Can you patent a piece of paper with some numbers written on it?
If you have discovered that the presence of those specific numbers have made the paper uniquely useful for some purpose which was previously quite unknown, what is so unreasonable about allowing it to be patentable product ?
Patenting an algorithm does not reflect the work of a company
Arithmetic Coding reflected the brilliance and hard work of Rissanen. If IBM had the good sense to employ him and support his work, don't they deserve the reward on that investment ? And won't it encourage other companies to maintain fundamental research ?
Patents do encourage investment. And patents do reduce trade secrecy. The important thing is to reward only what is genuinely new and non-trivial, and what is identifiably useful.
Trade secrets are moraly preferable, since, unlike patents, they don't limit the freedom for other people to use information they have found for themselves.
No. Absolutely not.
With trade secrets nobody can know about your process. Nobody can research around it. Nobody can be inspired by it to extend the art still further.
Encouraging trade secrets would be like going back to mediaeval guilds, or the ignorance of the dark ages.
In practice, what you patent is not the data, but a physical expression of that data which does not occur in nature -- eg the relevant isolated length of DNA; or a cell genetically engineered to include it (see the patents linked elsewhere for examples).
If you can establish that such a "product" has a practical use -- because you have established what the gene does -- then by law the USPTO must grant your application.
One question is whether the law should be changed to specifically make unpatentable the unnatural physical expression of natural DNA sequences. But encouraging Congress to micromanage what is and is not patentable might not be desirable; or easy; or even constitutional.
I was thinking about fully approved patents rather than jrg's very important post (score it up!) about provisional patent applications.
I do hope he's right about the very high threshold for proving utility, because exactly as he says: this is what costs the time and the money (and the blood, sweat and tears) now.
To discover the make-up of a protein, with a sequence of a previously unknown type, which blocks incoming self-destruct signals inside the cell, and then to prove beyond doubt that this is what the sequence does, as jrg's team did -- that seems to me a lot more impressive than just going through data automatically, and identifying everything that looks like something somebody else has seen before.
Which is why I don't think the latter should be enough even to get provisional pre-emptive patent rights.
When one files a provisional patent application on a gene, one is not applying for a patent on the gene itself, but rather on a _use_ for that gene. For example, "gene_x for use in treating osteoporosis." You then usually have a year to prove your claims by providing data or at least showing that you are actively working on it rather than just sitting on it. If another company or academic institution finds that gene_x is actually involved in cancer, then they can pursue gene_x for use in treating cancer and you're SOL (shit outta luck).
This isn't exactly right I think: to take your patent 5,712,381 as an example, it is a product patent for various biochemical substances and modified cells, identified in claims 1 to 24.
As the man from the USPTO says, having shown one use,
4.Once a product is patented, that patent extends to any use, even those that have not been disclosed in the patent. A future non-obvious method of using that product may be patentable, but the first patent will be dominant and a license for the use of the product may be required.
So if another company finds a different use for these products, they have to negotiate a licence from you.
In addition to this they have provided tissue distribution and show that many of the tissues the gene is expressed in are associated with the particular disease states that the gene family is.
I should have checked out the full text on the USPTO, instead of just the claims on the IBM server. (The USPTO kept crashing on me). Thanks for putting me right.
I checked out the first link and from what little I read, they have identified a novel sequence which is homologous to a known gene family that has some known functions (the prior art). Therefore, the utility of the discovery is clear.
The suggestion is that Celera have been doing only this, filing patents solely based on sequence homology.
It would be nice if a real biochemist could confirm it; but it looks to me as if the only genuine new knowledge in the each patent is the sequence information in Claim 1, and an identification that this sequence looks homologous to some other sequence we already know. The remaining claims then reflect the application of standard biochemical techniques, which make the sequence useful.
To be fair, there might be clues in the image pages and the prior art, which I haven't read; but I was struck by the very generic statement in the abstract, "The invention also provides methods for the prevention and treatment of diseases associated with expression of GPI-2h, as well as diagnostic assays". It's not clear (at least to me) that the authors definitely know that any diseases actually are associated with expression of GPI-2h.
The pull-together also includes several other summaries of on-topic stories.
