Patents exist solely to promote innovation. Or, more specifically, "science and the useful arts". There is plenty of evidence that traditional industrial patents do exactly that. There is very little evidence that software patents do so, and plenty of evidence that they stifle innovation.
This isn't about morals. It's about asking what bargain society wants to make with innovators, in order to promote innovation. The software patent bargain is helping neither society at large nor innovators. Making sure that the lawyers like it is not one of the goals here.
SparkFun sells a temperature-controlled iron perfectly suitable for general SMD work for $40. Sure, that's more than the cost of the computer, but I suspect it's less than computer + addon board. Yes, a good iron used to cost $150, but that's simple no longer true. (Sure, the $150 iron is somewhat better, but the $40 one can do 1.27mm gull wing packages just fine.)
It doesn't matter what the distribution is, or even that you know the distribution, provided that you can put a lower bound on the entropy. See the Turbid project papers for details. Turbid is a project that uses quantum resistor noise in ordinary sound cards to provide guaranteed entropy for cryptographic use (though at a relatively low bitrate).
You can also use resistor noise, a good amplifier, and an ADC to make moderately high bandwidth true quantum RNG. I priced out a simple design with a microcontroller on a USB key footprint; looked like $50-100 in prototype quantities, less in large quantities, for 10 KB/s output (or so). Getting the entropy is looked like the easy part; it then needed a fair bit of CPU power (by microcontroller standards) to hash that into usable bits.
You can also (with a lot more software work, and low bitrates) use the resistor noise present in audio input channels to good effect. Turbid is a project that does just that. Note that when evaluating such projects, the hard part is not getting the numbers, but proving that they have enough entropy, and that they've been properly processed to preserve it. Turbid does an excellent job on this important documentation step.
I think it should be legal. That doesn't mean I like it. I also think calling it opt-out is disingenuous at best. It's easy to put a password on my wifi; not so easy to disable the UIN on my phone. Suggesting I turn off the phone is the same as suggesting I turn off the wifi: it misses the whole point of having the phone or the wifi. The two cases, while similar, are not the same, and reasonable people can have opinions that depend on the details of a particular case, not simply the superficial similarities.
We can accelerate particles to near C, and then send them through matter at speeds faster than light would travel through said matter; see said article for some nice examples. If, as the OP suggests, c is actually slightly higher than the measured speed of light in a vacuum (in other words, vacuum has a refractive index > 1), then we should have plenty of examples of FTL particles from particle accelerators, not just some neutrinos.
If that were the case, we should be able to accelerate particles to faster than light speeds. There's nothing that prevents a particle from traveling above c in a material with an index of refraction > 1; see Cherenkov radiation.
Going fast at altitude doesn't make landings inherently difficult; you just need to slow down before you get there, which isn't usually that hard. For a couple examples of high-velocity manual piloting: Pete Knight flew an X-15 re-entry from over Mach 4 with no electrical power, no backup electrical power, and correspondingly no instruments. And Gordon Cooper flew a manual re-entry of a Mercury capsule from orbit:"So I used my wrist watch for time," he later recalled, "my eyeballs out the window for attitude. Then I fired my retrorockets at the right time and landed right by the carrier."
This cable is ridiculously long. There's a wide range between "really stiff and not flexible" and "infinitely stiff, or close enough that you don't have to worry about it", at least when it comes to space elevators. This pageseems to hit a few of the major points. There's plenty more out there.
Tolerance of micro-impacts is clearly required; you can't watch out for everything. But there's a significant amount of debris out there that is large enough you need to watch out for it. Your choices for handling it will tend to involve moving either the elevator or the debris; moving the elevator might turn out to be easier. Note that moving a tremendously stiff cable a distance of 10^-6 times its length is not that big a deal. The hard part is the dynamic stability control.
I think you underestimate the control problems inherent to very long, very flexible structures that need to move to avoid debris. It's a lot more like a machine than it looks at first glance.
If it costs $2700, that implies there's a fair bit of energy going into making it, whether directly or indirectly. If that's mostly labor costs, what do you think those employees do with that money?
