Court says that Flook's process is not the " kind " of process that the patent law permits to be patented, even though it is a process in the ordinary dictionary sense of the word, Judge Rich finds the inquiry impermissible because " ?101 was never intended to be a'standard of patentability'; the standards, or conditions as the statute calls them, are in ?102 and ?103 . " The only legitimate question, he says, is whether the claimed subject matter is " new, useful, and unobvious ."
32.
Such things happen in fact, with the spread of areal features or with commonplaces ( say, devoicing in word-final position ), but the whole point of setting up subgroups, branches, and so on, in the first place, is that it is more plausible that a phonological ( or morphological ) innovation, particularly a complex or unobvious one, took place only once in the history of the group in the speech community of a proto-branch, rather than separately and repeatedly in a whole array of daughter languages . ( Finnic consonant gradation is in the character of a complex and counterintuitive innovation .)
33.
There's also sympathy laughter like when a comedian on stage asks a fat person in the audience to stand and congratulations them on their fight against anorexia-- some of the audience laughs to make the fat person feel better-others laugh out of surprise because they didn't expect such an insensetive comment-others laugh to show superiority ( " I'm not fat, but you really are ! " )-others laugh when they see the reaction of the fat person trying to laugh it off when inside they must be pissed off ( and by laughing they are saying " I understand the unobvious here : I understand that he's laughing but inside he's dying " ).
