Second you must have the manufacture/ marketing/ sales etc. This is the bailiwick of larger corporations.
Why must I have these things? To be successful? I think not. The only reason I can see for these (especially marketing) is for other people to profit--and then it is they, not I, who must have them.
Consider, for example, when I play piano. I do not have a recording contract, there is no marketing, and I don't care. Why? Because I have a darned good time and that's the reason I do it. Now, if someone wanted to make a buck off of my piano playing they'd have to spend a pile on marketing (as anyone who's heard me can attest). They would need the resources of a large corporation, but I don't.
Hmm. A contractor had random access to the payroll system? Sounds almost as bad a practice as letting a prima donna type hold uniquely important material using just password protection.
I agreed. But neither practice was as bad as letting all employees have company credit cards with no real tracking of who spent what. They were in much better shape by the time I left. I even got them to stop running their Cat-5 on the outside of the building.
I wonder how tough it would be to crack SSN number passwords. These are easy to remember, but GOTTA be tought to crack....
Not really. I once worked (as a contractor) with a primadona / hot shot who thought he was the side the bread was buttered on (or something like that). Anyway, he left in a huff of wounded genius one day (someone had the audacity to challenge his expense report, IIRC). I had noticed a few months back that 1) his password was all numeric and 2) he typed it in a 3-2-4 pattern. After he was gone & everyone was in a panic because we were locked out of a few important things, I took it upon myself to look up his SSN in the payroll system.
After everyone was sufficiently worried about the fate of the company and all, I asked mildly "Mind if I take a stab at it?"
It worked the first time, and I deadpaned it like it was no big deal, with some Jeeves-ish quip about "the psychology of the individual" and tapped my forehead. It was quite fun.
>...communication and organization pose serious problems for mecha-nanobots
Agreed. I'm just not so sure that bio-nanobots won't have the same problems. It's a wonderful time to be alive if you enjoy tackling a little technical challenge now and then.
-- MarkusQ
Re:Software Patents have a repressive effect
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Fair IP Laws?
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Take this example -- you write some code that does CoolThingA in Method A. You compile the code and register the object code with the Copyright Office (object code to make it difficult to copy). That means no one else can use your copyrighted code to do CoolThingA. Now someone comes along and writes some code that does CoolThingA by MethodB. What protection do you have if your code was not copied? NONE. ZIP, NADA, NOTHING, ZUPKUS. Why? Because you need a PATENT to keep others from doing CoolThingA. CoolThingA is your invention - not necessarily the way of doing CoolThingA (although a well-written patent should cover both if possible).
Thus, Software Patents Have A Repressive Effect. Specifically, people are prevented from doing things they would otherwise have been free to do. More to the point, they have to worry that anything they might do might have been patented.
And who gains? Not society...they are given fewer options, and have to pay more for the options they retain. The only people who gain an advantage are the people (such as yourself) who charge people to play this silly game, and presumably your clients (though I don't know what your rates are) who manage to get more dollars from the "consumers" due to this artificial scarcity than they have to pay out to lawyers.
-- MarkusQ
Re:One thing I've NEVER seen here....
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Fair IP Laws?
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MQR: You aren't supposed to be able to pattent things that are "obvious," which is pretty much the same thing as saying that there are a large number of people who could come up with the same thing if asked.
Compulawyer: Sorry, but "obvious" is a term of art that has a specific legal meaning with over 150 years of court interpretation behind it. Without giving a course in patent law, I have to simply say that it does NOT mean that.
You could do what I did, and turn to Black's, which says:
Obvious. Easily discovered, seen, or understood; readily perceived by the eye or the intellect; plain; patent; apparent; evident; clear; manifest.
(Patent) Whether a patent is "obvious" must be determined by considering the scope and content of the prior art, the differences between prior art and the claims at issue and the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
So I will restate my point using this definition, without changing the meaning one whit: You aren't supposed to be able to pattent things that are "obvious," which includes things which fall within ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
Algorithms are patentable / No, they aren't.
Please clarify. If you are claiming that algorithms are not patentable (and, I presume, data structures, sinces they are just as much a part of mathematics as algorithms), what in the heck do you expect to protect with a software patent?
MQR: Most software patents are re-worded prior art. The recognised technique is to take something well known, rename all the key elements, and then patent it.
Compulawyer: I made this challenge earlier -- find some factual support for this assertion. This is pure speculation unsupported by facts.
No, in fact what you said was (and I quote) "I've seen plenty of comments that reduce down to "patents are bad" but no one ever says why". You asked for our reasons for claiming that software patents were bad, and I provided them. My assumption was that you asked because you honestly wanted to know. Holding to that assumption, I will answer your revised challenge: for starters, every patent on clicking, linking, hyperlinking, selecting values from a list, entering text, scrolling, paging, or tabbing issued since 1970 is clearly an example, since these were all well known at that time.
Perhaps it would be easier if we turned this around: can you produce a single example of a software patent that does not fall into this category?
MQR: Software patents have the opposite effect, encouraging litigation at the expense of new development.
Compulawyer: Same comment as above.
