There was no need to drag religion in. Humans get emotional and stupid over all kinds of causes. People love science (or [insert topic here]) when it goes right. People will bash it when it goes wrong. Just human nature.
Bullshit. If they threatened the scientists or other people behind this experiment, that would be terrorism. Instead, all they did was damage the potato experiment.
I wouldn't call that a peaceful protest, as they destroyed property, but neither is it "terrorism".
The one big screen with a touch interface was common before the iPhone on Windows Mobile phones.
As I said, I'm still waiting to see a link to the comparable phone that came out before iPhone. Please provide a link to a specific model that came out before the iPhone, so an actual comparison can be made. It shouldn't be hard.
Fair enough. For public use, see 35 U.S.C. 102(b). You will see the publication bar is separate and distinct from the public use bar.
Lots of software is never made public at all, and it's not easy to find somebody who was using a technique unless they went out of their way to publish it. It does no good that somebody, somewhere was using the technique if you can't find it, as you so glibly pointed out in your post: "Of course, the challenge for you is to find a reference that invalidates the patent:)"
I wasn't aware software patents were being "handed out like candy."
I just don't know where you've been then since the 90s and on.
Indeed, allowance rates generally have been on the decline.
Yes, there's been pushback in recent years as the abuses piled up.
Gotta love slashdot. It's much easier to be derisive and speak in generalities instead of citing any relevant evidence and constructing a cogent argument.
I cited no less evidence than you.
Being published isn't necessary for software to qualify as prior art; its use need merely be public.
What the fuck do you think it means to publish something?
verb: prepare and issue for public distribution or sale
When you're writing software, especially before open source became so popular, the average developer doesn't go out of their way to publicize their methods.
Moreover, if you truly did come up with the patented idea first, feel free to claim your rights, that's a benefit of being in America.
Maybe some people actually want to get work done and not act like a parasite for patenting every stupid little invention they come up with.
It really seems like a substantial number of slashdot posters suffer from extreme hindsight bias.
No, the problem is that far too many patents about being handed out like candy, and most of them are for obvious implementations of combinations of technology. Tell a smart developer the problem to be solved, and chances are they could come up with the solution that resembles the patent. When you go look at the patent, it's full of a bunch of mumbo jumbo to describe obvious ideas.
I get what you're saying but keep in mind that Semitic peoples include a large number of groups, not only the jewish people.
Read your own link:
"The term "anti-Semitic" (or "anti-Semite") overwhelmingly refers to Jews only. It was coined in 1879 by German journalist Wilhelm Marr in a pamphlet called, "The Victory of Germandom over Jewry". Using ideas of race and nationalism, Marr argued that Jews had become the first major power in the West. He accused them of being liberals, a people without roots who had Judaized Germans beyond salvation. In 1879 Marr founded the "League for Anti-Semitism".[2]"
Given the abundance of utterly crap software patents, and just how simple it is to invent software, I find your complaint rather shallow and self-serving.
Of course, the challenge for you is to find a reference that invalidates the patent:)
Yeah, exactly. Most people when writing software don't publish every little novelty they come up with during the course of business. The whole thing is a farce and a blight on humanity. I can only hope one day your parasitical job is legislated out of existence so that productive people can actually be productive.
When it comes to comparing items, especially electronic ones, the numbers game is huge when it comes to consumer decisions. All else being equal, people will go for the bigger number.
The fact that a most credit card transactions are based upon a couple magic numbers and a date makes them easy to defraud. Fixing this problem isn't rocket science. With smartcards, crypto and near field readers this problems shouldn't be hard to make this go away.
You are right. What's really pathetic is that public-private key crypto has been available for decades, yet the big credit card companies (Visa, MasterCard) have either been too afraid or stupid to move to it.
The last time they updated security, they added another secret number (that 3-digit number on the back of your card). The only difference was that this number is not supposed to be stored by the merchant.
There are hundreds of thousands of merchants. Trying to get them all tightly secured is a joke, yet that's what Visa pushes with their PCI DSS rules.
