Well, regardless of the results, I've had a lot of fun with the entire adventure. I've seen our offering come together from a few whiteboard scribbles to a functioning site which I use daily.
I've learned a lot in the process, too, and I'm grateful to have been introduced to a lot of amazing people throughout the process. I know the skills I've picked up along the way are going to help me regardless of acceptance, so the opportunity to participate is the icing on an already delicious cake.
I hope everyone else has had a similar positive experience. Hopefully I'll see many of you in California over the summer!
While I think this is a good approach, since the service's main drawbacks involve cosmetic damage, it makes sense to launch using a payment model which favors lower-end cars. Once the damage issues are adequately addressed in practice Tier 2, or an equivalent, might become more attractive.
Trends in property law and home ownership in urban areas seem to indicate that as rules and safeguards are developed for sharing more effectively, the rate of sharing increases dramatically.
Condominiums, for instance, seem like a crazy type of building if your system of land ownership is feudal, but they're a practical necessity if property value skyrockets and more population housing is needed in a dense area.
One of the main shifts in social structure occurred around the 1890s to 1920s, and was largely predicated on the difficulty associated with sharing issues in urban life, and the lack of rules to mediate that type of space sharing. Debates at the time about how to accommodate these issues were rather fierce, but mostly forgotten now. Our current laws regarding nuisance and abuse of rights are both hacks of the property system to make urban life work. Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation is a fantastic book which recounts the shift, if anyone is interested.
I'm interested in seeing what types of norms and rules would need to exist in order to fulfill the infrastructure requirement that you mention. Additionally, I wonder if certain areas of the world are already normatively primed for sharing, and whether or not they could become springboards for a more global shift.
Patent trolls are largely an american problem because America is one of the only jurisdictions that doesn't award legal costs to the successful party. Additionally, most of the 'deep pockets' are found in america, and since English is an international lingua-franca, its easier for foreign litigants to come and participate in litigation here, than it is to litigate elsewhere.
In general, Canadian patents treat software as any other invention; if it falls within the definition of an invention, and you can show utility, novelty and non-obviousness, you can acquire protection. The requirement for attachment to a physical process is trivial to circumvent for an experienced patent agent.
Obviousness is normally considered one of the big issues in software patents. Sanofi is the leading case on determining obviousness. Its got a succinct 4 point test that people like to gravitate towards centered on how to apply the 'obvious to try' standard, but the case also states that obvious to try isn't the only acceptable standard and that the determination should be industry specific.
Its against many large players' interests to bring litigation in this type of climate because of fear that courts will find that the software industry has a higher bar than most industries where satisfying obviousness is concerned.
N.B. one of the most common defenses to being charged with infringement is to show that the patent is invalid, so enforcement proceedings are risky.
Yes, but if the algorithm is a trade secret and you're licensing it out with terms of use that aren't favorable to you, you may determine that its in your best interest to buy the company rather than get sued for breach of the licensing contract depending on how much cash you're anticipating to lose through that litigation.
I get that there are different levels of quality regardless of the type of code. I was more interested in the security effects of hiding code after the open source community has had a chance to deal with vulnerabilities. None of the examples you gave were specific to code which has transitioned between open to closed.
What I've gotten from your answer so far is that it isn't an effect which is general, and it'll depend on the project in question. Am I on the mark?
Just curious, but wouldn't this indicate that open source code which allow iterators to close off their improvements would produce less vulnerable code overall?
The issue with this stance is that your 'opponent' can easily shift assets and IP ownership so as to absorb the loss via litigation in a company which has non-transferable licenses, but maintain ownership over the patents in a seperate corp, essentially shielding them from any substantial loss that litigation would bring. Even if they lose, they just need to open another corp and re-license.
The problem? That means that your mega-corp would be at a net-loss for every patent suit filed. What's more, it would create the issue wherein parties who couldn't adhere to the standards of whatever mega-entity are exiled from the industry.
The only corps that can be sued effectively are those with cash. This is why people are willing to innovate in patented areas; if they succeed, they're rich and can afford to pay for litigation. If they lose, they won't get sued anyways.