Bah! If there were no software patents there would be no litigation over software patents. So the only thing you could be claiming is that the existence of software patents somehow reduces the cost of new development, which is on the face of it absurd.
Suppose the shoe was on the other foot: suppose that the legal system were burdend with arbitrary requirements from computer science--say, all contracts had to be written in ADA or risk being thrown out if a conflicting contract that was written in ADA was ever presented. Do you honestly think this would encourage people to write new, inovative contracts?
there are good arguments both ways as to whether BMP's are good for society or not.
OK, I'll bite. How could you possibly argue that business method patents are "good for society"?
-- MarkusQ
Re:One thing I've NEVER seen here....
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Fair IP Laws?
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OK, lets, start with your list:
Is it because the USPTO has so few good examiners in the area that there is a sense that the quality of software patents is poor? Putting it mildly, yes.
Or is it simply that because there are so many talented programmers out there who can write code that does the same thing as the patented code that they don't want any impediments whatsoever?...I have serious problems because I see this as simply asking for special treatment in the eyes of the law. Then you should look back at the roots of the law. You aren't supposed to be able to pattent things that are "obvious," which is pretty much the same thing as saying that there are a large number of people who could come up with the same thing if asked.
Now for a few additions:
Algorithms are essentially mathematics, and as such should not be patentable. This was the generally held view up until a few decades ago, when truth and logic were sold down the river. Now we live in a world of Orwellian double think where we (as a society) agree that:
Mathematics (and laws of nature in general) should not be patentable.
Algorithms are mathematics
Algorithms are patentable
This makes many people who still have their brains turned on uncomfortable.
Most software patents are re-worded prior art. The recognised technique is to take something well known, rename all the key elements, and then patent it. In any other field I think this would be called "fraud".
The purpose of patents is to encourage the development of useful arts. Software patents have the opposite effect, encouraging litigation at the expense of new development.
When I think of a molecule, I think of a determinable chemical structure...I would assert, then, that diamond isn't a molecule at all, but is a crystaline structure.
Then I suppose to you it isn't. But in general useage, there is nothing requiring the formula to be known--and in fact, for the vast majority of macro molecules, polymers, etc. there isn't a fixed, will defined formula so much as a rule or pattern, as with diamond.
A molecule, by definition, is made up of different kinds of atoms (that is, different elements.) Diamond is made up of carbon only, so it is an allotrope (sp?) of carbon not a molecule made up of carbon.
Wrong on two counts. First, a molecule doesn't have to consist of more than one type of atom, and second, the surface of a diamond consists of other atoms (typically hydrogen or oxygen, IIRC) "capping off" the carbon latice.
A diamond isn't a molecule. It's a tighly packed structure of molecules with very strong connections between them, but not a single molecule.
No, a single crystal of diamond is a (potentially very large) single molecule. Every atom in it has a covalent bond to at least one (and generally four) of its neighbors.
...but physicists are voicing suspicions about the figures, portions of which seem almost identical even though the labels are different. Particularly puzzling is the fact that one pair of graphs show the same pattern of "noise," which should be random.
Lucent scientists today reported the remarkable discovery that, contrary to conventional wisdom and accepted scientific theory noise isn't random. Said one researcher, "We'd expected self-similarity, due to the fractal nature of noise, but this is amazing!"
Researchers estimate that there are actually less than a dozen examples of true noise, which are repeated endlessly through out nature. Some observers have expressed concerns over the fact that most, if not all of them are already copywritten by the RIAA.
Or to put it another way: after putting together the partial frames, scientists managed to come up with a picture that stated telportation was the norm. Then along comes Gould...
Sure. If punctuated equilibrium had been the accepted theory and Gould had been the one to point out that there was a simpler theory that fit the data just as well without all the hand waving, I'd have been all for it. But that's not the way it happened.
But to state that offering an alternative explanation is wrong because it'll give ammunition to the Enemy is just bullshit.
I never stated that, or even implied it. What I said was I didn't see value in people who create "controversy" just to promote themselves, or in people who write convincing "explanations" that miss the point in question. I'd feel the same way if he'd written a popular book on why the sun orbits the Earth or something.
The reasoning behind PE is based on more that just gaps in the fossil record, BTW. If a sparse fossil record were the sole basis for any theory, I'd cheerfully sneer.
I agree, the reasoning is based on a lot more. But what does it get you? What does it explain that actually needs explanation? Where is it better than the null hypothosis? What does it predict that you couldn't have predicted otherwise? In short, what good is it?
If I had a little machine for measuring sanctimony, you'd have just blown it up.
Evidently because your hypothetical sanctimony machine can't handle honesty.
Punctuated equilibrium, to my mind, answers so many questions it's amazing people are so dismissive of it.
"Punctuated equilibrium" is a good example of what I'm talking about. It is important to realize that the fossil record is very incomplete:
The vast majority of biological changes effect parts of the critter that don't fossilize
The vast majority of critters die without fossilizing
The vast majority of the fossils wind under the ocean, deep under ground, or are destoyed
We (and recognize only a small fraction of the fossils that are accessible
The incompleteness of the fossil record has been used for years by creationists to muddle the issues (c.f. the "missing link controversy"). There is a simple, accurate explanation of why we don't see intermediate forms, and it is important that it be clearly communicated: We don't see the intermediate forms because the fossil record is (quantifiable) incomplete.
