That sounds good. You actually get full say in who is allowed to do what, and "give permission" sounds like the permissions are secure by default.
Prepare to see a new waiver in the stack of crap you have to sign when going to a new doctor's office requiring you to give permission for full access to your records for any purpose not prohibited by law.
This will happen because doctors will not want to spend time having you okay access to each locked off section of your records that they might need, and they sure as heck don't want to spend time arguing with you about it when it's something you find embarrassing and don't know may be relevant.
If Speaker Cable A sounds better than Speaker Cable B to me, why souldn't I buy it? It makes me think I've bought the better product.
Because even if you know that the difference is psychological, you are giving money to scam artists who sell these cables at a ridiculous profit margin and then turn around and scam people who honestly believe in their horsefeed.
In other words, you're giving money to con artists to help fleece other people.
Well, hell, I'm glad your entertainment is worth seeing someone killed. I mean, aggravated rape, child molestation, and other non-murder crimes we don't execute people for are nothing compared to delaying or spoiling your little fun.
I'm sorry. I don't mean to be rude, but I read Slashdot because I don't have time to read a dozen articles about nonsense. I instead read a quick summary and fire off a comment if it strikes me as worth it. I've done so for many years, and will continue to do so.
You mean you're actually proud enough of spouting your mouth off in ignorance to defend it as the superior option to either (a) shutting up or (b) doing a little reading? Give this man a management position! He's obviously more important that the people who read his words.
There's not much I can do about that without adding a 25th hour to the day.
You know what would save even more time -- not posting. With all that not posting, you might actually find the time to read something -- especially if you're posting replies to other people's replies to your posts.
Yeesh... What a disgustingly indolent and contemptuous attitude does it take to not be a little ashamed of being wrong because you didn't do your homework? I know I often shoot my mouth off on Slashdot without having read the article, but at least I have the humility to be a little ashamed when I'm caught at it and not fire off a comment about how I can't be bothered with it.
The original title (from Firehose) is "Thousands Help To Map Light Pollution". Somehow the editors have managed to make the headline worse by dropping the first word. Good job!
The original title makes it sound like the task is pretty much done by the time you've read it; much like "Thousands Rally in DC."
The new title seems more like a plea for us to chip in on the project. I think it's an improvement.
Honestly, this was another classic case of someone with money looking at a wildly successful and completely unprofitable business and snapping it up without some serious thought to how to make it profitable or more importantly if it was possible to make it profitable.
None of these businesses that provided expensive service for free and whose selling point was that it was free have ever managed to become profitable. eBay should've known better when buying a business in 2005.
One should realize that the Tea Act, against which the colonists ultimately protested, actually *lowered* the price of British Tea.
*Cough* Well, that's one way to spin it, I suppose. What bothered the colonists was that it lowered the price of tea from only the East India Trading Company by removing all taxes and tariffs from the trade it alone did -- in other words harming the businesses of its competitors who participated in the act of rebellion / corporate sabotage.
That's all right there in the Wikipedia article you linked to (with an extra / at the end.) I personally recommend reading up more on the Boston Tea Party itself, in particular the events that led up to it.
Burma's the name that the last democratic regime in the country called it. Myanmar's what the military junta renamed it in 1989. Burmese opposition groups still call it Burma because they don't recognize the legitimacy of the military regime.
You can read more about it here. Personally, I use Burma. Let a legitimate regime change the English name one ever comes around.
This is not a 'pro-democratic' protest. People are protesting against drastic increase in petrol prices - from 28 cents per litre to 38. Nothing more.
You know, the same thing could've been said about the Boston Tea Party over the price of stamps. Sometimes it's just the straw that breaks that camel's back that turns discontent over economic matters into full-blown revolution.
Really? I tend to find that most people with brains that have gone greenish are always shuffling about seeking to use the brains of others, and they tend to pretty inefficient about it -- what with all the biting and chewing.
Though, they do seemed to have minimized their effort on clear communication...
These guys saying that the technology won't be here within their lifetime have to be ancient or just forgetting how rapidly the pace at which technology accelerates has been increasing of late. How long ago was it that this here "Internet" only had a few hundred nodes?
