The only exceptions that I will accept as reasonable are a very narrow area regarding national security
I agree, but I've never found a clear way to define that.
Obviously information regarding forces in a war should be classified. Is Libya a war? Ooops. Today's policitican can't even define war.
OK. You and I can define war. So let's say that we restrict classification to information regarding forces in a war. What about new weapons systems? OK. Troops in war, and weapons systems.
What's a weapons system? Your tank runs Linux. Linux is part of a weapons system. Linux is classified. Ooops.
Then, don't even get me started on homeland security.
It all boils down to judgement. Yep. No getting around it. We actually have to judge stuff. Trade negotiations. Plainly they should be public. Identities of CIA agents working in hostile countries. Plainly classified. It's like pornography. You know it when you see it.
Yep, Consider doomsday in general. What is the optimal ammount of time for a doomsdey prophet to get his message out? He needs time to build a following, get buzz, donations, etc. When it doesn't come true he fades into the background with a modest take. If it does come true, he/she can cash in big. IIRC, Jean Dixon did this with the Kennedy Asassination. I'm not sure how she worded here prediction, or what the timeframe was; but a lot of people believe she predicted it. That got her a lucrative horoscope column for decades. Not sure what she's up to now; might be dead. Anyway...
Let's say you want to break into the doomsday business. You can just choose a year; but that's a bit too easy. There are 365 days in a year. Pick a day 10-20 years from now. That gives you roughly 3650 days. The clock is starting--build your buzz. Really, if you can't get funding for your "startup" in that time you shouldn't be in the business anyway.
Think about that. Even if these guys are so bold as to pick a particular day, you only need about 3k guys in the ENTIRE WORLD to cover a timeframe that people care about. Less than 10 years? Too soon if you haven't got buzz yet. More than 20? Too far off. The old people figure they'll be dead anyway, and the youngsters think they'll live forever. I'm not sure if the 10/10 rule is optimal. I'll leave "optimal doomsday buzz building" for some PhD Psychology candidate.
BTW, this works for anything not just Jesus coming back. A lot of guys do it in finance particularly. They don't pick a date. I don't think just anybody can do it. You have to have charisma, and you have to have been doing it for a while. Once again, when it actually looks like the market is going in the direction you predict (which it usually will at some point if you pick something that's happened before) you start cashing in. CNBC, here you come. Write a few books. Retire. Pretty sweet gig. Funny thing is, I don't think these guys could pull it off if they didn't actually believe it themselves.
Statisticly though, I think it's BS which is while I'll probably never make it in the doomsday business.
Doctor (After checking him for anything serious) Don't worry it's part of the aging process.
Patient Can you do anything for me?
Doctor We can get you a hearing aid.
Patient How much will that cost?
Doctor Well, we have two models. One costs $1000 and the other costs $5.
Patient What's the difference between the two.
Doctor One is a sophisticated minitiarized amplifier assembled, customized to fit your ear, and tuned by highly trained technicians. The other is a button with a wire that goes to a wooden box in your pocket.
Patient What does the button do?
Doctor Nothing. But you'd be surprised at how much louder people talk when they see you wearing it.
I woke up to the sound of a hailstorm at 3 or 4 AM. I went back to get some sleep, rolled over at 5 AM and the Moon was out. It just happened to be in the right position to be right in my eye. It was indeed very bright. I thought it might be twilight combined with the Moon, but I don't think we are having twilight at 5 AM yet.
If we hadn't unloaded two full clips on Afghanistan and Iraq, we might have had more bullets left for K'daffy.
Aside from that, there's the whole pen vs. sword thing. The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt are just babies. We don't know what kind of kids or adults they'll be; but so far it looks like they've made more progress in two months than we did with 10 years of US intervention.
Gee. Imagine that.
All I can say is that as much as Obama comes off as "out of the loop", "weak", or even "not caring" it's a moot point. His hands are tied and everybody knows it. We wasted our ammo and our good will during the prior administration.
