cduan

11 ms·

61.
by cduan 17y ago
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 metho
62.
by cduan 17y ago
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 wor
63.
by cduan 17y ago
Would be cool if you'd put up a video and recipes, I'm always looking for new ideas!
64.
by cduan 17y ago
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.
65.
by cduan 17y ago
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 part
66.
by cduan 17y ago
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
67.
by cduan 17y ago
You're right that you can't copyright facts, and at any rate you can't copyright short phrases like names. But this is a trademark or right of publicity question, not a copyright question. Copyright deals with rights in written works. Trade
68.
by cduan 17y ago
Fair enough, I should have been more precise with my language. Section 1983 says that a violation of a constitutional right gives rise to a civil remedy for damages. A violation of the Fourth Amendment right is such a violation of a constit
69.
by cduan 17y ago
There doesn't appear to be a claim in the complaint regarding any child pornography laws yet. But who knows--that may change if new photos turn up during discovery. Here's some thoughts on the Fourth Amendment illegal search claim, at least
70.
by cduan 17y ago
Well, is this a complaint about relational SQL databases? The only issues the author has that actually are tied to the SQL language are #2 (queries are largely unknown up front) and possibly #1 (small records with normalized relationships).
71.
by cduan 17y ago
Not to be too nitpicky, but TeX is not really an exemplar of any hierarchical document format. I think the author is thinking of LaTeX, which has the \section, \subsection, and similar headings. LaTeX is just a macro package built on top of
72.
by cduan 17y ago
Little bit of legal background for you, hopefully it adds something to your thoughts: The standard for "obscenity" is defined in the leading Supreme Court case Miller v. California, which held that obscene material was not protected free sp
73.
by cduan 17y ago
Ignorance of the law is never an excuse, but ignorance of the facts is frequently an excuse. "Innocent" copyright infringement can occur when you think it is legal to copy something (e.g. the copyright has expired, it is fair use, etc.)
74.
by cduan 17y ago
Not to be nitpicky with the article, but it's a little misleading when it says (right above this quoted section): "What is clear is that the “non-obviousness” part of the test for patentability has not been applied anywhere near rigorously
75.
by cduan 17y ago
Have you considered contacting the Electronic Frontier Foundation? They might take interest in this case (I know they did some work in these sorts of domain name disputes before), and they are near enough to Google HQ that they might have s
76.
by cduan 17y ago
Why yes indeed. Although it's more an issue of the ratio of parameters to data points. Consider, for example: if you had 20 data points and used 20 parameters to fit them, you would generate a model that fits all 20 parameters perfectly! Bu
77.
by cduan 17y ago
I'm all for cutting out the no-reply addresses, but this doesn't seem like the best example. The email is an automated response saying that the sender's address could not be verified, so the message was ignored. If the sender replied to it,
78.
by cduan 17y ago
This is exactly why I wrote my tutorial: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=531517 It's pretty sad that this one not only assumes that knowledge of the internals is unnecessary, it in fact praises such ignorance ("newbies can ignore its
79.
by cduan 17y ago
If I had to guess, Google probably gets so many hits for bad URL's (from hackers and such) that it's not worth the processing power to return custom 404 pages. (Notice how it also has no images?)
80.
by cduan 17y ago
Please note RFC 2396, which defines URI's, and in particular section 1.5, which details the importance of a URI scheme that can be written on a paper napkin by hand.
81.
by cduan 17y ago
1. Interesting that both this and the opposing article were submitted by the same person (which suggests to me that the "I" in the article titles does not refer to the submitter). 2. Sometimes I use tabs. Sometimes I don't. I can never real
82.
by cduan 17y ago
> Kurt would not respond to the substance of what I asked. The jist of his response: “A court order should not shut down any website unless the entirety was not protected speech. While a ‘true threat’ is not protected speech, there ar
83.
by cduan 17y ago
Note that this site also links you to another site that makes plastic cards. I like that site less because of its privacy policy.
84.
Combine all your store loyalty cards(justoneclubcard.com)
1 points by cduan 17y ago|1 comments
85.
by cduan 17y ago
When this guy goes out at night, he meets a perfectly random sample of people from London, totally uncorrelated to any of his variables? Where is this stochastic heaven? The statisticians want to know! (Put another way, maybe he should freq
86.
by cduan 17y ago
It would probably be not too difficult to find the macros that generate the index and add in the appropriate PdfTeX instructions to make hyperlinks. Although, as a veteran Knuth code reader, I would say that his code is intended to be read
87.
by cduan 17y ago
Technically, this proof is slightly flawed. Why? Take the set of all files of 10 bits. There are 1024 possibilities. You can compress these files to 9 bits. But you could also compress them to 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, or even 0 bits. In tota
88.
by cduan 17y ago
Apparently a much simpler way is to just take the pedals off the bike: http://www.sandcanyoncyclery.com/index.php?option=com_conten...
89.
by cduan 17y ago
Interestingly, this reminds me of two programming languages you probably never thought about: TeX and Metafont. TeX is an entirely macro-driven language. It processes an input file by reading a token (usually a single letter or a backslashe
90.
by cduan 17y ago
It is great for drawing vector graphics. It also has capabilities for working with large data sets, as long as you don't do it the naive way (by reading a huge array into memory).

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