You are missing the point. Bender stays in the EU, so he's bound by the laws of the EU. Moreover, it's not probable for Bender to go off and steal your data. Okay, he might accidentally burp it all up. But he wouldn't go use the information to extort you. (Well, he would. But I mean a computer wouldn't.) Apu might go and Nigerian spam your ass using the information you were lead to believe was kept highly confidential.
Also, the idea of having a robot transcribe your love messages is far more acceptable to many than having a guy listen to your deepest thoughts and giggling while doing so. Who knows? He might even put a few jokes in there.
It's not that simple. Be aware that when you file a provisional patent, you have one year to file a full patent application in order to get the earlier filing date of the provisional patent. Moreover, if the invention is in use or one sale during the one-year period after the provisional filing but before the non-provisional filing, you may lose the right to ever patent that subject matter.
Furthermore, the provisional patent has to enable the inventions claimed in the following non-provisional filing. This is very important. You can't file a jumbled provisional app then claim everything later on.
The basic idea is that if you want to protect a trade secret, you should keep it secret. Even if you trust the guy giving you advice, a third party who misappropriates your trade secret may claim that it wasn't confidential if you let this other guy read it without a confidentiality agreement. In fact, that's probably the best way to get your advisor to sign: my explaining that it prevents third parties from claiming that the information is not confidential.
You could also file a provisional application, which is relatively cheap. After you file the provisional, you have up to a year to file a full-on patent application. However, it sounds like you are not ready for this expense yet. In that case, you should stick with a non-disclosure agreement or at least a confidentiality agreement that clarifies that the information is sensitive and confidential.
Outstanding lawyers may choose to take on these cases pro bono, especially at the beginning, for the publicity. But even if you get a retarded lawyer, it's probably better than the average college student strolling into court without a clue. I mean, most lawyers will go on Westlaw or Lexis and crib off of the successful RIAA cases. Soon, they'll probably all trot out the same arguments regarding making available =/= distributing and the Media Sentry stuff. I can imagine RIAA just lowering their settlement demands once a student gets a pro bono lawyers because let's face it: RIAA's lawyers aren't THAT stupid, and they're not really after money away. They want the stat that says, "99% of the people we sue settle or lose, so our campaign is just." They can make that claim no matter how small the settlement is.
In the US, you can thank Disney for copyrights being extended to death of author plus seventy years. Orwell died in 1950. For corporate authorship, it is 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever endpoint is earlier
America's next-generation aircraft carriers are designed with an excess of electricity generation capability so they can be upgraded with such energy weapons if and when they are deployable. The nuclear power plants are smaller but put out more power than the current models.
The ruling in the Pepsi points case was based on the unreasonableness of the belief that a military jet would be given as a prize for buying Pepsi points. The airplane was worth tens of millions. Also, the commercial was seen as an advertisement and not an offer to enter into a contract. (Pretend a store advertises a sale on computers, but runs out of stock. Can you enforce? No.)
The current cases is substantively different. The million dollars was a reward to justify his client's freedom, which is valuable enough to be reasonable. It wasn't an advertisement. Will the lawsuit succeed? Don't know. But the plaintiff has a good shot of getting his reliance damages such as his airfare and the like. I'm not so sure he can get his breach of contract damages ($1 million).
There are good reasons why it is illegal to compete with the USPS. The Postal Service has requirements that other competitors do not. First, it has to offer first class service to all fifty states, even Alaska, Hawaii, and other unprofitable places. Second, it has to charge exactly the same rates domestically regardless of the distance. Third, you can mail an envelope you labeled by hand whereas UPS/FedEx would require you to barcode it.
If you allowed private enterprises to compete unchecked, they would cherrypick the most profitable routes (hubs, basically) and quickly bankrupt the Post Office. They'd also charge less than the Post Office on short routes that the Post Office would need to subsidize the longer routes. But if you had to regulate competitors to make sure they had the same disadvantages as the Post Office, what's the point?
Yes, they fine you for littering if you leave your bumper on the road after an accident. They also bill you for repairing the dividers, signposts, and lamp posts that you destroyed in an accident. Utah did that to my parents when they got into a car accident. Utah could get reimbursement from the federal government only by showing they exhausted other sources of funding, including billing accident victims.
