Plants that *didn't* decay - because there was a period of 80 million plus years before bacteria and fungus figured out how to digest the freshly-evolved cellulose.
Plants could be a solution, but it would require figuring out how to permanently increase global biomass - grasslands are supposed to be really good for that, which is why various groups are looking at ways to bring back massive buffalo herds, mastadons, and other megafauna that maintain healthy grasslands.
There's also the option of actually making new "coal" in the form of biochar - burn woody material in the absence of oxygen and it becomes charcoal rather than CO2, and charcoal doesn't decompose. You can then break that up and use it as a soil additive which acts as a "biocatalyst", increasing the fertility of soil without being consumed in the process. Doing that on a scale large enough to start fixing things though? You'd have to grow and charcoalify more than a ton of charcoal for every ton of fossil fuel extracted, and we're extracting over 7 billion tons of fossil carbon per year.
Yes they have - it's very a simple experiment that's been done to death. It's what started scientists being aware that there was a potential problem back in the days when "computer" was still a human occupation. Take two identical glass jars with thermometers in them, fill one with ambient air, add some extra CO2 to the other, seal them up, and put them under a lamp. The CO2-enriched jar will always warm faster, with the difference depending on just how much CO2 was added.
100% of solar radiation will eventually escape back to space - that's not a question or the whole planet would eventually melt. The question is how long the heat takes to escape, and what that does to the temperature. Every single molecule of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere slows that down slightly by absorbing outbound infrared heat photons and re-emitting them in a random direction - which means half the time they get sent back down to Earth. It's sort of like adding more blankets on a cold night: 100% of your body heat is still escaping into the room, but it's doing so more slowly, so the temperature of the blankets near you stays higher. Even tossing a single thin sheet on top of the pile will make you slightly warmer.
Meanwhile most atmospheric gasses like nitrogen (~78%), oxygen (~21%) and argon (~1%) are transparent to IR (heat) - it passes through them like they weren't there, so for the purposes of global warming they may as well not be there, they have no direct effect on heat retention. You may notice that those three alone add up to 100% - all the trace gasses combined amount to a rounding error, about 0.04%. But if it weren't for them, our planet would be a frozen ball of ice. And of the remaining trace gasses, CO2 accounts for 93.4%. It IS the stable greenhouse gas - double it, as we have, and we roughly double the number of blankets wrapped around the Earth.
Well, except for one other greenhouse gas: water. Water is where things get complicated. It's hard to measure, since its presence is constantly changing with the weather, but varies between about 0.001% and 5% (around 2% in your average rain cloud). It's the more active and unpredictable feedback system. But the average amount in the air remains fairly constant from year to year so long as the global temperature remains fairly constant. But as anyone who has lived by a large body of water can tell you - in general, the hotter it gets, the greater the absolute humidity becomes. So if global temperatures rise, the amount of water vapor in the air can be reasonably be assumed to increase a little as well, accelerating the heating. Of course water can also forms clouds, which reflect some of the incoming sunlight before it ever becomes heat, but also reflect heat leaving the ground much more effectively. So things get a lot more complicated.
> According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the world's volcanoes, both on land and undersea, generate about 200 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, while our automotive and industrial activities cause some 24 billion tons of CO2 emissions every year worldwide. https://www.scientificamerican...
That puts volcanoes' total annual contribution at less than 1% of the CO2 produced just by cars - which are themselves only 15% of man-made fossil CO2 emissions. So only 0.125% of human production.
Forest fires are a somewhat separate issue - globally they're estimated to release fully half as much CO2 as human fossil fuel consumption, but it's CO2 that was already in the ecological carbon cycle, which is immense but more-or-less stable (at least until temperatures tilt far enough that thawing permafrost, etc. starts releasing long-term eco-sequestered carbon). Fire's are primarily a problem when the land is then developed (construction or farming) rather than allowed to return to a similarly carbon-rich ecology so that the CO2 can be reabsorbed. Think of it as floating a water-pump fountain in a swimming pool - it circulates a lot of water, but it's all water that was already there' so the pool doesn't get any fuller. Fossil carbon is like turning on a much smaller garden hose - it's not much in comparison, but it's adding water that wasn't there before, so the water level begins to climb slowly but steadily.
>You won't believe the amount of shit you can display across four 27" screens of 1920x1080.
Less than you can across a single seamless 54" monitor of 3840x2160 - which gives you the same dpi but more flexibility of apportionment. Unless of course you have a particular use for a wide or tall layout.
You do make some excellent points - except for the macula bit. You can only actually see well enough to read easily in the fovea, an area covering only a couple degrees. The illusion of a wider range of such extreme visual acuity is due to mostly-subconscious visual saccades - you're moving your eyes constantly regardless, the trick is to arrange things so that in any immediate context you're generally only working on a small area. On a traditional desk you're usually only working on one 8.5x11 sheet of paper at any given moment - but that doesn't mean having a large desk to spread out on so everything is available at a glance doesn't bring benefits.
