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Authored by: artp on Saturday, April 20 2013 @ 12:30 PM EDT |
Rectangles. Absolutely nothing about rectangles.
No foremen, so unions are out.
Apple abandoned a trial over FRAND in Wisconsin. No cheese.
Suit in Germany - no beer.
Same for Korea - no kimchee.
Ditto Japan - no Kobe beef, which leaves out Big Hat Darl
and SCO.
UIs are right out.
The numbers 4 and 5 and anything to do with docking bars are
out.
Maybe we should define what we CAN talk about instead?
Has Canada been infected yet?
---
Userfriendly on WGA server outage:
When you're chained to an oar you don't think you should go down when the galley
sinks ?[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 20 2013 @ 12:32 PM EDT |
constitutional gang rape [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- Street Justice, - Authored by: albert on Saturday, April 20 2013 @ 12:48 PM EDT
- Popehat's take - Authored by: Kalrog on Saturday, April 20 2013 @ 01:30 PM EDT
- Reverse Martial Law - Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 20 2013 @ 02:18 PM EDT
- Boston Bomber Captured - World Cheers - Many Cherished Rights Suspended - What Price Freedom? - Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 20 2013 @ 06:06 PM EDT
- Which law does he get tried under? - Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 20 2013 @ 08:02 PM EDT
- Boston Bomber ... weird ... - Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 20 2013 @ 09:29 PM EDT
- ..another swatting? You're flunking the 'Cui bono?' test. - Authored by: arnt on Saturday, April 20 2013 @ 10:29 PM EDT
- Lesson one — it isn’t the Czech Republic: - Authored by: JamesK on Sunday, April 21 2013 @ 09:06 AM EDT
- The one that died - maybe they should look for brain trama, due to boxing? - Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, April 21 2013 @ 03:35 PM EDT
- How long until... - Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, April 21 2013 @ 08:55 PM EDT
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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 20 2013 @ 01:07 PM EDT |
Government Makes
Rainwater Illegal
Is this for real or an april's fool prank?
One comment says:
"December 11, 2012 at 5:39 am
Don
says:
Utah attempted to set it right with SB32, Rainwater Harvesting, in
March of 2010. The legislation was incorporated into UT Code (73-3-1.5) but the
kicker is that a) you are limited to either a 2500 gallon underground or two 100
gallon above ground containers and b) you have to REGISTER with the State
Engineer via a website (http://waterrights.utah.gov/forms/rainwater.asp), which
still shows that the gov’t, not you, owns the water. I happen to have a water
right that came with my rural property, so I don’t think I have to register but
I’m still finding out that information."
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Authored by: macliam on Saturday, April 20 2013 @ 06:53 PM EDT |
I was looking into an old case, Diamond v. Bradley concerning a patent
application on computer firmware that came before the Supreme Court at the same
time as Diamond v. Diehr. Indeed oral argument for the two cases before
the Supreme Court took place on the same day, October 14, 1980, and the judgment
in Diamond v. Bradley was announced a few days after Diehr and was
very short:
PER CURIAM.
The judgment is affirmed by
an equally divided Court.
THE CHIEF JUSTICE took no part in the
consideration or decision of this case.
(It seems that Chief Justice Warren Burger
held stock in Honeywell Information Systems Inc. who were the assignees of
the patent, and he therefore recused himself.)
This patent was one of a
number concerned with improvements to the Honeywell Series 60, Level 64,
computer. It appears that Bradley's patent application concerned an improvement
to a multi-tasking computer that took the form of firmware to be run in a
microprocessor. Apparently scratchpad registered were maintained in the
microprocessor for efficiency in its normal operation, and these were
inaccessible to the multi-tasking operating system operating in main memory.
This caused problems when switching between processes, so the inventor developed
a firmware routine for updating the scratchpad registers and synchronizing them
with a data structure in main memory accessible to the operating system. (The
previous description may well be inaccurate: I am certainly not an expert in
operating systems, microprocessors, firmware, or forty-year-old computer
operating systems.) The legally significant point concerning the invention is
that the difference between the invention and the prior art consisted entirely
in the firmware routine, and neither the PTO for the Court of Customs and Patent
Appeals (CCPA) saw any legal distinction between firmware and software. Thus
the novel subject matter consisted entirely of a computer program.
The
oral argument is available, with a transcript, from the Diamond v.
Bradley page at the Oyez Project (which makes available recordings and
transcripts of oral arguments at the Supreme Court going back
decades).
My Wallace, the lawyer for the Commissioner of Patents, argued
against the theory that programming a computer with new software produced a new
machine. The Piano
Roll Blues argument duly found its way into his argument before the
Court:
And we have also addressed in our reply brief the
possibility of a doctrine of transitory novelty where a particular selection put
into a player piano or a particular letter or a memorandum inserted into a word
processor that hasn't been in the word processor before... you know, those
machines that are replacing typewriters in offices... would transform the
machine for the moment into a new machine.
