Doubtful. When you don't want satellites to photograph your subs, you keep them in sub pens or covered (dry)docks. It's not like the orbits of surveillance satellites are unknown, and China certainly has the radar capability to track them and know when they'll be overhead. It's a pretty safe bet that if there's a military asset visible on a satellite photograph, the military in question didn't feel it was worth the trouble to keep that asset concealed.
The industry should be paying closer attention to its meteoric rise
Meteors don't rise. They fall. "Meteoric rise" refers to something brief and transitory, like the track of a meteor which lasts for but a brief moment before disappearing; if you wish to say that a current seen trend is the way things are going to be for a while, "meteoric" is the opposite of what you should be calling it.
The RIAA has been pushing that line ever since Sgt. Pepper, because that lets them package music in a way that's more convenient to them. All they need to do is find a hit single, wrap it in an album's worth of crap, and sell it for $18. Here's a great article on the conflict between selling the single and selling the album. You speak of Sgt. Pepper? Fine. But you ignore the marginalization of whole genres of music as the push for the concept album came to dominate the industry:
It's laughable to even consider this now, but in 1966, while the Beatles were working on what became Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, EMI stole two of the catchiest songs from the sessions ("Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever") and issued them as a chart-topping "double-A-side" single; the Beatles left the songs off the album, released months later. Nowadays, that would be unthinkable. The label would release "Penny Lane" to deejays, "work it" to radio for six months or so and then, with carefully planned synergy, release an album with the built-in hit while working a second single. Rather than being the singles-free "concept" album we know, Sgt. Pepper would have been strip-mined for hit after hit.
And would that have been so bad? For one thing, the idea of the single-free, artistically "pure" album has proved to be (mostly) a crock, the occasional Led Zeppelin or Radiohead album notwithstanding. But there was a bigger problem with Sgt. Pepper, which officially kicked off the "album era" (even though it followed Pet Sounds by months and several Frank Sinatra concept albums by a decade, but never mind): it gave the music industry a new business model - one to which it still mindlessly clings, 40 years later.
Once labels saw that long-playing albums could sell as well as or better than 45-RPM singles, the whole emphasis changed. Music was meant to be heard, enjoyed, judged and, most important, purchased at length. The standard unit of measure for music became not the song, but the bundle of songs. Labels built their economic foundation around people's willingness to buy more than one song by an artist at a time.
So began three decades of artistic evolution - the best artists created brilliant, ageless album-length statements - and commercial devolution. In the '70s, labels treated rock acts as "album acts" and pop and R&B acts as "singles acts," prioritizing the former and ghettoizing the latter. In the '80s, labels emphasized albums that could be milked dry for hits: Thriller, Purple Rain, Born in the U.S.A., True Blue, Control, Hysteria, Faith - each spinning off five, six, even seven hits until radio listeners succumbed and bought the damned thing already. At least then, they let you buy the singles, too. By the '90s, overcome by greed, the labels decided to eliminate singles altogether, withholding radio smashes from the under-$5 market. You like that Fugees song we've spread across R&B, rock, top 40 and adult-contemporary radio over the past year? Come and get the full CD, it's on sale for 16 bucks. Pop lovers got whiplash, as they went from the '80s mode of hearing hit acts saturate radio with a string of singles to the '90s model - hearing one hit burned out for the better part of a year. One admiring Billboard article I read in the mid-'90s actually marveled at A&M Records' ability to promote the Gin Blossoms song "Hey Jealousy" for about 15 months.
When you look at pop-music history this way, the Napster movement at the end of the century can be read as a true, epoch-ending rebellion - not just to the mediocre quality and high prices of CDs in the '90s, but to an industry that misread human nature back in the '60s and can't admit it made a mistake. It's the songs, stupid! The public has tried to deliver this message to musicians and the industry over and over: let us buy the songs, and we might buy the album too; we learn to love an act one song at a time, n
it has got to be at least a little worrisome that a group of American corporations can effectively control the legal system of another major nation.
And not just because it speaks to ever-increasing amounts of corporate power, unrestricted by legal restraint.
What does it do to the notion of rule of law in those countries where foreign corporations come in and throw their weight around? It was bad enough when Adobe, an American corporation, engineered the arrest of Dimitry Skylarov for acts that didn't break the laws of the country he was operating in; that at least took place in America, according to American law. But for the RIAA to arrange for a company that's *legal* in Russia to be shut down by the Russian government? That can only serve to increase the contempt and fear Russians have for their own legal apparatus, and that can't be good for anyone.
