Oooooh, those idiot teachers and administrators.
It seems that they're unable to find a use for computers and the Internet as other than a big library!
Why, all those kids can really do is... read.
How "Old School".
Rubbish.
Look:
All television did for us was to perform the unprecedented bringing of audio-visual theatre into each home within broadcast range.
That had a remarkable potential... which we spent the next 3 generations progressively wasting.
Even the vast addition of cable-delivery (many more channels) has mostly wasted the medium.
TV's pervasiveness and popularity have brought out the worst in broadcast media.
TV's blue light flickers over the faces of millions of morons, and their ranks grow with each televised generation.
So, here we are with another unprecedented event:
the bringing of a world library into a connected school (and honestly, into each connected home).
The result?:
ho hum.
I can hear the virtual refrain from middle-class American homes:
"Moooom!
Now that we've got DSL, why doesn't the computer suck my dick when it shows me webcamgirl porn?
Waaaah!"
What the hell does it take to satisfy you people?
Does a technological advance have to be hip and sexy in order to be perceived as having value?
Students can access knowledge of world-wide span at home, at school and in their public libraries.
Literacy rates should be climbing when such an exposure occurs.
But I just don't see that.
I do see a lot of youth (computer-literate to the last) who have attentions that span comparably to short-lived nuclear particles.
Did they expect the computers to do their reading for them?
Do any of you look at modern American grade-school and junior-high texts?
They are becoming a blizzard of attention-diverting texts, colors, pictures and overall choppy layout.
What ever became of the reasoned argument, which is the strength of textual information?
We must keep our eye on the prize.
Books, field trips (to see artwork, manufacturing, etc.), lectures, and YES even the Internet are all tools for learning, and for developing that Holy Grail of education:
critical and analytical thinking.
If Internet usage seems to produce a drop in, say, understanding mathematics, then it's time to look at the student:
his time spent online, what he sees online, and how he interacts with what he finds.
Flighty use of an educational resource is more than enough grounds for downgrading its involvement.
Yes, this might even mean restricting computers in schools to their libraries, where they probably should have stayed in the first place.
See... a man came by my house two days ago, claiming to be an authorized agent of Amazon (R) (C) (tm).
He said that since I felt the need to fill my toilet with personal content, Amazon's latest patent #6506692 owned the process and that I now had a royalty to pay.
He affixed a coin-slotted device to my toilet handle, and now I have to ka-klink 25 cents to deliver my personal content to the undernet.
I'd remove the damned thing, but it uses the same monitor technology as the ones used in North Korean nuclear facilities.
I don't want my house bombed as a result.
I recognize your argument, but it seems to me that there are two problems with it.
Firstly, once Balkanization occurs, legal remedies won't exist. Hell, this happens now. Ohio's Supreme Court just ruled for the third time about the unconstitutionality of the way public schools are funded. Why 3 times? There are other reasons, but I must point out the attitude that the Governor and leading legislators expressed when they dismissed the ruling. How can a governor and legislators just ignore their own state 's Supreme Court? Easily... they just do it, and the rest of us do nothing about it. So I have no confidence in the application of legal remedies to anything CA might do directly to enforce a virtual wall along their borders.
Secondly, commerce is one thing, and residency is another. Now, if the SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) has definitively ruled on the issue and has linked commerce and residency, then I'd agree more with your point. But to my knowledge they haven't... thus, your case seems further weakened.
IANAL, BISHBO (but I should have been one)
P.S. Have you considered that perhaps vastly increased housnig prices is CA's way of making people post an assurance bond? Just speculating freely.
This leads to another of my predictions which I've advocated (yes, I mean "I support enthusiastically the idea of") for years: the water wars out in the American West.
There are just too many urban areas in too arid of climates. They draw so heavily on available water that rivers fail to reach the sea and aquifiers drain so much that the land sinks. Their appetite for water (and to be fair, that of farmers and industries) is simply too high. So they must use force in some respect to get more water.
I live near a Great Lake, and have seen more than enough attempts to get some of that water out West. If we let them, California alone would pipe out Lake Erie until the lake became a river.
As time goes on, the demand will just get worse, and there must be instances of crisis when a drought hits. The Californians will indeed bend the national Congress over their knee and spank them until they pass a law making Midwestern states dig the Great Lake pipeline. And then the shooting will start in ernest. (After all, there's no way to secure a pipeline; a little dynamite can always be brought into the argument, making CA's need and authorization a moot point.)
Re:Spammers?John Poindexter is getting a taste too
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To add and update a bit to this:
Some guy came up with a plan to fill bags (100ft wide and 800ft long) with Northern CA river water (in excess) and tow them to Southern CA (where it's needed).
Recently, this plan was shelved since one of the first steps (California-wise, at least) involved environmental-impact studies for the rivers the bags would be filled from.
The studies would have cost $1 million per river.
I think this sums up CA's problem; progress is definitely dampened by such reluctance to move into the unknown, and the level of assurance desired is simply too expensive.
That, and the fact that you shouldn't build cities in the desert or even an arid land.
To expand upon this article with personal opinion:
I think the USA has more than lost national identity and will Balkanize within a generation.
But like the Congress thinking that declarations of war are "anarchronistic" (ref. Rep. Ron Paul), actual secession will also be an anachronism.
The secession will be accomplished by other means.
A mixture of official and unofficial methods will be used to make sure that Californians stay in, and non-Californians stay out.
We kind of have that kind of thing now, scattered over America as local policy; if you are a Black man, try wandering around your town's wealthier sections and see how long it takes before a cop stops you... and takes you back home (... or to the "big house"... remember, as soon as you stop moving on the public way, you are "loitering" and thus subject to arrest).
To dimly predict, it might occur that the CA legislature votes for an "assurance bond" for people moving into CA.
To live there, you must present $10000 in cash or a bond good for same to local authorities.
Of course, this doesn't say "you can't live in CA", but for people unable to come up with $10K, it does say that... and official language once again doesn't match unofficial intent.
(I modeled this prediction on the experience of a petroleum engineer and his wife (a teacher) when they moved to New Zealand for a year.
NZ required them to have $50K on hand just to get into the country.)
Time will tell.
That's the good part about the future... it's going to arrive anyway, so you'll find out eventually.
If only those who make such arguments would admit or disclose that their opinions are rather limited in scope and suffer from a certain set of biases.
Bias:
Windows users are united.
This is like saying that white folks in America are united, since there are so many of them.
A majority market share != a united movement, or in fact any kind of movement at all.
Windows users may move together in certain instances, but that doesn't mean that the motion is in a desirable or even sensible direction.
Case in point:
IIS was a poor excuse for a web server, and we all knew it... yet it was a default install anyway for thousands and thousands of NT machines.
Bias:
Linux users must be united.
Linux has a very good grassroots background, and that has brought it very far.
However, insistence upon unions and -- particularly -- enforcement of involvement, will only achieve alienation of those who were freely involved in the first place.
So what, who cares that there are many Linux distros to choose from; the whole idea was to have more choices than just Wintel or Mac.
I find myself confused about the "lack of standards" that the article author is talking about.
Does that mean he laments the number of, say, browsers that can be run on a number Linux distros?
If having "One distro to rule them all, One browser to find them" is the goal, then we have that now with Mircrosoft Windows+IE, and yeah, isn't that working really well?
Obviously, no... it is only "working", from the standpoint of quantity and not quality.
Having "One standard to bring them all" will lead to an obvious tyranny, and in the darkness compile them.
Linux users and programmers already feel united in their desire to escape the limited options presented by Saur-- er, Microsoft.
These people are also finding more converts and sympathy from the MSWindows-using crowd... because this crowd has factions of people interested in a better computing experience.
One reply to the article on the site forum said " it doesn't help if I swear Linux is better: I only get labeled "zealot" ".
This is not a problem, but even if it were, the real solution is to support Linux and run it on your machine and the machines under your control.
Living well is the best revenge.
