Re: Lets get this out of the way
on
20 Years of Virii
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· Score: 2, Insightful
My pet peeve is people who misuse literally.
This word is supposed to mean "not figuratively". Then people started realizing they could use it to make their figurative speech sound even more dramatic, and so you hear things like "my head literally exploded when I heard that". Which is the exact opposite of what it's supposed to mean. What am we going to do when someone's head really does explode some day? The word has literally lost its meaning, and there is no convenient replacement for it.
Re:Lets get this out of the way
on
20 Years of Virii
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· Score: 1, Informative
Virii is a word. It is the plural of virus. 'Viruses' is just bad spelling.
The Oxford English Dictionary says it's viruses.
"Virii" is a term used neither in biology nor computer science, unless you include adolescents who submit articles to 2600.
Which party has the most powerful black man in the world? (Clarence Thomas)
Supreme Court Justices are not supposed to have a political affiliation. Moreover, Thomas's opinion on any given matter is determined by Scalia, who effectively has two votes on the court.
Can America trust regular punchcard voting? Didn't Florida teach us anything in 2000?
Sure.
According to the final, official count of the votes in Florida, W received a 537-vote margin after the USSC effectively barred any further official examination of the ballots. An independent subsequent examination determined that the official margin of victory was accurate to within a few hundred votes under the voting laws in place at the time of the election. So as chaotic as the election was, the official result was within one part in 10,000 of the underlying quantity. Afterwards, a multiplicity of standards for counting ballots were examined, but none of them placed the final margin anywhere further than 2 parts in 10,000 of the official results, for a percent accuracy of 0.02%. Compare this error rate to those seen in touchscreen voting, which has already been off by 2,690% in a mere tally of votes cast. Compared to these systems being foisted upon us, punch cards are impressively accurate.
The Florida election was essentially a tie, and a tie is an extreme test of any vote counting system. I don't see how people can say touchscreens will do any better, simply because they haven't been subjected to such a test.
This is like that frivolous McDonald's lawsuit where some greedy lady abused the court system
AAARGH. I'm getting really sick of having to write the same post over and over again. Sometimes I wonder if some McShill has been spreading McDisinformation on the radio for McDonald's.
The car was parked. The lady wasn't the driver. She was originally asking McDonald's to cover her medical bills (a few thousand). They told her to go to hell. Burn centers had been repeatedly asking McDonald's to lower the temperature of the coffee, but McDonald's had found that customers will put up with inferior grades of beans if the coffee is too hot to taste. Then they had the balls to argue in court that "the coffee tastes better that way". (Well duh, it's garbage!) Moreover, they had done a "Fight Club" analysis and determined the savings on cheap beans would more than make up for the lawsuits from burn victims.
This inflamed the jury and they awarded the woman a figure amounting to two days of McDonald's coffee profits. Which is a pretty reasonable way to figure out an award- in fact law schools typically present the case as an example of a wise decision on the part of a jury. But McDonald's was enjoying huge margins off its coffee- they were, after all, selling garbage- and coffee was actually a big moneymaker for them. Two days of coffee profits turned out to be a multimillion dollar figure. This was reduced by the judge to $480,000, and the case was settled for an undisclosed amount.
The real economic damage to McDonald's was the lowering of the temperature. This required retrofitting existing equipment, but that was a one-time cost. But now that the coffee is cool enough to actually taste, they can no longer get away with buying mud and passing it off as coffee, so they lost the high margins they were enjoying on coffee (which made two days' profits turn out to be such an exorbitant figure). But now the coffee tastes a lot better and it doesn't burn your mouth. Thanks, Stella Liebeck! Hope losing your crotch was worth it.
They're removing two whole genes. Viruses only have several to begin with. Your own junk DNA is littered with the DNA of several thousand extinct endogenous retroviruses that have lost one or two critical genes. Ebola, being a filovirus, lacks reverse transcriptase and cannot even look forward to a career as a dormant junk DNA sequence.
Your body sees the proteins expressed by the foreign DNA, creates antibodies, and that's it. The DNA does not replicate. Evolution requires successive copying operations (paired with natural selection) and does not apply to this process.
It isn't "welfare for physicists," if research is for helping government fufill its basic duties for the People.
I agree with your points. I was only mentioning one benefit, which is why I said "for one thing".
Perhaps I do mean to aim my criticism at Republicans, but it's been fashionable of late for Republicans to pass themselves off as libertarians. (Ducks...)
