Tesla already has prototypes for swapping batteries out in less than 2 minutes.
How long does it take when you get to the battery station in Nowheresville and they've run out of batteries?
Much, much less time than it takes to refuel when you get to the gas station in Nowheresville and they've run out of gas. You just plug the car in and wait 3 hours, instead of waiting 24 hours for the next tanker truck, oh wait! It's Saturday. 48 hours no gas for you.
I can also make up other ridiculous scenarios that could happen to people with bad luck or poor planning skills.
There are standardized addresses. Unfortunately, people who don't understand basic systems engineering (or who do, but are extremely greedy and amoral) refuse to use them.
Anyone providing Internet mail services is required by the SMTP protocol definition to have a human being receiving mail at the postmaster@domain.tld address. This has been true in every single revision of the protocol starting with RFC822 and continuing to the present day in RFC2821.
If you aren't manning the postmaster address, what you're doing is simply not SMTP, so it isn't Internet email. It is something else - metaphorically a bicycle wobbling down the center of the freeway, perhaps, or in the case of the big government-owning vendors like Verizon a steamroller in a pedestrian tunnel, crewed by laughing psychopaths.
The abuse@domain.tld address is slightly different - it is required by RFC2142, just like the hostmaster@domain.tld address is, but that RFC is not a protocol definition or a requirement for Internet connection.
However, the following statement is objectively true: If a domain does not staff the abuse, hostmaster and postmaster accounts, they will fall in at least one of two categories: technically incompetent or ethically corrupt.
The technically incompetent cannot handle the mail filtering required to deal with the spamload on these addresses. AOL claims that they are part of this group.
The ethically corrupt understand that the Internet is fundamentally a system of agreements - that wires and computers cannot function as a whole unless they use agreed-upon, mutually respected protocols, just as people cannot communicate efficiently unless they share some kind of common language. However, they also know the Internet's protocols are robust enough that only the majority of users must scrupulously comply with them, and extremely wealthy and powerful players can gain commerical advantage by breaking the rules they insist everyone else respect. Verizon and Microsoft fall in this category.
Because people continue to buy services from the technically incompetent and the ethically corrupt, they continue to prosper. This is something the free market is supposed to magically correct, but amazingly enough the same people trumpeting the power and the glory of free markets seem to be working very hard to support regional monopolies and strengthen barriers to entry in communications markets.
Lie, lie, lie. No one checks references. And even if you 1 out of 10 do check, you'll end up getting rejected because they checked only from that one place.
I check every reference. It's a pass/fail test of your social intelligence: are you clueless enough to list a reference who will not give you a glowing referral? If so, you aren't smart enough for any tech job I've got available.
Wake me up when there's empirical data used to plot actual numbers instead of wavy lines drawn on napkins.
Try this, for example: take the US population data and patent office data from 1640 to the present, and plot the per-capita curves for the numbers of patents granted, patents applied for, patents in force. Make the horizontal axis of your graph measure time in years, with dated marks for all changes in patent law. Scale your vertical axis, which will be used for the per capita patent values, so that you can also plot US population on the same graph, giving you four lines total.
Plotting real data may let you see interesting correlations between patent law and innovation, but unscaled curves drawn on a whim just show if there's any ink in your pen or not.
As soon as you start using political campaign contributions from existing power brokers to design the system, you've left sound engineering and real science behind. I have just described corn ethanol schemes in a nutshell.
Solar + Wind + Hydro would have worked back when Jimmy the Peanut wanted to do it, but Reagan-style governments (such as we have today) have wasted precious time and irreplaceable resources to the point where it's hard to imagine getting the infrastructure up in time to decommission the aging fission plants before they fail. The numbers are difficult - look how many wind turbines in remote windy areas you need to replace even one BWR sitting right next to a major population center. I'm all in favor of trying, but then I'm all in favor of pursuing LENR, too - I just wouldn't bet the entire bank on it.
