I know this is going to sound like a self-serving political statement from a hardcore Democrat -- but well done, President Obama.
My cynicism knows no bounds, which gives me to think what the Democratic response to this might have been if a Bush Administration official had proposed it. I'm betting something to the tune of, "Oh those damned Republicans they want to use band-aid technological fixes so they can go on driving their SUVs over baby polar bears for another ten years!"
I think this is a good idea, and if Chu can make it happen (again, colour me cynical) it'll be a good thing, particularly because of the reduced energy demand aspect, which will help with the whole peak oil deal.
But I can't help thinking about how mindless partisans (not necessarily you) would have reacted if the Offence rather than the Defence had suggested this (both parties are ultimately on the same team, of course, representing the plutocrats united against the people.)
Whether you think this is novel or not, it's not ordinary.
Handling a JavaScript OnChange event is not ordinary? What about a button click event?
Can I patent "1. A system for providing real-time information in a Web page comprising:a retrieval-enhanced button input element configured to contain an attribute for a retrieval expression for a button in a rendered Web page, wherein the retrieval-enhanced button input element is contained within a source code document corresponding to the rendered Web page; and an document retriever configured to retrieve a document real-time and visually display it."?
Also known as "a help button".
My fanciful claim above is a minuscule edit to the first claim in this idiotic application. If you can patent OnChange event handling for realtime validation (that being one of the purposes for which the event was added to the standard!) you can certainly patent any specific use of button handling. Closing a window, opening a window, displaying a document, changing a background colour... any specific use that is "non-obvious" to someone completely ignorant of software development.
I am not a "Web programmer" but anyone with even a passing familiarity with JavaScript has seen this.
The first claim in the patent is: "1. A system for providing real-time validation of text input fields in a Web page comprising:a validation-enhanced text input element configured to contain an attribute for a validation expression for a text field in a rendered Web page, wherein the validation-enhanced text input element is contained within a source code document corresponding to the rendered Web page; andan input text validator configured to validate a user-entered character of the text field against the validation expression in real-time and visually indicate invalid user-entered characters."
So these losers have filed a patent application in which the first claim is exactly nothing but a completely standard bit of JavaScript code. People have been doing this kind of real-time validation and response for years and years and years. JavaScript is designed to do it.
This is by far the most egregiously stupid patent application we have seen on/. in a long time.
Why IBM is doing this is a complete mystery, although "never assume venality where stupidity will do" comes forcibly to mind.
as long as he doesn't sue anyone over the patent no puppies have been harmed.
And when the company gets bought out and the puppy-torturing plans get put into action by the new owners, and he screams, "But I didn't mean this to happen!" he will not be forgiven.
2.5% of Canadians are of African descent vs 13.4% in the United States. 1.0% of Canadians are of Latino descent vs 14.8% in the United States. In fact, the US has more people of African descent than Canada has people (and the same, obviously, for people of Latin descent).
Looking at two large, relatively homogeneous minorities is not a good way of measuring ethnic diversity. There are 22 ethnic groups listed in the page you link as constituting more than 1% of the Canadian population. We are over 6% Native American and Metis. The US is less than 1% Native American.
If you lump our three nominally Anglo ethnic groups into one, you get just 50% of the population (and a lot of pissed off Irish and Scots who don't like being lumped with the English.) Our next largest ethnic group is the French, followed by Germans (most of whom came here in the 50's, so almost all the German-Canadians I know are children of German immigrants.)
We are a finely-sliced country, where Cree is spoken routinely in the hospitals of one major city (Winnipeg) and translation services are provided for many other languages. In Toronto a couple of years ago I spent a little time downtown and heard hardly a word of English spoken, but I did pick up Hindi, Russian, Portugese, and various Asian languages. In contrast, while visiting Boston I hear all English, all the time, and in San Deigo hear only English and Spanish.
The US has a few large ethnic minorities. Canada is a patchwork of ethnic diversity in comparison.
However, my original point is that the US government is incapable of delivering services that other countries manage just fine, and your point that health care for the poor in the US is socialized makes my point: in Canada we have a fully socialized health care system because the logic of delivery of care makes it clear that that is the best way to go to ensure that preventative care is delivered. In the US your government is so broken that you spend more dollars per capita across your entire population on health care for the poor, and still managed to deliver relatively poor outcomes.
Your government can't even run a socialized health care system competently. The thought of it trying to micro-manage the energy sector, which has proven to be far beyond the capabilities of even a relatively competent government like we have in Canada, is scary.
Government, on the other hand, has no such failsafe. Inefficient, ineffective, insufficient programs are the norm, not the exception. Why?
Because they are run by Americans.
I assume you're an American, posting about your own experience with your own government, and I agree: your government sucks.
To conclude from this that ALL government sucks, and is inherently unresponsive to people and unable to change, is not logically justified.
I'm a Canadian, and while our government has loads of problems, they are of the "the free market doesn't always work perfectly" kind, not the "everything the government touches turns to shit" kind.
The most important difference between Canada and the US in this regard is due to our more flexible constitution and our more independent judicial system, as well as the smaller number of relatively powerful provincial governments, all of which serve as strong Darwinian checks on our federal government. Add to that very significant regional differences, with the West throwing up an entirely new political party every few decades (and Quebec chiming in now and then) and we have a vastly more dynamic political discourse, which despite the combined efforts of the two major parties has never been captured by a single, monolithic political elite the way the American political system has.
The US government runs things badly because it is answerable to the parties, not the people. And the parties are run by the same type of people, who see the world is essentially similar ways, and who are far more interested in maintaining the dysfunctional, corrupt system you have in the face of any evolution or change that would allow the needs of ordinary Americans to be served.
