I suppose that these people intend to have robots mining these asteroids. Of course in space things like strip mining are OK since you won't be messing up the earth to do it. That is until 'asteroid huggers' start bemoaning 'despoiling' the 'natural habitat' (lets ignore the fact that a habitat requires something living in order for it to exist.)
The fact that we don't even begin to have such machines here on Earth doesn't seem to bother them. Mining of any type here on earth requires a lot of people to decide where to place the explosives etc.
I suppose that it would be conceivable to make some type of 'remote waldo' type of machines for the work, but I suspect that speed of light makes that pretty impossible. Move your hand and 10 seconds later the remote hand moves, then 10 seconds later you see the hand move. I don't see how that would work.
I think the only way to build mining equipment smart enough is to have a man controlling them. When you do that you have the habitat problem which the space station is designed to explore. The big plus from the space station is the millions of lines of tested, debugged, known good code, which the space station project will eventually deliver.
If you are going to have humans working in space then you need to have habitats that are long term livable. First the space station - then the mining, you can't do it any other way.
The fact that none of these people have ever put so much as a Tonka toy into space seems not to bother them at all. They strike me as 'know it alls'; i.e. the cluelessly confidant people who exist in the bottom 10 percentile of any given field.
Any time you are attempting that you have never done before - you will encounter problems that you have never seen before.
If you have ever written custom code for anything you recognize that truth. The code for the space station is essentially 'alpha' code. How could they get it to the 'beta' stage? Where would they get any 'users' to test it? Can any of you write millions of lines of alpha code with no errors?
The reason that nobody can write alpha code error free is the same reason that nobody can go out and shoot '18' for a round of golf; the job is too difficult for anyone to accomplish. That is why software requires several versions to get it right.
The computing section of the space station is far more extensive than any previous space flight. It was done that way because of the advantages that computer control brings. Because of Yin and Yang there is always a down side to anything which has an upside. The down side is that computer controlling everything necessarily increases the complexity of the computer code. With that complexity comes increased error problems. Sorry, that is the way that reality works.
There is one more truth - NASA has never managed a software project this complex for space use. As a result the management process has problems also.
Here is a management truth: nobody ever has enough time to spend doing the job right in the first place, but somehow they always find enough time to do the job over when their work breaks. In other words there always is enough time to do the job right . Doing it wrong and trying to fix the screw ups with kluges later always takes longer. That ought to be software management 101 - but it is something which most managers never understand.
The only way to solve the complexity issues that computer control brings is to do away with the computer controllers. That costs a lot more money and weighs a lot more. Either live with the problems that computers bring or live with the problems that not having computers bring.
I have to agree with the NASA veteran on the preparedness issue: it costs far less to be prepared at the start than to find out later that you weren't prepared.
I am shocked that Carnivore will capture unfiltered email.
Wait let me correct that: I am shocked that the FBI admitted that Carnivore will capture unfiltered email.
There was a time in the US when people would have been shocked at government snooping; but I suspect that by now most people have figured out that there is no tooth fairy, and that governments regularly lie to the people they govern.
There is something about trials which most people don't recognize. Both judges and
juries will believe a police officer over any other witness - not because of bias or
prejudice - but because a police officer is a professional witness!
This means that a police officer can lie better than you or I can tell the truth. That is a
terrible problem - and one for which I see little remedy. If you have ever seen a police
officer lie about something under oath you will find yourself believing him - even
though you know what he is saying is a lie.
The only partial fix for this problem is for the judge to instruct the jury that police
officers are professional witnesses, and that they need to be held to a higher standard
than other witnesses. The simple truth is that is never going to happen; judges have a
direct interest in obtaining as high a conviction rate as possible - their careers often
depend upon it. The only people who might point out the professional witness problem
would be the defense attorneys, but because of the nature of trials defense attorneys are
not in the most believable position.
--
The law, 100's of millions of lines of code, not one line of which has ever been tested to
see if it works.
The real problem with 'Terminators' is that they make war too easy. Fortunately war is horrible and difficult - if it weren't we would have far more of them. Anyone building devices that make war easy is an enemy of all of humanity. Any person who does that needs to be killed immediately; before he kills the rest of us - which he absolutely will.
