One could make the following case:
All of our tools, machines, and buildings are specifically designed for humans. Therefore a human-like robot could use our tools, machines, and buildings without having to modify them. For example, a human-like robot might be able to drive a car, climb stairs, and mix a martini.
I'm not sure even I buy the above argument. I think they sometimes develop human-like robots because such a silly design presents a challenge.
One side effect, as mentioned in previous posts, may be improved prosthetic limbs.
I don't know what American law says about it, but I've never agreed that journalists should have any special rights beyond that of the ordinary citizen.
Freedom of the press should give one the right to publish, not to avoid giving evidence that you or I would be required to give.
Perhaps a legal expert could tell us what view U.S. courts hold.
You may be assuming that the judge's comments are some kind of punishment for SCO. Actually, it's for SCO's benefit.
The judge may feel that it is his responsibility to let a participant know when part or all of its case is not measuring up. It gives SCO an opportunity to address the deficiencies in their case.
Far fairer to put a warning shot across the bow then to have your first shot blast their mainmast into splinters.
My confusion arises with the term "partial implemention".
Does reimplementing the brake with a software controller rather the original hardware controller mean the you are not in violation of the brake patent? I'm not sure, you see, how to interpret that first rule of yours.
Well that's a better answer than most I've gotten, I must say. Still, I find problems with it.
Suppose someone patents a new kind of car brake. A critical part of the brake is a piece of controlling electronics.
Someone else re-implements it with the controlling electronics replaced with a microchip running a program that serves the same function.
If I read your first rule correctly, this cannot be found to violate the brake patent. But surely this is not what is intended by a ban on software patents.
Right, because we really want to allow patenting of the/ exchange of money and goods.
I am not defending the patent, but pointing out that running a computer is generally only a component of a patent, not the whole thing.
I don't know whether software patents should be disallowed or not. I do know that without a practical and unambiguous definition of "software patent", this horse ain't gonna run.
Might I suggest that someone who compaigns against software patents, but can't come up with such a definition, has some thinking to do.
Any chemical reaction. Add this chemical, heat it up to that temperature, monitor its pH till it reaches this acidity, add the following catalyst, and stir.
Any patent concerned with the making of something ("A Method Of Attaching Bumpers to Sports Utility Vehicles" - okay I made that up).
Any patent that involves human interaction. Human interaction is allowed in a patent so long the the tasks are well defined and don't require expertise. If the judge figures he/she could do it, it's generally okay.
You should read more patents. Many of the claims read exactly like algorithms.
Anything that serves as instructions to a generic logic processor.
Yeah, I know what software is, thank you very much. The question is, what is a software patent, and that is not simple at all.
Are we to disallow the patenting of any invention which involves a computer as one of its component parts? Remember that running a computer, in and of itself, is not useful and therefore not patentable. That's just moving electrons around.
There is almost always some physical component to a "software patent". It might be the generation of entertaining graphics, or, in the case of "one-click shopping" (I haven't read this notorious patent), the exchange of money and goods.
Under many definitions, any algorithm is unpatentable, whether software-implemented or not.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines algorithm as "a step-by-step procedure for solving a problem or accomplishing some end, especially by a computer".
Now if we get rid of the computer part, as these definitions suggest, we are left with a hugely broad definition that would apply to a vast array of patents, many having nothing to do with software. It's not far off from disallowing patents altogether.
That would please many people, but I doubt if the europeans or any country would go for it. If one were trying to convince politicians to disallow software patents, suggesting we disallow algorithms in general would not likely succeed.
I know a considerable amount (for a programmer) about patent law, and I've read a fair number of patents.
I do not, however, know how one can clearly distinguish between software and non-software patents.
It is not as easy as one might think. Many things we call "software patents" do not mention software or even computers. This didn't use to be the case. They used to insist that an example hardware system be described in the patent, perhaps as a "preferred embodiment".
Now many patents simply describe an algorithm. Whether that algorithm is carried out by computer, sliderule, abacus, or pencil and paper is often not explained.
A further complication arises when software is a part of an invention that also has hardware components. There are many such inventions today.
Unfortunately, "I know a software patent when I see one" probably wouldn't cut it in the courts. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable than I could comment on this problem.
There were lots of corporations in 1776. The modern version, with its publicly traded shares, began in Europe in the 1550's. Isaac Newton lost a lot of money investing in one. The Hudson Bay Company (as it was eventually known) was founded in 1670, and played a huge role in North American history. It's still around today.
The writers of the U.S constitution would have known all about corporations in the late 1700's.
Yet the constitution is silent about government's role in defending the public against them. That is your interpretation, fed by your own politics.
They do their part to "reduce government", which is what people have formed to protect us from corporations (and their hereditary predecessors).
Historical flap doodle. Democracies came about out of a desire that governments exist "for the people" rather than serving a ruling class. Read, for example, the American Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. Neither refer, even indirectly, to protecting the people from corporations. It was not a priority.
