Few people really want nuclear power run like Monty Burns one...
I'd say that was a pretty efficient operation. You didn't even have to type in "Y-E-S" every time you wanted to vent off some gas to prevent an explosion.
Patents applied for (or claiming continuity) before 8 June 1995 have a term of either 17 years from date of issue or 20 years from the filing date (or the earliest filing date in the continuity chain), whichever is longer. On or after that date, the term expires 20 years from the filing date (or the earliest filing date in the continuity chain). This is modified by any patent term adjustment printed on the face of the patent, which results from some kinds of delays during examination caused by the USPTO. If the applicant filed a terminal disclaimer in the patent, then they have disclaimed additional patent term beyond the expiration of some other patent because of "double patenting" issues. Additionally, the patentee must pay maintenance fees at 3.5, 7.5, and 11.5 years after the date of issue to avoid abandonment of the patent.
And that's not even all of the potential caveats related to patent term expiration.
In this case, of course, the patent in question expired a few years ago at least. A clean room implementation of that patent (to avoid copyright issues) will have no patent hassles arising from that particular patent. There could be other patents covering related techniques or improvements on that same technique that are still in force, although the risks associated with that are similar to the risks faced by anyone writing code these days.
My wife and I are already legally married, but our ceremony isn't for a few months. We could be "married by" a parrot. Or an iPod. Or no one at all. Or, as is the case here, Dr. Sbaitso.
HOW DOES ARE ALREADY LEGALLY MARRIED BUT OUR CEREMONY ISN'T FOR CHANGE YOUR LIFE?
Wired reported on this a few days ago (and there was a Slashdot article about related information at the time, too), noting that Paypal handed over the information last December.
Exactly how did PayPal show its evilness this time? Their website was DDoSed, which is against the law, and they had evidence showing where the attacks originated, which they turned over to authorities. What's evil about that?
This is why I look at the negative reviews first to see if there are any particularly frequent problems with the product.
Of course, a few years ago when I was apartment shopping online, I found that this tactic doesn't always work so well. On one side, you have the management companies posting shill positive reviews for their apartments, and on the other side, you have disgruntled evicted tenants posting overblown negative reviews for those apartments.
Iran wants nukes so they can threaten Israel first and foremost, and after that, various Arab states in the region. There's really nothing more to it than that.
The real concern, though, is whether hard-line Hezbollah-supporting elements will hand over an Iranian nuke to terrorists for actual use in Israel. And that's why you'll eventually see Israeli military action in Iran, whether or not the US gives their blessing.
It depends on how it's being used. If they're comparing a person's face outside security with their face upon boarding to ensure that someone isn't somehow allowing another person to board in their place, then the system will have very few problems and can be verified manually if a person is flagged at the gate.
On the other hand, if it's being used to detect whether a person matches a huge list of hundreds of thousands or more people, then there will be false positives on a regular basis and more unnecessary grief for travelers, most likely affecting the same people over and over (unless they get plastic surgery).
In the case of patents, actually, most of the US statutory principles behind patentability have their roots in judicial decisions stretching back almost 200 years in some cases, all of which stem from the Constitutional provision empowering Congress "To promote the Progress of... useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to... Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective... Discoveries."
Subsequent to various court decisions, Congress chose to codify most of those decisions in particular ways to further define certain requirements. There are a few cases where court decisions were countermanded by Congressional action, such as 35 USC 112, sixth paragraph, and the bit in 35 USC 103(a) about "patentability shall not be negatived...," but for the most part, when it comes to patentability, Congress has just gone along with what the courts have said.
They visited a company that makes software to find duplicate patents, and they said that about 30% of patents granted are duplicates of the same idea.
Do they mean in a legally distinguishable sense, or in a "we used the same or a very similar specification but have different claims in each patent directed to our several different inventions" sense? Forgive me for being suspicious of the correctness of this statement, but very few people on Slashdot (and off Slashdot, for that matter) understand how to read a patent and how to understand what it actually covers.
Actually, it happened on Washington, DC's Metro system two years ago. A problem with a train proximity sensing system resulted in a failure to engage automatic braking on one train when it approached another train farther ahead that had broken down. In that case, there was evidence that the operator, shortly before her death, had attempted to stop her train manually, but didn't have enough advance warning to stop in time. Eight other people were killed, and in response, WMATA ordered operators to run their trains in manual mode at all times.
I call killing one million people in Iraq for oil and dollar supremacy irresponsible.
