That wasn't a mistake to "prove their own preconceptions". It simply was a flawed methodology. And what happened? Later analysis revealed the flaw and a better experiment was proposed. That's how it is done, as nobody's perfect. Science. It works, bitches!
he primary motivation of a lot of the scientific journals is financial gain. In fact the entire publishing system is an antiquated remnant of the last 2 centuries and doesn't belong in an Internet connected world, yet publication is still the primary tool by which a scientist's work gets recognized.
Let's not go there, lest i shall rant all evening. I am due for a pub-crawl, don't wanna miss it...
Short version of the evil socialist scientists rant.. I do government funded research, then have to PAY a private enterprise to publish my data, peer review is done for free by other scientist, and then I have to PAY again for reprints and the money-grubbbing bastards charge through the nose for the subscription, too, so that the local library can't even afford the online access to the journal I published in. Forjudge the bastards!! Freedom for scientific publication! To the sun, to freedom, comrades!
More seriously, the major flaw with the current publication system, is that you need positive data to even have a chance to publish. I always wished for a kind of "Journal of Negative Results", which basically gives you summaries on "see, we tried this, it did NOT work"-attempts. All the valuable work that did not work out as expected has no chance of getting published today, forcing you to repeat countless mistakes, because you have no chance of reading about previous failures.
Aye, I think I go with your interpretation here. I personally would confess to "questionable practices" of that kind - not thoroughly testing each and every factor that might have influenced your experiment, because it is "common knowledge" that the factors in question won't matter. Deadlines looming ahead, supervisor chewing your ass, you take the shortcut. No research is perfect. In hindsight you always find some things that you should have tested to be really sure, but real life is not perfect. I'd file that 33.7% under "maybe questionable, but not malicious". Scientist tend to be overly critical of themselves. I personally could not state that my research was alway impeccable and perfect with a straight face. Who could? We are humans, too.
I respectfully disagree. Falsified data has real world effects. Sooner or later, someone will try to reproduce or modify your experiment, fail to do so and properly mock you at the next conference. Seen it happen, no pretty sight. Science is mostly self-correcting, although some crap can always fall through the system and stick around a long time until it is corrected.
True, giving a certain "spin" to you interpretation of correctly presented data is common - but not necessarily a terrible thing. As you said, it it will be scrutinizied and filed in the big "misinterpretation" folder. As for active misconduct - it probably happens more often than reported, but thankfully gets caught internally most of the time before it is published. I can only offer anecdotal evidence, but while doing my PhD work, one of my colleagues tried to get away with made-up results. Head of department smelled a rat, checked the data and promptly fired the guy without hesitation. PhD student one day, unemployed with revoked visum the next day....
Wrong again. We equip the whales with the lens-thingy, sonar gets bent around them, they won't get hurt, the environmentalists are happy. Then we equip them with lasers. Stealthed killer whales with friggin' lasers, dude. World domination, here I come. Muhahhahahahhaaaaa.....
Slide rules do indeed rock. My father taught me how to work them after he repeatedly outclassed me in slide rule vs. pocket calculator fights. I have become a regular collector now - got a 40 cm long monstrosity with more functions than I could possibly ever need right on my desk at work.
And it *is* precisely engineered. There's always a tradeoff between cost and durability, and shopping at Walmart means strongly favoring low cost. It's as sturdy as possible for its price; the problem is that you didn't pay enough.
Ah... the glory of the free market in combination with technological progress: The ability to engineer to exactly that sweet level of crappiness that will just barely be tolerated by the customer.
You are most certainly right that this is more efficient in economical terms, but at times I mourn the loss of good old overengineering.
The OP was probably referring to the Polywell concept developed by Bussard, which indeed sounds quite interesting. Research is going on after Bussard's death, but you don't hear much due to most of it being military funded.
You think that anyone on slashdot of all sites, where reading the summary is considered to be unnecessary, not to speak of TFA, would try to read actual claims and think about them? Nah, we rather spam "Lol, obivous!!!one!!"-posts round here.
Seriously, the level of discussion about anything patent related on slashdot is abysmal. Oh, and the mods are on crack again, too. "Funny"? Come on...
Well, Zordak, i am a patent engineer (although not in the US) myself, and I applaud your attempts to inject some reason into such discussions, but I fear you are fighting a hopeless fight there.
