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They appear to have actually achieved at least one patent. Their news page contains a link to a description of "quantum technology" Which appears to be an abstract consisting of a jumble of barely related words, a reference to an otherwise unknown "Gendlin effect." and a child's sketch of a design for magnetic core memory.

However a google patents search uncovers an actual patent! Which is basically the same, but with more child's sketches, such as one of a transistor, and a page that appears to be practice isometric drawings, and several pages of black & white photoshop cloud noise renderings.

His engines used a homogenizer and a low boost turbo after the carb as well as the vaporization from heat chamber. According to what I just relooked up, he got 150 horse and 60 mpg from a two cylinder engine at 78 cubes. He said the biggest problem back then was finding good quality oil that would stand up to the engine, and all he could find was some jet engine oil at 98 dollars a quart, plus having to use some exotic materials to construct it, fine ceramics mostly. It was pretty neat for the time.

here's the patent

http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US04862859__

I wish the article itself was online to see the car and some better details. I remember reading it the month it came out in the dead trees version. (april 83, was the cover story)

I've been waiting for a Segway knockoff to appear so I could actually afford a similar device.

You're going to have to wait a long time:

http://www.delphion.com/details?&pn=US05971091__

I do like the Centaur and I can't find them anymore but there was another segway like thing for handicapped people that was like a wheelchair that grew so that the person was at eye level. That looked like it kicked ass for people confined to a wheelchair.

Delphion http://www.delphion.com/ is the best patent search tool there is, IMO. It's $200 USD per month. At the price of filing a patent, it's a bargain. FreePatentsOnline http://www.freepatentsonline.com/ is not nearly as slick, but it's free. I used to use Delphion, I love it--especially the 'snapshot' feature which lets you find out who's doing what very easily. I use freepatentsonline now since I don't have an employer paying for Delphion, it works.

Be warned, prior art search is itself an art. If your not experienced at least in the technical literature, better get an IP attorney.

BTW, the guy at the top who posted "Why bother? Nobody else does." was FUNNY, not INFORMATIVE. Do your prior art search and at least have part of a clue that you might have freedom to operate. Otherwise you are wasting a lot of money, and not just yours.

I'm not a patent attorney but I've filed about 40 patents on technology I've developed, written mostly by myself with a patent attorney just doing a final pass over the claims. There is a real art to writing good patent claims and if you're new to it you should get some professional help with at least that part (in addition to reading up on writing patents). In some ways a patent is like a computer program and the claims are the actual code -- the rest is just comments that help make the claims understandable. A court battle revolves completely around the claims. The battle is over whether the defendant's technology "reads" against the plaintiff's claims, and whether the relevant claims are valid, in light of ealier technology ("prior art").

A good prior art search makes your patent much more valuable and you are the best person to do that search, since you understand the subject area. There seems to be a common misconception that other patents are the main place you need to look. In my experience, the earliest prior art is almost never in other patents. For example, the best prior art for hash-based object naming I've seen is in a program called FWKCS that was used with a few BBS systems in the late 1980's. The patents in this area were all filed starting in the mid-1990's. Online mailing lists are a good source of pointers to programs and also descriptions of ideas that themselves constitute prior art, since they are public. Do some searching in Google Groups (formerly usenet groups) and in the archives of specialized mailing lists that are relevant to your topic (e.g., www-talk for early Internet-related ideas).

Academic papers are often an excellent source of prior art. Many papers are available online for free though citseer (http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/). You may also want to join the IEEE and ACM to gain access to their rather complete databases of all their published journal articles. Finally, you should also search in some patent databases. The USPTO has full text search online at their site (https://sportal.uspto.gov/secure/portal/efs-unreg istered). Subscription to a search database such as Delphion (http://www.delphion.com/) is relatively cheap if you only subscribe for a month or two. Note that the important date for a patent is its priority date, which is when it was filed or when an earlier application it is based on was filed. In the US, applicants are allowed to present proof in a court case that they actually had the idea up to a year before their priority date, so you may need to find art a year older than a filing date to be able to argue that a claim is invalid.

Finally, remember that you're searching for art relevant to claims (usually the broadest claims in a patent). Patents are not invalidated, specific sets of claims are. The more you understand what the most essential differences are between what you've done and what others have done before you, the stronger a set of claims you and an experienced patent writer will be able to put together. Good luck!

