My first thought was that he should have spent the first two years making this an automated robotics project, and then started digging. He may have completed sooner.
If you have an idea and someone else licenses it and implements it then there's no reason you should have any legal problems since you weren't involved.
Wow, that is a quite gratuitous assumption.:-) I am sure a host of trial lawyers have a quite different opinion.
If you do then that is a problem with the legal system, not the patent system.
So you are no longer claiming that no problem exists, rather you are claiming that there is a problem but it is in the legal system. Perhaps you now can see why an inventor legitimately wants to sell and move on, to avoid the problematic legal system, to let the experts in the corp buying his patent navigate those waters.
I'm sorry, someone came up with a better idea without infringing on yours? That's life.
No, that is why you want to sell not license. Does the original inventor need to be an economist and expert in marketing & product development in order to predict the viable life of his invention? Does the original inventor need to be a patent attorney so he can decide if others are infringing or not? No, he wants to leave all that to experts like those in the corp buying his patent. The inventor may just want to move on to the next idea.
Under your proposal inventors must now be, or pay for, experts in law, economics, marketing & product development, patents, etc. It increases the barrier to getting rewarded as an inventor. Original inventors often sell because they don't understand, and don't want to learn, all this other stuff. Deprive them of the ability to sell and be done with it, to force them into an ongoing relationship that will draw on their time and attention -- your proposed system will have the unintended consequence of deterring some guy who is an expert in some technical specialty from giving inventing a try.
Making patents non-transferable... could sure fix a lot of what's wrong with the patent system as it stands.
No. You don't seem to understand the true nature of the problem with the US patent system. It is *not* that patents are transferable. It is that patents are being issued for things that are too obvious, that should not be patentable. If the standards for issuing patents were cleaned up and only non-obvious things were awarded patents then patent trolls would not have the "mine field" that they currently have. Basically you seem to be focusing on the symptom not the disease, that is more likely to yield negative unintended consequences than actually fix anything.
Remaining on the hook for any legal problems and the associated legal bills does not sound like a problem to you?
Carrying a risk that a competitive or disruptive product will appear and make that invention unappealing and losing those licensees does not sound like a problem to you?
Why is selling patents even legal? The original creator of a patent deserves to be rewarded so that the can come up with more original ideas, but why should someone who has potentially created nothing be rewarded? The creator can license the patent to anyone, so shouldn't need to sell it.
Licensing can work, however it is the original inventor's choice and some prefer to just sell.
(1) Licensing requires an ongoing relationship and probably periodic payments.
(2) It also requires that the original inventor assume some risk in that the invention remains desirable and the inventor retains licensees.
(3) The original inventor is also still on the hook for any legal issues and costs.
An original inventor may prefer one lump sum payment and be done with it and move on to the next big idea without any distractions, risks or liabilities. Also some buyers prefer to own rather than license. If licensing is the only option the number of buyers is reduced, this may lower the value of the invention.
Most of this debris isn't sitting still, It's moving at thousands of MPH. How do you plan to catch something moving that fast without destroying the collector?
A collector could be sacrificial, designed to just sit there and take the hits. As long as it captures the debris and does not itself spall and generate more debris. A loose analogy would be a block of ballistic gelatin capturing a bullet as the bullet fragments.
No, I believe it would be more like catching a 25,000mph bullet while doing 25,000mph yourself. Just make sure you're both going in the same direction...
The problem is that orbits and velocities are different, that is why debris is often such a hazard. Its not just stuff moving in the opposite direction, its stuff moving in the same direction at a different velocity. A collector would need a lot of fuel to be matching various orbits and velocities.
The PP should break down in sunlight and can be reclaimed.
Well, it did for a while.
And it won't have any sunlight in the landfill so it won't degrade very well? I thought one problem with landfills is that things that should degrade do not due to a lack of sunlight, oxygen, etc. IIRC some researchers have dug around in landfills from the 40s and 50s and found well preserved newspapers and other theoretical degradables. On the other hand some landfills are producing enough methane to make capture economical. Is it a soil thing? Breathable/permeable vs something more impenetrable?
... Amazon blamed the PlayBook's Flash player for the issue, saying the Flash software needed to be update, even though my Adobe Flash software is up to date (v11.1.122.4)...
So its Adobe not Apple?
FWIW being current and needing an update is plausible. Amazon may have learned of an exploit in Flash and will only resume streaming after the security problem is fixed. OK, plausible but not terribly likely.
