Just playing devil's advocate here, but I'll get modded down anyway. Reading these comments, I tried replacing the word "Terrorist" with "People Who Trade in Kiddie Porn" and I find myself pulled a little to the center on this matter. The administration is setting up standards for companies to provide data to aid in criminal probes... with the same regulations applying to their requests for information as apply to wiretaps.
We have to find a middle way on this issue. I don't want law enforcement to be helpless against child sexual predators simply because those scumbags can simply hop on a P2P network and trade all they want. At the same time, there are some pretty imposing technical issues here. Who gets cited for an open-source project that isn't in compliance? How do we force the Executive branch to comply with the legal standards for requesting data? Bush was guilty of illegal wiretaps against Americans, but there were no legal repurcussions from those violations.
I think that's the real issue here. Law enforcement needs the tools to bust the bad guys, but the people need a legal recourse for ensuring law enforcement doesn't abuse that power. We currently don't have the latter, and that's where our outrage needs to be directed.
"...issues that make it hard to recommend that you roll your own Diaspora server just yet."
Umm... Am I missing something here? Why would you set up your own Diaspora server using a Developer's Release? It's in development, as in not ready for prime time yet. There might be too many security issues for it to go live in October, as is scheduled, but if the open source community gets behind the project, that could easily be overcome.
Unfortunately, this seems to be the catch-22 of many open source start-ups: You need outside developers to help you work out the bugs in your software, but when you publish your development software, everyone beats you up for all the bugs they find in it.
The London cab driver example is a very good one for focusing this debate on some empirical evidence. Because the cab drivers have had to internalize an immense amount of information about London roads and must constantly exercise mental navigation of those roads, the portion of their brains dealing with navigation, the hippocampus has grown substantially larger through these perpetual calculations of navigation. By eliminating the requirement to memorize this information, and allowing the cab drivers to rely entirely on GPS navigation systems, we are essentially replacing a skilled labor profession with automation.
The cab drivers themselves are reduced to automatons, mindlessly following the driving instructions fed to them via the navigation system. Because driving requires full attention, no other brain exercise can fill the gap. The hippocampus is no longer being exercised, and will atrophy.
So yes, this is a concrete empirical example of technology making someone stupider.
What offends me most about these malware tactics is that I'm savvy enough to recognize the spoof, but the low income kids and old people in my neighborhood aren't. I know not to click on anything that pops up in my browser when I'm surfing, but every week I get people on my porch needing help cleaning out their infected systems, which I do and they get infected again within a week. How can these malware authors take pride in preventing little kids and old people access to the Internet or their software? Where's the sport? What pathetic losers.
So it's a serialized novel, like Dicken's Great Expectations or Stephen King's Green Mile, where you get readers to subscribe for a year, and then get more money from them when you publish the finalized ebook or hardcopy. I'm sure this format could work and make money, but the fact that the NYT's ran this article, with a link to the website, which doesn't yet have a "Subscribe" option yet marks a sorely missed opportunity.
I'll be interested in seeing how this turns out. As many commenters have noted, it's nothing new, and reading for long stretches on a desktop, laptop, iPad, or cell phone is uncomfortable. I tried to write a novel using MediaWiki and allowing user contributions, but the online format drove people away. Illustrations might make it more appealing, but user contributions could quickly make it go the way of Oort-Cloud, lots of people posting mediocre content and nobody reading any of it.
All of which is carefully documented, just like the proper use of parenthesis and semicolons and whatnot is documented in a programming language.
To which document are you referring? MLA? Chicago? APA? Which version? APA just released their new standards. Are you referring to APA version five or six? You argue that "it's not a matter of opinion;" however, depending on the standard, you have different syntactical rules to which you must adhere.
It's like the modern saying, "I love standards, there's so many to choose from." I have a paper from my days in college, studying English, which one teacher gave an "A" and another gave the exact same paper an "F" for grammar because it really is just a matter of opinion.