Rather than using his writing abilities to present this undisputed fact, Gould cooked up "punctuated equilibrium" and got a large number of people waisting their time on another "explanation" for something that is an artifact of the data sample in the first place.
Imagine that the only record you had of life before WWI was a collection black and white films, from which 99% of the frames had been distroyed and 99% of each remaining frame was damaged beyond recognition. With years of hard work you'd managed to piece together a pretty good--if very incomplete--idea of what life was like in those day.
Then a Gould comes along and proposes a threory of "punctuated hanging out," claiming that people used to move by teleporting from place to place (thus "explaning" the lack of examples of coherent motion in your data). Would you welcome him?
Suppose than he proceeds to take such shallow, useless, pot shots at good people and sound work for decades, seemingly for no reason than to prop up his own fame & ego. Would you miss his "contribution" when he finally stopped, for whatever reason?
Note that I'm not saying that I'm glad he died. I'm saying that I, for one, won't miss his contribution.
I think the main problem was that (to steal a line from Max Born) "he wrote more clearly than he thought." I feel he did a great deal of harm to the public acceptance of evolution by inventing controversy and misrepresenting the work of others. Just because he's dead doesn't make his views any more sound.
Many people die each day. We happen to be discussing Gould because he happened to be famous. I personally feel much more loss over the death of the hundreds of interesting people who died today without every becoming famous.
...so my idea of "fun" may be different from yours?;)
No, data mining is great fun. Especially if you're working with auditors trying to figure out "where all the money went" or trying to put together the details of an catastrophic failure which shouldn't have ever happened (and consequently no one thought to check or log data for). It's very much like working in a mystery novel, or sometimes a farce.
Do you seriously expect me to believe that our nano-bots will be manipulating the world at an atomic scale?
Yes. That's what distinguishes nanotechnology from, say, MEMS. The whole point is to have atomically precise devices (eutactic machines if you prefer).
At that scale, brownian motion, electro-static and chemical forces create a whole new set of problems.
All of this and more is covered at length in Nanosystems, which you probably ought to take a look at.
WRT to the piston machine:...the spring needs to push the piston out before the next pressure wave hits, for high frequencies this means a stiffer spring, resulting in less energy extracted. Again, show me the power calculations.
For details on this point see chapter 6 (IIRC) of
Nanomedicine. In brief and partial answer to your spring-stiffness argument, just remember resonance--we know the frequency, etc. before hand and can design for it. When you add this to the facts that 1) the natural frequency of a system is inversely proportional to the scale, 2) the energy carried by a wave goes up with the square of frequency, 3) the power needed to run a machine drops as the inverse square of scale, it should (to a very rough first aproximation), be 10,000 times more effective to power a device with acoustic waves for every order of magnitude reduction in scale. Given that there have been simple ~10cm devices powered by anharmonic changes in barometric pressure, we should expect (all other things being equal, which of course they aren't) it to be on the order of 10^28 times more effective on the nanoscale.
...you can extract energy from a pressure wave with a wavelength much larger than you are. You can even build something that sits on a desk to extract power (not much of course) from daily variations in barometric pressure. In effect, it's just a piston.
Enkidu:
Ah, but only if you're stationary relative to the pressure wave. Nano-bots are going to be hard pressed to do that with the mass that they have. If the pressure wave is big enough to move you (which I assume to be the case with nano-bots), you're just a particle in the matrix which gets moved around. You'd have to use an intertial generation system, and with masses so small, you'd be hard pressed to extract any usable energy. Show me a realistic design that could work and I'll change my mind. Just a design with the appropriate mass calculations, materials and expected power. It doesn't have to be exact or even workable, but should outline the general principles of how it would work.
No, you don't have to be fixed in position. It's a lot easier than you seem to be thinking.
Take a rigid box with one side free to slide in and out (i.e., a piston).
Inside the box is a gizmo with two arms: one attatched to the piston-wall and the other attached to the opposite wall.
The box is floating freely in some medium that undergoes periodic pressure changes around a mean value P.
Inside the box is a fluid of pressure P, or there is a spring attached to the gizmo to give an eqiv. force.
The gizmo stores power when its arms are "pumped" in and out. It could wind up a spring, do something piezoelectric, whatever.
So what happens? As the pressure waves come & go, the piston is pushed in and out, and it extracts power from its environment.
I thought friction was a counteracting force to motion, usually at the surface/boundaries. Does friction just magically cease to exist for nanoscale materials? Mechanical linkages don't encounter the problems of viscosity and surface friction? Again, my intuition could be wrong, but it seems to me that the primary problem that ants and small insects deal with in mechanically manipulating their environment is friction. As things scale down, I only expect things to get worse.
