Huh, I didn't realize that. Looks like, for large companies at least (there are some discounts for individual inventors), the fees break down roughly like this:
Filing/search/examination fees: $1600
Issuance of an approved patent: $1780
Maintenance of an approved patent over its full lifespan: $12,600
So basically the USPTO gets $1600 if the patent is rejected, or $15,980 if it's approved.
Two of them actually did miss, and are now orbiting the sun in deep space. The other two didn't get far enough to miss.
Ranger 1 and 2 were botched launches, which barely made it into space into unstable low-earth orbits, from which they burned up on reentry shortly thereafter.
Ranger 3 did in fact miss the moon. It successfully launched to high-earth orbit, and then successfully boosted out of high-earth orbit towards the moon. But not quite towards the moon enough. It missed the moon by 22,000 miles and flew past it into deep space.
Ranger 4 was the first successful mission. And then Ranger 5 missed again, this time by a much smaller amount, only 450 miles. The exit from high-earth orbit towards the moon appears to have been reasonably good this time, and any minor trajectory errors were supposed to be fixed in a mid-course corrective burn. But the craft lost power after exiting earth orbit, so was unable to make the mid-course correction, causing it to miss.
The first landing of any kind (a crash landing), was the Soviet Luna-2 in 1959. The U.S. then sent a series of crash-impact spacecraft in the early 1960s, the Ranger series, whose goal was to take photos during the final descent, along with testing out systems. Five of the nine Ranger missions successfully impacted the moon, and three of them managed to send back photos.
Then as you note, Luna-9 was the first non-crash landing, in 1966.
Mindfuck is also an actual interpreter for an actual programming language. It may not be the most useful programming language, but it is one. The interpreter's source code is what's hosted on Github: it's code, in a code repository, pretty much the kind of thing GitHub intends to host. C+= was not a language implementation, not even an implementation of a parody language.
But it does illustrate the limits of Github's commitment to freedom and openness
Considering their platform is mainly closed-source, I'm not sure this is the first place we've spotted that they are not fully committed to freedom and openness. They're a business that sells project hosting space, using the free accounts as a marketing & onboarding tool, not some kind of free-culture advocacy group.
Yeah, the concise answer to the question is, "because the data is there, and they can get it".
Intelligence agencies piggy-backing on private-sector tracking is nothing new, either. Some of the earlier U.S. 4th-amendment cases came out of intelligence agencies getting access to people's telephone records. They also get information from banks, credit-card companies, and all sorts of other such compilers of private dossiers. If they want, they can probably get access to what food you eat, too, thanks to supermarkets compiling purchase profiles via scans of the club-card barcodes.
That doesn't really make them a defense contractor; sharing some data with the NSA doesn't involve the whole procurement game that is the mainstay of defense contracting.
Will they maintain its current (quite lucrative) military business? I can almost see Google becoming a defense contractor, and it would be one way of addressing their "we need revenue streams other than search ads" issue, which has been their main risk on the financial side for years.
But defense contracting would be a bit of a shift in how they like to do business, and I'm not sure a positive one. Alternately, they could just repurpose the acquired tech and expertise towards Google's own robotics projects, and dump the military clients. That would be leaving quite a bit of money and existing business on the table, though, not to mention possibly annoying some politically powerful folks.
Pol Pot really only controlled Cambodia for about 4 years, though, not a particularly lengthy reign. The rest of the time he was head of the Khmer Rouge, before 1975 and after 1979, they were a guerrilla group not actually in control of the country.
The consolation is that few excessively ruthless leaders tend to rule for very long.
I guess it depends on your definitions of both "long" and "excessively", but the 20th century had a pretty good number. Stalin might be the best example, in power for around 30 years. And Francisco Franco was in power for nearly 40 years.
people are paying too much for it on the open market
Typical knee-jerk Cobalt60-skepticism here on Slashdot. Everyone wants to compare it to tulip mania and yell "bubble", and won't believe that the recent price run-up is because people are genuinely finding it useful as a non-state-controlled currency. USD's days are numbered; in the future, coins glow blue.
You end up with a choice of: 1) wait for the service to come back up; or 2) visit an office in person and talk to a civil servant.
Basically the same choice you have when your bank's internet banking is down. If you need to initiate a transfer, you either wait for it to come back up, or you walk into a bank to do it. If their backend system is down, you can't walk into a bank either, so you just wait in that case. Same here; if you want to register a new corporation and the site is down, you either fill out the registration on paper and submit it the old-fashioned way, or you wait for the site to come back up.
Yeah, I guess that should read, more precisely: The opinion however leaves open the possibility that individual member states could choose to adopt data-retention rules in their national law, unless their national constitution also forbids such a mandate.
Key to the opinion seems to be that it conflicts with existing EU law to mandate data-retention at the EU level. The opinion however leaves open the possibility that individual member states could choose to adopt data-retention rules in their national law... so it doesn't say that data-retention mandates necessarily conflict with rights guaranteed in Europe, either. One of the things that seems to have particularly discomfited the opinion-writer is that implementing this kind of thing as an EU-wide mandate frustrates the ability of individual member states to issue more narrow mandates that keep data within their borders and have stronger privacy protections.
