(a) Except as otherwise provided in this title, whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent therefor, infringes the patent.
The "uses" part covers customers who have bought the infringing product. It is not common to go after the customers but it is legal and there are examples.
Uhhh, the article refers not at all to anything about performance. It refers to the fact that the chip is still using a 19nm process. i.e. the transistors are still 19nm on each side, and because of that, there's the same number of them.
Actually, it doesn't say that. While they are still using a 19 nm process, they found a way to pack them closer together, and hence there are more of them even though they are still the same size as the previous ones. They didn't say how much closer, though. Packing the units of the same size closer together is the kind of thing you can probably only manage to get useful improvement out of once. Then they'll probably make the chips bigger once, to deliver more transistors. This sounds like the stopgap things you do when the next smaller process won't work, or is too expensive, and they are already talking about stacking them in 3D as the next improvement. But adding another dimension has huge potential. Imagine how many layers you could stack in a 1 mm-high chip if each layer consisted of a 19 nm-thick circuit and a 19 nm-thick insulator.
I don't think this is really a Moore's Law failure. More like a hiccup, as the new technology needed to continue the growth of Moore's Law gets built up - as has happened multiple times in the decades since Moore stated his famous law.
Some of the easiest songs to get stuck in your head (as used by the researchers)
Alejandro – Lady Gaga
Bad Romance – Lady Gaga
Call me Baby – Carly Rae Jepsen.
Single Ladies – Beyoncé She Loves You – The Beatles
I Wanna Hold Your Hand – The Beatles She Loves You – The Beatles
SOS – Rihanna
You Belong with Me – Taylor Swift
Apparently She Loves You is such a catchy song that it gets stuck in your head twice.
And that is exactly the problem with this regulation. If transactions of more than $N into and/or out of bitcoins must be reported, criminals will keep their transactions under $N. They can create as many bitcoin accounts as they want. As long as they get the money into different US dollar accounts before buying bitcoins with it, there is nothing to tie the transactions together, and they won't be reported.
Actually both industries believe that ripping to another format is illegal. The music industry just at some point realized that calling all their customers criminals and suing joe downloader into bankruptcy wasn't going to guilt them into buying cds again.
"Believe," sure. But the difference in Jason Levine's example comes from the fact that DVDs are encrypted. This is considered an "access control" protecting a copyrighted work. Even though the password to this encryption is now public information, the DMCA makes it illegal to rip to another format, even when you don't distribute it. CDs have no such access control. While copyright law still applies to music, the DMCA does not apply, and the type of copy Jason describes falls under the fair use exception in copyright law as interpreted by just about everybody outside of the RIAA.
This is much the same with cell phone unlocking. You know (or can find out without too much effort) how to unlock your cell phone, but the DMCA prohibits actually doing it. The only difference is that there was, for a while, an exception to the DMCA permitted for unlocking cell phones. (See the previous slashdot story linked in the summary for an explanation of why this exception expired.)
This comes up every now and then, and it honestly looks like the majority of 3d printing patents are legitimate, original inventions that the owners created.
Take the "soluble print materials that support a structure whie it's being printed"; that's genius, I would never have come up with that.
I agree that the soluble print materials one is quite likely valid, a patent on an ingenious choice of materials that makes 3-D printing possible. This is an innovative field, and this patent is old enough to possibly be able to legitimately claim to have invented this idea and not be invalidated by prior art.
However, the patent linked in the summary on distributed rapid prototyping does not appear to have been granted, only filed (almost 6 years ago), and no doubt is having some trouble getting accepted due to broadness, prior art, and other considerations. This patent does not even appear to cover any specific 3-D printing method, but just the general process of setting up a service to produce 3-D models, and as such, should be invalidated due to being an obvious adaptation of services for conventional (2-D) printing into a new market for 3-D printing given the availability of 3-D printers.
The MIT patent is expired. It is more than 17 years since issue and more than 20 years since filing. The article says this one is "on the brink of expiration" so I assume it was written sometime last year when the patent was still valid. But it was very likely valid until it expired, and another innovation that helped establish the field.
