Rant

Does anyone want a “honey pot” for advertising spam?  This blog collected 3,355 spam comments in the past 24 hours. Very fortunately, AKISMET (most highly recommended) caught all but 4 of them.

That’s about 5 million percent better than the spam filtering on Blogger!  … and the reason all those Blogger folks use CAPTCHAs. Blogger itself should be doing the spam filtering instead of making visitors jump through CAPTCHA hoops.  (Blogger’s parent, Google, has a most excellent spam filter as part of GMail, but can’t seem to find a way to use it on Blogger.)

Way to go AKISMET!

Meanwhile…. woodworking / woodcarving is deferring to repairing these:

Just a little nick while holding a smallish piece of Cocobolo and cutting with a small pull saw. (Don’t send sympathies! Not needed.)

My saw stopping:

• did not require a $3000 saw.
• did not require 44 granted patents and more pending.
• did not require a government agency to coerce a particular technology.
• did not require any amount of cronyism.

About three pounds of “wetware” reacted instantly, stopping the saw.

What do you call it when an inventor surrounds his invention with 83 patents? Can’t get his invention into production because of the royalties he expects? Goes into business producing the product himself? Gains favorable import tariff legislation by contributing to legislators? Has a hard time selling the too-expensive product to consumers? Then, elbows his way into the market through legislation that mandates use of his invention?

Robert Lang at Popular Woodworking Magazine has done a yeoman’s job of chronicling the entire table saw safety story. His long and complete coverage has been very neutral in tone, probably because he’s a great guy, and is also because he’s clearly interested in providing unbiased information to a broad audience of readers.

Today, Robert tells us that California is on the verge of passing a law that mandates flesh sensing technology on table saws … and the only current producer of such saws is SawStop.

I heartily welcome ANY technology that makes table saws safer. Most woodworkers know how dangerous table saws are, and far too many suffer injuries with them. The SawStop technology certainly makes table saws safer. Yet, I can not stand quietly by while aggressive use of patent law, failed attempts at rational technology adoption, and outright CRONYISM gives one company a government sanctioned monopoly.

My suggestion is to require that any such legislation also include language that requires product availability from 5 or more firms before the law can be enforced.