From user graham clarke's review of J&SB Strikes Back on imdb:
I was totally baffled by reading that certain gay groups took offence to this movie. It would seem to me a total misreading as well as a great deficiency in the humor department. Apart from the fact that Smith lampoons all and sundry, it actually struck me as a particularly gay friendly movie. The fact that a gay character sums the movie up as one big gay joke should be taken as a compliment more than anything else.
This would seem to confirm my suspicion that J&SB Strikes Back is a gay marriage movie. It would explain the total self-indulgence, horrible premise, and baffling number of major star cameos. I saw Jay and Kevin Smith in an interview about the movie and they were practically crying and hugging each other. Jay also calls Silent Bob his "life partner" in the film. How many hints do they need to drop?
There's nothing wrong with the idea that everyone's a programmer. If you make the language simple enough, everyone does program. Battle.net (Starcraft, Warcraft) is an example of this.
The problem is that software needs to have a rigid specification, and open-source programmers are too antisocial and disorganized to come up with one. Big companies are much better at it. The linux specification, as defined by linux nerds, is to be a fileserver, and that's what it does. Open or closed source has nothing to do with it.
I agree with you that the best way to fight piracy is to compete on an economic level...i.e. to lower the cost of the songs until piracy is no longer useful. However, I'm not going to sit here while people say that "basic DRM is needed." The fight over copy control in the 80's taught us that when people buy software, they are actually buying a license to use the software, which means the right to make backups, and, if you can imagine any analogy with physical objects, the right to modify it to your needs (for example, highlighting pages of a book). You can't say that people should pay for music and then say that there should be limitations on how the music is used. If there are limitations, then you aren't buying anything.
The disabling of printing on eBooks and pdfs is an example of how you aren't buying the material, or a license to use the material, you're buying the experience of reading it on your monitor, which turns your computer into a peepshow booth inside your own home.
The seller does not have any costs associated with this peepshow booth - rent or employees - so it's hard to imagine how this model would be maintained.
Actually, the success of IBM/Microsoft over Apple and Commodore was to cater to the largest userbase possible. In the 80's and early 90's, your choice between Intel and Mac was a choice between widespread support and popular apps, verus a niche player with limited compatibility. Microsoft's success is entirely built on the popularity of third party applications, which Macintosh never pursued.
The comparison with McDonald's is a poor one, because software benefits from aggregation of knowledge, which the large companies have. In other words, Microsoft does make some of the best software out there. It's not very good software compared to what they should be doing, because they have unreasonable control over the source code. But the best software is going to come from the widest distribution and the widest testing base.
Ironically I think the problem is that Apple isn't big enough. They are trying to compete with Microsoft and IBM by supporting an entire hardware platform and operating system with perhaps 1/10 the resources.
Of course, that's Apple's own fault...they jealously guard their intellectual property and even third party Apple apps are very expensive. If you think Microsoft hates open source, try setting up a publishing system on a Macintosh. You will pay up the ass and you won't get your bugs fixed.
Why was the great wealth of historical America founded on its slave plantations? Why is the great wealth of modern America founded on its latino chefs and landscapers?
Because there are two forces driving human civilization. One is Capitalism, practiced since the dawn of time. The other I call Darwin's Dirty Secret (in other words, the pernicious effects of random evolution).
First, Capitalism: It is so old that it predates the solar system. Capitalism is an aggregative, extractionist model that requires nothing more than an "us" and a "them". The only restriction is that "they" are bigger than "us," and the only protocol, is to take resources from "them" and bring it home to "us."
In cosmological terms, they call it a black hole, a point in space that sucks resources from its surroundings. Imperical Rome was one such hole, as is New York City, or any small town on the edge of a forest. The capitalist protocol is to chop down trees and bring them into town. As long as you are moving trees from one point to another, you are making money. This applies even on a social scale, the typical "us" in Christian America is the nuclear family, the capital action is for the male to go out everyday, charge high prices for his services and bring money home to "us."
As stated before, capitalism requires a) The environment is larger than the family, and b) There is distinct separation between the two, so that moving resources from one to the other represents a form of potential energy. The problem arises when either one of these rules breaks down. If the family grows large enough to resemble the environment (for example, inner city living), then the result of extracting resources from the 'environment' (aka inner-city drug dealing) is actually a form of cannibalism.
