And whomever gets the top speed in the quarter mile means jack unless they're also the one who gets to the finish first. If you take the whole damn track to accellerate, and I accellerate to my (lower) top speed half a second from the start, it doesn't matter that you're going faster than me once you finally meet me at the finish line.
So if a hybrid does it in four flat, which hasn't been done by anybody in a car to my knowledge, then I'll be impressed.
I'm impressed by the fact that a hybrid is designed for a daily metropolitan commute--you know, the reason why we have automobiles in the first place--and that it does what it's designed to so very, very well.
At any rate, hybrid or not gasoline is on its long slow way out. We've passed peak oil, and unless synthetic crude takes off in a big way and soon, it's only a matter of time before the gasoline powered car has gone the way of the riding horse.
What, you mean that getting 500 miles on a 10 gallon tank at 50 mpg isn't good enough for you?
(hint: a quarter mile in 4 seconds is 225 mph. You just make yourself sound like an idiot saying it any other way. Especially since there's no prize for the guy who took 5 seconds to do the quarter mile but got to 310 mph.))
I'm talking about serious enthusiasts, not the "I've got hybrid technology just because it's fashionable".
I'm talking about people who push their car's performance meaure as far as it can go. People who modify their automobile in ways its manufacturer never thought of and wouldn't approve if they knew about it. Such as this guy.
These people aren't serious enthusiasts, not to the depth I'm speaking of. To put the point sharply, these are the people that buy Mac's, they want form before function.
Y'know, the three smartest, most savy computer techs I know all just recently went mac. Something about a Unix interface.
Trust me--once Nascar is won by a hybrid, those "enthusiasts" will adopt the technology wholesale. (Nascar involves a lot of accelleartion and decelleration; anything that increases your fuel economy will be adopted, and at some point hyrbids will be added into the mix, if not a direct fuel cell.)
Just buy your Honda hybrids and stay out of the fast lane because I'll take my german V6 and be happy for the rest of my life.
You mean, until your german v6 totally falls apart on you once the warranty expires. When you build performance you get performance--and that means that the car won't last as long as an equal-quality car with a different model in mind.
It might not be economically feasible for people like you but real enthusiasts that get that special feeling when the vehicle comes to life, we're willing to pay past the current gas prices to reach it again.
Once gasoline is no longer the cheapest fuel, you'll have about five years where it's still sold, as everyone and their brother buys a non-gasoline car. And then you'll have an amazing decline in the avaliability of gasoline; at some point, you'll be paying hundreds of 2005 dollars a gallon.
At that point, the real enthusiasts will laugh at you old fogies, and you'll quietly try and forget that you ever wrote this post.
You'll be hard pressed to get any serious car enthusiast to switch from a gas combustion engine to some alternative fuel car.
Except, of course, for those folk who become Hybrid car enthusiasts.
And those who want raw low-speed torque.
And those who will geek out over a totally silent car.
"Feel" isn't going to do jack to the acceptance of non-gasoline cars. As the price of oil rises and the cost of alternatives drops, we'll reach a point where it's no longer fiscally better to go with gasoline.
And where were these policies during the Cold War?
Have you seen the size of the DoD's budget during the cold war?
Or the fact that both proxy wars we fought during the cold war had drafts?
Or are you simply ignoring what I said altogether. The United States is not at war. We may be sending troops, but we're not. And every failure we suffer can be blamed at Bush's reprehensible decision to act as if we had not been attacked and were not at war throughout his term.
As far as I'm aware there is no conclusive evidence that shows Macs are inherently more secure
It's a question of expert knowledge. Not being an expert, though, I can still extrapolate an argument:
BSD was built with "security" in mind.
Windows was built with "compatability" in mind.
Mac OS X was built on top of BSD, as a way to make BSD more "usable".
If 1, 2, and 3 are true, and we do not have a case where Apple greatly reduced BSD's security, then we should assume that Mac OS X is more secure than windows.
It also follows common sense that if you focus your product on working with all different kinds of software, you're gong to make a product that doesn't block out unwanted parts of software.
Could we see an anti-military GPL that allows normal use except in orginizations who's express purpose is to kill people?
No, because:
(1) assassination guilds are illegal, and so ignore copyright law
(2) The purpose of the military is to defend or sieze land, not kill people. (Military strategy holds that wounding is generally preferrable to killing--makes the casualty more of a drain for the other side.)
