It's pretty astounding that not only was TFA author ignorant of the most basic fact about his/her subject but the glaring error was missed again and again before it got here.
Apart from all the excellent NPR podcasts around, the most entertaining and impressive thing I've come across in the pod-o-sphere is the wonderful phenomenon of "podiobooks". The premier innovator and author/narrator/podcaster in this genre is Mr. Scott Sigler of Earthcore fame. If you missed the hugely enjoyable Earthcore experience you can still catch up with it (details at http://scottsigler.net/ ) and then get stuck in to Sigler's more recent Ancestor and (now in progress) Infection. There are many other great authors appearing at sites such as http://podiobooks.com/ and http://podcastalley.com/ (I'm currently listening to Singularity by Bill DeSmedt, courtesy of podiobooks). As for software, I know what you mean about the paucity of good stuff out there but I recently found the Wizz RSS newsreader extension for Firefox ( http://www.wizzcomputers.com/ )and it's really damned good. It even let me import the OPML file (whatever the fsck that is) for my podiobooks.com subscriptions.
The system is broken but you didn't break it and there's no reason you should be held responsible for its ill effects. I was going to suggest telling your boss(es) that you are happy to do the work and understand perfectly that it is in your company's interest to apply for this sort of patent under current conditions but that you do not wish to see your own name on the software patent applications. I thought of how ashamed I'd feel to see my own name on something like the IsNot patent or, for different reasons, the RSA patent, but I'm not so sure your situation demands that you should feel obliged to take any such ethical stance and risk losing your job. It's not your fault that the patent system is the way it is today and it's not even your company's fault. You'd not be the first person or company who has decried the state of the patent system itself but found it necessary to make use of it.
"As others have pointed out, they'll try again and again, and they only have to win once. We have to win every time."
Yes, this situation is very annoying, personally inconvenient and wholly unnecessary and I think the remedy is for the FFII et al to adopt a more offensive political strategy. From an economic and legal perspective, the case for software patents is strongly reminiscent of the case for "Intelligent Design" and I don't think it is beyond us to make that clear to our European politicians, or beyond them to grasp it. We should be pressing for major reform of patent policy and administration in Europe (the EPO, in particular, has behaved as though it were an economist's version of the Discovery Institute) and, more urgently, that the correct interpretation of the EPC outlined by Prescott be made statutory.
D'Arcy Thompson expresses a similar view in his famous book, On Growth and Form:
The study of form may be descriptive merely, or it may become analytical. We begin by describing the shape of an object in the simple words of common speech: we end by defining it in the precise language of mathematics; and the one method tends to follow the other in strict scientific order and historical continuity. Thus, for instance, the form of the earth, of a raindrop or a rainbow, the shape of the hanging chain, or the path of a stone thrown up into the air, may all be described, however inadequately, in common words; but when we have learned to comprehend and to define the sphere, the catenary, or the parabola, we have made a wonderful and perhaps a manifold advance. The mathematical definition of a 'form' has a quality of precision which was quite lacking in our earlier stage of mere description; it is expressed in few words or in still briefer symbols, and these words or symbols are so pregnant with meaning that thought itself is economised; we are brought by means of it in touch with Galileo's aphorism (as old as Plato, as old as Pythagoras, as old perhaps as the wisdom of the Egyptians), that 'the Book of Nature is written in characters of Geometry'.
"I'd think the tide would be maximized at new moon, and minimized at full moon. The sun and moon are aligned in both cases, but during full moon, the moon and sun are on opposite sides of the earth, so the gravity from the sun and moon are in direct opposition to each other. Perhaps I'm missing something, but it seems like that should reduce the amplitude, shouldn't it?"
You are missing only the physics;-) In the appropriate f.o.r in which to consider matters tidal, namely the accelerated frame in which the centre of mass of the Earth is at rest, the relevant fields can be written in the form, g_r = (3cos^2t - 1)Gmr/a^3 and g_t = -3Gmrcostsint/a^3 where a[m] is the mean distance to[mass of] the Sun (or Moon). Each of these tiny fields is weaker than average on the far side and stronger than average on the near side, causing an elongation effect along the centre lines, and because they are so tiny, it is their periodicity that really explains their effects. Assuming the ocean surface to be an equipotential surface, it's easy to see though that, for example, if the Sun and Moon are on opposite sides, their fields are acting in the same direction and that is what causes the spring tides. Only when they act at right angles do they (partially) cancel, and that is what causes the neap tides.
