Knowingly violating a patent is treble damages, which is why they tell you never to look.
For every patent I have filed (hardware stuff, not software), the patent lawyers do a search of the patent database in all categories related to the patent, in order to ensure that the patent differs from any prior art. This is an essential part of the application.
The "never look" idea I think comes into play if, for example, you are writing a piece of software and want to be able to say that you came up with all the ideas yourself and did not simply peruse the patent database and copy someone elses idea.
Furthermore, I am assuming the original posters idea really was non-obvious and new, or they would not be trying to patent is (maybe this is naive), in which case there should be no identical prior art.
As a number of posters including the parent have stated, work for hire means you do not own the IP rights and it is not up to you to prevent a patent. If you(OP) are really opposed to software patents, if your company has an agreement about patent royalties where you get a share of profits, you should consider donating this money to one of the organizations that is fighting against software patents.
I would love to see a superhero movie that was 90% composed of the superhero using his/her powers in cool fight scenes. So many of these movies (cf. Hulk) which could have been awesome are filled with lame scenes about characters longing to be loved / whatever with a few min of cool fight scenes at the end. Based on most of the movies I have seen though, I appear to be in the minority and people like you who like romantic subplots, hero's staring at pictures of lost loves, etc., seem to be what drives the movie plots.
A number of people have jumped on the idea that people using Beta software should be prepared to have problems, and I think you're absolutely correct. I wonder, however, if people are becoming desensitized to 'beta' since so many companies, most prominently Google, but certainly dozens of other big names have perpetual 'beta' releases of software which are used by everyday users ?
Sorry for being a bit off-topic, but do is there a way to use street view without flash player ? Google says "to use street view, you must download flash player 9".
1. Thanks for the link. It's ironic that the link in the summary leads to an ad page. Any time a site shows a full page ad before the article I am trying to read, I immediately go back to try and send the message that I will not read their site if they insist on advertising that way.
2. On topic: Although I completely disagree with sony's actions here, it makes sense that a computer without all the crap would cost more. A crap filled PC is subsidized by revenue from the crap vendors, a clean PC is not.
I still use IE6 on all my machines (not for any real reason, it's just what I have always used). As a result, I have never had popup blocking. While they do still appear occasionally, I find that during most regular web browsing, very few sites use popups anymore, presumably because everybody blocks them.
The result is that on the off chance I am using a diferent machine with FF or IE7 installed, I spend far more time dealing with the popup bar blocking legitimate popups than I would normally spend closing unwanted ones. Obviously if IE dropped popup blocking, sites would probably start using them again, but for now I'm happiest being a popupblockingless minority.
Since it's hard to believe than anyone is actually that stupid, I assume you're a troll. (Mabye that means I am too)
The engergy due to the height of the mass (gravitational potential) is mass*g*height, where g is 9.81 m/s. This is the amount of energy the mass has to give up, and this is how the people "hating on it" earlier came up with their numbers. They are correct. You can put any gears you want to into the lamp, there is still only m*g*h worth of energy supplied to it.
If what you're saying is legitimate, you can rest easy knowing I'm a skeptical jackass. However, I'm amazed that you have been modded up / taken seriously. Your post has all the hallmarks of any other snake oil pitch: coming soon, radical new change, can't talk about it because it's proprietary, no real information.
Although it's possible, it is not often that breakthroughs are made by lone investigators, secretly toiling on 5 volume book sets. The usual way these things work is with a record of peer reviewed (or at least demonstrable) advances.
There is a saying somewhere about extrordinary claims and extrordinary evidence. Why are people taking you any more seriously than somebody who claims to have invented cold fusion or a perpetual motion machine ?
I forgot to mention that high field permanent magnets need to be sintered: basically a powder of NdFeB is formed into the shape of the magnet, then heated with a magnetic field applied until it hardens. Aside from the heating, the magnetic field is applied with a resistive electromagnet which would use way more energy than is actually stored in the magnet.
I was thinking about this a couple of weeks ago (storing energy as a magnetic field in a permanent magnet) and did some math. It is easy to (roughly) calculate the energy stored in a permanent magnet based on the field strength (energy per volume is 1/2 * B*H = 1/2*(B^2)/mu). Anyway, if you assume a remanent field of 1 Telsa (the best permanent magnets will in fact go up to ~1.4 T), and unit relative permeability for the magnet (really it's like 1.05) this gives you about 0.4 MJ/m^3 or 0.4 KJ/L Compared to 47.9 MJ/L for gasoline, or 0.36 MJ/L for NiMH batteries Wikipedia link, this does not compare favourably.
There is also the problem of getting the energy out.