I, unlike public officials, do not [b]govern[/b] or are in the service of those who [b]govern[/b] others. Those who govern should be at the mercy of those governed.
I'm sorry, just because somebody is in office they lose all their basic dignity as a human? And what you are doing right now is attempting to govern the governors, which turns you into a governor.
I would argue that a violation of the U.S.Constitution, as found by a jury of the electorate, described by me above, IS levying war against her.
It's a weak argument and a completely stretched reading. There's a reason they use the word "only" in there. They don't want everybody being accused of being treasonous in political fashion.
My introduction of the notion of treason was only to illustrate that there exists precedence in the law of the U.S. for crimes that do not involve the taking of lives carrying the death penalty.
This is the problem with your stretched reasoning. War involves killing.
Of course! All war is illegal from the point of view of the attacked. Therefore a civilized society requires a constitution which spells out clearly, and distinctly, when it is legal to overthrow the government.
That's the point of having the right to vote spelled out in the constitution. You can legally throw the bums out of office without any bloodshed. When they prevent you from voting, then you have a case for overthrow.
Otherwise, you are just another petty tyrant that you claim to be fighting against.
So that would just mean that HTC lawyers looked at the patents in question, and figured that they'd likely end up paying more in the court.
Or it could have just been a business decision that had nothing to do with what they think might have actually have happened in court (see Novell's deal with Microsoft). We'll never know, because they struck a deal in private. At the very least they could have publicly said what patent(s) was being violated.
Why hold it against them? Because you don't want to pay the big bully monopoly any money. Go with a company who doesn't.
Further, a public official can simply step down to avoid the punishment.
And you can simply not do drugs, engage in illegal sex acts, or make political statements that cause social upheaval to avoid being killed.
Finally, capital punishment is quite normal for acts of treason. I think elected officials not respecting the wishes of the electorate qualifies.
That's crap reasoning. Treason is narrowly defined and for a good reason. Maybe the electorate doesn't like your line of thought, and considers it treasonous.
It should take many to elect, few to remove.
That doesn't make any sense and makes a mockery of the democratic process.
Progress to return to a point that people were suckered into walking away from. Back in 2009 I had my N900, which was never locked down in the slightest.
Are you so sure about that? They gave you root, but everything I've seen about Maemo was that at a lower firmware level, especially near the actual bits that control the telephone device functions, it was locked down. That was also the case for future designs, well before they were eaten by Microsoft.
I'm still waiting to see a link to the comparable phone that came out before iPhone. If you stop at "smart phone", then you're missing the point of why the iPhone was a bestseller and turned everybody else into imitators, especially the Android.
What they realized was that tiny screens and little buttons were a pain in the ass to use for a smart phone. They gave you one big screen with a touch interface. They definitely innovated.
People were doubtful about the hype and especially the price -- and to quote Ballmer and bring this back on topic: "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance."
I say this as somebody who hates Apple for their proprietary ways, the focus on shiny and expensive, and their annoying fanboys.
It may be in the past, but I am not going to forget. If I'm going to abandon Gnome for pushing their new vision on a opposing userbase, I'm not going to embrace the guys who did the same not so long ago to their userbase.
I also dispute that Gnome is "minimalistic, unconfigurable crap", as it works for me and I have multiple configuration changes from the default.
I haven't tried KDE in years, but when I did it was too much eye candy. Gnome has always been subdued, offered basic functionality, and then got out of my way.
If anything, I will give Xfce a shot, as that is what many Gnome users are recommending as a fallback.
KDE is still here and works pretty well in 4.6, and has never been the kind of DE to remove choices and options.
They lost their reputation after they did a major release that broke lots of previous functionality. Their apologists then tried to put the blame on the distros for adopting a release too early, but KDE still owns the failure for releasing alpha software as a finished product.
Basically all these classifications still don't absolve parents from policing what their child can and cannot watch although reasonable ratings do help parents make informed decisions but unfortunately many parents appear to distance themselves from parenting preferring to let Government and so called moral groups dictate that.
I'm not a parent, but I was a kid, and there's only so much you can do to prevent your kid from seeing things you don't want them to see.
