Can we please have a preferences option to filter out anything that's been moderated as funny?
I mean, it's nice every now and then but practically every single frickin post on this story is a "+X Funny". Anyone who actually has anything to say about the proposals is drowned in a sea of jokes about increment operators. And let's face it THERE'S ONLY SO MANY JOKES YOU CAN HEAR ABOUT INCREMENT OPERATORS.
Apparently all of the alleged "infringements" relate to SMP code contributed to the kernel by IBM. Since most of the CELF stuff is aimed at embedded devices, is any of this code even necessary?
But you cannot patent an idea without an implementation. Try actually reading beyond the title of the patent (which is always very general) to see the actual body (which is always very specific).
I did read past the title. That isn't an implementation, it's an idea for an implementation which still only requires a fraction of the effort that would be put into an implementation. All those 'specifics' would go out the window as soon as anyone tried to build it.
You do know that nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants work differently, right?
Feynman's idea was for a 'nuclear propulsion system' which relied on exhaust gases from a nuclear explosion. 'Nuclear powered' was a poor choice of words on my part.
the implementation if the patent system is what's broken, not the principle.
No-one's arguing with that (at least I'm not). It's still astonishing how broken it is in the US
The idea would be obvious to a thoughtful undergraduate student. Actually *doing* it, on the other hand, is an impressive feat.
That's what so frustrating about the US patent system. So many obvious ideas which require little though have been patented, and when someone puts an enormous amount of effort into actually *implementing* something they get sued. No frickin way did the engineers who built that particular part of the chip plant read that patent. And they get sued by someone who couldn't have implemented it in a million years.
I read yesterday that when the physicist Richard Feynman was at Los Alamos working on the bomb he was approached by some government legal advisor who said that they should patent any ideas they might get. Feynman replied that couldn't possibly keep track of all the ideas that crossed his mind, let alone write patents on them. The legal beaver replied that "just let us know about them" so Feynman said "OK, how about a nuclear powered submarine, a nuclear rocket, a nuclear reactor... ". A few weeks later the guy came back and said "Submarine is taken, but the rocket and some other ones are still free... " I think someone eventually wrote up the "Nuclear Rocket" patent for him.
Imagine that, someone had patented a nuclear powered submarine propulsion system before anyone had even exploded an atom bomb.
The point is so many of these patents are granted to people who haven't implemented anything when all the work is in the implementation.
For that reason I think it would be good if some business software had its own scripting language so end users could customize it to their own needs. Sure you'd have to employ someone who had the time and inclination to learn to write the scripts, but that is a lot less trouble than hiring someone to write it from scratch, and hopefully the results would be less buggy.
Of interest... looking at my web server logs for the torrent above, the overwhelming majority of the users grabbing Mac images via a mostly-Linux news site are running... Windows
That's because we're all so technically l337 that we've altered the user agent string so we can access our online banking.
We think of this as a tree. We have the tree trunk, with Unix System 5 running right down the middle of the trunk. That is our core ownership position on Unix.
And I like to think of it as a rhizome. It spreads from the initial root and puts down more roots. If the original root is pulled up or even poisened the rest of the plant still survives.
I know, I have this vine called Madeira in my backyard.
The purpose of law is not to eliminate crime, but to regulate society, which includes removing from society people whose action society deems criminal. The analogy about prohibition in the U.S. is pointless.
Oh shut up. That is absurd even for Slashdot.
Laws act as deterrents for the explicit purpose of reducing crime ('eliminate' is your word). The entire analogy was intended to suggest that if demand for something is high enough then making it illegal will have little effect. When enough people are doing it the deterrent no longer works.
The entire physics department here got an email with the subject line "Re: hep-lat 020711 daily received" with the pif attachement.
hep-lat is the Los Alamos eprint Archive subject code for high energy physics on lattice models. The email refers to a paper on "A new proposal for the fermion doubling problem" which is supposedly attached (instead you get the.pif file)
The subject line is matched amazingly well to the recipient list. I thought "that looks interesting, I might have a look even though I probably wasn't supposed to get it."
Re:shareholders..
on
SCO SCO SCO!
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· Score: 2, Funny
1. Announce you're launching a lawsuit for a staggering amount of money on an IP/Contract claim against IBM. 2. Announce revenues are up as the result of threatening letters to companies who use Linux. 3. Publicly announce that MSFT bought a licence (I think MS is involved in this somehow, BWT). 4. McBride fodders the market with rumors that they are looking to be bought by IBM. Nothing makes a stock price jump like rumors that small company X may be bought out by huge company Y.
