It has to do with (a) a perception of poor judgment exercised on the part of Wikileaks in terms of what they release and how they release it, and (b) a perception that Wikileaks has an axe to grind against the US, the West, or capitalism in general. There's no real indication that Wikileaks has a goal in mind of improving the world somehow, but rather it seems that they release this information as a gigantic middle finger to the US.
On the other hand, conventional news organizations have frequently shown a willingness to work with (or, at least, in consideration of) the US and/or other countries to ensure that lives aren't endangered in the process and any generally positive objectives that the country in question may have are not unnecessarily undermined (or in some cases, are bolstered by revealing corruption that works to those objectives' detriment).
EveryDNS already said that their DNS servers were getting DDoSed, and so they found it a better move to drop one customer and their baggage for the sake of their other thousands of customers.
I wholeheartedly support their decision to drop Wikileaks, so I'll be sure to attempt to do all my holiday shopping with them. Works both ways, I guess.
Actually, the educational value of explaining a reason why a seemingly anticipatory reference can't be used to reject a claim far outweighs the humor value of the joke - especially in a place like Slashdot where everyone thinks they're an expert on rejecting patents, but few truly know what they're talking about.
Where exactly did I say that I approved of Bush going into Iraq? I'm just saying that his reasons for doing so weren't lies - they were misperceptions based on faulty intelligence; and I'm saying that you can't assign direct blame to someone when their actions were not the proximate cause of something.
Flying was also tried time and a time again, but eventually humans flew.
And eventually, some people realized the implications of commercialized flight and started blowing up planes or crashing them into buildings. But I'm sure we'll solve that problem eventually, too, won't we?
(Hint for the analogically dense.... flying : P2P DNS:: blowing up planes : exploiting gaping security holes fundamental to the P2P philosophy in order to reroute traffic to a desired destination for nefarious purposes)
I wish I could find the public statement where they basically said it isn't their responsibility to search for prior art.
My guess is that you're making an oblique, and somewhat confused, reference to the rules that were never implemented as a result of the Tafas v. Doll lawsuit, where some folks actually did sue the USPTO. Among other things, the rules would have required the applicant to perform a search and submit the results in cases where more than 5 independent and/or 25 total claims are filed. Since the USPTO lost the lawsuit, the rules were never implemented. Note that even if the rule had been implemented, it would not have obviated the need for the USPTO to conduct its own search, and at no time has the USPTO indicated that it would not conduct searches of the prior art.
On the other hand, in this case, the USPTO was most definitely not shirking its duties. The evidence presented by Microsoft is some of i4i's own software from the early 1990s, which was sold in the US more than a year before the filing date. The USPTO would only have had access to this software if i4i had presented it during prosecution, which they didn't. And Microsoft also was unable to submit the evidence during the re-examination proceedings, since only patent documents and other publications can be presented at re-exam.
First, this isn't the question that SCOTUS was asked to decide. They were asked to determine whether the "clear and convincing" burden of proof is the appropriate standard when a court is determining whether an issued patent is invalid, in those cases where there is evidence that the USPTO was not able to consider during prosecution. The court will generally limit itself only to answering those controversies specifically brought before it.
Second, the whole point of the Bilski v. Kappos decision was that the "machine or transformation" test is not the sole test for patent eligibility. I dunno, maybe they would invalidate the patent on subject matter eligibility grounds if they were presented with that question, but it's really hard to know for certain.
Presidents Bush and Clinton both believed there were WMDs in Iraq, and this was largely because Saddam went to great lengths to make the international community believe this to be true, in an effort to stave off war with Iran. So there certainly was a reason to go into Iraq, even if it turned out to be based on faulty intelligence.
Still, you can't assign direct blame for 100,000 deaths in Iraq to Bush, because it ignores the fact that AQI, Syria, and Iran were under no obligation to foment a deadly insurgency in Iraq, but they did anyway. The intended consequence of their actions was to kill people, while the US would have considered a bloodless war to be optimal. Trying to lay the blame on Bush completely ignores this fact.
