There was a short science fiction story that went something like this.
Alien arrives on Earth.
Alien asks to view all Earth encyclopedias.
Alien encodes all the content as a single very massive integer.
Alien treats number as a fraction between 0 and 1.
Alien takes out a crystal rod, measures, and makes a single mark on it.
Alien goes home with the rod to decode later.
Of course, a few terabytes of digits would exceed the resolution of any atomic matter, but the idea was there.
Let's actually spend our time trying to bust patents that are being used to SUE or RESTRICT other people, huh? Blind hatred or devotion for a company and its operations is just another example of childish groupthink.
Microsoft is one of the better cases in the patent arena; they rarely if ever sue over patent infringement (anyone have headlines showing Microsoft patent suits?).
Microsoft and many other companies hold a vast array of patents for purely defensive position. Nobody else can sue them for those methods, and nobody who is infringing on these methods can sue them for OTHER patented methods.
It is the latter case which keeps Microsoft or other companies from merely opening these methods to the public domain. If Microsoft had no patents, then it would be barraged by all the other companies who DO have stupid overbroad patents. As it is, Microsoft's ace in the hole is in their own patent holdings.
Maybe I've been out of the Linux distro comparison charts, but do any of the Linux kernels or distributions have hibernate support?
(Hibernate: all power goes off, and the hard drive's boot sector is set to load memory and processor state directly from a memory mapped chunk of the disk, avoiding all the individual component loading time.)
My laptop's now a few months old, and I have never truly rebooted it: every day I just open the lid and up pops Windows 2000, right where I left it. It's never bluescreened(*). I use a 11Mbps wireless LAN to read in bed. I love the fast boot from hibernation, especially when battery time is already less than a transcontinental flight.
(*) It's the drivers that'll kill Windows 95/98/NT/2K. The system isn't well-written to deal with shitty third parties like ATI, but a laptop's setup is pretty simple and doesn't depend on flaky bizarre upgrades of drivers all the time. Months of uptime (minus hibernate at night and driving), no bluescreen.
The noise perturbation function was turned off (set to introduce an error of zero) about a year ago. This feature of the system is called 'Selective Availability'. This can still be adjusted for military purposes, even on a regional basis, but SA is a dying feature.
Too many of our (western) armed forces rely on non-milspec GPS units. If the milspec receivers are in short supply, Magellan and Garmin civilian units are often used in the field instead.
The error introduced is variable, but still smaller than the inherent error in a non-modern missile system such as Iraqi/Russian SCUD. More modern weapons would hit a target by video or uv laser seeking reckoning, not by onboard GPS receipt.
Civilian uses for SA=0 are the official reason it was shut off. An ambulance called to a location given by an OnStar GPS would potentially know which side of the road it's talking about; important where a highway has long tall medians.
Also, civil pilots rely on GPS heavily for lesser-mapped airstrips.
Microsoft provides a LOT of hooks in their operating system specifically to encourage third-party opportunities. It's just good business to let third parties write cool stuff to extend your platform. Those competitors who don't take advantage of the documented ones always cry about how there must be a lot of undocumented ones that give Microsoft the advantage. Walking through your arguments...
Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer (the file management program) [...] look and run the basically the same. For example, if you are running IE, you have the ability to browse AND MANAGE your local hard drive, just like in Windows Explorer. Now since MS also include that crappy My Computer program in their OS too, why did they allow their web browser to MANAGE FILES/FOLDERS? Explain this to me with a straight face please.
Norton and many other companies have long made complete rewrites/replacements for the shell. It's a documented registry/win.ini setting, and has been ever since HP wanted to replace the Windows 2.0 shell. "SHELL=EXPLORER.EXE" That's so hard to change to "SHELL=NAVIGATOR.EXE"?
Let's say that Netscape didn't WANT to compete with the integration with Explorer. Okay, another hook provided by Microsoft is the SHELLOPEN function that can hook "filename conventions" like "\\smbhost\smbshare", "http://host/page", "ftp://host/page", "file:///d:/path/file" and so on. Netscape could have provided any of those hooks, and been able to offer its advantages there, too.
This is not an exhaustive list. There are literally hundreds of hooks that Netscape could have used, but they decided to use the DoJ as a hook instead.
