In any case, I like that Obama has the potential to bring a new outlook and a new kind of leadership to the fray whereas Hillary, to me at least, represents staying with the past, (in spite of the fact that some of her policy ideas are actually attractive).

Here’s the link:
http://www.usaspending.gov/apidoc.php

I really *don’t* understand US elections.

I simply can’t understand that those are you arguments for electing an candidate president. Shouldn’t your choice be based on the political ‘message’ a candidate is bringing you? (The US is big, there must me tons of problems to be solved). Are you going to vote your president who is dressed best? I really understand US elections.

- xul-vipz, The Netherlands

Also, I think that a politician’s “open politics” approach is more important than their “open source” stand. So for example for the Pyramid of Peace we are distributing resources through people who agree to make public their telephone numbers. For a candidate, I would wonder if they would say that public funds for software should go to open source projects whether in education, military, bureaucracy. And whether they would support a constitutional ammendemnet that “Public Domain have primacy over Copyright” (you could only copyright your ammendations of a work, and you would have to keep available any public domain sources, and if you don’t then your work would become public domain.) And to forbid corporations from owning or managing creative works (as they are not able to create them – human beings do – and they are not able to apply fair use – which is a gray zone, whereas corporations only think in black and white, which is why they were happy with a judgement of $200,000 for making 24 songs available, whereas no musician or human being would ever ask for such a punishment. These are the kinds of issues that we’re debating at our workshop on March 31, 2008 in Vilnius, Lithuania “Ethical Public Domain: Debate of Questionable Practices” which is a workshop of COMMUNIA, the European Union’s thematic network for the Public Domain. http://www.ethicalpublicdomain.org I hope you might come!

It’s a proprietary system the developed. Essentially, it works like this: every subject patent cites patents it builds off of (prior art). Future patents cite the subject patent (subsequent art). By building a big web of these citations and following all the links between patents, you can figure out where the holes are.

So, for example, subject patent cites has 10 prior art patents and 10 subsequent art patents (they cite the subject patent). All subsequent art also cites another patent that the subject doesn’t cite. The question becomes, if patents in the same innovation space all cite a particular patent but one doesn’t, why?

This is a gross oversimplification and there are some other parts to it like determining what patents are similar (this involves some language analysis) but that’s the basics of it.

http://preview.tinyurl.com/2ckzwn

My solution to all problems is software I used to program for a Virginia company that maintains the largest database of patents in the world. They use the database and their own algorithms to figure out where the “holes” are in patent citations…essentially determining the quality of an individual patent by examining the innovation space surrounding it. Really cool stuff — the USPTO has more or less ignored them though, preferring to stick to their legacy systems. Anyways, the company’s called M-CAM. I worked for them 2 summers during college coding Perl.

Answer that question and who knows, maybe a presidential candidate would have a patent reform proposal that was interesting…

BTW, there is some *immediate* action on patent reform happening in the Senate. EFF has a action alert: http://action.eff.org/site/Advocacy?id=361