You didn't answer my question. The specific case of an FM radio receiver can in fact be described in math; in fact it's just an implementation of certain mathematical operations if you want to view it that way. The wave equation and the behavior of EM waves are pretty damn deterministic to a first approximation (if you ignore multipath issues; if you want to take them into account then you have to worry about why you have multipath).
It's not clear to me why you think building a clever mechanical device to carry out a simple mathematical operation should be patentable while building a clever mathematical device to carry out a "it looks simple" operation like "make the video take up less space" shouldn't be. Seems to me the same arguments would apply to both.
Also of note: the key to a patent is usually not a specific piece, it's how you put them together. You don't patent a wheel or a gear (in most cases); you patent a specific way of putting together wheels and gears. The H.264 parents are not on basic building blocks like FFTs; they're either on clever modifications to these building blocks (think "lighter but just as strong wheel") or on specific ways of combining these blocks.
Now maybe you're arguing there should be no patents at all, period. That would be self-consistent. What you said above is not, so much.
> In the EU if i make a hardware player, then yes i need a license for H.264
See, the thing is.. what makes a hardware player? Is an FPGA programmed to decode H.264 a "hardware player"? What about an FPGA not thus programmed that comes with the software to so program it?
I'm not quite seeing how one can draw a legal distinction here given that I can't even draw a _technical_ distinction.
> Then software decoders and encoders would be in the clear.
Why? The point is that anything that uses the method, whether it's "software" or "hardware" (whatever those even mean in practice) is covered by the patent.
Well, hold on. How is performing a method using wires carrying electrons to carry a digital signal different from performing a method using wires carrying electrons to carry an analogue signal (e.g. an FM radio receiver)?
Should a mechanical device that performs a task be patentable but an integrated circuit that peforms the same task not be patentable?
But in any case, the point is that the patents involved have been granted in all sorts of jurisdictions that don't allow "software" patents. This is bad from the point of view of open-source projects that want to use H.264, for sure. But it seems to me that the fundamental idea of patenting the methods used in H.264 is sound, assuming the idea of patents is sound at all. This last is up for debate, of course.
Thing is... the H.264 patents are method patents, not software patents.
And the methods used seem eminently patentable to me: novel, non-obvious, etc, etc.
The only issue is that the setup doesn't play well with cases where the marginal unit cost of an encoder or decoder is very close to 0. This is not a software-specific problem, per se; if we had star-trek-like synthesizers available for physical items it would be a problem there too.
Because most of the threads are i/o threads. Low CPU usage, high latency, tend to be blocked on stuff. You don't want those operations on the same thread as your UI.
Most of the cpu-intensive stuff Firefox does (e.g. layout) does in fact happen on one single ui thread at the moment.
> they're spelled out in the Bill of Rights. > Anything that's not a right is a privelege that can be legislated away or restricted.
If you're going to get that pedantic, what exactly do you make of the 9th amendment? I realize it's more honored in the breach than anything else nowadays, but the discussion seems to have reached a level where we're effectively spec-lawyering with the Constitution, so...
> We require training for operating any other kind of heavy machinery
Depends on how you define "heavy machinery", but there is no training required for operating your typical ride-on lawn mower, last I checked. Similar for renting jackhammers. Similar for renting bulldozers. From what I can tell, similar for backhoes. What you say is true for things like forklifts, on the other hand.
> but none at all to drive a 6000-lb vehicle at 75 mph in traffic
While true (at least if you're over certain ages, etc) a competency test is in fact required. Granted, this test is a joke in many jurisdictions. That's slowly being changed, though. Slowly enough that I again think the issue will become irrelevant before anything really changes here.
That said, the fact that no additional licensing or training or testing is required for renting your typical moving truck is even weirder... and I've seen very few complaints about it. Too convenient, I guess.
One other note. What you _do_ "have a right to", at least per the Declaration of Independence, is "the pursuit of happiness". Whatever that may mean. The meaning will obviously be culture-dependent and context-dependent, but you would be hard-pressed to find someone in the U.S. today who would not include being able to have reasonable choice of living location and career in "pursuit of happiness". Modulo whatever "reasonable" means, of course. Funny how it's hard to make any absolute statements about "rights".