It was Isaac Asimov's opinion that the nonsensical nature of the English language is a major contributor to poor grammar and illiteracy in the United States. There are no spelling standards in our language, different letters can represent different sounds depending on the context, and grammar rules are unnecessarily complex. Asimov, President of Mensa and author of hundreds of books, thought that we should revamp the written word to spell things phonetically and do away with much of the silly grammar rules that only please those individuals so pedantic as to master them.
And whose standards are we talking about here? MLA style? Chicago? There are half a dozen different ways to place the commas in a list of items depending on the standard to which you are writing. That's why I find it hilarious when people make fun of others for poor grammar. Anyone who speaks and writes in a language as ridiculous and nonsensical as English has no right to criticize people who speak Ebonics, misplace i's and e's, or write words phonetically on MySpace.
Let me get this straight. My Kindle doesn't have the functionality to store my library in categories, meaning I have to hack in metatags on all my ebooks using the note-taking feature and search that if I wan't find just my books on Computer Science or Science Fiction, the recent upgrade to my Kindle allows me to view PDF files, but not zoom in on their page content, meaning I still can't read PDF's on it unless I pack a magnifying glass, and I have no way of exporting the personal notes I take on it to a text file or other non-kindle-readable format.
I don't mind these shortcomings, because the whole point of my Kindle is not having to reading books on my cellphone or computer monitor, but now I'm supposed to believe I will soon be getting games on this device currently lacking so many basic features? I'm not drinking this kool aide.
When Katie Curic asked Sarah Palin what newspapers and magazines she read, Palin should have responded "I don't read Newspapers, I read the news on the internet", and mentioned that all the news stories of the day have been driven by sites like Drudge, LittleGreenFootballs and Daily Kos, and Huffington Post, not by NYT or Washington Post.
Of course, this overlooks the fact that 80-90% of what these sites are linking to is content hosted on the NYT's, WP, WSJ, and other professionally-produced sources.
I'm okay with paying for the New York Times. I agree the quality of their articles makes it worth it. Lengthy, well-researched content costs money to produce, and people like myself and the rest of the Internet thrives on the professionally-produced news. Without it, Slashdot and my blog would have much less to link to.
Where I am against this is the implementation. New Scientist magazine and the WSJ have both gone the metered/subscription route. So if I want to access their content, that's two sets of usernames and passwords to keep track of, and payment for content I'm only reading incidentally because I got referred to it from another site. Add the NYT's to this, and it's three sites I have to manage and pay for.
The proper solution was for the newspapers to establish a single-access paid-for system where we can access all their content and have the papers get paid a percentage based on the popularity of their content. They are apparently shunning this logical strategy for an anarchy of individual strategies that will confuse, frustrate, and drive away consumers.
I love newspapers, I want them to succeed, and I think this old push-media strategy is going to drive away more readers than it will convince readers to pay for content.
As the Y Chromosome is a genetic dead zone filled with genes that don't do anything. The overwhelming majority of these changes are probably useless mutations that have no effect on the host organism and therefore didn't get bred out as harmful in the same way a mutation on the X chromosome would most likely kill the organism in which it expresses.
Think about it, we are 2 percent different genetically from chimpanzees, which accounts for the what we see as dramatic differences between our species, but this study found 20-plus percent genetic differences between our Y chromosome and our closest ancestor. Men are not 20-plus percent different from women as we are 2 percent different from chimpanzees.
The word "evolution" has nothing to do with this study. There is no natural selection involved, only random mutations amassing on a chromosome that is mostly empty space anyways.
Second Life had magnificient promise in academia. I used to love exploring the International Space Museum, NASA's virtual home there, and the garden of Physics demonstrations, and the NOAA's island of activities.
Then I tried to bring my class of high school aged kids into Second Life to go on a virtual field trip to these places... only to be thwarted by Linden Labs policy of not allowing more than five people to log into the world from the same location. I looked online, and people told me to call Linden Labs and request an exception be made, but by that time it was too late to attempt the field trip.
