I've seen a couple of articles on the topic. The conclusions were that the Earth gains mass slowly. But the amount is so small that it will probably be a fraction of a percent over the remaining lifetime of the planet. It may be somewhat more significant than it seems, though, since what is lost is mostly light atoms, i.e., our atmosphere and water. But still, it's not really significant.
The numbers have large error bars, partly because they're dependent on what sort of interstellar junk we're passing through. Right now, we're in a large "bubble" of low density, so what's being added to the Earth is close to a minimum. Come back in a few million years, and we may be in a denser cloud. But accretion to the planet will still be rather insignificant. (Unless one of the big rocks comes our way.;-)
Some astronomers have studied the Earth's "dust tail", partly because it interferes with some kinds of observations due to the light that it scatters. The most interesting conclusion is that the dust tail includes particles as large as bacterial spores, and such spores are known to be present in the upper atmosphere. Tests have shown that they can survive long periods in space. So it's easy to answer the question "Is there life on other planets?" The answer is "Yes, and they came from Earth."
Whether any of them can survive and grow on the other planets is unknown. But the Earth has been spraying the outer planets with bacterial spores for several billion years. The solar wind also eventually blows them out of the solar system, so we've been contaminating the rest of the galaxy, too.
The general term for this process is "panspermia". Ask google about it. It's all very hypothetical, of course. But it's interesting to consider. Maybe not all that interesting, since we can't collect much data on the topic (yet).
So when will we mac and linux users be permitted to use it? Or is there an exclusive deal with MS that locks us out?
My job requires that I do all the development on linux and OSX. Windows isn't permitted except as a leaf node (for UI testing), due to the extreme security problems. So I could easily get a business deduction for it, but not if I have to use MS software in the gateway/firewall.
Bringing up Coca-Cola does make for an interesting comparison. The recording industry is protected from their customers tampering with the product and opening a DVD's contents with unapproved tools. The auto industry has picked up on this and is slowly closing their products the same way, so customers won't be able to take their cars to anyone but an authorized repair shop, and eventually there will be no more independent auto mechanics for hire.
It seems likely that Coca-Cola's management just might be considering following up on this. We may soon see the day when you take a carton of Coke home, and find that the openers iin your kitchen drawer can't be used to open the cans or bottles. You have to pay a large amount of money for an authorized Coca-Cola opener. Every few months, the opener technology will be changed, and you'll have to pay again for the current model opener. If you figure out how it works and make your own opener in your basement shop, you will be committing a felony.
I wonder what other common products this principle might apply to? Book publishers are already onto it, with their electronic "books" protected from unauthorized opening similarly to DVDs. Now if they could only figure out how to apply this to printed books, they could eliminate all that unauthorized opening and pirate reading that is encouraged by public libraries.
But maybe this would finally be too much for Congress to rubber stamp. We can hope. Or maybe we can vote them out? Nah, not a chance.
Actually, "official" means ratified by the International Astronomical Union
Yes; of course. However, as with most scientific terminology, ratification by the IAU does tend to be a formality after it has been hashed out by the appropriate scentists in discussions (private and online), committees, and publications. This most happens when there are technical reasons to standardize the classification. Right now, there may not be such technical reasons. In the real universe, there aren't actually distinct things that correspond to terms like "asteroid", "planet", "star", etc. There is a continuous spectrum of objects with no natural boundaries. Such terms are only rough approximations, and to be specific, you give a longer description that includes the specifics.
Also, for example, Luna and Io are about the same size and shape, but they are radically different kinds of planets in many ways. Similarly with Venus and Earth (and you might want to add Titan to this set). So the term "planet" isn't technically very useful.
It's probably just as likely that the IAU will never decree technical definitions of such terms, on the grounds that there's no need. They are fuzzy terms mostly for public and media usage; in tech circles they are little more than slang. It may just stay that way indefinitely.
Another possibility is that astronomers could decide on some strict definitions, but the public and media wouldn't notice. There is much precedent for this. Thus, several decades ago biologists pretty much decided the answer to the century-old "Are birds dinosaurs?" question, and the International Zoological Conference officially reclassified the Aves as a suborder of the Dinosauria. But we still hear talk of, for example, the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. Ornithologists tend to smile when they hear this. "What do you mean? Dinosaurs aren't extinct. There are around 8000 species alive today. There's one outside the window sitting on that branch right now." But it doesn't matter much. The media and the public can change their terminology if and when they like; in the meantime, we know the technical meaning of the terms.
(Similarly, the computer industry still uses "hacker" in its technical sense, despite the media's redefinition of the term to imply criminal activity. )
(And people who speak Arabic stubbornly continue to use "jihad" in its everyday Arabic sense, despite the repeated mistranslation in the English-speaking world as "holy war". )
(And the really bizarre one: Geologists are constantly bemused by the media's insistence that a magnitude 5.7 earthquake be reported as "5.7 on the Richter Scale". That scale was replaced by the moment-magnitude scale decades ago, and nobody but the meda uses the Richter scale now. But what can ya do?;-)
The presence/absence of an atmosphere is not as clear-cut as you might think... Both the moon and Mercury have comparably thin atmospheres. Are they both planets or both asteroids?
Indeed. One useful way out of this is, as some astronomers have proposed, to divide celestial rocks up somewhat more precisely. First, simply define "planet" to mean something big enough to be a spheroid by self-gravitation, but not shine due to internal fusion (which would make it a star).
Then, divide the planets into three classes, and maybe establish single names for all of them:
1. Airless planets. The trace atmosphere is too thin to have weather that effects the surface significantly. Mercury, Luna, Io, Europa, Callisto, Ganymede, etc.
2. Airy planets. The atmosphere is thick enough to have weather that can reshape the planet's surface. Venus, Earth, Mars, Titan, Triton.
3. Gas giants. The atmosphere is most of the bulk. Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus.
And admit right up front that there are borderline cases. Pluto and Charon are apparently in class 2 now, but class 1 for most of their orbit. Several asteroids are nearly spheroids, but with visible defects. We don't know about this new planet.
As many atronomers have observed, both Earth/Luna and Pluto/Charon are double planets, sharing an orbit.
The term "moon" is something rather different, meaning a body in orbit around another that isn't a star. So the four planets orbiting Jupiter are also moons. Saturn and Neptune both have a single planetary moon. However, as someone else has observed, Earth doesn't really have a moon. Luna is more accurately described as orbiting the sun in the same orbit as Earth.
Of course, until astronomers publish an official set of definitions, where "official" means ratified by a major astronomical society, all of this is just an interesting discussion that can't possibly be settled. You don't decide technical nomenclature issues by asking the media or the general public what they think. If you do, you get things like astrology and creationism (and computer science;-) defined as science.
Hey, Dave Barry just explained it all in his recent column:
Q. Is that legal?
A. It is if you have nuclear weapons.
Now, he was talking about a different topic, but I think it's a good explanation for a lot that's going on in the world now. It certainly explains the US government current foreign policies.
