not useful for end-user activity? I think you'd have to have a fairly narrow view of "useful" for that statement to be defensible.
My son spent an amusing hour this evening driving a Viper aircraft at ground level from SFO to SEA at 390 miles per hour on Google Earth Flight Simulator. He was asked me how to figure out when he got near SEATAC, which gave me an opportunity to tell him to look for the various volcanos in the Cascades, the Columbia River, and to take a 30 degree left turn at Mt. Rainier.
Sounds useful to me, especially considering that huge fortune I spent on Google Earth.
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"useful" like "beauty" is in the eye of the beholder. We all know that MS produces loathesome software, stifles innovation, and serves up grilled dolphin steaks with penguin sauce to their droids in the cafeteria in Redmond. And yet, and yet,... dangit: a lot of people kind of like Windows.
I don't, but I have to admit, a lot of people do.
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I think Google Earth is cool. I'm not really sure why Google did it, but I'm not yelling at them for doing it.
largest != most sensitive. I'm sure that Pune is very nice, as is the radar at Gadanki... however
The US operates an even larger radar near Lima, Peru (the Jicamarca Radar Observatory). However, at 50 MHz, and looking up through the equatorial ionosphere... it's less sensitive than Arecibo. Arecibo (as a reflector system) is intrinsically broadband, operating from 50 MHz through X band... which *very* impressive.
Both JRO and AO have their uses. *neither* is replacable by *any* instruments on the planet. They are both fabulous instruments. They have *no* competition on Earth --- at what they do best.
In an era in which a larger world can be frustrated by other actions of the United States, take some comfort in physicist Robert Wilson's testimony to Congress in 1969 to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, when he was asked to explain why the United States should fund a very expensive atom smasher. Wilson had already explained that the atom smasher wouldn't do much at all for the defense of the United States, but Wilson continued,
It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.
There are seven people on board that rocket today, they are smarter than you or I, and harder working, and they have seen 14 others go to their deaths on the same craft.
So: let's all do something to make ourselves worth defending, okay?
It matters because the book was billed as an honest account of a serious addiction and how to get out of it.
I don't completely disagree. However, one of the principal reasons for prominence of this particular book was the air of authority lent it by Oprah. Oprah might herself say, "I was misled," but her stature as a recommender of books does, I think, impose upon her a certain responsibility. If she had liked the book very much, but said, "actually, it's more like fiction than fact," then she wouldn't be in a pickle. Perhaps we should dump upon the author, but Oprah herself deserves a little of the blame, here.
Along these lines, Ken Lay's trial has now begun. A theme of his defense is that he was just a good old boy who was misled by evildoers within Enron. Whether or not that's the case... if you're the CEO of a company that is worth such a stupendous amount, can it really be the case that "I was misled" is an allowable defense?
Issues like this pop up fairly often. When does an individual obtain so much power and influence that it becomes not only irresponsible but legally actionable for that person to say "I was misled; and therefore misled you"? One could say, "well, we're all responsible for our own investments," and I guess that's true. All of us reading Slashdot are clearly SuperWise folk who assiduously manage our investments, balance our checkbooks, and clear the cookies out of our browsers every day. But our dear Grandma Gertrude,... perhaps there's a different level of sophistication that we expect of her. If a charming gent like Ken Lay says, "Enron is da bomb!" and subsequently takes Grandma Gertrude to the cleaners, whom are we more angry with, Ken Lay, or Grandma? Ken Lay made in a week what Grandma made in a lifetime. He made in one afternoon what his charwoman made in a year. Doesn't that affect the meaning of "I was misled"?
In one extreme limit, we protect Grandma Gertrude by creating an oppressive nanny state, in which regulations are thick and heavy... and fallible. Or, we could take a Victorian British model of dealing with its naval captains; hanging a few of them from time to time when they fail to stomp the French, "to encourage the others."
What I am suggesting here is that it might be far more effective to "hang" Oprah --- to stomp her ratings, dent her popularity, deflate her ego --- than it would be to point out that the author of "million little pieces" is an exaggerator. Similarly, it might be more effective to toss Ken Lay in the brig than to contemplate a better regulatory regime.
There is simply no way that we can get rid of [patents], without completely rewriting our legal, economic, and probably also social systems. Anybody who says that patents can simply be made to 'go away' is living in a dreamland -- it's like wishing for money to go away, because you don't like being poor. It might fly in a college classroom, or other place equally insulated from the outside world (K5, Slashdot), but it has no value in real life.
The poster is right, that patents have played, and do play an important role in our commercial activity. But I think that the poster ignores a number of powerful trends:
Widespread intellectual property theft. Music, and videos, of course; but how much bigger would Microsoft's purse be if Certain Developing Nations weren't extraordinarily tolerant of piracy. Furthermore, the various spastic reactions by the music and video industries are, if anything, encouraging greater piracy in the First World.
GNU/Linux and xBSD. Many will write that "oh, these are just toys for geeks" but these "toys" control an enormous fraction of WWW servers around the world, as well as a variety of search engines and online databases.
