The second biggest problem is that "someone skilled in the art..." really means a Judge who is skilled in legalese.
That's because the PHOSITA (Person Having Ordinary Skill In The Art) doesn't exist! If a lawyer tries to bring in an expert witness to testify that something is obvious to someone ordinarily skilled in the art, he's caught on Morton's Fork. Either (a) the witness is not an expert, and therefore cannot be qualified to testify, or (b) the witness is an expert, and is ipso facto extraordinarily skilled.
The fact that an invention is obvious to someone who is extraordinarily skilled says nothing about whether it will be obvious to a PHOSITA. The result is that "ordinarily skilled" means "unskilled, a layman" rather than a practitioner.
What's the solution to this twisting of the law? I don't know. Maybe it would work to bring in a university professor to testify as to the skill level he expects of ordinary students? Or point out that even an ordinarily skilled lawyer can describe some everyday method and append the words "on the Internet?"
And (committing the sin of following up to myself), the designers of Epson projectors did not use similar care. For some years, the only status indication on the thing has been a single LED, which can be steady red Power off), flashing red (Powering down), steady green (Power on), flashing green (Powering up), or steady yellow (Lamp burnt out). I cannot for the life of me tell the colors apart, and I'm always doing things like powering down a projector that's just kicked into "power save" when I want to have it running.
Traffic engineers choose the colours carefully so that people with the common forms of colour blindness (including deuteranopes, like me) can distinuguish them. Incandescent traffic-light green (and aviation green) looks blue to me, but it doesn't look either red or yellow, so I don't get them confused. With LED traffic lights, the traffic engineers have found a green light that does look green to me.
Sharing risk is supposed to be the goal of insurance, going back to when it was a group of shipowners getting together in Lloyd's Coffeehouse to agree to cover each other if any of their ships sank (they all made a little less profit, but none had to worry about being utterly ruined by a single event.
If insurers begin to stratify the clients on the basis of genetic testing, a market will arise to insure the never-tested against bad test results (pay us $xxx up front, and we cover your increased premiums). What the proposed legislation does is force participation in that market, by essentially bundling it with all policies. That may be a good thing, because it's otherwise too easy for the insured to game the system (get a test secretly, buy "testing insurance" only if the test shows that it would pay off).
The problem with the whols system is that the market appears to have failed. You can't simply pay a little bit more to find an insurer who won't tell you,
go ahead and die!
The policy is that major version is bumped only when significant backward incompatibility is expected. New features don't do it unless they break old code.
The purpose of prison is not to rehabilitate. That idea was pretty conclusively ruled out in the last century. Prisons function as schools for crime; those who are imprisoned not only fail to reform, but go on to greater crimes. Prison is also not to deter. Most crimes are committed by people in the heat of passion or the youthful delusion of invulnerability. Punishment simply is not considered by such people. The purpose of prison is to compensate society for the wrong the criminal has done by giving it the joy of seeing the criminal suffer for the wrongdoing. This woman has deprived society of its revenge. She now owes her late husband's family not only revenge for the murder, but also revenge for missing out on thirty-five years of schadenfreude. She also owes her new family revenge for being taken from them. And she owes society revenge for the expense of searching for her, and the expense of guarding her for the rest of her natural life. Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.
Anyone who thinks the system works otherwise is deluded. Anyone who thinks the system should work otherwise should be working to change it.
In many States, all traffic controls are presumed to warn of conditions that a driver should be aware of anyway; the fact that a sign is obscured is no defence. A posted speed limit is a "reminder" that it is never safe to exceed the given speed; a "no U-turn" sign is a "reminder" that the road does not permit a driver to execute a U-turn safely, and so on.
Bobbs-Merrill was a copyright case, and this was a patent license.
Patent licenses that included resale price fixing were not held to be unlawful
restraint of trade until Straus v. Victor Talking Mach. Co., 243 U.S. 490 (1917);
the case at issue was a violation of this very license on the part of the Straus
brothers d/b/a Macy's.
Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus was a copyright case, and in fact was explicitly held not to apply in patent law.
It wasn't until 1917 with Straus v. Victor Talking Machine Co. that resale price fixing was found to be restraint of trade in patent law. Yes, in the case the Supreme Court ruled on this very license.
The US Supreme Court invalidate the EULA mentioned in the article in 1917. While it was held in 1908 (the doctrine of "first sale", articulated in Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus) that copyright did not extend to the restriction of resale price, the Courts until then held that patent did grant such a monopoly. But this specific license was challenged in Straus v. Victor Talking Machine Co. [243 U.S. 490 (1917)], and the Supreme Court's opinion was that licenses of this type were "mere shams to evade the general law governing sale of personal property."
When the President breaks a law, or the Executive Branch arrogates to itself powers that belong to one of the other two Branches, there is indeed a bill that the Congress can pass to remedy the situation. Its formal title is "articles of impeachment." It is the remedy for an executive officer's committing high crimes and misdemeanours."
Uhm, if Caesar Augustus fixed the boundaries of the Empire, why did it continue to grow until the time of Marcus Aurelius?
