One point the/. crowd needs to bear in mind when comparing patents is that in a patent infringement suit, what really matters are the claims. The abstract/description may help you to understand what the patent is for, and they help you interpret the claims, but for patent litigators, the claims are everything.
You and your friends didn't invent anything in the legal sense. To invent, you must a) conceive and b) reduce to practice. (This b) point is why someone can't patent a Star Trek transporter) Anyone can brainstorm; an inventor has to actually make it, or describe it well enough that someone could make it work.
Only patents and printed publications are considered in these prior art things; just being written down or documented isn't enough.
You're missing the point. You're viewing this initiative out of the context of every other post-9/11 counterterror program, and then faulting it for not doing everything on its own.
The point is not that terrorists can't get access to legitimate ID documents--it's that if ID documents can be issued with greater confidence as to their integrity, it's easier to check people's names against watch lists. You can argue about the propriety of those lists, and the competence of the government in creating them, but ultimately even the very best, most complete, no-false-positives watch list won't be any good if fraudulent ID documents can be easily obtained or created.
Of all the arguments against Internet sales taxes, complexity in administration is not a valid one. When a citizen in state A buys an item from a company in state Z, there could easily be some table for computing the relevant taxes. This is exactly what computers are for.
What evidence do you have that whatever security flaws you found in electronic voting machines could actually be exploited without being discovered? I'm looking for something stronger than the spooky language often thrown around, like "an attacker could theoretically" or "a person with the right access could" type stuff. Given the right access, I'm sure someone could wipe out electronic voting records--just as they could with paper ballots.
"What this person has done is neither unexpected nor really all that remarkable," Moss says. "(T)he chip is not in and of itself a silver bullet.... It's an additional means of verifying that the person who is carrying the passport is the person to whom that passport was issued by the relevant government."
Moss also said that the United States has no plans to use fully automated inspection systems; therefore, a physical inspection of the passport against the data stored on the RFID chip would catch any discrepancies between the two.
If the RFID passports were to used like some kind of gas card--where a traveller just waves his or her passport through a reader, gets a beep and a green light, and goes on--this news would be a problem.
But that's not how they'll be used. There will still be an inspector checking the RFID data against the printed data, and against the physical appearance of the traveller. Like they already do now, for crying out loud.
This post doesn't even link directly to the issue described in the intro, and only makes some oblique reference to responses by the EFF. We don't even know what's being discussed. Way to go, Slashdot.
It's been a while, but I recall that in Hawaii I did not see any power lines (likely due to the risk of heavy winds and storms). Can any Hawaii residents confirm this?
The article suggests students are slow to adopt digital textbooks because they can't resell them at the end of the semester.
But why should students do this at all? As one law school textbook author has suggested, why not include the price of textbooks in tuition? As he notes, "It's easy for prices to drift upward when the person choosing the product doesn't really care how much it costs."
Yes, tuition would have to go up accordingly, but once the textbooks came out of the school's funds instead of the students', professors would have to justify their textbook recommendations, instead of putting down a bunch of "required texts" that they refer to only lightly, if at all. Perhaps if such a scheme was in place, schools would find that it is in their interest to push digital textbooks more aggressively to keep down the costs of maintaining an inventory of textbooks from semester to semester.
Much of what the author of the article complains about--excessive warning dialogs and sets of windows where the foreground window is not readily apparent--can likely be fixed by adjusting a setting somewhere, or slightly tweaking the default theme. These do not indicate profound shortcomings in Vista (though that doesn't mean there aren't any). Power users of Windows have always had to customize the settings to their liking.
The whole article is based on the musings of one analyst, who also put out a "buy" order on Google. That's it. One guy's parsing of an alleged meeting between Google and some music people.
While Jobs may be committed to 99 cent songs on iTunes, I just don't see how they would stick to that if Google was really serious about this, and I imagine Apple would know.
I expect a denial from Google in the next couple days.
