Please, please please, if you want to think of the children, don't underestimate them.
This isn't about underestimating. You don't get someone excited about Rock 'n Roll by having them listen to a 30 year-old vinyl album of the Monkeys playing in concert, and you don't get someone interested in Sci-Fi by showing them authors who can't write. In either case, the fidelity and quality of work just isn't there.
My comment on not underestimating children was mostly about you saying the Anne McCaffrey books have too much sex and death to be for children. Personally I consider most of the Pern books children/young teen books.
...remains one of my favorite authors, and I have been reading her books since before I could read (they were read to me). I think her writing is also morally very rich and stimulating, with none of the powermongering bullshit of most fantasy. The turning point in her stories is usually not a battle. I did not like all of her books as a child (like Tehanu, the 4th earthsea book, which has way too many old people in it for me to get it at age 10).
The earthsea series has already been mentioned (I personally make no distinction between fantasy and Sci-fi), and is a great read for any age. I think The Tombs of Atuan was my favorite book. The Dispossessed is one of her best books, but I didn't read it as a child so I don't know. I liked "The Lathe of Heavens", and "A fisherman of the inland sea", "the word for world is forest", and many of her short stories...
Sure, you can propose some books you think they will like, but please also take them to a library and let them browse and pick up whatever they want. This is how you get kids into reading in the first place. We are all different, I have a lot of books that are dear to me that I've pushed on this or that youngling, and with some I have been successful, with some I have failed totally. I think I bought my sister Michael Ende's "Momo" twice by mistake, and she never read it once.
Real readers start omnivorous, reading all sort of good as well as bad books, but of all the books I read as a child, very few of the more important (for me) were "for children".
You're reading them as an adult, and you're glossing over things. Her novels are definitely PG-13, or possible R rated. She makes sex and death an everyday part of her novels, and not the Judy Bloom way. Characters are mating with/killing other characters, and she's describing how it makes them feel, which makes it much more real than seeing random redshirt die in Star Trek, or Kirk sleep with the green chick.
I read Anne McCaffery's pern books when I was 9-10, and loved it (especially the harper hall trilogy), and suffered no long lasting consequences. If I read them now, as an adult, as you say, I find them a bit naive, except for the ones I am very fond of since childhood (out of nostalgia value).
Which is a problem with the early works of the genre as a whole (i.e., pre-1960 or so). Start with people who actually write well to get them hooked on reading. Sadly, quite a few of the classics - Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, Wells - are terrible writers. They have excellent ideas from the broad "wouldn't this make a good story?" sense, but their command of language, plot development, and characters aren't as vivid as many of their counterparts of the times they wrote. That was just the way that sci-fi was. Most important of these is the characters. The timid reader has to become attached to them early on in the story so that he'll keep reading.
Later, once they're voracious readers, they can take on the guys who have great ideas but don't write well.
I won't argue that asimov was not much of a writer (technically speaking), especially in his early works. Bradbury on the other hand I will vouch for. But anyhow none of this rant matches my experience. I was reading the old, hard sci-fi mostly before my tenth birthday, and enjoyed Asimov's short stories/novellas (nightfall anyone?) as well as the martian chronicles a lot too.
Please, please please, if you want to think of the children, don't underestimate them.
Learn a foreign language (any one really). Choose a country/language/culture that you like, or have an interest in for some reason. Visit the country. If you get a chance, live/study/work there for a year or so. Nothing else will widen your understanding of the world as much.
In my opinion, people who only speak one language and have only ever lived in one country are incapable of understanding what cultural difference even means, just like a color blind person is incapable of understanding colors. Of course nobody can understand "other cultures"... the world is too big and life is too short, but at least we can really understand that *there are* other cultures, and what this means beyond stereotypes and folklore.
That's one thing I like about Europe as opposed to America. Because we are so many countries close together, we have more experience of foreign cultures. Also, thanks to the Erasmus program more than 1 million European students have lived and studied abroad for a year or so.
There is no "Swiss" language, they speak German, Italian, and French.
Actually swiss german (Schwyzerdütsch, or however it is spelled) is different enough from German that a German is likely to not understand most of even TV swiss german... let alone "up in the mountains" swiss german.
I read the article and read the wiki, again I ask: "how is this junk different from encryption or plausible deniability file systems - distributed or localized?"
