You assume that patents do anything to prevent MegaCorp from competing.
That is in fact exactly what they do.
You also assume that it is Joe Inventor filing most of the patents, and not said MegaCorp.
No, that would be you putting words in my mouth.
Since you started off with a patently (ho!) false assertion and a strawman, the rest of your argument - which also happens to be based on these two items - can safely be discarded.
Frivolous patents, patents which haven't been put to use (ie defensive patents), software patents, submarine patents and patent trollery benefit larger corporations, but these are abuses of the patent system. There's nothing wrong with the basic idea, and nothing that can't be fixed if the will to do so ever materialised.
Brilliant, so let's say the inventor starts his or her own company. MegaCorp sees the idea, likes it, and uses its massive financial and market power to create their own version which is better, faster and shinier. MegaCorp gets a 3% rise in stock prices, the inventor gets nothing.
The inventor has another brilliant idea, but this time he or she keeps it under their hat and the whole of society suffers as a result
Seriously, why does this need to be explained. But since it does I feel obliged to also mention that patents aren't copyrights and don't last nearly as long, because patents actually do describe things of real tangible value and often neccessity which usually only have one way of getting done, unlike copyrights which cover mostly discretionary subjects or subjects that can be trivially re-expressed without any loss of meaning and without violating copyright law - see educational textbooks, for example.
All the more reason to perfect this technique. If we can routinely take samples from species for future revival we can ensure their survival forever.
And please nobody say this will become an excuse for not caring about species going extinct, would you rather they go extinct anyway and vanish forever? Think about it, no one actually interested in conservation is going to argue against means to preserve species like this.
[Shrug] The Daily Flail and the Royal College of Arts aren't very high on my list of reliable sources ; though I'd expect one of the Royal Colleges to hold to reasonable standards of scholarship, but I wouldn't expect the Flail to honour that.
Ah I can see this is going to be a genuine and rational argument when your first salvo is attacking the messenger.
But more importantly, you've carefully (or accidentally ; I don't know how much you actually know about Stonehenge) shifted from referring to "the stones" being "bell stones", to citing information about the bluestones.
This doesn't even make any sense. The bluestones are bellstones or ringing rocks. There is a video where a guy hits them with a hammer and makes all sorts of musical notes. Initially they went back to the quarry where the stones originated and did the same thing, finding the same property. There are many other videos of people doing the same thing with other such rocks. Are you trying to say that this and all other such videos, some made by professional geologists, are fraudulent?
While the bluestones are a part of Stonehenge, they're far from the dominant structures. They may be the second or third oldest structures on the site though. Most of the bluestones (which originally (probably) formed an outer ring around the site, before the Sarsen trilithons were excavated, hauled to the site, hammered to shape, and erected) are under a metre high, and some of them are completely buried and were only discovered by excavation in the 1920s. Also, the bluestones have been moved at least twice - each time having their keels re-shaped (hammered and chipped) to fit into the sockets cut into the Chalk for them (the chips are still found in the sockets when excavated, often along with hammer stones). They also had some centuries residing in a stone store away from the main site, before being substantially re-shaped at this "dump" (or store-room ; look at a church which was being re-built after the War and see if you can tell the difference from a dump) and moved back to the Stonehenge site.
All that this this citationless grab bag of what may or may not have any connection to reality does is tell us that you're trying to insinuate the rocks have somehow picked up their acoustic properties in the process of being stored and re-shaped, yet again completely ignoring the links showing other such natural rock formations which produce musical notes regardless of their shape. This phenomenon, as the links indicate, is not really understood, mostly because it hasn't been studied much by scientists.
Whatever the original purpose of the bluestones was, they've had multiple uses, and multiple re-shapings over the millennium-plus of their major use. Regardless of the opinions of the RCA guy, re-shaping a brittle object is going to change it's acoustic properties nearly as much as burying it (partly) in a compliant medium is going to change it's properties. But I'm sure the music producer could put him straight on that.
Maybe you didn't read... anything I've posted or linked to. Or watched the video where the guy actually makes the sounds, including by hitting stones set in concrete and in soil. The fact that the rocks produce musical sounds aren't features of their shape. That the sounds may have changed a bit doesn't alter their basic ability to produce a note of some sort, which seems very likely the reason they were moved so far originally.
Now as to what cultural purpose the sounds may have served, that's a different question entirely. Maybe they just liked to party.
Anyway, you're not starting from a position of skepticism and potential interest, you're starting like most pseudoscientific types from a position of "lololol invisible pink unicorns". Needless to say this is about as far from a scientific mindset as any
Given that underage boys who were molested by women who subsequently got pregnant and forced the boys to pay child support upon reaching adulthood, pretty much the same as for adult fathers.
