... was that I looked at a Vista machine at a store and discovered that you can't reduce the Vista partition below 50% of the drive. Partition Magic and other tools don't work on Vista partitions and you have to use the built-in Microsoft tool.
All of my machines are dual boot (or multiple boot) with at least one Linux and possibly up to 3 (two Fedora versions plus Ubuntu), and I normally reduce Windows to less than a quarter of the drive. (I mainly use Windows to run an old version of Quick Books and the current year's tax program, neither of which run on Linux.)
I know what I'm getting with XP. Vista is a step into the unknown, but I know there will be problems.
There are three main problem with software patents (and business method patents as well). One is the impossibility of searching the prior art. Another is obviousness to a Person Having Ordinary Skill In The Art (PHOSITA). And a third is that many software patents don't claim innovative solutions to problems, but claim all solutions to a newly discovered problem, even one for which the applicant really hasn't provided a practical, implemented, innovative solution.
The prior art in software is the corpus of all previously written software. To see if something had been done before, it would be necessary for a patent examiner to look through all software that had been written before to determine if a particular technique claimed in a patent application had been used. Programmers don't document their work very thoroughly, much less write journal articles on the techniques they use. And a lot of software technology is just learned by doing and by copying ideas discovered by reading other peoples' code but not formally otherwise documented by them.
Open source software provides one window into the corpus of software, and the IBM Type 4 program libraries (for machines such as the 360 and 1130) have some published source code, but proprietary software is distinctly unavailable for searching in most cases.
The same applies to business method patents. What business writes journal articles about their ways of doing things, especially ways that give them a competitive edge? Again, ideas are learned by doing and copying ideas learned on previous jobs.
One example is the Amazon "One Click" patent. That patent combines the cookie with the open account. You couldn't tell that by looking at the obfuscated language in which the patent is written, but that is what it does. Evidence of the open account as a business process can probably be found by looking in records written in Babylonian cuneiform. However, the USPTO doesn't search records in Babylonian cuneiform to look for evidence that a business process has been used before.
A second example is the patent for which Verizon sued Vonage. Any programmer with a brain would know that to hook up a VOIP system to a telephone switch would require some information and that the best way to organize the information would be in a database. The rest is legal obfuscation. If patent applications had to be written to a level of plain understanding, most would fall away because of obviousness.
Finally, patent applications should be required to include a working model or implementation or some kind of other evidence that the applicant wasn't just patenting the problem but actually had a solution. There was a discussion some months ago on Slashdot about a patent that covered all ways of doing something with graphics. The recipient clearly had discovered something that needed to be done in a graphics system. What the patent claimed was all ways of doing what was needed. IIRC, what the patent actually provided may have been one way of doing it, or might not have provided an actual solution. This is the software equivalent of patenting the electric light without figuring out how to make one that worked, a process that took Edison a lot of time and effort.
Many lawyers have a difficult time understanding technology. Some became lawyers because they weren't good at math and science. When those lawyers become judges, they don't suddenly gain an understanding of technology. They stick to their comfort zone. That is the reason the CAFC required documentary evidence to prove what prompted a PHOSITA to do something obvious. If it wasn't obvious to a lawyer, why should they treat it as obvious to a PHOSITA? Fortunately, the Supreme Court saw otherwise. Perhaps the courts will come to their senses on software and business method patents as well.
From their document, this looks like a front for the cable industry and the telcos who are peddling what they call broadband. Their "broadband" is really at dumbed down legacy speeds compared to what other countries in the world are doing.
Real broadband is gigabit speed, bi-directional, to homes and small businesses. It allows every subscriber to become a content provider. The cable industry sees itself as being part of the entertainment industry, and the telcos would like to join the broadband-as-entertainment model. Real broadband scares the entertainment industry because they see it as a challenge to their business model.
The economic impact of real broadband would be immense. I like to analogize the comparison of legacy broadband to real broadband as the difference between animal power and engine power. If one horsepower is a fundamental limit, innovators will try to work out ways of getting two horses to work together. If power comes from engines, innovation goes to a much higher level. Innovators in countries with with real broadband can conceive ideas that American innovators can't even imagine.
The sponsors of this report are pushing legislation. I would urge people to examine the legislation to see how it defines broadband. If it doesn't talk about gigabit to the home, it is part of the trend in which the US is becoming a third world telecommunications country to protect entertainment business models.
