I think that is the whole point of the previous poster's suggestion (that you would have to pay tax on a patent even if it didn't make you money). The supposed point to patents is so that the patentee can have the oppertunity for the short term monopoly so they can make money to justify the R&D effort. Under his scheme, if you patent something wihtout a business model to make money off of it, then you are not even fulfilling what the patent was meant for. It would sure put a criimp in the plans of the patent and litgate companies which sit on thousands of patents in the hope that someone will breach it in the future.
At a software development company where I've previously worked, after each phase of design and implementation, a team of patent lawyers went over the algorithms and processes to find any and all aspects that can be patented. Those numerous patents ended up sitting around in hopes that some other company would wander over them and hence the company could try to litigate them out of the market space. The r&d would have gone on anyways, the company was just using the patent system to try and build itself it's own little permenant monopoly over sector of the market.
In theory it might be an interesting idea, however your price point is far outside what most people would be likely to accept. Consider that for one CD's worth of data, it would cost $650/year to archive. While more of a hassle, you could buy a spindle of 100 CDRs burn 25 identical copies every 3 months, using the CD from the previous batch which had the least corruption. You'd have $600 still in your pocket for that year, and I doubt that you're going to lose all that much data.
Heck, depending upon what the legal protections & encryption options things like GMail end up with, you could even try to use one of them as a storage medium for small amounts of data.
That reminds me of work a week ago, when a co-worker sent an email to me:
Subject: Compile this Body: Compile this and run to see if it works. Attachment: 4 C++ files and a makefile.
Needless to say I had to make a quick phone call to make sure it wasn't a new type of virus out to get those of us too savy to click on a.exe attachment.
Joel's comments may be applicable when applying straight to a person within a dept. But unfortunately for many companies, the resumes are sent through HR first.
The HR people usually don't know the tecnical details about a job all that well, so they filter based on presense of Buzzwords (or so it seems a lot of the time). If you don't put the admittadly moronic "detail oriented, forward-thinking, team player" in your resume, it may not even get to the person who can actually understand what is written on the resume!
Of course this only applies to technical positions. If you are applying to a job that only asks for MS OFFICE skills, HR can probably figure it out.
50% reduction? That's a little low I think. That would imply you only have two choices for any symbol, ie: SYMBOL symbol
when you have case sensitivity for a six letter word you've got 64 possible symbols without changing the letters.
what you're actually doing is reducing your alphabet by 26 characters when you make an english-based language case insensitive. This means you are not packing as much information into each byte of text, which translates into needing more text.
It might stand up to the damage from fast moving dust particles, but as has been discussed elsewhere, it will shatter if too much pressure is applied. Personally I'd rather the interior of my jacket didn't shatter into a fine dust and become essentially uninsulated, the first time someone threw a snowball at me, or I slipped on a patch of ice.
everything from strange one-handed KBs
It's not like one handed keyboards are exactely a new thing either... One handed Devorak keyboard layouts have been around since before the days of silicon transistors.
Of course those are still a normal keyboard, just with the useful keys put into more useful positions.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that is the whole point of the previous poster's suggestion (that you would have to pay tax on a patent even if it didn't make you money). The supposed point to patents is so that the patentee can have the oppertunity for the short term monopoly so they can make money to justify the R&D effort. Under his scheme, if you patent something wihtout a business model to make money off of it, then you are not even fulfilling what the patent was meant for. It would sure put a criimp in the plans of the patent and litgate companies which sit on thousands of patents in the hope that someone will breach it in the future. At a software development company where I've previously worked, after each phase of design and implementation, a team of patent lawyers went over the algorithms and processes to find any and all aspects that can be patented. Those numerous patents ended up sitting around in hopes that some other company would wander over them and hence the company could try to litigate them out of the market space. The r&d would have gone on anyways, the company was just using the patent system to try and build itself it's own little permenant monopoly over sector of the market.
In theory it might be an interesting idea, however your price point is far outside what most people would be likely to accept. Consider that for one CD's worth of data, it would cost $650/year to archive. While more of a hassle, you could buy a spindle of 100 CDRs burn 25 identical copies every 3 months, using the CD from the previous batch which had the least corruption. You'd have $600 still in your pocket for that year, and I doubt that you're going to lose all that much data. Heck, depending upon what the legal protections & encryption options things like GMail end up with, you could even try to use one of them as a storage medium for small amounts of data.
That reminds me of work a week ago, when a co-worker sent an email to me:
.exe attachment.
Subject: Compile this
Body: Compile this and run to see if it works.
Attachment: 4 C++ files and a makefile.
Needless to say I had to make a quick phone call to make sure it wasn't a new type of virus out to get those of us too savy to click on a
820 Million for a rover... you think they could have picked an OS that wouldn't require a reformat and reinstall quite so soon.
Someone should have told them not to use a Microsoft OS.
Joel's comments may be applicable when applying straight to a person within a dept. But unfortunately for many companies, the resumes are sent through HR first.
The HR people usually don't know the tecnical details about a job all that well, so they filter based on presense of Buzzwords (or so it seems a lot of the time). If you don't put the admittadly moronic "detail oriented, forward-thinking, team player" in your resume, it may not even get to the person who can actually understand what is written on the resume!
Of course this only applies to technical positions. If you are applying to a job that only asks for MS OFFICE skills, HR can probably figure it out.
50% reduction? That's a little low I think. That would imply you only have two choices for any symbol, ie:
SYMBOL
symbol
when you have case sensitivity for a six letter word you've got 64 possible symbols without changing the letters.
what you're actually doing is reducing your alphabet by 26 characters when you make an english-based language case insensitive. This means you are not packing as much information into each byte of text, which translates into needing more text.
I'd have to object, VB has it's uses.
If all you want to do is build a GUI for a database backend it's a heck of a lot faster and simpler to build it in VB.net than with Java or C.
also since it compiles to the CLR now it's not even agonizingly slow anymore.
Of course, I wouldn't even dream of building a client that had any appreciable processing to do in VB.
It might stand up to the damage from fast moving dust particles, but as has been discussed elsewhere, it will shatter if too much pressure is applied. Personally I'd rather the interior of my jacket didn't shatter into a fine dust and become essentially uninsulated, the first time someone threw a snowball at me, or I slipped on a patch of ice.
everything from strange one-handed KBs
It's not like one handed keyboards are exactely a new thing either... One handed Devorak keyboard layouts have been around since before the days of silicon transistors. Of course those are still a normal keyboard, just with the useful keys put into more useful positions.
If anyone actually managed to use such a defence in court, I imagine we'd get the RIAA, etc. pushing for IPv6.