Everything is obvious in hindsight. All invention procedes from the known to the unknown. An invention is nearly always the combination of two or more known things to produce something which was unknown and which has unexpected benefits.
What else could it be? The combination of two or more unknown things to produce a known thing?
Most of the abuses of the patent system would disapear if only individuals could own patents.
No, there is a fundamental difference between cooperative and adversarial systems.
I wasn't aware of cooperative systems until I got into martial arts under a cooperative system - the difference is dramatic. It has nothing to do with "being nice". The rate at which you learn in a cooperative system is so great that sometimes the students literally get dizzy with how much information they get in one session. It has to do with people all heading in the same direction seeking a common goal instead of fighting with other people to keep each other from succeeding.
Adversarial systems are simply stupid ways of doing things- we do them because they are familiar - not because they are the right way to do things.
A cooperative system is like a group of people working together to lift a heavy weight with a rope - an adversarial system is like everyone pulling the rope in different directions - guess which system works better to lift the weight.
The problem with skepticism is that it elevates the turd to a respected rank in science. The correct process is for everyone to work together to arrive at the best answers possible given the amount of data available.
Instead of an adversarial system - a cooperative system is the way to do things - with errors gently pointed out instead of with scorn and ridicule as is done today.
Skepticism attempts to eliminate "false positives" from science in the process it throws in a lot of "false negatives" - it rejects things which are true - but for which some other possible explanation exists.
The question is "Are we trying to advance human knowledge, or are we after some other goal; Ego, Money, Prizes, Fame, etc?" If the answer is "Advance human knowledge" then a cooperative system is the way to do things, If the answer is "something else" then I agree that flinging turds around is the way to achieve that goal.
"But EVERYTHING in science is ALWAYS subject to challenge."
Everything EXCEPT skepticism itself that is. That is not subject to challenge now is it?
One mustn't question the process itself - since we accept as a matter of faith - of religious dogma - that skepticism is the right way to do things. Anyone who questions the process of skepticism is a BLASPHEMER in the church of science.
Exactly what is the scientific confidence level that skepticism is the correct way to do things? How did scientists reach that confidence level, through scientific investigation, or from a Stupid Wild Ass Guess? Why is that SWAG valid, but others aren't? What experiments have been run on the process itself, what are the error bars on the data? Where is the scientific proof that skepticism works correctly and is the proper way to do scientific inquiry?
To the idiot who called my post a troll: This is not a troll - it is not my purpose to start some sort of off topic discussion so that I can laugh at people - it is an absolutely truthful and insightful post.
Kerry's Communist medal was on both television and in the newspapers back in 1983 - I remember it because I am a Vietnam Vet - and I remember what Kerry did. I am not the only person who remembers it - it was in the NY Times and the Houston Chronicle.
There is the mistaken idea that because liberals and conservatives have different views on things that one side is correct and the other side is wrong. Both conservatives and liberals have this view; that the other side if filled with gullible idiots who will destroy the country if given the chance. Because slashdot is predominately a site for young people, the liberal viewpoint is the main one expressed here.
If I hold up a coin between us and say "This coin is 'heads'" and you look at it and say "No, you're wrong the coin is tails" NEITHER one of us has incorrectly described what he sees. Arguments between the conservative viewpoint and the liberal viewpoint are just as pointless as arguing over whether the coin is heads or tails - both sides are right and wrong equally - neither is "seeing things" or delusional. Both sides have massive blind spots in back of them - neither sees that the people at the head of "their" party are up to no good - although that is obvious to those with the opposite viewpoint.
Are the liberals correct that the people at the head of the Republican party are Rich - would be kings - who wish to turn the U.S. into a second coming of Rome? Yes - that is not a delusional viewpoint.
Are the conservatives correct that the people at the head of the Democratic party are Rich malignant narcissists who will - given the chance - destroy everything the founding fathers worked to create by turning the United States into a second coming of the Soviet Union? Yes - that is not a delusional viewpoint.
Since most people here at Slashdot have the liberal perspective it is not necessary to show you that Liberals have correctly seen what the leaders of the Republican Party are about.
What is necessary is to show you that the conservative view of the Democratic leadership is just as accurate, and that conservatives are no more delusional than you are.
Did you know that John Kerry is a Communist Traitor? That is not conservative rhetoric or anybody's opinion - it is the official position of the Communist Government of Vietnam who in 1983 while Kerry was Lt. Governor of Massachusetts awarded him as a "Hero of Communist Victory" for his actions on their behalf during the Vietnam War. You won't be able to find confirmation of that fact on the Internet - except at some conservative sites which you naturally won't believe - but if you scan the newspaper archives from 1983 you will find that the story is absolutely true.
The conservatives are no more deluded than you are: they simply see things which are actually there that you are missing.
The problem is not Liberal vs Conservative the problem is 'the Republicans and the Democrats' VS all the rest of us. The antidote for the Imperialistic Rich is not the Narcissistic Rich.
