> In practice, that means they might get a judge to take your infringing > papers and radio away.
In practice a US Federal judge would dismiss the case as trivial. Patent law does not provide statutory damages and the most actual damage they could claim would be the lost royalties.
> I doubt a magazine would publish such an article without permission.
A magazine could publish such an article with complete impunity.
> The lens on the telescope would have to be over 115000 kilometers across..
No, the aperture would have to be 115000 km. The Keck telescope, for example, has a maximum aperture of 85m but each mirror is "only" 10m in diameter. You would need a substantial collecting area to get an adequate signal to noise ratio, but not that large (though gravitational lenses can be much larger than that).
> The diameter you want is 614 million kilometers...
That's the aperature you need for the specified resolution but you don't necessarily need that much collecting area (though it could be achieved via gravitational lensing).
I suspect that the OP's original requirement (imaging cities) could be achieved with a few dozen kilometer-scale mirrors seperated by a few million kilometers.
> They'd certainly corner the market on oppressing information (if that's > profitable I don't know).
Profitable for the Chinese government? Of course. They'd gain influence over governments that made Baidu the sole permitted search engine in their territories while flooding such nations with pro-Chinese propaganda.
> I think you've got enough evidence to involve the FCC.
I don't think that the FCC will act on a complaint from an unlicensed user of the 2.4GHz industrial, scientific, and medical band who is required to tolerate interference. The primary purpose of this band is non-communication uses such as microwave heating.
> The issue here is that software really is simply a set of algorithms.
Software is a set of instructions as to how to arrange the innards of a computer so as to carry out a task. It's very hard to come up with a clear rule to distinguish, in a fundamental way, between a set of instructions on how to arrange a bunch of pipes, tanks, valves, and reactors in such a way as to produce polyethylene when petroleum is put in from a set of instructions on how to arrange a bunch of registers, buses, ALUs, switches, and memory in such a way as to compute the fourier transform of a waveform.
No, I don't favor software patents either, but I also don't labor under the delusion that they software is obviously unpatentable under current law. It isn't as easy as we might like it to be.
> The fast Fourier transform. Or a compression algorithm. Both are examples of > things that are not machines, do not transform matter, yet are not abstract > ideas.
> So, it seems that those that oppose software patents on principle need - for > now - to pursue the notion that all of software is really just an "abstract > idea", which seems a hard sell given the software community's touting of the > real life benefits of computers and the software that runs them.
The laws of physics are just "abstract ideas" but they have real life benefits.
...adopted a "I know it when I see it" rule on the question of what constitutes a patentable invention. Makes things a little tough for the district courts, I think.
The Court explicitly narrowed the ruling to avoid setting a precedent that would change anything with respect to software or business methods. Nothing has changed.
> What has happened is a theory that cannot explain observation has been given > a crutch to aid it limping along for a while longer until a new hypothesis > is introduced to explain the discrepancy.
Dark matter is not a theory, it is a description. The phrase "dark matter" is shorthand for a set of observations, chosen because they seem to imply the existance of mass (therefor "matter") that does not interact electromagnetically (therefor "dark").
Slashdot Mirror
> In practice, that means they might get a judge to take your infringing
> papers and radio away.
In practice a US Federal judge would dismiss the case as trivial. Patent law does not provide statutory damages and the most actual damage they could claim would be the lost royalties.
> I doubt a magazine would publish such an article without permission.
A magazine could publish such an article with complete impunity.
> ...what did you expect?
Politics and silly-buggers bureaucracy, just like everywhere else. It's just government at work.
> Anyone know why they're low balling the estimate so much?
Because the orbit might be very eccentric.
> The lens on the telescope would have to be over 115000 kilometers across..
No, the aperture would have to be 115000 km. The Keck telescope, for example, has a maximum aperture of 85m but each mirror is "only" 10m in diameter. You would need a substantial collecting area to get an adequate signal to noise ratio, but not that large (though gravitational lenses can be much larger than that).
