While I agree with the sentiment, this isn't good logic. Since software is a combination of algorithms, the combination of those algorithms may be non-obvious and novel.
Any combination of algorithms in software is itself an algorithm. Knuth isn't arguing obviousness or novelty; he's arguing that software isn't patentable subject matter at all, no matter how non-obvious or novel it may be.
This is a common thing seen with drug addiction. Its easy for a user to stay clean while they are in jail. But chances are that once they get out they'll go back to using.
Maybe it isn't an addiction at that point. The withdrawal symptoms are over, the physical dependence is demonstrably absent. Maybe it's just something they fucking LIKE DOING. Whatever it is, whether drugs or eating or gambling or indeed the Internet. Just because a bunch of bluenoses have managed to demonize the activity by claiming it's an addiction doesn't mean it really is.
(Contrast smoking, which it is decidedly NOT easy for a user to stay clean while in jail, even in jails where smoking is forbidden. Now THAT is an addiction)
The problem that the earlier poster was referring to is that many environmentalists would rather support no option until a perfect option is somehow devised, and in the meantime, we're all supposed to sit around in the dark.
Bingo. Which leads some of us to suspect that making us sit around in the dark is the actual goal.
1: Stop throwing away 60% of our energy through "waste" heat. Which is pretty much what every electricity generating plant does.
Problem 1: It's really hard to move low-grade heat around and still have it be useful at the destination. Not too many of us live literally right next to a power plant. I live a few miles from two different ones, but there's no way you're going to usefully pipe the heat to my place. Problem 2: You could only do so in the winter
2: Stop using 50% of our 40% efficient electricity to move heat around... See air conditioning
Uh, yeah. You swelter in the heat, I'm keeping my AC. As for district cooling, an absence of heat is even harder to move usefully than a slight excess of heat.
(I'm also not for giving up the benefits of the industrial revolution with respect to transportation, nor of replacing the Green Revolution which gave us an abundance of food with a new Green Revolution which leaves us hungry)
I know some guys at a company who does planning for installations in buildings (such as ventilation, water, sewage, etc). When the deadline for a project is negotiated it usually goes like this:
[boss] How much time do you need for this project? [employee] I think this will require a little more than a week... [boss] Alright, I give you two days.
Thus the Engineer Scott approach:
[employee] We canna get this done in less than two months, Captain. [boss] You've got two weeks, Mr. Scott [employee] (a bit over a week later) Job's done, boss [boss] You're a genius, Scotty.
Of course, this requires your boss be dumb enough to fall for it every time.
Now that we are aware of the increasing use by law enforcement of cell phone records, won't criminal simply setup their cell phones at some alibi spot, go off and commit the crime and use the records as support for that alibi?
No, because most criminals aren't that intelligent or thoughtful.
Problem 1: Suppose the gaze-tracking works perfectly under static conditions (during training before the scrambling). Now the scramble kicks in and you've got crap changing all over the screen. You're going to notice that; it's going to be irritating. And when you catch something changing, you're going to look at it. Thus screwing up the algorithm.
Problem 2: The algorithm isn't going to be 100% perfect. And it doesn't have to be camo far off to make melvin unreliable.
The problem, as many have noted, is that once something is available on the internet, the cat's out of the bag. So the damages shouldn't be based on one infringement, the damages should be based on the value of the cat being kept in the bag.
Once the CD is published, the cat is out of the bag. So again, actual damages are zero.
You'd think they'd have accidentally stumbled across more efficient means of making incandescent bulbs while researching methods planned obsolescence in their bulbs. Edison's bulb is still working, but the ones sold in stores burn out within a year? Call me cynical, but the tech to lake long-lasting bulbs has been around for over a century.
Edison's first carbon filament bulb lasted 40 hours.
Incandescent light bulb bulbs have a tradeoff between efficiency and lifetime. If you want your bulb to be more efficient, you make the filament thinner. If you want it to have a longer life, you make the filament thicker. If you want a long-lasting bulb, get a "commercial service" bulb, usually marked "130V" as well. It will last a long time, but it won't give off much light for its wattage.
If you have a location where a bulb burns out often, check to see if the fixture is subject to a lot of vibration for some reason.
