On-line Opinion Magazine featuring annoyed rumblings from the leading edge of the Baby Boom firmly tied to a reality-based world.
Established: 21 November 2004
Editor
Commenting
The opinions expressed in Comments are those of the individuals making them. Truly absurd comments and opinions are subject to being cruelly mocked, but "flame wars" will take place on someone else's dime.
Your first comment, all comments with extensive links, and random comments that the software decides it doesn't like for no discernible reason will be held for moderation.
[Be aware that for unknown reasons the software rejects comments shorter than 15 characters, so if you want to leave a short comment fill the gap with periods ........]
Local Interest
Disaster Assistance
Notices
13 comments
Vive la France! Vive la République! eh? 😉 😀
Ahem.
OT: Want a laugh on us Aussies Bryan? 😉 😀 And amazingly, in US media (Boston Globe):
Actually, the guy set out to prove that our wonderful new streamlined and efficient Patent System (created by none other than John Howard, so anyone with a working brain knew it would be a disaster), would be the disaster it was. To be fair, the USA also issued a patent for a *new* wheel in 2011. It hasn’t been revoked. USA hates to admit it screwed up anything, so it won’t be. 😛
He & the Aus. Patent Office were awarded the 2001 “Ig Nobel Prize”. 😀
Re-inventing the wheel: Why not? Many do.
A less humorous, more technical article can be found on New Scientist from 2001:
Wheel patented in Australia
Too funny! 😀 See, this is Aussies! We love to “take the piss”! (Brit/Aussie slang, meaning: “to make a joke about someone or to make someone look silly”.) It’s a National pastime. 😉 😀
In the US system judges decide that patents are garbage after they have been approved and a law suit is filed. It is wasteful and weird, but that’s how we do it. It should get better after patents are finally in a decent data base with an adequate search engine, but given the government’s track record with large data bases, that would be never.
Most of the the software that receives patents is derivative, which is obvious to experienced people, but the people who process patents seem to reserve their experience to paper work.
Ridicule is always useful when dealing with absurd laws and requirements, as it is usually the only way to get people to notice the problems. You can present a logical case before the laws are enacted, but that is rarely successful.
OT: Man, if there was any way I could get a physical infection over the ‘Net you would be on my hate list. I’ve been on my back with a chest cold for four days. On day two I was hoping for pneumonia which can be cured and rates a hospital bed, but it is just a summer cold which can only be endured. We are getting too old for this crap.
LOL I wouldn’t blame you m8! And yeah… we are ! I know I’m pretty fed up with it all! Good luck my friend. Wish i could offer more. One thing that helped me was a pill Cenovis make with a combination Vit. C, Zinc, Echinacea & Garlic. I took then every 4 hours. But to really work, need to start taking big doses of C when you feel the first sniffle. That plus a good hot herbal tea with lot’s of anti-oxidants & lemon/honey. 🙂
I think I’ve been ill way too often! *sigh*
I hope this isn’t the beginning of a trend. Hell, I’m happy about being able to eat toast and oatmeal today for the first time in days. Everything else has been liquid.
Bryan, US patents *are* in a good search engine, but the Patent Office refuses to use it because it’s run by Google. Furthermore the problem is that the patent examiners are overworked, underpaid, and illiterate in the technology that they’re supposed to be examining. There are some patents that have been issued in the computer field for things that have been common practice for decades, but nobody in the patent office has sufficient technical knowledge to know that, for example — they are lawyers, not computer geeks. And for some reason they refuse to contact subject matter specialists to evaluate patent applications for prior art. It’s crazy.
They check to see that the forms are correctly filled in, approve them if they are, and let the courts sort it out. There are no incentives for doing more, so they just try to cope with the flood of applications. The government is broken and no one wants to fix it.
Having put my name on a couple of patent applications over the past few years, Bryan, I can tell you that it’s more involved than that. Patent examiners have been criticized for rubber stamping patent applications, so they never approve a correctly-filled-out form. Instead they find some BS reason to send it back for “clarification and revision”. It’s a game that serves to enrich patent attorneys and infuriate inventors trying to patent their invention. We’ve filed several patents on our new technology and we expect them to actually be issued three to five years from now, after all the games are finished playing. The patent system is broken for *everybody*, inventors and the general public alike, because patent trolls have no trouble getting their “inventions” through the system… sure, it’ll take several years, but they keep a constant stream of “inventions” in the pipeline. Meanwhile they’re clogging up the system to the point where real inventors often have gone out of business by the time the patent office finally gets around to issuing the patent…
Having looked at several software patents, I have a hard time believing anyone read them. I have always found copyright to be suitable for what I do, even if they contain unique routines that solve specific problems that have great benefit in specific industries.
I have always figured that as soon as you prove that something can be done, people will figure out how to do it on their own. The creative part is believing that it can be done before others do, or when others believe it is impossible.
The system is definitely broken, and the only people who can use it successfully are those with deep pockets.
Yeah, ‘patent pending’ is becoming more common every year.
We developed a couple patentable things over a decade ago (in IT), and our attorney (who lectured in IP & contract law at a Uni here) asked us who else would be extremely interested in it. We said pretty much any IT company, which is why we wanted to patent them to get royalties. He said something like “so, IBM, HP, Apple… Those companies?” We smiled and said oh yes! He said “Forget it! You can’t afford it.” We naturally asked what he was talking about. He said “Those companies and others are predators. They will gladly steal any patented idea they find, let it get to court and bleed us dry then settle to buy the patent for a pittance or pay a small sum as lifetime royalties.”
Basically, if you cannot afford to legally defend them, a patent is useless. and for most things. a National patent is pretty much useless. Would need to be a global patent anyway.
IP law as it is currently structured benefits the large corporations and no one else, just like most of the financial and tax systems in the “first world”. It is the Golden Rule: the people with gold rule …
Well, my previous employer got a hefty chunk of money selling off their patents to patent trolls. So I guess there’s some use for patent trolls. Sigh…
For something a bit different… 😉 I was reading through my daily news dump, and caught this on Mashable. 🙂
Snowden got a long standing ovation when he spoke via Google vid feed to the HOPE conference Sat. He even had a message for the NSA spooks he said he knew were there. LOL
Edward Snowden Calls on Hackers to Help Whistleblowers Leak More Secrets
I was reading this one in The Guardian, where he says that the US Intelligence services continue to prove just how inept they are, amongst other things. 😀
I, spy: Edward Snowden in exile
LOL
When everything is outsourced there is zero chance of getting reliable information. They aren’t collecting data, they are curating rumors, and creating propaganda.
If the system they have created were even slightly effective, they would have stopped the Boston Marathon bombing. That was amateur hour from start to finish, so the Tsaraevs should have been picked up before anything happened.