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Comment Re:But the gamers won't get any of the royalties (Score 1) 149

When was the last time you read a patent for a chemical or biological agent? The substance itself is just a valid a claim under the patent as the process that created it. US Classification 200/157.68 (definition) is one of the classes the resulting patent could land in if the process involves microwave energy.

If the person(s) who solved this challenge realize this, a landmark legal battle over crowd-sourcing for patent-eligible materials could be on the verge of happening.

Conventional wisdom is also called into question here, when the University system is trumped as the best way to continue research in an age when we could see the most significant advances in bio science come from people who are dynamos for complex rules. i.e. Gamers. Will it change? Likely not, the University system does have many advantages. But a decades-old problem solved in 3 weeks, by a single-generation crowd compared to how many layers of research papers on the topic? That's beyond embarrassing.

Facebook

Facebook Locks Down Social Gift Giving Patent 185

bizwriter writes "Facebook has been on a roll of late, nailing a number of patent grants that will help it retain dominance in social networking by creating barriers for competitors. Yesterday came patent number 7,970,657, 'Giving gifts and displaying assets in a social network environment'. Although it doesn't directly prevent other social networks from enabling gift giving among users, a clever legal and technical maneuver makes it far more difficult."
Android

The Real Reason Apple Is Suing Samsung 514

doperative writes with this quote from a speculative piece at Business Insider about Apple's real motive behind its recent lawsuit against Samsung's Galaxy devices: "Android is free. In some cases, it's even cheaper than free, with Google sharing some revenue from Google searches on Android phones with partners. This is hugely disruptive to both Microsoft and Apple's business models; Microsoft because they make money on software licenses, and Apple on hardware. And this disruptive approach is winning: Android is surging past iOS in marketshare. A lawsuit from a big company, even if doomed, still takes a lot of time, energy and money to fight off. So Samsung or someone else might settle, accepting to pay some form of license. If that happens, Apple can go around to the other manufacturers asking for the same license and have a much stronger claim. And now OEMs have to factor that cost into the decision to choose Android. And all of a sudden, Android has a price." Samsung has fired back with a lawsuit of its own.
Cloud

Apple Wants To Store Your History In the Cloud 99

bizwriter writes "Most online backup is about keeping the latest and greatest version of what resides on a device, whether a PC, tablet, or smartphone. Three recent patent filings suggest that Apple has a super version of backup on its mind. Someone would be able to go into an application (like iTunes or the App Store), find what material was available at a previous time, and recover any or all of what once was there without having to use a separate recovery program."
Media

Engineering Election Debates With Subtle Cues 105

smolloy writes "A recent innovation in televised election debates is a continuous response measure (the 'worm') that allows viewers to track the response of a sample of undecided voters in real-time. A potential danger of presenting such data is that it may prevent people from making independent evaluations. Researchers from Royal Holloway, University of London, and the University of Bristol, report an experiment with 150 participants in which they manipulated the worm and superimposed it on a live broadcast of a UK election debate. The majority of viewers were unaware that the worm had been manipulated, and yet the researchers were able to influence their perception of who won the debate, their choice of preferred prime minister, and their voting intentions."
Biotech

New Tech Promises Cheap Gene Sequencing In Minutes 121

Zothecula writes "Sequencing an entire genome is currently a highly complex, time-consuming process – the DNA must be broken down into segments and replicated, utilizing chemicals that destroy the original sample. Scientists from Imperial College London, however, have just announced the development of a prototype device that could lead to technology capable of sequencing a human genome within minutes, at a cost of just a few dollars. By contrast, when sequencing of the genome of Dr. James Watson (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) was completed in 2007, it had taken two years and cost US$1 million."

Comment Re:What about keys? (Score 1) 316

So you'd favor shutting down one of the greatest advances in technology purely on the grounds that the auxilliary effects would be expensive? Buy a bio-scanning lock and move on. They will become cheaper and cheaper as time goes on. Expense is no excuse to hold a technology this important back. Imagine what would have happened if your logic was considered when decisions about information technology in the early 90s were present? Not building the internet because of the distributed adjustment that needed to happen would have meant immeasurable losses in advancement on many fronts.