Sorry to disillusion you but the GPL is based on copyright.
I have contributed thousands of lines of free software under the GPL.
Before I heard of free software - back in the eighties - I wrote shareware. I still get inquiries/support requests from people about some of it - but despite the fact that a lot of my software was used - I got world wide sales of about $15 for the lot of it.
The return rate under a no copyright system would have been about the same - 0$ is very close to 15$ in the scheme of things. The monetary return from software is more closely linked to the effectiveness of marketing than to the actual usefulness of the software.
One way to get a good reputation would be to put your name on a lot of people's code: that way people would think that you were a really good software author. "Look at all the code this guy has written - and look at all of these people trying to claim they wrote his good code." That is perfectly legal under a 'no copyright' system.
Copyright is an accident of history but it is an accident which is a cornerstone of modern society. You might be right that things would work OK without it - or I might be right that everything would collapse into a feudal mess without it. The only way to tell would be to remove it and see. I think that is a very risky proposition - even if the chance that I am right is small . Most people aren't interested in playing Russian Roulette - even though the odds are 5 to 1 in their favor; the results of a loss are way too large to justify taking the chance.
I think one additional requirement is that each voting station be required by law to run Windows. That way Microsoft could profit from the process: undoubtedly they would require each voter to purchase a valid user license and scan in the hologram from their box before counting their vote.
Since most precincts would use Windows 9x rather than NT or 200X you can be sure that the ensuing chaos from machines locking up - losing votes, and in general crashing in flames would give the technical people of the world a massive - if silent - laugh. Then we could send the voting machines a virus and rig the election any way we wanted.
A difference in perspective occurs when two different people view the same thing; they both can't be in the same place at the same time so they both have a different perspective.
Thus in order for there to be a perspective difference we have to both be talking about the same thing. We are not talking about the same thing.
I am talking about forests you're trying to discredit my comments about forests by saying something about individual trees . I am discussing principles you're talking about concrete examples; which are two very different things. That is not a perspective difference - that is a difference in level of understanding.
How silly would the president of a company look saying "Ask not what your company can do for you - ask what you can do for your company"?
You are the one demonstrating perspective illusions: things in your life look big and important to you because they are near to you. Hold a quarter at arms length and it appears to be bigger than the moon - put them at the same distance and the quarter is invisible. Your job might look as important as the moon shot to you, but that is because you view your work from a very close perspective; to humanity as a whole your job is invisible. If you think that your job is as important as the Apollo project you have a distorted perspective.
One of the reasons that copyright came into being was that people want credit for their production. If that weren't true all copyrighted work would be released into the public domain anonymously .
Ranting against copyright while not posting as an Anonymous Coward is hypocrisy.
Let us imagine a world without copyright:
1. No software jobs. Who is going to pay you to write software and why would they? Perhaps they would do so out of the goodness of their hearts. But if their hearts are that good they would give you money regardless of whether you did anything for them or not.
Copyright dangles a carrot in front of you: "If I write this really good program that people like I will get praise and acceptance and money for my work." Do away with copyright and the only other motivation is a stick; produce this or else. This is a Yin and Yang world. There is an element of a stick under a copyright system: if I try to plagiarize something I get punished, and there is an element of a carrot in a non copyright system: "if the master likes me perhaps I'll get to eat"
No movies. Who would write them - and why would they write them? Perhaps people would produce scripts for the sheer artistic joy of creating them; but in the real world very little art of any type is produced anonymously. Without copyright there is nothing to stop anyone from taking your writing and putting their name on it. Notice that not much of artistic merit comes out of any of the countries that lack copyright protection. That is no accident.
In a world without copyright whoever is biggest and strongest gets to beat you into letting them put their name on any writing you produce. If you think corporations are abusive today wait until Guido and Company take over in the no copyright world.
No books or music to speak of. Who would pay you to write a book or music, and why would they pay?
Copyright is one of the cornerstones of modern technological society remove that cornerstone and everything collapses back to a pre capitalist feudal state. If you find the power that government and corporations wield against you oppressive in modern society imagine what they would be like in the stick motivating world with no copyright.
At least in today's world you have a right to any writing which you create. In a non copyright world you would have nothing of value to trade for sustenance other than your physical labor . Copyright is one of the things that lifted us out of the feudal world - get rid of it and we go right back to that era.
