Can someone who understand patent law tell me, is this patent valid? More specifically, can you patent something that is (either explicitly or implicitly) based on technology that doesn't exist yet?
In this case, the patent requires at least partially sentient computers (doesn't exist yet) that experience emotions (also doesn't exist yet) that resemble human emotions (also doesn't exist yet) and that we have the technology to metaprogram these emotions in some way (definitely doesn't exist yet) that is rigid and secure (most definitely doesn't exist yet).
For all of these, it's not just that we aren't quite sure but are closing in on the technology. Really, we have no farkin' clue how to do this, and lots of people are still arguing over whether even the first item in that list is possible.
So really, does U.S. patent law allow you to get patents on things you haven't actually invented?
But if Moses had, he probably would have been smart enough to follow the following Law of Patenting:
#32b: Don't get a 10-year patent on an invention that probably won't be usable for at least another 20 years.
He also forgot to follow the first Law of Creating Ethical Laws for Robots
#1: Ethical laws that make use of imprecise language are completely up to the interpretation of the user.
Corollary: If an agent (including a robot) can bizarro-fy a given system of ethics, it will. (cf: Muslim fundamentalists, Christian fundamentalists, anybody who has anything to do with business or business ethics, etc.)
The problem I have is with switching the interface libraries (formerly LGPL) to the GPL. That, with complaining in public about using ODBC or JDBC to speak to the database without opensourcing their software, leads me to believe that MySQL AB wants to lay claim to everything that people who don't buy a commercial license do with MySQL.
And don't get me started on the licensing page's wildly liberal interpretation of the GPL. Yes, it has been toned down a bit, but MySQL AB is still doing a damn good job of helping to convince the business world that the GPL really is a viral license.
I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that the author didn't seem to understand that Free Software does indeed have an owner and a copyright-holder, and therefore sees the GPL as an arbitrary restriction rather than a contract with the owners like any other software license.
What the author is really asking for is for Linux to transition from this bizarro-world that many businesses are afraid of and can't understand to the nice simple regimented money-based world they are used to.
In this world, if you get something for free (as in beer), you should be able to do anything you want with it. They can't understand the idea of nonmonetary compensation. The idea of, "You can use it, but if you try to do anything else with it you have to let us use your version, too." comes across as some sort of wacky bait-and-switch. The whole thing gets broken into two parts:
1. It's yours. Take it.
2. No, wait, WE WANT YOUR SOUL! SOUUUULLLS! RARRRRRRRRR! (Of courrse, it doesn't help that MySQL AB really does try to do the above.)
I'm sure it's frightening for lots of business folks. They don't like it when they can't pretend to understand what's going on.
BusinessWeek's readers are businesspeople. Business is about making money. There are two ways to make money.
1. Visionaries and geniuses can create buzzwords.
2. Everyone else can jump on the buzzwords as soon as they realize that the buzzwords are buzzwords. BusinessWeek caters to the second group because it's a market several orders of magnitude larger.
Linux is a buzzword. *BSD is not. This means that all the buzzword people jumped on Linux. This guarantees that in the future, Linux will have more buzzwords than BSD.
The next important rule with buzzwords is that you have to take a convoluted path to get to your buzzwords. This is the rule that explains why we have a group of people working hard at developing Linux for the Macintosh as well as a group of people working hard at developing Darwin for the PC.
(** note: The author realizes that there are indeed practical reasons to make many of the decisions mentioned above. In fact, he has jumped on a couple of the bandwagons mentioned above, both for practical reasons and because of buzzword bandwagoning. The problem is systemic, has been around for thousands of years, and can only be solved by the GPL.)
I think they just totally failed to do any market research whatsoever, or even thought of it.
I am apparently right in their target market, and here's how the economics work out for me:
I only game a little, which means I don't play games out very quickly, which means that I don't buy them very often. Maybe one every three months. On top of that, since I don't buy often, I have no problem waiting a few months for the good ones to be sold to used game stores by the hardcore gamers for $15-20 a pop rather than $40+. So, not counting the initial cost of the game system, I pay between $60 and $120 a year to be a gamer. I really have no idea which end of the range I'm closer to, so let's average it and say $90 per year.