Surely there's a patentable business practice in all this.
I just had a look at Patent 5,845,265. The bit covering online auctions says
At the auction date, perspective participants log onto the consignment node auction mode locally or through the consignment node network and await the first good to be auctioned. It is understood that in the best mode of the invention the participant will have a data terminal with a digital to analog converter such as a "sound blaster" and speaker, the digital to analog capability may be used in the auction mode to bring the aural excitement of an auction, e.g., the call of the heckler, the caller and bidders, home to the auction participant. This is discussed in more detail below.
The consignment node takes the first item to be auctioned and posts the image of the good and the good's text record to the participants. The consignment node then posts the opening bid. It is understood that the bid postings may be in a protocol that invokes the generation of an auctioneer's voice at the participant terminals. The participants may then respond with a higher bid. The consignment node mode scans electronically the participants for bids and accepts the highest bid. If bids are tied the consignment node may take the first highest bid by the participants log on order. A particular bidding participant receives a special acknowledgment from the consignment node that her bid was accepted. The consignment node then posts the higher bid to all the electronic auction participants. The consignment node repeats this process until no higher bid is received for a predetermined amount of time and closes the auctioning of that particular good.
Doesn't sound anything like Ebay to me. If the patent is meant to cover every single conveivable form of "competerized auction house" why don't they just say so? If they were really honest they could say "Joe bloggs has thought of something to do with auctions and computers. He isn't going to do anything with it, but has provided enough techno-babble to convince non-technical people that he could do something with it. Therefore, if anyone else tries to do something remotely similar they must give him money."
I once saw Isaac Chuang's quantum computing lab. He was controlling something to do with the NMR machine with an embedded linux device that looked like it was held together with gaff tape.
Re:The situation's aren't comparable.
on
RIAA vs The Economy
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Nobody ever made the comparison. The RIAA are wailing about P2P piracy affecting their music sales and using this to push for the implementation of draconian copyright control measures which trample all over consumer's rights.
Their declining music sales are supposed to be "proof" that digital piracy is affecting their business. However it's also possible that this is just part of a general economic trend, which is what this article is asserting.
For decades RIAA companies have made bucketloads of money of which artists only get a small fraction. Companies that should exist soley to promote and distribute the works of artists make more money than the artists themselves. See anything wrong here? The sort of things that are retrospecitvely taken out of artist royalties are unbelievable, food and alcohol at a promotional party for example.
The real reason the RIAA feels threatened by P2P is that if it was adopted as the medium of choice for music distribution, then the entry barrier into the industry would be lowered almost to the point where the artists could do it themselves. Their monopoly is threatened. So rather than embrace P2P as something which could potentially benefit the artists its member companies purportedly represent they are trying to legislate it out of existence. Using phony arguments like "P2P is eroding our profits".
Perhaps they won't make any more sales or revenue, but their stock price has more than tripled [yahoo.com] in the last 3 months, maybe because of all the press?
That was me. I had a spare $100 so I'm trying to buy a controlling interest. I originally had honest intentions of releasing all the Sys V code under the GPL, but now that I'm a high flying corporate mogul I fear I am being corrupted.
Applications of pure mathematics usually lag at least a century.
4 dimensional non-Euclidean geometry didn't appear to be that useful when it was first considered. 150 years later it was applied to the problem of gravity, and the results are used to ensure satellite clocks don't get out of sync with their ground level counterparts.
"what are the practical applications" is a stupid question anyway. As if all the human race concerns itself with is "practical."
Even if we leave aside the radioactivity of deuterium and tritium
Deuterium is stable. Tritium decays by emitting a low energy electron so if you're carrying a big chunk in your pocket it might sterlize you at worst. Rain water contains tritium so it's not like the world can't cope with it.
The main byproduct of nuclear fusion is helium-4 which hardly qualifies as radioactive waste.
Slashdot Mirror
Can we please have a preferences option to filter out anything that's been moderated as funny?
I mean, it's nice every now and then but practically every single frickin post on this story is a "+X Funny". Anyone who actually has anything to say about the proposals is drowned in a sea of jokes about increment operators. And let's face it THERE'S ONLY SO MANY JOKES YOU CAN HEAR ABOUT INCREMENT OPERATORS.
