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Microsoft Seeks Do-Let-The-Bed-Bugs-Bite Patent
theodp writes "In its just-published patent application for Adapting Parasites to Combat Disease, Microsoft lays out plans to unleash 'altered parasitic organisms' on humans, including mosquitoes, fleas, ticks, bed bugs, leeches, pinworms, tapeworms, hookworms, heart worms, roundworms, lice (head, body, and pubic), and the like. 'Irradiated mosquitoes can be used to deliver damaged Plasmodium to individuals,' explains Microsoft. 'Instead of contracting malaria, an individual receiving the damaged Plasmodium develops an immune response that renders the individual resistant to contracting malaria.' Don't worry about runaway breeding, advises Microsoft — 'a termination feature [that] can include programmed death' makes this impossible. As David Spade might say, I liked this movie the first time I saw it — when it was called Jurassic Park."
Organizations like SBRI are doing really interesting work on genetically attenuated malaria vaccines, and the research isn't as scary as TFS makes it out to be (e.g. comparing it to Jurassic Park). (Here's a detailed slideshow if you want to know the specifics.) The "runaway breeding" the article alludes to is ridiculous — we already have "runaway breeding" of anopheles mosquitoes, and as a result malaria kills a million or more persons per year, mostly in poor countries. The main issue with malaria vaccines is not "runaway breeding," but that eventually mutations may render the vaccine ineffective.
My main question here is: why is Microsoft filing for these patents? They have been involved in biomedics, afaik, only on the software and infomatics side. Bill Gates, through his foundation, is generously giving grants to many organizations doing promising research. I didn't realize that Microsoft was directly involved in the research side of things. Did they buy assignment rights to this research (and potential patent)? Develop it themselves? That, I think, is the bigger story for me — not that this patent has been filed for, but that it's MSFT that is the assignee.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
April 1st already?
I didn't know they had a germ warfare division...
Surely history must have some prior art that preceeds this stuff???
There was an unknown error in the submission.
'a termination feature [that] can include programmed death'
I'm confident Microsoft can get that part right, it's their core competency.
As David Spade might say, I liked this movie the first time I saw it — when it was called Jurassic Park."
To be fair, though, so long as they stay away from frog DNA they should be fine.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This is not the type of thing to be fooling with at this stage in technology. Until we understand things better it wont be safe to do this. Nature has a way of surviving in unusual and surprising ways. Besides Microsoft, seriously even if you arent a mac user you would not put something in your body from this company with a history of poor quality and security problems in its software not to mention an emphasis on making money rather than making a quality product that makes money because it is good they make a mediocre one and people use it because they don't know any better or think they have no choice. Frankly even if Apple were to do this type of thing (which they wont) i would not mess with it anyway because they are a computer and software company. IBM Nanomachines? There is something dangerous from a company that actually specializes in such things is on the cutting edge of development and knows what the hell they are doing.
411 Y0UR 8453 4R3 8310NG 70 U5!! -NSA
'Instead of contracting malaria, an individual receiving the damaged Plasmodium develops an immune response that renders the individual resistant to contracting malaria.
Of course when I'm sitting in the jungle deep in Africa I will know the mosquito "biting" me right now is the good guy... probably because it has a flashlight attached or so.
Best idea ever. heh.
There are fewer illiterates than people who can't read.
If it's from Microsoft, I'll wait for version 3. Then I'll keep waiting until Service Pack 1 is released.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
So, you call down to the manager to complain about the bedbugs. The manager says, "They're not bugs, they're features".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Seriously, hasn't Microsoft unleashed enough bugs into the world, in places we really, really don't want them?
This has to be a mistake. This is so far out of Microsoft's area that it can only be a case of the patent office putting down the wrong name as assignee.
MSFT morphing into a biotech for future growth?
Let's face it, computing is a mature stagnant industry - especially the desktop market(Facebook is a marketing company of old existing tech to the masses - hardly innovation or real growth). And when you see ex-Silicon Valley billionaires saying that biotech is going to be the next big thing (we've only just scratch the surface of what's going to happen), I can see why MS wants to go there.
Office and Windows day's won't be cash cows forever.
...that a proposed Microsoft project bases its success on the coordinated operation of a collection of bugs.
My main question here is: why is Microsoft filing for these patents?
They think they're Google?
My main question here is: why is Microsoft filing for these patents? They have been involved in biomedics, afaik, only on the software and infomatics side.
Remember how you can lose your farm because some Monsanto-patented seed blows onto your property? Just wait until you lose your right to sue a pharmaceutical company because "somehow" their patented pharmaceuticals have left traces in your system. You don't get immunizations from the Gates foundation unless you provide patent protection to Big Pharma that may impair your ability to legally care for your people later. The B&M Gates foundation is just the latest tool for controlling the poorer nations. Ask yourself why the DoJ under John Ashcroft waved off the campaign against Microsoft after finding that they had illegally abused their monopoly position as long as they could be said to have had one, which is a long time indeed.
