You'd think that professional apps have years of UI experience, but they probably just used their early market share to convince everyone that what they're doing is right. (btw, AutoCAD is probably the worst example of this... Ugh.)
I haven't met a single graphic artist who has liked the way Photoshop tool pallettes (layer properties, etc) roll up. They're a pain at the top of the screen so you put them at the side, but they roll up, not sideways... Ugh.
Photoshop also doesn't have a good way of exposing a commonly used sub-menu, like Gimp does with tear-off menus.
And, my pet peeve, Photoshop doesn't let you scroll a maximized picture past the edge of the picture. This would be handy for maximizing a photo (as I usually do when editing) and moving the left or right edges to the center to work on. It would also make it easier to drag a selection box and get the exact corner. You can do this if you window the photo and drag the window edges out, but then you've got the extra UI-cruft of the window title-bar, the dragable edges, etc.
Photoshop (for Windows) is intuitive, for a Windows (tm) user, but not as intuitive for a Mac user, or an old Amiga user, or an X-Windows user. Not that they're in the wrong, just that what is intuitive for you isn't intuitive for other people. Personally I find the Mac model the best, though I rarely use a Mac and didn't learn on one, it just seems to make more sense. It has an interface that looks like Gimp, but where all the pallette windows and such have just one toolbar icon. You don't have to futz with the MDI inanity, but you don't have sixteen toolbar icons either.:)
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
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Maybe you just don't understand that the answer to one question is not the answer to all questions.
You go and ask one of these experts if it's as easy for a heroin junkie to kick the habit as for a smoker. Go ahead.
Way to ignore the rest of the post too. Pesky troll.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
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then why do we have to bend over backwards to ensure they are equal?
I had asked a question about what you meant because your original comment was factually inaccurate. There are, and were, laws preventing women from even trying out for certain jobs.
If I never let you take the SATs I can point to your lack of a passing grade as an example of your inability to succeed, but it's pretty meaningless. If however I let you test and you fail (or succeed), you've demonstrated your own level of compotence.
Yeah, it's anecdotal only, and it flies in the face of what everyone in the field says. You're wasting my time...
Yap yap yap. If "everyone" in the field says something that's obviously wrong, then either 1) it's not everyone who says it, 2) everyone in the field is wrong (possible in soft-science fields ruled by fashion, such as psychology), or 3) you're asking the wrong question. I imagine the problem is #3, that you're asking the wrong question.
If your question is, "if I mainline 1mg of nicotine, and 1mg of heroin, which will be more addictive?" You might be told that the nicotine is more addictive.
If you ask the more reasonable question of, "If after a normal pattern of abuse (2 packs / day or 1 "hit" / day) for a period of time, will I find it easier to quit (and stay off) of heroin or nicotine, with a lack of social/legal pressure?" You'll be told the painfully obvious - that anyone with will-power can kick smokes without missing work and without painful medical problems, but to do the same with heroin is much, much harder.
intense pain
Yeah, why you then and not any of the other smokers I've seen go cold-turkey?
Maybe it wasn't all that bad and you were just cranky? Hmmm.
If cigarettes were illegal? [...] Because it's a felony to be caught doing this, so people tend not to do this in public [...] Because it's legal. [...] Because it's legal.
Exactly. That's why it's so easy to start smoking again. Because you can just light up, because so many other people do, and because you don't risk financial or social ruin by doing so.
The fact that they do not claim to be downloading video might not be relevant, if the court decides that any form of saving incoming video (from a packet-switched digital network, or from an analog television broadcast, etc) is the same, for purposes of this patent. Indeed, we see Tivo-type devices in all these situations and I'm sure Tivo intends their patent to cover all these uses.
And it's also not true that every claim must be duplicated for a new implementation to be found infringing, or that every claim must be disproven/shown to be obvious/etc for the patent to be overturned.
Certain claims describe the meat of the patent, and indeed a judge may rule that a product infringes on a patent even if it only infringes on one or two claims. This means though, that judges to examine patents in a piecemeal fashion in order to judge their validity. They frequently assume that one type of network (for example) is equivalent to another, unless an expert witness can testify that for the purposes of the patent, there is a difference.
In my opinion, based on the type of patent decisions I've seen, the way that Tivo gets the video signal is irrelevant and a judge will ignore it. The meat of the patent is what they do with the video, how the index it, how they control the flow, and so forth.
The claims that will decide the validity of their patents are the ones that talk about adding time codes to video frames, and certain cache issues, to make sure that video seems live. Of course, Tivo will try to play down the specifics in order to make the patent broader, but this is a delicate game because if they make it too broad the judge understands that all implementations are fundamentaly the same because it's simply the obvious way to do thing.
I think you get your understanding of patents from reading snippets of patent law. Not bad, but a little one-sided. Read case transcriptions and read summaries of judgements and you'll see how judges actually evaluate the validity. Much like the difference between criminal law and how a beat cop applies it.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
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Intelligent people have long realized that women have always had as equal a chance as is possible.
The only way to make this remotely true it to assume you mean 'ensured [that women...]'. Otherwise, you have to admit that there have been rules which arbitrarily state that women need not apply, despite qualifications.
And yet the NIDA--the science wing of the drug warrior establishment--says that tobacco is the more addictive drug, at least when measured using dependence as the criteria. And it isn't just NIDA that thinks so.
Well, they're wrong. I mean, when they say something that contradictory to observed fact... This may be anecdotal, but I've never seen severe detox reactions from people quitting smoking. I've seen the one heroin reaction described above, in less than scientific terms, and I've seen videos of other detox cases from morphine which I admit isn't the same as heroin, but is supposed to be similar in addiction. Morphine can be a fatal reaction, and it's supposedly always very painful.
Now, the numbers of recidivists probably indicates that tobacco is harder to kick, but how many people's families are going to hold an intervention, or kidnap them to detox, if they start smoking again? How many times do you go to the bar and have everyone around you shooting up? Smoking is still socially acceptable, especially in lower-income settings. Nobody ever lost their kids or job because they smoke.