So don't blame governments as such for the failings of the American government. Canadian governments, for all their astonishing failures, still manage to deliver health care more cheaply and effectively than the American government does (and yes, I mean the government: the US government pays more public dollars per capita than all levels of government in Canada do, and we get better outcomes as measured by longevity, infant mortality and morbidity than you do.)
The problem is not "government." Is it "American government." And the rest of the world would absolutely love you guys to fix it. Americans do many things brilliantly, but your government is broken, and that's hurting everyone, you most of all.
One of the great things about New World archeology is that so little is known that it's easy for experts to project their hopes, dreams and fears onto their finds.
Because we have a reasonable idea of what was going on in Europe and Asia and Africa 2500 years ago anyone suggesting the use of cosmetic dentistry for reasons other than expression of social class, wealth, power, etc would be laughed at. But our ignorance of New World peoples is vast, so they make a convenient armature to hang Euro-centric notions of "noble savages" and "peaceful kingdoms" on.
For example, the Inca--now known to be a violent, war-making civilization that was structured into an oppressive aristocracy over a downtrodden peasantry--were once believed to be entirely peaceful and relatively egalitarian. That was back in the '50's when global war was a great fear, and the myth of a "classless society" was still widely believed.
Those false beliefs eventually yielded to fact, particularly translation of the Incan language. Today, though, if you ask an "expert" what the Inca were worried about toward the end of their empire, they'll be apt to tell you with a straight face, "climate change, soil erosion, ecological degradation..." Whereas the honest answer is, "We don't have a clue. Who knows what people whose entire conceptual universe is still barely comprehensible to us were thinking. Probably that they had displeased the gods somehow because things kept getting worse, but even that's just a guess."
We do know there are some constants in human society. All societies have adultery, for example, and all societies have some form of conspicuous consumption or other flagrantly wasteful behaviour that is used as a marker of class, power, wealth, etc.
When a novel social phenomenon is found in an otherwise little-understood or little-known society, it is a good bet that it'll have something to do with one of those basic, common things. At least we have good reason to believe that they existed, rather than positing that a difficult and dangerous ornamental display is for the first time ever anywhere not related to expressing the social class, power, wealth, etc of the individual involved.
I'd also like to apologise on behalf of my government for driving Turing to suicide. We have much to be ashamed of.
There's nothing trollish about this comment. It is broadly agreed that Turing's suicide was significantly motivated by the effects of hormone therapy he was given to "cure" his homosexuality after he was convicted of the crime of being a homosexual.
That this could happen to one of the great minds who undoubtedly helped Britain survive the war should be a cautionary reminder to anyone anywhere who thinks that giving governments or corporations or churches the power over harmless human behaviour is a good thing.
The two observations mentioned in the first article don't seem to rule it out.
But the termination shock has zero influence on optical photons.
The handedness paper is looking a ordinary optical images of spiral galaxies within 172 Mpc and asking, "is there any axis where if we look one way we see mostly left-handed galaxies and if we look the other way we see mostly right-handed galaxies?" Since we are in the middle of the distribution a preponderance of a particular handedness will show up as more left-handed in one direction and more right-handed in the other.
This is ordinary optical astronomy of the crudest kind: they literally look at digital photos of a few thousand galaxies and say, "Yep, looks right-handed to me..." They've done a nice job of blinding that data by randomly mirroring the images so observer bias can't affect the results.
While heliopause can plausibly affect the CMB due to changes in ionization, it cannot do the same to optical frequencies, and certainly not to a degree that would change the apparent orientation of spiral galaxies without also radically changing the apparent distribution of spiral galaxies, to the extent that we would have noticed it ages ago.
It should be evenly distributed, but instead it's brighter and darker in places, and they think it's due to the uneven surface of the termination shock.
However, in a paper linked from the first article there is a second effect that optical phenomena at the termination shock won't account for: there appears to be a preferential handedness of spiral galaxies, and the handedness exhibits itself along an axis that is close to the Axis of Evil.
Furthermore, while this paper on optical effects is interesting and suggests some directions for more research, the author's own thoughts on what specific phenomena might be causing the distortions are, using his own term, "speculative."
Other than the asymmetry of the termination shock it is by no means certain that any of these phenomena exist (that is, that they are not artifacts of the instruments or the analysis), which is the typical state of affairs in leading-edge science, so it'll be interesting to see how the truth unfolds over the next few years.
Frankly, I find it more frightening that most of our leaders and most of the population in general have all bought into the idea that morality is just convention and that there is no higher power to answer to.
Why? There is ample evidence from history that a belief in a higher power is used far more frequently to motivate atrocities than to prevent them.
No one has ever been burned at the stake due to an excess of reasonableness on the part of their accusers. Faith, however frequently it has been used to opposed violence, has far more frequently and effectively been used to motivate it.
You're also posing a false alternative: the choice is not between "just a convention" and "a higher power". Many people who do not believe in a higher power do believe that morality is well-justified on biological, evolutionary, psychological and sociological grounds. In fact, you'd have to be insane NOT to believe that, given the vast amount of evidence that humans are social primates whose basic needs include security of person and secure attachment, both of which are morally foundational.
Or you can wallow in ignorance, self-delusion based on your particular ideological predilcctions.
As do the people who believe the science on global climate change is certain, but who don't understand what it means that GCMs don't conserve energy in their basic equations.
This drives me nuts: smug ignoramuses who couldn't integrate a first order PDE accurately to save their life telling me that scepticism toward anthropogenic climate change is self-delusion. It isn't self-delusion to note that GCMs are unphysical, crudely parameterized models that would take a miracle to get the SIGN of the response to a given climate forcing right much less magnitude or detailed geographic distribution.
Ocean heat content appears to be a quite significant signal that the globe is warming (and has the added virtue of being thermodynamically meaningful) and it is unquestionably plausible based on modelling that CO2 and other anthropogenic contributions to greenhouse gases are very significant contributors to that phenomenon. But treating anyone who is a sceptic as delusional is as unscientific as the nutjobs who dismiss it all as a left-wing conspiracy.
