An interesting argument, and probably the one that gets used in court. It has one major flaw in it, though. The sequence in question, the one with all the relevant info, does occur naturally. Not in the DNA, but in the mRNA. DNA is copied to mRNA, and the mRNA is spliced to form the cleaned up version. Using a reverse transcriptase to turn it back into DNA is cool, but not novel, and not all reverse transcriptases are patented.
Most likely the reason that the "no interons" is used in court is that judges don't actually know that much about how it works. Maybe if they catch on the next step will be to work out a way to use tRNA to read an amino acid sequence, produce some mRNA from that. Since the "genetic code" isn't quite one to one base triplet to amino acid you might well end up with a DNA sequence which dosn't exist in nature.
did someone invent scientific forumulas? it doesnt matter if it's "invented", only if the person is responsible for bringing it to everyone elses attention.
You can't patent mathematics and you can't patent a language. Sequencing DNA isn't in itself innovation. A specific way of doing it might be, though.
THey can patent specific genes for a specific purpose.
That's part of the problem. Allowing patenting the gene as opposed to only patenting the doing something with the gene. Whilst the DNA sequence itself remains in the public domain
So if they discover a gene that permits them to do something interesitng, like grow you a third arm... they can patent that
Such genes are likely to actually be fairly "general purpose", but only useful in combination with other genes Someone patenting genes which enable extra limbs could well affect using some (or all) of the same genes in something like improving healing of injuries.
Finding a gene is not new or nonobvious in any way. We all know the genes are there. Make the gene sequences public, but keep treatments patentable.
Maybe patents (or even copyright) should only apply to a gene which is either artificial or substantially modified. With the onus on the creator to demonstrate originality. Such things as moving genes between species should not be patentable only if they develop some new technique for doing it.
Copper is definitely cheaper. For a last mile solution, it will probably be the only feasible solution for the next 10-20 years.
Copper is cheaper because it is already there... The most expensive part of cabling is digging trenchs, errecting poles, etc. This is why so much effort has been spent in working out ways to send different signals down cable originally intended for telephones.
If such low-tech can navigate a huge assembly such as that, what's stopping lesser developed nations from using that same core as a foundation for "simple" weapons(think SCUD here)? How much MORE damage could a SCUD do IF it were outfitted with a simple navigation computer?
Why would a terrorist organisation bother with anything as complex as building their own missile. If they can steal one, fine. Even then a missile has the problem that isn't expecially stealthy. It's most likely easier and cheaper to smuggle in a bomb making team (and any appropriate bomb making material which isn't easily available near the target.) If you were a terrorist with a nuke would you prefer to take this on a truck to Washington and kill quite a few civilian and military leaders or launch a missile which certainly would not kill these same leaders.
On one hand, the terrorists really were not all that creative in their attacks in Sept.- hijacking has been part of terrorism 101... the only twist was deliberately crashing them.
Which isn't an original idea. The Japanese crashed planes into US ships in World War 2. Writers have described fictional uses of everything from cars to starships as improvised missiles. Definitly including hijacked airliners e.g. at the end of The Running Man. (Published in paperback in 1988, so probably written sometime before 1985.)
I'm of the opinion that it's impossible to fend off every sufficiently sophisticated attack. What we can do is implement basic security measures that prevent any old lunatic from causing mass destruction.
You need to be able to realise what the actual risks are. Otherwise you can end up doing something analagous to putting a lock on a tent or putting a very strong door in the middle of a field.
I agree. In the past, all you would have to do is burn down a village's grain silo or block a couple critical trade routes. Modern societies are more robust and better able to withstand and recover from an attack. Technology neither helps nor hurts attackers; it's agnostic. The main things that change are the targets and methods.
It is also a big factor how the technology is used. Used inappropriatly it can make a single failure far more serious. e.g. the USS Yorktown ended up with a single point failure because of being fitted with a computer system inadequate for the task. Another interesting senario is that there are different ways to connect up telephone switching centres. One way is to connect everything to a hub (possibly even a hierachical set of hubs.) However if the hub fails you don't have much of a telephone network. Indeed it's even possible that the lowest level parts of the network (the bits with telephone lines connected to them) are so "dumb" that they can't do anything without the hub being there. The alternative each connected to several other "switches" (though probably not fully connected) and at least capable of connecting calls between its own lines. Then even even if you end up with a failure resulting in disconnected bits of telephone network that's a lot more use than no telephone network at all.
