Which does not mean that a court of law will uphold it
Well, writing bug-free software (as in 100% defect free) is insanely difficult and expensive. Is the consumer ready to pay 100x the original cost? Formally proving even small segments of code requires a long difficult proof and the proof itself may have bugs. Doing the same for large non-trivial programs exponentially so.
Bigot? Not really. He's not opposed to gay people. He just wants them to prevent them from ruining the (religious) institution of marriage. The govt. and the courts did not invent marriage, religion did. So the courts have little power or right to redefine marriage to include same-sex partners.
Correction to second paragraph: The left-to-right and right-to-left sliding toggle switch in the video greatly resembles Apple's slide to unlock and should probably be considered prior art.
Can anyone explain why dead bolts [ebaystatic.com] are not sufficient prior art?
This should be considered as prior art as it performs exactly the same function, looks similar and most importantly has the same unlock mechanism as the iphone's slide-to-unlock. That is, both user interfaces open a door. The dead bolt is a real world representation (used in millions of homes around the world) of the idea whereas the apple's patent seems to have copied that idea into the computer software domain. So it fails the non-obviousness test. Just because you port something so common into computer UI does not make it non-obvious. Therefore it is not patent-worthy.
The video, on the other hand, does not show prior art of slide to unlock, just many variations of computer-based toggle switches. The solutions she presents is only vaguely related to slide-to-unlock (toggleness).
Or the gov installs the fiber to all the property and then leases access to the fiber to anyone who wants it.
The problem with that is the government is neither capable nor interested in being on the cutting-edge of latest internet technologies. They should just provide the infrastructure that makes whatever type of cable the network provider is interested in installing cost-effective.
Each pizza delivery company doesn't need to build their own roads to deliver pizza,
True, but road technology does not change every few years, the internet "roads" change.
Satellites are too expensive and slow. Instead, why doesn't the govt dig the trenches for the internet optical fibers using taxpayer money, then lease them out to competing internet providers. That is, the the conduit/hole/trench belongs to the govt and the local people, but the wires within the conduit belong to the internet companies. This way, many internet companies can compete because of they only have to install new fibers in already existing trenches, drastically reducing cost and encouraging competition and thereby lowering costs to consumers per Mbps speed.
But utilities are upgraded at a very slow pace because the govt regulates how much profit a utility company can make, putting brakes on innovation. With the internet, we want to replace/upgrade everything every 10 to 15 years and that is not possible if the internet is classified as a utility.
Utilities are fine for phone and electricity because they are mature technologies that don't change much year-to-year.
But scientists don't usually say "we don't know." Rather, they say emphatically, "Creation did not come from God." This is the whole Creation vs. Evolution theory debate.
Can kernel panic info also be saved to a disk log instead of just showing it on the screen? It could also be logged to a USB drive or something connected to the network or in the extreme case, CMOS space in BIOS.
Whatever the method, the log information should be easily accessible on reboot without the use of cameras/cell phones etc.
BU is a private university. I see your point for public universities, but a private entity should be able to do what it wishes in this regard.
But what about the grad/phd students who actually invented this stuff? Do they see even a penny of this settlement? I don't think all the lab equipment and tools in the world is worth 100% of the patent rights going to the university.
So it only took about a year of screaming from the users and slashdotters before Microsquishy paid attention and brought back the MENU instead of that god damned useless start screen
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but can anyone explain how the start menu is better than metro app grid? To launch an app from the start menu takes 4 or more clicks: Start menu --> programs --> scroll through all programs and click on program group --> launch actual program
Furthermore, all the above steps requires the user working with tiny 12 point font menus.
Now compare this with metro app launching: Start menu --> scroll until you find your app --> click to start app.
Step 2 (scrolling) can be eliminated if you place all your favorite programs in the first page. So why is the start menu better?
Software is not inventing math... just using it similar to how every field in engineering uses math. Pop open any vhdl or verilog book -- it looks like ada/pascal and C respectively. And yes, this software-like code that looks like algebraic formulas is used to create electronic circuits. The circuits and the code are patentable. So why can't software be patented? Stop repeating the same nonsense thousands of times that "Software is math!" It's not, it's technology.
