And more people die from cars than guns each year, which may or may not be an indication of where automobile complexity has gotten us.
I'm going to go with "probably not an indication" since that implication doesn't even make sense. You're suggesting that more people die in car accidents than from guns because cars are more complex than guns? Come on. Here's a logically equivalent statement: more people die from cars than from planes each year, which may or may not be an indication of where automobile complexity has gotten us."
Try again.
As for people not having time to make sure their gun is in proper working order... well, if you don't have time to do that, you probably don't have time to clean or maintain your gun either, which means it may not work when you pick it up.
That's why you keep firearms simple - complex things break.
I find this to be an interesting sentiment coming from a technology oriented community like Slashdot.
Of course complexity can increase error-proneness. But if this logic is always true, why aren't we still driving Model Ts? Maybe it really is up for debate, but it seems to me that cars have became vastly more complex over the decades, but reliability is on the rise, and cost of maintenance has gone down.
Planes - planes are vastly more complex than in the past, but very reliable. And peoples' lives literally hang in the balance.
My point is, we can in fact make complex AND reliable things when we want to, and when we spend the time and resources required. Why are guns exempt from this?
FWIW, I know how to use (some) guns, and I agree with you... "grip recognition" sounds like something that at best, will work 99% of the time, which isn't enough. But surely we can do better than that.
First off, the limit you reference about shotguns I think only applies to bird hunting or something. At least, I used a pump-action Mossberg that held 5 in the tube.
But on to my real question... this is a technology-oriented community... yet we seem very quick to crap all over the role that technology could play here.
Would an RFID-based system, in which you identify yourself to the gun using public key cryptography, be such a terrible thing? Assuming the mechanism can be made reliable (and with enough work, why can't it be made reliable enough?), to me it seems like it wouldn't be a bad idea to limit the number of people who can fire the weapon. E.g., you and your spouse both have key fobs that allow you to fire the gun, but without the fob, no one else can fire it.
If the fob is the problem - hear me out - why not have the RFID chip implanted in your wrist? Imagine it - you pick up your gun, and you can fire it, but if someone else picks it up, they can't. To me, that actually sounds pretty cool and futuristic. It would eliminate the need for a lot of fight scenes in sci-fi movies, though.
I know, not everyone wants something implanted in their wrist (although in this community I'd expect more than the average number to be willing). Well, maybe this is something only required for semi-automatic pistols, etc.... if you want a revolver, no RFID interlock required.
There are all sorts of interesting solutions we could come up with. Police departments could use a department key, so that any officer could fire any other officer's weapon, but a criminal in a struggle wouldn't be able to fire the officer's weapon.
Of course, we all know there are flaws with RFID. Could someone, with enough time and effort, clone a key fob? Probably. With enough time and effort, any sort of system we could devise will be defeated. Maybe someone will set off an EMP and render all our smart guns useless. The better question is, what is the increase in effectiveness we gain by doing this?
We seem very willing to invent scenarios in which safety mechanisms would cause problems... e.g., "me and my friend were working in the garage when someone came up and shot me! I told my friend to get my gun and shoot back, but he couldn't because of the RFID interlock!" and use this as a justification to ignore the potential of technology in this area. But are these really realistic scenarios? Or are we trying to justify what we already want to believe based on anecdotes...
Obviously this is not a total solution by any means. It does nothing to address the large number of firearms already in circulation. Some people suggest buy-back programs (although I'm a bit skeptical of those, since it seems like the people who are least likely to use a gun are going to be the most likely to trade it in for cash, and good luck trying to get the government to spend any money on a new program right now)... maybe gun manufacturers could offer a trade-in program, where people can upgrade to smart guns.
To sum up, I think there are viable things that can be done, but for some reason, a lot of us like to invent reasons, no matter how far-fetched, for us to conclude that nothing can be done.
I can see where this is going, and sure enough, Jack Thompson is already on the case. He or someone claiming to be him has been active in the comment sections of major newspapers, suggesting that this incident was motivated by violent video games.
Remember, it's not an ad hominem attack to point out that he was disbarred in Floria, because that fact is relevant to his credibility.
Looking up a book, then browsing the ones next to it is great research strategy.
To some extent you can gain a similar ability if the library catalog allows you to browse the titles "on the shelf" (in this case, of course, they wouldn't physically be next to it)... but it's still not the same as being able to pick up the next title, flip to the table of contents, and see if it's relevant. This problem isn't limited to automated systems... many large or special libraries require you to request books individually, and they are brought to you by library workers (e.g., Library of Congress, European Commission library, most archives).
