I agree that the judicial branch should not be legislating. The real problem, however, is that over the past decade, the legislature basically gave up on law-making. The DMCA is not the only vaguely (i.e. poorly) worded statute to issue from the bowels of Congress. The legislature is quite happy to crank out ambiguous laws under the rubric of "getting things done" and doesn't worry about being called on the carpet by the electorate since they can easily twist the meaning of whatever nonsense became law on their watch (looks at us, we outlawed starving children! woohoo!). The legislature is quite content to leave the heavy lifting to the judiciary since the actual pronouncement of a blank and white judgment tends to get you voted out of office.
If you want to limit judicial activism, make sure your legislature is passing clear and concise legislation. The judicial responsiblity is to interpret the law. The amount of interpretation they get to do is inversely proportional to the legal precision employed by the legislature.
"Verizon says it would be unfair to cancel users accounts unless the music companies concerned filed formal legal proceedings that would give the users a chance to fight back.
But the music industry says that would take too long."
That's just super. Now if they could just dispense with this habeas corpus nonsense, they could put all their customers in jail.
In the end it comes down to the delta between support and opposition. The fact the something as asinine as a V-chip got *legislated* into existence (opposed to free-marketed) is an important wake up call. In that case, the hardware vendors (set manufacturers) were actively opposed, and they failed. In the case of DRM, the hardware vendors are *already* on board, and you can sure believe that Jack Valenti and the RIAA horde is coming too. You've already seen what these people can do, and however well-organized and vocal you think you might be, the delta for DRM is far greater than it was for the V-chip.
btw: Feinstein is also my Senator, and I'm not thrilled with her either, but I doubt she's going anywhere in 2006 unless she wants to.
No, I think it's a great idea for parents to control what their kids watch BY USING THEIR OWN BRAIN.
Why should I have to pay an idiot tax because people like you are too stupid or apathetic to raise their own stupid and apathetic kids properly?
If you so desperately need it, perhaps we should just implant the V-chip directly into your head, though in your case, it will no doubt need an independent power source.
I don't suppose you're familiar with the V-chip and the fact that it's impossible to buy a new television without this asinine and needless expense? This was accomplished with a comparatively tiny V-chip lobby.
Now consider the fact that there will be a huge amount of money (i.e. the content providers) pushing legislation to make certain that ALL computers are sold with DRM. How long do you think that will take? I'm sure they'll be doing it 'for the children', too.
The older I get the more I appreciate his comment. The Duke of Wellington opposed the construction of railroads in Britain because they would, he said, "only encourage the common people to move about needlessly."
Replace "railroads" with "cell phones" and "move about" with "yammer", and welcome to the 21st century.
The other posters are right, though. They were stupid before they got the phones, they just now have a much more public way to demonstrate their idiocy. Their sphere of awareness extends two feet from their body and 5 seconds into the future.
Wrong, a person(s) did apply for the patent. A corporation cannot invent anything, only a natural person can, and that natural person must be the actual inventor. A corporation can, however, be the assignee, which is typically the case.
Excellent observation, but I still respectfully disagree.
On Dvorak, the fragment 'divis' (of division) would be typed (L = left hand, R = right hand) RLRLR wherein both left hand operations ('i') are on the exact same key. Since neither the left hand or even the fingers of the left hand need to move for the fragment, I find it highly dubious that this was a mere typo. You also have a two-key distance from 'i' to 'e' on Dvorak which further lessons the probability of mechanical failure.
Considering the 'i' is five keys from the 'e', this is not a typo. It's bad enough that most people type with their fists, but I would hope a purported writer of technology would
a) know how to spell a word mastered by most 5th graders
Yes, he's still there. I saw him quoted in InfoWorld this week. In the article he was quoted as "Chief Architect". Hmmm, wait, isn't Bill the Chief Architect...
DENY IT'S THE BIGGEST F***ING THING TO HAPPEN IN THE US SINCE THE CIVIL WAR.
'in the US' being the operative phrase. Does remote geography make it less horrific? Does the fact countless millions of US citizens died on foreign soil make it less so? Well sure it does, because the time and place of 9/11 call into question your own survival. You need to realize that a large part of the world has lived their entire lives with exactly that reality. Get inside their heads, and you'll have no problem understanding why they're pretty indifferent about killing you.
