I have an example of prior art here. There was a company called Trivida in southern California whose software did EXACTLY what this patent is claiming. It was bought by a company called Be Free and they renamed the product BSELECT. It was in use for a time between 1999-2004 by a number of medium sized web sites. Eventually, it was shelved because of lack of demand.
You can look at a press release about version 3.0 of this product (from 2002) here.
Don't get your hopes up too quickly. According to this article on CNET, you must be a current Verizon customer and switch your phone service to a wireless carrier or VoIP provider.
So, for people like me who dropped Verizon last year and switched to VoIP, this announcement doesn't mean anything. I would switch away from my Cable internet in a second if they would just smarten up and offer this to everyone.
BOSTON--According to a report released Monday by Boston University's School of Lifestyle Management, more than 180 trillion leisure hours were lost to work in 2004.
Seriously, in college I had discarded movie seats that I pulled from a dumpster and a futon with no frame as my dorm furniture. This guy has a Crate & Barrel rug with Pottery Barn couches & chairs. He must be hosting a pr0n site on those University of Michigan EECS servers also.
Actually, they can get rid of their shares in much faster than 80 days. Assuming the last five days averaged the same as their 3 month average (given on Yahoo), 292K. 10% of that is 29.2K. Of course, the next day, the 5 day average has moved up slightly because of the added 10% of volume. Each day of 10% additional volume increases the average and the amount they can trade.
You can do the calculations in Excel to see that it would only take 26 days for them to sell 2 million shares. Ah, the wonders of compounding!
That's exactly the point -- it's impossible to keep source code secret, as this proves.
Ummm. You need to go back to logic class. This doesn't prove that it's impossible to keep source code secret at all. That would be like saying that the fact that I got a ticket on my way to work this morning proves that it's impossible to speed without getting a ticket. It doesn't follow.
Re:For the lazy:
on
SCOoby Snacks
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Under number 4, they talk about SCO Unix being able to prevent denial of service attacks. Hmmm. Doesn't seem like if I were SCO, I'd be advertising that feature after last week.
Just to let you know. They still get your number. *67 does not work on 911, toll-free and 900 services.
"Please be aware that the FCC has ruled that certain types of calls, including 911, 900, 976, and toll free numbers (800, 888, 877, etc.), are exempt from Caller ID blocking. Non-Published and Non-Listed numbers will be forwarded on calls to these service providers, even if per call or per line blocking is activated."
It sounds like a cool project but companies like Color Kinetics and others have patents in the color changing LED arena that you should be aware of before you go too far down this road.
Re: Legality depends on if you have a monopoly
on
Office 2003 and XML
·
· Score: 1
You couldn't be more wrong. Although I can do anything I want within the law to maintain or increase my market position, once I have a monopoly I cannot legally do some of those same things any more.
For example, if I am Red Hat, it is perfectly legal for me to make an agreement with a hardware manufacturer to charge them based on how many PCs they sell, whether or not they have Red Hat installed. If I am Microsoft, and have an OS monopoly, this very same business practice is ILLEGAL.
You want to know what was visionary? How about the MS-DOS licensing agreement that got them on to every PC and set them up to move into desktop applications, programming languages, back-office applications, handheld computers, cellular phones, gaming consoles, etc, etc?
Just because Microsoft's visionaries are in management and not technology doesn't make them any less visionary. Now, whether it makes them law-abiding, that's a different question.
It's actually quite a bit more nuanced than what people are talking about here. I work for one of the affiliate companies involved and have been in active discussions with the companies that employ these shopping plug-ins. Most of them are realizing that diverting other affiliate commissions is wrong and many are actively changing the way their software works so that they don't take other affiliate's commissions - some have already made this change.
I suspect that merchants will choose not to work with folks who don't at least take this step. Even if the software publishers do the right thing, this model may work for some merchants and not work for others - In the end the merchants have the power to decide whether to work with these guys because they're writing the checks.
My sister just spent four months in Ghana working for a volunteer program called Geekcorps. The way it works is that you work a four month stint with a local company or NGO. One of the projects my sister did involved building the web site for the Ghanaian parliament. So, we're talking significant impact here.
If you have tech skills, four months to kill and are looking to make an appreciable impact in the future of a nation, check it out.
