I don't care about the one used by the USPTO ; I care about the system that we have to deal with. Which has been in legislative existence for about a century longer than the "US" part of the "USPTO."

Actually, the next time I see zymurgist Les (a fellow soldier-scientist from the anti-Creationist trenches), I'll have to check details with him, if he knows. He's a patent adviser now, rather than a scientist, so he may be involved in wording things so that they'll get past the Patent Office here AND past the USPTO, but obviously mean vastly different things in the two countries. It is, after all, "law", not sense.
But TBH, we're more likely to talk about beer.

I don't have case citations at hand but you can look them up. In particular, find copyright cases surrounding player piano rolls, in which the courts ruled that it made absolutely no difference whether copyrighted works were used to control a machine.

John Philip Sousa was famously involved in some of those suits.

Fair enough. To prove your theory, I propose we infect you with pneumonia and then have you swallow a quart of antibiotic soap. You'll be cured, right? Or, the reason you won't be cured is because too many people have been washing their hands with triclosan soap? Is that right? I propose this ludicrous test because you seem willing to move the goalposts at whim. You call it a biocide, I call it a an antimicrobial -- what's your point?

Furthermore, though you quoted a paragraph from some paper, I don't believe you understand a word of it. Prove me wrong. Why don't you assume we all have a tenth grade education and explain it to us? You're the expert.

You're scaring people. The study you cite only suggests that some microbes can develop resistance to antimicrobials. It does not suggest that there is any relationship between antimicrobials and antibiotics, which is what you seem to be suggesting. That's absolutely false.

At one moment in time, it was a really good way to get a hold of a high school or college kid (nephew, neice, cousin, whatever). Now it's SMS.

Standards?

1 watch newspapers for high profile deaths
2 show up at funeral
3 stage shockingly objectionable protest
4 be assaulted and/or insulted
5 file suit against grieving relatives for violation of civil rights

It's hard to see that WBC has any standards, or that those nonexistent standards might be any higher than the Prenda lawyers. I'd like to see someone like Judge Wright get hold of the WBC bunch.

I'm going to have to give Linux Mint a try, everyone who mentions it mentions it positively. I need to get Linux on this laptop, anyway.

That's not the point, the point is that if Google+ (or whatever they're naming their "standard") isn't open, then the cottage industry of third party IM clients (some of them are actually pretty decent) would roll over and die.

Fortunately there have been a few judges lately who have an actual head on their shoulders, and who have ruled that simply telling somebody their fly is open is not the same as rape.

But these B.S. laws, like CFAA and DMCA, need to disappear. They were ill-conceived and we KNOW that they cause problems. Not little problems, big ones.

I would keep the safe-harbor provisions of DMCA, and scrap all the rest of it. Same with CFAA.

F*cking clueless judges. There is precedent going back well over 100 years that software is irrelevant to the nature of the machine. Examples: different cards in a Jacquard loom do not make it a "different" loom. Different player piano rolls do not make it a "different" piano. Etc. There are actual court decisions to this effect.

Not to mention that it is also common sense.

A ship changes with hardware changes, and with crew changes. Removing as few as one crew members can change the character of a ship drastically. Likewise, the addition of one or more crew members. You may change a lot of minor physical parts of the ship, and not notice any real change. But changing a major structural member is almost certain to change her handling characteristics. You cannot duplicate a ship's keel precisely, no matter how hard you try.

Automobiles are mass produced, and you might think that two identical cars coming off the same assembly line on the same day would be indistinguishable. But - try to find two identical cars whose handling and performance characteristics are identical. It's not likely to happen.

The input/output from the antenna is patentable, and presumably it was patented. The bus that transfers the i/o from the antenna to the processor is patentable, and again, it was patented.

The software that manipulates those i/o numbers is the algorithm under discussion - and should not be patentable.

Let's suppose that loading a machine with a different set of softwares actually did "create" a new machine.

In that case, each new implementation would be the user's creation. That's right - it's the end user's unique creation, not that of some programmer halfway around the world who coded the individual program.

Or, if not the end user (in a corporate setting) then it would be the creation of the corporation's IT department. Copyrightable and patentable, I would guess. Set the machine up to your very precise specifications, register your creation, and NO ONE can use that same setup unless they license it from you!

Or, we could all fall back twenty and punt, with the admission that this "new machine" business is absurd.

Folks, there was a big bad security breach. Now, *adjusts his massive belt buckle* we're investigating this like we would any other serious crime. And right now we're just trying to identify weapons used in this heinous attack. Now, we've discovered that the hackers were using a very vicious mechanism in this attack. In a murder, you might find a revolver used to put two bullets into the back of a poor old defenseless lady's skull in order to get all her coupons and a couple of Indian head pennies out of her purse. Or perhaps in a pedophile case, you'll find the "secret candy" that was used to lure the children into a white panel van with painted over windows.

*expels a long tortured sigh*

Well, I gotta say, in my thirty years on the force, I wish we were only dealing with something like that today, honest to God Almighty I really do. Instead this artifact was discovered at the scene of the crime. Now, I'm not asking you to understand that -- hell, I'd warn you against even openin' up your browser to the devil's toolbox. But let me, a trained law enforcement professional, take the time to explain the gruesome evidence just one HTTP request away from you and your chillun'. The page is black. Black as a moonless night sky when raptors swoop from the murky inky nothing to take your kids and livestock back up with them silently. On it is a bunch of white text that makes no sense to any God fearun' man on this here Earth. That's what they call a "man page" probably because it is the ultimate culmination of man's sin and lo and behold it displays a guide to exact torture on innocent web servers across this great and holy internet.

Even if you want to use this "man page" for WGET to learn how to use Satan's server scythe, you would have to read through almost twenty pages of incomprehensible technobabble like what that kraut over in Cali -- the one who took his wife's life -- spoke. And if you want to just see an example, it's not at the top! No, why, it's all the way down at the bottom. For this one, they don't even have examples. Just enough options to kill a man. Probably gave Steve Jobs cancer, they never proved all these options in these pages didn't. Buried in the mud of a thousand evils lie more evils.

And why, oh why are we even wasting taxpayer money on these Scripps Journos? Who needs a trial when the evidence is in the tools they used? Folks, I think it's time we WGET one last thing, I'll WGET a rope and you WGET your pitchforks and torches ... let's go down to Scripps and put all this computer business behind us. Okay?

Sorry to respond to my own comment but for Ben Rothke it looks like he just reposts his Amazon reviews here:

Book Review: The Plateau Effect: Getting From Stuck To Success is identical to this Amazon review.

Book Review: The Death of the Internet is identical to this Amazon review.

Book Review: Everyday Cryptography is identical to this Amazon review.

Book Review: Liars and Outliers is identical to this Amazon Review.

It just keeps going ...