Great article. Not only does it get "TinEye" wrong (Tiny Eye? Really?) but it also fails to link to Google.
It's supposed to be part of images.google.com, although it's not working for me currently (the camera icon doesn't show up in the search box). There's help on how to use this feature here.
Just as important as the right to die in a dignified manner at a time of your choosing is the right to cryonically preserve your head (or your whole body) so that you can be either revived or downloaded when the technology for such things arrives. There's still so much for Sir Pterry to see and do, and it would be a shame for him to end it all without a backup plan.
"Should we let straight guys vote for number one gay, should we let youtubers vote on internet infrastructure designs, should we let Slashdot vote on best vag, and should Joe Frazier be on the HTML5 standards committee?"
Those are all great ideas! Why aren't you in charge?
Actually, he wanted to offer subsidies to nonprofits that would give rides to people while the transit union was on strike. Blind people already were in a pickle what with the buses not running. The plan apparently didn't go through, however, and the strike lasted a month and a half.
No, it's not hypocritical. You're just comparing apples to oranges. The Wikileaks thing is about leaking private (secret) documents to the public. This project, on the other hand, is about providing public access to the public Internet.
The patent statutes have been changed relatively little since 1952. There have been updates since then to accommodate a few treaties that the US has since ratified, but those updates didn't really affect patent validity and infringement. In fact, the biggest change in that regard was the gradual elimination of submarine patents by changing the patent term from 17 years after issuance to 20 years after effective filing date. In other words, payments to congresspeople would have had little effect on Lodsys's lawsuits.
In terms of judges, everything is appealable, and the Supreme Court is under enough watchful eyes that it probably wouldn't be possible to buy them off with gifts (trips, money, or otherwise).
On the other hand, moving forward, patent reform could be significantly affected by special interest lobbying. There's a patent reform bill that has passed the Senate and is awaiting action in the House, and the general perception of its biggest change (first inventor to file) is that it would favor large corporations over small inventors.
It sounds more like it would make them an easy target. It sticks out like a sore thumb, has paramilitary qualities more likely to result in a shoot-to-kill order, and puts a dozen or more men all enclosed in a small space prone to spalling and shrapnel.
Actually, I think the use of that quote is slightly more apt than you're giving the earlier poster credit for. The media is really good at sifting through quotes, pulling something out of context, spinning it, and then propping it up to achieve some political end aside from neutral journalism. Sure, that's not the same as creating documents from whole cloth based on a sample of the person's handwriting. But they do create meaning or intent where no such meaning or intent previously existed, usually by eliminating the nuances associated with the context that was present at the time, and that's at least analogous to what Richelieu was doing.
What's more, the bank account was compromised because of the account holder's lousy security that ended up with them getting keyloggers on their computers. Why should the bank be liable for that?
Actually, there is fairly old case law that affirms that the Constitution trumps any treaty. I'm not sure whether that helps in this case, though, since it's unclear how much weight SCOTUS would actually give the "to promote the progress of science" clause in determining whether Congress has the power to place public domain works back into copyrighted status. Plus, there's the Commerce Clause to rain on everyone's parade yet again.
Personally, I think this would be more interestingly argued as an unconstitutional taking from the public without just compensation in violation of the fifth amendment.
First of all, humans are better at image processing
Medical image processing is a rapidly advancing field, but it's not a lack of technological advances that will stand in the way of automatic diagnoses based on x-ray/CT/MRI. Instead, the threat of malpractice will require that doctors manually inspect the images and render a diagnosis. Otherwise, you could probably expect automatic diagnosis from medical imaging in the next decade or so (or sooner, depending on what kinds of illness or injury you're looking for).
Malpractice is such a threat to medical imaging technology that a lot of medical imaging system manufacturers are afraid even to implement simple noise reduction techniques. If a cancerous spot gets removed as noise from an image and the doctor misses it, it could be a multimillion dollar suit against both the doctor and the manufacturer.
OTOH, I can see Watson being immensely useful on the back end.
Well, he did always want to be a proctologist when he grew up.
Noncommercial "infringement" doesn't harm anyone, and studies show that "piracy" actually increases sales.
Of course, this is in an environment where noncommercial infringement is still infringement, and where people generally have the notion that artists should be paid for what they do. Compare this to developing countries where pirated music and movies are the norm, are rarely punished, and are sometimes tacitly encouraged by governments who see themselves as being in competition with the West; and consider: if noncommercial infringement in the developed world were considered "okay", would anyone pay for music or movies?
