The patent is a patent application to the World Intellectual Property Organization. I'm unclear if In Re Bilski would apply, given that Bilski is an American decision.
Of course the United States could tell WIPO to go stuff it, but that doesn't set a very good precedence, given the number of U.S. corporations which would like to leverage WIPO to prevent copyright infringement abroad.
This is what you get, by the way, when you have a treaty organization (the United Nations) with a bureaucratic agency (WIPO) pretending to be a world government but without the appropriate checks on power upwards or the appropriate guarantees of power downwards. (The U.S. Constitution, by contrast, guarantees checks upwards through the democratic process, and guarantees downwards by requiring all member States to be republics. The U.N., on the other hand, is no such critter: we don't elect U.N. officials and member States are not required to be democratic.) Now I can't even make a damned sandwich without licensing the appropriate technology from Geneva...
That's about the same in the United States as well.
Unless you can find an individual who has a personal itch to scratch or a university writing something similar that is in alignment with what you're doing, or there is a private company already trying to enter your market and is willing to allow you to give it feedback on it's software to add the features you want, then you're looking at perhaps $85/hr to $130/hr for someone who has experience and has specialized skills.
Personally, having developed for Windows Mobile and the iPhone, my inclination would be to instead create a web-based UI.
The reason is simple: first, the web is pretty universal. You can (in theory) use it from almost any device with a web browser.
Second, it's going to be a lot easier to quickly prototype the control software than a custom client/server architecture with a custom protocol, which you'd get with nearly any mobile device.
And third, if you switch to a new brand of phone, you're not completely hosed; the worst thing that will happen are a few web page tweaks.
Plants can also turn CO2 into fuel--but it all takes energy. For plants, the energy comes from the sun.
Where does the energy come from for the Carbon Sciences process? All I see are diagrams of a "biocatalyst" and an explanation that somehow it takes less energy for their process--but the amount of energy in to turn CO2 into a biofuel must necessarily be more than the amount of energy you'll get back out of that biofuel.
Every bloody two years you can count on some scientist telling you that the reason why Republicans vote Republican is because they're either mentally ill, emotionally stunted or biologically broken--and so we must somehow either take pity and help those poor conservatives, or perhaps look for a pill which will at least help these poor helpless folks stop clinging to their guns and their bibles holed up in their churches waiting for the rapture.
No; political viewpoints are not held because reasoned people come to different conclusions based on underly philosophical differences. No; differing viewpoints are because people are sick, and perhaps mentally unstable.
Which means, I guess, that the former Soviet Union had the right idea locking up political dissidents in mental institutes: disagreement is a sign of a broken mind that only needs to be fixed with drugs and "re-educated."
a) Less than 1/3 of all Americans support the censorship of political blogs.
b) 70% of Americans do not support regulation of political blogging.
Same data, different spin.
And when you factor out Sturgeon's Law that 90% of everything is crap, that leaves only 20% of Americans who actually support regulating political blogs for a coherent reason beyond accidently ticking off the 'yes' box.
There is a very interesting discussion about comparing infant mortality rates at Wikipedia; the short story is comparing two countries infant mortality rates is comparing apples and oranges: countries tend to use different standards as to what they count as an infant mortality.
(1) Oil companies are repositioning themselves as energy companies: you can see it now with the British Petroleum ads. In a post-oil world, the oil, erm, energy companies will be the ones deploying large fields of wind, solar and geothermal plants. So if you think somehow the oil companies are going away, think again.
(2) The amount of energy consumed in the United States in 2004 was around 3,350,000 megawatts, of which 1,340,000 megawatts of energy (or equivalent) came from oil. Source The next time someone brags about a 75 megawatt wind farm coming on-line, keep the 3,350,000 megawatt and 1,340,000 megawatt numbers in mind.
After all, the iPhone SDK cannot remain a "beta" forever, and once it's no longer a beta, I presume the SDK will show up side-by-side with the MacOS X Cocoa SDK from which it was derived.
Most of Apple's beta stuff has the same confidentiality agreement, so I presumed this was just a bug.
According to Xemplar Energy, the energy in one pound of yellowcake is equivalent to the energy in 31 barrels of fuel oil. So that 550 metric tons could keep 30 nuclear reactors going for a year.
