Technology and Society

Some patent thoughts

One of the things I did in my dissolute holiday was play Texas Hold’em with Dan Barry, among other people. The first thing in my inbox when I got back was an email from my advisor asking if I’d be willing to help someone with some patent advice. Among the first websites I visited when I got back was The Space Review, on which there is an article advising space entrepreneurs on patents, using Texas Hold’em as an example. Bizarre little chain of coincidences. Not being superstitious I’m not trying to figure out the deeper meaning, but it’s a little odd.

Anyway, on the topic of patents, the article by Sam Dinkin is pretty much exactly on target, but I thought I’d mention the advice I always give people thinking about patenting an idea. This is based on all of six month’s experience doing IP work, so it’s far from definitive, but my job would have been simpler had I known it, so here goes: The most important thing to understand about patents is that they aren’t about ideas or inventions, they are about lawsuits. The only utility of a patent is in a lawsuit or threat of a lawsuit. If your idea is unlikely to be picked up by someone else, a patent is unlikely to help. Given that the time when people are thinking about patenting an idea is right at the beginning of their business, the money and time invested will often pay off better elsewhere, such as in building a proof of concept demo. A patent can be useful in scaring away competition, but that cuts both ways – if you think you can build a genuinely better mousetrap but it infringes someone else’s IP, all may not be lost. After all, it’s about a lawsuit, and the patent holder doesn’t always win – there are some really lousy patents out there.

Anyway, I’m repeating a bit of what Sam Dinkin said, but hopefully the repetition isn’t wasted. If you have a good idea that might be patentable, go read his article, and then go read what Don Lancaster has to say on the subject. Also, check out the EFF’s Patent Busting Project for some examples of some of the egregious stuff that manages to get patented. EFF is trying to bring some sanity to the subject but they could certainly use some help.

General

Now *That’s* A Vacation

You know you had a wild vacation when it takes two days to recover from it. You’d think that hanging out with a bunch of neuroscientists would be intellectually stimulating but perhaps a little light on the wild partying. You’d be wrong, at least about the partying part. The social scene surrounding the Marine Biological Laboratory is really something to behold. It was a long weekend, so there were parties every night for four straight nights, and all the parties were too good to leave before the wee hours. I ended up averaging about 5 hours sleep a night, which is nowhere near enough. Somehow biologists simply have better parties than physicists. I think it has to do with the average level of social skills. I know some very socially smooth physicists, but let’s face it – the average physics geek is a little on the dorky side, and a bunch of slightly dorky people all in the same place tend to condense into a big glob of mutually reinforcing dorkiness. Biology dorks don’t undergo the same transition, probably because they are fermion dorks, while physicists are boson dorks. Or something. There’s actually a coherent explanation for why biologist dorks should be fermionic (having to do with the greater degree of distinction between different subfields of biology), but something tells me that it would be better not to go there. Maybe I’m not yet fully recovered from my vacation 🙂

General

Now *That’s* A Vacation

You know you had a wild vacation when it takes two days to recover from it. You’d think that hanging out with a bunch of neuroscientists would be intellectually stimulating but perhaps a little light on the wild partying. You’d be wrong, at least about the partying part. The social scene surrounding the Marine Biological Laboratory is really something to behold. It was a long weekend, so there were parties every night for four straight nights, and all the parties were too good to leave before the wee hours. I ended up averaging about 5 hours sleep a night, which is nowhere near enough. Somehow biologists simply have better parties than physicists. I think it has to do with the average level of social skills. I know some very socially smooth physicists, but let’s face it – the average physics geek is a little on the dorky side, and a bunch of slightly dorky people all in the same place tend to condense into a big glob of mutually reinforcing dorkiness. Biology dorks don’t undergo the same transition, probably because they are fermion dorks, while physicists are boson dorks. Or something. There’s actually a coherent explanation for why biologist dorks should be fermionic (having to do with the greater degree of distinction between different subfields of biology), but something tells me that it would be better not to go there. Maybe I’m not yet fully recovered from my vacation 🙂

General

Now *That’s* A Vacation

You know you had a wild vacation when it takes two days to recover from it. You’d think that hanging out with a bunch of neuroscientists would be intellectually stimulating but perhaps a little light on the wild partying. You’d be wrong, at least about the partying part. The social scene surrounding the Marine Biological Laboratory is really something to behold. It was a long weekend, so there were parties every night for four straight nights, and all the parties were too good to leave before the wee hours. I ended up averaging about 5 hours sleep a night, which is nowhere near enough. Somehow biologists simply have better parties than physicists. I think it has to do with the average level of social skills. I know some very socially smooth physicists, but let’s face it – the average physics geek is a little on the dorky side, and a bunch of slightly dorky people all in the same place tend to condense into a big glob of mutually reinforcing dorkiness. Biology dorks don’t undergo the same transition, probably because they are fermion dorks, while physicists are boson dorks. Or something. There’s actually a coherent explanation for why biologist dorks should be fermionic (having to do with the greater degree of distinction between different subfields of biology), but something tells me that it would be better not to go there. Maybe I’m not yet fully recovered from my vacation 🙂

General

I Want My DNS!

OK, I finally got it working. Sort of. I can ping the LAN. I can ping the internet. I can even get to web sites if I know the IP. But when I ping an internet domain from a client with no IP (even something as simple as yahoo.com) it goes “Huh!” as only computers can do, and sits doing nothing.

Any ideas what I have to do to get ZA (and please, no more stories about what a fool I am to use ZA–those are not helpful at this point) to allow DNS? Or diagnostics I can run to figure out where the problem is?

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, I still don’t know why it’s not doing DNS properly, but I fixed it by assigning some DNS servers manually to the client (Earthlink’s). It seems to work now, but it also seems like a kludge.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!