1. Remove all glare from your screen.... 4. Play with the monitor brightness/contrast as needed.
One of the more interesting comments that I read years ago, from an ergonomics expert was the question "Would you ask your customers to sit and stare at a lit flourescent tube for hours?"
The presumed answer that any sane person would give was, of course, "No."
He then pointed out that a CRT-type computer screen is in fact a flourescent tube, and a white window is a fully-lit flourescent tube. So if your screen has windows with a white background, you are staring at a fully-lit flourescent tube.
One of his points was that this is a simple, elegant way to refute almost all "user friendly" claims of software makers. Just look at their windows. Do the backgrounds default to white? If so, then nothing more need be said about any "user friendly" claim. They are viciously assaulting your eyes. End of discussion.
What I've done since then, for any new machine or software, quickly locate the color controls and set the background to a neutral gray. With browsers, you'll also want to look for the "override web page colors" or "always use my colors". This will significantly ease your eyestrain.
With LCD-type displays, it's not quite so bad, because they aren't flourescent tubes, and they don't glow as bright. But they're still a problem, and a medium to light gray is a much better background than white.
Or, to look really elegant, set the backgrounds to black and all the other colors to something bright and colorful. It's much prettier, your eyes will last longer, and your battery may too (depending on the technology).
On my Powerbook, I have the backgrounds mostly set to a gray that closely matches the brushed-steel look of the casing. It looks nice. Too bad Apple didn't think to set it up that way by default.
(But I can't find the color settings in Safari. That's one reason to use mozilla or firefox, I suppose.;-)
Before the 20th century made artificial lighting cheap, it was common for the holds of ships to be illuminated by light coming in through a lot of thick lenses that were embedded into the deck. The lenses were usually roughly pyramidal in shape, with the point down of course. Holes would be drilled in the deck, and then shaped so that the lenses would fit into them flush with the deck. You can see a lot of these in maritime museums these days, as well as in the decks of some of the historical ships in a few harbors.
Of course, they didn't transmit any sort of image. But you wouldn't want them to, really. They just has to be translucent and tough enough to take all the beating they got from above.
Of course, people also included glass bricks in walls for the same purpose. They're still for sale.
I'm sitting here looking at my great linux box on the left, thinking "Uh, oh; a major linux user is switching over to OSX." Then I look at the very nice Powerbook on my right, and think "Hey, great; a major linux user is switching to OSX."
I'm so confused. Which side am i supposed to root for?
I wonder if I could get a 17" Powerbook with linux and drivers for everything? With the translucent apple on the cover replaced with a translucent Tux? It'd be fun to compare them side by side. And tell the partisans of both what they could be doing better.
Something I've done when I aws involved in setting up new users was to have the default *rc files for shells do:
alias del "rm -i"
This makes life a lot easier for people coming from DOS without breaking zillions of shell scripts.
On a more complex level, something that I did for a project some years back, and which I've kept in my personal library, is to hack the rm/mv/cp/ln commands so that they could automatically make backups instead of deleting or overwriting files. You could define the backup style in the environment with a setting like:
#define BACKUP - (backups have a hyphen appended) #define BACKUP.bak (backups have.bak appended) #define BACKUP # (backups have a pound sign prepended) #define BACKUP ';' (VMS-style backup)
The first was the default. There was a command-line -b option to enable backups. A useful trick was that the programs also checked the first char of their name, and if it was upper-case, they did the backup. The '-' case was recursive, so if foo- existed, it would be renamed to foo-- before foo was renamed to foo. And so on.
Then we could just tell people "If you want to play it safe, remove files with Rm rather than rm. The latter is the old unix command that doesn't have any mercy. And if you want to get rid of those backup files, rm will do the job."
(One of the disasters in porting stuff to OSX was with these commands. We had to come up with variant names due to OSX's caseless file-name matching. This in turn broke lots of scripts. Grrr...)
I and others have repeatedly suggested something like this in the standard unix tools, but so far this has been like dropping a rose petal into the Grand Canyon and listening for the sound as it hits bottom. When people do it, they inevitably pick an inventive new scheme, so nothing is portable. And most often, they modify the builtin unix commands so that scripts can't be made portable.
One of the ongoing frustrations in writing scripts is seeing a user baffled when a script tries to delete a scratch file, and it suddenly asks the user /tmp/XQ34759.blx?
This is NOT what I'd call user-friendly. It comes about from vendors repeatedly doctoring rm so that it tries to protect users from accidentally deleting files. One result is that it is often very tricky to write a script that silently deletes a file. You think you've figured it out with something like "/bin/rm -f", and they decide to protect you from the danger of that command. You just can't win this arms race.
If you want a user-friendly file-deletion command, it's much better to call it "del", and leave "rm" in a form that is usable in scripts without harrassing some hapless user who won't have a clue.
Another idea I've seen is to have another set of system commands for scripts, which would have all the user friendliness stripped out so they would be script friendly. We might have directories with names like "/sbin" and "/usr/sbin" for these commands. Scripts could then start by prepending these directories to $PATH or $path, and things would work a lot better.
But I've never seen any vendor do this. Probably they'd decide that these commands aren't safe for novice users, and would start doctoring them to be user friendly.
There are powerful forces at work blocking the development of user-friendly scripts...
There's no warning about destructive behavior ('rm -r *' etc)
Huh? That's the silliest objection I've heard in years. There is absolutely nothing about rm that isn't destructive. That's why rm exists: to destroy things. It has no other purpose whatsoever. If you can't get that from the man page, you shouldn't be allowed near a keyboard.
Next you're going to demand that guns come with warning labels saying that they can injure or kill people, and that matches come with warnings that they can start fires that burn things.
Jeez; who lets people like this into this assylum?
Remember that we're talking about schools here. Schools are supposed to educate.
Granted, 90% of the students aren't going to look past the surface cosmetics, any more than they'll ever learn much in their math or history classes.
But for the minority that wants to learn, OSX is open to them in a way that isn't remotely possible with MS Windows. They can dig as deep into the system as they like, and except for a few proprietary apps, the underlying system is accessible.
Maybe in your office, the sysadmin corwd wants to keep you ignorant and at their mercy. But in a halfway decent school, closed system should be avoided for a very good reason: It's their job to help their students become educated. They need computers that can be opened up and studied.
Of course, a really good school will have a variety of computers. Even a few Windows boxes, so that the students can compare their design and construction with the others that are available. But OSX, linux and *BSD should probably be the workhorses, since those are the ones that are accessible to the students.
(And note that I haven't even mentioned quality. In an educational setting, bad examples are just as useful as good examples.;-)
When you and I use the terms, yes. But to any marketer, those terms are synonyms.
I challenge you to find another market leader in any major industry who has built their entire corporation on a history of non-innovation.
No problem. An obvious exmple is the auto industry. I recall way back when I bought one of my first cars, a VW Rabbit, and mentioned to a mechanic friend that Consumer Reports had given it a glowing recommendation for its advance features. His response was "Yeah; it's probably the first can ever made that's technically more advanced than the Model T." He also observed that the only reason that the US and European auto makers were starting to introduce more than cosmetic changes was that the Japanese were threatening to eat their lunch.
