That also happened to some people I knew in the UK, the police monitored their house via their POTS phone..
I don't really see how that's possible. When the handset is on-hook, the microphone is disconnected. This is a requirement for BABT compliance. You are correct. The analog POTS system fully disconnects the microphone and speaker when on hook, as per design standards going back to the 1870's. It's not possible to listen in on-hook without modifying the phone. OP is either engaging in "urban legendry", or the incident took place before 1982, when BT still owned the entire phone system (including the sets themselves) and could believably send a technician 'round to "fix the phone".
Small widgets are sorted and packed at high speed by machines. If you design a package that can be opened by the pretty feeble forces a human fingertip can exert, then it's not going to be able to be sorted at 80 MPH by the metal claw of a robot.
Heh. By machines, eh? You've obviously never worked in a factory. In my desperate youth I worked many minimum wage factory jobs. You'd be amazed at what they HAVEN'T automated. Put handles on plastic buckets? People do that. Assemble high voltage electrical connectors for the film industry. Yep, people with electric screwdrivers. But the number one thing I have always seen done by people, never by machines, that'd have to be packing and shipping. No 80mph conveyor belts-- any company moving product THAT fast isn't doing it on one line, they're doing it on several lines in parallel. High speed stuff breaks too easily. Certainly no expensive robots that, when they break, can't be replaced by calling the temp agency and having them send another the next day for the same $5/hr you were paying the last one.
6 years from glue to practical product doesn't sound all too much to me.
No fool, the practical product didn't appear till 1977, after 3 years of development. He had the idea in 1974. Besides, who cares what it sounds like to you? The point is, the glue already existed when Arthur Fry came up with the idea, which refutes the pulls-arguments-from-his-ass original poster who implied the non-obvious part of inventing the Post-It was developing an appropriate adhesive. Since so many like you are completely missing the point and brining up tangential issues, let me spell it out for you idiots:
1. 1968, Spencer Silver accidentally invents a weak adhesive
2. Attempt to use adhesive in a product fails, adhesive is shelved
3. Six years pass, adhesive formula remains unused
4. 1974, Arthur Fry, tired of his bookmarks falling out, in a flash of inspiration thinks "what if there was adhesive on them"
5. Working at 3M, he looked at their catalog of existing adhesives for something suitable and found Spencer Silver's formula
6. 1977, after three years of development, 3M funds an initial sample production run of the Post-It
7. 1980, after three years of sampling, the product hits the shelves.
Post-Its simply fucking weren't a product waiting for technology to catch up.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that they ARE obvious... Therefore, the current test is rubbish.
To whom? Just saying so doesn't make it so.
Christ in a sidecar. If I had a nickel for every time I wished I could access my email account from somewhere other than the computer lab back in the mid 80's, I'd have enough money to pay a goon to knock some sense into your head. Mere portability of an existing system is not a novel fucking innovation, you dumbshit.
If you have evidence showing that the NTP patents are really obvious, then maybe you should have tried to get hired on as a consultant to RIM...
You don't even understand the problem with the current system, do you. The problem RIM had was that the legal test to disprove novelty requires documentation (generally from a previous patent), and people don't waste time writing down and meticulously documenting the bloody obvious. This is why (as the GP poster said) the current test is rubbish.
Putting the sticky stuff on paper is obvious, figureing out how to make it stick repeatedly is not obvious.
The adhesive used on Post-Its was invented in 1968. After an initial attempt to use it to create a "sticky bulletin board" (a failure), it was set aside until Arthur Fry came up with the idea of creating sticky, reusable bookmarks in 1974. Post-Its weren't waiting for the glue. They were waiting for Arthur Fry.
If this is your test for obviousness, then NOTHING is patentable, because everything is just "a solution waiting for technological progress to make it feasible."
Bullshit. What technology were Post-Its waiting for? Or better yet, the high pressure McCoy automatic oiler, which used tech no more advanced than the steam engines it served? Steam engine parts were oiled by hand with oil cans for 20 years before the automatic oiler was invented.
As noted in another post, the first NTP patent was filed in 1991 -- was a portable device for email "bloody fucking obvious" in 1991?
Jesus, if anything is bloody fucking obvious, it's the observation of "man, I wish it were possible to make one of these things that was portable." The list is unbelievably long: phones, video cameras, calculators, TVs, radios, DVD players, and yes, even networked computers running a mail reader! Just because it took time for large LCDs, low power CPUs, and high capacity batteries make it possible to finally run that email app on a goddamn 2-way pager does not make it non-obvious before then.
