If he had put his text on a regular webpage with the one pic of the boat's blind spots it would have saved bandwidth, and wouldn't put his face and voice out to be recognizable to thousands of people.
Though perhaps he used Youtube because it's the latest happenin' thing, the "new media."
I just checked a URL that came to mind, there IS a website at whistleblowers.org but there's no mention of any youtube video. Maybe next week they'll get the word. I already heard the story on the radio four hours ago:
If YouTube had existed in time for some space-shuttle engineers, we might not have had two birds transferred to NADA.
You don't need Youtube to expose things. Free Geocities websites have been available for a decade or so. The popularity and exposure of the Internet perhaps came too late for Challenger, but as Columbia was orbiting there were emails going between engineers and management, saying the launch videos show something hitting the orbiter, let's have a big telescope look at it in orbit to see if it's okay. Management nixed the idea, though it had been done on early shuttle flights when tiles were a concern. If these concerns had been made public on a Geocities page, perhaps things would have been different.
Enterprise. It really wasn't that useful, it had no engines, and was "launched" in the air on the back of a 747 to glide to a landing, to test the Shuttle's performance in the air and in landing.
I think Despair.com said it best in their half-hearted, but sadly successful attempt in patenting the frowny-face emoticon. [despair.com]
Technically and pedantically, what they actually got was a trademark on the Frowny emoticon, NOT a patent. But your point is well taken, that the USPTO is too liberal with trademarks as well as patents, as demonstrated by the egregious trademark abuse by Monster Cable against other concerns using the word monster in their names but which have absolutely no relation to Monster Cable's business areas.
Despair said they weren't actually going to prosecute the 7 million email users of the Frowny they found, but just to taunt them I'll use their trademarked three-character sequence grossly here (actually I only have ONE in this attempt at posting. I tried posting with one gross frownies, then a dozen, but got a lameness filter rejection: "Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters."):-(
What I learned from my company (by seeing it done before my very eyes) was that you get a patent on what will do the most to hinder the competition, regardless of whether it is an innovative part of the design. It's up to the attorney writing the patent to hype up how it is innovative. Patents in the last several decades get pushed through with little or no regard to the "Non-obvious" and similar clauses. I and a co-worker have two patents, each in both our names and we had nothing to do with choosing what areas were patented. FWIW, the complete schematic and an attorney-digested (i.e. expanded in to legalese/patentese) descripion of the complete device's operation were put into the patent. I could show you what I and the other engineer thought were the innovative parts, but those weren't what got patented.
If you can get a patent on a method for growing broccoli sprouts, go for it - it will only take the rest of the broccoli sprout industry going to court to get it declared invalid. Yes, it happened, google for the story.
As an Irish person, I'd surely love for something scientifically significant to be invented here, if only so I don't have to endure racist comments for the rest of my life.
I'd also like to think that a great invention from Ireland would stop racist comments about the Irish, but I'm sure that would not happen either. People who have no respect for one's heritage won't start showing respect because of one or even a thousand great inventions. It is those who make the remarks who have to change.
I'd love it if you had a chat with a nice woman I met in Scotland who transferred her morphine addiction to a street heroin addiction when her prescription ran out. She'd be intrigued by your ideas, and would probably want to subscribe to your newsletter.
This is anectdotal evidence. Of what, I'm not sure. How many morphine prescriptions resulted in addiction? How many led to people leading more nearly normal lives rather than experiencing debilitating pain with less effective pain killers?
The decision to use many drugs and medical procedures is made on a cost-benefit analysis, and the decision is sometimes made to go ahead even when the cost is a reasonable chance of death.
But due to the War On Drugs and the idea that addiction is infinitely worse than death, certain drugs are witheld when comon sense would indicate their use.
I retract that last sentence. Doctors ARE operating on common sense when they withold drugs that would help the patient: if they write too many prescriptions for "certain drugs" the DEA will show up and ask a lot of questions, and possibly charge the doctor with illegal activity. And clearly the DEA knows better than any doctor how many prescriptions of "certain drugs" the doctor should prescribe, don't they?
Why not have a retractable blade & just move it out of the way?
Because the blade is directly connected to a heavy motor, and the mechanism to move it out of the way fast enough would be much more expensive. The pay-as-you-save-your-fingers cost can be less, even over the life of the machine. Not every machine is going to be triggered. I've used table saws and have yet to touch the blade while it's turning.
