The guy in the suit looks very smart. He is a smart guy. The credulous reporter is from the leading global news organisation, Reuters. She is a smart girl.
Smart guy meets smart girl, and both produce a smart story.
Whom shall I believe, smart guy and positive story on Reuters, done by a smart reporter; or some geek on 'News for nerds, stuff that matters'? Do you even own a suit?
[Being an old-timer,]I can in principle agree on the quality control. But the all-out American style of 'publish or perish' has resulted in some weird consequences:
1. There are thousands of academicians about with - just to give an example - 150 publications in 10 years of activity. 15 publications per year, that is one per good three weeks. Considering teaching obligations, supervisions, time for reviewing others' papers, making corrections as required by the reviewers, could take 1 week out of these three. If I have the honour to shake the hand of a person who can come up with a relevant contribution to science once a fortnight; do I shake the hand of a genius or the hand of a schemer?
2. Some will argue on the 'high impact journal'. While 'Nature' might be one of those, does this make my contribution in the [fictitious] 'Research Journal of the West Indies' any worse? Can one really exclude to encounter relevant contributions in the latter; maybe attributable to the shyness of the author?
3. More philosophically: Quality Control. The term implies that the researcher/professor needs to be controlled; or, (s)he can't be trusted to rather silently pursue the topic of inclination, the intrinsic drive, the obsession to advance what is close to one's heart? Personally, it is a disease of our times to just not trust; to ask [Anglo-American style] for objective measures at evaluation. As a researcher for many years now, I still feel that team members can assess the contributions and qualities of another team member pretty well. Much better than a quantifiable number ('number of publications') could. Often enough, I have to observe that attainment of these so-called objective achievements takes precedence over inherent quality. Last not least because promotion or tenure are attached to quantifiable criteria.
4. The author is correct on the relatively long duration between writing and publication. But not only is the lapse in time disadvantageous; also the effort(s) required by the average author [like myself]. Personally, I am rather drawn to online, direct, peer-to-peer interaction; like in the communities of the FOSS [and Slashdot]: The feedback is normally immediate, the product or solution can be trashed out in comparatively short terms through a consolidated effort. Being a member in quite a few of these communities, I perceive another advantage: plagiarism. Better: the relative lack thereof. Due to the direct and spontaneous interaction, there is not much of an incentive or time, to retrieve others' works just to show off.
5. When I started, a quarter of a century ago, there were a handful of relevant journals in my field; and it was possible to scan them, and be up to date. Probably one of our team would draw our attention to relevant articles. In these days, maybe due to the pressure to publish, most articles - of course except those in some highly relevant journals - will not even be noticed; or can't be noticed. It can be asked, if people like Alexander Fleming or Einstein would necessarily have been noticed in the contemporary academic publication climate.
Despite 1-5 above, we need per-review; and even more though in these days with all and sundry crackpot being able to publish the flat-earth-theory on his or her webpage or blogsite. I do doubt, though, that we need expensive printed journals. If one has achieved ground-breaking research - to pick up the argument from before - there is no reason to waste trees in order to distribute the results.
You seems to prove my point, thanks for the link. I went there, entered the country, and got:
The online store is only available for student software purchases from your country. Please contact your local MathWorks representative for pricing information or to place an order.
Without wanting to let this drag on, maybe there are different policies for different countries? Last time we paid in the range of US$ 1000 for one seat of Matlab; though we don't have a site license, just some tens of seats. Our request for a campus license was declined; such a thing would not exist. Or at least not for our requirements or our financial abilities, I don't know the details.
This is actually one reason that I gave when proposing Python. Python is not so much different on the side of the calculations, except of course w.r.t. the graphics.
Second that. Gnumeric is my preferred spreadsheet. Most of all it kicks OpenOffice's (and Excel's) charting ass(es). It's a pity that Miquel left it for good, and it leads its own existence in the shadow of the mainstream.
I know Matlab has really low (or no) cost for educational use
Usually I don't feed ACs, but here I am astonished and ask for clarifications, because we, as educational institution with a 'university' in its name, have to pay horrendous sums for the licenses of Matlab. One single seat license is close to the campus license price of Microsoft.
"News for Nerds, Stuff that matters". But not if posted by The Ignorant.
