I have previously posted about America's sorry history of ending debates violently, for instance the Congressman who was beaten unconscious on the floor of Congress over slavery -- but I rather suspect we have done much better at keeping debates civil than most countries. I am quite sure of that with respect to France, England, Germany, Italy, and Russia.
People have always attempted to filter out ideas they don't want to listen to. Did you think the Catholic church didn't have public suppor for burning heretics at the stake? Even in the short history of the USA, there are plenty of examples of both private and governmental violence being used to avoid having to listen to the other side. In the War of 1812, critics of the war were arrested for "Sedition" (quite unconstitutionally, but the Supreme Court wasn't yet confident that it could review things like that). In the 1850's, in Congressional debates over slavery there were Congressmen beating each other unconscious; at least they didn't murder each other like was happening in Kansas. In the 1920's, Attorney General Palmer (quite illegally) arrested many for "radical" views. (Hilary Clinton is more radical than most of those persecuted were.) In the 1950's, the FBI was still so busy investigating "radicals" that it didn't even notice there was a Mafia until the NY state police busted a national meeting of mob bosses. I assume nobody needs to hear more about the 60's. And so on...
So a simple internet filter is a considerable improvement over what has happened historically. It does bother me that many people can so insulate themselves as to never hear the other side of the story -- but what has changed? Throughout my lifetime the network news, major newspapers, and most magazines have kept their coverage limited to things that won't unduly surprise the 75% of Americans who don't bother to dig deeper.
Problem is, when you get that new flat panel, you'll probably want it parked just behind your keyboard, where the front of your monitor is now. Sure you've got storage space behind it, but you can't use it as desktop. To actually improve the desktop space, you need a flat panel that is considerably larger than a monitor, so you can hang it on the wall behind your desk and still read the fine print.
Being an engineer, what I really want is a 3 x 4 foot touchpanel display, mounted as a drafting table... 8-)
"Don't forget that IBM is a marketing company as much as a technical company." I sure wouldn't put IBM's technical prowess on a level with their marketing... unless their marketing has gotten a whole lot worse lately
That list covers the 1990's all too well, has too little about the 1980's, and nothing at all before 1975. Select a few key sections from those sources. But first go back further in time with:
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. This is an account of engineers at work designing a new computer in the mid-70's, just before microprocessors.
You need to spend at least a week on IBM; it (and companies it absorbed) dominated computing for one century, from the punch card machines of the 1880's through the system 360 and 370 mainframes, and finally the introduction of the PC in 1980. I can't remember many sources, but definitely include a brief look at The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks -- this is a description of what was possibly the most mismanaged nongovernmental project in history, by the manager. (His hindsight is as good as his foresight was lacking.) And it happened in the 1960's when IBM was as dominant as Microsoft is now...
Earlier stuff: Babbage, Jacquard looms, Pascal's calculator, the abacus and counting board...
The ESA is a gov't agency, they aren't concerned with competition. I think what they are really hoping for (besides getting enough eyes looking at the VHDL code to prevent anything like the Pentium divide bug from sneaking through), is that there will be sufficient commercial volume to drive the prices down for them. If they kept it closed source, it would simply remain a low-performance, high-cost chip built specially for space applications.
"They should implement the processor in some sort of non-volatile programmable logic." That would be nice. And it has been done for the Z80 and maybe some other 8-bitters. You take too big of a performance penalty to do this with a 32-bit CPU, so far. That will change, but by then 64-bit CPU's will be standard in desktop computers... So for now, expect to see this implemented as ASIC's (semi-custom chips) and maybe full-custom.
Also, the cost of compiling VHDL of this complexity to fit into any particular chip is probably in the low six figures. Sorry, but they are going to have to get it right, then be sparing with the upgrades.
What is actually open-sourced is VHDL code. That is a language that describes a hardware design. It can be written at various levels, I assume that for a CPU they'd carry it to the lower levels (registers and gates). But to actually get a chip, you've got to compile the VHDL for the particular chip-making processes. This isn't as easy as compiling a C program, it takes considerable human intervention to get a physical fit and correct for various process limitations. And then you've got to create the exposure masks for each step in the process (dozens of them), and finally make a batch of chips. It might take $0.5 million to get the first chip. But that's a few million less than if you created a CPU design from scratch, or licensed one from Intel.