Infinium is offering me the chance to be a gamer for four times the price, and they think that I'm supposed to do anything but laugh at the proposal?
And the console price is a damn cherry on top. I tell you, I'm just champing at the bit to spend twice as much so I have the chance to spend four times on the same product!
Yeah. I'd pay maybe half that if their system could make me have repeated orgasms while I played it. For the price they are asking, it'd have to clean up the mess, too.
My cousin had The Sega Channel during the last year it existed. It was pretty cool - basically an older version of cable modem technology, which meant the tiny little cartridge games downloaded lightning fast.
The product was probably doomed to failure from the get-go, though. It depends on your cable TV network having two-way repeaters. This was long before there was a widespread demand for cable services that need two-way repeaters, so they weren't too common at the time.
As a side note, the Sega Channel wasn't the first attempt at something like this. The first was the Intellivision's PlayCable system, which ran from 1980 until 1983.
Pretty much endemic to the generation. By 2001 it had gotten so bad at the college I attended that a few professors had a new guideline on their syllabi stating that students giving oral presentations either could not use presentation software or were strictly limited to a black-on-white scheme with absolutely no unnecessary graphics or animations, with necessary being interpreted in a rather strict manner, no sounds, and no fades.
Usually violations of this guideline were minor, but I did see severe repeat offenders have their grades liberally docked, and I can't say I was anything less than happy to see it happen.
Create a legal penalty for spamming, and the spammers will just go overseas and/or start working harder at covering their tracks. There is no infrastructure on the worldwide e-mail system that ensures that you know or can find out who is contacting you. This will make this law almost unenforcable. Besides, a legal solution is always the worst possible solution and should be chosen after any other options. As evidence, I present the DMCA and prohibition.
The real problem is and always has been that SMTP is a piss-poor protocol for handling this problem, and it is vital that it gets replaced. I don't want to hear about growing pains - ISPs can implement both protocols and leave it up to their users to choose which one to work with. I imagine that everyone will move to the new protocol of their own volition fairly quickly, and as soon as spammers lose their anonymity they will be out of business because we will be free to retaliate. All without ever having to deal with the law.
And while we're at it, we can make the same update for Usenet. I'd love to see a spam-free Usenet, especially since I didn't get on Usenet until after the spammers had already turned it into a radioactive wasteland.
Get a Dana from AlphaSmart. It's just a laptop that runs PalmOS. Full keyboard so you don't have to use the stylus to take notes, although it may still be necessary to use a stylus as a mouse.
Still, I think getting a laptop is best. Especially if you'll be taking courses that involve lots of math, you'll want to have a program that allows you to type equations easily (such as Mathematica).
Don't forget the eggs. You get a buttpile of money for eggs. As soon as we develop sex-change pills that work the right way, I'm totally going to take them just so I can go sell my eggs.
If I remember right, the way that LucasArts did it in the X-Wing series was to break the soundtrack into very small pieces, maybe four bars of music. Each chunk had a certain mood associated with it, and the game tried to detect when certain moods would be appropriate. Then, it would switch to the more victorious sounding pieces if you defeated a capital ship, somber ones if you lose someone on your wing, etc.
I assume they either put a lot of time into making sure that you could put any chunk after any other chunk without the music sounding bad, or creating a list of which chunks could come after a given one.
Anyway, I'm not sure what you mean by digital audio making it harder. The sound coming out of a video game is digital almost by definition. If you mean compressed audio like MP3, you'd probably get a performance hit from breaking the sound files into such small chunks, but modern computers are fast enough to handle it. It really isn't that big of a difference, since the X-wing games werent really dynamically generating music at all; they were just using a sort of heuristically-guided playlist shuffle.
The insight behind the parent is that a society that treats its citizens like criminals and makes policy that assumes they are all criminals will eventually turn them into criminals, either by making laws that can't possibly be followed or making rules and policy so asinine that people start to lose respect for the law.
Take the DRM on songs you get from iTMS. You know what? I want to play those songs on my MP3 player car stereo. I know the format of an AAC file is one that my stereo can read, except for that damn DRM. Well, screw it, we'll just strip that right off. . . oh, shit! DMCA!
