Re:If this were Trek...
on
Bayesian Tail
·
· Score: 1
As has been said: it's easiest just to write ad hoc filters for this sort of thing. This is what I've been using since my wmail stopped working properly:
I use similar rules for alerts about SSH break-in attempts, mail relay probes and machine check exceptions. I know there are all sorts of sophisticated log analyzer and colorizer tools around but I've never needed them.
I've found the smoothed Vera Sans Mono very pleasant and usable in both gvim and emacs (gentoo emacs-cvs) and you may also be interested in this if you didn't see it already in the recent K5 article. Some of the fonts listed there are pretty good.
"I am a mathematician and DO understand the RSA algorithm and how it encrypts data. To say it was "discovered" and not "invented" is silly..."
No it is not. The philosophical viewpoint of mathematics as discovery is ancient, well known and well respected (cf. Plato, Godel, Penrose et al). I should hardly need to point that out to a mathematician!!! Unless of course you are some weird, pre-Godelian Formalist dinosaur;-)
"However, things like the recent Microsoft "IsNot" patent should not be patentable. That is an attempt at a land grab. Also the patenting file formats in order to try and collect "tax" revenue from the internet should not be permitted."
Patent examiners do not and cannot look at patent applications and say; "Oooh! Naughty! - this guy seems to be engaging in an attempt to impose a bit of extra taxation on internet users - we'd better deny this application." They are not the morality police and if you understood the patent system at all you would know that they cannot objectively discriminate between "clever" and "trivial" inventions either. Since it would be unethical and unworkable to leave it to the subjective deliberations of individual patent examiners, they quite rightly do not attempt to discriminate in this way at all.
In other words, once you have allowed patents in a field, you have automatically allowed all the 'bad ones' too. In traditional fields of technology, based on physical objects and material processes, this does not necessarily lead to an unacceptable diminution of the rights of individuals, a perverse attenuation of innovation in those fields and other costly side effects. In the abstract field of technology of computer science or computational mathematics, I would say that it can and does.
The question has never been and can never be about the 'quality' of patents or patent examination - it is about which whole fields of human endeavour should be made subject to patents - and that boils down to deciding in which fields they are necessary in order to generally promote innovation in those fields. The trouble with patents on software ideas and algorithms is that the field is inherently vast, touching all other fields of human endeavour. It is naturally rapidly and incrementally progressive and - like art, music and literature - it is the natural domain of individual creators or authors, independent of the financial resources of business organisations, just as much as it is also the domain of those engaged in essential economic activity.
As for the RSA algorithm: Presumably you learnt Pythagoras's theorem in school? If so, would you consider an algorithm to determine the length of one of the sides of a right triangle, given the other two, a legitimate and patent-worthy invention? What of Euclid's algorithm or Taylor expansion or the Fourier transform and it's variants, or wavelets and filter banks or the Viterbi algorithm and various Monte Carlo methods etc. etc...? I can assure you that in their mathematical contexts, the RSA^H^H^H Cocks's lemma and the Pythagoras theorem are of equal 'inventive' height. You will find one in elementary number theory textbooks and the other in elementary geometry textbooks. The cleverness is in the mathematics, not in the programmatic realisation of the algorithm.
Once the mathematical theory is known, I would suggest that any professional programmer who is then unable to produce a program that enacts the implied algorithm without introducing new ideas in computer software or hardware technology should find something else to do for a living. The case of R,S and A is always brought up because they were both the rediscoverers of the lemma and the patentees of the algorithm, and that seems to confuse people into conflating the mathematical advance with the algorithmic 'invention' derived from it. So when you say that the RSA algorithm is inventive and should be patentable, what you are really saying is that the RSA lemma is inventive and consequently that the algorithm should be patentable. That is a very different statement.
Some PTOs, 'IP companies' and the holders of large patent portfolios may agree with you. I do not and I would hope that anyone half numerate would be capable of seeing the implications and that they are not good for either mathematics or software. Indeed in Europe, the proponents of software patentability explicitly state that they wish to avoid such an egregious
Yes - it looks conceptually attractive and it appears possible to have the all-important (to me anyway) interpreter mode. I always found doing any kind of programming but especially mathematical work a real drag until I discovered these kinds of language: CMUCL and SLIME radically improved every aspect of any kind of programming for me.
No-one's mentioned the superb pari-gp yet. It'll draw graphs using gnuplot and unlike much other software of it's type it has excellent documentation.