"You're missing the point. Claim #3 doesn't mention "software." It could be embodied as software, or as a circuit, or as the moving parts of the toaster. It is claimed solely as a "method," and is protected no matter how it is implemented. At the end of the day, it's just a method."
Indeed, as Jonas Maebe points out, it doesn't need to mention "software" to be recognisable as a "software patent" claim:
The easiest test is to check whether a claim can be formulated as a program claim. Each program claim can be formulated as a process claim, the reverse is not true.
An example of a program claim is "a computer program stored on a carrier which, when loaded and executed on a computer, performs the process according to claim X". You can always rewrite that as "a computer performing the process according to claim X", and it will cover the same innovation (be it in a different form, causing some differences regarding what you can forbid others from doing).
However, if you have a process claim stating "a printer printing an image whereby the ink is spread on paper according to algorithm X", then you cannot replace this with "a computer program stored on a carrier which, when loaded and executed on a computer, performs the process according to X", because a computer or computer program cannot spray ink (just like a computer program cannot wash your cloths, cannot make chocolate etc, otherwise I'd be programming myself a milkshake right now).
In other words, every process claim which can be rewritten as an equivalent program claim, is definitely a software patent claim.
What does this mean in practice? That people have to be careful regarding how they formulate their claims (just like they have to be today already to a certain extent, due to all the required technical and further technical effects). Instead of claiming "a computer performing an algorithm corresponds to industrial process X", they have to claim "industrial machinery Y steered by a computer giving instructions so that this machine performs industrial process X" (because a computer+software can never perform that industrial process).
Note that this still doesn't remove all grey areas, as that is simply impossible afaik (e.g. if you claim a program on mobile phone, is that the same as a computer?). It does work in most cases however. In cases of doubt, then you can go down to the classic controllable forces of nature theory in order to establish whether there is some empirical natural science behind it (mobile phone antennae using a new way of sending communication waves) or not (mobile phone just performing compression on the data to send). ... Jonas
"How do you draw a line of patentability between claim style #1 and claim style #3? More importantly, why would you?"
One would draw the line where you yourself have very nicely drawn it and disallow claim #3. That is the essence of the exclusions in EPC Article 52 and the answer to the why of it is to be found in the economic and social welfare principles upon which the patent system is founded. Principles that have apparently been forgotten in the U.S. but fortunately not in the U.K: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Patents/2005/1 589.html
It is quite irrelevant that it is possible to make the facile argument that every method could be implemented in software and that sometimes it is difficult to draw distinctions conceptually. Patent system policy and law is not made to conform to academic arguments about the mathematical nature of the physical world but to conform to the economic and social requirements implied in the phrase, "promote progress in the sciences and useful arts".
"There's something that always bothered me about this idea....
Whenever one of these spontaneous particle pairs pops out of the vacuum, there is always one matter particle and one antimatter particle. Shouldn't there be an equal probability that either one could fall into the black hole (unless it's a charged black hole, of course)? If equal numbers of matter and antimatter particles are going in, then shouldn't they balance each other out and result in a net effect of zero?"
You're probably right to be bothered by it! My understanding is that the particle pair description is only a crude (and potentially misleading) picture of a result that involves doing quantum field theory calculations on a classical curved spacetime. Not only is such a calculation difficult, it may not be appropriate to the physical conditions and I believe that the Hawking result isn't universally considered completely sound (and likely won't be without a working quantum theory of gravity). Even if it held up it'd still only be a theoretical prediction of course.
It's a black hole when all its mass is contained within a radius r = 2GM/c^2. When it loses mass due to the Hawking effect, that radius (the radius of its event horizon) shrinks too and it stays a black hole.
"The speed of light is constant with respect to inertial frame of reference"
That is the essential point (if meant as the observation that the constant 'c' isn't the notion of speed useful to describe what the light in question is doing in the curved spacetime it's moving in) but the "slowing" of the light has nothing to do with any "medium" the light is moving in.
"Even anti-particles still have a positive mass. They cannot cancel out anything. The black hole loses mass by what is radiating away, not by what is dropping back into it."
