I appreciate the reply. Your solution seems promising. I'm also pleasantly surprised that while your initial quotes made you look like some conservative who thinks the right to profit trumps all other responsibilities, you actually seem to be quite rational. Kudos.
are you arguing that large investment banks are/were unregulated and ungoverned?
Yup. The financial industry has been slowly deregulated over the years.
See: Reagan and the Savings and Loan crisis in the 80s - a result of the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act loosening regulations on S&L, causing around $160 billion in losses, $120 billion of which was covered by a US Taxpayer-funded bailout (sound anything like Bear Stearns?)
See: Clinton repealing the Glass-Steagall act in the 90s, loosening regulations so that commercial banks and investment banks could unite, leading to the Subprime Mortgage Crisis which nearly caused our economy to grand to a halt.
There's a test you can apply here: When a pharma company spends $1bn researching a drug that ends-up a flop, should we as taxpayers refund that cash to them? If the answer is "no," then you can't begrudge them for taking profits where they can.
And as much as I hate paying $4 for gas, I could say the same about oil: I don't know about you, but 8, 9 years ago when gas was $0.85/gallon, I never decided to pay $1.50 just to help out. Oil companies collapsed and consolodated when Oil was $20/barrel and now, I can't begrudge them for taking profits where they can.
I begrudge anyone who with an excessive income. There are people in this world who live on a few dollars a day. Others make hundreds of millions (or even billions!) per year. What right does someone have to concentrate economic power in their hands so much that they could in theory support millions of people?
The Public paid for and built those roads that the rich people use to make their money. The Public educated their employees. The Public consumes their products and media. The Public fights their wars for them.
How quickly the rich forget their debt to the Public, demanding that we take not a cent of their precious money in return for the glorious lifestyle the Public enables. When their power becomes so concentrated that the Public cannot support itself anymore, they will see exactly how much they owed to the Public.
There's only so much room on the street before the fat cats push everyone into the ditch. The fatter the cats, the less room on the street for everyone else.
You asked the wrong question. What you should be asking is what would motivate the GOP to allow $95 billion in domestic spending to be attached to the war funding bill passed just last week. Bush had three separate veto threats for pieces of that war spending bill only a few weeks ago, but now he's willing to let the pork pass.
Pelosi and Hoyer sold the 4th amendment. I bet they're not even ashamed of it.
A few things that make this debate simpler than you think...
Foreign-to-foreign calls are just a red herring - if they really couldn't tap them without a warrant (and under current law, they already can; 50 U.S.C. Â1802(a)(1)) they could just write "except for foreign-to-foreign calls" into the FISA law.
It came out a while ago that the issue really is email. You don't know where the person actually is with 100% certainty if the message hasn't been delivered, so that's why they want all this legalese with "reasonably believed to be outside of the US". This is what they really want and they're using foreign-to-foreign calls as an excuse to push for this.
None of this changes the fact that the 4th Amendment protects American citizens from warrantless surveillance. If they want to be able to wiretap American citizens without a warrant for any reason whatsoever (including national security), they ought to pass a Constitutional amendment.
None of this changes the fact that those private companies knowingly violated multiple federal laws that were put in place to prevent and protect against exactly this sort of behavior. Do you think Congress would give you immunity for breaking multiple federal laws? (assuming you had the connections and enough money) Isn't this two-tier system of justice, where the rich can buy the right to violate the law while everyone else must suffer justice, the antithesis of what makes America great?
The three features are more than 2 states (A), a momentary sensor (B), and snap-back tactile feedback (C). B + C = PC mouse button. A + C = attenuator knob. A + B = analog thumbstick. As far as I can tell, the USPTO thought A + B + C was novel and non-obvious.
It appears that we agree this is merely the result of synthesizing together features from any of multiple types of disparate but common input devices. We either add A to BC, or B to AC, or C to AB.
Given common examples of AB, AC, and BC, I don't think it's appropriate to allow a patent on ABC. Patents in this case would not be about creating an incentive to create ABC, but rather about trying to pre-empt someone else who is probably going to create ABC on their own. If someone manages to forecast the inevitable direction of an industry and gets a patent regarding a critical "invention" that would be necessary for that industry in the future, they potentially have a monopoly over everyone in said industry.
