So, yes. German tank research did not start until after WW1. Hence, the US would not have been attacked by German tanks after the Zimmerman note as they did not exist until after the war.
Furthermore, I'm confused by your righteous indignation. Apparently tanks (misattributed as panzers in your timeline) didn't exist until WE started using them, which is 1918. Except I said 1920s. So they didn't exist even after we had started using them.
Not quite sure how that logic plays out, but I went to an American "school" so I must just be missing some steps that were never covered.
Anyway, everything is going to be patented now regardless. Due to how cutthroat companies are, researchers have to patent simply to defend their work from people that might eventually troll them. Maybe if the patent system actually worked, you might have a case to make there, but unfortunatly researchers have to think about their work on a legal standing these days, too.
I didn't. I was trying for an analogy to say you can't patent the human part of a process and I'm not sure I even hit that right...and it just went on its own track afterwards.
A properly working patent system is about free, open disclosure and sharing of knowledge.
I would argue that's an idealistic patent system. (And probably not a patent system at all.)
People, however, are not ideal. There are idealists who want information to be free, and then there's robber barons who only want to make a buck off everyone's creativity. Without patent protection, a little guy could make a fantastic product and then have it stolen by big conglom-o and have zero recourse. (Yes, I know that technically even WITH patent protection, in today's courts that's a massive uphill climb, BUT it does at least allow for the climb.)
We can't let stupid decisions by the USPTO and SCOTUS blind us to the underlying need for a patent system: to protect research and development from the types of people that destroyed Wall Street.
The article is very light on details, unfortunatly. I was personally hoping for a layman's description of what the patents constituted but instead it felt I was just reading an anti-patent tirade. But what was overlooked in the article is that they didn't patent ribosomes (which it sounded like what the author was trying to imply), but they patented a method for analyzing their structure.
The irony is this could be one of the best cases FOR having patents. Yale spends millions on research, makes a breakthrough, licences it out to Big Pharma and as a result Yale is able to get funding for more research.
I just wish there was more detail on the patents themselves rather than someone arguing against patents in general to make a better determination on how evil, to use the local patent buzzword, these patents actually are.
Anyway, what would stop a pharmecutical from taking the method, getting their own patent for it and suing other people who use it into oblivion? In a utopia, you might have a point, but I'd rather Yale hold these patents than Merck, Pfizer or GlaxoSmithKline.
Except this is much more complex than just cut and paste. You can't patent, say, a person blowing air into glass for the purposes of shaping but you can patent a machine that performs the same operation.
The problem with this blog post is the author seems more bent on proclaiming "they patented this, patents are bad, therefore this is bad" rather than saying what parts of the patents are bad. There's obviously something novel in what was accomplished here. USPTO might be ignorant to prior art, but I doubt the Nobel committees are as lax.
Plus reading the patent abstracts don't do me much good either; I lack the necessary background to make any heads or tails of them. (Hell, I can't tell the diff between an -ane and an -ene without a cheat sheet.)
What I can tell is they're not patenting the ribosomes or any resulting compound created, but instead some method of isolating and analyzing them. This at least opens the door for a patent and is what the patent system was designed to protect. We have a methodology now that blue chip pharmecuticals are taking advantage of hand over fist but would never have gone through the risk of actually pioneering; it makes sense to have some of that trickle down to the people that actually created the process so they can continue research and make more breakthroughs (and allow the cycle to begin anew).
From the article,...cover not only the process for determining the structure of the molecules, but also the computation used to design new antibiotics.
Now, this might not be saying the whole story, but it doesn't sound like the ribosomes are what's being patented (which would result in ire here). Instead, it's a technique of how to find what molecules and bindings are used by the ribosomes (or something along those lines.)
The second part, the computation, probably a little more evil, but again it's a little light on details.
I could probably do a patent search and see exactly what the abstracts are...but I doubt I could understand them without a tl;dr and a chemistry glossary.
Basically, there's undoubtedly something patentable within this process it's just a matter of making sure they've got the right thing patented. I don't see anyone patenting a gene or a molcule here so there's no "nature made this already" defense. Furthermore, I don't think anyone can exactly make an "obviousness" claim here; USPTO might be pretty lax about prior art, but I'd think the Nobel committee would be a bit more thorough about trying to locate prior research.
Is it really that hard to print the circular table with all the letters in the same upright orientation so it can be read without turning the page? Durrrrr!
Instead of formatting one cell and populating it with data as necessary, you now have to format 118 cells seperately. Realize every cell of that table is different from every other cell. (Yes, Boron and Oxygen might hold the same area, but their different rotations require custom formatting.)
The major problem I see with it is they stitched the table ends together rather than really account for size. You have to know the previous one to make any sense of the new one.
Take the first inner ring: it LOOKS like it goes B - C - N - O - F - Ne - Li - Be... and that puts 10 right next to 3.
Makes sense if you KNOW to start counting at Lithium, but if you're just looking at the table, you will naturally start at Boron. More annoyingly is that puts a very unreactive element first. The great part about the old one is it went from very reactive, to minimally reactive, to very reactive (with a brief stop to inertsville). Again, you lose that having the top line bookended by Boron and Beryllium.
