Lights come on? Yes. Whatever would we do without the government to regulate electricity? After all those pesky power companies don't really like to sell electricity and would make more money if it were completely unreliable. (In case you're confused that's sarcasm).
Wasn't that part of Enron's reason for deliberately sabotaging energy distribution in California to make it unreliable? They were trying to manipulate prices and make a fake case for deregulation.
They did it to captured chemical weapons during the first gulf war with no problem. Of course, the low doses of neurotoxins US troops ended up getting from doing that were one of the causes (aside from undiagnosed PTSD) of Gulf War Syndrome, so it probably wasn't very bright.
Read his wikipedia page: "He grew up in a two-bedroom apartment in Chicago's South Shore middle-class Jewish neighborhood." Is that a sign of a wealthy family?
His adoptive father was "was a pompous government employee who had made a small fortune in Chicago real estate, only to lose it during the Great Depression." So, no, not wealthy.
Definitely have to grant you that one. Reading comprehension fail on that one. Missed the fact that he'd lost the fortune. I do have to say that a two bedroom apartment doesn't mean poverty. There are plenty of luxury apartments with two or fewer bedrooms.
I didn't say his parents were not middle class. I actually said that list is all middle class, simply not upper-middle class with powerful connections. He had Russian Jewish immigrant grandparents on both sides of his family. Are you agreeing this isn't an upper-class background, which was the argument I refuted in the first place?
Problem is, the details never really say how well off most of these people really were or were not. Were they just middle class, or upper middle class. Probably the latter. As I said, I'm not really sure why I'm in this particular argument rather than the comments about Walton's super-rich heirs. Here I was just examining the details I could find about your list of outliers. Most of them don't seem to have come from actual poverty, which was what the original article was discussing but I certainly admit that there are some who did come from outright poverty and others who came from less than upper middle class or wealthy backgrounds.
Also I'd like to note that a Russian Jewish immigrant background says nothing about relative state of poverty or wealth.
Jeff Bezos is the only one I listed that you have a chance of claiming comes from a rich background with good connections. Yes, his mother's family owns a ranch, but I don't find anything on how much money they made, and it is really easy for farmers and ranchers to lose everything. His mother's father was a regional director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, which probably helped open a few doors as well. As I say, this is the closest of the ones I listed to being upper-middle class with connections.
I listed Jeff specifically because I think it is great that a Cuban immigrant can come to America, alone at age 15, and marry a young ranch girl with a young son, and now be the father of the 11th wealthiest person in the US.
Not much to say on that one, really. Just quoting it for completeness. This space for rent.
Wow, you got me. A knitting shop.
Eh, I just addressed them all out of a compulsive sense of completeness. You should note that I also wrote: "Not that it made them rich..." For all we know, it was a massive success of a knitting shop, but it's probable it was just a small shop earning a small profit.
I listed the father because I didn't feel like adding that his mother ran a knitting shop. Check out the list I posted in response to mvdwege, where I had that detail as I made the list, with all the others whose mother's occupation was listed. But for the short list, I went with the fact Sheldon's father drove a taxi cab to illustrate that the family was not upper-middle class with powerful connections.
Well, yes, but the mother is the one who appears to have had her own business. That may not actually be the case. It's hard to tell from the brief descriptions. She may have just been the manager of someone else's shop, and the father may have been an owner operator. It seems to be saying though that she owned her own business and he worked for a wage and tips. Even if that is the case, it doesn't mean her business was a success and that he didn't make more money driving the cab. I just found it interesting that you focused on the fathers and ignored the mothers. You did that with the Walton heirs and with Bezos, so it stuck out.
3 Larry Ellison, born to an unwed mother, adopted by family members
Adopted by family members yes. Wealthy ones.
10 Michael Bloomberg, gather was a real estate agent, grandparents were Russian Jewish immigrants (not a group known for being wealthy)
His parents were middle class at least during his formative years, certainly not poor. It's a little unclear what his father did, some sources say bookkeeper and some say real estate. Varied business interests? In any case
11 Jeff Bezos, while his mother came from a ranching family, his adoptive father was a Cuban immigrant
So, his mother's family were rich and she married someone who might not have been rich. I'm not sure how that makes him not from a wealthy background.