Your intuition is wrong. Friction is a macroscopic effect, like colour or policical affiliation. Bellow a certain size, it doesn't apply, because the things you are dealing with don't have enough internal complexity to support it. With macroscale objects, there are many, many atoms that meet at the interface, and the sum of all their interactions is what we call friction. At the other extreme, when two atoms meet there are (obviously) only two atoms meeting. To a first aproximation, they either bond or they don't. If they don't, they behave (again, to a first aproximation) pretty much like perfect, elastic, frictionless spheres.
You can think of it this way: a large company will have a certain number of people die each year, and so we could define something like a mortal-attrition rate for the company. But if we try to extend our model to small companies, or even sole proprieterships, it breaks down. Bob of "Bob's Shoe Repair" may or may not die (most years he won't) but he will never have the 0.003% mortal-attrition rate we'd expect extrapolating from the large corporation.
Ah, but what we are trying to accomplish on the nanoscale is quite akin to the aims of what biology has been doing for a billion years or so. Biology hasn't built F-16's because there wasn't any evolutionary gain in building them (there not being any SAM-7's or Su-27's to compete against). But our nano/micro world has been teaming with (competing) life doing all sorts of interesting things (coral, ant colonies, bee hives, bacteria, yeast, fungi just to name a few examples) with close analogues to our aims in nano-technology. On the micro/nano scale of doing things efficiently, we haven't even made it to the stone age when compared to the biological world. Heck, we don't even have fire yet.
We may, to use your analogy, have to go through a phase of animal-labor before we develop maschines of our own. But you are wrong about the efficency of living things. The vast majority of "what they do" is centered around things like finding mates, spreading to and colonizing new environments, fighting other organisms, foraging for food, etc. that we don't want nanobots to do, any more than I want my car to go out and prowl for a mate, eat my neighbor's rose bushes, or speend the night out drag racing other cars to determine who's the big wheel in the neighborhood.
Mostly, I object to more of my tax dollars going to research into nano dreck (and fusion crap) instead of going to research towards more efficient power generation/solar generation/geothermal generation/waste heat utilization/home generation/efficient transportation/waste reduction/erosion prevention; all of which have a darn good chance of improving the state of the world during the next decade.
I, on the other hand, object to tax dolars being spent on short-term-returns things that ought to be paid for by private capital. I think tax dolars should be saved for the long-term we'll-need-this-someday-so-we-should-start-on-it-n ow stuff that otherwise won't get funded.
We are running some sort of a club in our University which has members who are interested in programming and related stuff...However, we are finding it really difficult to motivate new entries to join our club.
I think I see your problem. Try saying: "Programming kicks butt. There is nothing that matches the creative rush of a good code frenzy short of godhood. You get to litterly feel like you can do anything. Programming is what people have dreamed of for eons--giving orders to inanimate objects and having them obey you without question. I feel sorry for anybody who doesn't learn to control the power that programming gives us. We meet on Thursdays. Wanna join?"
-- MarkusQ
Re:Foul mood or troll, what's the difference :-).
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More on Micro Turbines
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Just doing a quick google search on turbine combustion temperature gives me a figure of 1250F. Or about 675C. I admit that 2000C was a load of horse-pucky but so is 200C.
Remember, if you double the linear scale you have eight times the volume to cool across only four times the surface area. So the smaller you go (other things being equal) the easier cooling will become. More to the point, what really matters isn't the absolute temperature but the gradient. At smaller scales, you can get temperature gradients much higher than you can with larger scales (e.g. in collapsing bubbles) without exposing your components to nearly as high average absolute temperatures.
Turbine blades are notoriously difficult to manufacture because of the high stresses and high temperatures involved in their operation. Making them really small doesn't sidestep the issue.
It sure helps. The main problem is finding something that will spin as fast as you like without flying apart. The forces/cross sectional area scale as RPM x r, so for something half the size you can use a material only half as strong.
Uhmm, to be high in frequency enough to be absorbed/used by nanobots, your average tweeter ain't going to cut it.
We aren't talking light here; you can extract energy from a pressure wave with a wavelength much larger than you are. You can even build something that sits on a desk to extract power (not much of course) from daily variations in barometric pressure. In effect, it's just a piston.
You don't need electronics to control machines.
Fluidics then? Pure mechanical linkages?
Sure. Not fluidics of course. See Nanosystems, Chapter 12, for a proof of concept design using only mechanical linkages.
Biobots on the other hand, allow us to crib off of a couple billion years of evolution. Why reinvent mitochondria?
For the same reason we don't harness birds to pull our airplanes. Those billions of years of evolution were hampered by the fact that the beasties had to stay alive every single day. That means no radical redesign, no optimizing for a specific purpose at the cost of evolutionary fitness, etc. As a consequence, we can do many orders of magnitude better than evolution has--when "better" is defined by meeting our needs and not by reproductive success.
Making them really small doesn't sidestep the issue. Especially with regard to friction.
Exactly backwards. Friction is a bulk effect; if you make things small enough, the whole concept of "friction" goes away. Of course, we're talking nanoscale now, not microscale, and thus many orders of magnitude smaller than these turbines.
