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Laser TV has existed for a long time using Argon (blue, green) and Krypton (red) lasers as a white light source (either mixed gas or two lasers) The color is chosen using an AOM or a PCAOM (see a patent for laser TV at: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6426781.html ).

The new breakthrough is that we have solid state Diode Pumped Solid State lasers (specifically high power DPSS), you should be familiar with the 532nm green laser pointers. The green is achived through frequency doubling 1064nm infared DPSS lasers. Red lasers need not be frequency doubled because they can manufacture Diode lasers to that frequency and is available in higher power ranges. Blue DPSS lasers were developed, usign 808nm infared lasers frequency doubled, the power available is still really low, (and I can't wait to rip apart a blue ray drive to get the laser out!) and the lasers are extremely expensive. Hopefully with greater production of blue lasers the prices will go down.

The next issue to deal with in the U.S. (I don't know austrailian law) lasers are regulated by the FDA and any laser over the power of 5mw that exposes radiation to the public has to have an FDA varience to legally operate. I am wondering how this TV would be classified. I really would prefer a solid state DPSS laser projector to replace easily broken, expensive to maintain, LCD projectors. If you need more information about this technology sam's laser faq, and the guys at alt.lasers are nice and answer questions.

Peace,
Adam

"You can't do that. Broadcast television is interlaced. VGA is progressive. Never the twain shall meet."

Oh, I wouldn't say that.

BTW DVD players do an internal conversion to interlaced.

Well if you have two of them at two known positions, you could probably get a direction based on the time difference between the signal's arrival at the two stations. Or maybe you could do something with measuring the signal's phase shift. I've never sat down and worked out the problem but it seems like it could be done, on paper at least.

Some Googling reveals that somebody at least has thought of the same concept (and got a patent on it already, although it was filed in 1977, so I think that means it's expired now), no idea if they've ever put it into practice:
Determining azimuth of a transponder by measuring a plurality of phase shifts. Tomasi, Jean-Pierre, United States Patent 4,110,754.

Uh, I'm not so sure that this is entirely new. Maybe the antifreeze additive is new....

Not funny at all. I've posted on this tivo stuff before, and just chose not to get in to it all again. One of the big points of the Tivo technology argued during the case was the 'time warp' function. Tivo's page about the lawsuit - http://investor.tivo.com/ReleaseDetail.cfm?Release ID=207787 - mentions the 'time warp' patent: "The Time Warp patent discloses systems and methods for the simultaneous storage and playback of programs, supporting advanced capabilities such as pausing live television, fast-forwarding, rewinding, instant replays, and slow motion."

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6233389.html has a quick summary, and IIRC, DISH's main defense was that they weren't converting to/from MPEG, so the patent wasn't valid. Also IIRC, that didn't prove to be enough to sway the verdict in their favor in April.

Any 'watching' in TV mode is still buffering to allow for pausing/rewinding/etc, so no matter whether you've got dual tuners or not, the buffering is what is violating the 'time warp' patent. My recollection from the trial notes I'd read was that DISH engineers had testified that their original pre-seeing-using-tivo versions of their DVRs wouldn't allow for pausing/rewinding/fastfwding during 'live' TV, only during playback of previously recorded shows.

This was stuff that was all being developed during the same time period by different companies, at least if we are to believe the Tivo bashers. If so, why were they the only company to be able to figure this out? Other companies had DVRs out even before Tivo which did not have this functionality. If it was simply a hardware limitation issue, the other companies surely still could have patented the idea with working prototypes which would simply be too costly to market (at that time) then bring the tech to market later when costs came down. I don't think that was the case. The materials I've read seem to point to Tivo having come up with a technique which was unique/novel/nonobvious *at that time*, and was able to implement it in a commercial play as well. Believing this to be the case (in absence of evidence to the contrary) I say good on them, and I hope echostar pays through the nose for the violations.

Link to the full patent: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fs rchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6233389.PN.&OS=PN/62333 89&RS=PN/6233389

Stability is an issue, as some people have commented here. I myself can't imagine how you can realistically balance what is essentially a pencil on its sharpened point for any length of time, especially with batteries draining away. The robot must look like some sort of drunk date, listing to and fro with some rather large amplitude.

If it isn't in there already, how about some sort of flywheel/gyro (axis of rotation vertical, along robot chassis) built into the robot, at a height in the chassis that globally minimizes the effective lever distance any lateral force it may receive along its height? All that inertia would do a lot towards keeping the thing upright, just like a top. With good bearings you would drain very little, and it could even be used as a method to rotate the whole robot quite quickly, albeit in one direction unless you have some sort of intermediating transmission, by having a variable clutch to transfer some of the angular force from the flywheel to the chassis.