In our house, we still have a black, rotary-dial phone that we continue to use. Obviously we have to use one of our (many) "touch tone" phones for things like working through telephone menu systems.
We also have two VCR's and sometimes have to adjust tracking.
Many of the skills listed are obsolete only for people who don't keep older products around or who are too young to ever have used them.
Microsoft certainly has a lot of expertise in foreclosing competition by restricting access to API's (as they claim Google would be in position to do). Funny they also didn't mention restricting access to data formats. Or does that cut too close to home for them.
There is a book written in 1841 by Charles Mackay titled "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds". It describes some "bubble" markets, such as the Dutch Tulip Craze (when people would invest their life savings in a tulip bulb, only to see the market eventually crash) and then goes on to describe other non-market crazes.
The book is frequently referenced in discussions of investment strategy, especially so-called "contrarian investing", which often makes money for its followers. The contrarian investing principle can be summarized as being that when the crowd overwhelmingly agrees on something, go the other way.
The book describes market behavior at least as well as Adam Smith's "unseen hand", and may also well describe other aspects of crowd behavior. I had never heard of the "wisdom of crowds" before this posting, but I have heard of the "madness of crowds" for many years.
"Now I'm no expert, but it seems to me that given a random distribution of voters throughout the day, it should be impossible to reliably skew the results of any particular machine using this method."
It is rare to find a random distribution of voters at a polling place. Neighborhoods tend to have fairly stable distributions of voter outlook, and polling places typically serve voters in a neighborhood or a group of neighborhoods. The 52-48 overall percentage result of an election is the sum of polling places with party ratios such as 50-50, 60-40, 40-60, 80-20, 20-80, 90-10, and 10-90. What tends to move is the party ratio, so for example, if a party is particularly strong in a given election, their 80-20 polling places might go to 90-10, while their opposition's 90-10's will go to 80-20.
A malicious voter going into an 80-20 or 90-10 polling place and deleting votes from a machine is predictably reducing the overall margin of the party having predominance at that polling place.
In recent years, a major strategy of Republicans has been vote suppression and non-internet dirty tricks. For example, they have distributed flyers in poor African-American neighborhoods stating that the election was on Wednesday (instead of Tuesday) and that it was illegal -- and grounds for arrest and prosecution -- for anyone with an overdue rent bill to vote. These issues have been widely reported.
However, the bigger, not as well reported, scandal is in the findings of the California Secretary of State. She set up teams to do penetration tests of the all-electronic (DRE) voting machines. Although the vendors later howled about the information given the penetration test teams, the information was similar to what the US Defense Department has been giving its penetration test teams for the last quarter century.
The team that tested the Diebold machine found that a minimally-skilled malicious voter could gain administrative access to the machine and erase all votes cast up to that point in the election. The access required a tool, described as being commonly found in an office, small enough to conceal in the palm of the hand, and such that it would create no suspicion in the minds of polling place officials. The description sounds to me like a paper clip.
In the 2004 general election, the board of elections of a Maryland county normally carried by Democratic candidates reported that up to 5% of their machines (all Diebolds) were suspected of having lost some or all of their recorded votes. Could this have been the same attack described by the California penetration test team? If so, where else was it performed? What other voting machine shenanigans occurred in 2004? How did that influence the outcome in 2004?
There was also a group of statisticians who determined that the 2006 Democratic margin in winning control of the House of Representatives was significantly different from the margin calculated from exit polls. The difference was around 3%, but should have been much smaller, according to well-tested statistical concepts. This could have meant several more Democratic seats in the House. Could this have been the result of voting machine tampering similar to what the California test teams demonstrated?
Could the 2008 election be decided, not by the voters, but by the sophistication of voting machine tamperers?
Microsoft recently patented the technology of sudo, which has been in *nix for over 30 years. Neglecting the issue of prior art (as did the USPTO in issuing the patent) isn't it reasonable to assume that sudo is one of the 200 patents M$ is claiming Linux violates?
The original developers of Unix should have anticipated that over a quarter century later M$ would have patented their technology and should have used a workaround instead to avoid infringing the future patent.
I looked at the Verizon patents. They involved using a database to look up connection information when transferring VOIP to the telephone network. Using a database to look up information is obvious now and was obvious then.
