And better yet, to the taxi drivers get any money for playing radio commercials to their captive audience? The radio stations get paid...
Of course, this could get very ugly very quickly - Ads plastered on the insides of cabs, $nack tray$ (a la hotel refrigerators) on the back of the seat, and do you get a reduced fare if you agree to watch/listen to an "informercial" during your ride?
Goodness, this thing is full of gramatical errors. (Grammar may be optional here, but these people are lobbying the Feds). Any of my teachers in High School would have sent this paper back if it had been submitted to them:
This half-baked inventor ripped off the patent system (and us, of ocurse, because we are paying). But he only was able to do it because the system was set up to let him get these ever-expanding patents without actually making anything.
But think about who else is gobbling up all of our options for the future via the USPO? Big corporations, who don't wait 40 years to cash in. More importantly, these big companies are the ones who are going to try to keep the system from changing. That is going to make this a long, hard struggle.
I think that is really more of a problem for *products* (or what the bio companies think are "products") like plants or farm animals. Biotech companies get the "best" version, and reproduce the heck out of it.
Repairing faulty genes is something else. I have a faultly gene (it is a DNA helicase gene, dealing with separating chromosomes during mitosis). It is no fun at all, and can (and has) mess up a whole raft of things. This mutation is not going to be useful to anyone down the road, unless trisomy is somehow adaptive. I would modify my genetic makeup in a second to fix this - it would probably add years to my life. I don't have any biological children (not that stupid), but they would certainly be more adaptive with a proper metabolism than dangerous (and often deadly) mutations.
FFFish, that makes lots of sense. There is one thing that I might say in defense of the Half Keyboard, though (no economic interest, although I did download the demo, have not tried it yet...). Since this is designed/recommended for use with a PDA, I am assuming that the average user (or a lot of them) are going back to a full-size keyboard when they get home. I am guessing that learning a whole new keyboard layout would make that difficult, and the Half-Keyboard less so.
I tend to agree with you on this one. AppleInsider has produced a bunch of stupid predictions over the years (most especially the "waterproof iBook" rumor). I have found their accuracy to be about 5%, and stopped reading their website.
If this thing is going to last 1,000 years, why not include something useful, like the location of all the nuclear waste dumps containing plutonium and other radioactive elements with multiple thousand year half lives. (24,000 for plutonium?).
There was recently (a few years back) an architectural design contest for storage of radioactive waste. The idea was to design a container that would not only last tens of thousands of years, but transmit (by it's structure - since no language used today will still be around - almost certainly) that the contents are dangerous - "Keep Out!"
There should be some interesting ideas from this contest that would help these Rosetta Disk folks make sure that someone actually figures out what this thing is for.
Right, which is exactly why Be is a tasty morsel for MS. They have the money to blow. They are in need of a good, multimedia OS for the desktop. And they are not going to have any trouble getting BeWindows (whatever...) into the market and deciding what to do with it. MS has the users, they have the apps, they just need a decent OS to replace the mess that they have made. And they want to get into the handheld/embedded market.
Scenario:
- MS shells out money for Be. - They port all their big Apps (Office, etc.) - Spread a little money around to get the third party developers interested (games, business software, etc - From what I understand, Be is a lot easier to program for than Windows. IANAP - at least on Windows and Be...). - Release Windows 2001 MM (multimedia) at the end of next year, eraly 2002
Viola! The choice is esy to make - a good, fast consumer OS form the buigest software company on the earth - people would eat it up. They could sell it as the client OS, and keep WinMonster2000 on the server.
They can keep Apple and Linux from eating up too much of the desktopmarket, and have a real competitor in the embedded market...
This may be a bit off-topic, but it does affect Mac/Be/etc.
How long before someone buys BeOS? Am I the only one who thinks that Microsoft could get itself out of the corner it has backed itself into by buying Be (once they take their whiping for being abusing the market).
1) A good, multimedia OS that runs on Intel. W2K is not going to make hordes of friends on the desktop.