Mars will be transformed into a shirt-sleeve, habitable world for humanity before century's end, made livable by thawing out the coldish climes of the red planet and altering its now carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere.
Mars doesn't have a carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere. Mars doesn't have an anything-rich atmosphere. Yes, what atmosphere Mars has is mostly CO2, but what atmosphere Mars has is actually a pretty decent approximation of vacuum; the thickest parts of it are barely 1% of typical atmospheric pressure on earth.
The whole article doesn't actually include any specifics, it's just handwaving of the "and then a miracle occurs" sort:
Overall, Wood said that a workable plan can be scripted to raise the average temperature of Mars, rid the world of excess carbon dioxide, as well as generate soil to support agriculture.
Right. We'll get right on that. We only have 93 years to go, according to this article.
Valhalla, NY, November 14, 2006 - FUJIFILM U.S.A., Inc. is pleased to announce plans to re-introduce an ISO 50 Fujichrome Velvia professional film, tentatively named Velvia II. Fujichrome Velvia (RVP 50) was the first high color saturation, high contrast transparency E-6 compatible film when it was introduced in 1990 and was a favorite among photographers. Its discontinuation was announced last year due to difficulties in procuring some of the raw materials used to produce the emulsion.
"Since we announced the discontinuation of Velvia 50, we have been inundated with requests from photographers worldwide to continue production," said Christian Fridholm, Director of Marketing, Picture Taking, Imaging Division, Fujifilm USA. "They had used Velvia for many years and consider it unmatched in terms of quality and character. One of Fujifilm's main priorities is to nurture the culture of photography, so we took those requests very seriously."
As a result, Fujifilm research and development teams have developed substitute raw materials and new manufacturing technologies that enable the company to restart production. The new film is expected to be available in late spring 2007. The characteristics of the new emulsion will mirror that of the previous product.
In all seriousness, mile-for-mile, a modern diesel engine using low sulfur diself fuel is cleaner than a gasoline engine of the same displacement. Get over it
Cleaner?
Sure. But the pollutant of most concern is CO2, and diesel is volumetrically worse than gasoline in that regard:
CO2 emissions from a gallon of gasoline = 2,421 grams x 0.99 x (44/12) = 8,788 grams = 8.8 kg/gallon = 19.4 pounds/gallon
CO2 emissions from a gallon of diesel = 2,778 grams x 0.99 x (44/12) = 10,084 grams = 10.1 kg/gallon = 22.2 pounds/gallon
Now, yes, you're getting more miles out of a gallon of diesel than out of a gallon of gasoline. So it's pretty much a wash; 15% better mileage in exchange for 15% more CO2/gallon. But I wouldn't be trumpeting diesel as any cleaner than gasoline.
Printz v. United States was the case that struck down major portions of the Brady gun-control bill. Appellants argued, and the court agreed, that the law's requiring state employees to engage in extra work in order to compose and retain documentation in order to appease federal law violated both federalism and the concept of a unitary executive.
Too bad WOTC (you may know them as Hasbro) don't choose to focus on their core competency. You know: "making games", instead of these lame ass lawyer tricks.
TSR's downfall coincided tightly with their choosing to focus on lameass lawyer tricks instead of making games.
And with publishing ridiculous amounts of totally crap paperback novels.
Your ISP simply cannot remove your material if you follow the procedure.
Yes, they can. What they lose if they do that is the DCMA's protection against a civil suit.
The notion that if you follow the anti-takedown notice rules, the ISP is *prohibited* from removing the material in question is a popular one, but it's flat-out wrong:
(g) Replacement of Removed or Disabled Material and Limitation on Other Liability.-- (1) No liability for taking down generally.-- Subject to paragraph (2), a service provider shall not be liable to any person for any claim based on the service provider's good faith disabling of access to, or removal of, material or activity claimed to be infringing or based on facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent, regardless of whether the material or activity is ultimately determined to be infringing. (2) Exception.-- Paragraph (1) shall not apply with respect to material residing at the direction of a subscriber of the service provider on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider that is removed, or to which access is disabled by the service provider, pursuant to a notice provided under subsection (c)(1)(C), unless the service provider-- (A) takes reasonable steps promptly to notify the subscriber that it has removed or disabled access to the material; (B) upon receipt of a counter notification described in paragraph (3), promptly provides the person who provided the notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) with a copy of the counter notification, and informs that person that it will replace the removed material or cease disabling access to it in 10 business days; and (C) replaces the removed material and ceases disabling access to it not less than 10, nor more than 14, business days following receipt of the counter notice, unless its designated agent first receives notice from the person who submitted the notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) that such person has filed an action seeking a court order to restrain the subscriber from engaging in infringing activity relating to the material on the service provider's system or network.
