Soverain Software, who pretend to sell software but actually do nothing but sue people, wanted substantial cash payments plus one per cent of all US online sales involving online shopping-cart systems.
Thanks to the patents they bought when dot-com Open Market went bankrupt, they were quite successful in this.
This is the strange but, by this stage, depressingly familiar story of small businesses being shaken down by patent trolls. In this case, the trolls are called "Project Paperless" - except perhaps not any more, as they've now apparently exploded into a constellation of hard-to-track nonsense-named shell companies.
Whoever they are, they as usual claim to hold patents on common things that a blind and severely developmentally delayed toddler could see were in common use long before the patents were awarded.
One of their targets who stood up to them is quoted, in that Ars Technica story, as saying the four patents held by Project Paperless are "...a lot of what I'd call gobbledygook ... Just jargon and terms strung together - it's really literally nonsensical."
Well, that sounded like fun, so I checked out the four linked patents. All of them were originally assigned to one "Laurence C. Klein", who at some point presumably transferred ownership of the patents to whoever Project Paperless are, if he and they are not the same person.
In this one, Mr Klein is in 2001 granted a patent on programs that can view images of documents.
In this one, Mr Klein is in 2004 granted a patent on the basic functions of document scanners, to which he gives the name "Virtual Copier".
In this one, Mr Klein is in 2009 granted a patent on sending documents from one computer to another.
And in this one, Mr Klein is in 2011 granted another patent on the same stuff he patented in 2004, but this time without calling it "Virtual Copier".
I have not ploughed through the legalese in great detail, lest I slide into severely refractory depression. But I do not think I am exaggerating this. These software patents really are this stupid.
Not only are these patents all almost completely obvious, but they are all for processes that were invented not long after, and in some cases significantly before, the invention of the cathode-ray-tube monitor. Documents were being scanned and stored in computer memory, for instance, in nineteen fifty-seven.
The only thing that really surprises me about patent trolls is that, in yet another testament to the essential decency of the human race, not one of them has yet been found strung up with their own guts.
From: Ernest
To: dan@dansdata.com
Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2012
Subject: Wine Clip
Your review is entertaining but is not very helpful. I have used a Wine Clip for about 3 years, and frequently do a blind test on myself. Naturally, having some one else do the pouring.
After all, I don't really care whether some one else thinks the wine is better using the Clip. I am the only relevant person involved. And it works every time! Red wine is better when the Wine Clip is used. That is what is important to me; after all, I am the consumer.
There is a factor in the use of panels. The participants should never know it is a test. (I found this out when I was doing panel responses. Whether it be taste, smell or any other perception, translation by the brain of the perceptions received is influenced by the environment.
But you are right about one thing. Great magnets!
What would you do, Ernest, if someone sent you an e-mail that said, "Your commentary on the Psychotronic Money Magnet is entertaining but is not very helpful. I have used a Money Magnet for about 3 years, and always make more money when I have it hanging around my neck than when I leave it in the bedside drawer"?
Would you, in response to this, drop everything and dash out to buy a Money Magnet from one of the... differently-cognitive... people who sell them?
Would you turn your whole comprehension of the world upside down, because apparently it seems that the free will of other humans and the very workings of abstract probability can be distorted by a talismanic device that works by, uh, quantums, and stuff?
Or would you, rather, presume that the fellow e-mailing you might have not quite the right end of the stick?
I do not doubt that you believe the Wine Clip works. I am intrigued by your claim to have tested it in a controlled, though not double-blind, way. I do not consider your claim plausible, though, not least because if it's correct, then the whole of electrochemistry, indeed most of modern physics, is not. Countless carefully-assayed chemical mixtures are exposed to magnetic fields from the modest to the monstrous every day, with the assumption that those fields will not modify any molecules and mess up the experiment - and the fields never do.
Unless you stick some magnets on a wine bottle, apparently. Then, suddenly, physics goes out the window and "tannins" start getting broken up by magnetism.
Since I am surrounded every day by evidence that magnetic fields do not pull molecules apart, and a good thing too or writing this piece would almost certainly have killed me, I am afraid I can only conclude that there is probably something wrong with your testing regimen. Your collaborator is accidentally signalling you - without your conscious knowledge - or the Clipped pour is consistently the first or the second, or any of the hundreds of other possible variables for which a good test must control, which is why good tests are so difficult to do.
