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For a reference published in 2001 (before the patent was filed): http://books.google.com/books?id=r_cecYD4AKkC&lpg=PA413&...
Also note that a doubly linked list is described by claim one.
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Yes, especially when there is no actual court case. Let's talk again once the owner of the patent successfully sues over it, making millions in the process. Never going to happen. Software patents are not the problem, patent trolls are.
If you are ok with bad software patents but not patent trolls what is your solution for limiting them?
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Google "sovereign immunity."
Interesting. I just did a bit but I can't tell if it covers the USPTO? Do you know if it does?
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What exactly does a patent office do to determine if something is actually original or not? Like did some clerk look at this and say "Yeah, I'm no computer scientist, but this sounds original to me"?
My understanding is that the patent office checks if the patent is substantially similar to previous patents. A non-novel idea can easily get through if it is phrased in a different way or never appeared in an earlier patent. I do not feel this is a problem. A patent just provides a legal presumption that you are allowed to file a lawsuit. Some people argue that this enables patent trolls, but patent trolls exist bec…
http://www.inventionstatistics.com/Patent_Litigation_Costs.h...
Filing patents isn't exactly free either, in terms of time or money.
Also, how exactly do you "beat up" patent trolls? They threaten to sue you, and you . . . threaten to spend millions of dollars on court fees to have their patent invalidated? That doesn't work so well unless you have millions of dollars you don't happen to need.
Are you really suggesting that all those small-time devs sued by lodsys over BS patents would have some recourse if only they'd filed a bunch of patents themselves? Or if only their predecessors had somehow flooded the patent office with enough BS patents that the lodsys ones got thrown out as prior art?
The whole "patent everything, let the courts sort it out" philosophy sounds nice in theory, but the whole problem is that it's freakishly expensive to sort those issues out in court, so patent lawsuits end up as shakedowns: you either pay up in licensing, or you pay up in laywer fees. Either way you're paying someone.
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I suspect that maybe an intro book skips over some stuff in order to present a good conceptual base rather than a fully rigorous, complete set of definitions and options. Compare an intro to calculus book: it presents you with several differentiation or integration methods, yet when you come across the Lebesgue integration technique, you don't run to your intro book and claim "It's not in here, it's not actually inte…
> I suspect that maybe an intro book skips over some stuff in order to present a good conceptual base rather than a fully rigorous, complete set of definitions and options. I suspect that the intro book leaves it out because it's not widely associated with the term, because it's a rather specialized data structure. TaoCP also doesn't seem to mention multiply-linked lists or anything equivalent in its discussion of li…
2) Don't try to extend my analogy about introductory vs rigorous sources to one about claims and invention and patents, the analogy doesn't hold up to it and such extensions to it are nonsensical. I was only talking about your choice of authority in your appeal to authority, and pointing out flaws with that choice - there was no attempt in that paragraph to discuss the wider validity of the patent claim.
3) You arguments are disingenuous which is why I keep calling them such. Disingenuous does not describe the number of words used, it does however describe repeatedly making logical fallacies that you point out and claim to understand elsewhere in your posts.
The Solaris kernel (for example) has lots of data structures that have multiple linked lists. For example, the cpu structure has at least 6 linked list pointers. For a reference published in 2001 (before the patent was filed): http://books.google.com/books?id=r_cecYD4AKkC&lpg=PA413&... Also note that a doubly linked list is described by claim one.
This is not a patent on the linked list. It's a patent on a modification of the linked list that provides a secondary (and possibly tertiary, etc.) traversal path. The patent should not have been granted, and should be deemed invalid if it ever goes to court, but it is not a patent on just the linked list. The anti-patent crowd makes themselves look bad by trotting out examples like this and being deceptive about the…
Sorry, but Linked List is class of similar things -- Single-, Double-, Multiple-linkings are all part of the Linked List genre. Just because you associate Linked List strongest with the singly-linked list does not mean that other forms of the same thing, all of which qualify as linked list, can't be called it as well. You are just being disingenuous -- stop it, that is not cool.
This is why some large companies have a "never discuss patents in email" policy.
It's another way in which patent law is broken; the law actively discourages practitioners from discussing patents, even bad ones.
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Sorry, but Linked List is class of similar things -- Single-, Double-, Multiple-linkings are all part of the Linked List genre. Just because you associate Linked List strongest with the singly-linked list does not mean that other forms of the same thing, all of which qualify as linked list, can't be called it as well. You are just being disingenuous -- stop it, that is not cool.
Imagine the headline read, "Gas up to $8.23 a gallon" and only upon reading the article did you discover that the "gas" they're talking about is 110 octane race gas. Yes, race gas is a type of gas(oline), but the headline is still quite misleading, as the common definition, without qualifiers, is the pump variety.
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> I suspect that maybe an intro book skips over some stuff in order to present a good conceptual base rather than a fully rigorous, complete set of definitions and options. I suspect that the intro book leaves it out because it's not widely associated with the term, because it's a rather specialized data structure. TaoCP also doesn't seem to mention multiply-linked lists or anything equivalent in its discussion of li…
1) You seem to think that a couple of books somehow form a complete set of all possible linked lists, despite others pointing out equally valid literature that describes things you are not recognizing as linked lists. This is the classic appeal to authority, and suffers from all the normal problems with it. Why do you think only the books you choose to cite are good examples? Why do you dismiss other sources, such as…
As for why my books are more valid, it's because they are well respected books. I see no compelling reason to trust Jorge Stolfi (the user who added multiply-linked lists to Wikipedia) over Knuth, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein, especially given that the initial definition Wikipedia gives agrees with my sources, and the mention of multiply-linked lists on Wikipedia is only 2 lines long a third of the way down the article. My argument is that "multiply-linked list" is not synonymous with "linked list", and so the HN title is inappropriate. I've not seen much that disputes that.
2) Your analogy doesn't hold up because it's already broken. My extension is "nonsensical" because it shows your analogy to be invalid. I have not disputed that multiply-linked lists can be considered a type of linked list any more than I've disputed that Lebesgue integration is a type of integration. What I have argued is that the term "linked list" is not typically associated with multiply-linked lists, and that using the term the way the title does is misleading.
You mention "appeal to authority", but an appeal to authority is appropriate when defining terms. It's bogus to argue that authoritative sources have no weight when discussing what a term means. And TaoCP is not an "introductory text". I would argue that "Intro to Algorithms" isn't truly an introductory text, either, given that it's authors consider the scope large enough to be used in graduate classes.
3) So basically you don't actually know what disingenuous means. It means insincere, lacking in candor. I'm not disingenuous simply because you disagree with me. I'm not even disingenuous just because I engage in logical fallacies, unless I do so intentionally (not that I believe I've committed any logical fallacies).
I'm also not sure I've accused anyone of logical fallacy. There was the one person who accused me of appeal to authority by appealing to the same authority, but I was mostly calling him ridiculous, not actually accusing him of a legitimate fallacy.