You make my argument better than I do. In one breath, you rail that the government must do something, and in the next, you say the CIA is a joke. The problem is, the CIA is not a joke (though INS certainly is). The CIA is the premier intelligence agency in the world. Unfortunately, that is not enough. A monolithic (government) agency can not defend against a distributed threat (terrorism). No amount of misguided legislation will change that. A distributed threat must be met by a distributed defense. The most distributed defense you can get is the individual. As an example, a woman who takes a self-defense course is taking responsibility for her own defense. She's made the decision that a monolithic organization (police) cannot adequately protect her from distributed threats like muggers, rapists, and car-jackers. That doesn't mean police are useless, it means the best defense is the police *augmented* by the personal ability to defend yourself. In the end, it's not about guns or karate, it's about attitude. If the first question you ask yourself is "What can the government do?" you'll find your freedoms steadily eroded. If your first question is "What can I do?", you've got a whisper of a chance of preserving those freedoms for your children. Those are your choices.
Uh no, wrong. The scale of the attack. Our unpreparedness. I disagree with you entirely- BUT... let us assume I agree with you 100%? Say you are theoretically correct. What do you say about our nation's psychological reaction to the attack?
Scale of the attack? 4000+ people? Sorry, that doesn't even make the top 50 in the atrocities man has perpetrated on himself. Consult your history. Our 'unpreparedness' is exactly my point. We've done a great job of deluding ourselves that we're above it all. No one can touch us. Worst case, our government will protect us. Wrong on all counts.
You are saying nothing about our nation's psychological state-of-mind following the attacks, regardless of the truth of your assertion. So, you are in denial- you don't take this into account.
It hasn't changed. Note the subject of the original post. The sentiment is 'the government will protect me.' What's the big change except the expectation that, golly, the government has to be a whole lot more intrusive to protect me, since they obviously weren't intrusive enough before.
Your whole self-preservation chest-thumping sounds wonderful. But, uh, it is wrong. Are you forgetting that humans form societies? Humans form large social groups. So what? They are not mutually exclusive. An individual has a duty to himself and a duty to the society he belongs to. The fact that you think one precludes the other illuminates why you think the way you do.
Aesop for you: "no man is an island". Aesop? Wrong. Try John Donne.
If you don't take responsibility for your own failure, you're certainly not going to take responsibility for your own protection. No one is talking about this. Stay on target my friend.
No, that's precisely on point. You are foremost responsible for yourself - that includes your own protection. You should spend some time contemplating why you don't see the connection.
Uh, forget what I said about saying on target- you might take me literally! HAHA. OK, sorry, I am not attacking you personally, that just sounded funny.;-P
The gun is as valid a metaphor as your herd of buffalo. If you weren't so busy tripping over your own ego, you'd see that. Your words can turn a mob of panicked citizens as bullets (fired into the air) can turn a herd of buffalo. And not coincidentally, your words can also be taken from you as easily as your bullets.
(long anti-gun polemic) Obviously, this is a favorite topic of yours since you can't resist hearing yourself talk about it. A lot more people are killed and injured by automobiles than by guns held by ordinary citizens. And again, it's not the cell-phoning, puppy-lapping, big-gulping motorist at fault, it's that 'defective' automobile. Gee, why does that abdication of personal responsibility sound so familiar?
As for the poor souls aboard the Pennsylvania flight, the basic individual survival instinct that you scoff at is the only thing that stopped the plane from doing a 1-point landing on the White House. Once some of the passengers understood that the only people who were going to save them were themselves, they took action. Obviously, the terrorists were not expecting that from a plane load of bourgeois Americans. The public knowledge that at least some individuals on a flight will fight to retake the plane does a lot more to prevent more of the same than having airport security give you a colonoscopy every time you pass through.
You claim to desire a solution to the problem posed by the original post instead of the usual/. caterwauling, but your own words belie a far greater interest in your own sophistry.
Nothing new about it. This is the Old World - always has been. The human race has been both literally and metaphorically bashing each other over the head to obtain resources since before we came out of the trees for good. Yes, even your adversary's fear can be a resource. We've just gotten very good at forgetting that. Franklin's words are prescient. His point is that a society that's foolish enough to believe it can obtain safety by surrendering freedom is doomed to have neither. He was just riffing Aesop, and it's ironic that two generations ago, most 10 year olds would already know this.