Yes. The internet (automation) will help replace the taxi cab phone operators who assign taxis to customers. Instead of humans, the taxi driver will receive his instructions from a smartphone app.
So cab companies and their phone operators will probably become obsolete as they cannot compete price-wise with a computer server that will do their job for 1/1000th of their cost. The taxi drivers are not obsolete (yet). But they might get a new boss soon. This is very likely to happen just as large grocery stores like Wal-mart, Safeway etc. replaced the mom-n-pop stores.
Few manager/executive type people say things like this. Their choice is either keep it a trade secret or patent it... unless the stuff you're creating is not very important to the business. Most companies' existence is based on various secrets they possess.
Which effectively meant, it a competitor saw our system at work, copied it and patented it we'd probably be willing to pay them a license fee just to get off our backs - shocking, but probably the case.
So generous, maybe you should copy your product's source code tree to a usb drive and hand it over to your competitors to save them the trouble.
As for Microsoft and Zynga, they're both standing on the shoulders of giants
Read MS-DOS' history. You'll find that MS bought Q-DOS (aka 86-DOS) which was created by Paterson. According to DR-DOS creator, Kildall, Paterson pretty much cloned the entire interface of CP/M to create Q-DOS. The lack of software patents at the time meant he could legally do this. Back then microprocessors were rare and software for them rarer. Do you want to remove s/w patents and promote this type of lawlessness?
this. Augmented reality is about interacting with the real world. Virtual reality is about being cut off from it.
But virtual reality can be based on real data. Imagine you want to visualize certain aspects of the billions of petabytes of data that Facebook has mined from its users. What's better than a VR headset for such a purpose?
Yes, you can. When you pay with a credit card, what exactly have you exchanged?
When using a credit card, you're borrowing money (at around 10-20%/year interest rate) from the credit card company and using that pay for the product/service. But that's real money, created by the feds and distributed by major banks. It seems to me bitcoins appear out of thin air when you do the bitcoin system "favors" such as mining (i.e. finding the number X which when appended to a newly minted bitcoin block results in sha256(block) == 0x00000).
If total USD currencies are valued around $1 trillion (hypothetically), and BTC around $200 billion, won't having two sets of fiat currencies depreciate the value of fiat currencies in general and place a inflationary burden of 15-30% on people who don't own bitcoins and have never used it?
I get it now... bitcoins do exist but not uniquely like currency notes. They exist as "account balance or number of bitcoins" in your e-wallet. So, you have 2.9 bitcoins in the above block chain and this block chain's transactions is proof to others that you are the rightful owner of 2.9 bitcoins. Right?
When you're transferring $10 from one bank account to another or sending those via PayPal, that $10 doesn't have any "unique random number", it's just subtraction from your account balance and addition to another.
Sorry, it's not just addition and subtraction if the sender's bank is different from the receiver's bank. The sender's bank has to send the $10 to the receiver's bank (or remaining part after balancing other account transactions).
If sender and receiver belong to the same bank, then its just addition and subtraction as you say. But now, virtually speaking, a pointer in the bank record that used pointed you to the $10 now points the receiver to the same $10.
THERE IS NO BITCOIN. Definitely not physical, but not even virtual!...
Bitcoin is nothing more than a ledger of transactions.
Okay, but a transaction is a process, (a machine, an algorithm). And a process needs input(s) to produce output(s). So inputs and outputs in the previous sentence are nouns and a transaction is a verb. What are these nouns in the bitcoin world? Putting this another way, if you go to a grocery store, you can exchange cash (a thing, a noun) for a loaf of bread. The exchange is a transaction and you get a record of the transaction as a sales receipt and the grocery store keeps another copy. But no one confuses cash for a transaction (receipt). If you were to use bitcoin system instead of cash, then how would it go? You can't exchange a transaction (bitcoins) for a loaf of bread.
The public key is what people use to increase your ledger count.
Ledger count is cash? Public key used by others to add cash (ledger count) to your wallet?
The private key is what you use to decrease your ledge count by increasing someone else's ledger count..
Private key used by you to spend cash (ledger count) to buy real world things/services?
I'm not interested in the ledger because it simply records who owns what. I'm more interested in how the "what" (bitcoin in this case) came into existence.
