Google is buying the buildings and most of the Summa Mill site [...] the space is most likely going to serve as a data center
Shows what the media knows. Haven't they heard of GMail Paper? Here's the spiel from Google:
Everyone loves Gmail. But not everyone loves email, or the digital era. What ever happened to stamps, filing cabinets, and the mailman? Well, you asked for it, and it's here. We're bringing it back.
A New Button Now in Gmail, you can request a physical copy of any message with the click of a button, and we'll send it to you in the mail.
Simplicity Squared Google will print all messages instantly and prepare them for delivery. Allow 2-4 business days for a parcel to arrive via post.
Total Control A stack of Gmail Paper arrives in a box at your doorstep, and it's yours to keep forever. You can read it, sort it, search it, touch it. Or even move it to the trash--the real trash. (Recycling is encouraged.)
Keep it Secret, Keep it Safe Google takes privacy very seriously. But once your email is physically in your hands, it's as secure as you want to make it.
Is it free? Yes. The cost of postage is offset with the help of relevant, targeted, unobtrusive advertisements, which will appear on the back of your Gmail Paper prints in red, bold, 36 pt Helvetica. No pop-ups, no flashy animations--these are physically impossible in the paper medium.
With Google's ad revenue suffering due to economic conditions, I imagine they need this new source of revenue very badly. For those who are curious, Wikipedia has a great article detailing the history of this new venture by Google.
Am I the only one who wonders if the design of this contest doesn't create an unbalanced playing field? It's often struck me that if the computers are "Pwn2Own", then the participants are going to focus more heavily on "pwning" the system they want to take home with them. e.g. Given a choice between a Vaio running Windows and a MacBook Pro running OS X, I know I would rather have the MacBook Pro. Thus I'm not going to try as hard to crack the Windows system because the system I REALLY want is the Mac.
Maybe it's just me. Maybe there are an equal number of equally talented individuals who's only disagreement is the preference of their machine. But somehow I don't think it's that easy.
"They don't have the right to read a book out loud," said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. "That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law."
I'm sitting here thinking that no lawyer could possibly be dumb enough to advise their client with this legal theory. Even if we accept this concept at face value (which it does have some value related to public performances and derivitive works), fair use throws a huge monkey wrench into any potential lawsuits. Courts have repeatedly held up that once you are sold a copy of a product, you are entititled to privately do whatever you want with it. That includes space and time shifting. Text to speech is just another type of space shifting. i.e. Moving from one medium to another.
Then I realized that there's no way Mr. Aiken is serious about these threats. He's posturing in an attempt to force Amazon to rethink the text-to-speech in light of their audio book business. This becomes especially clear based on the response from an Amazon spokesperson:
An Amazon spokesman noted the text-reading feature depends on text-to-speech technology, and that listeners won't confuse it with the audiobook experience. Amazon owns Audible, a leading audiobook provider.
So never fear! The world isn't quite upside down yet. This is just business as usual. Someone's trying to play a weak hand and hopes the other side folds. (Good luck with that.)
C# and.NET were born out of the COOL project. COOL was a engineering response to Sun's lawsuit over Microsoft's attempts to extend Java in incompatible ways. Microsoft Research was never involved in the development of.NET.
Here's the key issue: There's little evidence that anything useful has come out of Microsoft Research. Ever. They fund a lot of pie in the sky projects, with the resulting technology appearing to sit on the shelf indefinitely. A very odd situation for a technology company.
I've stated this before and I'll state it again. I often think that Microsoft Research is a way for MS to keep the top researchers away from the competition. Microsoft themselves doesn't have anything to do with them, so they simply let them to their research while ignoring their results.
Imagine for a moment if PageRank was developed at Microsoft Research rather than at Stanford? It never would have amounted to anything. In fact, it would be a forgotten paper filed away in CiteSeer.
The center of gravity is shifting away from the traditional, massive operating systems of the past
I don't see how this is "the center of gravity shifting". Rather, the examples given appear to indicate a diversification of Operating systems rather than a general downward trend. e.g. While there may be a smaller OS X revision, the desktop revision gets larger with every release.
Windows 7 is not so much a shrinking OS as it is a recognition that Vista was a mistake. A huge, crufty, useless mistake. Windows 7 cuts back some of the cruft and makes the system usable again. Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to push their embedded Windows for Devices product on the low end. Nothing new there.