Only in Marxist states was "protecting" the people against private entreprise considered so vital that it become part of the constitution. And equating corporations with aristocracy is pure historical revisionism.
For corporations, it means corporate tyranny, which the Economist is all for.
This is not true. Without a doubt, they are a big believer in the freedom of people to carry out commerce with a minimum of (but not zero) government interference. But this is not "corporate tyranny".
The Economist has spoken out many times against
"government by special interest group". They have been consistently against trade barriers, subsidies, and regulations which enrich certain groups (usually industrial, but also farming) over the welfare of the people of the whole.
Actually, The Economist considers itself liberal, although in the traditional, rather than the American liberal=socialist sense.
After many years of reading the Economist, I agree with their self-assessment.
Having said that, I've never been comfortable with the 1-dimensional right/left political categorizations. People and politics are far more complicated than that.
Pity you don't care for it. I found it totally mind altering. One of the truly distinct programming languages, remarkable that it was developed so early on. Three lessons from Lisp: (1) code and data are the same thing, (2) recursion is far more powerful and difficult than you think it is, and (3) simplicity and power in a language can co-exist.
I think it should be taught just to expand student's tiny little brains. It makes reading
Godel, Escher, Bach a much more enlightening experience.
So tell me when I start to sound like an aging hippie.
At times during the 1990's PC got very ugly. One student was publically reprimanded as being anti-gay because he wanted a new residence room when his roommate put up homo-erotic posters. Male students were called rapists for sleeping with consenting co-eds who had been drinking but were not excessively drunk. And disagreeing with any racially identifiable group often got one labelled a bigot.
These were the extreme cases, but they were not silly. There were students who lost the chance for an education over political correctness.
Some have suggested that politically correctness was a good idea that went wrong, or perhaps was just misunderstood.
Garbage. It was an attempt to short-circuit political and academic debate in favour of a single point of view, sometimes through repressive means.
PC suffered terrible publicity, was attacked by civil libertarians and defenders of academic freedom, and was occassionaly challenged in the courts. It deserved everthing it got.
And yes, it was a pretty easy target for conservatives. It was a pretty easy target period.
Fortunately PC has died down in recent years, but its trangressions are well documented. Playboy Magazine, hardly a right-wing organization, reported on many of these during the 1990's.
But even today, many campuses have policies limiting free speech. For example, there are often rules against giving offense to groups. Of course, they are rather selective about which groups they mean. Homosexuals, definitely. Young republicans, not so much (not that they need it).
The very term "political correctness" is an abomination. It explicitly assumes that there is a type of politics that is correct, and that academia is the possessor of this knowledge.
That in itself is arrogant but tolerable. But when schools and other institutions started forcing this political belief upon the general population, principally through the threat of denial of education and other opportunities, that it became "fascism through other means".
You may not like Fox News, but people at least have the choice to follow them or not. That hasn't always been the case with PC.
Now that's a unfair. The FFT is notoriously difficult to understand for such a short algorithm.
I admit, however, that the programming style is not helping here. And it looks like the "Numerical Recipes" version too.
Now to really obfuscate the code, you want alternate returns and assigned goto's. Control keeps popping up in all sorts of unexpected places. It's like watching a colony of gophers.
This is a not bad sample size at all. Statistics 101 goes into such things.
One serious problem is that this is not a random sample. It's only a sample of that portion of the population willing to answer telephone surveys - not a group I would want to base important decisions on.
A second problem is that we don't know how many surveyed just make up answers at random.
The 90-year-old cross-dressing skate boarders from Baton Rouge are particularly into this.
How To Lie With Statistics
on
Newsy Numbers
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"How To Lie With Statistics" by Darrell Huff, although more than 50 years old,
is still a great read.
It's astonishing how few of its lessons have been learned even today.
And I get a kick out of the illustrations by Irving Geis, even though (or maybe because) they are rather dated in style.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure even I buy the above argument. I think they sometimes develop human-like robots because such a silly design presents a challenge.
One side effect, as mentioned in previous posts, may be improved prosthetic limbs.
Freedom of the press should give one the right to publish, not to avoid giving evidence that you or I would be required to give.
Perhaps a legal expert could tell us what view U.S. courts hold.
The judge may feel that it is his responsibility to let a participant know when part or all of its case is not measuring up. It gives SCO an opportunity to address the deficiencies in their case.
Far fairer to put a warning shot across the bow then to have your first shot blast their mainmast into splinters.
Does reimplementing the brake with a software controller rather the original hardware controller mean the you are not in violation of the brake patent? I'm not sure, you see, how to interpret that first rule of yours.
Suppose someone patents a new kind of car brake. A critical part of the brake is a piece of controlling electronics. Someone else re-implements it with the controlling electronics replaced with a microchip running a program that serves the same function.
If I read your first rule correctly, this cannot be found to violate the brake patent. But surely this is not what is intended by a ban on software patents.
