Most of the proposals in TFA deal with cost shifting as a way to reign in the Patent Trolls. These proposals tend to make it easier to extract money from the trolls that lose their case, but that seems hardly enough.
If there were no patent trolls, we would STILL have a problem with pointless and obvious things being patented and these patents bought and sold with the sole intent to prevent others from using the "invention" and import bans etc.
If Patents are to benefit society as a whole, perhaps we should be investigating MANDATORY Licensing of patents.
Then develop a framework of deciding what that should cost. Maybe it would take the form of a Court of Cost Recovery, or a methodology of evaluating the value that each patent contributed to the wholesale price of the item. But such an evaluation would have to start from the position that the invention MUST be licensed, for the good of all human kind. And the remuneration must be in line with some realistic value.
Inventions couldn't be used solely to prevent another party from producing something.
Bounce-Back patents (reaching the end of a scrolling action), if forcibly licensed would not prevent the inventor from making phones, or add a great deal of value to other manufacturer's phones. The harm is very little for one side, the gain is vary little for the other side if such a patent is abused.
So why should import bans be on the table at all?
If you start from the basis that all inventions MUST be licensed, all that drama goes away, and it becomes a simple matter of price determination.
If you want to deny some item to society, you should find another way to use your invention, because you gain your patent protection only if you license it.
Mostly well reasoned, especially as it pertains to the type of patents being issued today, which amount to nothing more than protection for a mash-up of previously used ideas and objects.
Where your analysis falls down is most easily seen in the world of drug development. Unless a company can make a profit sufficient at least to cover its research costs many simply refuse to do the research at all. Its not petulant behavior of picking up their marbles and going home, its a simple fact of "They can't afford it".
Unless or until you transfer ALL research into the hands of tax payer funded entities (universities) there appears no other common mechanism to induce people to pay for billions in research with no sure way to pay for it in the end.
Its not just drugs, but it is easiest to see the direct linkage in that field. In Electronics and computers you have the same situation. Why would anyone develop some totally new technology at the expense of years in the lab and millions of dollars of salary and equipment with no way to assure a payment?
Comparison to a laborer is just tot simplistic to work, and i suspect you knew that when you wrote it.
You need to restructure virtually the entire methods of funding research before you can totally remove any protection for inventors. (And there is nothing so dangerous as a man with a plan to restructure society).
I just can't see any situation where you watch your family starve because you want to spend the next few years trying to invent a new widget or a new drug instead of planting a garden or getting a brick laying job. Sooner or later, you plant the garden, swing the hammer, and forget about new drugs.
If only Snowden hadn't been such a true believer in Obama, he would have released his cache before the prior election and forced the issue into the spotlight in the US. Both parties would be backpedaling furiously.
As it is, the administration (along with the opposition party) will do everything in its power to demonize him, when in fact he should be getting the Medal of Freedom. Here's hoping there is another Snowden in position to divulge the illegal spying in the run-up to the next election and perhaps some headway can be made on this issue. If not, it will all peter out in the States, and then all pretense if restrictions will be gone.
Actually, based on what has been happening in Australia lately this is a huge change of course, and probably a sign that the average citizen is getting a little sick of the shenanigans pulled by the current government, (sometimes pulled by only a minister here or there, without the consensus of his own party).
As for it being basically the American system, that is not true at all, because regardless of what they say they collect, you can be sure the NSA collects your entire email, not just the headers. And the us system has no such thing as privacy controls.
The word "peak" has a verb form. (Your own post showed that, it should have been your first clue).
The past tense of the verb form of "peak" is "peaked".
The Dow Jones average peaked just before the bell.
Verb Walk Past tense walked.
I walked the dog. Past perfect tense have walked, and, yes, wait for it.... was walked.
The dog was walked this morning.
Verb form Bill Past tense Billed.
I billed your insurance last week. Past perfect tense was billed
Your insurance was billed last week.
So it is perfectly correct to say
Verb form Peak Past tense peaked
My interest in baseball peaked in college. Past perfect tense was peaked
My interest in baseball was peaked in college.
It is clearly obvious that this is syntactically correct, logically correct, and grammatically correct. Does it differ from pique? Yes. But it is not wrong. Its just different. Piqued implies heightened, peaked implies maximized.
But it isn't all that much different.
English evolves, and the turn of a phrase from the past imposes no hard and fast rules upon the present. English is not French, even if Pique is.