Besides, I grew up in the bad old days. Atari, Commodore 64, Doom at 320x240. A 15" 640x480 screen (53dpi) was a huge step up. A 40" screen was mostly indulging the inner child who dreamed of gaming on a BIG screen - and it served that role well. And to someone who grew up programming with 8-pixel high bitmapped fonts, the jaggies are tolerable in exchange for the sheer amount of code I can fit on one screen. Especially when using a font specifically designed for programming with small font sizes. Like I said, when I bought the thing, you couldn't buy a higher resolution 40" screen without winning the lottery. Heck, at $1000 on sale it was more than I could really afford, at least 4x more expensive than any previous monitor I had bought, and cheaper than most 30" monitors - pretty much all of which were still only 1080p anyway since this was in the Dark Times when CRTs had been abandoned, and LCD manufacture had fallen completely under these sway of the exploding HD TV market. I've been waiting ever since for advancing technology and a limited budget to intersect at a point where it makes sense to upgrade.
Oh, and as for CAD and the like - how much do you do where the presence or absence of jaggies makes a FUNCTIONAL difference? Yes, jaggies make everything less pretty, but except in rare regions of high complexity that doesn't actually interfere with workflow. Meanwhile the sheer amount of screen real estate allows me to maintain a considerably larger overview while working on features drawn at, say, a 1" physical size.
Yes, it was very much a conscious compromise. But as for not being able to complain - I say bull. Yes, I could have bought a smaller monitor, but that's just a different set of compromises, and I reserve the right to complain about having to compromise. Especially in the context of celebrating the beginning of the end of the need for such compromise.
I agree about permanent juries being a problem - but not necessarily that they should be paid substantially more than a criminal jury - when your number gets called, you go do your civic duty.
There's also no reason to make a legal case out of it - the validity of a patent is a purely technical issue, and such a jury should be assembled before the patent is actually granted. There is no "other side", or outside arguments to be considered - that all relates to whether a patent has been infringed, which should rightly be handled by the courts. They're only considering whether it's actually a valid patent, which depends exclusively on the content of the patent and the state of the art. Similarly, a "case" is unlikely to take exceptionally long since they're only determining whether the documented invention is actually non-obvious or not. It's probably going to be rare that a bunch of engineers skilled in the domain can't come to a consensus (or at least a supermajority) relatively quickly - especially when provided with all the relevant prior art the patent examiner could come up with.
I'd also say "invalid by reason of lack of clarity" should be an absolutely valid finding - patents are supposed to explain how to do something so that others can readily learn from it - that's the "currency" you pay to get exclusive rights to that design for a while. IF experts in the field can't clearly understand what you're talking about, you need to document it better. Legalese and obfuscation have no place in the process.
As for a presumption of validity - I'd like to agree, but that depends on the PTO not simply rubber stamping patents with a presumption that the courts will sort it out.
Nope - a TV is used for watching TV broadcasts. This one is used as an interface to my computers, and is therefore a monitor. The "TV" label on the box was only there to appeal to the larger mass-market.;-)
A company created a fake expert to fraudulently advance their agenda? What is the world coming to?
It's one thing to create a fake persona for marketing purposes, but to present them as a genuine expert to media outlets? That seems like it should be crossing some sort of legal line.
Or we could just demand the patent office actually DOES ITS JOB, instead of passing on all the expense to honest people who have to fight expensive legal battles against patent trolls with shoddy patents.
I mean, why else do we even HAVE a patent office? Why not just let anyone claim a patent on anything, and force every challenge through the courts?
Or, if you're really hung up on an open process - have a *technical* jury of experts through the patent office - after all the validity of a patent is a technical question, NOT a legal one. The courts are ill-suited to answer it, and the expense of any legal challenge to litigation entity or large corporation is immense, so any presumption of validity imposes huge costs on society. We could even make it part of the normal process- if an application isn't obviously valid or invalid, we assemble a jury of experts in the field to make the call.
Why not? An engineer is personally penalized if they put their stamp on a blueprint with design flaws - is a patent examiner really doing any less damage when they fail at doing *their* job?
Unfortunately, that's the kind of thinking that got us into the current situation - the patent office granted questionable patents under the assumption that "the courts will decide", and the courts presumed the validity of any patent the PTO granted.
And really - a jury is a TERRIBLE judge of patent validity - juries are filled with "everymen", individuals totally incompetent to judge the validity of a patent. The only way that could work well is if patent juries were filled with experts in the relevant domain - after all a patent is supposed to be non-obvious to "someone skilled in the art", not to "some schmuck off the street".
>For 8k monitors, the smallest practical size to see the benefit will be at about 70".
Bull. A 4k 40" monitor is the equivalent of a 2x2 seamless array of 20" 1080p monitors, and 1080p is a rather lousy resolution for a 20" monitor - you could get considerably better than that in the late 90s. It's only 110 dpi, you still clearly see the jaggies at arm's length. Even newsprint quality is 200 dpi, and magazine quality is typically 300dpi - or roughly equivalent to a hypothetical "12k" resolution on a 40" monitor.
