... is amazing. "Microsoft's patent here seems obvious..." Really? well, I don't know about the inner workings of all cell phones, but I've yet seen a model that I can silence with a single instant button touch or one that uses an accelerometer to transmit a single clear command to the phone. -- Others may come up with examples which is great. Third parties can now (or soon) file with the USPTO to put prior art not considered by the examiner into the official record. This is a very recent change and I don't recall the details. It may be active just for business patents right now, but eventually all patent apps will be included and this one likely won't be examined before that rule is opened to all patents. So prep your arguments now! In any case the mere existence of accelerometers probably would not constitute obviousness which seems to be the main point being made by most.
"...and should have never been granted" Well, it hasn't. This is only an application published 18 months after filing. With the current backlog in the USPTO, it won't be examined for another 2 years.
..but leads to really bad behaviors in a static or shrinking organization.
The large company I work for has just scrapped it after about 10 yrs when HR finally heard the pleas of managers.
Survival when the org is static or shrinking includes understanding what is the "currency" of your manager and *all the other managers* who have teams that are pooled with yours. Get known as a high achiever not just with your manager but the others. At least in our company there would be an annual meeting of those managers at some point to work out the rankings in there respective organizations to have the parent org come out to the required distributions. Horse trading ensues. Being known by your manager's peers helps you in that meeting.
I'm late to the party, here, but the parent comment is *not* +5 Insightful, it's 0 Has no clue about the patent system. You cannot patent ideas. An idea must be reduced to practice in some novel way in order to considered for a patent. The problem is that the US Patent office started to hand out patents for computer software and business models. Computer software is rightly copyrighted, not patented. And patenting business models (which is patenting ideas -not inventions) is simply an atrocity that is eroding the societal benefits of the Patent System.
"the standard for giving a patent should be that no one else is likely to come up with that idea for the next 20 years assuming no patent system to motivate them."
This is wrong on so many levels it's not even worth addressing.
As exemplified by the summary, there's a pervasive misunderstanding on Slashdot on how patents work. Just because someone is able to patent one method in the field of X does *not* exclude others from practicing in the field of X. Don't get me wrong - method patents like this stink worse than the NY Giant's defense in the 4th quarter, but they are generally pretty easy to avoid by simply doing one step differently. Rival companies do this all the time with ligit process patents.
"Shouldn't 'property' owner needs to pay 'property' tax?" At least for patents, the property owner does pay a property tax. There are some fairly steep fees to keep a patent in force paid periodically through the life of the patent. If you don't pay the fee, it goes into the public domain. A single country's fees aren't too bad, but enforcing a patent worldwide over the life of the patent can run you way north of $100,000. Many opt for the just the countries that will take the majority of the market: US, EP with UK, Germany, France, JP.
Do the submitters actually RTFA? Dr. Demento's name was dropped in trying to put context around Prof. Tom Lehrer (not sure why you need to see Dr. D's name to understand who Lehrer is). BTW I think Dr. Demento has only a masters degree and was an A&R guy at one time - one of the least geeky jobs ever.
As an research chemist for a large company, I have had to teach myself the unique language of machine translated Japanese for when I'm in literature search mode. We pay $30 a pop for an instantaneous machine translated JP patent through a web-based service. The service is tuned to patent phrases so not as bad as Engrish, but it takes getting used to. The translations are good enough to get the gist, but if the reference is going to be used as prior art for a patent filing, we'll spring for a human translation which costs a whole lot more and takes a lot more time to get. I wonder how this copier would stack up against the service we use in a cost/benefit analysis?
"Someday homeowners will even be able to print sheets of these solar cells with inexpensive home-based inkjet printers."... "The team combined carbon nanotubes with tiny carbon buckyballs (fullerenes)..."
Whooboy! I wonder what that print cartridge is going to cost!
This patent issued in 10 Dec 1991. At that time in the US, a patent was in force 17 years after issue - so that patent becomes public domain in Dec 2008 giving it another 20 months. Since then, when the US changed its rules a few years ago to get closer to the practice in the rest of the world, new patents are now in force for 20 years from the date of application.