... Apple owns the rights to the hardware and software that would allow Amazon video content to be played on the BlackBerry PlayBook? Yet Amazon has allowed Instant Video customers to play video content on RIM's tablet for the past year, and just now the company decided to block the functionality? Something isn't right here, and I reached out to Amazon.com's media relations team more than 24 hours ago for clarification, but I haven't received a response. The above response from Amazon customer service could simply be misinformation sent by an irresponsible customer representative...
Then maybe a better title for your article would have been "Amazon Blocks Instant Video on BlackBerry PlayBook, Customer Service Rep Blames Apple"
That's a great example. Bush put a lot of money into AIDS prevention and research, which is a great thing. But the groups he funded were prohibited from advocating for contraceptive use,...
I believe that you are mistaken. I think the controversy was that abstinence was required to be part of the discussion. However the correct use of condoms was another part, even in the Bush years.
... ignoring all the research that tells us family planning is crucial to women's health. Look at all the good Bush did with that money, and think of how much better that would be if it was spent the way science tells us is effective? Like I said, they only care for science when it fits their social agenda.
AIDS prevention/research and family planning are *both* important issues. However when funding a project it is reasonable to keep that funding on a particular topic. Keeping an AIDS project's spending specifically on AIDS and not allowing its funds to go to otherwise worthy and somewhat related areas may simply be financial accountability. I used "somewhat related" because many family planning methods do not prevent the spread of AIDS and the two methods that do prevent AIDS (abstinence and condoms) were part of the program.
Again, family planning is an important issue but it shouldn't necessarily be able to draw funds from an account specifically setup for AIDS. Just as family planning shouldn't necessarily be able to draw funds from an account specifically setup for famine relief. Sadly if there is too much flexibility on how funds can be spent then there is more likely to be corruption, fraud and theft of some sort.
Republicans love science as long as it's something they can monetize and doesn't conflict with their social agenda.
Social agendas like battling AIDS in Africa?
"President-elect Barack Obama doesn't often offer praise for President George W. Bush's foreign policy, but on Monday he offered the outgoing head of state accolades for battling AIDS in Africa.
"I salute President Bush for his leadership in crafting a plan for AIDS relief in Africa and backing it up with funding dedicated to saving lives and preventing the spread of the disease," Obama said in taped remarks to the Saddleback Civil Forum on Global Health."" http://articles.cnn.com/2008-12-01/us/world.aids.day_1_aids-relief-anti-retroviral-president-s-emergency-plan?_s=PM:US
... the past moon missions have birthed a lot of technology...
More importantly the Apollo program got a lot of young kids interest in science and engineering. Which led to a following generation or two's worth of technology and economic activity.
Taking builk testing responsibilities off developers so they can work on more important stuff.
Not quite. Developers often make poor testers. Software tends to get debugged and tuned for the way developers use the software, which is not necessarily how others (in particular customers) will use the software. How many developers have written a piece of code, tested it conscientiously themselves, presented it to others expecting no problems, and watched these other folks find serious bugs within minutes?
Having dedicated testers between developers and customers yields better products, even when the developers take testing seriously.
It could be something good. At a past employer we had software engineers who developed the product, six figure telecommunications boxes, and software engineers who were part of the QA team. Those who were part of the QA team wrote code to test sub assemblies during manufacturing, to test fully assembled boxes before delivery to customers, regression tests to exercise the development team's software in simulated environments (i.e. testing development versions of code before approving the code for release), etc.
telling the developer he's right about everything and the product is never broken, or the tester will get a tongue lashing.
As a developer who was fortunate enough to have an internal QA department I can say that your opinion is not universal. Hell, myself and fellow developers were annoyed when our QA people were moved to an adjacent building. We preferred having them one floor away in the same building so that we could more easily walk over to their cube to see what they see. Of course our QA people were trained, part of the company not contractors, etc.
Apparently my 2nd year calculus professor believed in this model. He assigned sections to read from the textbook and exercises to do as homework. Homework was collected at the beginning of class and then he lectured on the topics covered in those sections. He wanted us to be "prepared and qualified" to listen to his lecture. He announced this approach on day 1 of class, half the students immediately dropped his class and signed up with a different professor. Too bad, I did better in 2nd year calculus than I did in 1st. He made us work hard and we enjoyed greater success as a result.