Lisp is also prominently absent but I agree with what Chaitin says about it being the natural computer language for mathematically minded computer users. Actually I'm surprised it isn't more popular with other software developers - it seems to me to make any kind of programming easier and more pleasurable.
People who've mentioned Maxima also haven't said anything much about graphical (non-plotting) interfaces to it. I like imaxima in emacs and also TeXmacs - which will act as a graphical front end to many other mathematical programs.
Anyway, I have now downloaded a couple of jpegs of Piia-Noora Kauppi to join pictures of Hilary Hahn, Bjork and others and it will take more than vague and unsubstantiated intimations of the unpleasantness of her character or the extremeness of her politics to make me wish to delete them.
Sigh.... Beautiful, intelligent, wise, incorruptible.... The Finns get a politician who appears to be the model for Galadriel in LotR and in the UK we get Arlene McCarthy. Great.
No perpetual motion machines there afaik, but something equivalently stupid in the software field. I really can't understand why archive.org hasn't used this technology to compress all their movies into 1 bit files yet;-)
"It has THE greatest pager ever. It even updates the mini window images in real time!"
Yes it has - which is probably why someone is attempting to steal the idea and patent it as though it were their own invention;-)
I just watched the video and it certainly is cool and beautiful. Maybe E17 could make itself some extra development funding by making appearances in some movies. I've always liked E16 but found it a bit too flaky for everyday use and it's development progressed painfully slowly over the years. Eventually I ended up using mostly Window Maker and Fluxbox. This constant rewriting everything from the ground up and the goal of extreme user configurability and flexibility makes me think they should've been (or at least wish they had been) developing E17 with Lisp.... [dream] # emerge cl-efl [/dream]....:)
"...if this is the core of the arguement that those against software patents have to make,..."
Don't worry - it isn't: The official argument has always been made on an economic basis. Hartmut and the others knew that this was the only one that the MEPs and most other people would readily understand and it is a strong enough argument in itself: patents are a quite drastic legal instrument to be deployed only if it is deemed economically necessary to do so. So if you can show that they are, in some field, likely to cause the reverse of the economic benefits they're supposed to confer, as the FFII has done, it's game over:-) The content of that letter from Torvalds etc. is all about how the wording of the Directive will inevitably lead to unlimited patentability and must be changed, but it is not the argument itself - even though for many of us it does in fact contain the heart of the matter.
They're not saying that the laws of physics themselves or any other discovered knowledge about the physical world should be patentable; they're just saying that the subject matter of any invention must concern the use of that knowledge by direct exemplification to be patentable. This is at the heart of the matter now because of the enormous pressure exerted on Government and Patent Offices by those in whose interest it is to see unlimited patentability (patent lawyers, monopoly sized software producers etc.) and by elements of manufacturing industry who seem unaware of the damage to others of supporting what is for them, merely a matter of convenience. These players are trying to pretend that what is in reality easy to define is very difficult, and - even more absurdly - that a return to a strict interpretation of the EPC would amount to abolishing the patent system altogether.
The EPO and UKPO, like the USPTO before them, have continually claimed that it is impossible or too difficult to separate the physical from the non-physical and abstract, when it comes to "computer implemented inventions", whereas it is in fact very easy: A computer program is concerned only with the reading, processing and writing of informational entities which unlike any physically measurable quantity, not only can be but are necessarily known to infinite precision. One program operating in one computer can in principle and by design, perfectly reproduce the salient effects of another program in another distinct computer, which is not true of any distinct embodiments of any physical device or process - not even a paper clip. It would of course be utterly absurd if the irreducible uncertainties of the physical world had any bearing on or relevance to the invention and construction of a computer program: an algorithm for digital signal processing for example, is acting on knowledge about the physical world and not directly on any of the entities of the physical world themselves. The applied mathematics and empirical knowledge needed to construct the algorithm as a computer program could equally well be - and historically would have been - used to construct an invention as a physical device, but a computer program, when it is running in a computer, can only embody a perfectly precise, approximate description of some external physical process, and it works reliably as a means of supplying the information used for controlling or enacting that process only because it's approximation is 'good enough'.