A variety of "Open X Initiatives" which have blossomed recently. Not just in software, but in a variety of more complete systems. There is usually some sort of computing thread. This can be things like file formats for astonomy data, or Open Document XML, PCBoard designs for whatever, and indeed companies like Redhat and Cygnus which have demonstrated existence proofs for whole new business models involving the support of freely available technology.
"Open source" and its unwashed cousin "piracy" are by their nature pretty unrestricted.
Conventional IP (i.e. patents) are safe only when the means to duplicate the technology are difficult, or easy duplications easily traced to a pirate. Offensive patents breed disrespect for the entire patent system, and that O Ye Slashdot Folke, is why a big fraction of you all are so quick to dump on patents. It doesn't really matter if you are right. The point is that you are going to contribute to the forces which are eroding the classical notion of "patent."...And while I'm on my high horse, let me finally say that there is nothing "unreal" about Universities. It's common, and fun, to suggest that universities are some sort of Toyland, but that's unfair and inaccurate. Universities are a critical part of the Real World. In the case of pharmaceutical IP mentioned in several articles, and as others have pointed out, a huge fraction of pharmaceutical R&D is funded directly by the government --- not industry. Along these lines, Pharmaceutical corporations routinely spend more money on marketing than on research. But Universities are also indirectly vital by training the skilled human workforce that can actually perform the work that pharmaceutical corporations do.
Here's a challenge: identify a modern drug therapy that was *not* principally designed by someone with a PhD or MD/PhD.
If you find one (good for you) then contemplate how rare this is.
William Jennings Bryan famously remarked "Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country." The same is true of universities and technology.
But in 1969, when Wilson was in the hot seat testifying before the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Sen. John Pastore demanded to know how a multimillion-dollar particle accelerator improved the security of the country. Wil
... however, this "constantly engaged planetary gear" has exactly the same function as a conventional differential, which connects a drive shaft to two wheels, permitting the wheels to spin at different speeds (particularly useful for cornering). In fact, this is mentioned within the patent text. The only difference is that this planetary gear assembly is coaxial.
I'm a little puzzled by the timing of this suit, which has emerged a full five years after Prius models have been available, and I don't think it was particularly secret that they were developing hybrid vehicles before 2000. (I own a 2000 model myself.) Did Solomon forget they had this patent? Wouldn't the doctrine of laches apply here? http://www.lectlaw.com/def/l056.htm.
Even in 1990 (when the patent was issued) wouldn't a gear assembly like this have been obvious to any knowledgable practitioner of the art?
The real test of whether cold fusion is for real is not scientific. It is economic. When someone opens a cold fusion power plant which sells more power than it consumes, you'll know it's the real deal.
This is true in a pretty strong sense. If it was possible to extract large amounts of energy by inserting pins into effigies of (say) Britney Spears or Tom Delay, and we didn't know why it worked, that wouldn't erase the basic fact that you could get energy out of torturing dolls.
The infuriating thing about "economic" is that it periodically annoints technologies which all Right Thinking Persons know are blasphemous, such as: Windows (compared to Mac OS or Gnu/Linux), or VHS (vs Betamax), or Infix Notation (vs Postfix), or MKS (vs CGS), or Vi (vs. Emacs), or Visual Basic (vs. Lisp), or the Dallas Cowboys (vs. the Green Bay Packers), or GSM (vs. CDMA), or Complex Numbers (vs. Quaternions), or the Hummer (vs. the Prius), or the body image of Kate Moss (vs. that of Scarlett Johansen), or that of Brad Pitt (vs. that of Jack Black), or ABBA (vs. Silkworm), or Old Coke (vs. New Coke); or George Bush (vs. George McGovern).
If you browse the web using firefox while running as administrator and you get hit with an exploit that exploit will have full access to your system.
The cultural milieu of Unix/Linux/BSD/Mac OS, users do not use root-level access while surfing the web. In the Windows Milieu, it happens all the time.
I'm reminded of the Steinem aphorism that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." In a thoughtful world, a user needs routine access to root privilege like a fish needs a bicycle. In the Windows world, um, fish have Campagnolo cleats on their feet.
Okay, that's gratuitous, karma annihilating, and, sort of perverse. I'm pretty sure that I spelled "milieu" good, though.
The charming little SciFi novel, Monument by Lloyd Biggle, Jr., has a few small but important scenes in which legal disputes are argued by human lawyers, but decided by a robot judge. A pleasant read, especially for tree-hugging sci-fi nerds.
For example, the date of the observation (7 November), and commentary in the article leads to the reasonable supposition that the observation was from a meteor in the Taurid stream http://comets.amsmeteors.org/meteors/showers/tauri ds.html. Since the Taurids are very well characterized, their orbital velocity is extremely well known, and thus the net impact velocity would be known with great precision, too. If it's one of the Taurids. Which is not so bad an assumption.
Even without the Taurid assumption, you can look at other data to put some bounds on the meteor velocities. For example, there are excellent "head echo" observations by some big radars:
and there have been several PhD dissertations in recent years exploring a variety of aspects of meteors, just from the plasma physics side (let alone the "meteor astronomy" side); check out Close and Dyrud from 2004 at BU, http://www.bu.edu/astronomy/alumni/phd.html.