As human society becomes globally interconnected, our desire to make money off of each other becomes cannibalistic. Right now, American prosperity is buoyed by the fact that Mexican labor represents a cheap "forest" we are chopping down for cash. When Mexican labor runs out, we must find another forest. As stated in the Matrix, the human race is a virus that can only spread from one place to another.
***
The second problem is the "efficiency of the free market," also known as Something is Better than Nothing. All of us accept the fact that we were created randomly by Darwinian evolution, aka the pressures of conforming to a changing environment. The problem with Darwin is that it is the LEAST efficient engineering model invented. Why? Because Darwin represents TRIAL AND ERROR. What could be worse than that?
The problem with random evolution is that it produces wild, unbuffered swings from one extreme to another. In a historical sense, we could call them atrocities. The stock market crash of 1929, the mass executions of WWII, the millions dead in the civil war, etc. All of these things were necessary to move society forward, to learn from our mistakes. But it is only because of randomness that our mistakes involve the death of millions of people.
In other words, the worst possible management model is no model, which is synonymous with the Godless evolution we started with. Conservatives would like to sell this back to you as "free market efficiency," but in fact buying Volkswagens from a company that propped up Hitler isn't efficient at all. It's simply better than not having a car, and as long as we are fighting scarcity, the atrocity of randomness will continue to be a weapon of choice.
did it ever occur to you that you have no moral right to restrict how other people use discoveries and inventions?
An easy question to answer. No, of course not, nobody owns ideas. Nobody can tell me I can't have fun or save my own life because somebody patented an idea that I used.
But here you reveal your ignorance of patent law: Patents protect the commercialization of ideas, and when it comes to commercializing, you can restrict people all you want in the name of fair market competition. For example, music sharing. Putting lossy copies on the internet for free download is legal (or should be). Selling bootlegs on the street for $10 is cheating. Simple enough for ya?
Laws don't make moral arguments. They simply enforce modes of behavior that have moral outcomes.
The competence of the author(s)...must be seriously called into question
The problem with this article is that it doesn't have authors. If you follow the link, there is a decent amount of text and no author's name. Now, it's possible that somewhere, maybe in print, there is a person's name associated with this puff-piece, but even if there is, you can read the article and see that it doesn't contain any author's viewpoint at all.
Instead, this Economist article is a high-school level survey of press releases related to intellectual propertly law. It is a reprint of available sources with no actual writing or editing, kind of like what Rob Malda does but IRL. The article makes several mentions of IP's benefit to corporations, mentions a few downsides (patent excess, for example) but doesn't examine them. It's just extremely shallow. And this lack of viewpoint, this lack of synthesis or rigor is what makes it propaganda.
Any journalist, editor, or publisher will tell you that the fundamental purpose of writing is to address the reader's interest. This is because, traditionally, writers and editors respected their readers and tried to impress them. A reader lost is a reader who goes to a competitor. Today, however, nobody gives a shit what you care. The New York Times, Newsday, FoxNews, MSNBC, CNN, they all sound like the Economist: "Intellectual property law is good for $45b corporations." Okay, but how does it help us?
>Rule #1 of modern warfare: Never believe your own propaganda.
Mmm...excellent point. Unfortunately, your piece was moderated "propaganda" (aka "troll") by some clueless fuckwit who couldn't tell you were being serious. After raping your artwork, he's going to veg out to the Strokes album and watch Desperate Housewives.
Moderators take notice: In the world of straight people, there is nothing wrong with being angry. Thus follows Rule No. 2 of Modern Warfare: IF YOU'RE A HOMOSEXUAL, YOU'VE ALREADY LOST.
I think the obvious first-cut to the patent problem is to disallow any patents that do not result in a physical object. In other words, all the software patents, the patents on genes, the patents on ideas (like one-click shopping) need to go in the trash. I get the sense that the bulk of today's patents are for IP-related concepts and if you got rid of those, patents would become real again.
There are a lot of people out there who think that "a patent is for a process" and that's one of those ideas that sounds nice, is difficult to disagree with, and also makes NO sense at all.