Yet that is why the hardware manufacturers, represented by EICTA et al are up in arms about this issue: they have gradually replaced 'good enough' but expensive physical embodiments of inventions with cheaper, perfect abstractions that are also 'good enough' but for very different reasons. What they have cavalierly dismissed, failed to recognize or accept, are the consequences to the wider community of making patentable this type of invention. They cannot see beyond their narrow self interests nor accept that most programs and most software inventions are not in fact written by or invented by them, and nor can they see that the patent system could easily adjust to their perceived requirements if they simply accepted that they must express the claims of their inventions in terms of the physical processes which enact those inventions and not in terms of the abstract algorithmic or programmatic theory underlying them. They are entirely careless of and oblivious to the fact that a general purpose computer, and every program it is possible to write for it, are nothing more than aids to mental calculation and any right to monopolise their uses is a much more severe infringement of the rights of others than any monopoly right to manufacture and sell some object or use some industrial process could ever be.
They're not even trying to compromise of course: they're trying to pretend to a lay audience that a return to a strict interpretation of the EPC's exclusion of computer programs, maths etc. will bring down the WHOLE PATENT SYSTEM!!! They are desperate and it is a heartening thing indeed to see this kind of hysterical nonsense. To see what it is they stand to lose, take a look at the patent applications waiting in the database (search for IBM, Hewlett-Packard etc.) and consider why these companies have begun to flood the EPO/UKPO with applications that are so clearly for business methods and pure software if they have taken seriously (as the rest of us are expected to do) the UKPO's insistence that such abominations will never be patentable.
Intellect, the UK subsidiary of EICTA, managed to get the DTI to include 'software R&D' in exemptions from tax recently. Lord Sainsbury is convinced that software patents are of little importance or relevance to society but will be a good measure of UK "innovation". He thinks that he will be able to count all those large (mostly hardware) manufacturers' software patents as a measure of the UK and Europe's success in competing with the likes of Japan and the US (that's what the Lisbon Strategy, which is at the root of this mess, is all about - the technological competitiveness of Europe). It doesn't seem to matter to him that 75% or more of those patents will in fact belong to corporations mostly from - yes, you guessed it - the US and Japan!
Heh! Feeling the heat now are we? - Now that the parliament and states like Poland have listened to the thoughtful and sustained debate and found that the dissimulation and downright lies of your industry sponsors and the parasite patent attorney lobbyists to be an unacceptable substitute for same.
"Much of the criticism against patents that has been leveled on this website is also driven by ignorance. People do not realize how specific patents are. I have seen posts on many patent articles here that read the first one or two claims and assume that a huge range of existing work is covered, without checking out the remaining claims that make it clear that one very small thing that is original is the actual target of the patent."
Apart from this being generally one of the most insightless posts there's ever been on this subject - while disgracefully and ironically dismissing as ignorant the many truly insightful ones there have been - the parent is himself grossly ignorant even of what a patent is: Patent claims in a patent document do not narrow the scope of any of the earlier claims. Each independent claim stands on it's own - which is why it is called a claim! I would've thought most people here would know that by now. Driven by ignorance indeed!
Well it could've been a lame blood-n-guts sequel - and superficially it even looks like one - but I don't think it was. I watched all four in a row recently and "Aliens" came across as an alternatively styled work, complementary to the original: a beautifully detailed and fast-paced sequel to Alien done in the 'action' style of sci-fi films, not an inferior movie at all.
The third one was where the deterioration began, though it's not really that bad and compared to "Resurrection"... well - all I can say is that Jeunet should be burnt at the stake for having made a complete mockery of the Alien series: The pantomime General, stereotypically drawn scientists, arty-farty, technologically empty sets and a time-serving support cast of art house cinema poseurs (Winona excepted).
When the alien hybrid made those sickeningly twee babyface expressions I felt like crying.
The strange surreality of the interview seemed more like a step towards the dystopia depicted in the classic '80s graphic novel to me: Attractive blonde rebel girl, radioactive seagulls, depressed rodents in the walls, Hoop? riots and weird techno weapons (no zenades though) - reminded me a little of the book by Alan Moore; "The Ballad of Halo Jones", but it was the mention of her feral robotic dogs that really clinched it.
"The embryonic stem cell study only allowed the mice to survive an additional 11 days... while the adult stem cell study allowed the mice to live an additional two months! In mouse years that is a huge difference... 11 days or 60 days? which treatment was more successful?"
Well I'm not a biologist but it strikes me as not terribly surprising given that the former study involved transplanting human stem cells into the mice whereas the latter involved the presumably more compatible transplantation of murine cells.
