our current lives being imagined by sci-fi writers 200 years ago (if sci-fi writers existed then - did they?)
Not many of them, for sure, but one could argue that sci-fi started as a genre with Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac's "Les États et Empires de la Lune" ("The States and Empires of the Moon"), which was published in 1657.
Of all the papers you quoted in an earlier post and all of what I have seen from a quick search, there is one paper that shows a slight increase in DNA single strand breaks post exposure to microwaves with more than 1W/kg. It does not seem to have been reproduced by now. There are a couple of papers that find no DNA damage, no chromatin alteration, no induction of DNA repair systems, but a change in gene expression patterns, which might very well be attributed to thermal effects due to the high intensity used. In summary, nothing that would overly concern me.
I wish I had any suggestions. I am completely with you there, this one is starting to look messy. On the other hand, a good old crisis always has the potential to become a cause to unify again. But then, things have to go much worse before they can get any better. I see no external factor on the horizon that could be a unifying cause. No good enemies there. China doesn't qualify, although, considering the amount of american debt held by china, you almost are in a state of economic MAD there...
Sorry but it's too late but not because of what you think. It's that the left and the right can no longer compromise on anything.
From an outside standpoint, that seems to be exactly the problem. I am not an american, though I have lived in the USA for quite some time in the past. You guys need to take a step back, both sides. I rarely have seen such polarized debates essentialy devoid of substance anywhere out of civil war zones. Take a deep breath and start talking about the issues instead of burning strawmen. More often than not I get the feeling that you are on a pretty straight road to blowing the shit up. I wouldn't want to see that, not only out of self interest, but because I actually happen to like your country and like to return there for extend period of times without seeing it spiral down into somalia 2.0. Get your shit together.
I'd love to see a serious take on a computer-based implementation of Paranoia. Probably too unforgiving for a MMO to give it any chance. But as a Fallout-style single player game, it would rock - perhaps with a cooperative small-scale multiplayer option, so you can play with some "trusted" non-idiots, whom you can stab in the back, er... report to friend computer... in style. You would like it too, wouldn't you? Or are you a commie? Or even a mutant?
My line of work - which is patent law, crucify me - brings me in contact with a lot of mechanical engineers. One complaint I often get to hear from the older ones is that in ye olden days, most people in management were engineers themselves, who had worked up their way through a lifelong career. Those were the days of quality products, of taking pride in the excellence of your work. Now, as MBAs have taken over, we have the days of producing as cheap and sloppy as you can get away with. This may be partially nostalgia-filtered, but I guess it has some reality to it.
Slashdot needs a word for all these obvious-in-retrospect claims. Something like "post hoc prior thought", only pithier.
In patent law, this is called ex post facto, which literally translates to "from after the fact". It's actually the hardest part of doing an analysis of inventive step/obviousness to try to evaluate the claim from a perspective of the man skilled in the art, not yet knowing the invention, so that you can leave the hindsight out of your analysis.
As you have already got some pointers to the style of McCarthy, let me tell a little anecdote. Some literary scientist once tried, only half-jokingly, to come up with a measure for the "southernness" of books. After some research, he found out that the deeper the southern roots of the author, the more dead mules appear in his texts. By this metric, Cormac McCarthy is the undisputed king of the genre, with over 100 dead mules in his novel "Blood Meridian" alone. He kills 50 alone when he let's them drop over a cliff while carrying mercury for a mining operation. To give some insight into the style, let me quote:
the animals dropping silently as martyrs, turning sedately in the empty air and exploding on the rocks below in startling bursts of blood and silver as the flasks broke open and the mercury loomed wobbling in the air in great sheets and lobes and small trembling satellites."
the same enclave of hippy bozos that brought us organic food also vies for the prohibition of DDT in developing countries where over a million people, mostly children below the age of 5, [wikipedia.org] die each year from malaria.
Trolling much lately? DDT is still in use as malaria control. Quoting from the wikipedia link you so kindly provided:
The evolution of resistance to DDT in mosquitos has greatly reduced its effectiveness in many parts of the world, and current WHO guidelines require that before the chemical is used in an area, susceptibility of local mosquitos to DDT must be confirmed.[83] The appearance of DDT-resistance is largely due to its use in agriculture, where it was used in much greater amounts than the relatively small quantities used for disease prevention. According to one study that attempted to quantify the lives saved by banning agricultural uses of DDT and thereby slowing the spread of resistance, "it can be estimated that at current rates each kilo of insecticide added to the environment will generate 105 new cases of malaria."
So, today's lesson: If you link something to further your bullshit agenda, you better read the linked content completely beforehand. Might save you from looking like an idiot.