Secondly, in regards to the "freedom" that someone would have to install navigator onto their OS, that task requires the ABILITY to find, download and install the program in question . Out of those 100 million net users, how many do you think could have accomplished this?
Let's see, how many newbies are competent enough to download and install greeting card programs? Print shop programs? Email messages from Hotmail? The Melissa virus? Newbies are these app-makers' bread and butter. People download stuff all the time, and it's a mark of a competent software package to make that installation easy for those newbies. If Netscape found that the newbie was the barrier, that's Netscape's fault, not Microsoft's.
Finally, all of you who manage Win98 boxes know how friggin difficult it is to get rid of that IE program. I'm not talking about deleting the shortcut off of the desktop--I'm talking about annihilating the sucker off of the OS. How many places does that program hide in the OS?? Let me count the ways... On the desktop, notice that the IE shortcut sits right next to all of the other Win essential programs like My Computer, Network Neighborhood, whatever. This is on purpose. MS designed Explorer to be considered as an essential part of the OS (for the average users they covet)--make no mistake about it.
Hm, when I set up a recent laptop, it had Adobe Type Manager pre-installed. I pulled the shortcut out of the startup group. Same goes for the greeting card program, the Encarta shortcut, and about five other icons I didn't need, too. How many icons does RealPlayer add to your desktop, startup menu, personal folders, tray, and context menus? Geesh! Now, I could have gone through and eradicated the files, if I cared. I didn't care, I had tons of space left over. It was *functionally* gone. I'm sure one of those "cleanup" utilities would have found 50MB to reclaim.
Now, if you never show an address bar in your tray, and you never type a URL in the File,Run... box, and you never click on the IE, and you use Netscape for your daily web browsing, how is the IE's presence in the OS or on the disk really hurting you? It's *functionally* gone, even if it has files and hooks all over the place which you never use.
If you don't smoke, do you remove the ashtray component from your car? No, you either leave it idle or you put coins there. If you don't like Da Vinci, do you have to eradicate the museums who "waste space" or "waste your taxes" on those works?
So, please, tell me how free the average PC user was to choose Navigator instead...
Um, I dunno... how about "put cd in drive, press OK a few times"?
What part of 'remand to the original judge' didn't you get?
Sure, Jackson could be recused, but if he weren't already biased (or tainted with the appearance of prejudice), then remanding to the original judge has a lot of benefits: the appellate court can have the original judge clarify or repair portions of the ruling without starting from scratch.
A new judge below the circuit court would have to start from scratch. Do you think that another two years on this case is good for competition and legal clarity on the general monopoly issues, or good for the consumers potentially harmed in 1996?
"Open Source" fits in with capitalism nicely (though RMS would disagree).
No, he'd agree that "The Open Source Movement condones the mixture of proprietary and non-proprietary solutions, whereas the Free Software Movement has more ambitious goals to ensure freedoms by making software free of proprietary controls." (Paraphrased from his last letter re: Allchin and the American Way.)
Not that I agree with RMS's goals, but I try to at least understand his argument more clearly.
The code of conduct for the judiciary states that a judge must not appear biased at all, throughout the case, even throughout the full appellate process. The appeals court cannot now in good conscience remand the case back to Jackson, which would be an option that was open to them before now. So Jackson has screwed up the appellate process by showing bias now, even if he wasn't biased at the beginning of the trial.
I was hoping to write a sci-fi short story, many years ago. The thrust is on this topic, as well as on the "Anticryptography" theories employed in the SETI project.
In this, a SETI-like project was trying to make the Encyclopedia Terra. The media had a casing made of a hardy metal, engraved on the inside with the introductory materials that would explain how our language worked and how to read the denser media protected within. The media, graduated into denser and denser volumes, then described our technologies from simple to complex, as well as other scientific data about Earth.
Shortly afterwards, a nuclear holocaust wiped out pretty much all Science on the planet. A working sample of the Encyclopedia wasn't launched in a space probe; it was instead found by some of the progenic humans on Earth.
Encyclopedia Terra would bootstrap Earth. How would our world religions be shaped if "how-to" were the focus, instead of our current religions' penchant for espousing "thou-shalt-not"? Our Restrictive God's society torn down by Science; the next society's Instructive God torn down ultimately by Faith?
