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I believe the official term is accessory dwelling unit. You'll have to check your local zoning regulations on the rules and regulations for those. Yes there are companies that specialize in building those.

A professor of mine once told me about when he was in school he studied a book written by a famous expert in the field and found a bunch of errors. So he wrote back to the author with the error and, after some back and forth correspondence, the author offered him a job after graduation. So that was how he first got his foot in the door in the field.

Some commuter rail lines in the U.S. are designed to only cater to commuters. So they may not run any train into downtown at night, or they may stop running well before the shows end at night, so there's no way to use the trains to get back home.

Midwest Developer 5 years ago

Interesting... that fur store always seemed so out of place in the North Loop as shiny new apartments and restaurants sprouted up around it.

Midwest Developer 5 years ago

Sure, a few restaurants I loved have closed, but that seems to mostly be due to covid (e.g. Bachelor's Farmer) or poor management (Butcher & the Boar). If anything restaurants have gotten even better in the last 10 years in the Twin Cities. There's of course higher-end places like Spoon and Stable, Kado no Mise, and Owamni, and also quite a few better Chinese options that have opened in Dinkytown (e.g., Lao Sze Chuan). And of course old favorites like Bar La Grassa that's still going strong.

1. People (in the US at least) overall consistently choose more land over living somewhere walkable. In a lot of places, the marginal cost of more land is near zero

Yeah this pretty much. In some other countries, it's really expensive to own a large piece of land somewhere remote, so only the Uber-rich can live in those sorts of settings.

So apparently all schools are amateur at commercialization. UF just has more experience than most.

I knew an engineering professor at a large state school with a renowned engineering program and one of his biggest complaints was how incompetent the licensing/commercialization office was at the school compared with, say, Stanford.

IBM also plays tricks to artificially boosts the number of patents it gets. For example, for a computer-implemented invention, a patent application will generally have a set of claims for the method that a computer performs to implement the invention and a set of claims for the computing device itself configured to perform the invention. What IBM likes to do is to split those two sets of claim into separate patent applications, so one application just claims the method and another application claims the computing device. So when most other companies would only get a single patent for a computer-implemented invention, IBM would get two patents. So this helps IBM maximize licensing revenue in the example where they're just adding up the number of patents.

Note that the patent bar exam tests you on knowledge of rules and regulations of the patent office and of the Patent Cooperation Treaty that many countries have signed on to. So you won't necessarily learn to draft a patent or how to read a patent just by studying materials for the patent bar exam.

It's hard to give really specific advice on this but do you have friends who work in tech who've filed patents? If so, they probably have worked with a patent attorney hired by their company to convert their invention into a patent application. Ask about their experience, whether the patent attorney properly understood their invention, whether the patent attorney was responsive, etc.

In general, as a patent attorney who's worked both in large international law firms and in a smaller firm (patent boutiques) that deals just with patent prosecution, my general advice would be to try and find a good patent boutique. In general the quality of the work will probably be about the same and the patent boutique will probably charge you less money.