Umm, that was more than a decade after the published HTTP standards included the PATH_INFO environment variable, which gives the program everything past the file pathname portion of a URL. This was essentially defined as a string that the invoked CGI program would interpret however it wishes. If this doesn't qualify as "prior art", what would? Note that the last-updated timestamps on these specs are in 1995 and 1996.
So Amazon is merely patenting a part of NCSA's published HTTP CGI-invocation standard.
This mostly shows that the patent examiners are totally ignorant of HTML and related Web standards, and are thus unqualified to say anything about the patent application.
And at least EU have guts to stand against MicroSoft. Government of USofA hasn't.
Back during the 2000 US election, it was widely reported that Microsoft had become the largest single campaign contributor to both major parties. This is generally understood as the explanation for why the Justice Dept's case was terminated on terms very friendly to Microsoft shortly after George Bush took office.
As far as I can determine, Microsoft hasn't become nearly as important a campaign contributor in the EU as it is now in the US. Maybe they'll learn from this, and we'll soon see them bribing European politicians at the appropriate level.
Give them time; they're still going through the pangs of learning how business is really done at the top levels.
(Are there web sites listing politicians' contributors in the EU, similar to what you can find in the US? I've seen a few partial lists for single countries, but nothing for the EU as a whole.)
It reminds me of the Jim Morin cartoon last week. That was about another case of "national security" being used to suppress information that was embarrassing to the government, but the basic idea is the same.
There's lots of historic evidence now that official secrecy in the US (and all other governments) rarely has anything to do with "national security". The primary reason for secrecy has always been to prevent a government's own citizens from knowing about the inner workings of their own government.
Suppression of evidence that would exonerate a defendant in a criminal court case is the most egregious sort of misuse of official secrecy, true, and it's routinely used for things much less important than this. Occasionally, it is actually used to prevent a nation's external enemies to learn something embarrassing. But mostly it's just to keep internal enemies (aka "citizens") from learning things that the government doesn't want you or me (or a judge) to know.
I have mentioned before that we will come to a time where the Internet as we know it will no longer exist in the way we see it now. There will be the "Trusted Computing" Internet where these low-jacked computers will communicate and there will be the "Hacker/Hobbyist" Internet where custom built machines, not running the majority OS, will connect to. Guess which one your banking, newspapers, search engines, most of your friends, jobs, etc will operate on?
Actually, this sort of thing happened back in the 1980s, when we had a lot of commercial networks, controlled by the corporations, each one in use by only a small set of corporate customers. Then news got out about this other network called the "Internet", built on government projects by a flock of "hackers", and not controlled by anyone.
It's pretty clear which one people decided to use.
So now the corporate world is hard at work bringing the Internet to heel, with strict corporate controls on what you and I can see or do. If they succeed, your scenario will happen once again. And as the Internet becomes as unusable as all those other networks back in the 1980s, people will slowly move to the network that actually works.
I've heard that a system similar to this (but lacking part 4.) is already in use in some publications.
Such a copyright standard would make it easy to use hundreds (or thousands) of programs that already exist to filter copyrighted material and determine what to do with it.
Do a quick scan for your right to privacy in [the 4th Ammendment to the US Constitution]... when you find it, let me know.
Hmmm... I've always been puzzled by how English-speaking people could not see it.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,..."
How could you read that and not think "privacy". Have you just started learning English? I'm sure any dictionary translating English to your native language would explain it well enough that you'd understand.
Being secure against searches is what "privacy" means.
(And being secure against seizures is what "property" means. Either that, or it's a guarantee of universal medical care. English does have a few ambiguities.;-)
Hmmm... That paper seems to be purely theoretical in nature; it didn't seem to include any actual examples of what I asked about. At least I didn't spot any in a quick reading. A closer reading of the intro and conclusions shows that the authors' intent was theoretical in nature, not case studies. And their phrasing implies that they think interference with others' use of the ideas is the point of a patent. So they'd probably treat "advancement of science and practical arts" as a failure of the patent system. I didn't spot any numbers applicable to the question of profit.
There is a brief discussion of the lawsuit over the Nakamura/Nichia blue-light LED case, but that was treated solely as an employee-vs-employer case. The question of whether their profits might have been different without the patent wasn't considered, as far as I can tell. The question of how much of the profit rightfully goes to the actual inventor rather than the employer is an interesting question, but it's not related to the question that I asked.
(And if followups go the way they often do on/., we will now have a huge blazing discussion of this topic, and my question will go ignored.;-)
So are there any documented cases where patents (or copyrights) did actually enhance "progress of science and the useful arts", as the US Constitution phrases it?
All the histories I've read say that when patents have had any measurable effect at all (and most don't), the effect has been to block both progress by everyone and profit by the patent holders.
But this could be a result of biased reporting, similar to the general case that bad news tends to get reported but smooth operations aren't considered news because they're normal.
So does anyone know of a case where a patent can be shown to either enhance further technical progress or benefit the patent holder financially? Or are all the histories of patents blocking progress and profit until the patents run out (and bankrupting small companies via legal fees) actually describing the normal case? If there are such cases, it would be interesting to compare them with the more-documented cases where patents are disastrous for everyone. Maybe we could learn how to revise the patent laws so we actually get the results that people say that patents should have.
I'd have replied to the main article, but for me there was no reply button, don't know why.
