If there's a more plausible explanation than sightings of dead or dying giant squid -- already a fantastically large creature -- creating the myth of the Kraken, I'd like to hear it.
In other news, werewolves, vampires, and zombies are people with rabies.
Seems to me that the Kraken being a real beast -- specifically the Giant Squid -- is pretty much a given, just as it's a given that the stories sailors told about it were exaggerated as well. Not that it takes a lot exaggeration to make a 40+ ft long creature seem like a mythical monster. Pants-shitting fear will do that.
Is anyone else disturbed a little by the paleontologist in this article actually calling this thing a "Kraken"?
Naw, I'm sure there are others who get in a tiff over their perception of what constitutes "serious" naming despite there being no basis in reality for their nitpicking.
This notion you seem to have that biological names must be completely serious, and therefore that using the names of mythological creatures is verboten in serious biology, is something you picked up somewhere other than in the context of real, serious biology. Which means you and everyone else who is disturbed should just get over yourselves.
What's next, someone finding a new type of dinosaur and calling it a "Dragon"?
Too late -- they already found the largest living lizard and called it the Komodo Dragon. You got a problem with that name?
Or how about some other mythological names in biology just off the top of my head: Hydra Chimera
If they find more evidence for pre-historic cephalopods of great size (greater than the giant and gargantuan squids of today), I think calling them Kraken is a great idea. Especially since rare sightings of giant squid were almost certainly the source of the Kraken legend in the first place.
You could ask the converse question - if he isn't looking to make money, why is he being so secretive about it? Why not just publish a paper and let everyone profit? Every day he delays means thousands of lives lost which might otherwise have been saved.
Yeah, exactly. If the mean ol' "international energy interests" are trying to shut him down because it threatens their business models, then publishing that shit is the best way to defeat them!
I had a friend who was telling me about some free energy scam he was nearly convinced was real, in part because of the claims that they didn't want to get rich just save the world, and were being suppressed by Big Energy. It claimed to be simple and made of less than $100 in magnets and other parts. I told him look, if this was real, they'd put the schematic on the internet and everyone would be out at Home Depot making them and there'd be nothing "Big Energy" could do about it.
Actually, the theory of special relativity has no problem with particles going faster than light.
Yes it does, since SR assumes a causal universe. The sending of any kind of information* faster than light results in a violation of causality according to some frame of reference. And SR also assumes the relativity principle that the laws of physics hold for all frames. But once given FTL travel/communication, you can create a scenario where causality is violated according to all reference frames and create a paradox.
* And thus particle, or anything else that could affect the outcome of some experiment at the end of transmission, like say a neutrino detector.
Let us be honest, a few hundred years ago they did prove the world was flat using the best science available at the time.
The world was known to be round, and even its approximate circumference calculated, around 2200 years ago at the latest (by the Greeks, the Chinese or others may have done it earlier).
This wasn't forgotten in Columbus' time. We just forgot that it wasn't forgotten at some point while romanticizing the man. So instead we think Columbus was brilliant, when really he just for some reason thought the earth was vastly smaller than the best science available at the time said it was -- science that was very close to correct.
None of this involves finding new planets, only verifying, thus nullifying the title of the post. The implication that the planets were "FOUND" in the hubble data is misleading because they had already been found elsewhere.
True, in this instance it does not involve finding new planets.
However the method of analyzing old Hubble pictures could reveal new exoplanet candidates, which could be verified with some other method. And then it would be a method of finding new planets. Which I can believe will happen, and would be cool.
The title is still misleading, though. It is technically correct (the planets were found in old hubble images, and today i found my house in Google Maps -- just not for the first time). But contrary to what some jackass once said, being technically correct is not the best kind of correct.:)
SR is based upon three assumptions or principles: 1. Causality (cause before effect) 2. Relativity (the laws of physics are the same for all reference frames, i.e. there is no 'privileged' reference) 3. Constancy of the speed of light (as was implied by Maxwell's equations)
Maintaining all three principles at once is how we end up at the rules of time dilation. Because of time dilation, if one could communicate between two inertial reference frames faster than light, then some observer would say that the message was received before it arrived -- which violates Causality for that observer, which would violate Relativity. With a few messages between ships traveling at relativistic speeds, it is possible to craft a scenario where the ship that sends the first message receives a response prior to having sent it -- Causality is then broken according to all observers.
