"Well sure, but only if you assume that there are patented procedures in Linux. Do we know that there are? I'm almost sure that there are in the Wine project. But can anyone point to an example of something in the Linux kernel that is patented by Microsoft?"
IIRC OSRM said that 27 of the 283 patents it found the kernel infringes are owned by Microsoft. Microsoft owns a large number of patents, many of which are infringed by other FOSS of course, and to assume that there are not patented procedures in Linux - and any other significant piece of FOSS - would be very foolish anyway.
Heh! Well if that's the legal theory of intellectual property, thank God we're making some headway in getting politicians to follow the economic theory here in the UK and Europe.
"
It seems that slashdot routinely posts headlines claiming "Microsoft patents X!" Where X is something obviously nonpatentable. However,..."
It seems that slashdot is becoming infested with fake patent experts and apologists. I see a fellow/.er has already quoted the crucial Claim 1 of the patent which you have subsequently misidentified as being part of the abstract. It is clear that you did not even read the patent yourself or if you did, you did not understand it.
"Disclaimer: I am a patent engineer. I write software patents for a living."
Florian Mueller I think made the observation recently that the patent system is now all about inventing patents rather than patenting inventions. But apparently it isn't even necessary to invent them - they can, as I think we all suspected, be churned out by "patent engineers";-)
"Let's think about this for a minute. There are two common arguments for doing away with software patents: 1) It's just math (i.e., algorithms), and 2) software is already covered by copyright."
Your counter to the first argument consists of making a strawman of it by stretching it into a false dilemma. Your counter to the second consists of nothing more than the tautology: "copyright doesn't protect certain kinds of inventions to the extent that patents do".
But the most serious flaw in your reasoning is your argumentum ad ignorantiam: "Why should software engineers be any less entitled to that kind of reward?". It is based on the false premise that the patent system is all about 'rewarding' inventors with patents (the punishment meted out to re-inventors, follow-on inventors and others conveniently forgotten, of course) and treating all fields of endeavour equally in the interests of 'fairness'. This, as any economist will tell you, is a nonsensical way to think about the patent system.
"Although patents are needed to protect innovation..."
This generalisation and assumption is possibly the worst mistake one can make when thinking about the patent system and its effects on innovation and economic welfare:
The most serious error in interpreting the economic evidence is perhaps that in section 5, where the rapporteur's statement asserts that "academic studies have shown a link between R&D spending, patent applications, and productivity." No documentation for this claim is provided. In fact, what is known via academic research is that although a firm's R&D spending is clearly related to its productivity, profitability, or market value, there is little evidence that patents contribute separately to performance, that is, above and beyond R&D spending.[17] Direct survey evidence for the United States and Europe has found that patents are only considered important for securing returns to innovation in the specialty chemicals industry including pharmaceuticals, medical instruments, and specialized machinery. -- From a critique attached to a petition signed by 14 prominent economists."
"When there are companies whose only holdings are IP, something needs to change."
There is nothing wrong with IP holding companies or "patent trolls". Patents are property. If you extend the scope of patentable subject matter to include "everything under the sun, made by man", heedless of the warnings of economists (and others), you can damn well live with the consequences.:P
"Apple was eager to move beyond the legal dispute caused by the patent, which could have eventually cost the company as much as the $100 million settlement amount, Dowling said."
I don't think It would be useful to speculate but do you have some reason to distrust the explanation given by Apple's Steve Dowling? It seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Check your own. Over the years I have read many hundreds of patents, discussed patent law and economics at length with experts in both patent law and patent system economics and read more books and papers on those subjects than I care to recall. Certainly enough to know when I am reading absolute twaddle:
"The patent is very simple, broad, and blindingly obvious." etc.
None of which are grounds for expecting that such a patent would not be granted or that it would be easy or even possible to have it invalidated (let alone cost effective). Indeed the simplicity or broadness of a patent are utterly irrelevant to its validity and the meaning of "obvious", in the patent legal sense, has little to do with its colloquial meaning. There are no "contradictory facts" here and it has nothing to do with Apple's lawyers not being smart enough. If you know bugger all about patents and patent law, (or any other subject) don't assume that just because someone is posting on slashdot that they must be equally ignorant.
