If you look at the exploit it makes heavy use of x86 specific inline assembly so it makes sense that it would fail on other platforms. That doesn't mean the other platforms aren't vulnerable, just that you need to have exploit code written for them. Than again, anyone who wants to hack someone running an Alpha should be punished the same as someone who mugs grandma (I kid I kid)
Please present actual evidence of this... oh and that comment that was massively misinterpreted about him saying that it is easier to change the Constitution than to rewrite the Bible does NOT mean he actually wanted to change the Constitution to be the Bible. Unfortunately, most people on Slashdot get politics through pre-digested soundbites on dailykos and not from actually reading what people actually say.
In fact in some ways he is actually calling for a real democratic debate over changing the government the RIGHT way. Most of the other candidates want to make whatever changes they want without the "inconvenience" of having to actually follow the process that the founding father's laid down. You might not agree with Huckabee's positions, but I would much rather have change come through means consistent with the Consitution than by executive fiat, or some Judge deciding to rewrite the Constitution to meet his own political goals.
Car makers like to sell.... wait for it..... cars. Despite the Illuminati Trilateral Bush 9/11 conspiracy theories that are popular on Slashdot, GM really doesn't make out that well when oil is expensive and people don't buy their cars. Case in point: Look at the profits oil companies are making right now vs. the insane losses GM is making right now.
Now unlike the John Edwards types who look at profits as always being "evil" they are instead incredibly useful. GM would not be putting a dime into ethanol if the Oil companies WEREN'T making huge $$ right now and there was a big desire to expand alternative fuels. This is also how I knew that Greenpeace didn't really give a shit about the environment. When gas first went above $3 per gallon, they had some airhead on venting about how the evil oil companies were price gouging. If Greenpeance actually cared about the environment they would have been jumping up and down praising the high cost of gas since that would spur more investment in alternatives.
He might not have been standing on school ground, but he was out of his normal class with school permission under school control at a school sponsored event. The kids are in school to learn, they had no "right" to see the torch go through, but they were still let out and the kid abused the privilege. He also expressly refused to put the sign away when the teachers who were there (because it was a school event) told him to. The sign was factually shown to be disruptive... he did it to grab attention and it worked. If you want to see how an actual political protest IS allowed in schools see the Tinker decision in which case there was an actual political protest that did not disrupt the educational process and was allowed. The Court has never said students don't have free speech, but free speech does not mean you can act like a jackass on the school's time and not have to worry about getting a (pretty normal) punishment for it.
Are these guys just trying to stake a reputation based on being critical of Google? I tend to agree, I could probably write a nice article about how map-reduce would be a terrible system to use in making a 3D game. Could an article like that be technically true? Sure. Would it be in anything more than a logical non-sequiter? Not unless Google all of the sudden came out and claimed mapreduce is the new platform for all 3D game development (not likely).
1998 called, it wants it's complaint back. It's 2008 now and nobody's afraid of Microsoft anymore.*
* That doesn't mean Linux won, just that you can get it, unfortunately it turns out the people who already want it rarely cared if it was preinstalled anyway.
It must be news to all the people on Slashdot who have said they would move to Canada since broadband in the U.S. was so terrible. Maple Syrup is always sweeter on the other side of the border.
Andrew Cuomo is infringing on Elliot Spitzer's patented method of going after any big "bad" company (conveniently based OUTSIDE of New York to not rile up local interests) in order to get political credentials as "crusading for the people" while doing nothing to actually help anybody. Oh, and the planned Fab that AMD was going to build in New York (but is probably not going to because its market capitalization is less than the value of a new fab post-Barcelona) has absolutely nothing to do with his "heroic" interests in going after Intel.
Please present some actual evidence for everything you just said, and some conspiracy-nut eco-lobbying website does not count. I grew up in Pennsylvania, home of Three Mile Island. If you had been standing at the exhaust vent where the (minute) amount of radiation was released and had been intentionally trying to suck down everything from the accident, you would have received LESS radiation than if you had hidden out in your basement in Harrisburg for 3 months following the accident... you know why? Radon! There has never been anything even approaching evidence that this "accident" ever injured anyone, and that is the worst-case scenario of anything that GE has ever been involved int.
If anything I'd say you are in on the scam and are trying to scare people into "saving the earth" by lining your own pocketbook while the US destroys its economy and China pollutes all it wants since somehow dirty coal burned in China is "green" but clean nuclear power in the US is terrible.
Considering the carbon emissions of atomic power are 0 that's a pretty good "offset", although I think the entire thing is a scam to separate over-indulged yuppies with guilty consciences from their money.