The simple fact of the matter is that you as an individual are the most qualified to protected yourself, despite what your government might tell you. Why? Because you have the most incentive to do so. It's called self-preservation, and it's the reason you're sitting in front a computer today reading these words. Any countless number of your ancestors were terribly good at it. If they weren't, you wouldn't be here. The passengers on the flight that went down in Pennsylvania were quickly reacquianted with it, and only because of it, did the hijackers fail to attain their ultimate objective. If you sit around convinced that someone else is going to save you, you become the ripe target the terrorists make you out to be. No database cataloging your DNA, fingerprints, and retinal scan will change that. Ever.
It's emblematic of western society and our en loco parentis governments, that nothing is our own fault anymore. If you don't take responsibility for your own failure, you're certainly not going to take responsibility for your own protection.
If you are unable or unwilling to get out of the way of the charging herd of buffalo, you can turn the herd with a few well-placed gun shots, presuming the government hasn't already taken your gun...
The verbs are just the anchor points for the meat of each step. What comes after the verb is where the battle rages between specificity and generality. Now, if you had a clever way to identify which trash cans are full...
Actually, the preamble is part of the claim as well, and that's actually the interesting part. "Real time" has a well-defined meaning to one skilled in the art of computer science, and it's a peculiar choice for an independent claim. This may be a case where the drafting lawyer screwed up, especially since "substantially in real time" appears in every single independent claim. Since "real-time internet web server" is about as oxymoronic as "French Resistance", a technologically adept patent litigator could quite possibly get all 67 claims tossed out in a single afternoon's work.
Writing a spec and writing a patent have little in common. In addition, patents are usually drafted by lawyers. The patent is intentionally vague and broad. Breadth is where a patent gets its strength. It's not in the drafter's interest to have a precisely-defined patent as that would impair the patent's coverage.
A lawyer would get fired for using the word "composed of" in an application. In patent-speak, "composed of" means "composed exactly of". That is, all I would have to do is add Froot Loops to my search term and poof, no infringement. "Comprising" means the thing has at least those components, and possibly more. In the "comprising" case, Froot Loops would infringe.
The patent does have to define a "complete" system, and that's why they have the bit about the client entering "the search term and the listing". If you've got something materializing out of nowhere, the app gets bounced for incompleteness.
That said, the patent is a monster: 7 independent claims and 60 dependent claims. If you really want to go nuts, read those.
Remove the banner advertisement Increase the browsing window area Browse the web your way Surf freely and discreetly Help Opera continue to make the best possible browser
Doesn't sound as if you're surfing freely and discreetly with their bannerware version...
Ah, but the medium, unless explicitly specified, is irrelevant. As something that solves a transduction problem, it has to function "over" something by definition. That's the context, and "over" should only be added if emphasis is required or a specific medium is addressed, but never at the expense of clarity.
You've constructed an artificial context where the medium is explicitly and necessarily specified, and tried to retrofit it to the original context where it is not. Since the premises are different, you've got no transitive closure and quite a mess of cat hair on the carpet.
Perhaps, but it's redundant. "it can work up to 1 kilometre" is sufficient.
"Over" is superfluous given the context, and in this case, amibiguous.
Re:Blech. Most of them are pretty bad.
on
Java IDEs?
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· Score: 1
Totally agree on avoiding debuggers. Knowing you can't just crack open a debugger and single step through your code completely changes the way you design and develop code. You're forced to design, develop, and test in very small increments, and encouraged to leverage that well-tested code. The end result is a higher quality product in less time. Yeah, that's the XP credo, but you will find very few XP'ers who don't use debuggers. I'd hire the developer who prefers a good editor and the command line over the guru of the IDE du jour every time.
Besides, if you're working with heavily multi-threaded code, there's no debugger in the world that will save you. Period.
Re:Cut the crap already...
on
More WTC News
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Curious and ironic then that you both post as Anonymous Cowards. Why isn't that a freedom you're willing to cede as well?
The worst our founding fathers had to face was death. Just like you. They fought not only for themselves, but for future generations under the tacit belief that future generations would do likewise (otherwise, what's the point of bothering?). You have the distinct advantage that someone else has already paid in advance for you. You enjoy that freedom only because you're a member of the lucky sperm club and happened to be born here (I say "born here" with a fair amount of certainty, because few immigrants take that freedom for granted). You have done nothing to earn it yourself. The best you can hope for is that you or your children will not be called upon to pay for it. The worst you can hope for is that you or them will shrink from the responsibility.
