IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you cannot patent a natural phenomenon
Dude, SCOTUS upheld that you can patentgenes. You know, the ones people already have.
I wish what you said were true, but I'm not sure it is any more.:(
It's a bit subtle, but I read the patent and and the various rulings and the currently only angle that has been upheld is that the segment of DNA which is extracted from a fragment of the BRCA gene is not naturally occuring so it can be patented (basically, a lengthy chemical process is needed to extract this chemical from naturally occuring mutated DNA and the result is no longer DNA, but a different chemical). However, the claims of the patent which involve identifying and using the results of the extraction to assess cancer risk are not valid because they do not involve the transformation of the chemical and are instead abstract mental steps.
The technical reading suggests that if someone came up with a different way to extract different fragments of the gene into a different end chemical (which is not the same as described) and used them to create a cancer risk assessment, then the part of the patent about using the fragments would not be enforcable. For example, if they transcribed the DNA fragment into another chemical (similar to the way a cell transcribes the DNA into a protein) and inferred that the the original DNA was mutated BRCA. However, if the remainder of the patent is eventually upheld, and someone used the same extraction of the same fragments of the BRCA gene, then it would be protected.
Admittedly this ruling seems a bit subtle, and may eventually be overturned as well, but that is my reading of the current situation, so I stand by my original assertion.
Forgive me, but every time I hear about wireless power, I think about how inefficient that sounds. Wouldn't a (more or less) direct connection to the power source be more efficient? Aren't we trying to conserve energy, and improve energy efficiency?
It's important to understand that even a "direct" connect is just a waveguide for an electromagnetic wave. Waveguides can have all sorts of losses (resistive, radiation, etc.) that limit their efficiency. At typical power distribution frequencies resistive losses can be quite large with long narrow wires, although in general with an impedance matched zip-cord, the radiation losses tend to be pretty low. Also direct connect isn't completely direct connect either. Inside that wall-wart is a step-down transformer which is basically a small inductive power transfer (wireless power), which has its own power efficiency issues.
Theoretically, the "free-space" transmission (well not really free-space, but air-space), has the potential to eliminate most of the resistive loss, although in practice there is this basic problem of radiation power loss. This type of tech (resonant magnetic coupling) has a few tweaks to try to help with this problem. First off, there's use of use of near-field evanscent waves which don't propogate very far (evanscent waves are the exponentally decay solution to the em wave equation) keeping most of the power local. Second, there is the use of resonance which reduces the losses and increases the efficiency of power transfer. The combination of these ideas allows pretty good power efficiency. I think you can get about 80% efficiency with near-field (vs 90% for a wall-wart connect). For the small amount of power going to recharge a mobile device, that's not really that much to worry about (if you were trying to power say a TV or a stereo, that would be another thing).
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you cannot patent a natural phenomenon, but you probably could potential patent the use of a natural phenomena in certain novel use cases (e.g. a very optimized circuit to transfer resonant magnetic power for a charger). I'm guessing there's lots of other companies/people working in this area and thus there are probably a few patents already (e.g., WiTricity, WREL, eCoupled, uBeam, etc), and some prior art/expired patents (e.g., Nikola Tesla)...
On the other hand, Apple has apparently patented rectangular phones with rounded corners, so what do I know...
FWIW, you don't need this technology for that, you could use simple inductive charging (like electric toothbrushes). This tech uses evanescent magnetic fields to charge things a bit farther away (maybe a meter depending on the frequency they use), and with higher efficiency.
Fear of retaliation: now that's an interesting point.
Actually, there's no reason to fear violent retaliation in a civilized society, so if you were to assume (like some folks), that civilized society is an evolutionary stable point, a sociopath would have very little to fear in the long run. However, as many have noted, we aren't completely civilized, so maybe some fractional amount of "uncivil" behavior is actually the real evolutionary stable point and those "we-can-live-as-one" imaginers need to wake up (like Mr Lennon did in his later years)...