I am not exaggerating when I say that automatic translation from extremely dissimilar languages requires strong AI. You need to be able to guess what a person is thinking from what they're expressing to map it into a different way of expressing themselves. You also need strong AI to understand the flow of conversation when terms are not expressed strongly.
As an example, Japanese doesn't really have a word that maps to "it." They have a word that maps well to "thing," but nothing that matches "it." This is because pronouns in English fulfill the function of referring back to a concept expressed in a previous sentence to place it in short form in the context of the sentence being expressed.
English Example: E1: Hey Frank, did you buy that TV yet? E2: Yeah, I bought it yesterday.
"Japanese" Example: J1: Hey Hiro, already you that TV did buy? [or still you that TV haven't bought?] J2: Yeah, yesterday bought. [Note the lack of "I" and "it!"]
Languages like English make translation easy in this regard because you have a generic pronoun to "hold the place" of a specific subject or object. You don't have to know what it is -- you just fill it in. In Japanese, if the conversation were to continue about the TV, the word TV would never be brought up again until the subject of a sentence changed away to something else.
Often, you can have a conversation in Japanese where the subject is never explicitly spoken because it's obvious from the context of the speakers. Given the frequency of homophones in the language (particularly in conjugated forms of verbs), this can make translation maddening if you don't know what the speakers are talking about (because you can't see what they can see or don't know what they know).
This is most frustrating when you're dealing with an author who is using ambiguous or cryptic speech by off-screen characters to give a sense of foreboding or foreshadowing. The conversation is just as cryptic to a native Japanese speaker as it is to us, but we literally cannot translate it to English without knowing the secrets ahead of time because grammatically correct English cannot be that vague!
Anyway, I'm starting to veer off from my original point which is to say that accurate translation requires modeling of the minds of the speaker which requires strong AI. A simple dictionary + grammar rule-set or even a theoretically complete database of possible sentences and phrases will never be able to achieve translation because of the inherent differences in the levels of specificity in the two languages that requires you to model and understand the thoughts and intentions of the speakers.
Frankly I've mostly given up on strong AI within my lifetime after so many decades of empty promises, so I don't see accurate automated translators coming any time soon.
A final thought: While I've harped on the difficulty of going from Japanese to English, there are some tricky parts of going the other way -- I just don't have as much experience. The one time I wrote a letter in Japanese for a class that included words I didn't know beforehand, I ended up accidentally using words that sounded bizarre and in one case insulting because words in different languages don't map 100% to each other. A word that means the same thing in Japanese and English for one use may not mean the same thing in another. For example, you can use both "karu" and "kiru" to mean "cut" when talking about hair, but you'd use "karu" for mowing grass or shearing sheep, and "kiru" for chopping up fish and accidentally cutting your finger. The relationship between words is a Venn diagram, and computer translation gets that wrong when it's unable to realize what the (omitted) subject or object of the sentence was.
Japanese and English (my languages) offer a great example, especially as it pertains to machine translation. Whereas English is a subject-predicate language, where basically all the information is encoded in the language stream, Japanese is a topic-comment language, where, once set, the "subject" is not re-stated until it changes. Beginning Anglophone learners of Japanese make the mistake of putting a "wa" to denote what they think of as the subject in every sentence, when it does not need to be there. "Wa" is a topic marker; not a subject marker.
This is excellent terminology to discuss the concept. Where did you get it from?
Either you are old, or a bit naive. I think in the next 10 years we will see significant improvement.
Yeah, 'cause researchers have long promised us that AI will reach us in 10 years. <sarcasm>
Seriously, I think you underestimate the difficulty of translating. Have you done any major foreign-language translation -- especially of conversational speech? My experience has primarily been with Japanese and English, and I'll tell you right now that it can be nightmarish.
Sentence fragments are the worst part. Japanese has a completely different word order from English. All modifiers (including phrases and clauses) come before the word they modify, and the language has a Subject-Object-Verb order. "I just saw the man who stole my friend's watch last Tuesday" becomes "Just I Last Tuesday friend's watch stole man saw." Now try translating that from Japanese to English when the sentence is cut in half.
