It was to point out that the government's criteria for recognizing our nation's great inventions is really pretty broken.
Um, the USPTO's mandate isn't to recognize the only nation's 'great' inventions. The USPTO is supposed to recognize and record the nation's useful inventions. A flower pot that doesn't leak when you overwater is just as patent-worthy as a new anti-gravity device.
To people in the appropriate field, specialized flower pots optimized for various purposes and applications are probably very useful. I haven't inspected the patents in question, but I doubt anyone else here has either. I think it's rather presumptuous--if not downright condescending--to make an a priori assumption that there's nothing patentable, innovative, and worthwhile that can be accomplished in flower pot design.
So the guy has made several--possibly incremental--improvements to flower pot design, and patented his work along the way? Good for him.
I mean, a false positive would get you cut off from what could be vital information.
Why is this 'vital' information being sent via a free webmail account?
Now I know Google is pretty good and reliable, but that's sort of a harsh way to do business.
..."But I didn't think that my friend would send me an attachment with a virus in it! She's so nice! And I really wanted to see the dancing Santa Claus, so I clicked past the warning anyway, and now my computer won't work, why did Google let me do that?" If you give people a 'click here to continue even though there seems to be a virus in your file', they will click there, and they'll still open the damn virus-ridden attachment. The fraction of false positives is likely to be very low.
There should be some sort of work-around if Google gets it wrong...
People most likely to need a workaround should already be able to figure one out. People who can't figure out a workaround probably aren't qualified to make a determination that Google's virus scanner has made an error.
I hope they at least warn the people that there was an attachment.
That seems to be implied in the text quoted by the parent. (A sender won't be able to send a message with a contaminated attachment; I presume that a receiver of a contaminated attachment will receive a notice as well. That's pretty much par for the course in my experience--the attachment is removed and replaced by a text file explaining where it went.)
China is full of amazing scientists that have been making huge advancements. Why are they pushing so hard for the space race and not for eliminating AIDS and opening their *real* numbers of infection to the world?
China has the world's largest population (1.3 billion) and the world's second-largest economy (GDP 8.1 trillion USD).
Leaving aside the point that aerospace engineers probably aren't going to be a whole lot of use in AIDS research (and vice versa, for that matter) the Chinese may actually be able to devote resources to more than one project at a time.
To me, this story mostly reflects poorly on Nature--attempting to pry into areas that really are none of their business--and the Korean research establishment.
How is "Where did you obtain your research materials?" none of the journal's business?
While there are some ethical considerations that go into publishing a journal, Nature has no business conducting ethics investigations, and this particular aspect of the experiment had no bearing on the scientific validity of the results.
Publishing scientifically-valid but ethically-questionable results encourages precisely the wrong behaviour in biomedical researchers. There has to be a disincentive to cutting ethical corners, whether the result is scientifically sound or not. If the researcher and his institution can't bite the bullet and follow accepted standards, then the journals become a final gatekeeper. It's only unfortunate that more journals don't take such steps (or do so consistently.)
If TV (and other media) doesn't inspire some people to commit crime, then explain this...
Well, if we grant the assumption for the moment that it was exposure to television that caused the crime wave, would you care to comment on what aspect of television was responsible? Was it cable news that caused a crime wave? Was it exposure to Barney? Was it the introduction of televangelists? Was it violent entertainment? Was it horror movies? Was it McDonald's commercials?
Or did it have nothing to do with the television itself? Was it the influx of foreign cable company employees?
Was it the major cultural shift that drove Bhutan to permit television in the first place? Was televion the only new thing to happen in Bhutan?
Also, how can we reconcile the article's statement "...a culture, barely changed in centuries..." with "there were no public hospitals or schools until the 1950s, and no paper currency, roads or electricity until several years after that. Bhutan had no diplomatic relations with any other country until 1961, and the first invited western visitors came only in 1974"?
I need 2 4x6's. Sure, they're $0.14 online, but add $4.95 in shipping and off you go.
Some other people have already observed that you can go to Wal-Mart or the local photo shop with a memory card and avoid the shipping costs. (Many will let you submit photos online for in-person pickup, too.)
Still, even if you're out in the boonies and you can't easily or conveniently have the printing done locally, you might still be better off with the online services and paying the delivery charges.
