But this is NOT A PATENT FOR SOFTWARE. It's a patent for an "encoding apparatus".
It is not a patent for software - it's a patent for the software, combined with hardware, to create an information encoding apparatus.
It is a software patent, as the hardware is never specified. Software, by definition, runs on some sort of hardware. Software is a set of instructions for performing a task on a computer. You tell me where the RSA patent either A) specifies any particular physical device these instructions are to be run on, or B) which of their methods is not part of a set of instructions for performing public key encryption on a computing device. It's a freakin' mathematical formula, not a steam engine. It's SOFTWARE.
How is that different than a design combined with steel to make a tractor hitch?
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with this analogy. Steel is just a construction material. Construction materials aren't relevant to patents, even for tractor hitches. If anything, steel is equivalent to the hardware of the RSA patent. It doesn't matter whether a hitch is made of steel or titanium as far a a patent is concerned; likewise, it doesn't matter on what hardware you run the RSA public key algorithm-- you'd be violating their patent because of the software.
Where is this wrong?
OK, you dorks (you know who you are) need to stop postulating about the memory failures having to do with static electricity, martian dust, or lack of redundancy. This is JPL and (the one case of metric vs. standard aside) they thought of all the obvious stuff during the design stage. Do you really think they're slapping their foreheads and saying "the dust! we forgot about the dust!" over in the design lab? Get real, people.
these rovers should have at least 2 computers on board with each CPU+OS constantly checking the state of the other and being able to take over.
Two computers is never a good idea in cases like this. Either one computer, or 3+ computers, but not 2. Three computers lets you know which computer is bad via consensus: "unit 1 says unit 3 is bad; unit 2 and 3 say unit 3 is ok, and unit 1 is the one that's bad; logically, it's most likely unit 1 is bad". Two computers you don't know whether the reporting computer is erroneously diagnosing a problem in the other, or if the other is actually bad. One computer, well, it just works or doesn't!
Who would want a wireless *trackball*? You don't move the thing, and there's just no way for the cord to whack things.
I have my trackball mouse mounted to the arm of my chair. Wireless means I don't have to worry about tripping over the cord. My case is unusual though.
Why does every press release have to mention how they are doing it "better" than we Americans are...
The press release doesn't even mention the USA or NASA...
You must've not read all the way to the end. I quote the last paragraph:
Mrs Edelgard Bulmahn, German Minister for Research and Education, who is also chair of the ESA Council at Ministerial level, said at the press conference: "Europe can be proud of this mission: Mars Express is an enormous success for the European Space Programme. We rule! In your FACE, NASA! Your rover SUCKS! Who's laughing NOW!"
I think Marty McFly does. I mean, that was one heck of a power chord.
Wow. I think you are the first person on/. to use the phrase "power chord" and not be talking about a wire that plugs into the wall! Your perspicacity is applauded and you may now advance to the next level. (???)
If you have a useful point, make it, rather than insulting the qualifications of someone whose qualifications you do not know. The person who showed this to me was well aware of the subtleties. He did work out the math for this, taking into account the radiation curves of the actual sky (air, occasional clouds, etc) -- it worked just fine -- I just have neither the space to post it on Slashdot, nor the time to work it out again.
You said it yourself: "Problem is the guy who came up with this (and showed it to me) was a physicist and not a chemist, and had no idea how one would go about creating a material whose color was that well controlled". The chemistry of creating a perfectly absorbing [paint/coating/etc] is clearly nontrivial, otherwise one of the innumerable people with physics degrees would have capitalized on it. I wasn't being insulting, I was merely pointing out the difference between theoretical physics and real-world engineering as it was illustrated to me by a physicist. I'm not impugning the qualifications of your physicist friend-- I'm sure the physics are perfectly accurate.
This means that you can theoretically heat or cool a house with just a painted square on the roof a few square meters in area, if you could just create a material of the right color.
Problem is the guy who came up with this (and showed it to me) was a physicist and not a chemist, and had no idea how one would go about creating a material whose color was that well controlled.
