With weather satellites in private hands, they will be used for private purposes, holding NOAA (and everyone using its weather services, i.e., everyone) hostage to a private entity. This is an incredibly bad idea.
The information has been released for public access (it contains nothing classified), but (apparently) not vetted for export control. Many, many so-called "public access" technologies cannot be exported to specific individuals and entities. For example, designs of microprocessors capable of operation at ambient temperatures above 125 C are not classified, but are a controlled technology. See item 3A001.a.2.a in the Commerce Control List.
We may agree on the utility of taking that server off-line, but it's the law, and woe betide the brave soul that ignores US export control regulations.
Classified technologies must be kept secret from everyone not authorized to see them, regardless of their nationality.
In the U.S., export-controlled technologies are technologies that may be freely distributed to anyone in the country -- and indeed, to anyone in most countries -- but not to members of certain "lists." One of the lists is for entities, and includes, "China." Such technologies may be even discussed in public forums -- stadiums, even -- as long as one is assured that no one from the restricted lists is present. Note that one does not have to physically export anything to be in violation of these laws -- discussing the wrong technology with the wrong foreign national is all that is required.
I'm not an expert in this field, but I seem to remember an exception to the rules in that anything intended for publication is permitted to be exported. That's how technical journals continued to exist. Strange, I know.
Actually, the military and licensed government spectrum is controlled by the National Telecommunications & Information Administration. It informs the FCC what frequencies will be used by federal users. The FCC only regulates use of the spectrum by non-federal users.
The National Radio Quiet Zone has been there since 1958. It's not like it was just discovered yesterday. People living in this zone have always had to live without radio transmitters. Not having 802.11 is just another of the services they cannot use, like wireless garage-door openers and cell phones.
The reason health care workers are required to be vaccinated is that someone contracting the flu starts to shed the flu virus for some hours before other symptoms develop. By the time someone begins to feel bad, sneeze, etc. one has already been spreading the illness for hours. (One can see how a virus that behaved in this way would be evolutionarily advantaged over a virus that spread only after the patient first noticed other symptoms.)
Since the spreading mechanism is primarily via the hands touching the nose and mouth, and then touching other surfaces (like doorknobs or keyboards) that are then touched by others, most hospitals with which I am familiar have a different policy: If an employee refuses the flu vaccine, the employee is not terminated, but is required to wear a face mask at all times when at work. This breaks the spreading pathway, albeit less efficiently.
Many hospitals even provide free, voluntary, flu vaccinations to the family members of employees, to reduce the possibility that virus particles shed by, say, a sick child will not be carried by the health care worker into the hospital (for example, in hair or on clothes). This has the added benefit of reducing time away from work to take care of, e.g., a child sick with the flu.
Yes. And if one makes a 6m antenna the same physical size as a handheld 2m antenna the 6m loading coil will be larger, its series resistance will be higher, and the 6m antenna will be significantly less efficient than the 2m antenna. It will work "well enough", for suitably generous definitions of "well enough."
The optimum operating frequency for a given service can be determined (in the absence of regulatory restrictions, of course) analytically, taking atmospheric noise, antenna performance, and receiver noise figure into account. See, for example, Kai Siwiak, Radiowave Propagation and Antennas for Personal Communications." Second Edition. Boston: Artech House. 1998. Chapter 4.7.
But I don't know enough about designing this kind of thing to know if that is feasible.
The SDR is feasible, in fact, easier, but the problem is the "handheld" part -- "emphasis on the word, 'handheld.'" The physical size of the antenna starts becoming uncomfortably large as the frequency goes down -- or, said another way, the efficiency of the antenna goes down with frequency if the physical size is held constant. A full-size 50 MHz quarter-wave whip antenna is 1.5 meters (or metres, if you prefer; about 59 inches) long; that's pretty unwieldy for a handheld radio.
I'm not against this idea at all, but the water table is so high in most places in Florida that it would be really difficult to do. One needs to drill down less than 20 feet in most places to reach water. It's why one sees so few (substantially zero) houses with basements in Florida.
