I think it is very reasonable to be up in arms about transit funding in the US until we get our costs under control. If we had Asian levels of cost-per-mile we would be rioting if we didn't have our current levels of spending.
Disagree. Parking structures are complements for transit and current levels are not adequate. I believe in getting places fast; I'm not a zealot for or against any particular modality.
I find it baffling that so few hardware makers get it. This not only is a killer feature. It also is so lightweight. It would power the system requirements dramatically.
The interesting thing is that the biggest changes to how we handle software patents came from the courts, not Congress. I suspect that eBay v. Mercexchange had a bigger impact on SCOTUS than Amazon did, but there was a ton of law review activity around the '411 patent. I must imagine this was a factor in judicial decisions around 101 eligibility.
This is a huge issue with the patent world in general. There's just so much prior art out there, and you have to be really clear about showing that it applies. This isn't a patent case, but I have a great Google Maps case involving Wi-Fi where a judge completely borked it. As for this particular patent, I'm not enough of an XML expert to say whether the court got it right here. But it is worth noting that Microsoft tried to invalidate the patent several times with USPTO and failed to do so there as well. So perhaps there's something more to the patent than meets the eye, or that is was novel at that time but not modern XML. Remember, the actual i4i patent at issue was filed in 1994, and it only matters if there was prior art from before 1994. It might have been novel at the time.
> Remember, the actual i4i patent at issue was filed in 1994, and it only matters if there was prior art from before 1994. It might have been novel at the time.
I am aware of the date of the "invention". I was programming on 8- and 16-bit computers in the 1980s and I was using this and similar kinds of formats for non-textual data, simply because it was easier to do this in assembler than writing a parser, paired with the difficulty of finding unused special bytes in binary data to separate meta-information from the data proper.
And I was also talking about non-obviousness, not novelty.
Fair enough. I haven’t seen the invalidation proceedings and am clearly less of an expert than you. So don’t know whether they got it right. Non-obviousness is, erm, non-obvious.
On the backend, all .docx files use XML. Joel is saying the root XML format was difficult to work with.
What my article is about is this: Microsoft used to allow users to write their own custom XML rules on top of Word. (This was mostly app developers using XML for macros rather than end users, and overall it was very rare.) This is the feature that was at issue with the patent.
Thanks for reading. Sorry if this was confusing! Microsoft said that i4i was a patent troll despite the court repeatedly telling Microsoft to not do that. The judge referred to Microsoft's repeated ignoring of its instructions as "persistent" etc. i4i had an operating business; it wasn't a patent troll. That operating business is niche and small, but it is real. I have updated that sentence to make it clearer. Thanks for your feedback!
Depends on one's definition. I don't think "not having a real product/service" is the defining charateristic of "patent troll". Here's what Wikipedia says.
> attempts to enforce patent rights against accused infringers far beyond the patent's actual value or contribution to the prior art
> often do not manufacture products or supply services based upon the patents in question
Looking back at it again now, I can see the intent of the original sentence where "it had an operating business" refers to i4i, but "in a manner that was..." refers to Microsoft. I didn't get the change of subject at that point.
Maybe an additional comma would have been all that I needed to figure it out: "even though it had an operating business, in a manner that was..."
Unclear which way it would go. I hope that would happen. But either way it would solve a major incentive misalignment. Even if SF stays just as progressive it will be much more functional.
I think the last several years have clearly proven that SF's polarized politics are absolutely no good at solving any problems and quite good at creating countless new ones, so it would be ridiculous for the rest of the Bay Area to follow them.
I didn’t have room to mention everything. I had to cut a lot! But Clipper is a cool example. Clipper is a nice interface for transit consolidation but making that the centerpiece is, in my opinion, very unambitious.
