I wonder if Scientology's next complaint will include a footnote that says something like, "this complaint is copyright (c) 2002 Scientology Inc. Redistribution of this document, posting it on the web, or linking to it if it should appear on the web, is expressly prohibited...."
That's funny, but I would think (IANAL) that when a complaint is submitted to the court it becomes a public record and so can't be copyrighted. At least, if you don't draw a judge that's a Scientologist...
[Scientology is] an MLM scheme that has found posing as a religion to be highly conductive to its fraudulent business practices.
I suspect Multi-Level Marketing was copied from proselytizing religions rather than the other way around. I'd match my grandparent's Jehovah's Witness study group of about a dozen fanatics against an entire Amway marketing convention. (Of course, there's no financial payback for recruiting more JW's, but it gets you higher in the queue for those 144,000 seats in heaven, and JW's should be so focused on heaven they don't mind a little poverty now...)
From what I've heard of the origins of Scientology, it began approximately 1950 as an alternate form of psychotherapy (Dianetics) invented by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard. The medical profession tried to get it banned. I don't see any scientific basis to Dianetics, but then I don't see any scientific basis to the medically approved psychotherapy of that era either, nor anything to indicate that Dianetics was more harmful than orthodox treatments of that time such as lobotomies, electroshock, or endless discussions of the patient's toilet training. So it's possible the MD's just didn't like the competition...
When L Ron Hubbard found out he wasn't going to be able to beat the AMA in court, he reconstituted Dianetics as a "religion", making it untouchable by the law. The problem is twofold:
To make it qualify as a religion, Hubbard apparently felt it had to have beliefs just as wacky as Christianity (Noah's ark, for instance). So he tossed in a bunch of science fiction about ancient alien civilations (like running the worst of Doc Smith through a blender 8-). The problem: some people actually _believe_ this bull****.
As a religion, Dianetics doesn't need any scientific research to back it, and AFAIC no research has been done. The only obvious change in 50 years was more sophisticated versions of the "e-meter" (sort of a single-channel lie detector) used in "counseling". Meanwhile, psychiatry has done a lot of real experimental research, and is much more effective than it used to be. In 50 years, medically approved psychotherapy has gone from the equivalent of leeches (just 200 years ago the leading doctor in the USA thought bleeding cured _everything_, but at least he didn't do lobotomies), to the equivalent of sulfa antibiotics (pre-penicillin, dangerous and only sometimes effective, but a hell of a lot better than nothing). Meanwhile dianetics has pretty much stood still.
Darn, I'm out of moderator points. You are right, Google's handling of this would be perfect if they just made the **CENSORED** notice prominent enough...
The mouse was invented in the 60's, IIRC, but it pretty much stayed in the lab until the 80's. Partly this was because machines with enough graphical capability for a mouse to be really useful cost around $50,000 -- maybe you'd find one in an engineering workstation, but not anything 99% of people could ever get their hands on. But arcade video games started in the 70's; these could cost over $50,000, and some did need a good pointing device. Put a mouse on them, and frustrated customers would have torn the thin, flexible cord right off. So they turned the mouse upside down (and expanded it to bowling-ball size, IIRC) and mounted it in the console so only the ball was exposed.
The original quotation is, "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you feed him for the rest of his life."
There are lots of cynical derivatives with this -- almost as many as the places where eating the fish will ensure you don't have to worry about a long life...
No, if you can prove you had the idea first, no one else should be able to patent it. If the idea is published before anyone files a patent application, in most countries it becomes public domain right then. That is, if you call up your local newspaper and persuade them to run a news article about your invention including enough technical detail, it's probably public domain now. (So if you want to keep rights to your invention, you don't hold the press conference until you have filed for the patent. This might mean that you'd better come up with the filing fee on your own, before you go looking for venture capitalists.)
The US might be a bit different. In most of the world, disputes between inventors are resolved by who filed the patent application first, so the "no prior publication" rule is natural -- otherwise you'd have people copying Popular Mechanics articles onto patent forms and rushing to the patent office. In the US, disputes are resolved according to who "invented" it first, so it's possible for you to publish the idea intending to give it away, and someone else to claim that he thought of it first and therefore can patent it. But there's a time limit to apply for a patent after the idea is published or it is irrevocably public domain -- it used to be two years, and IIRC it has been reduced as the US tries to get more into step with the rest of the world.
The one thing filing a patent does do in terms of blocking others is to put the idea into the patent office's database. The examiners are supposed to also check other obvious sources, but some of them must have slacked off when Australia approved a patent on the wheel and the US approved a patent on swinging sideways... So getting it into the patent office database improves the chance that the patent will be disapproved in the first place, rather than having to go to court and show the evidence of prior art to get the patent thrown out. In the US at least, there is a patent category for just this purpose -- the application goes in their database so their searches should find it, but the invention becomes public domain. I don't know if India has the same thing.
