Such was the outpouring of inventions in the late nineteeth century that in 1899 Charles Duell resigned as head of the patent office, declaring that "everything that can be invented has been invented."29 From Made in America by Bill Bryson.
Cute! That's ranks up there with Monty Python's three sided albulm. (One side of the record had a double groove. Depending on where the needle dropped, you got one of two seperate plays.)
*sigh* I'm going to have to explain needles and spiral mechanically encoded records aren't I? Well bugger off you young punks!
Hurmph. I remember "format" programs for the Atari ST that would format 720k floppies to over one meg. Of course, after track 82 or so, the head just kept banging into the end-stop out to track "99"!
The idiots believed the reported stats without ever actually trying to store (and retrieve) a meg on the floppy.
As for the hole punch, I never needed extra storage that badly. (Although you could turn a 720k floppy into a 1.44M floppy with a little work.)
14 years ago, I designed the hardware and software for some LED display signs. I used a Dallas Semiconductor chip for time/date which rolled over from year 99 to 00.
Now I probably incorporated protection against problems, but after 14 years who can remember exactly. (And I doubt I ever actually tested that code.)
I think I still have a copy of the code on 5 1/4" floppy somewhere. Does the company I worked at have a copy? Who can say?
Now I admit that LED signs aren't exactly "critical" applications -- Or are they? Shortly after I left, the company built the traffic control display signs for the 401 highway here in Toronto. If no one checked and tested before hand, the code to handle roll over would have been live-tested on the highway at 00:00 01/01/00.
I still don't get how Rambus claims they "innovate" anything.. stealing ideas from JEDEC or patenting obvious extensions to existing technology isn't innovation, it's patent-shopping at it's finest. It disturbs me to this day that Rambus' website has the claim "We never stop innovating.".
Ah! You don't understand--that's the motto of their legal department!:^)
Re:Maybe you should read about the Patent King
on
Magnet Patent Suits
·
· Score: 1
I love (hate really) the way he kept stringing out the patent process so that he could include someone else's work when they finally invented it -- and when there was money to be made!
That guy wasn't an inventor, he was an anti-inventor! He stole from the people who actually did the hard work and sweat. Grrr!
I'm sick of reading how company X managed to hoodwink the USTPO and get a patent on "tires, rubber".
Oddly enough, Goodyear's patent on rubber didn't do him any good. He spent many years and all his money (and family and friend's money) developing vulcanized rubber, and then didn't make dime one from the people that simply stole the idea and used it. (The Goodyear company has no relationship to him. The owners just liked the name and stole that too.)
Patents in general are a good idea. We just have to get them to stop issuing bloody stupid patents.
I think Charles Sheffield did a later story with a real terrorist attack, involving EVA between buckets on the beanstalk. (Transfering between down and up streams.)
I'm pretty sure it was in one of the incarnations of Jim Baen's Destinies/New Destinies/Far Frontiers book magazine, but I can't find the copy at the moment.
Do you remember that David Brin had two space needles in his first book, "Sundiver"?
Those were't "beanstalks", but large hollow towers that poked up a LOT of miles, and were pressurized inside. They floated spacecraft/cargo up and down the inside with balloons, as I recall. Starting 50 miles higher would save a lot of fuel, and reduce the environmental impact on the atmosphere.
Caribbean? Sorry, it has to be on the equator. (Hmm, maybe not if you want a leaning tower--the far end would have to be south of the equator, I think. I suspect there'd be some very ugly math involved.)
The biggest problem faced is who controls it? The country that builds this thing will have an ENORMOUS advantage over every other nation.
For starters, it'll have to built on the equator. That'll cause a few political problems right away.
As for safety, if it fails, a lot it is going to be coming down at better than 7 miles per second--a large-scale "crack the whip" around the world. One solution in the event of failure might be to immediately blow the base, and hope that any impact by the freewheeling tower is relatively "gentle".
