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A method of reducing atmospheric warming due to the greenhouse effect resulting from a layer of gases in the atmosphere which absorb strongly near infrared wavelength radiation, comprising the step of dispersing tiny particles of a material within the gases' layer, the particle material characterized by wavelength-dependent emissivity or reflectivity, in that said material has high emissivities with respect to radiation in the visible and far infrared wavelength spectra, and low emissivity in the near infrared wavelength spectrum, whereby said tiny particles provide a means for converting infrared heat energy into far infrared radiation which is radiated into space.

The amount of traffic generated by resets really isn't that bad, unless there is swarming from ignore the resets or simply doesn't assume the packet will even make it, usually P2P application.

How do I know? I work for the company that uses this Patent 6,044,402 but I don't think China will be sending a check anytime soon.

The public already has the power to submit a request to the USPTO, to reexamine a patent; it includes submitting prior art not on the record (not already submitted by the patentee.) The procedure is called "Ex Parte Reexamination." Details about this are included in the patent examination guidelines and is actually a part of the code of federal regulations (CFR): "37 CFR 1.510 Request for >ex parte (a) Any person may, at any time during the period of enforceability of a patent, file a request for an ex parte reexamination by the Office of any claim of the patent* on the basis of prior art patents or printed publications cited under 1.501. The request must be accompanied by the fee for requesting reexamination set in 1.20(c)(1)."

*In US Patent Law each claim in a patent stands on its own as valid or invalid.

Unfortunately, it involves a fee (ahem, $2500. . .), which already throws it in the big-companies-with-deep-pockets sandbox. One would have to have considerable investment tied up in something to go that route (take that route if you can use the additional prior art, and even then it might be easier and quicker to divert your attention to coming up and implementing a design around.

No. I Am Not A Patet Examiner.

Nielsen's been working on total measurement for years. Arbitron and VNU (current holders of Nielsen Media research) got together to build Project Apollo. However, because of the trouble Arbitron is having getting its Portable People Meter accredited, Apollo's deploying Nielsen's A/P Meter instead, which I've commented on before.

I work at Nielsen Media at the GTIC facility in Oldsmar FL and I've been hearing about Apollo for many years, but it seems that the rest of the world has only heard about it recently. Project Apollo has been described (internally) as the "holy grail" of measurement, which follows a consumer across every media channel and measures the affect on purchasing habits.

What it looks like Google is doing is a subset of Project Apollo, and even if it could compete on the TV/video side they probably need to license the tech from Nielsen. I'd love to have Google as an ally, but as a competitor I think they'll find Nielsen pretty hard to dislodge.

Nielsen's been working on total measurement for years. Arbitron and VNU (current holders of Nielsen Media research) got together to build Project Apollo. However, because of the trouble Arbitron is having getting its Portable People Meter accredited, Apollo's deploying Nielsen's A/P Meter instead, which I've commented on before.

I work at Nielsen Media at the GTIC facility in Oldsmar FL and I've been hearing about Apollo for many years, but it seems that the rest of the world has only heard about it recently. Project Apollo has been described (internally) as the "holy grail" of measurement, which follows a consumer across every media channel and measures the affect on purchasing habits.

What it looks like Google is doing is a subset of Project Apollo, and even if it could compete on the TV/video side they probably need to license the tech from Nielsen. I'd love to have Google as an ally, but as a competitor I think they'll find Nielsen pretty hard to dislodge.

Nielsen's been working on total measurement for years. Arbitron and VNU (current holders of Nielsen Media research) got together to build Project Apollo. However, because of the trouble Arbitron is having getting its Portable People Meter accredited, Apollo's deploying Nielsen's A/P Meter instead, which I've commented on before.

I work at Nielsen Media at the GTIC facility in Oldsmar FL and I've been hearing about Apollo for many years, but it seems that the rest of the world has only heard about it recently. Project Apollo has been described (internally) as the "holy grail" of measurement, which follows a consumer across every media channel and measures the affect on purchasing habits.

What it looks like Google is doing is a subset of Project Apollo, and even if it could compete on the TV/video side they probably need to license the tech from Nielsen. I'd love to have Google as an ally, but as a competitor I think they'll find Nielsen pretty hard to dislodge.

I think the patent is of dubious validity; it's basically a patent on applying a class of welll-known technologies to relational databases instead of in-memory databases. It doesn't contain any significant intellectual insights.