Clearly you've never seen the San Joaquin Valley. Once you get past the Cajon Pass from the south it's all fault free, mountain free flat land all the way to Sacramento.
How about a surveliance net? Anyone in or out is watched. Thermal cameras. Cameras aimed in your windows from public vantage points. Electrical sniffers on your data lines.
The results of this ruling are bad, but the law was clearly written to say this. It was probably not written this way on purpose, but I wouldn't bet on that. Considering that legislators often don't even read laws that they introduce, it is possible that some staffer introduced this wording for exactly this purpose.
I dunno, given that there are aspects of corporations that require them to be treated as an individual (contracts, property ownership) they might have just picked up a generic definition from some other location to save time. (The old "never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" defense.)
The real problem is these laws don't get the full fine-tooth comb treatment until they get challenged at which point everyone comes out with magnifying glasses arguing that a smudge is a comma and vice versa. Unfortunatly, laws are a numbers game for politicians rather than something that should be considered their legacy: "I've introduced XXX bills!" Yeah, but how many were actually good?
Wish I was actually taught grammar in school. I think I had four weeks of it throughout elementary and after that it was all reading boring by dead people, then writing what I thought it meant, and finally being told my interpretation was wrong.
My knowledge of adverbs extends to "they're the words by verbs that end in -ly."
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder, if I had instead phrased it as "German tank development, 1920s", would your reply have ever been made?
I'm used to seeing Panzer as the generic term for a German tank, and reference material seems to back up that assumption. ( http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/panzer?jss=0 )
So, yes. German tank research did not start until after WW1. Hence, the US would not have been attacked by German tanks after the Zimmerman note as they did not exist until after the war.
Furthermore, I'm confused by your righteous indignation. Apparently tanks (misattributed as panzers in your timeline) didn't exist until WE started using them, which is 1918. Except I said 1920s. So they didn't exist even after we had started using them.
Not quite sure how that logic plays out, but I went to an American "school" so I must just be missing some steps that were never covered.
Point of order:
Zimmerman note, WW1.
Panzer development, 1920s.
Stalingrad, WW2.
But I'm sure you know what you're talking about since you didn't go to American "school."
The question here is should you be able to patent the DNA itself?
That is not the question here, though. They've patented a method to analyze ribosomes, not the ribosomes themselves.
Anyway, I don't think that Nobel prices should be given for patented work.
So, if I go check out the thread on the physics prize ( http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/10/06/1427237/Father-of-Fiber-Optics-Wins-Nobel-Prize ) I should see this argument there too?
Anyway, everything is going to be patented now regardless. Due to how cutthroat companies are, researchers have to patent simply to defend their work from people that might eventually troll them. Maybe if the patent system actually worked, you might have a case to make there, but unfortunatly researchers have to think about their work on a legal standing these days, too.
I didn't. I was trying for an analogy to say you can't patent the human part of a process and I'm not sure I even hit that right...and it just went on its own track afterwards.
A properly working patent system is about free, open disclosure and sharing of knowledge.
I would argue that's an idealistic patent system. (And probably not a patent system at all.)
People, however, are not ideal. There are idealists who want information to be free, and then there's robber barons who only want to make a buck off everyone's creativity. Without patent protection, a little guy could make a fantastic product and then have it stolen by big conglom-o and have zero recourse. (Yes, I know that technically even WITH patent protection, in today's courts that's a massive uphill climb, BUT it does at least allow for the climb.)
We can't let stupid decisions by the USPTO and SCOTUS blind us to the underlying need for a patent system: to protect research and development from the types of people that destroyed Wall Street.
The article is very light on details, unfortunatly. I was personally hoping for a layman's description of what the patents constituted but instead it felt I was just reading an anti-patent tirade. But what was overlooked in the article is that they didn't patent ribosomes (which it sounded like what the author was trying to imply), but they patented a method for analyzing their structure.
The irony is this could be one of the best cases FOR having patents. Yale spends millions on research, makes a breakthrough, licences it out to Big Pharma and as a result Yale is able to get funding for more research.
I just wish there was more detail on the patents themselves rather than someone arguing against patents in general to make a better determination on how evil, to use the local patent buzzword, these patents actually are.
Then strip the prize money from the award too.
Anyway, what would stop a pharmecutical from taking the method, getting their own patent for it and suing other people who use it into oblivion? In a utopia, you might have a point, but I'd rather Yale hold these patents than Merck, Pfizer or GlaxoSmithKline.
Except this is much more complex than just cut and paste. You can't patent, say, a person blowing air into glass for the purposes of shaping but you can patent a machine that performs the same operation.
The problem with this blog post is the author seems more bent on proclaiming "they patented this, patents are bad, therefore this is bad" rather than saying what parts of the patents are bad. There's obviously something novel in what was accomplished here. USPTO might be ignorant to prior art, but I doubt the Nobel committees are as lax.