What if the developer gives the character movement tasks its own thread, but it can only be rendered at 400 fps. And the developer gives the 3D world drawer its own thread, but it can only be rendered at 60 fps. There's a lot of waiting by the audio and character threads until everything catches up. That's called synchronization.
If a student of mine wrote this, a Fail will be the immediate consequence. How can 400 fps be 'only'? And why is threading bad, if the character movement is ready after 1/400 second? There is not 'a lot of waiting'; instead, there are a lot of cycles to calculate something else. and 'waiting' is not 'synchronisation'. [The audio-rate of 7000 fps gave the author away; and I stopped reading. Audio does not come in fps.]
While we all agree on the problem of synchronisation in parallel programming, and maybe especially in the gaming world, we should not allow uninformed blurb on Slashdot.
From what I understand from just flippering through the summary, The attack itself injects some malicious JavaScript code into every text field in your database, the Javascript then loads an external script that can compromise a user's PC the infection requires that a local user on that database box browses the net, and hits a malicious site?
I really wonder, if users on database-running PC are supposed to browse the net, for pr0n, or what?
Am I correct that my fictitious boxen are free from danger, if I have no local losers' accounts for surfing?
Many people own PC's specifically for playing games, and don't do much else with them.
So true. But maybe this whole concept is wrong? I mean, it is their liberty to do what they feel like doing. But games are not exactly what the PC was invented for, and games is not exactly what the PC is best at. A dedicated gaming console will usually beat a general-purpose item like a PC hands down, with respect to performance as well as cost efficiency.
I am sure we are not alone at gradually converting our new boxes into PC-only; with 'green' low-TDP CPUs, integrated graphics, etc. and running close to 50W. While gaming is gradually shifted to dedicated, not always-on boxes. With 'Atom' and increasing prices for energy, we will see a huge shift to low-power computing. XP runs great on 800 MHz CPUs and 512 MB, including Office. So well, actually, that Microsoft should be investigated by DoE, and forced to keep XP alive, for the sake of the environment.
Someone smart figure this out and post a comment translating patentese into english
FYI to what you posted, the "Rendering advertisements with documents having one or more topics using user topic interest" contradicts the content of the post: US-7,346,606 is not on children. The word 'children' shows up a single time, at an irrelevant example within parentheses towards the end. I wished the editors were less sloppy. theodp might have made a mistake; we all can err; but then the editor ought to have noticed the mistake. This actually renders the whole post wrong, you might want to correct that: Said patent is on how to push ads according to the user's type of actions in the various areas of the (screen) regions. Nothing else. Nothing on gender, ethnicity, income, etc. [If you wanted, I might be able to provide a more comprehensible summary.]
The post of theodp ends with a rather unmotivated (within this context) and unrelated 'by the way, the inventor had earlier filed an application on identifying ethnicity, reading level, age, sex and income'.
The mislead crowd has been discussing the latter, unrelated, part until now.
So far nothing to be seen here, factually wrong post, wrong references, sloppy editing. No news. Nothing to be seen, move along.
Have you eventually used it, or are you talking out of some place? I tend to find people who equate "the cube" with compiz, to only having seen a YouTube. While it is impressive, it is pure eye candy. But a good handful of other features are not. Definitively Preview is not. Like now, when downloading, a mouse-over shows the status, speed, etc. Minimizing and closing are two different effects, and somehow I got hooked to 'knowing' what I did by using the effects. The rotation right/left is a great indication that I'm on another desktop; before I tended to search a window; now not any longer. In short: aside from a lot of pure eye-candy, compiz here is a usability feature.
What happens when the small inventor and his portfolio of a few patents starts a corporation that turns out to be highly successful?
Welcome to the club. This is exactly what the patent system was developed for. Nobody has any qualms about your arguments.
There is one serious trouble these days: It does exactly not work like this any longer, it does the opposite. Even if your clever buddy has a few very clever patents, he will be sued into bankruptcy before his patents are held valid. He will be sued for infringing close to 1000 patents of the competitor, because his production line will be plastered with patents of the multinationals. Because the multinationals exchange their patent portfolios ('you may use mine and I may use yours') to hammer your guy with his few patents into the ground. No, this is not overflow of fantasy. It is the daily happenings in the patent business. This is why it needs to be fdisk-ed. To - eventually - be recreated in a form and jurisdiction where "the small inventor and his portfolio of a few patents" will allow him, again, to start "a corporation that turns out to be highly successful".
