I have to say that many people on/. are quick to jump on the anti-patent bagwagon. What you have to realize is that it's necessary in the business world. Often patents are used just to solidify positions when attempting financing, etc
I have to say that many people on/. are quick to jump on the anti-crack cocaine bagwagon. What you have to realize is that it's necessary in the business world. Often profits from crack cocaine are used just to solidify positions when attempting financing, etc.
There is no excuse for committing perjury and civil fraud which is what a frivolous patent application is.
As a VC I would not be impressed by a business plan that amounted to no more than exploiting a frivolous patent. Filling a defensive patent to prevent someone else from filling is a different matter entirely. However the problem with those applications is that they are used to justify the USPTO scheme since they measure the 'success' of the system by the number of patents filled.
It is no surprise that most people on slashdot have a dim view of patents in general. The utter incompetence of the USPTO means that even genuine patents are hard to enforce. The typical response to a patent claim is for the corporation concerned to flip the bird at the owner. Most patents issued in the Internet space are completely bogus and border on outright fraud. So why take much notice of the constant stream of demands for payment?
There is also a massive amount of prior art in the VRML standard. The VRML mailing list had extensive discussions on the issues between 1994 and 1996. The alleged inventors were probablyon the list.
Another interesting source that may well invalidate the claim is Niel Stephenson's 'Snowcrash'. We can probably prove that the alleged inventors read the book.
I vote for the private perjury prosecution against the persons listed as inventors and the assignees.
Just find the spot in pi that contains a string of numbers that can represent the file. It's gotta be in there somewhere.
First off it would be better to choose a pseudo-random sequence that is easier to generate, something like RC4 which is designed to run fast.
Secondly the index into the random stream would increase with the number of bits, so there might be a section of Pi that met the criteria, chances are that it would be a very large number of bits out.
There is however a possible approach that is arguably not cheating. Chances are that the person setting the challenge did not generate a perfect random stream. If they are generating megabytes of the stuff they are most likely using some pseudorandom number generator to do so.
Cryptanalysing the input stream to identify the source could well reveal the random number generator. This would not be a cheat in my opinion.
Of course the person setting the challenge could have done the job properly as I did for a one time pad system once. What I did there was to hook up a microphone, record a reasonably random source (a loudish fan) and sampled at 16 bits. Then after determining that the ergodicity of the source was at least 4 bits per byte I ran blocks of 1K of data through a modified version of MD5 to remove any bias in the input stream.
Publically avaliable prior art: the [Harvest] distributed Internet search system, programmed in 1994, and still freely available for download, compilation and use today, includes exactly what is claimed here. (Related to Zeinfeld's work?)
I had forgot how Harvest worked, I suspect that the number of like cases is very large.
I have prior art for the specific first patent claim sent to the www-talk mailing list in 1994.
The HTTP protocol itself has had Jeff Moghul's cahce optimization protocol in it since at least 1996.
It is yet another bogus patent. Time to use the proposal I made of issuing a civil action for perjury against people making fraudulent patent claims. I suspect that approach would cut down on the number of bogus applications.
No it wasn't. AT&T was the direct descendant of the Bell system. Bell was *the* phone company for decades.
If you are going to be pedantic, at least get it right before you correct others. According to the oficial history of American Telegraph and Telephone:
AT&T's roots stretch back to 1875 with founder Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone. During the 19th century, AT&T became the parent company of the Bell System, the American telephone monopoly.
It is not surprising that people get confused between the Bell System and AT&T since AT&T was the holding company for the Bell system as well as the long distance arm since being founded in 1885.
Besides which the correction was entirely irelevant to the point made.
The United States government accepted the idea that AT&T be a monopoly utility initially in a 1913 agreement known as the Kingsbury Commitment. As part of this agreement, AT&T agreed to connect non-competing independent telephone companies to its network and divest its controlling interest in Western Union telegraph.
The key phrase being 'non competing'. That in effect meant that the vast majority of operators were frozen out since they were 'competing' against Bell system companies. If the Bell system offered a customer service there was no obligation to interconnect a rival telco even if they were already established.
No one on a different phone company could talk to a person on another phone company's system.
Then the FCC stepped in and created standards, and mandated interconnection.
No they didn't. AT&T was established as a regulated monopoly. There could have been an FCC mandated interoperability but there was not and we got the monopoly instead.
Zeinfeld may be right about the causes of the Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island accidents. Maybe the Russians had only 2D codes, but my memory is that the US had been using 3D codes for some time.
You remember doing 3D simulations? Or you remember being fed the propaganda?
