The government never tried to reulgate Internet content when everyone was using dial-up. It seems like they would have had a better argument since dial-up uses regular phone lines to to transmit data.
This is just the old, entrenched telcos trying to shut down VOIP as competition to their antiquited landline systems. They already tried to do this by having the FCC force VOIP companies implement 911 service. And when cellular providers still don't have 911 service wiorking properly, and the cell companies have been around far longer than the VOIP companies.
The telcos are regualted because they were given a limited monopoly in landline service in the early 20th century. VOIP providers have no monopoly, as anyone can send data packets over an existing 'net connection.
The problem is that the exorbitant taxes applied to landlines, and the innefficiencies in the existing infrastructure make landlines unattractive for more and more people. I gave up my landline, and just have cell phones for my family.
If the FCC starts regulating VOIP as a communcations system, will they try to regulate TeamSpeak? What Battlefield 2 or XBox Live, both of which have Voice capability? What about IM systems with voice?
SIM cards don't do any processing, they just store info. You can take the SIM card out of one and use it to swap your phone book into a new phone. I've never tried swapping them out and making calls, not sure if that would work.
The phones are essentially blank, and the SIM card has an identification number on them, and you can get blank SIM cards. The SIM Cards can be programmed at your local hole-in-the-wall cell phone store. The easiest thing to do would be to buy the equipment used in the cheapo cell phone store or get a job there and program the chips youself.
As for the private-public key analogy, the GSM encryption key seed is about 5 bytes long (a5 stream cipher). The cipher key is transmitted between the base and hand stations. There are not enough keys for each phone to have a unique one, they key is generated on the fly for each call. This allows GSM phones to be used between networks. Otherwise, the tables with every unique public key and every associated phone number would have to be shared in real time with every provider of GSM service.
Cloning phones has been going on forever. It's just that it's generaly too expensive comapred to just buying 5000 minutes to worry about for the average Joe.
Energy is measured in joules, dammit. A watt is one joule per second.
You answered your own question.
If it's 10 kW, it must average 10kJ for 1 second.
Most likely, it 100kJ for 0.1 seconds or so.
You'd need some big ass electrical buffer to handle a power spike like that. YOu just can't charge batteries that quickly, they have an annoying tendency to blow up. And a capacitor that could handle that instantaneous power would be enormous.
Your electric meter doesn't measure things in J, it uses kW.
But how does the local cell know who you are when you make a call? Surely the phone must transmit some identifying information. If it does that, and you can scan for it, you can reproduce it. Seems like a lot of those terroristy types are here on student visas, and a lot of them are studying electrical engineering. At my EE school, a lot of the students were of Middle Eastern descent, and one of our choices for senior design project was to design an entire cell phone network.
Not much of a stretch to think that someone could take a blank phone and spoof a SIM card.
Same here. I'm a 3L working at an IP firm in NY. I programmed for 6 1/2 years before going to Law School. Now every time we get a softwre patent case, it ends up on my desk, and I haven't even graduated yet.
Who cares if they patent a perpetual motion machine? Are you ever going to infiringe? Will it ever make anything ou buy cost more? Did some idiot just donate $10,000 to the patent office?
And try reading the perpetual motion patent that you're talking about. See if you can find where the perpetual motion part comes in.
Actauly, patent fees are halved for small entities, comapnies with less than 500 people. It's not the fees taht matter, most companies don't want to pay a patent attorney unless they're fairly sure the patent will work out money-wise for them.
Novelty and nonobviousness are where prior art comes in. Novelty essentially means that a applicaiton is not exactly the same as another (or a combination of) patent/reference. Unobviousness means that an application is not so close to another (or a combination of) patents and references.
No. But you do have to have what's called an "anabling disclosure". (35 USC 112). YOu have to describe the process in such a way that "one skilled in the art" could reproduce your invention. This is the carrot-stick tradeoff of patents. You have to tell how to make your invention, and in return for contributing that knowledge to the public, you get a limited monopoly on making, using or selling the product, for 20 years from the date of the application. After that, anyone can use or make the invention, as the knowledge is then dedicated to the public. The monopoly is the carrot, the disclosure is the stick.
Basically, anything you claim in a patent, what's actually protected, you have to describe how to make the invention. If you invent a new chemical compund for curing cancer, if you patent the compund, you have to tell how to make it. If you patent using the compund to treat cancer, you have to tell how you effectively treat cancer. And with chemical compunds, you have to tell what the molecle looks like.
