The duration of the mission is the problem. Hormones will cause problems over an extended period with a small unisex crew, or a mixed crew of any size.
For example, with one third of its crew female, the USS Acadia acquired the sobriquet "the love boat". In a single deployment to the Persian Gulf in late 1990, 36 members of its crew got pregnant.
- Services - A book can't deliver the newspaper to you, without any need for intervention, or killing trees.
This is a valid point, since the issues of resale and long term retention are generally not relevant to newspapers and suchlike. However, it would be useful to be able to keep "clippings" of articles from some magazines. Preferably, they would be exportable in some friendly form for pasting into other documents (even as a visibly watermarked bitmap - no need to encourage plagiarism). FYI, newsprint achieves remarkably high recycle rates, so the slaughter of innocent trees is less than commonly thought.
For professional journals or special interest magazines, one might wish to keep most copies for extended periods (although ebook readers cannot yet handle the "graphical" variety). I can still read my 1980s Scientific American and my 1970s Trans.I.Chem.E. issues are near perfect. These would be closer to the supply of goods model than the service model.
- Dictionary - A good e-reader lets you instantly lookup a word that you don't fully understand, in my opinion enhancing overall enjoyment of the book.
This would be a potential boon to those unfamiliar with the vocabulary of a topic, or those of generally limited vocabulary. On the other hand, it would need to have a damned good dictionary to be of any use to a tolerably well educated adult. I find that there are not many words in the typical 10^5 word "College Dictionary" for which I don't already know the primary few definitions (and know/use many words not in those dictionaries).
- Book price - If/when bookstores start doing things as they should be done, e-books will be much cheaper than a new, retail copy of a book.
Based on loss of potential resale, the value of an ebook is the difference between the new price of a printed book and its secondhand price in decent condition. The additional value which might be assigned to a search function, or a dictionary in the reader is essentially cancelled by the limitations in lending and longevity.
Anyway, I'd argue that the search and dictionary features are provided by the reader and included in its price; they do not come from the ebook. Also, these features will differ in capability between readers which might be able to read the same ebook, so it's incorrect to price them into the ebook. BTW, a search feature I'd like to see in ebook readers is use of boolean operators including the NEAR keyword, just like Altavista used to have, years ago. Actually, I'd like to see it appear in web search engines again (Google, please listen).
The authors of APL back in 1963 worked very, very hard to define the computational equivalents of common mathematical notation to preserve and obey the maximal set of mathematical identities. Perhaps they worked harder at this than other language teams because identities are none too compelling expressed in Lisp notation.
Later, when I learned many ideas about program correctness and defensive programming from Dijkstra, his notions of program correctness were highly APL compliant. People don't understand the full gravity of Dijkstra's lament APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. The only language consistent with his notions of programming elegance was a failed enterprise out of the starting gate. His implied converse also interests me: X, for X != APL, is a valuable step forward, borked beyond all recognition.
Old geezer reminisces: APL was my first computer language, back in the 1970s. It's notational elegance is still my favourite, and I occasionally use it as a sort of pseudocode to describe a computation. A few lines of APL can convey an unambiguous algorithm equivalent to hundreds of lines of C or C++.
FYI, Ken Iverson (inventor of the APL notation and abstract language in 1958) was also involved in the design of Mathematica, and produced an APL successor named J (before Microsoft assigned the name J++ to a totally unrelated language).
The people who brought you floor() truncating toward zero also brought you modulus operators where mod (x,N) == -mod(-x,N) Good luck using that to write an elegant loop dealing with possible negative values of x while ensuring that an array subscript is within the viable range [0..N)
A borked mod() nearly always goes with a borked floor().
Why a US government agency needs an "investment arm?"
Just copying the Brits. They've been referring to many kinds of government spending as "investment" for years now - even chunks of the welfare system. The debasement of the English language proceeds apace, on both sides of the Atlantic...
I know a lot of physicists and mathematicians who would groan a lot at that line.
And I can sympathize with them if they are thinking of what can be passed-off as an engineer in the UK or US. I had in mind the continental European notion of an Engineer, which requires the equivalent to at least a master's degree in the UK or US.
I did a 4 year full time engineering degree back in the 1970s, while living at my parents house. Tuition fees plus books and other materials (lab coats, lab goggles, drafting equipment, pens, paper, etc.) probably came to less than $10k total. In today's money, that would probably be $25-30k, due to inflation/debasement of currency http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CPIAUCNS?cid=9. The long hours each week (lectures, lab, assignments, study) meant there was no possibility of part-time work during term, but with summer jobs, I managed to graduate without any loans.
Later in my career, realizing I was in a country with free education (OK, I paid the damn high taxes), I went back to university part time, and got my MSc and PhD in other areas of engineering. The cost was just in textbooks and suchlike (also lost evenings, weekends, and vacations), although I also took several weeks unpaid leave of absence from work for thesis finalization.
Physics and maths are just theory, they have no economic value at face value and anyone who thinks otherwise is a moronic anti-intellectual who has no idea what either of those is or does. Also, someone who doesn't understand the meaning of economic value.
Hah! I guess you were going for giggles with that one. An abstract theory per se has little economic value, but the application of physical theory (which is all but inevitable) can create wealth. Since the development of theory is expected to be followed by practical uses, economists do assign value to such theory (as usual, they have difficulty estimating the value, except in hindsight). However, your statement made me recall an old saying which I heard as a freshman about 35 years ago:
"A physicist is a theoretician of engineering. An engineer is a practitioner of physics. Mathematics is their common language."
Depending on what language/program/whatever you're using, it'll either round towards -inf (as apparently they've patched this one to do), or towards 0.
This cursed wrongness of many implementations of floor (returning closest integer not further from zero) has caused me no end of hassle through many different environments. The bugs can be quite subtle, but significant, and occasionally really weird. This uncertainty in floor behavior is not limited to c-libraries, but can also be encountered in some higher-level analysis packages, such as in graphical programming environments and interactive data analysis packages. After being bitten in the butt too many times, I now always supply my own floor function with the correct behavior (returning closest integer not greater than input) in source code, or add a DLL or lib with such a module to any packaged environment.
Also when you figure per capita, the US has almost 4 times the population, which makes US sales roughly 2.5 times better.
I think your math is off a little. According to the summary, sales are 65,000 in 6 months in Germany, vs 650,000 (10*65,000) per week in the US. That would make annual rates 130,000 for Germany, and 33,800,000 for the US. The per capita rate is then 65 times higher in the US than Germany.
Chucking some sand at it would probably work better; nothing like sand in the air intake to choke an engine. Also carrying a small bag of sand in your pocket is less conspicuous than carrying a baseball bat all day. While it might work at more than baseball bat range, it would still be limited to a couple of meters.
A longer range method would be using one of those nice green laser pointers to saturate its visual detectors so it crashes into a wall. The higher powered green lasers from http://www.wickedlasers.com/ might even do permanent damage to the detectors. Hell, everyone can carry a laser pointer and claim it's for their job. I carry a green one:)
Where are the jobs going to be created? Best Buy and Walmart. Considering all TVs are now designed and produced overseas I can't see were any jobs would be created?
Writing regulations, testing for compliance with regulations, putting amusing stickers on compliant units, smuggling noncompliant units into the country, putting forged stickers on noncompliant units, legal actions for flouting regulations, building bigger prisons for incarcerating those who flout the laws, lots of prison guards, parole officers, etc.
Any sentence that requires an application of De Morgan's laws to parse the unending stream of negatives does not count as "plainly stated" English.
It does, in court. Plain language to one who works with intricate nuances of meaning (attorneys, lobbyists) can appear quite obfuscated to those who don't. And complex wording possibly exists in some of the license agreements you've signed or clicked through...
Several chains of conditionally negated combinations of negatives, expressed as being additional or alternative to one another, can sometimes be the clearest unambiguous expression of a particular state. The alternative description would be a long paragraph containing sentences of "Jill & John" complexity, but whose aggregate meaning would still need to be assembled through their implied dependencies, and may suffer from ambiguity due to its wordiness. I agree that it does not happen often, and can often be circumvented by skillful choice of simpler phrases, but this situation can occur. At least, it sometimes does in my profession (engineer), where in some cases the shorter "complicated" phrasing is clearly preferable, because the simpler wording would actually introduce greater obfuscation (through length of expression and ambiguity of simplified terms). Of course, these cases are usually only for documents where a suitable level of reading comprehension can be assumed in the audience (design specifications, contracts, etc.). I would not use such phrasing in any user document.
Pick a social networking site, and make a public announcement on your "wall" (or whatever they call it) as follows:
"Anyone who reads this need not necessarily feel neither unoffended nor unharassed notwithstanding their lack of failure to misconstrue its import."