You patent the implementation, not the idea. You can't patent flying cars, you can patent the flying car you manufacture and the neat tricks inside it.
You don't necessarily patent specific implementations. If no one had ever talked about the idea of the flying car before, you could very well go for claims like
1. Automobile, characterized in that said automobile is equipped with means of creating an aerodynamical lifting force greater or equal to the weight of said automobile.
You just have to provide at least one implementation that the averagely skilled person in the technical field of the invention can get to work, but you are not limited to this.
On the other hand, the patent application in question seems to focus on automating a known process. Under european case law, automation by itself does not constitute an inventive step. No idea about the situation in the US, though.
Law is sometimes like code, in that it can create unexpected and unintended behaviors when executed literally. It's not stupid, IMO... It's a sign that we need better law.
Good analogy, from the perspective of a geek working in patent law at the moment. And as in every coding project with an insane amount of LOC, law won't ever be bug-free. We need a better law in the sense that it has to provide graceful exception handling in case a bug is encountered.
Basically, imagine that NASA is an inefficient huge gas guzzler - say, a Hummer.
Imagine that ESA is a small fleet of more gas efficient but boring compact cars
Personally I think Tesla are couldn't pull off a true "people's car" because they don't have the manufacturing capacity. No country has the infrastructure. And besides it would be a huge financial risk. Maybe someone like Tata should come in as a partner.
Daimler already came in as a partner at a 10% share. They sure are interested and will probably provide a lot of mass manufacturing knowledge in exchange for the electric engineering know-how from Tesla.
You might be interested in ArmA II. Aircraft and vehicle models are unfortunately way too simple, but as a hardcore infantery milsim it works quite well. I totally agree with the rest of your post - a shame that the good hardcore games are gone. Falcon 5, I miss you.
You gotta keep in mind, though, that/. is mostly US-centric. In my experience as patent engineer working german and european cases (dreaded EQE coming up next year, urgh...), the european system is way more sane than the american one. So most of the patent bashing is caused by some excesses of wierdness which are more or less US-specific. Apart from that, the usual patent discussion on/. has about the same merit as a discussion between pure lawyers about networking technology would have...
I definitely agree with the rest of your post, anyway. It is a geek's dream, for exactly the reasons you mentioned.
In any event, here is a back-of-the-envelope calculation for you. The solar insolation is 1366 W/m^2 at the top of the atmosphere, with ~500-1000 W/m^2 absorbed before it gets to the ground. The cross section of the earth is 127,400,000 km^2, giving a total power absorbed by the atmosphere in excess of 63700 TW. So, producing the total energy consumption of humans on earth (16TW) by energy removed from the atmosphere this way is talking about a 0.025% decrease in the atmospheric energy...
Actually, the energy removed from the atmosphere is ultimately dissipated as heat again and thus returned. All that happens is a redistribution of energy. This is certainly influencing the climate, at least at a micro-scale, e.g. urban heat islands. I fail, however, to see how this is worse than introducing additional energy, that was chemically stored before, by burning fossil fuels. In that case we have the redistribution plus a net energy influx into the system.
And the work for pressing the plates down is done by what? Maybe, that could be, uhmm... the cars driving over them, yes? So basically they are using their customers fuel to power their store and call that "green". Way to go, guys.
IMHO any pilot who decides to fly directly into a large thunderstorm when going over it is a viable alternative has already committed pilot error, the computer probably let him fly further before crashing than he would have solo.
In that particular case, there was no way to go over it, with clouds topping out at 50000+ ft, way over the max. FL for an commercial airliner. As far as I know, it is not exactly uncommon to punch through a system in that case, trying to weave your way around the most nasty cells.
Fired? PhD students aren't employees, they're students.
Might be so in your country. Around here (germany) you usually get paid as PhD student, at least in the natural sciences. Half-time academic assistant job, normally.
Can't answer to the "why" as I have not been there. It happened and the flaw got identified later. I am all with you there. A little psychology might sure help in identifying why the flaw was there in the first experiments, and avoiding such flaws later on. We can't expect perfection, but we sure have to try to get better as we go along.
That's how you teach it. Been doing that myself while supervising entry level lab session at university. You tempt em to "modify" their results early and let em face the wrath of their supervisor. Take-home lesson: It is tempting and easy to adapt data to your expectations, but YOU SHALL NOT DO IT.
Slashdot Mirror
our current lives being imagined by sci-fi writers 200 years ago (if sci-fi writers existed then - did they?)
Not many of them, for sure, but one could argue that sci-fi started as a genre with Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac's "Les États et Empires de la Lune" ("The States and Empires of the Moon"), which was published in 1657.
