It's fundamentally a live recommendation system, and those votes make it work better than anything else (see Digg). I click on a subreddit and I get recommendations for related pages.
I'm talking about one focused idea. I dont want to do your homework for you guys but think "temporal social bookmarking" - social bookmarking and calendar app have a baby. Otherwise you're just rehashing Google Calendar and/or Digg.
I never said that TBL or Cerf were patent advocates. I am very familiar with their positions on the subject. Even though they released their work to the public with no restrictions, their work was built on top of a ton of prior art that was patented.
For example TCP IP was a derivative of prior communications protocols either developed for private for-profit enterprise or the defense industry (Xerox, Bell, IBM, etc). In nearly all cases they were patented and exploited, but not really for the public's use; TBL and the other forefathers did have access to (or even helped write) the published prior art though when they were inventing the internet.
So in this case it doesn't really matter whether they were for or against software patents; because without patented prior art they would have had nothing to build off of. The success of their invention did indeed come from their superior execution (releasing it to the public) but since then they have become more hypocritical than Steve Jobs in claiming that software patents would have been a hindrance to the internet.
You're being rather misleading. If someone solves a problem in a different way from an existing patent (avoids their claims), their new way is not covered by that patent. Patents definitively can't claim "problems"; instead, they can claim very specific solutions to problems. Any large patent portfolio or broad patent is simply a large house of cards and any good innovator can topple the house of cards by tipping one fundamental claim.
Further, the state of software patents in the U.S. and globally has been brought about not by laws, or by the establishment or the powers that be, but by inventors appealing the USPTO to get their inventions patented. Twenty years ago (the previous generation of tech nerds - the yahoo's even) these people that brought us the internet had to fight for their ability to join the technology landscape through patents.
Now, the common consensus among their descendants - at least the cheeky ones on the internet - is that that work must be destroyed for no other reason than vague opinion.
If startups / entrepreneurs who claim to be innovative would work with the patent landscape, rather than irrationally fearing and hating it, they would find that a huge patent portfolio or broad patent like those Yahoo owns are really just big houses of cards. A true innovator can topple it readily just using innovation; and then, voila, those innovations are now patentable.
I am reminded of star wars in this case: The more you tighten your grip, Admiral Tarkin, the more systems will slip through your fingers.
All that prior art will certainly bubble to the surface during the trial process. There is a cottage industry around finding it - kind of like bounty hunting. See articleonepartners.com, a service that lets researchers be rewarded for invalidating litigious patents.
I am aghast at the disastrous amount of disinformation about patents in this community. Patents are fundamentally and in the libertarian sense of the word, inalienable property rights, that have value, and that can be bought and sold.
Oh boy. This has proved true to me - but from dental surgeons, not physicians. I've gone through 3 dental surgeons who have opened up the gums above my canine teeth, excavated, charged my insurance $1000's and me $100's [the costs of successful operations], and then failed to fix the problem in my mouth. The problem is an extra tooth growing out of the root of my canine tooth, usually a simple extraction. But I'm convinced the dental surgeons are more interested in letting the tooth grow, destroying the rest of my mouth, so they can later put in more expensive dental implants. I'm highly fed up and am considering becoming a medical tourist to get the offending tooth out of my skull.
It is a plastic resin that has been blended to a precise dosage with YAG phosphor. You can buy YAG phosphor easily from wholesalers, for example, phosphortech, a Georgia company, sells a variety of colors of phosphor. However, the trick is to precisely and uniformly blend it in with the plastic resin - the reason that it takes so much time and development money to make a light bulb like this.
AFAIK the blue LEDs used in these remote phosphor applications is 550 nm "royal blue" monochromatic chip; you can buy these chips on their own, and they are some of the highest energy output chips available on the market.
Philips updates the technology in the Rebel LEDs several times a year. In fact, they have on several occasions demonstrated record-breaking output in this form factor up until earlier this year.
The reason that flashlights are updated so much more frequently than light bulbs is that flashlights don't require any consumer safety ratings. Where a company can release a battery-powered flashlight with no safety testing, a light bulb running on line voltage has to be brought through a rigorous UL, CSA and FCC standards compliance testing.
It's definitely not user serviceable. Indeed, the SMPS circuitry at the base of the bulb is going to fail before the LEDs do, and that stuff is all encapsulated in epoxy.
They aren't blue at all, they are 2700K - and this is a big part of the reason they are 57.8 lm/w. The remote phosphor, while creating a very uniform photometric distribution, reduces the overall light output by filtering the very monochromatic blue light into warm white light.