This approach seemed expensive, but as far as bringing a dead drive back to life through surgery, this seemed pretty easy.
"The hard way" would have been buying a new drive, taking it to a cleanroom and transplanting the platters! You'd more than likely lose the use of the 'donor' drive, and there's a higher chance of failure in this much more invasive procedure, but that would be much more article-worthy.
Kind of an afterthought to an earlier comment of mine paraphrased as "Doesn't MTBF mean anything anymore?"
Hard drives have warranties. Sure, these warrenty periods are shortening, but that's neither here nor there. Given that a drive is going to fail eventually, would it be beneficial for drive makers to offer 'data insurance'? Data recovery is expensive because it's not a common practice. If you paid some reasonable, optional $x when you buy a drive, and the drive goes down, and you could send it back to the maker for recovery (having paid 'insurance' on it), the practice would be more common and the price would decrease. The idea being, like most forms of insurance, you are paying less than what the recovery would cost because the rest is subsidized by the other people who pay but never need it. A third party recovery service could offer this as well.
There are a number of issues I can see with this arrangement (privacy, confidentiality of data, what happens when the drive can't be recovered, what if they just SAY it can't be done, etc), but it's something to think about.
What's the deal with this? More people I know have lost new IDE drives than I ever recall in the past. Are my friends just unlucky, or do drive just not have the quality anymore? I know this assumes that drives used to be better, and that may well not be true, just this is the trend I've noticed. Is it worth buying a new drive (I do need one...), or is it just going to die on me in a few months?
As far as the article goes: What a waste! It must be damn nice to be able to buy TWO new drives to replace the logic board on one! Sure, one of the new drives is usable, but the other is shot.
Any crypto algorithm worth its salt would have The Farm Boys cranking away until the Universe ended and then some. Not that this thing is going to be doing say, 2048-bit Blowfish or anything, but an expected brute-force or crack along a timeframe of 'weeks' is cryptographically poor.
On a similiar topic: this being sold at geeks.com. Front panel ports plus a thing that does "real time 64-bit DES" on your HD. I'm skeptical towards both products, but it's a good start. The jaded cynic in me saw "Secure IDE" and just assumed that Palladium was a step closer, at least data-storage-wise. Ever notice how when Certain Software Firms say 'secure' or 'trusted', it's usually not in the traditional senses of the words?
Why the hell not? You have desert maps (some of my favorite), and the oil rig. Might as well find where the coders hid the sweet, sweet oil. You can use the seismic waves put out by the HE grenades, or the terrorist bombs.
I've read about these in ESR's _The New Hacker's Dictionary_, and have been trying to find more information about them but to no avail. Has anybody ever seen or used one, or have pointers to information (ahem, more links to The Jargon File need not apply)? Pictures would be great. Thanks!
Last Minute Google Search! Search for "LISP Machine" turns up a few pages, such as this one, with information on the Symbolics machine, and has a picture of the keyboard, complete with the all-important control/super/hyper/meta keys. Still interested in more info on the MIT LISP machine, though!
I was thinking of doing something like this to run sound to the bathroom and kitchen. I dont have room to put boxes in there, so I was thinking of some sort of homebrew controller hardware.
My half-baked idea included things along the line of running audio cable and [ethernet, serial, ??] to the location. Have a box with [play, pause, volume, next, previous, etc] controls sending commands down the [ethernet, serial, ??] line to a daemon on the server, which passes them along to the streamer. The control box would need some sort of logic to deal with sending the commands. Something like a Basic Stamp and code?
Is there anybody out there who *didn't* drop out of electrical engineering after a year because their stuff never worked (ahem, like I did...went to CS. Sometimes being interested in a field isn't enough. There comes a point when you actually have to be good!) have any actual engineering-based ideas or opinions re: the above-described audio controller idea? It seems plausable enough, but the devil is more than likely in the details.