The science behind anthropogenic climate change is nothing like as solid as the advocates of particular political platforms would like it to be, and honest politicians (but I contradict myself) should be advocating minimal interventions based on the precautionary principle (that is, any government intervention carries huge risk, so we should be extremely cautious about intervening, in the same way any major climate change carries huge risk, so we should be extremely cautious about doing nothing.) Market-based solutions like cap and trade have been effective in other areas, and are probably the most reasonable precautionary measure with regard to CO2.
Is it only me, or is party politcal tribalism a possible new DSM classification?
It's not just you, and I dearly hope when the next rev of the DSM comes out it'll have "PPT" as an Axis I disorder, probably related to Schizophreniform disorder (but of longer duration) or they'll relax the cultural limitation a bit and see it as a type of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_psychotic_disorder
IIRC they compared driving with the AC on to driving with the windows open.
A few years ago I was doing a 700 km commute every couple of weeks. I have a ten year old Chrysler mini-van (3 litre) which gets 10 litres/100 km (dunno what that is in mpg, US or imperial.) As a test I tried windows open vs AC on different trips, and found my fuel efficiency at highway speeds was undetectably different.
This is the same result Mythbusters got, and while neither test is exactly high science, my real-world experience tends to back up their on-track testing.
There is a third alternative that no one has tried lately: some more efficient way of circulating air in the passenger cabin other than having the windows open. I imagine an air intake just below the windshield that was used to ventilate the cabin would have the potential to keep the passengers cool without the aerodynamic losses open windows produce.
Sensible people who are in favour of GE labelling are in it for one thing: we'd like to be able to not choose commercially owned monoculture species.
It has nothing to do with personal health, and everything to do with not wanting to contribute more than we have to toward the coming argi-ecological disaster. Bananas are the obvious example to illustrate this cautionary tale, but beef is almost as bad due to the tiny number of bulls used for artificial insemination, and GE foods are a pure example of stupid humans trying to beat the Red Queen by standing still.
Unfortunately idiots have made a lot of noise about the imagined health effects of GE foods, and the dishonest shills on the other side have latched onto those straw people and completely ignored the perfectly legitimate concerns of people like me, who don't want to contribute any more to the coming disaster than we have to.
Calorie restriction, or caloric restriction (CR), is a dietary regimen thought to improve health and slow the aging process in some animals
CR is a case where animal models are even less applicable than usual. Humans are tuned up for obvious evolutionary reasons to live about twice as long as one would normally expect for a mammal, well beyond our effective reproductive lifespan.
The average mammal lives about a billion heartbeats. Humans live twice that--way off the scale. Ergo, assuming that life extension techniques that work on other animals will work on us is problematic to say the least.
One of the mechanisms that has been optimized by evolutionary selection in humans to extend our lives is our extreme resistantance to cancer, which is why animal models for cancer (both causes and cures) have been so problematic over the past few decades.
Rats are nocturnal social scavengers, which may make them a better model for sleep research than cancer research, but given how weird the human brain is compared to most other animals it is again quite problematic to simply extrapolate any conclusions from them to us.
If the AirForce had known 3 years ago, they would've exercised some option to build more IIMR builds.
Or not. It should be of real concern to Americans that you are no longer able to credibly execute long-term plans at the government level. This is a bi-partisan issue.
The recent closing of Yucca Mountain is an unfortunate example of this. It should never have been the selected site due to geotechnical issues, and it should not have been allowed to dominate the waste disposal landscape for so many years and then close.
The Space Shuttle is nearing retirement with no plausible replacement in sight. Many of your military projects are way over budget and may never deliver the goods.
This is not a partisan issue. Many of these problems have persisted across administrations and changes in congressional control. I don't know what the issue is with you guys, but the rest of the world would really like you to get your act together and return to the "can do" republic you once were.
I'm not surprised that someone may have written a better book. I would just like the book to be treated fairly.
The book that's being cited in this thread is being given away for free. This gives you a reasonable estimate of the fair value for your book.
I do a little writing myself, and am slowly coming to terms with the idea that authorship as a viable career is very nearly dead.
There have always been good people able to write good books who haven't been able to afford to live on what an author makes. That figure has just about dropped to zero, meaning that in future most non-fiction will be written by people being paid for other things (university lecturers, think tankers, etc.) or hobbyists. Fiction will be written by the well-off or well-patronized or hobbyists.
It's the new reality authors are facing. Musicians are facing it too.
Music and fiction and non-fiction were all produced before the age of commercial publishing. They will continue to be produced in the age of electronic publishing an ubiquitous copying.
The reality is that equilibrium market price of a good whose marginal cost of production is zero... is zero. That's fact, and what's fact is by definition fair, if the term has any meaning at all.
The DNA in question must be "isolated". The DNA is not "isolated" when it is naturally occurring. Nobody is claiming your DNA that you were born with. Only an isolated DNA product.
As the suit points out, removing a naturally occurring product from its original location does not make it any less a naturally occurring product, which cannot be patented.
It's good that you've understood the nature of the patents (they are on specific sequences, not methods of isolating them or methods of using them.) But it's unclear why you, or anyone else, thinks that changing the location and surroundings of a naturally occurring molecule makes that molecule patentable.
It is also not clear why this insane doctrine would be limited to genes. Suppose I find a new species (this happens many times a year, as most insect species for example have yet to be identified.) According the the USPTO I could patent "an isolated individual of species XYZ", thus preventing anyone from capturing an individual of such a species for any purpose.
One could further argue that even studying that species in situ would violate my patent, as obviously the very act of observation constitutes "isolation" by an act of selective attention.
Returning from that little speculative excursion, it's curious that you use the term "product" in your defence of this ridiculous policy, as that term makes it sound like something is being "produced" by the act of removing a naturally occurring DNA molecule from its natural environment. But of course nothing is being produced. There is no "isolated DNA product", there is only "isolated DNA".