On the other hand, if this system allows them to keep many more books than they otherwise could, that's a good thing...
The EU Directive is a result of the WIPO Copyright Treaty and WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty. Both those treaties require members to protect rights management information from alteration or removal and provide penalties. The U.S. has a similar implementation as the EU directive.
I'm not sure how Facebook's stripping metadata wouldn't violate the plain language of this law, but I'm sure they have some fine print somewhere that makes it legal.
Note that most metadata probably doesn't qualify, but I think on high-end cameras you can set up copyright information to be embedded in the metadata...
I was at the CAP event this morning, and I wouldn't say the Ars story is that slanted. Did Kappos say that there is absolutely no improvement to be made to the US patent system? No. Are there some positive things going on at the patent office? Yes. However, he frankly came off as a total hack. Here is why:
He led off with a statistic about how "IP intensive industries" account for 40 million jobs, and 35% of GDP. Even if you accept the methodology behind those numbers, the vast majority of the jobs and GDP come from trademark intensive industries (e.g., retail) rather than patent intensive industries (or copyright). I called him on this in the Q&A, and he gave a politician's response (e.g., a non-answer).
He kept mentioning how "critics" don't have the "facts" but failed to even once suggest why high-profile innovative companies like Google are critical of software patents.
He claims that "Our founding fathers enshrined patent rights in our Constitution, an affirmative right here, that in other countries is only issued grudgingly. It’s one of the few, if not only, clauses in the Constitution that gives Congress the right to create personal property." This is inaccurate. The Constitution mentions that Congress has the power to secure to inventors their discoveries for limited times. It does not say that this must be done through patents, and it certainly does not analogize whatever method Congress chooses to property.
He claimed that "our IP system is the envy of the world." Well, I've actually talked to European Commission officials about what they think of our patent system, and they don't share his view. Actually, much of the world doesn't want our ultra-strong IP laws. Maybe he meant to say our "economy" is the envy of the world (although that's also a hard sell). He also seemed to think that our system was best because it was strongest... shockingly, I think there are a lot of people who don't think that strongest = best, yet he doesn't address this.
Essentially the bulk of his logic boils down to a post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy: The U.S. has software patents, the U.S. has software innovation, therefore the software innovation must come from the software patents. This is logically false, and I would also argue empirically false.
My guess is that phone personnel you speak with are just instructed to tell you that something is "proprietary" whenever they don't know the answer, don't want to look it up, or don't want to bother someone who does know.
Actually, I often turn on My Tracks to log my motorcycle rides in the hope that, if I am pulled over, the GPS evidence could conceivably help my case. Something like, "Your honor, the only reason I exceeded the posted speed limit at that time was to pass a car that was driving erratically," and then show your GPS records to offer some evidence in your support.
Obviously there's no obligation on the part of the judge to take your evidence seriously, but in traffic court I doubt it could hurt. And if it doesn't help my case, I don't have to bring it up.
Seriously, the claims aren't that had to understand, even though they're drafted in legalese that intentionally obscures how trivial the "invention" is.
Claims 1, 8, and 15 of the patent are broad enough that they very well could capture a chloropleth map. After all, a chloropleth map is really just a bunch of "cells" (regions) that you're assigning visual cues (colors) to based on a value they're associated with.
Maybe, just maybe, some of the finer dependent claims would meet the threshold of patentability, but the broader claims are obvious to anyone who's done more than dabble in Excel VBA.
IANAL (thank God), but FWIW I have taken IP law courses at one of the top two law schools in the country.
There are no technical details that are not obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art.
I'm not a programmer. I was a social science major in undergrad. My languages of choice are Perl and Visual Basic for Applications.
Why do I open myself up to the scorn of the/. community by revealing these facts? Because just this summer, I was about to implement EXACTLY what this patent describes when I was happy to find that the functionality already existed in Microsoft Excel. Thanks, Excel, for saving me some time. You deserve credit for that. But a patent? 20 years of exclusivity?
If the idea to do this, and the implementation (gee, look at maximums and minimum, set up a color scale or other visual indicator corresponding to certain values) was readily accessible to me (a person WITHOUT ordinary skill in the art), there is no reason this should have been granted a patent.
As the summary suggests, the claims seem broad enough that some of them (1, 8, and 15) might be invalidated by chloropleth mapping techniques present in GIS software.
There have been hundreds of thousands of students from Asia who knew the price differentials. None of us thought of exploiting it by arbitrage, because we knew it was "wrong". This creep from Thailand did just that.
