Unfortunately, the burden of proof lies with the person who does -not- have the patent.
USPTO was tasked with granting patents on non-obvious, novel inventions.
I think it has become fairly clear that it determines neither trait well. As such, it is deficient at its job.
The problem of the duration 'temporary' is -not- a separate discussion. It is directly relevant. Many people who oppose patents do so because they assert that patents are stifling innovation.
If the cycle of innovation is shorter than the duration of a patent, then you are discouraging innovation rather than encouraging. Thus the mechanism of current patents is running counter to the intent expressed.
You assert that patenting a trivial thing is money wasted. This is unfortunately not the case-- Death by paper-cuts (i.e. lawyers) is a fairly common tactic these days. Even if you win the court case you can lose the war.
To be clear: I'm not saying I disagree. IANAL, after all... but are you essentially saying that you go onto someone else's property, and you are subject to their rules?
This doesn't seem to make sense-- I didn't enter into a contract with them, with the exception of the purchase.. and as a previous poster noted the public is invited in.
Of course they can ask to see my receipt, but the question is: Do I have to show it?
And yet they don't allow people under 25 to pay the difference in insurance as an option in most cases..... And yet they allow you to rent a car on behalf of a company if you are under 25.
It is incorrect to take two observations (i.e. one sample) and claim that is sufficient basis for -confidence- in a hypothesis. This would be a bad statistic.
You are both wrong and right, incidentally- You are wrong because in this example there is 100% correlation (over a sample size of one). You are right because 100% correlation does not imply causation. 100% correlation implies there -could be- causataion, because anything less than 100% correlation implies there is -NOT- causation.
In the parent to my original posting, it was assumed/implied that the causal factor for global warming could not be observed. If you cannot observe causation, then the best you can do is observe 100% correlation and assume that there is some related causal factor (whether one causes the other, you cannot say. Nonetheless you can say that there is a causal relationship which may be either of the two, or perhaps parent to both).
Again: For a sample set of one, coincidence implies correlation.
Again: You need only to find one example to the contrary of a hypothesis to disprove it.
What is your method of determining that 'this is total horseshit,' by the way? Did you run tests to test your hypothesis (as would a good scientist)? How big was your sample set (one? zero?)? What is wrong with throwing out or reworking a theory that has been disproven?
For a more thorough treatment of the logical fallacy of 100% correlation implying causation, see the well written wikipedia article at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_impl ies_c ausation_(logical_fallacy)
When you assume that you cannot determine causality, the best you can do is to create a theory that stands up to testing.
In fact, you cannot say that your dieting is the cause of your weight loss. It may have been coincidence. The best you can say is that it is 100% correlated with a large sample set (and thus high confidence).
Example:
Observation: I started exercising Observation: I started to lose weight. These observations are 100% correlated.
Hypothesis: Exercising causes weight loss.
Testing: Exercise, then measure weight. If weight is lost, this adds weight to the theory. If weight is gained, the theory needs to be thrown out or reworked.
A theory is a working hypothesis that is considered probable based on experimental evidence or factual or conceptual analysis and is accepted as a basis for experimentation (Mirriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary)
In the case of global warming, of course, this is more complex-- There are many many more factors in making the planet warm up or cool down than there are in making you (or me) gain or lose weight.. And many of them are more difficult to measure. Nonetheless, we do have theories that have not been disproven with any real confidence.... the -real- problem with taking this approach with phenonema that take this long to disprove is that ou may not disprove it, and at that juncture, it is too late to do anything of substance about it.
More extreme example: I have a hypothesis that jumping out of an aircraft at 30,000 ft. without a parachute is not survivable. If my theory is wrong I'll survive (which is good), however testing it would be bad should it prove to be true. Not testing this theory is then, perhaps, the best alternative.
Actually, the crop that the farmer grew was intended to be his own.
He grew his own plants, and harvested his own seeds, which he had been doing for decades.
Montsanto then plants their GMO seeds in the next field over, those plants pollenate his field's plants, and now he has their gene in his plants.
He harvests the seeds, as normal, and plants the field as normal.
Next year, Montsanto sues him for violating their patented plant-gene... -becauase THEIR plants pollenated HIS field-
In this case the difference is that he CANNOT GROW NATURAL PLANTS EVEN IF HE WANTED TO-- they would be pollenated by Montsanto's plants, and then they would no longer be natural.
