And it even works on (relatively simple) Microsoft Word documents... however, there are a LOT of limitations to TextEdit, and it has its share of bugs as well. For example, there's no support for styles, particularly automatically choosing the next style. For some types of documents that one feature makes things much simpler. For bugs, I keep running into a problem that when I hit return, the tab-stop (and possibly other formatting features) appears to copy over from the previous paragraph, but as soon as I start to type, it magically turns into the default tabs. If I hit return twice, back up and delete the first paragraph, then continue on with the last one I created, I can get it to work again.
Not that AppleWorks doesn't have its bugs. It has quite a few, including crashing every once in a while. The auto-convert from Microsoft Word also doesn't do a very good job with more complex documents (e.g. when people embed spreadsheets into a word document and use multiple lines per spreadsheet cell, to do pseudo-table layouts).
Analog doesn't have ANY inherent bandwidth limitations. It all depends on the noise/power levels. Normal POTS has filters on the line which does limit the bandwidth. However, going digital in the switch doesn't change that.
Since the sampling rate is at 56Kbps (over a 64Kbps channel, but some is reserved for signaling), the max theoretical you can pump through it is 56Kbps - however, due to the filtering done on the line before the ADC (because it is designed for converting voice), you can't actually get that much on the uplink. For a 56Kbps downlink connection it has to stay digital until the DAC that heads towards you as an analog signal (and then, you only get the 56Kbps rate if the analog line is clean). At one point, the data rate in the US was limited to 53Kbps because of FCC limits on transmitted power over the phone line - there was a proposal to raise that limit, permitting the full 56Kbps, but I don't know if that ever happened.
Re:I really tried to read it
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Inside TechTV/G4
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· Score: 2, Informative
That's a dumb reason to think the article is bad. "Talent" is a standard term in TV to describe the person/people in front of the cameras. It is often used by the crew in an ironic way (though some talent are amazing - you try winging a 48 second pitch for something, have it make perfect sense, not be repetitive, and end at a logical place at exactly 47.5 seconds).
Anyone remember "The Colony"? Ran on a Mac Plus, a Mac II ran it too fast. It had a cute easter-egg, on Christmas Day the straggly-looking sticks sitting in various corners turned into lush Christmas trees. The guy who wrote it promised a color version for the Mac II, but I never heard anything more about it.
"if you can see" - well, technically, yes, but the dynamic range of the eye is amazing. The difference in the amount of energy you could get in dim light (say, just enough to read by) and the amount in full sunlight is so enormously large that the former might as well be zero. Even in fairly good light (e.g. under a 60W bulb 2-3 feet away) the amount of energy you can practically recover is very small (enough to run a calculator, not much more). Even with full sunlight and high efficiency, you still need quite a bit of area to satisfy the energy demands of the typical North American house, even disregarding heating/cooling needs.
"For distribution only in the United States and Canada". How is this violation of the licensing rights of the copyright owners okay but downloading it off the Internet not okay? Is it because you did pay them some money? Should there be mandatory licensing, where if I offer them the amount of money they're getting from somewhere else, I can now make a copy for myself (even if they don't accept the payment)?
How is importing a DVD and breaking the region coding scheme by playing it on a multi-region DVD, or importing a region 1 DVD player when you're "not supposed to" (Region 1 DVDs and Region 1 DVD players are only supposed to be sold in Region 1 countries) "morally" any better than downloading it from the Internet? If something is available on the Internet, you'd be willing to buy it if it was available, you'd STILL be willing to buy it when it DOES become available, even if you've downloaded it over the Internet and watched it - what harm to the copyright owner are you alleviating by choosing to NOT download and watch it?
In other words, perhaps the law has to be written the way it is, because the law can't distinguish between people who would be causing actual harm (they would buy it if it wasn't available, they wouldn't buy it if it is available for free download on the Internet) and those who wouldn't, but is it "wrong" to violate the law (other than being caught) if you are, in fact, in the non-harm group? Note that this is separate from the issue of whether you can honestly assess which group you are in. It is also more complicated if you'd be willing to pay SOME price, but not the price being asked (if it is indeed available through a "legitimate" channel) or in the form being offered (e.g. cut for commercial television), and/or you actually do pay some price to a non-legitimate distributor.