Notice that the implementations in silicon which have got as far as test are quite slow (down to 35MHz), while the chips that are still in process are estimated at 90 to 150MHz. But maybe a Sparc-compatible at 100MHz running *nix will beat a P-III at 800MHz burdened by Windoze? At any rate, it is one heck of an improvement on the underclocked 286's and 386's that are now the peak of space-rated technology. And since even the best quality checks seem to be subject to blind spots, getting outsiders to pick away at the design it should improve the chances of finding bugs before they pop up in flight. (Blind spots: ESA: A new Ariane rocket blew up on the first launch because a calculation related to velocity overflowed, in software was carried over from an older, slower rocket. NASA: Lost a Mars probe because they forgot to convert pounds to newtons. Intel: Pentium divide bug.)
"I would much rather leave it up the parents, but in today's society that just doesn't cut it." Take a good look at the way child protective and school bureaucracies really work before you go recommending more of that. I've seen them at work, and it takes an incredibly bad parent to do worse...
As for the actual topic here, video game censorship: scientific studies of links between violent games or shows and violent behavior have generally been inconclusive -- except where the researchers were heavily biased. The overall rate of youth violence has generally fallen as the media became more violent. However, excessive news coverage of a few oddballs has given people a contrary impression. More than that, every disturbed kid past 7 years old now knows that he can get lots of attention just by talking about bringing a gun to school...
My own opinion about links between violent shows and behavior: For people who are anywhere close to normal, it serves more as a catharsis, to work out anger in make-believe instead of the real world. There are two dangers in violent media:
1. A small number of really disturbed people (not just children) don't have much grasp on the difference between make believe and reality and might imitate the shows. Is that a reason to censor stuff for everyone? And if you are going to censor effectively, you'd have to start with the news...
2. Small children could learn that violence is a normal and acceptable way to handle conflicts. (Contrast a 1950's western where a good man is gradually pushed into meeting violence with violence, to some modern movies where they barely bother with a plot before spraying blood all over the scene.) But the influence of the tube and video games here is much less than that of parents, and in my experience most parents are doing a pretty good job -- or else 99% of children must have a natural tendency to hear the non-violent messages better. I'd keep children under five from watching the most violent stuff, but once they know that it's just make believe up on the screen, if you've taught them right and they don't have mental problems, don't worry about it.
That can be phrased a little better: A vaccinated animal has antibodies against foot and mouth virus. The usual blood test for foot and mouth looks for those antibodies. So you can't tell if a vaccinated animal is healthy just by doing a blood test. You'd think _looking_ at the cow to see if it's sick might be better, but when there are 10,000 cows this takes too long, and it still wouldn't catch animals that are infected but haven't come down sick yet, or the small percentage that become carriers (healthy but as infectious as Typhoid Mary).
The other issue is that the vaccination is not 100% effective. Some vaccinated animals will still catch the disease if exposed to it, and a good many of of those will be become carriers. And so importing vaccinated animals or meat from them still poses a significant risk of importing the virus. Or so the Ag Department says...
Cooking does kill the virus. The US allows imports of sausages, canned meats, cooked hams, etc. from foot-and-mouth-ridden areas, provided the preparation process ensures it's cooked all the way through and meets reasonable sanitation standards. Not that the USDA puts much limits on what can go into sausages, hot dogs, and lunchmeat made in America. Personally, I'd just as soon take my chances with a steak, so at least I can tell from what portion of the cow it was cut...
"dying a porper": It's spelled "pauper" if that's what you were trying to say.
Joseph Swan: I haven't studied the details of that, but my impression was that his and the Edison lab's work on light bulbs was truly simultaneous. Anyway, they both filed patents, then sued each other, and somehow Swan won in British courts and Edison won in American courts. (Makes you suspect a little bias, eh?) In any case, eventually tungsten filaments superseded the Swann & Edison bulbs. Edison got rich because he _also_ created the first electric company -- not a patentable idea, all the DC generation and distribution technology was more or less ready and waiting for an application, but it must have been much harder to put together all the financing and technology than just figuring out which kind of carbonized thread would work best as an incandescent filament was.
