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BT's Hyperlinking Patent Refuted 100

Posted by CmdrTaco from the this-story-violates-this-patent-twice! dept.
parvati writes "According to a newscientist.com story a 1968 Stanford University film demonstrating the use of the first mouse may be used to refute BT's claim of a 1976 patent on hyperlinks. In the film the mouse is used to click on hyperlinks." I've got a patent pending on swallowing, oxidation, and chewing gum.
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BT's Hyperlinking Patent Refuted More

BT's Hyperlinking Patent Refuted

Comments Filter:
  • The hyperlink streaming video [stanford.edu] (realplayer req.)
  • I was surfing around, and came across this, www.xanadu.net They claim to have been using "hypertext" since the early 60's. Has anyone else heard of this?

  • Same thing will happen to Amazon, RMBS (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If they keep pushing their "obvious" patents, someone will dig up stuff like: 1) Training video for tele-sales people showing how to bring up customers account w/credit card information to place an order for them. 2) Some old on-line purchasing site where all your account information poped up, and you just had to confirm it. YES, Amazon probably did bring "one-click" to the net, but going from "two-clicks" to "one-click" is just changing an "if" statement in code. But, they will probably get burned from it-- "My 8 year old son got on the computer, and purchased $3000 worth of stuff, I'm sueing you for in-adequately protecting or informing me of the risk to my account from juveniles...." RMBS: Electrical Engineers in the 60's knew and tried to implement the same techniques-- they didn't work due to major process and temperature variation. Kind of the same problems RDRAM faces today-- low yield of acceptable parts. So all RMBS did is rescurrect these methods. The only thing they deserve credit for is realizing the you can achieve greater yield these days, so the technique might have hope again.
  • but how else are you going to get noticed with lovely people like you around?


    1. INTERACTIVE [mikegallay.com]
      1. ENTERTAINMENT

  • Steven Segal owns a patent that allows oil companies to use his hair as an advertising vehicle

    Or is that a license?

  • his is the exact sam story that was up a few days ago...got to be some kinda bug right?...maybe soemthing to do with being hacked, and having to back up to an old version of the system?

    No, they just restarted the Matrix.

    --

  • I was going to get a patent for Common Sense, but then I realized that noone would ever use it.
  • I believe you're not 100% politically correct about X here. According to the man page, thou shalst refer to it as:
    • X
    • X Window System
    • X Version 11
    • X Window System, Version 11
    • X11
  • ahhh, now the coward speaks from both sides of his mouse....no dice 'til you be nice.


    1. INTERACTIVE [mikegallay.com]
      1. ENTERTAINMENT

  • From the Wired magazine archives, here's a great article on the history of Ted Nelson and the Xanadu project [wired.com]: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.htm l

  • Yep (Score:2)

    by Kaufmann ( 16976 )
    Prof. Ted Nelson is the guy who invented the modern concept of hyperlinks. He devoted his life and work to the idea of a pefectly designed global repository of hyperlinked objects. Unfortunately, the designed turned out to be a white elephant; OTOH, when the WWW was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, it was just poor and broken enough that the worse-is-better gang who runs things would adopt it as a suitable lowest common denominator. Nelson never got the recognition he deserved, and lost his funding. Finally, in 1998 (IIRC) he resorted to opening the existing sources of Xanadu software; it's now available as Udanax (here [udanax.com]. Sadly, that seems to have gone nowhere either.
  • Here's a virtual (+1, Funny) for you. Too bad I'm not moderating right now.
  • I submitted the following as a story, but they probably won't post it before 7pm tonight so I'm including it here. The topic is relevant anyhow.

    Free public debate [harvard.edu] between Jack Valenti and Lawrence Lessig: tonight at 7pm.

    If you're in the Boston area, you can attend in person, or catch the webcast with realplayer.

    ~

  • Why was this post marked as redundant and the one below, saying a very similar thing was marked as funny?

