The patent office is suspicious...

[u]PTO Requests Model of Warp Drive Invention[/u]

The Worsley-Twist warp drive does not depend upon traditional emissions of matter to create thrust. Rather, the drive creates a change in the curvature of the space-time continuum — thus allowing travel by warping space-time. … The Examiner has now requested a working model.

looks rather like the drive from Event Horizon

Rather, the drive creates a change in the curvature of the space-time continuum

Can the Tesseract be far behind?

I think they got the idea from the time-travelling dog who came back from the year 2408 to try to get people to quite euthanizing his ancestors. No, this is real, I just saw it in the Weekly World News!

That Dennis Crouch looks a right shify so-and-so. I can just see him covered in blood, racing down a passageway after Sam Neill.

The list of other applications is great grins!

“# 2005-110500 DEVICE FOR EXCHANGING TRANSMISSION AND RECEPTION OF FUTURE INFORMATION OF MULTI-WORLD IN-BETWEEN PAST”
Multi-world? They’ll need that warp drive working before anyone’s buying this one.

I like the careful thought this shows:
“# 2005-102494 GRAVITY CONTROL TIME MACHINE UTILIZING ACCELERATED MOTION TO WHICH GENERAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY IS APPLIED”

Returning particles is all very well, thanks; but I’ll wait to invest until I can return whole people:
“# 2005-101509 ULSI COMPRISING BINARY-NOTATION-SYSTEM ELEMENT FOR RETURNING ELEMENTARY PARTICLE OR ATOM TO PAST”

“# 2004-135253 APPARATUS FOR IRRADIATING EXCESS DIMENSION WITH GRAVITATIONAL WAVE USING BRANEWORLD THEORY IN BINARY NUMBER SYSTEM, TRANSMITTING-RECEIVING AND DECODING INFORMATION THEREFROM”
I’m guessing this is the same guy as #101509. He has a certain knack with spelling. Still, if he can irradiate the excess dimension of, say, my thighs, and then return those atoms to the past–heck yeah, I’m on board.

“# 2004-080981 APPARATUS FOR RAPIDLY ROTATING SMALL-SIZED ROD WITH ACCELERATOR TO FORM SINGULAR POINT, TO GENERATE CTL, TO PLACE FUTURE INFORMATION OBJECT THEREON AND TO SEND IT TO PAST”
“Future information object.” What would that be? PowerPoint presentations? What? What?


“# 2003-198642 DEVICE FOR TRANSMITTING FUTURE INFORMATION TO PAST BY INTEGRATING LEFT ELECTRON INTO MORSE SIGNAL SYSTEM BY USING INFORMATION TRANSMITTING SPEED ZERO SECOND OF SPIN OF ELECTRON BLEW OFF RIGHT AND LEFT”
“Blew off” would seem to be the operative phrase, here.

The amazing thing to me is that someone actually paid several hundred (or even several thousand) dollars to submit each of those patent applications.

I’m not so sure this stuff is entirely worthless. Look at the patent fight that RIM is in with their Blackberry due to some guy patenting a bunch of hazy, generalized concepts many years ago. He, or rather, his family is losing each patent case, but it is taking a lot of time and money to go through the process.

I liked some of the theoretical ideas that were in Crichton’s book “Timeline”, where they talked about possibilities of computing based on electrons having up to 26 different charge states, some of which go back in time.

Someday this character may make a mint just for having submitted a goofy notion.

djm

ohhh, I read those books as a kid, they sure were fun!!

Well if you believe in the idea, and you want to sell it to a company and try to disclose that ingormation without a patent they will say “that is very interesting, we’ll have to look into that”. Heck I have seen it done with chemical manufacturing patents. One of the parameters is just a little narrowly defined, and the large company works around, patents a new process and the inventor sees nothing.

I find it too bad that the original intent of the spread of knowledge (which is one of the primary reason’s for patent law) has greatly hindered the ability to use that knowledge. Trade secrets (one of the reasons for the patent system) held knowledge back people realized no matter what they made someone else could make it better and maybe for less if they knew their process. So they hoarded knowledge. The tools that we have now make a lot of technology easy to duplicate thanks to modern equipment and analytical devices. So now we still have trade secrets for things like Coke a Cola, and patents for technology that will be useless by the time that the patent expires. Strangely I find that patents go against both true communism (sharing of knowledge) and capitalism (free competition by competitors due to price fixing.)

PS, sometimes when I see a really bad spelling error, I cannot change it back.

Maybe you need one of these:
“# 2004-080981 APPARATUS FOR RAPIDLY ROTATING SMALL-SIZED ROD WITH ACCELERATOR TO FORM SINGULAR POINT, TO GENERATE CTL, TO PLACE FUTURE INFORMATION OBJECT THEREON AND TO SEND IT TO PAST”
:wink: