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http://www.boingboing.net/2006/06/22/table-saw-that-stops.html search "capacitance" in the following page: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7290474.html It's not a library checkout system but it does address your opening question. Of course in this system, a hot-dog would work, so probably so would it in a live-ness detector based on capacitance.

As said above: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5162150.pdf Not all that serious it seems. :)

Although I did (finally) laugh when I read their cited patent.

You're confusing obviousness with theft of idea.

The telephone was not an obvious idea when invented, but yes, Bell made it to the patent office first.

I assure you I'm not confused. I suspect you missed the point: "He who submits a patent first" should not have any merit over obviousness.

If a skilled professional creates something and thinks: "This is too obvious to patent",
and someone else comes along and patents that something then we have a "Theft of idea," and prior art can corroborate...

However, if a skilled professional takes A and applies it to B to produce AB it's not innovating, it's down-right obvious to any professional skilled in the art.
It's stealing of the future ideas of everyone. The very next person that approaches the problem and arrives at the same solution without prior knowledge of patented technology isn't "infringing" so much as they are proving the patent is obvious.

Patent law is designed to prevent such "I got here first" patents... However, patent examiners are ill equipped to make the obviousness distinction themselves (being uneducated and not professionals well versed in the art or trade over which they grant patents for), and so we have these oh-so-obvious patents on the books.

As a professional skilled in the trade of both websites and menus when my boss asked me in 1996 to produce a menu for our website, I did so.
It was obvious how to achieve this goal. I had no knowledge of prior art. It was so fnck!ng obvious I didn't need to go searching for someone else's work...
I just did what was asked of me.

Now, I know that our company was "infringing" on a M$ patent that should have never been granted due to obviousness claims.

If you ask any professional in the field how to achieve a task and they come up with "It can't be done," then the patent for that achievement should be granted.

However, If you ask any professional in the field how to achieve a task and they come up with a solution and implement it,
and use it without a second thought thinking "This is too obvious to patent", not realizing that M$ had in fact patented the technology already, then perhaps the patent is over-broad and/or too obvious to patent.

Just because someone thought of something first doesn't make it patentable.

We're all building off of the ideas and culture of our forefathers. Voice = communication. Reproducing Sound = already invented. Telegraph = wired communication. Voice over wire = obvious. Patenting the fundamental process for converting sound into electrical signals and reproducing sound is so obvious that two "inventors" (aka implementors) separately arrived at the same solution... on the same day... there was a race? (This reeks of obviousness folks).

Everyone is standing on the shoulders of Giants saying: "I climbed highest! Give me the monopoly!"

I say: Screw that. I'll get to that same height eventually. Simply having enough money to help you achieve a goal first doesn't give you the right to a monopoly over the goal itself, but that's what our broken patent system does (due to uneducated unskilled non-professional patent examiners).

Also: If our patent system weren't such a joke we wouldn't have Swinging side to side instead of forward and back as a patent.

And if "obvious" patents could actually be revoked in a sane manor then the above swinging on a swing patent wouldn't still be a valid patent...
(They could have asked any child about this perpendicular swinging motion claim -- but they didn't because the patent system is a joke.)

US patent 7144326 has some diagrams.

The idea doesn't seem entirely new (and I'm not convinced it works).

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/3934492.html

Lots of working models. Even some you can build.

The problem is that everyone focused on hydrogen because they sorted that energy density page by mass, not by volume. It's a very poor fuel. People are too focused on hydrogen IMHO. The best and cheapest methods so far considered to store hydrogen (reacting water with metal) all lead to the conclusion that metals are better. The fact that people have made metal air cells in their house that actually power things also shows that they are better.

Metal-air batteries work, and so does electrolysis to regenerate the batteries. The problem most of the companies I've seen so far hit has been the process of pumping the solid fuels ("pumping iron"). I'm a highschool student, so don't take my word for it. I'm also a roboticist, and so I think that if I can get the chemistry working, I can build robots to deal with fuel handling.

They did a similar stunt about 10 years ago: engraved IBM with single molecules. I think there is no practical application -- they just roll the machine out of a closet every 10 years for publicity.
Oh, wait, here's their patent... from 1971 !?

Here is one of the patents. If you look at the actual claims, you can see that what is needed is a device for doing isometric exercises, including a rod with a sensor that is used to detect force. The balance board alone doesn't have such a rod, so I think they needed to include the wii remote for it to count. It seems to me that the patent actually applies, as long as they can find any game that include isometric exercises (I've never played wii fit, so I don't know). Remember to understand if a patent applies to a device, you have to look at the claims, not the title; specifically the independent claims, which in this case are claim 1 and 9.