Well, Apple used the wrong term, because these screws were not intended to prevent removal, just prevent the customer from removing the screws because nobody had the tools. They remove easily if you use the right driver.
Apple themselves had to have the ability to take out the screws for repair.
This was just another apple design decision of mistaking obscurity for security, much like their source code.
Phillips was designed for things that were generally designed to be assembled once, and not disassembled.
Not true. Phillips was absolutely not designed for things that were never taken apart.
And drywall screws (ala buglehead screws) are easy to remove with a power driver, even those damaged by too much torque when installed, because the reverse plane of each slot is not damaged by to much forward torque. (I've removed entire walls of drywall which other workers put up by mistake before the insulation was installed.)
Yes, Phillips was designed to cam out before too much damage was inflicted, but that was only assured by screw hardness. Soft screws would often take the entire lobe out with too much torque.
Phillips is an industrial standard designed to solve the problem of the screw driver slipping out of the slot. It was never intended nor represented to be non-removable. That it occasionally is speaks to cheap materials.
If you think Apple chose pentalobe (which has been a standard screw type available my entire life) to stop people from opening up their case to replace the soldered in battery, you're just a moron.
If you thing Apple Pentalobe has been around all your life, you had to have been born sometime around 2009.
This is a totally nonstandard screw head, not used previously in ANYTHING. You are probably confusing it with torx, which has 6 not 5 lobes.
Google uses a combination of Tele Atlas and Street View (the Street View generates maps, and where there isn't street view data, they use Tele Atlas.
That tells a tiny part of what goes into Google Maps.
Google has dozens of major mapping sources and partners. Actually hundreds or thousands, when you count all the State and Local government in the US Canada and parts of Europe. Google pays fees to these these governments for the data and in return offers them imagery they might not be able to afford on their own. Zoom in to Trenton New Jersey, or San Francisco, CA. You will actually see LOT LINES in neighborhoods. This is true in many many places, and none of that data comes from Tele Atlas. It comes from public records held by local government.
Zoom in to various parts of the world and you will see the copyright data change on the screen. This is readily apparent in Google earth.
Google buys imagery from a multitude of different satellite companies such as Digital Globe, TerraMetrics, Cnes, Spot Image, Mapabc, and half a dozen others. Google's has banks of computers trained to follow roads on these images, and extract that to street maps.
Google has a fleet of satellites, for their own data transmission and mapping. More than any other mapping company.
Google street-view cars actually seldom reveal unknown streets or roads. They already know the road is there, but the cars can pick up street signs for places where they have no name on file, and also a much more precise GPS track to pin down the exact location of the road. In places where Street View cars have traveled, you never see the map line wandering away from the road in the imagery as you do in remote parts of the world and places where street view hasn't yet traveled.
There is no single mapping company upon which Google is dependent for mapping data. In fact the reverse is true. Most Google data acquisition agreements are a two way street, with Google giving back as much as they get.
You seem to think Google is in this on a shoe string. As of this point in time, there is nobody NOBODY that can come close to what Google has amassed in mapping data. Simply shift your view away from any urban area and you will get an abrupt education at how pathetic Wayz mapping really is.
We do have the grid to support failures or down time, because we use it every day right now.
Wheeling an extra couple hundred megawatts to cover some down time is not going to be a problem for a grid designed to wheeling multiple gigawatts.
The problem I see is what happens 50 years down the line when these multiple smaller reactors prove do reliable that we let the grid fall into disuse and disrepair.
You might as well enjoin the wind from blowing because it transports things without a license. The foundation does not handle or transfer funds any more than meteorologists control the winds.
The idea is not to SCALE UP the newer technologies, but rather to Scale them DOWN.
Small Modular Reactors is the focus of this Administration. These SMRs could be fabricated and fueled in a factory, sealed and transported to sites for power generation or process heat, and then returned to the factory for defueling at the end of the life cycle. So at least there is some indication they are budgeting in the shutdown costs.
And while I agree there have been no major costly failures, there have been some exorbitantly costly "successes", where the cost of permitting, construction, operation, refueling, and mothballing has exceeded the the wildest expectations by factors in excess of 100.
The technology is mature enough, it is 3rd or 4th generation technology after all. What is not clear is if it makes sense to drop a hundred 160-200MWe pre-fabricated, truck delivered reactors around the country near every major city.
Personally, I'm fine with running many plants at 70% capacity rather than fewer plants at 90%.