Sorry to nitpick, here, but this is not a "published paper" as described in the parent post which implies some sort of scholarly work. As others have pointed out, this ground has been well-plowed before and there are no citations. This is an "educational resource" provided by the U of Chicago - reuse of the ideas are free, and you only need author's permission to reproduce charts, etc, and you can't, of course, freely incorporate the exact text into something you are going to sell.
It's a pretty good site, actually, IMHO. Archive is worth a couple of hours of browsing.
From the home page: "The University of Chicago, through a consortium of 14 leading educational and cultural institutions called Fathom, provided high-quality, free educational resources on the Internet from January 2000 through March 2003.
This Library archive offers access to the complete range of free content developed for Fathom by University of Chicago faculty, researchers, and departments. Feel free to browse this archive of online learning resources, which include lectures, articles, interviews, and exhibits.
Faculty interested in finding other venues to disseminate materials for educational outreach should contact Stephen Gabel, Associate Provost, University of Chicago (sgabel@uchicago.edu, 702-0790)."
Of course no one here knows the specifics of your case, but this type of clause is in place not to steal your inventions, but to protect both parties.
The company's side: They pay you to help them develop a widgit or process that the company hopes to commercialize. During the process of your helping some valuable intellectual property is developed. Hopefully before the relationship you both decided who "owns" that property and how the company will get to use it - either by taking ownership from you or by getting a license from you for a reasonable cost. Now, what the company doesn't want to happen is to get that far and then have you pull dominating prior Invention #2 from your ass that you've kept hidden from them that prevents the company from practicing the art you've developed with them. This will gum up the whole commercialization process. - this happens a lot and several companies have been burned by it. Thus the company wants you to document related art up front so that the company can take into account that they'll have to negotiate the license of dominating prior Invention #2 in the work contract.
Your side: You have lots of stuff running around in your head or in progress, but it's not protected by a patent or copyright or whatever. You are now entering a relationship with a company that could use those ideas, but are paying you for something else, i.e., the *field* of the NDA does not cover the field of these ideas. If you never disclose these other ideas, there's no issue. But if you do disclose them - they aren't covered by the NDA and you could be screwed. However, if those ideas are specifically stated in the NDA, even if they are outside the field, then you'll be OK as identifying them as covered - the ideas will still be "yours".
The term of the NDA can be longer than 1 yr. That's negotiable. There's also usually two terms - one term during which you both can disclose info (if it's a two-way)- this usually is 1yr with some renewing mechanism. But there's a second term that is the length of time both of you need to hold the information secret - which is usually 5 yrs, sometimes as long as 10 yrs. The company cannot "steal" your ideas after the term. If you disclosed these ideas to the company *properly* you have now forever "poisoned" the company with respect to that idea. Proper disclosure should be explicitely defined in the NDA but usually means in writing on paper (not electronically) with CONFIDENTIAL written on the page and you keeping a copy. If the company tries to patent it without including you, you can go after them. However if you never patent the idea in a reasonable period, the company can, of course practice it - but they can't ever get a patent on it to exclude others without you being named as an (or the only) inventor. I work in R&D in a big company and we are paranoid at getting poisened in this fashion. It's one of the risks that needs to be managed before entering a relationship with smart people like you who can often greatly shorten development time. Of course, if the NDA is two-way the company can "poison" you in the same way - although this is rare since companies don't like disclosing anything outside of the NDA's field.
Disclosure through an NDA does not start the clock ticking for getting a patent - it's a private disclosure, not a public disclosure. However, you do have the risk that the company will publically disclose the idea - they've violated the NDA and can be sued, but you will now not get a patent unless you apply within a year.
In the end, the NDA is just a piece of paper - a good working relationship requires trust on both sides. If you feel the company is going to screw you, don't work with them. If the big company thinks you won't hold their disclosed IP confidential, or will not be upfront in disclosing potentially blocking ideas or art, they won't work with you.
