Alaska has no laws prohibiting drivers from watching DVDs, although many other states do.
Why? Lawmakers should spend their time repealing laws like this, and increasing penalties for actions like negligent homicide, depraved indifference, vehicular manslaughter and my favorite new category, menace to society.
While they are at it, they should bring in whomsoever was the brilliant fellow who made it possible for somebody to watch a DVD in the front seat as a co-defendant.
Then you might understand that *ALL* encryption is *MATH*
What the fuck does encryption do?? It changes one set of numbers into another!!
WRONG. Encryption transforms publically readable information into information that is not publically readable. It is not just mapping numbers absent meaning from one set to another. That abstract mapping of the encryption algorithm of one set of numbers into another set is not patentable. The application of that mapping for information hiding is.
Of course you are too freaking stupid to understand the difference between the math and it's practical application. The math is NOT patented. Using it on a computer to hide information is. You can use the math any other way you want, and it is NOT covered by the patent. IF YOU CAME UP WITH A DIFFERENT USE FOR THE SAME MATH, YOU TOO MIGHT BE AWARDED A PATENT FOR THAT USE OF THE ALGORITHM.
GO READ THE LITERATURE ON THE RSA PATENT, PARTICULARY PAY ATTENTION TO VARIOUS PUBLISHED ANALYSIS OF CLAIM 23.
Let me rephrase that so that even a person with a obviously low IQ like you can understand it. Math is not patentable. Using math in some practical application is. Rewriting an algorithm expressed in one form into some other form does not make the algorithm patentable, despite your fervent wish and claim that it be so. I have presented you with clear cut legal documentation of that, which you seem to be incapable of reading, or at least reading and understanding. Unfortunately you do not live in a place I can easily reach you to smack you on the side of the head in the faint hopes of getting a few neurons to fire, but maybe the tone of this polemic will stimulate your adrenal glands to the point where you achieve some semblance of conciousness.
Developing a mathematical means of accomplishing some practical ends and applying for a patent on the USE OF THAT ALGORITHM FOR THAT PRACTICAL END could yield a patent. Just writing down an algorithm and filing for a patent on that algorithm will get you zilch, zero, nada, bupkis, nothing. MATH IS NOT PATENTABLE. An application of mathematics to achieve a practical goal is.
If the "acts" of a claimed process manipulate only numbers, abstract concepts or ideas, or signals representing any of the foregoing, the acts are not being applied to appropriate subject matter. Thus, a process consisting solely of mathematical operations, i.e., converting one set of numbers into another set of numbers, does not manipulate appropriate subject matter and thus cannot constitute a statutory process.
The fact is, you have no clue as to what you are talking about, and need to spend a little time doing some reading.
I use the HTML 4 strict Doctype and check it using the w3 validator, and proof it on Netscape Navigator 4.78 and IE 5.0. You might have to make a couple of tweaks for Netscape. That pretty much works 100%.
DO NOT use transitional doctypes. That turns on something called 'tweaks mode' in a lot of browsers - in an attempt to be backward compatable. That usually translates into broken pages.
Then every time you sign up for something create a new email address. Thene you can figure out who is selling your address, filter out that particular address, and so on. It makes managing your email and filtering out spam much easier.
Then there are a whole slew of encryption algorithms (which are part of Mathematics! - can't patent math? lol!).
Sigh. People *really* don't understand patents at all. If you actually go and do some reading (I know that a streach) you would find out that a patent covers an IMPLEMENTATION, not an idea. Read the LZW patent - note that it covers the implementation of the LZW algorithm on a computer. Not the algorithm itself. If you want to you are perfectly free to use the algorithm in any other form you want, say on an abacus, or pencil and paper, it would not be an infringement at all.
Whatever you feel about the premise of this lecture, it is quite clear that the author doesn't understand patents and trademarks one iota.
Patents are a contract between government and the inventor where the inventor fully discloses his technology in return for a limited term monopoly. By virtue of this contract, patents cannot be copyrighted - the intent is to place NO barrier on the dissemination of the information, only the practice of the invention for commercial gain. The patent is a economic tool aimed at furtherance of the free disemination of information. Benkler clearly has NO CLUE about this.
