Shifting it to the courts is a very effective filter. Most of the rejected applications will not get appealed since they aren't worth the burden of the cost of the appeal. But the PTO may make mistakes and this would allow them to remedy those mistakes.
An alternative would be to allow for reapplication with the same priority date but require the inclusion of more evidence of why the patent should be granted. Of course if the PTO still doesn't believe it makes the cut into the 10K a month it will get rejected again.
The trade off for granting a patent is disclosure. Something valuable - a government monopoly - is granted in exchange for this disclosure. So why doesn't anyone read patents to learn from this disclosure? A few may get read but most patents do not contain anything interesting to someone practicing in the field. I would say this demonstrates that the value in many patents is the ability to cause legal problems not the actual technology being disclosed.
Keep a pool of about two months worth of patents that might meet the bar of being granted. Then reject the rest. The value of a patent is inversely correlated to how many patents are being granted. When there are fewer patents on better ideas, those patents will be respected and fulfill the original purpose that inspired the creation of patents.
Software patents are just totally broken. It is far, far too easy for a good software engineer to infringe dozens of patents through independent invention. And no one is going to go read through 100,000 patents and become aware of what has already been patented. So no one knows that they have "infringed" until they get a demand letter in the mail. Then of course they gag on licensing demands over something they have also spent resources on developing.
The problem is that the patent office is a papermill and the number of patents being granted has be growing at around 5% a year compounded for the last 25 years. I'm pretty certain that the number of patentable inventions found each year is not growing at 5%. Instead the definition of what is patentable keeps expanding into areas where it doesn't belong. The growth mainly benefits patent lawyers and patent office employees. We've gone from granting 100,000 patents a year 20 years ago to 300,000 a year now.
Do a little projecting out - if that same growth is maintained in 20 years they'll be granting 900,000 patents a year. And we'll have a pool of 12 million active patents to deal with. To support all that you'll need 25,000 or more examiners. Of course patent infringement lawsuits will be totally out of control - no human can be expected to know the contents of 12M patents and not infringe on them. Heck, I can only read three or four before my head explodes.
The simple fix is to limit the patent office to granting a fixed number of patents each month. And I'd set that limit at 10,000 or less per month. Doing that stabilizes the number of employees at the patent office. And do you really believe there are 10,000 inventions made each month worthy of patent protection? I sure don't believe that there are that many. I'd set the limit even lower - 5,000 or less. Setting the limit lower simply gets rid of the junk and makes the ones that do get granted more valuable.
You have to wonder how much the employees were really hurt by this. It was a 'no poaching' agreement. That meant that recruiters from those companies weren't going to call down the entire Rolodex of the competing firms and try to recruit. But.... there are nothing stopping external recruiters from doing that. And there was nothing stopping individuals from switching on their own.
There's some logic to an agreement like that. Each of these firm's recruiters could waste huge amounts of employee time in their competitors by making thousand of recruiting calls.
You are aiming at the wrong target. Google blindly indexes what it finds on the web. The right solution was for the EU to require the sites hosting the source articles to include a "do not index" meta tag which Google would then respect. Put this burden where it belongs - on the author of the stories, not the search engine.
There is a difference between forgiven and forgotten. Until we invent time machines undoing history is impossible. You can pass all of the laws you want but you will never be able to erase the event.
Trying to get Google to stop indexing is just going to result in a giant game of whack a mole like we have with DMCA take down notices. No matter how many million take downs they file the mole can never be erased.
Heck, I can even see source sites generating automated ways to combat this. Continuously keep poking Google to reindex your site. When you see the Google crawler insert meaningless random tidbits into the URLs. Now the other side of the robot war will keep issuing takedowns on these randomized URLs but since there is a cycle time of a week or so you will always have a set of working URLs in the Google index.
The ruling is insane. If the EU really wants to implement this insanity the best way would be for the sites hosting the article to include a 'do not index' meta tag which Google would then respect. Doing it that way places the burden where it belongs - on the author of the stories, not on the search engine.
Going after the URLs directly at Google is a total exercise in a whack a mole since the links are always changing. You're just going to end up with another pile of automated systems generating millions of takedown requests. When the source sites disappear they will change their URLs and then the cycle will endlessly repeat.