The article contains some other possibly valid patents, e.g., the smoothing one (if there is not prior art), the temperature control one from 2004, and possibly the filament coil one if their methods for keeping the filament feed smooth and/or automatically switching spools are really original. The summary just chose (2 out of 3) bad examples out of the article which stretched a bit to make a "top 10" list.
Square monitors. This reminds me of the IBM RT workstation. Back around 1991 when IBM was discontinuing this model, my university got a bunch of these cheap and used them to add seats in the Unix lab. For whatever reason they were set up for 1024x1024 resolution, with large color CRTs that has a special switch along with the usual image size/position/tint controls. This switch flipped between the image filling the screen and only filling a square section in the middle of the screen, so that you could get square pixels. Not exactly a square monitor (more akin to an earlier poster's suggestion to apply duct tape...) but supported in hardware!
Maybe. But in using one-time pads with codes like this there needs to be something to indicate WHICH one-time pad was used. Other codes are known to do something similar. For example, Enigma had initial rotor settings in combination with other agreed-upon global daily settings, and these were encoded (using agreed-upon settings) twice at the start of each message. Here, perhaps AOAKN indicates which one-time pad was used, and it is repeated at the start and end of the message to allow the message to be decipherable (assuming possession of the key) to the extent available if it is damaged and only part of the message is received. The number 27 probably indicates the total number of 5-letter blocks in the message, including AOAKN both times, which helps determine where to start in the key if only the end of the message is recovered. It's not clear what 1525/6 indicates.
They're not "getting rid of pixels," since you'll still have pixels on your monitor and your graphics card will still buffer what it's drawing to the screen.
When I beg my coworkers, friends and family to vote, I'm not telling them who to vote for nor do I want to know afterwards. I only ask them to inform themselves and hit the booths on November 6th. How is Google's tool any different than that?
It's the same, but on a larger scale. Though your coworkers, friends, and family may not vote the same way as you, because you share some part of your life with them, they are more likely to vote as you do than not to. So by encouraging them to vote when they might not have done so otherwise, you effectively increase your political power just a little.
The same applies on a larger scale for Google. By providing this information to potential voters, they hope to encourage more voting, and voting by more informed voters. Whether this actually helps Google is not clear to me, but can it influence the election? Certainly.
This is also why there is all the controversy over voter ID laws. Voters without government ID cards are seen as more likely to vote Democratic, so Democrats are trying to prevent these laws from going into effect while Republicans support them.
Three-year-olds are likely to only focus on one program at a time, exactly the model Windows 8 presents, and the model which works well on a smartphone because of the limited screen space. Experienced adult computer users are likely to have email, multiple browser windows, a document they are writing or a game they are playing, and maybe other programs open at the same time. The comparison presented in the article is not a reasonable one.
T-Mobile does have monthly prepaid plans so I'd expect it is something like this, paid for a month starting at the time they put these things together, which means they probably have a week or so left on them now.
Although the population listed in the summary is presumably just the sum of those four countries, the ones cited in the article (in the tables under Lost Feature Breakdown) show various inaccuracies.
The USA's population is listed at 3,368,595. I'm not sure what century he's from, but the population of the USA today is slightly over 300 million, not 3 million.
South Africa and South Korea, which appear one after the other in two of the tables, both show populations of 50,586,757. While population data for these countries show this as a plausible population for each of these countries, it's suspicious that they have exactly the same value, specified to a precision of 1 person.
Romania and Russia likewise are shown with the same population of 21,390,000. Here this is probably the population for Romania. Russia's population is around 143 million.
I haven't checked for further errors; these are just the ones I noticed were off because they were for my own country or two consecutive countries listed with the same population. Given these inaccuracies, I don't trust this population data at all. Ironically, the errors I noticed actually increase his population totals (assuming the total is the sum of the given numbers, which I also haven't checked) to even higher, more sensational numbers he could have used (more than 400 million higher).
The babies that "have ridden the [Roomba] since it was introduced exactly a decade ago" are now on the verge of being teenagers, if they somehow survived that decade of dizziness.