The patent office used to require a working model, but not anymore. Partly that's because so many things that aren't in tangible form can be patented. Software such as the XOR cursor and Gif compression and business methods such as treating cancer with a particular drug are examples of the intangible invention.
it generally doesn't work for copyright anymore. It only costs $20 to regsiter a copyright, it's jsut easier to file withteh copyright office. Additionally,. by filing withthe copyrightoffice, you can get damages. If you don't file with the copyrihgt office, you can usually only get an injunction to stop people from using the copyrighted work.
Submarine patents, in the traditional sense, do not exist any more. Jerome Lemelson was famous for submaine patenting, and made tons of money off of it invery diverse fields. However, the definition of a submarine patent is filing something vague, then keeping the patent pending until the industry develops, and then incorporating changes into the opatent to cover what is widely used in the industry. THe reason this worked is that patents used to have a term of 17 years from the patent grant date. So you could keep a patent pending for 20 years, thenget 17 years on top of the pendency period. Now, the term is 20 years from the filing date. If you keep a patent pending long enough, you won't get any patent protection. Additionally, there is now the doctrine of prosecution laches, which states taht if you do not advance the patent applciaiton, or if you make meaningless, unpatentable changes to the applicaiton, you can be barred from getting a patent at all.
What you are referring to are overly broad patents. Most of these can be challenged in court as not enabling, not specific, or no good because of prior art (obvious or not inventive). A lot of people end up paying because it's cheaper than patent litigation. And once a few smaller companies take out icense fees, that's evidence of commercial success to be used against larger companies if the patent holder gets taken to court.
The first person's publication doesn't automatically become prior art.
again, 35 USC 102(a) and (b):
102. Conditions for patentability; novelty and loss of right to patent
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless--
(a)
the invention was known or used by others in this country, or patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country, before the invention thereof by the applicant for patent, or
(b)
the invention was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country or in public use or on sale in this country, more than one year prior to the date of the application for patent in the United States
To be prior art it has to be published 1 year before the 2nd inventor files his app, or before the second inventor invents his device.
1 year, not 2:
35 CFR 102(b):
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless--
the invention was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country or in public use or on sale in this country, more than one year prior to the date of the application for patent in the United States, or
The original iPod probably didn't have the features covered in the patent. I know they didn't have the touchy-scroll-wheel in the first couple generations, it was just bottons covered by a white ring. I'm not sure about the interface.
The United States is not a first to file Country. In fact, it's one of the last first to invent countries. The patent protection runs from the time you file, because the applicaiton is concrete prrof that you have "reduced the invention to practice". If you get bounced by prior art, in some cases you can antedate the prior art by showing through inventors notebooks, test results, etc, that you conceived the idea at a time earlier than the prior art and were dilegently working to reduce the invention to practice. In the present Apple case, they probably have nothing showing an inventin date earlier than the prior art.
The moral here is, if you're working on something cool, soemthing that you might want to patent, write it down. Even a diagram or sketch can help you if it's dated.
There is, it's called an interference. Basically, it's a way to see who devloped something first. However, they don't generally judge both patents on the merits during an interference, just the date of invention. The junior patent applicaiton will then have to narrow the scope of their claims to avoid the senior patent.
The problem is, you let the government start regulating things like QoS, Coc, etc, and they'll want to regulate everything. You may have a better Quality of Service, and a reasonable Code of conduct enforced, but all of a sudden, some politician inserts a rider into a school funding bill that says you can't access information on evolution (or creationism, or communism, or cryptography, or whatever) through the Internet.
Pretty soon you're paying $50 a month for the sanitized Internet.
And rarely does government regulation help when facing service issues? Once the telcos were deregulated, service got better because people could vote with the dollars. Granted cable is a little different because of the monopoly/duopoly that's the nature of the cable business, but at some point, it would be profitable for a second party to come in with better service/prices etc.
Additionally, large cable companies have the $$ to lobby with. Say a Senator wanted to enforce some kind of QOS or COC. Surely the cable company could grease enough palms that the hurdles they had to jump through were almost meaningless. And in return, the cable companies probably get some kind of indemnity for other "bad" acts, like filtering select websites.
it took me longer to put FC3 on my computer than XP. I'll point out that XP comes on 1 CD, FC3 on 5. Linux may have more crap coming with it, but I don't want to spend time putting 3 GUIs on my hard drive.