The original article was in Science, 1 May 98 280:689, by John J. Doll (US Government), Director of Biotechnology Examination at the US Patent and Trademark Office
ON THE ADVANTAGES OF DNA PATENTING In the international community of molecular biologists, a debate has been underway for some time concerning the patenting of DNA. Now John J. Doll (US Government), Director of Biotechnology Examination at the US Patent and Trademark Office presents the following points concerning this issue:
Just as the issuing of broad product claims at the early stages of polymer technology did not deter development of other new vulcanizable copolymers, the issuing of relatively broad claims in genomic technology should not deter inventions in genomics.
The same patentability analysis is conducted for every patent application, regardless of whether the application is for a computer chip, a mechanical apparatus, a pharmaceutical, or a piece of DNA. In every field of technology -- whether emerging, complex, or competitive -- all the conditions for patentability (such as statutory subject matter utility, enablement, written description, novelty, and non-obviousness) must be met before a claim is allowed.
In order for DNA sequences to be distinguished from their naturally occurring counterparts, which cannot be patented, the patent application must state that the invention has been purified or isolated or is part of a recombinant molecule or is now part of a vector.
Once a product is patented, that patent extends to any use, even those that have not been disclosed in the patent. A future non-obvious method of using that product may be patentable, but the first patent will be dominant and a license for the use of the product may be required.
Without the incentive of patents, there would be less investment in DNA research, and scientists might not disclose their new DNA products to the public. It is only with the patenting of DNA technology that some companies, particularly small ones, can raise sufficient venture capital to bring beneficial products to the marketplace or fund further research.
A strong US patent system is critical for the continued development and dissemination to the public of information on DNA sequence elements.
QY: John J. Doll, Technology Center 1600, USPTO, Washington, DC 20231 US.
(Science 1 May 98 280:689) (Science-Week 22 May 98)
For a contrary view, this position paper from the American Society of Human Genetics, on the earlier issue of expressed sequence tags is worth reading:
More and more chipmakers are producing hardware implementations of standard cryptographic algorithms. But one of the principles of paranoia is "never trust any code you haven't read and compiled yourself".
Can we trust hardware crypto chips just by validating enough output sequences against software implementations; or would it be possible to hide a trigger in such a chip to switch it into an 'unsafe' mode ?
"The failures are not just poor board design, some serious theoretical issues are involved -- resonance being the key one. Buses are running into quarter and half wavelength resonance effects which cause voltage margin and timing margin violations. No re-engineering of the drivers, board, or receivers will fix this problem with three RIMM systems."
The article mentions some people who have "lost the ability to tell right from wrong" through neurological damange. As right and wrong are subjective classifications, I wonder what exactly they mean by that. Could they mean losing the abililty to empathize with others?
There's a longer and very interesting article on Dr Damasio's research in this week's edition of the Economist.
But unfortunately it's not one of the ones they're giving away free on the website, so here are a few paragraphs cut down from the full article. If any of the Economist science writers are out there (I know you sometimes read Slashdot), thanks for a fascinating piece!
"The two patients, now in their early 20s, had survived similar injuries to their pre-frontal cortexes during infancy... Both had lived lonely maladjusted lives with no plans for the future and unfortunate personal habits such as compulsive lying, petty theft, poor hygiene, irregular sex lives, and indifference to their resulting children
"In the set of tests psychologists have dreamt up to quantify moral health, their performance clearly bespoke an ignorance of the conceptual foundations of morality... The patients' responses to these tests were about the same as those that would have been expected from a ten-year-old child: that is, they appeared to be motivated exclusively by a desire to avoid personal punishment [ignoring any wider moral implications]. This degree of pathology is significantly more serious than those found in those who suffer brain damage as adults.
Also, the two "seemed never to have learnt any of the basic moral rules that cover social interaction, apparently because their early traumas prevented them from ever acquiring this sort of information... to all appearances, they suffer from little or no sense of remorse at their behaviour.
"Neurobiologists have long known that the brain can compensate for some sorts of injury that are sustained during the course of its development. It does this by recruiting new sets of nerve cells to substitute for those that have been damaged or destroyed. The pre-frontal cortex, however, seems to be unable to repair itself adequately in this way, leaving infant victims with no means of learning right from wrong during the relevant period of their growth.
"The solution, Dr Damasio postulates, may lie in helping that part of the brain to annex more nerve cells, by carefully adjusting levels of the relevant neurotransmitters..."
Thus, even if Dr Gould and Dr Gross are right that there are always new neurons migrating to the pre-frontal cortex, it seems they can't always be integrated.
