Lincoln instituted a type of sedition act in the USA, as did FDR.
Both during extremely vicious and protracted national crises. That doesn't justify them in my view, and these acts didn't last, but there was some motivation behind them. Singapore is at peace and their authoritarianism isn't due to any pressing national problem. And most Americans (and most politicians) generally realize these laws are bad and our country shouldn't have ever passed them. So Singapore is at least fifty years behind the curve.
This was true of the Persian empires (Archimenid, Kushan, etc), of Imperial Rome, of all the great Colonial empires of the 17th and 18th centuries, of US expansionism, and even of the expansion of the USSR (or CCCP if you prefer).
I'm not familiar with the Persians, but most of these examples weren't assimilationist. Both the US and the Roman Empire eventually evolved to become truly assimilationist. The USSR's expansionist policy, however, was partly driven by Russian paranoia about foreign invasion, and partly by Stalin's megalomania. Eastern Europe was pretty much immediately colonized after WWII; there was no initial period of peaceful trade. The European colonial empires were trade-driven but the conquest of anyone they encountered was guaranteed, and usually driven by extreme racism. They were never assimilationist either, except to the extent that they co-opted the natives in some cases to help run their colonies. The home nations were little influenced by the foreign conquests, and the colonies maintained an elite of pureblood colonizers.
And in almost all of these cases (Rome and maybe the US excepted), the subjugated nations never reached equal status with the homeland, even after centuries.
The mainland see it of minor importance, gaining points purely in chest beating;
The fact that the chest-beating continues unabated to this day suggests that for the PRC leadership it isn't at all a minor issue. The existence of a prosperous, capitalist, mostly Chinese democracy right off their shores seems to piss them off mightily. The past few decades of Chinese history indicate that the leadership will only permit freedom when it doesn't threaten their continued control of the country. They've shifted from totalitarianism to simple authoritarianism, with the result that they allow some freedoms but will quickly squash any mass movement they can't control. Taiwan, Falun Gong, the Internet...
I should add that I also find the Cuba embargo absurd, and I hate Communists almost as much as Nazis.
The same website also carries overtly anti-Semitic statements, like where he refers to "Jew Greenspan." I'll bet this guy also thinks the Protocols of the Elders of Zion wasn't a forgery. Given his apparent politics, it's no wonder he'd post a story warning of the Yellow Peril. Until I see this story somewhere else, I'll assume he pulled it out of his ass.
card counting and varying your bet amount isn't cheating
Most reasonable people would agree. Casino operators, however, are very adamant that it is cheating, I guess on the grounds that it eliminates pure chance from the equation, and it's cheating to use your brain. Or something. Although they've recently adopted measures to make card counting far more difficult, in the past a skilled enough gambler could exploit the odds (possibly as part of a group) and win big. Casinos don't want any skill involved, just dumb luck - otherwise they'll always be paying out to a few professionals.
Personally, this sort of attitude just makes me really, really want to fuck with them. Another ten years or so and you'll have professional gamblers armed with nanotechnology and remote computers analyzing every move. I can't wait.
Unfortunately, we aren't without that bit, so I don't think the question of when the government might stop has much relevance here.
Yes, but there are other sites that advocate pretty much the same stuff, except not from an Islamist perspective. The Maoist Internationalist Movement comes to mind; their website openly sneers and human rights and defends Stalin's purges. They'd happily put me in front of a firing squad or in a Siberian gulag. Or there's the Committee to Support the Revolution in Peru, diehard Shining Path partisans, whose website is run from Berkeley (where I live).
But are these assholes still online? Yup. Would I have it any other way? Nope. I don't see a point to censoring al Qaeda's web presence (or the Stalinists'); I'd prefer we combat them in meatspace. With napalm, ideally.
I STILL want to know just what the heck is up with Ron Glass's character.
That's seriously weirding me out (I just watched the last half of the series on DVD recently). I had assumed "hey, maybe this guy's a reformed criminal or a veteran", since he seemed a little too handy with guns. And then in the bounty-hunter episode (which I guess was the last on the DVD), the bounty hunter makes an offhand remark to Simon to the effect of "that's not a Shepherd." Very quick and I almost missed it. So he's obviously *still* more than he seems.
At least when IBM or Microsoft or Sun patent something, they have some tangible product they look to implement.