Actually, engaging in this sort of arbitrage is virtually an American tradition. The only reason there's a lawsuit here is because there's intellectual property involved. If someone discovered that they could purchase Widget X in Country B at a lower price than in Country A, then bought a lot of Widget X and imported to Country A to resell at a higher price, we'd typically call them smart or at least entrepreneurial. Not to mention that consumers in Country A benefit from lower prices.
But since this involves copyright, normal logic goes out the window, and we're told that a book, lawfully purchased in Thailand, cannot be lawfully sold by its purchaser in the United States... because OMG WE NEED DIFFERENTIAL PRICING. You know what? Not my problem. Don't use copyright law to outlaw arbitrage. You want to make your differential pricing more effective? You could translate it into the local language, that'd be a huge barrier to reimportation and reselling.
BTW, this is the exact issue brought up in the Omega v. Costco case - except there it was even more ridiculous, since the copyright was on a design that happened to be stamped on the watch. Currently Costco is apparently winning the issue, since they're arguing that Omega is engaging in copyright misuse in order to control distribution of a normally uncopyrighted object (a watch).
The first time I had some hipster process my card with his iPhone, I was apalled that there was a system that *can't* issue a physical receipt.
How is that different than shopping online? You're relying on online vendors to present you with a confirmation page, which you can then choose to print on your printer, or have e-mailed to you. If you're buying a physical object, you might get a receipt with your shipment, or maybe just a packing list. If not, where's your physical receipt? It's up to you to print it.
Square will e-mail or text you a receipt. Is it that hard to enter 10 digits to get a text? If the person you're buying from is complaining, the problem is them, not the system.
I don't know what specifically you tried to do, but there is a lot of data available down to the block group and block level, which are relatively small geographic units. There's even more data available by "place", which would include any major city and many smaller cities and towns. Some of the tax data is redacted for confidentiality (e.g., when there is only one employer of a certain type in a geographic area, they won't release payroll information for it), but that's pretty unusual in larger areas.
You may have been using one of the user-friendly tools, which can be limited in their reach. American FactFinder has more depth than most, but it's also kind of a PITA. If you're serious about digging into the data, you can download zipped text files that represent the full extent of the public information available, which you can then load into your favorite processing program.
That paper points out that three factors - DOB, place, and gender - are often enough to uniquely identify a person. How is that relevant to Census Summary File information, or ACS information?
I think the point that many people misunderstand is that Census/ACS public information is not a database where each row represents one response, and some data items have been withheld. It's not at all like that - it's aggregate totals for geographic areas of varying sizes. That row-by-row information is not made public until 72 years after the census (remember the news about info from the 1940 census being made public?).
The real issue that paper highlights is the state-level legislative mandates regarding information collection. I'm not denying you could link a voter registration list to state-collected health data, like the author does in that paper, but that fact has nothing to do with the data made accessible by this API (not to mention these data were already online, just in a more complicated format).
That's not how Census information is either collected or stored. First off, there are two different data sources at issue - the decennial census, which gathers a very limited set of information on (theoretically) every person in the country, and the American Community Survey, which uses sampling to get estimates on a much wider range of information. You cannot link those two datasets, since the only public factors they share are far too broad - e.g., age, race, sex, etc., and the time periods during which they are conducted are totally different.
Besides, the information is not released at person-level. The lowest level you can get sampled information at (e.g., the detailed ACS stuff) is the "block group", which on average contains 39 blocks. You can get decennial census information at the block level, and a "block" may correspond to a city block, or a much larger area for lesser-populated areas.
So, you can find some interesting information about your city street (I've looked up my own, and found the number of people living alone, owning/renting, age, sex, etc. for the 24 houses on my block), but these data are not per person, they are per block - in other words, if there is only one Native American living on my street, I cannot then find out whether they are owning/renting. I can only find out the number of renters on the entire block.
I don't necessarily disagree. Again, the IP hack response is that without the patent and profit, there is no new drug from which to benefit, so the question is irrelevant. In theory, decent health insurance coverage is supposed to solve the problem of access to the drugs, too.
But as you've pointed out there are other funding mechanisms that could potentially work, and might even produce better results. After all, the end result of our current patent system is not that life-saving drugs get made, it's that profitable drugs get made (or at least research for profitable conditions gets done). If they happen to be life-saving, that's nice. Research on drugs for tropical diseases languishes. We've noticed it and try to supplement the incentives of the patent system with prize funds, grants, non-profit money, and the Orphan Drug Act.
