getting a patent or filing a patent, can at least provide some tangible property/proof of a concept, that can enable a startup or small firm to get investors, thus building their business. Its the business standpoint that most people here on slashdot don't consider.
People may complain about abuse, but isn't it better that via the patent system, people disclose their inventions instead of hiding behind trade secrets, thus allowing others to improve upon the inital invention? I would expect that people here would be happy about that since, thanks to the DCMA, reverse engineering is now of questionable legality?
At lot of what people on slashdot say is "obvious" may not be really obvious. One has to look and decide if it was obvious at the time of invention, otherwise it is impermissible hindsight, which is not valid reasons for combining references.
getting a patent or filing a patent, can at least provide some tangible property/proof of a concept, that can enable a startup or small firm to get investors, thus building their business. Its the business standpoint that most people here on slashdot don't consider.
People may complain about abuse, but isn't it better that via the patent system, people disclose their inventions instead of hiding behind trade secrets, thus allowing others to improve upon the inital invention? I would expect that people here would be happy about that since, thanks to the DCMA, reverse engineering is now of questionable legality?
http://spaceplace.jpl.nasa.gov/spinoffs2.htm http ://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/benefits/index.html http://members.tripod.com/spaceracehistory/ spin.sh tml the above links deal with technologies not necesscarily from the 60's, but are a list of spin offs according to nasa (though i think the fisher space pen was around prior to manned space flight, even though the book that came with my pen says differently).
some noteables: bar codes, and CAD
from what i have heard from people in the space industry, every 1 dollar nasa spends puts back 4 bucks into the econonmy as a result of spin offs. I'm not really sure how this is quantized though.
the summary of invention provides several instances of prior art, including legacy systems in figures 1 and 2, and then proceeds to disclose how it is differentiated over the prior art.
they allready do charge more for corporations, independent inventors pay signifigiantly lower fees.
check out undersecratary rogan's 21st century plan to learn about the proposed new fee schedule. Basically a lower fee for less than 20 claims, a higher fee, for the next tier, and an extremely high fee for the next highest tier.
this is a continuation of a previous application with a 1999 filing date. the effective date of the application, the begining of its patent protection, and the date of which prior art must be earlier than is July 21,1999.
my alma mater, RPI, consistantly ranks lower than most of these schools on the list (48th over all), yet somehow ranks much higher on surveys from practicing engineers and recrutiers (heck MIT is pass failthe first yet, what kind of BS is that!)
I think they do exactly what you wrote above, yet when someone calls them on it (like with professor usher) they blame it on a "temporary employee" and then fire them.
"This makes me think that maybe the techies/geeks SHOULD band together (with groups like the EFF) to shape tech legislation and stop this government from taking away our personal freedoms, like routers, NAT, firewalls, and encryption.
Just a thought I've had for a while now. "
I'm not disagreeing with you here, but it sounds like you want the "freedom" to exclude others through the use of routers, NAT, firewalls and encryption. Or from another view point, a freedom of privacy.
I do belive that congressmen need to be better informed on technical issues, just like they need to be more informed on medical issues, perhaps with more members, the EFF can do just that.
this is how the rest of the world buys cars.
on
Build-to-Order Cars?
·
· Score: 1
this is actually of car buying in the rest of the world is done. you order your options and wait several months to get your car.
BMW is probably the only manufactuer that sells cars in america that does this, plus they have BMW individual which lets people get any color/seat combo etc. I ordered my M3 this way and waited several months. Most other auto companys just allow dealers to search stock elsewhere or check future allocations, but don't allow custom ordering.
mediccare/medicaid are more than defense social security alone is more than defense(and seems to get raided fairly often).
combined, entitlements/direct payments to people, including the FERS system is over 60% of the budget.
i don't know about you, but i paid roughly 10% of my income on local/state income/property taxes. that goes to fund schools mostly.
I went to private school, its better, and can cost less than public(i grew up in new jersey where spending is close to 10k a kid) because they gave homework to you in kindergarden, went to school longer and had smaller class sizes, yet somehow teachers get paid less. go figure.
applicants ay the patent office for each application they file, as well as different fees for the number of claims filed, for continuations of applications and a lot of other things.
The patent office also gets paid for term extensions, that means when your patent is issued, the applicant pays the issue fees, and then at set years, additional fees to continue the patent term, the applicant just doesnt magically get 20 years of protection without additional costs. In fact several hundred patents expire every 2 weeks because the fees werent paid.
