I was speaking in the context of a reply to somebody who sounded like one of the anti-globalism types and was trying to appeal to his/her biases. Those liberals do seem to have what I consider a muzzy-headed view of where money comes from (perhaps because they're opposed to "money" in general, though I'm unclear on precisely what alternative they're offering.)
The current coalitions have produced some very odd bedfellows. I see no reason why the "liberal" party should be opposed to firearms ownership, or why the fiscal conservatives should find themselves linked to the anti-gay-marriage lobby.
Those coalitions are rather fraying; the Catholics are leaving the Democrats, and the Log Cabin Republicans endorsed Kerry.
I read the initial opinion section, and the letters, then the US news. Those are the parts that get me what I don't read in my daily paper and the online news feeds. Then I'm afraid I skip over Europe and Latin America and Asia and read the science and glance at the arts.
If I have time I go back and skim the headlines of the rest, and read the articles on rare occasions. I'm ashamed to admit that I really don't much care about the workers strike in Bolivia or the folding of the soccer teams in Albania. I realize that makes me a bad person.
As I understand it, "liberal" once meant simple "freedom", even in political terms. In the US it came to mean "freedom from corporate oppression" back in the mid-to-late 19th century, when the workers were heavily victimized by powerful rich factory owners (who were often not all that readily distinguishable from the government.)
Later, that became associated with fighting for other sorts of freedom, such as civil rights for minority groups.
The association of "liberal" with "poor and minority groups" has led the term somewhat away from its original meaning. Over time, it's become associated with improving the lot of poor people even where they're not activily being oppressed but merely poor: welfare, medical care, affirmative action, etc.
Liberals argue that the causes of poverty are side-effects of less obvious rights violations by rich people and companies. They'd argue that a company which employs many people in a town has an obligation to those people to continue to employ them, even when that factory is no longer profitable. That obligation by the company is the right of the people.
I wouldn't say that the Economist is "all for" corporate tyranny. They'd say that a factory which isn't profitable cannot employ those workers because there simply is no money to pay them. That strikes them as simple level-headedness: you cannot pay workers from nonexistent money.
But they do hold the company responsible for its non-economic externalities. If the company is dumping cadmium into the water and poisoning those workers, even if it's proftable for the company it is wrong to do so. Simple economics will not prevent that, so they recommend well-chosen and well-enforced government regulation.
I often find myself disagreeing with them. Their notion of free-market capitalism often assumes frictionless changes that are untrue. If a company moves a factory from Flint, Michigan to Bangladesh, yes, I suppose it does improve the US economy by allowing Americans to purchase the goods more cheaply, thus freeing up their capital for investment in other things.
But the people of Flint, Michigan don't realize those improvements directly; they don't immediately acquire programming skills and move to San Francisco to get better jobs. Nor do they disappear. Even if the simple "invisble hand" argument works for the good of the country as a whole, it can cause vicious harm in microeconomic terms, and those are externalities which shouldn't be ignored.
Because only color-blind users should be the victims of phishing scams.
And because grandma is sure to notice that one letter, in a part of the screen she doesn't usually look at, is a different color. Just tell her to check every letter of every URL she goes to.
Not that I've got a lot of better solutions. I can imagine a patch that pops up a warning for suspicious-looking URLs, but dialog boxes are lousy security.
I can definitely see elimininating IDN, but that's hardly fair to the 95% of the users in the world who aren't American.
Still, in general I should caution you about using color as an important indicator in your software design. The world is full of color-blind (and blind) users who deserve your consideration. Not only will it help them out, it'll help out your normally-sighted users who will appreciate stronger cues than color.
The cutting out of the vowels is not part of the patent; it's merely an amusing side note. I point it out only because people were wondering why base 30.
The patent is on the representation of lat/lons in the alternative radixes.
You are correct: neither (1) nor (2) is actually part of the claims of the patent. I bring it up only because of the numerous posts saying "Haw haw haw... base 30 how stoopid." I was just explaining why.
Part (3) is where the patent lies: using a base N encoding for lat/lon values, where the lat/lons have been normalized to an integer. None of those pieces is novel, but to my knowledge they haven't been put together this way before. If they have been that's presumptive evidence to challenge the patent.
If you wish to say (for example) "I propose that we normalize on milliseconds-since-epoch, and represent that as a base N number, which would be useful for compressing times in URLs", yeah, that's probably patentable. Base 10 is probably excluded due to prior art.
It's probably not a terribly useful patent for you to have, since there are many alternative representation schemes already in use. Nobody else has particularly found the need for it yet, or they'd have done it already.
Now, those same things could be pointed out to MS about their patent, and it probably applies. That's why I suspect this is a defensive patent: MS is probably using this coding on the terraserver or some such, and decided it would be easier to get a patent than fight off some numnuts who decides to patent the idea and then sue MS hoping to get a settlement rather than have his case tossed out by a judge.
