A lot of people here make a good point that is, however, not relevant. Namely, that "we don't need more programmers." I'm inclined to agree, especially hearing from friends about how difficult the job market is for many of them. However, this criticism misses the point: we want to teach those that *aren't* going to programmers, in order to provide them with a well-rounded education.
Most of the people that are taught algebra (or any math above basic arithmatic) will never use it in their work, much less be mathematicians. Same for a foreign language, or history, geography, chemistry, physics, etc. For that matter, it is completely irrelevant to the lives of the vast majority of people whether humankind developed after billions of years of evolution, or created in a day. Yet I don't see many slashdotters arguing in favor of those religious groups that don't want to teach accurate biology. Children should be given exposure to as much information and knowledge as possible, to make them better informed and educated adults. What they do with it then is up to them.
Other countries do a better job producing more well-rounded students. Let me give an example: A German friend, a Ph.D. student in comparative literature, asked what my CompSci Ph.D. thesis was about. I said "mathematical integration," and asked her if she was familiar with the term (from experience, most Americans without science backgrounds are not). "Obviously," she said "I did graduate from high school, you know."
Apparently, in Germany, everyone at university-bound high schools takes calculus. It's just expected. It doesn't matter if they're going to be in science or math. It is taught in case they might use it, and so that they can be generally more-knowledgeable people. The same, in my view, should apply with programming. It teaches rigorous, formal thinking skills, something that is sorely lacking in American academia.
I hate to say it, especially thinking of all the people that will be losing their jobs in this hard economy, but GamePro's demise is long overdue, and no great loss. I haven't been into video games much for the last 10 years, but as a high-schooler in the 90's, I was quite a devoted reader of the video game press. Compared to Electronic Gaming Monthly, perhaps its major competitor for most of that time, GamePro was essentially a purveyor of hype and marketing buzz, rather than a serious commentator on the state of the field (assuming that a magazine about games can ever be serious). Nearly every (well-marketed/buzzworthy) game had an almost perfect rating on the scale that they used -- one could never rely on GamePro to give any sort of critical view. Many games had absolutely perfect scores.
By contrast, EGM had a scale of 1-10, through for the first year or so I thought it was a 1-9 scale because I never saw any 10's (I want to say it was Final Fantasy III that got the first 10 that I saw, but I'm not sure). I remember that EGM prided themselves for many years on never having rated a game 10 by all four reviewers. Moreover, unlike EGM (or earlier-90's Nintendo Power), GamePro had a saccarine, plastic, slick, manufactured feel (I apologize for my lack of a better term), and lacked any real sense of personality or character. Kind of like cheap candy -- yeah, it has an overwhelming sweetness, but has so little else that it ends up feeling as if it tasted bland. I've kept all the Nintendo Power issues from when it started in 1988, until I stopped subscribing around 2000. Most of the EGMs from that time period as well. GamePro, if I ever somehow ended up with an issue, went straight to the trash.
Sorry, but that simply isn't the state of the law -- certainly not in America, at least. The general theory for slip-and-fall cases is one of negligence: did the defendant fail to meet the standard of behavior that a reasonable person in similar circumstances would take, and if so, did that conduct cause the plaintiff's injury. If not, no liability.
The Hot Coffee case operated on a more plaintiff-friendly theory: in product-liability cases, liability is "strict." That is, courts will not ask whether the standard of care was negligent, only whether the product was defective, and did that defect cause the injury. The plaintiff there argued that coffee served at 185F was per se "defective," thus it didn't matter whether McDonald's was otherwise negligent. This is arguably the most questionable part about that lawsuit, since many people (including other courts) disagree with that premise, and instead argue that coffee *should* be served that hot. See McMahon v. Bunn-O-Matic Corp., 150 F.3d 651 (7th Cir. 1997):
"The smell (and therefore the taste) of coffee depends heavily on the oils containing aromatic compounds that are dissolved out of the beans during the brewing process. Brewing temperature should be close to 200 F [93 C] to dissolve them effectively, but without causing the premature breakdown of these delicate molecules. Coffee smells and tastes best when these aromatic compounds evaporate from the surface of the coffee as it is being drunk. Compounds vital to flavor have boiling points in the range of 150–160 F [66–71 C], and the beverage therefore tastes best when it is this hot and the aromatics vaporize as it is being drunk. For coffee to be 150 F when imbibed, it must be hotter in the pot. Pouring a liquid increases its surface area and cools it; more heat is lost by contact with the cooler container; if the consumer adds cream and sugar (plus a metal spoon to stir them) the liquid's temperature falls again. If the consumer carries the container out for later consumption, the beverage cools still further."