But what if you build the time machine after the patent expires and travel back in time to the present day? I think my head is going to explode.
Now this would, by extension, be covered by Art. 5ter of the Paris Agreement. The article basically states that if you are living in country A, where some thing is not patented, and use the thing on a ship, vehicle or airplane, your ship, vehicle or airplane is allowed to operate temporarily in country B, where the thing is patented, without violating the patent.
It should be possible to build a case arguing the same exception for time machines. (Disclaimer: IANYL. This is not legal advice. No Laws of Physics in general and Laws of Thermodynamics or Relativity in particular were violated while writing this post. Seriously.)
Isotope sorting is done large-scale for carbon. I used to work in NMR-spectroscopy, where we used 13C-labelled proteins. The 13C-glucose for their biosynthesis is commercially available, albeit not exactly cheap. As far as I remember, the separation is done by cryogenic distillation of CO2 in some huge-ass columns.
The patent in question has been filed and published. It has not been granted though. Every piece of nonsense will be published whether the patent will be issued or not, unless it is retracted before publication date. So, at least this one is not an example of the USPTO failing.
That would be cool...they would basically be "Pre-Brined" for you to throw them on the smoker!!
Seriously, I am advocating cell-culture based meat fresh from the vat for years. Imagine the possibilities - growing your beef in teriyaki-flavoured culture medium, marinating it for weeks...
Don't get me wrong - I am not saying your idea is without merit. You raised an interesting point that needs more thought.
On the topic of obviousness: Yes, our definitions vary. "obvious" and "inventive" are technical terms in patent law that differ from what you might expect. When you publish a problem to be solved, and someone comes up with the same solution as the applicant, I simply cannot prima facie state that this solution is obvious. The one person that came up with it could very well still have put a lot of creativity into it and thereby simply invented it a second time. Now, if 10, 50, 100 people came up with the idea, this would be a pretty good hint at obviousness. If you want to make this work, you need a robust metric to quantify the contents of the public responses.
On the topic of increasing staff at the USPTO: I am with you that this can't be the be-all-end-all solution. The systems is indeed in need of a reform. Again, I'd like to point you to Europe. The European Patent Agreement seems to work way better than US law in this regard. We have some US clients here that try to get their US patents approved at the EPO. I usually advise them to just give up if they bring me something utterly obvious or a pure business method or software patent. If they instruct me to try it, it most often gets shot down by the EPO, or I have to seriously butcher it to get to one valid claim. In my opinion, the european system works quite well - although it has its shortcomings, too. Less trolling, too, as most patent cases are dealt with by specialiced courts with technical judges - 2 out of 3 judges of a senate ruling over a case hold a science or engineering degree, the other one a law degree. Makes it hard to bullshit them on technical matters...
Hope that clarified my position a bit. Feel free to drop me a line on the weekend if you want to discuss this further. Gotta wrap my head around some decidedly non-obvious application now...
If you want to go that way, you gotta publish the underlying technical problem of the invention, not the claim - the claim already contains the solution.
However, in some cases, the major inventive step is contained in finding the problem, while the solution is rather trivial. In some cases, everyone skilled in the art failed to acknowledge that there even is a problem to be solved. Your approach wouldn't work there.
Another problem is that if the public would submit a solution within the set time frame - it still might very well be inventive. I don't see how your method can weed out the obvious ones without generating too much false negatives.
IMO, the solution is more simple. Increase staff at the USPTO. Reform your system to something more similar to the European one. I am a patent attorney in Europe, and we don't have half the problem with trivial patents and patent trolling like you guys over there.
If there only is a hint of doubt about the novelty of the patent in question, why not simply hire a skilled patent attorney and have it shot down by a pro? In most cases that might even be cheaper than 50k.
If there is no indication that the patent in question is new or non-obvious, well... then this is some weird kind of inverse patent trolling.
Exactly what would it take today, right now, for you to be convinced that a person claiming to be God, such as Jesus Christ did, really is telling the truth and cause you to worship him as God?
Encoding a binary message in the cosmic background radiation would do the trick for me. Anyone advanced enough to perform that thing at least holds powers indistinguishable from divine ones.