Generally most people won't carry a list of compatible hardware down to Fry's. They'll buy what's on sale and download the driver. No driver for Linux? That'll be the problem that keeps Linux from getting adopted as widely as Windows.
Admittedly, it's a chicken/egg problem, as vendors won't write Linux drivers themselves until more people have linux.
And then there are people like me who take an old computer, and put Linux on it to try out. You end up with too many problems, and turn the box into a Windows file server.
And when I install XP, pretty much all I have to do is put the CD in and set a few options. It took me about 3 hours to get FC3 on my old ass Optiplex.
It ain't the crippling effects of copyrights and patent, as every country has patents, and all of the terms are almost exactly the same across the world. Even Zimbabwe grants patents.
The U.S. will become a tech wasteland because it's cheaper to have the Chinese do the programming, and fucking literal minded Christian Bible bangers who think that the Genesis book of the bible is a literal tale will block any kind of tech research, e.g. stem cells.
And if patents aren't worth the paper they're printed on, people will stop getting them, and there will be less patent nonsense going on.
Too many people bitch about things like amazon's web service marketplace patent without knowing how to read a patent. and most don't know that if they see an applicaiton, and think a patent's bullshit, they can send prior art in for consideration during the examination. For everyone out there bitching about how the idea has been done, or is obvious, drop $39 on a stamp and mail the art in.
The largest problem with teh Patent Office and software type patents is that the Office only takes things that are in writing as prior art, and they have to have been published at some point. With Software, there is so little published prior art, that it's easy to get almost anything by. As a former programmer, I for one never wrote documentation. And software is sooooo easy to put something clever into, which is obscured by the UI. SInce you can't easily see the internals of how something works, it can't be cited as published prior art.
The thing is that it's always beent aht way. The PTO assumes you know that, and so it's really all us programmers who are at fault for not writing up what we do. We just program rilliantly, and get our code out the door so we can play Half-Life on the company's network.
Slashdot Mirror
The government never tried to reulgate Internet content when everyone was using dial-up. It seems like they would have had a better argument since dial-up uses regular phone lines to to transmit data.
This is just the old, entrenched telcos trying to shut down VOIP as competition to their antiquited landline systems. They already tried to do this by having the FCC force VOIP companies implement 911 service. And when cellular providers still don't have 911 service wiorking properly, and the cell companies have been around far longer than the VOIP companies.
The telcos are regualted because they were given a limited monopoly in landline service in the early 20th century. VOIP providers have no monopoly, as anyone can send data packets over an existing 'net connection.
The problem is that the exorbitant taxes applied to landlines, and the innefficiencies in the existing infrastructure make landlines unattractive for more and more people. I gave up my landline, and just have cell phones for my family.
If the FCC starts regulating VOIP as a communcations system, will they try to regulate TeamSpeak? What Battlefield 2 or XBox Live, both of which have Voice capability? What about IM systems with voice?
SIM cards don't do any processing, they just store info. You can take the SIM card out of one and use it to swap your phone book into a new phone. I've never tried swapping them out and making calls, not sure if that would work.
The phones are essentially blank, and the SIM card has an identification number on them, and you can get blank SIM cards. The SIM Cards can be programmed at your local hole-in-the-wall cell phone store. The easiest thing to do would be to buy the equipment used in the cheapo cell phone store or get a job there and program the chips youself.
As for the private-public key analogy, the GSM encryption key seed is about 5 bytes long (a5 stream cipher). The cipher key is transmitted between the base and hand stations. There are not enough keys for each phone to have a unique one, they key is generated on the fly for each call. This allows GSM phones to be used between networks. Otherwise, the tables with every unique public key and every associated phone number would have to be shared in real time with every provider of GSM service.
Cloning phones has been going on forever. It's just that it's generaly too expensive comapred to just buying 5000 minutes to worry about for the average Joe.
Energy is measured in joules, dammit. A watt is one joule per second.
You answered your own question.
If it's 10 kW, it must average 10kJ for 1 second.
Most likely, it 100kJ for 0.1 seconds or so.
You'd need some big ass electrical buffer to handle a power spike like that. YOu just can't charge batteries that quickly, they have an annoying tendency to blow up. And a capacitor that could handle that instantaneous power would be enormous. Your electric meter doesn't measure things in J, it uses kW.
