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| Authored by: mrisch on Tuesday, June 12 2012 @ 04:03 PM EDT |
<blockquote>
> And so a general computer is capable of anything.
Noboday said this. We said computers are turing-complete:
they can perform a (rather large) set of calculations whose
boundaries were understood before the invention of the
computer.
</blockquote>
Someone said something much like this - see the comment
where the manual for the computer suggested all software
that will ever exist. Part of the imprecision here is that
I'm responding to a variety of comments that are not quite
the same, and thus one response winds up looking like it was
a response to a different comment.
<blockquote>
> But in another sense, the capability is not present until
the proper software is written.
This is where the imprecision really bites. My computer
is *capable* of displaying birds crashing into pigs' houses,
the minute I connect the monitor.
To take advantage of that capability requires a bit of
work (writing a program). The question is whether that work
is patentable. To talk about "capability" doesn't add
anything to the discussion.
</blockquote>
This is why I said there were two senses of the word (and I
agree that this leads to imprecision). One is the capability
in the sense of CAN it do something. The other is the
capability in the sense of WILL it do something NOW if I hit
the on button. You can call them two different things if you
like, but they are two different concepts.
<blockquote>
>And that's different from an on/off switch,
which assumes that the machine already has the instructions
sufficient to do the work, if only the right button is
pushed.
This is where you fail to see the point of view of the
experts in the field. Software fundamentally *IS* a bunch
of on-off switches, completely analagous to pushing a lot of
the right buttons in the right order.
It's not unreasonable for you to think that when the
number of buttons gets this large, the work of figuring out
which buttons to push, in what order, is inventive and
therefore that one should consider patent protection for it.
</blockquote>
Yes, that's true. We are on the same page about this. But if
we are talking about straw men, saying "I turn the car
headlights on" is practically equivalent to programming a
large number of on/off switches to make complex software
seems like a straw man to me. If you want to say that the
complex set of switches is not patentable, I get that, but
it is not equivalent in practice (even if it is in theory)
to the on button of a device where those switches have
already been set.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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