I don't think this patent is as broad as you suggest. If you read the abstract and the claims, they are being fairly detailed in what their invention does/will do. This isn't a "We are patenting online distribution of multimedia content" type of patent.
I am not a fan of software patents, as they tend to be too closely related to patenting mathematics or business models (this one is particularly close to mathematics), but for the time being, they are allowable in the US, and at least this patent takes a stab at being non-obvious in its methods.
The patent is more concerned with the method of converting the image into a manageable dataset that can be searched. So, it does not seem to rely on feature vectors at all. Moreover, this does look different than approaches I've seen to do the same thing. Fractal compression of images isn't terribly new, it's covered a bit in "Chaos and Fractals: New Frontiers in Science." However, I am not familiar with this method of classifying images based upon results from such a technique, this may very well be a novel development... dare I say, even worthy of a patent?
Honestly, if this company has an implementation of this system that works reasonably well, they deserve a patent on it. Extracting shape/texture information into (I'd assume) feature vectors effectively isn't the kind of trivial "development" that a system that performs different functions depending on how long a button is held down is.
However, if all they are patenting/developing is the searching, they're douchebags. I say this because after you have the feature vectors, the next step is a Nearest Neighbor Search, and there are already a number of algorithms for determining nearest neighbors. Unless their method somehow gets around the "curse of dimensionality", or provides other major improvements, I will be unimpressed.
And then some, but when the original poster used bible instead of say, Torah, I assumed he was referring to the Christian bible, including New Testament. Perhaps I was wrong in my thinking, and the original poster was taking issue with all bibles, not just those used in Christian practices.
I had actually planned to use Einstein as well, but the original poster specifically referenced the bible, so I wanted to stick with Christian figures.
It's a pity I did that though, since Einstein has the great quote of "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
And, also, you're right, Newton was probably not the strongest case builder, especially given his.. character (for more info, take a look at what he did to Leibniz, although it's important to note that the Leibniz's notation (dy/dx) is the one most commonly used today.)
First, it's a Bush vs. Kerry piece on slashdot concerning science, a definite fire hazard. And to make the situation all the more flammable, the assertion is made that pro-science and pro-religion are mutually exclusive ideas.
Science and religion can co-exist, for evidence I submit Isaac Newton, as a classic example, and Dr. Donald Knuth, as a more modern one. Donald Knuth has written a number of papers and books on the topic of computer science, as well as having written "3:16", which offers analysis of Chatper 3, Verse 16 of every book in the bible.
One need not reject science to be religious, and one need not reject religion to be scientific.
A 1 means that each number in that slot was different. A 0 means either they were both 0's or 1's.
You do know those points, the problem is, which is it? If the xor'd slot was 1, was the 1 in the first character, or the second? If the xor'd slot was 0, were both slots in both characters zero's or ones? If you try every iteration for these choices, the possibilities explode.. In fact, you'd be doing the same amount of work (maybe less, technically) just abitrarily picking 0's and 1's to place in the data.
Another important point about XORing for encryption: The key NEEDS to be at least as long as the data you're encrypting. Sometimes, with a short 8 character (or however long you like) password system, the *encryption* will take the password, repeat it over and over again until a string is generated that's the same length of the data, and then XORing is done. This is a really bad idea. If you know a few characters of the plain text, and can figure out the length of the password, it will not take long to break this encryption. This may also be something these people were doing.
I have the same preferences set up as of yesterday, and the filters do not work. This is a known bug, here's one of many bug listings for the slash code. There are a few of these, most are marked as duplicates, I found one the other day that went into some discussion on this issue, and it seems to come down to they can't decide exactly how they want the exclude feature to work.
You raised a valid point, and I've attempted to heed your advice, but with no luck. I've set the exclude list to include Politics, Republicans, Democrats, and United States, none of which have prevented this particularly topic (and all of the topics in Politics, if "Collapse Sections" is checked) from being displayed. The FAQ seems rather sparse on topics concerning the preferences, so if you can offer any further advice, I'd appreciate it.
And maybe, just maybe, you're hijacking a thread targetted against this very behavior. Or maybe, just maybe, you're looking to incite a flame war.
While I don't feel everyone on slashdot is uninformed with regard to politics, I do feel that slashdot is not the place for it. Posts under the topic of politics do little more than fuel flame wars of "this is why candidate U is better than candidate V." If I wanted rhetoric and appeals to emotion, I would have persued Liberal Arts. Give me sweet technology and news that appeals specifically to geeks, not more of the same shit I have to suffer through on every other news portal.