Since there is so much yellow cake in the world that they're literally tripping over it in a country everyone knew had none--the stuff must have been naturally occurring and just sitting around in "bunkers" eroded from underground water formations, since we all know Iraq wasn't importing the stuff or planning to use the stuff--it tells me there is more than enough uranium yellowcake in the world to power our needs virtually forever.
Now if we can just build a few more nuclear reactors...
I have a 10megabit down, 1.5megabit up at home. This means it would take me 44 hours to upload 30 gigabytes with my 1.5mb/s upload speed.
Perhaps until the backbone in Japan is updated to uncap upload speeds, the right answer would be to throttle bit rates for anyone who has uploaded more than 20 gigabytes in a particular month? You could almost do it by just slowly ramping down rather than cutting people off--and it's a lot less antisocial than just pulling the customer's plug.
Hell, I have an effective 20gigabyte/month upload cap because that's the maximum capacity of my bandwidth; yet until I heard about Japan's bandwidth I wasn't complaining.
As a footnote, the quote of the day at the bottom of my page reads: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. -- Dr. Warren Jackson, Director, UTCS"
If you are a judge presiding over a case involving the illegal distribution of fetish porn, you should probably take down your own web site illegally distributing fetish porn first.
I think you can make a 90 day waiting period before a vote work even taking into account emergency acts.
Emergencies generally are in the category of natural disasters or cases where we are attacked or are at war. In each of these cases contingencies are already available for a response: natural disasters are supposed to be handled by the states first (hence, "first responders"), then federal funding is then sent afterwards, generally after about a week or two. In the case of war, the President has the authority to operate unilaterally for a short period of time before review by Congress--and the commanders on the ground are able to respond before notifying the President. (For example, if a bunch of guys took a shot at our soldiers in Germany, they don't have to call the President to defend themselves.)
This sort of delegated authority allows for the handling of an emergency--it's just a matter of updating, extending and modifying that delegated authority so that, for example, the military can continue to operate on "contingent review" for the first 90 days. Or we can pass an "exemption" for very narrow areas, such as an exemption for financing FEMA response to a natural disaster.
That's the entire idea behind the Chevy Volt. We'll see how well GM does on the car, but the great thing is that, at least in concept, the transmission is greatly simplified. The nice part is that with the right electric motor/battery chain you can peak at 160hp for getting onto the freeway, and use all the other tricks used by hybrids (like regenerative breaking) with a drive chain that is greatly simplified. Further, since the gas engine and power generator is a separate unit distinct from the rest of the car, in theory you can replace that unit with whatever future technology may come along (fuel cells, hydrogen, Mr. Fusion) fairly easily.
You talk as if each of these concepts (communism, capitalism, socialism, monarchy, oligarchy, etc) are monolithic, centrally administered governmental structures which have certain established goals (such as "deliver[ing] an ever-higher standard of living"), and how individuals are organized within each of these governmentally administered programs isn't what matters, only how much the central elite few administering each of these economic programs allow to 'trickle down' to the masses in order to keep the masses in line.
Applying this sort of centralized pseudo-Marxist analysis to Capitalism strikes me as extremely ironic, given that Capitalism isn't centrally organized at all: the proper role of government in a Capitalism is to establish rules of property ownership to protect individual rights, and otherwise get out of the way of individual decisions.
A corporation is essentially a group of people legally organized to do business. Thus the fact that a corporation's sole responsibilities to follow the law and make money stem from this fact.
Large corporations do engage in large social programs (such as the Ronald McDonald House for families) because they believe (and studies by organizations such as Harvard show) that such philanthropic acts improve the environment in which corporations operate--which help the corporate bottom line. (One reason why many tech companies have contribution matching programs is to make the area in which those tech companies operate better places to live, which help attract better quality workers.)
For anyone to stop and suggest that a corporation must (rather than 'should') engage in social responsibility--and to base that argument in a 'class warfare' style argument that corporations which solely profit seek are somehow evil (forgetting that even philanthropic activities are part of corporate profit seeking) is to suggest the people who created that corporation must engage in activities outside of the reason why they came together in the first place.