I am reminded of what my college physics instructor told us the first week of class. He said (paraphrasing) 'never mistake a physics problem for real life. Real life never happens at 0 degrees K or STP; at 0G (or 1G for ballistics) in a perfect vaccuum. While working problems you may think you've stumbled upon a better way to store electricity or move heat that nobody else has noticed and get overly enthusiastic about the financial prospects of your discovery. Don't bother. You're not going to make any earth shattering discoveries in first-year Physics. '
So preface everything your physicist friend said with "in a vaccuum," and you'll see the problem with the plan.
this auction on Ebay is selling a 4-6 Cubic inch chunk of Aerogel with a "Buy it Now" price of $160. Considering the auction says it costs about $200 per cubic inch to make, thats a deal.
Heh. Whoever bought it got taken to the cleaners. It deosn't cost $200/in^2 (~=$12/cc); it's more like $16/in^2. It looks to me like the guy marked it up %1000, as the nominal cost in 1 liter quantities is $1 per cc and there are ~16cc per in^2.
aerogel costs about $1 per cc in 1 litre quantities. Since 6 cubic inches is 98.322384 cc, $160 seems a little over priced.
So you're paying about $1.60/cc to buy it in units of one-tenth of a liter.
Actually, there are about 16 cubic centimeters in a cubic inch. These jokers are marking the stuff up tenfold, charging $10/cc, not $1.60. Not such a great deal.
Look around, despite the endless criticism of the past are we any better off than we were 50 or 100 years ago? Not if you really look at the real tangible results of our civilization. Everything built in the post war world is crap. We don't build any great new public works projects, design any great cities. Our houses are made of pine wood and plywood, they will barely last a half century let alone hundreds of years
Hmmm....so you're saying that nothing built in the last 50 years has become a 100+ year old [historical landmark/cultural icon/etc]? Nothing is valued for its longevity until it has existed long enough to have longevity. Do you really think building materials are worse now than before? What are you using as evidence of that? That there are crappy buildings built recently, but no crappy buildings from more than ~75 years ago? Is that perhaps because (gasp) only the good buildings last? You seriously need to develop a better perspective than your 2 decades of awareness has thusfar afforded you.
Apart from a minor role in Dune, I challenge you to honestly name one thing that you'd seen Patrick Stewart in before TNG.
Well, "Excalibur" springs to mind-- he played Leondegrance-- but your point is still valid because that covers about all he'd been in that anyone would have seen.
One solution would be to get a removable IDE bay, and hardwire a switch to the power cable to it so you can safely power off before swapping drives in/out.
Pretty much all removable drive enclosures have this already. The key lock that keeps the drive from being yanked out is also the power switch.
Sure you have simulators which people use for training - but those are incredibly expensive incredibly specialized pieces of equipment. Real life pilots aren't using MS flight simulator to get their licenses. And this war game stuff sure doesn't sound like anything more than Everquest set in a modern day war zone.
It isn't a replacement for real-world training, it's in addition to it. Your argument is bizarre and unrealistic.
Thats one of the reasons I think AR (Augmented Reality) is cool. Its not the same as VR simply because you are still in your environment.
And you can add extra soldiers and people around whom you can shoot/fight with and whatever.
I really wonder why this is not as widespread as VR.
Overlaying synthesized graphics on the real world is very, very difficult. Keeping the fake soldiers aligned with the real world when the soldier is whipping his head around looking for someone; knowing where real-world walls and trees are in order to display/not display/partially display fake soldiers; knowing if a synthetic soldier is hit when a real soldier shoots at him; etc. Too much to keep track of.
wouldn't let people drive for about an hour or two after they'd been in the VR because people often drove in very odd ways...I don't know exactly, but stories like that give me a very, very bad feeling about extending the use of simulator based training even further. it might not be VR, but I won't be surprised if the problems are similar.
The psychological effects are so subtle, but potentially so important.
The effects don't last long enough to be a problem. There will always be a period of several hours, days, or even weeks between when a soldier uses the simulator and when he goes into combat. When I went to Panama in '89 with the 7th Light Infantry it was on very short notice and it was a day and a half from "go" till we finally got into a HMMWV to drive into Panama City.
I think we might do much, much better investing these resources in better real-world training for troops than sims.