"Defensive patents" means something else than covering stuff you might make but don't mind others making too. Defensive patents are neither to discourage competitors nor to collect royalties, but you might collect them so if someone demands royalties from you for something that shouldn't have been patentable, you can retaliate with your own collection of trite and obvious patents. (Typically these disputes are resolved by cross-licensing the patents: no money changes hands (except producers to lawyers!), no product lines change, but now you can claim your baseless patents and the baseless patents you swapped them for are each worth $XX million and inflate your company's apparent worth by that much.)
If that's all NIIT ever does with their kiosk patent, no problem. However, there is quite a history of different management coming into possession of a defensive patent portfolio and thinking they can actually make some money off of it, so it would be a whole lot better if weak patents didn't exist in the first place...
What about OS/390? I thought that was their big mainframe OS.
Supercomputer != Mainframe
Supercomputers are just for calculations on massive arrays. Mainframe OS's are designed for government & large corporation databases, etc. They are heavily loaded with "frills" that are unneeded on a pure number-cruncher; they improve database reliability and do many other useful things in the data-processing environment, but they're just wasted cycles on a supercomputer.
Considering the nutritional standards of that age, I'd think those plump Rembrandt and Ruebens models must have been well over 18.
OTOH, Romeo and Juliet is a thinly veiled depiction of THIRTEEN YEAR OLDS having sex. Definitely ought to be banned. Or else translated so we can understand it.;-)
The Detrick Washington case was not law, but rather parole officers -- bureaucrats. You give a bureaucrat discretion, he'll abuse it. Give him absolute hard and fast rules, and he'll happily enforce them to the letter whether they make any sense or not...
Now if Washington had finished his parole and merely been subject to the law against ex-cons possessing a gun, chances are nothing would have happened. The DA is at least to some extent a politician; this has many bad effects, but it doesn't encourage public idiocy. If the DA was so stupid as to lay charges, maybe the grand jury would have slapped him down. If he got the indictment, most judges would have told him to drop it. If it came to a jury trial, they'd have laughed it out of court -- and most likely the DA would have the whole county laughing at him, lose the next election, and spend the rest of his life chasing ambulances...
In England, public sector workers tend to get significantly less than they would get in the business sector. What is (possibly) different on this side of the pond is that we often grossly increase the pay of public sector workers and the quality doesn't improve. In the case of school teachers, the personnel quality has actually declined quite a lot in my lifetime, even though their paychecks have increased greatly, both absolutely and in comparison to most other workers. Forty years ago public schools around here paid about like sweeping the floor in a unionized auto plant, and people that found they hated teaching almost all got out. Now they are likely to stay in, because without significant talents or an education far more rigorous than teacher's courses, they can't get another job paying nearly as well.
Fire the incompetents? Never happens in gov't service. I ran into two incompetent teachers in public schools, from 1958-1971. (By the way, on this side of the pond "public school" means 100% tax-supported and government-controlled, by distinction to tuition-charging "private schools". Private schools often provide superior education at 1/2 the per-pupil budget.) One incompetent was in her first year teaching; my 6th grade class drove her into a "nervous breakdown", and she didn't come back for a second year. The other one had been in the same job 20 years already, and had been just as incompetent all along -- I have no idea why he stayed, except he probably was too lazy to keep _any_ real job.) But when my son reached high-school age, about 50% of the local public high-school staff didn't know the subjects they were teaching. Needless to say, he didn't go there.
Now for the real bad news: apply this principle to airport security. The past: underpaid McDonald's rejects working for private security firms. The present: the same McDonald's rejects shifting to the government payroll. The future: McDonald's rejects that cannot be fired, drawing three times the pay at taxpayer's expense...
In this case, "obviousness" did not even have to be considered. Prior art is an objective barrier -- and is there any American kid that didn't do this for himself or herself???
Patents DO have legal standing by themselves. The approval stamp is taken by the courts to mean that skilled examiners have hunted for prior art and otherwise checked out the patent, and the burden of proof is on anyone challenging the patent. Add to that, in the US you won't get your legal expenses paid when you have to go to court to challenge a ridiculous patent. (Note that British Telecom is suing in US courts for infringement of it's so-called hyperlink patent -- if they sued in their own country and lost the case, they'd have been paying the other side's lawyers and other expenses.)
Has that Aussie applied for a US patent to match his Australian patent on a 'circular transportation facilitation device' yet? If they approved this swinging sideways patent, they shouldn't boggle at patenting the wheel.