This has never been a
doctrine recognized under the patent law and would have the same drawbacks, the
same inconsistencies of established law as I have
described.
Earlier in his oral argument, Mr. Wallace made
reference to a doctrine of patent law concerned with “the inherent
operation of a machine” that might prove relevant in trying to argue that
certain troll patent claims are invalid:
And indeed the fact
that the application is put as a machine claim rather than a process claim, if
anything raises possible additional impediments to the granting of the
application because of the cases we've collected on page 17 of our brief, in
which this Court has consistently held that a claim describing the inherent
operation of a known machine is not statutory subject
matter.
Obviously, whether the machine was capable of executing the
program that respondents have devised was predetermined by the design of the
machine itself, and the inventor of that machine should hardly be excluded under
the patent laws from uses of the machine which were inherent in the operation
that he built into the machine, which is really what's involved
here.
As we further point out, there is also the problem that allowing
this as a new machine claim would extend the life of the patent on the machine
through a new machine claim that essentially just describes one of the inherent
operations of the machine.
I should wrap up this comment, and
will do so with a few links. The issued patent is 4,351,024. Most of the
diagrams and text (describing the embodiment) are essentially irrelevant: since
the claim is to a multi-tasking computer incorporating the improvement, the
claim needs to explain to the Person Having Ordinary Skill in the Art (or
PHOSITA), how to construct a multi-tasking operating system for a 1970's
computer before going on to discuss the specifics of the invention. Moreover
the essentially irrelevant text and diagrams appear verbatim in a number of
other patent applications by Honeywell from that period. Also available on
Google Scholar is Judge Rich's opinion for the Court of Customs and
Patent Appeals.
I suggest that an understanding of these old cases
might be of relevance if someone were contemplating writing an amicus
curiae brief for the Supreme Court arguing that patent claims asserted by
some PAE are invalid. I may comment further on this, in another comment, to try
to explain why an argument involving the “inherent operation of a
machine” might prove to be of assistance in making a case against such a
patent claim. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 20 2013 @ 09:22 PM EDT |
Mark Reinhold’s
Blog
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 20 2013 @ 09:47 PM EDT |
wired.com
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 20 2013 @ 10:39 PM EDT |
"A woman who complained about an unpaid £146 invoice is
facing a libel
battle that could cost her more than
£100,000."
"Lesley Kemp,
55, took to Twitter claiming that a company
based in the Middle East had failed
to pay her promptly for
transcription work."
"Now the firm is
suing Mrs Kemp, of Milton Keynes, for
defamation, claiming up to £50,000 in
damages and a further
£70,000 in costs."
"The company,
Resolution Productions, based in Qatar, has
yet to comment." link[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- Hmmm - Authored by: Wol on Sunday, April 21 2013 @ 09:15 AM EDT
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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 20 2013 @ 11:00 PM EDT |
"The remarkable thing about the XPS 13 Developer Edition
is that it's so
unremarkable—it has Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
installed out of the box, and it simply
works .. The XPS 13
DE shows the level of functionality and polish possible
with
extra effort, and that effort and polish together means this
kind of
Linux integration is something we won't see very
often outside of boutique
OEMs." li
nk [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 20 2013 @ 11:29 PM EDT |
'Blackstone Group
LP
pulled out of bidding for Dell
Inc. amid
concerns about a worsening global PC slump, taking pressure
off
Chief Executive Officer Michael Dell to sweeten his
original $24.4 billion
buyout offer.` link [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: hardmath on Sunday, April 21 2013 @ 07:27 AM EDT |
As shown in this
"meta" thread Crypto.StackExchange.com, one of a family
of sites that
hosts Q&A style community content, a recent
question about analysis of
encryption products by
CipherCloud resulted in a DCMA takedown
notice.
Images of the notice from Michael Bartz, Senionr Corporate
Counsel
at CipherCloud, are shown in the above link and may
also be found at
PDF Archive.
The
wider StackExchange
community response revolves around a
proposal to send all such takedown
notices to EFF's Chilling
Effects
Clearinghouse.
The three DCMA violations claimed appear to relate, at
least
in part, to use of the CipherCloud trademark and to screen
captures of
output from CipherCloud products, in which
copyright is claimed by CipherCloud.
Tacked onto to these
are allegations that answers critiquing the CipherCloud
products are "false, misleading, or libelous... defamatory"
and Lanham Act
violations as "unfair competition".
Concern is expressed that such notices
may be used to
discourage legitimate cryptanalysis of proprietary products,
and that the claimed violations may not be permitted the
defenses available
under US law.
--- Recursion is the opprobrium of the mathists. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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