As for batteries, honestly energy storage is a solved problem, despite Exide's suppression of the nickel-iron battery (happily, once again available due to Edison's patents expiring) and Chevron's purchase and suppression of many of Ovinshky's key NiMH patents. If you don't like batteries you can always run a turbine backwards and pump water uphill; it's been done for over a hundred years now and it works. It's an interesting subject, yes, and important, but I don't think we need fuss over the details of energy storage in discussions about scheduled-to-fail nuclear plants.
Your remark about the land area required for agriculture based energy production is very relevant, though; even more so if you live in England - there just isn't room in the UK to do the job without major technology advances. I imagine many other nations have this problem as well. However, in the USA we already pay farmers tax dollars not to produce food; we have vast croplands that are simply not used, and even vaster areas that are not suitable for growing food which could be used for algae tank biogas and biodiesel production at less tax investment cost than the current expenditures on foreign military adventuring and various forms of corporate welfare.
Fundamentally, US taxpayers really can't lose by making more investments in all forms of distributed sustainable energy production. However, the tax allocations are controlled by people who can lose - and lose big - if energy production stops being a militarized, government protected and insured racket like nuclear fission plants are, and becomes a widely distributed, reliable and sustainable system employing huge numbers of people profitably at local levels.
Patents are currently too extensible, last too long, are far too transferable, and cover ideas that are too broad and things that should not be patentable. Logan slyly points out the heyday of American patenting and inventing (1865-1882) came to an end shortly after the US Patent Office stopped requiring models in 1880, although that's certainly not the emphasis he puts on it.
He's just defending the current, broken system because he can get rich by it. I wanted to give him a chance, but he's a troll and part of the problem.
It's going to be pretty ugly in a couple decades. It would be nice if people could be rational and let us build newer reactors.
Sigh. On slashdot, anti-democratic authoritarian talking points get modded insightful. I suspect it's why Malda left - that and the racist drivel brigade.
Democracy is supposed to be about the will of the people, and the people don't want tax-subsidized nuclear fission. Capitalism and free markets are about resource allocation efficiency and individual freedom, and nuclear fission is not viable economically without taxpayer support. We have dozens of more attractive options, but instead we spend our tremendous wealth on slaughtering brownish people abroad. For half the cost of the Bush/Obama wars, we could have had a true distributed carbon-neutral energy infrastructure based on agriculture.
But no, a true sustainable energy infrastructure based on sound engineering, modern science and military principles of resilience is somehow less rational than heating water with rocks and running the steam through a victorian turbine. On slashdot, anyway.
I don't see any non-Jewish pro-Israeli group/individual...
Like United States three-letter agencies that are dominated by professed Christian Armageddonists?
...having the zeal and motivation to carry out a terrorist attack against the enemies of Israel, driven solely by a goodwill for Israel.
Oh, good point. The armagaddonist nutjobs only sponsor pro-Israeli terrorism so that Israel will be around to be destroyed in the Last Days, and the unrepentant Jews sent screaming into Hell.
It's always amazed me how much of Western government policy is based on questionable interpretations of an Eastern religious book that contains glaringly obvious errors of translation (rabbits chewing cud, insects with four legs, and suchlike).
If something still does the job for which it was purchased or built, then it is not obsolete. The word you are looking for is "old" or possibly "outmoded".
Never use a module if you can possibly avoid it, and keep everything you use patched up to date.
That way you'll be as safe as you can be - because you'll only be using modules you aren't actually capable of writing yourself.
Pulling in a dozen wordpress plugins (or a dozen CPAN modules, or the Ruby or Python equivalents) so you can avoid learning how to unpack a trivial format is the road to software maintenance hell...
In any really tall building, servers belong in the middle floor - which is probably already a service floor, if it's an intelligently designed high-rise building.
Cable runs decrease in density, thickness, and length when you put the servers in the center of the served area. It's also the safest single place in regards to disasters such as floods, hurricanes, civic unrest, and lightning strikes.
It's cheaper and more reliable to put servers in the middle of the middle floor.