Or look at the telephone business. A couple of decades ago, the US government (and a few others) ended the nearly century-long ban on "foreign attachments", so that Ma Bell could no longer block the use of newfangled equipment. Overnight, real innovation bloomed (amidst the barrage of PR decrying the heavy-handed government regulation;-). Before that, the "industry" had settled to de-facto monopoly nearly everywhere, and was very effective at guaranteeing that no truly new products could be produced by anyone but them. If they'd kept their power to ban competitors' equipment from the wires, we still wouldn't have much more advanced than the old rotary phones.
Nowadays, the phone companies are fighting like crazy to block the threat of telephone service over the internet. This despite their widespread use of IP for "long distance lines", which more and more are just RTP connections over IP. But use of IP phones is a threat to the way the phone system does its billing, so it must be blocked if at all possible. (Good thing that they're slowly losing that battle.)
The computer industry is rife with this problem. Because of the "market leader" phenomenon, lots of practical ideas have never made it out of the lab. Putting IBM and Microsoft aside, as a programmer I keep running into difficult programming problems that make me think "Jeez; this would be so easy in Prolog or Snobol or APL or...." But try getting such radical ideas across to your typical project leader. There are reasons that the hot new programming languages today are hardly distinguishable except by cosmetic features from the languages of the 60's.
The "market leader" problem is alive and obstructing progress in software just like it does in most industries. C++, php and java succeed because the market leaders have bought into them. Perl, python and tcl are semi-successful, because they come standard now on most unix-like system, which is in fact the leader in the tech half of the market. But none of those language is much of an advance over Algol 60. The most radical concept in any of them is probably the inclusion of symbol tables, which is 1960's technology.
Funny thing: There was a story here a few weeks ago mentioning the radical suggestion of bounds-checking hardware in some future cpus. Back in the 70's, I worked on some Burroughs machines (5500, 6500) whose machine language was a RPM stack-oriented language. Memory references were though "descriptors" that contained an address and a size. Bounds checking was include at no extra time cost in every memory reference. Running off the end of a buffer produced an interrupt.
Such technology is more than a quarter-century old. But the market leaders have seen no reason to implement it, easy as it might be. So we programmers continue to waste our time hunting down bugs caused by out-of-bounds array indexes that could easily be caught by the hardware. The manufacturers continue to make cpus that, aside from speed and address size, are hardly distinguishable from the cpus in the 50's. And we all know why they get away with it.
I would like to see ANY example of true MS innovation.
Ah, you must be laboring under the illusion that "innovation" means producing something new. It doesn't. Producing something new is called "invention".
All "innovate" means is to produce something that's different from others in somee minor way. Small, cosmetic changes qualify as "innovations".
This is obvious when you look at the way that almost all marketers usee the terms.
Microsoft has generally been the last in our industry to adopt any new ideas. But they always "embrace and extend". Those extensions are usually small changes designed to throw a monkey wrench into attempts to develop an industry standard. But that is exactly what they mean by "innovation". Small changes, just enough to make things not interoperate well.
This isn't anything unique to Microsoft. The "market leaders" in most industries act exactly the same way. After all, if you've made it big by ripping off the little guys' ideas and "innovating" on them, why ever would you change your behavior?
... would be if a "meeting" could be initiated by a program (that I'd like to write, of course), and the program could participate as one of the parties.
Now I know you're thinking of games. In this case, the app is a program on a hospital's computer that wants to contact one or more people, send them messages, and collect their replies. One-on-one would be useful, but even more useful would be with N parties that could all talk.
Scenario:
Patient: Hello?
Computer: Hello, Mr Jones. Your surgery is tentatively scheduled for Tuesday at 9 am. Is this OK with you?
Patient: Um, no; I have another appointment at that time.
Computer: OK; I'll check with Dr Smith to see if we can reschedule. While I call him, what would be some other good times for you? (Starts dialing Dr Smith)
Patient: Any time that afternoon would be fine.
DrSmith: Hello?
Computer: Mr. Jones says he has a conflict with his 9am appointment tomorrow. Here's his comment... (plays Patient's comment).
DrSmith: I'd have to reschedule my golf game, but I could do it at 4pm tomorrow.
Patient: That would be OK with me, too.
Computer: Mr Jones' surgery is rescheduled for 4pm tomorrow. Can you both verify this?
Patient: Yes, 4pm is a good time.
DrSmith: 4pm tomorrow is OK here.
Computer: Rescheduled. Good-bye.
So could GnomeMeeting support a "meeting" like this? If so, how might I find the docs and/or some sample code?
Yeah, I know there's some voice recognition in there that is non-trivial. The first tests would probably be somewhat simpler, involving a basic computer message and recording all the replies of the other parties.
The Open Source nature is fairly important. In the US and other countries, we're seeing some fairly extensive medical privacy laws passed. This emphasizes that we really must avoid closed-source, binary software, because you can't know what's hidden inside it. In the long term, such software must be completely open to examination and auditing. Any Open-Source tools that can do the job will be very interesting to a lot of people that I work with.
Well, back in high school, I did a bit of practicing, and got good enough that I could flip a coin repeatedly and it would land in my palm with the original side up more than 90% of the time.
I just did a test with a quarter that was in my pocket, and found that I've lost my touch. I flipped it 10 times, and it landed the same side up only 8 of the tries.
Maybe I need to get back in practice, now that there's a "scientific" study of such a bias.
Last I checked, "corporate media" weren't stopping anyone from putting up websites,...
You haven't checked in my neighorhood. We have two cable ISPs here, Comcast and RCN. Both have blocked incoming port 80 for several years now, and have no plan to open them.
Now, it's true that I can put up a web site. But you can't get to my port 80, so you won't see what I have to say.
Now, I can run a server on another port, that's true. And I do at times. But I did discover that there are browsers out there that don't implement the:port portion of a URL. In a recent job, we had a collection of boxes with browsers on them for testing our web pages. We couldn't connect to anything but port 80 from several of the Macs (the ones running OS 9).
Also, it says right there in the TOS in the ISPs' contracts (from both Comcast and RCN) that you aren't permitted to run servers. Period. No web servers. No mail servers. No ssh servers. No echo servers. Any server is grounds for termination. They can do a port scan at any time, and if they get even a single connection, they can legally terminate your service instantly.
Here in the US, governments can't do that. They are subject to the First Ammendment. But corporations have no such limit. They can legally terminate (or censor) your communications at any time, for any reason. They don't even have to tell you their reasons. The laws are similar in lots of countries.
So if you want to be able to use the Internet to communicate, the most reliable way (and the only way protected by law) is if the infrastructure is owned and controlled by the government. They have to let you talk; corporations don't.
...you're suggesting that they actually dive into the code and fix OS problems themselves? Hahahah...
