law

I use Python for nearly all of my ETL processes that involve text processing. Even in production systems, I'd be hard-pressed to admit any significant performance issues. Python facilitates implementing algorithms in a functional style, which I tend to prefer over the imperative style (i.e., Java). With C++11 and boost, I'm able to translate my Python code to C++ while preserving the functional style, which has immensely simplified prototyping/deploying NLP/ML algorithms while simultaneously begetting enormous performance gains. I see Python as an extremely viable alternative to Java.

The USPTO has been taking some amazing technological steps in the last few years. This is the most recent. Earlier this year they, for the first time ever, released a search function for the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (which is a >2000-page tome that doesn't exactly read like a John Grisham novel). Several years ago, they gave Google their entire database of patents, patent applications, and trademarks. Given that they're a government agency, this progress is absolutely astonishing.

I'm an attorney. Read http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2209.html

However, we can continue to speak in hypotheticals that support your particularly cynical (and uninformed) view of the patent system, if you'd like.

> I am pretty sure they at least need to sign it, which is why the common (overreaching and abusive) employment contracts include a clause saying that the employee will facilitate the filing of such paperwork.

Sadly, that's not the case: "Whenever all of the inventors refuse to execute an application for patent, or cannot be found or reached after diligent effort, a person to whom an inventor has assigned or agreed in writing to assign the invention, or who otherwise shows sufficient proprietary interest in the matter justifying such action, may make application for patent on behalf of and as agent for all the inventors." 37 CFR 1.47(b).

You're wrong. The USPTO has an obligation to review any prior art that raises a substantial new question of patentability, even if the patent has already issued. Post-issuance, any person can request ex parte re-examination (even anonymously), and the cost is $2,520. That's a couple orders of magnitude cheaper than you asserted, so in the future, please refrain from commenting on matters about which you know nothing.

The system is not "broken and completely f* cked up." Certain aspects are dysfunctional (as one would reasonably expect given the extent to which technological progress exceeds legislative progress), but you cannot impute those specific flaws onto the system as a whole. It's like saying democracy is "broken and completely f* cked up" because one particular elected official was found to be corrupt. Give it a rest already.

I'm so relieved that this is the top comment. Design patents only protect the ornamental characteristics embodied in an article of manufacture. This NYT blogger seems to conflate design patents and utility patents, but the distinction is that utility patents protect how an article of manufacture works, whereas a design patent protects how an article of manufacture appears. In fact, Apple could have filed an application for a utility patent on "page turning," which the USPTO would summarily reject on the basis of "page turning" being anticipated by technologies like...the book. At any rate, this is the kind of sensationalized blog spam that I'd expect to see on reddit, rather than HN.

Flagged.

Modern C++ Design (Andrei Alexandrescu)[1] is wonderful, but C++11 has "simplified" much of what he covers. If you want to be able to read the C++11 standard[2] with little effort, Alexandrescu's book is nevertheless a good primer.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Design-Generic-Programming-Patt...

[2] http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2012/n333...

How mature is string manipulation in Lua? Personally, I use python for anything involving string manipulation, and then use C or C++ (depending on context) to do significant data processing on the (now hashed) data.

I'm not able to verify this right now, but facebook stores user identification information using EXIF in JPEGs? If so, I wonder whether image hosts delete this info before hosting your file.

Don't take this as legal advice (it's not), but my personal belief is that money is better spent patenting novel/non-obvious subject matter. Execution is very, very hard; if you waste all of your money on a poorly-executed idea, you're basically out of luck.

While many people on here like to tout the idea that investors invest in teams, there are many more investors who don't trust people that much--they want to invest in something other than charisma. If all your company has is an idea on which you're feverishly working, it's all but worthless in the absence of patent protection.

That's exactly the reason. It's from the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 (VPPA), which ``preserve[s] personal privacy with respect to the rental, purchase, or delivery of video tapes or similar audio visual materials.''[1] It prohibits video tape service providers from knowingly disclosing their consumers' personally identifiable information.

[1] Pub. L. 100-618, 120 Stat. 3195 (1988) (codified at 18 U.S.C. §2710 (2006)).

> Did you agree to the rules of the party before joining? Yup. One of which is: "Use your real name".

I signed up for Facebook in September 2004. I most certainly did not agree to that rule, because as far as I can recall, no such rule existed at the time. You may make the argument that my continued use of their service implies assent to any subsequent modifications to their terms of service, but that's an issue that would need to be litigated.

I agree that we're only getting limited information. I'd love to see his personal IMs, because I think those would shed even more light on his character. It's curiously ironic how the man who has access to the secrets of millions of people has revealed so little about himself.

It's incredible that they're offering this tape--especially from a computer vision perspective. With enough data, one could conceivably write a program that predicts a team's next play based on the players' pre-snap formation and the previous plays.

In one of the most telling IMs of their entire correspondence (see page 62 of The Complete Timeline), Zuckerberg stated: "i kind of view you as a friend." This came up when Zuckerberg was annoyed that Greenspan made a security hole public. Greenspan handled the situation with immense professionalism, while Zuckerberg simply could not accept responsibility. Mark's friends are only entitled to the appellation when it's convenient for Mark.

