Simplistically: there are only certain algorithms it can perform such a search over. One of them is factorization (Shor's algorithm), and this can be applied to most current asymmetric ciphers because they're essentially isomorphic to one another.
Surely they used Enigma for other critical long-distance communications as well!
Indeed. It was also used to communicate with the Luftwaffe, hence the widespread myth that decrypting Enigma meant that the devastating attack on Coventry could have been prevented (it couldn't: the Germans used a defence-in-depth system that used codewords to identify particular targets; that a massive attack was planned was known, the identity of the target was not).
5: There is the issue of trust. You can set up a quantum exchange with another machine and come up with a key that you know hasn't been touched... but is that really your bank, or is it some site in Elbonia that is patched in? Quantum key selection won't help you here in knowing that you are talking to the right host.
Actually, yes it does. You'll need a shared secret, but that shouldn't be too hard to arrange with your bank, right? It doesn't even need to be particularly secure, as there's no practical brute force attack to attempt to discover it. You could use your ATM card PIN and you'd be perfectly secure.
Indeed. But as far as I can see, combining an application binary in memory with GPL library is no different from combining a WoW raid data files in memory with Blizzard's game data.
The point isn't the combining in memory -- what causes the GPL-library-using software to come under the scope of the GPL is that distributing its binary will include parts of the GPL library.
Logically, if one needs a license, then both need a license.
Not really, no. Doing so in memory is different in two important ways:
- it is done by (or at least at the request of) the end user, rather than the software distributor - it is much more likely to fall into one of the various exemptions to copyright law: it is a temporary copy, thus transformative in nature, and is done (typically) not for commercial gain. It is also only done by somebody who already possesses a (presumably legitimate) copy of the game, and therefore is unlikely to have any effect on Blizzard's future revenue from exploiting this copyright. Because of these facts, it is almost certainly fair use. There may or may not be other exemptions that apply (e.g. making temporary copies in order to use digital media where there is no way to use it without making such copies -- I believe this is an exemption is some jurisdictions, although clearly not all).
And that of every other dictionary I have access to here. The only reference I have that even suggests this usage is incorrect is Fowler's The King's English, which comments that it is disputable, but suggests that "his" is preferable in this case. That book was published in 1908. The language we speak now is noticeably different from what was spoken then; singular they and their are now much more common than they were at the time and are now almost universally accepted. I have never met anyone who genuinely disapproves of their usage in this form; it appears to almost always be an affectation.
The patent examiner would seem to know the law a bit better than you. Patent applications are not examined on the basis of their titles, or even what they merely "describe in reasonable detail". Patent applications are examined on the basis of their claims. The claims are the invention, and it is each and every limitation in the claims that must exist in the prior art. Unless your "modicum of research" turns up each and every limitation in the claims, then you haven't actually provided sufficient prior art to claim this is a poorly granted patent.
What makes you think I didn't read the claims?
1. A digital wiring system to control electrical power coupled to a plurality of electrical devices, said digital wiring system comprising:
a plurality of switch control means for controlling said electrical devices, each one of said switch control means comprising a switch for selecting among a plurality of switch states, and a transmitter means for transmitting a switch command, said switch command uniquely identifying said selected switch state and said switch control means;
control unit means for generating a device command in response to said switch command, said control unit means comprising:
receiver means for receiving said switch command transmitted from said switch control means,
map means coupled to said receiver means for generating a device identification, said map means specifying those electrical devices which are controlled by each one of said switch control means, and said map means generating said device identification so as to identify each electrical device that is controlled, according to said specification, by the switch control means identified in said switch command,
operator interface means not restricted by predetermined selection rules for dynamically configuring said map means in response to an operator selection, so as to modify said specification of which ones of said electrical devices are controlled by each one of said switch control means,
encoder means coupled to said identification map means and said receiver means for generating a device command, said device command comprising said device identification and further specifying said selected switch state; and
a plurality of power outlet means coupled to said control unit means for providing said electrical power to said electrical devices in accordance with said device command, each one of said power outlet means being associated with one of said electrical devices, and each one of said power outlet means comprising:
decoding means for receiving and decoding said device command, and
device control means coupled to said decoding means for providing said electrical power to said associated electrical device in accordance with said selected switch state when said associated electrical device corresponds to said device identification of said device command.
