[rescue] Distributed Folding - the Geeks team

[Sheldon T. Hall]

 Phil Stracchino says ...
> On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 08:20:02PM +0000, Mike Meredith wrote:
> >
> > I don't know if things have changed, but their FAQ makes it plain that
> > although they intend to patent any discoveries the information will be
> > made available to the public at no cost. It may not be ideal, but it
> > makes more sense than allowing someone else to patent any discoveries.
>
> Personally, I like the idea of patenting information in order to keep it
> in the public domain, but despise the necessity.

Seeing as how a number of recent medical advances, some of them patented,
have kept me out of the hands of the funeral industry, I don't give a rat
sandwich.

I'll go further.  HP is a for-profit corporation, with no pretense of being
anything else.  HP makes a tiny sonography tool.  I'm sure it's patented.  I
don't like C.Fiorina, or what's happened to HP/DEC/Compaq under her tenure.
None-the-less, the HP sonography tool meant a surgeon at Stanford (whose
main field was research, and patenting some of it) could save my larynx long
enough for some _other_ medical wizards to come up with a way of replacing
half of it with a chunk of my arm.  I can still breathe, eat, and talk, and
I'm alive.

So, I'd offer my spare cycles to the HP guys if I thought they could use 'em
to produce something else that would save someone else.  The fact that they
might make a buck on it doesn't bother me at all.

-Shel