MSF is one of the least efficient (but most common) desalination methods in use and only makes sense when the thermal energy provided is "free." MED is a much more efficient version of the same thing. Presumably, though, locations with excess steam suitable for such facilities already have them (these technologies are nothing new). Currently these two technologies produce approximately 4 billion cubic meters of fresh water per year and any increase in desalination for the purpose of energy production through aggriculture would not be compatible with a scenario where a large number of new power plants were being built and would use the most efficient desalination technique (reverse osmosis).
To give you an idea of how much fresh water would be needed, though, compared to the 4 billion or so cubic meters currently derived from desalination processes which make use of excess process steam from combined cycle or cogeneration plants, let's look at the previous example.
In the US, we consume approximately 100 billion gallons of gasoline per year, which in turn comprises about 40% of the almost 240 billion gallons of gasoline consumed around the globe annually. Replacing that gasoline would require roughly 330 billion gallons of ethanol. For our beets, it takes approximately 5.3 cubic meters of water to yield a gallon of ethanol. That means the existing capacity of excess steam-based desalination would yield approximately 750 million gallons of ethanol, or about two days worth of current US transportation needs.
Unless we're going to make a lot more excess steam, reverse osmosis would be the most efficient way to desalinate that much water.
Desalination could make sense in environments where rainfall was highly variable between years, but such regions often have huge soil salination problems associated with excessive irrigation.
The only two viable biofuel options avialable in the forseeable future are Brazil's sugarcane ethanol program (which yields 8 units of energy ouput per unit of energy input) and algae (which can yield ten to fifteen thousand gallons of biodiesel per acre). I doubt desalination would be feasible for either of those processes (I'm not sure whether the algae process uses fresh- or salt-water algae, but fresh would require a ton of fresh water and salt would presumably require very little), and sugarcane requires a lot of water (~1.4 meters net annually)).
Ah, yes, but you're mistaking the source of energy here. The putative nuclear plant isn't being used to store energy in the fuel - sunlight and photosynthesis are. The nuke plant is being used to provide fresh water for the plants. It is still a power input, but an indirect one, which means that it's maximum output is probably much smaller than the total power input involved in making the biofuel.
I'm sorry, but there's no logical reason to believe that because the energy requirements of desalination for irrigation are indirect that they are significantly less than the energy output of the biofuel. All the indirect nature of the energy input implies is the thermodynamic possibility of a net energy profit.
Assuming the most favorable processes (sugar beets used for ethanol at 714 gal/acre, 5 kwh per cubic meter of desalinated water), 80% efficiency from a center pivot irrigation system, 60% efficiency from the original energy stock, and 30"/season of net water consumption, such a system would require 3855 cubic meters of fresh water at the cost of 19275 kwh of energy at the desalination plant or 32125 kwh of fuel stock. Ethanol yields 23 kwh per gallon, so a salination-supported sugar beet ethanol facility under ideal conditions would yield approximately 16422 kwh per acre at a per acre cost of approximately 32125 kwh of energy stock, ignoring the energy costs associated with delivering the water, powering farm equipment, &etc. That's a net loss of approximately 15703 kwh per acre per season, essentially converting your original fuel stock to ethanol at an efficiency of 51%. As ethanol-powered vehicles have an efficiency between 30 and 35%, this would yield a total efficiency (original fuel stock to end use as transportation energy) of around 15%. Electric vehicles charge at an efficiency between 80 and 90% and then use that stored energy at an efficiency between 80% and 90%. Assuming the low end on both of those scales, an electric vehicle would yield an energy stock to transportation efficiency of 38%.
Now, 60% at the power plant is using a state of the art combined cycle LNG system. In the US, mean efficiency is probably around half of that, but in this back-of-the-envelope comparison both systems scale linearly with the efficiency of the original power source. That means that under ideal conditions for biofuel vehicles (and worst case scenario conditions for electric vehicles), electric vehicles are about 2.5 times more efficient than desalination-irrigated biofuel vehicles. Under more realistic conditions, electric vehicles should fare even better. If you're using desalination to grow biofuel stock you're just throwing energy away.
Novelty and nonobviousness are separate requirements for patentability. You're conflating them. There is an argument for nonobviousness that draws heavily from the novelty of an invention (it invokes a long-felt unmet need satisfied by an invention to show its nonobviousness). As a DVR is just a VCR with a different storage medium, you'd have an obstacle to making such an argument.
it is an interesting point though, Line 6 didn't defend, so couldn't it be claimed that the "POD" is already in the public domain? in which case what are Apple defending? or does trademark law work in such a way that they can effectively steal one by defending it when another company doesn't?
In trademark law, a mark can be eroded and fall into the public domain but terms once in the public domain can also be turned into trademarks. "Apple" and "Macintosh" for example both existed before the Apple Computer company was founded but are both trademarked terms now. In this respect, trademark law is unlike patent and copyright law. In patent and copyright law the public good provided in exchange for legal rights is some novel creation which, once released to the public belongs to the public (with a few exceptions).
The key to understanding intellectual property law and the differences between the different varieties of IP law is understanding the bargain struck between the holders of the IP right and society at large. In trademark law, the public good received in exchange for the legal protection of the mark is the decrease in consumer search costs as a result of the mark. In theory, the more vigorously defended marks the better, as consumers can more efficiently identify the products they wish to purchase. The only thing the public sacrifices for this decrease in consumer search costs is the right to sell a product named in such a way that causes confusion as to its source. Novelty is neither necessary nor sufficient to establish a mark -- the public association between the mark and the source is the only relevant issue (though things like novelty can contribute to the strength of the mark and the ease of establishing it) and as a result a trademark can be lost and reclaimed (or even lost by one company and reclaimed by another). While there is essentially a one-way gate between patent or copyright protection and the public domain, the nature of the trademark bargain necessitates that the link between full trademark protection and the public domain be a sliding scale that can move in either direction.
In economics, things have value because they are scarse.
What background do you have in economics which gives you this idea?