Figure $100 for a cheap color inkjet that produces tolerable output, plus $50 every six months to replace that ink cartridge when it dries out. Think very carefully about how often you actually need 2 4x6s right this minute. (The parent poster may have done this math already, but I suspect that many of us haven't.) Sure you get instant gratification, but you also get a lower-quality print that's prone to fading and discolouration.
Many people, especially those living within say 8 miles of they're work, only have space for one car. They just can't have a large and a small vehicle, and if they occaisionally need a large vehicle, then that's the one they'll get.
Which is a pity, because they could save a ton of money by purchasing the smaller vehicle and renting the larger one on the (rare) occasions when it is needed.
Right off the top you save five or ten thousand dollars on the initial purchase. (You're welcome to roll some of that into a better sound system and leather seats, of course.) You might save another hundred or two per month on the insurance. Then tack on four or five hundred more in fuel savings each year.
If you add all that up, it will cover a lot of rentals, particularly if you have a gold or platinum credit card that covers the insurance for you.
"it is not in the interest of any disease to kill its host. the disease wants your body to replicate it and spread it. a dead body for a disease is a dead end"
That's true for diseases that are not designed by men.
I'm giving up the ability to moderate on this thread because Slashdot lacks a (-1, Paranoid Conspiracy) mod. Please.
By the way, even if we grant–for the moment and for the sake of argument–the assumption that HIV was an engineered virus, once it is in the wild it will evolve through natural selective processes just like any other pathogen. Strains that result in less mortality and longer symptom-free incubation periods will be favoured, because they will be less likely to be detected (and cured or isolated) and will have more time to be spread around by an unwitting (happy, healthy, sexually active) host. Long-term, there will also be a selection process that works on the hosts—again, individuals that don't die and don't develop severe symptoms are of benefit to the virus.
I'll believe that as soon as they finish the experiments that show lichen's ability to survive entry into the atmosphere.
That one's pretty easy. If the lichen is in a moderately deep crack in the rock it's riding on then the lichen should stay pretty cool during reentry. Only the outermost layers of the meteorite will experience much heating; rock is a pretty good insulator. The shock wave that forms in front of and around a big blunt object entering the atmosphere will also provide some protection. I would characterize atmospheric reentry as a relatively inefficient and unreliable sterilization method.
Considering the number of asteroids etc that only get seen on the way out, asking for decades of warning is perhaps unrealistic.
Not necessarily. Sure, for some asteroids we might get only days or hours of warning.
On the other hand, some potentially threatening asteroids may be among the near-Earth asteroids. Though their orbits are unstable on cosmic time scales, they can still stay in the inner Solar System for thousands or millions of years. 99942 Apophis was discovered in 2004 and created a brief stir when a possible intercept with Earth was predicted for 2029.
Though further observations have determined that 99942 Apophis will miss Earth in 2029, the 2029 perturbation may lead to a collision in 2036. The next reasonably close pass of this asteroid will occur in 2013; radar ranging at that time should help to nail down 99942 Apophis' behaviour out to at least 2070 (providing 2036 is a miss, of course.)
In other words, for the near-Earth asteroids, it's not necessarily unreasonable to have a twenty-year lead time. While we would need other plans for cases of shorter notice, this slow and steady method might be both sufficient and cost-effective in some situations.
But now we have been taken over by THE FRIGGIN' MOON! The data of that desolate celestial body is more accurate than the data of the Netherlands.
For what it's worth, the Moon has a surface area of a bit less than forty million square kilometers. The Earth has a surface area of more than five hundred million square kilometers. The Moon's a way easier job. If it makes you feel better, the resolution of the Netherlands (er, images thereof...) is proportionately quite a bit better than the Moon data.
...And yes, I know that there are other reasons for the limited availability of the Netherlands imagery.
So we need to be able to have them perform surgery in case of an emergency, and having a surgeon onboard would be one less valuable berth.
Some MDs are also PhDs; they focus on research and development, and not just cutting. Depending on their research specialties, some are highly talented physicists and chemists.
One would expect there to be significant cross-training of the entire Mars crew; a surgeon who went along would be expected to do useful work while he wasn't needed in his medical capacity (i.e., most of the time). A doctor who was willing to give up a high-paying practice to spend five years training and travelling to Mars is probably going to be keen to learn and participate as much as possible.
This is rather disturbing, and I can't really see any reason for it. Sure I can always just give myself access to their Exchange Mailbox, but still... disturbing.