As your so-called opponents or critics come to realize that your machine is not only cheaper (no MS tax), but is more stable and lets you play audio and video that MicroHollySoftWood has denied them... then they'll come around to your point of view.
And you'll be able to charge them $40/hr to set them up similarly.
In somewhat of a conclusion, I'm not worried at all about Linux's being hampered by a lack of certain standards.
Some universal installer will appear when enough Linux users shout loud (!cloud) enough for it.
Isn't it the point of a grassroots movement to be driven by need and not by direction?
Welcome to the future; America's past nuclear development can and will haunt us further.
Look at the old USSR for an example of the failures of a large nuclear regime.
Submarine reactor cores were ejected into rivers!
Full liquid waste canisters were dumped in fields!
If the Soviet regime hadn't fallen, the public would've likely remained ignorant of the contamination level that existed.
Who cares about trees?
The buildings worry me.
In the USA, we do know that there are many buildings that are probably contaminated and are sitting in company and government inventories, and are also in an abandoned state.
Like all those factories rusting away in the Midwest, the true costs of owning them won't become apparent until the cleanup must occur.
And this doesn't encompass the full scope of the problem on military sites.
Try finding out about their hazardous waste problems.
What we the public do know is a result of conscience, luck, closings and re-use.
Sometimes a military man gets a conscience; a reporter gets lucky; or a site is torn up and exposed during closure or transfer of ownership.
Then we can get a glimpse at what it Really Going On there.
And people worry about Yucca Mountain.
We've tiny Yuccas -- Yuccatesimals? Microyuccas? -- in too many locations to allow Yucca to become a preponderance of worry for us.
Does it have to be actually said?:
Keyword filterings of internet searches are just moronic.
The censorwareans have yet to demonstrate that keywords bypass the highly integrated nature of Human knowledge.
"Flesh" can be sexual, but also medical, religious and generally metaphorical for many other things, like the "substance" of an object or idea.
The only thing that "works" with stopping inappropriate Internet browsing in the public library is the common control of citizens.
If you see a kid surfing for pygmy lesbian cheerleaders (which he should do at home, like I do), stop him from doing it.
If the confrontation gets awry, just resort to a librarian and perhaps a security guard.
Problem solved.
My local library system has browsers that always come up with the same startup page, which is a yes/no statement of understanding.
It says that if you surf for the nasty stuff, the library can boot you off the computer and even out of the library, and perhaps can even confiscate your first-born child when you get one.
That the library that censored its own website -- and then changed its domain name to avoid being filtered -- was in deep Ohio, is hardly surprising.
It's in the flyover.
Don't expect much to come out of Ohio but tomatoes, corn and grapes.
(Oh, and also call centers to handle support and billing calls before an Indian company is found to handle the work at 1/2 the price.)
Re:Innovate Transport in America? Lotsa Laffs ...
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You bring up a good point about phobias.
Of course I have a phobia about being out of control.
It's called self preservation and everyone sane should be infected with the same meme.
It doesn't matter how much safer airline flight is since you can't take a flight to the grocery store or downtown to work.
The same thing will apply to the safety of the ETT.
Such a system will be for long travel runs that by definition will occur infrequently for the average person.
Now, that may change for the average traveller, and may change still further for the average ETT traveller.
And if one travels a system of transport extensively (as I do my city's roads and in some highway driving), then self preservation had better kick in and lead one to evaluate the damned risks.
America needs more public or mass transport.
Any fool can see this.
I've done planes, trains, buses, cars and ferries, so I've seen it all, and I can see the increased energy costs looming on the horizon (god help us with those 20+ million SUVs on the road now).
ETT is another stab at high-speed rail... and HSR is clearly not happening in America.
We just loooove those trucks for our cargo needs, even going so far as having veritable road-trains with 2 and 3 boxes tooling down the road.
Just in time!
We just loooove those planes for our fast passenger needs.
It seems that gasoline needs to climb to European levels before you'll see anyone placing an order for a mile of ETT tubing (or HSR rail or any other sort of bullet train).
This love affair with trucks and planes is if anything the real phobia in America (I guess it's actually an irrational philia, not a phobia).
Thank god we've long figured out that pipelines are the best way to transport certain materials.
As far as I understand it, in terms of mass, pipelines are the #1 transportation system in America (if not the world).
You're proposing people pipelines.
If it really is as cheap and as safe as a plane, then being much faster than a plane might win you some market share.
Might.
If the airlines are really in such a state of emergency since 911 and before, then ETT's concept if something worth pushing now.
P.S. I still don't fly.
Re:Innovate Transport in America? Lotsa Laffs ...
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Assumed -- read my posting again. I was talking about a tunnel entirely underground. The www.et3.net FAQ states that above- and below-ground tunnels will be built; hence, my figures can't apply. If you are getting something like $25 million per mile in costs (something like the costs of a modern subway) then much of this system must be built aboveground or atground ("in a trench" -- I'm just making up terms as I go). Digging is terribly expensive, and such construction costs aren't getting cheaper in America.
Re:Innovate Transport in America? Lotsa Laffs ...
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It doesn't apply to all transport systems.
There are nuances to transportation that I didn't consider adding to the discussion.
Now I will.
Those "fifty thousand" auto deaths each year in America are the very definition of avoidable.
(The USDOT said 42116 highway deaths in 2001, but there may be 50K total due to non-highway fatalities.)
Compared to being strapped into a capsule and unable to see out or control one's velocity (within Human reaction times) or path, then during a time of catastrophe driving a car is as safe as a run through a field of daises. By not being drunk or sleepy, by being defensive and sensible in my driving manner, and by having my tires and brakes in inspected condition, I have every expectation that I will not encounter a serious accident.
(Not driving an SUV or motorcycle also helps, although I suspect that with training an SUV driver is no more unsafe than any other trained driver in any other automobile.)
Excessive speed, little attention and slow reaction times (drugs, etc.) are the killers on America's roads... not just by climbing into a car and tooling along.
My awareness, sensibility, and defensiveness, combined with being in a capsule in good shape, makes no difference in a tunnel catastrophe.
I can swerve -- and have swerved -- on America's roads to avoid collisions, in fractions of a second.
There is nothing like such controls in a capsule accident.
Your point is of course a good one, and can be extended properly... not to cars but rather to constrained systems like existing trains.
Train derailments are certainly deadly.
But still they are not as deadly as airplane crashes.
The high speeds involved in aerospace means much, much more impact energy (Ek varies by v^2).
A capsule tunnel takes aerospace-scale energy and applies it into a constrained system like a train.
This should give us pause to consider the risks.
P.S. I don't fly.
Re:Innovate Transport in America? Lotsa Laffs ...
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Urr... I think that there's at least one good reason:
the vacuum tunnel will be out of reach of surface accidents and sabotage.
Remember, it will be crossing 3000 miles, so there's a lot of territory to cover.
The Alaska pipeline has problems with sabotage, for instance.
You can't effectively watch every mile.
The vacuum tunnel will effectively have weighty missiles inside it traveling along at kilometers a second.
Obstructions will create bombs (which depends; breaking the tube open will flood it with air and that alone will cushion incoming capsules).
Running a tube on the surface is still not a bad idea.
It will be much cheaper than digging a tunnel, or even digging a trench and filling it afterward.
Maintenance access to a surface tunnel is rated as "very".
Would you get into one of these surface-tube capsules if you knew that last week a proximity bomb was detonated along the line and turned the nearby capsule into a shredded-metal-and-plastic biscuit with creamy flesh filling?
... so, stop it, you're killing me.
But hey, a tube running from NY to LA would be a great idea.
Structure:
The running tube would have to be evacuated.
But it can't be sealed to the rock tube in which it runs.
The rock tube will shift at some point over its 3000 mile run due to subsistence or a quake.
Shifting will misalign the running tube, at least cracking it and letting in some air.
So, the evacuated running tube would have to be suspended and buffered in a larger rock tunneling.