I've been using FreeNAS 0.7 RC1 for a while. It works pretty well for a NAS, and does the job for my small business. However, I don't think it would be useful for a larger business that requires great performance and reliability.
This sounds like NASA posturing meant to get more funding for the ISS.
At the same time, I think a lot has been learned while building the ISS. I am far from certain that the lessons justify the cost, but just building a complex structure in space was a valuable exercise.
Vista got that market share on virtue of Microsoft's monopoly. All the same, Vista was a good operating system after SP1 once the drivers matured. I kept on telling my Linux-zealot friends that Vista x64 SP1 was the best Windows ever, and easier to use than Ubuntu. Well, one of my friends tried it. He concluded that, "Well, it doesn't suck as much as I thought it did."
Run Vista SP1 yourself on supported hardware. Don't knock it until you tried it. I am running Ubuntu, Vista x64, and Windows 7 x64 on the desktop. Vista is a surprisingly good operating system. FreeBSD on FreeNAS is solid as heck.
I think it's the backend that keeps everyone stuck onto Microsoft. Office 2007 was completely different from Office 2003. However, it was also much more stable, and faster. But I have a feeling that the backend infrastructure (Exchange servers, etc.) was the same. Windows Vista and 7 come with deployment and administration tools that IT groups are familiar with. So even though the end user is given a completely different change, the underlying backend technologies stay similar enough to keep people on Microsoft.
Google is attempting to position itself as the data kingpins of the next-generation. Right now, the average consumer is concerned about their privacy. They don't want to host their data on outside servers, etc. But kids nowadays have no such compunctions about posting their entire personal life onto Facebook or Myspace. You have teenagers who have spent their entire lives in the Internet age. They'll grow up with that attitude, then put all their business work onto third-party servers. Google wants to be that server. There is a network effect here so Google has to act fast to seize new ground. It doesn't make sense now, but it will in five years when everyone is running on Google's servers.
Google has taken Microsoft's MO of persistent beta testing. Google releases a product, it sucks, then Google fixes it, then adds more functionality. In a year or two, you have a good product. So Google is reaching all over to get its feet on the ground to start that process with as many products as possible. The end goal is to have a whole suite of interrelated data-related products that are good enough for 95% of the users out there so no one else can break into the Google data hegemony.
Google wants to provide an entire suite so all of your information goes through Google, so no one else can break in and take your data. You have Gmail, with its fast interface and great spam blocking. That naturally extends to Google Calendar. If you want directions, you have Google Maps that takes info from Gmail and Google Calendar and gives it to you. All that info is fed into Google so it can toss up targeted ads for you. Now with Google Voice being deployed, you can seamlessly call contacts who mailed you, or a business close to the destination. Google Street View lets you see where your destination looks like. You can get an ad from Gmail, then buy the product using Google Checkout. When you're on vacation, you can take photos and upload it onto Picasa Web via Picasa. You can tag your friends and location so Google knows where you like to go and who you hang out with. Your info is already on Google. The more products Google has, the less likely you are to take any bit of your data elsewhere. I mean, Flickr is great, but Picasa works so well with Picasa Web! You can easily retouch a photo using "I'm Feeling Lucky" then sync it onto Picasa Web. You can e-mail photos to your friends via Gmail through Picasa. And it's all free! It becomes increasingly hard for a competitor to get into the data business.
I am a small business owner. I have to say that Google has been a godsend. I cannot afford to deploy my own Exchange servers, much less administer one. But with Google Apps, I can push e-mail from my domain on my Blackberry. Third party apps (and now Google new plugin) allow me to sync my Google contacts and calendar onto Outlook and my Blackberry, which I can backup in case Google eats all my data. Google Voice lets me use only one phone number, so I can be selectively available everywhere I want to be available with clients being none the wiser. As the features become more complete, I can see Google penetrating deeper into mid-sized and large-sized businesses. Google has to maintain uptime and reliability, which is a very difficult task. Perhaps that's why they are building so many geographically-separate servers. But for a small business owner who would otherwise would have to do without Blackberry push mail on my domain, or without calendar and contacts syncing, I'm very happy with Google's software suite right now.