> Then you have to move to a city where this is possible.
There are not enough such cities in the US to hold its current population, or even any significant fraction thereof.
> Again, you don't have a right to live wherever you want.
You also don't have a right to not slowly starve to death in the street, really. Nor do you have a right to live anywhere at all.
None of which is useful in terms of dealing with society as a whole. If 10% (rough guess; I would be very surprised if the threshold is above this) of the population is homeless, you end up with civil unrest. If 20% of the population can't find a place to live where they can hold down a reasonable job, almost certainly the same thing will happen.
> Choose a job closer to your home (or on a better location WRT the bus route)
You seem to have a mistaken impression about how many such jobs there are.
> There's no right to a job.
Indeed, or to breathing if you want to look at it that way. Again, that's not useful for setting up a society.
> But McDonald's is always hiring
This is in fact false.
> and it shouldn't be hard to find a place where you can walk to work at McD's and live > within walking distance at some cockroach-infested apartment
For any one person, perhaps. For a significant fraction of the population, this would in fact be difficult: McD's simply doesn't need this many employees.
> You don't have a right to the job you prefer.
See above.
> We "invested" a bunch of money in a light-rail system here in Phoenix/Tempe, and it's > been a disaster.
Hey, I'm not talking about graft, people building bridges to nowhere, people screwing up, etc. I'm saying that even in the best case, with the best of intentions, people are _still_ bad at major non-incremental infrastructure investment. Which is why ideal infrastructure investment would be incremental: build a small piece that's immediately useful and then work out from there. That turns out to be pretty hard.
> The problem is our cities are already designed for cars
They were designed for pedestrians and carriages in 1890. Designs can be changed if the alternative is good enough or enough money is trying to push the changes through (or ideally both). In the case of alternatives to car transportation, we just aren't there.
SkyTran would be nice if it could happen, perhaps, but I predict we'll get cars that can drive themselves (given a combination of sensors and GPS) way before we could convince people that SkyTran is a good idea, much less get elected officials to act on it. Then we'll have the fun of scare stories about them running over pedestrians, and they will in fact run over pedestrians. Could get interested.
> Instead, we have politicians, who waste money on crap
Fundamentally, people want stuff for themselves out of a government. Each of them only wants a little bit, really, but we have 300e6 of them or so, and a nontrivial portion of them are trying to get more stuff all the time. Such things never get rolled back, typically (politicians like getting reelected) so if there is any success in getting stuff out it just all agglomerates.
I have a hard time seeing this social dynamic changing as long as you have universal suffrage. The only hope is that productivity growth remains high enough that the constant drain is not too bad. I'm not sure that'll happen.
Of course getting rid of universal suffrage would bring its own issues.
In the end, there aren't any magic bullets or simple solutions here, much as you seem to want there to be some...
> If you can't find a close job, you can move to an apartment near your job.
This is in fact impossible in many places due to little things like a combination of zoning and price.
Or put another way, there are quite a few school districts where the teachers can't afford to live anywhere close to the schools, say. Similar issues for other professions.
> There are also buses and taxis available in every metro area
This is a joke, right? There are plenty of US metro areas where buses are not actually "available" in any meaningful sense (in that there are not enough hours in a day to walk the multiple miles to the closest bus stop, take the multiple buses it takes to get from point A to point B, walk on the other end as well, do this twice a day, work an 8-hour day in the middle and still have time for, say, food or sleep.
> There is NO right to drive in the US, even though most people act like there is.
_That_ I agree with.
> You can also move someplace where rapid transit is better and more common, like NYC.
Yes, if you can find a job.
> You don't have a "right" to the job of your choice in the location of your choice.
Yep. Which is why if you have a given career you may have no choice in terms of location, or very little. Want to be a set dresser? Good luck feeding yourself outside LA. Want to be a farmer? Good luck doing that in NYC. If you're saying that choice of location should determine your choice of job, fine, but that often requires years of retraining.
> That said, we could really use some better public transit in this country
Yep. The problem is people not being willing to put in the initial investment to make it not suck compared to driving...
