Actually, if you read the university press release, you'll see the magical ingredient is silicon. Current lithium-ion batteries already contain graphene sheets. What they did was
sandwich silicon between the graphene sheets, because silicon can bind many more ions than carbon (the downside is that it fragments, and that's what they addressed with their sandwiching process) -> more capacity
make minuscule holes in the graphene sheets to offer shortcuts to ions traveling from one side of the sheet to the other side (-> faster charging)
Not to mention "engaging in a constructive discussion with one of the original authors of the paper, who hopped in and thanked people for their interesting comments".
I also experienced very nice example of this during the fight against the software patents directive in Europe. I had a discussion with a guy from WIPO and at one point said that software patents were generally bad for small companies. Rather than denying this like EICTA (the organisation representing mostly large ICT companies), he fully agreed with that.
But then he went off the cliff: he argued that this is actually how the system is supposed to work. By making sure that most small companies will be driven out of business or swallowed by larger ones, you get a consolidation in the market. And consolidation is good for efficiency, cost cutting etc. Basically, he considered software patents as a market optimisation tool to get rid of all the fragmentation, to speed up the "natural" evolution that any economic sector is supposed to go through (starting out with many small time independent businesses, followed by a consolidation phase that leaves a few giants to rule it all).
That said, WIPO isn't the worst. Countries such as India and Brazil also have a say in there, and they're far less extremist than the Western world (at least for now). WIPO is in fact so annoying to the current extremists that the US, EU and friends completely bypassed it with ACTA. So anyone arguing against UN bodies with the argument that those people are not accountable should be careful, because there at least you have countries from all over the world that have a say rather than only the interests of your own administration (or rather your own "IP"-lobbyists) and some self-selected partners.
Algorithmic trading, also known as high frequency trading (HFT), is rapidly replacing human decision making, according to a UK government panel which warned that the right regulations need to be introduced to protect stock markets
Like making it illegal for humans to beat the algorithms?
You're forgetting to blame Assange's: Negligent stupidity in releasing the data dump to the guardian with a "cute" & supposedly time limited password & then to torrent with the same password.
Well, yes, that's what I mean with "besides the fact that they gave the real password to the Guardian".
First the Guardian published the master password for the cables.csv file, which made all those names of informants and what not publicly available. Now that Wikileaks is also making the same information available that the Guardian first made public to everyone, the Guardian is trying to paint this disclosure of information as an irresponsible move by Wikileaks.
The only thing you can blame Wikileaks for, afaik, is to make that same information available via a search interface (besides the fact that they gave the real password to the Guardian). But it's not like people who had really bad intentions for uses of that information couldn't set something like that up themselves (and probably already did), which I assume is what motivated them to do this.
OK, just so we're clear that the solution to poverty is slavery.
Indeed, just like the solution to a centrally planned economy (like in communism) is unbridled libertarianism, and the solution to one-person dictatorships is mob rule.
If you pick two or more extremes, you are pretty much always going to find aspects from all of them in the real world situation. The free market has aspects from central planning (all sorts of regulations, antitrust,...) and libertarianism (free enterprise, competition,...). Democracy has aspects from single-person dictorships (representatives that once elected can ignore the masses, veto-rights to protect the interests of a minority,...) and mob rule (the majority decides who will take the decisions, and in turn the majority of the elected people can decide over many things against the wishes of the minority).
It's true that in today's world, it is extremely hard to cut yourself loose from both society's obligations and benefits should you wish to do so, except maybe if you migrate to a third world country and bribe or fight your way out (although even then you are not free since you have to pay someone or fight, both of which are obligations placed upon you to be in the state you want to be in). You certainly can interpret that as a form of slavery (I think it's unfair to real slaves though), and extremes of that line of thought are central to many movies: "the federation vs the rebels" meme, with sometimes one and sometimes the others depicted as the good guys -- think Star Wars vs Star Trek.
And when it does, I suddenly have the right to force you to work for me, because my right to your time and efforts trumps your right to your time and effort?