It's plain English, plainly stated, and clear enough to about 1% of the population. Obviously, it would intimidate the 99% of Americans who cannot parse or comprehend it, and many of them would feel both offended and harassed as well as insulted. They might feel that it must have been posted with the intention of offending or intimidating them.
So would this sort of thing be against the law in Texas?
Moreover, the U.S. is 82% urbanized while Finland is only 63%, so the U.S. population is more concentrated into compact areas.
Not necessarily. Some of the U.S. suburbs I've been to had lower densities than places I'd consider to be rural in Europe.
That may be so for some parts of Nederlands, but the comparison was explicitly U.S. vs Finland. I can assure you that the range of suburban densities in Finland largely overlaps that of U.S. suburbs. Moreover, the rural parts of Finland are decidedly not densely populated, except by Antarctic or Saharan standards.
I live in a "high density" rural area, not far from a major town in central Finland. The municipal zoning restricts construction here to one single-family residence per 10 hectares (that's 1 house per 24 acres in Yankee units). We've got a lot of forest around us.
As yet, the US PTO treats examination as being a matter between the PTO and the inventor. However, there are moves to allow outsiders to bring prior art to the attention of the examiner.
Actually the trick (and it involves work and good timing) is for the 3rd party (you) to monitor the application (via the USPTO's PAIR system, which is open to the public) and then mail the attorney/inventor a bunch of prior art right after a Notice of Allowance.
This forces (due to the duty of disclosure) the inventor to pull the application out of allowance and submit the mailed prior art to the USPTO for further consideration.
I don't think it would work like that, but am not aware of anyone trying it. Every Notice of Allowance that I have received contains the statement "PROSECUTION ON THE MERITS IS NOW CLOSED" (yes, it's in all-caps). Closed means closed, and the examiner is finished with it; issuance of the patent requires only the timely payment of the issue fee by the applicant. Only the applicant can prevent the inevitable patent issuance at this point. [If wrongdoing or some impropriety was suspected of the examiner, then an appropriate petition could be made, but that would be an entirely different issue to what you have in mind.]
If you want to bring relevant prior art to the attention of the examiner, it's advisable to do so as early as possible after the application is published. This is especially important if you think the prior art would invalidate some or all of the claims, or require them to be significantly modified. Otherwise, you risk the situation where the first office action after publication of the application is the notice of allowance. It happens: I've had one where the Notice of Allowance came just a few weeks after the application was published - the application was quite watertight, and the examiner did not take long to reach a decision. Normally, there are many office actions, often including some non-final rejections which cause the claims to be modified or subject matter definitions to be clarified (check any random filing at PAIR for an example). However, after the notice of allowance, it's pointless for a third party to communicate with the examiner, and if the issue fee has been paid, then the only recourse is to challenge it in an infringement trial, which is expensive and very risky.
An alternative and better way would be to send the material to both the applicant and the patent attorney listed in the application. It should be sent by recorded delivery mail with a cover letter indicating which application it is relevant to, and why you consider it relevant. The applicant has a duty to bring all such material to the attention of the examiner, but many are derelict in this duty. The patent attorney also has a duty to do so, and could face sanctions for not doing so. If the material does appear relevant, then the attorney will definitely submit them to the examiner, possibly even with a revision to the application. If the notice of allowance has already been issued, but the issue fee has not yet been paid (this is a fairly narrow time window) then the attorney would request continued examination. If the issue fee has been paid, then the patent will issue, and any further filings on behalf of the applicant will be in the "post-issuance" category - irrelevant to grant of the patent, but possibly useful in a court case.
I had to bring some material to the attention of the patent attorney some years back, in a case involving a patent application by someone who was then a colleague, and relevant prior art by a former colleague. The inventor colleague wanted to ignore it and indeed did ignore it. However, claiming ignorance was not possible, since all of us had worked together on-and-off for a long time, and had actually worked together on the prior art. Intransigence led to impasse, and I hoped that the examiner would find the prior art himself; he did not. After the notice of allowance wa
Too much stuff in this post that deserves long discussion.
In fact, one of the questions I ask of those who would get my vote: How do you feel the present scenario vis-a-vis patent and copyright could be improved?
Good luck with getting a clear answer, or even any answer from a candidate. The interests of citizens is in conflict with the interests of corporations when it comes to rights granted over inventions and media. Getting the balance right is not a task for those with a begging bowl and a supple spine. Unfortunately, US legislators appear to have fallen into certain pockets, and are dragging much of the world in the same ill-conceived directions (without much difficulty, it seems).