Of course you have to adjust the UI settings to compensate, assuming they don't scale automatically to maintain a fixed physical size - but those are a tiny portion of what's visible on screen. At a given physical font height the quality will increase dramatically. Consider - your average paperback has an "M" height of less than 4mm - go ahead and try setting your font height to that on your monitor - it'll be much less pleasant to read. Why? Because the resolution (dpi) just isn't sufficient to avoid horrible rendering artifacts.
I'm not interested in increasing my desktop space - I currently have a 40" 1080p screen, and it's already almost too large. I'm still debating about going slightly smaller when I replace it.
What I want is higher resolution (dpi) at the same size - I already have fonts and everything else scaled to my desired physical size, I want them to render with fewer "jaggies", which makes an enormous difference in comfort when writing, programming, doing CAD work, etc. for extended periods. As it is, I've essentially got a 2x2 seamless 20" monitor setup, with each running at only 960x540 - it hearkens back to the early SVGA days.
A nice idea, if you could somehow make it come out of the PTO's budget. Or better yet, penalize the particular employee who inappropriately approved the patent. But bureaucracies rarely work that way, and such penalties tend to just come out of the federal general fund, which helps no-one.
Not to mention, the corollary would be that the patent holder should have to refund all the licensing fees they ever collected for it - and that's probably unrealistic if not completely impossible, especially for patent-trolling companies who generally don't have any real assets beyond their patents. You could liquidate the patents, but that would probably just drive them to set up a separate corporation for every patent.
Yep. And far be it from me to mock those wealthy cutting-edge enthusiasts for creating an initial market for things I'd like to someday have. 8k might not be an earth-shattering improvement for watching movies from the couch, but ~200dpi on a 46 inch computer monitor still leaves plenty of room for improvement.
Heck, it'd make for an awesome computer screen too. Might be a bit much for most current gaming hardware to drive, but by the time it becomes mainstream I doubt that'll be a problem. In the meantime, it means smoother fonts and crisper images. I'm right at the cusp of upgrading to 4k - they're finally making affordable 40" 4k TVs (about the largest screen I'd want at arm's length), I'm just waiting for the improvements to slow enough that I don't get buyer's remorse right away as next month's models significantly improves quality at the same price point.
But even a "small" 40" screen has visible pixels at arm's length, another doubling in dpi should push detail down below the obvious perceptual threshold. And of course if you're getting a bigger screen, which are increasingly popular, then you'll notice that 8k improvement even at larger distances.
Heck, even video will improve - you don't need higher resolution *content* to appreciate a higher resolution *screen* - all you need is a decent upscaling algorithm. I mean sure, even excellent upscaling isn't going to make a DVD look as good as Blue-Ray, but it can make it look a lot better than it did on a CRT.
Of course, even 4k is more detail than you really need for a movie unless you have a rather obscenely large TV, or like sitting quite close to it - but hey, video buffs need love too! And hey, it's not even like audio enthusiasts don't get anything for their money with those oxygen-free gold-plated audio cables. Sure, the sound is physically indistinguishable, but the placebo effect improves the subjective experience anyway.
Fair enough. But you still have to figure that ancient artifacts subjected to many thousands of times as much geologic damage are going to be more difficult to recognize as unusual in the first place.
Seems to me, claiming to have found a 20-million year old artifact could be a far more career-ending move than doing the field-work poorly. Plenty of archaeologists have been sidelined for far less controversial claims. And most people are far more interested in their careers than avoiding sin. Unless you happened across a substantial cache of artifacts, many still unexcavated to allow independent corroboration of your field work by someone reputable, even publicly documenting it as an improbable novelty is likely to get you derided for bad field work and outlandish speculation, if not outright fraud - a ghost that could haunt your career for years.
Heck, you scour the internet a bit you come across all sorts of "weird artifacts encased in stone" stories - pretty much all dismissed out of hand as kookery or fraud by experts - if the experts even deign to weigh in at all.
The greenhouse/icehouse terminology seems solid enough, and a good distinction between our planet's bistable states. But icehouse seems to be a synonym for ice-age: e.g. the many references to the Quaternary Ice Age, the Karoo Ice Age, and the other four known ice ages, and by your definition that implies at least mostly-permanent icecaps, does it not?
Obviously it would seem that glacial and interglacial periods are necessarily confined to within an icehouse period - you're not going to get significant glaciation if you can't even manage permanent icecaps. And equally obviously they'll be far more vaguely defined as they're due to much more subtle variations of climate - there is no fundamental bistable toggle, just arbitrary distinctions we draw for our own labeling conveninece. Much like red versus orange versus yellow - orange didn't even exist as a separate category a few centuries ago.
