I did contact her office. And the staffer I talked to knew what I was talking about and said that this restriction was removed from the final senate-house reconciliation. That's a good sign.
Does this mean that I can't put pictures of my kids on a website hosted by an ISP? I understand the privacy implications of last names and addresses, but kids pictures by themselves seems like it is going too far.
There is a reason to ditch NTSC.. it's an incredibly inefficient way of transmitting video. I believe that HDTV can transmit the same image quality in 1/4 or 1/6 of the bandwidth dedicated to over-the-air NTSC video.
And from an economic view.. auctions are very efficient. With all that unused spectrum, would you prefer to have more TV channels, or more (hopefully) interesting wireless services? Let the market decide.
Now it's up to the regulators to figure out how to make the auction fair. I don't know how to do that part.
The military already uses the Internet for their stuff. It's largely disconnected from the public Internet, so denial-of-service attacks can't reach the important stuff.
Why shouldn't the banking industry uses industry-standard equipment and protocols? I'm sure that you can buy a lot of redundant routers at Frys for the price of one of their private-network routers.
The technology behind this service was described by Avery Wang in a Stanford Hearing Seminar talk. See the abstract at the UCSC archive.
I'm pretty sure there are some patents in Avery's name covering the same technology. They should be public now. (I don't know how closely the patents describe the product they offer.)
I use an HP Digital Sender (http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/151 79-64175-64404-12126-64404-25324.html) and htDIG to solve all my document storage problems.
The Digital Sender is a wonderful toy. Stick a stack of paper in the bin. Enter an email address. Press the big-green button. And a PDF shows up in my mailbox in a few minutes. Even does double sided. Very simple device and it does most of what I need.
It doesn't do OCR. The Digital Sender outputs a bit-mapped PDF that looks very good. I usually use the full version of Adobe Acrobat to do optical character recognition and store the results in the background. That way I still see the good scan on the screen and when I print. But I can copy and search the text as I would normally.
I use htDig (http://www.htdig.org/) to index my archive. I store content in file folders that make sense (2002 taxes, pitch perception papers, etc). But I still find htdig useful. It indexes both HTML (my lab notebook) and PDF files. All is good.
PDF is a well-documented file format. I wish there was a good free-OCR package, but sometimes you have to pay for good performance. htDig and PDF work great on Windows and Linux.
In three years I have accumulated just over 1Gbyte of content. That represents all my lab notes (in HTML format) and all the papers I've read (in PDF). It's wonderful having my entire paper life with me on my laptop. (I also back it up to three different machines.)
US experience shows that, unlike traditional patents, software patents
do not encourage innovation and R&D, quite the contrary. In particular
they hurt small and medium-sized enterprises and generally newcomers
in the market.
What hard evidence is there to support this claim? STAC won a very large settlement against Microsoft due to their compression patents. They certainly qualified as a small enterprise. I agree there are a lot of bad software patents out there (they fail the obviousness criteria), but that doesn't mean that software is inherently unpatentable.
The patent system is based on encouraging people to spend money on innovative things *and* document their ideas, in exchange for a short-term monopoly. Why should people who like to give away their efforts (i.e. the free software movement) get a free ride? The free-software movement has noble goals (I have contributed too), but I don't think it is right to tell other people that they should give us the fruits of their hard-fought research because we want give away their patentable ideas.
Check out www.yesvideo.com. They will transfer the tape to DVD, and add chapter points. Chapters makes the content much more useful. If you value your time at much more than minimum wage, then they will be much more cost effective then you doing it yourself.
I wrote a book chapter that talks about using Mathematics for creating interactive signal processing documents. It's online at http://rvl4.ecn.purdue.edu/~malcolm/apple/inter_si gnal.pdf.
I also compare Mathematica to other tools.
- Malcolm P.S. I still use Mathematica for derivations and documentation and Matlab for actual numerical work.
There should be no limit. Or maybe something safe like 1Gbytes.
