Oh, oops... I missed your earlier comment where you likewise criticized the racism in the original story. I'll scroll back and find it.

Hang on, it's gotta be around here somewhere...

HEY! Jimmy Hoffa's body!!!

Still looking...

Uhh, let me see if I follow this dialogue...

ORIGINAL STORY:

Americans are unemployable compared to Indians.

BHEER:

Sounds about right...

RANDOM COMMENT #41532:

That hasn't been my experience. I have better results hiring Chinese or Europeans.

BHEER:

Hey, THAT'S racist!!!

KNEE-JERK IDIOT SLASHDOTTERS:

+1 Insightful

What am I supposed to DO with karma (of the Slashdot variety)? I guess it's cool that after posting non-troll comments for a little while, you can disable ads and have your comments start out with a visibility score of two. However, beyond that there doesn't seem much point... and I don't understand why it affects people's posting in the way that it does.

After thinking on it further, I apologize for perhaps being overly harsh. It's not that I necessarily think your definition is a clear or easy-to-apply one... it's just that I don't have a better one offhand.

I was referring to the comments earlier in this thread about Gary Thuerk (i.e. world's first spammer) at DEC. If you draw the distinction that a "dot-com" must be purely virtual or Internet-only, then you have a distinction that might hold water. It's still somewhat leaky, though... as even the most virtual of companies has operations in the physical world.

I believe we're all aware of the distinction between a web browser and "the internet", sir. The more contentious question seems to be the distinction between Usenet and a "dot-com".

You claim that that a business platform on TCP/IP-based Usenet is a "dot-com", whereas a business platform on TCP/IP-based email is not. In the hands of a disinterested third-party, this distinction has little merit. In the hands of a biased party in search of bragging rights, this distinction is an absurdity.

Not only do we understand your point here on Slashdot, but Slashdot may be the ONLY place where it would even be entertained and discussed. In the hands of everyone else on the Internet, a "dot-com" is a website... and this whole conversation is silly.

I think that claiming a "dot-com" four years prior to the initial release of NCSA Mosaic is absurd. If we're going to contort definitions THAT far, then the first dot-com was probably on Prodigy or Compuserve or maybe even BBS'es in the 1970's.

While I respect and appreciate this post contributor's involvement in the EFF... this particular conversation seems like an awfully self-serving attempt to shoehorn "inventor of the dot-com" onto a resume, a la Al Gore and his infamous "creation of the Internet". Templeton COULD have a claim to this title, but it would feel far more legitimate if he had someone else making the "nomination" as opposed to all the extremely vigorous self-promotion.

There's a reason why Google's search-ranking algorithm works the way it does... because your legitimacy as a public figure depends on how many OTHER people are talking about you, rather than how many words you spew yourself. If you want to move to the top of the heap, you need to use a link farm (i.e. having some other people write stuff like this to Slashdot on your behalf).

Your website defines "dot-com" as "a company born to use the internet as its platform for business". So... Usenet counts as "the internet", but email doesn't? I don't really care either way, since this sounds like a silly pub debate over whether golf or NASCAR are "real" sports. I just can't help but point out the ego-serving fact that the guy on the barstool here happens to be a NASCAR driver.

New DNA sequences are only patentable when they are not found in nature. If they are human-contrived, then I don't see the issue (unless you're one of the fringe types who think we can do without patents altogether and still magically have modern medicine).

Whether a field constitutes patentable subject matter in the first place is a different issue (35 USC 101) than whether a particular patent clam is obvious in light of what has gone before (35 USC 103). So if it would be obvious to create a certain DNA sequence to get a combination of traits from prior art DNA sequences, then it shouldn't get a patent (if the examiner is on the ball).

For what it's worth, I pretty much agreed with Judge Rader's dissent in the In Re Bilski case. He simply argued that the problem with Bilki's patent wasn't that it was a process, but rather that it was an obvious process in light of prior art. We don't necessarily need sweeping new rules from the courts or the PTO... we simply need patent examiners with a clue. Examiners should have enough subject-matter expertise to spot some of these egregious patent claims that have been publicly practiced for decades or longer.

Google is your friend.

Sotomayor worked as an intellectual property litigator prior to becoming a judge. However, her record on IP is actually pretty moderate and mixed. She's ruled in favor of copyright holders in a few cases, yet has limited the ability of big corporations to squash cybersquatters. Generally, her opinions have tended to be pretty narrow and focused on the case at hand. No telling where she'll go now that she has the power to decide broader law without being reversed.

That "gene patent" case that the ACLU is pursuing deals with a method for isolating certain genes from anybody's DNA for the purpose of testing for cancer. It's no different than a medical test for checking a blood sample for chemical markers that indicate certain diseases... nobody's "patenting your blood" there either. Method patents make sense in these contexts because the costs of FDA approval for such medical tests can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, so without patents nobody would develop such tests and we would lack early diagnosis for those diseases.

The ACLU case is all about using a catchy (yet misleading) slogan for purposes of publicity and fundraising.

In the Federal Circuit opinion below, they held that a method patent must be tied to a particular "machine" or involve a "transformation" of some physical article. The "transformation" prong of that test left some interesting loopholes open for software patents, because they held that transforming REPRESENTATIONS of physical articles is good enough. When going through old cases, the court noted that a patent for x-ray medical software was okay because the data represented physical objects (i.e. human bones). However, patents for financial systems weren't patentable because dollars and cents aren't tangible articles.

However, the most interesting parts of the Federal Circuit's decision was that they almost completely declined to discuss the "machine" prong of the test at that time. It will be interesting to see what (if anything) the SCOTUS does with this. Specifically, the Federal Circuit said that a patent must be tied to a "particular" machine (so that the method could still be practiced on machines other than the one described). However, we don't really know much about what constitutes a "particular" machine. Up until Bilski, the Federal Circuit relied on "In Re Alappat"... which held that loading particular software onto a "general purpose" MAKES it a "particular" computer. The Bilski holding said that Alappat was now reversed... but in the discussion, they only talk about how other parts of that case were wrong.

So, is a general purpose computer "particular" enough when loaded with specific software, or not? That would be a very interesting question for the SCOTUS to answer.

Just as an aside... I know this is blasphemy on Slashdot, but not ALL method patents are bad. Method patents traditionally cover things like industrial processes and medical testing, things that actually do require innovation and/or substantial investment in FDA approval. The trick is in writing a rule that filters out crap from patents that actually do make public policy sense. It's harder than you might think to come up with a blanket rule that threads this needle.

I hated Office 2007's "ribbon" interface when I first saw it. However, after the first few days of using it, I found myself at least twice as productive when using it. Yeah, I know... it's a Microsoft idea, and therefore it's automatically bad. Except, it isn't. Everything I need is easier to get at with fewer clicks, and working properly with styles is finally a snap.

It's hard for me to take seriously people's snobbery toward the latest Microsoft UI designs, when so much of the open-source world is simply a direct rip-off of OLD Microsoft UI designs. OpenOffice is largely an MS Office 2000 clone, KDE started out as a beefier Windows 95 clone, and the new desktop menu in Gnome is a bastard stepchild of Vista and OSX. Up until very recently, innovation in UI design hasn't been an open-source strong point... and it would be nice to see more innovation rather than derivative work in this area. I look forward to seeing what the OOo community(*) comes up with.

(*) Just as I look forward to seeing what the "OOo community" IS under Oracle. Up until now, the community was basically "Sun".

Most buses have bike racks. I assume the guy's work was uphill relative to his house... or else he just didn't want to arrive at the office sweaty, but that wasn't an issue for coming home.