> this patent was filed in 1993, making it a 17 years from issue date patent. Based upon it's issue date of April 9, 1996, it expires (dies) on April 9, 2013.
if that is true then how come the mp3 patent hasn't expired? It was filed in 1992...
It's because there is no 'mp3 patent'. There are several patents applicable to the format; some have already expired, and some have yet to do so.
The various MP3-related patents expire on dates ranging from 2007 to 2017 in the U.S.[52] The initial near-complete MPEG-1 standard (parts 1, 2 and 3) was publicly available on 6 December 1991 as ISO CD 11172.[53][54] In the United States, patents cannot claim inventions that were already publicly disclosed more than a year prior to the filing date, but for patents filed prior to 8 June 1995, submarine patents made it possible to extend the effective lifetime of a patent through application extensions. Patents filed for anything disclosed in ISO CD 11172 a year or more after its publication are questionable; if only the known MP3 patents filed by December 1992 are considered, then MP3 decoding may be patent-free in the US by September 2015 when U.S. Patent 5,812,672 expires which had a PCT filing in Oct 1992.[55][56][57]
most slashdotters are round in shape asking them for fitness advice is a horrible idea.
I'm sure lots are, but I'd be surprised if there is a significantly larger proportion of overweight Slashdotters than in the general population. Staying healthy and being a geek aren't mutually exclusive.
Consider this: How did Slashdot become a medical web site?
Slashdot has always been a science and technology website; science includes medicine. Search Google including the term site:slashdot.org. You'll find plenty of medical stories on the site from 10 years ago and earlier.
Police reaction to speeding in the UK and US is often quite different. The last time I took the wheel in the UK I made a 220 km journey, over mostly M roads, in an hour and got no tickets despite passing several marked police cars. I presume it's because I always stayed left except to pass, was diligent about signaling and generally being polite in my driving behavior aside from the speed.
In contrast, a co-worker of mine received a ticket for 2 mph over the limit last year in the US.
Are you sure it was police you passed and not Highways Agency traffic officers? Their vehicles are marked similarly, but the traffic officers are there to attend to accidents on the motorways, maintain traffic flow etc., and not to arrest people. If you passed the police whilst travelling at 137 mph (almost double the maximum speed limit in the UK), it is very unlikely that you'd be spared a trip to court.
Oh wait... isn't it the government who receives the payment for the fine?;)
All this does is shift money. The government is just paying itself. It doesn't cost the taxpayer any more.
To some extent.
However, in the UK the police are funded partially through central government funds and partially through local council funds. People here pay income tax, which goes to central government, and a smaller amount of 'council' tax, which is for use on local services, police, fire departments etc.
What these fines do, in effect, is to take money that residents of the area have paid to police the local area and give it back to central government. The health service is currently fighting a similar £325,000 (over $500,000) fine.
These organisations should be held accountable for privacy breaches, but taking money away from residents and patients is not the answer.
$60 a year for doing what? Nothing? Surely marking a number as unlisted in the subscriber database is a once-off 30 activity of at most 5 minutes. So who's being paid $720 an hour for doing it?
I doubt it's even a 5 minute job. I work for a large telco in Europe. If a customer over here asks for their number not to be printed, we have to honour that request and we're not allowed (by law) to charge a cent for doing so. The phone directory is based on a database, which is linked to our customer care software. If a customer asks for their number to be removed from the phone book, a customer care agent clicks the button on their screen and the database is updated overnight. Factoring in a staff member's time, overheads for running the call centre etc., a call like this costs on average the equivalent of just over $4. Charging $60 per year is outrageous.
Indeed, on nature.com I would have expected something clearer like exponential notation.
Eric's answer to the first comment is even weirder:"It would be in Celsius. We’re metric around here. Cheers, Eric"
I'm pretty sure they work in Kelvin, for a US audience it would of course have been expressed as Rankin.
I believe the last record was reported in short-scale, so 4 trillion = 4 x 10^12
So I suspect this one must be 5 x 10^12 unless they've broken the record by a significant amount.:-)
I've gone all the way up to calculus 3 (vectors, multi-dimensional functions, and doing differentials and integrals therein) and I've yet to see calculus applied by any programming. I am curious how one actually implements it though, in what (limited) programming I've done, I haven't seen any clear way to calculate say an integral using something like c++ or c#.
Is it typically library/api driven and you just feed an equation to those functions? Or do most programmers hardcode them?