I say this not to endorse censorship (I'm completely against it), but to say I understand they parents concerns. However, tough luck. I value freedom more than some naive notion that you can shield your child from the realities of the world. Best just to teach them how to deal with it.
For those of you who hear that quantum mechanics is strange, but aren't sure exactly why, here is a little primer, based on the opening lecture from my intro quantum course:
Standard double-slit intro into quantum weirdness. You could just link to the Dr. Quantum video.
As an iPhone/iPad user and power user I sure as hell wouldn't want such a system on my mac unless, as I said, I could opt out.
Why do you accept it on your iPad, then? Or even your iPhone for that matter? The "it's a phone" excuse doesn't work for the iPad, and even that excuse is poor for today's smart phones.
For people who supposedly don't like power users they spend a lot of their effort developing their OS in ways to please them.
They'll follow the money. Don't bet they won't sacrifice the existing power user base to follow the trend.
They don't such a PC, they have the iPad to fill that niche and there is a huge demand for it. For people who need a physical keyboard there's the iPad keyboard dock and a dongle to import photographs from a digital camera.
Which just supports the parent's argument. It wouldn't be surprising if the desktop was just phased into the iPad at some point.
The reason JS was hated so much 10 years ago was because of the DOM. That's it.
That's just a lie. The reason people hated it was stated by the parent you replied to. It had the appearance of a toy language if you were coming to it from a language like Java. That's why all the hipsters starting talking about prototype inheritance and first-class functions.
They're right that those are cool features for a toy language, and you can bend JavaScript to do stuff to get around lacking features, but it's still not a good modern language.
I don't see what JavaScript has for appeal on the server side.
Slashdot Mirror
There was no need to drag religion in. Humans get emotional and stupid over all kinds of causes. People love science (or [insert topic here]) when it goes right. People will bash it when it goes wrong. Just human nature.
form of terrorism
Bullshit. If they threatened the scientists or other people behind this experiment, that would be terrorism. Instead, all they did was damage the potato experiment.
I wouldn't call that a peaceful protest, as they destroyed property, but neither is it "terrorism".
The one big screen with a touch interface was common before the iPhone on Windows Mobile phones.
As I said, I'm still waiting to see a link to the comparable phone that came out before iPhone. Please provide a link to a specific model that came out before the iPhone, so an actual comparison can be made. It shouldn't be hard.
Fair enough. For public use, see 35 U.S.C. 102(b). You will see the publication bar is separate and distinct from the public use bar.
Lots of software is never made public at all, and it's not easy to find somebody who was using a technique unless they went out of their way to publish it. It does no good that somebody, somewhere was using the technique if you can't find it, as you so glibly pointed out in your post: "Of course, the challenge for you is to find a reference that invalidates the patent :)"
I wasn't aware software patents were being "handed out like candy."
I just don't know where you've been then since the 90s and on.
Indeed, allowance rates generally have been on the decline.
Yes, there's been pushback in recent years as the abuses piled up.
Gotta love slashdot. It's much easier to be derisive and speak in generalities instead of citing any relevant evidence and constructing a cogent argument.
I cited no less evidence than you.
Being published isn't necessary for software to qualify as prior art; its use need merely be public.
What the fuck do you think it means to publish something?
http://www.onelook.com/?w=publish
verb: prepare and issue for public distribution or sale
When you're writing software, especially before open source became so popular, the average developer doesn't go out of their way to publicize their methods.
Moreover, if you truly did come up with the patented idea first, feel free to claim your rights, that's a benefit of being in America.
Maybe some people actually want to get work done and not act like a parasite for patenting every stupid little invention they come up with.
It really seems like a substantial number of slashdot posters suffer from extreme hindsight bias.
No, the problem is that far too many patents about being handed out like candy, and most of them are for obvious implementations of combinations of technology. Tell a smart developer the problem to be solved, and chances are they could come up with the solution that resembles the patent. When you go look at the patent, it's full of a bunch of mumbo jumbo to describe obvious ideas.
I get what you're saying but keep in mind that Semitic peoples include a large number of groups, not only the jewish people.