Maybe people on Slashdot have a problem when they equate "unauthorized" with "illegal" which they have done countless times in order to make the RIAA look bad. The RIAA is arguing in court filings that it does not "authorize" ripping of CD's.... which is 100% correct... it does NOT authorize you to rip from a CD. However, that is also completely meaningless as well. If I buy a car, the car maker does not "authorize" me to drive the car, paint the car, put gas in the car, etc. etc. etc. So what, authorization is completely irrelevant.
That just proves my point... you are using 32 bit drivers with a 32 bit kernel!! Having partial 64 bit support at higher levels does NOT give you a 64 bit operating system. There's something else he said in his post that you are overlooking too: He said he uses 32 bit POWER PC DRIVERS in a 64 bit INTEL Macintosh. Please show me how this works... you can't.
OK, this is Slashdot and I am amazed at the level of ignorance here. I think 98% of the people on this site would fail a basic OS exam flat out:
1. Everything you just described for having 32 bit executables and libraries co-existing on a 64 bit OS has existed from day 1 for 64 bit versions of Windows. read the wiki page
2. 32 bit drivers DO NOT WORK on 64 bit operating systems.. be they Linux, Windows, Slowaris, Mac OS X, or Irix for that matter. You are letting your anti-MS bias cloud your judgment in not realizing that there are fundamental differences between a 32 bit OS and a 64 bit one. It's not all a big conspiracy led by Bill Gates to screw you over, it's a technical fact of life. Don't believe me? Try to use 32 bit Nvidia drivers on your 64 bit Linux box (if you even have one).
3. Heck I got some PowerPC 32bit driver to run my 64Bit Intel Mac. Bullshit absent you running your "driver" in a PPC emulator or something like that. I want device names, binary blob names, versions, and a fucking video of that working. This line shows you are nothing more than a troll.
Uh... MS has had 64 bit OS's available for quite some time. In fact, AMD's CEO testified in Microsoft's favor at its antitrust trial, and in exchange MS chose AMD64 as the way to push its software to 64 bits (Itanium support is a joke).
The problem is, there has not been a lot of demand for 64 bit, and drivers for many pieces of hardware have not been written. Another point: Your VM example is plain wrong. XP CAN access all 4 gigs... just not all at the same time for the same application due to the Kernel/Userland split of the 32 bit address space. Your first VM can get one set of 2GB userland space, and the other VM can get a separate 1.5GB of space (although this will obviously be demand paged just like any other large apps would be). Incidentally, the exact same issue affects 32 bit Linux which still predominates in desktop/laptop use, and even a large chunk of server use.
I love how these coal plants are all Bush's fault when 100% of them existed for 100% of the Clinton administration (you know, the one with that "genius" Al Gore as vice president). I find it amusing that they were great and wonderful as long as Clinton was in office, but the moment Bush took over they started destroying the world and its ALL HIS FAULT.
Uh... if you saw the number of bugs currently open in this "release candidate" (and I use the term loosely) you might be a little more realistic and less idealistic. I use KDE exclusively, but I'm holding off a big permanent jump until this gets A LOT more polish. One problem with OSS is that there's plenty of work that needs to get done that isn't "fun" and people don't like to do the stuff that isn't "fun" for free. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean it's not important.
Remember kids this is Slashdot where greed is ALWAYS EVIL.*
* Exceptions:
1. Apple getting premium prices
2. Any Slashdot fanboy downloading any movie/music/game for free since this it's only greedy when the creators want $$ for it, not when Slashbots want it for free
3. The other companies mentioned in this article that are not really being banned, but may not be able to get "short" numbers. They are not greedy, since they want to make money, and get a scarce resource (short number codes). If these non-Verizon companies want to hog the short codes this is NOT greedy because they are Slashdot approved. Only the cellphone companies are greedy. Everything is purely black & white.
4. Whenever a Slashdot approved company makes money: AMD, IBM (called an 'underdog' for unknown reasons), Google, Apple (again)
5. Any company with a '90's style business plan that goes under due to ineptitude. They are seen as being martyrs for the religious cause of the week, and that they should have succeeded except for George Bush being evil and destroying them.
All Yoda would have to do is look at any company and just say: "No, too old" Some of the companies would then get really bent out of shape and turn evil later, while other ones would just annoy Yoda until he gave up and threw them a support contract he never has to fulfill since he dies!