You're just trolling, right? Theodore Roosevelt is not FDR. Note, he was a man of his time, and some of his words, particularly on race are abhorrent now. In the area to which I refered previously, he was spot-on and I believe he is turning in his grave.
Neither do I, but we're dealing with an irregular shape (the coast), Another irregular shape (the wave energy itself), refraction, superposition, differing ocean density (temp and salinity), and tides. My guess would be that the irregular form of the wave energy input makes it particularly difficult.
Ron Paul has no new ideas. He just wants to take us on a trip down memory lane, back to the preconditions that got us here in the first place.
We need a Theodore Roosevelt (trust buster) not a Ron Paul. And as I put my hand to my face, shield it from the blinding Sun and scan the horizon of the Fruited Plain, I see no Rough Rider coming to save us.
IANANuclear engineer, but I always thought reactors just used regular old water and pumps for cooling. this article appears to confirm it. The Air Force is also denying they sent anything.
The story had an air of unbeleivability right out of the box. Did Hillary even say anything like that? I dunno. If so, where did she get the info? I dunno.
Then again, maybe the USAF has some magical coolant that the aliens at Area 51 showed them. It works like this: 1. Pump coolant into reactor. 2. Heat is transferred to air. 3. Hot air comes out of politician's mouth on the other side of the planet.
Wholly owned shell corporations, yep. Big problem. There might be some way around that, maybe not.
I was later thinking that a large number of multiple claimants is a problem, even if they aren't part of such a scheme. You could end up with a deal similar to what happens in a class-action, where everybody gets a $0.10 coupon for the product. Not exactly an incentive to innovate.
It might be possible to short-circuit your scenario by not permitting any entity in which a corporation owns 5% or more (SEC disclosure percentage, a good cut-off) from making any claims against the corporation. Lots of layers of foreign shell corporations as you describe though; might also cause problems.
To a certain extent, the problem may also limit itself since you have to add superfluous features to the product. You might end up with something like the car that Homer Simpson designed. Although, in something like a microchip this is less of a problem--just implement 100 extra instructions that nobody will ever use...
We should just go to compulsory licensing. If you think that your product might infringe a patent, you place 10% of the sales price in escrow. You keep a record of each sale (something most businesses do anyway), and at the end of the year you have an escrow account that's 10% of gross sales. If you think you are in the clear, you escrow nothing.
OK, are you with me? Those who claim that your product violates a patent have 1 year after your fiscal year ends to make a claim against the money you escrowed. If they don't make any claims, you pocket the money with interest.
If any patent holders make claims during that year, at the end of that year (as long as two years from the first violating sale), two things may happen.
1. You may disburse the escrow funds to claimants, based on the number of patents violated. e.g, You violate 2 Farbco patents and 1 Spimco patent, Farbco gets 2/3 of the money and Spimco gets 1/3. This gets a bit more complicated if you have multiple product lines, but you get the idea.
2. You may contest the claims, but if you do, you are subject to the usual civil claims process. If you didn't escrow anything, this is your only option.
Most people would probably opt for (1), unless the claims are really frivolous.
A system like this would have a number of consequences. First, software given freely would have an escrow of zero--immunity from suits. Per-seat service contracts (ala Red Hat) might be a different story. Yes, commercial free software would have to maintain the escrow. Really, I'd like to see software patents just go "poof!", but one thing at a time. Secondly, "suppressive" patents would not exist. If there realy is a car that runs on water, all I have to do is build it and escrow the money from sales. This might even silence the conspiracy theorists. Ditto for things like restrictions on large battery packs for electric vehicles. Nobody can stop me from building it--they can just tax me 10% for the duration of their patent. If my car is 10% better than theirs, it's worth building. If they aren't building the car, they still get paid; but they can't just sit on the patent at the behest of Big Oil.
100 years from now, this will be on the top shelf at some rare book store. I can just picture it. You know how when you go into those stores, there is usually a several volume set of *something*. I've never asked about it, because I'm not much of a collector and I figure they're expensive.