I think you are mistaken about securities laws applying to banking. If you were to say that this is an investment scheme, that might be under the SEC, but at least in the United States, banks are under the purvey of the FDIC. The only exceptions I know about are local credit unions and banks that are not chartered in the US. You cannot just start an operation in the US and call it a bank w/o getting the FDIC involved.
On the other hand, if this whole thing was just an investment and offered some sort of "securities" (e.g. fractional ownership rights in exchange for money), the SEC would get involved. However, if the monetary transaction were just transacting an unsecured private loan to this other entity (either documented, or undocumented) which had an "interest" receiving understanding (written or unwritten), neither the SEC nor the FDIC would probably currently have the juristiction to get involved unless it was deceptive (unsecured loan posing as a bank interest scheme). Depending on how it was structured, it might fall under the juristiction of an state insurance commissioner (e.g., if it looked more like a fixed annuity product), but that is easy to get around. Nobody is really regulating how you loan your money to other people (as opposed to the crap load of regulation on companies loaning money to you).
Although I'm sure if stuff like this were prevalent enough a problem, maybe congress could act (they always want to get their noses into stuff like this), but the take away is that the SEC isn't involved w/ everything monetary...
Then there are PIN based debit card for which transactions which Visa/Mastercard don't get their cut.
Yes and no.
PIN based debit cards have to go through some PIN network for processing. Historically, Visa and Mastercard steered PIN transaction towards their own PIN networks to get their cut (by sneaking in exclusivity clauses into processor agreements to force merchants into using visa-Interlink or mc-Maestro for V/MC logo'd PIN debit cards).
Regulations in various countries (including the US now with the Durbin amendment), opened the door to a few competitor PIN networks like Star (first data corp), Pulse (discover), and NYCE (fidelity national) by banning these types of exclusivity agreements. But make not mistake about it, depending on the merchant's card processor, some company is getting a cut even if you use a PIN/debit because your bank is paying that company for the privledge of routing the transaction. Interlink and Maestro are still two of the biggest players in the business and they are the most common interchange networks for point-of-sale processor PIN transactions so it's still very likely that Visa and Mastercard are getting their cut (even from your non-logo'd PIN debit card)...
Note that this does NOT depend on your card, nor your bank, but which card processor the merchant you do business with signed up for.
This is simply a vanity-marketed stored-value reusable gift card. The vendor of this gift card just happens to accept bitcoin in exchange for value-add. This isn't any different than any other partner-reward card that puts value into a debit card, except you are rewarded by being able to pay in bitcoin instead of say buying gas or groceries (oh and you have to pay 1%+ATM fee on top of that instead of say getting 2% back)...
Vanity/Affinity gift-card marketing works great. I'm surprized that nobody has thought this up before...
Whether the conventional wisdom will actually prove correct for students starting undergraduate degrees in September this year, I don't know. I suspect a maths degree will always make you more employable than a media studies one, but there's no reason to suspect that any portion of the graduate jobs market is immune to over-saturation.
I think the falacy in the conventional wisdom is that somehow a university education is sufficient to prepare an arbitrary student for a graduate-level job at the end. In my opinion, some people just have an affinity towards math and science (similar to affinity that some folks have to the arts, or others have for business) that makes it an intangible element that makes all the difference that no university education can create.
Somehow I doubt a large increase in enrollment is reflective of an equivalently large number of untapped potential in the student population, but a foreshadowing of a bunch of potential drop-outs and/or mediocre graduates that will be released into the job market in a few years. Whether or not they can be absorbed depends if the economy is booming or not. I hope these prospective math and science students will be doing some serious self instrospection about what they are getting themselves into.
I have always felt that one should take inventory of your skills and select an appropriate course of study with a high potential of success (rather than chase the money and play the generic odds)... That doesn't mean follow your heart (as some would advocate), but follow your head, and not the whims of tradewinds...