I see a very common mistake occurring in these posts: the mistaken idea that because liberals and conservatives have different views on things that one side is correct and the other side is wrong. Both conservatives and liberals have this view; that the other side if filled with gullible idiots who will destroy the country if given the chance. Because slashdot is predominately a site for young people, the liberal viewpoint is the main one expressed here.
If I hold up a coin between us and say "This coin is 'heads'" and you look at it and say "No, you're wrong the coin is tails" NEITHER one of us has incorrectly described what he sees. Arguments between the conservative viewpoint and the liberal viewpoint are just as pointless as arguing over whether the coin is heads or tails - both sides are right and wrong equally - neither is "seeing things" or delusional. Both sides have massive blind spots in back of them - neither sees that the people at the head of "their" party are up to no good - although that is obvious to those with the opposite viewpoint.
Are the liberals correct that the people at the head of the Republican party are Rich - would be kings - who wish to turn the U.S. into a second coming of Rome? Yes - that is not a delusional viewpoint.
Are the conservatives correct that the people at the head of the Democratic party are Rich malignant narcissists who will - given the chance - destroy everything the founding fathers worked to create by turning the United States into a second coming of the Soviet Union? Yes - that is not a delusional viewpoint.
Since most people here at Slashdot have the liberal perspective it is not necessary to show you that Liberals have correctly seen what the leaders of the Republican Party are about.
What is necessary is to show you that the conservative view of the Democratic leadership is just as accurate, and that conservatives are no more delusional than you are.
Did you know that John Kerry is a Communist Traitor? That is not conservative rhetoric or anybody's opinion - it is the official position of the Communist Government of Vietnam who in 1983 while Kerry was Lt. Governor of Massachusetts awarded him as a "Hero of Communist Victory" for his actions on their behalf during the Vietnam War. You won't be able to find confirmation of that fact on the Internet - except at some conservative sites which you naturally won't believe - but if you scan the newspaper archives from 1983 you will find that the story is absolutely true.
The conservatives are no more deluded than you are: they simply see things which are actually there that you are missing.
The problem is not Liberal vs Conservative the problem is 'the Republicans and the Democrats' VS all the rest of us. The antidote for the Imperialistic Rich is not the Narcissistic Rich.
Sine credit card debt in the U.S. can no longer be bankrupted the banks have gotten incredibly greedy. The latest scam is targeting people who pay off their credit card every month: the credit card company simply "forgets" to send you a bill one month. If you don't notice, your next bill has late fees - interest, and is twice the size of what you expect. This in the hopes that you won't be able to pay it off.
Please don't tell me that I could look up the account information on line; I have exactly zero interest in becoming a creditor's unpaid employee - doing all of their key punch work for them so that they can save money on printed bills and fire employees.
Chase pulled the "we forgot to send you a bill" scam on me last month. I called them up fought through the automated phone system and got to a real person. I got my account balance - gave them the check number for the payment in full and explained that along with the check they would also be receiving their credit card in several pieces. I told them to close the account as I would not do business with a company that behaved that way. If enough people do that the credit card companies will be forced to cease the practice.
I have talked to a number of people who pay off their cards every month, and they all have had similar experiences.
Simple does not mean easy. Ballet consists of very simple moves - but they are right at the limit of human ability to perform. Google can come up with 100,000 hits on a search string from billions of web pages in a fraction of a second. If you attempt to do this you will discover how difficult this is to do.
Simple is very difficult to do well. People who turn out complicated programs do so because they can't produce simple programs.
By the way, your professors are professors in large part because they can't cut it in the non academic world; Listen to their opinions of things with that knowledge in mind.
1.Take a pile of dog crap. 2.Gold plate it. 3. Add more dog crap. 4. Gold plate that. 5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you have a huge imposing structure.
This results in glittering mass which impresses the avearage person, but underneath it all - it just stinks.
They are obviously following this formula in their challenge to Google.
There was no TV patent dispute: Farnsworth invented it, RCA attempted to steal it and failed. The history of RCA under Sarnof is truly disgusting. The company fortune was built on patents stolen from Major Armstrong who invented the super regenerative, super heterodyne, and FM radios as well as the phase lock loop. Armstrong committed suicide after he lost - in one of the worst court decisions in recorded history.- the FM case to RCA
Most of the abuses of the patent system would simply disappear if only individuals could own patents - instead of companies.
During World War II the Germans made Gasoline from coal on a massive scale. That process is well known. Making gasoline from oil is the preferred process because of several reasons: it costs less, it is cleaner - no strip mining, the oil can be pumped out of the ground as a liquid instead.
There are two well known problems with our current technological society: the first is supplying the energy source for it, the second is what do you do with the waste products? Basically no effort has been put into the second problem. That does not mean that the problem can't be solved.
Suppose you genetically engineered a form of chlorophyl which produced hydrocarbons instead of carbohydrates. This would convert water and CO2 into gasoline - burning the fuel would produce water and CO2 again. An area 100Km by 100Km at 20% efficiency would produce enough gasoline to fuel all of the vehicles in the US from solar power (sun light drives the CO2 and water conversion into gasoline) The process would be clean and environmentally friendly.