I'm not really thinking $5500 is that unreasonable. It's rather amazing.
You're determining whether the price is reasonable based on a company video? If it's THAT GOOD, I don't want to see it, it must used some incredible brainwashing techniques to convince you that you can determine it's a fair price based solely on watching the video.
Was it actually the company that inflicted harm, or the idiotic city government for not paying their bills?
Was it written in the contract that the thing would "stop working" (thus trapping any cars parked inside, whether that was spelled out or not) if the bill wasn't paid? Surely this, being a Government contract, is public information (or not?) - is it online somewhere?
I see a lot of idiots all around. Class action lawsuits should name both the city government AND the company as defendants, and let them fight it out in court.
While fighting my way out of a cult, I read many books on cults and how they work, but perhaps the most influentual work I read was on parapsychology, a subject in which I had only a minor interest. The book was Susan Blackmore's "In Search of the Light: The Adventures of a Parapsychologist" where she starts out believing in many things, and like so many studying parapsychology, believed that hard evidence was "just around the corner," waiting to be found. Perhaps her biggest downfall was her own honesty and scientific rigor, something her colleagues didn't seem to have. All her psi experiments were well designed, but failed to find anything. When she investigated others' experiments which appeared to be giving positive results, she found faults in their methods. After being corrected, the experiments no longer gave positive results. She was labeled "psi negative" because of this.
I never heard of so many people strongly believing in something, and having strong incentives to show it exists (would not the person who rigorously demonstrates PSI be justifiably rich and famous?), and find no evidence whatsoever, yet after years CONTINUE TO BELIEVE it exists! By the end of the book the author did not claim to no longer believe, but was certainly disillusioned, and just said "I don't know."
I was in a group where I had believed things with no evidence other than everyone around me also believed them and said they were true. Looking back, I thought I had independently come to the same conclusions as everyone else in the group! It was my own investigations outside the group and reading "outside material" that led me out. They told me not to quit a minute before the miracle happens, and that being happy, joyous and free was "just around the corner" if I kept doing what they told me. Despite the "spiritual not religious" claim, it was indeed a religious experience, and it is as much a religion as is fundamentalist Christianity.
Parapsychology is perhaps where religion and science come closest to overlapping, but like a Venn diagram showing two non-touching circles, there is no overlap. But at least parapsychologists try. "Creation scientists" do not do any actual science that I've heard of in attempts to show that their beliefs are true.
There is more evidence for cold fusion (the fusing of atoms at moderate temperature, not the programming system) than for ESP, and there's virtually NO evidence for cold fusion.
The letter seemed reasonable to me. The claim is so far beyond human experience that no reasonable person would consider investigating it. Perhaps if the claim were "I've had only water for 30 days and not lost any weight" and the subject is willing to be fully monitored 24/7 for (another) 30 days to verify the claim, then it might be worth checking out.
I've been reading James Gleick's bio of Richard Feynman, "Genius" and I've just been through the part where Feynman is on the 1993 Challenger investigation team, and he does the famous rubber-O-ring-in-the-ice-water trick for Congress. Feynman interviewed many engineers in different areas of the Shuttle program and was appalled as he found out that NASA was "approaching the envelope" on so many things. They had set high technical standards at the beginning, and then loosened them as they had more flights, and assumed that since they had had an uneventful flight that the more lax standards were okay. As the Challenger loss (and more recent Columbia loss) shows, this is a bad, HORRIBLE way to run things.
I do hope that not only future Shuttle missions, but also future NASA manned programs are run much differently and to much more rigorous standards.
Perhaps one of my most horrible memories of the 1993 Challenger explosion was of a reporter who (regrettably like most any other reporter) just didn't get it. He spoke of how he once spent the day with an astronaut who told him "you know, one of these days one of these things (Space Shuttles) is going to blow up." The reporter said of the astronaut, "He had a PREMONITION that this would happen..."
Even now it gives me an irrational urge to destroy the television.
More to the parent's point (and I'd trust Martha Stewart on Nascar more than I would journalists on space travel or science in general), I suspect that since all reporters learn to ask all the same questions in journalism school: who, what, why, where, whatever they are, that they will all get and report the same answers, resulting in oh-so-similar coverage by differing, independent news outlets.