In economics, resources are valued based on demand, not scarcity (and it's spelled "scarce" btw). Scarcity can play a role in supply, but it is not an issue in the current context where prices are fixed and the creation of an additional unit is essentially free. While it is copyright infringement, there's no economic loss when someone unwilling to pay $2.99 for their product buys it someplace else for $0.99 (and banning such a transaction creates what is called "deadweight loss"). Ideally, an efficiently enforced copyright law would lead all those willing to pay $2.99 to do so while still allowing an efficient level of copyright infringement or fair use among those unwilling to pay $2.99. Copyright law has become an unweildy beast in the United States, though, with anticompetitive cartels fixing prices for competing copyrighted content and increasingly severe laws explicitly targeting efficient copyright infringement and fair use. If the current DOJ weren't so gutless then content producers would be forced into competitive rather than collusive pricing and a much smaller portion of the population would participate in or contribute to copyright infringement.
The relevant question is whether the potentially offending party has something called "market power" -- the ability to change the market price for a commodity by unilateral action. While AMD is not a monopoly, the relevant market (intel-compatible chipsets) is concentrated enough that ATI probably has market power, and any attempt by AMD to use ATI to promote demand for AMD processors and harm both Intel and consumers by creating an artificial shortage in Intel motherboards would probably meet with hasty action from the DOJ. It would also be a pretty inefficient way to spend the X billion dollars it would cost to acquire the (profitable) Intel chipset production branch of ATI. They may be better off if they just spun it off -- the DOJ may not look kindly on a merger that gave one party market power over his competitor through vertical market restraints.
I don't think you (or whoever wrote what you pasted) understand the context of the Court's 1916 statement -- the legal community was split as to whether the 16th ammendment was necessary for an income tax. The original court statement is likely a reference to that, though I'd have to see the case to know for sure. You have the case name or citation?
The only time that income is taxable is if it is derived from an "activity" that is taxable by Congress.
This is circular nonsense. Perhaps you (or whoever wrote that) meant that only income derived from activity controlled by congress may be subject to an income-determined excise tax. Congress has plenary power over interstate commerce, though, so basically any transaction involving money or regulated securities would fall under this penumbra. That still wouldn't be what the constitution says, though -- the remaining constitutional limits on (federal) taxation are as follows:
all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States
No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state.
nor shall vessels bound to, or from, one state, be obliged to enter, clear or pay duties in another.
If you ever take a class or two in tax law you'll be left with one lasting impression: any argument that you can think of to reduce your total tax burden by reclassifying income or by otherwise denying the federal government's authority to tax your income has been tried and will land you in prison if you attempt to use it as a basis for paying less.
If you have the name of a Supreme Court case that you think claims that domestic income of citizens is not taxable, I'd like to hear it. I can look it up and paste the relevant portions here for discussion, which should be more productive than uncited assertions and links to web pages which cite no precedent but make ample use of bold, italics, and underline font styles.
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
Patent infringement cases are exclusively federal jurisdiction, so any state laws pertaining to damages would be completely irrelevant. More importantly, there aren't "punitive" damages in patent infringement cases -- the patentee is entitled to lost profits or a reasonable royalty for past infringement and an injunction against future infringement. Where the jury finds the infringement to be willful, that number can then be trebled.
The use of thermal imaging equipment to look through walls does not violate the 4th amendment, so I doubt any variation of this radar technology would. If this technology failed in the private sector, it had nothing to do with the 4th amendment.
Avoiding liability isn't about producing a perfect product. There are no perfect products. A company can avoid liability (in cases where liability laws haven't been modified by law to create strict liability schemes) when that company shows that they took efficient measures at preventing harm arising from the use of their product. If $1 of effort prevents $5 of damage and you fail to make your product safer, you will be held liable for damages suffered by your users. If $5 of effort prevents $1 of damage, you won't be held liable.
If you think subjecting software producers to the same standards as car manufacturers is a bad idea then you don't understand the relevant standards. More to the point, though, if you think software receives a special exemption from products liability then show me an example of this special treatment. I suspect that, due to the nature of software, every for-profit company takes reasonable measures to improve the safety of their product. It's been a while since I did anything with software, but in my experience QA and debugging consumed more resources than writing the original code. Many bugs are far from obvious even with thousands of hours of testing.
Products liability occurs only when a manufacturer of a good fails to take due care in making it safe for sale to the public. Only an obvious error or an inadequate (by industry standard) QA/debug process would trigger liability.
These embryos were never in a woman's womb, though. Did God "weave" them in a test tube? Because these embryos were formed in a process other than that described by your passage, why would you assume that your passage would apply?
A well known scam in the US involves taking investment money and buying a home in Florida. Then, once bankruptcy is called, the home that all of the investment is locked up in, gets sold by the individual. As I understand it, even if the court knew this for a fact, it's against law in Florida to seize someones home.
A court can pierce the corporate veil in cases of fraud or self-dealing similar to this one, allowing corporate debts to be collected against the owners/shareholders. Also, while many states protect a person's homestead from bankruptcy proceedings, I doubt any of them protect property obtained with the proceeds of a crime (here, fraud).
Didn't SpaceShipOne re-enter the Earth's Atmosphere using a composite resin body? How was SpaceShipOne able to do this without ceramic tiles? Was it Altitude?
SpaceShip One (orwhatever it was called) was going MUCH slower. It never reached orbital velocity, ~22,500 knots iirc. The heat experienced during reentry is from the atmosphere slowing the craft down. You wouldn't have to shield a craft at all if you were only traveling a few hundred mph. You'd have other problems, of course, but reentry heat wouldn't be one of them.
IMO, why waste money to see the content of a comet? There are so many better things to learn and explore in this great cosmos of ours.
I bet there's a tootsie pop in the middle and we'll still be left pondering that eternal question: how many licks does it take to get to the middle of a tootsie pop?
It's Clinton-think. In a world where someone can have sexual relations with you while at the same time you're not having sexual relations with them, you can claim anything.
How is this Clinton-think? If "sexual relations" are defined as the touching of another's sex organs, then one person can have non-reciprocal sexual relations. Think of it like kissing -- you can kiss someone (on the hand, cheek, forehead, whatever) without them kissing you. In this case, you "sexual relations" someone by touching their penis or vagina. There's a difference between a word's actual definition, as used in a legal proceeding, and the definition you might use on the street. This is because legal issues require precision. Indicting someone for properly using the language as it is intended is daft.
Of course I expect you're just a RW troll, but I thought I'd help you out just in case.
In such a world uploading can be immoral while downloading is not.