In the United States we bristle at the notion that people should be forced to provide services against their will in order to satisfy some notion of a "social good." The last time we forced a subset of our population to do work for what we considered at the time a large-scale social good without providing them compensation, we wound up fighting a Civil War over the issue...
For some reason, however, Java seems to have this massive explosion of frameworks, including huge numbers of frameworks that, as far as I can figure, do nothing but implement the core runtime library using someone else's theory on how they should be done.
Ironically the biggest problem I've had with Java is that, because it is relatively easy for developers to write code using an IDE such as Eclipse or NetBeans in the core language itself, but there are tons of various classes even within the core JRE, many programmers I know who write Java have created a sort of "ecosystem" of artificial complexity.
For example, I worked on one project which was a client/server system which handled maybe 10 transactions per second, with each transaction translating into maybe one or two table updates. The application could have been put together using something simple, like Tomcat and MySQL on the back-end, and something easy to use like an XML/RPC link to the client side. (There were only something like 10 remote procedure calls being made, and this was an internal application, which means the total audience was perhaps 100 people.)
But rather than keep the whole thing simple, we had a whole bunch of "Architecture Astronaut" wannabes who started tossing in third party frameworks like there was no yesterday, without carefully thinking if the framework was needed, and if so, how best to integrate the framework. Before we knew it, the server was broken into 8 separate EJBs, Hibernate and Spring were called in to handle the server side coding framework, and the entire build process was so complicated it no longer could be run or debugged within an IDE--apparently someone on the project didn't understand ant and used makefiles for part of the build. And to top it off, because so many different frameworks were thrown in for no good reason I can determine (there were something like 40 third-party jar files in the build directory), there were all sorts of runtime problems as each jar file was not designed or tested on the full range of Java 1.4 - 6.0 environments.
Now if this was my first exposure to Java, I'd say that while the core language itself wasn't bad, the entire Java ecosystem sucked hard core. But no; it was the developers: rather than keep it simple, they used the 'refactor' button in NetBeans about 100 times too many, until what should have been a one person-three month job turned into half a million lines of crap, that, to their credit, limped along okay.
Seriously, I wonder if those numbers would be far off from how Americans would reply. After all, with all of those news reports about all of those pedophiles and evil-doers on the 'net, while I suspect the number would be lower, I don't think it'd be 0%.
See, that's why we have a representative government backed by a constitution and founded on a culture of respect for individual rights and not a pure democracy: because sometimes the majority is not right, and it's important to have a check against what may seem to be "politically fashionable" but ultimately destructive.
In all seriousness, as more and more commercial systems (such as commercial aviation, logistics and consumer applications) come to rely upon GPS, it will become increasingly harder to justify turning GPS off, even in the event of a national emergency.
For example, most avionics now rely on GPS for navigation. If we turned off GPS for an hour at some random point in the future, at least two or three thousand people are going to die as airplanes across the United States go into the ground or into the side of various hills around the country.
I understand Europe's concern that as a system funded by the military, the United States has no apparent incentive to continue to allow civilians to "get a free ride" on GPS. Hell, a lot of the tension between Paris and Washington D.C. can be summed up as the apparent belief in Paris that the behavior of our planners in Washington D.C. are lying through their teeth because the decisions coming out of Washington D.C. (such as allowing civilians to use a military system for navigation) are otherwise completely inexplicable. (Stratfor had an excellent analysis of the tension between France and the United States--which boiled down to the inability of France to understand U.S. motivations for everything from our participation in NATO to our willingness to defend Europe against the Soviets because of basic cultural differences that underly each country's thinking processes.)
However, GPS is on the same trajectory as ARPANET was back in the 80's. And in many ways the debate around Galileo is similar to the debate about the placement of the root DNS servers: Europe wants greater control that the U.S. is not willing to give up--because the U.S. sees Europe as more than happy to "play games" with the system because of Europe's relative apathy over free speech and individual rights, while Europe sees the U.S. as desiring greater control for military gains.
Slashdot Mirror
The patent is a patent application to the World Intellectual Property Organization. I'm unclear if In Re Bilski would apply, given that Bilski is an American decision.
Of course the United States could tell WIPO to go stuff it, but that doesn't set a very good precedence, given the number of U.S. corporations which would like to leverage WIPO to prevent copyright infringement abroad.