Nah; any administrator in Munich or elsewhere would simply understand this to mean they have to hire people to dive into the code. Or assign the job to someone already on staff, though of course it's always better in any organization if you can hire someone and increase the size of your staff.
And I don't believe that there are no linux/unix programmers looking for a job in the Munich area. If they claim they can't find anyone to help them, they are most likely looking for an excuse to not do the job right.
Chances are that they have lots of people on staff that would jump at the offer to take linux training courses. This would be good for the old resume, and they have lots of immediate opportunities for some useful class projects.
Anyone have more URLs for good collections like this?
There have also been a number of books published on the topic. I have a copy of The Trenton Pickle Ordinance, one of the classics, and it's pretty funny.
There have also been a number of articles written over the years explaining why, at least in most of the US, it's not logically possible to be law-abiding. Most places have a number of conflicting laws that can't all be followed simultaneously.
In one place that I lived, a lawyer friend liked to explain that, if you have no money in your pocket, you can be arrested for vagrancy. But if you do have money in your pocket, consider those coin- or dollar-matching games that you learned as a child? There was a local law against the possession of "gambling devices" which you'd be violating. So they had you whether or not you had currency on your person or not.
This is significant, of course. If you think that "Oh, they'd never enforce something that stupid" then you don't understand the meaning of the phrase "nuisance law".
Can somebody tell me which government agency is actually run by sane, competent people?
Well, NOAA has a pretty good record. Does anyone know of anything they've done that comes close to the PTO's foolishness? Or even as dumb as NASA's screwups?
For that matter, aside from a name change every few decades, has NIST every done anything that qualifies as a major SNAFU?
Actually, it might be interesting to read about their screwups. So if you have links to stories, add them to the list...
People *are* making suggestions when they tell you your interface sucks. They're suggesting you redesign it.:)
Well, yeah. But usually this is only funny if you're not involved. It really helps to have some details about the users' problems, and suggestions from users about how to improve it.
Just saying "redesign it" is a lot like the old politician's trick of promising voters a change, without saying what the changes will be. Usually the result is even worse for the voters (though better for the politician and his/her major campaign contributors).
If you just ask for change, you will get change. But you might not like it when you see it.
In the news.com.com article, there's an elegant statement of the real problem with such patents:
"The Patent Office, being not a technical organization,..."
The USPTO (and probably similar agencies in other countries) has admitted that they have a very real problem in dealing with software patents. This was a rather new thing to them, and they have never been able to hire more than a few people with the right technical expertise. So they have basically taken the approach of "Approve everything and let the courts decide."
They know this is a disaster, but there's not a damned thing they can do about it. There aren't enough people with the right expertise, and even if there were, the USPTO doesn't have money to hire them. Their funding is controlled by Congress, and their hiring pool is controlled by The Market. So this will continue until Congress changes the rules or gives them the billions of $$ that the job requires. Or until millions of computer geeks decide to get a second degree in patent law and donate their time to the cause.
Until one of those things happen, we will continue to draw closer to the future that Bruce Parens described: It will become illegal to write software unless you're working for a giant corporation, because everything you write will be challenged in court as a patent violation.
Of course, we do have a similar problem with copyright. Ever since the laws were changed so that everything is copyrighted by default, it has slowly become more difficult to not infringe. Any sentence we write (including this one) has a growing chance of having been written before, and is thus violating the copyright of the previous author.
In the case of copyright, there is one way out, which is to make your sentences so long and complex that the chance of them duplicating what someone wrote earlier becomes increasingly minuscule, and you can be reasonably certain that a search via google (or any other search engines that may be developed in the future) won't find a good match, or at least a match that duplicates all the disparate ideas that you have managed to shoehorn into your convoluted, rambling sentence sufficiently well to violate any copyright that may be claimed on sentences that express only a few of the many concepts that you have managed to incorporate into your....
(Hmmm... Maybe the same idea would work with patents?;-)
Funny that we got a cluster of comments about birds eating hot peppers. The ufl.edu article was interesting, but I noticed that they reported their test peppers being eaten mostly by a single species of bird.
It's not really known whether all birds find hot peppers tasty. It wouldn't be surprising if this were limited mostly to New World birds, since that's where peppers evolved. We have a conure who loves hot peppers, but conures are from South America, so that's not too useful as an example. However, we also have two cockatiels, and they also like hot peppers. They are Australian, and are somewhat of an outlier among parrots. So they are useful support for an "all birds are immune to capsaicin" hypothesis.
Actually, it's probably not true that they can't taste capsaicin. It's obvious that all of our parrots like hot peppers better than sweet peppers. So there's a good chance that they can taste the capsaicin, and they like the taste. Part of recent research has shown that capsaicin attacks the same mammal nerves that report heat, but this doesn't happen in birds. So it's calling them "hot" isn't just a metaphor; the capsaicin is literally triggering your heat sensors. It's likely that, for birds, capsaicin has a taste, although it doesn't produce a "hot" effect. At least some birds, especially parrots, seem to like whatever taste it has.
A bit of irony here is that hot peppers have recently been spread all over the planet, by a mammal. The peppers' nefarious scheme to scare off mammals was a dismal failure with us, to the peppers' benefit. We have three pots of small, hot peppers in the house. Most of the fruit end up as bird food, though we use a few of them ourselves in cooking. One of the pots is in full bloom right now.
Depending on your pet, it might not be possible to make it hot enough.
Our problem is a cockatiel. The cute little devil has learned to pop the key caps off of keyboards. So far, we've managed to catch him in the act, retrieve the key cap, and press it back in place. But it's just a matter of time before he flies off with one.
Hot peppers don't faze parrots. Commercial parrot mixes often include hot peppers. A while ago, when I decided to harvest a pot full of ripe "decorative" peppers, our conure landed on my shoulder with an expectant look on her face. So I handed her one, which she devoured. She ate half of a second pepper before she was happy. These were peppers hot enough that one of them imparts a significant amount of heat to 3 or 4 litres of jambalaya.
There was a paper published last year by some researchers who had figured out why birds can eat hot peppers. It turns out that the capsaicin molecule that produces the "heat" binds to the nerve endings in mammals but not in birds. Birds literally don't feel the effect (or at least not very strongly).
They conjectured that this was adaptive on the peppers' part. Mammals mostly have long digestive tracts, where pepper seeds have a high attrition rate. Birds can't afford to fly all that undigested mass around. They have short digestive tracts that extract the easily-extracted stuff and dump the rest. The leathery shell of pepper seeds easily survives the few hours inside a bird, and are then dropped with a chunk of fertilizer far from the parent plant. The idea is that peppers evolved a tool to discourage mammals, while the rest of the fruit tastes good to many South American birds.
Anyway, you'll need to find a repellent that affects your particular pet.
(And I've also seen cats and dogs that like hot sausages. So hot peppers might affect some of them, but not all.)
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I've seen a couple of articles on the topic. The conclusions were that the Earth gains mass slowly. But the amount is so small that it will probably be a fraction of a percent over the remaining lifetime of the planet. It may be somewhat more significant than it seems, though, since what is lost is mostly light atoms, i.e., our atmosphere and water. But still, it's not really significant.