May not have been possible, as the chances are great the Israelis would have been working from passport lists or the like (if the theory is true.)
Are you implying that they set up the WTC incident, or that they simply had advance knowledge of some terrorist attack?
In a truly free country you'd even be able to donate to those nice policemen, even in the middle of being investigated or arrested! Wouldn't that be nice?
As I stated before, just because it is technically possible to create a functional equivelant at the time of filing
It's not that it was merely technically possible, it EXISTED! In the late 80s I could download very low quality (bandwidth limits on my 19.2 modem) video and play it while it downloaded. That's all this Tivo patent covers, though it's stretched to make it look advanced.
All the technology to let you view an incoming media stream was already here, and being used to do this. I had Telix open downloading a file, and used DesqView to switch to a dos prompt and used an mpeg viewer to view the file. This, plus a user interface, is what a Tivo is. It's *NOT* revolutionary.
Yes, I'm sure it's got a valid patent. Whoop-de-fucking-do. Everyone and his dog can get a valid patent, on the wheel if they wish, by having a lawyer pad a description out to twenty-seven claims including the terms digital, network, and packet. The validity of the patent is quite another matter and the courts have a much stricter view than the MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS which you are harping on about. Yes, I'm sure you could have a device that everyone would agree is novel that consisted of nothing more than two off-the-shelf products and some duct-tape, but in the other 99.997% of the time, that's not good enough, at the end of a long painful trial.
All this patent is good for, and I'm sure all it's intended for, is to put up a good enough show that a judge won't pitch the case for not having any merit. This lets Tivo have a multi-million dollar stick with which to scare their rivals, because any case that doesn't get pitched out of court can be drawn out for years and with temporary injunctions and continual delays, can bankrupt any one-product company.
And, that's why I'm spending time explaining to people that this patent, while valid by the letter of the law, will be thrown out if and when it ever does go through this trial. Right now Tivo is playing this in the court of public opinion, wanting to scare the stock-holders of the other companies into pushing for an early settlement. If these stockholders see your posts, where you gush over this patent, they might actually believe that Tivo stands a chance in court and push for an early settlement - one that gives Tivo money they don't deserve for a patent on the only freaking obvious way to implement this. However, if nobody is impressed by Tivo's little show they'll slick off with their little piece of paper and let the competition compete on merit.
Oh, I see, in order to have an opinion, I *must* write a document detailing where every one of their methods came from and a philosophical treatise on why they'd consider combining this method instead of that one?
Listen. PCs could do *exectly* what a Tivo could, except for the realtime MPEG encoding (that took an add-on card) over ten years ago. I installed video editing systems for a while and I remember being able to edit the low-res on-disk video while it was still back-ground converting the rest of the video, a long process.
That accomplished everything they've claimed their patent does. They may use a slightly different method, with a cache that also stores time codes, but that doesn't mean it deserves a patent. Not only must a patent be novel, etc, etc, but it must be useful. Doing the same thing but with a different file-format, or with the data munged in a different way, isn't a useful change. It's an implementation detail. It might be an implementation detail that everyone in the same field will copy for some reason, but if it's a trivial change, it's not patent-worthy.
Why don't you actually do something useful and read the patent and tell me what part you think IS patent worthy. Surely there must be something you can point to and say it's not bleeding obvious.
And as for combined in a new way, that's being abused left and right. That's why we got a rash on late-90s patents that take an existing process (transfer digital data, etc1) that tack on "over a packet-switched network" when the packet-switched network is an OS-level detail that can be swapped out for any other type of network. While it might fulfill the letter of the requirements for unique-ness and originality, it's an obvious abuse and would be stopped if the patent office worked.
It is an invention in the same way that gluing a wireless networking card to a mousetrap does make a new device, but it's not invention in the sense of advancing the state of the art. You can't patent a mousetrap that acts as a wifi hotspot, but you can patent the fact that your wifi hotspot is connected to the mousetrap with Gizmo X.
I fear that Tivo is patenting the set of features, not the methods behind them. Reading some of their patent encourages this view as most of their claims talk about what are essentially pointers into cache, and how cache blocks point to disk blocks, and how video data is in discrete blocks, etc. It's essentially describing how a PC would play an MPEG movie while downloading it from the net. While they *may* have been the first people to do this, they don't deserve a patent on the common and obvious applications of an OS, filesystem, drive cache, and video compression format.
The only "innovation" I saw was in time-coding the video keyframes to allow seeking by time instead of number of bytes. Handy, but that's only one aspect of their claim, and it seems to be what you'd do if the boss said "We need to be able to skip 30 seconds, not 30x29.7(?) frames." You'd add a time field, maybe as an index, maybe as a field in the frame. This aspect might be patentable, but it was only one claims among a ton that talked about basic OS stuff.
So, perhaps the Tivo-like companies reverse-engineered (or copied the patent application) of a Tivo in handling some basic stuff like this, or maybe it was just so simple that they came up with the same answers. How many ways are there to download in the background and play the same file?
This is a basic problem with patents though, they don't allow for independent discovery. And if you think about it, if you and I both come up with the idea ourselves, how do I deserve royalties from your work because I happened to file a patent first? It's not like you got the benefit of reading my patent and simply following a recipe. (Which is the intended use of patents - less development costs in trade for paying royalties. Not complete ownership of a function via an overly-broad method description.)
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
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The "women are equal" is taken by intelligent people to mean "women deserve an equal chance". Some men can't be firefighters because they can't pass the tests, but we give them a chance to try. Why shouldn't women get a chance?
My issue is that if we objectively determine that a fightfighter needs to carry 100lbs of gear, that men and women should have to do this. If we simply want people in the top 95% for fitness, tests should reflect this.