Most reactors in use today were designed in the 60s or late 70s. The computing power to do 3D simulations simply did not exist, either in the USSR or the US.
All accidents look ridiculous after the fact.
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If I recall right, Chernobyl blew up not because of incomplete simulation, but because boneheaded operators flouted well-known reactor physics.
There was more than one factor. However the comfortable myth that the explosion was caused by operator error is just that - a self serving myth. The operator's actions caused the meltdown however those actions were within the operating proceedures of the plant.
The cause of the explosion was that the reactor had an unknown region of positive feedback. That in turn was due to the simulations of the reactor being pretty rudimentary. At the time the standard approach was to simulate in 2D and then extrapolate using experimental data to 3D.
It's the incredible, abject, deep stupidity of the bottom 1% of nuclear plant workers.
Placing the blame on the shift crew is a good way to pretend that the problems could not occur in the US. That is why the US and British nuclear lobbies were pushing the 'operator error' theory long before there was any evidence that might support it.
I was finally convinced of this truism by the insanely stupid people in Japan, who made their own critical assembly out of dissolved uranium (by doubling the uranium batch size for faster processing)
The Japanese event was caused by management who ordered the workers to mix the stuff by hand in buckets rather than use the expensive machinery installed for that exact purpose. It was the plant management that decided that using the machinery took too long.
It appears that it was the workers who had the bright idea of mixing the stuff in double quantities.
Firstly, it is South Africa doing the immediate development and deployment, not the US.
Well perhaps you don't know but lots of US researchers including MIT have been working on pebble bed.
The magazine article is pretty far off base. I was not commenting on it because I didn't think it merited it. Fissile Uranium is the most highly controlled mineral arround. The idea that folk are suddenly going to be able to buy it by the sack full in Home Depot is plain stupid. Pebble bed reactors are certainly cheaper than light water but they are nowhere near as small and simple as the article makes out.
The other piece of data that had been raised in the discussion but you appear to be ignorant of is that Bush has been advocating building nuclear plants.
Only thing is that Bush is not pushing for the intrinsically safe designs. He wants to build more light water stations.
I am not particularly keen on SA building nuclear stations either. Their government is also headed by a scientific ignoramous who has convinced himself that HIV does not cause AIDS after listening to a discredited quack [apparently there is also a dose of wishful thinking since the President would prefer not to pay for AIDS drugs even at the low prices the sucessful patent suit make possible]. On top of that, the super powers built intrinsically faulty designs because Nuclear Power became part of what we nuclear physicists call a dick size contest. The US built nuclear stations to show it could tame the destructive force of the atom, the design and construction schedules were dictated by propaganda needs. The USSR naturally had to follow suit and built even faster and with even more carelessness.
The situation is SA appears to me to be precisely the situation that lead to the first generation of Nuclear Power being a failure. It will be a political statement signalling the rise of a regional superpower.
The economics of the design almost certainly depend on selling copies of the design in the West. To assert that the US has no influence is to miss the point. The US will likely fund the scheme before it is finished.
There are governments that might be capable of handling nuclear power responsibly. If the Blair government said new nuclear power was necessary that would be pretty credible. However given that their exisiting nuclear capacity costs three times as much to run as the coal fired and the fact that the UK has 400 years of coal reserves the chance of the UK being forced to go nuclear is vanishingly small.
Boss, if you think any politician, with the possible exception of Nader, is not in the pocket of the energy companies, I have an infinite series of cliches for you.
I doubt that big oil is too unhappy with the contribution from Mr Nader. I think that the Anwar oil field should be named after him.
While most politicians are slaves to the contributors most do actually take some time to come up with a policy that is marginally defensible. Bush appears to believe that all scientific evidence of harmful environmental effects is produced by liberal crypto-communists who are members of a giant conspiracy against capitalism.
I don't think that even US politicians would knowingly permit an unsafe nuclear plant to be built. Bush has made it plain that he only wants to hear scientific advice that supports his policies.
That is exactly the type of politics that rightly got nuclear power derailed in the first place. The Canadians built safe designs. But both the US and the USSR built unsafe designs. Challenging the nuclear establishment in either country meant the end of your career. They even destroyed Oppenheimer.
None too likely, in the first place Uranium is pretty common, the reason the core of this planet is molten is the uranium decaying inside heating things up.
Nothing is as unreliable as statements of mineral reserves.
That said, probably the best use for fission power is as a short term stopgap until fusion can be made to work.
Now this is just what the world needs. Giant stockpiles of U-235. How long do you think before somebody steals some of it?
Actually the pebble reactors don't need very much in the way of enrichment, one of the main attractions of the design sice the less energy required for enrichment the better off you are.