I only block certain kinds of advertisements that I consider egregious abuses of the medium. These include popup and popover ads and ads from companies that have abused their ability to track my movements on the Net in the past (like DoubleClick). For 'stealth' ads like these, I will block the ones that I can find a way to block, too. If you use fancy JavaScript ads that dance across the webpage I'm trying to read and I can't find a way to get rid of them, I will just avoid your site.
Banner ads and even clickthrough ads don't bother me. Yeah, they're advertising and advertising is inhrently annoying, but if it's an ad that interests me, I'll even click it to see what's up.
As soon as Real gets access to the iPod and iTunes, your iPod is going to start transmitting your GPS coordinates back to Real so they can keep track of what places you like to frequent and what stores you shop at. Your iPod will also randomly start playing advertisements, and your copy of iTunes will display nothing but slideshows of banner ads when you try to use the visualiser.
I imagine part of it is that 11g hits some diminishing returns on a handheld - you increase the cost for a device that really doesn't need a whole lot of speed. You aren't going to fit a very large file on your handheld, and the types of websites that benefit from a very fast connection aren't going to display well on a Palm sized screen. Add to that that I'm not even sure that a PalmOS web browser could render fast enough to handle the speed of 11g. I'm sure there are some users out there using VNC on their PalmOS device (Assuming the project to make a VNC client ever got off the ground - I haven't paid any attention to it), but that's a very small segment of the market.
On top of that, I imagine that an 11g card would consume signifigantly more power. I'm not sure if an SD card port can supply that much power, and even if it could you'd take a pretty hard hit on your battery life.
I think the point you just implicitly made, though, is that as things continue along this path the likelihood of the kind of solution you just brought up (armed revolution for those not up on American history (mostly Americans, I'm guessing. =D ) ) approaches one. Especially in a 'republic' like the USA - representative government is just too inefficient to aggressively repress a population the way a totalitarian state could.
The issue is that the information MySQL AB puts on their site advising people about which license to choose isn't entirely in sync with what the GPL really states. Basically, MySQL AB is trying to scare businesses who weren't planning on violating the GPL into purchasing a commercial license of MySQL just incase.
This even comes out in the article when they talk about applications that talk to a MySQL database but don't actually link against any MySQL (or other GPL) libraries being a gray area. There is no gray area in sight on this issue - if there is no mixing of code, the license is not applicable and there cannot be a GPL violation.
MySQL AB's assertion here is akin to their claiming that you're running dangerously close to violating the GPL when you develop commercial software that runs on GNU/Linux. Yes, your app speaks to GNU software constantly, depends fundamentally on it, and is completely useless without said GNU software, but nobody is claiming you're anywhere near violationg the GPL. It's a pretty damn hypocritical argument for them to make, too, since there is a build of their software that runs on (works closely with) GNU/Linux that they do not release under the GPL. (I consider the GPL and commercial versions of MySQL to be different products because they admit there are minor differences between the two due to licensing issues with the libraries MySQL depends on.)
I understand that MySQL is trying to secure a profit for themselves, but doing it by scaring folks away isn't going to help very much. They'll get more chance of a profit from me by putting out an effort to implement all of the features a lot of corporate users have come to expect from a bunch of their competitors and being a bit more well-behaved in terms of SQL standards compliance, thus making potential business customers more interested in tightly coupling applications with MySQL in the first place.
Methinks the Ambient Orb might have a chance at being prior art. It contains electronics and the case (a frosted glass globe) changes color using LEDs inside.
Whether or not the electronics count as a "computing device" remains to be seen, but if the Ambient Orb people have a patent than Apple might be infringing on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Can someone who understand patent law tell me, is this patent valid? More specifically, can you patent something that is (either explicitly or implicitly) based on technology that doesn't exist yet?
In this case, the patent requires at least partially sentient computers (doesn't exist yet) that experience emotions (also doesn't exist yet) that resemble human emotions (also doesn't exist yet) and that we have the technology to metaprogram these emotions in some way (definitely doesn't exist yet) that is rigid and secure (most definitely doesn't exist yet).
