NASA To Auction Automated Code Generation Patents 134
coondoggie writes "NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center said it is set to auction an exclusive license to five patents it holds for automated software development on November 11, 2010. NASA said the technology was originally developed to handle coding of control code for spacecraft swarms, but it is applicable to any commercial application where rule-based systems development is used."
Re:i'm sorry... (Score:4, Informative)
Here's a hint, unless you make $100 million a year or so, you are.
This is what happens when you let talking heads let you confuse tax percentage rates with actual tax dollars paid.
Fact is that the top earners of the country pay the vast majority of all income tax dollars I thought I did a post last week where I showed the math and sourced appropriate irs.gov docs, but I can't find it.
The gist: The numbers showed that the top 1% of earners paid something like 30% of ALL tax dollars received (as of 2008 - when things were supposed to be best for "the rich" due to Bush); the top 5% paid over 50%; and the top 10% paid something like 70%.
In other words, those in the remaining 90% of income earners pay ~30% of all tax dollars. And those who fall under to top 50% of income earners pay something like 3% of all tax dollars.
Those numbers aren't as much fun to report as "Bill passed to extend tax breaks for THE RICH", but that's our media for you.
Here's a hint, unless you make $100 million a year or so, you are.
A little homework... (Score:3, Informative)
It seemed weird that the US government should be in the patent game, so I did a little homework.
This document [uspto.gov] shows the number of patents held by US government agencies. The total is over 30,000 -- as usual, Slashdot is posting old news! The majority are held by the armed forces; DOE and NASA hold several thousand each.
At first, this seems appalling: why should the US gubmint, which we're paying taxes to support, make patents to keep us from using the products of its research? But think about it from a different perspective: if US agencies' inventions went into the public domain, than anyone who wanted could pick them up for free and potentially make billions off them, without doing a bit of R&D on their own. Isn't it more fair to ask the people who want to use government inventions for profit to pony up some cash? It's not like that money's going to pay for the NASA chief's next yacht: it's going right back into more research at NASA Goddard. Net result: more inventions!
It's really the same idea as patents held by universities. Patentable inventions are not their primary focus, but they do naturally arise from the universities' activities. If they *don't* patent them, the ideas get snapped for free by some undeserving entrepreneur who's spawn camping [wikipedia.org] the university. If they do patent them, the license profits go to improving teaching and research at the university.
Re:i'm sorry... (Score:1, Informative)
The contractor, although it could be transferred back to the government and then put up for sale (pretty sure that's not what happened here--patents are a whole different issue). In many cases work produced by government is owned by the contractor, even though it was paid for by taxpayer dollars. The government however gets a perpetual right to use it without paying royalties.
Source: I'm a contractor at NASA.
Re:i'm sorry... (Score:3, Informative)
Did you even read that page? It describes how the top 5% of income earners are shouldering 59% of the federal tax burden. That fact doesn't directly have anything to do with rates.
Since the top 5% own 95% of the wealth in this country, that hardly seems fair.
Re:i'm sorry... (Score:4, Informative)
In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2007, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one's home), the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.7%. Table 1 and Figure 1 present further details drawn from the careful work of economist Edward N. Wolff at New York University (2010).