Linux distros such as Ubuntu are stripping out functionality, including MySQL, CUPS, and LDAP, to cut footprints in half.
Cutting out MySQL and LDAP make sense. Why install services you don't need on a desktop machine? But why cut out CUPS? CUPS is pretty much the standard for printing these days. Doesn't cutting it seem counterproductive?
I know I don't know it and I see no reason to change that. I'm sure I know more than many people who do say that they know it, but I know enough to know they're wrong.
No, you don't. You are arguing from a position of ignorance. If you had taken the time to learn JS and then made the statement to stay away from it, then you would have the necessary credentials to provide a convincing argument. Or at least relayed the same sentiment from someone who has those credentials. Instead, you managed to type a page-long post about how Javascript looks scary, ergo it is.
Since migrating our UI code to GWT, our development times are faster, we have less bugs and our application actually performs better than it did when the code was in Javascript.
Our development times dropped like a rock. GWT presented as much of a barrier to developing web apps as it did a benefit. So I've made a point to start training my staff to understand and use the Javascript language correctly. This makes them far more productive than the stop-gap solution that GWT provides.
And I hate to break it to you, but you're going to have to deal with the JS eventually. GWT breaks down in a lot of complex situations. Unless you know how to thunk down to the JS level in those situations and write good code, you're going to have a lot of trouble meeting your goals in the future. I'm sure that the Javascript experts on your team are currently covering that gap for you. But how long will they continue to do so? Will they always be available? Will you be as valuable to your employer as JS code becomes more common and you still don't know how to properly work with it?
Funny, I was quite happy with the "Let them die!" The ISO standard is smoke and mirrors, nothing more. Microsoft did not standardize the most important parts, and you can be sure that the platform will continue to evolve in a non-standard direction.
Microsoft doesn't do standards. They monopolize the market, then call it a standard. Ever read the marketing on ActiveX? "An industry standard..." Yeah.
Embrace. Extend. Extinguish. That's the Microsoft credo. "Standards" are the first step. Take a look at Internet Explorer sometime and you can see how it works in practice.
The big win Sun pulled in the 90s was the amazing marketing job of putting Java out there as something you need, want, and are constantly reminded of (for updates, etc). They built up the Java brand brilliantly, and that's going to be hard to dismantle.
That's a rather rosy way of looking at it. In truth, Sun sort of messed up the marketing on a variety of different levels. The only reason why it caught on was that developers had a chance to try it out through Java Applets. (Originally supported through a partnership with Netscape.) Developers who tried the Java platform were so impressed by it (compared to the standard C library of the day) that they lobbied for its use everywhere. In fact, there was an entire news site devoted to Java promotion called JavaLobby. In its day, it handily competed with sites like Slashdot for readers.
Sun (thankfully) wasn't stupid. They took a look at where developers were trying to use Java and started supporting them. Some of the ideas took flight (e.g. servlets) while others floundered (e.g. Java3D). But at the end of the day, Sun managed to produce a superior platform that the vast majority of the market wanted to use.
The only reason why it gets so much criticism today is because other languages and platforms have invested considerable effort in catching up to where Java is today. And even then, it's hard to argue the rich availability of libraries for the Java platform. If you use Java, you are guaranteed to always be able to use the latest and the most obscure technologies. Nothing escapes its roving field of vision.
When Java gets replaced (and I'm sure it will happen eventually), it will not be because of marketing. It will be because the replacement platform yet again turns the entire industry on its head. Love it or hate it, the new technology will make us all step back and think.
Captain's log, stardate 9522.6: I've never trusted Microsoft, and I never will. I could never forgive them for the death of Netscape and countless other companies. It seems to me our mission to support.NET on Linux is problematic at best. McAllister says this could be an historic occasion, and I'd like to believe him, but how on earth can history get past people like me?
Ohhh, yeaaah. I remember this guy. This is the same nitwit who used logic from 1996 to try and convince us all to burn our webapps. I see he's back with even more faulty reasoning.
I guess there's only one thing to say. Slashdot, meet the new John C. Dvorak.
"Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister argues in favor of Mono, asking those among the open source community who have 'variously described Mono as a trap, a kludge, or simply a waste of effort' to look past Miguel de Icaza and Mono's associations with Microsoft and give the open source implementation of.Net a second chance
Ok, sure. I can do that. In fact, I wrote just such a journal entry in mid-07:
It is quite obvious to anyone using the platform that the Mono team is not in bed with Microsoft. In fact, it would seem that the Mono team is explicitly trying to warn you away from.NET technology. Otherwise, why would they make it SO GODDAMN HARD TO DEVELOP FOR?
