How does a company that has developed, manufactured, marketed and sold an actual product benefit when years later comes around and says "Nope, you can't keep selling that until you license your idea from us."
Patents have their uses. An invention a person or company spends time and money researching should be protected to a degree. IFF it is original and non obvious - especially if there is an actual product you're selling incorporating this patent.
However, filing a patent for every damn thing you can think of with "on the internet" or "on a mobile phone" tacked on the end IS an abuse of the system.
Besides the usual penis pills and pre-approved credit cards, what type of ads would you target at the president? He doesn't have much leisure time - so pretty much any ad you or I might see is out.
Lobbyists? Military contractors?
I wonder what the Blackwater PR department is like....
Google suggests that posting your personal information on the internet, even across multiple sites can make you susceptible to data mining. Ok. No argument there.
To remedy this, they propose to mine your data, presumably archive it for future reference, and finally politely report back how successful they were?
But the company seems to be storing the challenge/response pairs in a database somewhere. This means they either do a 500 million year brute force scan of each chip before shipping them out, the keys are predictable from some 'secret' set of data (batch/manufacturing line/serial number, etc), or they only store a small portion of the possible key space. Even if they sample a random portion of the key space for each individual chip, it might be possible to attack the psudorandom generator for the keys - you only have to mimic responses that they will ask for.
I would think it would be easier to find out my preferences from looking at my Facebook page than it would be to determine my mother's maiden name, best friend's name or what my first car was - you won't find any of that information spelled out clearly on facebook, but you would be able to look at my "Interests" to see what type of music, tv or foods I liked or view my pictures and see plenty of photos of me in art galleries and raves, but none at sporting events, for example.
Plus, as everyone knows, a multiple choice test is much easier to pass by answering randomly than a something where you have to fill in the blanks.
I can understand how a 'copyright cop' could work on a site like youtube, no problem for them to store a massive database of file or video hashes of all the content.
But how are they going to put that in the Zune or the Zune software? You're either going to have to download a massive new set of hashes for the previous day's new torrents, or you're going to have to upload your content to Microsoft before you can transfer it to your Zune.
Why do I have to be connected to the internet to watch my 'home movies' on my (hypothetical) Zune?
I imagine it said on the box 100GB*, and a little further down on the box, and the shelf it was on, and the manufacturer's website it says "*1 GB = 1 Billion Bytes" and I'm sure your hard drive is 100 billion bytes.
Comcast on the other hand seems to be selling High Speed Internet access, not High-Speed* Internet** Access***
*High Speed, provided you don't go above our invisible bandwidth caps **Internet = Our internal network. Any similarities to the real internet are coincidence. *** Unless we decided to place unwanted RST packets in the middle of your stream
What's so hard about doing this over the phone? A home or business owner presumably knows where they're physically located in relation to the nearest cross streets (a presumably undisputed location that would be shown in the google photos. The call would go something like this:
Google: Hi, is the the Hog's Head bar and grill? Business: Yes. Google: Great. Are you in the building two houses south from the corner of 5th and Main Street, or the pig barn 200m down the road? Business:Yep. Two doors south of 5th and main. Google: *clicks 'reject map marker chanage'*
One free/very cheap for homebrew, restrictions being you either can't sell the resulting applications at all, or are restricted to making, say, under $100,000 a year.
The other licence would be what they have now, more expensive for creating retail games.
There's a Prop 65 warning on the door of my appartment. It doesn't get any more everywhere than that. And it's not like I live in a garbage dump that became an appartment complex. It's a nice upscale facility. (that, according to the state of california, may cause cancer).
It COULD be that they'll be calling them MacBookPros until they phase out the G4 based powerbooks. And then make a big deal about how "The Powerbook Is Back!" when they're all core duos. Of corse, the fact they have both a PPC and core duo iMacs still for sale seems to indicate that that may not happen.
What's the need? (Besides the buy new gear syndrome) what cheap consumer device creates data faster than you can transfer with, say Firewire 800 or USB2? Consumer hard drives are an order of magnitude slower or more, and all but high end solid state memory is around the same speed. Firewire already does video.
If our government weren't addicted to the $15.7 billion dollars in taxes they collect on an annual basis from cigarettes, we would get safe cigarettes in a heartbeat.