Year 2000 Patent Office Fees collected: $984,000,000
Year 2000 Patent Office expenditures: $881,000,000
Remaining for contribution to general revenues: $103,000,000
(From the Patent Office)
If the USPTO were like the USPS, then they'd be autonomous, and able to fold that $103M back into improving the service. But Congress instead funnels $103M into their own pet pork-barrel projects.
$103M. That's One Hundred Three Million Dollars. "A million here, a million there; pretty soon, you're talking real money." Fiddling small change, uh huh.
Patents are not about who is right, or who is first; patents are
about who can sue.
The US PTO is a money-making service for the government, and this
fact is why it operates as it does.
There is a misconception that it is the central duty of the PTO to
form a blockade against granting patents. The PTO can and will block
applications where there's heavy similarity with prior art or existing
patents, but that's really just a guideline to using the service, not
the core function.
The PTO's purpose is to grant patents for a fee, and it's wholly
suited to do so.
The application vetting process of the PTO is a cost center
for the operation of the PTO. This is akin to saying that customer
service is a cost center for the operation of AT&T. It is
required, but they'll cut costs as much as they can get away with.
To fix the patent application vetting process, two things must happen:
Congress must stop using the PTO's filing fees as a revenue
source for other pet interests instead of the PTO's own budget, and
The PTO needs to allow third parties to aid the vetting process by
challenging potential patents before
they're granted.
At the minimum, if the PTO would publish the abstract for each patent
application at the time of filing, then third parties could submit
"helpful" arguments against controversial applications. The PTO can then weigh
obviousness against challenges without incurring the costs of doing all
the searching themselves.
Once a patent has been granted, the Patent Office does not get
involved in disputes; that is a matter for the courts.
Back in the 80s, I'd use DOS and play Infocom games constantly. Whenever I lost my train of thought, I'd do either L or DIR absentmindedly, just to get me restarted.
Of course, half the time, I'd get I don't know the word 'dir.' and the other half I'd get Bad command or filename: L.
Got so bad I made an L.BAT which did a DIR, which helped a little.:)
Back in 1940s or so, a dreadful series of space opera (precursor to Sci-Fi) was written. The Lensman Series by E.E. "Doc" Smith. It was a seminal work. I will avoid the particulars, but there is a minor sight gag that still rings true. AND BONUS, it's ON TOPIC today!
Early in the series, a main character is speeding on a motorcycle or car or something, heading for somewhere I forget. We learn of his annoyance and apathy at bigger and worse advertisements just in passing, but it comes back to haunt him many chapters (or is it several books?) later.
He's now got the mind-expanding powers of the mystic Lens artifact on his wrist, and he's visiting Rigel IV. On Rigel IV, apparently, the natives didn't evolve a sense of sight, since there wasn't much visible light there anyway. Instead, they evolved a sense of "knowing" where objects were spatially. The main character is tapping into a taxi-driver's sense of matter, while the taxi-driver zooms around recklessly.
The main character notes that there are these very strange areas, domes of opaque-like matter where this matter-sensing ability seems to stop. He asks the driver, and the driver replies, "Oh, those are just advertisements. I guess I just ignore them." The driver pays more attention to them, and inside the domes can now be discerned many mind-catching moving objects, pleading passersby to buy this product, or use that product.
Undercurrent: we all ignore ads, regardless of what race we are. Okay, long story for such a small anecdote, but did anyone else read this damn series?
The Windows 95 user interface by itself had a series of somewhat unrelated Theme organizers.
A theme for the coloring, typefacing and sizing metrics of common controls.
A theme for the background and standard icons.
A theme for the sound events that could be invoked by apps in a standard way.
A theme (or profile) for various recurring hardware enumerations, such as 'docked' or 'undocked' for laptops.
This patent by Apple appears to discuss a generalized system that combines all of these classes of "theme engines" into an over-arching "theme engine" that controls them all at once.
Windows 95 did not have a central theme manager, but the Windows 95 Plus Pack (released almost simultaneously) did. The sounds, icons, wallpapers, colors, fonts and metrics themes could be controlled centrally by choosing themes with the Plus Pack theme manager.