Hey, you could even make the flywheel out of materials so it also works like one of those static energy storage devices. Here is a somewhat decent link to a patent for one, but it's been covered on our beloved Slashdot before here, here, and here. This would give you a combination source of both electrical and direct mechanical energy for the robot to do with as it would. Theoretically, it could even be the primary power source, eliminating the need for heavy and expensive batteries, but the flywheel would have to spin really fast to store enough energy, and wouldn't have a way to spin back up during quiescent moments.

By the way, the robot building (and fighting!) community explored and exploited such dynamics thoroughly, spinners anyone?

Someone beat you to it.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6903725.html
This is for a ball mouse that generates electricity, optical mouse might be harder to do, but still possible.. Theoretically...

I also found this...

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6906700.html?high light=computer,games

According to the google summary. Patent was filed in 2000 and published in 2005. This is purely just another intended patent infrigement suit against a profitable company.

It is true that the patent system needs some updating because there are old fogies in there who are not up to date with what is going on outside their office walls. This is why you are hearing patent suits of this nature. Some are legitimate while some aren't, while some were clearly made to sue a profitable source. Other than that this is clearly a patent troll.

• Swinging on a swing - http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6368227.html
  
• Publishing on the Internet - http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/00/10/03/1523228.shtml ?tid=155
  
• Converting Windows File Names - http://swpat.ffii.org/patents/samples/ep800142/ind ex.en.html
  
• Learning Language by comparing pronounciation - http://swpat.ffii.org/patents/samples/ep461127/ind ex.en.html

Here's a pathetic example of the crap the USPO grants: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6368227.html (a method for swinging)

What this means is that, much like the court system challenging bad laws, it will take someone to challenge a patent to render its validity. If nobody challenges it, the bad patent stands.

The patent I was referring to is 5158081 and I also found 5549640, which might be relevant.
There seem to be a quite a few related patents, so I really doubt that any treatment based on this new discovery will be patentable.

The patent I was referring to is 5158081 and I also found 5549640, which might be relevant.
There seem to be a quite a few related patents, so I really doubt that any treatment based on this new discovery will be patentable.

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4751751.html

I suggest you have a look at Microsofts patent for a Digital rights management operating system.

Among other horrifying bits:
To protect the rights-managed data resident in memory, the digital rights management operating system refuses to load an untrusted program into memory while the trusted application is executing or removes the data from memory before loading the untrusted program. If the untrusted program executes at the operating system level, such as a debugger, the digital rights management operating system renounces a trusted identity created for it by the computer processor when the computer was booted.

I remember when Steve Ciarcia reported in _Byte_ magazine on a RAM chip, its cover ripped off and replaced with a lens, offering a 256x128pxl (32Kpxl) imaging chip marketed by... Micron Technology.

The patent is for "Tactile feedback man-machine interface device"

As far as I understand it, this is basically the same as what you find in vibrators, except that it's used in a "man-machine interface". Daft, eh? Not the first time I find a patent x which is the same as patent (or prior art) y, except that x is used for purpose z.

I agree with the common /.er view that the USPT needs a major overhaul.

There would be nothing more dangerous than for people to become accustomed to the idea of "beneficial malware" because that might create a false sense of security.

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 sorry, thats been patented.
You need to pay a licensing fee or purchase
an official Cat Chaser(tm) if you want to play
with your cat.

Just maybe they were trying out some new server based on this concept.

here's a wobble yoke flash animation.

can't find a picture of a swashplate engine but here's the old dyna-cam patent. It's not particularly clear what they're talking about but nobody seems to have online pictures. Scroll down this page about halfway and they have a cross-section drawn. If you do an image search on google under 'dyna-cam engine' you'll see what they were working on.

There's something to be said about 400 pounds of dogs chasing a tiny dot, pushing each other out of the way.

Interesting. Have you ever tried to patent that?

If you do, be sure to note prior art.

Oh yeah, and I want a cut. :o)

It was innovative at the time of filing: 1987-04-06

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4734690.html

And people are only now violating it, nearly 19 years later. Give it one more year and it will have expired!

Here you go.
US Patent #4804949: Hand-held optical scanner and computer mouse.

As you can see, the patent is quite old. It was filed in 1987, published in 1989.

Interesting. It could be that the chip-architect article is mistaken, but it was right about Yamhill, and also mentions an Intel patent that involves an on-chip crypto engine. (I think it means #6542981 [PDF], not the one referenced.) Alternatively, Intel could be lying, or just have changed plans since 2003.