Actually, I was re-reading this, and I'd like to make four points.
First, there is nothing in the claims about any springs.
Second, according to the body, the "spring" is actually the plastic part of the membrane switch pushing back up. So I question whether that is really "spring loaded".
Third, the idea of spring-loading an analog sensor would be similar to normal analog sticks which return to center when released.
Fourth, I thought the patent in question was this one, awarded in November 2000, not the one awarded in June 2000 that you cited.
I also have a question for you. Do you really consider that putting together two currently existing but separate technologies is worthy of a patent?
Compared to a rotary pot, the non-obvious part is spring-loading this sensor away from the side that has tactile snapping.
And this differs from spring-loaded digital buttons in what way? It's now novel and non-obvious to add an analog sensor to spring-loaded buttons?
Unlike a button, a knob is not spring-loaded and therefore doesn't measure "depressive force", let alone "variable depressive force".
My point was meant to compare the variable pressure sensor with a click-through mechanism to other types of conventional analog input mechanisms, which also similarly have click-through mechanisms at their extremes.
The analog joysticks and gas pedals of the prior art hit a wall at their maximum, without any sort of tactile snapping.
And here is where my point comes full circle. They took the idea of a volume knob, a fairly conventional analog input with a click-through at maximum attenuation, and applied it the conventional button. This is a synthesis of common techniques that every electrical engineer would be aware of.
Yours is the post I've been looking for. Thank you for pointing out the pertinent information, instead of just telling people to go read it themselves.
I believe the GP thinks that the issue is adding analog input to buttons that already click. In such a case, we're patenting "when it clicks" (i.e. click at the end, or the beginning). This makes sense, because the DualShock doesn't click you press the analog buttons, and Sony wasn't sued. I think there are other more important flaws with the claims you cite.
Consider for example other sources of variable sensors that have a click at one end to signify some sort of snap - your typical volume knob, letting you know you turned the volume to off. This sort of potentiometer with a click has existed for decades. You're telling me it's clever, unique, or non-obvious to make a button that clicks at one end, instead of a rotary pot?
From there, it's non-obvious to make it click at the other end? Perhaps you could say "but this is all the way on", however a volume knob is called an attenuator by people who build things like this for a living (otherwise known as "someone skilled in the art"). You get maximum attenuation when you hear the click.
We've also been using analog inputs to video games for similarly obscene amounts of time. The first joysticks were pure switches, but it wasn't soon after that analog sticks took their place. Analog inputs to video games were common long before this patent.
How, then, is claim 2 not obviated by the way existing hardware interprets analog values of variable force on the analog sticks to variably control imagery?
The rest of the claims that I read appear to describe very obvious ways to build what is the general state of video game controllers at the time. I doubt most of the claims could stand up under even the most basic scrutiny.
The experienced programmers know that most parallelisable problems are already being solved by breaking it across machines, and the rest won't be helped by 15 bazillion cores
If it can be solved by breaking it across machines, it most certainly can see improvement by going multi-threaded. What you point out is that multi-threading is hard. Actually, (most) American programmers are lazy; they don't want to remember to synchronize access to that variable, or use transactional instructions in case of a power outage.
I think, in the end, multi-threading will become the norm when some language manages to incorporate provably-safe multi-threading by abstraction, much like Java abstracts pointers away from the programmer (with all of the caveats that come with abstracting important pieces of the computer away). I predict console programmers blazing the trail for how to handle both symmetric and asymmetric multi-processing at the abstract level, since their current platforms flat-out require it (and remember, we're lazy).
I think non-US programmers aren't as scared about how hard multi-threading is. I wonder if the Japanese game developers' games perform better on the 360 and PS3.
Young bucks jump on the latest thing without thinking (or the experience to back their thoughts) of whether or not its the best way to go.
Note that the summary indicates the threshold of experience at 15 years. Your statement can characterize perhaps 20-30% of this set of programmers. Maybe the Old Guard will think that no problems should be solved by multi-core and ignore it as a technology when it can actually help in significant ways, all because they're confident about their "experience" in a highly-dynamic field.
