Because if not, they left out how they know what the underlying vector shapes are in the original image / video frame. Are those four pixels at the spatial sampling limit from what was originally a diamond, a circle, a letter o, a smiley face emoticon? I can only scale up if I already know that!
I can believe there is some interesting work being done in the algorithms that guess these things, and leveraging work done in the fields of machine vision and astronomy may translate to a video compression algorithm that is more efficient because of the inherently ordered nature of the universe (doesn't really matter if it guessed wrong if on random sample of images of real objects it stores the information more efficiently), but it's hardly novel to realize vector graphics work better if I'm making an illustration and I know what object I want it to represent rather than taking a picture (like the soda bottle with the small label on it).
If my link to your article increases the number of people reading your article (and increasing your ad revenue) then no, I don't think you're entitled to a cut of my earned revenue. Business relationships don't have to be zero sum andsearch engines are earning their keep here by providing added value (to the consumer by helping them find articles, and to the newspaper by bringing more eyes to their products).
There's some gray area where so called aggregators basically paste the entire article
into their site and probably do steal readership, but its pretty hard to imagine Google's single line quotes do that. More importantly, we don't have to speculate. Any site that doesn't want to show up in search can use robots.txt to test for themselves whether search engines are a net win or loss for readership. What they can't do ask a fee to be listed and then complain that Google is "threatening" to not purchase the product. If you want to charge for something, your potential customers are allowed to say no.
I agree with your main point, but I would dispute the implication that people have ever been very good about "backing up locally". Totally anecdotal, but I've known too many people who lost all their data (pictures and music on home computers, and expensively gathered data on work computers). They all say they same thing: "yeah, I know I should have been backing up, but I never got around to it." It's a rampant mix of laziness, underestimating the odds of data loss and under-appreciating the value of the data until it's gone. This was going on before Facebook and cloud storage, and still goes on now. And I'd wager almost anybody who recovers lost pictures from Facebook nowadays probably wasn't consciously using Facebook as a backup, but figured out they were the only copies left after their hard drive crashed.
Doesn't a contact lens sit closer to a human eye than anyone could ever actually focus their eyes on? In fact doesn't it sit on the focusing element? I guess the retina is different from the lens, but they are not very far apart IIRC, and can probably be considered one optic. IANAO (O = opthamologist) as you can tell, but I know a thing or two about optics. You cannot just display an image (either by absorption of the backlight or emission from tiny LEDS) onto an imaging lens (human or mechanical) that looks like what you want to display the way you can with a HUD or a computer monitor. What you percieve as spatially separated regions in your view map to different angles of incidence of light rays impinging on your lens. Each "pixel" in your eye (or literal pixel in a camera) collects light passing through all regions of the lens, but only at one angle. So to create a 256x256 display on a contact image that appeared in focus, the lens would have to emit light over a controllable grid of 256x256 angles.
I don't know that the technology is theoretically impossible, but I think articles like this usually gloss over this not at all minor technical difficulty. Transparent circuitry is much easier because of this same phenomenon. If you cover up 50% of the area of a contact lens with completely opaque circuitry, you won't see the circuits in your vision, you'll just see a reduced intensity as if you were wearing sunglasses, because the circuitry will be so out of focus it will appear uniform. If your circuitry is only covering 10% of the area, you probably won't even notice the difference.
It sounds a little silly, but how different is it from other copyrights? I think most people would agree that culinary arts are as as much an exercise in creativity as visual or audio art. A particular combination of available flavors creates whole greater than the sum. Certainly copyrighting a recipe doesn't seem any different to me than a piece of software code. I guess the weak part in Malaysia's claim is that they seem to be trying to retroactively pull public domain works (recipes that have been around for generations) back into the copyrighted realm, but even that is nothing new. If they can get back the rights to their ethnic food, it seems like Beethoven's descendants should be able to continue collecting royalties on his works.
Unless you can prove the programmer intentionally released the buggy program out of malice, I doubt you could recover damages for bugs in software you didn't purchase. Perhaps you should be able to in an extreme case like your example; it's a reasonable debate I suppose, but I don't see anything in the original article suggesting that's how the new rule would apply, except from the BSA representative who's primary interests are commercial software vendors. It just seems more like the commercial software equivalent of a lemon law. There should be a minimum level of functionality a customer can expect when they purchase software.