Comment This is the zenith. (Score 2, Insightful) 316

Years from now historians will lament over the fall of a nation. The Americas have finally reached a manufacturing technology zenith, and instead of realizing the potential for all if us, "vested" interests will hold all of us back for the sake of "we've always done it this way".

Does anyone here honestly think that China will not use this technology to empower citizens who are more nationally unified than Americans to outright cut imports from the US?

think about the potential plummet in the national debt alone if cheap plastic parts and products were domestic again.

Comment Re:Uh (Score 1) 725

Technical solution? Smalll merge documents, small table of possible storage locations, small table of important keyword combinations, table-valued function that returns a huge list of alpha-numeric "document number, one cartesian product, three million dollars in postage. The department handling these documents would be in quite some trouble if they try to implement a spam filter.
Censorship

White House Pressuring Registrars To Block Sites 569

An anonymous reader writes "While the Senate is still debating a bill that would force registrars and ISPs to block access to sites deemed 'infringing,' it appears that the White House's IP Czar is already holding meetings with ISPs, registrars and payment processors to start voluntarily blocking access to sites it doesn't like. Initially, they're focused on online pharmacies, but does anyone think it will only be limited to such sites? ICANN apparently has refused to attend the meetings, pointing out that they're 'inappropriate.' Doesn't it seem wrong for the US government to be pushing private companies to censor the Internet without due process?"

Comment Re:Atheist (Score 1) 583

Atheist, as the word would imply, is one without theism. I don't think it's been used in selective context as you have done here. (Zeus, Thor)

At any rate, yes your second statement is always unreasonable to these people. You can't seem to reach their logic centers on this topic, even given the massive contradictions they've read, let alone dichotomy between the book they hold sacred and their beliefs. Womens' Rights were not part of the old or new testament, but you'll find just as fierce opposition when pointing that out - usually in a dismissive wave such as "times change."

I find it sad that these people feel the need to sequester themselves away from the rest of the information on the web. It's doesn't take much to be just-critical enough to get by in a browser, yet their answer is a new service that blacklists most of the net with horrible ranks (or no result at all)

Comment Re:Teach them how to communicate (Score 1) 462

Mod parent up!

For all those people wanting their kids to excel and succeed beyond their parents, IT (real IT, not simply tech support) is a great avenue, and introduction early will foster aptitude in their adult life. The lowest rungs will be apt enough for stable tech support and the upper rungs will be developing FAT table hacks in grade 9.

For the nationalists out there, this is how to cultivate technical prowess in a country without costing the school system in overly-burdensome licensing fees, and not insult the intelligence of our children by calling classes on MS Word an "IT" class.

Transportation

Inventor Demonstrates Infinitely Variable Transmission 609

ElectricSteve writes with this excerpt from Gizmag: "Ready for a bit of a mental mechanical challenge? Try your hand at understanding how the D-Drive works. Steve Durnin's ingenious new gearbox design is infinitely variable — that is, with your motor running at a constant speed, the D-Drive transmission can smoothly transition from top gear all the way through neutral and into reverse. It doesn't need a clutch, it doesn't use any friction drive components, and the power is always transmitted through strong, reliable gear teeth. In fact, it's a potential revolution in transmission technology."
Piracy

Ubisoft's Authentication Servers Go Down 634

ZuchinniOne writes "With Ubisoft's fantastically awful new DRM you must be online and logged in to their servers to play the games you buy. Not only was this DRM broken the very first day it was released, but now their authentication servers have failed so absolutely that no-one who legally bought their games can play them. 'At around 8am GMT, people began to complain in the Assassin's Creed 2 forum that they couldn't access the Ubisoft servers and were unable to play their games.' One can only hope that this utter failure will help to stem the tide of bad DRM."

Comment Re:Geeks will blaze a new trail (Score 1) 452

Hmm...This could be just the (mis)opportunity they were looking for. Wasn't there an article sometime back about what the guys who came up with TCP/IP wanted to really do with the net and new protocols, but couldn't because of entrenched culture? Maybe now is the time...and to really look at employing that quantum entanglement effect as a communication medium. Let's see them tap that.

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