Any method of information transfer that occurs FTL -- regardless of method -- breaks causality, and thus Special Relativity.
However if no information is sent, then this isn't a problem. This is why Quantum Entanglement experiments do not violate SR, because no information transfer, and thus causality violation, is possible.
Tachyons that can be used to send information contradict SR.
There are other formulations of tachyons which do not allow information transfer, and they are the ones that are consistent with SR.
This experiment, however, definitely involved information transfer. If its results hold up, then SR and one of its basic assumptions is in trouble. It could be Causality. How effin' weird would that be?
But most likely we live in a causal universe, and they did not send information FTL.
Regardless Relativity does not allow for particles to be accelerated to the speed of light because of the amount of energy needed.
However, and this is important, particles already traveling at the speed of light are allowed.
No, that's not true if you mean a mass-full particle. A particle with rest mass traveling at the speed of light is forbidden for the same reason accelerating it to the speed of light is forbidden -- that particle would have infinite energy. It takes infinite energy to accelerate a particle to the speed of light because at the speed of light it has infinite energy. If you somehow suppose it is already at the speed of light, then it would already have infinite energy.
Particles without mass, on the other hand, can only travel at the speed of light.
It's possible they discovered tachyons.
If they discovered the kind of tachyon that would allow them to transfer information -- and this experiment would count -- then they broke Special Relativity, possibly the principle of causality.
Your arguments are true for nickel + nickel fusion: that costs energy. But this experiment fuses nickel with hydrogen, which does release energy, because hydrogen has the lowest binding energy of any element.
The binding energy of hydrogen, plus the binding energy of nickel, is greater than the binding energy of copper. Energy before > energy after, ergo it is endothermic.
Many endothermic reactions can occur under the right conditions. It's how all the heavy elements were formed, despite them being energy-negative to produce via fusion. These reactions cannot be self-sustaining, though.
Don't neutrinos have mass? Can particles with mass be accelerated to light speed? Without reading the article or the paper and not having taken even a college physics class, I would have expected that a neutrino should have been traveling at near light speed rather than "exactly the speed of light".
We have very strong evidence that at least two of the three neutrinos must have mass due to neutrino oscillation (used to be at least one of three, until we saw the other type of oscillation iirc), and from this we hypothesize that all the neutrinos have mass.
That mass, though, is extremely small (don't recall the experimental upper bound, but it's orders of magnitude smaller than electrons), so they would be traveling very close to c.
1. Catalysts can and do change the nature of reactions, whether they occur at all, and how exothermic or endothermic the reaction is - this can occur with chemical reactions
No, they absolutely do not change how endo- or exo-thermic a reaction is. They can reduce activation energy, which is different. Reducing the activation energy means the reaction can happen more readily and thus can be more economical. But the starting and ending energy states are unchanged, and thus the total energy produced or consumed is unchanged also.
Anyone who tells you they can make an energy-consuming process (like, say, splitting water) into an energy-producing or just free process via a catalyst is completely full of shit or being hoodwinked by someone who is.
3. The solar fusion reference makes sense only in the case of solar fusion -- yes -- in that process you bind up a tremendous amount of energy in nickel and iron. No it doesn't fuse higher naturally. So? Does that mean it's impossible? Absolutely not.
Solar fusion is not special, and it's not impossible to fuse these elements. Stars do fuse nickel and iron. The reason this is catastrophic for a star is that the reaction consumes energy rather than producing it. Without a net release of energy from the fusion, the star can no longer hold up its own mass against the force of gravity and collapses. Without a net release of energy from the fusion, no "fusion reactor" can ever be a source of power.
If a catalyst changes the fusion "activation energy" could heat be released in that process? I'm betting that it could.
No, it cannot. It doesn't matter if a "catalyst" makes the reaction happen easier. What matters is the starting and ending energy states of the reactants and products. If the delta between them is negative, then the reaction is not a power source no matter how you catalyze it. All making the reaction happen easier with a catalyst will do is make you lose energy faster.
I have to disagree with this. The other possibilities (CPM and what would become DR DOS) had the beginnings of good security built in.
I'm not sure how that's possible since the 8086 and 8088 processors did not support memory protection or privilege levels or anything else one could use to prevent a malicious program from overwriting whatever it wanted.