There's not a whole lot they can do to make current real-world training much better without making it truly dangerous. Besides, it's not like they're replacing field training exercises with a computer sim.
What's the difference between a geek with a perfectly normal rectuma and a geek with a disatrously distended rectum?
One had a lawyer to defend him after he was busted by Constitution-shredding RIAA private investigators after forgetting to load PeerGuardian while he downloaded the Complete Led Zeppelin off Suprnova, and the other one didn't.
The fact that having a lawyer is often necessary does not in any way make lawyers good.
As to the argument that "if the laws weren't so messed up, then the RIAA goons couldn't come after me" I'd ask/. collectively, when was the last time those of you who live in democracies voted? Do you vote eagerly? Do you wake up (in the US) on Primary Tuesdays and cast a vote so you won't be stuck with party candidates you hate?
Cripes, man, what are you talking about? If I vote, which lawyer (most politicians are lawyers) should I vote for? The entire root of the problem is that lawyers have been allowed to make law. Voting is a sham. It's a way for us citizens/children to make token gestures and claim "look Mommy, I'm helping!"
Corporations control America today not because the American system is broken, but because people bitch and bitch and bitch but aren't willing to do the hard work necessary to make sure the system does what it's supposed to. You wouldn't fill your car's gas tank up with water, right? And you wouldn't use a 10-year-old rubber band in place of a bike chain? You wouldn't build your beach house out of sand, would you?
That paragraph doesn't even make sense. Are you saying people are stupid and therefore shouldn't complain, or that complaining about bad laws is like a sand beach house?
You forget that abusive plaintiff's lawyers (the ones you're really griping about) only survive because the system is currently so chaotic and broken that they're able to make loads of money working the nooks and crannies of the broken system, just
So the voters' continually elect lawyers to write law, and it's the voters who shoulder all the blame because they should know better than to elect lawyers?
People make lawyer jokes, and they're funny, I suppose. But just remember something someone who was in prison after having a crappy court-appointed lawyer lose his case for him told me: the only lawyer you ever wished you could have is the one you realized you needed after a lifetime telling yourself they weren't wanted.
People make lawyer jokes because such a huge percentage of lawyers are scum. The law is a parasite on society. It's an arbitrary game of devised by an intellectually inbred subculture that has, by virtue of their power, made themselves necessary. Necessary is not the same thing as good. Lawyers are a necessary evil, and little else.
Drifting totally OT here, but I heard they don't have mechanical safety inspections out there, only smog inspections.
Cars don't decay in California like they do in New York-- mostly due to the lack of snow/salt rotting our cars-- so there's really very few cars on the road with serious impending mechanical problems. Mechanical inspections are a crock anyway. There's always someone, somewhere who'll find a way to get you that sticker. Then again, smog testing is just as stupid.
in streetlights? Does that make any sense to anyone? Considering that most street lights are meant to snap off their bases if enough force is applied to them, it just doesn't seem like the ideal location for that type of hardware.
Makes sense to me. They're high in the air over the road already, there's power there, and there's so damn many of them that the loss of one won't take down the whole system. It's perfect, in a technical sense.
Ok, here is one mirror, though I don't know about the bandwidth supply on it, so be careful:
Careful? As in "don't click the link too hard"? "Don't let your browser load the page too fast"? A teeming collective mass of idiots* (slashdot) is incapable of being careful.
* I know we're not all idiots individually. en masse we are the equivalent of one very large, distributed idiot.
Slashdot Mirror
It is a software patent, as the hardware is never specified. Software, by definition, runs on some sort of hardware. Software is a set of instructions for performing a task on a computer. You tell me where the RSA patent either A) specifies any particular physical device these instructions are to be run on, or B) which of their methods is not part of a set of instructions for performing public key encryption on a computing device. It's a freakin' mathematical formula, not a steam engine. It's SOFTWARE.
How is that different than a design combined with steel to make a tractor hitch?
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with this analogy. Steel is just a construction material. Construction materials aren't relevant to patents, even for tractor hitches. If anything, steel is equivalent to the hardware of the RSA patent. It doesn't matter whether a hitch is made of steel or titanium as far a a patent is concerned; likewise, it doesn't matter on what hardware you run the RSA public key algorithm-- you'd be violating their patent because of the software. Where is this wrong?