Computers are supposed to make our lives easier.
I routinely move large books (10s of Mbytes) and movies (100s of Mbytes) around, both for work and for entertainment. Email is much friendlier for us humans than ftp or scp.
Yes, that's a lot of bytes. Some things will break (like slow dialup lines).
Books that comes with a license are NOT new. It's not at all unusual to receive books of documentation when one signs a non-disclosure agremeent (NDA). That's not the unusual part.
There are two new aspects to this idea. I'm not a lawyer, so perhaps the more legal minded can answer these.
First, can I attach a shrinkwap license to anything? It seems well accepted for software. But what about apples? Can I enforce a shrinkwrap agreement that says you won't sell the apple to somebody else?
Second, are you bound by a shrink wrap license one receives unsolicited through the mail? One is *not* bound to return anything or even acknowledge merchandise that one receives unsolicitied through the mail.
I think there is an interesting question remaining about systems which judge the fidelity of an MP3 file.
Imagine a 3rd-party system which keeps track of the audio fingerprint for a known "good" copy of a song. Then somebody could fingerprint their version of the song through the 3rd-party verification system.
IMHO, the 3rd-party verification system is not directly contributing to piracy. The RIAA would not have a good case to sue them, since there are many non-infringing reasons to have the information (and the verificaton site wouldn't actually have a copy of the MP3). But it would be a very valuable check before downloading a file one found on the Internet.
>Executables shouldn't be sent as a direct attachment anyway
Why not? email is a great way to distribute all sorts of binary files; send it off and forget it. No waiting for slow HTTP downloads.
Email programs that auto-execute received mail are broken! And user's should not execute anything without knowing the sender. (And MS shouldn't disguise that clicking on something that looks like a JPEG is actually going to launch the program!) And why should I have to manually compress files before sending? Computers are supposed to make my life easier.
Michael Naimark, a famous interactive artist, put something similar together many years ago here in California. His project was based on Caltrans footage that was taken at 100 frames per mile along El Camino Real in Silicon Valley. Looks like it was done in 1975 and 1987. Check it out at http://www.naimark.net/projects/elcamino.html
1) The activities they are targetting (wide-spread sharing) are already illegal. (Napster is dead.)
2) The law targets all digital devices. (Does this mean that the locks in hotel doors have to have officially approved DRM technology since they are networked?)
3) This would KILL hobbiest efforts (I learned by building computers).
4) Open source is problematic
5) Hollywood is free to invent their own technology.
6) Hollywood is important to the county, but the computer industry is more imporant.
Your arguments are all good. (Although on your digital devices point, I like to characterize this as mandating breathalyzers on all wheeled vehicles, like wheelbarrels and matchbox cars, because of a few drunk drivers.)
But my friend in the know suggests that Hollings is really concerned about the health of the media industry. Right or wrong, you need to address that concern. I think you need to say something like "stealing music is already illegal. The existing laws have put Napster out of business."
You could also offer the opinion that the music industry is free to offer their own music-delivery platform, with all the security they want.
If you feel that you have been unfairly blacklisted, or some open-relay list doesn't remove you from their list fast enough, get somebody else to relay your mail. If somebody else is willing to vouch for you, then the problem is solved. Your upstream ISP. A business partner.
Teach people about disks, don't take the icon away.
NOPE!!!!
There *are* new concepts to learn. But don't make the user learn more than they have to. There are so many things to learn that are fundamental to today's GUIs (double click, or click to select). Anything more is a mistake.
Lots of drops (2 4-pair is enough per box)
on
Wiring A New House?
·
· Score: 1
Put in a phone/enet drop between every door in every room.... anyplace you can conceive of putting a desk, a wired picture frame, or an MP3 decoder. You really don't want to run ethernet across a door. Much better to have lots of wall boxes so you can decide later where to put things.
I'd put the boxes in, pull the wire and then on the long winter nights you can terminate the cables that you need.