The old opty 170 didn't have an L3 cache which is where the bug lies. This bug is rare, but it is reproducible when the CPU is under heavy load and was one of the reasons why AMD was trying to get hardware reviewers to come to an AMD event in Tahoe to run benchmarks on AMD approved systems instead of just dropping chips into FedEx packages. Causing a full-blown system freeze is also on the serious side when it comes to bugs. There have been even more problems, techreport has a story that unlike the hand selected systems that ran at Tahoe, many of the actual consumer phenoms you can buy today actually use slower HT speeds (1.8Ghz vs. 2.0 Ghz in the demos). This means that the memory subsystem (AMD's one theoretical strength over Intel right now) is slowed down, so the somewhat unimpressive initial results are actually overstatements of what the consumer chips can do. (article here).
AMD is in a world of hurt right now. The "true" quad-core line appears to be nothing more than marketing hyperbole since year-old q6600's are faster clock-for-clock than Phenom is. AMD will hopefully get these bugs ironed out... by next February. Even then though, AMD will have chips that are MASSIVELY expensive to make, but that they can't sell for the higher prices Intel is able to command. AMD would be fine if they had an expensive chip they could sell at a premium, or a very cheap to produce chip they could sell for the budget crowd, but right now they have Acura production costs coupled with Kia per-unit revenues: bad times.
(IANAL) Everything that's created is covered by copyright by default.
The IANAL bit is correct at least. Factual information is NOT copyrightable. There are plenty of things that Best Buy would not want employees copying (customer records, receipt info, etc. etc.) that would not fall under copyright. Copyright covers "creative works", and while the definition of a "creative work" is pretty broad, it doesn't cover everything (good example is the phone directory).
I'm not saying that this is what happened in this case (in fact I doubt it), but there is plenty of non-copyright material out there that a business does not want copied willy-nilly.
Maybe you should try RTFA or at least RTFS. This is not about bending to the will of America, it is about complying with international treaties. If the US ignored an international treaty like this you'd be on here jumping up & down about how evil America & Bush are because they ignore "international law" (a pure BS term by the way). At the same time when Canada just complies with an international treaty you don't like... all of the sudden it's "American Imperialism".
Canada has its own laws, and its own legislature. It can choose to withdraw from the treaties (very unlikely since there a major downsides to leaving WIPO). Or Canadians can choose to have laws that implement the treaties in ways that afford their citizens more freedoms. When the U.S. signed the treaty it didn't abrogate the Constitution, and there is no reason that Canada has to abrogate any fundamental rights....... unless Canada never afforded those rights as fundamental to its citizens in the first place. So maybe instead of making uneducated, snide remarks that you know will get a positive moderation because people here hate Bush, maybe you should think about how Canada's system of government has flaws that need to be fixed.
You sir are a candidate for the Fox 5 at 10 school of massively misjudging actual risks. Here's a hint: If you thought that pollution from using your computer was going to be SO great that it would dwarf the benefits of curing CANCER (a disease that was killing people a long time before we had global warming hysteria) then you should probably never: 1. use a fucking computer; 2. never destroy the "environment" by READING OR POSTING TO SLASHDOT!!!
The short answer is that finding a new use for an invention has never meant that the invention itself could be patented for longer. However, a new patent for the method of using the item could be patentable.
Example that I am dredging up from my (sometimes inaccurate) memory of the MPEP: A shoe polish compound that is well known in the prior art is discovered to have a new use in repelling insects that was not previously known. Since this is an inherent property of the shoe polish the discoverer cannot get a patent on the compound. However, say there is a specific method that you need to do in order to get the compound to actually repel bugs. This method of using the compound may be patentable if it meets the novelty/non-obviousness requirements needed for any patent.
Can you point out any evidence of this or did you just put up an anti-patent rant in order to get free mod points?
The last time I checked, every country in Europe, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan all had patents and patent laws too. In fact, all are signatories of the Patent Cooperation Treaty as well (which makes it easier to get patent protection in multiple countries for the same invention).
There are certainly issues with imports into the US with a few due to safety approval and environmental regulations, and others due to market factors. Americans don't always go in for the smallest and most expensive device possible, many go for the cheapest/most bling-ridden one... but that is a customer choice and not due to patents.
Finally, many new products made in Asia that are really new are not yet made in quantities that justify mass marketing and exports to the US. The local test market is the easiest way to see if there is demand for a gadget and then once there is critical mass it will be manufactured in quantities that support export. You can talk about how there should be more manufacturing of cool stuff in the US (I definitely think there should be), but patents have nothing to do with that either.