Read your own link:
"The term "anti-Semitic" (or "anti-Semite") overwhelmingly refers to Jews only. It was coined in 1879 by German journalist Wilhelm Marr in a pamphlet called, "The Victory of Germandom over Jewry". Using ideas of race and nationalism, Marr argued that Jews had become the first major power in the West. He accused them of being liberals, a people without roots who had Judaized Germans beyond salvation. In 1879 Marr founded the "League for Anti-Semitism".[2]"
Given the abundance of utterly crap software patents, and just how simple it is to invent software, I find your complaint rather shallow and self-serving.
Of course, the challenge for you is to find a reference that invalidates the patent :)
Yeah, exactly. Most people when writing software don't publish every little novelty they come up with during the course of business. The whole thing is a farce and a blight on humanity. I can only hope one day your parasitical job is legislated out of existence so that productive people can actually be productive.
When it comes to comparing items, especially electronic ones, the numbers game is huge when it comes to consumer decisions. All else being equal, people will go for the bigger number.
Of course it's manipulated like crazy. You'll never see anything like this with the naked eye.
The fact that a most credit card transactions are based upon a couple magic numbers and a date makes them easy to defraud. Fixing this problem isn't rocket science. With smartcards, crypto and near field readers this problems shouldn't be hard to make this go away.
You are right. What's really pathetic is that public-private key crypto has been available for decades, yet the big credit card companies (Visa, MasterCard) have either been too afraid or stupid to move to it.
The last time they updated security, they added another secret number (that 3-digit number on the back of your card). The only difference was that this number is not supposed to be stored by the merchant.
There are hundreds of thousands of merchants. Trying to get them all tightly secured is a joke, yet that's what Visa pushes with their PCI DSS rules.
I, unlike public officials, do not [b]govern[/b] or are in the service of those who [b]govern[/b] others. Those who govern should be at the mercy of those governed.
I'm sorry, just because somebody is in office they lose all their basic dignity as a human? And what you are doing right now is attempting to govern the governors, which turns you into a governor.
I would argue that a violation of the U.S.Constitution, as found by a jury of the electorate, described by me above, IS levying war against her.
It's a weak argument and a completely stretched reading. There's a reason they use the word "only" in there. They don't want everybody being accused of being treasonous in political fashion.
My introduction of the notion of treason was only to illustrate that there exists precedence in the law of the U.S. for crimes that do not involve the taking of lives carrying the death penalty.
This is the problem with your stretched reasoning. War involves killing.
Of course! All war is illegal from the point of view of the attacked. Therefore a civilized society requires a constitution which spells out clearly, and distinctly, when it is legal to overthrow the government.
That's the point of having the right to vote spelled out in the constitution. You can legally throw the bums out of office without any bloodshed. When they prevent you from voting, then you have a case for overthrow.
Otherwise, you are just another petty tyrant that you claim to be fighting against.
So that would just mean that HTC lawyers looked at the patents in question, and figured that they'd likely end up paying more in the court.
Or it could have just been a business decision that had nothing to do with what they think might have actually have happened in court (see Novell's deal with Microsoft). We'll never know, because they struck a deal in private. At the very least they could have publicly said what patent(s) was being violated.
Why hold it against them? Because you don't want to pay the big bully monopoly any money. Go with a company who doesn't.
Except, I am not a public official.
You're human and so are public officials.
Further, a public official can simply step down to avoid the punishment.
And you can simply not do drugs, engage in illegal sex acts, or make political statements that cause social upheaval to avoid being killed.
Finally, capital punishment is quite normal for acts of treason. I think elected officials not respecting the wishes of the electorate qualifies.
That's crap reasoning. Treason is narrowly defined and for a good reason. Maybe the electorate doesn't like your line of thought, and considers it treasonous.
It should take many to elect, few to remove.
That doesn't make any sense and makes a mockery of the democratic process.
What judgment? Microsoft and HTC worked out a deal in private. There was no court suit. There wasn't even a specific patent named in public.
Progress to return to a point that people were suckered into walking away from. Back in 2009 I had my N900, which was never locked down in the slightest.