If it wasn't for SuSe, Slackware, Mandrake and a few others Red Hat would have gone under. Commercialization of Linux was a team effort, despite the shameless historical revisionism of the article lead.
Those who worry are usually those who have something to hide or something criminal in the works.. Bottom line, you can't care about this, unless you do wrong or plan on doing wrong. That's kinda how I see it.
Nope. You don't see it at all. Because illegal is not a synonym for wrong.
Over 2000 years ago, Sun Tzu pointed out that when the laws imposed by the rulers are aligned with the customs and ethics of the people, societies are prosperous and resistant to crime, war and rebellion. When the rulers lose the way, as the corporate overlords of the USA have, the people become unhappy and the society becomes progressively more fragile over time. Eventually a neighbor invades or a province revolts and the rulers are replaced, because nobody's willing to die to protect them anymore.
Well, focusing on the sterile numbers of net value transfer rather than the method of implementation - when implementation is what actually impacts reality - is at least a little bit like a forest/trees thing. My spouse says "How you do it matters at least as much as what you actually do." You've also got an unexamined axiom that government economic interference is a zero-sum game, which I suspect is not really true.
But in any case I totally agree with you, in regards to your other statements! It amazes me that what were once solidly right-wing concepts - cap and trade, for example, or sin taxes - are now considered the purest left wing socialism by the GOP. They've totally lost their ideological moorings in pursuit of corporate cash.
Well, fresh raw tiger swallowtail butterflies taste sort of like watermelon (take the legs and wings off first) and live wood grubs are slightly sweet and actually kind of delicious (ground grubs, though, are gritty and taste muddy) but ants taste of formic acid, and they latch on to your tongue-bumps with their mandibles if you eat them live, so you end up scraping ant-heads off your tongue with your teeth.
I hear big spiders are tasty, but haven't tried any.
You can claim these are the same things, and Libertarian and Republican fat cats will totally agree with you, but they simply aren't. Let me explain.
A government can use empirical data of existing damage and cost externalization to guide taxation - thus picking losers or it can make uninformed decisions based on hypothetical projections - thus attempting to pick winners.
Notice that one of these two processes is easily manipulable by nearly anyone - when you aren't using empirical data, it's all just handwaving and shouting and the loudest sociopath wins. Tax breaks for Solyndra and Fiskar? Please. Those companies never had a chance in the market regardless of taxation because they had no customers or business plan. Giving them money was a political handout even though the clueless, technically ignorant politicians doing it had no way to know that.
But when Congressman Whitenose can look up and actually see smokestacks belching filth into the sky, and his staffers can analyze real data showing who is driving up healthcare costs in the Congressman's district, he doesn't have to guess at a mythical future, he can examine the past and present and know the truth.
So picking losers is not the same as picking winners. It's the difference between creating harmful market distortions and creating a fair market - not a totally free laissez faire market (where Murder Incorporated always wins) but a FAIR market, where cost displacement onto taxpayers by favored entities is not permitted.
Semantic quibblers and corporatist meme-shoppers will always claim that taxing known bad actors is the same as funding hypothetically good actors. Don't fall for it. You could also claim that Achilles can never outrace the tortoise, because the Greek continually has to cover half the ground and then half of that et cetera ad infinitum. But Achilles kicks the tortoise's armor plated ass in the real world. Future prediction is fundamentally different from acting on empirical data, and government should always favor the latter.
If it needs gov assistance is it really a business or just corporate welfare?
The latter. Government shouldn't try to pick winners - could political hacks and their appointees be any less qualified for any such endeavor? - they should pick losers, and tax the living shit out of them, instead of trying to outguess the market. Pollution taxes, sin taxes, whatever you want to call them, but use taxation to redress corporate cost externalizations and pay for government at the same time, everybody wins but the total sociopaths.
Want to start a renaissance in power generation? Tax carbon releases, just like George Bush Sr. wanted. Then, suddenly wind and tidal and geothermal and biofuel processes become more profitable, so market pressures will cause them to become more efficient and accessible.... without any tax breaks or corporate welfare at all. Pick losers not winners.
