though there is a serious problem getting past the deletionists to make a stub in the first place
Strangely, none of the articles I've created there have ever been deleted. Or perhaps it's not strange... I don't think more than a small fraction of articles created are deleted, except in certain "hobby horse" areas where I'll grant the deletionists roam free -- stuff related to explaining the plots of works of fiction and biographies of people known only for a single thing, mainly. Create articles outside of these areas, and myexperienceis they're normally kept.
This suggests that the holding of In re Bilski is limited to process claims and that many other types of claims that are used in software patents are unaffected
What's your opinion of the argument that software is by its very nature a process?
Looking around, it seems like since I last looked into this (about 2 years ago, when I last switched providers), they've stopped advertising such ratios. But they did, once. And contention still exists. See this support article from one ADSL provider.
given what was known at the time, would you have come up with ellipses?
Probably not. But the elliptical solution had been known for around 1000 years before it became generally accepted, having been discovered by Aryabhata, c. 500CE.
You can see the Dark Energy research as the intersection of high energy physics (DOE) and cosmology (NASA).
Except, I don't really see how high energy physics is involved. I mean, it's not as if anybody has proposed a high-energy experiment that could detect it.
AIUI, dark energy is theorized to be everywhere. Including within our own solar system. However, the amount of it in any given space is tiny. Current best estimate is 10^{29} grams per cubic centimeter, which is basically nothing. We can't detect that on any reasonable space. It's only because huge quantities of it are (theorized to be) scattered in the vast distances between galaxies that we are able to detect any effect of it at all.
Echoing what Andr. T said in his previous post, but in hopefully a little more detail: the evidence for Dark Energy is completely orthogonal to that for Dark Matter. Like you, I'm not an expert on this subject but have done a little reading, and find the D.E. evidence a lot more convincing. Unless there's something fundamentally wrong with general relativity and our understanding of its implications, there is some kind of repulsive force acting on galaxies to push them away from each other.
Now, I'm not totally convinced that this is tied in to the whole cosmological constant business (particularly of the value-varying-over-time variety, which is what this mission appears to be designed to test); that's a hypothesis that has obvious attractions but AFAICS it has received undue attention and there ought to more investigation of alternative hypotheses. But that's an unrelated matter. Something is clearly happening that we don't understand, ergo we need to know more about it.
So how come DSL providers advertise contention ratios (typically either 50:1 or 20:1, not the 25:1 the OP was talking about) then?
AIUI, your bandwidth isn't shared as far as the exchange. But from the exchange to your ISP's backbone it is shared.
OTOH, the capacity of the shared link isn't the same as the capacity of your own line. Usually it's substantially larger, and has substantially more than 20 users. This makes the connection rates average out much nicer than if you were sharing a single 24mbit line with 20 other users.
Perhaps this indicates that it just doesn't matter much to them. Hard as it may be for Slashdotters to believe, there are many people who do not regularly download entire operating systems and unauthorized copies of full-length movies.
Agreed. And right now, 2mb/s is more than enough for most users. So what's everyone complaining about?
Consistent night and day >6Mb/sec on an advertised 8Mb connection. Bittorrents running at several 100 KiB/sec in the right circumstances. Never been capped, throttled or shaped despite downloading 10's of GiB/month regularly. Who's my ISP ? That evil multinational known as Orange !
So, their service actually, like, works now? 'Cause when I was with them, the service worked for about the first week, but then the router started refusing to connect (it would sync fine, but couldn't establish a ppp link). When their Indian call centre had been promising to have the problem fixed soon for several weeks (which they wouldn't do unless I reset the router to factory settings... every bloody time I called them I had to do that) with no result, I just cancelled the service.
Of course, I'd have never signed up in the first place if I'd realised they were freeserve with a different name.
Yes there are many bad storied about Telefonica that could be told, but my point is that I'm quite confident that I have better bandwidth here than I would have if I returned to the UK. One more reason not to go back to the UK I guess.
The major problem with Telefonica, AFAICT, is that they basically refuse to install DSL facilities anywhere the slightest bit out of the way. I know people who live less than five kilometres from major commercial centres in mainland Spain but have to get their broadband via mobile providers because telefonica just aren't interested in providing the service in their area.
I've had a number of BT engineers visit the house to try to get DSL working. And they've done some work on the line to improve the signal strength. They conclude that it ain't going to happen; anecdotally, because the line is mainly buried, old, and waterlogged.
As they have reached this conclusion, they've marked my phone line on their database as "cannot get broadband"... and that's it. They'll make no further attempt / take no further interest / decline any further order from me for broadband.