What Verizon seems to have done is to go to the standards meetings and pick some obvious thing that needed to be done to implement VOIP and patent it. I wonder if Sprint did something similar.
The Supreme Court recently ruled on obviousness related to combining two technologies (e.g., databases and VOIP). The prior rulings by CAFC required some documentation of a motivation to combine. The Supreme Court threw that out and said to look at what PHOSITA (a person having ordinary skill in the art) would know at the time.
I think Vonage should try to bust these patents on obviousness, if they haven't tried already.
Because the Linux and the video app communicate via shared memory (and not the kind of arms-length communication -- files, pipes, messages, etc. -- used between separate works), the video app needs to be GPL3. That may be the Achilles heel of this arrangement.
... if they "randomize" the placement of ballots in the electronic records using a PSEUDO-random number generator with a non-random (known or hard-coded) initial seed value. That is every bit as good as Diebold's replacing their heavily criticized hard coded encryption keys by making the encryption key for each machine the MD5 hash of its nameplate serial number.
My music is traditional (pre-1950) jazz, sometimes called Dixieland. Most of the CD's in my collection were purchased directly from the bands during live performances or came from labels that are not RIAA members. Money paid to RIAA's royalty collecting entity does not go to those bands or labels unless they join the entity at substantial cost, most likely exceeding the value of joining.
Very little of the money paid to RIAA that is supposed to go to artists and songwriters actually gets to traditional jazz artists and songwriters (or their estates).
Traditional jazz is so far off the music industry radar screen that the satellite radio channels (that I get to listen to sometimes when I fly) do not have traditional jazz channels. The closest they come is big band. None of what they play is from currently playing bands that you can see today in live performance; it is all archived from the 1930's and 40's, when some bands had jazz musicians in their bands and gave them solos.
Before any proposal like this gets considered, there needs to be an alternative royalty entity established for non-RIAA music that ensures the money goes where it belongs.
You can find information on the typical voltages generated by various activities at the web site of the Electrostatic Discharge Association (http://www.esda.org/esd_fundamentals.html). Even with humidity above 25% (that is the breakpoint below which the voltages get really high) the typical voltages are around 1000 volts. The electronic parts shown in the pictures are probably designed to withstand at most about 100 volts. ESD damage can be latent, so the problems don't happen immediately.
BTW, her outfit looks like it is made of the kinds of materials (silk, synthetics, etc.) that tend to generate ESD.
The broadband offered to the US public is seriously dumbed down. You see advertisements trumpeting "blazingly fast" broadband with speeds under 10 Mbps. Those are legacy speeds. It is horse-and-buggy technology compared to jet planes and rockets in other countries.
REAL broadband starts at an appreciable fraction of a gigabit (such as 250 Mbps), bidirectional, to the end-user, at reasonable prices. At speeds like those, any subscriber can become a content originator. Families and small businesses would be able to have full motion video teleconferences. Every Little League baseball game and kids' musical recital could be on world-wide TV. Remote medical diagnosis and surgery could become commonplace, with the best experts remotely available wherever they are needed. It is almost impossible to imagine some of the advances that would become feasible.
From the viewpoint of innovation this is like the difference between animal power and engine power. If one horsepower is a fundamental limit, innovators will be thinking of ways to efficiently hook up two horses. However, if you have engines, innovators will be thinking of things you can do with engines, which are much more powerful than what you can do with horses.
US innovators won't be thinking about what you can do with the kind of broadband that innovators in other countries have. Mr. Capps is more right than he probably even realizes.
The protections Microsoft is providing are against infringement of their patents. Is this infringement retroactive?
For example, if Microsoft is issued a patent for something that has been in common use for over 30 years (such as the technology of sudo that they patented a few years ago), did all the people who used that technology for the past 30 years prior to its being patented infringe Microsoft's patent retroactively?
How far can they go back? Is there a statute of limitations on retroactive infringement? What if everyone regarded the technology involved as being too obvious to patent? Would we still have to pay?
Are the Microsoft lawyers who interpret GPL3 the same ones who apply for their patents? We should all be very worried.
... can be found in Babylonian cuneiform tablets. That part of the prior art is the "open account".
Customer walks into store, points to item, and says "I want that and put it on my tab." Store clerk recognizes the customer, provides the item, and puts it on the customer's tab. In ancient Babylonia the customer accounts were kept on cuneiform tablets. Later they were kept in other ways, such as on ink on paper.