Worse, the language has very different levels of allowed vagueness. "Complete" sentences in Japanese can contain just a descriptor or an action without any specification of who did/was what. Conversely, translating "3 of them" in English to Japanese is hard because you have to know "3 of what?" to know what counting suffix to use.
Another problem is that many very different words sound exactly the same when conjugated to the gerund or perfective forms. English has a number of homonyms, but there are MANY more opportunities for mix-ups if you don't have access to kanji to tell the semantic meaning apart because Japanese has a much more limited range of phonemes. For example, take "katte" which is the gerund form of the verbs "kau" (buy), "kau" (keep/raise), "karu" (cut), "karu" (spur on), and "katsu" (win). That's 5 completely different verbs that conjugate to the same sound. If they're written phonetically or your going from speech, then you have to be able to understand the meaning behind the words to translate. (Did I mention earlier that you may not have an explicit subject and object to go off of?)
Then you get into issues of translating things like politeness levels, different ways of addressing people, and other concepts that don't translate well into English or concepts like singular vs. plural that are dropped in going to Japanese. Let's not even consider puns and poetry!
These are not trivial issues. An automatic translator would need to somehow be able to conceptualize what a person is trying to speak about, which would require understanding the story being told and an ability to predict where they are going with it. This will require strong AI.
Accurate and intelligible translation is an art -- not a science -- because it requires an intuitive and empathetic ability to understand the mind of the speaker well enough to map their thoughts into a different method of expression.
In the case of your wipers example it's just a question of what the patent covers. If it's just the control system, then that component is in violation all by itself, and its manufacturer is at fault. If it's just the practical application of the control system then it's the auto manufacturer, because they put all the bits together.
The problem is that patents are not restricted to only describing one thing. A patent can describe both a control system and an application thereof in its claims; it doesn't have to be purely one or the other, and you can describe multiple novel components. That's where this whole mess originates.
Ummm you sue who is actually producing the violating item.
That's the bottom of the supply chain argument I mentioned earlier. It seems the easiest argument, but what happens if the innovation is based on the use of the component in a final product and not an intermediary one?
For example, let's imagine a windshield wiper that automatically adjusts its speed to the rate of rainfall. This would require at least two components -- a sensor for the rain and a controller that acts on said information. Assume that we don't have existing parts for each of these.
The patent for this would describe: A) The sensor for detecting rain. B) The motor control mechanism. C) The method of tying the two together to produce the result.
In this case there are at least three parties that could be infringing on the patent: A) The sensor maker. B) The motor control maker. C) Whoever makes the system to tie them together (most likely the auto manufacturer).
If you can only collect from the first people in the chain, then does it become impossible to patent non-obvious ways of combining off-the-shelf parts such as a system to auto-adjust your wiper speed to the rain? If you could only collect from the last person in the chain, then who is the last person in the chain? The auto manufacturer? The auto dealer?
The RIM patents are very similar to this, if I recall correctly. You have the hardware interface portion of the patent, the back-end server portion of the patent, and the service portion of the patent. Who must you be limited to suing, A, B, C, or some combination of them?
While it seems sensible that infringement should only happen at one point in the supply chain for a good or service, coming up with a hard and fast rule for where this should happen is going to be hard and may take decades of future Supreme Court rulings to nail down.
Of course with a bit of maneuvering that violating producer could be a shell company out of the courts jurisdiction with physical production in china at which case the issue becomes more complex as you mentioned.
That's not so much of a problem. You just sue them in federal court, and if they don't pony up the licensing fee, you sue to bar entry of their goods into the country. That's the ultimate (and only) power that a government has over a multinational or extranational entity -- the power to bar them from doing business in their country unless they play by their rules.
A lawyer acting in your best interests involves you not being in court anymore and protected in the future, which is entirely counter to their best interests of being in court and continuing to bill someone.
Not really. That's a common misperception, but the rules of the courts are strongly tilted to force people into some form of non-judicial settlement. Of course, big corporate lawyers have many, many other things that they can bill over outside of the courtroom, so your point isn't entirely moot there.
The best you can do is get a lawyer from out of town so that the opposition's lawyer isn't his golfing buddy and he might actually do a decent job of representing you.
