I just got this response from OO.org for a bug I filed. I'll check when I next upgrade but in common with most users don't have time to "upgrade and see if it's still an issue".
The huge number of disjunctives in the claim (not allowed in UK patent applications, they'd need separate "main" claims to ensure clarity) make it hard to determine the true scope - as a UK application I'd say it lacks clarity.
For example that end clause
Patent US7321783 claim 1 >>> "said display panel adapted for reproducing images or other data from at least one of said memory or the Internet, said other data including at least one of moving images, combined sounds and moving images, or music with or without images."
Can be reduced as a display panel for playing music from a memory. How does a display panel play music? Perhaps this is a feature of recordation (Korean derivation?) devices!
You might also interpret the need for "connecting to [...] remotely located telephones" as being some sort of direct connection; this doesn't appear to be in the spec and so the claim would need clarifying to show this isn't the case.
However, looking at the HP OmniGo 700LX as a suggested citation - not withstanding the clarity issues - this is a palmtop for external attachment of a cellphone. The case in point is distinct in claiming "a cellphone provided in said housing" and in context and in light of teh description this appears to mean that it's a single integrated device and not an attachable unit.
Again wrt the OmniGo citation the claim 1 requires "at least one of (1) voice controlled dialing, (2) a wireless earphone or (3) a wire connection jack earphone with a microphone for operation of the mobile entertainment and communication device;" I don't think any of those 3 features is mentioned in that disclosure. Indeed the drafting "for operation of the mobile entertainment and communication device" suggests [I'd need to study the description in detail for this part] that the wireless-earphone or jack-wired-earphone-mic would have to be used to control ("for operation") the device.
Other devices like the Nokia 9210 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9210) didn't have wireless earphones nor jack-wired mics it appears. Indeed were there any phones with wireless earphones before bluetooth?
My brief look at the spec suggests they really thought the invention was the use of a memory card that you could download music from the 'net on to. But that's an instant opinion, similarly I only really looked at claim 1, other claims may be broader. Glancing at claim 10 (for example) I see it's drafted badly for the patent owner too... that's an awful narrow claim. My gut suggests that file wrapper estoppel will be involved somewhere, that the application slipped through based on some statement made about the invention that isn't explicit in the evidence we have here.
I'm just a failed UK patent examiner though so what would I know! - yeah I know I must be an idiots idiot, hey.
If you're trying to develop imagination then a blank piece of paper is too hard - instead of exercising their imagination fully they'll just go for the easy options: a face, house, car, you know the sort of thing. It's like saying "write a program" without a framework of what you want the program to accomplish.
There's a great book I've seen called "The Art Book" IIRC, though I can't find it at the mo', with part pictures on each page and a suggestion. of what to draw - some more abstract than others. This pushes the artist to create images with which they aren't over familiar and which will cause them to be more creative and possibly even have to research their images (a hippo in a tutu, is the tutu just the flouncy bit or does it have an upper and straps?).
Sure, even that book has a blank page or two ("complete the drawing of a chamaleon", I just made that one up btw).
>>> "The same thing would go for selling hats that look like upended bowls of pasta and shout at random passers-by."
Sound novel to me!
I totally get where you're at, it may have been too subtle, but where I stated the argument that the ~appearance of novel features in a well-worked field implies inventiveness~ I tried to intimate that I don't buy the argument but can't readily refute it.
Moreover I'd agree that software is distinct from other areas of industry and have argued such myself - I'd like to have seen a separate system (part way between copyright and patents) for software but there would still be issues at the boundaries between these systems.
Your "polymer clay dog" is novel. The technical features of that clay dog are not and hence no patent. What constitutes "technical" is an open question in the worldwide patent system - it's axiomatic and difficult to clearly demarcate the boundaries of technicality (there have been several attempts by the EPO technical boards)... here's an interesting report on Peter Prescott QC's comments (acting as Deputy Judge) in a UK business method patentability dispute: http://www.out-law.com/page-5970.
One point I will contradict you on is the active cursor feature being merely asthetic (http://v3.espacenet.com/eclasrch?ECLA=/espacenet/ecla/g06f/g06f3.htm?q=3-048a1c). It demonstrates that the computer has not hung and provides information about the current load - that information requires measurement and the development of new routines as to when to display the cursor: what priority it should have, when it should stop, when it should start, how to locate the sprite correctly, where in memory it should be loaded from... if you do a search on "active wait cursor" you'll see there are still outstanding issues for this - the most basic of desktop GUI features. The styling of the cursor, merely asthetic, it's implementation is definitely technical. The earliest references from patent DB's appear to be 1989-ish - I'd have been playing lemmings on an Acorn Archimedes around that time.