I suppose the presumption is that if you have the necessary admin privileges to install the service pack, you could do whatever you damn well pleased with the machine (and the data passing through it) anyway.
I wonder how the Apollo astronauts would have reacted if the design of parts of their craft has been designed back in 1918?
It's worth noting that the world's most popular passenger airliner, the Boeing 737, first flew commercially in 1968. Modern upgrades of the 737 are still being produced and sold for commercial and military service.
If I were an astronaut, I might find something comforting about using technology that's been tested for forty or fifty years. If I'm building a moon base or going to Mars, I imagine that there will be lots of new technology and new equipment to test and to worry about; I'm willing to pass up gee-whiz on my launch vehicle as long as it's sturdy and reliable.
We can barely afford to keep a low-earth-orbit space station from burning up in the atmosphere, never mind actually doing anything useful. (The crew spends all its time on maintenance.)
This is because a) we don't have a reliable way to get crew back and forth from the station so the ISS is running on a skeleton crew only; and b) we don't have a cost-effective, reliable way to put up new sections of station so that the crew can have a place to live and good science to do when they get there.
It appears that NASA is trying to solve both of these problems with the proposed new designs. Don't know if it will work, but it's a sensible idea.
Asteroid missions (manned or not) would be interesting. Space elevators would be very interesting. Even another Cassini (for Jupiter) would be interesting.
It's worth noting that the proposed heavy lift design can put a hell of a lot more stuff (125 metric tons) into orbit than the Shuttle could. (It's a shade more than the Saturn V could handle, too.) I can think of all kinds of good science that can be done with that; the launches of the new system don't all have to be to support manned missions.
Put some bigass telescopes up in orbit to do long baseline interferometry (pick your wavelength). Start constructing a radio telescope on the other side of the Moon. Send some heavy probes to the outer solar system. While the missions described in the press release are centered on the Moon and Mars to please NASA's political masters, there's no reason that we won't find both heavy lift and reliable manned launch capacity useful for everything else on your wish list. If you want to build a space elevator, you need heavy lift capacity to put the cable in orbit in the first place....
Actually, what they really need now is a stable agrarian economy. Once they've got a handle on that, we'll talk information age.
Of course, a stable agrarian economy can enjoy massive benefits from information age technology.
Others have already mentioned access to weather forecasts. In addition, there's a wealth of other information that farmers on a local, regional, and national level would like to be able to share.
Need to find parts to repair your tractor? (You don't have to import stuff from John Deere in the States; there might be a guy in the next village who has what you need.) Want to arrange a program of crop rotation with your neighbours or the rest of your village? (An organized program of crop rotation can help to avoid the problems of soil nutrient depletion.) Interested in managing agricultural production to provide a variety of different crops? Like to find out about advances in agricultural techniques to improve crop yield? (Lots of that info is online.)
You don't need to put a laptop in every household. One or two computers and one or two satellite/cellular phones per village can make a tremendous difference; a little technology can help to transform subsistence farming into a stable agrarian economy.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, the USPTO's mandate isn't to recognize the only nation's 'great' inventions. The USPTO is supposed to recognize and record the nation's useful inventions. A flower pot that doesn't leak when you overwater is just as patent-worthy as a new anti-gravity device.
To people in the appropriate field, specialized flower pots optimized for various purposes and applications are probably very useful. I haven't inspected the patents in question, but I doubt anyone else here has either. I think it's rather presumptuous--if not downright condescending--to make an a priori assumption that there's nothing patentable, innovative, and worthwhile that can be accomplished in flower pot design.
So the guy has made several--possibly incremental--improvements to flower pot design, and patented his work along the way? Good for him.
Why is this 'vital' information being sent via a free webmail account?
Now I know Google is pretty good and reliable, but that's sort of a harsh way to do business.
There should be some sort of work-around if Google gets it wrong...
People most likely to need a workaround should already be able to figure one out. People who can't figure out a workaround probably aren't qualified to make a determination that Google's virus scanner has made an error.
I hope they at least warn the people that there was an attachment.
That seems to be implied in the text quoted by the parent. (A sender won't be able to send a message with a contaminated attachment; I presume that a receiver of a contaminated attachment will receive a notice as well. That's pretty much par for the course in my experience--the attachment is removed and replaced by a text file explaining where it went.)
China has the world's largest population (1.3 billion) and the world's second-largest economy (GDP 8.1 trillion USD).
