Here is the language he is basing his entire argument on from the Patent Act of 1952 section 112(f)
An element in a claim for a combination may be expressed as a means or step for performing a specified function without the recital of structure, material, or acts in support thereof, and such claim shall be construed to cover the corresponding structure, material, or acts described in the specification and equivalents thereof.
This is a problem that is unique to software. We wouldn’t permit in any other area of technology the sorts of claims that appear in thousands of different software patents. Pharmaceutical inventors don’t claim “an arrangement of atoms that cures cancer,” asserting their patent against any chemical, whatever its form, that achieves that purpose. Indeed, the whole idea seems ludicrous. Pharmaceutical patent owners invent a drug, and it is the drug that they are entitled to patent. But in software, as we will see, claims of just that form are everywhere.
And I think he makes a good point. The problem being that we can already copyright the code. So, if patents can be applied at all then they must be applied to the purpose of the code.
If this gets enacted as case law the obvious next step is that Apple will patent the 'for' loop and Microsoft will licence the 'if' statement.
I don't believe that you could patent a 'for' loop or 'if' statement since they would have to be considered prior art in the public domain. But, it does seam that according to this guy you could patent c# because it is a specific way to achieve the function of a 'binary file derived from a human readable algorithm that can be run as a functional computer program."
Society has every right to determine what is decent. We do not allow pornography to be broadcast on the "open" airwaves or nudists to walk down public streets (except in Berkeley). We have decency laws a plenty. But, we IMHO don't have the right to stop nudists from fencing in an area and walking around naked. Or stopping consenting adults from producing pornography for consumption by other consenting adults. And frankly the idea that "Lolita" and "Romeo and Juliet" would be outlawed because they deal with minors having sex is a frightening thing. We have allowed the written word to be the most open and free form of expression in society far longer than we have even believed in free speech. I don't believe you could actually stop it. I don't believe that you should stop it. Videos and pictures have a different qualitative value. They require an actual child to be involved.
We know and have known for a long time about some if not all of the regulatory function in DNA. The first description of non-coding DNA playing key regulatory roles in activation was in 1959 when the Lac operon was discovered by François Jacob and Jacques Monod for which they won the Nobel Prize. Many other regulatory sequences have been discovered since then. Other types of genetic operators such as transposons which are able to transport and duplicate blocks of DNA are known. This is the problem, we know a lot about the complexity and function of DNA. We understand that it does much more than simply code proteins. But, the popular press continues to act as if it is a giant surprise whenever any other function is discussed.
This is the best explanation for the 80% figure that I have seen. I've been reading a bunch of the articles out there about this and none of them made such a clear and useful analogy. Please Mod Parent Up.
You are so full of s*$t it comes out of your fingers when you type. I have lived in India and you cannot compare the poor (rich by Indian standards) in America with the poor in India. As you point out in America you can make yourself better off. Even if not everyone does, it is possible through hard work to get out of poverty in America. This is simply not true in India. Social systems that have existed for thousands of years continue to keep the vast majority of Indians poor. If you are born to the wrong caste in the wrong part of the country then no matter how smart or hard working you are you will not rise above. God help you if you are an orphan or single woman. Those parts of society are simply beggars with no other prospects. Please keep your work hard and make good ideas limited to places where that is in fact true.
"still has a large number of people living in abject poverty."
70% of the population live on less than $2.00 a day. That makes 850,000,000 or so living in abject poverty. I think that qualifies as a "large number".
A total geek, but you don't see the day when fiber to the house could be necessary. A day might be coming when several 3D Billion Pixel movie streams are coming into the residential environment. Capacity will almost always be used by something.
They are going to use the existing power poles here in KC. It was one of the original stumbling blocks. The city is letting them use the infrastructure for less than they charge existing cable and telephone companies.
It has ALWAYS been possible (and fairly easy) to make a lower receiver in the comfort and privacy of your own machine shop. Making it on a 3D printer doesn't change a thing except for requiring a different skill set.
