1veteran

1. Software costs next to nothing to produce. Why is it so easy to have startups in this sector? What is the overhead of a software/web company? It is almost all intellectual. Ask Microsoft. Pure profit.

2. It is difficult for examiners to find prior art because there is no "official" channel for "publishing" software research that they recognise. There is much know-how that is common knowledge among developers but is never published in any paper, textbook, standard, RFC, etc. The "database" for searching all these sources may end being a web search engine. That is not ideal.

1. Drugs are very expensive to produce. Not only the research, the equipment, the staff, but compliance with the regulatory regime. There are no protections against bad software to protect users (developers operate in a wild west type atmosphere), but we have many rules about medicines. These are designed to protect patients. Can you imagine an unregulated pharma industry? Profits take precedence over safety. It would be very dangerous for patients.

2. There is a littany of journals that public chemical, biological and medical research and they can all be searched easily in combined databases, to which most all pharmaceutical patent owners subscribe. It is not too difficult for examiners to find prior art and establish publication dates.

These are my thoughts.

That's assuming the user has js enabled. What I like about this is that it's just one line. No inline script (that would be just bloat for the user with js turned off.)

PageKite looks interesting. Although when I read the list under "without PageKite, you would have to:" it seems easier than PageKite. Crazy I know. :) (The catch I think is getting that static reachable IP. Most people do not have that. But I think there are workarounds.)

Question: Why the base64 encoding instead of a simple gzipped tar file? Also why instruct people to feed untrusted stuff from the internet directly into bash via curl? That is definitely not safe as a matter of policy.

But I like the idea of PacketKite. Nicely done.

Also curious about Dalpay. Are they a good alternative to PayPal?

I love this HTML.* If only all the web could follow this simple way to convey information. CONTENT. Heck, that's what makes HN interesting. It's the lack of web developer fluff. Just text. CONTENT.

*But why the reference to tags.js? Javascript is not used.

IMDB was originally crowsourced. Started on Usenet.

Can anyone assert ownership over and derive commercial benefit from a data source that traces its origins to volunteer contributors? What would be legally required to do that?