As for the drugs, I think you overstate the adictiveness of tobacco. Much of the reason why it's hard to quit is the social acceptability. There just aren't many immediate consequences for smokers. Heroin, from everything I've seen, is much harder to quit. I've seen (in the hallway of my old apt in the bad part of town) a heroin addict writhing in pain and screaming about ants on his head. I've also seen my friend who smoked two packs a day fidget endlessly and get mildly cranky because he hadn't had a cigarette in three days. Slight difference there, imho.
But, I don't believe that prohibition works - for stopping abuses, or general access. Even if I did, I think people have a right to run (or ruin) their own lives, and I dislike nanny states. The war on drugs is pretty much broken in every way and the goal isn't a desirable one.
As for the Israeli conspiracy, I've seen how secrets leak. I also know of Israelis who are anti-Israel (policy-wise) and who I think would speak out against this. I don't buy that there could be a large and fairly open (all the employees of these companies) conspiracy like this that the press didn't have conclusive proof of a few days later. Besides, a lot of New York Jews died (presumably with many family connections to Israel) and anyone warning Israelis would have wanted to warn these people, and there would likely be people in the group that was warned passing the warning on to friends and relatives in the new York Jewish population at the WTC.
And, to finish on a conspiritorial note, anyone who masterminded the deaths of thousands (up to 10k, had the buildings collapsed sooner) would likely be willing to sacrifice some of their countrymen in order to have increased justification. If it was a setup they wouldn't have warned these companies, they'd be making martyrs - a very handy thing to have.
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
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That's a pretty lame argument. Nobody cares if you feel like raising your child once you've had it, so nobody is going to care if you feel like having it. Your opinions don't matter one bit.
Everyone, except selfish twits, is focused on what is best for the infant and what the infant would want. I'm pro-abortion, but only because I don't think the potential of a fetus to become sentient means anything, not because you don't feel like dealing with the consequences of your actions.
And wah, wah, wah, you're a woman and the whole burden of reproduction falls on you, wah. Yeah, it does. Deal with it. You knew that before you contemplated having sex so I don't feel sorry for you. Everyone has their own cross to bear.
Hell, I support mandatory sterilization (both genders) for child abuse (including neglect, bad parenting, etc). I certainly am not going to be swayed by some neo-hippie, gaian, right-to-my-uterus argument. To paraphrase a well-known example, "Your right to bear childrens stops where the welfare of those children starts."
What they "invented" was the freaking use of a filesystem for reading and writing files. That's the whole fucking point of a filesystem. Their "technology" to accomplish this was a filesystem and a file cache. Neither of which they invented, or used in a new way.
You could do this in DOS, on a 386, with SmartDrv installed. The only "new" aspect of this is the interface, the way they present one file as being "live", despite being just a file like all others. And this is precisely what they can't patent - an idea without a technology behind it.
You might as well patent using frames to display one webpage inside another for the purpose of listing TV shows, despite it being exactly what frames were invented to do.
Some. It's wordier than Tolkein and the plot isn't as good.
Yes, I realize that while there is an obvious way to do it, they could have found a non-obvious way and Replay could have copied them. But really, is that likely? Or did both companies just come up with the first way of doing it and just happen to pick the same one because it's obvious?
Tivo's patent talks about how video is stored in discrete blocks, and how there's a block counter that indicates which cache block to play, and how fast-forward involves moving this counter forward, etc.
It sounds like a lawyer-ese way of talking about the benefits of a caching filesystem and what file pointers and block-based storage are.
They had one good idea, that I saw, of storing a time code with each frame, presumably so that you could binary search through the file for the right time instead of linear-search, but that's not only a fairly obvious way to go about it (considering they were obfuscating the format anyway) but it's not a difficult problem.
I really don't see anything in there that truly warrants a patent.
Congratulations on finding something obvious in hindsight
Do you need a course in reading comprehension? It was obvious in the 70s! Filesystems with read/write caches aren't new. MPEG isn't new. Not by a long shot.
What did they invent? Go through the patent and print out one claim that is 1) requried and 2) non-obvious when the patent was filed.
Boeing also can't spend forever perfecting their planes before they are released
But that's not our problem. If Boeing can't make a good product they're going to go out of business. Why does the patent office get to do a crappy job and stay running?
The patent office bitches a lot more than you think about Congress taking their money for other matters
Have they considered a work stoppage? (You know, like a strike) Or perhaps just doing a decent job on each patent and letting political pressure from the companies involved spur congress into giving them a larger budget?
Their whining carries no weight. I've quit a job where I was given an impossible task and told by the boss to make it look good and sign off on it. I'm married and have the same bills that everyone else does. If they haven't make a real stand, they're not serious enough.
How is this not a legal issue? The law is written and interpreted in a certain way
This isn't a legal matter because it's not in court. It's an idle threat until then. The fitness of their patent has yet to be shown, it was granted but that doesn't mean anything other than a license to abuse the courts.... wherein said media cache maintains an indication of a next block to be presented to a decoding process...
Wow, like a file-system cache maintains an indication of which blocks on disk correspond to the data in the cache.... wherein random access to said stream is achieved by moving a current block indicator to another block in said media cache...
Wow, like you keep a pointer within a file, and "random access" is indicated by pointing to another block.... wherein each block within said stream is marked with a Presentation Time Stamp (PTS)... said media cache finds a block containing a PTS which is closest to that requested by said buffer controller.
Wow, so each frame has a time associated with it and they can jump by time. VBR MPEGs have existed longer than Tivo and devices (hard and software) have been able to jump a specified number of frames into the file.
... wherein a forward/reverse function is implemented by moving a current block indicator forward/reverse through said media cache by one block for each event generated by a stream clock;
Wow, so forward moves a pointer (block indicator) *FORWARD* by one, and the opposite for reverse... Amazing. If only this wasn't blindingly obvious.... wherein said underlying information stream is composed of a plurality of discrete blocks of data.
It was obvious when they said it before, but saying it again, that's the novel part.