As far as trademarks, Benkler again falls down on the job, and badly. Trademarks are protected in order to provide AUTHENTICATION, that is the flow of accurate information as to the source of an item. "Trademark dilution" is in fact an act of counterfit and piracy, muddling with the process of authentication that is a big benefit to transparency in commerce.
It would be nicer where after the patent is issued, they do a follow-up check a year or two later to be sure that you've made progress on actually building/using your invention, otherwise it's invalidated.
Nonsense. Many patents take 10-15 years to become commercially viable. Look at the pharmacuetical industry, for example. This would be impossible to make work.
Similarly, if you don't actually sue anyone for patent infringement for a period of say, 5 years, you should lose your patent.
Can anyone say strawman lawsuit? All a company would have to do is file a bit of paper that meant nothing to get around this one.
Only about 3,750,000 actually could have been reviewed.
Actually much less that that because for a patent to be reviewed somebody has to request that it be reviewed. The fact is the numbers could easily be twisted the other way -
The Patent Office is doing such a great job that less than 0.1% of issued patents are controversial enough to trigger a review. Of those reviewed, 90% are found to be fundamentally valid.
Metric has only one unit for length: the metre. one for mass: the gram, one for volume: the litre.
Actually you've highlighted what is in my opinion one of the inconveniences of the metric system. The units don't interchange that well for common utilitarian use. A liter should be a cubic meter, not 1/1000th of a cubic meter. A gram should weigh more like a pound so that you aren't always messing with kilograms for much of normal measurement.
Well, while decimal has it's advantages because it is aligned with base ten which is the most commonly used numbering system, units of measure using other bases like 12 and 60 have advantages as well in that they have more factors. 60, for example has factors of 2,3,4,5,6,10,15,20 and 30.
For example, if an hour was 10 minutes, a quarter hour would be a fractional number of minutes. Not so in the base 60 system. Likewise, the foot, being 12 inches can be divided into more parts than a decimal foot could be.
We might want to consider getting rid of decimal numbering and going to duodecimal, and then adopting a self consistent set of units in the new numbering system as a superiour alternative to that crazy scheme developed by the cheese eating, wine drinking, unbathed, Godless French.
YOU just can't seem to grasp the idea that other people might innovate without patents.
Innovation happens without patents. What hasn't happened is industrial revolution or industialized society without patents. Patents as we know them now create systematic rewards for invention under the rule of law. Industrialized countries realize this and use the concept to promote innovation in their economies.
Prior to that, patents were absolute and you just had to be buddies with the royal establishment to be allowed manufacture things.
You are missing out on a key point here. Prior to 1624 the British Crown granted 'letters patent' to whomever they felt like with no regard to the real worthyiness of the recipient. Letters patent covered everything including granting people the right to a coat of arms, appointment as sea captain, you name it. And as you say, the practice was fully corrupt with kickbacks the rule. Often courts would overrule these grants.
In 1624 the British Parliment made the key invention of all - restriction of all monopolies to only patents as awards to inventors on application. It's called the Statute of Monopolies, and was so succesful that the concept has been adopted world-wide.
What happened was not a restriction of what we call the patent system, but establishment of the system under rule of law for the first time. It removed the granting of monopolies because the King liked your fart jokes to the rule of law, and established who (inventors) should be granted the monopolies.
I could still just as easily contend that patents SLOWED the initial breakneck speed of the industrial revolution, and that england got them first because they revolution happened first there, so the parasites descended first there...
You could contend that, but you would be wrong. 1624 is before the start of the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution followed, and thus patents could not have been a reaction to it. Since the Statute of Monopolies occurred before the I.R., it at least has to be considered a causitive factor. The success of nations with patent laws in dominating the progress of science and technology vs. nations without such laws is good empirical evidence that these laws do not hinder the advance of innovation. If these laws were hinderances, one would expect that competition among nations would result in their abandonment, much like other memes of economic progress have become abandoned due to their obvious ineffectiveness.
