I don't think so. Maybe my first example was just brief. I don't see that there's necessarily cognitive dissonance in the first place.
If I let go of a rubber ball and it floats away instead of falling, that would produce cognitive dissonance, because I believe in gravity, but this would be being contradicted by something else I believe in: my senses of touch and sight.
But here, we're talking about studies. Studies are made by humans, and some humans are morons, and other humans are biased due to politics or funding.
I believe in climate change because I've seen it. There was snow in the Winter when I was a kid, nowadays, half of our Winters are snowless. If someone says "I'm a scientist, and I've written on paper that the climate isn't changing" - I don't think this would produce cognitive dissonance. There's no conflict between my beliefs.
Heh, sounds to me like it's the publishers of the study that are ignoring a logical conclusion.
If I firmly believe the environment is changing, and someone shows me a study saying the opposite, I'm not going to put my time into deconstructing the nonsense study. I'll reject it, without any problems of cognitive dissonance - I'll assume the researchers didn't do their job correctly (nobody's perfect!) or it's biased research by people who've studied science but are under the influence of politics or funders.
Microsoft wrote Dos, Windows 3.x, Windows NT, and Windows 95 without patents.
Microsoft's whole patent portfolio in 1995 was five patents (and they might not even have been MS patents - they might just have been acquired when buying some company). How can you explain the investment to write all that software without your "guarantee of return" from patents? Was it charity?
Another example is GNU/Linux - even more software which is still being written without patents.
Another example: the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Where did software come from? Did it get invented in the 50s and stagnate until software patents appeared in the 90s?
The "needed to encourage investment" idea is completely bankrupt.
> Without that guarantee of return, these companies would have never bothered to invent
Utter nonsense.
First, the work of all free software encoder projects gets done without any patent royalty incentives.
Second, Google is now paying people to work on a video encoder, without any patent royalty incentives.
Third, if the current patent profiteers couldn't demand patent royalties, sure they're fire off teary-eyed press releases, but there's nothing to show they'd stop all development. All online video companies have an incentive to fund development of online video - I hope that doesn't need further explanation.
AV is really the area worst affected by software patents. The media talks a lot about "silly patents", but they're *not* the real problem. MPEG-LA holds over 1000 patents - no amount of raised standards will solve this problem. Patents on playing video have to be declared null and void.
Thanks for the encouragement. I think en.swpat.org is making great progress in terms of breadth and depth of information, but it's still not building a community of contributors. Any help with publicising it and with informing people that it's something they can also contribute to, would be very helpful.
To raise the bar for how informed us laypeople are, I've spent a year gathering software patent info in a wiki: http://en.swpat.org/
I've no background in German patent law, or the German courts system, and I don't speak German. If you could add any information, that would be very useful.
Yeh, but this patent is on doing that on a *limited resource* computer.
Code generation might be decades old, but do you really think anyone thought of doing code generation on a computer with less then 2Gb of RAM and less than a 1Ghz processor in the 70s or 80s?
Not really. Random doesn't have to mean oiyusg7no45c8wo9nq23r9.
In this case, I meant that for each site you visit, the plugin would identify your browser as firefox 3.4.2, or 3.2.1, or 3.5.9, etc. etc. and the build date as blah blah blah.
All perfectly credible, and still sufficiently random to stop your browser having a fingerprint.
Randomising most of HTTP_ACCEPT and User agent would totally fix this problem, right? Or at least, it should for those of us with javascript turned off by default (using noscript makes this pretty convenient).
A handful of things should stay the same, such as browser name, the major version number of the browser, and your main language preferences, but I guess the rest could change per-site by selecting random values from lists of valid values.
Anyone know of a plugin (for any browser) that does this?
From working on the Bilski case, I've ended up reading a dozen US Supreme Court decisions, and I've found them surprisingly readable. There are times when you just have to accept that something has a meaning that you don't know, but even with these gaps, the remaining text is usually coherent.
It's strange that companies actually went for litigation. Maybe it happened because this new field brought companies into competition with other companies tehy hadn't dealt with before, so the usual deals of paying patent tax to each other couldn't be set up fast enough.
Patent trolls are a problem for big companies that have lots of money. Trolls have nothing to do with HTML5 not being able to recommend a video codec, and they've nothing to do with worries about how Microsoft will use their patents on.doc, XML, or Mono. Some trolls *do* practice their invention, like the mp3 guys that made a packet from trolling - and as a side-effect, completely insignificant to them, forced GNU/Linux distros to omit mp3 support.
To solve the social problems caused by software patents, we have to abolish them - tweaking the numbers to reduce the problems of mega corporations is not *our* job.
