I think a large part of the hoo-raa about this patent is that the patent does not call out which elements are inventions, and which are prior art/previous patents/etc. So we get slapped with a wall of text the first bit we grok is "it's kinda like sudo...".
> Adding a GUI is no more "creative" and "non-obvious" than adding "on the Internet".
More to the point, adding a GUI to sudo has already been done. The groklaw article even points this out. Any invention must come from other factors than "we added a GUI".
And any claims to the extent of "we added a GUI with these features" has to withstand prior art claims per feature patented.
How could putting someone to death (that is assuming that the person is put to death within a year) cost less then keeping them in jail for the rest of their lives?
A $1 million trial thus costs about the same as 20 years of imprisonment. If the cost differential between a death penalty trial and a life incarceration trial exceeds about $3 million, the incarceration becomes more cost effective pretty much 100% of the time.
but because it's a free market, the price gets inflated to this point.
Remember, the "free market" is not free. It is manipulated like a puppet
Um... which is it? Free? or not free? And do you include in your market forces such things as the free market costs of labor (engineers, QA, etc)? Facilities?
How about risk on investment? The traditional corporation model is that many people throw money in together for a share of the profits ("shares in a company"). You buy into a startup and that startup fails, your money is gone.
You're right that the forces that manipulate the market don't care about you. But we do have at least minimal governmental controls on monopolies, those entities with the greatest influence on the "puppet reins" you are talking about.
Well, I suppose there's always a GPU somewhere... (rimshot)
But really. You're talking about an SQL database. For it to be useful, you have to issue queries. Queries composed in the Structured Query Language, and by nature are interpreted.
As I noted in a previous comment, there is a lot of frothing-at-the-mouth about "interpreted code" in the database. You declare you don't know MS-SQL, perhaps some of the other commenters could answer this.
I would appreciate people pinpointing what portion of SQL usage does not involve interpreted code.
Code I work with does simple queries directly, and embodies more complex queries as stored procedures. Both go through the same engine, so how can one be "interpreted" where the other is not? At some level, ANY use of the SQL engine would seem to require use of the interpreted SQL language.
I don't think the question changes if the issue is not "interpreted code", but instead "... is in the database", as an application can write those procedures at run time if needed, and drop them during a clean-up.
Given this, what would need to have been done differently, in order to still use an SQL engine yet not fall prey to interpreted or compiled code issues?
> stored procedure in SQL Server does not meet those criteria.... So I am guessing that you also consider Views interpreted code, as they are representations of interpreted code?
How about stored procedures that implement individual SELECT or UPDATE operations?
How about direct SQL operations (sending the procedure to the database to be operated there)?
At what point do you have to forgo SQL entirely? At what point is "execute an SQL command" (at base, a simple select command) NOT an action interpreted by the SQL engine?
No, really. You're a programmer. You've drawn a line somewhere. I'm providing examples closer and closer to the read/write head. Where is your line? Where was the line FIRST overstepped?
> Just knowing that my vote was an a box, and that the box was counted correctly is enough for me to know that my vote was counted correctly.
Ah, was that your box?
Sorry, but we had to replac your box with McStuffedBallet while carrying it to the election headquarters to be counted. Your box is now being counted by the sturgeon and catfish.
Even if the attorneys are working pro bono, there's court costs. And there's your OWN time (and that of your "victim") invested in the case.
And when you finally DO get a case resolved, you THEN have to run it through an appeals court to have precedent set for the district. Good luck there.
If you want the precedent to be more general (IE more districts), you have to run it up through the supreme court - and they don't take on just any case that comes by.
And as you do this, keep in mind that appeals are based on issues of law, not issues of fact. The factors you can appeal depend on how the judge decides the case.
Oh, and the final nightmare for ya: what if one or both sets of pro bono lawyers pull out? Do you continue (with a lawyer you're paying), or settle? Settle and you've not got your precedent (except perhaps some intermediate rulings on discovery, summary judgement, etc). Continue and you're on the hook for a LOT of expense.
Truth? I have a hard time distinguishing where your "rant" starts, and your echoing of various party lines after that line stops.
Except, of course, that you listed one variety of party line in that first paragraph (after the line I quoted above), and followed it with variations on the other party line in the rest.
The most recent examples were the articles on the Palm Pre store. Same vitriol, different platform.
A) If you are dealing with infinites, then removing a finite set of substates still leaves an infinite set of states.
B) You don't need to simulate the entire universe. You just need to simulate the portion of the universe that you experience. The Brain-in-a-jar problem. Simulating the "portion you experience" would be indistinguishable from "the entire universe" for a sufficiently adept simulation. From the inside, your tests are, of course, part of the simulation.