Develop it themselves? That, I think, is the bigger story for me -- not that this patent has been filed for, but that it's MSFT that is the assignee.
If you like that, you're going to love reading up on Microsoft patents on equipment to read and write DNA like a magtape.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In this case, the bugs are the feature.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Man - now you have no choice whether or not you want to be exposed to a vaccine. As someone who is allergic to a common ingredient in medications/vaccines this makes me really nervous... What will happen to people who have bad reactions to the new modified parasites? If you want to give people vaccines, give them the choice to receive them in a traditional injection. It is probably cheaper (at least in the short term) than properly developing and testing new types of parasites. I am actually quite irritated that MicroSoft thinks they have the right to make that choice for people.
The goal is to make people be ok with bugs, first in the bed, next on windows. No wonder they applied for this patent.
thinking this method can be used to apply mind control serums? lol
Side effects include death by anemia.
"Your potential. Our passion." => "Your blood. Our vaccines."
"Where do you want to go today?" => "Where do you want to be bitten today?"
"Start me up" => "Bite Me!"
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
The "runaway breeding" the article alludes to is ridiculous — we already have "runaway breeding" of anopheles mosquitoes, and as a result malaria kills a million or more persons per year, mostly in poor countries.
Yes but malaria doesn't create the ravenous walking dead now, does it?
But I can't say I would like the idea of being bitten by something with dna encoding a programmed death
Side note - slight irony in the fact the favicon for the website is the (now obsolete) Sun logo on an MS patent ;)
Mimic's plot is actually a lot more closer to that story than Jurassik Park.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119675/
I mean, seriously, doesn't just the words coming out of your mouth; "Irradiating mosquitoes." That, sounds like, so much fun. I'm not kidding.
Yes but malaria doesn't create the ravenous walking dead now, does it?
It will after Microsoft gets its grubby fingers on it.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Hmm, something must be bugging /. or its readers; What, no "In Soviet Russia..." jokes yet?
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
Nature finds a way! I can't believe your arrogance.
We also have runaway breeding of people.
Remember how you can lose your farm because some Monsanto-patented seed blows onto your property?
No I don't, because it has never happened.
Perhaps their position on the grants give them the ability to take the IP from the research.
Anyways, I'm curious to how this isn't obvious from general insects carrying virus' and other things or old school biological warfare. I mean if we were hurdling dead cows over the castle walls in medieval times in order to infect the populations during a siege, then isn't prior art somewhat already established? What's new and novel here besides using it to cure instead of infect? And outside of that, the entire concept of using parasites to treat illness or administer medicine is nothing new. They were talking about genetically manipulating cells and bacteria to deliver payloads for cancer treatments back in the 80's.
Mutations rendering the vaccine ineffective is the reason why you have to vaccinate aggressively. If you leave a pathogen nowhere to live, then it has nowhere to mutate into a version that the vaccine is ineffective against.
In Soviet version, the features are bugs!
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Even more indications that Microsoft (and all other proprietary software vendors) have nothing worth to patent in the software sphere to gain economic advantage... so they expand their field of "view."
Microsoft how is that pact with Oracle/Apple/EMC going? C or D planed yet?
And mosquito piracy? Before the mosquito bites you'll have to call the software line, and have the bug authenticated. They will be to heavy to fly with those stupid reflective stickers stuck to them. On the other hand, it would make it simple to see them coming. Or, use as a new kind of disco lighting scheme. Ok, I know I'm trying to hard...
So it seems that the patent is the idea that you can
" modifying or making a parasitic organism that can be programmatically controlled by a stimulus external to the altered parasitic organism, the parasitic organism can be a powerful tool in delivering therapeutic compounds."
These guys obviously have never worked on malaria or any other parasite before. The malaria genome is notoriously difficult to understand let alone manipulate. And then creating something to synthesize and deliver drugs safely? This is a sci-fi fantasy that has been dreamed up by some rich microscoft programer/managers. They are not scientists or medical workers and obviously don't have any idea of the reality for getting an dangerous organism modified and approved for human testing. I call patent trolling and here in is an example of patenting an idea when there is no real product that can be demonstrated. The problem will be for the team of people who put in the effort to actually develop something like this only never to be able to realize the fruits of their labor because they get sued for patent infringement. Again an example of how patent reform is needed because now that this patent is published no one will put money into developing it. There is no profit in it for Univerisities and these people at microsoft do not have the skill set to develop it.
I can't think of anything more nightmareish that Microsoft doing genetic engineering.
The BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH.
I think that's,
In Soviet Russia, features bug YOU!
No 'whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag?
Slashdot, I am disappoint.
In this case, the bugs are the future.
With apologies to Intel...
Yes it has.