"...they purchase a good: the right to get a product that works with fair commercial conditions,'...but where would this idea leave free software coders?"
I get that free as in beer != free as in speech, but there is a pretty high correlation, and really this article is trying to imply that if I give software away for free as in beer I can be liable to the person who "purchased" my software license. Are they really trying to suggest that the ubiquitous line in almost every free as in beer software along the lines of "hey I'm giving you this software for free, so I'm not liable" isn't legally valid? I mean if the only condition I ask of you when you use my free software is that you not expect it to be bug free, how can you sue me for damages? I didn't make anything remotely resembling a guarantee. You still have the choice not to use the software, just like you have the choice not to purchase any software with licensing conditions you are not willing to accept.
I mean I didn't read the text of the proposed law itself, but does seem like the idea that it will affect people who give away software for free is kind of a paranoid worst case scenario, and should be assumed to be false unless otherwise clearly stated, not the other way around. The text that was quoted in the article, "Licensing should guarantee consumers the same basic rights as when they purchase a good: the right to get a product that works with fair commercial conditions." hardly seems controversial or applicable to free software. Sure, if you sell software for mission critical / safetly applications and your buggy software gets people hurt, you should held liable. Alternately, if you give away for free a DVD player which skips, ignores every other button and dies after 4 weeks, you can't be sued for damages.
So does storing 1000's of customer/student/employee records unencrypted on a laptop just waiting to be stolen at the airport, and yet we have to read about one of those incidents every month or so. If you're too retarded to protect other people's data, you deserve to have a system that errs on the side of being too easy to lock down. If I sound bitter, it's because I've been informed twice in the last year that my personal information (including SSN) has been compromised on a stolen laptop.
What if, say, Japan or France or some other foreign nation decided that we were a "terrorist threat," and decided to begin wire tapping conversations going from America to Japan or France? Or originating in those countries? Wouldn't that make sense that you would be outraged that your conversations were being wire tapped by another country? What if you were French or Japanese?
Personally, I wouldn't care. My conversations are pretty boring. Besides, if I were calling someone in France, and persons in America had attacked France in the past, then I'd fully expect the French government to do whatever it deems necessary to protect its citizens. The government of France nor any other country but my own owes me rights.
Ahh..the old "You've got nothing to worry about...unless you're hiding something." argument. Why not just drop all pretense of having a justice system in this country and let Bush execute or incarcerate anyone he thinks is a terrorist? You're not a terrorist, are you? Surely you're comfortable with this? Snark aside, the real problem with unlimited presidential eavesdropping powers isn't that I'm worried about my boring conversations being picked up. I'm worried about domestic spying being abused for political advantage. It's not like this hasn't already happened in this country, and it's not like the Bush administration has ever once given us reason to think they wouldn't abuse every power the constitution grants them and a few it doesn't. Finally (on this point at least) I can say unequivocally that President Clinton or President Obama shouldn't have the power of warrentless wiretapping either. Are you willing to argue that they should?
I thought we busted the Japanese for water-boarding in WWII...or was that the Germans?
Do you realize that Germans hugged their children too? The Japanese ate fish! We do both those things. I hugged my child just this morning right after sharing my shrimp fajitas with her. I guess that makes me a Tojo Nazi then?
Worst...analogy...ever. Did we prosecute any Germans or Japanese for war crimes because they hugged their children or ate fish? It's a rhetorical question, but I'd better answer it to be sure: no, we didn't. We did actually prosecute (and successfully convict IIRC) some Japanese prison guards who had waterboarded their prisoners...for the act of waterboarding (they may have also ate fish, but for some reason those charges weren't pressed) which we and the court considered torture. To make the argument that waterboarding is torture when someone does it to our soldiers and then turn around and argue that it's not torture when we do it is pure hypocracy.
"Plus, using your mobile phone while driving isn't forbidden by law in the USA (or so I think)."
There's no federal law against it in the U.S., but plenty of states have made it illegal. Couldn't tell you which ones specifically, although I'd guess it's roughly half. I personally think anything of this nature should be covered by current statutes against driving while distracted so that we don't have to pass a whole new law for the next tech craze, but inevitably they don't get enforced. So instead we get morons out there texting while driving instead of talking because talking on the cell phone is specifically forbidden.
