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| Authored by: Wol on Tuesday, June 12 2012 @ 05:51 PM EDT |
What a computer can do in practice is restricted SOLELY by the amount of storage
available to it - how close an approximation to a true Turing machine it is.
As consumer will quite rightly tell you take your Turing machine and clear off
if you give him one that is too slow to run Angry Birds without taking up his
entire lifetime to do so.
But the consumer is angry that the computer can't do it in a reasonable time. To
him that may mean that "it can't do it" but as far as reality is
concerned he is wrong.
This is another example of the problems you seem to be having. You equate
"cannot be done in a reasonable time" with "cannot be done at
all". And you seem to think that "doing it faster" is worthy of a
patent. IT ISN'T. Sure, if I come up with some physical idea that enables a
computer to run faster, that physical idea is worthy of a patent.
But the idea that "run this program on a computer that's fast enough to
actually finish the program in a reasonable time" is worthy of a patent -
nah, that is PATENTLY stupid!
Cheers,
Wol[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: rcsteiner on Tuesday, June 12 2012 @ 07:03 PM EDT |
For what it's worth, I've seen games with reasonably accurate gravity simulation
done on an XT-class machine with a CGA display (Space War for DOS, anyone?
Quite playable). Angry Birds could be done in a playable manner on such
hardware, but the machine is admittedly suboptimal these days even if it is
still capable of performing that task. People want pretty colors, after all,
but I realize this isn't the main focus of this discussion. :-)
Speaking frankly: because we deal with logical constructs for a living, and
because many of us often do so outside of the workplace as well, I think many
software developers like myself tend to expect fairly logical conclusions and
rulings to be emitted by our legal system.
That appears to not be the case, today, at least in the context of software
patents in the United States.
As I'm sure you are acutely aware, this topic is not just an intellectual
exercise for many of us. For some of us, and possibly most of us, software
development is a core component of our businesses.
In some cases, software is *the* core component of our business. It's what we
sell, it enables us to operate, or it supports the main services we provide to
our customers.
Every single day, when I am designing and implementing solutions in code using
little more than my 30 years of coding experience and a bit of common sense, I'm
likely violating at least one, and sometimes possibly dozens, of published
software patents. Patents that describe common solutions and general techniques
that should probably not have been granted, but which are nonetheless out there
in circulation and almost impossible to get rid of because of the nature of the
existing legal and political environment in which we are forced operate.
I'm not that exceptional. There are probably dozens like me at my current
workplace, and it isn't that large.
This is a problem that can not be over emphasized. Patents are turning the
software development world into a high stakes minefield.
From what I've read of your postings here, it seems you still have a strong
difference of opinion with many of the posters here regarding the basic nature
of software.
Perhaps the environment here is causing you to be somewhat imprecise in your
responses. Perhaps you misunderstand the subject matter. I'm not sure what is
happening, precisely, and I could certainly speculate as to why, but I also
realize that this is a suboptimal medium for certain types of discussion.
However, you are also being presented to us as one of the folks in the legal
industry who is held to be an expert of sorts in this area of law. That may be
true, and yet it appears there is a fundamental gap in interpretation between
what you see as patentable subject matter and what most of us believe to be
patentable in a software context.
Is it any wonder that many of us, who are experts ourselves in various areas of
software development, have been very very concerned about the intersection
between software development and the law in this country?
Software patents simply do not make sense to most of the folks who are actually
performing software development, at least as far as I've been able to
determine.
Why does the legal industry seem to pretend otherwise?
---
-Rich Steiner >>>---> Mableton, GA USA
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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