According to the article, Lucent wanted to use the basic design of the Crater Coupler to develop something that did not yet exist--a watertight version that could be used with undersea fiber optic cables. Developing an enhanced or improved version of an existing invention is not infringement, it's innovation. It happens all the time, to the benefit of all of us.
The inventors had the "expectation" that Lucent would license their patent, but it doesn't say that they had an agreement to that effect, or that Lucent was bound in any way by existing IP law to do so. If Lucent was not required by law to do so, then it would be careless, if not irresponsible, to pay unnecessarily to license a patent.
The article is also vague about the contractural relationship between Lucent and the inventors. If you develop a product under contract, then that contract has to spell out very specifically who owns what rights to the product. It sounds as though the inventors left too many gray areas in their agreement, although that could just be the lack of detail in the article.
These guys sound like good inventors, but bad businessmen. And they had their lunch eaten by good businessmen. That's how it goes.
Since you worked in a climate lab, maybe you can help me with this: I have always wondered why we should put any stock in the long-term predictions of climate models, when we can't even produce accurate weather forecasts beyond about two weeks.
Are any of these climate models worth more than the proverbial bucket of warm spit? Or are there still so many factors that are unknown and/or unaccounted for that the models are no better than a WAG?
In a book called Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet, there's a lot of background on Vint Cerf and the invention of IP. I forget where he was working at the time (it wasn't MCI--maybe BBN?), but the guys he worked with had a saying:
Vint Cerf may be the father of the internet, but we're the mothers who make it work!
this idiot liberal actually suspects, due to your willfull refusal to think beyond your next tank of gas, that your IQ is somewhere south of his ow.
Of course you do. You're a liberal. Being smugly convinced of your own intellectual superiority, despite mounds of evidence to the contrary, is one of the signature traits of your ilk. Your idea of "thinking beyond the next tank of gas" is to freeze in the dark while telling yourself that you deserve it. Conservatives have a slightly more optimistic outlook.
Regarding the Senator from Massachusetts: in 2002 a company called Cape Wind Associates announced a plan to put 170 windmill towers in Nantucket Sound. These towers would be capable of generating approximately three-fourths of all electricity used in the Cape Island area. The twenty-year cost savings to ratepayers were estimated at $800 million. The windmills would also offset a million tons of "greenhouse gas" emissions annually. But that wasn't good enough for Ted, because the windmills would have been visible from the Kennedy compound in Hyannis. A local yacht club also complained that they would threaten navigation for the annual Hyannis-to-Nantucket regatta. Kennedy went so far as to insert an amendment into an energy bill to give the Department of the Interior the same authority to regulate wind power at sea as it has today to regulate oil and gas drilling on land. Can you say "hypocrisy"?
I have never heard even the most fervent proponets of drilling in ANWR describe it as a panacea for this country's energy woes. Every deposit of anything (oil, coal, gold, bauxite...) is finite. Does that mean we leave it alone? No. If nothing else, the ANWR oil buys time to develop viable large-scale alternatives, none of which are in place right now. Plus, given a choice between getting our oil here at home, and buying it from the Arabs, I'd rather get it here. I'd think that you "no blood for oil" liberal types would agree.
Your comment about "the wall that we're about to hit head-on" has been the recurring bleat of hopelessness that has sounded through the decades for energy sources from whale oil to wood to coal. None of those disaster scenarios ever materialized. Remember when the Club of Rome announced in 1970 that world would run out of oil in 19 years? They ignored the inevitable advances in technology that would both make it possible to recover previously inaccessible oil deposits and to more efficiently use the oil that we have. Not to mention that alternatives have always come into being when the need for them has made it attractive and profitable for private enterprise to develop and market them.
As for the 2000-acre "lie," the web site you link in your comment states, "There is no requirement that oil development be contiguous." They do nothing to substantiate this bald assertion, but I will stipulate it for the sake of argument. ANWR encompases 19.6 million acres (over 30,000 square miles). Of that, 17.16 million acres are off-limits, protected by law. The only area proposed for drilling is the 1.5 million acre (just over 2300 square mile) coastal plain. Just for fun, let's assume that the drilling takes place in 200 10-acre plots, each connected by 10 miles of two-lane road, 30 feet wide. Adding the land area of the road to the 2000 acres of drilling sites still gives a total land usage of under 10,000 acres, which is 0.67% of the area of the coastal plain, and 0.05% of all of ANWR.
The caribou argument is a total con job. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have been collecting calving-area data for the Porcupine Caribou herd (the herd that lives in the ANWR area) since 1983. Not once in that time has the proposed drilling area been the site of high-density caribou calving. Not to mention the fact that the Central Arctic herd, which inhabits the re
The second document you cite does state that the largest trucks will have a fuel economy standard of 21.3 by 2011. It also says that the smallest trucks will have a standard of 28.4--higher than the current passenger car standard of 27.5. This is because the new regulations create six categories of vehicles, thus sensibly recognizing that there is a significant difference between a Ford Ranger and a Hummer H1.
The tax deduction that you mention applies only to vehicles purchased by a small business for which business use exceeds 50%. Even then, the cost is deductible only up to the percentage of business use in the year that it is purchased. For a 100% deduction, the vehicle must be used 100% for business purposes. Otherwise, the vehicle is depreciated like any other business asset.
The gas guzzler tax has never applied to light trucks (including SUVs) since the tax was enacted in 1978 during the Carter administration. It applies to passenger cars. The heaviest passenger car that I could find is the Mercedes S-Class, with a curb weight of about 4500 lbs. If you don't like the fact that it doesn't apply to SUVs, write your sentators and your congressman.
And tax cuts have only worked every time they've been tried.
Absolutely right. By and large, public transportation in the U.S. sucks, where it exists at all. As an example, when I lived outside of San Diego and worked downtown, I tried taking the San Diego Trolley to work. By the time I waited for the trolley, changed from the orange line to the blue line, and then walked from the station to my office, my pleasant 30-minute drive had been transformed into an aggravating 90-minute nightmare. Was I going to take an extra two hours out of my day just to take public transit to work every day? Hell no.
Now I live in Orlando, and public transit here (which consists only of a bus system) is used almost exclusively by those who don't own a car.
For public transit to work on a large scale in the U.S., it will have to get car owners out of their cars. To do that, it will have to present a compelling value proposition. It will either have to save time, or save enough money to compensate for any extra time that it takes. It also has to be safe. In Houston, they built a light rail system that has suffered over 100 accidents since November 2003. That won't get me out of my car unless the train is about to hit it.
Check your facts. In 2003, the NHTSA established new rules for fuel economy for light trucks that took effect with the 2005 model year, and increase through the 2007 model year. This was done to account for the increase in light trucks as a percentage of total vehicles on the road in the U.S. So what, exactly, is Bush failing to enforce?
Wind farms are a nice idea, except for two things: the number of places where the wind blows consistently enough for windmills to be practical are fairly limited, and even where there is wind, you get rich liberals like Teddy Kennedy blocking their construction because they would spoil the view from his luxurious oceanside compound.
So the idiot liberals won't let us drill in ANWR (on 2000 acres of a desolate piece of land the size of South Carolina), but don't want us building "ugly" alternative energy sources. It must be nice to live in a fantasy world where you can have it both ways.
The United States has a "first-to-invent" patent system. Documentation that can establish what the inventor knew and when he knew it is used to determine the true inventor. Internal Apple documentation regarding the design and development of the iPod could be used for this.
European nations tend to have a "first-to-file" system, where rights go to whoever gets the paperwork done, regardless of who actually did the inventing.
Plus, if Robert Heinlein's mere description of the water bed in Stranger In a Strange Land could be considered prior art for that invention, then it stands to reason that Apple's production of actual iPods would have to be considered prior art for Microsoft's application.
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According to the article, Lucent wanted to use the basic design of the Crater Coupler to develop something that did not yet exist--a watertight version that could be used with undersea fiber optic cables. Developing an enhanced or improved version of an existing invention is not infringement, it's innovation. It happens all the time, to the benefit of all of us.
The inventors had the "expectation" that Lucent would license their patent, but it doesn't say that they had an agreement to that effect, or that Lucent was bound in any way by existing IP law to do so. If Lucent was not required by law to do so, then it would be careless, if not irresponsible, to pay unnecessarily to license a patent.
The article is also vague about the contractural relationship between Lucent and the inventors. If you develop a product under contract, then that contract has to spell out very specifically who owns what rights to the product. It sounds as though the inventors left too many gray areas in their agreement, although that could just be the lack of detail in the article.
These guys sound like good inventors, but bad businessmen. And they had their lunch eaten by good businessmen. That's how it goes.
Are any of these climate models worth more than the proverbial bucket of warm spit? Or are there still so many factors that are unknown and/or unaccounted for that the models are no better than a WAG?
In a book called Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet, there's a lot of background on Vint Cerf and the invention of IP. I forget where he was working at the time (it wasn't MCI--maybe BBN?), but the guys he worked with had a saying:
Vint Cerf may be the father of the internet, but we're the mothers who make it work!
Of course you do. You're a liberal. Being smugly convinced of your own intellectual superiority, despite mounds of evidence to the contrary, is one of the signature traits of your ilk. Your idea of "thinking beyond the next tank of gas" is to freeze in the dark while telling yourself that you deserve it. Conservatives have a slightly more optimistic outlook.
Regarding the Senator from Massachusetts: in 2002 a company called Cape Wind Associates announced a plan to put 170 windmill towers in Nantucket Sound. These towers would be capable of generating approximately three-fourths of all electricity used in the Cape Island area. The twenty-year cost savings to ratepayers were estimated at $800 million. The windmills would also offset a million tons of "greenhouse gas" emissions annually. But that wasn't good enough for Ted, because the windmills would have been visible from the Kennedy compound in Hyannis. A local yacht club also complained that they would threaten navigation for the annual Hyannis-to-Nantucket regatta. Kennedy went so far as to insert an amendment into an energy bill to give the Department of the Interior the same authority to regulate wind power at sea as it has today to regulate oil and gas drilling on land. Can you say "hypocrisy"?
