I do not consider myself educated on the matter of vaccines and am ill-equipped to defend any position on either side :) To your point, proving a negative such as "vaccines definitively do NOT cause autism, ever" with 100% certainty is nontrivial. I simply haven't seen any compelling evidence that they are causally linked to autism, which is usually the claim.
At this point, there is no _credible_ evidence I'm aware of that suggests vaccines cause autism. Hence, a doctor dismissing those claims is reasonable and expected. There is no claim here that non-experts necessarily have the same credibility as experts.
My statement was more in reference to e.g. the use by some experts of esoteric and potentially inaccurate models to silence critique by overwhelming non-experts with jargon. "I spent years developing this model, what do you know?"
I certainly agree that experts of various calibers and professions are frequently wrong. However, if I have an agenda, I haven't figured out what it is yet ;)
If you re-read the quote you pasted, you'll see that I accommodate your point of view (I think) - they human in your scenario BELIEVES that they do no wrong. I am trying to at least ask the question, "are you sure about that?"
With almost anything else, what you really need isn't the idea, but the factory to make the idea. You could tell me everything there is to know about making a Ferrari, but the likelihood that I could build a factory that could replicate Ferrari's is relatively small.
Now look at software. The "factory" can be obtained for free by going to a public library. As such, I'd argue that 1) the broadness of many of the patents that already exist is ridiculous, and was earned by nothing more than a rudimentary understanding of programming and 2) the relative likelihood that you're going to have a TRULY novel idea is lower due to the size of the population and amount of collaboration inherent in programming.
On top of all that, you don't see "first, invent a programming language that allows me to do all this neat stuff." They're already building on so much groundwork that they don't understand, it's sort of belittling the achievements of the people who truly created NEW things in computer science, to say that rounded corners on a texting app or whatever deserve a monopoly that could crush other applications.
- Your patent application is much more readable than most. That's a good start.
- hosay123 has already said basically what I would've - you may have found something that no one else has done 100% before, but it is clearly very similar to HTML in email with a few minor differences. Here are a few examples that I think would bring both the idea's novelty and non-obviousness into question:
http://www.boutell.com/wusage/8.0/eml.html
My question to you is: what will happen if you are granted this patent? You've been working on this for 4 years at least, judging by the 2009 date on the application, so my main argument would simply be that you could've probably found a more interesting use for your time. It pains me to say this, since I can tell you've spent a lot of time on your application, but honestly I would feel worse if I didn't say anything.
Actually, that's not a bad idea. Start-ups that value patent reform could band together and give a few hours a month to doing this, and I'll bet it would make a pretty significant dent.
Agreed! A huge part of what you can do to help is just parse the legalese into human language, so that any knowledgable person can see right through it.
It costs the companies quite a bit, and a reasonably knowledgable person about 10-15 minutes to find prior art that, once discovered by someone at the USPTO, can help to fast-track a denial. In any case, you're at least helping to make sure that none of the ridiculous claims get through (these are common in patents, just to see if they can get away with it since they're already spending the money)