Viewing profile — cduan

This will inevitably draw comparisons to Knuth's METAFONT and Computer Modern font family (as it should). It does suggest, to me, one particularly interesting use case: one could a…

The point of PG's essay is well-taken, but I'm not really sure how the linked article really applies other than at a superficial level. I can't find a recent press release from whi…

So here's what I gather, after having read the lower court opinion and several of the briefs. Monsanto owns a patent on certain soybean seeds. They sell 1G seeds to farmers, allowi…

I wonder if this algorithm would still present biases given the fact that large cities tend to vote differently from less densely populated areas. My hypothesis is that this algori…

Here's the patent (7,266,767): http://www.google.com/patents?id=bHeBAAAAEBAJ

The reason for setting up a DMCA takedown policy is precisely so that the site doesn't have to deal with copyright infringement: by doing a fairly minimal task of responding to tak…

Interesting--there is an email address listed. Wonder what happens if you email your notification there? Presumably, if you do, you are in compliance with the statute, regardless o…

Is this new? Because I can't find a corresponding listing in the Copyright Office's list of service provider agents ( http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/list/a_agents.html ). The re…

Here is one summary I found: http://uscfsales.wordpress.com/2011/07/01/an-“easy”-engine-f...

Here's the solution I came up with: http://sbf5.com/~cduan/technical/turing/

tl;dr: Use \A and \z rather than ^ and $ in regexps, because the latter two match newlines in the middle of strings, whereas the former strictly only match the beginning and end of…

Here's what I would like to know: has this lack of privacy resulted in the author not doing something he would have liked to do otherwise? Because the real problem with privacy inv…

I feel like any regular SEO advice book has most of the steps of the claims of this patent. 1. A computer-implemented method comprising: receiving a document containing content for…

> A ridiculously broad first claim does no harm That might be true other than the fact that each claim gives rise to an individual legal right. A ridiculously broad first claim can…

So it seems that the "abstract idea" under Bilski has turned into "does it look complicated enough." In Research Techs. Corp. v. Microsoft Corp., from last year, the court said tha…

I didn't see any science-related words when I took the test. Not sure if this is because of the process by which they made the word lists, or because there truly are not many commo…

I think that they mean copyright registrations, not patent applications: http://www.copyright.gov/eco/help-deposit.html "In any copy option where portions of the code are blocked o…

I've always thought that the best response to "Privacy is less important because I've got nothing to hide" is what I call the "privacy lets you pick your nose" argument. There are …

I've always thought it would be nice if you could cause Ruby to dump its heap and symbol table to a file, which could then be loaded by other instances of Ruby. So, for example, yo…