That linked-to article gets one thing wrong: IE has the same exact behavior. As did Netscape. It's a well-known aspect of how HTML forms work, and the real issue is an IRC server that for some reason decided that ignoring leading garbage in the IRC command stream was a good idea.
You would need to not only use the system JS library, but you also couldn't ship, say, the Gecko XSLT implementation (since XSLT is turing-complete). Could you ship CSS features like calc()? Hard to say.
Are there any browsers in the App Store that aren't just thin wrappers about the default Webkit and JavaScriptCore?
1) The bigger one will cost more 2) The one with less battery life will cost more 3) The effects of #1 and #2 compound dramatically.
As in, small batteries holding lots of charge are expensive. Working well on less charge is expensive. Smaller components are generally more expensive.
Oh, and custom processors are more expensive than off-the-shelf ones.
The going rate for IE and Firefox vulnerabilities on the open market was in the $10k range when I last checked a few years back.... So yeah. The $500 thing is more to motivate white-hats to maybe look at it than to keep black-hats from selling their stuff to the highest bidders.
It's better. I don't know about "a lot". It's usually enough to get the gist, but even this translation has some obvious issues and can be pretty difficult to read. For example, the sentence that says:
As the broadcast television channel "Russia 24" spokesperson of the aircraft
production association "dry" flight, which lasted about 45 minutes and completed
successfully.
in the google translation actually says (keeping as much of the Google translation as possible):
As a spokesperson of the aircraft production association "Sukhoi" noted on the air
during a "Russia 24" television broadcast, the flight, which lasted about 45 minutes,
completed successfully.
That, and it'll often give wildly different translations for the same text going from Russian to English depending on whether the first letter is capitalized (which should generally make no difference). By "wildly different" I mean completely reversed meaning in some cases ("here" vs "there" or "there" vs "where", that sort of thing).
> But - if you load either one with a full bomb load, those round bombs will happily give > your position away
While true, in the F-22 case you can stick to the internal bays if you want to. That does limit you to two 1000 pound bombs, whereas the F-117 could carry 2000 pound ones.
But yes, the main role of the F-22 seems to be air-superiority, and the main point of the stealth part seems to be to get the first shot in all cases when in the air-superiority role.
> Are we worried about the Taliban shooting down normal bombers?
No, though we're somewhat worried about a possible war with China, say... Not sure how justified that worry is.
In any case, the recent development in air stuff seems to mostly focus on UAVs, which are probably a much better money tradeoff than manned planes no matter what. As long as we don't waste them too much.
> If this is really such a critical issue, why not drop a team of image processing PhD's on > this for a couple years
I suspect you're underestimating the resources need to develop an H.264-quality codec without infringing on any of the H.264 patents by several orders of magnitude. For reference, On2 (which was basically in the business of video codec development, and had pretty lengthy experience with it) had 100-some employees (about 50% of the total manpower employed by Mozilla) as of 2008.
On the other hand, they also happened to have developed some H.264-quality video codecs that Google, having bought them, now owns. The question is whether Google will choose to license them, and if so under what terms.
I think it would be pretty difficult to be a major Youtube competitor without having any operations in any of the countries above, in the near term. Heck, just finding some place not on the list that have the right bandwidth to places with the rich viewers who are worth targeting with ads (generally the US and Europe at the moment) might be hard enough.
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't answer my question. The specific case of an FM radio receiver can in fact be described in math; in fact it's just an implementation of certain mathematical operations if you want to view it that way. The wave equation and the behavior of EM waves are pretty damn deterministic to a first approximation (if you ignore multipath issues; if you want to take them into account then you have to worry about why you have multipath).
It's not clear to me why you think building a clever mechanical device to carry out a simple mathematical operation should be patentable while building a clever mathematical device to carry out a "it looks simple" operation like "make the video take up less space" shouldn't be. Seems to me the same arguments would apply to both.
Also of note: the key to a patent is usually not a specific piece, it's how you put them together. You don't patent a wheel or a gear (in most cases); you patent a specific way of putting together wheels and gears. The H.264 parents are not on basic building blocks like FFTs; they're either on clever modifications to these building blocks (think "lighter but just as strong wheel") or on specific ways of combining these blocks.