Sort of, yes. It's part of what humanity several decades ago summarized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It even explicitly enshrines a right to social security and an adequate living standard (art. 22 and 25). That's not because the world was ruled by commies right after WWII, but simply because people realized that telling everyone to fend for themselves and suck it up does not exactly lead to a well-functioning and prosperous society (it does not lead to a society at all, except possibly at very small scales).
Does that mean that unconditionally giving everyone lots of money solves all problems or is the way to go? Of course not. Are there abuses? You bet. Has anyone figured out the magic way to organize things that solves all problems, or is that even likely going to ever happen? Nope. Then again, democracy isn't perfect either, nor is the free market (regardless of whether it's with or without attempted corrections and steering).
Do you spend 100s of millions of dollars on research to formulate new ideas and then bring them to market? Would you be able to afford to do that in a world where everyone freely copied your ideas and took them to market preventing you from ever recovering investment.
It's called competition. Why don't lawyers ask for patents on court strategies? After all, by not doing so their peers can steal those strategies and win cases without paying the original inventor of that strategy a single penny. And yet the entire lawyer profession hasn't imploded yet due to no one being interested anymore in helping their clients to the best of their abilities even though everyone else can look at how they argued the case.
No two cases are identical, you say? You can't just "take an argument" from one court case and apply it to another? Clients also care about how your ability to talk to them to figure out where they come from, what their background is and the background of the other party, and how to puzzle all the pieces together in this particular case? In fact, the most valuable part of the services a lawyer provides is not whether or not he uses some special argumentation, but rather how he tailors everything to the current case and uses whatever is most appropriate under the circumstances? Lawyers build their cases based on precedents argued by their peers? And their innovations are an inherent part of their work that they have to do to be competitive and get good results, rather than something they only do to get exclusive rights to them and get other people to pay for the privilege of doing something similar? And innovating in arguing before a court is definitely not something they stop doing because most of it becomes public without them being able to get royalties for it later?
Maybe the lawyer profession isn't that inherently different from software development after all...
And yes, there is more than philosophical rhetoric: in general, patents are some of the least used and least valued tools to ensure competitiveness for software firms (see esp. slides 14 and 15). This has been shown time and time again both in the past and in the present.
The best quote I know of is still this one from Robert Barr in a hearing before the FTC (and Cisco most definitely invests hundreds of millions in R&D, so it even addresses your point literally rather than only generally):
My observation is that patents have not been a positive force in stimulating innovation at Cisco. Competition has been the motivator; bringing new products to market in a timely manner is critical. Everything we have done to create new products would have been done even if we could not obtain patents on the innovations and inventions contained in these products. I know this because no one has ever asked me ‘can we patent this?’ before deciding whether to invest time and resources into product development.
On the other hand, I am sometimes asked whether anyone else has a patent on a product or feature that we are considering. But, despite the fact that our products are independently developed, that we do not copy, I can never definitively ‘clear’ a product or feature, or determine the costs of licensing in advance.
The claims of Hitwise don't explain why I keep finding things like Microsoft service pack download pages better through google than through bing.
That's because unlike Google, Bing doesn't favor its own services over others.
Since when does Google have a service to download Microsoft service packs?
There are also differences in algorithms. Bing doesn't count so called junk-links while Google does. Bing prefers link inside good, relevant content. Google, on the other hand, counts all kinds of links.
Google also filters on link farms. Of course their filtering isn't perfect, but it would surprise me a lot if Microsoft had discovered the magic algorithm to get rid of all "search engine optimization" gaming, and it's simply wrong to say that Google "counts all kinds of links".
Judging by the usual slashdot response of "but they should just improve their algorithms", people don't seem to get how immersively complex current search engines and their algorithms are.
One of my main issues with bing has nothing to do with complex search algorithms. Just search for e.g. shoes. The first page of results already contains two sets of duplicate results in my case: www.shoes.com and www.shoes.com/womens (sic, it actually stands for "women's"), and www.shoes.be and www.shoes.be/schoenwinkels.asp?l=k.
I get this with virtually every search term I've ever tried on Bing, which means that there are much less individually useful results than on Google (which will group all similar results from the same domain and then let you move on).
