You're absolutely right.

This isn't "conservative" in any way, these beliefs are _modern_ ones, projected into some imaginary past.

Take abortion -- since the middle ages, abortion was allowed by the church until the third or fourth month of the pregnancy. The belief that abortion should not be allowed at all comes up somewhere in the last quarter of the 20th century. It's an entirely modern view.

You're still not thinking big enough. Think C.

Yep, just about everything programmed in ANY programming language will suddenly infringe some copyright of the language-inventor. And in some cases, there are even programming languages programmed in other languages, these will infringe too. And don't bother to do assembler, obviously, the processor manufacturer has a copyright on that.

Oh, and I'm not even sure if that doesn't go further down to finally someone having a copyright on mathematics.

I can just see, in many years, headlines decrying ancestral decisions to tap lunar orbital energy which went too far, resulting in lunar orbital decay and imminent collision.

As many have said below, your brain is indeed doing math - what it's not doing is "computation".

Most of the discussions in this thread are forgetting that important difference. The applications for which this type of chip will be useful are those in which the exact value of something is not important, but the relationships between values are. For instance, if you're implementing a control system algorithm, you don't care that the value of your integration is something specific, but you do care that it will always increase in proportion to the inputs and time. This is more akin to how your brain works - it doesn't care how much force it has to apply to your arm to make it move to catch a ball - it just knows that it needs "more" or "less".

For things like finance or engineering design that actually require computation this chip would be a poor choice.

Yes, pharmaceuticals are actually the only place where the patent system works as planned: Every new chemical compound is patentable as entirely new. CHOOOH is NOT viewed as "depending" on CHOOH, but as a totally different thing. Which it actually is.

From the internal point of view -- does the patent system work as it is defined by itself -- it works there. In every other field of endeavour, the legal costs (across everyone) are actually higher than the license revenues. This means, patents on everything but chemical compounds are economically worthless waste, a tax from which only lawyers profit.

If we take a look what patents on pharmaceuticals do elsewhere, the picture looks different:
- http://www.boingboing.net/2011/03/14/10-drug-becomes-1500.html
- http://www.palgrave-journals.com/biosoc/journal/v6/n1/abs/biosoc201040a.html
And finally, to top it all off, there are the shenanigans companies like Monsanto are doing.

So from a macro-economic point of view, these patents are doing damage too.

Correction: It would be 2.6.19. Still; the oldest Kernel we've got running here is 2.6.24.

Yes, if copyright was 5 years right now, Linux 2.6.10 would be public domain. Who in his right mind is still running 2.6.10 now?

Pharmaceuticals: Contrary to what the industry says, a drug does not take 800 million Dollars to develop and test, but only 40 million Dollars.

Yes, I absolutely don't understand what the republicans have against this Obama Bush.

Well, there's of course plenty of reasons to hate him, but these would be the same reasons why you would hate George W. Bush Junior.

New Bush, same as the old Bush.

I don't see anything to justify "software patents" in the first place, and actually, patent law forbids it. Everyones.

Just because some idiot lawyers redefined "software" as not being "math", because they couldn't grasp the math isn't enough reason to not ditch illegally granted patents.

There is nothing to "opt out"; the situation with these illegally granted patent just needs to be resolved.