Barring a disagreement over what you distance you consider to be close, you are completely wrong. The people you see who are constantly braking are not being indecisive about what speed they want to travel. They're doing it because they're not leaving enough space. They pull up too close to a car in front of them, and then even if they match speeds temporarily, they will eventually find themselves needing to brake when the car in front slows down. Nobody who isn't using cruise control can maintain a perfectly constant speed, so when the front car inevitably slows down, even without braking, the tailgater ends up having to brake and viola. Enough of these events in series where each car has to brake a little harder, and you have end up with a traffic jam, which is what this supposedly profound model is suggesting.
I see a pattern with brake lights. Sometimes people tap the brake when they dont have to. This causes people behind them to tap their brake out of habbit, i.e. people automatically press their brake when they see red brake lights ahead regardless of the need to slowdown. A better method is to regulate speed by downshifting or letting off the gas rather than braking. Then people behind will not see brake lights and will be less likely to needlessly tap their brakes.
Seriously? What, do you think brake lights are some vast conspiracy to encourage traffic jams? Do you really downshift just to prevent your brake lights from going on? If you do, you're going to get rear-ended someday. And by the same token, when you see brake lights in front of you, I hope you at least consider the possibility that you're going to have to use your own brakes to avoid a collision. I absolutely agree that it's better to decelerate gradually by letting up on the gas if you have the time and distance to do so without rear-ending somebody, but that's only possible if you're not following too closely.
Obviously nothing I wrote implies that. But if your reading comprehension is as bad as your interpretation indications, I'll spell it out for you more clearly:
Planning for the war is not the same thing as justifying it. I would argue, and I'm sure you'd agree, that we had good reasons to enter WWII. I would not argue that establishing democracies in Germany and Japan was among them. It was certainly an added bonus and as you point out essentially a required part of any plan that involves dismantling the previous governments, but we entered the war because of active aggression by those countries against us and our allies. The neocons could not have convinced the public to support a war whose main purpose was to establish a democratic government in Iraq, and congress certainly wouldn't have passed a war authorization bill giving Bush the option to invade if Saddam doesn't voluntarily begin the formation of a democracy in Iraq. They had to play up the fear of WMDs and terrorism and make disarmament the justification for invasion. Bush himself repeated numerous times that going to war was a last resort...until the war started. The resulting democracy in Iraq was supposed to be an added bonus, not the justification. Now that it is abundantly clear the administration was at the very least exaggerating their estimates of Saddam's WMD arsenal if not completely aware of how bogus the whole story was, they insist that the single most important reason we invaded Iraq was to establish Democracy. No explanation of why Iraq was singled out over other brutal regimes with real WMD programs or real ties to Al-Qaeda.
"Not defending Bush, I didn't vote for him, but I am tired of this WMD crap also."
Well too bad, because until this administration realizes the futility of trying to re-write history in the internet age, this is going to come up again and again every time Bush|Cheney|Snow|Whoever tries to tell us we invaded Iraq to establish a peaceful Democracy. I'm sure the whole truth is a little more complicated than either Clinton=Bush or Bush=completely, psychopathically evil, but the fact is at the time of the invasion the stated reason was WMD, a fact that gets ignored every time a Bushie defends starting the war.
It's an interesting theory, but I think you're way too optimistic. It's an incredibly unstable situation, because combat in orbit involves almost no defensive options. There are no land formations to hide behind, and no air resistance to slow down projectiles, which is why satellites can be taken down without bothering to mount explosive warheads on the missiles (it's my understanding that is why they are called "kinetic kill vehicles"). Then all the debris created by space conflict becomes a danger to everyone's satellites. The result is that if the player with a satellite disadvantage has satkill technology, they can level the playing field and make it so nobody has any space capabilities. It doesn't help at all to be better at space combat than your opponent as long as your opponent is above a minimum technological threshold (which China is essentially at right now).
I wondered the same thing myself when I first saw this guy's opinion in the NYT arguing against network neutrality. Amazingly enough he seems to be expressing an opinion here independent of the usual confusion conservatarian scholars tend to have that anything good for big corporations is automatically good for the economy as a whole.
"Microsoft doesn't have to open source anything to show you what they have patented. All they have to do is show you the patent."