My understanding is that the Cirrus SR20, SR22 (and perhaps others) is not FAA rated for spins (i.e. 'unapproved for spins'), and hence the manufacturer was required to put the parachute on the plane for spin recovery certification.
http://www.aopa.org/asf/asfarticles/2003/sp0302. ht ml
You're missing the possibility of program(i.e. voting program) contamination.
The best way is:
0) verify the voter is elegible, by whatever means is allowable. 1) Vote on ATM style screen 2) ATM-machine prints out human verifiable paper result, which is behind glass. Same paper has machine-readable results encoded. 3) Human verifies paper by looking through glass 4) Human pulls lever which allows paper to drop into ballot box.
You can substitute whatever mechanism you think is most likely to not break for step 4.
You -need- to have the voter do the verification of the vote, else the machine can simply lie about what it is printing.
... You still have to aggregate the vote counts, and it seems easy to have the reporting of the numbers be different from their actual values.... also... Counting the votes at the site is a bit scary in small towns, as the local election officials would likely be able to figure out who (or what group) voted for what (based on what they know about the community). This is anti-productive to people voting without fear of reprisal.
The blind may well like a machine that does text-to-speach, or brail.
The sighted could enjoy hyperlinking of the actual text of the bill, etc, or other more descriptive terminology.
Computers are better at random access to information and translation of medium than paper can be..
In my opinion, this is the best reason for electronic voting.
There is one more reason (and this is the not-so-compelling one)-- fast counting (and aggregation)... But then again, since you can essentially accomplish all of the above without the inherent security risk of networking computers by providing the computers simply as data tools, and doing the paper-ballot thing.
Just to stave off any misconceptions here.. I don't like e-voting. Bad Bad Bad idea.
Its been quite some time since I last tried their speech recognition software.
The last time I used it (on my Power Mac 8100) When I told it to 'open window' about half the time it would 'close window'
I mean, looking at 'Dragon Naturally Speaking' we can see that speech recognition has come a fair way.... The real trick, as far as I'm concerned, is not speech recognition-- thats the easy part! The real trick is semantic interpretation... i.e. understanding what you mean by what you say. Admittedly, we humans don't do this especially well ourselved, but I'd be more than happy with human-level comprehension.
Lets say its any random football show with a yellow line, or a NASCAR (Nextel Cup) event with those wacky pointer things, or perhaps NBA basketball with those neato on-the-court shotcharts... etc etc..
So.. lets call it 'regular' HD video, with stuff added.
Of course, to make life more interesting, we'll make the video 10 bit instead of 8 bit because thats what the broadcaster uses to author video.. (PITA, of course, 10 bits doesn't align very nicely in an 2^N based word size machine)
Throw in a need to do location determination or perhaps foreground/background separation... and its a lot of compute horsepower.
For those scratching their heads, if any, 'speach' should have been 'speech.'
I do admit to being interested more in the discussion itself than in the relative triviality of the occasional mispelling or grammatical error... Its a character flaw...
I already have a space heater in my room.. It only runs at 1.2 Ghz, but it does come with a bunch of other devices running at 5400 rpm and 7200 rpm, which make up the bulk of the heat.
You want the room hotter, access more drives!.. Cooler? Ok, don't touch as many drives!
Absolutely. Try processing 1920x1280 sized frames of video at 30 frames per second. Even if the bandwidth is there (and it is, just barely), the CPU doesn't keep up.
Computer vision (and other computational perception/AI fields) eat up CPU like nobody's business...... And while you may immediately think its research, it is entirely possible that people in the broadcast industry attempt to do this kind of thing on a daily basis...
There is always a need for more processing power. Computer vision, speach recognition (semantic processing is a b*tch), etc are all still well beyond current computers' computational capabilities.
If you're just thinking about computers as being for 'work==Word Processing/Spreadsheet Editing', and 'play==computer games', them you need to look a little further.
More CPU power is always welcome. We shift what 'ordinary' means as computational power increases. Think of the day when you just speak to your computer and it speaks back.. Science fiction, well still yes, but it is verrrry likely that increased computational capability is the catalyst for such a thing.
The computer system is generally much more helpful to the voter.
For instance, the system can increase the font size, show pictures, show the full text of the law or measure, etc.