One of my biggest pet peeves with reactions to 9/11 has been the large set of technological security solutions. Very little mention is made of efforts to step up human intelligence/security -- from the level of "who's going to analyze the intelligence gathered by the CIA?" to "How do we make sure the human process at the airport is intelligence?"
Effectivly a big fuss has been made about technical "solutions". When lack of human intelligence (e.g. people who understood Arabic and local languages from parts of Afganistan) indeed an over reliance on technical methods was actually part of the problem. Throwing more technology is more likely to be a case of making a bad situation worst than doing anything to improve it. The best "tool" to catch devious humans is another human.
A corrupt, corporate-influenced government like ours?
What nation would really want one of those, given a free choice.
Really, now lets think about this.
Vietnam was caused by the fact that they wanted to use a communist government to unify their country, we of course can't have that, because its not "a government like ours."
There is the obvious ironly that the USA was founded on the principle of a people being able to choose how to govern themselves
In Central and South America, as well as in Africa, the CIA practiced numerous assassinations and overthrows of dictators of governments not "like ours," only to replace them with dictators who supported us but still were not democratic like us.
Usually the results have been a lot less democratic than whatever was there before. Nor has it alwasy been a case of overthrowing a dictator. The first time this was done (just over a century ago) what was overthrown was a constitutional monarchy. In places you can compare the US constitution and the Hawaiian Kindom word for word. The relevent test appears to not so much be "a government like ours". So much as being for US government and US corporate interests. Blindly supporting a foreign government or foreign corporate interests does not go down too well in a democracy. People, quite rightly, expect their government to place their interests first. Otherwise they will protest, petition for a change of policy, vote people out of office (nationalism can motivate apathetic voters), etc. However where you have a puppet dictatorship the only option is a revolution. Which has a much higher chance of sucess without the "puppetmaster" being able to enforce the status quo.
Why were planes flown into the Pentagon and the Trade Center, for example, and not into targets in Ottawa and Toronto?
For that matter targets in London, Frankfurt, Tokyo and Hong Kong. (As well as New York.) If they were simply anti tall buildings the Petronus towers and the CN tower are taller than the WTC...
In total dollars the U.S. is the third highest contributor to foreign aid in the world, behind Japan and France. The most recent U.S. foreign aid bill more than doubles its foreign aid budget. Eighty per cent of Americans support foreign aid in principal and the American public donates 3 times as much to private organizations like CARE and the Red Cross as those groups receive from the U.S. government.
The actual amount may well be less meaningful than where and how it gets spent. e.g. any which ends up supporting dictators (including the likes of the Emelda Marcos shoe collection) is probably worst than the money never having been spent on anything.
Yes, Americans give generously through charities, but so do a lot of other places, many of them at a much higher per-capita rate, and those other places seem less interested in tying control to the gifts.
Also a rather large amount of donations from the US to other parts of the world (especially those which come via the US government) are to entities which are in no way "charities". Including dictators and terrorists. IIRC the nation the US provides most aid to is Israel, which is in the middle of a brutal civil war...
This is like totting up Bill Gates' charity donations and calling him a nice man because of it: but pro rata, the average American single mother gives more, and doesn't insist in her donations being named after her or being applied
using only her technologies.
Hardly original, there is a story in the bible describing this.
Similarly, the technologies that give the West its edge aren't nukes and stealth bombers, they're freedom of communication and democracy. And the danger isn't that the enemy will acquire them, because they would then cease to be the enemy
This dosn't appear to exactly be the case, "the West" and especially the USA, has been perfectly prepared to crush developing democratic governments.
When you're right, you're right. The only real defense against terrorism, is to reduce the motive for terrorism. Consistently abusive foreign policy actons, breed millions of enemies.