Um. IBM was infamous for filing patents like crazy and then using these to shake down competitors. The worst as called the "fat lines" patent; I think it essentially covered drawing a line twice with a pixel offset. There was a story in Forbes (posted on Slashdot) a few years back about how IBM decided to extort money from Sun for violating the patent. Sun's engineers gave them a lengthy explanation and told them "see, we're not infringing." IBM's lawyers just shrugged and said "We're just going to find something else you're infringing, so you might as well pay us now."
Gates once remarked (back in 1990 or so) that if the patent situation had always been this bad the computing industry would have been stillborn. He also said that Microsoft needed to get patents purely as a defensive measure. As far as I'm aware, despite Microsoft's generally sleazy business practices they've generally been one of the least vicious and exploitative patent holders.
Don't people understand that they can use these analytical type people, the ones who actually want to pursue information, to their advantage?
Ahh, I view it another way. These are B-school applicants, remember? The little shits who couldn't wait till the deadline and tried to exploit the system are the ones who'll be under investigation for securities fraud in another couple of decades. Rules are what make the free market work, and protect us from rapacious execs, sleazy traders, and Marxist revolutionaries. Anyone who can't be bothered to follow the rules ought to stay far away from managing any amount of money.
If you blast the nucleus of an atom with X-Rays of a frequency specific to that type of atom, it will radiate electrons. No other atom will do so, so you can get an exact picture of what is there.
I thought this was particularly cool because it's the exact technique used to determine the majority of new protein structures. I would not have predicted that it would be equally well suited towards a completely different type of imaging, particularly for something so esoteric as ancient manuscripts. (On a side note, I almost ended up studying ancient history and literature but decided to stay in science, and now play with particle accelerators. If I'd known I could do both, my career might have turned out differently.)
archaeologists are wary of anything that can damage an ancient find
The funny thing is, I use a synchrotron regularly to study protein crystals, and we're always freaked out about radiation damage to our proteins. All of our crystals are frozen in liquid nitrogen, and kept cool in a cryojet while collecting data. (At room temperature, crystals fry extremely fast.) I'm curious how they protected the document while doing this study. It wouldn't be hard to burn it, unless they're using extremely short exposure times or a very diffuse beam.
I think that there is a general understanding even here in the US that the sanctions on Cuba are both counterproductive and implimented in such a way as to hurt the generally innocent Cuban civillians.
And this isn't limited to hysterical lefties either. I think Communism is evil and Castro is a thug, but I also think our current policies punish the Cuban people for the crimes of their leader. Frankly, I'd rather we normalize trade relations and allow US citizens to visit. Flood the country with cheap American consumer goods, or let the exiles visit their families, and watch Castro's pathetic little utopia crumble.
(By the way, the apparent success of Cuba's economic system was due in no small part to the massive subsidies it received from the Soviet Union for three decades. They're currently receiving free oil from Venezuela, since Chavez looks up to Castro. There was an immense propaganda value to having a "successful" Marxist state right on America's doorstep - seems to have worked pretty well, judging from some of the idiots here praising Castro.)
those countries which during the cold war associated themselves with the USSR are now further in their transition to democracy than those dictatorships that the US propped up. Sometimes I think that we are our own worst enemy in these regards.
You're right, but this doesn't necessarily mean the USSR did a better job fostering prosperity or democracy. What it really means is that as Communism collapsed, these nations had to find their own way without our "help". Apparently Vietnam is now full of Western companies and has a growing consumer economy. Which means we ended up winning the war after all, and didn't need to kill 50,000 Americans and three million Vietnamese to do it. Fuck.
Ahhh, an excellent demonstration of my point. These cumdumpsters have patented primers used to amplify specific regions of DNA that may be of clinical interest. Here's the trick with primers: you look at the sequence, and pick an optimal primer pair to amplify that sequence via PCR. They need to be specific to a single genomic locus, and have a certain melting temperature. People I work with who do cloning hate primer design.
So, it must be a pretty cool invention, right? WRONG. There are fucking programs that do this; a friend of mine wrote code to design them in bulk. It's just trial and error, and every lab that ever clones anything (which is just about every moelcular biology/clinical biology lab on the planet) does it every fucking week, multiple times. Now that we have genome sequences we can design PCR primers in a matter of seconds, and 24 hours later some company (or an in-house facility) has the primers ready for us. It is not rocket science. It is most certainly not "non-obvious" to anyone who's worked in a lab for any length of time. But since they are, techincally, "novel" and an "invention", they're patentable. Which means that anyone who wants to do anything vaguely commercial with that particular region of DNA needs to shell out $$$$ instead of spending 15 minutes in front of a computer reproducing GTG's IP.
