Your equation of "thought of it" with "patent it" is really exemplary of the problem.
The whole reason these submarine patents become problems is because someone did think of it, but didn't think to patent it. So the real inventor gets shafted by patent trolls later.
This is as bleeding obvious as the yellow pages, or a realty database.
Well, since I'm not going to be appearing in court I'm not going to drum up all the documentation... But the only thing that would be remotely hard to find evidence of predating 1996 would be the part about "at least one of said entries associated with a border geographical area is dynamically replicated into at least one narrower geographical area".
The first two bullets are simply describing the client-server model of networking which was old hat in the 60s.
The third bullet just describes a database with geographic location as the primary index. Aside from what are certainly many examples used within businesses, any electronic phone directory is an example of prior art. I recall using one as early as 1994.
The fourth bullet, aside from the part I mentioned, is nothing more than a search with geography as the primary search term, which is an obvious thing to do once you have a database organized by geography. Citysearch.com, yellowpages.com, I'm certain an example of this predating 1996 can be found. They may even include the technical detail of duplicating information into multiple geographies.
By the way, "obvious" is not supposed to require prior art -- prior art is by itself proof that the patent isn't novel, but isn't always necessary. It's just a sad fact of the USPTO that the non-obvious requirement is not enforced much at all.
Look, you're going to have to learn to get used to this kind of thing if you're going to adapt to the new world of time travel. Those without time-travel-causality skills will be left behind much like a person with no computer skills today basically has to get a job as a doorstop.
The only thing that has to happen for the present to receive the time machine technology is for a time machine to be sent back from the future. So the future invents a time machine, sends it back in time to the present, where it is reverse engineered and manufactured. The future no longer has an incentive to invent the time machine because it has already been invented, but that's okay, they just send one of the machines off the assembly line back into the past.
Once the timeline sorts itself out, it will essentially appear as though time travel technology spontaneously appeared and was never "discovered" at all, only reverse-engineered from an existing machine. This is perfectly normal and nothing to be alarmed about.
You'd know all this already if you had studied the action-documentary Terminator 2: Judgement Day, where Cyberdyne Systems invents the Terminator in the present by studying bits of a Terminator from the future. This documentary was sent from the future, by the way, to prepare us for when they send the actual time machine.
You can travel back in time, but you can't "change" the future. Because you traveled back in time, following events always occur as if you appeared.
The movie Twelve Monkeys appeared to use this model of time travel as well. I say appeared because being a Terry Gilliam film tidy explanations are not to be expected, and it isn't clear the scientists are trustworthy sources of information.
Your future self has clearly decided that it is more important to game the stock market, use the proceeds to buy weaponry, and then time travel to, say, ancient Mexico where you will have become an Aztec King.
Or maybe I'm just projecting what I'd do if I invented a time machine.
The difference between a crackpot and a scientist with a dream is that the scientist still relies on the rigorous application of the scientific method even if their theory is way outside of mainstream. It sounds like this guy is taking the latter tack. He has experiments in mind, and is completely open to the idea that they may fail.
You don't have to pick between dreaming and scientific rigor. The scientific method is how you turn your dreams into a reality -- if reality is ammenable to your dreams.
Yes, but wouldn't there be a certain ring that is exactly 70 degrees?
I'm no expert, but I'd be willing to bet that what you'd really get is a ring that fluctuates violently between the hot and cold extremes of the two sides of the planet and is constantly bombarded by gigantic storms. I mean we're basically talking about a permanent clash between hot and cold weather fronts.
Huge temperature deltas do not result in nice smooth gradients between them.
You apparently do not even understand the concept. You do not copyright the chemical, you copyright the implementation that produces it AND you can patent the abstract process used in the implementation. Patents are for algorithms, copyrights are for implementations. There are hundreds if not thousands of cases that have been adjudicated for copyright cases that you are apparently claiming cannot exist.
No, copyrights are for written works or other forms of expression, not implementations of arbitrary ideas. The "implementation that produces" the chemical is also not copyrightable. A document which describes the implementation is copyrightable, the process for making the chemical is patentable at best.