The reason it is destined to fail on a large scale is probably because of political pressure from pharmaceutical companies loathe to see anything significantly alter the current system.
the thing to take issue with there is the policy of expanding US- and European-style patent law worldwide.
Pharmaceuticals and chemicals are the prime examples of industries where patents are not only valuable, but also generally thought to be essential to innovation. Posner's suggestion of having different patent terms for different industries is not news, that idea has been circulating for decades, and probably longer. It's something that he's actually endorsing it in public, I guess.
The standard IP hack response to this proposal is that it would be too hard and costly to clearly define what industries and inventions are eligible for patents.
With a GUI, everything is visual, but nothing can be automated or repeated.
While somewhat true in Windows, OS X has the Automator, which is basically a GUI for building scripts using the OS X environment. It's quite powerful, and I often find myself using it to accomplish tasks that I normally would have written a shell script for in Linux. Given the complexity of the tasks it can accomplish, it's fairly user friendly.
On the other hand, my impression is that Automator is also vastly underused by OS X users. I think the fundamental difference between "computer people" and computer users is that if a computer person has to do the same thing more than twice, they see if they can't find a more efficient and automated way to do it... whereas computer users just sigh and resign themselves to a redundant and mindless task.
The Berne Convention has over 160 members, so there really aren't that many countries that haven't ratified it. Plus, if you look at the countries that haven't (in gray), you'll notice that they're not exactly countries where we probably expect that jobs, data, and investment will flow. You know, places like Somalia, Western Sahara, Iran, and Afghanistan.
I think you're partially right that in the future, Berne members with less restrictive IP enforcement might benefit somewhat compared to us, but even for a place like China, those benefits are going to have to be greater than quite a lot of other downsides from the perspective of many Westerners. Leaving Berne has very negative consquences for countries - it's not only a WTO violation, meaning they can be sued by other WTO members and have trade sanctions applied against them, but it also means losing copyright protection for all your own authors' works abroad, etc. And it's extremely difficult to amend Berne.
Finally, while the US wasn't in Berne until 1989, there were specific reasons for this. In the meantime, we established our own copyright treaties, like the Universal Copyright Convention.
In my experience, LS-120 never had the kind of limited success that Zip drives did. For that matter, there were lots of purported floppy-killers from that time. LS-120 did have the advantage that the drive was mechanically compatible with normal floppy disks, but it still had the same issues with high drive prices, high media prices, and low rates of adoption. Overall, I was always much more likely to find a Zip drive on a computer than an LS-120 drive.
Back before USB flash drives were widely and cheaply available, the only way to easily move around more than a few floppy's worth of data was the Zip drive.
100 MB was a lot back then. Even though the drive itself was not ubiquitous, the parallel port model could be easily transported, and it was supported on multiple operating systems. Macs were supported with SCSI. In some institutional environments, you'd find internal IDE zip drives. My local library branch had computers with internal drives, and for a few years it was the primary way I was able to download anything more than about 20 MB off the internet (hi-speed internet unavailable at home).
CD writers were expensive (my original 2X writer was $300), and came with all the problems of read-only media. Of course Zip had its problems - the drive itself wasn't very cheap, nor the disks, and of course there was the click of death... but all in all, it was IMO the most versatile portable storage medium we had between floppy disks and USB flash drives. Lugging around an IDE drive and opening up whatever you wanted to attach it to wasn't always an option:-)
Which of course has nothing to do with whether or not he should be tried...
I agree. Whether or not he's guilty/innocent or should be tried is not necessarily connected with whether his actions were intelligent. The former is a matter of law. But even if he is tried and acquitted, or never even tried, I think I'm still justified in thinking this outcome was not inevitable, and that he is responsible for the outcome.
Yep, too bad it's not possible to get a CCWP in DC. Then you might have been able to defend yourself.
I think you're missing my point. I was able to defend myself. I did not escalate the situation, and no one was injured. On the other hand, if either of us had a gun, including a legal one, one or both of us might have ended up injured or dead (or, bystanders might have been injured or dead). I fail to understand how the end result of my situation, in which no one was injured, is worse than me being "able to defend myself" and someone ending up injured or dead.
The main point of self-defense is to avoid injury or death...right?
Sure, and on that count, I ended up fine, and so did he. If I had aggravated the situation, I expect that one or both of us would have ended up in the hospital and/or jail. I don't see how that's better than what actually happened.
Allegedly, for committing a felonious assault on the wrong person.
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And more people die from cars than guns each year, which may or may not be an indication of where automobile complexity has gotten us.