"In a landmark victory for corporations heavily invested in genetically engineered foods, on March 29 a Canadian judge ruled that farmer Percy Schmeiser of Bruno, Saskatchewan must pay $105,000 to Monsanto for illegally growing the company's genetically engineered rapeseed, from which canola oil is made. But Schmeiser says he never planted Monsanto's seeds. "How can somebody put anything on someone else's land, then claim it's theirs and say, 'We'll take it. We'll sue him. We'll fine him'?" he asks."
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Food/Bad_Seeds.html
Is that because you didn't lose _your_ farm or because farms haven't been lost from GM material drifting elsewhere?
The former is your testimony and the latter is public record.
I didn't think you could patent broad concepts. They haven't got any concrete work done. Heck, I haven't taken a biology class in 10 years and I can come up with this stuff.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
MSoftie: "The latest report is in. Our software is riddled with viruses. Bugs everywhere."
Gates: "I thought we were the best at software! What's the meaning of this?!"
MSoftie: "Apparently we are the best at viruses and bugs..."
Gates: (ding!)
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Presents the following "screen" to each affected cell, and waits for the cell to press the button of its choice:
Do you really want to cure this condition?
[Yes] [No] [Abort]
Meanwhile, the patient dies as the primitive cell is frantically trying to push the non existing [Yes] button.
No thanks Mr. Hell Gates.
That was a bad joke, and you should feel bad.
I always thought that Microsoft was technically incompetent, now I'm afraid they are dangerously incompetent :(
Yes it has.
"In a landmark victory for corporations heavily invested in genetically engineered foods, on March 29 a Canadian judge ruled that farmer Percy Schmeiser of Bruno, Saskatchewan must pay $105,000 to Monsanto for illegally growing the company's genetically engineered rapeseed, from which canola oil is made. But Schmeiser says he never planted Monsanto's seeds. "How can somebody put anything on someone else's land, then claim it's theirs and say, 'We'll take it. We'll sue him. We'll fine him'?" he asks."
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Food/Bad_Seeds.html
This is going to become the McDonald's Hot Coffee case of agriculture, I can tell. The facts are that the farmer recognized that some of his crop was contaminated with Monsanto's strain. Instead of complaining then, or suing Monsanto then, he harvested the seed and replanted it widely on his farm. He knew what he was doing. He was hoping it was finders, keepers. The court did not agree.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
In related news, Microsoft is developing a fruit fly that will attack Apple.
Can someone explain why we might want to not let mosquitoes carrying a vaccine for malaria reproduce?
Perhaps they can create STDs that provide some health benefit, so we can screw for a happier tomorrow.
Agreed. He was using Round Up on those crops.. a pesticide that kills unmodified crops, demonstrating that he knew what he was doing.
It is the use of Round Up on Round Up Ready crops which is what the patent describes and what the farmer was violating.
If he had been just growing Round Up Ready crops without the use of Round Up he wouldn't have been violating the patent. If he had been just using Round Up to kill weeds then he wouldn't have been violating the patent. It's really simple. The only reason I can understand why people have trouble understanding this is just self induced ignorance.
How we know is more important than what we know.
So when can I start applying for the jobs to do this sort of work? I can't seem to find any job openings on Microsoft's site that are even tangentially related to DNA and biotech.
"Operating systems suck: you're better off using only the BIOS" --trainsaw.com
Patents are only valid for 20 years, they really see a market for this stuff in that time frame?
Sounds to me like they just pay people to come up with ideas for patents...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Just like Outlook, Explorer, ... :)
If (and it is a big if) Microsoft was succesful in moving just 50% of its enterprise customers to the cloud, their revenue would go up by approximately 400%. That's assuming no new products, no new releases and no increased penetration. Microsoft is growing in the not-so-low double digits year over year. I don't them as stagnant and the industry itself is growing faster than ever.
While widely derided, the "McDonald's Hot Coffee" case was nowhere near as ridiculous as people have made it out to be. The woman received 3rd degree burns over 6% of her body. Her immediate medical bills for her needed skin grafts and hospital care (proven later in court) were $11,000.
She was more than reasonable about it, and initially asked McDonald's for only $20,000 to cover her hospital bills and other expenses. McDonald's flatly refused. Further attempts to negotiate met with nothing but stonewalling. Otherwise, it would never have gone to court. When finally forced to go to court, the judge sent both parties to arbitration in a last attempt to reach agreement. Again, McDonald's completely refused to settle. McDonald's complete refusal to take responsibility is the only reason it ended up in court.
She was also not awarded $2.9 million, as is often reported. That was the original judgment, but it was later reduced to about 1/10 of that amount, and much of that went to attorney's fees.
McDonald's was also found to be serving coffee at unsafe temperature, and their coffee is now served 40 degrees F cooler.
