Anthology of Interest

I'm finally starting to get excited about the impending trip to Cuba. So much so in fact, that I've started researching it a bit. The Lonely Planet Guide seems informative. Apparently giving stuff to beggars could put them in jail. That sucks for them I guess, but I suppose it makes it nicer for tourists who don't want to deal with throngs of beggars.

Between Cuba and Hawaii, I'll need a hat. A +1 blessed anti-sun hat. (Yay nethack!)

I was googling around for info on Panama hats, or Panama Fedora's specifically, and I came across the website of Signal Path. Signal Path has mp3's available for download. It's pretty nice music.

Did you know I like hats? (But not bucket hats, nor trucker hats... *shudder*) For some reason, this silly little operating system keeps cluttering google results for hats!

I have to get my ass in gear and write a paper for a conference. The one I'm supposed to be going to is the 2005 IEEE/ACES International Conference on Wireless Communications and Applied Computational Electromagnetics. It's in Honolulu, Hawaii, so it's certainly worth putting some effort in! The submission is due by Dec 15th, so I have to get moving.

Since I'm trying to implement a near field to far field transformation in my FDTD code, I've been looking up the math behind it. Although I was supposed to have had a good understanding of Green's function for my antenna course, I never really did, or if I did, I forgot it. Here is a link to the most lucid explanation of Green's function I've ever read.

It makes a lot more sense as part of a method used to find the solution to a differential equation than it does as some kind of wacky black box that relates a source point and an observation point. Understanding where it comes from is everything.

I'm about halfway through Mother Earth, Mother Board, which I mentioned in my last entry. It's interesting. He foretells the fall of the World Trade Center towers while discussing what it must have been like for the citizens of Alexadria when the Lighthouse there came down.

Waxy has a link to another Neil Stephenson essay/story, Hole Hawg. It's about rm -Rf.

Also, my copy of The System of the World arrived yesterday. I gleefully look forward to reading it. The previous two books, Quicksilver and The Confusion were very good.

Here's one for all the Neil Stephenson fans in the audience: Mother Earth, Mother Board, on Wired. It's rather long, but that's Stephenson for you. It was written in '96 or '97, so it's a bit dated, but still interesting. It's about him and a photographer going around the world looking for details about the installation of a large undersea telecommunications fiber optic cable.

After reading Jonathan Schwartz's blog entry defending software patents (he is the COO of Sun), I decided to check and see what exactly was patentable in Canada. In particular, whether software is patentable.

So, from the Canadian Intellectual Property Office website, a description of what is patentable in Canada:

A patent is granted only for the physical embodiment of an idea—e.g., the description of a plausible door lock—or for a process that produces something saleable or tangible. You cannot patent a scientific principle, an abstract theorem, an idea, a method of doing business, a computer program, or a medical treatment.

I am pleased to see computer program specifically listed under things that cannot be patented.

Another nice thing about Canadian patents is that there is a possibility of applying for a compulsory licence to remedy patent abuse:

Compulsory licences may be granted to remedy what is called "abuse of patent rights." Such abuse can be considered only three years after grant. Hindering trade and industry is considered as an abuse. Abuse situations include:

• not meeting demand in Canada;
• hindering trade or industry in Canada by refusing to grant a licence (if such a licence is in the public interest), or by attaching unreasonable conditions to such a licence;
• using a process patent to unfairly prejudice production of a non-patented product, or allowing the patent on such a product to unfairly prejudice its manufacture, use or sale.

This probably means (IANAL) that things like the Eolas plugin patent problem which Mircosoft had would not have been an issue here. But then again, all that I know of the Eolas - Microsoft thing can be summed up thusly: "Eolas has a patent related to browser plugins; Microsoft makes a browser which support plugins; Eolas wants licence fees."

Quote of the day: "... open source doesn't really believe in End Users. To those sentimental fools, sharing software doesn't have an end, and users are just friends who haven't submitted a patch yet."

That is from Evil of September, an article talking about Microsoft's sender id thingy for dealing with spam.

If you want to waste a couple of hours, go play Grow. It is solvable. Little Fluffy Industries has lots of other time wasters for your time wasty enjoyment.

After playing Ultimate last week, my ankles and feet really hurt. They felt a bit better by yesterday, but not really that great. After getting our asses kicked by at Thursday team (the competitive leauge) who felt it would be fun to humiliate some newbs, I could barely walk! So I went to the doctor and he told me I has just pulled some ligaments, and that it only seems really painful because they haven't really been used in like nine years.

So he hold me told ice my ankle. Thus, peas in my sock.

The following rant has been brought to you by a Groklaw story of the same subject matter. Read that and this League for Programming Freedom page for information and arguments that are more well thought out than mine.

Software patents are a BAD idea. Tamara's Mom tried to defend software patents by say that if people invent something they should get credit for it. Ok, great. The problem is that so often patents are traded around by corporations in the same way kids trade baseball cards or pogs or whatever the hell the new hotness to trade is these days. So some company, oh say, Kodak, can buy some company, or it's holdings or whatever. Maybe Wang Laboratories? And then they have some patents sitting around, and business is kind of going downhill, so they look at the patents and say, hmmm, who can we sue?

Oh, I know, how about Sun! So the long and the short of it is that Kodak sues Sun and wins, because Kodak holds a patent describing how software can ask other software for help. That seems like a natural extension of interprocess communication to me. Once you have sockets or shared memory or whatever, of course software is going to start talking to each other. So in the end, Sun spends huge money and time developing Java, and now they have a huge patent royalty burden looming. And Kodak gets a whole bunch of free money! Yay!

Patents were intended to encourage innovation by guaranteeing a temporary monopoly on an invention. An inventor should be able to market a product for enough time that they are able to recover development costs and make enough of a profit so that more research and development can be funded to make more inventions. That drives a market forward; progress.

Now instead there are companies that buy patent rights and sit on them, some times long enough that other companies start developing products or technology that use the patented "invention." I'm willing to bet that these other companies aren't even aware of the patent they may be infringing upon, since different people can arrive at the same idea at approximately the same time (Newton vs. Leibniz for example). The patent holder might now pounce on its unsuspecting victim, demanding patent royalties for a product that they had no hand in inventing, producing, or marketing. Free Money (except for lawyering costs).

This behavior is a problem with patents on things that are real too, not just software. IBM holds hundreds or thousands of patents which they can use to crush competition if they wish. The result is that people developing new products must do extensive patent research to make sure they won't be infringing, or to find the patent holder to arrange a licensing deal. The alternative is to simply not to anything grand that might infringe on some patent. The question is, is it worth doing a whole bunch of work and spending a bunch of money to get some new product to market, which may or not succeed on its own merits, but which may also be subject to attack by patent profiteers?

Saw Shaun of the dead the other day. It was really good. Very funny in places, very sad in others. I quite liked it.

Since I'm far too lazy to write my own review, just read this one. It pretty much echos my thoughts (or lack there-of) on the film.