We agree about one thing: you *are* a crackpot. This is another Glenn Beck urban myth. In fact, there was a bogus story last week about exactly this kind of thing happening -- a local police force confiscated a guy's guns because he had been prescribed an anti-depressant. The local Clear Channel station picked it up and interviewed a local attorney who whined for 15 minutes that "I told you sol! I told you this would happen!" The next day, it turned out that the story was misreported and the local police representative stated that, to the best of his knowledge, despite the whining, the SAFE Act gave his department no such power.
There are plenty of good points and plenty of criticisms to be made on both sides of the gun debate. But when f-ing idiots on one side make an idiotic, unsubstantiated statement, which is propagated by large numbers of their f'ing sheep listeners and viewers, it helps no one.
But there are qualifiers, some of which others have mentioned.
- Your playback equipment has to have sufficient resolution to be able to reproduce the differences. On my high-end Quad ESL / Quad II system, it's not all that hard to hear differences between even FLAC and WAV, all things equal. But over my car system, the only difference I can hear between a 128Kbps MP3 and uncompressed CD audio is the MP3's digital clipping on overmodulated peaks (mostly percussion hits).
- You have to understand what you'd be listening for, and that is sometimes a function of the type of compression. Even lossless FLAC can compromise audio in subtle ways, but most people would not be able to put into words differences that they hear in parameters like soundstage or ambient detail. MP3 is easier because low bitrate MP3 produces pretty gross distortion that's hard to miss and you can train yourself to hear the difference by comparing the same pice of music ripped at a range of bit rates, starting as low as you can. Take ten minutes to give your ears a chance to hear what's going on and you'll never ask another question like the one that started this discussion
- Remember that most people who have opinions on this topic are full of merde. Maybe me too, but I've tried to many years to confirm that I'm not merely believing my own BS (degree in physics, a life time of audio engineering readings, a lot of listening to high-end sources, 10+ years writing audio reviews for two mainstream print magazines, and hundreds of hours of benchmarking audio gear & comparing measurement results to what I hear). People like Neal Young, OTOH, I believe, generally overestimate their own competence in this field. For example, wtf does he mean by "15%"? Although I'm not a big fan of the commercial CD (and that's an understatement), I can play you CDs on entrepreneurial music-lover lables like Chandos & dmp that make any analog Neil Young release sound muddy and artificial. And don't start me on Dr. friggin' Dre and his devil-spawn headphones. So before you believe what anybody tells you -- including me -- about audio formats, analog v. digital, tube v. solid state, vinyl v. CD, just take the time to investigate yourself. If you can't hear the difference, it doesn't matter. If you want to be able to better hear the differences, take the time to investigate yourself.
- And maybe the most important point: There's an increasingly popular impression today that concerns about audio quality is elitist technobabble motivated by cultish geeks with too much money. Nothing could be further from the truth. The bottom line for any audiophile I know has always been the music. A great sound system with well-recorded source material allows great music to shine. Even the most compelling source material can be uninvolving, or even fatiguing, when played over crappy headphones or recorded with too much bass and compression. If you don't have the experience or vocabulary to describe the inaccuracies you hear in reproduced music, you would likely assume that the music itself is not so good. It's no coincidence that general complaints about how "artists are simply not producing new music as good as what we used to hear" begain to gain traction at about the time that the industry started seriously screwing around with commercial recordings. But even if you don't like classical music, listen to one of the superb 1960s Living Stereo orchestral recordings ($10 all over eBay) on a good set of headphones and you may find yourself amazed by how lifelike the experience is.
Who is old enough to remember that a group of Hell's Angel killed Meredith Hunter at Altamont using sharpened cue sticks (and chains, but the sawn-off sticks were primary) as the club's weapon of choice. "Under My Thumb," indeed.
When I was in law school, I wrote an ambitious paper that interpreted the Napster decision (and others, including the Sony v. Universal "Betamax" case) in light of a multidisciplinary legal model that reconciled principles of group psychology, cognitive dissonance, evolutionary economics, management science, and Thomas Kuhn's theories about scientific paradigm shifts. The brunt of the argument, as it applied to Napster, was that, by the time that Napster had established its new paradigm, it was already too late for either the record industry or the federal government to save a business model based on controlling the distribution of physical media. While the Sony v. Universal decision "saved" the movie industry by stopping the industry from banning user-controlled video-recorders, I argued that the Napster court erred in giving the record industry legal control over the electronic distribution of copyrighted music. The only possible result -- which, in hindsight, is what actually occurred -- was a set of unexpected consequences detrimental to the goals of the established media businesses. Had the courts forced the music industry to work with Fanning to productize a useful, user-friendly distribution model back in the late 90s (because, let's face it, Napster really did suck from a usability standpoint), we might today all be happy with a ubiquitous iTunes-like resource controlled by the RIAA & MPAA. Not unlike what happened when the Sony decision forced the studios to embrace videotape as a profit center, rather than as a competitor.
