It takes significant R&D to determine these structures and it seems that the patent office considers the discovery of a pre-existing biological component to be deserving of protection as much as a designed system for that very reason. It's indicative that we really should get around to reforming the patent system.
New rule: you can not patent anything that you yourself did not create. No patents should be granted for any component of a naturally occuring system. Create an entirely novel system that doesn't exist in nature? Fine, have at it. On a separate note, it seems to me that with all the trouble we seem to be having with our 200+ year old patent system, that we ought to be able to devise a better system for encouraging innovation.
Sony stopped being a reputable vendor the moment they infected people's electronics with their very own trojan. From there it all went down hill. It is disgusting that Sony can issue a patch that they know know to be faulty and then actually charge people to fix the damage that Sony created in the first place. Someone get a class action lawsuit together and sue these crooks.
My point was that if an essay is required, the focus should primarily be on the overall quality of the essay and not how well the writer can contort their essay to match the length requirements. If the essay is well written, nothing else should matter.
Right you are... I didn't notice that until your comment and found that the student's essay was 447 words in length. However, I got the distinct impression that mot of the opposition to the move by MIT in that article was out of resentment and not so much about the merits of keeping or removing the essay. As the article said, the major problem was the prompt for these essays. If the prompt in the article was indicative of a typical prompt, then I would say that it probably wouldn't be a very good way to select candidates for admission into MIT. As a prior poster noted, it seems to be geared toward writing skill and not so much toward engineering which is MIT's major focus.
Has anyone considered that requiring a minimum length for an essay does not improve the quality of the essay? If a student can't create a convincing and well thought out essay without such a restriction, then I would think that it shows a flaw in their writing ability.
You do know that this isn't the warmest the Earth's ever been, right?
There was a cause for that warmth, the current warming trend can not be explained by natural causes. The warming trend is explainable when human emissions are taken into account.
I like how a less than one degree of change over the past 200 years is clearly not normal.
it isn't normal if the possible causes have been ruled out.
I'm not going to go so far as to say with 100% certainty that mankind isn't responsible for any of the warming. However, until you (and pro-global warming people like you) even acknowledge that the planet changes its temperate most of the time, I just can't take you seriously
Most competent "pro-global warming people" acknowledge tat the Earth's climate changes however, those changes require a cause. Asteroid impacts, volcani activity, large quantities of greenhouse gases all can cause these changes. Until you admit that this is the case, *you* should not be taken seriously.
Do you have any evidence to back up your assertion? The whole point of this work is to gather more data and possibly confirm or refute your hunch on the matter. Climate science can not rely on a hunch, it needs data and that means utilizing data from every source we can.
We generally know why the climate changed in the sahara region just as we know pumping enormous quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere causes a warming tend. Non-anthropomorphic causes of warming do not satisfactoryly explain the current warming tend.
Even if that were true, anthropomorphic greenhouse gas emissions would exacerbate any non-anthropomorphic warming effect. It would be like claiming that the thermostat in your house is slowly increasing the temperature in your room so therefore there's no harm in raising the thermostat further.
with a guessable password and a system administration regime that lets weak passwords exist in the first place.
Fail2ban would theoretically cut down on the attempts by 90% from 32 to 3 or whatever you set it at however, the real problem are the weak passwords used. Automatic salting of passwords and fail2ban should eliminate the threat entirely as these attacks are extremely unlikely to crack salted passwords in the number of attempts they would be allowed.
when I speak of "liberal" and "conservative" I mean it in relative terms for each country- a government that becomes more economically authoritarian is economically "liberal" and one that becomes more authoritarian on social issues is socially "conservative." Since Canada is tending toward more control over economic and some social matters, it too follows the trend.
I never mentioned the pharmaceutical industry, I just said *most* industries are not stimulated by patents. It is however, quite possible that patents are sub-optimal even in the two industries that CATO mentions as seeing a benefit from patents (drug and chemical industries). I think that with all we have learned about economics that we could develop a better system than our 200+ year old patent system to encourage worth while R&D.