Heron of Alexandria spoke Greek.
Most applications nowadays founder on memory
hierarchy performance (L1/L2 cache, main store,
backing store). Cache misses are a usual killer,
and fetch prediction doesn't work very well at
all yet.
Even on the base CPU, the most important metric,
I find, is "MIPS per watt". That's what determines
how much horsepower you can get off a given amount
of cooling, which is the real limiting factor for
CPU speed.
As Groklaw
points out, one significant item with Intel's
defense fund is that it covers end users. That
means that it is not redundant with
Red Hat's, which covers only developers.
This announcement should add a new dimension to SCO's nonsense about indemnification.
Since I'm flushing about 200MB/day, more or less, of
copies of the Swen virus, it's obvious to me that
it would be possible to get your enemies' bandwidth
capped (or even get their service terminated) simply
by mounting a DDoS attack that mailbombs them.
To this day, I can't see Logitech mouse packaging without thinking of the infamous 1992 Logitech ad with the pissing baby and "feels better" - making the point that the Logitech mouse fit the hand better than the competition's, or something. Story at Wired .
Ms. Rosen isn't going to be an "anchor," unless
you use the term very loosely. She's
going to be a regular commentator on three
panel-discussion shows; not even the moderator
of any of the three.
Lesson to be learned: Read the article, not just CowboyNeal's summary.
It's hard to imagine the FCC standing still while
the regulatory environment changes so substantially from State to State, particularly where the data communications can be viewed as "interstate commerce." The proposed and enacted State laws would otherwise have the effect of undermining everything that the Federal regulators have done in this area since about 1951. They would cast communications law back to a pre-Hush-a-Phone environment. Tom Carter must be spinning in his grave. (Yes, folks, there was a time when acoustic couplers were illegal!)
This area of the regulations isn't just "big business against the consumer." Consumer electronics manufacturers are big business, too.
I'd expect to see Federal preemption of these State laws in fairly short order.
Ohh, where to begin? Many of the most important
Tcl applications are so unusual that you don't
realize that Tcl is there under the hood.
Tcl runs the operator interface of Shell Oil's Auger, a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. See pictures of the rig
here, and read about the system integrators
here.
Don't like oil rigs? Well, it's highly unlikely
that you can mod this post down without the Tcl
that's built into practically every Cisco router
on the planet. Read Cisco's tesimonial.
Once you've done that, go log off and watch TV.
Oh yeah, did you know that the NBC network control
system is a Tcl application? It is; it's been
in the digital broadcast system from prototype all
the way to full 24x7 operation. ComputerWorld ran an article about the project.
Science geeks will be interested that a Tcl
interface is used to program the Hubble Space Telescope
Slashdot Mirror
The second biggest problem is that "someone skilled in the art..." really means a Judge who is skilled in legalese.
That's because the PHOSITA (Person Having Ordinary Skill In The Art) doesn't exist! If a lawyer tries to bring in an expert witness to testify that something is obvious to someone ordinarily skilled in the art, he's caught on Morton's Fork. Either (a) the witness is not an expert, and therefore cannot be qualified to testify, or (b) the witness is an expert, and is ipso facto extraordinarily skilled.
The fact that an invention is obvious to someone who is extraordinarily skilled says nothing about whether it will be obvious to a PHOSITA. The result is that "ordinarily skilled" means "unskilled, a layman" rather than a practitioner. What's the solution to this twisting of the law? I don't know. Maybe it would work to bring in a university professor to testify as to the skill level he expects of ordinary students? Or point out that even an ordinarily skilled lawyer can describe some everyday method and append the words "on the Internet?"
And (committing the sin of following up to myself), the designers of Epson projectors did not use similar care. For some years, the only status indication on the thing has been a single LED, which can be steady red Power off), flashing red (Powering down), steady green (Power on), flashing green (Powering up), or steady yellow (Lamp burnt out). I cannot for the life of me tell the colors apart, and I'm always doing things like powering down a projector that's just kicked into "power save" when I want to have it running.
Traffic engineers choose the colours carefully so that people with the common forms of colour blindness (including deuteranopes, like me) can distinuguish them. Incandescent traffic-light green (and aviation green) looks blue to me, but it doesn't look either red or yellow, so I don't get them confused. With LED traffic lights, the traffic engineers have found a green light that does look green to me.
Sharing risk is supposed to be the goal of insurance, going back to when it was a group of shipowners getting together in Lloyd's Coffeehouse to agree to cover each other if any of their ships sank (they all made a little less profit, but none had to worry about being utterly ruined by a single event. If insurers begin to stratify the clients on the basis of genetic testing, a market will arise to insure the never-tested against bad test results (pay us $xxx up front, and we cover your increased premiums). What the proposed legislation does is force participation in that market, by essentially bundling it with all policies. That may be a good thing, because it's otherwise too easy for the insured to game the system (get a test secretly, buy "testing insurance" only if the test shows that it would pay off). The problem with the whols system is that the market appears to have failed. You can't simply pay a little bit more to find an insurer who won't tell you, go ahead and die!