Also, if you specified that different login names had their own private preferences, then Windows 95 managed all of those settings separately for each user. (Much as Unix systems do with.bashrc,.emacsrc or other shell login preference ~/.foorc files.) Switch users and all of these preferences are changed automatically (albeit shutting down all foreground tasks).
It looks like Apple has a high hill to climb when Microsoft attacks on this. Of course, Microsoft has been laying low and settling cases out of court to keep the litigation threats to a minimum these days. Then again, Microsoft's bloc of non-voting shares in Apple (circa 1996?) may still be a strong deterrent against Apple's wielding this particular patent over them.
Actually, a Pound Sterling was more typically a pound of silver, not gold, in value. Hence the term 'sterling silver.' The term 'sterling' refers to purity of gold or silver, but the Pound was of silver specifically.
But Twiki, the piece of recycled aluminum who did lifelike impersonations of Gary Coleman, can't escape mention here as Aibo's lovechild.
I'd like to see a shooting gallery where you can take potshots at Alf, Twiki, and that crappy baby plesiosaur on Land of the Lost. Any other lame puppet or suit sidekicks worth mentioning here?
IANAL - Incompetent Advice Necessarily A Liability
Why do people ask advice on Ask Slashdot where a real lawyer is almost essential? If you're concerned about a licensing issue, especially with military brass, why would you even consider taking the opinions of anonymous amateur pundits on a for-profit advocacy weblog?
Get some professional, personal, specific advice from someone who is accountable for the answers they provide.
No, I did say that in severe cases, they can turn it off. It was in fact during Operation Desert Storm that they tried tuning SA for best military advantage, but they reversed themselves.
First, our own forces didn't have enough milspec GPS units available, so they had relatives mailing over civilian Garmins and Magellans. Second, the Iraqis didn't have much in the way of GPS, so they decided to kill SA so our forces could use civilian GPS signals.
SA is also targetable to terrain: if they want the satellites to remain mum over Bosnia, it won't hurt your Garmin receivers in Texas one bit. That's the "selective" in "SA".
in a freak accident takes out one of the GPS satellites. Every bit of consumer electronics in the 'North American Marketing Region' immediately shuts down
Nice joke, nice theory, but that's not how GPS works. There are up to 30 satellites, including spares, in orbit. The receiver needs to have line of sight to three of them to pinpoint latitude and longitude. My receiver usually can see six or more, giving altitude and redundancy.
Also, to the other jokester who commented that military scrambling could break devices who depend on GPS, the military SA (Selective Ability) feature just degrades the accuracy, it would not render GPS totally offline. It could, in extreme scenarios, but too many USA forces depend on non-military-enabled consumer GPS units.
This is my issue with the FSF philosophy that companies
shouldn't be able to remain proprietary about their source
code, if they also use elements of process that are "Free."
Companies are proprietary about injection-molding
techniques, they're proprietary about the integrated circuit
layouts, they're proprietary about so many physical processes
that go on behind closed doors. They also use such open
techniques such as how to mop the floors at night, and which
motor oils they use when they're maintaining the printing
presses. Why is software magically different?
If you aren't allowed to cut and paste existing processes
with no effort, you'll have to innovate. Sure you
have to start from scratch, or from simpler licensed
technologies, but by setting down your own requirements for
the new process, you'll probably have new strengths that the
existing ways don't have.
Heck, maybe the GPL is good for something. When I see
that a module is under the GPL, and I want to sell my
product, I have to skip the not-so-"Free" methods and write
it from scratch, thus making it fit exactly to my needs.
To me, Open Source and Free Software are irrelevant. Get the job done. If
your competitors want to do the same, let them. If you want
to open your source as a service to mankind, go for it.
If you show me your methods and then tell me not to use them, well,
that's just being petty.
A shrunken coin weighs exactly the same afterwards, and its density is also unchanged - it's merely the shape that's been altered.
Ever hear of Shrinky Dinks? This plastic material goes through a similar transformation when heated in a regular food oven. Two dimensions shrink, while it gets thicker to maintain the same volume and density.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a short science fiction story that went something like this.
Alien asks to view all Earth encyclopedias.
Alien encodes all the content as a single very massive integer.
Alien treats number as a fraction between 0 and 1.
Alien takes out a crystal rod, measures, and makes a single mark on it.
