Okay okay, so maybe I was asking to be labelled as "Flamebait" with a Subject: line ending in " . . . you idiot", but I was (and still am) distressed to see Slashdot propagating such pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo.
Slashdot's audience includes a lot of brilliant, but not-fully-formed young minds, young minds who with the proper guidance and background in scientific knowledge could go on to tackle Important Problems like human consciousness. Instead of providing solid knowledge, Slashdot peddles sensationalistic, second-hand ignorance that anyone with 101-level knowledge of the subject could recognize as nonsense. I think it's criminal to take such a precious audience and mislead them so horribly.
Katz rarely knows what he's talking about. When he does, it's like the proverbial stopped clock that's right twice a day. Slashdot shouldn't be giving that stopped clock the time of day.
Sigh. Whatever crap this book is spouting, it's so off base it's not even wrong.
Consciousness, whatever that is, is the result of neurons firing at each other. Are you with me so far?
Neurons interact by releasing neurotransmitters at one another. Billions of them at a time, per firing, per neuron, several times per second. Quantum effects are dwarfed at that scale.
Rob, why don't you try to give/. a modicum of scientific credibility instead of being a vehicle for a disinformation-monger like Katz? Great but unformed minds read/., it's a crime to send them barking up the wrong tree.
Call me inflammatory, but . . .
on
Planet Gattaca
·
· Score: 1
. . . I think that the cottage industry surrounding the "ethical implications of the genome project" is a bunch of hooey. Background: In the Federal grant for the HGP, about 2% was set aside for considering the ethical implications. As you math-heads may have figured, 2% of a whopping great number is a pretty durn big number itself. I attended a conference on the subject (partially funded by your tax $$$; thanks, everyone!), and yes, they discussed many important issues such as the implications of genetic testing. But IMHO, the anti-genetic-testing faction ruined their credibility with their choice of speakers. For example, one guy thought he was carrying a horrible time-bomb of a genetic disease, and so he lived his life as if there were no tommorrow. He racked up huge amounts of debt, failed to maintain interpersonal relationships, etc. Long story short, he got tested and discovered he doesn't have the disease gene, and he was pissed off about it! He was suddenly faced with the horrifying prospect of having to deal with the consequences of his nihilistic behavior, and he blamed genetic testing! Sigh. I do see the arguments against genetic testing, but couldn't they have gotten somebody better?
This is such nonsense, I can't even dignify it with a response. (Hey Jon, did you run around after seeing Jurassic Park yelling "dinosaurs are real! and chaos theory makes 'em dangerous!"?) A question for Rob: How bad does Jon's writing have to get before you actually reject an article?
I am astounded by the level of ignorance that springs up whenever patents or biotech appears in Slashdot, and the noise level goes through the roof when they appear simultaneously. I don't have enough time to address the fundamental misconceptions about patent law and biology, but I have to try to make one point: Research in biology takes huge amounts of time, money and effort, and requires the exploration of (literally) millions of dead ends before something successful is finally discovered. Sure, it's easy once you know where to look, but the whole challenge in biology is the search. You may not think Taq polymerase should be patentable because you see no inventive "eureka" moment associated with it, but you have to realize that discovering and isolating a thermostable polymerase was a huge and expensive effort, the benefits of which have proved immense. Serendipitous as the discovery of Taq itself was, it wasn't just "found".
Let me put it another way. Every one of you has two (essentially) complete haploid genomes in nearly every cell in your body. These genomes contain the keys for curing all known disease. Fat lot of good you're doing with 'em.
I won't argue that copyright is enforcable via technology. It's not. Furthermore, I resent the way the RIAA is trying to kill the web the same way they killed DAT, and I really resent the burglar's tools provision in the DMCA. But let me ask you this: (1) Do you dispute that the members of the RIAA are losing revenue because of the mp3 revolution? (2) Do you think it's okay if major label artists are losing money because of it?
Be honest with yourself about what side you take. Is it okay because you're "sticking it to the man"? Do you shoplift, too? Is it okay if you only shoplift from big chains?
Sure, microbes. But can companies really patent variants of human cells? Or patent DNA altogether?
Yes, if these things are useful and articles of manufacture. For example, if a company patents a "variant of a human cell" that can regrow tissue, why on earth would you want to deny them patent protection? Another example, if a company expends a great deal of effort locating a gene associated with a disease, why shouldn't they be afforded protection?
If you have a problem with living things being tinkered with, well that's your own Luddite opinion (IMHO). But it's exactly this sort of tinkering that has and will continue to confer great benefits to humanity. Incentives for this (expensive, time consuming, filled with dead-ends) tinkering, in the form of patent protection, is a Good Thing.
. . . and I do take your point that software patents may be counterproductive, but it is precisely the situation you describe -- low marginal costs for each additional unit, be it organism or software -- that intellectual property law is designed to protect. In other words, why spend all your money up-front if it's just gonna be instantly knocked off anyway?
As for your quote: The producer of the bug would have a massive market lead on any competitor who cloned it anyway. You don't know that. I don't know that. The company who develops it has to assess the risk about whether or not they're going to even recoup their development costs (or if it's even going to work, for that matter), and it's far less likely that they're going to bother without the benefit of patent protection.
Another benefit of patent law: By law, the patent makes the know-how public. Which means that anybody can look at the patent and think of ways to adapt or improve it. Such as developing a bug to eat toxic waste and produce cotton candy. Yum.
Finally, everyone: Please learn a little about patent law before you start spouting the doomsday scenarioes mentioned above. Thanks.
While you're at it, please come up with organisms and products that clean up toxic waste spills, produce insulin, kill crop-destroying pests, produce more nutritious food, serve as research tools for developing anti-cancer drugs, and grow new organs from scratch. We can agree that these are all Good goals. What more incentive do you need? Go to it!
Cheers, Sean, and congratulations once again on this important milestone.
Personally, though, I think public money should go to a myriad of smaller projects instead of one big Manhattan/Apollo style push that sucks money from everywhere else.
If the private sector is willing to plunk the $$$ to sequence genomes, I say let 'em do it and give them patent protection as a quid pro quo.
But that's just my opinion, not like you asked for it or anything. Cheers!
You know that patented organism that eats oil spills? That's a pretty darn useful organism, wouldn't you say? Well, guess what: That organism was made by humans. Admittedly it was made from parts found in nature, but the manufacture of these bugs took a tremendous expenditure of time, money, and human effort. They didn't just magically appear.
So I ask you, what, exactly is wrong with patenting these useful bugs? Or let me put it another way, what is the incentive to expend vast amounts of time, money, and human effort to produce these useful bugs in the absence of a patent system?
P.S.: Jeremy Rifkin has no grasp on science or the law. I strongly suggest you ignore his nonsense.
First of all, "junk" is a loaded term, which is certainly evidenced by all the nonsense it has spawned in this discussion. So let's do this by enumerating the different types of DNA a typical eukaryotic genome contains: 1. Coding Regions. DNA that gets transcribed to RNA. RNA transcripts in turn have exons, which get translated into proteins, and introns, which get spliced out before translation. Why this added level of complexity? Many reasons. In sexual reproduction, new chromosomes are produced by mixing and matching old chromosomes at random. It's more likely for the new chromosome to be functional if the crossover point is in an intron because crossovers can introduce mutations, especially a nasty sort of mutation called a frameshift which would render everything downstream unintelligible. Exons also allow for a certain modularity of function, evolutionary mutations can involve entire exons being combined instead of having to try changes on a base-by-base level. 2. Regulatory regions. DNA that turns other bits of DNA up or down. Mainly used to control transcription, but also used to control DNA replication. 3. Structural regions. Eukaryotic DNA is a huge, long, string requiring a certain amount of overhead to prevent it from becoming an unmanagable tangle. Lots of the chromosome is dedicated to binding to structural proteins, generally known as histones, around which the DNA is wound. Also centromeric and telomeric proteins. 4. Repeats, cryptic genes, etc: In order to avoid overloading the term "junk," let's call this category "cruft." Cruft arises for lots of reasons. For example, sexual reproduction produces gametes, and it's far from perfect: Regions get repeated, regions get dropped. So called cryptic genes are probably the result of a spliced RNA being reverse-transcribed back into DNA and reinserted into the genome without introns or regulatory elements. What's useful about the cruft is that it provides fodder for further evolution. In summary: Eukaryotes are big and complex, which means that you have to allow for a certain amount of overhead and slop. I hope this has helped.
lorax->cartman=cartman bulldozed the rainforest manhattan->apollo=two gargantuan projects: the Bomb and the moon shot hurricane->manhattan=I dunno, the British WW2 fighter and the Bomb? I doubt it . . .