The problems of technology can be solved by other technology. This may not make the gloom and doomers of the world happy - but it is the way things work. Nothing is perfect, but adequate answers can be found.
Splatters are spread by the foot steps of anyone who walks through the splatter - which spreads the antibiotic through most of the hospital floor space.
The advantage to the bacteria on the floor of not being killed by the antibiotics to which they are continually exposed far out weighs any advantage which natural bacteria would have in that environment.
If you would talk to hospital personnel - as I have - most of them know of a co-worker who has developed a bad antibiotic resistant infection after taking a fall on a hospital floor.
Let me propose a test to see which theory is correct: lets grind your face into a hospital floor until it is abraded and see if you develop an antibiotic resistant infection, while I take a shot of antibiotics to see if I get one.Or if you don't like that test we could inject you with the wash water from the floor while I get the antibiotic shot.
Of course when I put it that way - it is pretty obvious which one of our theories is full of crap isn't it?
The current theories on the cause of antibiotic resistant bacteria place the blame on antibiotics and their overuse or under use. These theories utterly fail to explain one simple fact: most people don't come into the hospital with cases of drug resistant bacteria, they acquire those infections while in the hospitals. Some where in the hospital there are conditions which are breeding drug resistant bacteria.
I believe that the real cause of antibiotic resistant bacteria is far more prosaic than anyone has suspected. Before Doctors and Nurses give people injections they are quite properly taught to point the needle up, tap the syringe to force air bubbles to the top of the syringe, then squirt enough of the fluid out of the syringe to insure that the air is cleared from the device and the needle. This is utterly necessary to prevent the injection of air into the patient's blood system where it could cause a fatal embolism.
The antibiotic squirted out of the needle simply falls to the floor and creates a splatter. This splatter kills bacteria on the floor where it is intense enough to do so, but around the edges of the splatter surviving bacteria can breed resistant strains to every type of injectable antibiotic being used in the hospital.
When antibiotic splatter is combined with the modern janitorial practice of a one step floor cleaner, the floor becomes a giant Petri dish for the breeding of drug resistant bacteria. One step floor 'cleaners' can't possibly clean floors; they make the floor look clean and shiny, but since many of them are made of glycerin compounds they simply serve as a growth medium for the Petri dish.
So how do you solve the problem of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria? You do two things: first, keep splatters of antibiotics off of the floor by performing the air clearing of the syringes while the needle is still in the bottle of antibiotics - immediately after filling the syringe- and by using a spillage overflow catcher pan under the syringe while it is being filled. Second, sterilize the hospital floors with bleach and intense ultra violet light sources mounted on the undersides of push broom like devices.
These two simple things will prevent the Petri dish conditions on floors which breed drug resistant bacteria. Both of these steps have very low costs while having very large benefits. They are similar in importance to the now standard practice of surgeons washing their hands before surgery, which was adapted in the 19th century, and which has saved countless lives since.
The economic justification for all of these things is obvious, reducing drug resistant bacteria cases will save insurance companies far more money than the slightly greater costs of better floor cleaning and splatter prevention protocols would cost them.
An additional note: if my theory is correct it would also explain what is causing the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria. After the janitorial staff at a hospital finishes washing the floors, the waste water is simply poured down the drain. This puts the antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria that have been picked up by the cleaning process into the sewer systems of the municipality - where they are now free to spread in a food rich environment. Such floor water needs to be treated as hazardous waste in need of biological neutralization, not as something just to be dumped in a cavalier fashion.
Business men claim that there is a lack of engineering talent grown here in the U.S. What they really mean is that there is a lack of U.S. engineers who are willing to work 60 hours a week for coolie wages - which is why they hire foreign engineers, programmers etc.
Technical people get very little respect in the U.S. Last week's Battlestar Galactica - where an engineering officer was promoted to command showed the way that the "people people" view technical people: "they only know how to deal with machines", "its all about the people - don't forget that" Of course "people people" are not technical people for the very simple reason that they can't be. The technical people who go into management tend to be technical incompetents who couldn't cut it where they were.
"People people" tend simply to be emotional bullies - stand up to them and they wilt. "People people" tend to make bad decisions that screw things up - hurting a lot of people in the process. Mostly their emotional strength is used for such ridiculous things as breaking off relationships - instead of making things work, they insure things are broken. While technical people get little respect from managers most managers don't know that the technical people are laughing at them behind their backs.
And yes, there is such a thing as a good manager - just like there is such a thing as an incompetent engineer.
Farnsworth was restricted by the company he was working for from publishing in a journal. Even if he had, the record of exactly how to build his device would not have been there.
The scientific world is hardly perfect either - the disgraceful treatment of Fleischmann and Pons by the scientific community is an example of that. By the way, Fleischmann and Pons have stated that a large part of the problem in duplicating their work is that Palladium appears to have about 16 different atomic arrangements, and that only one of those arrangements supports cold fusion. There have been a couple of Slashdot articles about the DOE admitting last year that Cold Fusion does appear to be real.