Incidentally what they (perhaps co-)invented wasn't the basic idea of the incandescent light bulb -- about ten years earlier some Frenchman had put a tiny wire in a vacuum and ran current through it until it glowed, then burned up because the vacuum wasn't good enough. Swann and Edison had better vacuum pumps, but had to work out all the details of how you bring wires through glass, seal off the bulb, and make a filament that lasts longer than it takes to change the bulb. It is indeed remarkable that Swann, who was a high-school teacher if I recall correctly, managed to find the solutions at least as fast as Edison's 100 men trying every possible way did...
Whittle: If he invented the jet engine, why was it the Germans who built the first combat jets?
Rep. Green's bill sounds pretty reasonable. Contrary to what Timothy implied, it doesn't affect ordinary persistent cookies, like the one that seems to be storing my/. login overnight, or Amazon's user-profiling "one-click" cookie. It's OK for a web site to collect a user profile for their own use, but a web-site can't pass you a third-party user-profiling cookie unless you opt-in. No hidden Double-Click cookies.
Furthermore, it forbids the web site from selling the user profiles they have gathered unless the the users give permission. It specifically says the rules don't change in a bankruptcy. (You know, the site with a good strong privacy policy that went bankrupt and wanted to auction their customer list.) And, IANAL, but I think the way it's worded, you would have to specifically give them permission (opt-in). Just putting it in the privacy policy link at the side won't do. Good enough?
"I find it very fascinating that MS doesn't mention anything about the hazards of running code from an unknown author." As opposed to the hazards of running code that really did originate in Redmond?;)
I'm not sure about Texas, but in general the Anonymous Coward is right. Trade secrets expire, because eventually either they aren't secret or they aren't relevant. The kind of trade secrets usually at issue in an "inevitable disclosure" lawsuit (like marketing plans) expire quickly -- as soon as they start to implement it, it's no secret. And any restrictions on what jobs a person can take have to expire in a year or two, otherwise it's involuntary servitude. Maybe Texas courts doen't worry about involuntary servitude, but Federal courts certainly will enforce the 13th amendment.
Most _technical_ trade secrets are short-lived; as soon as the product hits the market, anyone can reverse-engineer it, so you'd better patent it first. The Coke formula is one example of a long-lived technical trade secrets, but I suspect that it's more a marketing ploy than a real secret anymore. I can't imagine anything they could do (for a few cents a gallon) that a top-notch modern chem lab couldn't reverse engineer. But Pepsi, Faygo, etc. aren't going to pay a million bucks for the work. Pepsi's got the flavor their marketing people want, and Faygo's got a formula that's cheaper than the "real thing" could be.
The best public revelation of Coke's formula came about approx 1910, when the newborn FDA took Coca Cola into court on the grounds that either they were selling cocaine, or they were fraudulently claiming coca leaves (the source of cocaine) as a main ingredient. Coca Cola, Inc. revealed that they had 3 different places brew up 3 different flavoring mixes, then mixed them all together in a 4th plant. So only the founders knew the whole secret, and obviously it wasn't in their interest to let it out; no other one person knew enough to crack the secret. They did have to reveal that one ingredient of one mix was a cocaine free extract of coca leaves. They've never said whether that was the original real thing.;)
"trade secrets being used as patents" Not exactly. As far as I could tell from the article, the pump was still under development. Once they had it working, it would have been patented. But if a competitor was working on the same thing, getting a long list of "things we tried that didn't work" could have given them a six-month advantage.
seems to apply mostly to people who can walk out of one company with the customer list and marketing plans in their head and go right to work in marketing for a competitor. Since I consider most executives and salesmen to be ethically impaired;) to begin with, I can hardly disagree with the courts that they would mis-use their inside knowledge to the detriment of their former employer.
The only case cited where this concerned a technical job was the Allis-Chalmers case at the end of the article -- and that court simply enjoined the engineer from working on the same device he had been developing for the previous employer. Not too unreasonable...
I'd guess that it started with oviraptors or some other small member of the "raptor" bipedal predatory dinosaurs. Some raptor fossils have been found associated with the imprints of downy feathers -- so they had feathers to keep warm and must have been more or less warm-blooded. They were bipedal and had long upper limbs, unlike predators like T. Rex. The oviraptor was chicken-sized when adult, and much smaller when newborn. So I think the smaller raptors ate bugs, using those long arms to catch them. They evolved longer, stiffer feathers to extend their reach and strain more insects out of the air. So you have bird-sized critters running and jumping with feathered arms outstretched, eventually they'll hit the right combination to glide a little. This catches more bugs, so this gene is conserved and eventually they evolved to become better gliders, and finally fliers.