With luck, the GPL v3 will clear up the issue of fonts.

Apple owns the patents for grid-fitting the True Type fonts patent 1, patent 2, patent 3.

You don't like it, devise a new method.

With luck, the GPL v3 will clear up the issue of fonts.

Apple owns the patents for grid-fitting the True Type fonts patent 1, patent 2, patent 3.

You don't like it, devise a new method.

With luck, the GPL v3 will clear up the issue of fonts.

Apple owns the patents for grid-fitting the True Type fonts patent 1, patent 2, patent 3.

You don't like it, devise a new method.

I'm sorting through 2100 patents and applications that match my keywords. So far nothing that I would infringe. But there are two outcomes:

1. Yes, I'm the first one to this idea.

or a realistic probability that

2: I could infringe on someone's generically worded patent.

Okay, so if that is the playing field, what would you anti-this-idea zealots suggest??

If I infringe, then I have to look at who has the patent and attempt to contact them. I'd have to look up where their office is, and even if they're alive.
Then I have to attempt to make contact. Phonecalls and emails out of the blue for them, cold calling for me. Then the lawyers step in and negotiate.

So a lot of ball-ache, and the kicker is that once I call they know that I'm interested, and they can start to probe me to see how much it's worth to me.

With this idea, I can see advantages for having one [or several] known company who unifies the process:

1) Known address
2) Contact details for sales
3) Secretaries to take my inquiries
4) Some corporate information so that I don't have to spend £££ getting my lawyers to translate their lawyers' documents. These are all in slightly different and convoluted Legalese. 5) A range of products so I can see how much they charge for other things
6) A better chance of them not ripping me off when they know I'm interested.

As an organistation who deals with this all the time, they'd know which are the ideas that are worth a lot to someone, rather than a idea that is close to expiry and has a lot of other patents. Single patent holders like to think their ideas are going to earn them £££ x 10^£££ and try to extort you for even the simplest idea.

For those people who bitch and moan in this topic, I have to ask: How many patents have you actually applied for? Did you think through all the avenues, including actually having to license someone elses idea instead of just complaining about You versus The Man??

You think you are scared?

You're not scared enough -- MS has _tonnes_ of patents in the WIMP area, which several Operating Systems use.

MSR has been filing patents left right and center, in various areas such as Graphics, AI and what not. They even have people working on areas of Information Theory in Quantum Computing and what not.

A search on Delphion shows that about 7,542 patents have been registered in almost every conceivable area of computer science.

I was hoping that MS would not take this stance, but I guess this was inevitable.

I got this popup, apparently from going to the patent link:

http://www.delphion.com/assets/homepage_unk4_pop?0 1

This is the very first popup I've seen in about two months of surfing with Firefox:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040707 Firefox/0.9.2

Okay, just to make this on topic:
http://mindspring.com/~benbradley/grat_cat.jpg

I expect a cease and desist letter shortly, thanks to this slashdotting. By simply looking up this patent he would have known to keep the cat in the box!

The question of course is whether a kitten is a derivative cat work, or if having a kitten gives this guy prior art...

Looks like some else already patented this concept: http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US06101537__

"A universal electronic resource denotation, request and delivery system allows a user to locate information on a distributed computer system or network such as the Internet by knowing or guessing a short mnemonic alias of an electronic resource without the user having to know the physical or other location denotation such as the universal resource locator (URL) of the desired resource."

While you apparently mock his PhD

he's also the lead developer of the Battlecruiser games. (In other words, a 100% professional coder, unlike perhaps you, dear Windows dweeb.)

patents can refer to methods and systems, and exactly how tangible are those?

And I'll leave it to the real Derek to respond to you with that post with eight occurrences of "shit", no more, no less.

setuid has a patent . Assigned to public domain I believe.

The not-a-perpetual-motion-machine award goes to:
Hyper-light-speed antenna!

The invisible-pink-rabbit award goes to:
Santa Clause detector!

The use-the-force-Luke award goes to:
Pyramidal machine!

The suicide award goes to:
Greenhouse helmet!

The sick fuck award goes to:
Bird trap and cat feeder!