It depends on the law. Copyright law has rules against copying and distribution. Legally, if you are uploading you are distributing. If you are downloading you aren't. The real question, though, is who is copying. I think you'd have to say that the copying is taking place in the computer of the uploader, but as the copy is only completed in the downloader's computer, you may be able to make a case against him as well.
If those chambers are capable of holding oil and natural gas for millions of years, they are certainly capable of holding CO2 as well.
CO2 is actually one of the hardest gasses to contain. PET is the only polymer that can be affordably mass produced that can do it, for example, as all others will very quickly leak the excess. It is much easier to hold oil or natural gas than it is to hold CO2. The key to solving the CO2 problem is converting it into biomass and sequestering or using that biomass for some permanent or semipermanent purpose (houses, paper, etc). High levels of CO2 will just kill everything (and I mean everything), making sequestering it a pretty stupid strategy. Sequestrations are necessarily temporary, especially with a gas like CO2. You're much safer with a nuclear waste plant next door.
Basicially, if you can find a point in time where Bush "Knowinegly" Lied under oath in a court of law while in office, then hang him just as high as Clinton was, but until then he hasn't done anything wrong legally. The absolute worst case scenerio thing that bush did was lie to the american people, and since thats not a felony then he's still in charge.
Fraud? 18 U.S.C.A. Section 1001(a);(c)(1):
(a) Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully--
(1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact;
(2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or
(3) makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry;
shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.
...
(c) With respect to any matter within the jurisdiction of the legislative branch, subsection (a) shall apply only to--
(1) administrative matters, including a claim for payment, a matter related to the procurement of property or services, personnel or employment practices, or support services, or a document required by law, rule, or regulation to be submitted to the Congress or any office or officer within the legislative branch;
Bush committed Fraud when he "made a materially false, ficticious, or fraudulent statement or representation" to the legislative branch in order to "procure... services".
FYI, the patents infringed upon were:
US Patent # 5206951 Filed April 3, 1991
US Patent # 5421012 Filed May 30, 1993
US Patent # 5226161 Filed August 31, 1992
Because in the U.S. patent rights belong to the first to invent rather than the first to file, and companies often wait a long time before filing in order to maximize the value of each patent (the more you know about your eventual product when you patent it, the better you can protect it) it is likely that at least two, and possibly all 3 of these were "invented" before sun put together its green group, which eventually created Java.
For anyone interested with access, westlaw has 4 documents from this case, including rulings on FRCP 12(b)(1), 12(b)(6), and 56(c).
From the Court's Rule 56(c) decision (August 2, 2004):
The patented inventions attempt to solve this problem by teaching the creation of programs that, when faced with an unknown object (for example when a word processing program is faced with a picture), seek help from other software programs that do understand the unknown data (in this example the word processor would seek help from a graphics program that understands picture data).
In the most general terms, the patents describe a set of software programs where the programs have the ability, when confronted with a foreign type of data, to send a message seeking the assistance of an independent software program to help manipulate the unknown type of data, and have the ability to receive help from a second program to manipulate the unknown data.
I'm not sure there's a cut-and-dry case for prior art here. This seems to cover a specific method for one program to ask all other programs how to handle data -- a sort of "plug'n'play" for datatypes. While this is common (if not foolproof) right now, it wasn't in 1991 when the first patent was filed. IF the court is going to generally take this broad a view of this patent (reading the summary judgment decision I saw no reference to the specific methods mentioned in the patent) then Microsoft Office is probably squarely in Kodak's sights. Office was first released for windows (according to WIKI) in 1992 and I don't think it was as seamlessly integrated at the time as described by the patent. Further text from the decision:
The patents disclose the use of a set of integrated computer software programs that can work together to create documents, (or understand documents that have already been created), which use different types of data. Specifically, the inventions teach the creation of a software program that can seek the assistance of other independent software programs if the original program comes across, or is asked to use, data that it does not recognize. For example, a word processing program may generally understand only one kind of data: text. If word processing document were to incorporate a picture, the word processing program would not understand how to manipulate the data containing the picture, and would be unable to display or print the picture.
The kind of integration described in this patent was to my knowledge not existant at the time it was filed and is a rather recent thing. At the very least, it seems that this portion of the patents at issue were significantly ahead of their time, or at least enough that Wang actually worked on the project first and didn't win some race to the patent office.
That Business Law article is disturbingly wrong... Anyone following such advice would quickly find that they had wasted a great deal of time and money. An inventor has no exlcusive right to practice his invention, merely the right to exclude others. If I invent and patent the glove, then you invent and patent the red glove, you still cannot produce your red glove because it would infringe upon my patent (or, rather, I would have the legal right to stop you if I so chose). I could not make red gloves, either, but I could make brown gloves and green gloves and black gloves and so forth, provided there were not patents covering those inventions. This is absurdly simplistic, but you get the idea. Things could work differently in the U.K., but I don't know how you could have a patent system that assigned exclusive rights to the inventor, because any patents improving previous inventions still covered by patents would necessarily infringe.
For some reason the article also seems to use the term "register" in place of both the word "apply" and "renew", or at least where those words would appear in a description of the American patent system. Trademarks are generally "registered" because the objective behind them is to prevent nefarious entities from doing business under a name that a company has spent time and money promoting or associating with their own good practices. There is a public registry of protected trademarks so that upstanding businesses can check before they start to do business with someone else's goodwill.
There is no duty to protect a patent against infringement in the U.S. and there shouldn't be in the U.K. either, though it's possible they have such a law. In many cases, this would put an impossible burden on a patent holder because, in addition to managing his business, he must seek out infringers. Maybe if your invention is the automobile that would be easy, but many inventions are used to make consumer goods rather than used in them, and so any evidence of infringement would exist only on factory floors and, if the invention allows significantly greater efficiency and therefore profit, the balance sheet.
From your first article:
DYSON has settled a dispute over its bagless vacuum cleaner by accepting a 4 million [pounds sterling] damages offer, plus costs and interest, from arch-rival Hoover.
The offer, which is expected to top 6m [pounds sterling], follows a High Court ruling in October 2000 that Hoover's Triple Vortex vacuum cleaner infringed Dyson's Dual Cyclone patent.
...
Dyson revealed that, as early as June 2000, it had offered Hoover the opportunity to settle the claim for just over 1 million [pounds sterling], "in order to avoid court proceedings".
