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Comment Re:Weird ruling (Score 1) 250

Buying something IS a contract! At it's most basic level it is an agreement to exchange physical items or services.

Buying is indeed a contract. However is EULA part of that contract or is it another contract on its own?

For EULA to be part of the buying contract, it must be presented before entering into the contract. That is, EULA must be presented before paying. Otherwise both parties are not on equal ground. (Or you should also be able to amend the buying contract with whatever your imagination could spawn).

If EULA is separate contract, then rejecting it must not void your original contract. This means, I should still be able to use the product I've paid for. Otherwise both parties are not on equal ground as one of them pays money and doesn't get anything in return.

Comment Re:So... (Score 1) 293

Say the vaccine is 96% effective and we're studying a population of 1000 kids.

From the article

...Witt's group wrote in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases that the vaccine is effective about half of the time for all kids, and just 24 percent of the time in the eight to 12 year old age group.

So, the maximum effectiveness is 50%, if you keep 100% of the kids vaccinated at max level (with more regular shots) , you would still be a way lower than the minimum of 75% needed for herd immunity (for sickness with low transmission rate) .

Comment Re:A word of caution (Score 2) 117

The problem is that the government is not reversing any of its past actions.
It is not removing its signature under ACTA, its parliamentary group would not even let a proposal for official refusal of ratification to be presented to the parliament.
For all that matters, Bulgaria can just ratify ACTA tomorrow.

The official stance is to delay until the EU parliament makes a decision and then to repeat whatever that decision is. It seems that the ACTA proponents would try to delay the vote in the EU parliament. They hope that the matter would fade away from public conscious and at some point they would do a sudden silent vote on it, like the first one.
Whenever that happens, Bulgaria can ratify ACTA on the very next day.

Comment Re:Interesting idea, but what about the full impac (Score 5, Interesting) 226

Not long ago I watched a TV program that presented the work of Japanese scientist Izuru Senaha . He have found that seaweed grows optimally at 2% CO2 concentration (72 times the normal concentration in sea water). They use method (developed by Masanori Hiraoka) where the seaweeds are in constant motion to boost their growth.
He is making experiments by collecting CO2 from local power plants and using it to grow seaweed.

It would make a lot more sense to have farms for rapid growth than having to collect seaweed from the ocean.

This method alone could be great for collecting the carbon from the air and making it into solid form (thus reversing the greenhouse effect). But that would not be profitable on its own.

Comment Re:This virus can't be a thread with no Internet. (Score 1) 74

Have you forgotten about Stuxnet?
That virus was designed to sabotage industrial equipment that was not connected to internet. It was designed to propagate though removable drives and local networks. And Stuxnet did reach its target and sabotaged it successfully without even causing suspicion.

Imagine that the Chinese/Russians modify Stuxnet (I've read it is quite modular) to infiltrate the UAV control. Imagine that they add module that activates only when the drone enters GPS coordinates of China/Russia. This module could do a number of nasty things. Turning on active radar, so that the drone would shine like a super nova on the radar. Increase the chance of drone crashing. Introduce slight error in missile target coordinates and always hit few hundred feet off the target.

Just the radar thing would be enough disaster. In peaceful time the enemy may decide to ignore it and just track the path of the drone (and hide). In armed conflict, there are missiles that use the radar signal for target homing. It's very likely that a great number of the drones would be destroyed before somebody realizes that the enemy doesn't have miracle super secret drone tracking technology.

Comment Re:Not as bad as it sounds (Score 1) 179

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
&
The devil is in the details.

From your description I understand that the new institution would sue "larger companies" on behalf of small patent holders. Now if these small patent holders are patent trolls, this institution service would be like a pipe dream for them. Patent trolls could sue everybody everywhere and expenses would be covered by taxpayers.

I'm not saying that protecting small manufactures is bad thing, but fundamental principles should be established so that this "great power" won't be abused in just one or two decades.

If this institution works like MPEG-LA, then maybe it could do more good than harm.
It's all in the details.

Comment Re:Not actually reduced to math (Score 1) 323

"The nonpatentability of mathematics refers literally to patenting a formula or algorithm without any useful application"
I think the problem here is quite the opposite, the problem is patenting of formula or algorithm for all possible useful applications. And my claim is that if you patent for all possible useful applications, then you haven't actually patented for any of them (because you have not mentioned any).

Take for the example the patent in questions. "The specification makes it clear that 'information storage and retrieval system' refers to a computer system". The problem here is that the computer systems already exist, they existed and they did operate long before this patent was filled and they would continue doing so. The computers do store and retrieve information and they've been doing it for decades in a million of different ways. This patent describes algortitm for working with _abstract_ data. Thus it does not describe any useful application of that abstract data.
How, if the patent said "efficent malloc implementation allowing storage and tertival of heap memory in RAM" or "Efficent garbidge collection in programming language" then these would have been usefual applications, and that patent would not apply for "Efficent file retrival of Flash drives".

So in short, if you patent algorithm for working with abstract data, you patent pure math.

Comment Re:Why is it you can't sue. (Score 0, Flamebait) 541

http://www.prisonplanet.com/squalene-the-swine-flu-vaccine%E2%80%99s-dirty-little-secret-exposed.html
It's nice read.
In short, to make vaccine cheaper, they use additative that is very likely the cause of autoimmune diseases know as Gulf War Syndrome.
Vaccines have always been trade-offs, however here we have the following decision: 25% to get GWS if vaccinated or 0.1% of dying from Swine Flu if infected.

Comment Re:no more artificial scarcity (Score 5, Informative) 979

Now at the same time, Monsanto does not get to fly those seeds over random farms and drop them and then sue those farmers, thats bad business,....
Surprisingly enough, but they do. Here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Schmeiser is the story of a farmer who got his crops contaminated with Monsanto's GMO genes (cross breed from neighbor's crop) and Monsanto went ahead and sued him for patent infringement. And they won.
(Watch documentary "The Future of the Food" for more details)

The biggest problem here is how to revert to non-contaminated crops and how to prevent future contamination (aka stop the wind from blowing).

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As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. -- Albert Einstein

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