Here is the other patent, I am too lazy to read through two patents in one day, someone else have a go.

Here is one of the patents. If you look at the actual claims, you can see that what is needed is a device for doing isometric exercises, including a rod with a sensor that is used to detect force. The balance board alone doesn't have such a rod, so I think they needed to include the wii remote for it to count. It seems to me that the patent actually applies, as long as they can find any game that include isometric exercises (I've never played wii fit, so I don't know). Remember to understand if a patent applies to a device, you have to look at the claims, not the title; specifically the independent claims, which in this case are claim 1 and 9.

Here is the other patent, I am too lazy to read through two patents in one day, someone else have a go.

Since we're pretending, let's pretend your imaginary computer cluster actually exists. Now let's find us the speed that said computer would have to run at to crack that password in 2 months.
A 16 character password with symbols (12), numbers (10), lowercase letters (26) and uppercase letters (26) would have 76^16 combinations. This is approximately 1.24 * 10^30th.
An MD5 hash takes 256 clock cycles in the best-case scenario (search for 256), assuming no overhead. That means that we have 3.17*10^32 number of clock cycles that must be ran through in order to compute/crack every possible password in that range.
Two months is approximately (365.242199 days/year)(2/12)(24hours/day)(3600seconds/hour) = 5259488 = 5.26*10^6 seconds.
In that time, a "computer or cluster" would have to run at (3.17*10^32 cycles)/(5.26*10^6 seconds) = 6.03 * 10^25 Hz. That's 6.03 * 10^16 GHz, or 60.3 yottahertz.
Currently, the world's fastest supercomputer is the Cray Jaguar. It has 224256 opteron cores clocked at 3.2Ghz. That means it's total processing speed (again, assuming no overhead here) is 7.18*10^14 Hz. Your pretend "computer or cluster" is 84027852100 times as fast as the worlds fastest supercomputer. 84 billion times as fast.
Using the same architecture as the Cray Jaguar, the world GDP couldn't afford to buy that computer. The world's power grids couldn't power it. This is /., know the math behind your arguments before you post.

Someone already TRIED: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2008/0270152.html

The real issue, in my opinion, with these patents is that Myriad tries to make the information of the gene sequence essential to any detection method for that gene. Take a look at Myriad's patent for the breast cancer-related gene BRCA2. Right at the beginning, "Specifically, the present invention relates to methods and materials used to isolate and detect a human breast cancer predisposing gene (BRCA2), some mutant alleles of which cause susceptibility to cancer, in particular breast cancer. More specifically, the invention relates to germline mutations in the BRCA2 gene and their use in the diagnosis of predisposition to breast cancer." So at first glance, you might think that this patent refers to a diagnostic test for BRCA2, which seems to be an acceptable place for a patent for many people. After all, DNA sequences are just molecules, and there are any number of non-contentious patented tests for biological molecules already- think of glucose test strips, for instance. Manufacturers have found ways to patent various advances in testing for blood glucose without actually asserting a patent on glucose itself.

However, when you test for something like glucose, the test result is going to be a concentration. When you talk about performing a test for BRCA2-based cancer susceptibility, you don't just need to "detect" BRCA2, but be able to isolate it and determine whether it differs from the wild-type BRCA2. So Myriad had the idea that in their patent claims they could define their "methods and materials" to be both the likely molecular bio technique intermediates, and also the molecules that are the theoretical outcomes of any BRCA2 test.

Paraphrasing some of their claims: -We claim the isolated normal BRCA2 sequence, and any isolated subset of that sequence comprised of at least 15 contiguous nucleotides.
-We claim the isolated major mutant sequence of BRCA2 known to be involved in susceptibility to cancer, and any isolated subset of that sequence comprised of at least 15 contiguous nucleotides.
-We claim nearly 40 different variants of the major mutant sequence.
-We claim any sort of cloning vector, expression vector, recombinant cell line, or PCR primer involving an at least 15 contiguous nucleotide stretch of any of the above sequences.

So Myriad was trying to claim that the invention was a diagnostic method, just that any molecule corresponding to the nucleotide sequences they claimed were an intrinsic part of the "method." What's interesting about the "15 contiguous nucleotides" mention that keeps cropping up is that BRCA2 is over 11000 nucleotides long, producing a protein 3400 amino acids long, such that Myriad laid claim to tiny fragments of the gene which would have had no BRCA2 function on their own.

