Having gone to the movies at least once every two weeks for the past 10 years (usually once a week), I have never once had a showing ruined by a phone ringing, someone's kid screaming, or someone else throwing food.
I think you exaggerate the problem a bit much."
Seriously, I would love to know what city you live in.
Roughly 85% of my movie-going experiences are disrupted by other moviegoers.
- Cell phones.... People still do not turn them off, and many people still think it is acceptable to carry on a conversation in the theater during the movie.
- Teenagers....I don't really need to explain this one. The movies are a babysitter for them. Real parenting is just too hard for their "busy" parents. (In today's society, people count some of their self-imposed recreational routine alongside their jobs as something that makes their schedule so "hard")
- Whiny Kids...The movie is rated R. Get your screaming, whining hellspawn out of my $10 movie. If it is PG or PG-13 you can feel free to do the same, because I really don't want to hear their shit.
- Middle-aged Discussion Group....A close relative of the next two groups of people, but they are more aware of what is going on with the movie, they just feel the need to whisper about everything down the half-row they staked out for themselves. After the movie, they will go to a restaurant, demand the check be split 47 ways, and then stiff the waiter. (Sorry, had to go there)
- "Interrogators"...People continually ask "Who is that?" "Why did he/she do that?" "Did you see that?" "What does that mean?" when they could simply pay attention to the film that they are watching and you know...pick up on this as the story unfolds.
- "Explainers".... These are the counterparts to the Interrogators. They are usually just as clueless, but they feel the need to fill in someone on what they think the rest of the film might hold, instead of watching it.
- Ghetto Thugs.... I expect a lot of flack for this, but sorry, this subgroup of people have ruined more movie experiences than I can imagine. They are a combination of every bad element listed above, and even the ones with families will threaten those who make a stand for the quality of their moviegoing experience. They also invariably show up 10 minutes late to the film and yell about where they are going to sit for 5 minutes, and then run around the theater.
I'll gladly go see a half-decent movie now and then (though art house fare is more my thing) but I hesitate because my moviegoing experience is usually disrupted.
"This is same as today. Windows 95 came, all the features that were there were all available in Apple's OS. Today, Vista will be released soon, Vista's features are already available in Apple's OS. But who do you think will make the money?"
Apple made $100m off of Tiger in the last quarter alone. They may not be #1 in sales, but they are making a healthy chunk of change by simply being the most innovative OS vendor out there.
To think, the inherent problems with the shuttle have finally snowballed to the point where launching is next-to-impossible now that they are finally trying to hurry up and get something done (ISS).
Kinda makes you even angrier about the countless, 600 million dollar "We're growing some more fucking crystals, dammit" missions we've had for the past 20 years. Talk about time wasted. Let's not even get started on how the constant redesigns of the ISS have left it borderline useless (and how the costs of the redesigns and the station we have now equal the cost of the original proposal)
Yes, I will have to agree that OnDemand has been mismanaged across the board from its inception.
Virtually everything is Pan And Scan, only a handful of programs are Widescreen, and the decision about what gets the P&S or Wide treatment is seemingly random. Small indie films which will probably be viewed by Widescreen devotees are P&S, while crap romantic comedies are presented in your choice of P&S or Wide. Any time older films are added to the pay-per-view part and put on sale for a reduced rate, it is never, ever in Widescreen. A few months ago I was ready to order "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly", "Platoon" and several other films. But all of them were P&S.
Networks that try to lure you into their series by placing a season of their shows OnDemand often do it in the most half-assed way possible. (HBO, I'm looking at you).
Nothing is worse than trying to get into a show, only to discover that you have episodes 1-17 and 19-22 of the 22 episode season available for viewing. The latter episodes are sometimes marked for expiration from the service at a date earlier than the earlier episodes in the season. You may spend a few days plowing through a season, only to have the last two episiodes deleted from the lineup by the time you get to them, while the rest of the season remains. It makes absolutely no sense, and is delivered in such a way that makes me think it was designed to make it so that you are unable to catch up to the upcoming season. If I can't catch up, I won't watch it. Simple as that.
This is why Netflix will remain my choice provider of films and TV shows. I refuse to watch any film in Pan And Scan, and I can't drop $50-$100 to watch one season of one show.