12 Sheldon Adelson, father drove a taxi cab
Mother ran a knitting shop. Not that it made them rich, just wondering why you only count the fathers.
13 Sergey Brin, born in the USSR, came to USA with parents at age 6
Father a math professor and mother a researcher for NASA. Once again, not rich, but definitely middle class.
15 George Soros, while his parents were not poor, they were Jews in Hungary when the Nazis invaded
Mother from a reasonably well to do family and lawyer father. Not necessarily rich, but far from poor. So middle class background and family connections.
How many more do I have to list before they are no longer the outliers?
Well, it's a list of 400 (and the whole list are outliers just from being the richest of the rich in the first place), so I would say you have to list quite a few more.
In any case, I don't have a lot invested in this argument. Arguing about the mega-rich doesn't really say anything about the poverty trap, even if every person on the list actually came from abject poverty. For some reason, some people always want to focus on the mega-rich. It reminds me of arguments about, for example, mixed-gender youth sports teams, where there's a certain type of personality which will always focus on professional sports teams. It doesn't make any sense, as they are statistical anomalies anyway.
The thing that gets me is that you're still apparently convinced that Sam Walton's heirs and their heirs are somehow proof that people on the Forbes 400 list aren't descendants of wealthy people. I have to admit that you have solidly disproved the absolute statement made that "all of them come from at least upper middle class".
90% of millionaires earned less than $100K from their jobs. They got a million dollars by saving slowly over time and letting investment do it's thing (growth).
The ceiling on what someone earning federal minimum wage can earn in a year is about $87,500. That would be working 24 hours a day every day without any sleep and it accounts for overtime. Clearly no human could actually manage that, and no single minimum wage job would give anyone that many hours. Instead what happens is that minimum wage earners work multiple part-time jobs, which means they can theoretically work 80 or more hours a week without earning any overtime, which would be more like $30,000 a year (plus bonus medical expenses from high blood pressure, etc.) They're simply well below the level where they can get anywhere from wise investing. I think we both agree that the best investment for anyone earning that is in getting better employment.
As for those millionaires, I think you're not recognizing here that a millionaire isn't exactly a big deal any more. A millionaire is what any upper middle class person should be on retirement unless something went wrong.
Considering that the US has been, in recent years espousing the theory that cyber-attacks should be treated as real acts of war, suitable for real retaliation with real weapons, I would say it's pretty terrifying.
I agree that it won't last, but bubbles tend to be cyclical and it's hard to tell how long the current cycle will last and when the next one will peak. College is something that's a little difficult to reschedule for five years out when the outlook may be better.
It's not that clear that Sam Walton's family was all that poor. Aside from being a farmer, his father ran some sort of mortgage business. How much of a success he was is unclear. His heirs, however, are also the heirs of his wife, who was from a quite well off family. Not as massively wealthy as the Waltons would become, but well off enough to provide most of the money for Walton to buy his first stores. Walton's heirs also have heirs of their own, so we're talking about at least 4 generations. How many do you require for "long established wealth"? I get the feeling that your definition involves ancestors lugging sacks of gold off the Mayflower, or possibily a lineage that goes back to Charlemagne or something like that. I certainly don't claim that myself. It is generally true that most wealthy people come from wealth in one way or another. It's certainly not universally true, but it's true enough. The Walton family are not an example of currently rich people who come from poor backgrounds. I see it as being as simple as that.
Whatever background Walton came from, he had a family safety net and connections. He wasn't in the situation this article is talking about where stress or desperation trap people in poverty. Quite aside from that, he's also an outlier. Even if he had made a fortune out of absolute poverty, outliers don't invalidate this theory. Just because the poverty trap isn't perfect doesn't mean it isn't real.