Dude, RTFA! not theft, but robbery. I'm sure in SF as in any major city there are plenty of laptop thefts. Robbery is a much bolder crime. The point is that WiFi hotspots are beacons flashing to all criminals bold enough to commit robbery that there are $1000-$2000 articles out in plain site - It's pretty tough to go to a hotspot location and conceal your laptop as you would a valuable when you are in a place where you might be robbed. I'll assume your "carrying a laptop = you are 5x less likely to get murdered" was a weak attempt a humor and you really aren't that innumerate.
In common terms it may "sound" like an explosion, but this term has a strict definition in science, which is what the author of TFA was refering to.
In an explosion there is a detonation (or pressure) wave that travels from the site faster than the speed of sound - this indeed is what causes most of the damage in an explosion. I think an overpressure wave of around 1 psi will kill you or flatten a house - but I don't remember the specifics. These come from "high explosives" as a previous poster pointed out.
The Challenger was a "deflagration" which is defined as burning rapidly without generating a high pressure wave. Compounds that lead to deflagration are classified as "low explosives". Still very dangerous and destructive, but the damage is generally caused by heat (and flying objects if the deflagration was confined to a closed vessel that ruptured from the rise in pressure due to heating gases).
When a vessel is destroyed by deflagration, it generally rips open at a failure point or line. If a vessel is destroyed by explosion, it generally is obliterated into zillions of fragments (called shrapnel!)
Isn't this the good thing about capitalism? The Market will answer the question as to whether $2.49 is too high a price. If Sprint has done their homework they've had employees sweat the details of trying to predict the acceptable price point for their service. If they charge too little, they leave money on the table; if they charge too much, few people buy the offering - then you'll either see the price go down or Sprint retract the offering. Basic Econ/Marketing. Too high for YOU is not necessarily too high a price for the whole market. If Sprint meets their sales expectations then the price was just right.
Wow. The "You may also be interested in these items..." portion is completely off the mark for this Amazon item. Got It. Nope, Got that Hmm. Got that, too. Nope, got it. got that one covered.... Shouldn't it be redirecting you to other SF?
For those with a brain who like to read the original sources instead of the popular media's hack job of the summaries here are (I think) the two opposing studies. Dmitri Williams (University of Illinois, Urbana) "Internet Fantasy Violence: A Test of Aggression in an Online Game" Communication Monographs Vol. 72, No. 2, June 2005, pp.217-233, (this is a pdf) which says there's no link
AND in the other Corner
Well, no one paper, actually. The APA "Committee on Violence in Video Games and Interactive Media" appearently did a metastudy of several papers on the topic and come up with a resolution (pdf) and press release. At the end of the resolution is a bib of the papers taken into consideration. I certainly don't care enough to plow through all those - but William's paper isn't in the bib. I suspect there was lots of group thought going in that committee -lots of the papers were written by members of the committee.
I suspect that you can't make a blanket statement on video games. Folks with a predisposition for violence might be pushed over the edge to real life violent acts from habitual video play; whereas there are, I'm sure, many more level-headed people who understand this is all fantasy and escapism and can easily dissociate the video playing with real life. At least I hope so. Otherwise you all better run away from me. Fast.
I'd be interested in hearing what the course covered with respect to environmental, health and safety issues around nanomaterials. While these new materials bring interesting properties, they could also present some interesting, unexpected health hazards. By virtue of their size, nanoparticles can cross the blood/brain barrier. For some materials this new route of entry could be the difference between toxic and nontoxic. Materials that previously were thought of as nontoxic in the micron and above particle range could now have toxic effects. - Material data safety sheets generally don't consider a material's particle size, except to state "dusty" type warnings.
That the nanoparticles can have this new route of entry is proven - that this results in new toxic effects for previously nontoxic compounds is not (at least not that I've seen in the lit) - so there may be no issue - or there may be a big issue. Hopefully we don't find out the asbestos way where we make the material ubiquitous then be stuck with huge remediation and civil lawsuit issues!
