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Google Actually Patenting Its April Fools' Joke
theodp writes "On April Fools' Day, Google joked it was partnering with NASCAR on self-driving cars. Google Racing, the search giant joshed, had its roots in Project Caddy, which demonstrated the viability of self-driving golf carts. And in the future, Google added tongue-in-cheek, your kids will travel unattended in driverless-car car pools. Funny stuff, huh? Only thing is, GeekWire reports the USPTO disclosed Thursday that Google actually has a patent pending for driverless golf carts, as well as cars that can autonomously pick up kids from school and be switched into 'sport mode,' where 'the vehicle may navigate through turns at the maximum speed that is safe.' In addition to cars, trucks and golf carts, Google's patent application calls dibs on autonomous busses, boats, airplanes, helicopters, lawnmowers, recreational vehicles, amusement park vehicles, trams, trains, and trolleys. Google also describes how its invention will enable autonomous police cars to conduct high speed chases and give law enforcement vehicles 'a limited amount of control over nearby vehicles.' So, is the patent application legit, or did Google team up with the USPTO on a belated April Fools' goof?"
If they're applying for a patent, it means that they must have some sufficiently viable method of producing the tech. The "limited amount of control over nearby vehicles" sounds the most ominous, considering the inability of a percentage of law enforcement to not abuse their powers. I smell the singularity brewing inside the Googleplex....
I have the hiccups.
This is definitely going to be an improvement over those interminably long, boring bus rides I've known as a kid. Think of the children - support hyperspeed school buses!
It's quite the achievement turning an April Fool's joke into an actual product.
there.
Where is my Minority Report?
I know the pre-cogs have it!!
Wait... there is no minority report, but it still something crazy*
* Half assed spoiler..
We at the United States Patent Office do not have a sense of humor that we are aware of.
Please don't spell it "busses". The only reason it's an "acceptable" spelling now is because so many schools spelled it wrong on their signs. (How's that for irony?)
The nuts over at 24 Hours of Lemons added a new class for driverless cars theis year, with special prizes and everything. So far there have been no entries :)
This is hardly a new story.
Breakfast served all day!
Google has been experimenting in self driving vehicles for years now, that part was not a April Fools joke.
They might have joked about partnering with Nascar, but it actually sounds reasonable. And they very much are researching and building prototypes of driver-less vehicles.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Patents aren't really intended for patenting ideas, so Google is smart for trying to sneak this one through during a time (i.e. "this century") when the patent office seems to approve anything if you pay for it. Smart. Evil, but smart. Someday the patent office will be corrected, and then they'll already have patented what other people had been working on for decades.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I hope the cop cars fill up with foam during a crash and spit out tickets when you swear. Wonder if they'll patent that too? ;')
Looks like Tesla (and the Nazi's) beat ya to it, Goog.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
somebody patent the use of autonomous technology to allow a driver to partake in an interactive advertisement, or otherwise immersed in an advertisement experience that under standard non-autonymous conditions would be unsafe.
That wasn't an April Fools Joke. They have a self-driving car that has gone 200,000 miles in california. Their April Fools Joke was that google maps added nintendo mode.
Ummmm, we've known that google was working on autonomous cars LONG before this April fools day. The entire point of the joke was that they 1. Are working on this technology. 2. Joke being about Nascar having a driverless google car. I don't see the point of this post. If the joke was that they were going to be putting Google Glasses on penguins in the north pole, would this post been about how their Aprili fools joke is leading to Augmented reality glasses?
In 'Surely you're joking' he describes the last days of the Manhattan project, where they made up patent ideas for nuclear everything (cars, planes, etc). They considered it a joke at the time. There's a copy of that bit of the story online here.
However, if you did come up with some fundamental technology, and had the cash to file all the patents, it seems like a plan - though not for the inventor. Feynman's cut was just $1.
"give law enforcement vehicles 'a limited amount of control over nearby vehicles." to be used only on suspects and criminals of course i.e., having a different opinion than that of the state.
The hackers will have broken the "limited amount of control" interface before law enforcement ever gets to use it.
Even better, the criminals will have modified their vehicles to be immune to such control.
Even better still? The sophisticated criminals will be able to exercise the "limited amount of control" over law enforcement vehicles.
So while Mob Boss zooms away at 120 mph, the police will be stuck at 45 mph. How's that high speed chase looking now?
Google is the new Microsoft.
Did people suddenly forget all of the news regarding Google self-driving car technology? Did people honestly think a company would be publicly spending millions of dollars doing something like this and not patent it?
https://www.google.com/search?q=google+self+driving+car&tbm=nws
Here is a bunch more "news" about google's self-driving cars.
Does that mean /. will trade-mark the "OMG ita PONIEEZ"
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
I call prior art... Watch the jetsons.
Don't automatic lawnmowers already exist? Hasn't someone been making them for a few years now?
This appears to be a leaked video of Google's Autonomous Farm Equipment
The description suggests a risk of prior art being easy (I'll bet a number of slashdotters have automated lawn mowers and even more have vacuums). However, the patent trolling RIM got a few years back shows you don't have to DO anything to file a patent on an idea, just get there first. People who couldn't even afford to SeaLaunch a satellite described wireless communication devices that people might use for email exchange and ten years later, someone they sold it to, who had then been bought by another company, well, that 'nother company said, "Hey, we own blackberry. I bet we can extort some cash."
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
You can't patent anything which debuts on April 1. Since 1921, the US Patent and Trade Office has rejected any patent filed on the first of April.