I'd like to see some code examples. I'd probably never have a use for it, but I am curious.
I haven't tried it, but it appears that the GNU Scientific Library contains functions for linear algebra, numerical differentiation, differential equations etc. You can download it here, and it's also in the standard Debian repositories (and I suspect also included with most other Linux distros).
School taught 68hc11 assembly language, which is a great education, but poor training as supposedly everyone does microcontrollers in C, or at least the people that talk loudly do, I donno what people who actually write code do.
When I learned about Microcontrollers in my EE course, we were first taught how to code in assembly language, and only later taught C. I think the idea is that the learning of assembly language can help the students to think about the inner workings of the chip (i.e. moving values into registers etc.), so teaching assembly language is a good first step before moving onto C.
Sory to post this here, but it seems that SLASHCODE'S CSS HAS CHANGED IN A WAY THAT IT NO LONGER OBEYS CHROMIUM'S MAGNIFICATION COMMAND.
I am sight impaired and CANNOT READ unles with high magnification.
Please fix this!
You should probably email feedback at slashdot.org (see the footer of this page) instead of posting this in a random thread; maybe they can fix it for you.
As far as I'm concerned, if you're running BitTorrent you deserve to go to prison. I'm not sure why ISPs don't just monitor for BT traffic and report those users to the police right away. This technology has only ever been used for piracy. I've never encountered a legit use for it.
I'm sorry, am I misreading or are you saying statistics is a "soft science"?
If you're that confused about things, then just go to the textbook, and teach one chapter a week.
I understood the summary to mean that the OP is teaching a statistics course to soft science students (those who are majoring in social science and phychology), and not that (s)he considers statistics to be a soft science.
I have a Raspberry Pi, but now I'm more so sitting at the point of wtf do I use this for? I was originally thinking maybe some low power server to run a BNC or something small. Media player is another idea but I have enough devices that will play/stream media hooked up to my television.
Have you considered getting one of the extension boards, which allow for circuit prototyping? I intend to use mine (when it arrives) to process the signal from a Nasa Jove receiver, but there are tons of other circuits you could build. It's probably true that everything you can do with a Pi you could also do with a standard PC; but it seems to me that things like the Pi, which fit on a stand-alone circuit, just seem more... Fun.:-)
It's more than a few thousand people. Check out Stanford's Youtube channel, for example. They've uploaded multiple full lecture series on math, physics, biology, engineering, etc., and it already has 123,000 subscribers and 34 million video views.
Admittedly this doesn't answer the original poster's question of what publishers are best in this area, but I second the 'learn VHDL/Verilog' advice.
If you buy an inexpensive development board from a company like Xilinx, Altera or Digilent, you can immediately begin to experiment in developing your own digital circuits (there are some hugely expensive dev boards, but you really just need a cheap Spartan 3 board or similar to start out). Check out Opencores.org, which is sort of like the Sourceforge of digital hardware, where engineers share open source hardware designs; they are largely implemented in Verilog or VHDL, but there are also dev board schematics available for free.
A lot of the designs on the site are of course fairly difficult for an absolute beginner to follow. However, as it is with software, having working examples to base your learning on can be tremendously helpful. The site has multiple full microprocessors, hardware video decoders, Ethernet adapters etc.
"I understand the need to be aware of the attitudes of workers with high-level access to data and networks, but this strikes me as creepy. What if an IT employee suddenly has relationship problems or family issues?"
Not commenting on whether monitoring employee emails is right or wrong, but why would somebody use their corporate email account to deal with relationship or family issues? In a world where companies can and often will read their employees' emails, that anyone would use their work email for anything personal seems short-sited. Sign up for one of the free web-based mail accounts.
You're absolutely correct. I've been a vegetarian for many years. (I have no problem with other people eating meat -- I do understand that we evolved to eat it etc. -- but I just choose not to.) It's funny that, after all this time, I never crave chicken or steak or any of the better quality meats; but if I'm hungry and drive past McDonalds, I almost always start to crave a Big Mac, despite knowing how disgusting they are.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
"Graphics debugging has been furthered"
I don't believe that 'further' is a verb.
Not sure if I'm missing the joke, but further is a verb and furthered is its past participle.
Replying to undo accidental bad moderation. Sorry, I had meant to click 'informative'.