We've already tried a world without copyright - we rejected it because it didn't work worth a damn.
Basketball players might actually benefit from learning how to jump correctly. Yin and Yang predicts that there would be some ethical professions where the enhanced ethics of formal training is useful - even though in most cases it is used as window dressing for unethical professions.
Once again - from Yin and Yang, a largely ethical profession like medicine will have unethical elements to it; medical experiments and things like abortion do present ethical dilemmas.
Conversely it is possible to be an ethical businessman or an ethical lawyer, and I do personally know examples of each. However it is extremely difficult to be an ethical business or legal practitioner who is very rich - I don't know either of those. All of the wildly successful people in both of those fields that I know are unethical. I am sure that there are exceptions to those observations - somewhere there are successful businessmen and lawyers who are ethical - I have just never met any.
No, it is Yin and Yang; for the most part when people state truths there are exceptional conditions which violate those truths.
What you are doing is hoping to discredit the truth of what I said by pointing out those Yin and Yang exceptions.
That sort of tactic only works if the people reading these comments believe that we live in a black and white non Yin and Yang world. In the past such techniques were successful: people didn't realize that Yin and Yang is how the universe works - but as Western minds wake up to reality - tactics like yours will be less and less successful.
Any field in which you can take classes in ethics is a field which has no ethics . Otherwise why would anyone need to take the classes? If the practitioners of the field behaved ethically no one would ever think to create ethics classes for the field; it would be like a class for basketball players teaching them how to jump.
I do understand Yin and Yang; there is an element of formal ethics study in largely ethical professions. I know that there is a 'code of ethics' for professional engineering; but that is something that lawyer and business types created so that the engineering profession would remain forever in its place as a sacrificial profession for the consumption of business men and the law.
It is not something that ethical engineers saw that they needed to impose on their unethical fellow engineers to clean up their profession. In addition, from Yin and Yang it is predictable that there would be unethical fields where there are no ethics classes available; crime comes to mind - nobody can take classes in 'criminal ethics'.
Formal stated ethics usually occur in 'Con job' professions like the law or business where it is important that people believe that the fields are ethical when they are not.
Where did the 40 hour work week come from in the first place? Back in the early part of the twentieth century the question was asked: "what is the most efficient amount of time to work people at a job?" I believe it was the US government who funded a study of the question.
What they discovered was that up to 40 hours a week the amount of output was proportional to the number of hours worked. Beyond 40 hours that was true only for about 2 weeks. After two weeks the amount of work being done fell back to the 40 hour level - no matter how many hours were worked. All of the people working over time in the study thought they were doing more work - but when their production was measured it turned out that they were not.
Granted the study was of clerical workers - not programmers - but people are people. There may be statistical variation from one person to the next - but on the average 40 hours is the optimum time for most people. Yin and Yang qualification: mostly the results are true - but for some people they may be false.
In general most people working longer than 40 hour weeks are just kidding themselves - they really aren't getting much more useful work done than they would in a concentrated 40 hour week.
Work is more like a marathon than a 100 meter dash; it is not about brief sprints - it is about setting a pace than you can maintain for a long time. You can only sprint for so long - then you have to slow down to a long distance pace.
I would like to point out the the US was on the winning side in W.W.II and beat the Soviet Union to the moon - all on 40 hour work weeks. If you honestly believe your project is more pressing than either of those I suggest that maybe you are suffering from a lack of perspective.
Man bites dog is news - dog bites man is not. Meteors strikes that are air bursts - which a megaton range strike probably is - and which don't kill anybody are probably never reported to the media by the seismologists. I am sure that they see the effects - but they don't report them - any more than they report normal seismic events about the same size that do no damage - and there are a lot of those. Only part of the power of an airburst goes into shaking the ground - so there is a good chance that the seismologists may not even recognize them for what they are.
No one will notice megaton size impacts until the cosmic dice come up snake - eyes and we lose a city to one of them. Then everyone will start kicking and screaming and wondering why no one did anything about it before hand.
