Intellectual Property, Property

Boy takes swing at US patents

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Boy takes swing at US patents

A five-year-old kid from Minnesota has patented a way of swinging on a child’s swing. The US Patent Office issued patent 6,368,227 on 9 April to Steven Olson of St Paul, Minnesota for a “method of swinging on a swing”. Olson’s father Peter is a patent attorney.

The award has generated a mixture of chuckles and frustration at an overworked patent system unable to catch absurd applications. The patent covers moving a swing side to side or in an oval pattern. Children can get bored by swinging back and forth, or by twisting the swing to make it spin, the patent says.

“A new method of swinging on a swing would therefore represent an advance of great significance and value,” it reads. Olson’s alternative is to pull on one chain at a time, so the swing moves towards the side being pulled.

Peter Olson told New Scientist: “I had told him that if he invented something he could file a patent.” His son had not seen sideways swinging because the swings at his school are closely spaced, so he asked his father to file the application.

The patent office initially rejected the application for prior art – citing two earlier patents on swings – but Peter Olson appealed, noting that neither was a method for swinging sideways. The patent was then issued.

The US swing patent does not match an Australian patent on the wheel for sheer absurdity. However, in that case, an Australian lawyer was able to sneak the wheel patent through a fast-track application system. The US patent went through the full application procedure.

Peter Olson says he was not trying to prove anything, just show his son how inventions and patents work. The Australian lawyer who received a patent on the wheel was trying to point out how poorly the system operated.

The US Patent Office says it does not comment on individual patents, leaving it unclear how such an obvious idea won approval. A spokeswoman did say that the patent office uses a legalistic definition of obviousness: “That is not necessarily the conventional definition.”

The swing patent could face reconsideration at the request of the inventor, third parties, or the patent director.

When the laughter stops, silly patents filed by individuals are less a problem than trivial ones filed by large corporations, says Gregory Aharonian, publisher of the Internet Patent News.

As an example, he cites US patent 6,329,919, a business-method patent issued in December 2001 to four IBM developers for a system that issues reservations for using the toilet on an aeroplane.

Intellectual Property, Intelligent Design, Property

Lawyer moves to patent wheel

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Lawyer moves to patent wheel

An Australian man has registered a patent for a “circular transportation facilitation device” – more commonly known as the wheel.

Melbourne patent lawyer John Keogh said he registered the patent to show flaws in an intellectual property law that came into effect in May, the Australian newspaper The Age reported.

The new law established the “innovation patent” system, which Mr Keogh said did not require sufficient oversight from the patent office.

The new innovation patent can be prepared without professional help and only requires claimants to show “innovation”, not “invention”.

Mr Keogh said it represented the government caving in to claimants who said it was too expensive to obtain a standard patent.

“The government decided to find a way to issue a patent more easily,” he said.

“The patent office would be required to issue a patent for anything. All they’re doing is putting a rubber stamp on it.”

But Commissioner of Patents Vivienne Thom said: “To obtain the patent the applicant must make a declaration that they are the inventor.

“Obtaining a patent for the wheel would require a false claim, which would certainly invalidate the patent,” she added.

Compulsion, Democracy, Freedom, Hell, Nanny State, Propaganda, Slashing Bureaucracy, Slavery, Socialism, State Rape, Tax, Totalitarianism, Tyranny

Spawn of Satan… The Forked Tongue of John Key.

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Who ever believed John Key when he promised to deliver a budget surplus by 2015?
Only Chumps!

Via spin in the media we are told John Key now says that the global meltdown in Europe threatens to ‘delay’ his promises of a Budget surplus … Yet I say *This is Bullshit* fit only to be swallowed by dung beetles!
Why?
Because we all knew there was a major meltdown in progress at the very moment he made his Bullshit claims!
This Crisis is not a new Crisis… it’s the same crisis!
*Key and the National party are a bunch of dirty Politic-ing LIARS!*
Who voted for these vermin?
While I think a Key/ English zero-increase in expenditure is much better than a Labour/Shearer Big spend up ‘stimulus’… The truth is debt will still be increasing at the current criminal rate! (400 million per week).