;-)
The numbers have large error bars, partly because they're dependent on what sort of interstellar junk we're passing through. Right now, we're in a large "bubble" of low density, so what's being added to the Earth is close to a minimum. Come back in a few million years, and we may be in a denser cloud. But accretion to the planet will still be rather insignificant. (Unless one of the big rocks comes our way.
Some astronomers have studied the Earth's "dust tail", partly because it interferes with some kinds of observations due to the light that it scatters. The most interesting conclusion is that the dust tail includes particles as large as bacterial spores, and such spores are known to be present in the upper atmosphere. Tests have shown that they can survive long periods in space. So it's easy to answer the question "Is there life on other planets?" The answer is "Yes, and they came from Earth."
Whether any of them can survive and grow on the other planets is unknown. But the Earth has been spraying the outer planets with bacterial spores for several billion years. The solar wind also eventually blows them out of the solar system, so we've been contaminating the rest of the galaxy, too.
The general term for this process is "panspermia". Ask google about it. It's all very hypothetical, of course. But it's interesting to consider. Maybe not all that interesting, since we can't collect much data on the topic (yet).
So when will we mac and linux users be permitted to use it? Or is there an exclusive deal with MS that locks us out?
My job requires that I do all the development on linux and OSX. Windows isn't permitted except as a leaf node (for UI testing), due to the extreme security problems. So I could easily get a business deduction for it, but not if I have to use MS software in the gateway/firewall.
Bringing up Coca-Cola does make for an interesting comparison. The recording industry is protected from their customers tampering with the product and opening a DVD's contents with unapproved tools. The auto industry has picked up on this and is slowly closing their products the same way, so customers won't be able to take their cars to anyone but an authorized repair shop, and eventually there will be no more independent auto mechanics for hire.
It seems likely that Coca-Cola's management just might be considering following up on this. We may soon see the day when you take a carton of Coke home, and find that the openers iin your kitchen drawer can't be used to open the cans or bottles. You have to pay a large amount of money for an authorized Coca-Cola opener. Every few months, the opener technology will be changed, and you'll have to pay again for the current model opener. If you figure out how it works and make your own opener in your basement shop, you will be committing a felony.
I wonder what other common products this principle might apply to? Book publishers are already onto it, with their electronic "books" protected from unauthorized opening similarly to DVDs. Now if they could only figure out how to apply this to printed books, they could eliminate all that unauthorized opening and pirate reading that is encouraged by public libraries.
But maybe this would finally be too much for Congress to rubber stamp. We can hope. Or maybe we can vote them out? Nah, not a chance.
Actually, "official" means ratified by the International Astronomical Union
;-)
Yes; of course. However, as with most scientific terminology, ratification by the IAU does tend to be a formality after it has been hashed out by the appropriate scentists in discussions (private and online), committees, and publications. This most happens when there are technical reasons to standardize the classification. Right now, there may not be such technical reasons. In the real universe, there aren't actually distinct things that correspond to terms like "asteroid", "planet", "star", etc. There is a continuous spectrum of objects with no natural boundaries. Such terms are only rough approximations, and to be specific, you give a longer description that includes the specifics.
Also, for example, Luna and Io are about the same size and shape, but they are radically different kinds of planets in many ways. Similarly with Venus and Earth (and you might want to add Titan to this set). So the term "planet" isn't technically very useful.
It's probably just as likely that the IAU will never decree technical definitions of such terms, on the grounds that there's no need. They are fuzzy terms mostly for public and media usage; in tech circles they are little more than slang. It may just stay that way indefinitely.
Another possibility is that astronomers could decide on some strict definitions, but the public and media wouldn't notice. There is much precedent for this. Thus, several decades ago biologists pretty much decided the answer to the century-old "Are birds dinosaurs?" question, and the International Zoological Conference officially reclassified the Aves as a suborder of the Dinosauria. But we still hear talk of, for example, the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. Ornithologists tend to smile when they hear this. "What do you mean? Dinosaurs aren't extinct. There are around 8000 species alive today. There's one outside the window sitting on that branch right now." But it doesn't matter much. The media and the public can change their terminology if and when they like; in the meantime, we know the technical meaning of the terms.
(Similarly, the computer industry still uses "hacker" in its technical sense, despite the media's redefinition of the term to imply criminal activity. )
(And people who speak Arabic stubbornly continue to use "jihad" in its everyday Arabic sense, despite the repeated mistranslation in the English-speaking world as "holy war". )
(And the really bizarre one: Geologists are constantly bemused by the media's insistence that a magnitude 5.7 earthquake be reported as "5.7 on the Richter Scale". That scale was replaced by the moment-magnitude scale decades ago, and nobody but the meda uses the Richter scale now. But what can ya do?
The presence/absence of an atmosphere is not as clear-cut as you might think... Both the moon and Mercury have comparably thin atmospheres. Are they both planets or both asteroids?
;-) defined as science.
Indeed. One useful way out of this is, as some astronomers have proposed, to divide celestial rocks up somewhat more precisely. First, simply define "planet" to mean something big enough to be a spheroid by self-gravitation, but not shine due to internal fusion (which would make it a star).
Then, divide the planets into three classes, and maybe establish single names for all of them:
1. Airless planets. The trace atmosphere is too thin to have weather that effects the surface significantly. Mercury, Luna, Io, Europa, Callisto, Ganymede, etc.
2. Airy planets. The atmosphere is thick enough to have weather that can reshape the planet's surface. Venus, Earth, Mars, Titan, Triton.
3. Gas giants. The atmosphere is most of the bulk. Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus.
And admit right up front that there are borderline cases. Pluto and Charon are apparently in class 2 now, but class 1 for most of their orbit. Several asteroids are nearly spheroids, but with visible defects. We don't know about this new planet.
As many atronomers have observed, both Earth/Luna and Pluto/Charon are double planets, sharing an orbit.
The term "moon" is something rather different, meaning a body in orbit around another that isn't a star. So the four planets orbiting Jupiter are also moons. Saturn and Neptune both have a single planetary moon. However, as someone else has observed, Earth doesn't really have a moon. Luna is more accurately described as orbiting the sun in the same orbit as Earth.
Of course, until astronomers publish an official set of definitions, where "official" means ratified by a major astronomical society, all of this is just an interesting discussion that can't possibly be settled. You don't decide technical nomenclature issues by asking the media or the general public what they think. If you do, you get things like astrology and creationism (and computer science
Hey, Dave Barry just explained it all in his recent column:
Q. Is that legal?
A. It is if you have nuclear weapons.
Now, he was talking about a different topic, but I think it's a good explanation for a lot that's going on in the world now. It certainly explains the US government current foreign policies.
1. Remove all glare from your screen. ...
;-)
4. Play with the monitor brightness/contrast as needed.
One of the more interesting comments that I read years ago, from an ergonomics expert was the question "Would you ask your customers to sit and stare at a lit flourescent tube for hours?"