I'm going to go with "probably not an indication" since that implication doesn't even make sense. You're suggesting that more people die in car accidents than from guns because cars are more complex than guns? Come on. Here's a logically equivalent statement: more people die from cars than from planes each year, which may or may not be an indication of where automobile complexity has gotten us."
Try again.
As for people not having time to make sure their gun is in proper working order... well, if you don't have time to do that, you probably don't have time to clean or maintain your gun either, which means it may not work when you pick it up.
That's why you keep firearms simple - complex things break.
I find this to be an interesting sentiment coming from a technology oriented community like Slashdot.
Of course complexity can increase error-proneness. But if this logic is always true, why aren't we still driving Model Ts? Maybe it really is up for debate, but it seems to me that cars have became vastly more complex over the decades, but reliability is on the rise, and cost of maintenance has gone down.
Planes - planes are vastly more complex than in the past, but very reliable. And peoples' lives literally hang in the balance.
My point is, we can in fact make complex AND reliable things when we want to, and when we spend the time and resources required. Why are guns exempt from this?
FWIW, I know how to use (some) guns, and I agree with you... "grip recognition" sounds like something that at best, will work 99% of the time, which isn't enough. But surely we can do better than that.
First off, the limit you reference about shotguns I think only applies to bird hunting or something. At least, I used a pump-action Mossberg that held 5 in the tube.
But on to my real question... this is a technology-oriented community... yet we seem very quick to crap all over the role that technology could play here.
Would an RFID-based system, in which you identify yourself to the gun using public key cryptography, be such a terrible thing? Assuming the mechanism can be made reliable (and with enough work, why can't it be made reliable enough?), to me it seems like it wouldn't be a bad idea to limit the number of people who can fire the weapon. E.g., you and your spouse both have key fobs that allow you to fire the gun, but without the fob, no one else can fire it.
If the fob is the problem - hear me out - why not have the RFID chip implanted in your wrist? Imagine it - you pick up your gun, and you can fire it, but if someone else picks it up, they can't. To me, that actually sounds pretty cool and futuristic. It would eliminate the need for a lot of fight scenes in sci-fi movies, though.
I know, not everyone wants something implanted in their wrist (although in this community I'd expect more than the average number to be willing). Well, maybe this is something only required for semi-automatic pistols, etc.... if you want a revolver, no RFID interlock required.
There are all sorts of interesting solutions we could come up with. Police departments could use a department key, so that any officer could fire any other officer's weapon, but a criminal in a struggle wouldn't be able to fire the officer's weapon.
Of course, we all know there are flaws with RFID. Could someone, with enough time and effort, clone a key fob? Probably. With enough time and effort, any sort of system we could devise will be defeated. Maybe someone will set off an EMP and render all our smart guns useless. The better question is, what is the increase in effectiveness we gain by doing this?
We seem very willing to invent scenarios in which safety mechanisms would cause problems... e.g., "me and my friend were working in the garage when someone came up and shot me! I told my friend to get my gun and shoot back, but he couldn't because of the RFID interlock!" and use this as a justification to ignore the potential of technology in this area. But are these really realistic scenarios? Or are we trying to justify what we already want to believe based on anecdotes...
Obviously this is not a total solution by any means. It does nothing to address the large number of firearms already in circulation. Some people suggest buy-back programs (although I'm a bit skeptical of those, since it seems like the people who are least likely to use a gun are going to be the most likely to trade it in for cash, and good luck trying to get the government to spend any money on a new program right now)... maybe gun manufacturers could offer a trade-in program, where people can upgrade to smart guns.
To sum up, I think there are viable things that can be done, but for some reason, a lot of us like to invent reasons, no matter how far-fetched, for us to conclude that nothing can be done.
I can see where this is going, and sure enough, Jack Thompson is already on the case. He or someone claiming to be him has been active in the comment sections of major newspapers, suggesting that this incident was motivated by violent video games.
Remember, it's not an ad hominem attack to point out that he was disbarred in Floria, because that fact is relevant to his credibility.
Looking up a book, then browsing the ones next to it is great research strategy.
To some extent you can gain a similar ability if the library catalog allows you to browse the titles "on the shelf" (in this case, of course, they wouldn't physically be next to it)... but it's still not the same as being able to pick up the next title, flip to the table of contents, and see if it's relevant. This problem isn't limited to automated systems... many large or special libraries require you to request books individually, and they are brought to you by library workers (e.g., Library of Congress, European Commission library, most archives).
On the other hand, if this system allows them to keep many more books than they otherwise could, that's a good thing...