And none of those phones are relevant here. The comparison is between Samsung Android phones (including but not limited to the ones in the $1 billion trial) and iPhones.
Ironically, Caldera was a Linux company before they become The SCO Group and turned into a lawsuit fountain. One of the many fun pastimes of people in the early days of Groklaw was pointing out where The SCO Group was distributing the exact Linux files they claimed infringing, with accompanying GPL. But before long they shut down the Linux distribution.
The part of the deal that was rejected was related to Verizon Wireless selling the cable TV service from Comcast et al. (not FIOS TV) in their stores. This little detail is missing from the summary. Without understanding this, the "Verizon's commitment to the technology has faltered" makes little sense, since it would seem like they were trying to support FIOS if they wanted to sell FIOS TV service through their stores.
That they even considered doing this shows how little Verizon and Verizon Wireless cooperate. They are two separate companies, alike in name only.
Correct, the Supreme Court does not have original jurisdiction in the matter of the NSLs. This is why, if you read the heavily redacted documents about the case you will see, on the first page of each document, that this is being heard in US district court in California. If this gets appealed (and that seems likely to me regardless of the outcome), then the Supreme Court will get to hear it based on its appellate jurisdiction, which it has regarding all other cases, as quoted from the constitution by several other poster already.
I think the most ludicrous application is by Daniel Schindler, who has applied for hundreds of new top-level domains, each one under a separate LLC with a name composed of two words from a small set of words, including baxter, big, castle, falls, frostbite, galley, half, hill, holly, june, knob, lone, maple, north, oaks, sand, spring, steel, tigers, town, and victor. Those words are just the ones from the applications for domains starting with A.
Slashdot Mirror
If multiple separate parties all try to patent the same thing, then the idea was too obvious to be patented in the first place.
You say that, but exactly this situation has occurred with inventions as original and important as the telephone (1876).
The you clearly haven't read the law.
Section 271 of Title 35:
(a) Except as otherwise provided in this title, whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent therefor, infringes the patent.
The "uses" part covers customers who have bought the infringing product. It is not common to go after the customers but it is legal and there are examples.
As an example of going after customers, see the story about patent trolls extorting money from business who use scan-to-email functionality. There are more recent stories on this subject, but this one from January is what I can find right now.
Uhhh, the article refers not at all to anything about performance. It refers to the fact that the chip is still using a 19nm process. i.e. the transistors are still 19nm on each side, and because of that, there's the same number of them.
Actually, it doesn't say that. While they are still using a 19 nm process, they found a way to pack them closer together, and hence there are more of them even though they are still the same size as the previous ones. They didn't say how much closer, though. Packing the units of the same size closer together is the kind of thing you can probably only manage to get useful improvement out of once. Then they'll probably make the chips bigger once, to deliver more transistors. This sounds like the stopgap things you do when the next smaller process won't work, or is too expensive, and they are already talking about stacking them in 3D as the next improvement. But adding another dimension has huge potential. Imagine how many layers you could stack in a 1 mm-high chip if each layer consisted of a 19 nm-thick circuit and a 19 nm-thick insulator.
I don't think this is really a Moore's Law failure. More like a hiccup, as the new technology needed to continue the growth of Moore's Law gets built up - as has happened multiple times in the decades since Moore stated his famous law.
Some of the easiest songs to get stuck in your head (as used by the researchers)
Alejandro – Lady Gaga
Bad Romance – Lady Gaga
Call me Baby – Carly Rae Jepsen.
Single Ladies – Beyoncé
She Loves You – The Beatles
I Wanna Hold Your Hand – The Beatles
She Loves You – The Beatles
SOS – Rihanna
You Belong with Me – Taylor Swift
Apparently She Loves You is such a catchy song that it gets stuck in your head twice.
Send $9,999 Then donate $1.
Problam salved.
Life's cool up here in my Mansion tower.
