I see now, thanks. Yes, I agree with you that that was no reason to attack Rob. It seems a little odd that people are so ready to attack CmdrTaco, esp. since he's given us this nice site.
Rob seems to think we're just jerking our knees, but I thought this through awhile back and I've been against patents ever since.
I could be wrong on non-software, non-math, non-business-model patents, so I'd be happy enough going back to the way things used to be. However, I don't see how anyone can do research or implement good ideas in a minefield of patents.
Yes, I found CmdrTaco's remark offensive as well. Does he want someone to come along and patent something integral to Slashdot? As for Prior Art, that doesn't seem to be stopping too many people lately.
What does Rob Malda want, anyway? We don't hear much from him.
"Patents and copyrights are allright when they are there to protect real innovation and development of new technology."
One man's protection is another man's extortion.
"From the post, its plain to see that these patents deal with a specific method and implementation of an idea."
So, if you happen to believe that intellectual property is a valid concept, this should be a patentable idea if this was a non-obvious advance in the field. It doesn't look like one to me, but maybe I'm not well-versed in the field.
"This isn't one-click nonsense, this is a specific protocol."
Some of us think that artificial goverment monopolies are a bad thing no matter what they are "protecting," and that a free market is in serious danger whenever patents exist because of the chilling effect patents have. What new advances have been made in fractal compression since the early 1990s? Why aren't we hearing more about wavelet compression? Why hasn't the price of Polaroid cameras and film gone down?
If I see a great idea, ordinarily I'll rush to inplement it. Not anymore. Now I worry about patents and I search for any evidence that what I'm working on is patented. There's no way I can protect myself against pending software patents that I might not find about until the cease and desist order.
"Please at least try reading the article before jerking your knee. Taco opposes meaningless and assinine patents. No where did he say patents on their own are inherently evil."
Aposty might not be jerking his knee. He might have thought this through long ago and come to a conclusion different than yours. He might believe that patents on their own are inherently evil. I know I do.
The corporations are not yet engaged in slaughtering their critics and competition. Until they do, it's not as bad as what the Roman Catholic Church did.
I agree with you that the danger is equal, though I don't think it's that bad yet.
"When it comes to coercion, threat of harm is not the same as a threat of a lawsuit or legal action."
True. If someone were to steal your house, get you fired from your job, seize your bank accounts, ruin your reputation, and blackball you, that would not be the same as injuring you personally.
Filing a lawsuit is as good as winning.
Had the authors decided to publish, they would have been tied up in court for years, losing money very fast. If they won before going bankrupt, the RIAA would have appealed or sued them on different grounds.
If someone only threatens to shoot somebody without actually shooting them, they can still force the issue.
The RIAA has a weapon that they can use against anyone they choose. That weapon is a combination of expensive lawyers and the money to keep paying them until the heat death of the universe.
They don't have to win a case, they just have to use up time. They don't even have to sue, when the threat is nearly as effective.
Newton and Leibniz(sp?) came up with calculus at about the same time. The NSA hardened DES against differential cryptanalysis in the early 1970's, and then Eli Biham and Adi Shamir invented it a bit before 1990.
I don't know how frequent it is, but reinvention is more frequent when secrets are being kept.
"Well for starters physics just plain sucked from the beginning. The formulas hardly helped at all because mainly they were just rewritten each problem and each circumstance."
I feel your pain, I really do. I'm only a freshman in college, but I have done some math classes already, so I know the kind of thing you're talking about. You've probably had it worse, though.
"I cannot express how abyssmally hard I actually worked on such a thing. These problems made the most difficult calculus problems seem trivial. . . . and not only that but you have to have the right equation. Guess what it's impossible (ok if anyone has any bright ideas about how to check your formulae so that you know you have the right one I would be really interested to know how) to determine if you have the right one."
