"Irish patents, in common with most jurisdictions, have a maximum life span of twenty years."
You have to pay every from the third year, every year you want to keep your patent too, this encourages the release of patents into the public domain if the holder does not have a use for them.
Copyright on the other hand lasts for 70 years from the death of the author. Copyright's purpose is identical to patents, except it is for ideas, not things. I have never heard or seen one good argument for why copyright lasts so much longer.
As an aside, in my opinion the length of copyright is a reason for piracy. If copyright was 20 years, with a yearly fee similar to patents, an end-user could see a point in their lifetime when most ideas would become free. But as it stands, the copyright on this blog entry will most likely outlive anybody who reads it. I firmly believe this would change people's perspective on copyright infringement, it would be harder to internalise the moral question since time will allow the content to be free, as it stands that is not the case on a timescale of use to anyone.
The new Leap Card for travel on public transport in Ireland came out a few weeks back and I requested one to replace my Luas smart card pretty much right away. I've noticed a few quirks that I find a little strange.
A while back I wrote an explanation of Dijkstra's algorithm, this year I have noticed something rather amusing: an increase in people visiting that page and also asking for code and/or more detailed explanations on it - I am making the assumption this is college students who want me to write their assignments for them. The answer is no! I'm sure there is code out there for it, and I'm confident that if you follow my explanation step-by-step you will be able to put together some pseudo-code that you can then convert into the language of your choice.
We had our June Dublin GTUG on Tuesday last (28th June) and by all accounts it was a fantastic success.
We had Ilmari Heikkenen over from Google's London offices to talk about HTML5 and specifically the visual elements that are new to HTML5 and how you can use them to do some cool in-browser modifications to images.
We also had Neil Turner, a freelance web dev, talk about some of the tools he uses when developing for HTML5, I have a list of what I saw:
Some of these frameworks have built in tools to help mitigate cross-browser issues, particularly with regard to Internet Explorer, which was mentioned several times, not every time was in a bad way.
City of a Thousand Welcomes is a Dublin focussed website that allows visitors to our great city arrange to meet a Dublin ambassador. You book your slot for when you are visiting and then when you arrive you pop into the Little Museum of Dublin to meet your ambassador.
Groupon, love it or hate it, it's massive and you've heard of it. That's the first sign of their success, you know what they do and who they are. Much has been written about Groupon in the last few weeks, most of it bad, yes they don't get a lot of repeat business from either businesses or customers, yes they are spending huge amounts of money acquiring new customers, and yes they are spending huge sums of money on a giant staff acquiring new businesses for deals. All of this points to disaster for Groupon, but I can't help but wonder... something that I heard from Google a while back when talking about YouTube: "Google bets on the future".
Those who recall, when YouTube was purchased by Google there was a consensus it would never make money, it would only cost more as the business grew and it was going to end in disaster. Google made the purchase betting that technology would make the business costs decrease, that economies of scale would kick in also decreasing the costs, and they were right. By all accounts YouTube is profitable these days.
This leads me to wonder if Groupon isn't making a similar bet on the future. If they can become the main player in the daily deal space, and by 'main player' I mean practically the only player, they stand a chance. Instead of saying "I'm going to buy a daily deal" you say "I'm going to Groupon it", there is the possibility they will succeed. In that case the costs of acquiring new businesses goes down and the cost of acquiring new subscribers goes down, and suddenly they become profitable.
Personally I would rather they perish, in my experience they seem to suffer memory lapses about me unsubscribing which immediately makes them spam in my book.
