Isn't it impossible to transmit information via quantum entanglement? Since you cannot determine the state of an entangled particle, you cannot use it to "transmit" information until after you let the other end know, through conventional channels, what each possible state actually stands for. If that's the case, how exactly is this "quantum information transfer" supposed to work.
It is entirely up to interpretation if allowing prayer in schools constitutes an "establishment of religion" or whether it is "prohibiting the free exercise thereof".
1. There's no such thing as a statement that doesn't require interpretation, so saying it's a matter of interpretation isn't particularly helpful.
2. When you ask whether allowing prayer in schools constitutes this or that, you are asking the wrong question. There's a big difference between allowing prayer in schools and having school personnel conduct or give preferential treatment to religious practices such as prayer. Subjecting all students to daily prayer is clearly something that concerns the "establishment of religion" and is rightfully forbidden. Preventing religious students from praying amongst themselves, on the other hand, would constitute a ban on the "free exercise [of religion]" and should likewise be forbidden. It's that simple.
Everyone on Slashdot will be whining about how patents shouldn't apply to nanotechnology, because all the new "inventions" are obvious, and anyway a duration of 2-3 years is far more appropriate for nanites, and really you shouldn't be able to patent them at all because they're so small, and the economics of stuff that small is just different
I haven't noticed a single Slashdot poster complain about patents relating to existing advances in nanotechnology. To say they would do this and pretend that it somehow weakens the case against software patents is just plain silly and dishonest.
I don't care to argue the minutiae of why software should or should not be patentable, for that would take a great deal more effort than I'm willing to put into a silly Slashdot debate. I will, however, point you to the following paper which presents a computer professional's argument against software patents: Computational Theory for Lawyers.
Even so, patenting the "software" embodyment is no more evil than patenting the "electromechanical device" embodyment. Software patents protect that embodyment, not the algorithm itself.
I don't think it's true that a patent only covers a particular embodiment of an invention, but a "software embodiment" is technically so different from a "hardware embodiment" that patents should never be applied to software. The economics of software production versus hardware production coupled with how easy it is to infringe on software patents purely by accident make the patenting of software a totally different proposition than the patenting of hardware, and the law should be changed to recognize that.
Anything you can do in "software" I can do in "hardware" and achieve the same result.
But the way you go about it -- the actual method -- is very different in each case. To say you can do X in either software or hardware is not a valid argument in favor of the claim that software and hardware must be legally equivalent. Indeed, the fact that software can be copyrighted but hardware generally cannot is proof enough that the law already already distinguishes between software and hardware.
It's not simply a matter of convention, as you say, but of real differences between the two approaches to creating functionality.
Now who went down the road of deciding to ship or not ship libraries. It was a scare-mongering Free Software biggot who suddenly woke up one day and decided, for no reason, that these patents where a threat, in order to have something to picket about.
Boy you're full of shit. You're actually suggesting somebody would abandon a useful library just to have "something to picket about"?
You don't know that what you are saying is true. You are just speculating. You have never been sued and you don't know anyone personally who has.
Patents you can't sue for are useless, so the very existence of a patent is enough to establish the possibility of being sued for infringing upon that patent. Whether or not it actually happens in a particular case does not change the fact that the threat exists. Preventing others from reproducing your invention without permission is what the patent system is designed to do, and lawsuits are the way such a restriction is enforced.
Software and hardware are conceptually seperable because it is convenient, and there is no legal reason to make them conceptually one.
No. Software and hardware are conceptually separable because they're fundamentally different.
So your words actually proove my argument extremely well. I.e. that it would be useless for the patent system ever to distinguish between software and hardware.
They prove no such thing. Indeed, in the vast majority of cases, the line between software and hardware is clear enough that the law can make the distinction as easily as you and I can.
What's the distinction between hardware and software in a Babbage engine? In an automatic transmission? In a very complex system that responds in complex ways based on dozens of inputs, but is still electromechanical?