Whatever copyright cases you are referring to are obviously about appropriation of a document which can be copyrighted, not of a process or chemical which cannot. A chemical process is not copyrightable, an engine transmission is not copyrightable, many, many things which are patentable are not copyrightable. If you think they are because of a lawsuit that mentioned copyright, then you simply misunderstand the lawsuit.
All implementations of patents are copyrighted. It is the nature of the thing, so let's stop pretending like this is unique to software algorithms. Chemical process patents are fundamentally indistinguishable from software patents in all respects -- including copyright -- yet we ignore them and their long history. I get the impression that posters on slashdot are so clueless about other fields that they think software is special in this regard.
How utterly and completely wrong! The vast majority of "implementations of patents" cannot be copyrighted. And that includes chemicals. You can't copyright a chemical, you can't copyright a transmission block, you can't copyright a transistor radio. You can, however, copyright software, and that right there makes it different.
This issue will not be solved until people accept the mathematical truism that hardware patents and process patents are indistinguishable from software patents; one of the accomplishments of 20th century mathematics was proving that fact.
Oh really? So we mathematically proved that there's no difference between a change-sorting machine and "the concept of sorting", because I can pick up either one and beat you over the head with it until you understand the difference between a concept and a physical object?
And I wonder how many of those principled gentlemen had slaves. G. Washington did, I am too lazy to find about others.
Jefferson did, and quite probably fathered children by a slave. Children who were raised as slaves.
One thing I find remarkable about the Founding Fathers is that they were racist and sexist, yet in their writing and in the Constitution their language rises above their own racism. For example, outside of the part about counting the slave population at 3/5th for purposes of representation which was a political compromise to limit the power of the South, you won't find racism codified in the Constitution. If you call an African a Person, slavery was always against the 4th Ammendment. So all that was needed was for the social and political reality to catch up with the document. It is this ability to look past their own prejudices that I think makes the Founding Fathers more than your average political leader. Still flawed, to be sure, but better than can be expected. If you can distinguish "exceptional" from "god-like", then they were exceptional.
The US was in the brink of collapse thanks to a bunch of inhuman racists (whose descendants mantained an apartheid state well into the XXth century.
Right, and an important thing to note is that the issue of slavery threatened the nation from the very beginning, and the U.S. only exists due to compromise with those people. In fact the southern states ratified the Constitution only on the condition that even discussing slavery in Congress would be verboten for some number of decades which I forget. When in the first decade of the 1800s a northern legislator tried to bring up the issue, the southern states immediately threatened to secede. At the time, for certain, the union would not have held together. Slavery was the elephant in the room, and the pent up pressure finally boiled over in the civil war.
So which was the more successfull revolution? The one in which the U.S. was formed, and the stain of slavery existed for 80 years until a brutal civil war nearly destroyed the country, and even a hundred years after that the descendents of slaves were still fighting major civil rights battles? Or the one in which two separate countries were formed, one which ended slavery in the late 18th or early 19th century, the other which maintained and cemented slavery into its culture and could have maintained the practice for another 100 years if they could ever be forced to abandon it at all?
Not that it probably matters much if you're asking a Native American. The point is that when you consider the cards that were dealt, the American Revolution did turn out very well.
The problem with "Let the courts work it out" is that it effectively stifles the "little guy," the small company or inventor without the significant financial resources to defend his inventions in court.
Exactly, because the other problem with "let the courts work it out" is that the court's stance is "the work of the USPTO is by default valid", and if you go to court against someone holding a patent, the onus is on you to prove that the patent is invalid. It's not like the court does the job of USPTO for it by reviewing the patent from the beginning. Which means that ultimately the job of the USPTO is being done by lawyers.
The legal technicality that is used by software is that copying the program from the install media to your disk and then to RAM requires extra rights (not valid in all jurisdictions).
Copies made during the normal operation of a computer are covered under fair use provisions of U.S. copyright law, so no grant of rights should be necessary to install or run a computer program. Of course fair use is a bad joke these days, so who knows what the courts would say.