If I am correct the opposite of free rider is user pay which has it's own issues. For example, taxes pay for the National Weather Service. Does that mean that everyone who wants to know hat the weather is should pay a fee? Does it mean that everyone who wants to get tornado warnings should pay a fee? The government provides services for the good everyone and the payment is through taxes.
In this sense, the taxes that go to provide these services this are a mandatory fee. You are bringing up the classic free-rider problem. If the private entity providing a severe weather warning service only warned the people that pay, those people who warn other folks that didn't pay would be enabling free-riding making it unprofitable for that private entity. Since it many may agree that it is against good public policy to prevent free-riding in this case, these types of services collect mandatory fees and these are generally funded through a trip through the government.
Contrast this with two other situations: providing car liability insurance and providing entertainment. In the case of car liability insurance, this is also a mandatory fee, but since not everyone drives and not everyone needs the same level of insurance, collectively we have not found it prudent funnel this money through the government. In the case of entertainment, in the US, we have collectively decided that goverment is only going to be involved by legal means, no fees are mandatory for anyone. In the UK, they have decided to collect television and radio user fees routed through the government to fund the BBC (a nominally private entity). It is a choice of the people involved and both schemes have their plusses and minusses.
I don't see it as a free rider issue at all but a concentration of funds to be dispursed to projects for the good of the people. For example, there is a multi-year multi-billion dollar project to supply more water to New York City that will be used by everyone in the city. Do you know of any private company who could take on something that big with profits put off for so many years. Even the subject of this discussion is a great place for Government involvement. Telescopes need funding for construction and continued funding for operation. Is there enough profit in astronomy to cover costs and construction of new facilities? Do you really think that reasonably stable funding could be found without tax money? Governments get involved to fund projects that are good for the country.
As I mentioned before, it doesn't matter if it is for the good of the country or not, it is whatever we collectively decided to be a reasonable path: do nothing, enforce some sort of user or mandatory fees. Sometimes these mandatory fees are through the government, sometimes not.
Just because telescopes need stable funding an cannot operate for a profit doesn't mean that the government should fund it. As I mentioned in my original post, I think that geeks (like me) often advance with an entitilement complex when it comes to scientific research as we would rightly fear that if it were to come to a country-wide democratic vote on funding, the necessary funding would not be forthcoming. Sadly that doesn't make us any different from any other elitist special interest group lobbying for government funding. That is the sad uncomfortable truth. It is much easier to make a democratic case for something like a CDC or NIH, or even the military than a telescope, SETI, a super-conducting supercollider, or a rocket to mars.
Actually, private companies build almost all the things that seem to be credited to government. The money comes from you and me, goes through the goverment which generally hires a private contractor that does the real work.
The reason this money takes a detour through the government (e.g., for infrastructure) is the free-rider problem. For other thing that have less of a problem with free-riders, some folks would argue that we should just leave the government out of it. Others seem to like the government to get involved in most activities to achieve certain social agendas (e.g, redistribute wealth to stabilize a society, or achieve certain racial quotas).
This is of course a big debate, but not relavent in this situation. The actual building of stuff, at least in most world economies today, the activity is done by entities that are independent of the government, even if the government is pony-uping the money (or loan guarantees, or tax breaks)...
Of course people have a reasonable expectation of privacy for that data. It isn't publicly available, and in fact the police had to request it from the cell phone company. Just because you can track someone using it quite easily does not mean they do not have an expectation of privacy.
I think this is very analogous to fact that there is no legal expectation of privacy with cordless phones, but there is for wired phones. Cell phones are even more public than cordless phones in that they are pinging a public "tower", not a private leased line.
On a more technical note, in asia, it used to be very popular to have a charm attached to your cell phone that lit up when you got a call. I think it was called a MoPod. These $10 devices would be an example of a publically available device to capture a ring signal. For the do-it-yourself-ers in the crowd (and I know you're out there), here's a pointer on taking this to the next level with a small mod on a cheap throw-away phone... Professional devices are of course more expensive and only technically available to law enforcement.
So in this case (of an unmanned plane) all parties decided to forego pilot representation in exchange for the lucrative systems integration sub contract...