And that is exactly the problem with this regulation. If transactions of more than $N into and/or out of bitcoins must be reported, criminals will keep their transactions under $N. They can create as many bitcoin accounts as they want. As long as they get the money into different US dollar accounts before buying bitcoins with it, there is nothing to tie the transactions together, and they won't be reported.
Actually both industries believe that ripping to another format is illegal. The music industry just at some point realized that calling all their customers criminals and suing joe downloader into bankruptcy wasn't going to guilt them into buying cds again.
"Believe," sure. But the difference in Jason Levine's example comes from the fact that DVDs are encrypted. This is considered an "access control" protecting a copyrighted work. Even though the password to this encryption is now public information, the DMCA makes it illegal to rip to another format, even when you don't distribute it. CDs have no such access control. While copyright law still applies to music, the DMCA does not apply, and the type of copy Jason describes falls under the fair use exception in copyright law as interpreted by just about everybody outside of the RIAA.
This is much the same with cell phone unlocking. You know (or can find out without too much effort) how to unlock your cell phone, but the DMCA prohibits actually doing it. The only difference is that there was, for a while, an exception to the DMCA permitted for unlocking cell phones. (See the previous slashdot story linked in the summary for an explanation of why this exception expired.)
This comes up every now and then, and it honestly looks like the majority of 3d printing patents are legitimate, original inventions that the owners created.
Take the "soluble print materials that support a structure whie it's being printed"; that's genius, I would never have come up with that.
I agree that the soluble print materials one is quite likely valid, a patent on an ingenious choice of materials that makes 3-D printing possible. This is an innovative field, and this patent is old enough to possibly be able to legitimately claim to have invented this idea and not be invalidated by prior art.
However, the patent linked in the summary on distributed rapid prototyping does not appear to have been granted, only filed (almost 6 years ago), and no doubt is having some trouble getting accepted due to broadness, prior art, and other considerations. This patent does not even appear to cover any specific 3-D printing method, but just the general process of setting up a service to produce 3-D models, and as such, should be invalidated due to being an obvious adaptation of services for conventional (2-D) printing into a new market for 3-D printing given the availability of 3-D printers.
The MIT patent is expired. It is more than 17 years since issue and more than 20 years since filing. The article says this one is "on the brink of expiration" so I assume it was written sometime last year when the patent was still valid. But it was very likely valid until it expired, and another innovation that helped establish the field.
The article contains some other possibly valid patents, e.g., the smoothing one (if there is not prior art), the temperature control one from 2004, and possibly the filament coil one if their methods for keeping the filament feed smooth and/or automatically switching spools are really original. The summary just chose (2 out of 3) bad examples out of the article which stretched a bit to make a "top 10" list.
Square monitors. This reminds me of the IBM RT workstation. Back around 1991 when IBM was discontinuing this model, my university got a bunch of these cheap and used them to add seats in the Unix lab. For whatever reason they were set up for 1024x1024 resolution, with large color CRTs that has a special switch along with the usual image size/position/tint controls. This switch flipped between the image filling the screen and only filling a square section in the middle of the screen, so that you could get square pixels. Not exactly a square monitor (more akin to an earlier poster's suggestion to apply duct tape...) but supported in hardware!
He refers to this story, though we've only heard that MS plans to release Office on Linux, not that you can already pre-order it.
Maybe. But in using one-time pads with codes like this there needs to be something to indicate WHICH one-time pad was used. Other codes are known to do something similar. For example, Enigma had initial rotor settings in combination with other agreed-upon global daily settings, and these were encoded (using agreed-upon settings) twice at the start of each message. Here, perhaps AOAKN indicates which one-time pad was used, and it is repeated at the start and end of the message to allow the message to be decipherable (assuming possession of the key) to the extent available if it is damaged and only part of the message is received. The number 27 probably indicates the total number of 5-letter blocks in the message, including AOAKN both times, which helps determine where to start in the key if only the end of the message is recovered. It's not clear what 1525/6 indicates.
They're not "getting rid of pixels," since you'll still have pixels on your monitor and your graphics card will still buffer what it's drawing to the screen.
Vector monitors to the rescue!