While I don't like the idea of patents in software - there is one huge advantage of patents: when the patent expires, the patented technology becomes Public Domain and can never be patented again.
Patents have a maximum life of 20 years as opposed to copywrites - which for all practical purposes - are forever. Nobody alive today is likely to see Mickey Mouse become public domain, even though copywrites are supposed to be for a 'limited' time.
Patents are viewed by the patent office as a 'teaching method'; when discussing a patent an examiner will say something like: "Willford (referring to a patent by the name of the primary inventor) teaches so and so..." As such patents are a very useful record of how to do things; they keep technology from being lost when the people involved with it die. Because of this patents are very useful to society as a whole.
For example: Philo Farnsworth patented a vacuum tube which was able to produce controlled desktop thermonuclear fusion in 1967. The problem with the Farnsworth tube is that once the fusion reaction started the plasma became so hot that it was difficult to get more fuel into it. Of course, that is a problem with any hot fusion device; magnetic confinement simply hasn't reached the levels that Farnsworth achieved in 1967, so the problem has not yet become apparent in their research.
Had Farnsworth not patented his work (U.S. Patent number 3,386,883) we would have no record of what he did, and the thoughts of one of the most insightful inventors in history would have been lost forever.
The fusor tube is a brilliant design which deserves much more attention than it has received.
Sorry to point this out but the Democratic Party was the party of the KKK.
The current Liberal theory is that all of the rednecks and Klaners went to the Republicans while all the good people went to the Democrats. This evidently happened about 1960 - when the Democrats got the Black vote for the first time ever.
I was alive then, there was no party switching - except for blacks - who the Democrats figured they could con into voting for them if they quit burning crosses in their yards - and got the congress to vote in a wellfare state which the Republicans would pay for.
It was Eisenhower who sent the federal troops into Little Rock to force integration.
Truman integrated the military, but the thinking there was "Here if you love N*****s so much eat and live and fight along side of them and you'll see why we hate them"
Liberal media always presents blacks as dangerous and menacing hence "Gansta Rap" in the hope of turning non racists into racists.
Bill White, the mayor of Houston is not a conservative crypto fascist Republican Neanderthal - he is a Liberal Democrat.
Everybody who thinks that all would be cured if only we got rid of Chimp Hitler Reich Master Bush and put in a good old non-God fearing Progressive shining star like John Kerry needs to stop and think about that fact for a few minutes.
In this country we have two parties - one of them is composed of rich people looking out for the interests of the rich. The other is composed of rich people who claim to be looking out for the interests of the poor - but who actually just don't want the first group of rich people running things.
The vast majority of people - who are neither rich nor poor simply have no representation whatsoever.
In answer to the police chief's question about "If you aren't doing anything wrong - why would you object" let me follow him around all day with a live TV camera and see how long it is before he has his officers arrest me.
I have a 20 x 30 from my 6 mp SLR sitting next to a 35mm 20 x 30 in my living room. The Digital print simply looks better. While 35 mm film is potentially sharper than a 6 mp digital in practice that doesn't play out. The optical enlargement process loses a lot of sharpness.
I have a number of 35mm cameras - I love the feel of film cameras - but the digital SLR also works well.
And no, I'm not blind. The digital print was done at 300 PPI (54 MP after interpolation and sharpened in the GIMP). It looks very good, and I've gotten a lot of complements on it.
This may come as a shock to most people on Slashdot, but Republicans are not deluded.
Neither the Liberal - progressive point of view nor the Conservative point of view is "wrong" or "deluded".
The reason that people see things differently is perspective. If I hold a coin up between us am I deluded if I say that I see heads - while you clearly can see tails?
Liberals and conservatives both play an important role in American society: imagine a 1000 foot high antenna tower which is held in place by guy wires. If one side pulls too hard the antenna will begin to topple in their direction.
In the current political environment both sides have decided that the other side is trying to destroy the country by pulling too hard in their direction.
What is necessary is to turn down the rhetoric on both sides - the tension on the wires is too high. In the current situation we are vulnerable to the slightest outside force breaking the wires that are pulled too tight and making everything collapse.
I think that it is more than what feels good. Politics ultimately is about power. These are people who want power over you. They are afraid of you because your knowledge of engineering gives you power to change things. They lack the power to do that - so they try to keep you from having that power by making you feel bad about what you do. This is a passive - aggressive technique. In my opinion it is a waste of time to attempt to educate such people - as you discovered.
The proper course of action is to carefully listen to what they say. Give their viewpoint due consideration, and when you realize it is mostly a power game, keep the few good points they raise, then ignore everything else and continue being an engineer.
Engineering is about making things work in the real world - that includes making solutions to the problems of technology real. .
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Everything is obvious in hindsight. All invention procedes from the known to the unknown. An invention is nearly always the combination of two or more known things to produce something which was unknown and which has unexpected benefits.
What else could it be? The combination of two or more unknown things to produce a known thing?