The other part of the prior art is how the customer is recognized electronically. That method used the cookie, which was an obvious use within the scope of the recent Supreme Court decision on obviousness.
Unfortunately, the USPTO doesn't search Babylonian cuneiform for prior art on business methods that are thousands of years old.
The fact that the FBI is computer-challenged has been known for years. It goes well beyond information security.
When the police were investigating the DC area sniper case, the FBI brought in a computer system to help coordinate the leads. They wound up having everybody looking for a "white box truck", while there was an overlooked report about a blue Chevvy. The snipers' vehicle turned out to be the blue Chevvy. IIRC, the FBI's computer system didn't help much in actually catching the snipers.
Some years ago the chief of FBI information security turned out to be a spy for the Soviet Union. There wasn't anyone at the FBI who knew enough about computers or information security to realize that he was compromising them.
A major FBI system development was one of the huge systems canceled in the 1990's because it wasn't properly managed and became impossible to complete.
I suppose geeks don't meet image the FBI wants for its people. Computer-illiterates do. That's the way things go there.
... to the authorities responsible for combating credit card fraud and identity theft. This includes the Secret Service, the Federal Reserve, the relevant committees of both House and Senate, the Federal Trade Commission, the Justice Department, the Attorneys General of the states and DC, and possibly others.
Social security numbers were designed in an era before modern concepts of error control had been developed. Shannon didn't do his work on information theory until World War II, and social security was set up before that.
Social security numbers have no check digits. Any common error on a social security number (such as changing a digit or transposing digits) can result in another valid social security number.
The system was set up to handle accounts for old-age retirement and for support of children after the death of the breadwinner ("survivors insurance"). It was never intended to serve as a national personal identifier, and does that job very poorly.
This proposal will only compound the problems of using 70-year-old technology, originally designed for a limited purpose, for uses far beyond its originally intended use.
The use of social security numbers as personal identifiers is an Achilles' heel of this proposal.
The article talks about numerous people developing similar solutions at about the same time. It seems to me that if numerous people come to similar solutions to a problem at about the same time, this should be taken as strong evidence that the solutions are "obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art" and should not be patentable under the law.
Part of the prior art for the Amazon one-click patent can be found in Babylonian cuneiform. The one click patent is partially based on the concept of the open account. Customer walks into store, points to an item, says "I want it. Put it on my tab," storekeeper recognizes customer, provides item, and records it on customer's tab. In ancient Babylonia, customer accounts were kept in cuneiform.
The problem is that the Patent Office doesn't search Babylonian cuneiform for prior art on business methods. Nor do they search much of anywhere else.
My kind of music is traditional pre-1940's jazz (sometimes a.k.a. Dixieland). It is off the radar screen of the entertainment industry unless it involves reissues of very old recordings. You can't hear it on Sirius or XM Satellite radio. (I've looked for it when I take a flight where they offer satellite music.) You can't hear it on these consultant/remotely-programmed cookie-cutter stations that have taken over broadcasting over the past 20 years. About the only place you can hear it -- outside live performance or on recordings bought from the band or from labels that are not RIAA members -- is on public radio stations (for example, WAMU on Saturday night) who also stream their broadcasts on the Internet.
Royalties paid to ASCAP/BMI for broadcasting traditional jazz don't benefit the widows, descendents, and other heirs of the people who produced that music. They are thrown into a pool that mostly benefits others.
This royalty plan would not only send money to people who had nothing to do with the music being broadcast, but would also have the effect of further limiting the exposure of people to some of the greatest music of America.
To protect users against failure of the vendor to provide support, proprietary software must be escrowed. This involves placing a copy of the source code with an "escrow agent" who releases the source code under terms of an "escrow agreement" that defines what is meant by failure to provide support.
In advocating OSS, I have for years pointed out that OSS is essentially automatically escrowed, which is a significant part of the argument made by this author. I think that both the auto-escrow feature and the choice of support provider are extremely important aspects of OSS.
BTW, I've always wondered in escrow agreements how the escrowed software is guaranteed to be up to date, whether the escrowed software is sufficiently documented that a new support provider can step in without great difficulty, and how such provisions would be enforced by the escrow agent, which is usually a law firm.