"The leaders are well-educated professionals with money and degrees. The people who actually blow themselves up are the ones who aren't good for much else."
Not always.
Many of those who actually carried out the attacks on 9/11 were very well-educated and recruited from universities in Europe. Mohammed Atta for one, possessed a doctorate...in Urban Planning and Preservation.
What began as a useful feature for business users, has become the height of obnoxiousness when used by individuals. It's unfortunate that it wasn't kept just to the expensive ruggedized Motorola-Nextel commercial handsets. You don't see regular people walking around using business two-way radios in public, and you shouldn't use a PTT cellphone either.
Agreed, I would have been much happier if they had just migrated the ruggedized handsets to the consumer market and left PTT with the business types. I'm the kind of person who would love to get a really, really sturdy full-featured phone. There is nothing worse than the Black Screen Of Death from a cracked LCD. I'm hoping that they will wake up to the demand some day.
The only thing more expensive, IMO, are polyphonic ringtones. Whoever thought that it was a cool idea to allow every idiot with a cellphone to subject everyone around them to their favorite rap song or cartoon jingle, needs to be shot.
I hated polys, that is until I downloaded "The Pink Panther Theme". It just works so well and actually gets me compliments for its unobtrusiveness and pleasant sound. Then again, I've never met anyone who hated the "Pink Panther Theme".
The FCC should have mandated the removal of the "Push To Talk Feature" as part of the agreement. When you live in a society that has lost all concept of manners (and don't say the South is still some shining example, because I just lived there for 3 years and it is becoming just as vapid and rude as any place else) something that basically enables people to be even bigger assholes in public is the last thing we need.
Inevitably, you have soccer moms and ghetto thugs (or wannabes) blasting their conversations across the entire room, and for some reason they feel the need to shout even louder than they normally would on a cell phone. (another thing that drives me nuts)
The foam has always fallen. The problem is that some years ago the use of Freon was banned and Freon was an integral part of the foam application process for the External Tank. NASA was granted a waiver to continue using Freon, but they opted to ignore the waiver and go with a new method. The adopting of this new method (the specifics of which I am not knowledgeable of) coincided with a sharp increase in the size and frequency of the foam shedding from the ET. Despite this, NASA continued to use the new foam application method. Despite the size and speed of the impacts, and the damage found on the returning orbiters, it was not seen as a safety issue. Which brings me to the tile binder matter, as it is connected.
You have a similar situation with the tile binding as we had with the foam in the 1990s and we had with the O-Rings in decades past. NASA adopted the attitude that "It hasn't caused a problem yet."
With Columbia fresh in everyone's mind, that attitude and line of thinking has been suspended, at least for the moment. (I say for the moment, because it wasn't supposed to return after Challenger.
Just start recruiting chain-smokers and/or people from Memphis, TN into the astronaut program. Provide the smokers with nicotine inhalers for the duration of the mission and all will be well. Their chances of dying prematurely are astronomically greater than your average person, as it is. The latter group already faces 10% increase in the chance of dying just walking outside to get the paper.
(Hey, I lived there for 3 years and most people would choose to risk terminal cancer than stay)
Or wait a few months and get a Nintendo Revolution. Which should be cheaper.
The Powers That Be at Nintendo have come out and said that 3rd party developers will be turned-off by the Revolution (and the utter silence from most of them concerning the Rev pretty much confirms that) and so far the only selling point is that it will allow access to the games we've already bought at least once.
If Apple sold 5 million copies of OS X, it might help alleviate the shock of losing their desktop hardware business entirely.
The fact of the matter is however, the odds are that they would not reach the critical mass in OS X sales to offset the losses incurred by the termination of the desktop hardware division in a timely enough fashion to stem their losses in any appreciable way.
Building marketshare is not one of the easier tasks a company can attempt. It takes time and effort. Despite the pent-up demand in the techie community for a vendor-independant version of OS X, the unwashed masses could not be expected to adopt the new operating system in large enough numbers within a time frame that would avoid Apple burning through its savings on the chance that they would survive in the end.