One of the best things about the evolutionary biology field and the huge egos that dominate it is the intense academic flame wars that take place constantly.
One of my favorite feuds was between Daniel Dennett, a renowned professor of philosophy and cognitive studies at Tufts. In one of his best works, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett states that Gould is an intellectual coward for not following his ideas through to their logical conclusion. A couple of years later, Gould responded with an ad hominem attack in the New York Review of Books. Here's Dennett's reply:
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 1997 12:05:50 -0400 (EDT)
From: Daniel Dennett
To: nyrev@nybooks.com
Subject: reply to Gould
June 12, 1997
To the Editor
The New York Review of Books
1755 Broadway
New York, NY 10019-3780
Stephen Jay Gould complains that in Darwin's Dangerous Idea I attack his views via "hint, innuendo, false attribution" and "caricature." That is false. On the contrary, I went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that my account of his views was fair and accurate. One does not lightly embark on the course of demonstrating that a figure as famous and as honored as Stephen Jay Gould--"America's evolutionist laureate"--has misled his huge public about the theories in his field. I knew he was going to hate my book, and given the effectiveness of his past public attacks on sociobiology, IQ testing, and other targets of his disfavor, prudence alone would dictate that I should secure my criticisms against easy rebuttal and condemnation.
So I did my usual homework, and checked it all out with experts in the field, including experts sympathetic to Gould, urging them to correct any errors they spotted. I sent drafts of my critical chapters to Gould himself more than a year before I sent the final manuscript to the publisher, inviting him to meet with me at his convenience, or to respond in whatever way he chose. I invited him to participate in my seminar that was reviewing the penultimate draft. Gould kindly met with me in the summer of 1994, and we spent several hours going over his objections to the penultimate draft. He raised a variety of objections, and supported some of them with texts, and wherever he convinced me I had misinterpreted him, I revised my draft accordingly. On some points, however, he failed to persuade me, and one is particularly instructive, since now he accuses me of deliberately misrepresenting him.
I claimed that for a while he had presented punctuated equilibrium as a revolutionary "saltationist" alternative to standard neo-Darwinism, and he implored me to check this claim by reviewing all his work that dealt with the issue. It started well; he provided me with his complete curriculum vitae and photocopies of every piece therein that I requested. When I reviewed them, however, I found quotations--in addition to those that appear in my book on pages 286-290--that clearly supported my claim. I wrote back to him citing these. (Instead of quoting the quotations from my long letter to Gould, I refer readers to his notorious 1980 paper in Paleobiology, entitled "Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?") I ended my letter: "I want to be fair. When you begged me to see for myself that your opponents were foisting a caricature on you, you struck a nerve . . . . But now I need some more help from you if I am going to say that your critics are wrong in claiming that you tried on saltationism and then abandoned it." He never responded to my letter, or made any further attempt to correct my claims, and now he describes my interpretation of his views as "a farrago of false charges." On the contrary, my interpretation is standard fare, widely accepted in the field. For instance, two eminent evolutionary biologists, Jerry A. Coyne and Brian Charlesworth of Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago, wrote recently in response to a similar complaint of Gould's in a letter in Science (18 April, 1997, p338-341.): "In the past 25 years, Eldredge and Gould have proposed so many different versions of their theory that it is difficult to describe it with any accuracy. . . . Punctuated equilibrium originally attracted great attention because it invoked distinctly non-Darwinian mechanisms for stasis and change. . . . leading to Gould's pronouncement that 'if Mayr's characterization of the synthetic theory [of evolution] is accurate, then that theory, as a general proposition, is effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy.'" Neo-Darwinism--the synthetic theory of evolution that Gould propagandistically elides into "Darwinian fundamentalism"--is alive and well, in the textbooks and the laboratories. When Gould suggests otherwise, he is misleading the public.