Looking at that list, I can't figure out how these execs are thinking they're going to be able to dodge copyright issues. I mean, YouTube has it tough enough, with the RIAA sending takedown notices for short clips that simply include copyright music playing in the background, but each and every one of those stories is a derivative work of a well-known existing and maintained copyright.
NB: I'm not saying fanfic is all a copyright violation. There's plenty of well-known fanfic about characters whose copyright has long since lapsed, or those for whom copyright never existed in the first place. Hell, real respected authors like Tim Powers and Guy Gavriel Kay make a living writing what is essentially historical fanfic. But if you have a site with 2500 stories on it, and those 2500 stories are all fanfic involving Harry Potter, the X-Men, and Friends, you are going to get hammered by the rightsholders.
Well that's great, that's just fuckin' great man. Now what the fuck are we supposed to do? We're in some real pretty shit now man! That's it man, game over man, game over! What the fuck are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do?
His ass. Using breeders means you can use more expensive uranium, from lower-quality ore, and once you get to around $400-500/lb, it becomes economical to extract it from seawater. There's enough fissile uranium in seawater to supply the world's current electrical needs for, literally, millions of years.
You don't reprocess decommissioned reactor vessels
Decommissioned reactor vessels are low-level waste; they're radioactive as the result of neutron-induced activity. Given the lifespan of a reactor vessel, the number of reactor vessels we'd have to deal with, and the low level of activity, do you really think that's a gamebreaker?
So their process uses as much power as they put in and they are basically hoping for free electricity to make it commercially viable.
And even once they do make those assumptions, it's still not commercially viable:
"Most people don't realize how energy intensive aluminum is," Woodall said. "For every pound of aluminum you get more than two kilowatt hours of energy in the form of hydrogen combustion and more than two kilowatt hours of heat from the reaction of aluminum with water. A midsize car with a full tank of aluminum-gallium pellets, which amounts to about 350 pounds of aluminum, could take a 350-mile trip and it would cost $60, assuming the alumina is converted back to aluminum on-site at a nuclear power plant.
I can do better than 350 miles for $60 right now, with gasoline.
And Honda VTEC, IIRC, varies valve timing based on RPM.
It still uses a cam to lift the valves. With VTEC, the camshaft has two different sets of lobes on it. At a certain engine RPM, the cam slides forward, bringing the second set of lobes into play to do the lifting, which gives you another timing.
It's variable, but it's not continuously variable. You have one timing at low RPM, and another at high RPM, but that doesn't give you near the advantage that continuously variable electronically-actuated valves would.
And we do have good reasons to limit the supply of alcohol to minors, which is a major argument in favor of a legal drinking age of 21. While there are many exceptions, if you can't see the difference in the decision making maturity of, for example, an average 16 year old compared to an average 22 year old, you're just not thinking. There is significant brain development occurring up to even 18.
Come on, now. If you're just going to make shit up, why not just go with the MADD party line and claim that there's significant brain development up to even 21? I mean, in actual point of fact, the brain continues developing for a significant portion of your adult life; for example, there's a spurt of muscle-movement refinement at around 30 years of age. Would you support raising the drinking age to 31, on the same grounds you just supported setting it at 21? If not, there's something wrong with your argument.
Want the roads to be safer? Want binge drinking to decrease? Simple solution. Lower the drinking age to 14, subject to parental oversight, and raise the driving age to 18. Parents will be able to legally introduce their kids to alcohol, instead of that legal introduction happening when they're out at a bar with their friends at school when they're 21 and are set on getting as drunk as it's humanly possible to get and still be able to breathe autonomously. Parents will be able to teach them responsible consumption, a glass of wine at dinner, a cold beer when they're done mowing the yard. And teens will have four whole years to learn their limits, tp learn that waking up severely dehydrated in a puddle of your own vomit is *not* fun, and to get over the whole forbidden fruit aspect of alcohol before they wind up in control of a 3000-lb chunk of metal that they can propel upwards of 100 miles per hour.