Having said that, there IS a notable exception: CNN's Miles O'Brien. If we can clone humans, here's one we SHOULD clone. Mod Miles up.
I recall the story Feynman told on an episode of PBS's NOVA where a man came up to him and asked "Excuse me, sir, but why do you have Feynman diagrams painted on your VW Microbus?"
"Well, because I invented these diagrams. I'm Richard Feynman."
If you meet a man with fuzzy black holes on his wheelchair, he might be...
The big problem in politics is that too much power makes people corrupt, because they can't handle it (communism anyone?). Computers don't have that problem because they are not self-aware.
^yet
Sounds like the people who were in charge when the first shuttle blew up are back at the helm.
No, I don't believe that. It was 23 years ago when the Challenger exploded. The people in charge now are the children of the management 23 year ago.
There's gota be a name for this, perhaps nepodilbertism.
Re:Robocup is the coolest thing on the planet...
on
10th Annual RoboCup
·
· Score: 1
... and America could careless:(
This stuff should be on tv every year in full coverage real time coverage.
Hey, it's SOCCER. No one in the USA watches soccer.
No sports fan in the USA will care about a robot until it gets over 700 home runs (or by 2050, perhaps 980 - sorry, Babe, Hank and Barry). And then there will be rumors that it uses nuclear power.
Here's a pic from Halloween 1999, where I worked at the time. The man dressed as Dilbert really was my boss, and the other man was a boss about two levels up from Dilbert: http://frontiernet.net/~benbradley/dilbert_and_bos s.jpg
Slashdot Mirror
If he had put his text on a regular webpage with the one pic of the boat's blind spots it would have saved bandwidth, and wouldn't put his face and voice out to be recognizable to thousands of people.
Though perhaps he used Youtube because it's the latest happenin' thing, the "new media."
I just checked a URL that came to mind, there IS a website at whistleblowers.org but there's no mention of any youtube video. Maybe next week they'll get the word. I already heard the story on the radio four hours ago:
"Whistleblower takes his case to YouTube"
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/
If YouTube had existed in time for some space-shuttle engineers, we might not have had two birds transferred to NADA.
You don't need Youtube to expose things. Free Geocities websites have been available for a decade or so. The popularity and exposure of the Internet perhaps came too late for Challenger, but as Columbia was orbiting there were emails going between engineers and management, saying the launch videos show something hitting the orbiter, let's have a big telescope look at it in orbit to see if it's okay. Management nixed the idea, though it had been done on early shuttle flights when tiles were a concern. If these concerns had been made public on a Geocities page, perhaps things would have been different.
When I first saw the headline I thought.. cool blow job videos on YouTube. They finally allowed the X rated stuff.
That guy certainly blew HIS job.
Enterprise. It really wasn't that useful, it had no engines, and was "launched" in the air on the back of a 747 to glide to a landing, to test the Shuttle's performance in the air and in landing.
i ters/enterprise.html
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/resources/orb
I think Despair.com said it best in their half-hearted, but sadly successful attempt in patenting the frowny-face emoticon. [despair.com]
:-(
Technically and pedantically, what they actually got was a trademark on the Frowny emoticon, NOT a patent. But your point is well taken, that the USPTO is too liberal with trademarks as well as patents, as demonstrated by the egregious trademark abuse by Monster Cable against other concerns using the word monster in their names but which have absolutely no relation to Monster Cable's business areas.
Despair said they weren't actually going to prosecute the 7 million email users of the Frowny they found, but just to taunt them I'll use their trademarked three-character sequence grossly here (actually I only have ONE in this attempt at posting. I tried posting with one gross frownies, then a dozen, but got a lameness filter rejection: "Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.")
What I learned from my company (by seeing it done before my very eyes) was that you get a patent on what will do the most to hinder the competition, regardless of whether it is an innovative part of the design. It's up to the attorney writing the patent to hype up how it is innovative. Patents in the last several decades get pushed through with little or no regard to the "Non-obvious" and similar clauses. I and a co-worker have two patents, each in both our names and we had nothing to do with choosing what areas were patented. FWIW, the complete schematic and an attorney-digested (i.e. expanded in to legalese/patentese) descripion of the complete device's operation were put into the patent. I could show you what I and the other engineer thought were the innovative parts, but those weren't what got patented.