Let me say a word about "Darwinian fundamentalism." Nonsense. I do not espouse the preposterous views Gould attributes to this mythic creed. Gould labors to create a caricature of the "strict" adaptationist, a type that occurs nowhere in nature and is explicitly disavowed, at length, by me (Darwin's Dangerous Idea, pp. 55, 238-261, 302-5, 326-8, and elsewhere). In fact, the passage from my book which Gould uses to anchor his fantasy is misquoted by him. It is adaptationist thinking, not "adaptation, natural selection's main consequence" that I say plays a crucial and ubiquitous role in analysis, and so it does, even though, as I stress again and again, there are plenty of other factors (comets, and other catastrophes, for instance) that may well play the predominant causal role in particular cases. What is amazing is that Gould wrests this quotation from the very section (pp238-61) in which I attempt to undo the travesty of Gould's previous efforts over the years to caricature adaptationist thinking.
When Gould complains further of my "red-baiting" and "gratuitous speculation" about his religious views, this hits a new low. As he knows full well, his scientific critics have often attributed his curious biases to his politics or his views on religion, and I was pointedly disassociating myself from those claims. My criticisms are of his science and his logic, not his political or religious views. But Gould wants to have it both ways; he lards his own writing with political and religious motifs and then howls about red-baiting when anybody takes him up on it--even to dismiss it as beside the point, which is what I did. Besides, if his politics and religion are to be off limits to criticism, then he should clean up his own act. It is he, not I, who has repeatedly failed to live up to the fine principle that he himself has so eloquently expressed:
Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline. We may therefore be sorely tempted to misuse that power in furthering a personal prejudice or social goal--why not provide that extra oomph by extending the umbrella of science over a personal preference in ethics or politics? But we cannot, lest we lose the very respect that tempted us in the first place. (Bully for Brontosaurus, 1991, pp.429-430.)
I am sorry it has come to this. In my discussions with Gould over the years, I have tried hard to get him to stop misrepresenting the works that he disapproved of, to clarify his position, and to disavow the misconstruals of evolutionary theory that are so often expressed by non-biologists citing him as their authority. In my book I carefully left open a graceful avenue for him to take: if he wished, he could claim that his eager public had been misreading him and then take responsibility for correcting their readings. He chose instead to turn up the volume of his vituperation.
There are quite a few minor mistakes in my book, including three he cites, but they do not substantially affect any of my criticisms of his views. I have put a list of these errors on the web site of the Center for Cognitive Studies . I will not respond further to Gould's charges, trusting that readers will take him up on his challenge: "If you think I am being simplistic or unfair to Dennett in this characterization, read his book. . . " Do, please; see for yourself; that's the scientific way. John Maynard Smith praises my book; Stephen Jay Gould attacks it. They are both authorities, but they can't both be right, can they?
Daniel C. Dennett
Slashdot Mirror
I have an example of prior art here. There was a company called Trivida in southern California whose software did EXACTLY what this patent is claiming. It was bought by a company called Be Free and they renamed the product BSELECT. It was in use for a time between 1999-2004 by a number of medium sized web sites. Eventually, it was shelved because of lack of demand.
You can look at a press release about version 3.0 of this product (from 2002) here.
Don't get your hopes up too quickly. According to this article on CNET, you must be a current Verizon customer and switch your phone service to a wireless carrier or VoIP provider.
So, for people like me who dropped Verizon last year and switched to VoIP, this announcement doesn't mean anything. I would switch away from my Cable internet in a second if they would just smarten up and offer this to everyone.
BOSTON--According to a report released Monday by Boston University's School of Lifestyle Management, more than 180 trillion leisure hours were lost to work in 2004.
Read more at the onion.
Seriously, in college I had discarded movie seats that I pulled from a dumpster and a futon with no frame as my dorm furniture. This guy has a Crate & Barrel rug with Pottery Barn couches & chairs. He must be hosting a pr0n site on those University of Michigan EECS servers also.
Actually, they can get rid of their shares in much faster than 80 days. Assuming the last five days averaged the same as their 3 month average (given on Yahoo), 292K. 10% of that is 29.2K. Of course, the next day, the 5 day average has moved up slightly because of the added 10% of volume. Each day of 10% additional volume increases the average and the amount they can trade.
You can do the calculations in Excel to see that it would only take 26 days for them to sell 2 million shares. Ah, the wonders of compounding!
That's exactly the point -- it's impossible to keep source code secret, as this proves.
Ummm. You need to go back to logic class. This doesn't prove that it's impossible to keep source code secret at all. That would be like saying that the fact that I got a ticket on my way to work this morning proves that it's impossible to speed without getting a ticket. It doesn't follow.