The idea of Mr Fission is plain silly, the main obstacle preventing whackos making atom bombs is the difficulty of finding the fissile material.
Depleted Uranium on the other hand is pretty damn usefull stuff. It is a heavy metal and is pretty much as bad to mess about with as mercury. It is a solid at room temperature but thin chips of it will spontaneously combust in air. Oh and there is usually quite a bit of residual radiation but not so much that folk need to get paranoid.
There is a hefty chunk of depleted uranium in the nose of every 747. It is used for ballast to trim the aircraft.
I am currently working on a Battlebot with an outer shell of depleted uranium. I checked in the rules and it is not prohibited. Completely pointless (DU is pretty soft) but should psyche out some of the competition. Alternatively maybe we could go for carborundum or perhaps synthetic saphire like my watch has.
I suspect that reviving nuclear power in the US is something that no Republican president can pull off
Only Nixon could go to China
I agree, I think that the only way that Nuclear power can be revived in any form is under a President who is not so openly disdainful of science and environmentalists.
Forgive me if I misconstrued your statement, but Three Mile Island is by Harrisburg, PA in Southern PA (the area I live in). Manhattan is roughly 150 miles away (not large on a Global scale, but somewhere like Philadelphia would have been a greater concern)
Evacuating Philadelphia is probably possible in a short time, Manhattan is next to impossible. The idea of building any plant of that type next to the tri-state area is pretty whacky.
The Chernobyl fallout pretty much trashed cities 200 miles away. The real issue is the way the wind happens to be blowing at the time.
Who's the fucking asshole who moderated that as flamebait??? Must be one of those fuckin' republicans
The sad fact of nuclear power is that it is probably possible to do the job safely but it is easier to say that safety is number one priority than to make it number one priority.
Unfortunately there are many with the attitude that everyone who thinks there might be a problem with Nuclear power must be a tree hugger. If the people making the decisions and regulating Nuclear Power have that attitude we are likely to have a repeat of the 1960s - plants built in locations they should never have been using recycled military designs that were completely inapropriate.
The folk telling the President to build nuclear stations are probably the same ones who are claiming that Nuclear Missile Defense is viable.
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A nuclear reactor can not explode. A modern nuclear reactor can't even melt down.
And your expertise that qualifies you to make such a statement is?
I have a degree in Nuclear Physics. Any light water or Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor is essentially a bomb waiting to go off that the operator hopes to keep just under the critical point.
As for 'modern', go have a look at a real nuclear station. Most of the technology is out of the 1960s or earlier. There hasn't been a new station started since three mile island.
Somewhere along the line I picked up a degree in Nuclear Physics. It is somewhat bogus since the research I did was in particle physics, the behavior of atoms being pretty well known experimentally these days.
The big problem for nuclear power is that the Nuclear power industry has lied and lied and lied. It is no wonder that the public don't trust nuclear power, they would be morons if they did.
The only reason Chernobyl went up and Three Mile Island did not is luck. Both reactors were designed using inadequate computing power. Chernobyl went critical because there was a region of positive feedback in the operation cycle that was not uncovered using the two dimensional simulation techniques used in both the USSR and the US at the time.
If the west was so smart in its nuclear power strategy Three Mile Island would never have been choosen as a site with Manhattan right next door.
The problem today is that having lied about the costs, the safety and the military use of byproducts the civil nuclear industry is going to have a hard time being trusted even if it is proposing an entirely different technology.
Pebble bed and Heavy Water designs are both intrinsically safe technologies that will 'fail safe' in case of failure. Unfortunately the nuclear industry claimed that the intrinsically unstable and dangerous AGR and light water designs were 'fail safe'.
The backers of pebble bed have a point. However having been lied to the public is entirely rational in not trusting the experts again. The idiot in the Whitehouse is certainly not someone I would trust to ensure that safety standards were enforced. The administration has reneged on pledges to not drill off the coast of Florida and to implement C02 emissions caps, arsenic in drinking water is OK. And that is the crew to be trusted to regulate nuclear power?
We may need to start using Nuclear Power in the future, however I think we can wait another four years for a President who is not in the pocket of the energy companies before we let that genie out of the bottle again.
1 Most companies lose money on the hardware and recoup the money by charging for the games. This is not Microsoft's plan.
2Micsoft's principal concern is strategic, if the playstation becomes the internet appliace then it becomes a platform competitor.
3The Xbox will probably sell to retailers at about $220. That is probably enough to meet cost of manufacture. The reason Microsoft will make a net loss in the initial years is the enormous amount of advertising they plan.
