2. All ways of sending data that use the alphabet should also therefore be public domain. This includes books, etc.
Absolutely correct -- and I make (some) money as a writer.
What you're missing is that with books, etc, it's the content that's protectable, not the means of conveyance. You can't patent "a method and apparatus for conveying information via alphabetic writing in a book". At least, I bloody well hope not. (Actually if some sort of encoding technique like steganography was used, you might.) You can copyright particular arrangements of that alphabetic writing.
Sending data via TCP/IP should not be patentable, no matter what that data is. If said patent describes a hitherto uninvented way of converting voice to data, or interfacing data to a phone system, then fine.
Actually the video might have been helpful in determining the trajectory of the debris, facilitating its recovery. Or not -- the launch was already covered from a number of angles.
Why couldn't they be using some encoding scheme that gets multiple bits/pulse?
Amplitude modulation isn't going to work well in the described environment, and frequency-modulating a (single) laser diode is a good trick. It's an even better trick to FM demodulate that with a photodiode. Which leaves various pulse modulating techniques.
There are a lot of things you can do with a radio signal that are a lot tougher to do with light.
Hmm... you don't see how it can work, so it must not work.
Well, thank you for the implied compliment to my omniscience. Or perhaps that was just a massive fail of your reading comprehension ability. I never said that it didn't work.
Perhaps they simply know more than you do.
Gee, you think? If they actually got it to work, then in this one small area I'm sure that they do. Lots of people know more about certain specialized fields than I do -- your earlier comment above notwithstanding.
they are doing something relatively new, or the technology would have existed already
Ever meet a tautology you didn't like?
I'd thank you for your insightful contribution to the discussion, but I can't find one in your post.
I don't see how this can work at the speed they're claiming. 1+ Gbps means they're pulsing that light at sub-nanosecond intervals (or else doing something really amazing with frequency shifting, which I doubt). Since light travels less than a foot per nanosecond, if you're just bouncing it off the walls you're going to get echoes delayed by multiple pulse lengths and fractions of pulse lengths. Not a problem if the receiver is just seeing a single point, like in fiber, but how does that work in a room?
Seriously, who who wrote this? Thin air = less air for the props to bite, and less air to provide lift for the wings.
While you're right about this, of course, the problem is compounded with combustion engines because with altitude the thinner air means less oxygen to burn fuel with. Just when you need more power to turn the prop faster (or at higher pitch)*, you have less power because of relative oxygen starvation. Electrics avoid that problem, but yes ultimately you reach an altitude where you can't get any more lift at the airspeed you can reach with maximum power to the props.
(*And of course that's not straightforward either because it's easier to turn a prop in thinner air -- just not as effective. Flight controls include a mixture setting so that the engine doesn't run over-rich at altitude, and even some single-engine planes have constant-speed props whose pitch is variable.)
Heck, for thousands of years people have been killing each other with autonomous -- although not intelligent -- devices. The projectile from a trebuchet or ballista can't be recalled or turned off once it's on its way. And the destructive force of long range munitions has only gotten greater since.
To the extent that battlefield robots can do a better job of telling the combatants from the non-combatants than can lobbed rocks or bombs, then all the better.
C) I see a large amount of non-complicance with antibiotics....just because you feel better, don't stop taking the antibiotic!
How much of that is due to something like being prescribed a ten-day course of oral antibiotics for something that could be cleared up with a single injection instead? IMHO it's oral antibiotics that are overprescribed -- leading to poor compliance and an excess of unmetabolized antibiotic in the waste system. Given most people's aversion to shots, we'd probably see more rational use of antibiotics if oral administration were less of an option.
My question is, why do you think they care about people driving SUVs in the first place?
Personally I don't (well, some might), but the great-grandparent poster apparently felt that skeptics only denied AGW because they wanted to drive SUVs. Since there are plenty of AGW skeptics who don't even own (or care to own) SUVs, the argument is silly either way.
