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While I can't speak for ACM, the policy seems to be "you're smart enough to figure out a way to get it free, so we might as well make it cheap." For SIGDA, the board position is that if you're interested in the material, you should be able to get it with minimum hassle. The ACM portal is in fact working for ACM; they're getting lots of subscriptions, and have cut down on the admistrative grief.

Now if only the entertainment industry would get it....

ACM and IEEE journals can have page charges, but they're usually optional. If you've got a million bucks of government funding to do some research, it doesn't seem out of line for you to help subsidize the publication of research results. For conferences, much of the registration fee goes for rental of the meeting space, food, and so on; more than most people would expect. Conferences require authors to register so that the other attendees don't show up to an empty room. Conferences usually do a little better than break even, which helps cover the freebie DVD, and things like that.

I found a paper written by Najib Callaos on IEEEXPLORE.

Most people won't have a subscription so here's the abstract (it reads like one of the randomly generated papers):

Toward a practical methodological theory

Callaos, N. de Callaos, B.
Dept. de Procesos y Sistemas, Simon Bolivar Univ., Caracas, Venezuela;

Abstract

The general objective of this paper is to describe the way the authors have been relating general system theory (GST) to practice. The authors applied GST to design a methodology for software development, first. Then, by means of the experience/knowledge learned from applying the methodology to specific systems, a continuous redesigning process started, which simultaneously generalized the methodologies and increased its complexity adding new modules for an increasing diversity of diverse-tasks needed for different systems/situations. The methodological kernel increased it generality and the sub-methodological modules increased its details. This paved the way for a general systems methodology which, when including cognitive/thinking method would return to the theoretical realm, i.e. to a methodological theory which, in turn, would pave the way to theoretical methodology

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=biometric+hash

First result:

Biometric hash based on statistical features of online signatures

Vielhauer, C. Steinmetz, R. Mayerhofer, A.

Abstract: Presents an approach to generating biometric hash values based on statistical features in online signature signals. Whilst the output of typical online signature verification systems are threshold-based true-false decisions, based on a comparison between test sample signals and sets of reference signals, our system responds to a signature input with a biometric hash vector, which is calculated based on an individual interval matrix. Especially for applications, which require key management strategies, hash values are of great interest, as keys can be derived directly from the hash value, whereas a verification decision can only grant or refuse access to a stored key. Further, our approach does not require storage of templates for reference signatures, thus increases the security of the system. In our prototype implementation, the generated biometric hash values are calculated on a pen-based PDA and used for key generation for a future secure data communication between a PDA and a server by encryption. First tests show that the system is actuality able to generate stable biometric hash values of the users and although the system was exposed to skilled forgeries, no test person was able to reproduce another subject's hash vector.

There hasn't been a *public* Soyuz crew death since 1971

There haven't been any, and so the statistic stands. There are no gaps in the Soyuz launch records, no missing crews. Jim Oberg has pretty much debunked claims of covered up deaths in space. The deaths you explicitly refer to were indeed training accidents, and just as I don't count the crew of Apollo 1 (or people like Eliott See for that matter) in launch reliability statistics, you're correct not to count them either.

The Proton is a rocket family, but it doesn't contain the Soyuz, so I don't know where that non-sequiter comes from, especially given the proton is not human-rated. The Soyuz is also a family, but the differences between the family members comes from what upper stage you stick on top (Fregat, etc). The lower stage plus boosters is the same, right back to the original R-7 ICBM adapted to launch Sputnik. You can find more recent launch data from Starsem, the Soyuz launch company, and historical data can be also be found pretty easily, assuming you're searching for the right rocket family! If you're vague on Russian rocket families, this diagram will help. The Proton statistics -- a completely different, cargo rated booster-- have no bearing on the Soyuz statistics, the actual launch vehicle that is in the same arena as the shuttle (and these days the Long March 2F) in putting humans in orbit.

It is of course totally possible to create a wifi-based mesh network, but the Mesh network in Vegas inverts that idea: mesh is used for the backbone (which city workers and high end subscribers can access directly), with bridges to local WiFi hot spots for normal consumers. The radio technology underlying the Vegas mesh is very different from WiFi. The company which brought the technology over from its military roots (MeshNetworks) was bought by Motorala a few months ago, so expect to see more of it, including the possibility of a Mesh-based cell phone network.

