Given no requirement that the firearm be in any way useful, one would want to get as close as possible to "encase in concrete".
If you add the fact that you want some benefit, you want to be able to protect your family and those about you, one must balance availability to the owner or other authorized users vs. availability to unauthorized persons. That's very much situation dependent. A family with a three year old and five year running around the house is very different from a retired couple with no grandchildren, for example. For the retired couple, it matters whether you live in the hood or you live in a gated community in a very safe part of town. (This is one reason that the more specific laws are, the worse they are - they require specific behavior that's not appropriate to the situation.)
One method that's too often overlooked is keeping the weapon secured in your holster, on your person, with a safety mechanism that ensures it won't fire from being dropped or similar. That makes it very available to the owner, while unauthorized people aren't going to get to it without a fight.
You may very well be a smart person, and be able to reason quite well. If I told you all about waggles, you could probably come to some reasonable conclusions about waggles. However:
"As if I have to have to touch, see or own a gun to determine what to do about guns. I can very well think about what a gun represents and what it is capable of."
"What a gun represents" is, without any actual knowledge, whatever a political comedian on comedy central, or a movie, represented TO you. The basis of your thinking is some fiction presented to you on an entertainment program. It therefore completely undermines your otherwise logical thought process. It is precisely as though I gave you a book about waggles and you came to some conclusions, but half the the statements in the book were false. Your conclusions would be completely without merit not because you were wrong in your thinking, but because you're reasoning based on a false representation. That's reason #1 that it's silly to advocate a position on a topic you have little knowledge of.
Further, suppose I know a little bit about cats. I know 5% of all there is to know about cats. You, on the other hand, are a cat expert, knowing 90% of everything there is to know about cats. When it comes time to make a decision about cats, should we vote? Would that result in the best decisions? No, I would let you to make the cat decisions. If you argue on a subject about which you have 5% knowledge, you are (attempting to?) offset someone else who knows ten times as much. That's guaranteed to result in bad decisions, and that's reason #2.
Lastly, suppose you are the cat expert, and I'm the cybersecurity expert. The cat and the computer both have a virus. Should I spend my time trying to figure out the cat's symptoms? It would be much smarter for me to fix to the computer, while you tend to the cat. That way both jobs are done well. If we instead split our time, with both of us working on the cat and both on the computer, we'll probably just screw both up. So if you've never fired a gun, but you do know a lot about economics, you are wasting your talents and knowledge spending time arguing about guns. It would be far better for you to spend that time helping our society figure out this huge economic problem we have. All of these 50-something year old people will be 60-something in ten years, we know that for a fact. We also know for a fact that we're fucked when that happens, because we can't pay their social security. Please, please, if you know anything about budgeting, economics, etc., please go advocate a good solution to that problem rather than spending time spouting bullshit about someting you know nothing about. There are other topics where your knowledge could be very helpful. That's reason #3.
Can't tell if serious. In the post you linked to, I said only that I'm pretty sure a 0.001 degree increase in temperature wouldn't attract asteroids from millions of miles away.
I've directly experienced gravity, and I've directly experienced warmth, which is all the knowledge required to make that plainly obvious statement.
I have said one other thing about global warming, recently renamed "climate change" when you guys decided to blame the unusually cold winter on "warming". What I said is that their are wacky extermists on both sides of that debate AS EVIDENCED BY THE FACT that the extremists said in 1985 that "by the year 2000, most of California will be underwater". It's 2013 and California is still here. I have enough expertise is geography to know that California is still there, because I was IN California several months ago. Ergo, the wackies were wrong.
I don't say there's no such thing as global warming, nor do I say that the sky is falling. I simply say it's hard to get real, objective facts because most of the studies are funded by and run by extremists on one side or the other. Hell, some of the most credible evidence I've seen lately measured the "atmospheric" CO2 level AT A VOLCANO THAT WAS VENTING CO2. The whole global warming thing sucks for that reason. I'd like to leave it experts, or at least listen to experts,but it's obvious that every "expert" I've seen on either side is lying through their teeth, so who friggin knows what the true story is.
They very much do conflate "military style weapons" with "semi-automatic" weapons, including pistols. The Clinton magazine ban applied to pistols as well as long guns, for example. I said:
pistols and varmint guns which are semi-automatic
Not only did I not say that all semi-automatics are pistols, I specifically said that "varmint guns" may be semi-autos, and varmint guns are most often small rifles (aka not pistols).