Slashdot Mirror
That wasn't a mistake to "prove their own preconceptions". It simply was a flawed methodology. And what happened? Later analysis revealed the flaw and a better experiment was proposed. That's how it is done, as nobody's perfect. Science. It works, bitches!
he primary motivation of a lot of the scientific journals is financial gain. In fact the entire publishing system is an antiquated remnant of the last 2 centuries and doesn't belong in an Internet connected world, yet publication is still the primary tool by which a scientist's work gets recognized.
Let's not go there, lest i shall rant all evening. I am due for a pub-crawl, don't wanna miss it...
Short version of the evil socialist scientists rant.. I do government funded research, then have to PAY a private enterprise to publish my data, peer review is done for free by other scientist, and then I have to PAY again for reprints and the money-grubbbing bastards charge through the nose for the subscription, too, so that the local library can't even afford the online access to the journal I published in. Forjudge the bastards!! Freedom for scientific publication! To the sun, to freedom, comrades!
More seriously, the major flaw with the current publication system, is that you need positive data to even have a chance to publish. I always wished for a kind of "Journal of Negative Results", which basically gives you summaries on "see, we tried this, it did NOT work"-attempts. All the valuable work that did not work out as expected has no chance of getting published today, forcing you to repeat countless mistakes, because you have no chance of reading about previous failures.
Aye, I think I go with your interpretation here. I personally would confess to "questionable practices" of that kind - not thoroughly testing each and every factor that might have influenced your experiment, because it is "common knowledge" that the factors in question won't matter. Deadlines looming ahead, supervisor chewing your ass, you take the shortcut. No research is perfect. In hindsight you always find some things that you should have tested to be really sure, but real life is not perfect. I'd file that 33.7% under "maybe questionable, but not malicious". Scientist tend to be overly critical of themselves. I personally could not state that my research was alway impeccable and perfect with a straight face. Who could? We are humans, too.
I respectfully disagree. Falsified data has real world effects. Sooner or later, someone will try to reproduce or modify your experiment, fail to do so and properly mock you at the next conference. Seen it happen, no pretty sight. Science is mostly self-correcting, although some crap can always fall through the system and stick around a long time until it is corrected.
True, giving a certain "spin" to you interpretation of correctly presented data is common - but not necessarily a terrible thing. As you said, it it will be scrutinizied and filed in the big "misinterpretation" folder. As for active misconduct - it probably happens more often than reported, but thankfully gets caught internally most of the time before it is published. I can only offer anecdotal evidence, but while doing my PhD work, one of my colleagues tried to get away with made-up results. Head of department smelled a rat, checked the data and promptly fired the guy without hesitation. PhD student one day, unemployed with revoked visum the next day....
Wrong again. We equip the whales with the lens-thingy, sonar gets bent around them, they won't get hurt, the environmentalists are happy. Then we equip them with lasers. Stealthed killer whales with friggin' lasers, dude. World domination, here I come. Muhahhahahahhaaaaa.....
Slide rules do indeed rock. My father taught me how to work them after he repeatedly outclassed me in slide rule vs. pocket calculator fights. I have become a regular collector now - got a 40 cm long monstrosity with more functions than I could possibly ever need right on my desk at work.
And it *is* precisely engineered. There's always a tradeoff between cost and durability, and shopping at Walmart means strongly favoring low cost. It's as sturdy as possible for its price; the problem is that you didn't pay enough.
Ah... the glory of the free market in combination with technological progress: The ability to engineer to exactly that sweet level of crappiness that will just barely be tolerated by the customer.
You are most certainly right that this is more efficient in economical terms, but at times I mourn the loss of good old overengineering.
The OP was probably referring to the Polywell concept developed by Bussard, which indeed sounds quite interesting. Research is going on after Bussard's death, but you don't hear much due to most of it being military funded.
The question is, does such a device somewhat negate the values a Buddhist would stand for?"
Mu.
You think that anyone on slashdot of all sites, where reading the summary is considered to be unnecessary, not to speak of TFA, would try to read actual claims and think about them? Nah, we rather spam "Lol, obivous!!!one!!"-posts round here.
Seriously, the level of discussion about anything patent related on slashdot is abysmal. Oh, and the mods are on crack again, too. "Funny"? Come on...
Well, Zordak, i am a patent engineer (although not in the US) myself, and I applaud your attempts to inject some reason into such discussions, but I fear you are fighting a hopeless fight there.
But what if you build the time machine after the patent expires and travel back in time to the present day? I think my head is going to explode.
