Jules Verne is apropos here. He wrote Paris in the Twentieth Century in 1863.

From a review: "This novel ... shows Verne in a darker, frankly dystopian mood. His mid-20th century Paris is an enormously wealthy society, a place of technological wonders, but, like Huxley's Brave New World, it is also a society without meaningful art. Engineering and banking are the prime industries of this civilization and, as the book's protagonist discovers, not even the most talented poet can find a place for himself unless he's willing to produce odes to blast furnaces or locomotives.

From the USPTO PAIR database, "By this preliminary Amendment, claims 1-154 have been canceled..."

154 claims canceled?!? Typical patents have around 21 claims. USPTO charges per-claim over 21 total claims. JP Morgan's application had 170 claims — way beyond even a 3-sigma deviation for all patent applications. That is, it's amateurish. But, somehow they managed to avoid paying the $80/each for the excess claims. Most rejections were nominally due to the claims being "too abstract."

So, anyways, from the USPTO PAIR database — JP Morgan are claiming that their filing is under pre-AIA conditions. That is, that they are first to invent, and are not subject to the current first to file rules. Big difference. The inventor filed an "oath" regarding the invention date. Uh huh. USPTO also says, "Claims 155-175 are allowed over the prior art of record based on the earliest priority of the parent applications." I couldn't find the priority date that they are claiming, or whether it is before their filing date, but one might guess they are trying to get a pre-BitCoin patent priority date. Jerks. Once a patent is allowed and issued, any challenge to their priority would face a high hurdle, and would be expensive to prosecute.

If only someone knew of some actual prior art, and that this person also knew the name and contact information for the patent examiner. Hmmn...

Ah, here we are: From their non-final rejection, "Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to JAGDISH PATEL whose telephone number is (571) 272-6748." I'm sure he has an email address as well.

Good luck, and if no one here is willing to help nuke this, I'll send it over to the 4chan trogs.

Last, below is the Public PAIR filing-documents web address. Go there and search for "Publication Number" 20130317984. Click the "Image File Wrapper" tab to see PDFs of all communications between JP Morgan and the USPTO. Happy hunting!

http://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair

/sarcasm off

Oh my goodness!

You should just see what one member of the ANON.penet.fi anonymous email listserver for "ship in a bottle enthusiasts" writes about the government! It is just scandalous. Scandalous, I tell you!

He/she writes often about blowing up government buildings for terrorist purposes, and thinks that s/he furthers Al Quaeda goals by making these plans! S/he has said several times that s/he will perpetrate a major terrorist act early in 2014, but has not said exactly where on US soil it will occur.

Heavens to Betsy, I am scared!

It is actually both a First and a Fourth Amendment concern, which is what enabled him to avoid the cognitive dissonance of bald-faced lying.

For the uninitiated, it is a Fourth amendment concern because it is an illegal search and seizure (seizure occurs at the time of collection and retention, not later when a human examines it). Consequently, those who feel their Fourth Amendment rights may be violated will tend to censor themselves, leading also to a valid First-Amendment concern.

Long story short — weasel words from a former constitutional law professor. Not good.

Really? An ellipse as a coding example for K-12 kids? Kids don't even learn what the definition of an ellipse *is* until trigonometry or calculus.

Wait, wasn't there a thread just yesterday that we had a STEM shortage?

But today it's an over-abundance?

This is my ultimate goal, to be what might be called a Gentleman Scientist.

I saved up at a job, quit, and then took a several-month break to write a series of patents with the aim of licensing or sale.

Support from that will hopefully allow me to "work for free" at a University when funds run low (I already do). It also helps to stretch funding to support more instrument time, collaborators, major facility visits, etc.

It's a roller coaster, but is indeed do-able. Snowballs take a while to get going, but tend to grow once started.

Good description of a science/engineering post-doc. Produce and no one asks any questions. That part is great.

Ah, but after the post-docs, if no tenure-track position is obtained, you can stay in the academy by making a decision to accept an even more unstable position — the soft-money Research Professor! You can advise students, are awesome at your craft, and as long as you keep publishing or teaching, nobody asks any questions. But here's the rub. (1) You have to obtain your own support by writing proposals which compete with those of tenured Professors. (2) With no start-up package, you have no money to hire a postdoc at the start. You are your own postdoc! (3) You may eventually hop over to the tenure track, but will have to go through the whole hiring and review process, competing with everybody else, for the position. Sadly, if the ideas stop flowing, some people get stuck as "Research Staff" for the remainder of their careers, providing facility support and service work.