Or do I misinterpret your first rule?
I am not defending the patent, but pointing out that running a computer is generally only a component of a patent, not the whole thing.
I don't know whether software patents should be disallowed or not. I do know that without a practical and unambiguous definition of "software patent", this horse ain't gonna run.
Might I suggest that someone who compaigns against software patents, but can't come up with such a definition, has some thinking to do.
Any patent concerned with the making of something ("A Method Of Attaching Bumpers to Sports Utility Vehicles" - okay I made that up).
Any patent that involves human interaction. Human interaction is allowed in a patent so long the the tasks are well defined and don't require expertise. If the judge figures he/she could do it, it's generally okay.
You should read more patents. Many of the claims read exactly like algorithms.
Yeah, I know what software is, thank you very much. The question is, what is a software patent, and that is not simple at all.
Are we to disallow the patenting of any invention which involves a computer as one of its component parts? Remember that running a computer, in and of itself, is not useful and therefore not patentable. That's just moving electrons around.
There is almost always some physical component to a "software patent". It might be the generation of entertaining graphics, or, in the case of "one-click shopping" (I haven't read this notorious patent), the exchange of money and goods.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines algorithm as "a step-by-step procedure for solving a problem or accomplishing some end, especially by a computer".
Now if we get rid of the computer part, as these definitions suggest, we are left with a hugely broad definition that would apply to a vast array of patents, many having nothing to do with software. It's not far off from disallowing patents altogether.
That would please many people, but I doubt if the europeans or any country would go for it. If one were trying to convince politicians to disallow software patents, suggesting we disallow algorithms in general would not likely succeed.
I do not, however, know how one can clearly distinguish between software and non-software patents.
It is not as easy as one might think. Many things we call "software patents" do not mention software or even computers. This didn't use to be the case. They used to insist that an example hardware system be described in the patent, perhaps as a "preferred embodiment". Now many patents simply describe an algorithm. Whether that algorithm is carried out by computer, sliderule, abacus, or pencil and paper is often not explained.
A further complication arises when software is a part of an invention that also has hardware components. There are many such inventions today.
Unfortunately, "I know a software patent when I see one" probably wouldn't cut it in the courts. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable than I could comment on this problem.
The writers of the U.S constitution would have known all about corporations in the late 1700's. Yet the constitution is silent about government's role in defending the public against them. That is your interpretation, fed by your own politics.
Only in Marxist states was "protecting" the people against private entreprise considered so vital that it become part of the constitution. And equating corporations with aristocracy is pure historical revisionism.
This is not true. Without a doubt, they are a big believer in the freedom of people to carry out commerce with a minimum of (but not zero) government interference. But this is not "corporate tyranny".
The Economist has spoken out many times against "government by special interest group". They have been consistently against trade barriers, subsidies, and regulations which enrich certain groups (usually industrial, but also farming) over the welfare of the people of the whole.
After many years of reading the Economist, I agree with their self-assessment.
Having said that, I've never been comfortable with the 1-dimensional right/left political categorizations. People and politics are far more complicated than that.
I think it should be taught just to expand student's tiny little brains. It makes reading Godel, Escher, Bach a much more enlightening experience.
So tell me when I start to sound like an aging hippie.
These were the extreme cases, but they were not silly. There were students who lost the chance for an education over political correctness.
Garbage. It was an attempt to short-circuit political and academic debate in favour of a single point of view, sometimes through repressive means.
PC suffered terrible publicity, was attacked by civil libertarians and defenders of academic freedom, and was occassionaly challenged in the courts. It deserved everthing it got.
And yes, it was a pretty easy target for conservatives. It was a pretty easy target period.
But even today, many campuses have policies limiting free speech. For example, there are often rules against giving offense to groups. Of course, they are rather selective about which groups they mean. Homosexuals, definitely. Young republicans, not so much (not that they need it).
Recommended reading: Kindly Inquisitors.
That in itself is arrogant but tolerable. But when schools and other institutions started forcing this political belief upon the general population, principally through the threat of denial of education and other opportunities, that it became "fascism through other means".
You may not like Fox News, but people at least have the choice to follow them or not. That hasn't always been the case with PC.
It's all a bunch of flap-doodle.
Now to really obfuscate the code, you want alternate returns and assigned goto's. Control keeps popping up in all sorts of unexpected places. It's like watching a colony of gophers.
Personally, I never go near the things.
One serious problem is that this is not a random sample. It's only a sample of that portion of the population willing to answer telephone surveys - not a group I would want to base important decisions on.
A second problem is that we don't know how many surveyed just make up answers at random. The 90-year-old cross-dressing skate boarders from Baton Rouge are particularly into this.
Incorrect. You do not hyphenate "-ly" adverbs such as "poorly". Please see:
http://www.getitwriteonline.com/archive/042703.htm
And I get a kick out of the illustrations by Irving Geis, even though (or maybe because) they are rather dated in style.