The paper is written in an engaging, journalistic style (I was a mainstream tech writer before becoming a lawyer), but may still be a challenging read. Nonetheless, I recommend it to any Slashdotter interested in a deeper perspective on how intellectual-property controversies work.
Jeez, stop being such an arrogant blowhard, Ray. You give us IP lawyers a bad name. And, yes, there have been multiple cases, primarily in district courts and I think all within the last 18 months, that resulted in dismissal on similar grounds. Off the top of my head, I'd say that the most widely publicized ones, which you really ought to be aware of, cropped up during last year's BitTorrent RIAA-like mass infringement suits. There was one in Florida, I believe, in which the judge dismissed with famously dismissive remark (sorry!) "An IP address is not a person!" and, in the D.C. for the Central District of CA (I think the parties were something like "Celestial v. Swarm"?) In that case, the judge dismissed complaints against over a dozen defendants on the ground of lack of personal jurisdiction b/c -- even more encouraging than the case you cite -- he noted that a mere router IP address wasn't even sufficient to demonstrate that the defendants lived in the state.
And "STFU"?? Very professional, Wiley E. Coyote. You're no smarter than the rest of the people on this ls, so act like a grown up.
RTFM. Even claim 1, the broadest claim in the patent, is so narrow as to be credibly novel and nonobvious. I defy anyone to identify prior art that infringes on every element of this (or any dependent) claim in this patent. Holy jumpin jeezus, isn't there ANYONE at Slashdot knowledgeable enough to vet these "the patent system is broke, dude!" stories that appear every week? Seriously, Slashdot may need its own Amazing Randi.
So Wozniak says that Apple has dropped the ball and that Microsoft is the true innovator at this point. But Gates says that it's Microsoft that has dropped the ball. Arg. I understand that all slashdotters are required to hold an irrational hatred of either Microsoft or Apple, but it's getting harder to pretend that either company is worthy of that level of emotional involvement.
Yeah, this article definitely isn't newsworthy except for those whose time is worth considerably less than mine.
Here's the thing: You're not describing a problem unique to any characteristic of the U.S. the patent system. What you're describing is a flaw with the American system of justice. Scenarios analogous to yours could, and do, occur in most areas of the law that involve property rights (and some that involve personal rights). If you have a solution, you ought to patent that, because nobody yet has been able to crack this nut. But it's disingenuous to portray anything in your post (or even in the misleading Telegraph story referenced by the original/. article) as probative of flaws unique to the patent system.
Lately, I've launched a one-man campaign to educate Slashdot posters who comment on the generally-Glenn-Beck-class-misinformed stories posted in this forum about patent law. It's my hope that discussing some of the most commonly misconstrued concepts intrinsic to the patent system can raise the level of discourse here.
So today's nugget is about what constitutes a patent being "obvious." It may not be what you think. If someone suggests an idea to you, you might think, "Jeez, that's obvious!" and discount the idea as something you should have thought of first.
That's not what obviousness has ever meant in the patent system. "Obviousness" means that, to a person skilled in the art of the invention, it would have been obvious to combine features of existing inventions to create the claimed invention. The obviousness doesn't apply to the features themselves -- they need to already exist in analogous inventions. The obviousness analysis applies to the obviousness of combining those features into one invention.
So, if you assert that a claimed invention is "obvious," you need to show that every claimed feature -- every one! -- already existed in one or more prior invention. And then you need to demonstrate why it would be obvious for a person skilled in the art to combine them.
There's more to it than that, of course. Case law has drawn boundaries and conditions around the methods that can be used to perform these analyses and around the types of inventions that may be considered. And there are cases wherein secondary considerations, or even the very nature of some inventions, would actually "teach away" from, rather than suggest a combination. There are also cases when a feature is read into an analysis because it truly is "obvious" in the colloquial sense (it's obvious to design a water-holding vessel so that it does not leak).
