Under her version of the story, how did her stuff end up in his room? Theft wouldn't exactly be at the top of someone's mind after being beaten back from attempting rape.
(I say this without making any commentary about the veracity of her story. We armchair detectives don't have the tools to make a judgment, and it would be hubris to do so.)
Keeping in mind, of course, that this is just a thought exercise (IIUC, the court ruling does not rely on this line of reasoning), you are right that I overlooked the fact that usually "genes do not spring into existence as a result of sex". (Though we still have to consider novel gene mutations regardless of where they come from.)
Since the patent under discussion does not apply to a genome (I doubt any DNA patent does) but rather to particular mutations of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, if the patenter created/discovered the mutation before it's first occurrence "in the wild", then the defense of the original poster would fail. ("First to file" instead of "first to invent" complicates this, but prior art may get us back to the same place.)
That then leaves two potential loopholes (though they do not apply in this case). First, just as pharmaceutical companies can breathe new life into old drug patents by tweaking an "irrelevant" part of the molecule, it is conceivable that companies could patent variations of the mutated BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that have not yet occurred in the wild. Second, companies could proactively patent gene mutations that have not yet occurred, but that they think will become important (e.g. some other mutation of BRCA1 that they think would cause cancer if it eventually occurred).
I don't know enough about gene mutation rates or interactions to know how feasible these loopholes would be, but I might hesitate to rely on this defense because of these loopholes.
Patents should be for creations, not discoveries. The ONLY people who should be entitled to a patent on my genome is my parents, and even that is questionable.
But what if someone created/discovered a gene you have before your parents did? In patent law (unlike copyright), independent creation/discovery is not a defense. All that matters is who was first. This means that protections against DNA patents need to be based on a stronger line of reasoning.
On a slightly more serious note, I wonder if California could start a series of grants just to pay for the "author-pays" fee ($2000-$8000 depending on publisher). Some publishers are typically closed, but allow an author to make a particular article Open Access if they pay this fee. Unfortunately, paying that fee could enough of a barrier to prevent young researchers without enough money from choosing Open Access (especially if they are publishing multiple papers per year), but a grant to cover just that fee could lead to many more Open Access articles.
They'll never know whether it was because of the California law or just dull results.
The peer review process is separate from the publication process. One is run by volunteers from academia. The other is run by employees of the publisher. You'll absolutely know if they try to blackball you due to your funding sources. (My apologies if I'm misreading you.)
Lastly, even if it cuts out half the research, most for-profit journals would rather do that than all the revenue.
I don't know how it is in other areas, but the publishers in my area wouldn't survive the backlash if half the submissions were barred from publication over this. The social dynamics at play are subtle, but if even 10% of articles accepted by the peer review process were rejected over shenanigans like this, things would change.
Something you and a few other commenters seem to have missed is that many publishers already have policies that allow Open Access (or some sort or another) if it is required by a researcher's funding agency. What they don't allow is Open Access just because an author wants it.
If this passes, I would like to apply for a $1 grant even though I am not in California. Some publishers allow open access only when required by law and this would give me leverage. (As an academic it is in my interests to have my articles as easily accessible as possible. I never see a dime from the paywalls on my published articles.)
Performance is a problem but it isn't the problem. The distributed enforcement of policy is potentially a harder problem than even performance.
For example, on a monolithic kernel, ensuring that no process (except a specified list) is both setuid and talks to the network is (relatively) easy because different parts of the kernel can trust and rely on each others behavior. In a microkernel setting, these sorts of policies have to be encoded into how the different services interact with each other. That sort of distributed policy enforcement is much harder and something that we as a discipline are not good at yet. You can even see this play out if you look at the history of the L4/Hurd project and some of the complicated protocols that were proposed for securely establishing a basic handshake between services.
Dart understands that sometimes you just don’t feel like appeasing a ceremonial type checker.
Given that in Dard, the type checker is only ceremonial as far as I can tell, this is an interesting choice of words. The purpose of a true type checker like you find in Haskell, Agda, ML, ATS, etc. isn't just ceremonial. It guarentees certain properties of the resulting program (e.g., that variables of a certain type actually contain an object of that type, that you can never apply an invalid operation to an object, etc.). That is far from ceremonial.
It probably depends on what you are into. Also, keep in mind some of why I enjoy these may have to do with me not having enough time to play games myself, but having time to watch an LP.
Yes, really. The particularly popular LP-ers make their entire living off of the videos they produce.
That might sound strange at first, but some of the best LP-ers are something of a cross between comedians and critics. Both of these are jobs that we are accustomed to seeing making a living off of their work. A good LP-er doesn't just play the game, their value is in their commentary and jokes as they play the game.
Seriously though, this judge spent a good bit of time doing the legal research needed to produce a solid ruling. He knew it would be appealed so he included stuff in it to keep the appeals court from having the wool pulled over their eyes.
I think the argument is that winning a large city such as Chicago, Miami, Atlanta could no longer be used to win high value states.