For all of these, it's not just that we aren't quite sure but are closing in on the technology. Really, we have no farkin' clue how to do this, and lots of people are still arguing over whether even the first item in that list is possible.
So really, does U.S. patent law allow you to get patents on things you haven't actually invented?
Dude, you totally missed the point.
But if Moses had, he probably would have been smart enough to follow the following Law of Patenting:
#32b: Don't get a 10-year patent on an invention that probably won't be usable for at least another 20 years.
He also forgot to follow the first Law of Creating Ethical Laws for Robots
#1: Ethical laws that make use of imprecise language are completely up to the interpretation of the user.
Corollary: If an agent (including a robot) can bizarro-fy a given system of ethics, it will. (cf: Muslim fundamentalists, Christian fundamentalists, anybody who has anything to do with business or business ethics, etc.)
The problem I have is with switching the interface libraries (formerly LGPL) to the GPL. That, with complaining in public about using ODBC or JDBC to speak to the database without opensourcing their software, leads me to believe that MySQL AB wants to lay claim to everything that people who don't buy a commercial license do with MySQL.
And don't get me started on the licensing page's wildly liberal interpretation of the GPL. Yes, it has been toned down a bit, but MySQL AB is still doing a damn good job of helping to convince the business world that the GPL really is a viral license.
I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that the author didn't seem to understand that Free Software does indeed have an owner and a copyright-holder, and therefore sees the GPL as an arbitrary restriction rather than a contract with the owners like any other software license.
What the author is really asking for is for Linux to transition from this bizarro-world that many businesses are afraid of and can't understand to the nice simple regimented money-based world they are used to.
In this world, if you get something for free (as in beer), you should be able to do anything you want with it. They can't understand the idea of nonmonetary compensation. The idea of, "You can use it, but if you try to do anything else with it you have to let us use your version, too." comes across as some sort of wacky bait-and-switch. The whole thing gets broken into two parts:
1. It's yours. Take it.
2. No, wait, WE WANT YOUR SOUL! SOUUUULLLS! RARRRRRRRRR!
(Of courrse, it doesn't help that MySQL AB really does try to do the above.)
I'm sure it's frightening for lots of business folks. They don't like it when they can't pretend to understand what's going on.
buzzwords. buzzwords. buzzwords.
buzzwords. buzzwords. buzzwords.
BusinessWeek's readers are businesspeople.
Business is about making money.
There are two ways to make money.
1. Visionaries and geniuses can create buzzwords.
2. Everyone else can jump on the buzzwords as soon as they realize that the buzzwords are buzzwords.
BusinessWeek caters to the second group because it's a market several orders of magnitude larger.
buzzwords. buzzwords. buzzwords.
buzzwords. buzzwords. buzzwords.
Linux is a buzzword. *BSD is not.
This means that all the buzzword people jumped on Linux.
This guarantees that in the future, Linux will have more buzzwords than BSD.
buzzwords. buzzwords. buzzwords.
buzzwords. buzzwords. buzzwords.
The next important rule with buzzwords is that you have to take a convoluted path to get to your buzzwords.
This is the rule that explains why we have a group of people working hard at developing Linux for the Macintosh as well as a group of people working hard at developing Darwin for the PC.
buzzwords. buzzwords. buzzwords.
buzzwords. buzzwords. buzzwords.
(** note: The author realizes that there are indeed practical reasons to make many of the decisions mentioned above. In fact, he has jumped on a couple of the bandwagons mentioned above, both for practical reasons and because of buzzword bandwagoning. The problem is systemic, has been around for thousands of years, and can only be solved by the GPL.)
I'm interested in that, but before I'm going to buy it that picture on the top-right damn well better feature a crappile of calculator keys.
I think they just totally failed to do any market research whatsoever, or even thought of it.
I am apparently right in their target market, and here's how the economics work out for me:
I only game a little, which means I don't play games out very quickly, which means that I don't buy them very often. Maybe one every three months. On top of that, since I don't buy often, I have no problem waiting a few months for the good ones to be sold to used game stores by the hardcore gamers for $15-20 a pop rather than $40+. So, not counting the initial cost of the game system, I pay between $60 and $120 a year to be a gamer. I really have no idea which end of the range I'm closer to, so let's average it and say $90 per year.