The past decade has been a remarkably active time for meteor studies. There will be presentations about meteors at the URSI meeting in Boulder CO 4-7 Jan 2006, http://cires.colorado.edu/ursi/
The order of the numbers matches the way we usually talk, i.e., ("December Twenty-First, Two-thousand and five")
In Strunk & White's "Elements of Style", a case is made for the logic and error robustness of "21 December 2005" (text separating numbers, and progressively larger units)... and they are right. And that's the way I have talked and written ever since I first read Strunk & White, about 25 years ago.
The ISO standard ordering YYYYMMDD is perfectly sensible, too, for computer documents.
These tasks are probably much more complex than the Ansari X prize... which rewarded 40 times this much. Offering $250K is insane. Stupid. Insanely Stupid.
The size of the prize is only part of the interesting thing here.
Notice that that the X Prize http://www.xprizefoundation.com/about_us/mission.a sp sponsored an interesting, significant step in manned space travel, whereas the NASA competitions specifically promote unmanned space travel technology. The DARPA Grand Challenge http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge was unmanned, too --- and the prize size (2M USD) was Ansari-class.
The NASA and DARPA approaches are likely to yield more science in the near term (although NASA has been starving science to pay for the Space Station, and DARPA is more interested in technology than science). Howevert, Ansari-style competitions are probably more likely to get you and me into space; or rather, to Mars, since if you're healthy and wealthy enough, the Russians can already get you into space for a few days.
HAARP is capable of heating up a small patch of the ionosphere directly above the site. When the transmitter is turned off, the ionosphere recovers quickly. It has no ability to affect global, permanent changes in the ionosphere.
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Ionospheric physicists have two general attitudes about about HAARP.
(1) it's a cool facility which permits manipulation of the bottomside F region plasma physics, and provides an opportunity to study some intriguing plasma physics (3 and 4 wave interactions), as well as some thermospheric chemistry.
(2) It's yet-another-boondoggle from the Stevens/Murchowski axis, bringing pork to AK for no good reason, to support a need which no longer exists (how to communicate with subs, so that they can bomb whoever is threatening our precious bodily fluids [URL:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012]).
HAARP is not the only ionospheric heater on the planet. There is another one at Tromso, Norway (Ramfjordmoen), and there has been one at Arecibo, Puerto Rico. It got flooded and broke; they'd like to rebuild it. There are probably others in Russia somewhere.
It's a solution in search of a problem to my mind. Perhaps. The same could be said (by most people) of the WWW when it first appeared. I remember thinking that the GUI (i.e. Mosaic) was sort of nice, and the html was sort of interesting, but it wasn't clear to me that it was anything more than a friendly user interface to FTP and Gopher. Turns out, I was wrong. So perhaps these "ontology"/"semantic web" things are a bit clunky now, but that's okay. They are addressing a real issue with the Web. Since they are so new, it would be unreasonable to expect the early implementers to hit upon the optimal UI right off the bat.
For example, how many companies fortunes have been made with digital computers?
Many. But what evidence is there that digital computers would not exist in their current form without the Space Program? Roughly speaking, the "robustness" needs of spacecraft lead to the use of ancient, low performance, extraordinarily well understood, mature, technologies.
As prior comments have indicated, "teflon" and "velcro" were invented long before the Apollo program, and were invented to address very terrestrial applications.
Just what technologies do we now depend upon that were developed to support manned space flight? Certainly there are many technologies associated with unmanned spacecraft that we rely upon, such as GPS, satellite phones, NOAA solar wind measurements, etc. The horrifying ground truth here is that "science" and "technology" have been far more rapidly and inexpensively advanced by unmanned spacecraft than by manned spacecraft.
I'm in the space science business myself, and I see red whenever I read "space science" and "manned spacecraft" in the same sentence, because a hardnosed accounting simply cannot justify "manned space flight" for science reasons.
On the other hand, I'm very much in favor of manned spaceflight, and I'm in favor of going to Mars. But not because of a Science mission --- but rather, because this is the kind of challenge that humans should set for themselves.
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
Can anyone imagine W speaking such words (thank god that "nuclear" doesn't appear within)? W's idea of space flight seems to have more to do with Rapture than Noble Endeavor. Perhaps we should attempt to persuade W that Osama bin Laden, and huge oil deposits are on Mars. It is not inconceivable that he'd believe it --- this is, after all, the same president who thinks that Intelligent Design is a reasonable alternative to the modern theory of evolution; the same president who remarked that no one expected the levees to break.
It is tempting to think that I must therefore be a supergenious, however,
I'm not.
The particular topic that I was looking at is not my "specialty". It had to do with radio receivers, and my specialty is "ionospheric physics."
I have, in fact, never taken a single course in radio receivers; only have I looked at a couple text books, and contemplated the implications of DSP chips and modern mixers and preamps.
Maybe my standards for invention are simply too high. But am I really that smart? I have a hard time believing that I am really that special.