PS: yes, this is the first time in my life I've searched for the term "shoes" on the Internet
Is that so much worse than the US using the CIA and NSA to wiretap and bug foreign companies to steal trade secrets for US companies? (search for "Published cases")
Filing good patents could actually be made cheaper under this system, since the polluters would be paying their dues. You'd probably also soon get insurance-style companies paying the escrow for you in return for an insurance fee. Coupled with cheaper filing fees, it could well be a wash in the end.
The problem is that this approach is the world upside down. The correct approach would be that the polluter pays: make patent applicants put a certain amount of money into escrow (more and more general claims = larger amount of money), and if prior art is found then this money goes to the person/institution that dug it up (either the patent office or a third party).
This way you compensate people for spending their time on rooting out bad patents/claims, rather than more or less forcing them to do it for free because otherwise they may be badly affected by the granted patents.
JFTR: There is no EU Court of Human Rights. The Court you mean is
the European Court of Human Rights, which is not an EU institution
but an institution of the Council of Europe.
Yes, I know. Slip of the fingers because of the "EU Charter of Fundamental Rights" that came right before it in the sentence. Thanks for setting the record straight.
The link goes to Reuters. Who cares about the bias of the submitter? Doesn't pretty much every submitter only submit stories they feel should see wider exposure, and hence are biased about? It does work for me like that at least.
But we are just as free to tweet about a neighbor who is having an affair as we are a famous person.
I'm not sure that this is true in the EU. Both the right to privacy and the right to free speech are enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Right, so the EU Court of Human Rights would balance those out against each other and decide which one trumps which in this particular situation. Even in case of famous people, there is a balance to be upheld. See e.g. Naomi Campbell v MGN
No, they suffer from wanting to justify something they're not actually able to justify.
This is exactly I was thinking about. Whining about lack of comprehension, amnesia etc. does not make sense.
What IMO makes sense is looking who bribed them, was this bribing legal and are we able to make them liable for corruption.
No, that does not make sense. Most likely no bribing whatsoever was involved. The people working on this are most likely simply "captives" of the system. Not in the sense that they are being blackmailed, but simply that they are so deeply embedded in that world that they honestly cannot imagine how having more and harsher enforcement of any kind of "intellectual property rights" can be bad in the grand scheme of things. Of course, with an ex-IFPI lobbyist now being responsible for ACTA at the European Commission, they definitely are crossing quite a line. That's not a single point you can win on though, no matter how despicable it is.
Anyway, politics generally does not work like in movies of in TV-series. You seldom win by finding some secrets and then exposing them for the world to see. You win by exerting political pressure yourself. Example: Slashdot gets syndicated all over the web, just look at the google results for the (afaik unique) title of this story. Now, an IDG journalist wrote her own take on the blog post (while I can't be certain she picked it up from Slashdot, it certainly can't have hurt). This article again is being posted all over the web because IDG has many publications and those are also being syndicated. And yesterday I wrote another article on this topic for EDRI-gram, a respected European newsletter on digital rights issues that's also read in political circles.
The reason that all this is important, is because the European Parliament (EP) still has to assent to ACTA. And in the EP there are several people who are critical of ACTA. Furthermore, the Commission hasn't been very forthcoming with information about ACTA in the past, which made the EP naturally a bit peeved about this. While such press coverage is unlikely to convince anyone in the Commission, it might (note: might) weaken the position of whoever was responsible for that "rebuttal" (the Commission obviously does not like getting press coverage about how badly they botched something up). It also strengthens the position of members of the EP critical of ACTA, by showing that society cares and that the Commission is putting the EU in bad light with its antics.
And in case you think all that doesn't matter: it does. It's how we won the fight against the software patents directive. That doesn't mean we will win now, but wide press coverage and visibility are a basic requirement for getting results in politics at large. On the other hand, focussing on figuring out who bribed whom when there isn't any need whatsoever to bribe anyone to get such nonsense distributed in the name of a political body "specialised" in trade/ipr/enforcement is only a waste of time.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, if you read the university press release, you'll see the magical ingredient is silicon. Current lithium-ion batteries already contain graphene sheets. What they did was
Not to mention "engaging in a constructive discussion with one of the original authors of the paper, who hopped in and thanked people for their interesting comments".