This is definitely a fishing expedition. After all, our government would never break the law or torture innocentpeople and then try to avoid any accountability.
While your comment is excellent, you assume that each person's reaction time is a function only of those immediately in front of them. The problem is that I can see farther than adjacent cars. I could see that someone 5 cars ahead has hit the brakes, and I can start to slow down before the "shock wave" gets to me. Human reaction time is plenty if human attention span is sufficient.
There's a pretty Feynman diagram of what happens. It all starts with a high-energy proton, which causes a series of reactions eventually resulting in a low-energy thermal neutron (about 0.025 eV, I think). This neutron then collides with a N-14, creating C-14.
BTW, thanks for causing this discussion. I learned a lot today by wiki-ing.
P.S.: Thermal radiation is also lower than visible light.
Right. Thermal = infrared, which is a lower frequency than visible light, and hence lower energy.
You don't need to get up to the level of visible light to get nitrogen to convert to carbon.
Actually, you need to get way past the energy of visible light. According to wiki, Carbon 14 is formed when a neutron bombards Nitrogen 14, which Nitrogen atom splits into Carbon 14 and a Hydrogen atom. Neutrons are formed by cosmic rays in the atmosphere, which rays have peak energy in the 10^20 eV range.
Visible light is about 1.5 to 3 eV - well over a dozen orders of magnitude less than needed to generate neutrons. Infrared is about 1 eV or so.
I haven't calculated how many microwave photons you would need, but I'd be surprised if it took a thousand.
I actually did calculate it. Here, you can too.
E = hc/l, where h = Planck's constant [4.13567 * 10^(-15) eV/Hz], c = speed of light [299,792,458 m/s], l = wavelength.
Let's assume that at the near-end of the ultraviolet spectrum, a photon has enough energy to ionize a DNA chemical bond. Let's be conservative and pick the longest wavelength of UV, even though it is the lowest energy. This is around 400 nm (at shortest it is around 1 nm). Plug that into the equation for energy and you get around 30 eV.
Take a microwave photon and do the same thing. The wavelength of a microwave oven is in the neighborhood of 50 mm. That's about 250 * 10^(-6) eV. That's about five orders of magnitude less than the lowest energy ultraviolet photon.
Actually, it takes not only a thousand, but 120,000 microwave oven photons to reach the same energy as a single ultraviolet photon of the lowest energy.
The point wasn't that there is zero radiation that gets through the atmosphere. You're right, there is a consistent level of background radiation. However, I still think it's improper to compare energy levels that are several orders of magnitude apart.
If one is going to compare the danger generated by the radiation from nuclear waste to something, then one ought to pick something that's in the ballpark. You can't espouse the dangers of falling by saying that a one inch drop is similar to a one mile drop, and therefore we ought to get used to falling a mile...
Still, if two microwave photons hit a nucleus at once...or possibly three
Two or three....thousand photons. Microwave emissions are lower in energy than even visible light.
I mistook when he said "sunlight" for "visible light". Ultraviolet light is capable of damaging DNA bonds, though you have to be exposed to a lot of sunlight for that to happen.
So, nuclear has a radioactivity issue. So does sunlight, microwave ovens, televisions, coal burning, X-Rays, and many more items/activities in daily life.
o_O
Nuclear radiation is stuff like alpha (helium nucleus), beta (electrons), and gamma (high-energy photons) particles. In particular, when uranium decays it emits an alpha particle.
To say that sunlight and microwave (photons) are "radioactive" is disingenuous...your microwave oven is not going to damage the chemical bonds in your DNA even if you stick your hand in it while it's operating; you're about six orders of magnitude too low in energy to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
I appreciate the reply. Your solution seems promising. I'm also pleasantly surprised that while your initial quotes made you look like some conservative who thinks the right to profit trumps all other responsibilities, you actually seem to be quite rational. Kudos.
GRIND to a halt...
Man, what kinda typo is it whenever you not only use the wrong letter but you use the wrong finger to hit that letter?
are you arguing that large investment banks are/were unregulated and ungoverned?
Yup. The financial industry has been slowly deregulated over the years.