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... was that I looked at a Vista machine at a store and discovered that you can't reduce the Vista partition below 50% of the drive. Partition Magic and other tools don't work on Vista partitions and you have to use the built-in Microsoft tool.
All of my machines are dual boot (or multiple boot) with at least one Linux and possibly up to 3 (two Fedora versions plus Ubuntu), and I normally reduce Windows to less than a quarter of the drive. (I mainly use Windows to run an old version of Quick Books and the current year's tax program, neither of which run on Linux.)
I know what I'm getting with XP. Vista is a step into the unknown, but I know there will be problems.
There are three main problem with software patents (and business method patents as well). One is the impossibility of searching the prior art. Another is obviousness to a Person Having Ordinary Skill In The Art (PHOSITA). And a third is that many software patents don't claim innovative solutions to problems, but claim all solutions to a newly discovered problem, even one for which the applicant really hasn't provided a practical, implemented, innovative solution.
The prior art in software is the corpus of all previously written software. To see if something had been done before, it would be necessary for a patent examiner to look through all software that had been written before to determine if a particular technique claimed in a patent application had been used. Programmers don't document their work very thoroughly, much less write journal articles on the techniques they use. And a lot of software technology is just learned by doing and by copying ideas discovered by reading other peoples' code but not formally otherwise documented by them.
Open source software provides one window into the corpus of software, and the IBM Type 4 program libraries (for machines such as the 360 and 1130) have some published source code, but proprietary software is distinctly unavailable for searching in most cases.
The same applies to business method patents. What business writes journal articles about their ways of doing things, especially ways that give them a competitive edge? Again, ideas are learned by doing and copying ideas learned on previous jobs.
One example is the Amazon "One Click" patent. That patent combines the cookie with the open account. You couldn't tell that by looking at the obfuscated language in which the patent is written, but that is what it does. Evidence of the open account as a business process can probably be found by looking in records written in Babylonian cuneiform. However, the USPTO doesn't search records in Babylonian cuneiform to look for evidence that a business process has been used before.
A second example is the patent for which Verizon sued Vonage. Any programmer with a brain would know that to hook up a VOIP system to a telephone switch would require some information and that the best way to organize the information would be in a database. The rest is legal obfuscation. If patent applications had to be written to a level of plain understanding, most would fall away because of obviousness.
Finally, patent applications should be required to include a working model or implementation or some kind of other evidence that the applicant wasn't just patenting the problem but actually had a solution. There was a discussion some months ago on Slashdot about a patent that covered all ways of doing something with graphics. The recipient clearly had discovered something that needed to be done in a graphics system. What the patent claimed was all ways of doing what was needed. IIRC, what the patent actually provided may have been one way of doing it, or might not have provided an actual solution. This is the software equivalent of patenting the electric light without figuring out how to make one that worked, a process that took Edison a lot of time and effort.
Many lawyers have a difficult time understanding technology. Some became lawyers because they weren't good at math and science. When those lawyers become judges, they don't suddenly gain an understanding of technology. They stick to their comfort zone. That is the reason the CAFC required documentary evidence to prove what prompted a PHOSITA to do something obvious. If it wasn't obvious to a lawyer, why should they treat it as obvious to a PHOSITA? Fortunately, the Supreme Court saw otherwise. Perhaps the courts will come to their senses on software and business method patents as well.
From their document, this looks like a front for the cable industry and the telcos who are peddling what they call broadband. Their "broadband" is really at dumbed down legacy speeds compared to what other countries in the world are doing.
Real broadband is gigabit speed, bi-directional, to homes and small businesses. It allows every subscriber to become a content provider. The cable industry sees itself as being part of the entertainment industry, and the telcos would like to join the broadband-as-entertainment model. Real broadband scares the entertainment industry because they see it as a challenge to their business model.
The economic impact of real broadband would be immense. I like to analogize the comparison of legacy broadband to real broadband as the difference between animal power and engine power. If one horsepower is a fundamental limit, innovators will try to work out ways of getting two horses to work together. If power comes from engines, innovation goes to a much higher level. Innovators in countries with with real broadband can conceive ideas that American innovators can't even imagine.
The sponsors of this report are pushing legislation. I would urge people to examine the legislation to see how it defines broadband. If it doesn't talk about gigabit to the home, it is part of the trend in which the US is becoming a third world telecommunications country to protect entertainment business models.