How do you propose to perform your test? If others "skilled in the art" already know that there is a solution, then you are injecting hindsight into the equation, and EVERYTHING is obvious once you have hindsight.
The test is not as difficult as you seem to think. Stating that "everything is obvious in hindsight" is a largely meaningless handwave that tars all subjects with one brush, as both the obvious AND non-obvious fit the description. In these cases, hindsight actually helps. For example, the Post-It note seems obvious, yet people went around scotch taping, paper clipping, or pinning slips of paper to things for decades beforehand. Clearly not obvious, otherwise there'd have been an earlier example. On the other hand, you have patents on portable electronic devices for sending and receiving email--- that's bloody fucking obvious, and not just in hindsight. Portable email was not a solution waiting for an insightful genius to discover it, but a solution waiting for technological progress to make it feasible.
Today there aren't as many choices - I always liked the space ones and now everything has to be god awfull starwars crap.
You said it. I bought my nephew a tie fighter set, and it was so dang complicated the *I* had trouble putting it together. This year I'm getting an old style space set off ebay for him. I've been waxing nostalgic for those old blue sets with the red and white spacemen ever since I found a brick labeled LL928 from the Galaxy Explorer set I got for xmas 1979...
LEGO is the largest tire manufacturer in the world
Yet, when making a car, you are hard-pressed to find four of the same set in a very huge bucket filled with Legos....
Yes, I play legos with my kids....
I was "helping" my nephew build stuff with his legos over thanksgiving. My first task was to "school" him on what NOT to take apart. He had every tire pulled off its wheel and every wheel pulled off its axle! Additionally, the minifigs were disassembled completely, down to having no HANDS, and the 2-square vertical hinge pieces were all pulled apart also. Kids!
But my car is not a public place, as is the internet (or the subway).
You're misunderstanding the analogy.
car = your computer = private/your responsibility
road = internet = public area/greater controlling authority's responsibility
Of all of the historical things you could used as an example, you choose Nazism. If you didn't have such a good point I might have called Godwin's law on you.
Dun's Corollary to Godwin's Law: The time in seconds before an false invocation of Godwin's Law by someone who does not know that comparison to Nazis/Hitler is a requirement and that it only speaks of probability, roughly approximates the inverse square of the number of years since 1990.
I too want to see numbers! But he said that it seems like, which is different than making an assertion, as you state.
This is true, but it's really just a semantic trick for making a false assertion sound like empirical observation without actually claiming anything at all.
I think you missed his point. Even if you take the cellular out of cell phones, you can still call them cell phones because there is still a cell involved. Of course, by that reasoning, any portable telephony device would qualify.
Yeah, that's pretty silly. Nobody really acknowledges the individual "cells" in a battery anymore unless they're engineers anyway. I'm afraid pushing to shift the meaning of "cell" that direction is going to go over as well as a man with a PhD in English Literature standing up when someone shouts "is there a doctor in the house?"
The first manufacturer who comes up with a name like that will be sued off the planet for false advertising. Besides, mobiles (as we call them) are still powered by a cell, aren't they?
"Cell" is short for "cellular", which refers to the use of multiple short range antennas with overlapping coverage, not the power source.
managers would think: "We know how to deal with paper jams, ink shortages, and people occaisionally sticking their penis in the copy machine. But are we willing to buy a new system, using paper that degrades after 10 uses, and only lasts 16 hours, and hiring/training/paying for support to make sure it works, and changing the office practices around it?"
You nailed the fatal flaw in this product precisely. It does not fit in an existing niche well, but rather requires extensive adjustment to make it practical. It's just like the Segway, with the famous observation of "cities of the future will be designed around this"--- which is merely an optimistic way of saying the truth: "cities will have to be redesigned before this can truly be useful".
Don't state something when you don't know it for sure. As a matter of fact, my father owns a small construction company that specialises in building houses for families.
I have to say, they use thousands of nails in the construction of a single house. For the temporary scaffoldings, etc. The current nails just do perfectly fine for that purpose. In Hungary it is extremely rare that someone builds a wooden house. 99.9% of the residential homes are brick and tile houses.
Pedantic ass. As is patently obvious by the subject under discussion, the specific meaning of his statement was "Have you ever worked in (wood frame) construction? No, you (obviously) have not." As you confirm, you don't know jack shit about building a permanent structure out of wood, as you use masonry where you are. Really, your retort deserves nothing but ridicule, as you essentially replied to an observation of "you know nothing about construction" with a statement of "no, I am only ignorant about the kind of construction we're discussing". Good job! He'll never live down that smackdown!