See: Reagan and the Savings and Loan crisis in the 80s - a result of the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act loosening regulations on S&L, causing around $160 billion in losses, $120 billion of which was covered by a US Taxpayer-funded bailout (sound anything like Bear Stearns?)
See: Clinton repealing the Glass-Steagall act in the 90s, loosening regulations so that commercial banks and investment banks could unite, leading to the Subprime Mortgage Crisis which nearly caused our economy to grand to a halt.
since democrats totally ignore economics, let's do it too, and let's say ... uhm ... that america will print the necessary money
Sounds like the Republican approach to war.
Remember - it's not Democrats vs. Republicans, or Liberals vs. Conservatives. It's People vs. Corporations.
Barack Obama - Change you can believe in. Like how his stance on FISA changed.
There's a test you can apply here: When a pharma company spends $1bn researching a drug that ends-up a flop, should we as taxpayers refund that cash to them? If the answer is "no," then you can't begrudge them for taking profits where they can.
And as much as I hate paying $4 for gas, I could say the same about oil: I don't know about you, but 8, 9 years ago when gas was $0.85/gallon, I never decided to pay $1.50 just to help out. Oil companies collapsed and consolodated when Oil was $20/barrel and now, I can't begrudge them for taking profits where they can.
I begrudge anyone who with an excessive income. There are people in this world who live on a few dollars a day. Others make hundreds of millions (or even billions!) per year. What right does someone have to concentrate economic power in their hands so much that they could in theory support millions of people?
The Public paid for and built those roads that the rich people use to make their money. The Public educated their employees. The Public consumes their products and media. The Public fights their wars for them.
How quickly the rich forget their debt to the Public, demanding that we take not a cent of their precious money in return for the glorious lifestyle the Public enables. When their power becomes so concentrated that the Public cannot support itself anymore, they will see exactly how much they owed to the Public.
There's only so much room on the street before the fat cats push everyone into the ditch. The fatter the cats, the less room on the street for everyone else.
You asked the wrong question. What you should be asking is what would motivate the GOP to allow $95 billion in domestic spending to be attached to the war funding bill passed just last week. Bush had three separate veto threats for pieces of that war spending bill only a few weeks ago, but now he's willing to let the pork pass.
Pelosi and Hoyer sold the 4th amendment. I bet they're not even ashamed of it.
Change I can believe in...well, he did change his stance on FISA...
A few things that make this debate simpler than you think...
Foreign-to-foreign calls are just a red herring - if they really couldn't tap them without a warrant (and under current law, they already can; 50 U.S.C. Â1802(a)(1)) they could just write "except for foreign-to-foreign calls" into the FISA law.
It came out a while ago that the issue really is email. You don't know where the person actually is with 100% certainty if the message hasn't been delivered, so that's why they want all this legalese with "reasonably believed to be outside of the US". This is what they really want and they're using foreign-to-foreign calls as an excuse to push for this.
None of this changes the fact that the 4th Amendment protects American citizens from warrantless surveillance. If they want to be able to wiretap American citizens without a warrant for any reason whatsoever (including national security), they ought to pass a Constitutional amendment.
None of this changes the fact that those private companies knowingly violated multiple federal laws that were put in place to prevent and protect against exactly this sort of behavior. Do you think Congress would give you immunity for breaking multiple federal laws? (assuming you had the connections and enough money) Isn't this two-tier system of justice, where the rich can buy the right to violate the law while everyone else must suffer justice, the antithesis of what makes America great?
Laws of nature are how God implements omnipotence.
The three features are more than 2 states (A), a momentary sensor (B), and snap-back tactile feedback (C). B + C = PC mouse button. A + C = attenuator knob. A + B = analog thumbstick. As far as I can tell, the USPTO thought A + B + C was novel and non-obvious.
It appears that we agree this is merely the result of synthesizing together features from any of multiple types of disparate but common input devices. We either add A to BC, or B to AC, or C to AB.
Given common examples of AB, AC, and BC, I don't think it's appropriate to allow a patent on ABC. Patents in this case would not be about creating an incentive to create ABC, but rather about trying to pre-empt someone else who is probably going to create ABC on their own. If someone manages to forecast the inevitable direction of an industry and gets a patent regarding a critical "invention" that would be necessary for that industry in the future, they potentially have a monopoly over everyone in said industry.
