Someone asked a very similar question on Stack Overflow. It's here. The short version is: if you're running KDE and can change the window manager configuration, no problem. If you can change which window manager, then sure. (Also, the previous "yank the ethernet cable" or "boot off of live CD/USB" suggestions are quite reasonable. However, it is possible to handle most of it in the application using JNI to write X-Windows code which will capture most all keystrokes. It doesn't get ctrl-alt-backspace, but it appears to get prevent most of the rest.
Well, there's lots of stuff which isn't released on any media. For example, late night talk shows. If you are a big fan of Conan or The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, those don't really get released on Blu-Ray. Also, less popular, but still awesome shows like Arrested Development or Community have never gotten Blu-Ray releases. And although I'm not a huge sports nut, it's not difficult to imagine people who want to record and save all of the high-definition games of their favorite team. Obviously, if it's broadcast unencrypted (like Community is), then it could be pulled down that way. But stuff which is only available over cable/satellite is usually HDMI'ed by the cable box.
You're definitely correct that nuclear isn't renewable. But we have enough known, accessibly Uranium to last 10,000 years at current rates of consumption. And that isn't even factoring in the Thorium. So, hopefully that 10,000 years will give us enough time to find a better energy source which we can use or at least enough energy to build a shitload of solar panels.
Yeah, I read my license agreement for my Samsung TV and was content with it, too. It wasn't actually technically that short because it included the GPL and the BSD license, but the parts other than that were quite short and reasonable.
Thanks for returning your Sony based on a bad EULA. If more people returned TVs because of unacceptable EULAs, the TV makers would cut that shit out.
I double-checked things after I wrote this, and I'm wrong. I didn't realize that Shor's algorithm could be used to solve discrete logarithm problems. So, the ECC versions of things are not affected, but the integer versions of El Gamal and Diffe-Hellman are.
You should keep in mind that although theoretically there may be efficient quantum algorithms for a variety of problems on which cryptographic schemes are based, in practice, the only one which has been found is factoring. So, yeah, RSA will become toast if we can get the number of qubits in a quantum computer up into the neighborhood of RSA key lengths (1024, 2048, 4096). But, exceedingly few of the other major cryptographic systems rely on factoring being hard. So, for example, Diffe-Hellman or El Gamal (both integer and elliptic curve versions for both) will probably not be appreciably easier to crack. So, there doesn't seem to be any serious reason to be worried about public key cryptography, just RSA. So changes to SSH are pretty straight-forward.
As for why people aren't worrying about it, my guess would be that most people don't follow quantum computing, and the few which do may have reason to wonder if we will ever actually reach the 1024 qubit size in a functioning quantum computer. A few years ago, I would've told people not to worry about it because I was following the state of the art and it was around 5 qubits and research had shown that under current models, you needed 9 qubits of output to reliably output 1 normal bit (if my memory is correct). So, we weren't even one 0.1% of the way to cracking RSA. These days, the number of qubits is higher, but it's still not clear how long it will be until we can actually functionally factor a 1024 bit number.
As someone who's written code in a lot of different languages, I find that writing correct code in a type-inferring statically-typed functional language requires maybe a tiny bit more thinking than it does in a procedural language or a dynamically typed functional language. But it still requires less thinking than debugging non-obvious problems in procedural code. Debugging statically-typed functional language code is a little less thinky because functions are better localized and also, because debugging is a lot less common, I just don't wind up spending the same amount of total time thinking about it.
On the other hand, writing slapdash "it probably works, I think" code in procedural languages is much less thinky than in type-inferring statically-typed functional languages, but I'm not convinced that that's a good thing.
I've written projects in Logo, BASIC, Pascal, Prolog, C, C++, Fortran, HyperTalk, SML, Common Lisp, Java, Perl, Ocaml, Python, Actionscript, and Javascript. Out of all of these, I strongly prefer Ocaml and if I'm choosing my own language will use it for pretty well any project. I make that choice because I find that it minimizes the total time that it takes me to write, test, and debug the code to get to the point where the project has no bugs which are relevant to me and that I can feel assured that it is logically correct. This standard may not produce the same preference for all coders as not all coders are equal. However, I believe that the biggest reason that many programmers don't make this same choice is that they haven't actually learned a language like Ocaml or Haskell and developed projects in it. It's easy enough to say "Well, it's too complex", but until you actually try it out on a serious project and get some experience with it, it's tough to really evaluate a language.
