All modern games are written to game engines or game libraries that this rule would (does) exclude. The unreal engine, the PopCap engine and SDL all call the iPhone through an abstraction layer, which is not allowed.
But, as has been pointed out elsewhere, in a strict interpretation, designing your game in sudo code is also not allowed.
"Dyson sphere would radiate strongly in infrared", Maybe. You make a statement of fact about a technology we do not understand and civilizations (or AI) that would be on average millions of years old and billions of times smarter than us. The question would be what do they DECIDE to do with the energy. The things that can be accomplished after a million years of using 100% of a suns energy would seem like magic. IF there are Dyson spheres around suns, they really are old they REALLY have unimaginable resources and intelligence, billions of times greater than the human race. They have solved every problem we have ever even imagined.
Dark matter is something. Maybe it is the undetectable mystery matter that we are currently looking for, and maybe not. But we know for fact there is life in at least one place in this universe, and that it is within our imagination how to build a Dyson sphere. The possibility that the universe is full of life seems less like arrogance to me than the possibility that life does not reach as far as we seem to be about to.
If the universe was full of life what would it look like? Just roll the idea around for a while. Look at what current SF writers are thinking about, that we may soon be starting on our own primitive Dyson Sphereshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere. That we may eventually use all the energy from our sun and give of no visible radiation. It might seems impossible now but imagine we are going to work on the problem for a million years.
If the universe was full of intelligence, I think it would look just like what we see now.
"I suspect the world was seduced by the fact that conventional nuclear energy did get up and running fairly quickly..."
Nuclear fission up quickly? This is not true! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project. Nuclear fission power was a huge undertaking, "...the Manhattan Project would eventually employ more than 130,000 people and cost a total of nearly $2 billion USD".
Just because it has not worked yet, or is not easy, is not the same thing as it is not a good idea or possible.
What we really need to do is re-interpret the language of the Patent offices' mandate. 'Obvious', when used to describe if something should be patentable, needs to be interpreted such that, if the thing can be built by someone "knowledgeable in the field" just by looking at it, then it (the design) is obvious and cannot be patented.
This would effectively eliminate patents. Example: I look at a paper clip I can make one. I look at one-click shopping I can write it. I look at the Microsoft XML I can build a system that outputs the same thing.
The one exception that is usually brought up is drug development. And in aswer, the reason it is so expensive (the reason drug companies claim to need a patent) is actually a requirement imposed by the government (the FDA). If the government imposes special financial barriers to entry it can also give special financial incentives, perhaps the average costs of bringing a drug successfully to market (include the failures) + 20% rather than a 19 year patent.
Slashdot Mirror
All modern games are written to game engines or game libraries that this rule would (does) exclude. The unreal engine, the PopCap engine and SDL all call the iPhone through an abstraction layer, which is not allowed. But, as has been pointed out elsewhere, in a strict interpretation, designing your game in sudo code is also not allowed.
"Dyson sphere would radiate strongly in infrared", Maybe. You make a statement of fact about a technology we do not understand and civilizations (or AI) that would be on average millions of years old and billions of times smarter than us. The question would be what do they DECIDE to do with the energy. The things that can be accomplished after a million years of using 100% of a suns energy would seem like magic. IF there are Dyson spheres around suns, they really are old they REALLY have unimaginable resources and intelligence, billions of times greater than the human race. They have solved every problem we have ever even imagined.
Dark matter is something. Maybe it is the undetectable mystery matter that we are currently looking for, and maybe not. But we know for fact there is life in at least one place in this universe, and that it is within our imagination how to build a Dyson sphere. The possibility that the universe is full of life seems less like arrogance to me than the possibility that life does not reach as far as we seem to be about to.
If the universe was full of life what would it look like? Just roll the idea around for a while. Look at what current SF writers are thinking about, that we may soon be starting on our own primitive Dyson Sphereshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere. That we may eventually use all the energy from our sun and give of no visible radiation. It might seems impossible now but imagine we are going to work on the problem for a million years. If the universe was full of intelligence, I think it would look just like what we see now.
"I suspect the world was seduced by the fact that conventional nuclear energy did get up and running fairly quickly..."
Nuclear fission up quickly? This is not true! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project. Nuclear fission power was a huge undertaking, "...the Manhattan Project would eventually employ more than 130,000 people and cost a total of nearly $2 billion USD".
Just because it has not worked yet, or is not easy, is not the same thing as it is not a good idea or possible.
LEDs are photodiodes too! http://mrl.nyu.edu/~jhan/ledtouch/index.html
What we really need to do is re-interpret the language of the Patent offices' mandate. 'Obvious', when used to describe if something should be patentable, needs to be interpreted such that, if the thing can be built by someone "knowledgeable in the field" just by looking at it, then it (the design) is obvious and cannot be patented.
This would effectively eliminate patents. Example: I look at a paper clip I can make one. I look at one-click shopping I can write it. I look at the Microsoft XML I can build a system that outputs the same thing.
The one exception that is usually brought up is drug development. And in aswer, the reason it is so expensive (the reason drug companies claim to need a patent) is actually a requirement imposed by the government (the FDA). If the government imposes special financial barriers to entry it can also give special financial incentives, perhaps the average costs of bringing a drug successfully to market (include the failures) + 20% rather than a 19 year patent.