He grew up WAY back woods, as in he'd never heard of a toothbrush until he was seven years old and the floor of his parents house was dirt.

He got out of there by taking the bus. He went to Austin, where he worked as a janitor. Ghetto? Maybe. He worked overtime and moved. He kept working overtime and moving. When I was seven years old, we had Easter at the country club.

It woils be another 25 years before I understood HOW he ended up at the country club, with me doing a lot of short-sighted, dumb, and lazy stuff to make myself poor. Sometimes bringing in good money for short periods, but still doing poor things. For example, at 25 I didn't have a high school diploma. I sold a business for $100K and DIDN'T use the money to go to school, so four years later I was poor again, evicted from my rented house. My dad didn't do dumb like that, he did whatever was necessary to get an education.

Yes, my dad was in the right place at the right time .

If you've survived to adulthood, you proably realize that you jump off enough buildings, you'lo eventually get seriously hurt. It might happen on the first building, it might happen on the tenth. That's luck.

Everyday we decide whether to hit the snooze button or get up and get going, whether to iron our shirt or wear something with a few wrinkles. We choose to leave for work 10 minutes early or five minutes late. Thousands and thousands of good choices over the years created thousands and thousands of opportunities for luck to shine. I have made thousands of decisions, like not brushing my teeth some nights, that made it much harder to get lucky.

My dad was in the right place at the right time because he made a habit of being in the right place all the time, all day every day until the right time came.

When you work really hard both on today's work AND on becoming better prepared for five years from now, such as education, some people are going to want to hire you. Whether my dad got promoted on Monday or on Friday was luck, but he did promotion worthy things everyday. It was luck whether he got hired by company A or company B. He treated the people in both companies extremely well, so SOMEONE was going to want him working with them. That's luck - do you get hurt jumping off this building or that one, does the inevitable happen today or tomorrow.

Dyson came up with just the right vacuum design. After building and testing over a THOUSAND prototypes, he got it right and now he's rich. That tends to happen when you keep trying over a thousand times - eventually you hit it. Some call that luck. Dyson calls it hard fucking work. Since Dyson's way of thinking about it WORKS, I think I'll listen to him.

my dad worked overtime scrubbing toilets while going to college. that shows his dedication to hard work and learning. he was the kind of guy you want on your team. Most Americans would choose unemployment before they would scrub toilets. About 15% of Americans don't work. They "can't" find a job, or "can't" work because they are "disabled", though they can still build themselves a new deck. So they sour around complaining that they're not lucky. Guess how often my dad the janitor couldn't find a job, no job at all?

You have a very hard choice to make. So long as your life is the result of luck, or of what the illuminati decide or whatever, you have an excuse, but you're SCREWED. You can't change THEM. The moment you decide that your life is of your own making, you can have any life you want, but you're accepting your responsibility to.

I prefer a solution rather than an excuse .

Over the last 80 years or so, and over any 20 year period, the market has averaged about 8.5%. That's what you'd expect from a boring old index mutual fund. Subtract inflation and that leaves about 4%. Though it'll be close to 4% / year for any 20 year period, the period that matters to you may be a particularly bad one, so figure 3% to be on the safe side. (Or equaliventally use a hedge or other guarantee to lock in 3%).

> working at a minimum wage job

I've noticed gas stations start new people at almost double minimum wage. I made minimum wage - for about two months. Then I got raise because I reliably showed up for my shift - I was stoned out of my mind, but I was there. If you're over 16 1/2 and making minimum wage, start showing up on time. Flipping burgers is like a training bra to get prepared for an actual job, it's not a career for raising a family.

> 1/8th of their income

Do you not see that 1/8th of your income on soda is an INCREDIBLY stupid idea? Yet, I just spoke to someone who makes those kinds of decisions regularly. She literally buys several fountain drinks per day and she's on welfare. My ex-wife will always be broke because those are the decisions she makes.