I have enough knowledge of the subject to say "no, you may not kill my son". If you don't want to raise your child, you can let me, his father raise him, but you may not kill him.
You do realize you're advocating FORCED abortions, right? You're saying that you should have no say in whether or not your children are murdered, if you happen to be male.
The government certainly finds it useful to get search warrants and such to look at suspect's email, including gmail. That's very much not Google's doing. Google does more than any other company, probably any company in history, to fight against that. By law, they are required to honor National Security Letters asking them to give up information. Their policy is to refuse to provide the information, even though the law (since 1978) says they have to hand over the information. Google claims the law is unconstitutional and therefore void. In Doe versus Ashcroft, the judge agreed. (Courts have gone both ways.)
Just two weeks ago Google filed suit to have these information requests ruled unconstitutional: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/680852-googlemotion.html
They are the only company I know of which publicizes how many supeonas and national security letters they get. That itself is thumbing their nose at the FBI because those letters include a gag order saying Google isn't allowed to talk about them. (Which is why their name wasn't made public in Doe v Ashcroft, they aren't allowed to reveal the things they revealed in that suit. (It's a pretty safe assumption that Doe was Goog.)
Google has founded an organization to protect their users from such government intrusion and regularly funds other organizations with the same goal. No doubt, Google wants to HAVE information about you, but they do everything they can to avoid sharing that data with the government, with their executives actually risking jail time for openly defying the laws requiring them to give up the info. You can't possibly ask them to do more than that.
No, security regulations should be written by people who know something about security.
Security regulations that are specific to pharmacies should be written with input from people who know about operating a pharmacy. If I knew nothing about either subject, my "opinion" about the subject would be worthless and a waste of time when I could instead be commenting on something where I have an INFORMED opinion.
I might reasonably I say "people should be responsible, including pharmacists, so they should follow whatever procedures are considered essential by experts in the field." My knowledge, and therefore my opinion, ends there.
By chance, I've spent my whole career in security, so on the topic of security for a pharmacy, my state license is evidence of the fact that I could make informed comments a little beyond the above. I'd still leave the specifics up to people who are more specialized in appropriate security disciplines. (My main expertise is CYBER security, though I learned locksmithing 25 years ago and I do own a bulletproof vest.)
Yep, this is what happens when people who hate guns, and so have never touched a gun, probably never seen a gun, think they are gun experts and should be writing the rules and regulations about how they should be manufactured, sold, and used.
I'm not a doctor or pharmacist, so I don't have any opinion on proper methods manufacture, store, or otherwise handle various classes of prescription drugs. I have no idea what regulations make sense. It would be STUPID of me to comment on how a pharmacy must be run since I don't know anything about the subject.
Why is it that people who have no knowledge at all, people who don't know the difference between a machine gun and a pistol, want to decide on gun regulations? This is a fact - anti-gunners, including congress-critters, REGULARLY confuse an automatic (machine gun) with a semi-automatic (pistol). They claim to be trying to "ban automatic weapons" (machine guns), but their bill bans pistols and varmint guns, which are semi-automatic.
Or, I don't like guns, I've never seen a gun, I'm clueless about guns - so I think I'm qualified to decide on the laws about guns.
I'll tell you what, I don't watch clueless comedy central comedians doing fake news, and I don't know anything about comedians who do fake news, so I won't try to make the rules about comedians doing fake news. I'll leave that to you, since you probably watch those shows a lot more than I do and you know more about the subject. In turn, you can leave the gun rules to people who actually know something about the subject, okay?
> "I guess nobody told them what a Von Neumann machine [wikipedia.org] is."
Is a Von Neumann machine a machine?
Most Von Neumann machines are implemented using microcode, if not in C code (virtualization). If I understand you correctly, the fact that a Von Neumann machine is, or can be, implemented using microcode makes it no longer a machine?
> To make it clear: you should not be able patent your software and call it "xxx but with computer"
If XXX is not new, I agree, doing it on a computer doesn't make it new, in most cases. XXX is in fact far from new, some cave paintings are XXX rated;) "On a computer" doesn't make it patentable. I say that's because "on a computer" isn't all that significant to an invention, to whether it's new or not. Do you agree with that last statement, that "on a computer" isn't significant in terms of whether it's a new invention?
If doing something on a computer doesn't make the difference to make it a new invention, does a completely new invention that noone has ever thought of become "not new" because it happens to be done on a computer? If I build a working time machine, is that patentable? Does it suddenly become not a new invention if the time machine is mostly implemented in software?