It's also curious that you like to invoke "women and slavery" to denigrate those who gave you the freedom you claim to enjoy. Your words today indicate that you would have done nothing in their time to further the causes of women or slaves - or even the fight for your own freedom. So lucky for you that there are not more like you.
Okay, here are the abstracts of this, and their prior related patent. Can someone *please* tell me what they are actually claiming as theirs? Is it just the checksumming? Is it the checksum in the context of a user-specified portion of the page? Is it the whole web-page-change-email-notification enchilada? Is it checksumming in the context of the enchilada?
Oh, and the final insult:
"The present invention relates to an improvement in Internet-document change-detection tools. The following description is presented to enable one of ordinary skill in the art to make and use the invention as provided in the context of a particular application and its requirements. Various modifications to the preferred embodiment will be apparent to those with skill in the art, and the general principles defined herein may be applied to other embodiments. Therefore, the present invention is not intended to be limited to the particular embodiments shown and described, but is to be accorded the widest scope consistent with the principles and novel features herein disclosed."
xlation: If you happen to think of anything else on your own that we didn't, that's ours, too.
(and before you jump on me, yes, I know you're supposed to make your patent as broad as possible, but that used to mean actually *enumerating* the alternatives in the application)
okay: abstract for the latest patent (6,219,818), filed 2/18/99
Checksum-comparing change-detection tool indicating degree and location of change of internet documents
A change-detection web server automatically checks web-page documents for recent changes. The server retrieves and compares documents one or more times a week. The user is notified by electronic mail when a change is detected. The user registers a web-page document by submitting his e-mail address and the uniform resource locator (URL) of the desired document. The document is fetched and the user can select text on the page of interest. Non-selected text is ignored; only changes in the selected text are reported back to the user. Thus changes to less relevant parts of the document are ignored. The document is divided into sections bounded by hyper-text markup-language (HTML) tags. A checksum is generated and stored for each HTML-bound section. Storage requirements are reduced since only checksums are stored rather than the original documents. During periodic comparisons a fresh copy of the document is retrieved, divided into HTML-bound sections and checksums generated for each section. The freshly-generated checksums are compared to the archived checksums. Sections with non-matching checksums are highlighted as changed, and the percentage of changed sections is reported. The user-defined selection is also stored as a checksum and compared to a freshly-generated checksum. Changed checksums outside the user-defined selection do not generate a change notification. Re-ordering of sections does not generate a change notification when the checksums otherwise match. Thus format and layout changes do not generate change notifications, and the frequency of notices to user is reduced.
and the abstract for 5,898,836, filed 1/14/97
Change-detection tool indicating degree and location of change of internet documents by comparison of cyclic-redundancy-check(CRC) signatures
A change-detection web server automatically checks web-page documents for recent changes. The server retrieves and compares documents one or more times a week. The user is notified by electronic mail when a change is detected. The user registers a web-page document by submitting his e-mail address and the uniform-resource locator (URL) of the desired document. The document is fetched and the user can select text on the page of interest. Non-selected text is ignored; only changes in the selected text are reported back to the user. Thus changes to less relevant parts of the document are ignored. The document is divided into sections bounded by hyper-text markup-language (HTML) tags. A checksum is generated and stored for each HTML-bound section. Storage requirements are reduced since only checksums are stored rather than the original documents. During periodic comparisons a fresh copy of the document is retrieved, divided into HTML-bound sections and checksums generated for each section. The freshly-generated checksums are compared to the archived checksums. Sections with non-matching checksums are highlighted as changed, and the percentage of changed sections is reported. The user-defined selection is also stored as a checksum and compared to a freshly-generated checksum. Changed checksums outside the user-defined selection do not generate a change notification. Re-ordering of sections does not generate a change notification when the checksums otherwise match. Thus format and layout changes do not generate change notifications, and the frequency of notices to user is reduced.
Well, those abstracts appear to be identical, don't they?