A method of placing an order for an item comprising: under control of a client system, displaying information identifying the item; and in response to only a single action being performed, sending a request to order the item along with an identifier of a purchaser of the item to a server system; ... and corresponding server.
Question: isn't this exactly the interface on some dealers' screens for securities and foreign exchange trading ?
One of the options the dealer has is to get a list of all the share parcels being bid or offered at the current instant, any of which he/she can accept with a single click. The patent's main claims are written so broadly (with essentially no reference to the internet, except later as a possible implementation), it seems to me that should blow them away.
Can anyone confirm the existence of such a system, or (better) offer B&N a printed user manual ?
Mozilla is very definitely short on documentation -- anything that generates good explanations of the code (and well-grounded design critiques too) must be a good thing.
Plus I really like the idea of Moz becoming a standard reference for academic analysis, and for academic teaching. This kind of scrutiny can only help Mozilla; and what better than possibly the world's most ambitious open-source end-user application to give students an idea of the realities of a real software project ?
AOL/Netscape must have spent several millions so far on developer salaries for Mozilla. Seems to me that putting up x hundred dollars for first, second and third prizes in contests like this (and, I hope, similar in future) would be a very cost-effective way to build awareness and interest in their code.
I really can't wait for the day when a routine linux kernel release doesn't make a slashdot headline.
To be fair, 2.2.13 is intended to be a bit more than just a routine kernel release. There have been important small and not-so-small problems with all of the 2.2.* kernels so far.
2.2.13 is Alan's attempt to make a really bulletproof clean-up of the 2.2.* series so far, and to get it out as a definitive stable reference kernel, before he allows in quite a lot of exciting but more risky new stuff.
2.2.13 is intended as a kernel that distributions should go on including (at least as an option) long after 14,15,16,17 etc are all released and obsolete.
That's why it has taken a lot longer than most releases to go final, and why it is a worthy news item.
Work in quantum computing and quantum cryptography has shown that every cryptographic standard today can be broken in a no time at all, so how would wireless networks be able to take advantage of this?
To do quantum computing and quantum communication you have to have perfect control of the system, and prevent absolutely any interactions between it and its environment.
As a theoretical excercise quantum algorithms are certainly fascinating; but I suspect that in reality a quantum computer with enough completely isolated and non-interacting 'gates' to run the factorisation algorithm is unlikely ever to be achieved.
Similarly, quantum communication might work along optical fibres or tightly focussed laser beams, but I think you would have a lot of problems trying to detect the very subtle single-photon correlations using wireless against a noisy RF background.
But I'd be delighted to be proved wrong on either of the above!
Just about any computer program that does anything useful and novel can now be patented, if the data it works on has some identifiable meaning in the real world.
The judgment also blew away a previous assumption that 'business methods' were somehow unpatentable.
IMHO this does make rather more sense than the (very confused?) European law I described above. On the other hand, the European patent offices are allegedly much better resourced than the US PTO; perhaps this is also part of the problem
I thought patents could only be for "buildable" devices (i.e. hardware).
The European test is still close to this: a computer program "as such" is considered just to be a method for performing a "mental act", and is therefore specifically excluded from patentability. However, under guidelines the EPO brought in in 1985, computer programs are patentable if they have a "technical effect".
This had led to some truly classic decisions, a real must for connoisseurs of the mind-numbingly pedantic and the bizarre:
A claim for an image processing system was disallowed because the wording, "A method of digitally filtering data including scanning a data array with masks...", specified no physical entity that the data represented, so was held to be a purely mental act; an amended version, "A method of digitally processing images in the form of a 2D array..." would have been okay, except they then discovered it wasn't novel.
Word processing, according to the Board, is just a series of mental acts. This lacks technical significance and is therefore not patentable. Since there is no technical effect, this also rules out any methods for spell-checking, or for contextually identifying incorrect homophones ('there' instead of 'their')
But an IBM invention, to translate printer control codes into different control codes for a different system, was patentable, because it related to the control of machinery (a clear technical effect).
Even friends of mine studying to be lawyers are bemused... Meanwhile, to make it more complicated, the UK patent courts reckon that the new EPO guidelines (brought in under political pressure) are themselves incorrect; that its decisions on the subject are wrong; and so won't recognise them as proper case-law.