Hope this is helpful, because I think most people who post here really do want to feel like they know what they're talking about, and when they make statements that just seem silly to someone working in the field, it's not intentional.
So now you know. If you want to educate yourself further about the concept of patent obviousness, Google the KSR v. Teleflex, 550 U.S. 398 (2007) case and review commentary on 35 U.S.C. 103.
I've been hearing statements like this for years. There's no reason why in-ear buds would be more likely to cause hearing damage than any other type of phone. Think about it. SPL levels at the ear drum are SPL levels at the ear drum regardless of where the transducer is positioned. If anything, canalphones can help prevent ear damage by providing greater isolation from external noise, allowing one to hear the softer parts at a much lower overall volume level.
Interesting piece ran last year in Rolling Stone about the horrific climate-change problems that have been devastating Australia, and that include sci-fi-magnitude giant brushfires. The precept of the article was that, because global climate change will have its earliest effects on regions that already have extreme climates, Australia is the first inhabited continent to experience catastrophic effects of climate change. I believed about 90% of the piece and that 90% was a real jaw-dropper. See: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/climate-change-and-the-end-of-australia-20111003,
Fair-use excerpt: ""Australia is the canary in the coal mine," says David Karoly, a top climate researcher at the University of Melbourne. "What is happening in Australia now is similar to what we can expect to see in other places in the future."
As Yasi bears down on the coast, the massive storm seems to embody the not-quite-conscious fears of Australians that their country may be doomed by global warming. This year's disasters, in fact, are only the latest installment in an ongoing series of climate-related crises. In 2009, wildfires in Australia torched more than a million acres and killed 173 people. The Murray-Darling Basin, which serves as the country's breadbasket, has suffered a decades-long drought, and what water is left is becoming increasingly salty and unusable, raising the question of whether Australia, long a major food exporter, will be able to feed itself in the coming decades. The oceans are getting warmer and more acidic, leading to the all-but-certain death of the Great Barrier Reef within 40 years. Homes along the Gold Coast are being swept away, koala bears face extinction in the wild, and farmers, their crops shriveled by drought, are shooting themselves in despair.
>I am suspicious that Kuhn's paradigm shift were valid only during the formative years of science (specifically physics). The shifts - if they truly exist - have tended to become smaller asymptotically as science progresses.
Seriously? Like the paradigm shift to distribution of content via electronic, v. physical, media? Or the shift to mobile communications? Those are both pretty enormous shifts, both driven by disruptive technological innovation. Kuhn's model is hardly inapplicable to those types of shifts.
And, hey, I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt about the comment that the 1940s & 50s were "the formative years of science." Whew! That sounds like the statement of a young person.
Actually, I have to question even the assumptions underlying the issue being discussed here. My first major published paper discussed Kuhn's work at length and, although I don't have the references sitting here, I remember noting that he did indeed cite examples derived from the fields other than the physical sciences, especially in his later works. His theories underwent a fair amount of refinement over the first decade after SoSR. I haven't read the referenced article, but I wonder if the author bases his or her conclusions on superficial research.
Kind of old news. When I was in school 8 years ago, one professor gave us a handout with much of the same information. Wonder why this is suddenly making the rounds again. My understanding is that this linkage has been fairly well accepted since the 1990s.
***CORRECTION: A LINE WAS OMITTED FROM THE ABOVE POST****
*Most* stories about patent law published on Slashdot are wrong or misleading. Regardless of whether the patent system is "broken," relying on the factoids reported in this forum to argue your position will often make you look silly to anyone who is actually familiar with the system. Here are three reasons why:
i) (As here), Slashdot stories often conflate a patent application with an issued patent.
- Anybody can apply for a patent for anything. So what? That doesn't mean a patent will ever be granted. Also, since patent prosecution is a process of negotiation, it makes sense for an applicant to start from an extreme position and then negotiate down to something far more narrow. Just because you file a million-dollar suit against me because my dog crapped on your lawn doesn't mean that you'll prevail -- or that the tort system "doesn't work."
ii)/. stories often describe a patent claim that contains a ridiculously general and obvious element, but never consider the entire claim.