Why ban multiple users from the same location? Greed. That has always been Second Life's main detraction. Unlike the World Wide Web, where anyone with a server can plug in and host content, Linden Labs has total control over their world. A virtual world will not work unless it is completely open so that anyone can plug into it and host content themselves. Second Life is just a fantastic ghost town now, filled with amazing creations by people who ultimately do not own what they have built... it's like the Roman ruins.
However, I do completely agree that Tyson is being unfair to the American government. In fact, this is the same guy who previously argued Republicans were doing a great job of funding American science. The real issue here, and the one we are dealing with most in computer science, is American Culture's antipathy and outright contempt for science and academia. Kids aren't going into Computer Science, Physics, Chemistry, etc, because they are afraid of being associated with "geeks." The kids all want to be gangsters, models, and sports stars... not realizing how unrealistic those dreams are and that only a miniscule percentage of people succeed in those arenas.
We need a culture change, we need to be proud geeks and make others envy us. It'll help us out in the long run.
An 11 centimeter strip of phone or Ethernet wire, which represents one nanosecond of network travel time. RDM Grace Hopper used to use this to explain to the Generals why transmissions around the world took so long. Put a thousand of these together to create a microsecond.
History of computers: Put out an abacus, slide ruler, and scientific calculator for the kids to play with. Show them a photo of ENIAC and explain how their cell phone now has more computing power.
Don't be afraid to put computers out for the kids to play with. I maintain the computers at our local science center, and they do take some abuse, but we haven't lost one in three years of being in use. These are desktops though, with the CPU out of reach. My experience with laptops is that the kids will pull the keys off the keyboard or stick paperclips into the ports (We had an OLPC that got trashed quick when one child ripped the rubber keys off the keyboard). Don't put too much filtering on the computer, you want to keep the kids from looking at porn and installing malware, but you also don't want to keep them from exploring.
With computers out, you can have all sorts of activities, such as an Internet scavenger hunt. We did this last night and the kids absolutely loved it. There's also websites where you can perform visual traceroutes. I had our kids run a tracert to fbi.gov, which they got a kick out of.
There's the classic "bubblesort" game. Have the kids line up, assign them random numbers. Then have one child be the pointer, another the compare function, etc, etc, and sort the kids into order. It's nice to have psuedocode up on a projector to walk through as they perform the steps.
This is all I can think of right now, but I'll check my notes tonight to remember what else we've done.
Good Luck!
I second this! CS Unplugged has got some fantastic demos online. Check out their videos where they teach kids about network security, sorting algorithms, and binary. I've incorporated some of their activities into my own classes.
The greatest benefit of these e-readers is the fact that I can download tons of free books like Lawrence Lessig’s, Richard Stallman’s, the entire collection of Project Gutenberg, and the works of Creative Commons authors everywhere, and read them in the comfort of reflected light in bed rather than emitted light through a hot laptop or tiny cell phone. So long as Amazon doesn't try to erase the library of texts I got from independent sources, I'll continue to be very happy with my Kindle.
This was a very thoughtful explanation of why the system currently justifies software patents, and it does effectively pull my thinking a little more to the center on the matter; however, the author is justifying software patents from the perspective of someone who was programming when nothing fit the criteria of "obvious" in the field, when everything was new and innovative. The examples he gives, handwriting analysis, speech software, etc, are all very impressive, but I see them as bodies of creative work, collections of software engineering techniques that add up to something special, but also something anyone else should have the right to create if they have that same foundation of common software engineering tools in their minds. This makes software copyrightable, but not patentable in my view.
For instance, I've been learning design patterns for OOP this year. The GoF put a great deal of effort into formulating these solutions, and there is nothing "obvious" about them. Should they have been patentable? If design patterns were patented, it would cripple the progress of software innovation, but the GoF published them for everyone to use, and, as a result of their wide-adoption within programming, they have become "obvious," and would no longer fit the criteria for patenting. We work in a field of accelerating cultural-adoption, as more people become programmers, the less esoteric our field becomes and the non-obvious innovations of 20 years ago are the cultural norm of today.