State of mind is essential in the treatment of shock, which can itself be lethal. Everything, including treatment of shock, depends on rapid response, and that is of course the most important thing. Yet the nature of the response is also clearly important (arriving quickly to do nothing isn't very helpful), and calming the victim as much as possible is a very important part of first response.
But really that's why I don't see the use of these bear-bots. Someone going into shock is not going to be calmed by a robot beast hauling them off, nor is their bleeding going to stop.
But, let's be serious: if we ever have an army of hairless teddy bears, then militarism has truly gone mad.
[military cadence] Sarge: Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear! Company: Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear! Sarge: Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair! Company: Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair! Sarge: Sound off! Company: RAAAAAAAR!
I guess every president since Carter should have been impeached (These have been going on at least since then).
Carter complied with FISA, in fact the very executive letter that is used to "prove" he did unauthorized wiretaps was in fact the letter required by FISA to authorize his AG to conduct FISA-compliant taps. Whereas Bush did not comply with FISA, he has not claimed he has complied with FISA, and his own former Attorney General John Ashcroft, whose name I can't believe I'm bringing up in a positive light, said that Bush's program was not legal. I know it's only been all over the news for a couple weeks, so you may have missed it.
What about Clinton?... I bet none of you think he should have been impeached.
Actually, I do. I love people who assume everyone else is as partisan as they are. As if only a Clinton lover could think Bush deserves to be impeached. I laugh.
Why should George Bush, who hasn't been charged with a crime let alone convincted of one even be considered for impeachment.
Because impeachment hearings would be the best chance to get Bush to testify under oath and for the criminality of his actions to be determined. It is absolutely clear that Bush has not complied with the law, seeing as he admits as much. The only question of legality is whether he's right that being "The Decider" trumps the law. That's the only legal theory posited by the administration to explain why these taps aren't criminal.
Given the tenuous and frankly dictatorial nature of his legal claim, I'd say investigation is absolutely warranted, Bush testifying under oath is warranted, and if in the end the worst thing that we can find him guilty of is lying under oath... perfect.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like a lot of Bush's politics... but he is not a criminal.
Legally, no. Legally, OJ isn't a criminal. Legally, someone who is seen by a million people in Times Square beating the shit out of grannies is not a criminal until they are convicted of the crime in a court of law. But the evidence suggesting that they were criminals was sufficient to warrant prosecution.
You are basically suggesting that we should wait until after Bush is convicted of a crime before we prosecute. That's ridiculous.
Technically we are not at war, and the 4th Ammendment is not superseded by the existence of a war either. Yes I know habeus corpus has been suspended in past wars, but that doesn't mean it was legal. Not that it matters, we aren't at war in a legal sense, only a practical sense.
And yeah, I'm just as pissed at the dems for authorising Bush to invade, though you have to admit that the current political reality is such that they can't discontinue funding the war. They can't even put any serious restrictions on it without being able to break Bush's veto.
I'd like to say you're welcome, but it brings me no pleasure to inform you of these unpleasant facts.
The fact that more people don't know about this, that more people think the worst thing that happened at abu Ghraib was some dude had panties put over his head, is just saddening. Even the initial Taguba report listed much worse, including beatings with table legs and rape with broomsticks. I mean seriously, haven't you seen this picture? Do you think that man ended up on his back packed in ice because of having panties put on his head?!
They weren't following the unethical orders of their boss that compromised the integrity of the Dept. There is no justice in firing underlings who refuse to allow politics to define who gets prosecuted.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, yeah, exactly like I said, prior art is relevent to showing obviousness, but is not the same thing, as evidenced by facter #4.
Your equation of "thought of it" with "patent it" is really exemplary of the problem.
The whole reason these submarine patents become problems is because someone did think of it, but didn't think to patent it. So the real inventor gets shafted by patent trolls later.
This is as bleeding obvious as the yellow pages, or a realty database.
Well, since I'm not going to be appearing in court I'm not going to drum up all the documentation... But the only thing that would be remotely hard to find evidence of predating 1996 would be the part about "at least one of said entries associated with a border geographical area is dynamically replicated into at least one narrower geographical area".