Of all the papers you quoted in an earlier post and all of what I have seen from a quick search, there is one paper that shows a slight increase in DNA single strand breaks post exposure to microwaves with more than 1W/kg. It does not seem to have been reproduced by now. There are a couple of papers that find no DNA damage, no chromatin alteration, no induction of DNA repair systems, but a change in gene expression patterns, which might very well be attributed to thermal effects due to the high intensity used. In summary, nothing that would overly concern me.
And, unfortunate for your vastly overrated modding, neither of those were viruses, but bacteria.
I wish I had any suggestions. I am completely with you there, this one is starting to look messy. On the other hand, a good old crisis always has the potential to become a cause to unify again. But then, things have to go much worse before they can get any better. I see no external factor on the horizon that could be a unifying cause. No good enemies there. China doesn't qualify, although, considering the amount of american debt held by china, you almost are in a state of economic MAD there...
Sorry but it's too late but not because of what you think. It's that the left and the right can no longer compromise on anything.
From an outside standpoint, that seems to be exactly the problem. I am not an american, though I have lived in the USA for quite some time in the past. You guys need to take a step back, both sides. I rarely have seen such polarized debates essentialy devoid of substance anywhere out of civil war zones. Take a deep breath and start talking about the issues instead of burning strawmen. More often than not I get the feeling that you are on a pretty straight road to blowing the shit up. I wouldn't want to see that, not only out of self interest, but because I actually happen to like your country and like to return there for extend period of times without seeing it spiral down into somalia 2.0. Get your shit together.
I'd love to see a serious take on a computer-based implementation of Paranoia. Probably too unforgiving for a MMO to give it any chance. But as a Fallout-style single player game, it would rock - perhaps with a cooperative small-scale multiplayer option, so you can play with some "trusted" non-idiots, whom you can stab in the back, er... report to friend computer... in style. You would like it too, wouldn't you? Or are you a commie? Or even a mutant?
My line of work - which is patent law, crucify me - brings me in contact with a lot of mechanical engineers. One complaint I often get to hear from the older ones is that in ye olden days, most people in management were engineers themselves, who had worked up their way through a lifelong career. Those were the days of quality products, of taking pride in the excellence of your work. Now, as MBAs have taken over, we have the days of producing as cheap and sloppy as you can get away with. This may be partially nostalgia-filtered, but I guess it has some reality to it.
Slashdot needs a word for all these obvious-in-retrospect claims. Something like "post hoc prior thought", only pithier.
In patent law, this is called ex post facto, which literally translates to "from after the fact". It's actually the hardest part of doing an analysis of inventive step/obviousness to try to evaluate the claim from a perspective of the man skilled in the art, not yet knowing the invention, so that you can leave the hindsight out of your analysis.
As you have already got some pointers to the style of McCarthy, let me tell a little anecdote. Some literary scientist once tried, only half-jokingly, to come up with a measure for the "southernness" of books. After some research, he found out that the deeper the southern roots of the author, the more dead mules appear in his texts. By this metric, Cormac McCarthy is the undisputed king of the genre, with over 100 dead mules in his novel "Blood Meridian" alone. He kills 50 alone when he let's them drop over a cliff while carrying mercury for a mining operation. To give some insight into the style, let me quote:
the animals dropping silently as martyrs, turning sedately in the empty air and exploding on the rocks below in startling bursts of blood and silver as the flasks broke open and the mercury loomed wobbling in the air in great sheets and lobes and small trembling satellites."
the same enclave of hippy bozos that brought us organic food also vies for the prohibition of DDT in developing countries where over a million people, mostly children below the age of 5, [wikipedia.org] die each year from malaria.
Trolling much lately? DDT is still in use as malaria control. Quoting from the wikipedia link you so kindly provided:
The evolution of resistance to DDT in mosquitos has greatly reduced its effectiveness in many parts of the world, and current WHO guidelines require that before the chemical is used in an area, susceptibility of local mosquitos to DDT must be confirmed.[83] The appearance of DDT-resistance is largely due to its use in agriculture, where it was used in much greater amounts than the relatively small quantities used for disease prevention. According to one study that attempted to quantify the lives saved by banning agricultural uses of DDT and thereby slowing the spread of resistance, "it can be estimated that at current rates each kilo of insecticide added to the environment will generate 105 new cases of malaria."
So, today's lesson: If you link something to further your bullshit agenda, you better read the linked content completely beforehand. Might save you from looking like an idiot.
You patent the implementation, not the idea. You can't patent flying cars, you can patent the flying car you manufacture and the neat tricks inside it.
You don't necessarily patent specific implementations. If no one had ever talked about the idea of the flying car before, you could very well go for claims like
1. Automobile, characterized in that said automobile is equipped with means of creating an aerodynamical lifting force greater or equal to the weight of said automobile.