Kudos to you then;-)
I guess you can call it a distributed encrypted file system with plausible deniability if you want. I am not aware of any other implementations of the concept though. I still do not see how that makes it a "Big load of BS". Also, I think the fact I can use blocks which may be part of someone else's stuff to encrypt my own sounds like a cool and relatively new idea to me.
So, "nobody shares any copyrighted files, and therefore nobody needs to hide away" is erroneous. Both the person offering the URL and the person accessing it need to hide if it's a work someone's going to exercise copyright over.
True. But the people hosting the blocks used to encode the copyrighted file do not infringe. The system is designed in such a way that the block you create to encode your file today will be used tomorrow by somebody else as part of the encoding for something totally different. This is what you call plausible deniability. I am just hosting some blocks, I really have no clue what all the uses for each block are.. and I don't mean possible uses (yes, I can one time pad anything into anything else) I mean real uses that someone has made of that block.
From the practical point of view it makes a huge difference because preserving anonimity while sharing small amounts of data (the urls) is an easier problem than preserving anonimity while sharing large amounts of data (the files themselves).
how is this junk different from encryption or plausible deniability file systems - distributed or localized?
Congratulation to the moderators, for moderating +4 insightful a post which is a one line question titled "Big load of BS", written by someone who clearly did not RTFA.
Sure... So if I put in Brittany's latest album, then tell my friend to click on the url that 'reassembles' the 'truly random' data into, well, Brittany's latest album, then do you really think copyright has nothing to say?
Sure, so the URL is a link to copyrighted material, and reassembling the file is copyright violation. Thing is, none of the N random blocks which are used to rebuild the album is copyrighted, individually... in fact maybe one of them is "provably random" as in a hash of shakspear's works, and another one is one of the blocks encoding someone else's home-brew porn.
Replying to my own post, but this IS just a sort of encryption - their main claim being because the data is encrypted, it's not copyright.
Don't be so quick to dismiss it. It is not just encryption. To upload my file A into the network, I take N blocks at random that are already up there, XOR them and use them as a 1 time pad for my data. Then i upload the resulting block. Ok, sounds like encryption so far.
To reassemble the data I need all N+1 blocks, otherwise it is just garbage. Also, I need a URL telling me which blocks to combine to get which files, otherwise there is a combinatorial explosion in the number of possibilities.
Also, someone else can come tomorrow and encrypt his file B using some of the same blocks I used. So if you are hosting one of those blocks, and A is legal while B is illegal, which file were you really sharing? Also, even if the people who uploaded those N+1 blocks could be traced, which one of them uploaded the file? So really, the only person distributing the file is the guy hosting the URL.. but URLs are small and it's much harder to stop distribution of small files.
About the overhead: since the blocks can be reused, there doesn't have to be much storage overhead. Of course there is an N-fold bandwidth overhead.
It's much harder to write C++ code that, for example, will never leak memory no matter what goes wrong than in the assorted garbage collected languages, or even vanilla C. That, I don't see how anyone could even reasonably argue. You don't see? let me try to show you...
About C: you think it is easier to manage memory with C char* and arrays than with C++ string,vector,and exceptions + resource-acquisition-is-initialization paradigms? I can only call that an outlandish claim! Hell even auto_ptr helps (I use it to express ownership transfers in function parameters and return values), and in C++0x they will finally have a real smart pointer standardized too. If you use raw arrays in C++ and get buffer overflows, don't blame stroustroup.
About garbage collected languages: true, memory management is not your problem anymore, which makes coding a bit easier (although there are other resources than memory which must still be managed manually). The problem is performance and, specifically, memory usage. My memory-leaking C++ implementation may well use half as much memory at any given time as your non-leaking GC code. Despite what people think, computers do not have over-abundant performance for all relevant tasks. I myself wrote 2 pieces of code in C++ just in the first months of this year where I knew from the start performance would be a problem. In one case because of the sheer size of the data I was handling, in the other because I knew the problem was NP-Complete. The first one would have simply page thrashed me to death in a GC environment.
The problem is that GC is viral, in the sense that if I link my non-GC code to a single library written to run in a GC environment, GC needs to be enabled for the entire program. This is the difficulty of adding GC as an optional feature to C++. Making it mandatory is not an option for performance reasons. In a GC environment you have little in the way of guarantees that memory will be freed right away, and this will occasionally come back to bite you hard when your application slows to a crawl as it runs out of memory. GC may be fine 98% of the time, the problem is if the language uses GC, you just can't turn it off locally where the memory usage is really hurting you.