Two suggestions, depending on how much morality you think they deserve:
The moral one: get a second line installed. They'll then have to put a new one in, and that one might work. The immoral one: report an intermittent audio quality fault. They'll have an engineer look at it, he'll probably say there's nothing wrong with the line, and resolve it as fixed. Report it again. And keep reporting it (and refusing to pay your bill) until they replace the line.
Right. Because cable providers are renowned for their willingness to spend tens of thousands of pounds digging up mile after mile of road in order to lay cables to an area where there might possibly be enough customers that they would earn a couple of thousand per annum in revenue.
Your new, better designed, better documented, better implemented product has to compete with the same feature set - you said it yourself - with a more established product. What advantages will your product give the customer, making it easier to sell and possibly making the customers switch ?
Well, as he said in the summary, his product will be hosted rather than software. My experience is that this means he will not be competing directly with his previous employer, but rather with the consultants who would use his previous employer's product to provide a similar service. (My experience is in web content management and e-commerce, where my company provides hosted services; we have never once had a client compare our service to an off-the-shelf product, although we do regularly have to justify our service as better than consultants who would clearly use such products).
As such, familiarity with the code base will be a key selling point. It means new features that the clients want can be added much more quickly than those consultants will be able to (if this is something they can offer at all, which depends on how extendable the original product, which is presumably not open source, is).
Basically, the argument is if you have a nail that isn't patentable and a hammer that was specifically designed to hit nails with then hitting the nail with the hammer is obvious and not patentable
OTOH, patent lawyers' heads are also not patentable, but hitting them with a hammer is not obvious, and might in fact be patentable.
It looks to me like any method patent which isn't specific to a particular lump of hardware which implements it (ie. a pure software patent, as opposed to, say, a patent covering a piece of software which is then loaded onto a device sold by the manufacturer) is invalid.
Yes and no. Yes, this is one way to interpret the decision. No, not everyone is interpreting it this way. The crux of the matter is what it means to be "tied to a particular machine", and specifically, whether a general purpose computer is a "particular machine".
My own interpretation is that general purpose computer patents are still valid, although media-fixing-instructions style patents probably aren't. YMMV. IANAL. Etc.
But probably not, as the decision requires inventions to be "tied to a particular machine" to be patentable, and a Turing Machine is about as inparticular as you can get (given that its existence within the universe would be a logical impossibility).
For example, Beauregard claims, which are claims on a computer readable media adapted to implement a method or system, are considered patentable by the PTO. These kind of claims are very popular because they allow patent holders to go after the software distributors rather than end-users.
The PTO may still be accepting them, but I imagine the first time one goes to court they will be overruled. The decision is very specific: to be patentable, the subject of the patent must either "[be] tied to a particular machine" or "transform[...] an article". A storage medium is not a machine itself, and is not as far as I can see tied to a particular machine; nore does it transform an article. I note that the article you link to cites a federal court decision that such items are patentable, which obviously means that until such decisions are overruled explicitly by a court of appeals or the supreme court the PTO should continue as if it were still valid, but I would think that such an appeal court would, in light of the recent decision, look again and see that such claims are invalid.
Of course, this still leaves "computer with program loaded and executing" style claims, which can be targetted to developers as well as users.
Ob.Disclaimer: the above does not constitute legal advice. Consult an expert before making any decisions based on this.
It depends on how you file, whether you use a law firm etc.
I once did a web site for the firm of attorneys that MS used for EU patents. They were charging ~£7,000 per application at the time, which was approx 6 years ago. So my guess would be somewhere approaching $20K US by now.
Doing a quick bit of research shows that they had a copy of Symantec WebNOT filter. However, their copy didn't have a license for updates, so they missed out on all the new porn that appears daily.
Or, rather, they didn't miss out on all the new porn that appears daily, which is what the problem was.
The court officials are probably not geneticists either, yet presumably they deal with DNA evidence at least occassionally.
Yeah, and chances are when they're told that there's a 1 in a million chance of two individuals having a DNA match so close, they interpret that to mean "1 in a million chance this is the wrong person", because that's what almost everyone thinks when they hear that.
I don't recall there being any evidence that she was surfing questionable websites after hours.
So looking at porn on your work computer is now a criminal offence? Sure, I'll accept it's something you can be fired for (at least in most circumstances), but what about this means she should have to face a criminal charge?
Slashdot Mirror
though there is a serious problem getting past the deletionists to make a stub in the first place
Strangely, none of the articles I've created there have ever been deleted. Or perhaps it's not strange... I don't think more than a small fraction of articles created are deleted, except in certain "hobby horse" areas where I'll grant the deletionists roam free -- stuff related to explaining the plots of works of fiction and biographies of people known only for a single thing, mainly. Create articles outside of these areas, and my experience is they're normally kept.
