unavoidable

Once again proving that there are very few new _ideas_ out there. It's all about better execution.

But Wikipedia as an encyclopedic repository is never going to be a good venue for controversial topics. That's not the purpose of an encyclopedia. It's a terrible forum for a debate, and that's the way it will always be. This isn't something wrong with Wikipedia in particular, other than the fact that it is one of the largest and most visited sites on the Internet.

Wikipedia gets a worse rap than it really deserves.

If you ignore most of the pedantic self-important editors/trolls on WP, it's actually a great experience to contribute. I write a lot of articles on Canadian/British law and history, and the WPProjects are very supportive and generally polite. Otherwise, I don't really need to interact with anybody. I simply enjoy contributing to the organization of human knowledge. Nearly a decade and thousands of edits (on various accounts for reasons of anonymity) later, I have yet to have a real negative experience that has affected me in one way or another.

This claim would probably also run into issues regarding patentable subject matter post-Alice v CLS Bank. It's almost completely abstract...

edit: nevermind, it's a patent application and not an issued patent.

HN Posters: Please stop posting patent applications as patents! They are not the same!

Kim Dotcom is "kicking it" about as well as Julian Assange is. It's not like he's hidden somewhere. The authorities know exactly who he is, where he is, how much he owns, and how to get it. They're just sorting out the court procedures to make sure they get all of it.

In any event, Ross was running something somewhat more illicit than Megaupload. His opsec probably should have been commensurately better.

Anyone else think that OP is doing a disservice to his children, which he describes as eating mac and cheese?

Ah, free-range parents. Or as we used to call them, parents.

To be absolutely clear, it is a patent application and not yet a granted patent. Claims can still change, or not be allowed, etc.

Law librarians have been complaining for years about the expense of the old paper systems, especially since the companies who produce them keep increasing the price for updates every year. Almost everyone I know now uses equivalent digital systems, although where I work many older lawyers often ask for paper copies of things after you've found the most relevant cases/laws/rules.

Apple I?

Motorola was bleeding money when Google purchased them. Google can deduct the operating losses from their profits to reduce their tax burden.

In addition, Motorola likely has many depreciating capital assets, and when the loss was booked by the sale, they can also write those off from their profits. A deal like this will have tons of tax lawyers going through them to maximize their benefits.

The PTO is supposed to (and its employees are trained to) disallow trademark claims that do not meet the criteria for obtaining a trademark (for example, due to the term being generic, or because of descriptiveness). So a company that sells candy would not be allowed by the PTO to register a trademark for the word "candy".

Now, the situation gets a bit trickier for words and industries that don't really relate, like "candy" and video games (or, as the example in other comments, "apple" and electronics). In this case, the reality is that trademark agents will file a claim for something relatively broad, and the PTO will initially reject the claim for overbreadth (this is the default in practice), whereupon the trademark agent will narrow the claimed goods and services until the PTO accepts it.

In some cases, they do not ever accept such claims - but given enough time, one supposes that you can find a narrow enough set of goods that you can market exclusively with the word "candy".

Of course, the PTO is subject to review by courts. The problem for the PTO is that if they reject something, that decision can be appealed. Parties with deep pockets will always try to appeal if they think the mark is worth enough (see Apple). So it's a waste of the PTO's time and effort to be very aggressive in denying claims.

In effect, the process is just one of narrowing and back-and-forth negotiating, rather than a "yes"/"no" decision.

In short, the PTO gets blamed a lot for accepting shitty claims (both patents and trademarks), but they really don't have that much incentive to reject claims aggressively, because they get money from applications, and rejections are subject to review anyway.

Does the fact that it's a poorly designed language change the fact that it's a useful one?

I am curious - how do you think that these large groups will be able to set bitcoin policy? Technologically, they don't have much influence over the algorithms or the distribution of bitcoins as a whole. What meaningful policy decisions can be made?

I suppose you have to come at it from the mindset of those actually using Linux. That is, if it already exists and can be glued together using open tools (as opposed to having to code it yourself), it is "trivial", since it has already been done before.

This is actually very common in industry, especially with respect to manufacturing processes. For example, let's say you have a (presumably valid) patent on an improved manufacturing method for a drug. Maybe it's a really efficient way to mix things into pill form, giving you a cost advantage in the market. But you don't have a patent on the actual drug. If someone else makes the drug using your process, how would you actually find out?

There may be a number of ways to make a product, but only one of the ways of making it is infringing. It's not like companies go around telling people the secrets of their manufacturing plant. Many manufacturing plants, especially in pharma and also in tech, have high security.

