In the end he didn't receive much if anything for his invention. Perhaps this is because this invention does not work, for some reason or other? Just off-hand, without a degree in industrial design, I can think of several reasons, like more expensive to produce and more likely to break. The fact that I went shopping for a fan for my bathroom just the other week and found zero designs of this type leads me to believe that maybe it wasn't the best idea in the world. Besides, what good did the current patent system do your friend? Bear in mind that even if he had found the time and money to patent his invention, those same Chinese companies would have copied it anyway as China does not have a patent system as such and do not honour US patents.
Looking closer at your line of reasoning, not only is it a scathing indictment of the current system, it has logical flaws the size of a school bus: If he was in the phase of negotiating manufacturing deals, how could the Chinese copy his design the "very next day"? Did they, perhaps, come up with the design independently?
However, all that aside, this design is actually a fairly obvious solution in another industry - virtually all airplane propeller designs use tilt-blades.
The 90's called - they want their lameass-internet-stock-bubble-VC-speak back. 2005 called - they want their stale jokes back.
Actually, the authors of many empirical studies point out that patents do not play anything like a dominant role among the various mechanisms by which returns from innovation are captured. Indeed, for most firms trade secrets, know-how, lead time to markets, continuing technological innovation, licensing, name recognition, service capabilities and the use of complementary marketing and manufacturing capabilities are often deemed more effective than patent protection. In the end, in virtually all branches of industry, the absence of patent protection would have had little or no impact on the innovative efforts of a majority of firms (Mazzoleni and Nelson, 1998; Cohen et al., 2000).
If you know that the day after your product goes to market, a dozen other identical ones will be on the shelf next to it, why bother? Because having first-mover advantage is actually worth much more. Besides, if your innovation is such that it can be copied by a dozen competitiors the very next day, it probably wasn't much of an innovation in the first place.
Oh, and I'd rather have one-thirteenth of a market than no market at all. Apparently, all the makers of identical products (bottled water springs to mind, not to mention generical pharmaceuticals) realize this too.
I've been described as the guy who "turns email into an instant-messaging system." I coined the phrase "mail-chatting" for that behaviour back in 1996 and been happily addicted since.:-P
I think if someone did this to Disney they would send Mickey to come eat you or something. I can see the cartoon now: Minnie laying on the bed with the speech bubble: "Mickey, come eat me".;-)
Let's not forget all of the false hits. That aren't even mentioned in their FAQ over common reasons for WGA failures, prompting users to buy new copies when they have a perfectly good license already.
But there's a way around the most common problem - install the pirated VLK XP Pro and then use MS' own KeyUpdateTool.exe to transform it to the "real" key. I've done this with both IBM and HP OEM keys.
BTW, I currently have two workstations that fail WGA - I got full retail licenses for them to be able to swap hardware in them, but they still fail activation now, a new drive, gfx board and motherboard later. Instead of calling some call center, prostrating myself and humbly asking for a re-activation I just installed the VLK. Oh well, I boot Linux more and more often, I guess I'll just sell the licenses when I stop using XP.
Any chance those of us with websites could just setup dummy pages with thousands or tens of thousand of dummy email adresses for the spammers to harvest? Yes, there is: http://www.monkeys.com/wpoison/
What empowers you to decide all of humanity "will have to make the changes we can."? My desire to leave an inhabitable world to my children. You may believe that it's karma that humanity becomes extinct and that Gaia takes care of herself, but I like living.
Of course the economy will have to pay but if we bowed to the economy's wishes on everything you'd die from drinking tapwater. Actually, there's a large and growing consensus around the idea that new, eco-friendly high-tech solutions to many of the current problems may be just what the economy needs with new research areas, new opportunities for low-impact manufacturing and distribution as well as higher profit margins.
I guess the odds are 99% that it's humans that are causing all this stuff we see.But what of the other 1% ? What of it? Even if the root cause to global warming is sun cycles, we need to both adapt to the change and make efforts to stop or slow it down. Since we can not clean the sun's spots we will have to make the changes we can.
It's like you discover your basement is flooded. You are 99% sure it's a leak in your water mains but it COULD be leaking in from the nearby river so instead of turning the water off and getting a drainage pump, you blame the city council for not shoring up the riverbanks enough.
I'd say revealing. Same with "consumers".
"Sit still and buy our stuff, there's a good consumer. We'll have none of this vertical distribution and prosumer nonsense, how are we supposed to control you all?"
Hollywood hasn't admitted anything of the sort "DRMs' primary role is not about keeping copyrighted content off P2P networks. DRMs support an orderly market for facilitating efficient economic transactions between content producers and content consumers. " Dan Glickman, Motion Picture Association of America
MPAA executives have never admitted that piracy isn't the motivation for DRM."DRMs' primary role is not about keeping copyrighted content off P2P networks. DRMs support an orderly market for facilitating efficient economic transactions between content producers and content consumers." Dan Glickman, Motion Picture Association of America
Linux gets a pool of lawyers and marketers.... then dump piranhas and a couple of alligators in the pool. There's no way the pool guy is going to clean out those bones from the bottom of a pool full of sharks, piranhas and alligators.