Microsoft got targeted by this patent because they have money. But, in the end, that's good: Microsoft has been such a big proponent of "intellectual property protection" in recent years that they should realize that they have a lot to lose themselves from bogus patent claims, probably more than any of their competitors. Let's hope they'll change their lobbying as a result of such claims.

(Incidentally, this is a US patent case; the only thing Guatemalan about it is the inventor.)

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-a dv.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PTXT&S1=(%22Amado%3B+Carlos% 22.INNM.)&OS=IN/

This is how the patent system should work. A guy came up with an idea and tried to make his buck.

Actually, this is independent of how the patent system should work. The only goal of the patent system should be to promote innovation. It is not there to "help the little guy get his share from large companies" any more than it is there to "help large companies crush little guys with their huge portfolios".

Only if the chance that other people would come up with this on their own is very small, and if the "original discoverer" would not publish it without getting a 20 year monopoly in return, and if the downsides of this 20 year monopoly don't outweigh the upsides of disclosure, then there could be a justification for granting the patent. On a macro-economic scale, this is not true for software patents.

In this particular case, it's about patent US 5,701,400. Let's have a look at claim 1, which as a whole consists of a single sentence of 506 words. Below, you can find a summary of the meat of that claim:

a program in execution by said computer for controlling operations thereof for receiving user input defining one or more analysis rules to be applied to user specified data from said memory,

We have a program with rules operating on data

each said analysis rule being a user defined arithmetic and/or logic test to be applied to user specified items of said data and for controlling said computer to receive and store user entered data defining the alphanumeric text of a diagnostic statement associated with each true result of each said analysis rule,

Each rule is a mathematical or logical expression returning true or false, and its outcomes are associated with text strings (i.e., if-statements with a string as result)

each said diagnostic statement comprised of a user defined alphanumeric text string which the user can program to define the significance of the true result, its relevance or any other expression which provides meaning to the user of the true result of the analysis rule, and for controlling said computer to receive user input controlling which of said analysis rules are to be applied to said data,

The user can specify the "then" and the "else" outcomes of these "if" statements.

and for applying said analysis rules so designated to the data designated by said user and returning a true or false result for each analysis rule so applied depending upon the state of the data to which each analysis rule was applied,

You can apply the if-statements to different inputs, and the output will depend on the input

and for each true result returned by an analysis rule, controlling said computer to store in a file in said memory the user programmed text of a diagnostic statement associated with each true result as a diagnostic in a diagnostic database,

Those earlier mentioned text strings are stored in memory once those if-statements are evaluated.

and for controlling said computer to receive and store in said memory user input defining one or more expert tests, each expert test comprising a user defined arithmetic and/or logic statement to be applied to one or more diagnostics selected by user input from the diagnostics stored in said diagnostic database, said arithmetic and/or logic statement comprised of mathematical operators and/or logical operators from any logic set such as predicate logic or Boolean logic including at least the AND, OR and NOT functions, each said expert test returning either a true or false result, and for controlling said computer to receive us

The key word is "publish", not "try to publish".

If the invention has been described in a printed publication anywhere in the world, or if it was known or used by others in this country before the date that the applicant made his/her invention, a patent cannot be obtained.

Even if neither the applicant nor the USPTO had actually found your description, its existence will be enough to get the patent overturned (unless the application preceded your publication). Filing for a patent you don't intend to use is just a very expensive way of doing the same thing.

Just about everything in your post is already implemented by US law:

Priority is from the date of first application. NOT the claimed date of invention (submarine patents anyone)

In 1995, the US congress "fixed" this problem. For applications filed after June 1, 1995, the term of a patent issuing therefrom is 20 years from filing.

Once a patent is applied for, the applicant has a cooling off period in which to decide whether to go through the whole process or to talk to other people about licensing (this helps small inventors)

The average pendency for US patent applications is 3-5 years. For most software patent applications, the USPTO is currently estimating a 7-10 year delay before the application is ever examined. This gives a lengthy period before any enforceable right is granted.

The holder of a patent MUST either manufacture themselves or license manufacturing rights to any second parties on the same terms. The penalties for patent infringement shall be limited to legal costs plus the average current licensing rate for the goods sold to date

While the current standard is not a "MUST", the Supreme Court recently took away near-automatic injunctions in patent cases. See the z4 v. Microsoft case from Texas for a good example where just yesterday z4 was denied an injunction to prevent XP from being sold.

It shall not be possible to patent any business process simply because it is carried on in a different medium (e.g. one click is basically walking into shop, handing over money, receiving goods in exchange, and should not be patentable simply because it is computer implemented.)