Mod parent up.
How does C++ fair?
Farely average.
I also experienced very nice example of this during the fight against the software patents directive in Europe. I had a discussion with a guy from WIPO and at one point said that software patents were generally bad for small companies. Rather than denying this like EICTA (the organisation representing mostly large ICT companies), he fully agreed with that.
But then he went off the cliff: he argued that this is actually how the system is supposed to work. By making sure that most small companies will be driven out of business or swallowed by larger ones, you get a consolidation in the market. And consolidation is good for efficiency, cost cutting etc. Basically, he considered software patents as a market optimisation tool to get rid of all the fragmentation, to speed up the "natural" evolution that any economic sector is supposed to go through (starting out with many small time independent businesses, followed by a consolidation phase that leaves a few giants to rule it all).
That said, WIPO isn't the worst. Countries such as India and Brazil also have a say in there, and they're far less extremist than the Western world (at least for now). WIPO is in fact so annoying to the current extremists that the US, EU and friends completely bypassed it with ACTA. So anyone arguing against UN bodies with the argument that those people are not accountable should be careful, because there at least you have countries from all over the world that have a say rather than only the interests of your own administration (or rather your own "IP"-lobbyists) and some self-selected partners.
The article is using the wrong term. It's actually the Council of the European Union that decided this.
Algorithmic trading, also known as high frequency trading (HFT), is rapidly replacing human decision making, according to a UK government panel which warned that the right regulations need to be introduced to protect stock markets
Like making it illegal for humans to beat the algorithms?
... someone didn't switch off their phone.
You're forgetting to blame Assange's:
Negligent stupidity in releasing the data dump to the guardian with a "cute" & supposedly time limited password & then to torrent with the same password.
Well, yes, that's what I mean with "besides the fact that they gave the real password to the Guardian".
First the Guardian published the master password for the cables.csv file, which made all those names of informants and what not publicly available. Now that Wikileaks is also making the same information available that the Guardian first made public to everyone, the Guardian is trying to paint this disclosure of information as an irresponsible move by Wikileaks.
The only thing you can blame Wikileaks for, afaik, is to make that same information available via a search interface (besides the fact that they gave the real password to the Guardian). But it's not like people who had really bad intentions for uses of that information couldn't set something like that up themselves (and probably already did), which I assume is what motivated them to do this.
OK, just so we're clear that the solution to poverty is slavery.
Indeed, just like the solution to a centrally planned economy (like in communism) is unbridled libertarianism, and the solution to one-person dictatorships is mob rule.
If you pick two or more extremes, you are pretty much always going to find aspects from all of them in the real world situation. The free market has aspects from central planning (all sorts of regulations, antitrust, ...) and libertarianism (free enterprise, competition, ...). Democracy has aspects from single-person dictorships (representatives that once elected can ignore the masses, veto-rights to protect the interests of a minority, ...) and mob rule (the majority decides who will take the decisions, and in turn the majority of the elected people can decide over many things against the wishes of the minority).
It's true that in today's world, it is extremely hard to cut yourself loose from both society's obligations and benefits should you wish to do so, except maybe if you migrate to a third world country and bribe or fight your way out (although even then you are not free since you have to pay someone or fight, both of which are obligations placed upon you to be in the state you want to be in). You certainly can interpret that as a form of slavery (I think it's unfair to real slaves though), and extremes of that line of thought are central to many movies: "the federation vs the rebels" meme, with sometimes one and sometimes the others depicted as the good guys -- think Star Wars vs Star Trek.
Your world could turn on a dime. It happens
And when it does, I suddenly have the right to force you to work for me, because my right to your time and efforts trumps your right to your time and effort?
Sort of, yes. It's part of what humanity several decades ago summarized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It even explicitly enshrines a right to social security and an adequate living standard (art. 22 and 25). That's not because the world was ruled by commies right after WWII, but simply because people realized that telling everyone to fend for themselves and suck it up does not exactly lead to a well-functioning and prosperous society (it does not lead to a society at all, except possibly at very small scales).