That's why I said "real", not "float". Though Fortran calls it a "real", and strictly speaking a float could have arbitrary precision, so perhaps I'm splitting hairs. I meant "real" as a mathematical concept, not as a computer term.
In URLs (which are kind of indirectly the point) they don't use a floating-point represetnation; they use a fixed point and are abitrarily long. But they're still not infinitely long, so they're not true reals; you can't represent 1/3 precisely in any decimalized URL. But that distinction is subtle and kind of irrelevant, since more than ten decimal places of meters and you're talking about addressing individual atoms.
The nice thing about digital media is that you can leave it in an unrefrigerated shoe box for a decade or two, then come back and make a perfect copy of it with absolutely no degradation.
You can also make a perfect copy and stick it in numerous locations, making them harder to lose in a fire/terrorist attack/rampaging llama incident. They don't require refrigeration, and they take up a lot less room.
But it's not perfect: there's a analog-to-digital step, and you lose information there. Even a print of the film is an analog-to-analog copy, which is even blurrier. The only way to preserve that perfectly is to preserve the original medium.
This plan would be best done alongside preservation of the original media. You preserve media for things you have reason to believe are worth the expenense of elaborate storage for a century. For the rest of it, you keep a digital copy which is as accurate as possible, and you revisit it very, very rarely to ensure that it is still viable.
There is expense associated with refreshing the media every decade or so (at which time you also compress 10 CDs onto 1 DVD, then 10 DVDs onto a single holo-tera-whatever). But while I haven't seen numbers, I suspect that preserving the film stock is at least as expensive, and probably more so, and still prone to single points of failure.
I'm not a lawyer, but my suspicion is that the patent office reads other patents much more than it reads other prior art. Since MS has patent lawyers on retainer they probably got this patent for a few thousand bucks.
A patent is "stronger" prior art than a journal publication. It shouldn't be, but it is.
If somebody else were to patent it, or worse patent a similar and overlapping idea, it would take MS considerable effort and court time to prove that it had prior art. They may be hoping to forestall that by putting their idea in a place that patent examiners would be sure to see it if a similar patent comes in.
Even if the USPTO granted that patent, MS could point to their own prior patent, which would probably dramatically shorten the negotiations and/or the time in a courtroom.
Even if they are the first to convert floats to ints on the internet, I still fail to see how it is non-obvious.
It's not just floats to ints. It's a way of coding a particular, well-defined kind of information, which involves at least two steps (converting the float to an int, then coding the int in a form which is not only brief but can be coded in a URL (though strictly speaking that last part isn't a requirement of the patent).
Yeah, each piece is tiny, and the algorithm as a whole has not been done before, despite there being many others who might have done so. It would have been obvious to you if you'd been the first one to face the problem as MS defined it, but often times the real trick isn't so much solving a problem nobody's solved but finding a problem nobody's seen.
Why do they obscure the fact that they are talking about an algorithm by calling it a "computer implemented method"?
That's the way patents are written. I have no idea why. If I had to guess, I'd say it's because you're supposed to patent a thing, not an idea. An algorithm is an idea; a computer implemented method is a thing.
At best that's playing semantic games, and numerous categories of patent (not just software patents, e.g. business process patents) are increasingly far from the "adding an extra flange to a sewing machine" you-can-kick-it-with-your-foot style of patent originally envisioned.
I find the distinction stupid, because you were always patenting an idea rather than a machine. You're not inventing that particular flange on the sewing machine but the idea of sticking it on. They just wanted to limit you to ideas for physical things, as opposed to being able to patent, say, the plot of a book (though the actual text comes under a different category of intellectual property.)
As far as I can tell, none of the mapping sites encode information this way, even though it might be advantageous for them to do so. If somebody can show me a case where they do so of course I'd retract. But I'd argue that since people can and should have done this before, but haven't that makes it non-obvious.
It's certainly true that any competent designer, faced with this particular problem (how can you encode a lat/lon in a short URL) would come up with the same answer. Often, however, the point of an invention isn't coming up with a novel answer but defining a problem to be solved. Often that involves taking several things that were just laying around and sticking them together in a way nobody's done before.
I'm not certain that patents were ever limited to genius-level work. Early patents are full of tiny improvements to pin-makers and sewing machines. It's not unique to the software era.
The difference is that it was easy for Joe Blow to invent his improvement to the cotton gin, but hard for him to mass-manufacture them. The patent was his was of getting Massive Cotton Gins, Inc. to pay him for his idea. Software has a far lower barrier to entry; you could start using this idea right now and have your software on the market tomorrow morning.
It may well be that the world would be better off if patents were limited to earth-shaking improvements, but that sets up one of those hard choices: if you concede that patents are good for some inventions, it becomes messy to say that invention X is genius level but invention Y is merely kinda clever. Over the past decade the USPTO has proven rather promiscuous in its choice (leaving it up to the courts to make the real decisions), and I fault them for screwing up their jobs, but it sure doesn't mean I'd want to have their jobs myself. I'd do better, but still not well.