"It is so much less than carbon dioxide, but the important thing is on a per molecule basis, it is very very effective in interacting with heat from the Earth."
There are a number of gases that are more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide. The issue with carbon dioxide isn't that it has a particularly extreme greenhouse-gas effect, but the combination of two things: 1) it is a somewhat potent greenhouse gas; and 2) we are releasing a huge amount of it at pretty incredible industrial scales. Not a little bit here and there in obscure industrial processes, but through things like coal power plants that literally burn 100 to 200 train cars' worth of coal per day (a typical train car fits ~100 tonnes of coal). The scale is actually pretty impressive, in an old-school, 19th-century industrialism sort of way. The sheer volume of coal these plants burn is such that just keeping it coming regularly is a logistical challenge, and there's a whole industry around technology to unload these 100-car trains in few enough hours that you can get the next one in.
The short of it is that [potency x volume] is the basic issue. Very potent but miniscule releases aren't that important, though it's worth keeping on eye on them.
The program sounds like it had a nutty origin (like the analogous U.S. programs), but from this part:
Interestingly, the Soviets included non-local physics in this work, such as the Aharonov-Bohm effect in which an electromagnetic field can influence a particle confined to region where the field strength is zero. And they built a number of devices that exploited the effect, although research in this area appears to have ended in 2003.
That sounds like legitimate physics research. Research into the principle of locality is unlikely to produce a mind-controlled teleportation beam, but it has yielded a better understanding of quantum mechanics.
The assassination thing gets tried now and then, but assassinated leaders have a habit of being replaced by other leaders, who are not always better. Sometimes, instead, they're replaced by multiple would-be leaders and a civil war, also not necessarily better.
The so-called "Internet of Things" has rapidly become a buzzword du jour
The "internet of things" was one of the old buzzwords of Sun Microsystems (R.I.P.), along with "the network is the computer" and "write once, run everywhere".
You have this low-tech piece of equipment that brakes the non-drive wheels while spinning the drive wheels (called a "line lock"), problem solved. I guess they are going to do that, but with some electronics?
In the situations I've encountered turnaround time hasn't been the bottleneck keeping smaller businesses from automating things with robots. Maybe there are some cases where you really need custom stuff on the spot, but more often you can wait a week. The problem is that at small scale stuff is expensive and high-overhead. If you want one industrial robot, you are going to pay a lot for it, and you are going to incur a lot of labor costs just getting the thing to work.
I think it's also marketing aimed at recruitment to some extent. Amazon wants to be a cool tech company, like Google with their self-driving cars and whatnot. There's a danger they will become seen as just a boring logistics company, a profitable high-volume/low-margin business whose main technology is "warehouses". That's a successful business strategy (look at Wal-Mart), but not cool.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh, I didn't realize that. Looks like, for large companies at least (there are some discounts for individual inventors), the fees break down roughly like this:
So basically the USPTO gets $1600 if the patent is rejected, or $15,980 if it's approved.
Two of them actually did miss, and are now orbiting the sun in deep space. The other two didn't get far enough to miss.
Ranger 1 and 2 were botched launches, which barely made it into space into unstable low-earth orbits, from which they burned up on reentry shortly thereafter.
Ranger 3 did in fact miss the moon. It successfully launched to high-earth orbit, and then successfully boosted out of high-earth orbit towards the moon. But not quite towards the moon enough. It missed the moon by 22,000 miles and flew past it into deep space.
Ranger 4 was the first successful mission. And then Ranger 5 missed again, this time by a much smaller amount, only 450 miles. The exit from high-earth orbit towards the moon appears to have been reasonably good this time, and any minor trajectory errors were supposed to be fixed in a mid-course corrective burn. But the craft lost power after exiting earth orbit, so was unable to make the mid-course correction, causing it to miss.
More info in the usual place.
Nitpick: the name is Luna-9.
The first landing of any kind (a crash landing), was the Soviet Luna-2 in 1959. The U.S. then sent a series of crash-impact spacecraft in the early 1960s, the Ranger series, whose goal was to take photos during the final descent, along with testing out systems. Five of the nine Ranger missions successfully impacted the moon, and three of them managed to send back photos.
Then as you note, Luna-9 was the first non-crash landing, in 1966.
Mars next!
Mindfuck is also an actual interpreter for an actual programming language. It may not be the most useful programming language, but it is one. The interpreter's source code is what's hosted on Github: it's code, in a code repository, pretty much the kind of thing GitHub intends to host. C+= was not a language implementation, not even an implementation of a parody language.
Considering their platform is mainly closed-source, I'm not sure this is the first place we've spotted that they are not fully committed to freedom and openness. They're a business that sells project hosting space, using the free accounts as a marketing & onboarding tool, not some kind of free-culture advocacy group.
Yeah, the concise answer to the question is, "because the data is there, and they can get it".
Intelligence agencies piggy-backing on private-sector tracking is nothing new, either. Some of the earlier U.S. 4th-amendment cases came out of intelligence agencies getting access to people's telephone records. They also get information from banks, credit-card companies, and all sorts of other such compilers of private dossiers. If they want, they can probably get access to what food you eat, too, thanks to supermarkets compiling purchase profiles via scans of the club-card barcodes.