The industrial revolution might have been ten times larger and faster
There was NO industrial revolution prior to the patent. People lived as they had 2000 years earlier. Without patents the dissemination of technology was surpressed in order to prevent competitors from gaining an advantage. Enter the patent and people had an incentive to publish descriptions of their work and bring inventions into the market.
Why do you think the inustrial revolution started in England? Was it a coincidence that England was the first country to implement patents?
fastest progress was made when e.g. the spinning jenny and steam engine patent infringement
Faster progress was made when inventors had incentive to bring inventions like the spinning jenny and steam engine into the marketplace. Without patents you might as well sleep late instead because as soon as you reveal your invention everone else will be flooding the market with copies.
Can you imagine Microsoft trying to hide its double click patent?
You have been reading too much slashdot. These are pathological examples out of a system that produces hundreds of thousands of patents a year. If you want to tinker with the rules to eliminate business process patents and UI tweaks, go ahead. Making wholesale changes and you risk irreperable damage to the progress of technology. There is a reason that the industrial revolution immediately followed the institutionalization of the patent.
Patents nowadays are simply monopolizing utterly obvious ideas.
Like Alzheimer's drugs? Anti-cancer statins? GCMR heads for high capacity disk drives? The Polymerase Chain Reaction? Utterly obvious stuff, I am sure.
Here are my patents. Quiz: Which are utterly obvious? EHL
Have I read a patent? I have worked in R&D organizations whose goal was often to develop patentable technologies. I have read thousands of patents. I have also written about 18, and am listed as an inventor on 12 US patents, as well as the foreign equivalents in dozens of other countries.
As far as reverse engineering goes, there are plenty of cases where that doesn't work because of the complexity of modern biological systems, or the technology in question is a processing step needed to produce something very difficult to measure. And don't forget that reverse engineering can be barred through legal means, i.e. a license. And of course because of patents we don't have many companies trying to conceal their technologies to any great extent. Make patents difficult or impossible to obtain and you will get all sorts of creative (and ultimately damaging to the spread of new concepts - and the overall economy) efforts to conceal, obfuscate, and legally hinder any efforts to discover trade secrets. The possibilities are endless, and include stuff we haven't seen for centuries.
Before making a large scale attempt to destroy a major institution that has been in place for centuries, you had better be damn sure that you FULLY understand what forces caused it be put into place, and what the consequences of removing it will be.
localhost is a decent idea, however if I am signing up for one of those infernal registered user form that are obviously there to harvent names, I usually go for sales@domain, where domain is the website I'm signing up for.
Sometimes sales@localhost is a choice, and if the site is checking for @ and . in the email address I go for sales@127.0.0.1
Not really. By making patents too hard to get companies would start using trade secrets much more. To give you an idea how bad that would be, consider the fact that the concept of the patent was devised in order to cure the problems and abuses with trade secrets.
What if patent examiners posed that problem to other experts in the field. If they come up with a similar solution, patent denied.
Well, you would certainly have to change a lot of patent law for that one. The current law reads "not obvious to one with ORDINARY SKILL in the art." Fees would have to be a lot higher, too, to hire all these experts.
However I do agree with you that the bar is too low. I think a patent should require a significant advance in technology to be valid. Changing the law to encompass that idea would be the best thing to happen to the patent system.
Third a patent should be connected to an actual product which already has been sold seriously.
Talk about enabling submarine patents. Right now outside te US you have to file before using a patent commercially; in the US you have 1 year after commercial use to file. The reason for this is to discourage submarine patents - you start making something, in two years people copy you, then you file get approval and sue.
Slashdot Mirror
Alaska has no laws prohibiting drivers from watching DVDs, although many other states do.
Why? Lawmakers should spend their time repealing laws like this, and increasing penalties for actions like negligent homicide, depraved indifference, vehicular manslaughter and my favorite new category, menace to society.
While they are at it, they should bring in whomsoever was the brilliant fellow who made it possible for somebody to watch a DVD in the front seat as a co-defendant.
