This is sad, yet good. The thing is, no worthwhile patent will ever make it onto here. It will more like "Joe's Brainwashing Patent" that doesnt even work.....
Etoys.com backing down is one of the best things that they could have done for the sake of their name. I agree that something as simple as etoys should not be trademarkable, as said in the story. However, if the trademark office had held up the trademark, it would still have been in the best interest of etoys not to "press" the suit, because they would be seen as stifling free expression on the Internet, even though some marketing peon for them says it was not the case. Oh, well. Just my $0.02.
Remember that this was a contigency mission to replace the gyroscopes, not a normal servicing mission. The new computer was simply an added bonus that was ready to go up now. This mission was originally scheduled for mid-2001. That completely kills Y2K as any reason....
They have their place on smaller micros like the motorola 68xx and intel 8051 families, but not the IA-32 series.
Their website was a little sparse in content and slow to load, however from what I could see they have an extremely small OS. There are plenty of useful applications for a microOS on IA-32 systems. Not the PC on your desk, but who said thats the only thing that an IA-32 system could be used for? As the price of 386/486 chips wholesale continues to drop to nearly nothing, they will be used more and more in embedded systems needing more computing power than the current Motorola 65xx and 68xx can handle. Take, for instance, the recent upgrade of the main computer on board HST (Hubble Space Telescope). That qualifies as an embedded system. And here it is, using a 486 processor!!! Therefore the development of an OS for commercial applications is exactly the way to go, but I'm not sure if the requirements of the GPL of source distro makes it a good license or a bad one for this kind of project. If I go buy a thing that has such an OS embedded, I can't say that the average joe is going to want to have a CD included..."oh, by the way, here's the source code to the OS used. If you sell this thing you must include this or be in violation of some license that youve never heard of" (I'm talking the non-computer, non-OSS type of person). Just my $0.02 worth....
This is absurd. First we patent a user interface to a website (amazon.com), then we patent a business model (priceline.com), and now we're trying to patent (and have apparently succeeded) a method of handling dates??
Somewhere, someone needs to come up wih a way to overturn these absurd patents, AND the patent laws need to be seriously changed to define what is and is not a patentable concept.
For instance, a new drug is very well deserving of a patent. A company spent millions of dollars researching this drug to test its effectiveness on the disease it is supposed to treat, and this company gets in return a patent which prevents others from stealing their invention for a limited period of time, and that period of time is reasonable for that industry.
That's great for the pharmaceutical industry, but the same thing does not hold up in the software and website design industry. What is a reasonable period of time in the pharmaceutical world is an order of magnitude different the a reasonable period of time in the software world. Drugs take many, many years to bring to market, and require a significant investment of time and resources to bring them to market.
Now let's take a look in a little more detail at the amazon.com patent. What they have patented (from what I have read on/. and other places, I have not read that patent myself. If anyone wants to send me the patent# so i dont have to search for it I will read it, but IANAL. While writing this, I decided to do some research of my own, and I did find the patent. Look for some interesting details from it later on.) to be a mechanism for ordering products with one click of the mouse, and having your shipping and credit card information previously stored. A great idea for e-commerce. However, not patentable IM[ns]HO. Perhaps a copyright on the design of the website (the overall design, not that particular element) would be in line, but not a patent. What they have patented is:
1. A method of placing an order for an item comprising:
under control of a client system, displaying information identifying the item; and
in response to only a single action being performed, sending a request to order the item along with an identifier of a purchaser of the item to a server system;
under control of a single-action ordering component of the server system, receiving the request; retrieving additional information previously stored for the purchaser identified by the identifier in the received request; and
generating an order to purchase the requested item for the purchaser identified by the identifier in the received request using the retrieved additional information; and fulfilling the generated order to complete purchase of the item
whereby the item is ordered without using a shopping cart ordering model.
I take several issues with this. First is that it also seems to patent a business model, because what it patents is the complete system of one-click ordering. What I have pasted is only a subset of the patent, but its enough to get the jist of it. Later in the same patent, it would appear that they patent the idea of one-click ordering combined with shopping cart ordering. Again, IANAL.
While researching that previous patent, I came across another Amazon.com patent that is even more absurd. It patents entering only a subset of a credit card number online via an insecure connection, and then placing a telephone call to an automated system and entering the complete credit card number, and having the system correlate the two.
Is there anything that the retarded patent office wont patent???