I think you misread the GP's point. He wants Microsoft to open their code base so other patent holders can pour through Microsoft's code to see if Microsoft is violating anybody else's patent. As in what's good for the goose is good for the gander Not that I agree with him, it is an extreme response, and he's kind of missing the point of the article which is that the current patent system actively punishes those who try to "remain pure" and not stockpile patents. But it does also seem a little unfair that it's easier to get away with violating a software patents by keeping your code hidden. After all, if you're going to own software patents, what's the point of keeping your code secret? You can sue for patent violation if anyone tries to steal what you've done. If you're going to do that anyway, maybe it's only fair that everyone else in the world who thinks you might be violating their patent can check it out before they decide to sue you.
"If the open source community were really that concerned, they'd hire a lawyer to dig through the patents that Microsoft controls. They are, after all, a matter of public record."
I also respectfully disagree with this point. You make it sound so simple. One of the basic complaints people have with the patent system in general and software patents in particular is based on the incredible amount of work involved with "digging through patents" owned by everyone in the world (cuz really, what's the use in just digging through Microsofts patents?) and making sure you're not infringing any. It's just horribly inefficient and bad for innovation if the man-hours involved in avoiding patent infringement are comparable to the amount spent just writing software in the first place.
Correlation is not sufficient to imply causation, but it is necessary. Statistical analysis by itself can only ever indicate correlation, but it is certainly valid to go from correlation to causation based on other information. In the yawn experiment, for example, the counter-hypothesis is that the seeding yawn has no effect on the likelihood of being followed by another yawn and should therefore show no correlation.
I doubt this cloaking device is an issue for NVG's: You might only see one color when you look into the NVG, but that's just because that's the wavelength of the output resulting from the phosphor screen. I can't imagine any reason why the acceptable input wavelengths for NVG's would be limited to a single wavelength (or more realistically a narrow wavelength range): it's generally harder to make devices sensitive to a narrow range of wavelengths, and there'd be little to no advantage in doing so...you wouldn't need a fancy cloaking device to hide an object from NVGs at that point, just paint of any other color. Same thing with the IR vision: blackbody radiation from warm bodies is broadband, and so are IR detectors. I'm not in the military, but I've worked with IR lasers before, and we used what we called IR viewers, but sure seemed like they could have been rifle scopes, to see what we were doing. They could see IR from 800nm to 2000nm without any need to change modes or input filters.
"Peer review isn't about the accuracy of the data. It's about how the data supports the conclusions and whether the paper is notable enough for the journal."
You beat me to it. A lot of journals only use 1 or 2 reviewers. 3 is the most I've ever heard of. Reviewers are neither paid for their work nor given a lot of time to do it, so some really just phone it in. Even the more thorough ones: we're talking essentially 3 chances to find a mistake. I've rievewed papers and if I notice a mistake I'll certainly point it out even if it's just a grammar, but I'm not going to lose any sleep over the fact that I didn't manually overlay their graph with every other paper they've written to check for a mistake like the one mentioned in the article. That's the kind of mistake it takes 10000 pairs of eyes to catch.
To put it in terms a typical slashdotter should understand, that would be like expecting a program to be completely bug free after 4 revisions. Of course part of the process is that after it's been published, it's expected that other scientists will look at the paper and catch things reviewers might have missed...kind of like the open source coding model.
Actually in theory, the desk should not draw much current until something is charging, even if it is technically "always on". Transformers work on this same basic principle: electrical coils are not in direct contact, but inductively coupled. If there is no load on the downstream end, the power supply will also experience no load (well...ideally, in actuality it's a smaller load) and electriciy isn't particularly wasted.
All that said, though, I'm not convinced this desk is going to work like a perfectly ideal transformer. There does have to be some wasted energy in the AC magnetic fields this thing is generated. I'm pretty sure transformers have two sets of wires coiled together specifically to minimize the amount of energy wasted as EM radiation compared to inductively coupling to the other side, so have an entire desk area actively forming one side of the coupling to a small device seems like it could be horribly inefficient.
Slashdot Mirror
Because if not, they left out how they know what the underlying vector shapes are in the original image / video frame. Are those four pixels at the spatial sampling limit from what was originally a diamond, a circle, a letter o, a smiley face emoticon? I can only scale up if I already know that!