The reply button is on that annoying little floating widget to the left.../blockquote When that "Web 2.0" stuff was introduced to/., I found that installing NoScript in firefox or seamonkey did a very effective job of defeating them and making/. easy to use again.
Blocking all images from slashdot.org also helps. None of the pictures here add anything to the discussions anyway, so why slow down page loads with them?
Whether we like it or not, "linux" has almost from the start meant more than just a kernel.
Not according to Mr. Stallman, it hasn't...
And this just might be considered relevant in court. They've sued Red Hat, but Red Hat is really just an assembler of components from other suppliers.
To use the popular auto analogy, imagine that your car came equipped with a radio that happened to infringe some patent. Would the manufacturer of the engine be legally liable for the patent violation? Would the auto company that assembled the car be legally liable for the patent violation? How about the auto dealer?
Are there any lawyers hereabouts that actually know something about this topic? I suppose that Red hat might have some on hand, but we probably won't hear from them here.
It does seem like, if the patent violation is in Gnome and/or KDE, it would be quite correct to say that the people who provided linux aren't responsible. The fact that a lot of dumb users and marketers call the contents of the entire disk "linux" wouldn't be relevant to a court. That name has a legal meaning, and it certainly doesn't legally apply to any package that any assembler might decide to put on their CDs. Since Red Hat is effectively an "assembly" shop, they might or might not be responsible for patent violations buried in some package that they include.
But saying that "linux" is responsible for every package that someone has grafted onto it does sound like something that any competent lawyer could shoot down in minutes. Even if it's something as popular as GUI.
After all, radios are pretty much universal in cars, and all cars' dash boards are built with a hole for inserting a radio. But this doesn't make a car's manufacturer responsible for patent violations in the radio, does it?
(Actually, I'd bet that good lawyers could drag this out for many billable hours.;-)
Don't you ever worry about someone stealing your laptop and just needing to open the lid to get access to your life?
Nope. Just configure it to require your password to be entered when it resumes.
So how does that work if, as TFA says, the computer isn't turned on? The intruder has shut down your machine (if it was running), plugged in his machine that is supplying power to the disk. How does your OS intercept this and ask for a password, when the OS isn't running?
It seems to me to be an ideal tool for data thieves. Any machine that's shutdown will be totally accessible via the USB port, with no pesky security of any sort to get in the way. And the resident OS will have no record saying that anything happened.
Who boots a laptop? I just close the lid on my Mac, and it goes to sleep.
My wife and I have a Mac Powerbook that we've had to boot every week or so ever since we bought it. It has this curious behavior: At random times it just simply turns itself off. Everything goes dark, and no buttons work except the "boot" button at the upper right.
We took it back to the store for diagnosis a couple of times. They couldn't get it to happen. "It all works fine for us." We've never seen any pattern to when it turns off. It has nothing to do with what apps we were running or what (if any) things we have plugged in. The only thing we've noticed is that as far as we can tell, it only happens when it's on batter power, never when it's plugged into the wall. But it's rare enough that this might just be an accident, and five minutes from now it'll turn off even though it's now plugged in as I type this.
So yes, some of us Mac users do reboot our laptops occasionally. Whenever the laptop decides that it's time for a reboot.
(My wife also has a Windows laptop that shows similar behavior. She cusses it out a lot. But she needs it "for work". She knows it'll never work right, and accepts this because it's from Microsoft. But she expected better from a Mac.;-)
We've also seen a few incidents in which it won't wake up from sleep. The little blinking white "sleep" light just keeps blinking, showing that it is still alive, but it doesn't wake up. The only button that works is the "boot" button. I'd guess this is a software problem, but I don't have a clue how to diagnose it. How do you run test software when the damned thing won't wake up?
Pricing of products, plans for entering markets in the US etc? You're not concerned that information might make it into the hands of your competitors?
This is a point that is also lost on the management of most US corporations, so far. Remember that before the 2000 election, George W promised to be "America's CEO". Putting aside the historical implications of such a phrase and taking him at his word, this meant that his idea was to run the US government like a private corporation. One of the facts of life about any corporation is that it's in business for profit, and it will attempt to make a profit from anything that it can, as long as it doesn't result in the officers in prison. This clearly includes selling any information (such as your purchase history) that it may be able to capture, since information about customers is a valuable commercial quantity.
Any manager should understand that, when the US government gets its hands on a recording of any phone conversation, the intent is be to "monetize" this. If your conversation can be sold to one of your competitors, George W's policy is that it should be sold. That's the right and proper thing for a profitable corporation to do.
It may be only a matter of time before management slowly wakes up to the implications of this. Intercepting phone calls is not just a national security issue; it is a corporate profitability issue. If you don't want your conversations sold to interested competitors, you should be seriously looking at using only encrypting phone equipment. And unencrypted conversation is fair game as a profitable "product" to the current US administration.
It's not obvious that whichever Democrat wins the 2008 election will have a policy that's any different. And by then, such capture and sales will be institutionalized, automated, and out of view to the president, so the next president will be able to casually delegate the whole topic.
I wonder which companies make phones that do end-to-end encryption? They could be good candidates for stock purchases...
They (well, other than the nukes) sure did help the United States win the war in Iraq
Wow. So not only do you believe that what we're fighting in right now isn't the war in Iraq, you believe we already won the war, and now we're just inovlved in some "post-war" activity.