It's quotes like that that really make me wonder why our goverment doesn't legalize marijuana and tax it like tobacco. Save billions on enforcement (~80% of drug arrests are marijuana possession), and make tens of billions in taxes.
Yeah, but the RFID doesn't know the diffrence between a full tub of peanut butter, and empty one, and the empty one in the trash. Or even the peanut butter in the guy's fridge on the floor below you.
I was fortunate enough to go to a very small seminar held by Bruce Stering on RFID and he also ignored this issue. How are all of these magical RFID scanners going to know $YOUR_SHIT from $THEIR_SHIT? I understand how this would work in a wherehouse situation, but not for personal invantory.
Although, I'm axiously awaiting the day I can google for my phone.
While I beleive it's a good thing these messures are being implimented, it's far from a sure-fire way of preventing attacks. You could deadonate while in the queue to be sanned, blow up a bus from the extirior, or simply shift the attack to somewhere with less security.
No, what I propose is automated versons of these devices be installed into the doors ov every home. The advantages are several fold:
-Vitualy every space is now risk-free with citizens unable to exit their homes with guns, explosives, or butane lighters
-Much shorter queue to go through the device (Unless you have an exceptional number of flatmates that must leave just before you
-A much safter feeling populace. Studies have shown that security checks increse people's feelings of security even more than they increase acvtual security, and what could be a safer feeling than knowing that every person you meet is free of dangerous materials.
When implimenting this, you could also solve many other social problems by including with it a breathilyzer as well as a psyc profile, as well as a lie detector and deny enterance to the outside for anyone who fails to pass these favourably.
1,4,6 and 10 at least can be done just with a firefox search plugin (Do those work in safari as well? If not, they should.) Sure, there may be less eyecandy - but few widgets, either of the Tiger or Konfabulator varity do anything truely useful. That said, I have one or two Konfabulator widgets floting around sometimes to provide information at a glance. If I'm going to bother typing anything in to search, I might as well be in my browser anyway.
The Mythbusters tackled this one. They came up with two explinations.
1) Toast nocked off a table tends to flip only once before landing.
2)When buttering toast, you tend to compress the center of the toast, forming an airfoil alowing the toast to glide down, butter side down.
Sure, it's not hard science, but it's good television.
While that may be true, if you're going to disagree with an article that mentions not only one, but two studies disagreeing with you, why don't you back that up with a little fact?
It seems hireing Firefox developers is the new fad. Google just picked up a few, and if I rember correctly, there's no shortage of other companies who have one or two.
I know alot of slashdotters are scared of big companies trying to grab up peices of open source - but I for one think that this is an entirely good thing. It removes some of the nesesity of the end users to contribute (We alwas should, but some of us aren't skilled enough to code, or fiscaly stable enough to donate).
I'm just waiting for the news to break that Apple is looking for some firefox developers. I know they're using KHTML for Safari, at least at the moment, but Mozilla is, in many ways, a better browser - it just needs alot of polishing for the Mac. For example, Safari with 10 tabs, over 3 windows uses just over 30MB of ram, while Firefox eats up nearly that much with just about:blank open, and once you begin to actuly surf the web, it climbs sometimes 100MB of use.
Changing brand names at this pont would be ten kinds of retarded. A few every day people are starting to realize that there's an internet outside of Internet Explorer. Fewer still are realizing that firefox exitsts. To change brand names again will kill any chance they have of gaining a substantial amount of mindshare.
They licenced 1-Click because Amazon has the money to sue, and possibly win, also, to get the trademark for it. It's a good name.
And, I know this won't be a popular opinion here, but as far as software patents go (and it's almost more of a buisness method patent, isn't it?) 1-Click IS kind of inovatave. Other than amazon, what website rembered all your information and let you buy shit that impulsively? That IS a step forward(or backwards). I mean, I guess it's obvious - but nobody I know of thought of it before amazon.
Slashdot Mirror
How does a company that has developed, manufactured, marketed and sold an actual product benefit when years later comes around and says "Nope, you can't keep selling that until you license your idea from us."
Patents have their uses. An invention a person or company spends time and money researching should be protected to a degree. IFF it is original and non obvious - especially if there is an actual product you're selling incorporating this patent.