Don't worry. We'll be out of oil soon and our civilization will be pulled kicking and screaming into the future.
By future you mean Natural Gas? We are only at the beta testing stage, at best, of alternative energy. Yes this is a damn shame, we should have worked more diligently on it after the first energy crisis of the 1970s, but that didn't happen and we have the reality we must deal with today. Today there is little alternative to oil beyond nuclear and natural gas. We still have decades of research and testing ahead of us before solar, wind, tidal, batteries, etc may become viable large scale alternatives.
We could wish it were different but such wishing will not let us move food from farm and ranch to store on a large scale.
Only source I know of outside the rare internal position is as a consultant being hired piecemeal to make modifications to existing open source software.
I know several people who are platform agnostic, work on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux as a client needs, and who occasionally work on Linux based software targeting an embedded environment. However such a job may be philosophically objectionable for the job seeker in question. In addition to the Linux work on the device itself there is often a part of the project that requires a Windows based utility that interacts with the device.
Given that this job seeker is not platform agnostic being a consultant may not be the best idea. Perhaps he should work in academia, an environment where a person gets to choose the area they work in, accepting of course relatively lower salaries as the price for that freedom.
The law that enables it for the rich also enables it for the middle. The point being if there is an effort to change this law there will be a bit more resistance than some expect. Plus there is the ever present risk of unintended consequences that so many otherwise well meaning ideas die upon. I wouldn't be surprised if family farms and businesses can somehow get caught up in this and harmed.
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It was however, perfectly legitimate for him to walk out with the knowledge of how stuff worked in his head and sell his expertise
Only the general knowledge in his head. Knowledge that represented trade secrets of his past employer are still protected and may not be shared.
... Yesterday I talked to someone and asked how she got it and she said that a site prompted her to install it so she did ...
This scenario needs to be a job interview question.
Griefers are not motivated nor deterred by scoring. They are generally in it for the reaction of others.
My first thought was that he should have spent the first two years making this an automated robotics project, and then started digging. He may have completed sooner.
My second thought was that this guy will be fist in line to operate remote manipulators on the moon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_manipulator
My third thought was that we could have used this guy and some bigger RCs at Chernobyl and Fukushima.
If you have an idea and someone else licenses it and implements it then there's no reason you should have any legal problems since you weren't involved.
Wow, that is a quite gratuitous assumption. :-) I am sure a host of trial lawyers have a quite different opinion.
If you do then that is a problem with the legal system, not the patent system.
So you are no longer claiming that no problem exists, rather you are claiming that there is a problem but it is in the legal system. Perhaps you now can see why an inventor legitimately wants to sell and move on, to avoid the problematic legal system, to let the experts in the corp buying his patent navigate those waters.
I'm sorry, someone came up with a better idea without infringing on yours? That's life.
No, that is why you want to sell not license. Does the original inventor need to be an economist and expert in marketing & product development in order to predict the viable life of his invention? Does the original inventor need to be a patent attorney so he can decide if others are infringing or not? No, he wants to leave all that to experts like those in the corp buying his patent. The inventor may just want to move on to the next idea.
Under your proposal inventors must now be, or pay for, experts in law, economics, marketing & product development, patents, etc. It increases the barrier to getting rewarded as an inventor. Original inventors often sell because they don't understand, and don't want to learn, all this other stuff. Deprive them of the ability to sell and be done with it, to force them into an ongoing relationship that will draw on their time and attention -- your proposed system will have the unintended consequence of deterring some guy who is an expert in some technical specialty from giving inventing a try.
Making patents non-transferable ... could sure fix a lot of what's wrong with the patent system as it stands.
No. You don't seem to understand the true nature of the problem with the US patent system. It is *not* that patents are transferable. It is that patents are being issued for things that are too obvious, that should not be patentable. If the standards for issuing patents were cleaned up and only non-obvious things were awarded patents then patent trolls would not have the "mine field" that they currently have. Basically you seem to be focusing on the symptom not the disease, that is more likely to yield negative unintended consequences than actually fix anything.
None of that sounds like a problem.
Remaining on the hook for any legal problems and the associated legal bills does not sound like a problem to you?
Carrying a risk that a competitive or disruptive product will appear and make that invention unappealing and losing those licensees does not sound like a problem to you?
