. . . I tend to discount the reviews of those people who use real names and are labeled as "Top 100" or "Top 500" reviewers on Amazon. I tend to think that those people are major wannabes who wish that they were professional reviewers and therefore try too hard to be clever or literary. As a result, I find the reviews of such people to be among the most pretentious, overblown, non-credible reviews on Amazon. I no longer read them and skip past them to the anonymous reviews, which I find much honest and credible.
Here is a key empirical observation from the article: Mating between prairie voles is a tremendous 24-hour effort. After this, they bond for life.... However, another vole, a close relative called the montane vole, has no interest in partnership beyond one-night-stand sex. What is intriguing is that these vast differences in behaviour are the result of a mere handful of genes. The two vole species are more than 99% alike, genetically.
Imagine the implications for churches if it turns out that fidelity is based on genetic propensities rather than moral choice. On the other hand, if the concept of "original sin" is to be believed, perhaps that is what they have been saying all along.
From the article: So, your basic thesis is that programming constructs should be more intuitive to developers, and more closely simulate and resemble the real world. That would enable developers to write software with fewer bugs, right? Exactly.
But this point is just the application of existing principles. When I began learning C++ and OOP, one of the benefits that I noticed was the level of abstraction that becomes available. Your program becomes less procedural and becomes a closer metaphor to the real-world problem to be solved. This seemed to be a continuation of the trend toward abstraction that becomes apparent from the very beginning as you learn how to program. For example, at the most elementary level, abstraction begins with the simple variable: rather than hard coding specific values, you create a more abstract expression like "rate times distance" which makes your algorithm easy to understand. Then trend continues when you learn how to use functions and subroutines, which become freestanding abstractions for the functions being performed. The trend continues further with objects. As the level of abstraction increases, your program really starts to look like a flow chart of its various components, which maps to its real-world purpose. Isn't that all the author is saying?
Wouldn't it make more sense to use radio control by human operators, rather than autonomous on-board robots? Can the on-board robot really deal with every possible circumstance? Does it have enough "judgment" to improvise? Isn't human control simpler and hence more robust?
Actually no, this does not solve the problem. It has nothing to do with people being sheep. It has to do with manufacturers deliberately removing simple products to justify higher prices. The simple products people want ARE NO LONGER BEING OFFERED FOR SALE. As I posted elsewhere in this thread, Canon replaced the simple i450 printer with the more complex and expensive i470 printer that adds no true functionality and has more moving parts to fail. The i450 is GONE. Canon took it out of production. The option to buy it is not there.
Adding features adds additional failure points
on
KISS
·
· Score: 1
Feature creep does not just make things more complicated, it makes things more failure prone. For example, the Canon i450 is a very simple printer that you can buy for $80 and that works very well. It has now been replaced by the i470, which is EXACTLY the same print engine and chassis, but which adds an LCD display and a control panel and raises the price to $130. These extra "features" thus raise the price of the printer by over 60% but they do nothing more than replicate in hardware EXACTLY the same things that can be done with the printer driver software (i.e., change the printer settings). So no true functionality is added, but now a simple reliable printer has a bunch of additional electro-mechanical MOVING PARTS that can fail. I use lots of i450s as portable knock-around printers for my field team, and when I saw the i470, I immediately bought more i450s before they disappeared. I want simple things that don't break, and I don't want to pay for useless add-ons.
When I was young and foolish, I used a wipe utility (BC wipe) to wipe my main hard drive. First I carefully backed up the main drive to my second hard drive. Then the utility asked me to confirm that I wanted to wipe "Drive 1." I said OK, thinking that it was referring to the main hard drive. I did not realize that the main drive was actually identified as "Drive 0." So I wiped my second drive instead. Ever since then, I won't wipe a drive unless all other drives are physically disconnected first. So yes, I am sure the Spirit team is confident, but I always feel a twinge of concern when I hear someone claim that wiping a live drive on a production computer will fix everything.
Isn't this a perfect example of the benefits of open source? Yes, you can hire a team of hackers to attack a black box, but it's just an ad hoc approach, and tomorrow or next week or next year some other hacker will find another weakness that wasn't found in the first pass. Wouldn't you end up with a much more secure system if you could openly and systematically apply those same efforts to reviewing the code inside that black box?