What makes you say that? The background was that the legislation excludes "swpats as such", and the EPO interprets so narrowly to be almost non-existant. The story with the EU is that the Commission proposed to clearly allow software patents, and it was discussed at great volume levels for a few years, and the Parliament threw out the Commission's proposal almost unanimously.
This means there was no change in the legislation, so were back to the crappy situation where the EPO is granting whatever it likes, but it's still true that the Parliament's action was to throw out a proposal to legitimatise software patents. Here's the story at greater length:
The United Patent Litigation System replaces the EPLA. The official justifications are that it will decrease bureaucracy and costs. As a side effect (which is the real motivation of some pushers), it will push aside the European Parliament (which threw out swpats in 2005), and give more power to the European Patent Office (which approves almost as much as the USPTO does). More details:
Kagan:Hey, Barack. This software patent's issue is a real head scratcher. I can't find your stance on it. Can you remind me of it?
Obama:Elena, Elena, I'm busy. To be a patentable process, innovations should involve significant extra-solution activity i.e. activity central to the purpose of the claimed method. And don't forget that no patent can wholly pre-empt the use of a fundamental principle - and I don't just mean that a field-of-use restriction will suffice, I want to be sure that the algorithm can still be used for other purposes even in that same field.
Kagan:Thanks, I'll go fluff that out and add references. (done) Sorry to have bothered you, I simply don't have the power to come up with my own viewpoints, so I wanted to clarfy what yours are.
(...or just maybe it's not a purely clerical role and there's a bit of Kagan in the document she wrote and got approved by the president.)
Slashdot Mirror
Here's what I have on their previous trolling:
swpat.org is a publicly editable wiki, help welcome.
I don't think so. Maybe my first example was just brief. I don't see that there's necessarily cognitive dissonance in the first place.
If I let go of a rubber ball and it floats away instead of falling, that would produce cognitive dissonance, because I believe in gravity, but this would be being contradicted by something else I believe in: my senses of touch and sight.
But here, we're talking about studies. Studies are made by humans, and some humans are morons, and other humans are biased due to politics or funding.
I believe in climate change because I've seen it. There was snow in the Winter when I was a kid, nowadays, half of our Winters are snowless. If someone says "I'm a scientist, and I've written on paper that the climate isn't changing" - I don't think this would produce cognitive dissonance. There's no conflict between my beliefs.
Have I misunderstood cognitive dissonance?
Heh, sounds to me like it's the publishers of the study that are ignoring a logical conclusion.
If I firmly believe the environment is changing, and someone shows me a study saying the opposite, I'm not going to put my time into deconstructing the nonsense study. I'll reject it, without any problems of cognitive dissonance - I'll assume the researchers didn't do their job correctly (nobody's perfect!) or it's biased research by people who've studied science but are under the influence of politics or funders.
Enigma solved, dudes.
Here's the Supreme Court's decision:
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-661.pdf
Thanks for the Wild Fox link.
AIPLA make their money from patents, so I wouldn't trust them on their word.
Microsoft wrote Dos, Windows 3.x, Windows NT, and Windows 95 without patents.
Microsoft's whole patent portfolio in 1995 was five patents (and they might not even have been MS patents - they might just have been acquired when buying some company). How can you explain the investment to write all that software without your "guarantee of return" from patents? Was it charity?
Another example is GNU/Linux - even more software which is still being written without patents.
Another example: the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Where did software come from? Did it get invented in the 50s and stagnate until software patents appeared in the 90s?
The "needed to encourage investment" idea is completely bankrupt.
> Without that guarantee of return, these companies would have never bothered to invent
Utter nonsense.
First, the work of all free software encoder projects gets done without any patent royalty incentives.
Second, Google is now paying people to work on a video encoder, without any patent royalty incentives.
Third, if the current patent profiteers couldn't demand patent royalties, sure they're fire off teary-eyed press releases, but there's nothing to show they'd stop all development. All online video companies have an incentive to fund development of online video - I hope that doesn't need further explanation.
The Republic of Korea has information processing patents?
Have you any links about this, or any information that someone could use as a starting point to learn more?
I've pretty much no info about Korea, but it's all welcome here:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/South_Korea
Thanks.
AV is really the area worst affected by software patents. The media talks a lot about "silly patents", but they're *not* the real problem. MPEG-LA holds over 1000 patents - no amount of raised standards will solve this problem. Patents on playing video have to be declared null and void.
Maybe not enough, but I do sleep :-)
Thanks for the encouragement. I think en.swpat.org is making great progress in terms of breadth and depth of information, but it's still not building a community of contributors. Any help with publicising it and with informing people that it's something they can also contribute to, would be very helpful.
