In the 1950's, lots of households in the UK used coal gas ovens. A coal gas oven makes it very easy to kill yourself - just turn the gas on without lighting the oven, stick your head in and wait. Easy, clean and painless. About 1/3rd of suicides in the UK were made that way. Then coal gas fell out of fashion and was replaced. The suicide rate fell by one third. The people who would have used coal gas ovens didn't switch to another method, they just didn't commit suicide.

On the Golden Gate Bridge, people observed a man who acted very strange and in an agitated way. They called the police. What they found: He had decided to kill himself by jumping off the left side of the Golden Gate Bridge, but found himself on the right side. There is really no difference between both sides, but he had his mind set on the left side. And there were six lanes of traffic he had to cross to his suicide destination, and he was afraid that he would get killed crossing six lanes of traffic.

People attempting suicide are not thinking clearly. That's why they are attempting suicide in the first place. They have a Plan A, and if that fails, there is no Plan B. A gun makes it very easy to commit suicide. Take that easy way away, make it harder to commit suicide, and the suicide rate drops.

And then there's the clear statistic that in the USA, there are more women than men attempting suicide, but more men than women succeding - because men own more guns.

Contrary to popular belief, right to remain silent, right to a lawyer, right against unlawful searches, are not there to protect criminals, but to protect innocent citizens. For example, to protect innocent citizens from having their homes searched with a warrant, the law is that evidence against real criminals has to be thrown it if it is acquired that way - so police has no reason to do unlawful searches against people who might be innocent.

Now as a completely innocent citizen I have the right to have information on my phone that is completely legal but nobody's fucking business, including not the business of a police officer who stops me, and I want to be safe from this to be seen by anybody, including a policeman who has no search warrant.

Should a police officer get a justified search warrant (which is possible even when you are completely innocent), that's tough luck and cannot be avoided. But without such a warrant, my secrets should be safe.

I heard that before, and it seems to be a quote from some book, but I have never ever heard any evidence of that. So tell me three things that an average citizen with no intent of breaking the law might do that would be felonies.

It increases the time that people without this app take to find a parking spot. And by blocking the parking spaces, those using the app actually make it harder again.

And how distracting would it be if your phone connection breaks up in the middle of an important conversation? Obviously you shouldn't be talking on the phone anyway, but I could imagine that someone who loses the connection would act even more distracted and stupid than normally. And if he was driving on the motorway, lots of people on phones coming towards would have that distraction for a short time.

That should be easily done in a millisecond or so on a single core of any modern Intel processor. You could probably get it down to 100 microseconds on the latest ones.

In that case, an intelligent man wouldn't just have called customer service. They would have called customer service and told them that if the software provider doesn't send help, twenty violent prisoners will get released, and the prison admin will give these prisoners the addresses of anyone they can find at software company to say "thank you" to them in person.

Let's say you come up with some clever idea. Not being a software developer, you come to me, explain your idea, and I say "it will take me 12 months to turn this idea into a program". It's a lot of work, and you need a developer who is good at his job, but in these twelve months I do nothing that would be considered inventive, just good, solid work. This ruling says that the software is not patentable.

But let's say there's a difficult part in that idea. Where your idea says "we have this information, and from that information we figure out that other information". And I say "look, I don't have any idea right now how to figure out that other information. It should be possible, but I don't know how to. I'll have to invent something to do this". And now let's say in the end I can't figure out that bit, you go to some other developer, and he manages to solve the problem and writes the software for you. Now there is a much better argument that this software should be patentable.

All computer programs are math. Everything else is quantum physics. Quantum physics isn't patentable, so nothing should be patentable.

Unless there is something wrong with your argument.

You are looking at it from the wrong point of view. Here is an unpatentable idea: "We take messages, mash them up in a way so that only the intended receiver can put them back together, and then the intended receiver turns it back into the original message, while anybody else can't read it". No patent. In this case, there is a huge gap between the idea and actually making it work. If that gap is big enough and solving the problem is not obvious and therefore inventive, then it can be patented. And that's the case here. Cryptography and compression can be patented.

The patent that this thread was about was an idea, and an implementation that didn't require any inventive step. No patent.

But then Arithmetic Coding _is_ very clever and the average programmer wouldn't have been able to come up with it. The average programmer wouldn't even be able to understand it, after it is explained to them. Huffman isn't _that_ easy either, but definitely easier. So I would not call this a "stupid" patent.

You can't patent an idea in the first place. Now if you can implement my idea just by being your job as a competent software developer, then the idea + software cannot be patented. But if there is some part of my idea that not every competent developer can do, that requires a non-obvious invention, then the product might be patentable.

Since these exploits are illegal, a _known_ group cannot perform them. And I'd say that if you have 51% of the bit coin mining capacity, you are a big group and can be identified.

... a court should and will assume that the information you didn't hand over would be speaking against you. That is common practice. So if the judge orders the DOJ to hand over documents, it doesn't really matter that much (in the court case) whether they do or don't. If a plaintiff says "they should hand over these documents because it will clearly show that X is true", and they don't hand them over, then the court will assume that X is indeed true.

The idea that you can make a company successful by not chasing short term monetary gain but by having long term (10+ years) goals and working continously towards achieving those goals.