> New Software does not make a new machine. Software simply changes the state that the existing machine is in, and only does so while it's running. > The machine itself doesn't change. You turn the machine off, then back on, you're back at a known state
?!?!?!? I'm pretty sure that when I cold boot my DVR it does something completely different than when I boot my PBX system. Turning my DVR on and off doesn't turn it into a PBX, or vice versa. They are very different machines. They've run on the exact same hardware.
A DVR, an auto-pilot, and a PBX are completely diffrent machines for different purposes, and it's the software that makes them completely different. The hardware can be identical.
> If you are going to solder together logic gates to implement an algorithm, the end result you get a machine. Such machine you can patent, no arguments here
And if you put the parts together in a different way, joining different parts, you get a different machine, right? But if you hook the logic gates to relays which connect them, that doesn't make a machine? A computer is nothing more or less than a buttload of solid state relays. Setting the relays differently connects different parts in different ways,
> Like a refrigerator or a vending machine is a patent-able machine, and they will not become new machines if you put new groceries inside.
A refrigerator doesn't do something completely different depending on what you put in it. One machine might fly a F-18, that machine is called an autopilot. A DVR is a completely different type of machine. An autopilot and a DVR do completely different things, they are completely different machines. They may be the exact same hardware, running different software. So same hardware =! same machine.
> Only if you are burning fuses or proms (real proms, or at least some kind you can't erase for one reason or another) are you making it something in particular.
So if you burn a prom to make it do something completely different, that's a different machine, you say. Unless you're able to later repeat the same process, making a different machine from the same parts. That's a rather arbritrary distinction, isn't it?
I forgot my footnote. When I say "ANY electronic machine* can be implemented is software" that's provably true for a certain definition of "electronic machine". Those who are very familiar with these concepts, like gnupun, might prefer that I be more specific, but the point is that it's strictly true for a huge class of electronic devices which are obviously machines, and obviously patentable.
Those machines can be rendered directly as relays, groups of transistors, or larger groups of transistors. When they are built as "larger groups of transistors", we call that a "Flash drive" and call it "software". It's still the same machine, doing the same mechanical steps, as it would be if it were built fewer transistors and more solder.
A different program DOES make it a different machine, and I'll explain why that must be true. That's not enough to defend an overly general patent, though.
However, it seems to me that's the wrong question to ask in this case. It seems that someone wants to patent the concept of "a machine to do X" rather than patenting one SPECIFIC machine that does X. You can't patent "a machine to take people from place to place". You'd have to invent and patent some specific new transportation machine. So the patent would be invalid on that ground. The patentors claim that "a computer machine to do X" is specific enough to be patentable, and most people disagree - you've got to patent some specific new invention, and "on a computer" isn't new, or specific.
As to the question in the summary, ANY electronic machine* can be implemented is software, and any software machine can be easily rendered as a hardware machine. Converting between hardware circuits and software instructions is a trivial bit of arithmetic, so the exact same machine can be flashed into memory and and we'd call it software, or it can be flashed into a gate array and we'd cal it hardware. Therefore, if any electronic device is a device, a software device must also be a device. (Because the exact same functions can be flashed as hardware or software, it's still a device or not either way.)
Gate arrays show that one cannot really distinguish between hardware and software programs. With the original gate arrays, the factory would take some stock electronic logic parts and add layers of metal to implement a specific product. This isn't much different from soldering components together. It's definitely hardware. The cool thing was, the metal connections would be added based on a precise written description of of how the device should behave - a PROGRAM. In the next generation, the parts started out with fused connections between ALL of the parts and the factory would blow most of the fuses, leaving only the desired connections. Again, the list of which 10,000 fuses to blow was generated from written code, code that is pretty much a software program, a software definition of the hardware. Still, hardware produced according to a software program. In the third generation, the CUSTOMER could blow or reset fuses to reconfigure the electronics in the field, "re-wiring" the hardware. That generation is the FPGA, field PROGRAMMABLE gate array. Hmm, the customer can load different programs, that sure sounds like software programs. Those software programs are implemented as physical connections, so that sure sounds like hardware. It's both software and hardware, showing that in the end, codes that define how a machine operates really are both hardware and software - they can be implemented as either or as both at the same time.
So yes, software can control the other parts of the machine to act differently, making it a different machine. But only specific, newly invented machines are supposed to be patentable, regardless of whether the newly invented machine is rendered as hardware or as software on any given day.
As I recall, in the Mythbusters experiment, the stream broke up after 12-24 inches or so. The "dog on couch" scenario, or "passed out drunk guy" might be within that distance.
