Sort of. It has been the case for quite a long time already in chemistry/drug research that companies that make new chemicals/biologicals spend a bit of time and money researching if they have infranged a patent. This is normal and reasonnable since they themselves would like to patent their discovery and make money out of it. So if you want to use someone else's discovery, you pay them or you wait since patents don't last for ever.
Now, I agree with you that this strategy is becoming more and more difficult since all kind of crap is being patented. But, maybe it is so because more patentable discoveries are made. Maybe all this is good news. Maybe many scientists can at last make more money than lawyers and doctors (in medecine). But still, you are quite right that too many broad patents are issued.
I seem to remember that the web really took off and newsgroups became unusable when AOL and Compuserve became popular. That was around 95/96. We, academics, suddenly became the minority and we hated it. AOLer became a common insult. Those were the days!
1- Once again: Patents do not stop research. They just stop people from making money with someone else's discovery. Or at least that is the purpose of patents.
2- I would be quite suprise if anyone has managed to patent existing food stuff, as you mentioned. Do you have any information on this?
Ridiculous! All patented information is publically available. You can freely do research with it but you cannot sell a product based on some patented technology without an agreement/fee from the patent holder. This is about money, not freedom of information!
I quote from the article:
California strawberry growers canceled a project to develop a
strawberry resistant to fungus for fear that they would not be allowed to let the strawberry be grown commercially, said Dr. Alan Bennett,
executive director of the office of technology transfer at the University of California, which discovered the fungal resistance gene.
Do you think they are trying to save the world from hunger? With strawberry! Yeah right!
You are right. The reason the machine is so expensive is that SGI is selling it. A comparable machine from Dell,IBM,... would get much better QphH/US$. SGI is so desperate now that they try to sell their Intel based hardware as if it were MIPS based SGI Origin!
In my experience, as soon as software/hardware support personnel talks to you face to face everything goes well. But by email or phone, who cares? It's almost anonymous. People are arrogant because you cannot punch them in the face! In their cubicle they are untouchable. But when faced with an angry customer in vivo, they react better. It might just be a psychological problem.
We pay the peer reviewers.
WTF? I have reviewed dozens of scientific papers and never received a dime! Most scientific journals don't pay their reviewers. Scientists publish, review articles, write chapters or whole books because it's their job. And for once, they would like to have access to the information for doing things like text data mining which is close to impossible right now.
Not always in public. If there is a camera in the street you live in, can you be sure that it does not film you in your garden?
A surveillance guard interviewed on British TV once said that he would not mind if a camera was checking his garden when he was not in it to avoid burglaries, but he would not like to be filmed when he's having a BBQ with some friends.
Just compare Mars with Antartica. There is life on the most inhospitable places of Antartica but it is difficult to see it. It evolves very slowly and is often dormant and frozen. Why wouldn't it be the same on Mars?
One main reason the US (and others) may have a problem with this is that the communications bands in Geosync are already extremely clogged. You can look at a picture of the satellites up there and see that there just isn't much more room up there.
I am no specialist, but are you sure it is so crowded out there? It is so much bigger in high-orbit than on Earth and there are not billions of satellites, are there?
I guess Mr. Tony Stanco has read The business from Iain Banks. In this book Banks develop the idea of a large and secretive company where people at every step of the corporate ladder are elected by the people just below them.
I hope for them that they won't have an office in Paml Beach though!
You DO pay for incoming calls in Europe if you are abroad. Example:
- You have, say, a Dutch phone and contract
- You go to, say, Belgium
- You receive a call from Holland.
You pay for the communication from Holland to Belgium.
What the hell is an unelected bunch of managers of an organisation doing making wide-reaching policy decisions such as this which should a matter for elected lawmakers
These unelected people have no law-making power. They were just given their opinion.
It's exactly this kind of crap which makes so many of us in England against tighter integration with the EU.
It's exactly that kind of ignorance from England that make English people so out-of-touch with reality.
Where would we all be without the USofA? The machine gun and rapid advances in military science could have led to a European dominance and freezing of technology development.
Right! The fact that Europe was progressing very fast in the 19th and early 20th century does not lead to a freezing of technological development. Au contraire!
I had heard some of the people in the region still consider themselves occitan?
Yes and rightly so. France annexed the south of France in the 13th century. Occitania has always (and still is) much closer culturally speaking to Catalonia (i.e. Barcelona et. al) than the north of France. Unfortunately, in France, it seems only Paris count for something.
Academic research is an honest search for a deeper understanding of reality
Katz point (and I agree with him on that) is that nowadays academic research is geared towards making money and is no more honest. That's the problem.
When I was in Academia (France & UK), the only way to get money (real money that is not peanuts) was to work on applied sciences. This has been pushed by governments all over the western hemisphere for about 15 years. It has produced some interesting things but all in all I think it is a big pity for the hard sciences. Scientifically speaking and with the notable exception of biology, we have not made much progress for 20 years. Or at least not as much as we could have done, I think.
Across the country, university officials admit the Net is a gold mine, providing a much faster and larger paybacks for researchers than traditional scientific research in areas like biology.
This is a joke! What about the thousands of academic researchers that are now working in biotech start-ups? Really, it must be a joke.
a) going to cost a lot of money a) It really depends on volume. If it sales like hot cakes, then the prices will go lower (Ericsson is not M$ after all).
b) require some fairly extensive changes to the house. b) The reason why Ericsson is interested in home appliances (the French call it domotique which is a nice name) is that with "in-house" telecommunications, you don't need to put cables everywhere.
But it is true that the first such appliances will probably be very expensives.