But the two aren't really incompatible. The circuitry that the monograph points to is allegedly part of La Grande, Intel's proprietary version of Trusted Computing, not a TCG-compliant TPM. That’s even worse in a way, as it would mean software that only runs on an Intel CPU (and an Intel chipset: La Grande will also require a TPM and AMT, a proprietary technology in Intel network cards).

On-CPU crypto might also have something to do with trusted components. The TCG's long-term plan is to have some form of hardware signing/encryption in everything, not just a single chip in every PC. Most of the focus so far is on graphics/sound cards (for DRM) and keyboards/mice (to stop hardware sniffers), though.

I was aware that the TCPA predates the official announcements about Palladium, etc., but I thought that meant technical work. It's disturbing that the White House and the BSA were involved so far back, and that they chose the immediate aftermath of 9/11 to talk about it publicly.

You can read the patent yourself if you don't believe me. They claim the rights to do anything with the BRCA1 gene. Legally, you have to send your genetic sample to Myriad Genetics and pay them ~$3000 to even sequence the gene. Here's claim number one, which should demonstrate my point:

1. A method for detecting a germline alteration in a BRCA1 gene, said alteration selected from the group consisting of the alterations set forth in Tables 12A, 14, 18 or 19 in a human which comprises analyzing a sequence of a BRCA1 gene or BRCA1 RNA from a human sample or analyzing a sequence of BRCA1 cDNA made from mRNA from said human sample with the proviso that said germline alteration is not a deletion of 4 nucleotides corresponding to base numbers 4184-4187 of SEQ ID NO:1.

How is patenting a mutation of a gene any different from patenting a gene? You're still patenting a genetic sequence. I think it's fair to say that mutations in just about any gene can cause pathogenic effects, but if those mutations occur naturally, why should anyone be able to patent them? The sequence would exist whether Myriad discovered it or not. They don't have any new technology--just a sequence. Instead of coming up with something novel, they claim the rights to use pre-existing technology to detect a common variant (~3% of the population) of the BRCA1 gene. Claim 10 is just one example:

10. The method of claim 1 wherein a germline alteration is detected by amplifying BRCA1 gene nucleic acids in said sample, hybridizing the amplified nucleic acids to a BRCA1 DNA probe which specifically hybridizes to nucleic acids containing at least one of said alterations and not to wild-type BRCA1 sequences and detecting the presence of a hybridization product, wherein a presence of said product indicates the presence of said germline alteration.

Abstract: A method of swing on a swing is disclosed, in which a user positioned on a standard swing suspended by two chains from a substantially horizontal tree branch induces side to side motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other.

The application concludes with:

Lastly, it should be noted that because pulling alternately on one chain and then the other resembles in some measure the movements one would use to swing from vines in a dense jungle forest, the swinging method of the present invention may be referred to by the present inventor and his sister as "Tarzan" swinging. The user may even choose to produce a Tarzan-type yell while swinging in the manner described, which more accurately replicates swinging on vines in a dense jungle forest. Actual jungle forestry is not required.

Licenses are available from the inventor upon request.

Any invention that requires a large amount of upfront investment simply wouldn't happen if there wasn't some way to prevent competitors leeching off your R&D effort. This is so different from a new pizza topping that "order of magnitude" doesn't even begin to cover it.

Maybe, but most of the patents we see filed these days are comparable in their complexity to the new pizza topping. I could start listing them by thousands from Amazon's one click shopping patent to these, but I'm not going waste my time on it. What I'm saying, is that there a are some huge flaws in the patent system that unless they get fixed, they make the whole idea of patents stink.

Our patent system didn't used to work the way it does today. You had to submit a scale model of the thing you were patenting. Today you can patent a business model, part of the human genome, all kinds of ridiculous stuff. The legislature is doing a horrible job of defining what's patentable I agree, but you must also agree that the non-obvious consideration when evaluating a patent application seems to have just disappeared in many cases.

"My point is that people who work in IP and patents pretty unanimously see problems with the patent system as applied to computer and software technology, but those problems are almost always completely different than the ranting from groups like Slashdot."

So what sort of problems do they see? And are you sure that they just don't see the same problems as the slashdot crowd because they don't know as much about computers? Something computer-related may seem non-obvious and new to a given patent examiner, while IT professionals would immediately recognize it as neither.

This is still my favorite patent http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5443036.html/ - a method of exercising a cat with a laser pointer. C'mon - the patent examiner for that must be retarded. Gimme that one at least.

