No, they haven't patented "the" implementation or "this price or best offer equivalent". They've patented ANY implementation of "this price or best offer equivalent" in an "electronic dynamic pricing system" (which is some of that excess verbiage I'm referring to). That's patenting the goal. Sort of like patenting "a method of separating wheat from chaff in a mechanically-driven system"; you're not supposed to be able to do that. You can patent a particular threshing machine, but not the whole class of machines which thresh wheat.
Well, truthfully, it's exceedingly rare that consumers completely lose out on a useful feature or service as a result of a patent dispute. (Can anyone even recall a single instance of this?)
"Buy it now" isn't a "limit type order", which would be on the bidder side, not the sellers side. It's a slight variant on "or best offer" -- that is, "I'll sell this for $50 or best offer", the variant being that the $50 offer is only good until the first non-$50 offer. The idea that this is patentable merely because it's done as part of an online auction (as opposed to an online classified ad) is ludicrous (like much of the rest of the patent system).
Of course, MercExchange has dressed this simple idea up in excess verbiage to disguise the fact that it's neither novel nor non-obvious. EBay would probably rather not point that out as they have a bunch of similar patents on non-novel ideas.
Here's a thought Hollywood, stop making movies about gay cowboys and pimps.
Or at least put them together in the same movie.
One of the problems with the Oscars is the Academy has a strong bias towards movies which strive to be Important, rather than entertaining. So producers, directors, etc, particularly those already rich as hell, have a strong incentive to make such movies for the prestige. Obviously a movie can be both, but often enough they sacrifice entertainment value for Importance.
Only two things can come of a non-management type taking a $150,000 dollar management job
1) He screws up, gets fired, then is "overqualified" for technical positions he subsequently applies for and ends up taking a $7/hour job.
or
2) He screws up, retains his job and even gets promoted, but is miserable as hell doing it. Eventually his company has to downsize (or goes under) due to poor management and he gets laid off.
The problem is that some of the idiots yelling "VIOLATION" have lawyers. See the Blizzard v. Bnetd case. Even if you haven't signed an NDA, they can get you for reverse-engineering their code, either through the DMCA or by pulling out the shrink-wrap EULA.
It's utter bullshit, but bullshit with powerful backers.
On the positive side, with wireless, anonymity is trivial.
There are generally accepted accounting practices which are used to determine things like revenue, gross profit, net profit, etc. Hollywood doesn't use them; they use their own set of rules which are more arbitrary, more byzantine, and which at first glance appear to put items on the wrong side of the balance sheet.
Problem is, no one in their right mind in Hollywood trusts percentages of revenue unless they've got a lawyers as mean as the production company's. Hollywood accounting means that even a percentage of the gross can be worthless.
If Oracle et al were snapping these companies up for pennies on the dollar, THAT would be grim. Since they seem to be paying good money for them, the most likely effect is for them to attract new developers who have the basic business plan of
1) Write open-source software 2) Sell out to The Man 3) Profit!!
Of course, for most of them Step 2 ain't going to work out and Step 3 will be a mirage in the distance, but open source still benefits from Step 1.
Does anybody here remember the day everyone made their webpages BLACK as a protest? Does anybody remember when it was OKAY to fight back against something that was wrong? Now it seems, the M.O. is to give up, pay the bastards and lick your wounds, regardless of who's right or wrong.
Well, when all those gestures came to nought, what else was there to do? You'll notice that despite all the fighting, bad patents keep getting issued at an astonishing rate, the Communications Decency Act has been reauthorized under a new name, the DMCA is as strong as ever, copyright has not been reduced in scope one iota, and the EFF has pretty much thrown in the towel on those issues. The simple fact is that to operate at all today, you either have to be under the radar, or pay your tribute to the IP rulers.
The study says nothing about being able to ascertain tone in real e-mail messages where cues for tone may actually be present. It says that it's impossible to ascertain the state of mind of people sending canned e-mail messages which (having been composed by someone other than the sender) have no cues for tone. Probably should have been published in the Annals of Improbable Research instead of a serious journal.
First thing to do is to make sure you have everything in order BEFORE you resign. In particular, remove any personal data (which shouldn't be there but, let's face it, probably is) and back up (to machines under your control) any data on company machines which you believe you are entitled to. That way you're prepared if they do boot you immediately.
I always go for a fairly minimal resignation letter, of the general form, "I resign my position at 'blah' effective (now + 2 weeks), have a nice day. I think last time I put "to pursue another opportunity" in there. So far I've never had an employer revoke my access immediately or tell me to forget the two weeks. But I think that there's always a chance they'll do so, either because they're generally paranoid, because someone else screwed them in the past, or because you've been muttering about how you're going to "get those bastards" for the past month or so. Anyway, you really don't have much to complain about -- you got your two weeks pay without having to do the work.
You'd were the guy who told Bell Labs "...and sure this transistor has practical uses, but nothing a vacuum tube can't do cheaper, when you consider the cost of research", right?