Computers can me more user friendly because they are more interactive.
That does NOT mean that I like the idea of using computers. I program them for a living, and they're too easy to coerce into doing things wrong... Not to mention they're difficult to get to do the right thing in the first place..
Lossy compression methods are worthless? I think many disagree with that sentiment.
As for inexpensive pricing with my formats of choice.. Why not?
The source for FLAC and OGG is freely and legally available for download on the web, and I believe it is legal to incorporate it into your product... So the barrier to entry for these things should be pretty low.
Even assembly is not necessarily deterministic, depending on the system. For instance, you may have a problem with locking the memory bus on a multi-cpu system which would increase the latency of that memory instruction by an unknown amount.
The definition of 'real-time' is always fluxuating. The best definition that I've been able to find is 'hard-real-time==system calls are guaranteed to complete in a pre-specified amount of time,' i.e. that there is some (hopefully large) amount of determinism in the system, and the program is able to utilize that to make itself deterministic.
C code will have the same level of determinism as assembly, or c++, or any other compiled language (assuming you're using the same compiler and compiler flags).
In constrast, here is an analogy to your argument, using binary==assembly, assembly=C++/C
Using your argument, you should forgo the use of assembly-- its too high level. That blasted assembler may do some translations to/on what you inputted! If you really wanted it to be real-time you should program in binary!... that doesn't make sense (to me)...
You can examine the assembled output of the C or C++ compiler to understand the instruction count, just as you can count the assembly instructions in the assembler. You've simply used a different (and arguably better) too to generate the assembly.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, the burden of proof lies with the person who does -not- have the patent.
USPTO was tasked with granting patents on non-obvious, novel inventions.
I think it has become fairly clear that it determines neither trait well. As such, it is deficient at its job.
The problem of the duration 'temporary' is -not- a separate discussion. It is directly relevant. Many people who oppose patents do so because they assert that patents are stifling innovation.
If the cycle of innovation is shorter than the duration of a patent, then you are discouraging innovation rather than encouraging. Thus the mechanism of current patents is running counter to the intent expressed.
You assert that patenting a trivial thing is money wasted. This is unfortunately not the case-- Death by paper-cuts (i.e. lawyers) is a fairly common tactic these days. Even if you win the court case you can lose the war.
Show me the law for this one.
To be clear: I'm not saying I disagree. IANAL, after all.
This doesn't seem to make sense-- I didn't enter into a contract with them, with the exception of the purchase.. and as a previous poster noted the public is invited in.
Of course they can ask to see my receipt, but the question is: Do I have to show it?
And yet they don't allow people under 25 to pay the difference in insurance as an option in most cases... .. And yet they allow you to rent a car on behalf of a company if you are under 25.
Go figure.
It is incorrect to take two observations (i.e. one sample) and claim that is sufficient basis for -confidence- in a hypothesis. This would be a bad statistic.
l ies_c ausation_(logical_fallacy)
You are both wrong and right, incidentally-
You are wrong because in this example there is 100% correlation (over a sample size of one). You are right because 100% correlation does not imply causation. 100% correlation implies there -could be- causataion, because anything less than 100% correlation implies there is -NOT- causation.
In the parent to my original posting, it was assumed/implied that the causal factor for global warming could not be observed. If you cannot observe causation, then the best you can do is observe 100% correlation and assume that there is some related causal factor (whether one causes the other, you cannot say. Nonetheless you can say that there is a causal relationship which may be either of the two, or perhaps parent to both).
Again: For a sample set of one, coincidence implies correlation.
Again: You need only to find one example to the contrary of a hypothesis to disprove it.
What is your method of determining that 'this is total horseshit,' by the way? Did you run tests to test your hypothesis (as would a good scientist)? How big was your sample set (one? zero?)? What is wrong with throwing out or reworking a theory that has been disproven?
For a more thorough treatment of the logical fallacy of 100% correlation implying causation, see the well written wikipedia article at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_imp
When you assume that you cannot determine causality, the best you can do is to create a theory that stands up to testing.
In fact, you cannot say that your dieting is the cause of your weight loss. It may have been coincidence. The best you can say is that it is 100% correlated with a large sample set (and thus high confidence).
Example:
Observation: I started exercising
Observation: I started to lose weight.