One megaton is a horrendous explosion: the Atomic bomb which killed 60,000 people and incinerated Hiroshima was 1/50th of a megaton; approximately 20 kilotons. The Hiroshima bomb had a circle of total destruction of with a radius of about 1 mile: anything within a mile of ground zero was pretty much demolished. A megaton explosion would do similar damage for a radius of about 3.6 miles. A one megaton hit on a major city would kill about half a million people.
There is some evidence that a Chinese city of about 10,000 was destroyed by a megaton range strike around AD 1490.
Re:Reality Smacks You in the Face
on
Patent Warfare
·
· Score: 2
The most likely case is that you would be ignored by the government. I have reported far worse crimes and been utterly ignored. The basic rule is money and publicity buys enforcement. The FBI might take your complaint - but I doubt that it would be prosecuted. Good luck on the experiment - I would like to know how it turns out.
Sigh, there were no patents issued in either case I mentioned: it made absolutely no difference whether or not patent law existed. When something is in the public domain the existence or non existence of patent law is a moot point; anyone is free to manufacture anything which is in the public domain with no restrictions.
The point is that both inventions are in the public domain (the comb was back then, the xerox patent had already expired) and nobody is manufacturing them! It is not patent law which prevents them from doing so. I think most people understood that point.
Well, to be more exact, only an individual can ever be granted a patent - so NASA itself was not granted the patent - any more than IBM has ever been granted a patent. In each case the patents were assigned to them by the individual inventors.
The government can have patents assigned to them; if you invented a 'photon torpedo' or any other advanced weapon and tried to patent it - your application would be kept secret and the patent would be assigned to the government.
Yes you would get paid for it - unless it involved nuclear power of some type - in which case you might be executed - as it is a capital crime to do any non authorized research which might lead to a nuclear weapon. (Don't yell at me - I didn't write the law - I'm just telling you about it.)
If this homecoming was like most - there was no opportunity for him to speak. I have never seen anyone hand a microphone to anyone at a homecoming - having seen several at high school football games over the years.
The only statement he could have made was what he did. Had the school authorities ignored his actions nobody would have ever heard of it outside of the school. As he said they made a martyr out of him. Most likely the school officials figured that they could get away with their actions without anyone outside of the school knowing about it. I am sure that right now they are busy kicking themselves; they are starting to discover that their actions have consequences.
Here is the motivation behind 'authorities' like these - stated so that everyone can understand why they act that way: We can't tell the difference between a trouble maker and a problem solver; they both rock the boat - so we suppress anything and anyone that threatens to change the status quo.
These sort of authorities would suspend Thomas Jefferson as 'disruptive' if he were reincarnated; "we won't put up with any more of these' inalienable rights' pamphlets young man."
You say that the manufacturers have chosen to not develop these inventions or novel
applications of previously known technology?
In a field where patents are used.
And they are making their choice because patents are making a difference?
So the existance of the concept of patents is causing the companies to not innovate?
I was trying to say that a lack of patents held them back from bringing something to market - if patents didn't exist - I would never have brought the idea to them in the first place nor would most people. I am sure that there would be a few people who would innovate for the good of mankind: but I think the number of inventions would be way down.
Please don't interpret this as favoring software patents: I think they are wrong and counter productive: Yin and Yang again; I think hardware patents work, and software patents don't do what they are supposed to do. Part of the reason for patents is that they serve as a 'teaching tool'; they show future inventors how something is done. In software the source code itself serves to perform that function , and therein lies a major difference between the two.
Do I like Rambus: no - I think these guys are not the original inventors of the DDR section of their patents, I think they misappropriated them from JEDEC - and I think that there is a good chance they will lose in court on that if Micron can afford to fight them to the end. I don't like 'patent holding non-productive firms' like Rambus.
About your comb solution: To produce static you have to have two insulators in contact with each other which are in motion. The nickel plating is not an insulator - so no static is generated.
No, the voice array microphone they describe uses a DSP to evidently pick up sounds only in the preferred direction - canceling sounds that come from a different direction. The tech I was describing is a simple differential mic where one microphone is much closer to the mouth than the other, but both are about equally distant from the noise being produced.
I think that in earlier times when the rate of change was lower that the 17 year period of a patent was reasonable; it took a long time to get things to market and to get things developed.
In today's 'fast turn' circumstances I think a shorter time period is warranted.
