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When these landlubbers mix up terms. For instance, "The ship is docked..." or "Tied up..." when it's really MOORED.

But, FTA, what caught my eye was:

"They call it scrambling"

BZZZT! Get ur stuff right, reporters. It's SCRAM, as in Safety Control Rod Activation Mechanism. I frackin' knew this back in 80, as a 15-year old. WTF is wrong with these well-funded reporting arms out there? So, the text probably ought have said, "They call it SCRAMing"..., that is, unless something changed that i didn't know about in the past decade or so...

If the reporter wants to discuss "reactors" and "scrambling", then maybe the story should cover intra-molecular scrambling....

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1381116996002701

But, the reporter should have done some basic patent and process checking:

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4337118.html

"APRM 40 transmits a scram signal to the rod drive system 6 to scram the reactor. Scramming takes place when the power level reaches about 120% of the ..."

Yeah there are quite a few products like that, but most of them are really complex and cancel eachother out (making both ineffective for their original use), at least with respect to something as simple as a piece of fabric being able to seperate them.

But you could combine a fuel with another liquid that releases fumes that cancels out the feuls fumes, so that if there was a leak an ignition would be far less or completely impossible.

But a simple piece of this cloth in a feul filter, could seperate the feul from the liquid, use the feul, and then use the liquid to say cool the engine.

A better version of: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4158551.html

If they're full of toxins, then they're removing them from the water. That's a good thing, since otherwise the toxins end up elsewhere in the food chain. So the choice is now either toxin-laden fish (and the amphibians, birds, and people that feed on them), or toxin-laden mussels.

Some of those toxins are probably heavy metals. It might be interesting to do a bit of gene tweaking (maybe something simple as selective breeding will do it, since they breed fast enough) to get mussels that preferentially accumulate heavy metals. Then they could be "mined". Some things are only toxins because they're in the wrong place - the food supply.

Maybe the shells can be used as filler in concrete ... they're already being used for no-growth boat bottom paint.

Maybe we should be putting mussels into the holding pens at sewage treatment plants.

FWIW, I assume the PTO is run by pretty clever people

I assume it's run by government employees, take that as you will. As for the office itself, it gets paid when you file a patent, paid when they grant a patent, and paid when someone wants to challenge the patent they granted: follow the money and you'll see that the entire thing is set up to not reject bullshit.

Take a look at the linked list patent posted by an AC in the firehose. It's a bit old news, it was granted in 2006, but it's very straight forward, there's no mystery as to what the patent does, and it covers anyone who doubly links their list in a sorted order, because apparently this company invented the idea of combining a linked list with a sort algorithm sometime around 2001 (a year before they submitted the patent in 2002). If I looked through the big box of floppies hard enough, I'd be able to find my highschool CS homework where I created a linked list of peoples names sorted in last name and first name orders, using ^.nextfn and ^.nextln in turbo pascal in '95 or so. That's the level of this patent: high school homework.

Next up comes the "flip camera" patent: Read this and tell me HOW to implement compression and decompression on a single chip. You can't, can you? Funny, that was the POINT of patents: to force inventors to reveal their innermost secrets in exchange for years of protection, so that everyone else could learn from their genius. Maybe you can tell me what's so special about doing this using only one chip? Do you not think that in the past 4 decades of miniturization, that it would not be "obvious" to a "person having ordinary skill in the art" of electronics that two chips could be combined together? Remember, we've been getting entire Systems on A Chip for years now, the time for inventing "... on one chip" was well over a decade ago (in fact, the system on a chip "first appeared in the LSI market 12 years ago" in 2006, making the idea (which, face it: the idea is the only thing worth mentioning in this patent) at least 3 years older than the 1997 filing date on that patent).

So, as the old saying goes, it's better to keep your mouth shut and let everyone assume you're an idiot than to open your mouth and prove it. Based on the junk coming out of the patent office's "mouth", how do you support the "pretty clever" assumption you have made?

Obvious means 'Easily seen through because of a lack of subtlety'

We are talking about the ability to manipulate a buffer. Or to work with something half-downloaded. I have personally re-invented this concept, pretty much independently of Tivo -- in this case, it was figuring out that you can play back a file that is partially downloaded, before the download finishes. Looks like YouTube and everyone else are doing the same thing there.