In related news, the successor to Intel's Sandy Bridge CPU architecture will be the size of a paramecium, and will have Windows 9 embedded in firmware. They refer to it by the codename "BRAINS!!!"
Office and Windows day's won't be cash cows forever.
The genetically altered cows that produce cash are in the second round.
As a senior engagement manager at a consulting firm in the 90's, I once created an animated PowerPoint presentation that showed the customer literally as a cow, and the sales team as lions who came in to feast on its entrails after the technical staff knocked it over with dazzling technology. Money was pouring out of the cow as the sales people tore into it.
I got a standing ovation from the sales team. It occurred to no one that I was deliberately insulting them.
Don't take it personally, but I'm not going to read your pithy response to my post.
The filers of the patent are all employees of microsoft's blue-sky R&D labs (research.microsoft.com) in their "health and well being" section. They are not associated at all with microsoft product development, or with the Gates foundation, this is microsoft's attempt to replicate what Bell Labs or Xerox parc used to be like, and you can only hire that caliber of talent out of academia by letting them do whatever they want. Good gig if you can get it.
And they are, in fact, people who primarily do work in bioinformatics and human-computer interfaces and such, this patent very much reads like something written by electric engineers as it spends 75% of the time talking about the monitoring apparatus and otherwise just rehashes textbook-level information on the actual pathology and biology of parasites. So for all of those who are somehow worried that this is a part of an evil conspiracy on microsoft's part, don't worry, these people don't actually have a wet lab with germs and bugs in it, nor would they know what to do with them if they had it.
Isn't all of their software bug-ridden?
'Microsoft' and 'parasite' in the same sentence. Who'd have thought we'd ever see that?
I'm looking forward to the Blue Skin of Death feature when a person core dumps all their genetic codes...granted it will have to be encrypted because they won't be allowed to use their own genes.
The 90's called and wants its Microsoft sucks joke back.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Because no company has created more bugs in history than Microsoft.
I just hope I don't get the Blue Veil of Death.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Remember how you can lose your farm because some Monsanto-patented seed blows onto your property?
Wrong. That didn't happen. Why do people need to keep spreading falsehoods to make their point?
Look, Perry Schmeiser wasn't just innocently walking around when suddenly a Monsanto lawyer shows up and sues him. He knew damn well that an adjacent farmer was growing Monsanto's herbicide tolerant canola, so he intentionally saved seed from the edges of his field hoping to get some cross pollinated seed. He specifically selected for the seed with Monsanto's trait, and intentionally, knowingly grew that seed. That's how Monsanto found out what he was doing, he was buying craploads of Round-Up and spraying it on his field. He knew exactly what he was doing.
Now, I'm not saying he wasn't well within his right to do that. No one has ever cared before about cross pollination giving someone free access to a developed trait, and it's hard to say that now because someone else affects you you should have to react according to their contract, but don't pretend that Schmeiser was just some innocent farmer brown minding his own business when the big bad company came up and got on his case, because that's not what happened. Monsanto wouldn't have even known if he wasn't buying so much of the chemical that goes with those seeds. What really gets me though is that now this opportunistic asshole goes around getting paid to give speeches badmouthing GE crops, the very same things he coveted. Kinda reminds me of how Andrew Wakefield originally wanted to make his own vaccine, but decided to just roll with it when the anti-vaxxers made him their hero and he realized he could make more profit that way.
Of course, just like all the anti-biotech misinformation out there, I don't expect facts will correct this myth either.
That will add whole new meanings to being stung by a MS update.
I think that was the parent poster's point...the Schmeiser case was blown way out of what it actually was by people who, quite frankly, have no clue what they're talking about, and can't be bothered to look up the facts, and even when they're presented with them, just stick to the old, overly simplified, good guy/bad guy story anyway. So, it is very equivalent to what you're saying about the hot coffee case.
My main question here is: why is Microsoft filing for these patents? They have been involved in biomedics, afaik, only on the software and infomatics side. Bill Gates, through his foundation, is generously giving grants to many organizations doing promising research. I didn't realize that Microsoft was directly involved in the research side of things. Did they buy assignment rights to this research (and potential patent)? Develop it themselves? That, I think, is the bigger story for me — not that this patent has been filed for, but that it's MSFT that is the assignee.
I can't find a good reference (read: I am lazy), but I know the MS Basic Research Lab had been doing various bio/genetics stuff at one point. The MS Basic Research lab is (or at least was when I followed it more closely) basically the only true basic research lab left in the country, and one with enormously broad interests.
Of course they'll be sued for antitrust violations when Opera and Mozilla releases much less buggy solutions.
It demonstrates that he was aware that the strains he had been developing had acquired a round-up resistance trait, as have any number of weed species growing wild alongside roads in many places where canola is grown. It does NOT demonstrate that he believed the trait to come from Monsanto's strain. That is, the djinn is out of the bottle. Monsanto has irrevocably polluted the genome. I would think that at the very least warrants revocation of their patent.