It comes and goes in cycles. The nice thing about general purpose hardware is that it is flexible. The nice thing about special purpose hardware is it is cheaper for the same performance (but maybe more expensive for the needed performance). Anyone who says either is "on the way out" hasn't been paying attention.
Macrovision relies on simplistic automatic gain circuitry, messes around with levels during retrace. It is trivial to defeat it, and many VCRs weren't susceptible to it anyway (they ignored signal level during retrace, for example). The only reason it works now is that the DMCA includes a section requiring recorders to make themselves susceptible to it, usually by detecting that it is there and deliberately screwing up the copy (or disabling it altogether). That doesn't contradict the statement you were disagreeing with.
What's really ridiculous is that Macrovision has a patent on that technique, and even though it doesn't actually work, it is the only copy-prevention scheme that content owners can rely on, since it is required to be built in to DVD players (to generate it) and VCRs (to detect it). Content owners have to pay Macrovision a royalty to be allowed to turn on a bit on a DVD that tells the DVD player (that you paid for, but don't get to control) to inject Macrovision into the signal. So, instead of it failing in a free market due to it not really working, instead it gets legislated into being the only one that "works", and Macrovision gets all the royalties on it.
I obviously had read the claims, as I was referring to specific elements of them. You obviously didn't read them, or your reading comprehension is shot, or you don't understand how claims work. If ALL of the elements of ANY claim is present, then it infringes on the patent.Thus, claim 1, which says nothing about sealing or needing more than one filling:
1. A sealed crustless sandwich, comprising:
a first bread layer having a first perimeter surface coplanar to a contact surface;
at least one filling of an edible food juxtaposed to said contact surface;
a second bread layer juxtaposed to said at least one filling opposite of said first bread layer, wherein said second bread layer includes a second perimeter surface similar to said first perimeter surface;
a crimped edge directly between said first perimeter surface and said second perimeter surface for sealing said at least one filling between said first bread layer and said second bread layer;
wherein a crust portion of said first bread layer and said second bread layer has been removed.
Claim number 1 is only talking about "at least one" filling. Claim number 4 brings up 3 fillings, then claim 5 talks about sealing properties. Claim 7 is specifically a PB&J, with the jelly completely surrounded by the peanut butter. Claims 9 and 10 are pretty much a restatement of the earlier claims, with minor bits changed and the sealing properties not claimed in 9, only in 10.
Then there's the issue that a patent really tries to claim as much as it can. That all of the claims in this patent are "with a portion of the crust removed" is a strong implication that the patent wouldn't have been granted for ANY of the claims except for that portion. Thus, this really is a patent on taking the crust off of a non-novel sealed/crimped sandwich, whether with one or multiple fillings, whether those fillings surround each other or have sealing properties. Don't you think if they could they would have claimed all of those things both with and without the crust? The only thing they managed to get by the patent examiner was "with a portion of the crust removed". Maybe it was novel "in the literature", but it is beyond even the Patently Obvious criterion that the USPTO and the courts use.
Do you really think that the state of the art of making PB&J sandwiches has changed significantly in the last 7 years? I don't give myself as an example of being particularly clever, but of it being TOTALLY FREAKING OBVIOUS to anyone skilled in the art of making sandwiches, i.e. just about every mother in the United States at the very least for the last 50 years. Or maybe I should publish how I pour milk on my cereal to make sure no one patents that? Just for the record, I pour it on AFTER I put the cereal in the bowl. Oh, and when I make instant oatmeal, I put in milk, microwave it for 1 minute, stir, microwave another minute, then ADD MORE MILK. Maybe I should patent the adding more milk part, it isn't totally obvious you know. Hmm, claim 2 will be adding fruit AFTER microwaving and before adding the extra milk, and claim 3 will be where the fruit is sliced banana. Just for good measure, I'll add in claims 4 and 5, where the fruit is added AFTER the extra milk.