Under current law, the patent office supposedly examines patents and searches for prior art, and their approval on the patent is taken by the courts as prima facie evidence that the patent is OK. It takes a lot of legal expenses to fight this, even when it's obvious there was no innovation there... If they can't do better than this, we should replace them with an on-line database where you simply file patents, with a bond to pay the legal expenses if someone wants to take it to court. And have the court case starting without a gov't stamp of approval on either side.
There's plenty of reason to get upset at the INS for this, if you check the timeline. First, they sat on the applications for so long that the terrorists had already completed their course in how to fly airliners into buildings before the INS did anything with their applications. The INS obviously did not spend this time checking them out, because they approved the application. It was just time to move the paper from pile A to pile B... If they had actually done a check and come up with some reason to deny it ("We don't think suicidal fanatics should learn how to fly airliners"), it would have been too late anyhow. By the time they looked at that application, the terrorists had already finished the course -- and if the INS had decided to kick them out, they probably would have notified the cops to pick them up sometime in 2003.
In short, you have a gigantic, expensive, bureaucracy that makes trouble for honest immigrants but moves so slow that it is utterly effective at controlling the dishonest ones.
Not that their slow motion is always bad. About 15 years ago, I knew a guy who was quite convinced that he'd be killed if he went back to El Salvador, but the INS denied his asylum application. His lawyer was able to string the case out about 6 or 7 years, and then the war was over and he was ready to go back and get the family plantation running again. Meanwhile, he helped pour the foundations for many buildings around DC, possibly including wherever those INS incompetents are now (not) working, and stashed plenty of cash away...
But when they foul up or just plain move too slowly with terrorists, the bureaucrats move from being a drain on the treasury to active menaces.
By the way, it's not that hard to feed a list of names into a computer and kick out the matches from the already approved list. If they can't do that, then they should get a 12 year old kid to help them. If they don't get their databases working, you certainly will see them approving people to enter the country and take demolitions classes (for instance), at the same time some other branch is trying to arrest the same people...
There's no minimum age requirement for inventors. So if a five year old kid thinks he invented swinging sideways (like BT think they invented the hyperlink), there's not a damned thing to keep him from getting a patent on it -- except a patent examiner with at least one working neuron...
Do a web search for "compressed air" and "cooler" and you'll find a bunch of commercially available vortex devices. Electronics techs sometimes get them to replace the old freeze-spray for troubleshooting. (The original freeze-spray was freon, now banned. I'm not sure what the formulation is now, but it's probably a whole lot worse for your lungs than freon...)
Mims's treatment at the hands of Scientific American is an atrocity on par with anything the medieval Catholics could have come up with, at least without resorting to pitchforks and thumbscrews. They just fired him, they didn't burn him at the stake. Or hang him, which many 17th and 18th century protestants were prone to do to other types of protestants. Or even lock him up until he recanted, like Galileo.
"Scientific creationism" is an oxymoron. No serious scientific journal would want to be associated with it -- and neither would the wannabe SA.;-) However, as long as it was kept out of the magazine columns, Mims' beliefs were not their business. And note that the editors _job_ is to read and correct everything before it gets printed -- Mims couldn't slip something embarrassing past them if he wanted to, and I should note that I have read several books by Mims and never knew about his religion. Mims might have been uncomfortable writing a column about fossil-hunting -- but that's one activity amateurs should avoid, IMO. I read "The Amateur Scientist" every month since about 1965 and I don't recall that anything dealing with fossils was ever in it.
Uncalled for religious discrimination, yes. Atrocity, no.
The Houston Chronicle has a writeup, which describes the technology a little:
UH researchers worked with very thin films of perovskite oxides called manganites. When these thin films are exposed to electrical pulses their resistance can be programmed. The researchers developed an electrical switching process so that the material could be used to store and retrieve bits of information.
Computer memory using the new technology would look essentially the same as the memory being used in today's computers, Ignatiev said.
"If you put them under a microscope, they would really look no different," Ignatiev said. "The difference is that traditional memory uses transistors and capacitors, and these use a resistor."
It will require only a slight modification to the design of the current generation of motherboards. An interface that reads high and low resistance would have to be installed.
So it is non-volatile RAM. That makes four distinct NV-RAM technologies that I know of: battery-backed SRAM (fast, expensive, and low capacity), Flash and other electrically eraseable PROM's (slow writes, wears out), magnetic RAM, and resistive memory. The first two have been on the market for years, and capacity/price are nowhere near competitive with hard drives, although they are used where capacity can be much less than a PC needs and the environment is hostile to hard drives. MRAM is now being sold in small quantities, I think, but it's too young to tell how price and performance will work out.
What I did not see was any reason at all for thinking that resistive RAM would work out to a low enough price to be a hard drive replacement. I'll believe that, with enough work on the production process, it can beat SRAM on price and Flash on write speed (these aren't hard targets), but it has a very long way to go to compete with DRAM on price or speed, and then the price has to go down another 100 times to compete with hard drives. OTOH, start selling boxes with 256M of NVRAM and good non-bloated instant-on software, and maybe people will prefer them to MS's bloatware offerings on a 30G HD...
Finally, there have been much ballyhooed nonvolatile memories before that died once they hit the market. Bubble memory was supposed to replace hard drives about 20 years ago, but most slashdotters are too young to even remember it... I do like to see another technology out there, because if MRAM stumbles, now there's another chance of getting NVRAM that doesn't require major compromises.
Slave = black only in the special circumstances of American history. Biblical slavery was not race based -- mostly the slaves were war captives, although sometimes a criminal would be auctioned off to raise money to compensate his victims, or a bankrupt debtor might be sold to pay the creditors. So a slave might be a foreigner, distinguishable by accent but often not by appearance, or might even be a former neighbor.
The problem was, if a slave looked like free people, he could escape fairly easily. So in the American south, bondservants (white people who paid for their passage by agreeing to a limited period of slavery) would all too often simply walk away and take up land of their own out on the frontier, but africans couldn't travel even a few miles without showing papers. In other countries without a frontier, non-racial slavery worked better, but there were still problems in the long run. If slaves were used on a job, free men were reluctant to take wages for the same work -- in the antebellum south, there were poor whites that would be happy to take a job "overseeing" the slaves, but would rather eat clay and grass than pick cotton themselves. So in the long term, most societies evolve to either be mostly slave or mostly non-slave. E.g. in Medieval and Renaissance France, a poor man wandering the countryside was obviously a runaway serf. In England serfdom died away, then African slaves were imported for a while, but by the late 1700's slaves were so rare that it was easy to ban slavery entirely. However, in the Arab nations in the same period, only very important persons and desert nomads were free -- and when the Turkish empire extended from Bulgaria to Africa, legally _everyone_ was the Sultan's slave.
You're right, it was magnesium that they were worried about actually catching fire. Ti welding needs _really_ inert gasses (argon or helium) blown in a cone around the weld so the weld bead didn't turn into some sort of brittle Ti oxide, nitride, or something. This is unlike steel, where it's enough to just control the fuel-oxygen ratio so all the oxygen is used up.
I once saw an F111 where the fuel tanks had caught fire. The skin was completely burned or melted away, and the frame didn't look complete either. Powdered Al or Ti will burn, and even Fe will burn in a hot enough fire, but thick pieces of metal don't sustain combustion...
Ok, one letter in favor of the Hollings bill, thousands and thousands opposed. That'll win 'em over...
Unfortunately, that's one letter from companies that not only hand out millions in campaign contributions, but also control the media and tell the sheeple what to think...
Hey, let's also sue the tobacco companies for causing cancer:) How about instead we sue them for a century of attempting to mislead the public about the addictiveness and health risks of their product.
Even though tobacco, unlike guns, cars, and chainsaws, has _no_ safe uses, I agree that the smokers have the primary responsibility for their lung cancers, etc. And in fact, I don't think I have ever heard of a jury awarding damages to a smoker solely on the basis that the smokes caused their cancer, heart disease, emphysema, or whatever. IIRC, the first time the tobacco companies lost a jury case, the plaintiff was a non-smoker with lung cancer who had worked her whole life in smoke-filled rooms. Now plenty of evidence has come out about tobacco companies burying reports of the harmfulness of their products, but I'm not sure if any trial based on that has gone to a jury verdict, or if the tobacco companies have settled every time...
On the other hand, gun companies offer gun safety courses (or at least tell you how to find the NRA, whose training is as good as you can get), include pamphlets with safety tips such as "Never point the gun at yourself or anyone else", and in general do everything they can to encourage safe use of their product. Tobacco companies are in a bit of a bind there -- the only accurate and complete statement they could make about cigarette safety is "don't light it, don't eat it, and don't let the kids get it."
So Gateway is selling equipment that has both legal and illegal uses -- and they are running ads to educate their customers to know the difference. Sounds like they've pretty well covered their arse.
Were any of them ever using graphics similar to Hasbro/Parker Brothers' game? (I haven't seen them, but other posters claim that the portablemonopoly.com site used to have such graphics.) I'm usually against anyone being able to claim a single english word or a common phrase as a trademark, but in this case it seems reasonable:
1) Portable Monopoly is in the game business (add-ons to GameBoy), so they are competing for consumer dollars with Hasbro.
2) The first thing I thought of when I read "Portable Monopoly" was the board game.