    Well, since you ask, I'll explain it (Ask Jeeves in on vacation and I'm filling in for him). It all has to do with an add-in to Perl. It's called TemporalMechanics. It allows one to go backwards and forward in time. The exact syntax is:

    temporalmechanics(direction, timeline)

    As you can see, it allows for multiple timelines. Version 1.3 of the function will allow for parallel universes, but it's still in the debugging phase. Version 2.0 will send a memetic polyalloy self-replicating perl script to destroy any of Jon Katz mother's contributions to slashdot. The word is James Cameron is talking about version 3.0

    --
  • Why be a dick about it? "It embarasses me"? No, your Mom dressing you like that embarasses you. Duplicate stories on slashdot do not embarass you.

    You want better stories? Submit better stories. Probably 3/4 of ALL STORY SUBMISSIONS are duplicates of something we just posted - we post it, some other site posts it, people come back here and resubmit it as news. Boy, everybody and their brother can find old stories - even years ago - if they're posted, but NOBODY checks when they're submitting a story.

    The site was just hacked into. What, you think Taco is spending his frigging weekend cruising around town in a Ferrari? No, he's doing an intensive course called "fun with MySQL" and "rebuilding boxen for fun and profit" and "figuring out how to explain to management what happened and why it won't happen again".

    Sheesh. What an ingrate. Go crawl back under whatever rock you came from.
    --
    Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
  • After this shit about patents on algorythms in EU I started to think about what would be the best patent to buy,,, sooo if it gets to be real I will buy a patent about reading/writing to RAM or HardDrives ;o) It would be nice ay?
  • I don't know. All I know is Robert A Heinlein himself told the story. He got a free waterbed out of it too from the company chanllenging the patent. (He said it's been in his garage since then.:) )
  • Also fascinating is the notion that at 1968, this predates the text based OS's of Multics, Unix, DOS, and easily the "first" graphical OS, Macintosh.
  • Ack, replied to wrong thread. :)
  • I mean, now it looks pretty obvious that the only motives for BT's patent was very much oportunistic and trying to make (undeserved) money by cheating the system. Now couldn't this be titled as 'fraud' ? At least it sounds as it should be against some kind of law... Any lawyer that could comment on this? I mean, it would be a good balance if you could be sued for stupid patents, wouldn't it!?!?
  • It's becoming hashpot.com

  • You forgot:

    See the machines that the demo is running on? Imagine a Beowulf cluster of *those*!

    Alex

  • Not that it will affect the geek community or Taco by any means.... The rest of you better pay up.

  • Okay, so it wasn't the sites. This is really weird. Something aparently saved my IE web cache on July 7th, then yesterday, copied it over my normal cache and set while setting cache settings to never check for new content. Therefore it looked like several web pages (all those contained in my July 7th cache) had rolled back their news stories and such.

    Has anyone heard of such a virus or trojan? I'm on Win2k, but there was nothing so "secure" that a Linux trojan couldn't do the same to Netscape.

    Anm

  • Protesting against patents (Score:3)

    by thenerd ( 3254 ) on Sunday October 01, 2000 @10:42AM (#741495) Homepage
    Hey,

    Admittedly I've just started this site, but the first petition I've set up is against software patents.

    Go to http://freepetitions.com/cgi- bin /fpt/view.cgi?id=1 [freepetitions.com] and put your name against software patents. I believe that patents really work against the industry as a whole and we do need to protest.

    thenerd.
  • This particular techie legend has been around for as long as I've been driving (~30 years), which would mean that the patent protection period has expired and the invention has passed into the public domain. Except, of course, that no one has ever actually shown the 100 MPG carburators to actually work....
  • Why be a dick about it? "It embarasses me"? No, your Mom dressing you like that embarasses you. Duplicate stories on slashdot do not embarass you.

    Hooboy: this makes a lot of sense. Insult the people who do the talking and supply the good technical content on your site. Proofread your damm stories, check your facts, and remember this simple rule of capitalism: the customer is always right. You piss me off. You don't want to be known as a slashdot editor who pisses off customers, I can tell you that right now.
    --

  • "Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember previous articles are doomed to repeat them."