Hey guys.... read the claims. Especially the independent claims (those that don't depend on one of the other claims.) And you have to have all the features they describe in a claim, or you don't infrinte.
This patent is not just about recording video onto hard disks. Most of the claims are dependent on a clause that says "a processor selecting future shows from a channel guide database for recording based on said user specified criteria, wherein the selection of shows is
based on one of either pattern matching or fuzzy logic analysis of the user specified criteria and the channel guide database, and wherein the processor
further selects for removal a previously recorded show having a lower priority than the selected future shows if insufficient capacity exists for recording the
future shows;" This allows you the box to learn that you like SciFi and automatically record all the SciFi shows. Not hard, once you hear the idea, but I remember thinking that was a good idea when the product first came onto the market.
Other claims talk about automatically recording portions of a program that repeats. That way you always have the latest CNN sports news. I don't think anybody's product does this yet. (But it does seem kind of $illy to have two dependent claims that mention CNN.)
This patent is not just a software patent. Yes, some of it can be implemented using software, but not all of it. I don't know all the prior art, but this isn't completely obvious, and it's certainly not as fundamental to the industry as the press release implies.
As I read the agreement, it doesn't force MS to publish their protocols. Instead it says that MS must only disclose the middleware and communications protocols to entities with business models that they (MS!!!) determines are viable. I am pretty sure that MS does not consider OpenSource a viable business model.
In their favor, when you do an agreement like this, you don't want to have to cater to every 2-bit business. Open source is not 2-bit but yet is not a viable business in MS' eyes.
The parts of the agreement that I read doesn't say anything about publishing the specs. I assume that the secure facility that MS provides is so they can keep their secrets secret. I assume you have to sign an iron-clad NDA to see the protocols.
I don't know what the failure mechanisms are... but it sure is appealing to just buy two of the biggest IDE drives you can afford. Fill up one, copy all the data to the other, and then just turn the power off to the backup drive.
Last I checked, Fry's was advertising big disks at under $2 per Gigabyte. That's cheap backup.
How is this different from the shopkeeper in your hometown that knows who the "hooligans" are and keeps an extra close eye on them when they are in his store?
Slashdot Mirror
I did contact her office. And the staffer I talked to knew what I was talking about and said that this restriction was removed from the final senate-house reconciliation. That's a good sign.
- Malcolm
The poster at http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/resources/2008/01/lego-brick4-timeline.jpg says there is a patent filed in 1958. Does anybody know what number it is? I'm curious to see what they patented (probably the plastic injector?)
- Malcolm
Does this mean that I can't put pictures of my kids on a website hosted by an ISP? I understand the privacy implications of last names and addresses, but kids pictures by themselves seems like it is going too far.
- Malcolm
There is a reason to ditch NTSC.. it's an incredibly inefficient way of transmitting video. I believe that HDTV can transmit the same image quality in 1/4 or 1/6 of the bandwidth dedicated to over-the-air NTSC video.
And from an economic view.. auctions are very efficient. With all that unused spectrum, would you prefer to have more TV channels, or more (hopefully) interesting wireless services? Let the market decide.
Now it's up to the regulators to figure out how to make the auction fair. I don't know how to do that part.
The military already uses the Internet for their stuff. It's largely disconnected from the public Internet, so denial-of-service attacks can't reach the important stuff.
Why shouldn't the banking industry uses industry-standard equipment and protocols? I'm sure that you can buy a lot of redundant routers at Frys for the price of one of their private-network routers.
The technology behind this service was described by Avery Wang in a Stanford Hearing Seminar talk. See the abstract at the UCSC archive .
I'm pretty sure there are some patents in Avery's name covering the same technology. They should be public now. (I don't know how closely the patents describe the product they offer.)
- Malcolm
and htDIG to solve all my document storage problems.
The Digital Sender is a wonderful toy. Stick a stack of paper in the bin. Enter an email address. Press the big-green button. And a PDF shows up in my mailbox in a few minutes. Even does double sided. Very simple device and it does most of what I need.
