§ 201.14 Warnings of copyright for use by certain libraries and archives.
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The copyright law of the United States (title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material.
Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specific conditions is that the photocopy or reproduction is not to be “used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research.” If a user makes a request for, or later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excess of “fair use,” that user may be liable for copyright infringement.
This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copying order if, in its judgment, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of copyright law.
You can make a copy. If you (the person using the copied work) are using it for something other than private study, scholarship, research, or reproduction beyond "fair use", then you - the person doing that (not the person who made the copy) are liable for infringement.
It would be perfectly legal for me to go to the library and make photocopies of works. I could even take them home and use the photocopies as reference works write an essay and publish that. If {random person} took my photocopied pages and then sold them, that would likely go beyond the limits placed for how the photocopied works from the library may be used.
In some cases, it's diminishing or trivializing the work. "I just need to do X" trivializes the amount of work that X takes and in some cases implies that the person I am talking to is not competent / capable of doing it themselves (often implying that they should be).
Likewise, "they just did X" trivializes the work that the other person does.
Its a word I ̶j̶u̶s̶t̶ don't believe adds value to a sentence.
> You can't shrink down to the size of an amoeba without losing parts of yourself. That's the lesson one researcher is taking away from a microscopic analysis of the fairy wasp (Megaphragma mymaripenne), which at a mere 200 micrometers in length is one of the world's smallest animals (shown compared to a paramecium and amoeba above). When the scientist compared the neurons of adult and pupae fairy wasps, he discovered that more than 95% of adult neurons lack a nucleus.
> The smallest insects are comparable in size to unicellular organisms. Thus, their size affects their structure not only at the organ level, but also at the cellular level. Here we report the first finding of animals with an almost entirely anucleate nervous system. Adults of the smallest flying insects of the parasitic wasp genus Megaphragma (Hymenoptera: Trichogrammatidae) have only 339–372 nuclei in the central nervous system, i.e., their ganglia, including the brain, consist almost exclusively of processes of neurons. In contrast, their pupae have ganglia more typical of other insects, with about 7400 nuclei in the central nervous system. During the final phases of pupal development, most neuronal cell bodies lyse. As adults, these insects have many fewer nucleated neurons, a small number of cell bodies in different stages of lysis, and about 7000 anucleate cells. Although most neurons lack nuclei, these insects exhibit many important behaviors, including flight and searching for hosts.
> Researchers believe the wasp can survive without nuclei because of its short lifespan; the proteins manufactured during the pupal stage last the animal long enough to complete its life journey.
Interesting, but not surprising — DNA, and the cellular nucleus itself, aren't truly required to make our cells "go". (At least over the span of a few days.)
That is, after all, what radiation poisoning is: a complete destruction of your DNA in your cells, while the cells themselves (attempt to) continue to function. And they do! For some number of days. And that's without any of our evolutionary ancestors ever having been under evolutionary pressure to live without DNA (as far as we know.)
IIRC, cell death from radiation poisoning follows a bathtub curve.
• There's firstly a lot of immediate cell death from apoptosis — probably due damaged DNA starting to do something that looks like cancer, and autolyse safeguards activating in response. This is what a radiation "burn" is.
• But then, after that, everything's actually fine for a while. You're just sitting there for a few days, operating normally — despite the majority of your cells now having massive holes shot through their DNA, with any attempt to unzip that DNA to copy it failing.
After that few days, you get massive waves of cell death — the part of radiation poisoning that actually kills you. This likely arrives, due to cells experiencing various inputs that they see as triggers to attempt some kind of state-transition (whether a minor one, between e.g. glucose vs ketone metabolism; or a major one, e.g. into mitosis.) And doing that requires flipping some epigenetic methylation switches to start producing different proteins — which requires the DNA be un-rolled and re-rolled. The cell tries it; it fails; and there's no "error handling" for the case of "you started a state transition but can't connect to the blueprint database", so the cell just "deadlocks" in a volatile state — e.g. one where metabolism is shut down, so purine waste builds up until the cell lyses for chemical reasons.
So it's not too surprising that an organism could evolve to just intentionally not trigger such cellular state-transitions — likely no longer expressing any of the state-transition "machinery" at all. Such an organism would get quite far with their cells just "doing the thing they were programmed to do", without a nucleus. Even cellular metabolism would continue!
There'd just be nowhere to get "replacement parts" for proteins as the original proteins break down or get oxidized by some radical — thus the lifespan limit.
Also, something not mentioned in what you linked, but which seems like an obvious corollary: I would guess that such organisms would likely be "metabolically fragile." I.e., they likely have dropped anything like adrenaline signalling, as the whole point of that is to get cells to state-transition. So they'll be a bit like a person taking alpha-blockers, who gets winded extremely easily because the drugs are preventing their cells from "gearing up." For this organism, there are no other gears to switch to. The organism is a fixie.