Every idea in your head can be reduced to a process. That's why a patent has to be for a thing.
Does the circuit produce a physical result or just a bunch of electrons?
>Does it matter if the process is a hardware controller, or if it's a purely sofware simulation? Should it?
Yes it totally matters.
>Or, how about drug identification: should the process of finding a >protein target for a cancer drug be patentably different if carried >out in a test tube or a software simulation?
I'm not terribly well-acquainted with biochemistry but I would have to assume yes, they are different.
>Sounds to me like you haven't studied patents enough to understand >their style.
I've had this thrown at me before, and it's silly. No, I haven't studied the grammar of US patents, but I'm a computer programmer and patents read exactly like programs. In fact, this is my exact point, this is even your point, that a patent need only be a program, a self-contained logic structure, to be valid. What I see is that a bunch of hack programmers are trying to patent the world just by making definitions of things that already exist.
I believe patents are for inventions that must either have physical components or physical results. Are electrons physical? Look at it this way: Inventors come up with new results. The Bessemer process for steel created a new material, and the speed and ease of production was especially new.
The problem with your "processes" is that they just as easily point back to objects that are pre-existing, into a closed space of results. For example, how would you like it if I patented the process of living in your house? You would have to move out. The reason that's not logical is because your house is already yours. For that patent, I didn't invent anything, I was just clever enough to write it down before you did.
Electrons and numbers are part of this closed space. What if I patented addition? It is a process. Whether performed on a computer or on a slide rule, that cypher you listed produces no objects and no material results.
LIGHT has no MASS. Organization of light is not patentable. Patents can only exist in physical reality because it is only in reality that you can "invent" something "new." I find this completely straightforward yet people insist on conflating physical and mathematical processes as if patents were meant to be logical. They never were. They were always real, and I find it very interesting to debate this with computer people because some of us "get" that computers are fake and some of us don't.
What would happen if I took all the interesting comments off Slashdot, the ones that are opinionated enough to be motivational without being inflammatory, and compiled them on my own website? Or better yet, printed a book, a technology toilet reader?
One thing I know is that it is totally doable. One step beyond comprehension, editing is the process of reading for other people. Editing is fun because most of it is deletion. All you need is a few gems and you have a product. The second thing I know is that with a dozen stories a day averaging 300 comments each, it would take all day, every day to keep up with the flow.
The final thing, is that unlike the garbage-strewn service offered by Slob Malda, mine would offer intelligent commentary by thoughtful people. Since my service would have *gasp* actual content, I could actually charge money for it. You're not the first person to point out that IPO=AFK, but with most of the country trying to get rich and famous playing Texas Hold'em, there's probably a lot of people who could use a refresher course on betting money.
I'm just guessing, but I think it's because normal people actually play Blizzard games, unlike Everquest or Asheron's Call where you have to be a hobbit to log on to the server.
The difference between a "process" and a "computer-implemented process" is infinitely gray.
How so? It seems to me that a "process" involves physical phenomena and a "computer-implemented process" involves, for starters, a computer, running some kind of digital representation of something that may appear to correspond to reality, or may be totally imaginary. For example, a process is something like: take iron, add carbon, and get steel. It starts with physical objects and finishes with a new physical material.
A computer process is something like: take the number A, add X, and get B. Now, are you telling me that the quantity B, or the method of addition, are somehow patentable? If I do a lot of additions over and over again, thereby "obfuscating" the simplicity of the method, now is it patentable? The problem with software patents, is that anyone who has built a computer (that is, anyone with a C.S. bachelors) knows that all software methods are reducible to boolean logic, simple control structures, and, from that point, to assembly code and then binary. A computer is an adding machine, the input and output of all methods are simply numbers. What is a sufficient level of complexity to start patenting numbers?
I've read patents. Some patents are simply a long list of circular definitions, and do not deserve to be patents because they don't refer to anything real or unique. This is well down the road to abomination. Software is an arbitrary sequence of language instructions. Unless you can explain how to patent a dictionary, a newspaper, a magazine or a novel, I don't think even the phrase "software patent" holds enough weight to carry a discussion.