>>> How do these patent claims differ from normal drag and drop? In pretty trivial ways if at all, but it may be hard for a patent examiner to understand that trivial changes in drag and drop user interface are not in fact novel enough to warrant a patent.
Firstly I think you're confusing novelty and "inventive step". Something is either novel or not, there are no degrees of novelty. . It's very easy to create something novel, by collocation for example, but there must be a synergy between the elements as any application can only cover one "invention". The inventive step is the difference between the "state of the art" and the patent being considered, whether that step is obvious is often the crucial point.
Looking at the claims (eg http://peertopatent.org/patent/20070234226/overview; assuming they are copied correctly) then they seem to follow a pretty standard formula. Often (and in certain jurisdictions there's a benefit in this) the first claim is intended to be too broad. This means that the applicant gets an extra period of time for amending the patent before it can be granted and hence before fees have to be paid. Other reasons for broad claims are to get an overview of a field from the examiners perspective - they site a spread of patents that knock out your claim 1. The claim 1 in this case is to broad for this however.
The claims then branch off, methods, devices, systems each incorporating or excluding details of what might be the envisaged product. This way the broadest possible scope of monopoly is sort - it's an adversarial system really. So the article is bunk when it claims to be fighting overly broad patents - the applicant wouldn't want claim 1 to stand as such a patent wouldn't be enforceable as it's clearly invalid wrt the prior art.
Now back to that quote "trivial changes in drag and drop user interface are not in fact novel enough to warrant a patent". Well the issue if indeed the steps are minor is that drag and drop interfaces are used by a plurality of users in a plurality of places (!). So the field is extremely well worked. A very minor change therefore is critical, it could easily corner the market. Say the change from a static to a dynamic "wait" cursor (egg-timer) - a minor alteration but a very significant one. Now we say such a change is obvious, but we have to assess this question from the time of filing (or more properly the priority date) and from the perspective of the man skilled in the GUI art and in possession of the common knowledge of the GUI field or research. Do citations in the field mean you could produce that inventive step without being inventive. Is it plainly obvious.
In any well worked field it appears to me that it's perfectly reasonable to argue that any small feature that can't be hit for lack of novelty must be inventive as otherwise it would appear in the prior art. That argument can't easily be refuted; though I think it lacks rigour, personally.
>>> I doubt the judge represents the views of the French people; you think they're going to like having free shipping taken from them?
It depends if you look beyond the end of your nose or not.
A large US company decides to undercut all the french book sellers (including the publishers themselves if they like). They're global and can effectively take a loss on all sales in France in order to destroy the market. Who wins? Well short term the French get cheap books. Long term they get further unemployment and the chance to work for some multimillionaire americans and books that probably won't be any cheaper.
You probably also have issues, as les Francais appear to be hot in this, about American culture being transported over with the business. Amazon will run things Amazon's way, which probably won't be the French way... that may not be a bad thing but it's likely to be a further influence (though admittedly small for just one company) on the changing culture. For example Amazon will likely be a great opportunity for bilingual speakers, promoting non-French speech amongst those that aspire to great things in the business world, etc..*
Maintenant, is the Judge looking out for France? Je pense que... il pourrai etre.**
-- * yes, I realise that's not limited to Amazon, but Amazon helps the movement in this direction
** I'm not French I just pretend I can write the language, E&OE.
>>>...and by over-reacted we mean imprisoned him for the rest of his life, threatened to kill, torture and excommunicate him if he didn't publicly recant what he believed to be true, and banned his published work.
Threat of excommunication was probably there the other stuff there's no record of that I've read, got a source? Some people claim that his later blindness was due to torture but in reality he just went blind through age / illness. He was told he could publish his work if he made it clear that it was still a hypothesis and apparently the likes of Tycho Brahe were yet to be convinced so I'd say it wasn't yet a theory.
>>> Your education has failed you if you believe a geocentric view is workable.
Probably. But with relativity frames of reference become as important as each other - it is I believe one of the things that helped to fire off post-modernism. If I were a better mathematician I could formulate the equations based on the moon as the central point. The sun is not fixed based on it's position in our galaxy but it makes as much sense to say the earth is static as it does any other body.
>>> Yes the frame of reference of the sun shifts against the galaxy and the galaxy against the local group etc. but that doesn't make geocentric and heliocentric views equivalent.
So where is the centre about which the universe moves, oh learned one. Pick a point.
>>> Heliocentricism it failed to be as accurate as Ptolemy's tables in some circumstances while people insisted that the planets had circular orbits...
You're confusing the notion of the sun as the default centre about which calculations should procede with the derivation of accurate prediction from that assumption.