If Samsung can find all these examples of prior art, how is it that Apple was granted patents in the first place? These are hardly the only examples of Apple being given patents on things that were obviously done by others well before they "innovated" them.
Prosecuting a patent (the act of trying to get a patent, not it's enforcement) is generally an excercise where a patent is sort of innocent until shown to be guilty. In this respect, a patent examiner is more like a district attorney, they tell you what you what your odds probably are and let you decide to continue prosecuting a patent. It seems to me that patent examiners seem to nearly always err on the side of allowing borderline patents and letting the courts sort it out later.
Also, even if the original claims are not possible, sometimes the patent search itself suggests how to amend your original doomed patent application, so that it has a better chance to pass. Generally, a patent office is in the patent granting business, not the patent denying business, so if there is any patent to get near your application and you are willing to spend enough time/money to search for and amend your patent in the patent procecution/search process, you will likely be able to find it and get a patent on it. Of course, it may be a very borderline unenforceable patent, but it will be the best that money can buy.;^)
The patent law provides for the granting of design patents to any person who has invented any new, original and ornamental design for an article of manufacture. A design patent protects only the appearance of the article and not structural or utilitarian features. For instance, the roughly rectangular aspect of the structure would likely not be protectable for a smart phone (since existant lcd panels are rectangular, a minimal utilitarian enclosure would obviously be roughly rectangular).
AFAIK, the design patents in question are listed below. Be the judge yourself if you think the design is new, original and ornamental;^)
Note that these are only design patents, if there were any utility or functionality associated with the design (say having rounded corners won't catch on your pocket seams, or being a certain size would fit in most pockets or hands), I believe this would require claims like a utility patent, which these patents are not. I doubt any of the utility patents on this would be allowed for any of the examples I cited as they would of course be too obvious.
Next thing you know Star Trek episodes will be prior art.
Uh, regarding the rounded-corner rectangle design patent thing, how are they not prior art? Design patents are specifically for an appearance/shape, irrespective of function or purpose.
IANAL, but my understanding is that design patents are specifically for an appearance/shape, that do NOT have an integral function or purpose, but are merely ornamental in nature. If the design has an integral function or purpose, that function cannot be protected by a design patent, but must be covered by a utility patent to be enforceable.
I still don't understand the worth of Bitcoins and probably never will.
As with most collectible things, the worth of Bitcoins is simply the value that folks collecting them assign to it. Like all collectibles, if/when people don't value them anymore, they will be worthless (just like beanie babies).
So how are these bit-coin exchanges different from those virtual second-life "banks"? Did people truly expect a different result? What is the definition of insanity?
Have you used one of these USB-RS232 adaptors for something more challenging than a mouse? Half the time they don't work 100% when connected to something like a development board.
Well, I'm pretty sure that both the USB-RS232 or the direct connect RS232 will be challenged enough with a 60,000,000km cable so that: ALL of the time they won't work 100%;^)
Targetting the blind with this kind of product misses the bigger audience that might want to have eyes on the back of their head...
For example, I'm sure the police, military or the even firemen would be interested in something like that, then they can amortized the development costs to provide a version for blind folks pointing forward at an even lower cost.
Someday, maybe even sharks will be interested in it (when they get that version with the embedded laser)...
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, SCOTUS upheld that you can patent genes. You know, the ones people already have.
I wish what you said were true, but I'm not sure it is any more. :(
It's a bit subtle, but I read the patent and and the various rulings and the currently only angle that has been upheld is that the segment of DNA which is extracted from a fragment of the BRCA gene is not naturally occuring so it can be patented (basically, a lengthy chemical process is needed to extract this chemical from naturally occuring mutated DNA and the result is no longer DNA, but a different chemical). However, the claims of the patent which involve identifying and using the results of the extraction to assess cancer risk are not valid because they do not involve the transformation of the chemical and are instead abstract mental steps.