This is an unrealistic argument. If anything, it's Windows inertia amongst hardware manufacturers that keep Linux away from the desktop. They don't provide drivers for Linux, and Linux doesn't want binary blobs, so hardware support for Linux lags behinds Windows. Moreover, Linux just isn't a good operation system for the average user. Computers are ubiquitous nowadays. It's no longer the case that only fanboys should be able to use computers. Windows works. Once in a while, it breaks, but generally, it works, and the average guy can figure it out. Linux requires a bunch of file editing and command lines just to do mundane tasks. You want to apt-get a package? Well, you have to edit the.conf to put in the proper servers before you apt-get it. The user interface is inconsistent. And that's how things are supposed to work in Linux. Imagine when stuff breaks.
I use Linux on my netbook, FreeBSD-based FreeNAS on my NAS, and a Linux Apache server. I also have Windows Vista x64 and Windows 7 RC1 x64. For a desktop, in my experience, Windows 7 x64 probably offers the best experience as far as things being intuitive, and just working. (I haven't used MacOS, though.)
The cost savings of Google Apps would be in not having to host servers. If you have confidential information that cannot be put onto outside servers, then you're not the target audience for Google Apps.
Bilski does not address obviousness; it addresses patentable subject matter. You cannot patent scientific laws like gravity. By extension, you cannot patent mathematical rules or algorithms. You can patent machines that make use of algorithms to control it, such as a rubber-curing device that calculates when to turn off the heat, but software is arguably a pure algorithm because it's tied to ANY machine and not any machine in particular. Thus, regardless of how novel or non-obvious the software, it is not patentable under Bilski because it cannot be patented.
Collecting home addresses should be legal because it's not personally-identifiable information. They identify real property! This should be obvious to anyone who has a brain!!!
Slashdot Mirror
Macs: Perfect for kids and graphics designers. PC: Designed for real men, by real men.
Just kidding!
Well, the user can Google to find the best browsers. There's no reason users cannot make an informed decision.
Oh, wait. I see the problem here.
That's what the digital witches want you to believe.
You are missing the point. Bender stays in the EU, so he's bound by the laws of the EU. Moreover, it's not probable for Bender to go off and steal your data. Okay, he might accidentally burp it all up. But he wouldn't go use the information to extort you. (Well, he would. But I mean a computer wouldn't.) Apu might go and Nigerian spam your ass using the information you were lead to believe was kept highly confidential.
Also, the idea of having a robot transcribe your love messages is far more acceptable to many than having a guy listen to your deepest thoughts and giggling while doing so. Who knows? He might even put a few jokes in there.
It's not that simple. Be aware that when you file a provisional patent, you have one year to file a full patent application in order to get the earlier filing date of the provisional patent. Moreover, if the invention is in use or one sale during the one-year period after the provisional filing but before the non-provisional filing, you may lose the right to ever patent that subject matter.
Furthermore, the provisional patent has to enable the inventions claimed in the following non-provisional filing. This is very important. You can't file a jumbled provisional app then claim everything later on.
Be really careful of the in use or on sale bar.
You either trust the person not to steal your idea, or you need to get him to sign documents. There is no other way. I am going to give a shameless plug to an article I wrote regarding trade secrets.
The basic idea is that if you want to protect a trade secret, you should keep it secret. Even if you trust the guy giving you advice, a third party who misappropriates your trade secret may claim that it wasn't confidential if you let this other guy read it without a confidentiality agreement. In fact, that's probably the best way to get your advisor to sign: my explaining that it prevents third parties from claiming that the information is not confidential.
You could also file a provisional application, which is relatively cheap. After you file the provisional, you have up to a year to file a full-on patent application. However, it sounds like you are not ready for this expense yet. In that case, you should stick with a non-disclosure agreement or at least a confidentiality agreement that clarifies that the information is sensitive and confidential.
Outstanding lawyers may choose to take on these cases pro bono, especially at the beginning, for the publicity. But even if you get a retarded lawyer, it's probably better than the average college student strolling into court without a clue. I mean, most lawyers will go on Westlaw or Lexis and crib off of the successful RIAA cases. Soon, they'll probably all trot out the same arguments regarding making available =/= distributing and the Media Sentry stuff. I can imagine RIAA just lowering their settlement demands once a student gets a pro bono lawyers because let's face it: RIAA's lawyers aren't THAT stupid, and they're not really after money away. They want the stat that says, "99% of the people we sue settle or lose, so our campaign is just." They can make that claim no matter how small the settlement is.