Your argument seems to be that since the phrase "software patent" makes certain people sleep easier at night, we should leave it alone. That's a fairly typical pro-business argument, the old "we're completely helpless unless you allow us to shatter common sense in pursuit of the profit motive." It's exactly the kind of argument used to erode the real rights of real engineers.
Well, that's a matter of opinion, but I happen to agree. I play WC3 and I don't play any other RTS because I've looked around several times and nobody can point me to a better RTS. Meanwhile, I don't play FPS because FPS has always been a fairly significant practical joke (note to the trigger-happy players: FPS games are not 3D). So if everyone is bored with computer games, is WoW proof that the phenomenon is finally over? Is this the game that makes the industry jump the shark?
I don't play WoW and I've been put under heavy pressure to do so. THe other day, my friend was telling me how mages can only wear cloth armor, and I was like, dude.....are you explaining the rules of Dungeons and Dragons back to me? I'm 29, this kid is 17 and I literally knew which races could wear cloth armor before he was born.
WoW is bringing D&D to the masses and I don't think any of us is prepared for how truly disgusting that is. In the process, WoW will work wonders for everyone else's credibility. When the whole world is hooked on WoW, watching FoxNews will be considered a "reality check."
Kazaa is a notorious, deeply entrenched spyware author; their insipid content delivery system is a mere shadow of the service's true nature, which is to infect your computer as badly as AOL Instant Messenger or as ruthlessly as Real. It is a useless service, anybody who wants to download mp3s deletes Kazaa immediately and goes for something else.
Should I be happy Kazaa is getting sued for "copyright infringement?" It's true, Kazaa infringes on a lot of copyrights. Their spyware infringes on my personal data, copying off as much as it can, in secret, while also shredding copies of my system files. Kazaa both retrieves personal information from my computer, and deletes and re-routes other data to gain access and stay there.
In other words, downloading mp3s from Kazaa requires the installation of viruses, thus mp3s are proof of infection. If the music industry can sue Kazaa for putting viruses on my computer, can I do the same or do I have to author the virus?
Apple was colossally dissapointed today to learn that Perl, 4th Ed. is a fun and informative way to introduce open source. A new IBook and Apple mini are expected to get a handle on Vista while also hitting the shuttle during launch. With the USA getting ready to pass its science crown to China, the Mandriva Linux 2006 Beta has gotten underway, leaving Microsoft and Google fighting for the skies. With the annual cost of the Microsoft monopoly predicted to top $10b this year, thousands and thousands of hours of PVR TV are being used to make new google homepage features the state of solid state storage. Where is the British EFF? Just around the corner, according to UEFI, formed to replace the BIOS after Microsoft began checking for piracy. With China releasing its 2nd generation MIPS chip just days after Sony agreed to stop payola, Voltron, Nerdcore, and the shuttle Discovery all will be coming to a theater near you.
I have news for you, people who know how to make things work go into construction, not programming. People go into programming because they want to dick around.
I happen to like Gnome, but then again, I also liked Unix windowmanagers circa 1995. They do X and they do multiple desktops, two things that were always a hassle on Windows. Other than that, Gnome is still waiting for a third compelling application. It's just a prettier version of TWM, or FVWM, or whatever you were using way back when the internet was born.
Thank you. It seems that Slashdot is now (always was?) in DIY mode, where stories are just abstracts and readers have to find the story themselves.
Now the next question is, if Immersion's patents are related to using software to drive motors, isn't this just a software patent? Did Immersion actually invent or assemble something, or did they just make a lookup table of different situations and their corresponding vibrations?
In other words, intuition is real? You know it's funny, I've been relying on intuition for years, and somehow I intuited without scientific proof that this was okay!
Yeah, see I can groove to that. Knowing the prices in the aisle and having a running total is obviously a convenience. However, if they expect me to put money into the shopping cart and tell it to Have a Nice Day! on the way out the store, then they won't be getting much money from me.
The self-checkouts in Home Depot are similarly laughable, with one chaperone just kind of standing there aimlessly, not really looking or doing anything. Are these companies just admitting that they'll take whatever they can get? Because the idea that robots are going to enforce shoplifting laws is just about the scariest 1984-style scenario you can think of for a retail operation.