The technical reading suggests that if someone came up with a different way to extract different fragments of the gene into a different end chemical (which is not the same as described) and used them to create a cancer risk assessment, then the part of the patent about using the fragments would not be enforcable. For example, if they transcribed the DNA fragment into another chemical (similar to the way a cell transcribes the DNA into a protein) and inferred that the the original DNA was mutated BRCA. However, if the remainder of the patent is eventually upheld, and someone used the same extraction of the same fragments of the BRCA gene, then it would be protected.
Admittedly this ruling seems a bit subtle, and may eventually be overturned as well, but that is my reading of the current situation, so I stand by my original assertion.
FYI, this whole thing is just IDT's implementation of the Qi standard... http://www.wirelesspowerconsortium.com/
Forgive me, but every time I hear about wireless power, I think about how inefficient that sounds. Wouldn't a (more or less) direct connection to the power source be more efficient? Aren't we trying to conserve energy, and improve energy efficiency?
It's important to understand that even a "direct" connect is just a waveguide for an electromagnetic wave. Waveguides can have all sorts of losses (resistive, radiation, etc.) that limit their efficiency. At typical power distribution frequencies resistive losses can be quite large with long narrow wires, although in general with an impedance matched zip-cord, the radiation losses tend to be pretty low. Also direct connect isn't completely direct connect either. Inside that wall-wart is a step-down transformer which is basically a small inductive power transfer (wireless power), which has its own power efficiency issues.
Theoretically, the "free-space" transmission (well not really free-space, but air-space), has the potential to eliminate most of the resistive loss, although in practice there is this basic problem of radiation power loss. This type of tech (resonant magnetic coupling) has a few tweaks to try to help with this problem. First off, there's use of use of near-field evanscent waves which don't propogate very far (evanscent waves are the exponentally decay solution to the em wave equation) keeping most of the power local. Second, there is the use of resonance which reduces the losses and increases the efficiency of power transfer. The combination of these ideas allows pretty good power efficiency. I think you can get about 80% efficiency with near-field (vs 90% for a wall-wart connect). For the small amount of power going to recharge a mobile device, that's not really that much to worry about (if you were trying to power say a TV or a stereo, that would be another thing).
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you cannot patent a natural phenomenon, but you probably could potential patent the use of a natural phenomena in certain novel use cases (e.g. a very optimized circuit to transfer resonant magnetic power for a charger). I'm guessing there's lots of other companies/people working in this area and thus there are probably a few patents already (e.g., WiTricity, WREL, eCoupled, uBeam, etc), and some prior art/expired patents (e.g., Nikola Tesla)...
On the other hand, Apple has apparently patented rectangular phones with rounded corners, so what do I know...
FWIW, you don't need this technology for that, you could use simple inductive charging (like electric toothbrushes). This tech uses evanescent magnetic fields to charge things a bit farther away (maybe a meter depending on the frequency they use), and with higher efficiency.
Fear of retaliation: now that's an interesting point.
Actually, there's no reason to fear violent retaliation in a civilized society, so if you were to assume (like some folks), that civilized society is an evolutionary stable point, a sociopath would have very little to fear in the long run. However, as many have noted, we aren't completely civilized, so maybe some fractional amount of "uncivil" behavior is actually the real evolutionary stable point and those "we-can-live-as-one" imaginers need to wake up (like Mr Lennon did in his later years)...
Just trollin'... ;^)
I think you are mistaken about securities laws applying to banking. If you were to say that this is an investment scheme, that might be under the SEC, but at least in the United States, banks are under the purvey of the FDIC. The only exceptions I know about are local credit unions and banks that are not chartered in the US. You cannot just start an operation in the US and call it a bank w/o getting the FDIC involved.