If I see you eating icecream I'd probably assume you like icecream and that if I offer you icecream in the future you'll accept. Now I see you the next day and offer you icecream, you accept and apparently confirm my hypothesis. But the truth may be you hate icecream but had a sting in your mouth that needed (and still needs) cooling. The fact is you were still eating icecream regardless of my unsound conclusions. So the fact that heliocentricism led to better predictions doesn't necessarily imply that the sun has any greater significance than does the earth except in simplifying a mathematical model.
Suppose someone came along 10 years after Galileo and says well actually the sun is rotating about giant hidden star at the centre of the milky way (the galactic centre). This guy goes to the pope and demands to be allowed to publish that this is the truth that the universe rotates around the galactic centre and not around the sun as the heliocentrists propose...
We decide what the important point of reference is. This is the same mistake that we make when we look at ancient atlases with Jerusalem at the centre. When I drew a map as a child I made my house the centre - it doesn't mean anything more than that being the arbitrary centre of a frame of reference (in the non relativistic sense).
My parents last 3 digits are 555. They have been for over 30 years, the local number has changed once in that time when our exchange closed. The national code has changed once too.
Galileo's falling out with the Catholic Church may have been vital - but it sure wasn't about the church accepting a proven point of heliocentricism.
Corpenicus' work proposing the heliocentric hypothesis was after all church sponsored (as was Galileo) and indeed inscribed, IIRC, to the pope of the time.
Galileo had been wrong before, apparently he believed comets to be an atmospheric phenomenon and the great _scientific_ minds of the time were as yet unconvinced. The church was leaving the question of geo- and heliocentricism open rather than making a decree as to the truth of one or other. Galileo by all accounts didn't like that. Despite being called in to the vatican he went ahead and published non-latin work to tell the masses that his theory was the truth - this shows he wasn't trying to convince the learned scholars, incidentally. Kepler had already published on much of the stuff Galileo worked on anyway so the papacy was hardly keeping things in the bag. Possibly the church was wary of following Kepler's hypotheses which appear to have been founded on a sort of Platonic helio-mysticism (eg http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/kepler.html).
Fine, the papacy over-reacted to Galileo. We got it.
Incidentally - was Galileo right? Is the sun "fixed". I don't think so. Indeed I'm happy with both geocentric and heliocentric descriptions; but in a "sol" centred frame of reference I'm happier with heliocentric maths (though one of the problems with heliocentricism apparently was that it failed to be as accurate as Ptolemy's tables).
Companies like AVG (German Antivirus co.) give away very good free products. If you want then to use on a network or for a business or want particular extra features then you pay.
This works particularly well if you can have people use your software for a long time and then absolutely need the extra feature(s).
With financial software though verity of results is paramount.
I don't think they are claiming that, they are claiming he didn't break the law. If the man's (filesharer) position is considered wrong then the law should be changed to say that attempting to provide an illegal copy is wrong... there seems to be a bit of a slippery slope there though.
Consider a guy too drunk to drive legally - he can't get the key in the door and fails to get in the car (if he sits in it he's in charge and committing an offense). Now I think it's terrible that he intended to drive drunk, but can we really prosecute him?
Someone sets off to burgle(sp?) a house, doesn't take any tools (as that's going equipped and a crime in itself), he has an accident and never makes it but later confesses to intending to burgle, do we prosecute him?
Note that both these scenarios are open to being "completed" by a third party, the drunk can have his door opened by a passerby; the burglar could be saved from his accident.
Firefox gives 59/100 - Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071204 Ubuntu/7.10 (gutsy) Firefox/2.0.0.11 Konqueror-kde4 gives 1/100 (!) - Konqueror 4.00.00 (KDE 4.0.0) Konqueror FAIL - crashes, screencap shows that it says "scripting must be enabled" even when it is
"Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work)."
See section 4(c) of the license, which is ambiguous (and contains a typo "Ssection"). We must supply various attribution data if supplied or specified but how and where is it specified, not necessarily with the work. This information should be required by the license to be in the meta-data attached to the file or specifically stated visually-alongside the cc license marking.
>>> It's not a problem if you pay for an image because then you have a paper trail for the payment, and maybe even a written, signed license. I guess if you get a signed CC license from the supplier then that's one way out of this.
Wouldn't an email from the supplier of the CC-ed material be sufficient to shift the burden of proof?
If they said you forged the email then without proof you could countersue for slander too.
I often consider cc-by-sa images, there are lots on flickr. Flickr, and the license help info, say you should provide an attribution in the form requested. Thing is sticking a cc-by-sa logo next to something is as much as anyone does. Nobody ever mentions how they want their "by" to be recorded. So, usually you have to contact the producer anyway, and no they don't often respond to random emails from unknown individuals. Those that do respond often ask how I'm going to use the image first, which seems counter to the license already granted. Ho-hum.