In the presence of an event horizon, though, occasionally one member of a virtual pair will fall into the black hole while its partner escapes to infinity. The particle that reaches infinity will have to have a positive energy, but the total energy is conserved; therefore the black hole has to lose mass. (If you like you can think of the particle that falls in as having a negative mass.) We see the escaping particles as Hawking radiation. It's not a very big effect, and the temperature goes down as the mass goes up, so for black holes of mass comparable to the sun it is completely negligible. Still, in principle the black hole could lose all of its mass to Hawking radiation, and shrink to nothing in the process.
Actually it is considered to have a temperature, though it's not the same thing as the temperature of ordinary matter. The analogy of black holes as thermodynamic systems (which I think arose from the study of rotating black holes and Penrose processes) is what motivated Bekenstein historically to suggest that a black hole/should/ emit black body radiation. Hawking set out to prove him wrong and - ironically - discovered that they do indeed.
It doesn't actually matter what direction the light is emitted in - the "slowdown" of light occurs along radial paths too. It is, as you say, due to the badly bent spacetime that this effect is observed, but it's because of the metric structure of the spacetime itself, not the path of the light. In a "normal" (t,r,theta,phi) coordinate system - appropriate to a far away observer - where the Schwarzschild metric describes the spacetime structure surrounding a massive body at the origin, the radial coordinate speed of light (dr/dt) turns out to be (c - 2GM/rc). You get a better picture of what is happening near black holes with more suitable coordinate systems but at least here you can see that if we describe spacetime with a set of coordinates appropriate to "normal", speed of light = c conditions, "the speed of light" really is affected by the massive body.
No doubt it is - strictly speaking. It is also meaningless*. I know of several projects that have been sent threatening letters by patent holders, including VLC, Helmut Dersch and a doctor who was writing some patient record keeping/practice management free software. In order for a claim to be upheld against these individuals and communities of free software developers, they would have had to spend the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars necessary to fight it out in court. They cannot do that of course, however "major" the project and even the commercial distros would have a hard time doing so. Patents are not like copyright: the patent holder can have varying motives for threatening an alleged infringer (obviously the patent holders in the cases I refer to above weren't after money) and they can attack users as well as authors and distributors.
* Unsurprisintgly, the overwhelming majority of all patent disputes never take place in a Court.
"As I posted on another thread, the patent system was not designed to spur people into inventing. Patents or not, people will always be inventing. The patent system was designed to ensure that the way new inventions work will be available, in the future, for other people to build on."
Actually it is also supposed to encourage invention - or more to the (economic) point - R&D based innovation. You make a good point but the disclosure benefit is only one of the classical economic justifications for the patent system. Sorry to nitpick but these days I'd rather do that - to encourage otherwise good comments like yours - than reply to the rubbish from people who e.g. claim that Nobel prize winning economists don't know what they're talking about;-) You may like to read this up to date and interesting introduction:
I'd also point out that whether or not license fees can be extracted from a patent does not depend entirely on its validity (which is an unknown until it is - posibly very expensively - tested in a Court) or even on whether or not infringement has actually occurred (for the same reason). Not much money is ever likely to be made from patents that are weak because of their intrinsic absurdity of course - they're not likely to be held by those with the financial resources to wield them effectively, no-one's likely to be practising the 'invention' and legal costs involved in invalidating such a patent would surely be a minimum - but it is not inconceivable.
The iAudio X5L 30GB would be my choice. It's HD based so you might not like it but I've been doing a pre-xmas comparison of feature sets and reviews of DAPs and it stands out from the crowd.
"in order to participate in Summit-related events Lessig had to promise not to talk about intellectual property."
Dear Doctor Jones,
The committee of the WHO invites you to open the World Summit on Global Health Policy with a brief speech. Please don't talk about Malaria, AIDS or other minor diseases.
Dear Senator Bloggs,
The Board is pleased to offer you the opportunity to open the World Summit on National and International Security. We request that you do not bring up irrelevant matters such as war and terrorism.
Dear Professor Smith,
The organisers are pleased to offer you the opportunity to present the opening address at the World Summit on Climate Change. We ask only that you avoid subjects not directly relevant - such as greenhouse gases, temperatures and sea levels.
" I never thought much of Emacs keybindings,... but thanks to power of Eclipse, I made my own keybindings superior to either of those."
