On Stob and patenting numbers

Hold the front page

Letters Numbers to be patentable

Last week we welcomed Verity Stob to The Reg. Verity has built up a strong following for her humorous work in .EXE, alas defunct, and through a regular column in Dr. Dobbs Journal. Now we are introducing Verity to the online world.

Her Register debut, a series of linked articles on patenting integers, provoked a big mail-bag, some hostile to the idea of running satirical articles on our front page, some confused and many who enjoyed the joke. We think that our readers are clever enough to quickly spot that articles with the Stob byline and Stob intro on front page are not news stories and are not meant to be treated as such. Just like you know (sorry to disappoint) that BOFH is not the “real” diary of a sysadmin. But if we're wrong, we'll have a rethink over where we place the articles.

Now for some feedback:

While these articles are as well written as we would expect from The Register, they fail to meet the criteria for what for me makes a good Register article.

People go to The Register to read good, informed and biased journalism. And to keep up to date with what's happening in IT.

This whole number patent thing. Well it just seems like a bit of a silly rant really. Agreed it could happen - but as far as I know it hasn't yet. So let's stick to reporting what has happened, and then making wild extrapolations as to where it will go in the immediate future, based on at least partial fact? To me, that is what makes for interesting Register articles.

thanks,

James Jeffrey, UK

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The attempts by US corporations to patent integer numbers present a serious threat to the mathematical and scientific community and has the potential to stifle research and innovation.

In response to this threat the University of Sussex proposes the formation of an open source project for the development of numbers that will be freely available to researchers and others under the GNU general public licence. All numbers published under this system will be available for download from the projects web site, free for use by any individual who requires them.

OPENINT plan to stick their first two digits up within the next few weeks, and it is thought that they are most likely to be the numbers 0 and 1 due to the vital importance of these digits in the world of digital electronics and computing.

Details of the website and how to get involved with OPENINT will be released in due course.

Bill Bigge
OPENINT
Sussex University – Brighton

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Ms. Stobbs,

I have been informed by an ex-employee of SoftWron that the Wron number is not actually a Sinatra number. He believes it to be 195894762, although a quick hex analysis suggests this is unlikely.

Regards,

Tim Carding-Allen, UK ®