How can you then counter having lots of enemies? If you have fewer than it's more likely that you can have a viable intelligence and counter terrorism system.
My car CD player only holds 4 discs (with space in the armrest for 8 jewel cases). I have >300 discs at home. The average commercial CD holds about 45 minutes of music, which is about half of what it could
You could easily make a device to play about 3 weeks of uncompressed CD audio to fit in a car. Even put the controls for this on the steering wheel. Safer than having the driver change media.
I have a plethora of mp3 audio playback devices. My car, home and portable personal devices. These devices have been on the market for over 4 years now and sold with high visibility advertising, so you know for a fact they exist and people are using them. Yes, I rip everything to mp3 so I can listen to it MY WAY, on MY EQUIPMENT, in my home and elsewhere.
If you really were just buying a licence to listen to the music. Which is what CDs claim to be... Then people changing the media wouldn't be an issue at all. The problem is that various people are trying to blur the distinction between use and actual "piracy".
Business is supposed to work on supply and demand. No-one wants copy-protection, cds and dvds cost nothing to press and the intellectual property is not worth allot, so why are they selling bits of plastic for so much money?
However the supply and demand bit dosn't work where you have a monopoly. The laws surrounding "intellectual property" create a monopoly (originally a very restricted one. But extended, through one sided lobbying.)
I also have a theory that there's a direct conflict there -- labels have a tremendous amount of power over the artist when they are unknown. However, once an artist becomes known the power shifts dramatically -- contracts help keep artists from reaping those benefits, but all contracts run out eventually.
Remember you are talking about a different group of people. Artists who become "known" have some kind of fanbase and possibly some level of talent. There are a great many who sink into obscurity, e.g. the "one hit wonders".
I've personally noticed that pop music has hitten a real low in the last few years -- and I really think I'm being somewhat objective in this, not just square and living in the past. Pop music is being recycled longer, and bands aren't being cycled in as fast.
Pop music has always have quite a bit of recycling, just that they used to wait around 20 years.
Many of those long-lived groups are really just corporate machines. No single part of the group has enough talent to go on their own.
Even if they do it could be difficult in "corporate environment"
You can't be successful based on your singing talent and dancing alone -- someone has to write the songs,
It's hardly unknown for singers to write their own songs...
With "rip proof" technology (at least, until its cracked), however:
Person A buys CD1. Person A tries to rip CD1, and fails.
Or even Person A tries to play it. If it won't play they are far more likely to kick up a fuss with the retailer and tell their mates not to bother buying it than they are to replace their CD playing hardware.
Each aiplane in controled airspace files a flight plan. Each plan consits of where it will be at what time. It has exclusive use of each segment for a fixed amount of
time. This system (which was based on railroads before there was ATC radar) is based on the fact that radios don't work all the time. You could wipe out the entire
ATC system in the US and not have any planes running into each other.
A modern train system, such as SNCF's TVG, has central control centres, not unlike that used for air traffic control. Also there are different rules for different types of aircraft and different types of airspace. A large commercial jet with two pilots and multiply redundant systems is rather different from a light aircraft carrying only a pilot. Even if radios and transponders don't work all the time having an aircraft suddenly lose data & voice contact and deviate from its preplanned flight path should be cause enough to send someone to have a look at it. (If an aircraft is off cource then the exclusive use of each segment bit is no longer a valid assumption.) Unlike the passenger screening idea which will most of the time hassle perfectly innocent passengers. The most likely senario for an off course aircraft out of communication with the ground is some kind of malfunction with the aircraft systems. In which case the pilot is going to want to find somewhere to land safely. If it's a hijacker, the might well have second throughs about what they are doing. Just because someone is prepared to die in a kamikazae attack does not mean their are prepared to die having failed in their mission. Even if the whole thing is a complete false alarm consider it useful practice for the people involved in performing the intercept.
Slashdot Mirror
Thus one probably could not patent a fire breathing dragon, but could patent the various implementations of the various subsystems.