(Personally I'd rather drive a vehicle powered by nuclear steam turbine, but they're kinda pricey.;-) )
The pattern of AGW advocacy: hide the data, rig the models, mod the skeptics as "troll". What's next, burning the heretics at the stake? Oh wait, that will produce carbon dioxide...
Finally, global warming does stand up to skepticism. The data are no longer ambiguous -- global warming deniers are not practicing skepticism, they are simply asserting that their pre-determined philosophical standpoint is correct.
It always raises a huge red flag for me -- as it should for any honest debater -- when somebody miscategorizes those who are skeptical about the dogma promulgated by the priests of anthropogenic global warming (and the associated catechisms of carbon credits, cap'n'trade, etc) as "[cause unspecified] global warming 'deniers'". It's the kind of squirmy evasive argument that casts doubt on their whole position.
Global warming may very well be happening -- it has happened before, it will happen again. We're in the middle of an Interglacial, recovering from a time not that long ago (geologically) when ice covered much of North America to a depth of several thousand feet. Of course things are warming up. (Unless they're not -- so far in Colorado this has been one of the coldest Decembers on record, but that's merely an anecdote.)
The role of carbon dioxide in that warming is less clear, and the role of human-created carbon dioxide even less clear than that. That "anthropogenic global warming" (lovely catch-phrase, that, worthy of a Goebbels) is so near and dear to the hearts of those who, in the past, have advocated de-industrialization on other grounds, or who stand to make fortunes from "cap'n'trade", or who already make plenty of money jetting back and forth in their private, carbon-spewing jets to preach^W give talks to the masses (cough - Al Gore - cough), is no surprise, but the evidence for and theory behind AGW is far less established (even before they erased the data) than that for generic global warming.
The fact is that carbon dioxide is rather weak as greenhouse gases go. Methane and more significantly, water vapor are far more effective greenhouse gases than CO2. (There's a reason it can get freezing cold in the desert at night: no water vapor in the air to keep the heat in.) Just because -- according to some data sets -- atmospheric CO2 appears to correlate with temperature does not imply that particular causation. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that CO2 levels trail temperatures, that warming increases CO2 levels rather than the other way around. (Explained by thawing permafrost and the decreased solubility of gases in warmer water. The AGW priesthood acknowledge these effects but then scream "feedback cycle!" without quite explaining what that does for their models of climate history.)
Further and more, human contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are rather a small fraction of said levels. Yes, we spew the stuff out by the ton load (and not just industrial societies -- even "primitive" societies use fire for cooking and heating and clearing land for agriculture), but nature spews the stuff out even faster. As it also does with methane and water vapor.
There's a question you have to ask yourself, actually several questions that lead into each other. Let's first of all just accept as given that global warming is happening, whatever the cause. First, is that a bad thing? Some people would argue that it isn't, but let's assume that it is, that global warming will have horrific results. So the question then is: what if the AGW priesthood is wrong? What if we spend billions or trillions of dollars on the infrastructure changes to cap carbon emissions (making a few new billionaires on the trading side, and bankrupting many, many more on the economic impact of those changes (and you though the current recession was bad) -- but if global warming is that bad, maybe it's worth it)). But what if they're wrong, and after spending all that money and making those massive changes, and reducing human CO2 emissions to nothing...the Earth still keeps warming up? We will no longer have the economic wherewithal to implement another solution (and there are engine
Anthropogenic Global warming believers don't want anyone to drive SUVs without feeling bad about it, so they cherrypick data that supports their already determined philosophical standpoint.
There, fixed that for you in accord with what actually happened. It was the the High Priests of AGW who conveniently lost the data they were asked to release -- i.e., cherrypicked it.
They never said that. The expression (and this was the 1950s, not 60s) was "too cheap to meter" which didn't mean free, it meant that they'd just charge a flat rate that would be low enough not to be worth metering actual use. Of course that was hyperbole at the time, and most people knew it -- meters are cheap, and the metering infrastructure was already in place.
