5788307
submission
lousyd writes:
Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel and present instructor at Stanford Business School, has a message for industry. He believes that health care and energy, especially, could learn a lesson from computing's innovative and relatively government-free history. He asks students to imagine if mainframe vendors had asked government to prop them up in the same way that General Motors has recently had. On the issue of computer patents, he insists that firms must use their patents or lose them: "You can't just sit on your ass and give everyone the finger."
4347293
submission
lousyd writes:
Volokh has hosted a paper by George Mason University law professor Adam Mossoff on the patent fracas a century and a half ago surrounding the sewing machine. A Stitch in Time: The Rise and Fall of the Sewing Machine Patent Thicket challenges assumptions by courts and scholars today about the alleged efficiency-choking complexities of the modern patent system. Mossoff says that complementary inventions, extensive patent litigation, so-called "patent trolls," patent thickets, and privately formed patent pools have long been features of the American patent system reaching back to the antebellum era.
326153
submission
lousyd writes:
CNN Money DARPA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency have given $4.9 million to Lockheed Martin to develop an image recognition system that will be used to scan satellite images and photographs for familiar objects. Called Object Recognition via Brain-Inspired Technology (ORBIT), the system will fuse commercial airborne EO and LIDAR sensor data into a three-dimensional, photorealistic model of the landscape. The brains of the system, so to speak, will be Numenta's Hierarchical Temporal Memory technology, modelled on the technology growing inside human heads. The system is expected to increase image analysts' productivity by 100 times.
