Maybe finally all the anti-Slashdot-stereotype trolls will be wrong.
We would be if we didn't read the patent first. This one is really pathetic and should have never been issued in it's current form. This is why I think the patent process should have a comment mechanism so that this sort of thing gets caught.
Indeed. In fact there is no light either. The Sun sucks dark. In fact it sucks dark so hard that the friction of the dark moving to the Sun causes the Sun to be very hot. The flow of dark towards the Sun interrupted by the Earth causes the side of the Earth away from the Sun to accumulate dark, thus causing Night. As the Earth rotates the dark caught on the night side can then be pulled off, this causing the absence of dark known as Day.
What we call light bulbs are truly dark suckers as well. That is why light bulbs are hot, just like the Sun. When a light bulb is full of dark and won't suck dark any more, it cools off. If you look in old light bulbs you can even seen the accumulation of dark.
Dark is also heavier than water. This can be seen in the oceans where the deeper you go the darker it gets.
LOL. Slashdot and obviously the Register don't seem to be able to determine what a patent is. THIS IS AN APPLICATION, not an actual patent.
It was filed in Feb 2004 and PUBLISHED, not GRANTED on Aug 12. 20040156192 is the application number, not the patent number. Patent numbers are serial and are in the 6 million range.
The hard part is not turning a specification or requirement into a working piece of software. The hard part is writing a specification that captures what the customer needs to have happen in unambiguous language.
Software development should be treated as a multiplayer team communications game. The success of the team depends more on how successful the communications are.
This move is prompted by the high prices scientific journals often charge for subscriptions and for reprints -- even when the papers were funded by government grants.
It seems to me that these two are unrelated. The journals are certainly free to charge whatever they want, and given that the circulation of these journals is tiny it's understandable that they aren't going to be cheap. Since digital archiving is a bit questionable libraries of course want paper.
The funding by govenment grants is all fine and good, but last I looked that funding went to the researchers, not the journals.
Ultimately if we have a mandate that distribution of these articles is going to be free, the current journals are going to be put out of business by this madate. If this happens there will be side effects one of which is that the funding agencies like the NIH are going to have to pick up the burden of disseminating these articles.
Now the question is: do you want an increasingly politicized government agency deciding which articles are worthy of publication (remember that many scientists are already complaining that the Bush administration is surpressing scientific results that don't fit it's political agenda - Lysenko anyone?), or do you want the scientific community through it's professional societies deciding what gets published?
I was trying to suggest that it would make sense to permit a totally unique DNA sequence to be patented that does not exist normally in nature, just like if you wanted to patent a new chemical.
You miss the point here. The PTO *IS* treating DNA like it were just another chemical.
There is a huge body of patent law and precidence covering chemicals. The ruckus is that the PTO is very much trending towards treating DNA as just another chemical, much to the dismay of the the people who seem to want to treat DNA as some special material. And the fact of the matter is that if you make a chemical in pure form where previously it only existed in nature combined with other materials or in an impure form you have made a new composition of matter under patent law. Not 'discovered' because the fact is the pure form never existed in nature. Patents cover not only molecular structures but mixtures and other compositional variations as well. It doesn't have to be a molecule. All it has to be is a new form.
A new composition is part A of getting a standard chemical patent on that composition. Part B is showing a use for that new composition.
There are MANY such patents issued every year for an amazing array of products. The PTO is just applying that to DNA.
It's classical patent law the way it has been practiced for the past 200 years. Compositon of matter patents are well established - what has got people torqued is that the PTO is applying these well established principles to DNA, which of course from a pure scientific viewpoint is just another chemical. Very important functionality, but nonetheless GATTACA which are pretty simple amino acids.
People are free to argue that DNA is special, but in order for the PTO to treat it as special there will have to be some changes in precidence or the law. Until then they are pretty much on solid legal ground to treat DNA as a chemical.
I'm also saying that you need to have something novel to do when you apply for a patent, and a simple DNA sequence that hasn't been registered with the USPTO before shouldn't count.
It doesn't count. Read the patent policy.
http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/3607.ht ml
Do the work of sequencing the human genome and make it public domain so it wasn't patentable.
That last "so it wasn't patentable" is where you are mistaken. Sure, you can't patent the sequences per se. But if you have a use for that data such as a genetic test for a disease caused by a certain combination of GATTACA, you have patentable material.
Do these companies claim to have invented humans, or just certain diseases that have been around for millenia?
These people have claimed to have invented ways to isolate the genes from the human body so they can be used for various new things, including genetic tests for disease. The isolated gene, copied through PCR etc. is surely one of the most fundamental and important inventions in history. This isolated form does not exist in nature, and is purely a product of technology.
The existence in vitro, outside the human body of copies of the isolated gene by techniques like PCR is not prior art. Stories about people being sued for their own genome are nonsense because the patents cover isolated genes. Also the patent must include a substantial use for the gene, not just a description of the gene. That use is ALSO not prior art.
So if there are 15 different ways to do it the on click patent covers them all?
You are not patenting the program code, but the process of adding an item to a cart. If the program code implements adding an item to the cart, yes, it is covered.