"That point made, you can no longer claim that stopping federal funding for embryonic stem cell research is giving up on treatment or cures for said degenerative diseases.."
If your point had been that comprehensive research had already been done into both approaches and proved that embryonic stem cell research is a dead end and that completely satisfactory cures using adult stem cells have been demonstrated and are about to appear on the market, then your conclusion would seem reasonable.
The open source world generally develops software because it is interesting and rewarding work. Free to implement their ideas and build on the work of their peers, they create some of the world's finest software. But how much longer will being a free, open source software developer seem like an attractive proposition when one has to spend most of one's time trying to work around patent encumbered 'open standards', patents on fundamental and often trivial mathematical techniques you can read about in the yellowing pages of a 15 year old textbook, or fields completely sewn up with patents from the most elementary concepts onwards - like fractal compression, or arithmetic coding: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/compression-faq/ part1/sec tion-7.html
Please don't use RSA as an example of a 'good' software patent - it is one of the worst. The ideas behind it are purely mathematical and the cryptographic use of the algorithmic form of the trivial lemma rediscovered by R, S and A is truly simple and obvious.
Novell aren't throwing their patent portfolio behind open source, they're throwing it behind themselves and their customers. Microsoft has promised nothing substantial afaik and even if they had you'd have to have been born 10 minutes ago to swallow it.
As for your last remark, well... Perhaps if slashdotters relied on providing spamming services to viagra and penis enlargement companies, as I do, they wouldn't be so critical of spam.
Yes and unfortunately the European patent establishment is trying to drag us all down into the swamp:
"International efforts have been largely successful in creating a level playing field between the U.S. and Europe. While some differences in the application process and the granted rights remain, patentability is nearly uniform. Even modern technologies such as software are subject to widely unified treatment. Only when it comes to the very cutting-edge of the latest, controversial decisions can differences be discovered; most notable is the holding in State Street as opposed to that in Pension Benefits. However, the trend of limiting State Street's broad holding has started in the U.S., while Europe can be expected to move towards State Street at the same time -- probably leading to little practical difference soon".
[From Michael Guntesdorfer's "Software Patent Law: United States and Europe Compared"]
Not if you use it properly as shown in this training video. However, if you are worried, there is probably scope for building on the infamous patent and inventing some protective goggles or something to go with the cat laser.
Slashdot Mirror
As has been said: it's easiest just to write ad hoc filters for this sort of thing. This is what I've been using since my wmail stopped working properly:
/var/log/messages | awk '/from=/,"\033[1;32m&\033[0m",$7); system("aplay sounds/newmail.wav&")}; {sub(/.*/,"\033[37m&",$1); sub(/.*/,"\033[33m&\033[0m",$3); print}'
tail -F
I use similar rules for alerts about SSH break-in attempts, mail relay probes and machine check exceptions. I know there are all sorts of sophisticated log analyzer and colorizer tools around but I've never needed them.
I've found the smoothed Vera Sans Mono very pleasant and usable in both gvim and emacs (gentoo emacs-cvs) and you may also be interested in this if you didn't see it already in the recent K5 article. Some of the fonts listed there are pretty good.
"I am a mathematician and DO understand the RSA algorithm and how it encrypts data. To say it was "discovered" and not "invented" is silly..."
;-)
No it is not. The philosophical viewpoint of mathematics as discovery is ancient, well known and well respected (cf. Plato, Godel, Penrose et al). I should hardly need to point that out to a mathematician!!! Unless of course you are some weird, pre-Godelian Formalist dinosaur
"However, things like the recent Microsoft "IsNot" patent should not be patentable. That is an attempt at a land grab. Also the patenting file formats in order to try and collect "tax" revenue from the internet should not be permitted."
Patent examiners do not and cannot look at patent applications and say; "Oooh! Naughty! - this guy seems to be engaging in an attempt to impose a bit of extra taxation on internet users - we'd better deny this application." They are not the morality police and if you understood the patent system at all you would know that they cannot objectively discriminate between "clever" and "trivial" inventions either. Since it would be unethical and unworkable to leave it to the subjective deliberations of individual patent examiners, they quite rightly do not attempt to discriminate in this way at all.
