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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 14 2012 @ 05:53 AM EDT |
A meridian (local noon, not local zone noon) sight of the sun will give you a
latitude after correcting for season, and a local time. A sight of Polaris will
give you a latitude, but not an indication of time.
If you have a time reference (the best are a radio or a black dive watch that
lives on your wrist) will give you a line of position at right angles to the sun
at the time of the sight after correcting for season.
At dusk or dawn, you can similarly get a star sight. However, you can also get a
bunch of star sights giving you a fix from all the crossing lines of position.
Finally, for the real experts (no me) a sight of the distance from the moon to a
star can give you a fix and a time.
A less demanding variant is a sun-moon fix that gives you a pair of lines of
position. If you then get a different line of position later, an iteration of
the sun-moon fix for different times gives you a time check.
More than you ever wanted to know about sextants
cheers
Hugh.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 14 2012 @ 01:17 PM EDT |
Given the reasoning:
Electricity applied to a device down different paths
creates a new machine
Then a digital lamp that accepts a 3-way lightbulb
that can be programmed for a given setting for a specific time of the day has
345,600 patents that can be filed for the device.
4 states to the lightbulb
(off, low, medium and high).
60 seconds in each minute, 60 minutes in
each hour, 24 hours in one day.
=
60*60*24*4 = 345,600
I would
hope the Supreme's would agree that even the first person who decides to
"program a specific time for a specific setting into the device" should
not qualify to have that process deemed patent eligible.
Patent app
1: program 12:00.00 noon for medium setting
I'd love to watch:
Have
such a lamp right there in front of the Supreme's
Walk through the user
manual that came with the lamp from the manufaturer
Then have one of
the pro-software patent Lawyers try and convince the supreme's that programming
the lamp to High position at 8:00.00 pm really does create a new device and the
entity that did that - not the manufacturer of the device - deserves to have
that process patent eligible.
RAS[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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