In the US, you can thank Disney for copyrights being extended to death of author plus seventy years. Orwell died in 1950. For corporate authorship, it is 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever endpoint is earlier
Game companies should progressively lower prices of their games as time passes. This would eat up the used game market.
America's next-generation aircraft carriers are designed with an excess of electricity generation capability so they can be upgraded with such energy weapons if and when they are deployable. The nuclear power plants are smaller but put out more power than the current models.
The ruling in the Pepsi points case was based on the unreasonableness of the belief that a military jet would be given as a prize for buying Pepsi points. The airplane was worth tens of millions. Also, the commercial was seen as an advertisement and not an offer to enter into a contract. (Pretend a store advertises a sale on computers, but runs out of stock. Can you enforce? No.)
The current cases is substantively different. The million dollars was a reward to justify his client's freedom, which is valuable enough to be reasonable. It wasn't an advertisement. Will the lawsuit succeed? Don't know. But the plaintiff has a good shot of getting his reliance damages such as his airfare and the like. I'm not so sure he can get his breach of contract damages ($1 million).
There are good reasons why it is illegal to compete with the USPS. The Postal Service has requirements that other competitors do not. First, it has to offer first class service to all fifty states, even Alaska, Hawaii, and other unprofitable places. Second, it has to charge exactly the same rates domestically regardless of the distance. Third, you can mail an envelope you labeled by hand whereas UPS/FedEx would require you to barcode it.
If you allowed private enterprises to compete unchecked, they would cherrypick the most profitable routes (hubs, basically) and quickly bankrupt the Post Office. They'd also charge less than the Post Office on short routes that the Post Office would need to subsidize the longer routes. But if you had to regulate competitors to make sure they had the same disadvantages as the Post Office, what's the point?
Yes, they fine you for littering if you leave your bumper on the road after an accident. They also bill you for repairing the dividers, signposts, and lamp posts that you destroyed in an accident. Utah did that to my parents when they got into a car accident. Utah could get reimbursement from the federal government only by showing they exhausted other sources of funding, including billing accident victims.
"We've lost the tapes." "No, sir, we've found the tapes after all."
I've been using FreeNAS 0.7 RC1 for a while. It works pretty well for a NAS, and does the job for my small business. However, I don't think it would be useful for a larger business that requires great performance and reliability.
This sounds like NASA posturing meant to get more funding for the ISS.
At the same time, I think a lot has been learned while building the ISS. I am far from certain that the lessons justify the cost, but just building a complex structure in space was a valuable exercise.
It already left beta. The code-name was Vista, then Mojave. Get with the times, dude.
Vista got that market share on virtue of Microsoft's monopoly. All the same, Vista was a good operating system after SP1 once the drivers matured. I kept on telling my Linux-zealot friends that Vista x64 SP1 was the best Windows ever, and easier to use than Ubuntu. Well, one of my friends tried it. He concluded that, "Well, it doesn't suck as much as I thought it did."
Run Vista SP1 yourself on supported hardware. Don't knock it until you tried it. I am running Ubuntu, Vista x64, and Windows 7 x64 on the desktop. Vista is a surprisingly good operating system. FreeBSD on FreeNAS is solid as heck.
I think it's the backend that keeps everyone stuck onto Microsoft. Office 2007 was completely different from Office 2003. However, it was also much more stable, and faster. But I have a feeling that the backend infrastructure (Exchange servers, etc.) was the same. Windows Vista and 7 come with deployment and administration tools that IT groups are familiar with. So even though the end user is given a completely different change, the underlying backend technologies stay similar enough to keep people on Microsoft.
Google is attempting to position itself as the data kingpins of the next-generation. Right now, the average consumer is concerned about their privacy. They don't want to host their data on outside servers, etc. But kids nowadays have no such compunctions about posting their entire personal life onto Facebook or Myspace. You have teenagers who have spent their entire lives in the Internet age. They'll grow up with that attitude, then put all their business work onto third-party servers. Google wants to be that server. There is a network effect here so Google has to act fast to seize new ground. It doesn't make sense now, but it will in five years when everyone is running on Google's servers.