My question was simply - is it the permanent icecaps that distinguish an icehouse/iceage period, or is it the arrangement of continents that makes those icecaps more likely? To put it another way - if our current rampant burning of fossil carbon continues unabated long enough to actually cause a bistable inversion to a Greenhouse Earth state, would we still be considered to be in the Qauternary Ice Age? The continents wouldn't move noticeably, but it could still take millions of years for atmospheric carbon to be reabsorbed sufficiently for the cooling influence of constricted polar ocean currents to be able to re-establish permanent icecaps.
Well, at least if you want to keep it for more than a few years. But it doesn't change the fact that just because you were granted a patent doesn't mean it's actually valid. If you choose to keep renewing an invalid patent out of ignorance or malice, that's still your problem - no reason everyone else should suffer for it instead.
Language is democratic - a word means whatever most people thinks it means.
As for n***** - I really, really doubt it. If the vast majority of people decided to re-adopt such a hurtful word, it would be because they wish to be hurtful. In which case just as in the past, anyone protesting would just be labeled a n****-lover and receive similar violence unless/until they fell into line. You generally need a majority, or at least a prominent minority with violence on their side, to change such things.
Yep. And the Nintendo example is clearly an cracking. Cracking by hackers, to enable further hacking on hardware they supposedly own. But still cracking a security system.
Yep. And the only people who cared were the "good" hackers, while the media and general populace kept right on using "hacker" primarily for crackers.
So. Since the rest of the world refuses to adapt, maybe its time for those of us who enjoy "good" hacking to admit defeat and come up with a new word. "Makers" seems to be gathering momentum as a noun, but leaves much to be desired in verb form. Though of course "making" doesn't apply to the Nintendo example, which legitimately is an example of cracking security.
Still, at least "Makers find an unstoppable way hack any Nintendo switch" would at least give you better context.
Agreed. You pay to apply - there's no guarantee you'll be awarded the patent, and you don't pay any more if you are. Nor do you get a refund if it isn't.
Now, if you bought such a patent from someone else then you have paid for it. But perhaps you should have done more research to make sure it was a VALID patent first, instead of assuming that the patent office is infallible, or at least that any challengers would face such an expensive legal process that they'd rather let you fleece them than go through it. If you don't like it, take it up with whoever you bought the patent from.
Except NOTHING made of metal would survive. Probably nothing plastic. Fossilized wood artifacts might - but think of how rare it is for wood to be fossilized, and how much incredibly rarer wood artifacts are than trees.
And for more fossils, glass and other "stone" artifacts - we may already turn them up on a regular basis - but they're unlikely to be recognized. If you were a construction worker who found a chunk of "modern" ceramic while excavating, would you think "ancient pre-human civilization" or "I wonder how this junk got down here"? As for stone - heck, even if you were an archaeologist that stumbled across a dinosapien arrowhead in good enough shape to still be recognizeably an arrowhead of a totally unique style, would you think dinosapien, or would you think unknown human civilization? Or, in the absence of any others, "somebody must have been getting experimental"
Plus, if you're an archaeologist you're going to be looking in places where human artifacts are likely to be found, when the world was already much the same as it is today - not places that would have hosted civilizations millions of years older, when rivers, mountains, etc were all different.
Certainly artifacts could survive - the problem is that they'd be so distorted by time (think 10,000x the oldest human artifacts), that they probably wouldn't be recognizable as artifacts unless you were specifically looking for them. And even then it'd be iffy. Embed a glass or ceramic shard in sedimentary rock, and it just looks like more rock under casual observation, so you're not going to easily spot samples in the field. And glass especially flows under time, heat, and pressure, so the original shape would quite likely be lost over the course of millions or years.
Hewn wood would likely degrade to unrecognizability before it fossilized - all the detail that marks it as an artifact would be in the outer surface, which is the most likely to be lost. Plus, the conditions needed to fossilize a tool before it decays are rare enough that most would never make it.
Agricultural activity, or pretty much any disturbance of the surface, will almost certainly be weathered away completely long before it gets buried, with any remaining traces being distorted beyond recognition under the immense pressures of thousands of meters of sediment above it. And the excretement pile of an intelligent animal looks just like any other.
Arrowheads and other stone tools would probably be the most plentiful artifacts to find, for the same reason human-made ones are: the materials are durable on geologic time scales, so they'd mostly all still be around, and the stone age probably lasts for a VERY long time, so lots of artifacts accumulate. The hard part of course is spotting and recognizing a stone tool as something different than the rest of the stones around it in the sedimentary rock.
Really, that's the crux of the problem - not that we couldn't find artifacts if we looked hard enough, but that they'd generally look so much like naturally occurring objects that you could only tell the difference in the lab. And they'd be so uncommon that you'd need to look through literal tons of random samples to have a chance of finding even one.
If you've ever gone hunting for arrowheads or pottery shards you probably have a taste of the scope of the problem - depending on luck and location it likely takes you somewhere between hours and days to find one. Now imagine that instead of just spotting it against a backdrop of natural stones, you had to take EVERY stone your eyes slid across into the lab for analysis. Even if it only took a second or two per stone it would slow the process down by orders of magnitude.
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But it mostly does, as animals, fungus, and bacteria eat it and "burn" it for energy. Where do you think all the CO2 you exhale comes from?