The AsiaRF one includes the small PCB antenna in the photo. The PCB antenna has twice the range of those tiny chip antennas. Since there is a jack there you can use larger antenna if you want. Another advantage to the PCB antenna is that you can move it around and aim the signal where you need it.
In Vocore's blog he says that his external antennas did not perform as well as the chip one. I suspect that is because he doesn't own the expensive test equipment needed to adjust his RF path to match the external one he picked. In general, bigger is better with antennas. He's also wrong about needing two antennas for 802.11N support on the RT5350.
I don't believe the RT5350 has a security unit on it so it shouldn't be possible to lock the boot loader.
The $20 Vocore is for the module only. If you want the Ethernet, USB and power connectors you need to order the $40 Vocore+Dock choice. instead I'd recommend getting the $38 choice form the AsiaRF campaign. https://www.indiegogo.com/proj... AsiaRF is going to ship three months earlier and support for it is already checked into OpenWRT.
These unit aren't really the same thing as a RaspPi. RaspPi is oriented towards having a GUI and screen. These units are oriented towards networking and embedded control. The unit are also tiny - about one cubic inch. Many times smaller than a RaspPi.
There is another similar project simultaneously up on Indiegogo from AsiaRF https://www.indiegogo.com/proj... It was put up about a week later so its funding is not as far along. There are still a few Early Birds left.
It based on the same chip and around the same price. The main difference is that the AsiaRF module has already gone through CE/FCC testing and it is already in production. So there is very little risk of the project not shipping. Support for the AsiaRF unit is already checked into OpenWRT.
I find it interesting that they are offering to design and build 10 custom boards with wifi/Ethernet to your spec for $5000. Similar design work in the US/EU would be $30,000 or more.
Now you're just down to a cost benefit analysis. Is the value add from the publisher worth the money they will be taking? This answer will vary with the perceptions of the author and the cost of the publisher. The trend line on this answer is pointing in the direction of the publisher not being worth the price being asked.
Maybe you are looking at this wrong -- start a side-line business being an editor for these people. Are there places that will proofread a book by email for $250? Maybe $1000 to do major editing on it?
I have to agree with this, the need for a publisher is disappearing just like the need for a recording label. Stross should self publish and then cut a direct deal with Amazon. He'd probably end up with more money that way.
Since he's a well know author, maybe try putting his self-published books up on Indiegogo first. He might net enough off from doing that for each book that the later revenue from Amazon is just gravy.
All of the Allwinner CPUs will boot from an appropriately formatted SD card and ignore the OS in flash. Don't know what wifi is in there but 75% of Allwinner A31 based tables out of China have Broadcom Wifi in them and the drivers are in the mainline kernel. I believe Kitkat is already available for the A31 and given how standardized these tablets are I don't foresee major problems upgrading.
Allwinner devices are far more hackable than Nvidia based ones. Most features of the Allwinner CPUs are documented except for the usual suspects -- graphics. A31 uses an Imagination PowerVR GPU. And it is not Allwinner that is keeping that GPU secret, it is Imagination.
$85 (with Slickdeals coupon) with free ship is an excellent price for this set of features. Anyway it is already sold out until they can get more from their OEM.
BTW - I do think there is a CPU security feature that can encrypt the boot, but I've never seen an Allwinner device that has turned it on.
It is not worth my time to fight with them. Declare it a loss, move onto the next vendor and don't buy from the previous vendor again. I used to fight with them, now I understand the rewards from the fight are not worth the cost on low priced products. Just blacklist the vendor and move on. Of course there are probably a few vendors that are exceptions to this rule but it is not worth my time to locate them.
You need to put this into perspective. It is unreasonable to expect a company to provide significant human support for a product you spent $30 on at a retail store. The company has probably only made $1-2 profit from the sale, if they provide easy to access support they will lose money on every sale. If you want lots of free support go buy a $3,000 Macbook.
Personally, I don't even bother trying to return or get support on anything under $100 any more. It just goes into the trash and I buy something similar from a different manufacturer and hope it works.