I'm not an American, but am sole inventor or co-inventor of 15 granted US patents (and equivalents granted in numerous other jurisdictions). I think the patenting process in the US, while imperfect in certain obvious ways, is superior to that in Europe. It is being improved by allowing outsiders to bring prior art to the attention of the examiner, and may be further improved by limiting the scope of patentable material. In Europe, outsiders can file formal oppositions which result in expensive attorney involvement and tribunals before a patent is issued. The potential expense tends to discourage small entities from patenting, so that patents become primarily the domain of deep-pocketed entities. In the US, small entities are given preferential treatment in terms of lower fees, and there is no pre-grant opposition, other than from the PTO examiner.
The term of 19 years from patent grant is arguably an acceptable compromise, although 14 and 28 year terms have also existed in the US. Moreover, maintenance fees are due every 4 years, and they escalate as the patent ages. If maintenance fees are not paid, the patent expires early. A great improvement in copyright would be to shorten the term to be the same as for patents. Another would be to enforce early expiry of copyright if a copyrighted work is not readily available to the public - for instance by sale or rent - for any N year period (pick a suitable value for N).
I don't know where to begin with this comprehensive demonstration of ignorance. It would appear that you are arguing from a severe misapprehension of what patents are and the process of getting them.
Perhaps the best start would be for you to learn about patents. The PTO links in my earlier post would be one starting point...
I hear a lot of stories of people who go through the process to just have it killed by a corporation contesting the patent simply to stall it in court.
That's the system in the EPO and many other jurisdictions. An objection or challenge can be filed in a period after the patent application is published, and this delays or prevents its issue. The matter must be resolved, normally by written arguments from both parties, and the EPO will deliver a reasoned judgement based on the merits of the arguments. There can be appeals and so forth, sometimes with oral arguments before a tribunal (I have participated in one such oral proceeding in Munchen). The cost for both parties is significant, as arguments to the EPO must be by someone licensed to practice before the EPO.
As yet, the US PTO treats examination as being a matter between the PTO and the inventor. However, there are moves to allow outsiders to bring prior art to the attention of the examiner. This is probably a good thing, as it might reduce the number of problematic patents, and it would not greatly increase costs for the applicant if their invention is really novel.
Under the US system, once a patent is issued, the holder of the patent has many advantages (often bewailed on/. rightly or wrongly). A corporation can request (and pay for) a re-examination of the patent, but the PTO does not often comply with such requests. If a corporation infringes your patent, it is you who file a suit against them, and in US courts, there is a strong presumption that an issued patent is valid. The main question is whether it is being infringed, not whether it is valid.
Presumably, you would be patenting as a small entity, for which the US PTO cuts most fees by 50%.
You also don't necessarily need an expensive attorney to file a US patent application - you can do it yourself, provided you conform to certain formal requirements. For an application which goes smoothly through the process, the small entity fees are less than $2000 http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/qs/ope/fee2009september15.htm. If there are many office actions, this total could easily double or triple, however, so preparing the application carefully is essential. I'd recommend you peruse the documents at http://www.uspto.gov/patents/basics/index.html, and get a copy of 37CFR part 1 (patent rules) and the MPEP http://www.uspto.gov/patents/law/index.jsp.
FWIW, I've had a couple of patents which issued without any intervening office actions, but they were the exceptions. Most involved a few office actions, and a couple involved many office actions. Every office action involves a fee, even if the action was due to the PTO losing papers which they had officially acknowledged receiving (that case is still ongoing).
Also, publishing in some journal or on the web does not necessarily prevent someone else from filing a patent application on much the same thing. The US PTO does not and cannot search ALL possible publications when looking for prior art, and if a patent is wrongly issued, it would be up to you to challenge it in court (at much higher expense than actually getting a patent)). The PTO does search all US patents and US patent applications, however. So filing a patent application, and then abandoning it at the first office action, is a good and relatively cheap way of publishing your idea in a way that prevents everyone else from getting a patent on it. They'd have to make significant changes beyond anything clearly contemplated in your application to get their application through the PTO.
Slashdot Mirror
The duration of the mission is the problem. Hormones will cause problems over an extended period with a small unisex crew, or a mixed crew of any size.
For example, with one third of its crew female, the USS Acadia acquired the sobriquet "the love boat". In a single deployment to the Persian Gulf in late 1990, 36 members of its crew got pregnant.
There's some prior art, I'm sure of it.
But was it published?
Use a chillum when sharing.