I've already got my PhD in Physics and I've been a postdoc all around Europe and now I've got my own lab.
Aaaaah, now I see what is going on here.
"MY research is important and is guaranteed to lead to important technological applications. The guys down the hall are wasting their time with research that has no obvious technological benefit down the road so I should be getting all that money and equipment."
What does physics research do, anyway? Empower the public with advances in knowledge and technology providing solutions to difficult problems and building new markets to boost the world economy?!? Bah!
Physics research employs nerds and geeks in challenging, slightly less than decent-paying jobs, for one thing. Would you rather live in a world where physics was closed to you as a career option?
Of course, the libertarians will be all over that argument, saying it's a form of welfare for physicists, always playing on the basic human fear that someone, somewhere, might be getting away with something at my expense. But compared to recent corporate welfare projects like the Iraq war, physicsist welfare amounts to peanuts so the libertarians can just STFU.
Now that, my friend, is what basic research is (or should be) about. Not a gamble where you roll the dice and hope to produce something useful, but a coherrent endeavour which will definitely help with problems in the applied research, and consequently industry, but which may also contribute to the humankind's fundamental understanding of the nature.
So... you're saying scientific research that contributes to humankind's fundamental understanding of nature is OK if it is guaranteed a predetermined desirable outcome resulting in cool new products for consumers and industry.
Man... what a bad, bad scientist you would be. I suggest you go for the MBA instead.
Strange though that they don't do the 'obvious' duplicate filtering...
You didn't receive any duplicates. The three messages differ by hash-busting characters that alter the hash, and while it's not substantially different, it's different enough to get past a filter that is checking hashes. Duplicates refer to perfect duplicates.
I may be wrong about the prior art stuff, since IBM had filed their patent in 1999. Seems this crap has been going on forever though.
If you read the patent, you'll see it has nothing to do with "random letters or dictionary words" to break hashing detectors.
Yes it does. Note that while they describe many ways to alter a message, the specific method used is not central to their claim, which is merely that m different versions are created somehow, that recipients are assigned to sublists in which the same ISP does not appear twice, and each sublist gets a different version. While it doesn't mention them specifically, any technique using n random letters in a message will infringe, since it effectively divides all users into m=26^n sublists and sends the same message to all users in a sublist. Use of enough random characters effectively generates such a large m that each recipient lands in their own sublist. Therefore there is no need to "determine if the selected address is substantially similar to an address on the selected sublist" since there are no addresses already in the sublist. Nobody gets the same message, so you don't need to worry about two copies of one version going to users at the same ISP. It is algorithmically equivalent to what they're claiming.
The patent goes on to describe many ways that a message might be altered, like reordering paragraphs, etc. In general many of the techniques they describe are subtle and do not allow as many permutations as you can get from a bunch of random characters, and so they stipulate (as a part of the claim) that care must to be taken that no sublist contains two "similar" email addresses. Meaning, don't send two copies of the same version to two recipients at the same ISP, who will notice the identical message hash. Duh. Any spammer could figure that out for himself. And like I said, if you use a large enough m this part of the patent is irrelevant since you don't need to worry about this problem. All the messages are unique.
If you are too lazy to read the entire patent, and insist on only reading a small part, how about also reading what the claims section says instead of just the abstract?
Yeah, what in the claims section do you think I missed?
Sometimes, you know, patents are allowed that don't actually have prior art, or at least aren't as obvious as the abstract makes them sound.
While true, that's irrelevant in this case because this is an obvious patent with plenty of prior art.
This patent describes the simple use of hash-busting characters in email messages.
System and method for counteracting message filtering
Abstract
A system and method for circumventing schemes that use duplication detection to detect and block unsolicited e-mail (spam.) An address on a list is assigned to one of m sublists, where m is an integer that is greater than one. A set of m different messages are created. A different message from the set of m different messages is sent to the addresses on each sublist. In this way, spam countermeasures based upon duplicate detection schemes are foiled.
This isn't "providing slimeball spammers with yet a bigger hammer". It's a bread-and-butter spamming technique. Almost all the spam I get is salted with random letters or dictionary words in the address or message body to change the hash (and is therefore infringing on AT&T's new patent). We just saw a story a few days ago where spammers were sprinkling fraudulent scam emails with hash-busting characters to get past filters.