As I mentioned above, it seemed to me that patents have been awarded for identifying reasonable tactics, as opposed to inventing something truly fundamental.
Is identification of a reasonable tactic worth a patent? if yes, then "Doh!" in the modern parlance. (Has anyone copyrighted "Doh!" as an exclamation of "realization of missed opportunity for fame and fortune"? I've got dibs!)
Let us just say that the domestic tranquility saved by not pressing the point far exceeds the satisfaction I might gain by instructing my beloved in my magnificent hybrid milage management skills.
So, have you ever driven a Prius? I have, for the past four years. I don't have trouble with city traffic, or with highway traffic. It is the easiest driving car that I have ever owned.
Last Monday I put on 280 miles at 70 mph, and got 49.5 mpg. Sure, I got passed by a few Suburbans, but I passed a bunch, too. Our Prius is quite sensitive to who is driving it; I get significantly better milage than my wife. Also, in winter the milage drops substantially (colder battery? alcohol in the gas?).
It's true that the cost of the hybrid is such that it is hard to make a strong argument for buying a hybrid on strict economic grounds. However the estupidass US automakers have been so distracted with making ever larger SUVs that I simply couldn't bear to give them a dime when we needed a new car several years ago.
Look: my Prius is not a sports car, obviously. I'm not going to haul a horse trailer over Snoqualmie Pass with it. But it is really ignorant to describe these hybrids as lemons. They are extremely good at what they are designed to be good at, and that turns out to be just about 95 percent of all my family's driving needs. My Prius is comfortable, thrifty, fun to drive, and interesting to drive.
The single largest problem with the Prius is that it is so quiet that pedestrians and bicyclists don't hear it.
Perhaps... but a number of years ago I had the occasion to assist a student in patenting something he did for me as an "independent study" project (in electrical engineering). I hadn't had any real excuse to look at patented material before, but in the course of looking at relevant patent background in this case, I was... horrified.
In particular, there is the requirement that patents cover "non obvious" innovations, and yet what I saw was patent after patent after patent that covered techniques and ideas that any reasonable practitioner of the art would think to try. I did not see a single instance of an idea that struck me as fundamentally revolutionary. I resented the idea that I would actually have to seek some sort of costly licensing arrangement if I actually wished to produce a gadget that used these ideas, ideas which had been "patented" not because they were stupendously innovative, but simply because they had been identified.
The notion that patent examiners all have a minimum BS in our field makes me chuckle. I don't doubt it, but there is such a thing as Judgement which comes from experience and practice.
It has been said that the young think that they have invented sex. Fortunately none have, so far, been permitted to patent it; although I wouldn't put it past the USPTO.
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The contemporary USPTO is primarily useful for enabling IP lawyers to fart through silk.
For some high brow yet low brow commentary along these lines, let me recommend "Vineland" by Thomas Pynchon; about halfway through, as I recall, during the discussion of the People's Republic of Rock and Roll: there is a tale of a young man who likes his car, rather a lot.
That's rich, when has the government EVER had the BEST people in a field working for them? Even during the Manhattan project they weren't the best, they were the ones who could shove aside their morals for a certain price. The government could never afford to hire the best, because megacorps can ALWAYS pay more.
This is one of the most tragic ideas in circulation. The truth (in my opinion, of course) is exactly the opposite. And it goes like this. The government has the best people working for it. They tend to be the "little people" that you never hear of. There is a huge contingent of incredibly dedicated, smart, hardworking drones who labor for us because they actually value the notion of "government;" they "get" the idea of civil society, they actually know what taxes are for... a few examples:
I wish I knew the names of the two guys who interviewed me from the US Dept. of Interior back in the summer of 1982... they wanted to know *not* whether I had done something useful; they wanted to know whether I would consider a career in the Department of Interior. Like a dingbat I said "you're kidding, right, I'm a Caltech student, I've got serious career potential..." It took me a while to realize that these midlevel bureaucrats had taken the trouble to drive all the way to Yakima WA from Boise ID to interview a worthless shit like me... and I had the gall to trash them. These were two dedicated, hardworking guys who keep the lights on for everyone, and for their trouble, their hard work, their anonymity, the endless streams of insults and worse that they get from the "property rights/black helicopter crowd" they had to put up with assholes like me.
staffers for senators in DC. The senators may be more or less respectable, more or less dingbats, but if they want to last, they are going to surround themselves with whip-smart staffers. Several years ago I had the opportunity to visit my senators in DC, and although I didn't get to meet the senators in person, I *did* get to meet their geeky staffers. Let me tell you something. Those staffers are smarter, and harder working, than you are. The previous sentence is true with probability 99.9%. Object at your risk.
Sure, the patent system is completely broken --- I agree. But trash the right people, the big people -- the senators, the presidents, the congresscritters -- who vote for the structures, and not the *huge*army* of dedicated, underpaid public servants who work for you every single day --- and endure abuse from the shallow anti bureaucrats every single day --- to make your life better.
Blame The Responsible, not those whom it is fashinable to blame.