I don't think that making [a large rock tunneling] into the [evacuated running tube] would be workable.
If the capsule runs in a simple tube, then all the other stuff can be outside in air, thus easily maintainable while the system continues to run.
Drive:
Since the running tube needs to be evacuated, driving has to be manual or electromagnetic.
Manual drive is promising.
It stays with the capsule and leaves the running tube simple.
But, it will probably involve some friction.
Electromag drive is frictionless, but requires something complicated along the running tube.
Hopefully where my ignorance here ends, some fine engineering can begin, where some electromag system can tap power along running inductive lines and put the complicated stuff on the capsule and thus leave the running tube simple once again.
I do foresee the need for having drivers -- and access points -- occur often in the tube, since one can be stranded within the tube for some reason.
Safety:
This system will be as dangerous as an airplane.
If the capsule is really going at a couple of klicks per second, then any catastrophe will be spectacularly and instantly fatal.
The effects of other failures will be gradual, like air leaks and electrical failures.
Enough oxygen can be put aboard to alleviate the problem of stranding.
Finally, there is the problem of finance and lawsuits.
...
Well, that kills the entire idea.
Unless slave labor is employed to grind out the tunnel, no one in America will want to foot the bill.
The only economic and timely way to make the 3000-mile tunnel is to have a multitude of tunneling machines digging the line with a similar multitude of machines laying the running tunnel.
This translates unavoidably into $X-per-mile costs.
How much?
Well, the British Channel tunnel ("Chunnel") cost $15 billion for 31 miles, thus $500 million per mile... but that's a very short run and the price must be somewhat overhead-y.
The proposed tunnels under the Santa Ana Mountains are projected at $100 million per mile.
Assuming they are underbudgeted and are for simple road tunnels anyway, and allowing for the scale and depth of a 3000-mile tunnel with reasonably-stringent controls on the running tunnel, and also allowing for the number of digging machines to perform the job in 10 years, I can settle on $250 million per mile total costs for the NY-LA tunnel.
Thus, $750 billion.
Even with an ambitious 10-year construction program, that's an average of $75 billion a year.
People squawk over a mere billion for a single project, so I can't see budgeting seventy-five billion every year for the thing.
I take issue with your use of the word erroneously.
According to some books I've read ("Jews for Buchanan" stuck the most in my mind), the criteria for purging voter registrations was quite intentionally made so broad that "false positives" were guaranteed.
These directives came from the office of Florida's Secretary of State... filled by Katherine Harris, Republican.
The company that was actually hired to do the purging sent warnings of this to her office.
Today, this exclusion list (filled to some degree with false positives) still stands at a large number... about 94 thousand people.
I wonder why the Democrats who cried bloody murder in late 2000 have let this particular travesty continue?
In fact, what have the Democrats in Florida been doing for two years?
I hope they haven't been behind the buying of more voting machines... some of these things have been generating larger vote errors than the systems they supposedly replace.
I especially like the process of:
voter error occurs
machine issues an alarm on the back
vote worker resets the alarm
voter walks away none the wiser
Several European nations (including Russia and Albania) have recently sent observers to monitor Florida's upcoming election.
We joked about this after Nov 2000; now it is real.
Florida needs adult supervision.
It is time for Americans to recognize that what happened in Florida can and is happening all across America.
But until people are jailed in Florida for intentionally making false positives in their voter-registration-purge list, nothing is going to essentially change.
The article talks up the usual myth of sending people into the unknown.
I stopped buying into this crap a long time ago.
Putting equipment, people and resources anywhere in cislunar space is the very definition of a known exercise.
Another poster mentioned about objects drifing away if put into L1, 2 or 3 points.
Gee... if you're drifting... use attitude thrusters... and it is now time to pun:
it's not rocket science, folks.
Having figuratively seen Skylab and Mir tumble and burn while the Apollo gantries rusted in the sun, I now know their game.
The $8 billion spent before 1 kilogram of the ISS made it into orbit more than illustrates the game.
The game is to remain well employed and supplied with cool aerospace toys.
As for the return of value to the taxpayer... well, some mumbling of "benefits from technological research" has seemed to silence rumblings of dissent in the past.
It'll probably work again.
The article talks critically and comparatively about "politically motivated Apollo missions of the 1970s, or the aimless, cash-guzzling International Space Station".
This reminds me of the push for Network Computers some years ago, in which the very providers of software and hardware used their own high cost-of-ownership as a marketing reason for changing the installed plant over to NCs.
If Apollo, the ISS, and the (implied and obvious) Space Shuttle were such fiascos, then of what good is NASA's next project?
Irony abounds from this; irrelevant politics and outrageous expenses are the invisible bywords written into NASA's mission statement.
"This time the science will come first, promises Gary Martin, NASA's Future Technology Architect and head of NEXT."Oh, god!
That's the very problem about the American space program:
Science comes 1st; politics comes 2nd; and economics is in a very distant 378th place.
The average Kuiper Belt object is nearer to NASA than considerations of economics and ROI.
Don't you think that we should put an end to this "jobs program for PhDs"?
Don't you think that we should get manufacturing and energy returns from the public investment in a space program?
Why do we continue to explore space without making real plans to go there to exploit the resources we find?
I have an idea.
NASA should stop being some sort of "research agency on crack".
It should be trimmed down to be a rocket agency, devoted to tranportation only, and more cheaply than what we have now.
Its mission will be to lift cargo off the Earth, into 5 standard deliveries in increasing order of expense:
Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is for temporary satellites.
HEO is for long-term sats.
Geosynchronous is for sats that require such a position.
Cislunar is for reaching the Lagrange positions and Luna herself.
Escape is simply a push beyond about 7 miles per second, in order to escape the Earth and reach all other points beyond (although to escape Sol requires about 618 km/s).
Once NASA is there to transport stuff according to rate sheets and schedules, then we'll see what private industry can do to make a buck off of manufacturing and energy.
... Oh, who am I fooling?
No idea works in America unless is revolves (orbits?) around two central cultural ideas:
how much money can I steal this quarter?
how many poor people can I put into jail?
Reducing NASA to a cheap launcher has nothing to do with promoting white-collar crime and blue-collar imprisonment.
The future of Humankind in space is Chinese.
They will probably get it done before their empire surrenders to the inevitable self-immolation.
I didn't say patents were granted "automatically".
I said "almost unwittingly".
But I grant you that in some sense both terms are the same to me.
How else are we to understand why such things as the 1-click, swing-pushing, and bathroom queuing patents were granted?
In the same sense, if you hit a nail on the head with a hammer, it "automatically" buries itself into a piece of wood.
It seems to me that corporations are pushing patent apps upon the USPTO like a hammer; thus, even impossibly flimsy nails are buried in the wood.
The basis of my posting is that since terms keep being extended past what I would say are the limited times stated in the US Constitution, that the entire system is broken and needed a change, like fixing or honesty.
I implied that it won't be fixed since there is no public will to do so; i.e. there is no public perception that PT&C must have limits in order to place them to the public domain.
Without a fix, I proposed some things to at least make this entire PT&C farce more honest.
1st proposal:
ditch the entire USPTO thing.
If the return-of-value-to-the-public part of the exchange wasn't going to happen, then drop the other part of the exchange, that being monopoly protection.
But this is rather draconian, and strongly benefits those who can out-produce anyone else for any one item.
2nd proposal:
legalize and tax.
Since corporations will own a lot of intellectual property in perpetuity, I say let them.
In fact, let them patent, trademark and copyright anything they wish... for a fee, of course -- a large fee, generally.
I proposed this resignedly but while still hoping the public would see some good out of the influx of money.
It could be useful to earmark all that money for funding court times for challenging patents and trademarks, perhaps not crushing the little guy entirely.
Since there will be no restrictions on applying for PT&Cs (since those applications would actually be statements that would require no judgment or authorization) it seemed likely that the corporations would spend even more money in filing.