I guess you missed the part "over any 20 year period"
Didn't miss it. I don't necessarily agree with the future predictive power of those stats. Maybe I read too much Jane Austen when I was younger. All those people talking about their set yearly investment incomes. Apparently a lot of that was based on Navy bonds. Made me wonder what happened to all those people after the bottom dropped out of Navy bonds... Actually, not really, they were all connected upper class and got a bailout.
The same can be said of any 10 year period, except the period 2000 - 2010 and if you pick specific dates at the great depression.
So, except for half of the last 20 years. I certainly admit that just about everything is a gamble, so why not gamble on the stock market. It very well may work. Ultimately, nothing beats having real earning potential. The simple fact of the matter is that the minimum wage earner who squirrels away a little bit of money into an investment account every day would be much better served by searching for a job that pays twice as much. It's frankly a lot more realistic than gradually earning interest on a pittance invested in the stock market.
That's an interesting theory. In practice, people only have so many realistic choices. If the same kind of people are running the same kind of scam in all of them, they're stuck.
That's still an average though, and there can still be boring old index mutual funds that lose money. We're still talking about gambling here, even if it's a relatively safe form of gambling.
I'm not quite sure why you're giving him Sam Walton who isn't on that list since he's dead. The fact that the GP thinks pointing to Sam Walton's extremely wealthy heirs as an example proving that the people on the list aren't a bunch of wealthy heirs seems to point to a pretty bizarre case of cognitive dissonance.
.Donald Trump was born rich too, but others like Warran Buffet, Bill Gates, and Jobs earned their money.
They certainly earned lots of money above what they started with, but the first brokerage Warren Buffett worked in was Buffett-Falk and Company, with the Buffett in the name being his US Representative father, and Bill Gates was a millionaire from birth. One out of three isn't bad I suppose.
Why do people keep on talking about 3% compound interest as if it's gaining you money. Inflation is typically close to 3% over the long term. You have to subtract the rate of inflation from the interest percentage you're getting to get a real idea of how much you'll be getting from compound interest. You might actually end up losing money.
My baby will be born soon. If I drop the soda money into a Roth for five years, that's one year of tuition. I then stop saving. In seven years, the investment doubles. In another seven, it doubles again
So you'll be getting greater than 10% interest consistently over the course of decades. If you want to be realistic about inflation, you'd actually have to be doing better than about 13% interest. Then there's the fact that college costs are rising faster than inflation... Just doesn't sound realistic.
your parent or parents should be putting away something regularly.
Well there you go. Poor people are clearly to blame for not having parents who save money for their education. Possibly for not even having parents at all. Stinking poor people!
They get rewarded for every shoplifter they catch because if you are caught shoplifting, they will offer to make a deal with you for $400 to not press charges in the local courts.
What are their documentation requirements? If they don't have to provide video evidence, any moderately talented swindling extortionist could leverage that situation to make thousands of dollars a day framing people.
That may be the case, but in old school computer communications on say a BBS, e-mail, Usenet, etc. there was no way to put things in italics. At least not that would work with all readers. Back in those days, few things were more annoying than posts from people who used some particular online service or reader with some custom (and generally based on proprietary standards) display options that just produced garbage output for the other 99% of us. So, no italics, and all caps was the only way to simulate bold, then you had underscores to simulate underlining. All caps is generally considered rude since it's shouting, so underscores are the option most people use for all emphasis, regardless of context.
It seems like we're reading the part about the sole inventive feature being that it is a computer program a little differently, so we're coming up with different interpretations. My perspective on computer programs is that they're always implementations of some kind of algorithm or design that isn't a computer program, so there's no such thing as a solo computer program that qualifies as an invention. It just seems so intuitive and obvious to me that it's hard to understand how anyone can read it differently. Of course, I have to acknowledge that the reality of the situation is that legal types are going to mostly interpret it the way you are.
I create a machine to do something in a new and novel fashion. I do it using mechanical parts and gears (which are an implementation detail - the individual gears and such aren't really new or novel, just the way the machine works overall). I should be able to get a patent for that.