Cell phones, tablets, etc. take 5V DC from USB and draw no more than 2.5 watts (500ma). That's not a lot of power, so it could be safe and convenient to run two devices from a 1 amp supply that's fused at the wall plug.
120V and 240V AC wall power is dangerous. It can provide 2500 watts - a THOUSAND times as much as a USB charger. You might screw up and it be okay, leading to nothing more than a startling shock, or it might kill you. Don't mess with it.
You seem to be thinking of targetted attacks on a specific person. That's probably fewer rhan 1% of all attack attempts. Based on statistical analysis of thousands of attacks (tens of millions of login attempts), I'd estimate password guessing at more like 92%. There are many bot nets constantly trying dictionaries against random sites. As a rough guesstimate, there are maybe a few tens of millions of dictionary attempts by http EVERY DAY. The combos admin/admin and admin/password work all too often.
I know you probably won't see this since you're AC, but I'd like to get more details. At our institution, we don't manually input any grades because we just use Moodle for online classes. It would be great if you could post more details about what grades you're inputting, why, and how to the Moodle forum. Any suggestions on how to make it easier?
> Am I the only one that read the patent and thought it was extremely vague and so general that it describes almost every client-server relationship since the beginning of the computing?
It seems the answer is no. The judges, in the trial and the appeal, also thought it was a bogus patent.
Dude, you own two pet stores, with a web site that was apparently designed in Geocities. You're not only not in the same league as Google or eBay, you're not in the same solar system. When someone is 100,000,000,000 times more successful than you, the smart thing is to LEARN from them. The very dumbest thing you can do is to think you're smarter than everyone else and therefore refuse to learn.
> I have never comprehended why anyone would want to do RedHat's alpha testing for free.
I think "alpha" is a bit too strong, MANY people run Fedora on their desktop with no problems. I did so for several years before switching to CentOS for desktops. Fedora is certainly cutting edge as opposed to stable.
As to "why", I've used Fedora on an important business server when I needed some brand new virtualization features and I couldn't wait 18-24 months for them to be available in Red Hat or other enterprise stable distros. That was much better supported than me compiling all my own pieces and cobbling them together with the older libraries on RHEL. About two years later, I updated the system to RHEL which finally had the "new" versions that Fedora let me run years before most competitors did.
> I just suggest people buy something running android, because all these Linuxes are bleeding edgers.
Most web servers run Linux. Essentially all supercomputers run Linux. It's stable enough to run the whole of Google reliably. It's stable enough for NSA.
> know I likely won't ever use open source software to run any critical parts of my business, because part of my business model > is having a competitive advantage through better software than my competitors.
Then you're doing it wrong. Specifically, you've fallen into a black-or-white view and forgot that 90% of cases are gray. Surely your company didn't write it's own mail client, you use something like Outlook, Evolution or Claws because there's not nearly enough competitive advantage in having your own email client for the ROI to make sense. You don't write your own word processing program for writing memos and letters. That's one extreme.
At the other extreme, you may have ONE piece of software which does that thing that sets your company apart. You might open source or outsource your payroll, but Google would never open source their search algorithm. Ebay may open source or outsource their forums, but the core of their auction system is the core of their business, so it's 100% proprietary. That's the other extreme. So the two extremes are a) commodity software where you should use something off the shelf and b) your core competency, your true competitive advantage, key business secrets, which should be well closed.
90% of what you use doesn't properly fit either extreme. That 90% in the middle is where the ROI is best by CUSTOMIZING existing software. Ebay doesn't write it's own web server, they customize Apache. To handle petabytes of data, Google customizes open source storage stacks. For MOST things, being completely dependent on a vendor for updates, support, etc. is at least a risk, so committing to of-the-shelf proprietary software instead of an open system you'll be able to customize if needed is a mistake. At the same time, building from scratch is a huge waste of money for most of the software you use. Most cases fall in the middle - use what's already available rather than writing your own, but not by becoming dependent on a third party vendor who may pull an Adobe and decide to stop selling their desktop software, instead offering it only as a cloud based monthly service (or who may go out of business entirely). Open source fills this huge middle perfectly.
Think I'm wrong? That means you think Ebay and Google are wrong. Over half of the world's largest companies, the Fortune 500, are known use open source software. Are you REALLY smarter than Ebay, Google, and all the other multi-billion dollar companies? Is that proven by the fact that you're more successful than they are?
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Given no requirement that the firearm be in any way useful, one would want to get as close as possible to "encase in concrete".