The advantage of the Vegas Mesh technology is that it can handle, e.g. people driving around at 40 miles per hour and still maintain a seamless high speed VPN connection, even when moving from access point to access point, something 802.11 can't do. Nor do 802.11 based systems easily allow clients to become peers in the network, thereby automatically scaling coverage -- it's basically a backbone-and-star configuration, while MeshNetwork's tech is a true peer-to-peer mesh configuration (excluding anything on the other side of a WiFi bridge of course). However, MeshNetwork's cards for direct access are a lot pricier than WiFi cards, and the bells and whistles may not be needed for some municipalities anyway, especially if all you are interested in is providing WiFi service in the first place: Mesh really shines when you're also considering it as part of a package that includes first responder communications.

Disclaimer -- I'm the author of the original IEEE Spectrum article!

Are you sure you're talking about the
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=GM+%22X+F rame%22&btnG=Search
"X frame" for 1955-1957 Chevs or
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=GM+skateb oard&btnG=SearchGM's skateboard?

I think the skateboard concept is cool but really
should be electrical. It just makes more sense.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature /mar05/0305carf1.html
I think this car is the real wave of the future.
The stats are unreal!!

Cheers,
Ben

Here's another problem that is going to take people years to grasp, but Intel's approach to multiprocessing is all wrong. Intel's intellectual property makes them experts in single threads of execution. Critics argue that Intel's approach to multiprocessing (e.g. hyperthreading) is all wrong, more reminiscent of their older architectures. As a result the performance will lag far behind, say, Sun's upcoming Niagara

See xmlgrep. Also xgrep and xml command line utilities.

you, like all GNU fools, can't live without verbosity

A strange comment considering Plan 9's Unix origins.

I've been thinking recently about the direction of computing, it seems everything is 'going serial'. SCSI, ATA, FireWire, HyperTransport, USB, these are all serial protocols. It's time an OS focused on having fantastic and robust serial capabilities, and defined the various busses as limits against the entire set of capabilities. Maybe this is getting more towards the microkernel state of mind, but shouldn't all the serial protocols share a command set as far as the kernel is concerned?

(I'm not sure what that has to do with microkernels....)

The fact that the low-level transport for some interconnect mechanism happens to be bit-serial doesn't mean that it has any deeper relationship to any other interconnect mechanism that also happens to be bit-serial. The SCSI command set can be transported over the serial SCSI transport, FireWire, and even a certain other long-lived serial transport (iSCSI with IP running over Ethernet, as well as some SCSI-over-Ethernet transport), but that doesn't mean that the lower layers of the protocol share anything.

It seems to me that the IEEE is doing a great job of making itself totally irrelevant to the software community. The main reason for this is that people, who might otherwise be interested in what they have to say, are turned off because IEEE charges a hefty fee to access any of their content (standards or articles).

A quick example. You are about to introduce unit testing to your team. Do you know that IEEE has a standard for that? Probably not. Even if you knew it, would you pay $65 for a Xeroxed copy of it? Would it be any better if you were a IEEE member and could get it for $55? Probalby not, because you can find similar information for free on the web. It's not exactly the same because it's scattered all over the place and hasn't been peer reviewed, but it's good enough.

I think that opening up the stacks to everyone, free of charge or for a nominal fee, would be a good move for the IEEE that would make them more respected and relevant. They have accumulated a large amount of information about how software is done, but nobody pays any attention because the cost is too high. In my 10 years in the software business, I've only had ONE co-worker who was a IEEE member and I've never seen a IEEE software standard.

Personal Servers. Authors and/or their companies shall have the right to post their IEEE-copyrighted material on their own servers without permission, provided that the server displays a prominent notice alerting readers to their obligations with respect to copyrighted material and that the posted work includes the IEEE copyright notice as shown in Section 8.1.10A above. An example of an acceptable notice is: "This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder."