Well I took receipt of my new Acer T180 Athlon 64 X2 400+,3GB, 250GB yesterday... I've waited 9 years or so to get a new computer. Came preinstalled with Vista but sensibly there's a "data" partition which now holds my first Ubuntu 7.10 ("gutsy gibbon") install. I've been wanting to try Ubuntu for a while but having struggled with Vista (preinstalled mind you!) to get it working... Vista took about an hour to setup itself lots of "please wait..." without saying what it's doing (presumably trying to use a huge encryption key for something!?). OK, so looked nice, ran windows update, rebooted automatically - looks crap now.
Can't get my usbadsl modem (Speedtouch 330) working despite using the companies provided driver... it works now on ubuntu though (after some trickery, at present I have to ifconfig eth0 down to drop the eth0 default route before the ppp0 modem will work).
Ubuntu and the BIOS recognise the 3GB RAM, not Vista though.
Ubuntu install was pretty easy compiz is awesome and I installed umpteen new apps to try via synaptic (which I've used before) with no real effort. Best of all Ubuntu didn't stomp over my Vista install but simply added it to the boot menu.
My previous comp is KDE on Slackware (upgraded since v.9) but I'm seriously thinking of sticking with gnome based on this install; we'll see after a month or so.
So I'll keep Vista for testing web designs in IE7 (yes I know about ies4linux) and for learning new apps to train folk on where necessary - but against Ubuntu (gnome, I've really shocked myself!!) it just seems pretty lame, perhaps when I fix it up I'll be impressed but _preinstalled_ you'd think it'd work well. Oh the widgets looked good, btw, are they third-party?
>>> I'm pretty sure Flash renders 100% compatible Flash, and Silverlight renders 100% compatible Silverlight. If you look at the same HTML on Windows and Mac, you'll get different output on many web pages, but if you look at Silverlight on Windows and Mac, you'll get the same output.
That's because HTML is intended to present information and not identical images. You can pretty much guarrantee that any two randomly chosen renderings are different - different resolution, different colour settings, different fonts, different font-sizes, different browser width, different personal style sheets, different browsers. But provided setups are the same then browsers should not render differently.
I bet if you look on WindowsXP and Mac iPhone you don't get the _same_ rendering. If you do then it's broken as an information display medium.
What I want to know is what benefits do we have if we use Silverlight over using Flash, say, or other established standards for preparing webpages.
Energy is supplied to accelerate a particle towards the assumed limit "c". There is apparently only a limited amount of energy available as the universe appears to be both finite and without external sources of energy. Thus the kinetic energy of any group of particles is limited. Hence, temperature as a measure of kinetic energy should be limited too.
Looking another way: Wien's law gives the wavelength at which the maxima of black-body radiation exists - lambda_peak = 0.002898 / T. The wavelength also is observed (not shown in this equation) to tend towards 0 for increasing temperatures. If we assume this continues then we can get a bound based on the theoretical lamda_min (the planck length). This gives us about 1.8 x 10^32 K for T.
I don't know whether this theoretical maximum (which is pretty shakily established!) would be limited further by, say. Stefan-Boltzman's law on black body radiation. If we can establish a bound on the energy of the universe (and clearly some have tried) then we can use that limit to give a limit of temperature as no body could (it seems) radiate [much!] more than the entire energy of the universe.
Others have provided a temperature of about 1x10^32 at the planck time - but not sure how this was established! This would also appear to be a bound on the possible temperature, but not on the theoretically possible temperature and happily concurs with my estimation.
Slashdot Mirror
Me >>> I'll let you off though as no-one over here seems to have noticed either.
Old habits die hard. The government at the time refused to be hardline about it and so we have a continuing roll-out 30+ years later.
>>> usually weigh around 300-350 lbs [21-25 stone for the Brits in the audience]
We've been metric since before I was born, I'm 31. I'll let you off though as no-one over here seems to have noticed either.
So it's 135-160 Kg, thanks.
There are links ...?
Why didn't anyone say?
You should just do it. Ad-hominem attacks are always the highest form of logical argument IMHO.
... retarded you say.
:0)>
What's that? Me, surely not, but I
Well, with your experience in the matter, I guess I'll have to concede.
Fractured Engrish (sic): I assumed it was advanced text-to-speech.
... then he shows us the great advance!!
I like the opening with the guy typing on a regular keyboard on his dual screen setup
Take a carving knife and cut off 5-10lbs of your own flesh.
Trivial?
