I'm not current on the relevant literature, but I thought that this is something that computers tend to be generally inferior to humans at. Think about voice recognition and how awful almost all of it is.
In many cases, it can't be. Unless they can claim that you bought the house with illicit funds, they can't take your house in the US, and I'm sure they are even more lenient in most of Europe.
The number of government operations that should be classified are pretty minor. Basically, weapon designs and current locations of troops. The NSA isn't involved in either, and there is no indication that the NSA has protected us from anything. After all, there's nothing that is a credible threat. There are countries that have the means to be a military threat, but we are on at least amicable terms with them. There are countries that hate us, but we could wipe the floor with them. There are terrorists, but overall, they are less of a threat than bathtubs and mostly idiotic (yet the NSA still fails to catch ones that are lucky if they can tie their own shoes). If they want us to trust them, but there is something that must stay classified, have independent review by say, Bruce Schneier and the EFF. If it's all on the up and up, then they'll sign off on it and everything will be fine. If, however, they are power hungry morons who spend half the time trying to hide their bungles, then they would be shut down.
Actually, they refute your logical conclusion by showing that its based on a false premise. Additionally, unlike your numbers, mine are based in reality. You have no real numbers period.
Your numbers a real, but not meaningful to the conversation at hand. We know the numbers with our current incentives, but not the numbers in their absence. We can conclude that the USPTO is not completely ruled by those numbers, but we can't conclusively say whether or not they are influenced by them. I never claimed that my numbers were real. I just used them to illustrate how your numbers could be correct and the premise still be true.
Begging the question. I disagree that they're even "incentives", and my actual numbers show that they do not appear to be, since if anything, the USPTO has a greater incentive to reject applications and collect fees for RCEs and appeals.
Actually, that's pretty complicated math. You have to weigh the chances that an applicant will go for an RCE/appeal against the money lost by those who don't submit those. They also involve quite a bit more manpower than a rubber stamp for maintenance, so they might not be as profitable There is a complex risk and dynamics at play here, and humans are, generally speaking, pretty bad at gambling. That's actually a significant part of why patent trolls exist, despite a large number of even the most successful ones not making money. However, approving patents over denying them is a fairly simple game with a pretty reliable turnout.
You apparently have no idea what you're talking about. Maintenance fees have nothing to do with continuation applications. You are combining two things because you've heard the words in connection with patents and assume they must be related, even though you have no real clue what they mean.
No, I was using 'continuation as a way to explain that they simply collect money and stamp a form to not kill the patent. The patent's legal monoply would continue to exist My apologies on that one, IANAL, so sometimes I use common vernacular words without recalling that the term I used has a more specific legal definition.
Amendments aren't charged a fee unless you add claims without canceling other claims. The USPTO doesn't simply get more money by virtue of initially rejecting an application. You really are just tossing out statements with no idea whether they're correct or not.
I will attribute this to not intimately knowing the ins and outs of what fees are paid when. AFAIK, you have to file an amendment after an additional rejection, and there are listings of amendment fees on the fees page of the USPTO.
Your numbers refute nothing. The claim is that the way fees work creates a perverse incentive. You provide the allowance rate as evidence to the contrary, but those numbers are useless without context or a baseline. We know what the numbers are with the current incentives. We don't know how much they would differ if those incentives were neutralized. I wasn't saying that the allowance rate was 5%, but was instead giving an example to prove my point. In your hypothetical, that would be the case as well. In fact, it helps prove my point. We have no idea what the allowance rate would be if the fees were neutral, so your numbers lack context and are useless in this conversation. You keep spouting 'majority' as if that has any meaning here.
It's not unreasonable to draw suspicion on this practice, because the actual costs of maintenance are basically nothing. $7,500 for rubber stamping a continuation? That's quite fishy, and seems like it would be difficult to justify.
Also, your argument about initial rejections is based on poor reasoning in addition to not considering baseline measures. An initial rejection means that they get a little bit more for an amendment. The most profitable path might be to be milk out the application for as long as you can without facing a risk of an extension.
Yes, but the conclusion that the USPTO makes the majority of their fees post-grant relies on the premise that the majority of these patents have maintenance fees paid.
No, if only one in a hundred meets the maintenance fees, it's around a 10% increase in income from maintenance fees. It doesn't really matter how low it is, because there is no incentive for not paying maintenance
And, as you note, that relies on a premise that a majority are "commonplace" that are used to "ambush" people. However, the premise is false [patentlyo.com].