Keep in mind that his grad students were the ones that created the controlled technology in the first place, while working in his lab, and there is no evidence (nor any accusations made by the Prosecutor at his trial) that his students ever surreptitiously transferred the controlled technology outside the US. As another commenter notes elsewhere, it's impossible to exaggerate how goofy the rules are, and Prof. Roth ignored the "obviously illogical and irrational" regulations -- to his detriment.
And if you think he "chose" to employ foreign citizens as grad students, you haven't visited a US science, technology, engineering, or math graduate school since, say, 1980 or so. The ratio of foreign citizens to US citizens among the electrical engineering doctoral students at a major US state university with which I am familiar is approximately 20:1.
It's not just trading in state secrets ("espionage"). In the US it's also the trading in controlled technologies. The difference is, a controlled technology can be transferred to any US citizen with no legal issue at all, but cannot be transferred to (certain) foreign citizens. A state secret, on the other hand, may not be transferred even to another US citizen without authorization.
how does bringing them back there in anyway give China access to any "controlled technology" they don't already have?
It's the information the technologist has stored on it that is the problem. The export control laws are enforced by the Bureau of Industry and Security, and they are arcane, complex, and woefully out of date. Just to give one example, if you're a microprocessor designer, and have a design that operates at temperatures exceeding 125C, that design is controlled; carrying that design in your laptop when you go to China is a violation of the law -- whether or not it is even accessed while in China. (It's also illegal to show that design to any person of Chinese citizenship, even if you both are in the US at the time; that, too, is considered export under the law.)
The other -- and, I would submit, more important -- reason for not taking your business laptop to China (if you're from the US) is US export control laws. The definitions of "export" and "controlled technology" have been so generalized that it is an even-money bet that the laptop of a given technologist contains information that, were he to travel to China, would result in at least a technical violation of the law -- and the penalties are severe.
Dekatron valves are an example of a solution to the problem of making storage registers before integrated circuits made them essentially free. Making reliable working memory was one of the biggest problems faced by the early computer hardware designers, and Dekatron valves (tubes) were one of the more creative solutions. Of course, the reliability of solid-state electronics made them a technological backwater, but that makes them no less interesting -- it's fun to speculate on how things would have worked out if cold-cathode valves remained the dominant storage technology.
In my experience (speaking as someone old enough to remember watching the coverage of President Kennedy's assassination on television), the odds are not good, since the existing people are typically happy with the existing system -- otherwise, they would have changed it by now. However, one hope is to find a value of your organization -- and it'll be specific to each organization -- that would be improved by the change you desire.
Note that this is not your value, but a stated value of the "old guard" that could be improved by the new system -- and, usually, avoiding the mortality of the old guard itself is not an acceptable value. Extra credit if you can arrange a discussion of the old guard value in such a way that Bob can take credit for the improved performance of the new system.
Often, like so much in life, people with existing beliefs have to pass on before new ideas are accepted; ask yourself if you will be open to replacing your Google Docs system by something you don't know and have never heard of, in ten or twenty years' time.
Recognize that you will have to do all the work to install the new system, just as Bob did to install his own system years ago.
Can you give any examples where this change would stop or slow scientific progress?
Absolutely. Ever heard of co-processors, or hardware accelerators? They are hardware implementations of algorithms that are used to speed computation and reduce power consumption, and are in every modern microprocessor.
Since they are hardware implementations of software algorithms, if this change were in force the manufacturer and seller of hardware accelerators (and the computer that contains them) would be vulnerable to patent infringement lawsuits from holders of software patents. However, if the processor did not contain them, this would not be the case, so there would be great incentive for manufacturers to design microprocessors, and computers in general, without them.
Having to design computing hardware without embedded data processing algorithms would slow progress a lot -- I wouldn't want to do it. Especially with attorneys trying to tell me that my address decoder or bus contention manager or AES-128 encryption engine is a hardware implementation of their software algorithm. Eek.
Passing the buck to the hardware portion of the computer, instead of the software, doesn't solve the problem.