    George Slashdotayana

  • REALLY not new (Score:3)

    by pb ( 1020 ) on Sunday October 01, 2000 @10:45AM (#741499)
    It's good that someone has proof that hyperlinking is really not a new idea. Of course people do it on the web today, and they did it in gopher, but as far as I'm concerned, references and footnotes in a paper do the same conceptual thing, as does the index in the back of a book, or the table of contents in the front. It does the same thing, too; it points you to a number (a link) where you can find the information on the subject (text of link). Then you follow the link (turn to the page) and read the linked information.

    Asimov would often work in uses of hyperlinking in his stories; he was a big fan of it, and thought that if you had a machine that could track your eye movements, then if you stared at a word longer than necessary, it could make references pop up in the margins, and explain the subject. And that was a long time ago, and Asimov is dead now.

    The only thing new about hyperlinking was the idea that you could somehow automate this process, but that's not new; people always want to automate things. I'm sure people have said for as long as books have been around in their current form: gee, it'd be nice if I already had this information I wanted on the page in front of me...

    Yet another obvious implementation of a real world phenomenon that's unique now because it's on the net.

    In the future, this will be abbreviated YAOIOARWPTUNBIOTN.
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].

  • Take a Vacation ... (Score:3)

    by anim8 ( 109631 ) on Sunday October 01, 2000 @10:48AM (#741500)
    Rob, you're losing it. How many redundant stories have been posted this week?

    Apparently, you are the only one posting to the site this weekend. Take some time off. A week would do you good.

    And when you get back consider instituting some kind of Quality Assurance program for the site. It's really getting sad to see all the redundant posts ... and the legitimate ones are OLD news once they get posted.

  • Re:Um, I Was Just Wondering... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Note to the redundant.

    This has already been pointed out.

    In fact, there's a (+3, Funny) post making fun of this phenomena.

    The only thing worse than redundant articles on slashdot are redundant posts about redundant articles on slashdot.

    Please don't contribute to this frightening growing trend; come troll with the rest of us where it's safe and warm, and we make fun of slashdot for other, more wholesome reasons.
  • good one
  • its called: Post with useful and informative content. You should be noticed quite easily.
  • deal.


    1. INTERACTIVE [mikegallay.com]
      1. ENTERTAINMENT

  • I'm patenting all annoying stories on Slashdot that have no consequential value. I figure I'll make a fortune.
  • Refute could mean more than refused. It could also mean to prove in error. That means that the film could prove the patent to be in error, while saying nothing about whether or not the patent office accepted this proof.
  • I currently have a patent pending on a method for allowing other people to see the "source code" for a "software project" so that they may share the code and add to each other's work. It details that if they add to the project and release it, they must also release the alleged "source code."

  • How ironic that your petiton site is sponsored by amazon.com, one of the biggest stupid patent holders we discuss on Slashdot!

    What are you thinking?


    ---There is no spoon....---
  • Go to http://freepetitions.com/cgi-bin/fpt/view.cgi?id=1 [freepetitions.com] and put your name against software patents. I believe that patents really work against the industry as a whole and we do need to protest.

    I find it very, very funny that when I clicked your link, I was presented with a page and a banner ad. The banner ad was Amazon's.

    Get real.

  • I'd make a mint, problem would be proving i was the first one there.

    This whole patenting things that have been in use for years is incredible, like the first caveman (should there have been such a thing) that decicded the wheel was a good idea could have some distant relative that cashes in on it now, preposterous. I say what's done is done, if it was your idea and you couldn't at least act on it in a reasonable ammout of time tough crunchies.

    does anyone hold a patent on patenting?
  • The more troubling thing is that this has happened several times in the last week or so. In fact, once the same story was posted twce in the same /24 hour period/

    It's becoming reslashdot.org

    ----
  • In addition to that... It was mentioned in http://slashdot.org/articles/00/09/14/1158228.shtm l This article [slashdot.org]

    a few weeks ago!!! Ummm.... I believe we have a problem here.... Come on /. .... let's have some more news....

    On the subject of the Airboard post yesterday... I'm sure everyone knows that /. was hacked the other day....and it was theorized that /. may have temporarily may have been put up on a different server, and perhaps that double post was put up as a test or because a backup was restored wrong? (just a theory though... I do not know the intricate details of slashcode as I have not had a chance to play with it yet... anyway..)

    Regardless, We want some new news this week! br

  • Look at the amount of recycling it's doing; that's gotta be good for the nature, right?

  • Didn't I just see this story a few days ago with almost identical wording?
  • BT's patents were granted in a dozen countries, but have lapsed after their 20-year lifespans. But for reasons that are not yet clear, the US patent application (US 4873662) was effectively only filed in 1986-and granted in 1989-and will remain in force until 2006.

    This is no great mystery about this, and the remarks about a 1986 filing date are incorrect. The answer can be found on the face of the patent, or by checking ANY of the free on-line databases on the net.

    U.S. Patent No. 4,873,662 issued on October 10, 1989. Under the applicable law at that time, the patent would be entitled to a 17-year term, which would end on October 10, 2006. (A few years back, the patent terms were changed to twenty years from date of filing, rather than seventeen years from the date of issue. However, the then-existing patents were grandfathered to the longer of the two possible terms).

    The effective filing date of the patent, however, is not 1986, but to the contrary 7/12/1977. Accordingly, the critical date for invalidating prior art would be 7/12/1976. (Although a 1968 film, if it were in fact published about that time, or demonstrated legitimate, non-experimental, public use, sale or offer for sale of the invention, could beat that handily).

    While the particular application that matured into the '662 patent was filed on August 15, 1980, that application was a continuation of an earlier application, Ser. No. 814,922, which was filed on the earlier date. The effective filing date of a continuation, if properly filed, is the date of the parent application -- even if the previous application was later abandoned.
  • Yup. The story is here [slashdot.org]. I can't belive that they're repeating strories only three days after original post. Ridiculous!

  • I wonder if someone's patented putting text online. If not, I hereby patent this. All you people writing replies now owe me royalties.

    Sorry, it's not enough to simply say "I hereby patent this". You have to actually file for a patent with the patent office, a process which costs money.

    If I had the money, I would file for a patent on patents. With the current state of the patent office they would probably grant the patent, as long as the language used in the application was sufficiently technical and obscure.

    Force all these patent fiends to buy licences from me. That would be cool. By denying licences to those patents I didn't like I could become a really powerful dictator. All the suits would ph33r me. I could make them beg and kneel and worship and send me gifts of computer hardware and women and stuff. Heh. That would be cool.

    Did I mention how cool that would be? Someone send me money to file, 'cuz it would be cool.

  • about a month ago. Nice to see slashdot on the ball as usual. -
  • With all the duplicate stories we've had recently, I can't help but think of a solution.
    How about, before a story can be posted, it's title is pushed through slashdot's search page. Maybe this will make people notice that some stories share more than a passing similarity.
  • The headline say's the patent was refuted. The story says the movie may be used as evidence in the court case.

    Bit of a sensationalist headline don't you think??

  • Please, read your own weblog (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You already covered this story on Sep. 28 [slashdot.org] (in greater detail, I might add).

  • A little concerned (Score:5)

    by schussat ( 33312 ) on Sunday October 01, 2000 @10:22AM (#741522) Journal
    I won't complain as vitriolically as some about the recent spate of duplicate stories on slashdot, but the fact that this same story was posted two or three days ago (see it here [slashdot.org]) is troubling.

    Has slashdot grown so large that there are perhaps too many people with the ability to post stories? Or does it need someone "at the top" to make sure duplicates like this don't get through? Is slashdot so big that it just can't be managed by anybody? I hope not, but I'm really curious; what's breaking down so much that this keeps happening?

    Maybe we can have some constructive discussion instead of the regular round of "slashdot's gone downhill" talk. To CmdrTaco and the rest: We know you're all busy. But can you work this out?

    -schussat

  • I want to start a company whose sole business plan is to find the inane, everyday occurances that haven't been patented yet, (for example, masturbation) and just attack all people/companies that use them.

    I'd suggest adding the proviso that you take these inane, everyday things and put "cyber-" "hyperlinked" or "web-based" in front of every third or fourth word. History suggest that then the idea is guaranteed to be genuinely novel and patentworthy even if it were banal to begin with. (E.g., "One-click shopping (tm)" which is little more than a "cyber-vending machine").