3) Although "Portable Monopoly" has a reasonable derivation unrelated to Hasbro's trademark, if the web site designers used graphics reminiscent of the board game, there's proof that they had noticed the resemblance...
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if Scientology's next complaint will include a footnote that says something like, "this complaint is copyright (c) 2002 Scientology Inc. Redistribution of this document, posting it on the web, or linking to it if it should appear on the web, is expressly prohibited...."
That's funny, but I would think (IANAL) that when a complaint is submitted to the court it becomes a public record and so can't be copyrighted. At least, if you don't draw a judge that's a Scientologist...
[Scientology is] an MLM scheme that has found posing as a religion to be highly conductive to its fraudulent business practices.
I suspect Multi-Level Marketing was copied from proselytizing religions rather than the other way around. I'd match my grandparent's Jehovah's Witness study group of about a dozen fanatics against an entire Amway marketing convention. (Of course, there's no financial payback for recruiting more JW's, but it gets you higher in the queue for those 144,000 seats in heaven, and JW's should be so focused on heaven they don't mind a little poverty now...)
From what I've heard of the origins of Scientology, it began approximately 1950 as an alternate form of psychotherapy (Dianetics) invented by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard. The medical profession tried to get it banned. I don't see any scientific basis to Dianetics, but then I don't see any scientific basis to the medically approved psychotherapy of that era either, nor anything to indicate that Dianetics was more harmful than orthodox treatments of that time such as lobotomies, electroshock, or endless discussions of the patient's toilet training. So it's possible the MD's just didn't like the competition...
When L Ron Hubbard found out he wasn't going to be able to beat the AMA in court, he reconstituted Dianetics as a "religion", making it untouchable by the law. The problem is twofold:
To make it qualify as a religion, Hubbard apparently felt it had to have beliefs just as wacky as Christianity (Noah's ark, for instance). So he tossed in a bunch of science fiction about ancient alien civilations (like running the worst of Doc Smith through a blender 8-). The problem: some people actually _believe_ this bull****.
As a religion, Dianetics doesn't need any scientific research to back it, and AFAIC no research has been done. The only obvious change in 50 years was more sophisticated versions of the "e-meter" (sort of a single-channel lie detector) used in "counseling". Meanwhile, psychiatry has done a lot of real experimental research, and is much more effective than it used to be. In 50 years, medically approved psychotherapy has gone from the equivalent of leeches (just 200 years ago the leading doctor in the USA thought bleeding cured _everything_, but at least he didn't do lobotomies), to the equivalent of sulfa antibiotics (pre-penicillin, dangerous and only sometimes effective, but a hell of a lot better than nothing). Meanwhile dianetics has pretty much stood still.
Darn, I'm out of moderator points. You are right, Google's handling of this would be perfect if they just made the **CENSORED** notice prominent enough...
The mouse was invented in the 60's, IIRC, but it pretty much stayed in the lab until the 80's. Partly this was because machines with enough graphical capability for a mouse to be really useful cost around $50,000 -- maybe you'd find one in an engineering workstation, but not anything 99% of people could ever get their hands on. But arcade video games started in the 70's; these could cost over $50,000, and some did need a good pointing device. Put a mouse on them, and frustrated customers would have torn the thin, flexible cord right off. So they turned the mouse upside down (and expanded it to bowling-ball size, IIRC) and mounted it in the console so only the ball was exposed.
The original quotation is, "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you feed him for the rest of his life."
There are lots of cynical derivatives with this -- almost as many as the places where eating the fish will ensure you don't have to worry about a long life...
No, if you can prove you had the idea first, no one else should be able to patent it. If the idea is published before anyone files a patent application, in most countries it becomes public domain right then. That is, if you call up your local newspaper and persuade them to run a news article about your invention including enough technical detail, it's probably public domain now. (So if you want to keep rights to your invention, you don't hold the press conference until you have filed for the patent. This might mean that you'd better come up with the filing fee on your own, before you go looking for venture capitalists.)
The US might be a bit different. In most of the world, disputes between inventors are resolved by who filed the patent application first, so the "no prior publication" rule is natural -- otherwise you'd have people copying Popular Mechanics articles onto patent forms and rushing to the patent office. In the US, disputes are resolved according to who "invented" it first, so it's possible for you to publish the idea intending to give it away, and someone else to claim that he thought of it first and therefore can patent it. But there's a time limit to apply for a patent after the idea is published or it is irrevocably public domain -- it used to be two years, and IIRC it has been reduced as the US tries to get more into step with the rest of the world.