But that wouldn't satisfy our American tendency towards Puritanism. So you won't support it, and blather about "brain development" as a cover story.
The hubris of thinking they can ban the mention of a number, and then turn around and say they "respect free speech", is breathtaking doublethink.
Any piece of copyrighted information can be expressed as a number. I can take Photoshop CS3, and express it as a number.
Is anyone who supports copyright at all therefore engaged in doublethink if he also says he respects free speech?
I hate the DMCA and think that DRM is stupid, self-defeating, and violates fair use. But "it's just a number! How can you ban the mention of a number" is a bit simplistic.
Lasers make inefficient weapons because they cost a shitload more than a 10-cent bullet. Small bits of lead propelled to high velocity by a small chemical charge are extremely efficient ways to kill people.
Because of the rest of the description wherein he believed that other people downloading movies somewhere were clogging the pipes and kept his "internet" (email) from arriving on time
Again, I'm not seeing the problem with that. Set eMule or Azureus to its maximum UL/DL rates, start downloading a bunch of movies, and then see how quickly you can use the web when your connection is already maxed up.
My senior year at school, there were major problems with Napster bringing the school's internet connection to its knees. 2000 students, 95% of whom would go home on the weekends and leave Napster running. Problem wasn't those 2000 downloading from the wider internet, it was other people downloading from them. This was more than enough to predictably and regularly bring the school's single T1 to ridiculous levels of packet loss and latency. My roommates were all CS majors, and they could show you maps showing which local links on the LAN were completely saturated, and those were the ones tying in, the large residence hall with most of the students in it. You could see the Napster traffic on 6699, and you could see it go away when we rebooted that hall's router and caused all the connections to time out. Okay, instead of downloading movies, they were uploading music, but the principle's still the same: too much stuff being transfered, not enough bandwidth for it all to fit, other services (like email and Diablo 2) being slowed down to the point of unusability. Sounds exactly like what Stevens was talking about, even though his *specific example* was fundamentally flawed.
There are far worse metaphors to describe that than the one Stevens used. I've heard geek after geek refer to a nice connection as a "fat pipe." Pipe, tube, not a lot of difference there.
First, the argument goes, as stated by the parent poster, that "and because his buddies will be busy rescuing him instead of fighting." Except they won't. Troops aren't trained to put down their guns and stop fighting back to rescue wounded. The other argument goes that it ties up the other guy's resources in getting him to a hospital, fixing him, caring for him, and so forth. But that only matters if *you* lose the battle. If you *win*, you're now in possession of all those wounded, and now *you* have to care for them. Then there's the fact that there are all sorts of wounds that allow the wounded to not only keep fighting, but to return to the front to fight again after some medical care.
Slashdot Mirror
I've since given it up, however, since I started coughing.
There *are* other ways of absorbing nicotine. Smokeless tobaccos are still carcinogenic, but are a lot safer for you than smoking are.
Doubtful. When you don't want satellites to photograph your subs, you keep them in sub pens or covered (dry)docks. It's not like the orbits of surveillance satellites are unknown, and China certainly has the radar capability to track them and know when they'll be overhead. It's a pretty safe bet that if there's a military asset visible on a satellite photograph, the military in question didn't feel it was worth the trouble to keep that asset concealed.
The industry should be paying closer attention to its meteoric rise
Meteors don't rise. They fall. "Meteoric rise" refers to something brief and transitory, like the track of a meteor which lasts for but a brief moment before disappearing; if you wish to say that a current seen trend is the way things are going to be for a while, "meteoric" is the opposite of what you should be calling it.
The RIAA has been pushing that line ever since Sgt. Pepper, because that lets them package music in a way that's more convenient to them. All they need to do is find a hit single, wrap it in an album's worth of crap, and sell it for $18. Here's a great article on the conflict between selling the single and selling the album. You speak of Sgt. Pepper? Fine. But you ignore the marginalization of whole genres of music as the push for the concept album came to dominate the industry:
it has got to be at least a little worrisome that a group of American corporations can effectively control the legal system of another major nation.
And not just because it speaks to ever-increasing amounts of corporate power, unrestricted by legal restraint.