Hi,
To raise the bar for how informed us laypeople are, I've spent a year gathering software patent info in a wiki: http://en.swpat.org/
I've no background in German patent law, or the German courts system, and I don't speak German. If you could add any information, that would be very useful.
Thanks.
(As linked above, starting points include: Xa ZB 20/08 (2010, April, Germany), German patent courts and appeals, Case law in Germany, DE10232674)
> Isn't source code structured? Automatic code generation is quite ancient.
Yeh, but this patent is on doing that on a *limited resource* computer.
Code generation might be decades old, but do you really think anyone thought of doing code generation on a computer with less then 2Gb of RAM and less than a 1Ghz processor in the 70s or 80s?
Hat's off to Siemens for this stroke of genius.
I'm working on documenting this, and the general German situation, here:
swpat.org is a publicly editable wiki, help welcome.
I html-ised it and made links to a few automatic translations:
It indeed looks like bad news.
Not really. Random doesn't have to mean oiyusg7no45c8wo9nq23r9.
In this case, I meant that for each site you visit, the plugin would identify your browser as firefox 3.4.2, or 3.2.1, or 3.5.9, etc. etc. and the build date as blah blah blah.
All perfectly credible, and still sufficiently random to stop your browser having a fingerprint.
Randomising most of HTTP_ACCEPT and User agent would totally fix this problem, right? Or at least, it should for those of us with javascript turned off by default (using noscript makes this pretty convenient).
A handful of things should stay the same, such as browser name, the major version number of the browser, and your main language preferences, but I guess the rest could change per-site by selecting random values from lists of valid values.
Anyone know of a plugin (for any browser) that does this?
Here's the supremes' decision:
From working on the Bilski case, I've ended up reading a dozen US Supreme Court decisions, and I've found them surprisingly readable. There are times when you just have to accept that something has a meaning that you don't know, but even with these gaps, the remaining text is usually coherent.
> I couldn't pick out any attractive ones because their faces were all pixelated!
And? I'm into that. I gave them all 3s.
It's strange that companies actually went for litigation. Maybe it happened because this new field brought companies into competition with other companies tehy hadn't dealt with before, so the usual deals of paying patent tax to each other couldn't be set up fast enough.
Patent trolls are a problem for big companies that have lots of money. Trolls have nothing to do with HTML5 not being able to recommend a video codec, and they've nothing to do with worries about how Microsoft will use their patents on .doc, XML, or Mono. Some trolls *do* practice their invention, like the mp3 guys that made a packet from trolling - and as a side-effect, completely insignificant to them, forced GNU/Linux distros to omit mp3 support.
To solve the social problems caused by software patents, we have to abolish them - tweaking the numbers to reduce the problems of mega corporations is not *our* job.
> The EU threw out patents on software /per se/
What makes you say that? The background was that the legislation excludes "swpats as such", and the EPO interprets so narrowly to be almost non-existant. The story with the EU is that the Commission proposed to clearly allow software patents, and it was discussed at great volume levels for a few years, and the Parliament threw out the Commission's proposal almost unanimously.
This means there was no change in the legislation, so were back to the crappy situation where the EPO is granting whatever it likes, but it's still true that the Parliament's action was to throw out a proposal to legitimatise software patents. Here's the story at greater length:
The United Patent Litigation System replaces the EPLA. The official justifications are that it will decrease bureaucracy and costs. As a side effect (which is the real motivation of some pushers), it will push aside the European Parliament (which threw out swpats in 2005), and give more power to the European Patent Office (which approves almost as much as the USPTO does). More details:
His slides (on "slide share") don't work for me, using Firefox and Gnash.
C'mon guys. Attention to detail with your open web!
The USA has no law on software patents. The relevant law was written before anyone was manufacturing computers: Legislation in the USA
Kagan: Hey, Barack. This software patent's issue is a real head scratcher. I can't find your stance on it. Can you remind me of it?
Obama: Elena, Elena, I'm busy. To be a patentable process, innovations should involve significant extra-solution activity i.e. activity central to the purpose of the claimed method. And don't forget that no patent can wholly pre-empt the use of a fundamental principle - and I don't just mean that a field-of-use restriction will suffice, I want to be sure that the algorithm can still be used for other purposes even in that same field.
Kagan: Thanks, I'll go fluff that out and add references. (done) Sorry to have bothered you, I simply don't have the power to come up with my own viewpoints, so I wanted to clarfy what yours are.
(...or just maybe it's not a purely clerical role and there's a bit of Kagan in the document she wrote and got approved by the president.)