-

The not-a-perpetual-motion-machine award goes to:
Hyper-light-speed antenna!

The invisible-pink-rabbit award goes to:
Santa Clause detector!

The use-the-force-Luke award goes to:
Pyramidal machine!

The suicide award goes to:
Greenhouse helmet!

The sick fuck award goes to:
Bird trap and cat feeder!

-

The not-a-perpetual-motion-machine award goes to:
Hyper-light-speed antenna!

The invisible-pink-rabbit award goes to:
Santa Clause detector!

The use-the-force-Luke award goes to:
Pyramidal machine!

The suicide award goes to:
Greenhouse helmet!

The sick fuck award goes to:
Bird trap and cat feeder!

-

The not-a-perpetual-motion-machine award goes to:
Hyper-light-speed antenna!

The invisible-pink-rabbit award goes to:
Santa Clause detector!

The use-the-force-Luke award goes to:
Pyramidal machine!

The suicide award goes to:
Greenhouse helmet!

The sick fuck award goes to:
Bird trap and cat feeder!

-

The not-a-perpetual-motion-machine award goes to:
Hyper-light-speed antenna!

The invisible-pink-rabbit award goes to:
Santa Clause detector!

The use-the-force-Luke award goes to:
Pyramidal machine!

The suicide award goes to:
Greenhouse helmet!

The sick fuck award goes to:
Bird trap and cat feeder!

-

Unisys had one on LZW (compression, LZ77 variant) for a while, didn't they? Acquired from Sperry Corporation, it looks like.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was marked redundant though - I was under the impression that /. had multiple articles on this.

WTF?!?!?!!!! MICROSOFT has a patent on STYLE SHEETS?! I guess the PTO never got around to reading this.

My sister's roomate did succeed in attaching a laser pointer to my sister's cat's head for a few minutes; apparently, it was quite a sight (cats love to chase laser pointers).

Am I the only one to consider it ironic that it took a patent about "Machine Vision" to make someone in the legal system see just how stupid some patents are.

You would think that patent US5443036: Method of exercising a cat being granted would have been sufficient to show that the US Patent Office is too far gone.

I wonder if Kevin T. Amiss and Martin H. Abbott have tried to sue anyone yet.

Okay, everyone will just have to go back to patenting ridiculous circuit diagrams instead of software. That's very progressive-thinking.

Upon reading the link re: cat toys, I'm left wondering: if the beam is invisible, how does the cat see it?

Not only are non-patents allowable as prior art, but many companies actually publish technical disclosure documents specifically to serve as prior art for things that they're not interested in patenting or don't feel that they could get a patent in but want to make sure nobody tries to pull a stunt.

IBM is famous for publishing many thousands of these, which are frequently cited by both inventors and patent examiners as prior art, and frequently wielded by IBM to quash bogus patents.

The old IBM Patent server, which later became Delphion, originally provided access to the IBM technical disclosure bulletins as well as US patents. They are now searchable for free at the IP.com Prior Art Database along with disclosures from a number of other large companies. I've only just found out about it, but apparently you can only view summaries and have purchase full documents or to perform advanced searching, but it appears like a useful resource. Also easily browsable by month, which is kinda neat.

I'm sure someone could find an example otherwise (or even has their own horror story), but as I understand it, IBM is probably the one big tech company least guilty of abusing the patent system. Sure, they make a lot of money off of licensing and have been known to throw their weight around from time to time, but they usually seem to play relatively fair unless they're put on the defensive.

Believe it or not, since you mentioned "goofy" patents, did you know that Microsoft patented a door hinge?

The history of tablet computing is littered with failure, and MS is joining the parade 10 years late (though, as a history lesson, MS crushed Go by promising pen-windows 3.1 and forcing vendors to dump Go to get seeded with pen windows, then after Go tanked, they pulled the plug).

If you could get a touch/pen interface for trivial incremental cost and no resolution/weight/durability penalty, people would probably go for it. Maybe someday, but not yet.

Until then, as for Apple taking the niche: I worked on Scribe, the ATG's predecessor to the PenMac, a project so lost to history you can only find references to references on the web.