I don't deny there are cases where the hardware alone determines a device's behavior. What I'm arguing against is the notion that hardware and software must always be treated as part of an indivisible unit. The fact that we do have general purpose computers is enough to show that software and hardware are conceptually separable, and that's enough for the law to be able to them as separate in that context. Far from being a distraction, software vs hardware is a fundamental distinction in general-purpose computing, and software running on general-purpose computers is what most people have in mind when they argue against software patents. So while Babbage's Difference Engine would itself have been worthy of a patent, programs written for his later Analytical Engine would properly be seen as data to be processed by a patentable device.
Rereading my original post, it's pretty obvious I did say that, although it's not what I meant. The basic point is that judges should be smart enough to tell the difference between software and hardware and should therefore be able to decide against software patents masquerading as hardware patents.
"Full of it" is right. AbbeyRoad is taking two concepts any programmer or engineer would generally recognize as separable -- software vs hardware -- and conflating them. Indeed, the fact that software and hardware are conceptually separable means they could also be legally separable. For AbbeyRoad to pretend otherwise is just his way of pushing a pro-software-patent argument while hoping you don't notice the trick.
I never said they did. What judges do is decide whether patents already granted are valid or invalid. If software patents were all invalid, the act of combining what is distinctly a piece of software with that which is distinctly hardware would not render the software aspect patentable. The notion that one must generally accept software patents so hardware patents remain valid is not supported by fact and assumes the people deciding on a patent's validity are too stupid to know the difference.
So this whole anti-patent-software picketing is by people that don't read patents nor understand the patent system.
Adding software to a patented hardware device need not mean the software itself becomes patented. Similarly, adding software to an unpatented hardware device need not mean the combo is patentable. If software patents were clearly invalid, any judge worth his or her salt would refuse to grant a patent in either case.
And I hate to say it, but I think slashdot has played its part in steering posting fora towardes this decline.
Slashdot's D2 system is particularly infuriating. I like to have an idea of the structure of a discussion thread without having to click a bunch of times for articles to be loaded. I find D2 makes it a lot more difficult to browse deeply into particular threads, which is why in my preferences I have Slashdot set to use the old discussion system.
I don't see any difference between DejaNews and Googlegroups. It's still the same interface that I've been using since the 90s.
You must have a really poor memory, then. Google Groups has changed significantly since it first acquired Deja's USENET archive. USENET groups used to be featured a lot more prominently on Google, whereas now you have to wade through a bunch of groups and sites you don't care about when all you want is to search USENET specifically. It's obvious Google wants to make USENET a lot less visible than it used to be, and for that reason I find Google Groups is no longer useful to me.
And point 5 - Here you can browse the entire Usenet directly to find precisely what you desire, just the way it's done on a dedicated NetNews program: http://groups.google.com/groups/dir?sel=gtype%3D0
Did you even try searching USENET through the link you provided? When I try it I get a bunch of results pointing to third-party websites and very few pointing to USENET posts.
Google is nearly useless these days if you want to search USENET specifically.
In fairness, the problem with these textbooks isn't limited to religious bullshit, but rather to conservative bullshit in general. Most conservative nonsense is not unconstitutional, but the bits that skew the facts in favor of religious nonsense certainly are. From Phil Plait's blog:
The new history standards downplays and questions the separation of Church and State. And this was no accident by the religious zealots on the Board; when a more moderate Democrat tried to insert language about why the Establishment Clause was put in the Constitution, it was voted down by the Republicans.
The EFF site identifies my computer uniquely if I access it directly, but when I access it through proxify.com all the information it gathers has no relation to the information it gathers when I access it directly. The user agent and HTTP_ACCEPT headers are both spoofed, and since Javascript is disabled it cannot obtain any info about plugins, time zones, screen size, system fonts or supercookies. I suspect all who access the website through Proxify will look like the same user unless they happen to enable Javascript.
