I see your point - but hell, we have enough sports that are determined by what athlete has the best genetic makeup. Why not creating one which is determined by who can throw the most money at the best engineers? Sure, it probably wouldn't have mass appeal, but a geek can dream, can't he? For me, F1 isn't interesting to watch in its current state. If I want to see driving skills, I watch a rally event. Give me some unadulterated car tech geekery! Battle of the Engineers!
For it to be the ultimate car geek competition to me, they'd have to lift the technical regulations. Anything goes on the technical level. Who cares for the drivers? Let the engineers fight it out!
The approach to mathematics differs for different people though - I never really got a deeper interest in mathematics before I read Hermann Schulz' "Physik mit Bleistift" (Physics with a pencil), which unfortunately is not available in english translation. The book if written by a physicist, introducing you to different fields of mathematics from his point of view. Initially, he always focuses on the natural phenomena and then introduces the mathematics behind them. Sometimes in a gung-ho fashion "What's that - a singularity in your function? Heck, there's obviously no singularity in nature there, so let's slap a delta function on top of it to make it at least differentiable...", but always with a practical goal in mind. Starting from that point I got into more abstract stuff. Starting from a pure mathematical point would not have worked for me.
Sorry, you are mistaken here - you think of trademarks, which have to be used. There is no such clause for patents. (Disclaimer: Currently working at a patent law firm in Germany. IANAL, and especially not yours, this is no legal advice;)
One might argue that tangible property is a government intervention in the free market, as the government subsidizes property holders by providing a security force that saves them the cost of protecting that property by themselves day and night. A single person can't reasonably protect its property - you gotta sleep. You need some kind of societal agreement and mutual assistance to be sure that yours stays yours. So, the difference is not that great. No form of property can exist without some societal contract that establishes its existence. It might be easier to secure tangible property, but the difference is gradual.
In extension to that - just developing patents and not producing anything is not trollish per se, as long as the think tank in question is actually interested in licensing the stuff out, approaches probable producers for it and doesn't solely focus on suing people. In that form, it is just outsourced R&D. Around here I see that a lot in the form of engineering companies which only do the developing work and finance that development from licenses. The model seems to become more common in the European automotive industry, for example.
I don't know the numbers for the US, but in Europe, the average lifetime of a patent is 8 years - US numbers are probably not that different, as it costs an increasing yearly fee to keep patents alive. Patents do not suffer from repeated lifetime extension like copyright does. The maximum duration of 20 years for patents is only realized for really profitable stuff. If you want to rally against endless IP protection - target copyright.
Purely focusing on exports per GDP is a problem too, though. I live in Germany, which ranks very high on that scale. However, the trade volume within the country itself is suffering from focusing on export. We have pushed export numbers by any means, those means including reduction of real, inflation-adjusted wages inland, loss of spending power of the average citizen, erosion of our middle class. You gotta strike a balance between exports and domestic economic activity. I completely agree that you are at the opposite problematic end of the scale at the moment.
For some more devilish advocacy to the free marketeers around: I recently heard a talk by an expert for trade law. He basically made the point that the usual patent function theories, e.g. incentive for innovation, reward for inventors, and so on, are besides the point. In his view, the main point of patent law in particular and IP law in general is to make inventions, and in extension, intellectual property, a trade-able commodity. Only if inventions can be traded, their true value can be assessed. The true value of an invention is not the R&D cost behind it, but the price the market assigns for the transfer of the patent rights between market actors, or in a more indirect way, the price the market assigns for a license.
I realize that this is from his specific point of view, but he has got a point, neglecting, though, the effects of essentially broken litigation systems in some countries, which have a huge impact on the value assessment of patents.
You may have noticed that I have strong doubts about the inventive step involved in that patent myself, so we are basically in agreement here. I didn't think about the fact of accelerometers for hard drive protection, which definitely makes putting an accelerometer into a mobile device an obvious act. The use of that accelerometer is somewhat different, though. Again, in the light of gesture-based input, I don't see much left.
However, one more general remark regarding the determination of inventiveness/obviousness - and one thing that is often overlooked in/. discussions on the subject: You have to mentally detach yourself from the knowledge of the patent, of the final result of the (possibly) inventive step. It is often easy to define something as obvious in hindsight, so you have to try to get into the mind of the inventor at the time of the invention. Many things that seem obvious later are in fact not.