(3) Amending the GPL couldn't do that much; either you'd have to make an incompatbile fork, or you'd see a version that had no teeth because folk could just use another verison of the license.
(4) The GPL won't stop the USA's federal government. Copyright is administered by acts of congress, which rarely deal with copyright and rarely change. The military, OTOH, is authorized by an act of congress every two years.
If the universe is 14 billion years old, and the edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart
It's not.
Our perceptable universe is 28 billion light-years apart. We have no way of knowing how much larger the universe is, because no information from beyond our information-cone can get to us.
(Graph space and time on an X-Y axis. Pick a point on Y, time, and draw two 45-degree lines down the page. As time progesses, the distance that we can get light from increases, because light has a finite speed. That "cone" of sense is what I mean by information-cone.)
All of these things become obsolete, with newer things able to do the exact same job "better" and "cheaper"... so by your argument, you MUST toss the old immediately and replace it even it if works just fine.
No. I noted the difference between "obsolete" and "worthless." I use a whole bunch of obsolete things in my daily life. They're not worthless yet, becuase it costs me less to keep them than replace them.
Sheesh.
You must be privvy to some new type of "latch" and "flip flop" that the rest of the planet is unaware of. Or, you don't know WTF you're talking about.
Or, if you bothered to read what I wrote, you're realize that most of the modern computing world DOESN'T work in binary. While it underoots the system, binary-states also underroot the animal nervous system, and no one says that we're binary.
Computers work in blocks, data streams, and processes. Just because Elza and Great Blue use the same basic mathematics doesn't mean that they're anything like each other.
The only reason any software should be considered obsolete is when computers stop using binary and move on to something else. The 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, and 4 bit computers all speak binary at the same level.
That's so wrong I don't know where to begin. How about I start with what caught my eye.
Your computer is not much more binary than you or I. Our neurons either fire or don't fire, the biochemicals of memory either are or aren't in a certain qauntum state.
The computer, though its basic internal processor memory is all binary numbers, does NOT work in binary. It works in broad groups of blocks, which stop being binary once you get to the communication-between-chips level.
As for the rest:
Software is obsolete when a newer program can do the same job better, and software is worthless when a newer program can do the same job better AND cheaper.
(For the record, your 23 year old amoritization program is obsolete because even a ten-year old computer can do the same job, better and clearer and with easier to use output.)
Yes, it is the outcast's own fault that they're outcast. Just like it's the social primadona's fault that they can't work a computer, or the dumb jock's fault that he's failing math.
And let me repeat what I said earlier. ALL BUT TWO of the "geeks" i know successfuly mastered the social aspect of intelligence. Most of them have done very well by doing so.
If you're too lazy, too cowardly, or just too stupid to figure out how to navigate the human social system, you won't get any tears from me.
I bet that makes all the highschool geeks who are being pushed around feel a lot better...
It's not supposed to.
If you're in high school and beign pushed around, then for Christ's sake, figure out why and what you need to do to stop it!
Social intelligence is EVERY BIT as important as abstract intelligence, and you're just painting yourself as a fool if you refuse to expand yours.
(And, for the record, every other high school "geek" I know save two was able to learn what was wrong and adapt. The two who weren't able to adapt are STILL socially outcast; the problem isn't high school or the bully, it's the "geek" who refuses to apply himself to society the way he applies himself to math.)
How can you know this? Not being snotty, I really want to know.
Know? Can't do it. Statistics could never give sufficient understanding to recognize greatness. OTOH, those statistics DO say that there's something off-kilter about our educational system, at the least strongly implying that we have a paucity of great teachers.
It's entirely possible that the "baseline" that pundits and politicians and activists fight over is entirely a myth, and the national tests are simply badly designed. But than means that reailty is happilly out of sync with their understanding, not that you're in-line with their perception.
On a slightly related note--do you teach your students about alchemy, and show them how it's wrong?
Yes, and that covers computer languages. Just because programming languages can understood and followed by a computer does not change the fact that programming languages are also an effective and sometimes preferred means of human communication.
And just because something is said in a language does not make it copyrightable speach. And, conversely, just because certain contructs of a are uncopyrightable doesn't mean that all are.
