If the government were in charge of the pharmaceutical industry, there would be no need for a "decent ROI," nor would there be incentive to "treat" illness as opposed to cure it.
You're right. Instead, there would be an incentive for politicians to give huge, lucrative contracts to their buddies that they are in bed with, either literally or figuratively, and for those buddies to inflate their bids on those contracts to absurd levels. Because contractors would be focusing on landing the most pre-approved pork projects, they wouldn't agressively seek out the most effective drugs. After all, they get paid whether the drug works or not. The important thing is to keep the pork rolling in.
Still, it makes for an interesting though experiment. If you could completely characterize a larger object and transmit that signature at c to another point, then you could effectively permit matter to travel at c. Of course, you could only go somewhere there was a receiver, so it would have to be somewhere we've already gone the old fashioned way. But it could make for a very efficient way to move stuff around in our own solar system.
Probably one cobbled together from parts he cannibalized from old radios, digital toasters, and Clinton-era computers, running a custom ROM he flashed to the BIOS chip and a barebones customized "GNU/Linux." He has to carry the motherboard and RAID in a hemp backpack (which doubles as his exercise regimen), it has a full QWERTY keyboard that he keeps in a side holster so he can run his EMACS-based SMS client, and the display is a naked LCD running on an ISA framebuffer card, connected by a ribbon cable coming out the side of the monitor. He suspends the monitor from a helmet so he can go "hands free."
This summary and the article it's based on are both dismal failures. They are rabid, uninformed rantings of anti-patent morons.
The only thing you have to do to have a patent not get published until it issues is file a non-publication request, and not file in foreign countries. I do it for my clients all the time. And it's not quite what you're saying above. Until the patent issues, you can't sue somebody on it. The best you can do is inform them that they might possibly infringe your patent if and when it issues in the future. This is a regular practice, and depending on a lot of factors, may or may not accomplish something. Either way, you can't sue and your damages don't run until the day your patent issues.
But if you publish your application, you actually have a legally stronger threat, because you may get provisional rights that will date back to your publication if your patent issues substantially unchanged from when it published. That means you can send your published application to somebody and tell them, "I think this patent will issue substantially unchanged. If it does, I will be seeking a reasonable royalty starting from the day I informed you of this publication." You still can't sue until the patent issues, but you might get some money for the period between when it was published and when it issues.
That is not what the attached request is about. There are certain applications that are prevented from being published or issued until the government decrees that they no longer have to be classified. This is generally not a good thing for an inventor. It means there is very limited opportunity to exploit his invention. It means that his patent can sit in limbo for years. This request relates to whether similar "protection" should be extended to some patents that are "economically important."
It may or may not be a good idea. But it is not the doom and gloom scenario that the stupid article makes it sound like. This is the equivalent to some rube on the street hearing that Linus Torvalds is a famous "hacker" and demanding that Linus be jailed immediately for his heinous crimes.
No, patents protect the idea, copyrights protect implementations.
No, Copyrights protect "original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression." (17 U.S.C. 102). Patents protect new, nonobvious, and useful "process[es], machine[s], manufacture[s], [and] composition[s] of matter." (35 U.S.C. 101). Neither protects "wouldn't it be cool if..."
I can tell you from firsthand experience that patent examiners frown on merely claiming a desired result. If your patent claim is "I claim a cloaking device capable of preventing visible detection of an object," the examiner will usually reject the claim for lack of specificity, even if you've fully disclosed a fully-enabled embodiment of a cloaking device. Of course, your attorney may be clever enough to draft claims broad enough to cover every method of implementing a cloaking device that people are able to come up with for the next 20 years, but if anything I would say that is persuasive that you have something truly revolutionary that deserves patent protection.
But the larger theme is that Portrait itself is such a load of BS that it warrants no better treatment. And not just because it's Literature instead of mere pop fiction. I've read and enjoyed Faulkner and Melville and Shakespeare on my own. In fact, I re-read Billy Budd just a few months ago, with fresh perspective, having recently read a lot of Horatio Hornblower and Jack Aubrey. I don't mind expending effort on those authors because they have interesting things to say. Even in that same class, the next book we read was Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. I devoured it in one weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. Again, Amy Tan had interesting things to say, so I was happy to think about them.
All James Joyce had to say was, "Ooooh, look! i iz so 1337, cuz i can haz teh s3X000rz!1!!!" I know lots of 17-year-olds who think the same thing, and I have no patience for their tortured prose on the subject.