Unless the National Talking Express had a method for selecting per-user content before delivery, that ain't prior art.
However, in any case, thank you for adding something to the conversation! I would not be surprised if the patent was invalid, and personally I think it never should have been granted - but these claims that Logan never did any work and never created anything seem to be false, so wasting time on lame accusatory "questions" in this thread is stupid.
Yeah, me too. I need one to fix my chronosynclastic infandibulator; the space-time interociter I got from Tom Servo is totally shot and every time I try to send a.jpg of the turbo subsystem in to metalunan support it just shows black fog. Cheap Gizmonic crap!
You've made several good points, but I still feel compelled to repeat that Logan et al clearly did intend to use their patents, since they did build devices and did attempt to market them. These were never submarine patents (despite all the giant corporations crying bitter crocodile tears) and perfectly valid moral objections to that practice are not applicable here.
People are choosing to ignore certain realities because they don't want to pay the patent owner. It makes them feel morally righteous to pretend that Logan's patents weren't intended to be used, when he proved in court that he had every intention of using them, and tried his best to use them, but the market wasn't ready yet.
Personally, I say if you can't build a working physical model in a 12"x12"x12" cube you shouldn't be able to patent it, and patents longer than 14 years are destructive to society and culture. But I'm not a wealthy corporation so the Obama administration doesn't care what I think.
The villains here are not really Logan, Goessling and Call - they are playing entirely by the rules as our (supposedly representative) government has set them.
Way to shift the blame... The people running the Gas chambers at Auschwitz were not villains, it was all Hitlers fault.
You win the prize, in the form of "insightful" mods by people who apparently can't discriminate between mass murder and unsavory business practices. Congratulations!
That's not sarcasm. I sincerely admire the way you've gamed the system (just like Logan, Goessling, Call... and Hitler.)
Why does saihung believe that no work has been done, when Logan spent 1.6 million of his own money to bring a product to market before anyone else?
The guy built the invention. He played by both the spirit and the letter of the rules. The rules suck but you are just scapegoating this guy for that - maybe you should do some research before you start publicly calling people out?
Slashdot Mirror
Much, much less time than it takes to refuel when you get to the gas station in Nowheresville and they've run out of gas. You just plug the car in and wait 3 hours, instead of waiting 24 hours for the next tanker truck, oh wait! It's Saturday. 48 hours no gas for you.
I can also make up other ridiculous scenarios that could happen to people with bad luck or poor planning skills.
This doesn't answer all your questions. Sorry.
There are standardized addresses. Unfortunately, people who don't understand basic systems engineering (or who do, but are extremely greedy and amoral) refuse to use them.
Anyone providing Internet mail services is required by the SMTP protocol definition to have a human being receiving mail at the postmaster@domain.tld address. This has been true in every single revision of the protocol starting with RFC822 and continuing to the present day in RFC2821.
If you aren't manning the postmaster address, what you're doing is simply not SMTP, so it isn't Internet email. It is something else - metaphorically a bicycle wobbling down the center of the freeway, perhaps, or in the case of the big government-owning vendors like Verizon a steamroller in a pedestrian tunnel, crewed by laughing psychopaths.
The abuse@domain.tld address is slightly different - it is required by RFC2142, just like the hostmaster@domain.tld address is, but that RFC is not a protocol definition or a requirement for Internet connection.
However, the following statement is objectively true: If a domain does not staff the abuse, hostmaster and postmaster accounts, they will fall in at least one of two categories: technically incompetent or ethically corrupt.
The technically incompetent cannot handle the mail filtering required to deal with the spamload on these addresses. AOL claims that they are part of this group.
The ethically corrupt understand that the Internet is fundamentally a system of agreements - that wires and computers cannot function as a whole unless they use agreed-upon, mutually respected protocols, just as people cannot communicate efficiently unless they share some kind of common language. However, they also know the Internet's protocols are robust enough that only the majority of users must scrupulously comply with them, and extremely wealthy and powerful players can gain commerical advantage by breaking the rules they insist everyone else respect. Verizon and Microsoft fall in this category.