I'm not trying to be a copyright whore or a shill for the ??AA. In fact, I only buy/listen to indie music because the RIAA is a bunch of douchebags. I'm just pointing out that copyright does serve a purpose, and the problems we have today with copyright are more a matter of degrees rather than a problem with the basic premise.
This doesn't let you off the hook for not reading TFA, but the article was horribly written. It doesn't link to several of the patents they were talking about. It confuses patents with published patent applications. It quotes titles, abstracts, and drawings as indicating what's patented, instead of quoting the claims.
All in all, none of the patents or applications discussed in TFA actually covers the gesture itself. Instead, they cover the technology used to recognize the gestures (and one design patent, not linked in TFA, covers the design of Apple's "slide to unlock" UI).
I thought that the "First to File" law (if passed) would remove the whole idea of prior art invalidating a Patent. Am I wrong?
Yes.
First-to-file (or, in the US proposal, "first inventor to file", intended to note some remaining differences between the US proposal and other countries' systems) would simply mean that applicants would no longer be permitted to get an earlier invention date than the date they filed their application.
In current US law, prior art under 35 USC 102(a) and 102(e) can be "sworn behind" if the applicant can show that they invented their invention before the publication date (for (a), which covers publications) or filing date (for (e), which covers competing patent applications) of the prior art reference. This takes into account a one-year grace period for filing an application, so if there's a publication that predates the filing date of the application by a year, then it's covered under 102(b) and can't be sworn behind. (This is the short short version - I'm not covering things like interferences, conception, reduction to practice, due diligence, etc. here.)
The new proposal would keep the one-year grace period against publications but would always give priority to the earlier-filed application as long as the applicant actually invented the claimed subject matter. (Again, this is the short version - though interferences are eliminated, there are various complications that crop up in this system, too.)
Anti (some) Americans rant: Seriously how can you use the idea of freedom of speech to make it sound like a good idea to allow advertising or promotions of companies into news broadcasts.
Freedom of speech protects speech you like as well as speech you don't like.
That aside, this also bans a news channel from saying something like, "Follow us on Twitter at @newschannelname for the latest news updates direct to your phone." How does it benefit anyone to forbid that?
The "sales tax" would completely replace every other federal tax. It won't. It would add to the list of taxes being paid
That's a straw man argument: "Replacing all taxes with a national sales tax would result in not replacing all taxes with a national sales tax." It doesn't attack the flaws of the premise, but instead attacks a different premise that's easier to attack.
A sales tax would not tax those awful rich people one penny on any money they put in the bank.
And why should it? This attitude assumes that rich people have giant Scrooge McDuck money vaults that they regularly go swimming in. To the contrary, money that is in the bank and is not being spent provides no real utility to the person with the money, and it won't until that money is spent. Moreover, money in the bank (or invested, or what have you) benefits the larger economy by making that money available for other purposes, thereby making the economy grow.
There would be no exemptions or other reductions in the sales tax based on income or number of dependents, or for charitable contributions, or for unreimbursed medical expenses, or for home mortgage interest, or for any of the other things our current income tax code tries to social engineer.
And why should there be? It's the complexity of the tax code that leads to loopholes, underpayment, the need for tax professionals to prevent people from doing something illegal, and the huge IRS bureaucracy needed to detect when someone is doing something illegal.
The "sales tax" is already a cost for businesses. Not all of them. If you are a business in Oregon, you don't worry about sales taxes. This will increase the costs to businesses in every state as more people are hired to deal with the tax records.
There are already numerous systems in existence for collecting and paying sales taxes. Many states already have separate sales tax rates by county or even by municipality, and businesses in those states who do business in multiple places in the state have to determine how much income tax to remit on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis. On the other hand, a national sales tax would involve (1) determining how much in sales you had for the term, which you should already know anyway for accounting purposes; (2) multiplying by the national sales tax rate; and (3) remitting that much money to the federal government. It's not rocket science.
Slashdot Mirror
Great article. Not only does it get "TinEye" wrong (Tiny Eye? Really?) but it also fails to link to Google.
It's supposed to be part of images.google.com, although it's not working for me currently (the camera icon doesn't show up in the search box). There's help on how to use this feature here.
Just as important as the right to die in a dignified manner at a time of your choosing is the right to cryonically preserve your head (or your whole body) so that you can be either revived or downloaded when the technology for such things arrives. There's still so much for Sir Pterry to see and do, and it would be a shame for him to end it all without a backup plan.
DDoS doesn't reveal insecurity in computer systems, and apparently that's all they're doing to EVE and Minecraft.