I'm not sure I buy the argument. Like you say, someone would have to run the numbers for the past several elections. However, even those results would have to be taken with a grain of salt because how an election turns out depends on how candidates campaign which in turns depends on the rules. For example, in 2000 with the current rules it made no sense for Bush to spend much time campaigning in Texas but under a popularist system it would make a lot of sense(*). Thus it is kind of silly try to use the popular vote results from 2000 to predict who would have won under a popularist system.
(*) Which is one of the arguments against a popular vote for president. Candidates pander to voters that give them the most votes per unit effort (e.g. advertising dollars, candidate time, etc.). While your votes might count equally in a popularist election, the amount of effort to win your vote varies widely depending on geographic location. Thus a popularist election would not give voters equal political power.
I think it is for the same reason that (some) people are against GPS tracking by cops even though manual (by human) tracking is legal. When it is more expensive for the government to do, there is an in-built incentive against casual use.
We see the same dynamic with privacy and personal information. Before computers, technically someone could track and mine just as much information about your buying habits, but it wasn't worth the effort until computers made it cheap and easy. There may have been a few instances of abuse before, it didn't become a serious concern until it was widespread.
Since this is implemented voluntarily by the ISPs instead of being imposed by law, I don't see how this violates any treaty rights. (Though that doesn't change the fact that it's still stupid and wrong.)
It's puzzled me for some time that ISPs are so eager to help with these piracy measures. Can someone explain to my why they are so eager to please when there is no reasonable legal threat against them? (IIUC, the DMCA safe-harbor clauses immunize them.) The same goes for YouTube. Why is Google so eager to go above and beyond the DMCA(*)?
(*) I am aware of Viacom v. Google, but my understanding is the appellate judgment in many ways reaffirms the DMCA safe-harbor provisions.
I think it is more complicated than that. If you take something from me and I tell you that I'll call the police and have you procecuted for stealing unless you pay me for the thing you took, I don't think that would be considered blackmail.
Why are the ISP's being so accommodating of everything the MPAA/RIAA want? Given safe-harbor rules, it's not like there is any legal reason they have to do this is there?
Your credit card probably has an RFID too. Your cell phone may even have one.
No, they don't. I know of no major credit card vendor in the US that does this. Same for phones. It would be a major security whole if credit cards did this.
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And how did her stuff end up in his room?
Under her version of the story, how did her stuff end up in his room? Theft wouldn't exactly be at the top of someone's mind after being beaten back from attempting rape.
(I say this without making any commentary about the veracity of her story. We armchair detectives don't have the tools to make a judgment, and it would be hubris to do so.)
Do you have a citation for those numbers? I'd like to be able to use them when I'm discussing this topic with people.
Keeping in mind, of course, that this is just a thought exercise (IIUC, the court ruling does not rely on this line of reasoning), you are right that I overlooked the fact that usually "genes do not spring into existence as a result of sex". (Though we still have to consider novel gene mutations regardless of where they come from.)
Since the patent under discussion does not apply to a genome (I doubt any DNA patent does) but rather to particular mutations of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, if the patenter created/discovered the mutation before it's first occurrence "in the wild", then the defense of the original poster would fail. ("First to file" instead of "first to invent" complicates this, but prior art may get us back to the same place.)
That then leaves two potential loopholes (though they do not apply in this case). First, just as pharmaceutical companies can breathe new life into old drug patents by tweaking an "irrelevant" part of the molecule, it is conceivable that companies could patent variations of the mutated BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that have not yet occurred in the wild. Second, companies could proactively patent gene mutations that have not yet occurred, but that they think will become important (e.g. some other mutation of BRCA1 that they think would cause cancer if it eventually occurred).
I don't know enough about gene mutation rates or interactions to know how feasible these loopholes would be, but I might hesitate to rely on this defense because of these loopholes.
Patents should be for creations, not discoveries. The ONLY people who should be entitled to a patent on my genome is my parents, and even that is questionable.
But what if someone created/discovered a gene you have before your parents did? In patent law (unlike copyright), independent creation/discovery is not a defense. All that matters is who was first. This means that protections against DNA patents need to be based on a stronger line of reasoning.
On a slightly more serious note, I wonder if California could start a series of grants just to pay for the "author-pays" fee ($2000-$8000 depending on publisher). Some publishers are typically closed, but allow an author to make a particular article Open Access if they pay this fee. Unfortunately, paying that fee could enough of a barrier to prevent young researchers without enough money from choosing Open Access (especially if they are publishing multiple papers per year), but a grant to cover just that fee could lead to many more Open Access articles.
They'll never know whether it was because of the California law or just dull results.
The peer review process is separate from the publication process. One is run by volunteers from academia. The other is run by employees of the publisher. You'll absolutely know if they try to blackball you due to your funding sources. (My apologies if I'm misreading you.)
Lastly, even if it cuts out half the research, most for-profit journals would rather do that than all the revenue.
I don't know how it is in other areas, but the publishers in my area wouldn't survive the backlash if half the submissions were barred from publication over this. The social dynamics at play are subtle, but if even 10% of articles accepted by the peer review process were rejected over shenanigans like this, things would change.
Something you and a few other commenters seem to have missed is that many publishers already have policies that allow Open Access (or some sort or another) if it is required by a researcher's funding agency. What they don't allow is Open Access just because an author wants it.
