What is it about this patent that makes it any different from any other kind of text translation??? Okay, let's say you've got a translation technology that can read some ascii and spit it out in a different langauge. This is not a new idea from Microsoft. This already exists from several sources. Now let's say you have a technology that lets people send small ascii lines to each other in realtime. This is also not anything new from Microsoft, it exists from multiple sources already. So how come when you attach the two technologies together in a *very* primitive obvious way - why is it that that becomes a patentable innovation? It's a good idea, but it's one that's obvious how you would go about implementing it, and therefore it's not appropriate for being patented. Just tell J. Random programmer the idea, and he could understand how to implement it without much brainpower, if he already had access to the source for the translator and the source for the IM software.
Despite the fact that I hate Microsoft, I will admit that as a product "wish list" idea, this is really great. It's a wonderful idea. But since patents only cover technical innovations, not marketing or business innovations, I don't see how this qualifies, as it is not a technically difficult thing to implement. Patenting it is like patenting the process of adding one to one to get two.
You're forgetting that I was comparing to everyone having their own individual gasoline-burning personal power plant that they drive down the road, which is the situation that exists today. The current emissions testing for personal cars amounts to diddly squat - as long as your car isn't so broken it was going to die in a year anyway, you pass. I'm not denying that corruption exists in energy companies. But overall it's not as bad as when it exists millions of times over and over in little cases with everyone's personal car.
You falsely assume I think Christianity is better than Islam. I don't Both are dangerously evil if allowed to get control of the reins of government. The difference is that Christianity *used* to have that control and lost it, while Islam in many places still has that control, and hasn't watered down the scriptures that talk of how religion should run everything in your life. (Christianity has those kinds of passages too, but nobody takes them seriously anymore. Christianity has had 700 more years to calm down than Islam has, but other than having that head start, it's not any better.)
I have no respect for theocracy. None. And that is exactly how much respect it deserves.
I'd rather see this than having Microsoft be the dominant distributor of Java for Windows users. This way they can't pull the bullshit tactic of trying to break Java in subtle ways to make it work on their platform and fail on others, like they did to anyone developing in J++. If MS doesn't distribute Java, then people will tend to get the uncorrupted, uncrippled, unsabotaged version right from the original source. After all, look how popular RealAudio is for newscasts, and it doesn't come by default on machines - people just install the plugin when it comes up.
Nope. There's two possibilities: 1 - he meant what he said, in which case he doesn't know how search engines work, or 2 - he was kidding, in which case he's a liar.
The other hand is typing, hitting hotkeys, or holding up a paper. Yes, it IS busy. With two hands I *should* be able to do two things at once. When I have to use both to do one thing, my ability to work quickly has been hindered.
Standarization. Contrast this to the situation now, where almost everyone uses a different search engine, requiring website designers to submit their pages to hundreds of different databases.
The funny thing is that 5 of the 9 things you listed are precisely what *kept* me from ever wanting to by a Mac. Only one actually makes me more likey to want to buy one (dropping OS 9), and the remaining three were neutral, neither helping nor hindering my decision. If those features are really do to Jobs, then he's why Apple never got any money from me.
Plus, notice how many of those "prick" decisions got reversed. OS X most certainly is not "all GUI" like previous versions were. Different Color cases! Same Color cases! One-button mice! many button mice! Color displays suck! (In Mac Classic days, Jobs decided to go monocrhome in order to squeeze a few more pixels of resolution out, when everyone else had already gone color.) No, wait, they don't.
> You are statisically more likely to be hit than to > hit someone.
Eh? Uhh. That's not possible, if by "you" you meant the set of all vehicle drivers. Every collision involves two people, one of whom is the hitter and the other the hittee. There should be a 50/50 split. Every time you were the one hit, someone else was the hitter.
>Changing the source of pollution does not eliminate >the contaminants or remove our dependence on >foreign oil/non-renewable energy.
Actually, it does. If each and every vehicle is an oil-burning engine, you can't get good control over the emissions. If all the energy production is carried out at a smaller number of large institutions, such as electrical power plants, it's easier to monitor and correct the emissions.
Nice try bringing up the taxation issue, but the law makes stem cell research illegal, which goes beyond just choosing not to fund it. *Exceptions* were made for those facilities already involved, but that's not the same as making it legal. They were just grandfathered-in.
By that argument, sperm is human too. So don't you dare waste it. Every time you fail to have sex in a situation where you could have, you are aborting a potential human life. Abstainers are baby-killers. Now, see how silly this game is?
Absolutely. If "sufficiently advanced" robot technology existed, it could do the work, but that's a tautology because of what the word "sufficient" means. If sufficiently advanced time travel technology existed, I could see dinosaurs. Too bad it doesn't.