(Also: There's an high school English teacher on Slashdot? How do you not spend all your nights weeping?)
I think the flaw was completely positive feedback coupled with a poor grade. The poor grade should have been accompanied by some useful suggestions for improvement.
When I was in high school, we read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This is literally the worst alleged novel I have ever read. I actively despised it with my entire soul. So I skipped huge chunks of it wherever I figured I could get away with doing so and still pick up the threads of the mostly nonexistent plot.
When we (finally) finished the thing, we had to write a series of short essays responsive to several prompts. One of the prompts told us to describe the symbolism and significance of the "rose."
Having skipped huge portions of the book, I had never encountered this purported rose. And I certainly wasn't going to go back and pick through the dense, sophomoric prose to find it. Instead, I figured I could probably pick up some partial credit by saying some random insightful-sounding thing. So I started spewing what English teachers love. I used words like "juxtaposition" and "antithesis" and compared the rose to some other random symbolic object in the book. It was pure, unadulterated, Grade A, premium All-American BS.
I got an A on the paper. The teacher was particularly profuse in her praise of my short essay on the "rose," commented that I had captured the symbolism of the "rose" perfectly. I couldn't have agreed more.
You're right, I should have. My best guess is the professor was Catholic. Or he graded the tests drunk. Or both. Either way, I wasn't about to second guess his wisdom.
I used that on a Calculus test once. We were supposed to find the formula for the volume of a cone by rotating a line segment around the X axis. I did most of the steps right but I missed a minus sign or forgot a 1/2 or something, and instead of 1/3*pi*r^2*h, I ended up with V = some big, messy formula that I knew was wrong. I was out of time, so my next step was "Then a miracle occurs. V = 1/3*pi*r^2*h."
I fail to see why this is a problem. Software patents suck.
You're entitled to hold that opinion. But without a patent, you the little guy will have absolutely nothing of value. You can't compete with the big guys on infrastructure or scale. If you want to beat them at something, the only way you're going to do it is to have a government-granted monopoly on your side.
Of course, there's no evidence that the free Julia will be any better. And Julia doesn't have the advantage of 50-ish years of people understanding it. But I agree with that anybody who blabbers about numerical methods and mentions C but not FORTRAN worries me.
Whether or not you have an NDA can determine whether certain events are a "publication." A publication of your idea is one of the events that triggers a bar date. The U.S. has the most forgiving bar date statute in the world. You get exactly one year from the triggering event to file your patent. If you don't file within one year, your patent is DOA. Most of the rest of the world doesn't even give you the year. If you "publish" before you've filed a patent application, your patent is DOA. So an NDA can be the difference between "you get a valuable 20-year monopoly on your technology" and "you own nothing."
Under the new America Invents Act, with its screwed up "First Inventor to File" system, NDAs may be even more important if you end up in a "derivation" proceeding where you're trying to prove that the first person to file got the idea from you.
Under some circumstances, not having an NDA can kill your ability to get a patent. And as the GP said, good investors will want to ensure that you have adequately protected the idea. Because the value in your business is not your cool ideas; it's cool ideas that you have some enforceable proprietary interest in.
Do text-based MUDs also have 3-D avatars? From the actual claims (the part of the patent that matters):
A method for enabling a first user to interact with other users in a virtual space, each user of the first user and the other users being associated with a three dimensional avatar representing said each user in the virtual space, the method comprising the steps of: customizing, using a processor of a client device, an avatar in response to input by the first user; receiving, by the client device, position information associated with fewer than all of the other user avatars in an interaction room of the virtual space, from a server process, wherein the client device does not receive position information of at least some avatars that fail to satisfy a participant condition imposed on avatars displayable on a client device display of the client device; determining, by the client device, a displayable set of the other user avatars associated with the client device display; and displaying, on the client device display, the displayable set of the other user avatars associated with the client device display.
You can't just say, "Oh, we've had this stuff since the 80s" to inavlidate a patent claim. You have to find each and every element of the claim. And you need to find it before November 13, 1994, which is the bar date for this application. Now look at the insanely-large list of references the examiner considered. He/she tried and failed to find the prior art that kills this patent. Maybe it's out there, but it's not going to be your trivial recollections of what people were generally doing in the 80s.
