The original patent system was implimented so that if a person were to make a discovery or invention, it would be advantageous to that person to obtain a patent, publishing the details of their discovery, instead of keeping the method a secret in perpetuity. Clearly, if the greatest inventions are kept secret, nobody would be able to build off of them, and technological progress would stagnate.
So, how about we allow software patents, under the condition that the SOURCE CODE for all patented algorithms be placed in the public domain? Corporations would then not be legally allowed to make money on them due to patent law, but society as a whole would benefit by the non-profit use of the source code, allowing software technology to continue to progress without having to rediscover old code.
Clearly such a patent should be limited in duration, much moreso than patents on other stuff -- say, like 4 years or so? What do you think?
I'm kind of surprised that people are so shocked that someone might actually make, or drink, decaffinated coffee. Its not like this is a perversion of nature or something, the point is that there is a huge market out there for the stuff. Millions of people drink decaf every day.
We may not understand it, but the point is that genetically modifying the plant to produce less caffeine is both safer, and tastes better, than whatever god-awful shit they do to it now.
I guess I just think this is a cool, and potentially profitable use for the level of genetic engineering that we are able to do nowadays. If this kind of stuff works, and makes money, then we get to see the really neat stuff down the road!
Dudes: can anybody tell me what the hell a whitepaper is? How can it be a whitepaper if its all electronic? How is a whitepaper different than a normal paper? This smells to me of Dilbert's boss doublespeak.
Crappy temporal resolution -- 10 days/frame. I can't follow individual particles, they just jump around. I'd love to see this plot with 1 day resolution instead, I think that it would give a better impression of what's going on: comets in crazy eccentric orbits, Near Earth Asteroids crossing 1AU, planets circular.
If you shoot neutrinos, which travel in straight lines at nearly the speed of light, from Chicago to Minnesota, they will not pass through Canada! They will, in fact, pass well above Canada, since the Earth is not flat and the ground will fall away under the poor neutrinos as they travel away from Soudan, MN. Since Soudan is so far North, though, maybe some of them will fly through Canadian airspace -- I hope they get clearance from ATC.
Galileo's discovery of Ida in 1993 was quite unexpected and surprising. However, since then we have found that MANY asteroids have companions! Asteroids that pass near to the Earth are the easiest to search, and just today I was told by asteroid expert Rob Whiteley that fully 25% of near-Earth asteroids are binary! Craziness.
Recently as well, a binary Kuiper Belt Object was found (in addition to Pluto and Charon, though, I mean). The remarkable ubiquity of double-asteroids and KBOs in our solar system is trying to tell us something about the formation and evolution of planetary systems, and we're working on what that is. I personally suspect that, eventually, a binary extrasolar planet will be found (probably in transit), making this sort of thing even more exciting.
I think the fact that the Chinese have their own manned space program going is the best thing to happen to the American space program in years. This country works best under pressure, and always has -- examples: WWII, cold war, moon race. When NASA was competing with the Russian space program, we did all sorts of cool stuff like the apollo program, the Viking Mars landers, the Voyager spacecraft. Even the Space shuttle, at the beginning.
Now the Russian space program has imploded, and we haven't done jack for 15 years. The space shuttle has been flying for longer than the time between when Alan Shepherd flew and when the first shuttle flight, because the American manned space program has become complacent. Oh, okay, I guess we did blow $60 billion on a big pressurized can in space that people can go up to learn how to fix. . . But seriously, imagine if the Chinese were to start a program to return to the moon, or to go to Mars -- would we still be wasting our time and money on scientifically useless porkbarreling in Earth orbit then?
The problem is the stretch that I had to apply to bring out the tail without making the coma just a blob. Here's a stretch that brings out the tail better.
Use Xephem -- you download and compile the source 'cuz it was developed for Unix systems, hence its Linux & FreeBSD friendly. Its also a FreeBSDport, which makes it trivial for you to install should you be so fortunate as to be running that OS.
I took this image of the comet nucleus from the Steward Observatory1.6m Kuiper Telescope on top of Mt. Bigelow in Arizona on March 4. I took it for a friend of mine who's trying to nail down the comet's rotational period -- difficult to do when you can only observe it for about 1/2 hour each night before it sets. This is a raw image with a log stretch -- the dynamic range in brightness between the nucleus (saturated in the center), the coma (fuzzy part around bright area), and the three faint tails heading off to the left is huge (like a factor of several thousand). The area covered by the image is 5 arcminutes on a side, 1/6 the size of the full moon. The little bright lines are cosmic ray hits on the CCD, and the fat blotches (like the one above the coma) are stars.
Comets are one of the coolest things to observe in the sky because they CHANGE like every night!