I'm left with the same old question.

If the major car companies could indeed implement any of various technologies or techniques to enhance fuel economy, why would they NOT do it?

For instance, if just introducing turbulence in the fuel stream or direct injection in the chamber improved fuel economy substantially, why would they not do it?

Actually, they do.

TFA makes a few claims about the Transonic invention:

- Heating the gasoline.
- Pressurizing gasoline before injecting it into the combustion chamber.
- injecting it into the combustion chamber.

Pre-heating the gasoline is not common, to my knowledge, in passenger car engines. However, it is the subject of a patent. Indeed, there is an fascinating writeup by a determined and fairly clever amateur (maybe) on preheating the fuel. His concept seems dangerous, but it might work... Might, if we could test it adequately.

Pressurizing the gasoline is fundamental to injection; the process is obvious upon inspection. Higher pressures are being used now to overcome other problems. So far, we are not seeing improved economy, largely because these techniques are being used to improve performance. More about that later.

Injecting it into the chamber is not new, nor is it unused in passenger cars. Porche uses the technique, and advertises that it does improve economy. This is not new art.

So, if these techniques are well-known ( I know of them, so I expect the engineers know them even better), why aren;t they beign used to improve economy?

Well, it's later now. Performance is also a goal.

Turbocharging is used to essentially stuff more air and fuel into the chamber and either improve performance or economy, at little cost since it uses exhaust gas to power the pump. Usually used to deliver performance. actually, to deliver improved performance from otherwise economical engines. Serving two purposes at the same time - good engineering. Supercharging requires engine power to deliver the improved performance, so economy is not a goal there.

And the American market at least is not so focused on economy. Somewhat, but we also want to be able to beat the other guy to the end of the ramp. Deal with it.

Toyota clearly demonstrates the incentive manufacturers have to pursue economical cars, though right now it's as much marketing as it is market share. All-electric cars were tried - the Chevy EV1. It probably failed primarily because it threatened dealer profits. There is some diversity of opinion on this. The EV1 was just an experiment.

But my answer to the question "why not" is simple. These techniques to improve economy are not without consequences. Preheating fuel increases pressure and therefore chamber pressures. This imposes new demands on engine design, some increasing weight and size, which is contrary to current design trends. Complex injector design needs to be tested to verify it can survive at least the 100,000 mile standards. Lots of inventors don't ever test long-term or design life. The EPA does.

Bottom line, for me, is that if it were that simple it's either a true breakthrough or it's not that good in practice. Which one is this? I vote not that good in practice, but if it is, the manufacturers will either license it or steal it. Or not, for a good (to them) reason.

Apple lies.

Oh, do they? Let's look at the actual patent you so skillfully cited: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2010/0042954.html

A method for selecting an input value based on sensed motion is provided. In one embodiment, the method includes varying a graphical element displayed on a handheld device in response to sensed motion to identify an input value. The motion-based input may be used to perform a function on the handheld device or on an external device. For example, the input may be used to open a lock or to rotate a displayed image. Various additional methods, devices, and systems employing motion-based inputs are also provided.

They don't try to patent a key and lock, they want to patent a movement starting something, e.g. the communication between key and lock.

Isn't patenting all about implementation?

Eli Whitney came up with the idea of interchangeable parts for mass production, but Henry Ford instituted the assembly line. You could easily say that the latter was just a logical adaptation of the first, but most people would recognize it as a revolutionary idea and one that constitutes a patent. This is very similar to the case you are railing against, but does not constitute a Patent Troll.

Incidentally, someone patented the idea of a particular implementation of an Assembly Line in 1983, well after the original concept was introduced.

And then finally they'll get the bright idea to implement software that recognizes whether it's upside down and only print out the ones that are right-side up!

They can't implement that software because a method for doing that has already been patented!

Much though I dislike software patents, that doesn't prevent using text to detect orientation. Someone upthread came up with a solution that wouldn't violate that patent, namely OCRing all orientations and the one with the most dictionary words is the correct orientation.

The posted patent compares letter width to letter height, and uses that to determine if the image is sideways. If the document is all capital letters or in Russian, it looks at the 'T's in the document, otherwise it uses 'i's. It then figures the ratio of what appear to be correctly oriented 'T's or 'i's to incorrectly oriented 'T's or 'i's and uses that to determine whether or not the document is upside down.