Plants that *didn't* decay - because there was a period of 80 million plus years before bacteria and fungus figured out how to digest the freshly-evolved cellulose.
Plants could be a solution, but it would require figuring out how to permanently increase global biomass - grasslands are supposed to be really good for that, which is why various groups are looking at ways to bring back massive buffalo herds, mastadons, and other megafauna that maintain healthy grasslands.
There's also the option of actually making new "coal" in the form of biochar - burn woody material in the absence of oxygen and it becomes charcoal rather than CO2, and charcoal doesn't decompose. You can then break that up and use it as a soil additive which acts as a "biocatalyst", increasing the fertility of soil without being consumed in the process. Doing that on a scale large enough to start fixing things though? You'd have to grow and charcoalify more than a ton of charcoal for every ton of fossil fuel extracted, and we're extracting over 7 billion tons of fossil carbon per year.
Yes they have - it's very a simple experiment that's been done to death. It's what started scientists being aware that there was a potential problem back in the days when "computer" was still a human occupation. Take two identical glass jars with thermometers in them, fill one with ambient air, add some extra CO2 to the other, seal them up, and put them under a lamp. The CO2-enriched jar will always warm faster, with the difference depending on just how much CO2 was added.
100% of solar radiation will eventually escape back to space - that's not a question or the whole planet would eventually melt. The question is how long the heat takes to escape, and what that does to the temperature. Every single molecule of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere slows that down slightly by absorbing outbound infrared heat photons and re-emitting them in a random direction - which means half the time they get sent back down to Earth. It's sort of like adding more blankets on a cold night: 100% of your body heat is still escaping into the room, but it's doing so more slowly, so the temperature of the blankets near you stays higher. Even tossing a single thin sheet on top of the pile will make you slightly warmer.
Meanwhile most atmospheric gasses like nitrogen (~78%), oxygen (~21%) and argon (~1%) are transparent to IR (heat) - it passes through them like they weren't there, so for the purposes of global warming they may as well not be there, they have no direct effect on heat retention. You may notice that those three alone add up to 100% - all the trace gasses combined amount to a rounding error, about 0.04%. But if it weren't for them, our planet would be a frozen ball of ice. And of the remaining trace gasses, CO2 accounts for 93.4%. It IS the stable greenhouse gas - double it, as we have, and we roughly double the number of blankets wrapped around the Earth.
Well, except for one other greenhouse gas: water. Water is where things get complicated. It's hard to measure, since its presence is constantly changing with the weather, but varies between about 0.001% and 5% (around 2% in your average rain cloud). It's the more active and unpredictable feedback system. But the average amount in the air remains fairly constant from year to year so long as the global temperature remains fairly constant. But as anyone who has lived by a large body of water can tell you - in general, the hotter it gets, the greater the absolute humidity becomes. So if global temperatures rise, the amount of water vapor in the air can be reasonably be assumed to increase a little as well, accelerating the heating. Of course water can also forms clouds, which reflect some of the incoming sunlight before it ever becomes heat, but also reflect heat leaving the ground much more effectively. So things get a lot more complicated.
First Google result:
> According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the world's volcanoes, both on land and undersea, generate about 200 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, while our automotive and industrial activities cause some 24 billion tons of CO2 emissions every year worldwide.
https://www.scientificamerican...
That puts volcanoes' total annual contribution at less than 1% of the CO2 produced just by cars - which are themselves only 15% of man-made fossil CO2 emissions. So only 0.125% of human production.
Forest fires are a somewhat separate issue - globally they're estimated to release fully half as much CO2 as human fossil fuel consumption, but it's CO2 that was already in the ecological carbon cycle, which is immense but more-or-less stable (at least until temperatures tilt far enough that thawing permafrost, etc. starts releasing long-term eco-sequestered carbon). Fire's are primarily a problem when the land is then developed (construction or farming) rather than allowed to return to a similarly carbon-rich ecology so that the CO2 can be reabsorbed. Think of it as floating a water-pump fountain in a swimming pool - it circulates a lot of water, but it's all water that was already there' so the pool doesn't get any fuller. Fossil carbon is like turning on a much smaller garden hose - it's not much in comparison, but it's adding water that wasn't there before, so the water level begins to climb slowly but steadily.
>You won't believe the amount of shit you can display across four 27" screens of 1920x1080.
Less than you can across a single seamless 54" monitor of 3840x2160 - which gives you the same dpi but more flexibility of apportionment. Unless of course you have a particular use for a wide or tall layout.
You do make some excellent points - except for the macula bit. You can only actually see well enough to read easily in the fovea, an area covering only a couple degrees. The illusion of a wider range of such extreme visual acuity is due to mostly-subconscious visual saccades - you're moving your eyes constantly regardless, the trick is to arrange things so that in any immediate context you're generally only working on a small area. On a traditional desk you're usually only working on one 8.5x11 sheet of paper at any given moment - but that doesn't mean having a large desk to spread out on so everything is available at a glance doesn't bring benefits.