2) A good embedded OS. BeIA kicks WinCE all the way around the block (from what I have been able to gather - never used either of them). MS has failed so many times with WinCE, they could use something that works for a change. They know this is a huge and growing market.
The only big problem that they would have is backwards compatibility (big problem...), but I they could use an emulator. W2K is not winning any awards for backwards compatibility either.
Well, what really strikes me as silly is the way IP gets divided up, with the "latest and greatest" cashing in, taking all the glory, and everyone else looking foolish. So these guys figured out how to start and stop a biological process that has been going on almost as long as there has been life on earth (probably...). Does that give them the exclusive right to make megabucks off what could be potentially the biggest paradigm shift in energy use in our lifetime (probably not, though...)?
But what about the other people who contributed to this discovery - the University of California, the Federal Government (land grant college system, probably a bunch of grants these people worked or studied under at one time or another), the people who figured out that these organisms produce hydrogen in the first place? Does everyone get a cut? They all seem to have a pretty good claim, in this particular case.
To really stretch the point, perhaps part of the proceeds could be contributed to environmental causes - after all, global climate change and toxic waste may not be good for these little bacteria (yes, I know this is a stupid argument, but I am trying to make a point, and it is actually much more relevant in the case of medicines patented based on rare tropical plants, genes taken from animals in threatened environments, etc.)
Fundamentally, the whole idea of patenting discoveries and getting rich off of them in an area of scientific investigation raises some pretty big questions in my mind. There are a lot of parallels to software development. What if I decide that I am not going to publish anything, so that no one can use any of my ideas to come up with anything? What if people start horading their research? Corporations like pharmaceutical companies, already do this. Its this what we want academic research to become?
If this is public research, let it produce public results. If it is private (and I mean private, none of this "It was public until the government gave us the patent *cough* AZT *cough*" BS.
Not that I am the first to think of that... ...or I would have patented it by now...
A little off topic, but I would like to buy this book. Does anyone know a good, English-language technical bookstore that is online in Europe (except for Amazon-UK)? I live in Spain, and the markup on English technical texts here is brutal (often double).
Unhobbled, in that they meet no resistance from local governemts, film industry, etc. Here in Spain all the chain theatres run Hollywood movies, and local stuff has more or less success, depending on the movie.
Harrison Ford always gets into the big theatres. Javier Bardem has to do something worth watching.
What he is talking about is getting his content to you for a price, with nothing to stop him. Not about the content itself being "free", even in the sense of portability.
Well, I am sure there are lots of problems with developing a breeding population of mamoths today (like, where are you going to put them? They are going to need *lots* of room, and *lots* to eat - what other animals are going to get squeezed if they wanted to do this?), but the number of individuals available may not be one of them (or not as big as one might think).
Cheetahs, for example, are all almost genetically identical. They come from an extremely small population that survived the last ice age (there are theories that it ws a single, pregnant female...). One effect of having a very inbred population is that genetic defects express themselves and "fall out" of the gene pool. You get a high attrition rate (probably) in the first N generations, but after that it stabilizes.
Of course, you have the long term problem of lack of variability in the species, and adaptability problems that come with it. The cheetah is very much a "niche" predator.
Slashdot Mirror
"Rules ?!? In a knife fight ?!?"
The country code for the US is (conveniently) "1". So what happens now? A call that was "1 (234) 567-8999" is now "1 1 (234) 567-8999" ?
I hope this does not become recursive...
Actually, at the end of the article it mentions the idea of taking a biopsy of yourself, and growing a You-Burger(tm).
Unless you want to ask how the cells feel about this, you don't have to feel guilty.
This is confusing, but it appears that someone out there with a "Regisry" is attempting to pass it off as a "Registry".
This is very dangerous, so I am glad that the courts have stepped in. However, Slashdot may be next.
And better yet, to the taxi drivers get any money for playing radio commercials to their captive audience? The radio stations get paid...