The EU Directive is a result of the WIPO Copyright Treaty and WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty. Both those treaties require members to protect rights management information from alteration or removal and provide penalties. The U.S. has a similar implementation as the EU directive.
I'm not sure how Facebook's stripping metadata wouldn't violate the plain language of this law, but I'm sure they have some fine print somewhere that makes it legal.
Note that most metadata probably doesn't qualify, but I think on high-end cameras you can set up copyright information to be embedded in the metadata...
I was at the CAP event this morning, and I wouldn't say the Ars story is that slanted. Did Kappos say that there is absolutely no improvement to be made to the US patent system? No. Are there some positive things going on at the patent office? Yes. However, he frankly came off as a total hack. Here is why:
He led off with a statistic about how "IP intensive industries" account for 40 million jobs, and 35% of GDP. Even if you accept the methodology behind those numbers, the vast majority of the jobs and GDP come from trademark intensive industries (e.g., retail) rather than patent intensive industries (or copyright). I called him on this in the Q&A, and he gave a politician's response (e.g., a non-answer).
He kept mentioning how "critics" don't have the "facts" but failed to even once suggest why high-profile innovative companies like Google are critical of software patents.
He claims that "Our founding fathers enshrined patent rights in our Constitution, an affirmative right here, that in other countries is only issued grudgingly. It’s one of the few, if not only, clauses in the Constitution that gives Congress the right to create personal property." This is inaccurate. The Constitution mentions that Congress has the power to secure to inventors their discoveries for limited times. It does not say that this must be done through patents, and it certainly does not analogize whatever method Congress chooses to property.
He claimed that "our IP system is the envy of the world." Well, I've actually talked to European Commission officials about what they think of our patent system, and they don't share his view. Actually, much of the world doesn't want our ultra-strong IP laws. Maybe he meant to say our "economy" is the envy of the world (although that's also a hard sell). He also seemed to think that our system was best because it was strongest... shockingly, I think there are a lot of people who don't think that strongest = best, yet he doesn't address this.
Essentially the bulk of his logic boils down to a post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy: The U.S. has software patents, the U.S. has software innovation, therefore the software innovation must come from the software patents. This is logically false, and I would also argue empirically false.
My guess is that phone personnel you speak with are just instructed to tell you that something is "proprietary" whenever they don't know the answer, don't want to look it up, or don't want to bother someone who does know.
How horrible that all those people were forced to buy from Craigslist sellers at excessively high prices...
Actually, I often turn on My Tracks to log my motorcycle rides in the hope that, if I am pulled over, the GPS evidence could conceivably help my case. Something like, "Your honor, the only reason I exceeded the posted speed limit at that time was to pass a car that was driving erratically," and then show your GPS records to offer some evidence in your support.
Obviously there's no obligation on the part of the judge to take your evidence seriously, but in traffic court I doubt it could hurt. And if it doesn't help my case, I don't have to bring it up.
Seriously, the claims aren't that had to understand, even though they're drafted in legalese that intentionally obscures how trivial the "invention" is.
Claims 1, 8, and 15 of the patent are broad enough that they very well could capture a chloropleth map. After all, a chloropleth map is really just a bunch of "cells" (regions) that you're assigning visual cues (colors) to based on a value they're associated with.
Maybe, just maybe, some of the finer dependent claims would meet the threshold of patentability, but the broader claims are obvious to anyone who's done more than dabble in Excel VBA.
IANAL (thank God), but FWIW I have taken IP law courses at one of the top two law schools in the country.
There are no technical details that are not obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art.
I'm not a programmer. I was a social science major in undergrad. My languages of choice are Perl and Visual Basic for Applications.
Why do I open myself up to the scorn of the /. community by revealing these facts? Because just this summer, I was about to implement EXACTLY what this patent describes when I was happy to find that the functionality already existed in Microsoft Excel. Thanks, Excel, for saving me some time. You deserve credit for that. But a patent? 20 years of exclusivity?
If the idea to do this, and the implementation (gee, look at maximums and minimum, set up a color scale or other visual indicator corresponding to certain values) was readily accessible to me (a person WITHOUT ordinary skill in the art), there is no reason this should have been granted a patent.
As the summary suggests, the claims seem broad enough that some of them (1, 8, and 15) might be invalidated by chloropleth mapping techniques present in GIS software.
There have been hundreds of thousands of students from Asia who knew the price differentials. None of us thought of exploiting it by arbitrage, because we knew it was "wrong". This creep from Thailand did just that.