Heh! Before I try Eclipse, you'll have to give me a more credible reason than that it has greater power to customise the key bindings than Emacs does. In fact I suggest you steer clear of the subject of customisability and extensibility altogether if you want to make something look better than Emacs.
Unfortunately rationality is in very short supply when it comes to the patent system - a deliberate policy as far as its administrators and direct beneficiaries are concerned. Conveniently for them this admittedly complex subject is now surrounded by a thick fog of fallacies, distortions and ignorance. I've come to view my own experience of it over the last two or three years as a terrifying insight into what the science research and education system might be like under the supervision of a body such as the Discovery Institute.
"I can think of a handful of genuinely innovative algorithms that have been patented, such as RSA and the Karmarkar LP algorithm."
Much to my annoyance many people do indeed think RSA was "worthy" of a patent and I'd say there are actually quite a large number of such "worthy" patents on algorithms (or rather the use of them), if you choose to think of patents that way. I've read more patents - "worthy" and otherwise - than I care to remember now, but of course (and as you quite rightly imply) that is looking at the whole subject from entirely the wrong perspective. Ironically perhaps, it was my sense of outrage at the existence of that RSA patent and others like it that motivated me to learn about the patent system in the first place (I never really cared much about the risible one-click shopping type patents most people seem to agree are despicable). Though the RSA patent had already expired by the time I learned of it I cannot describe how it felt to sit in front of a programmable computer knowing simultaneously the trivial lemma that is RSA and the implications of there being a patent on it. "Intellectual violation" is the only phrase that seems suitable. Learning that such violations have no credible justification from the point of view of the philosophy and economics of the patent system itself has been a very depressing experience
Slashdot Mirror
It's pretty astounding that not only was TFA author ignorant of the most basic fact about his/her subject but the glaring error was missed again and again before it got here.
Apart from all the excellent NPR podcasts around, the most entertaining and impressive thing I've come across in the pod-o-sphere is the wonderful phenomenon of "podiobooks". The premier innovator and author/narrator/podcaster in this genre is Mr. Scott Sigler of Earthcore fame. If you missed the hugely enjoyable Earthcore experience you can still catch up with it (details at http://scottsigler.net/ ) and then get stuck in to Sigler's more recent Ancestor and (now in progress) Infection. There are many other great authors appearing at sites such as http://podiobooks.com/ and http://podcastalley.com/ (I'm currently listening to Singularity by Bill DeSmedt, courtesy of podiobooks). As for software, I know what you mean about the paucity of good stuff out there but I recently found the Wizz RSS newsreader extension for Firefox ( http://www.wizzcomputers.com/ )and it's really damned good. It even let me import the OPML file (whatever the fsck that is) for my podiobooks.com subscriptions.
The system is broken but you didn't break it and there's no reason you should be held responsible for its ill effects. I was going to suggest telling your boss(es) that you are happy to do the work and understand perfectly that it is in your company's interest to apply for this sort of patent under current conditions but that you do not wish to see your own name on the software patent applications. I thought of how ashamed I'd feel to see my own name on something like the IsNot patent or, for different reasons, the RSA patent, but I'm not so sure your situation demands that you should feel obliged to take any such ethical stance and risk losing your job. It's not your fault that the patent system is the way it is today and it's not even your company's fault. You'd not be the first person or company who has decried the state of the patent system itself but found it necessary to make use of it.
Yes, this situation is very annoying, personally inconvenient and wholly unnecessary and I think the remedy is for the FFII et al to adopt a more offensive political strategy. From an economic and legal perspective, the case for software patents is strongly reminiscent of the case for "Intelligent Design" and I don't think it is beyond us to make that clear to our European politicians, or beyond them to grasp it. We should be pressing for major reform of patent policy and administration in Europe (the EPO, in particular, has behaved as though it were an economist's version of the Discovery Institute) and, more urgently, that the correct interpretation of the EPC outlined by Prescott be made statutory.
Correction: the fields due to the Sun and Moon, not the tiny tidal parts referred to and derived from the quadratic terms in the potentials.