I just got this response from OO.org for a bug I filed. I'll check when I next upgrade but in common with most users don't have time to "upgrade and see if it's still an issue".
The huge number of disjunctives in the claim (not allowed in UK patent applications, they'd need separate "main" claims to ensure clarity) make it hard to determine the true scope - as a UK application I'd say it lacks clarity.
... that's an awful narrow claim. My gut suggests that file wrapper estoppel will be involved somewhere, that the application slipped through based on some statement made about the invention that isn't explicit in the evidence we have here.
For example that end clause
Patent US7321783 claim 1 >>> "said display panel adapted for reproducing images or other data from at least one of said memory or the Internet, said other data including at least one of moving images, combined sounds and moving images, or music with or without images."
[see eg http://v3.espacenet.com/origdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=US2004110545&F=0&QPN=US2004110545%5D
Can be reduced as a display panel for playing music from a memory. How does a display panel play music? Perhaps this is a feature of recordation (Korean derivation?) devices!
You might also interpret the need for "connecting to [...] remotely located telephones" as being some sort of direct connection; this doesn't appear to be in the spec and so the claim would need clarifying to show this isn't the case.
However, looking at the HP OmniGo 700LX as a suggested citation - not withstanding the clarity issues - this is a palmtop for external attachment of a cellphone. The case in point is distinct in claiming "a cellphone provided in said housing" and in context and in light of teh description this appears to mean that it's a single integrated device and not an attachable unit.
Again wrt the OmniGo citation the claim 1 requires "at least one of (1) voice controlled dialing, (2) a wireless earphone or (3) a wire connection jack earphone with a microphone for operation of the mobile entertainment and communication device;" I don't think any of those 3 features is mentioned in that disclosure. Indeed the drafting "for operation of the mobile entertainment and communication device" suggests [I'd need to study the description in detail for this part] that the wireless-earphone or jack-wired-earphone-mic would have to be used to control ("for operation") the device.
Other devices like the Nokia 9210 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9210) didn't have wireless earphones nor jack-wired mics it appears. Indeed were there any phones with wireless earphones before bluetooth?
My brief look at the spec suggests they really thought the invention was the use of a memory card that you could download music from the 'net on to. But that's an instant opinion, similarly I only really looked at claim 1, other claims may be broader. Glancing at claim 10 (for example) I see it's drafted badly for the patent owner too
I'm just a failed UK patent examiner though so what would I know! - yeah I know I must be an idiots idiot, hey.
If you're trying to develop imagination then a blank piece of paper is too hard - instead of exercising their imagination fully they'll just go for the easy options: a face, house, car, you know the sort of thing. It's like saying "write a program" without a framework of what you want the program to accomplish.
There's a great book I've seen called "The Art Book" IIRC, though I can't find it at the mo', with part pictures on each page and a suggestion. of what to draw - some more abstract than others. This pushes the artist to create images with which they aren't over familiar and which will cause them to be more creative and possibly even have to research their images (a hippo in a tutu, is the tutu just the flouncy bit or does it have an upper and straps?).
Sure, even that book has a blank page or two ("complete the drawing of a chamaleon", I just made that one up btw).
>>> "The same thing would go for selling hats that look like upended bowls of pasta and shout at random passers-by."
... here's an interesting report on Peter Prescott QC's comments (acting as Deputy Judge) in a UK business method patentability dispute: http://www.out-law.com/page-5970.
... if you do a search on "active wait cursor" you'll see there are still outstanding issues for this - the most basic of desktop GUI features. The styling of the cursor, merely asthetic, it's implementation is definitely technical. The earliest references from patent DB's appear to be 1989-ish - I'd have been playing lemmings on an Acorn Archimedes around that time.
Sound novel to me!
I totally get where you're at, it may have been too subtle, but where I stated the argument that the ~appearance of novel features in a well-worked field implies inventiveness~ I tried to intimate that I don't buy the argument but can't readily refute it.
Moreover I'd agree that software is distinct from other areas of industry and have argued such myself - I'd like to have seen a separate system (part way between copyright and patents) for software but there would still be issues at the boundaries between these systems.
Your "polymer clay dog" is novel. The technical features of that clay dog are not and hence no patent. What constitutes "technical" is an open question in the worldwide patent system - it's axiomatic and difficult to clearly demarcate the boundaries of technicality (there have been several attempts by the EPO technical boards)
One point I will contradict you on is the active cursor feature being merely asthetic (http://v3.espacenet.com/eclasrch?ECLA=/espacenet/ecla/g06f/g06f3.htm?q=3-048a1c). It demonstrates that the computer has not hung and provides information about the current load - that information requires measurement and the development of new routines as to when to display the cursor: what priority it should have, when it should stop, when it should start, how to locate the sprite correctly, where in memory it should be loaded from
>>> How do these patent claims differ from normal drag and drop? In pretty trivial ways if at all, but it may be hard for a patent examiner to understand that trivial changes in drag and drop user interface are not in fact novel enough to warrant a patent.
