More on BSE safety . . .

A while ago, I posted what was then my best understanding of the whole beef safety issue, which was basically that the rogue prions were believed to be confined to brain and spinal tissue, and that therefore beef butchered in manners which do not intermingle brain and spinal tissue with the meat or introduce it into the bloodstream (specifically, kosher and halal butchering) should be, if not perfectly safe, then at least very much safer to eat.

This turns out not to be the case.  The following is relayed from my sister in the UK.  (Emphasis, where used, is mine.)

"Dad's right about the nerve tissue in general being suspect.  The brain and spinal cord stuff comes from the earlier British outbreak, and the main reason they came up with it was as a means of avoiding the alternative of declaring all British Beef unsafe.  It was quite a cynical move, and a lot of people decided to treat all british beef as unsafe anyway, as did some european countries, much to the anger of the British government.  In my opinion the cynics were right, as these declarations about what was and was not safe to eat were being heavily influenced by pressure from the food and farming industry at a time when no-one had even 100% identified how BSE was transmitted.  There was general outrage when the minister for food and agriculture at the time, John Selwyn Gummer, decided to use his six year old daughter as a political gimmick and had her televised eating a hamburger."

So, in short, if you want to be completely safe, you must regard all beef as suspect.  Meanwhile, NPR is reporting that the cause of the Yakima outbreak has been putatively traced to a cow or cows bought from a Canadian breeder, where they are asserted to have been given contaminated feed.  (What imbecile came up with the idea of feeding ground-up bits of dead cow to cows, anyway?  They're herbivores, for crissake.  Ruminants, even.)  According to NPR, efforts are under way to track down every cow that came from this breeder.  Whether they'll succeed remains to be seen.

I'd share data on the actual infection rate of BSE and chances of contracting vCJD, except that to the best of my knowledge there IS no hard data on infection rates.  To the best of my knowledge, it's still all guesswork.  About all we seem to know so far is that, at our current state of understanding of the problem, if you contract vCJD, you will die.

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(Random thought:  I wonder if the biological structure of the BSE prion is always the same?  If so, reason says it ought to be possible to develop a genegineered antibody to it, which could then be used to fairly quickly test for the presence of BSE prions in any beef.)

North Korea tries to play the heavy

The BBC reports that the North Korean government in Pyongyang delivered a warning to an unofficial team from the United States visiting the Yongbyon nuclear reactor, telling the US to make a deal quickly or North Korea will spend the interim developing nuclear weapons.  The article goes on to say that North Korea is already "likely to have one or two nuclear weapons and may be trying to develop more."  A member of the team was shown an empty holding pond which he was told had formerly contained 8,000 spent fuel rods, which were asserted to have been reprocessed into weapons-grade plutonium.

Good news from England

It seems there was a misunderstanding of the diagnosis on my nan's arm.  It's not melanoma, it's a myeloma.  It is currently a single-site cancer, and all the tests they ran when they thought it was melanoma indicate that it has not spread, but it appears to be a Stage II myeloma judging from what I've been told and the information on this site.

It's still not good . . .

"Without treatment, the average survival time for multiple myeloma is only eighteen months. Younger patients are more likely to respond to aggressive treatment, which may improve survival by as much as four to six years."

. . . but it's a better prognosis than it was.

(no subject)

Poor nutrition and lack of exercise mean that for the first time in over a century, life expectancy of the new generation in Western nations has decreased.  Meanwhile, the US is fighting (and some say sabotaging) the WHO's strategy against obesity.

I don't believe it. I'm rooting for NetSol.

Much though we love to hate NSI and Verisign, one has to laugh and jeer at the pair of bottom-feeders who are sueing them for violation of a patent granted -- wait for it -- Dec 30, 2003, covering assigning URLs and email addresses differing only in '@' vs '.' after the username -- for instance, root@foo.com, root.foo.com.

You know, as found in uncountable mountains of prior art, not to mention, say, RFC1034?

"Weyer, who is a patent attorney, is handling this case himself.  He said that Network Solutions and Register.com have both been notified of the suit. Neither returned phone calls to comment on the lawsuit."

Well, yeah.  They probably haven't managed to stop laughing yet.  I'd say the chances of this ludicrous patent standing up in court are comparable to those of the proverbial nitrocellulose dog chasing the asbestos cat through Hell.

Y'know, it feels really weird to be on Netsol's side of an issue.  This might be a first.  I feel . . . tainted.

A Modest Proposal

So.  Enough of this bushwah of the USPTO granting ass-stupid patents because they don't know a useful tech innovation from a hole in the ground.  I have a suggestion.

Instead of continuing to try to get the USPTO to do a job at which it is demonstrably, utterly, totally and institutionally incompetent, to wit, the reasoned and informed evaluation of technology patent applications, let's create a second parallel office, the USCPO -- the US Computer Patents Office.  Staff it with people who actually know a computer from an ATM machine (well, yeah, I know, an ATM machine is a computer, work with me here) and a mouse click from a sharp stick up the ass.  I'm sure right now we can find lots and lots of out-of-work tech people to fill the jobs.  Then let's take away EVERYTHING to do with any form of computer-related patents for the USPTO and give them to the new agency, whose responsibility will be SOLELY to handle issuance or denial of computer technology patents, and which will have the authority to summarily reject any patent application on the grounds that, say, it's immediately obvious to a retarded wombat, or it's been common everyday practice for ten years whether or not it's ever been formalized, or it's simply a stupid patent with no possible reason for existence other than to provide a pretext for sueing people who violate it.

Oh yeah, and while we're at it, let's kill off these bloody submarine patents that people make preliminary filing on, then keep amending and amending and amending for ten or twenty years as other people come up with new ideas, without ever actually finalizing their filing of the patent, in an attempt to steal every idea that comes along that they can half-plausibly claim to have thought of first.  No more.  The buck stops here.  You make your preliminary filing, you can have no more than three revisions, all of which must be within a year of and germane to the preliminary filing, then that's it, game over, FILE IT or fuck off.  And give the examiners authority to summarily dismiss obvious submarine patents, too, while we're at it, just to be sure.

Think it'd help turn patents back into a device for innovators to protect their ideas with, instead of a device for ratfink weasels to use to profit from other people's inventiveness and the USPTO's ignorance and gullibility?