Not really. Acrimonious relations between opposing council can often lead to cases being unnecessarily drawn out and in you getting billed a lot more. People who know each other are likely to to realize the strength of the others' case given the history of the local courts and push towards a settlement instead of a protracted court battle.
Plus, you might find that someone from out of town doesn't know the local rules and practices and irritates the judge by doing something that considered a waste of the courts' time.
The real problem is who do you have to sue based on what your patent claims.
Let's take the example used in the summary of a component used in a motor in a windshield wiper blade. What does the new component do that made it patentable?
- Is the innovation purely in the use in a motor? (Reducing wear and tear?) - Or maybe is the innovation in its effect on the wiper? (A smoother wiping motion with less noise?) - Or maybe is the innovation in how the car performs? (Allowing a more aerodynamically friendly wiper?)
What if the patented item does all three and claims all three things? Does a SCOTUS decision ruling that you can only collect once open the door for a finger-pointing exercise between defendants (something the courts like to avoid) in trying assign infringement? Does going straight to the bottom of the supply chain always make sense? (For example, what if it doesn't do anything for the motor itself but only for the higher level functions?)
These are very important balance issues that the SCOTUS will have to consider.
It's just the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and I don't see anything in the article that's a shocking new revelation about it. The article's just a rehash of an idea that's been around since the 50s.
As someone who actually has a bachelors chemistry degree, and has been using it for 15 years, I can report that your impression of the job market from a freshman's perspective was off.
Well then I'm glad to say that I was wrong, and that my experience was not indicative of the field as a whole. It kind of makes me nostalgic thinking about the possibilities of what could've been; I really did love the subject matter, and it's good to hear that people pursuing it aren't necessarily "in for a penny, in for a pound" when it comes to requiring advanced degrees to get a job.
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds good. You actually get full say in who is allowed to do what, and "give permission" sounds like the permissions are secure by default.
Prepare to see a new waiver in the stack of crap you have to sign when going to a new doctor's office requiring you to give permission for full access to your records for any purpose not prohibited by law.
This will happen because doctors will not want to spend time having you okay access to each locked off section of your records that they might need, and they sure as heck don't want to spend time arguing with you about it when it's something you find embarrassing and don't know may be relevant.
Error: Could not find liver.dll
Seems to be a conflict with Alcohol 120%.
Didn't read the article -- didn't see that you can only bypass it by enabling it for the next reboot after which it returns to normal.
All of the performance penalty -- none of the security benefit.
It's purely crapware at this point. It eats CPU cycles to do nothing useful.
If Speaker Cable A sounds better than Speaker Cable B to me, why souldn't I buy it? It makes me think I've bought the better product.
Because even if you know that the difference is psychological, you are giving money to scam artists who sell these cables at a ridiculous profit margin and then turn around and scam people who honestly believe in their horsefeed.
In other words, you're giving money to con artists to help fleece other people.
I thought you could already do this by buying a Ramones tablature book.
Well, hell, I'm glad your entertainment is worth seeing someone killed. I mean, aggravated rape, child molestation, and other non-murder crimes we don't execute people for are nothing compared to delaying or spoiling your little fun.
I'm sorry. I don't mean to be rude, but I read Slashdot because I don't have time to read a dozen articles about nonsense. I instead read a quick summary and fire off a comment if it strikes me as worth it. I've done so for many years, and will continue to do so.
You mean you're actually proud enough of spouting your mouth off in ignorance to defend it as the superior option to either (a) shutting up or (b) doing a little reading? Give this man a management position! He's obviously more important that the people who read his words.
There's not much I can do about that without adding a 25th hour to the day.
You know what would save even more time -- not posting. With all that not posting, you might actually find the time to read something -- especially if you're posting replies to other people's replies to your posts.
Yeesh... What a disgustingly indolent and contemptuous attitude does it take to not be a little ashamed of being wrong because you didn't do your homework? I know I often shoot my mouth off on Slashdot without having read the article, but at least I have the humility to be a little ashamed when I'm caught at it and not fire off a comment about how I can't be bothered with it.
The original title (from Firehose) is "Thousands Help To Map Light Pollution". Somehow the editors have managed to make the headline worse by dropping the first word. Good job!