In other words, once you have allowed patents in a field, you have automatically allowed all the 'bad ones' too. In traditional fields of technology, based on physical objects and material processes, this does not necessarily lead to an unacceptable diminution of the rights of individuals, a perverse attenuation of innovation in those fields and other costly side effects. In the abstract field of technology of computer science or computational mathematics, I would say that it can and does.
The question has never been and can never be about the 'quality' of patents or patent examination - it is about which whole fields of human endeavour should be made subject to patents - and that boils down to deciding in which fields they are necessary in order to generally promote innovation in those fields. The trouble with patents on software ideas and algorithms is that the field is inherently vast, touching all other fields of human endeavour. It is naturally rapidly and incrementally progressive and - like art, music and literature - it is the natural domain of individual creators or authors, independent of the financial resources of business organisations, just as much as it is also the domain of those engaged in essential economic activity.
As for the RSA algorithm: Presumably you learnt Pythagoras's theorem in school? If so, would you consider an algorithm to determine the length of one of the sides of a right triangle, given the other two, a legitimate and patent-worthy invention? What of Euclid's algorithm or Taylor expansion or the Fourier transform and it's variants, or wavelets and filter banks or the Viterbi algorithm and various Monte Carlo methods etc. etc...? I can assure you that in their mathematical contexts, the RSA^H^H^H Cocks's lemma and the Pythagoras theorem are of equal 'inventive' height. You will find one in elementary number theory textbooks and the other in elementary geometry textbooks. The cleverness is in the mathematics, not in the programmatic realisation of the algorithm.
Once the mathematical theory is known, I would suggest that any professional programmer who is then unable to produce a program that enacts the implied algorithm without introducing new ideas in computer software or hardware technology should find something else to do for a living. The case of R,S and A is always brought up because they were both the rediscoverers of the lemma and the patentees of the algorithm, and that seems to confuse people into conflating the mathematical advance with the algorithmic 'invention' derived from it. So when you say that the RSA algorithm is inventive and should be patentable, what you are really saying is that the RSA lemma is inventive and consequently that the algorithm should be patentable. That is a very different statement.
Some PTOs, 'IP companies' and the holders of large patent portfolios may agree with you. I do not and I would hope that anyone half numerate would be capable of seeing the implications and that they are not good for either mathematics or software. Indeed in Europe, the proponents of software patentability explicitly state that they wish to avoid such an egregious
Yes - it looks conceptually attractive and it appears possible to have the all-important (to me anyway) interpreter mode. I always found doing any kind of programming but especially mathematical work a real drag until I discovered these kinds of language: CMUCL and SLIME radically improved every aspect of any kind of programming for me.
No-one's mentioned the superb pari-gp yet. It'll draw graphs using gnuplot and unlike much other software of it's type it has excellent documentation.
Lisp is also prominently absent but I agree with what Chaitin says about it being the natural computer language for mathematically minded computer users. Actually I'm surprised it isn't more popular with other software developers - it seems to me to make any kind of programming easier and more pleasurable.
People who've mentioned Maxima also haven't said anything much about graphical (non-plotting) interfaces to it. I like imaxima in emacs and also TeXmacs - which will act as a graphical front end to many other mathematical programs.
Unfortunately I cannot read Finnish but there is nothing in what I have found out about her that is in any way exceptionable - quite the contrary:
4 21 23.html
t ID =5672&PRContentLg=en
f o& id=550&med=
http://clearwisdom.net/emh/articles/2003/11/10/
http://www.epp-ed.org/press/showPR.asp?PRConten
http://www.minpolitik.dk/visnyhed.php?action=in
Anyway, I have now downloaded a couple of jpegs of Piia-Noora Kauppi to join pictures of Hilary Hahn, Bjork and others and it will take more than vague and unsubstantiated intimations of the unpleasantness of her character or the extremeness of her politics to make me wish to delete them.
Sigh.... Beautiful, intelligent, wise, incorruptible. ... The Finns get a politician who appears to be the model for Galadriel in LotR and in the UK we get Arlene McCarthy. Great.
"PS. Linux ppl, use Acrobat's reader ..."
Only ghostscript based readers - xpdf and gpdf will work fine.
No perpetual motion machines there afaik, but something equivalently stupid in the software field. I really can't understand why archive.org hasn't used this technology to compress all their movies into 1 bit files yet ;-)
"It has THE greatest pager ever. It even updates the mini window images in real time!"