Actually, I've read comments by quite a number of military people to the effect that we're not fighting a war with Iraq. Their argument is that we in fact won the "war", which only lasted a few days. The Iraq government was deposed, its army disbanded, and the US operated the government.
What we've been doing since then, they argue, is properly called an "occupation", not a "war". An occupation requires totally different tactics than a war. Successful occupations work by co-opting the population into support of the puppet government. But the US government keeps pretending there's a war, and using war tactics. Since the original enemy (Saddam Hussein's government) no longer exists, the victims of the war tactics are mostly the Iraqi civilian population. And they are acting exactly the way you'd expect if an outsider came in and started attacking a civilian population. They've formed guerrilla resistance forces to defend themselves against the attackers.
It's interesting reading such comments from military sources. And it might be interesting to read some explanation for why the Bush Administration keeps doing something so disastrous. The supposed justifications used so far just don't make sense, especially the "terrorism" one. Iraq wasn't a source of terrorism before the war (except by the Hussein gang of thugs against their own citizenry). It is now a danger to the rest of the world, as a direct result of US government actions.
Historians are already starting to analyze this "war" as a major political blunder of historic importance.
The American government - just one party away from Communism
Nah; it's only godless Communism if your political leaders mouth platitudes that include reverent invocations of Marx and Engels (and maybe Mao). If your political leaders' implement the same policies, but their platitudes invoke Jesus and Adam Smith, your country is a God-fearing Capitalist nation.
It's important to keep your terminology straight. But the actual policies and practices of the government don't much matter to much of anyone, as long as you get the words right.
Hasn't anyone learned that throughout history, positive changes to govenments to bring more power to the people have never been by force?
Oh, I dunno; George Washington and his buddies seem to have been somewhat successful.;-)
Of course, if you look at the history, it wasn't quite that simple. It never is. In reality, G.W.&Co were rather underpowered, and it really was the British forces that held most of the firepower. The Colonials knew the territory better, and had the "hearts & minds" of most of the population, so a strategy of wearing down their oppressors eventually won out. But still, without the meagre armaments that they had, the Colonials probably wouldn't have won. Their occasional use of firepower was part of what held off the stronger British forces.
All those invocations of the Second Ammendment can seem rather silly at times. As long as the majority of the US population goes along with whoever the two major parties are pushing, it's not too likely that an armed insurrection of any sort will ever do anything useful. You're better off subverting the system from within. The religious fundamentalists seem to have realized this a few decades ago, and they've been fairly successful at getting their guys in power recently. And I don't think we're going to get them out of power by means of any application of the Second Ammendment, especially since George W announced that the Constitution is "just a piece of paper" and made it clear that he wouldn't let it stand in his way.
(Actually, he was wrong there, too. It's made of parchment, not paper.;-)
This sort of silly routing happens at all levels. I'm in a western suburb of Boston, and traceroute shows traffic to machines at MIT in Cambridge going via four New York machines. That's a 400-mile, 12-hop trip to go roughly 11 miles.
What's really annoying is that the ping time now averages about 30 ms; a couple of years ago it was only 12. Think of all the wasted time waiting for replies.
Here's a clue people... I don't talk about my private life on the intertubes... never have... never will.
But you do on the telephone, Google isn't listening, the NSA is.
And we might note that, outside your local exchange, most telephone traffic now goes via VoIP now. Unencrypted. At least in the US, the phone companies have pretty much completed the conversion to an all-digital system for everything but that wire attached to your house.
So if you hear some politicians or telco execs talking about only monitoring and/or filtering/shaping/censoring "computer data downloading", you should understand that this includes your phone calls. Phone calls are now just data, passed around from computer to computer and finally to your ear.
The days when e.g. you could discover that there was no article at all about the author Jessamyn West ("The Friendly Persuasion") and quickly throw in three paragraphs off the top of your head with a little bit of cross-checking, totally confident that you were improving Wikipedia, are gone.
Quite possibly. For example, in the past I've added stuff to wikipedia at random, mostly when I look something up, find it's not there, dig around in other sites to find it, and then think "I've got the info now; why don't I just write up a summary and add it to wikipedia?" That doesn't happen nearly as often now, and I'm sufficiently busy that I don't go looking for missing wikipedia pages to create.
However, I have been adding stuff to wiktionary. That's a case where it's very easy to find missing entries, and if you happen to know the info, it's easy to add it. And this is obviously going to be true for a rather long time. After all, how many words are there in all the world's languages? Wiktionary wants a page for every one of those words, y'know, and .
Funny case: I happened to glance at the list of translations of "search" on the main wiktionary page, and noticed that the Chinese entry contained a character that I didn't know. Nothing odd there; Mandarin is one of my weakest languages. So I looked it up, and was duly surprised to find that there was no wiktionary entry for the word. WTF? I checked in a couple of online Chinese-English dictionaries, and sure enough, that 2-char word means "search" or "look up". It seemed really silly that wiktionary would have a word on its main page that it didn't have a page for. So I created it. It only has the Mandarin entry now, so if you know how "" (that's "sou1suo3" if your browser mangles it;-)) is pronounced in some other languages, you might go add their entries to the page.
This is something that could clearly go on for a very long time. And the result, maybe in another century, will be a very useful any-language-to-any-other-language dictionary.