Alien goes home with the rod to decode later.
Of course, a few terabytes of digits would exceed the resolution of any atomic matter, but the idea was there.
Let's actually spend our time trying to bust patents that are being used to SUE or RESTRICT other people, huh? Blind hatred or devotion for a company and its operations is just another example of childish groupthink.
Microsoft is one of the better cases in the patent arena; they rarely if ever sue over patent infringement (anyone have headlines showing Microsoft patent suits?).
Microsoft and many other companies hold a vast array of patents for purely defensive position. Nobody else can sue them for those methods, and nobody who is infringing on these methods can sue them for OTHER patented methods.
It is the latter case which keeps Microsoft or other companies from merely opening these methods to the public domain. If Microsoft had no patents, then it would be barraged by all the other companies who DO have stupid overbroad patents. As it is, Microsoft's ace in the hole is in their own patent holdings.
Even more links.
Yahoo!'s Scientology/OpposingViews page
It's interesting that Yahoo! made a subdivision under that for the copyright infringement links.
Local & State governments practically have no other source of income.
Property taxes are "practically no income" for states and localities? Um, right.
Maybe I've been out of the Linux distro comparison charts, but do any of the Linux kernels or distributions have hibernate support?
(Hibernate: all power goes off, and the hard drive's boot sector is set to load memory and processor state directly from a memory mapped chunk of the disk, avoiding all the individual component loading time.)
My laptop's now a few months old, and I have never truly rebooted it: every day I just open the lid and up pops Windows 2000, right where I left it. It's never bluescreened(*). I use a 11Mbps wireless LAN to read in bed. I love the fast boot from hibernation, especially when battery time is already less than a transcontinental flight.
(*) It's the drivers that'll kill Windows 95/98/NT/2K. The system isn't well-written to deal with shitty third parties like ATI, but a laptop's setup is pretty simple and doesn't depend on flaky bizarre upgrades of drivers all the time. Months of uptime (minus hibernate at night and driving), no bluescreen.
The noise perturbation function was turned off (set to introduce an error of zero) about a year ago. This feature of the system is called 'Selective Availability'. This can still be adjusted for military purposes, even on a regional basis, but SA is a dying feature.
Too many of our (western) armed forces rely on non-milspec GPS units. If the milspec receivers are in short supply, Magellan and Garmin civilian units are often used in the field instead.
The error introduced is variable, but still smaller than the inherent error in a non-modern missile system such as Iraqi/Russian SCUD. More modern weapons would hit a target by video or uv laser seeking reckoning, not by onboard GPS receipt.
Civilian uses for SA=0 are the official reason it was shut off. An ambulance called to a location given by an OnStar GPS would potentially know which side of the road it's talking about; important where a highway has long tall medians. Also, civil pilots rely on GPS heavily for lesser-mapped airstrips.
As the joke goes, the different armed services of the USA have a few distinctions in their use of military strategy jargon.
The order: "Secure that building!"
Microsoft provides a LOT of hooks in their operating system specifically to encourage third-party opportunities. It's just good business to let third parties write cool stuff to extend your platform. Those competitors who don't take advantage of the documented ones always cry about how there must be a lot of undocumented ones that give Microsoft the advantage. Walking through your arguments...
Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer (the file management program) [...] look and run the basically the same. For example, if you are running IE, you have the ability to browse AND MANAGE your local hard drive, just like in Windows Explorer. Now since MS also include that crappy My Computer program in their OS too, why did they allow their web browser to MANAGE FILES/FOLDERS? Explain this to me with a straight face please.
Norton and many other companies have long made complete rewrites/replacements for the shell. It's a documented registry/win.ini setting, and has been ever since HP wanted to replace the Windows 2.0 shell. "SHELL=EXPLORER.EXE" That's so hard to change to "SHELL=NAVIGATOR.EXE"?
Let's say that Netscape didn't WANT to compete with the integration with Explorer. Okay, another hook provided by Microsoft is the SHELLOPEN function that can hook "filename conventions" like "\\smbhost\smbshare", "http://host/page", "ftp://host/page", "file:///d:/path/file" and so on. Netscape could have provided any of those hooks, and been able to offer its advantages there, too.
