You're overplaying the occult aspects, I think. The majority of the NSDAP platform was always about appealing to conservative Christian sentiment, a strategy that worked so well because of the cultural memory of the Holy Roman Empire. With the exception of Wewelsburg Castle, which was really more Himmler's fetish than Hitler's, most of the pagan cultural symbology employed by the Nazis was either already adopted by the Christians in the region, or could be interpreted as a means of further strengthening the German cultural identity. It's not that much different from the BNP invoking mediaeval English lore or Confederate separatists in the US invoking the KKK. Otherwise, it wouldn't have worked as well as it did.
It's probably also worth mentioning that Nietzsche's philosophies were (a) so misunderstood by popular culture that by the time Hitler used them it was in direct contradiction of some of his objectives, (b) mostly about self-actualisation and fulfilment, despite using 'Master' and 'Slave' terminology, and (c) only prone to mentioning paganism as a literary crutch, the same way we might casually reference Cupid when talking about Valentine's day. Nietzsche explicitly damns polytheism in The Gay Science, pointing out how convenient it is to blame any impulse on a god.
I get the feeling you watch a lot of the History Channel. Stop doing that.
Which really makes you wonder if there're enough morons out there to justify the work. Or if, alternatively, they plan on skimping on warrants like they did with National Security Letters, and are just going to openly abuse their power this time.
Darn, I really thought I was correcting for a habitual typo there. Then again, that post shifts pronouns wildly, so I might've been more tired than I realised. Curiously, all of the other respondents silently corrected it, so I guess that could've at least been more awkward.
Also, congrats on the +5, Informative for being a stegosaurus. You can now join other stars like MobileTatsu-NJG and his world-famous +5, Informative "I like to lick butts" post.
Or, y'know, they could just use stenography. I'm hoping the FBI logic is "we won't catch everyone, but we'll catch more," which is at least not pathetically Orwellian.
Lobbying, mostly. The barrier to starting a new mobile telco (or even a traditional ISP) is massive, although the limited availability of spectrum is also a problem. If you are not familiar with the concept of lobbying, that is because it is known as corruption in most other countries.
Well, the procedure itself (diagnostic PCR) is common knowledge and widespread. They own the combination of the DNA and the procedure, and when you tally up all of the DNA involved in these kinds of patents, 41% of all (or possibly just protein-coding) genes are covered in some way. The paper gives an example of one diagnostic probe that's only 15 nt long; given that 15 nt is exactly 30 bits, that's equivalent to having exclusive rights to use a ten-digit number as a pattern in a regular expression.
They did invent something, technically. Their patents don't come into effect unless the sequence is extracted into a short fragment of DNA and used as a diagnostic tool.
The "non-obvious" requirement in the context of patents specifically refers to an expert skilled in the art at the time of the discovery, so your example is irrelevant. Once the mutation was identified, it was obvious that it could be used as a diagnostic tool in this way.
To draw a computing analogy, this would be like patenting a single-use program that detects the signature of a single non-polymorphic virus, where the signature is a piece of that virus's code, and then taking out a separate patent for each signature. (Except software is not patentable without a device, so to really do that, you'd need an auto-run USB dongle that scans your system for the same thing.) It's incredibly lame, which is why researchers and clinicians get upset about it.
The fence being ridden is when short pieces of DNA are used as diagnostic tools for diseases. One example highlighted in the paper is a 15-nucleotide sequence that can be used in a PCR assay to determine the presence of a specific breast-cancer-related mutation. While the patent technically only covers this diagnostic use, the reality is that it's a natural piece of the human genome and absolutely could not stand up under scrutiny as non-obvious... In fact, if it wasn't so obvious, they'd have no one to sue, and the patent wouldn't be worth anything to them in the first place.
By "almost everyone" they mean "people in the United States." It was like this in Canada too, but in the metropolitan areas here we've recently had a few new carriers (e.g. Wind and Public Mobile) who are severely undercutting the traditional mobile telcos by not being horrible.
