I don't object to NASA making information available to refute this, nor do I think silence is necessarily the right response to stupidity.
However, I object to NASA spending any money on this when they lack the money to actually fulfill their primary mission. Especially in this "give a man a fish" sort of way. If they want to spend money debunking, it should be spent on "teaching us to fish".
The solution? Open source debunking.
There are plenty of scientifically trained volunteers out there that would be more than happy to compile data and present cogent arguments.
If NASA spent some money to put the raw data up on the web, and opened a slashdot-style forum for people to discuss the data, it would be far better than hiring someone to speak the obvious truth.
If nothing else, if they hire someone to do it, obviously the conspiracy kooks will claim it's just propaganda. So it's useless for NASA to spend money on direct refutation.
Operating systems, document exchange formats, and Internet Browsers have 1 thing in common: they are natural monopolies.
It should be obvious to even the most casual observer that the advantages of these items are increased as the number of people using said software increases. It should also be obvious that the "clone" strategy for these kinds of items is doomed to fail. Software moves too fast.
The only logical consequence is that there can be only 1 "mainstream" example of these.
Why, though, would the obviously crappiest examples of these have "won"?
Open source software can't possibly be "the one" until it learns to deal with the fundamental reasons Microsoft won. The two main reasons are that corporations feel they can't afford to:
have only 1 company they theoretically could buy (eventually commoditized) hardware from... explaining Apple's loss
buy software that doesn't have a commercial support structure maintained by some company they can (feel like they can) trust to support it.
Yes, it's strange that software doesn't obey the same kinds of rules that hardware obeys, but even corporations can't change the facts that make unifying major chunks of software so advantageous.
And you *can* clone hardware adequately (but, of course, only in symbiosis with a "winning" OS that can virtualize the small differences that remain).
It doesn't matter what else the Open Source community does. It's not about the price or the features.
Does anyone else find it ironic that the more we understand about the universe, the less understandable it becomes?
Einstein and others of his ilk that expected science would continue to find simpler and simpler rules that explain how things work would be very sad.
Once we completely understand the laws of physics, I have every expectation that they will be completely incomprehensible, even to really smart people.
Maybe I'm crazy or something. It sounds like I'm the only person here that likes Amazon's profiling, suggestions, etc.
I love this feature. I'm a gloriously happy consumer.
I've found more cool books using this feature than I've ever found wandering around a bookstore (do it intelligently... you have to use the "friend of a friend" method and look for books related to books they recommend).
Occasionally it gets a little weird, because the various people in my family order books on wildly different topics, but if I don't like a suggestion there's nothing forcing me to do anything about it.
Why should I care what some dumb machine "thinks" (ha) about me? When people start using it for nefarious purposes (and it will happen, if it hasn't already), then is the time to squash that dead.
On top of that, software is not in fact patentable.
Surprised? Maybe you should look at *all* of these patents.
What is patented is a machine (in this case a general purpose computer) and surrounding support system that is capable of doing X using method Y.
No one would be allowed a patent on just the software part, absent the machine to run it.
The software itself is just an abstract thought, true. But once you embody it in a machine and run it, that machine becomes a mechanism with some new properties.
It is this mechanism with new properties that is patentable.
Unless you want to make it impossible to patent a mechanism with certain properties that make it able to do X using method Y, there's no way to avoid software patents.
If you're right, and he did patent it after hearing that Microsoft said they wouldn't do this very thing, then there's no possible way his patent could do anything except inconvenience MS.
The very statement that spurred him to patent the basic idea would be prior art to that basic idea.
Now, he still might be able to get very specific and narrow patent claims on particular ways in which one could use Palladium to enforce software licenses, but those would be mere inconveniences to Microsoft.
The broad idea of doing it would, in that case, be unpatentable by anyone other than Microsoft (assuming no one else thought of the idea before they announced it:-).
Also, assuming MS does want to challenge his patent, they won't do anything stupid like try to prevent it being issued, or sue him themselves.
They will wait until he sues them (which he won't unless he has big bucks, BTW), and then bring out all their prior art and proof of first invention, and claim that they are just protecting themselves against a predator (no bad intentions here, Mr. generous and understanding public).
That's not prior art for this invention, neither legally nor morally.
I see no reason we should restict patents to entirely new problems that have never been solved before. Rather, if we did, we wouldn't get any of the advantages that the patent system does genuinely bring.