If they made patent examiners have the same sense as you, there'd be all these ridiculous... wait, are you a patent examiner, by any chance?
They don't interfere with each other because they're all talking to the same cell, which coordinates frequency usage. Adjacent cells use different sets of frequencies, so that cells using the same frequencies aren't within range of each other (nor in range of any phone that is in range of the others). The scheme simply doesn't work very well when you violate the design specs by going up high enough that you have good line-of-sight to many cells, yet not so high that you'd be out of range.
Looking at scans of 35mm negatives, my estimate was 8MP to get similar resolution, at least for relatively inexpensive film. You could go significantly higher if you use more expensive slower speed film. What I'm really looking forward to is the Foveon X3 technology becoming more widespread and available in higher resolution.
Isn't the counterpart to that "if you don't want someone else to use your invention, don't tell anyone about it"? Why should you be able to prevent me from doing something? I'm not making YOU do something.
In the case of the car manufacturer or the mechanic, if they don't MAKE ME THE CAR or FIX MY CAR, it doesn't get done. I can't force them to do it, so I pay them money as an inducement. With patents, they also get to tell me that I can't build or fix my own car, even though my building or fixing my own car doesn't require ANYTHING from them.
To carry the patent idea further, why doesn't the person who made your toilet get a license fee every time you flush it? Why should ideas be different in that respect, allowing you to continue getting money without doing anything else? Ideas are certainly different, as they can be replicated without limit and with almost no cost, but that would point to the price of an idea approaching zero in a free market without the coercion of a patent.
I do in fact think that patents have some use, but that many software patents, business method patents, and (some types of) biotech patents are not warranted.
According to Wikipedia, a simple majority is more than half the votes cast, an absolute majority is more than half of the possible votes (counting not present, not voting, and abstention). Majority by itself means "more than half".
"Standard majority" may not be a standard phrasing, but its meaning was clear: a majority (more than half) that is not a super-majority (a requirement in excess of a simple majority), in this case a two-thirds majority.
While I don't question the safety of your flight, you do realize you're probably screwing up other people's cell phone conversations for many miles around you, right? Also, what pilots do NOT need is a reputation for ignoring rules and regulations just because they feel like it. In this case, it isn't an FAR that you're violating (as PIC you're responsible for determining what might interfere with on-board systems, and whether you care), but FCC regulations.
Keep your cell phone with you, it's a good emergency tool, but don't turn it on unless you lose your radios and need it. The time it takes you to turn it on shouldn't be critical, or you've already screwed up badly.
There's a lot of use for earplugs that don't block out the human voice, for any high-noise environment where you still need to communicate (e.g. over the radio). Pilots, for example.
Conscientious people can choose to not use the phone while driving, as well. The real difference between talking to someone on the phone and talking to someone in the car is that the person with you can see when you're paying necessary attention to something else.
The reason hands-free cell phones are better than hand-held cell phones is that you don't have distracted people trying to drive with only one hand, turning corners, not signaling (not that most people signal under the best of conditions). Driving like that is as bad as driving while talking with a hands-free AND eating a sloppy burger, except they never run out of burger.
The only time that a radar altimeter would be critical is when doing an auto-landing, and that usually isn't done except in very low visibility weather. Big airplanes are normally landed visually just like small airplanes. Also, they aren't accurate to fractions of an inch (the ground is jumping up and down all over the place anyway). The autoland will abort if the two radar altimeters are more than 15 FEET different. Radar altimeters aren't used above about 8000 feet.
There are plenty of people at the FAA who don't know what they're talking about, and there are plenty of pilots who are clueless as well when it comes to systems and electronics. A cell phone would be unlikely to interfere with radar, the signal levels are so much different. What it is much more likely to interfere with is ILS/VOR, which are most critical in the landing phase, especially during instrument conditions. I'll bet that even when they do allow cell phones during flight, you'll still need to turn them off during takeoff and landing.
The other important reason why cell phones aren't allowed in airplanes in flight is that it causes problems for the cell towers. For instance, when I take someone up in a glider, there's no way that a cell phone is going to cause me problems. I still have them turn it off. The solution for that is to have the cell phones talking to a local mini-cell on board. This also has the desirable side effect of reducing the amount of power the phone needs to use to transmit.