The vast majority of patents are approved the first time, believing so is just ignorant.
your post was far better than mine on the topic. I used to be a sales engineer for a small network software firm, but since the company was small, the developers had a more personal relationship with the sales force (the company doubled in size in the year I was there and it was a very different place when I left).
Developers are often shieled from the client for a variety of reasons, but I don't think most realize that they are(and probably would be very frustrated if they werent!)
In my previous job I was a sales engineer(thats not just a title, i did engineering work/customer support as part of my job, there is a big difference between salesman and sales engineer, most salesmen dont have a technical background,while sales engineers typically worked in the industry). Salesmen work 60-100hours a week, are on the road all the time. They get paid big bucks, but they are the first ones to go during hard times. You think about the job constanly, you don't have weekends because you are traveling to/from the next client, your mind is constantly on work, get called all hours of the day.
Its the hardest most stressfull white collar work I can think off. Your job is on the line because of what you do, TODAY, doesn't matter how much you are sold yesterday.
Clients have no clue what they want, and there are unscrupulous salesmen, but the salesman is there to offer something which they believe will make work easier for the client. (its very difficult to sell something you don't believe it, you can do it, but its just that much harder). Clients will ask for a specific feature, if its not there, sometimes they will not buy.
Its an interesting exciting job, and definatly broadens one's perspective outside the engineering world, which is gennerally pretty isolated from the clients for a reason (do you as a developer want to be pestered every 5 minutes by a client/prospect, probably not, but thats the salesman's job). I no longer work in sales, and now work back in engineering, but not in design (im an electrical engineer at the patent office), but the experience was invaluable.
i used to live in new jersey, HOV lanes were turned into normal lanes after a few years because only less than 2% of drivers were using them (according to the star ledger) but enforcement was high. After the lanes were opened up, traffic was much reduced.
Now i live in metro DC, and it is the opposite, in many cases the hov lanes are slower than the normal lanes, and there is very little to no enforcement. HOV cheaters are rampant on both the HOV lane and the HOV only sections of the road. The worst thing is that local politicians are proposing HOT (high occupancy tolls as indicated by the article) to allow single passenger vehicles in the allready congested lanes!
I believe the best solution is to build a carpool lane simultaniously with an additonal lane or to have a carpool lane inbetween the outter lanes which heads into the city HOV in the morning and out at night (we have this on 395 in virginia), this cuts down on cheating and provides an easier way of enforcement, and doesnt cause the problem of HOV people trying to get all the way over to a right lane exit from the left lane.
what you do is one of two things, file an application in the epo and USTPo at the same time, or file a PCT application to establish an earlier priority date, then you have 3 years to file an application in any PCT member country.
Filing an application on a patent already issued in europe after its issue date wont work in the US.
I own it actually. I don't see any reason why you cant still jump around. Mosts dvds pause for a 1/4 second when there is a layer change in a disc, so i don't really have a problem with it. PLus the movie itself on 2 discs(though i can't remember if extras were on those as well or just on the 2 features discs), there should be plenty of room for yet another audio track and alternate versions of the scenes. What it would likely require is a different end point for the first and second disc.
The t2 extended version has 3 different versions of the movie (i believe there is a 4th "hidden version" too) 2 of which are on the same disc, seamless branching is used. The import shaloin soccer has totally different scenes which are signalled by a little icon and can be played. Why isn't this possible?
It would not be difficult to load a seperate table of contents which would allow one to watch the theatrical version and extended cut off the same set of dvds.
I cant think of a technical reason why this isn't possible, unless there are different versions of the same scene instead of different length cuts of the same scene.
A 5th disc with the original cut wouldnt be hard to add either. I wonder if a superbit version will ever come out?
a lot of those details are left out of most patent specifications because the patents are written so that "one skilled in the art" would be able to read the specification and then know how to implement it to create the invention.
The patent application only needs to cover the specific implementation of the claimed invention, not all of the other details. If one did not do that, patent applications/published patents would often be hundreds/thousands of pages long. Think of what a new processor feature patent would look like if every gate within the processor was drawn out!
Patent examiners generally start at the GS-7/9 grades making roughly 50-60k a year. Promtion can be rapid, and it is possible to make 90k a year before bonuses/overtime. There was a pay increase several years ago to keep examiners from quiting to work in the private sector as patent agents.
http://www.popa.org/newsletters/julaug00.shtml Patent examiners are paid on GS scale with specailly 1224, it tops out around 120k for a gs15/10. Attorneys generally make around 100k to start and go up to around 400k.