And again, it is not clear why "isolated DNA", which is not a product but a naturally occurring molecule, ought to be patentable when naturally occurring products are specifically excluded from patentability. It is also not clear why, if "isolated DNA" is patentable, why "isolated any-other-naturally-occurring-thing" is NOT patentable, as in my absurd new-species example above.
1. An isolated DNA coding for a BRCA1 polypeptide, said polypeptide having the amino acid sequence set forth in SEQ ID NO:2.
2. The isolated DNA of claim 1, wherein said DNA has the nucleotide sequence set forth in SEQ ID NO:1.
3. The isolated DNA of claim 1 which contains BRCA1 regulatory sequences.
4. The isolated DNA of claim 2 which contains BRCA1 regulatory sequences.
5. An isolated DNA having at least 15 nucleotides of the DNA of claim 1.
6. An isolated DNA having at least 15 nucleotides of the DNA of claim 2.
7. An isolated DNA selected from the group consisting of:
(a) a DNA having the nucleotide sequence set forth in SEQ ID NO:1 having T at nucleotide position 4056;
(b) a DNA having the nucleotide sequence set forth in SEQ ID NO:1 having an extra C at nucleotide position 5385;
(c) a DNA having the nucleotide sequence set forth in SEQ ID NO: 1 having G at nucleotide position 5443; and, (d) a DNA having the nucleotide sequence set forth in SEQ ID NO:1 having 11 base pairs at nucleotide positions 189-199 deleted.
Remember, nothing but the claims tells you what is being patented. You can read the abstract and supporting matter in a patent until you're blue in the face, and they won't tell you what is being patented. ONLY the claims do that. So don't go citing me the abstract in reply to this post. It's irrelevant.
The USPTO has ruled that an "isolated and purified" piece of DNA may be patented. This is an idiotic ruling--as the claims in the lawsuit point out, removing a natural product from its location is does not make it any less a natural product, which cannot be patented--but it is currently the law of the land in the United States.
What is being claimed here is any DNA sequence whatsoever that codes for the BRAC1 protein (claim 1) and a specific DNA sequence that codes for the BRAC1 protein (claim 2). The thing that makes these "patentable" is the word isolated. The DNA sequences in your body are not "isolated", but if you take a blood sample, grind up the cells and do some biochemistry to pull out YOUR VERY OWN BRAC1 gene, you will be in violation of this patent. NOT because you've employed a patented METHOD to isolate this part of YOUR VERY OWN DNA, but because the holder of this patent "owns" something associated with that sequence.
WHAT they own is a very good question. Presumably any "use" of it. That means that if you isolated a few kg of BRAC1 this way and hit someone over the head with a lump of it that would be a violation of this patent. If you hung it on a wall and called it art, that would be a violation of this patent. If you "used" it to occupy space in a test tube that would be a violation of this patent. The very act of possession of isolated BRAC1 DNA would seem to be a violation of this patent.
Which is, obviously, insane. And quite plausibly in violation of the Constitution of the United States, as it far exceeds the patenting powers given to Congress in that document.
So my question then became how does this not spontaneously fuse?
It would... given enough time. The rate of fusion in the solar core is quite sedate. The vast majority of hydrogen or deuterium in the solar core won't fuse for some billions of years to come.
This stuff will have a huge spontaneous fusion cross-section, relatively speaking, but that could still be vastly lower than anything practically interesting. During the cold fusion flap Koonin and collaborators did a careful recalculation of the "standard" spontaneous fusion cross-section (which depends sensitively on the details of the asymptotic wavefunction) and found that the accepted value was many orders of magnitude too small. But the corrected value was still many orders of magnitude smaller than that required to make any of the cold fusion claims plausible.
Does anyone read To Kill a Mockingbird or Scarlet Letter for entertainment? Hardly. People read these books to explore the human condition and take a hard look at where society fails the individual.
Speak for yourself.
You're presenting a false alternative: some of us find the exploration of the human condition hugely entertaining, invigorating, stimulating.
Expand your horizons and open your mind. You'll find that there's vastly more scope to entertainment than shooting imaginary people in the face (not that doing that isn't also fun.)
Did they not realize that this is the Taoist symbol of yin and yang?
I hear there's a face on Mars, too, and a picture of Jesus on a fish stick, and quite a few other natural accidents that look a lot like things people have a big emotional investment in if you squint hard and click your heals together at exactly the same time.
The really curious thing is how ancient Taoists knew about dipole moments. I've studied the tao te ching pretty carefully and don't recall seeing a single spherical harmonic, Legendre polynomial, or anything similar.
In any case, I'm pretty sure if you subtract out the dipole and look carefully at the higher moments you'll find a pattern that looks suspiciously... noodly.
Sure, buy a company and kill off their highest revenue generating, and highest margin products which coincidentally are chosen more than any other platform to deploy your own database product. That's real smart.
Sorry, but I don't see where "smart" comes into it. People and the organizations they run--business or government--do incredibly stupid things all the time.
Any argument that begins with the premise, "It would be stupid to do X" and ends with the conclusion, "Therefore no one would ever do X" relies on the false premise, "No one ever does anything stupid." Unfortunately, the opposite is true: most of us do stupid things most of the time, even very successful people, whose success can be attributed to a combination of luck and being stupid slightly less often than others.
The transition of the modern United States to a national socialist economy does create an interesting conundrum with regard to Godwin. It can be resolved by observing that while the NAZIs were national socialists, not all national socialists are NAZIs, so for anyone who actually understands what the terms mean there should be no confusion.