All in all the X-Box is a good thing for the video games sector. The marketing tactics of Sega, Sony et. al. are more scumbagish than anything Microsoft has ever been accused of. Produce a game for Sega and they demand a royalty from you of $10 for access to their platform.
Microsoft is not playing to win here, they are playing to disrupt the industry and break an incumbent monopoly. Putting Linux on Xbox would not upset Microsoft one little bit
The server farm idea is cute but idiotic. The cost of hardware is only part of the cost of a server farm. By the time X-box comes out $300 will not be the sweat spot of price performance. A dedicated design would be much easier to install and maintain.
Contrary to the DMA's claims, opt-in works fine in Europe. The costs claim is utterly false. There is no difference in cost maintaining an opt-in database over an opt-out database. The reason the DMA hates the idea of opt-in is because most people would not opt-in and their business would crash.
Lost profits do not equal 'costs'. What the DMA calls costs are in fact lost profits.
The idea of opt-in requiring more direct mail is another deliberate falsehood. In Europe there is a box to tick on the original sign up, leave it blank and you are opted out. When the privacy directive came into force there was a long phase in period. The idea opt-in would generate more mail is a deliberate lie.
All 'opt-in' amounts to is attaching an implicit provision to every consumer contract that stipulates that the information provided is confidential.
In Europe the banks and credit card companies keep their customer's balances and purchases secret. They consider themselves to be under the same duty of secrecy as a lawyer. In the US this information is considered fair game to sell to anyone the bank chooses.
Most successful dotcom companies have made an issue of protecting their customer's privacy.
The only reason why the US is resisting European style privacy laws is the vast quantity of campaign bribes. Once privacy becomes an issue however the Congress types won't stay bribed and compete against each other to pass the most draconian privacy bill and claim ownership of the issue.
huh? Billion dollar business? What business? Napster didn't charge for anything and ads, as we all know, are a joke. I suppose it's possible that they thought they might one day become a billion dollar business, but I don't think they ever really thought about how they might get there.
Some of the most undereported documents are the ideas Napster had to 'monetize the userbase'. They were all at least as clueless as the ideas the RIAA have had.
Basically Napster would become a clone of AOL, a stiff monthly fee plus lots of intrusive pop up ads.
I agree that the ideas were stupid and Napster never had a chance of succeeding. However they told the billions of dolars story to their VC who evidently bought it.
In the future, every single one of these players may have SDMI
I don't think so. In the first place the SDMI group is close to collapse. The autocratic manner in which Leonardo was operating was already anoying many at the only meeting I attended. In the second there is no leverage to prevent non-SDMI players being available.
The rip protected CDs piece is not part of SDMI. The idea is to encode the watermark into digitally downloaded music. Only authorized content could be downloaded onto a player.
However the powerful stuff being smoked by the SDMI crew mean that they might well have got even more grandiose delusions.
The CD patents will have mostly expired at this point, CD having been arround for 20 years. The DMCA does not require CD players to adopt SDMI and the chances of new legislation are much smaller than two years ago.
In addition CD players are practically obsolete, as is the concept of a physical medium. There will be no replacement for CD, it will become a distribution medium only. Home hifi will work off a central mediastore with multiple player devices all giving access to the same database of content over WiFi.
The idea of SDMI was that portable players would be configured to only download authorized rips and to not allow transfers out of the device.
It was a bogus idea from the start. In the first place the Diamond Rio case meant that there was no way to force players to be SDMI compliant. Secondly an SDMI compliant device could not be a recording device - digital dictaphones are to be illegal it appears. Thirdly the SDMI scheme devices would not be able to play standard MP3s, initially they would but this capability would be retrospectively disabled through a 'drop dead' code encoded in a CD.
So with SDMI the hardware manufacturers were to build devices that nobody would buy and would be deliberately broken at a time in the future of the RIAA's choice.
The SDMI effort has been pretty disorganized and chaotic from start to finish. I was at an SDMI conference in 1999 where the premise was that the scheme had to ship for Xmas 1999. Needless to say they missed.
The whole premise of SDMI is pretty funky, the idea is that the device manufacturers will spike their devices to protect the interests of the labels. This is a pretty forlorn hope since the consumer electronics companies bought up content companies to help them sell hardware. Sony and Philips have content divisions but they play thrid or fourth fiddle to the consumer electronics divisions.
For SDMI to succeed there must be no way to get a non SDMI player. That ain't going to happen. The other premise is that there must either be no way to rip a CD - a futile effort in itself or no more material will be released on CD.