People keep complaining about how the design for the shuttle was polluted by polticial motivations, but the Soviet system was too. The reason Buran was controlled automatcially wasn't to fufill some technical need. It was political. The Soviet space program didn't want to give cosmonauts the ability to defect. If they were in control of the capsule it would have been trivially easy to (for example) do a de-orbit burn on the Soyuz timed to bring them down somewhere outside the Soviet Union, on parachutes, right into the country of their choice, opening the capsule and saying, "Hi there, would your government like a look at a soviet space capsule in exchange for giving us asylum? Great, thanks." All their missions had the ground control in charge and the "pilot" was just ballast.
The shuttle is as automated as the pilots feel comfortable with. The computer ground control still does all the calculating, but the human on board tells the craft to execute the plan, and if there was a reason to the crew can take manual control of everything and ignore the plan uploaded from ground control. So the shuttle is not less automatic that Buran. It's just go BOTH automatic and manual systems, and the Buran did not.
Since it's an emergency situation you are talking about, wouldn't it be possible to simply put the shuttle *near* the space station and use EVA gear to go from one to the other? If that was feasable, then you wouldn't need the appartus for docking if you're only worried about using this as a contingency emergency plan.
Gasoline is one means of making cars travel on roads. It's not the only means. A heavy electric car with massive battery packs also wears the road down, and pays no gas tax. Hydrogen is anothe possibility. So, with roads being payed for only by gasoline burning cars, there is little reason for the government to encourage developing alternate fuel source cars. The current system is not sustainable. It worked in the past because there was only one kind of fuel, and it's uses for other purposes was negligable. That will soon no longer be true. You can't tax electricial charges for road use since people could charge their car from home. (And if you make it illegal to do so, you are setting up a mandatory customer base for electrical charging stations, and that presents it's own type of problem.)
So the RIAA guy says this partway through the interview:
When you buy a CD, you should feel free to copy it for your own use. So, if you buy a CD that you keep at home, you should feel free to make a copy that you have in your car. It is not legal, ethical or cool to copy somebody else's CD for your own use.
This is a very reasonable stance. Too bad it's not in line with RIAA policy to stifle all technology that lets people make copies for personal use, and whack with a DMCA suit anyone who talks of how to make this actually possible.
I don't think Oppenheim's answers in this interview are compatable with the actions of the RIAA for which he speaks. I wish somebody would have brought this up as a question directly to him in the interview. "You seem to think it is perfectly okay for people to make copies for their own use, even copies that transfer format (i.e. audio CD tracks becoming MP3 files on your computer, provided you don't give copies out to others.) You also state that P2P can have legal uses and the technology itself shouldn't be stifled. Why then does the organization you are speaking for, the RIAA, apparently follow a policy of trying to curb such technology, and enforce DRM techniques that prevent BOTH legal and illegal copying?"
I really wish someone would have asked that. The problem is that the questions were prepared ahead of time, before the seeminingly contradictory answers from Oppenheim started coming out.
If you want to punish for pollution, that's an entirely seperate issue from charging for road maintenence. Gas taxes don't pay for pollution cleanup. They only pay for roads. Regardless of whether I pay $5 or $50 for gas tax, none of it is having any effect on pollution. And NO, two cars of equal weight don't have equal mileage. For one thing, not even if they are the same model. A car with 100,000 miles on it will have much worse gas mileage than one bought yesterday, even if they are the same make and model. Yes, you can make it feel better by pretending the gas tax is also paying for pollution, but that's not where the funds are going. And taxing for the sake of making a disincentive doesn't work either. Tax polluting cars more than clean ones and you end up giving the government an incentive to discourage companies from making cleaner cars.
It's like a gas tax. People who use the most gas, and therefore use the roads the most, [snip]
Stop. That's not true. If I buy gasoline for a lawnmower, that mower is not using the roads at all, but I'm still paying the tax. Also, two cars of equal weight put the same wear on the road even if one is more fuel efficient than the other and thus pays less gas tax.
Yeah, and when I was going through school we no longer knew how to use slide rules, and I remember how the old fogeys used to lament that. And we no longer remember how to chisel on stone tablets either. This doesn't bother me one bit. What matters is the language comprehension, not the tool used to write. I think the advent of computers increases literacy by giving kids and incentive to practice reading.
Nope. If gas station attendants denied people the right to buy gasoline and put it in a (safely designed for gasoline) can, then how would you mow your lawn? Would everyone be expected to throw away their gasoline powered mowers?
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The reason many geeks don't like IE is precisely because it doesn't "just work". Not on the OS platform they'd like to be using.