"Christ alive Slashdot is a joke when it comes to patent stories. At the time I'm reading this, your post is +4 Interesting. Let's see what passes for +4 Interesting in a Slashdot patent story"
At the time I'm reading this, your post is modded +5 informative. Yet it is just about as uninformative as it is possible to get.
"That took me 20 seconds to look up, copy, and paste."
Quite. Perhaps it would've been better if you'd also taken the time to read it and interpret it correctly before wrongly accusing someone of being factually incorrect.
Writing software for a Mac and/or Linux is a very different proposition from fabricating hardware for a niche music player."
Obviously.
"As expensive as software development is, it doesn't really compare with tooling a factory for making hardware that works with a specific MP3 player, then programming the firmware for said device."
Obviously.
But the patent in question is not for any invention in hardware fabrication technology or even for an invention that solves some problem specific to firmware programming, so it is hard to see what your point is.
Agreed. Wildberger's manner is off-putting and the idea of replacing trigonometry with his rational trigonometry in high schools seems eccentric but for starters a trigonometry valid in a general field is interesting and this review just stinks.
"Sometimes it seems that the only really new ideas being tossed around (outside of lab research and the like) in science are from Wolfram in his book, A New Kind of Science."
Really new? No. Tossed around? Oh yes;-)
" In ANKS Wolfram says that "the core of this
book can be viewed as introducing a major gener-
alization of mathematics" (p. 7). In this he is entirely
mistaken, but there are at least two ways in which
he has benefited mathematics: he has helped to
popularize a relatively little-known mathematical
area (CA theory), and he has unwittingly provided
several highly instructive examples of the pitfalls
of trying to dispense with mathematical rigor."
An acutely embarassing situation for their friends and relatives too, I would think, and if I were one of them I'd sue the USPTO for its part in facilitating this disgraceful and unnecessary exposure of these poor people to public ridicule. They need counselling or some other form of psychiatric help, not to have the symptoms of their illness recorded for posterity so that future generations can laugh and sneer at what they will no doubt see as seven lunatics or cretins who thought they were inventors.
Re:Creative is an evil company
on
Creative Sues Apple
·
· Score: 4, Informative
"Lady, did you even read your own link?....Nothing all to dirty here, just business."
Did you even read it? Sam Dietrich relates describing the technique publicly at a Creative Labs developer conference, after which Creative went and patented it. Fraud and extortion not dirty? Just business?
"Here in the EU, software patents are still illegal and so we can redistribute things like MP3 implementations without any problems."
Well, they're of dubious legality.
As Prof. Noveck has pointed out in her Peer to Patent project, there is no prospect, politically, of getting rid of software patents in the US. Patent system administrators and policy makers don't listen to economists any more than Creationists listen to biologists and the situation is made even worse when profound economic policy changes can (and have been) made in the courtroom. In Europe, the chance of restoring sanity to the patent system - and other areas of "intellectual property" - is much higher now than it has been (cf. the Gowers review, the RSA's Adelphi Charter etc.) but it is a hard struggle. When economists can petition economic policy makers and be largely ignored, one can see that the disease is severe indeed:
http://www.researchineurope.org/policy/patentdirlt r.htm
The wonderful peer to peer Internet is under attack from many directions; commercial service discrimination is just one - and IMHO, it would be more like the power company deciding how much (if any) juice and of what quality they'll supply, depending on who manufactured my toaster, kettle, TV etc. than the KFC/Pepsi analogy given by Wu.
"Are you sure you've understood Lisp or is the post a joke?"
I wouldn't even bother asking: There's an even worse piece of utter nonsense masquerading as expertise by zCyl above. I don't know what it is about/. but it seems to attract this sort of thing. One could try and explain, point by tedious point, just why everything these ignorami have posted is garbage (there's a good example of some of the power of macros here: http://www.pedrokroeger.net/weblog/?p=13 for example) but it's just not worth it: There's a/. user who often writes long posts posing as an expert in GR and other physics topics and I got really sick of seeing his disinformative rubbish once and wrote a polite reply exposing his ignorance of even the basics of classical mechanics. But of course it didn't make the slightest bit of difference. I must admit it though, it does take some skill to write plausible looking posts about subjects one knows nothing about.