Gates created the IBM PC as much as anyone who worked for IBM.
I suppose, in a way... His wasn't the only disk operating system. The IBM PC would not have been significantly different without him.
The choice of MS-DOS and the non-exclusive licensing agreement they signed with Gates did have an effect on the PC-clone market that developed since they could use the exact same operating system.
However it was Compaq who actually did all the technical work of reverse-engineering the IBM BIOS, and fought the resulting IBM lawsuit, that really enabled the PC-clone market. Gates' shrewd business decision wouldn't have mattered had it not been for that.
And without that decision, the clones would have used a DOS work-alike and maybe the OS monopoly would never have gotten established. But now I'm just speculating.
Nevertheless, I can't say Gates did nearly as much to create the PC as either IBM or Compaq.
There's no ambiguity because the grammar of using "times" or not makes it clear.
But if you'll notice I said "3 times closer to" means "1/3rd as far", because "distant" and "far" are synonyms, as are "closeness" and "nearness", and the two pairs of synonyms are antonyms with each other and it doesn't matter which one you use. It's the grammatical context, not the specific word choice, determining what the relationship is. "x times less" means "1/x times" and "x less" means "-x". That's all there is to it.
Sure, but that definition of 'closeness' as 1/distance is implied by the syntax of the sentence using 'times'. If I said I was 3 times closer to something than you, that would mean I was 1/3rd as far. However if I said I was 3m closer to something than you, then in this case "closeness" is "-distance".
Now I'm sounding pedantic, when my point about bringing up pedantry is how rarely it helps when understanding natural language where there are many definitions that must be decided upon by context, not a single "correct" definition as there is with technical terms.
Likewise the dark side of the space craft will be close to absolute zero. So there's a quite clear delineation of heat zones.
No, no it will not be close to absolute zero. Conduction will carry the heat from the sun-facing side of the craft to the dark side of the craft -- even if they weren't deliberately using pipes to move heat to the radiator. The craft will reach an equilibrium point that is based on the amount of heat it is absorbing, the size of the radiator, and the amount of blackbody radiation given off at a given temperature of the radiator.
At this distance from the sun, this temperature is going to be rather high.
To get close (as in 12K) to absolute zero, it took the WISE craft a significant store of solid hydrogen to use as coolant, and this was at 1 AU from the sun.
Actually there is a such a thing as 4 x closer it's just an inaccurate natural language representation of 1/4th the distance. Not everyone uses accuracy and precision in their every day speech as their goal is to communicate general ideas now explain something with technical accuracy. Vernacular do you speak it?
Well that's true except that it is perfectly accurate and precise if you simply understand the idiom. Which of course literalist wanna-be-pedants don't, as they do with so many aspects of language, and act like this means they're smart.
There's a big difference between rejecting your unrealistic and therefore useless and/or disastrous* options in and "keeping the status quo". You've failed to distinguish once again, and in doing so demonstrate binary thinking.
Reality is not binary. Reality is nuanced.
I do recognize the corruption in the major parties, but that does not make all candidates "exactly the same". That you infer from my rejection of that illogical statement that I also do not recognize political corruption or acknowledge third parties just shows your binary un-nuanced thinking. But in reality, I've voted for 3rd parties whenever I thought they had a decent candidate, which has mostly been for state and local positions but this is the best place for a 3rd party to gain support**.
I just haven't ever voted for Ron Paul, who would be a shit President, and by the way is a Republican. So therefore he's really exactly the same as every other Republican, and every Democrat because they're exactly the same too! Right?
No, he's a "radical". And rather than try to brake and steer the car away from the cliff in a controlled fashion, he'd demand an instantaneous cessation of all forward velocity and refuse to accept anything less. And you think this is "choosing not to be executed" rather than "Choosing a method of avoiding execution guaranteed to fail." Sorry, I'd rather pursue a method that might actually work, even if -- due to it involving 'reality' -- it might also fail.
* Disaster which I did define, thank you for not reading. I mean why bother reading if you're not going to bother distinguishing? ** Shooting for the Presidency first with the Electoral College system still in place, and with no significant presence in lesser offices, is just plain foolish.