What is it about this patent that makes it any different from any other kind of text translation??? Okay, let's say you've got a translation technology that can read some ascii and spit it out in a different langauge. This is not a new idea from Microsoft. This already exists from several sources. Now let's say you have a technology that lets people send small ascii lines to each other in realtime. This is also not anything new from Microsoft, it exists from multiple sources already. So how come when you attach the two technologies together in a *very* primitive obvious way - why is it that that becomes a patentable innovation? It's a good idea, but it's one that's obvious how you would go about implementing it, and therefore it's not appropriate for being patented. Just tell J. Random programmer the idea, and he could understand how to implement it without much brainpower, if he already had access to the source for the translator and the source for the IM software.
Despite the fact that I hate Microsoft, I will admit that as a product "wish list" idea, this is really great. It's a wonderful idea. But since patents only cover technical innovations, not marketing or business innovations, I don't see how this qualifies, as it is not a technically difficult thing to implement. Patenting it is like patenting the process of adding one to one to get two.
You're forgetting that I was comparing to everyone having their own individual gasoline-burning personal power plant that they drive down the road, which is the situation that exists today. The current emissions testing for personal cars amounts to diddly squat - as long as your car isn't so broken it was going to die in a year anyway, you pass. I'm not denying that corruption exists in energy companies. But overall it's not as bad as when it exists millions of times over and over in little cases with everyone's personal car.
You falsely assume I think Christianity is better than Islam. I don't Both are dangerously evil if allowed to get control of the reins of government. The difference is that Christianity *used* to have that control and lost it, while Islam in many places still has that control, and hasn't watered down the scriptures that talk of how religion should run everything in your life. (Christianity has those kinds of passages too, but nobody takes them seriously anymore. Christianity has had 700 more years to calm down than Islam has, but other than having that head start, it's not any better.)
I have no respect for theocracy. None. And that is exactly how much respect it deserves.
I'd rather see this than having Microsoft be the dominant distributor of Java for Windows users. This way they can't pull the bullshit tactic of trying to break Java in subtle ways to make it work on their platform and fail on others, like they did to anyone developing in J++. If MS doesn't distribute Java, then people will tend to get the uncorrupted, uncrippled, unsabotaged version right from the original source. After all, look how popular RealAudio is for newscasts, and it doesn't come by default on machines - people just install the plugin when it comes up.
You have no idea who PhysicsGenius is, do you?
Nope. There's two possibilities: 1 - he meant what he said, in which case he doesn't know how search engines work, or 2 - he was kidding, in which case he's a liar.
The other hand is typing, hitting hotkeys, or holding up a paper. Yes, it IS busy. With two hands I *should* be able to do two things at once. When I have to use both to do one thing, my ability to work quickly has been hindered.
Standarization. Contrast this to the situation now, where almost everyone uses a different search engine, requiring website designers to submit their pages to hundreds of different databases.
You have no idea how search engines work, do you?
..Requiring a waste of using two hands for what is essentailly a mousing opearation.
The funny thing is that 5 of the 9 things you listed are precisely what *kept* me from ever wanting to by a Mac. Only one actually makes me more likey to want to buy one (dropping OS 9), and the remaining three were neutral, neither helping nor hindering my decision. If those features are really do to Jobs, then he's why Apple never got any money from me.
Plus, notice how many of those "prick" decisions got reversed. OS X most certainly is not "all GUI" like previous versions were. Different Color cases! Same Color cases! One-button mice! many button mice! Color displays suck! (In Mac Classic days, Jobs decided to go monocrhome in order to squeeze a few more pixels of resolution out, when everyone else had already gone color.) No, wait, they don't.
> You are statisically more likely to be hit than to
> hit someone.
Eh? Uhh. That's not possible, if by "you" you meant the set of all vehicle drivers. Every collision involves two people, one of whom is the hitter and the other the hittee. There should be a 50/50 split. Every time you were the one hit, someone else was the hitter.
>Want to stop terrorism? Don't piss people off by >stationing your troops on their soil.
Or dare to be less than worshipful of their religion in their theocracy.
>Changing the source of pollution does not eliminate >the contaminants or remove our dependence on >foreign oil/non-renewable energy.
Actually, it does. If each and every vehicle is an oil-burning engine, you can't get good control over the emissions. If all the energy production is carried out at a smaller number of large institutions, such as electrical power plants, it's easier to monitor and correct the emissions.
Nice try bringing up the taxation issue, but the law makes stem cell research illegal, which goes beyond just choosing not to fund it. *Exceptions* were made for those facilities already involved, but that's not the same as making it legal. They were just grandfathered-in.