Apologies. That was not my intent. I, too, am trying to understand what Stallman is saying.
[rubs chin] . . . so his proposal would establish a sort of one-way intellectual property door, in which patented hardware could be emulated in software without patent infringement, but patented software algorithms implemented in hardware would infringe.
The implications of that are interesting. On the one hand, it would tend to force implementations of all kinds of things into software (even things that would be better done in hardware), for fear of lawsuits, which might slow the pace of hardware development -- even the programmable hardware the software runs on. On the other hand, it would make the decision of whether to patent a software algorithm an interesting one: The only valuable software patents would be those that seemed likely to be implemented into hardware (and could therefore get royalties).
once you move the code to general purpose hardware, it's no longer infringement.
As I have asked elsewhere, suppose that the guys developing code for general purpose hardware developed an improved algorithm, and some other guy took their algorithm, instantiated it in hard-wired logic gates, and sold it as a physical product. Is your position that the guy who took the improved algorithm and made money off of it owes nothing to those who invented the algorithm?
. . . but suppose that the guys working on programmable hardware developed an improved algorithm to use on their programmable hardware, and some other guy took their algorithm, instantiated it in hard-wired logic gates, and sold it. Is your position that the guy who took the improved algorithm and made money off of it owes nothing to those who invented the algorithm?
FPGA's are not at this time "generally used computing hardware", so the patent still applies to that line and above.
I beg to differ -- billions and billions of FPGAs have been sold, over the last 30 years, for just about every computing application one could name. It's hard to think of a more generally-used piece of computing hardware than one that can be programmed to be anything you want.
Or does "generally used computing hardware" mean that it has to be a consumer product? That wouldn't protect the armies of software developers in the world working on industrial or imbedded applications...
Besides, how do DSPs escape the "generally used computing hardware" category? They're above your line, too.
I'm not against it at all, but II really would like to understand how Stallman's proposal would apply to, say, the following example (one I've used before):
Suppose we take something like the FM demodulator in a radio. When Edwin Armstrong invented it, back in the stone age of the 1930s, I think we can all agree that (a) it was an "actual physical device," and (b) that it met all the other criteria (novelty, non-obviousness, utility, etc.) needed for a patent. It was implemented with the technology available at the time -- stone knives, bear skins, vacuum tubes (valves), and a transformer.
Skipping over details like the invention of ratio detectors, phase-locked loops, etc., the next change in implementation of FM detectors came when the tubes were replaced with discrete transistors. This required some change in bias methods, impedance levels, etc., but no major redesign. It did save cost, size, and power, though.
The next change was integration. At first, the transformer was still needed for the demodulator, and so it was pinned out of the ICs, which were still analog. This saved cost, size, and power still further.
Later, schemes were found to integrate the function of the transformer, fully integrating the (still analog) demodulator. This saved cost and size still further.
Still later, improvements in integration processes enabled the function of the FM demodulator to be performed digitally, using an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and a bunch of hard-wired logic gates, emulating the mathematical function performed by the analog demodulator. This saved cost, size, and power still further.
Demodulator designs were next ported into programmable hardware dedicated to signal-processing applications (digital signal processors); this required the ADC, plus the algorithm converted to the DSP's assembly language. This saved cost and size.
After that, demodulator designs were moved into hardware register-transfer languages, like Verilog, providing portability from chip to chip using standard-cell logic families. This saved cost.
Later, the Verilog designs were ported into field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), enabling one to program the hardware in the chip to become, when preceded by the ADC, an FM demodulator. This saved cost.
Finally, technology improved to the point that the FM demodulator could be made by an ADC followed by a microcomputer, programmed with software in a high-level language as part of a much larger system. This saved cost.
At what point in this development do we draw the line and say, "Below this, it's not patentable (or patent infringement)?" Where is "software"?
Slashdot Mirror
With weather satellites in private hands, they will be used for private purposes, holding NOAA (and everyone using its weather services, i.e., everyone) hostage to a private entity. This is an incredibly bad idea.