You calculated five years of soda = 1 year of college.
My baby will be born soon. If I drop the soda money into a Roth for five years, that's one year of tuition. I then stop saving. In seven years, the investment doubles. In another seven, it doubles again. So that's four years of tuition when my kid is 19, because I skipped soda (or bought generic 2L bottles) for five years.

My dad grew up dirt poor, as in the floor of his parents. By making decisions like the soda decision, he ended up flying us on private jets when he was 40. Leaving his house, I did poor people stuff until I was living under a tarp behind the supermarket. Then I started doing rich people stuff. I'm now richer than 99.8% of people, having a comfortable home and a five figure income. (Yes, five figures is rich. Anything over $32K puts you on the top 1%).

Yes and no. You called that a "landmark case" this year, suggesting that it was previously unclear, and would remain unclear in cases not clearly bound by Bank.

  A REASONABLE reading of US statute would be to realize that it says "novel invention", nowhere does it say "on a computer". Therefore, people with reading comprehension problems think that means either a) doing the same old thing is patentable if you add the words "on a computer" or b) brand new inventions are not patentable if they are on a computer. Sure, both are silly interpretations of US law, but they are COMMON interpretations. The new NZ law spells it out in plain English.

So yeah, it's the same as US law IF the person reading US law has any common sense. Unfortunately, common sense isn't all that common in this area. Same as partial birth abortion - zealotry for a political stance makes people blind to the obvious.

Poking at Microsoft is always fun, but when their competitors were doing huge, high pressure deals worth billions and Google bid $3.1415 billion (pi billion) that was the best, I think.

With their reputation for April Fool's day prank launches, launching Gmail on April fool's was good too.

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

It seems to me that doing the same old thing "with a computer" is what shouldn't be patentable. On the other hand, a truly new invention should be treated as such, whether it uses wood, metal, silicon, or cat hair. An old idea is an old idea, a new invention is a new invention. That's what this law says, so I think it's a victory for common sense.

That particular clause says if the novel part is "solely in it being a computer program". "Lies solely in being" is a wordy way of saying "Only because it is", so let's make it clearer by using those clearer words which have the exact same meaningm:

[if it's new] Only because it's a computer program ...

So if it's "new" only because it's a computer program, it's not eligible. On the other hand, if it's new for some other reason, that's not new "solely in being a computer program", that's independent novelty and therefore eligible.

You are mistaken about what the NZ law says. I've quoted it several times, and other commentors have as well. The new NZ law says it's not patentable if the ONLY new thing about it is "in software". So GIF would be unpatentable only if it was previously done in hardware.

Well yes, one could invent a new material. If the process or machine is new, the material isn't relevant.

You be right, my example may not have been the best. I haven't looked carefully at "abstract idea" and how that applies to patents (or doesn't).

> That's independent of whether you implemented that abstract idea on a computer.

Indeed. If it's not patentable, it's not patentable. Not if built of wood, not if built of magnetic iron dust (on a hard drive).
If it is, it is. What one example is made from doesn't matter.

I'm afraid you're entirely theory falls completely flat when you realize that gears and levers are devices for doing multiplication.
ANY machine can be described with a mathematical function. Therefore, if you were correct that anything which can be described as a mathematical function is not patentable, machines are not patentable. Machines are patentable, and carry out functions, ergo you are mistaken.

What is true is that one cannot patent the fundamental laws of math or other "natural laws". You can, however, patent novel USES of natural laws.
You can't patent gravity, you can patent elevators. You can't patent division, you can patent the GIF method for image compression.
You can't patent friction, you can patent new tire inventions.

Obviously patents are for new inventions. Something that does something new, or does it in a new, better way.
A math textbook isn't a new invention, it doesn't do anything new. The first person to invent a book could have patented it.

Google's self-driving car may very well have something new in it. That new invention is patentable. After they invent it and patent it,
they might build it. When they build it, they might build it from steel, glass, rubber, magnetic disks, or brass. Maybe two or three different version made from different materials. Does it matter what material they use to make it? Why are magnetic particles somehow special?