The evolution of flight shouldn't be that much of a mystery. True flight has arisen at least 4 times in very different kinds of animal (insects, pteropods, birds, and bats). In addition to that, gliders include many species of squirrels, at least one fish, and even a snake in New Guinea.
That's the Tasmanian wolf, a large marsupial predator that was shaped very much like a wolf. (It was also called a "tiger" because it was striped.) This is a clear case of parallel evolution: there was a niche for a large predator on Tasmania, and so a canine-like animal evolved to fill it. I think that it existed only on Tasmania, and died out soon after European settlement. It wouldn't learn to stay away from the sheep or something -- besides that, sheep ranchers bring large dogs, some of their dogs run away and go wild, and I doubt that any marsupial predator could compete.
So why didn't the Australian mainland have marsupial predators like the Tasmanian wolf and the smaller Tasmanian Devil? I'd guess because an earlier wave of human settlement brought along a few dogs, who escaped and evolved into dingoes.
"You would still have to have a fan to cool whatever heat sink you attached" Probably. Certainly if you were overclocking. But (assuming that further work on this provides much, much more cooling that the 7 degrees C mentioned in the article), it might also be used to run a chip at a moderate speed without a fan. In laptops, that's a big advantage. I don't expect to see that very often in desktops because chances are the Peltier cooler costs more than the fan.
No, they are running the thermoelectric stack backwards -- putting in electricity to pump the heat to a higher temperature at the top end, rather than letting the natural flow of heat to a lower temperature generate electricity. It would be nice if you could use the Peltier effect to recycle heat into electricity, but at the CPU the trouble is that the thermal resistance between the silicon and the heatsink is high enough to cause difficulties with keeping the silicon at a survivable temperature. Adding extra resistance in the form of a Peltier generator would cook the chip for sure.
Slashdot Mirror
I have previously posted about America's sorry history of ending debates violently, for instance the Congressman who was beaten unconscious on the floor of Congress over slavery -- but I rather suspect we have done much better at keeping debates civil than most countries. I am quite sure of that with respect to France, England, Germany, Italy, and Russia.
People have always attempted to filter out ideas they don't want to listen to. Did you think the Catholic church didn't have public suppor for burning heretics at the stake? Even in the short history of the USA, there are plenty of examples of both private and governmental violence being used to avoid having to listen to the other side. In the War of 1812, critics of the war were arrested for "Sedition" (quite unconstitutionally, but the Supreme Court wasn't yet confident that it could review things like that). In the 1850's, in Congressional debates over slavery there were Congressmen beating each other unconscious; at least they didn't murder each other like was happening in Kansas. In the 1920's, Attorney General Palmer (quite illegally) arrested many for "radical" views. (Hilary Clinton is more radical than most of those persecuted were.) In the 1950's, the FBI was still so busy investigating "radicals" that it didn't even notice there was a Mafia until the NY state police busted a national meeting of mob bosses. I assume nobody needs to hear more about the 60's. And so on...
So a simple internet filter is a considerable improvement over what has happened historically. It does bother me that many people can so insulate themselves as to never hear the other side of the story -- but what has changed? Throughout my lifetime the network news, major newspapers, and most magazines have kept their coverage limited to things that won't unduly surprise the 75% of Americans who don't bother to dig deeper.
Small ones for cell phones are actually in production now. RTFA! (Read the Fine Article)
Of course, that still leaves several years of development before full size OLED displays are available, if ever... But it's certainly a step forward.
Problem is, when you get that new flat panel, you'll probably want it parked just behind your keyboard, where the front of your monitor is now. Sure you've got storage space behind it, but you can't use it as desktop. To actually improve the desktop space, you need a flat panel that is considerably larger than a monitor, so you can hang it on the wall behind your desk and still read the fine print.
Being an engineer, what I really want is a 3 x 4 foot touchpanel display, mounted as a drafting table... 8-)
Send that to the Bulwer-Lytton contest: Bulwer-Lytton contest
"Don't forget that IBM is a marketing company as much as a technical company." I sure wouldn't put IBM's technical prowess on a level with their marketing ... unless their marketing has gotten a whole lot worse lately
That list covers the 1990's all too well, has too little about the 1980's, and nothing at all before 1975. Select a few key sections from those sources. But first go back further in time with:
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. This is an account of engineers at work designing a new computer in the mid-70's, just before microprocessors.
