Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen The 2007 CIA World Factbook by United States. Central Intelligence Agency The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce Dracula by Bram Stoker Les Misérables by Victor Hugo The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë Ulysses by James Joyce Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli Paradise Lost by John Milton A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens Grimm's Fairy Tales by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm The Marvelous Land Of Oz by L. Frank Baum Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
Amazon.com has all or nearly all of those books, some as DRM-Kindle ebooks.
Now... what idiot here wants explain to me why the hell I SHOULDN'T have this convenient Download-torrent-from-ThePirateBay button show up on the page in my Firefox browser? And offer me their brilliant rant on how this browser extension is or shoud-be illegal?
And a billboard giving detailed instructions on... running a confidence scam, successfully robbing banks, the finer points of mugging, or the detailed design of a botnet/phishing/money laundering operation
I know these people are in the Netherlands, but just a general FYI to this discussion, in the US all of those things are not only legal but it would be unconstitutional for congress to create any law criminalizing it.
If you want to blow up some building, and someone else says they are willing to do it if you give them the explosive formula, that is conspiracy to commit a crime, and that is a crime.
If you are working the register at a store, and you have actual knowledge that some particular person intends to murder someone by forcing a rubber duck down their throat, it is criminal aiding and abetting to sell that rubber ducky to that particular person.
However if you merely publish something and you don't commit any other actual crime, the fact that some generic person might use the information to commit some unknown crime does not make it criminal for you to publish that information - even on a billboard.
So you have irrefutable evidence that global warming is due to fossil fuel combustion products
Yes. It is trivial physics.
Carbon dioxide (and other gasses) trap thermal radiation. No one disputes this trivial point of physics. Carbon dioxide and other gasses has already produced about 50 degrees of global warming.
Yes, the size of underlying effect is already about 50 degrees. The normal pre-existing gasses in the atmosphere already trap thermal raditation and already warm the globe by about 50 degrees. Without the atmosphere and greenhouse gasses, the planet would be an iceball colder than the coldest ice age.
Even the most radical global warming denialists do not dispute the fact that humans have increased CO2 (and other gasses) in the atmosphere. Humans have raised CO2 levels from about 280 ppm to over 380 ppm. This is not in dispute.
CO2 and other gasses trap heat, and humans have increased the quantity of these heat trapping gasses. It is trivial physics - a blatantly obvious one - that increasing the quantity of trapping gasses will increase the heat trapping effect. The youngest school child knows that a thicker blanket will trap more heat and keep you warmer in bed.
End of argument. The basic effect is is real and indisputable.
The SIZE of the effect is a difficult complex and uncertain scientific matter. Predicting the FUTURE size and FUTURE consequences is a difficult complex and uncertain scientific matter. What we SHOULD DO or WILL DO about it is a difficult complex and uncertain POLITICAL matter.
The idea that it is not a real physical effect, the idea that it is even uncertain, that is a public relations position, that is a media subject of argument, that is a political position, that is an ideological position, and it is simply factually wrong.
and not, say, the output of the sun [freerepublic.com]?
Any effect from the sun would be IN PARALLEL with the real indisputable physical fact that these will still trap heat, any effect from the sun would be IN PRALLEL with the fact that humans are increasing the levels of heat trapping gasses.
The idea that this is an either-or situation is a fallacy.
You, me, and Mr. Freeper walk into a room and see a man lying on the floor in a pool of blood. I say he's been shot and he's about to bleed to death if we don't do something to stop the bleeding. Mr. Freeper points to a broken window and says he does not believe the man was shot. Mr. Freeper says he believes the blood on the floor may have been caused by glass cuts.
Guess what? There's an indisputable bullet hole in the man's chest. Yes, it is certainly possible that the man also has glass cuts. Yes, it is a potentially valid theory that the man is bleeding from glass cuts. However it is an obvious fallacy to suggest that pointing to broken glass somehow invalidates the idea that he is bleeding from a gunshot. If Mr. Freeper's idea is completely correct, all that means is that the man lying on the floor is bleeding from BOTH the gunshot AND bleeding from glass cuts. At most it means BOTH are true.
Any possible issue with the sun, even if it is completely correct, is merely IN ADDITION to the indisputable physics that CO2 and other gasses do trap heat, and the indisputed fact that humans have increased the levels of these gasses, and the indisputable fact that this increases the warming effect.
we shouldn't have irrational, knee-jerk reactions to the use of fossil fuels.