After all, there is already a blizzard of apps into the USPTO for patents, so this logic seems sound.
There is bar of some alloy sold through science supply houses. The bar can be bent into a horseshoe shape by hand, but the work-hardening done to the metal from the bending makes it too hard to bend back straight.
For some reason, the physical action of this demo reminds me of the demo that illustrates how much energy 100 watts is. Hook up a hand-cranked generator to a switch and then to a socket, into which is a 100W bulb. Crank away at the generator with the switch off, and it's easy. Switch the light bulb into the circuit and the cranking job is suddenly VERY DIFFICULT. Wiggling all those electrons is real work -- you're not apt to forget to turn the room lights off again after that.
The article is essentially correct.
The matter is made most clearly in patenting, due to the generating idea:
expose your information to the public, and in return you are granted a monopoly for some time.
The force of government is used to enforce the matter.
That age has passed, however.
Government, owning classes and certain involved subclasses of citizenry no longer believe that patents, trademarks and copyrights are marks of exchanges of value.
Instead, PT&Cs are considered to be owned assets, and as such, they are to be preserved for as long as possible, and are not to be surrenderd to the public for any reason.
For instance, the trademark on Mickey Mouse (c/o the Disney Corporation) will never expire to the public domain since the corporation continually and successfully petitions the Congress to keep extending the term.
We the People don't even see revenue from a (sizable) fee to renew the trademark.
Given this trend, I am now preferring to junk the USPTO.
If the public receives no value for granting a patent, trademark or copyright, then why grant them?
If the previous solution is perceived to be too draconian, alternatively I propose that the USPTO can be shrunk down into a building of a couple of hundred file clerks who simply file statements and process associated fees as they come in.
The system of monopoly can be kept, but all the brouhaha over preliminary evaluation can be junked.
Patents are tested in court anyway, and patents are granted almost unwittingly anyway, so why bother checking the patent app?
PT&C court battles will come down to two basic checks:
(1) is the PT&C itself just bullshit, and (2) if not, then who filed first?
The idea of public domain will be long dead, of course, but at least the government will see income from the slimmed-down USPTO, and court battles might be less costly all around.
Commissioner Rogan of the USPTO obviously has been spending more time on his hair than on fixing what we say are problems with the patenting process.
I doubt he thinks that there are such problems, despite his quotes.
The proposed reforms seem to be busy-work, primarily aimed at expanding Rogan's empire through an increase in headcount.
I think he doesn't have 1 bean's content in a fart's worth of concern about the USPTO's problems, since those problems seem to stem from the political environment in the agency.
The problems I refer to are specifically the software-based patents.
Did they think that I didn't notice how utterly biased they are?
Or that I wouldn't recognize the correlation between Internet stock growth and patent grants?
I'm sure by now that any examiner who is assigned a Microsoft DRM patent app of any kind well knows the trouble he'll get into by refusing the patent in part or whole.
Patent examiner thought cloud:
"Adminstrates user access to audiovisual file on the basis of a one mouse click system for affirming a digital certificate..." -- hey, sounds good to me, and I won't be called on the carpet for daring to refuse a New Economy patent.
Grubman has a future at the USPTO.
Why didn't I think of that before?
Whew!
Cynical Peahippo says:
Patent examiners are overwhelmed and compensate by letting patents get approved, figuring that the patent challenges in the courts will make the ultimate determination of validity.
End result of widening the Bullshit Filter micropores to meter-scale:
a flood of bullshit patents.
Have fun fighting them in court -- hey, some corporation now claims to own the rights to my own ass!
We're being lied to again... yeah, I know, what a shock.
And even less surprising, the people doing the lying don't know they are lying.
Sun Microsystems N1:
We've all heard this tripe before, and the same thing will happen.
Sun will produce a fancy-schmancy system; it will be over-budget, late, under-tested, and with thick manuals... but BOY, it will look super with all those 3D graphics and hopping folders and other such superficial marketing crapola.
"Could I get these icons in Cornsilk Blue?"
Many things will be exampled as simple (as we had seen in every Windows release).
BUT, immense complications will arise immediately when the simplest, real-world alteration will need to be done.
Some guy who was luckless to be assigned to oversee-the-oversight-system will say "how do I change the name of this workgroup?" and will eventually be faced with a 17-point checklist with several IF-THENs involving version numbers.
Now, look, dammit.
I worked in a call center that used customer-account management software that was designed so poorly that the "customer moved to another address in the service area" event invoked a ritual that Aleister Crowley would've admired.
Literally, that operation couldn't be performed without resorting to a 11-point checklist that bordered on folklore for all the reliability it offered, and there were several versions of the checklist going around due to all the confusion as people made their own alterations to counter the errors in the official checklist.
Sun's system will only succeed in automating system administration by severely limiting the scope of administration, either directly in its spec, or indirectly by the customer when he comes to realize that "severe limitations" is its only usable mode.
(Comparatively, just think how much easier it would be to support Windows PCs if no user could install a program or alter GUI settings.)
N1 will be as poorly designed as any Microsloth emission; from the viewpoint of honoring Sun's promises, N1 will be vaporware even as you grasp the CD it arrives on.
But... perhaps Sun's stock price will be supported for another quarter, which is the only "sensible" business goal in America nowadays.
I bet an even US$20 that N1 will require hardware upgrades whose cost will make your hair turn white (and if white already, then blue).
After all, you have to make your servers, clients and network certified to comply with the Sun Meta-Administration Standard, right?
These news items should say it all.
What do NASA engineers eat, the design documents from past projects?
What on (or off) Earth is so difficult engineering-wise about piecemeal replacement of an existing system, even entire redesigns?
Don't engineers spend time monitoring the obsolescence of their own equipment, and make plans to replace them?
NASA already blew through "several hundred million dollars" on the first replacement system called CORE.
They "threw the software away" after the project was killed.
This fact alone shows how wasteful and inept the NASA organization is.
All of Challenger's recovered remains are stored in in some bunker or silo; these remains will never fly again, although they can be examined again.
BUT... but some mag tapes in a multimillion-dollar project were deemed not worth archiving, even though the software (even the tapes) can be examined and re-used, and in fact should be looked at again when the present system must needs be replaced.
So now NASA is getting ready to shitcan the CLCS, probably having judged that it is time to kill the project...
after all, several hundred million dollars more have been spent, and that's enough waste for one project.
If I had my druthers, I'd crack NASA open like corporate Chapter 7, and sell off the pieces to the public.
Then all of those so-called engineers (who probably spend their time reporting on the reporting procedures of the Department of Departmental Oversight) would have to do real work.
(I had a more qualitative posting in mind, but while typing I got more and more pissed off.
Sorry.)
The Googlecache (yes, I made it into one word; Googling is now a word and we can only expand our Googlese) showed me a reasonably good explanation of the process.
From reading the ~100 comments here so far, Slashdotters seem to be missing out on the economics of the issue.
It is obviously trying to promote an on-tap process for germicidal, industrial and water-purifying needs.
It is probably easier and cheaper to handle salt as an input material than the bulkier, manufactured bleach and Sodium Hydroxide fluids.
One fluid has Cl (becoming Cl2, etc.) in it, and that ought to be germicidal.
The other has NaOH, and that has industrial use.
Obviously, these two fluids can be recombined later to produce salty water and a whole bunch of dead microorganisms.
You'd better use recondensation to filter all that crap out.
With some concern for lost Cl2, there will probably also be excess Sodium, making recondensation even more necessary.
Having said all that, why not just use recondensation in the first place to produce water for Human consumption?
Scratch my claim of water purification.
There are 2 problems with all of this proposal:
1. It can hardly be protected as a trade secret or even a patent since the process is so obvious, and the details should be easy enough to work out in a research lab.
A guy in a garage with disposable income can work this stuff out.
2. The concentration of the output fluids is iffy.
You'd have to get ahold of one of their Flow-through Electrolytic Module (FEMs) and see what it can actually produce.