Decimal degrees can be carried out to as many digits of precision as you wish with the decimal point. Microsoft's format converts the real number to an int, sacrificing precision.
Of course, it would be a simple (and, I suppose if we take this as a standard, patentable) extension to add a terdecimal point to the base-30 number.
A friend of mine worked on the center that took data from NASA scientific satellites and distributed it to the relevant scientists. That stream of data came to terabytes a day.
It won't be quite that easy; a lot of older PCs and some new ones have a PS2 keyboard and mouse. Unless the mac mini has those, you're gonna have to blow fifteen bucks on converters.
Fine with me; I'm getting my mac mini as soon as I can scrape together a few hours to get to the Apple store. I haven't owned a mac since my 5300cs died early and utterly unlamented. Man, that computer sucked.
The point of encoding lat/lons this way is to allow a compact coding in URLs.
That's useful in mobile devices, where URLs are limited. It's also useful in that now you might be able to memorize and type in your latitude/longitude, since in a higher base (30 is just an example) you can get good precision in few digits (their example is 5 characters, with 2-meter precision).
Why base 30? That's 10 digits and 26 letters, minus 6 vowels "to avoid the possibility of the algorithm inadvertently generating real words that could be offensive". Funny.
So it's useful. As far as I'm aware nobody's ever done it before, which makes it both non-obvious and novel. Those are the three tests of a patent. If you don't want to use it, keep using base 10. If you do want to use it, at least give Microsoft credit for coming up with a reasonably clever idea. As another poster pointed out, this is the type of patent MS usually uses defensively, so that nobody goes out and patents an idea they're already using in live software.
I think MS would like to see everybody memorize the lat-lon of their home as two five-digit strings, but it's not going to happen. First of all, the patent requires you to pick a precision beforehand; decimal degrees and degrees/minutes/seconds don't require that. Second, even if MS introduced a standard, they'd better release the patent for public use, or nobody will bother lest they risk being sued. Decimals are wordy, but everybody understands them and they're free.
I have one other gripe about the patent. They spend considerable time explaining how to convert a number in base 10 to a number in base N. It's not one of the claims, and it really could have been taken as given.
That "limited user" still can't access your files, which may be necessary if you want to do any real work. What if you've downloaded a photo processor, or an MP3 player? If you're manually copying over the files for the "limited user", then you're still putting forth lots of effort to give fine-grained control.
If it's saving things, it's saving them to some other place, scattering your files all over the disk. It can't save them to your space, unless you want to give the "limited user" access to your directory, in which case isn't so limited.
Worse, it can still access the internet. So if it's running a mail relay, you might not know it. You could be running a zombie right now under that "limited user" account. If you're not it's only because there are too few Linux users for them to take the effort to slip the code into every code base on sourceforge. It would only take a few lines of code, easily disguised.
Windows.NET and Java have tighter security models, where you can finely control the access each program gets. User-level control is extremely crude. You can dress that pig up in a skirt but I'm still not gonna dance with it.
Which is why rockets are Ferraris
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Ofcourse! A Ferrari is built to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the machinery, sacrificing silly stuff like economy, comfort and reliabiliy.
Very insightful: that's precisely why rocket ships are Ferraris, and will be for some time. Getting into space requires an immense amount of energy, and right now the best way to get that energy requires a whole bunch of heavy fuel which also has to be lifted.
The thing needs to run close to tolerance just to get off the ground. It's going to take a lot of work to change the balance.
That comes solidly under the category of "way too much work".
And that app doesn't have access to the rest of your files. Which is good from a security standpoint, but what if you're testing, say, a new MP3 player? Copy over a bunch of mp3s? Even more work.
At what point does the app become non-questionable, so you can give it access to the rest of your mp3s (and your home directory as well)? If it's open source, were you planning to scan the source code?
Or were you just hoping to notice whether or not it has opened a mail relay?
It's an excellent question, and since nobody else has tried to answer it, I'll take a first stab at it. In no particular order:
1. Windows has to support a lot of legacy code. The original Windows was developed with absolutely no conception of a networked computer, so a lot of its design supports free-and-friendly access, and a lot of old programs assume it.
2. Security is often entirely at odds with productivity.
3. In particular, Microsoft has added a bunch of features supposedly to make your life more easy & fun: auto-download of codecs, plugins, etc. with full acess to your system. Those are rife with problems.
4. Microsoft has a gazillion lines of code. The more code it is, the harder it is to secure.
5. As the primary target of opportunity, hackers put a lot of effort into Microsoft. I believe Mac and Linux are better designed in accordinace with the other reasons listed here, but they're probably also full of holes that nobody notices.
6. None of Windows, Linux, and OS X have a real sandbox architecture. Once you're penetrated, the worm can do everything you can do, which is a lot. Nobody notices on OS X and Linux because of reason #5.