You need to spend at least a week on IBM; it (and companies it absorbed) dominated computing for one century, from the punch card machines of the 1880's through the system 360 and 370 mainframes, and finally the introduction of the PC in 1980. I can't remember many sources, but definitely include a brief look at The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks -- this is a description of what was possibly the most mismanaged nongovernmental project in history, by the manager. (His hindsight is as good as his foresight was lacking.) And it happened in the 1960's when IBM was as dominant as Microsoft is now...
Earlier stuff: Babbage, Jacquard looms, Pascal's calculator, the abacus and counting board...
The ESA is a gov't agency, they aren't concerned with competition. I think what they are really hoping for (besides getting enough eyes looking at the VHDL code to prevent anything like the Pentium divide bug from sneaking through), is that there will be sufficient commercial volume to drive the prices down for them. If they kept it closed source, it would simply remain a low-performance, high-cost chip built specially for space applications.
"They should implement the processor in some sort of non-volatile programmable logic." That would be nice. And it has been done for the Z80 and maybe some other 8-bitters. You take too big of a performance penalty to do this with a 32-bit CPU, so far. That will change, but by then 64-bit CPU's will be standard in desktop computers... So for now, expect to see this implemented as ASIC's (semi-custom chips) and maybe full-custom.
Also, the cost of compiling VHDL of this complexity to fit into any particular chip is probably in the low six figures. Sorry, but they are going to have to get it right, then be sparing with the upgrades.
What is actually open-sourced is VHDL code. That is a language that describes a hardware design. It can be written at various levels, I assume that for a CPU they'd carry it to the lower levels (registers and gates). But to actually get a chip, you've got to compile the VHDL for the particular chip-making processes. This isn't as easy as compiling a C program, it takes considerable human intervention to get a physical fit and correct for various process limitations. And then you've got to create the exposure masks for each step in the process (dozens of them), and finally make a batch of chips. It might take $0.5 million to get the first chip. But that's a few million less than if you created a CPU design from scratch, or licensed one from Intel.
Notice that the implementations in silicon which have got as far as test are quite slow (down to 35MHz), while the chips that are still in process are estimated at 90 to 150MHz. But maybe a Sparc-compatible at 100MHz running *nix will beat a P-III at 800MHz burdened by Windoze? At any rate, it is one heck of an improvement on the underclocked 286's and 386's that are now the peak of space-rated technology. And since even the best quality checks seem to be subject to blind spots, getting outsiders to pick away at the design it should improve the chances of finding bugs before they pop up in flight. (Blind spots: ESA: A new Ariane rocket blew up on the first launch because a calculation related to velocity overflowed, in software was carried over from an older, slower rocket. NASA: Lost a Mars probe because they forgot to convert pounds to newtons. Intel: Pentium divide bug.)
"I would much rather leave it up the parents, but in today's society that just doesn't cut it." Take a good look at the way child protective and school bureaucracies really work before you go recommending more of that. I've seen them at work, and it takes an incredibly bad parent to do worse...
As for the actual topic here, video game censorship: scientific studies of links between violent games or shows and violent behavior have generally been inconclusive -- except where the researchers were heavily biased. The overall rate of youth violence has generally fallen as the media became more violent. However, excessive news coverage of a few oddballs has given people a contrary impression. More than that, every disturbed kid past 7 years old now knows that he can get lots of attention just by talking about bringing a gun to school...
My own opinion about links between violent shows and behavior: For people who are anywhere close to normal, it serves more as a catharsis, to work out anger in make-believe instead of the real world. There are two dangers in violent media:
1. A small number of really disturbed people (not just children) don't have much grasp on the difference between make believe and reality and might imitate the shows. Is that a reason to censor stuff for everyone? And if you are going to censor effectively, you'd have to start with the news...
2. Small children could learn that violence is a normal and acceptable way to handle conflicts. (Contrast a 1950's western where a good man is gradually pushed into meeting violence with violence, to some modern movies where they barely bother with a plot before spraying blood all over the scene.) But the influence of the tube and video games here is much less than that of parents, and in my experience most parents are doing a pretty good job -- or else 99% of children must have a natural tendency to hear the non-violent messages better. I'd keep children under five from watching the most violent stuff, but once they know that it's just make believe up on the screen, if you've taught them right and they don't have mental problems, don't worry about it.