An even more efficient form of this is buying stuff from Aliexpress/DX/etc. Prices there can be as low as 20% of US retail for similar products. Sure I occasionally get junk or the wrong product, but just throw it in the trash and try a different vendor. The overall savings is worth eating the occasional fraud or hassling with Ali's escrow to stop payment. I fully expect little to no support on these purchases and I know returns are almost impossible.
It would be cool if the companies suypporting this bill sent about about 20,000 demand letters to Vermont and Nevada companies and then started prosecuting on them. Should be easy since overly broad patents are a dime a dozen. Then maybe Leahy and Reid will get the message before their constituents break their doors down.
To clarify. It is a 40 acre parcel. It is likely that these wells are located on the property they are leasing. They article does not address this. I am wondering if they leased the land knowing the wells were there.
Put in $5,000 payment Nothing at start. 43 years (65 - 22), 6.3% Do this in an IRA so there are no taxes involved. You will have $1,018,527 at the end.
6.3% is reasonable. I have been averaging over 8% for last 20 years including the big meltdowns.
Long story short, Horgan's thesis isn't "oh noes we aren't funding basic research," it's more along the lines of "there is just nothing as huge to discover left, no matter how much money you pour onto it.
Anyone here think that the computer science revolution is anywhere close to being finished? In my opinion it probably has another hundred years left in it. I also think we are just scratching the surface in biochemistry. It is scary to think of where that field will be in a hundred years. Physics can go figure out dark matter and dark energy. That's sure to stir things up. Maybe figure out sustainable fusion while their at it.
He got into these problems with revenue matching because he is running his business on cash basis accounting. In general only very small businesses can be run on cash basis accounting almost all manufacturing oriented businesses use accrual accounting. With accrual accounting you would book the Kickstarter money as a customer deposit and then recognize it as income when the product ships.
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Shifting it to the courts is a very effective filter. Most of the rejected applications will not get appealed since they aren't worth the burden of the cost of the appeal. But the PTO may make mistakes and this would allow them to remedy those mistakes.
An alternative would be to allow for reapplication with the same priority date but require the inclusion of more evidence of why the patent should be granted. Of course if the PTO still doesn't believe it makes the cut into the 10K a month it will get rejected again.
The trade off for granting a patent is disclosure. Something valuable - a government monopoly - is granted in exchange for this disclosure. So why doesn't anyone read patents to learn from this disclosure? A few may get read but most patents do not contain anything interesting to someone practicing in the field. I would say this demonstrates that the value in many patents is the ability to cause legal problems not the actual technology being disclosed.
Keep a pool of about two months worth of patents that might meet the bar of being granted. Then reject the rest. The value of a patent is inversely correlated to how many patents are being granted. When there are fewer patents on better ideas, those patents will be respected and fulfill the original purpose that inspired the creation of patents.
Software patents are just totally broken. It is far, far too easy for a good software engineer to infringe dozens of patents through independent invention. And no one is going to go read through 100,000 patents and become aware of what has already been patented. So no one knows that they have "infringed" until they get a demand letter in the mail. Then of course they gag on licensing demands over something they have also spent resources on developing.
The problem is that the patent office is a papermill and the number of patents being granted has be growing at around 5% a year compounded for the last 25 years. I'm pretty certain that the number of patentable inventions found each year is not growing at 5%. Instead the definition of what is patentable keeps expanding into areas where it doesn't belong. The growth mainly benefits patent lawyers and patent office employees. We've gone from granting 100,000 patents a year 20 years ago to 300,000 a year now.
Do a little projecting out - if that same growth is maintained in 20 years they'll be granting 900,000 patents a year. And we'll have a pool of 12 million active patents to deal with. To support all that you'll need 25,000 or more examiners. Of course patent infringement lawsuits will be totally out of control - no human can be expected to know the contents of 12M patents and not infringe on them. Heck, I can only read three or four before my head explodes.
The simple fix is to limit the patent office to granting a fixed number of patents each month. And I'd set that limit at 10,000 or less per month. Doing that stabilizes the number of employees at the patent office. And do you really believe there are 10,000 inventions made each month worthy of patent protection? I sure don't believe that there are that many. I'd set the limit even lower - 5,000 or less. Setting the limit lower simply gets rid of the junk and makes the ones that do get granted more valuable.