While there are some good ideas in here, I think the author misses the point of the patent system, which is not so much to reward people for being innovative, as it is to reward them for making their innovations public. There's a fair amount of evidence for this. The Founders were very opposed to the trade guilds of the time (which were innovating just fine, but were keeping their innovations secret).
People who gripe about software patents might feel a little better if they view them as a reward for open-sourcing their code (eventually:-).
Granted, the patent office issues bogus patents. A lot of them in fact. But that's a very hard judgement call to make. It's very easy to say that something is obvious even 1.5 years in the future. In fact, it's a great sign if things that are patentable now are obvious in a couple years. That means the system is working.
Another thing I've never understood about people who argue against patents is an argument made in this comment: denying a patent won't ensure that it won't be produced, but granting a bad one might cause people to not do it. This is a bogus argument. If the patent is *so* obviously bogus, no one will actually avoid infringing it, and if it isn't where do they get off being so self-righteous about it?
Geez, folks, come on... so it's a bit stupid. So what. Give them credit at least for trying to expose the unwashed masses to something remotely resembling scientific thought.
What did you expect? Nova? Talk about preaching to the choir.
I'm really not certain there is an effective way to avoid software patents without removing the entire patent system.
Here's one example of a reductio ad absurdum semi-proof of this: most people would consider a typewriter a patentable idea. How about an improvement to a typewriter that allows correcting errors? How about a mechanical tab stop? How about an electroluminescent display on a typewriter?
In a logical chain of patentable improvements that almost no one would argue with, you can invent an entirely electro-mechanical device that is in every way perfectly and exactly identical to the DOS edit program.
So... let's suppose this invention is patentable and is indeed patented. Should Microsoft's DOS edit program be considered to infringe this patent? If not, why not?
It's very hard to argue that DOS edit should be allowed under that patent. If it is, then anyone can implement practically anything comprising a software element that performs some function equivilent to the mechanism of any patent and happily infringe on it.
The final nail in this coffin is that all you accomplish by banning software patents is that people will describe an entire electro-mechanical equivilent device that is equivilent to their software, and then just not ever implement or sell that device, but only do it in software (this isn't, and shoudn't be, a requirement).
The expected value is still pretty bad
on
What, Me Worry?
·
· Score: 1
While I'm certainly not going to go out and buy lots of pillows on Yahoo, average people tend to vastly *under*estimate the dangers of NEOs, rather than overestimating them.
Perhaps the chance of this one hitting the Earth is only 1/16,000,000, but it could kill off half the world population if it does.
That's an expected value of 187.5 deaths, which is comparable to an average days killings by automobiles in the US. Of course, that's over the next 17 years, so actually, it's not something that people should worry about that much...
But still, on average, that rock will kill 11 people a year for the next couple of decades:-).
While I'm certainly not going to go out and buy lots of pillows on Yahoo, average people tend to vastly *under*estimate the dangers of NEOs, rather than overestimating them.
Perhaps the chance of this one hitting the Earth is only 1/16,000,000, but it could kill off half the world population if it does.
That's an expected value of 187.5 deaths, which is comparable to an average days killings by automobiles in the US. Of course, that's over the next 17 years, so actually, it's not something that people should worry about that much...
But still, on average, that rock will kill 11 people a year for the next couple of decades:-).
Re:Computer 'Science'?
on
Think Python
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It's a lot more like mathematics than science (because essentially we're talking about a generative and definitional activity rather than an analytical process of discovery), but yes, there are plenty of CS "laws": Church's theorem, Godel's theorem, Shannon's Law, NP-completeness (no cracks about quantum computing now), etc., etc. Oh, I suppose there's always quantum computing to make it a science.
Lately, though, it's starting to become analytical, courtesy of Microsoft. First, you make a hypothesis about how the OS works, then you write a program to test this hypothesis, analyze the results, and modify your hypothesis to fit the facts:-).
You might find it interesting that, science or not, Feynman spent the last few years of his life teaching a computer science class called "The Potentialities and Limitations of Computing Machinary". It was a very interesting class. He brought his unique wit and wisdom to a subject much in need of wit and wisdom than most.
How about how to think like a Software Engineer?
on
Think Python
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I should probably quit whining and write my own copyleft book, but I skimmed through this book, and I'm not all that impressed.
This book doesn't strike me as a book on how to think like a Computer Scientist, except insofar as Computer Scientists generally make lousy Software Engineers.
There are no descriptions of the advantages of object oriented programming, discussions of theoretical topics, and in general very little encouragement to view programming as a science.