Rapid, widespread adoption would help, but they can't count on it happening. They've got a good thing going right now, and the importance of the hardware/software integration factor to the Mac community at large, cannot be over-stressed.
I'm hopelessly exhausted, but I hope that made sense and helped clarify things somewhat.
Apple does not want OS X installed on every generic PC out there. If Mac sales die tomorrow, Apple and OS X go with it. And no, they wouldn't open all the source after the liquidation and you would be stuck with Linux and Windows on the desktop. With both options being crap (for differing reasons).
I would absolutely love for OS X to be sold for any machine with an Intel or AMD chip inside, but it's just not going to happen because Apple is not positioned to do so and survive.
Fortunately, Apple has never even hinted at taking a route other than having OS X run on their machines and their machines only. Any disappointment should be tempered with the knowledge that they have had their cards on the table on this for some time. I don't think there was any question of another outcome.
Apple is not screwing anyone over, they are just continuing what they have done for the past 21 years (even the brief period of Mac clones only involved the OS running on approved hardware).
Perhaps things will change sometime down the road with Apple making further inroads into consumer electronics and successfully diversifying their business. I wouldn't hold my breath, though. The seamless integration between hardware and software is at the very core of the Mac experience.
It's unfortunate that OS X is going to stay on one set of hardware, but it is just the way it has to be for the time being.
Foundation is precisely what I was thinking of with the original post. I was going to include some bits of it, but you did a far better job than I could have.
With U.S. manufacturing, R&D, support and other jobs moving overseas, what exactly are we left with? "The New Service Economy" is what I keep hearing about, but at first glance it seems to mean getting paid absolutely decrepit wages to support the lifestyles of those at the top of the heap, who are there by virtue of having control of corporations that have moved all but their executive offices overseas.
The middle class is shrinking, and its former members are now downwardly mobile. Many of them want to work and learn skills, but career paths are evaporating at an alarming rate. Many of the once-hot jobs no longer exist within our borders, and it is increasingly difficult to gain traction in the new economy because no one is quite sure what they should be doing and the barriers for entry into the higher-paying fields continue to increase. We can't have a nation of MBAs, and our economy cannot survive if we have a nation of Wal-Mart employees. Welfare will not help if there is no taxbase to support it. Job training certainly would improve things, with the cost of higher education skyrocketing, it is no wonder that we have so many underskilled and underemployed people who have the intelligence and motivation to do much better in life.
Patenting a previously discovered gene simply because you learned what it can do is the equivalent of me patenting water because I discovered that it was wet. A basic concept should not be patentable. An implementation should be. A test for a gene is patentable, but the knowledge that gene is responsible for something should not be restricted. If you intend to profit off of biomedical research, then create something that can be used with what you discover and patent that, do not patent what was already there.
If the Periodic Table Of Elements had been created in today's environment, Dmitri Mendeleev would have never completed it, as he would have likely run out of money to pay the patent holders on each and every element that had been discovered. "Sorry man, can't give let you include Hydrogen until you pay me $500,000".
Ah, the emergence of a troll to toss accusations of "Communist" my way.
I was expecting it in the first reply, actually. You've left me dissapointed. I doubt Communists would be terribly appreciative of me explicitly advocating a market economy as I did, so you've made a bigger fool out of yourself than your intellect can probably comprehend.
My claim that business practices should not defeat the march of innovation, nor should they infringe on the rights of an individual are rather basic principles that you will find held by a great number of people from vastly different ideological perspectives from left to right.
With not only the accelerated rate at which patents are being accumulated, but the changing nature of the things being patented, the barrier for entry for any inventor that cannot afford an entire legal team to check for possible infringement is getting far, far too high.
In the past, if you wanted to make a better faucet, all you had to do was make sure your idea was so unique that it was unlikely that anyone had put something of that nature together before. Now, with the new attitude of the Patent Office, you have to prepare yourself for the possibility that the very idea that water comes out of a pipe is possibly claimed by someone out there. The amount of squatting on basic concepts is going to doom innovation, as a great deal of truly innovative and world-changing inventions have come from a man or woman working in their basement or garage in their spare time.
Just thinking to yourself, "Has the underlying concept been demonstrated before and left in the public domain?" means nothing, absolutely nothing. Prior art has grown increasingly meaningless. Hell, millions of year of prior art in each and every person that reads this has been patented.
