What are your reasons for running CyanogenMod on your Sensation?
Also, what battery life are you getting?
I'm undecided on my view about patents since I'm currently working in two areas.
One dedicated to making stuff for filing patents and the other purely for publication.
I much prefer the latter since I don't think the former will benefit me in terms of the patent(s) being licensed and making me £££, if it does then great but I don't enjoy it as much. I like doing research and having the chance to publish and let the world know about it, even if it isn't really of much interest to most of the scientific community, but that's the case with most research areas.
Aye, software/tech patents have gone too far in terms of the vagueness and how generic they are. What I've experienced so far in the patent world is a case of claiming the world and hoping the patent office don't cut too much of the ridiculous stuff out.
Some of the things claimed in the things I've been involved with really are just ideas/possibilities, and it will only be a case of proving these things /if/ the patent office cares enough or if there is a challenge on filing. Otherwise these things stand no matter how vague they are. It's something I've had to accept with patent work, so so bloody vague and claiming everything.
I didn't use Sense on my Desire (Launcher Pro Plus) so maybe I should try it.
I was using a Sense 3.5 ROM (InsertCoin) but had issues, I installed it without realising Sense 3.5 wasn't actually released on the Sensation yet. Gone to a 3.0 ROM and don't like it anywhere near as much as 3.5 but it's far more stable, so hopefully it does come out on the Sensation soon.
To be honest I'm not totally sure how it works in terms of accessing the patent info, procedures etc. Though I'm fairly sure it costs to look at a patent even if you don't want to license the procedure which is a bit shit.
You only tend to be able to find out what the patent is for in terms of the end product, not how they got there which is obviously the important bit and more often than not the bit which is actually patented. Though you can patent composition of matter as well as method etc
I think there is more of a trend within Universities to go down the patent route with new discoveries/developments rather than open publication, whereas in the past that was more of an industry/business thing to do. No surprise really due to the lack of funding these days so if licensing patents out is a way to make the University money it makes sense. Personally it's hard to gauge which is better.
Patenting does, without a doubt, restrict scientific development.
There's been a number of patents that have been filed for genuinely useful/revolutionary products, one being carbon nanotubes, where the patent owners were charging far too much to license the patent and were only licensing to certain (and not many) companies so no advances were made in the area until the patent expired after about 10 years and the product became available for anyone to do anything with.
Coca-Cola has never been patented as they'd have to give up the recipe if they did.
Same for Aero (although in that case it's the method for making the bubbles).
EDIT: That was meant to be to ALL :(