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This is sad, yet good. The thing is, no worthwhile patent will ever make it onto here. It will more like "Joe's Brainwashing Patent" that doesnt even work.....
This should turn into a fun waste of time for many geek like myself! :)
Etoys.com backing down is one of the best things that they could have done for the sake of their name. I agree that something as simple as etoys should not be trademarkable, as said in the story. However, if the trademark office had held up the trademark, it would still have been in the best interest of etoys not to "press" the suit, because they would be seen as stifling free expression on the Internet, even though some marketing peon for them says it was not the case. Oh, well. Just my $0.02.
Remember that this was a contigency mission to replace the gyroscopes, not a normal servicing mission. The new computer was simply an added bonus that was ready to go up now. This mission was originally scheduled for mid-2001. That completely kills Y2K as any reason....
Their website was a little sparse in content and slow to load, however from what I could see they have an extremely small OS. There are plenty of useful applications for a microOS on IA-32 systems. Not the PC on your desk, but who said thats the only thing that an IA-32 system could be used for? As the price of 386/486 chips wholesale continues to drop to nearly nothing, they will be used more and more in embedded systems needing more computing power than the current Motorola 65xx and 68xx can handle. Take, for instance, the recent upgrade of the main computer on board HST (Hubble Space Telescope). That qualifies as an embedded system. And here it is, using a 486 processor!!! Therefore the development of an OS for commercial applications is exactly the way to go, but I'm not sure if the requirements of the GPL of source distro makes it a good license or a bad one for this kind of project. If I go buy a thing that has such an OS embedded, I can't say that the average joe is going to want to have a CD included..."oh, by the way, here's the source code to the OS used. If you sell this thing you must include this or be in violation of some license that youve never heard of" (I'm talking the non-computer, non-OSS type of person). Just my $0.02 worth....
This is absurd. First we patent a user interface to a website (amazon.com), then we patent a business model (priceline.com), and now we're trying to patent (and have apparently succeeded) a method of handling dates??
Somewhere, someone needs to come up wih a way to overturn these absurd patents, AND the patent laws need to be seriously changed to define what is and is not a patentable concept.
For instance, a new drug is very well deserving of a patent. A company spent millions of dollars researching this drug to test its effectiveness on the disease it is supposed to treat, and this company gets in return a patent which prevents others from stealing their invention for a limited period of time, and that period of time is reasonable for that industry.
That's great for the pharmaceutical industry, but the same thing does not hold up in the software and website design industry. What is a reasonable period of time in the pharmaceutical world is an order of magnitude different the a reasonable period of time in the software world. Drugs take many, many years to bring to market, and require a significant investment of time and resources to bring them to market.
Now let's take a look in a little more detail at the amazon.com patent. What they have patented (from what I have read on /. and other places, I have not read that patent myself. If anyone wants to send me the patent# so i dont have to search for it I will read it, but IANAL. While writing this, I decided to do some research of my own, and I did find the patent. Look for some interesting details from it later on.) to be a mechanism for ordering products with one click of the mouse, and having your shipping and credit card information previously stored. A great idea for e-commerce. However, not patentable IM[ns]HO. Perhaps a copyright on the design of the website (the overall design, not that particular element) would be in line, but not a patent. What they have patented is:
1. A method of placing an order for an item comprising:
under control of a client system,
displaying information identifying the item; and
in response to only a single action being performed, sending a request to order the item along with an identifier of a purchaser of the item to a server system;
under control of a single-action ordering component of the server system,
receiving the request;
retrieving additional information previously stored for the purchaser identified by the identifier in the received request; and
generating an order to purchase the requested item for the purchaser identified by the identifier in the received request using the retrieved additional information; and
fulfilling the generated order to complete purchase of the item
whereby the item is ordered without using a shopping cart ordering model.
I take several issues with this. First is that it also seems to patent a business model, because what it patents is the complete system of one-click ordering. What I have pasted is only a subset of the patent, but its enough to get the jist of it. Later in the same patent, it would appear that they patent the idea of one-click ordering combined with shopping cart ordering. Again, IANAL.
While researching that previous patent, I came across another Amazon.com patent that is even more absurd. It patents entering only a subset of a credit card number online via an insecure connection, and then placing a telephone call to an automated system and entering the complete credit card number, and having the system correlate the two.
Is there anything that the retarded patent office wont patent???