As usual, it probably depends heavily on seals, the quality of the permeable membrane, the quality of the anode and cathode, and finally the amount of current.
Hey, I've got an idea!
If we can use nanotech biomaterials to make these high-tech fabrics link to the Internet via wireless, we can have the ultimate KILLER PRODUCT.
The Buzz Shirt -- using five buzzword-based technologies!
Just think of all the spam ads that will ripple across the back of it as you walk down your decaying inner city!
Just think, the shirt will twitch when you pass another "Help Wanted $7/HR" sign!
It'll be awesome to be hip and trendy while you slap the pavement looking for a job.
Sarcasm aside, I defecate (with Norden-bombsight precision) from a great distance above this idea's hype.
The only thing here that is going to "hot drive" the economy is more of the same overinvestment in an idea with limited application.
(Invest early, invest often -- you have decades to work like a dog to recoup your losses.)
Slashdot Mirror
Oooooh, those idiot teachers and administrators. It seems that they're unable to find a use for computers and the Internet as other than a big library! Why, all those kids can really do is ... read.
How "Old School".
... which we spent the next 3 generations progressively wasting.
Even the vast addition of cable-delivery (many more channels) has mostly wasted the medium.
TV's pervasiveness and popularity have brought out the worst in broadcast media.
TV's blue light flickers over the faces of millions of morons, and their ranks grow with each televised generation.
Rubbish. Look: All television did for us was to perform the unprecedented bringing of audio-visual theatre into each home within broadcast range. That had a remarkable potential
So, here we are with another unprecedented event: the bringing of a world library into a connected school (and honestly, into each connected home). The result?: ho hum. I can hear the virtual refrain from middle-class American homes: "Moooom! Now that we've got DSL, why doesn't the computer suck my dick when it shows me webcamgirl porn? Waaaah!"
What the hell does it take to satisfy you people? Does a technological advance have to be hip and sexy in order to be perceived as having value? Students can access knowledge of world-wide span at home, at school and in their public libraries. Literacy rates should be climbing when such an exposure occurs. But I just don't see that. I do see a lot of youth (computer-literate to the last) who have attentions that span comparably to short-lived nuclear particles. Did they expect the computers to do their reading for them?
Do any of you look at modern American grade-school and junior-high texts? They are becoming a blizzard of attention-diverting texts, colors, pictures and overall choppy layout. What ever became of the reasoned argument, which is the strength of textual information?
We must keep our eye on the prize. Books, field trips (to see artwork, manufacturing, etc.), lectures, and YES even the Internet are all tools for learning, and for developing that Holy Grail of education: critical and analytical thinking. If Internet usage seems to produce a drop in, say, understanding mathematics, then it's time to look at the student: his time spent online, what he sees online, and how he interacts with what he finds. Flighty use of an educational resource is more than enough grounds for downgrading its involvement. Yes, this might even mean restricting computers in schools to their libraries, where they probably should have stayed in the first place.
... but hey, this subject is no joke.
... a man came by my house two days ago, claiming to be an authorized agent of Amazon (R) (C) (tm).
He said that since I felt the need to fill my toilet with personal content, Amazon's latest patent #6506692 owned the process and that I now had a royalty to pay.
He affixed a coin-slotted device to my toilet handle, and now I have to ka-klink 25 cents to deliver my personal content to the undernet.
See
I'd remove the damned thing, but it uses the same monitor technology as the ones used in North Korean nuclear facilities. I don't want my house bombed as a result.
I recognize your argument, but it seems to me that there are two problems with it.
... they just do it, and the rest of us do nothing about it. So I have no confidence in the application of legal remedies to anything CA might do directly to enforce a virtual wall along their borders.
... thus, your case seems further weakened.
Firstly, once Balkanization occurs, legal remedies won't exist. Hell, this happens now. Ohio's Supreme Court just ruled for the third time about the unconstitutionality of the way public schools are funded. Why 3 times? There are other reasons, but I must point out the attitude that the Governor and leading legislators expressed when they dismissed the ruling. How can a governor and legislators just ignore their own state 's Supreme Court? Easily
Secondly, commerce is one thing, and residency is another. Now, if the SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) has definitively ruled on the issue and has linked commerce and residency, then I'd agree more with your point. But to my knowledge they haven't
IANAL, BISHBO (but I should have been one)
P.S. Have you considered that perhaps vastly increased housnig prices is CA's way of making people post an assurance bond? Just speculating freely.
This leads to another of my predictions which I've advocated (yes, I mean "I support enthusiastically the idea of") for years: the water wars out in the American West.
There are just too many urban areas in too arid of climates. They draw so heavily on available water that rivers fail to reach the sea and aquifiers drain so much that the land sinks. Their appetite for water (and to be fair, that of farmers and industries) is simply too high. So they must use force in some respect to get more water.
I live near a Great Lake, and have seen more than enough attempts to get some of that water out West. If we let them, California alone would pipe out Lake Erie until the lake became a river.
As time goes on, the demand will just get worse, and there must be instances of crisis when a drought hits. The Californians will indeed bend the national Congress over their knee and spank them until they pass a law making Midwestern states dig the Great Lake pipeline. And then the shooting will start in ernest. (After all, there's no way to secure a pipeline; a little dynamite can always be brought into the argument, making CA's need and authorization a moot point.)
To add and update a bit to this:
... and takes you back home (... or to the "big house" ... remember, as soon as you stop moving on the public way, you are "loitering" and thus subject to arrest).
... and official language once again doesn't match unofficial intent.
(I modeled this prediction on the experience of a petroleum engineer and his wife (a teacher) when they moved to New Zealand for a year.
NZ required them to have $50K on hand just to get into the country.)
... it's going to arrive anyway, so you'll find out eventually.
Some guy came up with a plan to fill bags (100ft wide and 800ft long) with Northern CA river water (in excess) and tow them to Southern CA (where it's needed). Recently, this plan was shelved since one of the first steps (California-wise, at least) involved environmental-impact studies for the rivers the bags would be filled from. The studies would have cost $1 million per river.
I think this sums up CA's problem; progress is definitely dampened by such reluctance to move into the unknown, and the level of assurance desired is simply too expensive. That, and the fact that you shouldn't build cities in the desert or even an arid land.
To expand upon this article with personal opinion:
I think the USA has more than lost national identity and will Balkanize within a generation. But like the Congress thinking that declarations of war are "anarchronistic" (ref. Rep. Ron Paul), actual secession will also be an anachronism. The secession will be accomplished by other means. A mixture of official and unofficial methods will be used to make sure that Californians stay in, and non-Californians stay out. We kind of have that kind of thing now, scattered over America as local policy; if you are a Black man, try wandering around your town's wealthier sections and see how long it takes before a cop stops you
To dimly predict, it might occur that the CA legislature votes for an "assurance bond" for people moving into CA. To live there, you must present $10000 in cash or a bond good for same to local authorities. Of course, this doesn't say "you can't live in CA", but for people unable to come up with $10K, it does say that
Time will tell. That's the good part about the future
If only those who make such arguments would admit or disclose that their opinions are rather limited in scope and suffer from a certain set of biases.
... yet it was a default install anyway for thousands and thousands of NT machines.
... it is only "working", from the standpoint of quantity and not quality.
Having "One standard to bring them all" will lead to an obvious tyranny, and in the darkness compile them.
... because this crowd has factions of people interested in a better computing experience.
... then they'll come around to your point of view.
And you'll be able to charge them $40/hr to set them up similarly.
Bias: Windows users are united.
This is like saying that white folks in America are united, since there are so many of them. A majority market share != a united movement, or in fact any kind of movement at all. Windows users may move together in certain instances, but that doesn't mean that the motion is in a desirable or even sensible direction. Case in point: IIS was a poor excuse for a web server, and we all knew it
Bias: Linux users must be united.