People have been repairing dents and tears in aircraft with duct tape for as long as the stuff has been around. The good stuff is also known as "200 mile per hour tape", it will stand up to an airspeed that fast.
The plane above is probably fine with 100 mph tape.
Windows 95, 98 and ME were, respectively, 4.0 (not to be confused with NT 4.0), 4.1 and 4.9.
Windows 2000, XP, and Server 2003 were based on NT and numbered NT 5.0, 5.1 and 5.2.
Windows Vista was NT 6.0. Windows 7, though, is apparently NT 6.1, not 7.0 as the name suggests.
In other words, the Windows version names are decided by Microsoft's marketing department and have almost nothing to do with any real version numbering. I'm just waiting for a couple of versions down the road where they try naming the release after Windows 9 as either "X Windows" or "Windows/X".
And an appropriate execution method might be death by ten thousand paper cuts. Or just leave him naked in mosquito country at the start of the season. I mean, it's not like any one cut or bite is that serious....
An automatically shifting car? Terrifying. What's next? Automatic traction control or *gasp* all-wheel drive? The horror... This automation thing has to stop.
Hear, hear! And while we're at it, let's bring back manual spark-advance control, choke, and hand-cranked starters.
A universe which permits time travel which can change the past is inherently unstable. Sooner or later (on some meta time axis) that universe's timeline will be changed to one where such time travel never occurs, and will then stay that way. It's the most stable state.
Slashdot Mirror
2. All ways of sending data that use the alphabet should also therefore be public domain. This includes books, etc.
Absolutely correct -- and I make (some) money as a writer.
What you're missing is that with books, etc, it's the content that's protectable, not the means of conveyance. You can't patent "a method and apparatus for conveying information via alphabetic writing in a book". At least, I bloody well hope not. (Actually if some sort of encoding technique like steganography was used, you might.) You can copyright particular arrangements of that alphabetic writing.
Sending data via TCP/IP should not be patentable, no matter what that data is. If said patent describes a hitherto uninvented way of converting voice to data, or interfacing data to a phone system, then fine.
Actually the video might have been helpful in determining the trajectory of the debris, facilitating its recovery. Or not -- the launch was already covered from a number of angles.
Why couldn't they be using some encoding scheme that gets multiple bits/pulse?
Amplitude modulation isn't going to work well in the described environment, and frequency-modulating a (single) laser diode is a good trick. It's an even better trick to FM demodulate that with a photodiode. Which leaves various pulse modulating techniques.
There are a lot of things you can do with a radio signal that are a lot tougher to do with light.
Hmm... you don't see how it can work, so it must not work.
Well, thank you for the implied compliment to my omniscience. Or perhaps that was just a massive fail of your reading comprehension ability. I never said that it didn't work.
Perhaps they simply know more than you do.
Gee, you think? If they actually got it to work, then in this one small area I'm sure that they do. Lots of people know more about certain specialized fields than I do -- your earlier comment above notwithstanding.
they are doing something relatively new, or the technology would have existed already
Ever meet a tautology you didn't like?
I'd thank you for your insightful contribution to the discussion, but I can't find one in your post.
I don't see how this can work at the speed they're claiming. 1+ Gbps means they're pulsing that light at sub-nanosecond intervals (or else doing something really amazing with frequency shifting, which I doubt). Since light travels less than a foot per nanosecond, if you're just bouncing it off the walls you're going to get echoes delayed by multiple pulse lengths and fractions of pulse lengths. Not a problem if the receiver is just seeing a single point, like in fiber, but how does that work in a room?
Seriously, who who wrote this? Thin air = less air for the props to bite, and less air to provide lift for the wings.
While you're right about this, of course, the problem is compounded with combustion engines because with altitude the thinner air means less oxygen to burn fuel with. Just when you need more power to turn the prop faster (or at higher pitch)*, you have less power because of relative oxygen starvation. Electrics avoid that problem, but yes ultimately you reach an altitude where you can't get any more lift at the airspeed you can reach with maximum power to the props.