I'm assuming a mining computer is similar to a govt. mint. A mint prints currency where each currency note is different from other notes based on its unique serial number. In a similar fashion, do these mining computers generate a coin which has a unique random number to differentiate it from the random numbers of other bitcoins? Is a bitcoin a random number with special attributes?
Then what exactly are these so-called mining computers producing after spending millions of dollars in computing power and electricity? Smoke and mirrors?
Does someone know what a single unencrypted bitcoin looks like? For eg, what is the length of a btc coin, in bits? What are the main components of a bitcoin expressed in the form of a C language struct?
Slashdot Mirror
Have they tried placing windmills near the ocean? It's very windy there.
Well, writing bug-free software (as in 100% defect free) is insanely difficult and expensive. Is the consumer ready to pay 100x the original cost? Formally proving even small segments of code requires a long difficult proof and the proof itself may have bugs. Doing the same for large non-trivial programs exponentially so.
Bigot? Not really. He's not opposed to gay people. He just wants them to prevent them from ruining the (religious) institution of marriage. The govt. and the courts did not invent marriage, religion did. So the courts have little power or right to redefine marriage to include same-sex partners.
Correction to second paragraph: The left-to-right and right-to-left sliding toggle switch in the video greatly resembles Apple's slide to unlock and should probably be considered prior art.
This should be considered as prior art as it performs exactly the same function, looks similar and most importantly has the same unlock mechanism as the iphone's slide-to-unlock. That is, both user interfaces open a door. The dead bolt is a real world representation (used in millions of homes around the world) of the idea whereas the apple's patent seems to have copied that idea into the computer software domain. So it fails the non-obviousness test. Just because you port something so common into computer UI does not make it non-obvious. Therefore it is not patent-worthy.
The video, on the other hand, does not show prior art of slide to unlock, just many variations of computer-based toggle switches. The solutions she presents is only vaguely related to slide-to-unlock (toggleness).
The problem with that is the government is neither capable nor interested in being on the cutting-edge of latest internet technologies. They should just provide the infrastructure that makes whatever type of cable the network provider is interested in installing cost-effective.
True, but road technology does not change every few years, the internet "roads" change.
Satellites are too expensive and slow. Instead, why doesn't the govt dig the trenches for the internet optical fibers using taxpayer money, then lease them out to competing internet providers. That is, the the conduit/hole/trench belongs to the govt and the local people, but the wires within the conduit belong to the internet companies. This way, many internet companies can compete because of they only have to install new fibers in already existing trenches, drastically reducing cost and encouraging competition and thereby lowering costs to consumers per Mbps speed.
But utilities are upgraded at a very slow pace because the govt regulates how much profit a utility company can make, putting brakes on innovation. With the internet, we want to replace/upgrade everything every 10 to 15 years and that is not possible if the internet is classified as a utility.
Utilities are fine for phone and electricity because they are mature technologies that don't change much year-to-year.
But scientists don't usually say "we don't know." Rather, they say emphatically, "Creation did not come from God." This is the whole Creation vs. Evolution theory debate.
Can kernel panic info also be saved to a disk log instead of just showing it on the screen? It could also be logged to a USB drive or something connected to the network or in the extreme case, CMOS space in BIOS.
Whatever the method, the log information should be easily accessible on reboot without the use of cameras/cell phones etc.
This law is kinda like:
"If you run with scissors and hurt someone it's okay to criminalize and sue the scissor manufacturer."
But what about the grad/phd students who actually invented this stuff? Do they see even a penny of this settlement? I don't think all the lab equipment and tools in the world is worth 100% of the patent rights going to the university.
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but can anyone explain how the start menu is better than metro app grid? To launch an app from the start menu takes 4 or more clicks:
Start menu --> programs --> scroll through all programs and click on program group --> launch actual program
Furthermore, all the above steps requires the user working with tiny 12 point font menus.
Now compare this with metro app launching:
Start menu --> scroll until you find your app --> click to start app.
Step 2 (scrolling) can be eliminated if you place all your favorite programs in the first page. So why is the start menu better?
Software is not inventing math... just using it similar to how every field in engineering uses math. Pop open any vhdl or verilog book -- it looks like ada/pascal and C respectively. And yes, this software-like code that looks like algebraic formulas is used to create electronic circuits. The circuits and the code are patentable. So why can't software be patented? Stop repeating the same nonsense thousands of times that "Software is math!" It's not, it's technology.