I've spent plenty of time, as I said in my post I've actually read all of the Ssupreme Court rulings on the subject.
Okay, so then you can enlighten me, the half-knowing. To my knowledge the whole mess started with the Supreme Court rebuking the USPTO in the Diamond vs. Diehr case, where the USPTO was kind of ordered to grant a patent on essentially software. Yes, I read the patent and some resources around it. Yes, the Supreme Court held the earlier appeals for non-patentable. Though in Diamond vs. Diehr they decided
On the other hand, when a claim containing a mathematical formula implements or applies that formula in a structure or process which, when considered as a whole, is performing a function which the patent laws were designed to protect (e. g., transforming or reducing an article to a different state or thing), then the claim satisfies the requirements [...]
And there was nothing new in the matter, if I am not mistaken, in curing rubber. But the formula as executed on a general purpose computer, in combination, was considered patentable. True, in the sense of 'software patents' the Supreme Court never endorsed such as singular patentable items. To me, it was a mistake nevertheless, a huge mistake to leave the formulation as is. Software as mathematical formula was still thrown out, but in real life, also in the first year of the 'PC' (1981), software would never be written not to be run on a (general purpose) computer. Literally, the Supreme Court did not allow software patents, de facto it invited them. In hindsight, one might assume a higher level of foresight by the creme of the creme of judges than to leave the indecisive, sorry, blurb that they produced. "implements or applies that formula in a structure or process" is so generally crappy that I am asking, seriously, wasn't this exactly opening the can of worms? Am I right when I assume that to disallow software patents as such, but to instruct software in combination with a computer as patentable, to be indecisive because both belong together: software needs a computer to run and a computer needs software to do something useful? Only recently (I am too lazy to look up the details, it was something about brakes) have they decided that combining a well-known feature of 50 years ago with a well-known recent feature (microcontroller) to achieve the expected effect was obvious.
It seems you want to shift the blame to the lower courts. Maybe you can. But when a judge in a lower court would try to get the gist out of that ruling, she could in principle only arrive at the conclusion that software to be run on hardware would be novel and inventive. The tragedy of that Diamond vs Diehr case was, AFAICS, that the result was not unexpected: curing rubber. Only in a slightly different manner. The case law therefore was clear: An expected outcome, achieved through a novel combination of a non-novel general purpose computer with a non-novel algorithm developed into a sequence of code, fulfills the requirement of 101.
Actually, are you a communist or what? Why do you defend governmental interventionism ('patent') to guarantee everyone repayment on their investment? Oh, more of a capitalist, then? I have actually just today spent some 18 Dollars to create a new flavour of cheese cake. Now you can help me, which department is the one to contact for readily ROI? And I am entitled to some repayment, and surely to protection from anyone else baking the same type of cake, right? You are happy paying some 20 or 30 percent more for your products, so that the inventors (sorry, their employers) can make an extra buck?
To help you out here: Of course, the implementations of H.264 or 802.11 are covered and protected by copyright. Those at the forefront have a distinct advantage compared to the bootleggers. 3COM made and still makes a lot of money with - at times - overpriced products. And I am very happy that I can buy some NIC from another manufacturer as well. The one from 3COM is protected, but not as a device to connect to a network. Lucky for all of us. Lucky, for most of us and maybe except for you, most standards are open, and are open to different implementations.
Yes and no. You are correct, using some new shiny and undocumented features for my own good does not primarily and automagically cripple others' products. But as secondary effect, those other products, in comparison, though effectively running at the original specs, look pale in comparison.
Since this is exactly one of the reasons how Microsoft came to dominate the software market, and had all major third parties kowtow to them (and pay) to get the information, the Free Market was distorted. It would not be the best/fastest application that grabbed the market, but the one with knowledge about and rights to the secrets. I'd have to seriously disappoint you on this one: This is exactly not what the term 'Free Market' means, especially if you are already the monopolist.
You yourself might already have grown up, now try to work on your thinking abilities.
Oh. It's just a way to seed Silverlight. Nevermind.
And a bad one. Here: Black screen. Only. Okay, NoScript pops up. I *allow* Microsoft.com (pun) Now the black screen is still black, with a tiny icon on top: Get Silverlight. I *click*. A full screen pops up inviting me to download. "Install Microsoft Silverlight now for a better Web experience". I click. "Download Silverlight.exe" 'OK'.... and I'm still waiting...