Personal Servers. Authors and/or their companies shall have the right to post their IEEE-copyrighted material on their own servers without permission, provided that the server displays a prominent notice alerting readers to their obligations with respect to copyrighted material and that the posted work includes the IEEE copyright notice as shown in Section 8.1.10A above. An example of an acceptable notice is: "This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder."

where do they get all these letters from?

where do they get all these letters from?

These numbers are all standards of the IEEE (the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Wikipedia article). The standards that this group comes up with are usually referred to by their numbers, such as IEEE 1394 (Firewire) or the 802.11 standards. The 802.11 standards are different implementations of wireless LAN-type tech. The letters represent revisions/different standards.

Here's another one:

WHEN THE CASSINI-HUYGENS MISSION BLASTED off from Cape Canaveral in October 1997, no one suspected that a critical design flaw was lurking deep within the telemetry system onboard Cassini that was dedicated to harvesting Huygens's broadcast. Uncorrected, the flaw meant the data flowing from the hardy lander was in danger of being hopelessly scrambled, its seven-year odyssey across the solar system in vain.

He called up Goldstone's signal-processing center and had it reduce the simulated Doppler shift of the signal reaching Cassini to zero. Forty-eight minutes later--light speed to the asteroid belt and back--Smeds's hunch paid off. "Suddenly I got better results. I knew then that there was something wrong in the data-detection system and that it was sensitive to Doppler shift," said Smeds.

Which is why large corporations tend to hire Quality Assurance people.

Speaking of someone who builds GSE (ie non flight ground support equipment), I can assure you that JPL/NASA have world-class QA inspectors. FAR better than anything you find in 'business'. I've personally had many a miserable day because an 'i' wasnt dotted or a 't' wasnt crossed which was found by these QA folks. And I 'only' build the non-flight stuff!

If there's already a QA group for the project (which I am hoping/assuming there is), then you hire a second group to QA the first QA groups results. You can never have too many people reviewing your results, if perfection is your goal.

HOLY CRAP! That is -not- the way to QA! Too many review cycles stagnates into a complete inabaility to get anything done. What you describe is the way that 'modern' software companies try to do QA- and they fail miserably.

The way to good QA is to have a good production process with adequate double-checks in the process reviewed by an independant QA inspection team. The QA process works in a feedback loop that incoroporates lessons learned back into the process such that the process doesn't make those mistakes again. Good QA is about getting the production -process- right, not about putting unending numbers of inspectors into the mix! Actually, in situations like this that QA feedback loop encompases the design, fabrication, test, and operations portion of the mission.

It would be analagous in the software world to requiring you to design your software before ever writing a line of code, then having peer review and QA approve your design, and only then do you get to write code (and only to the approved design). Then, the QA team would look at the crap code that you wrote and reject it; requiring you to start over and write it correctly to the design. Interestingly enough, the people who write flight software for the shuttle work exactly that way, and they are the best the world has ever seen.
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/06/writestuff.ht ml

For example, the probe going into Saturns moons didn't run some tests because it was never turned on before it was launched.

Your example demonstrates that you have no clue! You see, that prope called Huygens was an ESA built probe hitching a ride on a NASA spacecraft called Cassini. The Cassini recievers were not on because the commands sent to the spacecraft, which were supplied to NASA -by the ESA- only commanded ONE of the two ESA-provided recievers on. In other words, it wasn't a NASA screwup, but an ESA one! Oh, and it turns out that the data comms system based on those recievers wouldn't have worked at all because of a major major screw up by the ESA... and one determined engineer saved the friggin day on that one. Look for yourself: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature /oct04/1004titan.html

It's not a question of the giga part, everyone knows the metric system by now (I hope)

Really, do you? Last time I looked, G or giga is defined as exactly 10^9 (1,000,000,000).

Here's the important part you were ignoring:
---
Hard drive manufacturer: One GigaByte = 1000 bytes

Wrong. Hard drive manufacturers and everyone else who knows how to use SI prefixes correctly knows that one gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes.