If you add the fact that you want some benefit, you want to be able to protect your family and those about you, one must balance availability to the owner or other authorized users vs. availability to unauthorized persons. That's very much situation dependent. A family with a three year old and five year running around the house is very different from a retired couple with no grandchildren, for example. For the retired couple, it matters whether you live in the hood or you live in a gated community in a very safe part of town. (This is one reason that the more specific laws are, the worse they are - they require specific behavior that's not appropriate to the situation.)
One method that's too often overlooked is keeping the weapon secured in your holster, on your person, with a safety mechanism that ensures it won't fire from being dropped or similar. That makes it very available to the owner, while unauthorized people aren't going to get to it without a fight.
You may very well be a smart person, and be able to reason quite well. If I told you all about waggles, you could probably come to some reasonable conclusions about waggles. However:
"As if I have to have to touch, see or own a gun to determine what to do about guns. I can very well think about what a gun represents and what it is capable of."
"What a gun represents" is, without any actual knowledge, whatever a political comedian on comedy central, or a movie, represented TO you.
The basis of your thinking is some fiction presented to you on an entertainment program. It therefore completely undermines your otherwise logical thought process. It is precisely as though I gave you a book about waggles and you came to some conclusions, but half the the statements in the book were false.
Your conclusions would be completely without merit not because you were wrong in your thinking, but because you're reasoning based on a false
representation. That's reason #1 that it's silly to advocate a position on a topic you have little knowledge of.
Further, suppose I know a little bit about cats. I know 5% of all there is to know about cats. You, on the other hand, are a cat expert, knowing 90% of everything there is to know about cats. When it comes time to make a decision about cats, should we vote? Would that result in the best decisions? No, I would let you to make the cat decisions. If you argue on a subject about which you have 5% knowledge, you are (attempting to?) offset someone else who knows ten times as much. That's guaranteed to result in bad decisions, and that's reason #2.
Lastly, suppose you are the cat expert, and I'm the cybersecurity expert. The cat and the computer both have a virus. Should I spend my time trying to figure out the cat's symptoms? It would be much smarter for me to fix to the computer, while you tend to the cat. That way both jobs are done well. If we instead split our time, with both of us working on the cat and both on the computer, we'll probably just screw both up. So if you've never fired a gun, but you do know a lot about economics, you are wasting your talents and knowledge spending time arguing about guns. It would be far better for you to spend that time helping our society figure out this huge economic problem we have. All of these 50-something year old people will be 60-something in ten years, we know that for a fact. We also know for a fact that we're fucked when that happens, because we can't pay their social security. Please, please, if you know anything about budgeting, economics, etc., please go advocate a good solution to that problem rather than spending time spouting bullshit about someting you know nothing about. There are other topics where your knowledge could be very helpful. That's reason #3.
Thank you for your kind compliment.
Can't tell if serious. In the post you linked to, I said only that I'm pretty sure a 0.001 degree increase in temperature wouldn't attract asteroids from millions of miles away.
I've directly experienced gravity, and I've directly experienced warmth, which is all the knowledge required to make that plainly obvious statement.
I have said one other thing about global warming, recently renamed "climate change" when you guys decided to blame the unusually cold winter on "warming".
What I said is that their are wacky extermists on both sides of that debate AS EVIDENCED BY THE FACT that the extremists said in 1985 that "by the year 2000, most of California will be underwater". It's 2013 and California is still here. I have enough expertise is geography to know that California is still there, because I was IN California several months ago. Ergo, the wackies were wrong.
I don't say there's no such thing as global warming, nor do I say that the sky is falling. I simply say it's hard to get real, objective facts because most of the studies are funded by and run by extremists on one side or the other. Hell, some of the most credible evidence I've seen lately measured the "atmospheric" CO2 level AT A VOLCANO THAT WAS VENTING CO2. The whole global warming thing sucks for that reason. I'd like to leave it experts, or at least listen to experts,but it's obvious that every "expert" I've seen on either side is lying through their teeth, so who friggin knows what the true story is.
They very much do conflate "military style weapons" with "semi-automatic" weapons, including pistols.
The Clinton magazine ban applied to pistols as well as long guns, for example.
I said:
pistols and varmint guns which are semi-automatic
Not only did I not say that all semi-automatics are pistols, I specifically said that "varmint guns" may be semi-autos, and varmint guns are most often small rifles (aka not pistols).