Most of the abuses of the patent system would disapear if only individuals could own patents.
No, there is a fundamental difference between cooperative and adversarial systems.
I wasn't aware of cooperative systems until I got into martial arts under a cooperative system - the difference is dramatic. It has nothing to do with "being nice". The rate at which you learn in a cooperative system is so great that sometimes the students literally get dizzy with how much information they get in one session. It has to do with people all heading in the same direction seeking a common goal instead of fighting with other people to keep each other from succeeding.
Adversarial systems are simply stupid ways of doing things- we do them because they are familiar - not because they are the right way to do things.
A cooperative system is like a group of people working together to lift a heavy weight with a rope - an adversarial system is like everyone pulling the rope in different directions - guess which system works better to lift the weight.
The problem with skepticism is that it elevates the turd to a respected rank in science. The correct process is for everyone to work together to arrive at the best answers possible given the amount of data available.
Instead of an adversarial system - a cooperative system is the way to do things - with errors gently pointed out instead of with scorn and ridicule as is done today.
Skepticism attempts to eliminate "false positives" from science in the process it throws in a lot of "false negatives" - it rejects things which are true - but for which some other possible explanation exists.
The question is "Are we trying to advance human knowledge, or are we after some other goal; Ego, Money, Prizes, Fame, etc?" If the answer is "Advance human knowledge" then a cooperative system is the way to do things, If the answer is "something else" then I agree that flinging turds around is the way to achieve that goal.
"But EVERYTHING in science is ALWAYS subject to challenge."
Everything EXCEPT skepticism itself that is. That is not subject to challenge now is it?
One mustn't question the process itself - since we accept as a matter of faith - of religious dogma - that skepticism is the right way to do things. Anyone who questions the process of skepticism is a BLASPHEMER in the church of science.
Exactly what is the scientific confidence level that skepticism is the correct way to do things? How did scientists reach that confidence level, through scientific investigation, or from a Stupid Wild Ass Guess? Why is that SWAG valid, but others aren't? What experiments have been run on the process itself, what are the error bars on the data? Where is the scientific proof that skepticism works correctly and is the proper way to do scientific inquiry?
To the idiot who called my post a troll: This is not a troll - it is not my purpose to start some sort of off topic discussion so that I can laugh at people - it is an absolutely truthful and insightful post.
Kerry's Communist medal was on both television and in the newspapers back in 1983 - I remember it because I am a Vietnam Vet - and I remember what Kerry did. I am not the only person who remembers it - it was in the NY Times and the Houston Chronicle.
There is the mistaken idea that because liberals and conservatives have different views on things that one side is correct and the other side is wrong. Both conservatives and liberals have this view; that the other side if filled with gullible idiots who will destroy the country if given the chance. Because slashdot is predominately a site for young people, the liberal viewpoint is the main one expressed here.
If I hold up a coin between us and say "This coin is 'heads'" and you look at it and say "No, you're wrong the coin is tails" NEITHER one of us has incorrectly described what he sees. Arguments between the conservative viewpoint and the liberal viewpoint are just as pointless as arguing over whether the coin is heads or tails - both sides are right and wrong equally - neither is "seeing things" or delusional. Both sides have massive blind spots in back of them - neither sees that the people at the head of "their" party are up to no good - although that is obvious to those with the opposite viewpoint.
Are the liberals correct that the people at the head of the Republican party are Rich - would be kings - who wish to turn the U.S. into a second coming of Rome? Yes - that is not a delusional viewpoint.
Are the conservatives correct that the people at the head of the Democratic party are Rich malignant narcissists who will - given the chance - destroy everything the founding fathers worked to create by turning the United States into a second coming of the Soviet Union? Yes - that is not a delusional viewpoint.
Since most people here at Slashdot have the liberal perspective it is not necessary to show you that Liberals have correctly seen what the leaders of the Republican Party are about.
What is necessary is to show you that the conservative view of the Democratic leadership is just as accurate, and that conservatives are no more delusional than you are.
Did you know that John Kerry is a Communist Traitor? That is not conservative rhetoric or anybody's opinion - it is the official position of the Communist Government of Vietnam who in 1983 while Kerry was Lt. Governor of Massachusetts awarded him as a "Hero of Communist Victory" for his actions on their behalf during the Vietnam War. You won't be able to find confirmation of that fact on the Internet - except at some conservative sites which you naturally won't believe - but if you scan the newspaper archives from 1983 you will find that the story is absolutely true.
The conservatives are no more deluded than you are: they simply see things which are actually there that you are missing.
The problem is not Liberal vs Conservative the problem is 'the Republicans and the Democrats' VS all the rest of us. The antidote for the Imperialistic Rich is not the Narcissistic Rich.
The sun's escape velocity is high enough to cause fusion of any deuterium that strikes it in a free fall.
Thus any D20 in comets that impact the sun probably fuses.