The original title makes it sound like the task is pretty much done by the time you've read it; much like "Thousands Rally in DC."
The new title seems more like a plea for us to chip in on the project. I think it's an improvement.
Definitely lots of stars here! And still NINE planets! :-)
You mean eight planets, and a binary dwarf planet, right?
Honestly, this was another classic case of someone with money looking at a wildly successful and completely unprofitable business and snapping it up without some serious thought to how to make it profitable or more importantly if it was possible to make it profitable.
None of these businesses that provided expensive service for free and whose selling point was that it was free have ever managed to become profitable. eBay should've known better when buying a business in 2005.
One should realize that the Tea Act, against which the colonists ultimately protested, actually *lowered* the price of British Tea.
*Cough* Well, that's one way to spin it, I suppose. What bothered the colonists was that it lowered the price of tea from only the East India Trading Company by removing all taxes and tariffs from the trade it alone did -- in other words harming the businesses of its competitors who participated in the act of rebellion / corporate sabotage.
That's all right there in the Wikipedia article you linked to (with an extra / at the end.) I personally recommend reading up more on the Boston Tea Party itself, in particular the events that led up to it.
Burma's the name that the last democratic regime in the country called it. Myanmar's what the military junta renamed it in 1989. Burmese opposition groups still call it Burma because they don't recognize the legitimacy of the military regime.
You can read more about it here. Personally, I use Burma. Let a legitimate regime change the English name one ever comes around.
This is not a 'pro-democratic' protest.
People are protesting against drastic increase in petrol prices - from 28 cents per litre to 38.
Nothing more.
You know, the same thing could've been said about the Boston Tea Party over the price of stamps. Sometimes it's just the straw that breaks that camel's back that turns discontent over economic matters into full-blown revolution.
i gotta green brane, dood
Really? I tend to find that most people with brains that have gone greenish are always shuffling about seeking to use the brains of others, and they tend to pretty inefficient about it -- what with all the biting and chewing.
Though, they do seemed to have minimized their effort on clear communication...
These guys saying that the technology won't be here within their lifetime have to be ancient or just forgetting how rapidly the pace at which technology accelerates has been increasing of late. How long ago was it that this here "Internet" only had a few hundred nodes?
I am not exaggerating when I say that automatic translation from extremely dissimilar languages requires strong AI. You need to be able to guess what a person is thinking from what they're expressing to map it into a different way of expressing themselves. You also need strong AI to understand the flow of conversation when terms are not expressed strongly.
As an example, Japanese doesn't really have a word that maps to "it." They have a word that maps well to "thing," but nothing that matches "it." This is because pronouns in English fulfill the function of referring back to a concept expressed in a previous sentence to place it in short form in the context of the sentence being expressed.
English Example:
E1: Hey Frank, did you buy that TV yet?
E2: Yeah, I bought it yesterday.
"Japanese" Example:
J1: Hey Hiro, already you that TV did buy? [or still you that TV haven't bought?]
J2: Yeah, yesterday bought. [Note the lack of "I" and "it!"]
Languages like English make translation easy in this regard because you have a generic pronoun to "hold the place" of a specific subject or object. You don't have to know what it is -- you just fill it in. In Japanese, if the conversation were to continue about the TV, the word TV would never be brought up again until the subject of a sentence changed away to something else.
Often, you can have a conversation in Japanese where the subject is never explicitly spoken because it's obvious from the context of the speakers. Given the frequency of homophones in the language (particularly in conjugated forms of verbs), this can make translation maddening if you don't know what the speakers are talking about (because you can't see what they can see or don't know what they know).
This is most frustrating when you're dealing with an author who is using ambiguous or cryptic speech by off-screen characters to give a sense of foreboding or foreshadowing. The conversation is just as cryptic to a native Japanese speaker as it is to us, but we literally cannot translate it to English without knowing the secrets ahead of time because grammatically correct English cannot be that vague!
Anyway, I'm starting to veer off from my original point which is to say that accurate translation requires modeling of the minds of the speaker which requires strong AI. A simple dictionary + grammar rule-set or even a theoretically complete database of possible sentences and phrases will never be able to achieve translation because of the inherent differences in the levels of specificity in the two languages that requires you to model and understand the thoughts and intentions of the speakers.
