The main article was about environmental hazards, not personal hazards. These acids are nasty to your skin, but they can be neutralized and made safe to pour down the drain without endangering the environment.
HF, H2SO4, etc. are nasty, but easy to neutralize. If you neutralize them, they become aqueous solutions of relatively benign salts. The problems are more with organic solvents that have to be burned at high temperature and with heavy metals that cannot be rendered safe, but must be segregated from the environment.
It didn't matter if it was deionized water or 80 molar HF
Just a second... Pure liquid HF has a specific gravity slightly less than 1.0, so even pure liquid HF would be only about 50 molar (20 g/mole). In aqueous solution, the concentration would be smaller. Where did you get 80 M HF?
If KMart purchased the software under restrictions that prohibit resale, then yes, they are stuffed. Otherwise, the First Sale rules, and they can sell it as easily as any other capital they have on hand.
The key point is that they never purchased software, so First Sale does not apply. They purchased licenses to use software under the terms of the EULA. It is precisely to avoid First Sale that software companies license, rather than sell, software. When I was younger there were lending libraries that would lend software under the First Sale doctrine (go home, with the disks, install the software, and, on the honor system, uninstall it before returning the disks to the library). The move to licensing was inspired in part by the companies' desire to eliminate these libraries.
My point about hot spots is that what's relevant to sparking is not absolute power fed into the cavity, but energy density stored a the hot spots of the cavity, which can be substantially higher. Of course, an airplane cabin is not a terribly high-Q cavity, so the energy storage factor will not be much greater than 1, but the role of the cavity in creating hot spots is potentially much more serious. See T. Hondou, "Rising Level of Public Exposure to Mobile Phones: Accumulation through Additivity
and Reflectivity" for details.
The story addresses issues of problems with cell phones crowding land-based cell networks, but doesn't address the safety concerns that 100 people in a metal cavity, all generating microwaves might (a) disrupt internal electronics and (b) spark flammable material.
Cell phones can transmit at +30 dBm (= 1000 mW). 100 cell phones in the cabin would generate 100 W. Not much, if it's spread over the whole cabin volume, but if cavity resonances or multiple reflections create hot spots, it could be a problem.
Saudi Arabia has a vast oil wealth and generates a great deal of income. But this money is hoarded by the royal family and their close associates. The common man, on the other hand, lives a rather poor and meager existence
Just to emphasize what you're saying, according to the CIA World Factbook, both life expectancy at birth and infant mortality are significantly worse in Saudi Arabia than Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. The average oppressed Palestinian can expect to live four years longer than the average Saudi and Saudi babies have twice the infant mortality rate of Palestinian ones. Things are even worse in Egypt, where Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's personal physician and tutor in terrorism and militant Islamic fundamentalism, was born and raised.
While it's true that most of the Islamic Terrorists in the news came from privileged middle-class or wealthy families, they come from countries with tremendous gaps between the rich and poor, and this gap has been found to be one of the best statistical indicators of the level of violence within a society.
Seems to me that Microsoft could challenge the patent on some technicality, at which point he could either defend against Microsoft's suit (which requires lots of money) or concede. If he doesn't have the money to go up against Microsoft's lawyers, nobody in the legal system will care whether he was right. All that counts is whether he is able to establish that he was right in court.
As for Microsoft, slashdot will crow that Microsoft was lying about not using Palladium for software licensing, Microsoft will ignore slashdot, and so will most consumers.
Army is great for a single guy, but this guy has children who need a father all the time, not just when it's convenient for the army to let him spend time with them. You owe a lot to your country, but your first loyalty needs to be to your children because they're more helpless than the USA. Better to join up before you have kids, or see if they'll take you after the children are grown.
Ockham's razor is only one criterion for the quality of a scientific statement. Popper's falsifiability criterion is equally important and studying the atmospheres of distant planets can provide a nice way to rule out likely candidates for life.
Back in the 1960s, when the U.S. was planning the first Mars lander to look for signs of life, NASA scientists were proposing instruments such as traps for sand fleas. NASA gave Lovelock some money to look into whether they were going about this appropriately.