And while my original comment was correctly modded offtopic, it did seem to me germane to point out that the notion that badly run companies go out of businesses is a quaint and out-dated belief. In national socialist America, bankruptcy is something that only happens to the little people, the taxpayer, the small business. To make a blanket statement regarding "how the market works" as if there was still anything resembling a market in the politically controlled upper reaches of the American business world is to reveal a truly majestic scale of innocence or ignorance, and because myths die hard in America it seemed like a useful opportunity to remind you, once again, that the democratic republic of trade that you once were is long, long gone, and you are now living in a national socialist (but not NAZI) empire.
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I know this is going to sound like a self-serving political statement from a hardcore Democrat -- but well done, President Obama.
My cynicism knows no bounds, which gives me to think what the Democratic response to this might have been if a Bush Administration official had proposed it. I'm betting something to the tune of, "Oh those damned Republicans they want to use band-aid technological fixes so they can go on driving their SUVs over baby polar bears for another ten years!"
I think this is a good idea, and if Chu can make it happen (again, colour me cynical) it'll be a good thing, particularly because of the reduced energy demand aspect, which will help with the whole peak oil deal.
But I can't help thinking about how mindless partisans (not necessarily you) would have reacted if the Offence rather than the Defence had suggested this (both parties are ultimately on the same team, of course, representing the plutocrats united against the people.)
Whether you think this is novel or not, it's not ordinary.
Handling a JavaScript OnChange event is not ordinary? What about a button click event?
Can I patent "1. A system for providing real-time information in a Web page comprising:a retrieval-enhanced button input element configured to contain an attribute for a retrieval expression for a button in a rendered Web page, wherein the retrieval-enhanced button input element is contained within a source code document corresponding to the rendered Web page; and an document retriever configured to retrieve a document real-time and visually display it."?
Also known as "a help button".
My fanciful claim above is a minuscule edit to the first claim in this idiotic application. If you can patent OnChange event handling for realtime validation (that being one of the purposes for which the event was added to the standard!) you can certainly patent any specific use of button handling. Closing a window, opening a window, displaying a document, changing a background colour... any specific use that is "non-obvious" to someone completely ignorant of software development.
I assume that most Javascript validation waits until all of the text has been entered.
Your assumption is false. It's called an OnChange event: http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_onchange.asp
I am not a "Web programmer" but anyone with even a passing familiarity with JavaScript has seen this.
The first claim in the patent is: "1. A system for providing real-time validation of text input fields in a Web page comprising:a validation-enhanced text input element configured to contain an attribute for a validation expression for a text field in a rendered Web page, wherein the validation-enhanced text input element is contained within a source code document corresponding to the rendered Web page; andan input text validator configured to validate a user-entered character of the text field against the validation expression in real-time and visually indicate invalid user-entered characters."
So these losers have filed a patent application in which the first claim is exactly nothing but a completely standard bit of JavaScript code. People have been doing this kind of real-time validation and response for years and years and years. JavaScript is designed to do it.
This is by far the most egregiously stupid patent application we have seen on /. in a long time.
Why IBM is doing this is a complete mystery, although "never assume venality where stupidity will do" comes forcibly to mind.
as long as he doesn't sue anyone over the patent no puppies have been harmed.
And when the company gets bought out and the puppy-torturing plans get put into action by the new owners, and he screams, "But I didn't mean this to happen!" he will not be forgiven.
2.5% of Canadians are of African descent vs 13.4% in the United States. 1.0% of Canadians are of Latino descent vs 14.8% in the United States. In fact, the US has more people of African descent than Canada has people (and the same, obviously, for people of Latin descent).
Looking at two large, relatively homogeneous minorities is not a good way of measuring ethnic diversity. There are 22 ethnic groups listed in the page you link as constituting more than 1% of the Canadian population. We are over 6% Native American and Metis. The US is less than 1% Native American.
If you lump our three nominally Anglo ethnic groups into one, you get just 50% of the population (and a lot of pissed off Irish and Scots who don't like being lumped with the English.) Our next largest ethnic group is the French, followed by Germans (most of whom came here in the 50's, so almost all the German-Canadians I know are children of German immigrants.)
We are a finely-sliced country, where Cree is spoken routinely in the hospitals of one major city (Winnipeg) and translation services are provided for many other languages. In Toronto a couple of years ago I spent a little time downtown and heard hardly a word of English spoken, but I did pick up Hindi, Russian, Portugese, and various Asian languages. In contrast, while visiting Boston I hear all English, all the time, and in San Deigo hear only English and Spanish.
The US has a few large ethnic minorities. Canada is a patchwork of ethnic diversity in comparison.
However, my original point is that the US government is incapable of delivering services that other countries manage just fine, and your point that health care for the poor in the US is socialized makes my point: in Canada we have a fully socialized health care system because the logic of delivery of care makes it clear that that is the best way to go to ensure that preventative care is delivered. In the US your government is so broken that you spend more dollars per capita across your entire population on health care for the poor, and still managed to deliver relatively poor outcomes.
Your government can't even run a socialized health care system competently. The thought of it trying to micro-manage the energy sector, which has proven to be far beyond the capabilities of even a relatively competent government like we have in Canada, is scary.
Government, on the other hand, has no such failsafe. Inefficient, ineffective, insufficient programs are the norm, not the exception. Why?
Because they are run by Americans.
I assume you're an American, posting about your own experience with your own government, and I agree: your government sucks.
To conclude from this that ALL government sucks, and is inherently unresponsive to people and unable to change, is not logically justified.
I'm a Canadian, and while our government has loads of problems, they are of the "the free market doesn't always work perfectly" kind, not the "everything the government touches turns to shit" kind.
The most important difference between Canada and the US in this regard is due to our more flexible constitution and our more independent judicial system, as well as the smaller number of relatively powerful provincial governments, all of which serve as strong Darwinian checks on our federal government. Add to that very significant regional differences, with the West throwing up an entirely new political party every few decades (and Quebec chiming in now and then) and we have a vastly more dynamic political discourse, which despite the combined efforts of the two major parties has never been captured by a single, monolithic political elite the way the American political system has.