Great example. Another example is how Thomas Edison used his patent on film to control movie-production, which resulted in a union of independent filmakers establishing Hollywood, because it was far away from Edison, making it difficult for him to enforce his monopoly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Patents_Company
The Educate to Innovate Campaign sets up a "National Lab Day" beginning in May 2010. You can sign up to request support for your project, or offer yourself as an expert for projects in your area. I've signed up as a computer scientist to help out on projects in my locale.
http://www.nationallabday.org/about
This is an awesome opportunity to Geek out with kids as far as I'm concerned.
This may be a stupid question, but I'm wondering why Windows automatic updates wouldn't qualify:
You subscribe to it.
It's a media that is downloaded to the computer.
It's automatic.
It tells you how large the update is and allows you to customize what updates you accept.
And it's been around since Windows 98. Yes, the patent deals with audio and video files, but files are files in the eyes of the patent office (at least in the silly way they are justifying these algorithm/process patents for computers). I know it can't be this simple, but I'm having trouble figuring out why this wouldn't qualify as a 'prior art'.
It has a subscription option, and you can download content, but the problem is that the subscribed content is "streaming" and not automatically downloaded to the client computer. I'll be following this story as this patent would invalidate my Miro player.
I wish just one of these frivilous "process patents," which the high courts have ruled acceptable because they modify the physical components of a computer (ie. hard drive), would go to the Supreme Court, as the recent comments from its members signal they think the patents are ridiculous as well and would probably invalidate them.
Actually, the problem with science-specific funding in the stimulus bill is not that these projects will require additional funding, but that the funding won't be spent quickly. The NYT and other papers have been covering the fact that many projects have gotten the funding they desperately need from the stimulus bill to complete their research, but will be spending that funding over the next decade. Researchers are under political pressure to spend the funding quickly, but the research intrinsically takes time to perform and they are not required to spend now or lose it later.
The main problem is with public perceptions over what the science-specific portion of the spending was meant to achieve. It was not intended to create jobs immediately, but rather serve the long-term goal of putting America back in the lead for the world's research and development. The website referenced in this post does a great job of stressing this fact, and a survey of the impressive list of projects being funded by the stimulus bill further illustrates the surge in innovation we should be experiencing from this work a few years down the road.
Science funding isn’t the "stimulus" part of the bill, it's the "reinvestment" part.
I have a problem with making assumptions for automobile traffic based on a computer simulation that used pedestrian traffic. For one thing, pedestrians don't have speed limits. If everyone on the road drove 60 miles per hour, there would be no "traffic clumps." It's the variations in speed that cause these. Also, previous studies have shown it's the jerks who force the rule-abiders to hit their breaks unexpectedly, which causes additional clumps in the system, waves of traffic jams that can last hours after a close-call occurs.
Slashdot Mirror
Just playing devil's advocate here, but I'll get modded down anyway. Reading these comments, I tried replacing the word "Terrorist" with "People Who Trade in Kiddie Porn" and I find myself pulled a little to the center on this matter. The administration is setting up standards for companies to provide data to aid in criminal probes... with the same regulations applying to their requests for information as apply to wiretaps.
We have to find a middle way on this issue. I don't want law enforcement to be helpless against child sexual predators simply because those scumbags can simply hop on a P2P network and trade all they want. At the same time, there are some pretty imposing technical issues here. Who gets cited for an open-source project that isn't in compliance? How do we force the Executive branch to comply with the legal standards for requesting data? Bush was guilty of illegal wiretaps against Americans, but there were no legal repurcussions from those violations.
I think that's the real issue here. Law enforcement needs the tools to bust the bad guys, but the people need a legal recourse for ensuring law enforcement doesn't abuse that power. We currently don't have the latter, and that's where our outrage needs to be directed.
Umm... Am I missing something here? Why would you set up your own Diaspora server using a Developer's Release? It's in development, as in not ready for prime time yet. There might be too many security issues for it to go live in October, as is scheduled, but if the open source community gets behind the project, that could easily be overcome.