- A patent claim protects an invention against an infringement that incorporates *every* element of the claim. So a claim that begins "a software method for moving a cursor on a screen,,," doesn't necessarily protect all methods of moving cursors on a screen. Unfortunately, Slashdot stories (and the sloppy stories it references on sites like Groklaw) sometimes fail to make that critical distinction. The only way to know the actual scope of a patent is to read the actual claims in their entirety yourself. If you don't, you may be relying on idiots, since no one on the Slashdot staff seems to vet the patent-law stories it publishes. In the overwhelming majority of cases, even a quick readthrough reveals that the breathless outrage expressed by such a Slashdot story bears no relation to reality.
iii) A story misrepresents a design patent as a utility patent (often because the author doesn't even know the difference).
- A design patent on a uniquely shaped computer case does *NOT* patent the computer itself. A design patent on a page shape displayed on a monitor when a user electronically turns a page does *NOT* patent the concept of turning pages. Duh.
*Most* stories about patent law published on Slashdot are wrong or misleading. Regardless of whether the patent system is "broken," relying on the factoids reported in this forum to argue your position will often make you look silly to anyone who is actually familiar with the system. Here are three reasons why:
- Anybody can apply for a patent for anything. So what? That doesn't mean a patent will ever be granted. Also, since patent prosecution is a process of negotiation it makes sense for an applicant to start from an extreme position and then negotiate down to something far more narrow. Just because you file a million-dollar suit against me because my dog crapped on your lawn doesn't mean that you'll prevail -- or that the tort system "doesn't work."
ii) A story describes a patent claim that contains a ridiculously general and obvious element, but the story never cites the entire claim.
- A patent claim protects an invention against an infringement that incorporates *every* element of the claim. So a claim that begins "a software method for moving a cursor on a screen,,," doesn't necessarily protect all methods of moving cursors on a screen. Unfortunately, Slashdot stories (and the idiotic stories it references on sites like Groklaw) sometimes fail to make that critical distinction. The only way to know the actual scope of a patent is to read the claims yourself. In the overwhelming majority of cases, doing so reveals that the breathless outrage expressed by a Slashdot story bears no relation to reality.
iii) A story misrepresents a design patent as a utility patent (often because the author doesn't even know the difference).
- A design patent on a uniquely shaped computer case does *NOT* patent the computer itself. A design patent on a page shape displayed on a monitor when a user electronically turns a page does *NOT* patent the concept of turning pages. Duh.
PS: And Groklaw, the site cited in the/. posting, apparently isn't exactly a credible source for legal information about the patent system. In that same article, the author, after quoting s112(f), admits "They think software developers know what that is saying? I don't know from the words alone, and I'm a paralegal."
Jeez, if I was a paralegal working in IP, I wouldn't admit that!! 112(f) is covered in every first-semester patent course and, to be honest, is not that confusing as written. It basically says that you can express an element of a claim as a function, without specifying the means by which that function is performed, so long as you describe examples of those means in the accompanying written description of the claim. Your patent will then cover implementations that incorporate those means, as well as equivalents (and the exact definition of "equivalents" has been hammered out over the years by the courts). Among other things, this makes for easier-to-read claims. So, for example, you could claim "a machine that includes a lighting function," and this would not be rejected for vagueness if the written description, elsewhere in the application, states that "lighting functions can include incandescent light fixtures, LED light fixrues, and fluorescent light fixtures." Then the patent would include inventions that incorporate those three types of "lighting functions," as well as obvious equivalents, like, for example, an LED flashlight. This is simple stuff, well-known by every practitioner and if a Groklaw author finds it confusing, then anybody who accepts his opinion at face value might as well (sorry!) be listening to Glenn Beck.
Unfortunately, the patent system is one of those things about which everybody has an opinion and there is often an inverse relationship between the virulence of that opinion and the knowledge of the opinion-holder. I don't understand it. We don't have these emotionally charged discussions about, say, oncology drugs or American Idol contestants.
>now if software is some part of an actual physical product (ie something that would go THUD is dropped) and is an intergral part of said physical product then you can have a patent on the entire setup.
Ever wonder why the Federal government has as much respect for Slashdot opinions about patent law as it does for Glenn Beck's on-air interpretations of the Constitution? It's because of postings like this (and the equally ill-informed-but-self-important proclamations in some of the replies). And if you didn't blink when you read that posting, you're part of the problem. Despite implications that could be drawn from the faux patent-news stories routinely posted on this site, the patent system already has such a "tangible-machine" (surely you remember the Bilsky holding?) requirement and, except for a brief period before the case law caught up with technology, always has. A patent claim that does not include some sort of tangible apparatus (that is, "something that would thud if dropped") would be quickly rejected on 101 grounds ("lack of statutory subject matter") and this type of rejection is common, albeit easily overcome. In fact, one of the first things Director David Kappos did upon taking his position was to issue a high-profile memo to all USPTO examiners directing them to be sure to enforce this requirement.