I also found a one-day seminar with most of the main players, held a couple of years ago: http://www.patent.gov.uk/softpat/en/frmain.html but the couple of speakers I read seemed mostly to be congratulating themselves on how sensible they were.
Paxman filed his experience of the interview for yesterday's Sunday Telegraph, though it didn't make their electronic edition.
Talk to me, Bill
He's got an average suit,an average haircut but a very less-than-average sense of humour. As he prepared for a rare interview with Bill Gates, to be broadcast tonight, Jeremy Paxman discovers that the world's richest man is not good at small talk.
EVERY important man arrives with his entourage. In the case of the world's richest man, the claque is quietly busy and has only one focus: getting a photocopy of a list of the "most important men in Britain".
The word that "Bill needs the photocopy" comes as the man himself is en route to the BBC studios for his interview with me, after seeing the Prime Minister. The list, from a recent newspaper survey, ranks Bill Gates at No. 2, just below his Downing Street host.
Bill, when he arrives, will deny this importance. He will claim that he has no power. And, therefore, no responsibility for the fact that since 90 per cent of the world's computers run on his software, he is facilitating the production of pornography, incitements to racial hatred, and all the other tawdry misuses of the Internet.
Bill is on his way. He will arrive at the studio, to be hustled through by earpiece-wearing security men. Ever since an anarchist put a pie in his face, Bill has had to think about his security.
How he came to be a hate figure seems genuinely to baffle him. Plough through the endless screeds about Bill Gates and the word that leaps out time and again is "ubernerd". Gates is a geek who 1got lucky. And rich.
It won't really do as an explanation. Certainly, he's a nerd. Thirty years ago, how many other 12-year-olds would have become computer obsessives on the back of a device bought with the proceeds of a jumble sale held at his school ?
And obviously, he was interested in money. Having affected an indifference to his wealth in our interview, he let drop casually that he had made "thousands of dollars" out of programming computers while still at high school. Obviously, he likes money. Who wouldn't, if they were worth something in excess of $80 billion ?
Nowadays the Internet is full of "I hate Bill Gates" Web sites. On one, you click your mouse to punch his face. Another keeps a running tally of his wealth as it accumulates. Right now he is said to he worth more than 135 nations, including Ireland and New Zealand.
And now here comes the man himself. He is of average height, average weight, in an average suit, with average glasses and an average haircut. He had a monogrammed shirt (WHG), but he is certainly not spending his wealth on his appearance. If you didn't know what he looked like, Bill Gates could easily be the last person in his entourage with whom you would shake hands.
He sits down in the make-up chair. Would he like some eye definition, his hair brushed? To all inquiries he is equally noncommittal. He genuinely doesn't seem to care what he looks like.
His staff are chatty and solicitous, but they are not relaxed. Bill doesn't do media interviews often and they worry about how he will come across. I had watched one of his previous encounters - with the American Barbara Waiters - and could see their point. Bill is an awkward, retiring fellow and doesn't do small talk. The moment when she asked him to sing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star was the moment he should have grabbed her lacquered helmet of hair and thrust it through the nearest window.
But he didn't, he sat there and, in his reedy voice, sung for her. But back to the small talk, which Bill doesn't do. I make two or three attempts to engage him in conversation as he sits in front of the mirror. I get nowhere. He has logged off.
Bill Gates is this remote most of the time, I guess. But why shouldn't he be? He may be listed as the second most powerful man in Britain, but he's not a politician with a lot of gaudy promises to hawk around.
And that, I suppose, is the difficulty. For all his modesty, Bill Gates is an immensely influential figure. Because nine out of 10 personal computers use his software, the decisions his company makes determine the shape of the Information Age. That is why Tony Blair craves an hour of Bill's time.
When I put this to Gates, he seems genuinely nonplussed and produces a well-rehearsed argument. In essence, it is that he exists in a higly competitive industry and that he is, anyway, not the publisher of anything much. If we were talking newspapers, he would be the newsprint manufacturer. Perhaps.
But you cannot gainsay his achievement. To have had the vision of "a computer on every desk and in every home" was remarkable. To have recognised that what would matter was not who built the boxes, but who designed the software to make them ran, was just as remarkable.
It has made him fabulously rich and, whatever he says, given him great power. As the wealth has accrued, he has turned from Caped Crusader into Corporate Monster. The animosity is, staggering: in South Park The Movie, his cartoon representation gets shot. A friend who saw the film recently was amazed to hear the audience cheering their approval.