There's unlikely to be a ball of flame with hydrogen peroxide fuel -- although 90% peroxide can be touchy stuff. (All those oxygen molecules held in bondage, yearning to be free.) He could be savagely bleached!
And a fall from 32 miles won't generate much reentry heat.
Flipping over is quite possible since his pendulum guidance isn't stable.
What about guidance systems? The thrust will come out at the top of the rocket. An early American pioneer Robert Goddard did the same thing with his early test rockets. The rocket should "hang down" from the thrust like a pendulum. Since he is going straight up in the middle of a large desert there is no need for precise guidance. All he needs is a throttle.
Wasn't there an article on Slashdot (or a link) on Goddard's birthday showing that pendulum guidance just doesn't work?
But with Internet access, you could add lots of features to the pacemaker: Like pager functions with a vibration mode. Possibly audio could managed if the heart could be modulated fast enough.
This could cause a quandry to the warning about turning off pagers in movies, meetings and court rooms.
If you want fun, take an infrared laser (or high-power IR laser diode), modulate it with the control codes for most TV/CD/VCR/stereo remotes for on, play and max volume, then spray the side of a handy apartment building.
Judge the results by the number of lights that turn on at 3am.
Don't try this at home -- try it on someone else's home.
And if you want to be really scarey, light up a whole country from orbit. All your remote controls are belong to us!
Slashdot Mirror
So you're saying that it's wrong to hack the census forms?
Oh please allow Scientologists to fill out their religion on census forms. It'll point out that their UFO religion does not have 8 million+ members.
Not that a UFO religion is a bad thing. The Raelians are open and honest about what they believe in.
I just filled out my Canadian census. Guess what I filled in for religion... (It was either Jedi or Zen-Baptist.)
Such was the outpouring of inventions in the late nineteeth century that in 1899 Charles Duell resigned as head of the patent office, declaring that "everything that can be invented has been invented."29 From Made in America by Bill Bryson.
29 Economist, April 13, 1991, p.83.
Cute! That's ranks up there with Monty Python's three sided albulm. (One side of the record had a double groove. Depending on where the needle dropped, you got one of two seperate plays.)
*sigh* I'm going to have to explain needles and spiral mechanically encoded records aren't I? Well bugger off you young punks!
Yeah, it was Sony. Inches still seems odd, but I wouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.
Beware of gifts bearing greeks!
Hurmph. I remember "format" programs for the Atari ST that would format 720k floppies to over one meg. Of course, after track 82 or so, the head just kept banging into the end-stop out to track "99"!
The idiots believed the reported stats without ever actually trying to store (and retrieve) a meg on the floppy.
As for the hole punch, I never needed extra storage that badly. (Although you could turn a 720k floppy into a 1.44M floppy with a little work.)
Didn't a director of the US patent office resign in the 1890's because "there is nothing left to invent"?
I could provide references to this but...
Out of Caffine Error, Operator Halted!
Will they come with a sticker "Infinite Monkeys Inside"?
And if you watch the screen while it's running, will this collapse the computer's state and break it?
14 years ago, I designed the hardware and software for some LED display signs. I used a Dallas Semiconductor chip for time/date which rolled over from year 99 to 00.
Now I probably incorporated protection against problems, but after 14 years who can remember exactly. (And I doubt I ever actually tested that code.)
I think I still have a copy of the code on 5 1/4" floppy somewhere. Does the company I worked at have a copy? Who can say?
Now I admit that LED signs aren't exactly "critical" applications -- Or are they? Shortly after I left, the company built the traffic control display signs for the 401 highway here in Toronto. If no one checked and tested before hand, the code to handle roll over would have been live-tested on the highway at 00:00 01/01/00.
Sometimes probably okay isn't good enough.
I still don't get how Rambus claims they "innovate" anything.. stealing ideas from JEDEC or patenting obvious extensions to existing technology isn't innovation, it's patent-shopping at it's finest. It disturbs me to this day that Rambus' website has the claim "We never stop innovating.".