In our house, we still have a black, rotary-dial phone that we continue to use. Obviously we have to use one of our (many) "touch tone" phones for things like working through telephone menu systems.
We also have two VCR's and sometimes have to adjust tracking.
Many of the skills listed are obsolete only for people who don't keep older products around or who are too young to ever have used them.
Microsoft certainly has a lot of expertise in foreclosing competition by restricting access to API's (as they claim Google would be in position to do). Funny they also didn't mention restricting access to data formats. Or does that cut too close to home for them.
The test isn't only prior art. It is also obviousness.
I think this "invention" was obvious. The fact that numerous people did the same thing contemporaneously is evidence (in my opinion) of obviousness.
There is a book written in 1841 by Charles Mackay titled "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds". It describes some "bubble" markets, such as the Dutch Tulip Craze (when people would invest their life savings in a tulip bulb, only to see the market eventually crash) and then goes on to describe other non-market crazes.
The book is frequently referenced in discussions of investment strategy, especially so-called "contrarian investing", which often makes money for its followers. The contrarian investing principle can be summarized as being that when the crowd overwhelmingly agrees on something, go the other way.
The book describes market behavior at least as well as Adam Smith's "unseen hand", and may also well describe other aspects of crowd behavior. I had never heard of the "wisdom of crowds" before this posting, but I have heard of the "madness of crowds" for many years.
"Now I'm no expert, but it seems to me that given a random distribution of voters throughout the day, it should be impossible to reliably skew the results of any particular machine using this method."
It is rare to find a random distribution of voters at a polling place. Neighborhoods tend to have fairly stable distributions of voter outlook, and polling places typically serve voters in a neighborhood or a group of neighborhoods. The 52-48 overall percentage result of an election is the sum of polling places with party ratios such as 50-50, 60-40, 40-60, 80-20, 20-80, 90-10, and 10-90. What tends to move is the party ratio, so for example, if a party is particularly strong in a given election, their 80-20 polling places might go to 90-10, while their opposition's 90-10's will go to 80-20.
A malicious voter going into an 80-20 or 90-10 polling place and deleting votes from a machine is predictably reducing the overall margin of the party having predominance at that polling place.
In recent years, a major strategy of Republicans has been vote suppression and non-internet dirty tricks. For example, they have distributed flyers in poor African-American neighborhoods stating that the election was on Wednesday (instead of Tuesday) and that it was illegal -- and grounds for arrest and prosecution -- for anyone with an overdue rent bill to vote. These issues have been widely reported.
However, the bigger, not as well reported, scandal is in the findings of the California Secretary of State. She set up teams to do penetration tests of the all-electronic (DRE) voting machines. Although the vendors later howled about the information given the penetration test teams, the information was similar to what the US Defense Department has been giving its penetration test teams for the last quarter century.
The team that tested the Diebold machine found that a minimally-skilled malicious voter could gain administrative access to the machine and erase all votes cast up to that point in the election. The access required a tool, described as being commonly found in an office, small enough to conceal in the palm of the hand, and such that it would create no suspicion in the minds of polling place officials. The description sounds to me like a paper clip.
In the 2004 general election, the board of elections of a Maryland county normally carried by Democratic candidates reported that up to 5% of their machines (all Diebolds) were suspected of having lost some or all of their recorded votes. Could this have been the same attack described by the California penetration test team? If so, where else was it performed? What other voting machine shenanigans occurred in 2004? How did that influence the outcome in 2004?
There was also a group of statisticians who determined that the 2006 Democratic margin in winning control of the House of Representatives was significantly different from the margin calculated from exit polls. The difference was around 3%, but should have been much smaller, according to well-tested statistical concepts. This could have meant several more Democratic seats in the House. Could this have been the result of voting machine tampering similar to what the California test teams demonstrated?
Could the 2008 election be decided, not by the voters, but by the sophistication of voting machine tamperers?
Microsoft recently patented the technology of sudo, which has been in *nix for over 30 years. Neglecting the issue of prior art (as did the USPTO in issuing the patent) isn't it reasonable to assume that sudo is one of the 200 patents M$ is claiming Linux violates?
The original developers of Unix should have anticipated that over a quarter century later M$ would have patented their technology and should have used a workaround instead to avoid infringing the future patent.
Shame! Shame!
I looked at the Verizon patents. They involved using a database to look up connection information when transferring VOIP to the telephone network. Using a database to look up information is obvious now and was obvious then.