(*And of course that's not straightforward either because it's easier to turn a prop in thinner air -- just not as effective. Flight controls include a mixture setting so that the engine doesn't run over-rich at altitude, and even some single-engine planes have constant-speed props whose pitch is variable.)
Heck, for thousands of years people have been killing each other with autonomous -- although not intelligent -- devices. The projectile from a trebuchet or ballista can't be recalled or turned off once it's on its way. And the destructive force of long range munitions has only gotten greater since.
To the extent that battlefield robots can do a better job of telling the combatants from the non-combatants than can lobbed rocks or bombs, then all the better.
Just so long as somebody has an "off" switch.
C) I see a large amount of non-complicance with antibiotics....just because you feel better, don't stop taking the antibiotic!
How much of that is due to something like being prescribed a ten-day course of oral antibiotics for something that could be cleared up with a single injection instead? IMHO it's oral antibiotics that are overprescribed -- leading to poor compliance and an excess of unmetabolized antibiotic in the waste system. Given most people's aversion to shots, we'd probably see more rational use of antibiotics if oral administration were less of an option.
My question is, why do you think they care about people driving SUVs in the first place?
Personally I don't (well, some might), but the great-grandparent poster apparently felt that skeptics only denied AGW because they wanted to drive SUVs. Since there are plenty of AGW skeptics who don't even own (or care to own) SUVs, the argument is silly either way.
(Personally I'd rather drive a vehicle powered by nuclear steam turbine, but they're kinda pricey. ;-) )
The pattern of AGW advocacy: hide the data, rig the models, mod the skeptics as "troll". What's next, burning the heretics at the stake? Oh wait, that will produce carbon dioxide...
Finally, global warming does stand up to skepticism. The data are no longer ambiguous -- global warming deniers are not practicing skepticism, they are simply asserting that their pre-determined philosophical standpoint is correct.
It always raises a huge red flag for me -- as it should for any honest debater -- when somebody miscategorizes those who are skeptical about the dogma promulgated by the priests of anthropogenic global warming (and the associated catechisms of carbon credits, cap'n'trade, etc) as "[cause unspecified] global warming 'deniers'". It's the kind of squirmy evasive argument that casts doubt on their whole position.
Global warming may very well be happening -- it has happened before, it will happen again. We're in the middle of an Interglacial, recovering from a time not that long ago (geologically) when ice covered much of North America to a depth of several thousand feet. Of course things are warming up. (Unless they're not -- so far in Colorado this has been one of the coldest Decembers on record, but that's merely an anecdote.)
The role of carbon dioxide in that warming is less clear, and the role of human-created carbon dioxide even less clear than that. That "anthropogenic global warming" (lovely catch-phrase, that, worthy of a Goebbels) is so near and dear to the hearts of those who, in the past, have advocated de-industrialization on other grounds, or who stand to make fortunes from "cap'n'trade", or who already make plenty of money jetting back and forth in their private, carbon-spewing jets to preach^W give talks to the masses (cough - Al Gore - cough), is no surprise, but the evidence for and theory behind AGW is far less established (even before they erased the data) than that for generic global warming.
The fact is that carbon dioxide is rather weak as greenhouse gases go. Methane and more significantly, water vapor are far more effective greenhouse gases than CO2. (There's a reason it can get freezing cold in the desert at night: no water vapor in the air to keep the heat in.) Just because -- according to some data sets -- atmospheric CO2 appears to correlate with temperature does not imply that particular causation. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that CO2 levels trail temperatures, that warming increases CO2 levels rather than the other way around. (Explained by thawing permafrost and the decreased solubility of gases in warmer water. The AGW priesthood acknowledge these effects but then scream "feedback cycle!" without quite explaining what that does for their models of climate history.)
Further and more, human contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are rather a small fraction of said levels. Yes, we spew the stuff out by the ton load (and not just industrial societies -- even "primitive" societies use fire for cooking and heating and clearing land for agriculture), but nature spews the stuff out even faster. As it also does with methane and water vapor.
There's a question you have to ask yourself, actually several questions that lead into each other. Let's first of all just accept as given that global warming is happening, whatever the cause. First, is that a bad thing? Some people would argue that it isn't, but let's assume that it is, that global warming will have horrific results. So the question then is: what if the AGW priesthood is wrong? What if we spend billions or trillions of dollars on the infrastructure changes to cap carbon emissions (making a few new billionaires on the trading side, and bankrupting many, many more on the economic impact of those changes (and you though the current recession was bad) -- but if global warming is that bad, maybe it's worth it)). But what if they're wrong, and after spending all that money and making those massive changes, and reducing human CO2 emissions to nothing...the Earth still keeps warming up? We will no longer have the economic wherewithal to implement another solution (and there are engine
Anthropogenic Global warming believers don't want anyone to drive SUVs without feeling bad about it, so they cherrypick data that supports their already determined philosophical standpoint.
There, fixed that for you in accord with what actually happened. It was the the High Priests of AGW who conveniently lost the data they were asked to release -- i.e., cherrypicked it.
They never said that. The expression (and this was the 1950s, not 60s) was "too cheap to meter" which didn't mean free, it meant that they'd just charge a flat rate that would be low enough not to be worth metering actual use. Of course that was hyperbole at the time, and most people knew it -- meters are cheap, and the metering infrastructure was already in place.
People have been repairing dents and tears in aircraft with duct tape for as long as the stuff has been around. The good stuff is also known as "200 mile per hour tape", it will stand up to an airspeed that fast.
The plane above is probably fine with 100 mph tape.
My old 4x4 keypad phone doesn't have a C key.
Probably because it's only a 3x4 keypad phone. You want a keypad like this, the C is on the same row as the 7, 8 and 9.
You may also want to review your counting skills. ;-)
You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!
On the other hand if I'm doing a 650-mile road trip, I'll save nearly an hour and a half driving 75 vs 65. Yeah, I did the math.
Windows 95, 98 and ME were, respectively, 4.0 (not to be confused with NT 4.0), 4.1 and 4.9.
Windows 2000, XP, and Server 2003 were based on NT and numbered NT 5.0, 5.1 and 5.2.
Windows Vista was NT 6.0. Windows 7, though, is apparently NT 6.1, not 7.0 as the name suggests.
In other words, the Windows version names are decided by Microsoft's marketing department and have almost nothing to do with any real version numbering. I'm just waiting for a couple of versions down the road where they try naming the release after Windows 9 as either "X Windows" or "Windows/X".
Communism isnt social programs like Social Security. Communism is state owned property and means of production.
What, you mean like banks and automobile manufacturers?
And an appropriate execution method might be death by ten thousand paper cuts. Or just leave him naked in mosquito country at the start of the season. I mean, it's not like any one cut or bite is that serious....
Wouldn't it make a lot more sense and be a lot easier to hold the cable up with a balloon? (Or rather, hold the balloon down with the cable.)
who walked uphill both ways in the snow to and from school!
And you try telling that to kids these days, and they won't believe you. Now get off my lawn! ;-)
An automatically shifting car? Terrifying. What's next? Automatic traction control or *gasp* all-wheel drive? The horror... This automation thing has to stop.
Hear, hear! And while we're at it, let's bring back manual spark-advance control, choke, and hand-cranked starters.
A universe which permits time travel which can change the past is inherently unstable. Sooner or later (on some meta time axis) that universe's timeline will be changed to one where such time travel never occurs, and will then stay that way. It's the most stable state.
Hey, if Microsoft wants to take on IBM with its own tactics and give away a PC with every copy of Windows, that's fine with me.
Surely my high slashdot karma means I'm one of the most influential people on the internet... right?
Well, it would, but your user number has too many digits.