From TFA:
The manual, Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces (1994, 2004), may be critically described as "what we learned about running death squads and propping up corrupt government in Latin America and how to apply it to other places". Its contents are both history defining for Latin America and, given the continued role of US Special Forces in the suppression of insurgencies, including in Iraq and Afghanistan, history making. This has nothing to do with "war is war". These are tactics for keeping a corrupt government in place by killing, torturing and otherwise terrorizing any opposition (this includes legitimate, non-violent opposition, labor unions, etc) and the general population. This was applied in places like el Salvador or Nicaragua, and please remember that THE US WERE NOT AT WAR WITH THESE COUNTRIES. In fact, there is no war in Iraq either, right? Mission accomplished...
From TFA:
To find out which, Lenski turned to his freezer, where he had saved samples of each population every 500 generations. These allowed him to replay history from any starting point he chose, by reviving the bacteria and letting evolution "replay" again. He's debugging evolution... How cool is that?...
Many of us benefit from his contributions, and I am grateful for that, but RMS is also a crack-pot and his statements must be taken with a grain of salt.
It is interesting how most people today point at political and religious fanactics and all agree that fanaticism is never good, while many here worship at the feet of a fanatic. I have no trouble admitting stallman is a fanatic. But when he started writing free software, you had to be crazy to think you could have a whole free software ecosystem.. build tools, kernel, libraries...
Sometimes change doesn't happen without a fanatic getting it all started...
As I was quite surprised to find out when I moved into the field, apparently in Computer security the journals are not the main publishing venue, conference proceedings are. When I asked why, the answer I usually got is that journals are too slow for such a fast moving field. I don't know yet if I buy that. It may also have to do with the fact that the field is so recent (so there weren't any really well-established journals before the internet hit in force).
Conference proceedings are still peer reviewed, but with only one round of reviewing, which means that the program committee (based on the reviewers reccomandations) decides which papers to accept, and they send you back the verdict and the reviews. But since there isn't a second round of reviewing you don't really have to make the improvements the reviewers ask for, your paper is already accepted! (in fact, further work on it is seen as half-wasted.. keep it for the next paper!)
Maybe. I keep wonderng where the loophole is, and how big it is. Well, the loophole is that a company can ask to take your blood for a drug test when hiring you. Said blood is filled with cells whith your DNA in them... Once DNA tests become cheap enough and useful enough such a policy would allow employers to (illegally) screen potential employees for good/bad genetic traits. Sometimes it takes sci-fi to help us figure out all the ways the future can screw us!
there is an equally significant problem with patent applications that are improperly rejected. This is one silicon valley CEO whining his patents are being rejected.. His company, parimics does intellectual property only (but of course you need to sign an NDA if you want details).
So i asked google patents about it and got several patents by him (in previous companies), and only 1 by this company.
So here comes claim 1 of patent application: "Method and apparatus for image processing"
1. An image processing system adapted to process image frames and comprising:
an image processing engine adapted to perform object-independent processing corresponding to a first layer of the image processing system, said image processing engine further adapted to include a plurality of processors each associated with a different one of pixels of the image frame;
a post processing engine adapted to perform object-dependent processing corresponding to a second processing layer of the image processing system, said post processing engine further adapted to include an N-way symmetric multi-processing system (SMP) having disposed therein N DFT engines and N matrix multiplication engines; wherein N is an integer greater than 1, and
a processing engine adapted to perform object composition, recognition and association corresponding to a third processing layer of the image processing system. To me this sounds exactly like the kind of over-general claim that a good patent examiner should strike out, even if there is some worth in the patent as a whole.
You've got kids dealing with really high-level stuff in a lot of cases. Optics, physics, biotech. No wonder it's easier for companies to push shitty applications through. The problem is not that the examiners are incompetent.. i mean there may be a bit of that too but many patents are obvious enough that your average just-out-of-college kid can figure out they shouldn't be approved.
The problem is a) which way the incentive is and b) what the standards of patentability are. For a), I can just say that for a patent examiner it is less work to approve than to reject (it's up to him to find prior art, and then he gets an appeal...). And they need to be productive in terms of number of patents processed per month. I won't get into B.. but clearly if using known technique A to solve known problem B is patentable any half-wit can come up with 100 patents in one brainstorming session with his imaginary friend.
