ironic how your.sig basically states that you are not a target market for either the Republican or the Democratic party campaign advertisements. . .
On the contrary, I would be happy to vote for either Democrats or Republicans if I found their views in sufficient alignment with mine. (Indeed, there is a small percentage in each party which does, although none of them were on the ballot in my district this year.) I am more than willing to listen to the campaign advertisements of any candidate and consider whether they are worth voting for.
Sorry, I just realized that Lowtax, in his SA article, more or less alleged that the web would completely disappear WO advertising. Still, I haven't seen a single/. poster suggest that.
Why is it that so many people believe that without advertisements, the web would just disappear?
I challenge you to show me a single post that suggests the entire web would disappear without advertising. I haven't seen anyone here argue such a thing.
Of course, many sites existed without advertising in the past, do so without advertising (or any other revenue) currently, and would continue to do so in the future. Without advertising, some currently-free sites would charge for use, and some would solicit voluntary contributions.
And some good sites would disappear. Not all of them, surely. But some. (How many? Most of them, or only a small fraction? I can't say.) But to say "the web wouldn't disappear without advertising" is to attack a strawman.
Reminds me of Cluetrain point #74: We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.
Perhaps that's part of the problem.
In Douglas Coupland's book Generation X, (this is the book that coined the term "Generation X", and before you knock it on the basis of what mass media has made of the term, read the book itself--but that's another rant for another time) one of the chapters is titled "I Am Not a Target Market."
It seems fairly accurate for GenX (as much as any stereotype of millions of people can be, which is not very much), but I can't help but wonder if that's really the best thing. "You're not a target market? Fine. Screw you. You'd like to see such-and-such a product? Too bad, you're not a target market."
I, while I consider myself fairly advertising-savvy, and certainly highly skeptical of any claims made in advertising, am not completely immune to advertising, nor would I want to be.
Why do they even HAVE to advertise on the Internet? Just because its there DOESN'T mean it has to be advertised on.
Oh, and everyone is going to put up their websites at their own cost, as a labor of love?
How many times have you waited for a site to load because some ad company server is lagged trying to serve the ad in the page?
A well-designed page will be able to be rendered regardless of whether the ad (or any other image, for that matter) has loaded yet. If the rest of the page won't display until the ad has loaded, that's the fault of the site designer.
DEATH TO MODERN-DAY ADVERTISING!!! Today's ads don't just inform us of a product's existence; they also prey on our minds with flashing text, glitzy graphics, buzzwords by the dozen, and little white lies. Fortunately, we have the right to censor those ads; unfortunately, not all of us have the knowledge to do so. I'm striving to change that.
How, then, do you propose to support sites?
One option is to support a site through voluntary contributions (PayPal is one possible mechanism for doing so, but not the only one, and not without its own problems.) I know one author (whom I won't link to because I don't want to slashdot her) who has been informed by her free hosting service that they are not raising enough revenue through banner ads, so they want to go to pop-ups. She is currently taking a poll of her readers as to whether they would rather have pop-ups, or support her through voluntary contributions. Right now the majority seems to be willing to contribute, although it is not an overwhelming majority--there's quite a few people who say they wouldn't mind pop-ups. (Interestingly, most of those comment something along the lines of "I can kill the pop-up windows faster than they can load," which suggests to me that pop-up windows will not be a viable advertising mechanism, either.)
There's any number of good sites which I would be willing to donate a small amount to in order to keep them going. However, the maelstrom of misinformation that is Slashdot is not one of them. (Granted, I speak only for myself.)
It's now possible to prevent tracking while still seeing banner ads--for example, Netscape 6's ability to allow or disallow cookies on a site-by-site basis.
Re:Easy enuf..and talk about Denial
on
'Thirteen Days'
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· Score: 2
until China joins the nuclear powers of course
Hello? China first detonated a nuclear weapon in 1964.
50 years from now, basement bioweapons may be a reality. You're made of all the materials you need to build 'em.
Excellent point. Today, it takes quite a bit of education, not to mention hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment, to do this sort of thing.
But what about in the future? Will Wal-Mart sell "1-2-3 Genetic Engineering Kits(TM, as seen on TV)"? Then you'll have people doing molecular biology with no real understanding of the principles--the molecular biology equivalent of script kiddies ("gene kiddies?").
I can see it now..."i'm a 133t m013kv14r bi010je5t"
As a side note, why would any sane person make this statement?
Because anyone with a bachelor's degree in biology or biochemistry could have figured that out anyway, given the rest of the details?
Re:Let's use the USPTO to our advantage
on
What is 'IT'?