If thats pretty ordinary skillish then it is obvious and not patentable.
Be careful - you are confusing the patentable material and the unpatentable material.
Lets take a look at another example - let's say I came up with an idea for a new fuel injector that gave better gas milage. I publish the drawings for the thing. The materials it is made out of are, let's say, a 316 stainless steel. I don't have to provide exact machining steps, where to get the iro for the steel, and all that other sort of technology that is already known, any more than I have to provide the source code to implement basic server side functionality such as maintaining a session. If, as a competitor I find that I can make the same injector out of steel made from iron dug up in Canada instead of the US, well too bad because the injector is what is patented.
There is a principle associated with all this known as "rule of equivalents" which basically states that making changes to the implementation doesn't get you out from underneath the patent is you are recieving the benefit of the patent.
Write your governement official to move software patents to a new class of intellectual property which guarentees a slice of the 20year revenue -- to the inventors not the company.
THis is one I really agree with. Most other countries include a provision in their patent laws that requires that the inventor get some percentage if the patent really becomes lucrative. Of course that's only about 0.1% of all patents, but nonetheless it's a good idea.
In any case, the Europeans have the same argument, as do the Chinese, as do the Japanese, and they do have the purchasing power.
Right. Let's neglect the fact that the US runs a whopping trade imbalance with the rest of the world. Fact is everybody has access to US markets more than we have access to theirs.
I think the BBC article does the reviewers of the time a great deal of injustice by not including WH Auden's review. Auden was and still is regarded as one of the great reviewers, and he cast FoTR as one of the best.
In fact my wife (living in South America as a teenager at the time) ordered a copy from Unwin and Allen after reading the Auden review. As a result we have a First Edition in our library (as well as a 3rd Edition of Unwin and Allen of the Hobbit). The two are worth thousands now.
Slashdot Mirror
Gigabytes transferred.
Hmm. I've been using polyester based oils in my engines for a long time. So am I going to have to change my HDD oil every 3000 gigabytes or something?
The particle in question is the darkon and it's anti-particle is the photon, right?
No, you have to realize that quanta names are derived from Greek language names for the units in question. Thus dark quanta are called skotons.
Maybe finally all the anti-Slashdot-stereotype trolls will be wrong.
We would be if we didn't read the patent first. This one is really pathetic and should have never been issued in it's current form. This is why I think the patent process should have a comment mechanism so that this sort of thing gets caught.
Indeed. In fact there is no light either. The Sun sucks dark. In fact it sucks dark so hard that the friction of the dark moving to the Sun causes the Sun to be very hot. The flow of dark towards the Sun interrupted by the Earth causes the side of the Earth away from the Sun to accumulate dark, thus causing Night. As the Earth rotates the dark caught on the night side can then be pulled off, this causing the absence of dark known as Day.
What we call light bulbs are truly dark suckers as well. That is why light bulbs are hot, just like the Sun. When a light bulb is full of dark and won't suck dark any more, it cools off. If you look in old light bulbs you can even seen the accumulation of dark.
Dark is also heavier than water. This can be seen in the oceans where the deeper you go the darker it gets.
THe version I use has a different #4. Panic.
Database admins really only have 3 numbers to worry about too - 0, 1 and MANY.
Apple has a new patent for "a computing device...
LOL. Slashdot and obviously the Register don't seem to be able to determine what a patent is. THIS IS AN APPLICATION, not an actual patent.
It was filed in Feb 2004 and PUBLISHED, not GRANTED on Aug 12. 20040156192 is the application number, not the patent number. Patent numbers are serial and are in the 6 million range.
Talk about egg on face.
More than that, keep in mind that Xeon mobos are server-oriented, often coming with GbE and SCSI built in,
THere are as many Xeon motherboards without SCSI as with, and GigE is cheap these days.
Is this a community values issue, a censorship issue, or just crap music being foisted off onto the public
YES!!
The hard part is not turning a specification or requirement into a working piece of software. The hard part is writing a specification that captures what the customer needs to have happen in unambiguous language.
Software development should be treated as a multiplayer team communications game. The success of the team depends more on how successful the communications are.
one can assume a well-informed readership.
You mean like Congressmen and lawyers looking for something to sensationalize?
Peer review is much more than 'well informed'. It's leading experts in the field.
This move is prompted by the high prices scientific journals often charge for subscriptions and for reprints -- even when the papers were funded by government grants.
It seems to me that these two are unrelated. The journals are certainly free to charge whatever they want, and given that the circulation of these journals is tiny it's understandable that they aren't going to be cheap. Since digital archiving is a bit questionable libraries of course want paper.
The funding by govenment grants is all fine and good, but last I looked that funding went to the researchers, not the journals.
Ultimately if we have a mandate that distribution of these articles is going to be free, the current journals are going to be put out of business by this madate. If this happens there will be side effects one of which is that the funding agencies like the NIH are going to have to pick up the burden of disseminating these articles.
Now the question is: do you want an increasingly politicized government agency deciding which articles are worthy of publication (remember that many scientists are already complaining that the Bush administration is surpressing scientific results that don't fit it's political agenda - Lysenko anyone?), or do you want the scientific community through it's professional societies deciding what gets published?
