"WTF? Where could the 'inventor' of tetris have gained patent protection? Methinks the author of tfa has no idea what they're talking about."
Completely agree with you that the TFA-A is clueless. However, you most certainly can patent a game concept in the US (search for "Board Game" on patents.google.com to see extensive examples). In the UK you're bound by the normal limits on not patenting abstracts (which are the rules) but you can patent the totality of the game: http://www.intellectual-property.gov.uk/faq/how_pr otect/board_game.htm
Of more interest is whether Pajitnov had any rights to Tetris in the first place. The Sovs did exploit the rights by selling them to Nintendo, but Pajitnov, as a scientist working for the Soviet Academy of Scientists didn't benefit from the deal. The obvious conclusion is that the state ownership of property stifles innovation, but in what way was Pajitnov's situation different from a US academic researcher or government scientsit who would find their work equally appropraited either by the University or the state?
Better yet, there's obviously no way we can know how many inventions are covered by such orders, or what they cover.
Note that this has nothing to do with Communism or capitalism, which is the thesis the author's trying to build. The R&D regimes are actually identical: invent something militarily useful and it will dissappear from public knowledge.
I don't buy that argument. My birthday is both the 30th of December or December the 30th depending on what mood I'm in, what emphasis I'm (subconsciously) using, the rhythm of the sentence etc.
I also have a dentist appointment on today, the 12th of March, so even if French and Spanish are inflexible in their ordering, English is entirely neutral. (I'd argue that the December the 30th and December 30th sound a little abbreviated as they are missing the "of" conjunctive when spoken.) DD/MM/YYYY is the standard in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Eire and India among English speakers. All this suggests is that there must have been an actual decision taken at some point, rather than a simple appeal to natural language patterns.
"You cannot - as a web developer - rely only on statistics. "
No, indeed, because doing things based on empirical evidence is foolish behaviour. On the other hand you should take a political position (that data, presentation and behaviour should be kept separate) and behave as though that was in some way more true than a statistical value.
I'm not saying that the separation of data, presentation and behaviour is wrong, just that you have to realise that it's a human engineered best practise, not a law of the universe. So saying that you cannot rely on statistics is wrong. Of course you can. Saying you *shouldn't* rely on statisics is entirely correct.
Telekom *is* to all intents and purposes the German Government. Although the government has reduced its shareholding from 76% to 15.4% in the last decade it is still the largest (by far) single shareholder able to dictate policy throught the board (such as the sacking of the last two CEOs).
Also, the German government would have known all along that this deal was going to run into a lot of EU flak and presumably calculated that it could force it past the relevant regulatory bodies. Both German and France have enjoyed a certain amount of discretion over how much they fall into line with telecoms competiton policy. It may be that this deal was too much for even the relatively supine EU.
Wrong way round: we only started sentencing people to the Australian penal colonies after the US revolution meant there was no longer the option of deporting them to America. Australia wasn't properly mapped until 1770, so the opportunities for it to be long established were minimal.
Between a quarter and a third of British emigrants to the USA in the 18th century were criminals.
Is the partiy claiming it invented the helicopter AND the tractor these days?
Why not claim the internal combustion engine as well?
In what way did the US invent electricity? That's a little like claiming you invented gravity and it does a bit of disservice to Faraday, Ohm and Volta.
To which I can only remark what a difference 1300 years makes to standards of civility. The modern treatment of any minority anywhere is somewhat irrelevant to the discussion of standards of pre-mediaeval warfare.
Others have already posted to your comment so I will keep it short. First of all, no civilization was wiped out when Moors where removed from Spain, what happened was the removal of governing Muslim elite and replacing it with a christian king and nobles. It's a fair point well made, but in the case of the Reconquista it's not entirely true: the immediate result of the Christian conquest of Granada was the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, who were forbidden to be part of the elite by Islamic law.
Also on a note when you say that the socially mobile tend to follow the ways of a dominant power, you should also understand than in previous times there were no immigration. When Europe and west started to raise, that didn't succumb able part of other cultures to Europe because there still was religion, language and ethnic barriers. Sitting as I do in London, that seems like a very strange statement. It's hard to think of a century in England's history that hasn't been marked by some major immigration or emigration. In eastern Europe the question is largely nonsensical: no need to emigrate, hang around long enough and the country you thought you were in will simply move.