I call it irresponsible to inflate reported numbers of Iraqi deaths by an order of magnitude and to implicate coalition members as causing most of those deaths rather than AQI, Syria, and Iran. If we can't trust your judgment when it comes to getting simple, verifiable facts correct, why should we trust your judgment when it comes to an assessment of whether releasing the NATO documents would save lives rather than cause further bloodshed, especially when you haven't even seen the documents in question?
That's the idea, although it doesn't really prevent the expense of a lawsuit against someone. You would provide whoever got sued with evidence that you had notified the applicant of prior art, and if it turns out they never disclosed the information to the USPTO during prosecution, then the court might find that the applicant had exhibited "inequitable conduct" during prosecution and thereby obtained the patent by fraud, which sometimes invalidates the patent.
The legal question these days, though, is which prior art references does the applicant have to disclose to the USPTO. For example, if the reference doesn't render the issued claims anticipated or obvious, the patent might not get invalidated during litigation even if the applicant didn't disclose the reference to the USPTO. Or maybe it would get invalidated. Apparently, this depends on who's sitting on the Federal Circuit panel if the case gets appealed, phase of the moon, etc.
However, this process is rather limited in scope and costs a fee. You could also send copies of pertinent prior art to the applicant and/or his attorney, both of whom have a duty to disclose to the USPTO any prior art references that are pertinent to patentability, but you have no guarantee that they will abide by their duty and actually submit the references.
I'm not sure the Streisand Effect applies here. Everyone's heard of Google+ by now, and there's no way Facebook could ever prevent that, with Google's dominance in the advertising world.
But the one big reason that Google+ will be dominated by Facebook has nothing to do with whether people have heard of Google+ or not. Instead, it's that nobody's on Google+, and everybody's already on Facebook.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you even know what a genetic algorithm is?
Few people really want nuclear power run like Monty Burns one...
I'd say that was a pretty efficient operation. You didn't even have to type in "Y-E-S" every time you wanted to vent off some gas to prevent an explosion.
Patents applied for (or claiming continuity) before 8 June 1995 have a term of either 17 years from date of issue or 20 years from the filing date (or the earliest filing date in the continuity chain), whichever is longer. On or after that date, the term expires 20 years from the filing date (or the earliest filing date in the continuity chain). This is modified by any patent term adjustment printed on the face of the patent, which results from some kinds of delays during examination caused by the USPTO. If the applicant filed a terminal disclaimer in the patent, then they have disclaimed additional patent term beyond the expiration of some other patent because of "double patenting" issues. Additionally, the patentee must pay maintenance fees at 3.5, 7.5, and 11.5 years after the date of issue to avoid abandonment of the patent.
And that's not even all of the potential caveats related to patent term expiration.
In this case, of course, the patent in question expired a few years ago at least. A clean room implementation of that patent (to avoid copyright issues) will have no patent hassles arising from that particular patent. There could be other patents covering related techniques or improvements on that same technique that are still in force, although the risks associated with that are similar to the risks faced by anyone writing code these days.
My wife and I are already legally married, but our ceremony isn't for a few months. We could be "married by" a parrot. Or an iPod. Or no one at all. Or, as is the case here, Dr. Sbaitso.
HOW DOES ARE ALREADY LEGALLY MARRIED BUT OUR CEREMONY ISN'T FOR CHANGE YOUR LIFE?
I'm pretty sure Tea Partiers aren't cheering Obama on in Libya.
Wired reported on this a few days ago (and there was a Slashdot article about related information at the time, too), noting that Paypal handed over the information last December.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/op_payback/
Actually, this same problem occurred in 1996 and 2002-2004, in some cases coming within millions of dollars of reaching an inability to make payments.
It's getting much more airplay now than it did in those years, but the growing national debt has always been a political football.
Exactly how did PayPal show its evilness this time? Their website was DDoSed, which is against the law, and they had evidence showing where the attacks originated, which they turned over to authorities. What's evil about that?
This is why I look at the negative reviews first to see if there are any particularly frequent problems with the product.
Of course, a few years ago when I was apartment shopping online, I found that this tactic doesn't always work so well. On one side, you have the management companies posting shill positive reviews for their apartments, and on the other side, you have disgruntled evicted tenants posting overblown negative reviews for those apartments.
Does this mean that URL shortener services will die in a fire?
Iran wants nukes so they can threaten Israel first and foremost, and after that, various Arab states in the region. There's really nothing more to it than that.