I think we need multiple distros. (In fact, I once wrote an article to that effect.) However, I also think that we need more focus inside those distros. Rather than being good at being a desktop or being good at being a server, Linux distros tend to try and be all things to all people. Which makes them a jack of all trades, master of none.
What's needed are fundamental operating system components that support the desktop and/or support the server and/or support the supercomputer and/or support the embedded device, etc. It should all be a matter of how the OS is built.
I then went on to explain what I think would need to be done for a successful desktop distro, never once implying that the whole bleeding market should ditch packaging.
Why is everything an either/or with the Linux "community"? Do you understand the choice you espouse or not? Because from where I'm sitting, the Linux community appears to be one of the worst examples of monoculture in the history of software development. "Choice" tends to materialize more as infighting rather than true alternatives with well thought-out advantages/disadvantages.
No offense, but this childish attitude is getting rather old.
However having a packaging system does not prevent software being packaged the way you suggest as well.
Using packages as a method of creating and maintaining the base OS is fine, IMHO. That's what packaging systems were originally designed for. (I made this point in an article I wrote and submitted to Slashdot a few years ago.) Using packages as a method of distributing applications? Not so much. The Unix philosophy has traditionally been that programs become core parts of the OS. This does not jive with modern application distribution. (Thus the creation of/opt in Unix-proper.) This fact does not seem to be seeping through the cloudy thinking in Linux desktop design. Why? I have no bloody idea.
I'm hurt! You think I'd really complain so loudly about television without having already given it the boot?;-)
The only reason we have cable at all is because Comcast gave it to us for free with our Internet package. So we turn it on for the Superbowl and that's it. All other watching of shows or movies is by DVD or iTunes. Watching is strictly controlled and limited.
As an aside, consumer televisions with VGA ports make excellent large-screen monitors...
I'm amazed that among all these replies, no one has considered that my problem might not be so much the sex itself as much as the attitude toward sex? We're talking about commercials that objectify the people and devalue the act itself. Perhaps as a parent, I don't really want my kids to think of sex that way?
And besides. If we start allowing sex everywhere on television, that will soon be the ONLY thing on television. (It's getting pretty close these days.) There's always the desire to pander to the lowest common denominator. As an intelligent species capable of reasoning and critical thinking, we should be making efforts to stimulate our intelligence rather than pandering to our baser instincts.
For those of you who need the cliff notes version (probably the ones who think these commercials are "ok"): I don't want my kids to grow up to be drooling apes.
BSD and Solaris are my preferences, actually. I occasionally poke Linux with a stick, get frustrated, and move on. My views on graphics drivers actually developed during my use of FreeBSD. One of the things I noticed in learning the OS was that all the X subsystems were pointed to system drivers. You didn't run a mouse driver, you pointed X at the OS driver. You didn't run a keyboard driver, you pointed X at the OS driver. So on and so forth.
The concept was so much better and more cohesive, that I've been a proponent of OS-specific drivers ever since. Besides, it's not like OSS operating systems don't share code for drivers.
Oh god please don't do away with package management!
See, this right here is EXACTLY what I'm talking about. Why do you assume that by providing a standardized download solution, you would automatically lose the option of a package system? Did you miss the entire part about where OSS is supposed to be about choice? Why can't package distros coexist with appbundle distros?
Furthermore, why do you suggest unifying package systems? Doesn't that take away choice?
For a community that supposedly prides itself on freedom, freedom seems to be the one thing that Linux users don't get.
As a lawyer, he did have a certain measure of professional authority. He was still a crackpot then, but some people listened to him. Having been disbarred, his professional authority is completely gone. Unless he can convince someone else in authority to proxy for him (like this mythical state rep he claims to have in his pocket) no one is going to listen. So neither should we.
With the Superbowl commercials being what they were this year, I'm surprised anyone noticed the difference. GoDaddy in particular is getting out of hand, though I was not impressed by the Doritos or NBC commercials either. (At least the Conan commercial was just amusing innuendo.) All around, it was a rather embarrassing year to be watching the Superbowl with the family.
Who said anything about patents being bad? The words "information" and "business process" do not jive with what the patent system was intended to be used for. Nor do they happen to cost millions or billions in R&D.