You are missing only the physics ;-) In the appropriate f.o.r in which to consider matters tidal, namely the accelerated frame in which the centre of mass of the Earth is at rest, the relevant fields can be written in the form, g_r = (3cos^2t - 1)Gmr/a^3 and g_t = -3Gmrcostsint/a^3 where a[m] is the mean distance to[mass of] the Sun (or Moon). Each of these tiny fields is weaker than average on the far side and stronger than average on the near side, causing an elongation effect along the centre lines, and because they are so tiny, it is their periodicity that really explains their effects. Assuming the ocean surface to be an equipotential surface, it's easy to see though that, for example, if the Sun and Moon are on opposite sides, their fields are acting in the same direction and that is what causes the spring tides. Only when they act at right angles do they (partially) cancel, and that is what causes the neap tides.
Indeed, as Jonas Maebe points out, it doesn't need to mention "software" to be recognisable as a "software patent" claim:
Thank you for saving me from the irksome task of having to write yet another long and angry comment about the good 'ol RSA patent ;-)
One would draw the line where you yourself have very nicely drawn it and disallow claim #3. That is the essence of the exclusions in EPC Article 52 and the answer to the why of it is to be found in the economic and social welfare principles upon which the patent system is founded. Principles that have apparently been forgotten in the U.S. but fortunately not in the U.K: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Patents/2005/1 589.html
It is quite irrelevant that it is possible to make the facile argument that every method could be implemented in software and that sometimes it is difficult to draw distinctions conceptually. Patent system policy and law is not made to conform to academic arguments about the mathematical nature of the physical world but to conform to the economic and social requirements implied in the phrase, "promote progress in the sciences and useful arts".
"There's something that always bothered me about this idea....
Whenever one of these spontaneous particle pairs pops out of the vacuum, there is always one matter particle and one antimatter particle. Shouldn't there be an equal probability that either one could fall into the black hole (unless it's a charged black hole, of course)? If equal numbers of matter and antimatter particles are going in, then shouldn't they balance each other out and result in a net effect of zero?"
You're probably right to be bothered by it! My understanding is that the particle pair description is only a crude (and potentially misleading) picture of a result that involves doing quantum field theory calculations on a classical curved spacetime. Not only is such a calculation difficult, it may not be appropriate to the physical conditions and I believe that the Hawking result isn't universally considered completely sound (and likely won't be without a working quantum theory of gravity). Even if it held up it'd still only be a theoretical prediction of course.
It's a black hole when all its mass is contained within a radius r = 2GM/c^2. When it loses mass due to the Hawking effect, that radius (the radius of its event horizon) shrinks too and it stays a black hole.
"The speed of light is constant with respect to inertial frame of reference"
That is the essential point (if meant as the observation that the constant 'c' isn't the notion of speed useful to describe what the light in question is doing in the curved spacetime it's moving in) but the "slowing" of the light has nothing to do with any "medium" the light is moving in.
"A black hole itself has no temperature"
/should/ emit black body radiation. Hawking set out to prove him wrong and - ironically - discovered that they do indeed.
Actually it is considered to have a temperature, though it's not the same thing as the temperature of ordinary matter. The analogy of black holes as thermodynamic systems (which I think arose from the study of rotating black holes and Penrose processes) is what motivated Bekenstein historically to suggest that a black hole
It doesn't actually matter what direction the light is emitted in - the "slowdown" of light occurs along radial paths too. It is, as you say, due to the badly bent spacetime that this effect is observed, but it's because of the metric structure of the spacetime itself, not the path of the light. In a "normal" (t,r,theta,phi) coordinate system - appropriate to a far away observer - where the Schwarzschild metric describes the spacetime structure surrounding a massive body at the origin, the radial coordinate speed of light (dr/dt) turns out to be (c - 2GM/rc). You get a better picture of what is happening near black holes with more suitable coordinate systems but at least here you can see that if we describe spacetime with a set of coordinates appropriate to "normal", speed of light = c conditions, "the speed of light" really is affected by the massive body.
You might like this: http://www.scottsigler.net/earthcore/ I did, even though it's not the sort of book I'd normally choose to read.
There are several here: http://swpat.ffii.de/patente/wirkungen/index.en.ht ml although it is obviously rarer for a project to have to completely shut down than just hobble their software.
"I think that claim is correct."