Well, first, I'd think decades, surely, giving MS ample time to screw around; and second, I meant before the puppet companies go under. Caldera/SCO had lost something like 90% of its stock value a year or two before they started their campaign against Linux.
I was worried that I'd missed all of the Pi Day fun. Little did I know that there was a C programmer lurking nearby, waiting to output it as April 15th for display purposes.
I can do better than that: the photo supplied shows what appears to be standard SATA hard drives in no more protection than an anti-static bag. On the second row. Near the top.
It doesn't need to be a hostile takeover for a company selling out to EA to hurt the industry. Valuable IP is disappearing into a bad place either way. Even a bankrupt company going under might be better, if their property is picked up by a friendlier studio/publisher.
And as I said to MojoRilla, everyone was still very excited about the idea behind Spore, and it's pretty definite that it had enough steam that people would be willing to give the premise another shot if a sequel was made. But because of the DRM boycott and the weak reviews, EA's beancounter approach to franchise fostering guarantees it has no hope of occurring. Another company, one that wasn't so far removed from the market, might figure this out and cash in on fixing their mistakes. There are plenty of examples of series developed by smaller studios that only hit it big later on—how many people have played the original Fallout or Civilization?—but innovative ideas have no hope of being risked again once they're under the bootheel of a shambling behemoth like EA.
Even if that's true of all games that have been given EA's kiss of death, the people responsible for them can't refine their work properly because EA will never let there be a Spore 2. Sid Meier's first Civ wasn't exactly the fan favourite that Civ 4 and 5 are.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want something to really get hopping mad about, terminals that can do this have been around for years. Ages, in fact.
Congress, right. Why did I put Bush? Augh. Today is not my day.
I was folding that under (a), but yeah.
You're overplaying the occult aspects, I think. The majority of the NSDAP platform was always about appealing to conservative Christian sentiment, a strategy that worked so well because of the cultural memory of the Holy Roman Empire. With the exception of Wewelsburg Castle, which was really more Himmler's fetish than Hitler's, most of the pagan cultural symbology employed by the Nazis was either already adopted by the Christians in the region, or could be interpreted as a means of further strengthening the German cultural identity. It's not that much different from the BNP invoking mediaeval English lore or Confederate separatists in the US invoking the KKK. Otherwise, it wouldn't have worked as well as it did.
It's probably also worth mentioning that Nietzsche's philosophies were (a) so misunderstood by popular culture that by the time Hitler used them it was in direct contradiction of some of his objectives, (b) mostly about self-actualisation and fulfilment, despite using 'Master' and 'Slave' terminology, and (c) only prone to mentioning paganism as a literary crutch, the same way we might casually reference Cupid when talking about Valentine's day. Nietzsche explicitly damns polytheism in The Gay Science, pointing out how convenient it is to blame any impulse on a god.
I get the feeling you watch a lot of the History Channel. Stop doing that.
USPS might not be so bad in terms of general performance if Bush hadn't been lobbied so hard to nearly destroy it.
Which really makes you wonder if there're enough morons out there to justify the work. Or if, alternatively, they plan on skimping on warrants like they did with National Security Letters, and are just going to openly abuse their power this time.
Darn, I really thought I was correcting for a habitual typo there. Then again, that post shifts pronouns wildly, so I might've been more tired than I realised. Curiously, all of the other respondents silently corrected it, so I guess that could've at least been more awkward.
Also, congrats on the +5, Informative for being a stegosaurus. You can now join other stars like MobileTatsu-NJG and his world-famous +5, Informative "I like to lick butts" post.
Or, y'know, they could just use stenography. I'm hoping the FBI logic is "we won't catch everyone, but we'll catch more," which is at least not pathetically Orwellian.
Lobbying, mostly. The barrier to starting a new mobile telco (or even a traditional ISP) is massive, although the limited availability of spectrum is also a problem. If you are not familiar with the concept of lobbying, that is because it is known as corruption in most other countries.