Software/everyone else: One GigaByte = 1024 bytes

Wrong again. If in this case you mean 2^30 bytes, 1 GiB = 1,073,741,824 bytes. What about network people? To them, 1 GB is certainly 1,000,000,000 bytes. Does a 100 Mb/s Ethernet operate at 1,000,000 bits per second (10^6) or is is 1,048,576 (2^20)? More and more people are becoming aware of this issue and moving from the old ambiguous use of prefixes representing powers of ten to represent powers of two to the new more percise and seperate binary SI prefixes. Case in point. Bittorent. Download the client, use it, and you'll notice that bytes, in binary multiples are correctly refered to as KiB, MiB, etc.

If you had actually read the link I posted on SI prefixes for binary multiples, you might know the following historical context:

Once upon a time, computer professionals noticed that 2^10 was very nearly equal to 1000 and started using the SI prefix "kilo" to mean 1024. That worked well enough for a decade or two because everybody who talked kilobytes knew that the term implied 1024 bytes. But, almost overnight a much more numerous "everybody" bought computers, and the trade computer professionals needed to talk to physicists and engineers and even to ordinary people, most of whom know that a kilometer is 1000 meters and a kilogram is 1000 grams.

Then data storage for gigabytes, and even terabytes, became practical, and the storage devices were not constructed on binary trees, which meant that, for many practical purposes, binary arithmetic was less convenient than decimal arithmetic. The result is that today "everybody" does not "know" what a megabyte is. When discussing computer memory, most manufacturers use megabyte to mean 2^20 = 1 048 576 bytes, but the manufacturers of computer storage devices usually use the term to mean 1 000 000 bytes. Some designers of local area networks have used megabit per second to mean 1 048 576 bit/s, but all telecommunications engineers use it to mean 10^6 bit/s. And if two definitions of the megabyte are not enough, a third megabyte of 1 024 000 bytes is the megabyte used to format the familiar 90 mm (3 1/2 inch), "1.44 MB" diskette. The confusion is real, as is the potential for incompatibility in standards and in implemented systems.

Faced with this reality, the IEEE Standards Board decided that IEEE standards will use the conventional, internationally adopted, definitions of the SI prefixes. Mega will mean 1 000 000, except that the base-two definition may be used (if such usage is explicitly pointed out on a case-by-case basis) until such time that prefixes for binary multiples are adopted by an appropriate standards body.

In December 1998 the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), the leading international organization for worldwide standardization in electrotechnology, approved as an IEC International Standard names and symbols for prefixes for binary multiples for use in the fields of data processing and data transmission.

90% profit for iTunes? Try 10% profit at most. The royalties to record labels are 65%, and an additional 25% goes to such costs as bandwidth and credit card processing. The remaining 10% is unlikely to be pure profit, once you have to start paying people to manage the store. Also, with regards to it being cheaper to buy the CD, sometimes I just want one or two specific songs from an album, or want to create a mix CD with songs from an artist's many albums. That way, it becomes cheaper to buy songs on iTunes instead of multiple CDs or a whole CD for one song.

Source for percentages: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/dec0 4/1204webs.html

"Dr. Cerf said part of the reason their protocols took hold quickly and widely was that he and Dr. Kahn made no intellectual property claims to their invention. They made no money from it, though it did help their careers. "It was an open standard that we would allow anyone to have access to without any constraints," he said."

What would the internet be today if they'd tried to squeeze every last cent out of this idea?

Could someone summarize the state of the standardization process of the different task groups of 802.16? :)

This might be a good starting point: http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/16/

There are, in fact, deployments of WiMax (or at least pre-WiMax) according to the IEEE. Sites include Owensboro, KY and Seattle, WA.

This hasn't gotten as much coverage, but a design oversight nearly cost all Huygens data. Doppler shift was not accounted for in the signal decode process. The mission plan had to be rewritten to find an alternative flight path that reduced the Doppler shift to within the limited acceptable tolerances. Fortunately, Cassini's approach to Saturn was accurate enough that enough fuel existed to allow this while preserving the latter part of the existing flight plan.

Of course, in retrospect, maybe earth-based monitoring would have come to the rescue in this event, in an even bigger fashion.

"Titan Calling: How a Swedish engineer saved a once-in-a-lifetime mission to Saturn's mysterious moon"
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature /oct04/1004titan.html

Sorry if this is a repeat. Slashdot's search 503-ed on me.