Firstly I think you're confusing novelty and "inventive step". Something is either novel or not, there are no degrees of novelty. . It's very easy to create something novel, by collocation for example, but there must be a synergy between the elements as any application can only cover one "invention". The inventive step is the difference between the "state of the art" and the patent being considered, whether that step is obvious is often the crucial point.
Looking at the claims (eg http://peertopatent.org/patent/20070234226/overview; assuming they are copied correctly) then they seem to follow a pretty standard formula. Often (and in certain jurisdictions there's a benefit in this) the first claim is intended to be too broad. This means that the applicant gets an extra period of time for amending the patent before it can be granted and hence before fees have to be paid. Other reasons for broad claims are to get an overview of a field from the examiners perspective - they site a spread of patents that knock out your claim 1. The claim 1 in this case is to broad for this however.
The claims then branch off, methods, devices, systems each incorporating or excluding details of what might be the envisaged product. This way the broadest possible scope of monopoly is sort - it's an adversarial system really. So the article is bunk when it claims to be fighting overly broad patents - the applicant wouldn't want claim 1 to stand as such a patent wouldn't be enforceable as it's clearly invalid wrt the prior art.
Now back to that quote "trivial changes in drag and drop user interface are not in fact novel enough to warrant a patent". Well the issue if indeed the steps are minor is that drag and drop interfaces are used by a plurality of users in a plurality of places (!). So the field is extremely well worked. A very minor change therefore is critical, it could easily corner the market. Say the change from a static to a dynamic "wait" cursor (egg-timer) - a minor alteration but a very significant one. Now we say such a change is obvious, but we have to assess this question from the time of filing (or more properly the priority date) and from the perspective of the man skilled in the GUI art and in possession of the common knowledge of the GUI field or research. Do citations in the field mean you could produce that inventive step without being inventive. Is it plainly obvious.
In any well worked field it appears to me that it's perfectly reasonable to argue that any small feature that can't be hit for lack of novelty must be inventive as otherwise it would appear in the prior art. That argument can't easily be refuted; though I think it lacks rigour, personally.
FWIW.
[I was a UK Patent Examiner a few years ago.]
>>> I doubt the judge represents the views of the French people; you think they're going to like having free shipping taken from them?
... that may not be a bad thing but it's likely to be a further influence (though admittedly small for just one company) on the changing culture. For example Amazon will likely be a great opportunity for bilingual speakers, promoting non-French speech amongst those that aspire to great things in the business world, etc..*
... il pourrai etre.**
It depends if you look beyond the end of your nose or not.
A large US company decides to undercut all the french book sellers (including the publishers themselves if they like). They're global and can effectively take a loss on all sales in France in order to destroy the market. Who wins? Well short term the French get cheap books. Long term they get further unemployment and the chance to work for some multimillionaire americans and books that probably won't be any cheaper.
You probably also have issues, as les Francais appear to be hot in this, about American culture being transported over with the business. Amazon will run things Amazon's way, which probably won't be the French way
Maintenant, is the Judge looking out for France? Je pense que
--
* yes, I realise that's not limited to Amazon, but Amazon helps the movement in this direction
** I'm not French I just pretend I can write the language, E&OE.
>>> ...and by over-reacted we mean imprisoned him for the rest of his life, threatened to kill, torture and excommunicate him if he didn't publicly recant what he believed to be true, and banned his published work.
...
...
Threat of excommunication was probably there the other stuff there's no record of that I've read, got a source? Some people claim that his later blindness was due to torture but in reality he just went blind through age / illness. He was told he could publish his work if he made it clear that it was still a hypothesis and apparently the likes of Tycho Brahe were yet to be convinced so I'd say it wasn't yet a theory.
>>> Your education has failed you if you believe a geocentric view is workable.
Probably. But with relativity frames of reference become as important as each other - it is I believe one of the things that helped to fire off post-modernism. If I were a better mathematician I could formulate the equations based on the moon as the central point. The sun is not fixed based on it's position in our galaxy but it makes as much sense to say the earth is static as it does any other body.
>>> Yes the frame of reference of the sun shifts against the galaxy and the galaxy against the local group etc. but that doesn't make geocentric and heliocentric views equivalent.
So where is the centre about which the universe moves, oh learned one. Pick a point.