Two more......dramatically reducing the cost a recabling the entire building for fChannel, and the ease of switching someone over to a backup machine when their primary fails.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that the judicial branch should not be legislating. The real problem, however, is that over the past decade, the legislature basically gave up on law-making. The DMCA is not the only vaguely (i.e. poorly) worded statute to issue from the bowels of Congress. The legislature is quite happy to crank out ambiguous laws under the rubric of "getting things done" and doesn't worry about being called on the carpet by the electorate since they can easily twist the meaning of whatever nonsense became law on their watch (looks at us, we outlawed starving children! woohoo!). The legislature is quite content to leave the heavy lifting to the judiciary since the actual pronouncement of a blank and white judgment tends to get you voted out of office.
If you want to limit judicial activism, make sure your legislature is passing clear and concise legislation. The judicial responsiblity is to interpret the law. The amount of interpretation they get to do is inversely proportional to the legal precision employed by the legislature.
"Verizon says it would be unfair to cancel users accounts unless the music companies concerned filed formal legal proceedings that would give the users a chance to fight back.
But the music industry says that would take too long."
That's just super. Now if they could just dispense with this habeas corpus nonsense, they could put all their customers in jail.
Thoughtful analysis, but I respectfully disagree.
In the end it comes down to the delta between support and opposition. The fact the something as asinine as a V-chip got *legislated* into existence (opposed to free-marketed) is an important wake up call. In that case, the hardware vendors (set manufacturers) were actively opposed, and they failed. In the case of DRM, the hardware vendors are *already* on board, and you can sure believe that Jack Valenti and the RIAA horde is coming too. You've already seen what these people can do, and however well-organized and vocal you think you might be, the delta for DRM is far greater than it was for the V-chip.
btw: Feinstein is also my Senator, and I'm not thrilled with her either, but I doubt she's going anywhere in 2006 unless she wants to.
No, I think it's a great idea for parents to control what their kids watch BY USING THEIR OWN BRAIN.
Why should I have to pay an idiot tax because people like you are too stupid or apathetic to raise their own stupid and apathetic kids properly?
If you so desperately need it, perhaps we should just implant the V-chip directly into your head, though in your case, it will no doubt need an independent power source.
I don't suppose you're familiar with the V-chip and the fact that it's impossible to buy a new television without this asinine and needless expense? This was accomplished with a comparatively tiny V-chip lobby.
Now consider the fact that there will be a huge amount of money (i.e. the content providers) pushing legislation to make certain that ALL computers are sold with DRM. How long do you think that will take? I'm sure they'll be doing it 'for the children', too.
The older I get the more I appreciate his comment.
The Duke of Wellington opposed the construction of railroads in Britain because they would, he said, "only encourage the common people to move about needlessly."
Replace "railroads" with "cell phones" and "move about" with "yammer", and welcome to the 21st century.
The other posters are right, though. They were stupid before they got the phones, they just now have a much more public way to demonstrate their idiocy. Their sphere of awareness extends two feet from their body and 5 seconds into the future.
Note that a person didn't apply for this patent
Wrong, a person(s) did apply for the patent. A corporation cannot invent anything, only a natural person can, and that natural person must be the actual inventor. A corporation can, however, be the assignee, which is typically the case.
Excellent observation, but I still respectfully disagree.
On Dvorak, the fragment 'divis' (of division) would be typed (L = left hand, R = right hand) RLRLR wherein both left hand operations ('i') are on the exact same key. Since neither the left hand or even the fingers of the left hand need to move for the fragment, I find it highly dubious that this was a mere typo. You also have a two-key distance from 'i' to 'e' on Dvorak which further lessons the probability of mechanical failure.
I was told I needed a special devision of sales
WTF?
Considering the 'i' is five keys from the 'e', this is not a typo. It's bad enough that most people type with their fists, but I would hope a purported writer of technology would
a) know how to spell a word mastered by most 5th graders
b) use a spell checker
Yes, he's still there. I saw him quoted in InfoWorld this week. In the article he was quoted as "Chief Architect". Hmmm, wait, isn't Bill the Chief Architect...
When is Dog Bites Website Part VI coming out?
You are saying personal responsibility is the answer.
OK, wonderful, YAWN.
And THAT, is the exact source of the problem.
DENY IT'S THE BIGGEST F***ING THING TO HAPPEN IN THE US SINCE THE CIVIL WAR.
'in the US' being the operative phrase. Does remote geography make it less horrific? Does the fact countless millions of US citizens died on foreign soil make it less so? Well sure it does, because the time and place of 9/11 call into question your own survival. You need to realize that a large part of the world has lived their entire lives with exactly that reality. Get inside their heads, and you'll have no problem understanding why they're pretty indifferent about killing you.