I have enough knowledge of the subject to say "no, you may not kill my son". If you don't want to raise your child, you can let me, his father raise him, but you may not kill him.
You do realize you're advocating FORCED abortions, right? You're saying that you should have no say in whether or not your children are murdered, if you happen to be male.
The government certainly finds it useful to get search warrants and such to look at suspect's email, including gmail.
That's very much not Google's doing. Google does more than any other company, probably any company in history, to fight against that.
By law, they are required to honor National Security Letters asking them to give up information. Their policy is to refuse to provide the
information, even though the law (since 1978) says they have to hand over the information. Google claims the law is unconstitutional and
therefore void. In Doe versus Ashcroft, the judge agreed. (Courts have gone both ways.)
Just two weeks ago Google filed suit to have these information requests ruled unconstitutional:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/680852-googlemotion.html
They are the only company I know of which publicizes how many supeonas and national security letters they get. That itself is thumbing their nose at the
FBI because those letters include a gag order saying Google isn't allowed to talk about them. (Which is why their name wasn't made public in Doe v Ashcroft,
they aren't allowed to reveal the things they revealed in that suit. (It's a pretty safe assumption that Doe was Goog.)
Google has founded an organization to protect their users from such government intrusion and regularly funds other organizations with the same goal.
No doubt, Google wants to HAVE information about you, but they do everything they can to avoid sharing that data with the government, with their
executives actually risking jail time for openly defying the laws requiring them to give up the info. You can't possibly ask them to do more than that.
No, security regulations should be written by people who know something about security.
Security regulations that are specific to pharmacies should be written with input from people who know about operating a pharmacy. If I knew nothing about either subject, my "opinion" about the subject would be worthless and a waste of time when I could instead be commenting on something where I have an INFORMED opinion.
I might reasonably I say "people should be responsible, including pharmacists, so they should follow whatever procedures are considered essential by experts in the field." My knowledge, and therefore my opinion, ends there.
By chance, I've spent my whole career in security, so on the topic of security for a pharmacy, my state license is evidence of the fact that I could make informed comments a little beyond the above. I'd still leave the specifics up to people who are more specialized in appropriate security disciplines. (My main expertise is CYBER security, though I learned locksmithing 25 years ago and I do own a bulletproof vest.)
Yep, this is what happens when people who hate guns, and so have never touched a gun, probably never seen a gun, think they are gun experts and should be writing the rules and regulations about how they should be manufactured, sold, and used.
I'm not a doctor or pharmacist, so I don't have any opinion on proper methods manufacture, store, or otherwise handle various classes of prescription drugs.
I have no idea what regulations make sense. It would be STUPID of me to comment on how a pharmacy must be run since I don't know anything about the subject.
Why is it that people who have no knowledge at all, people who don't know the difference between a machine gun and a pistol, want to decide on gun regulations?
This is a fact - anti-gunners, including congress-critters, REGULARLY confuse an automatic (machine gun) with a semi-automatic (pistol). They claim to be
trying to "ban automatic weapons" (machine guns), but their bill bans pistols and varmint guns, which are semi-automatic.
Or, I don't like guns, I've never seen a gun, I'm clueless about guns - so I think I'm qualified to decide on the laws about guns.
I'll tell you what, I don't watch clueless comedy central comedians doing fake news, and I don't know anything about comedians who do fake news, so I won't try to make the rules about comedians doing fake news. I'll leave that to you, since you probably watch those shows a lot more than I do and you know more about the subject. In turn, you can leave the gun rules to people who actually know something about the subject, okay?
> "I guess nobody told them what a Von Neumann machine [wikipedia.org] is."
Is a Von Neumann machine a machine?
Most Von Neumann machines are implemented using microcode, if not in C code (virtualization). If I understand you correctly, the fact that a Von Neumann machine is, or can be, implemented using microcode makes it no longer a machine?
> To make it clear: you should not be able patent your software and call it "xxx but with computer"
;)
If XXX is not new, I agree, doing it on a computer doesn't make it new, in most cases. XXX is in fact far from new, some cave paintings are XXX rated
"On a computer" doesn't make it patentable. I say that's because "on a computer" isn't all that significant to an invention, to whether it's new or not.
Do you agree with that last statement, that "on a computer" isn't significant in terms of whether it's a new invention?
If doing something on a computer doesn't make the difference to make it a new invention, does a completely new invention that noone has ever thought of become "not new" because it happens to be done on a computer? If I build a working time machine, is that patentable? Does it suddenly become not a new invention if the time machine is mostly implemented in software?
