> He noted that during a time of growing litigation in the smartphone industry, "innovation continues at an absolutely breakneck pace. In a system like ours in which innovation is happening faster than people can keep up, it cannot be said that the patent system is broken," he said.

Metric X is high, therefore disputed policy Y is boosting metric X.

If more people understood the inanity of this line of argument, the world would be a much better place.

The head of the USPTO isn't even willing to have an intellectually honest debate on the subject. It's pretty clear that change is not going to come from within.

Sadly, demining is not this simple or easy.

Mine rollers and mine flails like this have been tried and tested since WWI but none have proven completely effective in finding and clearing mines. This is partially because they only work well on totally flat terrain and rapidly lose effectiveness in rougher terrain where a large number of mines are typically buried.

In practice, solutions like this achieve only 50-60% effectiveness at clearing minefields, which makes them useless for civilian demining which demands a 99% clearance rate.

For that reason there's been a ton of research in this area which has resulted in better demining vehicles and interesting new techniques such as using sniffer dogs or rats to detect the explosives inside landmines. This is especially useful for the numerous plastic-shelled landmines that resist standard detection methods.

Using a layered approach with these techniques, civilian demining organisations like Mechem[0] (which pioneered the use of sniffer dogs) are now able to achieve a high enough clearance rate to make areas safe, though the work is expensive and time-consuming. If you support this sort of work, donating money to demining NGOs would be better than funding yet another ineffective mine roller.

[0]http://www.mechemdemining.com/

Hi there - I'm the one who put up the $50k to bail weev out of jail.[1] (Otherwise he would have had to sit in Essex County Jail during these ~2 years since this started.)

There were some others in line to assist (I live in Europe), but they all feared various forms of retribution/harassment from the FBI/DoJ, so it fell to me (someone with comparatively little to lose, stateside). This only serves to underscore the truly chilling effects of these sorts of governmental abuses of power.

I also host his website, http://freeweev.info, where you can make donations to his case via both Paypal and Bitcoin. (He has various restrictions placed on his use of technology while out on bail.)

Please feel free to contact me directly if you have questions related to his case. Contact info can be found in my profile.

5539 AD00 DE4C 42F3 AFE1 1575 0524 43F4 DF2A 55C2

[1] https://twitter.com/rabite/status/270668883172671489

You're getting downvoted because civilian requirements are higher than military.

If you manage to clear a field such that there is a single mine in it, it will likely become safer to march through than avoid - there are plenty of other things that can kill you, and they must be triaged in war time.

However, if you take that same field after the war is over and put a farmer on it, it's basically a matter of time until he steps on it. His only chance is that an animal blows it up, or the mine is defective.

Therefore, if it's not suitable for military clearing, it is even less suitable for civilian purposes (except for figuring out what needs to be cleared, as they say).