Meanwhile, for every other trait in plants, it is the strain as a whole that is protected, not the individual traits. That makes it perfectly legal to cross someone's proprietary strain with your own to produce a hybrid to do with as you please.
This is the anti-hot coffee case. The deeper you dig, the more it looks like Schmeiser got shafted.
In this case the patent is a typical across the board bullshit patent, that the software industry is so famous. They are patenting the idea, an idea that has already been publicly expressed upon many occasions prior to this, except no greedy self serving ass hat patented.
They are not patenting a single application of the but the whole concept for which there is of course prior art, the expression of that concept. Whilst they might be entitled to a patent for an actual application of the concept they are not entitled to steal from the public an already openly publicly expressed concept. Their greed and deceit, apparently does know no bounds.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Of course the immunisation implied by this patent would also be illegal because people have the right of refusal to any treatment and this patent of course denies that right. Then of course their are allergies, each allergen being pretty much unique to each human individual, such that any pharmacological treatment can have negative and even deadly results to a percentage of the population. So the problem becomes how can you target the treatment to only those people that accept it and avoid those people who refuse it.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
oh God. Seriously, you believe that? You think the farmer did careful studies of all the available pesticides and Round Up just happened to be the one that worked on his "special" crops so he decided to go with it? Are you kidding?
The finding of the court was that anyone using Round Up on Round Up Ready crops is exercising the patent. It doesn't matter how they got the Round Up or the Round Up Ready crops. This is entirely consistent with the history of patent infringement. It doesn't matter if you independently discover the covered technique, you're still violating the patent if you exercise it.
Here's another thing that could possibly happen: someone could develop their own pesticide and then genetically engineer a crop which is resistant to it, completely independently from Monsanto's patent. Guess what? That too would be violating Monsanto's patent. That's how patents work.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Why not simply give people immunity to a virus directly?
Why the complicated chain through insects? A longer chain like that is harder to control.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
No, he wasn't using Round-Up on those crops. The Court specifically ruled that he didn't have to pay Monsanto any damages because he did not use Round Up on his crops, and therefore did not benefit from using Monsanto's patent without a license. He only noticed it was Round-Up resistant because he sprayed Round-Up in an adjacent ditch to kill weeds which were getting close to his crop. Some Canola which was also growing in the ditch survived the Round-Up. He never used Round-Up on his crop fields.
No, that was a miscarriage of justice. Monsanto argued that even though Schmeiser had no way of knowing the crop's Round-Up resistance was due to carrying the Monsanto gene, he should have known that was the reason why some of the canola survived being sprayed with Round-Up. The Court bought this argument hook, line, and sinker:
"I find that in 1998 Mr. Schmeiser planted canola seed saved from his 1997 crop in his field number 2 which seed he knew or ought to have known was Roundup tolerant, and that seed was the primary source for seeding and for the defendants' crops in all nine fields of canola in 1998."
That quote from the decision contains a glaring assumption which has since been proven false. The court assumed (accepting Monsanto's argument without question) that the only way for a plant to be resistant to Round-Up was for it to contain Monsanto's patented gene. It has since been shown that plants can develop a natural resistance to Round-Up. Therefore, the Court erred in ruling that Mr. Schmeiser "ought to have known" that the plants which resisted Round-Up spraying contained Monsanto's patented gene. In light of the development of Round-Up resistance in weeds, we now know that short of extensive genetic testing, there was no way to Mr. Schmeiser to have known whether the resistance was natural or came from Monsanto's patented gene.
No, I think he happened to discover the roundup resistance when he tried the perfectly normal procedure of applying roundup in the places he didn't want the canola to grow and some of it just kept growing.
Note that Monsanto is in the habit of suing any farmer that has a crop that resists roundup at all, even if they do not use roundup. They claim the gene and any plant containing it is theirs.
They have repeatedly claimed that cross contamination with neighboring fields cannot happen. The fact that there are now weeds with the trait brings that into question.
The finding of the court was that anyone using Round Up on Round Up Ready crops is exercising the patent. It doesn't matter how they got the Round Up or the Round Up Ready crops. This is entirely consistent with the history of patent infringement. It doesn't matter if you independently discover the covered technique, you're still violating the patent if you exercise it.
It also violates the principles that have served agriculture well for centuries. Carried to it's natural conclusion, it will eventually hand ownership of nature itself over to corporate interests (or at least so surround it in a thicket of patents that they might as well own it).
The courts may say otherwise, but it doesn't make them morally or ethically right, it just means the guys with guns and badges are listening to them.
My main question here is: why is Microsoft filing for these patents?
WOW! This is the most idiotic question EVER!!!!!
Who in the world has more experience in creating bugs?!?!?!?! Exactly!!!!