It seems that they are well on track for being available in a couple of decades, maybe in as little as 5 years for the Westinghouse models. Our ugly problem then will be dealing with half a hundred of these things on the outskirts of major cities, and the waste they produce needing to be stored someplace.
Sometimes companies want to hire these "minor celebrity" coders that have an online name/following behind them. They're then given the position of "Technology Specialists" and pretty much do very little work outside representing the company at tech conferences, giving lectures, giving presentations about tech A/B/C. Don't look at me, I have no idea why companies do that.
And I have no problem with that, as long as the company views it as their way of giving back to the Open Source community.
Why didn't Google need Waze? I mean, 'need' is a strong term, but are you asserting that they have no use for a mobile crowdsourced traffic service to go with their mobile map/directions service?
Because Google's crowd sourced traffic info already exceeds Wayz coverage and accuracy by several orders of magnitude. The get it from GPS location of millions of android phones.
Question: Have you indeed NEVER turned on the traffic layer in Google maps?
I will point out that Firefox gets almost 100% of its funding from Google, so It seems unlikely they will be setting up their own traffic or mapping service. There are limits to Google largess.
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Most of the proposals in TFA deal with cost shifting as a way to reign in the Patent Trolls.
These proposals tend to make it easier to extract money from the trolls that lose their case, but that seems hardly enough.
If there were no patent trolls, we would STILL have a problem with pointless and obvious things being patented and
these patents bought and sold with the sole intent to prevent others from using the "invention" and import bans etc.
If Patents are to benefit society as a whole, perhaps we should be investigating MANDATORY Licensing of patents.
Then develop a framework of deciding what that should cost. Maybe it would take the form of a Court of Cost Recovery, or a methodology of evaluating the value that each patent contributed to the wholesale price of the item. But such an evaluation would have to start from the position that the invention
MUST be licensed, for the good of all human kind. And the remuneration must be in line with some realistic value.
Inventions couldn't be used solely to prevent another party from producing something.
Bounce-Back patents (reaching the end of a scrolling action), if forcibly licensed would not prevent the inventor from making
phones, or add a great deal of value to other manufacturer's phones. The harm is very little for one side, the gain is vary little
for the other side if such a patent is abused.
So why should import bans be on the table at all?
If you start from the basis that all inventions MUST be licensed, all that drama goes away, and it becomes
a simple matter of price determination.
If you want to deny some item to society, you should find another way to use your invention, because you
gain your patent protection only if you license it.
Mostly well reasoned, especially as it pertains to the type of patents being issued today, which amount to nothing more than protection for a mash-up of previously used ideas and objects.
Where your analysis falls down is most easily seen in the world of drug development. Unless a company can make a profit sufficient at least to cover its research costs many simply refuse to do the research at all. Its not petulant behavior of picking up their marbles and going home, its a simple fact of "They can't afford it".
Unless or until you transfer ALL research into the hands of tax payer funded entities (universities) there appears no other common mechanism to induce people to pay for billions in research with no sure way to pay for it in the end.
Its not just drugs, but it is easiest to see the direct linkage in that field. In Electronics and computers you have the same situation. Why would anyone develop some totally new technology at the expense of years in the lab and millions of dollars of salary and equipment with no way to assure a payment?
Comparison to a laborer is just tot simplistic to work, and i suspect you knew that when you wrote it.
You need to restructure virtually the entire methods of funding research before you can totally remove any protection for inventors. (And there is nothing so dangerous as a man with a plan to restructure society).
I just can't see any situation where you watch your family starve because you want to spend the next few years trying to invent a new widget or a new drug instead of planting a garden or getting a brick laying job. Sooner or later, you plant the garden, swing the hammer, and forget about new drugs.
Until you solve that patents aren't going away.
If only Snowden hadn't been such a true believer in Obama, he would have released his cache before the prior election and forced the issue into the spotlight in the US. Both parties would be backpedaling furiously.
As it is, the administration (along with the opposition party) will do everything in its power to demonize him, when in fact he should be getting the Medal of Freedom. Here's hoping there is another Snowden in position to divulge the illegal spying in the run-up to the next election and perhaps some headway can be made on this issue. If not, it will all peter out in the States, and then all pretense if restrictions will be gone.