But one way or the other, causation is absolutely required. If you slip on your own shoelaces at McDonalds, and there is no link whatsoever to McDonald's conduct, you're necessarily out of luck.
Wait a minute... they keep saying, over and over again, "Windows 1 changes everything," "Windows 1 changes everything," "Windows 1 changes everything"? I would think that they would at least want to start pitching their new version every once in a while.;-)
Technically, what you're saying is true. But the requirement of "a physical implementation" is little more than a magic phrase necessary to recite to achieve patentability. Take for example, the following IBM patent on arithmatic coding: http://www.google.com/patents?vid=4122440. The claims recite over and over "an apparatus" to do X, an "apparatus" to do Y... etc... Of course, apparatus is not defined; they give some diagrams, but presumably a software implementation on a general purpose CPU is also an "apparatus." So at this point, the idea that "a physical implementation" is being claimed is meaningless.
Also, they do not make any claim that it has a useful purpose. The original -- to my knowledge only -- Supreme Court case directly on point to software patents upheld the patentability of an automated rubber-curing and -molding system, of which software to compute the Arrhenius equation was a part. Diamond v. Diehr, 450 U.S. 175 (1981). In that case, there was a real physical input transformed into a physical output. The claims state specifically "a rubber-molding system." Therefore, one could use the same basic software to cure or mold something else, and it would not infringe. By contrast, that IBM patent does not have an actual utility for a specific application; it covers anything that could ever use arithmetic coding.
This is a minor point, but Shakespeare and the King James Bible aren't Middle English; they're Early Modern English from the early 1600's. They are almost completely recognizable to a speaker of modern English, especially once the "thou/you" distinction is explained, and with the occasional vocabulary word. For an example of Middle English, the best known example is Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (late 1300's), http://www.librarius.com/cantales/genpro.htm. That's significantly more difficult to understand, though if you sound it out, and read about the rules of grammar, it doesn't take too much practice before you can read it without trouble.
But you're right, the big change was from Old English, which was a Germanic language that is far more intelligible to modern German speakers than modern English speakers. Our current language is highly influenced by the importation of French and Latin words after the Norman invasion of 1066.
I agree with the toxicity of software patents, but "abuse" is not the only reason for building a patent portfolio -- defensive patents may be even more significant. When companies face lawsuit from patent holders, one of the first responses is to see if they can retaliate by invoking one of their own patents against the plaintiff's products. Obviously if the plaintiff is merely a troll, this has limited utility (although there might be a possibility that one of their patents is a blocking patent against one of the troll's patent, and thus could retaliate by demanding a share of their licensing revenue).
Even before reaching the litigation stage, companies can often get favorable licensing terms for other companies' patents by cross-licensing to reduce (or instead of) a monetary royalty. Therefore, even if a company had the best intentions, and never planned to invoke their patents offensively, by giving up their patents they make themselves extremely vulnerable, and put themselves in a much worse competitive position.
In effect, we have an arms race scenario, in which players cannot take the risk of unilateral disarmament because that exposes them to the danger that others will not follow the lead of their altruism. It can only be resolved by coordinated effort to scale back the arms race, hopefully by legislative action (or the Supreme Court more tightly policing the Federal Circuit, which is generally very patent-holder friendly).
It would help to have a bit of trademark law primer to understand the issue here. A "trademark" is a "mark" (a name or graphic, etc.) that is used in commerce to identify the source of a product. There are five types of marks: fanciful, arbitrary, suggestive, descriptive, and generic.
A fanciful mark is one that has no prior meaning, and thus usually is a made-up word. (e.g. Kodak, Verizon, Slashdot)
An arbitrary mark is a word with existing meaning but is arbitrarily connected to the product which it labels. So therefore "Apple" is arbitrary when it is used to describe a manufacturer of computers, but not when used to describe an apple farmer.
A suggestive mark is one that *suggests* a quality or feature of the product, but does not describe it directly. Courts usually describe such a mark as requiring a "step of imagination" to get from the mark to the product. Examples include "Coppertone" for suntanning lotion, or "Playboy," or "Home Depot," or "SourceForge."