"I failed to really learn the language for my AI class because I could not figure out a way to format the code such that it was readily apparent what was going on."
That may well be a problem for a newcomer who doesn't understand the natural structure of the language or hasn't been taught the simple indentation rules but it takes 10 minutes to get the hang of it if you are shown how. If you weren't shown how, that is quite unforgiveable.
'However, I do not want to hear any garbage about a "Lisp aware editor."'
It isn't garbage. You weren't meant to infer that the editor is either necessary or is required to do anything sophisticated.
"If your code requires machine assistance to read"
It doesn't.
"My experience with LISP was that it fell into the latter [it can't be written clearly in the first place] category since there's frequently no good place to break the code up into subunits or blocks within the definition of a function."
Of course it can be written clearly, it is just easier and faster to do so with - you guessed it - a Lisp aware editor. All languages need to be written with structured and consistent formatting in order to be readable and I wouldn't choose to write any code in any language without the assistance of a decent editor.
While code formatting is, strictly speaking, neither a syntactic nor a semantic matter, proper formatting is important to reading and writing code fluently and idiomatically. The key to formatting Lisp code is to indent it properly. The indentation should reflect the structure of the code so that you don't need to count parentheses to see what goes with what. In general, each new level of nesting gets indented a bit more, and, if line breaks are necessary, items at the same level of nesting are lined up...
However, you don't need to worry too much about these rules because a proper Lisp environment such as SLIME will take care of it for you. In fact, one of the advantages of Lisp's regular syntax is that it's fairly easy for software such as editors to know how to indent it. Since the indentation is supposed to reflect the structure of the code and the structure is marked by parentheses, it's easy to let the editor indent your code for you.
It has more and better libraries (which is important of course) but other than that Lisp can hardly be described as intrinsically less effective, that's for sure.
"You pick LISP, a language whose syntax makes it utterly impossible to generate easily readable code. (No, seriously. If you have a formatting scheme that makes LISP easily readable, I'd love to hear it.)"
Up until that bit, what you were saying seemed quite reasonable. Perhaps your Lisp programming stint was rather cursory or you weren't using a Lisp aware editor?
Slashdot Mirror
"Well sure, but only if you assume that there are patented procedures in Linux. Do we know that there are? I'm almost sure that there are in the Wine project. But can anyone point to an example of something in the Linux kernel that is patented by Microsoft?"
IIRC OSRM said that 27 of the 283 patents it found the kernel infringes are owned by Microsoft. Microsoft owns a large number of patents, many of which are infringed by other FOSS of course, and to assume that there are not patented procedures in Linux - and any other significant piece of FOSS - would be very foolish anyway.
Heh! Well if that's the legal theory of intellectual property, thank God we're making some headway in getting politicians to follow the economic theory here in the UK and Europe.
" It seems that slashdot routinely posts headlines claiming "Microsoft patents X!" Where X is something obviously nonpatentable. However,..."
It seems that slashdot is becoming infested with fake patent experts and apologists. I see a fellow /.er has already quoted the crucial Claim 1 of the patent which you have subsequently misidentified as being part of the abstract. It is clear that you did not even read the patent yourself or if you did, you did not understand it.
"Disclaimer: I am a patent engineer. I write software patents for a living."
Florian Mueller I think made the observation recently that the patent system is now all about inventing patents rather than patenting inventions. But apparently it isn't even necessary to invent them - they can, as I think we all suspected, be churned out by "patent engineers" ;-)
"Let's think about this for a minute. There are two common arguments for doing away with software patents: 1) It's just math (i.e., algorithms), and 2) software is already covered by copyright."
Your counter to the first argument consists of making a strawman of it by stretching it into a false dilemma. Your counter to the second consists of nothing more than the tautology: "copyright doesn't protect certain kinds of inventions to the extent that patents do".
But the most serious flaw in your reasoning is your argumentum ad ignorantiam: "Why should software engineers be any less entitled to that kind of reward?". It is based on the false premise that the patent system is all about 'rewarding' inventors with patents (the punishment meted out to re-inventors, follow-on inventors and others conveniently forgotten, of course) and treating all fields of endeavour equally in the interests of 'fairness'. This, as any economist will tell you, is a nonsensical way to think about the patent system.