Besides, I grew up in the bad old days. Atari, Commodore 64, Doom at 320x240. A 15" 640x480 screen (53dpi) was a huge step up. A 40" screen was mostly indulging the inner child who dreamed of gaming on a BIG screen - and it served that role well. And to someone who grew up programming with 8-pixel high bitmapped fonts, the jaggies are tolerable in exchange for the sheer amount of code I can fit on one screen. Especially when using a font specifically designed for programming with small font sizes. Like I said, when I bought the thing, you couldn't buy a higher resolution 40" screen without winning the lottery. Heck, at $1000 on sale it was more than I could really afford, at least 4x more expensive than any previous monitor I had bought, and cheaper than most 30" monitors - pretty much all of which were still only 1080p anyway since this was in the Dark Times when CRTs had been abandoned, and LCD manufacture had fallen completely under these sway of the exploding HD TV market. I've been waiting ever since for advancing technology and a limited budget to intersect at a point where it makes sense to upgrade.
Oh, and as for CAD and the like - how much do you do where the presence or absence of jaggies makes a FUNCTIONAL difference? Yes, jaggies make everything less pretty, but except in rare regions of high complexity that doesn't actually interfere with workflow. Meanwhile the sheer amount of screen real estate allows me to maintain a considerably larger overview while working on features drawn at, say, a 1" physical size.
Yes, it was very much a conscious compromise. But as for not being able to complain - I say bull. Yes, I could have bought a smaller monitor, but that's just a different set of compromises, and I reserve the right to complain about having to compromise. Especially in the context of celebrating the beginning of the end of the need for such compromise.
I agree about permanent juries being a problem - but not necessarily that they should be paid substantially more than a criminal jury - when your number gets called, you go do your civic duty.
There's also no reason to make a legal case out of it - the validity of a patent is a purely technical issue, and such a jury should be assembled before the patent is actually granted. There is no "other side", or outside arguments to be considered - that all relates to whether a patent has been infringed, which should rightly be handled by the courts. They're only considering whether it's actually a valid patent, which depends exclusively on the content of the patent and the state of the art. Similarly, a "case" is unlikely to take exceptionally long since they're only determining whether the documented invention is actually non-obvious or not. It's probably going to be rare that a bunch of engineers skilled in the domain can't come to a consensus (or at least a supermajority) relatively quickly - especially when provided with all the relevant prior art the patent examiner could come up with.
I'd also say "invalid by reason of lack of clarity" should be an absolutely valid finding - patents are supposed to explain how to do something so that others can readily learn from it - that's the "currency" you pay to get exclusive rights to that design for a while. IF experts in the field can't clearly understand what you're talking about, you need to document it better. Legalese and obfuscation have no place in the process.
As for a presumption of validity - I'd like to agree, but that depends on the PTO not simply rubber stamping patents with a presumption that the courts will sort it out.
Nope - a TV is used for watching TV broadcasts. This one is used as an interface to my computers, and is therefore a monitor. The "TV" label on the box was only there to appeal to the larger mass-market. ;-)
A company created a fake expert to fraudulently advance their agenda? What is the world coming to?
It's one thing to create a fake persona for marketing purposes, but to present them as a genuine expert to media outlets? That seems like it should be crossing some sort of legal line.
Or we could just demand the patent office actually DOES ITS JOB, instead of passing on all the expense to honest people who have to fight expensive legal battles against patent trolls with shoddy patents.
I mean, why else do we even HAVE a patent office? Why not just let anyone claim a patent on anything, and force every challenge through the courts?
Or, if you're really hung up on an open process - have a *technical* jury of experts through the patent office - after all the validity of a patent is a technical question, NOT a legal one. The courts are ill-suited to answer it, and the expense of any legal challenge to litigation entity or large corporation is immense, so any presumption of validity imposes huge costs on society. We could even make it part of the normal process- if an application isn't obviously valid or invalid, we assemble a jury of experts in the field to make the call.
Why not? An engineer is personally penalized if they put their stamp on a blueprint with design flaws - is a patent examiner really doing any less damage when they fail at doing *their* job?
Unfortunately, that's the kind of thinking that got us into the current situation - the patent office granted questionable patents under the assumption that "the courts will decide", and the courts presumed the validity of any patent the PTO granted.
And really - a jury is a TERRIBLE judge of patent validity - juries are filled with "everymen", individuals totally incompetent to judge the validity of a patent. The only way that could work well is if patent juries were filled with experts in the relevant domain - after all a patent is supposed to be non-obvious to "someone skilled in the art", not to "some schmuck off the street".
>For 8k monitors, the smallest practical size to see the benefit will be at about 70".
Bull. A 4k 40" monitor is the equivalent of a 2x2 seamless array of 20" 1080p monitors, and 1080p is a rather lousy resolution for a 20" monitor - you could get considerably better than that in the late 90s. It's only 110 dpi, you still clearly see the jaggies at arm's length. Even newsprint quality is 200 dpi, and magazine quality is typically 300dpi - or roughly equivalent to a hypothetical "12k" resolution on a 40" monitor.