I agree. However there is absolutely nothing irrational in the concern that CO2 does trap heat, and that we are dumping billions of tons into the atmosphere. Billions of tons of a gas is indeed a quantity of planetary scale. It has already increased atmospheric CO2 levels from 280 ppm to over 380 ppm.
What we should do about that - that is a very difficult issue that needs to be considered carefully and rationally. However it is irrational and just plain false for anyone to deny the fundamental fact that human are emittin
How do you expect him to believe you when you write smartsy-fartsy technobabble like 'thermohaline circulation', 'Dansgaard-Oescher events', and 'Europe'?
Holy shit. Quadrant Magazine's own "about" page on themselves used to have:
Its stance is often described as conservative, neo-conservative, or rightwing. In fact it is not necessarily any of these things, but maintains a sceptical approach to unthinking Leftism, or political correctness, and its "smelly little orthodoxies". (Retrieved on 15 June 2008, according to Wikipedia)
Yeah, I'd say any left leaning publication selfdescribing as opposing the "smelly little orthodoxies" of the right would also well deserve the title rag.
I mean seriously... smelly? What are they? SIX? Conservapedia has higher journalistic standards than that.
And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see. And I saw, and behold a white squirrel: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer. And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see. And there went out another squirrel that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword. And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black squirrel; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine. And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. And I looked, and behold a pale squirrel: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
Why doesn't the patent office just charge fees sufficient to fund enough examiners to get anything done in a month?
Patent fees already well exceed the examiners-and-other-expenses budget.
The US government siphons off patent office revenues to fund other projects. There is no need to raise patent fees, you could actually lower the fees and hire more examiners. You just have to actually keep the fee money in the patent office and actually spend it on processing patents. But then you'd have to actually collect taxes to pay for the other things the government spends money on...
and collecting taxes to pay for stuff is bad.... mmm'kay?
He takes nearly the first half of that time before making grand announcement that the data structure will be... drumroll please... an 81 element array! He then lays out the top level design of a dumb-as-rocks guess-and-recursion approach, leaving several parts as homework, like testing weather placing a particular number in a certain spot would be legal. If you don't know enough programming to to fill in those details yourself, the video won't tell you how. If you do know enough programming that you *could* manage to write the most basic dumb-as-rocks guess-and-recursion sudoku solver on your own, you won't learn anything from the video.
If you are ok with the basics of programming and manipulating arrays and know what recursion is, but you have no idea how to attempt a sudoku solver, then skipping to somewhere around the halfway point in the video and watching the rest might be worthwhile.
Curious about duck-typing, I asked Google define:duck-typing. No results were found in English, but it did return a hit in the German Wikipedia. I had bookmarked Yahoo as my translation service page back before Google offered one, so I used that link to translate the webpage into English. The Wikipedia article opens with an English quote "When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and Quack like a duck, I call that bird a duck", which is then followed by the German translation of the phrase retranslated back into English. Ok, so far so good, duck-typing obviously enough is seems to follow some notion if an object has the property Quacks like a Duck then it is somehow treated as a Duck type or somesuch. So I'm reading the translation and fighting hard to follow the broken translation example they are using to illustrate how it works and what it means, and I crash head on into the striking phrase "also frogs can quaken". Okaaaaay. Quaken is cute, and frogs quacking is funny. I'm thinking they are deliberately making a Frog type that Quacks-like-a-Duck to make some special point about duck-typing. Completely by chance I then also happened to pull up the Google translation of the page. There I happen find "even frogs can croak" in the same spot. Whoah, waitaminute. So I go look at the original German text and find that it actually does use the word "quaken" there. The German text uses "quak" in the duck section and "quak" in the phrase with frog.
So I've learned a few things. (1) Apparently Germans use the same word for the noise-a-duck-makes and for the noise-a-frog-makes. (2) Apparently Yahoo is not smart enough to translate "quak" as "croak" when a frog does it, and that that would have left me completely confused trying to understand the point being made by giving a frog a "Quacks like a Duck" property. (3) Apparently Google silently has the "smarts" to translate the single word "quak" as either quak for birds or croak for frogs, and that that would have also left me completely confused by how duck-typing is handling a croaking frog and why the frog is gaining the ability to croak. (4) I never would have figured out any of this if I hadn't randomly happened to pull up BOTH the Google and Yahoo translations. (5) Now that I have learned that German frogs also quack, I've learned that my brain is bent over the example they are using. What the fuck is the Frog supposed to represent in the duck-typing illustration? Does/doesn't the Frog quack like a Duck? Is/isn't/should/shouldn't the Frog be accepted as a Duck type, and what the fuck is that supposed mean? What the fuck relationship is Frog supposed/not-supposed to have with the Bird and Duck types? (6) The measure of information I have gained on duck-typing has actually been a negative number due to all of this. My brain now contains scar tissue on what was once pristine blank neurological storage space.