Because people continue to buy services from the technically incompetent and the ethically corrupt, they continue to prosper. This is something the free market is supposed to magically correct, but amazingly enough the same people trumpeting the power and the glory of free markets seem to be working very hard to support regional monopolies and strengthen barriers to entry in communications markets.
I check every reference. It's a pass/fail test of your social intelligence: are you clueless enough to list a reference who will not give you a glowing referral? If so, you aren't smart enough for any tech job I've got available.
Wake me up when there's empirical data used to plot actual numbers instead of wavy lines drawn on napkins.
Try this, for example: take the US population data and patent office data from 1640 to the present, and plot the per-capita curves for the numbers of patents granted, patents applied for, patents in force. Make the horizontal axis of your graph measure time in years, with dated marks for all changes in patent law. Scale your vertical axis, which will be used for the per capita patent values, so that you can also plot US population on the same graph, giving you four lines total.
Plotting real data may let you see interesting correlations between patent law and innovation, but unscaled curves drawn on a whim just show if there's any ink in your pen or not.
As soon as you start using political campaign contributions from existing power brokers to design the system, you've left sound engineering and real science behind. I have just described corn ethanol schemes in a nutshell.
Solar + Wind + Hydro would have worked back when Jimmy the Peanut wanted to do it, but Reagan-style governments (such as we have today) have wasted precious time and irreplaceable resources to the point where it's hard to imagine getting the infrastructure up in time to decommission the aging fission plants before they fail. The numbers are difficult - look how many wind turbines in remote windy areas you need to replace even one BWR sitting right next to a major population center. I'm all in favor of trying, but then I'm all in favor of pursuing LENR, too - I just wouldn't bet the entire bank on it.
As for batteries, honestly energy storage is a solved problem, despite Exide's suppression of the nickel-iron battery (happily, once again available due to Edison's patents expiring) and Chevron's purchase and suppression of many of Ovinshky's key NiMH patents. If you don't like batteries you can always run a turbine backwards and pump water uphill; it's been done for over a hundred years now and it works. It's an interesting subject, yes, and important, but I don't think we need fuss over the details of energy storage in discussions about scheduled-to-fail nuclear plants.
Your remark about the land area required for agriculture based energy production is very relevant, though; even more so if you live in England - there just isn't room in the UK to do the job without major technology advances. I imagine many other nations have this problem as well. However, in the USA we already pay farmers tax dollars not to produce food; we have vast croplands that are simply not used, and even vaster areas that are not suitable for growing food which could be used for algae tank biogas and biodiesel production at less tax investment cost than the current expenditures on foreign military adventuring and various forms of corporate welfare.
Fundamentally, US taxpayers really can't lose by making more investments in all forms of distributed sustainable energy production. However, the tax allocations are controlled by people who can lose - and lose big - if energy production stops being a militarized, government protected and insured racket like nuclear fission plants are, and becomes a widely distributed, reliable and sustainable system employing huge numbers of people profitably at local levels.
Excellent post, devjoe, despite the length.
Patents are currently too extensible, last too long, are far too transferable, and cover ideas that are too broad and things that should not be patentable. Logan slyly points out the heyday of American patenting and inventing (1865-1882) came to an end shortly after the US Patent Office stopped requiring models in 1880, although that's certainly not the emphasis he puts on it.
He's just defending the current, broken system because he can get rich by it. I wanted to give him a chance, but he's a troll and part of the problem.
Sigh. On slashdot, anti-democratic authoritarian talking points get modded insightful. I suspect it's why Malda left - that and the racist drivel brigade.