I don't know about anyone else, but now that it exists and seems stable, my next web project is going to be written in Ocaml using Ocsigen and js_of_ocaml. My code is way more likely to be correct, that way.
Most people didn't really think in either way before they learned to program. Most people are terrible at writing intricate and correct lists of instructions. Learning to program required learning to think imperatively: to communicate exact instructions rather than just intent.
In some places, they've taught functional programming languages first. Students don't seem to have found it any harder to start with functional programming languages than imperative. What is hard is shifting paradigms. Programmers who have mostly written in imperative languages find it hard to switch to functional languages, but the opposite is true as well.
This appears to be the same list as from the Caribou Coffee case (brief). So far, I've read through three of them. I read the first one: '559, one which didn't fit the same pattern: '646, and the oldest: '397.
'559 is one of the patents which they are asserting that business are definitely violating because they're using WiFi. If you read the text of this patent, there are a large number of diagrams and descriptions of a very specific wireless sensor network system, which may, in fact, be novel. However, when you read the claims, they're sufficiently broadly written that they cover almost any wireless network. So on its face, it might look like they have a case. Except that this patent was filed in 2001. That was way, way after 802.11 was codified and consumer products using the patented techniques were already on the market. It's even written so broadly that it would cover AlohaNet, which went into operation in 1971. As such, prior art for this patent is obvious and it should be invalidated.
A large number of the patents in their suing portfolio would seem to match the same profile as '559 since in the lawsuits they're specifically claiming that they know for sure that the businesses are violating them despite not even knowing which particular type of access point those businesses are using. Many of the patents in the lawsuit are more recent than '559 and the plaintiffs are effectively claiming that they cover all WiFi devices. Any such patent should clearly be invalidated based on prior art.
There are also a few which they only claim that discovery will allow them find is being violated. I read one of the newer ones, '646, and the oldest one, '397.
By contrast to '559, the oldest patent: '397 is less clearly invalid. Filed in 1994, it's a patent for a wireless access point which uses two radios to ensure higher reliability. The claims leave out any specific requirement of the purpose of the second radio and so just cover any wireless access point with two radios. They're hoping that their discovery will show that some of the access points in use have two radios. Although it's quite possible that prior art exists (and likely, I would guess), it's not so easy and obvious that it shows up in a simple Google search. But someone more familiar with the history of WLAN devices may well be able to identify a dual-radio device from before 1994. Even if no such device exists, the novelty of the invention seems to be its primary weakness. Given that devices with one radio existed and that certain people were already using two radios for redundancy by using two different devices, is it really that novel to just include two radios in one device? If it were my choice, I would rule it obvious. But both courts and the patent office have been very reluctant to overturn patents based on lack of novelty. So I suspect that this one will hinge on whether or not they can find prior art.
The last patent I read, '646 is a newer patent that they also claim that discovery will show whether or not the defendants are violating it. It's a newer patent, but unlike the other one doesn't cover WiFi in general. It has a huge number of claims (270), but all of them are based on claims 1, 15, 87, 144, 145, 216, so reading those doesn't take too long. They all claim a system in which wireless node go into sleep mode and the periodically wake up to check to see if there are pending messages for them. This, very simply, is not how WiFi works. It clearly is not applicable to any existing WiFi devices. I haven't looked into the prior art situation because it's clear that the defendants aren't violating the patent.
So, from a survey of three of the claimed patents, my guess is that they're trying a "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks approach". The plaintiffs clearly don't understand all of their own patents or they would've left '559 and '646 out entirely because they have n
Details says the experiment would be "a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons."
So, given floating platform with loose building codes, I think that the hurricane plan is probably disintegration. This may also be the tropical storm plan, the nor'easter plan, the water spout plan, and the heavy rain plan. Of course, if they're lucky, that'll just be the buildings and not the platform itself.
Exactly! We need countries with stronger property rights. For example, did you know that in many countries you can't legally own people? The ability to buy and sell your fellow man is the traditional bedrock of most successful societies. Once unfettered from such silly, non-traditional restrictions, capitalists will have free reign to create a magnificent society the likes of which we have not seen since ancient Greece.
Having read the patent (RE40,092 in case anyone is interested), it's claims are so broad and complete that any implementation of any kind of acceleration of the booting process would violate it. In fact, they're so complete, that any hibernate mode would also likely violate them, which suggests that it shouldn't be hard to find prior art since hibernate modes substantially predate this patent. I suspect that Apple will use prior art to get the patent invalidated, but it's tough to say for sure.