Any time you are in a climate that uses air conditioning part time that benefit during the winter is negated by the extra cost of cooling in the summer. Unless of course you switch between CFL/incandescent when seasons change
I use less artificial lighting in the summer, actually.
2) As long as I can remember, my mother has thrown batteries into the garbage. Once I confronted her about it, and she just simply didn't believe that pollution was a problem. In her simple mind, the world simply "works" and will continue to work as long as she believes in America.
Alkaline and zinc batteries are OK to throw away (except it's illegal illegal in California, but what isn't?). The bad ones are mercury button batteries (pretty unusual nowadays), nickel-cadmium, and lead-acid. NiMH and lithium cells can be recycled, but they're not actually considered hazardous (except by California).
I brought my fluorescent tubes (I replaced about 20 tubes at once), a few small lead-acid batteries and a car battery to a hazardous waste drop-off, but my county only has a few of those a year and they're not very convenient. I can't see anyone doing it to take care of the occasional failed CF bulb.
Incandescent light bulbs: 100CRI, color temperature 2800-3200, relatively inefficient, relatively short lived, cheap.
Halogen: 100CRI, color temperature 3000-3200, slightly more efficient, long lived but decline in output near EOL. Expensive. Need dedicated fixtures.
Halogen Infrared: 95+CRI, slightly more efficient than halogen, and more expensive. I wish I could find these for my halogen fixtures.
Fluorescent: ~85CRI for the best common bulbs (the 90+ tubes are considerably more expensive and half the efficiency). Color temperature 3000-6000. Efficient, long lived, decline in output near EOL. Poor cold-weather performance. Need dedicated fixtures. Flicker and buzz if used with standard ballasts; can be eliminated with electronic ballasts. Contain mercury.
Compact fluorescent: Claim long life but don't deliver. Cheap ones flicker and buzz. CRI claimed to be 80+, perhaps the better ones deliver but the cheap ones don't. Color temperature 3000-6000 (but the cheap ones won't deliver what's on the box). Poor cold weather performance. Don't need dedicated fixtures. Expensive. Contain mercury.
LED: Geeks like them because LEDs are cool, but as a practical replacement for general lighting they aren't there yet. Even when they are, they use phosphors and are thus likely to have the same poor CRI as fluorescents.
And that's why some of us don't want to use those "farking efficient" light bulbs. Because they farking suck. If Phillips has managed to get a halogen or halogen infrared capsule to work properly inside a standard bulb envelope, I could get behind that. But compact fluorescent is the worst tradeoff, and the rest are very limiting in terms of fixtures.
So, anything else they promise, GET IT WRITING. When they pass a law, and you say "yeah, but it's so loosely worded that you can use it for [i]this other thing[/i]," and they say "but we won't," get it in writing.
It was in writing; that's why "NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION" was on the cards. As with other well-known governmental entitites, they chose to change the agreement and inform complainers that they should be hopeful there would be no further changes. Whenever a law has potential for abuse, even if language is specifically written to preclude that abuse, instead 1) Assume they're lying. and 2) Assume that even if they aren't, some future opportunist will break the promises made by the earlier legislation.
The Veyron is a penis substitute, just like an Enzo. Period, end of story. If there's no actual joy in your life, you can buy a car, and risk your life in order to find some.
Yeah, like there's no risk involved with the former. I mean, what do you think is more dangerous
1) Running the Veyron at 200+mph on public roads or 2) Trying to pick up that hot chick with the tattoos, leather, piercings, and chains?
(Bring the Veyron and you may succeed at #2, but that doesn't make it any safer...)
They also demonstrated the silliest thing about it, or any 200+ MPH car... It takes quite a while to get to those speeds. You may get 0-60 in 3 seconds, but the acceleration drops off rather rapidly. About the only place you can get a car like that up to speed *is* a test track with an enormous straight.
No way on Earth I would work hard writing or creating something to have it passed around the Internet for free. I create for my own profit, not your entertainment.
A 100% share of nothing is still nothing. And that's about what DRM will get you. If you manage to succeed in selling despite the DRM... you'll be pirated anyway.
$49K USD? Is that in 2009 dollars, or 2011 dollars?:-) If there is a massive period of dollar hyper-inflation in the next year, I think Tesla can stand to make a lot of money on promises no one can afford to keep.