MP3 is patented by side-effect; The MP3 patent covers a particular wavelet function that mp3 decoders need to use. It's entirely possible there's another function that produces the same result, but it's not the act of playing wavelet-compressed sounds that's patented here.

It is, however, the act of playing back any file which conforms to that mp3 standard. Yes, it is by side effect, but the result is the same -- despite the implementation being completely different, and the context being completely different, royalties must be paid.

Perhaps you simply hate patents, and hate TiVO because they patented something?

I don't have TiVo. And I am interested to see how this plays out.

I do hate patents. I feel that they retard progress more than promote it, and thus defeat their own original purpose. And I feel that 15 years is an insanely long time in today's world -- the patented item would either be irrelevant or already dominant within maybe two years.

But I don't actually know enough about the patents in question. However, if the concept is simply "pausing live TV", then it absolutely was an obvious idea, in that anyone forced to use Linux video tools from that time period would likely have come up with the same thing.

Would MythTV have come up with the idea of pausing and rewinding live TV using the method described by TiVO *without* TiVO?

The MythTV project, as is, might not exist. But someone would have.

The MythTV developers seem to think not, do you?

From that page:

It's credited with being a major influence on MythTV...

Nowhere does it say that MythTV could never have come up with the idea without TiVo.

Ah no. There's a very old light bulb which demonstrates that there's a significant amount of wiggle room in both the manufacturing and the materials.

And nothing on that page says anything about the manufacturing or the materials.

Do you just like to post impressive-looking links, hoping that people won't actually read them? Or is there a substance I am missing? That's not entirely a rhetorical question, by the way.

You can't patent a mere idea. You patent an *invention*. It has to be something that can be built (although not necessarily work).

Yes, in theory. But that's not what's happening.

Allow me to direct you to this patent on what is effectively "dd if=/dev/hda of=/media/my-flash-device/mbr.img bs=512 count=1"

Or maybe you'd like to know about this patent...

I could go on. And on. The fact is, the patent system is so thoroughly broken right now that my first reaction to just about any patent is to question whether or not it should actually be a patent. I mean, somebody's got to question it, and the US Patent Office certainly isn't...

Nobody's patented "playing mp3 files" either.

They have, however, patented an "invention" which is required to play MP3 files. Which is the whole point, really -- I can't legally play MP3 files without permission to use that wavelet function, which is, after all, even more general than MP3. It's also, by the way, one reason people are wary of MSOOXML.

Well then you'll be all over (literally) whatever Apple has planned with their new patent filing regarding 3D display systems.

Memory device with dual cantilever means, United States Patent 5036490, IBM, published 07/30/1991. TFA talks about IBM's Millipede project, which looks like something similar.

A better summary would have said "Improvements to cantilever memory hold promise for 1TB chips by 2018" or something similar.

Wikipedia has some information on non-memory uses of micro-cantilevers.

When you made your indepth investigation of dates on wikipedia, why did you only look at one side? It's nice that that Nakamura claims invention of the blue LED (not what Neuman is suing over btw) in 1991. But the patent that she is suing over is for a particular type of doping that is useful to create these LEDs - which she filed in 1988.

Try and get your basic facts rights before you post your pathetic righteous indignation that the FTC doesn't just conduct its business on wikipedia.

Patent infringement!

This might allow some intelligent discussion about the actual topic, rather than a flamefest about whether or not patents should exists.

Since INL I have no idea WTF the link is saying. So I'll just STFU for now.

-mcgrew

Are you sure? I'm sure there's no reason they couldn't.

From a quick Googling, it looks like some work has been done in this area.

>> In fact, a large number of CS majors apparently believe that everything can be
>> implemented in a virtual machine and that both memory and [CPU] cycles are infinite.
>
> Good for them; Alan Turing believed it too.

And now it is a near reality. Memory and CPU cycles are abundant and do not play much role in slowing down today's programs. Incompetent programmers who don't know how to program IO, or how to make their code small, slow down today's programs. As for virtual machines, there is no reason why the Java VM couldn't be implemented in hardware. It is already partially implemented.