Flagged for a misleading title. Page 10 explicitly states:

``To be clear, we hold that all the steps of a claimed method must be performed in order to find induced infringement, but that it is not necessary to prove that all the steps were committed by a single entity''

Previously, you either had to perform all of the steps of a claimed method or induce another to perform of all of the steps of a claimed method. There was no remedy available when you perform some of the steps and induce another party to perform the remaining steps.

> If you've had a look through even a handful of these patents people are getting sued for millions over, they're basically the equivalent of the long-form novel.

No. They're not. You say this because you, like everyone else, don't understand what the claims say. That's likely because they're written in legalese, and you're just trying your best to give those terms their plain English meaning. You can't do that. Many of them are terms of art, with very precise definitions crafted by the courts. As such, you have to look to various court opinions concerning claim construction (i.e., context) to understand their meaning.

You may disagree with that on principle, because everyone should be able to understand the subject matter taken removed from the public domain as a matter of law, and I'm somewhat inclined to agree. However, nothing precludes you from gaining such an understanding: there are many books written on patent law, and it's not too incredibly complex.

Not the federal government...

I spoke precisely, yet you managed to contort my statement into something that it's not: an expression of my opinion on universal health care. What I said was that other approaches exist that do not require marking tax returns in a way that reveals the existence of health insurance...

I'd even claim that the left wing has a greater propensity to engage in this conduct, albeit more subtly. For example, one side effect of the Affordable Care Act is the federal government knowing which Americans have health insurance. While this doesn't prove they have access to your health records, it's nevertheless troubling that they have direct evidence of whether you're insured (and whether it's ``Cadillac'' insurance) simply by examining tax returns.

Apple has a patent on this.[1]

[1] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...

Don't forget the obligatory leave-of-absence from NYU.

> I think it's quite a bit more sinister than this. As a patent lawyer confided to me once: The most valuable patents are the obvious ones (as other folks will likely think of it themselves) and that his job is to mask the fact that a patent is in fact obvious.

That lawyer should be disbarred. Obvious inventions (from the perspective of a person having ordinary skill in the art) are per se unpatentable, and merely masking this obviousness using an obtuse independent claim spawning many dependent claims is one reason why we're in this mess. I really think that a foreseeability or causation test should be used to measure obviousness, or better still, that obviousness should be a question of fact that the jury determines.

I think that fluid dynamics serves as an appropriate analogy for understanding social networking. Companies like facebook interact with a force that's very similar to fluid flow and equally subject to the conservation laws. As with fluids, it's convenient to view your community as a continuum of users whose desires are well-defined individually, but vary continuously between each other because of socialization.

From this, it logically follows that changing one aspect of the system could cause ``unforeseeable'' consequences in another. I hesitate to say ``unforeseeable,'' because really it's a complete failure by the decision makers to understand their community's intra-member interactions. So, claiming that facebook isn't going anywhere is flawed, because as soon as the users' needs change, altering one service could be like closing a release valve and increasing the temperature of water in a pipe: eventually, there'll be an explosion.

> That's still pretty cool – but again, I think it means that the term "social network" is losing its distinctiveness.

Good. The term should lose its distinctiveness. Currently, ``social'' closely relates to friendliness or geniality, but its Lockean definition pertains to ``society as a natural condition of human life.'' Although ``societal networking'' may be the more appropriate term in certain contexts (e.g., those outside the scope of friendly or genial conversation), ``social networking'' nevertheless remains correct. The exceptionally broad definition of the word ``social'' effectively portends ambiguity when discussing social networking, so a presumption of distinctiveness isn't warranted.

> Informational goods are nonrival: they are copyable and usable with no loss to the original. The relation between copies of information is abstract. A copy adds its value, and subtracts nothing.

That is where I disagree. There's an important distinction between the inventive step leading to a discovery and subsequent copies thereof. A subsequent copy of an idea does not possess the same characteristics as the ``flash of genius'' in the mind of the person responsible for producing that idea. From this distinction, it follows that an idea, alone, has no intrinsic value--intrinsic value arises out of attachment to society.

Your argument is that an idea gains value as it spreads, but I don't think that's correct. Rather, societal advancement occurs when members of a society generate and produce novel ideas. There are two competing forces: (1) the spread of new ideas is akin to a positive feedback loop, since new ideas are based on old ones (there's evidence of this: technological advancement grows exponentially with respect to time); and (2) as an idea spreads, its connection to its creator fades, eventually causing misappropriation of that 'inventive step' and disincentivizing the creator's continued creation of new ideas. The belief that losing control over the spread of an idea on the basis that no harm to the information occurs from copies thereof is flawed: it focuses on the information, rather than the person who created it.

Permitting patent rights to vest only in the inventor transforms his talent into a commodity, rather than the fruits of that talent. It rewards the individual rather than those acting on the information for no purpose other than economic gain.