How is this new system different/better than the FreeBSD pkg_add? When I want to download an install a precompiled binary I just type (as root)
pkg_add -r gnupg
for instance and the binary package gets automatically ftped down, unpacked, and the pieces installed to the correct locations. With thousands of FreeBSD ports already set up, why should I or anyone switch to this new system?
> I dont see the OS as perfected yet, but its come along way since DOS.
I disagree. I used to be a DOS/PC lover way, way back in the '80s when DOS was still around. Then Bill decided to do the GUI thing with Windows. I did move to Win95 when it came out, because of the ability to multitask (even if it wasn't all that great) but ever since then Bill's OSes have gone downhill, as far as I'm concerned.
Know why? Cuz I love the command line. I'm sorry, but GUI operating system interfaces are just hideously klunky kludges for secretaries to be able to write useless memos about coffee consumption while never using more than one finger. Yeah, I'm one of those old school guys that realizes that its much easier to just cd to a directory and delete something rather than open up some bloated GUI exploration tool and click myself silly finding where something is, then moving it to some damned bin somewhere.
That's why I switched over to Unix (FreeBSD). I haven't bought a new version of Windows since 1995 -- saved lots of money. When Regis Philbin noted that Bill had completely deprecated the CLI with XP, I realized that I can never go back; the FreeBSD that I use now is a better DOS than Windows is.
An excellent discussion of civil liberties in wartime can be found in the book All the Laws but One, written by the currently sitting Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist. Inside Rehnquist discusses in detail some of the incidents mentioned in the article linked to in this article, especially old Abe's suspension of the Writ of HAbeas Corpus and the subsequent political imprisonment of rebel sympathizers in the Maryland legislature.
As Lincoln said then, "Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself to go to pieces, lest that one be violated?" When Abe says it its hard to disagree with it, seeing as at the time the Republic REALLY WAS threatened with extinction.
D'oh. SHoulda used the "preview" button. Trying again:
Rainfall.
The area west of the 100th parallel used to be known as the "Great American Desert" and was considered by some to be as uninhabitable as the
Sahara. Giant dams and massive irrigation projects have made this less the case, but to this day only a small fraction of the West has been irrigated enough to be useful.
Its very interesting to look at a map of two states, say, Missouri and Nevada. In Missouri, there's a town every 10 miles. In Nevada, there's a town every 100 miles, and this difference is solely due to the difference in rainfall between the two regions. For a good espousure of this try reading Cadillac Desert, a documentary on the whole water thing.
The page seems to imply that light pollution always impacts the visibility of the night sky the same way, and that's not quite true. In a given area, Chicago for example, the more lights are on, the more diffuse light you'll see when you look up into the sky and the fewer stars you'll notice. However, if you use the same two light levels in Arizona, at the Grand Canyon for example, you'll be able to see more stars than the equivalent cases in Chicago.
This is due to other atmospheric hazes -- in Chicago there's all sorts of moisture in the air and other aerosols that reflect the light pollution back to you when you're looking up, thus making it harder for you to see stars. But under clean air there can be a huge amount of light pollution around you and it won't affect the sky brightness very much at all.
I've seen the Milky Way from the city of Tucson, one of those very bright spots, but never from my home of St. Louis despite the fact that they're both hopelessly light polluted, and this is why.
Rainfall.
The area west of the 100th parallel used to be known as the "Great American Desert" and was considered by some to be as uninhabitable as the Sahara. Giant dams and massive irrigation projects have made this less the case, but to this day only a small fraction of the West has been irrigated enough to be useful.
Its very interesting to look at a map of two states, say, Missouri and Nevada. In Missouri, there's a town every 10 miles. In Nevada, there's a town every 100 miles, and this difference is solely due to the difference in rainfall between the two regions.http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/014 0178244/qid=997558029/sr=2-1/107-3046739-4898128>C a dillac Desert.
For a good espousure of this try reading a href=
Dude, we've been hearing about the Voyagers nearing the heliopause and the termination shock for years. They're still not there, though. Why should this time be any different? I think that the space physics people must not understand this as well as they think they do.
The Vikings were great spacecraft, there's no doubt about that, and the things that they discovered about Mars have been invaluble to planetary scientists over the past 25 years. However, the biology experiments on board the landers were just poorly thought out crap.
Prior to the Viking lander touchdowns, the only spacecraft to touch down on mars was the Soviet Mars 3 mission which landed safely in 1971, only to have its computer lock up 30 seconds later such that no data was ever sent from the surface (D'oh!). All that was known about the surface was that which could be learned from orbiting spacecraft -- geomorphology, aeronomy, and the like, but certainly no chemistry. By sending generic rudimentary biology experiments to Mars without any knowledge of the chemical environment they would be operating in NASA set itself up for the rash of uninterpretable data that those experiments returned. In addition, the biology experiments for Mars were designed by astronomers, not biologists, and their focus reflects this.