It's not the shape of the rocks that give them musical properties, it's the material of the rocks:
English Heritage allowed archaeologists from Bournemouth and Bristol universities to acoustically test the bluestones at Stonehenge, effectively playing them like a huge xylophone.
To the researchers’ surprise, several were found to make distinctive if muted sounds, with several of the rocks showing evidence of having already been struck.
The stones make different pitched noises in different places and different stones make different noises - ranging from a metallic to a wooden sound.
The investigators believe that this could have been the prime reason behind the otherwise inexplicable transport of these stones nearly 200 miles from Preseli to Salisbury Plain.
There were plentiful local rocks from which Stonehenge could have been built, yet the bluestones were considered special.
The principal investigators for the Landscape & Perception project are Jon Wozencroft and Paul Devereux. Wozencroft is a senior lecturer at the RCA and the founding director of the musical publishing company, Touch.
Jon Wozencroft told MailOnline it was 'amazing' to find that the stones used in the monument make the noises that the researchers hoped for.
'It was a really magical discovery and refreshing to come across a phenomenon you can't explain,' he said.
Yeah, I linked to a factual and reasonable lecture about Marx below and the lefties modded it down. Which is behaviour I see repeated very often when dealing with Marxists/Communists/Feminists. The video by Stefan Molyneux can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Hear hear. Take half an hour out of your life to watch this, it highlights the kind of person who started Marxism and by extension Communism, time well spent:
Same in Ireland, we had this endless summer, the only thing approaching cold was in the last couple of weeks. Which is a pity really as I love ice and snow. Yes, I looked at those pictures of a snow covered US with envy.
Stonehenge has been at least partialy solved - the rocks are bell stones, when struck with metal they each make unique sounds. This would explain why they were hauled such a distance, and we can pretty safely assume their purpose was musical, although whether that was for entertainment, religion, or what is still unknown.
On a more constructive note as we approach the end of the great slashdot rebellion of '14, what they need to do is focus on the comments and making them more comment-y. That's the only reason anyone comes here after all. Once they don't turn it into an unreadable shitemare like reddit in the process.
Yes, the greatest advances in science haven't come about through carefully planned milestones paving the way towards a predetermined goal, but rather through someone peering at a report in surprise and saying wtf?
JQuery is less of a hack than it is a framework, and like all frameworks it comes with an overhead if you want to do something unusual with it. For straight down the line web design it can be a timesaver, but more than once I've just typed up a half dozen lines of JS rather than spend five hours trying to track down the obscure bug causing problems with a jQuery function. I refuse to work on wordpress installations for the same reason.
You shouldn't reply with research papers until you comprehend what they're saying.
Abstract AIM:
This study was conducted to examine the effect of consuming a dilute alcohol solution (weak beer) on urine production in euhydrated and hypohydrated individuals. METHODS:
Twelve males completed an intermittent cycle protocol in hot (35.1 +/- 0.3 degrees C), humid (68 +/- 2%) conditions to dehydrate by 1.9 +/- 0.3% body mass in the evening. Twice they were then fed and rehydrated, while on two other occasions they were fed the same meal but remained hypohydrated. The following morning they were given 1 l of beer to drink. On two occasions the beer was alcohol-free, while on the other two occasions the same beer contained 4% ethanol. Participants remained in the laboratory for monitoring over the subsequent 4 h. Blood and urine samples were taken prior to dehydration, prior to drink administration and once every hour of the monitoring period. RESULTS:
No difference existed in the volume of urine produced between the alcohol (261 +/- 138 ml; mean +/- SD) and non-alcohol (174 +/- 61 ml) beer when hypohydrated (P = 0.057), but there was a difference when euhydrated (1279 +/- 256 vs 1121 +/- 148 ml alcohol and non-alcohol, respectively; P CONCLUSION:
These results suggest that the diuretic action of alcohol is blunted when the body is hypohydrated.
When the body doesn't have enough water to pee, alcohol doesn't make you pee more. When the body does have normal hydration, alcohol makes you pee more.
You're an idiot, and I'm through with this discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
You assume that patents do anything to prevent MegaCorp from competing.
That is in fact exactly what they do.
You also assume that it is Joe Inventor filing most of the patents, and not said MegaCorp.
No, that would be you putting words in my mouth.
Since you started off with a patently (ho!) false assertion and a strawman, the rest of your argument - which also happens to be based on these two items - can safely be discarded.