However, filing a patent for every damn thing you can think of with "on the internet" or "on a mobile phone" tacked on the end IS an abuse of the system.
Besides the usual penis pills and pre-approved credit cards, what type of ads would you target at the president? He doesn't have much leisure time - so pretty much any ad you or I might see is out.
Lobbyists? Military contractors?
I wonder what the Blackwater PR department is like....
Google suggests that posting your personal information on the internet, even across multiple sites can make you susceptible to data mining.
Ok. No argument there.
To remedy this, they propose to mine your data, presumably archive it for future reference, and finally politely report back how successful they were?
Hmm...They've definitely identified a problem.
It'll be black plastic and glass with rounded corners. Totally different.
There. Fixed that for you.
But the company seems to be storing the challenge/response pairs in a database somewhere. This means they either do a 500 million year brute force scan of each chip before shipping them out, the keys are predictable from some 'secret' set of data (batch/manufacturing line/serial number, etc), or they only store a small portion of the possible key space. Even if they sample a random portion of the key space for each individual chip, it might be possible to attack the psudorandom generator for the keys - you only have to mimic responses that they will ask for.
I would think it would be easier to find out my preferences from looking at my Facebook page than it would be to determine my mother's maiden name, best friend's name or what my first car was - you won't find any of that information spelled out clearly on facebook, but you would be able to look at my "Interests" to see what type of music, tv or foods I liked or view my pictures and see plenty of photos of me in art galleries and raves, but none at sporting events, for example.
Plus, as everyone knows, a multiple choice test is much easier to pass by answering randomly than a something where you have to fill in the blanks.
MediaDefender's ISP. That's who should be gone after. 9gbps of bandwidth for BREAKING THE LAW can't be easy to get or cheap.
Cut off MediaDefender's pipe to the internet and let them die that way.
I can understand how a 'copyright cop' could work on a site like youtube, no problem for them to store a massive database of file or video hashes of all the content.
But how are they going to put that in the Zune or the Zune software? You're either going to have to download a massive new set of hashes for the previous day's new torrents, or you're going to have to upload your content to Microsoft before you can transfer it to your Zune.
Why do I have to be connected to the internet to watch my 'home movies' on my (hypothetical) Zune?
"...merely making available is not copyright infringement so it can't be a terrorist act."
Damn those terrorists and their unlicensed derivative works of London's copyrighted buses!
I imagine it said on the box 100GB*, and a little further down on the box, and the shelf it was on, and the manufacturer's website it says "*1 GB = 1 Billion Bytes" and I'm sure your hard drive is 100 billion bytes.
Comcast on the other hand seems to be selling High Speed Internet access, not High-Speed* Internet** Access***
*High Speed, provided you don't go above our invisible bandwidth caps
**Internet = Our internal network. Any similarities to the real internet are coincidence.
*** Unless we decided to place unwanted RST packets in the middle of your stream
What's so hard about doing this over the phone? A home or business owner presumably knows where they're physically located in relation to the nearest cross streets (a presumably undisputed location that would be shown in the google photos. The call would go something like this:
Google: Hi, is the the Hog's Head bar and grill?
Business: Yes.
Google: Great. Are you in the building two houses south from the corner of 5th and Main Street, or the pig barn 200m down the road?
Business:Yep. Two doors south of 5th and main.
Google: *clicks 'reject map marker chanage'*
Simple. Dual-licenced APIs.
One free/very cheap for homebrew, restrictions being you either can't sell the resulting applications at all, or are restricted to making, say, under $100,000 a year.
The other licence would be what they have now, more expensive for creating retail games.
There's a Prop 65 warning on the door of my appartment. It doesn't get any more everywhere than that. And it's not like I live in a garbage dump that became an appartment complex. It's a nice upscale facility. (that, according to the state of california, may cause cancer).
It COULD be that they'll be calling them MacBookPros until they phase out the G4 based powerbooks. And then make a big deal about how "The Powerbook Is Back!" when they're all core duos. Of corse, the fact they have both a PPC and core duo iMacs still for sale seems to indicate that that may not happen.