Actually, I was re-reading this, and I'd like to make four points.
First, there is nothing in the claims about any springs.
Second, according to the body, the "spring" is actually the plastic part of the membrane switch pushing back up. So I question whether that is really "spring loaded".
Third, the idea of spring-loading an analog sensor would be similar to normal analog sticks which return to center when released.
Fourth, I thought the patent in question was this one, awarded in November 2000, not the one awarded in June 2000 that you cited.
I also have a question for you. Do you really consider that putting together two currently existing but separate technologies is worthy of a patent?
Compared to a rotary pot, the non-obvious part is spring-loading this sensor away from the side that has tactile snapping.
And this differs from spring-loaded digital buttons in what way? It's now novel and non-obvious to add an analog sensor to spring-loaded buttons?
Unlike a button, a knob is not spring-loaded and therefore doesn't measure "depressive force", let alone "variable depressive force".
My point was meant to compare the variable pressure sensor with a click-through mechanism to other types of conventional analog input mechanisms, which also similarly have click-through mechanisms at their extremes.
The analog joysticks and gas pedals of the prior art hit a wall at their maximum, without any sort of tactile snapping.
And here is where my point comes full circle. They took the idea of a volume knob, a fairly conventional analog input with a click-through at maximum attenuation, and applied it the conventional button. This is a synthesis of common techniques that every electrical engineer would be aware of.
Yours is the post I've been looking for. Thank you for pointing out the pertinent information, instead of just telling people to go read it themselves.
I believe the GP thinks that the issue is adding analog input to buttons that already click. In such a case, we're patenting "when it clicks" (i.e. click at the end, or the beginning). This makes sense, because the DualShock doesn't click you press the analog buttons, and Sony wasn't sued. I think there are other more important flaws with the claims you cite.
Consider for example other sources of variable sensors that have a click at one end to signify some sort of snap - your typical volume knob, letting you know you turned the volume to off. This sort of potentiometer with a click has existed for decades. You're telling me it's clever, unique, or non-obvious to make a button that clicks at one end, instead of a rotary pot?
From there, it's non-obvious to make it click at the other end? Perhaps you could say "but this is all the way on", however a volume knob is called an attenuator by people who build things like this for a living (otherwise known as "someone skilled in the art"). You get maximum attenuation when you hear the click.
We've also been using analog inputs to video games for similarly obscene amounts of time. The first joysticks were pure switches, but it wasn't soon after that analog sticks took their place. Analog inputs to video games were common long before this patent.
How, then, is claim 2 not obviated by the way existing hardware interprets analog values of variable force on the analog sticks to variably control imagery?
The rest of the claims that I read appear to describe very obvious ways to build what is the general state of video game controllers at the time. I doubt most of the claims could stand up under even the most basic scrutiny.
I think you missed step 3. How can your account have fraudulent activity...if it's closed?
The experienced programmers know that most parallelisable problems are already being solved by breaking it across machines, and the rest won't be helped by 15 bazillion cores
If it can be solved by breaking it across machines, it most certainly can see improvement by going multi-threaded. What you point out is that multi-threading is hard. Actually, (most) American programmers are lazy; they don't want to remember to synchronize access to that variable, or use transactional instructions in case of a power outage.
I think, in the end, multi-threading will become the norm when some language manages to incorporate provably-safe multi-threading by abstraction, much like Java abstracts pointers away from the programmer (with all of the caveats that come with abstracting important pieces of the computer away). I predict console programmers blazing the trail for how to handle both symmetric and asymmetric multi-processing at the abstract level, since their current platforms flat-out require it (and remember, we're lazy).
I think non-US programmers aren't as scared about how hard multi-threading is. I wonder if the Japanese game developers' games perform better on the 360 and PS3.
Young bucks jump on the latest thing without thinking (or the experience to back their thoughts) of whether or not its the best way to go.
Note that the summary indicates the threshold of experience at 15 years. Your statement can characterize perhaps 20-30% of this set of programmers. Maybe the Old Guard will think that no problems should be solved by multi-core and ignore it as a technology when it can actually help in significant ways, all because they're confident about their "experience" in a highly-dynamic field.