These observations are 100% correlated.
Hypothesis: Exercising causes weight loss.
Testing: Exercise, then measure weight.
If weight is lost, this adds weight to the theory.
If weight is gained, the theory needs to be thrown out or reworked.
A theory is a working hypothesis that is considered probable based on experimental evidence or factual or conceptual analysis and is accepted as a basis for experimentation (Mirriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary)
In the case of global warming, of course, this is more complex-- There are many many more factors in making the planet warm up or cool down than there are in making you (or me) gain or lose weight.. And many of them are more difficult to measure. Nonetheless, we do have theories that have not been disproven with any real confidence.
More extreme example: I have a hypothesis that jumping out of an aircraft at 30,000 ft. without a parachute is not survivable.
If my theory is wrong I'll survive (which is good), however testing it would be bad should it prove to be true. Not testing this theory is then, perhaps, the best alternative.
Actually, the crop that the farmer grew was intended to be his own.
... -becauase THEIR plants pollenated HIS field-
He grew his own plants, and harvested his own seeds, which he had been doing for decades.
Montsanto then plants their GMO seeds in the next field over, those plants pollenate his field's plants, and now he has their gene in his plants.
He harvests the seeds, as normal, and plants the field as normal.
Next year, Montsanto sues him for violating their patented plant-gene
In this case the difference is that he CANNOT GROW NATURAL PLANTS EVEN IF HE WANTED TO-- they would be pollenated by Montsanto's plants, and then they would no longer be natural.
That makes sense-- The receiver was likely saturated at that point, so was seeing noise do to amplitude sampling aliasing.
No wing is likely to help in many kinds of stalls or spins.
Think flat-spin, or stall-in-the-clouds-with-no-instruments.
My understanding is that the Cirrus SR20, SR22 (and perhaps others) is not FAA rated for spins (i.e. 'unapproved for spins'), and hence the manufacturer was required to put the parachute on the plane for spin recovery certification.
. ht ml
http://www.aopa.org/asf/asfarticles/2003/sp0302
Dang it. speach should have been speech. I make this particular spelling mistake way too often.
You're missing the possibility of program(i.e. voting program) contamination.
The best way is:
0) verify the voter is elegible, by whatever means
is allowable.
1) Vote on ATM style screen
2) ATM-machine prints out human verifiable paper result, which is behind glass.
Same paper has machine-readable results encoded.
3) Human verifies paper by looking through glass
4) Human pulls lever which allows paper to drop into ballot box.
You can substitute whatever mechanism you think is most likely to not break for step 4.
You -need- to have the voter do the verification of the vote, else the machine can simply lie about what it is printing.
The blind may well like a machine that does text-to-speach, or brail.
.. But then again, since you can essentially accomplish all of the above without the inherent security risk of networking computers by providing the computers simply as data tools, and doing the paper-ballot thing.
The sighted could enjoy hyperlinking of the actual text of the bill, etc, or other more descriptive terminology.
Computers are better at random access to information and translation of medium than paper can be..
In my opinion, this is the best reason for electronic voting.
There is one more reason (and this is the not-so-compelling one)-- fast counting (and aggregation).
Just to stave off any misconceptions here.. I don't like e-voting. Bad Bad Bad idea.
Is your hostname resolving properly?
/etc/hosts file.
(if you do nslookup `hostname`, does it resolve?)
If not, then try putting your hostname in your
This is the problem I see most often with slow X startups.
Its been quite some time since I last tried their speech recognition software.
.. The real trick, as far as I'm concerned, is not speech recognition-- thats the easy part! The real trick is semantic interpretation... i.e. understanding what you mean by what you say. Admittedly, we humans don't do this especially well ourselved, but I'd be more than happy with human-level comprehension.
The last time I used it (on my Power Mac 8100) When I told it to 'open window' about half the time it would 'close window'
I mean, looking at 'Dragon Naturally Speaking' we can see that speech recognition has come a fair way..
Lets say its any random football show with a yellow line, or a NASCAR (Nextel Cup) event with those wacky pointer things, or perhaps NBA basketball with those neato on-the-court shotcharts... etc etc..
So.. lets call it 'regular' HD video, with stuff added.