Linux has a very good grassroots background, and that has brought it very far. However, insistence upon unions and -- particularly -- enforcement of involvement, will only achieve alienation of those who were freely involved in the first place. So what, who cares that there are many Linux distros to choose from; the whole idea was to have more choices than just Wintel or Mac.
I find myself confused about the "lack of standards" that the article author is talking about. Does that mean he laments the number of, say, browsers that can be run on a number Linux distros? If having "One distro to rule them all, One browser to find them" is the goal, then we have that now with Mircrosoft Windows+IE, and yeah, isn't that working really well? Obviously, no
Linux users and programmers already feel united in their desire to escape the limited options presented by Saur-- er, Microsoft. These people are also finding more converts and sympathy from the MSWindows-using crowd
One reply to the article on the site forum said " it doesn't help if I swear Linux is better: I only get labeled "zealot" ". This is not a problem, but even if it were, the real solution is to support Linux and run it on your machine and the machines under your control. Living well is the best revenge. As your so-called opponents or critics come to realize that your machine is not only cheaper (no MS tax), but is more stable and lets you play audio and video that MicroHollySoftWood has denied them
In somewhat of a conclusion, I'm not worried at all about Linux's being hampered by a lack of certain standards. Some universal installer will appear when enough Linux users shout loud (!cloud) enough for it. Isn't it the point of a grassroots movement to be driven by need and not by direction?
Welcome to the future; America's past nuclear development can and will haunt us further. Look at the old USSR for an example of the failures of a large nuclear regime. Submarine reactor cores were ejected into rivers! Full liquid waste canisters were dumped in fields! If the Soviet regime hadn't fallen, the public would've likely remained ignorant of the contamination level that existed.
Who cares about trees? The buildings worry me. In the USA, we do know that there are many buildings that are probably contaminated and are sitting in company and government inventories, and are also in an abandoned state. Like all those factories rusting away in the Midwest, the true costs of owning them won't become apparent until the cleanup must occur. And this doesn't encompass the full scope of the problem on military sites. Try finding out about their hazardous waste problems. What we the public do know is a result of conscience, luck, closings and re-use. Sometimes a military man gets a conscience; a reporter gets lucky; or a site is torn up and exposed during closure or transfer of ownership. Then we can get a glimpse at what it Really Going On there.
And people worry about Yucca Mountain. We've tiny Yuccas -- Yuccatesimals? Microyuccas? -- in too many locations to allow Yucca to become a preponderance of worry for us.
Does it have to be actually said?: Keyword filterings of internet searches are just moronic. The censorwareans have yet to demonstrate that keywords bypass the highly integrated nature of Human knowledge. "Flesh" can be sexual, but also medical, religious and generally metaphorical for many other things, like the "substance" of an object or idea.
The only thing that "works" with stopping inappropriate Internet browsing in the public library is the common control of citizens. If you see a kid surfing for pygmy lesbian cheerleaders (which he should do at home, like I do), stop him from doing it. If the confrontation gets awry, just resort to a librarian and perhaps a security guard. Problem solved.
My local library system has browsers that always come up with the same startup page, which is a yes/no statement of understanding. It says that if you surf for the nasty stuff, the library can boot you off the computer and even out of the library, and perhaps can even confiscate your first-born child when you get one.
That the library that censored its own website -- and then changed its domain name to avoid being filtered -- was in deep Ohio, is hardly surprising. It's in the flyover. Don't expect much to come out of Ohio but tomatoes, corn and grapes. (Oh, and also call centers to handle support and billing calls before an Indian company is found to handle the work at 1/2 the price.)
You bring up a good point about phobias. Of course I have a phobia about being out of control. It's called self preservation and everyone sane should be infected with the same meme.
... and HSR is clearly not happening in America.
We just loooove those trucks for our cargo needs, even going so far as having veritable road-trains with 2 and 3 boxes tooling down the road.
Just in time!
We just loooove those planes for our fast passenger needs.
It seems that gasoline needs to climb to European levels before you'll see anyone placing an order for a mile of ETT tubing (or HSR rail or any other sort of bullet train).
This love affair with trucks and planes is if anything the real phobia in America (I guess it's actually an irrational philia, not a phobia).
It doesn't matter how much safer airline flight is since you can't take a flight to the grocery store or downtown to work. The same thing will apply to the safety of the ETT. Such a system will be for long travel runs that by definition will occur infrequently for the average person. Now, that may change for the average traveller, and may change still further for the average ETT traveller. And if one travels a system of transport extensively (as I do my city's roads and in some highway driving), then self preservation had better kick in and lead one to evaluate the damned risks.
America needs more public or mass transport. Any fool can see this. I've done planes, trains, buses, cars and ferries, so I've seen it all, and I can see the increased energy costs looming on the horizon (god help us with those 20+ million SUVs on the road now). ETT is another stab at high-speed rail
Thank god we've long figured out that pipelines are the best way to transport certain materials. As far as I understand it, in terms of mass, pipelines are the #1 transportation system in America (if not the world). You're proposing people pipelines. If it really is as cheap and as safe as a plane, then being much faster than a plane might win you some market share. Might. If the airlines are really in such a state of emergency since 911 and before, then ETT's concept if something worth pushing now.
P.S. I still don't fly.
Assumed -- read my posting again. I was talking about a tunnel entirely underground. The www.et3.net FAQ states that above- and below-ground tunnels will be built; hence, my figures can't apply. If you are getting something like $25 million per mile in costs (something like the costs of a modern subway) then much of this system must be built aboveground or atground ("in a trench" -- I'm just making up terms as I go). Digging is terribly expensive, and such construction costs aren't getting cheaper in America.
It doesn't apply to all transport systems. There are nuances to transportation that I didn't consider adding to the discussion. Now I will.
... not just by climbing into a car and tooling along.
... not to cars but rather to constrained systems like existing trains.
Train derailments are certainly deadly.
But still they are not as deadly as airplane crashes.
The high speeds involved in aerospace means much, much more impact energy (Ek varies by v^2).
A capsule tunnel takes aerospace-scale energy and applies it into a constrained system like a train.
This should give us pause to consider the risks.
Those "fifty thousand" auto deaths each year in America are the very definition of avoidable. (The USDOT said 42116 highway deaths in 2001, but there may be 50K total due to non-highway fatalities.) Compared to being strapped into a capsule and unable to see out or control one's velocity (within Human reaction times) or path, then during a time of catastrophe driving a car is as safe as a run through a field of daises. By not being drunk or sleepy, by being defensive and sensible in my driving manner, and by having my tires and brakes in inspected condition, I have every expectation that I will not encounter a serious accident. (Not driving an SUV or motorcycle also helps, although I suspect that with training an SUV driver is no more unsafe than any other trained driver in any other automobile.) Excessive speed, little attention and slow reaction times (drugs, etc.) are the killers on America's roads
My awareness, sensibility, and defensiveness, combined with being in a capsule in good shape, makes no difference in a tunnel catastrophe. I can swerve -- and have swerved -- on America's roads to avoid collisions, in fractions of a second. There is nothing like such controls in a capsule accident.
Your point is of course a good one, and can be extended properly
P.S. I don't fly.
Urr ... I think that there's at least one good reason:
the vacuum tunnel will be out of reach of surface accidents and sabotage.
Remember, it will be crossing 3000 miles, so there's a lot of territory to cover.
The Alaska pipeline has problems with sabotage, for instance.
You can't effectively watch every mile.
The vacuum tunnel will effectively have weighty missiles inside it traveling along at kilometers a second.
Obstructions will create bombs (which depends; breaking the tube open will flood it with air and that alone will cushion incoming capsules).
Running a tube on the surface is still not a bad idea. It will be much cheaper than digging a tunnel, or even digging a trench and filling it afterward. Maintenance access to a surface tunnel is rated as "very".
Would you get into one of these surface-tube capsules if you knew that last week a proximity bomb was detonated along the line and turned the nearby capsule into a shredded-metal-and-plastic biscuit with creamy flesh filling?