I found it quite impossible to reconcile this public Gates with the awkward, shy, nasal character I found seated opposite me. He claimed, quite plausibly, not even to have heard a Bill Gates joke. When I told him one, the audience laughed, but he looked blank. He ought to add a Fool to his court. (C) Sunday Telegraph Limited, 17.10.99
Slashdot Mirror
Technically, the isolated genes are patented as new compositions of matter.
If you have discovered that the presence of those specific numbers have made the paper uniquely useful for some purpose which was previously quite unknown, what is so unreasonable about allowing it to be patentable product ?
Patenting an algorithm does not reflect the work of a company
Arithmetic Coding reflected the brilliance and hard work of Rissanen. If IBM had the good sense to employ him and support his work, don't they deserve the reward on that investment ? And won't it encourage other companies to maintain fundamental research ?
Patents do encourage investment. And patents do reduce trade secrecy. The important thing is to reward only what is genuinely new and non-trivial, and what is identifiably useful.
No. Absolutely not.
With trade secrets nobody can know about your process. Nobody can research around it. Nobody can be inspired by it to extend the art still further.
Encouraging trade secrets would be like going back to mediaeval guilds, or the ignorance of the dark ages.
If you can establish that such a "product" has a practical use -- because you have established what the gene does -- then by law the USPTO must grant your application.
One question is whether the law should be changed to specifically make unpatentable the unnatural physical expression of natural DNA sequences. But encouraging Congress to micromanage what is and is not patentable might not be desirable; or easy; or even constitutional.
I was thinking about fully approved patents rather than jrg's very important post (score it up!) about provisional patent applications.
I do hope he's right about the very high threshold for proving utility, because exactly as he says: this is what costs the time and the money (and the blood, sweat and tears) now.
To discover the make-up of a protein, with a sequence of a previously unknown type, which blocks incoming self-destruct signals inside the cell, and then to prove beyond doubt that this is what the sequence does, as jrg's team did -- that seems to me a lot more impressive than just going through data automatically, and identifying everything that looks like something somebody else has seen before.
Which is why I don't think the latter should be enough even to get provisional pre-emptive patent rights.
This isn't exactly right I think: to take your patent 5,712,381 as an example, it is a product patent for various biochemical substances and modified cells, identified in claims 1 to 24.
As the man from the USPTO says, having shown one use,
4.Once a product is patented, that patent extends to any use, even those that have not been disclosed in the patent. A future non-obvious method of using that product may be patentable, but the first patent will be dominant and a license for the use of the product may be required.
So if another company finds a different use for these products, they have to negotiate a licence from you.
I should have checked out the full text on the USPTO, instead of just the claims on the IBM server. (The USPTO kept crashing on me). Thanks for putting me right.
I checked out the first link and from what little I read, they have identified a novel sequence which is homologous to a known gene family that has some known functions (the prior art). Therefore, the utility of the discovery is clear.
The suggestion is that Celera have been doing only this, filing patents solely based on sequence homology.
http://patent. womplex.ibm.com/details?&pn=US05968742__&s_clms=1# clms
http://patent. womplex.ibm.com/details?&pn=US05962262__&s_clms=1# clms
It would be nice if a real biochemist could confirm it; but it looks to me as if the only genuine new knowledge in the each patent is the sequence information in Claim 1, and an identification that this sequence looks homologous to some other sequence we already know. The remaining claims then reflect the application of standard biochemical techniques, which make the sequence useful.
To be fair, there might be clues in the image pages and the prior art, which I haven't read; but I was struck by the very generic statement in the abstract, "The invention also provides methods for the prevention and treatment of diseases associated with expression of GPI-2h, as well as diagnostic assays". It's not clear (at least to me) that the authors definitely know that any diseases actually are associated with expression of GPI-2h.
This is from a pull-together of summaries by Science Week on gene patenting stories. It is no longer on their site, but is cached on google at
htt p://www.google.com/search?q=cache:9485790&dq=cache :scienceweek.com/arch2.htm
The pull-together also includes several other summaries of on-topic stories.
The original article was in Science, 1 May 98 280:689, by John J. Doll (US Government), Director of Biotechnology Examination at the US Patent and Trademark Office
ON THE ADVANTAGES OF DNA PATENTING
In the international community of molecular biologists, a debate has been underway for some time concerning the patenting of DNA. Now John J. Doll (US Government), Director of Biotechnology Examination at the US Patent and Trademark Office presents the following points concerning this issue:
QY: John J. Doll, Technology Center 1600, USPTO, Washington, DC 20231 US.