You have to wonder how much the employees were really hurt by this. It was a 'no poaching' agreement. That meant that recruiters from those companies weren't going to call down the entire Rolodex of the competing firms and try to recruit. But.... there are nothing stopping external recruiters from doing that. And there was nothing stopping individuals from switching on their own.
There's some logic to an agreement like that. Each of these firm's recruiters could waste huge amounts of employee time in their competitors by making thousand of recruiting calls.
It's a class action. The only person that is really winning here is the lawyer that is getting $150,000,000 for bringing the suit.
You are aiming at the wrong target. Google blindly indexes what it finds on the web. The right solution was for the EU to require the sites hosting the source articles to include a "do not index" meta tag which Google would then respect. Put this burden where it belongs - on the author of the stories, not the search engine.
There is a difference between forgiven and forgotten. Until we invent time machines undoing history is impossible. You can pass all of the laws you want but you will never be able to erase the event.
Trying to get Google to stop indexing is just going to result in a giant game of whack a mole like we have with DMCA take down notices. No matter how many million take downs they file the mole can never be erased.
Heck, I can even see source sites generating automated ways to combat this. Continuously keep poking Google to reindex your site. When you see the Google crawler insert meaningless random tidbits into the URLs. Now the other side of the robot war will keep issuing takedowns on these randomized URLs but since there is a cycle time of a week or so you will always have a set of working URLs in the Google index.
The ruling is insane. If the EU really wants to implement this insanity the best way would be for the sites hosting the article to include a 'do not index' meta tag which Google would then respect. Doing it that way places the burden where it belongs - on the author of the stories, not on the search engine.
Going after the URLs directly at Google is a total exercise in a whack a mole since the links are always changing. You're just going to end up with another pile of automated systems generating millions of takedown requests. When the source sites disappear they will change their URLs and then the cycle will endlessly repeat.
The AsiaRF one includes the small PCB antenna in the photo. The PCB antenna has twice the range of those tiny chip antennas. Since there is a jack there you can use larger antenna if you want. Another advantage to the PCB antenna is that you can move it around and aim the signal where you need it.
In Vocore's blog he says that his external antennas did not perform as well as the chip one. I suspect that is because he doesn't own the expensive test equipment needed to adjust his RF path to match the external one he picked. In general, bigger is better with antennas. He's also wrong about needing two antennas for 802.11N support on the RT5350.
I don't believe the RT5350 has a security unit on it so it shouldn't be possible to lock the boot loader.
The $20 Vocore is for the module only. If you want the Ethernet, USB and power connectors you need to order the $40 Vocore+Dock choice. instead I'd recommend getting the $38 choice form the AsiaRF campaign. https://www.indiegogo.com/proj...
AsiaRF is going to ship three months earlier and support for it is already checked into OpenWRT.
These unit aren't really the same thing as a RaspPi. RaspPi is oriented towards having a GUI and screen. These units are oriented towards networking and embedded control. The unit are also tiny - about one cubic inch. Many times smaller than a RaspPi.
There is another similar project simultaneously up on Indiegogo from AsiaRF
https://www.indiegogo.com/proj...
It was put up about a week later so its funding is not as far along. There are still a few Early Birds left.
It based on the same chip and around the same price. The main difference is that the AsiaRF module has already gone through CE/FCC testing and it is already in production. So there is very little risk of the project not shipping. Support for the AsiaRF unit is already checked into OpenWRT.
I find it interesting that they are offering to design and build 10 custom boards with wifi/Ethernet to your spec for $5000. Similar design work in the US/EU would be $30,000 or more.
Now you're just down to a cost benefit analysis. Is the value add from the publisher worth the money they will be taking? This answer will vary with the perceptions of the author and the cost of the publisher. The trend line on this answer is pointing in the direction of the publisher not being worth the price being asked.
Maybe you are looking at this wrong -- start a side-line business being an editor for these people. Are there places that will proofread a book by email for $250? Maybe $1000 to do major editing on it?