Democracy is supposed to be about the will of the people, and the people don't want tax-subsidized nuclear fission. Capitalism and free markets are about resource allocation efficiency and individual freedom, and nuclear fission is not viable economically without taxpayer support. We have dozens of more attractive options, but instead we spend our tremendous wealth on slaughtering brownish people abroad. For half the cost of the Bush/Obama wars, we could have had a true distributed carbon-neutral energy infrastructure based on agriculture.
But no, a true sustainable energy infrastructure based on sound engineering, modern science and military principles of resilience is somehow less rational than heating water with rocks and running the steam through a victorian turbine. On slashdot, anyway.
Like United States three-letter agencies that are dominated by professed Christian Armageddonists?
Oh, good point. The armagaddonist nutjobs only sponsor pro-Israeli terrorism so that Israel will be around to be destroyed in the Last Days, and the unrepentant Jews sent screaming into Hell.
It's always amazed me how much of Western government policy is based on questionable interpretations of an Eastern religious book that contains glaringly obvious errors of translation (rabbits chewing cud, insects with four legs, and suchlike).
If something still does the job for which it was purchased or built, then it is not obsolete. The word you are looking for is "old" or possibly "outmoded".
Never use a module if you can possibly avoid it, and keep everything you use patched up to date.
That way you'll be as safe as you can be - because you'll only be using modules you aren't actually capable of writing yourself.
Pulling in a dozen wordpress plugins (or a dozen CPAN modules, or the Ruby or Python equivalents) so you can avoid learning how to unpack a trivial format is the road to software maintenance hell...
Ah, yes, me too - the RL01 and RL02 drives with the aerodynamic heads. People used to make clocks out of the platters if they had a head crash.
Seriously, wtf? Maddog knows better than that.
In any really tall building, servers belong in the middle floor - which is probably already a service floor, if it's an intelligently designed high-rise building.
Cable runs decrease in density, thickness, and length when you put the servers in the center of the served area. It's also the safest single place in regards to disasters such as floods, hurricanes, civic unrest, and lightning strikes.
It's cheaper and more reliable to put servers in the middle of the middle floor.
If it wasn't for SuSe, Slackware, Mandrake and a few others Red Hat would have gone under. Commercialization of Linux was a team effort, despite the shameless historical revisionism of the article lead.
Nope. You don't see it at all. Because illegal is not a synonym for wrong .
Over 2000 years ago, Sun Tzu pointed out that when the laws imposed by the rulers are aligned with the customs and ethics of the people, societies are prosperous and resistant to crime, war and rebellion. When the rulers lose the way, as the corporate overlords of the USA have, the people become unhappy and the society becomes progressively more fragile over time. Eventually a neighbor invades or a province revolts and the rulers are replaced, because nobody's willing to die to protect them anymore.
The US switched routes because of Walker and Vanderbilt.
The Nicaraguan route was actually supposed to be easier, according to surveyors and engineers of the time, and it sure looks easier on a map.
But Vanderbilt, in a rather famous act of revenge against Walker's sponsors Garrison and Morgan, arranged to have the more difficult canal built.
Well, focusing on the sterile numbers of net value transfer rather than the method of implementation - when implementation is what actually impacts reality - is at least a little bit like a forest/trees thing. My spouse says "How you do it matters at least as much as what you actually do." You've also got an unexamined axiom that government economic interference is a zero-sum game, which I suspect is not really true.
But in any case I totally agree with you, in regards to your other statements! It amazes me that what were once solidly right-wing concepts - cap and trade, for example, or sin taxes - are now considered the purest left wing socialism by the GOP. They've totally lost their ideological moorings in pursuit of corporate cash.
Well, fresh raw tiger swallowtail butterflies taste sort of like watermelon (take the legs and wings off first) and live wood grubs are slightly sweet and actually kind of delicious (ground grubs, though, are gritty and taste muddy) but ants taste of formic acid, and they latch on to your tongue-bumps with their mandibles if you eat them live, so you end up scraping ant-heads off your tongue with your teeth.
I hear big spiders are tasty, but haven't tried any.
You can claim these are the same things, and Libertarian and Republican fat cats will totally agree with you, but they simply aren't. Let me explain.