This claim describes a basic controller with configurable buttons connected to a communication system that is in turn connected to a set of remote-controlled switches. It is the basic layout of a standard X10 network, and there is nothing in this claim that is in the slightest bit novel. The number of people who had implemented systems that match the claimed invention by the filing date of 1992 must have numbered in the tens of thousands.
2. A digital wiring system for controlling electrical power coupled to a plurality of electrical devices as claimed in claim 1 wherein said control unit means comprises a computer.
Using a computer as the controller; a trivial extension that was already widely in use by the time the patent was filed.
3. A digital wiring system for controlling electrical power coupled to a plurality of electrical devices as claimed in claim 1 wherein said decoding means comprises a microprocessor for controlling said electrical power flow to said electrical device in accordance with said switch state.
It's a plural and indicates that there is more than one reader making the decision.
dictionary.com disagrees with you:
their/ðr; unstressed ðr/ Show Spelled[thair; unstressed ther] Show IPA -pronoun [...] 2 (used after an indefinite singular antecedent in place of the definite masculine form his or the definite feminine form her ): Someone left their book on the table.
A case in point, GPL libraries rely on copyright giving right to say what can linked against it and what can't. If no license was required, then there would be no difference between GPL and LGPL libraries. And I haven't read anybody arguing that non-GPL-compatible software is allowed to link against a dynamic GPL library, though I don't know if that has actually been tested in court.
When you link against a library, even dynamically, details from it are copied into your resulting executable, e.g. names of functions, layouts of data structures, etc. This is enough to justify your linked program (and also probably your source code) being a derivitive work of the original GPL code and therefore requiring permission from the GPL code's authors to distribute.
There are obvious cases where this does not apply. One interesting one is where the GPL'd code is written to implement a preexisting API, an example being MySQL's JDBC connector. MySQL's copyright owners assert that you must either comply with the GPL or get a licence from them to use this library, but as the copyright in the parts of the code that would actually be copied from that library actually belong to Sun[1], it seems unlikely they could get away with this claim.
[1]: OK, Oracle now. Who also own MySQL. But assume this hadn't happened, and we don't actually live in bizarro-world for a moment.
I double-dog-dare you to diagram the last sentence of that post.
OK:
(S (VP (ADVP Never)
underestimate
(NP (NP the purchasing power)
(PP of
(NP (NP people)
(SBAR (WHNP who)
(S (VP spend
(NP money)
(PP with
(NP their penis)
(PP in
(NP (NP control)
(PP of
(NP their wallet)...)
(bonus: the software I usually use for sentence diagramming misparsed it:
([....]
(NP (NP people)
(SBAR (WHNP who)
(S (VP spend
(NP money)
(PP with
(NP their penis))
(PP in
(NP (NP control)
(PP of
(NP their wallet)...)
Which is a rather amusing interpretation.
Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Argh! Still won't work. Damnit. Who thought of adding a filter to a site used by computer scientists that objects to posting LISP data structures? Guess I just need some random text.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vivamus rhoncus lacus sed urna tincidunt lobortis. Nunc vehicula neque at est gravida sed varius elit vestibulum. Sed eu urna risus, sit amet porttitor purus. Donec pharetra ante ut risus dignissim quis pharetra massa sodales. Maecenas consectetur, arcu in sodales ultricies, lacus leo scelerisque orci, id elementum urna lorem et purus. Nullam pretium neque sit amet odio egestas venenatis. Nullam nec purus lectus. Curabitur velit dui, mattis sit amet congue ut, mollis quis turpis. Vivamus vulputate lobortis diam, ullamcorper malesuada risus pretium non. Donec id magna ut tellus blandit malesuada id at orci. Curabitur nisl mauris, vestibulum ut venenatis et, fermentum vel ante. Fusce viverra, sapien in gravida condimentum, risus nibh pretium ligula, at posuere orci elit vitae augue.