Now this would, by extension, be covered by Art. 5ter of the Paris Agreement. The article basically states that if you are living in country A, where some thing is not patented, and use the thing on a ship, vehicle or airplane, your ship, vehicle or airplane is allowed to operate temporarily in country B, where the thing is patented, without violating the patent.
It should be possible to build a case arguing the same exception for time machines. (Disclaimer: IANYL. This is not legal advice. No Laws of Physics in general and Laws of Thermodynamics or Relativity in particular were violated while writing this post. Seriously.)
Sorry, you are too late there. Check out the patent.
Isotope sorting is done large-scale for carbon. I used to work in NMR-spectroscopy, where we used 13C-labelled proteins. The 13C-glucose for their biosynthesis is commercially available, albeit not exactly cheap. As far as I remember, the separation is done by cryogenic distillation of CO2 in some huge-ass columns.
The stuff you are smoking... Can I have some?
Hail to the Sun God,
He sure is a Fun God!
Ra! Ra! Ra!
£(ï¾YÐ"ï¾Y
APL doesn't count...
This, friends, is all a cover-up. Plausible deniability and all. "Disorienting crocs". Sure.
If it looks like a croc and walks like a croc, it is abundantly clear that it is just another tool of the concspiracy!
The patent in question has been filed and published. It has not been granted though.
Every piece of nonsense will be published whether the patent will be issued or not, unless it is retracted before publication date. So, at least this one is not an example of the USPTO failing.
That would be cool...they would basically be "Pre-Brined" for you to throw them on the smoker!!
Seriously, I am advocating cell-culture based meat fresh from the vat for years. Imagine the possibilities - growing your beef in teriyaki-flavoured culture medium, marinating it for weeks...
Don't get me wrong - I am not saying your idea is without merit. You raised an interesting point that needs more thought.
On the topic of obviousness: Yes, our definitions vary. "obvious" and "inventive" are technical terms in patent law that differ from what you might expect. When you publish a problem to be solved, and someone comes up with the same solution as the applicant, I simply cannot prima facie state that this solution is obvious. The one person that came up with it could very well still have put a lot of creativity into it and thereby simply invented it a second time.
Now, if 10, 50, 100 people came up with the idea, this would be a pretty good hint at obviousness. If you want to make this work, you need a robust metric to quantify the contents of the public responses.
On the topic of increasing staff at the USPTO: I am with you that this can't be the be-all-end-all solution. The systems is indeed in need of a reform. Again, I'd like to point you to Europe. The European Patent Agreement seems to work way better than US law in this regard. We have some US clients here that try to get their US patents approved at the EPO. I usually advise them to just give up if they bring me something utterly obvious or a pure business method or software patent. If they instruct me to try it, it most often gets shot down by the EPO, or I have to seriously butcher it to get to one valid claim. In my opinion, the european system works quite well - although it has its shortcomings, too. Less trolling, too, as most patent cases are dealt with by specialiced courts with technical judges - 2 out of 3 judges of a senate ruling over a case hold a science or engineering degree, the other one a law degree. Makes it hard to bullshit them on technical matters...
Hope that clarified my position a bit. Feel free to drop me a line on the weekend if you want to discuss this further. Gotta wrap my head around some decidedly non-obvious application now...
ACK!
If you want to go that way, you gotta publish the underlying technical problem of the invention, not the claim - the claim already contains the solution. However, in some cases, the major inventive step is contained in finding the problem, while the solution is rather trivial. In some cases, everyone skilled in the art failed to acknowledge that there even is a problem to be solved. Your approach wouldn't work there. Another problem is that if the public would submit a solution within the set time frame - it still might very well be inventive. I don't see how your method can weed out the obvious ones without generating too much false negatives. IMO, the solution is more simple. Increase staff at the USPTO. Reform your system to something more similar to the European one. I am a patent attorney in Europe, and we don't have half the problem with trivial patents and patent trolling like you guys over there.
If there is no indication that the patent in question is new or non-obvious, well... then this is some weird kind of inverse patent trolling.
And yes. IAA(Patent)L. But not yours.
Exactly what would it take today, right now, for you to be convinced that a person claiming to be God, such as Jesus Christ did, really is telling the truth and cause you to worship him as God?
Encoding a binary message in the cosmic background radiation would do the trick for me. Anyone advanced enough to perform that thing at least holds powers indistinguishable from divine ones.