What I did was I started out with a small set of things I knew, and when I learned something new, I learned how to find it using only what I already knew. It was hard but it was usually possible to build something like a tree of facts. When I derived the equations from first priciples over and over, I usually could remember the process if not the end result. As an example, do you know the sine and cosine identities for sums and differences of angles? I don't. I know, however, that:
e^iu = cos u + i sin u
e^i(v+w) = e^iv * e^iw = (cos v + i sin v)(cos w + i sin w) = cos v cos w + i cos v sin w + i sin v cos w - sin v sin w
u=v+w
cos (v+w) = cos v cos w - sin v sin w
sin (v+w) = cos v sin w + sin v cos w
I did this kind of thing over and over until I could do it on the back of the test, then use the equations I got to work the test. It doesn't make it easy, but it makes it possible.
Pressure on a pane of glass under a certain amount of water? Cut the glass into horizontal slices, express the pressure on each slice as a function of depth, and make the slices infinitely thin. Add them up.
Ouch. I am disappointed because I still had hopes for H-bomb powered Orion ships. I guess there really is no such thing as a mostly clean nuclear explosion. Even N-bombs aren't, because they'll make anything near them get radioactive.
Well, there's always the Beanstalk. I just wish they'd hurry up and find a way to make structures that light and strong. Why did buckytubes have to turn out to be so slippery?
So what you're saying is, most of the energy produced by a fusion reaction go into the neutrons? I thought it was mostly gamma rays.
Re:Great idea, you personal own ...
on
Fission in a Box
·
· Score: 1
In a word, no.
For an A-bomb, you need very purified u-235 or plutonium, because those are the only fissionables that will go critical. Secondly, you need a lot of this very pure stuff. A critical mass of it, to be exact.
I heard something about solar panels producing less energy over their lifetime than the energy it takes to make them. Of course, maybe that was in Seattle or something.
Can you point me to some numbers that refute this idea?
Energy to make vs. energy made by it over a typical lifetime of a solar panel,
Price of a solar panel vs. price of electricity saved by using it,
that kind of thing?
I think he was making a joke. I laughed, anyway. Maybe it was serious, though.
Re:Speaking of small reactors...
on
Fission in a Box
·
· Score: 1
"However, uranium and plutonium aren't exactly compressible, so we're stuck with needing a good bit of the stuff."
Oh, that's no problem, just surround the core with a bunch of fission bombs and set them all off at once to make the core reach critical mass without haveing to use much uranium or plutonium.
Oh, wait, what am I forgetting...:)
Re:I am not a nuclear physicist...
on
Fission in a Box
·
· Score: 1
"It seems to me that a LOT of energy would be lost in the transfer from heat to mechanical to electrical energy."
I agree. One more efficient way to get power out of radiation, if you happen to have a very predictable alpha emitter, is to surround the alpha emitter with a metal shell charged with just less voltage than the alpha particles have. The current flows in the opposite direction as the voltage wants it to, so you get electrical power. Rather like a capacitor that charges itself up over time.
Since the alpha particles have lost most of their momentum by the time they hit the metal shell, there is not much heat produced. Instead, there is quite a bit of electrical power. However, this requires that the alpha particles have a very predictable energy - that doesn't happen often.
Some IEC fusion reactors use a similar model, but they don't break even yet. They are very good neutron sources, though.
Fuel cells? Where are you going to get the hydrogen? Fuel cells don't generate any new power at all. Electricity + water -> hydrogen + oxygen -> electricity + water is a lossy process.
You still need somewhere to get the original electricity.
Okay, an expert, finally.:) Why can't we just seal the radioactive waste in small, strong containers, and dump it in a subduction fault? Please excuse me if it's a dumb question, I'm just a guy who doesn't know any better.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I see now, thanks. Yes, I agree with you that that was no reason to attack Rob. It seems a little odd that people are so ready to attack CmdrTaco, esp. since he's given us this nice site.
Rob seems to think we're just jerking our knees, but I thought this through awhile back and I've been against patents ever since.
I could be wrong on non-software, non-math, non-business-model patents, so I'd be happy enough going back to the way things used to be. However, I don't see how anyone can do research or implement good ideas in a minefield of patents.