The copyright would protect any annotations, but not the genome itself.
Annotations themselves are facts, and can be reproduced simply by mentioning in a paper that "gene X has been found to be overexpressed in cell line Y." The form in which it appears in the database may be copyrighted, but there is no pre-existing barrier to reporting this in an article. Keeping such information a trade secret under an NDA will prevent it being released into the literature. (Because once it's in the literature, it will end up in someone else's database.)
The form in which a genome appears in a database essentially *is* annotations; the raw genome data is simply a vast assortment of smaller sequences which have been assembled into chromosomes (in Celera's case, the fragments were only a few thousand nucleotides each). The gene sequences cannot be derived without the assembled sequence. And the gene sequences are themselves annotations made with a combination of software packages and existing experimental data. It would be impossible to separate out the "annotations" from the actual useful genome sequence. The sum of the annotations and the raw data yield a database (even simply in the form of a single chromosome sequence) which most certainly is copyrightable in that particular format. You could, theoretically, reproduce the "facts" in their original format, but this would essentially limit you to the individual (and individually useless) fragments. (Which Celera probably didn't even release at the time.)
This still doesn't prevent anyone from reproducing it legally and independently, but any attempt to redistribute any of the database itself would have been legally actionable. Besides, genome sequencing is relatively immature and any results are somewhat subjective, making the distinction between "facts" and annotations blurry.
Secondly, there is the free/open culture within universities that almost punishes commercial ventures
I would not have stated it that way. The real reason is that academics hate to leave anything unpublished. If they're constrained by copyright law or some NDA, they can't tell everyone about the fabulous new work they've been doing - or at the very least, it becomes much more difficult.
I worked in bioinformatics at a university for several years, and much of what we did was take existing databases and analyze them, then publish the results online as our own database of annotations. As part of this, we reproduced much of the original database in modified form - and all we had to do was cite the original authors and describe our methods/sources. If the databases we used had not been public, none of these projects would have happened. In some cases, we had to ignore private databases that we had limited access to because we were not allowed to reproduce any of their data.
This is only cultural to the extent that academia thrives on publications. We're not out to punish anyone from trying to make an honest buck (lots of people here collaborate with or consult for companies), but we literally can't afford, professionally, to limit ourselves in accordance with restrictions on databases. So why pay money for something we can't legally use in the manner to which we're accustomed?
The database that Celera owned was protected as a trade secret.
And under copyright. Anyone else is free to duplicate a private genome database if they're willing to spend millions of dollars on sequencing. However, you couldn't take someone else's proprietary database and redistribute it. I assume the trade secrets were any specific annotations that Celera had made - for instance, you couldn't subscribe and then start blabbing about their annotations, or re-annotating the public database based on theirs.
I wish that were not the case. However, there are many gene patents in existence. The trick is that now you have to show a function for that gene - although bioinformatics is sophisticated (or rather, automated) enough that you can come up with a plausible-sounding function without ever doing benchwork.
What's really being patented is the medical application of these sequences. For instance, Company X discovers that gene Y is overexpressed in cancer Z. They take out a patent on gene Y based on this discovery. That means that no one else can pursue gene Y as a therapeutic target. Moreover, in one case testing for a specific mutation to detect cancer was covered by a patent. This is a very simple piece of labwork being covered, which any competent cancer researcher could have figured out.
The end result is that patents are being awarded for hard work, not for novelty and invention. Throw enough money at a subject, and you'll get data but not necessarily results. Since companies (or academics) can now patent just the data, if someone else gets "lucky" and comes up with an actual result the patent holders can sue the tar out of them if they try to make money off it. (Or even if they don't, as in the case of the breast cancer gene; the company wanted people to pay three times as much for its own testing kit.)
You may soon be able to patent single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which may be involved in differential drug responses. Back when I was in college we had a guest lecturer who was a biotech patent attorney, and he said he though SNPs should definitely be patentable. In any case, there is a world of difference between patenting a cancer drug, and patenting a gene (or a FUCKING POINT MUTATION) that may, in the future, be a drug target.