"Medicinal nitroglycerin is chemically identical to the explosive, but it is safe because it is far more dilute than pure nitroglycerin, and is bound to other inert substances that disrupts its perfect oxygen balance."

It's also put in condoms to improve erectile function, as it's a vasodilator.

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4829991.html
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5741511-description.html
http://tvnz.co.nz/view/news_health_story_skin/529240%3Fformat=html

Several of us in the Netrek community consulted with a set of patent defense lawyers back in 2000 to use Netrek as prior art to kill Patent number 5,822,523 claims 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6, which also killed 6018766 I think.

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5822523.html

I didn't get involved in consulting for the Goldberg patent, but I did in 2000. Had a few long face to face meetings with the defense's lawyers, showed them the game, did a technical presentation, presented a few packet logs, and got a few free meals out of it. From that, they understood the claims well enough that they got the appropriate declarations from the appropriate original developers.

The result of which the defense submitted a motion to declare the claims invalid, and the judge had a draft ruling granting the motion and was about to issue a final ruling, but the plaintiffs either dropped the case, or settled out of court. The parties were Lipstream vs. HearMe. (Lipstream were the defendants, HearMe the plaintiffs)

I have a PDF copy of the ruling somewhere in my archives. It used to be on netrek.org, but got dropped in a recent site-move and redesign.

I don't remember the name of the company but about 8 or 9 years ago I was offered an Intel webcam and a subscription to I believe it was Popular Mechanics if I would once a month use the webcam to scan a specially encoded picture/barcode on some of the magazine pages and give my feedback.

I told them it pretty much sucked and was a waste of time since the webcam was connected with a 6 foot cable and I have internet access. Why the hell would I want to hold up a magazine to scan the barcode image so that a website pops up telling me about it when I can just type the damn thing into a search engine myself?

They stopped asking for my opinion after a couple months although I was supposed to keep giving them for 12 months total. Using a cellphone camera makes a hell of a lot more sense since it's portable. Hmm - did a web search and came up with this site (sounds like it might be the same company) - http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7261612.html . Looks like they may have come up with some more useful applications for the technology.

Couple of things:

1. The automation of a catapult launch is a bit different from an autopilot. The pilot (AFAIK) still controls the plane once it leaves the deck. The computers just control the various factors of the plane's configuration necessary for a successful catapult. Once it's off the deck, it's still up to the pilot to keep it in the air and make the necessary clearing turns. Think of it more as a safety feature built into the fly-by-wire.

You can read one of the patents for such a system here:

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6793176.html

2. On the subject of magnesium, I think you might find the NeXT Cube burning story interesting. Linky:

http://www.simson.net/hacks/cubefire.html

In particular, you'll note how amazingly difficult it was to get the blasted thing ignited. :-)

Reaction yes. Explosive no.

It's not like nobody ever considered the risks before. http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=7208928

In this study they poured molten sodium into regular old limestone based concrete crucibles. It took about an hour and a half for the reaction to culminate and it left behind black slag in the crucible and a sodium oxide aresol, probably the "sodium snow" described in the film. Where I come from, explosions take seconds or less and not over an hour.

To minimize the damage to structural integrity, the line at risk areas. Metal, or special sodium resistant concretes.

Bad yes. Near miss for Nuclear Meltdown? No. Since this isn't supposed to happen, you have to re-examine all of your other places that may have the same or similar means of failing, and the re-certify the design. Very expensive and time consuming

There's already a similar patent

Who needs heart rate monitoring when you have one of these
All MS needs to do is hook their employees up to one of these and monitor the angle and pressure. That'll cut down on porn surfing, inter-office liasons and daydreams of Natalie Portman. That'll increase productivity alone.

You may think you are dealing with science, but you have no clue what you are talking about. What the hell is "Electrical coloration" and what the hell does it have to do with audio cables? Hint, there's a patent: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/3891513.html

I understand "passion" but I detest the flawed logic and junk or pseudo science of audiophiles.

