Re:Patents and You (Score 1)

This all sounds horribly familiar, was watching TV about the hanging gardens of babylon, or to be more precise a possible version of the hanging gardens.

now the historical chaps and the engineers worked out that the upper terraces required some 300 tons of water a day, and thus started playing with different ways of getting the water to the top of the gardens.

after a lot of messing around they concluded that the only way they could see this working was to use a screw, passages written by the bloke who built it all could be interpreted to support this and so all was dandy.

but NO! archimedes invented the screw 400 years later, so therefore this argument was wrong! Now I don't wish to sound pompous, but WHAT? why can't two people in history be credited with stumbling across the same idea?

patents thats why, what if I were to sit in my bath (having never heard the word "eureeka") and notice displacement. because someone else noticed this it would appear that, were it to be patented I'm not allowed to think of it.

for a world in which personal freedom is paramount, we seem to be intent on restricting our right to think

Datalas