Well, this isn't yet a patent on anything. It's just an application. And even if the claims issue as they're now written, it's not a patent on the basic idea of driverless cars. "I claim a car that operates itself without a driver" would immediately be shot down by the examiner on prior art and probably on lack of specificity too.
This application is claiming a specific method of automatically driving a car. Granted, claim 1 as it's currently written is fairly broad, but if it survives without Google having to narrow it, it will be the exception, not the rule (I only rarely see a patent issue without the claims being amended at all). As for whether it should survive without being amended, I couldn't even hazard a wild guess without analyzing the claims and searching the prior art to see what else is out there. So long story short, it's not time to panic just yet.
If they're applying for a patent, it means that they must have some sufficiently viable method of producing the tech. The "limited amount of control over nearby vehicles" sounds the most ominous, considering the inability of a percentage of law enforcement to not abuse their powers. I smell the singularity brewing inside the Googleplex....
Actually, all it means is that they have filed a patent application. You can file an application on any old nonsense you want as long as you pay the filing fee. But looking at this application (without spending any substantial time on it), it looks like they have a fairly beefy disclosure. In any case, this doesn't look like a "joke" application. This looks like the real thing.
Take an example from Canada we have a Prime Minister who campaign on honesty, integrity, openness and transparency who has run the most secretive, deceitful, closed, and ideological government we've ever seen.
Barack Obama is the Prime Minister of Canada, too? Dang, that man gets around.
Dickman also noted that long passwords were easier to crack if the phone belongs to a Slashdot user, because the password always turned out to be "Natal13 Pr0tman"
My favorite Old Testament story is when some youths mock Elisha's bald head, he curses them, and a she-bear comes out of the woods and tears them to pieces. DON'T MESS with Old Testament prophets. Those dudes were hard core.
I don't recall any sex in Ender's Game (or the sequel Speaker for the Dead). So NOT pornographic.
Well, except for the major plot point about Ender outing Novinha as an adulteress who had six kids and a sterile husband. But it wasn't exactly graphic.
Slashdot Mirror
If the government were in charge of the pharmaceutical industry, there would be no need for a "decent ROI," nor would there be incentive to "treat" illness as opposed to cure it.
You're right. Instead, there would be an incentive for politicians to give huge, lucrative contracts to their buddies that they are in bed with, either literally or figuratively, and for those buddies to inflate their bids on those contracts to absurd levels. Because contractors would be focusing on landing the most pre-approved pork projects, they wouldn't agressively seek out the most effective drugs. After all, they get paid whether the drug works or not. The important thing is to keep the pork rolling in.
Welcome to the Marxist utopia!
Still, it makes for an interesting though experiment. If you could completely characterize a larger object and transmit that signature at c to another point, then you could effectively permit matter to travel at c. Of course, you could only go somewhere there was a receiver, so it would have to be somewhere we've already gone the old fashioned way. But it could make for a very efficient way to move stuff around in our own solar system.
I wonder what kind of phone he actually uses...
Probably one cobbled together from parts he cannibalized from old radios, digital toasters, and Clinton-era computers, running a custom ROM he flashed to the BIOS chip and a barebones customized "GNU/Linux." He has to carry the motherboard and RAID in a hemp backpack (which doubles as his exercise regimen), it has a full QWERTY keyboard that he keeps in a side holster so he can run his EMACS-based SMS client, and the display is a naked LCD running on an ISA framebuffer card, connected by a ribbon cable coming out the side of the monitor. He suspends the monitor from a helmet so he can go "hands free."
It ain't purdy, but IT IS FREE!
This summary and the article it's based on are both dismal failures. They are rabid, uninformed rantings of anti-patent morons.
The only thing you have to do to have a patent not get published until it issues is file a non-publication request, and not file in foreign countries. I do it for my clients all the time. And it's not quite what you're saying above. Until the patent issues, you can't sue somebody on it. The best you can do is inform them that they might possibly infringe your patent if and when it issues in the future. This is a regular practice, and depending on a lot of factors, may or may not accomplish something. Either way, you can't sue and your damages don't run until the day your patent issues.
But if you publish your application, you actually have a legally stronger threat, because you may get provisional rights that will date back to your publication if your patent issues substantially unchanged from when it published. That means you can send your published application to somebody and tell them, "I think this patent will issue substantially unchanged. If it does, I will be seeking a reasonable royalty starting from the day I informed you of this publication." You still can't sue until the patent issues, but you might get some money for the period between when it was published and when it issues.