And even if you could find out (let's say by corporate espionage) - that evidence may not always be admissible (or reliable) in court.

Except that the lawyer is a partner and partners aren't just "fired".

And he's an engineer, to boot.

The part about introns and exons is very important. Normal ("naturally occurring") DNA has a bunch of extra stuff that is not coded for proteins (introns) and that may not serve much useful function for therapeutic research but are useful as unique identifiers/markers.

The cDNA mentioned in the judgment is not a simple XOR of the original information. It is an XOR of the information after the section of DNA has been isolated, and with all the introns stripped out. Using cDNA, one cannot recreate the original full DNA strand because it is like lossy compression.

The guidelines are actually pretty clear and the Canadian Patent Office mostly follows those. You will generally not be able to get a patent for a piece of software per se, although it is not very hard to attach it to a physical process to make it patentable subject matter. Any experienced patent prosecutor/attorney will be able to draft something that is acceptable to the patent office.

The Amazon 1-Click patent, for example, was held to be valid because the software and algorithms were attached to a physical system (of collecting and storing customer information along with an automated process of inventory gathering to shipping).

Most patent lawyers here in Canada are of the opinion that software _can_ be patentable, and that the trend is towards patentability. The main difference between US and Canada is not their respective Patent Acts (which are fairly similar), but the attitude of both the Patent Office and the courts in dealing with these things. It seems that the USPTO very easily accepts software patents, while Canadian patent examiners seem to be a little more strict on the requirements set out regarding software. Indeed, the Amazon 1-Click case arose in Canada because the patent office _rejected_ Amazon's patent, rather than the other way around as it seems more common in US.

The thinking process behind both are very similar indeed. At the core of both is true problem solving. You are given a set of constraints and facts, and you have to apply some set of rules (man made laws, or algorithms) in order to take the input and create a result that you want.

I think it is for this reason that many on HN enjoy discussing the law (of course it does have many other practical consequences as well). And although OP did the opposite, I would encourage many technical minded people to consider law as an option - much of the reason that laws suck for technology is because the people who work with the law on a daily basis do not understand the technology, and it would be great if we had more general tech literacy in the legal profession.

I think this misses the central idea in the essay - it's not that nerds are arrogant for thinking they are above social games (they're not), but that nerds are "nerds" because they prioritize the pursuit of knowledge over the pursuit of popularity (in broad strokes).

In fact, nerds would very much like to play the social game and be at the top of the ladder, but at the stage in life being discussed (high school), nerds don't have the kinds of life experiences or knowledge to play the game well, precisely because they spend most of their time tinkering/hacking/learning about other things.

Of course, Steam users tend to be power users and early adopters who need the latest and greatest. It's also still somewhat surprising to see how low OSX is on that list. I guess the games on offer are still not very good.

Yep. Contract law.

It's very interesting to see the hacker community turn on Google so abruptly over the last year or so. Not sure why, but it seems to me that Google itself has not actually changed its business model much, though its perception has turned radically downward.

Smart watches can succeed because they have different use cases than phones. Do people look at their phones because there is a clock on it, or for some other reason?

I am using a Pebble now and since I have gotten it I no longer look at my phone on a regular basis. In fact I often lose track of my phone because I so rarely take it out.

Once you get used to charging it, it's no longer a problem. People were annoyed when smartphones came out and they had to charge them every night instead of once a week or so.

The way I see it, this is a net positive development rather than a negative. Will it have some effect on the margins where developers who would rather be paid might not contribute to open source projects anymore? Probably. But the idea of FOSS is that the works are free as in freedom, not free as in beer.

If people are willing to pay to ensure that an open source project continues to thrive, that makes the ecosystem more viable in the long term, not less. This Kickstarter only demonstrates the pent up demand for this sort of thing. Not everyone can contribute time or knowledge, so they might instead contribute money.

Besides, many of the most popular open source projects are already implicitly backed by paid developers (Linux, WebKit, etc.). Nobody seems to have a problem with that.

First to file actually reduces amount and cost of litigation. It removes the need to prove that you invented something 'first', which invariably involves a lot of wrangling over when an invention was 'invented' and at what point something could even be considered 'invented'. Those questions were deemed to be distracting and not particularly helpful to the patent process. First-to-file may actually be more helpful in prior art searches because it reduces incentives to 'sit' on an invention and wait out the market, and increases certainty.

Would deduplication by technological means necessarily imply lack of security?