Blog Entries
No, you can’t do that with H.264 « Digital Diary of Ben Schwartz
Feb 4, 2:01On the crappy licensing of the H.264 and MPEG codecs in popular video encoding software.
Love this laughter: Sony's sublime emotion-detecting patent illustration | Offworld
2009 Aug 19, 8:06"I can conceive of no reality in which the designer behind Fig. 2 of Sony's newly patented emotion-detecting system didn't understand what he'd just created, especially as they perfectly distilled What TV Comedy Looks Like."
Apple Admits British Man Invented iPod in 1979, Uses Him to Win Patent Lawsuit - Apple - Gizmodo
2009 Jul 16, 3:28"I was up a ladder painting when I got the call from a lady with an American accent from Apple saying she was the head of legal affairs and that they wanted to acknowledge the work that I had done"
WIRED Blogs: Elsewhere
2008 Oct 29, 3:45Apparently the government routinely suppresses patents when they fear the invention may harm national security. 5002 total patents suppressed at the end of FY07 according to PTO. "...U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's record of the number of patent applications kept from public scrutiny under the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951, which allows the government to lock up a patent application on national security grounds, even if the inventor has no connection to the government."Patenting reincarnation - Knowledge Jolt with Jack
2008 Aug 28, 10:58"The patent is really bad, which is all part of the fun: Abstract: The invention consists of the process of reincarnation or rebirth resulting in immortality. Description: [0001] This invention resulted from my combining Einstein's Theory of Relativity and Newton's Second Law of Physics. [0002] Reincarnation is defined in Webster's Third New Inernational Dictionary as "rebith". Thus my invention is a process of rebirth or in other words immortality."[whatwg] Web Applications 1.0 Draft
2008 Aug 20, 9:48Apple will or will not license the canvas tag? 'Apple Computer, Inc. ("Apple") believes it has intellectual property rights ("IP Rights") relative to WHATWG's Web Applications 1.0 Working Draft, dated March 24, 2005, Section 10.1, entitled "Graphics: The bitmap canvas". At this time, Apple reserves all rights in its IP Rights and makes no representations as to Apple's willingness or unwillingness to license these IP Rights. However, in the event that the Web Applications 1.0 Working Draft, dated March 24, 2005, becomes part of a formalized draft standard at W3C or IETF, for example, Apple is prepared to address the disclosure/licensing rules of such organizations.'New office, new cubes
2008 Aug 5, 6:32
My previous window office was ripped from me when our team moved buildings but now I've got another.
The photo is poor because I didn't get the lighting correct and it depicts the office before I've moved all my crap into it. I have a lovely view of our parking lot and freeway which Jane spun as
an 'urban view'. At any rate I'm not complaining: I like knowing what its like outside and that there is an outside. The day after I found out about my office, I also got two new patent cubes. I didn't have any pictures last time so I took some
now and blacked out their text for fear of laywers.
GPS Jamming Circumvention Scheme
2008 Apr 22, 4:34Anti-anti GPS. Wait, they need a second positioning scheme to make this work? Lame. "A first signal is transmitted from a portable unit including the receiver to a component of a second positioning system that is different from the GPS. A second signal isUnited States Patent: 3716156
2007 Dec 5, 1:43Found my grandfather's patent: Donald Risney, February 13, 1973, BOAT TRANSPORTER. Abstract: A cross piece clamped and tied to the ends of a boat, rotatable about the short axis thereof, and longitudinally movable about the long axis thereof for liftingVishu and Patent Cube
2007 Nov 28, 5:07Vishu, my ex-office-mate, has left Washington and Microsoft for California and Facebook. Vishu and I shared an office for a while and I really enjoyed it. We were able to distract one another from, and help each other with work. We'd often bounce ideas off of one another, work related or otherwise. For one such idea I recently received a Microsoft patent cube, a small marble cube inscribed with my and my invention's name. There are some photos of other people's patent cubes on flickr. Vishu would have received one for this idea too since we developed the idea and wrote the document about it together, but they wait a long time to send you the cube and he was gone a few weeks before they sent it (don't worry, he got the credit and other rewards though).A week or two after I got my cube Vishu was visiting the Microsoft campus just before moving his family down with him to California. A bunch of us joined him for lunch that day and it sounds like he's enjoying his new job already. Have fun Vishu!
Flickr patents "Interestingness ranking of media objects" (United States Patent Application: 0060242139)
2006 Nov 8, 12:57Abstract Media objects, such as images or soundtracks, may be ranked according to a new class of metrics known as "interestingness." These rankings may be based at least in part on the quantity of user-entered metadata concerning the media object, the nu
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