That can be phrased a little better: A vaccinated animal has antibodies against foot and mouth virus. The usual blood test for foot and mouth looks for those antibodies. So you can't tell if a vaccinated animal is healthy just by doing a blood test. You'd think _looking_ at the cow to see if it's sick might be better, but when there are 10,000 cows this takes too long, and it still wouldn't catch animals that are infected but haven't come down sick yet, or the small percentage that become carriers (healthy but as infectious as Typhoid Mary).
The other issue is that the vaccination is not 100% effective. Some vaccinated animals will still catch the disease if exposed to it, and a good many of of those will be become carriers. And so importing vaccinated animals or meat from them still poses a significant risk of importing the virus. Or so the Ag Department says...
Cooking does kill the virus. The US allows imports of sausages, canned meats, cooked hams, etc. from foot-and-mouth-ridden areas, provided the preparation process ensures it's cooked all the way through and meets reasonable sanitation standards. Not that the USDA puts much limits on what can go into sausages, hot dogs, and lunchmeat made in America. Personally, I'd just as soon take my chances with a steak, so at least I can tell from what portion of the cow it was cut...
"dying a porper": It's spelled "pauper" if that's what you were trying to say.
Joseph Swan: I haven't studied the details of that, but my impression was that his and the Edison lab's work on light bulbs was truly simultaneous. Anyway, they both filed patents, then sued each other, and somehow Swan won in British courts and Edison won in American courts. (Makes you suspect a little bias, eh?) In any case, eventually tungsten filaments superseded the Swann & Edison bulbs. Edison got rich because he _also_ created the first electric company -- not a patentable idea, all the DC generation and distribution technology was more or less ready and waiting for an application, but it must have been much harder to put together all the financing and technology than just figuring out which kind of carbonized thread would work best as an incandescent filament was.
Incidentally what they (perhaps co-)invented wasn't the basic idea of the incandescent light bulb -- about ten years earlier some Frenchman had put a tiny wire in a vacuum and ran current through it until it glowed, then burned up because the vacuum wasn't good enough. Swann and Edison had better vacuum pumps, but had to work out all the details of how you bring wires through glass, seal off the bulb, and make a filament that lasts longer than it takes to change the bulb. It is indeed remarkable that Swann, who was a high-school teacher if I recall correctly, managed to find the solutions at least as fast as Edison's 100 men trying every possible way did...
Whittle: If he invented the jet engine, why was it the Germans who built the first combat jets?
Rep. Green's bill sounds pretty reasonable. Contrary to what Timothy implied, it doesn't affect ordinary persistent cookies, like the one that seems to be storing my /. login overnight, or Amazon's user-profiling "one-click" cookie. It's OK for a web site to collect a user profile for their own use, but a web-site can't pass you a third-party user-profiling cookie unless you opt-in. No hidden Double-Click cookies.
Furthermore, it forbids the web site from selling the user profiles they have gathered unless the the users give permission. It specifically says the rules don't change in a bankruptcy. (You know, the site with a good strong privacy policy that went bankrupt and wanted to auction their customer list.) And, IANAL, but I think the way it's worded, you would have to specifically give them permission (opt-in). Just putting it in the privacy policy link at the side won't do. Good enough?
Who could afford that, besides Bill Gates?
;)
OK, make the environmental controls run on Windows.
This seems to be the National Enquirer of science.
"I find it very fascinating that MS doesn't mention anything about the hazards of running code from an unknown author." As opposed to the hazards of running code that really did originate in Redmond? ;)
Or maybe it's another reason to move your business out of CA, if sky-high taxes and no electricity weren't enough...
I'm not sure about Texas, but in general the Anonymous Coward is right. Trade secrets expire, because eventually either they aren't secret or they aren't relevant. The kind of trade secrets usually at issue in an "inevitable disclosure" lawsuit (like marketing plans) expire quickly -- as soon as they start to implement it, it's no secret. And any restrictions on what jobs a person can take have to expire in a year or two, otherwise it's involuntary servitude. Maybe Texas courts doen't worry about involuntary servitude, but Federal courts certainly will enforce the 13th amendment.