The one thing filing a patent does do in terms of blocking others is to put the idea into the patent office's database. The examiners are supposed to also check other obvious sources, but some of them must have slacked off when Australia approved a patent on the wheel and the US approved a patent on swinging sideways... So getting it into the patent office database improves the chance that the patent will be disapproved in the first place, rather than having to go to court and show the evidence of prior art to get the patent thrown out. In the US at least, there is a patent category for just this purpose -- the application goes in their database so their searches should find it, but the invention becomes public domain. I don't know if India has the same thing.
"Defensive patents" means something else than covering stuff you might make but don't mind others making too. Defensive patents are neither to discourage competitors nor to collect royalties, but you might collect them so if someone demands royalties from you for something that shouldn't have been patentable, you can retaliate with your own collection of trite and obvious patents. (Typically these disputes are resolved by cross-licensing the patents: no money changes hands (except producers to lawyers!), no product lines change, but now you can claim your baseless patents and the baseless patents you swapped them for are each worth $XX million and inflate your company's apparent worth by that much.)
If that's all NIIT ever does with their kiosk patent, no problem. However, there is quite a history of different management coming into possession of a defensive patent portfolio and thinking they can actually make some money off of it, so it would be a whole lot better if weak patents didn't exist in the first place...
What about OS/390? I thought that was their big mainframe OS.
Supercomputer != Mainframe
Supercomputers are just for calculations on massive arrays. Mainframe OS's are designed for government & large corporation databases, etc. They are heavily loaded with "frills" that are unneeded on a pure number-cruncher; they improve database reliability and do many other useful things in the data-processing environment, but they're just wasted cycles on a supercomputer.
Considering the nutritional standards of that age, I'd think those plump Rembrandt and Ruebens models must have been well over 18.
;-)
OTOH, Romeo and Juliet is a thinly veiled depiction of THIRTEEN YEAR OLDS having sex. Definitely ought to be banned. Or else translated so we can understand it.
String them up by their testicles and make them read Jon Katz articles
;-)
But the constitution also bans "cruel and unusual punishment." No Jon Katz articles.
The Detrick Washington case was not law, but rather parole officers -- bureaucrats. You give a bureaucrat discretion, he'll abuse it. Give him absolute hard and fast rules, and he'll happily enforce them to the letter whether they make any sense or not...
Now if Washington had finished his parole and merely been subject to the law against ex-cons possessing a gun, chances are nothing would have happened. The DA is at least to some extent a politician; this has many bad effects, but it doesn't encourage public idiocy. If the DA was so stupid as to lay charges, maybe the grand jury would have slapped him down. If he got the indictment, most judges would have told him to drop it. If it came to a jury trial, they'd have laughed it out of court -- and most likely the DA would have the whole county laughing at him, lose the next election, and spend the rest of his life chasing ambulances...
In England, public sector workers tend to get significantly less than they would get in the business sector. What is (possibly) different on this side of the pond is that we often grossly increase the pay of public sector workers and the quality doesn't improve. In the case of school teachers, the personnel quality has actually declined quite a lot in my lifetime, even though their paychecks have increased greatly, both absolutely and in comparison to most other workers. Forty years ago public schools around here paid about like sweeping the floor in a unionized auto plant, and people that found they hated teaching almost all got out. Now they are likely to stay in, because without significant talents or an education far more rigorous than teacher's courses, they can't get another job paying nearly as well.
Fire the incompetents? Never happens in gov't service. I ran into two incompetent teachers in public schools, from 1958-1971. (By the way, on this side of the pond "public school" means 100% tax-supported and government-controlled, by distinction to tuition-charging "private schools". Private schools often provide superior education at 1/2 the per-pupil budget.) One incompetent was in her first year teaching; my 6th grade class drove her into a "nervous breakdown", and she didn't come back for a second year. The other one had been in the same job 20 years already, and had been just as incompetent all along -- I have no idea why he stayed, except he probably was too lazy to keep _any_ real job.) But when my son reached high-school age, about 50% of the local public high-school staff didn't know the subjects they were teaching. Needless to say, he didn't go there.
Now for the real bad news: apply this principle to airport security. The past: underpaid McDonald's rejects working for private security firms. The present: the same McDonald's rejects shifting to the government payroll. The future: McDonald's rejects that cannot be fired, drawing three times the pay at taxpayer's expense...
In this case, "obviousness" did not even have to be considered. Prior art is an objective barrier -- and is there any American kid that didn't do this for himself or herself???
Patents DO have legal standing by themselves. The approval stamp is taken by the courts to mean that skilled examiners have hunted for prior art and otherwise checked out the patent, and the burden of proof is on anyone challenging the patent. Add to that, in the US you won't get your legal expenses paid when you have to go to court to challenge a ridiculous patent. (Note that British Telecom is suing in US courts for infringement of it's so-called hyperlink patent -- if they sued in their own country and lost the case, they'd have been paying the other side's lawyers and other expenses.)
