Wired News: New Study Urges Patent Upgrade
bq. As a solution, the council recommended in its report that the patent office and Congress take seven steps to improve the patent system. Those steps include, among other things, hiring new patent examiners, creating a more open system for challenging questionable patents, and rejecting more patents on processes that are deemed to be “obvious” by people in the field.
Open Clip Art Project | Creative Commons
Kind of surprises me that we haven’t seen a big project like this in the past. It would be nice to have a large, open, royalty-free library though. Might be a good way for artists to try and get some exposure.
It seems like this collection could grow quite quickly though, and at some point there might be problems weeding out the wheat from the chaff. Hopefully they’ll have some kind of ranking system setup so that good work “floats to the top.”
New cars are getting too expensive to fix | csmonitor.com
bq. Costly air bags, expensive electronics, and lightweight body materials are driving up the cost of fixing new cars. Not only do many more parts have to be replaced rather than repaired, but fewer and fewer body shops can afford the special equipment and training required to do the work.”We’re moving closer and closer to the disposable car,” says Dan Bailey, an executive vice president at Carstar, the largest auto-body repair franchise in the United States.
I guess it’s the same thing as with electronics, but on a larger scale. Who bothers to get a VCR fixed anymore? Maybe recycling/junking will be the next great business.
Confessions of a code addict: Mac Archives
Actually pretty funny. The QueerEye crew remakes a Windows PC.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Software ‘chum’ to help students
His favourite feature – Take Me Home, I’m Drunk – is most likely to be used after students have taken advice on the best pubs in the area. It sends a message to a local taxi firm, detailing the address where the student can be found and their home address. Other features include a buddy list that can pinpoint a friend’s exact geographical location and translation services for foreign students.
Interesting example of location aware services. Seriously, this is exactly the kind of service I would like to have now that phones are supposed to have E911 sensing built in. Maybe also a “find the nearest gas station” feature, or “where’s a public bathroom?”
bq. At best, I can only conclude that our government was a mess regarding national security. And like any large beauracracy that changes leaders every 4 to 8 years, our government’s ability to plan long term, implement and fulfill long term projects, and remain consistently focused on priorities such that national security remains always the highest priority, is simply not built into our democratic system as it exists today. Partisan politics, money interests, high priced entrance fees for lobbyists influencing policy, and polls and media spin have all taken their toll on our government’s ability to do its first and most important task, national security, with any degree of competence.
I still think that it’s hard to fault the intelligence community considering the variety of threats and rumors and other items out there every day. Is government intelligence a big bureaucracy? Yes. If it was the most efficient, leanly run machine in the world would it be perfect? No. Continue Reading »
Using a tip from at [the girlie matters] tips and tricks: lastn recently modified entries using mtsql I finally enabled the listing of my most recently updated entries. This is good, because I often go back and change or edit past entries. Now there’s a convenient drop-down box in my header with the last 5 entries I’ve edited.
I’m testing out the “(extlink)MTCodeBeautifier”:http://voisen.org/archives/projects/000239.php plugin.
bc[Java]. import java.io.* public class HelloWorld{ public static void main(String args[]){ System.out.println(“Hello World”); } } Continue Reading »
the family economy | Metafilter references an article in the Washington Monthly discussing whether or not we’re in a housing bubble right now.
bq. Truth is, in most of the country there’s no housing bubble. Perhaps the crucial ratio from which economists determine whether housing markets are out of whack is the ratio of home prices to annual income. In most of the country, it is modest, 2.4:1 in Wisconsin, 2.2:1 in Kentucky, 2.9:1 in Illinois. Only in about 20 metro areas, mostly located in eight states, does the relationship of home price to income defy logic. The bad news is that those areas contain roughly half the housing wealth of the country. In California, the price of a home stands at 8.3 times the annual family income of its occupants; in Massachusetts, the ratio is 5.9:1; in Hawaii, a stunning, 10.1:1. To some extent, there are sound and basic economic reasons for this anomaly: supply and demand. Salaries in these areas have been going up faster than in the nation as a whole. The other is supply: These metro areas are “built out,” with zoning ordinances that limit the ability of developers to add new homes. But at some point, incomes simply can’t sustain the prices. That point has now been reached. In California, a middle-class family with two earners each making $50,000 a year now owns, on average, an $830,000 home. In the late 80s, the last time these eight states saw price-to-income ratios this high, the real estate market collapsed.
Being in the process of shopping around and looking at houses, I can say that the housing market is quite a hot place to be. Properties list for weeks, or even days, and each new listing seems to sell for more than the last. Continue Reading »