Gently reply
You forget that there are plenty of non human things that can go wrong:
A) Electronics can fail. Even redundant systems can fail.
B) Mechanics can fail in a way that the electronics aren't programmed to handle.
C) Environmental/External factors (i.e. EMP, sunflares, viruses, trojans, etc) can corrupt the required processing/communications.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
They're waiting on Google to open source their autonomous car OS...so that Google can make money on the ads it can display to your surfing the web, checking email, or watching youtube videos...instead of driving.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Because right now, the real April Fool's day joke is the entire U.S. Patent Office, and they seem to think April first lasts all year.
It's sad that I thought of that as gallows humor at first, but quickly came to the conclusion that it's roughly congruent with my actual opinion about all these legal entities girding their loins for patent wars. The system was meant to foster invention by protecting the private rewards of individual ingenuity, and the will to bring a product to market (not necessarily by the inventor). Patents were never intended to be stockpiled in this fashion. The system is being abused, and the USPTO is legally bound to obey laws desperately in need of legislative review and reform. Maybe it's Congress that is the joke here.
Of course, Google's leadership is smart enough that it's just possible they're trying to demonstrate how broken this is, by hastening its collapse. No CEO or board can possibly like the escalating Mutual Assured Destruction environment that is brewing in corporate conglomerate patent holdings. It's extremely volatile, and an unstable way to do business.
...for using Johnny Cab! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjRXyWFLkEY&feature=player_embedded
Sometimes you have to fight arseholes with arseholes. I think Melbourne's cops are doing a great job in that respect!
Since the time I started HS (1969) to the present, I have seen Melbourne's cops become more and more strict on road rules, especially drinking and speeding. The number of cars on the road must be at least 10x what it was back then. However the road toll in that same time period has been reduced by ~80%. Yes, seatbelts and other technical meausres are part of that, but they are not the full story since comprable situations elsewhere that have not implemented things like cameras and booze busses to the extent we have, have not seen such a dramatic improvement.
OTOH I have great memories of (legally) driving down (a 2 lane) springvale rd at 90mph in a red bettle to go fishing at Chelsea after dad knocked of work. Freedom lost and security gained, not because of any conspiracy, it's simply because the number of people on this rock has more than doubled since I was born. More people means a greater effort is required to keep basic order in a society that is only getting more congested and claustrophobic over time. Civilization itself is a 'recent' freedom limiting invention and is a direct result of our remarkable tool-making ability. We have not evolved to live in cities of millions and tribes of hunderds of millions, our 'souls' and instincts were built by nature to work in tribes of 1-200 individuals and are still somewhat confused by all this, but the tool-maker inside us all insist he can fix the civilization tool with yet more tools.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
In this case, there is plenty of prior art. Even Walt Disney had future movies out on this in the 1960s. Not that the patent examiner would know or care.
Where any moron can shit out an idea, and just kick back and wait for someone else to eventually do all the hard work bringing it to life, just to be sued out of existence by original shithead who had a dream, but in reality barley has the skills to wipe their own ass.
Its like that fucktard on development forums that has the best game ever created by man in his mind, and is willing to give you credit for actually writing the god damned thing, except the patent system is not even THAT sweet of a deal.
God bless America
This stops others, especially Slashdot, from publishing fake April Fool stories
Not all roads are limited access super-highways. I do most of my driving on surface streets.
And a lot of other people live and work in different towns to exploit the higher wages in one locality and the lower real estate cost in another. They might have a 50 mile commute to work, most of which is on a limited access interstate highway.
Until you make it illegal for pedestrians to enter the roadway
From signs posted at the on-ramps to interstate highways where I live:
Really, really badly...
I work for a tier-one cell phone manufacturer, with literally billions of devices in use all over the world. I attended a patent workshop for the company recently, and the word is that
1. You only need an idea to get a patent for an "invention".
2. You don't need to have created a gizmo that implements the "invention"
3. It doesn't even need to be implementable using current technology.
4. Let the lawyers deal with the patent detail cruft.
I hold a US patent, and it was for technology that I alone created, and implemented before the application was made. It still took 4 years and a lot of attorney time to get through the process. So, is the US patent office and process broken? You're danged skippy it is!
are the people. Not belittling Google or anyone in particular here, just a rant about how the patent system is turning out to be. So much innovation lost to the obvious patents that go around these days. For the patent office every day is an April Fools' Day.
How come I can't just patent magical bullshit?
I thought that patents were supposed to be accompanied by diagrams and schematics, full explanations of how the thing worked. That way, if somebody came up with a different way -- their own way -- to accomplish the same thing, they wouldn't have to pay on your patent and society could continue to improve technology.
If things are enforced that way, there's really nothing wrong with patenting and it really doesn't stifle progress.
But the way things have been the last twenty years is just stupid as hell. You can just patent concepts, now? Without any physical approximation of how they'll ever come about? You can just say "oh yeah well I patent flying carpets" and throw in some jargon "well of course they will utilize levitational leverage and will maneuver by means of hover redirection S.M.A.R.T. controls" and get it patented?
Well I call bullshit. In fact, I call Magic Bullshit(tm)!
That's fucking right. You can't have AAAANYY of this. Once real actual Magic Bullshit comes around to this universe you're all going to be had because *I'M* going to collect all the money from its usage and you'll ALL have to use it or you'll be left behiiiiind.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
"Building a Homebrew Robotic Lawnmower?" was easy to find for me, Mailbox-Head ;oP
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum