The science behind this has actually been known for quite some time, so it's amazing that no one thought of this application until now. I'm kicking myself for not having thought of it myself!
Anyways, here's an explanation of how their new sound works.
Re:So where does the information come from?
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A Map to Nowhere?
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You are right that the genome does not contain all the information needed to specify an organism.
Here's a semi-fanciful essay that I wrote, describing how to make heritable changes without changing the DNA.
Here's another prime number that's legally protected: it's hundreds of digits long and apparently has special cryptographic properties.
Scientific American article
From the article: ""I was kind of interested in pushing the system to see how far you could go with allowable claims," explains Schlafly, a member of the League for Programming Freedom, an organization that opposes software patents. Although Schlafly can now sue anybody for using his numbers, he is not worried about people infringing on his rights. "When you get to numbers that are so big that nobody has used them before, well, there are lots of them up there," he says."
As laser pointing becomes more accurate, we ought to be able to stimulate directly our individual cones -- one day somone could perceive "superred" by directly stimulating only the red cones in his fovea. I wonder how different it would look than the more common red?
I have wondered the same thing, and wrote an essay about how this might turn out.
Incidentally, here's a PC World article about a device that can "paint" color images directly onto your retina.
Lots of the instruction set is covered by prior art, but surely Intel could argue that the details of the exact instruction set provided, the op-codes used, etc., should be patentable/copyrightable.
As a point of comparison: if you scan in a 300-year-old painting, you can copyright your digital version, because you had to use creative judgement to adjust the contrast/brightness, etc.
It seems to me that deciding exactly which instructions to include in a chip's instruction set involves much more creativity than scanning in a picture. So shouldn't it also be copyrightable?
So why hasn't Intel done this? Anti-trust issues? Does anyone know?
Slashdot Mirror
Anyways, here's an explanation of how their new sound works.
You are right that the genome does not contain all the information needed to specify an organism.
Here's a semi-fanciful essay that I wrote, describing how to make heritable changes without changing the DNA.
Scientific American article
From the article: ""I was kind of interested in pushing the system to see how far you could go with allowable claims," explains Schlafly, a member of the League for Programming Freedom, an organization that opposes software patents. Although Schlafly can now sue anybody for using his numbers, he is not worried about people infringing on his rights. "When you get to numbers that are so big that nobody has used them before, well, there are lots of them up there," he says."
Patent number 5,373,560
I have wondered the same thing, and wrote an essay about how this might turn out.
Incidentally, here's a PC World article about a device that can "paint" color images directly onto your retina.
As a point of comparison: if you scan in a 300-year-old painting, you can copyright your digital version, because you had to use creative judgement to adjust the contrast/brightness, etc.
It seems to me that deciding exactly which instructions to include in a chip's instruction set involves much more creativity than scanning in a picture. So shouldn't it also be copyrightable?
So why hasn't Intel done this? Anti-trust issues? Does anyone know?
Even though the peak of the light pulse travels faster than c, no information actually travels faster than c. This animation nicely demonstrates the difference: http://www.netspace.net. au/ ~gregegan/APPLETS/20/20.html