This is not an exhaustive list. There are literally hundreds of hooks that Netscape could have used, but they decided to use the DoJ as a hook instead.
Secondly, in regards to the "freedom" that someone would have to install navigator onto their OS, that task requires the ABILITY to find, download and install the program in question . Out of those 100 million net users, how many do you think could have accomplished this?
Let's see, how many newbies are competent enough to download and install greeting card programs? Print shop programs? Email messages from Hotmail? The Melissa virus? Newbies are these app-makers' bread and butter. People download stuff all the time, and it's a mark of a competent software package to make that installation easy for those newbies. If Netscape found that the newbie was the barrier, that's Netscape's fault, not Microsoft's.
Finally, all of you who manage Win98 boxes know how friggin difficult it is to get rid of that IE program. I'm not talking about deleting the shortcut off of the desktop--I'm talking about annihilating the sucker off of the OS. How many places does that program hide in the OS?? Let me count the ways... On the desktop, notice that the IE shortcut sits right next to all of the other Win essential programs like My Computer, Network Neighborhood, whatever. This is on purpose. MS designed Explorer to be considered as an essential part of the OS (for the average users they covet)--make no mistake about it.
Hm, when I set up a recent laptop, it had Adobe Type Manager pre-installed. I pulled the shortcut out of the startup group. Same goes for the greeting card program, the Encarta shortcut, and about five other icons I didn't need, too. How many icons does RealPlayer add to your desktop, startup menu, personal folders, tray, and context menus? Geesh! Now, I could have gone through and eradicated the files, if I cared. I didn't care, I had tons of space left over. It was *functionally* gone. I'm sure one of those "cleanup" utilities would have found 50MB to reclaim.
Now, if you never show an address bar in your tray, and you never type a URL in the File,Run... box, and you never click on the IE, and you use Netscape for your daily web browsing, how is the IE's presence in the OS or on the disk really hurting you? It's *functionally* gone, even if it has files and hooks all over the place which you never use.
If you don't smoke, do you remove the ashtray component from your car? No, you either leave it idle or you put coins there. If you don't like Da Vinci, do you have to eradicate the museums who "waste space" or "waste your taxes" on those works?
So, please, tell me how free the average PC user was to choose Navigator instead...
Um, I dunno... how about "put cd in drive, press OK a few times"?
Simple then - get a new judge.
What part of 'remand to the original judge' didn't you get?
Sure, Jackson could be recused, but if he weren't already biased (or tainted with the appearance of prejudice), then remanding to the original judge has a lot of benefits: the appellate court can have the original judge clarify or repair portions of the ruling without starting from scratch.
A new judge below the circuit court would have to start from scratch. Do you think that another two years on this case is good for competition and legal clarity on the general monopoly issues, or good for the consumers potentially harmed in 1996?
"Open Source" fits in with capitalism nicely (though RMS would disagree).
No, he'd agree that "The Open Source Movement condones the mixture of proprietary and non-proprietary solutions, whereas the Free Software Movement has more ambitious goals to ensure freedoms by making software free of proprietary controls." (Paraphrased from his last letter re: Allchin and the American Way.)
Not that I agree with RMS's goals, but I try to at least understand his argument more clearly.
The code of conduct for the judiciary states that a judge must not appear biased at all, throughout the case, even throughout the full appellate process. The appeals court cannot now in good conscience remand the case back to Jackson, which would be an option that was open to them before now. So Jackson has screwed up the appellate process by showing bias now, even if he wasn't biased at the beginning of the trial.
I was hoping to write a sci-fi short story, many years ago. The thrust is on this topic, as well as on the "Anticryptography" theories employed in the SETI project.
In this, a SETI-like project was trying to make the Encyclopedia Terra. The media had a casing made of a hardy metal, engraved on the inside with the introductory materials that would explain how our language worked and how to read the denser media protected within. The media, graduated into denser and denser volumes, then described our technologies from simple to complex, as well as other scientific data about Earth.
Shortly afterwards, a nuclear holocaust wiped out pretty much all Science on the planet. A working sample of the Encyclopedia wasn't launched in a space probe; it was instead found by some of the progenic humans on Earth.