Yes, that's only bad. My browser identifies as "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS i86pc; en-US; rv:1.8.1.10) Gecko/20071230 Firefox/2.0.0.10". Any well-done site would inform me that I am not yet a convert, and point me to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/Search.aspx?displaylang=en for reference.
Seriously, bought good fit and good looking clothes are much better than free ugly ones. Do yourself a favor and get rid of all crap clothes and buy new good ones
I for one got a nice black, free, one. People say it suits me great. OpenSolaris World Tour. No, no online photos available. It doesn't hang lose, not slacking, funny prints, like http://logo.cafepress.com/7/4829055.2658817.jpg.
Researchers in Indiana University Bloomington's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences have received a $1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how the brain uses highly complex statistics to learn language. [...] Assistant professor Chen Yu and Linda B. Smith, professor and chair of the department [...] (http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/6382.html)
I sincerely hope we'll be seeing more and better stuff coming along from these Brain Scientists. (Am I the only one with an indelible association with some Flying Circus when I read these words?)
Funny, this. Mainly how irrelevant stuff overruns the editors. Okay, kdawson is off the RedMond-track...
Waiting for the day, when we read in/. that research has established without doubt that 2 legs are suitable to walk. I'd like to ask, how abstracta fit into this mine-field of links between content and images.
In any case, this smells like Chomsky**2, and the old man himself will be up in arms.
I actually checked if closing/purging Yahoo account is still easy and my account exists there since 1998. Guess why that account was opened first time? Hotmail got acquired by MS and I was one of first to ask if there is a way to close my account
Time to pack up, then, and move along. Want a Google invite??
Slashdot Mirror
That depends on how many promised revolutionary technologies they need to drop to make the deadline.
I might be wrong, but as of now, I have not heard about any revolutionary technology to enter Windows7.
Or, being on Slashdot, what I read until now, it will essentially be Vista with a revolutionary technology: it will work
Listen carefully to the Reuters clip, and you'll find that the reporta at one moment says: .. oh, sukka!"
"Genepax unveiled the eco-friendly vehicle in
Says it all!
The guy in the suit looks very smart. He is a smart guy.
...
The credulous reporter is from the leading global news organisation, Reuters. She is a smart girl.
Smart guy meets smart girl, and both produce a smart story.
Whom shall I believe, smart guy and positive story on Reuters, done by a smart reporter; or some geek on 'News for nerds, stuff that matters'? Do you even own a suit?
Temptations, temptations
[Being an old-timer,]I can in principle agree on the quality control. But the all-out American style of 'publish or perish' has resulted in some weird consequences:
1. There are thousands of academicians about with - just to give an example - 150 publications in 10 years of activity. 15 publications per year, that is one per good three weeks. Considering teaching obligations, supervisions, time for reviewing others' papers, making corrections as required by the reviewers, could take 1 week out of these three. If I have the honour to shake the hand of a person who can come up with a relevant contribution to science once a fortnight; do I shake the hand of a genius or the hand of a schemer?
2. Some will argue on the 'high impact journal'. While 'Nature' might be one of those, does this make my contribution in the [fictitious] 'Research Journal of the West Indies' any worse? Can one really exclude to encounter relevant contributions in the latter; maybe attributable to the shyness of the author?
3. More philosophically: Quality Control. The term implies that the researcher/professor needs to be controlled; or, (s)he can't be trusted to rather silently pursue the topic of inclination, the intrinsic drive, the obsession to advance what is close to one's heart?
Personally, it is a disease of our times to just not trust; to ask [Anglo-American style] for objective measures at evaluation. As a researcher for many years now, I still feel that team members can assess the contributions and qualities of another team member pretty well. Much better than a quantifiable number ('number of publications') could. Often enough, I have to observe that attainment of these so-called objective achievements takes precedence over inherent quality. Last not least because promotion or tenure are attached to quantifiable criteria.
4. The author is correct on the relatively long duration between writing and publication. But not only is the lapse in time disadvantageous; also the effort(s) required by the average author [like myself]. Personally, I am rather drawn to online, direct, peer-to-peer interaction; like in the communities of the FOSS [and Slashdot]: The feedback is normally immediate, the product or solution can be trashed out in comparatively short terms through a consolidated effort.
