skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Patents cannot be used to prevent someone publishing research, source code, explaining how things work, etc.
Infringement happens when the patented matter becomes part of commercial product, is being used commercially or sold. Not by publishing either textual description or source code. An example of this is x264 codec which is perfectly legal (to distribute and work on) even in countries that happily allow patenting everything under the sun. The infringement happens when it becomes used as part of the product or service.

Patent system's primary 'deal' with the inventor is "time-limited monopoly in return for a disclosure of how you did it".

Leaving aside the question on patentability of software and algorithms, I am sure talking to FFII, EFF and similar organizations might help gathering traction for a proper pushback.
I haven't used it for several years now, but when I finally got shot of it, it was because (a) it was still buggy after numerous upgrades, (b) support was appalling and (c) it felt like Intuit simply wanted to gouge as much money out of me as possible - it felt like I was always paying for the latest, required, version. I don't know whether the situation has changed in recent years?
Yeah, maybe the message is cliché but the way it was delivered - for example taking advantage of the cylindrical tank to paint the circular animation - was awesome!

By the way, it was rather "violence gets back to you" than "humans suck".
Please some can someone with good knowledge of proxies and etc post it one 4Chan or Posterous or similar site and then post it as Question on
http://metaoptimize.com/qa/

Which will get the word out to practitioners in this field
!
I currently cant do that since i am on a *.edu ip
Maybe they just figured it's unenforceable BS and went ahead anyway.
You missed one thing: to pay the people who (check and) approve the apps submission.
My personal password scheme is to string together a few random things. 2 or more random things I happen to be thinking about that day (often abbreviated weirdly to prevent having actual words in my password) with random special characters between them and/or at the beginning or end.

This may not be as secure as a random SHA1, but it's so random (and usually pretty long) that I think it's pretty solid.

One bad thing is that I have taken to having one password for all of my "really don't care about this" websites. Only for stuff where if it were compromised, I really wouldn't care (though I might care a little), but it's still not a great practice, and that password is weaker than my other ones.
"MS in 1995 still had many, many years of good work ahead of it. Remember that they won the browser wars, after everyone had written them off as being too big and clumsy to adapt to change. That was also when we got Win2k and WinXP (arguably the best versions of Windows ever) and their Office product matured into its familiar form."

Eh. We also got WindowsME in 2000, which was arguably the worst version ever. And to be fair, Office has been mostly re-arranging the furniture and re-painting the walls since Office95. And...let's not forget Bob. Bob was Microsoft's Buzz, circa 1995.

That said, sure, it's not like MS got to their current state on January 1, 1996. And there's no way I'd argue that they (or Google) are going away soon. My point is only that Google is starting to show signs of lumbering corporate giant-hood, and that it has happened pretty quickly, in comparison to MS.
cant we start http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect effect?
Rust in the bread basket
But most of their recent projects seem like they're trying to innovate and the coming out thoroughly mediocre, which isn't really a good combination.

Innovation and milking monopolies generally require different skills and attitudes. MS has tons of people good at the latter (starting with Balmer) and that very fact acts against them when it comes to innovation. Any innovation that happens (C# and LINQ come to mind) is limited in scope and is the work of individuals below senior management. These innovators have very little to do with steering the company.

If MS wishes to innovate they should start by firing or sidelining a lot of the entrenched senior hierarchy. Easier said than done.
Remember Paul Graham's words: "One thing I do feel pretty certain of is that if you're against software patents, you're against patents in general." http://paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html

I made up my mind, and currently, I think the whole patent system should be abolished.

Some may think we should be safe if software patents are abolished, but we're not. Make a bit of Arduino based hardware that happen to infringe a patent, and you're screwed. In short, patents are hampering the rise of Free Hardware, just like it does Free Software.

It is past time we examine the effects of patents rigorously, or listen to people who have.
That would invert the use in Pascal where

P := @X;

means assign the address of X to P. And

Y := P^;

means dereference P and assign the result to Y.

I think anyone who has written any Pascal/Delphi would prefer ^ for dereference.
I find this whole microcell thing amazing. Your operator tells you that since its service is sub-par and you can't get reception, you get the privilege of a) paying $250, b) supplying your own broadband, c) still paying your crappy operator, and d) being unable to move from within the cell to outside it without dropping the call.

I mean — seriously, what kind of a deal is that?
Realistic Dice in Illustrator
You have many things to learn in this tutorial, some commands, some techniques and Tools of course. Especially I’ve explained 3D Bevel and Extrude in detail, hopefully you will learn a lot from this tutorial.
alright, well, some people may find really annoying orange funny. In general though I see more of this type of irreverent content on youtube than anything else... -where the point of the thing is to make non-sensical jokes... I can throw in my elitist intellectual HN ideals here and wish for more substantive content...