It's quite absurd for you to call Iran dangerous; they haven't been at war for years.
Neither has North Korea, but I hope you'd agree that North Korea is extremely dangerous.
Yes, Iran hasn't been at war (overtly) since they were at war with Iraq. Likely the only reason there wasn't an encore performance is because Saddam went to great lengths to make the world believe that he still had WMDs even though he didn't. But Iran has been relentless in its funding of terrorist organizations throughout the region.
The danger inside Iraq and Afghanistan is completely internal. Neither country has the armed forces required to threaten their neighbors. In fact, Iran is a threat to both of these countries because of their funding of terrorists in both places.
Iran's worries about US invasion are not borne out by their actions. If they really wanted to guarantee their safety, they would abandon their WMD programs, allow full international inspections, and stop sponsoring terrorism abroad. Libya did this and was rewarded by the US despite its human rights problems, and it's reasonable to assume that the US would be willing to overlook quite a lot from Iran while still welcoming them back into the international community.
Instead, Iran is working on nuclear weapons, and it's quite likely that once they amass a sufficient stockpile, they will use that as leverage against the Arab nations, which is why the Arab nations are panicked by the thought. Iran's ties to Hamas and Hezbollah makes it reasonable to think that they would supply WMDs to one of those terrorist groups for use against Israel. The only way to prevent destabilization of the entire region and/or the deaths of possibly millions of people is to prevent Iran from creating a WMD arsenal, even if that requires military action.
Bush, literally a war criminal, an aggressor with nothing but financial and personal objectives, is directly responsible for killing about a hundred thousand Iraqis for no legitimate purpose.
Even under a very generous definition of "directly", I don't think you can substantiate this claim. The vast majority of Iraqi deaths were caused by insurgents backed either by Al Qaeda or Iran/Syria, which were far more proximate causes of those deaths than the US was.
Yes. It's a $180 fee to file a third-party submission of prior art into an application. You have to file it within 2 months of publication of the application, though. See 37 CFR 1.99 for all the related hoops to jump through.
As it turns out, you're in luck here: what Tandberg has filed is an International application, and it appears that they haven't filed a national stage application with the USPTO (or, at least, that it hasn't been published yet). That means you can prepare your filing now, keep a close watch for the publication of the national stage app, and file your references under 1.99 then.
That includes attorney's fees, though. You can file a patent application as a small entity for $462 (if my math is correct), and you don't have to prosecute it through to allowance if you aren't interested in actual patent rights. Applications publish after 18 months automatically, and this puts them in the searchable database that examiners use most of the time to find prior art, making it a lot easier to find.
There are some formal hoops that you have to jump through, though, to prevent abandonment before publication. That's why most people hire patent attorneys, because they actually know what they need to file. Looking at the paperwork behind other published applications on Public PAIR at the USPTO website might provide some hints, but I wouldn't recommend going pro se unless you know what you're doing or unless you are only interested in publication.
Inventions don't have to be revolutionary groundbreaking holy shit improvements over the prior art to get a patent. They can be for shit improvements, too.
Examiners have to work with what's provably in the prior art. That means they can't just sit there and dream up what's known or what's obvious - they have to find evidence that it was known or obvious at the time the application was filed.
The feature cited in the reasons for allowance was this:
wherein setting the allocation mode for the process to enable determining in real-time an invalid access is performed in real-time, and wherein the setting sets the allocation mode for an application executed by the process without requiring recompiling, linking or loading of the application to set, in real-time, the allocation mode for the application
You mean by a jury of people who have no expertise either with the subject matter or with patent law?
Examiners are required to have at least a Bachelor's degree in their field of expertise, and they receive several months of training on patent law.
Also, your example leaves out that to "file a modification" requires that either the person getting sued or (less likely) the patent holder or a third party files a re-exam request with the USPTO. The reason people do this is because it's orders of magnitude cheaper than attacking the patent in court. On the other hand, a re-exam provides the patent holder with an opportunity to amend (i.e., narrow the scope of) the claims, but if you take it on in court, then an invalidation of a claim is the end of the road for that claim.