I'm not claiming that every possible measurement of the value of c is invariant under changes in c (though I'm not convinced that they aren't, either.
My specific comment was aimed at bulk matter, in which nuclear radius doesn't matter (at least, for a few orders of magnitude). The poster to whom I was responding claimed that his "tangible" yard stick would let him know if c changed; my point was that his reasoning wasn't as sound as he might think since the length of his (physical) yardstick depended on the speed of light.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. As for your wavelength vs. nuclear radius thought example, I don't know enough about the inner workings of quark stew to be sure that there isn't some hidden dependence on c that would make it all work out. The assumption of c == 1 is so deep (and most physicists, at least by mathematical standards, so sloppy) that I would not bet one way or the other.
But since a yardstick is more tangible than the speed of light, people would prefer to say that the speed of light changed, and not the yardstick.
It may be more tangible, but it isn't "more constant." The length of a yardstick is determined by the number of atoms on a typical line running from one end to the other times the average distance between their centers along this line. The number of atoms won't change if you change c, but the distance between them (which is determined by the interaction between charges, which is mediated by photons, which move at c) will--it will change in exactly the way to make you think that c hasn't changed.
As the original poster was pointing out, c isn't so much a constant as a tautology.
I had pretty much decided that you were a troll, but looking at your posts on other topics leads me to suspect that you are either just clueless on this one or in a foul mood today.
In case you are a troll I won't waste too much time rebutting here, but just touch on a few highlights:
200C is a much better estimate of the temp. than 2000C, which you seem to have just pulled out of your hat as a straw man.
The "biobot"/nanobot distinction is also a straw man, or at perhaps handwaving flummery.
Fuel cells already perform controlled micro-combustion on homogenious fuels. Clever filtering can handle mixed fuels.
Sound waves can be made easily and cheaply with things called "speakers".
You don't need electronics to control machines.
The whole point of this is that they are working on new technologies, so saying that they don't exist yet doesn't add information.
Why don't you try monitoring? Leave something tcpdump-ish on the line, saving the last however many packets until something dies. Then dust for finger prints.
I've seen something like this happen and suspect either dumb/misconfigured DHCP clients, an election process run amok, or some sort of ICMP flurry. No proof either way, since in this case I'm just a user & I just wait it out.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. I have noticed an interesting patterm to the timing though. You might try looking at the times / dates of past events to see if that suggests anything (and it can often suggest a lot).
"always describe what the code is intended to do in your comments",
This can hinder the finding of bugs. Too often I have seen people read the comments, say "oh, that's what it does" and go on without actually looking at the code.
A much better idea: write clear code, with good variable names, well abstracted and well named procedures / functions / methods, so that the code itself is the "documentation."
Save the comments for out-of-band information like citations, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Second you must have the manufacture/ marketing/ sales etc. This is the bailiwick of larger corporations.
Why must I have these things? To be successful? I think not. The only reason I can see for these (especially marketing) is for other people to profit--and then it is they, not I, who must have them.
Consider, for example, when I play piano. I do not have a recording contract, there is no marketing, and I don't care. Why? Because I have a darned good time and that's the reason I do it. Now, if someone wanted to make a buck off of my piano playing they'd have to spend a pile on marketing (as anyone who's heard me can attest). They would need the resources of a large corporation, but I don't.
-- MarkusQ
I agreed. But neither practice was as bad as letting all employees have company credit cards with no real tracking of who spent what. They were in much better shape by the time I left. I even got them to stop running their Cat-5 on the outside of the building.
-- MarkusQ
Not really. I once worked (as a contractor) with a primadona / hot shot who thought he was the side the bread was buttered on (or something like that). Anyway, he left in a huff of wounded genius one day (someone had the audacity to challenge his expense report, IIRC). I had noticed a few months back that 1) his password was all numeric and 2) he typed it in a 3-2-4 pattern. After he was gone & everyone was in a panic because we were locked out of a few important things, I took it upon myself to look up his SSN in the payroll system.
After everyone was sufficiently worried about the fate of the company and all, I asked mildly "Mind if I take a stab at it?"
It worked the first time, and I deadpaned it like it was no big deal, with some Jeeves-ish quip about "the psychology of the individual" and tapped my forehead. It was quite fun.
-- MarkusQ
Agreed. I'm just not so sure that bio-nanobots won't have the same problems. It's a wonderful time to be alive if you enjoy tackling a little technical challenge now and then.
-- MarkusQ
Thus, Software Patents Have A Repressive Effect. Specifically, people are prevented from doing things they would otherwise have been free to do. More to the point, they have to worry that anything they might do might have been patented.
And who gains? Not society...they are given fewer options, and have to pay more for the options they retain. The only people who gain an advantage are the people (such as yourself) who charge people to play this silly game, and presumably your clients (though I don't know what your rates are) who manage to get more dollars from the "consumers" due to this artificial scarcity than they have to pay out to lawyers.
-- MarkusQ
MQR: You aren't supposed to be able to pattent things that are "obvious," which is pretty much the same thing as saying that there are a large number of people who could come up with the same thing if asked.
