Somewhat like the affable Regis Philbin, who gives contestants on the television show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" as much time as they want to answer questions, software agents of the future are expected to be extremely forbearing.
This is the real question about software: what's the perfect interval between updates?
"Kathy" posted a question about software that will override the deletion of history from a browser.
Since the word "terrorist" appeared in the user's question, the software could guess the context and choose the appropriate, nonliteral translation.
Cynthia Giles, an enforcement officer at the EPA, said on Friday that the cars in question "contained software that turns off emissions controls when driving normally and turns them on when the car is undergoing an emissions test".
NDS, the company in question, makes software for pay-TV systems including for the "smart cards" that act as keys to the set-top boxes that decode TV signals.
At one conference, held here at the University of California at Berkeley, the technology in question was software known as digital rights management, which allows copyright holders to set rules on how people can use a wide range of products, from DVD's to garage-door openers.
Tom Miller, the attorney general for Iowa, one of the states that joined the Justice Department in suing Microsoft, said in an interview that the decision "clearly calls into question" the software bundling moves Microsoft plans to make in Windows XP, which is to be introduced in October.
It is, however, an open research question if software TPMs, for example, based on CPU security extensions, can provide security guarantees similar to those of hardware TPMs [24].
The question of software patent eligibility is not new to the courts, for it has presented an ongoing source of debate.