To circumvent that, you could test something different. If using different letters and the same overall formula don't evade the patent, you could still use factors like frequency analysis ('b' and 'd' are more common in English than 'q' and 'p') or attempting to detect different known incorrect characters (there's no English letter that looks like a sideways 'b', 'd', 'p', or 'q' or an upside-down 'k' or 'h' or 'y' (though an upside-down 'y' looks like a backwards 'h')

As someone mentioned in a patent-related posting recently on slashdot, the government is actually not bound by patent law - they can legally use any patented technology they need.

This is just a situation where some idiot at the patent office didn't know how to rotate a file, so they just made some rule that outlawed it because it was easier.

At least, I'm guessing, didn't RTFA. The point is they're not held back by patents.
-Taylor

And then finally they'll get the bright idea to implement software that recognizes whether it's upside down and only print out the ones that are right-side up!

They can't implement that software because a method for doing that has already been patented!

Much though I dislike software patents, that doesn't prevent using text to detect orientation. Someone upthread came up with a solution that wouldn't violate that patent, namely OCRing all orientations and the one with the most dictionary words is the correct orientation.

The posted patent compares letter width to letter height, and uses that to determine if the image is sideways. If the document is all capital letters or in Russian, it looks at the 'T's in the document, otherwise it uses 'i's. It then figures the ratio of what appear to be correctly oriented 'T's or 'i's to incorrectly oriented 'T's or 'i's and uses that to determine whether or not the document is upside down.

To circumvent that, you could test something different. If using different letters and the same overall formula don't evade the patent, you could still use factors like frequency analysis ('b' and 'd' are more common in English than 'q' and 'p') or attempting to detect different known incorrect characters (there's no English letter that looks like a sideways 'b', 'd', 'p', or 'q' or an upside-down 'k' or 'h' or 'y' (though an upside-down 'y' looks like a backwards 'h')

I found one patent they granted that they might be worried about:

• US5276742: Rapid detection of page orientation

(And a poster higher up found this application, which is still in the examination phase: 20090274392: page orientation detection based on selective character recognition.)

And then finally they'll get the bright idea to implement software that recognizes whether it's upside down and only print out the ones that are right-side up!

They can't implement that software because a method for doing that has already been patented!

That patent application is an A1, it has been filed but not examined.

In the UK at least it would be mere application of a computer their is no added technical effect. There's a general principle that just doing something known with a computer is not a novel application of technology.

The first claim is excessively broad and there's no way that would be granted. Perhaps looking at just the i's and T's would be novel. Is it inventive? Not sure about the prior art so I couldn't say. If it were granted (as say claim 11) then as long as you looked at the top line of text and not just the selected chars you would bypass the patent.

Before the USPTO (at least this was true a few years ago) one has to inform them of the closest prior art you know about. This application can't have reached that stage yet as ABBYY certainly know about most of the art in this field.

And then finally they'll get the bright idea to implement software that recognizes whether it's upside down and only print out the ones that are right-side up!

They can't implement that software because a method for doing that has already been patented!

See http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7641984.pdf

Well, I was a projectionist at a 5-plex (about 20 years ago). No, the frames were not duplicated. As you pointed out, that would be ridiculous. The films area already huge and cumbersome to transport and maintain. And yes, I'm well familiar with the star-cam and shutter mechanism in projectors. On the projectors I ran, the shutter opened twice on the same frame for each full revolution of the cam.

Here's a link to a patent that describes a particular star-cam mechanism.

A quote of interest from that article (emphasis mine):

The reason that the shutter must close during pull down is that the projected movie image would be degraded if the moving film were projected onto the screen. Therefore, the projected movie image necessarily "flickers" as the shutter opens and closes. It has been found that a flicker rate of 24 Hz produces a noticeable flicker and is objectionable to the audience. This problem is much less noticeable at a flicker rate of 48 Hz. For this reason, it is common to use a shutter which closes again while the film frame is motionless in the projection gate. From the standpoint of flicker, this results in a good quality movie projection.

Another important aspect of movie projection quality is screen brightness. While closing the shutter twice per frame is good from the standpoint of flicker, it is bad from the standpoint of screen brightness. To achieve high screen brightness while still having a shutter rate of 48 Hz, the duration of the time the shutter is closed in comparison to the time that it is open should be as short as possible. But the length of time the shutter is closed is determined by the time required for film pull down. So screen brightness can be improved by reducing the film pull down time.