I was impressed by the engineering that went into this system. Certainly going a lot further than buying a watercooling kit from Popular Discount Computer Mod Store. I liked the switch and relay box that turned the pump on when the computer was switched on, saving a walk to the garage. The only question I had was this: He has a water transport loop a good deal longer than your average watercooling rig. Would the delay in getting the water circulating cause an undesireable or even dangerous heat build up at the processor before the water system was ramped up enough to deal with it? Would it be better to build in a timer that starts the pump when the machine's power button is pressed, and then starts the computer after a suitable delay?
This may be a complete non-issue. The water in the system may be sufficient to transfer heat for the couple of seconds before the pump is moving things along completely. The processor may take more time to heat up than I'm assuming. It's just something that bothered me a little, and none of my Mech-E friends are around for an impromptu consultation.
When one of the various Higher Ups says "Copyright Holder", they don't meant you. They mean the multinationals that put out music and movies and such, and pump billions into the economy, and millions more into campaign funding. You can't be a Copyright Holder without 1) Some serious, hard core old fasioned Walt Disney-style gumption and lots of luck. or 2) Well-targeted strategic takeovers of the worlds media holdings or 3) Massive, massive campaign contributions. Sorry.
Sure, you can hold a copyright. You can write something, or create something, and have it copyrighted, but you won't be a vaunted Copyright Holder. The metaphorical Big Red Button in this case will be given to the RIAA, the MPAA, Disney, et al. Not to J. Random Hacker to use when Big Software Giant steals routines from gprogram-0.1. You could ask, of course, as a legitimate copyright holder, but unless you're a Copyright Holder, you can expect a reply of "Tough Titty, Vote Quimby!". Doubt even Red Hat would rate for that kind of authority. Unless they put out a hit single.
"Your ants are dead" --Homer "I know...I can't get them out of there" --Disco Stu
Apple computers have an Apple on them Intel machines have an "Intel Inside" placard. What do you call a machine with ants in the case? A Windows(tm) Machine. A Windows(tm).....Machine. /me takes a practice swing with an invisible golf club
Should have stopped at the Simpsons paraphrase. Beware of falling karma.
Good point. I was looking for a figure that was pretty small, but still large enough to be a feasable rate.
Figure at 1 cent/message and 15 seconds to reply to a challange, that's 240 messages and $2.40/hour. 3 cents/message bumped it up to a little above minimum wage, and roughly what you'd make as a book re-shelfer at the library (which really isn't all that terrible a job. You don't have to be in league the Great Deceiver, for example). Don't know about the bottom line, but the hypothetical spammer would have to make the pay at least attractive to potential spam mules.
The punchline is that this disparity works out nicely for the forces of good. If the spammers can't afford to pay well enough without a huge hit to the bottom line (assuming even a buck an hour ~= 240 message; it's not like they report to the Department of Labor or anything), nobody will do it, and thus the challange-response system will hold against this form of circumvention. Now...problem becomes how many college kids would be willing to work for porn, bottom-dollar domain names, or weight loss pills...
Perl gurus, start your editors! How many lines will it take to write a script to automatically reply to challanges? As long as the messages have predictable structure, you should be able to write a parser to pick out the word or picture they want, then throw it back.
College kids: Are you bored, broke, and of weak moral fiber? You too can make money while sitting on your ass by replying to email challanges for the princely sum of 3 cents per message! Combine the first suggestion with the second, and you've got yourself a money machine.
It's great to see an ISP take some decisive steps, but this scheme has weaknesses. Interesting to see how it goes. Despite the concerns, I'm cautiously optimistic. As a twist, it would be interesting to see how that anti-spam vs. spam lawsuit with the copyrighted haiku goes (don't recall the parties names, but it's gotten coverage here). Maybe something similar could be combined with the challange-response system to make it illegal to respond to the challange under false pretenses. Raises a few slippery-slope legal issues that if you're going to touch, you might as well criminalize spam outright (which would be fine, of course).