What does it do to the notion of rule of law in those countries where foreign corporations come in and throw their weight around? It was bad enough when Adobe, an American corporation, engineered the arrest of Dimitry Skylarov for acts that didn't break the laws of the country he was operating in; that at least took place in America, according to American law. But for the RIAA to arrange for a company that's *legal* in Russia to be shut down by the Russian government? That can only serve to increase the contempt and fear Russians have for their own legal apparatus, and that can't be good for anyone.
Mars doesn't have a carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere. Mars doesn't have an anything-rich atmosphere. Yes, what atmosphere Mars has is mostly CO2, but what atmosphere Mars has is actually a pretty decent approximation of vacuum; the thickest parts of it are barely 1% of typical atmospheric pressure on earth.
The whole article doesn't actually include any specifics, it's just handwaving of the "and then a miracle occurs" sort:
Right. We'll get right on that. We only have 93 years to go, according to this article.
I note that it's now past late spring 2007.
Cleaner?
Sure. But the pollutant of most concern is CO2, and diesel is volumetrically worse than gasoline in that regard:
Now, yes, you're getting more miles out of a gallon of diesel than out of a gallon of gasoline. So it's pretty much a wash; 15% better mileage in exchange for 15% more CO2/gallon. But I wouldn't be trumpeting diesel as any cleaner than gasoline.
The motion will propagate down the pole at the speed of sound in the material.
Yes, this means relativity rules out infinitely-rigid materials.
Printz v. United States was the case that struck down major portions of the Brady gun-control bill. Appellants argued, and the court agreed, that the law's requiring state employees to engage in extra work in order to compose and retain documentation in order to appease federal law violated both federalism and the concept of a unitary executive.
This seems pretty similar.
Too bad WOTC (you may know them as Hasbro) don't choose to focus on their core competency. You know: "making games", instead of these lame ass lawyer tricks.
TSR's downfall coincided tightly with their choosing to focus on lameass lawyer tricks instead of making games.
And with publishing ridiculous amounts of totally crap paperback novels.
Yes, they can. What they lose if they do that is the DCMA's protection against a civil suit.
The notion that if you follow the anti-takedown notice rules, the ISP is *prohibited* from removing the material in question is a popular one, but it's flat-out wrong:
Was that intro music "Love Will Find a Way"?
That's hilarious.
Looking at that list, I can't figure out how these execs are thinking they're going to be able to dodge copyright issues. I mean, YouTube has it tough enough, with the RIAA sending takedown notices for short clips that simply include copyright music playing in the background, but each and every one of those stories is a derivative work of a well-known existing and maintained copyright.
NB: I'm not saying fanfic is all a copyright violation. There's plenty of well-known fanfic about characters whose copyright has long since lapsed, or those for whom copyright never existed in the first place. Hell, real respected authors like Tim Powers and Guy Gavriel Kay make a living writing what is essentially historical fanfic. But if you have a site with 2500 stories on it, and those 2500 stories are all fanfic involving Harry Potter, the X-Men, and Friends, you are going to get hammered by the rightsholders.
Well that's great, that's just fuckin' great man. Now what the fuck are we supposed to do? We're in some real pretty shit now man! That's it man, game over man, game over! What the fuck are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do?
Where did you pull that number out of?
. html
His ass. Using breeders means you can use more expensive uranium, from lower-quality ore, and once you get to around $400-500/lb, it becomes economical to extract it from seawater. There's enough fissile uranium in seawater to supply the world's current electrical needs for, literally, millions of years.
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/cohen
You don't reprocess decommissioned reactor vessels
Decommissioned reactor vessels are low-level waste; they're radioactive as the result of neutron-induced activity. Given the lifespan of a reactor vessel, the number of reactor vessels we'd have to deal with, and the low level of activity, do you really think that's a gamebreaker?
So their process uses as much power as they put in and they are basically hoping for free electricity to make it commercially viable.
And even once they do make those assumptions, it's still not commercially viable:
I can do better than 350 miles for $60 right now, with gasoline.
And Honda VTEC, IIRC, varies valve timing based on RPM.
It still uses a cam to lift the valves. With VTEC, the camshaft has two different sets of lobes on it. At a certain engine RPM, the cam slides forward, bringing the second set of lobes into play to do the lifting, which gives you another timing.
It's variable, but it's not continuously variable. You have one timing at low RPM, and another at high RPM, but that doesn't give you near the advantage that continuously variable electronically-actuated valves would.