(Are we sure Hedwig isn't a reference to Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a "rock musical"?)
BTW, if you like this sort of puzzle, the Onion's "Cultural Idiocy" quiz may be right up your alley.
If you want sports info, such as up-to-the-minute stats, previews, opinions, and schedules, go to ESPN SportsZone, end of story.
These guys pioneered and continue to produce THE most useful and informative website of its kind. (IMHO, of course.) Everybody should follow their shining example.
. . . your comments on Amazon are pure horse puckey. Bezos managed to get an unfathomable amount of mindshare with the Amazon name, and it would be sheer folly for him not to leverage it to the hilt.
Let me ask you one question: Does Amazon still provide the same high-quality (IMHO) service with respect to books? Has the bookselling actually suffered?
No? Then stop sounding like such a nostalgic old fogey. Besides, what's wrong with K-mart, you big snob? Face it, this posting is just like your earlier piece on the end of the Wired era. All you're doing is bitching that the hoi polloi have invaded your sandbox. Boo hoo.
I don't know what happened to the last link. But here is the front page for the USPTO's full text database. I'm sure y'all can find U.S. Patent No. 5,914,941 from there. If you can't then I can't help you.
Slashdot Mirror
. . . from chimpan-a to chimpan-zee.
Slashdot's audience includes a lot of brilliant, but not-fully-formed young minds, young minds who with the proper guidance and background in scientific knowledge could go on to tackle Important Problems like human consciousness. Instead of providing solid knowledge, Slashdot peddles sensationalistic, second-hand ignorance that anyone with 101-level knowledge of the subject could recognize as nonsense. I think it's criminal to take such a precious audience and mislead them so horribly.
Katz rarely knows what he's talking about. When he does, it's like the proverbial stopped clock that's right twice a day. Slashdot shouldn't be giving that stopped clock the time of day.
Seriously, Rob, don't you care at all about /.'s credibility? What's next, Katz, The Secret Life of Plants?
Sigh. Whatever crap this book is spouting, it's so off base it's not even wrong.
/. a modicum of scientific credibility instead of being a vehicle for a disinformation-monger like Katz? Great but unformed minds read /., it's a crime to send them barking up the wrong tree.
Consciousness, whatever that is, is the result of neurons firing at each other. Are you with me so far?
Neurons interact by releasing neurotransmitters at one another. Billions of them at a time, per firing, per neuron, several times per second. Quantum effects are dwarfed at that scale.
Rob, why don't you try to give
. . . I think that the cottage industry surrounding the "ethical implications of the genome project" is a bunch of hooey.
Background: In the Federal grant for the HGP, about 2% was set aside for considering the ethical implications. As you math-heads may have figured, 2% of a whopping great number is a pretty durn big number itself.
I attended a conference on the subject (partially funded by your tax $$$; thanks, everyone!), and yes, they discussed many important issues such as the implications of genetic testing.
But IMHO, the anti-genetic-testing faction ruined their credibility with their choice of speakers. For example, one guy thought he was carrying a horrible time-bomb of a genetic disease, and so he lived his life as if there were no tommorrow. He racked up huge amounts of debt, failed to maintain interpersonal relationships, etc.
Long story short, he got tested and discovered he doesn't have the disease gene, and he was pissed off about it! He was suddenly faced with the horrifying prospect of having to deal with the consequences of his nihilistic behavior, and he blamed genetic testing!
Sigh. I do see the arguments against genetic testing, but couldn't they have gotten somebody better?
This is such nonsense, I can't even dignify it with a response. (Hey Jon, did you run around after seeing Jurassic Park yelling "dinosaurs are real! and chaos theory makes 'em dangerous!"?)
A question for Rob: How bad does Jon's writing have to get before you actually reject an article?
In an insane society,
the sane man must appear insane.