(Science 1 May 98 280:689) (Science-Week 22 May 98)
For a contrary view, this position paper from the American Society of Human Genetics, on the earlier issue of expressed sequence tags is worth reading:
http://www.faseb.org/genetics/ ashg/policy/pol-08.htm
In practice overseas embassies etc have Faraday rooms -- the entire windowless room is shielded with copper.
Can we trust hardware crypto chips just by validating enough output sequences against software implementations; or would it be possible to hide a trigger in such a chip to switch it into an 'unsafe' mode ?
According to the Register, the i820 has fundamental problems.
"The failures are not just poor board design, some serious theoretical issues are involved -- resonance being the key one. Buses are running into quarter and half wavelength resonance effects which cause voltage margin and timing margin violations. No re-engineering of the drivers, board, or receivers will fix this problem with three RIMM systems."
AMD intros $666 700MHz Athlon, cuts prices (The Register)
http://books.whsmithonline.co.uk/frames.asp?pagede f=/ser/serdsp.asp&shop =4085&isbn=0099736411&DB=220
Hi! I'm Jenny your personal librarian.
What ??? Oh, please !
Sorry, people, it's back to Amazon.
http://shop.bn.com/bo oksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0452271401
But nobody shops at B&N, so you don't get all the nice reviews
http://www.uk.bol.com/cec/cstage?eccookie=kUngr LzGGXHSrYspHiNGi%2Bmyp02TaMNTiKFbcCjZz3gHWg1yZt1eQ wjJQJ88VIdhiTGXVlWVOvg54aZw2u%2BUvbr0iYD LQQA92N1Sma6R7xKHnjfzBq9VVILA8dj0dSHkIyUOHxtH0rYrI pk1B4Gz6kMzJ4zJIJTZ&ecaction=bolrate&a=i &t=i&r=1&m=i&c=&d=bolprditmview&template=bolproduc tview.uk.htm&PrdId=501452579
And I'm not sure Bertelsmann have sussed the idea of links yet.
Or Philip Kerr's interesting novel "A Philosophical Investigation" (1992) for a thought about some of the consequences:
http://www.am azon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0452271401/002-5356185-8 882646
http://www.wired.com/new s/news/technology/story/22223.html
There's a longer and very interesting article on Dr Damasio's research in this week's edition of the Economist.
But unfortunately it's not one of the ones they're giving away free on the website, so here are a few paragraphs cut down from the full article. If any of the Economist science writers are out there (I know you sometimes read Slashdot), thanks for a fascinating piece!
"The two patients, now in their early 20s, had survived similar injuries to their pre-frontal cortexes during infancy... Both had lived lonely maladjusted lives with no plans for the future and unfortunate personal habits such as compulsive lying, petty theft, poor hygiene, irregular sex lives, and indifference to their resulting children
"In the set of tests psychologists have dreamt up to quantify moral health, their performance clearly bespoke an ignorance of the conceptual foundations of morality... The patients' responses to these tests were about the same as those that would have been expected from a ten-year-old child: that is, they appeared to be motivated exclusively by a desire to avoid personal punishment [ignoring any wider moral implications]. This degree of pathology is significantly more serious than those found in those who suffer brain damage as adults.
Also, the two "seemed never to have learnt any of the basic moral rules that cover social interaction, apparently because their early traumas prevented them from ever acquiring this sort of information... to all appearances, they suffer from little or no sense of remorse at their behaviour.
"Neurobiologists have long known that the brain can compensate for some sorts of injury that are sustained during the course of its development. It does this by recruiting new sets of nerve cells to substitute for those that have been damaged or destroyed. The pre-frontal cortex, however, seems to be unable to repair itself adequately in this way, leaving infant victims with no means of learning right from wrong during the relevant period of their growth.
"The solution, Dr Damasio postulates, may lie in helping that part of the brain to annex more nerve cells, by carefully adjusting levels of the relevant neurotransmitters..."
Thus, even if Dr Gould and Dr Gross are right that there are always new neurons migrating to the pre-frontal cortex, it seems they can't always be integrated.
Question: isn't this exactly the interface on some dealers' screens for securities and foreign exchange trading ?
