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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • I don’t know anything about the system in the US, but I know that here in Canada they won’t take you to court instantly if you don’t fill in the census (short or long, similar to the US). Instead they’ll send you a few reminder letters first, and if that doesn’t work they’ll try to send a census working to your home to ask you the questions you missed. AFAIK, this is done to try to prevent a situation where you’re taking to court someone who perhaps can’t read (due to vision or literacy or language problems), or who has other trouble filling out the forms.

    So long as you cooperate with the census worker, you won’t see the inside of a courtroom. AFAIK they only take people to court who don’t cooperate with the census taker.



  • It’s been 25 years for me, so fortunately the patents have all expired (technically it was more than 2 because of publication in a few different countries, but it was for two inventions). However, during the time when they were all still valid I always had to tread a fine line with other employers — one the one hand, of course they’re on my resume (and LinkedIn profile). But on the other, if they knew about the contents of the inventions and someone in our organization ran afoul of them, they at least needed some plausible deniability that they didn’t know about the contents of the inventions. And for at least one of them, I always feared if they knew about it they might be tempted to try to use it, and be driven insane by the knowledge that if they did, IBM could sue them into the ground 🤣.

    I did have a pre-existing Open Source project from prior to working at IBM which I ensured was adequately documented prior to my employment. It was eventually forked and became an IBM alphaWorks project — I never got any money for it (they offered, but it was a pathetic amount for losing all rights to my own pre-existing code that took years of effort), and after leaving IBM had to go back to working on the original pre-IBM codebase.

    Overall, my experience at IBM as an inventor/innovator wasn’t great, but was better than most other organizations I’ve worked for since. Honestly, I wish we could just remove software patents altogether, making IBM’s move here moot.


  • When I was at IBM I won three such awards — one for publication, and two for patents.

    At the time at least, they had an online form you had to fill in if you thought something you had developed was potentially patentable; that would go to some small committee for analysis and a decision as to whether or not it was worth pursuing — if it was, it went off to the patent lawyers. You then spent a good deal of time describing your invention to them so they could write up all of the patent documents in a manner that would cover as many bases as possible.

    The awards weren’t huge. I don’t remember getting a monetary award for the publication — just a framed certificate. The patents paid $1500 CAN each.

    At least one of the patented inventions would have happened anyway, because it was just a solution I came up with during the course of my work. I didn’t even consider submitting it as a patentable idea until a few team members encouraged me to do so. But if there wasn’t a monetary award I would have been less likely to fill out the form for the patent in the first place. All IBM is likely going to find by removing the award is that a lot fewer people (outside IBM Research) are going to have incentive to self-declare their potentially patentable ideas.




  • Towards the beginning of the current school year, I was standing in my child’s classroom with other parents on a “meet the teacher” night, when she showed everyone her cabinet of “challenging” books — those with LGBTQ2S+ themes and books on very basic (and age appropriate) sexuality. Parents had the option to opt-out permitting their kids from reading books from that cabinet.

    I think that’s a fairly reasonable way of handling such books in the classroom — but at the time as the parent standing closest to the cabinet my first thought was to say (out loud for all the other parents to hear) “Ooh, they have Hustler for Tweens now!”.

    Sadly, better judgement took hold and I kept my mouth shut. Certain local weirdos who can’t seem to stop thinking about what other adults do with their sexy bits in private were fairly riled up at that time, and I decided it was better to keep the teacher from having to defend herself from them were any int he room with us.


  • While I still think that Hyundai engineering and design did some real magic with the IONIQ 5, I just can’t help but feel like the rest of the company is just screwing the pooch on this car. They’ve flooded the US market with models people there don’t seem to want to buy, and dealership lots often have a dozen or more waiting to be sold.

    Meanwhile, here in Canada buying one is damn near impossible. That doesn’t seem to stop them from sending out mass marketing materials and ads trying to sell them (or the IONIQ 6), mind you — I just wish they had focussed first on ensuring their biggest boosters globally were getting the cars they want, as opposed to putting lots of cars nobody seems to want on US dealership lots.

    (FWIW, my dealership told me they weren’t being allowed by Hyundai to order any 2023 IONIQ 5s. This seems to be a fairly common occurrence across all dealerships here in Canada, with just a few cars trickling in each month).