No, it doesn't. Even if there is a very low incidence of patents being used in ambushes, they can still be used to harm a large portion of the industry for billions of dollars.
furthermore, the evidence points to your conclusion being wrong. From here [uspto.gov], the allowance rate is 49.2% including RCEs, or 68.5% not including them, depending on whether you consider an RCE to be a new application or not (for our purposes, discussing fees, it's somewhat irrelevant). If the USPTO had such great incentives to allow these cases, wouldn't that be 90% or higher?
Not at all. They have to at least pretend to do their job. Let's say that absent economic incentives, the allowance rate would be 5%. In that case, 49.2% is almost ten times the rate and the USPTO is incredibly broken. They can be doing a horrible job due to perverse incentives without being 100% cronies. It's the same thing with police departments and their perverse incentives. They have incentives to write bullshit tickets and seize everything that they can, but cops do spent a lot of their time doing things other than that.
That's your definition of flipping out? You must be quite sheltered, then. Also, calling me a Tea Bagger doesn't mean that I'm a Tea Party member or that I share their philosophy. People have disliked both republicans and democrats before 2008. In fact, I don't know if I've met more than a handful of people that have ever liked republicans or democrats. They just hate one party more than the other.
Being obsolete doesn't mean that the patent isn't useful. If you manage to dupe the USPTO into granting you are patent on a necessary piece (or one that has become so commonplace to be necessary for interoperability reasons), you can ambush most anybody in the field. A good example would be the FAT filesystem. It wasn't a particularly great filesystem, and there are certainly better choices for anything you would do, ignoring the infrastructure. However, in reality, it is a virtual necessity to use either it or NTFS on any portable device that will be communicating with a desktop due to the dominant role of Microsoft there. There are plenty of operating systems that would make a great substitute if MS supported filesystems that they didn't create (with minor exceptions for things like ISO 9660.
You also don't seem to be understanding the criticism. The USPTO gets paid as much or more for accepting a patent than they do for rejecting it. Now, not all patents will be taken to full term, but more than zero of them will be. Therefore, the USPTO has incentives to approve patents.
Yes, only objectivists think that both major parties in the US politicans are by and large crony corporatists, not anybody with even moderate knowledge of our political realities and the slightest bit of cynicism. For fuck's sake, calling me an occupier would have made more sense if you are going to pigeonhole me.
Cops are more likely to kill you than terrorists, and apparently only about 20% of that 5-10% go to mosques regularly. That means it's 1-2% of the population are moderately religious, let alone zealots. It's also probably a safe bet that at least 75% of the zealots within that subpopulation are zealots because bigoted asshats like you want to 'send a message' that feeds the persecution complex that breeds the very zealotry that you cower before.
Bush being a crony corporatist doesn't mean Obama isn't also a crony corporatist. In fact, if they have an (R) or a (D) in front of their name, they are probably a crony corporatist.
It likely is a thankless job. It's also a useless job, at least for the general public. It might help with some corporate espionage that doesn't create any US jobs and doesn't result in any taxes beig paid, but those companies can attempt that with their own money. The public has not been made safer by the NSA, and thanks to their ineptness, we're probably at a much greater danger than we would be if the NSA was nuked from orbit.
Perhaps the bulk of the problem is not the moderators, but rather, the substance of your posts. Now, Assange does have his fanboys that will engage in some degree of the behavior you describe, but they are far less persistent than the government bootlickers and/or shills.
I'll agree that there are many simple ways to reduce the odds of getting cancer, but sometimes someone will smoke two packs a day, have a bucket of cornbread and lard for breakfast, and drink a fifth of whiskey a day, and die at 108 of a motorcycle accident, while someone may follow the clean living guide to the letter and die of cancer at 22.
MS had already engaged in some serious antitrust behavior circa 1990, before they were anywhere near the behemoth they are today.
what a load of crap, Windows may not have been the most secure system but against the horrible burden of IBM and the infancy and general lack of usability of GNU/Linux, Windows was the obvious choice and a choice made by people who were indeed free to choose. To this day some people would rather pretend they were completely helpless and at the mercy of big bad Microsoft than admit they made a poor choice.
Have you considered that the lack of viable competition might have been the result of robust set of anti-competitive practices? Also, by grossly oversimplifying things like you did, you forget that things weren't all that simple. MS was strong-arming OEMs if they dared to install competing OS's or browsers, and they ignored standards in IE while actively breaking compatibility of plugins.