:)
Just as well Anne McCaffrey didn't invent a Pern patent office
An interesting argument, and probably the one that gets used in court. It has one major flaw in it, though. The sequence in question, the one with all the relevant info, does occur naturally. Not in the DNA, but in the mRNA. DNA is copied to mRNA, and the mRNA is spliced to form the cleaned up version. Using a reverse transcriptase to turn it back into DNA is cool, but not novel, and not all reverse transcriptases are patented.
Most likely the reason that the "no interons" is used in court is that judges don't actually know that much about how it works. Maybe if they catch on the next step will be to work out a way to use tRNA to read an amino acid sequence, produce some mRNA from that. Since the "genetic code" isn't quite one to one base triplet to amino acid you might well end up with a DNA sequence which dosn't exist in nature.
did someone invent scientific forumulas? it doesnt matter if it's "invented", only if the person is responsible for bringing it to everyone elses attention.
You can't patent mathematics and you can't patent a language.
Sequencing DNA isn't in itself innovation. A specific way of doing it might be, though.
To a University, which is a very conservative institution, most of the time, the risk of being sued, and losing, is simply untenable
Unless you have deep pockets being even being sued and winning can be a problem.
THey can patent specific genes for a specific purpose.
That's part of the problem. Allowing patenting the gene as opposed to only patenting the doing something with the gene. Whilst the DNA sequence itself remains in the public domain
So if they discover a gene that permits them to do something interesitng, like grow you a third arm... they can patent that
Such genes are likely to actually be fairly "general purpose", but only useful in combination with other genes
Someone patenting genes which enable extra limbs could well affect using some (or all) of the same genes in something like improving healing of injuries.
Finding a gene is not new or nonobvious in any way. We all know the genes are there. Make the gene sequences public, but keep treatments patentable.
Maybe patents (or even copyright) should only apply to a gene which is either artificial or substantially modified. With the onus on the creator to demonstrate originality.
Such things as moving genes between species should not be patentable only if they develop some new technique for doing it.
Copper is definitely cheaper. For a last mile solution, it will probably be the only feasible solution for the next 10-20 years.
Copper is cheaper because it is already there... The most expensive part of cabling is digging trenchs, errecting poles, etc. This is why so much effort has been spent in working out ways to send different signals down cable originally intended for telephones.
If such low-tech can navigate a huge assembly such as that, what's stopping lesser developed nations from using that same core as a foundation for "simple" weapons(think SCUD here)? How much MORE damage could a SCUD do IF it were outfitted with a simple navigation computer?
Why would a terrorist organisation bother with anything as complex as building their own missile. If they can steal one, fine. Even then a missile has the problem that isn't expecially stealthy.
It's most likely easier and cheaper to smuggle in a bomb making team (and any appropriate bomb making material which isn't easily available near the target.)
If you were a terrorist with a nuke would you prefer to take this on a truck to Washington and kill quite a few civilian and military leaders or launch a missile which certainly would not kill these same leaders.
On one hand, the terrorists really were not all that creative in their attacks in Sept.- hijacking has been part of terrorism 101... the only twist was deliberately crashing them.
Which isn't an original idea. The Japanese crashed planes into US ships in World War 2. Writers have described fictional uses of everything from cars to starships as improvised missiles. Definitly including hijacked airliners e.g. at the end of The Running Man. (Published in paperback in 1988, so probably written sometime before 1985.)
Oh, I suppose you could return to the Stone Age so that no one can use your own technology against you,
Have to go back quite a bit further, whilst neolithic weapons might not have the range or fire rate of modern firearms, they are quite effective.
I'm of the opinion that it's impossible to fend off every sufficiently sophisticated attack. What we can do is implement basic security measures that prevent any old lunatic from causing mass destruction.
You need to be able to realise what the actual risks are. Otherwise you can end up doing something analagous to putting a lock on a tent or putting a very strong door in the middle of a field.
I agree. In the past, all you would have to do is burn down a village's grain silo or block a couple critical trade routes. Modern societies are more robust and better able to withstand and recover from an attack. Technology neither helps nor hurts attackers; it's agnostic. The main things that change are the targets and methods.
It is also a big factor how the technology is used. Used inappropriatly it can make a single failure far more serious. e.g. the USS Yorktown ended up with a single point failure because of being fitted with a computer system inadequate for the task.