Is the one in Maryland suitable for this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chillum,_Maryland
- Services - A book can't deliver the newspaper to you, without any need for intervention, or killing trees.
This is a valid point, since the issues of resale and long term retention are generally not relevant to newspapers and suchlike. However, it would be useful to be able to keep "clippings" of articles from some magazines. Preferably, they would be exportable in some friendly form for pasting into other documents (even as a visibly watermarked bitmap - no need to encourage plagiarism). FYI, newsprint achieves remarkably high recycle rates, so the slaughter of innocent trees is less than commonly thought.
For professional journals or special interest magazines, one might wish to keep most copies for extended periods (although ebook readers cannot yet handle the "graphical" variety). I can still read my 1980s Scientific American and my 1970s Trans.I.Chem.E. issues are near perfect. These would be closer to the supply of goods model than the service model.
- Dictionary - A good e-reader lets you instantly lookup a word that you don't fully understand, in my opinion enhancing overall enjoyment of the book.
This would be a potential boon to those unfamiliar with the vocabulary of a topic, or those of generally limited vocabulary. On the other hand, it would need to have a damned good dictionary to be of any use to a tolerably well educated adult. I find that there are not many words in the typical 10^5 word "College Dictionary" for which I don't already know the primary few definitions (and know/use many words not in those dictionaries).
- Book price - If/when bookstores start doing things as they should be done, e-books will be much cheaper than a new, retail copy of a book.
Based on loss of potential resale, the value of an ebook is the difference between the new price of a printed book and its secondhand price in decent condition. The additional value which might be assigned to a search function, or a dictionary in the reader is essentially cancelled by the limitations in lending and longevity.
Anyway, I'd argue that the search and dictionary features are provided by the reader and included in its price; they do not come from the ebook. Also, these features will differ in capability between readers which might be able to read the same ebook, so it's incorrect to price them into the ebook. BTW, a search feature I'd like to see in ebook readers is use of boolean operators including the NEAR keyword, just like Altavista used to have, years ago. Actually, I'd like to see it appear in web search engines again (Google, please listen).
The authors of APL back in 1963 worked very, very hard to define the computational equivalents of common mathematical notation to preserve and obey the maximal set of mathematical identities. Perhaps they worked harder at this than other language teams because identities are none too compelling expressed in Lisp notation.
Later, when I learned many ideas about program correctness and defensive programming from Dijkstra, his notions of program correctness were highly APL compliant. People don't understand the full gravity of Dijkstra's lament APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. The only language consistent with his notions of programming elegance was a failed enterprise out of the starting gate. His implied converse also interests me: X, for X != APL, is a valuable step forward, borked beyond all recognition.
Old geezer reminisces: APL was my first computer language, back in the 1970s. It's notational elegance is still my favourite, and I occasionally use it as a sort of pseudocode to describe a computation. A few lines of APL can convey an unambiguous algorithm equivalent to hundreds of lines of C or C++.
FYI, Ken Iverson (inventor of the APL notation and abstract language in 1958) was also involved in the design of Mathematica, and produced an APL successor named J (before Microsoft assigned the name J++ to a totally unrelated language).
The people who brought you floor() truncating toward zero also brought you modulus operators where mod (x,N) == -mod(-x,N) Good luck using that to write an elegant loop dealing with possible negative values of x while ensuring that an array subscript is within the viable range [0..N)
A borked mod() nearly always goes with a borked floor().
Why a US government agency needs an "investment arm?"
Just copying the Brits. They've been referring to many kinds of government spending as "investment" for years now - even chunks of the welfare system. The debasement of the English language proceeds apace, on both sides of the Atlantic...
First Ethernet was over coax
And it was thickwire ethernet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10Base5. I recall it from the 1980s, but with little fondness.
I know a lot of physicists and mathematicians who would groan a lot at that line.
And I can sympathize with them if they are thinking of what can be passed-off as an engineer in the UK or US. I had in mind the continental European notion of an Engineer, which requires the equivalent to at least a master's degree in the UK or US.
I did a 4 year full time engineering degree back in the 1970s, while living at my parents house. Tuition fees plus books and other materials (lab coats, lab goggles, drafting equipment, pens, paper, etc.) probably came to less than $10k total. In today's money, that would probably be $25-30k, due to inflation/debasement of currency http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CPIAUCNS?cid=9. The long hours each week (lectures, lab, assignments, study) meant there was no possibility of part-time work during term, but with summer jobs, I managed to graduate without any loans.