Of course you have to adjust the UI settings to compensate, assuming they don't scale automatically to maintain a fixed physical size - but those are a tiny portion of what's visible on screen. At a given physical font height the quality will increase dramatically. Consider - your average paperback has an "M" height of less than 4mm - go ahead and try setting your font height to that on your monitor - it'll be much less pleasant to read. Why? Because the resolution (dpi) just isn't sufficient to avoid horrible rendering artifacts.
I'm not interested in increasing my desktop space - I currently have a 40" 1080p screen, and it's already almost too large. I'm still debating about going slightly smaller when I replace it.
What I want is higher resolution (dpi) at the same size - I already have fonts and everything else scaled to my desired physical size, I want them to render with fewer "jaggies", which makes an enormous difference in comfort when writing, programming, doing CAD work, etc. for extended periods. As it is, I've essentially got a 2x2 seamless 20" monitor setup, with each running at only 960x540 - it hearkens back to the early SVGA days.
A nice idea, if you could somehow make it come out of the PTO's budget. Or better yet, penalize the particular employee who inappropriately approved the patent. But bureaucracies rarely work that way, and such penalties tend to just come out of the federal general fund, which helps no-one.
Not to mention, the corollary would be that the patent holder should have to refund all the licensing fees they ever collected for it - and that's probably unrealistic if not completely impossible, especially for patent-trolling companies who generally don't have any real assets beyond their patents. You could liquidate the patents, but that would probably just drive them to set up a separate corporation for every patent.
Yep. And far be it from me to mock those wealthy cutting-edge enthusiasts for creating an initial market for things I'd like to someday have. 8k might not be an earth-shattering improvement for watching movies from the couch, but ~200dpi on a 46 inch computer monitor still leaves plenty of room for improvement.
Heck, it'd make for an awesome computer screen too. Might be a bit much for most current gaming hardware to drive, but by the time it becomes mainstream I doubt that'll be a problem. In the meantime, it means smoother fonts and crisper images. I'm right at the cusp of upgrading to 4k - they're finally making affordable 40" 4k TVs (about the largest screen I'd want at arm's length), I'm just waiting for the improvements to slow enough that I don't get buyer's remorse right away as next month's models significantly improves quality at the same price point.
But even a "small" 40" screen has visible pixels at arm's length, another doubling in dpi should push detail down below the obvious perceptual threshold.
And of course if you're getting a bigger screen, which are increasingly popular, then you'll notice that 8k improvement even at larger distances.
Heck, even video will improve - you don't need higher resolution *content* to appreciate a higher resolution *screen* - all you need is a decent upscaling algorithm. I mean sure, even excellent upscaling isn't going to make a DVD look as good as Blue-Ray, but it can make it look a lot better than it did on a CRT.
Of course, even 4k is more detail than you really need for a movie unless you have a rather obscenely large TV, or like sitting quite close to it - but hey, video buffs need love too! And hey, it's not even like audio enthusiasts don't get anything for their money with those oxygen-free gold-plated audio cables. Sure, the sound is physically indistinguishable, but the placebo effect improves the subjective experience anyway.
Fair enough. But you still have to figure that ancient artifacts subjected to many thousands of times as much geologic damage are going to be more difficult to recognize as unusual in the first place.
Seems to me, claiming to have found a 20-million year old artifact could be a far more career-ending move than doing the field-work poorly. Plenty of archaeologists have been sidelined for far less controversial claims. And most people are far more interested in their careers than avoiding sin. Unless you happened across a substantial cache of artifacts, many still unexcavated to allow independent corroboration of your field work by someone reputable, even publicly documenting it as an improbable novelty is likely to get you derided for bad field work and outlandish speculation, if not outright fraud - a ghost that could haunt your career for years.
Heck, you scour the internet a bit you come across all sorts of "weird artifacts encased in stone" stories - pretty much all dismissed out of hand as kookery or fraud by experts - if the experts even deign to weigh in at all.
The greenhouse/icehouse terminology seems solid enough, and a good distinction between our planet's bistable states. But icehouse seems to be a synonym for ice-age: e.g. the many references to the Quaternary Ice Age, the Karoo Ice Age, and the other four known ice ages, and by your definition that implies at least mostly-permanent icecaps, does it not?
Obviously it would seem that glacial and interglacial periods are necessarily confined to within an icehouse period - you're not going to get significant glaciation if you can't even manage permanent icecaps. And equally obviously they'll be far more vaguely defined as they're due to much more subtle variations of climate - there is no fundamental bistable toggle, just arbitrary distinctions we draw for our own labeling conveninece. Much like red versus orange versus yellow - orange didn't even exist as a separate category a few centuries ago.