If this passes, I would like to apply for a $1 grant even though I am not in California. Some publishers allow open access only when required by law and this would give me leverage. (As an academic it is in my interests to have my articles as easily accessible as possible. I never see a dime from the paywalls on my published articles.)
Why do so many contemporary language designers choose C-style syntax and not Algol/Pascal/Ada style?
As long as we're talking about better syntaxes, don't forget the ISWIM/Miranda/Haskell style which IMHO is one of the best.
Performance is a problem but it isn't the problem. The distributed enforcement of policy is potentially a harder problem than even performance.
For example, on a monolithic kernel, ensuring that no process (except a specified list) is both setuid and talks to the network is (relatively) easy because different parts of the kernel can trust and rely on each others behavior. In a microkernel setting, these sorts of policies have to be encoded into how the different services interact with each other. That sort of distributed policy enforcement is much harder and something that we as a discipline are not good at yet. You can even see this play out if you look at the history of the L4/Hurd project and some of the complicated protocols that were proposed for securely establishing a basic handshake between services.
Dart understands that sometimes you just don’t feel like appeasing a ceremonial type checker.
Given that in Dard, the type checker is only ceremonial as far as I can tell, this is an interesting choice of words. The purpose of a true type checker like you find in Haskell, Agda, ML, ATS, etc. isn't just ceremonial. It guarentees certain properties of the resulting program (e.g., that variables of a certain type actually contain an object of that type, that you can never apply an invalid operation to an object, etc.). That is far from ceremonial.
It probably depends on what you are into. Also, keep in mind some of why I enjoy these may have to do with me not having enough time to play games myself, but having time to watch an LP.
Livelihood? Really?
Yes, really. The particularly popular LP-ers make their entire living off of the videos they produce.
That might sound strange at first, but some of the best LP-ers are something of a cross between comedians and critics. Both of these are jobs that we are accustomed to seeing making a living off of their work. A good LP-er doesn't just play the game, their value is in their commentary and jokes as they play the game.
Especially now that Obama has launched three new ones
What three new wars did Obama start? (I don't intend that to sound snarky. I just don't know what you are refering to.)
Alsup for Supreme Court!
Seriously though, this judge spent a good bit of time doing the legal research needed to produce a solid ruling. He knew it would be appealed so he included stuff in it to keep the appeals court from having the wool pulled over their eyes.
I think the argument is that winning a large city such as Chicago, Miami, Atlanta could no longer be used to win high value states.
I'm not sure I buy the argument. Like you say, someone would have to run the numbers for the past several elections. However, even those results would have to be taken with a grain of salt because how an election turns out depends on how candidates campaign which in turns depends on the rules. For example, in 2000 with the current rules it made no sense for Bush to spend much time campaigning in Texas but under a popularist system it would make a lot of sense(*). Thus it is kind of silly try to use the popular vote results from 2000 to predict who would have won under a popularist system.
(*) Which is one of the arguments against a popular vote for president. Candidates pander to voters that give them the most votes per unit effort (e.g. advertising dollars, candidate time, etc.). While your votes might count equally in a popularist election, the amount of effort to win your vote varies widely depending on geographic location. Thus a popularist election would not give voters equal political power.
The Kansas City airport is an International Airport. (Yes, technically the airport is in Missouri, but it's less than ten miles from the border.)
I think it is for the same reason that (some) people are against GPS tracking by cops even though manual (by human) tracking is legal. When it is more expensive for the government to do, there is an in-built incentive against casual use.
We see the same dynamic with privacy and personal information. Before computers, technically someone could track and mine just as much information about your buying habits, but it wasn't worth the effort until computers made it cheap and easy. There may have been a few instances of abuse before, it didn't become a serious concern until it was widespread.
Since this is implemented voluntarily by the ISPs instead of being imposed by law, I don't see how this violates any treaty rights. (Though that doesn't change the fact that it's still stupid and wrong.)
It's puzzled me for some time that ISPs are so eager to help with these piracy measures. Can someone explain to my why they are so eager to please when there is no reasonable legal threat against them? (IIUC, the DMCA safe-harbor clauses immunize them.) The same goes for YouTube. Why is Google so eager to go above and beyond the DMCA(*)?
(*) I am aware of Viacom v. Google, but my understanding is the appellate judgment in many ways reaffirms the DMCA safe-harbor provisions.
I think it is more complicated than that. If you take something from me and I tell you that I'll call the police and have you procecuted for stealing unless you pay me for the thing you took, I don't think that would be considered blackmail.
What do you do when they don't repeat it?
On the other hand, threatening to call the police isn't exacly incriminating so they might not care anyway.
Why are the ISP's being so accommodating of everything the MPAA/RIAA want? Given safe-harbor rules, it's not like there is any legal reason they have to do this is there?
Your credit card probably has an RFID too. Your cell phone may even have one.
No, they don't. I know of no major credit card vendor in the US that does this. Same for phones. It would be a major security whole if credit cards did this.
You jest, but wouldn't a cloud of reflective/diffusive things (e.g. chaff, glass beads, smoke, dust, etc.) counteract this quite well.