This is what you get, by the way, when you have a treaty organization (the United Nations) with a bureaucratic agency (WIPO) pretending to be a world government but without the appropriate checks on power upwards or the appropriate guarantees of power downwards. (The U.S. Constitution, by contrast, guarantees checks upwards through the democratic process, and guarantees downwards by requiring all member States to be republics. The U.N., on the other hand, is no such critter: we don't elect U.N. officials and member States are not required to be democratic.) Now I can't even make a damned sandwich without licensing the appropriate technology from Geneva...
That's about the same in the United States as well.
Unless you can find an individual who has a personal itch to scratch or a university writing something similar that is in alignment with what you're doing, or there is a private company already trying to enter your market and is willing to allow you to give it feedback on it's software to add the features you want, then you're looking at perhaps $85/hr to $130/hr for someone who has experience and has specialized skills.
Personally, having developed for Windows Mobile and the iPhone, my inclination would be to instead create a web-based UI.
The reason is simple: first, the web is pretty universal. You can (in theory) use it from almost any device with a web browser.
Second, it's going to be a lot easier to quickly prototype the control software than a custom client/server architecture with a custom protocol, which you'd get with nearly any mobile device.
And third, if you switch to a new brand of phone, you're not completely hosed; the worst thing that will happen are a few web page tweaks.
Plants can also turn CO2 into fuel--but it all takes energy. For plants, the energy comes from the sun.
Where does the energy come from for the Carbon Sciences process? All I see are diagrams of a "biocatalyst" and an explanation that somehow it takes less energy for their process--but the amount of energy in to turn CO2 into a biofuel must necessarily be more than the amount of energy you'll get back out of that biofuel.
Every bloody two years you can count on some scientist telling you that the reason why Republicans vote Republican is because they're either mentally ill, emotionally stunted or biologically broken--and so we must somehow either take pity and help those poor conservatives, or perhaps look for a pill which will at least help these poor helpless folks stop clinging to their guns and their bibles holed up in their churches waiting for the rapture.
No; political viewpoints are not held because reasoned people come to different conclusions based on underly philosophical differences. No; differing viewpoints are because people are sick, and perhaps mentally unstable.
Which means, I guess, that the former Soviet Union had the right idea locking up political dissidents in mental institutes: disagreement is a sign of a broken mind that only needs to be fixed with drugs and "re-educated."
Bah.
a) Less than 1/3 of all Americans support the censorship of political blogs.
b) 70% of Americans do not support regulation of political blogging.
Same data, different spin.
And when you factor out Sturgeon's Law that 90% of everything is crap, that leaves only 20% of Americans who actually support regulating political blogs for a coherent reason beyond accidently ticking off the 'yes' box.
There is a very interesting discussion about comparing infant mortality rates at Wikipedia; the short story is comparing two countries infant mortality rates is comparing apples and oranges: countries tend to use different standards as to what they count as an infant mortality.
Two points:
(1) Oil companies are repositioning themselves as energy companies: you can see it now with the British Petroleum ads. In a post-oil world, the oil, erm, energy companies will be the ones deploying large fields of wind, solar and geothermal plants. So if you think somehow the oil companies are going away, think again.
(2) The amount of energy consumed in the United States in 2004 was around 3,350,000 megawatts, of which 1,340,000 megawatts of energy (or equivalent) came from oil. Source The next time someone brags about a 75 megawatt wind farm coming on-line, keep the 3,350,000 megawatt and 1,340,000 megawatt numbers in mind.
After all, the iPhone SDK cannot remain a "beta" forever, and once it's no longer a beta, I presume the SDK will show up side-by-side with the MacOS X Cocoa SDK from which it was derived.
Most of Apple's beta stuff has the same confidentiality agreement, so I presumed this was just a bug.
According to Xemplar Energy, the energy in one pound of yellowcake is equivalent to the energy in 31 barrels of fuel oil. So that 550 metric tons could keep 30 nuclear reactors going for a year.
Since there is so much yellow cake in the world that they're literally tripping over it in a country everyone knew had none--the stuff must have been naturally occurring and just sitting around in "bunkers" eroded from underground water formations, since we all know Iraq wasn't importing the stuff or planning to use the stuff--it tells me there is more than enough uranium yellowcake in the world to power our needs virtually forever.