The answer to that question - as is the answer to most questions - is Yes and No. Nothing is all good or all bad. The universe works on Yin and Yang; something which is good has some bad points - something which is bad has some good points.
When I say that something is bad, I recognize that it has some good aspects. I'll give a couple of personal examples on how the lack of a patent stifled innovation.
Back in the early 1980's I made a trivial invention: a comb which wouldn't create static in your hair when you used it. It was a very simple invention; all you have to do is add a little conductive material such as graphite to the plastic in its molten state and the comb no longer will generate static.
I applied for a patent and took the invention to one of the major comb manufacturers in the states. They were very happy to see me and excited about the prospect of being able to get an exclusive license on the 'technology'; they could see that being able to advertise a "static free" comb would create a competitive advantage for them.
However, the patent office rejected my application (the interfering invention was a comb in a xerox copier - designed to drain off static charge from paper.) When this happened the comb manufacturer lost interest. What they said is that without a patent they would have no competitive advantage - as soon as they came out with their anti-static comb so would everyone else - so they weren't interested in producing the combs. While they might be an advantage to consumers they would be no advantage to the manufacturers without a patent, and to this day they don't exist in the marketplace.
The second example comes from a somewhat more advanced invention: a differential microphone which cancels out feedback problems in live music. The mic works by having to microphone elements wired in reverse phase - one closer to the mouth than the other. Feedback from a speaker is rejected as common mode noise while the voice comes through as a differential signal. NASA has this patented as an external noise cancellation microphone for space capsule use. However the same setup can be used for PA or live music and cancel out most feedback. The results are dramatic: minus feedback, microphone speaker combinations produce much less 'mechanical' sounds; the voice from the speaker sounds very lifelike.
I decided to forgo getting a patent; my earlier experience had cost me a lot of money and I wanted to do the right thing: I released the invention to a major microphone manufacturer - > placing it in the public domain . The results were the same as the comb: no patent - no manufacturer interest. Now 15 years later no one has seen a differential microphone on the market place because the manufacturers would not benefit from its existence - even though the public would.
I hope from these two examples that everyone will be able to see that as long as we live in a world with competing manufacturers of commercial products - that a lack of a patent can and does stifle effective innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that we don't even begin to have such machines here on Earth doesn't seem to bother them. Mining of any type here on earth requires a lot of people to decide where to place the explosives etc.
I suppose that it would be conceivable to make some type of 'remote waldo' type of machines for the work, but I suspect that speed of light makes that pretty impossible. Move your hand and 10 seconds later the remote hand moves, then 10 seconds later you see the hand move. I don't see how that would work.
I think the only way to build mining equipment smart enough is to have a man controlling them. When you do that you have the habitat problem which the space station is designed to explore. The big plus from the space station is the millions of lines of tested, debugged, known good code, which the space station project will eventually deliver.
If you are going to have humans working in space then you need to have habitats that are long term livable. First the space station - then the mining, you can't do it any other way.
The fact that none of these people have ever put so much as a Tonka toy into space seems not to bother them at all. They strike me as 'know it alls'; i.e. the cluelessly confidant people who exist in the bottom 10 percentile of any given field.
If you have ever written custom code for anything you recognize that truth. The code for the space station is essentially 'alpha' code. How could they get it to the 'beta' stage? Where would they get any 'users' to test it? Can any of you write millions of lines of alpha code with no errors?
The reason that nobody can write alpha code error free is the same reason that nobody can go out and shoot '18' for a round of golf; the job is too difficult for anyone to accomplish. That is why software requires several versions to get it right.
The computing section of the space station is far more extensive than any previous space flight. It was done that way because of the advantages that computer control brings. Because of Yin and Yang there is always a down side to anything which has an upside. The down side is that computer controlling everything necessarily increases the complexity of the computer code. With that complexity comes increased error problems. Sorry, that is the way that reality works.
There is one more truth - NASA has never managed a software project this complex for space use. As a result the management process has problems also.
Here is a management truth: nobody ever has enough time to spend doing the job right in the first place, but somehow they always find enough time to do the job over when their work breaks. In other words there always is enough time to do the job right . Doing it wrong and trying to fix the screw ups with kluges later always takes longer. That ought to be software management 101 - but it is something which most managers never understand.