Actually, based on what has been happening in Australia lately this is a huge change of course, and probably a sign that the average citizen is getting a little sick of the shenanigans pulled by the current government, (sometimes pulled by only a minister here or there, without the consensus of his own party).
As for it being basically the American system, that is not true at all, because regardless of what they say they collect, you can be sure the NSA collects your entire email, not just the headers. And the us system has no such thing as privacy controls.
The word "peak" has a verb form. (Your own post showed that, it should have been your first clue).
The past tense of the verb form of "peak" is "peaked".
The Dow Jones average peaked just before the bell.
Verb Walk
Past tense walked.
I walked the dog.
Past perfect tense have walked, and, yes, wait for it.... was walked.
The dog was walked this morning.
Verb form Bill
Past tense Billed.
I billed your insurance last week.
Past perfect tense was billed
Your insurance was billed last week.
So it is perfectly correct to say
Verb form Peak
Past tense peaked
My interest in baseball peaked in college.
Past perfect tense was peaked
My interest in baseball was peaked in college.
It is clearly obvious that this is syntactically correct, logically correct, and grammatically correct.
Does it differ from pique? Yes.
But it is not wrong. Its just different. Piqued implies heightened, peaked implies maximized.
But it isn't all that much different.
English evolves, and the turn of a phrase from the past imposes no hard and fast rules upon the present.
English is not French, even if Pique is.
Well, Apple used the wrong term, because these screws were not intended to prevent removal, just prevent the customer from removing the screws because nobody had the tools. They remove easily if you use the right driver.
Apple themselves had to have the ability to take out the screws for repair.
This was just another apple design decision of mistaking obscurity for security, much like their source code.
Phillips was designed for things that were generally designed to be assembled once, and not disassembled.
Not true. Phillips was absolutely not designed for things that were never taken apart.
And drywall screws (ala buglehead screws) are easy to remove with a power driver, even those damaged by too much torque when installed, because the reverse plane of each slot is not damaged by to much forward torque. (I've removed entire walls of drywall which other workers put up by mistake before the insulation was installed.)
Yes, Phillips was designed to cam out before too much damage was inflicted, but that was only assured by screw hardness. Soft screws would often take the entire lobe out with too much torque.
Phillips is an industrial standard designed to solve the problem of the screw driver slipping out of the slot. It was never intended nor represented to be non-removable. That it occasionally is speaks to cheap materials.
Oh, forgot,
Post a link to a photo of old camera that uses pentalobe screws.
If you think Apple chose pentalobe (which has been a standard screw type available my entire life) to stop people from opening up their case to replace the soldered in battery, you're just a moron.
If you thing Apple Pentalobe has been around all your life, you had to have been born sometime around 2009.
This is a totally nonstandard screw head, not used previously in ANYTHING. You are probably confusing it with torx, which has 6 not 5 lobes.
Continue your education here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screw_drives
Because phillips heads are easily damaged when screwing and unscrewing them. And pentalobe aren't.
If you think that screws using a better but less popular standard are "handcuffs", then you're a bit of a drama queen.
And if you think Apple chose pentalobe because Phillips was easily damaged, you are delusional.
The you can find drivers for the replacement screws at any hardware store or even Walmart, and any computer geek already has a set.
If handcuff keys were that easy to come by nobody would bother using cuffs, they'd just use zipties.
Google uses a combination of Tele Atlas and Street View (the Street View generates maps, and where there isn't street view data, they use Tele Atlas.
That tells a tiny part of what goes into Google Maps.
Google has dozens of major mapping sources and partners. Actually hundreds or thousands, when you count all the State and Local government in the US Canada and parts of Europe. Google pays fees to these these governments for the data and in return offers them imagery they might not be able to afford on their own. Zoom in to Trenton New Jersey, or San Francisco, CA. You will actually see LOT LINES in neighborhoods. This is true in many many places, and none of that data comes from Tele Atlas. It comes from public records held by local government.
Zoom in to various parts of the world and you will see the copyright data change on the screen. This is readily apparent in Google earth.
Google buys imagery from a multitude of different satellite companies such as Digital Globe, TerraMetrics, Cnes, Spot Image, Mapabc, and half a dozen others. Google's has banks of computers trained to follow roads on these images, and extract that to street maps.
Google has a fleet of satellites, for their own data transmission and mapping. More than any other mapping company.