Then you might understand that *ALL* encryption is *MATH*
What the fuck does encryption do?? It changes one set of numbers into another!!
WRONG. Encryption transforms publically readable information into information that is not publically readable. It is not just mapping numbers absent meaning from one set to another. That abstract mapping of the encryption algorithm of one set of numbers into another set is not patentable. The application of that mapping for information hiding is.
Of course you are too freaking stupid to understand the difference between the math and it's practical application. The math is NOT patented. Using it on a computer to hide information is. You can use the math any other way you want, and it is NOT covered by the patent. IF YOU CAME UP WITH A DIFFERENT USE FOR THE SAME MATH, YOU TOO MIGHT BE AWARDED A PATENT FOR THAT USE OF THE ALGORITHM.
GO READ THE LITERATURE ON THE RSA PATENT, PARTICULARY PAY ATTENTION TO VARIOUS PUBLISHED ANALYSIS OF CLAIM 23.
Let me rephrase that so that even a person with a obviously low IQ like you can understand it. Math is not patentable. Using math in some practical application is. Rewriting an algorithm expressed in one form into some other form does not make the algorithm patentable, despite your fervent wish and claim that it be so. I have presented you with clear cut legal documentation of that, which you seem to be incapable of reading, or at least reading and understanding. Unfortunately you do not live in a place I can easily reach you to smack you on the side of the head in the faint hopes of getting a few neurons to fire, but maybe the tone of this polemic will stimulate your adrenal glands to the point where you achieve some semblance of conciousness.
Developing a mathematical means of accomplishing some practical ends and applying for a patent on the USE OF THAT ALGORITHM FOR THAT PRACTICAL END could yield a patent. Just writing down an algorithm and filing for a patent on that algorithm will get you zilch, zero, nada, bupkis, nothing. MATH IS NOT PATENTABLE. An application of mathematics to achieve a practical goal is.
It sounds like enabling legislation for a new category of Darwin Awards: Ex-Sport Pilot.
You can patent the later!!!
Actually, no, you can't. See here. and here
In particular:
(c) Non-Statutory Process Claims
If the "acts" of a claimed process manipulate only numbers, abstract
concepts or ideas, or signals representing any of the foregoing, the
acts are not being applied to appropriate subject matter. Thus, a
process consisting solely of mathematical operations, i.e., converting
one set of numbers into another set of numbers, does not manipulate
appropriate subject matter and thus cannot constitute a statutory
process.
The fact is, you have no clue as to what you are talking about, and need to spend a little time doing some reading.
I use the HTML 4 strict Doctype and check it using the w3 validator, and proof it on Netscape Navigator 4.78 and IE 5.0. You might have to make a couple of tweaks for Netscape. That pretty much works 100%.
DO NOT use transitional doctypes. That turns on something called 'tweaks mode' in a lot of browsers - in an attempt to be backward compatable. That usually translates into broken pages.
Then every time you sign up for something create a new email address. Thene you can figure out who is selling your address, filter out that particular address, and so on. It makes managing your email and filtering out spam much easier.
Then there are a whole slew of encryption algorithms (which are part of Mathematics! - can't patent math? lol!).
Sigh. People *really* don't understand patents at all. If you actually go and do some reading (I know that a streach) you would find out that a patent covers an IMPLEMENTATION, not an idea. Read the LZW patent - note that it covers the implementation of the LZW algorithm on a computer. Not the algorithm itself. If you want to you are perfectly free to use the algorithm in any other form you want, say on an abacus, or pencil and paper, it would not be an infringement at all.
Whatever you feel about the premise of this lecture, it is quite clear that the author doesn't understand patents and trademarks one iota.
Patents are a contract between government and the inventor where the inventor fully discloses his technology in return for a limited term monopoly. By virtue of this contract, patents cannot be copyrighted - the intent is to place NO barrier on the dissemination of the information, only the practice of the invention for commercial gain. The patent is a economic tool aimed at furtherance of the free disemination of information. Benkler clearly has NO CLUE about this.