The presumed answer that any sane person would give was, of course, "No."
He then pointed out that a CRT-type computer screen is in fact a flourescent tube, and a white window is a fully-lit flourescent tube. So if your screen has windows with a white background, you are staring at a fully-lit flourescent tube.
One of his points was that this is a simple, elegant way to refute almost all "user friendly" claims of software makers. Just look at their windows. Do the backgrounds default to white? If so, then nothing more need be said about any "user friendly" claim. They are viciously assaulting your eyes. End of discussion.
What I've done since then, for any new machine or software, quickly locate the color controls and set the background to a neutral gray. With browsers, you'll also want to look for the "override web page colors" or "always use my colors". This will significantly ease your eyestrain.
With LCD-type displays, it's not quite so bad, because they aren't flourescent tubes, and they don't glow as bright. But they're still a problem, and a medium to light gray is a much better background than white.
Or, to look really elegant, set the backgrounds to black and all the other colors to something bright and colorful. It's much prettier, your eyes will last longer, and your battery may too (depending on the technology).
On my Powerbook, I have the backgrounds mostly set to a gray that closely matches the brushed-steel look of the casing. It looks nice. Too bad Apple didn't think to set it up that way by default.
(But I can't find the color settings in Safari. That's one reason to use mozilla or firefox, I suppose.
It's a much, much older idea.
Before the 20th century made artificial lighting cheap, it was common for the holds of ships to be illuminated by light coming in through a lot of thick lenses that were embedded into the deck. The lenses were usually roughly pyramidal in shape, with the point down of course. Holes would be drilled in the deck, and then shaped so that the lenses would fit into them flush with the deck. You can see a lot of these in maritime museums these days, as well as in the decks of some of the historical ships in a few harbors.
Of course, they didn't transmit any sort of image. But you wouldn't want them to, really. They just has to be translucent and tough enough to take all the beating they got from above.
Of course, people also included glass bricks in walls for the same purpose. They're still for sale.
I'm sitting here looking at my great linux box on the left, thinking "Uh, oh; a major linux user is switching over to OSX." Then I look at the very nice Powerbook on my right, and think "Hey, great; a major linux user is switching to OSX."
I'm so confused. Which side am i supposed to root for?
I wonder if I could get a 17" Powerbook with linux and drivers for everything? With the translucent apple on the cover replaced with a translucent Tux? It'd be fun to compare them side by side. And tell the partisans of both what they could be doing better.
Something I've done when I aws involved in setting up new users was to have the default *rc files for shells do:
.bak (backups have .bak appended)
/tmp/XQ34759.blx?
...
alias del "rm -i"
This makes life a lot easier for people coming from DOS without breaking zillions of shell scripts.
On a more complex level, something that I did for a project some years back, and which I've kept in my personal library, is to hack the rm/mv/cp/ln commands so that they could automatically make backups instead of deleting or overwriting files. You could define the backup style in the environment with a setting like:
#define BACKUP - (backups have a hyphen appended)
#define BACKUP
#define BACKUP # (backups have a pound sign prepended)
#define BACKUP ';' (VMS-style backup)
The first was the default. There was a command-line -b option to enable backups. A useful trick was that the programs also checked the first char of their name, and if it was upper-case, they did the backup. The '-' case was recursive, so if foo- existed, it would be renamed to foo-- before foo was renamed to foo. And so on.
Then we could just tell people "If you want to play it safe, remove files with Rm rather than rm. The latter is the old unix command that doesn't have any mercy. And if you want to get rid of those backup files, rm will do the job."
(One of the disasters in porting stuff to OSX was with these commands. We had to come up with variant names due to OSX's caseless file-name matching. This in turn broke lots of scripts. Grrr...)
I and others have repeatedly suggested something like this in the standard unix tools, but so far this has been like dropping a rose petal into the Grand Canyon and listening for the sound as it hits bottom. When people do it, they inevitably pick an inventive new scheme, so nothing is portable. And most often, they modify the builtin unix commands so that scripts can't be made portable.
One of the ongoing frustrations in writing scripts is seeing a user baffled when a script tries to delete a scratch file, and it suddenly asks the user
This is NOT what I'd call user-friendly. It comes about from vendors repeatedly doctoring rm so that it tries to protect users from accidentally deleting files. One result is that it is often very tricky to write a script that silently deletes a file. You think you've figured it out with something like "/bin/rm -f", and they decide to protect you from the danger of that command. You just can't win this arms race.
If you want a user-friendly file-deletion command, it's much better to call it "del", and leave "rm" in a form that is usable in scripts without harrassing some hapless user who won't have a clue.
Another idea I've seen is to have another set of system commands for scripts, which would have all the user friendliness stripped out so they would be script friendly. We might have directories with names like "/sbin" and "/usr/sbin" for these commands. Scripts could then start by prepending these directories to $PATH or $path, and things would work a lot better.
But I've never seen any vendor do this. Probably they'd decide that these commands aren't safe for novice users, and would start doctoring them to be user friendly.
There are powerful forces at work blocking the development of user-friendly scripts
There's no warning about destructive behavior ('rm -r *' etc)
Huh? That's the silliest objection I've heard in years. There is absolutely nothing about rm that isn't destructive. That's why rm exists: to destroy things. It has no other purpose whatsoever. If you can't get that from the man page, you shouldn't be allowed near a keyboard.
Next you're going to demand that guns come with warning labels saying that they can injure or kill people, and that matches come with warnings that they can start fires that burn things.
Jeez; who lets people like this into this assylum?
Remember that we're talking about schools here. Schools are supposed to educate.
;-)
Granted, 90% of the students aren't going to look past the surface cosmetics, any more than they'll ever learn much in their math or history classes.
But for the minority that wants to learn, OSX is open to them in a way that isn't remotely possible with MS Windows. They can dig as deep into the system as they like, and except for a few proprietary apps, the underlying system is accessible.
Maybe in your office, the sysadmin corwd wants to keep you ignorant and at their mercy. But in a halfway decent school, closed system should be avoided for a very good reason: It's their job to help their students become educated. They need computers that can be opened up and studied.
Of course, a really good school will have a variety of computers. Even a few Windows boxes, so that the students can compare their design and construction with the others that are available. But OSX, linux and *BSD should probably be the workhorses, since those are the ones that are accessible to the students.
(And note that I haven't even mentioned quality. In an educational setting, bad examples are just as useful as good examples.
No, that is a refinement, not an innovation.
;-). Before that, the "industry" had settled to de-facto monopoly nearly everywhere, and was very effective at guaranteeing that no truly new products could be produced by anyone but them. If they'd kept their power to ban competitors' equipment from the wires, we still wouldn't have much more advanced than the old rotary phones.
...." But try getting such radical ideas across to your typical project leader. There are reasons that the hot new programming languages today are hardly distinguishable except by cosmetic features from the languages of the 60's.
When you and I use the terms, yes. But to any marketer, those terms are synonyms.
I challenge you to find another market leader in any major industry who has built their entire corporation on a history of non-innovation.