The first two bullets are simply describing the client-server model of networking which was old hat in the 60s.
The third bullet just describes a database with geographic location as the primary index. Aside from what are certainly many examples used within businesses, any electronic phone directory is an example of prior art. I recall using one as early as 1994.
The fourth bullet, aside from the part I mentioned, is nothing more than a search with geography as the primary search term, which is an obvious thing to do once you have a database organized by geography. Citysearch.com, yellowpages.com, I'm certain an example of this predating 1996 can be found. They may even include the technical detail of duplicating information into multiple geographies.
By the way, "obvious" is not supposed to require prior art -- prior art is by itself proof that the patent isn't novel, but isn't always necessary. It's just a sad fact of the USPTO that the non-obvious requirement is not enforced much at all.
Look, you're going to have to learn to get used to this kind of thing if you're going to adapt to the new world of time travel. Those without time-travel-causality skills will be left behind much like a person with no computer skills today basically has to get a job as a doorstop.
The only thing that has to happen for the present to receive the time machine technology is for a time machine to be sent back from the future. So the future invents a time machine, sends it back in time to the present, where it is reverse engineered and manufactured. The future no longer has an incentive to invent the time machine because it has already been invented, but that's okay, they just send one of the machines off the assembly line back into the past.
Once the timeline sorts itself out, it will essentially appear as though time travel technology spontaneously appeared and was never "discovered" at all, only reverse-engineered from an existing machine. This is perfectly normal and nothing to be alarmed about.
You'd know all this already if you had studied the action-documentary Terminator 2: Judgement Day, where Cyberdyne Systems invents the Terminator in the present by studying bits of a Terminator from the future. This documentary was sent from the future, by the way, to prepare us for when they send the actual time machine.
You can travel back in time, but you can't "change" the future. Because you traveled back in time, following events always occur as if you appeared.
The movie Twelve Monkeys appeared to use this model of time travel as well. I say appeared because being a Terry Gilliam film tidy explanations are not to be expected, and it isn't clear the scientists are trustworthy sources of information.
Your future self has clearly decided that it is more important to game the stock market, use the proceeds to buy weaponry, and then time travel to, say, ancient Mexico where you will have become an Aztec King.
Or maybe I'm just projecting what I'd do if I invented a time machine.
Reality likes to be anthropomorphized.
The difference between a crackpot and a scientist with a dream is that the scientist still relies on the rigorous application of the scientific method even if their theory is way outside of mainstream. It sounds like this guy is taking the latter tack. He has experiments in mind, and is completely open to the idea that they may fail.
You don't have to pick between dreaming and scientific rigor. The scientific method is how you turn your dreams into a reality -- if reality is ammenable to your dreams.
Yes, but wouldn't there be a certain ring that is exactly 70 degrees?
I'm no expert, but I'd be willing to bet that what you'd really get is a ring that fluctuates violently between the hot and cold extremes of the two sides of the planet and is constantly bombarded by gigantic storms. I mean we're basically talking about a permanent clash between hot and cold weather fronts.
Huge temperature deltas do not result in nice smooth gradients between them.
You apparently do not even understand the concept. You do not copyright the chemical, you copyright the implementation that produces it AND you can patent the abstract process used in the implementation. Patents are for algorithms, copyrights are for implementations. There are hundreds if not thousands of cases that have been adjudicated for copyright cases that you are apparently claiming cannot exist.
No, copyrights are for written works or other forms of expression, not implementations of arbitrary ideas. The "implementation that produces" the chemical is also not copyrightable. A document which describes the implementation is copyrightable, the process for making the chemical is patentable at best.
Whatever copyright cases you are referring to are obviously about appropriation of a document which can be copyrighted, not of a process or chemical which cannot. A chemical process is not copyrightable, an engine transmission is not copyrightable, many, many things which are patentable are not copyrightable. If you think they are because of a lawsuit that mentioned copyright, then you simply misunderstand the lawsuit.
