Oh great. It's tough enough for my introductory chem students to learn how to calculate the atomic mass of a molecule from its empirical formula when all the masses on the periodic table are single scalars. Using ranges for masses requires that they now have to add truncation, rounding, averaging, or some sort of consistent choosing to that process. They're screwed. And so is anyone who has to grade their papers (i.e., me).

Not necessarily. If you have prior art documents that would invalidate one or more of the claims, then you are more than welcome to file an ex parte reexamination request. That costs well less than millions of dollars.

And yes, the MPEP has been revised in light of KSR. On the other hand, Bilski is still up in the air because the Supreme Court is going to hear it next year. Believe me, there are a lot of us who want the Bilski dust to settle.

I've always found it sadly hypocritical that /. geeks who have so little patience with people making mistakes on technical issues, when said mistakes can easily be corrected by a little bit of reading, are comfortable making similarly blatantly wrong statements about the US Patent system, when said mistakes can easily be corrected my reading the freely available Manual of Patent Examination Procedure. I mean, seriously, nobody should spout opinions about patentability unless they've read MPEP 2100 through at least once. It's like trying to argue vi vs. emacs when the only text editor you've ever used is Notepad.

I had never received one of these .mp3 spams. Until I read this story. The very next email I received was, sure enough, an .mp3 pump-and-dump.

At least, that's what I assumed. The filename was gloriaestefan.mp3 but I didn't listen (duh), so I can't be certain.

Okay, let me explain for you non-biochemist computer guys what this means. Take a computer, break it down into the smallest possible parts you can. I'm not talking about the hard drive/motherboard/case level. I'm talking about the level of transistors, resistors, ICs, connectors, motors, and the little blue LED that blinks whenever your hard drive spins. Now catalog everything. Keep a record of what you found where, and how many you found (eg, you found a laser in the DVD drive but not in the motherboard). So now you have a parts list, and a good idea of what parts to expect where. If you start finding unexpected things in unexpected places (like a SCSI connector on your video card, or an audio out port on one of your DIMMs), that tells you something is wrong.

Take a look at the database entry for something common like glucose. It's got

1. a brief, high-level description of the chemical
2. details about the chemistry
3. where it's found in the body
4. details about how much of it was found in what parts of the body based on various studies that have already been done
5. disorders it's linked to (eg, diabetes)
6. where to go for more information

Now what's missing is a lot of information about the connections, so technically this isn't really a map (because it's missing relational data), but a catalog. We need to know how each chemical turns into another, and what does the conversion. It's kinda like having a complete parts list for the computer, but not knowing how most of the parts fit together, nor how many volts and amps to run through the wires. Some of these connections we already know. I have a very large poster on my wall illustrating the more common chemical pathways in various organisms. It's not nearly as complete as this catalog in terms of chemicals, but it's got a lot of connections.

The connections are what's really useful. To continue the computer analogy, if you know that the blue LED connects to the hard drive, then if you don't see the blue light blink, then there's probably something wrong with the hard drive. A significant number of drugs aren't active in the form that you take them. They become active when the body (usually in the liver) converts them from the delivery form to the active form. But some people, because of their genetic makeup, convert the drugs differently. They turn them into different metabolites. These metabolites might be totally inactive, or even toxic in some cases. So if you know the connecting system, you can put a drug in, look for what metabolites result, and determine whether or not that person should continue taking the drug.

Star Trek isnt crap. If you want to see crap, tehn watch something like fearfactor or any other reality TV show where people eat out of toilets, have to get covered in worms etc. It is a good show and inspires people to do things like get jobs at NASA. I am a fan of it myself and this is my opinion of Star Trek. IT should continue to at least season 7