Does that mean that unconditionally giving everyone lots of money solves all problems or is the way to go? Of course not. Are there abuses? You bet. Has anyone figured out the magic way to organize things that solves all problems, or is that even likely going to ever happen? Nope. Then again, democracy isn't perfect either, nor is the free market (regardless of whether it's with or without attempted corrections and steering).
Forgot to mention: Robert Barr was Cisco's Chief Patent Counsel at that time.
Do you spend 100s of millions of dollars on research to formulate new ideas and then bring them to market? Would you be able to afford to do that in a world where everyone freely copied your ideas and took them to market preventing you from ever recovering investment.
It's called competition. Why don't lawyers ask for patents on court strategies? After all, by not doing so their peers can steal those strategies and win cases without paying the original inventor of that strategy a single penny. And yet the entire lawyer profession hasn't imploded yet due to no one being interested anymore in helping their clients to the best of their abilities even though everyone else can look at how they argued the case.
No two cases are identical, you say? You can't just "take an argument" from one court case and apply it to another? Clients also care about how your ability to talk to them to figure out where they come from, what their background is and the background of the other party, and how to puzzle all the pieces together in this particular case? In fact, the most valuable part of the services a lawyer provides is not whether or not he uses some special argumentation, but rather how he tailors everything to the current case and uses whatever is most appropriate under the circumstances? Lawyers build their cases based on precedents argued by their peers? And their innovations are an inherent part of their work that they have to do to be competitive and get good results, rather than something they only do to get exclusive rights to them and get other people to pay for the privilege of doing something similar? And innovating in arguing before a court is definitely not something they stop doing because most of it becomes public without them being able to get royalties for it later?
Maybe the lawyer profession isn't that inherently different from software development after all...
And yes, there is more than philosophical rhetoric: in general, patents are some of the least used and least valued tools to ensure competitiveness for software firms (see esp. slides 14 and 15). This has been shown time and time again both in the past and in the present.
The best quote I know of is still this one from Robert Barr in a hearing before the FTC (and Cisco most definitely invests hundreds of millions in R&D, so it even addresses your point literally rather than only generally):
My observation is that patents have not been a positive force in stimulating innovation at Cisco. Competition has been the motivator; bringing new products to market in a timely manner is critical. Everything we have done to create new products would have been done even if we could not obtain patents on the innovations and inventions contained in these products. I know this because no one has ever asked me ‘can we patent this?’ before deciding whether to invest time and resources into product development.
On the other hand, I am sometimes asked whether anyone else has a patent on a product or feature that we are considering. But, despite the fact that our products are independently developed, that we do not copy, I can never definitively ‘clear’ a product or feature, or determine the costs of licensing in advance.
I.o.w., he basically said the same as the GP.
The claims of Hitwise don't explain why I keep finding things like Microsoft service pack download pages better through google than through bing.
That's because unlike Google, Bing doesn't favor its own services over others.
Since when does Google have a service to download Microsoft service packs?
There are also differences in algorithms. Bing doesn't count so called junk-links while Google does. Bing prefers link inside good, relevant content. Google, on the other hand, counts all kinds of links.
Google also filters on link farms. Of course their filtering isn't perfect, but it would surprise me a lot if Microsoft had discovered the magic algorithm to get rid of all "search engine optimization" gaming, and it's simply wrong to say that Google "counts all kinds of links".
Judging by the usual slashdot response of "but they should just improve their algorithms", people don't seem to get how immersively complex current search engines and their algorithms are.
One of my main issues with bing has nothing to do with complex search algorithms. Just search for e.g. shoes. The first page of results already contains two sets of duplicate results in my case: www.shoes.com and www.shoes.com/womens (sic, it actually stands for "women's"), and www.shoes.be and www.shoes.be/schoenwinkels.asp?l=k.
I get this with virtually every search term I've ever tried on Bing, which means that there are much less individually useful results than on Google (which will group all similar results from the same domain and then let you move on).
PS: yes, this is the first time in my life I've searched for the term "shoes" on the Internet
I had to shut it off after the fifth one though.... incredibly depressing to watch.
Others made a great antidote for that.
Is that so much worse than the US using the CIA and NSA to wiretap and bug foreign companies to steal trade secrets for US companies? (search for "Published cases")
Yo momma is so fat she heats the whole city by sheer mass.