A government can use empirical data of existing damage and cost externalization to guide taxation - thus picking losers or it can make uninformed decisions based on hypothetical projections - thus attempting to pick winners.
Notice that one of these two processes is easily manipulable by nearly anyone - when you aren't using empirical data, it's all just handwaving and shouting and the loudest sociopath wins. Tax breaks for Solyndra and Fiskar? Please. Those companies never had a chance in the market regardless of taxation because they had no customers or business plan. Giving them money was a political handout even though the clueless, technically ignorant politicians doing it had no way to know that.
But when Congressman Whitenose can look up and actually see smokestacks belching filth into the sky, and his staffers can analyze real data showing who is driving up healthcare costs in the Congressman's district, he doesn't have to guess at a mythical future, he can examine the past and present and know the truth.
So picking losers is not the same as picking winners. It's the difference between creating harmful market distortions and creating a fair market - not a totally free laissez faire market (where Murder Incorporated always wins) but a FAIR market, where cost displacement onto taxpayers by favored entities is not permitted.
Semantic quibblers and corporatist meme-shoppers will always claim that taxing known bad actors is the same as funding hypothetically good actors. Don't fall for it. You could also claim that Achilles can never outrace the tortoise, because the Greek continually has to cover half the ground and then half of that et cetera ad infinitum. But Achilles kicks the tortoise's armor plated ass in the real world. Future prediction is fundamentally different from acting on empirical data, and government should always favor the latter.
The latter. Government shouldn't try to pick winners - could political hacks and their appointees be any less qualified for any such endeavor? - they should pick losers, and tax the living shit out of them, instead of trying to outguess the market. Pollution taxes, sin taxes, whatever you want to call them, but use taxation to redress corporate cost externalizations and pay for government at the same time, everybody wins but the total sociopaths.
Want to start a renaissance in power generation? Tax carbon releases, just like George Bush Sr. wanted. Then, suddenly wind and tidal and geothermal and biofuel processes become more profitable, so market pressures will cause them to become more efficient and accessible.... without any tax breaks or corporate welfare at all. Pick losers not winners.
Can you read BLISS source?
Unless the National Talking Express had a method for selecting per-user content before delivery, that ain't prior art.
However, in any case, thank you for adding something to the conversation! I would not be surprised if the patent was invalid, and personally I think it never should have been granted - but these claims that Logan never did any work and never created anything seem to be false, so wasting time on lame accusatory "questions" in this thread is stupid.
Yeah, me too. I need one to fix my chronosynclastic infandibulator; the space-time interociter I got from Tom Servo is totally shot and every time I try to send a .jpg of the turbo subsystem in to metalunan support it just shows black fog. Cheap Gizmonic crap!
You've made several good points, but I still feel compelled to repeat that Logan et al clearly did intend to use their patents, since they did build devices and did attempt to market them. These were never submarine patents (despite all the giant corporations crying bitter crocodile tears) and perfectly valid moral objections to that practice are not applicable here.
People are choosing to ignore certain realities because they don't want to pay the patent owner. It makes them feel morally righteous to pretend that Logan's patents weren't intended to be used, when he proved in court that he had every intention of using them, and tried his best to use them, but the market wasn't ready yet.
Personally, I say if you can't build a working physical model in a 12"x12"x12" cube you shouldn't be able to patent it, and patents longer than 14 years are destructive to society and culture. But I'm not a wealthy corporation so the Obama administration doesn't care what I think.
You win the prize, in the form of "insightful" mods by people who apparently can't discriminate between mass murder and unsavory business practices. Congratulations!
That's not sarcasm. I sincerely admire the way you've gamed the system (just like Logan, Goessling, Call... and Hitler.)
Why does saihung believe that no work has been done, when Logan spent 1.6 million of his own money to bring a product to market before anyone else?
The guy built the invention. He played by both the spirit and the letter of the rules. The rules suck but you are just scapegoating this guy for that - maybe you should do some research before you start publicly calling people out?