The US government runs things badly because it is answerable to the parties, not the people. And the parties are run by the same type of people, who see the world is essentially similar ways, and who are far more interested in maintaining the dysfunctional, corrupt system you have in the face of any evolution or change that would allow the needs of ordinary Americans to be served.
So don't blame governments as such for the failings of the American government. Canadian governments, for all their astonishing failures, still manage to deliver health care more cheaply and effectively than the American government does (and yes, I mean the government: the US government pays more public dollars per capita than all levels of government in Canada do, and we get better outcomes as measured by longevity, infant mortality and morbidity than you do.)
The problem is not "government." Is it "American government." And the rest of the world would absolutely love you guys to fix it. Americans do many things brilliantly, but your government is broken, and that's hurting everyone, you most of all.
And he knows this HOW?
One of the great things about New World archeology is that so little is known that it's easy for experts to project their hopes, dreams and fears onto their finds.
Because we have a reasonable idea of what was going on in Europe and Asia and Africa 2500 years ago anyone suggesting the use of cosmetic dentistry for reasons other than expression of social class, wealth, power, etc would be laughed at. But our ignorance of New World peoples is vast, so they make a convenient armature to hang Euro-centric notions of "noble savages" and "peaceful kingdoms" on.
For example, the Inca--now known to be a violent, war-making civilization that was structured into an oppressive aristocracy over a downtrodden peasantry--were once believed to be entirely peaceful and relatively egalitarian. That was back in the '50's when global war was a great fear, and the myth of a "classless society" was still widely believed.
Those false beliefs eventually yielded to fact, particularly translation of the Incan language. Today, though, if you ask an "expert" what the Inca were worried about toward the end of their empire, they'll be apt to tell you with a straight face, "climate change, soil erosion, ecological degradation..." Whereas the honest answer is, "We don't have a clue. Who knows what people whose entire conceptual universe is still barely comprehensible to us were thinking. Probably that they had displeased the gods somehow because things kept getting worse, but even that's just a guess."
We do know there are some constants in human society. All societies have adultery, for example, and all societies have some form of conspicuous consumption or other flagrantly wasteful behaviour that is used as a marker of class, power, wealth, etc.
When a novel social phenomenon is found in an otherwise little-understood or little-known society, it is a good bet that it'll have something to do with one of those basic, common things. At least we have good reason to believe that they existed, rather than positing that a difficult and dangerous ornamental display is for the first time ever anywhere not related to expressing the social class, power, wealth, etc of the individual involved.
I'd also like to apologise on behalf of my government for driving Turing to suicide. We have much to be ashamed of.
There's nothing trollish about this comment. It is broadly agreed that Turing's suicide was significantly motivated by the effects of hormone therapy he was given to "cure" his homosexuality after he was convicted of the crime of being a homosexual.
That this could happen to one of the great minds who undoubtedly helped Britain survive the war should be a cautionary reminder to anyone anywhere who thinks that giving governments or corporations or churches the power over harmless human behaviour is a good thing.
The two observations mentioned in the first article don't seem to rule it out.
But the termination shock has zero influence on optical photons.
The handedness paper is looking a ordinary optical images of spiral galaxies within 172 Mpc and asking, "is there any axis where if we look one way we see mostly left-handed galaxies and if we look the other way we see mostly right-handed galaxies?" Since we are in the middle of the distribution a preponderance of a particular handedness will show up as more left-handed in one direction and more right-handed in the other.
This is ordinary optical astronomy of the crudest kind: they literally look at digital photos of a few thousand galaxies and say, "Yep, looks right-handed to me..." They've done a nice job of blinding that data by randomly mirroring the images so observer bias can't affect the results.
While heliopause can plausibly affect the CMB due to changes in ionization, it cannot do the same to optical frequencies, and certainly not to a degree that would change the apparent orientation of spiral galaxies without also radically changing the apparent distribution of spiral galaxies, to the extent that we would have noticed it ages ago.
It should be evenly distributed, but instead it's brighter and darker in places, and they think it's due to the uneven surface of the termination shock.
However, in a paper linked from the first article there is a second effect that optical phenomena at the termination shock won't account for: there appears to be a preferential handedness of spiral galaxies, and the handedness exhibits itself along an axis that is close to the Axis of Evil.
Furthermore, while this paper on optical effects is interesting and suggests some directions for more research, the author's own thoughts on what specific phenomena might be causing the distortions are, using his own term, "speculative."
Other than the asymmetry of the termination shock it is by no means certain that any of these phenomena exist (that is, that they are not artifacts of the instruments or the analysis), which is the typical state of affairs in leading-edge science, so it'll be interesting to see how the truth unfolds over the next few years.
Frankly, I find it more frightening that most of our leaders and most of the population in general have all bought into the idea that morality is just convention and that there is no higher power to answer to.
Why? There is ample evidence from history that a belief in a higher power is used far more frequently to motivate atrocities than to prevent them.
No one has ever been burned at the stake due to an excess of reasonableness on the part of their accusers. Faith, however frequently it has been used to opposed violence, has far more frequently and effectively been used to motivate it.
You're also posing a false alternative: the choice is not between "just a convention" and "a higher power". Many people who do not believe in a higher power do believe that morality is well-justified on biological, evolutionary, psychological and sociological grounds. In fact, you'd have to be insane NOT to believe that, given the vast amount of evidence that humans are social primates whose basic needs include security of person and secure attachment, both of which are morally foundational.
Or you can wallow in ignorance, self-delusion based on your particular ideological predilcctions.
As do the people who believe the science on global climate change is certain, but who don't understand what it means that GCMs don't conserve energy in their basic equations.