Well said, Sir!
I am astounded by the level of ignorance that springs up whenever patents or biotech appears in Slashdot, and the noise level goes through the roof when they appear simultaneously.
I don't have enough time to address the fundamental misconceptions about patent law and biology, but I have to try to make one point:
Research in biology takes huge amounts of time, money and effort, and requires the exploration of (literally) millions of dead ends before something successful is finally discovered. Sure, it's easy once you know where to look, but the whole challenge in biology is the search.
You may not think Taq polymerase should be patentable because you see no inventive "eureka" moment associated with it,
but you have to realize that discovering and isolating a thermostable polymerase was a huge and expensive effort, the benefits of which have proved immense.
Serendipitous as the discovery of Taq itself was, it wasn't just "found".
Let me put it another way. Every one of you has two (essentially) complete haploid genomes in nearly every cell in your body. These genomes contain the keys for curing all known disease. Fat lot of good you're doing with 'em.
I won't argue that copyright is enforcable via technology. It's not.
Furthermore, I resent the way the RIAA is trying to kill the web the same way they killed DAT,
and I really resent the burglar's tools provision in the DMCA.
But let me ask you this:
(1) Do you dispute that the members of the RIAA are losing revenue because of the mp3 revolution?
(2) Do you think it's okay if major label artists are losing money because of it?
Be honest with yourself about what side you take. Is it okay because you're "sticking it to the man"? Do you shoplift, too? Is it okay if you only shoplift from big chains?
Too many martinis on my part.
Sure, microbes. But can companies really
patent variants of human cells? Or patent DNA altogether?
Yes, if these things are useful and articles of manufacture.
For example, if a company patents a "variant of a human cell" that can regrow tissue, why on earth would you want to deny them patent protection?
Another example, if a company expends a great deal of effort locating a gene associated with a disease, why shouldn't they be afforded protection?
If you have a problem with living things being tinkered with, well that's your own Luddite opinion (IMHO). But it's exactly this sort of tinkering that has and will continue to confer great benefits to humanity. Incentives for this (expensive, time consuming, filled with dead-ends) tinkering, in the form of patent protection, is a Good Thing.
IMHO, of course.
. . . and I do take your point that software patents may be counterproductive, but it is precisely the situation you describe -- low marginal costs for each additional unit, be it organism or software -- that intellectual property law is designed to protect. In other words, why spend all your money up-front if it's just gonna be instantly knocked off anyway?
As for your quote: The producer of the bug would have a massive market lead on any competitor who cloned it anyway. You don't know that. I don't know that. The company who develops it has to assess the risk about whether or not they're going to even recoup their development costs (or if it's even going to work, for that matter), and it's far less likely that they're going to bother without the benefit of patent protection.
Another benefit of patent law: By law, the patent makes the know-how public. Which means that anybody can look at the patent and think of ways to adapt or improve it. Such as developing a bug to eat toxic waste and produce cotton candy. Yum.
Finally, everyone: Please learn a little about patent law before you start spouting the doomsday scenarioes mentioned above. Thanks.
While you're at it, please come up with organisms and products that clean up toxic waste spills, produce insulin, kill crop-destroying pests, produce more nutritious food, serve as research tools for developing anti-cancer drugs, and grow new organs from scratch.
We can agree that these are all Good goals. What more incentive do you need? Go to it!
Cheers, Sean, and congratulations once again on this important milestone.
Personally, though, I think public money should go to a myriad of smaller projects instead of one big Manhattan/Apollo style push that sucks money from everywhere else.
If the private sector is willing to plunk the $$$ to sequence genomes, I say let 'em do it and give them patent protection as a quid pro quo.
But that's just my opinion, not like you asked for it or anything. Cheers!
You know that patented organism that eats oil spills? That's a pretty darn useful organism, wouldn't you say? Well, guess what: That organism was made by humans. Admittedly it was made from parts found in nature, but the manufacture of these bugs took a tremendous expenditure of time, money, and human effort. They didn't just magically appear.
So I ask you, what, exactly is wrong with patenting these useful bugs?
Or let me put it another way, what is the incentive to expend vast amounts of time, money, and human effort to produce these useful bugs in the absence of a patent system?