Yes, I found CmdrTaco's remark offensive as well. Does he want someone to come along and patent something integral to Slashdot? As for Prior Art, that doesn't seem to be stopping too many people lately.
What does Rob Malda want, anyway? We don't hear much from him.
"...so long as the patent covers a method of implementing this, prior use of the same idea doesn't count as prior art."
Aye, but it makes the "invention" trivial and obvious, and the inventors copycats. I wish the USPTO could see that.
I can just see it: "Did you see those lights? Yeah, that was cool! Let's go patent it! We can't, it's prior art. Well, let's do it with LEDs, then!"
I vote B, personally.
Of course, I can't speak for my good friend Meept! over there, I think he might pick Z.
That's Slashdot for ya, we can't agree on anything.
"Patents and copyrights are allright when they are there to protect real innovation and development of new technology."
One man's protection is another man's extortion.
"From the post, its plain to see that these patents deal with a specific method and implementation of an idea."
So, if you happen to believe that intellectual property is a valid concept, this should be a patentable idea if this was a non-obvious advance in the field. It doesn't look like one to me, but maybe I'm not well-versed in the field.
"This isn't one-click nonsense, this is a specific protocol."
Some of us think that artificial goverment monopolies are a bad thing no matter what they are "protecting," and that a free market is in serious danger whenever patents exist because of the chilling effect patents have. What new advances have been made in fractal compression since the early 1990s? Why aren't we hearing more about wavelet compression? Why hasn't the price of Polaroid cameras and film gone down?
If I see a great idea, ordinarily I'll rush to inplement it. Not anymore. Now I worry about patents and I search for any evidence that what I'm working on is patented. There's no way I can protect myself against pending software patents that I might not find about until the cease and desist order.
"Please at least try reading the article before jerking your knee. Taco opposes meaningless and assinine patents. No where did he say patents on their own are inherently evil."
Aposty might not be jerking his knee. He might have thought this through long ago and come to a conclusion different than yours. He might believe that patents on their own are inherently evil. I know I do.
The corporations are not yet engaged in slaughtering their critics and competition. Until they do, it's not as bad as what the Roman Catholic Church did.
I agree with you that the danger is equal, though I don't think it's that bad yet.
"When it comes to coercion, threat of harm is not the same as a threat of a lawsuit or legal action."
True. If someone were to steal your house, get you fired from your job, seize your bank accounts, ruin your reputation, and blackball you, that would not be the same as injuring you personally.
Filing a lawsuit is as good as winning.
Had the authors decided to publish, they would have been tied up in court for years, losing money very fast. If they won before going bankrupt, the RIAA would have appealed or sued them on different grounds.
If someone only threatens to shoot somebody without actually shooting them, they can still force the issue.
The RIAA has a weapon that they can use against anyone they choose. That weapon is a combination of expensive lawyers and the money to keep paying them until the heat death of the universe.
They don't have to win a case, they just have to use up time. They don't even have to sue, when the threat is nearly as effective.
What are you smoking?
I own many books. I do not own the copyrights on those books. I also own many CDs, which I do not own the copyrights on.
I own the publication, they own the copyrights.
Thanks, I didn't know that. Cool.
Newton and Leibniz(sp?) came up with calculus at about the same time. The NSA hardened DES against differential cryptanalysis in the early 1970's, and then Eli Biham and Adi Shamir invented it a bit before 1990.
I don't know how frequent it is, but reinvention is more frequent when secrets are being kept.
"Well for starters physics just plain sucked from the beginning. The formulas hardly helped at all because mainly they were just rewritten each problem and each circumstance."
I feel your pain, I really do. I'm only a freshman in college, but I have done some math classes already, so I know the kind of thing you're talking about. You've probably had it worse, though.
"I cannot express how abyssmally hard I actually worked on such a thing. These problems made the most difficult calculus problems seem trivial. . . . and not only that but you have to have the right equation. Guess what it's impossible (ok if anyone has any bright ideas about how to check your formulae so that you know you have the right one I would be really interested to know how) to determine if you have the right one."