For a multi-tier system to work properly, the level 2 staff should be the supervisors of the level 1 staff, and the level 3 staff should be the supervisors of level 2.
I realize it's considered terribly clever on Slashdot to deride every patent as "obvious", but it would be nice if people realized that the title of the patent does not indicate what the patent covers
Ok, fair enough.
What the patent *actually covers* is in the claims.
Yep. Exactly.
I went and read the claims. Amongst other things they are claiming a patent on taking a sandwich order, toasting the bread, and heating up the sandwich-filling while the bread toasts.
Well, if you want to go quoting Bill Gates on patents...
"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today."
-- Bill Gates 1991 internal memo to senior executives, prior to his own motivation to weaponize software patents against open source software.
A method of filling an order for a sandwich comprising: toasting a bread component for the sandwich for less than about 1 minute in response to the order in a first heating device; and initiating and completing the heating of a sandwich filling for the sandwich from about 4OF or less to about 120F or more in a second heating device, while the bread component is heating, in response to the order.
Translating from patentese into plain English, they are claiming a patent on:
Take an order, toast bread quickly, heat the cold stuff while bread toasts.
Assume for the moment that the method in question is both new and non-obvious.
Assume for the moment BITE ME. New and non-obvious my ass.
Almost no one around here seriously objects to patents on new physical devices. Not many here even object to physical process patents on physically transforming something like ore into elemental metal. But why do most patent lawyers have this pathological compulsion to promote and defend the patentability of anything they can commit to paper? Almost all of the claims filed here are obvious, under any sane stander of review. Almost all of the claims filed here are not truly novel, under any sane stander of review. And while yes, this is at least a claim on a physical process of physical sandwich making, I would say that "transformation of an article to a different state or thing" should be a substantive requirement. Placing bread on top of ham&cheese then flipping it over is hardly novel, it is not particularly non-obvious having been endlessly "invented" by common cooks and in home kitchens across the globe, and I'd say it fails to meet any reasonable substantive meaning of "transforming an article to a different state or thing".
Most people here are not anti-patent, but they do have a problem with patents becomming some horror movie monster escaping out of control from its box and devouring everything in sight. People here are largely programmers, and have a particular objection to patents on math - where "patents on math" means any and all "computer implemented inventions" lacking significant physical "post solution activity". Note that it was the US Supreme Court who declared that algorithms were unpatentable, and that "insignificant post solution activity" cannot be used to draft an unpatentable algorithm into a patentable process.
Computers cannot implement any invention. Computers can only calculate. Any and all software is nothing more than algorithm, nothing more than math. If you happen to include a computer in some novel non-obvious device you invent, fine you can have a patent on that new object. The incidental presence of a computer does not remove the patentability of an otherwise patenentable new object. If you incidentally make use of a computer to calculate some information during some novel non-obvious physical process to physically transform some physical article to a substanitively different physical state or substanitively different physical thing, fine you can have a patent on that new physical process. The incidental use of a computer does not remove the patentability of an otherwise patenentable physical process. The US Supreme court has said that any and all algorithm are treated as part of familiar art as far as patent purposes. For patent purposes any possible software must be treated as familiar prior art. You can make use of a computer in an invention, but computers cannot implement any invention, not ever. Computers can only implement math and mathematical algorithms. Insignificant post solution physical activity does not change software into a patentable process.
Slashdot Mirror
In related news, people with one deaf ear can't hear in stereo anyway.
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Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The 2007 CIA World Factbook by United States. Central Intelligence Agency
The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Ulysses by James Joyce
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
Paradise Lost by John Milton
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Grimm's Fairy Tales by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
The Marvelous Land Of Oz by L. Frank Baum
Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
Amazon.com has all or nearly all of those books, some as DRM-Kindle ebooks.
Now... what idiot here wants explain to me why the hell I SHOULDN'T have this convenient Download-torrent-from-ThePirateBay button show up on the page in my Firefox browser? And offer me their brilliant rant on how this browser extension is or shoud-be illegal?