> The diameter you want is 614 million kilometers...
That's the aperature you need for the specified resolution but you don't necessarily need that much collecting area (though it could be achieved via gravitational lensing).
I suspect that the OP's original requirement (imaging cities) could be achieved with a few dozen kilometer-scale mirrors seperated by a few million kilometers.
Let me guess. You've never dug a posthole, have you?
> It would also provide any filtering that a secretary might manage.
You've clearly never seen an even marginally competent secretary at work.
> He might even be able to enjoy cut and paste along with quoted replies.
A person privileged with the services of a competent secretary doesn't need that.
Yes. It will use S-expressions.
> you'll need to model it as a perculiar analog device.
No, as a quantum mechanical device.
> and if you're both not comfortable, why the fuck are you getting married!?
Because her father is paying you a boatload of money to take her off his hands (she did bring a dowry, didn't she?)
> They'd certainly corner the market on oppressing information (if that's
> profitable I don't know).
Profitable for the Chinese government? Of course. They'd gain influence over governments that made Baidu the sole permitted search engine in their territories while flooding such nations with pro-Chinese propaganda.
> ...I decided to try HomePlug-spec'd devices...
Thereby wiping out shortwave reception for miles around.
> In any case, the other half of the part 15 rule citation is "this device may
> not cause harmful interference".
With the unstated caveat that the only interference that counts is interference with non-part 15 uses.
> I think you've got enough evidence to involve the FCC.
I don't think that the FCC will act on a complaint from an unlicensed user of the 2.4GHz industrial, scientific, and medical band who is required to tolerate interference. The primary purpose of this band is non-communication uses such as microwave heating.
He's also ignoring the vast amount of aid the USSR received from the USA.
They don't necessarily have higher resolution data everywhere.
> ...who might want to rethink their position given the level of incompetence
> displayed herein
At Slashdot that sort of thing qualifies one for a promotion (not that this sets /. apart from the media in general...)
> The issue here is that software really is simply a set of algorithms.
Software is a set of instructions as to how to arrange the innards of a computer so as to carry out a task. It's very hard to come up with a clear rule to distinguish, in a fundamental way, between a set of instructions on how to arrange a bunch of pipes, tanks, valves, and reactors in such a way as to produce polyethylene when petroleum is put in from a set of instructions on how to arrange a bunch of registers, buses, ALUs, switches, and memory in such a way as to compute the fourier transform of a waveform.
No, I don't favor software patents either, but I also don't labor under the delusion that they software is obviously unpatentable under current law. It isn't as easy as we might like it to be.
> The fast Fourier transform. Or a compression algorithm. Both are examples of
> things that are not machines, do not transform matter, yet are not abstract
> ideas.
They most certainly are abstract ideas.
> So, it seems that those that oppose software patents on principle need - for
> now - to pursue the notion that all of software is really just an "abstract
> idea", which seems a hard sell given the software community's touting of the
> real life benefits of computers and the software that runs them.
The laws of physics are just "abstract ideas" but they have real life benefits.
...adopted a "I know it when I see it" rule on the question of what constitutes a patentable invention. Makes things a little tough for the district courts, I think.
I'd say there is a 5-4 majority in favor of dodging the issue of business method patents.
> Patents in their up-until-recently form were intended as protection for ways > of organizaing brute matter, not living things...
There are lots of patents on fermentation processes. I'd call those ways of organizing living things.
> ...in particular not human beings.
True.
The Court explicitly narrowed the ruling to avoid setting a precedent that would change anything with respect to software or business methods. Nothing has changed.
> What has happened is a theory that cannot explain observation has been given
> a crutch to aid it limping along for a while longer until a new hypothesis
> is introduced to explain the discrepancy.
Dark matter is not a theory, it is a description. The phrase "dark matter" is shorthand for a set of observations, chosen because they seem to imply the existance of mass (therefor "matter") that does not interact electromagnetically (therefor "dark").