Encyclopedia Terra would bootstrap Earth. How would our world religions be shaped if "how-to" were the focus, instead of our current religions' penchant for espousing "thou-shalt-not"? Our Restrictive God's society torn down by Science; the next society's Instructive God torn down ultimately by Faith?
Year 2000 Patent Office Fees collected: $984,000,000
Year 2000 Patent Office expenditures: $881,000,000
Remaining for contribution to general revenues: $103,000,000
(From the Patent Office)
If the USPTO were like the USPS, then they'd be autonomous, and able to fold that $103M back into improving the service. But Congress instead funnels $103M into their own pet pork-barrel projects.
$103M. That's One Hundred Three Million Dollars. "A million here, a million there; pretty soon, you're talking real money." Fiddling small change, uh huh.
[stock rant on the subject]
Patents are not about who is right, or who is first; patents are about who can sue.
The US PTO is a money-making service for the government, and this fact is why it operates as it does.
There is a misconception that it is the central duty of the PTO to form a blockade against granting patents. The PTO can and will block applications where there's heavy similarity with prior art or existing patents, but that's really just a guideline to using the service, not the core function.
The PTO's purpose is to grant patents for a fee, and it's wholly suited to do so.
The application vetting process of the PTO is a cost center for the operation of the PTO. This is akin to saying that customer service is a cost center for the operation of AT&T. It is required, but they'll cut costs as much as they can get away with.
To fix the patent application vetting process, two things must happen:
At the minimum, if the PTO would publish the abstract for each patent application at the time of filing, then third parties could submit "helpful" arguments against controversial applications. The PTO can then weigh obviousness against challenges without incurring the costs of doing all the searching themselves.
Once a patent has been granted, the Patent Office does not get involved in disputes; that is a matter for the courts.
[end of stock rant on the subject]
Back in the 80s, I'd use DOS and play Infocom games constantly. Whenever I lost my train of thought, I'd do either L or DIR absentmindedly, just to get me restarted.
Of course, half the time, I'd get I don't know the word 'dir.' and the other half I'd get Bad command or filename: L.
Got so bad I made an L.BAT which did a DIR, which helped a little. :)
Back in 1940s or so, a dreadful series of space opera (precursor to Sci-Fi) was written. The Lensman Series by E.E. "Doc" Smith. It was a seminal work. I will avoid the particulars, but there is a minor sight gag that still rings true. AND BONUS, it's ON TOPIC today!
Early in the series, a main character is speeding on a motorcycle or car or something, heading for somewhere I forget. We learn of his annoyance and apathy at bigger and worse advertisements just in passing, but it comes back to haunt him many chapters (or is it several books?) later.
He's now got the mind-expanding powers of the mystic Lens artifact on his wrist, and he's visiting Rigel IV. On Rigel IV, apparently, the natives didn't evolve a sense of sight, since there wasn't much visible light there anyway. Instead, they evolved a sense of "knowing" where objects were spatially. The main character is tapping into a taxi-driver's sense of matter, while the taxi-driver zooms around recklessly.
The main character notes that there are these very strange areas, domes of opaque-like matter where this matter-sensing ability seems to stop. He asks the driver, and the driver replies, "Oh, those are just advertisements. I guess I just ignore them." The driver pays more attention to them, and inside the domes can now be discerned many mind-catching moving objects, pleading passersby to buy this product, or use that product.
Undercurrent: we all ignore ads, regardless of what race we are. Okay, long story for such a small anecdote, but did anyone else read this damn series?
The Windows 95 user interface by itself had a series of somewhat unrelated Theme organizers.
A theme for the coloring, typefacing and sizing metrics of common controls.
A theme for the background and standard icons.
A theme for the sound events that could be invoked by apps in a standard way.
A theme (or profile) for various recurring hardware enumerations, such as 'docked' or 'undocked' for laptops.
This patent by Apple appears to discuss a generalized system that combines all of these classes of "theme engines" into an over-arching "theme engine" that controls them all at once.
Windows 95 did not have a central theme manager, but the Windows 95 Plus Pack (released almost simultaneously) did. The sounds, icons, wallpapers, colors, fonts and metrics themes could be controlled centrally by choosing themes with the Plus Pack theme manager.