    Patent your business model and also patent the process of copying or adapting the patented business model of another business. This should give you plenty of legal protection and meta-protection from your competitors. Your VCs will marvel at your acumen.

  • I have a patent on "Claiming to Have One or More Ridiculous Patents In Order to Make an Ironic or Satirical Point."

    So watch it.

  • Why have so many sites rolled back to July 7th? I assume this is some sort of semi anniversary april fools joke. Is there some relevence to July 7th?

    Anm
  • Didn't CmdrTaco once claim that he reads *all* of Slashdot? Hmm... guess not.

    ------
  • Taco, I have a patent for snide observations and sarcasm on the Internet. Why do you think that a tag has never made its way into HTML? I won't let W3C use it! NAH! You owe me big.
    --

  • What strikes me as doubly ironic is the fact that Slashdot, a forum well known for its criticism of lousy patent clerks who can't find prior art if their life depended on it, just posted a story which ran a few days ago on the very same site! Not even the USPTO grants patents twice!

    :^)

    ~

  • All it would take is one, or two people, situated on opposite sides of the planet (for time zones) to check away. Even I, after too many pints and typos, knew that this was a duplicate story.

    I'm sure there are many reliable volenteers arround to make sure duplicate stories arent posted.

    It's such a contrast when some posts have "as mentioned 5 months ago (click here)" and others are still on the main page yet dont even acknowledge the existence of the first post!
  • Maybe we can have some constructive discussion instead of the regular round of "slashdot's gone downhill" talk. To CmdrTaco and the rest: We know you're all busy. But can you work this out?

    You put it so nicely. Let me put it more bluntly: Rob Maldo, your success has gone to your head. Yes, we still like come to your party, but don't count on that forever. Your lack of attention to detail is embarrassing. It embarrasses me. Get your act together.
    --
  • Dear Mr. Malda:

    I have a patent on the copyright of the acronym OSDN - The open source dipshittery network, which you seem to be affiliated with through linux VA. You are hereby required to pay me $800 Billion dollars, a rocket car and a golden house if you or linux VA wish to have any more affiliation with them.

    Sincerely,
    Hugh Jass.



    Kris
    botboy60@hotmail.com
    Nerdnetwork.net [nerdnetwork.net]
  • Time for another CueCat story! I'll see what I can drum up in the next few days. :)

    -M

    ___________________________
  • Why? Did someone change the IP address, or install a device driver?
  • Why was this post marked as redundant and the one below, saying a very similar thing was marked as funny? Methinks that duplicate stories are not the only thing not quite right in the Slashdot world.
  • I have a patent on Taco saying "I have a patent..."
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • One JonKatz article.

  • When running the rebelion against the empire if Darth Vader offers to fund (No strings attached) you grab it before he realises what he's doing.

  • Hey! (Score:4)

    by the eric conspiracy ( 20178 ) on Sunday October 01, 2000 @10:22AM (#741539)
    I have a patent on posting redundant patent stories on Slashdot!! You will be hearing from my attorney shortly.

  • Look - this word, when designated with a pointing device, takes you to another set of words! And this tab on a computer screen acts exactly like one in a dictionary! And this convenient tool makes shopping take only one action with a mouse!!! Let's patent these obvious ideas!!!

    Enough with the patenting of obvious things either ripped off from physical objects (dictionaries,) or conveniences that are now commonplace. BT has the same force holding their patent to themselves that Amazon has to "One-Click" shopping, and Adobe to tabbed dialog boxes: none. Screw these big companies trying to control what is now a pop-culture phenomenon and let's just write good software, keep phone services working, and sell more books.

    Tell me what makes you so afraid
    Of all those people you say you hate

  • I'm sure there is way to much prior art in the public domain on this one to make your patent stand up.
  • From the law offices of GTX:

    Dear Mr. Malda,
    Please be advised that your use of 'oxidation' is in direct infringement of our client, British Telecom, and their IP. This 'oxidation' infringes on patent number 623326 for our product 'Rust'. Please ceast and desist all actions involving your product 'oxidation.'