Has that Aussie applied for a US patent to match his Australian patent on a 'circular transportation facilitation device' yet? If they approved this swinging sideways patent, they shouldn't boggle at patenting the wheel.
Under current law, the patent office supposedly examines patents and searches for prior art, and their approval on the patent is taken by the courts as prima facie evidence that the patent is OK. It takes a lot of legal expenses to fight this, even when it's obvious there was no innovation there... If they can't do better than this, we should replace them with an on-line database where you simply file patents, with a bond to pay the legal expenses if someone wants to take it to court. And have the court case starting without a gov't stamp of approval on either side.
Off-topic but...
There's plenty of reason to get upset at the INS for this, if you check the timeline. First, they sat on the applications for so long that the terrorists had already completed their course in how to fly airliners into buildings before the INS did anything with their applications. The INS obviously did not spend this time checking them out, because they approved the application. It was just time to move the paper from pile A to pile B... If they had actually done a check and come up with some reason to deny it ("We don't think suicidal fanatics should learn how to fly airliners"), it would have been too late anyhow. By the time they looked at that application, the terrorists had already finished the course -- and if the INS had decided to kick them out, they probably would have notified the cops to pick them up sometime in 2003.
In short, you have a gigantic, expensive, bureaucracy that makes trouble for honest immigrants but moves so slow that it is utterly effective at controlling the dishonest ones.
Not that their slow motion is always bad. About 15 years ago, I knew a guy who was quite convinced that he'd be killed if he went back to El Salvador, but the INS denied his asylum application. His lawyer was able to string the case out about 6 or 7 years, and then the war was over and he was ready to go back and get the family plantation running again. Meanwhile, he helped pour the foundations for many buildings around DC, possibly including wherever those INS incompetents are now (not) working, and stashed plenty of cash away...
But when they foul up or just plain move too slowly with terrorists, the bureaucrats move from being a drain on the treasury to active menaces.
By the way, it's not that hard to feed a list of names into a computer and kick out the matches from the already approved list. If they can't do that, then they should get a 12 year old kid to help them. If they don't get their databases working, you certainly will see them approving people to enter the country and take demolitions classes (for instance), at the same time some other branch is trying to arrest the same people...
There's no minimum age requirement for inventors. So if a five year old kid thinks he invented swinging sideways (like BT think they invented the hyperlink), there's not a damned thing to keep him from getting a patent on it -- except a patent examiner with at least one working neuron...
Do a web search for "compressed air" and "cooler" and you'll find a bunch of commercially available vortex devices. Electronics techs sometimes get them to replace the old freeze-spray for troubleshooting. (The original freeze-spray was freon, now banned. I'm not sure what the formulation is now, but it's probably a whole lot worse for your lungs than freon...)
Mims's treatment at the hands of Scientific American is an atrocity on par with anything the medieval Catholics could have come up with, at least without resorting to pitchforks and thumbscrews. They just fired him, they didn't burn him at the stake. Or hang him, which many 17th and 18th century protestants were prone to do to other types of protestants. Or even lock him up until he recanted, like Galileo.
;-) However, as long as it was kept out of the magazine columns, Mims' beliefs were not their business. And note that the editors _job_ is to read and correct everything before it gets printed -- Mims couldn't slip something embarrassing past them if he wanted to, and I should note that I have read several books by Mims and never knew about his religion. Mims might have been uncomfortable writing a column about fossil-hunting -- but that's one activity amateurs should avoid, IMO. I read "The Amateur Scientist" every month since about 1965 and I don't recall that anything dealing with fossils was ever in it.
"Scientific creationism" is an oxymoron. No serious scientific journal would want to be associated with it -- and neither would the wannabe SA.
Uncalled for religious discrimination, yes. Atrocity, no.
So it is non-volatile RAM. That makes four distinct NV-RAM technologies that I know of: battery-backed SRAM (fast, expensive, and low capacity), Flash and other electrically eraseable PROM's (slow writes, wears out), magnetic RAM, and resistive memory. The first two have been on the market for years, and capacity/price are nowhere near competitive with hard drives, although they are used where capacity can be much less than a PC needs and the environment is hostile to hard drives. MRAM is now being sold in small quantities, I think, but it's too young to tell how price and performance will work out.
What I did not see was any reason at all for thinking that resistive RAM would work out to a low enough price to be a hard drive replacement. I'll believe that, with enough work on the production process, it can beat SRAM on price and Flash on write speed (these aren't hard targets), but it has a very long way to go to compete with DRAM on price or speed, and then the price has to go down another 100 times to compete with hard drives. OTOH, start selling boxes with 256M of NVRAM and good non-bloated instant-on software, and maybe people will prefer them to MS's bloatware offerings on a 30G HD...
