I first became aware of your efforts when the Dow Chemical/Bhopal news stories hit. It struck me as brilliant at the time; but less than seven years later, it's hard for me to find folks who remember that bit of agitprop (indeed, sadly, it's often challenging to find people who remember what happened at Bhopal at all). In general, it's definitely hard to see any trend towards change in the attitudes of the type of organizations you've lampooned. I wonder sometimes if the most lasting effect of your efforts isn't simply to boost morale among activists who share your views and love seeing you skewer your targets? What do you think? In your opinion, what is the lasting impact of your work?

Surely you mean Dome-sday ;)

People have already correctly answered this question in the responses -- it's not expanding into anything -- but it's worth talking about that answer a little.

It's our nature, when confronted with something we don't comprehend, to try and understand it in terms of something else we know about. So when we try to imagine a physical entity of finite extent expanding, we're drawn to things like that in our lives: a balloon blowing up, or a cake rising as it bakes, etc. Indeed, many of the analogies we're given in articles and books appeal to just such an approach to understanding, e.g. "Imagine a 2-D universe. Draw dots on the surface of a balloon, and watch them growing further and further apart as the balloon blows up. The dots are analogous to galaxies, the inflation of the balloon is analogous to the expansion of the Universe, etc." You can find that analogy in a variety of sources. But it's a bad analogy -- it's flawed in that it depends on the existence of a third spatial dimension that is associated with the expansion of the balloon; there is no analogous spatial dimension for the expansion of the Universe. The thing you have to come to terms with is this: all attempts at understanding by analogy to something in our everyday lives will fail, because like quantum tunneling or the Aharonov-Bohm effect, it's simply not analogous to anything in our daily lives.

As Feynman put it, "I can't explain it in terms of something you're more familiar with, because I don't understand it in terms of something you're more familiar with."

I'd turn the question around: why is it that you think that if the government doesn't do it, private industry will? Especially when they could right now, even though the government is in the market -- witness the success of UPS, FedEx, etc. -- and choose not to.

You can only be confident about something like that if you're incredibly impatient, and don't know much about how hard this stuff is. The earliest observational evidence of dark matter came from the 1930s, when Fritz Zwicky measured the line-of-sight velocities of galaxies in clusters and realized that there had to be more mass in clusters than could be attributed to the galaxies alone, or there wouldn't be enough gravity to keep them together as a cluster. It was another 30+ years later that we observed with X-ray telescopes a decent-sized chunk of that missing mass in clusters, in the form of a hot intracluster plasma at temperatures of tens of millions of degrees that fills the space between galaxies in clusters and, in rich clusters of galaxies, contributes several times more mass to the cluster than the galaxies within it. Thirty-plus years, for something that's fairly easy to see once you have the technology that can look there (X-ray telescopes); it took us a while to get it.

All our cosmological theories may turn out to be complete crap. But it's absurd to say so now on the basis of complaints like 'we haven't solved the dark matter problem yet' or 'we can't explain a nonzero vacuum energy.' There was a fair amount of time between Oersted and Maxwell, as well. In the meantime, the most plausible theories will get pursued, and we'll see.

Only if one of the classes you could play was an Anonymous Coward :)

*sigh* Have you spared a moment to consider whether the OP is a non-native English speaker?

Slashdot might be based in the US and thus be predominantly Anglo-centric but there are quite a few people on this Earth who aren't native English speakers. English could be this guy's 4th or 5th language for example.

I have no problem with the idea of poking fun at someone's language skills when they should know better (or indeed DO know better but are just being lazy) but assuming everyone speaks MY language at least as well as I do is, in this day and age, very naive.

Reminds me of a girl I once went out with.

*shudder*

It's a METHOD of doing something. You can view each step of the method as a little black box with an input from the previous step and an output to the next. It is irrelevant TO THE METHOD what is in each black box. It could be some hardware, it could be software, it could be a little fairy with a wand and some fairy dust. It doesn't matter. What matters is whether the method - as a series of technical steps - is novel and inventive.

Maybe the method steps are not actually novel or lack an inventive step, I don't know as I've not studied the patent and related prior art and I don't intend to, it's not my field of work. I can only assume my colleagues did a thorough job and found that the method being claimed was both novel and inventive. Implementing something in a computer or with software when that is the only difference to the prior art is not patentable under the EPC as lacking (amongst other things) inventive step. This is very clear if you understand European Patent Law. There must therefore have been, in the eyes of the examiners, something inventive in the particular series of method steps as claimed in the granted patent specification. The parts of the independent claims referring to computer implementation will not have formed part of that reasoning. Furthermore, the general public (and ALL of Apple's competitors) had years in which they could oppose and comment on the application before it was granted and nobody did.