The information has been released for public access (it contains nothing classified), but (apparently) not vetted for export control. Many, many so-called "public access" technologies cannot be exported to specific individuals and entities. For example, designs of microprocessors capable of operation at ambient temperatures above 125 C are not classified, but are a controlled technology. See item 3A001.a.2.a in the Commerce Control List.
We may agree on the utility of taking that server off-line, but it's the law, and woe betide the brave soul that ignores US export control regulations.
You're talking apples and oranges.
Classified technologies must be kept secret from everyone not authorized to see them, regardless of their nationality.
In the U.S., export-controlled technologies are technologies that may be freely distributed to anyone in the country -- and indeed, to anyone in most countries -- but not to members of certain "lists." One of the lists is for entities, and includes, "China." Such technologies may be even discussed in public forums -- stadiums, even -- as long as one is assured that no one from the restricted lists is present. Note that one does not have to physically export anything to be in violation of these laws -- discussing the wrong technology with the wrong foreign national is all that is required.
I'm not an expert in this field, but I seem to remember an exception to the rules in that anything intended for publication is permitted to be exported. That's how technical journals continued to exist. Strange, I know.
Actually, the military and licensed government spectrum is controlled by the National Telecommunications & Information Administration. It informs the FCC what frequencies will be used by federal users. The FCC only regulates use of the spectrum by non-federal users.
Both must coordinate with each other, of course, and international bodies like the International Telecommunications Union.
The National Radio Quiet Zone has been there since 1958. It's not like it was just discovered yesterday. People living in this zone have always had to live without radio transmitters. Not having 802.11 is just another of the services they cannot use, like wireless garage-door openers and cell phones.
It would be great to see this addressed by our community through some outreach and awareness programs.
I assume these programs would be released under the GPL, or some other open-source license?
ASCII art is cool enough, but RTTY art is where it's at!
-Anon.
The reason health care workers are required to be vaccinated is that someone contracting the flu starts to shed the flu virus for some hours before other symptoms develop. By the time someone begins to feel bad, sneeze, etc. one has already been spreading the illness for hours. (One can see how a virus that behaved in this way would be evolutionarily advantaged over a virus that spread only after the patient first noticed other symptoms.)
Since the spreading mechanism is primarily via the hands touching the nose and mouth, and then touching other surfaces (like doorknobs or keyboards) that are then touched by others, most hospitals with which I am familiar have a different policy: If an employee refuses the flu vaccine, the employee is not terminated, but is required to wear a face mask at all times when at work. This breaks the spreading pathway, albeit less efficiently.
Many hospitals even provide free, voluntary, flu vaccinations to the family members of employees, to reduce the possibility that virus particles shed by, say, a sick child will not be carried by the health care worker into the hospital (for example, in hair or on clothes). This has the added benefit of reducing time away from work to take care of, e.g., a child sick with the flu.
Yes. And if one makes a 6m antenna the same physical size as a handheld 2m antenna the 6m loading coil will be larger, its series resistance will be higher, and the 6m antenna will be significantly less efficient than the 2m antenna. It will work "well enough", for suitably generous definitions of "well enough."
The optimum operating frequency for a given service can be determined (in the absence of regulatory restrictions, of course) analytically, taking atmospheric noise, antenna performance, and receiver noise figure into account. See, for example, Kai Siwiak, Radiowave Propagation and Antennas for Personal Communications." Second Edition. Boston: Artech House. 1998. Chapter 4.7.
But I don't know enough about designing this kind of thing to know if that is feasible.
The SDR is feasible, in fact, easier, but the problem is the "handheld" part -- "emphasis on the word, 'handheld.'" The physical size of the antenna starts becoming uncomfortably large as the frequency goes down -- or, said another way, the efficiency of the antenna goes down with frequency if the physical size is held constant. A full-size 50 MHz quarter-wave whip antenna is 1.5 meters (or metres, if you prefer; about 59 inches) long; that's pretty unwieldy for a handheld radio.
They should build this in Florida.