I would have been more concerned with the potential security problems these 'red hat boxes' are opening themselves up to by installing (purposefully or by a distro installer's whim) a mail server they don't know how to properly administer and patch. That aside, home users (and ideally, clueful home users) doing something to stop their own infinitesimal fraction of the worlds spam can't be all bad.
Ugh, don't remind me. We watched this one in Japanese class back in high school. Think it took a week of classes to get through it, at least. That's some depressing, depressing stuff. It was very well done but man, the creators of that should buy themselves puppies or get some help or pills or something. Guess it's deep and meaningful and certainly thought provoking, but wow. Guess that last 'wow' was the point, but that was a pretty quiet week for us all, I can tell you. 'Niisan...'Niisan...
You only speak that way because you are not a member of "The One Percent". What if you were of this "One Percent", and the web developers of the world were as 'fashionably apathetic' as you are? You'd probably be pretty pissed off.
Accomodating people with dissabilities is a bit different than worrying about supporting all of the worlds languages (which many sites DO pull off, by the way). Is it so hard to maybe adhere to a standard that allows your page to be rendered in a variety of ways to accomodate different viewer (or reader) types? I'm sure it isn't beyond the bounds of your art (And it's not, if you had read the interview) to aid the less fortunate in their quest for information, pr0n, exciting business opportunities, or weight loss pills. After all, the 'web development' industry brought us the cheesy flash intro and the stupid vibrating banner ad. What if they put that kind of effort into things that may actually help people?
That's about it. On the whole, I don't think the world would care if you don't consider the needs of others in your web-page design (If your website really mattered and had much traffic, you probably wouldn't have gotten requests by now since the One Percent would have statistically wandered by, but that doesn't sound like it's the case so this all has 'moot point' action). But then, you don't care that the world doesn't care. However, the world doesn't care that you don't care that the world doesn't care if you fix it or not. See? We're all fashionably apathetic and therefore super-cool.
...want to start blocking pop ups. I always operate out of university computer labs, so I just use the Netscape installed on them, and deal with the pop-ups as they came. Now that I know that there are people out there in the world who are mad about people blocking pop-ups, I'm going to put a Mozilla installation on the CD I take with me, that has all the things I use on it, and use it exclusively from now on.
This article has inspired me to action. I will fight the forces of the anti-pop-up cabal and not be informed about great deals on X10 cameras and offshore gambling. Think I'll drop them a note thanking them for opening my eyes to this issue. Go team spiteful!
We have this price list from 1998, which is the second or third generation of machines. I have what I think is a first generation SPARCbook (a 3XP w/ 85 mHz MicroSPARC II) I got on eBay for $110 after shipping. Here's an idea of what this might run you. Prices are in Australian Dollars (1998 dollars. I ran 36,990 AUD through a converter and it spit back $20,669.64, to give you an idea).
Start selling your children and vital organs now to avoid the market flood in Dec when these things come out. What I'd like to know is if it's running a stock Solaris, or a special Sparcbook version like they had for mine. It had a different kernel and I believe a different version of CDE (I don't know, I don't have it, or any OS on the machine for that matter). Kernel was to deal with all the whacky hardware packed into the magnesium monster, especially the microntroller that prevented ungraceful heat death and power management, that I don't think any BSD or Linux deals with 100% correctly. Moot point as the 3XP doesn't have any good way of getting an OS onto the machine (no floppy or CD-rom included, whacky network port [that you can get a cable to convert to AUI, which is less whacky]).
It's nice to see that they are still doing new hardware, but these definately aren't meant to take market share away from Apple or x86 in consumer laptops.
See also Tadpole AlphaBook, Tadpole 7007/IBM N40 RS/6000 laptop with a neat Byte writeup here. (portable AIX is a steal at $12,000. Now there is NO escape!)