Unfortunately, this seems to be the catch-22 of many open source start-ups: You need outside developers to help you work out the bugs in your software, but when you publish your development software, everyone beats you up for all the bugs they find in it.
Stop criticizing and start coding.
The London cab driver example is a very good one for focusing this debate on some empirical evidence. Because the cab drivers have had to internalize an immense amount of information about London roads and must constantly exercise mental navigation of those roads, the portion of their brains dealing with navigation, the hippocampus has grown substantially larger through these perpetual calculations of navigation. By eliminating the requirement to memorize this information, and allowing the cab drivers to rely entirely on GPS navigation systems, we are essentially replacing a skilled labor profession with automation.
The cab drivers themselves are reduced to automatons, mindlessly following the driving instructions fed to them via the navigation system. Because driving requires full attention, no other brain exercise can fill the gap. The hippocampus is no longer being exercised, and will atrophy.
So yes, this is a concrete empirical example of technology making someone stupider.
Good point. Colbert fans don't have a billionaire Obama-hating family to bus them out to the event like Glenn Beck does.
What offends me most about these malware tactics is that I'm savvy enough to recognize the spoof, but the low income kids and old people in my neighborhood aren't. I know not to click on anything that pops up in my browser when I'm surfing, but every week I get people on my porch needing help cleaning out their infected systems, which I do and they get infected again within a week. How can these malware authors take pride in preventing little kids and old people access to the Internet or their software? Where's the sport? What pathetic losers.
So it's a serialized novel, like Dicken's Great Expectations or Stephen King's Green Mile, where you get readers to subscribe for a year, and then get more money from them when you publish the finalized ebook or hardcopy. I'm sure this format could work and make money, but the fact that the NYT's ran this article, with a link to the website, which doesn't yet have a "Subscribe" option yet marks a sorely missed opportunity.
I'll be interested in seeing how this turns out. As many commenters have noted, it's nothing new, and reading for long stretches on a desktop, laptop, iPad, or cell phone is uncomfortable. I tried to write a novel using MediaWiki and allowing user contributions, but the online format drove people away. Illustrations might make it more appealing, but user contributions could quickly make it go the way of Oort-Cloud, lots of people posting mediocre content and nobody reading any of it.
We don't drink!
We don't cuss!
Norfolk! Norfolk! Norfolk!
To which document are you referring? MLA? Chicago? APA? Which version? APA just released their new standards. Are you referring to APA version five or six? You argue that "it's not a matter of opinion;" however, depending on the standard, you have different syntactical rules to which you must adhere.
It's like the modern saying, "I love standards, there's so many to choose from." I have a paper from my days in college, studying English, which one teacher gave an "A" and another gave the exact same paper an "F" for grammar because it really is just a matter of opinion.
It was Isaac Asimov's opinion that the nonsensical nature of the English language is a major contributor to poor grammar and illiteracy in the United States. There are no spelling standards in our language, different letters can represent different sounds depending on the context, and grammar rules are unnecessarily complex. Asimov, President of Mensa and author of hundreds of books, thought that we should revamp the written word to spell things phonetically and do away with much of the silly grammar rules that only please those individuals so pedantic as to master them.
And whose standards are we talking about here? MLA style? Chicago? There are half a dozen different ways to place the commas in a list of items depending on the standard to which you are writing. That's why I find it hilarious when people make fun of others for poor grammar. Anyone who speaks and writes in a language as ridiculous and nonsensical as English has no right to criticize people who speak Ebonics, misplace i's and e's, or write words phonetically on MySpace.
Let me get this straight. My Kindle doesn't have the functionality to store my library in categories, meaning I have to hack in metatags on all my ebooks using the note-taking feature and search that if I wan't find just my books on Computer Science or Science Fiction, the recent upgrade to my Kindle allows me to view PDF files, but not zoom in on their page content, meaning I still can't read PDF's on it unless I pack a magnifying glass, and I have no way of exporting the personal notes I take on it to a text file or other non-kindle-readable format.