Infinium is offering me the chance to be a gamer for four times the price, and they think that I'm supposed to do anything but laugh at the proposal?
And the console price is a damn cherry on top. I tell you, I'm just champing at the bit to spend twice as much so I have the chance to spend four times on the same product!
Yeah. I'd pay maybe half that if their system could make me have repeated orgasms while I played it. For the price they are asking, it'd have to clean up the mess, too.
My cousin had The Sega Channel during the last year it existed. It was pretty cool - basically an older version of cable modem technology, which meant the tiny little cartridge games downloaded lightning fast.
The product was probably doomed to failure from the get-go, though. It depends on your cable TV network having two-way repeaters. This was long before there was a widespread demand for cable services that need two-way repeaters, so they weren't too common at the time.
As a side note, the Sega Channel wasn't the first attempt at something like this. The first was the Intellivision's PlayCable system, which ran from 1980 until 1983.
Pretty much endemic to the generation. By 2001 it had gotten so bad at the college I attended that a few professors had a new guideline on their syllabi stating that students giving oral presentations either could not use presentation software or were strictly limited to a black-on-white scheme with absolutely no unnecessary graphics or animations, with necessary being interpreted in a rather strict manner, no sounds, and no fades.
Usually violations of this guideline were minor, but I did see severe repeat offenders have their grades liberally docked, and I can't say I was anything less than happy to see it happen.
Create a legal penalty for spamming, and the spammers will just go overseas and/or start working harder at covering their tracks. There is no infrastructure on the worldwide e-mail system that ensures that you know or can find out who is contacting you. This will make this law almost unenforcable. Besides, a legal solution is always the worst possible solution and should be chosen after any other options. As evidence, I present the DMCA and prohibition.
The real problem is and always has been that SMTP is a piss-poor protocol for handling this problem, and it is vital that it gets replaced. I don't want to hear about growing pains - ISPs can implement both protocols and leave it up to their users to choose which one to work with. I imagine that everyone will move to the new protocol of their own volition fairly quickly, and as soon as spammers lose their anonymity they will be out of business because we will be free to retaliate. All without ever having to deal with the law.
And while we're at it, we can make the same update for Usenet. I'd love to see a spam-free Usenet, especially since I didn't get on Usenet until after the spammers had already turned it into a radioactive wasteland.
Get a Dana from AlphaSmart. It's just a laptop that runs PalmOS. Full keyboard so you don't have to use the stylus to take notes, although it may still be necessary to use a stylus as a mouse.
Still, I think getting a laptop is best. Especially if you'll be taking courses that involve lots of math, you'll want to have a program that allows you to type equations easily (such as Mathematica).
Don't forget the eggs. You get a buttpile of money for eggs. As soon as we develop sex-change pills that work the right way, I'm totally going to take them just so I can go sell my eggs.
If I remember right, the way that LucasArts did it in the X-Wing series was to break the soundtrack into very small pieces, maybe four bars of music. Each chunk had a certain mood associated with it, and the game tried to detect when certain moods would be appropriate. Then, it would switch to the more victorious sounding pieces if you defeated a capital ship, somber ones if you lose someone on your wing, etc.
I assume they either put a lot of time into making sure that you could put any chunk after any other chunk without the music sounding bad, or creating a list of which chunks could come after a given one.
Anyway, I'm not sure what you mean by digital audio making it harder. The sound coming out of a video game is digital almost by definition. If you mean compressed audio like MP3, you'd probably get a performance hit from breaking the sound files into such small chunks, but modern computers are fast enough to handle it. It really isn't that big of a difference, since the X-wing games werent really dynamically generating music at all; they were just using a sort of heuristically-guided playlist shuffle.
It's the difference between 10 songs on a CD and a couple hundred songs on a CD.
The insight behind the parent is that a society that treats its citizens like criminals and makes policy that assumes they are all criminals will eventually turn them into criminals, either by making laws that can't possibly be followed or making rules and policy so asinine that people start to lose respect for the law.