> New Software does not make a new machine. Software simply changes the state that the existing machine is in, and only does so while it's running.
> The machine itself doesn't change. You turn the machine off, then back on, you're back at a known state
?!?!?!? I'm pretty sure that when I cold boot my DVR it does something completely different than when I boot my PBX system. Turning my DVR on and off doesn't turn it into a PBX, or vice versa. They are very different machines. They've run on the exact same hardware.
A DVR, an auto-pilot, and a PBX are completely diffrent machines for different purposes, and it's the software that makes them completely different. The hardware can be identical.
> If you are going to solder together logic gates to implement an algorithm, the end result you get a machine. Such machine you can patent, no arguments here
And if you put the parts together in a different way, joining different parts, you get a different machine, right?
But if you hook the logic gates to relays which connect them, that doesn't make a machine? A computer is nothing more or less than a buttload of solid state relays.
Setting the relays differently connects different parts in different ways,
> Like a refrigerator or a vending machine is a patent-able machine, and they will not become new machines if you put new groceries inside.
A refrigerator doesn't do something completely different depending on what you put in it. One machine might fly a F-18, that machine is called an autopilot.
A DVR is a completely different type of machine. An autopilot and a DVR do completely different things, they are completely different machines.
They may be the exact same hardware, running different software. So same hardware =! same machine.
> Only if you are burning fuses or proms (real proms, or at least some kind you can't erase for one reason or another) are you making it something in particular.
So if you burn a prom to make it do something completely different, that's a different machine, you say. Unless you're able to later repeat the same process, making a different machine from the same parts. That's a rather arbritrary distinction, isn't it?
I forgot my footnote. When I say "ANY electronic machine* can be implemented is software" that's provably true for a certain definition of "electronic machine".
Those who are very familiar with these concepts, like gnupun, might prefer that I be more specific, but the point is that it's strictly true for a huge class of electronic devices which are obviously machines, and obviously patentable.
Those machines can be rendered directly as relays, groups of transistors, or larger groups of transistors. When they are built as "larger groups of transistors", we call that a "Flash drive" and call it "software". It's still the same machine, doing the same mechanical steps, as it would be if it were built fewer transistors and more solder.
A different program DOES make it a different machine, and I'll explain why that must be true. That's not enough to defend an overly general patent, though.
However, it seems to me that's the wrong question to ask in this case. It seems that someone wants to patent the concept of "a machine to do X" rather than patenting one SPECIFIC machine that does X. You can't patent "a machine to take people from place to place". You'd have to invent and patent some specific new transportation machine. So the patent would be invalid on that ground. The patentors claim that "a computer machine to do X" is specific enough to be patentable, and most people disagree - you've got to patent some specific new invention, and "on a computer" isn't new, or specific.
As to the question in the summary, ANY electronic machine* can be implemented is software, and any software machine can be easily rendered as a hardware
machine. Converting between hardware circuits and software instructions is a trivial bit of arithmetic, so the exact same machine can be flashed into memory and
and we'd call it software, or it can be flashed into a gate array and we'd cal it hardware. Therefore, if any electronic device is a device, a software device must also be a device. (Because the exact same functions can be flashed as hardware or software, it's still a device or not either way.)
Gate arrays show that one cannot really distinguish between hardware and software programs. With the original gate arrays, the factory would take some stock
electronic logic parts and add layers of metal to implement a specific product. This isn't much different from soldering components together. It's definitely hardware. The cool thing was, the metal connections would be added based on a precise written description of of how the device should behave - a PROGRAM. In the next generation, the parts started out with fused connections between ALL of the parts and the factory would blow most of the fuses, leaving only the desired connections. Again, the list of which 10,000 fuses to blow was generated from written code, code that is pretty much a software program, a software definition of the hardware. Still, hardware produced according to a software program. In the third generation, the CUSTOMER could blow or reset fuses to reconfigure the electronics in the field, "re-wiring" the hardware. That generation is the FPGA, field PROGRAMMABLE gate array. Hmm, the customer can load different programs, that sure sounds like software programs. Those software programs are implemented as physical connections, so that sure sounds like hardware. It's both software and hardware, showing that in the end, codes that define how a machine operates really are both hardware and software - they can be implemented as either or as both at the same time.
So yes, software can control the other parts of the machine to act differently, making it a different machine. But only specific, newly invented machines are supposed to be patentable, regardless of whether the newly invented machine is rendered as hardware or as software on any given day.