Now if we can just build a few more nuclear reactors...
s/month/day/
I have a 10megabit down, 1.5megabit up at home. This means it would take me 44 hours to upload 30 gigabytes with my 1.5mb/s upload speed.
Perhaps until the backbone in Japan is updated to uncap upload speeds, the right answer would be to throttle bit rates for anyone who has uploaded more than 20 gigabytes in a particular month? You could almost do it by just slowly ramping down rather than cutting people off--and it's a lot less antisocial than just pulling the customer's plug.
Hell, I have an effective 20gigabyte/month upload cap because that's the maximum capacity of my bandwidth; yet until I heard about Japan's bandwidth I wasn't complaining.
As a footnote, the quote of the day at the bottom of my page reads: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. -- Dr. Warren Jackson, Director, UTCS"
Seems appropriate somehow...
If you are a judge presiding over a case involving the illegal distribution of fetish porn, you should probably take down your own web site illegally distributing fetish porn first.
I think you can make a 90 day waiting period before a vote work even taking into account emergency acts.
Emergencies generally are in the category of natural disasters or cases where we are attacked or are at war. In each of these cases contingencies are already available for a response: natural disasters are supposed to be handled by the states first (hence, "first responders"), then federal funding is then sent afterwards, generally after about a week or two. In the case of war, the President has the authority to operate unilaterally for a short period of time before review by Congress--and the commanders on the ground are able to respond before notifying the President. (For example, if a bunch of guys took a shot at our soldiers in Germany, they don't have to call the President to defend themselves.)
This sort of delegated authority allows for the handling of an emergency--it's just a matter of updating, extending and modifying that delegated authority so that, for example, the military can continue to operate on "contingent review" for the first 90 days. Or we can pass an "exemption" for very narrow areas, such as an exemption for financing FEMA response to a natural disaster.
That's the entire idea behind the Chevy Volt. We'll see how well GM does on the car, but the great thing is that, at least in concept, the transmission is greatly simplified. The nice part is that with the right electric motor/battery chain you can peak at 160hp for getting onto the freeway, and use all the other tricks used by hybrids (like regenerative breaking) with a drive chain that is greatly simplified. Further, since the gas engine and power generator is a separate unit distinct from the rest of the car, in theory you can replace that unit with whatever future technology may come along (fuel cells, hydrogen, Mr. Fusion) fairly easily.
If it's wrong, then argue how it is incorrect--don't just hit the big red "BZZZT! WRONG!" button...
How did this get marked as "troll?" Taking a position that is not popularly held is not 'trolling...'
You talk as if each of these concepts (communism, capitalism, socialism, monarchy, oligarchy, etc) are monolithic, centrally administered governmental structures which have certain established goals (such as "deliver[ing] an ever-higher standard of living"), and how individuals are organized within each of these governmentally administered programs isn't what matters, only how much the central elite few administering each of these economic programs allow to 'trickle down' to the masses in order to keep the masses in line.
Applying this sort of centralized pseudo-Marxist analysis to Capitalism strikes me as extremely ironic, given that Capitalism isn't centrally organized at all: the proper role of government in a Capitalism is to establish rules of property ownership to protect individual rights, and otherwise get out of the way of individual decisions.
A corporation is essentially a group of people legally organized to do business. Thus the fact that a corporation's sole responsibilities to follow the law and make money stem from this fact.
Large corporations do engage in large social programs (such as the Ronald McDonald House for families) because they believe (and studies by organizations such as Harvard show) that such philanthropic acts improve the environment in which corporations operate--which help the corporate bottom line. (One reason why many tech companies have contribution matching programs is to make the area in which those tech companies operate better places to live, which help attract better quality workers.)
For anyone to stop and suggest that a corporation must (rather than 'should') engage in social responsibility--and to base that argument in a 'class warfare' style argument that corporations which solely profit seek are somehow evil (forgetting that even philanthropic activities are part of corporate profit seeking) is to suggest the people who created that corporation must engage in activities outside of the reason why they came together in the first place.