Well, no, the patent is on any crustless sandwich, with one or more fillings, that are crimped around the edges (actually, it isn't even crustless - it just has to have a PORTION of the crust removed to violate this patent). If they were patenting some clever way of keeping the bread from getting soggy, they wouldn't have sued Albies. The patent may talk about various clever ways of doing things, but what they patented is much more basic, AND THAT"S THE PROBLEM with patents like these.
The subtext of the patent is that they couldn't get a patent on merely crimping a sandwich to seal in the fillings. They had to add in "a portion of the crust removed" to add a novel element. Yeah, novel. Ask any mother with a kid who doesn't like the crust. Note well: making a sealed sandwich WITH A CRUST is not a violation of this patent. Removing the crust from that sealed sandwich IS infringing.
I've been making PB&J sandwiches, with two layers of peanut butter and a layer of jelly in between, for a long time. I've also made sandwiches with two layers of cheese and a ham filling in between, pressed in one of those sandwich griller things that CRIMPS THE EDGES. If I, personally, didn't like crusts, it would be obvious to then remove the crusts (either before or after crimping them). If someone I was making the sandwich for didn't like crusts, it would also be obvious to remove them. I don't personally recall whether I ever made a sandwich like that without the crust more than a year before the filing date of this patent (Dec 1997). Actually, sometimes the sandwich griller sort of removes them by itself if I'm not careful, so I've probably at least removed "a portion" of the crust before this was "invented".
Of course, they risk someone else either patenting or disclosing their improvements, and losing out entirely.
The drug issue should be dealt with not by patents but by the FDA giving monopoly licensing on drugs - anyone can use them in research, but selling them is controlled (as it already is). Allow other companies to be licensed, but only after they've done significant additional clinical trials. This gets additional testing done on the safety and efficacy of the drug, and still protects the original company for quite some time.
Besides, the stats I've heardindicate that pharmaceutical companies spend at least twice as much on marketing as on R&D (discovering new drugs, clinical trials). They're also some of the most profitable companies.
Anyone who has a patent in a country that is importing infringing items can pretty easily have those items confiscated and banned. If they don't have a patent that is enforceable in that country, then there's no violation going on, so what's the problem?
An "improvement" would be something that used EVERYTHING in one or more of the claims of the patent, and added something new. To use such an improvement you would still need to license the original (improved-upon) patent. In the example you gave, it sounds like someone didn't use (all of) your dad's process, and consequently it wasn't as good. So, if your dad's product was so much better, why wasn't he able to sell it? Maybe his process was too expensive to be competitive?
When the other product failed, why didn't your dad's process start being used again? Perhaps his patent and the "knock-off" patent could be used together, to form a product superior to both. Perhaps someone who manufactures aquarium gravel would be interested in licensing both.
The other person didn't even need to patent his improvement; the fact that he wasn't actually using your dad's patent is enough to avoid infringing, even if what he was doing was similar. If the other person didn't patent it, then your dad was free to use the innovation along with his own process. If the other person did patent it, your dad was free to continue using his own process unhindered, or he could have attempted to license the other patent.
Do you have the two patent numbers so that people can see what you're talking about?
I only see one real hit on "plastic regrind" and aquarium gravel in Google, doesn't seem like it is a really hot topic. A product (including a patent) is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.
Reverse engineering has *nothing* to do with the justification of patents. I have no idea where you got that idea. Patents and trade secrets are completely different beasts, and by definition, if you patent something, the way it works is no longer a trade secret.
A justification for patents is so that the inventor will disclose the invention. Society grants a monopoly in exchange for learning how it works (same as the copyright argument). Without it, there is no incentive to disclose, and every incentive to keep it as a trade secret, so society loses the ability to innovate on top of such trade secrets. The argument is that with effective reverse engineering, a trade secret doesn't last long, so there's less reason for society to grant a patent in exchange for disclosure.