I guess it depends on what he's planning to do with the patent once he files and presumably is granted one. If he's just going to sit on it and somebody contacts him with a pretty decent reason why is patent violates their prior patent, he'll just drop his patent and that should be the end of it. If however he gets his patent and the next day starts cranking out and selling whatever he has patented (assuming the patent is something produceable and saleable), if another company takes offense to this on patent infringement grounds, he's going to be taken to court to recover perceived losses from the sales. Legal and court costs too, possibly, in either case (in the first case he might be sued to pay for the laywers time researching his patent and forming an opinion). In the case of an overbroad patent challange the same conditions apply; he can be taken to court and either stripped of his patent, damaged punatively, hit for costs, etc, depending on what injury is charged by the plantiff. Underbroad is probably his best hypothetical case where his patent claim is weakened by an omission but not actually violating anything. Guess the point I was trying to make was that it might be worth having a patent lawyer give his claim a once over to forcast any potential problems in the future (to the extent that this kind of thing can be predicted), rather than just 'screwing it' and going it on his own. Anybodies mileage may vary, of course, and if the repliers patents have flown well without any legal advice then great, but getting a second opinion never hurts. Or I just don't know what I'm talking about.
Bad idea, unfortunately. I'm right there with you in priciple...the less lawyers mucking things up in the world, the better. Going in on your own with a patent is just asking for trouble down the road. If the idea is already patented, you're screwed. If the idea is trademarked, you're screwed. If the patent language is overly broad, you're screwed. If the patent language isn't broad enough, you're screwed. All of these things will land you in legal hot water if your patent is challanged in court. You'll be sued by the origonal patent holder or sued by the trademark holder. If it's overbroad you'll be sued, your patent invalidated, and handed over to somebody else. Under-broad and somebody will implement your idea but tweak it that little bits so it's their own. Unpleasentness now will save more later.
Slashdot Mirror
This approach seemed expensive, but as far as bringing a dead drive back to life through surgery, this seemed pretty easy.
"The hard way" would have been buying a new drive, taking it to a cleanroom and transplanting the platters! You'd more than likely lose the use of the 'donor' drive, and there's a higher chance of failure in this much more invasive procedure, but that would be much more article-worthy.
Kind of an afterthought to an earlier comment of mine paraphrased as "Doesn't MTBF mean anything anymore?"
Hard drives have warranties. Sure, these warrenty periods are shortening, but that's neither here nor there. Given that a drive is going to fail eventually, would it be beneficial for drive makers to offer 'data insurance'? Data recovery is expensive because it's not a common practice. If you paid some reasonable, optional $x when you buy a drive, and the drive goes down, and you could send it back to the maker for recovery (having paid 'insurance' on it), the practice would be more common and the price would decrease. The idea being, like most forms of insurance, you are paying less than what the recovery would cost because the rest is subsidized by the other people who pay but never need it. A third party recovery service could offer this as well.
There are a number of issues I can see with this arrangement (privacy, confidentiality of data, what happens when the drive can't be recovered, what if they just SAY it can't be done, etc), but it's something to think about.
What's the deal with this? More people I know have lost new IDE drives than I ever recall in the past. Are my friends just unlucky, or do drive just not have the quality anymore? I know this assumes that drives used to be better, and that may well not be true, just this is the trend I've noticed. Is it worth buying a new drive (I do need one...), or is it just going to die on me in a few months?
As far as the article goes: What a waste! It must be damn nice to be able to buy TWO new drives to replace the logic board on one! Sure, one of the new drives is usable, but the other is shot.
matt@shogun:~$ cat us-const.txt | grep Federal | wc
0 0 0
matt@shogun:~$
You sly devil.
Any crypto algorithm worth its salt would have The Farm Boys cranking away until the Universe ended and then some. Not that this thing is going to be doing say, 2048-bit Blowfish or anything, but an expected brute-force or crack along a timeframe of 'weeks' is cryptographically poor.
On a similiar topic: this being sold at geeks.com. Front panel ports plus a thing that does "real time 64-bit DES" on your HD. I'm skeptical towards both products, but it's a good start. The jaded cynic in me saw "Secure IDE" and just assumed that Palladium was a step closer, at least data-storage-wise. Ever notice how when Certain Software Firms say 'secure' or 'trusted', it's usually not in the traditional senses of the words?
