Software patents are actually defined in terms of a physical object, the medium on which it's stored. They often include magic phrases like "a computer readable memory device having stored thereon a computer program".

IMHO, the problem isn't with the physicalness of the invention. After all, in the end it's really the insight and effort that you're trying to reward. The problem, I believe, is that the USPTO has done a terrible job of encouraging insight and effort by granting vague and obvious patents which contain neither, and the only "insight" was in how to game the patent office.

Judging what's insightful enough to merit a patent is tricky, but the patent trolls rely exclusively on patents where anybody "skilled in the art" would tell you that it was too trivial to bother writing down. The trolls rely on the fact that judges and juries are not skilled in the art, and are easily confused. Even in this case, the judge who came to the correct conclusion ends up making it (IMHO) needlessly complicated:

http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/images/stories/opinions-orders/2011-1009.Opinion.1-17-2013.1.PDF

He explicitly makes "obviousness" a matter of law, i.e. a thing defined by the details of previous cases, rather than the universal opinion of those who would have done precisely the same thing if presented with the same problem.

Yeah, I was afraid of that. Fortunately, the "medical marijuana" back door appears to be much more effective than the "really, you need it for industrial applications for which no other plants are as magical" back door. At least within some states, that one is slowly wedging the door into recreational use.

That doesn't solve the federal problem, which still presents problems even in legal states, and which will have to be solved before the actual (as opposed to delusional/wishful) advantages of hemp over other products can be realized. That one, I'm afraid, make take a few decades, even after public opinion shifts.

The wiki link to "bast" refers to a dozen species that produce basts, including flax, wisteria, mulberry, and kudzu.

Is there a reason to go for hemp in particular, aside from the usual hemp-will-solve-everything? Flax is also produced in industrial quantities. TFA doesn't mention why they chose hemp bast.

Look, I'm all for legalized weed and hate the propaganda that makes it out as a devil drug, but I'm not any bigger fan of exaggerations about the wonders of hemp. At least on this web site, it would be nice to look at actual data, rather than who can out-propagandize everybody else.

Obama and the Democrats did what was politically possible. The public option would have been too politically unpalatable for the most conservative Democrats. Under the rules, they needed every single Democrat; no Republican would have given serious consideration to any plan, even the one that is actually substantially similar to their own (and could have been even more similar if they'd participated in the development of it).

In hindsight, they might as well have gone for a public option: most of the conservative Democrats who put the kibosh on it to protect their right flanks lost anyway in the resulting outrage (a bizarre combination of complaints about the cost with complaints about nonexistent "death panels" whose actual purpose was to reduce costs). If they'd plotted it out better, they'd have just expanded Medicare as an insurance provider, which would have been far neater and cleaner than the state-run exchanges that are supposed to do the job. (People like to praise state governments over federal ones, largely because people are so focused on what they imagine is The Big Picture that they have no idea how badly their state governments mismanage things, and how little scrutiny they get for it, while suffering from massive losses to scale than the federal government achieves.)

Further apart _on average_, which they do. This result doesn't change that; the density of primes still goes to zero.

The question is whether despite that increasing _average_ distance, there is also an increase in the _minimum_ distance. That was unproven, and now we know: the greatest minimum distance is at most 70 million. It could be as small as 2, and in fact I think most mathematicians strongly suspect that it is: no matter how high you go, there will always be some pair of primes larger than that, separated only by 2. But they'll be rarer and rarer, just as the primes themselves are harder and harder to find.

Green strikes me as a pretty smart guy, but I don't think he has a PhD. I don't believe he even went to college.

Perhaps you're thinking of Brian May, the Queen guitarist who got a PhD in astrophysics.

I thought that was the case already. As I understand it, donations to 501(c)4 and 527 groups aren't tax deductible. Donations to 501(c)3 groups are, but they're not allowed to do political campaigning.

(501(c)4 groups are supposed to do only a little political campaigning, which is at the center of the current IRS kerfluffle: they investigated what are almost certainly political groups, who were supposed to file as 527s [whose donor lists are not secret]. But since many of these were conservative political groups, who all sprang into existence at the same time, Obama bad and Sarah Palin gets to be President. or some such.)