All implementations of patents are copyrighted. It is the nature of the thing, so let's stop pretending like this is unique to software algorithms. Chemical process patents are fundamentally indistinguishable from software patents in all respects -- including copyright -- yet we ignore them and their long history. I get the impression that posters on slashdot are so clueless about other fields that they think software is special in this regard.
How utterly and completely wrong! The vast majority of "implementations of patents" cannot be copyrighted. And that includes chemicals. You can't copyright a chemical, you can't copyright a transmission block, you can't copyright a transistor radio. You can, however, copyright software, and that right there makes it different.
This issue will not be solved until people accept the mathematical truism that hardware patents and process patents are indistinguishable from software patents; one of the accomplishments of 20th century mathematics was proving that fact.
Oh really? So we mathematically proved that there's no difference between a change-sorting machine and "the concept of sorting", because I can pick up either one and beat you over the head with it until you understand the difference between a concept and a physical object?
And I wonder how many of those principled gentlemen had slaves. G. Washington did, I am too lazy to find about others.
Jefferson did, and quite probably fathered children by a slave. Children who were raised as slaves.
One thing I find remarkable about the Founding Fathers is that they were racist and sexist, yet in their writing and in the Constitution their language rises above their own racism. For example, outside of the part about counting the slave population at 3/5th for purposes of representation which was a political compromise to limit the power of the South, you won't find racism codified in the Constitution. If you call an African a Person, slavery was always against the 4th Ammendment. So all that was needed was for the social and political reality to catch up with the document. It is this ability to look past their own prejudices that I think makes the Founding Fathers more than your average political leader. Still flawed, to be sure, but better than can be expected. If you can distinguish "exceptional" from "god-like", then they were exceptional.
The US was in the brink of collapse thanks to a bunch of inhuman racists (whose descendants mantained an apartheid state well into the XXth century.
Right, and an important thing to note is that the issue of slavery threatened the nation from the very beginning, and the U.S. only exists due to compromise with those people. In fact the southern states ratified the Constitution only on the condition that even discussing slavery in Congress would be verboten for some number of decades which I forget. When in the first decade of the 1800s a northern legislator tried to bring up the issue, the southern states immediately threatened to secede. At the time, for certain, the union would not have held together. Slavery was the elephant in the room, and the pent up pressure finally boiled over in the civil war.
So which was the more successfull revolution? The one in which the U.S. was formed, and the stain of slavery existed for 80 years until a brutal civil war nearly destroyed the country, and even a hundred years after that the descendents of slaves were still fighting major civil rights battles? Or the one in which two separate countries were formed, one which ended slavery in the late 18th or early 19th century, the other which maintained and cemented slavery into its culture and could have maintained the practice for another 100 years if they could ever be forced to abandon it at all?
Not that it probably matters much if you're asking a Native American. The point is that when you consider the cards that were dealt, the American Revolution did turn out very well.
I saw the headline that said "three pictures" as in still images and thought to myself "Yeah, that's about the right length for a Uwe Boll film".
Thus the joke about the cockroach being the next master of earth in case the A,H and other 1 letter bomb start to fall ?
The F-bomb?
The problem with "Let the courts work it out" is that it effectively stifles the "little guy," the small company or inventor without the significant financial resources to defend his inventions in court.
Exactly, because the other problem with "let the courts work it out" is that the court's stance is "the work of the USPTO is by default valid", and if you go to court against someone holding a patent, the onus is on you to prove that the patent is invalid. It's not like the court does the job of USPTO for it by reviewing the patent from the beginning. Which means that ultimately the job of the USPTO is being done by lawyers.
The legal technicality that is used by software is that copying the program from the install media to your disk and then to RAM requires extra rights (not valid in all jurisdictions).
Copies made during the normal operation of a computer are covered under fair use provisions of U.S. copyright law, so no grant of rights should be necessary to install or run a computer program. Of course fair use is a bad joke these days, so who knows what the courts would say.
