To amplify this point, patents don't reward inventors so much as their employers. Most engineers sign over all their rights to any patents/copyright/etc as a condition of employment. (Some are so broadly worded that taking pictures of your kids and sending them to grandma would constitute a violation of your employer's copyright.).
It didn't use to be this way. I have a very old "Stillson" pipe wrench sitting on top of my monitor. The inventor, Daniel Stillson, invented the wrench in 1870 when piping was beginning to be widely used for heating. Although he worked for someone else, the patent was assigned to him (that's how it used to work), and he apparently made about $80,000 (in the 1870's!) in royalties over his lifetime off of the invention.
So unless you are an independent inventor - the exception rather than the rule - the current patent system doesn't benefit you in the slightest. The benefit goes to the patent holder - something entirely different from an inventor.
Moore's law is not about physics it's about economics.
Your point on economics is well taken. However, there is one aspect of physics in Moore's law - that the equations governing a MOS transistor scale with size. That is, if you make a transistor that is 1/2 the size in all dimensions, and you run it at 1/2 the voltage, it will behave exactly the same as the original. So there has always been a clear development path for doubling your transistor density - cutting the size in half.
Other technologies (internal combustion engines, batteries, etc) improve in fits and starts - sometimes dramatically - but not by the continuous scaling of a single parameter.
(This is in no way minimizing the enormous technical challenges of making and designing smaller and smaller transistors. It's just that you know that if you can figure out the fabrication, you know it will work.)
The spambayes Outlook plug in installation package for windows, including a python interpreter, is 2.88MB. The unpacked python interpreter (python23.dll) is 956kB. So by most standards, we're not talking about a lot of space.
The first thing they need to do is integrate spambayes. Thunderbird's current spam filtering sucks. Spambayes works great. For the love of god, somebody please do it already!
There are amplifiers with Noise Figures of 600C == ~300K to ~900K) Gives an extra four or five dB of thermal noise.
Unless your a amplifying an extremely weak signal (for example, in an RF receiver), this amount of excess noise is probably irrelevant. Ku band (~14 GHz) Power amplifiers, for example, often have noise figures of 10 to 20 dB, and no one cares - because the signal level is so much higher than the thermal noise floor.
Tungsten is used in the current Aluminum metal via process, because it's very good at filling holes. (See Wikipedia for a reference.
I don't know if it's used for copper interconnects (I've been out of that business for years). It might work pretty well - the resistivity is twice that of Aluminum, which will slow down your interconnect performance some.
You raise a good point - the point could be to prevent this from becoming a common practice.
It does, however, raise two interesting points:
1) The current ridiculousness of the patent system. The patent system is intended to stimulate innovation by protecting useful ideas. If you're right, this is an attempt to stop a certain kind of behavior by a large company. Isn't that what the legislature is for?
2) If you're going to trust your data to a third party by keeping it online only, make SURE you have the right to retrieve it without entering into further agreements.
There are (expensive, but probably an academic discount if that's what you're doing) commercial packages for various PDE problems, usually tailored to specific applications. For example, I use Ansoft HFSS, which is an electromagnetic simulator. Our main use for the software is electromagnetic, of course, but I've used it for doing thermal resistance calculations, which can be mapped onto low frequency resistance measurements. However, the limitations are that it (1) solves the vector wave equation, not the scalar wave equation, with electromagnetic boundary conditions, and (2) it doesn't handle continously varying dielectric constants (wave velocities to you.) So I'm not sure it would be appropriate, I don't know that your problem would map on to the one it's solving.
The nice thing, though, is that they have worked through all the issues of stability, convergence, etc., and it's a lot more "plug and go" than it used to be.
So if you can map your problem onto a physical problem that has engineering interest, you may be able to find a commercial solution out there. I don't know if they exist, but acoustic simulation would be a good mapping to your problem (at least at small amplitudes.)
I recently turned down a senior level engineering position at a company because of what I felt were onerous and ridiculous "intellectual property" clauses - the gist of which were that the company owns anything I create during my employment, whether related to my work or not, even if done on my own time with my own resources.
I recently was on a plane coming from a trade show and I got into a long conversation with the guy next to me, who worked for this company at about the same level as I was applying for, and also in engineering. I told him I had turned down a job offer and that the IP clauses in the employment were one of my main concerns. His response was "But isn't that the industry standard?"