:^)
Ah! You don't understand--that's the motto of their legal department!
I love (hate really) the way he kept stringing out the patent process so that he could include someone else's work when they finally invented it -- and when there was money to be made!
That guy wasn't an inventor, he was an anti-inventor! He stole from the people who actually did the hard work and sweat. Grrr!
I'm sick of reading how company X managed to hoodwink the USTPO and get a patent on "tires, rubber".
Oddly enough, Goodyear's patent on rubber didn't do him any good. He spent many years and all his money (and family and friend's money) developing vulcanized rubber, and then didn't make dime one from the people that simply stole the idea and used it. (The Goodyear company has no relationship to him. The owners just liked the name and stole that too.)
Patents in general are a good idea. We just have to get them to stop issuing bloody stupid patents.
I think Charles Sheffield did a later story with a real terrorist attack, involving EVA between buckets on the beanstalk. (Transfering between down and up streams.)
I'm pretty sure it was in one of the incarnations of Jim Baen's Destinies/New Destinies/Far Frontiers book magazine, but I can't find the copy at the moment.
Do you remember that David Brin had two space needles in his first book, "Sundiver"?
Those were't "beanstalks", but large hollow towers that poked up a LOT of miles, and were pressurized inside. They floated spacecraft/cargo up and down the inside with balloons, as I recall. Starting 50 miles higher would save a lot of fuel, and reduce the environmental impact on the atmosphere.
Caribbean? Sorry, it has to be on the equator. (Hmm, maybe not if you want a leaning tower--the far end would have to be south of the equator, I think. I suspect there'd be some very ugly math involved.)
The biggest problem faced is who controls it? The country that builds this thing will have an ENORMOUS advantage over every other nation.
For starters, it'll have to built on the equator. That'll cause a few political problems right away.
As for safety, if it fails, a lot it is going to be coming down at better than 7 miles per second--a large-scale "crack the whip" around the world. One solution in the event of failure might be to immediately blow the base, and hope that any impact by the freewheeling tower is relatively "gentle".
You don't want to park it at L1--that's not a stable position. L4 and L5 are because anything that wanders away, gets pulled back by gravity.
Yup, here's the link to the explaination of why it doesn't work:
http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery/pendrock.html
If he gets off the ground, he's in for a very unfun F-ticket ride!
There's unlikely to be a ball of flame with hydrogen peroxide fuel -- although 90% peroxide can be touchy stuff. (All those oxygen molecules held in bondage, yearning to be free.) He could be savagely bleached!
And a fall from 32 miles won't generate much reentry heat.
Flipping over is quite possible since his pendulum guidance isn't stable.
What about guidance systems? The thrust will come out at the top of the rocket. An early American pioneer Robert Goddard did the same thing with his early test rockets. The rocket should "hang down" from the thrust like a pendulum. Since he is going straight up in the middle of a large desert there is no need for precise guidance. All he needs is a throttle.
Wasn't there an article on Slashdot (or a link) on Goddard's birthday showing that pendulum guidance just doesn't work?
I have a bad feeling about this...
But with Internet access, you could add lots of features to the pacemaker: Like pager functions with a vibration mode. Possibly audio could managed if the heart could be modulated fast enough.
This could cause a quandry to the warning about turning off pagers in movies, meetings and court rooms.
They'll pry my "Digital Duct-Tape" from my virtual hands when I'm dead!
(After all, it's really hard to remove.)
Here's a shot when the local Toronto Cthurch of $cientology thug comes to visit:
http://stalker.nx2000.net
If you want fun, take an infrared laser (or high-power IR laser diode), modulate it with the control codes for most TV/CD/VCR/stereo remotes for on, play and max volume, then spray the side of a handy apartment building.
Judge the results by the number of lights that turn on at 3am.
Don't try this at home -- try it on someone else's home.
And if you want to be really scarey, light up a whole country from orbit. All your remote controls are belong to us!