I can believe there is some interesting work being done in the algorithms that guess these things, and leveraging work done in the fields of machine vision and astronomy may translate to a video compression algorithm that is more efficient because of the inherently ordered nature of the universe (doesn't really matter if it guessed wrong if on random sample of images of real objects it stores the information more efficiently), but it's hardly novel to realize vector graphics work better if I'm making an illustration and I know what object I want it to represent rather than taking a picture (like the soda bottle with the small label on it).
If my link to your article increases the number of people reading your article (and increasing your ad revenue) then no, I don't think you're entitled to a cut of my earned revenue. Business relationships don't have to be zero sum andsearch engines are earning their keep here by providing added value (to the consumer by helping them find articles, and to the newspaper by bringing more eyes to their products).
There's some gray area where so called aggregators basically paste the entire article into their site and probably do steal readership, but its pretty hard to imagine Google's single line quotes do that. More importantly, we don't have to speculate. Any site that doesn't want to show up in search can use robots.txt to test for themselves whether search engines are a net win or loss for readership. What they can't do ask a fee to be listed and then complain that Google is "threatening" to not purchase the product. If you want to charge for something, your potential customers are allowed to say no.
Aarg! That was supposed to be lanisterium. Hope it still made sense.
They literally shit gold!
I agree with your main point, but I would dispute the implication that people have ever been very good about "backing up locally". Totally anecdotal, but I've known too many people who lost all their data (pictures and music on home computers, and expensively gathered data on work computers). They all say they same thing: "yeah, I know I should have been backing up, but I never got around to it." It's a rampant mix of laziness, underestimating the odds of data loss and under-appreciating the value of the data until it's gone. This was going on before Facebook and cloud storage, and still goes on now. And I'd wager almost anybody who recovers lost pictures from Facebook nowadays probably wasn't consciously using Facebook as a backup, but figured out they were the only copies left after their hard drive crashed.
...that insecticide would have bad side effects on bees? What does one thing have to do with the other?
I don't know that the technology is theoretically impossible, but I think articles like this usually gloss over this not at all minor technical difficulty. Transparent circuitry is much easier because of this same phenomenon. If you cover up 50% of the area of a contact lens with completely opaque circuitry, you won't see the circuits in your vision, you'll just see a reduced intensity as if you were wearing sunglasses, because the circuitry will be so out of focus it will appear uniform. If your circuitry is only covering 10% of the area, you probably won't even notice the difference.
It sounds a little silly, but how different is it from other copyrights? I think most people would agree that culinary arts are as as much an exercise in creativity as visual or audio art. A particular combination of available flavors creates whole greater than the sum. Certainly copyrighting a recipe doesn't seem any different to me than a piece of software code. I guess the weak part in Malaysia's claim is that they seem to be trying to retroactively pull public domain works (recipes that have been around for generations) back into the copyrighted realm, but even that is nothing new. If they can get back the rights to their ethnic food, it seems like Beethoven's descendants should be able to continue collecting royalties on his works.
Unless you can prove the programmer intentionally released the buggy program out of malice, I doubt you could recover damages for bugs in software you didn't purchase. Perhaps you should be able to in an extreme case like your example; it's a reasonable debate I suppose, but I don't see anything in the original article suggesting that's how the new rule would apply, except from the BSA representative who's primary interests are commercial software vendors. It just seems more like the commercial software equivalent of a lemon law. There should be a minimum level of functionality a customer can expect when they purchase software.
I get that free as in beer != free as in speech, but there is a pretty high correlation, and really this article is trying to imply that if I give software away for free as in beer I can be liable to the person who "purchased" my software license. Are they really trying to suggest that the ubiquitous line in almost every free as in beer software along the lines of "hey I'm giving you this software for free, so I'm not liable" isn't legally valid? I mean if the only condition I ask of you when you use my free software is that you not expect it to be bug free, how can you sue me for damages? I didn't make anything remotely resembling a guarantee. You still have the choice not to use the software, just like you have the choice not to purchase any software with licensing conditions you are not willing to accept.
