Witty, maybe. But not an argument.

if Google would slip them all those books.

Yours is surely the most Insighful comment here, modders notwithstanding.

You initially say (correctly) that the shutdown is about not spending money, but later slyly morph that into not being allowed to "run" facilities, and characterize failure to block access as "running", so as to prove that blocking access is required by the shutdown. Sorry, but sitting back and doing nothing is less aptly called "running" than is spending extra money to prevent access. And the additional spending clearly violates your original definition of a shutdown.

Evil.

Sadly, this case never reached the merits of the troll's ludicrous patent on the obvious.

If we're lucky.

self-censorship, not censorship or control by the state

The two are not mutually exclusive. I suspect that you are using "self" in an odd way. When you say that "the population made books illegal", what you mean is that a considerable portion of the population either demanded that the state make books illegal, or acquiesced in it. While that says something about how states become oppressive, it does not imply that the state is not doing the oppressing.

I appreciate the interesting ideas about the nature of the Myriad patents, and how obviousness could figure in. Now I'll have to revisit the decision again. I don't recall the court getting into those matters as part of its rationale.

I would still argue that the essence of a gene is its information content, in whatever physical embodiment, and thus that a human gene, even stripped of introns and embodied in cDNA form (or on a hard drive, for that matter), is naturally occurring. That's not at all to say that a non-obvious modification to a gene could not be patentable.

Yes, they held just what you quote them as having done, which is not what the article says they held. The article claims that the court ruled that "human genes cannot be patented, though synthetic DNA, created in the laboratory, can be". While the court did enunciate a principle that could be summarized in that way, and did follow that principle in its first holding, which invalidated some of Myriad's patents, it violated that principle in its second holding, in which it validated two of Myriad's patents of human genes.

The principle is that human genes are not patentable because they are discovered in nature, not invented by a human being, and allowing them to be patented would violate the fundamental point of patent law, whereas synthetic genes, as human inventions, are patentable. But they failed to correctly apply that principle in their second holding. The cDNA representations of the human genes BRCA1 and BRCA2, which are what Myriad had patented, were simply not invented by Myriad -- they were copied, letter-for-letter, from the gene as represented in naturally occurring mRNA. The court fell into the same mistake that the lower court they criticized in the first holding had made: failing to recognize that copying is not inventing. So the court did not in fact rule as the article stated.

the court ruled, unanimously, that human genes cannot be patented, though synthetic DNA, created in the laboratory, can be.

If only that were true! Read the SCOTUS decision, already.

Tell me again how it is the employee's responsibility to defray the employer's payroll processing costs?

They meant the actual occurrence of these particular genes in cDNA form in nature.

Yours is the simplistic argument. Yes, the cDNA is 'created' using an artificial process, like copying a book with a photocopier. Copying a book doesn't make you the author, and copying the naturally occurring gene embodied in mRNA into the cDNA form doesn't make you its inventor. Or its discoverer, for that matter, despite the fact that in this case, Myriad was the discoverer of the gene. That discovery was not the rationale offered by the court for their second holding. Their shaky rationale was that Myriad did in fact invent the cDNA form of the gene.

Any nation-state that does no espionage is irresponsible. They all do it. It's a game, and someone on the US side made a poor move.