Hoover has bad lawyers. If you can settle such an obviously lousy case for only ~$2M U.S., you do it. You'll spend almost that much on lawyers (it looks like dyson did, roughly). I'm not sure how this relates to the above, though -- Hoover infringed, refused to license/settle, was sued, and lost. The trademark claim is a different matter entirely and Dyson said he was "forced to sue" but he was forced by Hoover's business practices, not by a law which compelled him to act or lose his rights, as far as I can tell from the story.
The originators of the patent system thought it might spur innovation by establishing a public record of the workings of existing inventions. However, in reality, the only reason anyone carries out patent searches today is to scout out potential infringement claims, for either offensive or defensive purposes.
The Patent database isn't a good place to find prior art, anyway. Recent applications aren't there and nothing before '76 is searchable. The normal scenario for an independent inventor is this: 1)Inventor has problem. 2)Inventor searches for solution to problem. 3)Inventor finds no solution to problem discussed on the internet or in industry-specific journals or in publications addressing the problem. 4)Inventor wishes there were a solution to this problem. 5)Inventor gets an idea.
6)Inventor with new knowledge (the idea) again searches for solutions to the problem, finding nothing.
7)Inventor invests time and money in creating a workable solution to unsolved problem.
8)Inventor realizes (or knew before) that other people with the same problem will not see their problem solved unless the Inventor can effect a profitable method for inducing others to manufacture and distribute the invention to those with the problem.
9)Inventor realizes that no manufacturing company will talk to him without a patent because of the high costs assocated with mass production.
10)Inventor contacts lawyers who
11)Pay a private firm to search the world's publications and patents in dozens of different languages in order to determine whether the invention is novel.
12)If invention is novel, inventor pays lawyers to draft and submit a patent (for the sake of argument, it is immediately accepted).
13)Inventor talks with Company X that now is willing to invest monstrous ammounts of money retooling his factory because he knows that no subsequent company will undercut his prices once he has established a market for the invention.
The patent database is really only useful to large companies (who do a lot of research and would prefer not to duplicate what they can license) and lawyers. This isn't a sign of the obsolescence of the patent system, though -- it is a sign that it is working remarkably well. There is rarely any need to search a patent database because, once patented, ideas, designs, products, etc are freely discussed. Why search through a patent database when google has 10 pages of links to descriptions of a product, what it is used for, and why it works? Maybe if you have some bizarre fetish for arcane wording and complicated claim structures you'd search the database, but for the vast majority of people it is redundant BECAUSE of the rights granted to the patent holder.
That is why the system is broken. The USPTO should be throwing out any patent whose description is obvious enough that it's likely to be reinvented without a patent search. Otherwise, the patent system really does benefit nobody but the lawyers (and lucky 'inventors' of soon-to-be-obvious concepts).
Yeah, I have no idea what you are trying to say here. The patent search is only useful once you've invented something. It is very hard to search a database for something that isn't there. More to the point, in most cases you would find a more exact answer to the question of "is this new?" by using google. Should inventors be barred from using the internet? Besides, a patent is nothing more than its claims. A patent's description is not enforceable as a patent. In the current case, the invention is described only as "a method by which a program can "ask for help" from another application to carry out certain functions." That tells you nothing about what the patent covers, beyond some form of interprocess communication. You have no idea if it is truly novel or not, and you couldn't because you haven't read the patent.
Surely you will concede that there exist some things novel enou
The patent system assumes that ideas are something unique and that it is something special to come up with new ideas. It is only with software that the mistake becomes really obvious.
You have no idea about what you are talking. The problem with software patents is not that they are not special, it's that it's nearly impossible to determine novelty or nonobviousness. In a closed source world, the only way to determine what, exactly, a piece of software does and how it does it is through a patent. You could break out the hex editor and attempt a reverse-compilation, but you would have to do that with every piece of software before determining whether some new piece of software was either new or nonobvious. If every piece of software were open source, it would be easier to determine whether something was actually novel or nonobvious.
I also doubt you fully appreciate the three requirements of a patent -- that it be new, useful, and nonobvious. It has to be new -- that is it can't currently exist. It has to be useful -- meaning it has to solve a problem or convey some benefit to the user or practitioner. It has to be nonobvious to an expert in the field. If you come across a new problem, or are working on an old one, and come up with a novel solution to it that would not be obvious to an expert in the field, then society has an interest in learning your solution. To be absurd for a moment, how would you feel if some doctor got HIV (or cancer, or whatever), devised a cure, cured himself, and then told no one about it? What if you had HIV, or cancer? The patent system is how society pays for such secrets. Perhaps you think the USPTO grants patents for inventions that are overly obvious, and with software patents that is occasionally the case. There are reasons (above) for this, though, and it is the aggressive pursuit of software patents that will, through disclosing these methods, eventually reign in the "software patent monster" by increasing the availability of prior art.
If it were really neccessary for us to advance how the hell did the monkey ever come out of the tree without a working patent system?
It took roughly 7 million years (6.8, IIRC) for those tree apes that became men to develop the (modern) steam engine. It took approximately 200 years from the development of the modern steam engine for man to land on the moon. Innovation during the latter interval was protected by an effective patent system while innovation in the former interval was not. Attitudes such as yours towards innovation will soon see us back in the trees, though, and as I have no affinity for small, biting insects I would prefer for that not to happen.
And filing/defending a patent isn't easy. Filing costs are around $10,000 and you have to register your patent across the world (Europe, USA, Japan) and you must defend the patent the minute it is violated.
I don't see how you think you can discuss patents and intellectual property intelligently when you don't know the difference between a trademark and a patent. You have no duty to "defend" a violated patent. A patent is ONLY the exclusive right to prevent others from practicing the invention or process described in the patent. You also don't "register" a patent -- you have to file for a new patent in every country where you want one (though some countries are combining for this purpose, or are moving towards cross-patenting agreements). If you want to patent something in the U.S., and you only want to use that patent in the U.S. then you don't have to bother with the rest of the world. BTW, the patent application fee for an individual or small company is a whopping $395.
If you think it's so easy to patent something, go to town. If you hire a high-powered law firm to write your patent, research prior art, craft your claims so that they are as broad as reasonable, and prosecute the patent until issue (which would include several rejections for overly broad claims and additional fees for reexamination under narrower claims) then you could spend $10k. If you're doing that, though, you're either planning to license to a company to produce your product (which you presumably have no problem with, provided you are rational) or you are planning to practice or produce it yourself (again, there should be no problems here).