"Pretty sure the US Patent Office has a say in what is and isn't patentable."

Oh really? I beg to differ. I've come across a couple fun examples recently

Method of Swinging on a Swing.
Gee, I wouldn't have thought of that one! I think I heard somewhere that this patent was granted to a 5-year-old? 0_o

Method of Exercising a Cat (with a laser pointer...)

Here's a nice little read on the US Patent System that was in IEEE Spectrum a couple months ago. The US Patent System sucks ass

So you see, the US Patenting Office appears to patent just about everything. Oh no, I hope they haven't patented my favorite peanut butter and jelly sandwhiches...!

Patent 5,567,454
Patent 5,855,939
Patent RE37,275

OH NOES!!!!

This might be one of the reasons that the volume of patent related lawsuits is going through the roof. See the graph patent lawsuits per year (from the article A radical cure for the ailing U.S. patent system)

Ben in DC

This might be one of the reasons that the volume of patent related lawsuits is going through the roof. See the graph patent lawsuits per year (from the article A radical cure for the ailing U.S. patent system)

Ben in DC

... take your engineering skills and apply them in the oil industry allow this industry to be more clean an efficient.

• Emissions from the users of the petroleum products.
• Emissions from the producers of the crude oil (e.g. leaking natural gas)
• Political/terrorist problems caused by the religious/philosophical tendencies of the suppliers of the crude oil

You can get rid of all of those at once by engineering things so that they no longer need oil, or need a much smaller amount. No amount of re-engineering a refinery is going to cut the emissions from the H2 Hummer it feeds, but you could slash both refinery and vehicular emissions (and OPEC volume) by going to plug-in hybrid vehicles.

Putting up political roadblocks is only going to piss people off and get your agenda nowhere fast.

They have made a great capacitor. Actually, if the stone would be very thin, or had micropores (like this one) they could indeed solve a lot of the current battery problem. Unfortunately they use it in a perfectly wrong way.

I mean, think about it--both the data and the dopler effect are going to show up as variations in the frequency of the carrier wave (or, if you prefer, in a change in the amplitude of the signals received at frequencies near the nominal carrier frequency).

I find it a little confusing too, but as described in last year's IEEE Spectrum article on the Cassini relay doppler shift problem, the radio link from Huygens used neither frequency nor amplitude modulation, but rather phase modulation:

Huygens is designed to generate telemetry at a rate of 8192 bits per second. Using a common modulation technique known as binary phase-shift keying, Huygens's transmission system represents 1s and 0s by varying the phase of the outgoing carrier wave. Recovering these bits requires precise timing: in simple terms, Cassini's receiver is designed to break the incoming signal into 8192 chunks every second. It determines the phase of each chunk compared with an unmodulated wave and outputs a 0 or a 1 accordingly [see chart, " Going Through a Phase"].

I would assume that detecting the signal at all means they can also detect its phase, regardless of how weak it is; it should merely require comparing it with an unmodulated signal generated at the receiving end. I don't know what carrier frequency they used, but I suppose precise timing in the nanosecond range is necessary, as we are literally dealing with the speed of light here.

Or, was Huygens transmitting an entirely different signal to Earth merely for this interferometry experiment? I doubt it, but various comments regarding this event seem to point in that direction. In particular, the analogy ESA officials made with the dialling tone you hear when you pick up a phone handset would make more sense then, as neither the dialling tone contains any data.

I mean, think about it--both the data and the dopler effect are going to show up as variations in the frequency of the carrier wave (or, if you prefer, in a change in the amplitude of the signals received at frequencies near the nominal carrier frequency).

I find it a little confusing too, but as described in last year's IEEE Spectrum article on the Cassini relay doppler shift problem, the radio link from Huygens used neither frequency nor amplitude modulation, but rather phase modulation:

Huygens is designed to generate telemetry at a rate of 8192 bits per second. Using a common modulation technique known as binary phase-shift keying, Huygens's transmission system represents 1s and 0s by varying the phase of the outgoing carrier wave. Recovering these bits requires precise timing: in simple terms, Cassini's receiver is designed to break the incoming signal into 8192 chunks every second. It determines the phase of each chunk compared with an unmodulated wave and outputs a 0 or a 1 accordingly [see chart, " Going Through a Phase"].