I refer you back to my point - please learn some patent law before commenting on these cases. Yes, I've been around here a while and yes I know that most people comment on stuff here without reading the stories and without actually having any knowledge of the subject in question. I can usually resist but when people are choosing to mock my chosen career and the work carried out by my colleagues in the EPO, without any form of knowledge or study to back-up their obviously idiotic bias, it annoys me a tad.

Untrue. Yes, the claims in the document everyone keeps linking to and discussing are rubbish and should never be granted - indeed they weren't as that's merely the published application. If you look at the claims of the granted patent specification (and not the published application which everyone keeps linking to) http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/originalDocument?FT=D&date=20100929&DB=&locale=en_EP&CC=EP&NR=2059868B1&KC=B1 which actually define the scope of protection offered by the patent, you will see 2 independent claims. One is directed towards a method and is phrased in terms of method steps i.e. a series of actions to perform to obtain a desired event or result. The other is an apparatus claim, claiming the device that carries out the method of claim 1.

The method is "computer implemented" sure, but it's not software. Each step has a technical nature "do this, do that, wait for this to occur and then do something etc".

The claims don't claim software as such, they claim a method that can be carried out by software. It is, however the method itself which is granted (rightly or wrongly, I don't know, I don't work in this field) because that combination of method steps is, in the opinion of the examining division, new and inventive. The additional "feature" of it being computer implemented or "in software" is not inventive under the guidelines of the EPC and will have been treated as such.

There's too many to read. You won't read them all. But it makes me feel better to say this: thanks. Your work has meant a lot to me.

I am not going to comment on the validity of the patent as such and please don't take what I'm saying as implying in any way that I believe the patent is valid or invalid. I've not analysed it and it's not in my field of expertise anyway. Saying that, I do have a few patent law (and specifically, European patent law) related bits of info you might like to read:

1) In patent law the words "suitable for" are always implicitly present in a statement such as:

The disclosed embodiments relate generally to portable electronic devices, and more particularly, to portable devices for photo management, such as digital photographing, 5 photo editing, and emailing photos."

In this case, the Galaxy phone is quite definitely suitable for photo management.

2) - 4) No it's not software, it's a method of performing something comprising a series of technical steps. The fact that is can be implemented on a computer, or using software is secondary and irrelevant. It is the method steps themselves which are the invention and upon which the patent is based and upon which the examiner(s) will base their decision. The extent of protection granted by a patent is governed by the claims and not the description. The description merely describes aspects of the invention and will also contain quite a lot of info which is directed at the prior art or to methods of implementing the invention. The mere mention of the word software in the description does not imply that the claims are software-based. Even worse would be to use the title and/or abstract to get angry about a patent. The abstract for example has no legal value whatsoever and has no bearing on the scope of protection offered by the claimed invention. The description is there to aid the skilled man in carrying out the invention AS CLAIMED in the CLAIMS.

The EPO does, of course, have legal mechanisms for objecting to a patent and any stage of it's passage through the EPO system. Up until it was granted, anyone could have filed a 3rd party observation with the EPO which would be read and acted upon (if relevant) by the examiner in charge of the case. The patent was granted on 2010-09-29. By law you could have opposed the patent within 6 months of that date by filing a notice of opposition with the EPO, a facility open to anyone. Once this date is passed, it is no longer the responsibility of the EPO to manage or administer the patent and you would need to go to the patent offices of the individual countries where the patent has been granted to seek redress. Every country has a mechanism for opposing or fighting a granted patent.

Please go and learn some (European) patent law.

Uh, pretty much every single article in the BBC, the Guardian, or the Times today? That's why Tim Godwin was repeatedly quoted and shown on TV Monday night as saying that the most essential thing to control Tuesday night's rioting was for parents to keep their kids at home.

Not what I'm seeing on BBC or ITN. Stuff like the two white teenage girls speaking here is a lot more typical.

It started in Tottenham because the Duggan shooting was in Tottenham. Since then it's happened everywhere. Crouch End and Catford, as just two examples, don't exactly strike me as warrens of council housing.