In a set of original claims, you can sometimes tell what the "important" feature is because it's recited in a claim that has a lot of claims that are dependent from it. You can't just drop down to claim 10 out of 20 and say that's the important thing. In the present case, there's not really one such claim that stands out - there are a few claims that have several dependent claims.
In the issued claims, saying it's claim 10 out of 20 is even worse, because the examiner may have renumbered some of the claims upon allowance.
Put up or shut up. Write a rejection of Claim 1 based in part on the OP's website and/or code. And none of this handwavy "clearly prior art" bullshit. I'm talking something that would hold up in court.
Before spouting off about how the USPTO sucks so much ass solely on the basis of what the OP says, first try a little independent research. You can look up the entire prosecution history of the application in question on the USPTO's website at Public PAIR.
First off, the guy's website was cited by the examiner rather than by IBM. The examiner used the OP's website to reject the claims three times before IBM's attorney finally came around and amended the claims to include this:
wherein setting the allocation mode for the process to enable determining in real-time an invalid access is performed in real-time, and wherein the setting sets the allocation mode for an application executed by the process without requiring recompiling, linking or loading of the application to set, in real-time, the allocation mode for the application
This was cited by the examiner in the reasons for allowance. Does the OP's code do this?
Once again, this is an example of people who know very little about the patent system reading the abstract or looking at the figures, and not understanding that the really important part of the application is the claims. Nothing to see here, move along.
Slashdot Mirror
the concept:
LAMENESS FILTER
It has to do with (a) a perception of poor judgment exercised on the part of Wikileaks in terms of what they release and how they release it, and (b) a perception that Wikileaks has an axe to grind against the US, the West, or capitalism in general. There's no real indication that Wikileaks has a goal in mind of improving the world somehow, but rather it seems that they release this information as a gigantic middle finger to the US.
On the other hand, conventional news organizations have frequently shown a willingness to work with (or, at least, in consideration of) the US and/or other countries to ensure that lives aren't endangered in the process and any generally positive objectives that the country in question may have are not unnecessarily undermined (or in some cases, are bolstered by revealing corruption that works to those objectives' detriment).
EveryDNS already said that their DNS servers were getting DDoSed, and so they found it a better move to drop one customer and their baggage for the sake of their other thousands of customers.
According to my friend, at these high voltages most of the power is transmitted in the field surrounding the wire, not the wire itself.
There's something really frickin' scary about that.
I wholeheartedly support their decision to drop Wikileaks, so I'll be sure to attempt to do all my holiday shopping with them. Works both ways, I guess.
Whooosh
Actually, the educational value of explaining a reason why a seemingly anticipatory reference can't be used to reject a claim far outweighs the humor value of the joke - especially in a place like Slashdot where everyone thinks they're an expert on rejecting patents, but few truly know what they're talking about.
Where exactly did I say that I approved of Bush going into Iraq? I'm just saying that his reasons for doing so weren't lies - they were misperceptions based on faulty intelligence; and I'm saying that you can't assign direct blame to someone when their actions were not the proximate cause of something.
Flying was also tried time and a time again, but eventually humans flew.
And eventually, some people realized the implications of commercialized flight and started blowing up planes or crashing them into buildings. But I'm sure we'll solve that problem eventually, too, won't we?
(Hint for the analogically dense.... flying : P2P DNS :: blowing up planes : exploiting gaping security holes fundamental to the P2P philosophy in order to reroute traffic to a desired destination for nefarious purposes)
Nevermind that bin Laden was extensively trained by the CIA.
There's ample evidence that this claim lies somewhere between grossly misstated and total bullshit.
Holy shit.... Did you seriously just say that you looked at the claims, but then you quoted a chunk of text that isn't part of the claims?
I wish I could find the public statement where they basically said it isn't their responsibility to search for prior art.