Q: Does it suck to be an Engineering student?
A: Yes. All-nighters. Profs with horrible accents. Five years of coursework crammed into four years.
Q: Does it suck to be an Engineering professional?
A: No. Knowledge of how the physical world operates. Good pay. Work that is rewarding to do.
This is definitely a fishing expedition. After all, our government would never break the law or torture innocent people and then try to avoid any accountability.
Using a car analogy when the topic itself is cars would be recursion.
It would be even better if you could say that analogy with a LISP.
While your comment is excellent, you assume that each person's reaction time is a function only of those immediately in front of them. The problem is that I can see farther than adjacent cars. I could see that someone 5 cars ahead has hit the brakes, and I can start to slow down before the "shock wave" gets to me. Human reaction time is plenty if human attention span is sufficient.
You're misinterpreting how the neutron is generated. Check the following link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray#Interaction_with_the_Earth.27s_atmosphere
There's a pretty Feynman diagram of what happens. It all starts with a high-energy proton, which causes a series of reactions eventually resulting in a low-energy thermal neutron (about 0.025 eV, I think). This neutron then collides with a N-14, creating C-14.
BTW, thanks for causing this discussion. I learned a lot today by wiki-ing.
P.S.: Thermal radiation is also lower than visible light.
Right. Thermal = infrared, which is a lower frequency than visible light, and hence lower energy.
You don't need to get up to the level of visible light to get nitrogen to convert to carbon.
Actually, you need to get way past the energy of visible light. According to wiki, Carbon 14 is formed when a neutron bombards Nitrogen 14, which Nitrogen atom splits into Carbon 14 and a Hydrogen atom. Neutrons are formed by cosmic rays in the atmosphere, which rays have peak energy in the 10^20 eV range.
Visible light is about 1.5 to 3 eV - well over a dozen orders of magnitude less than needed to generate neutrons. Infrared is about 1 eV or so.
I haven't calculated how many microwave photons you would need, but I'd be surprised if it took a thousand.
I actually did calculate it. Here, you can too.
E = hc/l, where h = Planck's constant [4.13567 * 10^(-15) eV/Hz], c = speed of light [299,792,458 m/s], l = wavelength.
Let's assume that at the near-end of the ultraviolet spectrum, a photon has enough energy to ionize a DNA chemical bond. Let's be conservative and pick the longest wavelength of UV, even though it is the lowest energy. This is around 400 nm (at shortest it is around 1 nm). Plug that into the equation for energy and you get around 30 eV.
Take a microwave photon and do the same thing. The wavelength of a microwave oven is in the neighborhood of 50 mm. That's about 250 * 10^(-6) eV. That's about five orders of magnitude less than the lowest energy ultraviolet photon.
Actually, it takes not only a thousand, but 120,000 microwave oven photons to reach the same energy as a single ultraviolet photon of the lowest energy.
The point wasn't that there is zero radiation that gets through the atmosphere. You're right, there is a consistent level of background radiation. However, I still think it's improper to compare energy levels that are several orders of magnitude apart.
If one is going to compare the danger generated by the radiation from nuclear waste to something, then one ought to pick something that's in the ballpark. You can't espouse the dangers of falling by saying that a one inch drop is similar to a one mile drop, and therefore we ought to get used to falling a mile...
Still, if two microwave photons hit a nucleus at once...or possibly three
Two or three....thousand photons. Microwave emissions are lower in energy than even visible light.
I mistook when he said "sunlight" for "visible light". Ultraviolet light is capable of damaging DNA bonds, though you have to be exposed to a lot of sunlight for that to happen.
So, nuclear has a radioactivity issue. So does sunlight, microwave ovens, televisions, coal burning, X-Rays, and many more items/activities in daily life.
o_O
Nuclear radiation is stuff like alpha (helium nucleus), beta (electrons), and gamma (high-energy photons) particles. In particular, when uranium decays it emits an alpha particle.
To say that sunlight and microwave (photons) are "radioactive" is disingenuous...your microwave oven is not going to damage the chemical bonds in your DNA even if you stick your hand in it while it's operating; you're about six orders of magnitude too low in energy to do that.