Your argument was that Muslim architecture was in most part due to their policy of leaving societal elites in place, including architects, during the conquest. You go on to support this argument by pointing to the careers of two Ottoman architects Sinan and Mehmet Aga, and claiming that most of the mosques in Istanbul were built therefore by Christians. From this you draw the conclusion that muslims in the 11th century did not have the mathematical skills required to build large domes in the 11th century.
Your argument fails in a number of respects:
* The architects you reference flourished some 700 years after the first Muslim empire * They were both active in a country that was not part of the Muslim Empire * The Ottoman empire had been established for 200 years by the time of Sinan's birth, so he was not conquered * Both architects were trained by the Ottoman army, so their skills were not acquired before a Muslim conquest * Both architects were converts to Islam, not Christian as you state.
Not a patent, breach of copyright. The penrose tiling cannot be patented as it is a mathematical discovery. The patterns in Penrose's books are copyrighted.
The protective tax system actually led to a rather tolerant Arabic empire - why, there were Christians in Iraq until last year. It's a considerably better lot than say, expulsion. Which is exactly what happened to the Jews when Spanish finally took control of Granada in 1492.
You could, but I'm not really willing to get into the kind of "your side did this bad to mine, so when my side does double bad to you it's okay" discussion that bedevils any discussion of the Middle East.
I think it's enough to note that standards have changed in the last thousand years: in mediaeval war it was okay to loot a captured city, for example. Now that's definitely not okay, but destroying the city from space is.
The key point is that the common views, which you cheerfully quote, of the Muslim empire, Granada and the reconquista are wrong because they are based on a narrative that has the Muslims as the intolerant villains and nation states as somehow existing a priori (so that you can reconquer something that never existed).
It's for that reasons like that the ignorant chaps further up there can't believe that Arabs could have come up with aperiodic tiling.
Consider what happened to Christian communities in the Middle East with the rise of Islam, for example.
They were generally tolerated as people of the book, although not accorded the same rights as Muslims - look up Dhimmi in wikipedia; certainly no worse than, and in most cases definitely better than, the position of jews in Christian societies.
Muslim conquerors generally gave the people of newly conquered lands three choices: to be put to the sword, convert or pay indemnity. Very few chose the second, a few chose the middle option and most chose the last option.
By modern standards of course, these are barbarous options, but they are positively courtly compared to the behaviour of the crusaders a few centuries later.
As far as the "Imperialist invasion of spain" theory goes. That too is nonsense. Imperialism is the correct term, but there simply was no "Spain" to be conquered. There was a Roman territory called Hispania, which had collapsed into interfamily and tribal rivalry with the decline of the empire. (Incidentally, many people who fought with the Moors were Jews, fleeing the Church's policy of forced conversion.) The Moors were simply another grouping hoping to take advantage of the chaos.
The Reconquista is a useful national myth for the Spanish, but it doesn't have much basis in fact. The process of the unification of Spain is markedly similar to the process of the unification of England. If the Danes had stood their ground, or the mercians had held out for autonomy the English would have a different national myth, and if the Spanish had failed to retake the south they would have a different story of legitimacy, just as powerful.
Travelling past the boundary of space == space travel. Not really something you wriggle out of by adding extra conditions.
If you could throw your can up above the 62 mile mark it would be a space vehicle.
If I cross the border from Canada to the US to get some smokes from Walmart, the border guards aren't going to let me get away without ID on the grounds that I'm not really in the USA because I'm not planning to stay long.
I completely agree with you that the prize isn't of the same order as the people who stayed in the ISS but I think you need to find a better term for your objections.
Also, by your reasoning the first American astronaut would be John Glenn. (and if we add your "controlled" requirement Glenn doesn't really count either, as his flight had several malfunctions).
True, all speech recognition software *would* suffer from this exploit if the application designers hadn't thought about the likely scenarios in advance. I just checked the situation with my Mac, which comes with speech recognition built in (and has done since what, Mac OS 9?)
Nothing destructive is enabled by default: the worst you can do on a Mac is log yourself out, but that will keep everything running as it was before.
If you go to the Speech control panel you can, after putting your admin password in, enable Menu Bar actions which allow you to do things like trash files and restart the computer.
So by default the computer will just do helpful stuff, but if you really need full control over the OS through speech recognition (eg, you are disabled) you can enable it.
It's a good indicator of the different philosophies between the two OS vendors we also see in their approach to networking (this may have changed with Vista, I've not really been following it): Apple shut down everything by default and requires the user to open ports; windows boxes, on the other hand are wide open from first boot, have to have their ports shut down by a knowledgable user.
