Thus it's a requirement that a patent examiner be familiar with the relevent field. Otherwise they simply can't tell if something is or isn't obvious.
Of course, the problem is that if they know enough about the field to be able to make reasonable judgements, they can make more money doing real work than being a patent examiner.
IMO, patent application shsould be tested by giving the problem they claim to solve to 10 compitent workers in the field and if any of them come up with something close to the proposed patent's solution within an hour, the patent gets dropped as obvious. That would at least weed out the most extremely silly ones.
If you don't own "trademark" to your own name, something is really fucked up...
How many people named McDonald do you think there are in the world? Some proportion of them presumably run restaurants or similar. How many of them have the trademark on that name for that purpose in their jurisdiction?
What is supprising is that the court decided that such a different business infringed. Presumably French trademark law is very different from UK and US law.
Tangentially relevent: one news story recently which seems to have slipped past/. was the decision that in the EU non-published but `everyone knows that' information can count as prior art to kill a patent. (it was a biotech patent, but clearly the argument has wider applications).
they actually said that BECAUSE of not using GSM, you can't get good coverage in the US.
Hm. Not how I read it. I think they were saying that because there wasn't a consistant standard there was poor coverrage. I didn't see any technical claims for GSM in there.
No different from cost of collecting it from the forest
But they don't collect from forrests, but from plantations. In a plantation it comes in huge lumps carefully arranged in neat lines for easy collection. No picking up small amounts from each of a million suppliers.
Most paper is bleached whatever the source.
But trees aren't treated with dyes specially designed to be hard to remove. It's much easier to get rid of a slight yellowish tinge in fresh wood pulp than to get rid of colour-fast inks.
I believe the biggest problem is that once you've used the stuff once, the fibers are mashed and broken, so turning it back into pulp, giving it a heavy chemical treatment and then into paper results in poor quality paper. The best use, other than bog-roll, is to mix it with new wood pulp to make it go further.
Some newspaper actually let you access all of their online articles using a code they send you when you subscribe to their paper edition.
Quite common for magazines. I think most newspapers don't assume their content has enough medium-term value to make the free online access a significant draw, so it's not worth using access to it to try and increase paper circulation, rather they use the online presence as advertising.
One interesting case is the BBC funded by UK TV licence payers. They have no real motivation for providing the free online news service, beyond the fact that they need to be seen to be providing services, and there is no reason to try and restrict it to UK readers even if there was a sensible way to do so. As a licence payer, I find it somewhat weird that I pay a TV licence fee yet watch almost no BBC TV, but more than get my money's worth from the internet and radio services.
It should work like the Economist.com. Most material is free[...]
No, most of The Economist stuff isn't free, except to subscribers to the paper version. I'm not sure where the cutoff is any more, but it was high enough up that it prompted me to actually hunt out an envelope and authourise myself at some point.
Interestingly they run the oposite model to the one you propose, it is the older stuff which you would have to pay for. They presume what they write will have value over time.
Which is a Good Thing, so long as you don't throw the newspapers away.
Carbon sequestration.
So, the moral is to buy paper publications and a huge shed to keep them in:-).
More seriously, I wonder if anyone has done an environmental impact study comparing recycling with storage, taking into account the carbon removed from the atmosphere. Perhaps it would be a win to keep growing plants to make paper which we use once and then pule up somewhere where it won't rot.
Come to think of it, I remember reding about use of straw as a house building material. Perhaps bales of used newsprint could be used for that. Since the whole point is to do it in a way that prevents it from degrading, it should be a perfect form of sequestration with the resulting buildings being energy efficiant too (since they would be well insulated).
BT Talk Together used to have 200 minutes/month free local calls.
Bundled minutes are completely different from free calls, they are really just a way to put a floor on your use. They sell you a line plus 200 minutes because they have decided that they don't want to sell to anyone who uses less than that number of minutes. This is why non-business mobile contracts almost always have bundled minutes too.
Telewest keep mailing me to persuade me that I should switch to a flat rate plan (25 quid per month unlimited UK calls, no time limit). I am resisting even looking into it on the grounds that they wouldn't be trying so hard to persuade me to do it if it were to my advantage rather than theirs...
That explains then why i can opnly get 512k broadband at an extortionate cost in Uk
Er, Ithink the explanation there is more likely to be that you are dealing at some level with BT.
BT have, since their days as part of the post office, had some kind of deep and abiding hatred of computer users.
But even BT will now do 2MB. In theory. I suspect in practice you would find that they'd say that your line couldn't support it...
The depressing thing is that BT effectively provide a benchmark, so other networks only feel the need to provide a similar level of service or just a little more.
[lack of coverrage] has absolutly nothing to do with GSM versus other networks but with network coverages.
That is the point the article is making, that network coverage is poor so often in the US, not in remote areas, but in normal suburban areas.
Mind you, their assumption that this is down to multiple standards isn't obviously true. After all, having everyone use GSM doesn't mean that every phone can talk to every base station, since that is down to network policy.
I suppose the wide use of GSM probably makes the hardware cheaper, which would make more and smaller cells economical. However, even there I suspect the larger uptake is more significant - more customers per square mile means more network spend per square mile.
Slashdot Mirror
You access your bank from a computer you don't have complete control of?
Have you considered tapdancing in minefields as an alternative?
You get what you deserve for going to your bank via Google?
Of course, the problem is that if they know enough about the field to be able to make reasonable judgements, they can make more money doing real work than being a patent examiner.