I also don't think that passive consumption of content is going anywhere. To take music as a parallel, radio is dead, but pandora is really taking off. I think you just have to be smart about how your content is presented and in what context. I would think there's plenty of room for youtube type sites to bleed over into where tv is now. There's no real reason really annoying orange couldn't be presented in a passive context. I might even watch it and think it was ok, but there's no way I would willingly click on it and watch the whole thing, let alone more than one of their videos. That's the problem with channels, and content discovery on the internet in general- You're asked to dive deep too soon, or when you only have a passing interest.

The fact that it's on the "internet" or that people are "online" shouldn't really matter. All devices are going to be hooked up to your wifi/home network soon, if they aren't already. (e.g. netflix, etc.) Not to mention mobile/tablets. We'll see if google can do something with googletv.
And to play devil's advocate: I think it was Freud who traced his love of books back to a childhood anecdote where his father had this big, shiny, colorful book he despised, so he brought it to young Sigmund and they tore it to pieces together.
IAAPL (I am a patent lawyer), but I am at the very beginning of my career. Anyway, non-lawyers often are too credulous when they get nastygrams from the other side. Don't believe everything they say to you! It's amazing what non-lawyers will believe and do just because they get a mean-sounding email.

That being said, one of the fundamentally unfair things about the legal system is how expensive trials are. Even if the other side here has no case, they might be able to haul you into court and run up expenses for you. Maybe you can become a cause celebre of the anti-software patent blogosphere?
"schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or doing business, and programs for computers" are excluded from patentability by the European Patent Convention Article 52, paragraph 2.
and Dealighted.com
Wait a minute: what is the difference between an algorithm and a piece of software? I don't see any.
Marketing Materials To Amplify Referrals
The Value of Silence
I try it out from time to time, but the Cuil blog hasn't had any activity in a while. The results seem to have improved over the past few months, but I haven't noticed any major changes.
> Add few new features

Or devise some novel features that would allow this marvelous invention to interoperate with existing software!

Then patent the combination and fuck them with it. >:D
Now it's http://www.cpedia.com/
I may have Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and I'd appreciate some advice. (Long Post)

That is your major problem, right there - you are still typing a lot! When you're in a hole, stop digging. I had similar problems about your age, made some splints at home to correct some weird posture habits I had developed (eg crooking my pinkie fingers), and I took a break from typing for most of a month. Amazingly, the world continued to revolve without my help :-)

So here's what you do. First, set up an auto-responder on your email: 'Hi, this is me, but I've hurt my wrist and can't type for a few weeks. You can call me on 555-1212 if it's really important, but otherwise I may only be able to send you a one-line reply, if at all. Sorry!'

Next, like Zed says, stop lying on the sofa. this is bad for you in a bunch of ways. Sit up straight - it's uncomfortable at first but once you get used to it it's actually much more sustainable for hours at a time. You can't type, so don't torture yourself by surfing. As you're unemployed but still consider going back to school, how about a few textbooks (cheapie used on amazon, or from the library) to pass the time in a useful manner? You can make notes with a pencil and notebook - not much strain on your wrist when you're doing it at a leisurely pace, and writing is slow enough compared to typing that you'll be a bit more selective about what needs to be noted.

Of course, I am no doctor, and certainly not your doctor. But based on my own experience and that of many others I've spoken to, simple rest is one of the best therapies. You can still perform other tasks, the nature of carpal tunnel and the like stems from spending too long performing a limited set of movements with poor posture. Take it easy, chill out, and you'll find your brain still functions perfectly well without a keyboard.
Why is CouchDB taken out when I choose "Object-oriented: No" ?

To quote the CouchDB website:

"What it is Not"

An object-oriented database. Or more specifically, meant to function as a seamless persistence layer for an OO programming language.
The benchmark you’re reading is probably wrong
Can anyone explain what does it mean?
Entrepreneurial Spotlight: Daniel Brusilovsky (Just Graduated High School)
If you have US patent numbers, you can get the related European patents either from either http://ep.espacenet.com or http://www.patentlens.net. For example, http://www.patentlens.net/patentlens/patents.html?patnums=US... shows related patents for one of the two US patents mentioned.
I thought Garry Tan was the Hacker in Posterous, ans Sachin Agarwal was the Hustler? Did I get that wrong?
I suggest reading the e-mails of the executive-level management (including Gates) that were disclosed in the antitrust case and in Comes v. Microsoft. Aggressive lock-in was a conscious and deliberate part of their business strategy. A mountain of evidence and testimony is available from http://groklaw.net/.
um, cisco also had a "product" called the iphone.
This site is quite hilarious. Now can we get a iPhone app that lets me take a picture of an object and tell me my probability of getting cancer according to the daily mail index by using this object?
From the perspective of a text-based language that would make sense, but its completely inapplicable to a visual programming language. The IDE is the language. Printing/sharing/quoting would need to be features of the IDE and the language.
Baker Tweet uses the Arduino - http://www.bakertweet.com/

The official Arduino blog always has lots of interesting examples too - http://arduino.cc/blog/
The idea of visual programming is that we'll make the syntax easier for people by using colors and shapes and connecting things together in 2D.