What Verizon seems to have done is to go to the standards meetings and pick some obvious thing that needed to be done to implement VOIP and patent it. I wonder if Sprint did something similar.
The Supreme Court recently ruled on obviousness related to combining two technologies (e.g., databases and VOIP). The prior rulings by CAFC required some documentation of a motivation to combine. The Supreme Court threw that out and said to look at what PHOSITA (a person having ordinary skill in the art) would know at the time.
I think Vonage should try to bust these patents on obviousness, if they haven't tried already.
Because the Linux and the video app communicate via shared memory (and not the kind of arms-length communication -- files, pipes, messages, etc. -- used between separate works), the video app needs to be GPL3. That may be the Achilles heel of this arrangement.
... if they "randomize" the placement of ballots in the electronic records using a PSEUDO-random number generator with a non-random (known or hard-coded) initial seed value. That is every bit as good as Diebold's replacing their heavily criticized hard coded encryption keys by making the encryption key for each machine the MD5 hash of its nameplate serial number.
My music is traditional (pre-1950) jazz, sometimes called Dixieland. Most of the CD's in my collection were purchased directly from the bands during live performances or came from labels that are not RIAA members. Money paid to RIAA's royalty collecting entity does not go to those bands or labels unless they join the entity at substantial cost, most likely exceeding the value of joining.
Very little of the money paid to RIAA that is supposed to go to artists and songwriters actually gets to traditional jazz artists and songwriters (or their estates).
Traditional jazz is so far off the music industry radar screen that the satellite radio channels (that I get to listen to sometimes when I fly) do not have traditional jazz channels. The closest they come is big band. None of what they play is from currently playing bands that you can see today in live performance; it is all archived from the 1930's and 40's, when some bands had jazz musicians in their bands and gave them solos.
Before any proposal like this gets considered, there needs to be an alternative royalty entity established for non-RIAA music that ensures the money goes where it belongs.
You can find information on the typical voltages generated by various activities at the web site of the Electrostatic Discharge Association (http://www.esda.org/esd_fundamentals.html). Even with humidity above 25% (that is the breakpoint below which the voltages get really high) the typical voltages are around 1000 volts. The electronic parts shown in the pictures are probably designed to withstand at most about 100 volts. ESD damage can be latent, so the problems don't happen immediately.
BTW, her outfit looks like it is made of the kinds of materials (silk, synthetics, etc.) that tend to generate ESD.
The broadband offered to the US public is seriously dumbed down. You see advertisements trumpeting "blazingly fast" broadband with speeds under 10 Mbps. Those are legacy speeds. It is horse-and-buggy technology compared to jet planes and rockets in other countries.
REAL broadband starts at an appreciable fraction of a gigabit (such as 250 Mbps), bidirectional, to the end-user, at reasonable prices. At speeds like those, any subscriber can become a content originator. Families and small businesses would be able to have full motion video teleconferences. Every Little League baseball game and kids' musical recital could be on world-wide TV. Remote medical diagnosis and surgery could become commonplace, with the best experts remotely available wherever they are needed. It is almost impossible to imagine some of the advances that would become feasible.
From the viewpoint of innovation this is like the difference between animal power and engine power. If one horsepower is a fundamental limit, innovators will be thinking of ways to efficiently hook up two horses. However, if you have engines, innovators will be thinking of things you can do with engines, which are much more powerful than what you can do with horses.
US innovators won't be thinking about what you can do with the kind of broadband that innovators in other countries have. Mr. Capps is more right than he probably even realizes.
The protections Microsoft is providing are against infringement of their patents. Is this infringement retroactive?
For example, if Microsoft is issued a patent for something that has been in common use for over 30 years (such as the technology of sudo that they patented a few years ago), did all the people who used that technology for the past 30 years prior to its being patented infringe Microsoft's patent retroactively?
How far can they go back? Is there a statute of limitations on retroactive infringement? What if everyone regarded the technology involved as being too obvious to patent? Would we still have to pay?
Are the Microsoft lawyers who interpret GPL3 the same ones who apply for their patents? We should all be very worried.
... can be found in Babylonian cuneiform tablets. That part of the prior art is the "open account".