Now, I rip out the gears and put in motors and software to do the same thing the gears did, except instead of a bunch of gears doing what I invented, it's a computer program replicating the functionality. Is it suddenly unpatentable just because it's software rather than hardware?
You do realize that your machine using mechanical parts and gears and your computer program are different devices, right? See, the way patents are supposed to work is that, regardless how new and novel the function of your machine, patenting one device that performs that function isn't supposed to give you a broad patent on all means of performing that function, just on the particular device you made. If someone came along and used a different arrangement of mechanical parts and gears that gets the same results, but does it in a different way, that is meant to be a separate invention and not covered by your patent.
The version that passed replaces that line with saying that it;s not patentable if the only thing new about it is "on a computer". As passed, new inventions are new inventions - whether computers are involved or not.
So:
"where the actual contribution of an invention lies solely in it being a computer program, it is ineligible for patent protection... it will not be possible to obtain a patent for an invention that involves or makes use of the computer program if the sole inventive feature is that it is a computer program"
Does not seem to be exactly what you said. It seems to be saying that computer programs by themselves, even if completely novel, are ineligible for patent protection, not just that computer programs can only be patented if the function they perform is novel.
We have no idea how long he was in Indonesia. He could easily have been symptomatic on his way back in.
That's true, he could have been. If he was, he probably wouldn't have ended up spreading the disease around to other members of his church, however.
Just because precautionary guidelines won't work 100% of the time, or even 50% of the time, for totally valid reason you've mentioned, doesn't mean it's not worth having the guidelines at all.
Absolutely agree, but I was replying to someone who wrote:
Well, that or the failure of border protection?;)
It seems a bit harsh to call people failures for not doing what, with current technology, would be impossible. Maybe if they took a blood sample from everyone they could do it, but even then I'm not sure there's a test that would come back with definitive results before symptoms started.
Slashdot Mirror
Lights come on? Yes. Whatever would we do without the government to regulate electricity? After all those pesky power companies don't really like to sell electricity and would make more money if it were completely unreliable. (In case you're confused that's sarcasm).
Wasn't that part of Enron's reason for deliberately sabotaging energy distribution in California to make it unreliable? They were trying to manipulate prices and make a fake case for deregulation.
They did it to captured chemical weapons during the first gulf war with no problem. Of course, the low doses of neurotoxins US troops ended up getting from doing that were one of the causes (aside from undiagnosed PTSD) of Gulf War Syndrome, so it probably wasn't very bright.
Read his wikipedia page: "He grew up in a two-bedroom apartment in Chicago's South Shore middle-class Jewish neighborhood." Is that a sign of a wealthy family?
His adoptive father was "was a pompous government employee who had made a small fortune in Chicago real estate, only to lose it during the Great Depression." So, no, not wealthy.
Definitely have to grant you that one. Reading comprehension fail on that one. Missed the fact that he'd lost the fortune. I do have to say that a two bedroom apartment doesn't mean poverty. There are plenty of luxury apartments with two or fewer bedrooms.
I didn't say his parents were not middle class. I actually said that list is all middle class, simply not upper-middle class with powerful connections. He had Russian Jewish immigrant grandparents on both sides of his family. Are you agreeing this isn't an upper-class background, which was the argument I refuted in the first place?
Problem is, the details never really say how well off most of these people really were or were not. Were they just middle class, or upper middle class. Probably the latter. As I said, I'm not really sure why I'm in this particular argument rather than the comments about Walton's super-rich heirs. Here I was just examining the details I could find about your list of outliers. Most of them don't seem to have come from actual poverty, which was what the original article was discussing but I certainly admit that there are some who did come from outright poverty and others who came from less than upper middle class or wealthy backgrounds.
Also I'd like to note that a Russian Jewish immigrant background says nothing about relative state of poverty or wealth.
Jeff Bezos is the only one I listed that you have a chance of claiming comes from a rich background with good connections. Yes, his mother's family owns a ranch, but I don't find anything on how much money they made, and it is really easy for farmers and ranchers to lose everything. His mother's father was a regional director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, which probably helped open a few doors as well. As I say, this is the closest of the ones I listed to being upper-middle class with connections.