Another interesting senario is that there are different ways to connect up telephone switching centres. One way is to connect everything to a hub (possibly even a hierachical set of hubs.) However if the hub fails you don't have much of a telephone network. Indeed it's even possible that the lowest level parts of the network (the bits with telephone lines connected to them) are so "dumb" that they can't do anything without the hub being there. The alternative each connected to several other "switches" (though probably not fully connected) and at least capable of connecting calls between its own lines. Then even even if you end up with a failure resulting in disconnected bits of telephone network that's a lot more use than no telephone network at all.
One of my biggest pet peeves with reactions to 9/11 has been the large set of technological security solutions. Very little mention is made of efforts to step up human intelligence/security -- from the level of "who's going to analyze the intelligence gathered by the CIA?" to "How do we make sure the human process at the airport is intelligence?"
Effectivly a big fuss has been made about technical "solutions". When lack of human intelligence (e.g. people who understood Arabic and local languages from parts of Afganistan) indeed an over reliance on technical methods was actually part of the problem. Throwing more technology is more likely to be a case of making a bad situation worst than doing anything to improve it.
The best "tool" to catch devious humans is another human.
A corrupt, corporate-influenced government like ours?
What nation would really want one of those, given a free choice.
Really, now lets think about this. Vietnam was caused by the fact that they wanted to use a communist government to unify their country, we of course can't have that, because its not "a government like ours."
There is the obvious ironly that the USA was founded on the principle of a people being able to choose how to govern themselves
In Central and South America, as well as in Africa, the CIA practiced numerous assassinations and overthrows of dictators of governments not "like ours," only to replace them with dictators who supported us but still were not democratic like us.
Usually the results have been a lot less democratic than whatever was there before. Nor has it alwasy been a case of overthrowing a dictator. The first time this was done (just over a century ago) what was overthrown was a constitutional monarchy. In places you can compare the US constitution and the Hawaiian Kindom word for word.
The relevent test appears to not so much be "a government like ours". So much as being for US government and US corporate interests.
Blindly supporting a foreign government or foreign corporate interests does not go down too well in a democracy. People, quite rightly, expect their government to place their interests first. Otherwise they will protest, petition for a change of policy, vote people out of office (nationalism can motivate apathetic voters), etc.
However where you have a puppet dictatorship the only option is a revolution. Which has a much higher chance of sucess without the "puppetmaster" being able to enforce the status quo.
Why were planes flown into the Pentagon and the Trade Center, for example, and not into targets in Ottawa and Toronto?
For that matter targets in London, Frankfurt, Tokyo and Hong Kong. (As well as New York.)
If they were simply anti tall buildings the Petronus towers and the CN tower are taller than the WTC...
In total dollars the U.S. is the third highest contributor to foreign aid in the world, behind Japan and France. The most recent U.S. foreign aid bill more than doubles its foreign aid budget. Eighty per cent of Americans support foreign aid in principal and the American public donates 3 times as much to private organizations like CARE and the Red Cross as those groups receive from the U.S. government.
The actual amount may well be less meaningful than where and how it gets spent. e.g. any which ends up supporting dictators (including the likes of the Emelda Marcos shoe collection) is probably worst than the money never having been spent on anything.
Yes, Americans give generously through charities, but so do a lot of other places, many of them at a much higher per-capita rate, and those other places seem less interested in tying control to the gifts.
Also a rather large amount of donations from the US to other parts of the world (especially those which come via the US government) are to entities which are in no way "charities". Including dictators and terrorists. IIRC the nation the US provides most aid to is Israel, which is in the middle of a brutal civil war...
This is like totting up Bill Gates' charity donations and calling him a nice man because of it: but pro rata, the average American single mother gives more, and doesn't insist in her donations being named after her or being applied using only her technologies.
Hardly original, there is a story in the bible describing this.
Similarly, the technologies that give the West its edge aren't nukes and stealth bombers, they're freedom of communication and democracy. And the danger isn't that the enemy will acquire them, because they would then cease to be the enemy
This dosn't appear to exactly be the case, "the West" and especially the USA, has been perfectly prepared to crush developing democratic governments.