The real problem with this patent, though, is the standard one for software patents: it's just a set of general ideas about what you could do to make booting faster (store configuration data, check configuration data, write some or all pages of memory to disk, read some or all pages of memory from disk) with nothing that could actually be described as a specific invention or process. As such, the patent (as is almost always the case with software patents) is so broad that it's ridiculous. They've basically been granted a patent on any feasible idea for speeding up the boot process.
The patent isn't really very innovative. Most of what's covered in the first patent is simply the exact same control scheme available on CD players at that time (skip forward, back, change the order of tracks) except with digital audio files on a computer. I don't know if it should fail for prior art, but it should definitely fail for obviousness. Even worse is the fact that they're not really patenting a particular invention, they're patenting the very idea of skipping forwards and backwards in a list of audio tracks on a computer. Ideas don't deserve patent protection and aren't really particularly clever. If they had some specific mechanism, then there might be something clever there, but they don't.
This is the real problem with software patents as embodied in the US patent system: they're patents on ideas rather than particular inventions or processes. If you invented a new more efficient process for turning carbon and iron into steel, you couldn't simply claim "a process for turning carbon and iron into steel" and then be able to sue anyone else who made steel. You would instead have to patent the details of how you turned carbon and iron into steel and then sue other people who used the same process. But they've patented the very idea of skipping forward and backwards in a downloadable playlist. They don't patent storing the playlist in a doubly linked list and then using that to navigate or storing it in an array and using a second indirect array to reorder things or anything specific like that. If they did, that would be an invention or process. The total lack of implementation detail in the patent means that it should be rejected on its face because it's not an invention or process and hence, not patentable.
I bought some, and my daughter (who isn't old enough to have an X-Box Live Account) couldn't play them. The problem is that despite their stated policies when you buy the game, they don't let people without X-Box Live accounts play them and you can't play them if your network connection is down. This is because Microsoft wants to make sure that Indie Games don't do anything naughty, so they require that you check their servers to make sure that the game hasn't been revoked before you play it. When I buy X-Box or X-Box Live Arcade games everyone in my household can play them. When I buy Indie Games, it's just me because I'm the only one with an X-Box Live account (although my wife could certainly sign-up for a free Silver one if she wanted). I bought SuperCow so that my daughter could play it, but Microsoft won't let her. So it's not that I'd never, ever buy an Indie game, but it would have to be really good to overcome that handicap.
Having just taken the time to read the patent and being quite familiar with how BitTorrent works, I have to say that none of the claims in the patent describe the BitTorrent protocol or client in the slightest. My prediction for how this will end: This is going to get laughed out of court when the plaintiff can't produce an expert witness with any credibility at all who will agree that BitTorrent even slightly resembles their claims. They'll either be unable to line up expert witnesses or they'll have someone highly suspect who makes a combination of false and inaccurate statements.
The patent, in summary, is for a media server which takes requests from clients for media files and then serves them back at a bit-rate which is based on the available bandwidth using information from the client. All the claims are variations on this with things like multicasting, encryption, digital watermarking, payment, and the like mixed in. Now, this is a silly patent for several reasons but the biggest is that an alternate summary could be "Almost like RealAudio server, but with no streaming." So they could probably get their patent invalidated due to prior art since I believe that several of the streaming servers which existed at that time could be used for non-streaming purposes too.
But what's more immediately relevant is that none of this is anything like BitTorrent. In the BitTorrent protocol, a client asks the server for a list of other clients for the same file and the server delivers it. Then the clients swap pieces amongst themselves. In BT, there are no media files on the server, the server doesn't receive any transmission rate information from the client, and the server doesn't deliver any media files to the client. In their system, there is no peer-to-peer communication, the client cannot ask for or receive a list of other clients, and the media files are only delivered from the server directly to the client via either unicast or multicast. So what does this patent have to do with BitTorrent? Bugger all, that's what.
The only question in my mind about the outcome of this is whether or not the plaintiff will have to pay the defendant's legal fees. I sure hope so, because this lawsuit is nonsense. It's just an attempt to extract money from a more successful company.
The Enigma may have had 150,000,000,000,000,000,000 encodings which were theoretically possible before it was built, but, the actual real Enigma machines had quite a bit less. They had 3 rotors each with 26 positions and those three rotors were chosen (with some specific order) from a larger set of at most 7 (differing numbers depending on when in the war we're talking about and which branch of the German military). In addition, they used up to 2 patch cables. This gives a total number of possible encodings for a real Enigma machine of 26*26*26 (rotor postions) * 7*6*5 (rotor selection) * 26*25/2 (first patch) * 24*23/2 (second patch) / 2 (adjustment for the patch cables being interchangeable in the order) = 165,539,556,000 actual possible encodings at best (and less than that through most of the war due to smaller numbers of rotors being used). This is a lot, but, for example, not so many that you can't carry out a brute-force attack, which is exactly what the allies did. The bigger number from the article is only sensible so long as the rotor layout remains secret, which it didn't as some of the machines fell into allied hands.
In short, it's confusing the design space (possible choices at design time) with the key (parts which can be changed while in use). It's like calculating the number of encodings for DES by assuming that any S-Boxes could be chosen. The Enigma machine was a particular machine, not the set of all possible similar rotor machines which could have been manufactured.
You don't need a "fair use" exception. The needed exception is already written into copyright law in most countries. In the US, it's 17 USC 117 (a) (1).
(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy.— Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided: (1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or (2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.
That copy onto the hard drive and then the copying into RAM, each is definitely "an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine". As such, these are legal copies if you own a legal copy of the software (like if, for example, you walked into a store and bought one). The law is solid in this case.
The bit I don't understand is why a court would ever rule an EULA to be an enforceable contract given that the majority of them grant one party (the licensee) absolutely no rights which they don't already have. Why would the court ever support such a one-sided contract as being enforceable?
Did anyone here commenting on this read the article? Their HDMI Basics part is total crap.
The first thing to remember about HDMI is that it is a digital standard. Unlike component video, composite video, S-video, or coaxial cable, HDMI signals don't gradually degrade, or get fuzzy and lose clarity as the signal fades or interference grows. For digital signals like HDMI, as long as there is enough data for the receiver to put together a picture, it will form. If there isn't, it will just drop off. While processing artifacts can occur and gaps in the signal can cause blocky effects or screen blanking, generally an HDMI signal will display whenever the signal successfully reaches the receiver.
If they actually knew what they were talking about they would know that HDMI is an uncompressed video format with no error correction. 1) it's impossible for it to get blocky because those are artifacts of frame-based video compression techniques like the MPEG family. 2) The lack of error correction means that there's never an issue with whether or not there's enough data to put together a picture. Every since bit in the picture portion of the signal could be wrong and it would still show the resultant image. 3) Because of the lack of error correction, it is, in fact, entirely possible for the video signal to degrade. Specifically, this happens when some of the individual bits get misread and the result is that particular pixels are suddenly too light or too dark for one or more of their component colors. This is generally known as "sparkles" because it's generally marked by having random pixels which are markedly bright blue, red, or green for a single frame (due to a high-order bit being flipped).
Not quite as many as you think. If you'd like some more specific scientific insight into this, I would highly recommend that you read this free e-book by a psychology professor who has spent the last several decades studying these sort of issues. It's a really easy read and I guarantee that you'll learn some new things about authoritarian followers that you didn't know.
I wish we could. The fact of the matter is that large sections of our government are now out of the control of the citizenry. They do what the corporations tell them to with no regard for what the people say unless you can get truly massive protests mobilized. The problem is money. If a politician does what a corporation wants, he can count on them supporting him rather than his opponent in the next election. If they do what an individual voter wants, that individual might still vote for his opponent because individuals care about a range of issues. Pleasing an individual on one issue does not guarantee support. But each corporation only cares about a very few specific issues which affect their bottom line. So if you do them a favor, you can count on their support (and if they support you, you can count on being asked to do them a favor to continue to get their support). They also can now legally donate substantially more money than most political groups can afford to in order to promote their agenda. Put this together and politicians answer almost exclusively to the needs of the corporations rather than the citizenry, especially when it comes to issues like intellectual property on which most citizens are completely uneducated (see also other complex legal issues like tort reform, environmental regulation, product safety, financial regulation, federal mineral-rights leases, etc.). Then they use the force of the US government to try to ram this down the throats of everyone else.