The alleged rip protection for CDs on the street at the moment make use of widespread bugs in CDROM device drivers. An audio CD player that encounters an error makes a best effort attempt to continue. A CDROM driver will in many cases report an error and stop. This can be fixed by simply patching the driver to emulate CD Audio players - a process that was already in progress since users were complaining about lack of robustness when playing CDs.
Meanwhile the sales of CDs have actually started to decline for the first time ever. I suspect that this is not just the result of Napster. I suspect that the ultra aggressive tactics of the labels have discouraged many purchases.
I have no sympathy for the crooks running Napster, the idea you can build a billion dollar business helping people rip off everyone else in the music business is one extreeme of the debate. The other is the equally greed RIAA and DVD crew who want to use digital technology that is not up to the task to massively increase their profits. I have sat through presentations from DRM companies who claim that they will not only protect content, they will make higher profits possible through product placement, advertising, co-marketting and extortionate pay per view charges.
Between these poles I think that there is a rational middle ground. The type of rights enforcement technology the RIAA is insisting upon cannot work, as with DeCSS every player has to have the secret key.
I think that a digital download format with a watermark could work. But the detection software would have to be closely held and used only to identify individuals who were ripping lots of tracks and putting them onto the Internet. Their access to the download service would be cut off. Such a scheme would probably be as good a limit on piracy as can be obtained. There would be minimal incentive to break the watermark scheme since it would not prevent a person from listening to the pirate tracks, merely discouraging the piracy. The attackers could not know in any case whether their de-watermarking technology had succeeded. The distributors could deploy new schemes without prior notice.
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I have to say that many people on /. are quick to jump on the anti-crack cocaine bagwagon. What you have to realize is that it's necessary in the business world. Often profits from crack cocaine are used just to solidify positions when attempting financing, etc.
There is no excuse for committing perjury and civil fraud which is what a frivolous patent application is.
As a VC I would not be impressed by a business plan that amounted to no more than exploiting a frivolous patent. Filling a defensive patent to prevent someone else from filling is a different matter entirely. However the problem with those applications is that they are used to justify the USPTO scheme since they measure the 'success' of the system by the number of patents filled.
It is no surprise that most people on slashdot have a dim view of patents in general. The utter incompetence of the USPTO means that even genuine patents are hard to enforce. The typical response to a patent claim is for the corporation concerned to flip the bird at the owner. Most patents issued in the Internet space are completely bogus and border on outright fraud. So why take much notice of the constant stream of demands for payment?
Another interesting source that may well invalidate the claim is Niel Stephenson's 'Snowcrash'. We can probably prove that the alleged inventors read the book.
I vote for the private perjury prosecution against the persons listed as inventors and the assignees.
First off it would be better to choose a pseudo-random sequence that is easier to generate, something like RC4 which is designed to run fast.
Secondly the index into the random stream would increase with the number of bits, so there might be a section of Pi that met the criteria, chances are that it would be a very large number of bits out.
There is however a possible approach that is arguably not cheating. Chances are that the person setting the challenge did not generate a perfect random stream. If they are generating megabytes of the stuff they are most likely using some pseudorandom number generator to do so.
Cryptanalysing the input stream to identify the source could well reveal the random number generator. This would not be a cheat in my opinion.
Of course the person setting the challenge could have done the job properly as I did for a one time pad system once. What I did there was to hook up a microphone, record a reasonably random source (a loudish fan) and sampled at 16 bits. Then after determining that the ergodicity of the source was at least 4 bits per byte I ran blocks of 1K of data through a modified version of MD5 to remove any bias in the input stream.
I had forgot how Harvest worked, I suspect that the number of like cases is very large.
The HTTP protocol itself has had Jeff Moghul's cahce optimization protocol in it since at least 1996.
It is yet another bogus patent. Time to use the proposal I made of issuing a civil action for perjury against people making fraudulent patent claims. I suspect that approach would cut down on the number of bogus applications.
The idea of Bill Gates as playgirl centerfold is too disgusting to contemplate.
If you are going to be pedantic, at least get it right before you correct others. According to the oficial history of American Telegraph and Telephone:
AT&T's roots stretch back to 1875 with founder Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone. During the 19th century, AT&T became the parent company of the Bell System, the American telephone monopoly.
It is not surprising that people get confused between the Bell System and AT&T since AT&T was the holding company for the Bell system as well as the long distance arm since being founded in 1885.
Besides which the correction was entirely irelevant to the point made. The United States government accepted the idea that AT&T be a monopoly utility initially in a 1913 agreement known as the Kingsbury Commitment. As part of this agreement, AT&T agreed to connect non-competing independent telephone companies to its network and divest its controlling interest in Western Union telegraph.