To me that seems misguided. When it comes to parsing a stream of text into concepts, humans have hardware acceleration. You're doing it right now, effortlessly.

Visual formatting cues can help, but only at a pretty crude level, compared to our sophisticated understanding of language and grammar.

Furthermore programming requires that you extend the notation every time you use it. This implies that programming can only be represented well with combinations of symbols, of which the example par excellence is text.
Learn your facts sir, what he did at EPS was schooling.
I always wondered about that myself. How exactly do huge UI elements make an UI cleaner and easier to use (we are not talking about touch screens or accessibility features here)?
I would say that proper spacing and layout/grouping are much more important for designing a clean UI.
Who clicked expecting something to do with Ron Conway?
There's a massive difference. Here, let me show you:

Algorithm:

Algorithm Maximum
Input: Two numbers M and N.
Output: The largest number of M and N.

if M > N, then return M
else return N

Software:

// Returns the largest of m and n.
int Maximum(int m, int n) {
if (m > n) return n;
else return n;
}

There. Clear?
I was wondering how to contribute with my bit of pressure. I'm a regular Shazam user, and was thinking of sending them an email telling that I don't want to make business with companies that deal with bullies like Landmark Digital Services, that I'm uninstalling their app (even though I paid for it) and will be campaigning against it among my friends.

But then I thought Shazam might just be another victim of this messed up patent system. On the other hand, they're making profit out of it and favouring and legitimating Landmark Digital Services on the way.

What do you think?
Microsoft has the technical chops for OS's, no doubt.

The business chops to introduce and push device platforms is iffy--they got XBox through, but against weak competition and with very high expense. Apple and Google are much stouter competition than Sony and Nintendo and have significant advantages over Microsoft, not least among them the fact that Google has completely undercut Microsoft's traditional point of entry in the OS market (the low cost commodity OS).

Since Xbox, Microsoft can't get a decent offering together until well after the real competition and growth stage in the market is over. It's not like IE where they can leverage their desktop monopoly and deliver a compelling product 2-3 years after the competition and clean up--lately they're only really competing 4-8 years too late, in markets where their dominance in other markets gives them no advantage and their competitors have already moved on to newer, higher-growth markets. Maybe if they weren't spread too thin and were focused on Windows Phone 7 as much as Apple was focused on iPhone years ago and it was still 2008 or 2009, but none of these conditions are true. And they're not likely to become true in time to affect this particular project.
No, seriously. The padding is just too much, to the level that it wastes space.I know too much clutter is bad, but that doesn't mean GNOME people have to increase the padding to this extent.

Can we have a middle ground for padding? Nor too less, nor too much.
Reminds me of when I accidentally violated a software patent in less then an hour. http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=139913
Personally, after some silent wonderment, other reasons don't.

(I'm sorry, that was awful.)
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I'm considering going back to school at some point in the distant future, assuming I can save enough cash that it becomes feasible.

I know how this sounds since I'm typing this comment, but I've been really afraid to write lately. The problem first presented right as I began taking notes on an Australian CS course available on YouTube/iTunes. I had only been watching and noting for a few days when this hit. At first I thought it was just unused muscles complaining about the sudden workload, but as it persisted I started to realize I was wrong.

Perhaps I'll start up again today, now that my wrist feels a lot better.

As for taking a break, I've been trying, but it's not easy for me. In addition to my usual laziness of browsing reddit all day, my unemployment and severely depleted funds mean cover letters need writing and resumes need tweaking. I think the break is finally doing good though, so a little while longer can't hurt.
Your timeline is correct: the dam really started to break for open source and Linux when Mozilla got open sourced, and when Oracle announced they would release their Linux port. By the dot com boom, Linux was big business.
The main advantage of a BeagleBoard over a Mini-ITX system is significantly lower power consumption. The entire BB can run on a single USB port (5V 500ma). Otherwise, cell phones would be running Intel and AMD processors.
Couldn't agree more. I've recently had a similar experience with the windows of the flat I live in. They are big double-glazed windows, very nice, that are made of a single pane of glass with a horizontal axis so you can rotate it to open the window.