Basically, this appears to be just a book on the Python language, written for someone who has never programmed before. That's a fine thing, don't get me wrong. My brief look even makes me think it could be an effective example of such a book.
At the very least, I think it's hyped wrong.
However, from a software engineering point of view, I find it damning that the book forgoes any explanation of the practice of, or motivation for, writing maintainable code. I consider that unforgivable in a beginning programming book.
You absolutely have to impress on newbies early the importance of documentation, sensible structure, logical variable naming, good class hierarchy, etc.
I consider this especially true for Python, which is an interpreted non-declarative language (making maintainabilty all that more important). Python is, conversely, also especially well designed as a platform where such concepts could be taught. It largely overcomes the occasional weaknesses of its design philosophy by consciously including language features such as built in support for docstrings, well crafted namespaces, modules as first-class citizens, etc.
Yet, these language features are barely given a nod in this book.
It's books for existing programmers that can afford to skimp on these areas.
Several of the comments I've seen here seem to be making this point:
Patents were a good idea when there was less innovation. Now that there's a lot of innovation, the large number of resulting patents is stifling innovation.
This seems like a very strange position to me. The evidence for the innovation-stifling effects of patents seems to be almost entirely the rapid increase in the rate of innovation.
The reason a lot of things happen faster now is that things are done in software that could previously only be done in hardware.
While open-source development is a wonderful thing, don't get me wrong, most of the actual work in the country is done by for-profit organizations who are doing it because they think it will make them money.
If such organizations were unable to protect their new products against instant competition (remember, when it takes little time for the company to develop the product, it will also take very little time for their competitors to copy it), there would be very little motivation to develop them.
To my mind, the existance of software patents is patently (pun intended) obviously necessary for the rapid rate of innovation.
Of course, the term of those patents might be longer than is reasonable...
But us software geeks often seem to think we're unfairly impacted by patents. We routinely deal with thousands of software components in each of our products... why, if we had to worry about whether each of them were patented, we couldn't get anything done. And our products are obsolete so soon that we shouldn't be burdened by this ridiculously long protection.
On the other hand, I have first hand knowledge that almost every one of the 1000s of parts in your car is protected by one patent or another.
And each of those car models has only a 3-5 year product lifetime.
I had a great time viewing the eclipse with my kids (4 and 6 years old).
It's a really great opportunity to expose them to a bit of science, a bit of engineering, and bit of safety training, and a bit of "look, the world is interesting and you don't need a huge pile of money to see that".
I started out with a card with a hole punched in it. That didn't work, so we used a smaller hole. Then we played around with it a bit and discovered that the bigger hole worked if you moved the card farther away from the projection surface.
They got the biggest kick out of my making little crescent shaped sun shadows using my hand as a shadow puppet, though...
It's an interesting theory, but most people here seem to be ignoring the largest cost of this: time.
At an average of 1 minute per email per person, with an average cost of $1/minute (including overhead), I could easily see this email causing
~$175,000 in damages. Not huge, on Intel's scale, perhaps, but enough to put a damper on Mr. Hamidi...
Slashdot Mirror
However, I object to NASA spending any money on this when they lack the money to actually fulfill their primary mission. Especially in this "give a man a fish" sort of way. If they want to spend money debunking, it should be spent on "teaching us to fish".
The solution? Open source debunking.
There are plenty of scientifically trained volunteers out there that would be more than happy to compile data and present cogent arguments.
If NASA spent some money to put the raw data up on the web, and opened a slashdot-style forum for people to discuss the data, it would be far better than hiring someone to speak the obvious truth.
If nothing else, if they hire someone to do it, obviously the conspiracy kooks will claim it's just propaganda. So it's useless for NASA to spend money on direct refutation.
The best rule to follow is: never say anything in email or in a posting that you would mind saying in person to everyone you know.
Information wanting to be free is a 2 edged sword.
It should be obvious to even the most casual observer that the advantages of these items are increased as the number of people using said software increases. It should also be obvious that the "clone" strategy for these kinds of items is doomed to fail. Software moves too fast.
The only logical consequence is that there can be only 1 "mainstream" example of these.
Why, though, would the obviously crappiest examples of these have "won"? Open source software can't possibly be "the one" until it learns to deal with the fundamental reasons Microsoft won. The two main reasons are that corporations feel they can't afford to:
have only 1 company they theoretically could buy (eventually commoditized) hardware from... explaining Apple's loss
buy software that doesn't have a commercial support structure maintained by some company they can (feel like they can) trust to support it.