As far as trademarks, Benkler again falls down on the job, and badly. Trademarks are protected in order to provide AUTHENTICATION, that is the flow of accurate information as to the source of an item. "Trademark dilution" is in fact an act of counterfit and piracy, muddling with the process of authentication that is a big benefit to transparency in commerce.
It would be nicer where after the patent is issued, they do a follow-up check a year or two later to be sure that you've made progress on actually building/using your invention, otherwise it's invalidated.
Nonsense. Many patents take 10-15 years to become commercially viable. Look at the pharmacuetical industry, for example. This would be impossible to make work.
Similarly, if you don't actually sue anyone for patent infringement for a period of say, 5 years, you should lose your patent.
Can anyone say strawman lawsuit? All a company would have to do is file a bit of paper that meant nothing to get around this one.
Only about 3,750,000 actually could have been reviewed.
Actually much less that that because for a patent to be reviewed somebody has to request that it be reviewed. The fact is the numbers could easily be twisted the other way -
The Patent Office is doing such a great job that less than 0.1% of issued patents are controversial enough to trigger a review. Of those reviewed, 90% are found to be fundamentally valid.
Metric has only one unit for length: the metre. one for mass: the gram, one for volume: the litre.
Actually you've highlighted what is in my opinion one of the inconveniences of the metric system. The units don't interchange that well for common utilitarian use. A liter should be a cubic meter, not 1/1000th of a cubic meter. A gram should weigh more like a pound so that you aren't always messing with kilograms for much of normal measurement.
Well, while decimal has it's advantages because it is aligned with base ten which is the most commonly used numbering system, units of measure using other bases like 12 and 60 have advantages as well in that they have more factors. 60, for example has factors of 2,3,4,5,6,10,15,20 and 30.
For example, if an hour was 10 minutes, a quarter hour would be a fractional number of minutes. Not so in the base 60 system. Likewise, the foot, being 12 inches can be divided into more parts than a decimal foot could be.
We might want to consider getting rid of decimal numbering and going to duodecimal, and then adopting a self consistent set of units in the new numbering system as a superiour alternative to that crazy scheme developed by the cheese eating, wine drinking, unbathed, Godless French.
EAN already accomodates the US barcode by making the 13th digit a 0 by default.
European Barcode Monopoly competes using 'embrace and extend' tactics!
YOU just can't seem to grasp the idea that other people might innovate without patents.
Innovation happens without patents. What hasn't happened is industrial revolution or industialized society without patents. Patents as we know them now create systematic rewards for invention under the rule of law. Industrialized countries realize this and use the concept to promote innovation in their economies.
Prior to that, patents were absolute and you just had to be buddies with the royal establishment to be allowed manufacture things.
You are missing out on a key point here. Prior to 1624 the British Crown granted 'letters patent' to whomever they felt like with no regard to the real worthyiness of the recipient. Letters patent covered everything including granting people the right to a coat of arms, appointment as sea captain, you name it. And as you say, the practice was fully corrupt with kickbacks the rule. Often courts would overrule these grants.
In 1624 the British Parliment made the key invention of all - restriction of all monopolies to only patents as awards to inventors on application. It's called the Statute of Monopolies, and was so succesful that the concept has been adopted world-wide.
What happened was not a restriction of what we call the patent system, but establishment of the system under rule of law for the first time. It removed the granting of monopolies because the King liked your fart jokes to the rule of law, and established who (inventors) should be granted the monopolies.
I could still just as easily contend that patents SLOWED the initial breakneck speed of the industrial revolution, and that england got them first because they revolution happened first there, so the parasites descended first there...
You could contend that, but you would be wrong. 1624 is before the start of the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution followed, and thus patents could not have been a reaction to it. Since the Statute of Monopolies occurred before the I.R., it at least has to be considered a causitive factor. The success of nations with patent laws in dominating the progress of science and technology vs. nations without such laws is good empirical evidence that these laws do not hinder the advance of innovation. If these laws were hinderances, one would expect that competition among nations would result in their abandonment, much like other memes of economic progress have become abandoned due to their obvious ineffectiveness.