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· Score: 5
The problem with US patents is that they're not published until they're granted, meaning a lag of several years between filing and publication.
Anything that's going to be as big as this article suggests is not going to be patented only in the US. They'll have patents filed in all major developed countries. And most countries publish applications 18 months after filing.
Most commonly this is done through the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). They allow you to file a single application (known as a WO document) for a large number of countries, and they also publish applications 18 months after filing. [Side note before you conspiracy theorists get in a tizzy: WIPO does not grant patents. They only offer a simple method by which to file in a large number of countries, and each individual country still decides whether or not to grant the patent.]
Anyway, the bottom line is that there's less lag in the publication of WO applications than there is in the publication of US applications. If you go to the Delphion patent site (previously the IBM patent site) and search for WO documents listing Dean Kamen as the inventor, the results are even more interesting than the list of US patents (only transportation-related patents published in 2000 or 2001 included--the older ones are largely the same as the US list given in the parent comment):
(4) an alien intelligence in at least one target location that will have a 1 km^2 radio anntenna array and will have detectors tuned to 5 GHz;
It's not as if radio antennas are limited to one frequency (or even any finite number of frequencies) at one time. Perhaps you've heard of Fourier transform?
Certain parts of a company shouldn't be deemed 'off limits'.
There's even a precedent for this--a company's pension fund. By law, when one company is bought out by another, the purchasing company cannot plunder the other's pension fund--it must be maintained as a pension fund.
The entire theory of evolution, natural selection, the big bang, etc,
The big bang theory is separate from the theory of evolution. Evolutionary theory does not require that the universe was formed by a big bang, and the big bang theory does not require that evolution followed it.
if it were about any other topic then the origin of life
Theories of the origin of life on earth are theories of biogenesis. They are distinct from the theory of evolution, which described how life evolved once it existed. Again, two separate theories.
a fossil which simply does not contain the evidence that should be there if evolution were true
Of course it doesn't!!! No single fossil shows evidence of evolution, as evolution occurs through the progression of life, and not in any single organism. It is the entire fossil record which demonstrates evolution so well. Trying to say that evolution is wrong because no single fossil demonstrates evolution is like saying galaxies do not exist, because no single star demonstrates the existence of a galaxy.
Your short post contains no fewer than three fundamental misconceptions about evolution. Before you try to attack evolution, I suggest you learn what evolutionary theory really says, rather than what creationist propaganda says that evolutionary theory says.
As a Christian, I take offense when you try to reduce the bible to a mere science textbook.
No, they didn't. Not too long ago they published the sequence of one chromosome (one of the smallest chromosomes, at that). They plan to, of course, but it hasn't been done yet.
Secondly, the sequence published by the HGP is taken from a handful of people. It probably wouldn't count as novelty-destroying prior art (what most/.ers mean when they say "prior art") against variations of those sequences which might be found in other people.
Thirdly, don't forget about the "prior" part of "prior art". A sequence published by the HGP in 2000 wouldn't help against a patent for which the application was filed in 1998, for example, even if the patent wasn't granted until 2001.
Is putting it on a webpage publishing even though it can only be read with the aid of an expensive electronic device.?
Is having it as a DNA sequence publishing even though it can only be read with an expensive sequencing device?
The other thing I should have mentioned in my previous post is that there's quite a difference in magnitude between the two.
Your "expensive electronic device" to view a web page can cost under $1000 (and even better, you don't have to buy one, you can use one for free at many public libraries) and can display the web page in a matter of seconds.
Reading the sequence of a single gene takes tens of thousands of dollars, and dozens if not hundreds of person-hours of work.
Isn't DNA a perfectly good data-storage medium? If it can be published on a computer disk, what's wrong with a nice, compact mollecular form.
Even granting the argument that DNA is a good storage medium, in order to be considered prior art, it must be published--that is, accessible to the general public. Have you made your DNA available to the general public?
In and of itself, no. If the paper is available to the general public, yes.
Is putting it on a webpage publishing even though it can only be read with the aid of an expensive electronic device.?
Assuming it's a publicly accessible web page, probably yes, although I don't think that's been conclusively determined by the courts.
Is having it as a DNA sequence publishing even though it can only be read with an expensive sequencing device?
No.
Why is the third not publishing if the first two are?
This is law, not science. You can't start from general principles and extrapolate specifics in law the same way you can in science. It's a common mistake made by scientists/engineers/etc. when trying to understand law.
Not just put down on paper; it has to be available to the general public. Writing it on papaer and locking it away in a safe is not publication; writing it on paper and distributing it throughout your company, while making clear it is confidential and not distributing it outside the company is not publication; writing it in a journal or book which is available for sale to the general public is publication. Putting it on a (publicly-accessible) web page is probably also publication, although I don't know whether that's been tested in the courts.