While this development might seem to be an affront to Mac users who need IE to access certain websites (banks etc), I think in the long run this will help anyone who uses an alternative (non-IE browser). Websites can no longer just say "You need to use IE," lest they lock out all Mac users. They'll need to move away from proprietary content, which is a good thing for everyone.
Used to be, I could do a keyword search for an ongoing secret government project (no, not Aurora) and get 1/2 pages of hits, most of which had at least some relevant info.
Now, nothing. No matter how flexible the search. Not one. Either the Fedz stepped in and yanked the info (possible, but unlikely for them all to be pulled so close together in time) or Google agreed to suppress the hits.
they do a good job of mixing up the ethnicities. in insurgent camp, they appear arab. on bridge or mountain pass, they are "terrorists", ostensibly eastern european males. in weapons cache, they are terrorists of vague ethnicity.
i don't think its racist to consider that some--not all--conflicts in the foreseeable future may involve people of arab descent.
sites like yahoo, hotmail, etc are in a unique position to rid their users of spam.
i don't see why they cant implement some system that scans incoming mail for its users' mailboxes, maybe does a checksum for each message or something, and if it finds that a number of its users are receiving exactly (or nearly exactly) the same message, assume it's spam. nuke the messages, and any new incoming ones.
yeah, if such a system only scans a small number of mailboxes, it may filter out mailing list posts and so on. but it gets more and more reliable the higher number of mailboxes it tracks.
this avoids searching for certain keywords and eliminates false positives. after all, how well would these keyword searching methods do if i were to quote a spam message in an email to a friend?
Slashdot Mirror
I work in patent law.
/. crowd needs to bear in mind when comparing patents is that in a patent infringement suit, what really matters are the claims. The abstract/description may help you to understand what the patent is for, and they help you interpret the claims, but for patent litigators, the claims are everything.
One point the
You and your friends didn't invent anything in the legal sense. To invent, you must a) conceive and b) reduce to practice. (This b) point is why someone can't patent a Star Trek transporter) Anyone can brainstorm; an inventor has to actually make it, or describe it well enough that someone could make it work.
Only patents and printed publications are considered in these prior art things; just being written down or documented isn't enough.
Didn't they create and usefully apply terahertz frequencies four years ago? Terahertz > 190 gigahertz, right? What's the big deal?
4 7
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/11/18482
You're missing the point. You're viewing this initiative out of the context of every other post-9/11 counterterror program, and then faulting it for not doing everything on its own.
The point is not that terrorists can't get access to legitimate ID documents--it's that if ID documents can be issued with greater confidence as to their integrity, it's easier to check people's names against watch lists. You can argue about the propriety of those lists, and the competence of the government in creating them, but ultimately even the very best, most complete, no-false-positives watch list won't be any good if fraudulent ID documents can be easily obtained or created.
mod parent up!
Of all the arguments against Internet sales taxes, complexity in administration is not a valid one. When a citizen in state A buys an item from a company in state Z, there could easily be some table for computing the relevant taxes. This is exactly what computers are for.
Why is this on the front page? Because there may, possibly, theoretically, be some angle that makes Microsoft look bad? ZOMG!!@@!
What evidence do you have that whatever security flaws you found in electronic voting machines could actually be exploited without being discovered? I'm looking for something stronger than the spooky language often thrown around, like "an attacker could theoretically" or "a person with the right access could" type stuff. Given the right access, I'm sure someone could wipe out electronic voting records--just as they could with paper ballots.
OK, this is disturbing, and maybe unconstitutional. But why is this on Slashdot?
From TFA:
"What this person has done is neither unexpected nor really all that remarkable," Moss says. "(T)he chip is not in and of itself a silver bullet.... It's an additional means of verifying that the person who is carrying the passport is the person to whom that passport was issued by the relevant government."
Moss also said that the United States has no plans to use fully automated inspection systems; therefore, a physical inspection of the passport against the data stored on the RFID chip would catch any discrepancies between the two.