I'm a moderately old ham (although still young by modern ham demographics), got my Extra Class license back in about 1977, in the good/bad old days when you had to pass a code exam at 20 wpm. Practically all of my contacts have been on HF and VHF CW (preferred 15 and 10 meters. but some amateur satellite on 2m/10m), and when I was really buffed up, I could do 30 wpm with a vibroplex. If you don't know what "with a vibroplex" means, it's sort of like in the Star Trek scripts, where the writers wrote "insert tech here" and leaned on "dilithium crystals." You really aren't missing that much. I've keyed a keyed a transmitter with a foot pedal...
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion...
okay, forgive me the flashback, I'm old, remember?
Anyway, since I went to all the trouble to learn CW and get that license, it would be reasonable to conclude that I'd be a strong advocate for retaining the code requirement.
Nope.
I have always thought that the code requirement was dumb, dumb, dumb. As a nerd boy who eventually became a professor of electrical engineering, it was blindingly obvious to me that The Code was a charming bit of history that had no business in modern radio practice. Those who would argue, "but with duct tape, batteries, a couple transistors, I could send an SOS after being shipwrecked on an atoll!" I'm sure you could, and that would have been an interesting argument until about 1975,
But how many of you Slashdotters have cell phones, or some other wireless gadget? When is the last time that any of you actually held a three-lead transistor in your suspiciously sticky hands? And even though it's true that some Righteous Code Dudes have recently out communicated some Valley Girls in a Morse Code/IM Slugfest,... um, like, consider the competition, you know? I mean, ohmigod, I like valley girls as much as anyone else, but I'm not really looking to them for breakthroughs in efficient communication. Like, you know.
A few days ago, someone showed me a computer parsing some BPSK on 20 meters in a 31 Hz wide channel (not a typo!), passing perfectly good text, with a quality that I claim could rarely if ever be achieved by a human ear.
I'll probably do some CW again soon --- but it'll be for Art's sake, and not because of a misguided notion that it is important to maintain a pool of practitioners skilled in Morse Code.
Because it isn't important. If you think it is, then let me gently suggest that you send a handwritten note across the continent you're on, by horse.
Slashdot Mirror
not useful for end-user activity? I think you'd have to have a fairly narrow view of "useful" for that statement to be defensible.
My son spent an amusing hour this evening driving a Viper aircraft at ground level from SFO to SEA at 390 miles per hour on Google Earth Flight Simulator. He was asked me how to figure out when he got near SEATAC, which gave me an opportunity to tell him to look for the various volcanos in the Cascades, the Columbia River, and to take a 30 degree left turn at Mt. Rainier.
Sounds useful to me, especially considering that huge fortune I spent on Google Earth.
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"useful" like "beauty" is in the eye of the beholder. We all know that MS produces loathesome software, stifles innovation, and serves up grilled dolphin steaks with penguin sauce to their droids in the cafeteria in Redmond. And yet, and yet, ... dangit: a lot of people kind of like Windows.
I don't, but I have to admit, a lot of people do.
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I think Google Earth is cool. I'm not really sure why Google did it, but I'm not yelling at them for doing it.
Inspector Lopez
largest != most sensitive. I'm sure that Pune is very nice, as is the radar at Gadanki ... however
... it's less sensitive than Arecibo. Arecibo (as a reflector system) is intrinsically broadband, operating from 50 MHz through X band ... which *very* impressive.
The US operates an even larger radar near Lima, Peru (the Jicamarca Radar Observatory). However, at 50 MHz, and looking up through the equatorial ionosphere
Both JRO and AO have their uses. *neither* is replacable by *any* instruments on the planet. They are both fabulous instruments. They have *no* competition on Earth --- at what they do best.
There are seven people on board that rocket today, they are smarter than you or I, and harder working, and they have seen 14 others go to their deaths on the same craft.
So: let's all do something to make ourselves worth defending, okay?
As I learned to my very-near-chagrin while driving around in northern Sweden some years ago, ...
Me, in pidgin Swedish: "how far must man drive to get to Jokkmokk?"
Helpful Norra Swede: "ooh, it's a ways off, you know, perhaps about 8 miles."
I'm thinking, "crikey, can't he see my car? does he think I'm gonna walk? I'll be there in 15 minutes." With gas gauge on E, at the Arctic Circle.
Of course, that would be eight Swedish miles, each of which is, of course, 10 km.
Along these lines, Ken Lay's trial has now begun. A theme of his defense is that he was just a good old boy who was misled by evildoers within Enron. Whether or not that's the case
Issues like this pop up fairly often. When does an individual obtain so much power and influence that it becomes not only irresponsible but legally actionable for that person to say "I was misled; and therefore misled you"? One could say, "well, we're all responsible for our own investments," and I guess that's true. All of us reading Slashdot are clearly SuperWise folk who assiduously manage our investments, balance our checkbooks, and clear the cookies out of our browsers every day. But our dear Grandma Gertrude,
In one extreme limit, we protect Grandma Gertrude by creating an oppressive nanny state, in which regulations are thick and heavy
What I am suggesting here is that it might be far more effective to "hang" Oprah --- to stomp her ratings, dent her popularity, deflate her ego --- than it would be to point out that the author of "million little pieces" is an exaggerator. Similarly, it might be more effective to toss Ken Lay in the brig than to contemplate a better regulatory regime.