And since this is only for a video format, we'll also need to bring back Display Postscript for our user interface elements!
In the US the entertainment industry attributes losses of more 40 million to a single file-sharer.
When I beg my coworkers, friends and family to vote, I'm not telling them who to vote for nor do I want to know afterwards. I only ask them to inform themselves and hit the booths on November 6th. How is Google's tool any different than that?
It's the same, but on a larger scale. Though your coworkers, friends, and family may not vote the same way as you, because you share some part of your life with them, they are more likely to vote as you do than not to. So by encouraging them to vote when they might not have done so otherwise, you effectively increase your political power just a little.
The same applies on a larger scale for Google. By providing this information to potential voters, they hope to encourage more voting, and voting by more informed voters. Whether this actually helps Google is not clear to me, but can it influence the election? Certainly.
This is also why there is all the controversy over voter ID laws. Voters without government ID cards are seen as more likely to vote Democratic, so Democrats are trying to prevent these laws from going into effect while Republicans support them.
When I want a WYSIWYG HTML editor, which is not all the time, I use Seamonkey. The rest of the time I don't use it.
Three-year-olds are likely to only focus on one program at a time, exactly the model Windows 8 presents, and the model which works well on a smartphone because of the limited screen space. Experienced adult computer users are likely to have email, multiple browser windows, a document they are writing or a game they are playing, and maybe other programs open at the same time. The comparison presented in the article is not a reasonable one.
T-Mobile does have monthly prepaid plans so I'd expect it is something like this, paid for a month starting at the time they put these things together, which means they probably have a week or so left on them now.
The USA's population is listed at 3,368,595. I'm not sure what century he's from, but the population of the USA today is slightly over 300 million, not 3 million.
South Africa and South Korea, which appear one after the other in two of the tables, both show populations of 50,586,757. While population data for these countries show this as a plausible population for each of these countries, it's suspicious that they have exactly the same value, specified to a precision of 1 person.
Romania and Russia likewise are shown with the same population of 21,390,000. Here this is probably the population for Romania. Russia's population is around 143 million.
I haven't checked for further errors; these are just the ones I noticed were off because they were for my own country or two consecutive countries listed with the same population. Given these inaccuracies, I don't trust this population data at all. Ironically, the errors I noticed actually increase his population totals (assuming the total is the sum of the given numbers, which I also haven't checked) to even higher, more sensational numbers he could have used (more than 400 million higher).
The babies that "have ridden the [Roomba] since it was introduced exactly a decade ago" are now on the verge of being teenagers, if they somehow survived that decade of dizziness.
And do you really want to be flying in a fighter plane when the nose just falls off because of those cut corners? Reminds me of this building.
And none of those phones are relevant here. The comparison is between Samsung Android phones (including but not limited to the ones in the $1 billion trial) and iPhones.
Ironically, Caldera was a Linux company before they become The SCO Group and turned into a lawsuit fountain. One of the many fun pastimes of people in the early days of Groklaw was pointing out where The SCO Group was distributing the exact Linux files they claimed infringing, with accompanying GPL. But before long they shut down the Linux distribution.
That they even considered doing this shows how little Verizon and Verizon Wireless cooperate. They are two separate companies, alike in name only.
Correct, the Supreme Court does not have original jurisdiction in the matter of the NSLs. This is why, if you read the heavily redacted documents about the case you will see, on the first page of each document, that this is being heard in US district court in California. If this gets appealed (and that seems likely to me regardless of the outcome), then the Supreme Court will get to hear it based on its appellate jurisdiction, which it has regarding all other cases, as quoted from the constitution by several other poster already.
A fun thing is to look at all the stories that Slashdot readers have tagged "no".
I think the most ludicrous application is by Daniel Schindler, who has applied for hundreds of new top-level domains, each one under a separate LLC with a name composed of two words from a small set of words, including baxter, big, castle, falls, frostbite, galley, half, hill, holly, june, knob, lone, maple, north, oaks, sand, spring, steel, tigers, town, and victor. Those words are just the ones from the applications for domains starting with A.