Company A discovers that gene X causes disease Y and patents this gene that has existed since the dawn of humankind
Company B develops a test to establish wether gene X is present using nothing but their own methods except for the basic presumption that gene X will cause disease Y.
Company A sues Company B for patent infringement because they violated their patent on the gene.
This scenario has occurred before and Company A is the winner.
While I respect the fact a market economy is a neccesity for the human race at the present time (I say that in the hope that replicators are invented at some point) I don't see the neccesity to blindly approve of the persuit of profit at all costs simply because people want to and "That's just the way things have been done". There is a cost associated with such activity, a cost for which we have no means to compensate. The free flow and generation of capital should never undermine or be put ahead of the greater free flow of ideas in society as a whole , or the freedom of individuals, or you inevitably end up with a "snake eating his own tail" situation.
Locking down entire realms of study because of a overreaching patent does far, far more harm for us as a people than the good it does for the patent holder. It forces innovators to be reluctant or unwilling to pursue their ideas. The long term effects of this kind of stagnation should be self-evident.
The desire to make a buck - which should be encouraged - does not validate the methods employed to do so. Right now, the laws are structured to permit and encourage the lack of any focus other than short-term gains for the investors. Short-term gains which will likely pan out to be massive losses financially and otherwise for many in the end.
I've tried to keep on top of all the developments in private space travel, but I don't really have a good idea of how far along the various orbital projects are.
My ex-wife was crushed under a tractor trailer truck that flew out of parking lot without looking to see if the road was clear, and I was struck by a hit and run driver. So I kinda take these things seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile, nerds everywhere futilely pine away for Kate Botello to appear on TV somewhere....anywhere
Having gone to the movies at least once every two weeks for the past 10 years (usually once a week), I have never once had a showing ruined by a phone ringing, someone's kid screaming, or someone else throwing food.
...People continually ask "Who is that?" "Why did he/she do that?" "Did you see that?" "What does that mean?" when they could simply pay attention to the film that they are watching and you know...pick up on this as the story unfolds.
I think you exaggerate the problem a bit much."
Seriously, I would love to know what city you live in.
Roughly 85% of my movie-going experiences are disrupted by other moviegoers.
- Cell phones.... People still do not turn them off, and many people still think it is acceptable to carry on a conversation in the theater during the movie.
- Teenagers....I don't really need to explain this one. The movies are a babysitter for them. Real parenting is just too hard for their "busy" parents. (In today's society, people count some of their self-imposed recreational routine alongside their jobs as something that makes their schedule so "hard")
- Whiny Kids...The movie is rated R. Get your screaming, whining hellspawn out of my $10 movie. If it is PG or PG-13 you can feel free to do the same, because I really don't want to hear their shit.
- Middle-aged Discussion Group....A close relative of the next two groups of people, but they are more aware of what is going on with the movie, they just feel the need to whisper about everything down the half-row they staked out for themselves. After the movie, they will go to a restaurant, demand the check be split 47 ways, and then stiff the waiter. (Sorry, had to go there)
- "Interrogators"
- "Explainers".... These are the counterparts to the Interrogators. They are usually just as clueless, but they feel the need to fill in someone on what they think the rest of the film might hold, instead of watching it.
- Ghetto Thugs.... I expect a lot of flack for this, but sorry, this subgroup of people have ruined more movie experiences than I can imagine. They are a combination of every bad element listed above, and even the ones with families will threaten those who make a stand for the quality of their moviegoing experience. They also invariably show up 10 minutes late to the film and yell about where they are going to sit for 5 minutes, and then run around the theater.
I'll gladly go see a half-decent movie now and then (though art house fare is more my thing) but I hesitate because my moviegoing experience is usually disrupted.
"This is same as today. Windows 95 came, all the features that were there were all available in Apple's OS. Today, Vista will be released soon, Vista's features are already available in Apple's OS. But who do you think will make the money?"
Apple made $100m off of Tiger in the last quarter alone. They may not be #1 in sales, but they are making a healthy chunk of change by simply being the most innovative OS vendor out there.