By that argument, sperm is human too. So don't you dare waste it. Every time you fail to have sex in a situation where you could have, you are aborting a potential human life. Abstainers are baby-killers. Now, see how silly this game is?
> Ford, like the other vehicle manufacturers, only
> sells what the people want
American consumers, like any other, can't by that which isn't even on the market.
Absolutely. If "sufficiently advanced" robot technology existed, it could do the work, but that's a tautology because of what the word "sufficient" means. If sufficiently advanced time travel technology existed, I could see dinosaurs. Too bad it doesn't.
People keep complaining about how the design for the shuttle was polluted by polticial motivations, but the Soviet system was too. The reason Buran was controlled automatcially wasn't to fufill some technical need. It was political. The Soviet space program didn't want to give cosmonauts the ability to defect. If they were in control of the capsule it would have been trivially easy to (for example) do a de-orbit burn on the Soyuz timed to bring them down somewhere outside the Soviet Union, on parachutes, right into the country of their choice, opening the capsule and saying, "Hi there, would your government like a look at a soviet space capsule in exchange for giving us asylum? Great, thanks." All their missions had the ground control in charge and the "pilot" was just ballast.
The shuttle is as automated as the pilots feel comfortable with. The computer ground control still does all the calculating, but the human on board tells the craft to execute the plan, and if there was a reason to the crew can take manual control of everything and ignore the plan uploaded from ground control. So the shuttle is not less automatic that Buran. It's just go BOTH automatic and manual systems, and the Buran did not.
Since it's an emergency situation you are talking about, wouldn't it be possible to simply put the shuttle *near* the space station and use EVA gear to go from one to the other? If that was feasable, then you wouldn't need the appartus for docking if you're only worried about using this as a contingency emergency plan.
Gasoline is one means of making cars travel on roads. It's not the only means. A heavy electric car with massive battery packs also wears the road down, and pays no gas tax. Hydrogen is anothe possibility. So, with roads being payed for only by gasoline burning cars, there is little reason for the government to encourage developing alternate fuel source cars. The current system is not sustainable. It worked in the past because there was only one kind of fuel, and it's uses for other purposes was negligable. That will soon no longer be true. You can't tax electricial charges for road use since people could charge their car from home. (And if you make it illegal to do so, you are setting up a mandatory customer base for electrical charging stations, and that presents it's own type of problem.)
This is a very reasonable stance. Too bad it's not in line with RIAA policy to stifle all technology that lets people make copies for personal use, and whack with a DMCA suit anyone who talks of how to make this actually possible.
I don't think Oppenheim's answers in this interview are compatable with the actions of the RIAA for which he speaks. I wish somebody would have brought this up as a question directly to him in the interview. "You seem to think it is perfectly okay for people to make copies for their own use, even copies that transfer format (i.e. audio CD tracks becoming MP3 files on your computer, provided you don't give copies out to others.) You also state that P2P can have legal uses and the technology itself shouldn't be stifled. Why then does the organization you are speaking for, the RIAA, apparently follow a policy of trying to curb such technology, and enforce DRM techniques that prevent BOTH legal and illegal copying?"
I really wish someone would have asked that. The problem is that the questions were prepared ahead of time, before the seeminingly contradictory answers from Oppenheim started coming out.
If you want to punish for pollution, that's an entirely seperate issue from charging for road maintenence. Gas taxes don't pay for pollution cleanup. They only pay for roads. Regardless of whether I pay $5 or $50 for gas tax, none of it is having any effect on pollution. And NO, two cars of equal weight don't have equal mileage. For one thing, not even if they are the same model. A car with 100,000 miles on it will have much worse gas mileage than one bought yesterday, even if they are the same make and model. Yes, you can make it feel better by pretending the gas tax is also paying for pollution, but that's not where the funds are going. And taxing for the sake of making a disincentive doesn't work either. Tax polluting cars more than clean ones and you end up giving the government an incentive to discourage companies from making cleaner cars.
It's like a gas tax. People who use the most gas, and therefore use the roads the most, [snip]
Stop. That's not true. If I buy gasoline for a lawnmower, that mower is not using the roads at all, but I'm still paying the tax. Also, two cars of equal weight put the same wear on the road even if one is more fuel efficient than the other and thus pays less gas tax.
Yeah, and when I was going through school we no longer knew how to use slide rules, and I remember how the old fogeys used to lament that. And we no longer remember how to chisel on stone tablets either. This doesn't bother me one bit. What matters is the language comprehension, not the tool used to write. I think the advent of computers increases literacy by giving kids and incentive to practice reading.
Nope. If gas station attendants denied people the right to buy gasoline and put it in a (safely designed for gasoline) can, then how would you mow your lawn? Would everyone be expected to throw away their gasoline powered mowers?