Also, if you specified that different login names had their own private preferences, then Windows 95 managed all of those settings separately for each user. (Much as Unix systems do with .bashrc, .emacsrc or other shell login preference ~/.foorc files.) Switch users and all of these preferences are changed automatically (albeit shutting down all foreground tasks).
It looks like Apple has a high hill to climb when Microsoft attacks on this. Of course, Microsoft has been laying low and settling cases out of court to keep the litigation threats to a minimum these days. Then again, Microsoft's bloc of non-voting shares in Apple (circa 1996?) may still be a strong deterrent against Apple's wielding this particular patent over them.
To explain, in the UK one Pound Sterling used to be one pound of gold by weight.
pound sterling on brittanica.com
sterling on dictionary.com
Actually, a Pound Sterling was more typically a pound of silver, not gold, in value. Hence the term 'sterling silver.' The term 'sterling' refers to purity of gold or silver, but the Pound was of silver specifically.
But Twiki, the piece of recycled aluminum who did lifelike impersonations of Gary Coleman, can't escape mention here as Aibo's lovechild.
I'd like to see a shooting gallery where you can take potshots at Alf, Twiki, and that crappy baby plesiosaur on Land of the Lost. Any other lame puppet or suit sidekicks worth mentioning here?
IANAL - Incompetent Advice Necessarily A Liability
Why do people ask advice on Ask Slashdot where a real lawyer is almost essential? If you're concerned about a licensing issue, especially with military brass, why would you even consider taking the opinions of anonymous amateur pundits on a for-profit advocacy weblog?
Get some professional, personal, specific advice from someone who is accountable for the answers they provide.
IANAL - If Advice Needed, Ask Lawyers
A daily collection of political cartoons from around the USA, and also some world news, can be found at politicalcartoons.com.
No, I did say that in severe cases, they can turn it off. It was in fact during Operation Desert Storm that they tried tuning SA for best military advantage, but they reversed themselves.
First, our own forces didn't have enough milspec GPS units available, so they had relatives mailing over civilian Garmins and Magellans. Second, the Iraqis didn't have much in the way of GPS, so they decided to kill SA so our forces could use civilian GPS signals.
SA is also targetable to terrain: if they want the satellites to remain mum over Bosnia, it won't hurt your Garmin receivers in Texas one bit. That's the "selective" in "SA".
in a freak accident takes out one of the GPS satellites. Every bit of consumer electronics in the 'North American Marketing Region' immediately shuts down
Nice joke, nice theory, but that's not how GPS works. There are up to 30 satellites, including spares, in orbit. The receiver needs to have line of sight to three of them to pinpoint latitude and longitude. My receiver usually can see six or more, giving altitude and redundancy.
Also, to the other jokester who commented that military scrambling could break devices who depend on GPS, the military SA (Selective Ability) feature just degrades the accuracy, it would not render GPS totally offline. It could, in extreme scenarios, but too many USA forces depend on non-military-enabled consumer GPS units.
[stock rant on the subject]
This is my issue with the FSF philosophy that companies shouldn't be able to remain proprietary about their source code, if they also use elements of process that are "Free."
Companies are proprietary about injection-molding techniques, they're proprietary about the integrated circuit layouts, they're proprietary about so many physical processes that go on behind closed doors. They also use such open techniques such as how to mop the floors at night, and which motor oils they use when they're maintaining the printing presses. Why is software magically different?
If you aren't allowed to cut and paste existing processes with no effort, you'll have to innovate. Sure you have to start from scratch, or from simpler licensed technologies, but by setting down your own requirements for the new process, you'll probably have new strengths that the existing ways don't have.
Heck, maybe the GPL is good for something. When I see that a module is under the GPL, and I want to sell my product, I have to skip the not-so-"Free" methods and write it from scratch, thus making it fit exactly to my needs.
To me, Open Source and Free Software are irrelevant. Get the job done. If your competitors want to do the same, let them. If you want to open your source as a service to mankind, go for it. If you show me your methods and then tell me not to use them, well, that's just being petty.
[stock rant on the subject]
A shrunken coin weighs exactly the same afterwards, and its density is also unchanged - it's merely the shape that's been altered.
Ever hear of Shrinky Dinks? This plastic material goes through a similar transformation when heated in a regular food oven. Two dimensions shrink, while it gets thicker to maintain the same volume and density.