I have to agree with this, the need for a publisher is disappearing just like the need for a recording label. Stross should self publish and then cut a direct deal with Amazon. He'd probably end up with more money that way.
Since he's a well know author, maybe try putting his self-published books up on Indiegogo first. He might net enough off from doing that for each book that the later revenue from Amazon is just gravy.
Maybe do some fact checking first...
http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Pa...
All of the Allwinner CPUs will boot from an appropriately formatted SD card and ignore the OS in flash. Don't know what wifi is in there but 75% of Allwinner A31 based tables out of China have Broadcom Wifi in them and the drivers are in the mainline kernel. I believe Kitkat is already available for the A31 and given how standardized these tablets are I don't foresee major problems upgrading.
Allwinner devices are far more hackable than Nvidia based ones. Most features of the Allwinner CPUs are documented except for the usual suspects -- graphics. A31 uses an Imagination PowerVR GPU. And it is not Allwinner that is keeping that GPU secret, it is Imagination.
$85 (with Slickdeals coupon) with free ship is an excellent price for this set of features. Anyway it is already sold out until they can get more from their OEM.
BTW - I do think there is a CPU security feature that can encrypt the boot, but I've never seen an Allwinner device that has turned it on.
It is not worth my time to fight with them. Declare it a loss, move onto the next vendor and don't buy from the previous vendor again. I used to fight with them, now I understand the rewards from the fight are not worth the cost on low priced products. Just blacklist the vendor and move on. Of course there are probably a few vendors that are exceptions to this rule but it is not worth my time to locate them.
You need to put this into perspective. It is unreasonable to expect a company to provide significant human support for a product you spent $30 on at a retail store. The company has probably only made $1-2 profit from the sale, if they provide easy to access support they will lose money on every sale. If you want lots of free support go buy a $3,000 Macbook.
Personally, I don't even bother trying to return or get support on anything under $100 any more. It just goes into the trash and I buy something similar from a different manufacturer and hope it works.
An even more efficient form of this is buying stuff from Aliexpress/DX/etc. Prices there can be as low as 20% of US retail for similar products. Sure I occasionally get junk or the wrong product, but just throw it in the trash and try a different vendor. The overall savings is worth eating the occasional fraud or hassling with Ali's escrow to stop payment. I fully expect little to no support on these purchases and I know returns are almost impossible.
Amazingly content free press release. No clue what these devices are. This is just fluff reporting with no details.
It would be cool if the companies suypporting this bill sent about about 20,000 demand letters to Vermont and Nevada companies and then started prosecuting on them. Should be easy since overly broad patents are a dime a dozen. Then maybe Leahy and Reid will get the message before their constituents break their doors down.
To clarify. It is a 40 acre parcel. It is likely that these wells are located on the property they are leasing. They article does not address this. I am wondering if they leased the land knowing the wells were there.
Article says they lease the land.
Next question - were the wells there before they leased it?
How do you get 200 years? Money in the stock market makes returns.
Use this calculator
http://www.calculator.net/futu...
Put in $5,000 payment
Nothing at start.
43 years (65 - 22), 6.3%
Do this in an IRA so there are no taxes involved.
You will have $1,018,527 at the end.
6.3% is reasonable. I have been averaging over 8% for last 20 years including the big meltdowns.
Long story short, Horgan's thesis isn't "oh noes we aren't funding basic research," it's more along the lines of "there is just nothing as huge to discover left, no matter how much money you pour onto it.
Anyone here think that the computer science revolution is anywhere close to being finished? In my opinion it probably has another hundred years left in it. I also think we are just scratching the surface in biochemistry. It is scary to think of where that field will be in a hundred years. Physics can go figure out dark matter and dark energy. That's sure to stir things up. Maybe figure out sustainable fusion while their at it.
He got into these problems with revenue matching because he is running his business on cash basis accounting. In general only very small businesses can be run on cash basis accounting almost all manufacturing oriented businesses use accrual accounting. With accrual accounting you would book the Kickstarter money as a customer deposit and then recognize it as income when the product ships.
http://www.investopedia.com/te...