Of course, this could get very ugly very quickly - Ads plastered on the insides of cabs, $nack tray$ (a la hotel refrigerators) on the back of the seat, and do you get a reduced fare if you agree to watch/listen to an "informercial" during your ride?
In other words, whatever DOES kill it makes it stronger.... (if it doesn't kill it...)
So, what will the future be like - Planet of the Apes (pre simian evolution, when they are all domestic slaves) or Uplift war (a la David Brin)?
How long before they try to put the human version of this gene in a chimp to test this out?
Goodness, this thing is full of gramatical errors. (Grammar may be optional here, but these people are lobbying the Feds). Any of my teachers in High School would have sent this paper back if it had been submitted to them:
"harbors very close to IP infringement"
"are proponents for copyleft"
"code that reflects only 100 hours"
"knowledge of for something this critical"
Blech...
This half-baked inventor ripped off the patent system (and us, of ocurse, because we are paying). But he only was able to do it because the system was set up to let him get these ever-expanding patents without actually making anything.
But think about who else is gobbling up all of our options for the future via the USPO? Big corporations, who don't wait 40 years to cash in. More importantly, these big companies are the ones who are going to try to keep the system from changing. That is going to make this a long, hard struggle.
Tell me, forkboy, by what mechanism does overpopulation - in itself - produce infertility?
...
How exactly does "natural selection" say we are breeding too much?
Just curious
I think that is really more of a problem for *products* (or what the bio companies think are "products") like plants or farm animals. Biotech companies get the "best" version, and reproduce the heck out of it. Repairing faulty genes is something else. I have a faultly gene (it is a DNA helicase gene, dealing with separating chromosomes during mitosis). It is no fun at all, and can (and has) mess up a whole raft of things. This mutation is not going to be useful to anyone down the road, unless trisomy is somehow adaptive. I would modify my genetic makeup in a second to fix this - it would probably add years to my life. I don't have any biological children (not that stupid), but they would certainly be more adaptive with a proper metabolism than dangerous (and often deadly) mutations.
FFFish, that makes lots of sense. There is one thing that I might say in defense of the Half Keyboard, though (no economic interest, although I did download the demo, have not tried it yet...). Since this is designed/recommended for use with a PDA, I am assuming that the average user (or a lot of them) are going back to a full-size keyboard when they get home. I am guessing that learning a whole new keyboard layout would make that difficult, and the Half-Keyboard less so.
I tend to agree with you on this one. AppleInsider has produced a bunch of stupid predictions over the years (most especially the "waterproof iBook" rumor). I have found their accuracy to be about 5%, and stopped reading their website.
But you never know...
If this thing is going to last 1,000 years, why not include something useful, like the location of all the nuclear waste dumps containing plutonium and other radioactive elements with multiple thousand year half lives. (24,000 for plutonium?).
There was recently (a few years back) an architectural design contest for storage of radioactive waste. The idea was to design a container that would not only last tens of thousands of years, but transmit (by it's structure - since no language used today will still be around - almost certainly) that the contents are dangerous - "Keep Out!"
There should be some interesting ideas from this contest that would help these Rosetta Disk folks make sure that someone actually figures out what this thing is for.
Now where is that URL...?
Right, which is exactly why Be is a tasty morsel for MS. They have the money to blow. They are in need of a good, multimedia OS for the desktop. And they are not going to have any trouble getting BeWindows (whatever...) into the market and deciding what to do with it. MS has the users, they have the apps, they just need a decent OS to replace the mess that they have made. And they want to get into the handheld/embedded market.
Scenario:
- MS shells out money for Be.
- They port all their big Apps (Office, etc.)
- Spread a little money around to get the third party developers interested (games, business software, etc - From what I understand, Be is a lot easier to program for than Windows. IANAP - at least on Windows and Be...).
