Remember, not all arguments/debates are exercises in formal logic. A Slippery Slope argument, for instance, might be perfectly valid in a legal context where precedent carries weight.
3) Duplication is a cornerstone of the scientific method. The bill as written would preempt funding for any study checking the results of other recipients’ studies.
1) Not okay: what constitutes the 'best interests of the USA' is in the eye of the beholder. A libertarian might have a different outlook on 'best interests' than say a religious zealot, etc.
"Beyond all this, there’s the challenge of reconciling these income data with other things we’ve been hearing about economic trends. For example, I recently read somewhere that Americans are three times richer than they were a few decades ago […] a quick web search indeed shows something like a doubling of inflation-adjusted GDP since 1970."
I’m no statistician, but I do know that GDP is at best only loosely correlated with “wealth,” and it sure as heck doesn’t say anything about where that wealth — or even the activity that it actually is a measure of — is increasing.
Positive correlation between GDP and wealth exists but it's hard to find causality. GDP is a misleading terms in economics. Two major components that Gross Domestic Product measures are private consumption and government spending - things by definition unproductive.
The little girl selling lemonade is out there in the hot sun hustling lemonade, even if mom helped her make it or buy the ingredients. This KS, on the other hand, was obviously written entirely by the mother. That's the problem. The kid didn't do anything, and I doubt she's going to wind up with $20K in cash in her pocket.
In 1970 that billion dollar company would have been valued as such based mainly on its assets and cash flow, not its irrational-speculator-fueled market capitalization bubble.
No, he didn't save the seeds he contractually agreed not to when he made his purchase from Monsanto. The case is about commodity seeds he bought from a grain elevator that happened to include Monsanto seeds. Those seeds were not covered by the original contract, but Monsanto is claiming the right to extend that contract at will.
Those patents are on identifying, isolating, and extracting those sequences. Making a new copy of them in your body (or in the case of soybeans, growing the plant, which obviously involves DNA replication) isn't infringing, but doing anything else useful with them is.
You don't patent things, you patent methods. Monsanto has patented a method of inserting and manipulating certain gene sequences in soybeans. Growing offspring of existing modified beans is not the same as performing the modification.
If they wanted their seeds to have an expiration date they should have engineered that in there too. Soybean replicants.
That may be true now. There was a time, not so long ago, that a patent was denied to any idea that had not been reduced to practice, in a working physical embodiment:
Quote: "In United States patent law, the reduction to practice is a concept meaning the embodiment of the concept of an invention. The date of this embodiment is critical to the determination of priority between inventors in an interference proceeding."
(I hasten to add that the above rule about priority no longer applies. Because of recent changes, the U.S. is changing to a first-to-file system.)
Quote: "A 'working model' is usually a strong evidence to demonstrate actual reduction to practice. Unlike patent models of the 18th and 19th century, a working model is no longer a requirement of the U.S. patent law."
All this has been swept away by changes in the law, and we have the present patent system in which the patent office rubber-stamps virtually anything, and claimants work things out in court.
You can patent things other than methods. For example, If you invent a novel chemical you can patent it - that's the basis of the pharma industry business model.
Also, Ad Hominem is not a synonym for “insult.”