This suggests that the holding of In re Bilski is limited to process claims and that many other types of claims that are used in software patents are unaffected
What's your opinion of the argument that software is by its very nature a process?
Looking around, it seems like since I last looked into this (about 2 years ago, when I last switched providers), they've stopped advertising such ratios. But they did, once. And contention still exists. See this support article from one ADSL provider.
given what was known at the time, would you have come up with ellipses?
Probably not. But the elliptical solution had been known for around 1000 years before it became generally accepted, having been discovered by Aryabhata, c. 500CE.
You can see the Dark Energy research as the intersection of high energy physics (DOE) and cosmology (NASA).
Except, I don't really see how high energy physics is involved. I mean, it's not as if anybody has proposed a high-energy experiment that could detect it.
I wrote:
Current best estimate is 10^{29} grams per cubic centimeter
Somehow a minus sign got deleted from that post. I blame slashdot's unicode filtering.
That should, clearly, be 10^{-29} g/cm^2.
if there's so much dark energy in the universe
AIUI, dark energy is theorized to be everywhere. Including within our own solar system. However, the amount of it in any given space is tiny. Current best estimate is 10^{29} grams per cubic centimeter, which is basically nothing. We can't detect that on any reasonable space. It's only because huge quantities of it are (theorized to be) scattered in the vast distances between galaxies that we are able to detect any effect of it at all.
Echoing what Andr. T said in his previous post, but in hopefully a little more detail: the evidence for Dark Energy is completely orthogonal to that for Dark Matter. Like you, I'm not an expert on this subject but have done a little reading, and find the D.E. evidence a lot more convincing. Unless there's something fundamentally wrong with general relativity and our understanding of its implications, there is some kind of repulsive force acting on galaxies to push them away from each other.
Now, I'm not totally convinced that this is tied in to the whole cosmological constant business (particularly of the value-varying-over-time variety, which is what this mission appears to be designed to test); that's a hypothesis that has obvious attractions but AFAICS it has received undue attention and there ought to more investigation of alternative hypotheses. But that's an unrelated matter. Something is clearly happening that we don't understand, ergo we need to know more about it.
DSL doesn't share bandwidth. Cable shares bandwidth.
So how come DSL providers advertise contention ratios (typically either 50:1 or 20:1, not the 25:1 the OP was talking about) then?
AIUI, your bandwidth isn't shared as far as the exchange. But from the exchange to your ISP's backbone it is shared.
OTOH, the capacity of the shared link isn't the same as the capacity of your own line. Usually it's substantially larger, and has substantially more than 20 users. This makes the connection rates average out much nicer than if you were sharing a single 24mbit line with 20 other users.
I'm physically 200 meters from the exchange. Somehow the line is over 2000 meters long...
Because you don't connect directly to the exchange. The architecture is this:
Exchange local hub your house.
Local hubs are generally not located near the exchange, but at some distance from them.
Perhaps this indicates that it just doesn't matter much to them. Hard as it may be for Slashdotters to believe, there are many people who do not regularly download entire operating systems and unauthorized copies of full-length movies.
Agreed. And right now, 2mb/s is more than enough for most users. So what's everyone complaining about?
Consistent night and day >6Mb/sec on an advertised 8Mb connection. Bittorrents running at several 100 KiB/sec in the right circumstances. Never been capped, throttled or shaped despite downloading 10's of GiB/month regularly. Who's my ISP ? That evil multinational known as Orange !
So, their service actually, like, works now? 'Cause when I was with them, the service worked for about the first week, but then the router started refusing to connect (it would sync fine, but couldn't establish a ppp link). When their Indian call centre had been promising to have the problem fixed soon for several weeks (which they wouldn't do unless I reset the router to factory settings... every bloody time I called them I had to do that) with no result, I just cancelled the service.
Of course, I'd have never signed up in the first place if I'd realised they were freeserve with a different name.
Yes there are many bad storied about Telefonica that could be told, but my point is that I'm quite confident that I have better bandwidth here than I would have if I returned to the UK. One more reason not to go back to the UK I guess.
The major problem with Telefonica, AFAICT, is that they basically refuse to install DSL facilities anywhere the slightest bit out of the way. I know people who live less than five kilometres from major commercial centres in mainland Spain but have to get their broadband via mobile providers because telefonica just aren't interested in providing the service in their area.
I've had a number of BT engineers visit the house to try to get DSL working. And they've done some work on the line to improve the signal strength. They conclude that it ain't going to happen; anecdotally, because the line is mainly buried, old, and waterlogged.
As they have reached this conclusion, they've marked my phone line on their database as "cannot get broadband" ... and that's it. They'll make no further attempt / take no further interest / decline any further order from me for broadband.