Wail o ye Pitiful souls!
What? You say that you were forced to choose between The greater or lesser evils?
*YE FOOLS!*
The truth is you have had Honest Libertarians on your Ballots for over a decade!
Yes! I refer to those Pesky Seers of ‘Economic Hellfire and Socialist damnation’ you spurned as ‘Nut bars’… the Fringe dwellers the Media ignored… they were right… they are still right!
The Global meltdown is a Giant testimony to the Failure of socialism and the Regulated Economy!

That Millions sit with baited breath awaiting ‘the Budget’… as if awaiting a proclamation from Almighty God Just goes to show how politically enslaved….How deceived …. How un-self reliant the entire country has become!
In reality… if we were a healthy nation of free and self reliant people, The Government Budget ought to be of minor significance… Not as it is today… a matter of life and death!
This is a testimony to the tyranny and Nannyism We have accepted.
It is a testimony to our slavish / childish / pathetic worship of Little Gods Like Key and Shearer… at whose feet we grovel!
What a shameful pathetic people we have become!
Will you continue to swallow their filthy lies rather than face the truth?
We Must stop borrowing Money to feed the Beast!
We Must slit Nannys scaly throat and Liberate Lady Liberty from her Gulag!
We must Man up!
We must Slay the Beast for our children’s sake…and Face the world as freemen!
Lest you sell your children to Satan!
How can Freedom be any worse than this?… You are slaves of fear!
When will you realise that Big Government is millstone shackled around our necks?
When will you grasp the truth that the font of prosperity is not centralised political power… but the industry of a free and enterprising self-reliant people?
Tim Wikiriwhi.

John

Rebooted

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Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.”

Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”

“How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!”

Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” (NIV)

Compulsion, Labour Party, Nanny State, Propaganda, Slashing Bureaucracy, Socialism

Salesman Selling Flies… David Shearer

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NZ Labour Leader David Shearer may not want to sell State assets, but He sells BULLSHIT by the truck load!

Go Read this:

Zero Budget means zero growth – Shearer

Here we have the Big Lie!
Ie That Big Spending Government is the source of Prosperity.
Shearer thinks he can spend your money more wisely than you can!
He thinks if he was elected PM that would give him the right to sink you deeper in debt.

Yet This bullshit is music to the Ears of those whom suck off the state tit and are today faced with mass redundancy and being kicked off welfare.
These are the Parasites whom throw fire bombs at protests against austerity.
They violently reject Reality… the reality that they have sucked the productive sector to death… And Shearer sees Power in pandering to their Lunacy.
This evil bastard is playing the same fiddle as the new French President used to get elected

This Idea of Big spending ‘stimulus’ is a Failure which ends up creating more poverty and debt not jobs and growth.
This is the lesson we ought to have learned from Barack Obama.. who also won the American Presidency by promoting Stimulus instead of Austerity.
While he did included some Tax relief they were nullified because instead of being accompanied with austerity He … ” “Unfortunately, the trillion-dollar spending plan authored by congressional Democrats is chock full of government programs and projects, most of which won’t provide immediate relief to our ailing economy,” House Republican Leader John A. Boehner (Ohio) said yesterday in his party’s response address.”

Thus It Failed.
” On this day in 2009, President Barack Obama signed the stimulus bill into law.
Three years and $825 billion later, the results are clear. Instead of producing an economic recovery, the stimulus produced only broken promises and massive debt. The stimulus failed—and by the president’s own standards at that.”

As time passes, the math on Obama’s stimulus plan gets worse — even if you accept the most optimistic analysis of how many jobs it has created.

David Shearer is counting on the wooly headed sheeple of New Zealand not to aprehend what a monumental failure Barack Obama Big spending interventions have proven to be.