Compulawyer: Sorry, but "obvious" is a term of art that has a specific legal meaning with over 150 years of court interpretation behind it. Without giving a course in patent law, I have to simply say that it does NOT mean that.
You could do what I did, and turn to Black's, which says:
So I will restate my point using this definition, without changing the meaning one whit: You aren't supposed to be able to pattent things that are "obvious," which includes things which fall within ordinary skill in the pertinent art.Algorithms are patentable / No, they aren't.
Please clarify. If you are claiming that algorithms are not patentable (and, I presume, data structures, sinces they are just as much a part of mathematics as algorithms), what in the heck do you expect to protect with a software patent?
MQR: Most software patents are re-worded prior art. The recognised technique is to take something well known, rename all the key elements, and then patent it.
Compulawyer: I made this challenge earlier -- find some factual support for this assertion. This is pure speculation unsupported by facts.
No, in fact what you said was (and I quote) "I've seen plenty of comments that reduce down to "patents are bad" but no one ever says why". You asked for our reasons for claiming that software patents were bad, and I provided them. My assumption was that you asked because you honestly wanted to know. Holding to that assumption, I will answer your revised challenge: for starters, every patent on clicking, linking, hyperlinking, selecting values from a list, entering text, scrolling, paging, or tabbing issued since 1970 is clearly an example, since these were all well known at that time.
Perhaps it would be easier if we turned this around: can you produce a single example of a software patent that does not fall into this category?
MQR: Software patents have the opposite effect, encouraging litigation at the expense of new development.
Compulawyer: Same comment as above.
Bah! If there were no software patents there would be no litigation over software patents. So the only thing you could be claiming is that the existence of software patents somehow reduces the cost of new development, which is on the face of it absurd.
Suppose the shoe was on the other foot: suppose that the legal system were burdend with arbitrary requirements from computer science--say, all contracts had to be written in ADA or risk being thrown out if a conflicting contract that was written in ADA was ever presented. Do you honestly think this would encourage people to write new, inovative contracts?
-- MarkusQ
there are good arguments both ways as to whether BMP's are good for society or not.
OK, I'll bite. How could you possibly argue that business method patents are "good for society"?
-- MarkusQ
OK, lets, start with your list: Now for a few additions: How's that for a start?
-- MarkusQ
When I think of a molecule, I think of a determinable chemical structure...I would assert, then, that diamond isn't a molecule at all, but is a crystaline structure.
Then I suppose to you it isn't. But in general useage, there is nothing requiring the formula to be known--and in fact, for the vast majority of macro molecules, polymers, etc. there isn't a fixed, will defined formula so much as a rule or pattern, as with diamond.
-- MarkusQ
Wrong on two counts. First, a molecule doesn't have to consist of more than one type of atom, and second, the surface of a diamond consists of other atoms (typically hydrogen or oxygen, IIRC) "capping off" the carbon latice.
-- MarkusQ
A diamond isn't a molecule. It's a tighly packed structure of molecules with very strong connections between them, but not a single molecule.
No, a single crystal of diamond is a (potentially very large) single molecule. Every atom in it has a covalent bond to at least one (and generally four) of its neighbors.
-- MarkusQ
Lucent scientists today reported the remarkable discovery that, contrary to conventional wisdom and accepted scientific theory noise isn't random. Said one researcher, "We'd expected self-similarity, due to the fractal nature of noise, but this is amazing!"
Researchers estimate that there are actually less than a dozen examples of true noise, which are repeated endlessly through out nature. Some observers have expressed concerns over the fact that most, if not all of them are already copywritten by the RIAA.
-- MarkusQ
Or to put it another way: after putting together the partial frames, scientists managed to come up with a picture that stated telportation was the norm. Then along comes Gould...
Sure. If punctuated equilibrium had been the accepted theory and Gould had been the one to point out that there was a simpler theory that fit the data just as well without all the hand waving, I'd have been all for it. But that's not the way it happened.
But to state that offering an alternative explanation is wrong because it'll give ammunition to the Enemy is just bullshit.
I never stated that, or even implied it. What I said was I didn't see value in people who create "controversy" just to promote themselves, or in people who write convincing "explanations" that miss the point in question. I'd feel the same way if he'd written a popular book on why the sun orbits the Earth or something.
The reasoning behind PE is based on more that just gaps in the fossil record, BTW. If a sparse fossil record were the sole basis for any theory, I'd cheerfully sneer.
I agree, the reasoning is based on a lot more. But what does it get you? What does it explain that actually needs explanation? Where is it better than the null hypothosis? What does it predict that you couldn't have predicted otherwise? In short, what good is it?
-- MarkusQ
If I had a little machine for measuring sanctimony, you'd have just blown it up.
Evidently because your hypothetical sanctimony machine can't handle honesty.
Punctuated equilibrium, to my mind, answers so many questions it's amazing people are so dismissive of it.