Disney has already massively scaled down its traditional cell animation division to concentrate on digital animation. But without its relationship with Pixar, does Disney have any digital animation capabilities of its own? Does this leave Disney -- the quintessential animation studio -- with neither traditional nor digital capabilities?
That's a good thought and it had not occured to me. It could be an interesting insight into Microsoft's approach to perceived violations: maybe they always send two sets of proposed settlement papers right off the bat, and if you cave in, then you just sign one set and send it right back, and keep the other set for yourself. Since he ultimately reached another agreement, he would indeed have two duplicate original sets if that is the case.
I read the description of Mike Rowe's auction on Ebay. He says that he is auctioning "the WIPO book with the 25-page letter I received from Microsoft's lawyers on January 14/2004," but then says, "I have two copies of these and I will be keeping one for my own personal memoirs." So -- is the subject of the auction a true original? Did Microsoft serve a duplicate set of originals on the same guy? Or is he just selling a copy that he made? If I bought that letter, I would want to see blue ink on the signature line.
The problem is that the advertisement is not the "contract." So the real question is whether the discrepancy between the advertisement and the contract (including terms of service) is so extreme as to constitute fraud. When the discrepancy is extreme enough (e.g., the "silver thermal paste" that contains zero percent silver), then the vendor has a problem. But if the terms of service merely add a "reasonableness" qualifier, then it might not look so bad. If only the top fraction of one percent of users are getting these notices (meaning that 99+ percent are truly getting all of the bandwidth they want), the situation might not raise a regulator's eyebrow.
I don't think that follows. Consumers are not asking or demanding to be lied to. Consumers are, to the contrary, believing the lies. They are thereby being induced to obtain services that are fraudulently described. Yes, this puts you at a competitive disadvantage if your truthfulness makes you appear less competitive. But if so, then your complaint is against the lying competitors, not against the believing consumers.
Yes, it's funny, but this is actually an interesting point to consider. I was recently performing background research on a pool of potential jurors for a major case, using a commercial legal database service. Some people had distinctive names and it was easy to get useful results right away. But if someone had a name that combined a common first name with a common last name, I didn't even bother trying -- there just weren't enough hours in the day to isolate the false positive hits without some kind of unique identifier (and the jury commission did not give us unique identifiers to work with other than county of residence). So if you want to lower your profile and blend in with the background noise, change your name to something really bland.
It's like calling a mechanical engineer to change your fucking tire. Figure it out, it isn't that hard.
To the contrary, it really IS that hard for most people. It has nothing to do with intelligence. It has to do with whether you're the type who cares how a computer works, or whether you're the type who just wants to use a computer. Most of the people reading this are in the former category -- we've spent years or decades immersing ourselves in the technology. So we use other browsers (Opera for me), and we change all of the default settings to turn off active content, and we never have problems with malicious code, and we think this is how it should be, and we marvel at how bad it is for everyone else. But of course it has cost us thousands of hours of our lives to reach that point. It seems easy now, but that's because we know it already. Most people would rather spend those thousands of hours doing other things that they have an aptitude for. That's just the way it is, and always will be.
Yes, you're right. I was thinking only in terms of non-infringement (which is fact-specific), but the blurb and the press release do indeed say that the court declared the patents invalid. This is a big win.
This is only a District Court decision (District of Nevada) so it is not binding precendent elsewhere. But it will interesting to see if this is the beginning of a trend that eventually kills the major cash cow of the Lemelson foundation. The foundation's business model has been to sue everyone in sight (or at least everyone who makes image recognition systems) and then to offer a license on the patents for an amount less than the cost of defense. It's been a very effective strategy. But there are tons of other Lemelson lawsuits in the works, and I am sure the lawyers are all reading this decision very carefully tonight.
Yes, I think criticizing the Edsel is evidence that the author of this article does not have any independent conclusions. He only criticizes cars that others have criticized before him. The Edsel was only considered ugly in the context of its own time. That time is long gone, and today we can see that it's kind of cool looking.
The bigger mistake is the slideshow itself. I find it ironic that an article that purports to criticize bad design is itself so badly designed. Who on earth wants a "timed" slideshow that changes slides after a set number of seconds regardless of the amount of text? Who on earth wants to enable javascript and flash to watch a slideshow just so the horrendous moving advertisements are also enabled? Ten years from now I hope this article appears on someone's historic list of terrible web designs.
