When faced with the barrel of a gun you are just as likely to give up a password or PIN as a thumb print. When faced with serious physical coercion you might find yourself saying or doing a lot of things you hadn't thought you would. There are lots of reasons this might not be a good technology, but this certainly isn't one of them.
The general criteria for a patent is that it must be novel, not obvious to those working in the same field, and of practical use. Looking at the patent, it violates the 'not obvious' part of the criteria.
It seems to be saying that it's not obvious to string together all the functions that would be needed to do business internationally over the internet.
I get receipts from the gas pump, the ATM, and self serve checkouts. Why in the world can't an electronic voting machine produce 2 pieces of paper: one for me and one as a record for audit purposes? If nothing else, it seems Diebold is missing a revenue opportunity here. Make this an add on deluxe feature or something. There's a huge install base of these machines right now. If they don't do it someone else will.
While it's true that part of the reason the electoral college exists was to insure that each state was considered by the presidential candidates, another very important reason had to do with the state of political parties and mass communication at the time the constitution was written.
When the concept of the electoral college was created there were no political parties. They really didn't enter into the calculations of the founding fathers. Considering the size of the United States and the lack of any real means of communicating with the masses of people, it was thought necessary to have some means of having informed representatives of the people decide which candidate represented their local interests. Basically, the founders felt that the average person wasn't well enough informed to make a decision as to who should be president. Electors were supposed to get together and DEBATE. Not be a rubber stamp.
Political parties really altered the situation. A candidate, through his party organzation, could inform the masses of his platform.
The current state of politics in the US all but insures that the electoral college is an effective barrier to any third party candidate. The best they can hope for is to be a spoiler. The electoral college as it's currently implemented is a bad system that serves the two major parties better than it does people to the US.
Which useless IBM patent would you prefer they go after? Please cite why you think it is useless, and the benefit if it is overturned. Someone has to invest significant time in an effort to overturn a patent. You want to choose your targets carefully. The reason that this patent was considered important to overturn is not that it was owned by M$, but the potential impact if it wasn't.
It almost seems as if you feel the motivation for overturning individual patents should be to go after organizations, rather than to go after bad patents that could have a significant impact if not overturned.
The Eclipse Foundation is formed
exclusively as a non-profit trade association, as set out in section 501 (c) (6) of the Internal
Revenue Code (the "Code").
Good will in the geek community, free publicity for something that would have just laid around collecting dust otherwise, and maybe a $10 million tax deduction for donating to a non-profit. Not sure about the tax deduction, but this is a donation to a charitable organization, and you can deduct the value of what you donate to these organizations, such as the value of a used car.
I wouldn't mind the cameras so much if there was a rule that any cctv camera monitoring a public place had to be accessible to the internet. Hey, it's a public place, why shouldn't EVERYBODY get to see what's going on. This wouldn't be so much surveillance, as it would be the world's largest reality show. I want sound too. There'd be all sorts of uses for this. Just think of the educational possibilities. Children in small towns could watch pick pockets in action in central London. They could compare the solictaion techniques and appearances of street prostitutes. I could imagine certain street characters becoming international stars without ever knowing they had any fans. As an additional bonus, the number of unmonitored cameras would be significantly reduced. Britain would become the largest small town in the world.
In this litigous society we live in, the university can potentially be sued if it doesn't take some action to prevent malware from spreading on the network, and somebody loses a paper, or more, to a virus or worm. After all, the university network is a closed environment, under the control of the university. Forcing students to maintain AV software on their machines might leave the institution less open to lawsuits than doing nothing. A good attorney might be able to make a case for the university being liable in either situation. Hard to say, since like most people speculating about legal issues IANAL.
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When faced with the barrel of a gun you are just as likely to give up a password or PIN as a thumb print. When faced with serious physical coercion you might find yourself saying or doing a lot of things you hadn't thought you would. There are lots of reasons this might not be a good technology, but this certainly isn't one of them.
The general criteria for a patent is that it must be novel, not obvious to those working in the same field, and of practical use. Looking at the patent, it violates the 'not obvious' part of the criteria. It seems to be saying that it's not obvious to string together all the functions that would be needed to do business internationally over the internet.
Not entirely. It has had a number of articles on FOSS in general and several on the need to reform the US patent system.
I get receipts from the gas pump, the ATM, and self serve checkouts. Why in the world can't an electronic voting machine produce 2 pieces of paper: one for me and one as a record for audit purposes? If nothing else, it seems Diebold is missing a revenue opportunity here. Make this an add on deluxe feature or something. There's a huge install base of these machines right now. If they don't do it someone else will.
While it's true that part of the reason the electoral college exists was to insure that each state was considered by the presidential candidates, another very important reason had to do with the state of political parties and mass communication at the time the constitution was written.
When the concept of the electoral college was created there were no political parties. They really didn't enter into the calculations of the founding fathers. Considering the size of the United States and the lack of any real means of communicating with the masses of people, it was thought necessary to have some means of having informed representatives of the people decide which candidate represented their local interests. Basically, the founders felt that the average person wasn't well enough informed to make a decision as to who should be president. Electors were supposed to get together and DEBATE. Not be a rubber stamp.
Political parties really altered the situation. A candidate, through his party organzation, could inform the masses of his platform.
The current state of politics in the US all but insures that the electoral college is an effective barrier to any third party candidate. The best they can hope for is to be a spoiler. The electoral college as it's currently implemented is a bad system that serves the two major parties better than it does people to the US.
Which useless IBM patent would you prefer they go after? Please cite why you think it is useless, and the benefit if it is overturned. Someone has to invest significant time in an effort to overturn a patent. You want to choose your targets carefully. The reason that this patent was considered important to overturn is not that it was owned by M$, but the potential impact if it wasn't.
It almost seems as if you feel the motivation for overturning individual patents should be to go after organizations, rather than to go after bad patents that could have a significant impact if not overturned.
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation, incorporated in Delaware, USA, in June of 1999.
From http://www.eclipse.org/org/documents/Eclipse%20BYL AWS%202003_11_10%20Final.pdf
The Eclipse Foundation is formed exclusively as a non-profit trade association, as set out in section 501 (c) (6) of the Internal Revenue Code (the "Code").
Good will in the geek community, free publicity for something that would have just laid around collecting dust otherwise, and maybe a $10 million tax deduction for donating to a non-profit. Not sure about the tax deduction, but this is a donation to a charitable organization, and you can deduct the value of what you donate to these organizations, such as the value of a used car.
I wouldn't mind the cameras so much if there was a rule that any cctv camera monitoring a public place had to be accessible to the internet. Hey, it's a public place, why shouldn't EVERYBODY get to see what's going on. This wouldn't be so much surveillance, as it would be the world's largest reality show. I want sound too. There'd be all sorts of uses for this. Just think of the educational possibilities. Children in small towns could watch pick pockets in action in central London. They could compare the solictaion techniques and appearances of street prostitutes. I could imagine certain street characters becoming international stars without ever knowing they had any fans. As an additional bonus, the number of unmonitored cameras would be significantly reduced. Britain would become the largest small town in the world.
In this litigous society we live in, the university can potentially be sued if it doesn't take some action to prevent malware from spreading on the network, and somebody loses a paper, or more, to a virus or worm. After all, the university network is a closed environment, under the control of the university. Forcing students to maintain AV software on their machines might leave the institution less open to lawsuits than doing nothing. A good attorney might be able to make a case for the university being liable in either situation. Hard to say, since like most people speculating about legal issues IANAL.