I have never heard even the most fervent proponets of drilling in ANWR describe it as a panacea for this country's energy woes. Every deposit of anything (oil, coal, gold, bauxite...) is finite. Does that mean we leave it alone? No. If nothing else, the ANWR oil buys time to develop viable large-scale alternatives, none of which are in place right now. Plus, given a choice between getting our oil here at home, and buying it from the Arabs, I'd rather get it here. I'd think that you "no blood for oil" liberal types would agree.
Your comment about "the wall that we're about to hit head-on" has been the recurring bleat of hopelessness that has sounded through the decades for energy sources from whale oil to wood to coal. None of those disaster scenarios ever materialized. Remember when the Club of Rome announced in 1970 that world would run out of oil in 19 years? They ignored the inevitable advances in technology that would both make it possible to recover previously inaccessible oil deposits and to more efficiently use the oil that we have. Not to mention that alternatives have always come into being when the need for them has made it attractive and profitable for private enterprise to develop and market them.
As for the 2000-acre "lie," the web site you link in your comment states, "There is no requirement that oil development be contiguous." They do nothing to substantiate this bald assertion, but I will stipulate it for the sake of argument. ANWR encompases 19.6 million acres (over 30,000 square miles). Of that, 17.16 million acres are off-limits, protected by law. The only area proposed for drilling is the 1.5 million acre (just over 2300 square mile) coastal plain. Just for fun, let's assume that the drilling takes place in 200 10-acre plots, each connected by 10 miles of two-lane road, 30 feet wide. Adding the land area of the road to the 2000 acres of drilling sites still gives a total land usage of under 10,000 acres, which is 0.67% of the area of the coastal plain, and 0.05% of all of ANWR.
The caribou argument is a total con job. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have been collecting calving-area data for the Porcupine Caribou herd (the herd that lives in the ANWR area) since 1983. Not once in that time has the proposed drilling area been the site of high-density caribou calving. Not to mention the fact that the Central Arctic herd, which inhabits the re
The second document you cite does state that the largest trucks will have a fuel economy standard of 21.3 by 2011. It also says that the smallest trucks will have a standard of 28.4--higher than the current passenger car standard of 27.5. This is because the new regulations create six categories of vehicles, thus sensibly recognizing that there is a significant difference between a Ford Ranger and a Hummer H1.
The tax deduction that you mention applies only to vehicles purchased by a small business for which business use exceeds 50%. Even then, the cost is deductible only up to the percentage of business use in the year that it is purchased. For a 100% deduction, the vehicle must be used 100% for business purposes. Otherwise, the vehicle is depreciated like any other business asset.
The gas guzzler tax has never applied to light trucks (including SUVs) since the tax was enacted in 1978 during the Carter administration. It applies to passenger cars. The heaviest passenger car that I could find is the Mercedes S-Class, with a curb weight of about 4500 lbs. If you don't like the fact that it doesn't apply to SUVs, write your sentators and your congressman.
And tax cuts have only worked every time they've been tried.
Now I live in Orlando, and public transit here (which consists only of a bus system) is used almost exclusively by those who don't own a car.
For public transit to work on a large scale in the U.S., it will have to get car owners out of their cars. To do that, it will have to present a compelling value proposition. It will either have to save time, or save enough money to compensate for any extra time that it takes. It also has to be safe. In Houston, they built a light rail system that has suffered over 100 accidents since November 2003. That won't get me out of my car unless the train is about to hit it.
Check your facts. In 2003, the NHTSA established new rules for fuel economy for light trucks that took effect with the 2005 model year, and increase through the 2007 model year. This was done to account for the increase in light trucks as a percentage of total vehicles on the road in the U.S. So what, exactly, is Bush failing to enforce?
Wind farms are a nice idea, except for two things: the number of places where the wind blows consistently enough for windmills to be practical are fairly limited, and even where there is wind, you get rich liberals like Teddy Kennedy blocking their construction because they would spoil the view from his luxurious oceanside compound. So the idiot liberals won't let us drill in ANWR (on 2000 acres of a desolate piece of land the size of South Carolina), but don't want us building "ugly" alternative energy sources. It must be nice to live in a fantasy world where you can have it both ways.
European nations tend to have a "first-to-file" system, where rights go to whoever gets the paperwork done, regardless of who actually did the inventing.
Plus, if Robert Heinlein's mere description of the water bed in Stranger In a Strange Land could be considered prior art for that invention, then it stands to reason that Apple's production of actual iPods would have to be considered prior art for Microsoft's application.
This is sloppy work on the part of the USPTO.