My guess is that you're making an oblique, and somewhat confused, reference to the rules that were never implemented as a result of the Tafas v. Doll lawsuit, where some folks actually did sue the USPTO. Among other things, the rules would have required the applicant to perform a search and submit the results in cases where more than 5 independent and/or 25 total claims are filed. Since the USPTO lost the lawsuit, the rules were never implemented. Note that even if the rule had been implemented, it would not have obviated the need for the USPTO to conduct its own search, and at no time has the USPTO indicated that it would not conduct searches of the prior art.
On the other hand, in this case, the USPTO was most definitely not shirking its duties. The evidence presented by Microsoft is some of i4i's own software from the early 1990s, which was sold in the US more than a year before the filing date. The USPTO would only have had access to this software if i4i had presented it during prosecution, which they didn't. And Microsoft also was unable to submit the evidence during the re-examination proceedings, since only patent documents and other publications can be presented at re-exam.
Unlikely, for two reasons.
First, this isn't the question that SCOTUS was asked to decide. They were asked to determine whether the "clear and convincing" burden of proof is the appropriate standard when a court is determining whether an issued patent is invalid, in those cases where there is evidence that the USPTO was not able to consider during prosecution. The court will generally limit itself only to answering those controversies specifically brought before it.
Second, the whole point of the Bilski v. Kappos decision was that the "machine or transformation" test is not the sole test for patent eligibility. I dunno, maybe they would invalidate the patent on subject matter eligibility grounds if they were presented with that question, but it's really hard to know for certain.
Presidents Bush and Clinton both believed there were WMDs in Iraq, and this was largely because Saddam went to great lengths to make the international community believe this to be true, in an effort to stave off war with Iran. So there certainly was a reason to go into Iraq, even if it turned out to be based on faulty intelligence.
Still, you can't assign direct blame for 100,000 deaths in Iraq to Bush, because it ignores the fact that AQI, Syria, and Iran were under no obligation to foment a deadly insurgency in Iraq, but they did anyway. The intended consequence of their actions was to kill people, while the US would have considered a bloodless war to be optimal. Trying to lay the blame on Bush completely ignores this fact.
It's quite absurd for you to call Iran dangerous; they haven't been at war for years.
Neither has North Korea, but I hope you'd agree that North Korea is extremely dangerous.
Yes, Iran hasn't been at war (overtly) since they were at war with Iraq. Likely the only reason there wasn't an encore performance is because Saddam went to great lengths to make the world believe that he still had WMDs even though he didn't. But Iran has been relentless in its funding of terrorist organizations throughout the region.
The danger inside Iraq and Afghanistan is completely internal. Neither country has the armed forces required to threaten their neighbors. In fact, Iran is a threat to both of these countries because of their funding of terrorists in both places.
Iran's worries about US invasion are not borne out by their actions. If they really wanted to guarantee their safety, they would abandon their WMD programs, allow full international inspections, and stop sponsoring terrorism abroad. Libya did this and was rewarded by the US despite its human rights problems, and it's reasonable to assume that the US would be willing to overlook quite a lot from Iran while still welcoming them back into the international community.
Instead, Iran is working on nuclear weapons, and it's quite likely that once they amass a sufficient stockpile, they will use that as leverage against the Arab nations, which is why the Arab nations are panicked by the thought. Iran's ties to Hamas and Hezbollah makes it reasonable to think that they would supply WMDs to one of those terrorist groups for use against Israel. The only way to prevent destabilization of the entire region and/or the deaths of possibly millions of people is to prevent Iran from creating a WMD arsenal, even if that requires military action.
Bush, literally a war criminal, an aggressor with nothing but financial and personal objectives, is directly responsible for killing about a hundred thousand Iraqis for no legitimate purpose.
Even under a very generous definition of "directly", I don't think you can substantiate this claim. The vast majority of Iraqi deaths were caused by insurgents backed either by Al Qaeda or Iran/Syria, which were far more proximate causes of those deaths than the US was.