Actually, engaging in this sort of arbitrage is virtually an American tradition. The only reason there's a lawsuit here is because there's intellectual property involved. If someone discovered that they could purchase Widget X in Country B at a lower price than in Country A, then bought a lot of Widget X and imported to Country A to resell at a higher price, we'd typically call them smart or at least entrepreneurial. Not to mention that consumers in Country A benefit from lower prices.
But since this involves copyright, normal logic goes out the window, and we're told that a book, lawfully purchased in Thailand, cannot be lawfully sold by its purchaser in the United States... because OMG WE NEED DIFFERENTIAL PRICING. You know what? Not my problem. Don't use copyright law to outlaw arbitrage. You want to make your differential pricing more effective? You could translate it into the local language, that'd be a huge barrier to reimportation and reselling.
BTW, this is the exact issue brought up in the Omega v. Costco case - except there it was even more ridiculous, since the copyright was on a design that happened to be stamped on the watch. Currently Costco is apparently winning the issue, since they're arguing that Omega is engaging in copyright misuse in order to control distribution of a normally uncopyrighted object (a watch).
Then arguably it's referenced again in 1 Timothy 5:18. As for slavery... well, it doesn't say the slave deserves his wages...
The first time I had some hipster process my card with his iPhone, I was apalled that there was a system that *can't* issue a physical receipt.
How is that different than shopping online? You're relying on online vendors to present you with a confirmation page, which you can then choose to print on your printer, or have e-mailed to you. If you're buying a physical object, you might get a receipt with your shipment, or maybe just a packing list. If not, where's your physical receipt? It's up to you to print it.
Square will e-mail or text you a receipt. Is it that hard to enter 10 digits to get a text? If the person you're buying from is complaining, the problem is them, not the system.
I don't know what specifically you tried to do, but there is a lot of data available down to the block group and block level, which are relatively small geographic units. There's even more data available by "place", which would include any major city and many smaller cities and towns. Some of the tax data is redacted for confidentiality (e.g., when there is only one employer of a certain type in a geographic area, they won't release payroll information for it), but that's pretty unusual in larger areas.
You may have been using one of the user-friendly tools, which can be limited in their reach. American FactFinder has more depth than most, but it's also kind of a PITA. If you're serious about digging into the data, you can download zipped text files that represent the full extent of the public information available, which you can then load into your favorite processing program.
That paper points out that three factors - DOB, place, and gender - are often enough to uniquely identify a person. How is that relevant to Census Summary File information, or ACS information?
I think the point that many people misunderstand is that Census/ACS public information is not a database where each row represents one response, and some data items have been withheld. It's not at all like that - it's aggregate totals for geographic areas of varying sizes. That row-by-row information is not made public until 72 years after the census (remember the news about info from the 1940 census being made public?).
The real issue that paper highlights is the state-level legislative mandates regarding information collection. I'm not denying you could link a voter registration list to state-collected health data, like the author does in that paper, but that fact has nothing to do with the data made accessible by this API (not to mention these data were already online, just in a more complicated format).
That's not how Census information is either collected or stored. First off, there are two different data sources at issue - the decennial census, which gathers a very limited set of information on (theoretically) every person in the country, and the American Community Survey, which uses sampling to get estimates on a much wider range of information. You cannot link those two datasets, since the only public factors they share are far too broad - e.g., age, race, sex, etc., and the time periods during which they are conducted are totally different.
Besides, the information is not released at person-level. The lowest level you can get sampled information at (e.g., the detailed ACS stuff) is the "block group", which on average contains 39 blocks. You can get decennial census information at the block level, and a "block" may correspond to a city block, or a much larger area for lesser-populated areas.
So, you can find some interesting information about your city street (I've looked up my own, and found the number of people living alone, owning/renting, age, sex, etc. for the 24 houses on my block), but these data are not per person, they are per block - in other words, if there is only one Native American living on my street, I cannot then find out whether they are owning/renting. I can only find out the number of renters on the entire block.
I don't necessarily disagree. Again, the IP hack response is that without the patent and profit, there is no new drug from which to benefit, so the question is irrelevant. In theory, decent health insurance coverage is supposed to solve the problem of access to the drugs, too.
But as you've pointed out there are other funding mechanisms that could potentially work, and might even produce better results. After all, the end result of our current patent system is not that life-saving drugs get made, it's that profitable drugs get made (or at least research for profitable conditions gets done). If they happen to be life-saving, that's nice. Research on drugs for tropical diseases languishes. We've noticed it and try to supplement the incentives of the patent system with prize funds, grants, non-profit money, and the Orphan Drug Act.