... so, stop it, you're killing me. But hey, a tube running from NY to LA would be a great idea.
...
... but that's a very short run and the price must be somewhat overhead-y.
The proposed tunnels under the Santa Ana Mountains are projected at $100 million per mile.
Assuming they are underbudgeted and are for simple road tunnels anyway, and allowing for the scale and depth of a 3000-mile tunnel with reasonably-stringent controls on the running tunnel, and also allowing for the number of digging machines to perform the job in 10 years, I can settle on $250 million per mile total costs for the NY-LA tunnel.
Thus, $750 billion.
Even with an ambitious 10-year construction program, that's an average of $75 billion a year.
People squawk over a mere billion for a single project, so I can't see budgeting seventy-five billion every year for the thing.
Structure: The running tube would have to be evacuated. But it can't be sealed to the rock tube in which it runs. The rock tube will shift at some point over its 3000 mile run due to subsistence or a quake. Shifting will misalign the running tube, at least cracking it and letting in some air. So, the evacuated running tube would have to be suspended and buffered in a larger rock tunneling. I don't think that making [a large rock tunneling] into the [evacuated running tube] would be workable. If the capsule runs in a simple tube, then all the other stuff can be outside in air, thus easily maintainable while the system continues to run.
Drive: Since the running tube needs to be evacuated, driving has to be manual or electromagnetic. Manual drive is promising. It stays with the capsule and leaves the running tube simple. But, it will probably involve some friction. Electromag drive is frictionless, but requires something complicated along the running tube. Hopefully where my ignorance here ends, some fine engineering can begin, where some electromag system can tap power along running inductive lines and put the complicated stuff on the capsule and thus leave the running tube simple once again. I do foresee the need for having drivers -- and access points -- occur often in the tube, since one can be stranded within the tube for some reason.
Safety: This system will be as dangerous as an airplane. If the capsule is really going at a couple of klicks per second, then any catastrophe will be spectacularly and instantly fatal. The effects of other failures will be gradual, like air leaks and electrical failures. Enough oxygen can be put aboard to alleviate the problem of stranding.
Finally, there is the problem of finance and lawsuits.
Well, that kills the entire idea. Unless slave labor is employed to grind out the tunnel, no one in America will want to foot the bill. The only economic and timely way to make the 3000-mile tunnel is to have a multitude of tunneling machines digging the line with a similar multitude of machines laying the running tunnel. This translates unavoidably into $X-per-mile costs. How much? Well, the British Channel tunnel ("Chunnel") cost $15 billion for 31 miles, thus $500 million per mile
Today, this exclusion list (filled to some degree with false positives) still stands at a large number
- voter error occurs
- machine issues an alarm on the back
- vote worker resets the alarm
- voter walks away none the wiser
Several European nations (including Russia and Albania) have recently sent observers to monitor Florida's upcoming election. We joked about this after Nov 2000; now it is real. Florida needs adult supervision.It is time for Americans to recognize that what happened in Florida can and is happening all across America. But until people are jailed in Florida for intentionally making false positives in their voter-registration-purge list, nothing is going to essentially change.
Having figuratively seen Skylab and Mir tumble and burn while the Apollo gantries rusted in the sun, I now know their game. The $8 billion spent before 1 kilogram of the ISS made it into orbit more than illustrates the game. The game is to remain well employed and supplied with cool aerospace toys. As for the return of value to the taxpayer
The article talks critically and comparatively about "politically motivated Apollo missions of the 1970s, or the aimless, cash-guzzling International Space Station". This reminds me of the push for Network Computers some years ago, in which the very providers of software and hardware used their own high cost-of-ownership as a marketing reason for changing the installed plant over to NCs. If Apollo, the ISS, and the (implied and obvious) Space Shuttle were such fiascos, then of what good is NASA's next project? Irony abounds from this; irrelevant politics and outrageous expenses are the invisible bywords written into NASA's mission statement.
"This time the science will come first, promises Gary Martin, NASA's Future Technology Architect and head of NEXT." Oh, god! That's the very problem about the American space program: Science comes 1st; politics comes 2nd; and economics is in a very distant 378th place. The average Kuiper Belt object is nearer to NASA than considerations of economics and ROI.
Don't you think that we should put an end to this "jobs program for PhDs"? Don't you think that we should get manufacturing and energy returns from the public investment in a space program? Why do we continue to explore space without making real plans to go there to exploit the resources we find?
I have an idea. NASA should stop being some sort of "research agency on crack". It should be trimmed down to be a rocket agency, devoted to tranportation only, and more cheaply than what we have now. Its mission will be to lift cargo off the Earth, into 5 standard deliveries in increasing order of expense:
- Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is for temporary satellites.
- HEO is for long-term sats.
- Geosynchronous is for sats that require such a position.
- Cislunar is for reaching the Lagrange positions and Luna herself.
- Escape is simply a push beyond about 7 miles per second, in order to escape the Earth and reach all other points beyond (although to escape Sol requires about 618 km/s).
Once NASA is there to transport stuff according to rate sheets and schedules, then we'll see what private industry can do to make a buck off of manufacturing and energy.- how much money can I steal this quarter?
- how many poor people can I put into jail?
Reducing NASA to a cheap launcher has nothing to do with promoting white-collar crime and blue-collar imprisonment. The future of Humankind in space is Chinese. They will probably get it done before their empire surrenders to the inevitable self-immolation.I didn't say patents were granted "automatically". I said "almost unwittingly".
But I grant you that in some sense both terms are the same to me. How else are we to understand why such things as the 1-click, swing-pushing, and bathroom queuing patents were granted? In the same sense, if you hit a nail on the head with a hammer, it "automatically" buries itself into a piece of wood. It seems to me that corporations are pushing patent apps upon the USPTO like a hammer; thus, even impossibly flimsy nails are buried in the wood.
The basis of my posting is that since terms keep being extended past what I would say are the limited times stated in the US Constitution, that the entire system is broken and needed a change, like fixing or honesty. I implied that it won't be fixed since there is no public will to do so; i.e. there is no public perception that PT&C must have limits in order to place them to the public domain. Without a fix, I proposed some things to at least make this entire PT&C farce more honest.
... for a fee, of course -- a large fee, generally.
I proposed this resignedly but while still hoping the public would see some good out of the influx of money.
It could be useful to earmark all that money for funding court times for challenging patents and trademarks, perhaps not crushing the little guy entirely.
1st proposal: ditch the entire USPTO thing. If the return-of-value-to-the-public part of the exchange wasn't going to happen, then drop the other part of the exchange, that being monopoly protection. But this is rather draconian, and strongly benefits those who can out-produce anyone else for any one item.
2nd proposal: legalize and tax. Since corporations will own a lot of intellectual property in perpetuity, I say let them. In fact, let them patent, trademark and copyright anything they wish
Since there will be no restrictions on applying for PT&Cs (since those applications would actually be statements that would require no judgment or authorization) it seemed likely that the corporations would spend even more money in filing. After all, there is already a blizzard of apps into the USPTO for patents, so this logic seems sound.
There is bar of some alloy sold through science supply houses. The bar can be bent into a horseshoe shape by hand, but the work-hardening done to the metal from the bending makes it too hard to bend back straight.
For some reason, the physical action of this demo reminds me of the demo that illustrates how much energy 100 watts is. Hook up a hand-cranked generator to a switch and then to a socket, into which is a 100W bulb. Crank away at the generator with the switch off, and it's easy. Switch the light bulb into the circuit and the cranking job is suddenly VERY DIFFICULT. Wiggling all those electrons is real work -- you're not apt to forget to turn the room lights off again after that.
The article is essentially correct. The matter is made most clearly in patenting, due to the generating idea: expose your information to the public, and in return you are granted a monopoly for some time. The force of government is used to enforce the matter.