Face it, they write a file to disk from the MPEG encoder, tagging the keyframes with a time so that they can find the desired spot when a binary search (I imagine). They then read from a file, perhaps the one being written, and play the data (discrete chunks of it) to the output. They can also seek through these streams based on the time codes. That's it. They spend a lot more words describing it, but it's not a hard task and most of the caching is done by the OS.
Perhaps unfortunately, we don't reward the marketers who come up with the good idea for a device, we only reward the engineers who make it happen.
It could turn out that putting a sno-cone machine into a computer is a killer idea, but it's the engineer who solves the hard problems in doing so who gets a patent, not the guy who convinced customers to buy one.
Nobody is arguing that Tivo was the first mass-market commercial device to do what it does (and perhaps an unqualified first) but if all they did (essentially) was put a Linux PC into a little box with an MPEG encoder, they don't deserve a patent for it.
They'll get one though, you pretty much can't fail to get a patent if you have a qualified lawyer draft the application. If it was deserved, and if it will stand in court are seperate questions.
North-American politicians have strongly resisted giving up bribes (oh sorry, donations) specifically because they make tons of money off of companies who want things like bad patent law.
If we could get donations banned we might have a shot at everything else. Until then though, it's all about the money.
Did they market something novel and useful, or did they invent a novel and useful technology to make their device function?
They should only get the patent if the technology involved is new. If they're simply the first people to think of using a HD in an embedded device instead of a spool of tape (or whatever) they don't deserve the idea because reading and writing to the same file (or different files) is something computers have been doing for years. And any engineer who was asked how to do this could have told them how.
Their competitors somehow came up with the same technology (or Tivo wouldn't be threatening to sue). Did this happen because all their engineers invented the same non-obvious technology, or was it just really obvious once you use an embedded computer?
You make the fundamental mistake of discussing patents though. Expecting that because a company was the first to market with a feature that the feature deserves a patent. We (unfortunately?) don't protect good marketing ideas, just technical ones. You can't patent selling ice to eskimos and if you start, I can copy you. You can patent any devices you invented to aid your business though - as long as a skilled professional in the ice transportation wouldn't have found your device trivial at the time you patented it.
You say that the idea of playing the "live tv" from a file is non-obvious, but I contend that it's the only reasonable way to do it on a computer.
In any application where bandwidth isn't a concern (if bandwidth is a concern special buffering and bandwidth-minimization tools are often used) you download a file. The local file viewer can play any existing file, or the downloading one, without any hassle.
This may have been new to TV, and it might not have even been implemented in other PVRs, but it's going to be obvious to any computer programmer who is told "we want the ability to pause live TV".
I think your world of "economic reality" is the fantasy world. Boeing can't decide that five years is long enough to work on a plane and release it, expecting it to pass testing and sell, just because they need to release a plane to make money. If it doesn't work, they can't sell it. That's the painful economic reality; in the marketplace you don't get the luxury of releasing a product when you could use the money, you need to make sure it functions at least as well as is claimed on the box.
If patents are so important to the economy you'd better believe that the government would give the PTO more money if they announced that they'd be falling three years behind for every year worked.
That simply is not the way that the law is written.
The law was written with the assumption that patents would be inspected before being granted.
Besides, this isn't a legal issue. Tivo is trying to cash in an claiming their patent is valid without actually going to court. Like so many companies, they're using the US legal system as a threat. If they want any respect from the industry and from stockholders, they had better provide more evidence that they've got a patent that they expect to stand up in court.
Otherwise we'll right them off as the company that patented a file-cache, with only thirty years of prior art. (Oh yeah, this is a file cache "for audio-visual data", I'm sure it's new. Toss in "over a digital network" for that cool.com feel!)
Yeah yeah, they don't have all the aspects of the Tivo patent. But are those aspects which a skilled professional at that time would not have been able to easily implement?
Simply being first to market with a specific feature does not entitle one to a patent on that feature.
What claims do you think are so worthy of a patent? What do you think a skilled electrical engineer or computer programmer would not have thought was obvious when the patent was filed?
Remember, patents aren't granted for the good of the companies. Patents are granted for the good of society - we benefit by encouraging companies to share the fruits of the research. We do not benefit from granting restrictive monopolies on trivial extensions of common knowledge.
How about you take a course in goddamned reading comprehension, you fucking moron.
Just because you have an idea first does not mean you deserve a patent on it. A patent is supposed to be granted for a method. A non-obvious method at that.
You can't even patent really cool ideas, like cures for cancer, or glow monkeys. You can only patent the specific method used, such as splicing a specific gene into the monkey, or leaving them in nuclear reactors.
Please try to follow along. You're holding up the class.
How handy. I don't have time to do my job so I'm going to do a half-assed version.
How about they simply let patents pile up and spend the appropriate ammount of time on them? That way they wouldn't let crap patents through and stick legitimate businesses with the costs of fighting patent spam.
If patents actually meant something then people might believe Tivo. Unfortunately, junk patents are trivial to obtain and if you want to be believed you need to show some evidence that your patent isn't on the most obvious method.
Given that a PVR is something you can do pretty easily in software, what's the chance that Tivo invented some amazing way to do this and their competitors stumbled on the same non-trivial, non-obvious way to do it?
Bah. Patents were a bad idea. Anything that doesn't allow independent discovery is fucking retarded.
There's nothing you can do, unless you can afford to buy a politician. You think they care what people think? Not unless you can keep them in office long enough to collect more bribes. And unfortunately, large cash infusions are better at that than any campaigning you might do.
What will happen though is that real companies, ones that actually invent things, will realize that the flood of crap patents is dragging down the value of their valid patents, and they'll be the means of change. Not for anything that serves the people, but for something that helps the companies in a different way.
And when, in the last ten years, has a US patent examiner actually investigated patents? The system is a joke. You can patent anything and it's up to the courts to straighten it out - to determine if your patent is worth anything.
What proof does Tivo offer that their patent isn't trivial? What claim goes beyond "write to one file, read from another (possible the same) file. Let the OS handle buffering."
