Re: What if you had a very good patent lawyer...
On Jul 22, 2010, at 8:59 PM, John Gilmore wrote: It's pretty outrageous that anyone would try to patent rolling barcoded dice to generate random numbers. I've been generating random strings from dice for years. I find that gamers' 20-sided dice are great; each roll gives you a hex digit, and anytime you roll a 17 thru 20, you just roll again. One die will do; you just roll it as many times as you need hex digits. Presumably pointing a camera at ordinary dice could automate the data collection -- hey, wait, let me get my patent lawyer! Too late. http://gamesbyemail.com/DiceGenerator -wps - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to majord...@metzdowd.com
Re: What if you had a very good patent lawyer...
On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 05:59:50PM -0700, John Gilmore wrote: It's pretty outrageous that anyone would try to patent rolling barcoded dice to generate random numbers. If you have children at home you could just point a webcam at their gameroom, or, depending on how obsessive compulsive their guardians are regarding cleanliness, anywhere in their homes. Of course, they won't be there all the time, and their guardians will sometimes cleanup, which means that such a generator will tend to be biased, which means you need an entropy extractor and entropy pool (but you knew you needed those anyways). Even so, I believe that such an entropy generator will generally produce better entropy than a geiger counter, at least when it's operational. I wouldn't put it past any PTO, especially the USPTO, to issue a patent on gathering entropy from a webcam pointed at tiny, human entropy generators. But IANAL. Nico -- - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to majord...@metzdowd.com
Re: What if you had a very good patent lawyer...
It's pretty outrageous that anyone would try to patent rolling barcoded dice to generate random numbers. I've been generating random strings from dice for years. I find that gamers' 20-sided dice are great; each roll gives you a hex digit, and anytime you roll a 17 thru 20, you just roll again. One die will do; you just roll it as many times as you need hex digits. Presumably pointing a camera at ordinary dice could automate the data collection -- hey, wait, let me get my patent lawyer! John - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to majord...@metzdowd.com