I've worked in a patent-heavy industry. There was no 'innovation' being protected, because every company had to cross-license their patents with every other company in order to remain in business. The only things the patents did were keep more efficient competitors out of the market and keep patent lawyers well paid.
.
Same here. And I've been told directly by corporate patent lawyers not to see if anything I'm inventing might infringe on someone else's patents, because 1) something involved in what I'm making almost certainly does and 2) if you do a patent search that can show willful violation which is treble damages and screws up the "we both infringe each other so let's create a sharing agreement based on the relative value of our portfolios" negotiations.
As you say, the main real effect is to create an artificial barrier to entry into an industry when it's a minefield of patents.
The other real effect is to give patent trolls free reign to ruin the real innovation that these patent-holding corporations are engaging in because they're immune to the "well you're infringing too so let's just strike a deal and get on with business" tactic, having no products of their own.
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing that concerns me about the name Titan is what happens when they need another name some years from now to indicate its even faster.
Well, Olympian would be the obvious choice for a successor to Titan.
Kraken is not the Giant Squid.
If there's a more plausible explanation than sightings of dead or dying giant squid -- already a fantastically large creature -- creating the myth of the Kraken, I'd like to hear it.
In other news, werewolves, vampires, and zombies are people with rabies.
claiming that the Kraken was a real beast..
Seems to me that the Kraken being a real beast -- specifically the Giant Squid -- is pretty much a given, just as it's a given that the stories sailors told about it were exaggerated as well. Not that it takes a lot exaggeration to make a 40+ ft long creature seem like a mythical monster. Pants-shitting fear will do that.
Is anyone else disturbed a little by the paleontologist in this article actually calling this thing a "Kraken"?
Naw, I'm sure there are others who get in a tiff over their perception of what constitutes "serious" naming despite there being no basis in reality for their nitpicking.
This notion you seem to have that biological names must be completely serious, and therefore that using the names of mythological creatures is verboten in serious biology, is something you picked up somewhere other than in the context of real, serious biology. Which means you and everyone else who is disturbed should just get over yourselves.
What's next, someone finding a new type of dinosaur and calling it a "Dragon"?
Too late -- they already found the largest living lizard and called it the Komodo Dragon. You got a problem with that name?
Or how about some other mythological names in biology just off the top of my head:
Hydra
Chimera
If they find more evidence for pre-historic cephalopods of great size (greater than the giant and gargantuan squids of today), I think calling them Kraken is a great idea. Especially since rare sightings of giant squid were almost certainly the source of the Kraken legend in the first place.
You could ask the converse question - if he isn't looking to make money, why is he being so secretive about it? Why not just publish a paper and let everyone profit? Every day he delays means thousands of lives lost which might otherwise have been saved.
Yeah, exactly. If the mean ol' "international energy interests" are trying to shut him down because it threatens their business models, then publishing that shit is the best way to defeat them!
I had a friend who was telling me about some free energy scam he was nearly convinced was real, in part because of the claims that they didn't want to get rich just save the world, and were being suppressed by Big Energy. It claimed to be simple and made of less than $100 in magnets and other parts. I told him look, if this was real, they'd put the schematic on the internet and everyone would be out at Home Depot making them and there'd be nothing "Big Energy" could do about it.
Well as long as it was with in 60 nanoseconds correct let's just move on and assume we're all good :-)
It wasn't... so I guess it's panic time! =O
Actually, the theory of special relativity has no problem with particles going faster than light.
Yes it does, since SR assumes a causal universe. The sending of any kind of information* faster than light results in a violation of causality according to some frame of reference. And SR also assumes the relativity principle that the laws of physics hold for all frames. But once given FTL travel/communication, you can create a scenario where causality is violated according to all reference frames and create a paradox.
* And thus particle, or anything else that could affect the outcome of some experiment at the end of transmission, like say a neutrino detector.
Let us be honest, a few hundred years ago they did prove the world was flat using the best science available at the time.
The world was known to be round, and even its approximate circumference calculated, around 2200 years ago at the latest (by the Greeks, the Chinese or others may have done it earlier).
This wasn't forgotten in Columbus' time. We just forgot that it wasn't forgotten at some point while romanticizing the man. So instead we think Columbus was brilliant, when really he just for some reason thought the earth was vastly smaller than the best science available at the time said it was -- science that was very close to correct.