I would assume that detecting the signal at all means they can also detect its phase, regardless of how weak it is; it should merely require comparing it with an unmodulated signal generated at the receiving end. I don't know what carrier frequency they used, but I suppose precise timing in the nanosecond range is necessary, as we are literally dealing with the speed of light here.

Or, was Huygens transmitting an entirely different signal to Earth merely for this interferometry experiment? I doubt it, but various comments regarding this event seem to point in that direction. In particular, the analogy ESA officials made with the dialling tone you hear when you pick up a phone handset would make more sense then, as neither the dialling tone contains any data.

(I was reminded of this by a story on NPR this morning.)

You'll be waiting even longer if you want to use WiMax for a connection in a moving car. The WiMax (802.16) standard is for portable broaband access, connections that you can take with you but don't work so well while moving (ref).

802.16e is looking at adding mobility to WiMax but what you'll really need for access while mobile is 802.20 - (MBWA) - Mobile Broadband Wireless Access. This standard is specifically for broadband access while moving.

if things are far enough along to get excited and maybe buy something.
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/16/index.html

The Huygens probe was saved from probable failure, due to the inability of Cassini's receiver to compensate for the doppler effect:

Titan Calling How a Swedish engineer saved a once-in-a-lifetime mission to Saturn's mysterious moon (by James Oberg)

Without this guy, things would have gone a lot differently! I found this article in RISKS digest 23.65 (always worth a read).

Am I the only one who thinks ESA has completely dropped the ball here

See also the article of IEEE's Spectrum : "Titan calling"that explains that the problem was not just Doppler effect on frequency, but a change in data rate, i.e. the duration of a bit, that mattered.

Here's an interesting story about one guy who helped make it happen:

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature /oct04/1004titan.html

And about the Italian company that screwed up part of the transmission system in the first place (and who couldn't even be bothered to comment on the story because they were all off on summer vacation).

Che incompetenti!

How do fix a problem in firmware that's going to dump the data from the Huygens probe? Boris Smeds, uber geek 2005 knows how.

Your URL is wrong. Try this one instead:

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature /oct04/1004titan.html

or this one that should be clickable:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature /oct04/1004titan.html

The US engineers did not discover the problem. It was a Swedish engineer.

Furthermore: "Alenia Spazio (the Italian contractor) wasn't alone in missing the impact Doppler shift would have on the decoder. All the design reviews of the communications link, including those conducted with NASA participation, also failed to notice the error that would threaten to turn Huygens's moment of glory into an embarrassing failure."

Get your facts right (although being AC, no doubt it was just xenophobic bullshit on your part).

... at SpaceFlight Now

It'd be worth staying up for, but the last time I did that, I jinxed the Mars Polar Lander. :(

If the Huygens timeline executes as planned, it will rank among the coolest engineering achievements in history. It will also have happened thanks to one guy who kept his eye on the ball when nobody else was paying attention.

It is a (common) logical falsehood that software would be where it is now without software patents. It might, but the same could be said for any patents on anything.

Actually it would probably be farther ahead. The bulk of "inventions" are mostly refining an established idea. Patents as they exist today only serve to roadblock this process. In theory this would give the original inventor the ability to do the refining and reap the rewards but in practice this almost never happens. Patents only serve to limit the scope of development to a few, and in many cases they completely torpedo an idea. Bogus patents, IP holding companies (IMO nothing more than legalized fraud and extortion companies) and such only make things worse by completely killing ideas (the patent "holders" in this case will NEVER develop the idea - they simply wait for someone else to do it and then litigate).

The question is whether the protection of patents drive some people and/or companies to put effort (and money) into developing new things, whether they be medical devices or object recognition algorithms. Obviously it does drive some developments. The real question, which seems impossible to answer, is whether more developments + patents is better than just having the fewer developments.