If you can get a patent on a method for growing broccoli sprouts, go for it - it will only take the rest of the broccoli sprout industry going to court to get it declared invalid. Yes, it happened, google for the story.
As an Irish person, I'd surely love for something scientifically significant to be invented here, if only so I don't have to endure racist comments for the rest of my life.
I'd also like to think that a great invention from Ireland would stop racist comments about the Irish, but I'm sure that would not happen either. People who have no respect for one's heritage won't start showing respect because of one or even a thousand great inventions. It is those who make the remarks who have to change.
And I'm sure that by the year 2400 CRT's will be an EXTREMELY mature technology.
Think of the load on uce@ftc.gov!
I'd love it if you had a chat with a nice woman I met in Scotland who transferred her morphine addiction to a street heroin addiction when her prescription ran out. She'd be intrigued by your ideas, and would probably want to subscribe to your newsletter.
This is anectdotal evidence. Of what, I'm not sure. How many morphine prescriptions resulted in addiction? How many led to people leading more nearly normal lives rather than experiencing debilitating pain with less effective pain killers?
The decision to use many drugs and medical procedures is made on a cost-benefit analysis, and the decision is sometimes made to go ahead even when the cost is a reasonable chance of death.
But due to the War On Drugs and the idea that addiction is infinitely worse than death, certain drugs are witheld when comon sense would indicate their use.
I retract that last sentence. Doctors ARE operating on common sense when they withold drugs that would help the patient: if they write too many prescriptions for "certain drugs" the DEA will show up and ask a lot of questions, and possibly charge the doctor with illegal activity. And clearly the DEA knows better than any doctor how many prescriptions of "certain drugs" the doctor should prescribe, don't they?
Why not have a retractable blade & just move it out of the way?
Because the blade is directly connected to a heavy motor, and the mechanism to move it out of the way fast enough would be much more expensive. The pay-as-you-save-your-fingers cost can be less, even over the life of the machine. Not every machine is going to be triggered. I've used table saws and have yet to touch the blade while it's turning.
After watching the CNN video of this thing available here:
e / which doesn't say much at all. Perhaps Robotic Parking didn't pay their webhosting bill?
Robotic Parking [roboticparking.com]
That forwards to http://ezweb.source2.sourcedns1.com/suspended.pag
I'm not really thinking $5500 is that unreasonable. It's rather amazing.
You're determining whether the price is reasonable based on a company video? If it's THAT GOOD, I don't want to see it, it must used some incredible brainwashing techniques to convince you that you can determine it's a fair price based solely on watching the video.
If you have $5,500 a month to spend on software licenses alone, you probably have another $50,000 to install a high-end diesel generator.
No doubt they would have the money to do that, but did they DO that?
Was it actually the company that inflicted harm, or the idiotic city government for not paying their bills?
Was it written in the contract that the thing would "stop working" (thus trapping any cars parked inside, whether that was spelled out or not) if the bill wasn't paid? Surely this, being a Government contract, is public information (or not?) - is it online somewhere?
I see a lot of idiots all around. Class action lawsuits should name both the city government AND the company as defendants, and let them fight it out in court.
While fighting my way out of a cult, I read many books on cults and how they work, but perhaps the most influentual work I read was on parapsychology, a subject in which I had only a minor interest. The book was Susan Blackmore's "In Search of the Light: The Adventures of a Parapsychologist" where she starts out believing in many things, and like so many studying parapsychology, believed that hard evidence was "just around the corner," waiting to be found. Perhaps her biggest downfall was her own honesty and scientific rigor, something her colleagues didn't seem to have. All her psi experiments were well designed, but failed to find anything. When she investigated others' experiments which appeared to be giving positive results, she found faults in their methods. After being corrected, the experiments no longer gave positive results. She was labeled "psi negative" because of this.
. html
I never heard of so many people strongly believing in something, and having strong incentives to show it exists (would not the person who rigorously demonstrates PSI be justifiably rich and famous?), and find no evidence whatsoever, yet after years CONTINUE TO BELIEVE it exists! By the end of the book the author did not claim to no longer believe, but was certainly disillusioned, and just said "I don't know."