Yes, my preferred definitions for copyright would render things like recipies free for the taking. This is wholly acceptable to me and the general public--after all, how many times have you heard of recipies being traded like chain letters?
As for "legal 0-day warez", there are plenty of copyrightable works of art that can be included in a video game to render it protected, and a new non-game application should either be uniquely patentable in part or, at the least, qualify for a design patent which protects its unique form.
Regards to the current status of law:
My point being that that the lower court that is upholding software patents is in direct violation of standing Supreme Court law.
SCOTUS has had twenty-six years since their holding in Parker v. Flook wherein they withheld the patent examiner and patent board that a mere mathematical process wasn't patentable. Since then, as you noted a new court has been created, and we've also had a boom in purely-software industries.
When the State Street Bank case was decided by the Court of Appeals and SCOTUS declined to hear the case, they in effect stood by the lower Court's ruling. You would think that, if they really were of a mind to impose their ancilliary statement from two decades previous, they would have granted ceterari in the seven years (!) since State Street.
Patents for processes and designs without physical basis are entirely legal, as it is right that they should be considering the far-greater array of our economy that has no direct physical basis.
However I'd like to hear you explain why you think the Supreme Court won't toss out the first software patent appeal to cross their docket.
Because they're a conservative court that doesn't want to rock the boat if they can avoid it. And they've been that way for more than two centuries.
I am not a right-wing "fundie." I'm hardly right-wing, even if I'm not a placard-toting left-wing moron. And while I am a Christian, and I certainly believe in certain "fundamentals", my understanding of the gospel is far, FAR different than those who argue entirely against sin instead of for salvation.
Just because you can read what I've said doesn't mean that you know me. Especially since you went looking angry.
Anyway.
If you're so adamantly in favour of teaching ID, but you're not doing so out of bias toward Christianity, then you should be campaigning just as vigorously to have Buddhist, Hindi, Muslim, Native American, Wiccan, etc. creation stories taught in a science class.
You're absolutely right. A science class that taught I.D. would have to do so from a culturally-neutral viewpoint. One religion saying that a man walked on water is a tall tale. Most religons saying that there was a great flood is a pattern worth futher investigation. (Which, btw, has been done on several occasions.)
I'll say it again, and use small words so that someone so embarassingly moronic is sure to understand.
Science is not and can not be hurt by teaching a false story and why that story is false.
Science is not and can not be hurt by teaching both sides of a "maybe".
The first ten Amendments are called the Bill of Rights, and to people who are not named "John Ashcroft" or "Alberto Gonzales," these rights are sacrosanct and uninfringeable.
1: Wrong. First off, to people like the Justices of the Supreme Court, they aren't "sacrosanct" or "uninfringeable". Felons may not posess arms, soldiers can invade a home as a temporary barricade, and free speach can be limited by innumerable instances, from NDAs to possible harm to government secrecty laws.
2: Public education teaching about religion is not and can not be unconstitutional. If we banned every "religion" from public schools, we would essentially be instituting atheism as a state relgion. What must be done, however, is to give equal weight to all relevant religions in a discussion. Information about ALL religions should be taught in history / social-studies classes, and when those topics are brought into other courses as wide a variety as possible should be references so as not to give a bias.
Software is blatantly covered by copyright and I defy you to give any coherent explanation of copyright that does not encompass a work of software.
Sure. It's very easy, actually.
Copyright: n. The legal protection given to a work of Art or Speech in a fixed form.
And, since you're going to ask:
Art: n. A composition, construction, illustration, or other human endeavor done primarily for asthetic or self-expression, instead of the same done for a practical purpose.
Speech: n. A communication by one person to one or more other persons or to the state.
My position is that copyright shouldn't cover nearly as much as it does now. Yes, I know that this would remove all protection for unpatented software--that's a good thing, IMO. And the prevalent idea of "abandonware" supports my position.
You quoted certain statements of mine and said they were false, then you proceeded to AGREE with them!
*sigh*.
You stated:
but to have an invention and get a patent you have to have novelty and non-obviousness within some physical object and/or within the harnessing of the physical forces of nature for processing of physical matter.
This, as a statement of current law, is as false as saying that copyrights do not apply to software. You are perfectly free to argue that they SHOULD apply only to physical objects, but you would be incorrect.
