I did RTFA. However, there is no code, no algorithm description, no indication whatsoever in TFA describing exactly how their program operates. From the vague references in TFA it appears that this is nothing more than a glorified, article+abstract-wide, pattern matcher. Perhaps it is a little more clever and uses something similar to Google's page ranking algorithm via applying distance metrics to textual spaces. However, that is also a form of syntactic analysis rather than a context analysis. Barring further information on the algorithm, I can't see how your description invalidates my previous point.

I once had an English teacher who said, "If you have more than five consecutive words matching a source, without a citation then it's plagiarism." Perhaps that's how freshman writing assignments are graded, but it's silly when applied to scientific papers. Pick up any math paper on number theory, and you're bound to find the sentence "Let p be an odd prime number." without citation, but that would hardly qualify as plagiarism. Yet, syntactic matching appears to be exactly what this program is doing.

What constitutes "plagiarism" in a scientific paper is very different from plagiarism in journalism or English literature. In scientific writing, it is expected that authors will use the same flat, impersonal style and repeat definitions and the results of others to save the reader the time of having to look them up. So, simple pattern matching between science papers will result in a great many false positives. In science (and math) writing what matters is the new result which the author is claiming. It seems to me that it would be nearly impossible for a computer program to detect the distinction.

Thanks to both of you (AdmiralXyz and blueg3) for posting the recommendation. I'm a mathematician who has always wanted to know more physics, so this looks like a great reference for me.

I'm assuming that the architect will consult with the appropriate engineers before building the structure, but still I wonder how a house with airplane wings for roofs will fair in a major storm?

I think the reason that Apple is so celebrated here is that OS X provides what many long-time Linux users/developers have wanted: a highly functioning unix-like system under the hood with a nice polished user interface.

I do all of my "real work" on Linux systems, but my desktop and laptop are Macs because for most needs, it just works and I get a full bash shell and unix OS when needed. Yes, I pay a premium for that shiny hardware, but for me it's worth it not to have to deal with finding device drivers or re-compiling kernels, and it's nice to be able to view all forms of media, too.

Don't get me wrong. I still believe that Apple's DRM is evil and I wish that ever format was open and non-proprietary. I used to fight that fight when I was younger. But, now that I'm old, working full time, and have a family, I just don't have any energy left to get into fights with my desktop OS just to get some Dora The Explorer video to play for my kids.

But one problem is that the thread might be updating while you're typing. I've several times thought that I was the first person to present a particular idea only to watch it get modded redundant because another post shows up 5 seconds earlier (because it was posted while I was typing mine).

Same here.

I was running Linux back in the early 1990's and even submitting bug reports and fixes for the kernel. Over the course of my career I've admined numerous *nix boxes of all flavors. I'd always dreamed of the great and glorious future where the Linux desktop would reign supreme. I used to make fun of Macs and declare them "worse than Windows".

Then OS X came out. It was what I had envisioned for the Linux desktop, and for most of my needs it just worked without me having to spend hours reading poorly written man pages, struggling to find device drivers, or fixing code myself. I was willing to pay the premium to have that tedious work done for me.

Now, all my servers and big number-crunching machines are running Linux, but my desktop (and laptop) is a Mac. Pretty to look at, easy to use, and I can drop to a *nix environment anytime.

Clearly you didn't even watch the show. It was Reavers, not wraiths.

Besides, this is slashdot, you know, the website for nerds. If you don't like Firefly, then you should be posting on pompousliterarycritic.com not slashdot.

Thanks for posting that link. I was ignorant of Stanislav Petrov and of how close the US and USSR came to a full nuclear exchange. That was a sobering read.

I certainly understand your annoyance with C++. I also find it to be a "dirty" language with lots of kludging to get around defects. But, then I find something to grumble about with every language I've used.

FORTRAN was perfect for number crunching on machines that don't exist anymore. I never found any other use for it.

With C I used to get annoyed with its inconsistent handling of carry flags, endianness, floating point standards, default int sizes, etc., so I often found myself building huge #ifdef trees to handle platform and compiler idiosyncrasies.

Ada is great to read, but it's the most burdensome language to write that I have ever encountered.

Perl is great to write, but it's the most burdensome language to read that I have ever encountered.

Python could be really nice to code, but what's with the significant whitespace?

Java is a good language for beginners, but it's a little too Ada-like for my taste.

Lisp is a good language for masters, but it's a little too parenthetical for my taste.

I could go on... the point is, it's easy to grumble about any language, but all of the popular languages exist and are widely used because they solved a particular set of problems well enough that it was worthwhile for a large number of people to use them. When the problem set changes, then we see the balance shift (how may FORTRAN or Ada programmers do you know?) and new languages come along.

Now I hear the young kids talking about this rubies on train tracks thing... guess I better go look at it.

I do believe that you are arguing in good faith and that you are not a troll, and I understand your argument. Here are the things which I believe were obvious (to general practitioners in the field) in the 1990s:

1. Video display and video (de)compression are essentially large linear algebra problems which lend themselves to vector processing.

2. Video display hardware will continue to improve.

3. Eventually video display hardware will become sufficiently powerful to perform video (de)compression.

The reason I believe that those were all obvious to practitioners in the field in the 1990s is because they were obvious to me in the 1990s and I wasn't even a specialist in the field. (I was, however, working on large number-crunchy stuff). I would suspect that the true experts in those fields were well aware of all three of the above points even in the 1980s.

I'll have to end my participation in this thread, now, and get back to real work...

I was asserting what should be, not what actually is :-)

Because (linear) transformations, lighting and rasterisation are just large matrix-vector operations... as is the FFT which is central to every video compression algorithm. Just because the words are different doesn't mean that the math is different.

It's seems incredibly obvious to me. Of course, I've worked on FFT code for Cray vector units which were around a long time before 2004. If you can't see the relationship between vector processing, FFTs, and any form of video compression/display, then perhaps you shouldn't be in charge of determining what is "obvious" regarding this particular patent.

I have long felt that our patent system is ridiculous because it allows such silly patents. If something is obvious to an expert in the field, then it shouldn't be patentable.

Okay, that's two!

(Yeah, 40gr seems a bit lite to me, but it is sufficient... and substantially cheaper for practice purposes than your suggestions.)