The point is that no one can demonstrate with a double blind test that finely stranded cables sufficiently sized by gauge sound any different than any other. Sure, with an oscilloscope and a spectrum analyzer, you can show that one cable or another have different behaviors with RF frequencies, but hell you can do hat just by bending it different or putting a ferrous core at each end. With audio frequencies, the dust in the air has more affect on audio waves than any noise you are likely to pick up.

That's all 25 claims dead right there.

Odd. I thought at some point that the post had the link to the http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20060160053.html patent itself in it. But the "a" tag doesn't seem to be working for me. myminicity madness counteraction?

.. the future tech, just like Ken Perlin patented his fixed-up procedural noise.

I know, I know... "what!? it's patented??? But it's a textbook example in a gazillion books - and none of them mentioned anything!". yeah, sucks to be a graphics developer just realizing this - I know.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6867776.html

Back to his patent-free but discontinuity-happy noise.

Do you think telephones and ATMs aren't covered by patents?

If it's obvious, then why hasn't anybody implemented it yet? If it's worthless and obvious, then why does anybody care if Apple has a patent on it? I don't see anybody raising hell over "Method of exercising a cat".

Was it one of the ones sold as a pet exerciser under this patent, or will the IP cops need to visit your friend? ;-)

Bah, this is nothing. EEStor's EESU ultracapcitor prototype gets charge times like this, a leakage rate of 0.1% per month, virtually no degradation over time, and has over twice the energy density of the best lithium-ion batteries on the market, with half the cost of lead-acid. The science behind it is sound (a lot of these titanates have crazy permittivity from the perspective of individual crystals, and if you can eliminate the voids traditionally left by sintering, as they appear to have done, it can't arc discharge through them when you make bulk ceramics). The economics looks sound, too (nickel electrodes aren't that expensive, nor is anything needed to produce barium titanate). The only real question is whether they can actually commercialize them rather than just make and operate them in the lab (the typical sticking factor). Their mass production facility has hit its milestone for barium titanate purity, as tested by an outside lab, but they haven't yet hit their mass produced ceramic permittivity testing milestone. The company is abnormally tight-lipped; both scammers and legit companies are typically shouting about how great they are in order to get more money, but EEStor is being so quiet that the only way you can generally get info about what's going on is to talk to the company that gets their first units, ZENN Motors.

Either way, here's to hoping. :) Something like that would basically change the world. Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Beyers (the main funders, a major investment firm famous for early buys on tech companies that made it big -- Amazon.com, AOL, Compaq, Electronic Arts, Google, Intuit, Macromedia, Netscape, Sun, etc) calls it their "highest risk, highest reward" investment. Its a shame that ZENN has the initial exclusive rights to their capacitors for electric vehicles; I find ZENN's vehicles to be the ugliest, least interesting electrics being put on the market.

One of the most interesting works in this field was Dynamic synapse for signal processing in neural networks, unfortunatelly that was 2002!

"The concentration of uranium in soil ranges from 0.7 to 11 parts per million (up to 15 parts per million in farmland soil due to use of phosphate fertilizers), and 3 parts per billion of sea water is composed of the element." So there is far more uranium in the ground than the ocean but it's still fairly cheep to extract it from the ocean because of the insane amount of energy in tiny amounts of uranium.

Anyway, you don't extract uranium by boiling the sea you use some sort of ion exchange or http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4585627.html. If you used uranium from sea water you would increase the cost around 4%. And using Uranium from sea water is still 100's of times energy positive. So it works on an economic and energy basis. But it's pointless at this point in time we 100's of years of stock piled uranium already mined and waiting to be used.

Up to this point we have focused on extracting around 2% of the energy from high energy uranium ore. At this point we use depleted uranium in bullets even though it has more than 10,000 times the energy density of crude oil.

You mean things like these? http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6153958.html http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6211589.html http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:-TuUthMBszcJ:www.bretagne.ens-cachan.fr/pdf/mecatronique/EnergiesRenouv/Flywheel_Bernard_PCIM2003.PDF+energy+storage+centrifuge&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=11 http://www.google.com/search?q=energy+storage+centrifuge&hl=en&start=10&sa=N

I forgot that TrueType wasn't actually owned by Microsoft. But it seems they own plenty of other printer-related patents.