None of this involves finding new planets, only verifying, thus nullifying the title of the post. The implication that the planets were "FOUND" in the hubble data is misleading because they had already been found elsewhere.
True, in this instance it does not involve finding new planets.
However the method of analyzing old Hubble pictures could reveal new exoplanet candidates, which could be verified with some other method. And then it would be a method of finding new planets. Which I can believe will happen, and would be cool.
The title is still misleading, though. It is technically correct (the planets were found in old hubble images, and today i found my house in Google Maps -- just not for the first time). But contrary to what some jackass once said, being technically correct is not the best kind of correct. :)
Maybe, but the promise of "emit once, observe everywhere" never panned out....
SR is based upon three assumptions or principles:
1. Causality (cause before effect)
2. Relativity (the laws of physics are the same for all reference frames, i.e. there is no 'privileged' reference)
3. Constancy of the speed of light (as was implied by Maxwell's equations)
Maintaining all three principles at once is how we end up at the rules of time dilation. Because of time dilation, if one could communicate between two inertial reference frames faster than light, then some observer would say that the message was received before it arrived -- which violates Causality for that observer, which would violate Relativity. With a few messages between ships traveling at relativistic speeds, it is possible to craft a scenario where the ship that sends the first message receives a response prior to having sent it -- Causality is then broken according to all observers.
Any method of information transfer that occurs FTL -- regardless of method -- breaks causality, and thus Special Relativity.
However if no information is sent, then this isn't a problem. This is why Quantum Entanglement experiments do not violate SR, because no information transfer, and thus causality violation, is possible.
Tachyons that can be used to send information contradict SR.
There are other formulations of tachyons which do not allow information transfer, and they are the ones that are consistent with SR.
This experiment, however, definitely involved information transfer. If its results hold up, then SR and one of its basic assumptions is in trouble. It could be Causality. How effin' weird would that be?
But most likely we live in a causal universe, and they did not send information FTL.
But rather massive more Neutrinos.
What?
Regardless Relativity does not allow for particles to be accelerated to the speed of light because of the amount of energy needed.
However, and this is important, particles already traveling at the speed of light are allowed.
No, that's not true if you mean a mass-full particle. A particle with rest mass traveling at the speed of light is forbidden for the same reason accelerating it to the speed of light is forbidden -- that particle would have infinite energy. It takes infinite energy to accelerate a particle to the speed of light because at the speed of light it has infinite energy. If you somehow suppose it is already at the speed of light, then it would already have infinite energy.
Particles without mass, on the other hand, can only travel at the speed of light.
It's possible they discovered tachyons.
If they discovered the kind of tachyon that would allow them to transfer information -- and this experiment would count -- then they broke Special Relativity, possibly the principle of causality.
Your arguments are true for nickel + nickel fusion: that costs energy. But this experiment fuses nickel with hydrogen, which does release energy, because hydrogen has the lowest binding energy of any element.
The binding energy of hydrogen, plus the binding energy of nickel, is greater than the binding energy of copper. Energy before > energy after, ergo it is endothermic.
This process of nuclear fusion by proton captures can be seen in thermonuclear explosions from neutron stars: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rp-process
Many endothermic reactions can occur under the right conditions. It's how all the heavy elements were formed, despite them being energy-negative to produce via fusion. These reactions cannot be self-sustaining, though.
Don't neutrinos have mass? Can particles with mass be accelerated to light speed? Without reading the article or the paper and not having taken even a college physics class, I would have expected that a neutrino should have been traveling at near light speed rather than "exactly the speed of light".
We have very strong evidence that at least two of the three neutrinos must have mass due to neutrino oscillation (used to be at least one of three, until we saw the other type of oscillation iirc), and from this we hypothesize that all the neutrinos have mass.
That mass, though, is extremely small (don't recall the experimental upper bound, but it's orders of magnitude smaller than electrons), so they would be traveling very close to c.
I don't see much need to quote a one-line post.
1. Catalysts can and do change the nature of reactions, whether they occur at all, and how exothermic or endothermic the reaction is - this can occur with chemical reactions
No, they absolutely do not change how endo- or exo-thermic a reaction is. They can reduce activation energy, which is different. Reducing the activation energy means the reaction can happen more readily and thus can be more economical. But the starting and ending energy states are unchanged, and thus the total energy produced or consumed is unchanged also.
