If what you were saying were true, then nobody would have been scared of Unisys enforcing GIF patents, because they had left them unenforced for so long. You're clearly thinking of trademarks, and illustrating Stallman's point that lumping copyright, trademarks and patents under "Intellectual Property" causes confusion.
I consider ideas to be real innovation, and they are not always easy. However, in a sense I agree with you. There is a short supply of implementations, but an abundant supply of ideas. U.S. law has not seen fit to make ideas patentable for this very reason. Since academics and others gladly publish ideas without the need for a temporary monopoly, you do not "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" by granting patents.
For this reason, abstract ideas, mathematical algorithms, and their embodiment in computer software have never been statutory material for patents, erroneous rulings by lower courts (contradicting the US Supreme Court) notwithstanding. Interestingly, this means that if the EU ratifies software patents, they will be the first political entity where such patents are truly valid.
(Of course, don't take this as legal advice. To defeat software patents you would have to get the US Supreme Court to take another case, which they haven't done since 1981.)
Yes, the CLR had a chance to learn from the JVM's limitations. They've talked nice about making Scheme continuations possible to do efficiently on the CLR for years. It still hasn't materialized; Scheme is still no more implementable on the CLR than it is on the JVM. In typical Microsoft fashion, expect delivery to follow promises by 5-10 years. In the meantime, there's a very good Scheme interpreter (SISC) with full continuation support on the JVM, and a very good Scheme compiler (Kawa) with escaping continuation support on the JVM. Both have a decent userbase. I'm not impressed that the CLR can handle "unmanaged" code, pointer arithmetic, etc. Being able to turn off the safety features of a VM is not something that allures me. If you're going to do that, just write in C.
No, the majority found novelty in the continuous measuring of temperature without needing to open/close the door, and in the system as a whole. Sorry the opinion is so hard to read, but try my abridged version.
The US constitution, legislation, and Supreme Court are all consistent with what you said. It's the USPTO and certail lower courts that have allowed software patents, contradicting higher precedent.
How about that! After 14 years of professional software development, the number of programmers I've encountered who searched the patent literature for something useful has gone from zero to one. Maybe things are changing. Whether you found something useful or not is a matter of debate. Regardless, algorithms are not statutory material for a patent.
There are thousands of software developers who read slashdot. Find one who says "I found this great algorithm in the patent literature". Or find a reference to one on a web page. Or find someone who knows someone whose third cousin once heard about a software developer saying that. Until then, shut up about software "patents" increasing knowledge.
I put "patents" in quotes because the EU hasn't made them legal yet, and they've never been legal in the U.S. The Supreme Court has ruled each and every time that software is not statutory material for a patent. And their most recent decision (Diamond v. Diehr, 1981) cautioned that you couldn't make nonstatutory material statutory by changing the wording, etc. See section IV of the majority opinion.
IIRC, Unix did not take Ctrl-H to mean "delete the previous character". Thus the user of a terminal where backspace sent Ctrl-H would see the cursor back up on his terminal, but the remote system would just include ^H. The user didn't know that the text he thought he erased was visible to people reading his message. Those in the know started the joke of putting caret H in messages to simulate this phenomenon.
The US Supreme Court has always held that software and mathematical algorithms are nonstatutory material as far as patents are concerned, so they certainly define a distinction between software and hardware.
I really don't know about other engineering fields, but I have 14 years in software engineering. With the exception of the RSA patent (an egregious example of patenting math), I've never met, heard, or read anyone who said, ``I found this great algorithm in the patent literature.'' In other words, software patents make zero contribution to the art. The software industry grew by leaps and bounds before software was patentable, and will continue to do so even after the current error of the USPTO and lower courts is corrected.
Oh yeah. Slashdotters read first, then comment. That's hilarious.
It's almost as funny as all the posts complimenting the guy for having the "guts" to stand up to RMS. As if everybody else quakes in their boots at the thought of criticizing him.
It sounds like this hole cannot be exploited unless you've enabled certain extensions. I'm actually no longer using a host where PHP is turned on...never used PHP itself. Now I'm on Jetty with a UML host. Just curious about the hole...is my assessment correct?
One of such places is f.e. within the fileupload code, but is only triggerable on Apache 2 servers that are vulnerable to CAN-2004-0493, another one is only reachable if variables_order was changed to have the "E" in the end, a third one is within session extension which is activated by default but the vulnerability can not be triggered if the session functionality is not used. A fourth place is within the implementation of the register_globals functionality. Although this is deactivated by default since PHP 4.2 it is activated on nearly all servers that have to ensure compatibility with older scripts. Other places might exist in not default activated or 3rd party extensions.