Are you so sure about that? They gave you root, but everything I've seen about Maemo was that at a lower firmware level, especially near the actual bits that control the telephone device functions, it was locked down. That was also the case for future designs, well before they were eaten by Microsoft.
Palm beat Apple to market with the smart phone.
I'm still waiting to see a link to the comparable phone that came out before iPhone. If you stop at "smart phone", then you're missing the point of why the iPhone was a bestseller and turned everybody else into imitators, especially the Android.
What they realized was that tiny screens and little buttons were a pain in the ass to use for a smart phone. They gave you one big screen with a touch interface. They definitely innovated.
People were doubtful about the hype and especially the price -- and to quote Ballmer and bring this back on topic: "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance."
I say this as somebody who hates Apple for their proprietary ways, the focus on shiny and expensive, and their annoying fanboys.
It may be in the past, but I am not going to forget. If I'm going to abandon Gnome for pushing their new vision on a opposing userbase, I'm not going to embrace the guys who did the same not so long ago to their userbase.
I also dispute that Gnome is "minimalistic, unconfigurable crap", as it works for me and I have multiple configuration changes from the default.
I haven't tried KDE in years, but when I did it was too much eye candy. Gnome has always been subdued, offered basic functionality, and then got out of my way.
If anything, I will give Xfce a shot, as that is what many Gnome users are recommending as a fallback.
KDE is still here and works pretty well in 4.6, and has never been the kind of DE to remove choices and options.
They lost their reputation after they did a major release that broke lots of previous functionality. Their apologists then tried to put the blame on the distros for adopting a release too early, but KDE still owns the failure for releasing alpha software as a finished product.
but there is something strange about a company that books 31% of revenues as profit being priced for failure).
Exactly. The stock market game is driven by a bunch of emotional idiots.
Is this somehow barbaric? Taking lives for crimes that are not capital offenses?
Yes, yes it is. Maybe you'd like some committee similarly deciding your fate for even proposing this idea? Would that feel barbaric and unjust to you?
Basically all these classifications still don't absolve parents from policing what their child can and cannot watch although reasonable ratings do help parents make informed decisions but unfortunately many parents appear to distance themselves from parenting preferring to let Government and so called moral groups dictate that.
I'm not a parent, but I was a kid, and there's only so much you can do to prevent your kid from seeing things you don't want them to see.
I say this not to endorse censorship (I'm completely against it), but to say I understand they parents concerns. However, tough luck. I value freedom more than some naive notion that you can shield your child from the realities of the world. Best just to teach them how to deal with it.
My point was that there's no need to reinvent the wheel by typing up a bunch of course notes into a Slashdot comment.
For those of you who hear that quantum mechanics is strange, but aren't sure exactly why, here is a little primer, based on the opening lecture from my intro quantum course:
Standard double-slit intro into quantum weirdness. You could just link to the Dr. Quantum video.
As an iPhone/iPad user and power user I sure as hell wouldn't want such a system on my mac unless, as I said, I could opt out.
Why do you accept it on your iPad, then? Or even your iPhone for that matter? The "it's a phone" excuse doesn't work for the iPad, and even that excuse is poor for today's smart phones.
For people who supposedly don't like power users they spend a lot of their effort developing their OS in ways to please them.
They'll follow the money. Don't bet they won't sacrifice the existing power user base to follow the trend.
They don't such a PC, they have the iPad to fill that niche and there is a huge demand for it. For people who need a physical keyboard there's the iPad keyboard dock and a dongle to import photographs from a digital camera.
Which just supports the parent's argument. It wouldn't be surprising if the desktop was just phased into the iPad at some point.
The reason JS was hated so much 10 years ago was because of the DOM. That's it.
That's just a lie. The reason people hated it was stated by the parent you replied to. It had the appearance of a toy language if you were coming to it from a language like Java. That's why all the hipsters starting talking about prototype inheritance and first-class functions.
They're right that those are cool features for a toy language, and you can bend JavaScript to do stuff to get around lacking features, but it's still not a good modern language.
I don't see what JavaScript has for appeal on the server side.