    Furthermore, we also would like to request that any references to 'masturbation' be taken off of this and any other web sites, as that is the intellectual property of British Telecom.

    You have 7 days to comply with this letter.

    Thank you.


    I want to start a company whose sole business plan is to find the inane, everyday occurances that haven't been patented yet, (for example, masturbation) and just attack all people/companies that use them. My patent is already pending for "Selective use of action-describing words in making sales. (or, using verbs)"
  • Why be a dick about it? "It embarasses me"? No, your Mom dressing you like that embarasses you.

    Wow. "How not to respond to someone with a complaint."

    The fact that you know people submit duplicate stories sure isn't an excuse for posting them again. Isn't that why sites have editors?

    A whole lot of people have a lot of time and effort put into slashdot -- and it's not just all of you who run the site. There's a lot of discussion going on here by a lot of people who care about what slashdot is all about. I wouldn't have said that it's embarassing to see duplicate stories, but all the same, what are we all supposed to think when we see it happening more and more? One thing, that I don't particularly like to think, is that people don't care enough to know their own site anymore. Now, I'm pretty sure that's not the case. I have lots of faith that Taco and the rest of you really thrive on what goes on at slashdot. So we all want this place to be quality.

    You were in a position to say, "Hey guys, the load gets heavy and what with slashdot getting hacked and all, it's hard to keep our eyes uncrossed, let alone monitor the stories. We're working on it." Instead, you insulted this whole thread, when my intent was just to express that we think this place is cool we and hate to see it less than stellar. So much for reasonable discussion.

    -schussat

  • In this video, [stanford.edu] Doug Engelbart demonstrates cross references, which he even calls hyper links. Goodbye patent!
  • I've got a patent pending on swallowing, oxidation, and chewing gum.

    I've got patents pending on Sex, breathing, eating, going to the bathroom, and growing toe nails. I'm currently litigating sin with Satan, and grace with God. We don't expect to win with sin, but the grace thing we think we gotta chance.

    Laugh, it's funny.

  • It's a good thing I take several grams of Vitamin C daily along with other anti-oxidants, otherwise I might be facing a lawsuit from taco's lawyers for violating his patent.

  • Re:CEASE AND DESIST ORDER: (Score:5)

    by empesey ( 207806 ) on Sunday October 01, 2000 @10:29AM (#741547) Homepage
    This 'oxidation' infringes on patent number 623326 for our product 'Rust'

    Well, your patent number (623326) infringes on my patent (123321) on having patent numbers that are palindromes.

    --
  • Well, just yesterday (The day before? They all get blurred...) they repeated the Sony Airboard post so quickly, they both showed up on the front page together!

    I think they're getting old... I mean, c'mon, how can you expect anyone over twenty-five to stay sharp? Why do you think there are so many script-kiddies, but no script-adulties, huh?
  • patent, shmatent. that's not the cruz of this story. the real story here is this:
    i hate to be redundant in a comment regarding redundancy but here goes. rob, you've gotta institute some other function to monitor duplicated article postings. (perhaps you should patent protect old articles?) also, there should be a better selection process so the gaps between stories make more sense (ie. sometimes there is a flurry of activity from editorial, and at other times it seems like no one's upstairs at all!).


    1. INTERACTIVE [mikegallay.com]
      1. ENTERTAINMENT

  • Well, they could've been worse. They could've reported the patent was overturned and invalidated. This won't be the end of the stupid patent. The only way this'll ever change is if government decides to go against big business (however unlikely) and disqualify software patents in general.
  • ...why not also add in a system wherein the users can vote for a certain percentage of user-posted articles to enter into the overall cycle?
    1. if this is truly open-source journalism style, let's see you incorporate some of its mandates.



    1. INTERACTIVE [mikegallay.com]
      1. ENTERTAINMENT

  • ad revenue dropping? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    slashdot posted this SAME story not more than a couple days ago. i'd link to it, but for that darned patent.
  • Hmm. cyber-masturbation, hyper-masturbation, web-based masturbation.