To sum up, expect to be hungry, and to work all the time. After all, you are fulfilling three roles as a Research Professor. Visionary/planner, proposal-writer, post-doc, paper-writer, lecturer, and so on. But all is not lost, even at this late stage. If you have friends who are Profs., and have a strong reputation as someone who produces (papers and patents), then you'll survive by getting little freebies here and there. Knit those into publications — good ones. Give a few freebies yourself to meritorious experiments, and make sure they get published. Eventually, you can work up to being a co-I (or Co-PI) on a multi-institution project, meaning you get to eat. Keep producing! Eventually, if you continue to have good ideas, do good work, collaborate, and write well, you're likely to be scooped up somewhere.

Oh, and Food Stamps are an option during "dry" periods.

A few commenters have suggested that they have nothing to worry about because they let no "sensitive" information out onto the web.

Sorry to break it to you, but the world is not fair. People are sometimes framed or kangaroo-ed into apearing guilty of something when they are clearly not (I have had it happen). Sometimes, various authorities need to catch someone to hang blame upon for some crime. I've even heard cops tell a public defender, "We know he didn't do it, but we know he's a bad kid, so we got him."

Also, numerous (unregulated) consumer-monitoring agencies scrape up everything from public databases, buy lists from shops, service providers, your bank, your phone company, your credit card company, and your grocery "club card," sold subscriber lists, and so on. All of this data is correlated based on a few unique or semi-unique identifiers such as full name, SSN, phone number, credit card transaction number (it's illegal to track by CC #, but they get around this.), bank and account's last-four digits, addresses, and so on. This approach does produce some viable correlations, but typically yields "profiles" that are rife with errors.

HR departments use reports from these aggregators as if they were 100% accurate. There is no law in place that will allow you to opt out, to see their entire file on you, or to correct errors. There are anecdotes of people searching months for a job, only to find out at some point from an interviewer that, "you have XXXXX crime in your profile," even if you don't have a record. I once had collection agencies coming after me from Time-Warner Cable for bills on a Texas account — I have never lived in Texas, but the burden of proof was on me.

Despite what the aggregators would have everyone think, names are not unique. Phone numbers are not unique, as they are recycled. Email addresses are often not unique, as they are recycled.

Like it or not, there are many profiles on you that are beyond your access, and the law has not yet caught up with these practices.

Happy privacy!

The Sharp El-406 series has been around for 20+ years. Trig, other bases, and a backspace. Current model is probably EL-406C, but I don't remember.

For me — reliable and familiar.

For you — familiar to standardized test proctors.

I think Stalin's numbers are a bit higher. He was a bigger monster than the H-man.

For example, 6.5 million Ukrainians died of starvation during a single winter, due to Stalin stealing all of their food for Mother Russia.

Oh, and he re-introduced serfdom in the 20th century. USSR, communist, LOL. Farmers were owned by the land. The workers in cities were the proletariat. Party members were above it all. That's three classes, not one.

Fun fact: Farmers that were "healthy-looking" were killed or sent to labor camps. That is, they killed the ones that were the most skilled at farming — 20% of them. How stupid is that? Also, look up Lysenko, an anti-Darwinian "scientist" that, due to Stalin keeping him close, was responsible for widespread famine and failure of other agricultural and forestry projects.

Even at the height of the Cold War, the USA was sending shiploads of grain to its arch-enemy USSR. Because America feared a "cold, hungry Russia."

I had a similar experience. Drove my Nissan Sentra at 100 mph for about half an hour. (I was young and dumb.)

Suddenly, I had a James bond-style smokescreen in the rear-view mirror. Pulled over. Head gasket had blown or melted, and I had an oil fire on my hands.

I extinguished the oil fire with... I kid you not... a tea towel. That's all I had. I'd smother it out, and it would re-ignite. Repeat. Many, many times. Eventually, the engine cooled enough that it stopped re-igniting.

I drove to the next exit, bought several quarts of oil, and went on to my destination. Drove back home afterward, too, stopping occasionally to put another quart in. Fun times.

Elop went to Nokia as a subversive, to nuke their share price, so that MS could buy them on the cheap.

Save a company a few billion, and you tend to be remembered.

Although considering him an "outsider" is a bit of a stretch. And buying Nokia's handset business does NOT mean that MS now knows how to make hardware.

[citation needed]