And the PenMac had, back in 95/96, many of the features of the new windows versions, including pressure sensitivity, a very accurate neural net based natural handwriting engine, etc. It even seemed quite a bit more responsive on that old 68020. It sold briefly in Japan for Kanji entry...

One problem with tablets... who writes anymore? Have you tried to write a letter recently? If you're less than 20, you probably never did. It's a compelling paradigm, but ultimately retro. Honestly, I can't anymore; my hand gets tired after a few paragraphs. Sure I could if I did it every day but I still wouldn't write this much with a pen. (Would the quality of writing improve if we took away all the keyboards?)

To be sure, there are niche markets. It's a solid interface extension to existing touchscreen applications like POS and machine control, and it's a nice for sketching.

But niche markets won't make for profitable software or affordable hardware. The problem is, in a nutshell, if you do it really well - get the tactile interaction just right, eliminate the display parallax, get the contrast up, get the pen as light and durable as a regular pen, even make the display flexible, make the whole thing weigh only a few hundred grams, and make it "instant-on," uncrashable, and with failsafe archival data retention and you've got....

...paper.

The patent is at Delphion (free registration required) and the USPTO. Paul Vixie is listed as an inventor but probably has no ownership rights, or even the ability to collect on royalties. So don't lynch him yet...

The first base (or independent) claim is:

1. A method for transferring information via the Internet, comprising the steps of:
   • intercepting a message from an Internet user directed to a content provider address;
   • determining whether or not the message is an information request;
   • sending the message to the Internet without being affected if the message is not an information request;
   • determining whether or not said information request relates to a content provider address having a corresponding alternative address, said alternative address providing at least part of the information provided at said content provider address; and
   • directing said information request to said corresponding alternative address, if existing, or sending said information request to the Internet without being affected, if not.

Doesn't sound much like my understanding of how Akamai works (I didn't think Akamai "intercepted" requests -- the origin servers actually pointed to the cache servers in their img src tags). It does sound an awful lot like a transparent proxy however.

There's 36 claims, but only 3 are independent -- the rest are derived from those 3 (dependent claims). It's only the claims that are worth reading and worth worrying about. Press releases, abstracts and summaries are all irrelevant to what a patent actually covers. I find them more confusing than useful.

Let's concentrate on the 3 independent claims then. Here's the other 2:

• 15. A system for transferring information via the Internet, comprising:

  • first means for intercepting a message from an Internet user directed to a content provider address;
  • second means for determining whether or not the message is an information request;
  • third means for sending the message to the Internet without being affected if the message is not an information request;
  • fourth means for determining whether or not said information request relates to a content provider address having a corresponding alternative address, said alternative address providing at least part of the information provided at said content provider address; and
  • fifth means for directing said information request to said corresponding alternative address, if such a corresponding alternative address exists, or sending said information request to the Internet without being affected, if not.

• 36. A method for efficiently delivering cached information to Internet users, comprising the steps of:

  • intercepting a message from an Internet user directed to a content provider, the message requesting specific information;
  • determining whether or not the message relates to a content provider address having a corresponding alternative address, the corresponding alternative address providing at least part of the information provided at the content provider address;
  • determining whether or not the specific information is within the at least part of the information provided at the corresponding alternative address; and
  • providing the at least part of the information to the Internet user, if the specific information is within the at least part of the information, or sending the message to the Internet, if not.

As you can see, the differences between these claims are very subtle. I'd need to spend more time reading those claims to understand

As for storing hydrogen, what about the article on Slashdot a while back about a method of using Borax to store hydrogen in water which is extracted via a catalyst?

A hydrogen based economy is possible, people just need to put some serious effort into looking into all of the methods of extraction and storage to come up with a good inexpensive solution.

The problem is that the initial costs of any solution will be high until it is widely deployed.

-Aaron

There is a patent by walid.com on substituting national characters with ASCII in DNS systems. (So ærø.dk would be looked up as aro.dk etc.) IETF tried to build a standard but were told (bottom mail) that they could use the patent based on "reciprocity" meaning that companies using internationalised domain names would grant walid license to all their patents.

This might be related, the patented hyper light speed antenna. Faster than c, time reversal? It worked on tv.

You mean like, using one of these?