Years after having written the book, she finally did "give up" searching for PSI:
http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/journalism/NS2000
I was in a group where I had believed things with no evidence other than everyone around me also believed them and said they were true. Looking back, I thought I had independently come to the same conclusions as everyone else in the group! It was my own investigations outside the group and reading "outside material" that led me out. They told me not to quit a minute before the miracle happens, and that being happy, joyous and free was "just around the corner" if I kept doing what they told me. Despite the "spiritual not religious" claim, it was indeed a religious experience, and it is as much a religion as is fundamentalist Christianity.
Parapsychology is perhaps where religion and science come closest to overlapping, but like a Venn diagram showing two non-touching circles, there is no overlap. But at least parapsychologists try. "Creation scientists" do not do any actual science that I've heard of in attempts to show that their beliefs are true.
There is more evidence for cold fusion (the fusing of atoms at moderate temperature, not the programming system) than for ESP, and there's virtually NO evidence for cold fusion.
The letter seemed reasonable to me. The claim is so far beyond human experience that no reasonable person would consider investigating it. Perhaps if the claim were "I've had only water for 30 days and not lost any weight" and the subject is willing to be fully monitored 24/7 for (another) 30 days to verify the claim, then it might be worth checking out.
As for rude, there's Q1.9 here:
http://recaudiopro.net/faq/index.htm
I've been reading James Gleick's bio of Richard Feynman, "Genius" and I've just been through the part where Feynman is on the 1993 Challenger investigation team, and he does the famous rubber-O-ring-in-the-ice-water trick for Congress. Feynman interviewed many engineers in different areas of the Shuttle program and was appalled as he found out that NASA was "approaching the envelope" on so many things. They had set high technical standards at the beginning, and then loosened them as they had more flights, and assumed that since they had had an uneventful flight that the more lax standards were okay. As the Challenger loss (and more recent Columbia loss) shows, this is a bad, HORRIBLE way to run things.
I do hope that not only future Shuttle missions, but also future NASA manned programs are run much differently and to much more rigorous standards.
I seriously doubt anything catastrophic will happen in the next 20 missions.
With "only" two failures out of over 100 missions, you are statistically correct, but I find the idea of 20 more shuttle missions worriesome.
Perhaps one of my most horrible memories of the 1993 Challenger explosion was of a reporter who (regrettably like most any other reporter) just didn't get it. He spoke of how he once spent the day with an astronaut who told him "you know, one of these days one of these things (Space Shuttles) is going to blow up." The reporter said of the astronaut, "He had a PREMONITION that this would happen..."
Even now it gives me an irrational urge to destroy the television.
More to the parent's point (and I'd trust Martha Stewart on Nascar more than I would journalists on space travel or science in general), I suspect that since all reporters learn to ask all the same questions in journalism school: who, what, why, where, whatever they are, that they will all get and report the same answers, resulting in oh-so-similar coverage by differing, independent news outlets.
Having said that, there IS a notable exception: CNN's Miles O'Brien. If we can clone humans, here's one we SHOULD clone. Mod Miles up.
I recall the story Feynman told on an episode of PBS's NOVA where a man came up to him and asked "Excuse me, sir, but why do you have Feynman diagrams painted on your VW Microbus?"
"Well, because I invented these diagrams. I'm Richard Feynman."
If you meet a man with fuzzy black holes on his wheelchair, he might be...
Sounds like the people who were in charge when the first shuttle blew up are back at the helm.
No, I don't believe that. It was 23 years ago when the Challenger exploded. The people in charge now are the children of the management 23 year ago.
There's gota be a name for this, perhaps nepodilbertism.
... and America could careless :(
This stuff should be on tv every year in full coverage real time coverage.
Hey, it's SOCCER. No one in the USA watches soccer.
No sports fan in the USA will care about a robot until it gets over 700 home runs (or by 2050, perhaps 980 - sorry, Babe, Hank and Barry). And then there will be rumors that it uses nuclear power.
Here's a pic from Halloween 1999, where I worked at the time.s s.jpg
The man dressed as Dilbert really was my boss, and the other man was a boss about two levels up from Dilbert:
http://frontiernet.net/~benbradley/dilbert_and_bo
And I really wish I could forget them.