2015-2024 Form

Never, but don't be afraid.By "safe" I assume that you mean a combination of your ability to make the product free of claims of infringement, your ability to exclude other from using it and your ability to prevent others from patenting the same thing.  I also assume that you are filing in the United States.  If not, this answer may not fit.Don't worry about copyists.It is true that people are free to make copies of your product today, tomorrow and every day in the future until the patent issues.  I think a supermajority of my clients worry that as soon as their idea escapes their lips everyone will start copying it.  Yet, that virtually never happens.  Why?If you sell your product widely (assuming it's unique and people want it) then you will sell at the highest price the market is willing to pay at the quantity which corresponds to the best per unit profit.  If someone else wants to come into the market the quantity will increase and the price will fall (that is the law of demand).  The second mover will have to consider whether it is profitable to sell at this new lower price, not whether it is profitable to sell at your monopolist price.  If this new price is below its cost curve, the second mover will not enter the marketplace.  Until an economy of scale is signNowed, no one will want to enter the marketplace."But what about really big companies," most clients who have never worked for a big company ask, "can't they make my product for much less than me?"  Yes, but they won't.  Here, the problem isn't variable cost, but rather that new products are only viable if they are able to cover their share of the massive overhead large companies have.  If the contribution margin is less than 40% (it probably is) they will pass.  Inventors often confuse copying with independent inventorship.  The former requires a transmission of your invention to the copyist, which the copyist then copies.  This is like a copy machine.  Independent inventorship occurs when two people are trying to solve the same problem at the same time.  It is still rare that this occurs, but it does happen.  In my last thousand cases I have seen one instance of copying and maybe half a dozen cases of independent inventorship.  This is not something to worry about.You can't do anything about infringementA patent is a right to exclude, not a right to make and use your invention.  If a portion of your device is covered by another patent, you may be infringing that patent even though you have a patent on your own device.Let's say you  have a patent on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and that you are going to a patent infringement picnic.  You see the following:A peanut butter sandwich - no jelly no infringement.A peanut butter, jelly and ice cream sandwich - you find this impressive, and you speak to the assignee to learn that it has patent on this sandwich.  Nonetheless, it still infringes because there is peanut butter, jelly and sandwich.Filing and publishing your application with thwart a subsequent or simultaneous inventorA patent requires novelty and non-obvious over that which currently exists.  Novelty means that you cannot patent something that is available to the public.  Non-obvious prevents you from patenting something that is not available to the public but the public could figure out how to make your product given what is available and the skill in your field.Publishing your application creates a searchable prior art reference for a patent examiner to easily reject a later filed application.  Of course, the sales I advised you to make above could do the same thing, but the patent examiner may not have access to those and you might have a situation where the subsequent filer gets a patent that is not enforceable.Publication carries risk as well (most notably making life easier for copyists).  To figure out the best system to handle these risks requires a much more detailed assessment of your business.  If you PM me I can try to help you.

I live in Germany. I got an invite to the Quora partner program the day I landed in USA for a business trip. So from what I understand, irrespective of the number of views on your answers, there is some additional eligibility criteria for you to even get an email invite.If you read the terms of service, point 1 states:Eligibility. You must be located in the United States to participate in this Program. If you are a Quora employee, you are eligible to participate and earn up to a maximum of $200 USD a month. You also agree to be bound by the Platform Terms (https://www.quora.com/about/tos) as a condition of participation.Again, if you check the FAQ section:How can other people I know .participate?The program is invite-only at this time, but we intend to open it up to more people as time goes on.So my guess is that Quora is currently targeting people based out of USA, who are active on Quora, may or may not be answering questions frequently ( I have not answered questions frequently in the past year or so) and have a certain number of consistent answer views.Edit 1: Thanks to @Anita Scotch, I got to know that the Quora partner program is now available for other countries too. Copying Anuta’s comment here:If you reside in one of the Countries, The Quora Partner Program is active in, you are eligible to participate in the program.” ( I read more will be added, at some point, but here are the countries, currently eligible at this writing,) U.S., Japan, Germany, Spain, France, United Kingdom, Italy and Australia.11/14/2018Edit 2 : Here is the latest list of countries with 3 new additions eligible for the Quora Partner program:U.S., Japan, Germany, Spain, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Canada, Australia, Indonesia, India and Brazil.Thanks to Monoswita Rez for informing me about this update.

This was also addressed in another forum: How much space do directories consume? and I don’t think I can add much to the explanation, so here it is:According to the Wikipedia article about NTFS, all permissions are stored in the Master File Table. It's space can be seen apparently through the Disk Defragmenter, as shown on here.The size a MFT record occupies from both a folder or a file, is described in here:File and folder records are 1 KB each and are stored in the MFT, the attributes of which are written to the allocated space in the MFT. Besides file attributes, each file record contains information about the position of the file record in the MFT.When a file’s attributes can fit within the MFT file record for that file, they are called resident attributes. Attributes such as file name and time stamp are always resident. When the amount of information for a file does not fit in its MFT file record, some file attributes become nonresident. Nonresident attributes are allocated one or more clusters of disk space. A portion of the nonresident attribute remains in the MFT and points to the external clusters. NTFS creates the Attribute List attribute to describe the location of all attribute records. The table NTFS File Attribute Types lists the file attributes currently defined by NTFS.So, in NTFS, folders occupy at least 1 KB of space, unless they have very long argument and permission lists; at that point, the MFT record occupies an additional cluster in the partition, the size of which depends on how it was formatted, although for more than 2GB Microsoft in that post recommends 4KB clusters.As to why this could be important, a few years back I was developing a data logging feature as part of an IoT embedded system. The architecture was set up so that each calendar day would have it’s own folder (much like many digital cameras do to store pictures).Memory space was limited, so we had to calculate precisely how all of the memory was allocated including the system memory for the directories. The goal was to match the memory space with the battery life so that it was still capturing data until it just ran out of power.Without including the “overhead” for the folders / directories, the calculations would have been off.However, with 1TB of memory to work with, the overhead just becomes a rounding error.FYI - we recently published a review / buyers guide featuring the Seagate as the top pick: Best 1TB Portable External Hard Drive for under $50

First you must be truthful. Look at your assets, what do you do best, then look at what the future employer’s needs and fit the two together as best you can. On any job application or any correspondence try to master the King’s English to your very best ability. This is especially important if the new job requires communication interfacing with other people outside your company.

Are you able to build a feedback loop into a trial/demo version and offer the demo to the market to try out?

As many as you want to !