Don't use R5RS as your reference doc. Use the docs that come with your Scheme implementation. I'd be surprised if you're using an implementation that doesn't come with a read-line function.
A lot of folks have no problem migrating from f(a, b) to (f a b). In fact, a lot of people don't find the migration from 2+2 to (+ 2 2) all that hard. I use Scheme all the time and like it.
Stevens:
The federal questions that ultimately emerged in this case are not substantial.
Souter: The Court should not have reviewed...this case.
Ginsburg:
I might join The Chief Justice were it my commission to interpret Florida law.
Breyer:
The Court was wrong to take this case.
How much clearer can they get? Even Souter, appointed by Bush Senior, agreed that they should have let Florida decide the case. I don't know what straw you're grasping at to say that seven are in agreement about federal issues being involved. Clearly there aren't seven who think there's enough federal issue to justify the Supreme Court deciding the case.
The only "voter intent" issue that I find absolutely compelling is where somebody filled in a bubble and also wrote in the same candidate. I have not seen any source that has asserted that there were enough of those specifically to throw it to Gore.
Washington Post, 2001 as cited in the green party page I linked to earlier. Look for the illustration on the left with clear voter intent for Gore, and read the text to the right, including "Gore would have had a net gain of 662 votes, enough to win"
Thus we don't have to figure out how to recount the butterfly ballot, or give the thousands of illegally denied voters another chance at the ballot box, or disqualify the illegally accepted absentee ballots. Just count the clear, obvious votes and Gore wins.
Sure, democracy isn't perfect. Nonetheless, I don't see why the Bush camp resists it so strongly.
No, I wasn't implying that the buttefly ballot was deliberately rigged. I was merely answering your "you deserve your vote to be randomized" comment by pointing out the lopsidedness of the randomizer.
Look at the sources the green party cites. It isn't just their opinion. This is all well documented. I disagree with their overall thesis that Nader didn't hurt Gore; I simply googled, and theirs was the best page I found to summarize various issues.
As the dissenting justices pointed out, the US Supreme Court did not do what it was designed to do. It rendered a decision on state law, with no federal/constitutional issue entering into the question. They were outside their jurisdiction
As for the butterfly ballot, I'm perfectly happy to accept your idea that people who aren't careful should have their vote randomized, but not if you restrict it to only uncareful Democrats. The butterfly ballot was set up so that uncareful Republicans would have no trouble.
Note to Bush supporters: You posted misinformation about the 2000 election today. Don't whine about somebody correcting it today.
See section IV as a whole, and particularly the part of section IV that reads,
Similarly, insignificant post-solution activity will not transform <450 U.S. 192> an unpatentable principle into a patentable process.
Ibid. To hold otherwise would allow a competent draftsman to evade the recognized limitations on the type of subject matter eligible for patent protection.
Yes, section II of the dissent says that the Diehr application's only non-obvious part is a calculation...and that is why they are dissenting! You will not find anyplace where the majority says the only non-obvious part was the calculation. Quite the opposite. From section I of the majority opinion:
Because the temperature inside the press has heretofore been viewed as an uncontrollable variable, the conventional industry practice has been to calculate the cure time as the shortest time in which all parts of the product will definitely be cured, assuming a reasonable amount of moldopening time during loading and unloading....Respondents characterize their contribution to the art to reside in the process of constantly measuring the actual temperature inside the mold.
The majority did not view this as a claim on software (a.k.a. a mathematical formula), but on a change in a process that removed the need to open/close the door. Yes, software played an important role in that process, but it was the process that was being patented, not the software. The dissent says,
If the Court's reading of the claims were correct, I would agree that they disclose patentable subject matter. On the other hand, if the Court accepted my reading, I feel confident that the case would be decided differently.
Both the majority and the dissent base their decision on the non-software parts of the invention. The majority wisely includes a section IV that warns against using their decision to try to make nonstatutory material statutory by an excercise in drafting. The dissent unwisely rails at length against the concept of software patents in general. I think many people read the dissent and expect everything in there to be disagreement with the majority, thust they misinterpret the majority opinion to be an endorsement of software patents.
ended up having a president appointed by a panel of judges
This is a bald-faced "Urban Myth" go back and review the facts
Yeah, set him straight! I'm sick and tired of people blaming the whole panel. It was actually just five of the nine judges who appointed our current president when they overstepped their jurisdiction by making a decision about state law. They contradicted the Florida supreme court decision that called for a recount. Facts show that such a recount would have put Gore in office. But please, don't blame the whole panel.