Leaving aside the point that aerospace engineers probably aren't going to be a whole lot of use in AIDS research (and vice versa, for that matter) the Chinese may actually be able to devote resources to more than one project at a time.
How is "Where did you obtain your research materials?" none of the journal's business?
While there are some ethical considerations that go into publishing a journal, Nature has no business conducting ethics investigations, and this particular aspect of the experiment had no bearing on the scientific validity of the results.
Publishing scientifically-valid but ethically-questionable results encourages precisely the wrong behaviour in biomedical researchers. There has to be a disincentive to cutting ethical corners, whether the result is scientifically sound or not. If the researcher and his institution can't bite the bullet and follow accepted standards, then the journals become a final gatekeeper. It's only unfortunate that more journals don't take such steps (or do so consistently.)
Well, if we grant the assumption for the moment that it was exposure to television that caused the crime wave, would you care to comment on what aspect of television was responsible? Was it cable news that caused a crime wave? Was it exposure to Barney? Was it the introduction of televangelists? Was it violent entertainment? Was it horror movies? Was it McDonald's commercials?
Or did it have nothing to do with the television itself? Was it the influx of foreign cable company employees?
Was it the major cultural shift that drove Bhutan to permit television in the first place? Was televion the only new thing to happen in Bhutan?
Also, how can we reconcile the article's statement "...a culture, barely changed in centuries..." with "there were no public hospitals or schools until the 1950s, and no paper currency, roads or electricity until several years after that. Bhutan had no diplomatic relations with any other country until 1961, and the first invited western visitors came only in 1974"?
Some other people have already observed that you can go to Wal-Mart or the local photo shop with a memory card and avoid the shipping costs. (Many will let you submit photos online for in-person pickup, too.)
Still, even if you're out in the boonies and you can't easily or conveniently have the printing done locally, you might still be better off with the online services and paying the delivery charges.
Figure $100 for a cheap color inkjet that produces tolerable output, plus $50 every six months to replace that ink cartridge when it dries out. Think very carefully about how often you actually need 2 4x6s right this minute. (The parent poster may have done this math already, but I suspect that many of us haven't.) Sure you get instant gratification, but you also get a lower-quality print that's prone to fading and discolouration.
Which is a pity, because they could save a ton of money by purchasing the smaller vehicle and renting the larger one on the (rare) occasions when it is needed.
Right off the top you save five or ten thousand dollars on the initial purchase. (You're welcome to roll some of that into a better sound system and leather seats, of course.) You might save another hundred or two per month on the insurance. Then tack on four or five hundred more in fuel savings each year.
If you add all that up, it will cover a lot of rentals, particularly if you have a gold or platinum credit card that covers the insurance for you.
I'm giving up the ability to moderate on this thread because Slashdot lacks a (-1, Paranoid Conspiracy) mod. Please.
By the way, even if we grant–for the moment and for the sake of argument–the assumption that HIV was an engineered virus, once it is in the wild it will evolve through natural selective processes just like any other pathogen. Strains that result in less mortality and longer symptom-free incubation periods will be favoured, because they will be less likely to be detected (and cured or isolated) and will have more time to be spread around by an unwitting (happy, healthy, sexually active) host. Long-term, there will also be a selection process that works on the hosts—again, individuals that don't die and don't develop severe symptoms are of benefit to the virus.
That one's pretty easy. If the lichen is in a moderately deep crack in the rock it's riding on then the lichen should stay pretty cool during reentry. Only the outermost layers of the meteorite will experience much heating; rock is a pretty good insulator. The shock wave that forms in front of and around a big blunt object entering the atmosphere will also provide some protection. I would characterize atmospheric reentry as a relatively inefficient and unreliable sterilization method.
Not necessarily. Sure, for some asteroids we might get only days or hours of warning.
On the other hand, some potentially threatening asteroids may be among the near-Earth asteroids. Though their orbits are unstable on cosmic time scales, they can still stay in the inner Solar System for thousands or millions of years. 99942 Apophis was discovered in 2004 and created a brief stir when a possible intercept with Earth was predicted for 2029.
Though further observations have determined that 99942 Apophis will miss Earth in 2029, the 2029 perturbation may lead to a collision in 2036. The next reasonably close pass of this asteroid will occur in 2013; radar ranging at that time should help to nail down 99942 Apophis' behaviour out to at least 2070 (providing 2036 is a miss, of course.)