Lovelock did not believe that there was life on Mars and proposed that anomalous gases in the atmosphere was the best test for ruling out the presence of life on a planet. As described in Nature:
In his opinion, "life proclaims itself as a global phenomenon," leaving a clear fingerprint in a planet's atmosphere. This was where he thought the missions should be looking -- although he considered Mars's atmosphere to be that of a lifeless planet anyway.
This hypothesis has the advantage of strongly satisfying Popper's falsifiability requirement: If life must create a chemical balance in the atmosphere that is far from thermodynamic equilibrium, then it's easy to rule out life on a planet by demonstrating that its atmosphere is close to equilibrium.
Of course, a non-equilibrium atmosphere is a necessary, not a sufficient condition, so further work must, of course, be carried out before reaching the conclusion that life must be present, but it's so rare to see such strong non-equilibrium conditions that this is indeed exciting news.
whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States, or imports into the United States any patented invention during the term of the patent therefor, infringes the patent.
There is no mention of an exemption for personal use.
Propagation of action potentials across cardiac tissue. I stimulate an animal heart and watch the electrical activation propagate across the heart as a wave. I am very interested in transient phenomena that occur right at activation.
I am currently trying to get a data-acquisition computer to keep up with a five thousand frame-per-second video feed while doing processing between the frames. Hard real-time is a real issue for me.
Apart from the question of risks and benefits to your vision in the short-term, there is also the question of how well Lasik holds up over the long term. You might ask your surgeon what he or she knows about the incidence of complications or degradation of vision ten or twenty years down the road?
For elective surgery like this, I would wait until there was at least a good statistical base of 30-40-year postoperative outcomes before I would be comfortable with the idea that I had even a clue about the risks involved. In other words, I will not consider this procedure for myself, but my children may be able to make informed decisions when they grow up.
All else being equal, images from a 4-megapixel camera will have twice the resolution (resolving ability) of a one-megapixel camera.... Assuming a fixed aspect ratio, image resolution varies with the square of the pixel count, and that's just the way it goes.
Uh, last time I checked two was the square root of four, not the square of four.
There's nothing wrong with having a modest carreer, and enjoying your work. But just be straight about one thing: when you are 60, you will in all likelyhood look back and see it as a waste.
On the other hand, if we assume that you and I will live well past 60, and that with inputs from a modest career, allowing for things like two or three college tuitions for the kids, neither 401(k) nor social security will likely provide for a few decades of idleness.
Thus, we should expect to be working hard into our seventies, if not into our eighties. Presumably we would like better options than working at McDonalds at that point, and the willingness of 20-somethings to work 100-hour weeks may well cut into our option of a modest programming career.
The real world tends to be up-or-out, which can be a great frustration for those who seek a life outside the workplace.
There is no such thing as a "right to privacy" in the United States. Check out the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
From Justice Douglas's opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), spelling out the reasons why there is a constitutional right to privacy (Not the best argued opinion I have ever read, but until the Supreme Court reverses itself, this is the law of the land):
The association of people is not mentioned in the Constitution nor in the Bill of Rights. The right to educate a child in a school of the parents' choice -- whether public or private or parochial -- is also not mentioned. Nor is the right to study any particular subject or any foreign language. Yet the First Amendment has been construed to include certain of those rights.
...
The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. See Poe v. Ullman, 367 U.S. 497, 516-522 (dissenting opinion). Various guarantees create zones of privacy. The right of association contained in the penumbra of the First Amendment is one, as we have seen. The Third Amendment, in its prohibition against the quartering of soldiers "in any house" in time of peace without the consent of the owner, is another facet of that privacy. The Fourth Amendment explicitly affirms the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." The Fifth Amendment, in its Self-Incrimination Clause, enables the citizen to create a zone of privacy which government may not force him to surrender to his detriment. The Ninth Amendment provides: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
...
We have had many controversies over these penumbral rights of "privacy and repose." See, e.g., Breard v. Alexandria, 341 U.S. 622, 626, 644; Public Utilities Comm'n v. Pollak, 343 U.S. 451; Monroe v. Pape, 365 U.S. 167; Lanza v. New York, 370 U.S. 139; Frank v. Maryland, 359 U.S. 360; Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535 , 541 . These cases bear witness that the right of privacy which presses for recognition here is a legitimate one.
That said, the constitutional right to privacy only prohibits the state from violating this right by coercion. There is nothing to prohibit people from voluntarily waiving some or all of this right as part of a contract of employment.
