For more on the crimes and abuses perpetrated on innocent travelers at the hands of TSA I encourage you to visit Travel Underground.

bit.ly/TravelUndergroundTSAabuses or http://www.travelunderground.org/index.php?threads/317/

I only have to shop for food if the refrigerator is empty. The rest of the world has no idea when that will be. when it happens, what I buy will depend on idiosyncratic factors. Do I feel like cooking, do I have time to cook something fancy, is the weather good enough to grill outside, and so on. Which store I go to will depend on the time of day when I leave and what else i have to do that day. When I get to the store, my purchases will be impacted by what is available at that time and place, and what its price is. If steaks are on sale (a rare thing these days) I might buy a couple and freeze some for later. But, I won’t do that for fish or chicken. Sometimes the store will not have what I want. I might substitute, I might go to another store, or I might write it down and wait.

The knowledge of what I and 320 million other consumers will do on a given day does not exist until it actually happens. When the day is over, the data remains, but it is now history. Most of the time we operate with the assumption that tomorrow will be much like yesterday, with certain regularities like the calendar and the passage of the seasons thrown in, and it works moderately well. But, things can and do change from shocks large and small. And they will be more or less hard to accommodate.

My point of this is, I hope simple. The reason the contextual knowledge problem exists is that contexts are mutable and unpredictable, and reactions to changing contexts are likewise mutable and unpredictable, and what any one action will be in a context will depend on the context of other mutable and unpredictable actions.

Life is tough, wear a cup.

Your nit is well-picked, so to speak. I used your comment as inspiration to take the analysis in a different direction. Both suggest that the material question is whether or not patents do increase innovation. There’s not a lot of evidence to support that claim in most industries; chemicals and pharmaceuticals are the exception.

I wish my thermostats were as intelligent as your Infinity!

If I may “pick a nit”, I did not ask “how it is that patents stifle innovation rather than promote it”. Rather, I suggested that a large number of patents was an indication of innovation. An even larger number of patents would then be an indication of even greater innovation. However, I acknowledge that a patent which protects an element of innovation prevents that same element from being an innovation again. I believe that is the whole point of the exercise.

My personal experience with USPTO is that their typical approach with any new patent application is to reject all claims in the application, requiring the filer to defend each and every claim in the application. I believe this is a very lazy approach to the issue on the part of the examiner, but it is reality nonetheless.

There is always an effort on the part of the filer to obtain as broad a set of claims as can be negotiated with the examiner. The process is too expensive and time consuming to justify attempting to protect the difference between a “left-handed widget” and a “right-handed widget”, in most cases. I would also observe that many things appear to be obvious once you can see them. However, someone else had the “light bulb” moment. Using two separated but closely spaced wheels at the front of a wheelbarrow to make it more stable certainly appears obvious, after you see one built that way.

I do not own a Nest thermostat, so I am unfamiliar with all of its features. I do own earlier versions of the Carrier Infinity thermostat, which are very versatile but are not internet accessible. I understand that many younger users might well be enamored with the ability to “diddle” with their thermostats from afar, using their smart phones. Since I don’t have a smart phone, I have little interest in that feature. My thermostats learned how I expect them to perform in about 15 minutes on day one, and have been doing my bidding ever since, without any interference from me. I can tell them I will be away for “x” days and they automatically set up or back until the day I have told them I will return. They monitor the outside temperature and the inside humidity and adjust the operation of the equipment they control to achieve the desired conditions without any attention from me. I am happy with that arrangement and do not feel the need to interfere. But then, I am old; and, was not very hip when I was younger either.

I still have the scars from the successful prosecution of 22 US patent applications, most recently in 1992. All of these patents were device and system, rather than component level, patents. Unless the process has changed dramatically, Honeywell had to fight for every claim in every one of the patents they now believe are being infringed by Nest. If Nest has a patent, which I could not determine from the USPTO website, Nest had to fight for every claim in their patent as well. In a well developed field of technology, such as residential and small commercial HVAC thermostats, with multiple major manufacturer participants, it is very difficult to obtain broad claims in any patent. It can also be very difficult to build a complete device, rather than just a component, which does not infringe on technology patented by some other developer.

I have not studied the relevant Honeywell patents, so I cannot comment specifically on them.

I would not argue that there is no need to reform the patent system, though we might not agree on the nature of the reforms.

I agree with Mike that this lawsuit is yet another data point serving as evidence for the need to reform the patent system.

I have no experience in moving thermostat patent applications through the USPTO. However, I have done so in other residential and commercial appliance and equipment technologies. It is almost certain that NEST had each of the patents Honeywell believes are being infringed cited in rejections by USPTO. If Nest holds issued patents on their technology, they at least convinced the patent examiner that it was unique. However, that does not mean that elements of their produce design not covered by any patents issued to Nest do not infringe patents issued to Honeywell.

It is almost certain that Honeywell, before filing an infringement action, communicated its concerns to Nest. It is also highly likely that their were discussions regarding cross-licensing of technology, assuming that any aspect of the Nest design was both novel and commercially interesting to Honeywell.

I understand that some may be fascinated with the ability to “play with” their thermostats remotely. However, thermostat “diddling” is rarely the path to energy efficiency or energy conservation. However, there have been thermostats available in the market for decades which “learn” from 15 minutes of instruction, rather than from a much longer period of experiential learning.