I'd gladly vote for someone who claimed that they were going to do something about this (and, in fact, I did when I voted for Obama), but almost no one who's gotten elected in the last several decades has even tried to do anything about this and it certainly hasn't been a campaign issue. If, in twenty or thirty years, we look back and wonder why America no longer has the world's strongest economy, this will be why: because a slow erosion of public control of the government has replaced most effective governance and regulation with a system where the highest bidder and/or the shrewdest power broker gets to craft laws and regulations to their own benefit and everyone else's detriment. An economy where those are the rules is going to become a struggling economy once the existing inertia and capital are no longer sufficient to sustain it.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone asked a very similar question on Stack Overflow. It's here. The short version is: if you're running KDE and can change the window manager configuration, no problem. If you can change which window manager, then sure. (Also, the previous "yank the ethernet cable" or "boot off of live CD/USB" suggestions are quite reasonable. However, it is possible to handle most of it in the application using JNI to write X-Windows code which will capture most all keystrokes. It doesn't get ctrl-alt-backspace, but it appears to get prevent most of the rest.
Well, there's lots of stuff which isn't released on any media. For example, late night talk shows. If you are a big fan of Conan or The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, those don't really get released on Blu-Ray. Also, less popular, but still awesome shows like Arrested Development or Community have never gotten Blu-Ray releases. And although I'm not a huge sports nut, it's not difficult to imagine people who want to record and save all of the high-definition games of their favorite team. Obviously, if it's broadcast unencrypted (like Community is), then it could be pulled down that way. But stuff which is only available over cable/satellite is usually HDMI'ed by the cable box.
Best estimates suggest that it can buy us several thousand years. I think that should be enough time.
You're definitely correct that nuclear isn't renewable. But we have enough known, accessibly Uranium to last 10,000 years at current rates of consumption. And that isn't even factoring in the Thorium. So, hopefully that 10,000 years will give us enough time to find a better energy source which we can use or at least enough energy to build a shitload of solar panels.
Yeah, I read my license agreement for my Samsung TV and was content with it, too. It wasn't actually technically that short because it included the GPL and the BSD license, but the parts other than that were quite short and reasonable.
Thanks for returning your Sony based on a bad EULA. If more people returned TVs because of unacceptable EULAs, the TV makers would cut that shit out.
I predict that this will be like Coupon the Movie all over again.
I double-checked things after I wrote this, and I'm wrong. I didn't realize that Shor's algorithm could be used to solve discrete logarithm problems. So, the ECC versions of things are not affected, but the integer versions of El Gamal and Diffe-Hellman are.
You should keep in mind that although theoretically there may be efficient quantum algorithms for a variety of problems on which cryptographic schemes are based, in practice, the only one which has been found is factoring. So, yeah, RSA will become toast if we can get the number of qubits in a quantum computer up into the neighborhood of RSA key lengths (1024, 2048, 4096). But, exceedingly few of the other major cryptographic systems rely on factoring being hard. So, for example, Diffe-Hellman or El Gamal (both integer and elliptic curve versions for both) will probably not be appreciably easier to crack. So, there doesn't seem to be any serious reason to be worried about public key cryptography, just RSA. So changes to SSH are pretty straight-forward.
As for why people aren't worrying about it, my guess would be that most people don't follow quantum computing, and the few which do may have reason to wonder if we will ever actually reach the 1024 qubit size in a functioning quantum computer. A few years ago, I would've told people not to worry about it because I was following the state of the art and it was around 5 qubits and research had shown that under current models, you needed 9 qubits of output to reliably output 1 normal bit (if my memory is correct). So, we weren't even one 0.1% of the way to cracking RSA. These days, the number of qubits is higher, but it's still not clear how long it will be until we can actually functionally factor a 1024 bit number.
As someone who's written code in a lot of different languages, I find that writing correct code in a type-inferring statically-typed functional language requires maybe a tiny bit more thinking than it does in a procedural language or a dynamically typed functional language. But it still requires less thinking than debugging non-obvious problems in procedural code. Debugging statically-typed functional language code is a little less thinky because functions are better localized and also, because debugging is a lot less common, I just don't wind up spending the same amount of total time thinking about it.
On the other hand, writing slapdash "it probably works, I think" code in procedural languages is much less thinky than in type-inferring statically-typed functional languages, but I'm not convinced that that's a good thing.
I've written projects in Logo, BASIC, Pascal, Prolog, C, C++, Fortran, HyperTalk, SML, Common Lisp, Java, Perl, Ocaml, Python, Actionscript, and Javascript. Out of all of these, I strongly prefer Ocaml and if I'm choosing my own language will use it for pretty well any project. I make that choice because I find that it minimizes the total time that it takes me to write, test, and debug the code to get to the point where the project has no bugs which are relevant to me and that I can feel assured that it is logically correct. This standard may not produce the same preference for all coders as not all coders are equal. However, I believe that the biggest reason that many programmers don't make this same choice is that they haven't actually learned a language like Ocaml or Haskell and developed projects in it. It's easy enough to say "Well, it's too complex", but until you actually try it out on a serious project and get some experience with it, it's tough to really evaluate a language.
