Re:Patented -- cannot sell or MAKE
on
Build Your Own Segway
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Try again, building it is perfectly legal, profiting from it (financially) is not. Remember that the intent of a patent is to protect ones rights for commercial exploitation of a given method or device.
Kamen never said cities would be designed around the Segway, that was Jeff Bezos, of Amazon.
Please get your facts straight.
The funny thing about the lil problem with the Segway having these problems when having a low charge in the battery is little different then an airplane when it is low on fuel. In both cases, the amount of time the controller has to come in to a safe 'landing' is short and will get shorter with any changes.
The difference is that when an airplane runs out of gas it tends to crash from a much higher altitude, a person falling off a Segway is getting off much easier then a pilot with a dry tank.
As I seem to be in an airplane bashing mood, I shall continue... another reason airplanes should be bannered (or at least recalled), in addition to their unfortunate behavior of crashing when they run out of gas... is the fact that they too can hurt people. Did you know that the first airplane passenger on one of the earliest Wright planes died in what was the first airplane crash?
New technology reveals new problems about it's self and other areas, and those that willingly use any form of technology (new or old) accept the risks as to what might happen.
What plans? He said no more about the internal workings of his creation then you'd learn from ripping open your VCR and reading each of the chips, hell, at least seeing the wiring configuration of a part (ie VCR is more revealing to it's inner workings then this story).
All this is is a bit of information on how he did it, even if someone wanted to do it themselves they are going to have a fair amount of code to write and wiring to design.
I've got a friend who's family works in Hollywood... if you were to look at a shelf in their home near the TV you will see hundreds of DVD's, all studio screeners, the thing that has always amazed me is that they get these DVD's a week or two BEFORE the theatrical release of the film.
It amazes me that the powers that be have not tried to crack down on the distribution of these movies.
Of what? 2K is up to SP4 and XP is up to SP1 already... ok, 2003 server maybe, but such a patch for an OS like that would not matter much... provided they are not trying to restrict the serving of files with out a valid license.
I am forced to wonder with the major problem being/.ed can cause for a site... if they would do the same for another site which was not part of the OSDN.
I wish too that software patents would meet their end, however such thinking currently is nothing more then a dream. For software patents to truly be defeated there would need to be serious and repeated challenges to them, and of those challenges thus far none have had enough force to do what we want to see happen. Keep on dreaming for now, because for the time being, software patents are a reality and here to stay for the forcible future, just like the DMCA I'm afraid.
Despite the fact that every word I said above is factual... I know I am going to get flamed for this so... let er rip...
You need to understand that those running the network at my school are not the brightest.
Two years ago when school started up again, it took them a month to connect students, not due to inspections, but until they had firewalls set up that could prevent Red from getting students. In order to prevent people from ever being infected by things like the Red worm on campus, the idea of banning any operating system from student use which could run a server was seriously considered.
Lets think about this one... all versions of Windows, DOS, Linux, you name it, so long as something has a TCP stack you can run a server! When they realized this they backed off of it. Officially, students within the dorms are not permitted to run 'servers', although the definition of this has never been made clear, technically, if ones computer responds to a ping request, then it is a server. Then of course there is the 'server' service in Windows 2000 and XP.
Lets just say I'm very happy to be living off campus where I can use the internet as I please, with out worrying about being monitored for usage and having my bandwidth throttled just because I use a chat program from time to time (yes, it's happened).
For years, the last thing the admins at my university wanted to do was inspect each computer before it was permitted to be on the network. This year they have broken down and are doing so, to be connected (wired or wirelessly) one of their employees must inspect the computer and make sure that they are not only completely patched, but also that they are running antiviral software (Norton ONLY).
This is of course great in theory, until a week later when someone formats, 'forgets' to patch, brings their computer home, gets re-infected and comes back to school.
Until patches become mandatory for many of these users, there is no way to prevent such a thing... short of finding the virus writers and skinning them alive during prime time, that might make some of these script kiddies think twice before doing what they do.
that's pretty much what a FPGA is, like a Xilinx which will execute many commands in parallel, not just a few pipelines, but entire large blocks, imagine executing 500 if statements in parallel rather then sequentially.
I'd love to learn to program one... I just don't want to have to learn Verilog.
As you said, your program is for a very specialized audience, traditionally, the more popular the software, the more likely a crack.
It tends to be very easy to find a copy of windows xp and ways to crack it's copy protection system, gets a little harder to even find a copy of exchange server for instance, the more specialized the program, the less useful it often becomes to your average pirate.
in your case you were lucky as it sounds like there wasn't much of a demand for a crack for your code, however, I have no doubt that if it was being used by even... 1 in 100 computer users out there, that someone would have spent the time to develop one.