Note that James Randi told me, personally, that he has specifically requested that makers of magnetic wine-treatment devices demonstrate the truth of their claims in return for worldwide fame and a million dollars.
Not a peep.
(You are of course welcome to join the many other believers in paranormal events who say that the Randi Challenge is clearly some kind of scam. I would venture the opinion that a scam-challenge looks more like this.)
But wait a minute - why am I bothering to say all this to you, when you conclude by saying that tests that people know are tests aren't useful anyway?!
I'm currently writing a piece in response to yet another example of audiophile weirdness, and this "the participants should never know it is a test" thing comes up there, too.
I even managed to find someone claiming that the fact that blinded tests are objective makes them bad. Because, see, if a proper test shows you that a $900 audiophile widget does nothing, and you therefore save some money and don't buy that widget, you then won't be as happy listening to music, because even though you now know it was a placebo, you still need that placebo in order to fully enjoy the music. Or something.
But... didn't you say you frequently do blind tests on yourself, Ernest?
If objective testing doesn't work if the testees know they're being tested, I suppose you don't know when these blind tests are happening, right?
So is it something like, your wife sometimes doesn't use the Clip when you think she is using it, or something? And then asks you what you think of the wine, which for some reason doesn't alert you to the fact that another "test" is in progress? And then you turn out to be the first person in human history completely immune to cues from a non-blinded researcher with whom you have a personal relationship?
I'm really trying to not insult your intelligence here, Ernest, but you're not making it easy for me.
Given the recent plague of idiots who start a game of MechWarrior Online and immediately overheat themselves to death in return (I think) for the basic reward you get, win or lose, I have as previously mentioned been e-mailing the names of those players to support@mwomercs.com.
When the same dude showed up again, I sent another report, the text often just:
"NameOfDickhead", again.
I was pretty sure they wanted players to do this. They certainly haven't told us not to, to my knowledge.
Except for me, just now.
> Dan
>
> Nov 30 01:17 (PST)
>
> "CHIEOKURE NO KO", again, AND "skSniper", YET again. Both on my team
> in one game.
>
> You have told me, TWICE, that my suicide reports for "skSniper" have
> been "solved" - ticket numbers #56050 and #56059.
>
> This is apparently some strange definition of the word "solved" that
> I have not previously encountered.
Hello Dan,
This is Game Master Destined. I am one of the Game Masters addressing the Reported Players tickets, and all of the processed tickets go through me personally for filing and logging. I would like to clarify some information for you:
It is not our policy to disclose disciplinary actions taken against another user. This is the reason your tickets are marked as "solved" - because the report has been logged, investigated (fully) and we have moved on to the next tickets. I've noticed that you have an exorbitant amount of tickets (36, at this point in time), many of which are player reports and duplicate player reports - we are at the point now that I have to ask you to stop submitting tickets. We are aware of the situation, we have addressed it on the forums, and are taking actions against players as we speak. It takes time to investigate each report as we must go through logs and make a proper audit trail, contact the players, etc... and the more tickets we have to process, the longer it takes to build a report about each user.
Understand that, by submitting a ticket about a player, you are in no way guaranteeing that the actions you wish to be taken will be taken. We decide as a group of game masters and community representatives what should be done, and do not proceed without proof of grievances. Let me give you again the text we have been responding to you with:
"We will follow-up on this privately, thank you for bringing this to our attention.
Please note that, by receiving this notification, we are acknowledging your report and have started an investigation into the situation. Unless we have any further questions regarding your report, we require no other correspondence with you on this matter."
This is pretty clear to me. Every time you send us another ticket, you are slowing us down. I will be solving all of your tickets after logging them in our system. If you continue to contact us on this matter, I will consider it harassment and be forced to suspend your account.
This issue is now considered to be closed, and no further correspondence will be necessary on your part. Thank you for your understanding.
I have thus far given the MechWarrior Onlinepeople quite a lot more money, for this less-than-perfect beta, than I would have paid for a AAA retail game. I firmly intend to give them even more, if I run out of my current "Mech Credits".