And we do have good reasons to limit the supply of alcohol to minors, which is a major argument in favor of a legal drinking age of 21. While there are many exceptions, if you can't see the difference in the decision making maturity of, for example, an average 16 year old compared to an average 22 year old, you're just not thinking. There is significant brain development occurring up to even 18.
Come on, now. If you're just going to make shit up, why not just go with the MADD party line and claim that there's significant brain development up to even 21? I mean, in actual point of fact, the brain continues developing for a significant portion of your adult life; for example, there's a spurt of muscle-movement refinement at around 30 years of age. Would you support raising the drinking age to 31, on the same grounds you just supported setting it at 21? If not, there's something wrong with your argument.
Want the roads to be safer? Want binge drinking to decrease? Simple solution. Lower the drinking age to 14, subject to parental oversight, and raise the driving age to 18. Parents will be able to legally introduce their kids to alcohol, instead of that legal introduction happening when they're out at a bar with their friends at school when they're 21 and are set on getting as drunk as it's humanly possible to get and still be able to breathe autonomously. Parents will be able to teach them responsible consumption, a glass of wine at dinner, a cold beer when they're done mowing the yard. And teens will have four whole years to learn their limits, tp learn that waking up severely dehydrated in a puddle of your own vomit is *not* fun, and to get over the whole forbidden fruit aspect of alcohol before they wind up in control of a 3000-lb chunk of metal that they can propel upwards of 100 miles per hour.
But that wouldn't satisfy our American tendency towards Puritanism. So you won't support it, and blather about "brain development" as a cover story.
The hubris of thinking they can ban the mention of a number, and then turn around and say they "respect free speech", is breathtaking doublethink.
Any piece of copyrighted information can be expressed as a number. I can take Photoshop CS3, and express it as a number.
Is anyone who supports copyright at all therefore engaged in doublethink if he also says he respects free speech?
I hate the DMCA and think that DRM is stupid, self-defeating, and violates fair use. But "it's just a number! How can you ban the mention of a number" is a bit simplistic.
Lasers make inefficient weapons because they cost a shitload more than a 10-cent bullet. Small bits of lead propelled to high velocity by a small chemical charge are extremely efficient ways to kill people.
Because of the rest of the description wherein he believed that other people downloading movies somewhere were clogging the pipes and kept his "internet" (email) from arriving on time
Again, I'm not seeing the problem with that. Set eMule or Azureus to its maximum UL/DL rates, start downloading a bunch of movies, and then see how quickly you can use the web when your connection is already maxed up.
My senior year at school, there were major problems with Napster bringing the school's internet connection to its knees. 2000 students, 95% of whom would go home on the weekends and leave Napster running. Problem wasn't those 2000 downloading from the wider internet, it was other people downloading from them. This was more than enough to predictably and regularly bring the school's single T1 to ridiculous levels of packet loss and latency. My roommates were all CS majors, and they could show you maps showing which local links on the LAN were completely saturated, and those were the ones tying in, the large residence hall with most of the students in it. You could see the Napster traffic on 6699, and you could see it go away when we rebooted that hall's router and caused all the connections to time out. Okay, instead of downloading movies, they were uploading music, but the principle's still the same: too much stuff being transfered, not enough bandwidth for it all to fit, other services (like email and Diablo 2) being slowed down to the point of unusability. Sounds exactly like what Stevens was talking about, even though his *specific example* was fundamentally flawed.
There are far worse metaphors to describe that than the one Stevens used. I've heard geek after geek refer to a nice connection as a "fat pipe." Pipe, tube, not a lot of difference there.
2007 - 1987 = 20 years. Utility patents last 14 years from date of filing, utility patents last 20.
How's this patent even still...well, patented?
God, I wish this dumb myth would die.
So do I. There are still other reasons it's dumb.
First, the argument goes, as stated by the parent poster, that "and because his buddies will be busy rescuing him instead of fighting." Except they won't. Troops aren't trained to put down their guns and stop fighting back to rescue wounded. The other argument goes that it ties up the other guy's resources in getting him to a hospital, fixing him, caring for him, and so forth. But that only matters if *you* lose the battle. If you *win*, you're now in possession of all those wounded, and now *you* have to care for them. Then there's the fact that there are all sorts of wounds that allow the wounded to not only keep fighting, but to return to the front to fight again after some medical care.
It's a dumb myth.