Being a member in quite a few of these communities, I perceive another advantage: plagiarism. Better: the relative lack thereof. Due to the direct and spontaneous interaction, there is not much of an incentive or time, to retrieve others' works just to show off.
5. When I started, a quarter of a century ago, there were a handful of relevant journals in my field; and it was possible to scan them, and be up to date. Probably one of our team would draw our attention to relevant articles.
In these days, maybe due to the pressure to publish, most articles - of course except those in some highly relevant journals - will not even be noticed; or can't be noticed. It can be asked, if people like Alexander Fleming or Einstein would necessarily have been noticed in the contemporary academic publication climate.
Despite 1-5 above, we need per-review; and even more though in these days with all and sundry crackpot being able to publish the flat-earth-theory on his or her webpage or blogsite.
I do doubt, though, that we need expensive printed journals. If one has achieved ground-breaking research - to pick up the argument from before - there is no reason to waste trees in order to distribute the results.
I said I don't feed ACs, did I? Why AC?
You seems to prove my point, thanks for the link. I went there, entered the country, and got:
The online store is only available for student software purchases from your country. Please contact your local MathWorks representative for pricing information or to place an order.
Without wanting to let this drag on, maybe there are different policies for different countries? Last time we paid in the range of US$ 1000 for one seat of Matlab; though we don't have a site license, just some tens of seats. Our request for a campus license was declined; such a thing would not exist. Or at least not for our requirements or our financial abilities, I don't know the details.
This is actually one reason that I gave when proposing Python. Python is not so much different on the side of the calculations, except of course w.r.t. the graphics.
Second that. Gnumeric is my preferred spreadsheet. Most of all it kicks OpenOffice's (and Excel's) charting ass(es).
It's a pity that Miquel left it for good, and it leads its own existence in the shadow of the mainstream.
I know Matlab has really low (or no) cost for educational use
Usually I don't feed ACs, but here I am astonished and ask for clarifications, because we, as educational institution with a 'university' in its name, have to pay horrendous sums for the licenses of Matlab. One single seat license is close to the campus license price of Microsoft.
"News for Nerds, Stuff that matters".
But not if posted by The Ignorant.
What if the developer gives the character movement tasks its own thread, but it can only be rendered at 400 fps. And the developer gives the 3D world drawer its own thread, but it can only be rendered at 60 fps. There's a lot of waiting by the audio and character threads until everything catches up. That's called synchronization.
If a student of mine wrote this, a Fail will be the immediate consequence. How can 400 fps be 'only'? And why is threading bad, if the character movement is ready after 1/400 second? There is not 'a lot of waiting'; instead, there are a lot of cycles to calculate something else. and 'waiting' is not 'synchronisation'.
[The audio-rate of 7000 fps gave the author away; and I stopped reading. Audio does not come in fps.]
While we all agree on the problem of synchronisation in parallel programming, and maybe especially in the gaming world, we should not allow uninformed blurb on Slashdot.
From what I understand from just flippering through the summary,
The attack itself injects some malicious JavaScript code into every text field in your database, the Javascript then loads an external script that can compromise a user's PC
the infection requires that a local user on that database box browses the net, and hits a malicious site?
I really wonder, if users on database-running PC are supposed to browse the net, for pr0n, or what?
Am I correct that my fictitious boxen are free from danger, if I have no local losers' accounts for surfing?
Because linux would never make you run not fully tested code? Lol
Astroturf? LOL!
I even doubt for twitter that he'd pay USD300 (and neither USD50) for testing some alpha-Linux.
Many people own PC's specifically for playing games, and don't do much else with them.
So true. But maybe this whole concept is wrong? I mean, it is their liberty to do what they feel like doing. But games are not exactly what the PC was invented for, and games is not exactly what the PC is best at. A dedicated gaming console will usually beat a general-purpose item like a PC hands down, with respect to performance as well as cost efficiency.
I am sure we are not alone at gradually converting our new boxes into PC-only; with 'green' low-TDP CPUs, integrated graphics, etc. and running close to 50W. While gaming is gradually shifted to dedicated, not always-on boxes. With 'Atom' and increasing prices for energy, we will see a huge shift to low-power computing. XP runs great on 800 MHz CPUs and 512 MB, including Office. So well, actually, that Microsoft should be investigated by DoE, and forced to keep XP alive, for the sake of the environment.