I'm going to spell perspex "perpsex" from now on. It seems more fitting, particularly in reference to lame case mods!
OK, you dorks (you know who you are) need to stop postulating about the memory failures having to do with static electricity, martian dust, or lack of redundancy. This is JPL and (the one case of metric vs. standard aside) they thought of all the obvious stuff during the design stage. Do you really think they're slapping their foreheads and saying "the dust! we forgot about the dust!" over in the design lab? Get real, people.
Two computers is never a good idea in cases like this. Either one computer, or 3+ computers, but not 2. Three computers lets you know which computer is bad via consensus: "unit 1 says unit 3 is bad; unit 2 and 3 say unit 3 is ok, and unit 1 is the one that's bad; logically, it's most likely unit 1 is bad". Two computers you don't know whether the reporting computer is erroneously diagnosing a problem in the other, or if the other is actually bad. One computer, well, it just works or doesn't!
I have my trackball mouse mounted to the arm of my chair. Wireless means I don't have to worry about tripping over the cord. My case is unusual though.
The patent must be for software, and not for the resulting machine. Does even one single example exist?
RSA public key cryptosystem. U.S. patent #4,405,829, issued 20 Sep 1983. Happy now?
The press release doesn't even mention the USA or NASA...
You must've not read all the way to the end. I quote the last paragraph:
Mrs Edelgard Bulmahn, German Minister for Research and Education, who is also chair of the ESA Council at Ministerial level, said at the press conference: "Europe can be proud of this mission: Mars Express is an enormous success for the European Space Programme. We rule! In your FACE, NASA! Your rover SUCKS! Who's laughing NOW!"
Wow. I think you are the first person on /. to use the phrase "power chord" and not be talking about a wire that plugs into the wall! Your perspicacity is applauded and you may now advance to the next level. (???)
Better for who? High concentrations of oxygen are bad for plants.
You said it yourself: "Problem is the guy who came up with this (and showed it to me) was a physicist and not a chemist, and had no idea how one would go about creating a material whose color was that well controlled". The chemistry of creating a perfectly absorbing [paint/coating/etc] is clearly nontrivial, otherwise one of the innumerable people with physics degrees would have capitalized on it. I wasn't being insulting, I was merely pointing out the difference between theoretical physics and real-world engineering as it was illustrated to me by a physicist. I'm not impugning the qualifications of your physicist friend-- I'm sure the physics are perfectly accurate.
Christ, man, what's your problem?
You mean your father is lobbier than anybody else?
I should change my sig to that.
Problem is the guy who came up with this (and showed it to me) was a physicist and not a chemist, and had no idea how one would go about creating a material whose color was that well controlled.
I am reminded of what my college physics instructor told us the first week of class. He said (paraphrasing) 'never mistake a physics problem for real life. Real life never happens at 0 degrees K or STP; at 0G (or 1G for ballistics) in a perfect vaccuum. While working problems you may think you've stumbled upon a better way to store electricity or move heat that nobody else has noticed and get overly enthusiastic about the financial prospects of your discovery. Don't bother. You're not going to make any earth shattering discoveries in first-year Physics. '
So preface everything your physicist friend said with "in a vaccuum," and you'll see the problem with the plan.
Heh. Whoever bought it got taken to the cleaners. It deosn't cost $200/in^2 (~=$12/cc); it's more like $16/in^2. It looks to me like the guy marked it up %1000, as the nominal cost in 1 liter quantities is $1 per cc and there are ~16cc per in^2.
So you're paying about $1.60/cc to buy it in units of one-tenth of a liter.
Actually, there are about 16 cubic centimeters in a cubic inch. These jokers are marking the stuff up tenfold, charging $10/cc, not $1.60. Not such a great deal.
Yeah, gotta get me an Agonizer. Those were rad. In some ways, ST:TOS totally rulez.
