Uh, lets see. Computers are pretty much a practical implementation of a Universal Turing Machine which Turing proved could compute any computable problem. Therefore a computer is, in effect, a universal machine. Since changing the software on what is already a universal machine doesn't really change the fact that it is still a universal machine then it seems that no software for any computer should be patentable.

Even 40+ years ago, when I got my BS in engineering, any sort of hands on experience was disappearing from the requirements. Even the lab instructors often didn't know how to use some of the instruments (Oscilloscopes, signal generators, etc.) or how to troubleshoot a circuit that wasn't doing what the design said it should.

Engineering is really a combination of Art and Science and no one can learn to be an Artist from a book. Technology needs both and both are required to keep the modern world working. I am in awe and have utmost respect for a skilled craftsman/artisan and our world needs more of them.

I am a third generation engineer, and many decades ago my Father often told me that I should be a plumber or an auto mechanic and there were many times during my working career that I realized just how right he probably was.

Longer ago than I care to remember, while in the Air Force, one "extra detail" I ended up with a few times was to destroy some mainframe magnetic tapes that had been used for Top Secret and above data. The protocol we (there HAD to be two people doing it) were required to follow was to run each tape TWICE through a very large automated degaussing machine and THEN strip the tape OFF the reel into a "BURN BAG" which was taken under guard to an incinerator and burned. I guess they were afraid of all those bits floating off into the Either with the smoke -- and this was LONG before there was Ethernet!

Sounds like the pitch I get from car salesmen from time to time. "We loose money on every car we sell, but we make it up with our sales volume!"

With this many comments both for and against DST on this site, whoever currently manages the TZ database had better keep a close eye on it.

This really doesn't surprise me. Having worked with a State government in the late 1990's I was in charge of a conversion from Token Ring to eithernet for a moderate sized network for an agency. Cisco seemed to assume that we were all dumb as dirt and insisted that no other brand of eithernet switches would work with their routers which we were already using and which we did want to stay with for the one router we needed.. A classic case of FUD. Fortunately, they were high bid on the overall project by a factor of over two! By using the vendor WE wanted (who also had the lowest total cost) for the switches, and keeping the Cisco router, the conversion went off ahead of schedule and way under budget and worked fine for as long as I was there. My experience taught me that they really didn't CARE what was best for the customer, they just wanted the sale.

Wow, Has anyone patented the concept of the old mainframe Generation Data Set recently? I used them extensively back in the mainframe days and could have used a similar concept in more recent systems, but never found a real substitute in either Unix/Linux or Windows. A simple explanation for those who have not heard of them is that they are sort of a push down stack of files managed by the OS with a fixed stack length. You could reference them by a long serial number that was of the format GnnnnVnnnn or by a simple index where the top (and most recent) file in the stack had a zero index. Has anyone seen anything similar in either Unix or Windows?

I have hated the term cyberspace ever since I first heard it applied to the Internet. There is no place in space that IS cyberspace. Of course if cyberspace doesn't exist then Cybercrime can't exist either. There can not be a crime that can only happen in a place that doesn't really exist. Of course all of the crimes that are thought of as cybercrimes are really just ordinary crimes done using a new technology. Stealing 10,000 social security numbers to commit identity theft is just a technological variant on a type of fraud that has been around for centuries. Obtaining copyrighted content over the Internet, becomes as it should always have been, a civil matter of copyright infringement and not called piracy which can again apply to taking over a physical vessel, whether on land, sea or air, but not in a place that doesn't really exist.

Unfortunately the concept of doing something that has been done for decades (think of scheduled deliveries of milk) becomes a new and patentable thing when done on a computer or over the Internet. That is the kind of thing that happens when people think of cyberspace as a real place and somehow a different place.

I think THE ELECTRIC PENCIL was one of the very first word processing programs and may deserve to be on the list. I saw Algol-60 mentioned in one of the comments, but when I first used Turbo Pascal it seemed a lot like the Algol I used on a Burroughs B-5500 back in the early 1960's. Of course, no matter what one thinks of the current products the original BASIC for the ALTAR 8800 by some guys named Bill and Allen might have a place in history. It also generated the first complaint of people copying software instead of buying it by the aforementioned Bill. I am not sure one would call it a program, but the C language is itself a major piece of past, current and future history. There must be many more

Thank you for your comments. I was aware of the multitude of problems that would have to be addressed to really do this effectively. Both of my parents had Alzheimer's, and prior to retirement in 2007 I was Network Engineer and Security Officer for a State Agency that handled PHI and was on a state wide HIPAA implementation team. A nightmare that still haunts me from time to time.