The poster is right, that patents have played, and do play an important role in our commercial activity. But I think that the poster ignores a number of powerful trends:
"Open source" and its unwashed cousin "piracy" are by their nature pretty unrestricted.
...And while I'm on my high horse, let me finally say that there is nothing "unreal" about Universities. It's common, and fun, to suggest that universities are some sort of Toyland, but that's unfair and inaccurate. Universities are a critical part of the Real World. In the case of pharmaceutical IP mentioned in several articles, and as others have pointed out, a huge fraction of pharmaceutical R&D is funded directly by the government --- not industry. Along these lines, Pharmaceutical corporations routinely spend more money on marketing than on research. But Universities are also indirectly vital by training the skilled human workforce that can actually perform the work that pharmaceutical corporations do.
Conventional IP (i.e. patents) are safe only when the means to duplicate the technology are difficult, or easy duplications easily traced to a pirate. Offensive patents breed disrespect for the entire patent system, and that O Ye Slashdot Folke, is why a big fraction of you all are so quick to dump on patents. It doesn't really matter if you are right. The point is that you are going to contribute to the forces which are eroding the classical notion of "patent."
Here's a challenge: identify a modern drug therapy that was *not* principally designed by someone with a PhD or MD/PhD.
If you find one (good for you) then contemplate how rare this is.
William Jennings Bryan famously remarked "Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country." The same is true of universities and technology.
The reality, the real world value of universities, and by extention "open source" was expressed brilliantly by Robert Wilson http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/00/1.20.00/W ilson_obit.html
... however, this "constantly engaged planetary gear" has exactly the same function as a conventional differential, which connects a drive shaft to two wheels, permitting the wheels to spin at different speeds (particularly useful for cornering). In fact, this is mentioned within the patent text. The only difference is that this planetary gear assembly is coaxial.
I'm a little puzzled by the timing of this suit, which has emerged a full five years after Prius models have been available, and I don't think it was particularly secret that they were developing hybrid vehicles before 2000. (I own a 2000 model myself.) Did Solomon forget they had this patent? Wouldn't the doctrine of laches apply here? http://www.lectlaw.com/def/l056.htm.
Even in 1990 (when the patent was issued) wouldn't a gear assembly like this have been obvious to any knowledgable practitioner of the art?
This is true in a pretty strong sense. If it was possible to extract large amounts of energy by inserting pins into effigies of (say) Britney Spears or Tom Delay, and we didn't know why it worked, that wouldn't erase the basic fact that you could get energy out of torturing dolls.
The infuriating thing about "economic" is that it periodically annoints technologies which all Right Thinking Persons know are blasphemous, such as: Windows (compared to Mac OS or Gnu/Linux), or VHS (vs Betamax), or Infix Notation (vs Postfix), or MKS (vs CGS), or Vi (vs. Emacs), or Visual Basic (vs. Lisp), or the Dallas Cowboys (vs. the Green Bay Packers), or GSM (vs. CDMA), or Complex Numbers (vs. Quaternions), or the Hummer (vs. the Prius), or the body image of Kate Moss (vs. that of Scarlett Johansen), or that of Brad Pitt (vs. that of Jack Black), or ABBA (vs. Silkworm), or Old Coke (vs. New Coke); or George Bush (vs. George McGovern).
For all you nerd-kings and nerd-queens out there: ignore "economics" at your peril. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't ignore economics; it just means that you should ignore it at your peril. Occasionally weird things happen, involving (say) quixotically charismatic Finnish grad students. Some of them become cellists http://www.apocalyptica.com/home/, or hackers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds, or radar waveform designers, http://www.eiscat.no/EISCAT/boards/discuss/0081.h
You just never know.
The cultural milieu of Unix/Linux/BSD/Mac OS, users do not use root-level access while surfing the web. In the Windows Milieu, it happens all the time.
I'm reminded of the Steinem aphorism that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." In a thoughtful world, a user needs routine access to root privilege like a fish needs a bicycle. In the Windows world, um, fish have Campagnolo cleats on their feet.
Okay, that's gratuitous, karma annihilating, and, sort of perverse. I'm pretty sure that I spelled "milieu" good, though.
The charming little SciFi novel, Monument by Lloyd Biggle, Jr., has a few small but important scenes in which legal disputes are argued by human lawyers, but decided by a robot judge. A pleasant read, especially for tree-hugging sci-fi nerds.
There is other information available.
i ds.html. Since the Taurids are very well characterized, their orbital velocity is extremely well known, and thus the net impact velocity would be known with great precision, too. If it's one of the Taurids. Which is not so bad an assumption.
