cduan

This line in the patent:

  This is a divisional of application Ser. No. 09/919,672, filed Jul. 31, 2001.

means that it was effectively filed on that date, so you would need prior art predating 2001. (Though it might be more complicated than that, it depends on a couple of things.)

If you look at the Patent Office record, you will find that the patent was ultimately upheld, with a few wording changes. The blog post refers to the Patent Office's initial opinion (called a "non-final Office Action"), not the final decision.

Here's a post from the same person, discussing the final result:

http://igdmlgd.blogspot.com/2010/03/one-click-patent-reexami...

I used to write papers in a fractal form. A short one would go like:

In my opinion, A is true. A is true for at least three reasons: B, C, and D.

B is true for at least three reasons. First, E. Second, F. Third, G. Therefore, B is true.

C is true for at least three reasons...

D is true for at least three reasons...

In conclusion, A is true.

If I wanted a longer paper, there would be subparagraphs under B, C, and D, in the same form. For my thesis, each of those subparagraphs got sub-subparagraphs. You can guess what I would do if I ever wrote a book.

The way I read it, they're not deleting any tests, but rather just providing additional case law guidance on three of them. The reason the other four aren't included is simply that there is no case law to be discussed for them, presumably.

The notice includes this paragraph:

Although the other rationales discussed in the 2007 KSR Guidelines are not the focus of separate discussions in this 2010 KSR Guidelines Update, it will be noted that obviousness concepts such as applying known techniques, design choice, and market forces [the items not discussed] are addressed when they arise in the selected cases. The cases included in this 2010 KSR Guidelines Update reinforce the idea, presented in the 2007 KSR Guidelines, that there may be more than one line of reasoning that can properly be applied to a particular factual scenario. The selected decisions also illustrate the overlapping nature of the lines of reasoning that may be employed to establish a prima facie case of obviousness. Although the 2007 KSR Guidelines presented the rationales as discrete, self-contained lines of reasoning, and they may indeed be employed that way, it is useful to recognize that real-world situations may require analyses that may not be so readily pigeon-holed into distinct categories.

Additionally, keep in mind that the USPTO can't change the test of obviousness. That is the role of Congress (and, some might argue, the federal courts). The USPTO is just giving advice to its patent examiners of its best interpretations of the existing decisions.

I suppose the saving grace is that it would be pretty difficult--not impossible, but pretty difficult--to truly get away with this without detection. With all the logging that goes on, chances are that you could be identified by a MAC address, a web login of your own, a credit card swipe nearby, a surveillance camera, a cell phone in your pocket, or who knows what. There is a lot of information to be gotten with the right subpoenas.

This is based on this comic, I think:

http://www.labnol.org/software/tutorials/jpeg-vs-png-image-q...

(It has a link to the original website, but the original website isn't working for me.)

I see a lot of economists making arguments of this form:

1. There is this social norm I observe. ("Which makes it ironic that we consider pedophilia a bad thing.")

2. The social norm is justified by some sort of moral/psychological factor. ("So why are we so offended? Perhaps the key is our extending kid dependency further via more years of school....")

3. However, science tells us that the social norm is bad for some reason. ("Pedophilia is a sign that a species or a culture has longer term sexual relationships.")

4. Thus, we are silly and irrational people for believing the social norm in the face of science. ("Count this as another way we have not fully adapted to industry era novelties.")

Now where does this argument fall apart?

A. The step of 1 to 2 is unjustified. There are plenty of other reasons behind a particular social norm besides the one proposed, often more attractive than that one proposed. For example, most people probably consider sexual relationships between an older man and a teenage woman unacceptable because of unequal dominance factors, because it curtails the teenager's formative development years, etc.

B. The step of 3 is unjustified. The mere fact that science leads to one conclusion does not mean that it leads to other conclusions. There are, perhaps, scientific reasons why pedophilia is good, if the author's views are taken as true. But the author ignores the fact that there may well be scientific evidence in the other direction.

C. The step of 3 to 4 is unjustified. The mere fact that science leads to one conclusion does not mean that it trumps all. Indeed, the triumph of humanity is often that it can overcome factors that might otherwise be considered "innate" or "natural." For example, it is in the nature of some people to go around killing others; we do not say that this is permissible because it is simply in those people's natures.

So if you picked "keep" you have a chance at an extra $125,000. But you also look like a selfish bastard on national TV, you'll probably lose a lot of friends, and whatever relationship you had going with your housemate (I assume there was something, I didn't watch the show) is now gone. I think those outweigh the extra hundred-odd grand.