For example, a pendulum suspended from a high-quality bearing, oscillating in air, would have a high Q, while a pendulum immersed in oil would have a low one.

For example, a pendulum suspended from a high-quality bearing, oscillating in air, would have a high Q, while a pendulum immersed in oil would have a low one.

Evidently there's at LEAST one, as a search on "flash disk" there redirects you to "flash drive".

If you'd looked, you'd have seen what the rest of us did. While Samsung may call it a drive, they're smart enough to know the Sheeple might call it a disk, and include metatags to suit the crawlers...

Ya want positive or negative drive?

Sure. Here's the patent: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20070154448.html And the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_P

I'm sure you could do something with this and a willing partner...

Hard drives are a good example of your point, but I would consider them a special market. What can you possibly think of as a way to improve them? The latest "innovation" is perpendicular recording, which was thought up back in the 1970s. Manufacturers are competing not in an "innovation" sense - simply because the product can't be improved unless everybody does it at the same time. Native Command Queuing and Serial ATA wouldn't have taken off if everybody hadn't done them. NCQ doesn't even lead to major performance increases, it just makes storing more data on the same platter cost less. The next step is flash-based drives, which all the major players are working on making cheaply at the moment, but this is just a different way of storing data. In fact, that's all a hard drive will ever do - store data.

This particular patent appears to patent a semiconductor material and is incredibly general. This line makes me laugh at its generality:

...wherein the range of alumina is from 15% to 85% and the range of zirconia is from 15% to 85%.

If you bother reading the whole patent...well, I really can't imagine this claim standing up in court.

Assuming this claim does not stand up in court, then the patent system works. If any of the hard drive companies try to patent a component, four other companies can point to the research they've been doing as prior art. This forces companies to continue researching. Sure, it wastes time and money, but it sure as hell beats the alternative. The alternative, of course, is one company not researching anymore, but simply copying the works of others and selling a cheaper product. OEMs will switch to them (because the majority of them couldn't care less about reliability and they sure as hell don't care about getting the "original" product). Using this advantage, one manufacturer will eventually establish an effective monopoly wherein no innovation will occur.

What about a new company? If they (hypothetically) come out with a truly unique way to do hard drives, then, in a patentless system, all the major players would simply copy that idea. Having the idea first means nothing, as the major players already have the money and the fabrication labs to outproduce you. Your only hope is to be hired by one of the companies that took your idea - but why would they do that? They would have to pay you. Where is the freedom?

I'm all for patent reform, but this is one of many markets where patents actually force innovation, although not in the way that patents were originally intended.

Actually, I just did a bit of checking online:

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/help/item/When-does-a-patent-expire.html

1. U.S. Patents filed after June 8, 1995 expire 20 years from the date of filing.

2. U.S. Patents filed prior to June 8, 1995 expire 17 years from the date of issue, or 20 years from the first non-provisional patent application in the family - whichever is later.

This patent was filed in 1987 and issued in 1991. So based on the filing date its already expired.

All you need is an appropriate length of oxygen free copper cable/wire with sufficient shielding and appropriate gauge. All but the lowest of low end OEM cables meet these needs. Beyond this, there is zero difference in cables other than packaging and branding. Any perceived difference is in the listeners head.

Close but a few facts are left out. Lets touch base on speaker cable and what it needs to do. It needs to move electric power from one place to another. Along the way it needs to keep most of the power (all cable has resistance and loss even superconductors which have a bit less). In moving power is should deliver all frequencies the same.

Now back to your statement... oxygen free copper cable/wire Hmm, the first step seems to trend to snake oil. I'll grant you that oxygen free has lower resistance than plain copper, but how much? Is it worth the money? Would the money be better spent on maybe a larger wire size? You will find the lack of copper wire resistance tables for copper wire and oxygen free copper wire almost completely absent. The reason is because the change is almost not measurable. If it essentially makes no change, why spend the money.