I suggested to "Destined" that they might like to make more clear, via perhaps an official news post, what they want players to do and what they do not want them to do. And to be perhaps a little less ready to threaten to ban players who are only trying to help.
I shan't say much more here, because I fear I may say something intemperate, and get myself banned. Then I would be $US95.85 in the hole, not to mention all that time spent levelling up 'Mechs, and time spent promoting the game via near-obsessive blog posts to my not-insubstantial readership, and time spent reporting the abovementioned bad players.
In that case I would certainly never come back to the game, and I'd strongly advise anybody else to go with Hawken or Living Legends or even World of Tanks instead. Should you try MWO anyway, I would, if banned, certainly not advise you to buy any Mech Credits, lest this happen to you too.
And now, I'm going to get drunk and play some more MWO.
You are supposed to put some water in the heater packet and then lean the MRE pack against, famously, a rock or something, while it warms up. The reaction shouldn't take more than a minute.
What, young soldiers with little to do have doubtless asked many, many times, would happen if you were instead to collect the powder from several ration heaters and put it in a sturdy sealed vessel, with some water?
Why, this would, thanks for asking!
Unlike relatives like the dry ice bomb, the heat of these "MRE bombs" will soften plastic, allowing the impressive inflation seen above.
If this just isn't dangerous enough for you, you could always use a metal canteen instead of a plastic bottle!
Note also the suggestion of putting the MREs' Tabasco sauce in the bomb, to add a chemical-warfare tang to the operation.
Me: Three-Streak-SRM-2Commando, which is a surprisingly dangerous build now that the most recent patch has made Streaks both more accurate and more damaging. My 6-Streak Commando now consistently gets more kills per match than my 40-LRMAwesome.
The scene: My side's base in Caustic Valley, where after finding myself the last alive on my team and facing an enemy medium and two heavies capturing our base, I have been running in frantic circles, managing heat, shooting big 'Mechs in the back, and being highly successful. Two enemy big boys dead, and my total kill count is four. (From, I remind you, the smallest 'Mech in the game. With, because I'm in Australia, also easily the worst ping.)
But the Catapult remains, 65 tons to my 25, and has 95% health.
I have about 12 missiles left.
I fire them all, bringing him down to 87% or something, and then park myself in front of him and await the inevitable.
Nothing happens.
It turns out he's a Catapult with a lot of Long-Range Missiles and... nothing else.
No close-range armament at all.
You can shoot LRMs at targets closer than 180 metres in MechWarrior Online, but they don't arm before they hit the target, and bounce off harmlessly.
He could try to move a couple of hundred metres away from me so his missiles would work, but I'm more than twice as fast as him; he'd never manage to escape my affectionate, cat-like rubbing on his legs.
I could bolt for the enemy base and try to capture it, probably without dying to his missiles on the way, but there's no way I'd get there before he captured our base by just staying where he was.
So we just stood there and stared at each other, while the match's 15-minute timer ran out.
I was pretty sure that when the timer ran out the other team would win (either because they'd partially captured our base, or because they had more tonnage still alive), but they wouldn't get a capture win, worth more to them than an ordinary military one.
There was some conversation in the chat, mostly about the effectiveness of the Streak-Commando, the foolishness of not fitting even one Small Laser or SRM of some sort to supplement your long-range armament, and other amusing situations people had encountered in this game.
At one point someone called me gay, but this did not impress the other spectators. Who, as I pointed out to the you're-so-gay guy, could just quit the match and not miss out on any money or XP.
As the last several seconds ticked away, we bowed to each other, and said our farewells.
My side did lose, but this was still the most fun I've had so far in this game.
Meaning if a missile falls in a location is it highly probably that another will fall in the same area?
R.
From Israel.
Right at the top, I'm just going to say that I'm not going to say anything about the politics of this situation which has been particularly in the news, yet again, in the last few days, and I'd appreciate it if commenters didn't either. I sure do have opinions on this subject, but there are a million places people can have arguments about the Heroic Downtrodden Palestinians versus the Stoic Peace-Loving Israelis, and this blog post is not the time nor the place.