This drives me nuts: smug ignoramuses who couldn't integrate a first order PDE accurately to save their life telling me that scepticism toward anthropogenic climate change is self-delusion. It isn't self-delusion to note that GCMs are unphysical, crudely parameterized models that would take a miracle to get the SIGN of the response to a given climate forcing right much less magnitude or detailed geographic distribution.
Ocean heat content appears to be a quite significant signal that the globe is warming (and has the added virtue of being thermodynamically meaningful) and it is unquestionably plausible based on modelling that CO2 and other anthropogenic contributions to greenhouse gases are very significant contributors to that phenomenon. But treating anyone who is a sceptic as delusional is as unscientific as the nutjobs who dismiss it all as a left-wing conspiracy.
The science behind anthropogenic climate change is nothing like as solid as the advocates of particular political platforms would like it to be, and honest politicians (but I contradict myself) should be advocating minimal interventions based on the precautionary principle (that is, any government intervention carries huge risk, so we should be extremely cautious about intervening, in the same way any major climate change carries huge risk, so we should be extremely cautious about doing nothing.) Market-based solutions like cap and trade have been effective in other areas, and are probably the most reasonable precautionary measure with regard to CO2.
Is it only me, or is party politcal tribalism a possible new DSM classification?
It's not just you, and I dearly hope when the next rev of the DSM comes out it'll have "PPT" as an Axis I disorder, probably related to Schizophreniform disorder (but of longer duration) or they'll relax the cultural limitation a bit and see it as a type of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_psychotic_disorder
IIRC they compared driving with the AC on to driving with the windows open.
A few years ago I was doing a 700 km commute every couple of weeks. I have a ten year old Chrysler mini-van (3 litre) which gets 10 litres/100 km (dunno what that is in mpg, US or imperial.) As a test I tried windows open vs AC on different trips, and found my fuel efficiency at highway speeds was undetectably different.
This is the same result Mythbusters got, and while neither test is exactly high science, my real-world experience tends to back up their on-track testing.
There is a third alternative that no one has tried lately: some more efficient way of circulating air in the passenger cabin other than having the windows open. I imagine an air intake just below the windshield that was used to ventilate the cabin would have the potential to keep the passengers cool without the aerodynamic losses open windows produce.
various improved breeds
Sensible people who are in favour of GE labelling are in it for one thing: we'd like to be able to not choose commercially owned monoculture species.
It has nothing to do with personal health, and everything to do with not wanting to contribute more than we have to toward the coming argi-ecological disaster. Bananas are the obvious example to illustrate this cautionary tale, but beef is almost as bad due to the tiny number of bulls used for artificial insemination, and GE foods are a pure example of stupid humans trying to beat the Red Queen by standing still.
Unfortunately idiots have made a lot of noise about the imagined health effects of GE foods, and the dishonest shills on the other side have latched onto those straw people and completely ignored the perfectly legitimate concerns of people like me, who don't want to contribute any more to the coming disaster than we have to.
Calorie restriction, or caloric restriction (CR), is a dietary regimen thought to improve health and slow the aging process in some animals
CR is a case where animal models are even less applicable than usual. Humans are tuned up for obvious evolutionary reasons to live about twice as long as one would normally expect for a mammal, well beyond our effective reproductive lifespan.
The average mammal lives about a billion heartbeats. Humans live twice that--way off the scale. Ergo, assuming that life extension techniques that work on other animals will work on us is problematic to say the least.
One of the mechanisms that has been optimized by evolutionary selection in humans to extend our lives is our extreme resistantance to cancer, which is why animal models for cancer (both causes and cures) have been so problematic over the past few decades.
Rats are nocturnal social scavengers, which may make them a better model for sleep research than cancer research, but given how weird the human brain is compared to most other animals it is again quite problematic to simply extrapolate any conclusions from them to us.
If the AirForce had known 3 years ago, they would've exercised some option to build more IIMR builds.
Or not. It should be of real concern to Americans that you are no longer able to credibly execute long-term plans at the government level. This is a bi-partisan issue.
The recent closing of Yucca Mountain is an unfortunate example of this. It should never have been the selected site due to geotechnical issues, and it should not have been allowed to dominate the waste disposal landscape for so many years and then close.
The Space Shuttle is nearing retirement with no plausible replacement in sight. Many of your military projects are way over budget and may never deliver the goods.
This is not a partisan issue. Many of these problems have persisted across administrations and changes in congressional control. I don't know what the issue is with you guys, but the rest of the world would really like you to get your act together and return to the "can do" republic you once were.
I'm not surprised that someone may have written a better book. I would just like the book to be treated fairly.
The book that's being cited in this thread is being given away for free. This gives you a reasonable estimate of the fair value for your book.
I do a little writing myself, and am slowly coming to terms with the idea that authorship as a viable career is very nearly dead.
There have always been good people able to write good books who haven't been able to afford to live on what an author makes. That figure has just about dropped to zero, meaning that in future most non-fiction will be written by people being paid for other things (university lecturers, think tankers, etc.) or hobbyists. Fiction will be written by the well-off or well-patronized or hobbyists.
It's the new reality authors are facing. Musicians are facing it too.
Music and fiction and non-fiction were all produced before the age of commercial publishing. They will continue to be produced in the age of electronic publishing an ubiquitous copying.
The reality is that equilibrium market price of a good whose marginal cost of production is zero... is zero. That's fact, and what's fact is by definition fair, if the term has any meaning at all.
The DNA in question must be "isolated". The DNA is not "isolated" when it is naturally occurring. Nobody is claiming your DNA that you were born with. Only an isolated DNA product.
As the suit points out, removing a naturally occurring product from its original location does not make it any less a naturally occurring product, which cannot be patented.
It's good that you've understood the nature of the patents (they are on specific sequences, not methods of isolating them or methods of using them.) But it's unclear why you, or anyone else, thinks that changing the location and surroundings of a naturally occurring molecule makes that molecule patentable.