(Linux does have a notion of a "jail", but security limits you. I betcha people don't run their window managers in a jail, and they're sitting listening on sockets just waiting for an buffer overrun. Nobody notices. Jails are no fun to run in.)
7. The story is about an incident a year ago. The firewall in Windows SP2 goes a long way towards solving the "plug it in and it gets infected" problem. It doesn't solve the "click here to get Gator!" problem.
8. The "Gator!" problem, where people delibertately invite malware onto their systems, is a combination of ignorance of users, deception of malware writers, and Microsoft's decision to let executable content come in over the Internet. People are faced with security decisions all the time, and people get them wrong because they don't know. The solution involves either more effort on behalf of users, or preventing them from downloading stuff (which also locks out valid codecs and plugins.)
9. Microsoft is fixing some of these problems in time for Longhorn, but that's still a year off. Which means they're proactive about Longhorn but reactive on XP.
Those are my top 9 off the top of my head, without just shouting "Microsoft sucks!" Tack that on and call it a top-10 list, but there are probably even more and better reasons.
The "repent" clause is an excellent idea, but if I were faced with a lawsuit, I'd want to get a lawyer to advise me on it. If you're guilty, that's not an unreasonable thing to ask you to pay for. If not, I'm out of pocket a few hundred dollars.
Mostly, I'd just like to know why the RIAA's lawyers screwed this up. The real problem here is not that the RIAA is suing people, but that their law staff allowed them to sue obviously the wrong person.
The article says they'd been sent a letter saying the woman was dead. What the RIAA needs to reconsider is not their lawsuits (which I agree can be valid) but their law staffs. It's a stupid mistake, and they're going to need to clean up their own house before going after anybody else.
I love this effort to discredit all file-sharing suits by pointing out the few that are off-target.
Well, yeah. The RIAA is trying to track down anonymous people against whom they have a legitimate beef, but just because they have valid complaints doesn't mean they have a valid complaint against you.
Lawsuits are extremely disruptive, and it's vitally important that the RIAA know who it's suing. If I were to be sued by the RIAA, I have the choice of a lengthy defense (expensive in both my time and money for a lawyer, with no guarantee that I'll get it back when I win), or settling.
This is not an ordinary accident. They didn't just send out a mistaken cease-and-desist letter. They filed a lawsuit, and had she been alive to get it, the very next thing she'd have had to do is spend a few hundred dollars on a lawyer. The RIAA may be able to file lawsuits out of petty cash, but real people don't have lawyers on retainer, or a staff of people to handle suits.
When you're filing lawsuits against people and you haven't bothered to verify who they are, it says to me that you have an awful lot of money and you don't care who you hurt in the process. Morally, I have to weigh the incidental damage you're causing against the legitimate harm done to you, and in this case I find the RIAA very wanting.
Note that I'm not one of those "socialist free information" types. I support copyrights and even patents. The RIAA must not simply have a legitimate case: they have to have THE legitimate case. If they're just hoping to cow people into settling to make a buck, they're less sinned against than sinning.
Incidents like this suggest that they are doing precisely that. I agree that they have a valid case, but they're losing the moral high ground rapidly.
Got me. I monitor a couple of "promiscuous" addresses, e.g. info@websitename.tld, where I'm expecting unsolicited emails from potential clients. These do get spam, presumably from where the scrapers have pulled the names from the web site.
I had assumed that these would get TONS of spam; once you're on one spam list you're on every spam list. Instead I get spams-per-day instead of kilo-spams-per-day.
At least some of it is the ISP blocking it. I don't know how many false-positives I've suffered, causing me to lose business, but I have reason to believe it's not very much.
But that couldn't be all of it; some spam still gets through. I dunno what's up.
Perhaps you should have stuck with it. I used to know the only straight male ballet dancer in the troupe. He may have been humiliated when he was younger, but in late high school, he made out like a bandit. As it were.
"Troll" is a bit harsh, though he's verging into that territory. It is "An outrageous message posted to a newsgroup or mailing list or message board to bait people to answer." I'd call it "outrageous" not because it's entirely untrue, but it is deliberately inflammatory, stated without support, and as far as I can tell rather overstating the case.
I say "overstated" because it's at least partially true. History classes are designed to cast positive light on the US government, and to cover up or lie about the negative. But that indoctrination isn't some massive federal program; rather, it's 50 state indoctrination programs.
More to the point, it's overstated because while the history program is heavily rigged, it's not the entire curriculum. Every teacher I know is there to teach students, and they're not teaching dialectics in chemistry class.
In short, school is NOT some big program designed to create automatons, and you're pushing the bounds of common sense to say so in a single sentence without clarifying what you mean.
So it gets marked "troll" not just because it's controversial, but because of the way it's said. It goes to far and offers zero support. If asked to metamoderate it I'd probably mark it "unfair" because it's on-topic and the poster isn't in general a troller; he's just badly stating an opinion.