If you look carefully under the diagram (Fig 1) there are two links to one of the patents - #6,015,258. Pictures and all (although the uspto site didn't show the pics properly for me). Text version or PDF.

1. 'how to swing on a swing set',
   
2. Stamp moistener (with your tongue!!!),
   
3. Towel with a neck loop,
   
4. Light bulb changer, weighing over 100 lbs.,
   
5. 6 duplicative patents on 'cat toys on a string attached to a stick'1,2,3,4,5,6,
   

1. 'how to swing on a swing set',
   
2. Stamp moistener (with your tongue!!!),
   
3. Towel with a neck loop,
   
4. Light bulb changer, weighing over 100 lbs.,
   
5. 6 duplicative patents on 'cat toys on a string attached to a stick'1,2,3,4,5,6,
   

1. 'how to swing on a swing set',
   
2. Stamp moistener (with your tongue!!!),
   
3. Towel with a neck loop,
   
4. Light bulb changer, weighing over 100 lbs.,
   
5. 6 duplicative patents on 'cat toys on a string attached to a stick'1,2,3,4,5,6,
   

1. 'how to swing on a swing set',
   
2. Stamp moistener (with your tongue!!!),
   
3. Towel with a neck loop,
   
4. Light bulb changer, weighing over 100 lbs.,
   
5. 6 duplicative patents on 'cat toys on a string attached to a stick'1,2,3,4,5,6,
   

1. 'how to swing on a swing set',
   
2. Stamp moistener (with your tongue!!!),
   
3. Towel with a neck loop,
   
4. Light bulb changer, weighing over 100 lbs.,
   
5. 6 duplicative patents on 'cat toys on a string attached to a stick'1,2,3,4,5,6,
   

1. 'how to swing on a swing set',
   
2. Stamp moistener (with your tongue!!!),
   
3. Towel with a neck loop,
   
4. Light bulb changer, weighing over 100 lbs.,
   
5. 6 duplicative patents on 'cat toys on a string attached to a stick'1,2,3,4,5,6,
   

1. 'how to swing on a swing set',
   
2. Stamp moistener (with your tongue!!!),
   
3. Towel with a neck loop,
   
4. Light bulb changer, weighing over 100 lbs.,
   
5. 6 duplicative patents on 'cat toys on a string attached to a stick'1,2,3,4,5,6,
   

1. 'how to swing on a swing set',
   
2. Stamp moistener (with your tongue!!!),
   
3. Towel with a neck loop,
   
4. Light bulb changer, weighing over 100 lbs.,
   
5. 6 duplicative patents on 'cat toys on a string attached to a stick'1,2,3,4,5,6,
   

1. 'how to swing on a swing set',
   
2. Stamp moistener (with your tongue!!!),
   
3. Towel with a neck loop,
   
4. Light bulb changer, weighing over 100 lbs.,
   
5. 6 duplicative patents on 'cat toys on a string attached to a stick'1,2,3,4,5,6,
   

1. 'how to swing on a swing set',
   
2. Stamp moistener (with your tongue!!!),
   
3. Towel with a neck loop,
   
4. Light bulb changer, weighing over 100 lbs.,
   
5. 6 duplicative patents on 'cat toys on a string attached to a stick'1,2,3,4,5,6,
   

Application Number: 324443

Filing Date: 1994-10-17

Publication Date: 1998-11-17

So unfourtnatly your november 1995 document is a post dated publication and as such does not qualify as prior art under any provisions of 35 U.S.C 102, and thusly is unable to be applied as prior art...

Just thought you may want to have some of your patent law straightened out for you...

The abstract is just there for shits and giggles. The "inventor" can outright lie about the patent in the abstract, and some previous patent story here had two different patents with the exact same abstract. The abstract could just as easily have read "This is an invention to create happy fun places with sunshine and happiness for all!"

It's the claims that count, all they need is a claim like

12512: A method as in any of the above where the data is stored in a hiearchical format.

and they'd have XML by the balls (pending prior art).

In fact in the first patent the word "hiearchical" doesn't occur in any of the claims at all, and claim 14 describes the process by which most XML parsers work (matching data in the document to variables in the program). The second patent again doesn't mention the word anywhere in the claims, but the claims pretty much describe hierarchical data ("sub-clusters", etc).

SGML should be our prior-art saving grace though, even after all of these years of pushing "separation of presentation and data", I'm sure you can find someone who can argue that presentation is data ;)

The abstract is just there for shits and giggles. The "inventor" can outright lie about the patent in the abstract, and some previous patent story here had two different patents with the exact same abstract. The abstract could just as easily have read "This is an invention to create happy fun places with sunshine and happiness for all!"