You just have to provide at least one implementation that the averagely skilled person in the technical field of the invention can get to work, but you are not limited to this.
On the other hand, the patent application in question seems to focus on automating a known process. Under european case law, automation by itself does not constitute an inventive step. No idea about the situation in the US, though.
Law is sometimes like code, in that it can create unexpected and unintended behaviors when executed literally. It's not stupid, IMO... It's a sign that we need better law.
Good analogy, from the perspective of a geek working in patent law at the moment. And as in every coding project with an insane amount of LOC, law won't ever be bug-free. We need a better law in the sense that it has to provide graceful exception handling in case a bug is encountered.
Basically, imagine that NASA is an inefficient huge gas guzzler - say, a Hummer. Imagine that ESA is a small fleet of more gas efficient but boring compact cars
I see your hummer and raise you the Daimler Unimog Brabus Black Edition. We, too, know how to build absolutely ludicrous gas guzzlers.
You're sorry you didn't marry a reptile?
He clearly is an agent of The Lizard People, mating with an unsuspecting human female. Burn him, before it is too late.
Personally I think Tesla are couldn't pull off a true "people's car" because they don't have the manufacturing capacity. No country has the infrastructure. And besides it would be a huge financial risk. Maybe someone like Tata should come in as a partner.
Daimler already came in as a partner at a 10% share. They sure are interested and will probably provide a lot of mass manufacturing knowledge in exchange for the electric engineering know-how from Tesla.
You might be interested in ArmA II. Aircraft and vehicle models are unfortunately way too simple, but as a hardcore infantery milsim it works quite well. I totally agree with the rest of your post - a shame that the good hardcore games are gone. Falcon 5, I miss you.
In addition, nuclear is one of the few forms of energy we have ready access to that *doesn't* come, directly or indirectly, from the Sun.
Well, if I was inclined to do some nitpicking, I'd comment that it does come from an ex-sun. Thankfully I am not so inclined today.
You gotta keep in mind, though, that /. is mostly US-centric. In my experience as patent engineer working german and european cases (dreaded EQE coming up next year, urgh...), the european system is way more sane than the american one. So most of the patent bashing is caused by some excesses of wierdness which are more or less US-specific. Apart from that, the usual patent discussion on /. has about the same merit as a discussion between pure lawyers about networking technology would have...
I definitely agree with the rest of your post, anyway. It is a geek's dream, for exactly the reasons you mentioned.
In any event, here is a back-of-the-envelope calculation for you. The solar insolation is 1366 W/m^2 at the top of the atmosphere, with ~500-1000 W/m^2 absorbed before it gets to the ground. The cross section of the earth is 127,400,000 km^2, giving a total power absorbed by the atmosphere in excess of 63700 TW. So, producing the total energy consumption of humans on earth (16TW) by energy removed from the atmosphere this way is talking about a 0.025% decrease in the atmospheric energy...
Actually, the energy removed from the atmosphere is ultimately dissipated as heat again and thus returned. All that happens is a redistribution of energy. This is certainly influencing the climate, at least at a micro-scale, e.g. urban heat islands. I fail, however, to see how this is worse than introducing additional energy, that was chemically stored before, by burning fossil fuels. In that case we have the redistribution plus a net energy influx into the system.
And the work for pressing the plates down is done by what? Maybe, that could be, uhmm... the cars driving over them, yes? So basically they are using their customers fuel to power their store and call that "green". Way to go, guys.
Perhaps we could roll a new Ubuntu sub-project: Blubuntu
Sure would beat the turd-coloured default edition...
IMHO any pilot who decides to fly directly into a large thunderstorm when going over it is a viable alternative has already committed pilot error, the computer probably let him fly further before crashing than he would have solo.
In that particular case, there was no way to go over it, with clouds topping out at 50000+ ft, way over the max. FL for an commercial airliner. As far as I know, it is not exactly uncommon to punch through a system in that case, trying to weave your way around the most nasty cells.
Fired? PhD students aren't employees, they're students.
Might be so in your country. Around here (germany) you usually get paid as PhD student, at least in the natural sciences. Half-time academic assistant job, normally.
Can't answer to the "why" as I have not been there. It happened and the flaw got identified later. I am all with you there. A little psychology might sure help in identifying why the flaw was there in the first experiments, and avoiding such flaws later on. We can't expect perfection, but we sure have to try to get better as we go along.
That's how you teach it. Been doing that myself while supervising entry level lab session at university. You tempt em to "modify" their results early and let em face the wrath of their supervisor. Take-home lesson: It is tempting and easy to adapt data to your expectations, but YOU SHALL NOT DO IT.