There is, of course, a latch, to make sure the window doesn't open past a dangerous point (we're on the 7th floor of a 20-floor building). The clever designer who designed these windows managed to hide the latch in such a way that it doesn't look like an ugly safety latch. Result? When cleaning the windows some time ago, one of the windows rotated all the way around and then latched itself. We couldn't figure out what was going on (the latch pin is entirely concealed) and so while trying to close it again, broke the pin, which required us to call in some window fixing people whose only option was to actually saw through the pin to close the window, because the pin was so inaccessible.

We also got them to install some simple latches. Those are clearly visible, and involve a little bar of metal with notches that you can hook onto the window to latch it. Clear, obvious, and I can guarantee you that no one will ever break one of those latches while trying to close the window.

Kudos to the designer who managed to screw up the usability of a window, though.
the london-stock-exchange fiasco

Are you referring to this? http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_to_aban...

Despite the ignorant and inflammatory commentary that I linked to, I doubt that Accenture's failure to write a system in C# raised much of a wave inside Microsoft. Accenture could have made the same mistakes in Java or in any other language.
Okay, so I am not a lawyer, but I don't get it. One of the most know audio matching systems is from Kalker and Haitsma, published 2002.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.103...
I don't get how this is different to Ubuntu Cloud which provides EC2 compatible instances inside an EC2 carbon copy hypervisor with EC2 API interop.

...which is also FOSS.

http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud
The video itself convinced me no to go to his site. He opens his site in the browser just to get hung up on the "Sign up for my newsletter" pop-up that runs when the site loads.

"Hey! Watch me demo this using my websight! Look at this
annoying sign-up prompt that you get when you go to my
websight!"
I do grant them all the benefit of the doubt. I want them to succeed as it would be very good to have more players in the market.

My question is when did the inconvenience of proving a real legal basis stop a big company attacking a smaller competitor? Hoover and Dyson is a good example, and in this case, it's a bit more personal.
works until you recall it as "iltttfloewoetrs" :)
Ubuntu code of conduct adopted by other FOSS projects
I thought the ipad caught the competition off guard not because of the timing, people have made slate tablets before, but because of the pricing. When rumours of the ipad started to float around, most people seemed to believe it would be a ~$1000 device.
Didn't take too long for the Hack-A-Day commenters to point that out too: http://hackaday.com/2010/07/07/nexus-one-gets-linux/#comment...
Validator is having hiccups ATM. It is valid, trust me. Try later. If you don't believe me, try some other pages, including the W3 one itself, they all come out as invalid.

Edit: The validator works now.
The death and evolution of blogging
This is a stupid password scheme. You still need to remember some weird piece of information (a symbol and colour? wtf?), and if you put that as the password hint for your websites, they will be able to figure out your password if they have the card.

And it can be brute-forced too.

Just use something like 1Password or LastPass.
Their main problem is that their release cycles are too long across all of their product lines.

It takes a year for Microsoft to release a minor revision to Windows Mobile 6. In a year, Apple releases a major revision to iOS. Google releases multiple revisions to Android.

It also took them 2.5 years to release Windows 7 to essentially fix Vista which should have been way better considering XP came out 5 years before Vista. Meanwhile Apple and Google have been continuously innovating and iterating.

When they did try to rush to market with the Xbox 360, they ended up having to take a $1B charge to repair the shoddy hardware.
The problem I see is: it's still a bit complicated (i.e. too complicated for the "usual" folks). I see a lot of the security stuff failing for most people because it's just not easy enough.

In this sense, Lastpass (passwords stored online) or Roboform (passwords stored locally) is imho better in that it makes it easy to use secure, one-time passwords for each website.
James Dyson on the late late show:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3z-5vgCmbU
"While we trust your good intentions, yes, we would like you to refrain from releasing the code at all and to remove the blogpost explaining the algorithm."

It doesn't say directly the description is a problem. IMHO it's the whole blogpost, because it contains code.
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> I couldn't imagine how they could possibly finish their mission statement.

Aren't they almost there already? Documents, email, maps, news, phone/voice, search, videos online, and soon television.

> "Organize the world's information, and make it universally accessible and useful."

... and to sell ads based on that information. Google is still primarily an ad company that just happens to also do technology that helps them sell more ads.
Example: Apple had two primary founders; Steve Wozniak was a “hacker”, Steve Jobs was a “hustler.” Woz solved difficult technical problems and built cool systems, while Jobs was busy pitching the utopia of modern personal computing. Both were essential in creating the Apple we know today.
I must request that you do not ship, deploy or post the code presented in your post ...

Patent Trolls LLC