The USPTO is currently revising its rules for examining method patents: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/dapp/opla/pre ognotice/guidelines101_20051026.pdf , you'll see that the test has never been merely performing a method in a new medium.

It's about the specific implementation

The article doesn't specify the number of the patent at issue, so I can't just go look up the claims on uspto.gov like I usually do. But if this patent is the one I think it is (U.S. Patent 6,928,433), I deconstructed that patent nearly a year ago and found that it's worded so broadly that even Windows 9x + Winamp on a laptop would infringe.

This looks like a somewhat minor addition to the state of the art in this field. The folks at Graphics Security Systems Corporation patented similar techniques which use a lenticular lens to pull out a hidden image at a specific frequency, or software to do the same (search http://www.uspto.gov/" for inventor=Alasia). This technique appears to take the same approach down to the pixel wavelength level, and let the software "tune in" certain hidden images as if it was an FM radio. GSSC's advantage is that it can be decoded with a physical device, though.

Strangely enough, the patent describes an IP and email address registration and lookup mechanism which appears to be identical to that used by Tribal Voice's PowWow program.

PowWow worked by registering the user's email address, IP address and password with a database serve. If the password matched, the IP address associated with the email address was updated in the database. When someone wanted to chat with another user, they entered (or selected) the email address for the other user, which did a query against the IP address database to locate the last known IP address associated with their email address. The client then disconnected from the server and initiated a connection with that IP address. There was a lot of other things done including presence detection, version checking and so forth, but thtat is the basis of how connections were registered and established.

Development of PowWow started at the end of 1994, and the first version was released around March or April of 1995, so while it does not pre-date the patent by years and years, it does predate it by at least several months.

It is worth remembering that analog methods were invented around WWII that were very effective. Including an invention by Hedy Lamarr (yes the film star) that used frequency hopping spread spectrum. So we own WiFi to a very smart woman.

Abstract
A point-to-point Internet protocol exchanges Internet Protocol (IP) addresses between processing units to establish a point-to-point communication link between the processing units through the Internet. A first point-to-point Internet protocol includes the steps of (a) storing in a database a respective IP address of a set of processing units that have an on-line status with respect to the Internet; (b) transmitting a query from a first processing unit to a connection server to determine the on-line status of a second processing unit; and (c) retrieving the IP address of the second unit from the database using the connection server, in response to the determination of a positive on-line status of the second processing unit, for establishing a point-to-point communication link between the first and second processing units through the Internet. A second point-to-point Internet protocol includes the steps of (a) transmitting an E-mail signal, including a first IP address, from a first processing unit; (b) processing the E-mail signal through the Internet to deliver the E-mail signal to a second processing unit; and (c) transmitting a second IP address to the first processing unit for establishing a point-to-point communication link between the first and second processing units through the Internet.

So......they Patented the internet????? 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=6,108,704.PN.&OS=PN/6,1 08,704&RS=PN/6,108,704

Hey c'mon now, they're not that greedy.

Why can't people make a keyboard that has the feel of the old Model M without sounding like you're firing off a machine gun?

Everyone's favorite, the US Patent Office, provides a free PDF writer called ABXPDF. It's allegedly based on CutePDF.

Luckly Apple just got a patent on such a device. Add in good access to a faster-than-a-modem net connection, automated NSA data mining for the "good stuff" and outsourcing the final analysis to someone that makes less than $.50 USD a hour on the other side of the earth.

Could be a fun project if it was so fucking evil. Welcome to amerika.

I have both an IPOD, then a PSP, which I bought from a user fed up with both.

I don't even touch the IPOD anymore, the PSP gets all the action... because it has wireless and that big beautiful screen, and a coolness factor. Even though it doesn't have a harddrive, it has the network, which is a bigger harddrive.

Everyone who comes over plays with the PSP. Nobody cares about the IPOD anymore. Even though I have it full of 20gbs worth of music. Playing LocoRoco demo on the PSP is so much more fun...

The main problem with the PSP is SONY, which have a psycho anal retentive grip on the platform. If they would open it up, put an HD in it, upgrade the wifi from b to g or even better, nothing else could touch it. They could even dump the space taken by the UMD and put 6 slots for more Sandisk or Duo mem cards.

IPOD enjoyed a brief window of coolness for a moment, then like all gadgets, was passed by... there's cooler things out there. There was nothing special to me about it, I already had a RioCar. As far as I was concerned, Apple just ripped off the idea from EMPEG, who ripped the idea off from car hobbiests who blazed the trail sticking homebrew boxes in their car to play mp3s.