Still I believe the problem is on the administrative side, not the lawyer side (whether patent or otherwise). The patent lawyer is filing the application at the behest of the company that claims the "invention." The patent lawyer is not originating the invention. And the USPTO is the agency that actually grants the patent, supposedly after conducting the independent research necessary to prove the invention's novelty, utility, and lack of obviousness. The USPTO (like everyone else in the world) knows that a patent lawyer is an advocate, not a neutral party, so any bias in the application should already be taken into account.
The parent post is nonsense (someone mod it overrated, please). Bored lawyers have nothing to do with the failure of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to screen patent applications properly, to identify the pertinent prior art, and to weed out those applications that lack novelty. Businesses are now fully aware of the USPTO's lax standards, and thus are now submitting anything they can think of in the hope of scoring a cheap win. So no, it does NOT "all get back to lawyers who are bored" and has nothing to do with "barratry." The issuance of trivial patents is the result of a flawed administrative procedure within a federal agency.
To the contrary. There were reports that a number of defendants from the last round of lawsuits did indeed pay settlements. Those settlements fund the next round of lawsuits. The pump is primed.
The cost of litigating these claims is lower than you think. Those 500+ complaints were not custom crafted. Think cookie cutter. Think fill-in-the-blanks.
So the ISPs respond with names of real defendants, the lawyers contact those defendants, many of those defendants do not want to hire lawyers to fight, so more settlements are paid. Again -- the pump is primed.
United States Code, 35 USC Section 103: Conditions for patentability; non-obvious subject matter
(a) A patent may not be obtained . . . if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains.
So -- is this a trivial, obvious extension of the prior art?
Consider this: on almost every album since Sgt. Pepper, the record labels have included printed lyrics along with the album itself. Lyrics are, of course, copyrighted. So the copyrighted lyrics are provided twice, in two different formats: once printed and once sung. Does this mean that lyricists have been cheated for 35 years?
And since when is a "song" a proper unit of storage size? The press release speaks only in terms of "songs," not gigs. People who rip their own MP3s to their own standards want to know gigs, and are fully aware of how unreliable an estimate of "songs" can be. This suggests to me that the intended audience for this product is not the tech savvy user.
Slashdot Mirror
. . . I tend to discount the reviews of those people who use real names and are labeled as "Top 100" or "Top 500" reviewers on Amazon. I tend to think that those people are major wannabes who wish that they were professional reviewers and therefore try too hard to be clever or literary. As a result, I find the reviews of such people to be among the most pretentious, overblown, non-credible reviews on Amazon. I no longer read them and skip past them to the anonymous reviews, which I find much honest and credible.
Here is a key empirical observation from the article: Mating between prairie voles is a tremendous 24-hour effort. After this, they bond for life.... However, another vole, a close relative called the montane vole, has no interest in partnership beyond one-night-stand sex. What is intriguing is that these vast differences in behaviour are the result of a mere handful of genes. The two vole species are more than 99% alike, genetically.
Imagine the implications for churches if it turns out that fidelity is based on genetic propensities rather than moral choice. On the other hand, if the concept of "original sin" is to be believed, perhaps that is what they have been saying all along.
From the article: So, your basic thesis is that programming constructs should be more intuitive to developers, and more closely simulate and resemble the real world. That would enable developers to write software with fewer bugs, right? Exactly.
But this point is just the application of existing principles. When I began learning C++ and OOP, one of the benefits that I noticed was the level of abstraction that becomes available. Your program becomes less procedural and becomes a closer metaphor to the real-world problem to be solved. This seemed to be a continuation of the trend toward abstraction that becomes apparent from the very beginning as you learn how to program. For example, at the most elementary level, abstraction begins with the simple variable: rather than hard coding specific values, you create a more abstract expression like "rate times distance" which makes your algorithm easy to understand. Then trend continues when you learn how to use functions and subroutines, which become freestanding abstractions for the functions being performed. The trend continues further with objects. As the level of abstraction increases, your program really starts to look like a flow chart of its various components, which maps to its real-world purpose. Isn't that all the author is saying?
Wouldn't it make more sense to use radio control by human operators, rather than autonomous on-board robots? Can the on-board robot really deal with every possible circumstance? Does it have enough "judgment" to improvise? Isn't human control simpler and hence more robust?