In the United States we bristle at the notion that people should be forced to provide services against their will in order to satisfy some notion of a "social good." The last time we forced a subset of our population to do work for what we considered at the time a large-scale social good without providing them compensation, we wound up fighting a Civil War over the issue...
For some reason, however, Java seems to have this massive explosion of frameworks, including huge numbers of frameworks that, as far as I can figure, do nothing but implement the core runtime library using someone else's theory on how they should be done.
Ironically the biggest problem I've had with Java is that, because it is relatively easy for developers to write code using an IDE such as Eclipse or NetBeans in the core language itself, but there are tons of various classes even within the core JRE, many programmers I know who write Java have created a sort of "ecosystem" of artificial complexity.
For example, I worked on one project which was a client/server system which handled maybe 10 transactions per second, with each transaction translating into maybe one or two table updates. The application could have been put together using something simple, like Tomcat and MySQL on the back-end, and something easy to use like an XML/RPC link to the client side. (There were only something like 10 remote procedure calls being made, and this was an internal application, which means the total audience was perhaps 100 people.)
But rather than keep the whole thing simple, we had a whole bunch of "Architecture Astronaut" wannabes who started tossing in third party frameworks like there was no yesterday, without carefully thinking if the framework was needed, and if so, how best to integrate the framework. Before we knew it, the server was broken into 8 separate EJBs, Hibernate and Spring were called in to handle the server side coding framework, and the entire build process was so complicated it no longer could be run or debugged within an IDE--apparently someone on the project didn't understand ant and used makefiles for part of the build. And to top it off, because so many different frameworks were thrown in for no good reason I can determine (there were something like 40 third-party jar files in the build directory), there were all sorts of runtime problems as each jar file was not designed or tested on the full range of Java 1.4 - 6.0 environments.
Now if this was my first exposure to Java, I'd say that while the core language itself wasn't bad, the entire Java ecosystem sucked hard core. But no; it was the developers: rather than keep it simple, they used the 'refactor' button in NetBeans about 100 times too many, until what should have been a one person-three month job turned into half a million lines of crap, that, to their credit, limped along okay.
Seriously, I wonder if those numbers would be far off from how Americans would reply. After all, with all of those news reports about all of those pedophiles and evil-doers on the 'net, while I suspect the number would be lower, I don't think it'd be 0%.
See, that's why we have a representative government backed by a constitution and founded on a culture of respect for individual rights and not a pure democracy: because sometimes the majority is not right, and it's important to have a check against what may seem to be "politically fashionable" but ultimately destructive.
In all seriousness, as more and more commercial systems (such as commercial aviation, logistics and consumer applications) come to rely upon GPS, it will become increasingly harder to justify turning GPS off, even in the event of a national emergency.
For example, most avionics now rely on GPS for navigation. If we turned off GPS for an hour at some random point in the future, at least two or three thousand people are going to die as airplanes across the United States go into the ground or into the side of various hills around the country.
I understand Europe's concern that as a system funded by the military, the United States has no apparent incentive to continue to allow civilians to "get a free ride" on GPS. Hell, a lot of the tension between Paris and Washington D.C. can be summed up as the apparent belief in Paris that the behavior of our planners in Washington D.C. are lying through their teeth because the decisions coming out of Washington D.C. (such as allowing civilians to use a military system for navigation) are otherwise completely inexplicable. (Stratfor had an excellent analysis of the tension between France and the United States--which boiled down to the inability of France to understand U.S. motivations for everything from our participation in NATO to our willingness to defend Europe against the Soviets because of basic cultural differences that underly each country's thinking processes.)
However, GPS is on the same trajectory as ARPANET was back in the 80's. And in many ways the debate around Galileo is similar to the debate about the placement of the root DNS servers: Europe wants greater control that the U.S. is not willing to give up--because the U.S. sees Europe as more than happy to "play games" with the system because of Europe's relative apathy over free speech and individual rights, while Europe sees the U.S. as desiring greater control for military gains.
... And Europe is pissed that the on-off switch is in Washington D.C. rather than in Brussels ...
But we are a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
So if we have the most dangerous government in the world, it's because of the people behind that government.
Now Ma, go fetch me my gun so I can get this euroweanie off our front lawn!