Of course, now that I've jinxed it, way too many people will buy them and sock them away, figuring wrongly that nobody else would pay that much for this. So, 100 years from now your great grandchildren will walk into the store with it in a cardboard box, and say "we have this, we heard it was connected to the old computer days", and the guy behind the counter will say, "we've got 3 sets already"
This whole thread is an illustration of a "law" I have observed on the Internet. AFAIK, this law has no person of note associated with it such as Godwin's law. I've never actually tried to phrase it succinctly, but I'll take a stab at it. It should go something like this:
For even the shortest phrase posted in an online forum, there is virtually no limit to the number of ridiculous inferences that may be made.
It further follows (or perhaps should be a separate "law") that: "It is impossible to strawman-proof your arguments online".
In case you haven't noticed, most revolutions suck. That's why the founders institutionalized revolution in the form of elections, and gave us cherished tools like freedom of speech and association with which to peacefully foment revolutions now and then.
So. Instead of just asking for revolution, why don't you name the shape and form of your desired change, broadcast it, and see if anybody else wants to associate with you.
Chances are, most don't. That's a major clue that your vision for revolution sucks.
Really, we got lucky to have the people in power that we had, when our revolution occured. Not only were these guys smart, they were wise and moral. It was the perfect combination that just doesn't come along often enough when things change like that.
In fact, there are already a lot of people working to bring about revolution in the USA, in the manner in which the founders envisioned. They're marching, they're blogging, they're voting. We already live in revolution. The revolution will not be revolutionized.
Technology in general facilitated the revolutions (but didn't cause them).
Economic policy probably had more to do with it.
First, the nations involved are effectively if not explicitly dollarized. Second, the dollar has been weakened due to US economic policy. When you consider that these people spend a much higher percentage of their incomes on food and other basic items that are heavily impacted by inflation, Ben Bernanke probably deserves more credit (or blame, depending on the outcome) for these changes.
Really though, even that is stretching it a bit. Dictatorships as heavy-handed as those are probably just unsustainable anyway. There was no WikiLeaks or global economic crisis impacting Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. They were all just sick and tired after a few decades of oppression, and did something about it.
Yeah, just a plane that doesn't take off, waste of resources, yada, yada.
I feel the same way sometimes; but if you don't want to do this, is there an alternative that's potentially productive, yet still satisfies the "need for speed"?
Of course, I'm sure that to some people both of these things will seem silly. I find the 50cc more interesting; because it's something I might actually be able to finance if I really wanted it. The point is though, whether you're horking a huge jet engine onto a car, or putting really tall gears on a 50cc, you never know what you might learn from it.
The space race had the biggest rockets after all, and arguably the very computer you're typing on is a spinoff from the space race.
The socialist aspect of Ivy tuition doesn't bother me; but I wonder if the implementation needs some work.
A while ago, it was big news when Stanford announced that any undergrad from a family earning less than $100k/yr would get free tuition (and maybe board, I don't recall).
The first thought running through my head was, "Wow, I bet there are some people turning down some nice raises, or selling some dividend-earning stocks to make sure they make high 90s instead of $100k"
It's the same problem as "bracket creep" in taxation, and I would expect a bunch of smart guys from Stanford to know that. Did they do it right though? I don't know.
The "invention" of self-esteem to which I'm referring is actually The Self Esteem Movement which does indeed have its roots in the late 60s, early 70s.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a special circle in hell for that bunch of idiots
Actually, it's a torroid and you're not being fair. It's in purgatory and both sides of the aisle keep us spinning in circles there.
The only exceptions that I will accept as reasonable are a very narrow area regarding national security
I agree, but I've never found a clear way to define that.
Obviously information regarding forces in a war should be classified. Is Libya a war? Ooops. Today's policitican can't even define war.
OK. You and I can define war. So let's say that we restrict classification to information regarding forces in a war. What about new weapons systems? OK. Troops in war, and weapons systems.
What's a weapons system? Your tank runs Linux. Linux is part of a weapons system. Linux is classified. Ooops.
Then, don't even get me started on homeland security.