Now maybe you're arguing there should be no patents at all, period. That would be self-consistent. What you said above is not, so much.
> In the EU if i make a hardware player, then yes i need a license for H.264
See, the thing is.. what makes a hardware player? Is an FPGA programmed to decode H.264 a "hardware player"? What about an FPGA not thus programmed that comes with the software to so program it?
I'm not quite seeing how one can draw a legal distinction here given that I can't even draw a _technical_ distinction.
> Then software decoders and encoders would be in the clear.
Why? The point is that anything that uses the method, whether it's "software" or "hardware" (whatever those even mean in practice) is covered by the patent.
Well, hold on. How is performing a method using wires carrying electrons to carry a digital signal different from performing a method using wires carrying electrons to carry an analogue signal (e.g. an FM radio receiver)?
Should a mechanical device that performs a task be patentable but an integrated circuit that peforms the same task not be patentable?
But in any case, the point is that the patents involved have been granted in all sorts of jurisdictions that don't allow "software" patents. This is bad from the point of view of open-source projects that want to use H.264, for sure. But it seems to me that the fundamental idea of patenting the methods used in H.264 is sound, assuming the idea of patents is sound at all. This last is up for debate, of course.
The H.264 patents are method patents, not software patents.
> Remember the CODECs we were using six years ago?
You mean H.264 (standardized in 2003)?
Thing is... the H.264 patents are method patents, not software patents.
And the methods used seem eminently patentable to me: novel, non-obvious, etc, etc.
The only issue is that the setup doesn't play well with cases where the marginal unit cost of an encoder or decoder is very close to 0. This is not a software-specific problem, per se; if we had star-trek-like synthesizers available for physical items it would be a problem there too.
Of course Opera also trusts this CA. But yes, there's always Opera. ;)
Because most of the threads are i/o threads. Low CPU usage, high latency, tend to be blocked on stuff. You don't want those operations on the same thread as your UI.
Most of the cpu-intensive stuff Firefox does (e.g. layout) does in fact happen on one single ui thread at the moment.
> they're spelled out in the Bill of Rights.
> Anything that's not a right is a privelege that can be legislated away or restricted.
If you're going to get that pedantic, what exactly do you make of the 9th amendment? I realize it's more honored in the breach than anything else nowadays, but the discussion seems to have reached a level where we're effectively spec-lawyering with the Constitution, so...
> We require training for operating any other kind of heavy machinery
Depends on how you define "heavy machinery", but there is no training required for operating your typical ride-on lawn mower, last I checked. Similar for renting jackhammers. Similar for renting bulldozers. From what I can tell, similar for backhoes. What you say is true for things like forklifts, on the other hand.
> but none at all to drive a 6000-lb vehicle at 75 mph in traffic
While true (at least if you're over certain ages, etc) a competency test is in fact required. Granted, this test is a joke in many jurisdictions. That's slowly being changed, though. Slowly enough that I again think the issue will become irrelevant before anything really changes here.
That said, the fact that no additional licensing or training or testing is required for renting your typical moving truck is even weirder... and I've seen very few complaints about it. Too convenient, I guess.
One other note. What you _do_ "have a right to", at least per the Declaration of Independence, is "the pursuit of happiness". Whatever that may mean. The meaning will obviously be culture-dependent and context-dependent, but you would be hard-pressed to find someone in the U.S. today who would not include being able to have reasonable choice of living location and career in "pursuit of happiness". Modulo whatever "reasonable" means, of course. Funny how it's hard to make any absolute statements about "rights".
> Then you have to move to a city where this is possible.
There are not enough such cities in the US to hold its current population, or even any significant fraction thereof.
> Again, you don't have a right to live wherever you want.
You also don't have a right to not slowly starve to death in the street, really. Nor do you have a right to live anywhere at all.
None of which is useful in terms of dealing with society as a whole. If 10% (rough guess; I would be very surprised if the threshold is above this) of the population is homeless, you end up with civil unrest. If 20% of the population can't find a place to live where they can hold down a reasonable job, almost certainly the same thing will happen.