One of the options the dealer has is to get a list of all the share parcels being bid or offered at the current instant, any of which he/she can accept with a single click. The patent's main claims are written so broadly (with essentially no reference to the internet, except later as a possible implementation), it seems to me that should blow them away.
Can anyone confirm the existence of such a system, or (better) offer B&N a printed user manual ?
Mozilla is very definitely short on documentation -- anything that generates good explanations of the code (and well-grounded design critiques too) must be a good thing.
Plus I really like the idea of Moz becoming a standard reference for academic analysis, and for academic teaching. This kind of scrutiny can only help Mozilla; and what better than possibly the world's most ambitious open-source end-user application to give students an idea of the realities of a real software project ?
AOL/Netscape must have spent several millions so far on developer salaries for Mozilla. Seems to me that putting up x hundred dollars for first, second and third prizes in contests like this (and, I hope, similar in future) would be a very cost-effective way to build awareness and interest in their code.
To be fair, 2.2.13 is intended to be a bit more than just a routine kernel release. There have been important small and not-so-small problems with all of the 2.2.* kernels so far.
2.2.13 is Alan's attempt to make a really bulletproof clean-up of the 2.2.* series so far, and to get it out as a definitive stable reference kernel, before he allows in quite a lot of exciting but more risky new stuff.
2.2.13 is intended as a kernel that distributions should go on including (at least as an option) long after 14,15,16,17 etc are all released and obsolete.
That's why it has taken a lot longer than most releases to go final, and why it is a worthy news item.
To do quantum computing and quantum communication you have to have perfect control of the system, and prevent absolutely any interactions between it and its environment.
As a theoretical excercise quantum algorithms are certainly fascinating; but I suspect that in reality a quantum computer with enough completely isolated and non-interacting 'gates' to run the factorisation algorithm is unlikely ever to be achieved.
Similarly, quantum communication might work along optical fibres or tightly focussed laser beams, but I think you would have a lot of problems trying to detect the very subtle single-photon correlations using wireless against a noisy RF background.
But I'd be delighted to be proved wrong on either of the above!
http://www.law.emory.ed u/fedcircuit/july98/96-1327.wpd.html
Just about any computer program that does anything useful and novel can now be patented, if the data it works on has some identifiable meaning in the real world.
The judgment also blew away a previous assumption that 'business methods' were somehow unpatentable.
IMHO this does make rather more sense than the (very confused?) European law I described above. On the other hand, the European patent offices are allegedly much better resourced than the US PTO; perhaps this is also part of the problem
The European test is still close to this: a computer program "as such" is considered just to be a method for performing a "mental act", and is therefore specifically excluded from patentability. However, under guidelines the EPO brought in in 1985, computer programs are patentable if they have a "technical effect".
For more information, see:
http://www.ladas.com/GUIDE S/COMPUTER/Computer.EPOJP.html
and
http://www.jurisdiction.com/epc.htm
which includes the text of the section of the law in question.
This had led to some truly classic decisions, a real must for connoisseurs of the mind-numbingly pedantic and the bizarre:
- A claim for an image processing system was disallowed because the wording, "A method of digitally filtering data including scanning a data array with masks...", specified no physical entity that the data represented, so was held to be a purely mental act; an amended version, "A method of digitally processing images in the form of a 2D array..." would have been okay, except they then discovered it wasn't novel.
- Word processing, according to the Board, is just a series of mental acts. This lacks technical significance and is therefore not patentable. Since there is no technical effect, this also rules out any methods for spell-checking, or for contextually identifying incorrect homophones ('there' instead of 'their')
- But an IBM invention, to translate printer control codes into different control codes for a different system, was patentable, because it related to the control of machinery (a clear technical effect).
Even friends of mine studying to be lawyers are bemused... Meanwhile, to make it more complicated, the UK patent courts reckon that the new EPO guidelines (brought in under political pressure) are themselves incorrect; that its decisions on the subject are wrong; and so won't recognise them as proper case-law.I also found a one-day seminar with most of the main players, held a couple of years ago: /frmain.html
http://www.patent.gov.uk/softpat/en
but the couple of speakers I read seemed mostly to be congratulating themselves on how sensible they were.
Strange world, patent law...