- 947.pdf
d -3-6063.pdf
For example, the date of the observation (7 November), and commentary in the article leads to the reasonable supposition that the observation was from a meteor in the Taurid stream http://comets.amsmeteors.org/meteors/showers/taur
Even without the Taurid assumption, you can look at other data to put some bounds on the meteor velocities. For example, there are excellent "head echo" observations by some big radars:
Arecibo http://www.copernicus.org/EGU/acp/acp/4/947/acp-4
Jicamarca http://www.copernicus.org/EGU/acp/acpd/3/6063/acp
and there have been several PhD dissertations in recent years exploring a variety of aspects of meteors, just from the plasma physics side (let alone the "meteor astronomy" side); check out Close and Dyrud from 2004 at BU, http://www.bu.edu/astronomy/alumni/phd.html.
The past decade has been a remarkably active time for meteor studies. There will be presentations about meteors at the URSI meeting in Boulder CO 4-7 Jan 2006, http://cires.colorado.edu/ursi/
In Strunk & White's "Elements of Style", a case is made for the logic and error robustness of "21 December 2005" (text separating numbers, and progressively larger units)
The ISO standard ordering YYYYMMDD is perfectly sensible, too, for computer documents.
For an nice version of this idea in the SciFi lit, try "Man Plus" by Fred Pohl, which in particular features exploration of Mars.
The size of the prize is only part of the interesting thing here.
Notice that that the X Prize http://www.xprizefoundation.com/about_us/mission.
The NASA and DARPA approaches are likely to yield more science in the near term (although NASA has been starving science to pay for the Space Station, and DARPA is more interested in technology than science). Howevert, Ansari-style competitions are probably more likely to get you and me into space; or rather, to Mars, since if you're healthy and wealthy enough, the Russians can already get you into space for a few days.
HAARP is capable of heating up a small patch of the ionosphere directly above the site. When the transmitter is turned off, the ionosphere recovers quickly. It has no ability to affect global, permanent changes in the ionosphere.
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Ionospheric physicists have two general attitudes about about HAARP.
(1) it's a cool facility which permits manipulation of the bottomside F region plasma physics, and provides an opportunity to study some intriguing plasma physics (3 and 4 wave interactions), as well as some thermospheric chemistry.
(2) It's yet-another-boondoggle from the Stevens/Murchowski axis, bringing pork to AK for no good reason, to support a need which no longer exists (how to communicate with subs, so that they can bomb whoever is threatening our precious bodily fluids [URL:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012]).
HAARP is not the only ionospheric heater on the planet. There is another one at Tromso, Norway (Ramfjordmoen), and there has been one at Arecibo, Puerto Rico. It got flooded and broke; they'd like to rebuild it. There are probably others in Russia somewhere.
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I'm an ionospheric physicist, and I vote.
It's a solution in search of a problem to my mind.
Perhaps. The same could be said (by most people) of the WWW when it first appeared. I remember thinking that the GUI (i.e. Mosaic) was sort of nice, and the html was sort of interesting, but it wasn't clear to me that it was anything more than a friendly user interface to FTP and Gopher. Turns out, I was wrong. So perhaps these "ontology"/"semantic web" things are a bit clunky now, but that's okay. They are addressing a real issue with the Web. Since they are so new, it would be unreasonable to expect the early implementers to hit upon the optimal UI right off the bat.
Many. But what evidence is there that digital computers would not exist in their current form without the Space Program? Roughly speaking, the "robustness" needs of spacecraft lead to the use of ancient, low performance, extraordinarily well understood, mature, technologies.
As prior comments have indicated, "teflon" and "velcro" were invented long before the Apollo program, and were invented to address very terrestrial applications.
Just what technologies do we now depend upon that were developed to support manned space flight? Certainly there are many technologies associated with unmanned spacecraft that we rely upon, such as GPS, satellite phones, NOAA solar wind measurements, etc. The horrifying ground truth here is that "science" and "technology" have been far more rapidly and inexpensively advanced by unmanned spacecraft than by manned spacecraft.
I'm in the space science business myself, and I see red whenever I read "space science" and "manned spacecraft" in the same sentence, because a hardnosed accounting simply cannot justify "manned space flight" for science reasons.
On the other hand, I'm very much in favor of manned spaceflight, and I'm in favor of going to Mars. But not because of a Science mission --- but rather, because this is the kind of challenge that humans should set for themselves.
--- notorious Massachusetts liberal John F. Kennedy, Address at Rice University on the Space Effort, September 12, 1962 http://www.rice.edu/fondren/woodson/speech.html
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Can anyone imagine W speaking such words (thank god that "nuclear" doesn't appear within)? W's idea of space flight seems to have more to do with Rapture than Noble Endeavor. Perhaps we should attempt to persuade W that Osama bin Laden, and huge oil deposits are on Mars. It is not inconceivable that he'd believe it --- this is, after all, the same president who thinks that Intelligent Design is a reasonable alternative to the modern theory of evolution; the same president who remarked that no one expected the levees to break.
Okay, that was a karma damaging late hit: sorry.
It is tempting to think that I must therefore be a supergenious, however,
Maybe my standards for invention are simply too high. But am I really that smart? I have a hard time believing that I am really that special.