The industry won't fail. This is true, however things will change. Any corporation dependant on the current patent system to destroy its competition will fight tooth and nail to keep it and frankly, considering what happened with anti-trust charges against MS I wouldn't count on software patents being invalidated by SCOTUS.
The sad thing is that you are completely right. The powers that be are stuck in Keynes era economic thinking that speculates the proper allocation of resources results in an overall loss of jobs... It doesn't any more than the loss of the buggie whip industry did but there it is.
I would go further to speculate that the patent system as it is harms technological advancement more than it encourages it in most industries. The patent system was established with the intent to create temporary monopolies for inventors in order to encourage the development and dissemination of that R&D throughout society. The problem is that too often, it's used to destroy competitors. The court costs and inequality of enforcement associated with the system defeat most of its purpose as specified in the US constitution. Software patents are only the tip of a very large iceberg.
Nanotubes can theoretically carry a current of 1 billion Amps/cm^2 which is over a thousand times the current at which Copper gets fried. THey are also lighter and far stronger than any other conductor we have tested. Upwards of 200x as strong as medium grade steel and 4x less dense. Not even superconductors can carry the amount of power we are talking about here as the magnetic fields created by such a current destroy the superconductivity of all known examples of superconductors well before this amount of current is reached.
First of all that isn't quite true. Nanotubes are now used as the tips of some STMs, bucky paper composites, single nanotube transistors and a few others. THe major hurdle to the widespread use of nanotubes is solely due to their high cost. They are about ~1000$/gram the last time I checked so really they'd need to be pretty special to justify that kind of cost.
Copyright was intended to "encourage the arts" not grant special rights to publishers over works that were funded by the public. All publicly funded information should be in the public domain. If publishers don't like it then boo hoo. The only reason they even get copyright rights in the first place is that we, the public, gave them those rights and we are very well within our power to take them away for works that we funded.
Slashdot Mirror
Why bother with using advanced technology like this when the school system already does that? :)
It takes significant R&D to determine these structures and it seems that the patent office considers the discovery of a pre-existing biological component to be deserving of protection as much as a designed system for that very reason. It's indicative that we really should get around to reforming the patent system.
New rule: you can not patent anything that you yourself did not create. No patents should be granted for any component of a naturally occuring system. Create an entirely novel system that doesn't exist in nature? Fine, have at it. On a separate note, it seems to me that with all the trouble we seem to be having with our 200+ year old patent system, that we ought to be able to devise a better system for encouraging innovation.
Sony stopped being a reputable vendor the moment they infected people's electronics with their very own trojan. From there it all went down hill. It is disgusting that Sony can issue a patch that they know know to be faulty and then actually charge people to fix the damage that Sony created in the first place. Someone get a class action lawsuit together and sue these crooks.
My point was that if an essay is required, the focus should primarily be on the overall quality of the essay and not how well the writer can contort their essay to match the length requirements. If the essay is well written, nothing else should matter.
Right you are... I didn't notice that until your comment and found that the student's essay was 447 words in length. However, I got the distinct impression that mot of the opposition to the move by MIT in that article was out of resentment and not so much about the merits of keeping or removing the essay. As the article said, the major problem was the prompt for these essays. If the prompt in the article was indicative of a typical prompt, then I would say that it probably wouldn't be a very good way to select candidates for admission into MIT. As a prior poster noted, it seems to be geared toward writing skill and not so much toward engineering which is MIT's major focus.
Has anyone considered that requiring a minimum length for an essay does not improve the quality of the essay? If a student can't create a convincing and well thought out essay without such a restriction, then I would think that it shows a flaw in their writing ability.
There was a cause for that warmth, the current warming trend can not be explained by natural causes. The warming trend is explainable when human emissions are taken into account.
it isn't normal if the possible causes have been ruled out.
