Actually 20 mpg isn't that great for a small aircraft, it's as bad as that because they're using powered lift. A small Cessna or Cherokee will do a bit better than that, and those are not very aerodynamically clean aircraft. Don't know what the slick composite aircraft (the EZ types, or Lancair or Glasair at the higher speeds) will do.
Consider that mileage in an aircraft is like "all highway miles" in a car -- the engine is running at constant speed, you're not repeatedly stopping and accellerating. Add to that the fact that aircraft have less drag than all but the slickest cars, and don't have to contend with tire rolling resistance, and a light plane easily gets better mileage than a car (until you go to much higher speeds, drag goes up with square of the airspeed).
Yeah, good questions. I'd like to see some in-flight pix.
> Horizontal landing
Not necessarily. It isn't clear what the low speed lift capabilities are, other than bad, so it doesn't gain you much, and it adds to the complexity of the landing gear. Actually horizontal landing is undesirable because of the landing gear and other issues (think about it, you're trying to 'dock' with a surface at as close to zero vertical speed as possible while maintaining a high (50-200 kts, depending on the aircraft) horizontal speed. The only reason airplanes do it is because they don't have a choice.
>Low speed (eg stall)
Doesn't really apply to a powered lift vehicle since the lift (except at high speed) is not aerodynamic but propulsive. Yes, I imagine if you went to a really high angle-of-attack at 300kt where most of the lift is aero, you'd have problems. But I suspect lifting surface stalling would be the least of those problems:-)
It's not an aeroplane, and not really much like a helicopter either. Think Harrier without the wings.
> Carleton University
Hi, my brother's a Carleton grad (Physics, '86). I used to fly out of Rockliffe.
And if you want VTOL, you can buy a Rotorway helicopter (kit, but pretty easy to assemble from what I've heard) for about the same $60K. Rotorway is pretty fancy as homebuilt helicopters go, there are others you can get much cheaper.
The FAA will just do what they've always done about pilots that violate air regs. Get your tail number (and in this case, likely an ID encoded in your transponder signal) and often as not, have somebody waiting for you when you land.
Words you don't hear on the radio after you tell the tower you're clear of the runway/landing area: "Acknowledged, and please report to the FAA rep.".
Heh, with flying cars you're always on traffic radar.
The Harrier uses a fanjet with very high velocity exhaust out of smaller ports for a much higher weight vehicle.
The aircar uses ducted fans, large ports, and is light weight.
Noise goes up as some power of the exhaust velocity, which goes up with weight and down with nozzle diameter.
It won't be that bad.
(Loudest noise I ever heard was being a hundred or so feet from somebody demonstrating the old Bell rocket belt. I've witnessed large rocket launch/landing (DC-X) too, but that was from a couple miles away. Sounded like a jet.)
In response to some of the questions/comments above about GPL'd or free Java, here's a summary of what I'm aware of:
Compilers:
egcs - Now with Java support, compiles to native code, includes necessary runtime lib. I haven't tried it but I've heard it's good from those who have.
guavac - GNU Java compilers, compiles to java bytecode. Worked pretty well last time I tried it a year or so back.
Java Virtual Machines (to run bytecode):
kaffe - probably the best non-Sun JVM I've seen, includes JIT for many platforms. Released under a BSD-style license (which might mean that Microsoft could adopt it?)
japhar - LGPL'd JVM. I have no experience with this one.
Other Java related:
GNU Classpath - LGPL'd core class libraries
Kore - cleanroom core class libraries - for JDK 1.0.2, now obsolete and the code has been rolled into the Kaffe class libs
TYA - a GPL'd JIT compiler/vm for i386/linux
Mauve - non-Sun compliance test suite
There may well be more out there, its been a few months since I was following this closely.
What the fsck is the point of having a multitasking OS and windowing system if you're just gonna fullscreen the damn app? It's only a doc viewer, for pete's sake. Go out and spend the few bucks to upgrade your 14" 640x480 screen to something reasonable if you want to see more browser window. Yeesh, what a useless misfeature.
Naturally occuring thorium (as found in, e.g. thorite) is, like most things, a mix of isotopes. Given how hard separating isotopes is, I sincerely doubt that anyone is enriching thorium in any particular isotope for any particular purpose. So basically, thorium is thorium no matter where you get it -- the same mix of isotopes.
(There are probably minor exceptions -- thorium found in, say, pitchblende or uranite might have a *slightly* different isotope ratio because of the influence of other elements/decay products.)
You don't need power, just high voltage -- which you can get from a static generator like a van de Graaf machine. You don't need magnets, either, unless you want to bend the beam path.
The Scientific American "Amateur Scientist" column about 35 years ago had a "build your own accelerator" article. Small (couple feet high) van de Graaf as the voltage source and it accelerated protons at your target, -- which is going to work better on the light elements than the heavy ones.
it can cost a fortune to migrate a running business from one office suite to another
Yep, and that includes from one version of MS Office to another.
Sure, you can retrofit filters and such so that your department still using Office 95 can open docs than some other branch that's using Office 97 sends you - maybe. But what about those old Word 5.0 files you've got around, or the Word documents from the division that used to be all-Mac? Yeah, you can open them (if you jump through the right hoops), but you'll lose the formatting. (Voice of experience here.)
Yes, it's an effort to switch from one office suite to another -- and each one still insists on its own internal format as well as supporting (to some degree or other) several other "portable" document formats -- but you're going to face that cost every time - or at best every other time - Microsoft comes out with a new version of Office, so you ought to look at all the long term costs involved.
Hell, a halfway competent manager will have already looked at these factors and decreed some standard -- as in really standard, not just what's most popular -- document format (or subset of document content) for the company, so that last year's contract boilerplate is still recognizable in next year's version of Office -- whoever's Office it is.
> The sky was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
I got to thinking about this when rereading Neuromancer a couple of months ago. The first time I read it, years ago, that phrase meant to me the mottled, flickering grey of a static-filled CRT. These days, with electronic tuning and detection of a valid video signal, that means a solid bright blue screen (not unlike BSODs). Which leads to a totally different "mood" conjured up by that phrase -- gloomy overcast or bright cloudless blue?
Neuromancer was written long enough ago I suspect he meant the former, but it shows the danger of using technological metaphors...
But it's not either/or to RMS...
on
GNU Inside?
·
· Score: 1
I'd much rather have a cool GNU sticker than deal with the tongue-twisting GNU/Linux deal.
Sure, me to. But listen to what Stallman says in http://linux.codemeta.com/archives/gnhlug_1999a_ar chive/2003.html :
The idea of a slogan that we and the "Linux" people could agree on is an interesting idea, and I would be glad to do that. However, that would be in parallel with using the name "GNU/Linux" to inform people about the origin and nature of the system. [Emphasis added]
Sorry bucko, but no sticker for me until you drop the silly name.
If they wanted it pronounced that way, they should have spelled it differently, and come up with an acronym to suit.
The history of programming languages has too many *BOL languages pronounced -ball for anyone to complain about pronouncing REBOL 'reeball'. (E.g. COBOL, SNOBOL, SPITBOL,...) Besides, it's "reeball" (or "reeboll") according to English pronunciation rules, such as they are.
Two books, printed back-to-back so that either could be considered the front. It was reprinted some years later in slightly smaller format.
Yes, and he had a system (Xanadu) based on the hypertext concept (which, AFAIK, is still a struggling project - they want to incorporate the idea of tiny royalties being paid the author for every click on a link leading to something the author wrote). This before the WWW or Hypercard.
To give an idea of the timeframe, the idea of "computer lib" was publicly accessible dumb terminals linked to minicomputers...
Re:My can of Diet Pepsi had Queen Amidala (sp?) on
on
More Star Wars Hype
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, but ask yourself who's doing the marketing in this case - Lucasfilm or PepsiCo? Hint, I'll bet PepsiCo is paying Lucas for the rights to crank out a set of SW:TPM "collector cans", and not Lucasfilm paying Pepsico to advertise SW:TPM on their cans.
Last I heard, Lucasfilm had hardly spent any money advertising the film - they don't need to. Ditto with all the product tie-ins. Who do you suppose was beating down whose doors for the rights to manufacture SW toys and action figures? Lucas probably had to beat them off with a stick.
It's also about the most effective thing Solo could have said at that point - effective in getting Leia to focus her attention on her own problems. Not "I love you too", not "Don't worry about me". Just a smartass response like "I know" to snap her out of a potential melancholy mindset into an action mindset.
Linux's strengths lie in its technology, not its marketing.
Agreed.
This could be quite beneficial really: the Linux people get a chance to see how Linux really compares to NT on high-end hardware
Disagreed.
Oh, not that it wouldn't be nice to do some comparisons and tweaking on high-hardware, sure it would. But not in a circus like this. To get meaningful data this needs to be done in a lab setting where everything can be instrumented, code can be tweaked and re-tweaked, and so on, not in a media circus (Ziff-Davis's labs!?) where there's time pressure ("you've got two days, then we need to clear this lab out for a comparison of left-handed USB DVD players we're doing for PC Week"). And of course Microsoft will spin the results any way it wants to anyway. ("It took a team of the original developers of Linux to tweak it to match NT out-of-the-box").
Let's think outside the box a little and quit letting Microsoft set all the rules of the game.
Precisely. That's how we've got where we are. There is no advantage in playing Microsoft's game. Even if Linux/Apache/Samba wins the benchmark (certainly not guaranteed, given known issues), MS will spin it that the only way you'd get that performance yourself (if you went Linux) would be if you hired Torvalds, Cox, etc to tune your systems for you. If we lose, even if the margin is tiny (compared to the original Mindshaft tests), MS will trumpet that as 'proof' of NT's superiority and continue to quote the first set of numbers. (We haven't heard the results of the second benchmark, have we?)
If we simply don't show up, Microsoft can say what they like but folks out there will remember how they skewed the first benchmark, and knowing how trustworthy Microsoft is (ahem!), will as like as not say "hey, I don't blame them, why get screwed over a third time".
Microsoft is running scared on this, they don't know how fight something they can't buy out or bury. Let's just keep them off balance, and ignore this particular challenge.
Given Linux's ability to run on many different platforms, it might be interesting to spec out what configuration would deliver benchmark numbers an order of magnitude higher than anything NT is claiming. I doubt NT would even run on that hardware, and the hardware might cost more than the quad Xeon of this test. But so what? If Microsoft wants to get into a price/performance match with free software... Well, I don't think they'd really want to go there.
The whole tone of that page is of someone desperately trying to counteract FUD. When was the last time Microsoft was the one fighting FUD? (Of course, they were doing it by spreading some FUD of their own -- but the very existence of this page shows how MS is sweating bullets over Linux.)
Sure, in some carefully selected set of benchmarks NT might beat some carefully chosen aspects of Linux. You can prove anything if you design your benchmarks carefully (witness the first Mindcraft test). So what - Linux (and other Unixen) give you enough flexibility over hardware configurations that if the software isn't fast enough, you can fix it in hardware. Last time I looked, NT just wouldn't run on an array of SPARCs or an IBM 390 (even if the Linux port to the 390 isn't done yet (I don't know) I know there's a Unix that runs on it.)
What's really funny about this, because it's so frustrating for Microsoft, is that there isn't any one person or company they can target. They can't buy Linux out, they can't "cut off [Linux's] air supply" (on the contrary, that's what Linux is doing to NT in the small server arena already).
The best way for "the Linux community" to respond to this challenge is to simply ignore it. Don't fight on MS's turf. Just go away and keep quietly working to improve those areas at the high end that might need improvement, and keep improving things at the desktop end too, quietly stealing MS territory a piece at a time while MS execs give themselves ulcers fighting a two-front war where the enemy refuses to engage them directly. (Remember the analogies to guerrilla warfare a while back?)
Meanwhile, take this "challenge" as yet another sign of approaching victory: "...then they fight you, then you win".
Somebody's (Halcyon??) patent on the waterbed was invalidated by a description of same in an old Robert Heinlein novel. That's the classic example of a patent invalidated by an SF reference, there may well be others.
I don't know that anybody even tried to patent the geosynchronous communications satellite, since that would have been invalidated by Arthur C. Clarke's 1945 paper describing same. (And if Clarke had patented it, the patent would have expired by the time the technology was capable of launching same, although I think there is/was some proviso in UK patent law such that you can't patent things that are beyond current technical capabilities.) (However, some sat com companies have tried to patent specific other orbits!)
With a bo or quarter staff, you can grab it anywhere along the length, giving you a number of usage options.
Try grabbing a dual light saber (light stave?) anywhere but the handle and you're in deep trouble.
That said, the different ends of the dual saber may be independantly operable, which gives you the effect of rapidly reversing a saber without wasting the time that actually doing that would take.
Slashdot Mirror
Flying cars, warp drive (see yesterday) and Linux on the desktop.
Is 2000+ going to be a great century or what?
(Now if the politicians can just manage to avoid starting WW III...)
Actually 20 mpg isn't that great for a small aircraft, it's as bad as that because they're using powered lift. A small Cessna or Cherokee will do a bit better than that, and those are not very aerodynamically clean aircraft. Don't know what the slick composite aircraft (the EZ types, or Lancair or Glasair at the higher speeds) will do.
Consider that mileage in an aircraft is like "all highway miles" in a car -- the engine is running at constant speed, you're not repeatedly stopping and accellerating. Add to that the fact that aircraft have less drag than all but the slickest cars, and don't have to contend with tire rolling resistance, and a light plane easily gets better mileage than a car (until you go to much higher speeds, drag goes up with square of the airspeed).
> M200
:-)
Yeah, good questions. I'd like to see some in-flight pix.
> Horizontal landing
Not necessarily. It isn't clear what the low speed lift capabilities are, other than bad, so it doesn't gain you much, and it adds to the complexity of the landing gear. Actually horizontal landing is undesirable because of the landing gear and other issues (think about it, you're trying to 'dock' with a surface at as close to zero vertical speed as possible while maintaining a high (50-200 kts, depending on the aircraft) horizontal speed. The only reason airplanes do it is because they don't have a choice.
>Low speed (eg stall)
Doesn't really apply to a powered lift vehicle since the lift (except at high speed) is not aerodynamic but propulsive. Yes, I imagine if you went to a really high angle-of-attack at 300kt where most of the lift is aero, you'd have problems. But I suspect lifting surface stalling would be the least of those problems
It's not an aeroplane, and not really much like a helicopter either. Think Harrier without the wings.
> Carleton University
Hi, my brother's a Carleton grad (Physics, '86). I used to fly out of Rockliffe.
And if you want VTOL, you can buy a Rotorway helicopter (kit, but pretty easy to assemble from what I've heard) for about the same $60K. Rotorway is pretty fancy as homebuilt helicopters go, there are others you can get much cheaper.
The FAA will just do what they've always done about pilots that violate air regs. Get your tail number (and in this case, likely an ID encoded in your transponder signal) and often as not, have somebody waiting for you when you land.
Words you don't hear on the radio after you tell the tower you're clear of the runway/landing area: "Acknowledged, and please report to the FAA rep.".
Heh, with flying cars you're always on traffic radar.
The Harrier uses a fanjet with very high velocity
exhaust out of smaller ports for a much higher weight vehicle.
The aircar uses ducted fans, large ports, and is light weight.
Noise goes up as some power of the exhaust velocity, which goes up with weight and down with nozzle diameter.
It won't be that bad.
(Loudest noise I ever heard was being a hundred or so feet from somebody demonstrating the old Bell rocket belt. I've witnessed large rocket launch/landing (DC-X) too, but that was from a couple miles away. Sounded like a jet.)
In response to some of the questions/comments above about GPL'd or free Java, here's a summary of what I'm aware of:
Compilers:
egcs - Now with Java support, compiles to native code, includes necessary runtime lib. I haven't tried it but I've heard it's good from those who have.
guavac - GNU Java compilers, compiles to java bytecode. Worked pretty well last time I tried it a year or so back.
Java Virtual Machines (to run bytecode):
kaffe - probably the best non-Sun JVM I've seen, includes JIT for many platforms. Released under a BSD-style license (which might mean that Microsoft could adopt it?)
japhar - LGPL'd JVM. I have no experience with this one.
Other Java related:
GNU Classpath - LGPL'd core class libraries
Kore - cleanroom core class libraries - for JDK 1.0.2, now obsolete and the code has been rolled into the Kaffe class libs
TYA - a GPL'd JIT compiler/vm for i386/linux
Mauve - non-Sun compliance test suite
There may well be more out there, its been a few months since I was following this closely.
What the fsck is the point of having a multitasking OS and windowing system if you're just gonna fullscreen the damn app? It's only a doc viewer, for pete's sake.
Go out and spend the few bucks to upgrade your 14" 640x480 screen to something reasonable if you want to see more browser window.
Yeesh, what a useless misfeature.
"This is not a Nuclear Reactor"
[...]
"What they did [...] thereby causing a nuclear reaction"
Hmm, if they put something together that caused nuclear reactions, sure sounds to me like it could be described as a nuclear reactor.
It just never reached breakeven.
Naturally occuring thorium (as found in, e.g. thorite) is, like most things, a mix of isotopes. Given how hard separating isotopes is, I sincerely doubt that anyone is enriching thorium in any particular isotope for any particular purpose.
So basically, thorium is thorium no matter where you get it -- the same mix of isotopes.
(There are probably minor exceptions -- thorium found in, say, pitchblende or uranite might have a *slightly* different isotope ratio because of the influence of other elements/decay products.)
You don't need power, just high voltage -- which you can get from a static generator like a van de Graaf machine. You don't need magnets, either, unless you want to bend the beam path.
The Scientific American "Amateur Scientist" column about 35 years ago had a "build your own accelerator" article. Small (couple feet high) van de Graaf as the voltage source and it accelerated protons at your target, -- which is going to work better on the light elements than the heavy ones.
it can cost a fortune to migrate a running business from one office suite to another
Yep, and that includes from one version of MS Office to another.
Sure, you can retrofit filters and such so that your department still using Office 95 can open docs than some other branch that's using Office 97 sends you - maybe. But what about those old Word 5.0 files you've got around, or the Word documents from the division that used to be all-Mac? Yeah, you can open them (if you jump through the right hoops), but you'll lose the formatting. (Voice of experience here.)
Yes, it's an effort to switch from one office suite to another -- and each one still insists on its own internal format as well as supporting (to some degree or other) several other "portable" document formats -- but you're going to face that cost every time - or at best every other time - Microsoft comes out with a new version of Office, so you ought to look at all the long term costs involved.
Hell, a halfway competent manager will have already looked at these factors and decreed some standard -- as in really standard, not just what's most popular -- document format (or subset of document content) for the company, so that last year's contract boilerplate is still recognizable in next year's version of Office -- whoever's Office it is.
> The sky was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
I got to thinking about this when rereading Neuromancer a couple of months ago. The first time I read it, years ago, that phrase meant to me the mottled, flickering grey of a static-filled CRT. These days, with electronic tuning and detection of a valid video signal, that means a solid bright blue screen (not unlike BSODs).
Which leads to a totally different "mood" conjured up by that phrase -- gloomy overcast or bright cloudless blue?
Neuromancer was written long enough ago I suspect he meant the former, but it shows the danger of using technological metaphors...
I'd much rather have a cool GNU sticker than deal with the tongue-twisting GNU/Linux deal.
r chive/2003.html :
Sure, me to. But listen to what Stallman says in http://linux.codemeta.com/archives/gnhlug_1999a_a
The idea of a slogan that we and the "Linux" people could agree on is an interesting idea, and I would be glad to do that. However, that
would be in parallel with using the name "GNU/Linux" to inform people about the origin and nature of the system. [Emphasis added]
Sorry bucko, but no sticker for me until you drop the silly name.
If they wanted it pronounced that way, they should have spelled it differently, and come up with an acronym to suit.
...) Besides, it's "reeball" (or "reeboll") according to English pronunciation rules, such as they are.
The history of programming languages has too many *BOL languages pronounced -ball for anyone to complain about pronouncing REBOL 'reeball'. (E.g. COBOL, SNOBOL, SPITBOL,
Looks more like a cathedral model than the bazaar, just serving as a middleman for connecting clients and contract programmers.
Which has its place, I suppose, but the Free Software Bazaar seems a lot more, well, free. (As in liberty).
I guess anything that produces more open source software is a plus, though.
Two books, printed back-to-back so that either could be considered the front. It was reprinted some years later in slightly smaller format.
Yes, and he had a system (Xanadu) based on the hypertext concept (which, AFAIK, is still a struggling project - they want to incorporate the idea of tiny royalties being paid the author for every click on a link leading to something the author wrote). This before the WWW or Hypercard.
To give an idea of the timeframe, the idea of "computer lib" was publicly accessible dumb terminals linked to minicomputers...
Yeah, but ask yourself who's doing the marketing in this case - Lucasfilm or PepsiCo? Hint, I'll bet PepsiCo is paying Lucas for the rights to crank out a set of SW:TPM "collector cans", and not Lucasfilm paying Pepsico to advertise SW:TPM on their cans.
Last I heard, Lucasfilm had hardly spent any money advertising the film - they don't need to. Ditto with all the product tie-ins. Who do you suppose was beating down whose doors for the rights to manufacture SW toys and action figures? Lucas probably had to beat them off with a stick.
It's also about the most effective thing Solo could have said at that point - effective in getting Leia to focus her attention on her own problems. Not "I love you too", not "Don't worry about me". Just a smartass response like "I know" to snap her out of a potential melancholy mindset into an action mindset.
Which makes that line particularly effective.
Linux's strengths lie in its technology, not its marketing.
Agreed.
This could be quite beneficial really: the Linux people get a chance to see how Linux really compares to NT on high-end hardware
Disagreed.
Oh, not that it wouldn't be nice to do some comparisons and tweaking on high-hardware, sure it would. But not in a circus like this. To get meaningful data this needs to be done in a lab setting where everything can be instrumented, code can be tweaked and re-tweaked, and so on, not in a media circus (Ziff-Davis's labs!?) where there's time pressure ("you've got two days, then we need to clear this lab out for a comparison of left-handed USB DVD players we're doing for PC Week"). And of course Microsoft will spin the results any way it wants to anyway. ("It took a team of the original developers of Linux to tweak it to match NT out-of-the-box").
Nope, let's pick our own fights, on our terms.
Pretty ironic, coming from an Anonymous Coward.
Heh.
Let's think outside the box a little and quit letting Microsoft set all the rules of the game.
Precisely. That's how we've got where we are. There is no advantage in playing Microsoft's game. Even if Linux/Apache/Samba wins the benchmark (certainly not guaranteed, given known issues), MS will spin it that the only way you'd get that performance yourself (if you went Linux) would be if you hired Torvalds, Cox, etc to tune your systems for you. If we lose, even if the margin is tiny (compared to the original Mindshaft tests), MS will trumpet that as 'proof' of NT's superiority and continue to quote the first set of numbers. (We haven't heard the results of the second benchmark, have we?)
If we simply don't show up, Microsoft can say what they like but folks out there will remember how they skewed the first benchmark, and knowing how trustworthy Microsoft is (ahem!), will as like as not say "hey, I don't blame them, why get screwed over a third time".
Microsoft is running scared on this, they don't know how fight something they can't buy out or bury. Let's just keep them off balance, and ignore this particular challenge.
Given Linux's ability to run on many different platforms, it might be interesting to spec out what configuration would deliver benchmark numbers an order of magnitude higher than anything NT is claiming. I doubt NT would even run on that hardware, and the hardware might cost more than the quad Xeon of this test. But so what? If Microsoft wants to get into a price/performance match with free software... Well, I don't think they'd really want to go there.
Heck, not just scared, terrified.
The whole tone of that page is of someone desperately trying to counteract FUD. When was the last time Microsoft was the one fighting FUD? (Of course, they were doing it by spreading some FUD of their own -- but the very existence of this page shows how MS is sweating bullets over Linux.)
Sure, in some carefully selected set of benchmarks NT might beat some carefully chosen aspects of Linux. You can prove anything if you design your benchmarks carefully (witness the first Mindcraft test). So what - Linux (and other Unixen) give you enough flexibility over hardware configurations that if the software isn't fast enough, you can fix it in hardware. Last time I looked, NT just wouldn't run on an array of SPARCs or an IBM 390 (even if the Linux port to the 390 isn't done yet (I don't know) I know there's a Unix that runs on it.)
What's really funny about this, because it's so frustrating for Microsoft, is that there isn't any one person or company they can target. They can't buy Linux out, they can't "cut off [Linux's] air supply" (on the contrary, that's what Linux is doing to NT in the small server arena already).
The best way for "the Linux community" to respond to this challenge is to simply ignore it. Don't fight on MS's turf. Just go away and keep quietly working to improve those areas at the high end that might need improvement, and keep improving things at the desktop end too, quietly stealing MS territory a piece at a time while MS execs give themselves ulcers fighting a two-front war where the enemy refuses to engage them directly. (Remember the analogies to guerrilla warfare a while back?)
Meanwhile, take this "challenge" as yet another sign of approaching victory: "...then they fight you, then you win".
Somebody's (Halcyon??) patent on the waterbed was invalidated by a description of same in an old Robert Heinlein novel. That's the classic example of a patent invalidated by an SF reference, there may well be others.
I don't know that anybody even tried to patent the geosynchronous communications satellite, since that would have been invalidated by Arthur C. Clarke's 1945 paper describing same. (And if Clarke had patented it, the patent would have expired by the time the technology was capable of launching same, although I think there is/was some proviso in UK patent law such that you can't patent things that are beyond current technical capabilities.)
(However, some sat com companies have tried to patent specific other orbits!)
Think about it.
With a bo or quarter staff, you can grab it anywhere along the length, giving you a number of usage options.
Try grabbing a dual light saber (light stave?) anywhere but the handle and you're in deep trouble.
That said, the different ends of the dual saber may be independantly operable, which gives you the effect of rapidly reversing a saber without wasting the time that actually doing that would take.