It is also not clear why this insane doctrine would be limited to genes. Suppose I find a new species (this happens many times a year, as most insect species for example have yet to be identified.) According the the USPTO I could patent "an isolated individual of species XYZ", thus preventing anyone from capturing an individual of such a species for any purpose.
One could further argue that even studying that species in situ would violate my patent, as obviously the very act of observation constitutes "isolation" by an act of selective attention.
Returning from that little speculative excursion, it's curious that you use the term "product" in your defence of this ridiculous policy, as that term makes it sound like something is being "produced" by the act of removing a naturally occurring DNA molecule from its natural environment. But of course nothing is being produced. There is no "isolated DNA product", there is only "isolated DNA".
And again, it is not clear why "isolated DNA", which is not a product but a naturally occurring molecule, ought to be patentable when naturally occurring products are specifically excluded from patentability. It is also not clear why, if "isolated DNA" is patentable, why "isolated any-other-naturally-occurring-thing" is NOT patentable, as in my absurd new-species example above.
As has been said many times, the gene itself is not patented, using it to diagnose diseases is.
False.
From the patent 5,747,282:
Remember, nothing but the claims tells you what is being patented. You can read the abstract and supporting matter in a patent until you're blue in the face, and they won't tell you what is being patented. ONLY the claims do that. So don't go citing me the abstract in reply to this post. It's irrelevant.
The USPTO has ruled that an "isolated and purified" piece of DNA may be patented. This is an idiotic ruling--as the claims in the lawsuit point out, removing a natural product from its location is does not make it any less a natural product, which cannot be patented--but it is currently the law of the land in the United States.
What is being claimed here is any DNA sequence whatsoever that codes for the BRAC1 protein (claim 1) and a specific DNA sequence that codes for the BRAC1 protein (claim 2). The thing that makes these "patentable" is the word isolated. The DNA sequences in your body are not "isolated", but if you take a blood sample, grind up the cells and do some biochemistry to pull out YOUR VERY OWN BRAC1 gene, you will be in violation of this patent. NOT because you've employed a patented METHOD to isolate this part of YOUR VERY OWN DNA, but because the holder of this patent "owns" something associated with that sequence.
WHAT they own is a very good question. Presumably any "use" of it. That means that if you isolated a few kg of BRAC1 this way and hit someone over the head with a lump of it that would be a violation of this patent. If you hung it on a wall and called it art, that would be a violation of this patent. If you "used" it to occupy space in a test tube that would be a violation of this patent. The very act of possession of isolated BRAC1 DNA would seem to be a violation of this patent.
Which is, obviously, insane. And quite plausibly in violation of the Constitution of the United States, as it far exceeds the patenting powers given to Congress in that document.
So my question then became how does this not spontaneously fuse?
It would... given enough time. The rate of fusion in the solar core is quite sedate. The vast majority of hydrogen or deuterium in the solar core won't fuse for some billions of years to come.
This stuff will have a huge spontaneous fusion cross-section, relatively speaking, but that could still be vastly lower than anything practically interesting. During the cold fusion flap Koonin and collaborators did a careful recalculation of the "standard" spontaneous fusion cross-section (which depends sensitively on the details of the asymptotic wavefunction) and found that the accepted value was many orders of magnitude too small. But the corrected value was still many orders of magnitude smaller than that required to make any of the cold fusion claims plausible.
Does anyone read To Kill a Mockingbird or Scarlet Letter for entertainment? Hardly. People read these books to explore the human condition and take a hard look at where society fails the individual.
Speak for yourself.
You're presenting a false alternative: some of us find the exploration of the human condition hugely entertaining, invigorating, stimulating.
Expand your horizons and open your mind. You'll find that there's vastly more scope to entertainment than shooting imaginary people in the face (not that doing that isn't also fun.)
Did they not realize that this is the Taoist symbol of yin and yang?
I hear there's a face on Mars, too, and a picture of Jesus on a fish stick, and quite a few other natural accidents that look a lot like things people have a big emotional investment in if you squint hard and click your heals together at exactly the same time.
The really curious thing is how ancient Taoists knew about dipole moments. I've studied the tao te ching pretty carefully and don't recall seeing a single spherical harmonic, Legendre polynomial, or anything similar.
In any case, I'm pretty sure if you subtract out the dipole and look carefully at the higher moments you'll find a pattern that looks suspiciously... noodly.
Sure, buy a company and kill off their highest revenue generating, and highest margin products which coincidentally are chosen more than any other platform to deploy your own database product. That's real smart.
Sorry, but I don't see where "smart" comes into it. People and the organizations they run--business or government--do incredibly stupid things all the time.
Any argument that begins with the premise, "It would be stupid to do X" and ends with the conclusion, "Therefore no one would ever do X" relies on the false premise, "No one ever does anything stupid." Unfortunately, the opposite is true: most of us do stupid things most of the time, even very successful people, whose success can be attributed to a combination of luck and being stupid slightly less often than others.
The transition of the modern United States to a national socialist economy does create an interesting conundrum with regard to Godwin. It can be resolved by observing that while the NAZIs were national socialists, not all national socialists are NAZIs, so for anyone who actually understands what the terms mean there should be no confusion.
And while my original comment was correctly modded offtopic, it did seem to me germane to point out that the notion that badly run companies go out of businesses is a quaint and out-dated belief. In national socialist America, bankruptcy is something that only happens to the little people, the taxpayer, the small business. To make a blanket statement regarding "how the market works" as if there was still anything resembling a market in the politically controlled upper reaches of the American business world is to reveal a truly majestic scale of innocence or ignorance, and because myths die hard in America it seemed like a useful opportunity to remind you, once again, that the democratic republic of trade that you once were is long, long gone, and you are now living in a national socialist (but not NAZI) empire.