> For following, all rights reserved.
> :-) - what rights those are vary with administration. NZ = none. US =
> much AFAIK.

Probably not.  I don't remember signing a non-disclosure or intellectual
property agreement with you, so I believe I am free to use anything you say
to me without any obligation to you.  You also can't prove that I didn't
have some of those ideas independently before you listed them publicly,
which I did by the way.  I'm reasonably sure that your chance of
successfully getting a court to force me to give you compensation should I
develop these ideas is very slim.

>From the little I've been exposed to patent law by having been thru the
process a few times, I think this starts a 1 year clock ticking within which
anyone that wishes to file a patent must do so, else it can be rejected
easily if filed later.  I also think that many of your ideas are obvious, in
the sense that many engineers given the basic problem statement would come
up with them, although the patent office unfortunately seems unwilling to
apply the obviousness criterion much.

Fortunately, I have no current plans to develop a table saw safety device,
but find the exercise of thinking about one interesting.  Keep in mind that
ideas are cheap.  What's not cheap is the hard work to develop them into
real usable and producable products, and to effectively market and sell
those products.

One of the ideas I had I don't remember you mentioning (although I
admittedly didn't read much of your original message) is in part using the
blade's own momentum to move it out of the way.  Table saw blades always
spin so that the top of the blade is moving towards the front of the saw
(apposing the direction of feed).  Therefore a brake applied behind the
rotation axis would simultaneously slow the blade down while also converting
the blade's rotary momentum into downward translation.  That would require a
mechanism to allow the blade to move downward while the brake is applied at
the same time.  Harnessing the momentum or energy stored in the rotating
blade should require less external energy input, and probably be less
stressful on the various mechanisms.


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