It doesn't do OCR. The Digital Sender outputs a bit-mapped PDF that looks very good. I usually use the full version of Adobe Acrobat to do optical character recognition and store the results in the background. That way I still see the good scan on the screen and when I print. But I can copy and search the text as I would normally.
I use htDig (http://www.htdig.org/) to index my archive. I store content in file folders that make sense (2002 taxes, pitch perception papers, etc). But I still find htdig useful. It indexes both HTML (my lab notebook) and PDF files. All is good.
PDF is a well-documented file format. I wish there was a good free-OCR package, but sometimes you have to pay for good performance. htDig and PDF work great on Windows and Linux.
In three years I have accumulated just over 1Gbyte of content. That represents all my lab notes (in HTML format) and all the papers I've read (in PDF). It's wonderful having my entire paper life with me on my laptop. (I also back it up to three different machines.)
The patent system is based on encouraging people to spend money on innovative things *and* document their ideas, in exchange for a short-term monopoly. Why should people who like to give away their efforts (i.e. the free software movement) get a free ride? The free-software movement has noble goals (I have contributed too), but I don't think it is right to tell other people that they should give us the fruits of their hard-fought research because we want give away their patentable ideas.
Check out www.yesvideo.com. They will transfer the tape to DVD, and add chapter points. Chapters makes the content much more useful. If you value your time at much more than minimum wage, then they will be much more cost effective then you doing it yourself.
I wrote a book chapter that talks about using Mathematics for creating interactive signal processing documents. It's online at http://rvl4.ecn.purdue.edu/~malcolm/apple/inter_si gnal.pdf.
I also compare Mathematica to other tools.
- Malcolm
P.S. I still use Mathematica for derivations and documentation and Matlab for actual numerical work.
There should be no limit. Or maybe something safe like 1Gbytes.
Computers are supposed to make our lives easier.
I routinely move large books (10s of Mbytes) and movies (100s of Mbytes) around, both for work and for entertainment. Email is much friendlier for us humans than ftp or scp.
Yes, that's a lot of bytes. Some things will break (like slow dialup lines).
Fix the computers, not the humans.
Books that comes with a license are NOT new. It's not at all unusual to receive books of documentation when one signs a non-disclosure agremeent (NDA). That's not the unusual part.
There are two new aspects to this idea. I'm not a lawyer, so perhaps the more legal minded can answer these.
First, can I attach a shrinkwap license to anything? It seems well accepted for software. But what about apples? Can I enforce a shrinkwrap agreement that says you won't sell the apple to somebody else?
Second, are you bound by a shrink wrap license one receives unsolicited through the mail? One is *not* bound to return anything or even acknowledge merchandise that one receives unsolicitied through the mail.
I think there is an interesting question remaining about systems which judge the fidelity of an MP3 file.
Imagine a 3rd-party system which keeps track of the audio fingerprint for a known "good" copy of a song. Then somebody could fingerprint their version of the song through the 3rd-party verification system.
IMHO, the 3rd-party verification system is not directly contributing to piracy. The RIAA would not have a good case to sue them, since there are many non-infringing reasons to have the information (and the verificaton site wouldn't actually have a copy of the MP3). But it would be a very valuable check before downloading a file one found on the Internet.
Sort of a "Good Musickeeping Seal of Approval".
Would this be useful (and not get itselt sued)?
>Executables shouldn't be sent as a direct attachment anyway
Why not? email is a great way to distribute all sorts of binary files; send it off and forget it. No waiting for slow HTTP downloads.
Email programs that auto-execute received mail are broken! And user's should not execute anything without knowing the sender. (And MS shouldn't disguise that clicking on something that looks like a JPEG is actually going to launch the program!) And why should I have to manually compress files before sending? Computers are supposed to make my life easier.