You make my argument better than I do. In one breath, you rail that the government must do something, and in the next, you say the CIA is a joke. The problem is, the CIA is not a joke (though INS certainly is). The CIA is the premier intelligence agency in the world. Unfortunately, that is not enough. A monolithic (government) agency can not defend against a distributed threat (terrorism). No amount of misguided legislation will change that. A distributed threat must be met by a distributed defense. The most distributed defense you can get is the individual. As an example, a woman who takes a self-defense course is taking responsibility for her own defense. She's made the decision that a monolithic organization (police) cannot adequately protect her from distributed threats like muggers, rapists, and car-jackers. That doesn't mean police are useless, it means the best defense is the police *augmented* by the personal ability to defend yourself. In the end, it's not about guns or karate, it's about attitude. If the first question you ask yourself is "What can the government do?" you'll find your freedoms steadily eroded. If your first question is "What can I do?", you've got a whisper of a chance of preserving those freedoms for your children. Those are your choices.
Uh no, wrong. The scale of the attack. Our unpreparedness. I disagree with you entirely- BUT... let us assume I agree with you 100%? Say you are theoretically correct. What do you say about our nation's psychological reaction to the attack?
;-P
/. caterwauling, but your own words belie a far greater interest in your own sophistry.
Scale of the attack? 4000+ people? Sorry, that doesn't even make the top 50 in the atrocities man has perpetrated on himself. Consult your history. Our 'unpreparedness' is exactly my point. We've done a great job of deluding ourselves that we're above it all. No one can touch us. Worst case, our government will protect us. Wrong on all counts.
You are saying nothing about our nation's psychological state-of-mind following the attacks, regardless of the truth of your assertion. So, you are in denial- you don't take this into account.
It hasn't changed. Note the subject of the original post. The sentiment is 'the government will protect me.' What's the big change except the expectation that, golly, the government has to be a whole lot more intrusive to protect me, since they obviously weren't intrusive enough before.
Your whole self-preservation chest-thumping sounds wonderful. But, uh, it is wrong. Are you forgetting that humans form societies? Humans form large social groups.
So what? They are not mutually exclusive. An individual has a duty to himself and a duty to the society he belongs to. The fact that you think one precludes the other illuminates why you think the way you do.
Aesop for you: "no man is an island".
Aesop? Wrong. Try John Donne.
If you don't take responsibility for your own failure, you're certainly not going to take responsibility for your own protection.
No one is talking about this. Stay on target my friend.
No, that's precisely on point. You are foremost responsible for yourself - that includes your own protection. You should spend some time contemplating why you don't see the connection.
Uh, forget what I said about saying on target- you might take me literally! HAHA. OK, sorry, I am not attacking you personally, that just sounded funny.
The gun is as valid a metaphor as your herd of buffalo. If you weren't so busy tripping over your own ego, you'd see that. Your words can turn a mob of panicked citizens as bullets (fired into the air) can turn a herd of buffalo. And not coincidentally, your words can also be taken from you as easily as your bullets.
(long anti-gun polemic)
Obviously, this is a favorite topic of yours since you can't resist hearing yourself talk about it. A lot more people are killed and injured by automobiles than by guns held by ordinary citizens. And again, it's not the cell-phoning, puppy-lapping, big-gulping motorist at fault, it's that 'defective' automobile. Gee, why does that abdication of personal responsibility sound so familiar?
As for the poor souls aboard the Pennsylvania flight, the basic individual survival instinct that you scoff at is the only thing that stopped the plane from doing a 1-point landing on the White House. Once some of the passengers understood that the only people who were going to save them were themselves, they took action. Obviously, the terrorists were not expecting that from a plane load of bourgeois Americans. The public knowledge that at least some individuals on a flight will fight to retake the plane does a lot more to prevent more of the same than having airport security give you a colonoscopy every time you pass through.
You claim to desire a solution to the problem posed by the original post instead of the usual
Nothing new about it. This is the Old World - always has been. The human race has been both literally and metaphorically bashing each other over the head to obtain resources since before we came out of the trees for good. Yes, even your adversary's fear can be a resource. We've just gotten very good at forgetting that. Franklin's words are prescient. His point is that a society that's foolish enough to believe it can obtain safety by surrendering freedom is doomed to have neither. He was just riffing Aesop, and it's ironic that two generations ago, most 10 year olds would already know this.