> this patent was filed in 1993, making it a 17 years from issue date patent. Based upon it's issue date of April 9, 1996, it expires (dies) on April 9, 2013.
if that is true then how come the mp3 patent hasn't expired? It was filed in 1992...
It's because there is no 'mp3 patent'. There are several patents applicable to the format; some have already expired, and some have yet to do so.
From Wikipedia:
The various MP3-related patents expire on dates ranging from 2007 to 2017 in the U.S.[52] The initial near-complete MPEG-1 standard (parts 1, 2 and 3) was publicly available on 6 December 1991 as ISO CD 11172.[53][54] In the United States, patents cannot claim inventions that were already publicly disclosed more than a year prior to the filing date, but for patents filed prior to 8 June 1995, submarine patents made it possible to extend the effective lifetime of a patent through application extensions. Patents filed for anything disclosed in ISO CD 11172 a year or more after its publication are questionable; if only the known MP3 patents filed by December 1992 are considered, then MP3 decoding may be patent-free in the US by September 2015 when U.S. Patent 5,812,672 expires which had a PCT filing in Oct 1992.[55][56][57]
most slashdotters are round in shape asking them for fitness advice is a horrible idea.
I'm sure lots are, but I'd be surprised if there is a significantly larger proportion of overweight Slashdotters than in the general population. Staying healthy and being a geek aren't mutually exclusive.
Consider this: How did Slashdot become a medical web site?
Slashdot has always been a science and technology website; science includes medicine. Search Google including the term site:slashdot.org. You'll find plenty of medical stories on the site from 10 years ago and earlier.
The original poster said that they had driven 220 km in one hour. This means they must have averaged 220 km/h...
Police reaction to speeding in the UK and US is often quite different. The last time I took the wheel in the UK I made a 220 km journey, over mostly M roads, in an hour and got no tickets despite passing several marked police cars. I presume it's because I always stayed left except to pass, was diligent about signaling and generally being polite in my driving behavior aside from the speed.
In contrast, a co-worker of mine received a ticket for 2 mph over the limit last year in the US.
Are you sure it was police you passed and not Highways Agency traffic officers? Their vehicles are marked similarly, but the traffic officers are there to attend to accidents on the motorways, maintain traffic flow etc., and not to arrest people. If you passed the police whilst travelling at 137 mph (almost double the maximum speed limit in the UK), it is very unlikely that you'd be spared a trip to court.
Oh wait... isn't it the government who receives the payment for the fine? ;)
All this does is shift money. The government is just paying itself. It doesn't cost the taxpayer any more.
To some extent.
However, in the UK the police are funded partially through central government funds and partially through local council funds. People here pay income tax, which goes to central government, and a smaller amount of 'council' tax, which is for use on local services, police, fire departments etc.
What these fines do, in effect, is to take money that residents of the area have paid to police the local area and give it back to central government. The health service is currently fighting a similar £325,000 (over $500,000) fine.
These organisations should be held accountable for privacy breaches, but taking money away from residents and patients is not the answer.
Blacks do not innovate.
False.
$60 a year for doing what? Nothing? Surely marking a number as unlisted in the subscriber database is a once-off 30 activity of at most 5 minutes. So who's being paid $720 an hour for doing it?
I doubt it's even a 5 minute job. I work for a large telco in Europe. If a customer over here asks for their number not to be printed, we have to honour that request and we're not allowed (by law) to charge a cent for doing so. The phone directory is based on a database, which is linked to our customer care software. If a customer asks for their number to be removed from the phone book, a customer care agent clicks the button on their screen and the database is updated overnight. Factoring in a staff member's time, overheads for running the call centre etc., a call like this costs on average the equivalent of just over $4. Charging $60 per year is outrageous.
Indeed, on nature.com I would have expected something clearer like exponential notation. Eric's answer to the first comment is even weirder:"It would be in Celsius. We’re metric around here. Cheers, Eric" I'm pretty sure they work in Kelvin, for a US audience it would of course have been expressed as Rankin.
I believe the last record was reported in short-scale, so 4 trillion = 4 x 10^12
So I suspect this one must be 5 x 10^12 unless they've broken the record by a significant amount. :-)
Additionally, a Google search turned up this, which looks very interesting. Might be worth a look.
I've gone all the way up to calculus 3 (vectors, multi-dimensional functions, and doing differentials and integrals therein) and I've yet to see calculus applied by any programming. I am curious how one actually implements it though, in what (limited) programming I've done, I haven't seen any clear way to calculate say an integral using something like c++ or c#.