> On a cold day of 2 December 2001, three inhabitants of Lia (later designated
as Patients 1-DN, 2-MG and 3-MB) drove their truck approximately 45–50 km
east of Lia to collect firewood. At around 18:00, they found two containers —
metallic, cylindrical objects — lying on a forest path. Around them, the snow
had curiously thawed within a radius of approximately 1 m, and the wet soil
was steaming. All three individuals stated that the two, rather heavy, cylindrical objects (8–10 kg, 10 cm × 15 cm) were found by chance while carrying out their usual task of collecting firewood.
> One of the three men (Patient 3-MB) picked up one of the cylindrical
objects and, finding that it was hot, dropped it immediately. They planned to
place the gathered wood in their truck the next morning, and because it was
getting dark, they decided to spend the night in the forest, using the hot objects they had discovered as personal heaters.
Section 6 on page 36 is where it gets NSFL. It only gets worse as you continue going through the timeline. There are pictures - they are not for the weak of stomach.
Section 4 is neat from the engineering perspective... "how do you move something that is radioactive enough to melt the snow around it?"
Jesus, that's rather awful. Guess these guys had never heard of radiation. Seems incredible, but I have no idea what the media was like in Georgia 20 years ago (or now, for that matter).
> Julian Baumgartner of Baumgartner Fine Art Restoration, a second generation studio and now the oldest in Chicago employs only the finest archival and reversible materials and techniques to conserve and restore artworks for future generations.
Its really interesting seeing the removal of past restoration attempts and the modern techniques to restore a painting.
If I was to pick two that touch most on the responsibility of restoration and what is and is not achievable...
Scraping, Scraping, Scraping Or A Slow Descent Into Madness. The Conservation of Mathias J. Alten https://youtu.be/YOOQl0hC18U
% touch -- -i
% touch foo
% touch bar
% rm *
zsh: sure you want to delete all 3 files in /Users/shagie/test [yn]? y
remove bar? y
remove foo? y
% ls
-i
%
Here's a ML problem for someone to consider tackling ... given a cat picture, identify all of the relevant cat subs that it might get posted in. This could be applied to dogs too... but cats rule the internet ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cats_and_the_Internet )
One of the people I went to school with (several years ahead, his assembly class was on VAX rather than MIPS) had to write a program that solved a polynomial.
As he was going through the tome that represented the CISC instruction set of a VAX system (long before easy search engines), he found POLY ( https://www.ece.lsu.edu/ee4720/doc/vax.pdf page 9-118).
So, his program, instead of doing all the calculations was setting up a few registers, a large comment block that explained it, a call to POLY, and reading out the registers.
He claimed to have gotten full credit and within a handful of semesters later the course was switched from CISC architectures to RISC.
The instruction you refer to is for evaluating polynomials, not solving them, so I’m a bit confused by your claims. It is pretty common to evaluate polynomials as part of solving them (if you’re aiming for numeric solutions), but solving tends to also require:
- some kind of root finding (note that methods like Newton–Raphson don’t work when zeros have multiplicity)
- dividing polynomials by (X - a) after finding one root to find the next root
The POLY instruction was the CISCiest of the VAX instructions. One machine instruction could evaluate a polynomial. I think it could even handle the situation where fetching one of the coefficients caused a page fault. If you knew the VAX instruction set well, writing code in VAX assembly was almost as easy as using a higher level language.
Was the instruction really much more complex than eg some byte-string comparison instruction? For string comparison you’re doing a simpler operation at each step, and the accumulation is much simpler, but maybe you have short-circuiting too. POLY corresponds to the following C, I think:
float poly(int d, float x, float *c) {
c+=d;
float y = *c;
while(d--)
y = *c-- + y * x;
return y;
}
I also don’t see why you consider this to be the CISCiest instruction from an architecture that includes a substring-search instruction, a vaguely printf-like instruction with its own mini instruction set for the pattern strings it takes, and an instruction to do polynomial division in the ring of polynomials over F_2 (ok this is just CRC)
> Whilst I wouldn’t recommend remote team members having to endure a subpar experience, for example during the daily Kanban meeting, is that really a good reason to degrade the experience for the rest of the team, losing out on all the benefits that gathering around a physical board can bring?
Are they seriously proposing _physical kanban board_ as a viable alternative to JIRA? This got to be a joke, right?
(Checks post date, it's 2019... Ah, that explains it)
Worked with a manager who had a physical kanban board in a nearby vacant cube... and had a ip camera set up to it so that the business could go to the IP and see the board. When they had meetings, they'd have the business people on speaker phone and... honestly, we had trouble not laughing overhearing those meetings.
> I am absolutely not a lawyer; but, I don't believe game mechanics are patentable in the United States (this is Japan, so of course that doesn't matter); but there's a reason there's a lot of -opoly games that aren't Monopoly (and the -opoly, non-Monopoly games are not Hasbro games, in general).