Having seen how construction is done here in California it's completely amazing anything survives a big truck driving by, let alone a real earthquake.
Well, as my boss put it once: "rigidity is the enemy of earthquakes". Weakly fastened structures tend to simply pull apart ever so slightly at the joints, often requiring little more than a little stucco and drywall mud to cover the cracks and return them to their original (cosmetic) glory. It's amazing how far a wood frame building can go out of square and still be considered habitable. I lived in a craptastic apartment building once that was only 30 years old, but visibly out of square at just about every corner. Between the bad foundation fill causing half the building to sink several inches over the years, and the door frames so off-kilter that a plumb line from the center top of the door would fall over an inch off of center at the bottom, I'm surprised it ever passed inspection--- but it's still standing.
They are called screws, and they have been known for a few thousand years to be vastly better then nails.
Wow! I'm sure they completely overlooked that! Never mind that you can fire 25 nails via a pneumatic nailgun in the time it takes to drive one screw. Never mind that screws cost 3 times what "regular" 16p green vinyl sinker nails do, vs. 10-20% more for these nails. No, clearly they're just stupid and didn't think of screws! You know, they also didn't think of wedged/pinned mortise and tenon construction either. What a bunch of fools, inventing a better nail when we can already slot giant oaken beams together and fasten them with pegs much more securely!
Also, screws as fasteners have not been known for "thousands of years" to be anything. Try less than 600.
but builders will hate it; not only because removing a nail will be ridiculously difficult, but also because homes that don't fall down don't have to be re-built. If you make your money building homes and you build homes that last forever, then you will eventually become obsolete. The trend since the 1950's has been to build homes using progressively cheaper materials with progressively shorter lifespans.
Bollocks. Typical ridiculous conspiracy theory nonsense. Builders do not engage in "planned obsolescence". They don't necessarily even plan to still be in the business by the time a "planned obsolescent" house would fall down, much less plan to be the guy re-building it. Ten years later, when the crappiest built house starts to show its age, how did the crappy builder ensure that he would be the one the current owner would call? Furthermore, have you ever met any general contractors? It's hard enough to get a house built, much less play puppetmaster with the rough carpenters' materials in such a Machiavellian way as to make the house fall down just in time for them to show up offering to help. No, the notion is entirely absurd. The reason builders use cheap materials is very simply the obvious one: cheaper materials cost them less, which maximizes their profit on a fixed bid job.
All the "proofs" in the comments that show this is a scam so far calculates how many dots can be printed/read from a piece of paper, and then corresponds each dot to a bit of data. Well, guess what. The whole point of this thing is he's NOT USING DOTS. This may very well be bullshit, but the "proofs" against it are meaningless.No, you simply don't understand very basic information theory. Printers print with dots. Any shapes you make on the paper are made up of dots. A 3x3 grid of dots (9 bits) can be marked in 512 different combinations, only 10 of which make a squares(2), triangles(4), or lines(4) that can be easily differentiated. Using shapes does not increase the resolution, it limits it. You cannot represent 8 arbitrarily chosen bits of information if you've budgeted 7 bits of storage. At 1440dpi, 8 bit color, even assuming perfect readability, you cannot record more than 1.4GB of information, no matter what "shapes" you arrange for the dots to make.
You are an idiot because: You ignored the one and only thing he/did/ say, which was that he was doing something differently.
Bzzt.
Encoding data using dots is the most efficient method possible. He has to print the image somehow, and scan it back in again. No combination of triangles and circles can circumvent the resolution limit, which is what is being calculated here.
By showing that the claim exceeds all practical limits of optical resolution (and probably the absolute physical limits), we show that what we have is just another magical compression scam.
He says that he's "doing something differently"; we've proved that what he claims to be doing is impossible. End of story.Indeed. For those not inclined to simple mathematics, here it is in a nutshell-
Assumptions (none of them unreasonable, all of them quite generous even):
1440dpi
8 bit color
8" x 10.5" printing area
Even assuming perfect readability, this resolution yields only 1.4GB per page. Talk of "shapes" is smoke and mirrors to obfuscate one of the cold hard facts of information theory: you cannot accurately represent all permutations of 8 bits of information if you've budgeted less than 8 bits. Compression schemes allow you to compress repetitive patterns is you know they're going to be there beforehand (e.g. an almost arbitrarily large number of only 1's or only 0's can be represented with run length encoding), but X bits of random data requires X bits of allocated space.