Historical example: The wheel. Knowing of the wheel, it seems glaringly obvious to stick some wheels to a couple of planks, and there you go: the cart. Then again, the Mesoamericans knew the wheel for decades if not centuries - but only as toy. No one ever utilized it as a way of transportation in any manner whatsoever. At least to them, it was objectively not obvious - even if it seems so from our point of view. A totally objective determination of obviousness or inventiveness is probably impossible, you can only try.
Nearly being the keyword - a 5% difference can be all that it takes. I'll give you that the "main obesity mechanism" is simply too much of the stuff, but that effect gets even more pronounced by this 5%. The weight gain is cumulative, after all.
Cough... brainfart. Not the F6P metabolism - which is obviously the normal glycolytic path, but the fructokinase reaction in the liver is insulin independent, in contrast to the usual glucokinase-catalyzed first step of glycolysis.
You are right on the mechanism. However, there is another step. There is a liver-only fructokinase, which has a way higher Km than the hepatic glucokinase - so basically all fructose in the bloodstream is pulled by GLUT2 into the liver and retained there by phosphorylation through the hepatic fructokinase. The glucose also enters the liver via GLUT2, but is phosphorylated way more slowly, so a significant amount is not retained hepatically by the phosphorylation reaction. The additional liver stress and the main metabolic difference results from the fact that the subsequent metabolizing of F6P in the liver is insulin independent.
Hope that suffices for starters. For more details, I'd have to break out the literature... and I am stressing my own liver with a decent red wine way too much for that at the moment;)
Good question - but then, caffeinated sodas with HFCS and sucrose have the same caffeine content, so in practice, that effect should cancel out, and sucrose+caffeine is still better than HFCS+caffeine.
Please - the sucrose content difference between white and brown sugar is marginal. The sugar spike difference between the same amount of white and brown sugar is not noteworthy. Brown sugar, however, contains at least some vitamins and minerals that get lost in the raffination process. That's what makes it better. And, of course, in terms of vitamins, honey is indeed best.
Sorry, but that blog seems to be a wee bit on the crackpot side of things. The body does not really care how the fructose is administered - when it arrives in the intestine, it is in solution anyway, so no difference whether it comes crystalline or as HFCS. The effect should be the same. The problems that are pointed at in that post are probably true, however. Fructose triggers a lower insulin response than glucose, so the hunger persists despite caloric intake. Also, fructose is metabolized mostly, if not only, in the liver, which causes stress on the organ.
Usual table sugar - sucrose - is a disaccharide made from one molecule of fructose and one of glucose. The glucose part triggers the insulin production, which signals that you have taken in calories. So, if you use normal sugar instead of HFCS, your body knows that you got energy way faster. That seems to be the main obesity mechanism associated with HFCS.
On a quick-and-dirty view, the patent is probably novel over inertial navigation systems, because those probably did not generate a specific control signal after a specified back-and-forth motion combination, as it is claimed in claim 1. Also, one could argue that in the case of the inertial navigation system, the computing device controlled and the navigation system are separate entities, which also underscores the novelty of the claim. If you talk about simple novelty, there is no significant barrier - each and any additional or different property of the claim to the prior art renders it novel. So, determining novelty is the rather simple part.
Obviousness is a different beast, though. I have to admit that I am not overly familiar with the US way of determining obviousness, so I'll discuss that in European terms. What is done here is some kind of retrospective reconstruction of the inventive process. To determine novelty (non-obviousness), you first identify the closest prior art, because that would be the starting point for the inventor. I wouldn't say an inertial navigation system qualifies for that, because the invention is basically aimed at hand-held computers, smartphones, PDAs or the like, so, for the sake of this exercise, we start with a conventional smartphone.
Now, the difference is, that the claimed computing device is controllable by a certain motion-combo. From this difference, we ask what the actual purpose of the invention is. In other words, what improvement is reached? That would be, again, quick-and-dirty, to improve the ease of use of the smartphone - which is also stated as purpose in the description.
The follow-up question is, has the man skilled in the art any ideas how to reach this goal from other prior art or from his knowledge? He certainly knows inertial navigation systems, but he doesn't know them as input devices to improve user-friendliness. So, I fear the inertial navigation system is not relevant here.