Again, to ensure that you can't maliciously misread me again:
Physical Forces are not required for a process patent.
There is ample law for the patentability of game rules, algorithms, and other novel processes that have nothing directly to do with physical matter or force. The most well-known of these would be the "LZW" patent, but most of the familiar input, output, and processing methedologies that underly software would have been patentable at the time of their invention.
And all of the patents that I am familiar with regarding non-physical processes are well after your 1978 court case. Obviously, that ancilliary line in your SCOUTS decicsion doesn't have nearly the weight that you think it does.
And the intelligent design movement itself is quite political, and not at all scientific.
I'd call them 'not particularly scientific.'
It's hardly unscientific to conclude from the apparant wide variety of non-life-conducive possible outcomes and the prevalent existance of creator-myths that there was something that influenced our development.
If we applied the same standard of historical proof to creationism / evolution that we do to a great many aspects of "prehistoric science", we would, at the least, be financing a study or ten as to the existance of a creator being. But we aren't doing that, because any study that started would have its determination made before it began.
(Just like, oh, a study as to the biological basis of homosexuality.)
You guys are the ones making it political, not us scientists, and you're killing the value of American scientific education in the process.
1: Stop abscrbing your percieved enemey's vitues unto mine. You have no idea what my religion or politics are, and its hardly conductive to a discussion for you to keep doing so.
2: The only things that kill American scientific education are teaching as if science is infallible and decreeing that any topic is off-limits. And idea, good scientific class would cover BOTH I.D. and historical Evolution, and disect both the arguments for and against both interpretations of the facts. If I.D. is as plainly false as you believe it to be, then why worry if it's taught? A good scientific education will lead students to question, evalutate, and discard falsehoods they encoutner.
3: Intelligent Design is a contradiction of Random Design, not the Theory of Evolution. You can no more easily disprove I.D. than prove it--and the same thing goes for its compliment, Random Design.
Assuming that you're a high school science teacher, which is the area under discussion:
Are your students tested on the history of science, their ability to defend a conclusion, their experimental methedology, or their inquisitiveness? Or are they tested on facts, formulas, and figures?
If the answers are "yes" and "not only", then you're a far better science teacher than any I've ever met, with a science program that I would love to enroll my children in.
But you would also be far away from the baseline norm that the evolution vs. creationism argument is fought against.
I didn't say it was. What, did would you rather I call it a "meme"?
More to the point, it's not an accepted scientific theorum. Which makes it a hypothesis, in scientific terms. The experiment to test this, "find God and ask him", has yet to provide any results whatsoever.
Please stop trying to imply that science is a monolithic quorum of understanding. Science is a method, and it's an insult to everyone when you kotwow to political pressure and make it more than that.
Oh, and while I'm rebutting:
Science classes are for teaching science.
No, they're not. They're for teaching about Scientific Discoveries. At the point in contention, students need to learn the what and the when far more than they need to know how we learned that. (And the "how we learned" is science.)
As for I.D. -- it certainly does have a place in science class. If that place is next to "spontaneous gestation" (i.e., ideas from the past that are disproven) or "commercial fusion"(i.e., ideas that are not yet and may never be proven) is a matter of some debate, but they certainly have a place in the wide range of scientific cirriculum.
Programmers are authors and they have copyright protection.
Let's put the card on the table.
You, or at the least, Bill Gates et al, don't want software patents because you want software copyright.
I say that there is nothing at all copyrightable about computer code, and if we aren't going to do the right thing and create a new form of IP, the thing to do is to require patents for the protection of computer software.
(For the record, if you're not clever enough to recognize someone who's opposing you, you probably aren't smart enough to even speculate what is the best part of law to apply to a given fact. I hope that you were collecting a straw-man, and I'm not wasting my time.)
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You're not an American, are you?
Yes, I am you redneck troll.
And whomever gets the top speed in the quarter mile means jack unless they're also the one who gets to the finish first. If you take the whole damn track to accellerate, and I accellerate to my (lower) top speed half a second from the start, it doesn't matter that you're going faster than me once you finally meet me at the finish line.
So if a hybrid does it in four flat, which hasn't been done by anybody in a car to my knowledge, then I'll be impressed.
I'm impressed by the fact that a hybrid is designed for a daily metropolitan commute--you know, the reason why we have automobiles in the first place--and that it does what it's designed to so very, very well.