But how does the local cell know who you are when you make a call? Surely the phone must transmit some identifying information. If it does that, and you can scan for it, you can reproduce it. Seems like a lot of those terroristy types are here on student visas, and a lot of them are studying electrical engineering. At my EE school, a lot of the students were of Middle Eastern descent, and one of our choices for senior design project was to design an entire cell phone network. Not much of a stretch to think that someone could take a blank phone and spoof a SIM card.
Same here. I'm a 3L working at an IP firm in NY. I programmed for 6 1/2 years before going to Law School. Now every time we get a softwre patent case, it ends up on my desk, and I haven't even graduated yet.
I figured it was either Law School or management.
Who cares if they patent a perpetual motion machine? Are you ever going to infiringe? Will it ever make anything ou buy cost more? Did some idiot just donate $10,000 to the patent office?
And try reading the perpetual motion patent that you're talking about. See if you can find where the perpetual motion part comes in.
Actauly, patent fees are halved for small entities, comapnies with less than 500 people. It's not the fees taht matter, most companies don't want to pay a patent attorney unless they're fairly sure the patent will work out money-wise for them.
They do this. They're called patent examiners. Problem is, no one wants to go work for the government starting at $35k a year.
Because almost no one on Slashdot knows the proper way to search prior art. Much less what the "Motivation to combine" hurdle means.
It said whiLe females... not whiTe females...
Novelty and nonobviousness are where prior art comes in. Novelty essentially means that a applicaiton is not exactly the same as another (or a combination of) patent/reference. Unobviousness means that an application is not so close to another (or a combination of) patents and references.
No way this gets past utility.
You got a B.A.
Don't go patting yourself on the back just yet.
No. But you do have to have what's called an "anabling disclosure". (35 USC 112). YOu have to describe the process in such a way that "one skilled in the art" could reproduce your invention. This is the carrot-stick tradeoff of patents. You have to tell how to make your invention, and in return for contributing that knowledge to the public, you get a limited monopoly on making, using or selling the product, for 20 years from the date of the application. After that, anyone can use or make the invention, as the knowledge is then dedicated to the public. The monopoly is the carrot, the disclosure is the stick.
Basically, anything you claim in a patent, what's actually protected, you have to describe how to make the invention. If you invent a new chemical compund for curing cancer, if you patent the compund, you have to tell how to make it. If you patent using the compund to treat cancer, you have to tell how you effectively treat cancer. And with chemical compunds, you have to tell what the molecle looks like.
The patent office used to require a working model, but not anymore. Partly that's because so many things that aren't in tangible form can be patented. Software such as the XOR cursor and Gif compression and business methods such as treating cancer with a particular drug are examples of the intangible invention.
it generally doesn't work for copyright anymore. It only costs $20 to regsiter a copyright, it's jsut easier to file withteh copyright office. Additionally,. by filing withthe copyrightoffice, you can get damages. If you don't file with the copyrihgt office, you can usually only get an injunction to stop people from using the copyrighted work.
Submarine patents, in the traditional sense, do not exist any more. Jerome Lemelson was famous for submaine patenting, and made tons of money off of it invery diverse fields. However, the definition of a submarine patent is filing something vague, then keeping the patent pending until the industry develops, and then incorporating changes into the opatent to cover what is widely used in the industry. THe reason this worked is that patents used to have a term of 17 years from the patent grant date. So you could keep a patent pending for 20 years, thenget 17 years on top of the pendency period. Now, the term is 20 years from the filing date. If you keep a patent pending long enough, you won't get any patent protection. Additionally, there is now the doctrine of prosecution laches, which states taht if you do not advance the patent applciaiton, or if you make meaningless, unpatentable changes to the applicaiton, you can be barred from getting a patent at all.
What you are referring to are overly broad patents. Most of these can be challenged in court as not enabling, not specific, or no good because of prior art (obvious or not inventive). A lot of people end up paying because it's cheaper than patent litigation. And once a few smaller companies take out icense fees, that's evidence of commercial success to be used against larger companies if the patent holder gets taken to court.
The first person's publication doesn't automatically become prior art.
again, 35 USC 102(a) and (b):
102. Conditions for patentability; novelty and loss of right to patent
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless--
(a)
the invention was known or used by others in this country, or patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country, before the invention thereof by the applicant for patent, or
(b)
the invention was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country or in public use or on sale in this country, more than one year prior to the date of the application for patent in the United States
To be prior art it has to be published 1 year before the 2nd inventor files his app, or before the second inventor invents his device.
