Tag: patent

Valve lawsuit

Volunteers 3D-Print unobtainable valve and get sued

And if you’re wondering why the original manufacturer would risk what is bound to be awful publicity for its actions, over something that only costs 1 euro to make, a detail in the Business Insider Italia article provides an explanation: the official list price for a single valve is $11K.

Melatonin

Van Geiklswijk et al describe supplemental melatonin as “a chronobiotic drug with hypnotic properties”. Using it as a pure hypnotic – a sleeping pill – is like using an AK-47 as a club to bash your enemies’ heads in. It might work, but you’re failing to appreciate the full power and subtlety available to you.

the correct dose is 0.3 mg:

Most drugstore melatonin supplements are 10x or more the recommended dose. the FDA chose to label it a dietary supplement, which does not require FDA regulation. Clearly, this was wrong because melatonin is a hormone, not a dietary supplement. Quickly, supplement manufacturers saw the huge potential in selling melatonin to promote good sleep. After all, millions of Americans struggled to get to sleep and stay asleep, and were desperate for safe alternatives to anti-anxiety medicines and sleeping pills that rarely worked well and came with plenty of side effects. Also, manufacturers must have realized that they could avoid paying royalties to MIT for melatonin doses over the 1 mg measure. So, they produced doses of 3 mg, 5 mg, 10 mg and more! Their thinking–like so much else in our American society–was likely, “bigger is better!” But, they couldn’t be more wrong.

Hailstorm patent

A schema-based service for Internet access to per-user services data, wherein access to data is based on each user’s identity. The service includes a schema that defines rules and a structure for each user’s data, and also includes methods that provide access to the data in a defined way. The services schema thus corresponds to a logical document containing the data for each user. The user manipulates (e.g., reads or writes) data in the logical document by data access requests through defined methods. In one implementation, the services schemas are arranged as XML documents, and the services provide methods that control access to the data based on the requesting user’s identification, defined role and scope for that role. In this way, data can be accessed by its owner, and shared to an extent determined by the owner.

Flickr Attempt to Patent Interestingness

“I don’t think Flickr should be able to get a broad patent on “interestingness”. There’s a very large number of papers in the image processing and collaborative filtering areas that all define various notions of relevance, interestingness, salience, or novelty. A specific innovative technique might be patentable, but not the general idea of computing how interesting an image or media object is to a person or set of people.”

yeah what is up with that yahoo?

Animated Traffic Patent

When will this end? Traffic.com today received a patent (US #7,116,326) on displaying animated traffic data on a graphical map of the road system Unbelievably, and, in reading the claims, grotesquely over-broad. While you might argue that no-one currently shows realtime animation, that is hardly a meaningful and patentable innovation.

very bad