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If you look at the exploit it makes heavy use of x86 specific inline assembly so it makes sense that it would fail on other platforms. That doesn't mean the other platforms aren't vulnerable, just that you need to have exploit code written for them. Than again, anyone who wants to hack someone running an Alpha should be punished the same as someone who mugs grandma (I kid I kid)
Please present actual evidence of this... oh and that comment that was massively misinterpreted about him saying that it is easier to change the Constitution than to rewrite the Bible does NOT mean he actually wanted to change the Constitution to be the Bible. Unfortunately, most people on Slashdot get politics through pre-digested soundbites on dailykos and not from actually reading what people actually say.
In fact in some ways he is actually calling for a real democratic debate over changing the government the RIGHT way. Most of the other candidates want to make whatever changes they want without the "inconvenience" of having to actually follow the process that the founding father's laid down. You might not agree with Huckabee's positions, but I would much rather have change come through means consistent with the Consitution than by executive fiat, or some Judge deciding to rewrite the Constitution to meet his own political goals.
Car makers like to sell.... wait for it..... cars. Despite the Illuminati Trilateral Bush 9/11 conspiracy theories that are popular on Slashdot, GM really doesn't make out that well when oil is expensive and people don't buy their cars. Case in point: Look at the profits oil companies are making right now vs. the insane losses GM is making right now.
Now unlike the John Edwards types who look at profits as always being "evil" they are instead incredibly useful. GM would not be putting a dime into ethanol if the Oil companies WEREN'T making huge $$ right now and there was a big desire to expand alternative fuels. This is also how I knew that Greenpeace didn't really give a shit about the environment. When gas first went above $3 per gallon, they had some airhead on venting about how the evil oil companies were price gouging. If Greenpeance actually cared about the environment they would have been jumping up and down praising the high cost of gas since that would spur more investment in alternatives.
He might not have been standing on school ground, but he was out of his normal class with school permission under school control at a school sponsored event. The kids are in school to learn, they had no "right" to see the torch go through, but they were still let out and the kid abused the privilege. He also expressly refused to put the sign away when the teachers who were there (because it was a school event) told him to. The sign was factually shown to be disruptive... he did it to grab attention and it worked. If you want to see how an actual political protest IS allowed in schools see the Tinker decision in which case there was an actual political protest that did not disrupt the educational process and was allowed. The Court has never said students don't have free speech, but free speech does not mean you can act like a jackass on the school's time and not have to worry about getting a (pretty normal) punishment for it.
Are these guys just trying to stake a reputation based on being critical of Google? I tend to agree, I could probably write a nice article about how map-reduce would be a terrible system to use in making a 3D game. Could an article like that be technically true? Sure. Would it be in anything more than a logical non-sequiter? Not unless Google all of the sudden came out and claimed mapreduce is the new platform for all 3D game development (not likely).
1998 called, it wants it's complaint back. It's 2008 now and nobody's afraid of Microsoft anymore.*
* That doesn't mean Linux won, just that you can get it, unfortunately it turns out the people who already want it rarely cared if it was preinstalled anyway.
It must be news to all the people on Slashdot who have said they would move to Canada since broadband in the U.S. was so terrible. Maple Syrup is always sweeter on the other side of the border.
Andrew Cuomo is infringing on Elliot Spitzer's patented method of going after any big "bad" company (conveniently based OUTSIDE of New York to not rile up local interests) in order to get political credentials as "crusading for the people" while doing nothing to actually help anybody. Oh, and the planned Fab that AMD was going to build in New York (but is probably not going to because its market capitalization is less than the value of a new fab post-Barcelona) has absolutely nothing to do with his "heroic" interests in going after Intel.
Please present some actual evidence for everything you just said, and some conspiracy-nut eco-lobbying website does not count. I grew up in Pennsylvania, home of Three Mile Island. If you had been standing at the exhaust vent where the (minute) amount of radiation was released and had been intentionally trying to suck down everything from the accident, you would have received LESS radiation than if you had hidden out in your basement in Harrisburg for 3 months following the accident... you know why? Radon! There has never been anything even approaching evidence that this "accident" ever injured anyone, and that is the worst-case scenario of anything that GE has ever been involved int.
If anything I'd say you are in on the scam and are trying to scare people into "saving the earth" by lining your own pocketbook while the US destroys its economy and China pollutes all it wants since somehow dirty coal burned in China is "green" but clean nuclear power in the US is terrible.
Considering the carbon emissions of atomic power are 0 that's a pretty good "offset", although I think the entire thing is a scam to separate over-indulged yuppies with guilty consciences from their money.