>>> Heliocentricism it failed to be as accurate as Ptolemy's tables in some circumstances while people insisted that the planets had circular orbits
You're confusing the notion of the sun as the default centre about which calculations should procede with the derivation of accurate prediction from that assumption.
If I see you eating icecream I'd probably assume you like icecream and that if I offer you icecream in the future you'll accept. Now I see you the next day and offer you icecream, you accept and apparently confirm my hypothesis. But the truth may be you hate icecream but had a sting in your mouth that needed (and still needs) cooling. The fact is you were still eating icecream regardless of my unsound conclusions. So the fact that heliocentricism led to better predictions doesn't necessarily imply that the sun has any greater significance than does the earth except in simplifying a mathematical model.
Suppose someone came along 10 years after Galileo and says well actually the sun is rotating about giant hidden star at the centre of the milky way (the galactic centre). This guy goes to the pope and demands to be allowed to publish that this is the truth that the universe rotates around the galactic centre and not around the sun as the heliocentrists propose
We decide what the important point of reference is. This is the same mistake that we make when we look at ancient atlases with Jerusalem at the centre. When I drew a map as a child I made my house the centre - it doesn't mean anything more than that being the arbitrary centre of a frame of reference (in the non relativistic sense).
My parents last 3 digits are 555. They have been for over 30 years, the local number has changed once in that time when our exchange closed. The national code has changed once too.
Galileo's falling out with the Catholic Church may have been vital - but it sure wasn't about the church accepting a proven point of heliocentricism.
Corpenicus' work proposing the heliocentric hypothesis was after all church sponsored (as was Galileo) and indeed inscribed, IIRC, to the pope of the time.
Galileo had been wrong before, apparently he believed comets to be an atmospheric phenomenon and the great _scientific_ minds of the time were as yet unconvinced. The church was leaving the question of geo- and heliocentricism open rather than making a decree as to the truth of one or other. Galileo by all accounts didn't like that. Despite being called in to the vatican he went ahead and published non-latin work to tell the masses that his theory was the truth - this shows he wasn't trying to convince the learned scholars, incidentally. Kepler had already published on much of the stuff Galileo worked on anyway so the papacy was hardly keeping things in the bag. Possibly the church was wary of following Kepler's hypotheses which appear to have been founded on a sort of Platonic helio-mysticism (eg http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/kepler.html).
Fine, the papacy over-reacted to Galileo. We got it.
Incidentally - was Galileo right? Is the sun "fixed". I don't think so. Indeed I'm happy with both geocentric and heliocentric descriptions; but in a "sol" centred frame of reference I'm happier with heliocentric maths (though one of the problems with heliocentricism apparently was that it failed to be as accurate as Ptolemy's tables).
---
Some comparative sources:
http://galileo.rice.edu/bio/narrative_7.html
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06342b.htm
Companies like AVG (German Antivirus co.) give away very good free products. If you want then to use on a network or for a business or want particular extra features then you pay.
This works particularly well if you can have people use your software for a long time and then absolutely need the extra feature(s).
With financial software though verity of results is paramount.
>>> "he's not at fault"
... there seems to be a bit of a slippery slope there though.
I don't think they are claiming that, they are claiming he didn't break the law. If the man's (filesharer) position is considered wrong then the law should be changed to say that attempting to provide an illegal copy is wrong
Consider a guy too drunk to drive legally - he can't get the key in the door and fails to get in the car (if he sits in it he's in charge and committing an offense). Now I think it's terrible that he intended to drive drunk, but can we really prosecute him?
Someone sets off to burgle(sp?) a house, doesn't take any tools (as that's going equipped and a crime in itself), he has an accident and never makes it but later confesses to intending to burgle, do we prosecute him?
Note that both these scenarios are open to being "completed" by a third party, the drunk can have his door opened by a passerby; the burglar could be saved from his accident.
Firefox gives 59/100 - Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071204 Ubuntu/7.10 (gutsy) Firefox/2.0.0.11
Konqueror-kde4 gives 1/100 (!) - Konqueror 4.00.00 (KDE 4.0.0)
Konqueror FAIL - crashes, screencap shows that it says "scripting must be enabled" even when it is
FWIW
> I may have a simpler way: ... a_n = 1/2^(n-1)
:)
> distance remaining (s) = 1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16
> lim_(n->infinity) 1/2^(n-1) = 0.
> So, the object reaches its target
Yes, at infinity, how long does it take to get to infinity again? So the object doesn't reach its target?
"Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work)."
from http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ (same as v.2.0 incidentally)
See section 4(c) of the license, which is ambiguous (and contains a typo "Ssection"). We must supply various attribution data if supplied or specified but how and where is it specified, not necessarily with the work. This information should be required by the license to be in the meta-data attached to the file or specifically stated visually-alongside the cc license marking.