Under number 4, they talk about SCO Unix being able to prevent denial of service attacks. Hmmm. Doesn't seem like if I were SCO, I'd be advertising that feature after last week.
Just to let you know. They still get your number. *67 does not work on 911, toll-free and 900 services.
"Please be aware that the FCC has ruled that certain types of calls, including 911, 900, 976, and toll free numbers (800, 888, 877, etc.), are exempt from Caller ID blocking. Non-Published and Non-Listed numbers will be forwarded on calls to these service providers, even if per call or per line blocking is activated."
Verizon as one source for this information.
It sounds like a cool project but companies like Color Kinetics and others have patents in the color changing LED arena that you should be aware of before you go too far down this road.
You couldn't be more wrong. Although I can do anything I want within the law to maintain or increase my market position, once I have a monopoly I cannot legally do some of those same things any more.
For example, if I am Red Hat, it is perfectly legal for me to make an agreement with a hardware manufacturer to charge them based on how many PCs they sell, whether or not they have Red Hat installed. If I am Microsoft, and have an OS monopoly, this very same business practice is ILLEGAL.
You want to know what was visionary? How about the MS-DOS licensing agreement that got them on to every PC and set them up to move into desktop applications, programming languages, back-office applications, handheld computers, cellular phones, gaming consoles, etc, etc?
Just because Microsoft's visionaries are in management and not technology doesn't make them any less visionary. Now, whether it makes them law-abiding, that's a different question.
I suspect that merchants will choose not to work with folks who don't at least take this step. Even if the software publishers do the right thing, this model may work for some merchants and not work for others - In the end the merchants have the power to decide whether to work with these guys because they're writing the checks.
If you have tech skills, four months to kill and are looking to make an appreciable impact in the future of a nation, check it out.
One of the best things about the evolutionary biology field and the huge egos that dominate it is the intense academic flame wars that take place constantly. One of my favorite feuds was between Daniel Dennett, a renowned professor of philosophy and cognitive studies at Tufts. In one of his best works, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett states that Gould is an intellectual coward for not following his ideas through to their logical conclusion. A couple of years later, Gould responded with an ad hominem attack in the New York Review of Books. Here's Dennett's reply: Date: Thu, 12 Jun 1997 12:05:50 -0400 (EDT) From: Daniel Dennett To: nyrev@nybooks.com Subject: reply to Gould June 12, 1997 To the Editor The New York Review of Books 1755 Broadway New York, NY 10019-3780 Stephen Jay Gould complains that in Darwin's Dangerous Idea I attack his views via "hint, innuendo, false attribution" and "caricature." That is false. On the contrary, I went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that my account of his views was fair and accurate. One does not lightly embark on the course of demonstrating that a figure as famous and as honored as Stephen Jay Gould--"America's evolutionist laureate"--has misled his huge public about the theories in his field. I knew he was going to hate my book, and given the effectiveness of his past public attacks on sociobiology, IQ testing, and other targets of his disfavor, prudence alone would dictate that I should secure my criticisms against easy rebuttal and condemnation. So I did my usual homework, and checked it all out with experts in the field, including experts sympathetic to Gould, urging them to correct any errors they spotted. I sent drafts of my critical chapters to Gould himself more than a year before I sent the final manuscript to the publisher, inviting him to meet with me at his convenience, or to respond in whatever way he chose. I invited him to participate in my seminar that was reviewing the penultimate draft. Gould kindly met with me in the summer of 1994, and we spent several hours going over his objections to the penultimate draft. He raised a variety of objections, and supported some of them with texts, and wherever he convinced me I had misinterpreted him, I revised my draft accordingly. On some points, however, he failed to persuade me, and one is particularly instructive, since now he accuses me of deliberately misrepresenting him. I claimed that for a while he had presented punctuated equilibrium as a revolutionary "saltationist" alternative to standard neo-Darwinism, and he implored me to check this claim by reviewing all his work that dealt with the issue. It started well; he provided me with his complete curriculum vitae and photocopies of every piece therein that I requested. When I reviewed them, however, I found quotations--in addition to those that appear in my book on pages 286-290--that clearly supported my claim. I wrote back to him citing these. (Instead of quoting the quotations from