;)
Most _technical_ trade secrets are short-lived; as soon as the product hits the market, anyone can reverse-engineer it, so you'd better patent it first. The Coke formula is one example of a long-lived technical trade secrets, but I suspect that it's more a marketing ploy than a real secret anymore. I can't imagine anything they could do (for a few cents a gallon) that a top-notch modern chem lab couldn't reverse engineer. But Pepsi, Faygo, etc. aren't going to pay a million bucks for the work. Pepsi's got the flavor their marketing people want, and Faygo's got a formula that's cheaper than the "real thing" could be.
The best public revelation of Coke's formula came about approx 1910, when the newborn FDA took Coca Cola into court on the grounds that either they were selling cocaine, or they were fraudulently claiming coca leaves (the source of cocaine) as a main ingredient. Coca Cola, Inc. revealed that they had 3 different places brew up 3 different flavoring mixes, then mixed them all together in a 4th plant. So only the founders knew the whole secret, and obviously it wasn't in their interest to let it out; no other one person knew enough to crack the secret. They did have to reveal that one ingredient of one mix was a cocaine free extract of coca leaves. They've never said whether that was the original real thing.
"trade secrets being used as patents" Not exactly. As far as I could tell from the article, the pump was still under development. Once they had it working, it would have been patented. But if a competitor was working on the same thing, getting a long list of "things we tried that didn't work" could have given them a six-month advantage.
seems to apply mostly to people who can walk out of one company with the customer list and marketing plans in their head and go right to work in marketing for a competitor. Since I consider most executives and salesmen to be ethically impaired ;) to begin with, I can hardly disagree with the courts that they would mis-use their inside knowledge to the detriment of their former employer.
The only case cited where this concerned a technical job was the Allis-Chalmers case at the end of the article -- and that court simply enjoined the engineer from working on the same device he had been developing for the previous employer. Not too unreasonable...
I'd guess that it started with oviraptors or some other small member of the "raptor" bipedal predatory dinosaurs. Some raptor fossils have been found associated with the imprints of downy feathers -- so they had feathers to keep warm and must have been more or less warm-blooded. They were bipedal and had long upper limbs, unlike predators like T. Rex. The oviraptor was chicken-sized when adult, and much smaller when newborn. So I think the smaller raptors ate bugs, using those long arms to catch them. They evolved longer, stiffer feathers to extend their reach and strain more insects out of the air. So you have bird-sized critters running and jumping with feathered arms outstretched, eventually they'll hit the right combination to glide a little. This catches more bugs, so this gene is conserved and eventually they evolved to become better gliders, and finally fliers.
The evolution of flight shouldn't be that much of a mystery. True flight has arisen at least 4 times in very different kinds of animal (insects, pteropods, birds, and bats). In addition to that, gliders include many species of squirrels, at least one fish, and even a snake in New Guinea.
That's the Tasmanian wolf, a large marsupial predator that was shaped very much like a wolf. (It was also called a "tiger" because it was striped.) This is a clear case of parallel evolution: there was a niche for a large predator on Tasmania, and so a canine-like animal evolved to fill it. I think that it existed only on Tasmania, and died out soon after European settlement. It wouldn't learn to stay away from the sheep or something -- besides that, sheep ranchers bring large dogs, some of their dogs run away and go wild, and I doubt that any marsupial predator could compete.
So why didn't the Australian mainland have marsupial predators like the Tasmanian wolf and the smaller Tasmanian Devil? I'd guess because an earlier wave of human settlement brought along a few dogs, who escaped and evolved into dingoes.
"You would still have to have a fan to cool whatever heat sink you attached" Probably. Certainly if you were overclocking. But (assuming that further work on this provides much, much more cooling that the 7 degrees C mentioned in the article), it might also be used to run a chip at a moderate speed without a fan. In laptops, that's a big advantage. I don't expect to see that very often in desktops because chances are the Peltier cooler costs more than the fan.
No, they are running the thermoelectric stack backwards -- putting in electricity to pump the heat to a higher temperature at the top end, rather than letting the natural flow of heat to a lower temperature generate electricity. It would be nice if you could use the Peltier effect to recycle heat into electricity, but at the CPU the trouble is that the thermal resistance between the silicon and the heatsink is high enough to cause difficulties with keeping the silicon at a survivable temperature. Adding extra resistance in the form of a Peltier generator would cook the chip for sure.