Frivolous patents, patents which haven't been put to use (ie defensive patents), software patents, submarine patents and patent trollery benefit larger corporations, but these are abuses of the patent system. There's nothing wrong with the basic idea, and nothing that can't be fixed if the will to do so ever materialised.
Brilliant, so let's say the inventor starts his or her own company. MegaCorp sees the idea, likes it, and uses its massive financial and market power to create their own version which is better, faster and shinier. MegaCorp gets a 3% rise in stock prices, the inventor gets nothing.
The inventor has another brilliant idea, but this time he or she keeps it under their hat and the whole of society suffers as a result
Seriously, why does this need to be explained. But since it does I feel obliged to also mention that patents aren't copyrights and don't last nearly as long, because patents actually do describe things of real tangible value and often neccessity which usually only have one way of getting done, unlike copyrights which cover mostly discretionary subjects or subjects that can be trivially re-expressed without any loss of meaning and without violating copyright law - see educational textbooks, for example.
All the more reason to perfect this technique. If we can routinely take samples from species for future revival we can ensure their survival forever.
And please nobody say this will become an excuse for not caring about species going extinct, would you rather they go extinct anyway and vanish forever? Think about it, no one actually interested in conservation is going to argue against means to preserve species like this.
[Shrug] The Daily Flail and the Royal College of Arts aren't very high on my list of reliable sources ; though I'd expect one of the Royal Colleges to hold to reasonable standards of scholarship, but I wouldn't expect the Flail to honour that.
Ah I can see this is going to be a genuine and rational argument when your first salvo is attacking the messenger.
But more importantly, you've carefully (or accidentally ; I don't know how much you actually know about Stonehenge) shifted from referring to "the stones" being "bell stones", to citing information about the bluestones.
This doesn't even make any sense. The bluestones are bellstones or ringing rocks. There is a video where a guy hits them with a hammer and makes all sorts of musical notes. Initially they went back to the quarry where the stones originated and did the same thing, finding the same property. There are many other videos of people doing the same thing with other such rocks. Are you trying to say that this and all other such videos, some made by professional geologists, are fraudulent?
While the bluestones are a part of Stonehenge, they're far from the dominant structures. They may be the second or third oldest structures on the site though. Most of the bluestones (which originally (probably) formed an outer ring around the site, before the Sarsen trilithons were excavated, hauled to the site, hammered to shape, and erected) are under a metre high, and some of them are completely buried and were only discovered by excavation in the 1920s. Also, the bluestones have been moved at least twice - each time having their keels re-shaped (hammered and chipped) to fit into the sockets cut into the Chalk for them (the chips are still found in the sockets when excavated, often along with hammer stones). They also had some centuries residing in a stone store away from the main site, before being substantially re-shaped at this "dump" (or store-room ; look at a church which was being re-built after the War and see if you can tell the difference from a dump) and moved back to the Stonehenge site.
All that this this citationless grab bag of what may or may not have any connection to reality does is tell us that you're trying to insinuate the rocks have somehow picked up their acoustic properties in the process of being stored and re-shaped, yet again completely ignoring the links showing other such natural rock formations which produce musical notes regardless of their shape. This phenomenon, as the links indicate, is not really understood, mostly because it hasn't been studied much by scientists.
Whatever the original purpose of the bluestones was, they've had multiple uses, and multiple re-shapings over the millennium-plus of their major use. Regardless of the opinions of the RCA guy, re-shaping a brittle object is going to change it's acoustic properties nearly as much as burying it (partly) in a compliant medium is going to change it's properties. But I'm sure the music producer could put him straight on that.
Maybe you didn't read... anything I've posted or linked to. Or watched the video where the guy actually makes the sounds, including by hitting stones set in concrete and in soil. The fact that the rocks produce musical sounds aren't features of their shape. That the sounds may have changed a bit doesn't alter their basic ability to produce a note of some sort, which seems very likely the reason they were moved so far originally.
Now as to what cultural purpose the sounds may have served, that's a different question entirely. Maybe they just liked to party.
Anyway, you're not starting from a position of skepticism and potential interest, you're starting like most pseudoscientific types from a position of "lololol invisible pink unicorns". Needless to say this is about as far from a scientific mindset as any
If you're going to build a space elevator an anchored/oil rig like floating platform isn't much of a stretch.
Given that underage boys who were molested by women who subsequently got pregnant and forced the boys to pay child support upon reaching adulthood, pretty much the same as for adult fathers.
It's not the shape of the rocks that give them musical properties, it's the material of the rocks:
English Heritage allowed archaeologists from Bournemouth and Bristol universities to acoustically test the bluestones at Stonehenge, effectively playing them like a huge xylophone.