The key phrase being 'non competing'. That in effect meant that the vast majority of operators were frozen out since they were 'competing' against Bell system companies. If the Bell system offered a customer service there was no obligation to interconnect a rival telco even if they were already established.
No they didn't. AT&T was established as a regulated monopoly. There could have been an FCC mandated interoperability but there was not and we got the monopoly instead.
You remember doing 3D simulations? Or you remember being fed the propaganda?
Most reactors in use today were designed in the 60s or late 70s. The computing power to do 3D simulations simply did not exist, either in the USSR or the US.
All accidents look ridiculous after the fact.
There was more than one factor. However the comfortable myth that the explosion was caused by operator error is just that - a self serving myth. The operator's actions caused the meltdown however those actions were within the operating proceedures of the plant.
The cause of the explosion was that the reactor had an unknown region of positive feedback. That in turn was due to the simulations of the reactor being pretty rudimentary. At the time the standard approach was to simulate in 2D and then extrapolate using experimental data to 3D.
It's the incredible, abject, deep stupidity of the bottom 1% of nuclear plant workers.
Placing the blame on the shift crew is a good way to pretend that the problems could not occur in the US. That is why the US and British nuclear lobbies were pushing the 'operator error' theory long before there was any evidence that might support it.
I was finally convinced of this truism by the insanely stupid people in Japan, who made their own critical assembly out of dissolved uranium (by doubling the uranium batch size for faster processing)
The Japanese event was caused by management who ordered the workers to mix the stuff by hand in buckets rather than use the expensive machinery installed for that exact purpose. It was the plant management that decided that using the machinery took too long.
It appears that it was the workers who had the bright idea of mixing the stuff in double quantities.
Well perhaps you don't know but lots of US researchers including MIT have been working on pebble bed.
The magazine article is pretty far off base. I was not commenting on it because I didn't think it merited it. Fissile Uranium is the most highly controlled mineral arround. The idea that folk are suddenly going to be able to buy it by the sack full in Home Depot is plain stupid. Pebble bed reactors are certainly cheaper than light water but they are nowhere near as small and simple as the article makes out.
The other piece of data that had been raised in the discussion but you appear to be ignorant of is that Bush has been advocating building nuclear plants.
Only thing is that Bush is not pushing for the intrinsically safe designs. He wants to build more light water stations.
I am not particularly keen on SA building nuclear stations either. Their government is also headed by a scientific ignoramous who has convinced himself that HIV does not cause AIDS after listening to a discredited quack [apparently there is also a dose of wishful thinking since the President would prefer not to pay for AIDS drugs even at the low prices the sucessful patent suit make possible]. On top of that, the super powers built intrinsically faulty designs because Nuclear Power became part of what we nuclear physicists call a dick size contest. The US built nuclear stations to show it could tame the destructive force of the atom, the design and construction schedules were dictated by propaganda needs. The USSR naturally had to follow suit and built even faster and with even more carelessness.
The situation is SA appears to me to be precisely the situation that lead to the first generation of Nuclear Power being a failure. It will be a political statement signalling the rise of a regional superpower.
The economics of the design almost certainly depend on selling copies of the design in the West. To assert that the US has no influence is to miss the point. The US will likely fund the scheme before it is finished.
There are governments that might be capable of handling nuclear power responsibly. If the Blair government said new nuclear power was necessary that would be pretty credible. However given that their exisiting nuclear capacity costs three times as much to run as the coal fired and the fact that the UK has 400 years of coal reserves the chance of the UK being forced to go nuclear is vanishingly small.
I doubt that big oil is too unhappy with the contribution from Mr Nader. I think that the Anwar oil field should be named after him.
While most politicians are slaves to the contributors most do actually take some time to come up with a policy that is marginally defensible. Bush appears to believe that all scientific evidence of harmful environmental effects is produced by liberal crypto-communists who are members of a giant conspiracy against capitalism.
I don't think that even US politicians would knowingly permit an unsafe nuclear plant to be built. Bush has made it plain that he only wants to hear scientific advice that supports his policies.
That is exactly the type of politics that rightly got nuclear power derailed in the first place. The Canadians built safe designs. But both the US and the USSR built unsafe designs. Challenging the nuclear establishment in either country meant the end of your career. They even destroyed Oppenheimer.
Nothing is as unreliable as statements of mineral reserves.
That said, probably the best use for fission power is as a short term stopgap until fusion can be made to work.
Actually the pebble reactors don't need very much in the way of enrichment, one of the main attractions of the design sice the less energy required for enrichment the better off you are.