Most competent "pro-global warming people" acknowledge tat the Earth's climate changes however, those changes require a cause. Asteroid impacts, volcani activity, large quantities of greenhouse gases all can cause these changes. Until you admit that this is the case, *you* should not be taken seriously.
Do you have any evidence to back up your assertion? The whole point of this work is to gather more data and possibly confirm or refute your hunch on the matter. Climate science can not rely on a hunch, it needs data and that means utilizing data from every source we can.
I am sure Fox news would gladly pick up on it.
We generally know why the climate changed in the sahara region just as we know pumping enormous quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere causes a warming tend. Non-anthropomorphic causes of warming do not satisfactoryly explain the current warming tend.
Even if that were true, anthropomorphic greenhouse gas emissions would exacerbate any non-anthropomorphic warming effect. It would be like claiming that the thermostat in your house is slowly increasing the temperature in your room so therefore there's no harm in raising the thermostat further.
FTA:
Fail2ban would theoretically cut down on the attempts by 90% from 32 to 3 or whatever you set it at however, the real problem are the weak passwords used. Automatic salting of passwords and fail2ban should eliminate the threat entirely as these attacks are extremely unlikely to crack salted passwords in the number of attempts they would be allowed.
when I speak of "liberal" and "conservative" I mean it in relative terms for each country- a government that becomes more economically authoritarian is economically "liberal" and one that becomes more authoritarian on social issues is socially "conservative." Since Canada is tending toward more control over economic and some social matters, it too follows the trend.
I never mentioned the pharmaceutical industry, I just said *most* industries are not stimulated by patents. It is however, quite possible that patents are sub-optimal even in the two industries that CATO mentions as seeing a benefit from patents (drug and chemical industries). I think that with all we have learned about economics that we could develop a better system than our 200+ year old patent system to encourage worth while R&D.
The industry won't fail. This is true, however things will change. Any corporation dependant on the current patent system to destroy its competition will fight tooth and nail to keep it and frankly, considering what happened with anti-trust charges against MS I wouldn't count on software patents being invalidated by SCOTUS.
The sad thing is that you are completely right. The powers that be are stuck in Keynes era economic thinking that speculates the proper allocation of resources results in an overall loss of jobs... It doesn't any more than the loss of the buggie whip industry did but there it is.
I would go further to speculate that the patent system as it is harms technological advancement more than it encourages it in most industries. The patent system was established with the intent to create temporary monopolies for inventors in order to encourage the development and dissemination of that R&D throughout society. The problem is that too often, it's used to destroy competitors. The court costs and inequality of enforcement associated with the system defeat most of its purpose as specified in the US constitution. Software patents are only the tip of a very large iceberg.
whoosh
Most governments tend to lean "liberal" economically and "conservative" socially so authoritarian all around.
If you thought the mafiaa was scary, just imagine what the government can do with this.
Nanotubes can theoretically carry a current of 1 billion Amps/cm^2 which is over a thousand times the current at which Copper gets fried. THey are also lighter and far stronger than any other conductor we have tested. Upwards of 200x as strong as medium grade steel and 4x less dense. Not even superconductors can carry the amount of power we are talking about here as the magnetic fields created by such a current destroy the superconductivity of all known examples of superconductors well before this amount of current is reached.
First of all that isn't quite true. Nanotubes are now used as the tips of some STMs, bucky paper composites, single nanotube transistors and a few others. THe major hurdle to the widespread use of nanotubes is solely due to their high cost. They are about ~1000$/gram the last time I checked so really they'd need to be pretty special to justify that kind of cost.
Because our government has become corrupted and seeks to collude with corporations?
Copyright was intended to "encourage the arts" not grant special rights to publishers over works that were funded by the public. All publicly funded information should be in the public domain. If publishers don't like it then boo hoo. The only reason they even get copyright rights in the first place is that we, the public, gave them those rights and we are very well within our power to take them away for works that we funded.