On the other hand, if this whole thing was just an investment and offered some sort of "securities" (e.g. fractional ownership rights in exchange for money), the SEC would get involved. However, if the monetary transaction were just transacting an unsecured private loan to this other entity (either documented, or undocumented) which had an "interest" receiving understanding (written or unwritten), neither the SEC nor the FDIC would probably currently have the juristiction to get involved unless it was deceptive (unsecured loan posing as a bank interest scheme). Depending on how it was structured, it might fall under the juristiction of an state insurance commissioner (e.g., if it looked more like a fixed annuity product), but that is easy to get around. Nobody is really regulating how you loan your money to other people (as opposed to the crap load of regulation on companies loaning money to you).
Although I'm sure if stuff like this were prevalent enough a problem, maybe congress could act (they always want to get their noses into stuff like this), but the take away is that the SEC isn't involved w/ everything monetary...
Then there are PIN based debit card for which transactions which Visa/Mastercard don't get their cut.
Yes and no.
PIN based debit cards have to go through some PIN network for processing. Historically, Visa and Mastercard steered PIN transaction towards their own PIN networks to get their cut (by sneaking in exclusivity clauses into processor agreements to force merchants into using visa-Interlink or mc-Maestro for V/MC logo'd PIN debit cards).
Regulations in various countries (including the US now with the Durbin amendment), opened the door to a few competitor PIN networks like Star (first data corp), Pulse (discover), and NYCE (fidelity national) by banning these types of exclusivity agreements. But make not mistake about it, depending on the merchant's card processor, some company is getting a cut even if you use a PIN/debit because your bank is paying that company for the privledge of routing the transaction. Interlink and Maestro are still two of the biggest players in the business and they are the most common interchange networks for point-of-sale processor PIN transactions so it's still very likely that Visa and Mastercard are getting their cut (even from your non-logo'd PIN debit card)...
Note that this does NOT depend on your card, nor your bank, but which card processor the merchant you do business with signed up for.
FWIW, I think you are missing the point.
This is simply a vanity-marketed stored-value reusable gift card. The vendor of this gift card just happens to accept bitcoin in exchange for value-add. This isn't any different than any other partner-reward card that puts value into a debit card, except you are rewarded by being able to pay in bitcoin instead of say buying gas or groceries (oh and you have to pay 1%+ATM fee on top of that instead of say getting 2% back)...
Vanity/Affinity gift-card marketing works great. I'm surprized that nobody has thought this up before...
They prefer to call it Carousel.
or Sleepshop, however, some believe there is Sanctuary on mars, if you can get there...
Why not reprocess? People (rightly or wrongly) are concerned with nuclear proliferation...
Whether the conventional wisdom will actually prove correct for students starting undergraduate degrees in September this year, I don't know. I suspect a maths degree will always make you more employable than a media studies one, but there's no reason to suspect that any portion of the graduate jobs market is immune to over-saturation.
I think the falacy in the conventional wisdom is that somehow a university education is sufficient to prepare an arbitrary student for a graduate-level job at the end. In my opinion, some people just have an affinity towards math and science (similar to affinity that some folks have to the arts, or others have for business) that makes it an intangible element that makes all the difference that no university education can create.
Somehow I doubt a large increase in enrollment is reflective of an equivalently large number of untapped potential in the student population, but a foreshadowing of a bunch of potential drop-outs and/or mediocre graduates that will be released into the job market in a few years. Whether or not they can be absorbed depends if the economy is booming or not. I hope these prospective math and science students will be doing some serious self instrospection about what they are getting themselves into.
I have always felt that one should take inventory of your skills and select an appropriate course of study with a high potential of success (rather than chase the money and play the generic odds)... That doesn't mean follow your heart (as some would advocate), but follow your head, and not the whims of tradewinds...
Simply giving a name to something doesn't make it part of your collection...
Unless perhaps you are Alexander Selkirk...
I am monarch of all I survey,
My right there is none to dispute;
From the centre all round to the mare,
But all are rocks so it is just moot.
-Curiosity, with apologies to the *other* William... (Cowper)
If I am correct the opposite of free rider is user pay which has it's own issues. For example, taxes pay for the National Weather Service. Does that mean that everyone who wants to know hat the weather is should pay a fee? Does it mean that everyone who wants to get tornado warnings should pay a fee? The government provides services for the good everyone and the payment is through taxes.