Apple never innovated anything. They just steal ideas and then mass market them.

http://patft1.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-adv.ht m

done

No probably about it.

The word violence has many definitions, "an act of agression" is one of them, but "an act of aggression" is not the most relevant one in this case. The reason I included the wiki linkwas for the context of Gandhi's quote. From the article:

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. There are many causes I am prepared to die for but no causes I am prepared to kill for.

Under the context of his quote, the "eye for an eye" sentence makes much more sense when we're talking about violence as a "physical force exerted for the purpose of violating, damaging, or abusing"(like killing) not as an "act of an agression".

Patents(something MPAA isn't concerned with BTW) and copyrights are not violence; they are laws. Laws can be used violently but they are not violence. If we used your reasoning we could say laws against murder are violent because they are an "act of agression" against murders.

The word violence has many definitions, "an act of agression" is one of them, but "an act of aggression" is not the most relevant one in this case. The reason I included the wiki linkwas for the context of Gandhi's quote. From the article:

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. There are many causes I am prepared to die for but no causes I am prepared to kill for.

Under the context of his quote, the "eye for an eye" sentence makes much more sense when we're talking about violence as a "physical force exerted for the purpose of violating, damaging, or abusing"(like killing) not as an "act of an agression".

Patents(something MPAA isn't concerned with BTW) and copyrights are not violence; they are laws. Laws can be used violently but they are not violence. If we used your reasoning we could say laws against murder are violent because they are an "act of agression" against murders.

The MOBI name is currently trademarked in the US by Route1 Inc., a Canadian corporation. See the USPTO listing at http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=7 uj6cr.2.7/.

Since this trademark is directly related to computer networking and electronic messaging, Route 1 might be none to happy.

Sun would already have that problem covered. If your version of Java does not fully meet Sun's specifications, you are not legally entitled to use the "Java" trademark (for instance this trademark). Thusly, if Red Hat were to release an incompatible version of Sun's Java anything (or any other Java-related technology) and falsely advertised it as such (using the Java trademark), Sun would be able to sue Red Hat for trademark infringement.

Ahem *cough* and *cough*. Has it not occurred to you that perhaps you don't know anything about how the patent system works? Re-exam is an old and well-established practice. Try learning for a change. You would be amazed at what you find out.

Ahem *cough* and *cough*. Has it not occurred to you that perhaps you don't know anything about how the patent system works? Re-exam is an old and well-established practice. Try learning for a change. You would be amazed at what you find out.

In other words, Sony itself had prior art. Who would have thought that the courts would ignore that and let Immersion win... twice?

> If there were 1000 phone calls between two cities, then there had to be at least 1000 copper pairs to support them.

Bull, except in the very early days of telephony, that simply wasn't the case. Mechanical multiplexers were developed very early on, since the need for a separate long distance circuit per connection was considered absurd even in the wire-happy 19th century. Check out US patent 0161,739. Later on CRT multiplexers were used, where each connection was represented by one pixel which was modulated by the voltage of that circuit, to be finally displaced by electronic and then digital multiplexers. The ealier history of telephony is actually an extremely fascinating subject, full of ingenious yet obscure technology.

I guess they don't know how to handle Creative any other way?

Usually years, somewhere around 3-4 on average. Stick a random number between 5,500,000 and 7,000,000 (1996-2006, ish) into the USPTO numsearch page and compare the granted date (top right) to the date of filing (usually the last line in the third info-section) if you want to have a play.

It takes such a long time because they have to be reviewed by patent examiners, compared to prior art to make sure they're not infringing, which includes referring to patents not in the patent referral list (you'll see in a lot of patents that the inventor compares and contrasts his application with previous patents, to clarify the differences). It usually has to be sent back and corrected, sits in a waiting queue whenever it's in the patent office's hands, suffer any delays the submitter wants or has; the list goes on. It's a tedious process that I think we saw an article about last week, since the workload of patent reviewers is simply too high; it all contributes to major delays. Compare with older patents - the few around 4M I checked took between a year and two years.

Patent No. 6,928,433 was filed in January 2001. Before the iPod was unveiled in October.

The site isn't available at the moment (Maximum number of users has been reached.) but it looked like a fairly typical old-method-but-for-new-technology patent. You know the type... "auction bidding... but on the Internet!".

It would seem to refer to Patent #6928433. It was filed back in 2001, however I would have thought that this sort of hierarchical organisation existed before then.

