Most of these inventions look a lot more like commercial product development which should be handled by the private sector rather than scientific research that is legitimate government activity.
Could it be that this organization has gotten a taste of patent money, and is now using their government money as a seed for what really is a private enterprise? Socialism anyone?
When you see something like this one has to wonder what their compensation schedule is like. Is it more like a private sector operation, or a government agency?
Lots of people believe they are trolls.The appellation is generally applied to non-practicing holders who sue infringers, especially if they try to get a permanent injunction to cease practicing the invention, or if the patent covers an implementation standard.
In this case CSIRO is suing people who implement IEEE 802.11a and 802.11g and go after permanent injunctions. This is poor behavior.
It royally sucked. Every time it rained, snowed or was windy or foggy the link degraded severely. Unless this technology improves link quality in bad weather I'd say it was a waste of time to develop it.
That's the down payment. The full price is much higher.
What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated.
While it's fine to be conservative when considering the impact of adding something to the food chain, we need to also consider these studies with a very jaundiced eye. The simple fact of this matter is that in the worst case scenarios, i.e. occupational exposure (workers at the actual factories that make this stuff) there is no epidemiological evidence of problems. And there is no known mechanism for the extreme low level effects that are being reported in many of these studies.
Well, I don't know much about the economics of copyrights, but I sure do when it comes to patents. Clearly I think the term needs to be flexible - for some of the technology that is patented takes an awful lot of money and time to commercialize. Say like a new drug. One or two years isn't going to work there. A company I worked for invented amorphous metals - I think their basic patents (which had a term of 17 years) expired long before they were able to recoup their investment.
The question is can you come up with a practical system for doing this? I have real doubts.
Well, I read the Macaulay speech. And found that it had nothing to do with this particular discussion. In fact it could be construed to support the idea of copyright, in so far as that it recognized granting a monopoly to authors as the solution to seeing they are paid.
"It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good."
Clearly legislation that controls the content of the internet, or tries to is evil. I was among the many who was active in opposing SOPA and PIPA. However that does not solve the issue - making sure authors get paid. And sometimes the cost of authoring is great, especially in the realm of film.
So SOPA-like legislation is not acceptable. But what happens when there are exceptions to monopolies?
Early farmers practiced techniques which would induce mutations or resulted in trans species crosses. And of course any time a favorable natural sport or mutation occurred this genetic variation was exploited. This is no different from the induced mutation programs that are practiced in development of some bioengineered crops, except of course the time scale is vastly compressed.
In fact almost all modern crops are the result of generations of work in cross species breeding. Even cross genus breeding has been accomplished using conventional techniques.
In addition it is important to be aware of the fact that the techniques used to implant genes during the bioengineering of crops also occur in nature. For example the spread of antibiotic resistance often occurs due the exchange of genetic material between completely unrelated mircoorganisms.
Oh, the fact that it turns out that there are only 60 participants in the lawsuit instead of 300,000 missed your scrutiny?
Or that there were NO lawsuits for accidentally contaminated crops rather than the 144 the article claimed? Monsanto has sued 144 farmers, but none of the suits were related to accidental contamination. Almost all of them are due to farmers saving seed (and sometimes selling the saved seed), which is against the contract they sign with Monsanto when they buy the seed. And of those 144 cases, only 11 actually went to court.
They didn't patent gene guns, as you say. They didn't patent combining genes to produce a new crop either. And the Supreme Court did not say that you can't patent life forms, either.
The Supreme Court said you can't patent a law of nature, which is something very different. The Supreme Court case Diamond v. Chakrabarty settled the question of whether or not you can patent a life form many years ago.
Also since when has anyone claimed ownership of contaminated natural crops? That is an absolutely ridiculous statement.
As far as me being affiliated with Monsanto, if true (which it is not) how does that have anything to do with the validity of my arguments? Better go look up the concepts of logical fallacy, ad-hominem and do some more reading about patent law.
A 4.2% compound growth rate is not a doubling every ten years. Simply just apply the rule of 70 and you find it's 16.7 years.
And even that math isn't that great because it doesn't factor in the overall US economic growth rate of 2.5% over the past 20 years or so. So really the excess patent rate is 1.7% per year compared to the overall economy. That's a doubling every 40 years.
And that's the overall growth rate, which is not as fast as the growth rate of the technological components of the US economy.
Once you figure in that I bet it isn't growing at a significant rate compared to the economy it's linked to at all.
And those who moderated the parent article up - WTF?
People have been genetically manipulating crops including intentionally introducing mutation since the development of agriculture 6000 years ago. What would you have us do, go back to the wild precursors?
Slashdot Mirror
An anonymous reader?
Better yet note the name of the poster.
This is not the first Slashdot story about this.
That would be a geography FAIL.
Most of these inventions look a lot more like commercial product development which should be handled by the private sector rather than scientific research that is legitimate government activity.
Could it be that this organization has gotten a taste of patent money, and is now using their government money as a seed for what really is a private enterprise? Socialism anyone?
When you see something like this one has to wonder what their compensation schedule is like. Is it more like a private sector operation, or a government agency?
Lots of people believe they are trolls.The appellation is generally applied to non-practicing holders who sue infringers, especially if they try to get a permanent injunction to cease practicing the invention, or if the patent covers an implementation standard.
In this case CSIRO is suing people who implement IEEE 802.11a and 802.11g and go after permanent injunctions. This is poor behavior.
http://www.itworld.com/mobile-amp-wireless/58796/court-puts-csiro-wi-fi-injunction-hold
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/australian-government-patent-troll-collects-from-wi-fi-vendors/2187
http://apcmag.com/wi-fi-patent-has-turned-csiro-money-mad.htm
http://legalpad.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/10/patent-troll-throws-party-to-celebrate-its-huge-pots-of-money.html
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=900005557448&slreturn=1
http://www.ipfrontline.com/depts/article.aspx?id=15866&deptid=7
My workplace was on a microwave link for a while.