One of the nice things about spammers is that (unlike their opponents) they rarely patent the circumvention mechanisms they use, leaving their bag of tricks open for intellectual property land grabs like this one. Compared to laws against spam, which for the most part hardly exist, patent law rests on sound international footing and gives AT&T much greater leverage against spammers who are now patent infringers. Good for AT&T. I wish I'd thought of it first.
It's lunacy to assume that AT&T secured this patent for any other reason- like productizing this stupid patent. Are they going to sell a new software suite for spamming? Spammers aren't an ideal software market by any reasonable standard. There's only 180 of them. AT&T would sell one copy, it would get pirated 179 times, everyone with a copy would start spamming warez versions of it, and that would be the end of it. Assuming that spammers cared about using patent-encumbered software at all- which they don't. And AT&T would alienate its customers in all the other markets they're in. It would be like a Christian bookstore opening a bondage videos section. It makes no sense. I can't understand how anyone could possibly take the outrage in this article at face value.
What is really amazing about this patent is what it says about the research done by the USPTO. I bet the USPTO examiner received a dozen examples of prior art in his own inbox the very day he approved this patent, and he approved it anyway!
We had one of those projects going: the Superconducting Supercollider.
I remember when I was at Rutgers (88-92), everyone in the physics department hated the Supercondcting Supercollider. They have to beg for public money for a living. The feeling was that this thing was going to suck up all the physics money, and their requests for funding would be met with "we just gave you this wonderful supercollider, why isn't that enough"?
I second this. Feynman's lectures on computation are at a very fundamental level, so they are impractical for day to day use, but the theory is solid. Thousands of years from now, computers will undoubtedly have changed a lot, but the principles in this book will still apply to them since they merely describe how the laws of physics affect any computational system.
Here is an interesting excerpt on pages 149-150 that explains Maxwell's demon in terms of reversible computing:
The demon has a very simple task. Set into the partition is a flap, which he can open and shut at will. He looks in one half of the box (say, the left) and waits until he sees a fast-moving molecule approaching the flap. When he does, he opens the flap momentarily, letting the molecule through into the right side, and then shuts the flap again. Similarly, if the demon sees a slow-moving molecule approaching from the right side of the flap, he lets that through into the side the fast one came from. After a period of such activity, our little friend will have separated the fast- and slow-moving molecules into the two compartments. In other words, he will have separated the hot from the cold, and hence created a temperature difference between the two sides of the box. This means that the entropy of the system has decreased, in clear violation of the Second Law!
This seeming paradox, as I have said, caused tremendous controversy among physicists. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is a well-established principle in physics, and if Maxwell's demon appears to be able to violate it, there is probably something fishy about him. Since Maxwell came up with his idea in 1867, many people have tried to spot the flaw in his argument. Somehow, somewhere, in the process of looking for molecules of a given type and letting them through the flap, there had to be some entropy generated.
Until recently, it was generally accepted that this entropy arose as a result of the demon's measurement of the position of the molecules. This did not seem unreasonable. For example, one way in which the demon could detect fast-moving molecules would be to shine a demonic torch at them; but such a process would involve dispersing at least one photon, which would cost energy. More generally, before looking at a particular molecule, the demon could not know whether it was moving left or right. Upon observing it, however this was done, his uncertainty, and hence entropy, would have reduced by half, surely accompanied by the corresponding generation of entropy in the environment.
In fact, and surprisingly, Bennett has shown that Maxwell's demon can actually make its measurements with zero energy expenditure, providing it follows certain rules for recording and erasing whatever information it obtains. The demon must be in a standard state of some kind before measurement, which we will call S: this is the state of uncertainty. After it measures the direction of motion of a molecule, it enters one of two other states- say L for "left-moving", or R for "right-moving". It overwrites the S with whichever is appropriate. Bennett has demonstrated that this procedure can be performed for no energy cost. The cost comes in the next step, which is the erasure of the L or R to reset the demon in the S state in preparation for the next measurement. This realization, that it is the erasure of information, and not measurement, that is the source of entropy generation in the computational process, was a major breakthrough in the study of reversible computation.
Has so much coding in shitty slow-by-design languages made you this negative and unhappy? You sound like the Java freaks who whip out the "slow algorithm" argument whenever their favourite language is said to be slow.
Someone wrote a program in Qbasic, and someone wrote a program in C. So far in this thread, we have reached the following conclusions from that limited information:
The C program is faster and therefore better than the Qbasic program.
Since the Qbasic program is faster than the C program, the C programmer is a moron.