I see a very common mistake occurring in these posts: the mistaken idea that because liberals and conservatives have different views on things that one side is correct and the other side is wrong. Both conservatives and liberals have this view; that the other side if filled with gullible idiots who will destroy the country if given the chance. Because slashdot is predominately a site for young people, the liberal viewpoint is the main one expressed here.
If I hold up a coin between us and say "This coin is 'heads'" and you look at it and say "No, you're wrong the coin is tails" NEITHER one of us has incorrectly described what he sees. Arguments between the conservative viewpoint and the liberal viewpoint are just as pointless as arguing over whether the coin is heads or tails - both sides are right and wrong equally - neither is "seeing things" or delusional. Both sides have massive blind spots in back of them - neither sees that the people at the head of "their" party are up to no good - although that is obvious to those with the opposite viewpoint.
Are the liberals correct that the people at the head of the Republican party are Rich - would be kings - who wish to turn the U.S. into a second coming of Rome? Yes - that is not a delusional viewpoint.
Are the conservatives correct that the people at the head of the Democratic party are Rich malignant narcissists who will - given the chance - destroy everything the founding fathers worked to create by turning the United States into a second coming of the Soviet Union? Yes - that is not a delusional viewpoint.
Since most people here at Slashdot have the liberal perspective it is not necessary to show you that Liberals have correctly seen what the leaders of the Republican Party are about.
What is necessary is to show you that the conservative view of the Democratic leadership is just as accurate, and that conservatives are no more delusional than you are.
Did you know that John Kerry is a Communist Traitor? That is not conservative rhetoric or anybody's opinion - it is the official position of the Communist Government of Vietnam who in 1983 while Kerry was Lt. Governor of Massachusetts awarded him as a "Hero of Communist Victory" for his actions on their behalf during the Vietnam War. You won't be able to find confirmation of that fact on the Internet - except at some conservative sites which you naturally won't believe - but if you scan the newspaper archives from 1983 you will find that the story is absolutely true.
The conservatives are no more deluded than you are: they simply see things which are actually there that you are missing.
The problem is not Liberal vs Conservative the problem is 'the Republicans and the Democrats' VS all the rest of us. The antidote for the Imperialistic Rich is not the Narcissistic Rich.
Sine credit card debt in the U.S. can no longer be bankrupted the banks have gotten incredibly greedy. The latest scam is targeting people who pay off their credit card every month: the credit card company simply "forgets" to send you a bill one month. If you don't notice, your next bill has late fees - interest, and is twice the size of what you expect. This in the hopes that you won't be able to pay it off.
Please don't tell me that I could look up the account information on line; I have exactly zero interest in becoming a creditor's unpaid employee - doing all of their key punch work for them so that they can save money on printed bills and fire employees.
Chase pulled the "we forgot to send you a bill" scam on me last month. I called them up fought through the automated phone system and got to a real person. I got my account balance - gave them the check number for the payment in full and explained that along with the check they would also be receiving their credit card in several pieces. I told them to close the account as I would not do business with a company that behaved that way. If enough people do that the credit card companies will be forced to cease the practice.
I have talked to a number of people who pay off their cards every month, and they all have had similar experiences.
Simple does not mean easy. Ballet consists of very simple moves - but they are right at the limit of human ability to perform. Google can come up with 100,000 hits on a search string from billions of web pages in a fraction of a second. If you attempt to do this you will discover how difficult this is to do.
Simple is very difficult to do well. People who turn out complicated programs do so because they can't produce simple programs.
By the way, your professors are professors in large part because they can't cut it in the non academic world; Listen to their opinions of things with that knowledge in mind.
Here is the secret to Microsoft's domination:
1.Take a pile of dog crap.
2.Gold plate it.
3. Add more dog crap.
4. Gold plate that.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you have a huge imposing structure.
This results in glittering mass which impresses the avearage person, but underneath it all - it just stinks.
They are obviously following this formula in their challenge to Google.
3 million web hits - not users. My brother's home made site has had nearly that many.
They're just trying to boost the number to up the advertising revenue.
Like everything Microsoft does - gold plated dog crap.
There was no TV patent dispute: Farnsworth invented it, RCA attempted to steal it and failed. The history of RCA under Sarnof is truly disgusting. The company fortune was built on patents stolen from Major Armstrong who invented the super regenerative, super heterodyne, and FM radios as well as the phase lock loop. Armstrong committed suicide after he lost - in one of the worst court decisions in recorded history.- the FM case to RCA
Most of the abuses of the patent system would simply disappear if only individuals could own patents - instead of companies.
During World War II the Germans made Gasoline from coal on a massive scale. That process is well known. Making gasoline from oil is the preferred process because of several reasons: it costs less, it is cleaner - no strip mining, the oil can be pumped out of the ground as a liquid instead.
There are two well known problems with our current technological society: the first is supplying the energy source for it, the second is what do you do with the waste products? Basically no effort has been put into the second problem. That does not mean that the problem can't be solved.