The messed up part about all of this is that it's all caused by an early misinterpretation of technology by courts. There was a case that came up where a patent was filed for a device (a rubberizer, IIRC?) that used computer control to accomplish its innovative task. The judge correctly assessed that the invention as a whole was innovative and granted patent protection.
Unfortunately, the court cases that followed cited that case as precedent for software patents. The judges didn't understand the difference and started granting exceptions carte blanche. Thus we ended up in the screwed up system we have now with no oversight over what is a valid patent and what is not.
Even more messed up is that patent law is okay. It says that patents should be non-obvious, it says that they should have no prior art, etc., etc., etc. Yet technology patents regularly get shoved through the system without any of these checks or balances applied.
The bozos who are defending this messed up violation of the law as legit are nothing more than charlatans who couldn't make an honest living if they tried. Last I checked, many of them even helped tank the world economy in recent news.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey Mods! Don't you think modding a poor guy "Troll" just because he fell for a joke is a little harsh? Be kind, rewind*. (*Your moderation)
Of course it isn't! Didn't you read the Wikipedia article?!?! Obviously it's com-pletely seerious.
Shows what the media knows. Haven't they heard of GMail Paper? Here's the spiel from Google:
With Google's ad revenue suffering due to economic conditions, I imagine they need this new source of revenue very badly. For those who are curious, Wikipedia has a great article detailing the history of this new venture by Google.
Am I the only one who wonders if the design of this contest doesn't create an unbalanced playing field? It's often struck me that if the computers are "Pwn2Own", then the participants are going to focus more heavily on "pwning" the system they want to take home with them. e.g. Given a choice between a Vaio running Windows and a MacBook Pro running OS X, I know I would rather have the MacBook Pro. Thus I'm not going to try as hard to crack the Windows system because the system I REALLY want is the Mac.
Maybe it's just me. Maybe there are an equal number of equally talented individuals who's only disagreement is the preference of their machine. But somehow I don't think it's that easy.
I'm sitting here thinking that no lawyer could possibly be dumb enough to advise their client with this legal theory. Even if we accept this concept at face value (which it does have some value related to public performances and derivitive works), fair use throws a huge monkey wrench into any potential lawsuits. Courts have repeatedly held up that once you are sold a copy of a product, you are entititled to privately do whatever you want with it. That includes space and time shifting. Text to speech is just another type of space shifting. i.e. Moving from one medium to another.
Then I realized that there's no way Mr. Aiken is serious about these threats. He's posturing in an attempt to force Amazon to rethink the text-to-speech in light of their audio book business. This becomes especially clear based on the response from an Amazon spokesperson:
So never fear! The world isn't quite upside down yet. This is just business as usual. Someone's trying to play a weak hand and hopes the other side folds. (Good luck with that.)
C# and .NET were born out of the COOL project. COOL was a engineering response to Sun's lawsuit over Microsoft's attempts to extend Java in incompatible ways. Microsoft Research was never involved in the development of .NET.
Here's the key issue: There's little evidence that anything useful has come out of Microsoft Research. Ever. They fund a lot of pie in the sky projects, with the resulting technology appearing to sit on the shelf indefinitely. A very odd situation for a technology company.
I've stated this before and I'll state it again. I often think that Microsoft Research is a way for MS to keep the top researchers away from the competition. Microsoft themselves doesn't have anything to do with them, so they simply let them to their research while ignoring their results.
Imagine for a moment if PageRank was developed at Microsoft Research rather than at Stanford? It never would have amounted to anything. In fact, it would be a forgotten paper filed away in CiteSeer.
I don't see how this is "the center of gravity shifting". Rather, the examples given appear to indicate a diversification of Operating systems rather than a general downward trend. e.g. While there may be a smaller OS X revision, the desktop revision gets larger with every release.
Windows 7 is not so much a shrinking OS as it is a recognition that Vista was a mistake. A huge, crufty, useless mistake. Windows 7 cuts back some of the cruft and makes the system usable again. Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to push their embedded Windows for Devices product on the low end. Nothing new there.
Cutting out MySQL and LDAP make sense. Why install services you don't need on a desktop machine? But why cut out CUPS? CUPS is pretty much the standard for printing these days. Doesn't cutting it seem counterproductive?
No, you don't. You are arguing from a position of ignorance. If you had taken the time to learn JS and then made the statement to stay away from it, then you would have the necessary credentials to provide a convincing argument. Or at least relayed the same sentiment from someone who has those credentials. Instead, you managed to type a page-long post about how Javascript looks scary, ergo it is.