No problem. An obvious exmple is the auto industry. I recall way back when I bought one of my first cars, a VW Rabbit, and mentioned to a mechanic friend that Consumer Reports had given it a glowing recommendation for its advance features. His response was "Yeah; it's probably the first can ever made that's technically more advanced than the Model T." He also observed that the only reason that the US and European auto makers were starting to introduce more than cosmetic changes was that the Japanese were threatening to eat their lunch.
Or look at the telephone business. A couple of decades ago, the US government (and a few others) ended the nearly century-long ban on "foreign attachments", so that Ma Bell could no longer block the use of newfangled equipment. Overnight, real innovation bloomed (amidst the barrage of PR decrying the heavy-handed government regulation
Nowadays, the phone companies are fighting like crazy to block the threat of telephone service over the internet. This despite their widespread use of IP for "long distance lines", which more and more are just RTP connections over IP. But use of IP phones is a threat to the way the phone system does its billing, so it must be blocked if at all possible. (Good thing that they're slowly losing that battle.)
The computer industry is rife with this problem. Because of the "market leader" phenomenon, lots of practical ideas have never made it out of the lab. Putting IBM and Microsoft aside, as a programmer I keep running into difficult programming problems that make me think "Jeez; this would be so easy in Prolog or Snobol or APL or
The "market leader" problem is alive and obstructing progress in software just like it does in most industries. C++, php and java succeed because the market leaders have bought into them. Perl, python and tcl are semi-successful, because they come standard now on most unix-like system, which is in fact the leader in the tech half of the market. But none of those language is much of an advance over Algol 60. The most radical concept in any of them is probably the inclusion of symbol tables, which is 1960's technology.
Funny thing: There was a story here a few weeks ago mentioning the radical suggestion of bounds-checking hardware in some future cpus. Back in the 70's, I worked on some Burroughs machines (5500, 6500) whose machine language was a RPM stack-oriented language. Memory references were though "descriptors" that contained an address and a size. Bounds checking was include at no extra time cost in every memory reference. Running off the end of a buffer produced an interrupt.
Such technology is more than a quarter-century old. But the market leaders have seen no reason to implement it, easy as it might be. So we programmers continue to waste our time hunting down bugs caused by out-of-bounds array indexes that could easily be caught by the hardware. The manufacturers continue to make cpus that, aside from speed and address size, are hardly distinguishable from the cpus in the 50's. And we all know why they get away with it.
I would like to see ANY example of true MS innovation.
Ah, you must be laboring under the illusion that "innovation" means producing something new. It doesn't. Producing something new is called "invention".
All "innovate" means is to produce something that's different from others in somee minor way. Small, cosmetic changes qualify as "innovations".
This is obvious when you look at the way that almost all marketers usee the terms.
Microsoft has generally been the last in our industry to adopt any new ideas. But they always "embrace and extend". Those extensions are usually small changes designed to throw a monkey wrench into attempts to develop an industry standard. But that is exactly what they mean by "innovation". Small changes, just enough to make things not interoperate well.
This isn't anything unique to Microsoft. The "market leaders" in most industries act exactly the same way. After all, if you've made it big by ripping off the little guys' ideas and "innovating" on them, why ever would you change your behavior?
... would be if a "meeting" could be initiated by a program (that I'd like to write, of course), and the program could participate as one of the parties.
... (plays Patient's comment).
Now I know you're thinking of games. In this case, the app is a program on a hospital's computer that wants to contact one or more people, send them messages, and collect their replies. One-on-one would be useful, but even more useful would be with N parties that could all talk.
Scenario:
Patient: Hello?
Computer: Hello, Mr Jones. Your surgery is tentatively scheduled for Tuesday at 9 am. Is this OK with you?
Patient: Um, no; I have another appointment at that time.
Computer: OK; I'll check with Dr Smith to see if we can reschedule. While I call him, what would be some other good times for you? (Starts dialing Dr Smith)
Patient: Any time that afternoon would be fine.
DrSmith: Hello?
Computer: Mr. Jones says he has a conflict with his 9am appointment tomorrow. Here's his comment
DrSmith: I'd have to reschedule my golf game, but I could do it at 4pm tomorrow.
Patient: That would be OK with me, too.
Computer: Mr Jones' surgery is rescheduled for 4pm tomorrow. Can you both verify this?
Patient: Yes, 4pm is a good time.
DrSmith: 4pm tomorrow is OK here.
Computer: Rescheduled. Good-bye.
So could GnomeMeeting support a "meeting" like this? If so, how might I find the docs and/or some sample code?
Yeah, I know there's some voice recognition in there that is non-trivial. The first tests would probably be somewhat simpler, involving a basic computer message and recording all the replies of the other parties.
The Open Source nature is fairly important. In the US and other countries, we're seeing some fairly extensive medical privacy laws passed. This emphasizes that we really must avoid closed-source, binary software, because you can't know what's hidden inside it. In the long term, such software must be completely open to examination and auditing. Any Open-Source tools that can do the job will be very interesting to a lot of people that I work with.
Not only does search.msn.com work fine for XXX, but it also presents you a "featured site": NightSurf.com.
...
So they accept paid ads from porn sites, but they intercept and redirecto XFree86 sites. Hmmm
Well, back in high school, I did a bit of practicing, and got good enough that I could flip a coin repeatedly and it would land in my palm with the original side up more than 90% of the time.
I just did a test with a quarter that was in my pocket, and found that I've lost my touch. I flipped it 10 times, and it landed the same side up only 8 of the tries.
Maybe I need to get back in practice, now that there's a "scientific" study of such a bias.
(Consult the Amazing Randi for many more such examples.)
Last I checked, "corporate media" weren't stopping anyone from putting up websites, ...
:port portion of a URL. In a recent job, we had a collection of boxes with browsers on them for testing our web pages. We couldn't connect to anything but port 80 from several of the Macs (the ones running OS 9).
You haven't checked in my neighorhood. We have two cable ISPs here, Comcast and RCN. Both have blocked incoming port 80 for several years now, and have no plan to open them.
Now, it's true that I can put up a web site. But you can't get to my port 80, so you won't see what I have to say.
Now, I can run a server on another port, that's true. And I do at times. But I did discover that there are browsers out there that don't implement the
Also, it says right there in the TOS in the ISPs' contracts (from both Comcast and RCN) that you aren't permitted to run servers. Period. No web servers. No mail servers. No ssh servers. No echo servers. Any server is grounds for termination. They can do a port scan at any time, and if they get even a single connection, they can legally terminate your service instantly.
Here in the US, governments can't do that. They are subject to the First Ammendment. But corporations have no such limit. They can legally terminate (or censor) your communications at any time, for any reason. They don't even have to tell you their reasons. The laws are similar in lots of countries.
So if you want to be able to use the Internet to communicate, the most reliable way (and the only way protected by law) is if the infrastructure is owned and controlled by the government. They have to let you talk; corporations don't.
...you're suggesting that they actually dive into the code and fix OS problems themselves? Hahahah...