Qbasic sucks.
C sucks.
Since lower level languages run faster, people who write programs in those languages are writing poor code to compensate.
Since higher level languages run slower, people who write programs in those languages are just embittered and jealous of the people who write programs in low level languages like C.
Java sucks.
No matter what two languages are in the war, Java always ends up losing.
What if you're receding, so your IR looks like RF? There must be an inertial reference frame where this device becomes illegal.
This reminds me of a physics problem that is in every physics book in the chapter about relativity and doppler shifts. A motorist is speeding towards a traffic light and runs a red. In traffic court he claims that the red light appeared green to him because of the great speed with which he approached it. The judge fines him one dollar per mph he was driving over the speed limit (55 mph). What was the fine?
You seem, however, to have left out your scientific criticism of their methodology and results.
The original 1998 paper by Mann, Bradley, and Hughes was not in error. McIntyre and McKitrick screwed up their data when they published this paper. Somebody exported the raw data in the original paper to Excel but somehow exported 159 columns of data into a 112 column spreadsheet. M&M did not compare the spreadsheet and produced a "correction" to the original paper that was based on nothing but errors, since the full paleoclimatic data series of 159 columns is required to properly audit the analysis done in the 1998 paper. More information here and here. The world really is melting.
The authors of the original paper have already published a rebuttal to this M&M paper with further details about how M&M faithfully replicated neither the data nor the procedures in their audit.
The conflict of interest is clear, perhaps, but there seems to be no problem with disclosure. You want to be the first one down the slope where you decide what ventures people may or may not invest in? You want to use the theory that there might be a vast right-wing conspiracy as your criterion to make that decision?
Are you on crack?
I have nothing against "allowing" Diebold to invest in online voting ventures. But their right to seek business with us does not trump our right to decline to give it to them. There is an obvious conflict of interest in this case, and I think that's a pretty clear standard. We don't need to be worried about falling down some "slippery slope" and babbling about right wing conspiracies, as you imply in your straw man argument. A conflict of interest is enough to make something a bad idea.
Well I do know that you are offered a "verifiable paper reciept.":)
This is a very good point. Diebold has this attitude that merely having a printout of each vote as it's cast would present some sort of unbearable hardship. They act like we're asking them to produce moon samples. But banks impose requirements on Diebold that are far more dire than merely preventing election fraud. They must dispense yuppie food stamps- now with pretty colors- and unlike a vote, there is no room for error here. And Diebold delivers for the banks. An ATM creates a paper record on an internal printer as well as the paper receipt that you get. The banks aren't interested in playing games with Diebold, and will not put up with the shoddy standards that apply to the safeguarding of democracy in the United States.
On an unrelated note: whoever is behind this attack on images.slashdot.org, please stop it. You aren't funny.
Someone is clearly using other, unofficial mechanisms to collect fees for granting patents, or we wouldn't see such heavy opposition to even the most trivial patent reforms.
false. prior art means that the idea has been in common use for a while.
I phrased it badly- I meant "there is no prior art" as far as the USPTO is concerned when they grant the patent. They do a search through their database, and if they don't find anything, they grant the patent and pocket the fees.
Why waste time doing a Google search? It might find something, and then they don't get the fee. If there's unpatented prior art out there, let the courts sort it out!
Of course, coming up with prior art should be no problem
You mean, coming up with a prior patent should be no problem- and it will be a problem in this case because apparently there was no prior patent or the USPTO wouldn't have granted this one.
The USPTO definition of prior art is a prior patent. If nobody has filed a patent on something, there is no prior art and they consider it patentable.
She didn't send it to postmaster@homelandsecurity.gov.
I bet postmaster@homelandsecurity.gov gets plenty of spam...
Postmaster, Instant Pleasures........ TYcw4ixg Hey Postmaster! We were waiting for you last night Postmaster, v^iagra is cheapest here............2qx3 postivic@homelandsecurity.go v, thanks for your purchase 100% satisfaction guaranteed on inkjet cartridges, postmaster xd ds jj1esdzzb Postmaster, get home delivery of V a l i u m and V i a g a r a Postmaster You could have money coming blackbody posman, Tired of deleting spam? egmgsdoptoreoq postmaster, Government grants are easier to get than you think
Slashdot Mirror
My pet peeve is people who misuse literally.