He also knows mouse-gestures, though - so the idea to use a back-and-forth gesture to elicit a certain response from the device might actually be within his reach. Now we are a step closer to the subject-matter. Still not there yet - we need to establish that he also would use a motion of the device itself as input source for that gesture. If motion sensor input for computers/smartphones was known at the filing date, he probably would, though.
To get to the claimed matter, we therefore need to combine 3 things - a normal smartphone, detection of the motion of a computer as input for that computer and finally, gesture recognition. Combining more than 2 written documents is generally counted as a strong pointer to non-obviousness here. If one of our 3 things can be shown to be general knowledge for the man skilled in the art, however, it is quite likely that the combination is not actually inventive.
In our case here, without doing actual research, we are in a bit of a grey zone. I would strongly tend to count it non-inventive. The inertial navigation, however, plays no role in that.
Hope that ramblings gave some insight into the actual mental process performed when analyzing a patent.
Finally, the usual disclaimer - I am not a patent lawyer (yet) - and especially not yours. This is not legal advice, but rather an educational exercise and my personal ramblings. Do not rely on this post for anything at all. Thanks.
I am not a patent lawyer (yet), but I can assure you, we are not in league with any Fungus from Outer Space nor with any Old Ones, New Ones or Ones of Any Intermediate Age. And my personal Shoggoth is always properly leashed. No danger there at all. IA! IA! Shub-Ni*COUGH*. Sorry gotta go. Something's outside... *Tekeli-li... Tekeli-li....*
Additionally, the patent covers movement of the computing device, not movements of an input device. As a mouse is not a computing device as such, it is not covered. Doesn't help for obviousness, though.
Well, yeah - but that is more a problem of the US litigation system than of the patent system. Where I come from (Europe), the costs of lawsuits is not nearly as high as in the US. Combine that with a loser-pays system and the possibility to get lawsuit cost assistance from the government if you are a broke individual inventor, and the small guy actually stands a chance. Oh, and lawyer costs are somewhat limited, too, so no $750 bill just for that quick lunch meeting where nothing actually happened.
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I see your point - but hell, we have enough sports that are determined by what athlete has the best genetic makeup. Why not creating one which is determined by who can throw the most money at the best engineers? Sure, it probably wouldn't have mass appeal, but a geek can dream, can't he? For me, F1 isn't interesting to watch in its current state. If I want to see driving skills, I watch a rally event. Give me some unadulterated car tech geekery! Battle of the Engineers!
For it to be the ultimate car geek competition to me, they'd have to lift the technical regulations. Anything goes on the technical level. Who cares for the drivers? Let the engineers fight it out!
Believe me, you don't want to know how much math I've forgotten since university. And, yeah, get off my lawn.. ;)
The approach to mathematics differs for different people though - I never really got a deeper interest in mathematics before I read Hermann Schulz' "Physik mit Bleistift" (Physics with a pencil), which unfortunately is not available in english translation. The book if written by a physicist, introducing you to different fields of mathematics from his point of view. Initially, he always focuses on the natural phenomena and then introduces the mathematics behind them. Sometimes in a gung-ho fashion "What's that - a singularity in your function? Heck, there's obviously no singularity in nature there, so let's slap a delta function on top of it to make it at least differentiable...", but always with a practical goal in mind. Starting from that point I got into more abstract stuff. Starting from a pure mathematical point would not have worked for me.
Sorry, you are mistaken here - you think of trademarks, which have to be used. There is no such clause for patents. (Disclaimer: Currently working at a patent law firm in Germany. IANAL, and especially not yours, this is no legal advice;)
One might argue that tangible property is a government intervention in the free market, as the government subsidizes property holders by providing a security force that saves them the cost of protecting that property by themselves day and night. A single person can't reasonably protect its property - you gotta sleep. You need some kind of societal agreement and mutual assistance to be sure that yours stays yours. So, the difference is not that great. No form of property can exist without some societal contract that establishes its existence. It might be easier to secure tangible property, but the difference is gradual.
In extension to that - just developing patents and not producing anything is not trollish per se, as long as the think tank in question is actually interested in licensing the stuff out, approaches probable producers for it and doesn't solely focus on suing people. In that form, it is just outsourced R&D. Around here I see that a lot in the form of engineering companies which only do the developing work and finance that development from licenses. The model seems to become more common in the European automotive industry, for example.