;-)
:)
Yes it has - which is probably why someone is attempting to steal the idea and patent it as though it were their own invention
I just watched the video and it certainly is cool and beautiful. Maybe E17 could make itself some extra development funding by making appearances in some movies. I've always liked E16 but found it a bit too flaky for everyday use and it's development progressed painfully slowly over the years. Eventually I ended up using mostly Window Maker and Fluxbox. This constant rewriting everything from the ground up and the goal of extreme user configurability and flexibility makes me think they should've been (or at least wish they had been) developing E17 with Lisp.... [dream] # emerge cl-efl [/dream]....
"...if this is the core of the arguement that those against software patents have to make,..."
:-) The content of that letter from Torvalds etc. is all about how the wording of the Directive will inevitably lead to unlimited patentability and must be changed, but it is not the argument itself - even though for many of us it does in fact contain the heart of the matter.
Don't worry - it isn't: The official argument has always been made on an economic basis. Hartmut and the others knew that this was the only one that the MEPs and most other people would readily understand and it is a strong enough argument in itself: patents are a quite drastic legal instrument to be deployed only if it is deemed economically necessary to do so. So if you can show that they are, in some field, likely to cause the reverse of the economic benefits they're supposed to confer, as the FFII has done, it's game over
They're not saying that the laws of physics themselves or any other discovered knowledge about the physical world should be patentable; they're just saying that the subject matter of any invention must concern the use of that knowledge by direct exemplification to be patentable. This is at the heart of the matter now because of the enormous pressure exerted on Government and Patent Offices by those in whose interest it is to see unlimited patentability (patent lawyers, monopoly sized software producers etc.) and by elements of manufacturing industry who seem unaware of the damage to others of supporting what is for them, merely a matter of convenience. These players are trying to pretend that what is in reality easy to define is very difficult, and - even more absurdly - that a return to a strict interpretation of the EPC would amount to abolishing the patent system altogether.
The EPO and UKPO, like the USPTO before them, have continually claimed that it is impossible or too difficult to separate the physical from the non-physical and abstract, when it comes to "computer implemented inventions", whereas it is in fact very easy: A computer program is concerned only with the reading, processing and writing of informational entities which unlike any physically measurable quantity, not only can be but are necessarily known to infinite precision. One program operating in one computer can in principle and by design, perfectly reproduce the salient effects of another program in another distinct computer, which is not true of any distinct embodiments of any physical device or process - not even a paper clip. It would of course be utterly absurd if the irreducible uncertainties of the physical world had any bearing on or relevance to the invention and construction of a computer program: an algorithm for digital signal processing for example, is acting on knowledge about the physical world and not directly on any of the entities of the physical world themselves. The applied mathematics and empirical knowledge needed to construct the algorithm as a computer program could equally well be - and historically would have been - used to construct an invention as a physical device, but a computer program, when it is running in a computer, can only embody a perfectly precise, approximate description of some external physical process, and it works reliably as a means of supplying the information used for controlling or enacting that process only because it's approximation is 'good enough'.
Yet that is why the hardware manufacturers, represented by EICTA et al are up in arms about this issue: they have gradually replaced 'good enough' but expensive physical embodiments of inventions with cheaper, perfect abstractions that are also 'good enough' but for very different reasons. What they have cavalierly dismissed, failed to recognize or accept, are the consequences to the wider community of making patentable this type of invention. They cannot see beyond their narrow self interests nor accept that most programs and most software inventions are not in fact written by or invented by them, and nor can they see that the patent system could easily adjust to their perceived requirements if they simply accepted that they must express the claims of their inventions in terms of the physical processes which enact those inventions and not in terms of the abstract algorithmic or programmatic theory underlying them. They are entirely careless of and oblivious to the fact that a general purpose computer, and every program it is possible to write for it, are nothing more than aids to mental calculation and any right to monopolise their uses is a much more severe infringement of the rights of others than any monopoly right to manufacture and sell some object or use some industrial process could ever be.
They're not even trying to compromise of course: they're trying to pretend to a lay audience that a return to a strict interpretation of the EPC's exclusion of computer programs, maths etc. will bring down the WHOLE PATENT SYSTEM!!! They are desperate and it is a heartening thing indeed to see this kind of hysterical nonsense. To see what it is they stand to lose, take a look at the patent applications waiting in the database (search for IBM, Hewlett-Packard etc.) and consider why these companies have begun to flood the EPO/UKPO with applications that are so clearly for business methods and pure software if they have taken seriously (as the rest of us are expected to do) the UKPO's insistence that such abominations will never be patentable.