Yes and no. By the time VCRs were becoming mainstream, the 3 hour L750 tapes were available, and 4 hour VHS tapes were rare at the time. There were other considerations, too. Betamax machines typically cost nearly twice what an equivalent VHS machine did. Betamax tapes were more expensive, too. Betamax machines also had severe reliability problems, as Sony took their usual approach to manufacturing them. The Sony C5 my family had basically had to go back to Sony every 12 months to have its playback heads replaced, a process that typically took about 3 months. Eventually they managed to fit a set that lasted 13 months and pushed the machine out of its warranty period, so it had to be scrapped. VHS was produced under much broader licence terms, so you could get quality machines and shoddy machines depending on which manufacturer you went to.
Everyone had super-small TVs back then anyway, so quality of the tape didn't matter much
Really? We had a 28" screen, which seems to be about average even today, and I don't believe it was particularly expensive. OK, it was a monstrosity if you ever needed to move it...
it still looked like garbage on the screen (by today's standards).
Not convinced. I may be misremembering it, but I don't recall there being any substantial difference in quality between beta recordings and live broadcast. When we switched to VHS, the quality difference was very noticeable, even despite the fact that the VHS machine we got was a so-called "VHS-HQ" revision that was supposed to be better than traditional VHS.
I'm not saying the patent system isn't broken, but...
* It's not a software patent
Who cares? Software patents are just examples of what's wrong with patents, and show to anyone who understands the field that patent examiners routinely issue patents for "inventions" that are entirely obvious to those of us who actually know how to write software. Just because software patents are routinely bad doesn't mean we can't and shouldn't find examples in other fields that are just as bad.
* Let's see the author/owner try to extract license fees from someone, anyone
He isn't about to, because he wrote it as a joke, and because he really doesn't care about this patent. If it fell into the hands of somebody who cared, though, they might try it, and might even succeed. At the very least, they could cause their target to have to spend thousands defending themselves in court.
* The patent system is not about holding back stupid ideas. You are allowed to patent both clever and dumb inventions
Who said the "invention" here is dumb? Actually, it's quite a good idea, and describes in reasonable detail a device very similar in operation to an X10 network. The point here is that the prior art is very well known, has existed since (at a minimum) 1975, and is widely commercially available. A modicum of research would have pointed the patent examiner to the existing art that this application adds essentially nothing to. This is exactly what patent examiners are supposed to prevent.
* It's not funny and it's not clever
If you're talking about the patent system, I think I have to agree with you.
If I understand the story correctly, the company lost a lot of money because of a patent they thought was a bit stupid, decided to get patent protection for all their new projects, this guy and his buddies thought it would be a great idea to waste even more money patenting dumb stuff. Does he still work there ?
No. He resigned for political reasons when Oracle took over. BTW, "this guy" was the lead designer on the Java project.
If the RISC patent was so obvious, why didn't the company spend money getting it invalidated and then get all their costs back? (rather than wasting it on something they believed to be pointless)
(1) This approach is very risky. Courts are notorious for not understanding arguments about obviousness of patents. The problem is, whatever you do, the idea is going to sound non-obvious to the judge. They're going to be sceptical of people saying "yes, I would have thought of this at the time if I were working on this problem" and wonder why they actually *didn't*. And in the end, they're going to presume that the patent examiners did their job and rejected the applications that didn't show real innovation. All of this means even when you are right, you've got no better than a 50/50 chance of getting the patent invalidated in court.
(2) Lawyers are expensive. This was 1988. Sun was a small company back then. The first SPARC processor had only been off the production line for a year. DEC's virtual monopoly on workstations was proving hard to penetrate. IBM's on servers even more so. Sure, the business was profitable, but fighting that battle would have put a big dent in their cashflow, even if they had won and eventually got their costs back.
Why are you convinced that schooling is the only way that someone can obtain an education?