In the post I originally replied to you spoke about "the second part of that famous sentence in the first amendment getting short shrift", implying that preventing Texas from including religious material in its textbooks was somehow a violation of people's "free exercise" of religion.
Texas' schoolbook policy as described by Slashdot is clearly motivated by religious beliefs, and that means the school board's actions are unconstitutional. The government is not allowed to promote religion in school, whether through mandatory school prayer or through giving religious beliefs any kind of preferential treatment. To integrate religious doctrine into schoolbooks used in Texas is a blatant violation of the US Constitution. The school board's responsibility is to the facts, and in that respect it fails miserably.
You have a right to free speech, and with that right comes the responsibility to do it in ways that don't offend everyone around you. If you are the minority and those around you are offended, its rather silly to try and argue that you should be allowed to do whatever you want.
People have absolutely no right to not be offended, even when those who feel offended constitute a majority of the US population. The US Constitution protects even a single individual against the will of the majority.
Slashdot Mirror
Cello!
Phil Plait has a writeup as well.
Isn't it impossible to transmit information via quantum entanglement? Since you cannot determine the state of an entangled particle, you cannot use it to "transmit" information until after you let the other end know, through conventional channels, what each possible state actually stands for. If that's the case, how exactly is this "quantum information transfer" supposed to work.
1. There's no such thing as a statement that doesn't require interpretation, so saying it's a matter of interpretation isn't particularly helpful.
2. When you ask whether allowing prayer in schools constitutes this or that, you are asking the wrong question. There's a big difference between allowing prayer in schools and having school personnel conduct or give preferential treatment to religious practices such as prayer. Subjecting all students to daily prayer is clearly something that concerns the "establishment of religion" and is rightfully forbidden. Preventing religious students from praying amongst themselves, on the other hand, would constitute a ban on the "free exercise [of religion]" and should likewise be forbidden. It's that simple.
I haven't noticed a single Slashdot poster complain about patents relating to existing advances in nanotechnology. To say they would do this and pretend that it somehow weakens the case against software patents is just plain silly and dishonest.
I don't care to argue the minutiae of why software should or should not be patentable, for that would take a great deal more effort than I'm willing to put into a silly Slashdot debate. I will, however, point you to the following paper which presents a computer professional's argument against software patents: Computational Theory for Lawyers.
I don't think it's true that a patent only covers a particular embodiment of an invention, but a "software embodiment" is technically so different from a "hardware embodiment" that patents should never be applied to software. The economics of software production versus hardware production coupled with how easy it is to infringe on software patents purely by accident make the patenting of software a totally different proposition than the patenting of hardware, and the law should be changed to recognize that.
But the way you go about it -- the actual method -- is very different in each case. To say you can do X in either software or hardware is not a valid argument in favor of the claim that software and hardware must be legally equivalent. Indeed, the fact that software can be copyrighted but hardware generally cannot is proof enough that the law already already distinguishes between software and hardware.
It's not simply a matter of convention, as you say, but of real differences between the two approaches to creating functionality.
Boy you're full of shit. You're actually suggesting somebody would abandon a useful library just to have "something to picket about"?
Patents you can't sue for are useless, so the very existence of a patent is enough to establish the possibility of being sued for infringing upon that patent. Whether or not it actually happens in a particular case does not change the fact that the threat exists. Preventing others from reproducing your invention without permission is what the patent system is designed to do, and lawsuits are the way such a restriction is enforced.
No. Software and hardware are conceptually separable because they're fundamentally different.
They prove no such thing. Indeed, in the vast majority of cases, the line between software and hardware is clear enough that the law can make the distinction as easily as you and I can.
Then the patent system needs to change.