Maybe people on Slashdot have a problem when they equate "unauthorized" with "illegal" which they have done countless times in order to make the RIAA look bad. The RIAA is arguing in court filings that it does not "authorize" ripping of CD's.... which is 100% correct... it does NOT authorize you to rip from a CD. However, that is also completely meaningless as well. If I buy a car, the car maker does not "authorize" me to drive the car, paint the car, put gas in the car, etc. etc. etc. So what, authorization is completely irrelevant.
That just proves my point... you are using 32 bit drivers with a 32 bit kernel!! Having partial 64 bit support at higher levels does NOT give you a 64 bit operating system. There's something else he said in his post that you are overlooking too: He said he uses 32 bit POWER PC DRIVERS in a 64 bit INTEL Macintosh. Please show me how this works... you can't.
OK, this is Slashdot and I am amazed at the level of ignorance here. I think 98% of the people on this site would fail a basic OS exam flat out:
1. Everything you just described for having 32 bit executables and libraries co-existing on a 64 bit OS has existed from day 1 for 64 bit versions of Windows. read the wiki page
2. 32 bit drivers DO NOT WORK on 64 bit operating systems.. be they Linux, Windows, Slowaris, Mac OS X, or Irix for that matter. You are letting your anti-MS bias cloud your judgment in not realizing that there are fundamental differences between a 32 bit OS and a 64 bit one. It's not all a big conspiracy led by Bill Gates to screw you over, it's a technical fact of life. Don't believe me? Try to use 32 bit Nvidia drivers on your 64 bit Linux box (if you even have one).
3. Heck I got some PowerPC 32bit driver to run my 64Bit Intel Mac. Bullshit absent you running your "driver" in a PPC emulator or something like that. I want device names, binary blob names, versions, and a fucking video of that working. This line shows you are nothing more than a troll.
Uh... MS has had 64 bit OS's available for quite some time. In fact, AMD's CEO testified in Microsoft's favor at its antitrust trial, and in exchange MS chose AMD64 as the way to push its software to 64 bits (Itanium support is a joke).
The problem is, there has not been a lot of demand for 64 bit, and drivers for many pieces of hardware have not been written. Another point: Your VM example is plain wrong. XP CAN access all 4 gigs... just not all at the same time for the same application due to the Kernel/Userland split of the 32 bit address space. Your first VM can get one set of 2GB userland space, and the other VM can get a separate 1.5GB of space (although this will obviously be demand paged just like any other large apps would be). Incidentally, the exact same issue affects 32 bit Linux which still predominates in desktop/laptop use, and even a large chunk of server use.
I love how these coal plants are all Bush's fault when 100% of them existed for 100% of the Clinton administration (you know, the one with that "genius" Al Gore as vice president). I find it amusing that they were great and wonderful as long as Clinton was in office, but the moment Bush took over they started destroying the world and its ALL HIS FAULT.
Uh... if you saw the number of bugs currently open in this "release candidate" (and I use the term loosely) you might be a little more realistic and less idealistic. I use KDE exclusively, but I'm holding off a big permanent jump until this gets A LOT more polish. One problem with OSS is that there's plenty of work that needs to get done that isn't "fun" and people don't like to do the stuff that isn't "fun" for free. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean it's not important.
Remember kids this is Slashdot where greed is ALWAYS EVIL.*
* Exceptions:
1. Apple getting premium prices
2. Any Slashdot fanboy downloading any movie/music/game for free since this it's only greedy when the creators want $$ for it, not when Slashbots want it for free
3. The other companies mentioned in this article that are not really being banned, but may not be able to get "short" numbers. They are not greedy, since they want to make money, and get a scarce resource (short number codes). If these non-Verizon companies want to hog the short codes this is NOT greedy because they are Slashdot approved. Only the cellphone companies are greedy. Everything is purely black & white.
4. Whenever a Slashdot approved company makes money: AMD, IBM (called an 'underdog' for unknown reasons), Google, Apple (again)
5. Any company with a '90's style business plan that goes under due to ineptitude. They are seen as being martyrs for the religious cause of the week, and that they should have succeeded except for George Bush being evil and destroying them.
All Yoda would have to do is look at any company and just say: "No, too old"
Some of the companies would then get really bent out of shape and turn evil later, while other ones would just annoy Yoda until he gave up and threw them a support contract he never has to fulfill since he dies!