If this observatoin causes you cognitive dissonance, you might want to consider the possibility that patent law, as presented and discussed in silly forums like this one bear as much resemblance to the way the patent system actually does work as, um, a Glenn Beck whiteboard lecture might bear to real-world macroeconomics. My advice: If you're really interested in intelligently discussing (and educating yourself about) the patent system, steer clear of this self-rationalizing ghetto and visit legitimate sites like Patenty-O, where posters at least bother to read (and, for that matter, know how to read) a questionable patent's claims before making snarky comments about that patent.
Actually, the talking point that the Clear Channel talkshow entertainers have long been hammering is that the Federal government, i.e., Barack Obama hisself, covertly created and supports the OWS movemen, which promotes Socialist government policies, in order to counter the threat posed by the brilliant minds of the Tea Party. What, now you're saying no?? Next thing they'll be trying to tell us that the President isn't even a Muslim.
I have the same reaction to posts in my field (IP law). Slashdot stories about, say, patents, have become increasingly biased, poorly researched, and, often simply nonsensical. Yet last week's story about Apple's attempt to patent a page-turn -- despite the fact that the story was so obviously wrong -- generated hundreds of outraged posts from I-ANAL-disclaiming posters who, even if they were to bother reviewing a primary source before beginning to shout, would have no idea what they were reading. It's like sitting in on a convention of Obama birthers or climate-change deniers -- Slashdot has become talk radio for a huge number of people who have so little idea of what they're talking about that they can't conceive that their perceptions aren't the only ones that make sense. I've been _this close_ to closing my account for some time. But, like the poster above, it's the rare rational post that keeps me plugging along in hope of hitting that rare jackpot of lucidity. I guess that's why slot machines make money.
Can't we have a SlashElitist forum wherein only people who know what they're talking about are allowed to post comments? Or, as a minimum, allowed to post articles? (Yeah, just kidding. But still...)
Slashdot Mirror
Unless this is irony (hard to tell without being able to navigate /. threads in any rational order.)
Dexter, Game of Thrones, The Americans... v. what 10 years ago? The last gasping seasons of Battlestar Galactica?
There are plenty of good points and plenty of criticisms to be made on both sides of the gun debate. But when f-ing idiots on one side make an idiotic, unsubstantiated statement, which is propagated by large numbers of their f'ing sheep listeners and viewers, it helps no one.
Would enable apps that may independently verify that it truly was the dog that farted.
But there are qualifiers, some of which others have mentioned. - Your playback equipment has to have sufficient resolution to be able to reproduce the differences. On my high-end Quad ESL / Quad II system, it's not all that hard to hear differences between even FLAC and WAV, all things equal. But over my car system, the only difference I can hear between a 128Kbps MP3 and uncompressed CD audio is the MP3's digital clipping on overmodulated peaks (mostly percussion hits). - You have to understand what you'd be listening for, and that is sometimes a function of the type of compression. Even lossless FLAC can compromise audio in subtle ways, but most people would not be able to put into words differences that they hear in parameters like soundstage or ambient detail. MP3 is easier because low bitrate MP3 produces pretty gross distortion that's hard to miss and you can train yourself to hear the difference by comparing the same pice of music ripped at a range of bit rates, starting as low as you can. Take ten minutes to give your ears a chance to hear what's going on and you'll never ask another question like the one that started this discussion - Remember that most people who have opinions on this topic are full of merde. Maybe me too, but I've tried to many years to confirm that I'm not merely believing my own BS (degree in physics, a life time of audio engineering readings, a lot of listening to high-end sources, 10+ years writing audio reviews for two mainstream print magazines, and hundreds of hours of benchmarking audio gear & comparing measurement results to what I hear). People like Neal Young, OTOH, I believe, generally overestimate their own competence in this field. For example, wtf does he mean by "15%"? Although I'm not a big fan of the commercial CD (and that's an understatement), I can play you CDs on entrepreneurial music-lover lables like Chandos & dmp that make any analog Neil Young release sound muddy and artificial. And don't start me on Dr. friggin' Dre and his devil-spawn headphones. So before you believe what anybody tells you -- including me -- about audio formats, analog v. digital, tube v. solid state, vinyl v. CD, just take the time to investigate yourself. If you can't hear the difference, it doesn't matter. If you want to be able to better hear the differences, take the time to investigate yourself. - And maybe the most important point: There's an increasingly popular impression today that concerns about audio quality is elitist technobabble motivated by cultish geeks with too much money. Nothing could be further from the truth. The bottom line for any audiophile I know has always been the music. A great sound system with well-recorded source material allows great music to shine. Even the most compelling source material can be uninvolving, or even fatiguing, when played over crappy headphones or recorded with too much bass and compression. If you don't have the experience or vocabulary to describe the inaccuracies you hear in reproduced music, you would likely assume that the music itself is not so good. It's no coincidence that general complaints about how "artists are simply not producing new music as good as what we used to hear" begain to gain traction at about the time that the industry started seriously screwing around with commercial recordings. But even if you don't like classical music, listen to one of the superb 1960s Living Stereo orchestral recordings ($10 all over eBay) on a good set of headphones and you may find yourself amazed by how lifelike the experience is.