-
And a billboard giving detailed instructions on... running a confidence scam, successfully robbing banks, the finer points of mugging, or the detailed design of a botnet/phishing/money laundering operation
I know these people are in the Netherlands, but just a general FYI to this discussion, in the US all of those things are not only legal but it would be unconstitutional for congress to create any law criminalizing it.
If you want to blow up some building, and someone else says they are willing to do it if you give them the explosive formula, that is conspiracy to commit a crime, and that is a crime.
If you are working the register at a store, and you have actual knowledge that some particular person intends to murder someone by forcing a rubber duck down their throat, it is criminal aiding and abetting to sell that rubber ducky to that particular person.
However if you merely publish something and you don't commit any other actual crime, the fact that some generic person might use the information to commit some unknown crime does not make it criminal for you to publish that information - even on a billboard.
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What is illegal about this?
I believe that would be the crime of pissing off a corporation with enough money to rape your pathetic ass in court.
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I think you mean molten ice.
Jupiter's moon Europa also has a core of molten ice. I it even erupts occasionally from volcanos, as Europan lava.
Thousands of people die each year from molten ice inhalation.
Ask your congressman to ban molten ice!
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Oh look, I just fed a troll.
Consider it an act of compassion.
They're probably going hungry from the acorn shortage.
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So you have irrefutable evidence that global warming is due to fossil fuel combustion products
Yes. It is trivial physics.
Carbon dioxide (and other gasses) trap thermal radiation. No one disputes this trivial point of physics. Carbon dioxide and other gasses has already produced about 50 degrees of global warming.
Yes, the size of underlying effect is already about 50 degrees. The normal pre-existing gasses in the atmosphere already trap thermal raditation and already warm the globe by about 50 degrees. Without the atmosphere and greenhouse gasses, the planet would be an iceball colder than the coldest ice age.
Even the most radical global warming denialists do not dispute the fact that humans have increased CO2 (and other gasses) in the atmosphere. Humans have raised CO2 levels from about 280 ppm to over 380 ppm. This is not in dispute.
CO2 and other gasses trap heat, and humans have increased the quantity of these heat trapping gasses. It is trivial physics - a blatantly obvious one - that increasing the quantity of trapping gasses will increase the heat trapping effect. The youngest school child knows that a thicker blanket will trap more heat and keep you warmer in bed.
End of argument. The basic effect is is real and indisputable.
The SIZE of the effect is a difficult complex and uncertain scientific matter. Predicting the FUTURE size and FUTURE consequences is a difficult complex and uncertain scientific matter. What we SHOULD DO or WILL DO about it is a difficult complex and uncertain POLITICAL matter.
The idea that it is not a real physical effect, the idea that it is even uncertain, that is a public relations position, that is a media subject of argument, that is a political position, that is an ideological position, and it is simply factually wrong.
and not, say, the output of the sun [freerepublic.com]?
Any effect from the sun would be IN PARALLEL with the real indisputable physical fact that these will still trap heat, any effect from the sun would be IN PRALLEL with the fact that humans are increasing the levels of heat trapping gasses.
The idea that this is an either-or situation is a fallacy.
You, me, and Mr. Freeper walk into a room and see a man lying on the floor in a pool of blood.
I say he's been shot and he's about to bleed to death if we don't do something to stop the bleeding.
Mr. Freeper points to a broken window and says he does not believe the man was shot. Mr. Freeper says he believes the blood on the floor may have been caused by glass cuts.
Guess what? There's an indisputable bullet hole in the man's chest. Yes, it is certainly possible that the man also has glass cuts. Yes, it is a potentially valid theory that the man is bleeding from glass cuts. However it is an obvious fallacy to suggest that pointing to broken glass somehow invalidates the idea that he is bleeding from a gunshot. If Mr. Freeper's idea is completely correct, all that means is that the man lying on the floor is bleeding from BOTH the gunshot AND bleeding from glass cuts. At most it means BOTH are true.
Any possible issue with the sun, even if it is completely correct, is merely IN ADDITION to the indisputable physics that CO2 and other gasses do trap heat, and the indisputed fact that humans have increased the levels of these gasses, and the indisputable fact that this increases the warming effect.
we shouldn't have irrational, knee-jerk reactions to the use of fossil fuels.
I agree. However there is absolutely nothing irrational in the concern that CO2 does trap heat, and that we are dumping billions of tons into the atmosphere. Billions of tons of a gas is indeed a quantity of planetary scale. It has already increased atmospheric CO2 levels from 280 ppm to over 380 ppm.