As I recall, in the Mythbusters experiment, the stream broke up after 12-24 inches or so. The "dog on couch" scenario, or "passed out drunk guy" might be within that distance.
Cell phones, tablets, etc. take 5V DC from USB and draw no more than 2.5 watts (500ma).
That's not a lot of power, so it could be safe and convenient to run two devices from a 1 amp supply that's fused at the wall plug.
120V and 240V AC wall power is dangerous. It can provide 2500 watts - a THOUSAND times as much as a USB charger. You might screw up and it be okay, leading to nothing more than a startling shock, or it might kill you. Don't mess with it.
You seem to be thinking of targetted attacks on a specific person. That's probably fewer rhan 1% of all attack attempts. Based on statistical analysis of thousands of attacks (tens of millions of login attempts), I'd estimate password guessing at more like 92%. There are many bot nets constantly trying dictionaries against random sites. As a rough guesstimate, there are maybe a few tens of millions of dictionary attempts by http EVERY DAY. The combos admin/admin and admin/password work all too often.
I know you probably won't see this since you're AC, but I'd like to get more details. At our institution, we don't manually input any grades because we just use Moodle for online classes. It would be great if you could post more details about what grades you're inputting, why, and how to the Moodle forum. Any suggestions on how to make it easier?
> Am I the only one that read the patent and thought it was extremely vague and so general that it describes almost every client-server relationship since the beginning of the computing?
It seems the answer is no. The judges, in the trial and the appeal, also thought it was a bogus patent.
Dude, you own two pet stores, with a web site that was apparently designed in Geocities. You're not only not in the same league as Google or eBay, you're not in the same solar system. When someone is 100,000,000,000 times more successful than you, the smart thing is to LEARN from them. The very dumbest thing you can do is to think you're smarter than everyone else and therefore refuse to learn.
> I have never comprehended why anyone would want to do RedHat's alpha testing for free.
I think "alpha" is a bit too strong, MANY people run Fedora on their desktop with no problems. I did so for several years before switching to CentOS for desktops.
Fedora is certainly cutting edge as opposed to stable.
As to "why", I've used Fedora on an important business server when I needed some brand new virtualization features and I couldn't wait 18-24 months for them to be available in Red Hat or other enterprise stable distros. That was much better supported than me compiling all my own pieces and cobbling them together with the older libraries on RHEL. About two years later, I updated the system to RHEL which finally had the "new" versions that Fedora let me run years before most competitors did.
> I just suggest people buy something running android, because all these Linuxes are bleeding edgers.
Most web servers run Linux. Essentially all supercomputers run Linux. It's stable enough to run the whole of Google reliably. It's stable enough for NSA.
> know I likely won't ever use open source software to run any critical parts of my business, because part of my business model
> is having a competitive advantage through better software than my competitors.
Then you're doing it wrong. Specifically, you've fallen into a black-or-white view and forgot that 90% of cases are gray.
Surely your company didn't write it's own mail client, you use something like Outlook, Evolution or Claws because there's not nearly enough competitive advantage in having your own email client for the ROI to make sense. You don't write your own word processing program for writing memos and letters. That's one extreme.
At the other extreme, you may have ONE piece of software which does that thing that sets your company apart. You might open source or outsource your payroll, but Google would never open source their search algorithm. Ebay may open source or outsource their forums, but the core of their auction system is the core of their business, so it's 100% proprietary. That's the other extreme. So the two extremes are a) commodity software where you should use something off the shelf and b) your core competency, your true competitive advantage, key business secrets, which should be well closed.
90% of what you use doesn't properly fit either extreme. That 90% in the middle is where the ROI is best by CUSTOMIZING existing software. Ebay doesn't write it's own web server, they customize Apache. To handle petabytes of data, Google customizes open source storage stacks. For MOST things, being completely dependent on a vendor for updates, support, etc. is at least a risk, so committing to of-the-shelf proprietary software instead of an open system you'll be able to customize if needed is a mistake. At the same time, building from scratch is a huge waste of money for most of the software you use. Most cases fall in the middle - use what's already available rather than writing your own, but not by becoming dependent on a third party vendor who may pull an Adobe and decide to stop selling their desktop software, instead offering it only as a cloud based monthly service (or who may go out of business entirely). Open source fills this huge middle perfectly.
Think I'm wrong? That means you think Ebay and Google are wrong. Over half of the world's largest companies, the Fortune 500, are known use open source software. Are you REALLY smarter than Ebay, Google, and all the other multi-billion dollar companies? Is that proven by the fact that you're more successful than they are?