A descriptive mark is one that directly describes a quality or feature of the product: "International Business Machines," "American Telephone and Telegraph"
Finally, generic marks are those that merely describe the general class of which the product is a member: "corn flakes," "raisin bran," etc.
Fanciful, arbitrary and suggestive marks are considered "inherently distinctive." They can be registered as-is (subject to minor restrictions, like being used in commerce), and immediately grant their owner the right to prevent others from using that mark in commerce. (To be clear, it does not prevent other people from using it for non-commerce purposes, nor does it prevent "nominative" use, where the other party is using it to describe the trademark owner's actual product -- as in, "our service is better than Verizon's")
On the opposite extreme, generic marks are never protected. The middle ground is for descriptive marks, which have to have acquired "secondary meaning" before they can be protected. This means that, despite its lack of inherent distinctiveness, the public must have come to associate that mark with the source. For example, when someone sees "IBM" on a computer they have a very specific idea of the company that produced that product.
The question, it would seem, is whether "App Store" is descriptive or generic, and if descriptive, has it acquired secondary meaning? It seems to me that it is *not* suggestive -- one does not need a leap of imagination to realize that an "App Store" is a store where one buys apps. Personally, I'm inclined to say that it is generic -- an "App Store" is a class of stores, of which "Apple App Store" is one member (the latter is protected as an arbitrary mark, btw).
This contrasts with "Windows," which is either suggestive or descriptive with acquired secondary meaning. Arguably, one needs imagination to jump from the mark "Windows" to "an operating system with graphical user interface." One could claim that "Windows" merely describes one aspect of that operating system, namely that it displays windows, but the counter argument would be that the term "window" itself, as used for a collection of pixels on the screen that displays the output of a computer program, is itself a suggestive term (i.e., it bears little resemblance to the traditional definition of Windows). Furthermore, even if descriptive, "Windows" has acquired secondary meaning, as it is universally understood to refer to the Microsoft product. Whoever first coined that term might have had the right to prevent Microsoft's use at some point, assuming that they used it in commerce, but that right has lapsed by failure to maintain it.
Anyways, that's what they taught me in IP class in law school. Hopefully that is helpful.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of people here make a good point that is, however, not relevant. Namely, that "we don't need more programmers." I'm inclined to agree, especially hearing from friends about how difficult the job market is for many of them. However, this criticism misses the point: we want to teach those that *aren't* going to programmers, in order to provide them with a well-rounded education.
Most of the people that are taught algebra (or any math above basic arithmatic) will never use it in their work, much less be mathematicians. Same for a foreign language, or history, geography, chemistry, physics, etc. For that matter, it is completely irrelevant to the lives of the vast majority of people whether humankind developed after billions of years of evolution, or created in a day. Yet I don't see many slashdotters arguing in favor of those religious groups that don't want to teach accurate biology. Children should be given exposure to as much information and knowledge as possible, to make them better informed and educated adults. What they do with it then is up to them.
Other countries do a better job producing more well-rounded students. Let me give an example: A German friend, a Ph.D. student in comparative literature, asked what my CompSci Ph.D. thesis was about. I said "mathematical integration," and asked her if she was familiar with the term (from experience, most Americans without science backgrounds are not). "Obviously," she said "I did graduate from high school, you know."
Apparently, in Germany, everyone at university-bound high schools takes calculus. It's just expected. It doesn't matter if they're going to be in science or math. It is taught in case they might use it, and so that they can be generally more-knowledgeable people. The same, in my view, should apply with programming. It teaches rigorous, formal thinking skills, something that is sorely lacking in American academia.
I hate to say it, especially thinking of all the people that will be losing their jobs in this hard economy, but GamePro's demise is long overdue, and no great loss. I haven't been into video games much for the last 10 years, but as a high-schooler in the 90's, I was quite a devoted reader of the video game press. Compared to Electronic Gaming Monthly, perhaps its major competitor for most of that time, GamePro was essentially a purveyor of hype and marketing buzz, rather than a serious commentator on the state of the field (assuming that a magazine about games can ever be serious). Nearly every (well-marketed/buzzworthy) game had an almost perfect rating on the scale that they used -- one could never rely on GamePro to give any sort of critical view. Many games had absolutely perfect scores.
