase characters whatsoever (the telegraph, morse code, etc.), all in the name of simplicity.
While the crusade for a single case was not completely successful when it came to letters, it was quite successful when it came to numbers. The typewriter keyboard became popular with only a single case for numbers and the ever-popular caps-lock key. Since the typewriter keyboard was the model for computer keyboards, we are still stuck with an interface that has only one case for numerals.
Coming to today, the case for a single case of characters is largely a relic. The instances where one needs caps lock are growing fewer and futher between, and clearly there is a movement to do away with the key entirely. Perhaps we might want to take this a step further and provide people with a way of using numbers as they did successfully for hundreds of years, and take back a practice from which the 19th century has deprived us.
While I can buy the notion that The GIMP is suitable for many tasks that programmers might require, does anyone on here who considers him/herself first and foremost a designer use The GIMP as their daily composition tool?
I've always seen it (rightly or wrongly) as a tool made by programmers for programmers who want to make/modify and image here and there, but I'd like to be shown to be wrong about this.
When I watch the news over here in the US on CSPAN or the Sunday morning politics shows, this newspaper is usually cited verbally as "The Times London," by which they probably mean, visually, The Times (London) or The Times, London. That seems to offer both clarification and respect for the given name.
Except that your case isn't actually skewing any statistics. It's still an accurate representation of users, like yourself, who have older versions.
While default firefox versions in linux distros may be a large percentage of the pre-1.5 users on slashdot, that doesn't make the statistics skewed, nor does it mean that those users shouldn't upgrade.
While we all love Google and everything it produces over here on slashdot, I don't think that they are going to crash PayPal's party in the too near future.
This is what they said when Blockbuster started competing with NetFlix, but NetFlix is doing quite alright by themselves, and PayPal is, in my opinion, in better shape in their space than NetFlix was. PayPal and eBay are pretty good bed buddies, and PayPal is already accepted on thousands of other websites. People know the name, people have used it before, people know it works.
Regardless of how great the product Google produces turns out to be, people will still use PayPal as long as PayPal remains competitive, which I imagine it will. I mean, for all the people who rave and rant about how amazing Gmail is, the mailing list that my mom's quilt shop has accumulated is saturated with yahoo, hotmail, and aol addresses, with not a single gmail address to be found out of a few thousand names.
Just because the sentence structure is similar doesn't mean it's an apt analogy. You shoot the gun-- you take an active role in this chain of events. We know that filesharers often don't realize that they're sharing their music, as popular P2P programs often say "Do you want to search for music? Yes/No?" and many people just click yes out of habit, if they even need to do anything at all.
The analogy should perhaps be more like when someone runs a red light-- someone might hit them, but it's not the hitting person's fault. It was their fault for running the light.
Not that I completely disagree with what you're saying, but one can be both partial and disinterested, or interested and impartial.
Also, disinterested can be used as a verb, as happens when referring to partners or parties as related to privately-held companies: "John sabotaged the dealmaking process, and so was disinterested by the Board." In the verb sense, the word means precisely what you'd infer from its parts.
By using the phrase "begs the question" ignorantly, people are depriving the language of a term that has few other real synonyms, if any, that can be used in the same way-- unlike the "popular" use of "begs the question" which is perfectly adequately served by "raises the question," "poses the question," and myriad other variations.
It's like the word "disinterested" which specifically means that one is not invested in an issue in a monetary sense, as opposed to "uninterested" which basically means that one doesn't care. People using "disinterested" to mean "uninterested" are stripping the language of a word that has few synonyms, if any.
But for a school district that receives a large portion (say, 40-70%) of its revenue from state funds, it takes only a short step for the CIO to mandate that the state's Department of Education (or whatever it is in Mass) require local schools to adhere to state technology standards as a matter of "accessibility" or something like that. If the schools don't comply, then they don't get their 40-70% from the state. In short, schools might put up a fight, but they'd comply.
When I was in high school, my school district briefly considered ignoring a state regulation and giving up its state funding, but in that case it was a much smaller percentage -- 15% or so if I recall. Nonetheless, they decided that the issue wasn't worth losing that 15%, and they went along with it.
The same is basically true of the Federal Government's control on schools... they only provide 1-10% of a school's budget, but not many schools are willing to give it up...
That's an erroneous request. You don't show what makes something legal, as it's presumed (in the US, etc) that your actions are legal until it's demonstrated that you have broken some law. So you don't request to be shown why something is legal, but instead why something isn't.