Of course it takes more skill to find a patentable idea that will actually make you money, but it has nothing to do with innoviation and all to do with knowing what's up in the market.
So after patenting doing A on the web, then doing A over wireless, then doing it localised with wireless+gps, what's the next software patent fad?
From TFA:
Blizzard has said the tool infringes copyright because it copies the game into RAM in order to avoid detection by anti-cheat software. This is retarded. Copying something around on your own machine should definitely be within the scope of fair use.
Of course you and me know depleted uranium is called 'depleted' for a reason and you'd have to try really hard to get any results off it. Depleted is called depleted because it is depleted of the more unstable Uranium 235 isotope, so it cannot be used by the current, chernobyl generation of nuclear power plants (breeder reactors which could use Uranium 235 have not yet been successfully built), nor can it be used for a nuclear bomb. It is less radioactive than normal uranium (which has some low percentage of the unstable Uranium 238 isotope in it) but it is by no means harmless. For instance here in Italy there has been way higher than normal leucemia incidence among military personnel who were in the balcans during the war, where depleted uranium bullets were used all over the place.
Even though only one member per organisation is allowed, Microsoft not only allowed 4 members but also members who were foreign nationals to discuss India's position. It's not understandable why lawyers should be brought to technical meetings. Lovely quote from the article (emphasis mine). (Yes, I did RTFA!)
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Please, please please, if you want to think of the children, don't underestimate them.
This isn't about underestimating. You don't get someone excited about Rock 'n Roll by having them listen to a 30 year-old vinyl album of the Monkeys playing in concert, and you don't get someone interested in Sci-Fi by showing them authors who can't write. In either case, the fidelity and quality of work just isn't there.
My comment on not underestimating children was mostly about you saying the Anne McCaffrey books have too much sex and death to be for children. Personally I consider most of the Pern books children/young teen books.
...remains one of my favorite authors, and I have been reading her books since before I could read (they were read to me). I think her writing is also morally very rich and stimulating, with none of the powermongering bullshit of most fantasy. The turning point in her stories is usually not a battle. I did not like all of her books as a child (like Tehanu, the 4th earthsea book, which has way too many old people in it for me to get it at age 10).
The earthsea series has already been mentioned (I personally make no distinction between fantasy and Sci-fi), and is a great read for any age. I think The Tombs of Atuan was my favorite book. The Dispossessed is one of her best books, but I didn't read it as a child so I don't know. I liked "The Lathe of Heavens", and "A fisherman of the inland sea", "the word for world is forest", and many of her short stories...
Sure, you can propose some books you think they will like, but please also take them to a library and let them browse and pick up whatever they want. This is how you get kids into reading in the first place. We are all different, I have a lot of books that are dear to me that I've pushed on this or that youngling, and with some I have been successful, with some I have failed totally. I think I bought my sister Michael Ende's "Momo" twice by mistake, and she never read it once.
Real readers start omnivorous, reading all sort of good as well as bad books, but of all the books I read as a child, very few of the more important (for me) were "for children".
Anne McCaffery has some good ones
You're reading them as an adult, and you're glossing over things. Her novels are definitely PG-13, or possible R rated. She makes sex and death an everyday part of her novels, and not the Judy Bloom way. Characters are mating with/killing other characters, and she's describing how it makes them feel, which makes it much more real than seeing random redshirt die in Star Trek, or Kirk sleep with the green chick.
I read Anne McCaffery's pern books when I was 9-10, and loved it (especially the harper hall trilogy), and suffered no long lasting consequences. If I read them now, as an adult, as you say, I find them a bit naive, except for the ones I am very fond of since childhood (out of nostalgia value).
Which is a problem with the early works of the genre as a whole (i.e., pre-1960 or so). Start with people who actually write well to get them hooked on reading. Sadly, quite a few of the classics - Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, Wells - are terrible writers. They have excellent ideas from the broad "wouldn't this make a good story?" sense, but their command of language, plot development, and characters aren't as vivid as many of their counterparts of the times they wrote. That was just the way that sci-fi was. Most important of these is the characters. The timid reader has to become attached to them early on in the story so that he'll keep reading.
Later, once they're voracious readers, they can take on the guys who have great ideas but don't write well.