Er... sorry, actually that was an AP wire report that Fox put on their website.
They already reported on the Senate hack, and failed to report that "lulz" is about schadenfreude rather than laughing out loud.
"Should we let straight guys vote for number one gay, should we let youtubers vote on internet infrastructure designs, should we let Slashdot vote on best vag, and should Joe Frazier be on the HTML5 standards committee?"
Those are all great ideas! Why aren't you in charge?
Actually, he wanted to offer subsidies to nonprofits that would give rides to people while the transit union was on strike. Blind people already were in a pickle what with the buses not running. The plan apparently didn't go through, however, and the strike lasted a month and a half.
Not the best source, but at least it's a source: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/269165/pawlenty-s-transit-strike-katrina-trinko
If you're thinking of something else, you should probably provide a source.
everybody should persue every opportunity to see themselves and their peers properly valued.
You're properly valued according to your personal irreplaceability, labor supply, and labor demand - the same as any other good or service.
No, it's not hypocritical. You're just comparing apples to oranges. The Wikileaks thing is about leaking private (secret) documents to the public. This project, on the other hand, is about providing public access to the public Internet.
The patent statutes have been changed relatively little since 1952. There have been updates since then to accommodate a few treaties that the US has since ratified, but those updates didn't really affect patent validity and infringement. In fact, the biggest change in that regard was the gradual elimination of submarine patents by changing the patent term from 17 years after issuance to 20 years after effective filing date. In other words, payments to congresspeople would have had little effect on Lodsys's lawsuits.
In terms of judges, everything is appealable, and the Supreme Court is under enough watchful eyes that it probably wouldn't be possible to buy them off with gifts (trips, money, or otherwise).
On the other hand, moving forward, patent reform could be significantly affected by special interest lobbying. There's a patent reform bill that has passed the Senate and is awaiting action in the House, and the general perception of its biggest change (first inventor to file) is that it would favor large corporations over small inventors.
It sounds more like it would make them an easy target. It sticks out like a sore thumb, has paramilitary qualities more likely to result in a shoot-to-kill order, and puts a dozen or more men all enclosed in a small space prone to spalling and shrapnel.
Actually, I think the use of that quote is slightly more apt than you're giving the earlier poster credit for. The media is really good at sifting through quotes, pulling something out of context, spinning it, and then propping it up to achieve some political end aside from neutral journalism. Sure, that's not the same as creating documents from whole cloth based on a sample of the person's handwriting. But they do create meaning or intent where no such meaning or intent previously existed, usually by eliminating the nuances associated with the context that was present at the time, and that's at least analogous to what Richelieu was doing.
What's more, the bank account was compromised because of the account holder's lousy security that ended up with them getting keyloggers on their computers. Why should the bank be liable for that?
Quoth the final rejection: "The specification has not described how one of ordinary skill in the art could make or use the claimed godly powers."
Actually, there is fairly old case law that affirms that the Constitution trumps any treaty. I'm not sure whether that helps in this case, though, since it's unclear how much weight SCOTUS would actually give the "to promote the progress of science" clause in determining whether Congress has the power to place public domain works back into copyrighted status. Plus, there's the Commerce Clause to rain on everyone's parade yet again.
Personally, I think this would be more interestingly argued as an unconstitutional taking from the public without just compensation in violation of the fifth amendment.
First of all, humans are better at image processing
Medical image processing is a rapidly advancing field, but it's not a lack of technological advances that will stand in the way of automatic diagnoses based on x-ray/CT/MRI. Instead, the threat of malpractice will require that doctors manually inspect the images and render a diagnosis. Otherwise, you could probably expect automatic diagnosis from medical imaging in the next decade or so (or sooner, depending on what kinds of illness or injury you're looking for).
Malpractice is such a threat to medical imaging technology that a lot of medical imaging system manufacturers are afraid even to implement simple noise reduction techniques. If a cancerous spot gets removed as noise from an image and the doctor misses it, it could be a multimillion dollar suit against both the doctor and the manufacturer.
OTOH, I can see Watson being immensely useful on the back end.
Well, he did always want to be a proctologist when he grew up.
Noncommercial "infringement" doesn't harm anyone, and studies show that "piracy" actually increases sales.
Of course, this is in an environment where noncommercial infringement is still infringement, and where people generally have the notion that artists should be paid for what they do. Compare this to developing countries where pirated music and movies are the norm, are rarely punished, and are sometimes tacitly encouraged by governments who see themselves as being in competition with the West; and consider: if noncommercial infringement in the developed world were considered "okay", would anyone pay for music or movies?