Someone smart figure this out and post a comment translating patentese into english
FYI to what you posted, the "Rendering advertisements with documents having one or more topics using user topic interest" contradicts the content of the post: US-7,346,606 is not on children. The word 'children' shows up a single time, at an irrelevant example within parentheses towards the end. I wished the editors were less sloppy. theodp might have made a mistake; we all can err; but then the editor ought to have noticed the mistake.
This actually renders the whole post wrong, you might want to correct that: Said patent is on how to push ads according to the user's type of actions in the various areas of the (screen) regions. Nothing else. Nothing on gender, ethnicity, income, etc. [If you wanted, I might be able to provide a more comprehensible summary.]
The post of theodp ends with a rather unmotivated (within this context) and unrelated 'by the way, the inventor had earlier filed an application on identifying ethnicity, reading level, age, sex and income'.
The mislead crowd has been discussing the latter, unrelated, part until now.
So far nothing to be seen here, factually wrong post, wrong references, sloppy editing. No news. Nothing to be seen, move along.
Have you eventually used it, or are you talking out of some place?
I tend to find people who equate "the cube" with compiz, to only having seen a YouTube. While it is impressive, it is pure eye candy.
But a good handful of other features are not. Definitively Preview is not. Like now, when downloading, a mouse-over shows the status, speed, etc. Minimizing and closing are two different effects, and somehow I got hooked to 'knowing' what I did by using the effects. The rotation right/left is a great indication that I'm on another desktop; before I tended to search a window; now not any longer.
In short: aside from a lot of pure eye-candy, compiz here is a usability feature.
Hi, get 5 mod points for being really insightful. I don't have any at the moment, but I'd give all to you.
Thanks!
What happens when the small inventor and his portfolio of a few patents starts a corporation that turns out to be highly successful?
Welcome to the club. This is exactly what the patent system was developed for. Nobody has any qualms about your arguments.
There is one serious trouble these days: It does exactly not work like this any longer, it does the opposite.
Even if your clever buddy has a few very clever patents, he will be sued into bankruptcy before his patents are held valid. He will be sued for infringing close to 1000 patents of the competitor, because his production line will be plastered with patents of the multinationals. Because the multinationals exchange their patent portfolios ('you may use mine and I may use yours') to hammer your guy with his few patents into the ground.
No, this is not overflow of fantasy. It is the daily happenings in the patent business. This is why it needs to be fdisk-ed. To - eventually - be recreated in a form and jurisdiction where "the small inventor and his portfolio of a few patents" will allow him, again, to start "a corporation that turns out to be highly successful".
I've spent plenty of time, as I said in my post I've actually read all of the Ssupreme Court rulings on the subject.
Okay, so then you can enlighten me, the half-knowing. To my knowledge the whole mess started with the Supreme Court rebuking the USPTO in the Diamond vs. Diehr case, where the USPTO was kind of ordered to grant a patent on essentially software. Yes, I read the patent and some resources around it. Yes, the Supreme Court held the earlier appeals for non-patentable. Though in Diamond vs. Diehr they decided
On the other hand, when a claim containing a mathematical formula implements or applies that formula in a structure or process which, when considered as a whole, is performing a function which the patent laws were designed to protect (e. g., transforming or reducing an article to a different state or thing), then the claim satisfies the requirements [...]
And there was nothing new in the matter, if I am not mistaken, in curing rubber. But the formula as executed on a general purpose computer, in combination, was considered patentable. True, in the sense of 'software patents' the Supreme Court never endorsed such as singular patentable items. To me, it was a mistake nevertheless, a huge mistake to leave the formulation as is. Software as mathematical formula was still thrown out, but in real life, also in the first year of the 'PC' (1981), software would never be written not to be run on a (general purpose) computer. Literally, the Supreme Court did not allow software patents, de facto it invited them. In hindsight, one might assume a higher level of foresight by the creme of the creme of judges than to leave the indecisive, sorry, blurb that they produced. "implements or applies that formula in a structure or process" is so generally crappy that I am asking, seriously, wasn't this exactly opening the can of worms? Am I right when I assume that to disallow software patents as such, but to instruct software in combination with a computer as patentable, to be indecisive because both belong together: software needs a computer to run and a computer needs software to do something useful?
Only recently (I am too lazy to look up the details, it was something about brakes) have they decided that combining a well-known feature of 50 years ago with a well-known recent feature (microcontroller) to achieve the expected effect was obvious.