Not Aztec, Maggie, Olmec. Ooolmec!
Also, the giant stone head from Mr. Burns was Olmec in origin. Coincidence? Probably.
Why the hell not? You have desert maps (some of my favorite), and the oil rig. Might as well find where the coders hid the sweet, sweet oil. You can use the seismic waves put out by the HE grenades, or the terrorist bombs.
I've read about these in ESR's _The New Hacker's Dictionary_, and have been trying to find more information about them but to no avail. Has anybody ever seen or used one, or have pointers to information (ahem, more links to The Jargon File need not apply)? Pictures would be great. Thanks!
Last Minute Google Search!
Search for "LISP Machine" turns up a few pages, such as this one, with information on the Symbolics machine, and has a picture of the keyboard, complete with the all-important control/super/hyper/meta keys. Still interested in more info on the MIT LISP machine, though!
I was thinking of doing something like this to run sound to the bathroom and kitchen. I dont have room to put boxes in there, so I was thinking of some sort of homebrew controller hardware.
My half-baked idea included things along the line of running audio cable and [ethernet, serial, ??] to the location. Have a box with [play, pause, volume, next, previous, etc] controls sending commands down the [ethernet, serial, ??] line to a daemon on the server, which passes them along to the streamer. The control box would need some sort of logic to deal with sending the commands. Something like a Basic Stamp and code?
Is there anybody out there who *didn't* drop out of electrical engineering after a year because their stuff never worked (ahem, like I did...went to CS. Sometimes being interested in a field isn't enough. There comes a point when you actually have to be good!) have any actual engineering-based ideas or opinions re: the above-described audio controller idea? It seems plausable enough, but the devil is more than likely in the details.
FIXME: Users can still play whatever they want. Look into/correct this.
I guess this means we won't be seeing Weird Al smashing any old computers or monitors this year at Comdex.
I guess it really IS all about the Pentiums.
I was impressed by the engineering that went into this system. Certainly going a lot further than buying a watercooling kit from Popular Discount Computer Mod Store. I liked the switch and relay box that turned the pump on when the computer was switched on, saving a walk to the garage. The only question I had was this: He has a water transport loop a good deal longer than your average watercooling rig. Would the delay in getting the water circulating cause an undesireable or even dangerous heat build up at the processor before the water system was ramped up enough to deal with it? Would it be better to build in a timer that starts the pump when the machine's power button is pressed, and then starts the computer after a suitable delay?
This may be a complete non-issue. The water in the system may be sufficient to transfer heat for the couple of seconds before the pump is moving things along completely. The processor may take more time to heat up than I'm assuming. It's just something that bothered me a little, and none of my Mech-E friends are around for an impromptu consultation.
Don't forget "Network Intrusion Detection" and "Intrusion Signatures and Analysis". I'm a fan of both.
Not nessesarily.
When one of the various Higher Ups says "Copyright Holder", they don't meant you. They mean the multinationals that put out music and movies and such, and pump billions into the economy, and millions more into campaign funding. You can't be a Copyright Holder without 1) Some serious, hard core old fasioned Walt Disney-style gumption and lots of luck. or 2) Well-targeted strategic takeovers of the worlds media holdings or 3) Massive, massive campaign contributions. Sorry.
Sure, you can hold a copyright. You can write something, or create something, and have it copyrighted, but you won't be a vaunted Copyright Holder. The metaphorical Big Red Button in this case will be given to the RIAA, the MPAA, Disney, et al. Not to J. Random Hacker to use when Big Software Giant steals routines from gprogram-0.1. You could ask, of course, as a legitimate copyright holder, but unless you're a Copyright Holder, you can expect a reply of "Tough Titty, Vote Quimby!". Doubt even Red Hat would rate for that kind of authority. Unless they put out a hit single.