The industrial revolution might have been ten times larger and faster
There was NO industrial revolution prior to the patent. People lived as they had 2000 years earlier. Without patents the dissemination of technology was surpressed in order to prevent competitors from gaining an advantage. Enter the patent and people had an incentive to publish descriptions of their work and bring inventions into the market.
Why do you think the inustrial revolution started in England? Was it a coincidence that England was the first country to implement patents?
fastest progress was made when e.g. the spinning jenny and steam engine patent infringement
Faster progress was made when inventors had incentive to bring inventions like the spinning jenny and steam engine into the marketplace. Without patents you might as well sleep late instead because as soon as you reveal your invention everone else will be flooding the market with copies.
There are other ways to reward innovators.
Are there any actual implementations of these ideas that have been shown to actually work?
Can you imagine Microsoft trying to hide its double click patent?
You have been reading too much slashdot. These are pathological examples out of a system that produces hundreds of thousands of patents a year. If you want to tinker with the rules to eliminate business process patents and UI tweaks, go ahead. Making wholesale changes and you risk irreperable damage to the progress of technology. There is a reason that the industrial revolution immediately followed the institutionalization of the patent.
Patents nowadays are simply monopolizing utterly obvious ideas.
Like Alzheimer's drugs? Anti-cancer statins? GCMR heads for high capacity disk drives? The Polymerase Chain Reaction? Utterly obvious stuff, I am sure.
Here are my patents. Quiz: Which are utterly obvious? EHL
Have I read a patent? I have worked in R&D organizations whose goal was often to develop patentable technologies. I have read thousands of patents. I have also written about 18, and am listed as an inventor on 12 US patents, as well as the foreign equivalents in dozens of other countries.
As far as reverse engineering goes, there are plenty of cases where that doesn't work because of the complexity of modern biological systems, or the technology in question is a processing step needed to produce something very difficult to measure. And don't forget that reverse engineering can be barred through legal means, i.e. a license. And of course because of patents we don't have many companies trying to conceal their technologies to any great extent. Make patents difficult or impossible to obtain and you will get all sorts of creative (and ultimately damaging to the spread of new concepts - and the overall economy) efforts to conceal, obfuscate, and legally hinder any efforts to discover trade secrets. The possibilities are endless, and include stuff we haven't seen for centuries.
Before making a large scale attempt to destroy a major institution that has been in place for centuries, you had better be damn sure that you FULLY understand what forces caused it be put into place, and what the consequences of removing it will be.
The best I ever saw was somebody who set their domain's MX record to 127.0.0.1
localhost is a decent idea, however if I am signing up for one of those infernal registered user form that are obviously there to harvent names, I usually go for sales@domain, where domain is the website I'm signing up for.
Sometimes sales@localhost is a choice, and if the site is checking for @ and . in the email address I go for sales@127.0.0.1
Now that'd fix our patent system!
Not really. By making patents too hard to get companies would start using trade secrets much more. To give you an idea how bad that would be, consider the fact that the concept of the patent was devised in order to cure the problems and abuses with trade secrets.
What if patent examiners posed that problem to other experts in the field. If they come up with a similar solution, patent denied.
Well, you would certainly have to change a lot of patent law for that one. The current law reads "not obvious to one with ORDINARY SKILL in the art." Fees would have to be a lot higher, too, to hire all these experts.
However I do agree with you that the bar is too low. I think a patent should require a significant advance in technology to be valid. Changing the law to encompass that idea would be the best thing to happen to the patent system.
Third a patent should be connected to an actual product which already has been sold seriously.
Talk about enabling submarine patents. Right now outside te US you have to file before using a patent commercially; in the US you have 1 year after commercial use to file. The reason for this is to discourage submarine patents - you start making something, in two years people copy you, then you file get approval and sue.
couch is a little to short for me.
I've had days when the couch was waay too tall for me. Inflatable carpets are an excellent idea!
Henry David Thoreau.
A really potent one, that.