Fictional dollars. The price of the roadster went up significantly between pre-order and release; no reason the S will be any different. And as with the Roadster, I think we'll see the specs change for the worse as well. (45-minute charge? As has been pointed out, the math doesn't add up, and the chemistry doesn't work either)
There is lots of very useful information on the internet. Martial Arts weapons are a perfectly good example of finding high-quality, even admissable evidence.
Here's the problem: Some poor slob is caught with an odd-looking knife, and is charged with carrying an offensive weapon. The cops go onto Wikipedia and find an article about said knife which describes it as a "Ninja weapon" and "used exclusively for cutting the throats of victims from behind". The cop goes into court and soberly testifies about how this knife the guy was caught with has no peaceful purpose and is used for cutting people's throats from behind. Problem is, unbeknownst to the cops and to the Wikipedia author, like many martial arts weapons it was adapted from a tool, and it's actually some sort of common Japanese knife for cutting up fish. But in court, by repeating the Wikipedia testimony, the cop lends his own authority to it, and the fisherman goes to prison because.
Sure, it's a stupid patent. Sure, it merely applies existing general techniques to a specific domain they were already applicable to. But as far as I'm concerned, Amazon can have this patent and have it forever. Then I'll know if I get e-books from a competitor, there won't be any stinking ads in them.
Slashdot Mirror
Any combination of algorithms in software is itself an algorithm. Knuth isn't arguing obviousness or novelty; he's arguing that software isn't patentable subject matter at all, no matter how non-obvious or novel it may be.
Maybe it isn't an addiction at that point. The withdrawal symptoms are over, the physical dependence is demonstrably absent. Maybe it's just something they fucking LIKE DOING. Whatever it is, whether drugs or eating or gambling or indeed the Internet. Just because a bunch of bluenoses have managed to demonize the activity by claiming it's an addiction doesn't mean it really is.
(Contrast smoking, which it is decidedly NOT easy for a user to stay clean while in jail, even in jails where smoking is forbidden. Now THAT is an addiction)
Bingo. Which leads some of us to suspect that making us sit around in the dark is the actual goal.
Problem 1: It's really hard to move low-grade heat around and still have it be useful at the destination. Not too many of us live literally right next to a power plant. I live a few miles from two different ones, but there's no way you're going to usefully pipe the heat to my place.
Problem 2: You could only do so in the winter
Uh, yeah. You swelter in the heat, I'm keeping my AC. As for district cooling, an absence of heat is even harder to move usefully than a slight excess of heat.
(I'm also not for giving up the benefits of the industrial revolution with respect to transportation, nor of replacing the Green Revolution which gave us an abundance of food with a new Green Revolution which leaves us hungry)
Thus the Engineer Scott approach:
[employee] We canna get this done in less than two months, Captain.
[boss] You've got two weeks, Mr. Scott
[employee] (a bit over a week later) Job's done, boss
[boss] You're a genius, Scotty.
Of course, this requires your boss be dumb enough to fall for it every time.
No, because most criminals aren't that intelligent or thoughtful.
Problem 1: Suppose the gaze-tracking works perfectly under static conditions (during training before the scrambling). Now the scramble kicks in and you've got crap changing all over the screen. You're going to notice that; it's going to be irritating. And when you catch something changing, you're going to look at it. Thus screwing up the algorithm.
Problem 2: The algorithm isn't going to be 100% perfect. And it doesn't have to be camo far off to make melvin unreliable.
That IS a destroyed life. Ask anyone buried in student loan debt. If they haven't taken out Chapter .45 bankruptcy yet, anyway.
Once the CD is published, the cat is out of the bag. So again, actual damages are zero.
No. That's what the "making available" ruling determined.
Edison's first carbon filament bulb lasted 40 hours.
Incandescent light bulb bulbs have a tradeoff between efficiency and lifetime. If you want your bulb to be more efficient, you make the filament thinner. If you want it to have a longer life, you make the filament thicker. If you want a long-lasting bulb, get a "commercial service" bulb, usually marked "130V" as well. It will last a long time, but it won't give off much light for its wattage.
If you have a location where a bulb burns out often, check to see if the fixture is subject to a lot of vibration for some reason.
Get a heat pump if you want to be cold. Heat pumps are the CFLs of heating.
I use less artificial lighting in the summer, actually.