I don't mind these shortcomings, because the whole point of my Kindle is not having to reading books on my cellphone or computer monitor, but now I'm supposed to believe I will soon be getting games on this device currently lacking so many basic features? I'm not drinking this kool aide.
When Katie Curic asked Sarah Palin what newspapers and magazines she read, Palin should have responded "I don't read Newspapers, I read the news on the internet", and mentioned that all the news stories of the day have been driven by sites like Drudge, LittleGreenFootballs and Daily Kos, and Huffington Post, not by NYT or Washington Post.
Of course, this overlooks the fact that 80-90% of what these sites are linking to is content hosted on the NYT's, WP, WSJ, and other professionally-produced sources.
I'm okay with paying for the New York Times. I agree the quality of their articles makes it worth it. Lengthy, well-researched content costs money to produce, and people like myself and the rest of the Internet thrives on the professionally-produced news. Without it, Slashdot and my blog would have much less to link to.
Where I am against this is the implementation. New Scientist magazine and the WSJ have both gone the metered/subscription route. So if I want to access their content, that's two sets of usernames and passwords to keep track of, and payment for content I'm only reading incidentally because I got referred to it from another site. Add the NYT's to this, and it's three sites I have to manage and pay for.
The proper solution was for the newspapers to establish a single-access paid-for system where we can access all their content and have the papers get paid a percentage based on the popularity of their content. They are apparently shunning this logical strategy for an anarchy of individual strategies that will confuse, frustrate, and drive away consumers.
I love newspapers, I want them to succeed, and I think this old push-media strategy is going to drive away more readers than it will convince readers to pay for content.
As the Y Chromosome is a genetic dead zone filled with genes that don't do anything. The overwhelming majority of these changes are probably useless mutations that have no effect on the host organism and therefore didn't get bred out as harmful in the same way a mutation on the X chromosome would most likely kill the organism in which it expresses.
Think about it, we are 2 percent different genetically from chimpanzees, which accounts for the what we see as dramatic differences between our species, but this study found 20-plus percent genetic differences between our Y chromosome and our closest ancestor. Men are not 20-plus percent different from women as we are 2 percent different from chimpanzees.
The word "evolution" has nothing to do with this study. There is no natural selection involved, only random mutations amassing on a chromosome that is mostly empty space anyways.
Second Life had magnificient promise in academia. I used to love exploring the International Space Museum, NASA's virtual home there, and the garden of Physics demonstrations, and the NOAA's island of activities.
Then I tried to bring my class of high school aged kids into Second Life to go on a virtual field trip to these places... only to be thwarted by Linden Labs policy of not allowing more than five people to log into the world from the same location. I looked online, and people told me to call Linden Labs and request an exception be made, but by that time it was too late to attempt the field trip.
Why ban multiple users from the same location? Greed. That has always been Second Life's main detraction. Unlike the World Wide Web, where anyone with a server can plug in and host content, Linden Labs has total control over their world. A virtual world will not work unless it is completely open so that anyone can plug into it and host content themselves. Second Life is just a fantastic ghost town now, filled with amazing creations by people who ultimately do not own what they have built... it's like the Roman ruins.
The problem with anecdotal evidence, is that people arguing the exact opposite point can pull out a dozen examples too. In this article John Derbyshire pulls out a dozen examples of why Obama is trying to kill science in the United States. It's not convincing to anyone who knows about National Lab Day, Educate to Innovate STEM initiative, Computer Science Week, data.gov, and the Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research... but this is all anecdotal too, a better resource would be an overview of all the projects being funded by the stimulus package or trends in government funding of scientific research.
However, I do completely agree that Tyson is being unfair to the American government. In fact, this is the same guy who previously argued Republicans were doing a great job of funding American science. The real issue here, and the one we are dealing with most in computer science, is American Culture's antipathy and outright contempt for science and academia. Kids aren't going into Computer Science, Physics, Chemistry, etc, because they are afraid of being associated with "geeks." The kids all want to be gangsters, models, and sports stars... not realizing how unrealistic those dreams are and that only a miniscule percentage of people succeed in those arenas.