Why is selling patents even legal? The original creator of a patent deserves to be rewarded so that the can come up with more original ideas, but why should someone who has potentially created nothing be rewarded? The creator can license the patent to anyone, so shouldn't need to sell it.
Licensing can work, however it is the original inventor's choice and some prefer to just sell.
(1) Licensing requires an ongoing relationship and probably periodic payments.
(2) It also requires that the original inventor assume some risk in that the invention remains desirable and the inventor retains licensees.
(3) The original inventor is also still on the hook for any legal issues and costs.
An original inventor may prefer one lump sum payment and be done with it and move on to the next big idea without any distractions, risks or liabilities. Also some buyers prefer to own rather than license. If licensing is the only option the number of buyers is reduced, this may lower the value of the invention.
Most of this debris isn't sitting still, It's moving at thousands of MPH. How do you plan to catch something moving that fast without destroying the collector?
A collector could be sacrificial, designed to just sit there and take the hits. As long as it captures the debris and does not itself spall and generate more debris. A loose analogy would be a block of ballistic gelatin capturing a bullet as the bullet fragments.
No, I believe it would be more like catching a 25,000mph bullet while doing 25,000mph yourself. Just make sure you're both going in the same direction...
The problem is that orbits and velocities are different, that is why debris is often such a hazard. Its not just stuff moving in the opposite direction, its stuff moving in the same direction at a different velocity. A collector would need a lot of fuel to be matching various orbits and velocities.
Will this laptop have a sunlight readable screen?
The PP should break down in sunlight and can be reclaimed.
Well, it did for a while.
And it won't have any sunlight in the landfill so it won't degrade very well? I thought one problem with landfills is that things that should degrade do not due to a lack of sunlight, oxygen, etc. IIRC some researchers have dug around in landfills from the 40s and 50s and found well preserved newspapers and other theoretical degradables. On the other hand some landfills are producing enough methane to make capture economical. Is it a soil thing? Breathable/permeable vs something more impenetrable?
... Amazon blamed the PlayBook's Flash player for the issue, saying the Flash software needed to be update, even though my Adobe Flash software is up to date (v11.1.122.4) ...
So its Adobe not Apple?
FWIW being current and needing an update is plausible. Amazon may have learned of an exploit in Flash and will only resume streaming after the security problem is fixed. OK, plausible but not terribly likely.
... Apple owns the rights to the hardware and software that would allow Amazon video content to be played on the BlackBerry PlayBook? Yet Amazon has allowed Instant Video customers to play video content on RIM's tablet for the past year, and just now the company decided to block the functionality? Something isn't right here, and I reached out to Amazon.com's media relations team more than 24 hours ago for clarification, but I haven't received a response. The above response from Amazon customer service could simply be misinformation sent by an irresponsible customer representative ...
Then maybe a better title for your article would have been "Amazon Blocks Instant Video on BlackBerry PlayBook, Customer Service Rep Blames Apple"
That's a great example. Bush put a lot of money into AIDS prevention and research, which is a great thing. But the groups he funded were prohibited from advocating for contraceptive use, ...
I believe that you are mistaken. I think the controversy was that abstinence was required to be part of the discussion. However the correct use of condoms was another part, even in the Bush years.
... ignoring all the research that tells us family planning is crucial to women's health. Look at all the good Bush did with that money, and think of how much better that would be if it was spent the way science tells us is effective? Like I said, they only care for science when it fits their social agenda.
AIDS prevention/research and family planning are *both* important issues. However when funding a project it is reasonable to keep that funding on a particular topic. Keeping an AIDS project's spending specifically on AIDS and not allowing its funds to go to otherwise worthy and somewhat related areas may simply be financial accountability. I used "somewhat related" because many family planning methods do not prevent the spread of AIDS and the two methods that do prevent AIDS (abstinence and condoms) were part of the program.
Again, family planning is an important issue but it shouldn't necessarily be able to draw funds from an account specifically setup for AIDS. Just as family planning shouldn't necessarily be able to draw funds from an account specifically setup for famine relief. Sadly if there is too much flexibility on how funds can be spent then there is more likely to be corruption, fraud and theft of some sort.
Republicans love science as long as it's something they can monetize and doesn't conflict with their social agenda.
Social agendas like battling AIDS in Africa?