Hmmm....so you're saying that nothing built in the last 50 years has become a 100+ year old [historical landmark/cultural icon/etc]? Nothing is valued for its longevity until it has existed long enough to have longevity. Do you really think building materials are worse now than before? What are you using as evidence of that? That there are crappy buildings built recently, but no crappy buildings from more than ~75 years ago? Is that perhaps because (gasp) only the good buildings last? You seriously need to develop a better perspective than your 2 decades of awareness has thusfar afforded you.
Pfff....kids....
Well, "Excalibur" springs to mind-- he played Leondegrance-- but your point is still valid because that covers about all he'd been in that anyone would have seen.
Pretty much all removable drive enclosures have this already. The key lock that keeps the drive from being yanked out is also the power switch.
It isn't a replacement for real-world training, it's in addition to it. Your argument is bizarre and unrealistic.
Overlaying synthesized graphics on the real world is very, very difficult. Keeping the fake soldiers aligned with the real world when the soldier is whipping his head around looking for someone; knowing where real-world walls and trees are in order to display/not display/partially display fake soldiers; knowing if a synthetic soldier is hit when a real soldier shoots at him; etc. Too much to keep track of.
The effects don't last long enough to be a problem. There will always be a period of several hours, days, or even weeks between when a soldier uses the simulator and when he goes into combat. When I went to Panama in '89 with the 7th Light Infantry it was on very short notice and it was a day and a half from "go" till we finally got into a HMMWV to drive into Panama City.
I think we might do much, much better investing these resources in better real-world training for troops than sims.
There's not a whole lot they can do to make current real-world training much better without making it truly dangerous. Besides, it's not like they're replacing field training exercises with a computer sim.
The fact that having a lawyer is often necessary does not in any way make lawyers good.
As to the argument that "if the laws weren't so messed up, then the RIAA goons couldn't come after me" I'd ask /. collectively, when was the last time those of you who live in democracies voted? Do you vote eagerly? Do you wake up (in the US) on Primary Tuesdays and cast a vote so you won't be stuck with party candidates you hate?
Cripes, man, what are you talking about? If I vote, which lawyer (most politicians are lawyers) should I vote for? The entire root of the problem is that lawyers have been allowed to make law. Voting is a sham. It's a way for us citizens/children to make token gestures and claim "look Mommy, I'm helping!"
Corporations control America today not because the American system is broken, but because people bitch and bitch and bitch but aren't willing to do the hard work necessary to make sure the system does what it's supposed to. You wouldn't fill your car's gas tank up with water, right? And you wouldn't use a 10-year-old rubber band in place of a bike chain? You wouldn't build your beach house out of sand, would you?
That paragraph doesn't even make sense. Are you saying people are stupid and therefore shouldn't complain, or that complaining about bad laws is like a sand beach house?
You forget that abusive plaintiff's lawyers (the ones you're really griping about) only survive because the system is currently so chaotic and broken that they're able to make loads of money working the nooks and crannies of the broken system, just
So the voters' continually elect lawyers to write law, and it's the voters who shoulder all the blame because they should know better than to elect lawyers?
People make lawyer jokes, and they're funny, I suppose. But just remember something someone who was in prison after having a crappy court-appointed lawyer lose his case for him told me: the only lawyer you ever wished you could have is the one you realized you needed after a lifetime telling yourself they weren't wanted.
People make lawyer jokes because such a huge percentage of lawyers are scum. The law is a parasite on society. It's an arbitrary game of devised by an intellectually inbred subculture that has, by virtue of their power, made themselves necessary. Necessary is not the same thing as good. Lawyers are a necessary evil, and little else.
Cars don't decay in California like they do in New York-- mostly due to the lack of snow/salt rotting our cars-- so there's really very few cars on the road with serious impending mechanical problems. Mechanical inspections are a crock anyway. There's always someone, somewhere who'll find a way to get you that sticker. Then again, smog testing is just as stupid.
Makes sense to me. They're high in the air over the road already, there's power there, and there's so damn many of them that the loss of one won't take down the whole system. It's perfect, in a technical sense.
Careful? As in "don't click the link too hard"? "Don't let your browser load the page too fast"? A teeming collective mass of idiots* (slashdot) is incapable of being careful.
* I know we're not all idiots individually. en masse we are the equivalent of one very large, distributed idiot.