The lengthy process after is better than an even more lengthy process before, because the even more lengthy process before is much more harmful to the individual inventor or small business than to the large business, while at the same time being far easier for the large business to initiate.
You can't limit how long someone has to explain the objection, it might be just citing a prior patent, but it might be more involved than that.
Its not a matter of it being "ok as long as the little guy gets it" its a matter of pre-grant opposition vastly favoring the larger entity. Say I am an individual inventor or small startup, I only have a few patent applications, and I may need those to turn into patents to get funding or to have any hope of keeping my product from being copied by big existing companies. The moment the giant corp becomes aware of me they search my handful of applications and send their lawyers to file any objection they can think of. And they are likely to become aware of me as a threat while most or all of my applications are still pending. Now I can't get funding or I can't get my patent to issue quickly so I can stop people from copying me, and I go out of business.
Also the examiner is not going to be able to just ignore the large company's "BS" objection, if they could then they could just ignore everything, or they could ignore the little guys and favor the big guys, you never want to allow a bureaucrat to be able to exercise arbitrary judgement, if you think thats ok or desirable you have never had to get something you needed from an government agency before.
Turn it around, I am the little startup, I have no idea which patents from which companies are going to be a problem, and from the existing companies in the field only a fraction of their patents are pending, most are issued, so there is almost no ability for the little guy to take advantage of this.
If the patent sucks then it can be dealt with after issue, pre-grant opposition is just an invitation for people to make the already too slow process of getting a patent even slower.
While I hate all this ACTA and related types of laws (DMCA, etc) the summary for this article is not accurate, for example it says it would forbid third party opposition to patents, which it doesn't say, what it actually says is that it prohibits them prior to the grant of a patent. And as someone with a bunch of patents from little startups, thats a good thing actually, as it would be way to easy for big corporations to make small inventors and startups waste money by filling all sorts of third party opposition during the patent prosecution.
In any case, don't believe the summary article, if you care about a particular point follow the links to the full text and read it in the original.
Two mornings each week, I volunteer to teach physics to local 12 & 13 year old kids.
They're homeschooled kids; we meet at one of their homes for 4 hours a week. I'm teaching the science class that I wish I'd received when I was in 8th grade.
3 months of Newtonian physics, then a month on wave mechanics (made a glass wave tank!), we're now finishing thermodynamics and will soon start E&M. Heavy on experiments: bicycle wheel gyroscope, conservation of momentum when throwing a football while standing on a skateboard, entropy & heat of crystallization using Sodium Acetate. We use the physics apparatus that I've collected over the years
This past Tuesday, we measured the distance to the sun by comparing the warmth of sunlight on the kids hands to the warmth from a 100 watt incandescent lamp. By adjusting the distance from hand to lamp, they found the distance from the light where it was "just about as warm as sunlight". Then they looked up the solar luminosity and used the inverse square law to deteremine the astronomical unit. Got it to with 30 percent of the canonical value. (of course, Slashdot people will see the circular reasoning here, but letting the kids figure that out is part of the fun).
No tests - it's immediately apparent when someone doesn't get something, and when to take a different approach. Occasional homework (always an experiment: for instance, determine the vertical distance (in meters) from the sidewalk outside your house to your bed. Knowing your mass in Kg and the gravitational constant, find the amount of work it takes to walk into your house and go to bed. Notice that there's no "right" answer to this question, and it's unlikely that two kids will get the same answer)
Parents often bring muffins & goodies; the kids are curious, enthusiastic, and motivated. Best part: I take home a broad smile
A friend of mine - a PhD chemical engineer - volunteers at the San Francisco Exploratorium. Another friend works as a docent at a nearby bird sanctuary.
All of us are busy, yet each of has something to contribute. Mix your interests with enthusiasm, toss in some creativity, then get out there and volunteer. You'll never know how much fun it'll be!
-Cliff on a sunny Saturday morning in Oakland, California
Actually it is a way to subvert the public's knowledge. Calling them "undocumented" implies that the only deficiency with their presence in this country is the lack of some paperwork. The people in question have entered in violation of the law, no amount of paperwork will alter the fact that they are now criminals.
To answer your follow on question, a local radio talk show host doesn't use the term "illegal alien", he refers to them as "criminal aliens", which I think you should approve of, since the answer to your question is, we call most people who commit crimes "criminal citizens" or just "criminals" for short... although given the growing prison population who are not citizens, perhaps we should stop shortening it to just "criminal" since while in the past it was a generally valid simplification that most criminals were (unfortunately) our fellow citizens, it now seems perhaps it is time to be explicit about the citizenship status of those who chose to flaunt the laws of our country.
"hauling semiautomatic weaponry"????
either you meant to say FULLY automatic weaponry, in which case you probably need to the FBI and the ATF involved, or your police are cowards and need to be replaced.
or do you think that most burglars are still packing single shot muzzle loaders?
Demonstrating the truth of the saying
"You're not paranoid if people really are out to get you"
You post this on Veterans day? Pitty I already posted in this thread and can't use my mod points
the post "Prior art?" has exactly the image I was thinking of
The addition of the spike to get through insulated lines is a nice addition, but I don't know that its really needed, some how I imagine the places where this will get used don't bother with such things as insulation. Its a common practice to steal power in 3rd world countries to just toss a cable over the nearest powerline. I've seen pictures of streets in slums where the powerlines just look like spaghetti from all the cables just draped over them.
Striping doesn't make sequential writes become random. It just interleaves them across multiple devices.
Sorry I wasn't clear enough, assume you are not making gigantic sequential accesses, but just say 64K writes that are otherwise "randomly" distributed. But 64K might be large enough to get you the sequential write performance speed. If you stripe that 64K access over 4 SDDs it might turn out that the performance you see for 16K "random" writes to each SDD is less than 1/4th the performance you were getting doing 64K "random" writes to one SSD. Which results in lower over all performance, which was my original point.
Also, for any SSD controller you'd care to use.....
I was just trying to simplify the explanation, I actually design those controllers for my day job so I don't really want to get into the details because a) it would take all day b) then I would have to kill you
But the essence of what I said is still true regardless of how the data is written down by the controller because while it can control where it writes data you give it, it can't control which old data it was that becomes "stale" and that is what will effect the cost of performing the garbage collection.
Actually your understanding is quite incorrect. The problem most SSDs have with random access is not that there is any time spent moving the head around over the disk, but the fact that random, or rather non-sequential writes lead to fragmentation of the flash array requiring expensive garbage collection to compact all the live data to free space for more writes. When the writes are largely sequential when data is re-written it means the areas of the flash holding live data are contiguous and easier to compact.
Fine it's a secret test, but why on Earth would you do it near the coast? Why not just do it out in the ocean where it's substantially less public? I mean, it's supposed to be secret, why do it in plain view?
Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?
How many movies are there where the villain sets out to start a war by launching an attack meant to look like it came from one of the super powers?
But seriously.... a SLBM was fired a few miles off our coast and we don't know where it came from?
Is the area around that launch site full of planes dropping SONAR buoys? It better damn well be if we don't know where this came form.
Actually if you notice they only give "sequential" performance numbers for these products. Depending on what you are using it for you could see your performance go *down* if you striped it because the random write performance could easily be worse than the sequential write performance by a factor that is greater than the number of them you have striped together.
For SSDs the performance numbers quoted have to be viewed in the same light as supercomputer benchmark numbers, these are "guaranteed not to exceed" numbers, what you get for your own use pattern can be very hard to predict in advance.
Testing can show the presense of bugs, but not their absence. -- Dijkstra