Intellect, the UK subsidiary of EICTA, managed to get the DTI to include 'software R&D' in exemptions from tax recently. Lord Sainsbury is convinced that software patents are of little importance or relevance to society but will be a good measure of UK "innovation". He thinks that he will be able to count all those large (mostly hardware) manufacturers' software patents as a measure of the UK and Europe's success in competing with the likes of Japan and the US (that's what the Lisbon Strategy, which is at the root of this mess, is all about - the technological competitiveness of Europe). It doesn't seem to matter to him that 75% or more of those patents will in fact belong to corporations mostly from - yes, you guessed it - the US and Japan!
Heh! Feeling the heat now are we? - Now that the parliament and states like Poland have listened to the thoughtful and sustained debate and found that the dissimulation and downright lies of your industry sponsors and the parasite patent attorney lobbyists to be an unacceptable substitute for same.
Apart from this being generally one of the most insightless posts there's ever been on this subject - while disgracefully and ironically dismissing as ignorant the many truly insightful ones there have been - the parent is himself grossly ignorant even of what a patent is: Patent claims in a patent document do not narrow the scope of any of the earlier claims. Each independent claim stands on it's own - which is why it is called a claim! I would've thought most people here would know that by now. Driven by ignorance indeed!
Well it could've been a lame blood-n-guts sequel - and superficially it even looks like one - but I don't think it was. I watched all four in a row recently and "Aliens" came across as an alternatively styled work, complementary to the original: a beautifully detailed and fast-paced sequel to Alien done in the 'action' style of sci-fi films, not an inferior movie at all.
The third one was where the deterioration began, though it's not really that bad and compared to "Resurrection"... well - all I can say is that Jeunet should be burnt at the stake for having made a complete mockery of the Alien series: The pantomime General, stereotypically drawn scientists, arty-farty, technologically empty sets and a time-serving support cast of art house cinema poseurs (Winona excepted).
When the alien hybrid made those sickeningly twee babyface expressions I felt like crying.
The strange surreality of the interview seemed more like a step towards the dystopia depicted in the classic '80s graphic novel to me: Attractive blonde rebel girl, radioactive seagulls, depressed rodents in the walls, Hoop? riots and weird techno weapons (no zenades though) - reminded me a little of the book by Alan Moore; "The Ballad of Halo Jones", but it was the mention of her feral robotic dogs that really clinched it.
Illustrative bar charts here. :-)
Well I'm not a biologist but it strikes me as not terribly surprising given that the former study involved transplanting human stem cells into the mice whereas the latter involved the presumably more compatible transplantation of murine cells.
"That point made, you can no longer claim that stopping federal funding for embryonic stem cell research is giving up on treatment or cures for said degenerative diseases.."
If your point had been that comprehensive research had already been done into both approaches and proved that embryonic stem cell research is a dead end and that completely satisfactory cures using adult stem cells have been demonstrated and are about to appear on the market, then your conclusion would seem reasonable.
The open source world generally develops software because it is interesting and rewarding work. Free to implement their ideas and build on the work of their peers, they create some of the world's finest software. But how much longer will being a free, open source software developer seem like an attractive proposition when one has to spend most of one's time trying to work around patent encumbered 'open standards', patents on fundamental and often trivial mathematical techniques you can read about in the yellowing pages of a 15 year old textbook, or fields completely sewn up with patents from the most elementary concepts onwards - like fractal compression, or arithmetic coding:/ part1/sec tion-7.html
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/compression-faq
Please don't use RSA as an example of a 'good' software patent - it is one of the worst. The ideas behind it are purely mathematical and the cryptographic use of the algorithmic form of the trivial lemma rediscovered by R, S and A is truly simple and obvious.
Novell aren't throwing their patent portfolio behind open source, they're throwing it behind themselves and their customers. Microsoft has promised nothing substantial afaik and even if they had you'd have to have been born 10 minutes ago to swallow it.
As for your last remark, well... Perhaps if slashdotters relied on providing spamming services to viagra and penis enlargement companies, as I do, they wouldn't be so critical of spam.
[From Michael Guntesdorfer's "Software Patent Law: United States and Europe Compared"]
Not if you use it properly as shown in this training video. However, if you are worried, there is probably scope for building on the infamous patent and inventing some protective goggles or something to go with the cat laser.