The simple fact of the matter is that you as an individual are the most qualified to protected yourself, despite what your government might tell you. Why? Because you have the most incentive to do so. It's called self-preservation, and it's the reason you're sitting in front a computer today reading these words. Any countless number of your ancestors were terribly good at it. If they weren't, you wouldn't be here. The passengers on the flight that went down in Pennsylvania were quickly reacquianted with it, and only because of it, did the hijackers fail to attain their ultimate objective. If you sit around convinced that someone else is going to save you, you become the ripe target the terrorists make you out to be. No database cataloging your DNA, fingerprints, and retinal scan will change that. Ever.
It's emblematic of western society and our en loco parentis governments, that nothing is our own fault anymore. If you don't take responsibility for your own failure, you're certainly not going to take responsibility for your own protection.
If you are unable or unwilling to get out of the way of the charging herd of buffalo, you can turn the herd with a few well-placed gun shots, presuming the government hasn't already taken your gun...
The verbs are just the anchor points for the meat of each step. What comes after the verb is where the battle rages between specificity and generality. Now, if you had a clever way to identify which trash cans are full...
Actually, the preamble is part of the claim as well, and that's actually the interesting part. "Real time" has a well-defined meaning to one skilled in the art of computer science, and it's a peculiar choice for an independent claim. This may be a case where the drafting lawyer screwed up, especially since "substantially in real time" appears in every single independent claim. Since "real-time internet web server" is about as oxymoronic as "French Resistance", a technologically adept patent litigator could quite possibly get all 67 claims tossed out in a single afternoon's work.
Writing a spec and writing a patent have little in common. In addition, patents are usually drafted by lawyers. The patent is intentionally vague and broad. Breadth is where a patent gets its strength. It's not in the drafter's interest to have a precisely-defined patent as that would impair the patent's coverage.
A lawyer would get fired for using the word "composed of" in an application. In patent-speak, "composed of" means "composed exactly of". That is, all I would have to do is add Froot Loops to my search term and poof, no infringement. "Comprising" means the thing has at least those components, and possibly more. In the "comprising" case, Froot Loops would infringe.
The patent does have to define a "complete" system, and that's why they have the bit about the client entering "the search term and the listing". If you've got something materializing out of nowhere, the app gets bounced for incompleteness.
That said, the patent is a monster: 7 independent claims and 60 dependent claims. If you really want to go nuts, read those.
SaveInternetRadio.org or http://208.3.135.80/
Good clearinghouse on the whole issue and links to your representatives. Speak out now or shut up later.
excerpted from http://www.opera.com/order/
Why Buy Opera?
Remove the banner advertisement
Increase the browsing window area
Browse the web your way
Surf freely and discreetly
Help Opera continue to make the best possible browser
Doesn't sound as if you're surfing freely and discreetly with their bannerware version...
Ah, but the medium, unless explicitly specified, is irrelevant. As something that solves a transduction problem, it has to function "over" something by definition. That's the context, and "over" should only be added if emphasis is required or a specific medium is addressed, but never at the expense of clarity.
You've constructed an artificial context where the medium is explicitly and necessarily specified, and tried to retrofit it to the original context where it is not. Since the premises are different, you've got no transitive closure and quite a mess of cat hair on the carpet.
Perhaps, but it's redundant. "it can work up to 1 kilometre" is sufficient.
"Over" is superfluous given the context, and in this case, amibiguous.
Totally agree on avoiding debuggers. Knowing you can't just crack open a debugger and single step through your code completely changes the way you design and develop code. You're forced to design, develop, and test in very small increments, and encouraged to leverage that well-tested code. The end result is a higher quality product in less time. Yeah, that's the XP credo, but you will find very few XP'ers who don't use debuggers. I'd hire the developer who prefers a good editor and the command line over the guru of the IDE du jour every time.
Besides, if you're working with heavily multi-threaded code, there's no debugger in the world that will save you. Period.
Curious and ironic then that you both post as Anonymous Cowards. Why isn't that a freedom you're willing to cede as well?