"Well, if it could make a "dead man come", that would be really special."
That's reserved for Windows Vista: Keith Richards Edition.
To think, the inherent problems with the shuttle have finally snowballed to the point where launching is next-to-impossible now that they are finally trying to hurry up and get something done (ISS).
Kinda makes you even angrier about the countless, 600 million dollar "We're growing some more fucking crystals, dammit" missions we've had for the past 20 years. Talk about time wasted. Let's not even get started on how the constant redesigns of the ISS have left it borderline useless (and how the costs of the redesigns and the station we have now equal the cost of the original proposal)
Anyone who bothered to register their product will find out. Apple is very good about informing people of refunds, recalls, etc.
Yes, I will have to agree that OnDemand has been mismanaged across the board from its inception.
Virtually everything is Pan And Scan, only a handful of programs are Widescreen, and the decision about what gets the P&S or Wide treatment is seemingly random. Small indie films which will probably be viewed by Widescreen devotees are P&S, while crap romantic comedies are presented in your choice of P&S or Wide. Any time older films are added to the pay-per-view part and put on sale for a reduced rate, it is never, ever in Widescreen. A few months ago I was ready to order "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly", "Platoon" and several other films. But all of them were P&S.
Networks that try to lure you into their series by placing a season of their shows OnDemand often do it in the most half-assed way possible. (HBO, I'm looking at you).
Nothing is worse than trying to get into a show, only to discover that you have episodes 1-17 and 19-22 of the 22 episode season available for viewing. The latter episodes are sometimes marked for expiration from the service at a date earlier than the earlier episodes in the season. You may spend a few days plowing through a season, only to have the last two episiodes deleted from the lineup by the time you get to them, while the rest of the season remains. It makes absolutely no sense, and is delivered in such a way that makes me think it was designed to make it so that you are unable to catch up to the upcoming season. If I can't catch up, I won't watch it. Simple as that.
This is why Netflix will remain my choice provider of films and TV shows. I refuse to watch any film in Pan And Scan, and I can't drop $50-$100 to watch one season of one show.
"The leaders are well-educated professionals with money and degrees. The people who actually blow themselves up are the ones who aren't good for much else."
Not always.
Many of those who actually carried out the attacks on 9/11 were very well-educated and recruited from universities in Europe. Mohammed Atta for one, possessed a doctorate...in Urban Planning and Preservation.
I bet your university was pissed that someone stole the tube from one of their battery-equipped emergency lights.
What began as a useful feature for business users, has become the height of obnoxiousness when used by individuals. It's unfortunate that it wasn't kept just to the expensive ruggedized Motorola-Nextel commercial handsets. You don't see regular people walking around using business two-way radios in public, and you shouldn't use a PTT cellphone either.
Agreed, I would have been much happier if they had just migrated the ruggedized handsets to the consumer market and left PTT with the business types. I'm the kind of person who would love to get a really, really sturdy full-featured phone. There is nothing worse than the Black Screen Of Death from a cracked LCD. I'm hoping that they will wake up to the demand some day.
The only thing more expensive, IMO, are polyphonic ringtones. Whoever thought that it was a cool idea to allow every idiot with a cellphone to subject everyone around them to their favorite rap song or cartoon jingle, needs to be shot.
I hated polys, that is until I downloaded "The Pink Panther Theme". It just works so well and actually gets me compliments for its unobtrusiveness and pleasant sound. Then again, I've never met anyone who hated the "Pink Panther Theme".
The FCC should have mandated the removal of the "Push To Talk Feature" as part of the agreement. When you live in a society that has lost all concept of manners (and don't say the South is still some shining example, because I just lived there for 3 years and it is becoming just as vapid and rude as any place else) something that basically enables people to be even bigger assholes in public is the last thing we need.
Inevitably, you have soccer moms and ghetto thugs (or wannabes) blasting their conversations across the entire room, and for some reason they feel the need to shout even louder than they normally would on a cell phone. (another thing that drives me nuts)
Linky
It has a lot to do with the planned use of Vandenburg Air Force base to launch the shuttles and disruptions in the launch schedule.
Two reasons really.