That is true enough. The difference being that owning your own machine shop is expensive and knowing how to use your machines to build a gun is a complicated process that takes skill. Even though you can't currently build a real gun in a 3D printer, if you ever could you would need nothing other than the printer and the file. That greatly expands the number and sort of people who can build a gun at home. Not saying it is good or bad. Just saying that there is a big difference between a kid downloading a file from the internet and building a gun on his 3D printer and a skilled machinist building a gun in his machine shop.
You speak from experience I can tell.
All car web sites have the same set of functionality. Build your own, find a dealer, owner alerts, dealer alerts, model information etc. Tell me build your own is a simple application that you can just bang together no talent needed. Integrate with the VAX back end to look up VINs and give owners information about their individual cars, integrate with mapping software and dealer databases to display the correct dealers, integrate with a large content management system, cause yeah there are a lot of graphical design and interactive flash, with a bunch of Jr. developers. Cause it's just a web site. Amazon developers don't need to be good it is just a web site. That google stuff is simple it's just a web site.
I'm real impressed with your list of places where you need "good" developers. But, I think you must believe that by web site I mean HTML. Almost nothing about real web development anymore is in the HTML and on most web sites developers don't make the HTML or any of the view really. They integrate with the corporate back ends. They create the systems that move information to and from the page. They develop an application.
I have a feeling you haven't worked on anything very complicated in the corporate web environment. Everything today has a web component. Everything today has a phone component. I once worked on an application that allowed traders in weather derivatives to run weather models through different sets of statistical analysis tools and trade in real time based on the results. But, we didn't need good developers because the front end was just a web site.
The best outcome of a project I have ever been a part of was during a project for an unnamed automobile manufacturers website. The project was far behind when we came on and the original development group was let go.:-) We put together a group of a few "Rock Star" developers together with a group of experienced developers that we knew form previous projects would take direction and understood design. It was only because of the urgency of the project and the potential profit that management allowed us to form this group. We placed them in what we used to call the prison. They were not allowed contact with the rest of the project team (Business, Graphic Arts, PMs etc). I had short standup meeting with them every morning. Then the "Rock Stars" rocked away. They implemented an elegant, workable, well executed design. There were 12 of them when normally we would have used more like 25 or 30.
My point being they were real "Rock Stars". They could design and code. They were not above doing the actual work. The idea that there are only two kinds of developers: ivory tower academics who know UML and Patterns but can't code, and spaghetti coders who hack through crap but get it done, is the real problem. We hire everybody who can understand an if then statement as a developer these days. What needs to happen in the development business is that hiring managers need to learn that developers are not all equal and resumes can lie.
It is obvious that in the daily news feed no one is ever going to say "Hey by the way did you know that today no one discovered a solution to - Frankl's union-closed sets conjecture." What we never hear is the foundation on which new discovers stand. Today there are many fundamentalist or just uninformed people who don't "believe" in evolution and geology. If the press included in the discovery of say a new medicine for cancer the fact that evolutionary theory underlies our understanding of the what and why of genetics that led to the discovery, maybe people would see that biology today is the study of the evolutionary process.
People have strange notions of what the quantum uncertainty principal means. I have heard people say that "anything can happen" and "scientists can't say for certain that gravity will work". The truth that should be told when we smash particles to find the Higgs Boson or like is that quantum physics for all of it's uncertainty makes better predictions than any mathematical scientific framework ever previously invented. It may rely on probability but, it is still very exact.
I guess I mean that if we are talking about informing the uninformed about science I think telling them how much we know and how we got there is more important than saying what exactly we still don't know.
Granted and just to say it, who cares if it is in the boondocks. If your phone doesn't work it doesn't work. I was just getting tired of reading that San Fransisco was the same as say Wichita Ks. Close to the same population but only one of them is in the boondocks.
Come on. Once again you are looking at the population inside the city limits. The Seattle area is more like 3,500,000 residents. Well over the 500,000 we are talking about.
Yeah, Granted San Francisco only has 800,000 or so. But, the bay area is what, 7 Million. I think we can consider the entire metro area in this calculation.