P.S.: Jeremy Rifkin has no grasp on science or the law. I strongly suggest you ignore his nonsense.
First of all, "junk" is a loaded term, which is certainly evidenced by all the nonsense it has spawned in this discussion. So let's do this by enumerating the different types of DNA a typical eukaryotic genome contains:
1. Coding Regions. DNA that gets transcribed to RNA. RNA transcripts in turn have exons, which get translated into proteins, and introns, which get spliced out before translation. Why this added level of complexity? Many reasons. In sexual reproduction, new chromosomes are produced by mixing and matching old chromosomes at random. It's more likely for the new chromosome to be functional if the crossover point is in an intron because crossovers can introduce mutations, especially a nasty sort of mutation called a frameshift which would render everything downstream unintelligible. Exons also allow for a certain modularity of function, evolutionary mutations can involve entire exons being combined instead of having to try changes on a base-by-base level.
2. Regulatory regions. DNA that turns other bits of DNA up or down. Mainly used to control transcription, but also used to control DNA replication.
3. Structural regions. Eukaryotic DNA is a huge, long, string requiring a certain amount of overhead to prevent it from becoming an unmanagable tangle. Lots of the chromosome is dedicated to binding to structural proteins, generally known as histones, around which the DNA is wound. Also centromeric and telomeric proteins.
4. Repeats, cryptic genes, etc: In order to avoid overloading the term "junk," let's call this category "cruft." Cruft arises for lots of reasons. For example, sexual reproduction produces gametes, and it's far from perfect: Regions get repeated, regions get dropped. So called cryptic genes are probably the result of a spliced RNA being reverse-transcribed back into DNA and reinserted into the genome without introns or regulatory elements. What's useful about the cruft is that it provides fodder for further evolution.
In summary: Eukaryotes are big and complex, which means that you have to allow for a certain amount of overhead and slop.
I hope this has helped.
lorax->cartman=cartman bulldozed the rainforest
manhattan->apollo=two gargantuan projects: the Bomb and the moon shot
hurricane->manhattan=I dunno, the British WW2 fighter and the Bomb? I doubt it . . .
(Are we sure Hedwig isn't a reference to Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a "rock musical"?)
BTW, if you like this sort of puzzle, the Onion's "Cultural Idiocy" quiz may be right up your alley.
Hey, it's every bit as important as a browser, no?
Are you listening, Microsoft?
Big things:
behemoth, gigantor, titanic, colossus, mammoth, marmaduke, olympic, moby, etc.
Quarterbacks:
marino, favre, montana, jaworski, bledsoe, simms, starr, elway, aikman, testaverde, tarkenton, bradshaw, young, etc.
Roman Emperors:
julius, augustus, claudius, caligula, nero, trajan, heliogabolus, tiberuis, vitellus, vespasian, eugenius, constantine, etc
". . . the courts have held that no one but a patent attorney can really know what the scope of coverage of a patent claim is."
Please provide a citation to support this interesting assertion. Thank you.
My experience with MediaOne around here has been
extremely positive. The techies have all been
Linux-friendly, and the QoS is consistently fast.
My point is this: YMMV. When getting information,
ask around locally. Ignore my anecdotal evidence
if you're outside Route 128.
If you want sports info, such as up-to-the-minute stats, previews, opinions, and schedules, go to ESPN SportsZone,
end of story.
These guys pioneered and continue to produce THE most useful and informative website of its kind. (IMHO, of course.) Everybody should follow their shining example.
. . . your comments on Amazon are pure horse puckey. Bezos managed to get an unfathomable amount of mindshare with the Amazon name, and it would be sheer folly for him not to leverage it to the hilt.
Let me ask you one question: Does Amazon still provide the same high-quality (IMHO) service with respect to books? Has the bookselling actually suffered?
No? Then stop sounding like such a nostalgic old fogey. Besides, what's wrong with K-mart, you big snob? Face it, this posting is just like your earlier piece on the end of the Wired era. All you're doing is bitching that the hoi polloi have invaded your sandbox. Boo hoo.
I don't know what happened to the last link.
But here is the front page for the USPTO's full text database. I'm sure y'all can find U.S. Patent No. 5,914,941 from there. If you can't then I can't help you.