The foam has always fallen. The problem is that some years ago the use of Freon was banned and Freon was an integral part of the foam application process for the External Tank. NASA was granted a waiver to continue using Freon, but they opted to ignore the waiver and go with a new method. The adopting of this new method (the specifics of which I am not knowledgeable of) coincided with a sharp increase in the size and frequency of the foam shedding from the ET. Despite this, NASA continued to use the new foam application method. Despite the size and speed of the impacts, and the damage found on the returning orbiters, it was not seen as a safety issue. Which brings me to the tile binder matter, as it is connected.
You have a similar situation with the tile binding as we had with the foam in the 1990s and we had with the O-Rings in decades past. NASA adopted the attitude that "It hasn't caused a problem yet."
With Columbia fresh in everyone's mind, that attitude and line of thinking has been suspended, at least for the moment. (I say for the moment, because it wasn't supposed to return after Challenger.
Down fanboy, down.
/ 220205
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/04
Just start recruiting chain-smokers and/or people from Memphis, TN into the astronaut program. Provide the smokers with nicotine inhalers for the duration of the mission and all will be well. Their chances of dying prematurely are astronomically greater than your average person, as it is. The latter group already faces 10% increase in the chance of dying just walking outside to get the paper.
(Hey, I lived there for 3 years and most people would choose to risk terminal cancer than stay)
Or wait a few months and get a Nintendo Revolution. Which should be cheaper.
The Powers That Be at Nintendo have come out and said that 3rd party developers will be turned-off by the Revolution (and the utter silence from most of them concerning the Rev pretty much confirms that) and so far the only selling point is that it will allow access to the games we've already bought at least once.
Not terribly compelling so far.
Was his name Peter Gibbons?
If Apple sold 5 million copies of OS X, it might help alleviate the shock of losing their desktop hardware business entirely.
The fact of the matter is however, the odds are that they would not reach the critical mass in OS X sales to offset the losses incurred by the termination of the desktop hardware division in a timely enough fashion to stem their losses in any appreciable way.
Building marketshare is not one of the easier tasks a company can attempt. It takes time and effort. Despite the pent-up demand in the techie community for a vendor-independant version of OS X, the unwashed masses could not be expected to adopt the new operating system in large enough numbers within a time frame that would avoid Apple burning through its savings on the chance that they would survive in the end.
Rapid, widespread adoption would help, but they can't count on it happening. They've got a good thing going right now, and the importance of the hardware/software integration factor to the Mac community at large, cannot be over-stressed.
I'm hopelessly exhausted, but I hope that made sense and helped clarify things somewhat.
Seriously, what did anyone expect?
Apple does not want OS X installed on every generic PC out there. If Mac sales die tomorrow, Apple and OS X go with it. And no, they wouldn't open all the source after the liquidation and you would be stuck with Linux and Windows on the desktop. With both options being crap (for differing reasons).
I would absolutely love for OS X to be sold for any machine with an Intel or AMD chip inside, but it's just not going to happen because Apple is not positioned to do so and survive.
Fortunately, Apple has never even hinted at taking a route other than having OS X run on their machines and their machines only. Any disappointment should be tempered with the knowledge that they have had their cards on the table on this for some time. I don't think there was any question of another outcome.
Apple is not screwing anyone over, they are just continuing what they have done for the past 21 years (even the brief period of Mac clones only involved the OS running on approved hardware).
Perhaps things will change sometime down the road with Apple making further inroads into consumer electronics and successfully diversifying their business. I wouldn't hold my breath, though. The seamless integration between hardware and software is at the very core of the Mac experience.
It's unfortunate that OS X is going to stay on one set of hardware, but it is just the way it has to be for the time being.
Foundation is precisely what I was thinking of with the original post. I was going to include some bits of it, but you did a far better job than I could have.
With U.S. manufacturing, R&D, support and other jobs moving overseas, what exactly are we left with? "The New Service Economy" is what I keep hearing about, but at first glance it seems to mean getting paid absolutely decrepit wages to support the lifestyles of those at the top of the heap, who are there by virtue of having control of corporations that have moved all but their executive offices overseas.