If the robot looks like a dragonfly to the human eye, why shouldn't it look like a dragonfly to a bird's eye?
Well, first off, most birds have eyes that are a lot better than ours. I once read a comment by a biologist that if our eyes were as good as the average hawk's, we could read a newspaper from a quarter-mile away. They're not all that good, of course, but since flying is mostly done visually, evolution has given most of them the best eyes that are practical for their size. So unless a drone looks like a dragonfly in great detail, a bird will know it's not one.
How does a predator reads its infrared signature
With its eyes. Infrared light is just photons, somewhat longer than what we can see. Of course, it depends on the visual range of a specific predator. Most birds do have 4-color visual pigments, unlike our 3-color pigments, and have a wider frequency response than we do. But for most birds, the extra visual pigment is a blue/UV pigment, extending their vision into the ultraviolet. Some birds do have a red pigment that matches longer wavelengths than ours, and they can see farther into the IR than we can.
,... its acoustic signature?
Wait for it... with their ears, of course!
The squirrel robot strikes me as as equally ridiculous.
Maybe. But in some parts of the world, including the American South, squirrels are routinely hunted and eaten. They can be fatty, but the country squirrels can be good to eat.
"Honest, Sarge; Ah wuz jist out huntin' with mah squirrel gun, hopin ta bring home a few of the critters fer dinner. Ah din't know it wuz a military squirrel. Y'know, if y'all would jist paint insignias on 'em, you wouldn't have ta worry 'bout the folks hereabouts shootin' 'em down."
Before they rush on with alphabets that read right to left and use alternative character sets they really should try English words with greater than 8 bit characters. Are they gonna actually work?
Well, lately I've been testing a lot of my old code in various UTF-8 environments, and I've been duly impressed by the fact that, as Ken intended, almost all the code "just works" with Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, etc.
It turns out that there's a simple explanation. If the code doesn't examine chars with bit 8 turned on, but just treats them as unexamined "data" (or letters if the code is trying to distinguish that way), then everything works right. The only time the code needs to actually look at non-ASCII characters' values are when the text is being rendered in physical form. And hardly any code ever actually does that. Almost all my code reads data from files and writes data to other files, but never does anything with the physical representation of the data. It passes the data to other programs for that.
A case in point: I was recently working on some multi-language HTML files, and I decided to try a fun test with CSS: I defined a whole lot of classes whose names were in Chinese. This made sense, since these classes were being used for pieces of the text that contained mostly Chinese characters, not counting things like spaces and punctuation. I tested the CSS using more than a dozen browsers that I have installed on my linux and OSX test machines. I was unable to find a single case where it didn't work. I even hunted down some Windows boxes and tested the files on IE6 and IE7; the worked fine (despite the well-known CSS incompatibilities in IE;-). I also tried a few CSS class names with Arabic and Hebrew names, and they worked fine, too.
Now, I don't think for a second that the writers of all those browsers spent time making sure that their code could handle UTF-8-encoded Chinese identifiers in CSS. I suspect that most of them never even considered the possibility. I'd bet that the code just takes anything that's not a significant character in CSS syntax, and tacitly treats it as a "letter". This is all it takes to make UTF-8 work correctly in this case.
I did mention this in a couple of browsers' newsgroups. The responses were basically of the form "Well, of course it works. Why wouldn't it? You don't need special code to handle charset=UTF-8, except for the rendering. You'd have to be a fairly incompetent programmer to write code that doesn't work correctly with UTF-8. Except for rendering."
I can hear people saying "but those browsers all need to render the text." Yeah, but the CSS routines don't render text. They parse the CSS input, and fill in fields in data structures that tell the rendering code how to position and color the text. But the charset-handling code is probably not called anywhere in the CSS modules; it's only called in the few places that actually need to color pixels on the screen.
Lots of people have suggested declaring UTF-8 to be the only encoding for URLs. If this is done, there's probably very little URL-handling code anywhere that needs to be changed; it'll mostly "just work", because char codes 0x800 to 0xFF are treated as "letters". The only question is whether the final step of rendering the text's pixels will produce the right glyph, and the URL-handling code doesn't care about that.
I happen to have a DNS server handy. Maybe I'll try a little test: In one of the domains, I'll add hostnames in Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and maybe a few other non-Roman alphabets. I'll wait a while, and see if I can access the machines via those names from a few other machines. I'll predict that it'll also "just work".
[T]o imagine that the democrats are less owned by big business than the republicans is self delusion on a grand scale.
Sometime recently there was a good Doonesbury comic on this topic. One of the character makes a comment about both parties being equally corrupt. Another character says "Yeah, but when the Democrats do it, they know it's wrong."
Of course, this is little consolation if you're among the victims of their actions.
The obvious answer is that the universe was designed by committee.... Polytheism anyone?;-)
Yeah, that's a tempting theory to throw at the "intelligent design" people.
But even a cursory look at the universe exposes such an incredible mess that the only real explanation is that there was no intelligence whatsoever behind the "design".
Another theory I've heard and liked is that there was actually a God that did it all, but He (She? It? Bvqx?) was so embarrassed by the results that He has carefully covered up all the evidence and fled to another universe.
Then there's the Doug-Adams-like theory that God did it, and got a D- grade for the assignment.
Legitimate and well written articles are constantly deleted or merged because they're "not notable" or they're fancruft.