It all boils down to judgement. Yep. No getting around it. We actually have to judge stuff. Trade negotiations. Plainly they should be public. Identities of CIA agents working in hostile countries. Plainly classified. It's like pornography. You know it when you see it.
No reason to build inductors in the road without inductive cars. No reason to build inductive cars without inductors in the road.
Followed by, "cost a lot" is an understatement.
Car happy, alternative loving California is broke. Otherwise, we'd probably be the first to try it.
Then of course, nevermind installation. Maintenance... whooo boy... everybody wants to ride the lane that isn't broken. Oh, and billing.
There are more problems than you can shake a drumstick at.
s/why/while
I wonder if I'm getting senile, or if there is a spell checker going over my posts.
Yep, Consider doomsday in general. What is the optimal ammount of time for a doomsdey prophet to get his message out? He needs time to build a following, get buzz, donations, etc. When it doesn't come true he fades into the background with a modest take. If it does come true, he/she can cash in big. IIRC, Jean Dixon did this with the Kennedy Asassination. I'm not sure how she worded here prediction, or what the timeframe was; but a lot of people believe she predicted it. That got her a lucrative horoscope column for decades. Not sure what she's up to now; might be dead. Anyway...
Let's say you want to break into the doomsday business. You can just choose a year; but that's a bit too easy. There are 365 days in a year. Pick a day 10-20 years from now. That gives you roughly 3650 days. The clock is starting--build your buzz. Really, if you can't get funding for your "startup" in that time you shouldn't be in the business anyway.
Think about that. Even if these guys are so bold as to pick a particular day, you only need about 3k guys in the ENTIRE WORLD to cover a timeframe that people care about. Less than 10 years? Too soon if you haven't got buzz yet. More than 20? Too far off. The old people figure they'll be dead anyway, and the youngsters think they'll live forever. I'm not sure if the 10/10 rule is optimal. I'll leave "optimal doomsday buzz building" for some PhD Psychology candidate.
BTW, this works for anything not just Jesus coming back. A lot of guys do it in finance particularly. They don't pick a date. I don't think just anybody can do it. You have to have charisma, and you have to have been doing it for a while. Once again, when it actually looks like the market is going in the direction you predict (which it usually will at some point if you pick something that's happened before) you start cashing in. CNBC, here you come. Write a few books. Retire. Pretty sweet gig. Funny thing is, I don't think these guys could pull it off if they didn't actually believe it themselves.
Statisticly though, I think it's BS which is while I'll probably never make it in the doomsday business.
Patient I'm losing my hearing
Doctor (After checking him for anything serious) Don't worry it's part of the aging process.
Patient Can you do anything for me?
Doctor We can get you a hearing aid.
Patient How much will that cost?
Doctor Well, we have two models. One costs $1000 and the other costs $5.
Patient What's the difference between the two.
Doctor One is a sophisticated minitiarized amplifier assembled, customized to fit your ear, and tuned by highly trained technicians. The other is a button with a wire that goes to a wooden box in your pocket.
Patient What does the button do?
Doctor Nothing. But you'd be surprised at how much louder people talk when they see you wearing it.
I woke up to the sound of a hailstorm at 3 or 4 AM. I went back to get some sleep, rolled over at 5 AM and the Moon was out. It just happened to be in the right position to be right in my eye. It was indeed very bright. I thought it might be twilight combined with the Moon, but I don't think we are having twilight at 5 AM yet.
I ended up sleeping in until 10:30.
Is what the on looks like.
(This is what the victory on nouns looks like)
If we hadn't unloaded two full clips on Afghanistan and Iraq, we might have had more bullets left for K'daffy.
Aside from that, there's the whole pen vs. sword thing. The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt are just babies. We don't know what kind of kids or adults they'll be; but so far it looks like they've made more progress in two months than we did with 10 years of US intervention.
Gee. Imagine that.
All I can say is that as much as Obama comes off as "out of the loop", "weak", or even "not caring" it's a moot point. His hands are tied and everybody knows it. We wasted our ammo and our good will during the prior administration.