A transparent ceramic that's lighter and stronger than glass and the various plastics now used, and you think it doesn't have a practical application? It doesn't even take much of an imagination to find tons. Armor, obviously. Better windows on aircraft and spacecraft (where weight matters much more than on a ground vehicle). Child-proof computer monitors (OK, that one's a stretch...)
I'd have expected the US people to say "the foundation of our great nation is being undermined! time to take action".Instead an outsider could almost come to believe that US citizens don't mind ground into the dirt. Just so long as the jackboots have "Made in the USA" printed on the sole.
That outsider would be right. Most US citizens _don't_ mind being ground into the dirt; they just happily throw their lighters away into the TSA bins, smile as their cold medicines are taken off the shelves, and contendly watch the commercials at the beginning of their DVDs. That's a large part of why the US will never be free again; there's no constituency for freedom. The foundation of our great nation _has been_ undermined. It is too late for any action.
Go to www.globeexplorer.com. Enter the address "1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC, 20500". Go to town. That's an aerial photo. If it's a map you want, you can buy them pretty much anywhere, or even go to http://www.usgs.gov/ and get a topo.
Formal verification of the source code and tool chain won't do it either. There might be errors in the verification.... which is guaranteed to be at least as complex as the program being verified.
Since, with software, there's no good distinction between the description of device and the device itself, the court is splitting a mighty fine hair there. It's pretty clear why, too -- they wanted to uphold the law (because of who the plaintiffs and defendants were, mostly), despite it's damn clear unconstitutionality.
Douglas Adams once posited a program which, given a set of premises and a desired conclusion, would find a logical-sounding set of steps leading from one to the other. This decision appears to be the output of such a program (but actually lawyers and judges have been doing that for millenia)
I suppose it could be worse. The US Justice Department takes the position that instructions -- whether intended for a computer or a person -- aren't protected speech full stop.
The section of the DMCA which says it doesn't affect defenses to copyright infringement (which is mostly covered by 17 USC 106) doesn't make it legal to write your own software to overcome technical protection measures. That section was put in there to make the bill look "fair and balanced", but it actually has no effect. This is because fair use is NOT and never was a defense to violation of the DMCA device provisions in 17 USC 1201(a) and (b).
Please note that while the copyright office can grant exemptions to allow the act of circumventing technical protection schemes, they cannot grant exemptions to allow the manufacture or trafficking in devices which can circumvent those measures. So even if your special pleadings get you an exemption, you can't legally make or purchase a device which can do the job.
Nothing is stopping you from doing just that. The law actually prohibits distributing, selling, and/or giving away such software. You are perfectly within your rights to write your own software to bypass what is on a DVD, etc. That is, as long as you are engaging in fair usage. (archival purposes, educational, etc.)
Unfortunately, not so. The law prohibits manufacturing anti-circumvention devices also. So you can't write your own software either.
So don't blame the Judicial Branch, they are just doing their jobs. They have no authority to overturn the DMCA at all.
Sure they do. The device provisions are a direct violation of freedom of speech. They prevent utterance and publication of certain speech -- specifically, speech that can be used to instruct a computer how to bypass copy protection measures. Further, the DMCA, in the 2600 case, has been used successfully to prevent publication of speech which tells other people where to find such instructions. That's an even clearer violation, if you don't believe code is speech.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they haven't patented "the" implementation or "this price or best offer equivalent". They've patented ANY implementation of "this price or best offer equivalent" in an "electronic dynamic pricing system" (which is some of that excess verbiage I'm referring to). That's patenting the goal. Sort of like patenting "a method of separating wheat from chaff in a mechanically-driven system"; you're not supposed to be able to do that. You can patent a particular threshing machine, but not the whole class of machines which thresh wheat.
"Buy it now" isn't a "limit type order", which would be on the bidder side, not the sellers side. It's a slight variant on "or best offer" -- that is, "I'll sell this for $50 or best offer", the variant being that the $50 offer is only good until the first non-$50 offer. The idea that this is patentable merely because it's done as part of an online auction (as opposed to an online classified ad) is ludicrous (like much of the rest of the patent system).
Of course, MercExchange has dressed this simple idea up in excess verbiage to disguise the fact that it's neither novel nor non-obvious. EBay would probably rather not point that out as they have a bunch of similar patents on non-novel ideas.
Only two things can come of a non-management type taking a $150,000 dollar management job
1) He screws up, gets fired, then is "overqualified" for technical positions he subsequently applies for and ends up taking a $7/hour job.
or
2) He screws up, retains his job and even gets promoted, but is miserable as hell doing it. Eventually his company has to downsize (or goes under) due to poor management and he gets laid off.
The problem is that some of the idiots yelling "VIOLATION" have lawyers. See the Blizzard v. Bnetd case. Even if you haven't signed an NDA, they can get you for reverse-engineering their code, either through the DMCA or by pulling out the shrink-wrap EULA.
It's utter bullshit, but bullshit with powerful backers.
On the positive side, with wireless, anonymity is trivial.
There are generally accepted accounting practices which are used to determine things like revenue, gross profit, net profit, etc. Hollywood doesn't use them; they use their own set of rules which are more arbitrary, more byzantine, and which at first glance appear to put items on the wrong side of the balance sheet.