Of course, to make life more interesting, we'll make the video 10 bit instead of 8 bit because thats what the broadcaster uses to author video.. (PITA, of course, 10 bits doesn't align very nicely in an 2^N based word size machine)
Throw in a need to do location determination or perhaps foreground/background separation... and its a lot of compute horsepower.
Its not an odd aspect-ratio I just mistyped.
So... FYI (and correcting myself)
1080i == 1920x1080x30 FPS (interlaced),
1080p == 1920x1080x60 FPS (progressive)
720p == 1280x 720x60 FPS (progressive)
486i == 720x486 x30 FPS (interlaced) (i.e. ntsc)
So, bandwidth comparison(s):
1080i == 5.9*486i
1080p == 11.8*486i
In other words, a 1080i stream is about the same bandwidth as six 'regular' (i.e. SD) streams, and 720p is about the same as 12 SD streams.
Thats a lot of pixel pushing/processing.
Ah yes, sorry for mispelling. *shakes head*
For those scratching their heads, if any, 'speach' should have been 'speech.'
I do admit to being interested more in the discussion itself than in the relative triviality of the occasional mispelling or grammatical error... Its a character flaw...
I already have a space heater in my room.. It only runs at 1.2 Ghz, but it does come with a bunch of other devices running at 5400 rpm and 7200 rpm, which make up the bulk of the heat.
You want the room hotter, access more drives!.. Cooler? Ok, don't touch as many drives!
Absolutely. Try processing 1920x1280 sized frames of video at 30 frames per second. Even if the bandwidth is there (and it is, just barely), the CPU doesn't keep up.
... And while you may immediately think its research, it is entirely possible that people in the broadcast industry attempt to do this kind of thing on a daily basis ...
Computer vision (and other computational perception/AI fields) eat up CPU like nobody's business...
Disagreement.
There is always a need for more processing power.
Computer vision, speach recognition (semantic processing is a b*tch), etc are all still well beyond current computers' computational capabilities.
If you're just thinking about computers as being for 'work==Word Processing/Spreadsheet Editing', and 'play==computer games', them you need to look a little further.
More CPU power is always welcome. We shift what 'ordinary' means as computational power increases. Think of the day when you just speak to your computer and it speaks back.. Science fiction, well still yes, but it is verrrry likely that increased computational capability is the catalyst for such a thing.
The computer system is generally much more helpful to the voter.
For instance, the system can increase the font size, show pictures, show the full text of the law or measure, etc.
Computers can me more user friendly because they are more interactive.
That does NOT mean that I like the idea of using computers. I program them for a living, and they're too easy to coerce into doing things wrong... Not to mention they're difficult to get to do the right thing in the first place..
Lossy compression methods are worthless? I think many disagree with that sentiment.
As for inexpensive pricing with my formats of choice.. Why not?
The source for FLAC and OGG is freely and legally available for download on the web, and I believe it is legal to incorporate it into your product... So the barrier to entry for these things should be pretty low.
It is illegal to distribute software that has mp3 capabilities without a license from the Franhaufer guys (regardless of who wrote it).
OGG is freely distributable, has arguably superior compression for the same sound quality.
Furthermore, some important Linux distros don't include mp3 support at all, but they do support OGG (for the aforementioned reason).
When I rip anything, I ripp to ogg. It saves space, it plays just as well, and I don't have to feel guilty about breaking the law.
BS.
Even assembly is not necessarily deterministic, depending on the system. For instance, you may have a problem with locking the memory bus on a multi-cpu system which would increase the latency of that memory instruction by an unknown amount.
The definition of 'real-time' is always fluxuating. The best definition that I've been able to find is 'hard-real-time==system calls are guaranteed to complete in a pre-specified amount of time,' i.e. that there is some (hopefully large) amount of determinism in the system, and the program is able to utilize that to make itself deterministic.
C code will have the same level of determinism as assembly, or c++, or any other compiled language (assuming you're using the same compiler and compiler flags).
In constrast, here is an analogy to your argument, using binary==assembly, assembly=C++/C
Using your argument, you should forgo the use of assembly-- its too high level. That blasted assembler may do some translations to/on what you inputted! If you really wanted it to be real-time you should program in binary!
You can examine the assembled output of the C or C++ compiler to understand the instruction count, just as you can count the assembly instructions in the assembler. You've simply used a different (and arguably better) too to generate the assembly.