The moral of the story is that ongoing relationships can break the prisoner's dilemma. This could be anything from an emotional relationship to a business contract to mere public scrutiny. The prisoner's dilemma is really only a dilemma if it is a true one-shot game, or if the monetary amounts are enough to overcome these other factors.

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.

A simpler explanation seems to be that morning people are more in line with the regular 9-5 schedule of businesses and schools, and that 9-5 schedule was set from the days when natural light was an important factor in when work could be conducted. Thus, biology may be less of a factor than social structures.

These days, I'm noticing a shift toward later schedules--college professors are realizing they get better attendance if they hold classes in the afternoons, for example. So perhaps a gradual cultural shift will come to better accommodate evening people.

If it really is the case that this is copyright infringement, the easiest step may be to send a DMCA complaint to GitHub. The purpose of the DMCA complaint mechanism was to make it cheap and easy to deal with online copyright infringement without resorting to the courts. I know we're used to hearing about silly and illegitimate DMCA complaints, but this would seem like a reasonable use of it.

(This isn't legal advice, of course; I don't know enough of the facts to be sure what applies.)

That's not really a reason to avoid answering the question either. Regardless of the mechanism by which your mind arrives at the answer (be it animal instincts, brain chemistry, whatever), you are indeed capable of coming up with an answer, and even if you believe the answer says nothing about the universe in general, it still says something about you and your own mind. And I'm fairly interested in knowing what your mind--and the minds of other people--have to say about these sorts of questions.

To be a little more clear, your answer (yes or no) is of little value to me. What I really want to know is why you answer yes or no--is it because of some general principle you're applying, because of a gut instinct, because someone told you to say that, or something else?

EDIT: Based on the reply below, I'm not being clear. There are lots of reasons I'd like to know your reasoning process, beyond trying to generalize it to people in general. Among other things, I'd like to know whether I should be worried about going to dinner with you (particularly if your answer is "Sure, I'd kill for even just a dollar").

It's never clear to me why people answer thought experiments like this in this manner. The point of the question "would you kill someone for a trillion dollars" is to tease out an answer to an underlying philosophical question, such as, "is the act of killing as we know it a moral absolute wrong, or is it merely an act with great negative utility that can be compensated by sufficient positive utility?"

Yes, there are always creative ways to avoid really answering the question (such as doing a brain upload, as suggested), but these answers do nothing to answer the underlying question, which is what the thought experiment is really trying to get at.

Two questions come to mind:

1. It would be pretty simple to write a computer simulation to test this, no? Would anyone care to do so?

2. I don't know enough about the AIDS situation in Africa to say whether it is empirical evidence for or against this paper. Is anyone else more familiar with this?

All the points are good, but it always sounds a little weird to me when people say things like "LaTeX is great because it handles hyphenation." The hyphenation support is part of TeX, which is the programming language, not LaTeX, which is a library built on the TeX language. It's kind of like saying that Rails is great because it supports regular expressions.

Not that this distinction really matters when you use it, but it at least gives credit where it's due (in this case, to Donald Knuth rather than Leslie Lamport for the hyphenation algorithm, which is indeed a brilliant algorithm).

Knuth agrees with you (see the bottom of the page):

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html

> However, what's "free to stream"? According to the interpretation of the U.S. law, if you stream your video with ads (e.g. Youtube, Vimeo), then that's a non-free usage. It's commercial video, even if you, the producer, makes no dime out of it (and that's a definition and interpretation of the US law that even Creative Commons believes so, if I am to judge from their last year's "what's a commercial video" survey)

This is a pretty common error of legal reasoning. For one thing, the definition of "commercial video" that Creative Commons asserts is just a definition it made up; only a court can actually determine what the term means. (I am unaware of any cases deciding this; if they exist, please let me know of them.)

And at any rate, the definition of "commercial video" in a CC license has no necessary bearing on the definition of "free to stream" in the MPEG-LA license. They are not the same document, and the same term in two different contracts can have entirely different meanings.

Back in 2004, someone pointed out to me a nice way of getting free CAPTCHA solvers by offering certain audiovisual materials to visitors and requiring the visitors to solve CAPTCHAs in order to access those materials. To maximize effectiveness, said audiovisual materials tended to "appeal to the prurient interest," to put it politely.

The current title ("How to manipulate people with font type") relays two pieces of information about the article: that it is about fonts, and that it is about psychology (manipulation of people). The original article title does neither, at least to one who has not yet read the article--it could be about those inspirational posters, for all I know.

Though perhaps the title changed between our comments? I cannot tell.