Copy protection, even product activation is nothing more then a lock on a door, often before someone even starts to pick a lock, they see if there is anything worthwhile which it protects, to offset the time of breaking in. Same goes for software.
So in a way... as sad as it sounds... it is good to be small, and thus less of a target.
I could be like the MPAA, blame everyone but myself when something bad happens. I'll start by blaming communists, woman, minorities, foreigners, my parents, teachers, politicians... and everyone else, but me. It's a good thing I'm perfect!
Most know that... one must also remember to make sure the spelling is correct, teachers often get wise when two students make the same spelling mistake
I've owned half a dozen sony items over the years... all crap, maybe they've gotten better in recent times... I woulnd't know as I haven't bought or owned anything sony for at least 4 years.
... please let this one incorporate better tracking so they can monitor it all the way to the ground... just in case this like a few other notable Martian craft go plunging into the ground at around 300 mph... we can at least see where and how it hit.
If a company is developing a product using Linux as an embedded solution, a simple way to avoid any problem with SCO (if there was any fear) would be to simply not include those portions of code which SCO claims as their own (SMP, etc). Why pay for IP you aren't going to use?
Problem solved
(I hope that anyone reading this can detect the sarcasm intended by it)
Some would call this anarchy, in most systems (both technical and personal) you need some form of leadership, telcoâ(TM)s and ISPâ(TM)s provide this necessary service, like it or not.
Further more, the kind of hardware these groups you want to be no more use is far out of the price range of most private citizens, such hardware is required within any kind of system which is of any size.
Two blocks of code looking identical is nothing new to me, a couple of years ago I had a couple of friends be accused of cheating in one of their programming classes. The source of this accusation was the teacher who thought one was copying from the other as almost each assignment theyâ(TM)d turn in were identical other then the names at the top.
It wasnâ(TM)t until they put them in two different rooms and asked them to write the same thing that they found that these two had virtually identical ways of coding, not just the code itâ(TM)s self, but the variables uses, the code formatting and even the comments. Everyone was surprised, and eventually the accusation of cheating was dropped.
The moral of this story is that two blocks of code can be identical, itâ(TM)s very rare, just remember the infinite monkey principal.
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Try again, building it is perfectly legal, profiting from it (financially) is not. Remember that the intent of a patent is to protect ones rights for commercial exploitation of a given method or device.
Kamen never said cities would be designed around the Segway, that was Jeff Bezos, of Amazon.
Please get your facts straight.
The funny thing about the lil problem with the Segway having these problems when having a low charge in the battery is little different then an airplane when it is low on fuel. In both cases, the amount of time the controller has to come in to a safe 'landing' is short and will get shorter with any changes.
The difference is that when an airplane runs out of gas it tends to crash from a much higher altitude, a person falling off a Segway is getting off much easier then a pilot with a dry tank.
As I seem to be in an airplane bashing mood, I shall continue... another reason airplanes should be bannered (or at least recalled), in addition to their unfortunate behavior of crashing when they run out of gas... is the fact that they too can hurt people. Did you know that the first airplane passenger on one of the earliest Wright planes died in what was the first airplane crash?
New technology reveals new problems about it's self and other areas, and those that willingly use any form of technology (new or old) accept the risks as to what might happen.
What plans? He said no more about the internal workings of his creation then you'd learn from ripping open your VCR and reading each of the chips, hell, at least seeing the wiring configuration of a part (ie VCR is more revealing to it's inner workings then this story).
All this is is a bit of information on how he did it, even if someone wanted to do it themselves they are going to have a fair amount of code to write and wiring to design.
I've got a friend who's family works in Hollywood... if you were to look at a shelf in their home near the TV you will see hundreds of DVD's, all studio screeners, the thing that has always amazed me is that they get these DVD's a week or two BEFORE the theatrical release of the film.
It amazes me that the powers that be have not tried to crack down on the distribution of these movies.
Of what? 2K is up to SP4 and XP is up to SP1 already... ok, 2003 server maybe, but such a patch for an OS like that would not matter much... provided they are not trying to restrict the serving of files with out a valid license.
I was looking at some of the videos about an hour ago and it looked like they got the spelling right
I am forced to wonder with the major problem being /.ed can cause for a site... if they would do the same for another site which was not part of the OSDN.
I wish too that software patents would meet their end, however such thinking currently is nothing more then a dream. For software patents to truly be defeated there would need to be serious and repeated challenges to them, and of those challenges thus far none have had enough force to do what we want to see happen. Keep on dreaming for now, because for the time being, software patents are a reality and here to stay for the forcible future, just like the DMCA I'm afraid.
Despite the fact that every word I said above is factual... I know I am going to get flamed for this so... let er rip...
You need to understand that those running the network at my school are not the brightest.
Two years ago when school started up again, it took them a month to connect students, not due to inspections, but until they had firewalls set up that could prevent Red from getting students. In order to prevent people from ever being infected by things like the Red worm on campus, the idea of banning any operating system from student use which could run a server was seriously considered.
Lets think about this one... all versions of Windows, DOS, Linux, you name it, so long as something has a TCP stack you can run a server! When they realized this they backed off of it. Officially, students within the dorms are not permitted to run 'servers', although the definition of this has never been made clear, technically, if ones computer responds to a ping request, then it is a server. Then of course there is the 'server' service in Windows 2000 and XP.
Lets just say I'm very happy to be living off campus where I can use the internet as I please, with out worrying about being monitored for usage and having my bandwidth throttled just because I use a chat program from time to time (yes, it's happened).
For years, the last thing the admins at my university wanted to do was inspect each computer before it was permitted to be on the network. This year they have broken down and are doing so, to be connected (wired or wirelessly) one of their employees must inspect the computer and make sure that they are not only completely patched, but also that they are running antiviral software (Norton ONLY).
This is of course great in theory, until a week later when someone formats, 'forgets' to patch, brings their computer home, gets re-infected and comes back to school.
Until patches become mandatory for many of these users, there is no way to prevent such a thing... short of finding the virus writers and skinning them alive during prime time, that might make some of these script kiddies think twice before doing what they do.
that's pretty much what a FPGA is, like a Xilinx which will execute many commands in parallel, not just a few pipelines, but entire large blocks, imagine executing 500 if statements in parallel rather then sequentially.
I'd love to learn to program one... I just don't want to have to learn Verilog.
As you said, your program is for a very specialized audience, traditionally, the more popular the software, the more likely a crack.
It tends to be very easy to find a copy of windows xp and ways to crack it's copy protection system, gets a little harder to even find a copy of exchange server for instance, the more specialized the program, the less useful it often becomes to your average pirate.
in your case you were lucky as it sounds like there wasn't much of a demand for a crack for your code, however, I have no doubt that if it was being used by even... 1 in 100 computer users out there, that someone would have spent the time to develop one.
Copy protection, even product activation is nothing more then a lock on a door, often before someone even starts to pick a lock, they see if there is anything worthwhile which it protects, to offset the time of breaking in. Same goes for software.
So in a way... as sad as it sounds... it is good to be small, and thus less of a target.
What about Al Gore?
I could be like the MPAA, blame everyone but myself when something bad happens. I'll start by blaming communists, woman, minorities, foreigners, my parents, teachers, politicians... and everyone else, but me. It's a good thing I'm perfect!
Most know that... one must also remember to make sure the spelling is correct, teachers often get wise when two students make the same spelling mistake
I've owned half a dozen sony items over the years... all crap, maybe they've gotten better in recent times... I woulnd't know as I haven't bought or owned anything sony for at least 4 years.
Sony free is the way to be!
... please let this one incorporate better tracking so they can monitor it all the way to the ground... just in case this like a few other notable Martian craft go plunging into the ground at around 300 mph... we can at least see where and how it hit.
If a company is developing a product using Linux as an embedded solution, a simple way to avoid any problem with SCO (if there was any fear) would be to simply not include those portions of code which SCO claims as their own (SMP, etc). Why pay for IP you aren't going to use?
Problem solved
(I hope that anyone reading this can detect the sarcasm intended by it)
Some would call this anarchy, in most systems (both technical and personal) you need some form of leadership, telcoâ(TM)s and ISPâ(TM)s provide this necessary service, like it or not.
Further more, the kind of hardware these groups you want to be no more use is far out of the price range of most private citizens, such hardware is required within any kind of system which is of any size.
Don't forget the fact that SCO is also working on WMD's!
My list of fears that may strike me down...
Plague, famine, war, draught, ex-friends, guns, China, W Bushâ¦
And the new addition...
SCO revoking my license
Now I must be off to my âpanic roomâ(TM) to cower in fear!
I'm not the only one who can't write or hold a pencil worth a damn.
Two blocks of code looking identical is nothing new to me, a couple of years ago I had a couple of friends be accused of cheating in one of their programming classes. The source of this accusation was the teacher who thought one was copying from the other as almost each assignment theyâ(TM)d turn in were identical other then the names at the top.
It wasnâ(TM)t until they put them in two different rooms and asked them to write the same thing that they found that these two had virtually identical ways of coding, not just the code itâ(TM)s self, but the variables uses, the code formatting and even the comments. Everyone was surprised, and eventually the accusation of cheating was dropped.
The moral of this story is that two blocks of code can be identical, itâ(TM)s very rare, just remember the infinite monkey principal.
From this day forward... I will never listen to a single word CmdrTaco says or posts.
Or license?