That argument could go the opposite way: the justification for patents is to encourage inventors to innovate, and with trade secret being less effective at protecting your innovation from unfair competition, a patent is more important. Without some protection, that argument goes, inventors won't invest in innovation and society loses out. In that view, the disclosure of a patent is secondary, and primarily so that competitors know what they can't do, or know what they can license.
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And it even works on (relatively simple) Microsoft Word documents... however, there are a LOT of limitations to TextEdit, and it has its share of bugs as well. For example, there's no support for styles, particularly automatically choosing the next style. For some types of documents that one feature makes things much simpler. For bugs, I keep running into a problem that when I hit return, the tab-stop (and possibly other formatting features) appears to copy over from the previous paragraph, but as soon as I start to type, it magically turns into the default tabs. If I hit return twice, back up and delete the first paragraph, then continue on with the last one I created, I can get it to work again.
Not that AppleWorks doesn't have its bugs. It has quite a few, including crashing every once in a while. The auto-convert from Microsoft Word also doesn't do a very good job with more complex documents (e.g. when people embed spreadsheets into a word document and use multiple lines per spreadsheet cell, to do pseudo-table layouts).
Analog doesn't have ANY inherent bandwidth limitations. It all depends on the noise/power levels. Normal POTS has filters on the line which does limit the bandwidth. However, going digital in the switch doesn't change that.
Since the sampling rate is at 56Kbps (over a 64Kbps channel, but some is reserved for signaling), the max theoretical you can pump through it is 56Kbps - however, due to the filtering done on the line before the ADC (because it is designed for converting voice), you can't actually get that much on the uplink. For a 56Kbps downlink connection it has to stay digital until the DAC that heads towards you as an analog signal (and then, you only get the 56Kbps rate if the analog line is clean). At one point, the data rate in the US was limited to 53Kbps because of FCC limits on transmitted power over the phone line - there was a proposal to raise that limit, permitting the full 56Kbps, but I don't know if that ever happened.
That's a dumb reason to think the article is bad. "Talent" is a standard term in TV to describe the person/people in front of the cameras. It is often used by the crew in an ironic way (though some talent are amazing - you try winging a 48 second pitch for something, have it make perfect sense, not be repetitive, and end at a logical place at exactly 47.5 seconds).
Of course, on Linux you could just run it under strace to find out what files it is trying to open...
Anyone remember "The Colony"? Ran on a Mac Plus, a Mac II ran it too fast. It had a cute easter-egg, on Christmas Day the straggly-looking sticks sitting in various corners turned into lush Christmas trees. The guy who wrote it promised a color version for the Mac II, but I never heard anything more about it.
"if you can see" - well, technically, yes, but the dynamic range of the eye is amazing. The difference in the amount of energy you could get in dim light (say, just enough to read by) and the amount in full sunlight is so enormously large that the former might as well be zero. Even in fairly good light (e.g. under a 60W bulb 2-3 feet away) the amount of energy you can practically recover is very small (enough to run a calculator, not much more). Even with full sunlight and high efficiency, you still need quite a bit of area to satisfy the energy demands of the typical North American house, even disregarding heating/cooling needs.
"For distribution only in the United States and Canada". How is this violation of the licensing rights of the copyright owners okay but downloading it off the Internet not okay? Is it because you did pay them some money? Should there be mandatory licensing, where if I offer them the amount of money they're getting from somewhere else, I can now make a copy for myself (even if they don't accept the payment)?
How is importing a DVD and breaking the region coding scheme by playing it on a multi-region DVD, or importing a region 1 DVD player when you're "not supposed to" (Region 1 DVDs and Region 1 DVD players are only supposed to be sold in Region 1 countries) "morally" any better than downloading it from the Internet? If something is available on the Internet, you'd be willing to buy it if it was available, you'd STILL be willing to buy it when it DOES become available, even if you've downloaded it over the Internet and watched it - what harm to the copyright owner are you alleviating by choosing to NOT download and watch it?