So is there a way that "outsiders" can easily find these deleted "not notable" articles, and copy them to some other more-appropriate site? Even if it's about something that I find utterly uninteresting, I'd think it's to our loss to let such articles disappear forever.
After all, the storage manufacturers keep selling us bigger and bigger capacity storage systems. We've gotta have stuff to fill it with, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Filed: August 23, 2004
Umm, that was more than a decade after the published HTTP standards included the PATH_INFO environment variable, which gives the program everything past the file pathname portion of a URL. This was essentially defined as a string that the invoked CGI program would interpret however it wishes. If this doesn't qualify as "prior art", what would? Note that the last-updated timestamps on these specs are in 1995 and 1996.
So Amazon is merely patenting a part of NCSA's published HTTP CGI-invocation standard.
This mostly shows that the patent examiners are totally ignorant of HTML and related Web standards, and are thus unqualified to say anything about the patent application.
And at least EU have guts to stand against MicroSoft. Government of USofA hasn't.
Back during the 2000 US election, it was widely reported that Microsoft had become the largest single campaign contributor to both major parties. This is generally understood as the explanation for why the Justice Dept's case was terminated on terms very friendly to Microsoft shortly after George Bush took office.
As far as I can determine, Microsoft hasn't become nearly as important a campaign contributor in the EU as it is now in the US. Maybe they'll learn from this, and we'll soon see them bribing European politicians at the appropriate level.
Give them time; they're still going through the pangs of learning how business is really done at the top levels.
(Are there web sites listing politicians' contributors in the EU, similar to what you can find in the US? I've seen a few partial lists for single countries, but nothing for the EU as a whole.)
It reminds me of the Jim Morin cartoon last week. That was about another case of "national security" being used to suppress information that was embarrassing to the government, but the basic idea is the same.
There's lots of historic evidence now that official secrecy in the US (and all other governments) rarely has anything to do with "national security". The primary reason for secrecy has always been to prevent a government's own citizens from knowing about the inner workings of their own government.
Suppression of evidence that would exonerate a defendant in a criminal court case is the most egregious sort of misuse of official secrecy, true, and it's routinely used for things much less important than this. Occasionally, it is actually used to prevent a nation's external enemies to learn something embarrassing. But mostly it's just to keep internal enemies (aka "citizens") from learning things that the government doesn't want you or me (or a judge) to know.
I have mentioned before that we will come to a time where the Internet as we know it will no longer exist in the way we see it now. There will be the "Trusted Computing" Internet where these low-jacked computers will communicate and there will be the "Hacker/Hobbyist" Internet where custom built machines, not running the majority OS, will connect to. Guess which one your banking, newspapers, search engines, most of your friends, jobs, etc will operate on?
Actually, this sort of thing happened back in the 1980s, when we had a lot of commercial networks, controlled by the corporations, each one in use by only a small set of corporate customers. Then news got out about this other network called the "Internet", built on government projects by a flock of "hackers", and not controlled by anyone.
It's pretty clear which one people decided to use.
So now the corporate world is hard at work bringing the Internet to heel, with strict corporate controls on what you and I can see or do. If they succeed, your scenario will happen once again. And as the Internet becomes as unusable as all those other networks back in the 1980s, people will slowly move to the network that actually works.
industry standard to filter copyrighted material
...
How about we suggest the following standard:
1. the © character (Unicode 00A9, or decimal 251), followed by
2. the date of the copyright, followed by
3. the name of the copyright holder, optionally followed by
4. an email or web address to contact the copyright holder
I've heard that a system similar to this (but lacking part 4.) is already in use in some publications.
Such a copyright standard would make it easy to use hundreds (or thousands) of programs that already exist to filter copyrighted material and determine what to do with it.
Think anyone would go for it?
Maybe we should write up an RFC
They killed Kenny???
Do a quick scan for your right to privacy in [the 4th Ammendment to the US Constitution] ... when you find it, let me know.
... I've always been puzzled by how English-speaking people could not see it.
..."
;-)
Hmmm
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,
How could you read that and not think "privacy". Have you just started learning English? I'm sure any dictionary translating English to your native language would explain it well enough that you'd understand.
Being secure against searches is what "privacy" means.
(And being secure against seizures is what "property" means. Either that, or it's a guarantee of universal medical care. English does have a few ambiguities.
Hmmm ... That paper seems to be purely theoretical in nature; it didn't seem to include any actual examples of what I asked about. At least I didn't spot any in a quick reading. A closer reading of the intro and conclusions shows that the authors' intent was theoretical in nature, not case studies. And their phrasing implies that they think interference with others' use of the ideas is the point of a patent. So they'd probably treat "advancement of science and practical arts" as a failure of the patent system. I didn't spot any numbers applicable to the question of profit.
/., we will now have a huge blazing discussion of this topic, and my question will go ignored. ;-)
There is a brief discussion of the lawsuit over the Nakamura/Nichia blue-light LED case, but that was treated solely as an employee-vs-employer case. The question of whether their profits might have been different without the patent wasn't considered, as far as I can tell. The question of how much of the profit rightfully goes to the actual inventor rather than the employer is an interesting question, but it's not related to the question that I asked.
(And if followups go the way they often do on
So are there any documented cases where patents (or copyrights) did actually enhance "progress of science and the useful arts", as the US Constitution phrases it?