How many ways is the story on the color-blindness patent, and the comments on it wrong?
rozzin presents (and timothy does not correct) as a direct quote text which does not even appear in the linked press release. The press release claims that ColorMax licensed the patent rights from the Medical College of Wisconsin, not that ColorMax had a patent granted to them.
Yes, the press release says that the genes were patented. I'm not buying it. Company press releases aren't exactly unbiased sources of information. The only patent I could find remotely resembling what is described in the press release is US 5,837,461. (And I search patents for a living, so I know what I'm doing.) Know what? It doesn't claim the gene. That patent claims:
1. A method of detecting cone-photoreceptor-based vision disorders, comprising the steps of a) examining the amino acid sequence of a patient's red or green photopigments, and
b) correlating the amino acid sequence with amino acid combinations associated with vision disorder,
wherein the amino acid sequence is the sequence at positions selected from the group consisting of codon positions 65, 111, 116, 153, 171, 174, 178, 180, 230, 233, 236, 274, 275, 277, 279, 285, 298, and 309 of the gene encoding the red or green photopigment and wherein the correlation comprises comparison of the amino acid sequence with amino acid sequences shown to be diagnostic of vision disorders.
2. The method of claim 1 wherein the examination of the amino acid sequence is by examination of photopigment genes.
3. The method of claim 1 wherein the sequence at positions 153, 171, 174, and 180 can be correlated with a diagnosis of age-related macular degeneration.
4. The method of claim 1 wherein the sequence at positions 153, 171, 174, 178, and 180 can be correlated with a diagnosis of deuteranomaly cone, degeneration, or B-cone monochromat condition.
5. A method of detecting red-green vision disorders and determining the severity of the disorder, comprising the steps of
a) examining the predicted spectral separation of L and M pigments encoded by a patient's photoreceptor genes, and
b) correlating the spectral separation with a degree of vision disorder, wherein a spectral separation of greater than 8 nM is predictive of very mild red-green color blindness disorder, a separation of 5 nM-8 nM is predictive of mild vision disorder, a separation of 1 nM-4 nM is predictive a severe disorder and a separation of less than 1 nM is predictive of very severe disorder.
6. The method of claim 5 wherein the examination comprises analyzing the patient's photopigment genes at codon positions 65, 111, 116, 153, 171, 174, 178, 180, 230, 233, 236, 274, 275, 277, 279, 285, 298 and 309 of the genes encoding the red or green photopigment.
If the gene were patented (and the people who are saying you can't patent genes and those who say you can are both right, in a way; technically, you can't patent the gene itself, but you can patent use of the gene to do X, Y, or Z, where X, Y, and Z are so broad as to cover virtually any use of the gene), you would not be prior art just because you were color-blind. Prior art must be published. That thing you've made in the basement for 50 years but never told anyone about is not prior art. For genes, generally the genetic sequence must be included. So unless you've sequenced your gene for color-blindness and published it, it's not prior art.
Here's my general guidelines for determining what a patent really claims:
Ignore the slashdot story.
Ignore any other general news sources.
Ignore the company press release.
Go to the patent itself, but ignore the patent's abstract.
Ignore the detailed description of the invention in the patent.
Ignore the drawings in the patent, unless they're referred to by the claims.
Read the claims. This is the part of the patent that determines what's legally covered by it.
Keep in mind that each numbered claim is like a little mini-patent of its own. If a question arises as to the validity of the patent, each claim stands or falls on its own.
However, for each individual claim, keep in mind that all of the multiple elements described in that claim must be present in order to be covered by that claim. If a claim reads "A device consisting of A, B, C, D, and E," that does not prevent you from using a device which has A, B, C, and D but not E. If you take C, D, and E out of the context of the claim as a whole, and try to claim "Here's a device with C, D, and E which existed (and was described in a publication) 10 years before this patent was filed for! It's prior art," that's completely irrelevant, and it would not invalidate the patent.
If the patent has been granted, then it was most likely filed at least two years ago. An FDA paper from Dec. 1999 misses the "prior" part of "prior art".
Secondly, improvements on previous inventions are perfectly patentable. This FDA paper describes the tinted lenses, but not the genetic testing described in the press release.
Slashdot Mirror
On the contrary, I would be happy to vote for either Democrats or Republicans if I found their views in sufficient alignment with mine. (Indeed, there is a small percentage in each party which does, although none of them were on the ballot in my district this year.) I am more than willing to listen to the campaign advertisements of any candidate and consider whether they are worth voting for.