(Readers who feel an uncontrollable need to argue about something are encouraged to do so on that post about a free book that some guy argued against without even looking at the free book, that post about the existence or otherwise of "copper bullion" where a lady turned up to hotly argue that buying copper by the ounce is a great idea, and the fewposts that sort of ended up being about Jock Doubleday and the floridly preposterous conditions of his "vaccine challenge". Bonus points for anybody who manages to persuade me to their religion, or that climate change isn't happening, or that every man secretly craves sex with other men.)
Speaking of time and place, though, both things are important here, because impacts of artillery over time have a distribution both in space and in time. This is a problem which has been addressed before, most famously in analyses of where the thousands of V-1 and V-2 missiles landed in and around London in World War II.
(That, by the way, is one of the approximately 300 themes of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, which I read once, and finished, purely because I am susceptible to the sunk-costs fallacy. Forget Israelis and Palestinians - if you want to see true hatred, ask me what I think of Gravity's Fucking Rainbow. How can such dazzling ability to paint a whole scene with ten words be used to create such an indigestible housebrick of a book?!)
The British analysts in WWII wanted to know how good the guidance systems of the V-2, in particular, were. Since it turned out that V-2 hits conformed quite well to a random Poisson distribution, the analysts reached the correct conclusion that the V-2 did not have a guidance system capable of targeting particular areas of the city.
Even the V-1s did have some kind of guidance system, though. There's a popular belief that V-1s "flew until their fuel ran out", but they actually had an autopilot that counted the revolutions of a little propeller on the nose of the missile, and put the bomb in a dive after a predetermined flight distance. That dive happened to cut off the fuel flow and stop the engine in early V-1s, creating the out-of-fuel legend; this bug was fixed in later V-1s, most of which therefore managed to do their final dive under power, as originally designed.
Aaaaanyway, if you abstract it all out and presume that any arbitrary square metre of Sderot is as likely to be hit by a rocket from the Gaza Strip as any other over a given hour, then the lightning-strike conditional-probability situation applies. Whichever square metre you're standing in is, by these assumptions, as likely to be hit over the next hour as any other, but in order for a missile to next hit your particular square metre two hours from now, there must by definition not be a hit in the next hour. So, as in the lightning-strike example, you multiply the probability of no-hit next hour by the probability of a hit the hour after that, and get a slightly lower number. The probability of a hit in any given spot in any given hour is the same, but the probability of the next hit being separated from now by one, or ten, or a million, hours gets lower and lower as time wears on.
This is of no use whatsoever in determining what location's going to be hit next, though; we assumed right at the start of our abstraction that the missiles were falling randomly. It just explains why clusters of hits, close in time and/or space, can and will occur - and encourage the statistically untutored to explain them in terms of aim and guidance systems - even if the actual distribution of events is random.
In the real world, of course, the distribution of Palestinian missile hits on Israel is only partially random. The basic garage-built missiles have no guidance system at all and variable performance characteristics, which predisposes them to land in a Poisson distribution just like the V-2s in WWII. But there are many launch sites and several other kinds of missile...
...making the overall situation extremely complex.
Many Palestinian missiles are just shot in the right general direction (in the opinion of the people launching them, of course). In videos of the Iron Dome missile-defence system in operation...
...you'll occasionally see the system not bothering to shoot an interceptor missile at some of the incoming fire, because the system calculates that that rocket isn't going to hit a populated area. (See also, mortar attacks by insurgents/terrorists/freedom-fighters, strike out whichever does not in your opinion apply, on military bases and police stations and various other targets in Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, Iraq, and a dismayingly long list of other places.)
But the more sophisticated actual military rockets definitely can be aimed, at least to some extent, so the distribution of their hits will be skewed toward populated areas, military targets, or whatever else the people launching them are trying to hit. You could probably protect yourself from those rockets by a considerable amount by going and living in a tent in the middle of the desert.
As regards avoiding getting blown up in the Israeli towns within rocket range of the Gaza Strip, though, I'm afraid conditional probability has nothing to offer you. All it tells you is that it's improbable that some particular location will not be hit for an extended period of time, which you already, unfortunately, knew.
, which I read once, and finished, purely because I am susceptible to the 