That is not what the attached request is about. There are certain applications that are prevented from being published or issued until the government decrees that they no longer have to be classified. This is generally not a good thing for an inventor. It means there is very limited opportunity to exploit his invention. It means that his patent can sit in limbo for years. This request relates to whether similar "protection" should be extended to some patents that are "economically important."
It may or may not be a good idea. But it is not the doom and gloom scenario that the stupid article makes it sound like. This is the equivalent to some rube on the street hearing that Linus Torvalds is a famous "hacker" and demanding that Linus be jailed immediately for his heinous crimes.
I'd say the problem is that you feel entitled to take stuff as long as it's easy to take, or at least more convenient than paying the author for it.
No, patents protect the idea, copyrights protect implementations.
No, Copyrights protect "original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression." (17 U.S.C. 102). Patents protect new, nonobvious, and useful "process[es], machine[s], manufacture[s], [and] composition[s] of matter." (35 U.S.C. 101). Neither protects "wouldn't it be cool if ..."
I can tell you from firsthand experience that patent examiners frown on merely claiming a desired result. If your patent claim is "I claim a cloaking device capable of preventing visible detection of an object," the examiner will usually reject the claim for lack of specificity, even if you've fully disclosed a fully-enabled embodiment of a cloaking device. Of course, your attorney may be clever enough to draft claims broad enough to cover every method of implementing a cloaking device that people are able to come up with for the next 20 years, but if anything I would say that is persuasive that you have something truly revolutionary that deserves patent protection.
But the larger theme is that Portrait itself is such a load of BS that it warrants no better treatment. And not just because it's Literature instead of mere pop fiction. I've read and enjoyed Faulkner and Melville and Shakespeare on my own. In fact, I re-read Billy Budd just a few months ago, with fresh perspective, having recently read a lot of Horatio Hornblower and Jack Aubrey. I don't mind expending effort on those authors because they have interesting things to say. Even in that same class, the next book we read was Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. I devoured it in one weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. Again, Amy Tan had interesting things to say, so I was happy to think about them.
All James Joyce had to say was, "Ooooh, look! i iz so 1337, cuz i can haz teh s3X000rz!1!!!" I know lots of 17-year-olds who think the same thing, and I have no patience for their tortured prose on the subject.
(Also: There's an high school English teacher on Slashdot? How do you not spend all your nights weeping?)
I think the flaw was completely positive feedback coupled with a poor grade. The poor grade should have been accompanied by some useful suggestions for improvement.
When I was in high school, we read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This is literally the worst alleged novel I have ever read. I actively despised it with my entire soul. So I skipped huge chunks of it wherever I figured I could get away with doing so and still pick up the threads of the mostly nonexistent plot.
When we (finally) finished the thing, we had to write a series of short essays responsive to several prompts. One of the prompts told us to describe the symbolism and significance of the "rose."
Having skipped huge portions of the book, I had never encountered this purported rose. And I certainly wasn't going to go back and pick through the dense, sophomoric prose to find it. Instead, I figured I could probably pick up some partial credit by saying some random insightful-sounding thing. So I started spewing what English teachers love. I used words like "juxtaposition" and "antithesis" and compared the rose to some other random symbolic object in the book. It was pure, unadulterated, Grade A, premium All-American BS.
I got an A on the paper. The teacher was particularly profuse in her praise of my short essay on the "rose," commented that I had captured the symbolism of the "rose" perfectly. I couldn't have agreed more.
You're right, I should have. My best guess is the professor was Catholic. Or he graded the tests drunk. Or both. Either way, I wasn't about to second guess his wisdom.
I used that on a Calculus test once. We were supposed to find the formula for the volume of a cone by rotating a line segment around the X axis. I did most of the steps right but I missed a minus sign or forgot a 1/2 or something, and instead of 1/3*pi*r^2*h, I ended up with V = some big, messy formula that I knew was wrong. I was out of time, so my next step was "Then a miracle occurs. V = 1/3*pi*r^2*h."
I scored 100% on the test.
I fail to see how.
Then research bar dates.
I fail to see why this is a problem. Software patents suck.
You're entitled to hold that opinion. But without a patent, you the little guy will have absolutely nothing of value. You can't compete with the big guys on infrastructure or scale. If you want to beat them at something, the only way you're going to do it is to have a government-granted monopoly on your side.