Slashdot Mirror
This would seem to confirm my suspicion that J&SB Strikes Back is a gay marriage movie. It would explain the total self-indulgence, horrible premise, and baffling number of major star cameos. I saw Jay and Kevin Smith in an interview about the movie and they were practically crying and hugging each other. Jay also calls Silent Bob his "life partner" in the film. How many hints do they need to drop?
There's nothing wrong with the idea that everyone's a programmer. If you make the language simple enough, everyone does program. Battle.net (Starcraft, Warcraft) is an example of this.
The problem is that software needs to have a rigid specification, and open-source programmers are too antisocial and disorganized to come up with one. Big companies are much better at it. The linux specification, as defined by linux nerds, is to be a fileserver, and that's what it does. Open or closed source has nothing to do with it.
I agree with you that the best way to fight piracy is to compete on an economic level...i.e. to lower the cost of the songs until piracy is no longer useful. However, I'm not going to sit here while people say that "basic DRM is needed." The fight over copy control in the 80's taught us that when people buy software, they are actually buying a license to use the software, which means the right to make backups, and, if you can imagine any analogy with physical objects, the right to modify it to your needs (for example, highlighting pages of a book). You can't say that people should pay for music and then say that there should be limitations on how the music is used. If there are limitations, then you aren't buying anything.
The disabling of printing on eBooks and pdfs is an example of how you aren't buying the material, or a license to use the material, you're buying the experience of reading it on your monitor, which turns your computer into a peepshow booth inside your own home.
The seller does not have any costs associated with this peepshow booth - rent or employees - so it's hard to imagine how this model would be maintained.
Actually, the success of IBM/Microsoft over Apple and Commodore was to cater to the largest userbase possible. In the 80's and early 90's, your choice between Intel and Mac was a choice between widespread support and popular apps, verus a niche player with limited compatibility. Microsoft's success is entirely built on the popularity of third party applications, which Macintosh never pursued.
The comparison with McDonald's is a poor one, because software benefits from aggregation of knowledge, which the large companies have. In other words, Microsoft does make some of the best software out there. It's not very good software compared to what they should be doing, because they have unreasonable control over the source code. But the best software is going to come from the widest distribution and the widest testing base.
Ironically I think the problem is that Apple isn't big enough. They are trying to compete with Microsoft and IBM by supporting an entire hardware platform and operating system with perhaps 1/10 the resources.
Of course, that's Apple's own fault...they jealously guard their intellectual property and even third party Apple apps are very expensive. If you think Microsoft hates open source, try setting up a publishing system on a Macintosh. You will pay up the ass and you won't get your bugs fixed.
Why was the great wealth of historical America founded on its slave plantations? Why is the great wealth of modern America founded on its latino chefs and landscapers?
Because there are two forces driving human civilization. One is Capitalism, practiced since the dawn of time. The other I call Darwin's Dirty Secret (in other words, the pernicious effects of random evolution).
First, Capitalism: It is so old that it predates the solar system. Capitalism is an aggregative, extractionist model that requires nothing more than an "us" and a "them". The only restriction is that "they" are bigger than "us," and the only protocol, is to take resources from "them" and bring it home to "us."
In cosmological terms, they call it a black hole, a point in space that sucks resources from its surroundings. Imperical Rome was one such hole, as is New York City, or any small town on the edge of a forest. The capitalist protocol is to chop down trees and bring them into town. As long as you are moving trees from one point to another, you are making money. This applies even on a social scale, the typical "us" in Christian America is the nuclear family, the capital action is for the male to go out everyday, charge high prices for his services and bring money home to "us."
As stated before, capitalism requires a) The environment is larger than the family, and b) There is distinct separation between the two, so that moving resources from one to the other represents a form of potential energy. The problem arises when either one of these rules breaks down. If the family grows large enough to resemble the environment (for example, inner city living), then the result of extracting resources from the 'environment' (aka inner-city drug dealing) is actually a form of cannibalism.
As human society becomes globally interconnected, our desire to make money off of each other becomes cannibalistic. Right now, American prosperity is buoyed by the fact that Mexican labor represents a cheap "forest" we are chopping down for cash. When Mexican labor runs out, we must find another forest. As stated in the Matrix, the human race is a virus that can only spread from one place to another.