Nonsense, I paid around 10% of my income in federal income tax this year (having a house is a nice way to reduce your taxable income). I payed roughly 8% of my income for medicare/aid/social security. Even if we were to use the above piechart representation, 13.3% out of the 18% of my income last year went to pay for non military items.
VA benefits/the military retirement system is something which in part is paid for by itself. This military now has a system which is simliar to the civilian FERS system which is simliiar to a 401k, meaning servicemen pay into their own system. However 20/30 year retirements arestill in effect (unlike new federal employees which are covered under the FERS system, FERS is somewhat confusing to explain unless you have read the books on it, basically each federal employee has 3 different income sources upon retirement). Thus the piechart is quite misleading.
The above piechart is woefully incomplete. A pretty large portion of my own taxes are going to pay for social programs I will likely never be able to qualify for/recieve(mostly due to funding in the future, its unsutainable unless there is a massive population increase in each generation), but are necesscary (the elderly can be viewed as both the poor and the rich, having large net worths due to fully paid mortgages, but little income due to not working and no health insurnace due to not being employed, these issues don't seem to be included in media reports on health insurance). These social programs must be included within such a chart because they are the largest expendutres within the government and will grow even more as the baby boomers retire. Additonally, since funds from them have repeatedly been diverted in the past to pay for other programs, they must be included as well, to not do so makes the charts misleading because there is no source of income for the actual expenditures.
6.2 percent of my income goes into a ponzi scheme. I'm not expecting to ever get this money back, unless payroll taxes are hiked massivly. I'm not saying that we should dump such a scheme, it would be unfair to all the retiree's who have paid 30, 40 years into it(like my dad), but I cant think of a workable replacement.
even if you move social security(23%) of the budget, medicaid/care still is a larger portion of the federal budget than defense. I wasn't aware of that until I checked out the statistics myself.
Heck that 19% for non defense spending is what goes for education, science, transportation, park maintenance etc.
Slashdot Mirror
getting a patent or filing a patent, can at least provide some tangible property/proof of a concept, that can enable a startup or small firm to get investors, thus building their business. Its the business standpoint that most people here on slashdot don't consider.
People may complain about abuse, but isn't it better that via the patent system, people disclose their inventions instead of hiding behind trade secrets, thus allowing others to improve upon the inital invention? I would expect that people here would be happy about that since, thanks to the DCMA, reverse engineering is now of questionable legality?
At lot of what people on slashdot say is "obvious" may not be really obvious. One has to look and decide if it was obvious at the time of invention, otherwise it is impermissible hindsight, which is not valid reasons for combining references.
getting a patent or filing a patent, can at least provide some tangible property/proof of a concept, that can enable a startup or small firm to get investors, thus building their business. Its the business standpoint that most people here on slashdot don't consider.
People may complain about abuse, but isn't it better that via the patent system, people disclose their inventions instead of hiding behind trade secrets, thus allowing others to improve upon the inital invention? I would expect that people here would be happy about that since, thanks to the DCMA, reverse engineering is now of questionable legality?
http://spaceplace.jpl.nasa.gov/spinoffs2.htmp ://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/benefits/index .html/ spin.sh tml
htt
http://members.tripod.com/spaceracehistory
the above links deal with technologies not necesscarily from the 60's, but are a list of spin offs according to nasa (though i think the fisher space pen was around prior to manned space flight, even though the book that came with my pen says differently).
some noteables:
bar codes, and CAD
from what i have heard from people in the space industry, every 1 dollar nasa spends puts back 4 bucks into the econonmy as a result of spin offs. I'm not really sure how this is quantized though.
the summary of invention provides several instances of prior art, including legacy systems in figures 1 and 2, and then proceeds to disclose how it is differentiated over the prior art.
don't be quite so reactionary
they allready do charge more for corporations, independent inventors pay signifigiantly lower fees.
check out undersecratary rogan's 21st century plan to learn about the proposed new fee schedule. Basically a lower fee for less than 20 claims, a higher fee, for the next tier, and an extremely high fee for the next highest tier.
this is a continuation of a previous application with a 1999 filing date. the effective date of the application, the begining of its patent protection, and the date of which prior art must be earlier than is July 21,1999.
my alma mater, RPI, consistantly ranks lower than most of these schools on the list (48th over all), yet somehow ranks much higher on surveys from practicing engineers and recrutiers (heck MIT is pass failthe first yet, what kind of BS is that!)
you can make the numbers say anything you want
I think they do exactly what you wrote above, yet when someone calls them on it (like with professor usher) they blame it on a "temporary employee" and then fire them.