> Choose a job closer to your home (or on a better location WRT the bus route)
You seem to have a mistaken impression about how many such jobs there are.
> There's no right to a job.
Indeed, or to breathing if you want to look at it that way. Again, that's not useful for setting up a society.
> But McDonald's is always hiring
This is in fact false.
> and it shouldn't be hard to find a place where you can walk to work at McD's and live
> within walking distance at some cockroach-infested apartment
For any one person, perhaps. For a significant fraction of the population, this would in fact be difficult: McD's simply doesn't need this many employees.
> You don't have a right to the job you prefer.
See above.
> We "invested" a bunch of money in a light-rail system here in Phoenix/Tempe, and it's
> been a disaster.
Hey, I'm not talking about graft, people building bridges to nowhere, people screwing up, etc. I'm saying that even in the best case, with the best of intentions, people are _still_ bad at major non-incremental infrastructure investment. Which is why ideal infrastructure investment would be incremental: build a small piece that's immediately useful and then work out from there. That turns out to be pretty hard.
> The problem is our cities are already designed for cars
They were designed for pedestrians and carriages in 1890. Designs can be changed if the alternative is good enough or enough money is trying to push the changes through (or ideally both). In the case of alternatives to car transportation, we just aren't there.
SkyTran would be nice if it could happen, perhaps, but I predict we'll get cars that can drive themselves (given a combination of sensors and GPS) way before we could convince people that SkyTran is a good idea, much less get elected officials to act on it. Then we'll have the fun of scare stories about them running over pedestrians, and they will in fact run over pedestrians. Could get interested.
> Instead, we have politicians, who waste money on crap
Fundamentally, people want stuff for themselves out of a government. Each of them only wants a little bit, really, but we have 300e6 of them or so, and a nontrivial portion of them are trying to get more stuff all the time. Such things never get rolled back, typically (politicians like getting reelected) so if there is any success in getting stuff out it just all agglomerates.
I have a hard time seeing this social dynamic changing as long as you have universal suffrage. The only hope is that productivity growth remains high enough that the constant drain is not too bad. I'm not sure that'll happen.
Of course getting rid of universal suffrage would bring its own issues.
In the end, there aren't any magic bullets or simple solutions here, much as you seem to want there to be some...
> If you can't find a close job, you can move to an apartment near your job.
This is in fact impossible in many places due to little things like a combination of zoning and price.
Or put another way, there are quite a few school districts where the teachers can't afford to live anywhere close to the schools, say. Similar issues for other professions.
> There are also buses and taxis available in every metro area
This is a joke, right? There are plenty of US metro areas where buses are not actually "available" in any meaningful sense (in that there are not enough hours in a day to walk the multiple miles to the closest bus stop, take the multiple buses it takes to get from point A to point B, walk on the other end as well, do this twice a day, work an 8-hour day in the middle and still have time for, say, food or sleep.
> There is NO right to drive in the US, even though most people act like there is.
_That_ I agree with.
> You can also move someplace where rapid transit is better and more common, like NYC.
Yes, if you can find a job.
> You don't have a "right" to the job of your choice in the location of your choice.
Yep. Which is why if you have a given career you may have no choice in terms of location, or very little. Want to be a set dresser? Good luck feeding yourself outside LA. Want to be a farmer? Good luck doing that in NYC. If you're saying that choice of location should determine your choice of job, fine, but that often requires years of retraining.
> That said, we could really use some better public transit in this country
Yep. The problem is people not being willing to put in the initial investment to make it not suck compared to driving...
That linked-to article gets one thing wrong: IE has the same exact behavior. As did Netscape. It's a well-known aspect of how HTML forms work, and the real issue is an IRC server that for some reason decided that ignoring leading garbage in the IRC command stream was a good idea.
You would need to not only use the system JS library, but you also couldn't ship, say, the Gecko XSLT implementation (since XSLT is turing-complete). Could you ship CSS features like calc()? Hard to say.
Are there any browsers in the App Store that aren't just thin wrappers about the default Webkit and JavaScriptCore?