Two suggestions, depending on how much morality you think they deserve:
The moral one: get a second line installed. They'll then have to put a new one in, and that one might work.
The immoral one: report an intermittent audio quality fault. They'll have an engineer look at it, he'll probably say there's nothing wrong with the line, and resolve it as fixed. Report it again. And keep reporting it (and refusing to pay your bill) until they replace the line.
Get cable.
Right. Because cable providers are renowned for their willingness to spend tens of thousands of pounds digging up mile after mile of road in order to lay cables to an area where there might possibly be enough customers that they would earn a couple of thousand per annum in revenue.
Your new, better designed, better documented, better implemented product has to compete with the same feature set - you said it yourself - with a more established product. What advantages will your product give the customer, making it easier to sell and possibly making the customers switch ?
Well, as he said in the summary, his product will be hosted rather than software. My experience is that this means he will not be competing directly with his previous employer, but rather with the consultants who would use his previous employer's product to provide a similar service. (My experience is in web content management and e-commerce, where my company provides hosted services; we have never once had a client compare our service to an off-the-shelf product, although we do regularly have to justify our service as better than consultants who would clearly use such products).
As such, familiarity with the code base will be a key selling point. It means new features that the clients want can be added much more quickly than those consultants will be able to (if this is something they can offer at all, which depends on how extendable the original product, which is presumably not open source, is).
Basically, the argument is if you have a nail that isn't patentable and a hammer that was specifically designed to hit nails with then hitting the nail with the hammer is obvious and not patentable
OTOH, patent lawyers' heads are also not patentable, but hitting them with a hammer is not obvious, and might in fact be patentable.
It looks to me like any method patent which isn't specific to a particular lump of hardware which implements it (ie. a pure software patent, as opposed to, say, a patent covering a piece of software which is then loaded onto a device sold by the manufacturer) is invalid.
Yes and no. Yes, this is one way to interpret the decision. No, not everyone is interpreting it this way. The crux of the matter is what it means to be "tied to a particular machine", and specifically, whether a general purpose computer is a "particular machine".
My own interpretation is that general purpose computer patents are still valid, although media-fixing-instructions style patents probably aren't. YMMV. IANAL. Etc.
a Turing Machine just might count!
But probably not, as the decision requires inventions to be "tied to a particular machine" to be patentable, and a Turing Machine is about as inparticular as you can get (given that its existence within the universe would be a logical impossibility).
For example, Beauregard claims, which are claims on a computer readable media adapted to implement a method or system, are considered patentable by the PTO. These kind of claims are very popular because they allow patent holders to go after the software distributors rather than end-users.
The PTO may still be accepting them, but I imagine the first time one goes to court they will be overruled. The decision is very specific: to be patentable, the subject of the patent must either "[be] tied to a particular machine" or "transform[...] an article". A storage medium is not a machine itself, and is not as far as I can see tied to a particular machine; nore does it transform an article. I note that the article you link to cites a federal court decision that such items are patentable, which obviously means that until such decisions are overruled explicitly by a court of appeals or the supreme court the PTO should continue as if it were still valid, but I would think that such an appeal court would, in light of the recent decision, look again and see that such claims are invalid.
Of course, this still leaves "computer with program loaded and executing" style claims, which can be targetted to developers as well as users.
Ob.Disclaimer: the above does not constitute legal advice. Consult an expert before making any decisions based on this.
It depends on how you file, whether you use a law firm etc.
I once did a web site for the firm of attorneys that MS used for EU patents. They were charging ~£7,000 per application at the time, which was approx 6 years ago. So my guess would be somewhere approaching $20K US by now.
Doing a quick bit of research shows that they had a copy of Symantec WebNOT filter. However, their copy didn't have a license for updates, so they missed out on all the new porn that appears daily.
Or, rather, they didn't miss out on all the new porn that appears daily, which is what the problem was.
The court officials are probably not geneticists either, yet presumably they deal with DNA evidence at least occassionally.
Yeah, and chances are when they're told that there's a 1 in a million chance of two individuals having a DNA match so close, they interpret that to mean "1 in a million chance this is the wrong person", because that's what almost everyone thinks when they hear that.
You picked a bad example, there.
For many of the children in that classroom, do you really believe that this was their first exposure to porn?
You're right. They were about the same age I was when I first saw porn and I'm ... err ... no, wait.
Hmm.
Perhaps not the best example.
I don't recall there being any evidence that she was surfing questionable websites after hours.
So looking at porn on your work computer is now a criminal offence? Sure, I'll accept it's something you can be fired for (at least in most circumstances), but what about this means she should have to face a criminal charge?