The worst our founding fathers had to face was death. Just like you. They fought not only for themselves, but for future generations under the tacit belief that future generations would do likewise (otherwise, what's the point of bothering?). You have the distinct advantage that someone else has already paid in advance for you. You enjoy that freedom only because you're a member of the lucky sperm club and happened to be born here (I say "born here" with a fair amount of certainty, because few immigrants take that freedom for granted). You have done nothing to earn it yourself. The best you can hope for is that you or your children will not be called upon to pay for it. The worst you can hope for is that you or them will shrink from the responsibility.
It's also curious that you like to invoke "women and slavery" to denigrate those who gave you the freedom you claim to enjoy. Your words today indicate that you would have done nothing in their time to further the causes of women or slaves - or even the fight for your own freedom. So lucky for you that there are not more like you.
Okay, here are the abstracts of this, and their prior related patent. Can someone *please* tell me what they are actually claiming as theirs? Is it just the checksumming? Is it the checksum in the context of a user-specified portion of the page? Is it the whole web-page-change-email-notification enchilada? Is it checksumming in the context of the enchilada?
Oh, and the final insult:
"The present invention relates to an improvement in Internet-document change-detection tools. The following description is presented to enable one of ordinary skill in the art to make and use the invention as provided in the context of a particular application and its requirements. Various modifications to the preferred embodiment will be apparent to those with skill in the art, and the general principles defined herein may be applied to other embodiments. Therefore, the present invention is not intended to be limited to the particular embodiments shown and described, but is to be accorded the widest scope consistent with the principles and novel features herein disclosed."
xlation: If you happen to think of anything else on your own that we didn't, that's ours, too.
(and before you jump on me, yes, I know you're supposed to make your patent as broad as possible, but that used to mean actually *enumerating* the alternatives in the application)
okay: abstract for the latest patent (6,219,818), filed 2/18/99
Checksum-comparing change-detection tool indicating degree and location of change of internet documents
A change-detection web server automatically checks web-page documents for recent changes. The server retrieves and compares documents one or more times a week. The user is notified by electronic mail when a change is detected. The user registers a web-page document by submitting his e-mail address and the uniform resource locator (URL) of the desired document. The document is fetched and the user can select text on the page of interest. Non-selected text is ignored; only changes in the selected text are reported back to the user. Thus changes to less relevant parts of the document are ignored. The document is divided into sections bounded by hyper-text markup-language (HTML) tags. A checksum is generated and stored for each HTML-bound section. Storage requirements are reduced since only checksums are stored rather than the original documents. During periodic comparisons a fresh copy of the document is retrieved, divided into HTML-bound sections and checksums generated for each section. The freshly-generated checksums are compared to the archived checksums. Sections with non-matching checksums are highlighted as changed, and the percentage of changed sections is reported. The user-defined selection is also stored as a checksum and compared to a freshly-generated checksum. Changed checksums outside the user-defined selection do not generate a change notification. Re-ordering of sections does not generate a change notification when the checksums otherwise match. Thus format and layout changes do not generate change notifications, and the frequency of notices to user is reduced.
and the abstract for 5,898,836, filed 1/14/97
Change-detection tool indicating degree and location of change of internet documents by comparison of cyclic-redundancy-check(CRC) signatures
A change-detection web server automatically checks web-page documents for recent changes. The server retrieves and compares documents one or more times a week. The user is notified by electronic mail when a change is detected. The user registers a web-page document by submitting his e-mail address and the uniform-resource locator (URL) of the desired document. The document is fetched and the user can select text on the page of interest. Non-selected text is ignored; only changes in the selected text are reported back to the user. Thus changes to less relevant parts of the document are ignored. The document is divided into sections bounded by hyper-text markup-language (HTML) tags. A checksum is generated and stored for each HTML-bound section. Storage requirements are reduced since only checksums are stored rather than the original documents. During periodic comparisons a fresh copy of the document is retrieved, divided into HTML-bound sections and checksums generated for each section. The freshly-generated checksums are compared to the archived checksums. Sections with non-matching checksums are highlighted as changed, and the percentage of changed sections is reported. The user-defined selection is also stored as a checksum and compared to a freshly-generated checksum. Changed checksums outside the user-defined selection do not generate a change notification. Re-ordering of sections does not generate a change notification when the checksums otherwise match. Thus format and layout changes do not generate change notifications, and the frequency of notices to user is reduced.
Well, those abstracts appear to be identical, don't they?
Two more... ...dramatically reducing the cost a recabling the entire building for fChannel, and the ease of switching someone over to a backup machine when their primary fails.