Serial Modem, for those of us on dialup who don't want to fight with a winmodem under a non-MS based OS. $11 dollars for a 56k non-winmodem is of great value to me.
Wow, 4 replies to this, such was not my intent. I was just being a bit pedantic about the quote. Darwin never said "survival of the fittest", to the best of my knowledge, that quote came from the Social Darwinism movement as a means for the rich to justify the shit load of money they inherited from dead relatives.
I had no intention of starting up a discourse on what makes a species fit or anything of the sort.
However, watching how the mods have treated my initial post has been a lot of fun. It went from Offtopic to Informative to Troll back to Informative...I'm waiting to get blasted with overrated next:D
This may be seen as a nitpick, but it's actually an important point. It's survival of the "fit", not fittest. Evolution is about being *good enough*, not the best.
A very reasonable point. And what's more, with the existence of searcheable peer-to-peer networks, it only takes one person to break the "1,000 algorithms" in order for everyone else to be able to enjoy. This is the main problem with that line of thinking. If everyone who wanted a copy had to go through steps 1-1000 to get past DRM/encryption/whathaveyou, it would be a non-issue to the MPAA and their kin. The general public is not likely to go through such a process, and these industries have been mitigating damage done by technophiles for years. However, now a single technophile can decode the material, and make it available on any given network, and in time, it won't matter that only one person was able to break the technology.
Actually, I never played that game, but that is pretty..interesting. Brings to mind the scene in "A Christmas Story," where Ralph decodes Little Orphan Annie's secret message and finds it's an add for Ovaltine, heh.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think this patent is as broad as you suggest. If you read the abstract and the claims, they are being fairly detailed in what their invention does/will do. This isn't a "We are patenting online distribution of multimedia content" type of patent.
I am not a fan of software patents, as they tend to be too closely related to patenting mathematics or business models (this one is particularly close to mathematics), but for the time being, they are allowable in the US, and at least this patent takes a stab at being non-obvious in its methods.
The patent is more concerned with the method of converting the image into a manageable dataset that can be searched. So, it does not seem to rely on feature vectors at all. Moreover, this does look different than approaches I've seen to do the same thing. Fractal compression of images isn't terribly new, it's covered a bit in "Chaos and Fractals: New Frontiers in Science." However, I am not familiar with this method of classifying images based upon results from such a technique, this may very well be a novel development... dare I say, even worthy of a patent?
Honestly, if this company has an implementation of this system that works reasonably well, they deserve a patent on it. Extracting shape/texture information into (I'd assume) feature vectors effectively isn't the kind of trivial "development" that a system that performs different functions depending on how long a button is held down is.
However, if all they are patenting/developing is the searching, they're douchebags. I say this because after you have the feature vectors, the next step is a Nearest Neighbor Search, and there are already a number of algorithms for determining nearest neighbors. Unless their method somehow gets around the "curse of dimensionality", or provides other major improvements, I will be unimpressed.
To be obnoxiously pedantic, if they're left/socialist leanings, wouldn't that make them "pinkos", and not full blown Red Commies?
This coming from a pinko.
And then some, but when the original poster used bible instead of say, Torah, I assumed he was referring to the Christian bible, including New Testament. Perhaps I was wrong in my thinking, and the original poster was taking issue with all bibles, not just those used in Christian practices.
I had actually planned to use Einstein as well, but the original poster specifically referenced the bible, so I wanted to stick with Christian figures.
It's a pity I did that though, since Einstein has the great quote of "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
And, also, you're right, Newton was probably not the strongest case builder, especially given his.. character (for more info, take a look at what he did to Leibniz, although it's important to note that the Leibniz's notation (dy/dx) is the one most commonly used today.)
First, it's a Bush vs. Kerry piece on slashdot concerning science, a definite fire hazard. And to make the situation all the more flammable, the assertion is made that pro-science and pro-religion are mutually exclusive ideas.
Science and religion can co-exist, for evidence I submit Isaac Newton, as a classic example, and Dr. Donald Knuth, as a more modern one. Donald Knuth has written a number of papers and books on the topic of computer science, as well as having written "3:16", which offers analysis of Chatper 3, Verse 16 of every book in the bible.
One need not reject science to be religious, and one need not reject religion to be scientific.