Problem is, no one in their right mind in Hollywood trusts percentages of revenue unless they've got a lawyers as mean as the production company's. Hollywood accounting means that even a percentage of the gross can be worthless.
Yeah, but if you read the article you find out that they don't actually read Slashdot. Instead, they just make stuff up about Slashdot.
If Oracle et al were snapping these companies up for pennies on the dollar, THAT would be grim. Since they seem to be paying good money for them, the most likely effect is for them to attract new developers who have the basic business plan of
1) Write open-source software
2) Sell out to The Man
3) Profit!!
Of course, for most of them Step 2 ain't going to work out and Step 3 will be a mirage in the distance, but open source still benefits from Step 1.
The study says nothing about being able to ascertain tone in real e-mail messages where cues for tone may actually be present. It says that it's impossible to ascertain the state of mind of people sending canned e-mail messages which (having been composed by someone other than the sender) have no cues for tone. Probably should have been published in the Annals of Improbable Research instead of a serious journal.
First thing to do is to make sure you have everything in order BEFORE you resign. In particular, remove any personal data (which shouldn't be there but, let's face it, probably is) and back up (to machines under your control) any data on company machines which you believe you are entitled to. That way you're prepared if they do boot you immediately.
I always go for a fairly minimal resignation letter, of the general form, "I resign my position at 'blah' effective (now + 2 weeks), have a nice day. I think last time I put "to pursue another opportunity" in there. So far I've never had an employer revoke my access immediately or tell me to forget the two weeks. But I think that there's always a chance they'll do so, either because they're generally paranoid, because someone else screwed them in the past, or because you've been muttering about how you're going to "get those bastards" for the past month or so. Anyway, you really don't have much to complain about -- you got your two weeks pay without having to do the work.
You'd were the guy who told Bell Labs "...and sure this transistor has practical uses, but nothing a vacuum tube can't do cheaper, when you consider the cost of research", right?
A transparent ceramic that's lighter and stronger than glass and the various plastics now used, and you think it doesn't have a practical application? It doesn't even take much of an imagination to find tons. Armor, obviously. Better windows on aircraft and spacecraft (where weight matters much more than on a ground vehicle). Child-proof computer monitors (OK, that one's a stretch...)
Err, my double-helical DNA sequence contains all those mirror DNA sequences too. I'm 33; any patents on my genes would have run out a while ago.
That outsider would be right. Most US citizens _don't_ mind being ground into the dirt; they just happily throw their lighters away into the TSA bins, smile as their cold medicines are taken off the shelves, and contendly watch the commercials at the beginning of their DVDs. That's a large part of why the US will never be free again; there's no constituency for freedom. The foundation of our great nation _has been_ undermined. It is too late for any action.
Go to www.globeexplorer.com. Enter the address "1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC, 20500". Go to town. That's an aerial photo. If it's a map you want, you can buy them pretty much anywhere, or even go to http://www.usgs.gov/ and get a topo.
...top mice vote to bell cat.
Formal verification of the source code and tool chain won't do it either. There might be errors in the verification.... which is guaranteed to be at least as complex as the program being verified.
Except that Europe is trying to jump down the same rathole as fast as it can.
Forget about Shelley. Try Orwell instead. You want to see the future of the world? Imagine a boot stomping on a human face -- forever.
Since, with software, there's no good distinction between the description of device and the device itself, the court is splitting a mighty fine hair there. It's pretty clear why, too -- they wanted to uphold the law (because of who the plaintiffs and defendants were, mostly), despite it's damn clear unconstitutionality.
Douglas Adams once posited a program which, given a set of premises and a desired conclusion, would find a logical-sounding set of steps leading from one to the other. This decision appears to be the output of such a program (but actually lawyers and judges have been doing that for millenia)
I suppose it could be worse. The US Justice Department takes the position that instructions -- whether intended for a computer or a person -- aren't protected speech full stop.
The section of the DMCA which says it doesn't affect defenses to copyright infringement (which is mostly covered by 17 USC 106) doesn't make it legal to write your own software to overcome technical protection measures. That section was put in there to make the bill look "fair and balanced", but it actually has no effect. This is because fair use is NOT and never was a defense to violation of the DMCA device provisions in 17 USC 1201(a) and (b).
Please note that while the copyright office can grant exemptions to allow the act of circumventing technical protection schemes, they cannot grant exemptions to allow the manufacture or trafficking in devices which can circumvent those measures. So even if your special pleadings get you an exemption, you can't legally make or purchase a device which can do the job.
Unfortunately, not so. The law prohibits manufacturing anti-circumvention devices also. So you can't write your own software either.
Sure they do. The device provisions are a direct violation of freedom of speech. They prevent utterance and publication of certain speech -- specifically, speech that can be used to instruct a computer how to bypass copy protection measures. Further, the DMCA, in the 2600 case, has been used successfully to prevent publication of speech which tells other people where to find such instructions. That's an even clearer violation, if you don't believe code is speech.