All the histories I've read say that when patents have had any measurable effect at all (and most don't), the effect has been to block both progress by everyone and profit by the patent holders.
But this could be a result of biased reporting, similar to the general case that bad news tends to get reported but smooth operations aren't considered news because they're normal.
So does anyone know of a case where a patent can be shown to either enhance further technical progress or benefit the patent holder financially? Or are all the histories of patents blocking progress and profit until the patents run out (and bankrupting small companies via legal fees) actually describing the normal case? If there are such cases, it would be interesting to compare them with the more-documented cases where patents are disastrous for everyone. Maybe we could learn how to revise the patent laws so we actually get the results that people say that patents should have.
And this just might be considered relevant in court. They've sued Red Hat, but
Red Hat is really just an assembler of components from other suppliers.
To use the popular auto analogy, imagine that your car came equipped with a radio that happened to infringe some patent. Would the manufacturer of the engine be legally liable for the patent violation? Would the auto company that assembled the car be legally liable for the patent violation? How about the auto dealer?
Are there any lawyers hereabouts that actually know something about this topic? I suppose that Red hat might have some on hand, but we probably won't hear from them here.
It does seem like, if the patent violation is in Gnome and/or KDE, it would be quite correct to say that the people who provided linux aren't responsible. The fact that a lot of dumb users and marketers call the contents of the entire disk "linux" wouldn't be relevant to a court. That name has a legal meaning, and it certainly doesn't legally apply to any package that any assembler might decide to put on their CDs. Since Red Hat is effectively an "assembly" shop, they might or might not be responsible for patent violations buried in some package that they include.
But saying that "linux" is responsible for every package that someone has grafted onto it does sound like something that any competent lawyer could shoot down in minutes. Even if it's something as popular as GUI.
After all, radios are pretty much universal in cars, and all cars' dash boards are built with a hole for inserting a radio. But this doesn't make a car's manufacturer responsible for patent violations in the radio, does it?
(Actually, I'd bet that good lawyers could drag this out for many billable hours.
So how does that work if, as TFA says, the computer isn't turned on? The intruder has shut down your machine (if it was running), plugged in his machine that is supplying power to the disk. How does your OS intercept this and ask for a password, when the OS isn't running?
It seems to me to be an ideal tool for data thieves. Any machine that's shutdown will be totally accessible via the USB port, with no pesky security of any sort to get in the way. And the resident OS will have no record saying that anything happened.
Who boots a laptop? I just close the lid on my Mac, and it goes to sleep.
;-)
My wife and I have a Mac Powerbook that we've had to boot every week or so ever since we bought it. It has this curious behavior: At random times it just simply turns itself off. Everything goes dark, and no buttons work except the "boot" button at the upper right.
We took it back to the store for diagnosis a couple of times. They couldn't get it to happen. "It all works fine for us." We've never seen any pattern to when it turns off. It has nothing to do with what apps we were running or what (if any) things we have plugged in. The only thing we've noticed is that as far as we can tell, it only happens when it's on batter power, never when it's plugged into the wall. But it's rare enough that this might just be an accident, and five minutes from now it'll turn off even though it's now plugged in as I type this.
So yes, some of us Mac users do reboot our laptops occasionally. Whenever the laptop decides that it's time for a reboot.
(My wife also has a Windows laptop that shows similar behavior. She cusses it out a lot. But she needs it "for work". She knows it'll never work right, and accepts this because it's from Microsoft. But she expected better from a Mac.
We've also seen a few incidents in which it won't wake up from sleep. The little blinking white "sleep" light just keeps blinking, showing that it is still alive, but it doesn't wake up. The only button that works is the "boot" button. I'd guess this is a software problem, but I don't have a clue how to
diagnose it. How do you run test software when the damned thing won't wake up?
Pricing of products, plans for entering markets in the US etc? You're not concerned that information might make it into the hands of your competitors?
...
This is a point that is also lost on the management of most US corporations, so far. Remember that before the 2000 election, George W promised to be "America's CEO". Putting aside the historical implications of such a phrase and taking him at his word, this meant that his idea was to run the US government like a private corporation. One of the facts of life about any corporation is that it's in business for profit, and it will attempt to make a profit from anything that it can, as long as it doesn't result in the officers in prison. This clearly includes selling any information (such as your purchase history) that it may be able to capture, since information about customers is a valuable commercial quantity.
Any manager should understand that, when the US government gets its hands on a recording of any phone conversation, the intent is be to "monetize" this. If your conversation can be sold to one of your competitors, George W's policy is that it should be sold. That's the right and proper thing for a profitable corporation to do.
It may be only a matter of time before management slowly wakes up to the implications of this. Intercepting phone calls is not just a national security issue; it is a corporate profitability issue. If you don't want your conversations sold to interested competitors, you should be seriously looking at using only encrypting phone equipment. And unencrypted conversation is fair game as a profitable "product" to the current US administration.
It's not obvious that whichever Democrat wins the 2008 election will have a policy that's any different. And by then, such capture and sales will be institutionalized, automated, and out of view to the president, so the next president will be able to casually delegate the whole topic.
I wonder which companies make phones that do end-to-end encryption? They could be good candidates for stock purchases
Actually, I've read comments by quite a number of military people to the effect that we're not fighting a war with Iraq. Their argument is that we in fact won the "war", which only lasted a few days. The Iraq government was deposed, its army disbanded, and the US operated the government.