At any rate, hybrid or not gasoline is on its long slow way out. We've passed peak oil, and unless synthetic crude takes off in a big way and soon, it's only a matter of time before the gasoline powered car has gone the way of the riding horse.
the quarter mile in 4 seconds flat at 300mph
What, you mean that getting 500 miles on a 10 gallon tank at 50 mpg isn't good enough for you?
(hint: a quarter mile in 4 seconds is 225 mph. You just make yourself sound like an idiot saying it any other way. Especially since there's no prize for the guy who took 5 seconds to do the quarter mile but got to 310 mph.))
I'm talking about serious enthusiasts, not the "I've got hybrid technology just because it's fashionable".
I'm talking about people who push their car's performance meaure as far as it can go. People who modify their automobile in ways its manufacturer never thought of and wouldn't approve if they knew about it. Such as this guy.
These people aren't serious enthusiasts, not to the depth I'm speaking of. To put the point sharply, these are the people that buy Mac's, they want form before function.
Y'know, the three smartest, most savy computer techs I know all just recently went mac. Something about a Unix interface.
Trust me--once Nascar is won by a hybrid, those "enthusiasts" will adopt the technology wholesale. (Nascar involves a lot of accelleartion and decelleration; anything that increases your fuel economy will be adopted, and at some point hyrbids will be added into the mix, if not a direct fuel cell.)
Just buy your Honda hybrids and stay out of the fast lane because I'll take my german V6 and be happy for the rest of my life.
You mean, until your german v6 totally falls apart on you once the warranty expires. When you build performance you get performance--and that means that the car won't last as long as an equal-quality car with a different model in mind.
It might not be economically feasible for people like you but real enthusiasts that get that special feeling when the vehicle comes to life, we're willing to pay past the current gas prices to reach it again.
Once gasoline is no longer the cheapest fuel, you'll have about five years where it's still sold, as everyone and their brother buys a non-gasoline car. And then you'll have an amazing decline in the avaliability of gasoline; at some point, you'll be paying hundreds of 2005 dollars a gallon.
At that point, the real enthusiasts will laugh at you old fogies, and you'll quietly try and forget that you ever wrote this post.
You'll be hard pressed to get any serious car enthusiast to switch from a gas combustion engine to some alternative fuel car.
Except, of course, for those folk who become Hybrid car enthusiasts.
And those who want raw low-speed torque.
And those who will geek out over a totally silent car.
"Feel" isn't going to do jack to the acceptance of non-gasoline cars. As the price of oil rises and the cost of alternatives drops, we'll reach a point where it's no longer fiscally better to go with gasoline.
And at that point, the party's over.
And where were these policies during the Cold War?
Have you seen the size of the DoD's budget during the cold war?
Or the fact that both proxy wars we fought during the cold war had drafts?
Or are you simply ignoring what I said altogether. The United States is not at war. We may be sending troops, but we're not. And every failure we suffer can be blamed at Bush's reprehensible decision to act as if we had not been attacked and were not at war throughout his term.
The US is at war. Get used to it.
There has been no rationing, no draft, no tax hikes...
we're not at war. We're sending soldiers overseas to fight, but the United States of America is not at war.
Sony should be able to fill the courtroom with examples of force feedback/vibration prior to the filing date of this patent.
They're a multi-billion dollar international company. I'm sure that they had a competent lawyer, who attempted to get the patent ruled invalid.
It's a question of expert knowledge. Not being an expert, though, I can still extrapolate an argument:
If 1, 2, and 3 are true, and we do not have a case where Apple greatly reduced BSD's security, then we should assume that Mac OS X is more secure than windows.
It also follows common sense that if you focus your product on working with all different kinds of software, you're gong to make a product that doesn't block out unwanted parts of software.
Could we see an anti-military GPL that allows normal use except in orginizations who's express purpose is to kill people?
:
No, because
(1) assassination guilds are illegal, and so ignore copyright law
(2) The purpose of the military is to defend or sieze land, not kill people. (Military strategy holds that wounding is generally preferrable to killing--makes the casualty more of a drain for the other side.)
(3) Amending the GPL couldn't do that much; either you'd have to make an incompatbile fork, or you'd see a version that had no teeth because folk could just use another verison of the license.
