You linked to a Score:0 Anonymous Coward, who I think was probably making a sarcastic joke that they should obviously just eat more carrots. However after you posted we got at least two certifiable cases:
Score:5, Insightful ranting we should just "encourage them to grow more sweet potatoes" and
Score:5, Informative ranting they should just eat sweet potatoes and moringa tree leaves.

If they are growing rice, there are probably reasons that they grow rice. Maybe sweet potatoes don't grow in that soil and climate. Maybe they can't obtain an economically viable yeild. Maybe moringa tree leaves taste like shit. (WTF is a moringa tree anyway?) Maybe there are cultural reasons. It doesn't matter what the reasons are, it doesn't much matter if they are good reasons. The fact is that six hundred thousand children are DYING each year and another half million are going BLIND each year, and yelling at people in extreme poverty to just "eat some goddamn vegetables you idiots" is not a particularly successful solution. I kinda suspect that curing blindness and vitamin-deficiency disease might provide a teensy-weensy bit of help for them to climb themselves out of poverty.

If I found a mutant variety of rice out in the wild which contained Vitamin A, these GMO ranters would embracing it because it's a NATURAL mutant. We knew we wanted rice containing Vitamin A, we looked for it, we didn't find it (yet), that mutation might pop up in a field somewhere tomorrow..... but somehow it magically becomes daaaaaaaaangerous if we make it ourselves rather than waiting around looking for that "natural" mutation. Because a natural mutation potentially making cyanide in your food is somehow better than intelligently, carefully, deliberately putting vitamins into food.... because if we smartly do it that's unnaaaaaaatural.

There's the old Luddite saying: "If man were meant to fly he would have been born with wings"
Fuck that. If we weren't meant to engineer artificial solutions to problems we wouldn't have been born with brains. Well, some of us anyway.

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And you misspeled CanHasDIY.

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You mispelled sarcastic.

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That is configurable, and typically ranges between about a half second and ten seconds. In fact I've been seeing about ten seconds between key-frames in some of the movies on my cable TV. It's visible as a faint fog that creeps up in very dark scenes, and abruptly vanishes to black at the next key-frame. The sudden jump is distracting, but it's even more distracting consciously realizing I'm "watching a CODEC" rather than "watching a movie. Chuckle.

Yeah, my description was a little sloppy.

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No. The New Zealand bill was a scam, and all the news coverage screwed up and fell for the scam. The main body of the bill directly stated that software was not patentenable, but Supplementary Order Paper No 237 provided "clarification" that only software-as-such was not patentable, and further "clarified" that software-as-such ONLY included patent claims which merely added on-a-computer to something old. In legalese, they excluded patent claims who's sole contribution was that it was a program.

This means the bill actually MANDATED pure software patents, so long as the patent claim described some new math or something.

For example the classic pure-software patent catastrophe was the GIF patent... that patent claimed some new mathematics for converting one series of numbers (representing a picture) into a shorter series of numbers (a GIF compressed picture). The patent described (contributed) new mathematics, therefore the it's patentable. The RSA public-key crypto software patent is also still patentable, it claims new math for encrypting stuff. All audio and video codec patents, all patentable in New Zealand.

The only patents they excluded was the stupidest level stuff like "fill out your tax form exactly the same way you filled it out last year, but I want a patent on doing it with software".

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It's not even that. The current version is basically just a glorified slideshow viewer.

The way most video codecs work is they start by storing a full picture once every second or two. These are called key-frames, or intra-frames. The frames in between key-frames are called inter-frames, and this is where 90+% of the real work of a codec happens. These frames are stored as a short description of how the current frame is different than the last key-frame. Instead of storing the full picture you just describe what parts of the picture are moving, or if part of the picture is getting brighter or darker, or if colors are shifting.

It's essentially a slideshow viewer, showing something akin to a series of JPEG pictures. Basically the entire CODEC is missing, the part that compresses and decompresses all the video frames in between.

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What marketers know about me:
He's running AdBlock.

What marketers think they know:
Everyone wants to see relevant ads.
He's running AdBlock because he's annoyed that the ads he's been seeing aren't relevant enough.

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Oh, a little clarification on the US Supreme Court and US law.

The Supreme Court handed down some good, but somewhat murky, rulings a few decades ago. Since then the lower courts have gone batshit insane throwing out all limitations on patentability.

Part of the reason is that many court cases involving a megacorp on one side demanding they be given a patent on X, and on the other side is some lawyer from the patent office arguing X isn't a valid invention. And of course the army of megacorp lawyers tends to steamroll the patent office lawyer, establishing some new tidbit of twisted precedence. Case, after case, after case, they steadily pushed the line (and the rules) off into the Twilight Zone.

Oh, and the corporations are free to file their case in any US district they want. So they ALL file in the same district... the Eastern District of Texas. That district has a well deserved reputation for judges having the most extreme ideology, granting and uphold anything that has the word "patent" scribbled on it in crayon.

In the last few years the Supreme Court has taken notice and started issuing some harsh smackdowns against the nutty logic of the lower courts. Unfortunately the Supreme Court has been issuing "narrow" rulings, basically they've stated that X Y and Z are insane interpretations of patent law, they've said invalid patents are being granted, but haven't clarified which or how many invalid patents are being granted, and basically all the Supreme Court said is "Yo, you're fucking up, go back and follow our old rulings on patents". Except the lower courts have spent the last few decades becoming experts in how to actively not understand those Supreme Court rulings.