I was trying to suggest that it would make sense to permit a totally unique DNA sequence to be patented that does not exist normally in nature, just like if you wanted to patent a new chemical.
You miss the point here. The PTO *IS* treating DNA like it were just another chemical.
There is a huge body of patent law and precidence covering chemicals. The ruckus is that the PTO is very much trending towards treating DNA as just another chemical, much to the dismay of the the people who seem to want to treat DNA as some special material. And the fact of the matter is that if you make a chemical in pure form where previously it only existed in nature combined with other materials or in an impure form you have made a new composition of matter under patent law. Not 'discovered' because the fact is the pure form never existed in nature. Patents cover not only molecular structures but mixtures and other compositional variations as well. It doesn't have to be a molecule. All it has to be is a new form.
A new composition is part A of getting a standard chemical patent on that composition. Part B is showing a use for that new composition.
There are MANY such patents issued every year for an amazing array of products. The PTO is just applying that to DNA.
It's classical patent law the way it has been practiced for the past 200 years. Compositon of matter patents are well established - what has got people torqued is that the PTO is applying these well established principles to DNA, which of course from a pure scientific viewpoint is just another chemical. Very important functionality, but nonetheless GATTACA which are pretty simple amino acids.
People are free to argue that DNA is special, but in order for the PTO to treat it as special there will have to be some changes in precidence or the law. Until then they are pretty much on solid legal ground to treat DNA as a chemical.
I'm also saying that you need to have something novel to do when you apply for a patent, and a simple DNA sequence that hasn't been registered with the USPTO before shouldn't count.
t ml
It doesn't count. Read the patent policy.
http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/3607.h
Do the work of sequencing the human genome and make it public domain so it wasn't patentable.
That last "so it wasn't patentable" is where you are mistaken. Sure, you can't patent the sequences per se. But if you have a use for that data such as a genetic test for a disease caused by a certain combination of GATTACA, you have patentable material.
Do these companies claim to have invented humans, or just certain diseases that have been around for millenia?
These people have claimed to have invented ways to isolate the genes from the human body so they can be used for various new things, including genetic tests for disease. The isolated gene, copied through PCR etc. is surely one of the most fundamental and important inventions in history. This isolated form does not exist in nature, and is purely a product of technology.
Isn't the existence of the gene prior art?
The existence in vitro, outside the human body of copies of the isolated gene by techniques like PCR is not prior art. Stories about people being sued for their own genome are nonsense because the patents cover isolated genes. Also the patent must include a substantial use for the gene, not just a description of the gene. That use is ALSO not prior art.
Here the story.
Yeah, wouldn't 4 million + years of use be considered prior art?
So you are saying that people have been doing genetic tests for diseases for 4 million+ years? Give me a break.
So if there are 15 different ways to do it the on click patent covers them all?
You are not patenting the program code, but the process of adding an item to a cart. If the program code implements adding an item to the cart, yes, it is covered.
If thats pretty ordinary skillish then it is obvious and not patentable.
Be careful - you are confusing the patentable material and the unpatentable material.
Lets take a look at another example - let's say I came up with an idea for a new fuel injector that gave better gas milage. I publish the drawings for the thing. The materials it is made out of are, let's say, a 316 stainless steel. I don't have to provide exact machining steps, where to get the iro for the steel, and all that other sort of technology that is already known, any more than I have to provide the source code to implement basic server side functionality such as maintaining a session. If, as a competitor I find that I can make the same injector out of steel made from iron dug up in Canada instead of the US, well too bad because the injector is what is patented.
There is a principle associated with all this known as "rule of equivalents" which basically states that making changes to the implementation doesn't get you out from underneath the patent is you are recieving the benefit of the patent.
Write your governement official to move software patents to a new class of intellectual property which guarentees a slice of the 20year revenue -- to the inventors not the company.
THis is one I really agree with. Most other countries include a provision in their patent laws that requires that the inventor get some percentage if the patent really becomes lucrative. Of course that's only about 0.1% of all patents, but nonetheless it's a good idea.
explicit enough that you could build it
The rule is that you have to describe it well enough so that somebody with ordinary skill in the art could build it.
Saying a method of clicking a button to add an item to a shoppiung cart and check out would not.
That's pretty ordinary skillish.
The lawyers always win. The person with the most lawyers comes in second place.
You come in n+1 place where n is the number of lawyers. Note that n is rapidly increasing,
In any case, the Europeans have the same argument, as do the Chinese, as do the Japanese, and they do have the purchasing power.
Right. Let's neglect the fact that the US runs a whopping trade imbalance with the rest of the world. Fact is everybody has access to US markets more than we have access to theirs.
I think the BBC article does the reviewers of the time a great deal of injustice by not including WH Auden's review. Auden was and still is regarded as one of the great reviewers, and he cast FoTR as one of the best.
In fact my wife (living in South America as a teenager at the time) ordered a copy from Unwin and Allen after reading the Auden review. As a result we have a First Edition in our library (as well as a 3rd Edition of Unwin and Allen of the Hobbit). The two are worth thousands now.