China don't believe in patents?

Discussion in 'Economics' started by Lights, Dec 26, 2007.

  1. Innovation at work.
    Case closed.
     
    #61     Dec 29, 2007
  2. In the 90's we were led to believe that 14.4kb/sec was the maximum throughput via copper wire. Modem manufactures claimed it was not physically possible to break this ceiling throughput.

    Today you can get 1.5mb/s via copper DSL. So much for "natural law"

     
    #62     Dec 29, 2007
  3. You will not see actual production, IN YOUR LIFETIME.

     
    #63     Dec 29, 2007
  4. As the other poster already pointed out, there are no impediments to doing whatever it is you're claiming in some other country, including China.
    If someone knew how to do this in 1973, believe me someone else would have figured out some other way in the 35+ years since then, and gotten around whatever patents are out there that are still current.
    You have no argument.
     
    #64     Dec 29, 2007
  5. Anthead

    Anthead

    The earliest use of chariots was in the Sumerian civilization. This has been validated by archaeological evidence.

    There's a lot of nationalistic hyperbole on Wikipedia - don't believe everything you read.

    And by the way - did you read that list closely? It listed whiskey and brandy as Chinese inventions!
     
    #65     Dec 29, 2007
  6. Couldn't believe that one either, but it's validated! http://www.amazon.com/Genius-China-Science-Discovery-Invention/dp/product-description/1594772177


    Here's a few I may have left out..
    The Horse Collar: China. Third Century B.C.
    About the fourth century B.C., the Chinese devised a harness with a breast strap known as the trace harness, modified approximately one hundred later into the collar harness. Unlike the throat-and-girth harness used in the West, which choked a horse and reduced its efficiency (it took two horses to haul a half a ton), the collar harness allowed a single horse to haul a ton and a half. The trace harness arrived in Europe in the sixth century and made its way across Europe by the eighth century.


    The Wheelbarrow: China, First Century B.C.
    Wheelbarrows did not exist in Europe before the eleventh or twelfth century (the earliest known Western depiction is in a window at Chartres Cathedral, dated around 1220 A.D.). Descriptions of the wheelbarrow in China refer to first century B.C., and the oldest surviving picture, a frieze relief from a tomb-shrine in Szechuan province, dates from about 118 A.D.

    The Moldboard Plow: China, Third Century B.C.
    Called kuan, these ploughshares were made of malleable cast iron. They had an advanced design, with a central ridge ending in a sharp point to cut the soil and wings which sloped gently up towards the center to throw the soil off the plow and reduce friction. When brought to Holland in the 17th Century, these plows began the Agricultural Revolution.

    Paper Money: China, Ninth Century A.D.
    Its original name was 'flying money' because it was so light it could blow out of one's hand. As 'exchange certificates' used by merchants, paper money was quickly adopted by the government for forwarding tax payments. Real paper money, used as a medium of exchange and backed by deposited cash (a Chinese term for metal coins), apparently came into use in the tenth century. The first Western money was issued in Sweden in 1661. America followed in 1690, France in 1720, England in 1797, and Germany not until 1806.

    Cast Iron: China, Forth Century B.C.
    By having good refractory clays for the construction of blast furnace walls, and the discovery of how to reduce the temperature at which iron melts by using phosphorus, the Chinese were able cast iron into ornamental and functional shapes. Coal, used as a fuel, was placed around elongated crucibles containing iron ore. This expertise allowed the production of pots and pans with thin walls. With the development of annealing in the third century, ploughshares, longer swords, and even buildings were eventually made of iron. In the West, blast furnaces are known to have existed in Scandinavia by the late eighth century A.D., but cast iron was not widely available in Europe before 1380.

    The Helicopter Rotor and the Propeller: China, Forth Century A.D.
    By the fourth century A.D., a common toy in China was the helicopter top, called the 'bamboo dragonfly'. The top was an axis with a cord wound round it, and with blades sticking out from the axis and set at an angle. One pulled the cord, and the top went climbing in the air. Sir George Cayley, the father of modern aeronautics, studied the Chinese helicopter top in 1809. The helicopter top in China led to nothing but amusement and pleasure, but, fourteen hundred years later, it was to be one of the key elements in the birth of modern aeronautics in the West.

    The Decimal System: China, Fourteenth Century B.C.
    An example of how the Chinese used the decimal system may be seen in an inscription from the thirteenth century B.C., in which '547 days' is written 'Five hundred plus four decades plus seven of days'. The Chinese wrote with characters instead of an alphabet. When writing with a Western alphabet of more than nine letters, there is a temptation to go on with words like eleven. With Chinese characters, ten is ten-blank and eleven is ten-one (zero was left as a blank space: 405 is 'four blank five'), This was much easier than inventing a new character for each number (imagine having to memorize an enormous number of characters just to read the date!). Having a decimal system from the beginning was a big advantage in making mathematical advances. The first evidence of decimals in Europe is in a Spanish manuscript of 976 A.D.

    The Seismograph: China, Second Century A.D.
    China has always been plagued with earthquakes and the government wanted to know where the economy would be interrupted. A seismograph was developed by the brilliant scientist, mathematician, and inventor Chang Heng (whose works also show he envisaged the earth as a sphere with nine continents and introduced the crisscrossing grid of latitude and longitude). His invention was noted in court records of the later Han Dynasty in 132 A.D. Modern seismographs only began development in 1848.