That doesn't really make them a defense contractor; sharing some data with the NSA doesn't involve the whole procurement game that is the mainstay of defense contracting.
Will they maintain its current (quite lucrative) military business? I can almost see Google becoming a defense contractor, and it would be one way of addressing their "we need revenue streams other than search ads" issue, which has been their main risk on the financial side for years.
But defense contracting would be a bit of a shift in how they like to do business, and I'm not sure a positive one. Alternately, they could just repurpose the acquired tech and expertise towards Google's own robotics projects, and dump the military clients. That would be leaving quite a bit of money and existing business on the table, though, not to mention possibly annoying some politically powerful folks.
Pol Pot really only controlled Cambodia for about 4 years, though, not a particularly lengthy reign. The rest of the time he was head of the Khmer Rouge, before 1975 and after 1979, they were a guerrilla group not actually in control of the country.
I guess it depends on your definitions of both "long" and "excessively", but the 20th century had a pretty good number. Stalin might be the best example, in power for around 30 years. And Francisco Franco was in power for nearly 40 years.
Destruction of public infrastructure is not only not a separate charge in the UK, there is even a whole party that advocates for it!
people are paying too much for it on the open market
Typical knee-jerk Cobalt60-skepticism here on Slashdot. Everyone wants to compare it to tulip mania and yell "bubble", and won't believe that the recent price run-up is because people are genuinely finding it useful as a non-state-controlled currency. USD's days are numbered; in the future, coins glow blue.
Multithreaded FU too, buddy
You end up with a choice of: 1) wait for the service to come back up; or 2) visit an office in person and talk to a civil servant.
Basically the same choice you have when your bank's internet banking is down. If you need to initiate a transfer, you either wait for it to come back up, or you walk into a bank to do it. If their backend system is down, you can't walk into a bank either, so you just wait in that case. Same here; if you want to register a new corporation and the site is down, you either fill out the registration on paper and submit it the old-fashioned way, or you wait for the site to come back up.
Yeah, I guess that should read, more precisely: The opinion however leaves open the possibility that individual member states could choose to adopt data-retention rules in their national law, unless their national constitution also forbids such a mandate.
Key to the opinion seems to be that it conflicts with existing EU law to mandate data-retention at the EU level. The opinion however leaves open the possibility that individual member states could choose to adopt data-retention rules in their national law... so it doesn't say that data-retention mandates necessarily conflict with rights guaranteed in Europe, either. One of the things that seems to have particularly discomfited the opinion-writer is that implementing this kind of thing as an EU-wide mandate frustrates the ability of individual member states to issue more narrow mandates that keep data within their borders and have stronger privacy protections.
There are a number of gases that are more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide. The issue with carbon dioxide isn't that it has a particularly extreme greenhouse-gas effect, but the combination of two things: 1) it is a somewhat potent greenhouse gas; and 2) we are releasing a huge amount of it at pretty incredible industrial scales. Not a little bit here and there in obscure industrial processes, but through things like coal power plants that literally burn 100 to 200 train cars' worth of coal per day (a typical train car fits ~100 tonnes of coal). The scale is actually pretty impressive, in an old-school, 19th-century industrialism sort of way. The sheer volume of coal these plants burn is such that just keeping it coming regularly is a logistical challenge, and there's a whole industry around technology to unload these 100-car trains in few enough hours that you can get the next one in.
The short of it is that [potency x volume] is the basic issue. Very potent but miniscule releases aren't that important, though it's worth keeping on eye on them.
The program sounds like it had a nutty origin (like the analogous U.S. programs), but from this part:
That sounds like legitimate physics research. Research into the principle of locality is unlikely to produce a mind-controlled teleportation beam, but it has yielded a better understanding of quantum mechanics.
The assassination thing gets tried now and then, but assassinated leaders have a habit of being replaced by other leaders, who are not always better. Sometimes, instead, they're replaced by multiple would-be leaders and a civil war, also not necessarily better.
The "internet of things" was one of the old buzzwords of Sun Microsystems (R.I.P.), along with "the network is the computer" and "write once, run everywhere".
One way that seems to work in tech is just to "do a startup". This can be basically any idea, no matter how stupid, and doesn't need funding to count.
You have this low-tech piece of equipment that brakes the non-drive wheels while spinning the drive wheels (called a "line lock"), problem solved. I guess they are going to do that, but with some electronics?
In the situations I've encountered turnaround time hasn't been the bottleneck keeping smaller businesses from automating things with robots. Maybe there are some cases where you really need custom stuff on the spot, but more often you can wait a week. The problem is that at small scale stuff is expensive and high-overhead. If you want one industrial robot, you are going to pay a lot for it, and you are going to incur a lot of labor costs just getting the thing to work.
I think it's also marketing aimed at recruitment to some extent. Amazon wants to be a cool tech company, like Google with their self-driving cars and whatnot. There's a danger they will become seen as just a boring logistics company, a profitable high-volume/low-margin business whose main technology is "warehouses". That's a successful business strategy (look at Wal-Mart), but not cool.