What is up with all the startups using .ly domain or "ly" in their name? I can understand using a foreign top level domain in order to find available domain names, but that does not explain why we don't see ones from all the other international TLDs.
Anecdotal personal experience being part of patent applications has showed me that almost any idea, as long as there are no mainstream examples of prior art, can be patented given time (will take 4-5 years these days) and money. Most decently smart people will come up with patentable ideas all the time, just doing their job, but won't file because they don't have the desire or resources (and don't understand why their only somewhat-novel obvious-to-them idea is patentable).
"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying." - John Carmack
You'd almost think that they were getting money for accepting patent applications...
<Edit>This is a perfect example of mismatched incentives. The patent office has a lot of incentive (in the form of attracting user fees) for issuing dubious patents, and no real disincentive for doing the same.
Although, if I were to take your implication correctly - there should be no incentive to take a patent or reject a patent other than its merit.
Which would in turn imply no cost on applying for a patent, except its applicability after review.
But that would also create a perverse incentive for firms to submit patents all the time - there is no cost involved, no barrier of entry and hence no loss in making the effort.
Alternatively, we could have a very quick review system, which would mean that soon after patent submission you get rejection or acceptance. Which would mean that the patent office would need significantly more funding - considering the number of patents it receives vs people who have to review.
If there was a solution which could automate the search for prior art, that would be cool, and a way to reduce the size of the work load.
Its do-able, but I am certain that the law of unintended consequences was written to describe situations like these.
For example, in your suggestion, the part where we move the onus onto the courts, will gum up the courts. I live in India, where courts are constantly arbiting cases, and people know that if your case gets into court, it could be there for ever. Thats not a side effect we want to induce.
Now you could build in redundancy for that eventuality by expanding the number of people in court, justices and areas, but then in essence, you are moving the burden from department X to department N, with the added problem that those new people will be from law, and not a technical background.
I really do think that this is a case where people should just get someone whos a technocrat in charge, give him authority and funds, and then forget about it while the patent office is built back up into an institution that people respect.
Is there a plan to offer this as a non-web-browser service? I would love to be able to write math out on paper, or a resistive screen tablet, and then import it into a LaTeX document.
I am faster writing equations by hand than typing LaTeX (and definitely faster compared to using a WYSIWYG equation program).
Edit: By the way, this is the perfect example of a problem I've always wished a start-up would come along and solve for me.
Fifteen thousand people died in the Japan earthquakes with not a single death due to the Fukushima meltdown. Yet when one asks the average American about it, all he remembers is how horrible Fukushima was. (It's mind boggling to me.)
It is interesting that so much fear is focused at nuclear power. There must be a combination of the association with nuclear weapons, fear of hard to understand things, and possibility for rare but severe accidents.
So it is possible several people may face an earlier death than they would have if Fukoshima did not occur. But when talking deaths we are still short by 3 to 4 orders of magnitudes to the direct deaths from the earthquake.
[1] http://www.slideshare.net/iaea/radiological-briefing-11-0505 [2] http://xkcd.com/radiation/
I disagree with the article; there is no one reddit culture. One can go to r/politics, r/gardening, r/fitness, or r/askscience for example, and they all feature their own cultures and own biases. For example r/fitness has a culture focusing on weight lifting for fitness. But for people who are into fitness through running, there is r/running. The same thing goes for politics: r/politics tends to be left leaning, but you can find right leaning people in order subreddits.
There are thousands of vibrant community subreddits were people with similar interests (and sometimes opinions) participate. All with their own cultures and moderation rules for what are acceptable posts.
Subreddits combined with voting and good moderation make reddit way better than usenet, Digg in its heyday, or 4chan.
You could compare it to 4chan having a culture despite there being dozens of different boards.
The site self-selects; you are not going to get many grannies coming on board when the front page is filled with f-bombs, sexual questions or interviews (AskReddit/IAmA), non-sensical pictures and jokes, and news about IPv6 or other techie stuff. That's just the long and short of it.
Even if you give a specific link to an individual subreddit, anyone who participates to a meaningful degree will venture outside into the broader world of reddit and be very sorry they did so, often swearing off the site entirely.
I haven't even mentioned the intentional harassment offered by the kind reddit denziens who find what you are trying to talk about "moronic", "abusive", or "mind-numbing".
This effect was so pervasive that I recognized I could not get meaningful participation from relevant segments of the population if I hosted the community on reddit. I coded a clone and started an independent site. I think this is required for anyone whose primary audience doesn't overlap with the 20-something nerd crowd.
I will admit that for the ones I use, the proportion of Americans are at least 90%.
That's what makes reddit great, if your not into the memes, you can easily "turn them off".
For one thing, the site admins won't get involved with what they term "moderation fights" so one bad actor as a mod can cause a hostile takeover/coup of a subreddit that nothing can be done about.
If you know your goals will fail, isn't it better to try to overachieve some other way that may actually work.
Except the nicest feature of Mosh is it makes the remote session feel more responsive. Is there anything out there (not just local echo) that does this?