The way I understand it, a triangle can store 4 bits (pointing up, down, left, right). Then add colors (ROYGBIVK) to the equation, that's 8 bits. Now the triangle can hold a total of 32 bits (4x8)of info. What if the triangle is hollow/solid? That's now 32x2 =64 bits!. Squares are 2x8x2, circles are 1x8x2, line holds 32 (vert, horiz, slash, bkslash). See where this is going. This isn't something new. I look forward to seeing if they can make it practical.
No, it's a scam. You're missing the greater point. Even with all this fuddly array of shape arrangements, there is not nearly as much bandwidth on a standard sheet of paper as they claim. Sure shape encoding is an interesting notion, but not nearly as practical as they profess.
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I don't really see how that's possible. When the handset is on-hook, the microphone is disconnected. This is a requirement for BABT compliance. You are correct. The analog POTS system fully disconnects the microphone and speaker when on hook, as per design standards going back to the 1870's. It's not possible to listen in on-hook without modifying the phone. OP is either engaging in "urban legendry", or the incident took place before 1982, when BT still owned the entire phone system (including the sets themselves) and could believably send a technician 'round to "fix the phone".
1. 1968, Spencer Silver accidentally invents a weak adhesive
2. Attempt to use adhesive in a product fails, adhesive is shelved
3. Six years pass, adhesive formula remains unused
4. 1974, Arthur Fry, tired of his bookmarks falling out, in a flash of inspiration thinks "what if there was adhesive on them"
5. Working at 3M, he looked at their catalog of existing adhesives for something suitable and found Spencer Silver's formula
6. 1977, after three years of development, 3M funds an initial sample production run of the Post-It
7. 1980, after three years of sampling, the product hits the shelves.
Post-Its simply fucking weren't a product waiting for technology to catch up.
You don't even understand the problem with the current system, do you. The problem RIM had was that the legal test to disprove novelty requires documentation (generally from a previous patent), and people don't waste time writing down and meticulously documenting the bloody obvious. This is why (as the GP poster said) the current test is rubbish.
car = your computer = private/your responsibility
road = internet = public area/greater controlling authority's responsibility
Also, screws as fasteners have not been known for "thousands of years" to be anything. Try less than 600.
All the "proofs" in the comments that show this is a scam so far calculates how many dots can be printed/read from a piece of paper, and then corresponds each dot to a bit of data. Well, guess what. The whole point of this thing is he's NOT USING DOTS. This may very well be bullshit, but the "proofs" against it are meaningless.No, you simply don't understand very basic information theory. Printers print with dots. Any shapes you make on the paper are made up of dots. A 3x3 grid of dots (9 bits) can be marked in 512 different combinations, only 10 of which make a squares(2), triangles(4), or lines(4) that can be easily differentiated. Using shapes does not increase the resolution, it limits it. You cannot represent 8 arbitrarily chosen bits of information if you've budgeted 7 bits of storage. At 1440dpi, 8 bit color, even assuming perfect readability, you cannot record more than 1.4GB of information, no matter what "shapes" you arrange for the dots to make.
You are an idiot because: You ignored the one and only thing he /did/ say, which was that he was doing something differently.
Bzzt.
Encoding data using dots is the most efficient method possible. He has to print the image somehow, and scan it back in again. No combination of triangles and circles can circumvent the resolution limit, which is what is being calculated here.
By showing that the claim exceeds all practical limits of optical resolution (and probably the absolute physical limits), we show that what we have is just another magical compression scam.
He says that he's "doing something differently"; we've proved that what he claims to be doing is impossible. End of story.Indeed. For those not inclined to simple mathematics, here it is in a nutshell-
Assumptions (none of them unreasonable, all of them quite generous even):
1440dpi
8 bit color
8" x 10.5" printing area
Even assuming perfect readability, this resolution yields only 1.4GB per page. Talk of "shapes" is smoke and mirrors to obfuscate one of the cold hard facts of information theory: you cannot accurately represent all permutations of 8 bits of information if you've budgeted less than 8 bits. Compression schemes allow you to compress repetitive patterns is you know they're going to be there beforehand (e.g. an almost arbitrarily large number of only 1's or only 0's can be represented with run length encoding), but X bits of random data requires X bits of allocated space.