What we've been doing since then, they argue, is properly called an "occupation", not a "war". An occupation requires totally different tactics than a war. Successful occupations work by co-opting the population into support of the puppet government. But the US government keeps pretending there's a war, and using war tactics. Since the original enemy (Saddam Hussein's government) no longer exists, the victims of the war tactics are mostly the Iraqi civilian population. And they are acting exactly the way you'd expect if an outsider came in and started attacking a civilian population. They've formed guerrilla resistance forces to defend themselves against the attackers.
It's interesting reading such comments from military sources. And it might be interesting to read some explanation for why the Bush Administration keeps doing something so disastrous. The supposed justifications used so far just don't make sense, especially the "terrorism" one. Iraq wasn't a source of terrorism before the war (except by the Hussein gang of thugs against their own citizenry). It is now a danger to the rest of the world, as a direct result of US government actions.
Historians are already starting to analyze this "war" as a major political blunder of historic importance.
The American government - just one party away from Communism
Nah; it's only godless Communism if your political leaders mouth platitudes that include reverent invocations of Marx and Engels (and maybe Mao). If your political leaders' implement the same policies, but their platitudes invoke Jesus and Adam Smith, your country is a God-fearing Capitalist nation.
It's important to keep your terminology straight. But the actual policies and practices of the government don't much matter to much of anyone, as long as you get the words right.
Hasn't anyone learned that throughout history, positive changes to govenments to bring more power to the people have never been by force?
;-)
;-)
Oh, I dunno; George Washington and his buddies seem to have been somewhat successful.
Of course, if you look at the history, it wasn't quite that simple. It never is. In reality, G.W.&Co were rather underpowered, and it really was the British forces that held most of the firepower. The Colonials knew the territory better, and had the "hearts & minds" of most of the population, so a strategy of wearing down their oppressors eventually won out. But still, without the meagre armaments that they had, the Colonials probably wouldn't have won. Their occasional use of firepower was part of what held off the stronger British forces.
All those invocations of the Second Ammendment can seem rather silly at times. As long as the majority of the US population goes along with whoever the two major parties are pushing, it's not too likely that an armed insurrection of any sort will ever do anything useful. You're better off subverting the system from within. The religious fundamentalists seem to have realized this a few decades ago, and they've been fairly successful at getting their guys in power recently. And I don't think we're going to get them out of power by means of any application of the Second Ammendment, especially since George W announced that the Constitution is "just a piece of paper" and made it clear that he wouldn't let it stand in his way.
(Actually, he was wrong there, too. It's made of parchment, not paper.
This sort of silly routing happens at all levels. I'm in a western suburb of Boston, and traceroute shows traffic to machines at MIT in Cambridge going via four New York machines. That's a 400-mile, 12-hop trip to go roughly 11 miles.
What's really annoying is that the ping time now averages about 30 ms; a couple of years ago it was only 12. Think of all the wasted time waiting for replies.
And we might note that, outside your local exchange, most telephone traffic now goes via VoIP now. Unencrypted. At least in the US, the phone companies have pretty much completed the conversion to an all-digital system for everything but that wire attached to your house.
So if you hear some politicians or telco execs talking about only monitoring and/or filtering/shaping/censoring "computer data downloading", you should understand that this includes your phone calls. Phone calls are now just data, passed around from computer to computer and finally to your ear.
The days when e.g. you could discover that there was no article at all about the author Jessamyn West ("The Friendly Persuasion") and quickly throw in three paragraphs off the top of your head with a little bit of cross-checking, totally confident that you were improving Wikipedia, are gone.
;-)) is pronounced in some other languages, you might go add their entries to the page.
Quite possibly. For example, in the past I've added stuff to wikipedia at random, mostly when I look something up, find it's not there, dig around in other sites to find it, and then think "I've got the info now; why don't I just write up a summary and add it to wikipedia?" That doesn't happen nearly as often now, and I'm sufficiently busy that I don't go looking for missing wikipedia pages to create.
However, I have been adding stuff to wiktionary. That's a case where it's very easy to find missing entries, and if you happen to know the info, it's easy to add it. And this is obviously going to be true for a rather long time. After all, how many words are there in all the world's languages? Wiktionary wants a page for every one of those words, y'know, and .
Funny case: I happened to glance at the list of translations of "search" on the main wiktionary page, and noticed that the Chinese entry contained a character that I didn't know. Nothing odd there; Mandarin is one of my weakest languages. So I looked it up, and was duly surprised to find that there was no wiktionary entry for the word. WTF? I checked in a couple of online Chinese-English dictionaries, and sure enough, that 2-char word means "search" or "look up". It seemed really silly that wiktionary would have a word on its main page that it didn't have a page for. So I created it. It only has the Mandarin entry now, so if you know how "" (that's "sou1suo3" if your browser mangles it
This is something that could clearly go on for a very long time. And the result, maybe in another century, will be a very useful any-language-to-any-other-language dictionary.
If the robot looks like a dragonfly to the human eye, why shouldn't it look like a dragonfly to a bird's eye?
... its acoustic signature?
... with their ears, of course!
Well, first off, most birds have eyes that are a lot better than ours. I once read a comment by a biologist that if our eyes were as good as the average hawk's, we could read a newspaper from a quarter-mile away. They're not all that good, of course, but since flying is mostly done visually, evolution has given most of them the best eyes that are practical for their size. So unless a drone looks like a dragonfly in great detail, a bird will know it's not one.