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You'd think that professional apps have years of UI experience, but they probably just used their early market share to convince everyone that what they're doing is right. (btw, AutoCAD is probably the worst example of this... Ugh.)
:)
I haven't met a single graphic artist who has liked the way Photoshop tool pallettes (layer properties, etc) roll up. They're a pain at the top of the screen so you put them at the side, but they roll up, not sideways... Ugh.
Photoshop also doesn't have a good way of exposing a commonly used sub-menu, like Gimp does with tear-off menus.
And, my pet peeve, Photoshop doesn't let you scroll a maximized picture past the edge of the picture. This would be handy for maximizing a photo (as I usually do when editing) and moving the left or right edges to the center to work on. It would also make it easier to drag a selection box and get the exact corner. You can do this if you window the photo and drag the window edges out, but then you've got the extra UI-cruft of the window title-bar, the dragable edges, etc.
Photoshop (for Windows) is intuitive, for a Windows (tm) user, but not as intuitive for a Mac user, or an old Amiga user, or an X-Windows user. Not that they're in the wrong, just that what is intuitive for you isn't intuitive for other people. Personally I find the Mac model the best, though I rarely use a Mac and didn't learn on one, it just seems to make more sense. It has an interface that looks like Gimp, but where all the pallette windows and such have just one toolbar icon. You don't have to futz with the MDI inanity, but you don't have sixteen toolbar icons either.
Maybe you just don't understand that the answer to one question is not the answer to all questions.
You go and ask one of these experts if it's as easy for a heroin junkie to kick the habit as for a smoker. Go ahead.
Way to ignore the rest of the post too. Pesky troll.
then why do we have to bend over backwards to ensure they are equal?
I had asked a question about what you meant because your original comment was factually inaccurate. There are, and were, laws preventing women from even trying out for certain jobs.
If I never let you take the SATs I can point to your lack of a passing grade as an example of your inability to succeed, but it's pretty meaningless. If however I let you test and you fail (or succeed), you've demonstrated your own level of compotence.
Yeah, it's anecdotal only, and it flies in the face of what everyone in the field says. You're wasting my time...
Yap yap yap. If "everyone" in the field says something that's obviously wrong, then either 1) it's not everyone who says it, 2) everyone in the field is wrong (possible in soft-science fields ruled by fashion, such as psychology), or 3) you're asking the wrong question. I imagine the problem is #3, that you're asking the wrong question.
If your question is, "if I mainline 1mg of nicotine, and 1mg of heroin, which will be more addictive?" You might be told that the nicotine is more addictive.
If you ask the more reasonable question of, "If after a normal pattern of abuse (2 packs / day or 1 "hit" / day) for a period of time, will I find it easier to quit (and stay off) of heroin or nicotine, with a lack of social/legal pressure?" You'll be told the painfully obvious - that anyone with will-power can kick smokes without missing work and without painful medical problems, but to do the same with heroin is much, much harder.
intense pain
Yeah, why you then and not any of the other smokers I've seen go cold-turkey?
Maybe it wasn't all that bad and you were just cranky? Hmmm.
If cigarettes were illegal? [...] Because it's a felony to be caught doing this, so people tend not to do this in public [...] Because it's legal. [...] Because it's legal.
Exactly. That's why it's so easy to start smoking again. Because you can just light up, because so many other people do, and because you don't risk financial or social ruin by doing so.
The fact that they do not claim to be downloading video might not be relevant, if the court decides that any form of saving incoming video (from a packet-switched digital network, or from an analog television broadcast, etc) is the same, for purposes of this patent. Indeed, we see Tivo-type devices in all these situations and I'm sure Tivo intends their patent to cover all these uses.
And it's also not true that every claim must be duplicated for a new implementation to be found infringing, or that every claim must be disproven/shown to be obvious/etc for the patent to be overturned.
Certain claims describe the meat of the patent, and indeed a judge may rule that a product infringes on a patent even if it only infringes on one or two claims. This means though, that judges to examine patents in a piecemeal fashion in order to judge their validity. They frequently assume that one type of network (for example) is equivalent to another, unless an expert witness can testify that for the purposes of the patent, there is a difference.
In my opinion, based on the type of patent decisions I've seen, the way that Tivo gets the video signal is irrelevant and a judge will ignore it. The meat of the patent is what they do with the video, how the index it, how they control the flow, and so forth.
The claims that will decide the validity of their patents are the ones that talk about adding time codes to video frames, and certain cache issues, to make sure that video seems live. Of course, Tivo will try to play down the specifics in order to make the patent broader, but this is a delicate game because if they make it too broad the judge understands that all implementations are fundamentaly the same because it's simply the obvious way to do thing.
I think you get your understanding of patents from reading snippets of patent law. Not bad, but a little one-sided. Read case transcriptions and read summaries of judgements and you'll see how judges actually evaluate the validity. Much like the difference between criminal law and how a beat cop applies it.
Intelligent people have long realized that women have always had as equal a chance as is possible.
The only way to make this remotely true it to assume you mean 'ensured [that women...]'. Otherwise, you have to admit that there have been rules which arbitrarily state that women need not apply, despite qualifications.
And yet the NIDA--the science wing of the drug warrior establishment--says that tobacco is the more addictive drug, at least when measured using dependence as the criteria. And it isn't just NIDA that thinks so.
Well, they're wrong. I mean, when they say something that contradictory to observed fact... This may be anecdotal, but I've never seen severe detox reactions from people quitting smoking. I've seen the one heroin reaction described above, in less than scientific terms, and I've seen videos of other detox cases from morphine which I admit isn't the same as heroin, but is supposed to be similar in addiction. Morphine can be a fatal reaction, and it's supposedly always very painful.
Now, the numbers of recidivists probably indicates that tobacco is harder to kick, but how many people's families are going to hold an intervention, or kidnap them to detox, if they start smoking again? How many times do you go to the bar and have everyone around you shooting up? Smoking is still socially acceptable, especially in lower-income settings. Nobody ever lost their kids or job because they smoke.