***
The second problem is the "efficiency of the free market," also known as Something is Better than Nothing. All of us accept the fact that we were created randomly by Darwinian evolution, aka the pressures of conforming to a changing environment. The problem with Darwin is that it is the LEAST efficient engineering model invented. Why? Because Darwin represents TRIAL AND ERROR. What could be worse than that?
The problem with random evolution is that it produces wild, unbuffered swings from one extreme to another. In a historical sense, we could call them atrocities. The stock market crash of 1929, the mass executions of WWII, the millions dead in the civil war, etc. All of these things were necessary to move society forward, to learn from our mistakes. But it is only because of randomness that our mistakes involve the death of millions of people.
In other words, the worst possible management model is no model, which is synonymous with the Godless evolution we started with. Conservatives would like to sell this back to you as "free market efficiency," but in fact buying Volkswagens from a company that propped up Hitler isn't efficient at all. It's simply better than not having a car, and as long as we are fighting scarcity, the atrocity of randomness will continue to be a weapon of choice.
FYI: aids is a hoax (or HIV is a hoax anyway. See duesberg.com and read the statistical analysis in his 2003 paper.)
Otherwise an excellent and revealing post.
did it ever occur to you that you have no moral right to restrict how other people use discoveries and inventions?
An easy question to answer. No, of course not, nobody owns ideas. Nobody can tell me I can't have fun or save my own life because somebody patented an idea that I used.
But here you reveal your ignorance of patent law: Patents protect the commercialization of ideas, and when it comes to commercializing, you can restrict people all you want in the name of fair market competition. For example, music sharing. Putting lossy copies on the internet for free download is legal (or should be). Selling bootlegs on the street for $10 is cheating. Simple enough for ya?
Laws don't make moral arguments. They simply enforce modes of behavior that have moral outcomes.
The competence of the author(s)...must be seriously called into question
The problem with this article is that it doesn't have authors . If you follow the link, there is a decent amount of text and no author's name. Now, it's possible that somewhere, maybe in print, there is a person's name associated with this puff-piece, but even if there is, you can read the article and see that it doesn't contain any author's viewpoint at all.
Instead, this Economist article is a high-school level survey of press releases related to intellectual propertly law. It is a reprint of available sources with no actual writing or editing, kind of like what Rob Malda does but IRL. The article makes several mentions of IP's benefit to corporations, mentions a few downsides (patent excess, for example) but doesn't examine them. It's just extremely shallow. And this lack of viewpoint, this lack of synthesis or rigor is what makes it propaganda.
Any journalist, editor, or publisher will tell you that the fundamental purpose of writing is to address the reader's interest. This is because, traditionally, writers and editors respected their readers and tried to impress them. A reader lost is a reader who goes to a competitor. Today, however, nobody gives a shit what you care. The New York Times, Newsday, FoxNews, MSNBC, CNN, they all sound like the Economist: "Intellectual property law is good for $45b corporations." Okay, but how does it help us?
>Rule #1 of modern warfare: Never believe your own propaganda.
Mmm...excellent point. Unfortunately, your piece was moderated "propaganda" (aka "troll") by some clueless fuckwit who couldn't tell you were being serious. After raping your artwork, he's going to veg out to the Strokes album and watch Desperate Housewives.
Moderators take notice: In the world of straight people, there is nothing wrong with being angry. Thus follows Rule No. 2 of Modern Warfare: IF YOU'RE A HOMOSEXUAL, YOU'VE ALREADY LOST.
I think the obvious first-cut to the patent problem is to disallow any patents that do not result in a physical object. In other words, all the software patents, the patents on genes, the patents on ideas (like one-click shopping) need to go in the trash. I get the sense that the bulk of today's patents are for IP-related concepts and if you got rid of those, patents would become real again.
There are a lot of people out there who think that "a patent is for a process" and that's one of those ideas that sounds nice, is difficult to disagree with, and also makes NO sense at all.
Every idea in your head can be reduced to a process. That's why a patent has to be for a thing.
Liquid Crystal TV
>So are you also opposed to patents for circuits?
Does the circuit produce a physical result or just a bunch of electrons?