I know it's fun to jump on someone you think is wrong, but at the very least, please make sure you're actually correct before you do so.

FYI-The PLATO IV Terminal you've linked to includes a projector that could be used to back-project program-selectable microfiche images - a 1975 patent application notes that the panel itself was only about a 1/4 inch thick.

There was recently a story about how people with a high-fat, high-sugar diet have different microbes in their stomach that allow them to absorb a higher % of calories from those fat/sugar than a more moderate diet.

Some have made quite a fuss over the methane coming from cows. Considering how many people there are on this planet, it probably makes more sense to focus on the methane coming from people.
The mix of intestinal flora affects the amounts of methane and other gases a person produces. Perhaps diet modification and other efforts to affect human floral balance could reduce our contributions of this greenhouse gas.

The high-corn diet that fattens up feed-lot cattle affects more than their weight (and methane production?). Because of the higher acidity present in corn-fed cattle as compared with range fed, the e-coli they carry adapts. The e-coli adapted to higher acidity is far more of a problem for humans than that from range-fed cattle.

Maybe it's time that we start thinking of bad diet as another form of pollution.

http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/98/9.17.98/cattle_feeding.html

http://www.nbafoodadvocate.com/corn-fed-cattle-bigger-cows-bigger-e-coli-threat-more-foodborne-illness-1177

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6328959.html

http://www.springerlink.com/content/r24j133q21u1g838/

New codecs exist, like CIFF. h.264 codecs are a joke in comparison.

There are a new group of highly efficient video codecs that perform HD encoding at different bitrates, including loss less with extremely low (few ms) latencies. With some compression, it is truly amazing how much efficient a 4Mbps stream with HD content can hold. No floating point math is used and they scale out to use at least 8 threads, maybe more. Imagine encoding video with this codec on a 64-thread SPARC T5120 Server! Of course, you'll need both the encoder and the decoder, which I'm fairly certain the BBC doesn't have. http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2006/0053004.html

This is serious stuff, not some vaporware. The code exists today.

I've seen something like this used at the Costco cafe. Seems to work easier than doing math.

a few advancements in ion propulsion or vacuum propellers,

Although the vacuum propeller has actually been patented, according to Wikipedia, it doesn't really exist. However, by following one of the external links, I get the impression it's right up there next to the Electric Universe in terms of generating useful information. That is, it's extraordinarily unlikely.

None of the technology to do this is very far-fetched at all, but we just aren't willing to spend the money.

Your hold on reality seems a tad weak. I'd strongly advise turning off the TV for a while and make sure you get outside on a regular basis.

My biggest complaint about software patents (ok patents in general) is that you can patent the idea without ever having to invest the effort and time to create the software. For example, AMD owns a patent on location based reminder. But as far as I can tell they do not sell any software that implements the patent. Yet this patent keeps me from making the effort of creating my own software that provides reminders based on location. This whole patent thing is just ridiculous. I'm going to patent "patenting ideas" ;) maybe finally I will have my own patent.

If someone can link me a software patent that they feel was a new invention and that others might benefit from then by all means, I am happy to be proved wrong...

The problem is that a lot of software patents you hear about are of the silly kind (e.g. hyperlinks, one-click shopping, user-interfaces etc.)
To give a better example, consider this patent, which covers a method of computing
fluid flow. There are many other patents like this one.

I thought people were already trying to do this sort of thing using electroactive polymers. Certainly there seems to be a couple patents on the idea, not to mention someone who thinks the technology could be used to make braille-capable touchscreens.

Christ, moderators, you can see from my other posts that I think parent is painfully uninformed, but that is not what Troll means. Get with the program.

Yeah, my first reaction was something close to WTF :) Anyway... I'm quite ready to accept being uninformed, and I'll bite the abuse and stir the discussion some more.

My initial point is that you've been affirming a lot of things that are not easily acceptable as truth without citation. That's at least my case. I'd be really glad to see them and I'm sure others would profit too.

I did do my little googling and I came up with some things like this High reflectivity laser mirrors patent.

When I propose the shedding layer as a possible path to make the laser + radar problem less effective, I'm not proposing to shed the entire layer at once, just the bit being hit by the laser.

I fail to see why this mere idea should be discarded only because you religiously believe that there's no escape from laser + radar. I hope you don't expect me to come out with a working solution within 1h after reading the /. article. The laser certainly took more than that.