As I mentioned above, it seemed to me that patents have been awarded for identifying reasonable tactics, as opposed to inventing something truly fundamental.
Is identification of a reasonable tactic worth a patent? if yes, then "Doh!" in the modern parlance. (Has anyone copyrighted "Doh!" as an exclamation of "realization of missed opportunity for fame and fortune"? I've got dibs!)
Let us just say that the domestic tranquility saved by not pressing the point far exceeds the satisfaction I might gain by instructing my beloved in my magnificent hybrid milage management skills.
So, have you ever driven a Prius? I have, for the past four years. I don't have trouble with city traffic, or with highway traffic. It is the easiest driving car that I have ever owned.
Last Monday I put on 280 miles at 70 mph, and got 49.5 mpg. Sure, I got passed by a few Suburbans, but I passed a bunch, too. Our Prius is quite sensitive to who is driving it; I get significantly better milage than my wife. Also, in winter the milage drops substantially (colder battery? alcohol in the gas?).
It's true that the cost of the hybrid is such that it is hard to make a strong argument for buying a hybrid on strict economic grounds. However the estupidass US automakers have been so distracted with making ever larger SUVs that I simply couldn't bear to give them a dime when we needed a new car several years ago.
Look: my Prius is not a sports car, obviously. I'm not going to haul a horse trailer over Snoqualmie Pass with it. But it is really ignorant to describe these hybrids as lemons. They are extremely good at what they are designed to be good at, and that turns out to be just about 95 percent of all my family's driving needs. My Prius is comfortable, thrifty, fun to drive, and interesting to drive.
The single largest problem with the Prius is that it is so quiet that pedestrians and bicyclists don't hear it.
Perhaps ... but a number of years ago I had the occasion to assist a student in patenting something he did for me as an "independent study" project (in electrical engineering). I hadn't had any real excuse to look at patented material before, but in the course of looking at relevant patent background in this case, I was ... horrified.
In particular, there is the requirement that patents cover "non obvious" innovations, and yet what I saw was patent after patent after patent that covered techniques and ideas that any reasonable practitioner of the art would think to try. I did not see a single instance of an idea that struck me as fundamentally revolutionary. I resented the idea that I would actually have to seek some sort of costly licensing arrangement if I actually wished to produce a gadget that used these ideas, ideas which had been "patented" not because they were stupendously innovative, but simply because they had been identified.
The notion that patent examiners all have a minimum BS in our field makes me chuckle. I don't doubt it, but there is such a thing as Judgement which comes from experience and practice.
It has been said that the young think that they have invented sex. Fortunately none have, so far, been permitted to patent it; although I wouldn't put it past the USPTO.
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The contemporary USPTO is primarily useful for enabling IP lawyers to fart through silk.
For some high brow yet low brow commentary along these lines, let me recommend "Vineland" by Thomas Pynchon; about halfway through, as I recall, during the discussion of the People's Republic of Rock and Roll: there is a tale of a young man who likes his car, rather a lot.
This is one of the most tragic ideas in circulation. The truth (in my opinion, of course) is exactly the opposite. And it goes like this. The government has the best people working for it. They tend to be the "little people" that you never hear of. There is a huge contingent of incredibly dedicated, smart, hardworking drones who labor for us because they actually value the notion of "government;" they "get" the idea of civil society, they actually know what taxes are for
Sure, the patent system is completely broken --- I agree. But trash the right people, the big people -- the senators, the presidents, the congresscritters -- who vote for the structures, and not the *huge*army* of dedicated, underpaid public servants who work for you every single day --- and endure abuse from the shallow anti bureaucrats every single day --- to make your life better.
Blame The Responsible, not those whom it is fashinable to blame.
okay, forgive me the flashback, I'm old, remember?
Anyway, since I went to all the trouble to learn CW and get that license, it would be reasonable to conclude that I'd be a strong advocate for retaining the code requirement.
Nope.
I have always thought that the code requirement was dumb, dumb, dumb. As a nerd boy who eventually became a professor of electrical engineering, it was blindingly obvious to me that The Code was a charming bit of history that had no business in modern radio practice. Those who would argue, "but with duct tape, batteries, a couple transistors, I could send an SOS after being shipwrecked on an atoll!" I'm sure you could, and that would have been an interesting argument until about 1975,
But how many of you Slashdotters have cell phones, or some other wireless gadget? When is the last time that any of you actually held a three-lead transistor in your suspiciously sticky hands? And even though it's true that some Righteous Code Dudes have recently out communicated some Valley Girls in a Morse Code/IM Slugfest,
A few days ago, someone showed me a computer parsing some BPSK on 20 meters in a 31 Hz wide channel (not a typo!), passing perfectly good text, with a quality that I claim could rarely if ever be achieved by a human ear.
I'll probably do some CW again soon --- but it'll be for Art's sake, and not because of a misguided notion that it is important to maintain a pool of practitioners skilled in Morse Code.
Because it isn't important. If you think it is, then let me gently suggest that you send a handwritten note across the continent you're on, by horse.
73 de Inspector Lopez
WB7NWP