How does a predator reads its infrared signature
With its eyes. Infrared light is just photons, somewhat longer than what we can see. Of course, it depends on the visual range of a specific predator. Most birds do have 4-color visual pigments, unlike our 3-color pigments, and have a wider frequency response than we do. But for most birds, the extra visual pigment is a blue/UV pigment, extending their vision into the ultraviolet. Some birds do have a red pigment that matches longer wavelengths than ours, and they can see farther into the IR than we can.
,
Wait for it
The squirrel robot strikes me as as equally ridiculous.
Maybe. But in some parts of the world, including the American South, squirrels are routinely hunted and eaten. They can be fatty, but the country squirrels can be good to eat.
"Honest, Sarge; Ah wuz jist out huntin' with mah squirrel gun, hopin ta bring home a few of the critters fer dinner. Ah din't know it wuz a military squirrel. Y'know, if y'all would jist paint insignias on 'em, you wouldn't have ta worry 'bout the folks hereabouts shootin' 'em down."
Before they rush on with alphabets that read right to left and use alternative character sets they really should try English words with greater than 8 bit characters. Are they gonna actually work?
;-). I also tried a few CSS class names with Arabic and Hebrew names, and they worked fine, too.
Well, lately I've been testing a lot of my old code in various UTF-8 environments, and I've been duly impressed by the fact that, as Ken intended, almost all the code "just works" with Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, etc.
It turns out that there's a simple explanation. If the code doesn't examine chars with bit 8 turned on, but just treats them as unexamined "data" (or letters if the code is trying to distinguish that way), then everything works right. The only time the code needs to actually look at non-ASCII characters' values are when the text is being rendered in physical form. And hardly any code ever actually does that. Almost all my code reads data from files and writes data to other files, but never does anything with the physical representation of the data. It passes the data to other programs for that.
A case in point: I was recently working on some multi-language HTML files, and I decided to try a fun test with CSS: I defined a whole lot of classes whose names were in Chinese. This made sense, since these classes were being used for pieces of the text that contained mostly Chinese characters, not counting things like spaces and punctuation. I tested the CSS using more than a dozen browsers that I have installed on my linux and OSX test machines. I was unable to find a single case where it didn't work. I even hunted down some Windows boxes and tested the files on IE6 and IE7; the worked fine (despite the well-known CSS incompatibilities in IE
Now, I don't think for a second that the writers of all those browsers spent time making sure that their code could handle UTF-8-encoded Chinese identifiers in CSS. I suspect that most of them never even considered the possibility. I'd bet that the code just takes anything that's not a significant character in CSS syntax, and tacitly treats it as a "letter". This is all it takes to make UTF-8 work correctly in this case.
I did mention this in a couple of browsers' newsgroups. The responses were basically of the form "Well, of course it works. Why wouldn't it? You don't need special code to handle charset=UTF-8, except for the rendering. You'd have to be a fairly incompetent programmer to write code that doesn't work correctly with UTF-8. Except for rendering."
I can hear people saying "but those browsers all need to render the text." Yeah, but the CSS routines don't render text. They parse the CSS input, and fill in fields in data structures that tell the rendering code how to position and color the text. But the charset-handling code is probably not called anywhere in the CSS modules; it's only called in the few places that actually need to color pixels on the screen.
Lots of people have suggested declaring UTF-8 to be the only encoding for URLs. If this is done, there's probably very little URL-handling code anywhere that needs to be changed; it'll mostly "just work", because char codes 0x800 to 0xFF are treated as "letters". The only question is whether the final step of rendering the text's pixels will produce the right glyph, and the URL-handling code doesn't care about that.
I happen to have a DNS server handy. Maybe I'll try a little test: In one of the domains, I'll add hostnames in Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and maybe a few other non-Roman alphabets. I'll wait a while, and see if I can access the machines via those names from a few other machines. I'll predict that it'll also "just work".
[T]o imagine that the democrats are less owned by big business than the republicans is self delusion on a grand scale.
Sometime recently there was a good Doonesbury comic on this topic. One of the character makes a comment about both parties being equally corrupt. Another character says "Yeah, but when the Democrats do it, they know it's wrong."
Of course, this is little consolation if you're among the victims of their actions.
The obvious answer is that the universe was designed by committee.... Polytheism anyone? ;-)
Yeah, that's a tempting theory to throw at the "intelligent design" people.
But even a cursory look at the universe exposes such an incredible mess that the only real explanation is that there was no intelligence whatsoever behind the "design".
Another theory I've heard and liked is that there was actually a God that did it all, but He (She? It? Bvqx?) was so embarrassed by the results that He has carefully covered up all the evidence and fled to another universe.
Then there's the Doug-Adams-like theory that God did it, and got a D- grade for the assignment.
Legitimate and well written articles are constantly deleted or merged because they're "not notable" or they're fancruft.
So is there a way that "outsiders" can easily find these deleted "not notable" articles, and copy them to some other more-appropriate site? Even if it's about something that I find utterly uninteresting, I'd think it's to our loss to let such articles disappear forever.
After all, the storage manufacturers keep selling us bigger and bigger capacity storage systems. We've gotta have stuff to fill it with, right?