dodo53

possibly, doesn't seem to be exactly like I remember but is quite possibly my memory fail. Although it's not clear in your comment where the market value comes from (e.g. is it essentially the government is the market maker? that seems like a bad idea as central authority is unlikely to understand and price everything correctly). What stops people from understating the patent value?

EDIT - I guess main point is - is the patent value declared by owner and does the value affect ability to litigate?

This is why I like the idea (from someone around here I think) that patent owners should state a value of the patent when filing, and fees should be a percent of that value. Then value of patent limits maximum damage for infringement. So the amount of damages that can be sued for depends on the amount of funded attention at USPTO on checking the patent is valid (and patent owners could have the option of increasing stated value later, in which case extra fees would be used to revalidate patent). But I guess the whole culture that the number of patents = amount of innovation in economy = success of USPTO would have to be battled.

That would be cool! (although probably banned from games if it got too popular...) Or you could synchronize loads of phones so they take photos at the same time and reconstruct a Matrix style 360 photo-model of a point in the game :oP

Well if nothing else it gives a portable measure of ability. Like instead of having to saying I'm an expert in Scala and the meaning of that being largely arbitrary; you've got a syllabus of stuff they claim to know (which you still need to verify it it matters).

It's redistribution from heavier than average carbon users to lower than average carbon users.

I love this idea (there would have to be careful thinking around patent resell/value restating to avoid sneaky shell company tricks). It means you don't have the problems of special-casing software (no software patents) or vice versa special-casing like big pharma stuff (only patents on drugs - which most people seem to think is a needed case for patents) - big pharma would be much happier to claim up front that drug patent is worth millions on pay tax on that.

It also means that you'd get lots of press around big stated-value (and so big potential claim) patents, so people in the same industry would know which patents to avoid infringing, hopefully much reducing risk of accidental infringement.

I think a huge factor is attitude to risk. The younger entrepreneurs are in the no-ties shoot-for-the-sky phase. A larger proportion of people in the 30-40 range will be becoming more risk averse as they need to have financial stability to pay mortgages/support kids/spouses or whatever. But people tend to become more able to take financial risk as they get past young-kids stage, and develop enough of a savings cushion to go off on their own for a bit.

Flounder can be used as verb to mean to thrash around like a fish (e.g. struggling) - so either could work in context. http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/flounder.html

The canonical example of fast human evolution is lactase (the enzyme for digesting lactose and so cow's milk), thought to have spread widely in <10000 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence#Evolutionar...

Or because then the banks have an insider who knows what 'features' of the legislation are coming out next so they can exploit them the fastest.

Does your reader record which items in a feed were read? I'm sure lots of feed providers would be interested in metrics on which of their articles were frequently read (and possibly some clustering of interests based on what else readers subscribe to)

usesthis.com?

I think the dubiousness comes from the history - it's a way of granting commoners a part in the aristocracy, somewhere below the rank of the existing nobility and clergy.

that would be pretty handy for actual criminals

It's not about whether third party investment is a good idea, it's about whether the valuations third parties make are reasonable or based on hype. The cost of bubbles is in talent misallocation - could talented people be producing other things of more enduring value?

(Just kidding): this incentivizes sinkorship trying to sink everyone else's projects :oP Maybe they'll start organising startup WoW guilds...

I think what it will take is mind uploading. Once a sentience can suspend until interesting circumstances are detected, I'm sure some wealthy people will go decide to go off explore the galaxy / take a punt on van neuman machine mining.

Interesting, yes like social news aggregation it's quite possible to end creating reality-bubbles. I still feel like bumping into interesting people by trial-and-error is less than optimal, but I am generally introverted so my number of trials may be below average.

But beyond filtering of people, there's many other social-augmentation things you could do - I'd quite like a face-recognition remind me of their name thing. Or people to annotate people with notes so I can say last time I bumped into them we were talking about X.

I always wonder if it's possible to replace all computer monitors - could you plug your glasses into your work pc and see the display as virtual monitors floating in front of you? Or is there a resolution/eye focusing at wrong distance/strain issue?

Also I think (have opined this before) could be huge for local social network - suppose you walk into a tech conference and you can see what everyone is currently interested in talking about floating in bubbles over their head. Or flirting using only show indicator if both parties show they're interested. Or a waiter can see who's ready to order/pay etc..

Well cannibalism is a pretty strong taboo and probably we have evolved disgust reactions to it, but rationally if it hasn't killed anybody and doesn't cause any health issues (like BSE analogues) what's wrong with it?

So wait for the Apple designer glasses version :o)

I think the people flailing their arms and dodging virtual stuff is not going to be the main use though.

I could imagine several less-intrusive, very useful things.

Go to an airport/train station etc.. and have a user-specific glowing arrow showing you where you need to go next.

Go to a conference and have a social network overlay telling you everyone's names and what they do.

Or Sims style public intent-bubbles - say a waiter surveys the restaurant and can see who's ready to order/pay.

Interesting, I've not heard much about multiple patent licensing deadlock before but sounds like it could be common.

Would be interesting to be more specific - LightSail actually sounds like the kind of situation people are more likely support patents in: non-obvious research work leading to large improvements over existing methods; presumably it woudld be considerably easier to reverse engineer if you had to the physical device. And I imagine company could productively use huge investment to have huge impact but investment might be hard without reassurance of IP.

So you say you have secrets - are there patents on the mechanism itself? Did investors request/care about those patents?

Maybe is different in this case cos I wouldn't be surprised if author actually was happy for this technology to be successful even if some other company made more money out of it.

Also for anyone who hasn't, read around rest of the website also!

A lot of opinion on that kind of thing is pretty much axiomatic and not changeable by reasoned debate

Exactly, I always thing 'what's the worst that could happen?' as a motivational exercise is for people who lack imagination.

Also there are choices on what to optimise for. Our elevators are triggered by swiping your company card, which then tells the elevator which floor you're going to. You're then assigned one of 16 elevators. Elevators frequently wait for a couple of minutes for more people to arrive. So instead of which floor(s) should I now go to, there's also how long should I wait to go there. I suspect the algorithm might be optimized to some degree for minimizing number of journeys (to save energy or whatever) instead of/as well as average/maximum wait time per person.

I'm guessing the devil is in the detail (and I don't know much so I'll shut up shortly) - could companies set up shell legal entities to offend for them / shop around for a better jurisdiction to do dodgy deals in / is current law clear enough that serious penalties wouldn't end up having a chilling effect on all business (OP was implying that the current status is that if the SEC wants to, they can probably find some law you're breaking). Serious penalties would probably demand a lot of legal boilerplate to make absolutely sure 'good business' wasn't effected and the government doesn't have power to destroy politically inconvenient companies without due process; the more boilerplate, the more likely the more expensive lawyers at the banks will outwit the lawyers writing the laws. Add some (possibly sponsored) political rhetoric about regulations killing jobs in a recession and I think it gets very hard to actually nail it down.

Who said people were happy about it? I think there's a lot of anger at banks at the moment for perceived corruption. But there's a huge gap between voters caring and measures that are actually effective being put in place with lots of lobbying in between (and I have no idea what measures would be effective; and many people that do probably are also in a position to get a cushie job helping to avoid or lobby against those measures at a bank).

But wikipedia have previously frozen controversial pages that are having edit wars. They could choose the last revision that is reasonable favourable to advertiser and then freeze the page