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Mosquito BSOD
Table-ized A.I.
had acquired a round-up resistance trait, as have any number of weed species growing wild alongside roads in many places where canola is grown.
For a moment I must admit I had my doubts about that, having seen how that thing can wither a plant to death very quickly with just a few drops accidentally sprinkled (as opposed to much weaker herbicides such as gramoxone) and the fact that farmers usually use Round-up only to completely clear patches of land (or more recently, on those "round-up ready crops"), but damn that's right.
While widely derided, the "McDonald's Hot Coffee" case was nowhere near as ridiculous as people have made it out to be. The woman received 3rd degree burns over 6% of her body. Her immediate medical bills for her needed skin grafts and hospital care (proven later in court) were $11,000. She was more than reasonable about it, and initially asked McDonald's for only $20,000 to cover her hospital bills and other expenses. McDonald's flatly refused. .
None of this changes the fact that coffee should be served hot, and that it was her own stupidity that caused the damage. Would you put your coffee cup between your legs at home, and sue the one who made the coffee if you spilled? Serving cold coffee avoids the problem, true, but people like hot coffee and hot foods.
So here in Europe, most people I know still see this as a good example of ridiculous American legal practices... just as warnings that it could be dangerous to fall down from a ladder, so the manufacturer can't be sued.
Again, another ignorant moron who gets his information from the activists. Go read the court ruling.
Monsanto's patented gene
See? You're an idiot. It doesn't matter if you're using "their gene" or not. If you are using a genetically engineered crop tailored to a pesticide, you lose. That's how broad their patent is.
Maybe you think that patent should never have been issued. I don't exactly disagree with you, but it was issued.
Understand the law.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Microsoft is the perfect organization to back this. They've been foisting bugs on humans for years.
The only reason I can understand why people have trouble understanding this is just self induced ignorance.
I imagine you do not have the intelligence to understand this statement for it's true irony. After all, you seem to not to comprehend the implications that arise from people patenting plants.
Citation needed you fucking liar.
Wow, what a braying ass you are. Heeeee Hawwwww
That aside, start here.
When mosquitoes are referenced, Microsft *sucks* jokes are entirely valid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy
Also, what could possibly go wrong with genetically modifying organisms which will then interact with a human body? Yes, tech fear etc. But I am not sure I want to be a testing bed for the stuff that will inevitably survive.
Soviet Russia has nothing to do with WGA and UAC.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Microsoft and Bill Gates motto: "Do Great Evil, patent it and profit from it."
Send him directly to Hell.
As a senior engagement manager at a consulting firm in the 90's, I once created an animated PowerPoint presentation that showed the customer literally as a cow, and the sales team as lions who came in to feast on its entrails after the technical staff knocked it over with dazzling technology. Money was pouring out of the cow as the sales people tore into it.
*applauds*
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
McDonald's was also found to be serving coffee at unsafe temperature, and their coffee is now served 40 degrees F cooler.
I don't drink coffee, but I know that coffee is supposed to be served at unsafe temperatures leaving a little time to cool off. The reason that McDonald's is serving at the lower temperature is not because of them doing anything wrong, but because they risk ridiculous court rulings.
40 degrees F are also just 22 real degrees.
As for her costs, those were her own fault. If you hand me a gun and I shoot myself in the head, it is my fault, not yours. It doesn't matter if I am European or American.
They didn't patent plants.
Fucking idiot.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Way to only tell part of the facts. I invite you and everyone else who thinks along those line to read the very nice summary available on Wikipedia.
A quick quote from that article:
Lets face it. Amazing is a litigation-happy country. People will sue over anything.
morcego
Screw-worms were irradiated so that they would be sterile, mate with screw-worms that weren't sterile, and produce no offspring. This as almost 50 years ago. Theidea of using radiation to interrupt the reproductive vectors is not patentable.
It's called sickle-cell anemia - and the disease *is* worse than the cure.
That will add whole new meanings to being stung by a MS update.
Until the mosquitos switch to "Open-Sores" ...
If (and it is a big if) Microsoft was succesful in moving just 50% of its enterprise customers to the cloud, their revenue would go up by approximately 400%.
You left out that they would have to convince enterprises to go with THEIR "clould" solution. Self-hosting your own client/server architecture in a data center is dirt cheap nowadays, and doesn't require a license from Microsoft.
That's assuming no new products, no new releases and no increased penetration. Microsoft is growing in the not-so-low double digits year over year. I don't them as stagnant and the industry itself is growing faster than ever.
The industry is changing. There won't ever be a "Year of the linux desktop", but there WILL be constant erosion, the same as there was never a "Year of the Firefox Web Browser", but Firefox somehow became the standard.
Microsoft's growth has slowed down, while the rest of the industry continues to expand. "A rising tide lifts all boats" explains the current situation.