Finally, there have been much ballyhooed nonvolatile memories before that died once they hit the market. Bubble memory was supposed to replace hard drives about 20 years ago, but most slashdotters are too young to even remember it... I do like to see another technology out there, because if MRAM stumbles, now there's another chance of getting NVRAM that doesn't require major compromises.
Actually, the article itself says 'The "F" stands for "fast," not "fink."' And if you believe that, here are some hot stock tips...
Slave = black only in the special circumstances of American history. Biblical slavery was not race based -- mostly the slaves were war captives, although sometimes a criminal would be auctioned off to raise money to compensate his victims, or a bankrupt debtor might be sold to pay the creditors. So a slave might be a foreigner, distinguishable by accent but often not by appearance, or might even be a former neighbor.
The problem was, if a slave looked like free people, he could escape fairly easily. So in the American south, bondservants (white people who paid for their passage by agreeing to a limited period of slavery) would all too often simply walk away and take up land of their own out on the frontier, but africans couldn't travel even a few miles without showing papers. In other countries without a frontier, non-racial slavery worked better, but there were still problems in the long run. If slaves were used on a job, free men were reluctant to take wages for the same work -- in the antebellum south, there were poor whites that would be happy to take a job "overseeing" the slaves, but would rather eat clay and grass than pick cotton themselves. So in the long term, most societies evolve to either be mostly slave or mostly non-slave. E.g. in Medieval and Renaissance France, a poor man wandering the countryside was obviously a runaway serf. In England serfdom died away, then African slaves were imported for a while, but by the late 1700's slaves were so rare that it was easy to ban slavery entirely. However, in the Arab nations in the same period, only very important persons and desert nomads were free -- and when the Turkish empire extended from Bulgaria to Africa, legally _everyone_ was the Sultan's slave.
You're right, it was magnesium that they were worried about actually catching fire. Ti welding needs _really_ inert gasses (argon or helium) blown in a cone around the weld so the weld bead didn't turn into some sort of brittle Ti oxide, nitride, or something. This is unlike steel, where it's enough to just control the fuel-oxygen ratio so all the oxygen is used up.
I once saw an F111 where the fuel tanks had caught fire. The skin was completely burned or melted away, and the frame didn't look complete either. Powdered Al or Ti will burn, and even Fe will burn in a hot enough fire, but thick pieces of metal don't sustain combustion...
Ok, one letter in favor of the Hollings bill, thousands and thousands opposed. That'll win 'em over...
Unfortunately, that's one letter from companies that not only hand out millions in campaign contributions, but also control the media and tell the sheeple what to think...
Hey, let's also sue the tobacco companies for causing cancer :) How about instead we sue them for a century of attempting to mislead the public about the addictiveness and health risks of their product.
Even though tobacco, unlike guns, cars, and chainsaws, has _no_ safe uses, I agree that the smokers have the primary responsibility for their lung cancers, etc. And in fact, I don't think I have ever heard of a jury awarding damages to a smoker solely on the basis that the smokes caused their cancer, heart disease, emphysema, or whatever. IIRC, the first time the tobacco companies lost a jury case, the plaintiff was a non-smoker with lung cancer who had worked her whole life in smoke-filled rooms. Now plenty of evidence has come out about tobacco companies burying reports of the harmfulness of their products, but I'm not sure if any trial based on that has gone to a jury verdict, or if the tobacco companies have settled every time...
On the other hand, gun companies offer gun safety courses (or at least tell you how to find the NRA, whose training is as good as you can get), include pamphlets with safety tips such as "Never point the gun at yourself or anyone else", and in general do everything they can to encourage safe use of their product. Tobacco companies are in a bit of a bind there -- the only accurate and complete statement they could make about cigarette safety is "don't light it, don't eat it, and don't let the kids get it."
So Gateway is selling equipment that has both legal and illegal uses -- and they are running ads to educate their customers to know the difference. Sounds like they've pretty well covered their arse.
Were any of them ever using graphics similar to Hasbro/Parker Brothers' game? (I haven't seen them, but other posters claim that the portablemonopoly.com site used to have such graphics.) I'm usually against anyone being able to claim a single english word or a common phrase as a trademark, but in this case it seems reasonable:
1) Portable Monopoly is in the game business (add-ons to GameBoy), so they are competing for consumer dollars with Hasbro.
2) The first thing I thought of when I read "Portable Monopoly" was the board game.
3) Although "Portable Monopoly" has a reasonable derivation unrelated to Hasbro's trademark, if the web site designers used graphics reminiscent of the board game, there's proof that they had noticed the resemblance...