I listed Jeff specifically because I think it is great that a Cuban immigrant can come to America, alone at age 15, and marry a young ranch girl with a young son, and now be the father of the 11th wealthiest person in the US.
Not much to say on that one, really. Just quoting it for completeness. This space for rent.
Wow, you got me. A knitting shop.
Eh, I just addressed them all out of a compulsive sense of completeness. You should note that I also wrote: "Not that it made them rich..." For all we know, it was a massive success of a knitting shop, but it's probable it was just a small shop earning a small profit.
I listed the father because I didn't feel like adding that his mother ran a knitting shop. Check out the list I posted in response to mvdwege, where I had that detail as I made the list, with all the others whose mother's occupation was listed. But for the short list, I went with the fact Sheldon's father drove a taxi cab to illustrate that the family was not upper-middle class with powerful connections.
Well, yes, but the mother is the one who appears to have had her own business. That may not actually be the case. It's hard to tell from the brief descriptions. She may have just been the manager of someone else's shop, and the father may have been an owner operator. It seems to be saying though that she owned her own business and he worked for a wage and tips. Even if that is the case, it doesn't mean her business was a success and that he didn't make more money driving the cab. I just found it interesting that you focused on the fathers and ignored the mothers. You did that with the Walton heirs and with Bezos, so it stuck out.
3 Larry Ellison, born to an unwed mother, adopted by family members
Adopted by family members yes. Wealthy ones.
10 Michael Bloomberg, gather was a real estate agent, grandparents were Russian Jewish immigrants (not a group known for being wealthy)
His parents were middle class at least during his formative years, certainly not poor. It's a little unclear what his father did, some sources say bookkeeper and some say real estate. Varied business interests? In any case
11 Jeff Bezos, while his mother came from a ranching family, his adoptive father was a Cuban immigrant
So, his mother's family were rich and she married someone who might not have been rich. I'm not sure how that makes him not from a wealthy background.
12 Sheldon Adelson, father drove a taxi cab
Mother ran a knitting shop. Not that it made them rich, just wondering why you only count the fathers.
13 Sergey Brin, born in the USSR, came to USA with parents at age 6
Father a math professor and mother a researcher for NASA. Once again, not rich, but definitely middle class.
15 George Soros, while his parents were not poor, they were Jews in Hungary when the Nazis invaded
Mother from a reasonably well to do family and lawyer father. Not necessarily rich, but far from poor. So middle class background and family connections.
How many more do I have to list before they are no longer the outliers?
Well, it's a list of 400 (and the whole list are outliers just from being the richest of the rich in the first place), so I would say you have to list quite a few more.
In any case, I don't have a lot invested in this argument. Arguing about the mega-rich doesn't really say anything about the poverty trap, even if every person on the list actually came from abject poverty. For some reason, some people always want to focus on the mega-rich. It reminds me of arguments about, for example, mixed-gender youth sports teams, where there's a certain type of personality which will always focus on professional sports teams. It doesn't make any sense, as they are statistical anomalies anyway.
The thing that gets me is that you're still apparently convinced that Sam Walton's heirs and their heirs are somehow proof that people on the Forbes 400 list aren't descendants of wealthy people. I have to admit that you have solidly disproved the absolute statement made that "all of them come from at least upper middle class".
Oh they can cause plenty of destruction, but they're not undercover operatives who are in danger if their cover is blown.
90% of millionaires earned less than $100K from their jobs. They got a million dollars by saving slowly over time and letting investment do it's thing (growth).
The ceiling on what someone earning federal minimum wage can earn in a year is about $87,500. That would be working 24 hours a day every day without any sleep and it accounts for overtime. Clearly no human could actually manage that, and no single minimum wage job would give anyone that many hours. Instead what happens is that minimum wage earners work multiple part-time jobs, which means they can theoretically work 80 or more hours a week without earning any overtime, which would be more like $30,000 a year (plus bonus medical expenses from high blood pressure, etc.) They're simply well below the level where they can get anywhere from wise investing. I think we both agree that the best investment for anyone earning that is in getting better employment.