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I was speaking in the context of a reply to somebody who sounded like one of the anti-globalism types and was trying to appeal to his/her biases. Those liberals do seem to have what I consider a muzzy-headed view of where money comes from (perhaps because they're opposed to "money" in general, though I'm unclear on precisely what alternative they're offering.)
The current coalitions have produced some very odd bedfellows. I see no reason why the "liberal" party should be opposed to firearms ownership, or why the fiscal conservatives should find themselves linked to the anti-gay-marriage lobby.
Those coalitions are rather fraying; the Catholics are leaving the Democrats, and the Log Cabin Republicans endorsed Kerry.
I read the initial opinion section, and the letters, then the US news. Those are the parts that get me what I don't read in my daily paper and the online news feeds. Then I'm afraid I skip over Europe and Latin America and Asia and read the science and glance at the arts.
If I have time I go back and skim the headlines of the rest, and read the articles on rare occasions. I'm ashamed to admit that I really don't much care about the workers strike in Bolivia or the folding of the soccer teams in Albania. I realize that makes me a bad person.
As I understand it, "liberal" once meant simple "freedom", even in political terms. In the US it came to mean "freedom from corporate oppression" back in the mid-to-late 19th century, when the workers were heavily victimized by powerful rich factory owners (who were often not all that readily distinguishable from the government.)
Later, that became associated with fighting for other sorts of freedom, such as civil rights for minority groups.
The association of "liberal" with "poor and minority groups" has led the term somewhat away from its original meaning. Over time, it's become associated with improving the lot of poor people even where they're not activily being oppressed but merely poor: welfare, medical care, affirmative action, etc.
Liberals argue that the causes of poverty are side-effects of less obvious rights violations by rich people and companies. They'd argue that a company which employs many people in a town has an obligation to those people to continue to employ them, even when that factory is no longer profitable. That obligation by the company is the right of the people.
I wouldn't say that the Economist is "all for" corporate tyranny. They'd say that a factory which isn't profitable cannot employ those workers because there simply is no money to pay them. That strikes them as simple level-headedness: you cannot pay workers from nonexistent money.
But they do hold the company responsible for its non-economic externalities. If the company is dumping cadmium into the water and poisoning those workers, even if it's proftable for the company it is wrong to do so. Simple economics will not prevent that, so they recommend well-chosen and well-enforced government regulation.
I often find myself disagreeing with them. Their notion of free-market capitalism often assumes frictionless changes that are untrue. If a company moves a factory from Flint, Michigan to Bangladesh, yes, I suppose it does improve the US economy by allowing Americans to purchase the goods more cheaply, thus freeing up their capital for investment in other things.
But the people of Flint, Michigan don't realize those improvements directly; they don't immediately acquire programming skills and move to San Francisco to get better jobs. Nor do they disappear. Even if the simple "invisble hand" argument works for the good of the country as a whole, it can cause vicious harm in microeconomic terms, and those are externalities which shouldn't be ignored.
Because only color-blind users should be the victims of phishing scams.
And because grandma is sure to notice that one letter, in a part of the screen she doesn't usually look at, is a different color. Just tell her to check every letter of every URL she goes to.
Not that I've got a lot of better solutions. I can imagine a patch that pops up a warning for suspicious-looking URLs, but dialog boxes are lousy security.
I can definitely see elimininating IDN, but that's hardly fair to the 95% of the users in the world who aren't American.
Still, in general I should caution you about using color as an important indicator in your software design. The world is full of color-blind (and blind) users who deserve your consideration. Not only will it help them out, it'll help out your normally-sighted users who will appreciate stronger cues than color.
The cutting out of the vowels is not part of the patent; it's merely an amusing side note. I point it out only because people were wondering why base 30.
The patent is on the representation of lat/lons in the alternative radixes.
You are correct: neither (1) nor (2) is actually part of the claims of the patent. I bring it up only because of the numerous posts saying "Haw haw haw... base 30 how stoopid." I was just explaining why.
Part (3) is where the patent lies: using a base N encoding for lat/lon values, where the lat/lons have been normalized to an integer. None of those pieces is novel, but to my knowledge they haven't been put together this way before. If they have been that's presumptive evidence to challenge the patent.
If you wish to say (for example) "I propose that we normalize on milliseconds-since-epoch, and represent that as a base N number, which would be useful for compressing times in URLs", yeah, that's probably patentable. Base 10 is probably excluded due to prior art.
It's probably not a terribly useful patent for you to have, since there are many alternative representation schemes already in use. Nobody else has particularly found the need for it yet, or they'd have done it already.
Now, those same things could be pointed out to MS about their patent, and it probably applies. That's why I suspect this is a defensive patent: MS is probably using this coding on the terraserver or some such, and decided it would be easier to get a patent than fight off some numnuts who decides to patent the idea and then sue MS hoping to get a settlement rather than have his case tossed out by a judge.
That's why I said "real", not "float". Though Fortran calls it a "real", and strictly speaking a float could have arbitrary precision, so perhaps I'm splitting hairs. I meant "real" as a mathematical concept, not as a computer term.