This word is supposed to mean "not figuratively". Then people started realizing they could use it to make their figurative speech sound even more dramatic, and so you hear things like "my head literally exploded when I heard that". Which is the exact opposite of what it's supposed to mean. What am we going to do when someone's head really does explode some day? The word has literally lost its meaning, and there is no convenient replacement for it.
Virii is a word. It is the plural of virus. 'Viruses' is just bad spelling.
The Oxford English Dictionary says it's viruses.
"Virii" is a term used neither in biology nor computer science, unless you include adolescents who submit articles to 2600.
Which party has the most powerful black man in the world? (Clarence Thomas)
Supreme Court Justices are not supposed to have a political affiliation. Moreover, Thomas's opinion on any given matter is determined by Scalia, who effectively has two votes on the court.
Can America trust regular punchcard voting? Didn't Florida teach us anything in 2000?
Sure.
According to the final, official count of the votes in Florida, W received a 537-vote margin after the USSC effectively barred any further official examination of the ballots. An independent subsequent examination determined that the official margin of victory was accurate to within a few hundred votes under the voting laws in place at the time of the election. So as chaotic as the election was, the official result was within one part in 10,000 of the underlying quantity. Afterwards, a multiplicity of standards for counting ballots were examined, but none of them placed the final margin anywhere further than 2 parts in 10,000 of the official results, for a percent accuracy of 0.02%. Compare this error rate to those seen in touchscreen voting, which has already been off by 2,690% in a mere tally of votes cast. Compared to these systems being foisted upon us, punch cards are impressively accurate.
The Florida election was essentially a tie, and a tie is an extreme test of any vote counting system. I don't see how people can say touchscreens will do any better, simply because they haven't been subjected to such a test.
This is like that frivolous McDonald's lawsuit where some greedy lady abused the court system
AAARGH. I'm getting really sick of having to write the same post over and over again. Sometimes I wonder if some McShill has been spreading McDisinformation on the radio for McDonald's.
The car was parked. The lady wasn't the driver. She was originally asking McDonald's to cover her medical bills (a few thousand). They told her to go to hell. Burn centers had been repeatedly asking McDonald's to lower the temperature of the coffee, but McDonald's had found that customers will put up with inferior grades of beans if the coffee is too hot to taste. Then they had the balls to argue in court that "the coffee tastes better that way". (Well duh, it's garbage!) Moreover, they had done a "Fight Club" analysis and determined the savings on cheap beans would more than make up for the lawsuits from burn victims.
This inflamed the jury and they awarded the woman a figure amounting to two days of McDonald's coffee profits. Which is a pretty reasonable way to figure out an award- in fact law schools typically present the case as an example of a wise decision on the part of a jury. But McDonald's was enjoying huge margins off its coffee- they were, after all, selling garbage- and coffee was actually a big moneymaker for them. Two days of coffee profits turned out to be a multimillion dollar figure. This was reduced by the judge to $480,000, and the case was settled for an undisclosed amount.
The real economic damage to McDonald's was the lowering of the temperature. This required retrofitting existing equipment, but that was a one-time cost. But now that the coffee is cool enough to actually taste, they can no longer get away with buying mud and passing it off as coffee, so they lost the high margins they were enjoying on coffee (which made two days' profits turn out to be such an exorbitant figure). But now the coffee tastes a lot better and it doesn't burn your mouth. Thanks, Stella Liebeck! Hope losing your crotch was worth it.
"Little genetic errors"?
They're removing two whole genes. Viruses only have several to begin with. Your own junk DNA is littered with the DNA of several thousand extinct endogenous retroviruses that have lost one or two critical genes. Ebola, being a filovirus, lacks reverse transcriptase and cannot even look forward to a career as a dormant junk DNA sequence.
Your body sees the proteins expressed by the foreign DNA, creates antibodies, and that's it. The DNA does not replicate. Evolution requires successive copying operations (paired with natural selection) and does not apply to this process.
It isn't "welfare for physicists," if research is for helping government fufill its basic duties for the People.
I agree with your points. I was only mentioning one benefit, which is why I said "for one thing".
Perhaps I do mean to aim my criticism at Republicans, but it's been fashionable of late for Republicans to pass themselves off as libertarians. (Ducks...)
I've already got my PhD in Physics and I've been a postdoc all around Europe and now I've got my own lab.
Aaaaah, now I see what is going on here.
"MY research is important and is guaranteed to lead to important technological applications. The guys down the hall are wasting their time with research that has no obvious technological benefit down the road so I should be getting all that money and equipment."