I don't know the numbers for the US, but in Europe, the average lifetime of a patent is 8 years - US numbers are probably not that different, as it costs an increasing yearly fee to keep patents alive. Patents do not suffer from repeated lifetime extension like copyright does. The maximum duration of 20 years for patents is only realized for really profitable stuff. If you want to rally against endless IP protection - target copyright.
Purely focusing on exports per GDP is a problem too, though. I live in Germany, which ranks very high on that scale. However, the trade volume within the country itself is suffering from focusing on export. We have pushed export numbers by any means, those means including reduction of real, inflation-adjusted wages inland, loss of spending power of the average citizen, erosion of our middle class. You gotta strike a balance between exports and domestic economic activity. I completely agree that you are at the opposite problematic end of the scale at the moment.
For some more devilish advocacy to the free marketeers around: I recently heard a talk by an expert for trade law. He basically made the point that the usual patent function theories, e.g. incentive for innovation, reward for inventors, and so on, are besides the point. In his view, the main point of patent law in particular and IP law in general is to make inventions, and in extension, intellectual property, a trade-able commodity. Only if inventions can be traded, their true value can be assessed. The true value of an invention is not the R&D cost behind it, but the price the market assigns for the transfer of the patent rights between market actors, or in a more indirect way, the price the market assigns for a license.
I realize that this is from his specific point of view, but he has got a point, neglecting, though, the effects of essentially broken litigation systems in some countries, which have a huge impact on the value assessment of patents.
You may have noticed that I have strong doubts about the inventive step involved in that patent myself, so we are basically in agreement here. I didn't think about the fact of accelerometers for hard drive protection, which definitely makes putting an accelerometer into a mobile device an obvious act. The use of that accelerometer is somewhat different, though. Again, in the light of gesture-based input, I don't see much left.
/. discussions on the subject: You have to mentally detach yourself from the knowledge of the patent, of the final result of the (possibly) inventive step. It is often easy to define something as obvious in hindsight, so you have to try to get into the mind of the inventor at the time of the invention. Many things that seem obvious later are in fact not.
However, one more general remark regarding the determination of inventiveness/obviousness - and one thing that is often overlooked in
Historical example: The wheel. Knowing of the wheel, it seems glaringly obvious to stick some wheels to a couple of planks, and there you go: the cart. Then again, the Mesoamericans knew the wheel for decades if not centuries - but only as toy. No one ever utilized it as a way of transportation in any manner whatsoever. At least to them, it was objectively not obvious - even if it seems so from our point of view. A totally objective determination of obviousness or inventiveness is probably impossible, you can only try.
Yep. It is called "Food, Inc."
Actually - reuters mentions the really original paper, which is here, in this weeks Science edition.
Nearly being the keyword - a 5% difference can be all that it takes. I'll give you that the "main obesity mechanism" is simply too much of the stuff, but that effect gets even more pronounced by this 5%. The weight gain is cumulative, after all.
Cough... brainfart. Not the F6P metabolism - which is obviously the normal glycolytic path, but the fructokinase reaction in the liver is insulin independent, in contrast to the usual glucokinase-catalyzed first step of glycolysis.
You are right on the mechanism. However, there is another step. There is a liver-only fructokinase, which has a way higher Km than the hepatic glucokinase - so basically all fructose in the bloodstream is pulled by GLUT2 into the liver and retained there by phosphorylation through the hepatic fructokinase. The glucose also enters the liver via GLUT2, but is phosphorylated way more slowly, so a significant amount is not retained hepatically by the phosphorylation reaction. The additional liver stress and the main metabolic difference results from the fact that the subsequent metabolizing of F6P in the liver is insulin independent.
;)
Hope that suffices for starters. For more details, I'd have to break out the literature... and I am stressing my own liver with a decent red wine way too much for that at the moment
Good question - but then, caffeinated sodas with HFCS and sucrose have the same caffeine content, so in practice, that effect should cancel out, and sucrose+caffeine is still better than HFCS+caffeine.
Please - the sucrose content difference between white and brown sugar is marginal. The sugar spike difference between the same amount of white and brown sugar is not noteworthy. Brown sugar, however, contains at least some vitamins and minerals that get lost in the raffination process. That's what makes it better. And, of course, in terms of vitamins, honey is indeed best.
From a biochemical standpoint, the important factor is fructose content and nothing else. Glucose does have less adverse effects than fructose.