So, the current general practice of US patent law is that they still accept insane patents from Twilight Zone, but the judges know most of the basis for doing so has been struck down, and the judges are arguing with each other in utter confusion desperately trying to figure out some coherent set of logic and rules.

And a major problem is that any sane set of rules, anything coherent with the old Supreme Court rules, is basically going to invalidate over a HUNDRED THOUSAND existing patents. Many of the district judges are dead set on the mindset that those patents are valid, and the more reasonable judges are insecure at the prospect of making a "radical" ruling that would create chaos by invalidating vast numbers of existing patents.

Ummm... this post was supposed to be a "small note" explaining the Supreme Court quote from my other post, and why we're in a mess despite having that obvious-solution quote. I guess I got carried away. Chuckle.

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Agreed :)

And you'll probably appreciate this U.S. Supreme Court quote:
[this] Court explained the correct procedure for analyzing a patent claim employing a mathematical algorithm. Under this procedure, the algorithm is treated for 101 purposes as though it were a familiar part of the prior art; the claim is then examined to determine whether it discloses 'some other inventive concept.'

Yep and yep. It has been a long and painful wrapping my head around the language and logic they use. Unfortunately being able to read it has pretty much only accomplished one-way communication so far. Every time I discuss it with a software-patent advocate I can't seem to get them to wrap their head around the (obvious to us) point that certain patent-claims disclose nothing more than new-math, and that a new math equation or new math function or new math algorithm isn't an invention.

Hell, the New Zealand law was uncommonly easy to understand. In a lot of these cases they state "Software, as such, is not patentable", without the extra explanation given in this law. Now, I'm sure you look at that and think it says software isn't patentable. But in their language "software, as such" means "software that doesn't do anything". You see, you're not claiming a patent on the software (as such), you're claiming a patent on software that does something.... you're claiming what the software does. And what the software does isn't "software as such".

Laws that loudly and pointlessly proclaim they exclude patents on "software-that-does-nothing". If you ever see "as such", that's what it means.

Yeah. Painful.

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No. Common sense says that new-poetry is not an invention, new-movie-plots are not an invention, and new-math is not an invention. A survey of programmers found 94% of programmers saying it's not an invention. And pardon my America-centric reference here, but the U.S. Supreme Court said it's not an invention:

[this] Court explained the correct procedure for analyzing a patent claim employing a mathematical algorithm. Under this procedure, the algorithm is treated for 101 purposes as though it were a familiar part of the prior art; the claim is then examined to determine whether it discloses "some other inventive concept."

Software is nothing more than a particular form of written-out algorithm. "New software" is nothing more than a written out "new math algorithm". All software is required to be treated as familiar prior art. You can certainly list software inside or in conjunction with an invention, the presence of software obviously doesn't remove patentability, but software itself cannot be an invention. "new math" cannot provide the requisite novelty or non-obviousness. Describing a new math algorithm isn't an invention, you only have an invention if you disclose "some other inventive concept" beyond the (presumed familiar prior art) software.

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More lies straight from the pits of hell.
Obviously this super-canyon was carved during Noah's flood.
Another Win for Flood geology!

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Crapman and Dropin?

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Alexis Parrish: My name is Alexis Parrish And I need to get my own patent please have someone. Contact me at
alexisparrish28@gmail.com... US should come up with its own distinct logo that must be present
somewhere on every item traded ;)

Ooooh...... was this supposed to be a thread for posting fake responses? Sorry, my bad.

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Maybe I've spend too much time learning to read patent law (and copyright law), but I'm baffled how you think it says that. It's clearly saying the only time you can't get a patent is if the *sole* contribution is that it's a program. A "contribution" means "the new thing I'm teaching the world."

Consider the classic software-patent-catastrophy example, the GIF patent. It is a purely mathematical contribution teaching how to convert one series of numbers (representing a picture) into a shorter series of numbers (representing the identical picture). This is "useful" because the picture can now be stored in a computer using less memory, and because the picture can be sent over the internet more quickly. That's the "contribution".

The law mandates that this sort of pure software patent, pure mathematics patent, must be patentable.

The only thing excluded is a patent which contributes NOTHING beyond adding the words "on a computer" to some old non-patentable thing.

And we have many in the software community cheering victory, when in fact this is a complete bait-and-switch defeat.

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The 237 supplement mandates that any software passing the usual "new" and "useful" requirements MUST be patentable.

10A Computer programs

        (1) A computer program is not an invention and not a manner of manufacture for the purposes of this Act.

        (2) Subsection (1) prevents anything from being an invention or a manner of manufacture for the purposes of this Act only to the extent that a claim in a patent or an application relates to a computer program as such.

        (3) A claim in a patent or an application relates to a computer program as such if the actual contribution made by the alleged invention lies solely in it being a computer program.

The ONLY thing excluded from patentability is something like a program to fill out your tax form, where the SOLE contribution is that it's software doing it. It rules out "X on a computer" if X is something old, and NOTHING is added to it other than "on a computer".

All the standard software patents, the GIF patent, the RSA encryption, patent, the MP3 and other audio/video codec patents, all contain novel mathematical contributions. The GIF patent contribution is that compresses image data. The RSA patent contribution is a new public-key encryption.

This is a complete and utter loss for programmers. They ruled out a laughable narrow category of blatantly bogus patent claims, and otherwise mandated any software that does anything "novel" and "useful" must be patentable.

It's appalling that such a large segment of the geek community have been completely swindled by it.

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