(4) The GPL won't stop the USA's federal government. Copyright is administered by acts of congress, which rarely deal with copyright and rarely change. The military, OTOH, is authorized by an act of congress every two years.
If the universe is 14 billion years old, and the edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart
It's not.
Our perceptable universe is 28 billion light-years apart. We have no way of knowing how much larger the universe is, because no information from beyond our information-cone can get to us.
(Graph space and time on an X-Y axis. Pick a point on Y, time, and draw two 45-degree lines down the page. As time progesses, the distance that we can get light from increases, because light has a finite speed. That "cone" of sense is what I mean by information-cone.)
All of these things become obsolete, with newer things able to do the exact same job "better" and "cheaper"... so by your argument, you MUST toss the old immediately and replace it even it if works just fine.
No. I noted the difference between "obsolete" and "worthless." I use a whole bunch of obsolete things in my daily life. They're not worthless yet, becuase it costs me less to keep them than replace them.
Sheesh.
You must be privvy to some new type of "latch" and "flip flop" that the rest of the planet is unaware of. Or, you don't know WTF you're talking about.
Or, if you bothered to read what I wrote, you're realize that most of the modern computing world DOESN'T work in binary. While it underoots the system, binary-states also underroot the animal nervous system, and no one says that we're binary.
Computers work in blocks, data streams, and processes. Just because Elza and Great Blue use the same basic mathematics doesn't mean that they're anything like each other.
The only reason any software should be considered obsolete is when computers stop using binary and move on to something else. The 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, and 4 bit computers all speak binary at the same level.
That's so wrong I don't know where to begin. How about I start with what caught my eye.
Your computer is not much more binary than you or I. Our neurons either fire or don't fire, the biochemicals of memory either are or aren't in a certain qauntum state.
The computer, though its basic internal processor memory is all binary numbers, does NOT work in binary. It works in broad groups of blocks, which stop being binary once you get to the communication-between-chips level.
As for the rest:
Software is obsolete when a newer program can do the same job better, and software is worthless when a newer program can do the same job better AND cheaper.
(For the record, your 23 year old amoritization program is obsolete because even a ten-year old computer can do the same job, better and clearer and with easier to use output.)
Yes, it is the outcast's own fault that they're outcast. Just like it's the social primadona's fault that they can't work a computer, or the dumb jock's fault that he's failing math.
And let me repeat what I said earlier. ALL BUT TWO of the "geeks" i know successfuly mastered the social aspect of intelligence. Most of them have done very well by doing so.
If you're too lazy, too cowardly, or just too stupid to figure out how to navigate the human social system, you won't get any tears from me.
I bet that makes all the highschool geeks who are being pushed around feel a lot better...
It's not supposed to.
If you're in high school and beign pushed around, then for Christ's sake, figure out why and what you need to do to stop it!
Social intelligence is EVERY BIT as important as abstract intelligence, and you're just painting yourself as a fool if you refuse to expand yours.
(And, for the record, every other high school "geek" I know save two was able to learn what was wrong and adapt. The two who weren't able to adapt are STILL socially outcast; the problem isn't high school or the bully, it's the "geek" who refuses to apply himself to society the way he applies himself to math.)
How can you know this? Not being snotty, I really want to know.
Know? Can't do it. Statistics could never give sufficient understanding to recognize greatness. OTOH, those statistics DO say that there's something off-kilter about our educational system, at the least strongly implying that we have a paucity of great teachers.
It's entirely possible that the "baseline" that pundits and politicians and activists fight over is entirely a myth, and the national tests are simply badly designed. But than means that reailty is happilly out of sync with their understanding, not that you're in-line with their perception.
On a slightly related note--do you teach your students about alchemy, and show them how it's wrong?
Yes, and that covers computer languages. Just because programming languages can understood and followed by a computer does not change the fact that programming languages are also an effective and sometimes preferred means of human communication.
And just because something is said in a language does not make it copyrightable speach. And, conversely, just because certain contructs of a are uncopyrightable doesn't mean that all are.
Yes, my preferred definitions for copyright would render things like recipies free for the taking. This is wholly acceptable to me and the general public--after all, how many times have you heard of recipies being traded like chain letters?