This is a phrase I hear from most people when I tell them this story. Yes, it may be the industry standard. But it's an industry standard because no one complains about it, or protests it, or turns down jobs because of it. The thing is, it mostly affects the most talented, energetic, and entrepreneurial engineers - who might actually create something of value outside of normal business hours.
I applaud these people for pushing back. Sure, working in the federal system is a "privilege". But the employers have an obligation to run the federal system in a way that produces the best results for the country. If you treat your employees like mechanical cogs, to be inspected and tuned and replaced, your not going to get those kinds of results.
"Fingers of God" is unrelated to the current paper. Fingers of God is an apparent anisotropy, while this paper describes an actual anisotropy.
The fingers of god effect is simple - the doppler shift of a galaxy is proportional to the distance, according to Hubble's observations. If you do a plot of galactic positions, using the observed position in the sky and the red shift as the third dimension, you see what appear to be long, skinny clusters, all pointed directly at you. This happens because in tight clusters, galaxies are attracted to each other gravitational and have a range of velocities which is relatively large. So there's an added velocity on top of that caused by the expansion of the universe, which changes the distance you'd compute by Hubble's law.
Unrelated to phones, but I once broke my car key in the lock while at work, 30 miles from home. It turns out a locksmith can make a duplicate of a broken key. I now keep a spare in my desk at work.
That's the rub, isn't it, if contracting out an activity constitutes engaging in it? Certainly for criminal activity, it amounts to the same thing. For civil cases, I'd say you'd have a pretty good case too, so I'd have to disagree with you. If you paid someone to, for example, damage my house, you can bet I'd sue you - and win, too, if I could prove there was a contract.
I disagree. I think this is a good opportunity to make a point. No, the MPAA isn't going to change, but you're at a school, and educating the students by getting them to think about things they might not otherwise is a good thing to do.
I don't have specific ideas about what to do, but I have some advice on what NOT to do. Don't attempt to harass, trap, or otherwise embarass this guy. Be civil. Your goal here is to get people thinking, not to attack this particular person. Likewise, your goal isn't to express your anger or disgust - it's to educate the student body about the very real and sometimes subtle issues. Handouts? Teach-ins? Big signs and pamphlets? Parody films? It depends on your target audience, venue, etc.
I used to work on the KAMIOKA neutrino detector project (as a lowly undergrad). We looked at Chernkov radiation from scattered electrons, and saw about 1 a day, with huge background (the detector triggered about once a second or more, IIRC.) And certainly not realtime, there was a huge amount of post processing required.
The Chernkov detectors do give you direction information which this detector does no - but the sensitivity is really impressive.
One interesting aspect of this result is that it probes the presents of 7Be, which can give us a lot of insight into how the various nuclear reactions are taking place, and at what rates. It wouldn't be possible without a confirmation of neutrino oscillation, which cuts our measured neutrino flux by a third (I believe.)
In Virginia, if you get a speeding ticket, you can go to a shop to get your speedometer recalibrated. If it is sufficiently out of calibration, the speeding ticket will get thrown out. (This is according to my mechanic, I've never gotten a speeding ticket in VA.)
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It didn't use to be this way. I have a very old "Stillson" pipe wrench sitting on top of my monitor. The inventor, Daniel Stillson, invented the wrench in 1870 when piping was beginning to be widely used for heating. Although he worked for someone else, the patent was assigned to him (that's how it used to work), and he apparently made about $80,000 (in the 1870's!) in royalties over his lifetime off of the invention.
So unless you are an independent inventor - the exception rather than the rule - the current patent system doesn't benefit you in the slightest. The benefit goes to the patent holder - something entirely different from an inventor.
Your point on economics is well taken. However, there is one aspect of physics in Moore's law - that the equations governing a MOS transistor scale with size. That is, if you make a transistor that is 1/2 the size in all dimensions, and you run it at 1/2 the voltage, it will behave exactly the same as the original. So there has always been a clear development path for doubling your transistor density - cutting the size in half.
Other technologies (internal combustion engines, batteries, etc) improve in fits and starts - sometimes dramatically - but not by the continuous scaling of a single parameter.
(This is in no way minimizing the enormous technical challenges of making and designing smaller and smaller transistors. It's just that you know that if you can figure out the fabrication, you know it will work.)
The spambayes Outlook plug in installation package for windows, including a python interpreter, is 2.88MB. The unpacked python interpreter (python23.dll) is 956kB. So by most standards, we're not talking about a lot of space.
The first thing they need to do is integrate spambayes. Thunderbird's current spam filtering sucks. Spambayes works great. For the love of god, somebody please do it already!