Additionally, how exactly do you sue an NPE? They aren't infringing a patent. That's the entire idea behind being an NPE in the first place; you're not dissuaded by counter-patent litigation because you don't practice. NPEs were a reaction to the exact type of litigation broadside that you're talking about, specifically that patent-rich corps (Apple, Google, Microsoft and most of the companies in the telecom industry, for instance are a notable subset) could amass a patent portfolio so large that any encroachment you made into their industry would saddle you with massive search and negotiation costs in order for you to pay licensing fees, or open yourself up to being demolished in court the moment they needed you out of the market.
Non-practicing entities aren't really the issue. Most companies cannot, and do not, have the skills and assets to effectively enforce their rights. If you're a developer, you're better at focusing on developing. Accordingly it makes sense to allow people specialized in IPR enforcement to do that work for you. The idea that 'anything under the sun' can be captured under a method patent is far more sinister, and it accounts for the massive inflation in patents. The fact that protections over electronics are receiving overlapping IPRs from copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret is a far larger issue. It shouldn't be an issue of 'who' is asserting the patent rights, but rather 'what' patent rights they can assert. You bring this up in one of your replies, and I think your follow-up argumentation is a lot closer to a solution than this initial post.
Circuit topography's protection in the law makes a lot more sense, as its tailored to the industry it seeks to regulate. Patent, however, is a circus with too many clowns under the big-top.
Your tips certainly did line up with our process. Most of our resources were drawn from friends and colleagues who are working in the venture capital firm. In retrospect, those tips were more industry specific and funding-level specific than we had expected.
Oh well! We've learned a lot regardless of the outcome. I've tried the above tool and its helped cut down our pitch duration by nearly half. Thanks!
Well, you're probably right. There's a conflict of interest with respect to developing an employee's career from the perspective of the employee and the firm. Both want what's best for themselves.
One of the big concepts in negotiation theory, has been the rise of interest harmonization, wherein parties attempt to figure out how to make their dealings with others create shared interests. If successful these efforts might make career development efforts live up to their name.
Determining the theoretical 'worth' of a programmer is difficult because demand for programmers is typically tied up with a firm determining how much value they can get from a particular hire. Where information regarding the value of a skill is difficult to quantify due to the largely tacit nature of the skill, valuation is difficult.
It is, however, possible to examine value by examining the differences in demand. If a firm compares their programming staff to a theoretical programmer, then determine what they would be willing to pay for wrt some specific added value that they would get at a particular level of execution, they can effectively price talent.
The take home point is that your first step to pricing is by way of comparing delivered value. The interesting part here is that programmers will likely discover that their skillsets are highly asymmetric wrt value delivery.
My question is how do we measure delivered value? Seems the push for quantifying contributions (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5462622) might be related to the difficulty in value calculation.
Our team is in the same boat and I think you're entirely right regarding how beneficial the application process has been.
The concision required of some of the questions was cleansing: Even if I couldn't hit 120, I know I took a scalpel to the ideas we were tossing around in order to pull out those few nuggets of gold.
Best of luck, Adrian. Maybe we'll meet over the summer!
Assume for a moment that organizations are information technologies. If that's the case, then processing units are the firm's humans, plus whatever mechanized information systems they have.
Now, unlike mechanical systems, human components of this larger IT network are far less modular. Certain positions require decades of experience and knowledge in order to perform optimally. You can't merely buy a person off the rack to slot into your organization if you have particular needs for their position.
From the perspective of an organization, then, in order to ensure continuity of capacity of a system, niche capacities need to be actively cultivated. If your position as X manager is part of their VP of X pipeline, then the organization's ability to selectively pick people who would be best suited for grooming into the VP of X position could be vital to their staffing strategy.
That said, this assumes a certain approach to developing capacity within firms (one, however, that is excessively common), which itself is a strategy choice mediated by a number of factors, including the firm's attractiveness to hires from the outside. If you're Google, for instance, you likely have the ability to pull the capacity you need from the market if its a generalized asset.
I've learned a lot in the process, too, and I'm grateful to have been introduced to a lot of amazing people throughout the process. I know the skills I've picked up along the way are going to help me regardless of acceptance, so the opportunity to participate is the icing on an already delicious cake.
I hope everyone else has had a similar positive experience. Hopefully I'll see many of you in California over the summer!