Who is old enough to remember that a group of Hell's Angel killed Meredith Hunter at Altamont using sharpened cue sticks (and chains, but the sawn-off sticks were primary) as the club's weapon of choice. "Under My Thumb," indeed.
The paper is written in an engaging, journalistic style (I was a mainstream tech writer before becoming a lawyer), but may still be a challenging read. Nonetheless, I recommend it to any Slashdotter interested in a deeper perspective on how intellectual-property controversies work.
Freely downloadable from the Richmond Journal of Law & Technology at: http://jolt.richmond.edu/v16i1/article1.pdf
And "STFU"?? Very professional, Wiley E. Coyote. You're no smarter than the rest of the people on this ls, so act like a grown up.
RTFM. Even claim 1, the broadest claim in the patent, is so narrow as to be credibly novel and nonobvious. I defy anyone to identify prior art that infringes on every element of this (or any dependent) claim in this patent. Holy jumpin jeezus, isn't there ANYONE at Slashdot knowledgeable enough to vet these "the patent system is broke, dude!" stories that appear every week? Seriously, Slashdot may need its own Amazing Randi.
Seriously, a slurp? A friggin' slurp??
Yeah, this article definitely isn't newsworthy except for those whose time is worth considerably less than mine.
Here's the thing: You're not describing a problem unique to any characteristic of the U.S. the patent system. What you're describing is a flaw with the American system of justice. Scenarios analogous to yours could, and do, occur in most areas of the law that involve property rights (and some that involve personal rights). If you have a solution, you ought to patent that, because nobody yet has been able to crack this nut. But it's disingenuous to portray anything in your post (or even in the misleading Telegraph story referenced by the original /. article) as probative of flaws unique to the patent system.
No, I don't really believe that. I just wanted to beat all the Slashdot Wile E. Coyote's who were about to post the same comment.
Gas stations here in NYS, despite the consumer-protection law, began charging more for credit-card purchases last year.
So today's nugget is about what constitutes a patent being "obvious." It may not be what you think. If someone suggests an idea to you, you might think, "Jeez, that's obvious!" and discount the idea as something you should have thought of first.
That's not what obviousness has ever meant in the patent system. "Obviousness" means that, to a person skilled in the art of the invention, it would have been obvious to combine features of existing inventions to create the claimed invention. The obviousness doesn't apply to the features themselves -- they need to already exist in analogous inventions. The obviousness analysis applies to the obviousness of combining those features into one invention.
So, if you assert that a claimed invention is "obvious," you need to show that every claimed feature -- every one! -- already existed in one or more prior invention. And then you need to demonstrate why it would be obvious for a person skilled in the art to combine them.
There's more to it than that, of course. Case law has drawn boundaries and conditions around the methods that can be used to perform these analyses and around the types of inventions that may be considered. And there are cases wherein secondary considerations, or even the very nature of some inventions, would actually "teach away" from, rather than suggest a combination. There are also cases when a feature is read into an analysis because it truly is "obvious" in the colloquial sense (it's obvious to design a water-holding vessel so that it does not leak).