The reality is We must now endure a period of pain to pay for all the overspending of decades of Shearer type socialism… The longer Austerity is postponed… the longer and greater will be the recovery.
Libertarians around the Globe have known this time of reckoning was coming. They have tireless worked to prevent it, yet to no avail. The sheeple thought they were getting a free ride… a free lunch…
Wrong Bet Morons!
Its time to pay the Piper!
If your children suffer today it is because you sold them out!
We must slay the Beast!
Kill That King Kong Socialist Gorilla on our Backs… not keep feeding the Freak!
We need to downsize Government.
We need to remove heavy Taxation.
We need to removed burdensome Regulations and compliance cost.

Easy Listening

Power

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In the beginning was the Mash-Up.

Wikipedia says

[John Oswald’s] 1975 track “Power” married frenetic Led Zeppelin guitars to the impassioned exhortations of a Southern US evangelist years before hip hop discovered the potency of the same (and related) ingredients.

Amen!

Ayn Rand, Christian Libertarianism

Was Ayn Rand a Christian? (Part 2)

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Ayn Rand said

My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists—and in a single choice: to live.

For those unfamiliar with Randspeak, Rand’s “morality, the morality of reason” is Objectivist ethics. The axiom “existence exists” is metaphysical naturalism. Rand denied the existence of the supernatural. But it is not metaphysical naturalism that defines Rand’s moral system. Naturalistic moral theories are a dime a dozen. What distinguishes Objectivist ethics from other moral systems, and that which is its very foundation stone, is the choice “to live.”

Lindsay Perigo, the southern Pope of Objectivism, explains this (here and elsewhere) very clearly.

Objectivism holds that the choice to live, while it is the basis of morality, is itself pre-moral. If one chooses to live, then morality becomes necessary; if one doesn’t, then, surely, morality has nothing to say about that? How can it have anything to say when it has not yet entered the picture?

If one chooses to live, then the book of morality opens. If one chooses to die, one can just lie down and do it … one is [then] simply irrelevant to morality and vice versa. The key to this and the fact that it keeps on coming up is that Objectivists, being intrinsicists as they usually are, cannot accept that the basis of morality is an “if”—if one chooses life. Even though Rand herself spells it out repeatedly.

Life is neither good nor bad. It simply *is*. It’s the standard of good and bad. If you choose life, then x follows.

The choice to live is pre-moral … and the basis of “moral.” The code of morality that flows from such a choice precludes murder. …

As far as I know, Perigo never does explain how the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” flows from choosing something that “is neither good nor bad,” but “simply *is*.” But it’s not, in fact, hard to explain.

Consider the following remark by impolite, badly flawed Objectivist Tom Burroughes.

Tara Smith’s focus on the issue of human flourishing … is an absolutely vital aspect of Tara Smith’s book. It is, if you will, the punchline.

When people mock the Objectivist focus on life as the reward and standard of value, they seem to ignore that “life” is not just about dodging a morgue or just dragging oneself through the day at a miserable, but not-dead, level. It is about trying to reach the maximum one can in life, in all aspects, over the course of a life. And to do that requires, inter alia, that one cultivates the virtues, and as a consequence, treats others justly and rationally. It is, in fact, a pretty demanding way to live …

Burroughes does not describe something that “simply is” “neither good nor bad.” His is a rich description of the good life, a life that requires that one cultivate certain moral virtues … whereby, one treats others justly and rationally. His is, in fact, a description of Christian living (which is, notoriously, “a pretty demanding way to live”).

Was Ayn Rand a Christian? Yes, she was. She smuggled Christian values into her concept of “life,” at the ground level. She then chose that life, one suffused with Christian virtue. Objectivist ethics is an edifice built on the sure foundation of Christian ethics.

It’s no wonder that good Objectivists and good Christians are both proponents of a broadly libertarian political ideology, such being the only basis of a just system of government.

[Cross-posted to SOLO.]

Give me Liberty, or give me Death!