I too was surprised that the image could not be transmitted electronically between the two hospitals. Some prior experiences with medical records may have influenced my opinion. When was in military service I hand carried my medical records when I moved permanently to a new base. That was back in the days of paper and film records. Latter, my employer had a large HMO (Kaiser) as the insurer for their employees and it was at the time that they were making the transition from paper to internal electronic records. Considering what I did I was very skeptical of how well it would work, but the transition was much smoother than expected and the advantages of every doctor in the network having immediate access to my complete medical record soon became very obvious.

Earlier in my career I worked on design, implementation, and quality assurance of some large systems. I know that good systems can be built and can be designed to do what what the USER needs not what is easy for the designer or coder to make. However, this does not seem to be being done much any more. I suspect that part of the problem is that the developers never actually talk and work with the people who are going to use the system and don't really know what is needed.

A recent experience in my family made me fully aware of how important immediate access to personal medical records can be and how difficult they can be to obtain at times.

A family member had been hospitalized and surgery was indicated. However, the current CT image showed something that may contraindicate surgery if it was new, but would not do so if it was an artifact of a previous surgery many years before. The only way they could tell was to compare the current image with an image several years old, but after the prior surgery. There was such imaging done at a different hospital about 20 miles away about eight years prior and the doctor learned that they did have the image archived. However, the only way to get the image to him was for someone to drive to the hospital and bring a copy of it back on a CD. I made that trip and the CD showed that the suspicious object on the CT scan was an artifact from a surgery over a decade prior.

This made me realize how important having one's own copy of complete medical records could be. It would be so easy to have them on even a small thumb drive and they could be encrypted for security. The real problem is getting the medical community to give the patient those records in electronic format, and that format should be an open and published format and not in any way proprietary.

I don't know if there is a difference between the Barium Sulfate used in medical imaging and that used to drill oil wells, but I know that one of the largest mines in the world for that mineral was near Cartersville, (no relation to a former president) Georgia. At least that was true back in the late 1960's when I took some geology courses at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Is this another case of the US having closed mines in favor of imports from China? I seem to remember reading that this may have been partially responsible for the "shortages" of rare earth elements.

Last week I got my first look at Windows 8 when trying to set up my 72 year old cousin's new PC that came with it installed. We got it up, but having never looked at it nor even considered getting it I couldn't tell her the first thing about using it. If there had been some EASY and OBVIOUS way to get rid of the METRO interface and go back to a Classic Shell she might have been happy with it, but after an hour of trying to do anything useful she wanted it boxed up and she has already returned it for a refund.

I have never really been that fond of Windows since I started working with Unix and Linux back in the late 1990's but this time I think Microsoft has played a game of Russian Roulette with a semi-automatic pistol.

Just kind of hunker down to avoid the small arms fire in this county.

I am old enough to remember when social security numbers were of no value to anyone except the Social Security Administration. The back of large a large stack of wide green bar paper from a discarded mainframe printout was often used for drawing charts and diagrams for other business use. I used it often to draw state diagrams and flow charts for systems (this was LONG before Power Point and Visio). People also took stacks home for kids to draw and color on. Many times the front side of this paper was full of social security numbers and other data that, today, would be valuable to thieves.

The real problem is with social security numbers being used as a personal ID number and that banks and credit card companies rely on this number in this way. In pre-relational database days the number was often used as an index key for the databases of that era. It was and probably still is used as an index in some relational databases to this day even though it is not a good number to use for this since duplicate numbers are far more common than most people think ( we saw perhaps half a dozen per year per 100k social security numbers back in the 1980's)

Perhaps one solution to the problem of the social security number having value and thus being a target for theft, would be to publish everyone's social security number. Then it would be incumbent on the financial institutions to NOT use it as their primary means of ID for purposes of granting credit. Something that has no value is not often the target of a thief.