Dammit, Everybody who reads about my supper on facebook "likes" it. The more pictures of Chicken, Steak and my secret Pot Pie I put up on my FB page the more "likes" I get. And everybody know that a lot of "likes" equates to love and love makes a person happy. So, don't ruin my personal happiness by dissing FB food posters you fun hater.:-)
I call bullshit. Conservative / Liberal political or ideological tags have NOTHING to do with the software development cycle or in many cases with developer sentiment. All the good developers I know can change their methodology and coding practice to fit the circumstance. If I am developing software for a heart monitor, a bank or a rocket to the moon then I am going to employ a high level of structure, testing and code review in my process. If I am developing a script to send someone and email every time a comment is added to their blog posting then I'm just going to rip out the code, give it a quick test and turn it on. This has NOTHING to do with my ideology. It has to do with the real world import and impact of the code I am writing.
I don't agree with software patents. I think they are unenforceable and generally for things that are beyond obvious (one click payment). But, this strikes me as more than that. They have done something non-obvious that creates something in the physical world and has value beyond just the source code. I think that should be patentable. I (or any moderately talented programmer) could create on click payment very quickly and easily. I could not just knock out automated fully articulated action 3d printable action figures. Now I understand that patents are not based on what is easy for me to do but, as a rough guide things that have value, are new to the world and rely on non-obvious original ideas should be patentable by their creators. Patents aren't bad, the serve a purpose. The crazy software patent wars are bad and stupid and server no purpose but to pay lawyers.
Once again the "Free Market" prevails. We have Justin Beiber instead of good music. Thank God! Who would want a world in which talented creative people are well rewarded for their work and untalented teen age boys were simply teen age boys instead of semi-iconic sex idols for prepubescent girls. I for one happily bow to the marketing overlords.
Score 5 funny, Score 100000 true. I think Obama should just start reading from the Republican Party Platform instead of giving speeches. "Read my lips, no new taxes" should be his slogan. The right wing would suddenly be in favor of new taxes and gun control.
Slashdot Mirror
An element in a claim for a combination may be expressed as a means or step for performing a specified function without the recital of structure, material, or acts in support thereof, and such claim shall be construed to cover the corresponding structure, material, or acts described in the specification and equivalents thereof.
This is a problem that is unique to software. We wouldn’t permit in any other area of technology the sorts of claims that appear in thousands of different software patents. Pharmaceutical inventors don’t claim “an arrangement of atoms that cures cancer,” asserting their patent against any chemical, whatever its form, that achieves that purpose. Indeed, the whole idea seems ludicrous. Pharmaceutical patent owners invent a drug, and it is the drug that they are entitled to patent. But in software, as we will see, claims of just that form are everywhere.
And I think he makes a good point. The problem being that we can already copyright the code. So, if patents can be applied at all then they must be applied to the purpose of the code.
If this gets enacted as case law the obvious next step is that Apple will patent the 'for' loop and Microsoft will licence the 'if' statement.
I don't believe that you could patent a 'for' loop or 'if' statement since they would have to be considered prior art in the public domain. But, it does seam that according to this guy you could patent c# because it is a specific way to achieve the function of a 'binary file derived from a human readable algorithm that can be run as a functional computer program."
Society has every right to determine what is decent. We do not allow pornography to be broadcast on the "open" airwaves or nudists to walk down public streets (except in Berkeley). We have decency laws a plenty. But, we IMHO don't have the right to stop nudists from fencing in an area and walking around naked. Or stopping consenting adults from producing pornography for consumption by other consenting adults. And frankly the idea that "Lolita" and "Romeo and Juliet" would be outlawed because they deal with minors having sex is a frightening thing. We have allowed the written word to be the most open and free form of expression in society far longer than we have even believed in free speech. I don't believe you could actually stop it. I don't believe that you should stop it. Videos and pictures have a different qualitative value. They require an actual child to be involved.
We know and have known for a long time about some if not all of the regulatory function in DNA. The first description of non-coding DNA playing key regulatory roles in activation was in 1959 when the Lac operon was discovered by François Jacob and Jacques Monod for which they won the Nobel Prize. Many other regulatory sequences have been discovered since then. Other types of genetic operators such as transposons which are able to transport and duplicate blocks of DNA are known. This is the problem, we know a lot about the complexity and function of DNA. We understand that it does much more than simply code proteins. But, the popular press continues to act as if it is a giant surprise whenever any other function is discussed.