Alkaline and zinc batteries are OK to throw away (except it's illegal illegal in California, but what isn't?). The bad ones are mercury button batteries (pretty unusual nowadays), nickel-cadmium, and lead-acid. NiMH and lithium cells can be recycled, but they're not actually considered hazardous (except by California).
I brought my fluorescent tubes (I replaced about 20 tubes at once), a few small lead-acid batteries and a car battery to a hazardous waste drop-off, but my county only has a few of those a year and they're not very convenient. I can't see anyone doing it to take care of the occasional failed CF bulb.
Incandescent light bulbs: 100CRI, color temperature 2800-3200, relatively inefficient, relatively short lived, cheap.
Halogen: 100CRI, color temperature 3000-3200, slightly more efficient, long lived but decline in output near EOL. Expensive. Need dedicated fixtures.
Halogen Infrared: 95+CRI, slightly more efficient than halogen, and more expensive. I wish I could find these for my halogen fixtures.
Fluorescent: ~85CRI for the best common bulbs (the 90+ tubes are considerably more expensive and half the efficiency). Color temperature 3000-6000. Efficient, long lived, decline in output near EOL. Poor cold-weather performance. Need dedicated fixtures. Flicker and buzz if used with standard ballasts; can be eliminated with electronic ballasts. Contain mercury.
Compact fluorescent: Claim long life but don't deliver. Cheap ones flicker and buzz. CRI claimed to be 80+, perhaps the better ones deliver but the cheap ones don't. Color temperature 3000-6000 (but the cheap ones won't deliver what's on the box). Poor cold weather performance. Don't need dedicated fixtures. Expensive. Contain mercury.
LED: Geeks like them because LEDs are cool, but as a practical replacement for general lighting they aren't there yet. Even when they are, they use phosphors and are thus likely to have the same poor CRI as fluorescents.
And that's why some of us don't want to use those "farking efficient" light bulbs. Because they farking suck. If Phillips has managed to get a halogen or halogen infrared capsule to work properly inside a standard bulb envelope, I could get behind that. But compact fluorescent is the worst tradeoff, and the rest are very limiting in terms of fixtures.
It was in writing; that's why "NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION" was on the cards. As with other well-known governmental entitites, they chose to change the agreement and inform complainers that they should be hopeful there would be no further changes. Whenever a law has potential for abuse, even if language is specifically written to preclude that abuse, instead
1) Assume they're lying.
and
2) Assume that even if they aren't, some future opportunist will break the promises made by the earlier legislation.
So it's a waldo. Picky, picky.
Rain on your wedding day isn't ironic without a big stretch, but a free ride when you've already paid could easily be situational irony.
It's not a broken window, because it misses the essential element of the destruction of value.
Yeah, like there's no risk involved with the former. I mean, what do you think is more dangerous
1) Running the Veyron at 200+mph on public roads or
2) Trying to pick up that hot chick with the tattoos, leather, piercings, and chains?
(Bring the Veyron and you may succeed at #2, but that doesn't make it any safer...)
You've never heard of Interstate 95?
A 100% share of nothing is still nothing. And that's about what DRM will get you. If you manage to succeed in selling despite the DRM... you'll be pirated anyway.
Fictional dollars. The price of the roadster went up significantly between pre-order and release; no reason the S will be any different. And as with the Roadster, I think we'll see the specs change for the worse as well. (45-minute charge? As has been pointed out, the math doesn't add up, and the chemistry doesn't work either)
Here's the problem: Some poor slob is caught with an odd-looking knife, and is charged with carrying an offensive weapon. The cops go onto Wikipedia and find an article about said knife which describes it as a "Ninja weapon" and "used exclusively for cutting the throats of victims from behind". The cop goes into court and soberly testifies about how this knife the guy was caught with has no peaceful purpose and is used for cutting people's throats from behind. Problem is, unbeknownst to the cops and to the Wikipedia author, like many martial arts weapons it was adapted from a tool, and it's actually some sort of common Japanese knife for cutting up fish. But in court, by repeating the Wikipedia testimony, the cop lends his own authority to it, and the fisherman goes to prison because.
Sure, it's a stupid patent. Sure, it merely applies existing general techniques to a specific domain they were already applicable to. But as far as I'm concerned, Amazon can have this patent and have it forever. Then I'll know if I get e-books from a competitor, there won't be any stinking ads in them.