I mean, it doesn't matter HOW you write the text, im sure some people write in uni-strokes as it is with a pen and paper without even knowing what it is.. How could Xerox patent a writing STYLE? Can I patent the way I make a capital P? Absurd!

RTFPA (patent application). The patent is for "A machine implemented method for interpreting handwritten text..." in other words it is the method for reading uni-strokes that is patented, not the Unistrokes themselves:

The patent

The issue for me as an architect (I have written IETF, W3C and OASIS standards)

If I need to get an IP owner to donate their property for the common good my job is easiest if I have to ask for as little as is necessary for the particular purpose.

The FSF reading on the situation is 100% about their ideology and has nothing to do with real needs as far as I am concerned. Open Source software is not imune to the patent system. If you modify any open source software sufficiently you will run into a patent infringement.

If you apply the FSF "logic" you would have to stop distributing gzip because someone could modify it so that it infringed the Unisys LZ patents.

At the end of the day the IP policy is utterly irrelevant since nobody is going to use the specification unless the IP terms are acceptable

The last thing W3C needs to do at this stage is to reopen the IP issue with the membership.

As for the silencer...I dunno, doesn't that also have some kind of chemical component? Or is it just layers of fine "grill work" dampening the blast...but if the latter, why do silencers degrade...clogging?

Its been a while, and I'll probably need to be corrected, but I believe that there are many ways to make a silencer. One way is to make a whole bunch of 'baffles' (layers of fine grill work). I wish I could find a good picture, but google's image search is failing me. Anyways, they serve two purposes, slowing down the round and diffusing built up gas pressure. The hole in the center of the baffle is like 1/1000ths of an inch bigger then the projectile going through it. Over time this will degrade the baffle so that the aforementioned hole is larger then tollerances allow. If this happens, then the round will not be slowed down enough and the silencer will fail.

For more information check out the original patent here

check out this patent for advanced wireless technology

And there's more where that came from.

In a statement to the press, Jeff Bezos said that the company plans to expand the technology covered by the patent to work on other pets as well. He promised that while Amazon will seek legal protection of the expanded technologies.

"Additionally, we believe that by reverse engineering this particular method, we can come up with some other ways of excersising cats. Potentially much more cost-efficient ways."

It is rumored that some among Amazon.com upper management believe that a method without the use of complicated laser technology is feasible by the end of the decade.

"We will of course pass along the cost reduction to our licensees," Bezos promised.

Check out this Patent
Basically it's 450kB per duplex page (assuming a generous 0.5" margin). So a TB costs 2330 pages, not bad for 5 reams of paper costing what a few $ each.

You could directly connect this piezo-electric spark generator to this spark-gap transmitter and you'd be set!

Careful ! You may be infringing US patent US05443036

The Laser pointer cat exerciser is patented - the owners have been notified and will contact you to arrange easy payment options.

remember, there's a patent for that...

someone, bruker or hp, had them attached to some huge piece of machinery, like an nmr or a big spectrometer. That system, inertial mouse, was actually patented in 1988.

I think the new thing they're trying to hype here is that they're wireless and consumer grade (cheap).

hopefully, that gets us one step closer to the ui on minority report.

--mandi

Looking for details on the patent I got the page with the abstract. No one wonder these things get through. Its enough to let anyone want to skip over it and just patent the damn thing.

US patent US5307162 among others have already been awarded to inventors.

Wasn't that the plan behind this patent?

Well, that is one of the problems - most people don't know this - you can't and don't complain about something you don't know.

EP0504287B1: METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR REMOTE DELIVERY OF RETAIL BANKING SERVICES

AllCast have been doing this for quite a while, or at least thought about doing it back in 1996. And we`ve been experimenting for a few months too.
I think the biggest problem with p2p streaming is the fact that clients really need to upload more than they download; bandwidth is still expensive for most people, and somebody connecting via modem isn`t really going to be able to contribute anything back to the network.
At the moment our p2p client helps a bit with this in that it lets you get 2 channels from 2 different sources, ie Mono or Stereo, depending on how well connected you are. But one major improvement would be if the audio stream was somehow layered in a way that would allow you to build up audio "quality", eg. 1 connection gets you 24KBps, 2 = 48 KBps etc. Maybe this could be an extension of Ogg Vorbis?