This failure has an important lesson to teach us about planetary exploration: don't get ahead of yourself. Before we can go searching for life, we need to do some basic science, learning about how a planet works before blindly looking for our version of life everywhere. Despite this, every NASA Mars press release mentions how Mars Odyssey, or MGS, or whatever new spacecraft will be looking for life, and that's too bad. At least the spacecraft themselves are better thought out, sent to address specific scientific problems and to teach us more about the planet Mars so that someday we CAN go look for life, but this time, we'll do it RIGHT.
Slashdot Mirror
The original patent system was implimented so that if a person were to make a discovery or invention, it would be advantageous to that person to obtain a patent, publishing the details of their discovery, instead of keeping the method a secret in perpetuity. Clearly, if the greatest inventions are kept secret, nobody would be able to build off of them, and technological progress would stagnate.
So, how about we allow software patents, under the condition that the SOURCE CODE for all patented algorithms be placed in the public domain? Corporations would then not be legally allowed to make money on them due to patent law, but society as a whole would benefit by the non-profit use of the source code, allowing software technology to continue to progress without having to rediscover old code.
Clearly such a patent should be limited in duration, much moreso than patents on other stuff -- say, like 4 years or so? What do you think?
I'm kind of surprised that people are so shocked that someone might actually make, or drink, decaffinated coffee. Its not like this is a perversion of nature or something, the point is that there is a huge market out there for the stuff. Millions of people drink decaf every day.
We may not understand it, but the point is that genetically modifying the plant to produce less caffeine is both safer, and tastes better, than whatever god-awful shit they do to it now.
I guess I just think this is a cool, and potentially profitable use for the level of genetic engineering that we are able to do nowadays. If this kind of stuff works, and makes money, then we get to see the really neat stuff down the road!
Gee, a computer museum? That sounds like my basement. Maybe I can charge admission and get a tax writeoff!
I liked this movie better when it was called 'The Wrath of Khan' in 1982.
- Shooter
Dudes: can anybody tell me what the hell a whitepaper is? How can it be a whitepaper if its all electronic? How is a whitepaper different than a normal paper? This smells to me of Dilbert's boss doublespeak.
Crappy temporal resolution -- 10 days/frame. I can't follow individual particles, they just jump around. I'd love to see this plot with 1 day resolution instead, I think that it would give a better impression of what's going on: comets in crazy eccentric orbits, Near Earth Asteroids crossing 1AU, planets circular.
If you shoot neutrinos, which travel in straight lines at nearly the speed of light, from Chicago to Minnesota, they will not pass through Canada! They will, in fact, pass well above Canada, since the Earth is not flat and the ground will fall away under the poor neutrinos as they travel away from Soudan, MN. Since Soudan is so far North, though, maybe some of them will fly through Canadian airspace -- I hope they get clearance from ATC.
Russia can't afford a manned mission to New Jersey. What makes them think they can afford to go to Mars?
Recently as well, a binary Kuiper Belt Object was found (in addition to Pluto and Charon, though, I mean). The remarkable ubiquity of double-asteroids and KBOs in our solar system is trying to tell us something about the formation and evolution of planetary systems, and we're working on what that is. I personally suspect that, eventually, a binary extrasolar planet will be found (probably in transit), making this sort of thing even more exciting.
Now the Russian space program has imploded, and we haven't done jack for 15 years. The space shuttle has been flying for longer than the time between when Alan Shepherd flew and when the first shuttle flight, because the American manned space program has become complacent. Oh, okay, I guess we did blow $60 billion on a big pressurized can in space that people can go up to learn how to fix. . . But seriously, imagine if the Chinese were to start a program to return to the moon, or to go to Mars -- would we still be wasting our time and money on scientifically useless porkbarreling in Earth orbit then?
The problem is the stretch that I had to apply to bring out the tail without making the coma just a blob. Here's a stretch that brings out the tail better.
Use Xephem -- you download and compile the source 'cuz it was developed for Unix systems, hence its Linux & FreeBSD friendly. Its also a FreeBSD port, which makes it trivial for you to install should you be so fortunate as to be running that OS.
Comets are one of the coolest things to observe in the sky because they CHANGE like every night!
How is this new system different/better than the FreeBSD pkg_add? When I want to download an install a precompiled binary I just type (as root)
pkg_add -r gnupg
for instance and the binary package gets automatically ftped down, unpacked, and the pieces installed to the correct locations. With thousands of FreeBSD ports already set up, why should I or anyone switch to this new system?
