patenting ideas

Just a thought - watching kids building "throw-away" houses like crazy in Sims2.

What if - design a Sims-like environment in which houses' energy consumption is an environment factor, and - design elements could be tested against climate, or other variables could be controlled for.

For example, what if, in designing the house, one could compare the energy efficiency of roofs: asphalt shingles vs cedar shake vs standing seam steel (and make running several seasons worth variations against a range of color choices - similarly for siding ...).

Perhaps we could get some schools offering video gaming design programs to work with software vendors like EA to open source (or otherwise provide certified teaching institutions with access to programming) their game engine logic.

I wanted to write this down, because I was reminded that at the same time Bb sued D2L, I was reading Accelerando by Charles Stross, and in it, one of the characters gets up each morning, patents half a dozen ideas, grants their use to a free-use patent holding organization (for which donations he gains capital in the reputation economy), and moves on with his day. (Free downloads of the book: http://www.accelerando.org/). It'd be nice if in the world of patenting ideas, there were an organization that tracked those ideas that reasonably informed practioners could anticipate and therefore prevent patent trolls from amassing idea capital.

13. Pied Beauty. Hopkins, Gerard Manley. 1918. Poems

13. Pied Beauty. Hopkins, Gerard Manley. 1918. Poems

Lucy and I just spent at least an hour, trying to see how many words we could make out of the word "Leadership" - we quit at 150 - the clincher was "pied."

635. When I have Fears that I may cease to be. John Keats. The Oxford Book of English Verse

635. When I have Fears that I may cease to be. John Keats. The Oxford Book of English Verse

(Another) Keats for the day.

History | The T-Square Project

The T-Square Project

History | The T-Square Project

Georgia Tech's Sakai project site - the history page is interesting for some of the conclusions they draw about the state of LMS.

JOLT - Journal of Online Learning and Teaching

JOLT - Journal of Online Learning and Teaching

Learning Management Systems of the Future:
A Theoretical Framework and Design

Farhad Saba

Lapsing into the future - catching up on some reading - with a JOLT. Plenty to catch up on in this June 2008 issue:
Special Issue on Next Generation Learning/Course Management Systems

Interesting and useful concluding paragraphs:

Components for Education Management System of the Future

A real lapse

Updating drivers - annoyed that the mouse wheel won't scroll in M$ Office 2007.

Looks like the registry's been corrupted. Tried out HiJackThis - pretty cool tool - suggests registry is at least fouled - system still boots, but the regitry is messed up.

Found Lenovo / IBM's Rescue and Recovery (T61) may enable restore to point-in-time ("one button recovery" - right - but ...). Waiting for a complete backup to attempt. Man, there's a lot of junk on this workstation.

38. From a Railway Carriage. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1913. A Child’s Garden of Verses and Underwoods

38. From a Railway Carriage. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1913. A Child’s Garden of Verses and Underwoods

Each a glimpse and gone forever!

Gotta like the bartleby.com