In URLs (which are kind of indirectly the point) they don't use a floating-point represetnation; they use a fixed point and are abitrarily long. But they're still not infinitely long, so they're not true reals; you can't represent 1/3 precisely in any decimalized URL. But that distinction is subtle and kind of irrelevant, since more than ten decimal places of meters and you're talking about addressing individual atoms.
The nice thing about digital media is that you can leave it in an unrefrigerated shoe box for a decade or two, then come back and make a perfect copy of it with absolutely no degradation.
You can also make a perfect copy and stick it in numerous locations, making them harder to lose in a fire/terrorist attack/rampaging llama incident. They don't require refrigeration, and they take up a lot less room.
But it's not perfect: there's a analog-to-digital step, and you lose information there. Even a print of the film is an analog-to-analog copy, which is even blurrier. The only way to preserve that perfectly is to preserve the original medium.
This plan would be best done alongside preservation of the original media. You preserve media for things you have reason to believe are worth the expenense of elaborate storage for a century. For the rest of it, you keep a digital copy which is as accurate as possible, and you revisit it very, very rarely to ensure that it is still viable.
There is expense associated with refreshing the media every decade or so (at which time you also compress 10 CDs onto 1 DVD, then 10 DVDs onto a single holo-tera-whatever). But while I haven't seen numbers, I suspect that preserving the film stock is at least as expensive, and probably more so, and still prone to single points of failure.
I'm not a lawyer, but my suspicion is that the patent office reads other patents much more than it reads other prior art. Since MS has patent lawyers on retainer they probably got this patent for a few thousand bucks.
A patent is "stronger" prior art than a journal publication. It shouldn't be, but it is.
If somebody else were to patent it, or worse patent a similar and overlapping idea, it would take MS considerable effort and court time to prove that it had prior art. They may be hoping to forestall that by putting their idea in a place that patent examiners would be sure to see it if a similar patent comes in.
Even if the USPTO granted that patent, MS could point to their own prior patent, which would probably dramatically shorten the negotiations and/or the time in a courtroom.
Even if they are the first to convert floats to ints on the internet, I still fail to see how it is non-obvious.
It's not just floats to ints. It's a way of coding a particular, well-defined kind of information, which involves at least two steps (converting the float to an int, then coding the int in a form which is not only brief but can be coded in a URL (though strictly speaking that last part isn't a requirement of the patent).
Yeah, each piece is tiny, and the algorithm as a whole has not been done before, despite there being many others who might have done so. It would have been obvious to you if you'd been the first one to face the problem as MS defined it, but often times the real trick isn't so much solving a problem nobody's solved but finding a problem nobody's seen.
Why do they obscure the fact that they are talking about an algorithm by calling it a "computer implemented method"?
That's the way patents are written. I have no idea why. If I had to guess, I'd say it's because you're supposed to patent a thing, not an idea. An algorithm is an idea; a computer implemented method is a thing.
At best that's playing semantic games, and numerous categories of patent (not just software patents, e.g. business process patents) are increasingly far from the "adding an extra flange to a sewing machine" you-can-kick-it-with-your-foot style of patent originally envisioned.
I find the distinction stupid, because you were always patenting an idea rather than a machine. You're not inventing that particular flange on the sewing machine but the idea of sticking it on. They just wanted to limit you to ideas for physical things, as opposed to being able to patent, say, the plot of a book (though the actual text comes under a different category of intellectual property.)
As far as I can tell, none of the mapping sites encode information this way, even though it might be advantageous for them to do so. If somebody can show me a case where they do so of course I'd retract. But I'd argue that since people can and should have done this before, but haven't that makes it non-obvious.
It's certainly true that any competent designer, faced with this particular problem (how can you encode a lat/lon in a short URL) would come up with the same answer. Often, however, the point of an invention isn't coming up with a novel answer but defining a problem to be solved. Often that involves taking several things that were just laying around and sticking them together in a way nobody's done before.
I'm not certain that patents were ever limited to genius-level work. Early patents are full of tiny improvements to pin-makers and sewing machines. It's not unique to the software era.
The difference is that it was easy for Joe Blow to invent his improvement to the cotton gin, but hard for him to mass-manufacture them. The patent was his was of getting Massive Cotton Gins, Inc. to pay him for his idea. Software has a far lower barrier to entry; you could start using this idea right now and have your software on the market tomorrow morning.
It may well be that the world would be better off if patents were limited to earth-shaking improvements, but that sets up one of those hard choices: if you concede that patents are good for some inventions, it becomes messy to say that invention X is genius level but invention Y is merely kinda clever. Over the past decade the USPTO has proven rather promiscuous in its choice (leaving it up to the courts to make the real decisions), and I fault them for screwing up their jobs, but it sure doesn't mean I'd want to have their jobs myself. I'd do better, but still not well.
Decimal degrees can be carried out to as many digits of precision as you wish with the decimal point. Microsoft's format converts the real number to an int, sacrificing precision.
Of course, it would be a simple (and, I suppose if we take this as a standard, patentable) extension to add a terdecimal point to the base-30 number.
A friend of mine worked on the center that took data from NASA scientific satellites and distributed it to the relevant scientists. That stream of data came to terabytes a day.
It won't be quite that easy; a lot of older PCs and some new ones have a PS2 keyboard and mouse. Unless the mac mini has those, you're gonna have to blow fifteen bucks on converters.
Fine with me; I'm getting my mac mini as soon as I can scrape together a few hours to get to the Apple store. I haven't owned a mac since my 5300cs died early and utterly unlamented. Man, that computer sucked.
The point of encoding lat/lons this way is to allow a compact coding in URLs.
That's useful in mobile devices, where URLs are limited. It's also useful in that now you might be able to memorize and type in your latitude/longitude, since in a higher base (30 is just an example) you can get good precision in few digits (their example is 5 characters, with 2-meter precision).
Why base 30? That's 10 digits and 26 letters, minus 6 vowels "to avoid the possibility of the algorithm inadvertently generating real words that could be offensive". Funny.
So it's useful. As far as I'm aware nobody's ever done it before, which makes it both non-obvious and novel. Those are the three tests of a patent. If you don't want to use it, keep using base 10. If you do want to use it, at least give Microsoft credit for coming up with a reasonably clever idea. As another poster pointed out, this is the type of patent MS usually uses defensively, so that nobody goes out and patents an idea they're already using in live software.
I think MS would like to see everybody memorize the lat-lon of their home as two five-digit strings, but it's not going to happen. First of all, the patent requires you to pick a precision beforehand; decimal degrees and degrees/minutes/seconds don't require that. Second, even if MS introduced a standard, they'd better release the patent for public use, or nobody will bother lest they risk being sued. Decimals are wordy, but everybody understands them and they're free.
I have one other gripe about the patent. They spend considerable time explaining how to convert a number in base 10 to a number in base N. It's not one of the claims, and it really could have been taken as given.
That "limited user" still can't access your files, which may be necessary if you want to do any real work. What if you've downloaded a photo processor, or an MP3 player? If you're manually copying over the files for the "limited user", then you're still putting forth lots of effort to give fine-grained control.
.NET and Java have tighter security models, where you can finely control the access each program gets. User-level control is extremely crude. You can dress that pig up in a skirt but I'm still not gonna dance with it.
If it's saving things, it's saving them to some other place, scattering your files all over the disk. It can't save them to your space, unless you want to give the "limited user" access to your directory, in which case isn't so limited.
Worse, it can still access the internet. So if it's running a mail relay, you might not know it. You could be running a zombie right now under that "limited user" account. If you're not it's only because there are too few Linux users for them to take the effort to slip the code into every code base on sourceforge. It would only take a few lines of code, easily disguised.
Windows
Ofcourse! A Ferrari is built to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the machinery, sacrificing silly stuff like economy, comfort and reliabiliy.
Very insightful: that's precisely why rocket ships are Ferraris, and will be for some time. Getting into space requires an immense amount of energy, and right now the best way to get that energy requires a whole bunch of heavy fuel which also has to be lifted.
The thing needs to run close to tolerance just to get off the ground. It's going to take a lot of work to change the balance.
That comes solidly under the category of "way too much work".
And that app doesn't have access to the rest of your files. Which is good from a security standpoint, but what if you're testing, say, a new MP3 player? Copy over a bunch of mp3s? Even more work.
At what point does the app become non-questionable, so you can give it access to the rest of your mp3s (and your home directory as well)? If it's open source, were you planning to scan the source code?
Or were you just hoping to notice whether or not it has opened a mail relay?
It's an excellent question, and since nobody else has tried to answer it, I'll take a first stab at it. In no particular order:
1. Windows has to support a lot of legacy code. The original Windows was developed with absolutely no conception of a networked computer, so a lot of its design supports free-and-friendly access, and a lot of old programs assume it.
2. Security is often entirely at odds with productivity.
3. In particular, Microsoft has added a bunch of features supposedly to make your life more easy & fun: auto-download of codecs, plugins, etc. with full acess to your system. Those are rife with problems.
4. Microsoft has a gazillion lines of code. The more code it is, the harder it is to secure.
5. As the primary target of opportunity, hackers put a lot of effort into Microsoft. I believe Mac and Linux are better designed in accordinace with the other reasons listed here, but they're probably also full of holes that nobody notices.
6. None of Windows, Linux, and OS X have a real sandbox architecture. Once you're penetrated, the worm can do everything you can do, which is a lot. Nobody notices on OS X and Linux because of reason #5.
(Linux does have a notion of a "jail", but security limits you. I betcha people don't run their window managers in a jail, and they're sitting listening on sockets just waiting for an buffer overrun. Nobody notices. Jails are no fun to run in.)