Nope. I've actually read Diamond v. Diehr, and they clearly predicated their decision on there being nonobvious material that wasn't purely software. In fact, they had a whole section (IV) in there just to make sure that people didn't think they could make non-patentable things patentable by careful wording. Diamond v. Diehr didn't cause the problem. People failing to read Diamond v. Diehr caused the problem.
Read-write sharing over NFS does not scale
on
On PHP and Scaling
·
· Score: 1
Obviously the NFS solution would not scale very well horizontally. "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these" all wanting a lock on the same NFS file at the same time. A database session driver might scale somewhat better, but couldn't you do the same thing with Java?
The best solution is to eschew the whole "session" model as much as possible. The article seemed to imply that PHP encouraged this, but I'm not convinced. I think I've seen plenty of PHP tutorials encouraging session variables unnecessarily.
Even though nobody mentioned the anti-trust suit, I should correct myself: there was one response to that part of the troll, the "what if someone else patented BASIC" post.
Slashdot Mirror
If what you were saying were true, then nobody would have been scared of Unisys enforcing GIF patents, because they had left them unenforced for so long. You're clearly thinking of trademarks, and illustrating Stallman's point that lumping copyright, trademarks and patents under "Intellectual Property" causes confusion.
I consider ideas to be real innovation, and they are not always easy. However, in a sense I agree with you. There is a short supply of implementations, but an abundant supply of ideas. U.S. law has not seen fit to make ideas patentable for this very reason. Since academics and others gladly publish ideas without the need for a temporary monopoly, you do not "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" by granting patents.
For this reason, abstract ideas, mathematical algorithms, and their embodiment in computer software have never been statutory material for patents, erroneous rulings by lower courts (contradicting the US Supreme Court) notwithstanding. Interestingly, this means that if the EU ratifies software patents, they will be the first political entity where such patents are truly valid.
(Of course, don't take this as legal advice. To defeat software patents you would have to get the US Supreme Court to take another case, which they haven't done since 1981.)
Yes, the CLR had a chance to learn from the JVM's limitations. They've talked nice about making Scheme continuations possible to do efficiently on the CLR for years. It still hasn't materialized; Scheme is still no more implementable on the CLR than it is on the JVM. In typical Microsoft fashion, expect delivery to follow promises by 5-10 years. In the meantime, there's a very good Scheme interpreter (SISC) with full continuation support on the JVM, and a very good Scheme compiler (Kawa) with escaping continuation support on the JVM. Both have a decent userbase. I'm not impressed that the CLR can handle "unmanaged" code, pointer arithmetic, etc. Being able to turn off the safety features of a VM is not something that allures me. If you're going to do that, just write in C.
No, the majority found novelty in the continuous measuring of temperature without needing to open/close the door, and in the system as a whole. Sorry the opinion is so hard to read, but try my abridged version.
The US constitution, legislation, and Supreme Court are all consistent with what you said. It's the USPTO and certail lower courts that have allowed software patents, contradicting higher precedent.
How about that! After 14 years of professional software development, the number of programmers I've encountered who searched the patent literature for something useful has gone from zero to one. Maybe things are changing. Whether you found something useful or not is a matter of debate. Regardless, algorithms are not statutory material for a patent.
There are thousands of software developers who read slashdot. Find one who says "I found this great algorithm in the patent literature". Or find a reference to one on a web page. Or find someone who knows someone whose third cousin once heard about a software developer saying that. Until then, shut up about software "patents" increasing knowledge.
I put "patents" in quotes because the EU hasn't made them legal yet, and they've never been legal in the U.S. The Supreme Court has ruled each and every time that software is not statutory material for a patent. And their most recent decision (Diamond v. Diehr, 1981) cautioned that you couldn't make nonstatutory material statutory by changing the wording, etc. See section IV of the majority opinion.
IIRC, Unix did not take Ctrl-H to mean "delete the previous character". Thus the user of a terminal where backspace sent Ctrl-H would see the cursor back up on his terminal, but the remote system would just include ^H. The user didn't know that the text he thought he erased was visible to people reading his message. Those in the know started the joke of putting caret H in messages to simulate this phenomenon.