Unless your a amplifying an extremely weak signal (for example, in an RF receiver), this amount of excess noise is probably irrelevant. Ku band (~14 GHz) Power amplifiers, for example, often have noise figures of 10 to 20 dB, and no one cares - because the signal level is so much higher than the thermal noise floor.
That warmth is the 10^8 Watts of heat put out by the 10^8 vacuum tubes.
I don't know if it's used for copper interconnects (I've been out of that business for years). It might work pretty well - the resistivity is twice that of Aluminum, which will slow down your interconnect performance some.
Maybe it will convince someone else to rehabilitate.
It does, however, raise two interesting points:
1) The current ridiculousness of the patent system. The patent system is intended to stimulate innovation by protecting useful ideas. If you're right, this is an attempt to stop a certain kind of behavior by a large company. Isn't that what the legislature is for?
2) If you're going to trust your data to a third party by keeping it online only, make SURE you have the right to retrieve it without entering into further agreements.
Particularly overcrowding.
To hang a sign under the screen with an arrow pointing up and the word "nerd" on it would be really high...
The nice thing, though, is that they have worked through all the issues of stability, convergence, etc., and it's a lot more "plug and go" than it used to be.
So if you can map your problem onto a physical problem that has engineering interest, you may be able to find a commercial solution out there. I don't know if they exist, but acoustic simulation would be a good mapping to your problem (at least at small amplitudes.)
I recently was on a plane coming from a trade show and I got into a long conversation with the guy next to me, who worked for this company at about the same level as I was applying for, and also in engineering. I told him I had turned down a job offer and that the IP clauses in the employment were one of my main concerns. His response was "But isn't that the industry standard?"
This is a phrase I hear from most people when I tell them this story. Yes, it may be the industry standard. But it's an industry standard because no one complains about it, or protests it, or turns down jobs because of it. The thing is, it mostly affects the most talented, energetic, and entrepreneurial engineers - who might actually create something of value outside of normal business hours.
I applaud these people for pushing back. Sure, working in the federal system is a "privilege". But the employers have an obligation to run the federal system in a way that produces the best results for the country. If you treat your employees like mechanical cogs, to be inspected and tuned and replaced, your not going to get those kinds of results.
Start reading the GP post again, following the word "with three different axes".
The fingers of god effect is simple - the doppler shift of a galaxy is proportional to the distance, according to Hubble's observations. If you do a plot of galactic positions, using the observed position in the sky and the red shift as the third dimension, you see what appear to be long, skinny clusters, all pointed directly at you. This happens because in tight clusters, galaxies are attracted to each other gravitational and have a range of velocities which is relatively large. So there's an added velocity on top of that caused by the expansion of the universe, which changes the distance you'd compute by Hubble's law.
Unrelated to phones, but I once broke my car key in the lock while at work, 30 miles from home. It turns out a locksmith can make a duplicate of a broken key. I now keep a spare in my desk at work.
That's the rub, isn't it, if contracting out an activity constitutes engaging in it? Certainly for criminal activity, it amounts to the same thing. For civil cases, I'd say you'd have a pretty good case too, so I'd have to disagree with you. If you paid someone to, for example, damage my house, you can bet I'd sue you - and win, too, if I could prove there was a contract.
I don't have specific ideas about what to do, but I have some advice on what NOT to do. Don't attempt to harass, trap, or otherwise embarass this guy. Be civil. Your goal here is to get people thinking, not to attack this particular person. Likewise, your goal isn't to express your anger or disgust - it's to educate the student body about the very real and sometimes subtle issues. Handouts? Teach-ins? Big signs and pamphlets? Parody films? It depends on your target audience, venue, etc.
But do something!
And let's not forget that lying under oath is also a big no-no.
The Chernkov detectors do give you direction information which this detector does no - but the sensitivity is really impressive.
One interesting aspect of this result is that it probes the presents of 7Be, which can give us a lot of insight into how the various nuclear reactions are taking place, and at what rates. It wouldn't be possible without a confirmation of neutrino oscillation, which cuts our measured neutrino flux by a third (I believe.)
In Virginia, if you get a speeding ticket, you can go to a shop to get your speedometer recalibrated. If it is sufficiently out of calibration, the speeding ticket will get thrown out. (This is according to my mechanic, I've never gotten a speeding ticket in VA.)
Suuuure you are.
It's all particularly chilling given the reason deaths due to a bridge collapse, which exposes problems in this very agency.
No, he just has a REALLY big head.