"Punctuated equilibrium" is a good example of what I'm talking about. It is important to realize that the fossil record is very incomplete:
The incompleteness of the fossil record has been used for years by creationists to muddle the issues (c.f. the "missing link controversy"). There is a simple, accurate explanation of why we don't see intermediate forms, and it is important that it be clearly communicated: We don't see the intermediate forms because the fossil record is (quantifiable) incomplete.Rather than using his writing abilities to present this undisputed fact, Gould cooked up "punctuated equilibrium" and got a large number of people waisting their time on another "explanation" for something that is an artifact of the data sample in the first place.
Imagine that the only record you had of life before WWI was a collection black and white films, from which 99% of the frames had been distroyed and 99% of each remaining frame was damaged beyond recognition. With years of hard work you'd managed to piece together a pretty good--if very incomplete--idea of what life was like in those day.
Then a Gould comes along and proposes a threory of "punctuated hanging out," claiming that people used to move by teleporting from place to place (thus "explaning" the lack of examples of coherent motion in your data). Would you welcome him?
Suppose than he proceeds to take such shallow, useless, pot shots at good people and sound work for decades, seemingly for no reason than to prop up his own fame & ego. Would you miss his "contribution" when he finally stopped, for whatever reason?
Note that I'm not saying that I'm glad he died. I'm saying that I, for one, won't miss his contribution.
-- MarkusQ
I think the main problem was that (to steal a line from Max Born) "he wrote more clearly than he thought." I feel he did a great deal of harm to the public acceptance of evolution by inventing controversy and misrepresenting the work of others. Just because he's dead doesn't make his views any more sound.
Many people die each day. We happen to be discussing Gould because he happened to be famous. I personally feel much more loss over the death of the hundreds of interesting people who died today without every becoming famous.
-- MarkusQ
No, data mining is great fun. Especially if you're working with auditors trying to figure out "where all the money went" or trying to put together the details of an catastrophic failure which shouldn't have ever happened (and consequently no one thought to check or log data for). It's very much like working in a mystery novel, or sometimes a farce.
-- MarkusQ
Thanks for the interesting discussion.
Ditto.
Do you seriously expect me to believe that our nano-bots will be manipulating the world at an atomic scale?
Yes. That's what distinguishes nanotechnology from, say, MEMS. The whole point is to have atomically precise devices (eutactic machines if you prefer).
At that scale, brownian motion, electro-static and chemical forces create a whole new set of problems.
All of this and more is covered at length in Nanosystems, which you probably ought to take a look at.
WRT to the piston machine:...the spring needs to push the piston out before the next pressure wave hits, for high frequencies this means a stiffer spring, resulting in less energy extracted. Again, show me the power calculations.
For details on this point see chapter 6 (IIRC) of Nanomedicine. In brief and partial answer to your spring-stiffness argument, just remember resonance--we know the frequency, etc. before hand and can design for it. When you add this to the facts that 1) the natural frequency of a system is inversely proportional to the scale, 2) the energy carried by a wave goes up with the square of frequency, 3) the power needed to run a machine drops as the inverse square of scale, it should (to a very rough first aproximation), be 10,000 times more effective to power a device with acoustic waves for every order of magnitude reduction in scale. Given that there have been simple ~10cm devices powered by anharmonic changes in barometric pressure, we should expect (all other things being equal, which of course they aren't) it to be on the order of 10^28 times more effective on the nanoscale.
-- MarkusQ
MQR:
Enkidu:
No, you don't have to be fixed in position. It's a lot easier than you seem to be thinking.
- Take a rigid box with one side free to slide in and out (i.e., a piston).
- Inside the box is a gizmo with two arms: one attatched to the piston-wall and the other attached to the opposite wall.
- The box is floating freely in some medium that undergoes periodic pressure changes around a mean value P.
- Inside the box is a fluid of pressure P, or there is a spring attached to the gizmo to give an eqiv. force.
- The gizmo stores power when its arms are "pumped" in and out. It could wind up a spring, do something piezoelectric, whatever.
So what happens? As the pressure waves come & go, the piston is pushed in and out, and it extracts power from its environment. Your intuition is wrong. Friction is a macroscopic effect, like colour or policical affiliation. Bellow a certain size, it doesn't apply, because the things you are dealing with don't have enough internal complexity to support it. With macroscale objects, there are many, many atoms that meet at the interface, and the sum of all their interactions is what we call friction. At the other extreme, when two atoms meet there are (obviously) only two atoms meeting. To a first aproximation, they either bond or they don't. If they don't, they behave (again, to a first aproximation) pretty much like perfect, elastic, frictionless spheres.You can think of it this way: a large company will have a certain number of people die each year, and so we could define something like a mortal-attrition rate for the company. But if we try to extend our model to small companies, or even sole proprieterships, it breaks down. Bob of "Bob's Shoe Repair" may or may not die (most years he won't) but he will never have the 0.003% mortal-attrition rate we'd expect extrapolating from the large corporation.
We may, to use your analogy, have to go through a phase of animal-labor before we develop maschines of our own. But you are wrong about the efficency of living things. The vast majority of "what they do" is centered around things like finding mates, spreading to and colonizing new environments, fighting other organisms, foraging for food, etc. that we don't want nanobots to do, any more than I want my car to go out and prowl for a mate, eat my neighbor's rose bushes, or speend the night out drag racing other cars to determine who's the big wheel in the neighborhood.