Filing good patents could actually be made cheaper under this system, since the polluters would be paying their dues. You'd probably also soon get insurance-style companies paying the escrow for you in return for an insurance fee. Coupled with cheaper filing fees, it could well be a wash in the end.
US version: http://peertopatent.org/
The problem is that this approach is the world upside down. The correct approach would be that the polluter pays: make patent applicants put a certain amount of money into escrow (more and more general claims = larger amount of money), and if prior art is found then this money goes to the person/institution that dug it up (either the patent office or a third party).
This way you compensate people for spending their time on rooting out bad patents/claims, rather than more or less forcing them to do it for free because otherwise they may be badly affected by the granted patents.
JFTR: There is no EU Court of Human Rights. The Court you mean is
the European Court of Human Rights, which is not an EU institution
but an institution of the Council of Europe.
Yes, I know. Slip of the fingers because of the "EU Charter of Fundamental Rights" that came right before it in the sentence. Thanks for setting the record straight.
The link goes to Reuters. Who cares about the bias of the submitter? Doesn't pretty much every submitter only submit stories they feel should see wider exposure, and hence are biased about? It does work for me like that at least.
But we are just as free to tweet about a neighbor who is having an affair as we are a famous person.
I'm not sure that this is true in the EU. Both the right to privacy and the right to free speech are enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Right, so the EU Court of Human Rights would balance those out against each other and decide which one trumps which in this particular situation. Even in case of famous people, there is a balance to be upheld. See e.g. Naomi Campbell v MGN
the reason has to do with legal reasons : the non rechargeable pacemakers are less likely to fail and kill a patient.
I would call that common sense rather than a "legal reason".
The Mac loses its network connection constantly
Now we finally know why it takes forever to copy that 17MB file.
No, they suffer from wanting to justify something they're not actually able to justify.
This is exactly I was thinking about. Whining about lack of comprehension, amnesia etc. does not make sense.
What IMO makes sense is looking who bribed them, was this bribing legal and are we able to make them liable for corruption.
No, that does not make sense. Most likely no bribing whatsoever was involved. The people working on this are most likely simply "captives" of the system. Not in the sense that they are being blackmailed, but simply that they are so deeply embedded in that world that they honestly cannot imagine how having more and harsher enforcement of any kind of "intellectual property rights" can be bad in the grand scheme of things. Of course, with an ex-IFPI lobbyist now being responsible for ACTA at the European Commission, they definitely are crossing quite a line. That's not a single point you can win on though, no matter how despicable it is.
Anyway, politics generally does not work like in movies of in TV-series. You seldom win by finding some secrets and then exposing them for the world to see. You win by exerting political pressure yourself. Example: Slashdot gets syndicated all over the web, just look at the google results for the (afaik unique) title of this story. Now, an IDG journalist wrote her own take on the blog post (while I can't be certain she picked it up from Slashdot, it certainly can't have hurt). This article again is being posted all over the web because IDG has many publications and those are also being syndicated. And yesterday I wrote another article on this topic for EDRI-gram, a respected European newsletter on digital rights issues that's also read in political circles.
The reason that all this is important, is because the European Parliament (EP) still has to assent to ACTA. And in the EP there are several people who are critical of ACTA. Furthermore, the Commission hasn't been very forthcoming with information about ACTA in the past, which made the EP naturally a bit peeved about this. While such press coverage is unlikely to convince anyone in the Commission, it might (note: might) weaken the position of whoever was responsible for that "rebuttal" (the Commission obviously does not like getting press coverage about how badly they botched something up). It also strengthens the position of members of the EP critical of ACTA, by showing that society cares and that the Commission is putting the EU in bad light with its antics.
And in case you think all that doesn't matter: it does. It's how we won the fight against the software patents directive. That doesn't mean we will win now, but wide press coverage and visibility are a basic requirement for getting results in politics at large. On the other hand, focussing on figuring out who bribed whom when there isn't any need whatsoever to bribe anyone to get such nonsense distributed in the name of a political body "specialised" in trade/ipr/enforcement is only a waste of time.