7. The story is about an incident a year ago. The firewall in Windows SP2 goes a long way towards solving the "plug it in and it gets infected" problem. It doesn't solve the "click here to get Gator!" problem.
8. The "Gator!" problem, where people delibertately invite malware onto their systems, is a combination of ignorance of users, deception of malware writers, and Microsoft's decision to let executable content come in over the Internet. People are faced with security decisions all the time, and people get them wrong because they don't know. The solution involves either more effort on behalf of users, or preventing them from downloading stuff (which also locks out valid codecs and plugins.)
9. Microsoft is fixing some of these problems in time for Longhorn, but that's still a year off. Which means they're proactive about Longhorn but reactive on XP.
Those are my top 9 off the top of my head, without just shouting "Microsoft sucks!" Tack that on and call it a top-10 list, but there are probably even more and better reasons.
The "repent" clause is an excellent idea, but if I were faced with a lawsuit, I'd want to get a lawyer to advise me on it. If you're guilty, that's not an unreasonable thing to ask you to pay for. If not, I'm out of pocket a few hundred dollars.
Mostly, I'd just like to know why the RIAA's lawyers screwed this up. The real problem here is not that the RIAA is suing people, but that their law staff allowed them to sue obviously the wrong person.
The article says they'd been sent a letter saying the woman was dead. What the RIAA needs to reconsider is not their lawsuits (which I agree can be valid) but their law staffs. It's a stupid mistake, and they're going to need to clean up their own house before going after anybody else.
I love this effort to discredit all file-sharing suits by pointing out the few that are off-target.
Well, yeah. The RIAA is trying to track down anonymous people against whom they have a legitimate beef, but just because they have valid complaints doesn't mean they have a valid complaint against you.
Lawsuits are extremely disruptive, and it's vitally important that the RIAA know who it's suing. If I were to be sued by the RIAA, I have the choice of a lengthy defense (expensive in both my time and money for a lawyer, with no guarantee that I'll get it back when I win), or settling.
This is not an ordinary accident. They didn't just send out a mistaken cease-and-desist letter. They filed a lawsuit, and had she been alive to get it, the very next thing she'd have had to do is spend a few hundred dollars on a lawyer. The RIAA may be able to file lawsuits out of petty cash, but real people don't have lawyers on retainer, or a staff of people to handle suits.
When you're filing lawsuits against people and you haven't bothered to verify who they are, it says to me that you have an awful lot of money and you don't care who you hurt in the process. Morally, I have to weigh the incidental damage you're causing against the legitimate harm done to you, and in this case I find the RIAA very wanting.
Note that I'm not one of those "socialist free information" types. I support copyrights and even patents. The RIAA must not simply have a legitimate case: they have to have THE legitimate case. If they're just hoping to cow people into settling to make a buck, they're less sinned against than sinning.
Incidents like this suggest that they are doing precisely that. I agree that they have a valid case, but they're losing the moral high ground rapidly.
Got me. I monitor a couple of "promiscuous" addresses, e.g. info@websitename.tld, where I'm expecting unsolicited emails from potential clients. These do get spam, presumably from where the scrapers have pulled the names from the web site.
I had assumed that these would get TONS of spam; once you're on one spam list you're on every spam list. Instead I get spams-per-day instead of kilo-spams-per-day.
At least some of it is the ISP blocking it. I don't know how many false-positives I've suffered, causing me to lose business, but I have reason to believe it's not very much.
But that couldn't be all of it; some spam still gets through. I dunno what's up.
Perhaps you should have stuck with it. I used to know the only straight male ballet dancer in the troupe. He may have been humiliated when he was younger, but in late high school, he made out like a bandit. As it were.
"Troll" is a bit harsh, though he's verging into that territory. It is "An outrageous message posted to a newsgroup or mailing list or message board to bait people to answer." I'd call it "outrageous" not because it's entirely untrue, but it is deliberately inflammatory, stated without support, and as far as I can tell rather overstating the case.
I say "overstated" because it's at least partially true. History classes are designed to cast positive light on the US government, and to cover up or lie about the negative. But that indoctrination isn't some massive federal program; rather, it's 50 state indoctrination programs.
More to the point, it's overstated because while the history program is heavily rigged, it's not the entire curriculum. Every teacher I know is there to teach students, and they're not teaching dialectics in chemistry class.
In short, school is NOT some big program designed to create automatons, and you're pushing the bounds of common sense to say so in a single sentence without clarifying what you mean.
So it gets marked "troll" not just because it's controversial, but because of the way it's said. It goes to far and offers zero support. If asked to metamoderate it I'd probably mark it "unfair" because it's on-topic and the poster isn't in general a troller; he's just badly stating an opinion.
You'll note that now he's been modded way up.
How did you get humiliated? Did you get your mom to make you crappy cafeteria food? Did they hire somebody to come beat you up?
Man, you really missed out.