I've been using social networks for a pretty long while. But I've found myself unsubscribing to a great many feeds and websites. The culprit is people commenting just to hear themselves comment (and get retwittered), and an incredible amount of noise in the communication channel. I'm a very fast reader, and I still find myself chopping stuff that's been forwarded to me just because there's too much cruft in the messages. Yes, I miss good stuff, but I just can't consign myself to read through a few hundred postings to get one morsel of goodness.

My opinion is that people using social networks often lack a plan for what they want to accomplish:

Make it succinct and compelling.

Apply judgment about what you should send to your readers - don't just tweet the fact that a car is available in red unless it reaches the level of import that you would pickup the phone and call a colleague only to tell them this fact.

Be vicious about culling cruft from your messages.

Make certain that the vast majority of your messages are supporting your mission.

Ideas?

Max,

You've hit on some very thorny problems. First, in my experience mainline functionality is almost universally correct. The failures mos frequently occur in the margins - cases where nobody thought of that particular combination as anything that somebody would really try, and what do do about semantic mismatch in the english language. It's amazing how imprecise English is in practice.

This in turn leads to the inescapable conclusion that complete validation isn't possible.

Actually this is a common misunderstanding when reading abstracts, descriptions and claims. The claims have to be interpreted by the lexicon of the patent application and the prosecution history. Many of these applications turn on how definitions are crafted. Keep in mind that claims may be made up until the application is issued.

So, it's pretty premature to assess what this application means. But looking at the figures and definitions briefly, claims 1 actually is claiming a very specific "computer system" that stores specific data structures.

Brian,

I think that you have my 90 mile trip beat by quite a lot. My condolences.

It's funny how often I find this type of situation. In embedded programming I'm forever referring to 30 year old texts - th4 data and methids remain teh same.

Rick,

What most people don't know is that every service call by AAA is reported as an insurance claim. So that quick call to get into your locked car counts as an insurance claim - which may increase your other premiums.

There are a few other reasons that could motivate Atmel to sell:

1. they can't afford to invest to the next technology node
2. their money may be better spent developing new products, ie the marginal return on design is better for their case than the marginal return on the fab
3. their defense on the patent front for manufacturing may be waning, thus a sale to another company with a superior position could avoid expensive cross-licenses or lacking enough patents of their own, eliminate the need for very expensive one-sided licenses.

Very nice article! Having been involved for many years as a subject matter expert in patent matters, I've found that patent due diligence often skips dealing with technical issues. Specifically, in the4 software area a great many patents are relatively easy (but expensive) to challenge successfully. To do so requires a wide subject matter body of knowledge. Few people have that level of knowledge.

Max,

Nice job! Once, long ago, I worked with a class of third graders. The teacher wanted to make the concept of a billion (!) more concrete for the kids. So I suggested collecting pop tops (that should gove a clue as to how long ago this was.) The kids worked for months collecting pop tops. They got 100,000 tops together. It was a far cry from one billion. But by measuring homw much space the tops took they figured out that a billion took a whole bunch of classrooms.

I shudder to think about collecting a trillion...

Okay, so "things are moving..." Things being a generic descriptor, things obviously includes the Internet. Now we have motion involved which in turn means that the local gravitational field varies. Ah, the advantage of time in our physical world. And velocity. As far as I know the Internet is mostly on Earth, except what isn't.

So why don;lt we just bend to the simpler metric and deal with mass?