- Release Windows 2001 MM (multimedia) at the end of next year, eraly 2002
Viola! The choice is esy to make - a good, fast consumer OS form the buigest software company on the earth - people would eat it up. They could sell it as the client OS, and keep WinMonster2000 on the server.
They can keep Apple and Linux from eating up too much of the desktopmarket, and have a real competitor in the embedded market...
This may be a bit off-topic, but it does affect Mac/Be/etc.
- --
How long before someone buys BeOS? Am I the only one who thinks that Microsoft could get itself out of the corner it has backed itself into by buying Be (once they take their whiping for being abusing the market).
1) A good, multimedia OS that runs on Intel. W2K is not going to make hordes of friends on the desktop.
2) A good embedded OS. BeIA kicks WinCE all the way around the block (from what I have been able to gather - never used either of them). MS has failed so many times with WinCE, they could use something that works for a change. They know this is a huge and growing market.
The only big problem that they would have is backwards compatibility (big problem...), but I they could use an emulator. W2K is not winning any awards for backwards compatibility either.
-----------------------------------------------
Well, what really strikes me as silly is the way IP gets divided up, with the "latest and greatest" cashing in, taking all the glory, and everyone else looking foolish. So these guys figured out how to start and stop a biological process that has been going on almost as long as there has been life on earth (probably...). Does that give them the exclusive right to make megabucks off what could be potentially the biggest paradigm shift in energy use in our lifetime (probably not, though...)?
But what about the other people who contributed to this discovery - the University of California, the Federal Government (land grant college system, probably a bunch of grants these people worked or studied under at one time or another), the people who figured out that these organisms produce hydrogen in the first place? Does everyone get a cut? They all seem to have a pretty good claim, in this particular case.
To really stretch the point, perhaps part of the proceeds could be contributed to environmental causes - after all, global climate change and toxic waste may not be good for these little bacteria (yes, I know this is a stupid argument, but I am trying to make a point, and it is actually much more relevant in the case of medicines patented based on rare tropical plants, genes taken from animals in threatened environments, etc.)
Fundamentally, the whole idea of patenting discoveries and getting rich off of them in an area of scientific investigation raises some pretty big questions in my mind. There are a lot of parallels to software development. What if I decide that I am not going to publish anything, so that no one can use any of my ideas to come up with anything? What if people start horading their research? Corporations like pharmaceutical companies, already do this. Its this what we want academic research to become?
If this is public research, let it produce public results. If it is private (and I mean private, none of this "It was public until the government gave us the patent *cough* AZT *cough*" BS.
Not that I am the first to think of that...
...or I would have patented it by now...
Uh, these people are working in *public* universities. Funded with taxes, maybe?
How much do you think they spent on airtight jars for this experiment?
A little off topic, but I would like to buy this book. Does anyone know a good, English-language technical bookstore that is online in Europe (except for Amazon-UK)? I live in Spain, and the markup on English technical texts here is brutal (often double).
Any help appreciated...
Unhobbled, in that they meet no resistance from local governemts, film industry, etc. Here in Spain all the chain theatres run Hollywood movies, and local stuff has more or less success, depending on the movie.
Harrison Ford always gets into the big theatres. Javier Bardem has to do something worth watching.
What he is talking about is getting his content to you for a price, with nothing to stop him. Not about the content itself being "free", even in the sense of portability.
Well, I am sure there are lots of problems with developing a breeding population of mamoths today (like, where are you going to put them? They are going to need *lots* of room, and *lots* to eat - what other animals are going to get squeezed if they wanted to do this?), but the number of individuals available may not be one of them (or not as big as one might think).
Cheetahs, for example, are all almost genetically identical. They come from an extremely small population that survived the last ice age (there are theories that it ws a single, pregnant female...). One effect of having a very inbred population is that genetic defects express themselves and "fall out" of the gene pool. You get a high attrition rate (probably) in the first N generations, but after that it stabilizes.
Of course, you have the long term problem of lack of variability in the species, and adaptability problems that come with it. The cheetah is very much a "niche" predator.