Well, the procedure itself (diagnostic PCR) is common knowledge and widespread. They own the combination of the DNA and the procedure, and when you tally up all of the DNA involved in these kinds of patents, 41% of all (or possibly just protein-coding) genes are covered in some way. The paper gives an example of one diagnostic probe that's only 15 nt long; given that 15 nt is exactly 30 bits, that's equivalent to having exclusive rights to use a ten-digit number as a pattern in a regular expression.
They did invent something, technically. Their patents don't come into effect unless the sequence is extracted into a short fragment of DNA and used as a diagnostic tool.
The "non-obvious" requirement in the context of patents specifically refers to an expert skilled in the art at the time of the discovery, so your example is irrelevant. Once the mutation was identified, it was obvious that it could be used as a diagnostic tool in this way.
To draw a computing analogy, this would be like patenting a single-use program that detects the signature of a single non-polymorphic virus, where the signature is a piece of that virus's code, and then taking out a separate patent for each signature. (Except software is not patentable without a device, so to really do that, you'd need an auto-run USB dongle that scans your system for the same thing.) It's incredibly lame, which is why researchers and clinicians get upset about it.
The fence being ridden is when short pieces of DNA are used as diagnostic tools for diseases. One example highlighted in the paper is a 15-nucleotide sequence that can be used in a PCR assay to determine the presence of a specific breast-cancer-related mutation. While the patent technically only covers this diagnostic use, the reality is that it's a natural piece of the human genome and absolutely could not stand up under scrutiny as non-obvious... In fact, if it wasn't so obvious, they'd have no one to sue, and the patent wouldn't be worth anything to them in the first place.
By "almost everyone" they mean "people in the United States." It was like this in Canada too, but in the metropolitan areas here we've recently had a few new carriers (e.g. Wind and Public Mobile) who are severely undercutting the traditional mobile telcos by not being horrible.
What if you're the one being trolled, and that was actually the same poster? (Dun, dun, dun....)
Well, first, I'd think decades, surely, giving MS ample time to screw around; and second, I meant before the puppet companies go under. Caldera/SCO had lost something like 90% of its stock value a year or two before they started their campaign against Linux.
Yuck. Kinda makes you wonder how many other companies MS will puppet in the same way before they go under.
Yeah, but only into Koine Greek bytecode, so it's kinda on the fence...
Nine words for you: "If the NSA can do it, so can we!"
Perhaps the "opportunity" Gianato speaks of is co-locating a DHS seeekriiiit data centre.
the biggest disaster ever
Not just one—he was CEO since 2007. That makes him responsible for Spore and everything in between. And a bit before that, probably.
Leave Microsoft's customers out of this!
I was worried that I'd missed all of the Pi Day fun. Little did I know that there was a C programmer lurking nearby, waiting to output it as April 15th for display purposes.
I can do better than that: the photo supplied shows what appears to be standard SATA hard drives in no more protection than an anti-static bag. On the second row. Near the top.
*clunk*
*smash*
It doesn't need to be a hostile takeover for a company selling out to EA to hurt the industry. Valuable IP is disappearing into a bad place either way. Even a bankrupt company going under might be better, if their property is picked up by a friendlier studio/publisher.
And as I said to MojoRilla, everyone was still very excited about the idea behind Spore, and it's pretty definite that it had enough steam that people would be willing to give the premise another shot if a sequel was made. But because of the DRM boycott and the weak reviews, EA's beancounter approach to franchise fostering guarantees it has no hope of occurring. Another company, one that wasn't so far removed from the market, might figure this out and cash in on fixing their mistakes. There are plenty of examples of series developed by smaller studios that only hit it big later on—how many people have played the original Fallout or Civilization?—but innovative ideas have no hope of being risked again once they're under the bootheel of a shambling behemoth like EA.
Even if that's true of all games that have been given EA's kiss of death, the people responsible for them can't refine their work properly because EA will never let there be a Spore 2. Sid Meier's first Civ wasn't exactly the fan favourite that Civ 4 and 5 are.