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Most Innovations are Rephrasings of Past Technology

posted by cmn32480 on Saturday May 02 2015, @04:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the everything-old-is-new-again dept.

AnonTechie writes in with an article from phys.org:

Most new patents are combinations of existing ideas and pretty much always have been, even as the stream of fundamentally new core technologies has slowed, according to a new paper in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface by SFI researchers Hyejin Youn, Luis Bettencourt, Jose Lobo, and Deborah Strumsky.

Youn and colleagues reached those conclusions sifting through the records of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Dating back to 1790, the records feature an elaborate system of technology codes—a vocabulary of sorts, in which any new invention is a phrase.

The researchers found that throughout the USPTO's history, about 40 percent of patents have been refinements on existing patents that leave the "phrase" unchanged. The rest are either new words or new phrases—and the balance between those has changed. "Suppose you write a long novel. You may emphasize the introduction of new vocabularies or the introduction of new phrases," says Youn.

[Abstract]: http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v11/n1/full/nphys3222.html

[Source]: http://www.santafe.edu/news/item/youn-language-patents/

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 02 2015, @04:39AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 02 2015, @04:39AM (#177767)

    Then there's JavaScript. It's claimed to be "modern", but it's 20 years old, and it's full of obvious mistakes and outright stupidity that languages that predated by 20 years or more managed to avoid. Additionally, JavaScript supporters are actually proud, in public, when somebody uses JavaScript to create a shitty, partial reimplementation of games from the 1980s.

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 02 2015, @05:50AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 02 2015, @05:50AM (#177777)

    The moronic shitstains that call themselves "gamers" these days need their games to be inside browsers because they cannot understand how to install software.

  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday May 02 2015, @08:48PM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Saturday May 02 2015, @08:48PM (#177951) Homepage

    You're definitely on the right track.

    Remember the old saying, "Those that do not know Unix are doomed to reinvent it, poorly?" The same goes for Emacs, namely, Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0?), HTML5, and Javascript. The ability to do everything in a web browser using web apps is just taking a page out of Emacs's book. Unfortunately, they didn't take the part where every function can interoperate with every other function...

    --
    Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!