Immigrants are an integral part of the American Dream and much of the success America has seen. Also, having success in the US doesn't mean that they can't come back at some point and also try to help their native country.
I don't remember Gartner, IDC, and such getting it right at all. I only remember them getting nearly the opposite at their worst and getting it vaguely right at best. Random chance is probably more reliable than them.
You have to avoid everything to avoid cancer. There are causes, but there are far too many known causes to avoid (let alone unknown), and most of them have absolutely nothing to do with western decadence and are not avoided by the latest fad in fake ancient eastern holistic advice. You can be following your advice to the t and still get cancer.
It's not bad code. It might have been reviewed by someone who knows security and someone who knows functionality and stability but doesn't know arcane laws.
Slashdot Mirror
Sex for the purpose of pleasure is part of our biology. However, I believe the concern is that sex education is biology.
I'm not current on the relevant literature, but I thought that this is something that computers tend to be generally inferior to humans at. Think about voice recognition and how awful almost all of it is.
In many cases, it can't be. Unless they can claim that you bought the house with illicit funds, they can't take your house in the US, and I'm sure they are even more lenient in most of Europe.
When is George Lucas writing a fat check for his Star Wars re-releases?
The number of government operations that should be classified are pretty minor. Basically, weapon designs and current locations of troops. The NSA isn't involved in either, and there is no indication that the NSA has protected us from anything. After all, there's nothing that is a credible threat. There are countries that have the means to be a military threat, but we are on at least amicable terms with them. There are countries that hate us, but we could wipe the floor with them. There are terrorists, but overall, they are less of a threat than bathtubs and mostly idiotic (yet the NSA still fails to catch ones that are lucky if they can tie their own shoes). If they want us to trust them, but there is something that must stay classified, have independent review by say, Bruce Schneier and the EFF. If it's all on the up and up, then they'll sign off on it and everything will be fine. If, however, they are power hungry morons who spend half the time trying to hide their bungles, then they would be shut down.
Your numbers a real, but not meaningful to the conversation at hand. We know the numbers with our current incentives, but not the numbers in their absence. We can conclude that the USPTO is not completely ruled by those numbers, but we can't conclusively say whether or not they are influenced by them. I never claimed that my numbers were real. I just used them to illustrate how your numbers could be correct and the premise still be true.
Actually, that's pretty complicated math. You have to weigh the chances that an applicant will go for an RCE/appeal against the money lost by those who don't submit those. They also involve quite a bit more manpower than a rubber stamp for maintenance, so they might not be as profitable There is a complex risk and dynamics at play here, and humans are, generally speaking, pretty bad at gambling. That's actually a significant part of why patent trolls exist, despite a large number of even the most successful ones not making money. However, approving patents over denying them is a fairly simple game with a pretty reliable turnout.
No, I was using 'continuation as a way to explain that they simply collect money and stamp a form to not kill the patent. The patent's legal monoply would continue to exist My apologies on that one, IANAL, so sometimes I use common vernacular words without recalling that the term I used has a more specific legal definition.
I will attribute this to not intimately knowing the ins and outs of what fees are paid when. AFAIK, you have to file an amendment after an additional rejection, and there are listings of amendment fees on the fees page of the USPTO.
Your numbers refute nothing. The claim is that the way fees work creates a perverse incentive. You provide the allowance rate as evidence to the contrary, but those numbers are useless without context or a baseline. We know what the numbers are with the current incentives. We don't know how much they would differ if those incentives were neutralized. I wasn't saying that the allowance rate was 5%, but was instead giving an example to prove my point. In your hypothetical, that would be the case as well. In fact, it helps prove my point. We have no idea what the allowance rate would be if the fees were neutral, so your numbers lack context and are useless in this conversation. You keep spouting 'majority' as if that has any meaning here.
It's not unreasonable to draw suspicion on this practice, because the actual costs of maintenance are basically nothing. $7,500 for rubber stamping a continuation? That's quite fishy, and seems like it would be difficult to justify.
Also, your argument about initial rejections is based on poor reasoning in addition to not considering baseline measures. An initial rejection means that they get a little bit more for an amendment. The most profitable path might be to be milk out the application for as long as you can without facing a risk of an extension.
No, if only one in a hundred meets the maintenance fees, it's around a 10% increase in income from maintenance fees. It doesn't really matter how low it is, because there is no incentive for not paying maintenance
No, it doesn't. Even if there is a very low incidence of patents being used in ambushes, they can still be used to harm a large portion of the industry for billions of dollars.