my long letter to Gould, I refer readers to his notorious 1980 paper in Paleobiology, entitled "Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?") I ended my letter: "I want to be fair. When you begged me to see for myself that your opponents were foisting a caricature on you, you struck a nerve . . . . But now I need some more help from you if I am going to say that your critics are wrong in claiming that you tried on saltationism and then abandoned it." He never responded to my letter, or made any further attempt to correct my claims, and now he describes my interpretation of his views as "a farrago of false charges." On the contrary, my interpretation is standard fare, widely accepted in the field. For instance, two eminent evolutionary biologists, Jerry A. Coyne and Brian Charlesworth of Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago, wrote recently in response to a similar complaint of Gould's in a letter in Science (18 April, 1997, p338-341.): "In the past 25 years, Eldredge and Gould have proposed so many different versions of their theory that it is difficult to describe it with any accuracy. . . . Punctuated equilibrium originally attracted great attention because it invoked distinctly non-Darwinian mechanisms for stasis and change. . . . leading to Gould's pronouncement that 'if Mayr's characterization of the synthetic theory [of evolution] is accurate, then that theory, as a general proposition, is effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy.'" Neo-Darwinism--the synthetic theory of evolution that Gould propagandistically elides into "Darwinian fundamentalism"--is alive and well, in the textbooks and the laboratories. When Gould suggests otherwise, he is misleading the public. Let me say a word about "Darwinian fundamentalism." Nonsense. I do not espouse the preposterous views Gould attributes to this mythic creed. Gould labors to create a caricature of the "strict" adaptationist, a type that occurs nowhere in nature and is explicitly disavowed, at length, by me (Darwin's Dangerous Idea, pp. 55, 238-261, 302-5, 326-8, and elsewhere). In fact, the passage from my book which Gould uses to anchor his fantasy is misquoted by him. It is adaptationist thinking, not "adaptation, natural selection's main consequence" that I say plays a crucial and ubiquitous role in analysis, and so it does, even though, as I stress again and again, there are plenty of other factors (comets, and other catastrophes, for instance) that may well play the predominant causal role in particular cases. What is amazing is that Gould wrests this quotation from the very section (pp238-61) in which I attempt to undo the travesty of Gould's previous efforts over the years to caricature adaptationist thinking. When Gould complains further of my "red-baiting" and "gratuitous speculation" about his religious views, this hits a new low. As he knows full well, his scientific critics have often attributed his curious biases to his politics or his views on religion, and I was pointedly disassociating myself from those claims. My criticisms are of his science and his logic, not his political or religious views. But Gould wants to have it both ways; he lards his own writing with political and religious motifs and then howls about red-baiting when anybody takes him up on it--even to dismiss it as beside the point, which is what I did. Besides, if his politics and religion are to be off limits to criticism, then he should clean up his own act. It is he, not I, who has repeatedly failed to live up to the fine principle that he himself has so eloquently expressed: Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline. We may therefore be sorely tempted to misuse that power in furthering a personal prejudice or social goal--why not provide that extra oomph by extending the umbrella of science over a personal preference in ethics or politics? But we cannot, lest we lose the very respect that tempted us in the first place. (Bully for Brontosaurus, 1991, pp.429-430.) I am sorry it has come to this. In my discussions with Gould over the years, I have tried hard to get him to stop misrepresenting the works that he disapproved of, to clarify his position, and to disavow the misconstruals of evolutionary theory that are so often expressed by non-biologists citing him as their authority. In my book I carefully left open a graceful avenue for him to take: if he wished, he could claim that his eager public had been misreading him and then take responsibility for correcting their readings. He chose instead to turn up the volume of his vituperation. There are quite a few minor mistakes in my book, including three he cites, but they do not substantially affect any of my criticisms of his views. I have put a list of these errors on the web site of the Center for Cognitive Studies . I will not respond further to Gould's charges, trusting that readers will take him up on his challenge: "If you think I am being simplistic or unfair to Dennett in this characterization, read his book. . . " Do, please; see for yourself; that's the scientific way. John Maynard Smith praises my book; Stephen Jay Gould attacks it. They are both authorities, but they can't both be right, can they? Daniel C. Dennett