I won't argue that asimov was not much of a writer (technically speaking), especially in his early works. Bradbury on the other hand I will vouch for. But anyhow none of this rant matches my experience. I was reading the old, hard sci-fi mostly before my tenth birthday, and enjoyed Asimov's short stories/novellas (nightfall anyone?) as well as the martian chronicles a lot too.
Please, please please, if you want to think of the children, don't underestimate them.
Learn a foreign language (any one really). Choose a country/language/culture that you like, or have an interest in for some reason. Visit the country. If you get a chance, live/study/work there for a year or so. Nothing else will widen your understanding of the world as much.
In my opinion, people who only speak one language and have only ever lived in one country are incapable of understanding what cultural difference even means, just like a color blind person is incapable of understanding colors. Of course nobody can understand "other cultures"... the world is too big and life is too short, but at least we can really understand that *there are* other cultures, and what this means beyond stereotypes and folklore.
That's one thing I like about Europe as opposed to America. Because we are so many countries close together, we have more experience of foreign cultures. Also, thanks to the Erasmus program more than 1 million European students have lived and studied abroad for a year or so.
There is no "Swiss" language, they speak German, Italian, and French.
Actually swiss german (Schwyzerdütsch, or however it is spelled) is different enough from German that a German is likely to not understand most of even TV swiss german... let alone "up in the mountains" swiss german.
I read the article and read the wiki, again I ask: "how is this junk different from encryption or plausible deniability file systems - distributed or localized?"
Kudos to you then ;-)
I guess you can call it a distributed encrypted file system with plausible deniability if you want. I am not aware of any other implementations of the concept though. I still do not see how that makes it a "Big load of BS". Also, I think the fact I can use blocks which may be part of someone else's stuff to encrypt my own sounds like a cool and relatively new idea to me.
When I bought my laptop in october last year, the macbook with similar features and warranty cost almost exactly twice as what I paid.
So, "nobody shares any copyrighted files, and therefore nobody needs to hide away" is erroneous. Both the person offering the URL and the person accessing it need to hide if it's a work someone's going to exercise copyright over.
True. But the people hosting the blocks used to encode the copyrighted file do not infringe. The system is designed in such a way that the block you create to encode your file today will be used tomorrow by somebody else as part of the encoding for something totally different. This is what you call plausible deniability. I am just hosting some blocks, I really have no clue what all the uses for each block are.. and I don't mean possible uses (yes, I can one time pad anything into anything else) I mean real uses that someone has made of that block.
From the practical point of view it makes a huge difference because preserving anonimity while sharing small amounts of data (the urls) is an easier problem than preserving anonimity while sharing large amounts of data (the files themselves).
how is this junk different from encryption or plausible deniability file systems - distributed or localized?
Congratulation to the moderators, for moderating +4 insightful a post which is a one line question titled "Big load of BS", written by someone who clearly did not RTFA.
Sure... So if I put in Brittany's latest album, then tell my friend to click on the url that 'reassembles' the 'truly random' data into, well, Brittany's latest album, then do you really think copyright has nothing to say?
Sure, so the URL is a link to copyrighted material, and reassembling the file is copyright violation. Thing is, none of the N random blocks which are used to rebuild the album is copyrighted, individually... in fact maybe one of them is "provably random" as in a hash of shakspear's works, and another one is one of the blocks encoding someone else's home-brew porn.
Replying to my own post, but this IS just a sort of encryption - their main claim being because the data is encrypted, it's not copyright.
Don't be so quick to dismiss it. It is not just encryption. To upload my file A into the network, I take N blocks at random that are already up there, XOR them and use them as a 1 time pad for my data. Then i upload the resulting block. Ok, sounds like encryption so far.
To reassemble the data I need all N+1 blocks, otherwise it is just garbage. Also, I need a URL telling me which blocks to combine to get which files, otherwise there is a combinatorial explosion in the number of possibilities.
Also, someone else can come tomorrow and encrypt his file B using some of the same blocks I used. So if you are hosting one of those blocks, and A is legal while B is illegal, which file were you really sharing? Also, even if the people who uploaded those N+1 blocks could be traced, which one of them uploaded the file? So really, the only person distributing the file is the guy hosting the URL.. but URLs are small and it's much harder to stop distribution of small files.