Hope this is helpful, because I think most people who post here really do want to feel like they know what they're talking about, and when they make statements that just seem silly to someone working in the field, it's not intentional.
So now you know. If you want to educate yourself further about the concept of patent obviousness, Google the KSR v. Teleflex, 550 U.S. 398 (2007) case and review commentary on 35 U.S.C. 103.
I've been hearing statements like this for years. There's no reason why in-ear buds would be more likely to cause hearing damage than any other type of phone. Think about it. SPL levels at the ear drum are SPL levels at the ear drum regardless of where the transducer is positioned. If anything, canalphones can help prevent ear damage by providing greater isolation from external noise, allowing one to hear the softer parts at a much lower overall volume level.
Fair-use excerpt: ""Australia is the canary in the coal mine," says David Karoly, a top climate researcher at the University of Melbourne. "What is happening in Australia now is similar to what we can expect to see in other places in the future." As Yasi bears down on the coast, the massive storm seems to embody the not-quite-conscious fears of Australians that their country may be doomed by global warming. This year's disasters, in fact, are only the latest installment in an ongoing series of climate-related crises. In 2009, wildfires in Australia torched more than a million acres and killed 173 people. The Murray-Darling Basin, which serves as the country's breadbasket, has suffered a decades-long drought, and what water is left is becoming increasingly salty and unusable, raising the question of whether Australia, long a major food exporter, will be able to feed itself in the coming decades. The oceans are getting warmer and more acidic, leading to the all-but-certain death of the Great Barrier Reef within 40 years. Homes along the Gold Coast are being swept away, koala bears face extinction in the wild, and farmers, their crops shriveled by drought, are shooting themselves in despair.
Seriously? Like the paradigm shift to distribution of content via electronic, v. physical, media? Or the shift to mobile communications? Those are both pretty enormous shifts, both driven by disruptive technological innovation. Kuhn's model is hardly inapplicable to those types of shifts.
And, hey, I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt about the comment that the 1940s & 50s were "the formative years of science." Whew! That sounds like the statement of a young person.
Actually, I have to question even the assumptions underlying the issue being discussed here. My first major published paper discussed Kuhn's work at length and, although I don't have the references sitting here, I remember noting that he did indeed cite examples derived from the fields other than the physical sciences, especially in his later works. His theories underwent a fair amount of refinement over the first decade after SoSR. I haven't read the referenced article, but I wonder if the author bases his or her conclusions on superficial research.
Kind of old news. When I was in school 8 years ago, one professor gave us a handout with much of the same information. Wonder why this is suddenly making the rounds again. My understanding is that this linkage has been fairly well accepted since the 1990s.
*Most* stories about patent law published on Slashdot are wrong or misleading. Regardless of whether the patent system is "broken," relying on the factoids reported in this forum to argue your position will often make you look silly to anyone who is actually familiar with the system. Here are three reasons why:
i) (As here), Slashdot stories often conflate a patent application with an issued patent.
- Anybody can apply for a patent for anything. So what? That doesn't mean a patent will ever be granted. Also, since patent prosecution is a process of negotiation, it makes sense for an applicant to start from an extreme position and then negotiate down to something far more narrow. Just because you file a million-dollar suit against me because my dog crapped on your lawn doesn't mean that you'll prevail -- or that the tort system "doesn't work."
ii) /. stories often describe a patent claim that contains a ridiculously general and obvious element, but never consider the entire claim.
- A patent claim protects an invention against an infringement that incorporates *every* element of the claim. So a claim that begins "a software method for moving a cursor on a screen,,," doesn't necessarily protect all methods of moving cursors on a screen. Unfortunately, Slashdot stories (and the sloppy stories it references on sites like Groklaw) sometimes fail to make that critical distinction. The only way to know the actual scope of a patent is to read the actual claims in their entirety yourself. If you don't, you may be relying on idiots, since no one on the Slashdot staff seems to vet the patent-law stories it publishes. In the overwhelming majority of cases, even a quick readthrough reveals that the breathless outrage expressed by such a Slashdot story bears no relation to reality.
iii) A story misrepresents a design patent as a utility patent (often because the author doesn't even know the difference).
- A design patent on a uniquely shaped computer case does *NOT* patent the computer itself. A design patent on a page shape displayed on a monitor when a user electronically turns a page does *NOT* patent the concept of turning pages. Duh.