Nah; any administrator in Munich or elsewhere would simply understand this to mean they have to hire people to dive into the code. Or assign the job to someone already on staff, though of course it's always better in any organization if you can hire someone and increase the size of your staff.
And I don't believe that there are no linux/unix programmers looking for a job in the Munich area. If they claim they can't find anyone to help them, they are most likely looking for an excuse to not do the job right.
Chances are that they have lots of people on staff that would jump at the offer to take linux training courses. This would be good for the old resume, and they have lots of immediate opportunities for some useful class projects.
There are some collections of weird and stupid laws. One is at http://www.dumblaws.com/states/.
Anyone have more URLs for good collections like this?
There have also been a number of books published on the topic. I have a copy of The Trenton Pickle Ordinance, one of the classics, and it's pretty funny.
There have also been a number of articles written over the years explaining why, at least in most of the US, it's not logically possible to be law-abiding. Most places have a number of conflicting laws that can't all be followed simultaneously.
In one place that I lived, a lawyer friend liked to explain that, if you have no money in your pocket, you can be arrested for vagrancy. But if you do have money in your pocket, consider those coin- or dollar-matching games that you learned as a child? There was a local law against the possession of "gambling devices" which you'd be violating. So they had you whether or not you had currency on your person or not.
This is significant, of course. If you think that "Oh, they'd never enforce something that stupid" then you don't understand the meaning of the phrase "nuisance law".
Can somebody tell me which government agency is actually run by sane, competent people?
...
Well, NOAA has a pretty good record. Does anyone know of anything they've done that comes close to the PTO's foolishness? Or even as dumb as NASA's screwups?
For that matter, aside from a name change every few decades, has NIST every done anything that qualifies as a major SNAFU?
Actually, it might be interesting to read about their screwups. So if you have links to stories, add them to the list
People *are* making suggestions when they tell you your interface sucks. They're suggesting you redesign it. :)
Well, yeah. But usually this is only funny if you're not involved. It really helps to have some details about the users' problems, and suggestions from users about how to improve it.
Just saying "redesign it" is a lot like the old politician's trick of promising voters a change, without saying what the changes will be. Usually the result is even worse for the voters (though better for the politician and his/her major campaign contributors).
If you just ask for change, you will get change. But you might not like it when you see it.
In the news.com.com article, there's an elegant statement of the real problem with such patents:
..."
....
... Maybe the same idea would work with patents? ;-)
"The Patent Office, being not a technical organization,
The USPTO (and probably similar agencies in other countries) has admitted that they have a very real problem in dealing with software patents. This was a rather new thing to them, and they have never been able to hire more than a few people with the right technical expertise. So they have basically taken the approach of "Approve everything and let the courts decide."
They know this is a disaster, but there's not a damned thing they can do about it. There aren't enough people with the right expertise, and even if there were, the USPTO doesn't have money to hire them. Their funding is controlled by Congress, and their hiring pool is controlled by The Market. So this will continue until Congress changes the rules or gives them the billions of $$ that the job requires. Or until millions of computer geeks decide to get a second degree in patent law and donate their time to the cause.
Until one of those things happen, we will continue to draw closer to the future that Bruce Parens described: It will become illegal to write software unless you're working for a giant corporation, because everything you write will be challenged in court as a patent violation.
Of course, we do have a similar problem with copyright. Ever since the laws were changed so that everything is copyrighted by default, it has slowly become more difficult to not infringe. Any sentence we write (including this one) has a growing chance of having been written before, and is thus violating the copyright of the previous author.
In the case of copyright, there is one way out, which is to make your sentences so long and complex that the chance of them duplicating what someone wrote earlier becomes increasingly minuscule, and you can be reasonably certain that a search via google (or any other search engines that may be developed in the future) won't find a good match, or at least a match that duplicates all the disparate ideas that you have managed to shoehorn into your convoluted, rambling sentence sufficiently well to violate any copyright that may be claimed on sentences that express only a few of the many concepts that you have managed to incorporate into your
(Hmmm
Funny that we got a cluster of comments about birds eating hot peppers. The ufl.edu article was interesting, but I noticed that they reported their test peppers being eaten mostly by a single species of bird.
It's not really known whether all birds find hot peppers tasty. It wouldn't be surprising if this were limited mostly to New World birds, since that's where peppers evolved. We have a conure who loves hot peppers, but conures are from South America, so that's not too useful as an example. However, we also have two cockatiels, and they also like hot peppers. They are Australian, and are somewhat of an outlier among parrots. So they are useful support for an "all birds are immune to capsaicin" hypothesis.
Actually, it's probably not true that they can't taste capsaicin. It's obvious that all of our parrots like hot peppers better than sweet peppers. So there's a good chance that they can taste the capsaicin, and they like the taste. Part of recent research has shown that capsaicin attacks the same mammal nerves that report heat, but this doesn't happen in birds. So it's calling them "hot" isn't just a metaphor; the capsaicin is literally triggering your heat sensors. It's likely that, for birds, capsaicin has a taste, although it doesn't produce a "hot" effect. At least some birds, especially parrots, seem to like whatever taste it has.
A bit of irony here is that hot peppers have recently been spread all over the planet, by a mammal. The peppers' nefarious scheme to scare off mammals was a dismal failure with us, to the peppers' benefit. We have three pots of small, hot peppers in the house. Most of the fruit end up as bird food, though we use a few of them ourselves in cooking. One of the pots is in full bloom right now.
Depending on your pet, it might not be possible to make it hot enough.
Our problem is a cockatiel. The cute little devil has learned to pop the key caps off of keyboards. So far, we've managed to catch him in the act, retrieve the key cap, and press it back in place. But it's just a matter of time before he flies off with one.
Hot peppers don't faze parrots. Commercial parrot mixes often include hot peppers. A while ago, when I decided to harvest a pot full of ripe "decorative" peppers, our conure landed on my shoulder with an expectant look on her face. So I handed her one, which she devoured. She ate half of a second pepper before she was happy. These were peppers hot enough that one of them imparts a significant amount of heat to 3 or 4 litres of jambalaya.
There was a paper published last year by some researchers who had figured out why birds can eat hot peppers. It turns out that the capsaicin molecule that produces the "heat" binds to the nerve endings in mammals but not in birds. Birds literally don't feel the effect (or at least not very strongly).
They conjectured that this was adaptive on the peppers' part. Mammals mostly have long digestive tracts, where pepper seeds have a high attrition rate. Birds can't afford to fly all that undigested mass around. They have short digestive tracts that extract the easily-extracted stuff and dump the rest. The leathery shell of pepper seeds easily survives the few hours inside a bird, and are then dropped with a chunk of fertilizer far from the parent plant. The idea is that peppers evolved a tool to discourage mammals, while the rest of the fruit tastes good to many South American birds.
Anyway, you'll need to find a repellent that affects your particular pet.
(And I've also seen cats and dogs that like hot sausages. So hot peppers might affect some of them, but not all.)