As for "legal 0-day warez", there are plenty of copyrightable works of art that can be included in a video game to render it protected, and a new non-game application should either be uniquely patentable in part or, at the least, qualify for a design patent which protects its unique form.
Regards to the current status of law:
My point being that that the lower court that is upholding software patents is in direct violation of standing Supreme Court law.
SCOTUS has had twenty-six years since their holding in Parker v. Flook wherein they withheld the patent examiner and patent board that a mere mathematical process wasn't patentable. Since then, as you noted a new court has been created, and we've also had a boom in purely-software industries.
When the State Street Bank case was decided by the Court of Appeals and SCOTUS declined to hear the case, they in effect stood by the lower Court's ruling. You would think that, if they really were of a mind to impose their ancilliary statement from two decades previous, they would have granted ceterari in the seven years (!) since State Street.
Patents for processes and designs without physical basis are entirely legal, as it is right that they should be considering the far-greater array of our economy that has no direct physical basis.
However I'd like to hear you explain why you think the Supreme Court won't toss out the first software patent appeal to cross their docket.
Because they're a conservative court that doesn't want to rock the boat if they can avoid it. And they've been that way for more than two centuries.
...your Christianity...
/. info page. That word has a wider swath of meaning that you think it does. ... your rampant right-wing Republicanism...
No, "Christianity" is on my
This is rich.
Do you mean this?
or maybe THIS?
Or perhaps you only read this one, and missed this one, this one, this one, this one, this one (pay attention to the first comment!), or, of course, THIS ONE.
I am not a right-wing "fundie." I'm hardly right-wing, even if I'm not a placard-toting left-wing moron. And while I am a Christian, and I certainly believe in certain "fundamentals", my understanding of the gospel is far, FAR different than those who argue entirely against sin instead of for salvation.
Just because you can read what I've said doesn't mean that you know me. Especially since you went looking angry.
Anyway.
If you're so adamantly in favour of teaching ID, but you're not doing so out of bias toward Christianity, then you should be campaigning just as vigorously to have Buddhist, Hindi, Muslim, Native American, Wiccan, etc. creation stories taught in a science class.
You're absolutely right. A science class that taught I.D. would have to do so from a culturally-neutral viewpoint. One religion saying that a man walked on water is a tall tale. Most religons saying that there was a great flood is a pattern worth futher investigation. (Which, btw, has been done on several occasions.)
I'll say it again, and use small words so that someone so embarassingly moronic is sure to understand.
Science is not and can not be hurt by teaching a false story and why that story is false.
Science is not and can not be hurt by teaching both sides of a "maybe".
The first ten Amendments are called the Bill of Rights, and to people who are not named "John Ashcroft" or "Alberto Gonzales," these rights are sacrosanct and uninfringeable.
1: Wrong. First off, to people like the Justices of the Supreme Court, they aren't "sacrosanct" or "uninfringeable". Felons may not posess arms, soldiers can invade a home as a temporary barricade, and free speach can be limited by innumerable instances, from NDAs to possible harm to government secrecty laws.
2: Public education teaching about religion is not and can not be unconstitutional. If we banned every "religion" from public schools, we would essentially be instituting atheism as a state relgion. What must be done, however, is to give equal weight to all relevant religions in a discussion. Information about ALL religions should be taught in history / social-studies classes, and when those topics are brought into other courses as wide a variety as possible should be references so as not to give a bias.
Yeah, because 9th grade boys just love being unpopular, pushed around and called geeks.
Some of those bullys go into IT. Some of those "geeks" just learn to push back.
And some of those quiet types who just like to play on their video game system go into computers, too.
Software is blatantly covered by copyright and I defy you to give any coherent explanation of copyright that does not encompass a work of software.
Sure. It's very easy, actually.
Copyright: n. The legal protection given to a work of Art or Speech in a fixed form.
And, since you're going to ask:
Art: n. A composition, construction, illustration, or other human endeavor done primarily for asthetic or self-expression, instead of the same done for a practical purpose.
Speech: n. A communication by one person to one or more other persons or to the state.
My position is that copyright shouldn't cover nearly as much as it does now. Yes, I know that this would remove all protection for unpatented software--that's a good thing, IMO. And the prevalent idea of "abandonware" supports my position.
You quoted certain statements of mine and said they were false, then you proceeded to AGREE with them!