This is the best explanation for the 80% figure that I have seen. I've been reading a bunch of the articles out there about this and none of them made such a clear and useful analogy. Please Mod Parent Up.
You are so full of s*$t it comes out of your fingers when you type. I have lived in India and you cannot compare the poor (rich by Indian standards) in America with the poor in India. As you point out in America you can make yourself better off. Even if not everyone does, it is possible through hard work to get out of poverty in America. This is simply not true in India. Social systems that have existed for thousands of years continue to keep the vast majority of Indians poor. If you are born to the wrong caste in the wrong part of the country then no matter how smart or hard working you are you will not rise above. God help you if you are an orphan or single woman. Those parts of society are simply beggars with no other prospects. Please keep your work hard and make good ideas limited to places where that is in fact true.
"still has a large number of people living in abject poverty."
70% of the population live on less than $2.00 a day. That makes 850,000,000 or so living in abject poverty. I think that qualifies as a "large number".
A total geek, but you don't see the day when fiber to the house could be necessary. A day might be coming when several 3D Billion Pixel movie streams are coming into the residential environment. Capacity will almost always be used by something.
They are going to use the existing power poles here in KC. It was one of the original stumbling blocks. The city is letting them use the infrastructure for less than they charge existing cable and telephone companies.
It has ALWAYS been possible (and fairly easy) to make a lower receiver in the comfort and privacy of your own machine shop. Making it on a 3D printer doesn't change a thing except for requiring a different skill set.
That is true enough. The difference being that owning your own machine shop is expensive and knowing how to use your machines to build a gun is a complicated process that takes skill. Even though you can't currently build a real gun in a 3D printer, if you ever could you would need nothing other than the printer and the file. That greatly expands the number and sort of people who can build a gun at home. Not saying it is good or bad. Just saying that there is a big difference between a kid downloading a file from the internet and building a gun on his 3D printer and a skilled machinist building a gun in his machine shop.
You speak from experience I can tell.
All car web sites have the same set of functionality. Build your own, find a dealer, owner alerts, dealer alerts, model information etc. Tell me build your own is a simple application that you can just bang together no talent needed. Integrate with the VAX back end to look up VINs and give owners information about their individual cars, integrate with mapping software and dealer databases to display the correct dealers, integrate with a large content management system, cause yeah there are a lot of graphical design and interactive flash, with a bunch of Jr. developers. Cause it's just a web site. Amazon developers don't need to be good it is just a web site. That google stuff is simple it's just a web site.
I'm real impressed with your list of places where you need "good" developers. But, I think you must believe that by web site I mean HTML. Almost nothing about real web development anymore is in the HTML and on most web sites developers don't make the HTML or any of the view really. They integrate with the corporate back ends. They create the systems that move information to and from the page. They develop an application.
I have a feeling you haven't worked on anything very complicated in the corporate web environment. Everything today has a web component. Everything today has a phone component. I once worked on an application that allowed traders in weather derivatives to run weather models through different sets of statistical analysis tools and trade in real time based on the results. But, we didn't need good developers because the front end was just a web site.
The best outcome of a project I have ever been a part of was during a project for an unnamed automobile manufacturers website. The project was far behind when we came on and the original development group was let go. :-) We put together a group of a few "Rock Star" developers together with a group of experienced developers that we knew form previous projects would take direction and understood design. It was only because of the urgency of the project and the potential profit that management allowed us to form this group. We placed them in what we used to call the prison. They were not allowed contact with the rest of the project team (Business, Graphic Arts, PMs etc). I had short standup meeting with them every morning. Then the "Rock Stars" rocked away. They implemented an elegant, workable, well executed design. There were 12 of them when normally we would have used more like 25 or 30.
My point being they were real "Rock Stars". They could design and code. They were not above doing the actual work. The idea that there are only two kinds of developers: ivory tower academics who know UML and Patterns but can't code, and spaghetti coders who hack through crap but get it done, is the real problem. We hire everybody who can understand an if then statement as a developer these days. What needs to happen in the development business is that hiring managers need to learn that developers are not all equal and resumes can lie.