One of the problems is that if you stake your claim in knowledge-space and file a patent, a large company can come along and file a hefty number of patents in every possible direction your research could go in. Sure you own the land, but they now own the access.
You plainly don't understand the patent system. A patent has to be new, useful, and nonobvious. If, given Company A's patent, Company B's engineers can invent new, useful X, Y, and Z without substantial thought, research, or development then X, Y, and Z are not patentable inventions. If X, Y, and Z are not obvious (Company B had to invest substantial research etc) then they are patentable. Why? Because we want to reward Company B for adding to our global knowledge base. Your problem is that you think, many years after the fact, that X, Y, and Z are obvious, and because they are obvious now that they were obvious at the time they were invented. You can't patent "in every possible direction," (whatever that means) you can only patent related nonobvious inventions.
Your ignorant, paranoid rantings are really quite disturbing to those of use who contribute to society, and to the onward march of technology, and wish for a system that rewards largely based on innovative merit to remain in place. The system does have some problems, and determining obviousness in software patents is one of the harrier issues, but your desire to dismantle a system that has successfully promoted innovation and prevented intellectual quagmire for more than two centuries based on a problem with a 20-30 year-old industry is unfounded.
I am saying that MS had not political protection. How many other monopoly cases can you remember? Right. You think there arent any out there? Right. Political contributions talk. What is fact is that Clinton and Gore both personally soliticted donations from Microsoft. I know because I asked Al Gore myself as a student hosting a debate that was carried live on C-SPAN.
First, learn to use correct English. Your post is a minefield.
Second, corporate law cases are boring and normally garner little if any press. Just because you haven't heard of other antitrust actions doesn't mean they haven't happened. Clinton's DOJ apparently brought more antitrust actions than the previous 4 presidents combined, or something along those lines. Actions analogous to the one against MSFT are rare because few if any industries see the same level of dominance by one firm that MSFT has over the home computing industry. MSFT's actions were also extreme -- they knew they were breaking the law when they did it, took that into account, and decided they didn't care. It was better business for them to risk prosecution and the accompanying costs than to play by the rules. This in and of itself should have been sufficient for the break-up ruling.
Third, it's wrong for you to imply that there is something untoward about Clinton and Gore asking for campaign contributions from MSFT. Clinton and Gore are (were) politicians. Politicians in the U.S. are in the business of getting reelected, which in this country means asking other people for money. If your business were asking people or companies for money, would you maybe ask the richest company on the planet? Yeah, I think you would.
Slashdot Mirror
MSF is one of the least efficient (but most common) desalination methods in use and only makes sense when the thermal energy provided is "free." MED is a much more efficient version of the same thing. Presumably, though, locations with excess steam suitable for such facilities already have them (these technologies are nothing new). Currently these two technologies produce approximately 4 billion cubic meters of fresh water per year and any increase in desalination for the purpose of energy production through aggriculture would not be compatible with a scenario where a large number of new power plants were being built and would use the most efficient desalination technique (reverse osmosis).
To give you an idea of how much fresh water would be needed, though, compared to the 4 billion or so cubic meters currently derived from desalination processes which make use of excess process steam from combined cycle or cogeneration plants, let's look at the previous example.
In the US, we consume approximately 100 billion gallons of gasoline per year, which in turn comprises about 40% of the almost 240 billion gallons of gasoline consumed around the globe annually. Replacing that gasoline would require roughly 330 billion gallons of ethanol. For our beets, it takes approximately 5.3 cubic meters of water to yield a gallon of ethanol. That means the existing capacity of excess steam-based desalination would yield approximately 750 million gallons of ethanol, or about two days worth of current US transportation needs.
Unless we're going to make a lot more excess steam, reverse osmosis would be the most efficient way to desalinate that much water.
Desalination could make sense in environments where rainfall was highly variable between years, but such regions often have huge soil salination problems associated with excessive irrigation.
The only two viable biofuel options avialable in the forseeable future are Brazil's sugarcane ethanol program (which yields 8 units of energy ouput per unit of energy input) and algae (which can yield ten to fifteen thousand gallons of biodiesel per acre). I doubt desalination would be feasible for either of those processes (I'm not sure whether the algae process uses fresh- or salt-water algae, but fresh would require a ton of fresh water and salt would presumably require very little), and sugarcane requires a lot of water (~1.4 meters net annually)).
Math and Science are cousins that get a bit too friendly at family reunions.
I'm sorry, but there's no logical reason to believe that because the energy requirements of desalination for irrigation are indirect that they are significantly less than the energy output of the biofuel. All the indirect nature of the energy input implies is the thermodynamic possibility of a net energy profit.
Assuming the most favorable processes (sugar beets used for ethanol at 714 gal/acre, 5 kwh per cubic meter of desalinated water), 80% efficiency from a center pivot irrigation system, 60% efficiency from the original energy stock, and 30"/season of net water consumption, such a system would require 3855 cubic meters of fresh water at the cost of 19275 kwh of energy at the desalination plant or 32125 kwh of fuel stock. Ethanol yields 23 kwh per gallon, so a salination-supported sugar beet ethanol facility under ideal conditions would yield approximately 16422 kwh per acre at a per acre cost of approximately 32125 kwh of energy stock, ignoring the energy costs associated with delivering the water, powering farm equipment, &etc. That's a net loss of approximately 15703 kwh per acre per season, essentially converting your original fuel stock to ethanol at an efficiency of 51%. As ethanol-powered vehicles have an efficiency between 30 and 35%, this would yield a total efficiency (original fuel stock to end use as transportation energy) of around 15%. Electric vehicles charge at an efficiency between 80 and 90% and then use that stored energy at an efficiency between 80% and 90%. Assuming the low end on both of those scales, an electric vehicle would yield an energy stock to transportation efficiency of 38%.
Now, 60% at the power plant is using a state of the art combined cycle LNG system. In the US, mean efficiency is probably around half of that, but in this back-of-the-envelope comparison both systems scale linearly with the efficiency of the original power source. That means that under ideal conditions for biofuel vehicles (and worst case scenario conditions for electric vehicles), electric vehicles are about 2.5 times more efficient than desalination-irrigated biofuel vehicles. Under more realistic conditions, electric vehicles should fare even better. If you're using desalination to grow biofuel stock you're just throwing energy away.