The US Government can't hold copyrights by statute... if it's a government production, it can either be classified or it is freely available for use. If a work is a "work for hire," basically meaning that it was commissioned by someone else, then that someone else who commissioned the work owns the copyright. If the US Government paid the sculptor to make this, then it would be a work for hire, and would not be copyrighted.
Not sure if this is the case with Krpytos, but I'd suspect that it is.
Remember that patents take years to issue. This one was filed in 2001, and just issued now, more than five years later.
That said, I'm sure it does relate to the parent's link, and Google decided that, at the moment, there's not much of a market for search results via telephone. Not that they can't apply it in other ways now that VOIP is becoming more of a reality.
Remember that patents take years to issue, and this just looked like a list of issued patents. They could have applied for many more since that most recent one, which was filed in 2003. Especially since they've gone public since then, the number might be substantially higher than 15.
Joint registration is certainly acceptable in a limited type of cases, but one good example is when two companies jointly produce a single product, and both have a continued interest in it.
Consider the IEEE standards committees/documents, like 802.11 or C38. C38's committee and standards are jointly maintained by the IEEE and NEMA, and so they hold joint ownership of the C38 trademark.
Consider in this case the (unresearched) possibility where two companies jointly begin using a distinctive term, but only one of them registers the trademark. The other company can either sue and show prior use or something like that and risk the mark being nullified and declared either common, descriptive, or something else. Alternatively, they can enter into an agreement with the registrant, and become a co-registrant, and then both companies get the benefits of the mark.
Forbes is a big magazine, though. This is the difference between you telling your significant other that you don't like your job, and you telling the New York Times that you don't like it.
This Forbes interview will make business-types who know nothing about software, but recognize Linus's name and think him a genius think that the GPLv3 is bad news, and they won't read any RMS rant on some random blog that gives the other side of the argument.
I've sent several telegrams over the last few years... it's a great way to acknowledge a special event (birthday, anniversary, whatever) on short notice, it gets hand-delivered, it's not as corny as most greeting cards, it's relatively inexpensive, it shows some effort, and, most importantly, it's relatively unique these days.
I'll miss having that option, as I always got responses like "wow, that's so cool-- I'd never gotten a telegram before!"
Hopefully, someone else will pick it up, acknowledging its novelty value and marketing it effectively as such, but Western Union really had the old-school image that made it especially attractive for me.
And now that it's been linked on /. by the GP, Bush is back at the top!
*brain explodes*
Obviously that's true, but they haven't been as overt about all of it as would be the case if they started offering a scanner for a fee.
If you get hit by a car, and need to take a cab to the hospital to get checked out, you're not going to think twice about paying. But if the cab driver who hit you charged you, you'd be outraged. Charging for a virus scanner would be Microsoft hitting you with a car, and then charging you for the trip to the hospital.
If they could ship an anti-virus product, why couldn't they just patch the issues that allow the viruses in the first place? I, for one, would be up in arms if a company took such an overtly-passive approach to the security of their software.
It would be like parachute makers/packers offering body padding in case their parachutes malfunction. Yeah, maybe it'd work (), but it displays a distinct lack of confidence and effort with regards to the quality and reliability of their product.
So, you're saying that any government interactions with Google are now due to Google's holdout?
And you're saying that the government cares so much about this issue that they're willing to sacrifice other executives and companies who have complied?
Wow, just give Google another reason to go along with this government anti-pornography campaign-- apparently, they can still get screwed even if they do cooperate.
Tossing around completely baseless conspiracy theories is nothing if not counterproductive.
Hi Edd, is that you?
Your local property taxes aren't the only things paying for education. In many cases (and I'm speaking from a Pennsylvania perspective right now, so YMMV), the State/Commonwealth contributes over 50% of a given school district's budget, and in a large number of cases that percentage is closer to 75%. The Federal government can contribute as much as 20% in certain cases, with 7-10% seeming to be a more common figure. In most cases, the local taxes pay for less than 50% of the education costs in your local district.
So if you're paying $2500 toward education through local taxes, and you're in a situation where that is less than 50% of the education costs, the GP would suggest that you would futhermore get the applicable state and federal taxes back as well, which would put you over $5k or $6, and likely more in the $6k to $8k range.
Certainly, that alone is not sufficient to allow a parent to stay home in most cases, but it can be sufficient to provide for a decent private education.
He was overselling it, but there are points to this general perspective.