"This makes me think that maybe the techies/geeks SHOULD band together (with groups like the EFF) to shape tech legislation and stop this government from taking away our personal freedoms, like routers, NAT, firewalls, and encryption.
Just a thought I've had for a while now. "
I'm not disagreeing with you here, but it sounds like you want the "freedom" to exclude others through the use of routers, NAT, firewalls and encryption. Or from another view point, a freedom of privacy.
I do belive that congressmen need to be better informed on technical issues, just like they need to be more informed on medical issues, perhaps with more members, the EFF can do just that.
this is actually of car buying in the rest of the world is done. you order your options and wait several months to get your car.
BMW is probably the only manufactuer that sells cars in america that does this, plus they have BMW individual which lets people get any color/seat combo etc. I ordered my M3 this way and waited several months. Most other auto companys just allow dealers to search stock elsewhere or check future allocations, but don't allow custom ordering.
Unfortunatly that only seems to apply in criminal court.
Look at the OJ simpson case. OJ was pronounced not guilty in the criminal case, yet lost the civil case and most of his fortune.
vh1 is the same way, in face mtv2 was created to show videos, but seems like less and less are shown.
the only all video channels MTV offers are their genre channels, such as mtvx(all metal, later replaced by MTVJ) vh1 classic etc.
mediccare/medicaid are more than defense
social security alone is more than defense(and seems to get raided fairly often).
combined, entitlements/direct payments to people, including the FERS system is over 60% of the budget.
i don't know about you, but i paid roughly 10% of my income on local/state income/property taxes. that goes to fund schools mostly.
I went to private school, its better, and can cost less than public(i grew up in new jersey where spending is close to 10k a kid) because they gave homework to you in kindergarden, went to school longer and had smaller class sizes, yet somehow teachers get paid less. go figure.
Its actually the name of a chainsaw, but has that rpg feel.
applicants ay the patent office for each application they file, as well as different fees for the number of claims filed, for continuations of applications and a lot of other things.
The patent office also gets paid for term extensions, that means when your patent is issued, the applicant pays the issue fees, and then at set years, additional fees to continue the patent term, the applicant just doesnt magically get 20 years of protection without additional costs. In fact several hundred patents expire every 2 weeks because the fees werent paid.
The vast majority of patents are approved the first time, believing so is just ignorant.
your post was far better than mine on the topic. I used to be a sales engineer for a small network software firm, but since the company was small, the developers had a more personal relationship with the sales force (the company doubled in size in the year I was there and it was a very different place when I left).
Developers are often shieled from the client for a variety of reasons, but I don't think most realize that they are(and probably would be very frustrated if they werent!)
In my previous job I was a sales engineer(thats not just a title, i did engineering work/customer support as part of my job, there is a big difference between salesman and sales engineer, most salesmen dont have a technical background,while sales engineers typically worked in the industry). Salesmen work 60-100hours a week, are on the road all the time. They get paid big bucks, but they are the first ones to go during hard times. You think about the job constanly, you don't have weekends because you are traveling to/from the next client, your mind is constantly on work, get called all hours of the day.
Its the hardest most stressfull white collar work I can think off. Your job is on the line because of what you do, TODAY, doesn't matter how much you are sold yesterday.
Clients have no clue what they want, and there are unscrupulous salesmen, but the salesman is there to offer something which they believe will make work easier for the client. (its very difficult to sell something you don't believe it, you can do it, but its just that much harder). Clients will ask for a specific feature, if its not there, sometimes they will not buy.
Its an interesting exciting job, and definatly broadens one's perspective outside the engineering world, which is gennerally pretty isolated from the clients for a reason (do you as a developer want to be pestered every 5 minutes by a client/prospect, probably not, but thats the salesman's job). I no longer work in sales, and now work back in engineering, but not in design (im an electrical engineer at the patent office), but the experience was invaluable.
i used to live in new jersey, HOV lanes were turned into normal lanes after a few years because only less than 2% of drivers were using them (according to the star ledger) but enforcement was high. After the lanes were opened up, traffic was much reduced.
Now i live in metro DC, and it is the opposite, in many cases the hov lanes are slower than the normal lanes, and there is very little to no enforcement. HOV cheaters are rampant on both the HOV lane and the HOV only sections of the road. The worst thing is that local politicians are proposing HOT (high occupancy tolls as indicated by the article) to allow single passenger vehicles in the allready congested lanes!