> I dont see the OS as perfected yet, but its come along way since DOS.
I disagree. I used to be a DOS/PC lover way, way back in the '80s when DOS was still around. Then Bill decided to do the GUI thing with Windows. I did move to Win95 when it came out, because of the ability to multitask (even if it wasn't all that great) but ever since then Bill's OSes have gone downhill, as far as I'm concerned.
Know why? Cuz I love the command line. I'm sorry, but GUI operating system interfaces are just hideously klunky kludges for secretaries to be able to write useless memos about coffee consumption while never using more than one finger. Yeah, I'm one of those old school guys that realizes that its much easier to just cd to a directory and delete something rather than open up some bloated GUI exploration tool and click myself silly finding where something is, then moving it to some damned bin somewhere.
That's why I switched over to Unix (FreeBSD). I haven't bought a new version of Windows since 1995 -- saved lots of money. When Regis Philbin noted that Bill had completely deprecated the CLI with XP, I realized that I can never go back; the FreeBSD that I use now is a better DOS than Windows is.
An excellent discussion of civil liberties in wartime can be found in the book All the Laws but One, written by the currently sitting Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, William Rehnquist. Inside Rehnquist discusses in detail some of the incidents mentioned in the article linked to in this article, especially old Abe's suspension of the Writ of HAbeas Corpus and the subsequent political imprisonment of rebel sympathizers in the Maryland legislature. As Lincoln said then, "Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself to go to pieces, lest that one be violated?" When Abe says it its hard to disagree with it, seeing as at the time the Republic REALLY WAS threatened with extinction.
Rainfall.
The area west of the 100th parallel used to be known as the "Great American Desert" and was considered by some to be as uninhabitable as the Sahara. Giant dams and massive irrigation projects have made this less the case, but to this day only a small fraction of the West has been irrigated enough to be useful.
Its very interesting to look at a map of two states, say, Missouri and Nevada. In Missouri, there's a town every 10 miles. In Nevada, there's a town every 100 miles, and this difference is solely due to the difference in rainfall between the two regions. For a good espousure of this try reading Cadillac Desert, a documentary on the whole water thing.
This is due to other atmospheric hazes -- in Chicago there's all sorts of moisture in the air and other aerosols that reflect the light pollution back to you when you're looking up, thus making it harder for you to see stars. But under clean air there can be a huge amount of light pollution around you and it won't affect the sky brightness very much at all.
I've seen the Milky Way from the city of Tucson, one of those very bright spots, but never from my home of St. Louis despite the fact that they're both hopelessly light polluted, and this is why.
Rainfall. The area west of the 100th parallel used to be known as the "Great American Desert" and was considered by some to be as uninhabitable as the Sahara. Giant dams and massive irrigation projects have made this less the case, but to this day only a small fraction of the West has been irrigated enough to be useful. Its very interesting to look at a map of two states, say, Missouri and Nevada. In Missouri, there's a town every 10 miles. In Nevada, there's a town every 100 miles, and this difference is solely due to the difference in rainfall between the two regions.http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/014 0178244/qid=997558029/sr=2-1/107-3046739-4898128>C a dillac Desert.
For a good espousure of this try reading a href=
Dude, we've been hearing about the Voyagers nearing the heliopause and the termination shock for years. They're still not there, though. Why should this time be any different? I think that the space physics people must not understand this as well as they think they do.
The Vikings were great spacecraft, there's no doubt about that, and the things that they discovered about Mars have been invaluble to planetary scientists over the past 25 years. However, the biology experiments on board the landers were just poorly thought out crap.
Prior to the Viking lander touchdowns, the only spacecraft to touch down on mars was the Soviet Mars 3 mission which landed safely in 1971, only to have its computer lock up 30 seconds later such that no data was ever sent from the surface (D'oh!). All that was known about the surface was that which could be learned from orbiting spacecraft -- geomorphology, aeronomy, and the like, but certainly no chemistry. By sending generic rudimentary biology experiments to Mars without any knowledge of the chemical environment they would be operating in NASA set itself up for the rash of uninterpretable data that those experiments returned. In addition, the biology experiments for Mars were designed by astronomers, not biologists, and their focus reflects this.
This failure has an important lesson to teach us about planetary exploration: don't get ahead of yourself. Before we can go searching for life, we need to do some basic science, learning about how a planet works before blindly looking for our version of life everywhere. Despite this, every NASA Mars press release mentions how Mars Odyssey, or MGS, or whatever new spacecraft will be looking for life, and that's too bad. At least the spacecraft themselves are better thought out, sent to address specific scientific problems and to teach us more about the planet Mars so that someday we CAN go look for life, but this time, we'll do it RIGHT.