1 year, not 2:
35 CFR 102(b):
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless--
the invention was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country or in public use or on sale in this country, more than one year prior to the date of the application for patent in the United States, or
The original iPod probably didn't have the features covered in the patent. I know they didn't have the touchy-scroll-wheel in the first couple generations, it was just bottons covered by a white ring. I'm not sure about the interface.
The United States is not a first to file Country. In fact, it's one of the last first to invent countries. The patent protection runs from the time you file, because the applicaiton is concrete prrof that you have "reduced the invention to practice". If you get bounced by prior art, in some cases you can antedate the prior art by showing through inventors notebooks, test results, etc, that you conceived the idea at a time earlier than the prior art and were dilegently working to reduce the invention to practice. In the present Apple case, they probably have nothing showing an inventin date earlier than the prior art.
The moral here is, if you're working on something cool, soemthing that you might want to patent, write it down. Even a diagram or sketch can help you if it's dated.
There is, it's called an interference. Basically, it's a way to see who devloped something first. However, they don't generally judge both patents on the merits during an interference, just the date of invention. The junior patent applicaiton will then have to narrow the scope of their claims to avoid the senior patent.
Actually, you have a year to file a patent after publishing your idea.
The problem is, you let the government start regulating things like QoS, Coc, etc, and they'll want to regulate everything. You may have a better Quality of Service, and a reasonable Code of conduct enforced, but all of a sudden, some politician inserts a rider into a school funding bill that says you can't access information on evolution (or creationism, or communism, or cryptography, or whatever) through the Internet.
Pretty soon you're paying $50 a month for the sanitized Internet.
And rarely does government regulation help when facing service issues? Once the telcos were deregulated, service got better because people could vote with the dollars. Granted cable is a little different because of the monopoly/duopoly that's the nature of the cable business, but at some point, it would be profitable for a second party to come in with better service/prices etc.
Additionally, large cable companies have the $$ to lobby with. Say a Senator wanted to enforce some kind of QOS or COC. Surely the cable company could grease enough palms that the hurdles they had to jump through were almost meaningless. And in return, the cable companies probably get some kind of indemnity for other "bad" acts, like filtering select websites.
it took me longer to put FC3 on my computer than XP. I'll point out that XP comes on 1 CD, FC3 on 5. Linux may have more crap coming with it, but I don't want to spend time putting 3 GUIs on my hard drive.
Generally most people won't carry a list of compatible hardware down to Fry's. They'll buy what's on sale and download the driver. No driver for Linux? That'll be the problem that keeps Linux from getting adopted as widely as Windows.
Admittedly, it's a chicken/egg problem, as vendors won't write Linux drivers themselves until more people have linux.
And then there are people like me who take an old computer, and put Linux on it to try out. You end up with too many problems, and turn the box into a Windows file server.
And when I install XP, pretty much all I have to do is put the CD in and set a few options. It took me about 3 hours to get FC3 on my old ass Optiplex.
It ain't the crippling effects of copyrights and patent, as every country has patents, and all of the terms are almost exactly the same across the world. Even Zimbabwe grants patents.
The U.S. will become a tech wasteland because it's cheaper to have the Chinese do the programming, and fucking literal minded Christian Bible bangers who think that the Genesis book of the bible is a literal tale will block any kind of tech research, e.g. stem cells.
And if patents aren't worth the paper they're printed on, people will stop getting them, and there will be less patent nonsense going on.
Too many people bitch about things like amazon's web service marketplace patent without knowing how to read a patent. and most don't know that if they see an applicaiton, and think a patent's bullshit, they can send prior art in for consideration during the examination. For everyone out there bitching about how the idea has been done, or is obvious, drop $39 on a stamp and mail the art in.
The largest problem with teh Patent Office and software type patents is that the Office only takes things that are in writing as prior art, and they have to have been published at some point. With Software, there is so little published prior art, that it's easy to get almost anything by. As a former programmer, I for one never wrote documentation. And software is sooooo easy to put something clever into, which is obscured by the UI. SInce you can't easily see the internals of how something works, it can't be cited as published prior art.
The thing is that it's always beent aht way. The PTO assumes you know that, and so it's really all us programmers who are at fault for not writing up what we do. We just program rilliantly, and get our code out the door so we can play Half-Life on the company's network.