A Strange Thought Process

a man is sitting on a rooftop, looking at the stars. he is sitting alone, thinking of life, reality and other such crap people think of to make themselves feel relevant and important. he is looking at the skies, cursing for the light pollution ruining his night skies and cursing the occasional flight crossing over head for looking like a star from far away ... he starts wondering why do they have such huge lights or are they strong lights with huge divergence. then because of the immense noise disturbing his peace, he starts wondering why the hell do flights make so much of a noise, how air is compressed in the jet planes and the construction of the jet engines. 

he slowly starts to wonder how the noise from a turbo propeller engine would sound, imagining movies where they featured, how they scared the crap out of the english and apparently even the indian, making people run for a safe place every night, making people switch off their lights(if they could afford lighting in those days) and on the other end of the spectrum the millions of pilots, dog fights, how they inspire and how they are excellent examples to the perfect blend of man and machine (not like the planes these days where it's like a game that you're playing in a really awesome room and you have well only 1 life, which if you lose, will most probably die). 

wondering if there was anyone who ever thought making silencers for turbo prop airplanes, would they have had the "death from the heavens" kind of effect ?!! obviously not !!! and how do silencers work, i do know that in the early days, there were no silencers with the engines and cars making so much noise that nothing else was audible. wait!! didnt anyone patent the design of a silencer or the concept of it. that would've been an interesting event, which would've changed today's life. i read somewhere that ford and other manufacturers fought against a man who was trying to patent his design of a "four wheeled vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine, run on diesel", basically a car. so, if he had patented it, everyone who used the design after him(basically a century of manufacturers) will have to pay him loyalties for having used/copied the design. 

now comes to the more serious part of the thought process. with all this fuss about patents infringement lawsuits between samsung and apple, htc and apple, which basically include patents for using a button to lock the phone or a patent for a specific type or function of a tool bar(i've heard of worse, and these are just my exaggerations, google for apple vs samsung, and you'll see for yourselves). so, are software patents really important. are patents really important in the field of technology?? true that there are people who would like to get money out of a prototype or a design, but there is the limit on the kind of prototype and design which you want a patent for. and how dumb can the patent offices be to have issued such patents. Apple, whose products make people ogle and beg for, maybe using it's sales for research and development, but all i can see if  a few tweaks in the software and new labels, new shapes etcc but well they do look awesome at the end. so, why is it that when a competitive product is released into the field, where apple already has a huge share, instead of  tech marvel, they are going through their basements, looking for patents which the other company might've infringed and starts going on a global tour, looking for countries, courts and judges who would take up the case and then maybe able to ban the sales of the competition. and now, because of this, the opposition too instead of coming up with a newer, better product, in the fear of some new patent rising from the grave, start diverting their revenues into taking over smaller companies with good patents, buying patents off companies and sometimes buying whole divisions of companies (google buying motorola mobility) so that the next time there is a court scene, even they can sue the other side of some patent, if they do get lucky while buying the patents. 

there has been a lot of fuss about digital patents, how and why patents are used, is there need for patents and companies funding research and development in colleges, alongside promoting it in their workspace, the "open source" way of life, to open source all the results of the work, so that it can reach the relevant people easier and hassle free. 

so, after having postponed it for about a month, my thought process ended with me writing this blogpost, and having done that i take leave, for now. till next time, live long and prosper. 

PS: i couldnt find the relevant news articles which i've used as a background, i will edit the post of post comments with links to the relevant articles.