Suppose you genetically engineered a form of chlorophyl which produced hydrocarbons instead of carbohydrates. This would convert water and CO2 into gasoline - burning the fuel would produce water and CO2 again. An area 100Km by 100Km at 20% efficiency would produce enough gasoline to fuel all of the vehicles in the US from solar power (sun light drives the CO2 and water conversion into gasoline) The process would be clean and environmentally friendly.
The problems of technology can be solved by other technology. This may not make the gloom and doomers of the world happy - but it is the way things work. Nothing is perfect, but adequate answers can be found.
Splatters are spread by the foot steps of anyone who walks through the splatter - which spreads the antibiotic through most of the hospital floor space.
The advantage to the bacteria on the floor of not being killed by the antibiotics to which they are continually exposed far out weighs any advantage which natural bacteria would have in that environment.
If you would talk to hospital personnel - as I have - most of them know of a co-worker who has developed a bad antibiotic resistant infection after taking a fall on a hospital floor.
Let me propose a test to see which theory is correct: lets grind your face into a hospital floor until it is abraded and see if you develop an antibiotic resistant infection, while I take a shot of antibiotics to see if I get one.Or if you don't like that test we could inject you with the wash water from the floor while I get the antibiotic shot.
Of course when I put it that way - it is pretty obvious which one of our theories is full of crap isn't it?
The current theories on the cause of antibiotic resistant bacteria place the blame on antibiotics and their overuse or under use. These theories utterly fail to explain one simple fact: most people don't come into the hospital with cases of drug resistant bacteria, they acquire those infections while in the hospitals. Some where in the hospital there are conditions which are breeding drug resistant bacteria.
I believe that the real cause of antibiotic resistant bacteria is far more prosaic than anyone has suspected. Before Doctors and Nurses give people injections they are quite properly taught to point the needle up, tap the syringe to force air bubbles to the top of the syringe, then squirt enough of the fluid out of the syringe to insure that the air is cleared from the device and the needle. This is utterly necessary to prevent the injection of air into the patient's blood system where it could cause a fatal embolism.
The antibiotic squirted out of the needle simply falls to the floor and creates a splatter. This splatter kills bacteria on the floor where it is intense enough to do so, but around the edges of the splatter surviving bacteria can breed resistant strains to every type of injectable antibiotic being used in the hospital.
When antibiotic splatter is combined with the modern janitorial practice of a one step floor cleaner, the floor becomes a giant Petri dish for the breeding of drug resistant bacteria. One step floor 'cleaners' can't possibly clean floors; they make the floor look clean and shiny, but since many of them are made of glycerin compounds they simply serve as a growth medium for the Petri dish.
So how do you solve the problem of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria? You do two things: first, keep splatters of antibiotics off of the floor by performing the air clearing of the syringes while the needle is still in the bottle of antibiotics - immediately after filling the syringe- and by using a spillage overflow catcher pan under the syringe while it is being filled. Second, sterilize the hospital floors with bleach and intense ultra violet light sources mounted on the undersides of push broom like devices.
These two simple things will prevent the Petri dish conditions on floors which breed drug resistant bacteria. Both of these steps have very low costs while having very large benefits. They are similar in importance to the now standard practice of surgeons washing their hands before surgery, which was adapted in the 19th century, and which has saved countless lives since.
The economic justification for all of these things is obvious, reducing drug resistant bacteria cases will save insurance companies far more money than the slightly greater costs of better floor cleaning and splatter prevention protocols would cost them.
An additional note: if my theory is correct it would also explain what is causing the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria. After the janitorial staff at a hospital finishes washing the floors, the waste water is simply poured down the drain. This puts the antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria that have been picked up by the cleaning process into the sewer systems of the municipality - where they are now free to spread in a food rich environment. Such floor water needs to be treated as hazardous waste in need of biological neutralization, not as something just to be dumped in a cavalier fashion.
Business men claim that there is a lack of engineering talent grown here in the U.S. What they really mean is that there is a lack of U.S. engineers who are willing to work 60 hours a week for coolie wages - which is why they hire foreign engineers, programmers etc.
Technical people get very little respect in the U.S. Last week's Battlestar Galactica - where an engineering officer was promoted to command showed the way that the "people people" view technical people: "they only know how to deal with machines", "its all about the people - don't forget that" Of course "people people" are not technical people for the very simple reason that they can't be. The technical people who go into management tend to be technical incompetents who couldn't cut it where they were.
"People people" tend simply to be emotional bullies - stand up to them and they wilt. "People people" tend to make bad decisions that screw things up - hurting a lot of people in the process. Mostly their emotional strength is used for such ridiculous things as breaking off relationships - instead of making things work, they insure things are broken. While technical people get little respect from managers most managers don't know that the technical people are laughing at them behind their backs.
And yes, there is such a thing as a good manager - just like there is such a thing as an incompetent engineer.
Farnsworth was restricted by the company he was working for from publishing in a journal. Even if he had, the record of exactly how to build his device would not have been there.