Of course, maybe I'm completely off and you just want to have fun at my expense. In that case, I'll be happy to have contributed to your daily laughter :)

I don't have access to the internal code for competitors' sites, obviously :-)

There's actually a patent - # 6539494 - for using a second session id wrt failover and backup.

If the user isn't running javascript, you can't use an xmlhttprequest, same as if they aren't using cookies, you can't use a cookie to store state.

1. My sites are not broken, if the browser saves a cookie without asking consent it's not because I told the browser to save a cookie without asking consent, I just told it to save a cookie. If the browser the user happens to be using does not comply with the RFC that's not the fault of my application.

According to RFC2965, which YOU pointed out, your site is broken. It says "Both the user agent and the origin server must assist informed consent. I've reproduced the section below.

What I (and the EU) don't like about cookies is that sites tend to drop a LOT of them, they do it without my permission, and they use these for tracking purposes between sites both by aggregating the data and by the "same-server" or "same-domain" permissions policies, which end users aren't aware of, and wouldn't understand if they were. This is totally against end-user expectations of privacy, and what the EU proposes is that no site use a cookie without informing people that they do so, and what they do with the data. To me, this is reasonable behaviour, and it's the expected behaviour in RFC2965. The objection isn't to cookies per se, but to the way that they have become pervasive and intrusive.

It's true that using a post is more secure than a get, but that wasn't the original question. The original issue was whether it was even possible to do away with cookies, and it is, in all cases.

Moreover, for someone so concerned about what the RFCs say, I'm a little surprised that you're so willing to ignore RFCs 2109 and 2965. Turns out we've already got a state management mechanism for HTTP.

RFC 2109 has been superceded. Here's the exact wording from FRC 2965. I'm not ignoring it - it says exactly what I've been arguing for - that as a site developer you MUST get informed consent from the user before you drop cookies on them.

6. PRIVACY

Informed consent should guide the design of systems that use cookies.
A user should be able to find out how a web site plans to use
information in a cookie and should be able to choose whether or not
those policies are acceptable. Both the user agent and the origin
server must assist informed consent.

(emphasis added)

Look - it's just proper etiquette. Advertisers shouldn't be able to track you from site to site with cookies, which is what they do now. It's an invasion of privacy, and it's just wrong. The EU is on the right on this one, same as Canada was right to threaten to take Facebook to court if Facebook didn't fix it's problems with unauthorized sharing of user data with 3rd party developers (which enabled a lot of phishing schemes, btw).

The default should be to preserve privacy. And, in the event that the user doesn't accept cookies, we can do a different session management technique that doesn't require cookies, and that would require us, as site developers, to directly communicate with advertisers wrt the customers - and only after getting customer permission for sharing that information. Informed consent. Since we wouldn't be following customers when they go to other sites, and since there is no session id stored on the client computer, customer privacy is preserved wrt 3rd parties. This is a "Good Thing", no? Sure, advertisers will hate it. It's not up to the end user to come up with a business plan for them, and it's not up to us to, either, unless that's what they're paying us for. If the want to do that, let them pay to "pick our

The patent itself has screenshots of a Mac desktop, so I'd imagine this is along the lines of "Here's a subsidised computer, but you'll have to watch our ads" - which has been done many times before. Here they present a "new" implementation.

On the other hand, I'd hate to be in their legal team the first time someone comes unstuck using Skype (or equiv) from their computer for an emergency call, and obviously they've also written the patent to apply to stuff like phones & PDAs with reference to iTunes (see [0048] on p12). Odd that they didn't include language to be able to bypass this advertising for certain instances of the function being blocked (e.g. dialling 911 rather than dialling a chum).

I wonder what would happen if you 127.0.0.1 the advertising IPs in your hosts file? Conceivably you'd be bricking the box (while breaking the ToS you signed up to, too, no doubt).

There are some ancient writings which no one knows how to read anymore. Will future archaeologists wonder what the microscopic pits in our coasters with holes in them are all about?

That's an interesting thought experiment. Let's say civilization fell and rose again, and that future archaeologists came across some of our optical discs. They wouldn't need much beyond 19th-century technology and mathematics to decipher them.

Once cleaned, 1,000-year-old discs would still shimmer the way they do today. Under a microscope (well-developed by the 19th century), pits and lands would be visible. A pit is approximately the same size as a bacterial cell, after all. The pits and lands would form a recognizable pattern. That pattern looks nothing like binary, being a clocked encoding of it. But it's obvious that a CD would spin, so eventually someone clever will realize that information is encoded at clock boundaries.