Yes, it's strange that software doesn't obey the same kinds of rules that hardware obeys, but even corporations can't change the facts that make unifying major chunks of software so advantageous.
And you *can* clone hardware adequately (but, of course, only in symbiosis with a "winning" OS that can virtualize the small differences that remain).
It doesn't matter what else the Open Source community does. It's not about the price or the features.
Einstein and others of his ilk that expected science would continue to find simpler and simpler rules that explain how things work would be very sad.
Once we completely understand the laws of physics, I have every expectation that they will be completely incomprehensible, even to really smart people.
I love this feature. I'm a gloriously happy consumer.
I've found more cool books using this feature than I've ever found wandering around a bookstore (do it intelligently... you have to use the "friend of a friend" method and look for books related to books they recommend).
Occasionally it gets a little weird, because the various people in my family order books on wildly different topics, but if I don't like a suggestion there's nothing forcing me to do anything about it.
Why should I care what some dumb machine "thinks" (ha) about me? When people start using it for nefarious purposes (and it will happen, if it hasn't already), then is the time to squash that dead.
Surprised? Maybe you should look at *all* of these patents.
What is patented is a machine (in this case a general purpose computer) and surrounding support system that is capable of doing X using method Y.
No one would be allowed a patent on just the software part, absent the machine to run it.
The software itself is just an abstract thought, true. But once you embody it in a machine and run it, that machine becomes a mechanism with some new properties.
It is this mechanism with new properties that is patentable.
Unless you want to make it impossible to patent a mechanism with certain properties that make it able to do X using method Y, there's no way to avoid software patents.
The very statement that spurred him to patent the basic idea would be prior art to that basic idea.
Now, he still might be able to get very specific and narrow patent claims on particular ways in which one could use Palladium to enforce software licenses, but those would be mere inconveniences to Microsoft.
The broad idea of doing it would, in that case, be unpatentable by anyone other than Microsoft (assuming no one else thought of the idea before they announced it :-).
Also, assuming MS does want to challenge his patent, they won't do anything stupid like try to prevent it being issued, or sue him themselves.
They will wait until he sues them (which he won't unless he has big bucks, BTW), and then bring out all their prior art and proof of first invention, and claim that they are just protecting themselves against a predator (no bad intentions here, Mr. generous and understanding public).
I see no reason we should restict patents to entirely new problems that have never been solved before. Rather, if we did, we wouldn't get any of the advantages that the patent system does genuinely bring.
People who gripe about software patents might feel a little better if they view them as a reward for open-sourcing their code (eventually :-).
Granted, the patent office issues bogus patents. A lot of them in fact. But that's a very hard judgement call to make. It's very easy to say that something is obvious even 1.5 years in the future. In fact, it's a great sign if things that are patentable now are obvious in a couple years. That means the system is working.
Another thing I've never understood about people who argue against patents is an argument made in this comment: denying a patent won't ensure that it won't be produced, but granting a bad one might cause people to not do it. This is a bogus argument. If the patent is *so* obviously bogus, no one will actually avoid infringing it, and if it isn't where do they get off being so self-righteous about it?
You're so sued, dude :-).
It only makes unenforcable any provisions in the EULA that would limit the rights granted in the bill.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Damn. This is harder than it seems.
What did you expect? Nova? Talk about preaching to the choir.
Only then can we get a court case to throw out this nonsense.
Here's one example of a reductio ad absurdum semi-proof of this: most people would consider a typewriter a patentable idea. How about an improvement to a typewriter that allows correcting errors? How about a mechanical tab stop? How about an electroluminescent display on a typewriter?
In a logical chain of patentable improvements that almost no one would argue with, you can invent an entirely electro-mechanical device that is in every way perfectly and exactly identical to the DOS edit program.
So... let's suppose this invention is patentable and is indeed patented. Should Microsoft's DOS edit program be considered to infringe this patent? If not, why not?
It's very hard to argue that DOS edit should be allowed under that patent. If it is, then anyone can implement practically anything comprising a software element that performs some function equivilent to the mechanism of any patent and happily infringe on it.
The final nail in this coffin is that all you accomplish by banning software patents is that people will describe an entire electro-mechanical equivilent device that is equivilent to their software, and then just not ever implement or sell that device, but only do it in software (this isn't, and shoudn't be, a requirement).
Perhaps the chance of this one hitting the Earth is only 1/16,000,000, but it could kill off half the world population if it does.