In other words, for the near-Earth asteroids, it's not necessarily unreasonable to have a twenty-year lead time. While we would need other plans for cases of shorter notice, this slow and steady method might be both sufficient and cost-effective in some situations.
...had a fool for a client. No news here.
Dude...to use a mailbox, I would have to go outside.
I might get eaten by a wolf or something. Torrents are much safer.
For what it's worth, the Moon has a surface area of a bit less than forty million square kilometers. The Earth has a surface area of more than five hundred million square kilometers. The Moon's a way easier job. If it makes you feel better, the resolution of the Netherlands (er, images thereof...) is proportionately quite a bit better than the Moon data.
The recording sounds a lot better after you take your head out of your ass.
Some MDs are also PhDs; they focus on research and development, and not just cutting. Depending on their research specialties, some are highly talented physicists and chemists.
One would expect there to be significant cross-training of the entire Mars crew; a surgeon who went along would be expected to do useful work while he wasn't needed in his medical capacity (i.e., most of the time). A doctor who was willing to give up a high-paying practice to spend five years training and travelling to Mars is probably going to be keen to learn and participate as much as possible.
So, were you thinking about your sig at all when you posted that last comment? :D
This is rather disturbing, and I can't really see any reason for it. Sure I can always just give myself access to their Exchange Mailbox, but still... disturbing.
I suppose the presumption is that if you have the necessary admin privileges to install the service pack, you could do whatever you damn well pleased with the machine (and the data passing through it) anyway.
Hey, I'll have you know they make some damn trustworthy washing machines.
It's worth noting that the world's most popular passenger airliner, the Boeing 737, first flew commercially in 1968. Modern upgrades of the 737 are still being produced and sold for commercial and military service.
If I were an astronaut, I might find something comforting about using technology that's been tested for forty or fifty years. If I'm building a moon base or going to Mars, I imagine that there will be lots of new technology and new equipment to test and to worry about; I'm willing to pass up gee-whiz on my launch vehicle as long as it's sturdy and reliable.
This is because a) we don't have a reliable way to get crew back and forth from the station so the ISS is running on a skeleton crew only; and b) we don't have a cost-effective, reliable way to put up new sections of station so that the crew can have a place to live and good science to do when they get there.
It appears that NASA is trying to solve both of these problems with the proposed new designs. Don't know if it will work, but it's a sensible idea.
Asteroid missions (manned or not) would be interesting. Space elevators would be very interesting. Even another Cassini (for Jupiter) would be interesting.
It's worth noting that the proposed heavy lift design can put a hell of a lot more stuff (125 metric tons) into orbit than the Shuttle could. (It's a shade more than the Saturn V could handle, too.) I can think of all kinds of good science that can be done with that; the launches of the new system don't all have to be to support manned missions.
Put some bigass telescopes up in orbit to do long baseline interferometry (pick your wavelength). Start constructing a radio telescope on the other side of the Moon. Send some heavy probes to the outer solar system. While the missions described in the press release are centered on the Moon and Mars to please NASA's political masters, there's no reason that we won't find both heavy lift and reliable manned launch capacity useful for everything else on your wish list. If you want to build a space elevator, you need heavy lift capacity to put the cable in orbit in the first place....
For a moment there, I thought you meant 'people who like to talk loudly in restaurants'.
The word you're looking for is iSect.
Of course, a stable agrarian economy can enjoy massive benefits from information age technology.
Others have already mentioned access to weather forecasts. In addition, there's a wealth of other information that farmers on a local, regional, and national level would like to be able to share.
Need to find parts to repair your tractor? (You don't have to import stuff from John Deere in the States; there might be a guy in the next village who has what you need.) Want to arrange a program of crop rotation with your neighbours or the rest of your village? (An organized program of crop rotation can help to avoid the problems of soil nutrient depletion.) Interested in managing agricultural production to provide a variety of different crops? Like to find out about advances in agricultural techniques to improve crop yield? (Lots of that info is online.)
You don't need to put a laptop in every household. One or two computers and one or two satellite/cellular phones per village can make a tremendous difference; a little technology can help to transform subsistence farming into a stable agrarian economy.
There are some interesting parallels.
Mechanical computation features prominently in both Babbage's engines and in the Long Now clock.
And the lay public seem to have approximately equal levels of difficulty in understanding how each device is supposed to work....