I hope you have some money otherwise you can't teleport as it's patented...

Ok, most of this list was harmless fun. But how dare they violate the valuable IP of patent #6,368,227? Don't bother letting these hardened criminals rot in jail- just shoot them for their crimes against humanity.

Ok, most of this list was harmless fun. But how dare they violate the valuable IP of patent #6,368,227? Don't bother letting these hardened criminals rot in jail- just shoot them for their crimes against humanity.

I've been interested in CWT's thermal Depolymerization Process, and whil patent searching is an arcane art that I haven't mastered, the only patent they seem to have is 5,269,947 which was filed for on, September 17, 1992. This patent doesn't have a lot of life left, which squares with how cagey CWT has been about information on the process. With only a little over 6 years left on the patent, CWT needs to posistion themselves as the authority on the process, and I don't think they have the capital to do that with plants going for $20 million a pop. Of course they promote the process as scaleable and have table-top test-bed and insinuate that semi-trailor sized plant are effective; other than a boutique plant built with con-agra as a partner, they're not doing any comercialization of it that I'm aware of in the United States, and are concentrateing in Europe where animal byproducts aren't used as animal foder.

... because frownie was already trademarked by Despair!

http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&e ntry=75502288

Actually, no. This is a pilot program. From the USPTO website:

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) will hold a briefing on May 12, 2006, from 9:00 a.m. to noon in the agency's Madison building, 600 Dulany Street, Alexandria, VA. The USPTO has created a partnership with academia and the private sector to launch an online, peer review pilot project that seeks to ensure that patent examiners will have improved access to all available prior art during the patent examination process.

As a follow-up to the February 16th meeting, this briefing will focus on further developing previously discussed initiatives as well as answering the question of what constitutes valid prior art and a greater in-depth analysis of the peer review pilot project that is under consideration.

The meeting is open to the public. However, space is limited so please register early. Only the first 220 registrations can be accepted.

The article links to the registration page, so it's a bit confusing.

I missed how "Apple" relates to computers

My point exactly. It doesn't, nor does it relate to music - which was the argument the fab four were making. A trademark doesn't protect the individual words - just look at the typical entry at USPTO. They ofter have something such as "NO CLAIM IS MADE TO THE EXCLUSIVE RIGHT TO USE "SOFTWARE" APART FROM THE MARK AS SHOWN" included in order to pass muster with the office. So the trademark isn't considered to protect "Apple" or "computer". It's only on "Apple Computer". That said, they can enforce against someone creating "Apple Technologies" because the name implies they are in the same industry.

You will also see VERY elaborate attempts to name EVERYTHING the company is protecting. For example, here's one for Microsoft protecting it's name in financing! http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=o 4e32p.4.38

Doesn't Despair Inc. have a patent on the frownie? I think that Walmart was trying to be honest and put a frown, but they couldn't due to the patent.

http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&e ntry=75502288

SCM

Only fitting, since the frown is already trademarked.

Actually, the sad face is owned by despair.com
http://www.despair.com/frownonthis.html

See the actual posting at
http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&e ntry=75502288

Everybody thinks the new screen will be a camera of some sort, but input is where it's really at.

It's a danged digital canvas.

It's a tablet and more, but it's too new to make it into a product, unless that's part of Steve's new anti-leak plan.

Since the parent wrote "Exxon-Mobil holds the patents to the nickel-metal hydride battery...," I figured I'd check.

Below are a couple of links to the Patent and Trademarket Office site.

http://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/patog/week43/OG/h tml/1299-4/US06958200-20051025.html
http://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/patog/week31/OG/h tml/1297-1/US06924062-20050802.html

Is Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd., Osaka (Japan) a subsidiary of Exxon-Mobil or did they purchase the patent from Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd., since the 25th DAY OF October or 2nd DAY OF August, 2005?

Since the parent wrote "Exxon-Mobil holds the patents to the nickel-metal hydride battery...," I figured I'd check.

Below are a couple of links to the Patent and Trademarket Office site.

http://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/patog/week43/OG/h tml/1299-4/US06958200-20051025.html
http://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/patog/week31/OG/h tml/1297-1/US06924062-20050802.html

Is Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd., Osaka (Japan) a subsidiary of Exxon-Mobil or did they purchase the patent from Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd., since the 25th DAY OF October or 2nd DAY OF August, 2005?

The McVickers invented it in 1956. Patent 3,167,440 was granted on January 26, 1965.