What I did was I started out with a small set of things I knew, and when I learned something new, I learned how to find it using only what I already knew. It was hard but it was usually possible to build something like a tree of facts. When I derived the equations from first priciples over and over, I usually could remember the process if not the end result. As an example, do you know the sine and cosine identities for sums and differences of angles? I don't. I know, however, that:
e^iu = cos u + i sin u
e^i(v+w) = e^iv * e^iw = (cos v + i sin v)(cos w + i sin w) = cos v cos w + i cos v sin w + i sin v cos w - sin v sin w
u=v+w
cos (v+w) = cos v cos w - sin v sin w
sin (v+w) = cos v sin w + sin v cos w
I did this kind of thing over and over until I could do it on the back of the test, then use the equations I got to work the test. It doesn't make it easy, but it makes it possible.
Pressure on a pane of glass under a certain amount of water? Cut the glass into horizontal slices, express the pressure on each slice as a function of depth, and make the slices infinitely thin. Add them up.
Things like that, you know?
Now, I like Perl and all, but how can that be, as Perl is written in either C or C++?
All your compilers are belong to us!
Ouch. I am disappointed because I still had hopes for H-bomb powered Orion ships. I guess there really is no such thing as a mostly clean nuclear explosion. Even N-bombs aren't, because they'll make anything near them get radioactive.
Well, there's always the Beanstalk. I just wish they'd hurry up and find a way to make structures that light and strong. Why did buckytubes have to turn out to be so slippery?
/me pouts
Fascinating. Thanks for the correction.
So what you're saying is, most of the energy produced by a fusion reaction go into the neutrons? I thought it was mostly gamma rays.
In a word, no.
For an A-bomb, you need very purified u-235 or plutonium, because those are the only fissionables that will go critical. Secondly, you need a lot of this very pure stuff. A critical mass of it, to be exact.
I heard something about solar panels producing less energy over their lifetime than the energy it takes to make them. Of course, maybe that was in Seattle or something.
Can you point me to some numbers that refute this idea?
Energy to make vs. energy made by it over a typical lifetime of a solar panel,
Price of a solar panel vs. price of electricity saved by using it,
that kind of thing?
I think he was making a joke. I laughed, anyway. Maybe it was serious, though.
"However, uranium and plutonium aren't exactly compressible, so we're stuck with needing a good bit of the stuff."
:)
Oh, that's no problem, just surround the core with a bunch of fission bombs and set them all off at once to make the core reach critical mass without haveing to use much uranium or plutonium.
Oh, wait, what am I forgetting...
"It seems to me that a LOT of energy would be lost in the transfer from heat to mechanical to electrical energy."
I agree. One more efficient way to get power out of radiation, if you happen to have a very predictable alpha emitter, is to surround the alpha emitter with a metal shell charged with just less voltage than the alpha particles have. The current flows in the opposite direction as the voltage wants it to, so you get electrical power. Rather like a capacitor that charges itself up over time.
Since the alpha particles have lost most of their momentum by the time they hit the metal shell, there is not much heat produced. Instead, there is quite a bit of electrical power. However, this requires that the alpha particles have a very predictable energy - that doesn't happen often.
Some IEC fusion reactors use a similar model, but they don't break even yet. They are very good neutron sources, though.
Fuel cells? Where are you going to get the hydrogen? Fuel cells don't generate any new power at all. Electricity + water -> hydrogen + oxygen -> electricity + water is a lossy process.
You still need somewhere to get the original electricity.
Okay, an expert, finally. :) Why can't we just seal the radioactive waste in small, strong containers, and dump it in a subduction fault? Please excuse me if it's a dumb question, I'm just a guy who doesn't know any better. :)
Wouldn't most genetically engineered critters have trouble competing with natural lifeforms? We still can't beat evolution.
Would it be possible to make a mostly clean H-bomb by removing the depleted uranium? Just a thought.