Thomas Savery invented the Steam Engine, Joseph Swan invented the light bulb and Edison only invented half the phonograph, the french having figured out the recording part.
Perhaps a more useful 250 word essay would be on how the patent system enshrines the myth of the individual genius, when in fact technology moves forwards by little increments.
The link between intelligence and the receipt of higher education degrees has never been conclusively proven to my mind; British life is littered with Oxbridge graduates who are quite demonstrably dense in everything but a narrow field, and usually only pull that off by force of will.
The link between wealth and power is well established and easily demonstrable.
I don't know who's dumber really: people who can't follow simple instructions when sterilising a sponge in a microwave, the people who were surprised that superheating water in an object killed off bacteria. I've been sterilising soil from the garden for indoor plants in the microwave for years; kills all bacterial and fungal spores stone dead (and provides a heady scent of cooked worm).
On the contrary the MOAB fits no common definition of WMD. It would cause extensive civilian casualties if dropped in a city, but so would the equivalent amount of explosive dropped as many separate bombs. So would a sufficient quantity of golf balls.
What it is is something not legislated against but still fairly unpleasant: a terror weapon designed to cow civilian populations. The MOAB is ineffective in its supposed role (that of a bunker buster) but it's extremely good at scaring the shit out of civilian populations it's dropped near. Its blast signature (big flash, big boom, mushroom cloud) is identical to a nuke.
The US airforce conducted a legal review of the Moab and decided (perhaps unsurprisingly) that it was okay to use it so long as civilians weren't deliberately targeted.
On the other hand, other US weapon systems such as cluster bombs, bunker buster nukes and white phosphorus based weapons flirt with the definition of WMD, not to mention the c.6,000 nuclear warheads...
Slashdot Mirror
"WTF? Where could the 'inventor' of tetris have gained patent protection? Methinks the author of tfa has no idea what they're talking about."
Completely agree with you that the TFA-A is clueless. However, you most certainly can patent a game concept in the US (search for "Board Game" on patents.google.com to see extensive examples). In the UK you're bound by the normal limits on not patenting abstracts (which are the rules) but you can patent the totality of the game: http://www.intellectual-property.gov.uk/faq/how_pr otect/board_game.htm
Of more interest is whether Pajitnov had any rights to Tetris in the first place. The Sovs did exploit the rights by selling them to Nintendo, but Pajitnov, as a scientist working for the Soviet Academy of Scientists didn't benefit from the deal. The obvious conclusion is that the state ownership of property stifles innovation, but in what way was Pajitnov's situation different from a US academic researcher or government scientsit who would find their work equally appropraited either by the University or the state?
The reason given for the fact that the boots were not commercialised before the fall of the Communism was that they were classified as a military secret. Very frustrating for the inventor, but nearly all western patent regimes allow the government to classify any invention as a military secret - in the US they're called "Secrecy Orders" - see http://www.bitlaw.com/source/mpep/120.html and http://patentbaristas.com/archives/2006/12/06/is-t he-government-keeping-more-inventions-secret/ for more information.
Better yet, there's obviously no way we can know how many inventions are covered by such orders, or what they cover.
Note that this has nothing to do with Communism or capitalism, which is the thesis the author's trying to build. The R&D regimes are actually identical: invent something militarily useful and it will dissappear from public knowledge.
I don't buy that argument. My birthday is both the 30th of December or December the 30th depending on what mood I'm in, what emphasis I'm (subconsciously) using, the rhythm of the sentence etc.
I also have a dentist appointment on today, the 12th of March, so even if French and Spanish are inflexible in their ordering, English is entirely neutral. (I'd argue that the December the 30th and December 30th sound a little abbreviated as they are missing the "of" conjunctive when spoken.) DD/MM/YYYY is the standard in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Eire and India among English speakers. All this suggests is that there must have been an actual decision taken at some point, rather than a simple appeal to natural language patterns.
Interestingly, there are also three unused formats:
MM-YYYY-DD
DD-YYYY-MM
YYYY-DD-MM
While two of those are obviously plain daft, with the year separating month and date, the third is only as "illogical" as the US standard.
(Slashdot swallowed my sarcasm tag there - the first paragraph should be read in a mildly mocking voice - the second one is the meat of the matter)
"You cannot - as a web developer - rely only on statistics. "
No, indeed, because doing things based on empirical evidence is foolish behaviour. On the other hand you should take a political position (that data, presentation and behaviour should be kept separate) and behave as though that was in some way more true than a statistical value.