The middle class is shrinking, and its former members are now downwardly mobile. Many of them want to work and learn skills, but career paths are evaporating at an alarming rate. Many of the once-hot jobs no longer exist within our borders, and it is increasingly difficult to gain traction in the new economy because no one is quite sure what they should be doing and the barriers for entry into the higher-paying fields continue to increase. We can't have a nation of MBAs, and our economy cannot survive if we have a nation of Wal-Mart employees. Welfare will not help if there is no taxbase to support it. Job training certainly would improve things, with the cost of higher education skyrocketing, it is no wonder that we have so many underskilled and underemployed people who have the intelligence and motivation to do much better in life.
I disagree.
Patenting a previously discovered gene simply because you learned what it can do is the equivalent of me patenting water because I discovered that it was wet. A basic concept should not be patentable. An implementation should be. A test for a gene is patentable, but the knowledge that gene is responsible for something should not be restricted. If you intend to profit off of biomedical research, then create something that can be used with what you discover and patent that, do not patent what was already there.
If the Periodic Table Of Elements had been created in today's environment, Dmitri Mendeleev would have never completed it, as he would have likely run out of money to pay the patent holders on each and every element that had been discovered. "Sorry man, can't give let you include Hydrogen until you pay me $500,000".
Ah, the emergence of a troll to toss accusations of "Communist" my way.
I was expecting it in the first reply, actually. You've left me dissapointed. I doubt Communists would be terribly appreciative of me explicitly advocating a market economy as I did, so you've made a bigger fool out of yourself than your intellect can probably comprehend.
My claim that business practices should not defeat the march of innovation, nor should they infringe on the rights of an individual are rather basic principles that you will find held by a great number of people from vastly different ideological perspectives from left to right.
With not only the accelerated rate at which patents are being accumulated, but the changing nature of the things being patented, the barrier for entry for any inventor that cannot afford an entire legal team to check for possible infringement is getting far, far too high.
In the past, if you wanted to make a better faucet, all you had to do was make sure your idea was so unique that it was unlikely that anyone had put something of that nature together before. Now, with the new attitude of the Patent Office, you have to prepare yourself for the possibility that the very idea that water comes out of a pipe is possibly claimed by someone out there. The amount of squatting on basic concepts is going to doom innovation, as a great deal of truly innovative and world-changing inventions have come from a man or woman working in their basement or garage in their spare time.
Just thinking to yourself, "Has the underlying concept been demonstrated before and left in the public domain?" means nothing, absolutely nothing. Prior art has grown increasingly meaningless. Hell, millions of year of prior art in each and every person that reads this has been patented.
Company A discovers that gene X causes disease Y and patents this gene that has existed since the dawn of humankind
Company B develops a test to establish wether gene X is present using nothing but their own methods except for the basic presumption that gene X will cause disease Y.
Company A sues Company B for patent infringement because they violated their patent on the gene.
This scenario has occurred before and Company A is the winner.
While I respect the fact a market economy is a neccesity for the human race at the present time (I say that in the hope that replicators are invented at some point) I don't see the neccesity to blindly approve of the persuit of profit at all costs simply because people want to and "That's just the way things have been done". There is a cost associated with such activity, a cost for which we have no means to compensate. The free flow and generation of capital should never undermine or be put ahead of the greater free flow of ideas in society as a whole , or the freedom of individuals, or you inevitably end up with a "snake eating his own tail" situation.
Locking down entire realms of study because of a overreaching patent does far, far more harm for us as a people than the good it does for the patent holder. It forces innovators to be reluctant or unwilling to pursue their ideas. The long term effects of this kind of stagnation should be self-evident.
The desire to make a buck - which should be encouraged - does not validate the methods employed to do so. Right now, the laws are structured to permit and encourage the lack of any focus other than short-term gains for the investors. Short-term gains which will likely pan out to be massive losses financially and otherwise for many in the end.
I've tried to keep on top of all the developments in private space travel, but I don't really have a good idea of how far along the various orbital projects are.
Could someone provide some more info on this?
Actually, I do ignore my cell while driving, as using it has been proven to be as great an impediment as drinking.
My ex-wife was crushed under a tractor trailer truck that flew out of parking lot without looking to see if the road was clear, and I was struck by a hit and run driver. So I kinda take these things seriously.