Certainly there are greener and less green alternatives when looking at similar price points, but I don't see how spending 10x the amount on a bike could possibly be considered a "greener" alternative.
Most ideas don't pan out. This applies to patent-worthy, reasonably thought out ideas as well. Plenty of things look perfectly reasonable at the patent stage, but just don't quite work for one reason or another. This causes a problem for your idea: if I put in the effort to develop ten patents, all of them reasonable, and pursue them further, perhaps one or two or three will actually turn into a saleable, profitable product. If I can only recoup 1.5x my costs on those 3, and nothing on the others, I lose money.
Patents are, in general, a bet on an unlikely outcome. Much like startup companies. Most of them fail, too. In order to make that work, you need a possibility of a high return. Maybe not an astronomical return, but a high return. Of course, none of these comments are relevant to patent trolls and such, but the problem isn't quite as trivial as you suggest.
Why are SWAT teams raiding houses and kicking in doors at all for suspects who aren't believed to be armed and dangerous? There are plenty of ways to make mistakes, and a knock on the door with warrant in hand would have been as effective if they'd been right, and drastically reduced the trauma to innocent people if they were wrong.
Satellites naturally end up with modest densities, not super tightly packed (usually). Weight tends to be at more of a premium than space, especially when you have bulky things like solar panels and antennas involved. A few small, dense pieces might reach the ground, but that's not normally an issue. They'll be deorbited over the ocean, for starters, and the total mass reaching the ground is small.
We had a chem lab like that. Final lab in the honors chem class. 10 test tubes, each with unknown ionic solution. There was a list of possible cations and a list of possible anions. Oh, and be careful with the quantities, you only got one test tube worth. It was an excellent lab.
As others have mentioned, details vary from state to state within the US. (I have no idea about other countries; I assume there's a lot of variation.) I made myself a set of lockpicks; I know that you're correct where I live.
However, it's worth pointing out that "burglary tools" are just that — any tool used to commit burglary. That includes a screwdriver, if you use it to pry open a window. The only difference between lockpicks and a screwdriver or hammer is that the DA will have an easier time convincing the jury that lockpicks are burglary tools. (Also, the screwdriver example is completely real: I sat on a grand jury that indicted a man for precisely that. I don't know whether it went to trial or what happened, but I suspect the same basic thing.)
250Hz isn't high frequency; it's fairly low, as audio frequencies go. It's normally considered in the bass or low mid region. Wavelength will be > 1m in air, several times that in the materials making up the enclosure. Damping it out effectively and efficiently is not entirely trivial, though the obvious techniques like rubber mounts and the velcro you suggest will help a lot.
Huh? A 24" display with 1920x1200 resolution is a completely boring 100 dpi or so. 27" at 2560x1440 is only 110 dpi or so. A high resolution display would be more like 150 dpi, ideally more like 200 dpi. Any idea where I can get a display that's at least 2560x1440, and at least 150 dpi?
I'm not exactly doing that, though. I'm assuming that the data in each of those 2-month periods is drawn from a Poisson distribution. The precisely correct next step would then be to find the set of Poisson distributions consistent with that observation. (Analogous to the binomial distribution Clopper-Pearson interval; I don't remember the name when applied to a Poisson distribution.) For large n, this is well approximated by what I did: take the n given as the mean of a Poisson distribution and find the standard deviation of that interval.
Also, this isn't really a single data point: it's a single sampling interval, with many (either 244 or 177) data points in it. We're then taking statistics on the count. This is very different from something like measuring one person's height and then doing statistics by assuming their height is the average population height. For data of the sort we have, it is absolutely possible to show significance (or lack thereof) on a single sampling interval of this size. The important, unanswered, question is of course why the two intervals are different: that is, establishing causality.
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Patents exist solely to promote innovation. Or, more specifically, "science and the useful arts". There is plenty of evidence that traditional industrial patents do exactly that. There is very little evidence that software patents do so, and plenty of evidence that they stifle innovation.