The real concern, though, is whether hard-line Hezbollah-supporting elements will hand over an Iranian nuke to terrorists for actual use in Israel. And that's why you'll eventually see Israeli military action in Iran, whether or not the US gives their blessing.
Yep, that about sums it up.
It depends on how it's being used. If they're comparing a person's face outside security with their face upon boarding to ensure that someone isn't somehow allowing another person to board in their place, then the system will have very few problems and can be verified manually if a person is flagged at the gate.
On the other hand, if it's being used to detect whether a person matches a huge list of hundreds of thousands or more people, then there will be false positives on a regular basis and more unnecessary grief for travelers, most likely affecting the same people over and over (unless they get plastic surgery).
This seems surprisingly normal.
If you put it on a bobblehead doll, it'd be normal for the US also.
In the case of patents, actually, most of the US statutory principles behind patentability have their roots in judicial decisions stretching back almost 200 years in some cases, all of which stem from the Constitutional provision empowering Congress "To promote the Progress of... useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to... Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective... Discoveries."
Subsequent to various court decisions, Congress chose to codify most of those decisions in particular ways to further define certain requirements. There are a few cases where court decisions were countermanded by Congressional action, such as 35 USC 112, sixth paragraph, and the bit in 35 USC 103(a) about "patentability shall not be negatived...," but for the most part, when it comes to patentability, Congress has just gone along with what the courts have said.
They visited a company that makes software to find duplicate patents, and they said that about 30% of patents granted are duplicates of the same idea.
Do they mean in a legally distinguishable sense, or in a "we used the same or a very similar specification but have different claims in each patent directed to our several different inventions" sense? Forgive me for being suspicious of the correctness of this statement, but very few people on Slashdot (and off Slashdot, for that matter) understand how to read a patent and how to understand what it actually covers.
Actually, it happened on Washington, DC's Metro system two years ago. A problem with a train proximity sensing system resulted in a failure to engage automatic braking on one train when it approached another train farther ahead that had broken down. In that case, there was evidence that the operator, shortly before her death, had attempted to stop her train manually, but didn't have enough advance warning to stop in time. Eight other people were killed, and in response, WMATA ordered operators to run their trains in manual mode at all times.
Petraeus.
One word: biofouling.
Somebody call Mike Rowe.
I call killing one million people in Iraq for oil and dollar supremacy irresponsible.
I call it irresponsible to inflate reported numbers of Iraqi deaths by an order of magnitude and to implicate coalition members as causing most of those deaths rather than AQI, Syria, and Iran. If we can't trust your judgment when it comes to getting simple, verifiable facts correct, why should we trust your judgment when it comes to an assessment of whether releasing the NATO documents would save lives rather than cause further bloodshed, especially when you haven't even seen the documents in question?
That's the idea, although it doesn't really prevent the expense of a lawsuit against someone. You would provide whoever got sued with evidence that you had notified the applicant of prior art, and if it turns out they never disclosed the information to the USPTO during prosecution, then the court might find that the applicant had exhibited "inequitable conduct" during prosecution and thereby obtained the patent by fraud, which sometimes invalidates the patent.
The legal question these days, though, is which prior art references does the applicant have to disclose to the USPTO. For example, if the reference doesn't render the issued claims anticipated or obvious, the patent might not get invalidated during litigation even if the applicant didn't disclose the reference to the USPTO. Or maybe it would get invalidated. Apparently, this depends on who's sitting on the Federal Circuit panel if the case gets appealed, phase of the moon, etc.
That's a very good synopsis.
Except for the part where it's not actually true.
By the way, there's already a process for third parties to submit prior art into an application:
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/documents/1100_1134_01.htm
However, this process is rather limited in scope and costs a fee. You could also send copies of pertinent prior art to the applicant and/or his attorney, both of whom have a duty to disclose to the USPTO any prior art references that are pertinent to patentability, but you have no guarantee that they will abide by their duty and actually submit the references.
That's great, but the abstract means nothing. You have to look at the claims to see what's being patented.
If you can do better, formulate a rejection of any of the claims in that application. In other words, provide the "proof" of which you speak.
I'm not sure the Streisand Effect applies here. Everyone's heard of Google+ by now, and there's no way Facebook could ever prevent that, with Google's dominance in the advertising world.
But the one big reason that Google+ will be dominated by Facebook has nothing to do with whether people have heard of Google+ or not. Instead, it's that nobody's on Google+, and everybody's already on Facebook.