I don't know about anyone else, but now that it exists and seems stable, my next web project is going to be written in Ocaml using Ocsigen and js_of_ocaml. My code is way more likely to be correct, that way.
Most people didn't really think in either way before they learned to program. Most people are terrible at writing intricate and correct lists of instructions. Learning to program required learning to think imperatively: to communicate exact instructions rather than just intent.
In some places, they've taught functional programming languages first. Students don't seem to have found it any harder to start with functional programming languages than imperative. What is hard is shifting paradigms. Programmers who have mostly written in imperative languages find it hard to switch to functional languages, but the opposite is true as well.
This appears to be the same list as from the Caribou Coffee case (brief). So far, I've read through three of them. I read the first one: '559, one which didn't fit the same pattern: '646, and the oldest: '397.
'559 is one of the patents which they are asserting that business are definitely violating because they're using WiFi. If you read the text of this patent, there are a large number of diagrams and descriptions of a very specific wireless sensor network system, which may, in fact, be novel. However, when you read the claims, they're sufficiently broadly written that they cover almost any wireless network. So on its face, it might look like they have a case. Except that this patent was filed in 2001. That was way, way after 802.11 was codified and consumer products using the patented techniques were already on the market. It's even written so broadly that it would cover AlohaNet, which went into operation in 1971. As such, prior art for this patent is obvious and it should be invalidated.
A large number of the patents in their suing portfolio would seem to match the same profile as '559 since in the lawsuits they're specifically claiming that they know for sure that the businesses are violating them despite not even knowing which particular type of access point those businesses are using. Many of the patents in the lawsuit are more recent than '559 and the plaintiffs are effectively claiming that they cover all WiFi devices. Any such patent should clearly be invalidated based on prior art.
There are also a few which they only claim that discovery will allow them find is being violated. I read one of the newer ones, '646, and the oldest one, '397.
By contrast to '559, the oldest patent: '397 is less clearly invalid. Filed in 1994, it's a patent for a wireless access point which uses two radios to ensure higher reliability. The claims leave out any specific requirement of the purpose of the second radio and so just cover any wireless access point with two radios. They're hoping that their discovery will show that some of the access points in use have two radios. Although it's quite possible that prior art exists (and likely, I would guess), it's not so easy and obvious that it shows up in a simple Google search. But someone more familiar with the history of WLAN devices may well be able to identify a dual-radio device from before 1994. Even if no such device exists, the novelty of the invention seems to be its primary weakness. Given that devices with one radio existed and that certain people were already using two radios for redundancy by using two different devices, is it really that novel to just include two radios in one device? If it were my choice, I would rule it obvious. But both courts and the patent office have been very reluctant to overturn patents based on lack of novelty. So I suspect that this one will hinge on whether or not they can find prior art.
The last patent I read, '646 is a newer patent that they also claim that discovery will show whether or not the defendants are violating it. It's a newer patent, but unlike the other one doesn't cover WiFi in general. It has a huge number of claims (270), but all of them are based on claims 1, 15, 87, 144, 145, 216, so reading those doesn't take too long. They all claim a system in which wireless node go into sleep mode and the periodically wake up to check to see if there are pending messages for them. This, very simply, is not how WiFi works. It clearly is not applicable to any existing WiFi devices. I haven't looked into the prior art situation because it's clear that the defendants aren't violating the patent.
So, from a survey of three of the claimed patents, my guess is that they're trying a "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks approach". The plaintiffs clearly don't understand all of their own patents or they would've left '559 and '646 out entirely because they have n
Well, quoting from the article:
So, given floating platform with loose building codes, I think that the hurricane plan is probably disintegration. This may also be the tropical storm plan, the nor'easter plan, the water spout plan, and the heavy rain plan. Of course, if they're lucky, that'll just be the buildings and not the platform itself.
Exactly! We need countries with stronger property rights. For example, did you know that in many countries you can't legally own people? The ability to buy and sell your fellow man is the traditional bedrock of most successful societies. Once unfettered from such silly, non-traditional restrictions, capitalists will have free reign to create a magnificent society the likes of which we have not seen since ancient Greece.
We all know that Rapture didn't float. You're thinking of the setting from the game after Bioshock Infinite.
That's pretty well every software patent ever.