Or did you mean participating in a productive discussion?
On Slashdot? What are you smoking?
It is obvious that in the daily news feed no one is ever going to say "Hey by the way did you know that today no one discovered a solution to - Frankl's union-closed sets conjecture." What we never hear is the foundation on which new discovers stand. Today there are many fundamentalist or just uninformed people who don't "believe" in evolution and geology. If the press included in the discovery of say a new medicine for cancer the fact that evolutionary theory underlies our understanding of the what and why of genetics that led to the discovery, maybe people would see that biology today is the study of the evolutionary process.
People have strange notions of what the quantum uncertainty principal means. I have heard people say that "anything can happen" and "scientists can't say for certain that gravity will work". The truth that should be told when we smash particles to find the Higgs Boson or like is that quantum physics for all of it's uncertainty makes better predictions than any mathematical scientific framework ever previously invented. It may rely on probability but, it is still very exact.
I guess I mean that if we are talking about informing the uninformed about science I think telling them how much we know and how we got there is more important than saying what exactly we still don't know.
Yeah I know. I didn't RTFA.
Granted and just to say it, who cares if it is in the boondocks. If your phone doesn't work it doesn't work. I was just getting tired of reading that San Fransisco was the same as say Wichita Ks. Close to the same population but only one of them is in the boondocks.
Come on. Once again you are looking at the population inside the city limits. The Seattle area is more like 3,500,000 residents. Well over the 500,000 we are talking about.
Yeah, Granted San Francisco only has 800,000 or so. But, the bay area is what, 7 Million. I think we can consider the entire metro area in this calculation.
I agree T-mobile. Your unlocked phone will work (mine does) and they can get you a good plan.
Dammit, Everybody who reads about my supper on facebook "likes" it. The more pictures of Chicken, Steak and my secret Pot Pie I put up on my FB page the more "likes" I get. And everybody know that a lot of "likes" equates to love and love makes a person happy. So, don't ruin my personal happiness by dissing FB food posters you fun hater. :-)
I call bullshit. Conservative / Liberal political or ideological tags have NOTHING to do with the software development cycle or in many cases with developer sentiment. All the good developers I know can change their methodology and coding practice to fit the circumstance. If I am developing software for a heart monitor, a bank or a rocket to the moon then I am going to employ a high level of structure, testing and code review in my process. If I am developing a script to send someone and email every time a comment is added to their blog posting then I'm just going to rip out the code, give it a quick test and turn it on. This has NOTHING to do with my ideology. It has to do with the real world import and impact of the code I am writing.
Is there anyone still using twitter who is not a bot, bot dealer, or PR shill?
Politicians...
I don't know I would qualify those who work for politicians as PR shills so maybe they were covered.
I don't agree with software patents. I think they are unenforceable and generally for things that are beyond obvious (one click payment). But, this strikes me as more than that. They have done something non-obvious that creates something in the physical world and has value beyond just the source code. I think that should be patentable. I (or any moderately talented programmer) could create on click payment very quickly and easily. I could not just knock out automated fully articulated action 3d printable action figures. Now I understand that patents are not based on what is easy for me to do but, as a rough guide things that have value, are new to the world and rely on non-obvious original ideas should be patentable by their creators. Patents aren't bad, the serve a purpose. The crazy software patent wars are bad and stupid and server no purpose but to pay lawyers.
Once again the "Free Market" prevails. We have Justin Beiber instead of good music. Thank God! Who would want a world in which talented creative people are well rewarded for their work and untalented teen age boys were simply teen age boys instead of semi-iconic sex idols for prepubescent girls. I for one happily bow to the marketing overlords.
Yeah and...
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates, 1981
No matter how much space or bandwidth we have we will find a way to need more.
Score 5 funny, Score 100000 true. I think Obama should just start reading from the Republican Party Platform instead of giving speeches. "Read my lips, no new taxes" should be his slogan. The right wing would suddenly be in favor of new taxes and gun control.