Posts by Ian 12
4 posts • joined Saturday 4th September 2010 23:06 GMT
APS attack
I think that some of the commentards above missed the point of his letter. He wasn't trying to provide great reasoned scientific arguments for or against climate change. He is a sceptic and wanted the APS to abide by its constitution and have a debate. He couldn't get that debate so has publicly resigned.
I assume if had got that debate he may brought up some sciency type arguments.
Posted in Apple jumps the pond in Nokia fight
Re: Software patents in the UK?
Where does the article say anything about software patents?
Nokia sued regarding patents that "cover wireless data, speech coding, security and encryption" all of which may be hardware related. Apple sued regarding various patents including signal processing and power conservation (although other aspects do have a software feel). (in the US, I haven't seen the UK details)
That aside, the UK does have a fairly robust approach to "software patents" but it is possible to get a "software patent" as along as it is not solely related to software. The prime example is a software program which controls a manufacturing plant. If the improved software "invention" were to result in better quality/faster manufacture, there is a good argument that it has a real world "technical effect" and would be allowable and enforceable in the UK.
That is the law as it stands in the UK - not a comment on what is right.
</ patent lesson>
Floating data centres...
Have already, of course, been thought of - by Google!
http://tiny.cc/t5g8y
Slight Mixed message in the first para???
"Businesses aren't built on ideas"
and
"It won because it did search better than anyone else"
Just making the point that they did have a new idea (no idea if they tried to patent it), a different way to rank web pages, which turned out to be much better.
I think that the whole monetizing came later, as a result of being so popular as a search engine. So, absolutely agree that an idea is nothing without the people to do something with it. Just not sure you're comments are "what makes the US patent system ... so broken".
I think it the US system is not good but I think it is more to do with incentives to sue such as "triple damages" if the person you are suing were aware (or should have been aware) of the patent.
Whilst the US patent system is quite different to other countries, I think it is the difference in the court process which really creates the trolls.