There's also more concern about churches, who are 501(c)3 and therefore have tax-deductible donations, who are explicitly doing political campaigning. But since it's a church-state matter, the IRS is reluctant to call them on it.

I dunno, but TFA appears to be outraged about it.

I'm having a hard time sorting out their methodology, but it looks as if the problem is that there just weren't any "anti-" groups opposing the measure, at least by their calculation. They totted up only $1.4 million spent by all the "anti-" groups, which is practically nothing compared to the billions spent on all of the Senate campaigns put together.

Neither, in fact, is that $55M spent by "pro-" groups all that large. This is the problem with the "campaign fund bribery" theory. These groups are heavily constrained in how much money they can give, just $10,000 to each candidate. These candidates need millions.

http://www.fec.gov/pages/brochures/contriblimits.shtml

Their contributions just aren't big enough to make a bribe. It's not even enough to get them to take a meeting with you. Rather, it's the other way around: they contribute to the candidates that they want to see win the election.

EVERYBODY on this list got more money from the "pro-" groups than from the "anti-" groups. Kelly Ayotte voted no; she got $326,335, compared to $31,751. Mike Crapo, $181,414 vs $15,020. Ted Cruz, $529,897 vs $19,050.

What this data indicates, if anything, is that there just weren't many groups who opposed this. The direct marketers, the catalog sales, and computer manufacturers. That's it. Weren't there any consumer groups? Consumers are the ones who pay the tax. None of the consumer groups took a stand? Or did their crappy methodology just miss them?

I really wish that were true, but nobody except a few working climatologists actually does the tests. For 99.999% of the population, "science" means "looking up the arguments that agree with me, and repeating them." They don't even read the primary sources, nor are they capable of tracking back their arguments to them.

That's true even for people who are correct about climate change. The difference isn't that they've engaged in actual science, but rather that they're on the side of those who have. They're not even necessarily any less ideology-bound. Though these days, the fierce devotion of the right to its own echo chamber is unparalleled. The problem isn't so much that they're wrong on climate change, but that their entire view of what science does is completely wrong, and the processes themselves are treated with suspicion when they contradict their beliefs. If the scientific data doesn't tell them what they want to hear, they'll tell you that the scientists who gathered the data are lying.

My point being: you're not going to convince them with a socratic argument based on verifiable data, and they're not going to go out and gather the data themselves. They'll continue to cherry-pick their arguments (i.e. every graph they show you will begin in 1998), and I can't think of any mechanism for changing that. (Except perhaps time: the denialists tend to be older, and are eventually going to die off.)

It's standard fare for science press releases. If the actual advance you're making is boring (using different hardware to speed up processing), then tell them about the part that's been done all along and take credit for it. (Alternatively: take credit for being "just about there" from some far off future goal, to which you've just made a non-trivial but still minor advancement.)

Most "science" journalists eat it up, slightly rewriting it and passing it over to their editors so that they can knock off early and grab a beer. One would hope for slightly more from a web site "for nerds", but their editors also would like to knock off early and grab a beer.

I wonder how bad a problem identity theft is in those cases. "Hi, I'm Jim Jones, and I'd like to withdraw all of the money out of my account." "Why sure, Mr. Jones, if that's who you say you are. Since I've got no pic on file, I'm going to take you at your word."

It's hardly the worst problem banks have in terms of security: everybody you've ever handed a check has everything they need to empty your account, since the only ID verification is the signature and they're not checking that, either. We've always had these problems, though the increased reliance on computers means that the thefts can be automated more effectively.

I'd pay more for an account which took better steps to verify my identity before giving out money from my account, or worse, loaning out money to somebody claiming to be me.

Thanks for posting that. That's very interesting.

It's entirely possible, though it can be difficult to judge based on the trailer. The trailer is made by a marketing department, whose goal is to make the film look as appealing as possible in their estimation of the target market. And if that means playing up the Big Name Star who isn't actually the lead, or showing you the climax of the film because it's the most exciting thing (yeah, you saw that too, I bet), they're perfectly happy to do that.

I'm not crazy about the trailer, but I'll reserve judgment on the film itself until I see it. Which I probably will (which is why the trailer isn't aimed at me).