Apparently all of the alleged "infringements" relate to SMP code contributed to the kernel by IBM. Since most of the CELF stuff is aimed at embedded devices, is any of this code even necessary?
Real geeks use Mutt.
I mean if the US can hold a Russian for violation of the DMCA (remember Dimitry) obviously American Law extends further than the borders of america.
He was arrested in Las Vegas. I was under the impression that was within the borders of America.
Heh ... mescaline
I remember after trying LSD I imagined a hidden geometry behind everything.
On mescaline however I imagined there was a hidden vegetable behind everything. Far less scary.
But you cannot patent an idea without an implementation. Try actually reading beyond the title of the patent (which is always very general) to see the actual body (which is always very specific).
I did read past the title. That isn't an implementation, it's an idea for an implementation which still only requires a fraction of the effort that would be put into an implementation. All those 'specifics' would go out the window as soon as anyone tried to build it.
You do know that nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants work differently, right?
Feynman's idea was for a 'nuclear propulsion system' which relied on exhaust gases from a nuclear explosion. 'Nuclear powered' was a poor choice of words on my part.
the implementation if the patent system is what's broken, not the principle.
No-one's arguing with that (at least I'm not). It's still astonishing how broken it is in the US
The idea would be obvious to a thoughtful undergraduate student. Actually *doing* it, on the other hand, is an impressive feat.
... ". A few weeks later the guy came back and said "Submarine is taken, but the rocket and some other ones are still free ... " I think someone eventually wrote up the "Nuclear Rocket" patent for him.
That's what so frustrating about the US patent system. So many obvious ideas which require little though have been patented, and when someone puts an enormous amount of effort into actually *implementing* something they get sued. No frickin way did the engineers who built that particular part of the chip plant read that patent. And they get sued by someone who couldn't have implemented it in a million years.
I read yesterday that when the physicist Richard Feynman was at Los Alamos working on the bomb he was approached by some government legal advisor who said that they should patent any ideas they might get. Feynman replied that couldn't possibly keep track of all the ideas that crossed his mind, let alone write patents on them. The legal beaver replied that "just let us know about them" so Feynman said "OK, how about a nuclear powered submarine, a nuclear rocket, a nuclear reactor
Imagine that, someone had patented a nuclear powered submarine propulsion system before anyone had even exploded an atom bomb.
The point is so many of these patents are granted to people who haven't implemented anything when all the work is in the implementation.
For that reason I think it would be good if some business software had its own scripting language so end users could customize it to their own needs. Sure you'd have to employ someone who had the time and inclination to learn to write the scripts, but that is a lot less trouble than hiring someone to write it from scratch, and hopefully the results would be less buggy.
But Sony lost a case in Australia where they were seeking to make mod-chipping illegal. I would guess it's probably perfectly legal to sell them here.
Of interest... looking at my web server logs for the torrent above, the overwhelming majority of the users grabbing Mac images via a mostly-Linux news site are running... Windows
That's because we're all so technically l337 that we've altered the user agent string so we can access our online banking.
CD sales increased when the economy was bad in the early nineties. In fact, the economy was worse then than it is now. How do you explain that?
Nirvana.
What the hell was this paper given a subject classification that placed it as a paper on condensed matter physics? It sounds more like vapour to me.
We think of this as a tree. We have the tree trunk, with Unix System 5 running right down the middle of the trunk. That is our core ownership position on Unix.
And I like to think of it as a rhizome. It spreads from the initial root and puts down more roots. If the original root is pulled up or even poisened the rest of the plant still survives.
I know, I have this vine called Madeira in my backyard.
The purpose of law is not to eliminate crime, but to regulate society, which includes removing from society people whose action society deems criminal. The analogy about prohibition in the U.S. is pointless.
Oh shut up. That is absurd even for Slashdot.
Laws act as deterrents for the explicit purpose of reducing crime ('eliminate' is your word). The entire analogy was intended to suggest that if demand for something is high enough then making it illegal will have little effect. When enough people are doing it the deterrent no longer works.
The entire physics department here got an email with the subject line "Re: hep-lat 020711 daily received" with the pif attachement.
.pif file)
hep-lat is the Los Alamos eprint Archive subject code for high energy physics on lattice models. The email refers to a paper on "A new proposal for the fermion doubling problem" which is supposedly attached (instead you get the
The subject line is matched amazingly well to the recipient list. I thought "that looks interesting, I might have a look even though I probably wasn't supposed to get it."