- Anybody can apply for a patent for anything. So what? That doesn't mean a patent will ever be granted. Also, since patent prosecution is a process of negotiation it makes sense for an applicant to start from an extreme position and then negotiate down to something far more narrow. Just because you file a million-dollar suit against me because my dog crapped on your lawn doesn't mean that you'll prevail -- or that the tort system "doesn't work."
ii) A story describes a patent claim that contains a ridiculously general and obvious element, but the story never cites the entire claim.
- A patent claim protects an invention against an infringement that incorporates *every* element of the claim. So a claim that begins "a software method for moving a cursor on a screen,,," doesn't necessarily protect all methods of moving cursors on a screen. Unfortunately, Slashdot stories (and the idiotic stories it references on sites like Groklaw) sometimes fail to make that critical distinction. The only way to know the actual scope of a patent is to read the claims yourself. In the overwhelming majority of cases, doing so reveals that the breathless outrage expressed by a Slashdot story bears no relation to reality.
iii) A story misrepresents a design patent as a utility patent (often because the author doesn't even know the difference).
- A design patent on a uniquely shaped computer case does *NOT* patent the computer itself. A design patent on a page shape displayed on a monitor when a user electronically turns a page does *NOT* patent the concept of turning pages. Duh.
Jeez, if I was a paralegal working in IP, I wouldn't admit that!! 112(f) is covered in every first-semester patent course and, to be honest, is not that confusing as written. It basically says that you can express an element of a claim as a function, without specifying the means by which that function is performed, so long as you describe examples of those means in the accompanying written description of the claim. Your patent will then cover implementations that incorporate those means, as well as equivalents (and the exact definition of "equivalents" has been hammered out over the years by the courts). Among other things, this makes for easier-to-read claims. So, for example, you could claim "a machine that includes a lighting function," and this would not be rejected for vagueness if the written description, elsewhere in the application, states that "lighting functions can include incandescent light fixtures, LED light fixrues, and fluorescent light fixtures." Then the patent would include inventions that incorporate those three types of "lighting functions," as well as obvious equivalents, like, for example, an LED flashlight. This is simple stuff, well-known by every practitioner and if a Groklaw author finds it confusing, then anybody who accepts his opinion at face value might as well (sorry!) be listening to Glenn Beck.
Unfortunately, the patent system is one of those things about which everybody has an opinion and there is often an inverse relationship between the virulence of that opinion and the knowledge of the opinion-holder. I don't understand it. We don't have these emotionally charged discussions about, say, oncology drugs or American Idol contestants.
Ever wonder why the Federal government has as much respect for Slashdot opinions about patent law as it does for Glenn Beck's on-air interpretations of the Constitution? It's because of postings like this (and the equally ill-informed-but-self-important proclamations in some of the replies). And if you didn't blink when you read that posting, you're part of the problem. Despite implications that could be drawn from the faux patent-news stories routinely posted on this site, the patent system already has such a "tangible-machine" (surely you remember the Bilsky holding?) requirement and, except for a brief period before the case law caught up with technology, always has. A patent claim that does not include some sort of tangible apparatus (that is, "something that would thud if dropped") would be quickly rejected on 101 grounds ("lack of statutory subject matter") and this type of rejection is common, albeit easily overcome. In fact, one of the first things Director David Kappos did upon taking his position was to issue a high-profile memo to all USPTO examiners directing them to be sure to enforce this requirement.
If this observatoin causes you cognitive dissonance, you might want to consider the possibility that patent law, as presented and discussed in silly forums like this one bear as much resemblance to the way the patent system actually does work as, um, a Glenn Beck whiteboard lecture might bear to real-world macroeconomics. My advice: If you're really interested in intelligently discussing (and educating yourself about) the patent system, steer clear of this self-rationalizing ghetto and visit legitimate sites like Patenty-O, where posters at least bother to read (and, for that matter, know how to read) a questionable patent's claims before making snarky comments about that patent.
Actually, the talking point that the Clear Channel talkshow entertainers have long been hammering is that the Federal government, i.e., Barack Obama hisself, covertly created and supports the OWS movemen, which promotes Socialist government policies, in order to counter the threat posed by the brilliant minds of the Tea Party. What, now you're saying no?? Next thing they'll be trying to tell us that the President isn't even a Muslim.
Can't we have a SlashElitist forum wherein only people who know what they're talking about are allowed to post comments? Or, as a minimum, allowed to post articles? (Yeah, just kidding. But still...)