We need a culture change, we need to be proud geeks and make others envy us. It'll help us out in the long run.
This is all I can think of right now, but I'll check my notes tonight to remember what else we've done. Good Luck!
I second this! CS Unplugged has got some fantastic demos online. Check out their videos where they teach kids about network security, sorting algorithms, and binary. I've incorporated some of their activities into my own classes.
The greatest benefit of these e-readers is the fact that I can download tons of free books like Lawrence Lessig’s, Richard Stallman’s, the entire collection of Project Gutenberg, and the works of Creative Commons authors everywhere, and read them in the comfort of reflected light in bed rather than emitted light through a hot laptop or tiny cell phone. So long as Amazon doesn't try to erase the library of texts I got from independent sources, I'll continue to be very happy with my Kindle.
This was a very thoughtful explanation of why the system currently justifies software patents, and it does effectively pull my thinking a little more to the center on the matter; however, the author is justifying software patents from the perspective of someone who was programming when nothing fit the criteria of "obvious" in the field, when everything was new and innovative. The examples he gives, handwriting analysis, speech software, etc, are all very impressive, but I see them as bodies of creative work, collections of software engineering techniques that add up to something special, but also something anyone else should have the right to create if they have that same foundation of common software engineering tools in their minds. This makes software copyrightable, but not patentable in my view. For instance, I've been learning design patterns for OOP this year. The GoF put a great deal of effort into formulating these solutions, and there is nothing "obvious" about them. Should they have been patentable? If design patterns were patented, it would cripple the progress of software innovation, but the GoF published them for everyone to use, and, as a result of their wide-adoption within programming, they have become "obvious," and would no longer fit the criteria for patenting. We work in a field of accelerating cultural-adoption, as more people become programmers, the less esoteric our field becomes and the non-obvious innovations of 20 years ago are the cultural norm of today.
Great example. Another example is how Thomas Edison used his patent on film to control movie-production, which resulted in a union of independent filmakers establishing Hollywood, because it was far away from Edison, making it difficult for him to enforce his monopoly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Patents_Company
The Educate to Innovate Campaign sets up a "National Lab Day" beginning in May 2010. You can sign up to request support for your project, or offer yourself as an expert for projects in your area. I've signed up as a computer scientist to help out on projects in my locale. http://www.nationallabday.org/about This is an awesome opportunity to Geek out with kids as far as I'm concerned.
And it's been around since Windows 98. Yes, the patent deals with audio and video files, but files are files in the eyes of the patent office (at least in the silly way they are justifying these algorithm/process patents for computers). I know it can't be this simple, but I'm having trouble figuring out why this wouldn't qualify as a 'prior art'.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_42/b3854093_mz063.htm
It has a subscription option, and you can download content, but the problem is that the subscribed content is "streaming" and not automatically downloaded to the client computer. I'll be following this story as this patent would invalidate my Miro player.
I wish just one of these frivilous "process patents," which the high courts have ruled acceptable because they modify the physical components of a computer (ie. hard drive), would go to the Supreme Court, as the recent comments from its members signal they think the patents are ridiculous as well and would probably invalidate them.
The main problem is with public perceptions over what the science-specific portion of the spending was meant to achieve. It was not intended to create jobs immediately, but rather serve the long-term goal of putting America back in the lead for the world's research and development. The website referenced in this post does a great job of stressing this fact, and a survey of the impressive list of projects being funded by the stimulus bill further illustrates the surge in innovation we should be experiencing from this work a few years down the road.
Science funding isn’t the "stimulus" part of the bill, it's the "reinvestment" part.
I have a problem with making assumptions for automobile traffic based on a computer simulation that used pedestrian traffic. For one thing, pedestrians don't have speed limits. If everyone on the road drove 60 miles per hour, there would be no "traffic clumps." It's the variations in speed that cause these. Also, previous studies have shown it's the jerks who force the rule-abiders to hit their breaks unexpectedly, which causes additional clumps in the system, waves of traffic jams that can last hours after a close-call occurs.