Our development times dropped like a rock. GWT presented as much of a barrier to developing web apps as it did a benefit. So I've made a point to start training my staff to understand and use the Javascript language correctly. This makes them far more productive than the stop-gap solution that GWT provides.
And I hate to break it to you, but you're going to have to deal with the JS eventually. GWT breaks down in a lot of complex situations. Unless you know how to thunk down to the JS level in those situations and write good code, you're going to have a lot of trouble meeting your goals in the future. I'm sure that the Javascript experts on your team are currently covering that gap for you. But how long will they continue to do so? Will they always be available? Will you be as valuable to your employer as JS code becomes more common and you still don't know how to properly work with it?
Damn. I apparently checked "Post Anonymously" by accident. Please pretend the above post says, "AKAImBatman" on it.
Funny, I was quite happy with the "Let them die!" The ISO standard is smoke and mirrors, nothing more. Microsoft did not standardize the most important parts, and you can be sure that the platform will continue to evolve in a non-standard direction.
Microsoft doesn't do standards. They monopolize the market, then call it a standard. Ever read the marketing on ActiveX? "An industry standard..." Yeah.
Embrace. Extend. Extinguish. That's the Microsoft credo. "Standards" are the first step. Take a look at Internet Explorer sometime and you can see how it works in practice.
Then you are a fool.
Axioms of software design:
1. Algorithmic improvements will always trump optimizing execution speed.
2. Unless there is a hard requirement, development time is more important than raw performance.
3. Hardware is cheaper than developers.
4. A rich and flexible library is more useful and stable than custom coding for performance.
That's a rather rosy way of looking at it. In truth, Sun sort of messed up the marketing on a variety of different levels. The only reason why it caught on was that developers had a chance to try it out through Java Applets. (Originally supported through a partnership with Netscape.) Developers who tried the Java platform were so impressed by it (compared to the standard C library of the day) that they lobbied for its use everywhere. In fact, there was an entire news site devoted to Java promotion called JavaLobby. In its day, it handily competed with sites like Slashdot for readers.
Sun (thankfully) wasn't stupid. They took a look at where developers were trying to use Java and started supporting them. Some of the ideas took flight (e.g. servlets) while others floundered (e.g. Java3D). But at the end of the day, Sun managed to produce a superior platform that the vast majority of the market wanted to use.
The only reason why it gets so much criticism today is because other languages and platforms have invested considerable effort in catching up to where Java is today. And even then, it's hard to argue the rich availability of libraries for the Java platform. If you use Java, you are guaranteed to always be able to use the latest and the most obscure technologies. Nothing escapes its roving field of vision.
When Java gets replaced (and I'm sure it will happen eventually), it will not be because of marketing. It will be because the replacement platform yet again turns the entire industry on its head. Love it or hate it, the new technology will make us all step back and think.
Mod parent up to +11. And I'd like to emphasize learn Javascript. Don't assume you already know it. Because chances are you probably don't.
Captain's log, stardate 9522.6: I've never trusted Microsoft, and I never will. I could never forgive them for the death of Netscape and countless other companies. It seems to me our mission to support .NET on Linux is problematic at best. McAllister says this could be an historic occasion, and I'd like to believe him, but how on earth can history get past people like me?
They're animals. Don't believe them. Don't trust them.
(They're dying)
Let them die!
Sorry, I couldn't resist. I got a kick out of the way you started your post.
Joking aside, mod parent up. :-)
Ohhh, yeaaah. I remember this guy. This is the same nitwit who used logic from 1996 to try and convince us all to burn our webapps. I see he's back with even more faulty reasoning.
I guess there's only one thing to say. Slashdot, meet the new John C. Dvorak.
Ok, sure. I can do that. In fact, I wrote just such a journal entry in mid-07:
It is quite obvious to anyone using the platform that the Mono team is not in bed with Microsoft. In fact, it would seem that the Mono team is explicitly trying to warn you away from .NET technology. Otherwise, why would they make it SO GODDAMN HARD TO DEVELOP FOR?
Read More: A Day Without Mono is like a Day Without a Bullet in my Head
Ooooh. That wasn't positive at all, was it? Huh.
Bull. Here's what I said:
I then went on to explain what I think would need to be done for a successful desktop distro, never once implying that the whole bleeding market should ditch packaging.