In other words, perhaps the law has to be written the way it is, because the law can't distinguish between people who would be causing actual harm (they would buy it if it wasn't available, they wouldn't buy it if it is available for free download on the Internet) and those who wouldn't, but is it "wrong" to violate the law (other than being caught) if you are, in fact, in the non-harm group? Note that this is separate from the issue of whether you can honestly assess which group you are in. It is also more complicated if you'd be willing to pay SOME price, but not the price being asked (if it is indeed available through a "legitimate" channel) or in the form being offered (e.g. cut for commercial television), and/or you actually do pay some price to a non-legitimate distributor.
It comes and goes in cycles. The nice thing about general purpose hardware is that it is flexible. The nice thing about special purpose hardware is it is cheaper for the same performance (but maybe more expensive for the needed performance). Anyone who says either is "on the way out" hasn't been paying attention.
Macrovision relies on simplistic automatic gain circuitry, messes around with levels during retrace. It is trivial to defeat it, and many VCRs weren't susceptible to it anyway (they ignored signal level during retrace, for example). The only reason it works now is that the DMCA includes a section requiring recorders to make themselves susceptible to it, usually by detecting that it is there and deliberately screwing up the copy (or disabling it altogether). That doesn't contradict the statement you were disagreeing with.
What's really ridiculous is that Macrovision has a patent on that technique, and even though it doesn't actually work, it is the only copy-prevention scheme that content owners can rely on, since it is required to be built in to DVD players (to generate it) and VCRs (to detect it). Content owners have to pay Macrovision a royalty to be allowed to turn on a bit on a DVD that tells the DVD player (that you paid for, but don't get to control) to inject Macrovision into the signal. So, instead of it failing in a free market due to it not really working, instead it gets legislated into being the only one that "works", and Macrovision gets all the royalties on it.
I obviously had read the claims, as I was referring to specific elements of them. You obviously didn't read them, or your reading comprehension is shot, or you don't understand how claims work. If ALL of the elements of ANY claim is present, then it infringes on the patent.Thus, claim 1, which says nothing about sealing or needing more than one filling:
Claim number 1 is only talking about "at least one" filling. Claim number 4 brings up 3 fillings, then claim 5 talks about sealing properties. Claim 7 is specifically a PB&J, with the jelly completely surrounded by the peanut butter. Claims 9 and 10 are pretty much a restatement of the earlier claims, with minor bits changed and the sealing properties not claimed in 9, only in 10.Then there's the issue that a patent really tries to claim as much as it can. That all of the claims in this patent are "with a portion of the crust removed" is a strong implication that the patent wouldn't have been granted for ANY of the claims except for that portion. Thus, this really is a patent on taking the crust off of a non-novel sealed/crimped sandwich, whether with one or multiple fillings, whether those fillings surround each other or have sealing properties. Don't you think if they could they would have claimed all of those things both with and without the crust? The only thing they managed to get by the patent examiner was "with a portion of the crust removed". Maybe it was novel "in the literature", but it is beyond even the Patently Obvious criterion that the USPTO and the courts use.
Do you really think that the state of the art of making PB&J sandwiches has changed significantly in the last 7 years? I don't give myself as an example of being particularly clever, but of it being TOTALLY FREAKING OBVIOUS to anyone skilled in the art of making sandwiches, i.e. just about every mother in the United States at the very least for the last 50 years. Or maybe I should publish how I pour milk on my cereal to make sure no one patents that? Just for the record, I pour it on AFTER I put the cereal in the bowl. Oh, and when I make instant oatmeal, I put in milk, microwave it for 1 minute, stir, microwave another minute, then ADD MORE MILK. Maybe I should patent the adding more milk part, it isn't totally obvious you know. Hmm, claim 2 will be adding fruit AFTER microwaving and before adding the extra milk, and claim 3 will be where the fruit is sliced banana. Just for good measure, I'll add in claims 4 and 5, where the fruit is added AFTER the extra milk.
If they made patent examiners have the same sense as you, there'd be all these ridiculous ... wait, are you a patent examiner, by any chance?