The flaw in this argument is that lack of patents necessarily means fewer inventions. This is simply not the case. I know as a hardware developer myself that being able to develop devices without the potential of being litigated out of the blue would make things MUCH easier. If the patents on the books today were 100% legit and patent law was perfectly enforced then technical development in this country would come to a grinding halt. It would be impossible to develop a device without paying many times the value of the device in royalties to companies which truly had absolutely nothing to do development of the device (effectively it kills the notion of two people thinking of the same thing at the same time, despite the fact that it happens all the time - first to patent takes all).

Which is better? I don't know, and I'm sure you don't either.

Another bad assumption. In fact I DO know that the patent system today is completely busted. Try reading some of the stuff on PUBPAT sometime. According to one of their briefs an empirical study showed that 46% of patents litigated to judgement on validity issues were held invalid. How many individuals and companies were litigated out of existance in the name of these bogus patents? Those same individuals and companies would have produced far more innovation than the respective holders of the bogus patents.

The system today is nothing more than a way of extorting a profit rather than actually earning one. I'm a strong believer that people should be rewarded for actually "doing" not just "thinking". If someone can't DO anything with their idea then they should hell out of the way of people that can.

I could rant for hours on this, but then I'm far from alone. I would suggest checking out the December issue of Spectrum from the IEEE which had a decent article on the failures of the patent system.

The PCMCIA folks, who are behind this ExpressCard thing, want $349 USD for a copy of the standard, and it is only available in electronic form.

I can understand a small printing fee for a dead-tree copy. But sheesh, when will these guys follow the lead of the IEEE on the 802. standards and just open them up?

ifconfig {eth0|wlan0} hw ether CA:CA:CA:CA:CA:CA

obviously you're wrong, they're skipping because the intermediate letters have been assigned already and once they run of letter they do stuff like aa or pick a new number. I would explain more but there's lot on google and I guess you're ignorant anyway so who cares :D
And perhaps this page might be a good start:

http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/11/

Another interesting article from Wired titled "Love Machines" can be found here.

"The interest [in developing the Blackberry] came through his fascination with ham radio."

Seiko Epson, using inkjet printing, unveiled a 35-inch (88-cm) prototype full-color OLED display in May-- the industry's largest OLED screen. Seiko Epson says it will be able to produce large OLED TV panels using this technology after improving its OLED materials and extending their lifetime.

Is Nature really a scientific journal? That's a serious question: it's not in my field, and I'm not familiar with it. As I recall, it's printed on glossy paper, and has advertisements?

I'm familiar with journals like Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) and American Economic Review (AER), which do have some paid staff, paid for through the American Economics Association dues and subscriptions. I'm also familiar with journals like the IEEE Spectrum and the American Statistics Association American Statistician (AMSTAT), which are glossy magazine with ads, and the Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA), which has few or no ads.

Spectrum and AMSTAT are not considered serious journals in their fields, peer-reviewed or not, while AER and JASA are. The difference is that a non-Ph.D might read Spectrum or AMSTAT, but would not (probably could not) read JEL, AER or JASA. I think that Nature is in the same class as Spectrum, isn't it? It is intended for a broader audience than the few academics working in the field? It's not the primary journal of record for the discipline it covers? If so, I don't think that it's really the sort of thing this initiative is aimed at.

Is Nature really a scientific journal? That's a serious question: it's not in my field, and I'm not familiar with it. As I recall, it's printed on glossy paper, and has advertisements?

I'm familiar with journals like Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) and American Economic Review (AER), which do have some paid staff, paid for through the American Economics Association dues and subscriptions. I'm also familiar with journals like the IEEE Spectrum and the American Statistics Association American Statistician (AMSTAT), which are glossy magazine with ads, and the Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA), which has few or no ads.

Spectrum and AMSTAT are not considered serious journals in their fields, peer-reviewed or not, while AER and JASA are. The difference is that a non-Ph.D might read Spectrum or AMSTAT, but would not (probably could not) read JEL, AER or JASA. I think that Nature is in the same class as Spectrum, isn't it? It is intended for a broader audience than the few academics working in the field? It's not the primary journal of record for the discipline it covers? If so, I don't think that it's really the sort of thing this initiative is aimed at.