What does physics research do, anyway? Empower the public with advances in knowledge and technology providing solutions to difficult problems and building new markets to boost the world economy?!? Bah!
Physics research employs nerds and geeks in challenging, slightly less than decent-paying jobs, for one thing. Would you rather live in a world where physics was closed to you as a career option?
Of course, the libertarians will be all over that argument, saying it's a form of welfare for physicists, always playing on the basic human fear that someone, somewhere, might be getting away with something at my expense. But compared to recent corporate welfare projects like the Iraq war, physicsist welfare amounts to peanuts so the libertarians can just STFU.
Now that, my friend, is what basic research is (or should be) about. Not a gamble where you roll the dice and hope to produce something useful, but a coherrent endeavour which will definitely help with problems in the applied research, and consequently industry, but which may also contribute to the humankind's fundamental understanding of the nature.
So... you're saying scientific research that contributes to humankind's fundamental understanding of nature is OK if it is guaranteed a predetermined desirable outcome resulting in cool new products for consumers and industry.
Man... what a bad, bad scientist you would be. I suggest you go for the MBA instead.
Strange though that they don't do the 'obvious' duplicate filtering...
You didn't receive any duplicates. The three messages differ by hash-busting characters that alter the hash, and while it's not substantially different, it's different enough to get past a filter that is checking hashes. Duplicates refer to perfect duplicates.
I may be wrong about the prior art stuff, since IBM had filed their patent in 1999. Seems this crap has been going on forever though.
If you read the patent, you'll see it has nothing to do with "random letters or dictionary words" to break hashing detectors.
Yes it does. Note that while they describe many ways to alter a message, the specific method used is not central to their claim, which is merely that m different versions are created somehow, that recipients are assigned to sublists in which the same ISP does not appear twice, and each sublist gets a different version. While it doesn't mention them specifically, any technique using n random letters in a message will infringe, since it effectively divides all users into m=26^n sublists and sends the same message to all users in a sublist. Use of enough random characters effectively generates such a large m that each recipient lands in their own sublist. Therefore there is no need to "determine if the selected address is substantially similar to an address on the selected sublist" since there are no addresses already in the sublist. Nobody gets the same message, so you don't need to worry about two copies of one version going to users at the same ISP. It is algorithmically equivalent to what they're claiming.
The patent goes on to describe many ways that a message might be altered, like reordering paragraphs, etc. In general many of the techniques they describe are subtle and do not allow as many permutations as you can get from a bunch of random characters, and so they stipulate (as a part of the claim) that care must to be taken that no sublist contains two "similar" email addresses. Meaning, don't send two copies of the same version to two recipients at the same ISP, who will notice the identical message hash. Duh. Any spammer could figure that out for himself. And like I said, if you use a large enough m this part of the patent is irrelevant since you don't need to worry about this problem. All the messages are unique.
If you are too lazy to read the entire patent, and insist on only reading a small part, how about also reading what the claims section says instead of just the abstract?
Yeah, what in the claims section do you think I missed?
Sometimes, you know, patents are allowed that don't actually have prior art, or at least aren't as obvious as the abstract makes them sound.
While true, that's irrelevant in this case because this is an obvious patent with plenty of prior art.
This isn't "providing slimeball spammers with yet a bigger hammer". It's a bread-and-butter spamming technique. Almost all the spam I get is salted with random letters or dictionary words in the address or message body to change the hash (and is therefore infringing on AT&T's new patent). We just saw a story a few days ago where spammers were sprinkling fraudulent scam emails with hash-busting characters to get past filters.
One of the nice things about spammers is that (unlike their opponents) they rarely patent the circumvention mechanisms they use, leaving their bag of tricks open for intellectual property land grabs like this one. Compared to laws against spam, which for the most part hardly exist, patent law rests on sound international footing and gives AT&T much greater leverage against spammers who are now patent infringers. Good for AT&T. I wish I'd thought of it first.
It's lunacy to assume that AT&T secured this patent for any other reason- like productizing this stupid patent. Are they going to sell a new software suite for spamming? Spammers aren't an ideal software market by any reasonable standard. There's only 180 of them. AT&T would sell one copy, it would get pirated 179 times, everyone with a copy would start spamming warez versions of it, and that would be the end of it. Assuming that spammers cared about using patent-encumbered software at all- which they don't. And AT&T would alienate its customers in all the other markets they're in. It would be like a Christian bookstore opening a bondage videos section. It makes no sense. I can't understand how anyone could possibly take the outrage in this article at face value.