Other way round - the corn lobby pushed HFCS over sucrose in the US. The metabolic differences between the two are long known from impartial studies.
Sorry, but that blog seems to be a wee bit on the crackpot side of things. The body does not really care how the fructose is administered - when it arrives in the intestine, it is in solution anyway, so no difference whether it comes crystalline or as HFCS. The effect should be the same. The problems that are pointed at in that post are probably true, however. Fructose triggers a lower insulin response than glucose, so the hunger persists despite caloric intake. Also, fructose is metabolized mostly, if not only, in the liver, which causes stress on the organ.
Usual table sugar - sucrose - is a disaccharide made from one molecule of fructose and one of glucose. The glucose part triggers the insulin production, which signals that you have taken in calories. So, if you use normal sugar instead of HFCS, your body knows that you got energy way faster. That seems to be the main obesity mechanism associated with HFCS.
On a quick-and-dirty view, the patent is probably novel over inertial navigation systems, because those probably did not generate a specific control signal after a specified back-and-forth motion combination, as it is claimed in claim 1. Also, one could argue that in the case of the inertial navigation system, the computing device controlled and the navigation system are separate entities, which also underscores the novelty of the claim. If you talk about simple novelty, there is no significant barrier - each and any additional or different property of the claim to the prior art renders it novel. So, determining novelty is the rather simple part.
Obviousness is a different beast, though. I have to admit that I am not overly familiar with the US way of determining obviousness, so I'll discuss that in European terms. What is done here is some kind of retrospective reconstruction of the inventive process. To determine novelty (non-obviousness), you first identify the closest prior art, because that would be the starting point for the inventor. I wouldn't say an inertial navigation system qualifies for that, because the invention is basically aimed at hand-held computers, smartphones, PDAs or the like, so, for the sake of this exercise, we start with a conventional smartphone.
Now, the difference is, that the claimed computing device is controllable by a certain motion-combo. From this difference, we ask what the actual purpose of the invention is. In other words, what improvement is reached? That would be, again, quick-and-dirty, to improve the ease of use of the smartphone - which is also stated as purpose in the description.
The follow-up question is, has the man skilled in the art any ideas how to reach this goal from other prior art or from his knowledge? He certainly knows inertial navigation systems, but he doesn't know them as input devices to improve user-friendliness. So, I fear the inertial navigation system is not relevant here.
He also knows mouse-gestures, though - so the idea to use a back-and-forth gesture to elicit a certain response from the device might actually be within his reach. Now we are a step closer to the subject-matter. Still not there yet - we need to establish that he also would use a motion of the device itself as input source for that gesture. If motion sensor input for computers/smartphones was known at the filing date, he probably would, though.
To get to the claimed matter, we therefore need to combine 3 things - a normal smartphone, detection of the motion of a computer as input for that computer and finally, gesture recognition. Combining more than 2 written documents is generally counted as a strong pointer to non-obviousness here. If one of our 3 things can be shown to be general knowledge for the man skilled in the art, however, it is quite likely that the combination is not actually inventive.
In our case here, without doing actual research, we are in a bit of a grey zone. I would strongly tend to count it non-inventive. The inertial navigation, however, plays no role in that.
Hope that ramblings gave some insight into the actual mental process performed when analyzing a patent.
Finally, the usual disclaimer - I am not a patent lawyer (yet) - and especially not yours. This is not legal advice, but rather an educational exercise and my personal ramblings. Do not rely on this post for anything at all. Thanks.
I am not a patent lawyer (yet), but I can assure you, we are not in league with any Fungus from Outer Space nor with any Old Ones, New Ones or Ones of Any Intermediate Age. And my personal Shoggoth is always properly leashed. No danger there at all. IA! IA! Shub-Ni*COUGH*. Sorry gotta go. Something's outside... *Tekeli-li... Tekeli-li....*
Additionally, the patent covers movement of the computing device, not movements of an input device. As a mouse is not a computing device as such, it is not covered. Doesn't help for obviousness, though.
Well, yeah - but that is more a problem of the US litigation system than of the patent system. Where I come from (Europe), the costs of lawsuits is not nearly as high as in the US. Combine that with a loser-pays system and the possibility to get lawsuit cost assistance from the government if you are a broke individual inventor, and the small guy actually stands a chance. Oh, and lawyer costs are somewhat limited, too, so no $750 bill just for that quick lunch meeting where nothing actually happened.