Customer walks into store, points to item, and says "I want that and put it on my tab." Store clerk recognizes the customer, provides the item, and puts it on the customer's tab. In ancient Babylonia the customer accounts were kept on cuneiform tablets. Later they were kept in other ways, such as on ink on paper.
The other part of the prior art is how the customer is recognized electronically. That method used the cookie, which was an obvious use within the scope of the recent Supreme Court decision on obviousness.
Unfortunately, the USPTO doesn't search Babylonian cuneiform for prior art on business methods that are thousands of years old.
The fact that the FBI is computer-challenged has been known for years. It goes well beyond information security.
When the police were investigating the DC area sniper case, the FBI brought in a computer system to help coordinate the leads. They wound up having everybody looking for a "white box truck", while there was an overlooked report about a blue Chevvy. The snipers' vehicle turned out to be the blue Chevvy. IIRC, the FBI's computer system didn't help much in actually catching the snipers.
Some years ago the chief of FBI information security turned out to be a spy for the Soviet Union. There wasn't anyone at the FBI who knew enough about computers or information security to realize that he was compromising them.
A major FBI system development was one of the huge systems canceled in the 1990's because it wasn't properly managed and became impossible to complete.
I suppose geeks don't meet image the FBI wants for its people. Computer-illiterates do. That's the way things go there.
... to the authorities responsible for combating credit card fraud and identity theft. This includes the Secret Service, the Federal Reserve, the relevant committees of both House and Senate, the Federal Trade Commission, the Justice Department, the Attorneys General of the states and DC, and possibly others.
Social security numbers were designed in an era before modern concepts of error control had been developed. Shannon didn't do his work on information theory until World War II, and social security was set up before that.
Social security numbers have no check digits. Any common error on a social security number (such as changing a digit or transposing digits) can result in another valid social security number.
The system was set up to handle accounts for old-age retirement and for support of children after the death of the breadwinner ("survivors insurance"). It was never intended to serve as a national personal identifier, and does that job very poorly.
This proposal will only compound the problems of using 70-year-old technology, originally designed for a limited purpose, for uses far beyond its originally intended use.
The use of social security numbers as personal identifiers is an Achilles' heel of this proposal.
The article talks about numerous people developing similar solutions at about the same time. It seems to me that if numerous people come to similar solutions to a problem at about the same time, this should be taken as strong evidence that the solutions are "obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art" and should not be patentable under the law.
Part of the prior art for the Amazon one-click patent can be found in Babylonian cuneiform. The one click patent is partially based on the concept of the open account. Customer walks into store, points to an item, says "I want it. Put it on my tab," storekeeper recognizes customer, provides item, and records it on customer's tab. In ancient Babylonia, customer accounts were kept in cuneiform.
The problem is that the Patent Office doesn't search Babylonian cuneiform for prior art on business methods. Nor do they search much of anywhere else.
My kind of music is traditional pre-1940's jazz (sometimes a.k.a. Dixieland). It is off the radar screen of the entertainment industry unless it involves reissues of very old recordings. You can't hear it on Sirius or XM Satellite radio. (I've looked for it when I take a flight where they offer satellite music.) You can't hear it on these consultant/remotely-programmed cookie-cutter stations that have taken over broadcasting over the past 20 years. About the only place you can hear it -- outside live performance or on recordings bought from the band or from labels that are not RIAA members -- is on public radio stations (for example, WAMU on Saturday night) who also stream their broadcasts on the Internet.
Royalties paid to ASCAP/BMI for broadcasting traditional jazz don't benefit the widows, descendents, and other heirs of the people who produced that music. They are thrown into a pool that mostly benefits others.
This royalty plan would not only send money to people who had nothing to do with the music being broadcast, but would also have the effect of further limiting the exposure of people to some of the greatest music of America.
To protect users against failure of the vendor to provide support, proprietary software must be escrowed. This involves placing a copy of the source code with an "escrow agent" who releases the source code under terms of an "escrow agreement" that defines what is meant by failure to provide support.
In advocating OSS, I have for years pointed out that OSS is essentially automatically escrowed, which is a significant part of the argument made by this author. I think that both the auto-escrow feature and the choice of support provider are extremely important aspects of OSS.
BTW, I've always wondered in escrow agreements how the escrowed software is guaranteed to be up to date, whether the escrowed software is sufficiently documented that a new support provider can step in without great difficulty, and how such provisions would be enforced by the escrow agent, which is usually a law firm.