The idea of Mr Fission is plain silly, the main obstacle preventing whackos making atom bombs is the difficulty of finding the fissile material.
Depleted Uranium on the other hand is pretty damn usefull stuff. It is a heavy metal and is pretty much as bad to mess about with as mercury. It is a solid at room temperature but thin chips of it will spontaneously combust in air. Oh and there is usually quite a bit of residual radiation but not so much that folk need to get paranoid.
There is a hefty chunk of depleted uranium in the nose of every 747. It is used for ballast to trim the aircraft.
I am currently working on a Battlebot with an outer shell of depleted uranium. I checked in the rules and it is not prohibited. Completely pointless (DU is pretty soft) but should psyche out some of the competition. Alternatively maybe we could go for carborundum or perhaps synthetic saphire like my watch has.
Only Nixon could go to China
I agree, I think that the only way that Nuclear power can be revived in any form is under a President who is not so openly disdainful of science and environmentalists.
Evacuating Philadelphia is probably possible in a short time, Manhattan is next to impossible. The idea of building any plant of that type next to the tri-state area is pretty whacky.
The Chernobyl fallout pretty much trashed cities 200 miles away. The real issue is the way the wind happens to be blowing at the time.
The sad fact of nuclear power is that it is probably possible to do the job safely but it is easier to say that safety is number one priority than to make it number one priority.
Unfortunately there are many with the attitude that everyone who thinks there might be a problem with Nuclear power must be a tree hugger. If the people making the decisions and regulating Nuclear Power have that attitude we are likely to have a repeat of the 1960s - plants built in locations they should never have been using recycled military designs that were completely inapropriate.
The folk telling the President to build nuclear stations are probably the same ones who are claiming that Nuclear Missile Defense is viable.
And your expertise that qualifies you to make such a statement is?
I have a degree in Nuclear Physics. Any light water or Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor is essentially a bomb waiting to go off that the operator hopes to keep just under the critical point.
As for 'modern', go have a look at a real nuclear station. Most of the technology is out of the 1960s or earlier. There hasn't been a new station started since three mile island.
The big problem for nuclear power is that the Nuclear power industry has lied and lied and lied. It is no wonder that the public don't trust nuclear power, they would be morons if they did.
The only reason Chernobyl went up and Three Mile Island did not is luck. Both reactors were designed using inadequate computing power. Chernobyl went critical because there was a region of positive feedback in the operation cycle that was not uncovered using the two dimensional simulation techniques used in both the USSR and the US at the time.
If the west was so smart in its nuclear power strategy Three Mile Island would never have been choosen as a site with Manhattan right next door.
The problem today is that having lied about the costs, the safety and the military use of byproducts the civil nuclear industry is going to have a hard time being trusted even if it is proposing an entirely different technology.
Pebble bed and Heavy Water designs are both intrinsically safe technologies that will 'fail safe' in case of failure. Unfortunately the nuclear industry claimed that the intrinsically unstable and dangerous AGR and light water designs were 'fail safe'.
The backers of pebble bed have a point. However having been lied to the public is entirely rational in not trusting the experts again. The idiot in the Whitehouse is certainly not someone I would trust to ensure that safety standards were enforced. The administration has reneged on pledges to not drill off the coast of Florida and to implement C02 emissions caps, arsenic in drinking water is OK. And that is the crew to be trusted to regulate nuclear power?
We may need to start using Nuclear Power in the future, however I think we can wait another four years for a President who is not in the pocket of the energy companies before we let that genie out of the bottle again.
2Micsoft's principal concern is strategic, if the playstation becomes the internet appliace then it becomes a platform competitor.
3The Xbox will probably sell to retailers at about $220. That is probably enough to meet cost of manufacture. The reason Microsoft will make a net loss in the initial years is the enormous amount of advertising they plan.
All in all the X-Box is a good thing for the video games sector. The marketing tactics of Sega, Sony et. al. are more scumbagish than anything Microsoft has ever been accused of. Produce a game for Sega and they demand a royalty from you of $10 for access to their platform.
Microsoft is not playing to win here, they are playing to disrupt the industry and break an incumbent monopoly. Putting Linux on Xbox would not upset Microsoft one little bit
The server farm idea is cute but idiotic. The cost of hardware is only part of the cost of a server farm. By the time X-box comes out $300 will not be the sweat spot of price performance. A dedicated design would be much easier to install and maintain.
Lost profits do not equal 'costs'. What the DMA calls costs are in fact lost profits.
The idea of opt-in requiring more direct mail is another deliberate falsehood. In Europe there is a box to tick on the original sign up, leave it blank and you are opted out. When the privacy directive came into force there was a long phase in period. The idea opt-in would generate more mail is a deliberate lie.