Take the DRM on songs you get from iTMS. You know what? I want to play those songs on my MP3 player car stereo. I know the format of an AAC file is one that my stereo can read, except for that damn DRM. Well, screw it, we'll just strip that right off. . . oh, shit! DMCA!
I only block certain kinds of advertisements that I consider egregious abuses of the medium. These include popup and popover ads and ads from companies that have abused their ability to track my movements on the Net in the past (like DoubleClick). For 'stealth' ads like these, I will block the ones that I can find a way to block, too. If you use fancy JavaScript ads that dance across the webpage I'm trying to read and I can't find a way to get rid of them, I will just avoid your site.
Banner ads and even clickthrough ads don't bother me. Yeah, they're advertising and advertising is inhrently annoying, but if it's an ad that interests me, I'll even click it to see what's up.
As soon as Real gets access to the iPod and iTunes, your iPod is going to start transmitting your GPS coordinates back to Real so they can keep track of what places you like to frequent and what stores you shop at. Your iPod will also randomly start playing advertisements, and your copy of iTunes will display nothing but slideshows of banner ads when you try to use the visualiser.
I imagine part of it is that 11g hits some diminishing returns on a handheld - you increase the cost for a device that really doesn't need a whole lot of speed. You aren't going to fit a very large file on your handheld, and the types of websites that benefit from a very fast connection aren't going to display well on a Palm sized screen. Add to that that I'm not even sure that a PalmOS web browser could render fast enough to handle the speed of 11g. I'm sure there are some users out there using VNC on their PalmOS device (Assuming the project to make a VNC client ever got off the ground - I haven't paid any attention to it), but that's a very small segment of the market.
On top of that, I imagine that an 11g card would consume signifigantly more power. I'm not sure if an SD card port can supply that much power, and even if it could you'd take a pretty hard hit on your battery life.
Keep in mind that martial law and military occupations don't count. =D
I think the point you just implicitly made, though, is that as things continue along this path the likelihood of the kind of solution you just brought up (armed revolution for those not up on American history (mostly Americans, I'm guessing. =D ) ) approaches one. Especially in a 'republic' like the USA - representative government is just too inefficient to aggressively repress a population the way a totalitarian state could.
d00d, you totally forgot Mozilla. If you want to stick with databases, Firebird is another good example.
Given enough eyes, all kludges are visible.
The issue is that the information MySQL AB puts on their site advising people about which license to choose isn't entirely in sync with what the GPL really states. Basically, MySQL AB is trying to scare businesses who weren't planning on violating the GPL into purchasing a commercial license of MySQL just incase.
This even comes out in the article when they talk about applications that talk to a MySQL database but don't actually link against any MySQL (or other GPL) libraries being a gray area. There is no gray area in sight on this issue - if there is no mixing of code, the license is not applicable and there cannot be a GPL violation.
MySQL AB's assertion here is akin to their claiming that you're running dangerously close to violating the GPL when you develop commercial software that runs on GNU/Linux. Yes, your app speaks to GNU software constantly, depends fundamentally on it, and is completely useless without said GNU software, but nobody is claiming you're anywhere near violationg the GPL. It's a pretty damn hypocritical argument for them to make, too, since there is a build of their software that runs on (works closely with) GNU/Linux that they do not release under the GPL. (I consider the GPL and commercial versions of MySQL to be different products because they admit there are minor differences between the two due to licensing issues with the libraries MySQL depends on.)
I understand that MySQL is trying to secure a profit for themselves, but doing it by scaring folks away isn't going to help very much. They'll get more chance of a profit from me by putting out an effort to implement all of the features a lot of corporate users have come to expect from a bunch of their competitors and being a bit more well-behaved in terms of SQL standards compliance, thus making potential business customers more interested in tightly coupling applications with MySQL in the first place.
Methinks the Ambient Orb might have a chance at being prior art. It contains electronics and the case (a frosted glass globe) changes color using LEDs inside.
Whether or not the electronics count as a "computing device" remains to be seen, but if the Ambient Orb people have a patent than Apple might be infringing on it.