By contrast, EGM had a scale of 1-10, through for the first year or so I thought it was a 1-9 scale because I never saw any 10's (I want to say it was Final Fantasy III that got the first 10 that I saw, but I'm not sure). I remember that EGM prided themselves for many years on never having rated a game 10 by all four reviewers. Moreover, unlike EGM (or earlier-90's Nintendo Power), GamePro had a saccarine, plastic, slick, manufactured feel (I apologize for my lack of a better term), and lacked any real sense of personality or character. Kind of like cheap candy -- yeah, it has an overwhelming sweetness, but has so little else that it ends up feeling as if it tasted bland. I've kept all the Nintendo Power issues from when it started in 1988, until I stopped subscribing around 2000. Most of the EGMs from that time period as well. GamePro, if I ever somehow ended up with an issue, went straight to the trash.
Sorry, but that simply isn't the state of the law -- certainly not in America, at least. The general theory for slip-and-fall cases is one of negligence: did the defendant fail to meet the standard of behavior that a reasonable person in similar circumstances would take, and if so, did that conduct cause the plaintiff's injury. If not, no liability.
The Hot Coffee case operated on a more plaintiff-friendly theory: in product-liability cases, liability is "strict." That is, courts will not ask whether the standard of care was negligent, only whether the product was defective, and did that defect cause the injury. The plaintiff there argued that coffee served at 185F was per se "defective," thus it didn't matter whether McDonald's was otherwise negligent. This is arguably the most questionable part about that lawsuit, since many people (including other courts) disagree with that premise, and instead argue that coffee *should* be served that hot. See McMahon v. Bunn-O-Matic Corp., 150 F.3d 651 (7th Cir. 1997):
"The smell (and therefore the taste) of coffee depends heavily on the oils containing aromatic compounds that are dissolved out of the beans during the brewing process. Brewing temperature should be close to 200 F [93 C] to dissolve them effectively, but without causing the premature breakdown of these delicate molecules. Coffee smells and tastes best when these aromatic compounds evaporate from the surface of the coffee as it is being drunk. Compounds vital to flavor have boiling points in the range of 150–160 F [66–71 C], and the beverage therefore tastes best when it is this hot and the aromatics vaporize as it is being drunk. For coffee to be 150 F when imbibed, it must be hotter in the pot. Pouring a liquid increases its surface area and cools it; more heat is lost by contact with the cooler container; if the consumer adds cream and sugar (plus a metal spoon to stir them) the liquid's temperature falls again. If the consumer carries the container out for later consumption, the beverage cools still further."
But one way or the other, causation is absolutely required. If you slip on your own shoelaces at McDonalds, and there is no link whatsoever to McDonald's conduct, you're necessarily out of luck.
Wait a minute... they keep saying, over and over again, "Windows 1 changes everything," "Windows 1 changes everything," "Windows 1 changes everything"? I would think that they would at least want to start pitching their new version every once in a while. ;-)
Technically, what you're saying is true. But the requirement of "a physical implementation" is little more than a magic phrase necessary to recite to achieve patentability. Take for example, the following IBM patent on arithmatic coding: http://www.google.com/patents?vid=4122440. The claims recite over and over "an apparatus" to do X, an "apparatus" to do Y... etc... Of course, apparatus is not defined; they give some diagrams, but presumably a software implementation on a general purpose CPU is also an "apparatus." So at this point, the idea that "a physical implementation" is being claimed is meaningless.
Also, they do not make any claim that it has a useful purpose. The original -- to my knowledge only -- Supreme Court case directly on point to software patents upheld the patentability of an automated rubber-curing and -molding system, of which software to compute the Arrhenius equation was a part. Diamond v. Diehr, 450 U.S. 175 (1981). In that case, there was a real physical input transformed into a physical output. The claims state specifically "a rubber-molding system." Therefore, one could use the same basic software to cure or mold something else, and it would not infringe. By contrast, that IBM patent does not have an actual utility for a specific application; it covers anything that could ever use arithmetic coding.
This is a minor point, but Shakespeare and the King James Bible aren't Middle English; they're Early Modern English from the early 1600's. They are almost completely recognizable to a speaker of modern English, especially once the "thou/you" distinction is explained, and with the occasional vocabulary word. For an example of Middle English, the best known example is Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (late 1300's), http://www.librarius.com/cantales/genpro.htm. That's significantly more difficult to understand, though if you sound it out, and read about the rules of grammar, it doesn't take too much practice before you can read it without trouble.