Frankly I've mostly given up on strong AI within my lifetime after so many decades of empty promises, so I don't see accurate automated translators coming any time soon.
A final thought:
While I've harped on the difficulty of going from Japanese to English, there are some tricky parts of going the other way -- I just don't have as much experience. The one time I wrote a letter in Japanese for a class that included words I didn't know beforehand, I ended up accidentally using words that sounded bizarre and in one case insulting because words in different languages don't map 100% to each other. A word that means the same thing in Japanese and English for one use may not mean the same thing in another. For example, you can use both "karu" and "kiru" to mean "cut" when talking about hair, but you'd use "karu" for mowing grass or shearing sheep, and "kiru" for chopping up fish and accidentally cutting your finger. The relationship between words is a Venn diagram, and computer translation gets that wrong when it's unable to realize what the (omitted) subject or object of the sentence was.
Japanese and English (my languages) offer a great example, especially as it pertains to machine translation. Whereas English is a subject-predicate language, where basically all the information is encoded in the language stream, Japanese is a topic-comment language, where, once set, the "subject" is not re-stated until it changes. Beginning Anglophone learners of Japanese make the mistake of putting a "wa" to denote what they think of as the subject in every sentence, when it does not need to be there. "Wa" is a topic marker; not a subject marker.
This is excellent terminology to discuss the concept. Where did you get it from?
Either you are old, or a bit naive. I think in the next 10 years we will see significant improvement.
Yeah, 'cause researchers have long promised us that AI will reach us in 10 years. <sarcasm>
Seriously, I think you underestimate the difficulty of translating. Have you done any major foreign-language translation -- especially of conversational speech? My experience has primarily been with Japanese and English, and I'll tell you right now that it can be nightmarish.
Sentence fragments are the worst part. Japanese has a completely different word order from English. All modifiers (including phrases and clauses) come before the word they modify, and the language has a Subject-Object-Verb order. "I just saw the man who stole my friend's watch last Tuesday" becomes "Just I Last Tuesday friend's watch stole man saw." Now try translating that from Japanese to English when the sentence is cut in half.
Worse, the language has very different levels of allowed vagueness. "Complete" sentences in Japanese can contain just a descriptor or an action without any specification of who did/was what. Conversely, translating "3 of them" in English to Japanese is hard because you have to know "3 of what?" to know what counting suffix to use.
Another problem is that many very different words sound exactly the same when conjugated to the gerund or perfective forms. English has a number of homonyms, but there are MANY more opportunities for mix-ups if you don't have access to kanji to tell the semantic meaning apart because Japanese has a much more limited range of phonemes. For example, take "katte" which is the gerund form of the verbs "kau" (buy), "kau" (keep/raise), "karu" (cut), "karu" (spur on), and "katsu" (win). That's 5 completely different verbs that conjugate to the same sound. If they're written phonetically or your going from speech, then you have to be able to understand the meaning behind the words to translate. (Did I mention earlier that you may not have an explicit subject and object to go off of?)
Then you get into issues of translating things like politeness levels, different ways of addressing people, and other concepts that don't translate well into English or concepts like singular vs. plural that are dropped in going to Japanese. Let's not even consider puns and poetry!
These are not trivial issues. An automatic translator would need to somehow be able to conceptualize what a person is trying to speak about, which would require understanding the story being told and an ability to predict where they are going with it. This will require strong AI.
Accurate and intelligible translation is an art -- not a science -- because it requires an intuitive and empathetic ability to understand the mind of the speaker well enough to map their thoughts into a different method of expression.
In the case of your wipers example it's just a question of what the patent covers. If it's just the control system, then that component is in violation all by itself, and its manufacturer is at fault. If it's just the practical application of the control system then it's the auto manufacturer, because they put all the bits together.
The problem is that patents are not restricted to only describing one thing. A patent can describe both a control system and an application thereof in its claims; it doesn't have to be purely one or the other, and you can describe multiple novel components. That's where this whole mess originates.
Ummm you sue who is actually producing the violating item.