"President-elect Barack Obama doesn't often offer praise for President George W. Bush's foreign policy, but on Monday he offered the outgoing head of state accolades for battling AIDS in Africa. "I salute President Bush for his leadership in crafting a plan for AIDS relief in Africa and backing it up with funding dedicated to saving lives and preventing the spread of the disease," Obama said in taped remarks to the Saddleback Civil Forum on Global Health.""
http://articles.cnn.com/2008-12-01/us/world.aids.day_1_aids-relief-anti-retroviral-president-s-emergency-plan?_s=PM:US
... the past moon missions have birthed a lot of technology ...
More importantly the Apollo program got a lot of young kids interest in science and engineering. Which led to a following generation or two's worth of technology and economic activity.
I think they already have RO filters with hand pumps that would fit that niche.
There are also inflatable solar stills. They generate a lot less water but they are passive and you can use a bunch of them at a time.
(Dr. Emmett Brown) "According to my calculations, the nature of the First Post directly influences the quality of the entire thread.
Perhaps in the future but I don't think this is true today.
Taking builk testing responsibilities off developers so they can work on more important stuff.
Not quite. Developers often make poor testers. Software tends to get debugged and tuned for the way developers use the software, which is not necessarily how others (in particular customers) will use the software. How many developers have written a piece of code, tested it conscientiously themselves, presented it to others expecting no problems, and watched these other folks find serious bugs within minutes?
Having dedicated testers between developers and customers yields better products, even when the developers take testing seriously.
It could be something good. At a past employer we had software engineers who developed the product, six figure telecommunications boxes, and software engineers who were part of the QA team. Those who were part of the QA team wrote code to test sub assemblies during manufacturing, to test fully assembled boxes before delivery to customers, regression tests to exercise the development team's software in simulated environments (i.e. testing development versions of code before approving the code for release), etc.
telling the developer he's right about everything and the product is never broken, or the tester will get a tongue lashing.
As a developer who was fortunate enough to have an internal QA department I can say that your opinion is not universal. Hell, myself and fellow developers were annoyed when our QA people were moved to an adjacent building. We preferred having them one floor away in the same building so that we could more easily walk over to their cube to see what they see. Of course our QA people were trained, part of the company not contractors, etc.
Apparently my 2nd year calculus professor believed in this model. He assigned sections to read from the textbook and exercises to do as homework. Homework was collected at the beginning of class and then he lectured on the topics covered in those sections. He wanted us to be "prepared and qualified" to listen to his lecture. He announced this approach on day 1 of class, half the students immediately dropped his class and signed up with a different professor. Too bad, I did better in 2nd year calculus than I did in 1st. He made us work hard and we enjoyed greater success as a result.
I believe the Apple adapter that comes with the iPad is 2 amp, the normal usb port is 0.5 amp. 2 amp aviation oriented adapters exist.
"ATTENTION iPad USERS:
Please be sure to select the 2 Amp USB Model to ensure proper charging."
http://www.lonestaraviation.com/Power-Adapter-USB-Socket.html
Don't worry. We'll be out of oil soon and our civilization will be pulled kicking and screaming into the future.
By future you mean Natural Gas? We are only at the beta testing stage, at best, of alternative energy. Yes this is a damn shame, we should have worked more diligently on it after the first energy crisis of the 1970s, but that didn't happen and we have the reality we must deal with today. Today there is little alternative to oil beyond nuclear and natural gas. We still have decades of research and testing ahead of us before solar, wind, tidal, batteries, etc may become viable large scale alternatives.
We could wish it were different but such wishing will not let us move food from farm and ranch to store on a large scale.
Only source I know of outside the rare internal position is as a consultant being hired piecemeal to make modifications to existing open source software.
I know several people who are platform agnostic, work on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux as a client needs, and who occasionally work on Linux based software targeting an embedded environment. However such a job may be philosophically objectionable for the job seeker in question. In addition to the Linux work on the device itself there is often a part of the project that requires a Windows based utility that interacts with the device.
Given that this job seeker is not platform agnostic being a consultant may not be the best idea. Perhaps he should work in academia, an environment where a person gets to choose the area they work in, accepting of course relatively lower salaries as the price for that freedom.
The law that enables it for the rich also enables it for the middle. The point being if there is an effort to change this law there will be a bit more resistance than some expect. Plus there is the ever present risk of unintended consequences that so many otherwise well meaning ideas die upon. I wouldn't be surprised if family farms and businesses can somehow get caught up in this and harmed.