Having read the patent (RE40,092 in case anyone is interested), it's claims are so broad and complete that any implementation of any kind of acceleration of the booting process would violate it. In fact, they're so complete, that any hibernate mode would also likely violate them, which suggests that it shouldn't be hard to find prior art since hibernate modes substantially predate this patent. I suspect that Apple will use prior art to get the patent invalidated, but it's tough to say for sure.
The real problem with this patent, though, is the standard one for software patents: it's just a set of general ideas about what you could do to make booting faster (store configuration data, check configuration data, write some or all pages of memory to disk, read some or all pages of memory from disk) with nothing that could actually be described as a specific invention or process. As such, the patent (as is almost always the case with software patents) is so broad that it's ridiculous. They've basically been granted a patent on any feasible idea for speeding up the boot process.
The patent isn't really very innovative. Most of what's covered in the first patent is simply the exact same control scheme available on CD players at that time (skip forward, back, change the order of tracks) except with digital audio files on a computer. I don't know if it should fail for prior art, but it should definitely fail for obviousness. Even worse is the fact that they're not really patenting a particular invention, they're patenting the very idea of skipping forwards and backwards in a list of audio tracks on a computer. Ideas don't deserve patent protection and aren't really particularly clever. If they had some specific mechanism, then there might be something clever there, but they don't.
This is the real problem with software patents as embodied in the US patent system: they're patents on ideas rather than particular inventions or processes. If you invented a new more efficient process for turning carbon and iron into steel, you couldn't simply claim "a process for turning carbon and iron into steel" and then be able to sue anyone else who made steel. You would instead have to patent the details of how you turned carbon and iron into steel and then sue other people who used the same process. But they've patented the very idea of skipping forward and backwards in a downloadable playlist. They don't patent storing the playlist in a doubly linked list and then using that to navigate or storing it in an array and using a second indirect array to reorder things or anything specific like that. If they did, that would be an invention or process. The total lack of implementation detail in the patent means that it should be rejected on its face because it's not an invention or process and hence, not patentable.
I bought some, and my daughter (who isn't old enough to have an X-Box Live Account) couldn't play them. The problem is that despite their stated policies when you buy the game, they don't let people without X-Box Live accounts play them and you can't play them if your network connection is down. This is because Microsoft wants to make sure that Indie Games don't do anything naughty, so they require that you check their servers to make sure that the game hasn't been revoked before you play it. When I buy X-Box or X-Box Live Arcade games everyone in my household can play them. When I buy Indie Games, it's just me because I'm the only one with an X-Box Live account (although my wife could certainly sign-up for a free Silver one if she wanted). I bought SuperCow so that my daughter could play it, but Microsoft won't let her. So it's not that I'd never, ever buy an Indie game, but it would have to be really good to overcome that handicap.
Having just taken the time to read the patent and being quite familiar with how BitTorrent works, I have to say that none of the claims in the patent describe the BitTorrent protocol or client in the slightest. My prediction for how this will end: This is going to get laughed out of court when the plaintiff can't produce an expert witness with any credibility at all who will agree that BitTorrent even slightly resembles their claims. They'll either be unable to line up expert witnesses or they'll have someone highly suspect who makes a combination of false and inaccurate statements.
The patent, in summary, is for a media server which takes requests from clients for media files and then serves them back at a bit-rate which is based on the available bandwidth using information from the client. All the claims are variations on this with things like multicasting, encryption, digital watermarking, payment, and the like mixed in. Now, this is a silly patent for several reasons but the biggest is that an alternate summary could be "Almost like RealAudio server, but with no streaming." So they could probably get their patent invalidated due to prior art since I believe that several of the streaming servers which existed at that time could be used for non-streaming purposes too.
But what's more immediately relevant is that none of this is anything like BitTorrent. In the BitTorrent protocol, a client asks the server for a list of other clients for the same file and the server delivers it. Then the clients swap pieces amongst themselves. In BT, there are no media files on the server, the server doesn't receive any transmission rate information from the client, and the server doesn't deliver any media files to the client. In their system, there is no peer-to-peer communication, the client cannot ask for or receive a list of other clients, and the media files are only delivered from the server directly to the client via either unicast or multicast. So what does this patent have to do with BitTorrent? Bugger all, that's what.
The only question in my mind about the outcome of this is whether or not the plaintiff will have to pay the defendant's legal fees. I sure hope so, because this lawsuit is nonsense. It's just an attempt to extract money from a more successful company.