Yes. It's a $180 fee to file a third-party submission of prior art into an application. You have to file it within 2 months of publication of the application, though. See 37 CFR 1.99 for all the related hoops to jump through.
As it turns out, you're in luck here: what Tandberg has filed is an International application, and it appears that they haven't filed a national stage application with the USPTO (or, at least, that it hasn't been published yet). That means you can prepare your filing now, keep a close watch for the publication of the national stage app, and file your references under 1.99 then.
That includes attorney's fees, though. You can file a patent application as a small entity for $462 (if my math is correct), and you don't have to prosecute it through to allowance if you aren't interested in actual patent rights. Applications publish after 18 months automatically, and this puts them in the searchable database that examiners use most of the time to find prior art, making it a lot easier to find.
There are some formal hoops that you have to jump through, though, to prevent abandonment before publication. That's why most people hire patent attorneys, because they actually know what they need to file. Looking at the paperwork behind other published applications on Public PAIR at the USPTO website might provide some hints, but I wouldn't recommend going pro se unless you know what you're doing or unless you are only interested in publication.
That's okay, you can just sue the bacteria for copyright infringement.
Inventions don't have to be revolutionary groundbreaking holy shit improvements over the prior art to get a patent. They can be for shit improvements, too.
Examiners have to work with what's provably in the prior art. That means they can't just sit there and dream up what's known or what's obvious - they have to find evidence that it was known or obvious at the time the application was filed.
The feature cited in the reasons for allowance was this:
wherein setting the allocation mode for the process to enable determining in real-time an invalid access is performed in real-time, and wherein the setting sets the allocation mode for an application executed by the process without requiring recompiling, linking or loading of the application to set, in real-time, the allocation mode for the application
they rule more carelessly than a court
You mean by a jury of people who have no expertise either with the subject matter or with patent law?
Examiners are required to have at least a Bachelor's degree in their field of expertise, and they receive several months of training on patent law.
Also, your example leaves out that to "file a modification" requires that either the person getting sued or (less likely) the patent holder or a third party files a re-exam request with the USPTO. The reason people do this is because it's orders of magnitude cheaper than attacking the patent in court. On the other hand, a re-exam provides the patent holder with an opportunity to amend (i.e., narrow the scope of) the claims, but if you take it on in court, then an invalidation of a claim is the end of the road for that claim.
In a set of original claims, you can sometimes tell what the "important" feature is because it's recited in a claim that has a lot of claims that are dependent from it. You can't just drop down to claim 10 out of 20 and say that's the important thing. In the present case, there's not really one such claim that stands out - there are a few claims that have several dependent claims.
In the issued claims, saying it's claim 10 out of 20 is even worse, because the examiner may have renumbered some of the claims upon allowance.
as the submitter's code is clearly prior art
Put up or shut up. Write a rejection of Claim 1 based in part on the OP's website and/or code. And none of this handwavy "clearly prior art" bullshit. I'm talking something that would hold up in court.
Before spouting off about how the USPTO sucks so much ass solely on the basis of what the OP says, first try a little independent research. You can look up the entire prosecution history of the application in question on the USPTO's website at Public PAIR.
First off, the guy's website was cited by the examiner rather than by IBM. The examiner used the OP's website to reject the claims three times before IBM's attorney finally came around and amended the claims to include this:
wherein setting the allocation mode for the process to enable determining in real-time an invalid access is performed in real-time, and wherein the setting sets the allocation mode for an application executed by the process without requiring recompiling, linking or loading of the application to set, in real-time, the allocation mode for the application
This was cited by the examiner in the reasons for allowance. Does the OP's code do this?
Once again, this is an example of people who know very little about the patent system reading the abstract or looking at the figures, and not understanding that the really important part of the application is the claims. Nothing to see here, move along.
USians simply don't grasp the fact that, bar war zones, they live in some of the places with the highest homicide rates in the world.
The irony being, of course, that these particular areas have some of the most restrictive gun control laws in the country.