They don't interfere with each other because they're all talking to the same cell, which coordinates frequency usage. Adjacent cells use different sets of frequencies, so that cells using the same frequencies aren't within range of each other (nor in range of any phone that is in range of the others). The scheme simply doesn't work very well when you violate the design specs by going up high enough that you have good line-of-sight to many cells, yet not so high that you'd be out of range.
"standard" "normal" "nothing-special" majority. All he was doing was emphasizing that it wasn't a super-majority.
Looking at scans of 35mm negatives, my estimate was 8MP to get similar resolution, at least for relatively inexpensive film. You could go significantly higher if you use more expensive slower speed film. What I'm really looking forward to is the Foveon X3 technology becoming more widespread and available in higher resolution.
Isn't the counterpart to that "if you don't want someone else to use your invention, don't tell anyone about it"? Why should you be able to prevent me from doing something? I'm not making YOU do something.
In the case of the car manufacturer or the mechanic, if they don't MAKE ME THE CAR or FIX MY CAR, it doesn't get done. I can't force them to do it, so I pay them money as an inducement. With patents, they also get to tell me that I can't build or fix my own car, even though my building or fixing my own car doesn't require ANYTHING from them.
To carry the patent idea further, why doesn't the person who made your toilet get a license fee every time you flush it? Why should ideas be different in that respect, allowing you to continue getting money without doing anything else? Ideas are certainly different, as they can be replicated without limit and with almost no cost, but that would point to the price of an idea approaching zero in a free market without the coercion of a patent.
I do in fact think that patents have some use, but that many software patents, business method patents, and (some types of) biotech patents are not warranted.
According to Wikipedia, a simple majority is more than half the votes cast, an absolute majority is more than half of the possible votes (counting not present, not voting, and abstention). Majority by itself means "more than half".
"Standard majority" may not be a standard phrasing, but its meaning was clear: a majority (more than half) that is not a super-majority (a requirement in excess of a simple majority), in this case a two-thirds majority.
Your "simple majority" is what is properly known as a plurality or relative majority.
While I don't question the safety of your flight, you do realize you're probably screwing up other people's cell phone conversations for many miles around you, right? Also, what pilots do NOT need is a reputation for ignoring rules and regulations just because they feel like it. In this case, it isn't an FAR that you're violating (as PIC you're responsible for determining what might interfere with on-board systems, and whether you care), but FCC regulations.
Keep your cell phone with you, it's a good emergency tool, but don't turn it on unless you lose your radios and need it. The time it takes you to turn it on shouldn't be critical, or you've already screwed up badly.
There's a lot of use for earplugs that don't block out the human voice, for any high-noise environment where you still need to communicate (e.g. over the radio). Pilots, for example.
Conscientious people can choose to not use the phone while driving, as well. The real difference between talking to someone on the phone and talking to someone in the car is that the person with you can see when you're paying necessary attention to something else.
The reason hands-free cell phones are better than hand-held cell phones is that you don't have distracted people trying to drive with only one hand, turning corners, not signaling (not that most people signal under the best of conditions). Driving like that is as bad as driving while talking with a hands-free AND eating a sloppy burger, except they never run out of burger.
The only time that a radar altimeter would be critical is when doing an auto-landing, and that usually isn't done except in very low visibility weather. Big airplanes are normally landed visually just like small airplanes. Also, they aren't accurate to fractions of an inch (the ground is jumping up and down all over the place anyway). The autoland will abort if the two radar altimeters are more than 15 FEET different. Radar altimeters aren't used above about 8000 feet.
There are plenty of people at the FAA who don't know what they're talking about, and there are plenty of pilots who are clueless as well when it comes to systems and electronics. A cell phone would be unlikely to interfere with radar, the signal levels are so much different. What it is much more likely to interfere with is ILS/VOR, which are most critical in the landing phase, especially during instrument conditions. I'll bet that even when they do allow cell phones during flight, you'll still need to turn them off during takeoff and landing.
The other important reason why cell phones aren't allowed in airplanes in flight is that it causes problems for the cell towers. For instance, when I take someone up in a glider, there's no way that a cell phone is going to cause me problems. I still have them turn it off. The solution for that is to have the cell phones talking to a local mini-cell on board. This also has the desirable side effect of reducing the amount of power the phone needs to use to transmit.