Is it typically library/api driven and you just feed an equation to those functions? Or do most programmers hardcode them?
I'd like to see some code examples. I'd probably never have a use for it, but I am curious.
I haven't tried it, but it appears that the GNU Scientific Library contains functions for linear algebra, numerical differentiation, differential equations etc. You can download it here, and it's also in the standard Debian repositories (and I suspect also included with most other Linux distros).
School taught 68hc11 assembly language, which is a great education, but poor training as supposedly everyone does microcontrollers in C, or at least the people that talk loudly do, I donno what people who actually write code do.
When I learned about Microcontrollers in my EE course, we were first taught how to code in assembly language, and only later taught C. I think the idea is that the learning of assembly language can help the students to think about the inner workings of the chip (i.e. moving values into registers etc.), so teaching assembly language is a good first step before moving onto C.
Replying to undo accidental redundant moderation.
Sory to post this here, but it seems that SLASHCODE'S CSS HAS CHANGED IN A WAY THAT IT NO LONGER OBEYS CHROMIUM'S MAGNIFICATION COMMAND.
I am sight impaired and CANNOT READ unles with high magnification.
Please fix this!
You should probably email feedback at slashdot.org (see the footer of this page) instead of posting this in a random thread; maybe they can fix it for you.
Sorry, I broke the link. Should have been: http://www.debian.org/CD/torrent-cd/
As far as I'm concerned, if you're running BitTorrent you deserve to go to prison. I'm not sure why ISPs don't just monitor for BT traffic and report those users to the police right away. This technology has only ever been used for piracy. I've never encountered a legit use for it.
a hhttp://www.debian.org/CD/torrent-cd/
I'm sorry, am I misreading or are you saying statistics is a "soft science"? If you're that confused about things, then just go to the textbook, and teach one chapter a week.
I understood the summary to mean that the OP is teaching a statistics course to soft science students (those who are majoring in social science and phychology), and not that (s)he considers statistics to be a soft science.
I have a Raspberry Pi, but now I'm more so sitting at the point of wtf do I use this for? I was originally thinking maybe some low power server to run a BNC or something small. Media player is another idea but I have enough devices that will play/stream media hooked up to my television.
Have you considered getting one of the extension boards, which allow for circuit prototyping? I intend to use mine (when it arrives) to process the signal from a Nasa Jove receiver, but there are tons of other circuits you could build. It's probably true that everything you can do with a Pi you could also do with a standard PC; but it seems to me that things like the Pi, which fit on a stand-alone circuit, just seem more... Fun. :-)
Sorry, should have posted the link for anyone who's interested.
It's more than a few thousand people. Check out Stanford's Youtube channel, for example. They've uploaded multiple full lecture series on math, physics, biology, engineering, etc., and it already has 123,000 subscribers and 34 million video views.
Admittedly this doesn't answer the original poster's question of what publishers are best in this area, but I second the 'learn VHDL/Verilog' advice.
If you buy an inexpensive development board from a company like Xilinx, Altera or Digilent, you can immediately begin to experiment in developing your own digital circuits (there are some hugely expensive dev boards, but you really just need a cheap Spartan 3 board or similar to start out). Check out Opencores.org, which is sort of like the Sourceforge of digital hardware, where engineers share open source hardware designs; they are largely implemented in Verilog or VHDL, but there are also dev board schematics available for free.
A lot of the designs on the site are of course fairly difficult for an absolute beginner to follow. However, as it is with software, having working examples to base your learning on can be tremendously helpful. The site has multiple full microprocessors, hardware video decoders, Ethernet adapters etc.
"I understand the need to be aware of the attitudes of workers with high-level access to data and networks, but this strikes me as creepy. What if an IT employee suddenly has relationship problems or family issues?"
Not commenting on whether monitoring employee emails is right or wrong, but why would somebody use their corporate email account to deal with relationship or family issues? In a world where companies can and often will read their employees' emails, that anyone would use their work email for anything personal seems short-sited. Sign up for one of the free web-based mail accounts.
You're absolutely correct. I've been a vegetarian for many years. (I have no problem with other people eating meat -- I do understand that we evolved to eat it etc. -- but I just choose not to.) It's funny that, after all this time, I never crave chicken or steak or any of the better quality meats; but if I'm hungry and drive past McDonalds, I almost always start to crave a Big Mac, despite knowing how disgusting they are. :-)