As with most of these biz model or software patents this one seems trivially easy to get around. It seems like *any* type of human intervention anywhere in the process and it's no longer "a computer system" as required by claim 1. So have the whole process automated as described by the patent, but have some minimum wage flunky approve of one step in the process by hitting a return key. Now you're outside the scope of the patent. I'm sure there are more creative ways of getting around this patent, but it doesn't sound like too big of a deal. And, no, this patent does not prevent you from looking up receipients' addresses or zip codes or calling them. You, yourself, can do anything you want. If you write code to completely automate the process, then you need to read the patent and figure out what step you'll do differently to be outside the scope -this shouldn't be too taxing. Process patents generally are pretty weak and the burdon will be on Amazon to prove someone is infriging (not the other way around).
Just an aside: I took a two hour patent tutorial today on Patent Prosecution. One thing I didn't realize is that the burden of proof is on the Examiner to prove why an application shouldn't be a patent - not on the inventor to prove why it should be a patent. The laws govening why something shouldn't be a patent are actually quite simple - however interpretation of these laws have kept patent lawyers happy for many years.
" You know the patent is complete bullshit when they start adding in things like:
various modifications may be made without deviating from the spirit and scope of the invention"
Nope, this is standard patent language. This is to prevent someone from claiming something like "I did this on a web page with a black background which isn't specifically covered in the patent spec and therefore I'm not infringing."
If you read the rest of the paragraph, the patent coverage is bounded by what's in the claims.
I'm not sticking up for this or any other software patent - but the language you attack can be seen in many patents and is put there to restrict trivial changes from escaping infringement.
On Dec 31, 1999 my wife and I threw a New Year's Eve party at our house. As we closed in on midnight we handed out the bubbly and had everybody downstairs in the basement watching the ball drop in Times Square on TV. My wife then causually picked up the TV remote while I drifted over to the light switch. At the stroke of midnight she turned off the TV while I turned off the lights. A collective gasp rose up from our guests - we turned everything back on after about 10 seconds. So all in all the Y2K expense wasn't a waste at all for us since it allowed us to successfully pull off a good practical joke.
Slashdot Mirror
That is all
... is amazing.
"Microsoft's patent here seems obvious..."
Really? well, I don't know about the inner workings of all cell phones, but I've yet seen a model that I can silence with a single instant button touch or one that uses an accelerometer to transmit a single clear command to the phone. -- Others may come up with examples which is great. Third parties can now (or soon) file with the USPTO to put prior art not considered by the examiner into the official record. This is a very recent change and I don't recall the details. It may be active just for business patents right now, but eventually all patent apps will be included and this one likely won't be examined before that rule is opened to all patents. So prep your arguments now! In any case the mere existence of accelerometers probably would not constitute obviousness which seems to be the main point being made by most.
"...and should have never been granted"
Well, it hasn't. This is only an application published 18 months after filing. With the current backlog in the USPTO, it won't be examined for another 2 years.
..but leads to really bad behaviors in a static or shrinking organization.
The large company I work for has just scrapped it after about 10 yrs when HR finally heard the pleas of managers.
Survival when the org is static or shrinking includes understanding what is the "currency" of your manager and *all the other managers* who have teams that are pooled with yours. Get known as a high achiever not just with your manager but the others. At least in our company there would be an annual meeting of those managers at some point to work out the rankings in there respective organizations to have the parent org come out to the required distributions. Horse trading ensues. Being known by your manager's peers helps you in that meeting.
I'm late to the party, here, but the parent comment is *not* +5 Insightful, it's 0 Has no clue about the patent system. You cannot patent ideas. An idea must be reduced to practice in some novel way in order to considered for a patent. The problem is that the US Patent office started to hand out patents for computer software and business models. Computer software is rightly copyrighted, not patented. And patenting business models (which is patenting ideas -not inventions) is simply an atrocity that is eroding the societal benefits of the Patent System.
"the standard for giving a patent should be that no one else is likely to come up with that idea for the next 20 years assuming no patent system to motivate them."
This is wrong on so many levels it's not even worth addressing.
As exemplified by the summary, there's a pervasive misunderstanding on Slashdot on how patents work. Just because someone is able to patent one method in the field of X does *not* exclude others from practicing in the field of X.
Don't get me wrong - method patents like this stink worse than the NY Giant's defense in the 4th quarter, but they are generally pretty easy to avoid by simply doing one step differently. Rival companies do this all the time with ligit process patents.