"Your ants are dead" --Homer
/me takes a practice swing with an invisible golf club
"I know...I can't get them out of there" --Disco Stu
Apple computers have an Apple on them
Intel machines have an "Intel Inside" placard.
What do you call a machine with ants in the case?
A Windows(tm) Machine. A Windows(tm).....Machine.
Should have stopped at the Simpsons paraphrase. Beware of falling karma.
Good point. I was looking for a figure that was pretty small, but still large enough to be a feasable rate.
Figure at 1 cent/message and 15 seconds to reply to a challange, that's 240 messages and $2.40/hour. 3 cents/message bumped it up to a little above minimum wage, and roughly what you'd make as a book re-shelfer at the library (which really isn't all that terrible a job. You don't have to be in league the Great Deceiver, for example).
Don't know about the bottom line, but the hypothetical spammer would have to make the pay at least attractive to potential spam mules.
The punchline is that this disparity works out nicely for the forces of good. If the spammers can't afford to pay well enough without a huge hit to the bottom line (assuming even a buck an hour ~= 240 message; it's not like they report to the Department of Labor or anything), nobody will do it, and thus the challange-response system will hold against this form of circumvention. Now...problem becomes how many college kids would be willing to work for porn, bottom-dollar domain names, or weight loss pills...
Then again, when do spammers use real replyto: addresses. Maybe responder bots aren't such a big dea.
Perl gurus, start your editors!
How many lines will it take to write a script to automatically reply to challanges? As long as the messages have predictable structure, you should be able to write a parser to pick out the word or picture they want, then throw it back.
College kids: Are you bored, broke, and of weak moral fiber? You too can make money while sitting on your ass by replying to email challanges for the princely sum of 3 cents per message! Combine the first suggestion with the second, and you've got yourself a money machine.
It's great to see an ISP take some decisive steps, but this scheme has weaknesses. Interesting to see how it goes. Despite the concerns, I'm cautiously optimistic.
As a twist, it would be interesting to see how that anti-spam vs. spam lawsuit with the copyrighted haiku goes (don't recall the parties names, but it's gotten coverage here). Maybe something similar could be combined with the challange-response system to make it illegal to respond to the challange under false pretenses. Raises a few slippery-slope legal issues that if you're going to touch, you might as well criminalize spam outright (which would be fine, of course).
I would have been more concerned with the potential security problems these 'red hat boxes' are opening themselves up to by installing (purposefully or by a distro installer's whim) a mail server they don't know how to properly administer and patch. That aside, home users (and ideally, clueful home users) doing something to stop their own infinitesimal fraction of the worlds spam can't be all bad.
Ugh, don't remind me. We watched this one in Japanese class back in high school. Think it took a week of classes to get through it, at least. That's some depressing, depressing stuff. It was very well done but man, the creators of that should buy themselves puppies or get some help or pills or something. Guess it's deep and meaningful and certainly thought provoking, but wow. Guess that last 'wow' was the point, but that was a pretty quiet week for us all, I can tell you. 'Niisan...'Niisan...
You only speak that way because you are not a member of "The One Percent". What if you were of this "One Percent", and the web developers of the world were as 'fashionably apathetic' as you are? You'd probably be pretty pissed off.
Accomodating people with dissabilities is a bit different than worrying about supporting all of the worlds languages (which many sites DO pull off, by the way). Is it so hard to maybe adhere to a standard that allows your page to be rendered in a variety of ways to accomodate different viewer (or reader) types? I'm sure it isn't beyond the bounds of your art (And it's not, if you had read the interview) to aid the less fortunate in their quest for information, pr0n, exciting business opportunities, or weight loss pills. After all, the 'web development' industry brought us the cheesy flash intro and the stupid vibrating banner ad. What if they put that kind of effort into things that may actually help people?
That's about it. On the whole, I don't think the world would care if you don't consider the needs of others in your web-page design (If your website really mattered and had much traffic, you probably wouldn't have gotten requests by now since the One Percent would have statistically wandered by, but that doesn't sound like it's the case so this all has 'moot point' action). But then, you don't care that the world doesn't care. However, the world doesn't care that you don't care that the world doesn't care if you fix it or not. See? We're all fashionably apathetic and therefore super-cool.