I'm not using any Microsoft software on the client. Just need to buy the CAL (which in itself is totally bollocks, IMHO) and you're in. The problem is that M$ also wants to be paid for the client, which is really double dipping. They are actually trying to triple-dip:
He *is* legal, his client box runs Linux (see the rdesktop reference.) Yeah, but MS requires Terminal Services Licenses for the clients. These come with XP but would theoretically need to be purchased from MS if connecting with other clients. In addition, you probably need to have enough CALs too, depending on what the servers are being used for (for example, a Win2k3 SBS comes with only 5 CALs). I had to research this whole scam^H^H^H^Hscheme back in the Win2k Server days and it's a total bitch. Apparently it's even more convoluted in 2k3...
I have the certificates to prove this, and furthermore they're issued by the biggest software company in existence. Oh, you're an IBM Certified Enterprise Developer? Good for you! Way more impressive than, say, a MVP for MSN Messenger or Notepad.;-)
Might as well include the rest of the article too:
Other theoreticians calculated the effects of subshell closings in other superheavy nuclei. They concluded that an isotope of hassium containing 108 protons and 162 neutrons (270Hs) should survive a long time--much longer than the millisecond or shorter lifetimes typical of most of the heaviest nuclides.
Now, an international team of experimentalists has detected four of those atoms and probed some of their chemical properties during the roughly 30 seconds the nuclei survive (Phys. Rev. Lett. 2006, 97, 242501). The findings confirm the predictions and provide new statistical data with which such theoretical models can be refined. The team includes 24 scientists from 10 research institutions, including the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Institute for Heavy-Ion Research (GSI), both in Germany, as well as institutions in Russia, the U.S., Switzerland, Japan, China, and Poland.
As TUM graduate student Jan Dvorak explains, the hassium nuclei were formed by firing a high-energy beam of 26Mg projectiles into a target enriched in 248Cm. The target was also doped with a small amount of gadolinium to produce isotopes of hassium's lighter homolog, osmium. Upon formation, nuclear products were exposed to a stream of oxygen. From earlier studies of 269Hs, scientists learned that hassium and osmium--but not other heavy elements--form volatile tetroxides, thereby providing a method for filtering unwanted products.
In the latest experiments, the volatile oxides were swept into a multistage chromatographic detector, which was cooled along its length in a gradient from room temperature at one end to -150 C. On the basis of the two sets of experiments, 269Hs and 270Hs exhibit distinct nuclear properties but similar chemical properties, as expected.
The study paints a very consistent picture of that region of the chart of the nuclides and makes clever use of chemistry to sort out an assignment of atomic number, says Kenton J. Moody, a heavy-element research group leader at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Moody adds that the observations support theoretical calculations that scientists have been using to predict transactinide properties and plan superheavy element experiments.
Slashdot Mirror
Looking closer at your line of reasoning, not only is it a scathing indictment of the current system, it has logical flaws the size of a school bus: If he was in the phase of negotiating manufacturing deals, how could the Chinese copy his design the "very next day"? Did they, perhaps, come up with the design independently?
However, all that aside, this design is actually a fairly obvious solution in another industry - virtually all airplane propeller designs use tilt-blades.
http://www.quebecoislibre.org/000902-3.htm
But there's a way around the most common problem - install the pirated VLK XP Pro and then use MS' own KeyUpdateTool.exe to transform it to the "real" key. I've done this with both IBM and HP OEM keys.
BTW, I currently have two workstations that fail WGA - I got full retail licenses for them to be able to swap hardware in them, but they still fail activation now, a new drive, gfx board and motherboard later. Instead of calling some call center, prostrating myself and humbly asking for a re-activation I just installed the VLK. Oh well, I boot Linux more and more often, I guess I'll just sell the licenses when I stop using XP.
I'd say revealing. Same with "consumers". "Sit still and buy our stuff, there's a good consumer. We'll have none of this vertical distribution and prosumer nonsense, how are we supposed to control you all?"
Dan Glickman, Motion Picture Association of America
Dan Glickman, Motion Picture Association of America
There's no way the pool guy is going to clean out those bones from the bottom of a pool full of sharks, piranhas and alligators.
"In addition to a server license, a Windows Server Client Access License (CAL) is required. If you wish to conduct a Windows session, an incremental Terminal Server Client Access License (TS CAL) is required as well."
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/howtob
Well, I guess this is what happens when some well-meaning doctor teaches an old ex-GNAA renegade to play Minesweeper as therapy...
They barely mention in passing one other item in favour of LCD - LCDs draw less power and generate less heat than plasmas.
Seriously, it's worth a try... That's been tried. Didn't work.