Novelty and nonobviousness are separate requirements for patentability. You're conflating them. There is an argument for nonobviousness that draws heavily from the novelty of an invention (it invokes a long-felt unmet need satisfied by an invention to show its nonobviousness). As a DVR is just a VCR with a different storage medium, you'd have an obstacle to making such an argument.
In trademark law, a mark can be eroded and fall into the public domain but terms once in the public domain can also be turned into trademarks. "Apple" and "Macintosh" for example both existed before the Apple Computer company was founded but are both trademarked terms now. In this respect, trademark law is unlike patent and copyright law. In patent and copyright law the public good provided in exchange for legal rights is some novel creation which, once released to the public belongs to the public (with a few exceptions).
The key to understanding intellectual property law and the differences between the different varieties of IP law is understanding the bargain struck between the holders of the IP right and society at large. In trademark law, the public good received in exchange for the legal protection of the mark is the decrease in consumer search costs as a result of the mark. In theory, the more vigorously defended marks the better, as consumers can more efficiently identify the products they wish to purchase. The only thing the public sacrifices for this decrease in consumer search costs is the right to sell a product named in such a way that causes confusion as to its source. Novelty is neither necessary nor sufficient to establish a mark -- the public association between the mark and the source is the only relevant issue (though things like novelty can contribute to the strength of the mark and the ease of establishing it) and as a result a trademark can be lost and reclaimed (or even lost by one company and reclaimed by another). While there is essentially a one-way gate between patent or copyright protection and the public domain, the nature of the trademark bargain necessitates that the link between full trademark protection and the public domain be a sliding scale that can move in either direction.
What background do you have in economics which gives you this idea?
In economics, resources are valued based on demand, not scarcity (and it's spelled "scarce" btw). Scarcity can play a role in supply, but it is not an issue in the current context where prices are fixed and the creation of an additional unit is essentially free. While it is copyright infringement, there's no economic loss when someone unwilling to pay $2.99 for their product buys it someplace else for $0.99 (and banning such a transaction creates what is called "deadweight loss"). Ideally, an efficiently enforced copyright law would lead all those willing to pay $2.99 to do so while still allowing an efficient level of copyright infringement or fair use among those unwilling to pay $2.99. Copyright law has become an unweildy beast in the United States, though, with anticompetitive cartels fixing prices for competing copyrighted content and increasingly severe laws explicitly targeting efficient copyright infringement and fair use. If the current DOJ weren't so gutless then content producers would be forced into competitive rather than collusive pricing and a much smaller portion of the population would participate in or contribute to copyright infringement.
The relevant question is whether the potentially offending party has something called "market power" -- the ability to change the market price for a commodity by unilateral action. While AMD is not a monopoly, the relevant market (intel-compatible chipsets) is concentrated enough that ATI probably has market power, and any attempt by AMD to use ATI to promote demand for AMD processors and harm both Intel and consumers by creating an artificial shortage in Intel motherboards would probably meet with hasty action from the DOJ. It would also be a pretty inefficient way to spend the X billion dollars it would cost to acquire the (profitable) Intel chipset production branch of ATI. They may be better off if they just spun it off -- the DOJ may not look kindly on a merger that gave one party market power over his competitor through vertical market restraints.
This is circular nonsense. Perhaps you (or whoever wrote that) meant that only income derived from activity controlled by congress may be subject to an income-determined excise tax. Congress has plenary power over interstate commerce, though, so basically any transaction involving money or regulated securities would fall under this penumbra. That still wouldn't be what the constitution says, though -- the remaining constitutional limits on (federal) taxation are as follows:
If you ever take a class or two in tax law you'll be left with one lasting impression: any argument that you can think of to reduce your total tax burden by reclassifying income or by otherwise denying the federal government's authority to tax your income has been tried and will land you in prison if you attempt to use it as a basis for paying less.
If you have the name of a Supreme Court case that you think claims that domestic income of citizens is not taxable, I'd like to hear it. I can look it up and paste the relevant portions here for discussion, which should be more productive than uncited assertions and links to web pages which cite no precedent but make ample use of bold, italics, and underline font styles.
FWIW, the best online constitution I've come across is here: http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitut
16th Amendment:
Patent infringement cases are exclusively federal jurisdiction, so any state laws pertaining to damages would be completely irrelevant. More importantly, there aren't "punitive" damages in patent infringement cases -- the patentee is entitled to lost profits or a reasonable royalty for past infringement and an injunction against future infringement. Where the jury finds the infringement to be willful, that number can then be trebled.
The use of thermal imaging equipment to look through walls does not violate the 4th amendment, so I doubt any variation of this radar technology would. If this technology failed in the private sector, it had nothing to do with the 4th amendment.
Perfect software doesn't exist.
Avoiding liability isn't about producing a perfect product. There are no perfect products. A company can avoid liability (in cases where liability laws haven't been modified by law to create strict liability schemes) when that company shows that they took efficient measures at preventing harm arising from the use of their product. If $1 of effort prevents $5 of damage and you fail to make your product safer, you will be held liable for damages suffered by your users. If $5 of effort prevents $1 of damage, you won't be held liable.
If you think subjecting software producers to the same standards as car manufacturers is a bad idea then you don't understand the relevant standards. More to the point, though, if you think software receives a special exemption from products liability then show me an example of this special treatment. I suspect that, due to the nature of software, every for-profit company takes reasonable measures to improve the safety of their product. It's been a while since I did anything with software, but in my experience QA and debugging consumed more resources than writing the original code. Many bugs are far from obvious even with thousands of hours of testing.
Products liability occurs only when a manufacturer of a good fails to take due care in making it safe for sale to the public. Only an obvious error or an inadequate (by industry standard) QA/debug process would trigger liability.
These embryos were never in a woman's womb, though. Did God "weave" them in a test tube? Because these embryos were formed in a process other than that described by your passage, why would you assume that your passage would apply?
A well known scam in the US involves taking investment money and buying a home in Florida. Then, once bankruptcy is called, the home that all of the investment is locked up in, gets sold by the individual. As I understand it, even if the court knew this for a fact, it's against law in Florida to seize someones home. A court can pierce the corporate veil in cases of fraud or self-dealing similar to this one, allowing corporate debts to be collected against the owners/shareholders. Also, while many states protect a person's homestead from bankruptcy proceedings, I doubt any of them protect property obtained with the proceeds of a crime (here, fraud).