...want to start blocking pop ups. I always operate out of university computer labs, so I just use the Netscape installed on them, and deal with the pop-ups as they came. Now that I know that there are people out there in the world who are mad about people blocking pop-ups, I'm going to put a Mozilla installation on the CD I take with me, that has all the things I use on it, and use it exclusively from now on.
This article has inspired me to action. I will fight the forces of the anti-pop-up cabal and not be informed about great deals on X10 cameras and offshore gambling. Think I'll drop them a note thanking them for opening my eyes to this issue. Go team spiteful!
We have this price list from 1998, which is the second or third generation of machines. I have what I think is a first generation SPARCbook (a 3XP w/ 85 mHz MicroSPARC II) I got on eBay for $110 after shipping. Here's an idea of what this might run you. Prices are in Australian Dollars (1998 dollars. I ran 36,990 AUD through a converter and it spit back $20,669.64, to give you an idea).
SPARCBook price List
Start selling your children and vital organs now to avoid the market flood in Dec when these things come out. What I'd like to know is if it's running a stock Solaris, or a special Sparcbook version like they had for mine. It had a different kernel and I believe a different version of CDE (I don't know, I don't have it, or any OS on the machine for that matter). Kernel was to deal with all the whacky hardware packed into the magnesium monster, especially the microntroller that prevented ungraceful heat death and power management, that I don't think any BSD or Linux deals with 100% correctly. Moot point as the 3XP doesn't have any good way of getting an OS onto the machine (no floppy or CD-rom included, whacky network port [that you can get a cable to convert to AUI, which is less whacky]).
It's nice to see that they are still doing new hardware, but these definately aren't meant to take market share away from Apple or x86 in consumer laptops.
See also Tadpole AlphaBook, Tadpole 7007/IBM N40 RS/6000 laptop with a neat Byte writeup here. (portable AIX is a steal at $12,000. Now there is NO escape!)
I guess it depends on what he's planning to do with the patent once he files and presumably is granted one. If he's just going to sit on it and somebody contacts him with a pretty decent reason why is patent violates their prior patent, he'll just drop his patent and that should be the end of it. If however he gets his patent and the next day starts cranking out and selling whatever he has patented (assuming the patent is something produceable and saleable), if another company takes offense to this on patent infringement grounds, he's going to be taken to court to recover perceived losses from the sales. Legal and court costs too, possibly, in either case (in the first case he might be sued to pay for the laywers time researching his patent and forming an opinion). In the case of an overbroad patent challange the same conditions apply; he can be taken to court and either stripped of his patent, damaged punatively, hit for costs, etc, depending on what injury is charged by the plantiff. Underbroad is probably his best hypothetical case where his patent claim is weakened by an omission but not actually violating anything. Guess the point I was trying to make was that it might be worth having a patent lawyer give his claim a once over to forcast any potential problems in the future (to the extent that this kind of thing can be predicted), rather than just 'screwing it' and going it on his own. Anybodies mileage may vary, of course, and if the repliers patents have flown well without any legal advice then great, but getting a second opinion never hurts. Or I just don't know what I'm talking about.
Bad idea, unfortunately. I'm right there with you in priciple...the less lawyers mucking things up in the world, the better. Going in on your own with a patent is just asking for trouble down the road. If the idea is already patented, you're screwed. If the idea is trademarked, you're screwed. If the patent language is overly broad, you're screwed. If the patent language isn't broad enough, you're screwed. All of these things will land you in legal hot water if your patent is challanged in court. You'll be sued by the origonal patent holder or sued by the trademark holder. If it's overbroad you'll be sued, your patent invalidated, and handed over to somebody else. Under-broad and somebody will implement your idea but tweak it that little bits so it's their own. Unpleasentness now will save more later.