Well, no, the patent is on any crustless sandwich, with one or more fillings, that are crimped around the edges (actually, it isn't even crustless - it just has to have a PORTION of the crust removed to violate this patent). If they were patenting some clever way of keeping the bread from getting soggy, they wouldn't have sued Albies. The patent may talk about various clever ways of doing things, but what they patented is much more basic, AND THAT"S THE PROBLEM with patents like these.
The subtext of the patent is that they couldn't get a patent on merely crimping a sandwich to seal in the fillings. They had to add in "a portion of the crust removed" to add a novel element. Yeah, novel. Ask any mother with a kid who doesn't like the crust. Note well: making a sealed sandwich WITH A CRUST is not a violation of this patent. Removing the crust from that sealed sandwich IS infringing.
I've been making PB&J sandwiches, with two layers of peanut butter and a layer of jelly in between, for a long time. I've also made sandwiches with two layers of cheese and a ham filling in between, pressed in one of those sandwich griller things that CRIMPS THE EDGES. If I, personally, didn't like crusts, it would be obvious to then remove the crusts (either before or after crimping them). If someone I was making the sandwich for didn't like crusts, it would also be obvious to remove them. I don't personally recall whether I ever made a sandwich like that without the crust more than a year before the filing date of this patent (Dec 1997). Actually, sometimes the sandwich griller sort of removes them by itself if I'm not careful, so I've probably at least removed "a portion" of the crust before this was "invented".
Of course, they risk someone else either patenting or disclosing their improvements, and losing out entirely.
The drug issue should be dealt with not by patents but by the FDA giving monopoly licensing on drugs - anyone can use them in research, but selling them is controlled (as it already is). Allow other companies to be licensed, but only after they've done significant additional clinical trials. This gets additional testing done on the safety and efficacy of the drug, and still protects the original company for quite some time.
Besides, the stats I've heard indicate that pharmaceutical companies spend at least twice as much on marketing as on R&D (discovering new drugs, clinical trials). They're also some of the most profitable companies.
Anyone who has a patent in a country that is importing infringing items can pretty easily have those items confiscated and banned. If they don't have a patent that is enforceable in that country, then there's no violation going on, so what's the problem?
An "improvement" would be something that used EVERYTHING in one or more of the claims of the patent, and added something new. To use such an improvement you would still need to license the original (improved-upon) patent. In the example you gave, it sounds like someone didn't use (all of) your dad's process, and consequently it wasn't as good. So, if your dad's product was so much better, why wasn't he able to sell it? Maybe his process was too expensive to be competitive?
When the other product failed, why didn't your dad's process start being used again? Perhaps his patent and the "knock-off" patent could be used together, to form a product superior to both. Perhaps someone who manufactures aquarium gravel would be interested in licensing both.
The other person didn't even need to patent his improvement; the fact that he wasn't actually using your dad's patent is enough to avoid infringing, even if what he was doing was similar. If the other person didn't patent it, then your dad was free to use the innovation along with his own process. If the other person did patent it, your dad was free to continue using his own process unhindered, or he could have attempted to license the other patent.
Do you have the two patent numbers so that people can see what you're talking about?
I only see one real hit on "plastic regrind" and aquarium gravel in Google, doesn't seem like it is a really hot topic. A product (including a patent) is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.
A justification for patents is so that the inventor will disclose the invention. Society grants a monopoly in exchange for learning how it works (same as the copyright argument). Without it, there is no incentive to disclose, and every incentive to keep it as a trade secret, so society loses the ability to innovate on top of such trade secrets. The argument is that with effective reverse engineering, a trade secret doesn't last long, so there's less reason for society to grant a patent in exchange for disclosure.
That argument could go the opposite way: the justification for patents is to encourage inventors to innovate, and with trade secret being less effective at protecting your innovation from unfair competition, a patent is more important. Without some protection, that argument goes, inventors won't invest in innovation and society loses out. In that view, the disclosure of a patent is secondary, and primarily so that competitors know what they can't do, or know what they can license.