As far as I'm aware, it is the only system anybody has demonstrated to result in a majority of children reaching what would generally be considered an acceptable level of education to live in an industrialized society. If you're aware of any alternatives that have been shown to work for an average child, please enlighten us.
Undoing my moderation to respond to this, as nobody's called BS.
"Well established"? Smartphones were a niche market before the iPhone, and only exploded in popularity (and continue to grow dramatically) after the iPhone was introduced in 2007.
Really? Let's try some actual data. See the chart following the 2nd paragraph. Compare the figures for each successive year:
Yeah, really looks like the launch of the iPhone had a serious impact on the sector's growth. A slight blip in the first year of availability, followed by a substantial drop in the second.
Are you sure their servers did not distribute any material with Blizzard's copyright? Models? Textures? Maps?
I'm not an expert on this, having never actually touched WOW, but with most MMOs these are distributed with the client, the server only sends out identifiers to reference the data the client already has.
Texts? Raid data?
As these (typically) reside on the server, I'm not sure how the defendant in this case would have acquired them. From what I've seen of such things before, chances are the server in question ran custom-build raids that had little in common with the official Blizzard ones other than (due to the restrictions imposed by the client) using locations and creatures that Blizzard designed.
if you don't even bother making the court appointment, then you can't really bitch that the judge is ignorant for following a pretty goddamned clear procedure.
Who bitched about the judge? I'm bitching about Blizzard's lawyers for even filing the claim.
Obviously the prejudice of a professor can play heavily upon grades. Most of us have seen it in action. Sometimes it's the old guy who gives great grades to pretty girls and hates anyone on the football team. The next time around may be the opposite. Perhaps only the football team gets a break on grades. The point being that it is flat out bonkers to think that the student is the only one in charge of his grades
At my school, papers and exams were anonymized before grading. Is this not standard practice?
Around 1997 a friend asked me to install Windows95 on his girlfriend's computer for her. I thought this was an odd request, since she had graduated from Computer Science at the University of Western Ontario that week... I thought that was nuts. And then during the Y2K upgrade boom, I was asked to install a bunch of new machines for 15 (newly graduated, but from where I don't know) programmers hired to work at a government office. I was asked to set up the development environment as well because - wait for it - none of them knew how to install any of the tools. None of them! WTF?! It boggled my mind that people who have no idea how to use a computer were getting degrees in computer science.
During my CS degree at around the same timeframe, the only computers we touched were running SunOS and, later, Solaris. There's nothing there that can prepare you for the brain-dead behaviour of Microsoft installers.
(True fact: I spent a day yesterday trying to install Visual Studio 2005 SP1... turns out Windows Update has a default size limit for updates that's smaller than the size of the service pack, so it fails to install it unless you hack the registry to put on a larger limit)
Did you enjoy those 3 hours? I find it telling that this didn't even factor into the equation of whether the game was good or not.
Judging a game based on its length or replay-ability is as idiotic as judging a movie by its running time or the content of the DVD/blu-ray special features.
Even assuming he did, $20 (or whatever) is basically too much to pay for 3 hours of entertainment. I can buy a novel for $7 and that'll provide at least 10.
I don't buy many games, but the ones I do buy are always ones that I can replay time after time - Civ4 was the last one. I think I must have had over 100 hours out of that so far, and I'm still playing.
Yes, length is not the only factor. But even assuming the game is fun, length/price is a very relevant consideration. I'd call it "value for money".
Where the HR person and police officer authorized? Did the authorized person have power to extend authorization?
Is there some reason he couldn't have written the passwords down privately and handed them to the authorized person without the other two seeing the contents of the paper?
Over cleanliness, over "fear of germs", soccer moms, etc, etc
let the kids play in dirt and eat stuff, no allergies
It's a working theory, and possibly a good one, that exposure to infections prevents allergies developing. But the evidence is a long way from conclusive. The most recent review I can find of the evidence (published in 2007) concluded that the studies to that date were inconclusive. So, you might be right, but even if you are the effect you have on the chance of developing allergies is small, and there's always the chance you're wrong.