>Does it matter if the process is a hardware controller, or if it's a purely sofware simulation? Should it?
Yes it totally matters.
>Or, how about drug identification: should the process of finding a
>protein target for a cancer drug be patentably different if carried
>out in a test tube or a software simulation?
I'm not terribly well-acquainted with biochemistry but I would have to assume yes, they are different.
>Sounds to me like you haven't studied patents enough to understand
>their style.
I've had this thrown at me before, and it's silly. No, I haven't studied the grammar of US patents, but I'm a computer programmer and patents read exactly like programs. In fact, this is my exact point, this is even your point, that a patent need only be a program, a self-contained logic structure, to be valid. What I see is that a bunch of hack programmers are trying to patent the world just by making definitions of things that already exist.
I believe patents are for inventions that must either have physical components or physical results. Are electrons physical? Look at it this way: Inventors come up with new results. The Bessemer process for steel created a new material, and the speed and ease of production was especially new.
The problem with your "processes" is that they just as easily point back to objects that are pre-existing, into a closed space of results. For example, how would you like it if I patented the process of living in your house? You would have to move out. The reason that's not logical is because your house is already yours. For that patent, I didn't invent anything, I was just clever enough to write it down before you did.
Electrons and numbers are part of this closed space. What if I patented addition? It is a process. Whether performed on a computer or on a slide rule, that cypher you listed produces no objects and no material results.
LIGHT has no MASS. Organization of light is not patentable. Patents can only exist in physical reality because it is only in reality that you can "invent" something "new." I find this completely straightforward yet people insist on conflating physical and mathematical processes as if patents were meant to be logical. They never were. They were always real, and I find it very interesting to debate this with computer people because some of us "get" that computers are fake and some of us don't.
-Mike
What would happen if I took all the interesting comments off Slashdot, the ones that are opinionated enough to be motivational without being inflammatory, and compiled them on my own website? Or better yet, printed a book, a technology toilet reader?
One thing I know is that it is totally doable. One step beyond comprehension, editing is the process of reading for other people. Editing is fun because most of it is deletion. All you need is a few gems and you have a product. The second thing I know is that with a dozen stories a day averaging 300 comments each, it would take all day, every day to keep up with the flow.
The final thing, is that unlike the garbage-strewn service offered by Slob Malda, mine would offer intelligent commentary by thoughtful people. Since my service would have *gasp* actual content, I could actually charge money for it. You're not the first person to point out that IPO=AFK, but with most of the country trying to get rich and famous playing Texas Hold'em, there's probably a lot of people who could use a refresher course on betting money.
I'm just guessing, but I think it's because normal people actually play Blizzard games, unlike Everquest or Asheron's Call where you have to be a hobbit to log on to the server.
The difference between a "process" and a "computer-implemented process" is infinitely gray.
How so? It seems to me that a "process" involves physical phenomena and a "computer-implemented process" involves, for starters, a computer, running some kind of digital representation of something that may appear to correspond to reality, or may be totally imaginary. For example, a process is something like: take iron, add carbon, and get steel. It starts with physical objects and finishes with a new physical material.
A computer process is something like: take the number A, add X, and get B. Now, are you telling me that the quantity B, or the method of addition, are somehow patentable? If I do a lot of additions over and over again, thereby "obfuscating" the simplicity of the method, now is it patentable? The problem with software patents, is that anyone who has built a computer (that is, anyone with a C.S. bachelors) knows that all software methods are reducible to boolean logic, simple control structures, and, from that point, to assembly code and then binary. A computer is an adding machine, the input and output of all methods are simply numbers. What is a sufficient level of complexity to start patenting numbers?
I've read patents. Some patents are simply a long list of circular definitions, and do not deserve to be patents because they don't refer to anything real or unique. This is well down the road to abomination. Software is an arbitrary sequence of language instructions. Unless you can explain how to patent a dictionary, a newspaper, a magazine or a novel, I don't think even the phrase "software patent" holds enough weight to carry a discussion.
Your argument seems to be that since the phrase "software patent" makes certain people sleep easier at night, we should leave it alone. That's a fairly typical pro-business argument, the old "we're completely helpless unless you allow us to shatter common sense in pursuit of the profit motive." It's exactly the kind of argument used to erode the real rights of real engineers.