I'm not trying to be a copyright whore or a shill for the ??AA. In fact, I only buy/listen to indie music because the RIAA is a bunch of douchebags. I'm just pointing out that copyright does serve a purpose, and the problems we have today with copyright are more a matter of degrees rather than a problem with the basic premise.
This doesn't let you off the hook for not reading TFA, but the article was horribly written. It doesn't link to several of the patents they were talking about. It confuses patents with published patent applications. It quotes titles, abstracts, and drawings as indicating what's patented, instead of quoting the claims.
All in all, none of the patents or applications discussed in TFA actually covers the gesture itself. Instead, they cover the technology used to recognize the gestures (and one design patent, not linked in TFA, covers the design of Apple's "slide to unlock" UI).
Don't they realize they would gain much more by apologizing for and desisting against GeoHot
What part of "settled out of court" don't you understand?
I thought that the "First to File" law (if passed) would remove the whole idea of prior art invalidating a Patent. Am I wrong?
Yes.
First-to-file (or, in the US proposal, "first inventor to file", intended to note some remaining differences between the US proposal and other countries' systems) would simply mean that applicants would no longer be permitted to get an earlier invention date than the date they filed their application.
In current US law, prior art under 35 USC 102(a) and 102(e) can be "sworn behind" if the applicant can show that they invented their invention before the publication date (for (a), which covers publications) or filing date (for (e), which covers competing patent applications) of the prior art reference. This takes into account a one-year grace period for filing an application, so if there's a publication that predates the filing date of the application by a year, then it's covered under 102(b) and can't be sworn behind. (This is the short short version - I'm not covering things like interferences, conception, reduction to practice, due diligence, etc. here.)
The new proposal would keep the one-year grace period against publications but would always give priority to the earlier-filed application as long as the applicant actually invented the claimed subject matter. (Again, this is the short version - though interferences are eliminated, there are various complications that crop up in this system, too.)
Hmm, I had no idea that Michael Scott was a slashdotter.
Anti (some) Americans rant: Seriously how can you use the idea of freedom of speech to make it sound like a good idea to allow advertising or promotions of companies into news broadcasts.
Freedom of speech protects speech you like as well as speech you don't like.
That aside, this also bans a news channel from saying something like, "Follow us on Twitter at @newschannelname for the latest news updates direct to your phone." How does it benefit anyone to forbid that?
How many people in the general population even know what pasteurization means?
It clearly refers to free-range milk. You know, letting it wander around in the pasture all day. Pasteurization.
Thanks, I'll be here all week.
The "sales tax" would completely replace every other federal tax. It won't. It would add to the list of taxes being paid
That's a straw man argument: "Replacing all taxes with a national sales tax would result in not replacing all taxes with a national sales tax." It doesn't attack the flaws of the premise, but instead attacks a different premise that's easier to attack.
A sales tax would not tax those awful rich people one penny on any money they put in the bank.
And why should it? This attitude assumes that rich people have giant Scrooge McDuck money vaults that they regularly go swimming in. To the contrary, money that is in the bank and is not being spent provides no real utility to the person with the money, and it won't until that money is spent. Moreover, money in the bank (or invested, or what have you) benefits the larger economy by making that money available for other purposes, thereby making the economy grow.
There would be no exemptions or other reductions in the sales tax based on income or number of dependents, or for charitable contributions, or for unreimbursed medical expenses, or for home mortgage interest, or for any of the other things our current income tax code tries to social engineer.
And why should there be? It's the complexity of the tax code that leads to loopholes, underpayment, the need for tax professionals to prevent people from doing something illegal, and the huge IRS bureaucracy needed to detect when someone is doing something illegal.
The "sales tax" is already a cost for businesses. Not all of them. If you are a business in Oregon, you don't worry about sales taxes. This will increase the costs to businesses in every state as more people are hired to deal with the tax records.
There are already numerous systems in existence for collecting and paying sales taxes. Many states already have separate sales tax rates by county or even by municipality, and businesses in those states who do business in multiple places in the state have to determine how much income tax to remit on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis. On the other hand, a national sales tax would involve (1) determining how much in sales you had for the term, which you should already know anyway for accounting purposes; (2) multiplying by the national sales tax rate; and (3) remitting that much money to the federal government. It's not rocket science.
Good heavens, how someone can make a living reading these on a daily basis is beyond me.
Duct tape: apply directly to the forehead.