The only way to solve the complexity issues that computer control brings is to do away with the computer controllers. That costs a lot more money and weighs a lot more. Either live with the problems that computers bring or live with the problems that not having computers bring.
I have to agree with the NASA veteran on the preparedness issue: it costs far less to be prepared at the start than to find out later that you weren't prepared.
Wait let me correct that: I am shocked that the FBI admitted that Carnivore will capture unfiltered email.
There was a time in the US when people would have been shocked at government snooping; but I suspect that by now most people have figured out that there is no tooth fairy, and that governments regularly lie to the people they govern.
This means that a police officer can lie better than you or I can tell the truth. That is a terrible problem - and one for which I see little remedy. If you have ever seen a police officer lie about something under oath you will find yourself believing him - even though you know what he is saying is a lie.
The only partial fix for this problem is for the judge to instruct the jury that police officers are professional witnesses, and that they need to be held to a higher standard than other witnesses. The simple truth is that is never going to happen; judges have a direct interest in obtaining as high a conviction rate as possible - their careers often depend upon it. The only people who might point out the professional witness problem would be the defense attorneys, but because of the nature of trials defense attorneys are not in the most believable position.
--
The law, 100's of millions of lines of code, not one line of which has ever been tested to see if it works.
The real problem with 'Terminators' is that they make war too easy. Fortunately war is horrible and difficult - if it weren't we would have far more of them. Anyone building devices that make war easy is an enemy of all of humanity. Any person who does that needs to be killed immediately; before he kills the rest of us - which he absolutely will.
The return rate under a no copyright system would have been about the same - 0$ is very close to 15$ in the scheme of things. The monetary return from software is more closely linked to the effectiveness of marketing than to the actual usefulness of the software.
Since most precincts would use Windows 9x rather than NT or 200X you can be sure that the ensuing chaos from machines locking up - losing votes, and in general crashing in flames would give the technical people of the world a massive - if silent - laugh. Then we could send the voting machines a virus and rig the election any way we wanted.
The future looks bright for techies.
A difference in perspective occurs when two different people view the same thing; they both can't be in the same place at the same time so they both have a different perspective.
Thus in order for there to be a perspective difference we have to both be talking about the same thing. We are not talking about the same thing.
I am talking about forests you're trying to discredit my comments about forests by saying something about individual trees . I am discussing principles you're talking about concrete examples; which are two very different things. That is not a perspective difference - that is a difference in level of understanding.
How silly would the president of a company look saying "Ask not what your company can do for you - ask what you can do for your company"?
You are the one demonstrating perspective illusions: things in your life look big and important to you because they are near to you. Hold a quarter at arms length and it appears to be bigger than the moon - put them at the same distance and the quarter is invisible. Your job might look as important as the moon shot to you, but that is because you view your work from a very close perspective; to humanity as a whole your job is invisible. If you think that your job is as important as the Apollo project you have a distorted perspective.
Ranting against copyright while not posting as an Anonymous Coward is hypocrisy.
Let us imagine a world without copyright:
Copyright dangles a carrot in front of you: "If I write this really good program that people like I will get praise and acceptance and money for my work." Do away with copyright and the only other motivation is a stick; produce this or else. This is a Yin and Yang world. There is an element of a stick under a copyright system: if I try to plagiarize something I get punished, and there is an element of a carrot in a non copyright system: "if the master likes me perhaps I'll get to eat"
In a world without copyright whoever is biggest and strongest gets to beat you into letting them put their name on any writing you produce. If you think corporations are abusive today wait until Guido and Company take over in the no copyright world.
Copyright is one of the cornerstones of modern technological society remove that cornerstone and everything collapses back to a pre capitalist feudal state. If you find the power that government and corporations wield against you oppressive in modern society imagine what they would be like in the stick motivating world with no copyright.
At least in today's world you have a right to any writing which you create. In a non copyright world you would have nothing of value to trade for sustenance other than your physical labor . Copyright is one of the things that lifted us out of the feudal world - get rid of it and we go right back to that era.
We've already tried a world without copyright - we rejected it because it didn't work worth a damn.
Once again - from Yin and Yang, a largely ethical profession like medicine will have unethical elements to it; medical experiments and things like abortion do present ethical dilemmas.