Actually no, this does not solve the problem. It has nothing to do with people being sheep. It has to do with manufacturers deliberately removing simple products to justify higher prices. The simple products people want ARE NO LONGER BEING OFFERED FOR SALE. As I posted elsewhere in this thread, Canon replaced the simple i450 printer with the more complex and expensive i470 printer that adds no true functionality and has more moving parts to fail. The i450 is GONE. Canon took it out of production. The option to buy it is not there.
Feature creep does not just make things more complicated, it makes things more failure prone. For example, the Canon i450 is a very simple printer that you can buy for $80 and that works very well. It has now been replaced by the i470, which is EXACTLY the same print engine and chassis, but which adds an LCD display and a control panel and raises the price to $130. These extra "features" thus raise the price of the printer by over 60% but they do nothing more than replicate in hardware EXACTLY the same things that can be done with the printer driver software (i.e., change the printer settings). So no true functionality is added, but now a simple reliable printer has a bunch of additional electro-mechanical MOVING PARTS that can fail. I use lots of i450s as portable knock-around printers for my field team, and when I saw the i470, I immediately bought more i450s before they disappeared. I want simple things that don't break, and I don't want to pay for useless add-ons.
When I was young and foolish, I used a wipe utility (BC wipe) to wipe my main hard drive. First I carefully backed up the main drive to my second hard drive. Then the utility asked me to confirm that I wanted to wipe "Drive 1." I said OK, thinking that it was referring to the main hard drive. I did not realize that the main drive was actually identified as "Drive 0." So I wiped my second drive instead. Ever since then, I won't wipe a drive unless all other drives are physically disconnected first. So yes, I am sure the Spirit team is confident, but I always feel a twinge of concern when I hear someone claim that wiping a live drive on a production computer will fix everything.
Isn't this a perfect example of the benefits of open source? Yes, you can hire a team of hackers to attack a black box, but it's just an ad hoc approach, and tomorrow or next week or next year some other hacker will find another weakness that wasn't found in the first pass. Wouldn't you end up with a much more secure system if you could openly and systematically apply those same efforts to reviewing the code inside that black box?
Disney has already massively scaled down its traditional cell animation division to concentrate on digital animation. But without its relationship with Pixar, does Disney have any digital animation capabilities of its own? Does this leave Disney -- the quintessential animation studio -- with neither traditional nor digital capabilities?
one copy for him, one for them perhaps?
That's a good thought and it had not occured to me. It could be an interesting insight into Microsoft's approach to perceived violations: maybe they always send two sets of proposed settlement papers right off the bat, and if you cave in, then you just sign one set and send it right back, and keep the other set for yourself. Since he ultimately reached another agreement, he would indeed have two duplicate original sets if that is the case.
I read the description of Mike Rowe's auction on Ebay. He says that he is auctioning "the WIPO book with the 25-page letter I received from Microsoft's lawyers on January 14/2004," but then says, "I have two copies of these and I will be keeping one for my own personal memoirs." So -- is the subject of the auction a true original? Did Microsoft serve a duplicate set of originals on the same guy? Or is he just selling a copy that he made? If I bought that letter, I would want to see blue ink on the signature line.
The problem is that the advertisement is not the "contract." So the real question is whether the discrepancy between the advertisement and the contract (including terms of service) is so extreme as to constitute fraud. When the discrepancy is extreme enough (e.g., the "silver thermal paste" that contains zero percent silver), then the vendor has a problem. But if the terms of service merely add a "reasonableness" qualifier, then it might not look so bad. If only the top fraction of one percent of users are getting these notices (meaning that 99+ percent are truly getting all of the bandwidth they want), the situation might not raise a regulator's eyebrow.
Consumers demand to be lied to.
I don't think that follows. Consumers are not asking or demanding to be lied to. Consumers are, to the contrary, believing the lies. They are thereby being induced to obtain services that are fraudulently described. Yes, this puts you at a competitive disadvantage if your truthfulness makes you appear less competitive. But if so, then your complaint is against the lying competitors, not against the believing consumers.
Yes, it's funny, but this is actually an interesting point to consider. I was recently performing background research on a pool of potential jurors for a major case, using a commercial legal database service. Some people had distinctive names and it was easy to get useful results right away. But if someone had a name that combined a common first name with a common last name, I didn't even bother trying -- there just weren't enough hours in the day to isolate the false positive hits without some kind of unique identifier (and the jury commission did not give us unique identifiers to work with other than county of residence). So if you want to lower your profile and blend in with the background noise, change your name to something really bland.