Yes but you are forgetting that people don't buy what they need but what they are told they need. Remember how many people bought computers in the 80s and did not know what to do with them?
Conservatives tend to be for private companies and against governement power, socialists tend to be against private companies and for more governemental control. Moreover neither is interested in personal freedom.
Our culture has been sliding down the slippery slope for 50 years. How many time have we heard this one? Nostalgia is a wonderful thing, isn't it. Everyhting was so much better before. Need I say more than slavery, religious wars, colonisation? I don't think I do.
Slashdot Mirror
Sort of. It has been the case for quite a long time already in chemistry/drug research that companies that make new chemicals/biologicals spend a bit of time and money researching if they have infranged a patent. This is normal and reasonnable since they themselves would like to patent their discovery and make money out of it. So if you want to use someone else's discovery, you pay them or you wait since patents don't last for ever.
Now, I agree with you that this strategy is becoming more and more difficult since all kind of crap is being patented. But, maybe it is so because more patentable discoveries are made. Maybe all this is good news. Maybe many scientists can at last make more money than lawyers and doctors (in medecine). But still, you are quite right that too many broad patents are issued.
2- I would be quite suprise if anyone has managed to patent existing food stuff, as you mentioned. Do you have any information on this?
I quote from the article: California strawberry growers canceled a project to develop a strawberry resistant to fungus for fear that they would not be allowed to let the strawberry be grown commercially, said Dr. Alan Bennett, executive director of the office of technology transfer at the University of California, which discovered the fungal resistance gene.
Do you think they are trying to save the world from hunger? With strawberry! Yeah right!
Turkey? I think not! You forgot Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Luxembourg.
You are right. The reason the machine is so expensive is that SGI is selling it. A comparable machine from Dell,IBM,... would get much better QphH/US$. SGI is so desperate now that they try to sell their Intel based hardware as if it were MIPS based SGI Origin!
In my experience, as soon as software/hardware support personnel talks to you face to face everything goes well. But by email or phone, who cares? It's almost anonymous. People are arrogant because you cannot punch them in the face! In their cubicle they are untouchable. But when faced with an angry customer in vivo, they react better. It might just be a psychological problem.
WTF? I have reviewed dozens of scientific papers and never received a dime! Most scientific journals don't pay their reviewers. Scientists publish, review articles, write chapters or whole books because it's their job. And for once, they would like to have access to the information for doing things like text data mining which is close to impossible right now.
---
Writing credits (in credits order)
Arthur C. Clarke (story The Sentinel)
Stanley Kubrick & Arthur C. Clarke
---
A surveillance guard interviewed on British TV once said that he would not mind if a camera was checking his garden when he was not in it to avoid burglaries, but he would not like to be filmed when he's having a BBQ with some friends.
Just compare Mars with Antartica. There is life on the most inhospitable places of Antartica but it is difficult to see it. It evolves very slowly and is often dormant and frozen. Why wouldn't it be the same on Mars?
I am no specialist, but are you sure it is so crowded out there? It is so much bigger in high-orbit than on Earth and there are not billions of satellites, are there?
I hope for them that they won't have an office in Paml Beach though!
You DO pay for incoming calls in Europe if you are abroad. Example:
- You have, say, a Dutch phone and contract
- You go to, say, Belgium
- You receive a call from Holland.
You pay for the communication from Holland to Belgium.
Americans should take example on China. They know the results of elections before they even start!
These unelected people have no law-making power. They were just given their opinion.
It's exactly this kind of crap which makes so many of us in England against tighter integration with the EU.
It's exactly that kind of ignorance from England that make English people so out-of-touch with reality.
Where would we all be without the USofA?
The machine gun and rapid advances in military science could have led to a European dominance and freezing of technology development.
Right! The fact that Europe was progressing very fast in the 19th and early 20th century does not lead to a freezing of technological development. Au contraire!
I had heard some of the people in the region still consider themselves occitan?
Yes and rightly so. France annexed the south of France in the 13th century. Occitania has always (and still is) much closer culturally speaking to Catalonia (i.e. Barcelona et. al) than the north of France. Unfortunately, in France, it seems only Paris count for something.
Academic research is an honest search for a deeper understanding of reality
Katz point (and I agree with him on that) is that nowadays academic research is geared towards making money and is no more honest. That's the problem.
Scientifically speaking and with the notable exception of biology, we have not made much progress for 20 years. Or at least not as much as we could have done, I think.
Across the country, university officials admit the Net is a gold mine, providing a much faster and larger paybacks for researchers than traditional scientific research in areas like biology.
This is a joke! What about the thousands of academic researchers that are now working in biotech start-ups? Really, it must be a joke.
a) It really depends on volume. If it sales like hot cakes, then the prices will go lower (Ericsson is not M$ after all).
b) require some fairly extensive changes to the house.
b) The reason why Ericsson is interested in home appliances (the French call it domotique which is a nice name) is that with "in-house" telecommunications, you don't need to put cables everywhere.
But it is true that the first such appliances will probably be very expensives.
Yes but you are forgetting that people don't buy what they need but what they are told they need. Remember how many people bought computers in the 80s and did not know what to do with them?
Having fun with genomics::
The entire genome of Deinococcus radiodurans is freely available at TIGR.
Enjoy!
Conservatives tend to be for private companies and against governement power, socialists tend to be against private companies and for more governemental control. Moreover neither is interested in personal freedom.
Our culture has been sliding down the slippery slope for 50 years.
How many time have we heard this one? Nostalgia is a wonderful thing, isn't it. Everyhting was so much better before. Need I say more than slavery, religious wars, colonisation? I don't think I do.