Then there's the fact that coeliacs is an intolerance, not an allergy, so this research doesn't even apply to it. And the theory that it's caused by a rotavirus infection, which would mean playing in the dirt and eating stuff would increase your risk of developing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Simplistically: there are only certain algorithms it can perform such a search over. One of them is factorization (Shor's algorithm), and this can be applied to most current asymmetric ciphers because they're essentially isomorphic to one another.
Surely they used Enigma for other critical long-distance communications as well!
Indeed. It was also used to communicate with the Luftwaffe, hence the widespread myth that decrypting Enigma meant that the devastating attack on Coventry could have been prevented (it couldn't: the Germans used a defence-in-depth system that used codewords to identify particular targets; that a massive attack was planned was known, the identity of the target was not).
5: There is the issue of trust. You can set up a quantum exchange with another machine and come up with a key that you know hasn't been touched... but is that really your bank, or is it some site in Elbonia that is patched in? Quantum key selection won't help you here in knowing that you are talking to the right host.
Actually, yes it does. You'll need a shared secret, but that shouldn't be too hard to arrange with your bank, right? It doesn't even need to be particularly secure, as there's no practical brute force attack to attempt to discover it. You could use your ATM card PIN and you'd be perfectly secure.
Indeed. But as far as I can see, combining an application binary in memory with GPL library is no different from combining a WoW raid data files in memory with Blizzard's game data.
The point isn't the combining in memory -- what causes the GPL-library-using software to come under the scope of the GPL is that distributing its binary will include parts of the GPL library.
Logically, if one needs a license, then both need a license.
Not really, no. Doing so in memory is different in two important ways:
- it is done by (or at least at the request of) the end user, rather than the software distributor
- it is much more likely to fall into one of the various exemptions to copyright law: it is a temporary copy, thus transformative in nature, and is done (typically) not for commercial gain. It is also only done by somebody who already possesses a (presumably legitimate) copy of the game, and therefore is unlikely to have any effect on Blizzard's future revenue from exploiting this copyright. Because of these facts, it is almost certainly fair use. There may or may not be other exemptions that apply (e.g. making temporary copies in order to use digital media where there is no way to use it without making such copies -- I believe this is an exemption is some jurisdictions, although clearly not all).
Well, that's just their opinion.
And that of every other dictionary I have access to here. The only reference I have that even suggests this usage is incorrect is Fowler's The King's English, which comments that it is disputable, but suggests that "his" is preferable in this case. That book was published in 1908. The language we speak now is noticeably different from what was spoken then; singular they and their are now much more common than they were at the time and are now almost universally accepted. I have never met anyone who genuinely disapproves of their usage in this form; it appears to almost always be an affectation.
The patent examiner would seem to know the law a bit better than you. Patent applications are not examined on the basis of their titles, or even what they merely "describe in reasonable detail". Patent applications are examined on the basis of their claims. The claims are the invention, and it is each and every limitation in the claims that must exist in the prior art. Unless your "modicum of research" turns up each and every limitation in the claims, then you haven't actually provided sufficient prior art to claim this is a poorly granted patent.
What makes you think I didn't read the claims?
This claim describes a basic controller with configurable buttons connected to a communication system that is in turn connected to a set of remote-controlled switches. It is the basic layout of a standard X10 network, and there is nothing in this claim that is in the slightest bit novel. The number of people who had implemented systems that match the claimed invention by the filing date of 1992 must have numbered in the tens of thousands.
2. A digital wiring system for controlling electrical power coupled to a plurality of electrical devices as claimed in claim 1 wherein said control unit means comprises a computer.
Using a computer as the controller; a trivial extension that was already widely in use by the time the patent was filed.
3. A digital wiring system for controlling electrical power coupled to a plurality of electrical devices as claimed in claim 1 wherein said decoding means comprises a microprocessor for controlling said electrical power flow to said electrical device in accordance with said switch state.