What we should do about that - that is a very difficult issue that needs to be considered carefully and rationally. However it is irrational and just plain false for anyone to deny the fundamental fact that human are emittin
How do you expect him to believe you when you write smartsy-fartsy technobabble like 'thermohaline circulation', 'Dansgaard-Oescher events', and 'Europe'?
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Holy shit. Quadrant Magazine's own "about" page on themselves used to have:
Its stance is often described as conservative, neo-conservative, or rightwing. In fact it is not necessarily any of these things, but maintains a sceptical approach to unthinking Leftism, or political correctness, and its "smelly little orthodoxies". (Retrieved on 15 June 2008, according to Wikipedia)
Yeah, I'd say any left leaning publication selfdescribing as opposing the "smelly little orthodoxies" of the right would also well deserve the title rag.
I mean seriously... smelly? What are they? SIX?
Conservapedia has higher journalistic standards than that.
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Revelation 6:1-8, Sciuridae James Bible
And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see.
And I saw, and behold a white squirrel: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.
And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see.
And there went out another squirrel that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.
And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black squirrel; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.
And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.
And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see.
And I looked, and behold a pale squirrel: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
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Why doesn't the patent office just charge fees sufficient to fund enough examiners to get anything done in a month?
Patent fees already well exceed the examiners-and-other-expenses budget.
The US government siphons off patent office revenues to fund other projects.
There is no need to raise patent fees, you could actually lower the fees and hire more examiners. You just have to actually keep the fee money in the patent office and actually spend it on processing patents. But then you'd have to actually collect taxes to pay for the other things the government spends money on...
and collecting taxes to pay for stuff is bad.... mmm'kay?
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The problem with bittorrent, is that it's MORE convenient than watching TV the old fashioned way.
Chuckle. Yeah, I know what you mean.
The problem with electricity, is that it's MORE convenient than eating dinner in the dark after cooking it over a firepit.
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The above linked video is nearly an hour long.
He takes nearly the first half of that time before making grand announcement that the data structure will be... drumroll please... an 81 element array! He then lays out the top level design of a dumb-as-rocks guess-and-recursion approach, leaving several parts as homework, like testing weather placing a particular number in a certain spot would be legal. If you don't know enough programming to to fill in those details yourself, the video won't tell you how. If you do know enough programming that you *could* manage to write the most basic dumb-as-rocks guess-and-recursion sudoku solver on your own, you won't learn anything from the video.
If you are ok with the basics of programming and manipulating arrays and know what recursion is, but you have no idea how to attempt a sudoku solver, then skipping to somewhere around the halfway point in the video and watching the rest might be worthwhile.
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Curious about duck-typing, I asked Google define:duck-typing. No results were found in English, but it did return a hit in the German Wikipedia. I had bookmarked Yahoo as my translation service page back before Google offered one, so I used that link to translate the webpage into English. The Wikipedia article opens with an English quote "When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and Quack like a duck, I call that bird a duck", which is then followed by the German translation of the phrase retranslated back into English. Ok, so far so good, duck-typing obviously enough is seems to follow some notion if an object has the property Quacks like a Duck then it is somehow treated as a Duck type or somesuch. So I'm reading the translation and fighting hard to follow the broken translation example they are using to illustrate how it works and what it means, and I crash head on into the striking phrase "also frogs can quaken". Okaaaaay. Quaken is cute, and frogs quacking is funny. I'm thinking they are deliberately making a Frog type that Quacks-like-a-Duck to make some special point about duck-typing. Completely by chance I then also happened to pull up the Google translation of the page. There I happen find "even frogs can croak" in the same spot. Whoah, waitaminute. So I go look at the original German text and find that it actually does use the word "quaken" there. The German text uses "quak" in the duck section and "quak" in the phrase with frog.
So I've learned a few things.
(1) Apparently Germans use the same word for the noise-a-duck-makes and for the noise-a-frog-makes.
(2) Apparently Yahoo is not smart enough to translate "quak" as "croak" when a frog does it, and that that would have left me completely confused trying to understand the point being made by giving a frog a "Quacks like a Duck" property.
(3) Apparently Google silently has the "smarts" to translate the single word "quak" as either quak for birds or croak for frogs, and that that would have also left me completely confused by how duck-typing is handling a croaking frog and why the frog is gaining the ability to croak.
(4) I never would have figured out any of this if I hadn't randomly happened to pull up BOTH the Google and Yahoo translations.