It royally sucked. Every time it rained, snowed or was windy or foggy the link degraded severely. Unless this technology improves link quality in bad weather I'd say it was a waste of time to develop it.
Does anyone really believe today that any information that one posts to the internet is confidential?
It seems to me that internet privacy has been an oxymoron since the earliest days. Why do you think we have technologies like PGP and VPN?
Does this bill really change anything?
That's the down payment. The full price is much higher.
What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated.
Might even work because the connecting host was prolly brute forced earlier. What you want to do if you get in is disable the machine somehow.
Anyone see these guys on a port other than 22?
Not to mention that there are estimates that about 80% of these studies cannot be reproduced.
Including the BPA ones.
http://toxsci.oxfordjournals.org/content/114/1/1.full
While it's fine to be conservative when considering the impact of adding something to the food chain, we need to also consider these studies with a very jaundiced eye. The simple fact of this matter is that in the worst case scenarios, i.e. occupational exposure (workers at the actual factories that make this stuff) there is no epidemiological evidence of problems. And there is no known mechanism for the extreme low level effects that are being reported in many of these studies.
Well, I don't know much about the economics of copyrights, but I sure do when it comes to patents. Clearly I think the term needs to be flexible - for some of the technology that is patented takes an awful lot of money and time to commercialize. Say like a new drug. One or two years isn't going to work there. A company I worked for invented amorphous metals - I think their basic patents (which had a term of 17 years) expired long before they were able to recoup their investment.
The question is can you come up with a practical system for doing this? I have real doubts.
It wouldn't matter - Bush II would have just pardoned him like he did Scooter Libby.
FidoNet was terrific. I made several long term friends on that system. I even had a gateway over which you could send internet email.
The internet though has pretty much supplanted that.
Well, I read the Macaulay speech. And found that it had nothing to do with this particular discussion. In fact it could be construed to support the idea of copyright, in so far as that it recognized granting a monopoly to authors as the solution to seeing they are paid.
"It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good."
Clearly legislation that controls the content of the internet, or tries to is evil. I was among the many who was active in opposing SOPA and PIPA. However that does not solve the issue - making sure authors get paid. And sometimes the cost of authoring is great, especially in the realm of film.
So SOPA-like legislation is not acceptable. But what happens when there are exceptions to monopolies?
Early farmers practiced techniques which would induce mutations or resulted in trans species crosses. And of course any time a favorable natural sport or mutation occurred this genetic variation was exploited. This is no different from the induced mutation programs that are practiced in development of some bioengineered crops, except of course the time scale is vastly compressed.
In fact almost all modern crops are the result of generations of work in cross species breeding. Even cross genus breeding has been accomplished using conventional techniques.
In addition it is important to be aware of the fact that the techniques used to implant genes during the bioengineering of crops also occur in nature. For example the spread of antibiotic resistance often occurs due the exchange of genetic material between completely unrelated mircoorganisms.
Oh, the fact that it turns out that there are only 60 participants in the lawsuit instead of 300,000 missed your scrutiny?
Or that there were NO lawsuits for accidentally contaminated crops rather than the 144 the article claimed? Monsanto has sued 144 farmers, but none of the suits were related to accidental contamination. Almost all of them are due to farmers saving seed (and sometimes selling the saved seed), which is against the contract they sign with Monsanto when they buy the seed. And of those 144 cases, only 11 actually went to court.
The fact is the article you linked to is baloney.
They didn't patent gene guns, as you say. They didn't patent combining genes to produce a new crop either. And the Supreme Court did not say that you can't patent life forms, either.
The Supreme Court said you can't patent a law of nature, which is something very different. The Supreme Court case Diamond v. Chakrabarty settled the question of whether or not you can patent a life form many years ago.
Also since when has anyone claimed ownership of contaminated natural crops? That is an absolutely ridiculous statement.
As far as me being affiliated with Monsanto, if true (which it is not) how does that have anything to do with the validity of my arguments? Better go look up the concepts of logical fallacy, ad-hominem and do some more reading about patent law.
A 4.2% compound growth rate is not a doubling every ten years. Simply just apply the rule of 70 and you find it's 16.7 years.
And even that math isn't that great because it doesn't factor in the overall US economic growth rate of 2.5% over the past 20 years or so. So really the excess patent rate is 1.7% per year compared to the overall economy. That's a doubling every 40 years.
And that's the overall growth rate, which is not as fast as the growth rate of the technological components of the US economy.
Once you figure in that I bet it isn't growing at a significant rate compared to the economy it's linked to at all.
And those who moderated the parent article up - WTF?
LOL. Zerohedge is the Drudge Report of finance.
If we continue consuming resources at an exponentially increasing rate, Earth 2 will not help very much.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY
It was quite novel some 20 years ago when the patents were awarded.
People have been genetically manipulating crops including intentionally introducing mutation since the development of agriculture 6000 years ago. What would you have us do, go back to the wild precursors?
Ever hear of the word famine?
That is an absolutely specious argument. All patents of things cover things that are combinations of already existing materials, the elements.
Patents are either about new processes or new things, and these things are ALWAYS combinations of pre-existing materials.
Some facts for you to chew on.
1. Patents on RoundUp have expired. Several companies, not just Monsanto manufacture this herbicide.
2. US Patents on RoundUp seed will expire in 2014. In 2 years farmers will be able to do anything they want with it. It has already expired in Canada.