Michael Naimark, a famous interactive artist, put something similar together many years ago here in California. His project was based on Caltrans footage that was taken at 100 frames per mile along El Camino Real in Silicon Valley. Looks like it was done in 1975 and 1987. Check it out at http://www.naimark.net/projects/elcamino.html
1) The activities they are targetting (wide-spread sharing) are already illegal. (Napster is dead.)
2) The law targets all digital devices. (Does this mean that the locks in hotel doors have to have officially approved DRM technology since they are networked?)
3) This would KILL hobbiest efforts (I learned by building computers).
4) Open source is problematic
5) Hollywood is free to invent their own technology.
6) Hollywood is important to the county, but the computer industry is more imporant.
See this article by John Platt for all the theory you can handle on ClearType
Your arguments are all good. (Although on your digital devices point, I like to characterize this as mandating breathalyzers on all wheeled vehicles, like wheelbarrels and matchbox cars, because of a few drunk drivers.)
But my friend in the know suggests that Hollings is really concerned about the health of the media industry. Right or wrong, you need to address that concern. I think you need to say something like "stealing music is already illegal. The existing laws have put Napster out of business."
You could also offer the opinion that the music industry is free to offer their own music-delivery platform, with all the security they want.
If you feel that you have been unfairly blacklisted, or some open-relay list doesn't remove you from their list fast enough, get somebody else to relay your mail. If somebody else is willing to vouch for you, then the problem is solved. Your upstream ISP. A business partner.
Teach people about disks, don't take the icon away.
NOPE!!!!
There *are* new concepts to learn. But don't make the user learn more than they have to. There are so many things to learn that are fundamental to today's GUIs (double click, or click to select). Anything more is a mistake.
Put in a phone/enet drop between every door in every room.... anyplace you can conceive of putting a desk, a wired picture frame, or an MP3 decoder. You really don't want to run ethernet across a door. Much better to have lots of wall boxes so you can decide later where to put things.
I'd put the boxes in, pull the wire and then on the long winter nights you can terminate the cables that you need.
This patent is not just about recording video onto hard disks. Most of the claims are dependent on a clause that says "a processor selecting future shows from a channel guide database for recording based on said user specified criteria, wherein the selection of shows is based on one of either pattern matching or fuzzy logic analysis of the user specified criteria and the channel guide database, and wherein the processor further selects for removal a previously recorded show having a lower priority than the selected future shows if insufficient capacity exists for recording the future shows;" This allows you the box to learn that you like SciFi and automatically record all the SciFi shows. Not hard, once you hear the idea, but I remember thinking that was a good idea when the product first came onto the market.
Other claims talk about automatically recording portions of a program that repeats. That way you always have the latest CNN sports news. I don't think anybody's product does this yet. (But it does seem kind of $illy to have two dependent claims that mention CNN.)
This patent is not just a software patent. Yes, some of it can be implemented using software, but not all of it. I don't know all the prior art, but this isn't completely obvious, and it's certainly not as fundamental to the industry as the press release implies.
As I read the agreement, it doesn't force MS to publish their protocols. Instead it says that MS must only disclose the middleware and communications protocols to entities with business models that they (MS!!!) determines are viable. I am pretty sure that MS does not consider OpenSource a viable business model.
In their favor, when you do an agreement like this, you don't want to have to cater to every 2-bit business. Open source is not 2-bit but yet is not a viable business in MS' eyes.
The parts of the agreement that I read doesn't say anything about publishing the specs. I assume that the secure facility that MS provides is so they can keep their secrets secret. I assume you have to sign an iron-clad NDA to see the protocols.
I don't know what the failure mechanisms are... but it sure is appealing to just buy two of the biggest IDE drives you can afford. Fill up one, copy all the data to the other, and then just turn the power off to the backup drive.
Last I checked, Fry's was advertising big disks at under $2 per Gigabyte. That's cheap backup.
Before you complain about cameras in Borders....
How is this different from the shopkeeper in your hometown that knows who the "hooligans" are and keeps an extra close eye on them when they are in his store?