(5) Now that I have learned that German frogs also quack, I've learned that my brain is bent over the example they are using. What the fuck is the Frog supposed to represent in the duck-typing illustration? Does/doesn't the Frog quack like a Duck? Is/isn't/should/shouldn't the Frog be accepted as a Duck type, and what the fuck is that supposed mean? What the fuck relationship is Frog supposed/not-supposed to have with the Bird and Duck types?
(6) The measure of information I have gained on duck-typing has actually been a negative number due to all of this. My brain now contains scar tissue on what was once pristine blank neurological storage space.
And finally number (6) I learned:
I
QUIT
Adventures in duck-typing.
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Al-Qaeda has infiltrated Dell customer service.
Yes. The fools!
Why else do you think Al-Qaeda operations have ground to almost a complete halt?
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Pffft! Apache pilot.
His son is a lawyer. Only half the world wants to shoot your son.
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He's a geek, who just happens to be in the Army. Send in the Stallman.
"I'm not leaving here 'till he gets his laptop!"
You'll get your laptop ASAP. Just so he'll leave.
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For a multi-tier system to work properly, the level 2 staff should be the supervisors of the level 1 staff, and the level 3 staff should be the supervisors of level 2.
And who supervises the level 3 staff?
Joke-serious answer version 1:
A clueless suit.
Joke-serious answer version 2:
Linus Torvalds.
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I realize it's considered terribly clever on Slashdot to deride every patent as "obvious", but it would be nice if people realized that the title of the patent does not indicate what the patent covers
Ok, fair enough.
What the patent *actually covers* is in the claims.
Yep. Exactly.
I went and read the claims. Amongst other things they are claiming a patent on taking a sandwich order, toasting the bread, and heating up the sandwich-filling while the bread toasts.
Yeah, we can fairly deride this one.
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Well, if you want to go quoting Bill Gates on patents...
"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today."
-- Bill Gates 1991 internal memo to senior executives, prior to his own motivation to weaponize software patents against open source software.
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Assume for the moment that the method in question is both new and non-obvious.
They are claiming a patent on:
Translating from patentese into plain English, they are claiming a patent on:
Assume for the moment that the method in question is both new and non-obvious.
Assume for the moment BITE ME.
New and non-obvious my ass.
Almost no one around here seriously objects to patents on new physical devices. Not many here even object to physical process patents on physically transforming something like ore into elemental metal. But why do most patent lawyers have this pathological compulsion to promote and defend the patentability of anything they can commit to paper? Almost all of the claims filed here are obvious, under any sane stander of review. Almost all of the claims filed here are not truly novel, under any sane stander of review. And while yes, this is at least a claim on a physical process of physical sandwich making, I would say that "transformation of an article to a different state or thing" should be a substantive requirement. Placing bread on top of ham&cheese then flipping it over is hardly novel, it is not particularly non-obvious having been endlessly "invented" by common cooks and in home kitchens across the globe, and I'd say it fails to meet any reasonable substantive meaning of "transforming an article to a different state or thing".
Most people here are not anti-patent, but they do have a problem with patents becomming some horror movie monster escaping out of control from its box and devouring everything in sight. People here are largely programmers, and have a particular objection to patents on math - where "patents on math" means any and all "computer implemented inventions" lacking significant physical "post solution activity". Note that it was the US Supreme Court who declared that algorithms were unpatentable, and that "insignificant post solution activity" cannot be used to draft an unpatentable algorithm into a patentable process.
Computers cannot implement any invention. Computers can only calculate. Any and all software is nothing more than algorithm, nothing more than math. If you happen to include a computer in some novel non-obvious device you invent, fine you can have a patent on that new object. The incidental presence of a computer does not remove the patentability of an otherwise patenentable new object. If you incidentally make use of a computer to calculate some information during some novel non-obvious physical process to physically transform some physical article to a substanitively different physical state or substanitively different physical thing, fine you can have a patent on that new physical process. The incidental use of a computer does not remove the patentability of an otherwise patenentable physical process. The US Supreme court has said that any and all algorithm are treated as part of familiar art as far as patent purposes. For patent purposes any possible software must be treated as familiar prior art. You can make use of a computer in an invention, but computers cannot implement any invention, not ever. Computers can only implement math and mathematical algorithms. Insignificant post solution physical activity does not change software into a patentable process.
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Failing memory faculties... you were probably replaced :)
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WHAT AN OFFENSIVE COMMENT!!!
Business has nothing to do with it.
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Reality is a stalker Ex?
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Back in the day, we put them on boats and sent them to America.
See? More proof Darwin was wrong! ;)