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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, December 30 2012 @ 04:55 PM EST |
"You can't pump a well/do sewing/generate a usable amount of electricty
with just your brain."
No, but you can with your body instead of a steam engine. Unless you're arguing
here for the existence of a soul, your brain physically performs work just like
your body, but of a different kind.
"You can, however, mentally execute an algorithm to compute the hp required
to do the above."
Which has nothing to do with the discussion.
"Therefore, if you can patent doing something "with a computer",
then you should also be able to patent doing something "in your head"
and "with a calculator" and "with a pencil and
paper.""
No, the question was about whether a computer is "necessary." Since a
patent is supposed to cover something "useful", there could easily be
something which you _could_ do in your head, but not usefully, because it would
take too long. In that instance, the computer would, in fact, be necessary for
the process to actually be useful.
I know there are a lot of other reasons why people think programs should not be
patentable. I am merely addressing what I perceive to be the fallacy of
thinking that a computer could never be necessary. The space shuttle employs
fly-by-wire, because it is too unstable to fly without constant computer
correction. All the calculations could, in theory, be done by humans, but the
space shuttle would have crashed with all aboard before the humans had finished
the calculation. So the whole "computer can't be necessary" argument
is a non-starter for a lot of applications. In some applications, people wind
up dead if you don't use a computer; in others, the task is simply not worth
doing without computers -- another marker of necessity.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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