As an aside, magnetic fields have always been a favorite of perpetual motion people becuase they are difficult to understand and essentially add a non-intuitive level of obfuscation.
I had always pictured 'feeder tracks': each city along the way would have a loop that went out to the main track and back again. Passengers would board a smaller train at the city station which would go out on the loop and mate with the main train at speed. Passengers travelling onwards would get onto the main train, and passengers stopping at that city would get onto the feeder train which would take them back to the station.
Of course this involves the resolution of a lot of timing/safety issues (what if a feeder train is late, what if some emergency prevents the feeder train from detaching from the main train before it runs out of track, etc.) Although arguably less elegant, your way makes a lot more practical sense. Rather than having a car for each destination, it may be more efficient to just have a 'swap car' that you board to get off which is swapped for one filled with passengers at the station.
they could just write a Windows app and have it work on OS/2.
I think you are absolutely right. This may seem backward, but what somebody needs to do is write a Linux emulator for windows. I know they exist (I think Cygwin or something), but I mean one that would let average users painlessly try out linux apps on their windows machine. If it was good enough, there might be less windows ports of good linux apps, with people being told to run it under emulation. It would let people ease into linux familiarity, and if people find themselves using mostly emulated linux programs, they may give it more thought when buying their next machine.
To me, the biggest challenge facing the creation of a useful high-speed train across the country is that every city is going to think it needs to stop there. You seem to think chicago and denver, somebody else said Milwaukee and Seattle. By the time the project is done and various special interests have been satisfied, the top speed of the train will be irrelevant because it will stop 30 times on its way across the country.
The only way this will beat a plane is nonstop NY-LA, which is how it should be.
"Electrical engineering, of course, has thermodynamics, etc."
You think this is why it is allowed to be called engineering ? It has electricity. All of the mature engineering disciplines use applied physics to solve problems. That is what has made them engineering. The definition may be changing, but historically that is why some things are called engineering, and some are not.
I agree with most of what you say, except this paranoia against RFID. You are absolutely right that it would be possible to track people with RFID assuming a massive tracking infrastructure was set up. Right now, the infrastructure is in place to track anyone who has a cellphone but nobody (including me) is worried about this. What is it about RFID that makes people so paranoid ?
Slashdot Mirror
Knowingly violating a patent is treble damages, which is why they tell you never to look.
For every patent I have filed (hardware stuff, not software), the patent lawyers do a search of the patent database in all categories related to the patent, in order to ensure that the patent differs from any prior art. This is an essential part of the application.
The "never look" idea I think comes into play if, for example, you are writing a piece of software and want to be able to say that you came up with all the ideas yourself and did not simply peruse the patent database and copy someone elses idea.
Furthermore, I am assuming the original posters idea really was non-obvious and new, or they would not be trying to patent is (maybe this is naive), in which case there should be no identical prior art.
As a number of posters including the parent have stated, work for hire means you do not own the IP rights and it is not up to you to prevent a patent. If you(OP) are really opposed to software patents, if your company has an agreement about patent royalties where you get a share of profits, you should consider donating this money to one of the organizations that is fighting against software patents.
I would love to see a superhero movie that was 90% composed of the superhero using his/her powers in cool fight scenes. So many of these movies (cf. Hulk) which could have been awesome are filled with lame scenes about characters longing to be loved / whatever with a few min of cool fight scenes at the end. Based on most of the movies I have seen though, I appear to be in the minority and people like you who like romantic subplots, hero's staring at pictures of lost loves, etc., seem to be what drives the movie plots.
A number of people have jumped on the idea that people using Beta software should be prepared to have problems, and I think you're absolutely correct. I wonder, however, if people are becoming desensitized to 'beta' since so many companies, most prominently Google, but certainly dozens of other big names have perpetual 'beta' releases of software which are used by everyday users ?
Sorry for being a bit off-topic, but do is there a way to use street view without flash player ? Google says "to use street view, you must download flash player 9".
1. Thanks for the link. It's ironic that the link in the summary leads to an ad page. Any time a site shows a full page ad before the article I am trying to read, I immediately go back to try and send the message that I will not read their site if they insist on advertising that way.
2. On topic: Although I completely disagree with sony's actions here, it makes sense that a computer without all the crap would cost more. A crap filled PC is subsidized by revenue from the crap vendors, a clean PC is not.
I still use IE6 on all my machines (not for any real reason, it's just what I have always used). As a result, I have never had popup blocking. While they do still appear occasionally, I find that during most regular web browsing, very few sites use popups anymore, presumably because everybody blocks them.