IMO, patent application shsould be tested by giving the problem they claim to solve to 10 compitent workers in the field and if any of them come up with something close to the proposed patent's solution within an hour, the patent gets dropped as obvious. That would at least weed out the most extremely silly ones.
God knows, 14 year old boys need to be tricked to make them look at porn.
How many people named McDonald do you think there are in the world? Some proportion of them presumably run restaurants or similar. How many of them have the trademark on that name for that purpose in their jurisdiction?
What is supprising is that the court decided that such a different business infringed. Presumably French trademark law is very different from UK and US law.
Oh yeuch. Anonymous vegetable fat, sugar and something to stain it brown without introducing any noticable flavour of chocolate.
There is an unbelievable amount of prior art.
Tangentially relevent: one news story recently which seems to have slipped past /. was the decision that in the EU non-published but `everyone knows that' information can count as prior art to kill a patent. (it was a biotech patent, but clearly the argument has wider applications).
You mean the Google who are proposing to donate host space to wikipedia?
Should take someone about 5 seconds to produce a filter which will drop them on the floor.
A better solution would be to use one of the baisian spam filters to pre-screen comments.
I presume they are being posted automatically, so measures to make that hard would seem to be in order too.
Surely, this kind of stuff should be built into any blogging software above the level of `I knocked this together in my coffee break'.
Hm. Not how I read it. I think they were saying that because there wasn't a consistant standard there was poor coverrage. I didn't see any technical claims for GSM in there.
OK, I exaggerated:-).
How do you know? Perhaps you aren't using the correct translation.
That was this morning. Bush just found the federal credit card again, so it's nearly 2 million now.
Out of interest, what speed do you actually get?
But they don't collect from forrests, but from plantations. In a plantation it comes in huge lumps carefully arranged in neat lines for easy collection. No picking up small amounts from each of a million suppliers.
Most paper is bleached whatever the source.
But trees aren't treated with dyes specially designed to be hard to remove. It's much easier to get rid of a slight yellowish tinge in fresh wood pulp than to get rid of colour-fast inks.
I believe the biggest problem is that once you've used the stuff once, the fibers are mashed and broken, so turning it back into pulp, giving it a heavy chemical treatment and then into paper results in poor quality paper. The best use, other than bog-roll, is to mix it with new wood pulp to make it go further.
Everyone's got to be somewhere boss.
Besides, there isn't an `elephantine pretty but pointless software' section.
Quite common for magazines. I think most newspapers don't assume their content has enough medium-term value to make the free online access a significant draw, so it's not worth using access to it to try and increase paper circulation, rather they use the online presence as advertising.
One interesting case is the BBC funded by UK TV licence payers. They have no real motivation for providing the free online news service, beyond the fact that they need to be seen to be providing services, and there is no reason to try and restrict it to UK readers even if there was a sensible way to do so. As a licence payer, I find it somewhat weird that I pay a TV licence fee yet watch almost no BBC TV, but more than get my money's worth from the internet and radio services.
No, most of The Economist stuff isn't free, except to subscribers to the paper version. I'm not sure where the cutoff is any more, but it was high enough up that it prompted me to actually hunt out an envelope and authourise myself at some point.
Interestingly they run the oposite model to the one you propose, it is the older stuff which you would have to pay for. They presume what they write will have value over time.
Which is a Good Thing, so long as you don't throw the newspapers away.
Carbon sequestration.
So, the moral is to buy paper publications and a huge shed to keep them in:-).
More seriously, I wonder if anyone has done an environmental impact study comparing recycling with storage, taking into account the carbon removed from the atmosphere. Perhaps it would be a win to keep growing plants to make paper which we use once and then pule up somewhere where it won't rot.
Come to think of it, I remember reding about use of straw as a house building material. Perhaps bales of used newsprint could be used for that. Since the whole point is to do it in a way that prevents it from degrading, it should be a perfect form of sequestration with the resulting buildings being energy efficiant too (since they would be well insulated).
Bundled minutes are completely different from free calls, they are really just a way to put a floor on your use. They sell you a line plus 200 minutes because they have decided that they don't want to sell to anyone who uses less than that number of minutes. This is why non-business mobile contracts almost always have bundled minutes too.
Telewest keep mailing me to persuade me that I should switch to a flat rate plan (25 quid per month unlimited UK calls, no time limit). I am resisting even looking into it on the grounds that they wouldn't be trying so hard to persuade me to do it if it were to my advantage rather than theirs...
Er, Ithink the explanation there is more likely to be that you are dealing at some level with BT.
BT have, since their days as part of the post office, had some kind of deep and abiding hatred of computer users.
But even BT will now do 2MB. In theory. I suspect in practice you would find that they'd say that your line couldn't support it...
The depressing thing is that BT effectively provide a benchmark, so other networks only feel the need to provide a similar level of service or just a little more.
I have only come across plans with free calls to anywhere in the UK, no special local call options.
And the BT all-in plan has stealth charges if you don't watch the clock to hang up before an hour is up, so it's not really a flat rate service.
That is the point the article is making, that network coverage is poor so often in the US, not in remote areas, but in normal suburban areas.
Mind you, their assumption that this is down to multiple standards isn't obviously true. After all, having everyone use GSM doesn't mean that every phone can talk to every base station, since that is down to network policy.
I suppose the wide use of GSM probably makes the hardware cheaper, which would make more and smaller cells economical. However, even there I suspect the larger uptake is more significant - more customers per square mile means more network spend per square mile.
And what proportion of landlines are now cordless?
Paying to recieve calls and SMSs must make telesales people even more loved and admired!