I recall a short story of a "US vs USSR" style chess championship (or "Deep Blue" vs another computer...). Each side put up their best computer for the contest.
One side had an ace in the hole, though... they had developed a field that sped up the passage of time. Set a computer in it, and it could calculate all possible moves from a given position in a reasonable amount of time.
So:
Our heros' computer made an opening move. The foe's computer, able to calculate all possible moves from that position, resigned.
If I wrote web code for an online gambling site, it could be used anywhere, not just in the US. And it's really unlikely that the government would come after me, unless I was foolish enough to have my name on the registration of the site.
And even if they did, I'd roll over faster than my 401k...
>Well, they certainly succeeded in prodding the other party into action! Too bad about those results, huh?
More tellingly, the other party prodded the police into action.
As the Gonzalez case shows, you can't always do that. As the supreme court ruling in that same case shows, they can get away with not enforcing them, without penalty. For now, at least.
My father knows of 2 people, relative and acquaintance, who suffered from GBS after a vaccination (likely the 1976 one mentioned in the articles), one of whom died from complications from it. He has declined to get vaccinated because of it, and frankly I don't blame him. He has been through times when vaccinations were even more unreliable, and riskier, than they are today. And I don't consider them that big a panacea today, myself.
Slashdot Mirror
I think a large part of the hoo-raa about this patent is that the patent does not call out which elements are inventions, and which are prior art/previous patents/etc. So we get slapped with a wall of text the first bit we grok is "it's kinda like sudo...".
> Adding a GUI is no more "creative" and "non-obvious" than adding "on the Internet".
More to the point, adding a GUI to sudo has already been done. The groklaw article even points this out. Any invention must come from other factors than "we added a GUI".
And any claims to the extent of "we added a GUI with these features" has to withstand prior art claims per feature patented.
so why should he get rid of a nifty new super power?
I think he got gypped. If I were asking for a new super power, it'd be the power of flight. (And NOT X-Ray Vision. Think about it.)
How could putting someone to death (that is assuming that the person is put to death within a year) cost less then keeping them in jail for the rest of their lives?
Automatic appeals. Court time.
An anti-death penalty site which relies in large part on this study.
Cost to incarcerate one person, one year is about $50k, currently.
A $1 million trial thus costs about the same as 20 years of imprisonment. If the cost differential between a death penalty trial and a life incarceration trial exceeds about $3 million, the incarceration becomes more cost effective pretty much 100% of the time.
Just have a small pebble thrown at him, (and it can be thrown lightly), for every spam he sent...
Um... I'd rather not.
Choose instead: grain of sand, placed as close to his feet as possible.
Best performed in an open yard, to make space for the new sand dune...
Foreground: Cruise missile flying over a dirt track in a desert.
Voiceover: (OnStar) "Turn left in 3 miles."
Yahoo? Is that you?
You might read up on Trusting trust.
And I have heard of the NSA (or CIA, or some TLA agency) examining chips in routers, in search of discrepancies. IE trojans, at the chip level.
You only THINK your tin foil hat is too tight...
The original comment stands, in my book.
Hmm... A company imports cars into the US and sells them here.
Q: How much profit do they make?
A: sale price minus their costs, of course!
Q: so what are their costs?
A: Um... they'll tell us?
Q: Riiight....
but because it's a free market, the price gets inflated to this point.
Remember, the "free market" is not free. It is manipulated like a puppet
Um... which is it? Free? or not free? And do you include in your market forces such things as the free market costs of labor (engineers, QA, etc)? Facilities?
How about risk on investment? The traditional corporation model is that many people throw money in together for a share of the profits ("shares in a company"). You buy into a startup and that startup fails, your money is gone.
You're right that the forces that manipulate the market don't care about you. But we do have at least minimal governmental controls on monopolies, those entities with the greatest influence on the "puppet reins" you are talking about.
it's never free.
"Love me?"
"Love you."
"Shake on it?"
Would that have been Leon County? Volusia County? Broward? Sarasota?
Perhaps Palm Beach?
Hope I haven't burst your bubble, but there sure is a lot of fraud going on in Florida. Much more than I thought when I started this post...
> by other means than the CPU
Well, I suppose there's always a GPU somewhere... (rimshot)
But really. You're talking about an SQL database. For it to be useful, you have to issue queries. Queries composed in the Structured Query Language, and by nature are interpreted.
Are you saying that SQL should not be used?
As I noted in a previous comment, there is a lot of frothing-at-the-mouth about "interpreted code" in the database. You declare you don't know MS-SQL, perhaps some of the other commenters could answer this.
I would appreciate people pinpointing what portion of SQL usage does not involve interpreted code.
Code I work with does simple queries directly, and embodies more complex queries as stored procedures. Both go through the same engine, so how can one be "interpreted" where the other is not? At some level, ANY use of the SQL engine would seem to require use of the interpreted SQL language.
I don't think the question changes if the issue is not "interpreted code", but instead "... is in the database", as an application can write those procedures at run time if needed, and drop them during a clean-up.
Given this, what would need to have been done differently, in order to still use an SQL engine yet not fall prey to interpreted or compiled code issues?
> stored procedure in SQL Server does not meet those criteria. ... So I am guessing that you also consider Views interpreted code, as they are representations of interpreted code?
How about stored procedures that implement individual SELECT or UPDATE operations?
How about direct SQL operations (sending the procedure to the database to be operated there)?
At what point do you have to forgo SQL entirely? At what point is "execute an SQL command" (at base, a simple select command) NOT an action interpreted by the SQL engine?
No, really. You're a programmer. You've drawn a line somewhere. I'm providing examples closer and closer to the read/write head. Where is your line? Where was the line FIRST overstepped?
> Just knowing that my vote was an a box, and that the box was counted correctly is enough for me to know that my vote was counted correctly.
Ah, was that your box?
Sorry, but we had to replac your box with McStuffedBallet while carrying it to the election headquarters to be counted. Your box is now being counted by the sturgeon and catfish.
Apologies,
Afghan Rural Election Commission.
Come on! It'll be fun!
... it'll be expensive.
Even if the attorneys are working pro bono, there's court costs. And there's your OWN time (and that of your "victim") invested in the case.
And when you finally DO get a case resolved, you THEN have to run it through an appeals court to have precedent set for the district. Good luck there.
If you want the precedent to be more general (IE more districts), you have to run it up through the supreme court - and they don't take on just any case that comes by.
And as you do this, keep in mind that appeals are based on issues of law, not issues of fact. The factors you can appeal depend on how the judge decides the case.
Oh, and the final nightmare for ya: what if one or both sets of pro bono lawyers pull out? Do you continue (with a lawyer you're paying), or settle? Settle and you've not got your precedent (except perhaps some intermediate rulings on discovery, summary judgement, etc). Continue and you're on the hook for a LOT of expense.
Heres the party line:
Truth? I have a hard time distinguishing where your "rant" starts, and your echoing of various party lines after that line stops.
Except, of course, that you listed one variety of party line in that first paragraph (after the line I quoted above), and followed it with variations on the other party line in the rest.
The most recent examples were the articles on the Palm Pre store. Same vitriol, different platform.
A) If you are dealing with infinites, then removing a finite set of substates still leaves an infinite set of states.
B) You don't need to simulate the entire universe. You just need to simulate the portion of the universe that you experience. The Brain-in-a-jar problem. Simulating the "portion you experience" would be indistinguishable from "the entire universe" for a sufficiently adept simulation. From the inside, your tests are, of course, part of the simulation.
I recall a short story of a "US vs USSR" style chess championship (or "Deep Blue" vs another computer...). Each side put up their best computer for the contest.
One side had an ace in the hole, though... they had developed a field that sped up the passage of time. Set a computer in it, and it could calculate all possible moves from a given position in a reasonable amount of time.
So:
Our heros' computer made an opening move.
The foe's computer, able to calculate all possible moves from that position, resigned.
Conversely, your key could be cracked Between the Strokes of Night.
If I wrote web code for an online gambling site, it could be used anywhere, not just in the US. And it's really unlikely that the government would come after me, unless I was foolish enough to have my name on the registration of the site.
And even if they did, I'd roll over faster than my 401k...
>Well, they certainly succeeded in prodding the other party into action! Too bad about those results, huh?
More tellingly, the other party prodded the police into action.
As the Gonzalez case shows, you can't always do that. As the supreme court ruling in that same case shows, they can get away with not enforcing them, without penalty. For now, at least.
I'm sure that anyone who gets recurring Guillain-Barré Syndrome as a result of a flu shot will be mighty happy to lose their job as a result of mandatory vaccination.
My father knows of 2 people, relative and acquaintance, who suffered from GBS after a vaccination (likely the 1976 one mentioned in the articles), one of whom died from complications from it. He has declined to get vaccinated because of it, and frankly I don't blame him. He has been through times when vaccinations were even more unreliable, and riskier, than they are today. And I don't consider them that big a panacea today, myself.