As for those millionaires, I think you're not recognizing here that a millionaire isn't exactly a big deal any more. A millionaire is what any upper middle class person should be on retirement unless something went wrong.
Considering that the US has been, in recent years espousing the theory that cyber-attacks should be treated as real acts of war, suitable for real retaliation with real weapons, I would say it's pretty terrifying.
I agree that it won't last, but bubbles tend to be cyclical and it's hard to tell how long the current cycle will last and when the next one will peak. College is something that's a little difficult to reschedule for five years out when the outlook may be better.
It's not that clear that Sam Walton's family was all that poor. Aside from being a farmer, his father ran some sort of mortgage business. How much of a success he was is unclear. His heirs, however, are also the heirs of his wife, who was from a quite well off family. Not as massively wealthy as the Waltons would become, but well off enough to provide most of the money for Walton to buy his first stores. Walton's heirs also have heirs of their own, so we're talking about at least 4 generations. How many do you require for "long established wealth"? I get the feeling that your definition involves ancestors lugging sacks of gold off the Mayflower, or possibily a lineage that goes back to Charlemagne or something like that. I certainly don't claim that myself. It is generally true that most wealthy people come from wealth in one way or another. It's certainly not universally true, but it's true enough. The Walton family are not an example of currently rich people who come from poor backgrounds. I see it as being as simple as that.
Whatever background Walton came from, he had a family safety net and connections. He wasn't in the situation this article is talking about where stress or desperation trap people in poverty. Quite aside from that, he's also an outlier. Even if he had made a fortune out of absolute poverty, outliers don't invalidate this theory. Just because the poverty trap isn't perfect doesn't mean it isn't real.
I guess you missed the part "over any 20 year period"
Didn't miss it. I don't necessarily agree with the future predictive power of those stats. Maybe I read too much Jane Austen when I was younger. All those people talking about their set yearly investment incomes. Apparently a lot of that was based on Navy bonds. Made me wonder what happened to all those people after the bottom dropped out of Navy bonds... Actually, not really, they were all connected upper class and got a bailout.
The same can be said of any 10 year period, except the period 2000 - 2010 and if you pick specific dates at the great depression.
So, except for half of the last 20 years. I certainly admit that just about everything is a gamble, so why not gamble on the stock market. It very well may work. Ultimately, nothing beats having real earning potential. The simple fact of the matter is that the minimum wage earner who squirrels away a little bit of money into an investment account every day would be much better served by searching for a job that pays twice as much. It's frankly a lot more realistic than gradually earning interest on a pittance invested in the stock market.
What operatives? None of the people involved in this are working undercover, they're working in cubicles in office blocks in the US.
That's an interesting theory. In practice, people only have so many realistic choices. If the same kind of people are running the same kind of scam in all of them, they're stuck.
That's still an average though, and there can still be boring old index mutual funds that lose money. We're still talking about gambling here, even if it's a relatively safe form of gambling.
I'm not quite sure why you're giving him Sam Walton who isn't on that list since he's dead. The fact that the GP thinks pointing to Sam Walton's extremely wealthy heirs as an example proving that the people on the list aren't a bunch of wealthy heirs seems to point to a pretty bizarre case of cognitive dissonance.
.Donald Trump was born rich too, but others like Warran Buffet, Bill Gates, and Jobs earned their money.
They certainly earned lots of money above what they started with, but the first brokerage Warren Buffett worked in was Buffett-Falk and Company, with the Buffett in the name being his US Representative father, and Bill Gates was a millionaire from birth. One out of three isn't bad I suppose.
Why do people keep on talking about 3% compound interest as if it's gaining you money. Inflation is typically close to 3% over the long term. You have to subtract the rate of inflation from the interest percentage you're getting to get a real idea of how much you'll be getting from compound interest. You might actually end up losing money.