Since most of the human genome is noncoding, I suspect it will be harder to patent pieces of it. I also suspect that some asshole will try anyway.
Sorry, but there's a reason why people aren't legally considered adults until their 18. There's a reason why there's a drinking age.
The fact that these aren't even the same in the USA should be proof enough that the distinctions we draw based on age are both arbitrary and unfair. Besides, the reason for the drinking age is that the states caved into (unconstitutional) pressure from a crusading, moralizing Transportation Secretary by the name of Liddy Dole. (Not one of the Reagan administration's greater legacies.)
I don't really see an anti-discrimination law as "special rights".
It's "special rights" in the sense that it's one of a limited number of reasons why you can't be fired. You could still be fired because, say, you're a Democrat and your boss loves Bush. Or because you root for the wrong sports team. But not because your boss saw you wearing that pride day button.
I generally don't trust this type of law (a family member nearly got dragged through the coals by spurious complaints about age discrimination). I'd rather just boycott companies that discriminate.
I want that power in the hands of as many people as possible, and I don't want people cut off from that power just because a private company can't improve its bottom line by providing access.
Gee, then why stop at free wireless? Why don't we just put the government into the computer manufacturing business too, so it can give computers away to the poor for free? After all, why should the poor be deprived of these wonderful tools just because Dell won't give them away? What about cell phones? The poor should have those too.
Sorry, but this sort of socialist technological utopianism is ridiculous. You're extrapolating from your own experience with computers to envision ubiquitous Internet as a transformative power, when in fact most people would probably use it for porn and illegal downloads. The real reason cities are rushing to install wireless networks is that they're trying to make themselves attractive to a certain class of people and businesses. In the mean time, the poor have far more to worry about, like a lack of good public schools and health insurance. If the cities are going to try to uplift the working classes, maybe they could start there.
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I think its respectable for a country to punish people for seditious behavior, if done appropriately.
Please tell me you're not American.
Lincoln instituted a type of sedition act in the USA, as did FDR.
Both during extremely vicious and protracted national crises. That doesn't justify them in my view, and these acts didn't last, but there was some motivation behind them. Singapore is at peace and their authoritarianism isn't due to any pressing national problem. And most Americans (and most politicians) generally realize these laws are bad and our country shouldn't have ever passed them. So Singapore is at least fifty years behind the curve.
This was true of the Persian empires (Archimenid, Kushan, etc), of Imperial Rome, of all the great Colonial empires of the 17th and 18th centuries, of US expansionism, and even of the expansion of the USSR (or CCCP if you prefer).
I'm not familiar with the Persians, but most of these examples weren't assimilationist. Both the US and the Roman Empire eventually evolved to become truly assimilationist. The USSR's expansionist policy, however, was partly driven by Russian paranoia about foreign invasion, and partly by Stalin's megalomania. Eastern Europe was pretty much immediately colonized after WWII; there was no initial period of peaceful trade. The European colonial empires were trade-driven but the conquest of anyone they encountered was guaranteed, and usually driven by extreme racism. They were never assimilationist either, except to the extent that they co-opted the natives in some cases to help run their colonies. The home nations were little influenced by the foreign conquests, and the colonies maintained an elite of pureblood colonizers.
And in almost all of these cases (Rome and maybe the US excepted), the subjugated nations never reached equal status with the homeland, even after centuries.
The mainland see it of minor importance, gaining points purely in chest beating;
The fact that the chest-beating continues unabated to this day suggests that for the PRC leadership it isn't at all a minor issue. The existence of a prosperous, capitalist, mostly Chinese democracy right off their shores seems to piss them off mightily. The past few decades of Chinese history indicate that the leadership will only permit freedom when it doesn't threaten their continued control of the country. They've shifted from totalitarianism to simple authoritarianism, with the result that they allow some freedoms but will quickly squash any mass movement they can't control. Taiwan, Falun Gong, the Internet...
I should add that I also find the Cuba embargo absurd, and I hate Communists almost as much as Nazis.
The same website also carries overtly anti-Semitic statements, like where he refers to "Jew Greenspan." I'll bet this guy also thinks the Protocols of the Elders of Zion wasn't a forgery. Given his apparent politics, it's no wonder he'd post a story warning of the Yellow Peril. Until I see this story somewhere else, I'll assume he pulled it out of his ass.