I, on the other hand, object to tax dolars being spent on short-term-returns things that ought to be paid for by private capital. I think tax dolars should be saved for the long-term we'll-need-this-someday-so-we-should-start-on-it--- MarkusQ
We are running some sort of a club in our University which has members who are interested in programming and related stuff...However, we are finding it really difficult to motivate new entries to join our club.
I think I see your problem. Try saying: "Programming kicks butt. There is nothing that matches the creative rush of a good code frenzy short of godhood. You get to litterly feel like you can do anything. Programming is what people have dreamed of for eons--giving orders to inanimate objects and having them obey you without question. I feel sorry for anybody who doesn't learn to control the power that programming gives us. We meet on Thursdays. Wanna join?"
-- MarkusQ
Just doing a quick google search on turbine combustion temperature gives me a figure of 1250F. Or about 675C. I admit that 2000C was a load of horse-pucky but so is 200C.
Remember, if you double the linear scale you have eight times the volume to cool across only four times the surface area. So the smaller you go (other things being equal) the easier cooling will become. More to the point, what really matters isn't the absolute temperature but the gradient. At smaller scales, you can get temperature gradients much higher than you can with larger scales (e.g. in collapsing bubbles) without exposing your components to nearly as high average absolute temperatures.
Turbine blades are notoriously difficult to manufacture because of the high stresses and high temperatures involved in their operation. Making them really small doesn't sidestep the issue.
It sure helps. The main problem is finding something that will spin as fast as you like without flying apart. The forces/cross sectional area scale as RPM x r, so for something half the size you can use a material only half as strong.
Uhmm, to be high in frequency enough to be absorbed/used by nanobots, your average tweeter ain't going to cut it.
We aren't talking light here; you can extract energy from a pressure wave with a wavelength much larger than you are. You can even build something that sits on a desk to extract power (not much of course) from daily variations in barometric pressure. In effect, it's just a piston.
You don't need electronics to control machines. Fluidics then? Pure mechanical linkages?
Sure. Not fluidics of course. See Nanosystems, Chapter 12, for a proof of concept design using only mechanical linkages.
Biobots on the other hand, allow us to crib off of a couple billion years of evolution. Why reinvent mitochondria?
For the same reason we don't harness birds to pull our airplanes. Those billions of years of evolution were hampered by the fact that the beasties had to stay alive every single day. That means no radical redesign, no optimizing for a specific purpose at the cost of evolutionary fitness, etc. As a consequence, we can do many orders of magnitude better than evolution has--when "better" is defined by meeting our needs and not by reproductive success.
Making them really small doesn't sidestep the issue. Especially with regard to friction.
Exactly backwards. Friction is a bulk effect; if you make things small enough, the whole concept of "friction" goes away. Of course, we're talking nanoscale now, not microscale, and thus many orders of magnitude smaller than these turbines.
-- MarkusQ
My specific comment was aimed at bulk matter, in which nuclear radius doesn't matter (at least, for a few orders of magnitude). The poster to whom I was responding claimed that his "tangible" yard stick would let him know if c changed; my point was that his reasoning wasn't as sound as he might think since the length of his (physical) yardstick depended on the speed of light.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. As for your wavelength vs. nuclear radius thought example, I don't know enough about the inner workings of quark stew to be sure that there isn't some hidden dependence on c that would make it all work out. The assumption of c == 1 is so deep (and most physicists, at least by mathematical standards, so sloppy) that I would not bet one way or the other.
But since a yardstick is more tangible than the speed of light, people would prefer to say that the speed of light changed, and not the yardstick.
It may be more tangible, but it isn't "more constant." The length of a yardstick is determined by the number of atoms on a typical line running from one end to the other times the average distance between their centers along this line. The number of atoms won't change if you change c, but the distance between them (which is determined by the interaction between charges, which is mediated by photons, which move at c) will--it will change in exactly the way to make you think that c hasn't changed.
As the original poster was pointing out, c isn't so much a constant as a tautology.
-- MarkusQ
I had pretty much decided that you were a troll, but looking at your posts on other topics leads me to suspect that you are either just clueless on this one or in a foul mood today.
In case you are a troll I won't waste too much time rebutting here, but just touch on a few highlights:
And so forth.-- MarkusQ -- MarkusQ
I've seen something like this happen and suspect either dumb/misconfigured DHCP clients, an election process run amok, or some sort of ICMP flurry. No proof either way, since in this case I'm just a user & I just wait it out.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. I have noticed an interesting patterm to the timing though. You might try looking at the times / dates of past events to see if that suggests anything (and it can often suggest a lot).
This can hinder the finding of bugs. Too often I have seen people read the comments, say "oh, that's what it does" and go on without actually looking at the code.
A much better idea: write clear code, with good variable names, well abstracted and well named procedures / functions / methods, so that the code itself is the "documentation."
Save the comments for out-of-band information like citations, etc.
-- MarkusQ