That's an expected value of 187.5 deaths, which is comparable to an average days killings by automobiles in the US. Of course, that's over the next 17 years, so actually, it's not something that people should worry about that much...
But still, on average, that rock will kill 11 people a year for the next couple of decades :-).
Perhaps the chance of this one hitting the Earth is only 1/16,000,000, but it could kill off half the world population if it does.
That's an expected value of 187.5 deaths, which is comparable to an average days killings by automobiles in the US. Of course, that's over the next 17 years, so actually, it's not something that people should worry about that much...
But still, on average, that rock will kill 11 people a year for the next couple of decades :-).
Lately, though, it's starting to become analytical, courtesy of Microsoft. First, you make a hypothesis about how the OS works, then you write a program to test this hypothesis, analyze the results, and modify your hypothesis to fit the facts :-).
You might find it interesting that, science or not, Feynman spent the last few years of his life teaching a computer science class called "The Potentialities and Limitations of Computing Machinary". It was a very interesting class. He brought his unique wit and wisdom to a subject much in need of wit and wisdom than most.
This book doesn't strike me as a book on how to think like a Computer Scientist, except insofar as Computer Scientists generally make lousy Software Engineers. There are no descriptions of the advantages of object oriented programming, discussions of theoretical topics, and in general very little encouragement to view programming as a science. Basically, this appears to be just a book on the Python language, written for someone who has never programmed before. That's a fine thing, don't get me wrong. My brief look even makes me think it could be an effective example of such a book. At the very least, I think it's hyped wrong.
However, from a software engineering point of view, I find it damning that the book forgoes any explanation of the practice of, or motivation for, writing maintainable code. I consider that unforgivable in a beginning programming book. You absolutely have to impress on newbies early the importance of documentation, sensible structure, logical variable naming, good class hierarchy, etc.
I consider this especially true for Python, which is an interpreted non-declarative language (making maintainabilty all that more important). Python is, conversely, also especially well designed as a platform where such concepts could be taught. It largely overcomes the occasional weaknesses of its design philosophy by consciously including language features such as built in support for docstrings, well crafted namespaces, modules as first-class citizens, etc.
Yet, these language features are barely given a nod in this book.
It's books for existing programmers that can afford to skimp on these areas.
This explains many things about Linux and the Linux community that I hadn't previously understood.
Seeing as how these 2 components *are* all the net traffic, I don't see how the statement is an error. :-).
Patents were a good idea when there was less innovation. Now that there's a lot of innovation, the large number of resulting patents is stifling innovation.
This seems like a very strange position to me. The evidence for the innovation-stifling effects of patents seems to be almost entirely the rapid increase in the rate of innovation.
The reason a lot of things happen faster now is that things are done in software that could previously only be done in hardware.
While open-source development is a wonderful thing, don't get me wrong, most of the actual work in the country is done by for-profit organizations who are doing it because they think it will make them money.
If such organizations were unable to protect their new products against instant competition (remember, when it takes little time for the company to develop the product, it will also take very little time for their competitors to copy it), there would be very little motivation to develop them.
To my mind, the existance of software patents is patently (pun intended) obviously necessary for the rapid rate of innovation.
Of course, the term of those patents might be longer than is reasonable...
But us software geeks often seem to think we're unfairly impacted by patents. We routinely deal with thousands of software components in each of our products... why, if we had to worry about whether each of them were patented, we couldn't get anything done. And our products are obsolete so soon that we shouldn't be burdened by this ridiculously long protection.
On the other hand, I have first hand knowledge that almost every one of the 1000s of parts in your car is protected by one patent or another.
And each of those car models has only a 3-5 year product lifetime.
It's a really great opportunity to expose them to a bit of science, a bit of engineering, and bit of safety training, and a bit of "look, the world is interesting and you don't need a huge pile of money to see that".
I started out with a card with a hole punched in it. That didn't work, so we used a smaller hole. Then we played around with it a bit and discovered that the bigger hole worked if you moved the card farther away from the projection surface.
They got the biggest kick out of my making little crescent shaped sun shadows using my hand as a shadow puppet, though...
At an average of 1 minute per email per person, with an average cost of $1/minute (including overhead), I could easily see this email causing ~$175,000 in damages. Not huge, on Intel's scale, perhaps, but enough to put a damper on Mr. Hamidi...
A brilliant idea, but easy to copy once you see it.
It's fascinating to me that the government grant he received is for the purpose of getting international patent rights to this idea.