It's the claims that count, all they need is a claim like

12512: A method as in any of the above where the data is stored in a hiearchical format.

and they'd have XML by the balls (pending prior art).

In fact in the first patent the word "hiearchical" doesn't occur in any of the claims at all, and claim 14 describes the process by which most XML parsers work (matching data in the document to variables in the program). The second patent again doesn't mention the word anywhere in the claims, but the claims pretty much describe hierarchical data ("sub-clusters", etc).

SGML should be our prior-art saving grace though, even after all of these years of pushing "separation of presentation and data", I'm sure you can find someone who can argue that presentation is data ;)

Here is an example of a "Gene Patent" Nucleotide sequences which code for the menE gene, United States Patent 6946271.

It really looks like most of the claims are about the sequence, not any particular utility for it! Of course, it does say what the proteins that the sequence codes for is and does.

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5668601.html 60% down: If the is sync error is above the limit of the human audio sensitivity, a listener/viewer will notice the discrepancy. Generally, the sensible limit of the lip sync error is said to be about several milliseconds.

Overal they might make some things marginally more efficient, but they aren't solving any fundamental problems. They're simply moving some around slightly.

Some patents are much more useful, however. ;)

Someone already beat you to it.

I'll start by comparing screen corners to pie menus:

To quote Tog on Fitts' Law: "The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target." He points out that "the screen edge is, for all practical purposes, infinitely deep."

But the advantage of "screen corners" is just an indirect and wasteful application of Fitts' Law, which pie menus exploit much more directly, efficiently and flexibly than "screen corners". Tog's "screen corner" argument is just an ex post facto application of Fitts' Law: an after-the-fact rationalization, not the reason they originally designed the menu bar that way. If Fitts' Law was really the reason Apple designed their menu bar that way, then why aren't there four menu bars, one at each edge of the screen? Apple never mentioned Fitts' Law in their infamous menu bar patent.

Pie menus "slices" are better than "screen corners" or "menu bars" because:

Screen corners and edges are static and fixed in number, so they only enable a small fixed number of global commands at once.

Pie menus are dynamic and context sensitive, so each pie menu can have multiple slices, with a different set of functions associated with each, including submenus. The screen only has four corners and four edges, but pie menus are extremely reliable with eight items, and can support up to 12 items reliably.

Pie menus also support submenus, so you can have an infinite combination of pie menu items, depending on the context you click on, instead of just four screen corners or four menu bars.

Each pie menu item is easier to hit than any screen corner, because every pie slice target area starts directly adjacent to the cursor and extends all the way out to the screen edge, and beyond!

Screen corners and menu bars flaunt Fitts' Law by requiring you to physically move the mouse a large distance, and they usually leave the cursor far away from the object you're manipulating.

Pie menu target area "slices" extend all the way out to the edge of the screen and beyond, so their area is quite large, but you don't have to actually move all the way to the screen edge to select them. You simply move the cursor outside of the small inactive area in the pie menu center. Each "slice" target area starts out directly adjacent to the cursor, in a different direction, and occupies a large area extending out to the edge of the screen.

Fitts' Law relates the target seek time and error rate to the target area and distance from the cursor. The bigger the target and the closer the target, the faster the seletion and fewer errors. Pie menus maximize the target area and minimize the target distance, so consequently they minimize both the speed and error rate, as Fitts' Law predicts.

Pie menus have been empirically proven to be 20% faster than the linear menus, and about half the error rate ("A Comparative Analysis of Pie Menu Performance"; by Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser, and Ben Shneiderman; Proc. CHI'88 conference, Washington D.C.)

Screen corners are worse than pie menus, because they actually have smaller target areas than pie menu slices, and actually maximize the distance from the cursor by putting the target as far away from the cursor as possible.

Tog claims the screen edge target area is "infinitely deep", but in practice you never move the cursor an infinite distanc

No, you are wrong. What we are seeing are bad patents that are neither unique nor novel and companies abusing the patent system here in the US.

So we end up with patents like Amazon's assinine "one-click" patent, to Kodak pulling out their Wang patents against Java.

I could post links to bad software patents all day long that pretty much 'eclipse' your idea of "really good arguments".

Personally, I take a more balanced view

But the problem is that the system is so abused that it is dishonest, if not immoral. You would think that EU representatives/legal committees would recognize this, hence my parent post.

Also, I find your comment about little software companies really offensive, as many of us work for such companies and it's how we put food on the table.