I believe the best solution is to build a carpool lane simultaniously with an additonal lane or to have a carpool lane inbetween the outter lanes which heads into the city HOV in the morning and out at night (we have this on 395 in virginia), this cuts down on cheating and provides an easier way of enforcement, and doesnt cause the problem of HOV people trying to get all the way over to a right lane exit from the left lane.
what you do is one of two things, file an application in the epo and USTPo at the same time, or file a PCT application to establish an earlier priority date, then you have 3 years to file an application in any PCT member country.
Filing an application on a patent already issued in europe after its issue date wont work in the US.
I own it actually. I don't see any reason why you cant still jump around. Mosts dvds pause for a 1/4 second when there is a layer change in a disc, so i don't really have a problem with it. PLus the movie itself on 2 discs(though i can't remember if extras were on those as well or just on the 2 features discs), there should be plenty of room for yet another audio track and alternate versions of the scenes. What it would likely require is a different end point for the first and second disc.
The t2 extended version has 3 different versions of the movie (i believe there is a 4th "hidden version" too) 2 of which are on the same disc, seamless branching is used. The import shaloin soccer has totally different scenes which are signalled by a little icon and can be played. Why isn't this possible?
It would not be difficult to load a seperate table of contents which would allow one to watch the theatrical version and extended cut off the same set of dvds.
I cant think of a technical reason why this isn't possible, unless there are different versions of the same scene instead of different length cuts of the same scene.
A 5th disc with the original cut wouldnt be hard to add either. I wonder if a superbit version will ever come out?
a lot of those details are left out of most patent specifications because the patents are written so that "one skilled in the art" would be able to read the specification and then know how to implement it to create the invention.
The patent application only needs to cover the specific implementation of the claimed invention, not all of the other details. If one did not do that, patent applications/published patents would often be hundreds/thousands of pages long. Think of what a new processor feature patent would look like if every gate within the processor was drawn out!
Patent examiners generally start at the GS-7/9 grades making roughly 50-60k a year. Promtion can be rapid, and it is possible to make 90k a year before bonuses/overtime. There was a pay increase several years ago to keep examiners from quiting to work in the private sector as patent agents.
http://www.popa.org/newsletters/julaug00.shtml
Patent examiners are paid on GS scale with specailly 1224, it tops out around 120k for a gs15/10. Attorneys generally make around 100k to start and go up to around 400k.
Nonsense, I paid around 10% of my income in federal income tax this year (having a house is a nice way to reduce your taxable income). I payed roughly 8% of my income for medicare/aid/social security. Even if we were to use the above piechart representation, 13.3% out of the 18% of my income last year went to pay for non military items.
VA benefits/the military retirement system is something which in part is paid for by itself. This military now has a system which is simliar to the civilian FERS system which is simliiar to a 401k, meaning servicemen pay into their own system. However 20/30 year retirements arestill in effect (unlike new federal employees which are covered under the FERS system, FERS is somewhat confusing to explain unless you have read the books on it, basically each federal employee has 3 different income sources upon retirement). Thus the piechart is quite misleading.
The above piechart is woefully incomplete. A pretty large portion of my own taxes are going to pay for social programs I will likely never be able to qualify for/recieve(mostly due to funding in the future, its unsutainable unless there is a massive population increase in each generation), but are necesscary (the elderly can be viewed as both the poor and the rich, having large net worths due to fully paid mortgages, but little income due to not working and no health insurnace due to not being employed, these issues don't seem to be included in media reports on health insurance). These social programs must be included within such a chart because they are the largest expendutres within the government and will grow even more as the baby boomers retire. Additonally, since funds from them have repeatedly been diverted in the past to pay for other programs, they must be included as well, to not do so makes the charts misleading because there is no source of income for the actual expenditures.
well yes and no,
6.2 percent of my income goes into a ponzi scheme. I'm not expecting to ever get this money back, unless payroll taxes are hiked massivly. I'm not saying that we should dump such a scheme, it would be unfair to all the retiree's who have paid 30, 40 years into it(like my dad), but I cant think of a workable replacement.
even if you move social security(23%) of the budget, medicaid/care still is a larger portion of the federal budget than defense. I wasn't aware of that until I checked out the statistics myself.
Heck that 19% for non defense spending is what goes for education, science, transportation, park maintenance etc.