You: "Oh I know exactly the event you're talking about...
... as evidenced by the fact that I asked about it, and confused it for something entirely different!"
Me: "So not only do you know exactly what I'm talking about..."
I see that you're having an argument with your own imagination, and losing. Sad.
That's two seperate events, and the one you're talking about was where domestic violence victims were trying to speak about being turned away from shelters or threatened with arrest. You just shot yourself in the foot bringing that up.
Me: Do you have a citation for your claim?
You: No! And you just shot yourself in the foot by bringing up another event!
Nice try, but it doesn't work that way. If you can't support your claim when called out, no amount of deflection is going to hide that fact.
Yes, actually, considering that men who don't conform to that gender role are attacked using slurs like "neckbeard" and "dudebro".
I don't think "guys who communicate their feelings" are the ones being called neckbeard or dudebro.
In fact feminists went so far as to commit felonies to shut down a suicide prevention conference because hey fuck men.
Well, I'm sure you have a valid citation for that, and not, say, a link to a video of protesters at a speech on "men's issues and the double standards of feminism" (rather than a "suicide prevention conference") cheering when someone random pulls a fire alarm.
This is not a problem exclusive to women. As a man you can also get your life disrupted by death threats, unordered pizzas/taxis/products and doxxing.
It's probably easier to get singled out for it as a women, but if you are subject to it as a man you'll get much less support to cope with it. This is reflected in the offline world too as a MUCH higher suicide rate for men compared to women. Trying to construct this as some purely misgyonistic issue is just reinforcing the gender bias of men as some disposable soldier caste and is likely to aggrevate misgyonistic tendencies overall in society.
And who do you think is out there telling men to keep their feelings bottled up until they explode? Women? Misogyny hurts men, too.
It also is not cool the way the government went after him.
Or technically, it was not cool the way the government went after him for the wrong crime. If they had pursued his ass for the stalking and harassment, that'd be just fine.
I'm no physicist myself, but from what I can tell, David Weber's Honor Harrington series of novels does a pretty good job of getting the physics right. Most battles are missile duels, energy weapons are powerful, but short-range, and when they develop a means of giving missiles multi-stage drives, it changes the game significantly, as they no longer have a single burst of maneuvering speed and then come in ballistic; they can accelerate at their target, burn out the first stage, coast in ballistic for many thousands of kilometers, and then activate the second stage for final maneuvering.
It's a good concept on the surface, but Weber destroys the physics with his own lust for large numbers: ships are not fighting at "short-range" of a kilometer or two... they're at "short-range" of a hundred thousand kilometers. "Long" range stretches out to tens of millions of kilometers. Of course, he has to, when he has ships that can accelerate at hundreds of Gs, and missiles that can accelerate at 96 thousand G's.
I love the series, but Weber's constant need to go from "a ship firing 10 missiles at a broadside... no wait, 10 thousand missiles at a broadside! And they zoom off at a kilometer per secon- no, wait, a million kilometers per second!" is more than little silly, and certainly not a "pretty good job" of getting the physics right.
It's a resource allocation problem. There is enough food on earth right now to sustainably feed everyone, the problem lies with the people on the path from the food to the hungry mouths. Increasing food production increases the wealth of the people in the middle, who now have more resources to allocate, but does not necessarily reduce the number of hungry people.
This also would help the hungry mouths grow their own food, faster, with less space, in damp areas that were previously prone to rot (one of the things discussed in the video is that through faster germination, less of the crop rots before harvest). This doesn't change increase the wealth of the people in the middle, but opens new areas to farming by hungry people.
A detailed description of a process in a textbook is also enough for any skilled programmer. For Alice and Bilski you can find the steps to perform the process in any finance book. Pseudocode and flow charts don't teach anything when the process is well known. Chances are finance books have charts in them as well.
Sure, and completely stipulated. The "do something well known and described in finance books" and "on a computer" stuff shouldn't be patentable... Rather, it's new processes (that are nonetheless, done on a computer):
If your talking about a brand new process then your not talking about a software patent. Your patenting a new business method.
What if it was a brand new process or business method, never been done before, on a computer. Like, say, calculating the value of some strange multidimensional factorial required to teleport yourself twenty feet to the left and six hours into the future? Certainly new, but let's assume it can be done with a TI-83. Should that be patentable?
Patents don't disclose source code. So they don't teach a programmer how to "put the bits of plastic together".
Pseudocode and detailed* flow charts should be enough for any skilled programmer. You shouldn't need C+ code - and if you do, what happens in 5 years when you say "I don't know C+, I only know Swift" or whatever the next language is? Conversely, what about art from the 60s or 70s - if it had COBOL code would you know how to use that? No, pseudocode and detailed* flow charts should be enough of a disclosure, because from them, you can implement the program in any language.
*Many patent applications do not have detailed flow charts, but rather "flow charts" that just show a single series of steps in a line, as Prof. Lemley noted in one of the interviews linked from another comment. You're right - those are total crap and don't teach anyone anything.
Patent examiners can do their thing. Alice gives them a tool now too.
Yes, and no... Patent Examiners are bound under the requirements of due process to present a prima facie case for why an application is not patentable, as the initial burden rests on the Office. How do you provide a prima facie case that an idea is abstract? It's a conclusion, not an argument supported by evidence, as the Courts have admitted when their evidence is "I know it when I see it".
How do you define "actually inventive"?
Here are the questions I ask when contemplating patent filings, post-Alice, for a software method (or computer implemented method):
* Can I reasonably determine the bits and pieces you put together a specific solution to a specific problem based on your claims? should avoid a 101 issue.
* Do the claims give me all of the pieces of the puzzle or does it give me a flowchart?
* And, to entirely avoid an Alice question, are you using generic bits of technology for their ordinary purpose to solve an old problem the old way?
"Good" answers to these questions should avoid a 101 issue.
Quite possibly, though it fails to answer my question about your definition of "actually inventive". It also points to part of the problem with Alice, since your first question is really about 112 written description, your second question is really about 112 enablement and unclaimed essential matter, and your third question (as you note) is really about 103 obviousness. Now, I agree, that if you meet 103 and 112, Justice Thomas would likely not "know an [abstract idea] when he sees it" and find the application invalid under 101, and maybe that's a fine answer from a pragmatic standpoint, but it's a terrible one from a jurisprudence standpoint.
I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"