A 1 means that each number in that slot was different. A 0 means either they were both 0's or 1's.
You do know those points, the problem is, which is it? If the xor'd slot was 1, was the 1 in the first character, or the second? If the xor'd slot was 0, were both slots in both characters zero's or ones? If you try every iteration for these choices, the possibilities explode.. In fact, you'd be doing the same amount of work (maybe less, technically) just abitrarily picking 0's and 1's to place in the data.
Another important point about XORing for encryption: The key NEEDS to be at least as long as the data you're encrypting. Sometimes, with a short 8 character (or however long you like) password system, the *encryption* will take the password, repeat it over and over again until a string is generated that's the same length of the data, and then XORing is done. This is a really bad idea. If you know a few characters of the plain text, and can figure out the length of the password, it will not take long to break this encryption. This may also be something these people were doing.
Naturally, Gauss will have claimed to have discovered this first, but felt it was too trivial to publish.
Vaqrrq vg unf. Vg srryf yvxr gur byq qnlf nyy bire ntnva, cbfgvat naq ercylvat va ebg13 :)
At least he'll go out with a bang, not like that other guy who once worked for id and later promised to make us his bitch.
I have the same preferences set up as of yesterday, and the filters do not work. This is a known bug, here's one of many bug listings for the slash code. There are a few of these, most are marked as duplicates, I found one the other day that went into some discussion on this issue, and it seems to come down to they can't decide exactly how they want the exclude feature to work.
Was afraid of that :/
;)
Well, at any rate, thanks for the advice, hopefully it'll prevent such issues in the future
You raised a valid point, and I've attempted to heed your advice, but with no luck. I've set the exclude list to include Politics, Republicans, Democrats, and United States, none of which have prevented this particularly topic (and all of the topics in Politics, if "Collapse Sections" is checked) from being displayed. The FAQ seems rather sparse on topics concerning the preferences, so if you can offer any further advice, I'd appreciate it.
And maybe, just maybe, you're hijacking a thread targetted against this very behavior. Or maybe, just maybe, you're looking to incite a flame war. While I don't feel everyone on slashdot is uninformed with regard to politics, I do feel that slashdot is not the place for it. Posts under the topic of politics do little more than fuel flame wars of "this is why candidate U is better than candidate V." If I wanted rhetoric and appeals to emotion, I would have persued Liberal Arts. Give me sweet technology and news that appeals specifically to geeks, not more of the same shit I have to suffer through on every other news portal.
Serial Modem, for those of us on dialup who don't want to fight with a winmodem under a non-MS based OS. $11 dollars for a 56k non-winmodem is of great value to me.
Wow, 4 replies to this, such was not my intent. I was just being a bit pedantic about the quote. Darwin never said "survival of the fittest", to the best of my knowledge, that quote came from the Social Darwinism movement as a means for the rich to justify the shit load of money they inherited from dead relatives.
:D
I had no intention of starting up a discourse on what makes a species fit or anything of the sort.
However, watching how the mods have treated my initial post has been a lot of fun. It went from Offtopic to Informative to Troll back to Informative...I'm waiting to get blasted with overrated next
This may be seen as a nitpick, but it's actually an important point. It's survival of the "fit", not fittest. Evolution is about being *good enough*, not the best.
A very reasonable point. And what's more, with the existence of searcheable peer-to-peer networks, it only takes one person to break the "1,000 algorithms" in order for everyone else to be able to enjoy. This is the main problem with that line of thinking. If everyone who wanted a copy had to go through steps 1-1000 to get past DRM/encryption/whathaveyou, it would be a non-issue to the MPAA and their kin. The general public is not likely to go through such a process, and these industries have been mitigating damage done by technophiles for years. However, now a single technophile can decode the material, and make it available on any given network, and in time, it won't matter that only one person was able to break the technology.
Maybe he just likes having sex on his ceiling?
You are absolutely correct, the only sure test beyond the psychological test was a test on the replicant's bone marrow.
Bastard still got me, thank god there were few people in the office. Thanks for the heads up, wish I would've caught it sooner ;)
I suspect so, for sufficiently large values of 2.
Actually, I never played that game, but that is pretty ..interesting. Brings to mind the scene in "A Christmas Story," where Ralph decodes Little Orphan Annie's secret message and finds it's an add for Ovaltine, heh.
Cool username btw, I'm a big fan of The Tick.