"Shouldn't 'property' owner needs to pay 'property' tax?"
At least for patents, the property owner does pay a property tax. There are some fairly steep fees to keep a patent in force paid periodically through the life of the patent. If you don't pay the fee, it goes into the public domain.
A single country's fees aren't too bad, but enforcing a patent worldwide over the life of the patent can run you way north of $100,000. Many opt for the just the countries that will take the majority of the market: US, EP with UK, Germany, France, JP.
Do the submitters actually RTFA? Dr. Demento's name was dropped in trying to put context around Prof. Tom Lehrer (not sure why you need to see Dr. D's name to understand who Lehrer is). BTW I think Dr. Demento has only a masters degree and was an A&R guy at one time - one of the least geeky jobs ever.
As an research chemist for a large company, I have had to teach myself the unique language of machine translated Japanese for when I'm in literature search mode. We pay $30 a pop for an instantaneous machine translated JP patent through a web-based service. The service is tuned to patent phrases so not as bad as Engrish, but it takes getting used to. The translations are good enough to get the gist, but if the reference is going to be used as prior art for a patent filing, we'll spring for a human translation which costs a whole lot more and takes a lot more time to get. I wonder how this copier would stack up against the service we use in a cost/benefit analysis?
"Someday homeowners will even be able to print sheets of these solar cells with inexpensive home-based inkjet printers."
"The team combined carbon nanotubes with tiny carbon buckyballs (fullerenes)
Whooboy! I wonder what that print cartridge is going to cost!
This patent issued in 10 Dec 1991. At that time in the US, a patent was in force 17 years after issue - so that patent becomes public domain in Dec 2008 giving it another 20 months. Since then, when the US changed its rules a few years ago to get closer to the practice in the rest of the world, new patents are now in force for 20 years from the date of application.
Sorry to nitpick, here, but this is not a "published paper" as described in the parent post which implies some sort of scholarly work. As others have pointed out, this ground has been well-plowed before and there are no citations. This is an "educational resource" provided by the U of Chicago - reuse of the ideas are free, and you only need author's permission to reproduce charts, etc, and you can't, of course, freely incorporate the exact text into something you are going to sell.
It's a pretty good site, actually, IMHO. Archive is worth a couple of hours of browsing.
From the home page:
"The University of Chicago, through a consortium of 14 leading educational and cultural institutions called Fathom, provided high-quality, free educational resources on the Internet from January 2000 through March 2003.
This Library archive offers access to the complete range of free content developed for Fathom by University of Chicago faculty, researchers, and departments. Feel free to browse this archive of online learning resources, which include lectures, articles, interviews, and exhibits.
Faculty interested in finding other venues to disseminate materials for educational outreach should contact Stephen Gabel, Associate Provost, University of Chicago (sgabel@uchicago.edu, 702-0790)."
Of course no one here knows the specifics of your case, but this type of clause is in place not to steal your inventions, but to protect both parties.
The company's side: They pay you to help them develop a widgit or process that the company hopes to commercialize. During the process of your helping some valuable intellectual property is developed. Hopefully before the relationship you both decided who "owns" that property and how the company will get to use it - either by taking ownership from you or by getting a license from you for a reasonable cost. Now, what the company doesn't want to happen is to get that far and then have you pull dominating prior Invention #2 from your ass that you've kept hidden from them that prevents the company from practicing the art you've developed with them. This will gum up the whole commercialization process. - this happens a lot and several companies have been burned by it. Thus the company wants you to document related art up front so that the company can take into account that they'll have to negotiate the license of dominating prior Invention #2 in the work contract.
Your side: You have lots of stuff running around in your head or in progress, but it's not protected by a patent or copyright or whatever. You are now entering a relationship with a company that could use those ideas, but are paying you for something else, i.e., the *field* of the NDA does not cover the field of these ideas. If you never disclose these other ideas, there's no issue. But if you do disclose them - they aren't covered by the NDA and you could be screwed. However, if those ideas are specifically stated in the NDA, even if they are outside the field, then you'll be OK as identifying them as covered - the ideas will still be "yours".