OK html time: HERE
The old opty 170 didn't have an L3 cache which is where the bug lies. This bug is rare, but it is reproducible when the CPU is under heavy load and was one of the reasons why AMD was trying to get hardware reviewers to come to an AMD event in Tahoe to run benchmarks on AMD approved systems instead of just dropping chips into FedEx packages. Causing a full-blown system freeze is also on the serious side when it comes to bugs. There have been even more problems, techreport has a story that unlike the hand selected systems that ran at Tahoe, many of the actual consumer phenoms you can buy today actually use slower HT speeds (1.8Ghz vs. 2.0 Ghz in the demos). This means that the memory subsystem (AMD's one theoretical strength over Intel right now) is slowed down, so the somewhat unimpressive initial results are actually overstatements of what the consumer chips can do. (article here).
AMD is in a world of hurt right now. The "true" quad-core line appears to be nothing more than marketing hyperbole since year-old q6600's are faster clock-for-clock than Phenom is. AMD will hopefully get these bugs ironed out... by next February. Even then though, AMD will have chips that are MASSIVELY expensive to make, but that they can't sell for the higher prices Intel is able to command. AMD would be fine if they had an expensive chip they could sell at a premium, or a very cheap to produce chip they could sell for the budget crowd, but right now they have Acura production costs coupled with Kia per-unit revenues: bad times.
(IANAL) Everything that's created is covered by copyright by default.
The IANAL bit is correct at least. Factual information is NOT copyrightable. There are plenty of things that Best Buy would not want employees copying (customer records, receipt info, etc. etc.) that would not fall under copyright. Copyright covers "creative works", and while the definition of a "creative work" is pretty broad, it doesn't cover everything (good example is the phone directory).
I'm not saying that this is what happened in this case (in fact I doubt it), but there is plenty of non-copyright material out there that a business does not want copied willy-nilly.
Maybe you should try RTFA or at least RTFS. This is not about bending to the will of America, it is about complying with international treaties. If the US ignored an international treaty like this you'd be on here jumping up & down about how evil America & Bush are because they ignore "international law" (a pure BS term by the way). At the same time when Canada just complies with an international treaty you don't like... all of the sudden it's "American Imperialism".
Canada has its own laws, and its own legislature. It can choose to withdraw from the treaties (very unlikely since there a major downsides to leaving WIPO). Or Canadians can choose to have laws that implement the treaties in ways that afford their citizens more freedoms. When the U.S. signed the treaty it didn't abrogate the Constitution, and there is no reason that Canada has to abrogate any fundamental rights....... unless Canada never afforded those rights as fundamental to its citizens in the first place. So maybe instead of making uneducated, snide remarks that you know will get a positive moderation because people here hate Bush, maybe you should think about how Canada's system of government has flaws that need to be fixed.
You sir are a candidate for the Fox 5 at 10 school of massively misjudging actual risks. Here's a hint: If you thought that pollution from using your computer was going to be SO great that it would dwarf the benefits of curing CANCER (a disease that was killing people a long time before we had global warming hysteria) then you should probably never: 1. use a fucking computer; 2. never destroy the "environment" by READING OR POSTING TO SLASHDOT!!!
The short answer is that finding a new use for an invention has never meant that the invention itself could be patented for longer. However, a new patent for the method of using the item could be patentable.
Example that I am dredging up from my (sometimes inaccurate) memory of the MPEP: A shoe polish compound that is well known in the prior art is discovered to have a new use in repelling insects that was not previously known. Since this is an inherent property of the shoe polish the discoverer cannot get a patent on the compound. However, say there is a specific method that you need to do in order to get the compound to actually repel bugs. This method of using the compound may be patentable if it meets the novelty/non-obviousness requirements needed for any patent.
No... this is NOT official legal advice.
Can you point out any evidence of this or did you just put up an anti-patent rant in order to get free mod points?
The last time I checked, every country in Europe, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan all had patents and patent laws too. In fact, all are signatories of the Patent Cooperation Treaty as well (which makes it easier to get patent protection in multiple countries for the same invention).
There are certainly issues with imports into the US with a few due to safety approval and environmental regulations, and others due to market factors. Americans don't always go in for the smallest and most expensive device possible, many go for the cheapest/most bling-ridden one... but that is a customer choice and not due to patents.
Finally, many new products made in Asia that are really new are not yet made in quantities that justify mass marketing and exports to the US. The local test market is the easiest way to see if there is demand for a gadget and then once there is critical mass it will be manufactured in quantities that support export. You can talk about how there should be more manufacturing of cool stuff in the US (I definitely think there should be), but patents have nothing to do with that either.