It seems you want to shift the blame to the lower courts. Maybe you can. But when a judge in a lower court would try to get the gist out of that ruling, she could in principle only arrive at the conclusion that software to be run on hardware would be novel and inventive. The tragedy of that Diamond vs Diehr case was, AFAICS, that the result was not unexpected: curing rubber. Only in a slightly different manner. The case law therefore was clear: An expected outcome, achieved through a novel combination of a non-novel general purpose computer with a non-novel algorithm developed into a sequence of code, fulfills the requirement of 101.
Correct me if I see this in a wrong light.
Sounds good. At first sight.
Actually, are you a communist or what? Why do you defend governmental interventionism ('patent') to guarantee everyone repayment on their investment? Oh, more of a capitalist, then?
I have actually just today spent some 18 Dollars to create a new flavour of cheese cake. Now you can help me, which department is the one to contact for readily ROI? And I am entitled to some repayment, and surely to protection from anyone else baking the same type of cake, right? You are happy paying some 20 or 30 percent more for your products, so that the inventors (sorry, their employers) can make an extra buck?
To help you out here: Of course, the implementations of H.264 or 802.11 are covered and protected by copyright. Those at the forefront have a distinct advantage compared to the bootleggers. 3COM made and still makes a lot of money with - at times - overpriced products. And I am very happy that I can buy some NIC from another manufacturer as well. The one from 3COM is protected, but not as a device to connect to a network. Lucky for all of us. Lucky, for most of us and maybe except for you, most standards are open, and are open to different implementations.
Yes and no. You are correct, using some new shiny and undocumented features for my own good does not primarily and automagically cripple others' products. But as secondary effect, those other products, in comparison, though effectively running at the original specs, look pale in comparison.
Since this is exactly one of the reasons how Microsoft came to dominate the software market, and had all major third parties kowtow to them (and pay) to get the information, the Free Market was distorted. It would not be the best/fastest application that grabbed the market, but the one with knowledge about and rights to the secrets.
I'd have to seriously disappoint you on this one: This is exactly not what the term 'Free Market' means, especially if you are already the monopolist.
You yourself might already have grown up, now try to work on your thinking abilities.
Microsoft needs more programmers
DEVELOPERS!
it is, for the uninformed AC
Oh. It's just a way to seed Silverlight. Nevermind.
... and I'm still waiting ...
And a bad one.
Here:
Black screen. Only. Okay, NoScript pops up. I *allow* Microsoft.com (pun)
Now the black screen is still black, with a tiny icon on top: Get Silverlight. I *click*.
A full screen pops up inviting me to download. "Install Microsoft Silverlight now for a
better Web experience". I click. "Download Silverlight.exe" 'OK'.
Yes, that's only bad. My browser identifies as "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS i86pc; en-US; rv:1.8.1.10) Gecko/20071230 Firefox/2.0.0.10". Any well-done site would inform me that I am not yet a convert, and point me to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/Search.aspx?displaylang=en for reference.
Seriously, bought good fit and good looking clothes are much better than free ugly ones. Do yourself a favor and get rid of all crap clothes and buy new good ones
I for one got a nice black, free, one. People say it suits me great. OpenSolaris World Tour. No, no online photos available. It doesn't hang lose, not slacking, funny prints, like http://logo.cafepress.com/7/4829055.2658817.jpg.
I surely picked the wrong place ... :(
Researchers in Indiana University Bloomington's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences have received a $1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how the brain uses highly complex statistics to learn language. [...] Assistant professor Chen Yu and Linda B. Smith, professor and chair of the department [...]
(http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/6382.html)
I sincerely hope we'll be seeing more and better stuff coming along from these Brain Scientists. (Am I the only one with an indelible association with some Flying Circus when I read these words?)
Funny, this. Mainly how irrelevant stuff overruns the editors. Okay, kdawson is off the RedMond-track ...
/. that research has established without doubt that 2 legs are suitable to walk.
Waiting for the day, when we read in
I'd like to ask, how abstracta fit into this mine-field of links between content and images.
In any case, this smells like Chomsky**2, and the old man himself will be up in arms.
I actually checked if closing/purging Yahoo account is still easy and my account exists there since 1998. Guess why that account was opened first time? Hotmail got acquired by MS and I was one of first to ask if there is a way to close my account
Time to pack up, then, and move along. Want a Google invite??