Copper wire facts are easy to find and are well docummented.

http://www.otherpower.com/cgi-bin/webbbs/webbbs_config.pl?noframes;read=6346
http://www.stealth316.com/2-wire-resistance.htm
http://www.epanorama.net/documents/wiring/wire_resistance.html
http://amasci.com/tesla/wire1.txt
http://www.thelenchannel.com/1wire.php

On the other hand the data on oxygen free seems to be tied up in perceptions and not solid facts. Where are the tables?

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20060198757.html
http://mobile-emotions.com/speakerwire_faq.html?1062644160781
http://www.roger-russell.com/wire.htm
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5443665-description.html
http://www.cda.org.uk/megab2/elecapps/pub122/sec72.htm

"Oddly enough, it isn't the freedom of oxygen in copper wire that makes any difference. The process of removing oxygen also removes the impurity of iron and it's this impurity that can cause the resistance to be slightly higher."

Could someone please define and give a measurement to me for Slightly higher? As in is the change enough to spend money on? Until someone publishes a table, I would assume slightly higher is slightly less than the measuring test equipment. A larger wire size is a measurable change. Oxygen free as far as I am concerned is below the threshold of measurement.

Beyond this, there is zero difference in cables other than packaging and branding.

OK here I disagree with you again. The number of strands and twist in the wire affect the ability of a wire to withstand repeated flexing. When I worked doing some TV studio stuff, I had to show some of the features of some of the cable to the staff. The low loss and low price was a draw to the PHB who thought he was a studio engineer. I showed him the flaw in his reasoning when I held up a 3 foot piece of coax and pushed out a ceiling tile. Then I held up a 1 foot length of super flex which had much poorer response and the 1 foot length flopped over like a piece of braided nylon rope. The signal loss for the studio was a trade off for cable that stood up well following the cameras without breaking. A cable that lays flat instead

"Attempting to recover data packed at a density of 1 GB/sq.in. from a disk spinning at 10,000 revolutions per minute where the actual data is stored in a micron thin layer of rust on the surface of the disk is manifestly impossible."

It's not always iron oxide . Sometimes it's Cobalt

We have a programmer who even gets to write his own business cards. He ended up being our "princapal developer" so apparently we get to loan him out on occasion.

My solution was along the lines of "strings *.so | aspell" you might need to use c++filt to demangle c++ names.

aspell 0.5 handled compound words, but apparently doesn't anymore. However, during a quick search I found this which has the most obvious patent abstract I have ever seen and probably means that any solution to this problem will violate a patent!

Note that this is more of a glob than a regex. A regular expression would need some character before the * to denote what is repeated 0 or more times.
Thus, you'd have .*ball instead of *ball, or [:lower:]*ball if you want to make sure to only match lower-case letters instead of looking like garbage.

I mean, if you're going to be pedantic, be sure to get it right!

(Besides, who says it was meant to represent multiple sports instead of using symbols to censor a word the poster considers obscene? Incidentally, I just found out that this is patented.)

10 minutes may be an average, but like lunar eclipses, geosynchronous satellites don't eclipse on every orbit, instead, there's something called "eclipse season". I'd expect this to occur twice a year.

Eclipses will occur no further south along the orbit than about 2 hours below the equator on either side, and no further north than about 2.5 hours above the equator on either side. The maximum eclipse duration will be about 79-80 minutes. The longer eclipses occur when the shadow is above the equator, because the farther away from perigee the spacecraft gets, the slower it moves, and the longer it takes to get through the earth's shadow.

3. Proclaim that computer science doesn't need math.
4. ????
5. Profit!!

3. Proclaim that computer science doesn't need math.
4. ????
5. Profit!!

3. Proclaim that computer science doesn't need math.
4. ????
5. Profit!!

Not unless they pay this guy:

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20050174322.html

So basically after tahoe, reno and vegas, fasttcp is a nex gen congestion algorithm.
Benefits of fasttcp can be observed at 1gbps an up.

All this good an well but will Linux suport it ?
Not sure because it's patend pending technology.

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20070121511.html

"The cleaned garbage cans are then placed on a clean garbage conveyor 56 from where they pass through a microwave station 58."

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20020023860.html

The patent does not state why the microwave action though, it could be for disinfectant purposes?