That age has passed, however. Government, owning classes and certain involved subclasses of citizenry no longer believe that patents, trademarks and copyrights are marks of exchanges of value. Instead, PT&Cs are considered to be owned assets, and as such, they are to be preserved for as long as possible, and are not to be surrenderd to the public for any reason. For instance, the trademark on Mickey Mouse (c/o the Disney Corporation) will never expire to the public domain since the corporation continually and successfully petitions the Congress to keep extending the term. We the People don't even see revenue from a (sizable) fee to renew the trademark.
Given this trend, I am now preferring to junk the USPTO. If the public receives no value for granting a patent, trademark or copyright, then why grant them?
If the previous solution is perceived to be too draconian, alternatively I propose that the USPTO can be shrunk down into a building of a couple of hundred file clerks who simply file statements and process associated fees as they come in. The system of monopoly can be kept, but all the brouhaha over preliminary evaluation can be junked. Patents are tested in court anyway, and patents are granted almost unwittingly anyway, so why bother checking the patent app? PT&C court battles will come down to two basic checks: (1) is the PT&C itself just bullshit, and (2) if not, then who filed first? The idea of public domain will be long dead, of course, but at least the government will see income from the slimmed-down USPTO, and court battles might be less costly all around.
Paranoid Peahippo says:
..." -- hey, sounds good to me, and I won't be called on the carpet for daring to refuse a New Economy patent.
Grubman has a future at the USPTO.
Why didn't I think of that before?
Commissioner Rogan of the USPTO obviously has been spending more time on his hair than on fixing what we say are problems with the patenting process. I doubt he thinks that there are such problems, despite his quotes. The proposed reforms seem to be busy-work, primarily aimed at expanding Rogan's empire through an increase in headcount. I think he doesn't have 1 bean's content in a fart's worth of concern about the USPTO's problems, since those problems seem to stem from the political environment in the agency. The problems I refer to are specifically the software-based patents. Did they think that I didn't notice how utterly biased they are? Or that I wouldn't recognize the correlation between Internet stock growth and patent grants? I'm sure by now that any examiner who is assigned a Microsoft DRM patent app of any kind well knows the trouble he'll get into by refusing the patent in part or whole. Patent examiner thought cloud: "Adminstrates user access to audiovisual file on the basis of a one mouse click system for affirming a digital certificate
Whew! Cynical Peahippo says:
Patent examiners are overwhelmed and compensate by letting patents get approved, figuring that the patent challenges in the courts will make the ultimate determination of validity. End result of widening the Bullshit Filter micropores to meter-scale: a flood of bullshit patents. Have fun fighting them in court -- hey, some corporation now claims to own the rights to my own ass!
We're being lied to again ... yeah, I know, what a shock.
And even less surprising, the people doing the lying don't know they are lying.
... but BOY, it will look super with all those 3D graphics and hopping folders and other such superficial marketing crapola.
"Could I get these icons in Cornsilk Blue?"
Many things will be exampled as simple (as we had seen in every Windows release).
BUT, immense complications will arise immediately when the simplest, real-world alteration will need to be done.
Some guy who was luckless to be assigned to oversee-the-oversight-system will say "how do I change the name of this workgroup?" and will eventually be faced with a 17-point checklist with several IF-THENs involving version numbers.
... perhaps Sun's stock price will be supported for another quarter, which is the only "sensible" business goal in America nowadays.
Sun Microsystems N1: We've all heard this tripe before, and the same thing will happen. Sun will produce a fancy-schmancy system; it will be over-budget, late, under-tested, and with thick manuals
Now, look, dammit. I worked in a call center that used customer-account management software that was designed so poorly that the "customer moved to another address in the service area" event invoked a ritual that Aleister Crowley would've admired. Literally, that operation couldn't be performed without resorting to a 11-point checklist that bordered on folklore for all the reliability it offered, and there were several versions of the checklist going around due to all the confusion as people made their own alterations to counter the errors in the official checklist.
Sun's system will only succeed in automating system administration by severely limiting the scope of administration, either directly in its spec, or indirectly by the customer when he comes to realize that "severe limitations" is its only usable mode. (Comparatively, just think how much easier it would be to support Windows PCs if no user could install a program or alter GUI settings.) N1 will be as poorly designed as any Microsloth emission; from the viewpoint of honoring Sun's promises, N1 will be vaporware even as you grasp the CD it arrives on. But
I bet an even US$20 that N1 will require hardware upgrades whose cost will make your hair turn white (and if white already, then blue). After all, you have to make your servers, clients and network certified to comply with the Sun Meta-Administration Standard, right?
These news items should say it all. What do NASA engineers eat, the design documents from past projects? What on (or off) Earth is so difficult engineering-wise about piecemeal replacement of an existing system, even entire redesigns? Don't engineers spend time monitoring the obsolescence of their own equipment, and make plans to replace them?
... but some mag tapes in a multimillion-dollar project were deemed not worth archiving, even though the software (even the tapes) can be examined and re-used, and in fact should be looked at again when the present system must needs be replaced.
...
after all, several hundred million dollars more have been spent, and that's enough waste for one project.
NASA already blew through "several hundred million dollars" on the first replacement system called CORE. They "threw the software away" after the project was killed. This fact alone shows how wasteful and inept the NASA organization is. All of Challenger's recovered remains are stored in in some bunker or silo; these remains will never fly again, although they can be examined again. BUT
So now NASA is getting ready to shitcan the CLCS, probably having judged that it is time to kill the project
If I had my druthers, I'd crack NASA open like corporate Chapter 7, and sell off the pieces to the public. Then all of those so-called engineers (who probably spend their time reporting on the reporting procedures of the Department of Departmental Oversight) would have to do real work.
(I had a more qualitative posting in mind, but while typing I got more and more pissed off. Sorry.)
I was hoping that Micrsoft would change the project name to "Unobtainium", but no luck on that yet.
The Googlecache (yes, I made it into one word; Googling is now a word and we can only expand our Googlese) showed me a reasonably good explanation of the process.
From reading the ~100 comments here so far, Slashdotters seem to be missing out on the economics of the issue. It is obviously trying to promote an on-tap process for germicidal, industrial and water-purifying needs. It is probably easier and cheaper to handle salt as an input material than the bulkier, manufactured bleach and Sodium Hydroxide fluids.
One fluid has Cl (becoming Cl2, etc.) in it, and that ought to be germicidal. The other has NaOH, and that has industrial use. Obviously, these two fluids can be recombined later to produce salty water and a whole bunch of dead microorganisms. You'd better use recondensation to filter all that crap out. With some concern for lost Cl2, there will probably also be excess Sodium, making recondensation even more necessary. Having said all that, why not just use recondensation in the first place to produce water for Human consumption? Scratch my claim of water purification.
There are 2 problems with all of this proposal:
1. It can hardly be protected as a trade secret or even a patent since the process is so obvious, and the details should be easy enough to work out in a research lab. A guy in a garage with disposable income can work this stuff out.
2. The concentration of the output fluids is iffy. You'd have to get ahold of one of their Flow-through Electrolytic Module (FEMs) and see what it can actually produce. As usual, it probably depends heavily on seals, the quality of the permeable membrane, the quality of the anode and cathode, and finally the amount of current.
Hey, I've got an idea! If we can use nanotech biomaterials to make these high-tech fabrics link to the Internet via wireless, we can have the ultimate KILLER PRODUCT. The Buzz Shirt -- using five buzzword-based technologies! Just think of all the spam ads that will ripple across the back of it as you walk down your decaying inner city! Just think, the shirt will twitch when you pass another "Help Wanted $7/HR" sign! It'll be awesome to be hip and trendy while you slap the pavement looking for a job.
Sarcasm aside, I defecate (with Norden-bombsight precision) from a great distance above this idea's hype. The only thing here that is going to "hot drive" the economy is more of the same overinvestment in an idea with limited application.
(Invest early, invest often -- you have decades to work like a dog to recoup your losses.)