Why is everything an either/or with the Linux "community"? Do you understand the choice you espouse or not? Because from where I'm sitting, the Linux community appears to be one of the worst examples of monoculture in the history of software development. "Choice" tends to materialize more as infighting rather than true alternatives with well thought-out advantages/disadvantages.
No offense, but this childish attitude is getting rather old.
Using packages as a method of creating and maintaining the base OS is fine, IMHO. That's what packaging systems were originally designed for. (I made this point in an article I wrote and submitted to Slashdot a few years ago.) Using packages as a method of distributing applications? Not so much. The Unix philosophy has traditionally been that programs become core parts of the OS. This does not jive with modern application distribution. (Thus the creation of /opt in Unix-proper.) This fact does not seem to be seeping through the cloudy thinking in Linux desktop design. Why? I have no bloody idea.
I'm hurt! You think I'd really complain so loudly about television without having already given it the boot? ;-)
The only reason we have cable at all is because Comcast gave it to us for free with our Internet package. So we turn it on for the Superbowl and that's it. All other watching of shows or movies is by DVD or iTunes. Watching is strictly controlled and limited.
As an aside, consumer televisions with VGA ports make excellent large-screen monitors...
I'm amazed that among all these replies, no one has considered that my problem might not be so much the sex itself as much as the attitude toward sex? We're talking about commercials that objectify the people and devalue the act itself. Perhaps as a parent, I don't really want my kids to think of sex that way?
And besides. If we start allowing sex everywhere on television, that will soon be the ONLY thing on television. (It's getting pretty close these days.) There's always the desire to pander to the lowest common denominator. As an intelligent species capable of reasoning and critical thinking, we should be making efforts to stimulate our intelligence rather than pandering to our baser instincts.
For those of you who need the cliff notes version (probably the ones who think these commercials are "ok"): I don't want my kids to grow up to be drooling apes.
BSD and Solaris are my preferences, actually. I occasionally poke Linux with a stick, get frustrated, and move on. My views on graphics drivers actually developed during my use of FreeBSD. One of the things I noticed in learning the OS was that all the X subsystems were pointed to system drivers. You didn't run a mouse driver, you pointed X at the OS driver. You didn't run a keyboard driver, you pointed X at the OS driver. So on and so forth.
The concept was so much better and more cohesive, that I've been a proponent of OS-specific drivers ever since. Besides, it's not like OSS operating systems don't share code for drivers.
See, this right here is EXACTLY what I'm talking about. Why do you assume that by providing a standardized download solution, you would automatically lose the option of a package system? Did you miss the entire part about where OSS is supposed to be about choice? Why can't package distros coexist with appbundle distros?
Furthermore, why do you suggest unifying package systems? Doesn't that take away choice?
For a community that supposedly prides itself on freedom, freedom seems to be the one thing that Linux users don't get.
As a lawyer, he did have a certain measure of professional authority. He was still a crackpot then, but some people listened to him. Having been disbarred, his professional authority is completely gone. Unless he can convince someone else in authority to proxy for him (like this mythical state rep he claims to have in his pocket) no one is going to listen. So neither should we.
With the Superbowl commercials being what they were this year, I'm surprised anyone noticed the difference. GoDaddy in particular is getting out of hand, though I was not impressed by the Doritos or NBC commercials either. (At least the Conan commercial was just amusing innuendo.) All around, it was a rather embarrassing year to be watching the Superbowl with the family.
Who said anything about patents being bad? The words "information" and "business process" do not jive with what the patent system was intended to be used for. Nor do they happen to cost millions or billions in R&D.
The messed up part about all of this is that it's all caused by an early misinterpretation of technology by courts. There was a case that came up where a patent was filed for a device (a rubberizer, IIRC?) that used computer control to accomplish its innovative task. The judge correctly assessed that the invention as a whole was innovative and granted patent protection.
Unfortunately, the court cases that followed cited that case as precedent for software patents. The judges didn't understand the difference and started granting exceptions carte blanche. Thus we ended up in the screwed up system we have now with no oversight over what is a valid patent and what is not.
Even more messed up is that patent law is okay. It says that patents should be non-obvious, it says that they should have no prior art, etc., etc., etc. Yet technology patents regularly get shoved through the system without any of these checks or balances applied.
The bozos who are defending this messed up violation of the law as legit are nothing more than charlatans who couldn't make an honest living if they tried. Last I checked, many of them even helped tank the world economy in recent news.