I'm not saying that the separation of data, presentation and behaviour is wrong, just that you have to realise that it's a human engineered best practise, not a law of the universe. So saying that you cannot rely on statistics is wrong. Of course you can. Saying you *shouldn't* rely on statisics is entirely correct.
Telekom *is* to all intents and purposes the German Government. Although the government has reduced its shareholding from 76% to 15.4% in the last decade it is still the largest (by far) single shareholder able to dictate policy throught the board (such as the sacking of the last two CEOs).
Also, the German government would have known all along that this deal was going to run into a lot of EU flak and presumably calculated that it could force it past the relevant regulatory bodies. Both German and France have enjoyed a certain amount of discretion over how much they fall into line with telecoms competiton policy. It may be that this deal was too much for even the relatively supine EU.
Wrong way round: we only started sentencing people to the Australian penal colonies after the US revolution meant there was no longer the option of deporting them to America. Australia wasn't properly mapped until 1770, so the opportunities for it to be long established were minimal.
Between a quarter and a third of British emigrants to the USA in the 18th century were criminals.
Is the partiy claiming it invented the helicopter AND the tractor these days?
Why not claim the internal combustion engine as well?
In what way did the US invent electricity? That's a little like claiming you invented gravity and it does a bit of disservice to Faraday, Ohm and Volta.
To which I can only remark what a difference 1300 years makes to standards of civility. The modern treatment of any minority anywhere is somewhat irrelevant to the discussion of standards of pre-mediaeval warfare.
In eastern Europe the question is largely nonsensical: no need to emigrate, hang around long enough and the country you thought you were in will simply move.
And so he did. But he did it 500 years later.
a phies/Al-Sijzi.html
Your argument was that Muslim architecture was in most part due to their policy of leaving societal elites in place, including architects, during the conquest. You go on to support this argument by pointing to the careers of two Ottoman architects Sinan and Mehmet Aga, and claiming that most of the mosques in Istanbul were built therefore by Christians. From this you draw the conclusion that muslims in the 11th century did not have the mathematical skills required to build large domes in the 11th century.
Your argument fails in a number of respects:
* The architects you reference flourished some 700 years after the first Muslim empire
* They were both active in a country that was not part of the Muslim Empire
* The Ottoman empire had been established for 200 years by the time of Sinan's birth, so he was not conquered
* Both architects were trained by the Ottoman army, so their skills were not acquired before a Muslim conquest
* Both architects were converts to Islam, not Christian as you state.
In addition, Islamic mathematicians were intrigued by the properties of Spheres, see, for example the work of Al Sijzi, who was active in exactly the time frame you claim Muslims were mathematically ignorant: http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biogr
Not a patent, breach of copyright. The penrose tiling cannot be patented as it is a mathematical discovery. The patterns in Penrose's books are copyrighted.
Given than Sinan was born in 1493 it's doubtful he understood the mathematics required to build a large dome in the 11th century either.
The protective tax system actually led to a rather tolerant Arabic empire - why, there were Christians in Iraq until last year. It's a considerably better lot than say, expulsion. Which is exactly what happened to the Jews when Spanish finally took control of Granada in 1492.
You could, but I'm not really willing to get into the kind of "your side did this bad to mine, so when my side does double bad to you it's okay" discussion that bedevils any discussion of the Middle East.
I think it's enough to note that standards have changed in the last thousand years: in mediaeval war it was okay to loot a captured city, for example. Now that's definitely not okay, but destroying the city from space is.
The key point is that the common views, which you cheerfully quote, of the Muslim empire, Granada and the reconquista are wrong because they are based on a narrative that has the Muslims as the intolerant villains and nation states as somehow existing a priori (so that you can reconquer something that never existed).
It's for that reasons like that the ignorant chaps further up there can't believe that Arabs could have come up with aperiodic tiling.
Consider what happened to Christian communities in the Middle East with the rise of Islam, for example.
They were generally tolerated as people of the book, although not accorded the same rights as Muslims - look up Dhimmi in wikipedia; certainly no worse than, and in most cases definitely better than, the position of jews in Christian societies.Muslim conquerors generally gave the people of newly conquered lands three choices: to be put to the sword, convert or pay indemnity. Very few chose the second, a few chose the middle option and most chose the last option.