I'm not against this idea at all, but the water table is so high in most places in Florida that it would be really difficult to do. One needs to drill down less than 20 feet in most places to reach water. It's why one sees so few (substantially zero) houses with basements in Florida.
Keep in mind that his grad students were the ones that created the controlled technology in the first place, while working in his lab, and there is no evidence (nor any accusations made by the Prosecutor at his trial) that his students ever surreptitiously transferred the controlled technology outside the US. As another commenter notes elsewhere, it's impossible to exaggerate how goofy the rules are, and Prof. Roth ignored the "obviously illogical and irrational" regulations -- to his detriment.
And if you think he "chose" to employ foreign citizens as grad students, you haven't visited a US science, technology, engineering, or math graduate school since, say, 1980 or so. The ratio of foreign citizens to US citizens among the electrical engineering doctoral students at a major US state university with which I am familiar is approximately 20:1.
See the sad case of Prof. John Roth, of the University of Tennessee.
It's not just trading in state secrets ("espionage"). In the US it's also the trading in controlled technologies. The difference is, a controlled technology can be transferred to any US citizen with no legal issue at all, but cannot be transferred to (certain) foreign citizens. A state secret, on the other hand, may not be transferred even to another US citizen without authorization.
how does bringing them back there in anyway give China access to any "controlled technology" they don't already have?
It's the information the technologist has stored on it that is the problem. The export control laws are enforced by the Bureau of Industry and Security, and they are arcane, complex, and woefully out of date. Just to give one example, if you're a microprocessor designer, and have a design that operates at temperatures exceeding 125C, that design is controlled; carrying that design in your laptop when you go to China is a violation of the law -- whether or not it is even accessed while in China. (It's also illegal to show that design to any person of Chinese citizenship, even if you both are in the US at the time; that, too, is considered export under the law.)
The other -- and, I would submit, more important -- reason for not taking your business laptop to China (if you're from the US) is US export control laws. The definitions of "export" and "controlled technology" have been so generalized that it is an even-money bet that the laptop of a given technologist contains information that, were he to travel to China, would result in at least a technical violation of the law -- and the penalties are severe.
Dekatron valves are an example of a solution to the problem of making storage registers before integrated circuits made them essentially free. Making reliable working memory was one of the biggest problems faced by the early computer hardware designers, and Dekatron valves (tubes) were one of the more creative solutions. Of course, the reliability of solid-state electronics made them a technological backwater, but that makes them no less interesting -- it's fun to speculate on how things would have worked out if cold-cathode valves remained the dominant storage technology.
In my experience (speaking as someone old enough to remember watching the coverage of President Kennedy's assassination on television), the odds are not good, since the existing people are typically happy with the existing system -- otherwise, they would have changed it by now. However, one hope is to find a value of your organization -- and it'll be specific to each organization -- that would be improved by the change you desire.
Note that this is not your value, but a stated value of the "old guard" that could be improved by the new system -- and, usually, avoiding the mortality of the old guard itself is not an acceptable value. Extra credit if you can arrange a discussion of the old guard value in such a way that Bob can take credit for the improved performance of the new system.
Often, like so much in life, people with existing beliefs have to pass on before new ideas are accepted; ask yourself if you will be open to replacing your Google Docs system by something you don't know and have never heard of, in ten or twenty years' time.
Recognize that you will have to do all the work to install the new system, just as Bob did to install his own system years ago.
Is this a leer jet? Is this a Learjet?
Can you give any examples where this change would stop or slow scientific progress?
Absolutely. Ever heard of co-processors, or hardware accelerators? They are hardware implementations of algorithms that are used to speed computation and reduce power consumption, and are in every modern microprocessor.
Since they are hardware implementations of software algorithms, if this change were in force the manufacturer and seller of hardware accelerators (and the computer that contains them) would be vulnerable to patent infringement lawsuits from holders of software patents. However, if the processor did not contain them, this would not be the case, so there would be great incentive for manufacturers to design microprocessors, and computers in general, without them.
Having to design computing hardware without embedded data processing algorithms would slow progress a lot -- I wouldn't want to do it. Especially with attorneys trying to tell me that my address decoder or bus contention manager or AES-128 encryption engine is a hardware implementation of their software algorithm. Eek.