Later in my career, realizing I was in a country with free education (OK, I paid the damn high taxes), I went back to university part time, and got my MSc and PhD in other areas of engineering. The cost was just in textbooks and suchlike (also lost evenings, weekends, and vacations), although I also took several weeks unpaid leave of absence from work for thesis finalization.
Physics and maths are just theory, they have no economic value at face value and anyone who thinks otherwise is a moronic anti-intellectual who has no idea what either of those is or does. Also, someone who doesn't understand the meaning of economic value.
Hah! I guess you were going for giggles with that one. An abstract theory per se has little economic value, but the application of physical theory (which is all but inevitable) can create wealth. Since the development of theory is expected to be followed by practical uses, economists do assign value to such theory (as usual, they have difficulty estimating the value, except in hindsight). However, your statement made me recall an old saying which I heard as a freshman about 35 years ago:
"A physicist is a theoretician of engineering. An engineer is a practitioner of physics. Mathematics is their common language."
Depending on what language/program/whatever you're using, it'll either round towards -inf (as apparently they've patched this one to do), or towards 0.
This cursed wrongness of many implementations of floor (returning closest integer not further from zero) has caused me no end of hassle through many different environments. The bugs can be quite subtle, but significant, and occasionally really weird. This uncertainty in floor behavior is not limited to c-libraries, but can also be encountered in some higher-level analysis packages, such as in graphical programming environments and interactive data analysis packages. After being bitten in the butt too many times, I now always supply my own floor function with the correct behavior (returning closest integer not greater than input) in source code, or add a DLL or lib with such a module to any packaged environment.
Also when you figure per capita, the US has almost 4 times the population, which makes US sales roughly 2.5 times better.
I think your math is off a little. According to the summary, sales are 65,000 in 6 months in Germany, vs 650,000 (10*65,000) per week in the US. That would make annual rates 130,000 for Germany, and 33,800,000 for the US. The per capita rate is then 65 times higher in the US than Germany.
Baseball Bat 1, Helicopter 0.
Chucking some sand at it would probably work better; nothing like sand in the air intake to choke an engine. Also carrying a small bag of sand in your pocket is less conspicuous than carrying a baseball bat all day. While it might work at more than baseball bat range, it would still be limited to a couple of meters.
:)
A longer range method would be using one of those nice green laser pointers to saturate its visual detectors so it crashes into a wall. The higher powered green lasers from http://www.wickedlasers.com/ might even do permanent damage to the detectors. Hell, everyone can carry a laser pointer and claim it's for their job. I carry a green one
in the name of "Anonymous Coward"...
Where are the jobs going to be created? Best Buy and Walmart. Considering all TVs are now designed and produced overseas I can't see were any jobs would be created?
Writing regulations, testing for compliance with regulations, putting amusing stickers on compliant units, smuggling noncompliant units into the country, putting forged stickers on noncompliant units, legal actions for flouting regulations, building bigger prisons for incarcerating those who flout the laws, lots of prison guards, parole officers, etc.
All the things the US excels in!
Hugh Pickens writes
I most certainly did not!
Oh, yes you did!
...get that ID today.
Any sentence that requires an application of De Morgan's laws to parse the unending stream of negatives does not count as "plainly stated" English.
It does, in court. Plain language to one who works with intricate nuances of meaning (attorneys, lobbyists) can appear quite obfuscated to those who don't. And complex wording possibly exists in some of the license agreements you've signed or clicked through...
Several chains of conditionally negated combinations of negatives, expressed as being additional or alternative to one another, can sometimes be the clearest unambiguous expression of a particular state. The alternative description would be a long paragraph containing sentences of "Jill & John" complexity, but whose aggregate meaning would still need to be assembled through their implied dependencies, and may suffer from ambiguity due to its wordiness. I agree that it does not happen often, and can often be circumvented by skillful choice of simpler phrases, but this situation can occur. At least, it sometimes does in my profession (engineer), where in some cases the shorter "complicated" phrasing is clearly preferable, because the simpler wording would actually introduce greater obfuscation (through length of expression and ambiguity of simplified terms). Of course, these cases are usually only for documents where a suitable level of reading comprehension can be assumed in the audience (design specifications, contracts, etc.). I would not use such phrasing in any user document.
This says there is an exception allowing uninformed installation of programs, and that the copyright lobby is against the exception.
No - quite the opposite, in fact. It says that the copyright lobby is against removing that exception. The summary states this quite clearly.