"Although patents are needed to protect innovation..."
This generalisation and assumption is possibly the worst mistake one can make when thinking about the patent system and its effects on innovation and economic welfare:
The most serious error in interpreting the economic evidence is perhaps that in section 5, where the rapporteur's statement asserts that "academic studies have shown a link between R&D spending, patent applications, and productivity." No documentation for this claim is provided. In fact, what is known via academic research is that although a firm's R&D spending is clearly related to its productivity, profitability, or market value, there is little evidence that patents contribute separately to performance, that is, above and beyond R&D spending.[17] Direct survey evidence for the United States and Europe has found that patents are only considered important for securing returns to innovation in the specialty chemicals industry including pharmaceuticals, medical instruments, and specialized machinery.
-- From a critique attached to a petition signed by 14 prominent economists."
"When there are companies whose only holdings are IP, something needs to change."
There is nothing wrong with IP holding companies or "patent trolls". Patents are property. If you extend the scope of patentable subject matter to include "everything under the sun, made by man", heedless of the warnings of economists (and others), you can damn well live with the consequences. :P
"Apple was eager to move beyond the legal dispute caused by the patent, which could have eventually cost the company as much as the $100 million settlement amount, Dowling said."
I don't think It would be useful to speculate but do you have some reason to distrust the explanation given by Apple's Steve Dowling? It seems perfectly reasonable to me.
"Check your assumptions."
Check your own. Over the years I have read many hundreds of patents, discussed patent law and economics at length with experts in both patent law and patent system economics and read more books and papers on those subjects than I care to recall. Certainly enough to know when I am reading absolute twaddle:
"The patent is very simple, broad, and blindingly obvious." etc.
None of which are grounds for expecting that such a patent would not be granted or that it would be easy or even possible to have it invalidated (let alone cost effective). Indeed the simplicity or broadness of a patent are utterly irrelevant to its validity and the meaning of "obvious", in the patent legal sense, has little to do with its colloquial meaning. There are no "contradictory facts" here and it has nothing to do with Apple's lawyers not being smart enough. If you know bugger all about patents and patent law, (or any other subject) don't assume that just because someone is posting on slashdot that they must be equally ignorant.
"Christ alive Slashdot is a joke when it comes to patent stories. At the time I'm reading this, your post is +4 Interesting. Let's see what passes for +4 Interesting in a Slashdot patent story"
At the time I'm reading this, your post is modded +5 informative. Yet it is just about as uninformative as it is possible to get.
"That took me 20 seconds to look up, copy, and paste."
Quite. Perhaps it would've been better if you'd also taken the time to read it and interpret it correctly before wrongly accusing someone of being factually incorrect.
The GP is either a troll or has absolutely no idea how to read and interpret a patent.
Writing software for a Mac and/or Linux is a very different proposition from fabricating hardware for a niche music player."
Obviously.
"As expensive as software development is, it doesn't really compare with tooling a factory for making hardware that works with a specific MP3 player, then programming the firmware for said device."
Obviously.
But the patent in question is not for any invention in hardware fabrication technology or even for an invention that solves some problem specific to firmware programming, so it is hard to see what your point is.
"Nothing like one mathematician being snarky about another mathematician."
Only one of the protagonists here appears to be a mathematician.
Agreed. Wildberger's manner is off-putting and the idea of replacing trigonometry with his rational trigonometry in high schools seems eccentric but for starters a trigonometry valid in a general field is interesting and this review just stinks.
"Sometimes it seems that the only really new ideas being tossed around (outside of lab research and the like) in science are from Wolfram in his book, A New Kind of Science."
Really new? No. Tossed around? Oh yes ;-)
http://www.ams.org/notices/200302/fea-gray.pdf#se
An acutely embarassing situation for their friends and relatives too, I would think, and if I were one of them I'd sue the USPTO for its part in facilitating this disgraceful and unnecessary exposure of these poor people to public ridicule. They need counselling or some other form of psychiatric help, not to have the symptoms of their illness recorded for posterity so that future generations can laugh and sneer at what they will no doubt see as seven lunatics or cretins who thought they were inventors.