Didn't SpaceShipOne re-enter the Earth's Atmosphere using a composite resin body? How was SpaceShipOne able to do this without ceramic tiles? Was it Altitude?
SpaceShip One (orwhatever it was called) was going MUCH slower. It never reached orbital velocity, ~22,500 knots iirc. The heat experienced during reentry is from the atmosphere slowing the craft down. You wouldn't have to shield a craft at all if you were only traveling a few hundred mph. You'd have other problems, of course, but reentry heat wouldn't be one of them.
IMO, why waste money to see the content of a comet? There are so many better things to learn and explore in this great cosmos of ours.
I bet there's a tootsie pop in the middle and we'll still be left pondering that eternal question: how many licks does it take to get to the middle of a tootsie pop?
How is this Clinton-think? If "sexual relations" are defined as the touching of another's sex organs, then one person can have non-reciprocal sexual relations. Think of it like kissing -- you can kiss someone (on the hand, cheek, forehead, whatever) without them kissing you. In this case, you "sexual relations" someone by touching their penis or vagina. There's a difference between a word's actual definition, as used in a legal proceeding, and the definition you might use on the street. This is because legal issues require precision. Indicting someone for properly using the language as it is intended is daft.
Of course I expect you're just a RW troll, but I thought I'd help you out just in case.
In such a world uploading can be immoral while downloading is not.
It depends on the law. Copyright law has rules against copying and distribution. Legally, if you are uploading you are distributing. If you are downloading you aren't. The real question, though, is who is copying. I think you'd have to say that the copying is taking place in the computer of the uploader, but as the copy is only completed in the downloader's computer, you may be able to make a case against him as well.
CO2 is actually one of the hardest gasses to contain. PET is the only polymer that can be affordably mass produced that can do it, for example, as all others will very quickly leak the excess. It is much easier to hold oil or natural gas than it is to hold CO2. The key to solving the CO2 problem is converting it into biomass and sequestering or using that biomass for some permanent or semipermanent purpose (houses, paper, etc). High levels of CO2 will just kill everything (and I mean everything), making sequestering it a pretty stupid strategy. Sequestrations are necessarily temporary, especially with a gas like CO2. You're much safer with a nuclear waste plant next door.
Fraud? 18 U.S.C.A. Section 1001(a);(c)(1):
Bush committed Fraud when he "made a materially false, ficticious, or fraudulent statement or representation" to the legislative branch in order to "procure ... services".
US Patent # 5206951 Filed April 3, 1991
US Patent # 5421012 Filed May 30, 1993
US Patent # 5226161 Filed August 31, 1992
Because in the U.S. patent rights belong to the first to invent rather than the first to file, and companies often wait a long time before filing in order to maximize the value of each patent (the more you know about your eventual product when you patent it, the better you can protect it) it is likely that at least two, and possibly all 3 of these were "invented" before sun put together its green group, which eventually created Java.
For anyone interested with access, westlaw has 4 documents from this case, including rulings on FRCP 12(b)(1), 12(b)(6), and 56(c).
From the Court's Rule 56(c) decision (August 2, 2004):
I'm not sure there's a cut-and-dry case for prior art here. This seems to cover a specific method for one program to ask all other programs how to handle data -- a sort of "plug'n'play" for datatypes. While this is common (if not foolproof) right now, it wasn't in 1991 when the first patent was filed. IF the court is going to generally take this broad a view of this patent (reading the summary judgment decision I saw no reference to the specific methods mentioned in the patent) then Microsoft Office is probably squarely in Kodak's sights. Office was first released for windows (according to WIKI) in 1992 and I don't think it was as seamlessly integrated at the time as described by the patent. Further text from the decision:
The kind of integration described in this patent was to my knowledge not existant at the time it was filed and is a rather recent thing. At the very least, it seems that this portion of the patents at issue were significantly ahead of their time, or at least enough that Wang actually worked on the project first and didn't win some race to the patent office.
For some reason the article also seems to use the term "register" in place of both the word "apply" and "renew", or at least where those words would appear in a description of the American patent system. Trademarks are generally "registered" because the objective behind them is to prevent nefarious entities from doing business under a name that a company has spent time and money promoting or associating with their own good practices. There is a public registry of protected trademarks so that upstanding businesses can check before they start to do business with someone else's goodwill.
There is no duty to protect a patent against infringement in the U.S. and there shouldn't be in the U.K. either, though it's possible they have such a law. In many cases, this would put an impossible burden on a patent holder because, in addition to managing his business, he must seek out infringers. Maybe if your invention is the automobile that would be easy, but many inventions are used to make consumer goods rather than used in them, and so any evidence of infringement would exist only on factory floors and, if the invention allows significantly greater efficiency and therefore profit, the balance sheet.
From your first article:
Hoover has bad lawyers. If you can settle such an obviously lousy case for only ~$2M U.S., you do it. You'll spend almost that much on lawyers (it looks like dyson did, roughly). I'm not sure how this relates to the above, though -- Hoover infringed, refused to license/settle, was sued, and lost. The trademark claim is a different matter entirely and Dyson said he was "forced to sue" but he was forced by Hoover's business practices, not by a law which compelled him to act or lose his rights, as far as I can tell from the story.
The Patent database isn't a good place to find prior art, anyway. Recent applications aren't there and nothing before '76 is searchable. The normal scenario for an independent inventor is this:
1)Inventor has problem.
2)Inventor searches for solution to problem.
3)Inventor finds no solution to problem discussed on the internet or in industry-specific journals or in publications addressing the problem.
4)Inventor wishes there were a solution to this problem.
5)Inventor gets an idea.
6)Inventor with new knowledge (the idea) again searches for solutions to the problem, finding nothing.
7)Inventor invests time and money in creating a workable solution to unsolved problem.
8)Inventor realizes (or knew before) that other people with the same problem will not see their problem solved unless the Inventor can effect a profitable method for inducing others to manufacture and distribute the invention to those with the problem.
9)Inventor realizes that no manufacturing company will talk to him without a patent because of the high costs assocated with mass production.
