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Sextant | 227 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Sextant
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 14 2012 @ 05:53 AM EDT
A meridian (local noon, not local zone noon) sight of the sun will give you a
latitude after correcting for season, and a local time. A sight of Polaris will
give you a latitude, but not an indication of time.

If you have a time reference (the best are a radio or a black dive watch that
lives on your wrist) will give you a line of position at right angles to the sun
at the time of the sight after correcting for season.

At dusk or dawn, you can similarly get a star sight. However, you can also get a
bunch of star sights giving you a fix from all the crossing lines of position.

Finally, for the real experts (no me) a sight of the distance from the moon to a
star can give you a fix and a time.

A less demanding variant is a sun-moon fix that gives you a pair of lines of
position. If you then get a different line of position later, an iteration of
the sun-moon fix for different times gives you a time check.

More than you ever wanted to know about sextants

cheers
Hugh.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

A programmable lamp - another example of the fallacy
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 14 2012 @ 01:17 PM EDT

Given the reasoning:

    Electricity applied to a device down different paths creates a new machine
Then a digital lamp that accepts a 3-way lightbulb that can be programmed for a given setting for a specific time of the day has 345,600 patents that can be filed for the device.
    4 states to the lightbulb (off, low, medium and high).
    60 seconds in each minute, 60 minutes in each hour, 24 hours in one day.
=
    60*60*24*4 = 345,600
I would hope the Supreme's would agree that even the first person who decides to "program a specific time for a specific setting into the device" should not qualify to have that process deemed patent eligible.
    Patent app 1: program 12:00.00 noon for medium setting
I'd love to watch:
    Have such a lamp right there in front of the Supreme's
    Walk through the user manual that came with the lamp from the manufaturer
    Then have one of the pro-software patent Lawyers try and convince the supreme's that programming the lamp to High position at 8:00.00 pm really does create a new device and the entity that did that - not the manufacturer of the device - deserves to have that process patent eligible.

RAS

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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