It's probably less assuming that a programmer is male, and more the fact that, at the time, "he" was well-accepted as a gender-neutral pronoun:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun

If you are consistent in ending your tag lines with an opening brace, :g/{$/p will work.

There are plenty of good reasons for selling tickets at lower-than-necessary prices on a first-come, first-served basis. If tickets were sold at market price (or auctioned off), they would tend to go to more affluent--and likely then older--customers. If they were sold by lottery, then they would be distributed to random customers.

However, ticket sellers want to sell to younger customers who are more likely to become loyal fans, buy merchandise, promote to friends, etc. The low prices help attract younger customers who likely are not as well off, and the first-come, first-serve policy tends to weed out customers who only have a marginal interest (and thus would not serve as loyal fans).

This isn't to say that this business model is the best; just to point out that there are more considerations than the volume of tickets sold or fairness in the sales.

Link to actual paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1102378

EDIT: This must be an early version of the paper, or the linked article is substantially overstating its conclusions. (Is there a student on HN who can get free access to the published version?) I don't even see a metric for intelligence, other than a binary high/low.

I like to add a simple hash value based on the URL onto my passwords. A simple hash that you can calculate in your head is best, such as the first four consonants of the URL, and then you can integrate that into a password by just concatenating them or splicing them together somehow.

That way, all your passwords are different in a manner that is not immediately obvious, but there is no significant additional burden on your memory.

Two bases for the rejections: one for lack of statutory subject matter (no machine or transformation under Bilski) and one for obviousness (combining an article about patent trolling with the PTO's prosecution manual makes the claimed method obvious).

With regard to subject matter, the applicant makes two arguments: (1) patents are like personal property, so they satisfy the "transformation of matter" prong of Bilski; and (2) one of the steps involves computer research (basically, Google searching), which involves a machine.

With regard to obviousness, the patent applicant argues that the prosecution manual does not contain all the steps of the claimed method.

In my mind, the big issue is that the applicant most likely wrote the claims up based on what other patent trolls have done before. Besides the fact that this means that his claims are anticipated by prior use, it means that he is not the original inventor of the claims, making them unpatentable.

It is pretty well established that using the characters etc. of one work to make a new work constitutes copyright infringement (it would be a derivative work). (Quick Google search turns up: http://www.publaw.com/fiction.html) The new work certainly has copyrightable elements of its own, but that does not change the basic fact that the new work infringes the old.

The bigger issue in my mind is the license. It is generally the case that if someone gives you a license to property, and you spend money in reliance on that license in a reasonable and expected manner, then the license becomes irrevocable. If Vivendi granted Phoenix a license, and Phoenix spent money developing the game, I can't see how the new property owner Activision can just retract the license.

Would be cool if you'd put up a video and recipes, I'm always looking for new ideas!

Look at the 12/14/2009 interview summary (an interview is where the patent applicants talk to the examiner), and in particular the third page.

If you look at the file history of the patent application (which you can get from http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/pair), you will see that the patent was allowed only after adding the "where the link enables a viewing user to participate in the same activity" limitation. It is mentioned in the Interview Summary.

Brief look at the claims suggests to me that this patent probably won't cover Twitter, or much else for that matter. It looks like it has two pretty severe limitations: (1) there has to be a link to an online activity that feed readers can participate in, and (2) the feed must be limited to certain users prior to the feed's existence.

Here is Claim 1 (all the other claims look to be similar):

> 1. A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment, the method comprising: monitoring a plurality of activities in a social network environment; storing the plurality of activities in a database; generating a plurality of news items regarding one or more of the activities, wherein one or more of the news items is for presentation to one or more viewing users wherein one or more of the news items is for presentation to one or more viewing users and relates to an activity that was performed by another user;

It is a news feed about user activities. So far, nothing looks so interesting.

> attaching a link associated with at least one of the activities of another user to at least one of the plurality of news items

Ok, the news items in the feed have links. But...

> where the link enables a viewing user to participate in the same activity as the another user;

So this is interesting. This means that it has to be an online activity (otherwise how can a link "enable" you to participate in the activity?).

> limiting access to the plurality of news items to a set of viewing users;

So the news feed cannot be public. Although Facebook might try to argue that this covers situations where the feed is sometimes private and sometimes public, it seems likely that this element would be read to require limiting all the time. If Facebook intended the opposite, then it should have said something like "determining whether to limit access." (Alternately, it might mean that the damages for the patent would be cut off by the fraction of feeds that were private.)

> and displaying a news feed comprising two or more of the plurality of news items to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewing users.

And you display the news feed to some of the users. That word "predetermined" is interesting--it suggests that the viewing users have to be chosen before the feed is made.