Conversely it is possible to be an ethical businessman or an ethical lawyer, and I do personally know examples of each. However it is extremely difficult to be an ethical business or legal practitioner who is very rich - I don't know either of those. All of the wildly successful people in both of those fields that I know are unethical. I am sure that there are exceptions to those observations - somewhere there are successful businessmen and lawyers who are ethical - I have just never met any.
What you are doing is hoping to discredit the truth of what I said by pointing out those Yin and Yang exceptions.
That sort of tactic only works if the people reading these comments believe that we live in a black and white non Yin and Yang world. In the past such techniques were successful: people didn't realize that Yin and Yang is how the universe works - but as Western minds wake up to reality - tactics like yours will be less and less successful.
I do understand Yin and Yang; there is an element of formal ethics study in largely ethical professions. I know that there is a 'code of ethics' for professional engineering; but that is something that lawyer and business types created so that the engineering profession would remain forever in its place as a sacrificial profession for the consumption of business men and the law.
It is not something that ethical engineers saw that they needed to impose on their unethical fellow engineers to clean up their profession. In addition, from Yin and Yang it is predictable that there would be unethical fields where there are no ethics classes available; crime comes to mind - nobody can take classes in 'criminal ethics'.
Formal stated ethics usually occur in 'Con job' professions like the law or business where it is important that people believe that the fields are ethical when they are not.
What they discovered was that up to 40 hours a week the amount of output was proportional to the number of hours worked. Beyond 40 hours that was true only for about 2 weeks. After two weeks the amount of work being done fell back to the 40 hour level - no matter how many hours were worked. All of the people working over time in the study thought they were doing more work - but when their production was measured it turned out that they were not.
Granted the study was of clerical workers - not programmers - but people are people. There may be statistical variation from one person to the next - but on the average 40 hours is the optimum time for most people. Yin and Yang qualification: mostly the results are true - but for some people they may be false.
In general most people working longer than 40 hour weeks are just kidding themselves - they really aren't getting much more useful work done than they would in a concentrated 40 hour week.
Work is more like a marathon than a 100 meter dash; it is not about brief sprints - it is about setting a pace than you can maintain for a long time. You can only sprint for so long - then you have to slow down to a long distance pace.
I would like to point out the the US was on the winning side in W.W.II and beat the Soviet Union to the moon - all on 40 hour work weeks. If you honestly believe your project is more pressing than either of those I suggest that maybe you are suffering from a lack of perspective.
Man bites dog is news - dog bites man is not. Meteors strikes that are air bursts - which a megaton range strike probably is - and which don't kill anybody are probably never reported to the media by the seismologists. I am sure that they see the effects - but they don't report them - any more than they report normal seismic events about the same size that do no damage - and there are a lot of those. Only part of the power of an airburst goes into shaking the ground - so there is a good chance that the seismologists may not even recognize them for what they are.
One megaton is a horrendous explosion: the Atomic bomb which killed 60,000 people and incinerated Hiroshima was 1/50th of a megaton; approximately 20 kilotons. The Hiroshima bomb had a circle of total destruction of with a radius of about 1 mile: anything within a mile of ground zero was pretty much demolished. A megaton explosion would do similar damage for a radius of about 3.6 miles. A one megaton hit on a major city would kill about half a million people.
There is some evidence that a Chinese city of about 10,000 was destroyed by a megaton range strike around AD 1490.
The most likely case is that you would be ignored by the government. I have reported far worse crimes and been utterly ignored. The basic rule is money and publicity buys enforcement. The FBI might take your complaint - but I doubt that it would be prosecuted. Good luck on the experiment - I would like to know how it turns out.
The point is that both inventions are in the public domain (the comb was back then, the xerox patent had already expired) and nobody is manufacturing them! It is not patent law which prevents them from doing so. I think most people understood that point.
The government can have patents assigned to them; if you invented a 'photon torpedo' or any other advanced weapon and tried to patent it - your application would be kept secret and the patent would be assigned to the government. Yes you would get paid for it - unless it involved nuclear power of some type - in which case you might be executed - as it is a capital crime to do any non authorized research which might lead to a nuclear weapon. (Don't yell at me - I didn't write the law - I'm just telling you about it.)