By modern standards of course, these are barbarous options, but they are positively courtly compared to the behaviour of the crusaders a few centuries later.
As far as the "Imperialist invasion of spain" theory goes. That too is nonsense. Imperialism is the correct term, but there simply was no "Spain" to be conquered. There was a Roman territory called Hispania, which had collapsed into interfamily and tribal rivalry with the decline of the empire. (Incidentally, many people who fought with the Moors were Jews, fleeing the Church's policy of forced conversion.) The Moors were simply another grouping hoping to take advantage of the chaos.
The Reconquista is a useful national myth for the Spanish, but it doesn't have much basis in fact. The process of the unification of Spain is markedly similar to the process of the unification of England. If the Danes had stood their ground, or the mercians had held out for autonomy the English would have a different national myth, and if the Spanish had failed to retake the south they would have a different story of legitimacy, just as powerful.
They made three: the A1000, the A920 and the A925. They were all horrible. The horribleness of Motorola phones has nothing to do with OS
Travelling past the boundary of space == space travel. Not really something you wriggle out of by adding extra conditions.
If you could throw your can up above the 62 mile mark it would be a space vehicle.
If I cross the border from Canada to the US to get some smokes from Walmart, the border guards aren't going to let me get away without ID on the grounds that I'm not really in the USA because I'm not planning to stay long.
I completely agree with you that the prize isn't of the same order as the people who stayed in the ISS but I think you need to find a better term for your objections.
Also, by your reasoning the first American astronaut would be John Glenn. (and if we add your "controlled" requirement Glenn doesn't really count either, as his flight had several malfunctions).
True, all speech recognition software *would* suffer from this exploit if the application designers hadn't thought about the likely scenarios in advance. I just checked the situation with my Mac, which comes with speech recognition built in (and has done since what, Mac OS 9?)
Nothing destructive is enabled by default: the worst you can do on a Mac is log yourself out, but that will keep everything running as it was before.
If you go to the Speech control panel you can, after putting your admin password in, enable Menu Bar actions which allow you to do things like trash files and restart the computer.
So by default the computer will just do helpful stuff, but if you really need full control over the OS through speech recognition (eg, you are disabled) you can enable it.
It's a good indicator of the different philosophies between the two OS vendors we also see in their approach to networking (this may have changed with Vista, I've not really been following it): Apple shut down everything by default and requires the user to open ports; windows boxes, on the other hand are wide open from first boot, have to have their ports shut down by a knowledgable user.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line
It's not an orbital flight, no, but it's definitely outer space. Alan Shepherd only went 50 miles higher.
There are, especially as:
Thomas Savery invented the Steam Engine, Joseph Swan invented the light bulb and Edison only invented half the phonograph, the french having figured out the recording part.
Perhaps a more useful 250 word essay would be on how the patent system enshrines the myth of the individual genius, when in fact technology moves forwards by little increments.
The link between intelligence and the receipt of higher education degrees has never been conclusively proven to my mind; British life is littered with Oxbridge graduates who are quite demonstrably dense in everything but a narrow field, and usually only pull that off by force of will.
The link between wealth and power is well established and easily demonstrable.
I don't know who's dumber really: people who can't follow simple instructions when sterilising a sponge in a microwave, the people who were surprised that superheating water in an object killed off bacteria. I've been sterilising soil from the garden for indoor plants in the microwave for years; kills all bacterial and fungal spores stone dead (and provides a heady scent of cooked worm).
": the more intelligent, well-educated people will be more at the top,"
I presume you're not an American?
On the contrary the MOAB fits no common definition of WMD. It would cause extensive civilian casualties if dropped in a city, but so would the equivalent amount of explosive dropped as many separate bombs. So would a sufficient quantity of golf balls.
What it is is something not legislated against but still fairly unpleasant: a terror weapon designed to cow civilian populations. The MOAB is ineffective in its supposed role (that of a bunker buster) but it's extremely good at scaring the shit out of civilian populations it's dropped near. Its blast signature (big flash, big boom, mushroom cloud) is identical to a nuke.
The US airforce conducted a legal review of the Moab and decided (perhaps unsurprisingly) that it was okay to use it so long as civilians weren't deliberately targeted.
On the other hand, other US weapon systems such as cluster bombs, bunker buster nukes and white phosphorus based weapons flirt with the definition of WMD, not to mention the c.6,000 nuclear warheads...