My question was simply - is it the permanent icecaps that distinguish an icehouse/iceage period, or is it the arrangement of continents that makes those icecaps more likely? To put it another way - if our current rampant burning of fossil carbon continues unabated long enough to actually cause a bistable inversion to a Greenhouse Earth state, would we still be considered to be in the Qauternary Ice Age? The continents wouldn't move noticeably, but it could still take millions of years for atmospheric carbon to be reabsorbed sufficiently for the cooling influence of constricted polar ocean currents to be able to re-establish permanent icecaps.
Well, at least if you want to keep it for more than a few years. But it doesn't change the fact that just because you were granted a patent doesn't mean it's actually valid. If you choose to keep renewing an invalid patent out of ignorance or malice, that's still your problem - no reason everyone else should suffer for it instead.
Language is democratic - a word means whatever most people thinks it means.
As for n***** - I really, really doubt it. If the vast majority of people decided to re-adopt such a hurtful word, it would be because they wish to be hurtful. In which case just as in the past, anyone protesting would just be labeled a n****-lover and receive similar violence unless/until they fell into line. You generally need a majority, or at least a prominent minority with violence on their side, to change such things.
Yep. And the Nintendo example is clearly an cracking. Cracking by hackers, to enable further hacking on hardware they supposedly own. But still cracking a security system.
Yep. And the only people who cared were the "good" hackers, while the media and general populace kept right on using "hacker" primarily for crackers.
So. Since the rest of the world refuses to adapt, maybe its time for those of us who enjoy "good" hacking to admit defeat and come up with a new word. "Makers" seems to be gathering momentum as a noun, but leaves much to be desired in verb form. Though of course "making" doesn't apply to the Nintendo example, which legitimately is an example of cracking security.
Still, at least "Makers find an unstoppable way hack any Nintendo switch" would at least give you better context.
Agreed. You pay to apply - there's no guarantee you'll be awarded the patent, and you don't pay any more if you are. Nor do you get a refund if it isn't.
Now, if you bought such a patent from someone else then you have paid for it. But perhaps you should have done more research to make sure it was a VALID patent first, instead of assuming that the patent office is infallible, or at least that any challengers would face such an expensive legal process that they'd rather let you fleece them than go through it. If you don't like it, take it up with whoever you bought the patent from.
Except NOTHING made of metal would survive. Probably nothing plastic. Fossilized wood artifacts might - but think of how rare it is for wood to be fossilized, and how much incredibly rarer wood artifacts are than trees.
And for more fossils, glass and other "stone" artifacts - we may already turn them up on a regular basis - but they're unlikely to be recognized. If you were a construction worker who found a chunk of "modern" ceramic while excavating, would you think "ancient pre-human civilization" or "I wonder how this junk got down here"? As for stone - heck, even if you were an archaeologist that stumbled across a dinosapien arrowhead in good enough shape to still be recognizeably an arrowhead of a totally unique style, would you think dinosapien, or would you think unknown human civilization? Or, in the absence of any others, "somebody must have been getting experimental"
Plus, if you're an archaeologist you're going to be looking in places where human artifacts are likely to be found, when the world was already much the same as it is today - not places that would have hosted civilizations millions of years older, when rivers, mountains, etc were all different.
Certainly artifacts could survive - the problem is that they'd be so distorted by time (think 10,000x the oldest human artifacts), that they probably wouldn't be recognizable as artifacts unless you were specifically looking for them. And even then it'd be iffy. Embed a glass or ceramic shard in sedimentary rock, and it just looks like more rock under casual observation, so you're not going to easily spot samples in the field. And glass especially flows under time, heat, and pressure, so the original shape would quite likely be lost over the course of millions or years.
Hewn wood would likely degrade to unrecognizability before it fossilized - all the detail that marks it as an artifact would be in the outer surface, which is the most likely to be lost. Plus, the conditions needed to fossilize a tool before it decays are rare enough that most would never make it.
Agricultural activity, or pretty much any disturbance of the surface, will almost certainly be weathered away completely long before it gets buried, with any remaining traces being distorted beyond recognition under the immense pressures of thousands of meters of sediment above it. And the excretement pile of an intelligent animal looks just like any other.
Arrowheads and other stone tools would probably be the most plentiful artifacts to find, for the same reason human-made ones are: the materials are durable on geologic time scales, so they'd mostly all still be around, and the stone age probably lasts for a VERY long time, so lots of artifacts accumulate. The hard part of course is spotting and recognizing a stone tool as something different than the rest of the stones around it in the sedimentary rock.
Really, that's the crux of the problem - not that we couldn't find artifacts if we looked hard enough, but that they'd generally look so much like naturally occurring objects that you could only tell the difference in the lab. And they'd be so uncommon that you'd need to look through literal tons of random samples to have a chance of finding even one.
If you've ever gone hunting for arrowheads or pottery shards you probably have a taste of the scope of the problem - depending on luck and location it likely takes you somewhere between hours and days to find one. Now imagine that instead of just spotting it against a backdrop of natural stones, you had to take EVERY stone your eyes slid across into the lab for analysis. Even if it only took a second or two per stone it would slow the process down by orders of magnitude.