When you're right, you're right. The only real defense against terrorism, is to reduce the motive for terrorism. Consistently abusive foreign policy actons, breed millions of enemies.
How can you then counter having lots of enemies? If you have fewer than it's more likely that you can have a viable intelligence and counter terrorism system.
My car CD player only holds 4 discs (with space in the armrest for 8 jewel cases). I have >300 discs at home. The average commercial CD holds about 45 minutes of music, which is about half of what it could
You could easily make a device to play about 3 weeks of uncompressed CD audio to fit in a car. Even put the controls for this on the steering wheel. Safer than having the driver change media.
I have a plethora of mp3 audio playback devices. My car, home and portable personal devices. These devices have been on the market for over 4 years now and sold with high visibility advertising, so you know for a fact they exist and people are using them. Yes, I rip everything to mp3 so I can listen to it MY WAY, on MY EQUIPMENT, in my home and elsewhere.
If you really were just buying a licence to listen to the music. Which is what CDs claim to be... Then people changing the media wouldn't be an issue at all.
The problem is that various people are trying to blur the distinction between use and actual "piracy".
Business is supposed to work on supply and demand. No-one wants copy-protection, cds and dvds cost nothing to press and the intellectual property is not worth allot, so why are they selling bits of plastic for so much money?
However the supply and demand bit dosn't work where you have a monopoly. The laws surrounding "intellectual property" create a monopoly (originally a very restricted one. But extended, through one sided lobbying.)
I also have a theory that there's a direct conflict there -- labels have a tremendous amount of power over the artist when they are unknown. However, once an artist becomes known the power shifts dramatically -- contracts help keep artists from reaping those benefits, but all contracts run out eventually.
Remember you are talking about a different group of people. Artists who become "known" have some kind of fanbase and possibly some level of talent. There are a great many who sink into obscurity, e.g. the "one hit wonders".
I've personally noticed that pop music has hitten a real low in the last few years -- and I really think I'm being somewhat objective in this, not just square and living in the past. Pop music is being recycled longer, and bands aren't being cycled in as fast.
Pop music has always have quite a bit of recycling, just that they used to wait around 20 years.
Many of those long-lived groups are really just corporate machines. No single part of the group has enough talent to go on their own.
Even if they do it could be difficult in "corporate environment"
You can't be successful based on your singing talent and dancing alone -- someone has to write the songs,
It's hardly unknown for singers to write their own songs...
With "rip proof" technology (at least, until its cracked), however:
Person A buys CD1. Person A tries to rip CD1, and fails.
Or even Person A tries to play it. If it won't play they are far more likely to kick up a fuss with the retailer and tell their mates not to bother buying it than they are to replace their CD playing hardware.
Each aiplane in controled airspace files a flight plan. Each plan consits of where it will be at what time. It has exclusive use of each segment for a fixed amount of time. This system (which was based on railroads before there was ATC radar) is based on the fact that radios don't work all the time. You could wipe out the entire ATC system in the US and not have any planes running into each other.
A modern train system, such as SNCF's TVG, has central control centres, not unlike that used for air traffic control.
Also there are different rules for different types of aircraft and different types of airspace. A large commercial jet with two pilots and multiply redundant systems is rather different from a light aircraft carrying only a pilot.
Even if radios and transponders don't work all the time having an aircraft suddenly lose data & voice contact and deviate from its preplanned flight path should be cause enough to send someone to have a look at it. (If an aircraft is off cource then the exclusive use of each segment bit is no longer a valid assumption.)
Unlike the passenger screening idea which will most of the time hassle perfectly innocent passengers. The most likely senario for an off course aircraft out of communication with the ground is some kind of malfunction with the aircraft systems. In which case the pilot is going to want to find somewhere to land safely. If it's a hijacker, the might well have second throughs about what they are doing. Just because someone is prepared to die in a kamikazae attack does not mean their are prepared to die having failed in their mission. Even if the whole thing is a complete false alarm consider it useful practice for the people involved in performing the intercept.