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It's just math. I don't have time to debate idiots. | 277 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
So, how to get our thoughts into an amicus brief?
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, October 09 2012 @ 03:56 PM EDT
You are still instructing the bank to make a payment on your
behalf. Just because the "check" takes an electronic form of
signals traversing some set of wires or airwaves does not make
it any less of a check.
Checks are not patentable to my knowledge, nor is the telling
of your bank to "cut a check" whether you do it by signing a
piece of paper, using sign language, or using a keyboard.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

So, how to get our thoughts into an amicus brief?
Authored by: darrellb on Tuesday, October 09 2012 @ 03:57 PM EDT
Funds residing in a bank account are not software. That I can manipulate the
funds using a computer does not make them into software.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

gene?
Authored by: sumzero on Tuesday, October 09 2012 @ 04:08 PM EDT
if not, a reader of his surely because he advanced this exact
argument in a comment on one attached to one of his recent
articles.

sum.zero

---
48. The best book on programming for the layman is "alice in wonderland"; but
that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.

alan j perlis

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

So, how to get our thoughts into an amicus brief?
Authored by: Imaginos1892 on Tuesday, October 09 2012 @ 04:30 PM EDT
The identifier and password are values plugged into the
security algorithm. If they generate the correct result,
the bank's computer accepts instructions until the
"logout" directive is processed. All math, through and
through.
---------------------
There is no such thing as too much ammo -- only too much to carry.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

So, how to get our thoughts into an amicus brief?
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, October 09 2012 @ 04:32 PM EDT
>It's not that simple.

>If you think it's all "just math" then give me the password and
user identifier to your banking website.

It's really that simple. There is "information" and there is
"matter/energy". Math is about manipulating information, physics is
about manipulating matter/energy.

Bank account numbers are "information". They can't be patented, and
any generic mechanism for manipulating information can be used so manipulate
bank account numbers. The ordinary ASCII encoding is used to store them, the
ordinary string comparison operators tell whether two bank account numbers are
the same, the ordinary IP packets transmit them to your bank's web server. All
information.

Programs are information too. Encoded in ASCII, transmitted in IP packets, all
same.

Slide rules, CRT or LED displays, RAM, CPUs -- they are physical objects:
machines, designed and patented and built.

Here's the simple test. If you can keep something after you've given it away,
it's information. If you can send it across the solar system in an IP packet,
and the person at the other end can make the same use of it that you do, then
it's information. If you can do it in your head (perhaps taking notes), it's
information.

Otherwise, it's a machine.

Don't be confused by the fact that a machine, like an envelope, can be designed
to hold information. The test is, that the information can be removed from the
machine without harming it.

Player piano -- machine.
Roll of paper with holes in it -- device designed to hold information, on which
any sufficiently simple performance can be perfectly described.
Piano score -- another device designed to hold information, on which any
sufficiently simple composition can be perfectly described.
shape of tune "Danny Boy" -- information.

Blueprint of a bridge: information. Duplicatable. Transmittable by FAX machine.
Doesn't actually carry trains, autos, or bicycle traffic.

Bridge: machine. You sell the London bridge to some Arizona developer, you're
short one bridge over the Thames. Doesn't travel over ethernet worth anything.

It is really really simple. The universe has natural laws for both machines (we
call them "physical laws") and information (we call them
"math"). And it's not hard to tell the difference.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

It's just math. I don't have time to debate idiots.
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, October 10 2012 @ 04:08 AM EDT
n/t

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Even if it is all just math...
Authored by: Ribbit on Wednesday, October 10 2012 @ 05:38 AM EDT
It's really more complicated than that... Even if it is all just math, there are still computer programming ideas that are sufficiently innovative as to be patentable by any reasonable definition of innovative.

Take for example, the Cooley–Tukey FFT algorithm.

Carl Friedrich Gauss thought of it as a useful mathematical/computational concept in 1805, but until J.W Cooley and John Tukey described how to do it on a computer, it was "just math". After that, however, it became the preferred way to do a discrete Fourier transform, saving untold hours of computer time, and making thousands of new applications possible.

Don't let the antiquity of this particular basic idea -- considered as "prior art" -- distract you. If Cooley and Tukey had instead been the first people to think of the Math, their idea should, I think, have been patentable when implemented in a computer program.

Now, to be sure, mathematical ideas of this depth and originality are very rare. I believe that is an indication that patents for computer-implemented-mathematical innovations should be correspondingly rare -- perhaps a few per decade. Nevertheless, if we are proposing to re- write the criteria for patentability, we should leave room in them for innovations of this caliber.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

So, how to get our thoughts into an amicus brief?
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, October 10 2012 @ 04:04 PM EDT
I f you think it's all "just math" then give me the password and user identifier to your banking website.
Even if I gave them to you, how does that prove your point that software is not math? Neither my user id or my password are part of the algorithm -- part of the math -- at issue.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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