Yes. The internet (automation) will help replace the taxi cab phone operators who assign taxis to customers. Instead of humans, the taxi driver will receive his instructions from a smartphone app.
So cab companies and their phone operators will probably become obsolete as they cannot compete price-wise with a computer server that will do their job for 1/1000th of their cost. The taxi drivers are not obsolete (yet). But they might get a new boss soon. This is very likely to happen just as large grocery stores like Wal-mart, Safeway etc. replaced the mom-n-pop stores.
Few manager/executive type people say things like this. Their choice is either keep it a trade secret or patent it... unless the stuff you're creating is not very important to the business. Most companies' existence is based on various secrets they possess.
So generous, maybe you should copy your product's source code tree to a usb drive and hand it over to your competitors to save them the trouble.
Read MS-DOS' history. You'll find that MS bought Q-DOS (aka 86-DOS) which was created by Paterson. According to DR-DOS creator, Kildall, Paterson pretty much cloned the entire interface of CP/M to create Q-DOS. The lack of software patents at the time meant he could legally do this. Back then microprocessors were rare and software for them rarer. Do you want to remove s/w patents and promote this type of lawlessness?
No, not just games/graphics. Some of his books apply to all software
But virtual reality can be based on real data. Imagine you want to visualize certain aspects of the billions of petabytes of data that Facebook has mined from its users. What's better than a VR headset for such a purpose?
When using a credit card, you're borrowing money (at around 10-20%/year interest rate) from the credit card company and using that pay for the product/service. But that's real money, created by the feds and distributed by major banks. It seems to me bitcoins appear out of thin air when you do the bitcoin system "favors" such as mining (i.e. finding the number X which when appended to a newly minted bitcoin block results in sha256(block) == 0x00000).
If total USD currencies are valued around $1 trillion (hypothetically), and BTC around $200 billion, won't having two sets of fiat currencies depreciate the value of fiat currencies in general and place a inflationary burden of 15-30% on people who don't own bitcoins and have never used it?
I get it now... bitcoins do exist but not uniquely like currency notes. They exist as "account balance or number of bitcoins" in your e-wallet. So, you have 2.9 bitcoins in the above block chain and this block chain's transactions is proof to others that you are the rightful owner of 2.9 bitcoins. Right?
Sorry, it's not just addition and subtraction if the sender's bank is different from the receiver's bank. The sender's bank has to send the $10 to the receiver's bank (or remaining part after balancing other account transactions).
If sender and receiver belong to the same bank, then its just addition and subtraction as you say. But now, virtually speaking, a pointer in the bank record that used pointed you to the $10 now points the receiver to the same $10.
Okay, but a transaction is a process, (a machine, an algorithm). And a process needs input(s) to produce output(s). So inputs and outputs in the previous sentence are nouns and a transaction is a verb. What are these nouns in the bitcoin world? Putting this another way, if you go to a grocery store, you can exchange cash (a thing, a noun) for a loaf of bread. The exchange is a transaction and you get a record of the transaction as a sales receipt and the grocery store keeps another copy. But no one confuses cash for a transaction (receipt). If you were to use bitcoin system instead of cash, then how would it go? You can't exchange a transaction (bitcoins) for a loaf of bread.
Ledger count is cash? Public key used by others to add cash (ledger count) to your wallet?
Private key used by you to spend cash (ledger count) to buy real world things/services?
I'm not interested in the ledger because it simply records who owns what. I'm more interested in how the "what" (bitcoin in this case) came into existence.
I'm assuming a mining computer is similar to a govt. mint. A mint prints currency where each currency note is different from other notes based on its unique serial number. In a similar fashion, do these mining computers generate a coin which has a unique random number to differentiate it from the random numbers of other bitcoins? Is a bitcoin a random number with special attributes?
Then what exactly are these so-called mining computers producing after spending millions of dollars in computing power and electricity? Smoke and mirrors?
Does someone know what a single unencrypted bitcoin looks like? For eg, what is the length of a btc coin, in bits? What are the main components of a bitcoin expressed in the form of a C language struct?