"Thank you," it said, "for making a simple door very happy."
card counting and varying your bet amount isn't cheating
Most reasonable people would agree. Casino operators, however, are very adamant that it is cheating, I guess on the grounds that it eliminates pure chance from the equation, and it's cheating to use your brain. Or something. Although they've recently adopted measures to make card counting far more difficult, in the past a skilled enough gambler could exploit the odds (possibly as part of a group) and win big. Casinos don't want any skill involved, just dumb luck - otherwise they'll always be paying out to a few professionals.
Personally, this sort of attitude just makes me really, really want to fuck with them. Another ten years or so and you'll have professional gamblers armed with nanotechnology and remote computers analyzing every move. I can't wait.
Unfortunately, we aren't without that bit, so I don't think the question of when the government might stop has much relevance here.
Yes, but there are other sites that advocate pretty much the same stuff, except not from an Islamist perspective. The Maoist Internationalist Movement comes to mind; their website openly sneers and human rights and defends Stalin's purges. They'd happily put me in front of a firing squad or in a Siberian gulag. Or there's the Committee to Support the Revolution in Peru, diehard Shining Path partisans, whose website is run from Berkeley (where I live).
But are these assholes still online? Yup. Would I have it any other way? Nope. I don't see a point to censoring al Qaeda's web presence (or the Stalinists'); I'd prefer we combat them in meatspace. With napalm, ideally.
I STILL want to know just what the heck is up with Ron Glass's character.
That's seriously weirding me out (I just watched the last half of the series on DVD recently). I had assumed "hey, maybe this guy's a reformed criminal or a veteran", since he seemed a little too handy with guns. And then in the bounty-hunter episode (which I guess was the last on the DVD), the bounty hunter makes an offhand remark to Simon to the effect of "that's not a Shepherd." Very quick and I almost missed it. So he's obviously *still* more than he seems.
I don't think anything they've done has been ethically wrong.
How about telling Apple that they'd drop Office for Mac (an insanely profitable product) unless Apple made IE the default browser?
It is when people abuse the system by applying for things that are either obvious or developed by someone else that this type of lawsuit occurs.
Yes, now every asshole CS student in the country is going to start patenting any tweak to MS software that they think might possibly be worthwhile.
At least when IBM or Microsoft or Sun patent something, they have some tangible product they look to implement.
Um. IBM was infamous for filing patents like crazy and then using these to shake down competitors. The worst as called the "fat lines" patent; I think it essentially covered drawing a line twice with a pixel offset. There was a story in Forbes (posted on Slashdot) a few years back about how IBM decided to extort money from Sun for violating the patent. Sun's engineers gave them a lengthy explanation and told them "see, we're not infringing." IBM's lawyers just shrugged and said "We're just going to find something else you're infringing, so you might as well pay us now."
Gates once remarked (back in 1990 or so) that if the patent situation had always been this bad the computing industry would have been stillborn. He also said that Microsoft needed to get patents purely as a defensive measure. As far as I'm aware, despite Microsoft's generally sleazy business practices they've generally been one of the least vicious and exploitative patent holders.
Don't people understand that they can use these analytical type people, the ones who actually want to pursue information, to their advantage?
Ahh, I view it another way. These are B-school applicants, remember? The little shits who couldn't wait till the deadline and tried to exploit the system are the ones who'll be under investigation for securities fraud in another couple of decades. Rules are what make the free market work, and protect us from rapacious execs, sleazy traders, and Marxist revolutionaries. Anyone who can't be bothered to follow the rules ought to stay far away from managing any amount of money.
If you blast the nucleus of an atom with X-Rays of a frequency specific to that type of atom, it will radiate electrons. No other atom will do so, so you can get an exact picture of what is there.
I thought this was particularly cool because it's the exact technique used to determine the majority of new protein structures. I would not have predicted that it would be equally well suited towards a completely different type of imaging, particularly for something so esoteric as ancient manuscripts. (On a side note, I almost ended up studying ancient history and literature but decided to stay in science, and now play with particle accelerators. If I'd known I could do both, my career might have turned out differently.)
archaeologists are wary of anything that can damage an ancient find
The funny thing is, I use a synchrotron regularly to study protein crystals, and we're always freaked out about radiation damage to our proteins. All of our crystals are frozen in liquid nitrogen, and kept cool in a cryojet while collecting data. (At room temperature, crystals fry extremely fast.) I'm curious how they protected the document while doing this study. It wouldn't be hard to burn it, unless they're using extremely short exposure times or a very diffuse beam.
I think that there is a general understanding even here in the US that the sanctions on Cuba are both counterproductive and implimented in such a way as to hurt the generally innocent Cuban civillians.
And this isn't limited to hysterical lefties either. I think Communism is evil and Castro is a thug, but I also think our current policies punish the Cuban people for the crimes of their leader. Frankly, I'd rather we normalize trade relations and allow US citizens to visit. Flood the country with cheap American consumer goods, or let the exiles visit their families, and watch Castro's pathetic little utopia crumble.
(By the way, the apparent success of Cuba's economic system was due in no small part to the massive subsidies it received from the Soviet Union for three decades. They're currently receiving free oil from Venezuela, since Chavez looks up to Castro. There was an immense propaganda value to having a "successful" Marxist state right on America's doorstep - seems to have worked pretty well, judging from some of the idiots here praising Castro.)
those countries which during the cold war associated themselves with the USSR are now further in their transition to democracy than those dictatorships that the US propped up. Sometimes I think that we are our own worst enemy in these regards.
You're right, but this doesn't necessarily mean the USSR did a better job fostering prosperity or democracy. What it really means is that as Communism collapsed, these nations had to find their own way without our "help". Apparently Vietnam is now full of Western companies and has a growing consumer economy. Which means we ended up winning the war after all, and didn't need to kill 50,000 Americans and three million Vietnamese to do it. Fuck.
some arsehole already has http://www.gtg.com.au/
Ahhh, an excellent demonstration of my point. These cumdumpsters have patented primers used to amplify specific regions of DNA that may be of clinical interest. Here's the trick with primers: you look at the sequence, and pick an optimal primer pair to amplify that sequence via PCR. They need to be specific to a single genomic locus, and have a certain melting temperature. People I work with who do cloning hate primer design.
So, it must be a pretty cool invention, right? WRONG. There are fucking programs that do this; a friend of mine wrote code to design them in bulk. It's just trial and error, and every lab that ever clones anything (which is just about every moelcular biology/clinical biology lab on the planet) does it every fucking week, multiple times. Now that we have genome sequences we can design PCR primers in a matter of seconds, and 24 hours later some company (or an in-house facility) has the primers ready for us. It is not rocket science. It is most certainly not "non-obvious" to anyone who's worked in a lab for any length of time. But since they are, techincally, "novel" and an "invention", they're patentable. Which means that anyone who wants to do anything vaguely commercial with that particular region of DNA needs to shell out $$$$ instead of spending 15 minutes in front of a computer reproducing GTG's IP.
MOTHERFUCKERS.
The copyright would protect any annotations, but not the genome itself.
Annotations themselves are facts, and can be reproduced simply by mentioning in a paper that "gene X has been found to be overexpressed in cell line Y." The form in which it appears in the database may be copyrighted, but there is no pre-existing barrier to reporting this in an article. Keeping such information a trade secret under an NDA will prevent it being released into the literature. (Because once it's in the literature, it will end up in someone else's database.)
The form in which a genome appears in a database essentially *is* annotations; the raw genome data is simply a vast assortment of smaller sequences which have been assembled into chromosomes (in Celera's case, the fragments were only a few thousand nucleotides each). The gene sequences cannot be derived without the assembled sequence. And the gene sequences are themselves annotations made with a combination of software packages and existing experimental data. It would be impossible to separate out the "annotations" from the actual useful genome sequence. The sum of the annotations and the raw data yield a database (even simply in the form of a single chromosome sequence) which most certainly is copyrightable in that particular format. You could, theoretically, reproduce the "facts" in their original format, but this would essentially limit you to the individual (and individually useless) fragments. (Which Celera probably didn't even release at the time.)
This still doesn't prevent anyone from reproducing it legally and independently, but any attempt to redistribute any of the database itself would have been legally actionable. Besides, genome sequencing is relatively immature and any results are somewhat subjective, making the distinction between "facts" and annotations blurry.
Secondly, there is the free/open culture within universities that almost punishes commercial ventures
I would not have stated it that way. The real reason is that academics hate to leave anything unpublished. If they're constrained by copyright law or some NDA, they can't tell everyone about the fabulous new work they've been doing - or at the very least, it becomes much more difficult.
I worked in bioinformatics at a university for several years, and much of what we did was take existing databases and analyze them, then publish the results online as our own database of annotations. As part of this, we reproduced much of the original database in modified form - and all we had to do was cite the original authors and describe our methods/sources. If the databases we used had not been public, none of these projects would have happened. In some cases, we had to ignore private databases that we had limited access to because we were not allowed to reproduce any of their data.
This is only cultural to the extent that academia thrives on publications. We're not out to punish anyone from trying to make an honest buck (lots of people here collaborate with or consult for companies), but we literally can't afford, professionally, to limit ourselves in accordance with restrictions on databases. So why pay money for something we can't legally use in the manner to which we're accustomed?
The database that Celera owned was protected as a trade secret.
And under copyright. Anyone else is free to duplicate a private genome database if they're willing to spend millions of dollars on sequencing. However, you couldn't take someone else's proprietary database and redistribute it. I assume the trade secrets were any specific annotations that Celera had made - for instance, you couldn't subscribe and then start blabbing about their annotations, or re-annotating the public database based on theirs.
You can't generally patent "found" sequences.
I wish that were not the case. However, there are many gene patents in existence. The trick is that now you have to show a function for that gene - although bioinformatics is sophisticated (or rather, automated) enough that you can come up with a plausible-sounding function without ever doing benchwork.
What's really being patented is the medical application of these sequences. For instance, Company X discovers that gene Y is overexpressed in cancer Z. They take out a patent on gene Y based on this discovery. That means that no one else can pursue gene Y as a therapeutic target. Moreover, in one case testing for a specific mutation to detect cancer was covered by a patent. This is a very simple piece of labwork being covered, which any competent cancer researcher could have figured out.
The end result is that patents are being awarded for hard work, not for novelty and invention. Throw enough money at a subject, and you'll get data but not necessarily results. Since companies (or academics) can now patent just the data, if someone else gets "lucky" and comes up with an actual result the patent holders can sue the tar out of them if they try to make money off it. (Or even if they don't, as in the case of the breast cancer gene; the company wanted people to pay three times as much for its own testing kit.)
You may soon be able to patent single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), which may be involved in differential drug responses. Back when I was in college we had a guest lecturer who was a biotech patent attorney, and he said he though SNPs should definitely be patentable. In any case, there is a world of difference between patenting a cancer drug, and patenting a gene (or a FUCKING POINT MUTATION) that may, in the future, be a drug target.
Since most of the human genome is noncoding, I suspect it will be harder to patent pieces of it. I also suspect that some asshole will try anyway.
Sorry, but there's a reason why people aren't legally considered adults until their 18. There's a reason why there's a drinking age.
The fact that these aren't even the same in the USA should be proof enough that the distinctions we draw based on age are both arbitrary and unfair. Besides, the reason for the drinking age is that the states caved into (unconstitutional) pressure from a crusading, moralizing Transportation Secretary by the name of Liddy Dole. (Not one of the Reagan administration's greater legacies.)
Um, Bob Casey Jr. is apparently beating Santorum in the polls by double digits right now. Doesn't guarantee a thing, but it's a hopeful sign.
I don't really see an anti-discrimination law as "special rights".
It's "special rights" in the sense that it's one of a limited number of reasons why you can't be fired. You could still be fired because, say, you're a Democrat and your boss loves Bush. Or because you root for the wrong sports team. But not because your boss saw you wearing that pride day button.
I generally don't trust this type of law (a family member nearly got dragged through the coals by spurious complaints about age discrimination). I'd rather just boycott companies that discriminate.
I want that power in the hands of as many people as possible, and I don't want people cut off from that power just because a private company can't improve its bottom line by providing access.
Gee, then why stop at free wireless? Why don't we just put the government into the computer manufacturing business too, so it can give computers away to the poor for free? After all, why should the poor be deprived of these wonderful tools just because Dell won't give them away? What about cell phones? The poor should have those too.
Sorry, but this sort of socialist technological utopianism is ridiculous. You're extrapolating from your own experience with computers to envision ubiquitous Internet as a transformative power, when in fact most people would probably use it for porn and illegal downloads. The real reason cities are rushing to install wireless networks is that they're trying to make themselves attractive to a certain class of people and businesses. In the mean time, the poor have far more to worry about, like a lack of good public schools and health insurance. If the cities are going to try to uplift the working classes, maybe they could start there.