Google street-view cars actually seldom reveal unknown streets or roads. They already know the road is there, but the cars can pick up street signs for places where they have no name on file, and also a much more precise GPS track to pin down the exact location of the road. In places where Street View cars have traveled, you never see the map line wandering away from the road in the imagery as you do in remote parts of the world and places where street view hasn't yet traveled.
There is no single mapping company upon which Google is dependent for mapping data. In fact the reverse is true. Most Google data acquisition agreements are a two way street, with Google giving back as much as they get.
You seem to think Google is in this on a shoe string. As of this point in time, there is nobody NOBODY that can come close to what Google has amassed in mapping data. Simply shift your view away from any urban area and you will get an abrupt education at how pathetic Wayz mapping really is.
We do have the grid to support failures or down time, because we use it every day right now.
Wheeling an extra couple hundred megawatts to cover some down time is not going to be a problem for a grid designed to wheeling multiple gigawatts.
The problem I see is what happens 50 years down the line when these multiple smaller reactors prove do reliable that we let the grid fall into disuse and disrepair.
But its not an institution.
You might as well enjoin the wind from blowing because it transports things without a license.
The foundation does not handle or transfer funds any more than meteorologists control the winds.
Even Google can't find a SunCold refrigerator.
Electrical power consumption is about to become far less FLAT.
The inexorable move to electric cars is going to soak up a lot of capacity.
The idea is not to SCALE UP the newer technologies, but rather to Scale them DOWN.
Small Modular Reactors is the focus of this Administration. These SMRs could be fabricated and fueled in a factory, sealed and transported to sites for power generation or process heat, and then returned to the factory for defueling at the end of the life cycle. So at least there is some indication they are budgeting in the shutdown costs.
And while I agree there have been no major costly failures, there have been some exorbitantly costly "successes", where the cost of permitting, construction, operation, refueling, and mothballing has exceeded the the wildest expectations by factors in excess of 100.
The technology is mature enough, it is 3rd or 4th generation technology after all. What is not clear is if it makes sense to drop a hundred 160-200MWe pre-fabricated, truck delivered reactors around the country near every major city.
Personally, I'm fine with running many plants at 70% capacity rather than fewer plants at 90%.
It's going to be pretty ugly in a couple decades. It would be nice if people could be rational and let us build newer reactors.
Well it is happening, but the focus these days is on more plentiful smaller reactors.
Westinghouse is beginning fueling tests on the SMR Reactors, which are small enough to be delivered on a couple flatbed trucks. They are engineered for 225 MWe .
The Babcock & Wilcox Company is designing their own model as well as NuScale. Most of these are in the 180 MWe range.
It seems that they are well on track for being available in a couple of decades, maybe in as little as 5 years for the Westinghouse models.
Our ugly problem then will be dealing with half a hundred of these things on the outskirts of major cities, and the waste they produce needing to be stored someplace.
Not necessarily so.
The temperature peaked at 105 degrees.
Agreed, 4 posts on something that is not even technically wrong.
While not using the old phrase, "peaked their interest" is syntactically correct.
Peaked is the simple past, and past participle, of the verb "peak".
Third, how long would such a subsidy last? If algae oil sold for $40 a barrel, how many years and how many dollars would the government spend?
Given past track records, just about forever.
Especially if any part of it slips into the Department of Agriculture.
Their subsidies never die.
Sometimes companies want to hire these "minor celebrity" coders that have an online name/following behind them. They're then given the position of "Technology Specialists" and pretty much do very little work outside representing the company at tech conferences, giving lectures, giving presentations about tech A/B/C. Don't look at me, I have no idea why companies do that.
And I have no problem with that, as long as the company views it as their way of giving back to the Open Source community.
Burglars aren't likely to be in your Circles on Google+. (And if they are, you deserve any thing they get).
But by the same token, simple notes work fine. Anyone could write such an app. Oh, wait, someone already did.
Why does Google have to know what you lend out?
So they can tell your mooching friends where they can borrow something?
Why didn't Google need Waze? I mean, 'need' is a strong term, but are you asserting that they have no use for a mobile crowdsourced traffic service to go with their mobile map/directions service?
Because Google's crowd sourced traffic info already exceeds Wayz coverage and accuracy by several orders of magnitude.
The get it from GPS location of millions of android phones.
Question: Have you indeed NEVER turned on the traffic layer in Google maps?
I will point out that Firefox gets almost 100% of its funding from Google, so It seems unlikely they will be setting up their own traffic or mapping service.
There are limits to Google largess.