Not at all. They have to at least pretend to do their job. Let's say that absent economic incentives, the allowance rate would be 5%. In that case, 49.2% is almost ten times the rate and the USPTO is incredibly broken. They can be doing a horrible job due to perverse incentives without being 100% cronies. It's the same thing with police departments and their perverse incentives. They have incentives to write bullshit tickets and seize everything that they can, but cops do spent a lot of their time doing things other than that.
That's your definition of flipping out? You must be quite sheltered, then. Also, calling me a Tea Bagger doesn't mean that I'm a Tea Party member or that I share their philosophy. People have disliked both republicans and democrats before 2008. In fact, I don't know if I've met more than a handful of people that have ever liked republicans or democrats. They just hate one party more than the other.
Being obsolete doesn't mean that the patent isn't useful. If you manage to dupe the USPTO into granting you are patent on a necessary piece (or one that has become so commonplace to be necessary for interoperability reasons), you can ambush most anybody in the field. A good example would be the FAT filesystem. It wasn't a particularly great filesystem, and there are certainly better choices for anything you would do, ignoring the infrastructure. However, in reality, it is a virtual necessity to use either it or NTFS on any portable device that will be communicating with a desktop due to the dominant role of Microsoft there. There are plenty of operating systems that would make a great substitute if MS supported filesystems that they didn't create (with minor exceptions for things like ISO 9660.
You also don't seem to be understanding the criticism. The USPTO gets paid as much or more for accepting a patent than they do for rejecting it. Now, not all patents will be taken to full term, but more than zero of them will be. Therefore, the USPTO has incentives to approve patents.
Yes, only objectivists think that both major parties in the US politicans are by and large crony corporatists, not anybody with even moderate knowledge of our political realities and the slightest bit of cynicism. For fuck's sake, calling me an occupier would have made more sense if you are going to pigeonhole me.
Cops are more likely to kill you than terrorists, and apparently only about 20% of that 5-10% go to mosques regularly. That means it's 1-2% of the population are moderately religious, let alone zealots. It's also probably a safe bet that at least 75% of the zealots within that subpopulation are zealots because bigoted asshats like you want to 'send a message' that feeds the persecution complex that breeds the very zealotry that you cower before.
Eben Moglen is playing a pretty big role in this, and I feel like he would be someone who would stand on principle.
Someone fresh out of some engineering school would probably be better, actually.
Bush being a crony corporatist doesn't mean Obama isn't also a crony corporatist. In fact, if they have an (R) or a (D) in front of their name, they are probably a crony corporatist.
Actually, SCOTUS could save us if we are lucky.
It likely is a thankless job. It's also a useless job, at least for the general public. It might help with some corporate espionage that doesn't create any US jobs and doesn't result in any taxes beig paid, but those companies can attempt that with their own money. The public has not been made safer by the NSA, and thanks to their ineptness, we're probably at a much greater danger than we would be if the NSA was nuked from orbit.
Perhaps the bulk of the problem is not the moderators, but rather, the substance of your posts. Now, Assange does have his fanboys that will engage in some degree of the behavior you describe, but they are far less persistent than the government bootlickers and/or shills.
Because then the exploits of the 'other teams' are hidden, furthering the illusion.
I'll agree that there are many simple ways to reduce the odds of getting cancer, but sometimes someone will smoke two packs a day, have a bucket of cornbread and lard for breakfast, and drink a fifth of whiskey a day, and die at 108 of a motorcycle accident, while someone may follow the clean living guide to the letter and die of cancer at 22.
Have you considered that the lack of viable competition might have been the result of robust set of anti-competitive practices? Also, by grossly oversimplifying things like you did, you forget that things weren't all that simple. MS was strong-arming OEMs if they dared to install competing OS's or browsers, and they ignored standards in IE while actively breaking compatibility of plugins.
Immigrants are an integral part of the American Dream and much of the success America has seen. Also, having success in the US doesn't mean that they can't come back at some point and also try to help their native country.
I don't remember Gartner, IDC, and such getting it right at all. I only remember them getting nearly the opposite at their worst and getting it vaguely right at best. Random chance is probably more reliable than them.
You have to avoid everything to avoid cancer. There are causes, but there are far too many known causes to avoid (let alone unknown), and most of them have absolutely nothing to do with western decadence and are not avoided by the latest fad in fake ancient eastern holistic advice. You can be following your advice to the t and still get cancer.
It's not bad code. It might have been reviewed by someone who knows security and someone who knows functionality and stability but doesn't know arcane laws.