My baby will be born soon. If I drop the soda money into a Roth for five years, that's one year of tuition. I then stop saving. In seven years, the investment doubles. In another seven, it doubles again
So you'll be getting greater than 10% interest consistently over the course of decades. If you want to be realistic about inflation, you'd actually have to be doing better than about 13% interest. Then there's the fact that college costs are rising faster than inflation... Just doesn't sound realistic.
You should be able to get around 3% in ETFs. There are finds currently posting 14% for the 5 year.
Doesn't the inflation rate tend to average higher than 3%?
your parent or parents should be putting away something regularly.
Well there you go. Poor people are clearly to blame for not having parents who save money for their education. Possibly for not even having parents at all. Stinking poor people!
They get rewarded for every shoplifter they catch because if you are caught shoplifting, they will offer to make a deal with you for $400 to not press charges in the local courts.
What are their documentation requirements? If they don't have to provide video evidence, any moderately talented swindling extortionist could leverage that situation to make thousands of dollars a day framing people.
That may be the case, but in old school computer communications on say a BBS, e-mail, Usenet, etc. there was no way to put things in italics. At least not that would work with all readers. Back in those days, few things were more annoying than posts from people who used some particular online service or reader with some custom (and generally based on proprietary standards) display options that just produced garbage output for the other 99% of us. So, no italics, and all caps was the only way to simulate bold, then you had underscores to simulate underlining. All caps is generally considered rude since it's shouting, so underscores are the option most people use for all emphasis, regardless of context.
It seems like we're reading the part about the sole inventive feature being that it is a computer program a little differently, so we're coming up with different interpretations. My perspective on computer programs is that they're always implementations of some kind of algorithm or design that isn't a computer program, so there's no such thing as a solo computer program that qualifies as an invention. It just seems so intuitive and obvious to me that it's hard to understand how anyone can read it differently. Of course, I have to acknowledge that the reality of the situation is that legal types are going to mostly interpret it the way you are.
I create a machine to do something in a new and novel fashion. I do it using mechanical parts and gears (which are an implementation detail - the individual gears and such aren't really new or novel, just the way the machine works overall). I should be able to get a patent for that.
Now, I rip out the gears and put in motors and software to do the same thing the gears did, except instead of a bunch of gears doing what I invented, it's a computer program replicating the functionality. Is it suddenly unpatentable just because it's software rather than hardware?
You do realize that your machine using mechanical parts and gears and your computer program are different devices, right? See, the way patents are supposed to work is that, regardless how new and novel the function of your machine, patenting one device that performs that function isn't supposed to give you a broad patent on all means of performing that function, just on the particular device you made. If someone came along and used a different arrangement of mechanical parts and gears that gets the same results, but does it in a different way, that is meant to be a separate invention and not covered by your patent.
Errr, didn't you say:
The version that passed replaces that line with saying that it;s not patentable if the only thing new about it is "on a computer".
As passed, new inventions are new inventions - whether computers are involved or not.
So:
"where the actual contribution of an invention lies solely in it being a computer program, it is ineligible for patent protection... it will not be possible to obtain a patent for an invention that involves or makes use of the computer program if the sole inventive feature is that it is a computer program"
Does not seem to be exactly what you said. It seems to be saying that computer programs by themselves, even if completely novel, are ineligible for patent protection, not just that computer programs can only be patented if the function they perform is novel.
We have no idea how long he was in Indonesia. He could easily have been symptomatic on his way back in.
That's true, he could have been. If he was, he probably wouldn't have ended up spreading the disease around to other members of his church, however.
Just because precautionary guidelines won't work 100% of the time, or even 50% of the time, for totally valid reason you've mentioned, doesn't mean it's not worth having the guidelines at all.
Absolutely agree, but I was replying to someone who wrote:
Well, that or the failure of border protection? ;)
It seems a bit harsh to call people failures for not doing what, with current technology, would be impossible. Maybe if they took a blood sample from everyone they could do it, but even then I'm not sure there's a test that would come back with definitive results before symptoms started.