THE FILES OF PATENTS that have been granted are a fruitful hunting ground for forgotten games, although going through these files, as anyone who has ever been involved in a patent search well knows, is a time consuming job. Often the patented games are downright silly, such as a set of dominos made of rubber so that they can double as ink erasers (No. 729,489) or a sliding block puzzle with edible pieces so that a player who despairs of a solution can find consolation in gratifying his stomach (No. 1,274,294). Often the patents are repetitious: There are over a hundred variations of the well-known checkerboard and over a thousand different baseball games.
...
Preceding THE LANDLORD'S GAME by just under a year, on April 21, 1903, Patent No. 726,023 was granted to Henry Busch and Arthur Jaeger, also for a game board. Their game, called BLUE AND GRAY, made no lasting impression in the world of games which, I suppose, is understandable since it didn't have the innovative qualities of THE LANDLORD's GAME. Yet it was, and is, a delightful pastime, which should particularly appeal to the ChEckers fan who is looking for something different.
The name Blue and Gray, of course, refers to the uniforms of the South and the North in the Civil War and in the original game the playing pieces of the contestants were of those colors.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to board type games played on a game board or surface, preferably a substantially orthogonally gridded, planar surface, and more particularly to a game which selectively diverts a beam (e.g. laser beam) by user-placed mirrored game pieces that are moved laterally or rotated during play.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many board games have been provided which use paths across their surface as part of the game. An example of such a game is chess. In addition, games exist that depend on the deflection or reflection of objects off of other objects to “score” points.
The following US Patents are examples of board games, each hereby incorporated herein by reference: U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,516,671; 5,145,182; and 6,702,286.
Going into the patent citations there are a number of other laser board games that it references that are different games with different claims as to what they patent. Here's a different board game with lasers that predates Khet - https://patents.google.com/patent/US5145182A/en
Is it different? Do they claim different things? Having something similar isn't necessarily legally similar.
Blue and Gray is a checkers game that is played on a checkers board with checkers pieces and is distinct enough to receive a patent.
Trademarks protect names. Copyrights protect that text or music or ... Patents protect that idea - the rules and mechanics of that game.
The game of the present invention generates a “beam” for each player, which can be a low-powered laser diodes to emit a beam of colored light. These beams are reflected and deflected around the playing field by mirrored surfaces of pieces, or stopped by non-mirrored surfaces of pieces.
The game is won by a player who strategically maneuvers pieces to reflect a laser beam so as to illuminate a key piece belonging to his opponent, e.g., a “Pharaoh” or “King” piece.
With each turn, a player may move one of his pieces to one of the potentially eight, unoccupied adjacent squares (front, back, left, right or diagonal) or may rotate (re-orient) one of his pieces.
After moving or rotating a piece, that player presses a fire button that triggers the emission of a beam above and parallel to the playing surface. If the beam hits a non-mirrored surface of a playing piece, that piece is removed from the board and eliminated from further play, unless it is the key piece, e.g., “King” or “Pharaoh” piece, in which case the game ends.
The pieces can vary in design and setup, with mirrors being located on multiple (e.g. one, two or more) sides or no sides.
And more specifically the claim about movement:
39. A method of playing a game by opposed players; said game comprising two sets of distinguishable playing pieces, each set having movable pieces with no mirrored surfaces, of which one is a key piece, and pieces with at least one mirrored surface, a game board consisting of a first end, a second end, and a plurality of rows and columns, intersecting to form a plurality of spaces, the method comprising the steps of:
placing each player's set of playing pieces on the game in a pre-determined starting configuration; and
alternating turns, each turn comprising moving, either a translation or a rotation, a piece followed by activation of a laser, said alternating moves continuing until one player illuminates the opposing player's key piece;
wherein moving a piece consists of a movement one space in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal direction to an unoccupied adjacent space.
Yes. Very much it does. It's been 35 years since I played Laser Chess, so perhaps there are some minor differences in the rules. But it describes a game so close to Laser Chess that it immediately brought the game to mind.
In laser chess, pieces have different movement rules.
You can move a piece 1 or 2 spaces in a single direction (1 east, or 2 east, but not 1 north east unless that was used as two moves). You could also rotate on your turn. Firing a laser was optional.
In Khet, you can move one piece 1 adjacent spot (any of the 8) or rotate (not both) and you always fired the laser.
The rules are different - and the rules are patented.
If you had different rules that weren't covered by the claims, it would be a different game.
It seems to me like taking chess, same pieces, same game board, same movement, same rules except you can't en passant in the A or H file. Then patenting it. It doesn't seem novel enough qualify for a patent when there is something so similar 20 years prior.
https://www.copyright.gov/title37/201/37cfr201-14.html
You can make a copy. If you (the person using the copied work) are using it for something other than private study, scholarship, research, or reproduction beyond "fair use", then you - the person doing that (not the person who made the copy) are liable for infringement.It would be perfectly legal for me to go to the library and make photocopies of works. I could even take them home and use the photocopies as reference works write an essay and publish that. If {random person} took my photocopied pages and then sold them, that would likely go beyond the limits placed for how the photocopied works from the library may be used.
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