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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 15 2013 @ 06:39 PM EDT |
This isn't a difficult concept.
Think about a printing press, with movable type. Patenting a press, an improved
press, a specialized type font--all valid.
Taking an existing press, and an existing font, and patenting the act of
printing a page containing some particular sequence of symbols, by putting
together items from that font into a forme--is insane. It's
But that's what Judge Rader does with computers. Would he say, "A printing
press doesn't print anything but smudges until the plate is inserted"?
Would he say "a copier doesn't copy anything but glare unless an image is
placed on the glass plate"? A chainsaw doesn't cut anything unless the
starter cord is pulled--or until the blade makes contact with a log"? Maybe
a chainsaw that cuts oak is a completely different machine from a chainsaw that
cuts Texas cheerleaders. Or a calculator doesn't calculate anything until you
press the buttons. Nobody is that out of touch with reality!
Ah, but bring a computer in, and suddenly we're in a whole different universe. A
COMPUTER, you must know, is a whole different machine when it's processing the
objects which it was designed from the beginning to process.
What Judge Rader doesn't understand is -- there is no such thing as installing a
program on a computer. You can, if you wish, copy files into a storage medium
with a high-speed connection to your processor. You can also copy files into a
storage medium which is on another continent, and has no direct connection to
your computer at all. So long as the computer can access its instructions (one
bit at a time), it doesn't matter where the file is. The computer is performing
EXACTLY the same computation.
What some people call "installation" is simply caching information
where it can be accessed more rapidly. It's completely unnecessary to the
computation, and it's completely irrelevant to any conceivable concept of
computating machinery.
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