This isn't about morals. It's about asking what bargain society wants to make with innovators, in order to promote innovation. The software patent bargain is helping neither society at large nor innovators. Making sure that the lawyers like it is not one of the goals here.
SparkFun sells a temperature-controlled iron perfectly suitable for general SMD work for $40. Sure, that's more than the cost of the computer, but I suspect it's less than computer + addon board. Yes, a good iron used to cost $150, but that's simple no longer true. (Sure, the $150 iron is somewhat better, but the $40 one can do 1.27mm gull wing packages just fine.)
It doesn't matter what the distribution is, or even that you know the distribution, provided that you can put a lower bound on the entropy. See the Turbid project papers for details. Turbid is a project that uses quantum resistor noise in ordinary sound cards to provide guaranteed entropy for cryptographic use (though at a relatively low bitrate).
You can also use resistor noise, a good amplifier, and an ADC to make moderately high bandwidth true quantum RNG. I priced out a simple design with a microcontroller on a USB key footprint; looked like $50-100 in prototype quantities, less in large quantities, for 10 KB/s output (or so). Getting the entropy is looked like the easy part; it then needed a fair bit of CPU power (by microcontroller standards) to hash that into usable bits.
You can also (with a lot more software work, and low bitrates) use the resistor noise present in audio input channels to good effect. Turbid is a project that does just that. Note that when evaluating such projects, the hard part is not getting the numbers, but proving that they have enough entropy, and that they've been properly processed to preserve it. Turbid does an excellent job on this important documentation step.
I think it should be legal. That doesn't mean I like it. I also think calling it opt-out is disingenuous at best. It's easy to put a password on my wifi; not so easy to disable the UIN on my phone. Suggesting I turn off the phone is the same as suggesting I turn off the wifi: it misses the whole point of having the phone or the wifi. The two cases, while similar, are not the same, and reasonable people can have opinions that depend on the details of a particular case, not simply the superficial similarities.
To end on a quip; protesting for the right to protest is like having sex for virginity.
Let me know when you find a better way of making new virgins.
It may not be the thrust of OWS, but it certainly is one of their major points. See The99PercentDeclaration, for example.
We can accelerate particles to near C, and then send them through matter at speeds faster than light would travel through said matter; see said article for some nice examples. If, as the OP suggests, c is actually slightly higher than the measured speed of light in a vacuum (in other words, vacuum has a refractive index > 1), then we should have plenty of examples of FTL particles from particle accelerators, not just some neutrinos.
If that were the case, we should be able to accelerate particles to faster than light speeds. There's nothing that prevents a particle from traveling above c in a material with an index of refraction > 1; see Cherenkov radiation.
Going fast at altitude doesn't make landings inherently difficult; you just need to slow down before you get there, which isn't usually that hard. For a couple examples of high-velocity manual piloting: Pete Knight flew an X-15 re-entry from over Mach 4 with no electrical power, no backup electrical power, and correspondingly no instruments. And Gordon Cooper flew a manual re-entry of a Mercury capsule from orbit:"So I used my wrist watch for time," he later recalled, "my eyeballs out the window for attitude. Then I fired my retrorockets at the right time and landed right by the carrier."
This cable is ridiculously long. There's a wide range between "really stiff and not flexible" and "infinitely stiff, or close enough that you don't have to worry about it", at least when it comes to space elevators. This pageseems to hit a few of the major points. There's plenty more out there.
Tolerance of micro-impacts is clearly required; you can't watch out for everything. But there's a significant amount of debris out there that is large enough you need to watch out for it. Your choices for handling it will tend to involve moving either the elevator or the debris; moving the elevator might turn out to be easier. Note that moving a tremendously stiff cable a distance of 10^-6 times its length is not that big a deal. The hard part is the dynamic stability control.
I think you underestimate the control problems inherent to very long, very flexible structures that need to move to avoid debris. It's a lot more like a machine than it looks at first glance.
If it costs $2700, that implies there's a fair bit of energy going into making it, whether directly or indirectly. If that's mostly labor costs, what do you think those employees do with that money?