Having a microprocessor
It's a plural and indicates that there is more than one reader making the decision.
dictionary.com disagrees with you:
their /ðr; unstressed ðr/ Show Spelled[thair; unstressed ther] Show IPA
-pronoun
[...]
2 (used after an indefinite singular antecedent in place of the definite masculine form his or the definite feminine form her ): Someone left their book on the table.
A case in point, GPL libraries rely on copyright giving right to say what can linked against it and what can't. If no license was required, then there would be no difference between GPL and LGPL libraries. And I haven't read anybody arguing that non-GPL-compatible software is allowed to link against a dynamic GPL library, though I don't know if that has actually been tested in court.
When you link against a library, even dynamically, details from it are copied into your resulting executable, e.g. names of functions, layouts of data structures, etc. This is enough to justify your linked program (and also probably your source code) being a derivitive work of the original GPL code and therefore requiring permission from the GPL code's authors to distribute.
There are obvious cases where this does not apply. One interesting one is where the GPL'd code is written to implement a preexisting API, an example being MySQL's JDBC connector. MySQL's copyright owners assert that you must either comply with the GPL or get a licence from them to use this library, but as the copyright in the parts of the code that would actually be copied from that library actually belong to Sun[1], it seems unlikely they could get away with this claim.
[1]: OK, Oracle now. Who also own MySQL. But assume this hadn't happened, and we don't actually live in bizarro-world for a moment.
Did you ever study geography? Or did you just spend the lesson time reading hentai?
I double-dog-dare you to diagram the last sentence of that post.
OK:
(S (VP (ADVP Never)
underestimate
(NP (NP the purchasing power)
(PP of
(NP (NP people)
(SBAR (WHNP who)
(S (VP spend
(NP money)
(PP with
(NP their penis)
(PP in
(NP (NP control)
(PP of
(NP their wallet)...)
(bonus: the software I usually use for sentence diagramming misparsed it:
([....]
(NP (NP people)
(SBAR (WHNP who)
(S (VP spend
(NP money)
(PP with
(NP their penis))
(PP in
(NP (NP control)
(PP of
(NP their wallet)...)
Which is a rather amusing interpretation.
Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Argh! Still won't work. Damnit. Who thought of adding a filter to a site used by computer scientists that objects to posting LISP data structures? Guess I just need some random text.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vivamus rhoncus lacus sed urna tincidunt lobortis. Nunc vehicula neque at est gravida sed varius elit vestibulum. Sed eu urna risus, sit amet porttitor purus. Donec pharetra ante ut risus dignissim quis pharetra massa sodales. Maecenas consectetur, arcu in sodales ultricies, lacus leo scelerisque orci, id elementum urna lorem et purus. Nullam pretium neque sit amet odio egestas venenatis. Nullam nec purus lectus. Curabitur velit dui, mattis sit amet congue ut, mollis quis turpis. Vivamus vulputate lobortis diam, ullamcorper malesuada risus pretium non. Donec id magna ut tellus blandit malesuada id at orci. Curabitur nisl mauris, vestibulum ut venenatis et, fermentum vel ante. Fusce viverra, sapien in gravida condimentum, risus nibh pretium ligula, at posuere orci elit vitae augue.
the [betamax/vhs] war was mainly over tape length
Yes and no. By the time VCRs were becoming mainstream, the 3 hour L750 tapes were available, and 4 hour VHS tapes were rare at the time. There were other considerations, too. Betamax machines typically cost nearly twice what an equivalent VHS machine did. Betamax tapes were more expensive, too. Betamax machines also had severe reliability problems, as Sony took their usual approach to manufacturing them. The Sony C5 my family had basically had to go back to Sony every 12 months to have its playback heads replaced, a process that typically took about 3 months. Eventually they managed to fit a set that lasted 13 months and pushed the machine out of its warranty period, so it had to be scrapped. VHS was produced under much broader licence terms, so you could get quality machines and shoddy machines depending on which manufacturer you went to.
