It's fundamentally a live recommendation system, and those votes make it work better than anything else (see Digg). I click on a subreddit and I get recommendations for related pages.
Don't you think it would be better to focus on one, get it working really well then we can expand. All these companies started with a small focused idea
I'm talking about one focused idea. I dont want to do your homework for you guys but think "temporal social bookmarking" - social bookmarking and calendar app have a baby. Otherwise you're just rehashing Google Calendar and/or Digg.
You're being rather misleading. If someone solves a problem in a different way from an existing patent (avoids their claims), their new way is not covered by that patent. Patents definitively can't claim "problems"; instead, they can claim very specific solutions to problems. Any large patent portfolio or broad patent is simply a large house of cards and any good innovator can topple the house of cards by tipping one fundamental claim.
Further, the state of software patents in the U.S. and globally has been brought about not by laws, or by the establishment or the powers that be, but by inventors appealing the USPTO to get their inventions patented. Twenty years ago (the previous generation of tech nerds - the yahoo's even) these people that brought us the internet had to fight for their ability to join the technology landscape through patents.
Now, the common consensus among their descendants - at least the cheeky ones on the internet - is that that work must be destroyed for no other reason than vague opinion.
Vint Cerf: "The openness of those protocols and their availability was key to their adoption and widespread use. I think if Bob [Kahn] and I had not done that - if we had tried to, in some way, constrain and restrict access to those protocols, some other protocol suite would probably be
the one we'd be using today .... The fact that it wasn't
patented, I think, was very important."
Tim Berners-Lee: "I mention patents in passing, but in fact they are a great stumbling block for Web development. Developers are stalling their e orts in a given direction when they hear rumors that some company may have a patent
that may involve the technology."
I never said that TBL or Cerf were patent advocates. I am very familiar with their positions on the subject. Even though they released their work to the public with no restrictions, their work was built on top of a ton of prior art that was patented.
For example TCP IP was a derivative of prior communications protocols either developed for private for-profit enterprise or the defense industry (Xerox, Bell, IBM, etc). In nearly all cases they were patented and exploited, but not really for the public's use; TBL and the other forefathers did have access to (or even helped write) the published prior art though when they were inventing the internet.
So in this case it doesn't really matter whether they were for or against software patents; because without patented prior art they would have had nothing to build off of. The success of their invention did indeed come from their superior execution (releasing it to the public) but since then they have become more hypocritical than Steve Jobs in claiming that software patents would have been a hindrance to the internet.
If startups / entrepreneurs who claim to be innovative would work with the patent landscape, rather than irrationally fearing and hating it, they would find that a huge patent portfolio or broad patent like those Yahoo owns are really just big houses of cards. A true innovator can topple it readily just using innovation; and then, voila, those innovations are now patentable.
I am reminded of star wars in this case: The more you tighten your grip, Admiral Tarkin, the more systems will slip through your fingers.
All that prior art will certainly bubble to the surface during the trial process. There is a cottage industry around finding it - kind of like bounty hunting. See articleonepartners.com, a service that lets researchers be rewarded for invalidating litigious patents.
I am aghast at the disastrous amount of disinformation about patents in this community. Patents are fundamentally and in the libertarian sense of the word, inalienable property rights, that have value, and that can be bought and sold.
A patent is not an inalienable right. Definetly not in the libriterian sense.
1. A patent is, fundamentally anti-libriterian. It's an example of the government interfering with private action, buy granting exclusive rights solely to a single entity. When the government enforces a patent it intervenes in the market place, picking winners and loosers. In most contexts, that's called corpatism. The fact that the rights conveyed by government granted monopoly can be bought and sold doesn't make them a libriterian concept.
2. The monopoly granted by a patent is not inalienable. Congress has the express power to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts" through granting of monopolies. Any monopoly rights conveyed by congress impede the natural rights of man. They prevent me from manufacturing, selling, or reproducing what I see fit to manufacture, sell, or reproduce. As an action that is fundamentally abhorrent to liberty, congress's power to grant such a monopoly is only valid within the scope of it's enumerated powers. Software patents do not "promote the progress of science or the useful arts", they impede it. So, not only are they not inalienable, they are unconstitutional.
Oh boy. This has proved true to me - but from dental surgeons, not physicians. I've gone through 3 dental surgeons who have opened up the gums above my canine teeth, excavated, charged my insurance $1000's and me $100's [the costs of successful operations], and then failed to fix the problem in my mouth. The problem is an extra tooth growing out of the root of my canine tooth, usually a simple extraction. But I'm convinced the dental surgeons are more interested in letting the tooth grow, destroying the rest of my mouth, so they can later put in more expensive dental implants. I'm highly fed up and am considering becoming a medical tourist to get the offending tooth out of my skull.
You'll find this in any medical field. But, being married to a general dentist, I know that it's very possible for you to find an oral surgeon via a referral that will do as you ask (if it's not putting other teeth at risk). It's generally accepted in their community (from what I've gathered) that if there is a high probability to save a tooth they'll opt for that. Talk to them, if you don't like what they have to say go somewhere you feel more comfortable with the treatment plan.