Consider this - Microsoft's server division has never shown a profit. Kind of hard to compete against superior free offerings. So, Microsoft is shafted with the whole "cloud thing" - if it ignores it, it looks like what it is - stuck in the '90s. If it pushes it, it opens the doors for competitors with lower-cost, better solutions to eat their lunch.
"It has since been shown [slashdot.org] that plants can develop a natural resistance to Round-Up. Therefore, the Court erred in ruling that Mr. Schmeiser "ought to have known" that the plants which resisted Round-Up spraying contained Monsanto's patented gene."
At the time however this research had not been produced and the only knowledge available to and extremely widespread in the farming community would be that Monsanto's strain was the only one resistant to Roundup.
There is the theoretical possibility that he unlike practically every farmer didn't know about this - whilst at the same time knowing that Roundup was an efficient crop killer. This would take a very peculiar mindset, which is why the court reached an "ought to know" verdict.
In lawsuits about money it also comes down to a balance of probability rather than "proof beyond any reasonable doubt".
Hence, firstly, to argue that it was less than 50% likely that this farmer had heard about Roundup which is as notorious as an upstart Apple of the farming community, is something I can only conclude is argued in bad faith.
Secondly, to state with absolute truth and certainty that "Monsanto screwed an innocent and unknowing farmer over!" actually means that you postulate the opposite probability: that it is beyond reasonable doubt that he didn't know. This is completely unwarranted.
Hence, it appears that you are arguing in bad faith and debate is therefore pointless. If arguments with words are all made in bad faith the only approach you can really take is the Arizona one.
Microsoft in bio-tech business? well if you're gonna use them, make sure to swallow a good anti-virus!
After all these years, anyone trusting Microsoft to avoid risk because it has "bug recovery" that it promises will be a perfect failsafe deserves to die a slow, horrible death.
If we let Microsoft directly go and mutate bugs to unleash on the world, we will deserve to suffer into extinction. They're cutting out the middleman, and going directly to live, stinging, buggy bugs, for crying out loud!
--
make install -not war
considering how successful they have been with producing software bugs, i guess they figure they'll be successful producing real ones?! really though, this has to be the strangest thing ever.... hopefully they are just patent trolling and don't actually intend on producing such things...
This is just the biological version of a command and control bot network.
Subsititute plasmodium with a dangerous payload and you have a biological weapon with analytics!
#fail
So instead he was supposed to do extra work to make sure his crops weren't mixed with Monstanto seeds that had blown into his field? Destroying any of his plants that were?
Why the fuck should he have to do that?
Microsoft is now getting into genetic and nano engineering? Oh shit, does that mean our eyes will now project the BSOD?
...Monsanto had already patented every possible genetically modified organism (GMO) they could get their greedy little hands on... you mean they forgot mosquitoes?
Are you a paid shill for Monsanto? That might be how patents are currently "working" due to corporate bribery, but that's most definitely NOT how patents are supposed to work. In fact, it's almost the opposite of how patents are supposed to work.
more like: You feature bugs...
loose: not fitting closely or tightly != lose: to suffer the deprivation of
It was called Mimic.
You don't serve close-to-boiling coffee at home either. That was the point. If you spill coffee in your lap at home, you don't need skin grafts.
McDonald's admitted that they served their coffee at nearly 200 degrees F. MUCH hotter than you would normally serve it. Their excuse was that they wanted the coffee to still be hot when people arrived at their destination.
I did NOT tell "just part of the story". The official policy of McDonald's (before they were found negligent) was to serve their coffee at nearly 200 degrees F. That's hotter than any sane person would drink it, because that can and does cause burns.
Yes, the woman put the coffee between her legs. But normally if you did that (at home for example) and you spilled, at most you would get a bit of a scald and have a little redness. Not large patches of 3rd degree burns. Get real.
"...coffee is supposed to be served at unsafe temperatures leaving a little time to cool off. The reason that McDonald's is serving at the lower temperature is not because of them doing anything wrong, but because they risk ridiculous court rulings."
Wrong and wrong.
McDonald's coffee was served at nearly 200 degrees F. That's almost boiling. You don't do that at home, which is precisely how she got those burns. At home, if you spilled your coffee it would only hurt a little. It doesn't cause 3rd degree burns.
And the reason McDonald's serves their coffee cooler now is because they were already found to be negligent.
Yes, you left things out. Like the facts I posted (Brewing temperature should be close to 200 F [93 C] to dissolve them effectively, but without causing the premature breakdown of these delicate molecules.), along with the fact similar lawsuits were dismissed in other places exactly because coffee should be served that hot.
You didn't mention that "The National Coffee Association of U.S.A. instructs that coffee should be brewed "between 195-205 degrees Fahrenheit [91–96 C] for optimal extraction" and consumed "immediately". If not consumed immediately, the coffee is to be "maintained at 180-185 degrees Fahrenheit [82–85 C]"."