    Matches: China, Sixth Century A.D.
    The first version of the match was invented in 577 A.D. by impoverished court ladies during a military siege. Hard pressed for tinder during the siege, they could otherwise not start fires for cooking, heating, etc. The matches consisted of little sticks of pinewood impregnated with sulfur. There is no evidence of matches in Europe before 1530.

    Circulation of the Blood: China, Second Century B.C.
    Most people believe blood circulation was discovered by William Harvey in 1628, but there are other recorded notations dating back to the writings of an Arab of Damascus, al-Nafis (died 1288). However, circulation appears discussed in full and complex form in The Yellow Emperor's Manual of Corporeal Medicine in China by the second century B.C.

    Paper: China, Second Century B.C.
    Papyrus, the inner bark of the papyrus plant, is not true paper. Paper is a sheet of sediment which results from the settling of a layer of disintegrated fibers from a watery solution onto a flat mold. Once the water is drained away, the deposited layer is removed and dried. The oldest surviving piece of paper in the world is made of hemp fibers, discovered in 1957 in a tomb near Xian, China, and dates from between the years 140 and 87 B.C. The oldest paper with writing on it, also from China, is dated to 110 A.D. and contains about two dozen characters. Paper reached India in the seventh century and West Asia in the eighth. The Arabs sold paper to Europeans until manufacture in the West in the twelfth century.

    Brandy and Whiskey: China, Seventh Century A.D.
    The tribal people of Central Asia discovered 'frozen- out wine' in their frigid climate in the third century A.D. In wine that had frozen was a remaining liquid (pure alcohol). Freezing became a test for alcohol content. Distilled wine was known in China by the seventh century. The distillation of alcohol in the West was discovered in Italy in the twelfth century.


    The Kite: China, Fifth/Fourth Century B.C.
    Two kite makers, Kungshu P'an who made kites shaped like birds which could fly for up to three days, and Mo Ti (who is said to have spent three years building a special kite) were famous in Chinese traditional stories from as early as the fifth century B.C. Kites were used in wartime as early as 1232 when kites with messages were flown over Mongol lines by the Chinese. The strings were cut and the kites landed among the Chinese prisoners, inciting them to revolt and escape. Kites fitted with hooks and bait were used for fishing, and kites were fitted with strings and whistles to make musical sounds while flying. The kite was first mentioned in Europe in a popular book of marvels and tricks in 1589.

    The rocket and multi-staged rockets: China, Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries A.D.
    Around 1150, it crossed someone's mind to attach a comet-like fireworks to a four foot bamboo stick with an arrowhead and a balancing weight behind the feathers. To make the rockets multi-staged, a secondary set of rockets was attached to the shaft, their fuses lighted as the first rockets burned out. Rockets are first mentioned in the West in connection with a battle in Italy in 1380, arriving in the wake of Marco Polo.
    Not all Chinese scientific and technological achievements lie in the remote past. Contemporary scientists include Chen Ning Yang and Tsung Dao Lee (Nobel Physics Prize, 1957), and Choh Hao Li (biochemist, world's foremost authority on the pituitary gland). Chinese physicists developed a nuclear reactor is 1958, an atomic bomb in 1964, a missile to deliver it in 1966, and put a satellite into orbit in 1970.





     
    #66     Dec 29, 2007
  7. Retired

    Retired

    Here is an extensive discussion on the origin of chess --

    http://www.ishipress.com/origin.htm
     
    #67     Dec 29, 2007
  8. You seem to not understand the difference between a natural law and a technological limitation.

    In the case of modems, in was in fact 33.8Kb/sec that was the though to be the technological peak based on analogue systems over a telephone connection. This barrier was broken by the digital 56kb/sec systems in the late nineties.

    DSL is a completely different system that effectively bypasses the communication set-up of the phone exchange allowing the faster speeds and has been around for donkeys years - nothing to do with the technological barriers of standard modems.

    In any case the barrier was not caused by a limitation of transmission over copper wires, it was simply the weakest link of the way the phone system operates. Nonetheless the maximum speed of transmitting an electrical signal over a copper wire is still limited by natural laws - basically the speed of light - which has never been broken.

    As with your conspiracy theories, your ideas have a vague allusion of truth about them, but on closer inspection are ill-conceived and poorly researched.
     
    #68     Dec 29, 2007
  9. Your statements are very misleading!

    It is common for a patent holder to obtain numerous patents on improvements and other adaptations to the original invention. However anyone is free to do this and they will have a patent granted to them for a improvement on a currently patented invention as long as they apply for it first. Although getting a patent doesn't mean you have the right to perform the invention if that would infringe earlier patents. But the original patent holder also doesn't have the right to perform your invention just because they have the original patent.

    That is one of the 'fundamental' concepts of the patent system - the description of the invention and how to perform it is published so others may learn and improve upon it.
     
    #69     Dec 29, 2007
  10. You're not serious, are you? Assuming they are not yours, you cannot infringe on existing patents, and borrow technologies for free to register new ones. Tell me, you're a tech by day and lawyer by night?

     
    #70     Dec 29, 2007