What's the need? (Besides the buy new gear syndrome) what cheap consumer device creates data faster than you can transfer with, say Firewire 800 or USB2? Consumer hard drives are an order of magnitude slower or more, and all but high end solid state memory is around the same speed. Firewire already does video.
If our government weren't addicted to the $15.7 billion dollars in taxes they collect on an annual basis from cigarettes, we would get safe cigarettes in a heartbeat.
It's quotes like that that really make me wonder why our goverment doesn't legalize marijuana and tax it like tobacco. Save billions on enforcement (~80% of drug arrests are marijuana possession), and make tens of billions in taxes.
Maybe they're too to stoned to realize.
Same thing is happening to me. Weird.
Yeah, but the RFID doesn't know the diffrence between a full tub of peanut butter, and empty one, and the empty one in the trash. Or even the peanut butter in the guy's fridge on the floor below you.
I was fortunate enough to go to a very small seminar held by Bruce Stering on RFID and he also ignored this issue. How are all of these magical RFID scanners going to know $YOUR_SHIT from $THEIR_SHIT? I understand how this would work in a wherehouse situation, but not for personal invantory.
Although, I'm axiously awaiting the day I can google for my phone.
While I beleive it's a good thing these messures are being implimented, it's far from a sure-fire way of preventing attacks. You could deadonate while in the queue to be sanned, blow up a bus from the extirior, or simply shift the attack to somewhere with less security. No, what I propose is automated versons of these devices be installed into the doors ov every home. The advantages are several fold: -Vitualy every space is now risk-free with citizens unable to exit their homes with guns, explosives, or butane lighters -Much shorter queue to go through the device (Unless you have an exceptional number of flatmates that must leave just before you -A much safter feeling populace. Studies have shown that security checks increse people's feelings of security even more than they increase acvtual security, and what could be a safer feeling than knowing that every person you meet is free of dangerous materials. When implimenting this, you could also solve many other social problems by including with it a breathilyzer as well as a psyc profile, as well as a lie detector and deny enterance to the outside for anyone who fails to pass these favourably.
1,4,6 and 10 at least can be done just with a firefox search plugin (Do those work in safari as well? If not, they should.) Sure, there may be less eyecandy - but few widgets, either of the Tiger or Konfabulator varity do anything truely useful. That said, I have one or two Konfabulator widgets floting around sometimes to provide information at a glance. If I'm going to bother typing anything in to search, I might as well be in my browser anyway.
The Mythbusters tackled this one. They came up with two explinations.
1) Toast nocked off a table tends to flip only once before landing.
2)When buttering toast, you tend to compress the center of the toast, forming an airfoil alowing the toast to glide down, butter side down.
Sure, it's not hard science, but it's good television.
While that may be true, if you're going to disagree with an article that mentions not only one, but two studies disagreeing with you, why don't you back that up with a little fact?
It seems hireing Firefox developers is the new fad. Google just picked up a few, and if I rember correctly, there's no shortage of other companies who have one or two.
I know alot of slashdotters are scared of big companies trying to grab up peices of open source - but I for one think that this is an entirely good thing. It removes some of the nesesity of the end users to contribute (We alwas should, but some of us aren't skilled enough to code, or fiscaly stable enough to donate).
I'm just waiting for the news to break that Apple is looking for some firefox developers. I know they're using KHTML for Safari, at least at the moment, but Mozilla is, in many ways, a better browser - it just needs alot of polishing for the Mac. For example, Safari with 10 tabs, over 3 windows uses just over 30MB of ram, while Firefox eats up nearly that much with just about:blank open, and once you begin to actuly surf the web, it climbs sometimes 100MB of use.
Changing brand names at this pont would be ten kinds of retarded. A few every day people are starting to realize that there's an internet outside of Internet Explorer. Fewer still are realizing that firefox exitsts. To change brand names again will kill any chance they have of gaining a substantial amount of mindshare.
They licenced 1-Click because Amazon has the money to sue, and possibly win, also, to get the trademark for it. It's a good name.
And, I know this won't be a popular opinion here, but as far as software patents go (and it's almost more of a buisness method patent, isn't it?) 1-Click IS kind of inovatave. Other than amazon, what website rembered all your information and let you buy shit that impulsively? That IS a step forward(or backwards). I mean, I guess it's obvious - but nobody I know of thought of it before amazon.