That's the bottom of the supply chain argument I mentioned earlier. It seems the easiest argument, but what happens if the innovation is based on the use of the component in a final product and not an intermediary one?
For example, let's imagine a windshield wiper that automatically adjusts its speed to the rate of rainfall. This would require at least two components -- a sensor for the rain and a controller that acts on said information. Assume that we don't have existing parts for each of these.
The patent for this would describe:
A) The sensor for detecting rain.
B) The motor control mechanism.
C) The method of tying the two together to produce the result.
In this case there are at least three parties that could be infringing on the patent:
A) The sensor maker.
B) The motor control maker.
C) Whoever makes the system to tie them together (most likely the auto manufacturer).
If you can only collect from the first people in the chain, then does it become impossible to patent non-obvious ways of combining off-the-shelf parts such as a system to auto-adjust your wiper speed to the rain? If you could only collect from the last person in the chain, then who is the last person in the chain? The auto manufacturer? The auto dealer?
The RIM patents are very similar to this, if I recall correctly. You have the hardware interface portion of the patent, the back-end server portion of the patent, and the service portion of the patent. Who must you be limited to suing, A, B, C, or some combination of them?
While it seems sensible that infringement should only happen at one point in the supply chain for a good or service, coming up with a hard and fast rule for where this should happen is going to be hard and may take decades of future Supreme Court rulings to nail down.
Of course with a bit of maneuvering that violating producer could be a shell company out of the courts jurisdiction with physical production in china at which case the issue becomes more complex as you mentioned.
That's not so much of a problem. You just sue them in federal court, and if they don't pony up the licensing fee, you sue to bar entry of their goods into the country. That's the ultimate (and only) power that a government has over a multinational or extranational entity -- the power to bar them from doing business in their country unless they play by their rules.
A lawyer acting in your best interests involves you not being in court anymore and protected in the future, which is entirely counter to their best interests of being in court and continuing to bill someone.
Not really. That's a common misperception, but the rules of the courts are strongly tilted to force people into some form of non-judicial settlement. Of course, big corporate lawyers have many, many other things that they can bill over outside of the courtroom, so your point isn't entirely moot there.
The best you can do is get a lawyer from out of town so that the opposition's lawyer isn't his golfing buddy and he might actually do a decent job of representing you.
Not really. Acrimonious relations between opposing council can often lead to cases being unnecessarily drawn out and in you getting billed a lot more. People who know each other are likely to to realize the strength of the others' case given the history of the local courts and push towards a settlement instead of a protracted court battle.
Plus, you might find that someone from out of town doesn't know the local rules and practices and irritates the judge by doing something that considered a waste of the courts' time.
The real problem is who do you have to sue based on what your patent claims.
Let's take the example used in the summary of a component used in a motor in a windshield wiper blade. What does the new component do that made it patentable?
- Is the innovation purely in the use in a motor? (Reducing wear and tear?)
- Or maybe is the innovation in its effect on the wiper? (A smoother wiping motion with less noise?)
- Or maybe is the innovation in how the car performs? (Allowing a more aerodynamically friendly wiper?)
What if the patented item does all three and claims all three things? Does a SCOTUS decision ruling that you can only collect once open the door for a finger-pointing exercise between defendants (something the courts like to avoid) in trying assign infringement? Does going straight to the bottom of the supply chain always make sense? (For example, what if it doesn't do anything for the motor itself but only for the higher level functions?)
These are very important balance issues that the SCOTUS will have to consider.
It happens to be that the answer to life, the universe and everything in that universe is 43
Sounds like prime real estate to me.
It's just the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and I don't see anything in the article that's a shocking new revelation about it. The article's just a rehash of an idea that's been around since the 50s.
As someone who actually has a bachelors chemistry degree, and has been using it for 15 years, I can report that your impression of the job market from a freshman's perspective was off.
Well then I'm glad to say that I was wrong, and that my experience was not indicative of the field as a whole. It kind of makes me nostalgic thinking about the possibilities of what could've been; I really did love the subject matter, and it's good to hear that people pursuing it aren't necessarily "in for a penny, in for a pound" when it comes to requiring advanced degrees to get a job.
We can still pity the Nukees though, right?