The term of the NDA can be longer than 1 yr. That's negotiable. There's also usually two terms - one term during which you both can disclose info (if it's a two-way)- this usually is 1yr with some renewing mechanism. But there's a second term that is the length of time both of you need to hold the information secret - which is usually 5 yrs, sometimes as long as 10 yrs. The company cannot "steal" your ideas after the term. If you disclosed these ideas to the company *properly* you have now forever "poisoned" the company with respect to that idea. Proper disclosure should be explicitely defined in the NDA but usually means in writing on paper (not electronically) with CONFIDENTIAL written on the page and you keeping a copy. If the company tries to patent it without including you, you can go after them. However if you never patent the idea in a reasonable period, the company can, of course practice it - but they can't ever get a patent on it to exclude others without you being named as an (or the only) inventor. I work in R&D in a big company and we are paranoid at getting poisened in this fashion. It's one of the risks that needs to be managed before entering a relationship with smart people like you who can often greatly shorten development time. Of course, if the NDA is two-way the company can "poison" you in the same way - although this is rare since companies don't like disclosing anything outside of the NDA's field.
Disclosure through an NDA does not start the clock ticking for getting a patent - it's a private disclosure, not a public disclosure. However, you do have the risk that the company will publically disclose the idea - they've violated the NDA and can be sued, but you will now not get a patent unless you apply within a year.
In the end, the NDA is just a piece of paper - a good working relationship requires trust on both sides. If you feel the company is going to screw you, don't work with them. If the big company thinks you won't hold their disclosed IP confidential, or will not be upfront in disclosing potentially blocking ideas or art, they won't work with you.
Dude, RTFA! not theft, but robbery. I'm sure in SF as in any major city there are plenty of laptop thefts. Robbery is a much bolder crime. The point is that WiFi hotspots are beacons flashing to all criminals bold enough to commit robbery that there are $1000-$2000 articles out in plain site - It's pretty tough to go to a hotspot location and conceal your laptop as you would a valuable when you are in a place where you might be robbed.
I'll assume your "carrying a laptop = you are 5x less likely to get murdered" was a weak attempt a humor and you really aren't that innumerate.
In common terms it may "sound" like an explosion, but this term has a strict definition in science, which is what the author of TFA was refering to.
In an explosion there is a detonation (or pressure) wave that travels from the site faster than the speed of sound - this indeed is what causes most of the damage in an explosion. I think an overpressure wave of around 1 psi will kill you or flatten a house - but I don't remember the specifics. These come from "high explosives" as a previous poster pointed out.
The Challenger was a "deflagration" which is defined as burning rapidly without generating a high pressure wave. Compounds that lead to deflagration are classified as "low explosives". Still very dangerous and destructive, but the damage is generally caused by heat (and flying objects if the deflagration was confined to a closed vessel that ruptured from the rise in pressure due to heating gases).
When a vessel is destroyed by deflagration, it generally rips open at a failure point or line. If a vessel is destroyed by explosion, it generally is obliterated into zillions of fragments (called shrapnel!)
Isn't this the good thing about capitalism? The Market will answer the question as to whether $2.49 is too high a price. If Sprint has done their homework they've had employees sweat the details of trying to predict the acceptable price point for their service. If they charge too little, they leave money on the table; if they charge too much, few people buy the offering - then you'll either see the price go down or Sprint retract the offering. Basic Econ/Marketing. Too high for YOU is not necessarily too high a price for the whole market. If Sprint meets their sales expectations then the price was just right.
Wow. The "You may also be interested in these items..." portion is completely off the mark for this Amazon item. ...
Got It.
Nope, Got that
Hmm. Got that, too.
Nope, got it.
got that one covered.
Shouldn't it be redirecting you to other SF?
Anonymous Coward Flamer: "Like I am going to donate to a bunch of communists. PBS I yes, but no way in hell am I donating to NPR."
Oh, sure. Now you'll contribute since Tomlinson has committed to turn PBS into GOP BS
For those with a brain who like to read the original sources instead of the popular media's hack job of the summaries here are (I think) the two opposing studies.