Talk to me, Bill
He's got an average suit,an average haircut but a very less-than-average sense of humour. As he prepared for a rare interview with Bill Gates, to be broadcast tonight, Jeremy Paxman discovers that the world's richest man is not good at small talk.
EVERY important man arrives with his entourage. In the case of the world's richest man, the claque is quietly busy and has only one focus: getting a photocopy of a list of the "most important men in Britain".
The word that "Bill needs the photocopy" comes as the man himself is en route to the BBC studios for his interview with me, after seeing the Prime Minister. The list, from a recent newspaper survey, ranks Bill Gates at No. 2, just below his Downing Street host.
Bill, when he arrives, will deny this importance. He will claim that he has no power. And, therefore, no responsibility for the fact that since 90 per cent of the world's computers run on his software, he is facilitating the production of pornography, incitements to racial hatred, and all the other tawdry misuses of the Internet.
Bill is on his way. He will arrive at the studio, to be hustled through by earpiece-wearing security men. Ever since an anarchist put a pie in his face, Bill has had to think about his security.
How he came to be a hate figure seems genuinely to baffle him. Plough through the endless screeds about Bill Gates and the word that leaps out time and again is "ubernerd". Gates is a geek who 1got lucky. And rich.
It won't really do as an explanation. Certainly, he's a nerd. Thirty years ago, how many other 12-year-olds would have become computer obsessives on the back of a device bought with the proceeds of a jumble sale held at his school ?
And obviously, he was interested in money. Having affected an indifference to his wealth in our interview, he let drop casually that he had made "thousands of dollars" out of programming computers while still at high school. Obviously, he likes money. Who wouldn't, if they were worth something in excess of $80 billion ?
Nowadays the Internet is full of "I hate Bill Gates" Web sites. On one, you click your mouse to punch his face. Another keeps a running tally of his wealth as it accumulates. Right now he is said to he worth more than 135 nations, including Ireland and New Zealand.
And now here comes the man himself. He is of average height, average weight, in an average suit, with average glasses and an average haircut. He had a monogrammed shirt (WHG), but he is certainly not spending his wealth on his appearance. If you didn't know what he looked like, Bill Gates could easily be the last person in his entourage with whom you would shake hands.
He sits down in the make-up chair. Would he like some eye definition, his hair brushed? To all inquiries he is equally noncommittal. He genuinely doesn't seem to care what he looks like.
His staff are chatty and solicitous, but they are not relaxed. Bill doesn't do media interviews often and they worry about how he will come across. I had watched one of his previous encounters - with the American Barbara Waiters - and could see their point. Bill is an awkward, retiring fellow and doesn't do small talk. The moment when she asked him to sing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star was the moment he should have grabbed her lacquered helmet of hair and thrust it through the nearest window.
But he didn't, he sat there and, in his reedy voice, sung for her. But back to the small talk, which Bill doesn't do. I make two or three attempts to engage him in conversation as he sits in front of the mirror. I get nowhere. He has logged off.
Bill Gates is this remote most of the time, I guess. But why shouldn't he be? He may be listed as the second most powerful man in Britain, but he's not a politician with a lot of gaudy promises to hawk around.
And that, I suppose, is the difficulty. For all his modesty, Bill Gates is an immensely influential figure. Because nine out of 10 personal computers use his software, the decisions his company makes determine the shape of the Information Age. That is why Tony Blair craves an hour of Bill's time.
When I put this to Gates, he seems genuinely nonplussed and produces a well-rehearsed argument. In essence, it is that he exists in a higly competitive industry and that he is, anyway, not the publisher of anything much. If we were talking newspapers, he would be the newsprint manufacturer. Perhaps.
But you cannot gainsay his achievement. To have had the vision of "a computer on every desk and in every home" was remarkable. To have recognised that what would matter was not who built the boxes, but who designed the software to make them ran, was just as remarkable.
It has made him fabulously rich and, whatever he says, given him great power. As the wealth has accrued, he has turned from Caped Crusader into Corporate Monster. The animosity is, staggering: in South Park The Movie, his cartoon representation gets shot. A friend who saw the film recently was amazed to hear the audience cheering their approval.
I found it quite impossible to reconcile this public Gates with the awkward, shy, nasal character I found seated opposite me. He claimed, quite plausibly, not even to have heard a Bill Gates joke. When I told him one, the audience laughed, but he looked blank. He ought to add a Fool to his court. (C) Sunday Telegraph Limited, 17.10.99