The only statement he could have made was what he did. Had the school authorities ignored his actions nobody would have ever heard of it outside of the school. As he said they made a martyr out of him. Most likely the school officials figured that they could get away with their actions without anyone outside of the school knowing about it. I am sure that right now they are busy kicking themselves; they are starting to discover that their actions have consequences.
Here is the motivation behind 'authorities' like these - stated so that everyone can understand why they act that way: We can't tell the difference between a trouble maker and a problem solver; they both rock the boat - so we suppress anything and anyone that threatens to change the status quo.
These sort of authorities would suspend Thomas Jefferson as 'disruptive' if he were reincarnated; "we won't put up with any more of these' inalienable rights' pamphlets young man."
Interesting: that would probably invalidate the NASA patent - which is probably a noot point - I am sure it has expired by now.
I was trying to say that a lack of patents held them back from bringing something to market - if patents didn't exist - I would never have brought the idea to them in the first place nor would most people. I am sure that there would be a few people who would innovate for the good of mankind: but I think the number of inventions would be way down.
Please don't interpret this as favoring software patents: I think they are wrong and counter productive: Yin and Yang again; I think hardware patents work, and software patents don't do what they are supposed to do. Part of the reason for patents is that they serve as a 'teaching tool'; they show future inventors how something is done. In software the source code itself serves to perform that function , and therein lies a major difference between the two.
Do I like Rambus: no - I think these guys are not the original inventors of the DDR section of their patents, I think they misappropriated them from JEDEC - and I think that there is a good chance they will lose in court on that if Micron can afford to fight them to the end. I don't like 'patent holding non-productive firms' like Rambus.
About your comb solution: To produce static you have to have two insulators in contact with each other which are in motion. The nickel plating is not an insulator - so no static is generated.
No, the voice array microphone they describe uses a DSP to evidently pick up sounds only in the preferred direction - canceling sounds that come from a different direction. The tech I was describing is a simple differential mic where one microphone is much closer to the mouth than the other, but both are about equally distant from the noise being produced.
In today's 'fast turn' circumstances I think a shorter time period is warranted.
I will leave it for everyone to judge who is arrogant - the words are there for anyone to read.
When I say that something is bad, I recognize that it has some good aspects. I'll give a couple of personal examples on how the lack of a patent stifled innovation.
Back in the early 1980's I made a trivial invention: a comb which wouldn't create static in your hair when you used it. It was a very simple invention; all you have to do is add a little conductive material such as graphite to the plastic in its molten state and the comb no longer will generate static.
I applied for a patent and took the invention to one of the major comb manufacturers in the states. They were very happy to see me and excited about the prospect of being able to get an exclusive license on the 'technology'; they could see that being able to advertise a "static free" comb would create a competitive advantage for them.
However, the patent office rejected my application (the interfering invention was a comb in a xerox copier - designed to drain off static charge from paper.) When this happened the comb manufacturer lost interest. What they said is that without a patent they would have no competitive advantage - as soon as they came out with their anti-static comb so would everyone else - so they weren't interested in producing the combs. While they might be an advantage to consumers they would be no advantage to the manufacturers without a patent, and to this day they don't exist in the marketplace.
The second example comes from a somewhat more advanced invention: a differential microphone which cancels out feedback problems in live music. The mic works by having to microphone elements wired in reverse phase - one closer to the mouth than the other. Feedback from a speaker is rejected as common mode noise while the voice comes through as a differential signal. NASA has this patented as an external noise cancellation microphone for space capsule use. However the same setup can be used for PA or live music and cancel out most feedback. The results are dramatic: minus feedback, microphone speaker combinations produce much less 'mechanical' sounds; the voice from the speaker sounds very lifelike.
I decided to forgo getting a patent; my earlier experience had cost me a lot of money and I wanted to do the right thing: I released the invention to a major microphone manufacturer - > placing it in the public domain . The results were the same as the comb: no patent - no manufacturer interest. Now 15 years later no one has seen a differential microphone on the market place because the manufacturers would not benefit from its existence - even though the public would.
I hope from these two examples that everyone will be able to see that as long as we live in a world with competing manufacturers of commercial products - that a lack of a patent can and does stifle effective innovation.