The result is that on the off chance I am using a diferent machine with FF or IE7 installed, I spend far more time dealing with the popup bar blocking legitimate popups than I would normally spend closing unwanted ones. Obviously if IE dropped popup blocking, sites would probably start using them again, but for now I'm happiest being a popupblockingless minority.
Since it's hard to believe than anyone is actually that stupid, I assume you're a troll. (Mabye that means I am too)
The engergy due to the height of the mass (gravitational potential) is mass*g*height, where g is 9.81 m/s. This is the amount of energy the mass has to give up, and this is how the people "hating on it" earlier came up with their numbers. They are correct. You can put any gears you want to into the lamp, there is still only m*g*h worth of energy supplied to it.
If what you're saying is legitimate, you can rest easy knowing I'm a skeptical jackass. However, I'm amazed that you have been modded up / taken seriously. Your post has all the hallmarks of any other snake oil pitch: coming soon, radical new change, can't talk about it because it's proprietary, no real information.
Although it's possible, it is not often that breakthroughs are made by lone investigators, secretly toiling on 5 volume book sets. The usual way these things work is with a record of peer reviewed (or at least demonstrable) advances. There is a saying somewhere about extrordinary claims and extrordinary evidence. Why are people taking you any more seriously than somebody who claims to have invented cold fusion or a perpetual motion machine ?
I forgot to mention that high field permanent magnets need to be sintered: basically a powder of NdFeB is formed into the shape of the magnet, then heated with a magnetic field applied until it hardens. Aside from the heating, the magnetic field is applied with a resistive electromagnet which would use way more energy than is actually stored in the magnet.
I was thinking about this a couple of weeks ago (storing energy as a magnetic field in a permanent magnet) and did some math. It is easy to (roughly) calculate the energy stored in a permanent magnet based on the field strength (energy per volume is 1/2 * B*H = 1/2*(B^2)/mu). Anyway, if you assume a remanent field of 1 Telsa (the best permanent magnets will in fact go up to ~1.4 T), and unit relative permeability for the magnet (really it's like 1.05) this gives you about 0.4 MJ/m^3 or 0.4 KJ/L Compared to 47.9 MJ/L for gasoline, or 0.36 MJ/L for NiMH batteries Wikipedia link, this does not compare favourably.
There is also the problem of getting the energy out.
As an aside, magnetic fields have always been a favorite of perpetual motion people becuase they are difficult to understand and essentially add a non-intuitive level of obfuscation.
I had always pictured 'feeder tracks': each city along the way would have a loop that went out to the main track and back again. Passengers would board a smaller train at the city station which would go out on the loop and mate with the main train at speed. Passengers travelling onwards would get onto the main train, and passengers stopping at that city would get onto the feeder train which would take them back to the station.
Of course this involves the resolution of a lot of timing/safety issues (what if a feeder train is late, what if some emergency prevents the feeder train from detaching from the main train before it runs out of track, etc.) Although arguably less elegant, your way makes a lot more practical sense. Rather than having a car for each destination, it may be more efficient to just have a 'swap car' that you board to get off which is swapped for one filled with passengers at the station.
I think you are absolutely right. This may seem backward, but what somebody needs to do is write a Linux emulator for windows. I know they exist (I think Cygwin or something), but I mean one that would let average users painlessly try out linux apps on their windows machine. If it was good enough, there might be less windows ports of good linux apps, with people being told to run it under emulation. It would let people ease into linux familiarity, and if people find themselves using mostly emulated linux programs, they may give it more thought when buying their next machine.
To me, the biggest challenge facing the creation of a useful high-speed train across the country is that every city is going to think it needs to stop there. You seem to think chicago and denver, somebody else said Milwaukee and Seattle. By the time the project is done and various special interests have been satisfied, the top speed of the train will be irrelevant because it will stop 30 times on its way across the country.
The only way this will beat a plane is nonstop NY-LA, which is how it should be.
"Electrical engineering, of course, has thermodynamics, etc."
You think this is why it is allowed to be called engineering ? It has electricity. All of the mature engineering disciplines use applied physics to solve problems. That is what has made them engineering. The definition may be changing, but historically that is why some things are called engineering, and some are not.
The people that wrote the fuel injector firmware code were likely embedded systems engineers which falls under electrical engineering.
I agree with most of what you say, except this paranoia against RFID. You are absolutely right that it would be possible to track people with RFID assuming a massive tracking infrastructure was set up. Right now, the infrastructure is in place to track anyone who has a cellphone but nobody (including me) is worried about this. What is it about RFID that makes people so paranoid ?
I think the most interesting thing to come to light in this study is that scientists have identified fourty characteristics of nematode sexual organs.