Of course, there's no evidence that the free Julia will be any better. And Julia doesn't have the advantage of 50-ish years of people understanding it. But I agree with that anybody who blabbers about numerical methods and mentions C but not FORTRAN worries me.
Whether or not you have an NDA can determine whether certain events are a "publication." A publication of your idea is one of the events that triggers a bar date. The U.S. has the most forgiving bar date statute in the world. You get exactly one year from the triggering event to file your patent. If you don't file within one year, your patent is DOA. Most of the rest of the world doesn't even give you the year. If you "publish" before you've filed a patent application, your patent is DOA. So an NDA can be the difference between "you get a valuable 20-year monopoly on your technology" and "you own nothing."
Under the new America Invents Act, with its screwed up "First Inventor to File" system, NDAs may be even more important if you end up in a "derivation" proceeding where you're trying to prove that the first person to file got the idea from you.
Under some circumstances, not having an NDA can kill your ability to get a patent. And as the GP said, good investors will want to ensure that you have adequately protected the idea. Because the value in your business is not your cool ideas; it's cool ideas that you have some enforceable proprietary interest in.
A method for enabling a first user to interact with other users in a virtual space, each user of the first user and the other users being associated with a three dimensional avatar representing said each user in the virtual space, the method comprising the steps of: customizing, using a processor of a client device, an avatar in response to input by the first user; receiving, by the client device, position information associated with fewer than all of the other user avatars in an interaction room of the virtual space, from a server process, wherein the client device does not receive position information of at least some avatars that fail to satisfy a participant condition imposed on avatars displayable on a client device display of the client device; determining, by the client device, a displayable set of the other user avatars associated with the client device display; and displaying, on the client device display, the displayable set of the other user avatars associated with the client device display.
You can't just say, "Oh, we've had this stuff since the 80s" to inavlidate a patent claim. You have to find each and every element of the claim. And you need to find it before November 13, 1994, which is the bar date for this application. Now look at the insanely-large list of references the examiner considered. He/she tried and failed to find the prior art that kills this patent. Maybe it's out there, but it's not going to be your trivial recollections of what people were generally doing in the 80s.
Well, this isn't yet a patent on anything. It's just an application. And even if the claims issue as they're now written, it's not a patent on the basic idea of driverless cars. "I claim a car that operates itself without a driver" would immediately be shot down by the examiner on prior art and probably on lack of specificity too.
This application is claiming a specific method of automatically driving a car. Granted, claim 1 as it's currently written is fairly broad, but if it survives without Google having to narrow it, it will be the exception, not the rule (I only rarely see a patent issue without the claims being amended at all). As for whether it should survive without being amended, I couldn't even hazard a wild guess without analyzing the claims and searching the prior art to see what else is out there. So long story short, it's not time to panic just yet.
If they're applying for a patent, it means that they must have some sufficiently viable method of producing the tech. The "limited amount of control over nearby vehicles" sounds the most ominous, considering the inability of a percentage of law enforcement to not abuse their powers. I smell the singularity brewing inside the Googleplex....
Actually, all it means is that they have filed a patent application. You can file an application on any old nonsense you want as long as you pay the filing fee. But looking at this application (without spending any substantial time on it), it looks like they have a fairly beefy disclosure. In any case, this doesn't look like a "joke" application. This looks like the real thing.
Take an example from Canada we have a Prime Minister who campaign on honesty, integrity, openness and transparency who has run the most secretive, deceitful, closed, and ideological government we've ever seen.
Barack Obama is the Prime Minister of Canada, too? Dang, that man gets around.
Remember when the Onion used to be funny, like 10 years ago, before it was a shameless shill for the DNC? Those were the days.
*Arguably, this one could go either way.
(Doctor Who and grammar. We all need our little obsessions.)
Dickman also noted that long passwords were easier to crack if the phone belongs to a Slashdot user, because the password always turned out to be "Natal13 Pr0tman"
My favorite Old Testament story is when some youths mock Elisha's bald head, he curses them, and a she-bear comes out of the woods and tears them to pieces. DON'T MESS with Old Testament prophets. Those dudes were hard core.
Ender's father was Catholic. His mother was Mormon.
I don't recall any sex in Ender's Game (or the sequel Speaker for the Dead). So NOT pornographic.
Well, except for the major plot point about Ender outing Novinha as an adulteress who had six kids and a sterile husband. But it wasn't exactly graphic.