Passing the buck to the hardware portion of the computer, instead of the software, doesn't solve the problem.
so don't start an argument with me.
Apologies. That was not my intent. I, too, am trying to understand what Stallman is saying.
[rubs chin] . . . so his proposal would establish a sort of one-way intellectual property door, in which patented hardware could be emulated in software without patent infringement, but patented software algorithms implemented in hardware would infringe.
The implications of that are interesting. On the one hand, it would tend to force implementations of all kinds of things into software (even things that would be better done in hardware), for fear of lawsuits, which might slow the pace of hardware development -- even the programmable hardware the software runs on. On the other hand, it would make the decision of whether to patent a software algorithm an interesting one: The only valuable software patents would be those that seemed likely to be implemented into hardware (and could therefore get royalties).
once you move the code to general purpose hardware, it's no longer infringement.
As I have asked elsewhere, suppose that the guys developing code for general purpose hardware developed an improved algorithm, and some other guy took their algorithm, instantiated it in hard-wired logic gates, and sold it as a physical product. Is your position that the guy who took the improved algorithm and made money off of it owes nothing to those who invented the algorithm?
. . . but suppose that the guys working on programmable hardware developed an improved algorithm to use on their programmable hardware, and some other guy took their algorithm, instantiated it in hard-wired logic gates, and sold it. Is your position that the guy who took the improved algorithm and made money off of it owes nothing to those who invented the algorithm?
FPGA's are not at this time "generally used computing hardware", so the patent still applies to that line and above.
I beg to differ -- billions and billions of FPGAs have been sold, over the last 30 years, for just about every computing application one could name. It's hard to think of a more generally-used piece of computing hardware than one that can be programmed to be anything you want.
Or does "generally used computing hardware" mean that it has to be a consumer product? That wouldn't protect the armies of software developers in the world working on industrial or imbedded applications...
Besides, how do DSPs escape the "generally used computing hardware" category? They're above your line, too.
I'm not against it at all, but II really would like to understand how Stallman's proposal would apply to, say, the following example (one I've used before):
Suppose we take something like the FM demodulator in a radio. When Edwin Armstrong invented it, back in the stone age of the 1930s, I think we can all agree that (a) it was an "actual physical device," and (b) that it met all the other criteria (novelty, non-obviousness, utility, etc.) needed for a patent. It was implemented with the technology available at the time -- stone knives, bear skins, vacuum tubes (valves), and a transformer.
Skipping over details like the invention of ratio detectors, phase-locked loops, etc., the next change in implementation of FM detectors came when the tubes were replaced with discrete transistors. This required some change in bias methods, impedance levels, etc., but no major redesign. It did save cost, size, and power, though.
The next change was integration. At first, the transformer was still needed for the demodulator, and so it was pinned out of the ICs, which were still analog. This saved cost, size, and power still further.
Later, schemes were found to integrate the function of the transformer, fully integrating the (still analog) demodulator. This saved cost and size still further.
Still later, improvements in integration processes enabled the function of the FM demodulator to be performed digitally, using an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and a bunch of hard-wired logic gates, emulating the mathematical function performed by the analog demodulator. This saved cost, size, and power still further.
Demodulator designs were next ported into programmable hardware dedicated to signal-processing applications (digital signal processors); this required the ADC, plus the algorithm converted to the DSP's assembly language. This saved cost and size.
After that, demodulator designs were moved into hardware register-transfer languages, like Verilog, providing portability from chip to chip using standard-cell logic families. This saved cost.
Later, the Verilog designs were ported into field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), enabling one to program the hardware in the chip to become, when preceded by the ADC, an FM demodulator. This saved cost.
Finally, technology improved to the point that the FM demodulator could be made by an ADC followed by a microcomputer, programmed with software in a high-level language as part of a much larger system. This saved cost.
At what point in this development do we draw the line and say, "Below this, it's not patentable (or patent infringement)?" Where is "software"?