The policy is that major version is bumped only when significant backward incompatibility is expected. New features don't do it unless they break old code.
The purpose of prison is not to rehabilitate. That idea was pretty conclusively ruled out in the last century. Prisons function as schools for crime; those who are imprisoned not only fail to reform, but go on to greater crimes. Prison is also not to deter. Most crimes are committed by people in the heat of passion or the youthful delusion of invulnerability. Punishment simply is not considered by such people. The purpose of prison is to compensate society for the wrong the criminal has done by giving it the joy of seeing the criminal suffer for the wrongdoing. This woman has deprived society of its revenge. She now owes her late husband's family not only revenge for the murder, but also revenge for missing out on thirty-five years of schadenfreude. She also owes her new family revenge for being taken from them. And she owes society revenge for the expense of searching for her, and the expense of guarding her for the rest of her natural life. Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.
Anyone who thinks the system works otherwise is deluded. Anyone who thinks the system should work otherwise should be working to change it.
In many States, all traffic controls are presumed to warn of conditions that a driver should be aware of anyway; the fact that a sign is obscured is no defence. A posted speed limit is a "reminder" that it is never safe to exceed the given speed; a "no U-turn" sign is a "reminder" that the road does not permit a driver to execute a U-turn safely, and so on.
Bobbs-Merrill was a copyright case, and this was a patent license. Patent licenses that included resale price fixing were not held to be unlawful restraint of trade until Straus v. Victor Talking Mach. Co., 243 U.S. 490 (1917); the case at issue was a violation of this very license on the part of the Straus brothers d/b/a Macy's.
Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus was a copyright case, and in fact was explicitly held not to apply in patent law. It wasn't until 1917 with Straus v. Victor Talking Machine Co. that resale price fixing was found to be restraint of trade in patent law. Yes, in the case the Supreme Court ruled on this very license.
The US Supreme Court invalidate the EULA mentioned in the article in 1917. While it was held in 1908 (the doctrine of "first sale", articulated in Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus) that copyright did not extend to the restriction of resale price, the Courts until then held that patent did grant such a monopoly. But this specific license was challenged in Straus v. Victor Talking Machine Co. [243 U.S. 490 (1917)], and the Supreme Court's opinion was that licenses of this type were "mere shams to evade the general law governing sale of personal property."
When the President breaks a law, or the Executive Branch arrogates to itself powers that belong to one of the other two Branches, there is indeed a bill that the Congress can pass to remedy the situation. Its formal title is "articles of impeachment." It is the remedy for an executive officer's committing high crimes and misdemeanours."
"Sentence suspended if you join the army."
Latin is useful in IT!
I have a sign on my office door: "Ita erat quando hic adveni."
Uhm, if Caesar Augustus fixed the boundaries of the Empire, why did it continue to grow until the time of Marcus Aurelius? Heron of Alexandria spoke Greek.
Mightn't it be easier to adapt the ordnance from an automobile airbag? That's a similar case of "must definitely work and needs to work only once."
Even on the base CPU, the most important metric, I find, is "MIPS per watt". That's what determines how much horsepower you can get off a given amount of cooling, which is the real limiting factor for CPU speed.
Yeah, well, it's kinda hard to hijack a train and drive it into a building.
This announcement should add a new dimension to SCO's nonsense about indemnification.
Since I'm flushing about 200MB/day, more or less, of copies of the Swen virus, it's obvious to me that it would be possible to get your enemies' bandwidth capped (or even get their service terminated) simply by mounting a DDoS attack that mailbombs them.
Turkeys.
To this day, I can't see Logitech mouse packaging without thinking of the infamous 1992 Logitech ad with the pissing baby and "feels better" - making the point that the Logitech mouse fit the hand better than the competition's, or something. Story at Wired .
Ms. Rosen isn't going to be an "anchor," unless you use the term very loosely. She's going to be a regular commentator on three panel-discussion shows; not even the moderator of any of the three.
Lesson to be learned: Read the article, not just CowboyNeal's summary.
Sell SCO stock? To whom?
This area of the regulations isn't just "big business against the consumer." Consumer electronics manufacturers are big business, too. I'd expect to see Federal preemption of these State laws in fairly short order.
Tcl runs the operator interface of Shell Oil's Auger, a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. See pictures of the rig here, and read about the system integrators here.
Don't like oil rigs? Well, it's highly unlikely that you can mod this post down without the Tcl that's built into practically every Cisco router on the planet. Read Cisco's tesimonial.
Once you've done that, go log off and watch TV. Oh yeah, did you know that the NBC network control system is a Tcl application? It is; it's been in the digital broadcast system from prototype all the way to full 24x7 operation. ComputerWorld ran an article about the project.
Science geeks will be interested that a Tcl interface is used to program the Hubble Space Telescope
Database heavies will be intrigued by the intimate role that Tcl has in Oracle Enterprise Manager.
I could go on all evening, this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.