*sigh*.
You stated:
but to have an invention and get a patent you have to have novelty and non-obviousness within some physical object and/or within the harnessing of the physical forces of nature for processing of physical matter.
This, as a statement of current law, is as false as saying that copyrights do not apply to software. You are perfectly free to argue that they SHOULD apply only to physical objects, but you would be incorrect.
Again, to ensure that you can't maliciously misread me again:
Physical Forces are not required for a process patent.
There is ample law for the patentability of game rules, algorithms, and other novel processes that have nothing directly to do with physical matter or force. The most well-known of these would be the "LZW" patent, but most of the familiar input, output, and processing methedologies that underly software would have been patentable at the time of their invention.
And all of the patents that I am familiar with regarding non-physical processes are well after your 1978 court case. Obviously, that ancilliary line in your SCOUTS decicsion doesn't have nearly the weight that you think it does.
And the intelligent design movement itself is quite political, and not at all scientific.
I'd call them 'not particularly scientific.'
It's hardly unscientific to conclude from the apparant wide variety of non-life-conducive possible outcomes and the prevalent existance of creator-myths that there was something that influenced our development.
If we applied the same standard of historical proof to creationism / evolution that we do to a great many aspects of "prehistoric science", we would, at the least, be financing a study or ten as to the existance of a creator being. But we aren't doing that, because any study that started would have its determination made before it began.
(Just like, oh, a study as to the biological basis of homosexuality.)
Don't pray in my school, and I won't think in your church.
If you came to my church and refused to think, I might have to toss you out on your ear.
You guys are the ones making it political, not us scientists, and you're killing the value of American scientific education in the process.
1: Stop abscrbing your percieved enemey's vitues unto mine. You have no idea what my religion or politics are, and its hardly conductive to a discussion for you to keep doing so.
2: The only things that kill American scientific education are teaching as if science is infallible and decreeing that any topic is off-limits. And idea, good scientific class would cover BOTH I.D. and historical Evolution, and disect both the arguments for and against both interpretations of the facts. If I.D. is as plainly false as you believe it to be, then why worry if it's taught? A good scientific education will lead students to question, evalutate, and discard falsehoods they encoutner.
3: Intelligent Design is a contradiction of Random Design, not the Theory of Evolution. You can no more easily disprove I.D. than prove it--and the same thing goes for its compliment, Random Design.
This is utterly wrong. I am a science teacher.
Assuming that you're a high school science teacher, which is the area under discussion:
Are your students tested on the history of science, their ability to defend a conclusion, their experimental methedology, or their inquisitiveness? Or are they tested on facts, formulas, and figures?
If the answers are "yes" and "not only", then you're a far better science teacher than any I've ever met, with a science program that I would love to enroll my children in.
But you would also be far away from the baseline norm that the evolution vs. creationism argument is fought against.
Intelligent design is not science.
I didn't say it was. What, did would you rather I call it a "meme"?
More to the point, it's not an accepted scientific theorum. Which makes it a hypothesis, in scientific terms. The experiment to test this, "find God and ask him", has yet to provide any results whatsoever.
Please stop trying to imply that science is a monolithic quorum of understanding. Science is a method, and it's an insult to everyone when you kotwow to political pressure and make it more than that.
Oh, and while I'm rebutting:
Science classes are for teaching science.
No, they're not. They're for teaching about Scientific Discoveries. At the point in contention, students need to learn the what and the when far more than they need to know how we learned that. (And the "how we learned" is science.)
As for I.D. -- it certainly does have a place in science class. If that place is next to "spontaneous gestation" (i.e., ideas from the past that are disproven) or "commercial fusion"(i.e., ideas that are not yet and may never be proven) is a matter of some debate, but they certainly have a place in the wide range of scientific cirriculum.
Programmers are authors and they have copyright protection.
Let's put the card on the table.
You, or at the least, Bill Gates et al, don't want software patents because you want software copyright.
I say that there is nothing at all copyrightable about computer code, and if we aren't going to do the right thing and create a new form of IP, the thing to do is to require patents for the protection of computer software.
(For the record, if you're not clever enough to recognize someone who's opposing you, you probably aren't smart enough to even speculate what is the best part of law to apply to a given fact. I hope that you were collecting a straw-man, and I'm not wasting my time.)