But you're right, the big change was from Old English, which was a Germanic language that is far more intelligible to modern German speakers than modern English speakers. Our current language is highly influenced by the importation of French and Latin words after the Norman invasion of 1066.
I agree with the toxicity of software patents, but "abuse" is not the only reason for building a patent portfolio -- defensive patents may be even more significant. When companies face lawsuit from patent holders, one of the first responses is to see if they can retaliate by invoking one of their own patents against the plaintiff's products. Obviously if the plaintiff is merely a troll, this has limited utility (although there might be a possibility that one of their patents is a blocking patent against one of the troll's patent, and thus could retaliate by demanding a share of their licensing revenue).
Even before reaching the litigation stage, companies can often get favorable licensing terms for other companies' patents by cross-licensing to reduce (or instead of) a monetary royalty. Therefore, even if a company had the best intentions, and never planned to invoke their patents offensively, by giving up their patents they make themselves extremely vulnerable, and put themselves in a much worse competitive position.
In effect, we have an arms race scenario, in which players cannot take the risk of unilateral disarmament because that exposes them to the danger that others will not follow the lead of their altruism. It can only be resolved by coordinated effort to scale back the arms race, hopefully by legislative action (or the Supreme Court more tightly policing the Federal Circuit, which is generally very patent-holder friendly).
It would help to have a bit of trademark law primer to understand the issue here. A "trademark" is a "mark" (a name or graphic, etc.) that is used in commerce to identify the source of a product. There are five types of marks: fanciful, arbitrary, suggestive, descriptive, and generic.
A fanciful mark is one that has no prior meaning, and thus usually is a made-up word. (e.g. Kodak, Verizon, Slashdot)
An arbitrary mark is a word with existing meaning but is arbitrarily connected to the product which it labels. So therefore "Apple" is arbitrary when it is used to describe a manufacturer of computers, but not when used to describe an apple farmer.
A suggestive mark is one that *suggests* a quality or feature of the product, but does not describe it directly. Courts usually describe such a mark as requiring a "step of imagination" to get from the mark to the product. Examples include "Coppertone" for suntanning lotion, or "Playboy," or "Home Depot," or "SourceForge."
A descriptive mark is one that directly describes a quality or feature of the product: "International Business Machines," "American Telephone and Telegraph"
Finally, generic marks are those that merely describe the general class of which the product is a member: "corn flakes," "raisin bran," etc.
Fanciful, arbitrary and suggestive marks are considered "inherently distinctive." They can be registered as-is (subject to minor restrictions, like being used in commerce), and immediately grant their owner the right to prevent others from using that mark in commerce. (To be clear, it does not prevent other people from using it for non-commerce purposes, nor does it prevent "nominative" use, where the other party is using it to describe the trademark owner's actual product -- as in, "our service is better than Verizon's")
On the opposite extreme, generic marks are never protected. The middle ground is for descriptive marks, which have to have acquired "secondary meaning" before they can be protected. This means that, despite its lack of inherent distinctiveness, the public must have come to associate that mark with the source. For example, when someone sees "IBM" on a computer they have a very specific idea of the company that produced that product.
The question, it would seem, is whether "App Store" is descriptive or generic, and if descriptive, has it acquired secondary meaning? It seems to me that it is *not* suggestive -- one does not need a leap of imagination to realize that an "App Store" is a store where one buys apps. Personally, I'm inclined to say that it is generic -- an "App Store" is a class of stores, of which "Apple App Store" is one member (the latter is protected as an arbitrary mark, btw).
This contrasts with "Windows," which is either suggestive or descriptive with acquired secondary meaning. Arguably, one needs imagination to jump from the mark "Windows" to "an operating system with graphical user interface." One could claim that "Windows" merely describes one aspect of that operating system, namely that it displays windows, but the counter argument would be that the term "window" itself, as used for a collection of pixels on the screen that displays the output of a computer program, is itself a suggestive term (i.e., it bears little resemblance to the traditional definition of Windows). Furthermore, even if descriptive, "Windows" has acquired secondary meaning, as it is universally understood to refer to the Microsoft product. Whoever first coined that term might have had the right to prevent Microsoft's use at some point, assuming that they used it in commerce, but that right has lapsed by failure to maintain it.
Anyways, that's what they taught me in IP class in law school. Hopefully that is helpful.