All 'opt-in' amounts to is attaching an implicit provision to every consumer contract that stipulates that the information provided is confidential.
In Europe the banks and credit card companies keep their customer's balances and purchases secret. They consider themselves to be under the same duty of secrecy as a lawyer. In the US this information is considered fair game to sell to anyone the bank chooses.
Most successful dotcom companies have made an issue of protecting their customer's privacy.
The only reason why the US is resisting European style privacy laws is the vast quantity of campaign bribes. Once privacy becomes an issue however the Congress types won't stay bribed and compete against each other to pass the most draconian privacy bill and claim ownership of the issue.
Sorry, that is SDMI are Loosers (TM)
Some of the most undereported documents are the ideas Napster had to 'monetize the userbase'. They were all at least as clueless as the ideas the RIAA have had.
Basically Napster would become a clone of AOL, a stiff monthly fee plus lots of intrusive pop up ads.
I agree that the ideas were stupid and Napster never had a chance of succeeding. However they told the billions of dolars story to their VC who evidently bought it.
I don't think so. In the first place the SDMI group is close to collapse. The autocratic manner in which Leonardo was operating was already anoying many at the only meeting I attended. In the second there is no leverage to prevent non-SDMI players being available.
The rip protected CDs piece is not part of SDMI. The idea is to encode the watermark into digitally downloaded music. Only authorized content could be downloaded onto a player. However the powerful stuff being smoked by the SDMI crew mean that they might well have got even more grandiose delusions.
The CD patents will have mostly expired at this point, CD having been arround for 20 years. The DMCA does not require CD players to adopt SDMI and the chances of new legislation are much smaller than two years ago.
In addition CD players are practically obsolete, as is the concept of a physical medium. There will be no replacement for CD, it will become a distribution medium only. Home hifi will work off a central mediastore with multiple player devices all giving access to the same database of content over WiFi.
The idea of SDMI was that portable players would be configured to only download authorized rips and to not allow transfers out of the device. It was a bogus idea from the start. In the first place the Diamond Rio case meant that there was no way to force players to be SDMI compliant. Secondly an SDMI compliant device could not be a recording device - digital dictaphones are to be illegal it appears. Thirdly the SDMI scheme devices would not be able to play standard MP3s, initially they would but this capability would be retrospectively disabled through a 'drop dead' code encoded in a CD.
So with SDMI the hardware manufacturers were to build devices that nobody would buy and would be deliberately broken at a time in the future of the RIAA's choice.
The whole premise of SDMI is pretty funky, the idea is that the device manufacturers will spike their devices to protect the interests of the labels. This is a pretty forlorn hope since the consumer electronics companies bought up content companies to help them sell hardware. Sony and Philips have content divisions but they play thrid or fourth fiddle to the consumer electronics divisions.
For SDMI to succeed there must be no way to get a non SDMI player. That ain't going to happen. The other premise is that there must either be no way to rip a CD - a futile effort in itself or no more material will be released on CD.
The alleged rip protection for CDs on the street at the moment make use of widespread bugs in CDROM device drivers. An audio CD player that encounters an error makes a best effort attempt to continue. A CDROM driver will in many cases report an error and stop. This can be fixed by simply patching the driver to emulate CD Audio players - a process that was already in progress since users were complaining about lack of robustness when playing CDs.
Meanwhile the sales of CDs have actually started to decline for the first time ever. I suspect that this is not just the result of Napster. I suspect that the ultra aggressive tactics of the labels have discouraged many purchases.
I have no sympathy for the crooks running Napster, the idea you can build a billion dollar business helping people rip off everyone else in the music business is one extreeme of the debate. The other is the equally greed RIAA and DVD crew who want to use digital technology that is not up to the task to massively increase their profits. I have sat through presentations from DRM companies who claim that they will not only protect content, they will make higher profits possible through product placement, advertising, co-marketting and extortionate pay per view charges.
Between these poles I think that there is a rational middle ground. The type of rights enforcement technology the RIAA is insisting upon cannot work, as with DeCSS every player has to have the secret key.
I think that a digital download format with a watermark could work. But the detection software would have to be closely held and used only to identify individuals who were ripping lots of tracks and putting them onto the Internet. Their access to the download service would be cut off. Such a scheme would probably be as good a limit on piracy as can be obtained. There would be minimal incentive to break the watermark scheme since it would not prevent a person from listening to the pirate tracks, merely discouraging the piracy. The attackers could not know in any case whether their de-watermarking technology had succeeded. The distributors could deploy new schemes without prior notice.