> 1) The bigger one will cost more
> 2) The one with less battery life will cost more
Those should both have said "less" of course....
Given two devices that do the same thing:
1) The bigger one will cost more
2) The one with less battery life will cost more
3) The effects of #1 and #2 compound dramatically.
As in, small batteries holding lots of charge are expensive. Working well on less charge is expensive. Smaller components are generally more expensive.
Oh, and custom processors are more expensive than off-the-shelf ones.
The going rate for IE and Firefox vulnerabilities on the open market was in the $10k range when I last checked a few years back.... So yeah. The $500 thing is more to motivate white-hats to maybe look at it than to keep black-hats from selling their stuff to the highest bidders.
The google translation is a bit off. The Russian text says "" (low visibility), not "" (invisibility). The full sentence in the Google translation:
Fighter will differ maneuverability and invisibility in the optical, infrared and
radar wavelengths.
is better translated as:
The fighter will excel at supermaneuverability and low visibility in the optical,
infrared, and radar wavelenghts.
It's better. I don't know about "a lot". It's usually enough to get the gist, but even this translation has some obvious issues and can be pretty difficult to read. For example, the sentence that says:
As the broadcast television channel "Russia 24" spokesperson of the aircraft
production association "dry" flight, which lasted about 45 minutes and completed
successfully.
in the google translation actually says (keeping as much of the Google translation as possible):
As a spokesperson of the aircraft production association "Sukhoi" noted on the air
during a "Russia 24" television broadcast, the flight, which lasted about 45 minutes,
completed successfully.
That, and it'll often give wildly different translations for the same text going from Russian to English depending on whether the first letter is capitalized (which should generally make no difference). By "wildly different" I mean completely reversed meaning in some cases ("here" vs "there" or "there" vs "where", that sort of thing).
> But - if you load either one with a full bomb load, those round bombs will happily give
> your position away
While true, in the F-22 case you can stick to the internal bays if you want to. That does limit you to two 1000 pound bombs, whereas the F-117 could carry 2000 pound ones.
But yes, the main role of the F-22 seems to be air-superiority, and the main point of the stealth part seems to be to get the first shot in all cases when in the air-superiority role.
> Are we worried about the Taliban shooting down normal bombers?
No, though we're somewhat worried about a possible war with China, say... Not sure how justified that worry is.
In any case, the recent development in air stuff seems to mostly focus on UAVs, which are probably a much better money tradeoff than manned planes no matter what. As long as we don't waste them too much.
> If this is really such a critical issue, why not drop a team of image processing PhD's on
> this for a couple years
I suspect you're underestimating the resources need to develop an H.264-quality codec without infringing on any of the H.264 patents by several orders of magnitude. For reference, On2 (which was basically in the business of video codec development, and had pretty lengthy experience with it) had 100-some employees (about 50% of the total manpower employed by Mozilla) as of 2008.
On the other hand, they also happened to have developed some H.264-quality video codecs that Google, having bought them, now owns. The question is whether Google will choose to license them, and if so under what terms.
> Not if that competitor is somewhere in Asia, for example.
H.264 is covered by patents granted in Japan, China, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, India. I didn't look for others; there might be more.
> Or in almost any country in Europe.
Covered by patents granted in Germany, France, UK, Finland, Italy, Sweden, Belgium, Bulgaria, Liechtenstein, Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Spain, Hungary, Ireland, The Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Portugal, Slovenia.
> Canada may be an option as well
It's not. Plenty of patents on H.264 granted in Canada.
Oh, not on the above lists, but also places where H.264 is patent-encumbered: Australia, Mexico.
Oh, and I stopped on page 6 of the 45-page list of patents. There might be a few other countries hiding in there.
Source: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx
I think it would be pretty difficult to be a major Youtube competitor without having any operations in any of the countries above, in the near term. Heck, just finding some place not on the list that have the right bandwidth to places with the rich viewers who are worth targeting with ads (generally the US and Europe at the moment) might be hard enough.
> And the second thing you mention is not equally delusional as the first why exactly?
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/05/google-acquires-video-compression-technology-company-on2-for-106-million/