Google has taken Microsoft's MO of persistent beta testing. Google releases a product, it sucks, then Google fixes it, then adds more functionality. In a year or two, you have a good product. So Google is reaching all over to get its feet on the ground to start that process with as many products as possible. The end goal is to have a whole suite of interrelated data-related products that are good enough for 95% of the users out there so no one else can break into the Google data hegemony.
Google wants to provide an entire suite so all of your information goes through Google, so no one else can break in and take your data. You have Gmail, with its fast interface and great spam blocking. That naturally extends to Google Calendar. If you want directions, you have Google Maps that takes info from Gmail and Google Calendar and gives it to you. All that info is fed into Google so it can toss up targeted ads for you. Now with Google Voice being deployed, you can seamlessly call contacts who mailed you, or a business close to the destination. Google Street View lets you see where your destination looks like. You can get an ad from Gmail, then buy the product using Google Checkout. When you're on vacation, you can take photos and upload it onto Picasa Web via Picasa. You can tag your friends and location so Google knows where you like to go and who you hang out with. Your info is already on Google. The more products Google has, the less likely you are to take any bit of your data elsewhere. I mean, Flickr is great, but Picasa works so well with Picasa Web! You can easily retouch a photo using "I'm Feeling Lucky" then sync it onto Picasa Web. You can e-mail photos to your friends via Gmail through Picasa. And it's all free! It becomes increasingly hard for a competitor to get into the data business.
I am a small business owner. I have to say that Google has been a godsend. I cannot afford to deploy my own Exchange servers, much less administer one. But with Google Apps, I can push e-mail from my domain on my Blackberry. Third party apps (and now Google new plugin) allow me to sync my Google contacts and calendar onto Outlook and my Blackberry, which I can backup in case Google eats all my data. Google Voice lets me use only one phone number, so I can be selectively available everywhere I want to be available with clients being none the wiser. As the features become more complete, I can see Google penetrating deeper into mid-sized and large-sized businesses. Google has to maintain uptime and reliability, which is a very difficult task. Perhaps that's why they are building so many geographically-separate servers. But for a small business owner who would otherwise would have to do without Blackberry push mail on my domain, or without calendar and contacts syncing, I'm very happy with Google's software suite right now.
This is an unrealistic argument. If anything, it's Windows inertia amongst hardware manufacturers that keep Linux away from the desktop. They don't provide drivers for Linux, and Linux doesn't want binary blobs, so hardware support for Linux lags behinds Windows. Moreover, Linux just isn't a good operation system for the average user. Computers are ubiquitous nowadays. It's no longer the case that only fanboys should be able to use computers. Windows works. Once in a while, it breaks, but generally, it works, and the average guy can figure it out. Linux requires a bunch of file editing and command lines just to do mundane tasks. You want to apt-get a package? Well, you have to edit the .conf to put in the proper servers before you apt-get it. The user interface is inconsistent. And that's how things are supposed to work in Linux. Imagine when stuff breaks.
I use Linux on my netbook, FreeBSD-based FreeNAS on my NAS, and a Linux Apache server. I also have Windows Vista x64 and Windows 7 RC1 x64. For a desktop, in my experience, Windows 7 x64 probably offers the best experience as far as things being intuitive, and just working. (I haven't used MacOS, though.)
The cost savings of Google Apps would be in not having to host servers. If you have confidential information that cannot be put onto outside servers, then you're not the target audience for Google Apps.
Bilski does not address obviousness; it addresses patentable subject matter. You cannot patent scientific laws like gravity. By extension, you cannot patent mathematical rules or algorithms. You can patent machines that make use of algorithms to control it, such as a rubber-curing device that calculates when to turn off the heat, but software is arguably a pure algorithm because it's tied to ANY machine and not any machine in particular. Thus, regardless of how novel or non-obvious the software, it is not patentable under Bilski because it cannot be patented.
If you don't lock the door then we can steal everything in your house.
Collecting home addresses should be legal because it's not personally-identifiable information. They identify real property! This should be obvious to anyone who has a brain!!!