Everyone had super-small TVs back then anyway, so quality of the tape didn't matter much
Really? We had a 28" screen, which seems to be about average even today, and I don't believe it was particularly expensive. OK, it was a monstrosity if you ever needed to move it...
it still looked like garbage on the screen (by today's standards).
Not convinced. I may be misremembering it, but I don't recall there being any substantial difference in quality between beta recordings and live broadcast. When we switched to VHS, the quality difference was very noticeable, even despite the fact that the VHS machine we got was a so-called "VHS-HQ" revision that was supposed to be better than traditional VHS.
I'm not saying the patent system isn't broken, but...
* It's not a software patent
Who cares? Software patents are just examples of what's wrong with patents, and show to anyone who understands the field that patent examiners routinely issue patents for "inventions" that are entirely obvious to those of us who actually know how to write software. Just because software patents are routinely bad doesn't mean we can't and shouldn't find examples in other fields that are just as bad.
* Let's see the author/owner try to extract license fees from someone, anyone
He isn't about to, because he wrote it as a joke, and because he really doesn't care about this patent. If it fell into the hands of somebody who cared, though, they might try it, and might even succeed. At the very least, they could cause their target to have to spend thousands defending themselves in court.
* The patent system is not about holding back stupid ideas. You are allowed to patent both clever and dumb inventions
Who said the "invention" here is dumb? Actually, it's quite a good idea, and describes in reasonable detail a device very similar in operation to an X10 network. The point here is that the prior art is very well known, has existed since (at a minimum) 1975, and is widely commercially available. A modicum of research would have pointed the patent examiner to the existing art that this application adds essentially nothing to. This is exactly what patent examiners are supposed to prevent.
* It's not funny and it's not clever
If you're talking about the patent system, I think I have to agree with you.
If I understand the story correctly, the company lost a lot of money because of a patent they thought was a bit stupid, decided to get patent protection for all their new projects, this guy and his buddies thought it would be a great idea to waste even more money patenting dumb stuff. Does he still work there ?
No. He resigned for political reasons when Oracle took over. BTW, "this guy" was the lead designer on the Java project.
If the RISC patent was so obvious, why didn't the company spend money getting it invalidated and then get all their costs back? (rather than wasting it on something they believed to be pointless)
(1) This approach is very risky. Courts are notorious for not understanding arguments about obviousness of patents. The problem is, whatever you do, the idea is going to sound non-obvious to the judge. They're going to be sceptical of people saying "yes, I would have thought of this at the time if I were working on this problem" and wonder why they actually *didn't*. And in the end, they're going to presume that the patent examiners did their job and rejected the applications that didn't show real innovation. All of this means even when you are right, you've got no better than a 50/50 chance of getting the patent invalidated in court.
(2) Lawyers are expensive. This was 1988. Sun was a small company back then. The first SPARC processor had only been off the production line for a year. DEC's virtual monopoly on workstations was proving hard to penetrate. IBM's on servers even more so. Sure, the business was profitable, but fighting that battle would have put a big dent in their cashflow, even if they had won and eventually got their costs back.
Why are you convinced that schooling is the only way that someone can obtain an education?
As far as I'm aware, it is the only system anybody has demonstrated to result in a majority of children reaching what would generally be considered an acceptable level of education to live in an industrialized society. If you're aware of any alternatives that have been shown to work for an average child, please enlighten us.
I thought the fluoride in the water is why we don't all have "british looking" teeth.
Quite possibly, but rumour has it that it's why you're all obese, too.
Trust me, the rest of the world doesn't really want to see your pictures of the kids at their friend Joey's birthday party.
Specially not at 2048x1536.
Undoing my moderation to respond to this, as nobody's called BS.
"Well established"? Smartphones were a niche market before the iPhone, and only exploded in popularity (and continue to grow dramatically) after the iPhone was introduced in 2007.
Really? Let's try some actual data. See the chart following the 2nd paragraph. Compare the figures for each successive year:
04-05: 214% growth.
05-06: 95% growth.
06-07: 139% growth.
