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Nathan Myhrvold Live Q&A
Last week we announced that co-founder and CEO of Intellectual Ventures, Nathan Myhrvold, had agreed to do a live Q&A. Earlier today we posted a few of his answers, but now's your chance to hear it directly from him. Mr. Myhrvold will be answering your questions below until 12:30 PDT. Please keep it to one question per post so everyone gets a chance.
Update: 04/03 19:41 GMT by S : 12:30pm PDT has come and gone, and Mr. Myhrvold has to move on. Thanks for the answers! Here's a link to his user page if you'd just like to read his responses.
In your responses earlier today, you said, "The patent office has had funding issues. In recent years Congress has raided the patent office fees and taken them to spend elsewhere rather than let them be used to improve the patent office."
How do you think additional funding could be best spent? A friend of mine is a patent lawyer for a private firm, and he tells me they have a massive advantage over the USPTO workers because they're highly specialized and they work for companies who can afford to hire talent. Would boosting USPTO salaries help? Do they need better infrastructure?
Mr. Myhrvold:
I have some thoughts on your patent activities, but a) it's complex, and b) probably nothing you haven't heard before or that would suddenly make you repent and start your life over ;)
So instead, I'd like to hear about cooking. I enjoy cooking, but I realize I'm a duffer, and keep finding small improvements from random sources (YouTube, relatives, friends, books) of the "why didn't I think of that?" variety. Is there any advice that you think the average non-cook should hear based on your non-conventional approach?
I think what you mean is that I wrote a paper many years ago (1997?) that showed through computer modeling that sauropod dinosaurs (i.e. apatosaurus) could whip their tails and crack them like bullwhips. The crack is actually a sonic boom! So they were the first creatures to break the sound barrier (not Chuck Yeager). The paper has been pretty widely accepted in the paleontology community. I have been meaning to build a physical model (not full scale) to test it empirically, but have been busy with other tihngs, including other dinosaur projects.
Well, it turns out that there were horse sized birds at many points in the past - particularly the elephant bird of madagascar, the moa of new zealand and the "terror birds" which lived in ancient south america. Also, ancient (several millions years ago) horses were pretty small - some probably did have goose-sized ponies.... They were mean, so I would much rather face duck sized horses.
Why do you think Slashdot chose you over other for a live Q&A?
As patents become more complex and arcane (or at least about inventions that are more complex and more arcane), do you think we can expect the judicial system to accurately evaluate their validity? There have been cases recently where justices and jurors have clearly been in over their head with regard to understanding how patented software claims work, and software isn't getting any simpler. Hardware, too, is becoming difficult for hobbyists to comprehend, yet we expect a few weeks of testimony to make people competent to judge patent validity. If you don't think it's a problem at this point, do you think it will be in the future?
any comment on developments regarding the geoengineering patent?
Given how much you deal with new inventions, what tech do you see taking the world by storm in the next 5-10 years? Will wearable computing make as big of a mark as smartphones? How about autonomous cars?
Since you've lived in both the food world and the software patent world, can you draw any parallels between cooks and their recipes and software engineers and their code WRT IP law and tradition?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
According to your wikipedia page you like nature photography. Have you ever considered embracing your inner Thoreau and giving it all up to live a simpler life in the woods?