SpamMotel is similar.
Sorry, I just realized that Lowtax, in his SA article, more or less alleged that the web would completely disappear WO advertising. Still, I haven't seen a single /. poster suggest that.
I challenge you to show me a single post that suggests the entire web would disappear without advertising. I haven't seen anyone here argue such a thing.
Of course, many sites existed without advertising in the past, do so without advertising (or any other revenue) currently, and would continue to do so in the future. Without advertising, some currently-free sites would charge for use, and some would solicit voluntary contributions.
And some good sites would disappear. Not all of them, surely. But some. (How many? Most of them, or only a small fraction? I can't say.) But to say "the web wouldn't disappear without advertising" is to attack a strawman.
Perhaps that's part of the problem.
In Douglas Coupland's book Generation X, (this is the book that coined the term "Generation X", and before you knock it on the basis of what mass media has made of the term, read the book itself--but that's another rant for another time) one of the chapters is titled "I Am Not a Target Market."
It seems fairly accurate for GenX (as much as any stereotype of millions of people can be, which is not very much), but I can't help but wonder if that's really the best thing. "You're not a target market? Fine. Screw you. You'd like to see such-and-such a product? Too bad, you're not a target market."
I, while I consider myself fairly advertising-savvy, and certainly highly skeptical of any claims made in advertising, am not completely immune to advertising, nor would I want to be.
Oh, and everyone is going to put up their websites at their own cost, as a labor of love?
How many times have you waited for a site to load because some ad company server is lagged trying to serve the ad in the page?
A well-designed page will be able to be rendered regardless of whether the ad (or any other image, for that matter) has loaded yet. If the rest of the page won't display until the ad has loaded, that's the fault of the site designer.
How, then, do you propose to support sites?
One option is to support a site through voluntary contributions (PayPal is one possible mechanism for doing so, but not the only one, and not without its own problems.) I know one author (whom I won't link to because I don't want to slashdot her) who has been informed by her free hosting service that they are not raising enough revenue through banner ads, so they want to go to pop-ups. She is currently taking a poll of her readers as to whether they would rather have pop-ups, or support her through voluntary contributions. Right now the majority seems to be willing to contribute, although it is not an overwhelming majority--there's quite a few people who say they wouldn't mind pop-ups. (Interestingly, most of those comment something along the lines of "I can kill the pop-up windows faster than they can load," which suggests to me that pop-up windows will not be a viable advertising mechanism, either.)
There's any number of good sites which I would be willing to donate a small amount to in order to keep them going. However, the maelstrom of misinformation that is Slashdot is not one of them. (Granted, I speak only for myself.)
It's now possible to prevent tracking while still seeing banner ads--for example, Netscape 6's ability to allow or disallow cookies on a site-by-site basis.
Hello? China first detonated a nuclear weapon in 1964.
Excellent point. Today, it takes quite a bit of education, not to mention hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment, to do this sort of thing.
But what about in the future? Will Wal-Mart sell "1-2-3 Genetic Engineering Kits(TM, as seen on TV)"? Then you'll have people doing molecular biology with no real understanding of the principles--the molecular biology equivalent of script kiddies ("gene kiddies?"). I can see it now..."i'm a 133t m013kv14r bi010je5t"
Because anyone with a bachelor's degree in biology or biochemistry could have figured that out anyway, given the rest of the details?
Anything that's going to be as big as this article suggests is not going to be patented only in the US. They'll have patents filed in all major developed countries. And most countries publish applications 18 months after filing.
Most commonly this is done through the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). They allow you to file a single application (known as a WO document) for a large number of countries, and they also publish applications 18 months after filing. [Side note before you conspiracy theorists get in a tizzy: WIPO does not grant patents. They only offer a simple method by which to file in a large number of countries, and each individual country still decides whether or not to grant the patent.]
Anyway, the bottom line is that there's less lag in the publication of WO applications than there is in the publication of US applications. If you go to the Delphion patent site (previously the IBM patent site) and search for WO documents listing Dean Kamen as the inventor, the results are even more interesting than the list of US patents (only transportation-related patents published in 2000 or 2001 included--the older ones are largely the same as the US list given in the parent comment):
PERSONAL MOBILITY VEHICLES AND METHODS
MECHANICAL IMPROVEMENTS TO A PERSONAL VEHICLE
BALANCING VEHICLE WITH CAMBER AND TOE-IN
CONTROL OF A BALANCING PERSONAL VEHICLE
CONTROL SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR WHEELCHAIR
FAULT TOLERANT ARCHITECTURE FOR A PERSONAL VEHICLE
It's not as if radio antennas are limited to one frequency (or even any finite number of frequencies) at one time. Perhaps you've heard of Fourier transform?