I don't deny there are cases where the hardware alone determines a device's behavior. What I'm arguing against is the notion that hardware and software must always be treated as part of an indivisible unit. The fact that we do have general purpose computers is enough to show that software and hardware are conceptually separable, and that's enough for the law to be able to them as separate in that context. Far from being a distraction, software vs hardware is a fundamental distinction in general-purpose computing, and software running on general-purpose computers is what most people have in mind when they argue against software patents. So while Babbage's Difference Engine would itself have been worthy of a patent, programs written for his later Analytical Engine would properly be seen as data to be processed by a patentable device.
Rereading my original post, it's pretty obvious I did say that, although it's not what I meant. The basic point is that judges should be smart enough to tell the difference between software and hardware and should therefore be able to decide against software patents masquerading as hardware patents.
"Full of it" is right. AbbeyRoad is taking two concepts any programmer or engineer would generally recognize as separable -- software vs hardware -- and conflating them. Indeed, the fact that software and hardware are conceptually separable means they could also be legally separable. For AbbeyRoad to pretend otherwise is just his way of pushing a pro-software-patent argument while hoping you don't notice the trick.
I never said they did. What judges do is decide whether patents already granted are valid or invalid. If software patents were all invalid, the act of combining what is distinctly a piece of software with that which is distinctly hardware would not render the software aspect patentable. The notion that one must generally accept software patents so hardware patents remain valid is not supported by fact and assumes the people deciding on a patent's validity are too stupid to know the difference.
Adding software to a patented hardware device need not mean the software itself becomes patented. Similarly, adding software to an unpatented hardware device need not mean the combo is patentable. If software patents were clearly invalid, any judge worth his or her salt would refuse to grant a patent in either case.
Slashdot is a made up name. Geekgirl, if you read it as "Geek Girl", is just descriptive.
Slashdot's D2 system is particularly infuriating. I like to have an idea of the structure of a discussion thread without having to click a bunch of times for articles to be loaded. I find D2 makes it a lot more difficult to browse deeply into particular threads, which is why in my preferences I have Slashdot set to use the old discussion system.
You must have a really poor memory, then. Google Groups has changed significantly since it first acquired Deja's USENET archive. USENET groups used to be featured a lot more prominently on Google, whereas now you have to wade through a bunch of groups and sites you don't care about when all you want is to search USENET specifically. It's obvious Google wants to make USENET a lot less visible than it used to be, and for that reason I find Google Groups is no longer useful to me.
Did you even try searching USENET through the link you provided? When I try it I get a bunch of results pointing to third-party websites and very few pointing to USENET posts.
Google is nearly useless these days if you want to search USENET specifically.
In fairness, the problem with these textbooks isn't limited to religious bullshit, but rather to conservative bullshit in general. Most conservative nonsense is not unconstitutional, but the bits that skew the facts in favor of religious nonsense certainly are. From Phil Plait's blog:
See also Think Progress' description of the new standards, where we learn:
The only flaw in their plan: the documents describing how to read these formats are stored on eight-inch floppies.
The EFF site identifies my computer uniquely if I access it directly, but when I access it through proxify.com all the information it gathers has no relation to the information it gathers when I access it directly. The user agent and HTTP_ACCEPT headers are both spoofed, and since Javascript is disabled it cannot obtain any info about plugins, time zones, screen size, system fonts or supercookies. I suspect all who access the website through Proxify will look like the same user unless they happen to enable Javascript.
In the post I originally replied to you spoke about "the second part of that famous sentence in the first amendment getting short shrift", implying that preventing Texas from including religious material in its textbooks was somehow a violation of people's "free exercise" of religion.
Texas' schoolbook policy as described by Slashdot is clearly motivated by religious beliefs, and that means the school board's actions are unconstitutional. The government is not allowed to promote religion in school, whether through mandatory school prayer or through giving religious beliefs any kind of preferential treatment. To integrate religious doctrine into schoolbooks used in Texas is a blatant violation of the US Constitution. The school board's responsibility is to the facts, and in that respect it fails miserably.
People have absolutely no right to not be offended, even when those who feel offended constitute a majority of the US population. The US Constitution protects even a single individual against the will of the majority.