Well, that's a matter of opinion, but I happen to agree. I play WC3 and I don't play any other RTS because I've looked around several times and nobody can point me to a better RTS. Meanwhile, I don't play FPS because FPS has always been a fairly significant practical joke (note to the trigger-happy players: FPS games are not 3D). So if everyone is bored with computer games, is WoW proof that the phenomenon is finally over? Is this the game that makes the industry jump the shark?
I don't play WoW and I've been put under heavy pressure to do so. THe other day, my friend was telling me how mages can only wear cloth armor, and I was like, dude.....are you explaining the rules of Dungeons and Dragons back to me? I'm 29, this kid is 17 and I literally knew which races could wear cloth armor before he was born.
WoW is bringing D&D to the masses and I don't think any of us is prepared for how truly disgusting that is. In the process, WoW will work wonders for everyone else's credibility. When the whole world is hooked on WoW, watching FoxNews will be considered a "reality check."
Kazaa is a notorious, deeply entrenched spyware author; their insipid content delivery system is a mere shadow of the service's true nature, which is to infect your computer as badly as AOL Instant Messenger or as ruthlessly as Real. It is a useless service, anybody who wants to download mp3s deletes Kazaa immediately and goes for something else.
Should I be happy Kazaa is getting sued for "copyright infringement?" It's true, Kazaa infringes on a lot of copyrights. Their spyware infringes on my personal data, copying off as much as it can, in secret, while also shredding copies of my system files. Kazaa both retrieves personal information from my computer, and deletes and re-routes other data to gain access and stay there.
In other words, downloading mp3s from Kazaa requires the installation of viruses, thus mp3s are proof of infection. If the music industry can sue Kazaa for putting viruses on my computer, can I do the same or do I have to author the virus?
Apple was colossally dissapointed today to learn that Perl, 4th Ed. is a fun and informative way to introduce open source. A new IBook and Apple mini are expected to get a handle on Vista while also hitting the shuttle during launch. With the USA getting ready to pass its science crown to China, the Mandriva Linux 2006 Beta has gotten underway, leaving Microsoft and Google fighting for the skies. With the annual cost of the Microsoft monopoly predicted to top $10b this year, thousands and thousands of hours of PVR TV are being used to make new google homepage features the state of solid state storage. Where is the British EFF? Just around the corner, according to UEFI, formed to replace the BIOS after Microsoft began checking for piracy. With China releasing its 2nd generation MIPS chip just days after Sony agreed to stop payola, Voltron, Nerdcore, and the shuttle Discovery all will be coming to a theater near you.
I have news for you, people who know how to make things work go into construction, not programming. People go into programming because they want to dick around.
I happen to like Gnome, but then again, I also liked Unix windowmanagers circa 1995. They do X and they do multiple desktops, two things that were always a hassle on Windows. Other than that, Gnome is still waiting for a third compelling application. It's just a prettier version of TWM, or FVWM, or whatever you were using way back when the internet was born.
Can I get these books on eDonkey yet?
Thank you. It seems that Slashdot is now (always was?) in DIY mode, where stories are just abstracts and readers have to find the story themselves.
Now the next question is, if Immersion's patents are related to using software to drive motors, isn't this just a software patent? Did Immersion actually invent or assemble something, or did they just make a lookup table of different situations and their corresponding vibrations?
In other words, intuition is real? You know it's funny, I've been relying on intuition for years, and somehow I intuited without scientific proof that this was okay!
I'm just curious, would a monkey's arm controlled by robot thoughts be more or less interesting?
Yeah, see I can groove to that. Knowing the prices in the aisle and having a running total is obviously a convenience. However, if they expect me to put money into the shopping cart and tell it to Have a Nice Day! on the way out the store, then they won't be getting much money from me.
The self-checkouts in Home Depot are similarly laughable, with one chaperone just kind of standing there aimlessly, not really looking or doing anything. Are these companies just admitting that they'll take whatever they can get? Because the idea that robots are going to enforce shoplifting laws is just about the scariest 1984-style scenario you can think of for a retail operation.