In this sense, the taxes that go to provide these services this are a mandatory fee. You are bringing up the classic free-rider problem. If the private entity providing a severe weather warning service only warned the people that pay, those people who warn other folks that didn't pay would be enabling free-riding making it unprofitable for that private entity. Since it many may agree that it is against good public policy to prevent free-riding in this case, these types of services collect mandatory fees and these are generally funded through a trip through the government.
Contrast this with two other situations: providing car liability insurance and providing entertainment. In the case of car liability insurance, this is also a mandatory fee, but since not everyone drives and not everyone needs the same level of insurance, collectively we have not found it prudent funnel this money through the government. In the case of entertainment, in the US, we have collectively decided that goverment is only going to be involved by legal means, no fees are mandatory for anyone. In the UK, they have decided to collect television and radio user fees routed through the government to fund the BBC (a nominally private entity). It is a choice of the people involved and both schemes have their plusses and minusses.
I don't see it as a free rider issue at all but a concentration of funds to be dispursed to projects for the good of the people. For example, there is a multi-year multi-billion dollar project to supply more water to New York City that will be used by everyone in the city. Do you know of any private company who could take on something that big with profits put off for so many years. Even the subject of this discussion is a great place for Government involvement. Telescopes need funding for construction and continued funding for operation. Is there enough profit in astronomy to cover costs and construction of new facilities? Do you really think that reasonably stable funding could be found without tax money? Governments get involved to fund projects that are good for the country.
As I mentioned before, it doesn't matter if it is for the good of the country or not, it is whatever we collectively decided to be a reasonable path: do nothing, enforce some sort of user or mandatory fees. Sometimes these mandatory fees are through the government, sometimes not.
Just because telescopes need stable funding an cannot operate for a profit doesn't mean that the government should fund it. As I mentioned in my original post, I think that geeks (like me) often advance with an entitilement complex when it comes to scientific research as we would rightly fear that if it were to come to a country-wide democratic vote on funding, the necessary funding would not be forthcoming. Sadly that doesn't make us any different from any other elitist special interest group lobbying for government funding. That is the sad uncomfortable truth. It is much easier to make a democratic case for something like a CDC or NIH, or even the military than a telescope, SETI, a super-conducting supercollider, or a rocket to mars.
Actually, private companies build almost all the things that seem to be credited to government. The money comes from you and me, goes through the goverment which generally hires a private contractor that does the real work.
The reason this money takes a detour through the government (e.g., for infrastructure) is the free-rider problem. For other thing that have less of a problem with free-riders, some folks would argue that we should just leave the government out of it. Others seem to like the government to get involved in most activities to achieve certain social agendas (e.g, redistribute wealth to stabilize a society, or achieve certain racial quotas).
This is of course a big debate, but not relavent in this situation. The actual building of stuff, at least in most world economies today, the activity is done by entities that are independent of the government, even if the government is pony-uping the money (or loan guarantees, or tax breaks)...
Of course people have a reasonable expectation of privacy for that data. It isn't publicly available, and in fact the police had to request it from the cell phone company. Just because you can track someone using it quite easily does not mean they do not have an expectation of privacy.
I think this is very analogous to fact that there is no legal expectation of privacy with cordless phones, but there is for wired phones. Cell phones are even more public than cordless phones in that they are pinging a public "tower", not a private leased line.
On a more technical note, in asia, it used to be very popular to have a charm attached to your cell phone that lit up when you got a call. I think it was called a MoPod. These $10 devices would be an example of a publically available device to capture a ring signal. For the do-it-yourself-ers in the crowd (and I know you're out there), here's a pointer on taking this to the next level with a small mod on a cheap throw-away phone... Professional devices are of course more expensive and only technically available to law enforcement.
So in this case (of an unmanned plane) all parties decided to forego pilot representation in exchange for the lucrative systems integration sub contract...