Thank you for the absolutely fantastic insight. I completely agree with everything that you've written, and especially with your sentiments concerning rash decisions in reforming patent law. Patent law is an enormously complex system that's inextricably linked with the conflicting interests of many stakeholders. Moreover, getting it wrong (by constricting the scope of patentable subject matter, limiting the remedies available, etc.) will cause the very conduct that the framers sought to avoid: overuse of trade secrets to safeguard inventions. Effectively, an exclusive right to exclude others from practicing an invention is the price the public pays to help the public repository of knowledge (e.g., scientific, literary, artistic) stay abreast of the private repository.

I have a problem with any suggested systemic improvement where the available protection depends on either the cost of the inventive process or its duration. The industry averages sound good in theory, but the USPTO is not equipped to investigate the truthfulness of these claims, which themselves are extraordinarily susceptible to accounting tricks and the like. I don't believe the solution stems from increased regulation. Instead, I've been considering an alternative approach that I haven't heard of before: patents should be inalienable with their rights vesting exclusively in the inventors (jointly and with right of survivorship) for the statutory period. It follows that the state would have a vested remainder in those rights and that no inventor would be able to transfer their right to another.

This idea came after reading about the philosophical and theological concept of inalienable possessions. Paul Kockelman's[1] first theoretical point on the topic concerns ontological classification: ``the gain and loss of inalienable possessions is related to the expansion and contraction of personhood.'' In other words, an individual's accumulation of inalienable possessions correlates with their personhood. Kockelman's second theoretical point asserts that inalienable possessions ontologically individuate, viz. they are uniquely identifiable with the particular individual for his life. Kockelman's final theoretical point is intimately related to classification and individuation: ``inalienable possessions historically and biographically trace.'' It follows that the inalienable possessions held by a group of people can act as a lens through which an observer may view that group's history.

Kockelman's formulation serves as a brilliant metaphor in the domain of Art. 1, Sec. 8, Cl. 8, because ``Writings and Discoveries'' are precisely the ``transcendent treasures'' that we must ``guard[] against all the exigencies that might force their loss.''[2] Overly litigious plaintiffs who amass war chests of patents constitute one such ``exigency.'' Another ``exigency'' occurs when universities strip patent rights from uncompensated students who took that one giant inventive leap. Universities justify their actions by asserting that the transfer was consideration for facility usage---an ``exigency'' that arguably constricts the affected students' personhood.

Many people question how an idea is patentable subject matter: the answer is that it's not. An invention isn't any idea: it's a process, machine, manufacture, composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement on any of them. During the inventive process, an inventor must maintain constant ``intellectual domination'' over his work, and but for a highly particular ordered set of neurophysiological reactions occurring in the prefrontal cortex (``the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain''), the idea would not have occurred at the instant it did. If the idea contemplates a novel and nonobvious invention, then it advances the humanities or sciences by that fact itself. The idea is a psychofact capable of acting as a vehicle ``for bringing past times into present'' so that the history of the inventive process elides into the inventor's identity. It logically follows that a chronology of all inventors in a society produces historically significant insight into the progress of the Arts and Sciences. By contrast, a chronology of patent assignees produces its own historically significant insight: the alarming increase in exigencies threatening the dissemination of these ``transcendental treasures:'' ideas. Accordingly, inventions are properly entitled to the appellation of inalienable possessions.

Applying Kockelman's theoretical points creates what, in my view, is a sensible reformation of intellectual property law. We can distinguish patents from other property interests by noting that patentability requires an idea to meet a series of standards that elevate it to the status of an invention. When an idea meets those standards, it becomes intertwined with the inventor's personhood---his conscious ability to frame representations about the world and act accordingly on them. The gain and loss of inventions is clearly related to the expansion and contraction of the inventor's personhood, because as he invents, the plans he formulates and actions he takes on his conscious perceptions change according to new representations based on the changed state of technological advancement.

In the end, intellectual property is different because it's inextricably linked with the property creator's personhood. Ideas are so profoundly human that it becomes unconscionable to think someone can claim ownership rights in a property interest arising out of another's invention. This solution isn't perfect, but it's one with which I would be more okay.

[1] http://www.columbia.edu/~pk2113/Article%20PDFs/Inalienable%2... at 343

[2] http://books.google.com/books?id=lNitvRLiiBUC&lpg=PA33&#...

Let's take it a step further: every item that you purchase with a credit card is recorded. It wouldn't surprise me if some retail stores use CCTV systems capable of facial recognition to identify cash purchases, too...

It's time to create an underground data haven in Kinakuta--the Crypt.

I agree with you that Roberts should be praised for his prudence and pragmatism; he held true to his belief that the Justices are umpires. However, there's a huge inconsistency in this ruling: The Anti-Injunction Act says that you can't file a lawsuit challenging a tax until after that tax is paid. Congress argued that they intend to enforce the mandate by attaching a "penalty," rather than a "tax," and as such, the Anti-Injunction Act doesn't apply. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court upheld the health care act as a tax for purposes of its constitutionality, but not for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act. Were this construed as a tax for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act, then the Supreme Court wouldn't have been able to rule on the issue of the mandate's constitutionality.