07-08: 61% growth.
Yeah, really looks like the launch of the iPhone had a serious impact on the sector's growth. A slight blip in the first year of availability, followed by a substantial drop in the second.
Are you sure their servers did not distribute any material with Blizzard's copyright?
Models? Textures? Maps?
I'm not an expert on this, having never actually touched WOW, but with most MMOs these are distributed with the client, the server only sends out identifiers to reference the data the client already has.
Texts? Raid data?
As these (typically) reside on the server, I'm not sure how the defendant in this case would have acquired them. From what I've seen of such things before, chances are the server in question ran custom-build raids that had little in common with the official Blizzard ones other than (due to the restrictions imposed by the client) using locations and creatures that Blizzard designed.
if you don't even bother making the court appointment, then you can't really bitch that the judge is ignorant for following a pretty goddamned clear procedure.
Who bitched about the judge? I'm bitching about Blizzard's lawyers for even filing the claim.
Real gambling involves skill too.
So does investing in the stock market, but that isn't considered gambling by most people. What's the difference? Where do you draw the line?
Obviously the prejudice of a professor can play heavily upon grades. Most of us have seen it in action. Sometimes it's the old guy who gives great grades to pretty girls and hates anyone on the football team. The next time around may be the opposite. Perhaps only the football team gets a break on grades. The point being that it is flat out bonkers to think that the student is the only one in charge of his grades
At my school, papers and exams were anonymized before grading. Is this not standard practice?
Around 1997 a friend asked me to install Windows95 on his girlfriend's computer for her. I thought this was an odd request, since she had graduated from Computer Science at the University of Western Ontario that week...
I thought that was nuts. And then during the Y2K upgrade boom, I was asked to install a bunch of new machines for 15 (newly graduated, but from where I don't know) programmers hired to work at a government office. I was asked to set up the development environment as well because - wait for it - none of them knew how to install any of the tools. None of them! WTF?!
It boggled my mind that people who have no idea how to use a computer were getting degrees in computer science.
During my CS degree at around the same timeframe, the only computers we touched were running SunOS and, later, Solaris. There's nothing there that can prepare you for the brain-dead behaviour of Microsoft installers.
(True fact: I spent a day yesterday trying to install Visual Studio 2005 SP1... turns out Windows Update has a default size limit for updates that's smaller than the size of the service pack, so it fails to install it unless you hack the registry to put on a larger limit)
Anyone remember this one? Learned all I know about human biology from it. :)
Did you enjoy those 3 hours? I find it telling that this didn't even factor into the equation of whether the game was good or not.
Judging a game based on its length or replay-ability is as idiotic as judging a movie by its running time or the content of the DVD/blu-ray special features.
Even assuming he did, $20 (or whatever) is basically too much to pay for 3 hours of entertainment. I can buy a novel for $7 and that'll provide at least 10.
I don't buy many games, but the ones I do buy are always ones that I can replay time after time - Civ4 was the last one. I think I must have had over 100 hours out of that so far, and I'm still playing.
Yes, length is not the only factor. But even assuming the game is fun, length/price is a very relevant consideration. I'd call it "value for money".
Where the HR person and police officer authorized? Did the authorized person have power to extend authorization?
Is there some reason he couldn't have written the passwords down privately and handed them to the authorized person without the other two seeing the contents of the paper?
The deal is simple
Over cleanliness, over "fear of germs", soccer moms, etc, etc
let the kids play in dirt and eat stuff, no allergies
It's a working theory, and possibly a good one, that exposure to infections prevents allergies developing. But the evidence is a long way from conclusive. The most recent review I can find of the evidence (published in 2007) concluded that the studies to that date were inconclusive. So, you might be right, but even if you are the effect you have on the chance of developing allergies is small, and there's always the chance you're wrong.
Then there's the fact that coeliacs is an intolerance, not an allergy, so this research doesn't even apply to it. And the theory that it's caused by a rotavirus infection, which would mean playing in the dirt and eating stuff would increase your risk of developing it.