(BTW, you don't need OOP to wrap collection handlers.)
Amen to that!
Here is one such problem in CWEB:
If you want to add new category codes for the tokenizer, Knuth has allocated all 127 lower-ascii codes to signify the 126 possible input characters, plus a special sentinal value for 127 (DEL).
Codes above 127 are interpreted in a special way as a tricky encoding of pointers into a symbol table. If I want to introduce a new value, I must make it larger than 127, and then add lots of tests (if statements) at various places in the code to check for my special new value and not interpret it as an encoded pointer. There is not a single centralized place to do this, and it would have been very easy to implement a simpler two-stage token-lookup routine (first check whether the catcode == encoded_pointer, then lookup the pointer via an ancillary value).
The code uses a lot of "magic numbers" that are neither #defined symbolically nor explained in a central point in the documentation, but scattered throughout, so the programmer must comb it looking for places at which bugs can arise.
As you say, you don't need OOP, but a better job of structured programming would have been nice. Then again, this is a program by someone who wrote a whole paper on "Structured programming with goto statements."
Although literate programming has a lot of potential, all too often literate projects become completely ossified. M.D. McIlroy's criticism of Knuth's literate programs (CACM 29, 471-83 (1986)), that they tend to be like "industrial strength Faberg eggs" as opposed to reusable tools, is still quite valid.
For a project I am working on, I needed to extend CWEB to do some things Knuth hadn't thought of, and I found that excessive cleverness in the data structures made it much more difficult to extend than it should have been, so that Knuth could demonstrate clever data structures that probably add a few percent to the performance over what he could have achieved with more prosaic ones (Knuth does not document why he made these excessively clever design choices, nor whether the performance advantages they offer were significant).
Similarly, a recent thread on comp.text.tex recently asking about the extensibility of TEX produced a number of comments from those who know about how unextensible and unreusable TEX really is.
So, while I use literate programming (CWEB) to document a lot of my own code, I don't believe in all these years, that I have ever seen a good example of literate-programming that looks towards the future (refactoring, extending, reusing) as opposed to generating a fossil with that comes with a good story of its life and times.
You make very good points. To extend this discussion, I would distinguish statutory from common law. Common law has a long history of precedent against patenting processes and life forms, although statutory law remained noncommittal on both (see, e.g., Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303 (1980), where Chief Justice Berger, writing for the U.S. Supreme Court, ruled that living organisms could be patented despite years of precedent to the contrary).
My major point is that U.S. courts and the USPTO interpreted U.S. patent law as excluding business plans and algorithms for two centuries, but then decided to open to door to accepting patents on intangible processes. Whether they should do so is a good topic for debate, but I argue that statutory law and the U.S. Constitution do not exclude such patents.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and
Discoveries.
There is nothing there that says the "discovery" needs to be a machine and not an algorithm.
Thomas Jefferson thought patents should be just for machines, but he was not the king of the U.S., and others thought differently. The Patent Act of 1793 states that the inventor of
any new and useful
art, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new or useful improvement thereof
is entitled to a patent. Note that "arts," not just machines, are entitled to patents. The 1952 Patent Act revised this to read,
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful
process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
Again, not just machines, but processes were elegible according to the letter of the law to be patented. Algorithms and business plans seem to me to be processes and hence, are not automatically excluded from the wording of the historical patent laws.
You realize you've also just said, people holding conversations while driving can't pay attention to the road, therefore having passengers is just as dangerous.
You are correct. There was a peer-reviewed paper, "Carrying passengers as a risk factor for crashes fatal to 16- and 17-year-old drivers," published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Mar 22/29 2000, pp.1617-8) that did indeed conclude that conversations between the driver and passengers dramatically increased the risk of a fatal accident for newly-licensed drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
The main article was about environmental hazards, not personal hazards. These acids are nasty to your skin, but they can be neutralized and made safe to pour down the drain without endangering the environment.
HF, H2SO4, etc. are nasty, but easy to neutralize. If you neutralize them, they become aqueous solutions of relatively benign salts. The problems are more with organic solvents that have to be burned at high temperature and with heavy metals that cannot be rendered safe, but must be segregated from the environment.