Maybe it's a ploy to trick us into actually reading the article.
Failing to comprehend the summary (which was not awful, for a change) does not bode well for comprehension of the article.
Pick a social networking site, and make a public announcement on your "wall" (or whatever they call it) as follows:
"Anyone who reads this need not necessarily feel neither unoffended nor unharassed notwithstanding their lack of failure to misconstrue its import."
It's plain English, plainly stated, and clear enough to about 1% of the population. Obviously, it would intimidate the 99% of Americans who cannot parse or comprehend it, and many of them would feel both offended and harassed as well as insulted. They might feel that it must have been posted with the intention of offending or intimidating them.
So would this sort of thing be against the law in Texas?
Moreover, the U.S. is 82% urbanized while Finland is only 63%, so the U.S. population is more concentrated into compact areas.
Not necessarily. Some of the U.S. suburbs I've been to had lower densities than places I'd consider to be rural in Europe.
That may be so for some parts of Nederlands, but the comparison was explicitly U.S. vs Finland. I can assure you that the range of suburban densities in Finland largely overlaps that of U.S. suburbs. Moreover, the rural parts of Finland are decidedly not densely populated, except by Antarctic or Saharan standards.
I live in a "high density" rural area, not far from a major town in central Finland. The municipal zoning restricts construction here to one single-family residence per 10 hectares (that's 1 house per 24 acres in Yankee units). We've got a lot of forest around us.
As yet, the US PTO treats examination as being a matter between the PTO and the inventor. However, there are moves to allow outsiders to bring prior art to the attention of the examiner.
Actually the trick (and it involves work and good timing) is for the 3rd party (you) to monitor the application (via the USPTO's PAIR system, which is open to the public) and then mail the attorney/inventor a bunch of prior art right after a Notice of Allowance.
This forces (due to the duty of disclosure) the inventor to pull the application out of allowance and submit the mailed prior art to the USPTO for further consideration.
I don't think it would work like that, but am not aware of anyone trying it. Every Notice of Allowance that I have received contains the statement "PROSECUTION ON THE MERITS IS NOW CLOSED" (yes, it's in all-caps). Closed means closed, and the examiner is finished with it; issuance of the patent requires only the timely payment of the issue fee by the applicant. Only the applicant can prevent the inevitable patent issuance at this point. [If wrongdoing or some impropriety was suspected of the examiner, then an appropriate petition could be made, but that would be an entirely different issue to what you have in mind.]
If you want to bring relevant prior art to the attention of the examiner, it's advisable to do so as early as possible after the application is published. This is especially important if you think the prior art would invalidate some or all of the claims, or require them to be significantly modified. Otherwise, you risk the situation where the first office action after publication of the application is the notice of allowance. It happens: I've had one where the Notice of Allowance came just a few weeks after the application was published - the application was quite watertight, and the examiner did not take long to reach a decision. Normally, there are many office actions, often including some non-final rejections which cause the claims to be modified or subject matter definitions to be clarified (check any random filing at PAIR for an example). However, after the notice of allowance, it's pointless for a third party to communicate with the examiner, and if the issue fee has been paid, then the only recourse is to challenge it in an infringement trial, which is expensive and very risky.
An alternative and better way would be to send the material to both the applicant and the patent attorney listed in the application. It should be sent by recorded delivery mail with a cover letter indicating which application it is relevant to, and why you consider it relevant. The applicant has a duty to bring all such material to the attention of the examiner, but many are derelict in this duty. The patent attorney also has a duty to do so, and could face sanctions for not doing so. If the material does appear relevant, then the attorney will definitely submit them to the examiner, possibly even with a revision to the application. If the notice of allowance has already been issued, but the issue fee has not yet been paid (this is a fairly narrow time window) then the attorney would request continued examination. If the issue fee has been paid, then the patent will issue, and any further filings on behalf of the applicant will be in the "post-issuance" category - irrelevant to grant of the patent, but possibly useful in a court case.
I had to bring some material to the attention of the patent attorney some years back, in a case involving a patent application by someone who was then a colleague, and relevant prior art by a former colleague. The inventor colleague wanted to ignore it and indeed did ignore it. However, claiming ignorance was not possible, since all of us had worked together on-and-off for a long time, and had actually worked together on the prior art. Intransigence led to impasse, and I hoped that the examiner would find the prior art himself; he did not. After the notice of allowance wa
In fact, one of the questions I ask of those who would get my vote: How do you feel the present scenario vis-a-vis patent and copyright could be improved?