May not have been possible, as the chances are great the Israelis would have been working from passport lists or the like (if the theory is true.)
Are you implying that they set up the WTC incident, or that they simply had advance knowledge of some terrorist attack?
In a truly free country you'd even be able to donate to those nice policemen, even in the middle of being investigated or arrested! Wouldn't that be nice?
As I stated before, just because it is technically possible to create a functional equivelant at the time of filing
It's not that it was merely technically possible, it EXISTED! In the late 80s I could download very low quality (bandwidth limits on my 19.2 modem) video and play it while it downloaded. That's all this Tivo patent covers, though it's stretched to make it look advanced.
All the technology to let you view an incoming media stream was already here, and being used to do this. I had Telix open downloading a file, and used DesqView to switch to a dos prompt and used an mpeg viewer to view the file. This, plus a user interface, is what a Tivo is. It's *NOT* revolutionary.
Yes, I'm sure it's got a valid patent. Whoop-de-fucking-do. Everyone and his dog can get a valid patent, on the wheel if they wish, by having a lawyer pad a description out to twenty-seven claims including the terms digital, network, and packet. The validity of the patent is quite another matter and the courts have a much stricter view than the MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS which you are harping on about. Yes, I'm sure you could have a device that everyone would agree is novel that consisted of nothing more than two off-the-shelf products and some duct-tape, but in the other 99.997% of the time, that's not good enough, at the end of a long painful trial.
All this patent is good for, and I'm sure all it's intended for, is to put up a good enough show that a judge won't pitch the case for not having any merit. This lets Tivo have a multi-million dollar stick with which to scare their rivals, because any case that doesn't get pitched out of court can be drawn out for years and with temporary injunctions and continual delays, can bankrupt any one-product company.
And, that's why I'm spending time explaining to people that this patent, while valid by the letter of the law, will be thrown out if and when it ever does go through this trial. Right now Tivo is playing this in the court of public opinion, wanting to scare the stock-holders of the other companies into pushing for an early settlement. If these stockholders see your posts, where you gush over this patent, they might actually believe that Tivo stands a chance in court and push for an early settlement - one that gives Tivo money they don't deserve for a patent on the only freaking obvious way to implement this. However, if nobody is impressed by Tivo's little show they'll slick off with their little piece of paper and let the competition compete on merit.
Oh, I see, in order to have an opinion, I *must* write a document detailing where every one of their methods came from and a philosophical treatise on why they'd consider combining this method instead of that one?
Listen. PCs could do *exectly* what a Tivo could, except for the realtime MPEG encoding (that took an add-on card) over ten years ago. I installed video editing systems for a while and I remember being able to edit the low-res on-disk video while it was still back-ground converting the rest of the video, a long process.
That accomplished everything they've claimed their patent does. They may use a slightly different method, with a cache that also stores time codes, but that doesn't mean it deserves a patent. Not only must a patent be novel, etc, etc, but it must be useful. Doing the same thing but with a different file-format, or with the data munged in a different way, isn't a useful change. It's an implementation detail. It might be an implementation detail that everyone in the same field will copy for some reason, but if it's a trivial change, it's not patent-worthy.
Why don't you actually do something useful and read the patent and tell me what part you think IS patent worthy. Surely there must be something you can point to and say it's not bleeding obvious.
And as for combined in a new way, that's being abused left and right. That's why we got a rash on late-90s patents that take an existing process (transfer digital data, etc1) that tack on "over a packet-switched network" when the packet-switched network is an OS-level detail that can be swapped out for any other type of network. While it might fulfill the letter of the requirements for unique-ness and originality, it's an obvious abuse and would be stopped if the patent office worked.
It is an invention in the same way that gluing a wireless networking card to a mousetrap does make a new device, but it's not invention in the sense of advancing the state of the art. You can't patent a mousetrap that acts as a wifi hotspot, but you can patent the fact that your wifi hotspot is connected to the mousetrap with Gizmo X.
I fear that Tivo is patenting the set of features, not the methods behind them. Reading some of their patent encourages this view as most of their claims talk about what are essentially pointers into cache, and how cache blocks point to disk blocks, and how video data is in discrete blocks, etc. It's essentially describing how a PC would play an MPEG movie while downloading it from the net. While they *may* have been the first people to do this, they don't deserve a patent on the common and obvious applications of an OS, filesystem, drive cache, and video compression format.
The only "innovation" I saw was in time-coding the video keyframes to allow seeking by time instead of number of bytes. Handy, but that's only one aspect of their claim, and it seems to be what you'd do if the boss said "We need to be able to skip 30 seconds, not 30x29.7(?) frames." You'd add a time field, maybe as an index, maybe as a field in the frame. This aspect might be patentable, but it was only one claims among a ton that talked about basic OS stuff.
So, perhaps the Tivo-like companies reverse-engineered (or copied the patent application) of a Tivo in handling some basic stuff like this, or maybe it was just so simple that they came up with the same answers. How many ways are there to download in the background and play the same file?
This is a basic problem with patents though, they don't allow for independent discovery. And if you think about it, if you and I both come up with the idea ourselves, how do I deserve royalties from your work because I happened to file a patent first? It's not like you got the benefit of reading my patent and simply following a recipe. (Which is the intended use of patents - less development costs in trade for paying royalties. Not complete ownership of a function via an overly-broad method description.)
The "women are equal" is taken by intelligent people to mean "women deserve an equal chance". Some men can't be firefighters because they can't pass the tests, but we give them a chance to try. Why shouldn't women get a chance?
My issue is that if we objectively determine that a fightfighter needs to carry 100lbs of gear, that men and women should have to do this. If we simply want people in the top 95% for fitness, tests should reflect this.
As for the drugs, I think you overstate the adictiveness of tobacco. Much of the reason why it's hard to quit is the social acceptability. There just aren't many immediate consequences for smokers. Heroin, from everything I've seen, is much harder to quit. I've seen (in the hallway of my old apt in the bad part of town) a heroin addict writhing in pain and screaming about ants on his head. I've also seen my friend who smoked two packs a day fidget endlessly and get mildly cranky because he hadn't had a cigarette in three days. Slight difference there, imho.
But, I don't believe that prohibition works - for stopping abuses, or general access. Even if I did, I think people have a right to run (or ruin) their own lives, and I dislike nanny states. The war on drugs is pretty much broken in every way and the goal isn't a desirable one.
As for the Israeli conspiracy, I've seen how secrets leak. I also know of Israelis who are anti-Israel (policy-wise) and who I think would speak out against this. I don't buy that there could be a large and fairly open (all the employees of these companies) conspiracy like this that the press didn't have conclusive proof of a few days later. Besides, a lot of New York Jews died (presumably with many family connections to Israel) and anyone warning Israelis would have wanted to warn these people, and there would likely be people in the group that was warned passing the warning on to friends and relatives in the new York Jewish population at the WTC.
And, to finish on a conspiritorial note, anyone who masterminded the deaths of thousands (up to 10k, had the buildings collapsed sooner) would likely be willing to sacrifice some of their countrymen in order to have increased justification. If it was a setup they wouldn't have warned these companies, they'd be making martyrs - a very handy thing to have.
That's a pretty lame argument. Nobody cares if you feel like raising your child once you've had it, so nobody is going to care if you feel like having it. Your opinions don't matter one bit.
Everyone, except selfish twits, is focused on what is best for the infant and what the infant would want. I'm pro-abortion, but only because I don't think the potential of a fetus to become sentient means anything, not because you don't feel like dealing with the consequences of your actions.
And wah, wah, wah, you're a woman and the whole burden of reproduction falls on you, wah. Yeah, it does. Deal with it. You knew that before you contemplated having sex so I don't feel sorry for you. Everyone has their own cross to bear.
Hell, I support mandatory sterilization (both genders) for child abuse (including neglect, bad parenting, etc). I certainly am not going to be swayed by some neo-hippie, gaian, right-to-my-uterus argument. To paraphrase a well-known example, "Your right to bear childrens stops where the welfare of those children starts."
What they "invented" was the freaking use of a filesystem for reading and writing files. That's the whole fucking point of a filesystem. Their "technology" to accomplish this was a filesystem and a file cache. Neither of which they invented, or used in a new way.
You could do this in DOS, on a 386, with SmartDrv installed. The only "new" aspect of this is the interface, the way they present one file as being "live", despite being just a file like all others. And this is precisely what they can't patent - an idea without a technology behind it.
You might as well patent using frames to display one webpage inside another for the purpose of listing TV shows, despite it being exactly what frames were invented to do.
Some. It's wordier than Tolkein and the plot isn't as good.
Yes, I realize that while there is an obvious way to do it, they could have found a non-obvious way and Replay could have copied them. But really, is that likely? Or did both companies just come up with the first way of doing it and just happen to pick the same one because it's obvious?
Tivo's patent talks about how video is stored in discrete blocks, and how there's a block counter that indicates which cache block to play, and how fast-forward involves moving this counter forward, etc.
It sounds like a lawyer-ese way of talking about the benefits of a caching filesystem and what file pointers and block-based storage are.
They had one good idea, that I saw, of storing a time code with each frame, presumably so that you could binary search through the file for the right time instead of linear-search, but that's not only a fairly obvious way to go about it (considering they were obfuscating the format anyway) but it's not a difficult problem.
I really don't see anything in there that truly warrants a patent.
Congratulations on finding something obvious in hindsight
Do you need a course in reading comprehension? It was obvious in the 70s! Filesystems with read/write caches aren't new. MPEG isn't new. Not by a long shot.
What did they invent? Go through the patent and print out one claim that is 1) requried and 2) non-obvious when the patent was filed.
Boeing also can't spend forever perfecting their planes before they are released
... wherein said media cache maintains an indication of a next block to be presented to a decoding process ...
... wherein random access to said stream is achieved by moving a current block indicator to another block in said media cache ...
... wherein each block within said stream is marked with a Presentation Time Stamp (PTS) ... said media cache finds a block containing a PTS which is closest to that requested by said buffer controller.
... wherein a forward/reverse function is implemented by moving a current block indicator forward/reverse through said media cache by one block for each event generated by a stream clock;
... wherein said underlying information stream is composed of a plurality of discrete blocks of data.
But that's not our problem. If Boeing can't make a good product they're going to go out of business. Why does the patent office get to do a crappy job and stay running?
The patent office bitches a lot more than you think about Congress taking their money for other matters
Have they considered a work stoppage? (You know, like a strike) Or perhaps just doing a decent job on each patent and letting political pressure from the companies involved spur congress into giving them a larger budget?
Their whining carries no weight. I've quit a job where I was given an impossible task and told by the boss to make it look good and sign off on it. I'm married and have the same bills that everyone else does. If they haven't make a real stand, they're not serious enough.
How is this not a legal issue? The law is written and interpreted in a certain way
This isn't a legal matter because it's not in court. It's an idle threat until then. The fitness of their patent has yet to be shown, it was granted but that doesn't mean anything other than a license to abuse the courts.
Wow, like a file-system cache maintains an indication of which blocks on disk correspond to the data in the cache.
Wow, like you keep a pointer within a file, and "random access" is indicated by pointing to another block.
Wow, so each frame has a time associated with it and they can jump by time. VBR MPEGs have existed longer than Tivo and devices (hard and software) have been able to jump a specified number of frames into the file.
Wow, so forward moves a pointer (block indicator) *FORWARD* by one, and the opposite for reverse... Amazing. If only this wasn't blindingly obvious.
It was obvious when they said it before, but saying it again, that's the novel part.
Face it, they write a file to disk from the MPEG encoder, tagging the keyframes with a time so that they can find the desired spot when a binary search (I imagine). They then read from a file, perhaps the one being written, and play the data (discrete chunks of it) to the output. They can also seek through these streams based on the time codes. That's it. They spend a lot more words describing it, but it's not a hard task and most of the caching is done by the OS.
Perhaps unfortunately, we don't reward the marketers who come up with the good idea for a device, we only reward the engineers who make it happen.
It could turn out that putting a sno-cone machine into a computer is a killer idea, but it's the engineer who solves the hard problems in doing so who gets a patent, not the guy who convinced customers to buy one.
Nobody is arguing that Tivo was the first mass-market commercial device to do what it does (and perhaps an unqualified first) but if all they did (essentially) was put a Linux PC into a little box with an MPEG encoder, they don't deserve a patent for it.
They'll get one though, you pretty much can't fail to get a patent if you have a qualified lawyer draft the application. If it was deserved, and if it will stand in court are seperate questions.
North-American politicians have strongly resisted giving up bribes (oh sorry, donations) specifically because they make tons of money off of companies who want things like bad patent law.
If we could get donations banned we might have a shot at everything else. Until then though, it's all about the money.
Did they market something novel and useful, or did they invent a novel and useful technology to make their device function?
They should only get the patent if the technology involved is new. If they're simply the first people to think of using a HD in an embedded device instead of a spool of tape (or whatever) they don't deserve the idea because reading and writing to the same file (or different files) is something computers have been doing for years. And any engineer who was asked how to do this could have told them how.
Their competitors somehow came up with the same technology (or Tivo wouldn't be threatening to sue). Did this happen because all their engineers invented the same non-obvious technology, or was it just really obvious once you use an embedded computer?
You make the fundamental mistake of discussing patents though. Expecting that because a company was the first to market with a feature that the feature deserves a patent. We (unfortunately?) don't protect good marketing ideas, just technical ones. You can't patent selling ice to eskimos and if you start, I can copy you. You can patent any devices you invented to aid your business though - as long as a skilled professional in the ice transportation wouldn't have found your device trivial at the time you patented it.
You say that the idea of playing the "live tv" from a file is non-obvious, but I contend that it's the only reasonable way to do it on a computer.
In any application where bandwidth isn't a concern (if bandwidth is a concern special buffering and bandwidth-minimization tools are often used) you download a file. The local file viewer can play any existing file, or the downloading one, without any hassle.
This may have been new to TV, and it might not have even been implemented in other PVRs, but it's going to be obvious to any computer programmer who is told "we want the ability to pause live TV".
I think your world of "economic reality" is the fantasy world. Boeing can't decide that five years is long enough to work on a plane and release it, expecting it to pass testing and sell, just because they need to release a plane to make money. If it doesn't work, they can't sell it. That's the painful economic reality; in the marketplace you don't get the luxury of releasing a product when you could use the money, you need to make sure it functions at least as well as is claimed on the box.
.com feel!)
If patents are so important to the economy you'd better believe that the government would give the PTO more money if they announced that they'd be falling three years behind for every year worked.
That simply is not the way that the law is written.
The law was written with the assumption that patents would be inspected before being granted.
Besides, this isn't a legal issue. Tivo is trying to cash in an claiming their patent is valid without actually going to court. Like so many companies, they're using the US legal system as a threat. If they want any respect from the industry and from stockholders, they had better provide more evidence that they've got a patent that they expect to stand up in court.
Otherwise we'll right them off as the company that patented a file-cache, with only thirty years of prior art. (Oh yeah, this is a file cache "for audio-visual data", I'm sure it's new. Toss in "over a digital network" for that cool
Yeah yeah, they don't have all the aspects of the Tivo patent. But are those aspects which a skilled professional at that time would not have been able to easily implement?
Simply being first to market with a specific feature does not entitle one to a patent on that feature.
What claims do you think are so worthy of a patent? What do you think a skilled electrical engineer or computer programmer would not have thought was obvious when the patent was filed?
Remember, patents aren't granted for the good of the companies. Patents are granted for the good of society - we benefit by encouraging companies to share the fruits of the research. We do not benefit from granting restrictive monopolies on trivial extensions of common knowledge.
How about you take a course in goddamned reading comprehension, you fucking moron.
Just because you have an idea first does not mean you deserve a patent on it. A patent is supposed to be granted for a method. A non-obvious method at that.
You can't even patent really cool ideas, like cures for cancer, or glow monkeys. You can only patent the specific method used, such as splicing a specific gene into the monkey, or leaving them in nuclear reactors.
Please try to follow along. You're holding up the class.
How handy. I don't have time to do my job so I'm going to do a half-assed version.
How about they simply let patents pile up and spend the appropriate ammount of time on them? That way they wouldn't let crap patents through and stick legitimate businesses with the costs of fighting patent spam.
If patents actually meant something then people might believe Tivo. Unfortunately, junk patents are trivial to obtain and if you want to be believed you need to show some evidence that your patent isn't on the most obvious method.
Given that a PVR is something you can do pretty easily in software, what's the chance that Tivo invented some amazing way to do this and their competitors stumbled on the same non-trivial, non-obvious way to do it?
Bah. Patents were a bad idea. Anything that doesn't allow independent discovery is fucking retarded.
There's nothing you can do, unless you can afford to buy a politician. You think they care what people think? Not unless you can keep them in office long enough to collect more bribes. And unfortunately, large cash infusions are better at that than any campaigning you might do.
What will happen though is that real companies, ones that actually invent things, will realize that the flood of crap patents is dragging down the value of their valid patents, and they'll be the means of change. Not for anything that serves the people, but for something that helps the companies in a different way.
And when, in the last ten years, has a US patent examiner actually investigated patents? The system is a joke. You can patent anything and it's up to the courts to straighten it out - to determine if your patent is worth anything.
What proof does Tivo offer that their patent isn't trivial? What claim goes beyond "write to one file, read from another (possible the same) file. Let the OS handle buffering."