I mean I didn't read the text of the proposed law itself, but does seem like the idea that it will affect people who give away software for free is kind of a paranoid worst case scenario, and should be assumed to be false unless otherwise clearly stated, not the other way around. The text that was quoted in the article, "Licensing should guarantee consumers the same basic rights as when they purchase a good: the right to get a product that works with fair commercial conditions." hardly seems controversial or applicable to free software. Sure, if you sell software for mission critical / safetly applications and your buggy software gets people hurt, you should held liable. Alternately, if you give away for free a DVD player which skips, ignores every other button and dies after 4 weeks, you can't be sued for damages.
So does storing 1000's of customer/student/employee records unencrypted on a laptop just waiting to be stolen at the airport, and yet we have to read about one of those incidents every month or so. If you're too retarded to protect other people's data, you deserve to have a system that errs on the side of being too easy to lock down. If I sound bitter, it's because I've been informed twice in the last year that my personal information (including SSN) has been compromised on a stolen laptop.
[snip]
It think it's a debateable point that having religion is indicative of a more evolved state :-).
There's no federal law against it in the U.S., but plenty of states have made it illegal. Couldn't tell you which ones specifically, although I'd guess it's roughly half. I personally think anything of this nature should be covered by current statutes against driving while distracted so that we don't have to pass a whole new law for the next tech craze, but inevitably they don't get enforced. So instead we get morons out there texting while driving instead of talking because talking on the cell phone is specifically forbidden.
Barring a disagreement over what you distance you consider to be close, you are completely wrong. The people you see who are constantly braking are not being indecisive about what speed they want to travel. They're doing it because they're not leaving enough space. They pull up too close to a car in front of them, and then even if they match speeds temporarily, they will eventually find themselves needing to brake when the car in front slows down. Nobody who isn't using cruise control can maintain a perfectly constant speed, so when the front car inevitably slows down, even without braking, the tailgater ends up having to brake and viola. Enough of these events in series where each car has to brake a little harder, and you have end up with a traffic jam, which is what this supposedly profound model is suggesting.
Seriously? What, do you think brake lights are some vast conspiracy to encourage traffic jams? Do you really downshift just to prevent your brake lights from going on? If you do, you're going to get rear-ended someday. And by the same token, when you see brake lights in front of you, I hope you at least consider the possibility that you're going to have to use your own brakes to avoid a collision. I absolutely agree that it's better to decelerate gradually by letting up on the gas if you have the time and distance to do so without rear-ending somebody, but that's only possible if you're not following too closely.
Planning for the war is not the same thing as justifying it. I would argue, and I'm sure you'd agree, that we had good reasons to enter WWII. I would not argue that establishing democracies in Germany and Japan was among them. It was certainly an added bonus and as you point out essentially a required part of any plan that involves dismantling the previous governments, but we entered the war because of active aggression by those countries against us and our allies. The neocons could not have convinced the public to support a war whose main purpose was to establish a democratic government in Iraq, and congress certainly wouldn't have passed a war authorization bill giving Bush the option to invade if Saddam doesn't voluntarily begin the formation of a democracy in Iraq. They had to play up the fear of WMDs and terrorism and make disarmament the justification for invasion. Bush himself repeated numerous times that going to war was a last resort...until the war started. The resulting democracy in Iraq was supposed to be an added bonus, not the justification. Now that it is abundantly clear the administration was at the very least exaggerating their estimates of Saddam's WMD arsenal if not completely aware of how bogus the whole story was, they insist that the single most important reason we invaded Iraq was to establish Democracy. No explanation of why Iraq was singled out over other brutal regimes with real WMD programs or real ties to Al-Qaeda.
"Not defending Bush, I didn't vote for him, but I am tired of this WMD crap also." Well too bad, because until this administration realizes the futility of trying to re-write history in the internet age, this is going to come up again and again every time Bush|Cheney|Snow|Whoever tries to tell us we invaded Iraq to establish a peaceful Democracy. I'm sure the whole truth is a little more complicated than either Clinton=Bush or Bush=completely, psychopathically evil, but the fact is at the time of the invasion the stated reason was WMD, a fact that gets ignored every time a Bushie defends starting the war.
Yes she was undercover, a fact that was established in the trial. Being back in the U.S. does not automatically negate an agent's undercover status.