    Sounds promising so far.
  • And while you're at it, Rob, institute a function to moderate -1 all bold posts.
  • Apropos of nothing (I hope), take a look here [latimes.com].
  • Why would a patent like this help anyone? How would anyone make money off of a hyperlink patent? are they going to start charging people to make hyperlinks? Are they going to get paid-per-click?

    If that is the case...Amazon's patented one click technology will actually be worth something...


  • How many times will the BT patent and the 60's video be news on Slashdot? I think this is the third time in September.
  • It's amazing to watch these films and realise how little progress we've made in UI technology since 1968. In fact, we've actually lost the capability to easily organise hierarchical information as Engelbart demonstrates. And we've only recently regained the knowledge/use of such things as hypertext. I wish current software (like word processors) could focus more on easily organising things hierarchically; it appears that this 1968 UI is better at doing that than any of today's software. Really sort of makes you think...
  • Are we supposed to be frightened by a lawyer named "Shortly"?

    (Good thing there's no patent on posting stupid jokes, otherwise I'd be broke by now)
  • Fair play. Sometimes you cannot see the wood for the trees, myself included.

    Duly chastened.

    thenerd.
  • As we all know there are a ton of patents for really stupid stuff. It should be noted that all that's required to refute a patent is a concept available to the public.

    A well known example is the science fiction author Robert A Heinlein's description of a water bed in one of his books. Soon afterwards a company put a patent out on water beds. The patent was challenged and later invalidated because the description and design of a water bed (contained within RAH's book) was available to the public domain therefore not the intelectual property of anyone.

    Proof of concept available to the public is all that is required AFAIK.

  • You want better stories? Submit better stories.

    We (I) do - but they get rejected since they sometimes are about _competitors_ to Palm/Linux doing cool things. Which is, of course, forbidden here at Slashdot.

  • It's not clear that a video demonstration at some conference necessarily constitutes prior art. In order for something to be prior art, it needs to meet fairly stringent publication requirements.

    The rationale is that the patent system exists to support the dissemination of ideas. If people are protected from patent claims merely because they did something first, the incentive for people to publish their ideas would be greatly diminished. With patents, so the legal thinking goes, it may take 21 years for it to become public domain but at least it will.

    The lesson is: if you do something, even for an open source project, document it in writing and disclose it in proper form. You can disclose directly to the patent office without filing a patent.

  • I wouldn't say it's a 'great' history, as it casts Nelson as an out and out eccentric with a drive to an Augean task which has been fraught with more disaster than Apple, which Nelson has refuted himself. Check out this link [feedmag.com] for a better view, or dig through the Xanadu project site [xanadu.com] or Ted Nelson's homepage [keio.ac.jp].
  • MSN had an article on CmdrTaco swallowing months ago already
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • When imagining the depths of stupidity, your own actions rarely seem to be prevalent. I was fairly horrified to see what I had done, getting up in the morning to see how the petition had got on. I suddenly realised that I just had not thought. It wasn't really that I cared for Amazon's money, nobody is going to get very fat on referrals from anyone, least of all me as I'm better off doing my day job. The banner was there simply because I didn't want to cause a debate by putting a banner there later on, and an Amazon ad was the first thing that came into my mind. I shall always remember from now on that the first thing that comes into my mind is usually wrong. When you can't see the wood for the trees, sit in a clearing and think about it.

    I can see how that must have seemed like a lot of things - hypocrisy, stupidity, short-sightedness, idiocy, etc.

    I've pulled the Amazon banner (at least graphic due to system nightmares) - thanks for telling me what I'd done - I would have probably never realised.

    Please sign it.
  • Its the obvious solution.

    When I worked for a daily college paper as an editor (ok it was photos...) but I had to read the paper everyday (or a least look at the photos) and I instructed my staff to do so as well. It was part of the job.

    I'd also mark-up a copy (constructive criticism) from time to time, so newer staff could see what worked and what didn't.

    Slashdot being dynamic is harder to do this with, but reading it once and a while would seem a good idea.
  • Has anyone heard about that Airboard thingy?

    Oh wait...

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