It's like calling a mechanical engineer to change your fucking tire. Figure it out, it isn't that hard.
To the contrary, it really IS that hard for most people. It has nothing to do with intelligence. It has to do with whether you're the type who cares how a computer works, or whether you're the type who just wants to use a computer. Most of the people reading this are in the former category -- we've spent years or decades immersing ourselves in the technology. So we use other browsers (Opera for me), and we change all of the default settings to turn off active content, and we never have problems with malicious code, and we think this is how it should be, and we marvel at how bad it is for everyone else. But of course it has cost us thousands of hours of our lives to reach that point. It seems easy now, but that's because we know it already. Most people would rather spend those thousands of hours doing other things that they have an aptitude for. That's just the way it is, and always will be.
Yes, you're right. I was thinking only in terms of non-infringement (which is fact-specific), but the blurb and the press release do indeed say that the court declared the patents invalid. This is a big win.
This is only a District Court decision (District of Nevada) so it is not binding precendent elsewhere. But it will interesting to see if this is the beginning of a trend that eventually kills the major cash cow of the Lemelson foundation. The foundation's business model has been to sue everyone in sight (or at least everyone who makes image recognition systems) and then to offer a license on the patents for an amount less than the cost of defense. It's been a very effective strategy. But there are tons of other Lemelson lawsuits in the works, and I am sure the lawyers are all reading this decision very carefully tonight.
Yes, I think criticizing the Edsel is evidence that the author of this article does not have any independent conclusions. He only criticizes cars that others have criticized before him. The Edsel was only considered ugly in the context of its own time. That time is long gone, and today we can see that it's kind of cool looking.
The bigger mistake is the slideshow itself. I find it ironic that an article that purports to criticize bad design is itself so badly designed. Who on earth wants a "timed" slideshow that changes slides after a set number of seconds regardless of the amount of text? Who on earth wants to enable javascript and flash to watch a slideshow just so the horrendous moving advertisements are also enabled? Ten years from now I hope this article appears on someone's historic list of terrible web designs.
Still I believe the problem is on the administrative side, not the lawyer side (whether patent or otherwise). The patent lawyer is filing the application at the behest of the company that claims the "invention." The patent lawyer is not originating the invention. And the USPTO is the agency that actually grants the patent, supposedly after conducting the independent research necessary to prove the invention's novelty, utility, and lack of obviousness. The USPTO (like everyone else in the world) knows that a patent lawyer is an advocate, not a neutral party, so any bias in the application should already be taken into account.
The parent post is nonsense (someone mod it overrated, please). Bored lawyers have nothing to do with the failure of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to screen patent applications properly, to identify the pertinent prior art, and to weed out those applications that lack novelty. Businesses are now fully aware of the USPTO's lax standards, and thus are now submitting anything they can think of in the hope of scoring a cheap win. So no, it does NOT "all get back to lawyers who are bored" and has nothing to do with "barratry." The issuance of trivial patents is the result of a flawed administrative procedure within a federal agency.
To the contrary. There were reports that a number of defendants from the last round of lawsuits did indeed pay settlements. Those settlements fund the next round of lawsuits. The pump is primed.
The cost of litigating these claims is lower than you think. Those 500+ complaints were not custom crafted. Think cookie cutter. Think fill-in-the-blanks.
So the ISPs respond with names of real defendants, the lawyers contact those defendants, many of those defendants do not want to hire lawyers to fight, so more settlements are paid. Again -- the pump is primed.
Just a reminder of the standard that must be met:
United States Code, 35 USC Section 103:
Conditions for patentability; non-obvious subject matter
(a) A patent may not be obtained . . . if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains.
So -- is this a trivial, obvious extension of the prior art?
Consider this: on almost every album since Sgt. Pepper, the record labels have included printed lyrics along with the album itself. Lyrics are, of course, copyrighted. So the copyrighted lyrics are provided twice, in two different formats: once printed and once sung. Does this mean that lyricists have been cheated for 35 years?
And since when is a "song" a proper unit of storage size? The press release speaks only in terms of "songs," not gigs. People who rip their own MP3s to their own standards want to know gigs, and are fully aware of how unreliable an estimate of "songs" can be. This suggests to me that the intended audience for this product is not the tech savvy user.