Dmitri Williams (University of Illinois, Urbana)
"Internet Fantasy Violence: A Test of Aggression in an Online Game" Communication Monographs Vol. 72, No. 2, June 2005, pp.217-233, (this is a pdf) which says there's no link
AND in the other Corner
Well, no one paper, actually. The APA "Committee on Violence in Video Games and Interactive Media" appearently did a metastudy of several papers on the topic and come up with a resolution (pdf) and press release. At the end of the resolution is a bib of the papers taken into consideration. I certainly don't care enough to plow through all those - but William's paper isn't in the bib. I suspect there was lots of group thought going in that committee -lots of the papers were written by members of the committee.
I suspect that you can't make a blanket statement on video games. Folks with a predisposition for violence might be pushed over the edge to real life violent acts from habitual video play; whereas there are, I'm sure, many more level-headed people who understand this is all fantasy and escapism and can easily dissociate the video playing with real life. At least I hope so. Otherwise you all better run away from me. Fast.
I'd be interested in hearing what the course covered with respect to environmental, health and safety issues around nanomaterials. While these new materials bring interesting properties, they could also present some interesting, unexpected health hazards.
By virtue of their size, nanoparticles can cross the blood/brain barrier. For some materials this new route of entry could be the difference between toxic and nontoxic. Materials that previously were thought of as nontoxic in the micron and above particle range could now have toxic effects. - Material data safety sheets generally don't consider a material's particle size, except to state "dusty" type warnings.
That the nanoparticles can have this new route of entry is proven - that this results in new toxic effects for previously nontoxic compounds is not (at least not that I've seen in the lit) - so there may be no issue - or there may be a big issue. Hopefully we don't find out the asbestos way where we make the material ubiquitous then be stuck with huge remediation and civil lawsuit issues!
As with most of these biz model or software patents this one seems trivially easy to get around. It seems like *any* type of human intervention anywhere in the process and it's no longer "a computer system" as required by claim 1. So have the whole process automated as described by the patent, but have some minimum wage flunky approve of one step in the process by hitting a return key. Now you're outside the scope of the patent. I'm sure there are more creative ways of getting around this patent, but it doesn't sound like too big of a deal.
And, no, this patent does not prevent you from looking up receipients' addresses or zip codes or calling them. You, yourself, can do anything you want. If you write code to completely automate the process, then you need to read the patent and figure out what step you'll do differently to be outside the scope -this shouldn't be too taxing. Process patents generally are pretty weak and the burdon will be on Amazon to prove someone is infriging (not the other way around).
Just an aside:
I took a two hour patent tutorial today on Patent Prosecution. One thing I didn't realize is that the burden of proof is on the Examiner to prove why an application shouldn't be a patent - not on the inventor to prove why it should be a patent. The laws govening why something shouldn't be a patent are actually quite simple - however interpretation of these laws have kept patent lawyers happy for many years.
" You know the patent is complete bullshit when they start adding in things like:
various modifications may be made without deviating from the spirit and scope of the invention"
Nope, this is standard patent language. This is to prevent someone from claiming something like "I did this on a web page with a black background which isn't specifically covered in the patent spec and therefore I'm not infringing."
If you read the rest of the paragraph, the patent coverage is bounded by what's in the claims.
I'm not sticking up for this or any other software patent - but the language you attack can be seen in many patents and is put there to restrict trivial changes from escaping infringement.
Suddenly a large segment of the US population would be unable to view TV broadcasts?
no reality shows. no MTV. no Fox Lies^H^H^H^H News.
Sounds like the best damn piece of legislation to come from Congress in a long time!
Damn near killed us all as I remember it.
On Dec 31, 1999 my wife and I threw a New Year's Eve party at our house. As we closed in on midnight we handed out the bubbly and had everybody downstairs in the basement watching the ball drop in Times Square on TV. My wife then causually picked up the TV remote while I drifted over to the light switch. At the stroke of midnight she turned off the TV while I turned off the lights. A collective gasp rose up from our guests - we turned everything back on after about 10 seconds. So all in all the Y2K expense wasn't a waste at all for us since it allowed us to successfully pull off a good practical joke.