There's even a precedent for this--a company's pension fund. By law, when one company is bought out by another, the purchasing company cannot plunder the other's pension fund--it must be maintained as a pension fund.
The big bang theory is separate from the theory of evolution. Evolutionary theory does not require that the universe was formed by a big bang, and the big bang theory does not require that evolution followed it.
if it were about any other topic then the origin of life
Theories of the origin of life on earth are theories of biogenesis. They are distinct from the theory of evolution, which described how life evolved once it existed. Again, two separate theories.
a fossil which simply does not contain the evidence that should be there if evolution were true
Of course it doesn't!!! No single fossil shows evidence of evolution, as evolution occurs through the progression of life, and not in any single organism. It is the entire fossil record which demonstrates evolution so well. Trying to say that evolution is wrong because no single fossil demonstrates evolution is like saying galaxies do not exist, because no single star demonstrates the existence of a galaxy.
Your short post contains no fewer than three fundamental misconceptions about evolution. Before you try to attack evolution, I suggest you learn what evolutionary theory really says, rather than what creationist propaganda says that evolutionary theory says.
As a Christian, I take offense when you try to reduce the bible to a mere science textbook.
Secondly, the sequence published by the HGP is taken from a handful of people. It probably wouldn't count as novelty-destroying prior art (what most /.ers mean when they say "prior art") against variations of those sequences which might be found in other people.
Thirdly, don't forget about the "prior" part of "prior art". A sequence published by the HGP in 2000 wouldn't help against a patent for which the application was filed in 1998, for example, even if the patent wasn't granted until 2001.
Is having it as a DNA sequence publishing even though it can only be read with an expensive sequencing device?
The other thing I should have mentioned in my previous post is that there's quite a difference in magnitude between the two.
Your "expensive electronic device" to view a web page can cost under $1000 (and even better, you don't have to buy one, you can use one for free at many public libraries) and can display the web page in a matter of seconds.
Reading the sequence of a single gene takes tens of thousands of dollars, and dozens if not hundreds of person-hours of work.
Even granting the argument that DNA is a good storage medium, in order to be considered prior art, it must be published--that is, accessible to the general public. Have you made your DNA available to the general public?
In and of itself, no. If the paper is available to the general public, yes.
Is putting it on a webpage publishing even though it can only be read with the aid of an expensive electronic device.?
Assuming it's a publicly accessible web page, probably yes, although I don't think that's been conclusively determined by the courts.
Is having it as a DNA sequence publishing even though it can only be read with an expensive sequencing device?
No.
Why is the third not publishing if the first two are?
This is law, not science. You can't start from general principles and extrapolate specifics in law the same way you can in science. It's a common mistake made by scientists/engineers/etc. when trying to understand law.
Not just put down on paper; it has to be available to the general public. Writing it on papaer and locking it away in a safe is not publication; writing it on paper and distributing it throughout your company, while making clear it is confidential and not distributing it outside the company is not publication; writing it in a journal or book which is available for sale to the general public is publication. Putting it on a (publicly-accessible) web page is probably also publication, although I don't know whether that's been tested in the courts.
...it's the double-zero, of course.
- rozzin presents (and timothy does not correct) as a direct quote text which does not even appear in the linked press release. The press release claims that ColorMax licensed the patent rights from the Medical College of Wisconsin, not that ColorMax had a patent granted to them.
- Yes, the press release says that the genes were patented. I'm not buying it. Company press releases aren't exactly unbiased sources of information. The only patent I could find remotely resembling what is described in the press release is US 5,837,461. (And I search patents for a living, so I know what I'm doing.) Know what? It doesn't claim the gene. That patent claims:
- If the gene were patented (and the people who are saying you can't patent genes and those who say you can are both right, in a way; technically, you can't patent the gene itself, but you can patent use of the gene to do X, Y, or Z, where X, Y, and Z are so broad as to cover virtually any use of the gene), you would not be prior art just because you were color-blind. Prior art must be published. That thing you've made in the basement for 50 years but never told anyone about is not prior art. For genes, generally the genetic sequence must be included. So unless you've sequenced your gene for color-blindness and published it, it's not prior art.
Here's my general guidelines for determining what a patent really claims:Now if you can show us where she's published her genetic sequence, we can invalidate the patent.
I'm not defending it, just explaining it.
Secondly, improvements on previous inventions are perfectly patentable. This FDA paper describes the tinted lenses, but not the genetic testing described in the press release.