No doubt it is - strictly speaking. It is also meaningless*. I know of several projects that have been sent threatening letters by patent holders, including VLC, Helmut Dersch and a doctor who was writing some patient record keeping/practice management free software. In order for a claim to be upheld against these individuals and communities of free software developers, they would have had to spend the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars necessary to fight it out in court. They cannot do that of course, however "major" the project and even the commercial distros would have a hard time doing so. Patents are not like copyright: the patent holder can have varying motives for threatening an alleged infringer (obviously the patent holders in the cases I refer to above weren't after money) and they can attack users as well as authors and distributors.
* Unsurprisintgly, the overwhelming majority of all patent disputes never take place in a Court.
"As I posted on another thread, the patent system was not designed to spur people into inventing. Patents or not, people will always be inventing. The patent system was designed to ensure that the way new inventions work will be available, in the future, for other people to build on."
;-) You may like to read this up to date and interesting introduction:
l eveque.htm
Actually it is also supposed to encourage invention - or more to the (economic) point - R&D based innovation. You make a good point but the disclosure benefit is only one of the classical economic justifications for the patent system. Sorry to nitpick but these days I'd rather do that - to encourage otherwise good comments like yours - than reply to the rubbish from people who e.g. claim that Nobel prize winning economists don't know what they're talking about
http://www.law.berkeley.edu/institutes/bclt/pubs/
I'd also point out that whether or not license fees can be extracted from a patent does not depend entirely on its validity (which is an unknown until it is - posibly very expensively - tested in a Court) or even on whether or not infringement has actually occurred (for the same reason). Not much money is ever likely to be made from patents that are weak because of their intrinsic absurdity of course - they're not likely to be held by those with the financial resources to wield them effectively, no-one's likely to be practising the 'invention' and legal costs involved in invalidating such a patent would surely be a minimum - but it is not inconceivable.
The iAudio X5L 30GB would be my choice. It's HD based so you might not like it but I've been doing a pre-xmas comparison of feature sets and reviews of DAPs and it stands out from the crowd.
"in order to participate in Summit-related events Lessig had to promise not to talk about intellectual property."
Dear Doctor Jones,
The committee of the WHO invites you to open the World Summit on Global Health Policy with a brief speech. Please don't talk about Malaria, AIDS or other minor diseases.
Dear Senator Bloggs,
The Board is pleased to offer you the opportunity to open the World Summit on National and International Security. We request that you do not bring up irrelevant matters such as war and terrorism.
Dear Professor Smith,
The organisers are pleased to offer you the opportunity to present the opening address at the World Summit on Climate Change. We ask only that you avoid subjects not directly relevant - such as greenhouse gases, temperatures and sea levels.
" I never thought much of Emacs keybindings,... but thanks to power of Eclipse, I made my own keybindings superior to either of those."
Heh! Before I try Eclipse, you'll have to give me a more credible reason than that it has greater power to customise the key bindings than Emacs does. In fact I suggest you steer clear of the subject of customisability and extensibility altogether if you want to make something look better than Emacs.
Unfortunately rationality is in very short supply when it comes to the patent system - a deliberate policy as far as its administrators and direct beneficiaries are concerned. Conveniently for them this admittedly complex subject is now surrounded by a thick fog of fallacies, distortions and ignorance. I've come to view my own experience of it over the last two or three years as a terrifying insight into what the science research and education system might be like under the supervision of a body such as the Discovery Institute.
"I can think of a handful of genuinely innovative algorithms that have been patented, such as RSA and the Karmarkar LP algorithm."
Much to my annoyance many people do indeed think RSA was "worthy" of a patent and I'd say there are actually quite a large number of such "worthy" patents on algorithms (or rather the use of them), if you choose to think of patents that way. I've read more patents - "worthy" and otherwise - than I care to remember now, but of course (and as you quite rightly imply) that is looking at the whole subject from entirely the wrong perspective. Ironically perhaps, it was my sense of outrage at the existence of that RSA patent and others like it that motivated me to learn about the patent system in the first place (I never really cared much about the risible one-click shopping type patents most people seem to agree are despicable). Though the RSA patent had already expired by the time I learned of it I cannot describe how it felt to sit in front of a programmable computer knowing simultaneously the trivial lemma that is RSA and the implications of there being a patent on it. "Intellectual violation" is the only phrase that seems suitable. Learning that such violations have no credible justification from the point of view of the philosophy and economics of the patent system itself has been a very depressing experience