If Samsung can find all these examples of prior art, how is it that Apple was granted patents in the first place? These are hardly the only examples of Apple being given patents on things that were obviously done by others well before they "innovated" them.
Prosecuting a patent (the act of trying to get a patent, not it's enforcement) is generally an excercise where a patent is sort of innocent until shown to be guilty. In this respect, a patent examiner is more like a district attorney, they tell you what you what your odds probably are and let you decide to continue prosecuting a patent. It seems to me that patent examiners seem to nearly always err on the side of allowing borderline patents and letting the courts sort it out later.
Also, even if the original claims are not possible, sometimes the patent search itself suggests how to amend your original doomed patent application, so that it has a better chance to pass. Generally, a patent office is in the patent granting business, not the patent denying business, so if there is any patent to get near your application and you are willing to spend enough time/money to search for and amend your patent in the patent procecution/search process, you will likely be able to find it and get a patent on it. Of course, it may be a very borderline unenforceable patent, but it will be the best that money can buy. ;^)
The patent law provides for the granting of design patents to any person who has invented any new, original and ornamental design for an article of manufacture. A design patent protects only the appearance of the article and not structural or utilitarian features. For instance, the roughly rectangular aspect of the structure would likely not be protectable for a smart phone (since existant lcd panels are rectangular, a minimal utilitarian enclosure would obviously be roughly rectangular).
AFAIK, the design patents in question are listed below. Be the judge yourself if you think the design is new, original and ornamental ;^)
http://www.google.com/patents/USD504889
http://www.google.com/patents/USD593087
http://www.google.com/patents/USD618677
Note that these are only design patents, if there were any utility or functionality associated with the design (say having rounded corners won't catch on your pocket seams, or being a certain size would fit in most pockets or hands), I believe this would require claims like a utility patent, which these patents are not. I doubt any of the utility patents on this would be allowed for any of the examples I cited as they would of course be too obvious.
Next thing you know Star Trek episodes will be prior art.
Uh, regarding the rounded-corner rectangle design patent thing, how are they not prior art? Design patents are specifically for an appearance/shape, irrespective of function or purpose.
IANAL, but my understanding is that design patents are specifically for an appearance/shape, that do NOT have an integral function or purpose, but are merely ornamental in nature. If the design has an integral function or purpose, that function cannot be protected by a design patent, but must be covered by a utility patent to be enforceable.
I still don't understand the worth of Bitcoins and probably never will.
As with most collectible things, the worth of Bitcoins is simply the value that folks collecting them assign to it.
Like all collectibles, if/when people don't value them anymore, they will be worthless (just like beanie babies).
So how are these bit-coin exchanges different from those virtual second-life "banks"?
Did people truly expect a different result?
What is the definition of insanity?
(or a USB->RS232 adaptor)...
Have you used one of these USB-RS232 adaptors for something more challenging than a mouse? Half the time they don't work 100% when connected to something like a development board.
Well, I'm pretty sure that both the USB-RS232 or the direct connect RS232 will be challenged enough with a 60,000,000km cable so that: ALL of the time they won't work 100% ;^)
Targetting the blind with this kind of product misses the bigger audience that might want to have eyes on the back of their head...
For example, I'm sure the police, military or the even firemen would be interested in something like that, then they can amortized the development costs to provide a version for blind folks pointing forward at an even lower cost.
Someday, maybe even sharks will be interested in it (when they get that version with the embedded laser)...
Does anyone know A)where Curiosity was born B)Curiosity's childhood pet C)Curiosity's mother's maiden name?
A) JPL Spacecraft Assembly Facility, Pasadena
B) Childhood pet: (@jpltweetup)
C) Mother's maiden name: Ma
Forget all of that. I think it has an unsecured RS232 port. Just plug your laptop up to that.
Does anyone have a 60,000,000 km RS232 cable? Oh yeah, and a null-modem adapter.
Oh yeah, and an old laptop with built-in RS232 (or a USB->RS232 adaptor)...