Sorry, but that's what I thought 20 years ago. It's my thought, and you are not allowed to think it now.
The US Supreme Court has always held that software and mathematical algorithms are nonstatutory material as far as patents are concerned, so they certainly define a distinction between software and hardware.
I really don't know about other engineering fields, but I have 14 years in software engineering. With the exception of the RSA patent (an egregious example of patenting math), I've never met, heard, or read anyone who said, ``I found this great algorithm in the patent literature.'' In other words, software patents make zero contribution to the art. The software industry grew by leaps and bounds before software was patentable, and will continue to do so even after the current error of the USPTO and lower courts is corrected.
In nature, the most vulnerable species end up extinct. Of course, if they have some kind of monopoly to leverage, they might survive.
I really admire Bill Gates for having the guts to stand up to RMS like that.
Oh yeah. Slashdotters read first, then comment. That's hilarious.
It's almost as funny as all the posts complimenting the guy for having the "guts" to stand up to RMS. As if everybody else quakes in their boots at the thought of criticizing him.
Don't use R5RS as your reference doc. Use the docs that come with your Scheme implementation. I'd be surprised if you're using an implementation that doesn't come with a read-line function.
There isn't any loop construct in C that can't be done easily with named let in Scheme. You really don't have to learn recursion if you don't want to.
A lot of folks have no problem migrating from f(a, b) to (f a b). In fact, a lot of people don't find the migration from 2+2 to (+ 2 2) all that hard. I use Scheme all the time and like it.
Boy, whenever I feel like killing time it's nice to know that Bush supporters can endlessly supply distortions for me to correct.
Do you forget how easy it is for people to look at the actual Supreme Court writeup?
Stevens: The federal questions that ultimately emerged in this case are not substantial.
Souter: The Court should not have reviewed...this case.
Ginsburg: I might join The Chief Justice were it my commission to interpret Florida law.
Breyer: The Court was wrong to take this case.
How much clearer can they get? Even Souter, appointed by Bush Senior, agreed that they should have let Florida decide the case. I don't know what straw you're grasping at to say that seven are in agreement about federal issues being involved. Clearly there aren't seven who think there's enough federal issue to justify the Supreme Court deciding the case.
Washington Post, 2001 as cited in the green party page I linked to earlier. Look for the illustration on the left with clear voter intent for Gore, and read the text to the right, including "Gore would have had a net gain of 662 votes, enough to win"
Thus we don't have to figure out how to recount the butterfly ballot, or give the thousands of illegally denied voters another chance at the ballot box, or disqualify the illegally accepted absentee ballots. Just count the clear, obvious votes and Gore wins.
Sure, democracy isn't perfect. Nonetheless, I don't see why the Bush camp resists it so strongly.
No, I wasn't implying that the buttefly ballot was deliberately rigged. I was merely answering your "you deserve your vote to be randomized" comment by pointing out the lopsidedness of the randomizer.
Look at the sources the green party cites. It isn't just their opinion. This is all well documented. I disagree with their overall thesis that Nader didn't hurt Gore; I simply googled, and theirs was the best page I found to summarize various issues.
As the dissenting justices pointed out, the US Supreme Court did not do what it was designed to do. It rendered a decision on state law, with no federal/constitutional issue entering into the question. They were outside their jurisdiction
As for the butterfly ballot, I'm perfectly happy to accept your idea that people who aren't careful should have their vote randomized, but not if you restrict it to only uncareful Democrats. The butterfly ballot was set up so that uncareful Republicans would have no trouble.
Note to Bush supporters: You posted misinformation about the 2000 election today. Don't whine about somebody correcting it today.
Nope. I've actually read Diamond v. Diehr, and they clearly predicated their decision on there being nonobvious material that wasn't purely software. In fact, they had a whole section (IV) in there just to make sure that people didn't think they could make non-patentable things patentable by careful wording. Diamond v. Diehr didn't cause the problem. People failing to read Diamond v. Diehr caused the problem.
Obviously the NFS solution would not scale very well horizontally. "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these" all wanting a lock on the same NFS file at the same time. A database session driver might scale somewhat better, but couldn't you do the same thing with Java?
The best solution is to eschew the whole "session" model as much as possible. The article seemed to imply that PHP encouraged this, but I'm not convinced. I think I've seen plenty of PHP tutorials encouraging session variables unnecessarily.
Even though nobody mentioned the anti-trust suit, I should correct myself: there was one response to that part of the troll, the "what if someone else patented BASIC" post.