>>> It's not a problem if you pay for an image because then you have a paper trail for the payment, and maybe even a written, signed license. I guess if you get a signed CC license from the supplier then that's one way out of this.
Wouldn't an email from the supplier of the CC-ed material be sufficient to shift the burden of proof?
If they said you forged the email then without proof you could countersue for slander too.
I often consider cc-by-sa images, there are lots on flickr. Flickr, and the license help info, say you should provide an attribution in the form requested. Thing is sticking a cc-by-sa logo next to something is as much as anyone does. Nobody ever mentions how they want their "by" to be recorded. So, usually you have to contact the producer anyway, and no they don't often respond to random emails from unknown individuals. Those that do respond often ask how I'm going to use the image first, which seems counter to the license already granted. Ho-hum.
Well I took receipt of my new Acer T180 Athlon 64 X2 400+,3GB, 250GB yesterday ... I've waited 9 years or so to get a new computer. Came preinstalled with Vista but sensibly there's a "data" partition which now holds my first Ubuntu 7.10 ("gutsy gibbon") install. I've been wanting to try Ubuntu for a while but having struggled with Vista (preinstalled mind you!) to get it working ... Vista took about an hour to setup itself lots of "please wait ..." without saying what it's doing (presumably trying to use a huge encryption key for something!?). OK, so looked nice, ran windows update, rebooted automatically - looks crap now.
... it works now on ubuntu though (after some trickery, at present I have to ifconfig eth0 down to drop the eth0 default route before the ppp0 modem will work).
Can't get my usbadsl modem (Speedtouch 330) working despite using the companies provided driver
Ubuntu and the BIOS recognise the 3GB RAM, not Vista though.
Ubuntu install was pretty easy compiz is awesome and I installed umpteen new apps to try via synaptic (which I've used before) with no real effort. Best of all Ubuntu didn't stomp over my Vista install but simply added it to the boot menu.
My previous comp is KDE on Slackware (upgraded since v.9) but I'm seriously thinking of sticking with gnome based on this install; we'll see after a month or so.
So I'll keep Vista for testing web designs in IE7 (yes I know about ies4linux) and for learning new apps to train folk on where necessary - but against Ubuntu (gnome, I've really shocked myself!!) it just seems pretty lame, perhaps when I fix it up I'll be impressed but _preinstalled_ you'd think it'd work well. Oh the widgets looked good, btw, are they third-party?
>>> "That's just mind-boogeling amounts of data"
640K, should be enough memory to hold, it. Wouldn't you think.
[Bill Gates claims he never said it incidentally http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1997/01/1484%5D
>>> I'm pretty sure Flash renders 100% compatible Flash, and Silverlight renders 100% compatible Silverlight. If you look at the same HTML on Windows and Mac, you'll get different output on many web pages, but if you look at Silverlight on Windows and Mac, you'll get the same output.
That's because HTML is intended to present information and not identical images. You can pretty much guarrantee that any two randomly chosen renderings are different - different resolution, different colour settings, different fonts, different font-sizes, different browser width, different personal style sheets, different browsers. But provided setups are the same then browsers should not render differently.
I bet if you look on WindowsXP and Mac iPhone you don't get the _same_ rendering. If you do then it's broken as an information display medium.
What I want to know is what benefits do we have if we use Silverlight over using Flash, say, or other established standards for preparing webpages.
Well said.
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/a/2/3/a234845f2e68dc74e420e32f15d7578d.png]
Energy is supplied to accelerate a particle towards the assumed limit "c". There is apparently only a limited amount of energy available as the universe appears to be both finite and without external sources of energy. Thus the kinetic energy of any group of particles is limited. Hence, temperature as a measure of kinetic energy should be limited too.
Looking another way: Wien's law gives the wavelength at which the maxima of black-body radiation exists - lambda_peak = 0.002898 / T. The wavelength also is observed (not shown in this equation) to tend towards 0 for increasing temperatures. If we assume this continues then we can get a bound based on the theoretical lamda_min (the planck length). This gives us about 1.8 x 10^32 K for T.
I don't know whether this theoretical maximum (which is pretty shakily established!) would be limited further by, say. Stefan-Boltzman's law on black body radiation. If we can establish a bound on the energy of the universe (and clearly some have tried) then we can use that limit to give a limit of temperature as no body could (it seems) radiate [much!] more than the entire energy of the universe.
Others have provided a temperature of about 1x10^32 at the planck time - but not sure how this was established! This would also appear to be a bound on the possible temperature, but not on the theoretically possible temperature and happily concurs with my estimation.
Tell me if this is all crap.