1. Announce you're launching a lawsuit for a staggering amount of money on an IP/Contract claim against IBM.
2. Announce revenues are up as the result of threatening letters to companies who use Linux.
3. Publicly announce that MSFT bought a licence (I think MS is involved in this somehow, BWT).
4. McBride fodders the market with rumors that they are looking to be bought by IBM. Nothing makes a stock price jump like rumors that small company X may be bought out by huge company Y.
Surely there's a patentable business practice in all this.
I just had a look at Patent 5,845,265. The bit covering online auctions says
At the auction date, perspective participants log onto the consignment node auction mode locally or through the consignment node network and await the first good to be auctioned. It is understood that in the best mode of the invention the participant will have a data terminal with a digital to analog converter such as a "sound blaster" and speaker, the digital to analog capability may be used in the auction mode to bring the aural excitement of an auction, e.g., the call of the heckler, the caller and bidders, home to the auction participant. This is discussed in more detail below.
The consignment node takes the first item to be auctioned and posts the image of the good and the good's text record to the participants. The consignment node then posts the opening bid. It is understood that the bid postings may be in a protocol that invokes the generation of an auctioneer's voice at the participant terminals. The participants may then respond with a higher bid. The consignment node mode scans electronically the participants for bids and accepts the highest bid. If bids are tied the consignment node may take the first highest bid by the participants log on order. A particular bidding participant receives a special acknowledgment from the consignment node that her bid was accepted. The consignment node then posts the higher bid to all the electronic auction participants. The consignment node repeats this process until no higher bid is received for a predetermined amount of time and closes the auctioning of that particular good.
Doesn't sound anything like Ebay to me. If the patent is meant to cover every single conveivable form of "competerized auction house" why don't they just say so? If they were really honest they could say "Joe bloggs has thought of something to do with auctions and computers. He isn't going to do anything with it, but has provided enough techno-babble to convince non-technical people that he could do something with it. Therefore, if anyone else tries to do something remotely similar they must give him money."
I once saw Isaac Chuang's quantum computing lab. He was controlling something to do with the NMR machine with an embedded linux device that looked like it was held together with gaff tape.
Nobody ever made the comparison. The RIAA are wailing about P2P piracy affecting their music sales and using this to push for the implementation of draconian copyright control measures which trample all over consumer's rights.
Their declining music sales are supposed to be "proof" that digital piracy is affecting their business. However it's also possible that this is just part of a general economic trend, which is what this article is asserting.
For decades RIAA companies have made bucketloads of money of which artists only get a small fraction. Companies that should exist soley to promote and distribute the works of artists make more money than the artists themselves. See anything wrong here? The sort of things that are retrospecitvely taken out of artist royalties are unbelievable, food and alcohol at a promotional party for example.
The real reason the RIAA feels threatened by P2P is that if it was adopted as the medium of choice for music distribution, then the entry barrier into the industry would be lowered almost to the point where the artists could do it themselves. Their monopoly is threatened. So rather than embrace P2P as something which could potentially benefit the artists its member companies purportedly represent they are trying to legislate it out of existence. Using phony arguments like "P2P is eroding our profits".
Perhaps they won't make any more sales or revenue, but their stock price has more than tripled [yahoo.com] in the last 3 months, maybe because of all the press?
That was me. I had a spare $100 so I'm trying to buy a controlling interest. I originally had honest intentions of releasing all the Sys V code under the GPL, but now that I'm a high flying corporate mogul I fear I am being corrupted.
You're a boring wet blanket aren't you? I bet no-one ever invites you around for dinner.
Applications of pure mathematics usually lag at least a century.
4 dimensional non-Euclidean geometry didn't appear to be that useful when it was first considered. 150 years later it was applied to the problem of gravity, and the results are used to ensure satellite clocks don't get out of sync with their ground level counterparts.
"what are the practical applications" is a stupid question anyway. As if all the human race concerns itself with is "practical."
anyone tried it?
actualy the Army uses tritium to make wrist watches luminus in the dark
However it's not the tritium that glows. The beta decay from the tritium exites a phosphorescent material.
Even if we leave aside the radioactivity of deuterium and tritium
Deuterium is stable. Tritium decays by emitting a low energy electron so if you're carrying a big chunk in your pocket it might sterlize you at worst. Rain water contains tritium so it's not like the world can't cope with it.
The main byproduct of nuclear fusion is helium-4 which hardly qualifies as radioactive waste.