Just a second... Pure liquid HF has a specific gravity slightly less than 1.0, so even pure liquid HF would be only about 50 molar (20 g/mole). In aqueous solution, the concentration would be smaller. Where did you get 80 M HF?
The key point is that they never purchased software, so First Sale does not apply. They purchased licenses to use software under the terms of the EULA. It is precisely to avoid First Sale that software companies license, rather than sell, software. When I was younger there were lending libraries that would lend software under the First Sale doctrine (go home, with the disks, install the software, and, on the honor system, uninstall it before returning the disks to the library). The move to licensing was inspired in part by the companies' desire to eliminate these libraries.
KazaA is discussed in the paper as an existence proof.
Now there's a use for RealPlayer.
From my ARRL Handbook (p. 2-7, 1993 Ed.), the definition of dBm = 10 * log(P / mW). Frequency is irrelevant.
Thus, P = 10 **(dBm / 10) * mW. 30 dBm = 10**3 mW = 1 Watt.
My point about hot spots is that what's relevant to sparking is not absolute power fed into the cavity, but energy density stored a the hot spots of the cavity, which can be substantially higher. Of course, an airplane cabin is not a terribly high-Q cavity, so the energy storage factor will not be much greater than 1, but the role of the cavity in creating hot spots is potentially much more serious. See T. Hondou, "Rising Level of Public Exposure to Mobile Phones: Accumulation through Additivity and Reflectivity" for details.
Cell phones can transmit at +30 dBm (= 1000 mW). 100 cell phones in the cabin would generate 100 W. Not much, if it's spread over the whole cabin volume, but if cavity resonances or multiple reflections create hot spots, it could be a problem.
Just to emphasize what you're saying, according to the CIA World Factbook, both life expectancy at birth and infant mortality are significantly worse in Saudi Arabia than Palestinians in the occupied West Bank . The average oppressed Palestinian can expect to live four years longer than the average Saudi and Saudi babies have twice the infant mortality rate of Palestinian ones. Things are even worse in Egypt, where Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's personal physician and tutor in terrorism and militant Islamic fundamentalism, was born and raised.
While it's true that most of the Islamic Terrorists in the news came from privileged middle-class or wealthy families, they come from countries with tremendous gaps between the rich and poor, and this gap has been found to be one of the best statistical indicators of the level of violence within a society.
As for Microsoft, slashdot will crow that Microsoft was lying about not using Palladium for software licensing, Microsoft will ignore slashdot, and so will most consumers.
Army is great for a single guy, but this guy has children who need a father all the time, not just when it's convenient for the army to let him spend time with them. You owe a lot to your country, but your first loyalty needs to be to your children because they're more helpless than the USA. Better to join up before you have kids, or see if they'll take you after the children are grown.
Does the adoption of Palladium mean that Microsoft will recommend against the use of Windows OS's in medical and similar applications?
Back in the 1960s, when the U.S. was planning the first Mars lander to look for signs of life, NASA scientists were proposing instruments such as traps for sand fleas. NASA gave Lovelock some money to look into whether they were going about this appropriately.
Lovelock did not believe that there was life on Mars and proposed that anomalous gases in the atmosphere was the best test for ruling out the presence of life on a planet. As described in Nature:
This hypothesis has the advantage of strongly satisfying Popper's falsifiability requirement: If life must create a chemical balance in the atmosphere that is far from thermodynamic equilibrium, then it's easy to rule out life on a planet by demonstrating that its atmosphere is close to equilibrium.Of course, a non-equilibrium atmosphere is a necessary, not a sufficient condition, so further work must, of course, be carried out before reaching the conclusion that life must be present, but it's so rare to see such strong non-equilibrium conditions that this is indeed exciting news.
Not so. See the patent law: 35 U.S.C. 271:
There is no mention of an exemption for personal use.Propagation of action potentials across cardiac tissue. I stimulate an animal heart and watch the electrical activation propagate across the heart as a wave. I am very interested in transient phenomena that occur right at activation.
I am currently trying to get a data-acquisition computer to keep up with a five thousand frame-per-second video feed while doing processing between the frames. Hard real-time is a real issue for me.
Apart from the question of risks and benefits to your vision in the short-term, there is also the question of how well Lasik holds up over the long term. You might ask your surgeon what he or she knows about the incidence of complications or degradation of vision ten or twenty years down the road?
For elective surgery like this, I would wait until there was at least a good statistical base of 30-40-year postoperative outcomes before I would be comfortable with the idea that I had even a clue about the risks involved. In other words, I will not consider this procedure for myself, but my children may be able to make informed decisions when they grow up.
Uh, last time I checked two was the square root of four, not the square of four.
On the other hand, if we assume that you and I will live well past 60, and that with inputs from a modest career, allowing for things like two or three college tuitions for the kids, neither 401(k) nor social security will likely provide for a few decades of idleness.
Thus, we should expect to be working hard into our seventies, if not into our eighties. Presumably we would like better options than working at McDonalds at that point, and the willingness of 20-somethings to work 100-hour weeks may well cut into our option of a modest programming career.
The real world tends to be up-or-out, which can be a great frustration for those who seek a life outside the workplace.
From Justice Douglas's opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), spelling out the reasons why there is a constitutional right to privacy (Not the best argued opinion I have ever read, but until the Supreme Court reverses itself, this is the law of the land):
That said, the constitutional right to privacy only prohibits the state from violating this right by coercion. There is nothing to prohibit people from voluntarily waiving some or all of this right as part of a contract of employment.Amen to that!
Here is one such problem in CWEB:
If you want to add new category codes for the tokenizer, Knuth has allocated all 127 lower-ascii codes to signify the 126 possible input characters, plus a special sentinal value for 127 (DEL).
Codes above 127 are interpreted in a special way as a tricky encoding of pointers into a symbol table. If I want to introduce a new value, I must make it larger than 127, and then add lots of tests (if statements) at various places in the code to check for my special new value and not interpret it as an encoded pointer. There is not a single centralized place to do this, and it would have been very easy to implement a simpler two-stage token-lookup routine (first check whether the catcode == encoded_pointer, then lookup the pointer via an ancillary value).
The code uses a lot of "magic numbers" that are neither #defined symbolically nor explained in a central point in the documentation, but scattered throughout, so the programmer must comb it looking for places at which bugs can arise.
As you say, you don't need OOP, but a better job of structured programming would have been nice. Then again, this is a program by someone who wrote a whole paper on "Structured programming with goto statements."
For a project I am working on, I needed to extend CWEB to do some things Knuth hadn't thought of, and I found that excessive cleverness in the data structures made it much more difficult to extend than it should have been, so that Knuth could demonstrate clever data structures that probably add a few percent to the performance over what he could have achieved with more prosaic ones (Knuth does not document why he made these excessively clever design choices, nor whether the performance advantages they offer were significant).
Similarly, a recent thread on comp.text.tex recently asking about the extensibility of TEX produced a number of comments from those who know about how unextensible and unreusable TEX really is.
So, while I use literate programming (CWEB) to document a lot of my own code, I don't believe in all these years, that I have ever seen a good example of literate-programming that looks towards the future (refactoring, extending, reusing) as opposed to generating a fossil with that comes with a good story of its life and times.
My major point is that U.S. courts and the USPTO interpreted U.S. patent law as excluding business plans and algorithms for two centuries, but then decided to open to door to accepting patents on intangible processes. Whether they should do so is a good topic for debate, but I argue that statutory law and the U.S. Constitution do not exclude such patents.
Funny, the Constitution says (Art. I, Sect. 8)
There is nothing there that says the "discovery" needs to be a machine and not an algorithm.Thomas Jefferson thought patents should be just for machines, but he was not the king of the U.S., and others thought differently. The Patent Act of 1793 states that the inventor of
is entitled to a patent. Note that "arts," not just machines, are entitled to patents. The 1952 Patent Act revised this to read,Again, not just machines, but processes were elegible according to the letter of the law to be patented. Algorithms and business plans seem to me to be processes and hence, are not automatically excluded from the wording of the historical patent laws.
You realize you've also just said, people holding conversations while driving can't pay attention to the road, therefore having passengers is just as dangerous. You are correct. There was a peer-reviewed paper, "Carrying passengers as a risk factor for crashes fatal to 16- and 17-year-old drivers," published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Mar 22/29 2000, pp.1617-8) that did indeed conclude that conversations between the driver and passengers dramatically increased the risk of a fatal accident for newly-licensed drivers.