Any idea what a gram of coke is worth in orbit? If you think running stuff up from Mexico is lucrative, just imagine supplying the ISS.
How long does that stuff keep? Maybe the cartels have a secret deal to piggyback some on shuttles, and stash it in LEO.
Running coke to Mars, just imagine!
And then the Mars Colony Authority will be doing everything they can to get Earth to control the growers, to no avail.
You're just trolling, right? Theodore Roosevelt is not FDR. Note, he was a man of his time, and some of his words, particularly on race are abhorrent now. In the area to which I refered previously, he was spot-on and I believe he is turning in his grave.
Neither do I, but we're dealing with an irregular shape (the coast), Another irregular shape (the wave energy itself), refraction, superposition, differing ocean density (temp and salinity), and tides. My guess would be that the irregular form of the wave energy input makes it particularly difficult.
Ron Paul has no new ideas. He just wants to take us on a trip down memory lane, back to the preconditions that got us here in the first place.
We need a Theodore Roosevelt (trust buster) not a Ron Paul. And as I put my hand to my face, shield it from the blinding Sun and scan the horizon of the Fruited Plain, I see no Rough Rider coming to save us.
We will have to do it ourselves, somehow.
IANANuclear engineer, but I always thought reactors just used regular old water and pumps for cooling. this article appears to confirm it. The Air Force is also denying they sent anything.
The story had an air of unbeleivability right out of the box. Did Hillary even say anything like that? I dunno. If so, where did she get the info? I dunno.
Then again, maybe the USAF has some magical coolant that the aliens at Area 51 showed them. It works like this: 1. Pump coolant into reactor. 2. Heat is transferred to air. 3. Hot air comes out of politician's mouth on the other side of the planet.
That would explain a lot of things.
Wholly owned shell corporations, yep. Big problem. There might be some way around that, maybe not.
I was later thinking that a large number of multiple claimants is a problem, even if they aren't part of such a scheme. You could end up with a deal similar to what happens in a class-action, where everybody gets a $0.10 coupon for the product. Not exactly an incentive to innovate.
It might be possible to short-circuit your scenario by not permitting any entity in which a corporation owns 5% or more (SEC disclosure percentage, a good cut-off) from making any claims against the corporation. Lots of layers of foreign shell corporations as you describe though; might also cause problems.
To a certain extent, the problem may also limit itself since you have to add superfluous features to the product. You might end up with something like the car that Homer Simpson designed. Although, in something like a microchip this is less of a problem--just implement 100 extra instructions that nobody will ever use...
We should just go to compulsory licensing. If you think that your product might infringe a patent, you place 10% of the sales price in escrow. You keep a record of each sale (something most businesses do anyway), and at the end of the year you have an escrow account that's 10% of gross sales. If you think you are in the clear, you escrow nothing.
OK, are you with me? Those who claim that your product violates a patent have 1 year after your fiscal year ends to make a claim against the money you escrowed. If they don't make any claims, you pocket the money with interest.
If any patent holders make claims during that year, at the end of that year (as long as two years from the first violating sale), two things may happen.
1. You may disburse the escrow funds to claimants, based on the number of patents violated. e.g, You violate 2 Farbco patents and 1 Spimco patent, Farbco gets 2/3 of the money and Spimco gets 1/3. This gets a bit more complicated if you have multiple product lines, but you get the idea.
2. You may contest the claims, but if you do, you are subject to the usual civil claims process. If you didn't escrow anything, this is your only option.
Most people would probably opt for (1), unless the claims are really frivolous.
A system like this would have a number of consequences. First, software given freely would have an escrow of zero--immunity from suits. Per-seat service contracts (ala Red Hat) might be a different story. Yes, commercial free software would have to maintain the escrow. Really, I'd like to see software patents just go "poof!", but one thing at a time. Secondly, "suppressive" patents would not exist. If there realy is a car that runs on water, all I have to do is build it and escrow the money from sales. This might even silence the conspiracy theorists. Ditto for things like restrictions on large battery packs for electric vehicles. Nobody can stop me from building it--they can just tax me 10% for the duration of their patent. If my car is 10% better than theirs, it's worth building. If they aren't building the car, they still get paid; but they can't just sit on the patent at the behest of Big Oil.
