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Quid Pro Quo With The Gods

Discussion in 'Cheeniya's Senile Ramblings' started by Cheeniya, May 20, 2017.

  1. Cheeniya

    Cheeniya Super Moderator Staff Member IL Hall of Fame

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    @Novalis
    1354 Guinnessed
    Can this ever be compared with 'gruntled'? That man was a genius!
    Alexander Pope's quote reminds me of this limerick:
    "God's plan made a hopeful beginning
    But man spoiled his chances by sinning.
    We trust that the story
    Will end in God's glory;
    But at present the other side's winning."
     
  2. Amulet

    Amulet IL Hall of Fame

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    Plurality is a word that is in lots of patents. i.e., posited willy-nilly, all over everywhere in "specifications" paragraphs in the claims section. Because the lawyer (or the legal aide person who copy-pasted the sentence from some other patent) thought so.
    It means "two or more..", and "more" is a reasonable number of the whatever the word "plurality" was used to describe.

    I liked that donkey-lie detector story. Quite clever. What we need now is a passive-aggressive analyser for text. Google is supposedly using something called "sentiment analyser", but it is not something one can buy and put on a personal computer, and analyze text. do you know of any ?
     
  3. Amulet

    Amulet IL Hall of Fame

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    In this modern world, most patents are assigned to the corporations (La sociedad anónima (abreviatura: S. A. in latin countries) where the employees working in their R&D facilities arrive at that invention, and the company decides to patent that whatever....a thing (widget/composition of matter), a process or even a design.

    There is a filing fee, and an annual subscription to keep it valid for the usual length of the patent. This is the critical point where patenting something is worth or not decision is made by the individual or the company. Scaling, and getting to market, have buyers adopt the thingummy-whatever in sufficient volume so as to recover the cost that had been sunk would all have to be forecast before people put down the legal fees to have those agents go to the patent office and file the darn thing. Recently @Cheeniya wondered why a new "composition of matter" patent couldn't have been applied by Jayasala42 for her innovation of grinding-sieving, adding perfumes, designing bottle/label and launching a Talcum Powder product. Jayasala42's enterprise couldn't afford a patent filing -- even in an inexpensive legal jurisdiction like India. Holding a patent only gives the holder the right to sue someone for infringing -- i.e., unless additional legal costs are feasible, holding a patent would simply be the threat of a paper tiger to anyone who wants to infringe. It is not the government's business to go after patent infringers. When Apple fought Samsung about that curved bezel design, because they had a patent on that curvature, they, both parties, had to pay court costs as well as legal fees. Eventually the winner breaks even or wins a few extra shekels. Government gets its agents' commission in the middle.

    Access to employment with R&D, legal backing, business strategy, etc.. are all required. Women are slowly catching up. But all in all, it had been a man's world, and in many ways, it still is. That is why there aren't many girl inventors, except those that work for big MNC's with deep pockets to have a stable of legal attack dogs in their employ.

    Some large corporations are so cash flush, they could file all manner of patents (the so called picket-fence patents) as defensive measures to protect their crown jewel patents' variations (or pluralities for @Novalis), so that even when the C.J.'s validity runs out after a number of years, and it becomes a public domain art, nobody can make a copy all that easily, because they'd end up infringing one of the picket fence defensive patents, and get sued big time by powerful legal teams.

    Sometimes corporations would also file patents for a lark. A laugh. Because some joker in the R&D wrote up a grand invention, and a Dilbertesque middle manager took it upon himself to promote that for legal funding to get it converted into file'able format. And it will go all the way and get issued. And the company would start to pay annual subscriptions (to the patent office of the country of legal jurisdiction) to keep it valid. Everybody (who is in the know) would get a laugh. Expensive nerd humor. Girls are very much part of this drama too.
     
    Last edited: Jun 12, 2019
  4. Cheeniya

    Cheeniya Super Moderator Staff Member IL Hall of Fame

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    1355 Learning through questioning
    That takes us back to the days of yore. Socrates was best known for this method of learning. Learning in Vedic era also followed the question-answer system. A classic example of Hinduism in the method of learning could be related to Adi Sankara and Mandana Misra. Their debate was reported to have gone beyond 6 months in front of thousands of scholars.
     
  5. Cheeniya

    Cheeniya Super Moderator Staff Member IL Hall of Fame

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    1356 What a whole new body!
    Our earth is reported to be 4.5 billion years old. Evidence for fossilized microorganisms considered to be 3,770 million to 4,280 million years old have been found. The first human existence is reported to be 66 million years ago. The story of modern civilization when man found that the earth was globular and not a flat disk is just about three thousand years back. What man has done in the last two decades is a lot more than the millions of years of his existence. How? What is so special about the last two decades? Why did not the homosapien discover the computer? If a computer can take a man far away from our planet and leave him spinning in psychadelic configuration in 2001, what will it do in the Space Odyssey of 3001?
     
  6. Cheeniya

    Cheeniya Super Moderator Staff Member IL Hall of Fame

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    1357 Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
    Nobody has made me run to Wikipedia as mush as you do these days. And so I went there in search of further fodder and it was indeed a rewarding experience. I learn that it is the debut novel of Gail Honeyman and it has brought him instant recognition. He wrote it in 2017 and became the winner of the 2017 Costa Debut Novel Award. The following review in the Guardian touched my heart too:
    "a narrative full of quiet warmth and deep and unspoken sadness" with a "wonderful, joyful" ultimate message"
     
  7. Cheeniya

    Cheeniya Super Moderator Staff Member IL Hall of Fame

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    1360 Saint Simeon Stylites
    You know who Saint Simeon Stylites reminded me of? Diogenes the cynic! We have spoken we have spoken enough about him in the past. Among the Greek Philosophers, he is my numero uno. It's a pity that we haven't done anything worthwhile to justify our role as a cynical nonsense!
    Reminds me of the song:
    'Number fifty-four
    The house with the bamboo door
    Bamboo roof and bamboo walls
    They've even got a bamboo floor
    You must get to know Soho Joe
    He runs an Expresso
    Called the house of bamboo
    It's a made of sticks
    Sticks and bricks
    But you can get your kicks
    In the house of bamboo'
     
  8. Cheeniya

    Cheeniya Super Moderator Staff Member IL Hall of Fame

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    1365 A Million Words and Counting
    I went after this book through the Net. I find that it has received a maximum rating of 3 out of 5. Why? (Not asking this question to rhyme with 5). From the selection that you have given, I guess that it must be a good read. The collection you had given was interesting and I loved the black coffee one the best.
     
  9. Cheeniya

    Cheeniya Super Moderator Staff Member IL Hall of Fame

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    1366 Talking of Goals
    That's even better than what Dr. Abdul Kalam was trying to drill into our heads.
    I had a friend in my school days. He was a massive guy with rippling muscles. He would hit a coconut in the tree with a stone and make it fall. I complimented him for the accuracy of his aim which reminded me of that of Arjuna! He laughed and said that if he wanted to bring down a coconut, he would always aim at the sky!
     
  10. Cheeniya

    Cheeniya Super Moderator Staff Member IL Hall of Fame

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    1367 The quirky kings
    That reminds of Yul Brynner. acting as King Mongkut of Siam with Deborah Kerr in the movie The King and I (1956) Deborah Kerr is a governess and English tutor to the wives and many children of the stubborn King Mongkut. An unforgettable King indeed!
    How nostalgic! This reminds me of the 1953 song Istanbul (not Constantinople) by the Four Lads
     

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