The Enigma may have had 150,000,000,000,000,000,000 encodings which were theoretically possible before it was built, but, the actual real Enigma machines had quite a bit less. They had 3 rotors each with 26 positions and those three rotors were chosen (with some specific order) from a larger set of at most 7 (differing numbers depending on when in the war we're talking about and which branch of the German military). In addition, they used up to 2 patch cables. This gives a total number of possible encodings for a real Enigma machine of 26*26*26 (rotor postions) * 7*6*5 (rotor selection) * 26*25/2 (first patch) * 24*23/2 (second patch) / 2 (adjustment for the patch cables being interchangeable in the order) = 165,539,556,000 actual possible encodings at best (and less than that through most of the war due to smaller numbers of rotors being used). This is a lot, but, for example, not so many that you can't carry out a brute-force attack, which is exactly what the allies did. The bigger number from the article is only sensible so long as the rotor layout remains secret, which it didn't as some of the machines fell into allied hands.
In short, it's confusing the design space (possible choices at design time) with the key (parts which can be changed while in use). It's like calculating the number of encodings for DES by assuming that any S-Boxes could be chosen. The Enigma machine was a particular machine, not the set of all possible similar rotor machines which could have been manufactured.
You don't need a "fair use" exception. The needed exception is already written into copyright law in most countries. In the US, it's 17 USC 117 (a) (1) .
That copy onto the hard drive and then the copying into RAM, each is definitely "an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine". As such, these are legal copies if you own a legal copy of the software (like if, for example, you walked into a store and bought one). The law is solid in this case.
The bit I don't understand is why a court would ever rule an EULA to be an enforceable contract given that the majority of them grant one party (the licensee) absolutely no rights which they don't already have. Why would the court ever support such a one-sided contract as being enforceable?
Did anyone here commenting on this read the article? Their HDMI Basics part is total crap.
If they actually knew what they were talking about they would know that HDMI is an uncompressed video format with no error correction. 1) it's impossible for it to get blocky because those are artifacts of frame-based video compression techniques like the MPEG family. 2) The lack of error correction means that there's never an issue with whether or not there's enough data to put together a picture. Every since bit in the picture portion of the signal could be wrong and it would still show the resultant image. 3) Because of the lack of error correction, it is, in fact, entirely possible for the video signal to degrade. Specifically, this happens when some of the individual bits get misread and the result is that particular pixels are suddenly too light or too dark for one or more of their component colors. This is generally known as "sparkles" because it's generally marked by having random pixels which are markedly bright blue, red, or green for a single frame (due to a high-order bit being flipped).
Not quite as many as you think. If you'd like some more specific scientific insight into this, I would highly recommend that you read this free e-book by a psychology professor who has spent the last several decades studying these sort of issues. It's a really easy read and I guarantee that you'll learn some new things about authoritarian followers that you didn't know.
I wish we could. The fact of the matter is that large sections of our government are now out of the control of the citizenry. They do what the corporations tell them to with no regard for what the people say unless you can get truly massive protests mobilized. The problem is money. If a politician does what a corporation wants, he can count on them supporting him rather than his opponent in the next election. If they do what an individual voter wants, that individual might still vote for his opponent because individuals care about a range of issues. Pleasing an individual on one issue does not guarantee support. But each corporation only cares about a very few specific issues which affect their bottom line. So if you do them a favor, you can count on their support (and if they support you, you can count on being asked to do them a favor to continue to get their support). They also can now legally donate substantially more money than most political groups can afford to in order to promote their agenda. Put this together and politicians answer almost exclusively to the needs of the corporations rather than the citizenry, especially when it comes to issues like intellectual property on which most citizens are completely uneducated (see also other complex legal issues like tort reform, environmental regulation, product safety, financial regulation, federal mineral-rights leases, etc.). Then they use the force of the US government to try to ram this down the throats of everyone else.
I'd gladly vote for someone who claimed that they were going to do something about this (and, in fact, I did when I voted for Obama), but almost no one who's gotten elected in the last several decades has even tried to do anything about this and it certainly hasn't been a campaign issue. If, in twenty or thirty years, we look back and wonder why America no longer has the world's strongest economy, this will be why: because a slow erosion of public control of the government has replaced most effective governance and regulation with a system where the highest bidder and/or the shrewdest power broker gets to craft laws and regulations to their own benefit and everyone else's detriment. An economy where those are the rules is going to become a struggling economy once the existing inertia and capital are no longer sufficient to sustain it.