The scientific world is hardly perfect either - the disgraceful treatment of Fleischmann and Pons by the scientific community is an example of that. By the way, Fleischmann and Pons have stated that a large part of the problem in duplicating their work is that Palladium appears to have about 16 different atomic arrangements, and that only one of those arrangements supports cold fusion. There have been a couple of Slashdot articles about the DOE admitting last year that Cold Fusion does appear to be real.
And yes, I misspelled copyright. Sorry.
While I don't like the idea of patents in software - there is one huge advantage of patents: when the patent expires, the patented technology becomes Public Domain and can never be patented again.
Patents have a maximum life of 20 years as opposed to copywrites - which for all practical purposes - are forever. Nobody alive today is likely to see Mickey Mouse become public domain, even though copywrites are supposed to be for a 'limited' time.
Patents are viewed by the patent office as a 'teaching method'; when discussing a patent an examiner will say something like: "Willford (referring to a patent by the name of the primary inventor) teaches so and so..." As such patents are a very useful record of how to do things; they keep technology from being lost when the people involved with it die. Because of this patents are very useful to society as a whole.
For example: Philo Farnsworth patented a vacuum tube which was able to produce controlled desktop thermonuclear fusion in 1967. The problem with the Farnsworth tube is that once the fusion reaction started the plasma became so hot that it was difficult to get more fuel into it. Of course, that is a problem with any hot fusion device; magnetic confinement simply hasn't reached the levels that Farnsworth achieved in 1967, so the problem has not yet become apparent in their research.
Had Farnsworth not patented his work (U.S. Patent number 3,386,883) we would have no record of what he did, and the thoughts of one of the most insightful inventors in history would have been lost forever.
The fusor tube is a brilliant design which deserves much more attention than it has received.
Sorry to point this out but the Democratic Party was the party of the KKK.
The current Liberal theory is that all of the rednecks and Klaners went to the Republicans while all the good people went to the Democrats. This evidently happened about 1960 - when the Democrats got the Black vote for the first time ever.
I was alive then, there was no party switching - except for blacks - who the Democrats figured they could con into voting for them if they quit burning crosses in their yards - and got the congress to vote in a wellfare state which the Republicans would pay for.
It was Eisenhower who sent the federal troops into Little Rock to force integration.
Truman integrated the military, but the thinking there was "Here if you love N*****s so much eat and live and fight along side of them and you'll see why we hate them"
Liberal media always presents blacks as dangerous and menacing hence "Gansta Rap" in the hope of turning non racists into racists.
Bill White, the mayor of Houston is not a conservative crypto fascist Republican Neanderthal - he is a Liberal Democrat.
Everybody who thinks that all would be cured if only we got rid of Chimp Hitler Reich Master Bush and put in a good old non-God fearing Progressive shining star like John Kerry needs to stop and think about that fact for a few minutes.
In this country we have two parties - one of them is composed of rich people looking out for the interests of the rich. The other is composed of rich people who claim to be looking out for the interests of the poor - but who actually just don't want the first group of rich people running things.
The vast majority of people - who are neither rich nor poor simply have no representation whatsoever.
In answer to the police chief's question about "If you aren't doing anything wrong - why would you object" let me follow him around all day with a live TV camera and see how long it is before he has his officers arrest me.
I have a 20 x 30 from my 6 mp SLR sitting next to a 35mm 20 x 30 in my living room. The Digital print simply looks better. While 35 mm film is potentially sharper than a 6 mp digital in practice that doesn't play out. The optical enlargement process loses a lot of sharpness.
I have a number of 35mm cameras - I love the feel of film cameras - but the digital SLR also works well.
And no, I'm not blind. The digital print was done at 300 PPI (54 MP after interpolation and sharpened in the GIMP). It looks very good, and I've gotten a lot of complements on it.
This may come as a shock to most people on Slashdot, but Republicans are not deluded.
Neither the Liberal - progressive point of view nor the Conservative point of view is "wrong" or "deluded".
The reason that people see things differently is perspective. If I hold a coin up between us am I deluded if I say that I see heads - while you clearly can see tails?
Liberals and conservatives both play an important role in American society: imagine a 1000 foot high antenna tower which is held in place by guy wires. If one side pulls too hard the antenna will begin to topple in their direction.
In the current political environment both sides have decided that the other side is trying to destroy the country by pulling too hard in their direction.
What is necessary is to turn down the rhetoric on both sides - the tension on the wires is too high. In the current situation we are vulnerable to the slightest outside force breaking the wires that are pulled too tight and making everything collapse.
I think that it is more than what feels good. Politics ultimately is about power. These are people who want power over you. They are afraid of you because your knowledge of engineering gives you power to change things. They lack the power to do that - so they try to keep you from having that power by making you feel bad about what you do. This is a passive - aggressive technique. In my opinion it is a waste of time to attempt to educate such people - as you discovered.
The proper course of action is to carefully listen to what they say. Give their viewpoint due consideration, and when you realize it is mostly a power game, keep the few good points they raise, then ignore everything else and continue being an engineer.
Engineering is about making things work in the real world - that includes making solutions to the problems of technology real.
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