10)Inventor contacts lawyers who
11)Pay a private firm to search the world's publications and patents in dozens of different languages in order to determine whether the invention is novel.
12)If invention is novel, inventor pays lawyers to draft and submit a patent (for the sake of argument, it is immediately accepted).
13)Inventor talks with Company X that now is willing to invest monstrous ammounts of money retooling his factory because he knows that no subsequent company will undercut his prices once he has established a market for the invention.
The patent database is really only useful to large companies (who do a lot of research and would prefer not to duplicate what they can license) and lawyers. This isn't a sign of the obsolescence of the patent system, though -- it is a sign that it is working remarkably well. There is rarely any need to search a patent database because, once patented, ideas, designs, products, etc are freely discussed. Why search through a patent database when google has 10 pages of links to descriptions of a product, what it is used for, and why it works? Maybe if you have some bizarre fetish for arcane wording and complicated claim structures you'd search the database, but for the vast majority of people it is redundant BECAUSE of the rights granted to the patent holder.
Yeah, I have no idea what you are trying to say here. The patent search is only useful once you've invented something. It is very hard to search a database for something that isn't there. More to the point, in most cases you would find a more exact answer to the question of "is this new?" by using google. Should inventors be barred from using the internet? Besides, a patent is nothing more than its claims. A patent's description is not enforceable as a patent. In the current case, the invention is described only as "a method by which a program can "ask for help" from another application to carry out certain functions." That tells you nothing about what the patent covers, beyond some form of interprocess communication. You have no idea if it is truly novel or not, and you couldn't because you haven't read the patent.
Surely you will concede that there exist some things novel enou
You have no idea about what you are talking. The problem with software patents is not that they are not special, it's that it's nearly impossible to determine novelty or nonobviousness. In a closed source world, the only way to determine what, exactly, a piece of software does and how it does it is through a patent. You could break out the hex editor and attempt a reverse-compilation, but you would have to do that with every piece of software before determining whether some new piece of software was either new or nonobvious. If every piece of software were open source, it would be easier to determine whether something was actually novel or nonobvious.
I also doubt you fully appreciate the three requirements of a patent -- that it be new, useful, and nonobvious. It has to be new -- that is it can't currently exist. It has to be useful -- meaning it has to solve a problem or convey some benefit to the user or practitioner. It has to be nonobvious to an expert in the field. If you come across a new problem, or are working on an old one, and come up with a novel solution to it that would not be obvious to an expert in the field, then society has an interest in learning your solution. To be absurd for a moment, how would you feel if some doctor got HIV (or cancer, or whatever), devised a cure, cured himself, and then told no one about it? What if you had HIV, or cancer? The patent system is how society pays for such secrets. Perhaps you think the USPTO grants patents for inventions that are overly obvious, and with software patents that is occasionally the case. There are reasons (above) for this, though, and it is the aggressive pursuit of software patents that will, through disclosing these methods, eventually reign in the "software patent monster" by increasing the availability of prior art.
It took roughly 7 million years (6.8, IIRC) for those tree apes that became men to develop the (modern) steam engine. It took approximately 200 years from the development of the modern steam engine for man to land on the moon. Innovation during the latter interval was protected by an effective patent system while innovation in the former interval was not. Attitudes such as yours towards innovation will soon see us back in the trees, though, and as I have no affinity for small, biting insects I would prefer for that not to happen.
I don't see how you think you can discuss patents and intellectual property intelligently when you don't know the difference between a trademark and a patent. You have no duty to "defend" a violated patent. A patent is ONLY the exclusive right to prevent others from practicing the invention or process described in the patent. You also don't "register" a patent -- you have to file for a new patent in every country where you want one (though some countries are combining for this purpose, or are moving towards cross-patenting agreements). If you want to patent something in the U.S., and you only want to use that patent in the U.S. then you don't have to bother with the rest of the world. BTW, the patent application fee for an individual or small company is a whopping $395.
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/qs/ope/fee200
If you think it's so easy to patent something, go to town. If you hire a high-powered law firm to write your patent, research prior art, craft your claims so that they are as broad as reasonable, and prosecute the patent until issue (which would include several rejections for overly broad claims and additional fees for reexamination under narrower claims) then you could spend $10k. If you're doing that, though, you're either planning to license to a company to produce your product (which you presumably have no problem with, provided you are rational) or you are planning to practice or produce it yourself (again, there should be no problems here).
You plainly don't understand the patent system. A patent has to be new, useful, and nonobvious. If, given Company A's patent, Company B's engineers can invent new, useful X, Y, and Z without substantial thought, research, or development then X, Y, and Z are not patentable inventions. If X, Y, and Z are not obvious (Company B had to invest substantial research etc) then they are patentable. Why? Because we want to reward Company B for adding to our global knowledge base. Your problem is that you think, many years after the fact, that X, Y, and Z are obvious, and because they are obvious now that they were obvious at the time they were invented. You can't patent "in every possible direction," (whatever that means) you can only patent related nonobvious inventions.
Your ignorant, paranoid rantings are really quite disturbing to those of use who contribute to society, and to the onward march of technology, and wish for a system that rewards largely based on innovative merit to remain in place. The system does have some problems, and determining obviousness in software patents is one of the harrier issues, but your desire to dismantle a system that has successfully promoted innovation and prevented intellectual quagmire for more than two centuries based on a problem with a 20-30 year-old industry is unfounded.
First, learn to use correct English. Your post is a minefield.
Second, corporate law cases are boring and normally garner little if any press. Just because you haven't heard of other antitrust actions doesn't mean they haven't happened. Clinton's DOJ apparently brought more antitrust actions than the previous 4 presidents combined, or something along those lines. Actions analogous to the one against MSFT are rare because few if any industries see the same level of dominance by one firm that MSFT has over the home computing industry. MSFT's actions were also extreme -- they knew they were breaking the law when they did it, took that into account, and decided they didn't care. It was better business for them to risk prosecution and the accompanying costs than to play by the rules. This in and of itself should have been sufficient for the break-up ruling.
Third, it's wrong for you to imply that there is something untoward about Clinton and Gore asking for campaign contributions from MSFT. Clinton and Gore are (were) politicians. Politicians in the U.S. are in the business of getting reelected, which in this country means asking other people for money. If your business were asking people or companies for money, would you maybe ask the richest company on the planet? Yeah, I think you would.