Cheap to advertise and apparently very popular:. html
http://www.gumtree.com/index_posting_jobs_landing
http://www.gumtree.com/ (Find other gumtree and kijiji sites around the world)
Did you even read it? Sam Dietrich relates describing the technique publicly at a Creative Labs developer conference, after which Creative went and patented it. Fraud and extortion not dirty? Just business?
Well, they're of dubious legality.
As Prof. Noveck has pointed out in her Peer to Patent project, there is no prospect, politically, of getting rid of software patents in the US. Patent system administrators and policy makers don't listen to economists any more than Creationists listen to biologists and the situation is made even worse when profound economic policy changes can (and have been) made in the courtroom. In Europe, the chance of restoring sanity to the patent system - and other areas of "intellectual property" - is much higher now than it has been (cf. the Gowers review, the RSA's Adelphi Charter etc.) but it is a hard struggle. When economists can petition economic policy makers and be largely ignored, one can see that the disease is severe indeed: http://www.researchineurope.org/policy/patentdirlt r.htm
s%KFC/Pepsi%Highways/GM cars%
From the Bell Sympatico acceptable use policy.
The wonderful peer to peer Internet is under attack from many directions; commercial service discrimination is just one - and IMHO, it would be more like the power company deciding how much (if any) juice and of what quality they'll supply, depending on who manufactured my toaster, kettle, TV etc. than the KFC/Pepsi analogy given by Wu.
John Walker describes other, related threats here: http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimat ur/
I wouldn't even bother asking: There's an even worse piece of utter nonsense masquerading as expertise by zCyl above. I don't know what it is about /. but it seems to attract this sort of thing. One could try and explain, point by tedious point, just why everything these ignorami have posted is garbage (there's a good example of some of the power of macros here: http://www.pedrokroeger.net/weblog/?p=13 for example) but it's just not worth it: There's a /. user who often writes long posts posing as an expert in GR and other physics topics and I got really sick of seeing his disinformative rubbish once and wrote a polite reply exposing his ignorance of even the basics of classical mechanics. But of course it didn't make the slightest bit of difference. I must admit it though, it does take some skill to write plausible looking posts about subjects one knows nothing about.
That may well be a problem for a newcomer who doesn't understand the natural structure of the language or hasn't been taught the simple indentation rules but it takes 10 minutes to get the hang of it if you are shown how. If you weren't shown how, that is quite unforgiveable.
'However, I do not want to hear any garbage about a "Lisp aware editor."'
It isn't garbage. You weren't meant to infer that the editor is either necessary or is required to do anything sophisticated.
"If your code requires machine assistance to read"
It doesn't.
"My experience with LISP was that it fell into the latter [it can't be written clearly in the first place] category since there's frequently no good place to break the code up into subunits or blocks within the definition of a function."
Of course it can be written clearly, it is just easier and faster to do so with - you guessed it - a Lisp aware editor. All languages need to be written with structured and consistent formatting in order to be readable and I wouldn't choose to write any code in any language without the assistance of a decent editor.
While code formatting is, strictly speaking, neither a syntactic nor a semantic matter, proper formatting is important to reading and writing code fluently and idiomatically. The key to formatting Lisp code is to indent it properly. The indentation should reflect the structure of the code so that you don't need to count parentheses to see what goes with what. In general, each new level of nesting gets indented a bit more, and, if line breaks are necessary, items at the same level of nesting are lined up...
However, you don't need to worry too much about these rules because a proper Lisp environment such as SLIME will take care of it for you. In fact, one of the advantages of Lisp's regular syntax is that it's fairly easy for software such as editors to know how to indent it. Since the indentation is supposed to reflect the structure of the code and the structure is marked by parentheses, it's easy to let the editor indent your code for you.
http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/syntax-and-semanti cs.html
I'm sorry your experience of Lisp has been so poor but I think you should blame whoever it was that took that AI class, not the language itself ;-)
It has more and better libraries (which is important of course) but other than that Lisp can hardly be described as intrinsically less effective, that's for sure.
Up until that bit, what you were saying seemed quite reasonable. Perhaps your Lisp programming stint was rather cursory or you weren't using a Lisp aware editor?
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/legal/0,39020651, 39253949,00.htm