Good luck with getting a clear answer, or even any answer from a candidate. The interests of citizens is in conflict with the interests of corporations when it comes to rights granted over inventions and media. Getting the balance right is not a task for those with a begging bowl and a supple spine. Unfortunately, US legislators appear to have fallen into certain pockets, and are dragging much of the world in the same ill-conceived directions (without much difficulty, it seems).
I'm not an American, but am sole inventor or co-inventor of 15 granted US patents (and equivalents granted in numerous other jurisdictions). I think the patenting process in the US, while imperfect in certain obvious ways, is superior to that in Europe. It is being improved by allowing outsiders to bring prior art to the attention of the examiner, and may be further improved by limiting the scope of patentable material. In Europe, outsiders can file formal oppositions which result in expensive attorney involvement and tribunals before a patent is issued. The potential expense tends to discourage small entities from patenting, so that patents become primarily the domain of deep-pocketed entities. In the US, small entities are given preferential treatment in terms of lower fees, and there is no pre-grant opposition, other than from the PTO examiner.
The term of 19 years from patent grant is arguably an acceptable compromise, although 14 and 28 year terms have also existed in the US. Moreover, maintenance fees are due every 4 years, and they escalate as the patent ages. If maintenance fees are not paid, the patent expires early. A great improvement in copyright would be to shorten the term to be the same as for patents. Another would be to enforce early expiry of copyright if a copyrighted work is not readily available to the public - for instance by sale or rent - for any N year period (pick a suitable value for N).
I don't know where to begin with this comprehensive demonstration of ignorance. It would appear that you are arguing from a severe misapprehension of what patents are and the process of getting them.
Perhaps the best start would be for you to learn about patents. The PTO links in my earlier post would be one starting point...
I hear a lot of stories of people who go through the process to just have it killed by a corporation contesting the patent simply to stall it in court.
That's the system in the EPO and many other jurisdictions. An objection or challenge can be filed in a period after the patent application is published, and this delays or prevents its issue. The matter must be resolved, normally by written arguments from both parties, and the EPO will deliver a reasoned judgement based on the merits of the arguments. There can be appeals and so forth, sometimes with oral arguments before a tribunal (I have participated in one such oral proceeding in Munchen). The cost for both parties is significant, as arguments to the EPO must be by someone licensed to practice before the EPO.
/. rightly or wrongly). A corporation can request (and pay for) a re-examination of the patent, but the PTO does not often comply with such requests. If a corporation infringes your patent, it is you who file a suit against them, and in US courts, there is a strong presumption that an issued patent is valid. The main question is whether it is being infringed, not whether it is valid.
As yet, the US PTO treats examination as being a matter between the PTO and the inventor. However, there are moves to allow outsiders to bring prior art to the attention of the examiner. This is probably a good thing, as it might reduce the number of problematic patents, and it would not greatly increase costs for the applicant if their invention is really novel.
Under the US system, once a patent is issued, the holder of the patent has many advantages (often bewailed on
Presumably, you would be patenting as a small entity, for which the US PTO cuts most fees by 50%.
You also don't necessarily need an expensive attorney to file a US patent application - you can do it yourself, provided you conform to certain formal requirements. For an application which goes smoothly through the process, the small entity fees are less than $2000 http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/qs/ope/fee2009september15.htm. If there are many office actions, this total could easily double or triple, however, so preparing the application carefully is essential. I'd recommend you peruse the documents at http://www.uspto.gov/patents/basics/index.html, and get a copy of 37CFR part 1 (patent rules) and the MPEP http://www.uspto.gov/patents/law/index.jsp.
FWIW, I've had a couple of patents which issued without any intervening office actions, but they were the exceptions. Most involved a few office actions, and a couple involved many office actions. Every office action involves a fee, even if the action was due to the PTO losing papers which they had officially acknowledged receiving (that case is still ongoing).
Also, publishing in some journal or on the web does not necessarily prevent someone else from filing a patent application on much the same thing. The US PTO does not and cannot search ALL possible publications when looking for prior art, and if a patent is wrongly issued, it would be up to you to challenge it in court (at much higher expense than actually getting a patent)). The PTO does search all US patents and US patent applications, however. So filing a patent application, and then abandoning it at the first office action, is a good and relatively cheap way of publishing your idea in a way that prevents everyone else from getting a patent on it. They'd have to make significant changes beyond anything clearly contemplated in your application to get their application through the PTO.