To the researchers’ surprise, several were found to make distinctive if muted sounds, with several of the rocks showing evidence of having already been struck.
The stones make different pitched noises in different places and different stones make different noises - ranging from a metallic to a wooden sound.
The investigators believe that this could have been the prime reason behind the otherwise inexplicable transport of these stones nearly 200 miles from Preseli to Salisbury Plain.
There were plentiful local rocks from which Stonehenge could have been built, yet the bluestones were considered special.
The principal investigators for the Landscape & Perception project are Jon Wozencroft and Paul Devereux. Wozencroft is a senior lecturer at the RCA and the founding director of the musical publishing company, Touch.
Jon Wozencroft told MailOnline it was 'amazing' to find that the stones used in the monument make the noises that the researchers hoped for.
'It was a really magical discovery and refreshing to come across a phenomenon you can't explain,' he said.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
You are absolutely right to question but less snark would make you look less silly should you turn out to be wrong.
Yeah, I linked to a factual and reasonable lecture about Marx below and the lefties modded it down. Which is behaviour I see repeated very often when dealing with Marxists/Communists/Feminists. The video by Stefan Molyneux can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Can't keep the truth down, you misanthropes!
Hear hear. Take half an hour out of your life to watch this, it highlights the kind of person who started Marxism and by extension Communism, time well spent:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Why can't women be this stupid?
Same in Ireland, we had this endless summer, the only thing approaching cold was in the last couple of weeks. Which is a pity really as I love ice and snow. Yes, I looked at those pictures of a snow covered US with envy.
I suspect this will become an increasing problem as the need for in-depth specialisation increases with the advance of the sciences.
Huge flying spider eh? That's me on the next train to Nope.
Would somebody please kill all the "social scientists" before they do any more harm.
Stonehenge has been at least partialy solved - the rocks are bell stones, when struck with metal they each make unique sounds. This would explain why they were hauled such a distance, and we can pretty safely assume their purpose was musical, although whether that was for entertainment, religion, or what is still unknown.
This is trilateration, not triangulation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
I've yet to see anyone use "Google" as a search engine in the movies.
Spam and corned beef usually have lengthy sell by dates too.
Heh, worthy of Sun Tzu.
On a more constructive note as we approach the end of the great slashdot rebellion of '14, what they need to do is focus on the comments and making them more comment-y. That's the only reason anyone comes here after all. Once they don't turn it into an unreadable shitemare like reddit in the process.
Yes, the greatest advances in science haven't come about through carefully planned milestones paving the way towards a predetermined goal, but rather through someone peering at a report in surprise and saying wtf?
An even larger deciding factor is gender, would you believe it.
JQuery is less of a hack than it is a framework, and like all frameworks it comes with an overhead if you want to do something unusual with it. For straight down the line web design it can be a timesaver, but more than once I've just typed up a half dozen lines of JS rather than spend five hours trying to track down the obscure bug causing problems with a jQuery function. I refuse to work on wordpress installations for the same reason.
You shouldn't reply with research papers until you comprehend what they're saying.
Abstract
AIM:
This study was conducted to examine the effect of consuming a dilute alcohol solution (weak beer) on urine production in euhydrated and hypohydrated individuals.
METHODS:
Twelve males completed an intermittent cycle protocol in hot (35.1 +/- 0.3 degrees C), humid (68 +/- 2%) conditions to dehydrate by 1.9 +/- 0.3% body mass in the evening. Twice they were then fed and rehydrated, while on two other occasions they were fed the same meal but remained hypohydrated. The following morning they were given 1 l of beer to drink. On two occasions the beer was alcohol-free, while on the other two occasions the same beer contained 4% ethanol. Participants remained in the laboratory for monitoring over the subsequent 4 h. Blood and urine samples were taken prior to dehydration, prior to drink administration and once every hour of the monitoring period.
RESULTS:
No difference existed in the volume of urine produced between the alcohol (261 +/- 138 ml; mean +/- SD) and non-alcohol (174 +/- 61 ml) beer when hypohydrated (P = 0.057), but there was a difference when euhydrated (1279 +/- 256 vs 1121 +/- 148 ml alcohol and non-alcohol, respectively; P
CONCLUSION:
These results suggest that the diuretic action of alcohol is blunted when the body is hypohydrated.
When the body doesn't have enough water to pee, alcohol doesn't make you pee more. When the body does have normal hydration, alcohol makes you pee more.
You're an idiot, and I'm through with this discussion.