That having been figured out, these future archaeologists will see repeating patterns of eight units. Presuming that our language came down intact (much like Latin has to us), 19th century cryptanalytical techniques could determine the correspondence of the mysterious 8-pit repeating units to letters. (After all, what is ASCII except a simple substitution cipher?)

ECC information would be gibberish, but it could be ignored. (And once even one Wikipedia backup were deciphered, the ECC information would be understood.)

Of course, there's a huge amount of information on each disc. It'd take a long time to go over even part of one by hand, but it could be done. After all, even in the 17th century, huge logarithm table books were produced.

Once technology advanced a bit, it'd be possible to build an electromechanical system to read and print the contents of CDs. Even Babbage had a workable printer design, and printing telegraph machines emerged by 1910. The hardest part for our future archaeologists would be reading the discs at high speed, for which (I think) they'd need a laser. But maybe the problem would stimulate them, and they'd build lasers before we got around to discovering the things.

Of course, this is just idle speculation, but it's fun!

I really like the idea! Preferably it should be combined with US patent 6970105 (Passenger control system during a plane flying) http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6970105.html

So we fit all passengers with large collars containing big needles with sedatives. At the first smell of fear we inject a propper dose of sedatives in their necks. The problems with terrorism and fear of flying solved at the same time.

I really must run and patent this idea right now... And get the movie rights!

and "Exchange Web Services" is Patented!

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2009/0113001.html

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=846&q=%22Exchange+Web+Services%22+patent+microsoft&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=

They'd probably sue Coke if they could find a networked vending machine.

It's been patented: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6462644.html

That is actually very cute. It's worth looking at the patent where any layman can actually get the gist of what the invention is and does by just looking at the pictures let alone reading the text. The contrast with most software patents where you don't have a clue what the invention is even after reading in detail and even if you are an expert in a nearby area couldn't be stronger.

You can't patent, say,..

Hold that thought, and that just the short list, make sure you read the claims.... The patent office has permitted everything to be patented. The problem is that when it come to the courts, its assume that the patent is valid and a default injunction passed without even considering whats in the patent...

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6685890.html Shower head provided with an ultraviolet lamp United States Patent 6685890

Why did nobody patent breathing, drinking mechanisms, water filters, bottled water, and clothing, or sewing? How about the process of applying heat to food? Then they could sue any human being for being alive and not paying royalties. No matter. The race to patent human DNA is on, lawsuits over the right included.

Why did nobody patent breathing, drinking mechanisms, water filters, bottled water, and clothing, or sewing? How about the process of applying heat to food? Then they could sue any human being for being alive and not paying royalties. No matter. The race to patent human DNA is on, lawsuits over the right included.

Why did nobody patent breathing, drinking mechanisms, water filters, bottled water, and clothing, or sewing? How about the process of applying heat to food? Then they could sue any human being for being alive and not paying royalties. No matter. The race to patent human DNA is on, lawsuits over the right included.

Why did nobody patent breathing, drinking mechanisms, water filters, bottled water, and clothing, or sewing? How about the process of applying heat to food? Then they could sue any human being for being alive and not paying royalties. No matter. The race to patent human DNA is on, lawsuits over the right included.

Why did nobody patent breathing, drinking mechanisms, water filters, bottled water, and clothing, or sewing? How about the process of applying heat to food? Then they could sue any human being for being alive and not paying royalties. No matter. The race to patent human DNA is on, lawsuits over the right included.

Why did nobody patent breathing, drinking mechanisms, water filters, bottled water, and clothing, or sewing? How about the process of applying heat to food? Then they could sue any human being for being alive and not paying royalties. No matter. The race to patent human DNA is on, lawsuits over the right included.

Why did nobody patent breathing, drinking mechanisms, water filters, bottled water, and clothing, or sewing? How about the process of applying heat to food? Then they could sue any human being for being alive and not paying royalties. No matter. The race to patent human DNA is on, lawsuits over the right included.

So what does t mean that the patent in question has been withdrawn?

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5787499.html

Wrong patent. The patent is 5787449, not 5787499.

Here is the correct link:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5787449.html[freepatentsonline.com]

So what does t mean that the patent in question has been withdrawn?

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5787499.html

Wrong patent. The patent is 5787449, not 5787499.

Here is the correct link:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5787449.html[freepatentsonline.com]