About the overhead: since the blocks can be reused, there doesn't have to be much storage overhead. Of course there is an N-fold bandwidth overhead.
1- Your pal "accidentally" makes a loud noise
2- Cameras all turn towards him
3- rob bank
4- Profit
About C: you think it is easier to manage memory with C char* and arrays than with C++ string,vector,and exceptions + resource-acquisition-is-initialization paradigms? I can only call that an outlandish claim! Hell even auto_ptr helps (I use it to express ownership transfers in function parameters and return values), and in C++0x they will finally have a real smart pointer standardized too. If you use raw arrays in C++ and get buffer overflows, don't blame stroustroup.
About garbage collected languages: true, memory management is not your problem anymore, which makes coding a bit easier (although there are other resources than memory which must still be managed manually). The problem is performance and, specifically, memory usage. My memory-leaking C++ implementation may well use half as much memory at any given time as your non-leaking GC code. Despite what people think, computers do not have over-abundant performance for all relevant tasks. I myself wrote 2 pieces of code in C++ just in the first months of this year where I knew from the start performance would be a problem. In one case because of the sheer size of the data I was handling, in the other because I knew the problem was NP-Complete. The first one would have simply page thrashed me to death in a GC environment.
The problem is that GC is viral, in the sense that if I link my non-GC code to a single library written to run in a GC environment, GC needs to be enabled for the entire program. This is the difficulty of adding GC as an optional feature to C++. Making it mandatory is not an option for performance reasons. In a GC environment you have little in the way of guarantees that memory will be freed right away, and this will occasionally come back to bite you hard when your application slows to a crawl as it runs out of memory. GC may be fine 98% of the time, the problem is if the language uses GC, you just can't turn it off locally where the memory usage is really hurting you.
Sometimes change doesn't happen without a fanatic getting it all started...
As I was quite surprised to find out when I moved into the field, apparently in Computer security the journals are not the main publishing venue, conference proceedings are. When I asked why, the answer I usually got is that journals are too slow for such a fast moving field. I don't know yet if I buy that. It may also have to do with the fact that the field is so recent (so there weren't any really well-established journals before the internet hit in force).
Conference proceedings are still peer reviewed, but with only one round of reviewing, which means that the program committee (based on the reviewers reccomandations) decides which papers to accept, and they send you back the verdict and the reviews. But since there isn't a second round of reviewing you don't really have to make the improvements the reviewers ask for, your paper is already accepted! (in fact, further work on it is seen as half-wasted.. keep it for the next paper!)
"and here I was hoping space would be one place to someday finally have a lawyer-free haven."
I think we should put them on the first spaceship leaving earth before doom strikes, except it doesn't.
Send them to lawyer planet...
Oh wait!.. THIS is lawyer planet
PS: if you don't get this, you're probably still wondering what's the deal with this 42 thing..
So i asked google patents about it and got several patents by him (in previous companies), and only 1 by this company.
So here comes claim 1 of patent application: "Method and apparatus for image processing" 1. An image processing system adapted to process image frames and comprising:
an image processing engine adapted to perform object-independent processing corresponding to a first layer of the image processing system, said image processing engine further adapted to include a plurality of processors each associated with a different one of pixels of the image frame;
a post processing engine adapted to perform object-dependent processing corresponding to a second processing layer of the image processing system, said post processing engine further adapted to include an N-way symmetric multi-processing system (SMP) having disposed therein N DFT engines and N matrix multiplication engines; wherein N is an integer greater than 1, and
a processing engine adapted to perform object composition, recognition and association corresponding to a third processing layer of the image processing system.
To me this sounds exactly like the kind of over-general claim that a good patent examiner should strike out, even if there is some worth in the patent as a whole.
The problem is a) which way the incentive is and b) what the standards of patentability are. For a), I can just say that for a patent examiner it is less work to approve than to reject (it's up to him to find prior art, and then he gets an appeal...). And they need to be productive in terms of number of patents processed per month. I won't get into B.. but clearly if using known technique A to solve known problem B is patentable any half-wit can come up with 100 patents in one brainstorming session with his imaginary friend.
Of course it takes more skill to find a patentable idea that will actually make you money, but it has nothing to do with innoviation and all to do with knowing what's up in the market.
So after patenting doing A on the web, then doing A over wireless, then doing it localised with wireless+gps, what's the next software patent fad?