If the RFID passports were to used like some kind of gas card--where a traveller just waves his or her passport through a reader, gets a beep and a green light, and goes on--this news would be a problem.
But that's not how they'll be used. There will still be an inspector checking the RFID data against the printed data, and against the physical appearance of the traveller. Like they already do now, for crying out loud.
This post doesn't even link directly to the issue described in the intro, and only makes some oblique reference to responses by the EFF. We don't even know what's being discussed. Way to go, Slashdot.
It's been a while, but I recall that in Hawaii I did not see any power lines (likely due to the risk of heavy winds and storms). Can any Hawaii residents confirm this?
The article suggests students are slow to adopt digital textbooks because they can't resell them at the end of the semester.
But why should students do this at all? As one law school textbook author has suggested, why not include the price of textbooks in tuition? As he notes, "It's easy for prices to drift upward when the person choosing the product doesn't really care how much it costs."
Yes, tuition would have to go up accordingly, but once the textbooks came out of the school's funds instead of the students', professors would have to justify their textbook recommendations, instead of putting down a bunch of "required texts" that they refer to only lightly, if at all. Perhaps if such a scheme was in place, schools would find that it is in their interest to push digital textbooks more aggressively to keep down the costs of maintaining an inventory of textbooks from semester to semester.
Much of what the author of the article complains about--excessive warning dialogs and sets of windows where the foreground window is not readily apparent--can likely be fixed by adjusting a setting somewhere, or slightly tweaking the default theme. These do not indicate profound shortcomings in Vista (though that doesn't mean there aren't any). Power users of Windows have always had to customize the settings to their liking.
The whole article is based on the musings of one analyst, who also put out a "buy" order on Google. That's it. One guy's parsing of an alleged meeting between Google and some music people.
While Jobs may be committed to 99 cent songs on iTunes, I just don't see how they would stick to that if Google was really serious about this, and I imagine Apple would know.
I expect a denial from Google in the next couple days.
While this development might seem to be an affront to Mac users who need IE to access certain websites (banks etc), I think in the long run this will help anyone who uses an alternative (non-IE browser). Websites can no longer just say "You need to use IE," lest they lock out all Mac users. They'll need to move away from proprietary content, which is a good thing for everyone.
Who would have thought the /. would ever have such a headline?
"Would you like to play a game?"
This is an interesting story, and somewhat science/tech related, but not quite "news for nerds."
Ok, so, if next week all of Microsoft's products became stable and secure, you would have no problem switching over then?
From an Internet cafe in Erbil, Iraq.
Also Baghdad, but given the abundance of satellite connections for media types there, I think that's less unusual.
Used to be, I could do a keyword search for an ongoing secret government project (no, not Aurora) and get 1/2 pages of hits, most of which had at least some relevant info.
Now, nothing. No matter how flexible the search. Not one. Either the Fedz stepped in and yanked the info (possible, but unlikely for them all to be pulled so close together in time) or Google agreed to suppress the hits.
they do a good job of mixing up the ethnicities. in insurgent camp, they appear arab. on bridge or mountain pass, they are "terrorists", ostensibly eastern european males. in weapons cache, they are terrorists of vague ethnicity.
i don't think its racist to consider that some--not all--conflicts in the foreseeable future may involve people of arab descent.
sites like yahoo, hotmail, etc are in a unique position to rid their users of spam.
i don't see why they cant implement some system that scans incoming mail for its users' mailboxes, maybe does a checksum for each message or something, and if it finds that a number of its users are receiving exactly (or nearly exactly) the same message, assume it's spam. nuke the messages, and any new incoming ones.
yeah, if such a system only scans a small number of mailboxes, it may filter out mailing list posts and so on. but it gets more and more reliable the higher number of mailboxes it tracks.
this avoids searching for certain keywords and eliminates false positives. after all, how well would these keyword searching methods do if i were to quote a spam message in an email to a friend?