State of mind is essential in the treatment of shock, which can itself be lethal. Everything, including treatment of shock, depends on rapid response, and that is of course the most important thing. Yet the nature of the response is also clearly important (arriving quickly to do nothing isn't very helpful), and calming the victim as much as possible is a very important part of first response.
But really that's why I don't see the use of these bear-bots. Someone going into shock is not going to be calmed by a robot beast hauling them off, nor is their bleeding going to stop.
But, let's be serious: if we ever have an army of hairless teddy bears, then militarism has truly gone mad.
[military cadence]
Sarge: Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear!
Company: Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear!
Sarge: Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair!
Company: Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair!
Sarge: Sound off!
Company: RAAAAAAAR!
I apologize for the ambiguity of my speech. I was trying to speak to the average person. Most people associate impeachment with removal from office.
So... You're saying most people think Clinton was removed from office?
I think you are mistaken.
I guess every president since Carter should have been impeached (These have been going on at least since then).
... I bet none of you think he should have been impeached.
Carter complied with FISA, in fact the very executive letter that is used to "prove" he did unauthorized wiretaps was in fact the letter required by FISA to authorize his AG to conduct FISA-compliant taps. Whereas Bush did not comply with FISA, he has not claimed he has complied with FISA, and his own former Attorney General John Ashcroft, whose name I can't believe I'm bringing up in a positive light, said that Bush's program was not legal. I know it's only been all over the news for a couple weeks, so you may have missed it.
No court has deemed the wiretaps illegal.
Incorrect.
What about Clinton?
Actually, I do. I love people who assume everyone else is as partisan as they are. As if only a Clinton lover could think Bush deserves to be impeached. I laugh.
Why should George Bush, who hasn't been charged with a crime let alone convincted of one even be considered for impeachment.
Because impeachment hearings would be the best chance to get Bush to testify under oath and for the criminality of his actions to be determined. It is absolutely clear that Bush has not complied with the law, seeing as he admits as much. The only question of legality is whether he's right that being "The Decider" trumps the law. That's the only legal theory posited by the administration to explain why these taps aren't criminal.
Given the tenuous and frankly dictatorial nature of his legal claim, I'd say investigation is absolutely warranted, Bush testifying under oath is warranted, and if in the end the worst thing that we can find him guilty of is lying under oath... perfect.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like a lot of Bush's politics... but he is not a criminal.
Legally, no. Legally, OJ isn't a criminal. Legally, someone who is seen by a million people in Times Square beating the shit out of grannies is not a criminal until they are convicted of the crime in a court of law. But the evidence suggesting that they were criminals was sufficient to warrant prosecution.
You are basically suggesting that we should wait until after Bush is convicted of a crime before we prosecute. That's ridiculous.
I'm pretty sure you had a compelling point, but I can't begin to remember it after that metaphor at the end. Ouch my brain. :P
Technically we are not at war, and the 4th Ammendment is not superseded by the existence of a war either. Yes I know habeus corpus has been suspended in past wars, but that doesn't mean it was legal. Not that it matters, we aren't at war in a legal sense, only a practical sense.
And yeah, I'm just as pissed at the dems for authorising Bush to invade, though you have to admit that the current political reality is such that they can't discontinue funding the war. They can't even put any serious restrictions on it without being able to break Bush's veto.
Where'e the justice in firing disobediant underlings?
Oh man, I missed the hilarity of your wording the first time.
That you would say this in a case about people being fired for not allowing political considerations to determine how they dispense justice.
Cause of death: Blunt force trauma and asphyxiation.
I'd like to say you're welcome, but it brings me no pleasure to inform you of these unpleasant facts.
The fact that more people don't know about this, that more people think the worst thing that happened at abu Ghraib was some dude had panties put over his head, is just saddening. Even the initial Taguba report listed much worse, including beatings with table legs and rape with broomsticks. I mean seriously, haven't you seen this picture? Do you think that man ended up on his back packed in ice because of having panties put on his head?!
They weren't following the unethical orders of their boss that compromised the integrity of the Dept. There is no justice in firing underlings who refuse to allow politics to define who gets prosecuted.