The reason it is destined to fail on a large scale is probably because of political pressure from pharmaceutical companies loathe to see anything significantly alter the current system.
the thing to take issue with there is the policy of expanding US- and European-style patent law worldwide.
Pharmaceuticals and chemicals are the prime examples of industries where patents are not only valuable, but also generally thought to be essential to innovation. Posner's suggestion of having different patent terms for different industries is not news, that idea has been circulating for decades, and probably longer. It's something that he's actually endorsing it in public, I guess.
The standard IP hack response to this proposal is that it would be too hard and costly to clearly define what industries and inventions are eligible for patents.
With a GUI, everything is visual, but nothing can be automated or repeated.
While somewhat true in Windows, OS X has the Automator, which is basically a GUI for building scripts using the OS X environment. It's quite powerful, and I often find myself using it to accomplish tasks that I normally would have written a shell script for in Linux. Given the complexity of the tasks it can accomplish, it's fairly user friendly.
On the other hand, my impression is that Automator is also vastly underused by OS X users. I think the fundamental difference between "computer people" and computer users is that if a computer person has to do the same thing more than twice, they see if they can't find a more efficient and automated way to do it... whereas computer users just sigh and resign themselves to a redundant and mindless task.
The Berne Convention has over 160 members, so there really aren't that many countries that haven't ratified it. Plus, if you look at the countries that haven't (in gray), you'll notice that they're not exactly countries where we probably expect that jobs, data, and investment will flow. You know, places like Somalia, Western Sahara, Iran, and Afghanistan.
I think you're partially right that in the future, Berne members with less restrictive IP enforcement might benefit somewhat compared to us, but even for a place like China, those benefits are going to have to be greater than quite a lot of other downsides from the perspective of many Westerners. Leaving Berne has very negative consquences for countries - it's not only a WTO violation, meaning they can be sued by other WTO members and have trade sanctions applied against them, but it also means losing copyright protection for all your own authors' works abroad, etc. And it's extremely difficult to amend Berne.
Finally, while the US wasn't in Berne until 1989, there were specific reasons for this. In the meantime, we established our own copyright treaties, like the Universal Copyright Convention.
Wrong: There was also the LS120 drive.
In my experience, LS-120 never had the kind of limited success that Zip drives did. For that matter, there were lots of purported floppy-killers from that time. LS-120 did have the advantage that the drive was mechanically compatible with normal floppy disks, but it still had the same issues with high drive prices, high media prices, and low rates of adoption. Overall, I was always much more likely to find a Zip drive on a computer than an LS-120 drive.
Back before USB flash drives were widely and cheaply available, the only way to easily move around more than a few floppy's worth of data was the Zip drive.
100 MB was a lot back then. Even though the drive itself was not ubiquitous, the parallel port model could be easily transported, and it was supported on multiple operating systems. Macs were supported with SCSI. In some institutional environments, you'd find internal IDE zip drives. My local library branch had computers with internal drives, and for a few years it was the primary way I was able to download anything more than about 20 MB off the internet (hi-speed internet unavailable at home).
CD writers were expensive (my original 2X writer was $300), and came with all the problems of read-only media. Of course Zip had its problems - the drive itself wasn't very cheap, nor the disks, and of course there was the click of death... but all in all, it was IMO the most versatile portable storage medium we had between floppy disks and USB flash drives. Lugging around an IDE drive and opening up whatever you wanted to attach it to wasn't always an option :-)
Which of course has nothing to do with whether or not he should be tried...
I agree. Whether or not he's guilty/innocent or should be tried is not necessarily connected with whether his actions were intelligent. The former is a matter of law. But even if he is tried and acquitted, or never even tried, I think I'm still justified in thinking this outcome was not inevitable, and that he is responsible for the outcome.
Yep, too bad it's not possible to get a CCWP in DC. Then you might have been able to defend yourself.
I think you're missing my point. I was able to defend myself. I did not escalate the situation, and no one was injured. On the other hand, if either of us had a gun, including a legal one, one or both of us might have ended up injured or dead (or, bystanders might have been injured or dead). I fail to understand how the end result of my situation, in which no one was injured, is worse than me being "able to defend myself" and someone ending up injured or dead.
The main point of self-defense is to avoid injury or death...right?
Sure, and on that count, I ended up fine, and so did he. If I had aggravated the situation, I expect that one or both of us would have ended up in the hospital and/or jail. I don't see how that's better than what actually happened.
Allegedly, for committing a felonious assault on the wrong person.
It was a rhetorical question.