It's an interesting theory, but I think you're way too optimistic. It's an incredibly unstable situation, because combat in orbit involves almost no defensive options. There are no land formations to hide behind, and no air resistance to slow down projectiles, which is why satellites can be taken down without bothering to mount explosive warheads on the missiles (it's my understanding that is why they are called "kinetic kill vehicles"). Then all the debris created by space conflict becomes a danger to everyone's satellites. The result is that if the player with a satellite disadvantage has satkill technology, they can level the playing field and make it so nobody has any space capabilities. It doesn't help at all to be better at space combat than your opponent as long as your opponent is above a minimum technological threshold (which China is essentially at right now).
I wondered the same thing myself when I first saw this guy's opinion in the NYT arguing against network neutrality. Amazingly enough he seems to be expressing an opinion here independent of the usual confusion conservatarian scholars tend to have that anything good for big corporations is automatically good for the economy as a whole.
I think you misread the GP's point. He wants Microsoft to open their code base so other patent holders can pour through Microsoft's code to see if Microsoft is violating anybody else's patent. As in what's good for the goose is good for the gander Not that I agree with him, it is an extreme response, and he's kind of missing the point of the article which is that the current patent system actively punishes those who try to "remain pure" and not stockpile patents. But it does also seem a little unfair that it's easier to get away with violating a software patents by keeping your code hidden. After all, if you're going to own software patents, what's the point of keeping your code secret? You can sue for patent violation if anyone tries to steal what you've done. If you're going to do that anyway, maybe it's only fair that everyone else in the world who thinks you might be violating their patent can check it out before they decide to sue you.
"If the open source community were really that concerned, they'd hire a lawyer to dig through the patents that Microsoft controls. They are, after all, a matter of public record."
I also respectfully disagree with this point. You make it sound so simple. One of the basic complaints people have with the patent system in general and software patents in particular is based on the incredible amount of work involved with "digging through patents" owned by everyone in the world (cuz really, what's the use in just digging through Microsofts patents?) and making sure you're not infringing any. It's just horribly inefficient and bad for innovation if the man-hours involved in avoiding patent infringement are comparable to the amount spent just writing software in the first place.
Correlation is not sufficient to imply causation, but it is necessary. Statistical analysis by itself can only ever indicate correlation, but it is certainly valid to go from correlation to causation based on other information. In the yawn experiment, for example, the counter-hypothesis is that the seeding yawn has no effect on the likelihood of being followed by another yawn and should therefore show no correlation.
I doubt this cloaking device is an issue for NVG's: You might only see one color when you look into the NVG, but that's just because that's the wavelength of the output resulting from the phosphor screen. I can't imagine any reason why the acceptable input wavelengths for NVG's would be limited to a single wavelength (or more realistically a narrow wavelength range): it's generally harder to make devices sensitive to a narrow range of wavelengths, and there'd be little to no advantage in doing so...you wouldn't need a fancy cloaking device to hide an object from NVGs at that point, just paint of any other color. Same thing with the IR vision: blackbody radiation from warm bodies is broadband, and so are IR detectors. I'm not in the military, but I've worked with IR lasers before, and we used what we called IR viewers, but sure seemed like they could have been rifle scopes, to see what we were doing. They could see IR from 800nm to 2000nm without any need to change modes or input filters.
You beat me to it. A lot of journals only use 1 or 2 reviewers. 3 is the most I've ever heard of. Reviewers are neither paid for their work nor given a lot of time to do it, so some really just phone it in. Even the more thorough ones: we're talking essentially 3 chances to find a mistake. I've rievewed papers and if I notice a mistake I'll certainly point it out even if it's just a grammar, but I'm not going to lose any sleep over the fact that I didn't manually overlay their graph with every other paper they've written to check for a mistake like the one mentioned in the article. That's the kind of mistake it takes 10000 pairs of eyes to catch.
To put it in terms a typical slashdotter should understand, that would be like expecting a program to be completely bug free after 4 revisions. Of course part of the process is that after it's been published, it's expected that other scientists will look at the paper and catch things reviewers might have missed...kind of like the open source coding model.
All that said, though, I'm not convinced this desk is going to work like a perfectly ideal transformer. There does have to be some wasted energy in the AC magnetic fields this thing is generated. I'm pretty sure transformers have two sets of wires coiled together specifically to minimize the amount of energy wasted as EM radiation compared to inductively coupling to the other side, so have an entire desk area actively forming one side of the coupling to a small device seems like it could be horribly inefficient.