Just so you know, me and everyone else I know brew coffee at around 90 C (don't ever let it get to 100 C, or it tastes bad). It is known that coffee brewed at high altitudes doesn't taste as good, exactly because water boils at a lower temperature. I was actually talking to a barista a few days ago, and he mentioned that his machine was configured to work at 92 C (exactly).
Do your homework, please.
morcego
Don't serve it near boiling?? You idiot, espresso machines make coffee using STEAM!
What could go wrong?
Microsoft applies their expertise to biology? What ever could go wrong?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Exactly. Normal coffee is meant to be consumed at 60C/140F, and no hotter than 70C/160F, and is generally served around 10-15C hotter and allowed to cool.
At 200F, you're looking at instantaneous 2nd/3rd degree burns. Knock 20-25F off that serving temperature and cooling factors such as airborne dispersal and time taken to soak through clothes give you at least a fighting chance of coming out of it without needing skin grafts.
There is no way in which it is reasonable to expect farmers not to save seed from crops which sprung up because seed drifted onto their property through no fault of their own. The entire fucking legal system is broken, and it's broken in favor of and in fact on behalf of Monsanto and other similar interests, who typically not only lobby for legislation, but also actually write it. He did what he always had done, reuse seed from crops grown on his land. Is this illegal? Apparently so. Is this reasonable? Only an industry tool would say yes.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"Don't serve it near boiling?? You idiot, espresso machines make coffee using STEAM!"
So? They don't SERVE IT that hot! When was the last time you put your mouth around live steam?
What's that? You haven't? Why not?
I left those out because they are IRRELEVANT. This isn't about how hot you BREW coffee, it's about how hot you SERVE and DRINK it. Two completely different things.
There are plenty of consumer products that are harmful or even lethal if mishandled. But the hot coffee case isn't about the product at all, its about having sensible safety precautions for customers that are appropriate to the context where business is conducted. Specifically, an item handed to people through a car window shouldn't be one that is is dangerous to their health if it is mishandled, because the car is an environment where mishandling of such items is likely. Keep in mind that the temperature of McDonalds coffee wasn't just an incidental artifact of setting the dial wrong on the machine that day, it was a company-wide policy.
Suppose I ran a lumber supply company, and the floor of the store was littered with broken 2x4s with rusty nails sticking out. People know better than to step on nails, so thats no problem right? Well it doesn't matter if people should "know better", it just isn't ethical to run a business with that level of inherent danger to the customer.
Its also true that we tend to push the protections a bit far sometimes in America, in particular when compared to Europe. But in Europe they also have things like universal health care, so its likely that the woman in this case would not have been stuck with the medical bill if this happened in an EU country, and it was the medical bill that started the whole lawsuit off in the first place.
Think this dealt with how it was served/consumed.
You don't serve close-to-boiling coffee at home either. That was the point. If you spill coffee in your lap at home, you don't need skin grafts.
Other courts judged otherwise, that people want hot coffee:
"If this submission be right, McDonald’s should not have served drinks at any temperature which would have caused a bad scalding injury. The evidence is that tea or coffee served at a temperature of 65 C will cause a deep thickness burn if it is in contact with the skin for just two seconds. Thus, if McDonald’s were going to avoid the risk of injury by a deep thickness burn they would have had to have served tea and coffee at between 55 C and 60 C. But tea ought to be brewed with boiling water if it is to give its best flavour and coffee ought to be brewed at between 85 C and 95 C. Further, people generally like to allow a hot drink to cool to the temperature they prefer. Accordingly, I have no doubt that tea and coffee served at between 55 C and 60 C would not have been acceptable to McDonald's customers. Indeed, on the evidence, I find that the public want to be able to buy tea and coffee served hot, that is to say at a temperature of at least 65 C, even though they know (as I think they must be taken to do for the purposes of answering issues (1) and (2)) that there is a risk of a scalding injury if the drink is spilled.
Okay, but that's STILL colder than McDonald's was serving its coffee.
Title says it all.
...I can't imagine this is as ominous as it's being made out to be here. That said, the people named in the patent should therefore not be unwilling to address your concerns. After all, our company's own published values states that we aim to be an open company: "As a company, and as individuals, we value integrity, honesty, openness, personal excellence, constructive self-criticism, continual self-improvement, and mutual respect" here: http://www.microsoft.com/about/en/us/default.aspx My personal experience for 8 years here is that these values are truly aimed for everywhere.
So if you'd like to reach the Microsoft people named in the patent (which is a public document) rather than just gripe about our company, here are their email aliases. You can also call Microsoft's main number and have the automated switchboard route you to their phones at +1(425)882-8080.
Eric Horvitz horvitz@microsoft.com
Simon Mercer smercer@microsoft.com
Sonia Carlson soniacar@microsoft.com
Chris "Jim" Karkanias jimkar@microsoft.com
David Heckerman heckerma@microsoft.com