Plus reading the patent abstracts don't do me much good either; I lack the necessary background to make any heads or tails of them. (Hell, I can't tell the diff between an -ane and an -ene without a cheat sheet.)
What I can tell is they're not patenting the ribosomes or any resulting compound created, but instead some method of isolating and analyzing them. This at least opens the door for a patent and is what the patent system was designed to protect. We have a methodology now that blue chip pharmecuticals are taking advantage of hand over fist but would never have gone through the risk of actually pioneering; it makes sense to have some of that trickle down to the people that actually created the process so they can continue research and make more breakthroughs (and allow the cycle to begin anew).
From the article, ...cover not only the process for determining the structure of the molecules, but also the computation used to design new antibiotics.
Now, this might not be saying the whole story, but it doesn't sound like the ribosomes are what's being patented (which would result in ire here). Instead, it's a technique of how to find what molecules and bindings are used by the ribosomes (or something along those lines.)
The second part, the computation, probably a little more evil, but again it's a little light on details.
I could probably do a patent search and see exactly what the abstracts are...but I doubt I could understand them without a tl;dr and a chemistry glossary.
Basically, there's undoubtedly something patentable within this process it's just a matter of making sure they've got the right thing patented. I don't see anyone patenting a gene or a molcule here so there's no "nature made this already" defense. Furthermore, I don't think anyone can exactly make an "obviousness" claim here; USPTO might be pretty lax about prior art, but I'd think the Nobel committee would be a bit more thorough about trying to locate prior research.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_sheet
Is it really that hard to print the circular table with all the letters in the same upright orientation so it can be read without turning the page? Durrrrr!
Instead of formatting one cell and populating it with data as necessary, you now have to format 118 cells seperately. Realize every cell of that table is different from every other cell. (Yes, Boron and Oxygen might hold the same area, but their different rotations require custom formatting.)
The major problem I see with it is they stitched the table ends together rather than really account for size. You have to know the previous one to make any sense of the new one.
Take the first inner ring: it LOOKS like it goes B - C - N - O - F - Ne - Li - Be... and that puts 10 right next to 3.
Makes sense if you KNOW to start counting at Lithium, but if you're just looking at the table, you will naturally start at Boron. More annoyingly is that puts a very unreactive element first. The great part about the old one is it went from very reactive, to minimally reactive, to very reactive (with a brief stop to inertsville). Again, you lose that having the top line bookended by Boron and Beryllium.
Think GP is trying to be clever and refer to the revival of Doctor Who currently playing as opposed to the episodes with the first eight doctors.
Damnit, Tejon Pass. Yeah, someone's gonna correct me on that one before /.'s "You must wait longer!!" filter lets me reply...
Clearly you've never seen the San Joaquin Valley. Once you get past the Cajon Pass from the south it's all fault free, mountain free flat land all the way to Sacramento.
And it smells like asparagus. I hate the I-5...
Oh I'm sure we can work around that then.
How about a surveliance net? Anyone in or out is watched. Thermal cameras. Cameras aimed in your windows from public vantage points. Electrical sniffers on your data lines.
More than one way to invade your privacy.
No problem. Now, these electricians are going to be installing webcams into your house now so we can monitor your daily life a la The Truman Show.
(Not sure if you're trolling or just going for brevity...but if it's the latter, I do believe some qualifiers need to be added.)
The results of this ruling are bad, but the law was clearly written to say this. It was probably not written this way on purpose, but I wouldn't bet on that. Considering that legislators often don't even read laws that they introduce, it is possible that some staffer introduced this wording for exactly this purpose.
I dunno, given that there are aspects of corporations that require them to be treated as an individual (contracts, property ownership) they might have just picked up a generic definition from some other location to save time. (The old "never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" defense.)
The real problem is these laws don't get the full fine-tooth comb treatment until they get challenged at which point everyone comes out with magnifying glasses arguing that a smudge is a comma and vice versa. Unfortunatly, laws are a numbers game for politicians rather than something that should be considered their legacy: "I've introduced XXX bills!" Yeah, but how many were actually good?
"VOTE FOR SMARTER CONGRESSPEOPLE"
In order to vote for them, they need to actually run for the office...
And before that they actually have to get nominated...
Hate adverbs more.
Wish I was actually taught grammar in school. I think I had four weeks of it throughout elementary and after that it was all reading boring by dead people, then writing what I thought it meant, and finally being told my interpretation was wrong.
My knowledge of adverbs extends to "they're the words by verbs that end in -ly."
Blood doesn't stop pumping when you get cut. Try it. Go cut yourself. Feel the pulse? Blood's still flowing.
The clotting mechanism is something else entirely. You're thinking of hemophilia.
Hrm, never mind, just noticed that tiny word 'here.' Pronouns suck.
Citation needed, what with this patient being allegedly being the first recipient here to get a new artificial heart that pumps blood continuously
That's hilarious.
Pretty obvious someone(s) stuffed the box on that one. Probably a good thing moot's never written a book (or had one ghostwritten, et cetera).