Certainly there are greener and less green alternatives when looking at similar price points, but I don't see how spending 10x the amount on a bike could possibly be considered a "greener" alternative.
You also need to not be a particularly tempting fruit. See spear phishing, advanced persistent threats, Stuxnet, etc.
It may still be monolithic, but it's at least possible to switch and take your data with you. Not perfect, but a huge improvement.
Most ideas don't pan out. This applies to patent-worthy, reasonably thought out ideas as well. Plenty of things look perfectly reasonable at the patent stage, but just don't quite work for one reason or another. This causes a problem for your idea: if I put in the effort to develop ten patents, all of them reasonable, and pursue them further, perhaps one or two or three will actually turn into a saleable, profitable product. If I can only recoup 1.5x my costs on those 3, and nothing on the others, I lose money.
Patents are, in general, a bet on an unlikely outcome. Much like startup companies. Most of them fail, too. In order to make that work, you need a possibility of a high return. Maybe not an astronomical return, but a high return. Of course, none of these comments are relevant to patent trolls and such, but the problem isn't quite as trivial as you suggest.
Why are SWAT teams raiding houses and kicking in doors at all for suspects who aren't believed to be armed and dangerous? There are plenty of ways to make mistakes, and a knock on the door with warrant in hand would have been as effective if they'd been right, and drastically reduced the trauma to innocent people if they were wrong.
FYI, the Phillips screw is intended to cam out. It's a torque-limiting feature. Useful in some contexts, but mostly just annoying.
Satellites naturally end up with modest densities, not super tightly packed (usually). Weight tends to be at more of a premium than space, especially when you have bulky things like solar panels and antennas involved. A few small, dense pieces might reach the ground, but that's not normally an issue. They'll be deorbited over the ocean, for starters, and the total mass reaching the ground is small.
We had a chem lab like that. Final lab in the honors chem class. 10 test tubes, each with unknown ionic solution. There was a list of possible cations and a list of possible anions. Oh, and be careful with the quantities, you only got one test tube worth. It was an excellent lab.
Yes, yes we are.
As others have mentioned, details vary from state to state within the US. (I have no idea about other countries; I assume there's a lot of variation.) I made myself a set of lockpicks; I know that you're correct where I live.
However, it's worth pointing out that "burglary tools" are just that — any tool used to commit burglary. That includes a screwdriver, if you use it to pry open a window. The only difference between lockpicks and a screwdriver or hammer is that the DA will have an easier time convincing the jury that lockpicks are burglary tools. (Also, the screwdriver example is completely real: I sat on a grand jury that indicted a man for precisely that. I don't know whether it went to trial or what happened, but I suspect the same basic thing.)
250Hz isn't high frequency; it's fairly low, as audio frequencies go. It's normally considered in the bass or low mid region. Wavelength will be > 1m in air, several times that in the materials making up the enclosure. Damping it out effectively and efficiently is not entirely trivial, though the obvious techniques like rubber mounts and the velcro you suggest will help a lot.
Huh? A 24" display with 1920x1200 resolution is a completely boring 100 dpi or so. 27" at 2560x1440 is only 110 dpi or so. A high resolution display would be more like 150 dpi, ideally more like 200 dpi. Any idea where I can get a display that's at least 2560x1440, and at least 150 dpi?
I'm not exactly doing that, though. I'm assuming that the data in each of those 2-month periods is drawn from a Poisson distribution. The precisely correct next step would then be to find the set of Poisson distributions consistent with that observation. (Analogous to the binomial distribution Clopper-Pearson interval; I don't remember the name when applied to a Poisson distribution.) For large n, this is well approximated by what I did: take the n given as the mean of a Poisson distribution and find the standard deviation of that interval.
Also, this isn't really a single data point: it's a single sampling interval, with many (either 244 or 177) data points in it. We're then taking statistics on the count. This is very different from something like measuring one person's height and then doing statistics by assuming their height is the average population height. For data of the sort we have, it is absolutely possible to show significance (or lack thereof) on a single sampling interval of this size. The important, unanswered, question is of course why the two intervals are different: that is, establishing causality.