What is really amazing about this patent is what it says about the research done by the USPTO. I bet the USPTO examiner received a dozen examples of prior art in his own inbox the very day he approved this patent, and he approved it anyway!
We had one of those projects going: the Superconducting Supercollider.
I remember when I was at Rutgers (88-92), everyone in the physics department hated the Supercondcting Supercollider. They have to beg for public money for a living. The feeling was that this thing was going to suck up all the physics money, and their requests for funding would be met with "we just gave you this wonderful supercollider, why isn't that enough"?
Here is an interesting excerpt on pages 149-150 that explains Maxwell's demon in terms of reversible computing:
Someone wrote a program in Qbasic, and someone wrote a program in C. So far in this thread, we have reached the following conclusions from that limited information:
No matter what two languages are in the war, Java always ends up losing.
FCC controls RF, nobody controls light (IR)
What if you're receding, so your IR looks like RF? There must be an inertial reference frame where this device becomes illegal.
This reminds me of a physics problem that is in every physics book in the chapter about relativity and doppler shifts. A motorist is speeding towards a traffic light and runs a red. In traffic court he claims that the red light appeared green to him because of the great speed with which he approached it. The judge fines him one dollar per mph he was driving over the speed limit (55 mph). What was the fine?
You seem, however, to have left out your scientific criticism of their methodology and results.
The original 1998 paper by Mann, Bradley, and Hughes was not in error. McIntyre and McKitrick screwed up their data when they published this paper. Somebody exported the raw data in the original paper to Excel but somehow exported 159 columns of data into a 112 column spreadsheet. M&M did not compare the spreadsheet and produced a "correction" to the original paper that was based on nothing but errors, since the full paleoclimatic data series of 159 columns is required to properly audit the analysis done in the 1998 paper. More information here and here. The world really is melting.
The authors of the original paper have already published a rebuttal to this M&M paper with further details about how M&M faithfully replicated neither the data nor the procedures in their audit.
The conflict of interest is clear, perhaps, but there seems to be no problem with disclosure. You want to be the first one down the slope where you decide what ventures people may or may not invest in? You want to use the theory that there might be a vast right-wing conspiracy as your criterion to make that decision?
Are you on crack?
I have nothing against "allowing" Diebold to invest in online voting ventures. But their right to seek business with us does not trump our right to decline to give it to them. There is an obvious conflict of interest in this case, and I think that's a pretty clear standard. We don't need to be worried about falling down some "slippery slope" and babbling about right wing conspiracies, as you imply in your straw man argument. A conflict of interest is enough to make something a bad idea.
Well I do know that you are offered a "verifiable paper reciept." :)
This is a very good point. Diebold has this attitude that merely having a printout of each vote as it's cast would present some sort of unbearable hardship. They act like we're asking them to produce moon samples. But banks impose requirements on Diebold that are far more dire than merely preventing election fraud. They must dispense yuppie food stamps- now with pretty colors- and unlike a vote, there is no room for error here. And Diebold delivers for the banks. An ATM creates a paper record on an internal printer as well as the paper receipt that you get. The banks aren't interested in playing games with Diebold, and will not put up with the shoddy standards that apply to the safeguarding of democracy in the United States.
On an unrelated note: whoever is behind this attack on images.slashdot.org, please stop it. You aren't funny.
As I said in my last post on the subject, the USPTO and their overlords need large doses of antipsychotics.
I, for one, welcome our new psychotic undermedicated patent-holding Texan overlords.
[ducks]
Hmmm... well that would make the most sense.
Someone is clearly using other, unofficial mechanisms to collect fees for granting patents, or we wouldn't see such heavy opposition to even the most trivial patent reforms.
false. prior art means that the idea has been in common use for a while.
I phrased it badly- I meant "there is no prior art" as far as the USPTO is concerned when they grant the patent. They do a search through their database, and if they don't find anything, they grant the patent and pocket the fees.
Why waste time doing a Google search? It might find something, and then they don't get the fee. If there's unpatented prior art out there, let the courts sort it out!
Of course, coming up with prior art should be no problem
You mean, coming up with a prior patent should be no problem- and it will be a problem in this case because apparently there was no prior patent or the USPTO wouldn't have granted this one.
The USPTO definition of prior art is a prior patent. If nobody has filed a patent on something, there is no prior art and they consider it patentable.
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