100 years from now, this will be on the top shelf at some rare book store. I can just picture it. You know how when you go into those stores, there is usually a several volume set of *something*. I've never asked about it, because I'm not much of a collector and I figure they're expensive.
Of course, now that I've jinxed it, way too many people will buy them and sock them away, figuring wrongly that nobody else would pay that much for this. So, 100 years from now your great grandchildren will walk into the store with it in a cardboard box, and say "we have this, we heard it was connected to the old computer days", and the guy behind the counter will say, "we've got 3 sets already"
This whole thread is an illustration of a "law" I have observed on the Internet. AFAIK, this law has no person of note associated with it such as Godwin's law. I've never actually tried to phrase it succinctly, but I'll take a stab at it. It should go something like this:
For even the shortest phrase posted in an online forum, there is virtually no limit to the number of ridiculous inferences that may be made.
It further follows (or perhaps should be a separate "law") that: "It is impossible to strawman-proof your arguments online".
In case you haven't noticed, most revolutions suck. That's why the founders institutionalized revolution in the form of elections, and gave us cherished tools like freedom of speech and association with which to peacefully foment revolutions now and then.
So. Instead of just asking for revolution, why don't you name the shape and form of your desired change, broadcast it, and see if anybody else wants to associate with you.
Chances are, most don't. That's a major clue that your vision for revolution sucks.
Really, we got lucky to have the people in power that we had, when our revolution occured. Not only were these guys smart, they were wise and moral. It was the perfect combination that just doesn't come along often enough when things change like that.
In fact, there are already a lot of people working to bring about revolution in the USA, in the manner in which the founders envisioned. They're marching, they're blogging, they're voting. We already live in revolution. The revolution will not be revolutionized.
Technology in general facilitated the revolutions (but didn't cause them).
Economic policy probably had more to do with it.
First, the nations involved are effectively if not explicitly dollarized. Second, the dollar has been weakened due to US economic policy. When you consider that these people spend a much higher percentage of their incomes on food and other basic items that are heavily impacted by inflation, Ben Bernanke probably deserves more credit (or blame, depending on the outcome) for these changes.
Really though, even that is stretching it a bit. Dictatorships as heavy-handed as those are probably just unsustainable anyway. There was no WikiLeaks or global economic crisis impacting Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. They were all just sick and tired after a few decades of oppression, and did something about it.
Yeah, just a plane that doesn't take off, waste of resources, yada, yada.
I feel the same way sometimes; but if you don't want to do this, is there an alternative that's potentially productive, yet still satisfies the "need for speed"?
How about 143 mph with a 50cc engine
Of course, I'm sure that to some people both of these things will seem silly. I find the 50cc more interesting; because it's something I might actually be able to finance if I really wanted it. The point is though, whether you're horking a huge jet engine onto a car, or putting really tall gears on a 50cc, you never know what you might learn from it.
The space race had the biggest rockets after all, and arguably the very computer you're typing on is a spinoff from the space race.
The socialist aspect of Ivy tuition doesn't bother me; but I wonder if the implementation needs some work.
A while ago, it was big news when Stanford announced that any undergrad from a family earning less than $100k/yr would get free tuition (and maybe board, I don't recall).
The first thought running through my head was, "Wow, I bet there are some people turning down some nice raises, or selling some dividend-earning stocks to make sure they make high 90s instead of $100k"
It's the same problem as "bracket creep" in taxation, and I would expect a bunch of smart guys from Stanford to know that. Did they do it right though? I don't know.
The "invention" of self-esteem to which I'm referring is actually The Self Esteem Movement which does indeed have its roots in the late 60s, early 70s.
You're taking what I said waaaay too literally.
LOL. Even more ironic than the usual Internet complaint about government research when you target DARPA.
Do you do know where the Internet came from?