Anyone who tells you they can make an energy-consuming process (like, say, splitting water) into an energy-producing or just free process via a catalyst is completely full of shit or being hoodwinked by someone who is.
3. The solar fusion reference makes sense only in the case of solar fusion -- yes -- in that process you bind up a tremendous amount of energy in nickel and iron. No it doesn't fuse higher naturally. So? Does that mean it's impossible? Absolutely not.
Solar fusion is not special, and it's not impossible to fuse these elements. Stars do fuse nickel and iron. The reason this is catastrophic for a star is that the reaction consumes energy rather than producing it. Without a net release of energy from the fusion, the star can no longer hold up its own mass against the force of gravity and collapses. Without a net release of energy from the fusion, no "fusion reactor" can ever be a source of power.
If a catalyst changes the fusion "activation energy" could heat be released in that process? I'm betting that it could.
No, it cannot. It doesn't matter if a "catalyst" makes the reaction happen easier. What matters is the starting and ending energy states of the reactants and products. If the delta between them is negative, then the reaction is not a power source no matter how you catalyze it. All making the reaction happen easier with a catalyst will do is make you lose energy faster.
I have to disagree with this. The other possibilities (CPM and what would become DR DOS) had the beginnings of good security built in.
I'm not sure how that's possible since the 8086 and 8088 processors did not support memory protection or privilege levels or anything else one could use to prevent a malicious program from overwriting whatever it wanted.
Um... yes they did. Maybe your threshold is too low to see the AC's post or something, but they did say exactly those things.
Gates created the IBM PC as much as anyone who worked for IBM.
I suppose, in a way... His wasn't the only disk operating system. The IBM PC would not have been significantly different without him.
The choice of MS-DOS and the non-exclusive licensing agreement they signed with Gates did have an effect on the PC-clone market that developed since they could use the exact same operating system.
However it was Compaq who actually did all the technical work of reverse-engineering the IBM BIOS, and fought the resulting IBM lawsuit, that really enabled the PC-clone market. Gates' shrewd business decision wouldn't have mattered had it not been for that.
And without that decision, the clones would have used a DOS work-alike and maybe the OS monopoly would never have gotten established. But now I'm just speculating.
Nevertheless, I can't say Gates did nearly as much to create the PC as either IBM or Compaq.
There's no ambiguity because the grammar of using "times" or not makes it clear.
But if you'll notice I said "3 times closer to" means "1/3rd as far", because "distant" and "far" are synonyms, as are "closeness" and "nearness", and the two pairs of synonyms are antonyms with each other and it doesn't matter which one you use. It's the grammatical context, not the specific word choice, determining what the relationship is. "x times less" means "1/x times" and "x less" means "-x". That's all there is to it.
Sure, but that definition of 'closeness' as 1/distance is implied by the syntax of the sentence using 'times'. If I said I was 3 times closer to something than you, that would mean I was 1/3rd as far. However if I said I was 3m closer to something than you, then in this case "closeness" is "-distance".
Now I'm sounding pedantic, when my point about bringing up pedantry is how rarely it helps when understanding natural language where there are many definitions that must be decided upon by context, not a single "correct" definition as there is with technical terms.
Likewise the dark side of the space craft will be close to absolute zero. So there's a quite clear delineation of heat zones.
No, no it will not be close to absolute zero. Conduction will carry the heat from the sun-facing side of the craft to the dark side of the craft -- even if they weren't deliberately using pipes to move heat to the radiator. The craft will reach an equilibrium point that is based on the amount of heat it is absorbing, the size of the radiator, and the amount of blackbody radiation given off at a given temperature of the radiator.
At this distance from the sun, this temperature is going to be rather high.
To get close (as in 12K) to absolute zero, it took the WISE craft a significant store of solid hydrogen to use as coolant, and this was at 1 AU from the sun.
Actually there is a such a thing as 4 x closer it's just an inaccurate natural language representation of 1/4th the distance. Not everyone uses accuracy and precision in their every day speech as their goal is to communicate general ideas now explain something with technical accuracy. Vernacular do you speak it?
Well that's true except that it is perfectly accurate and precise if you simply understand the idiom. Which of course literalist wanna-be-pedants don't, as they do with so many aspects of language, and act like this means they're smart.
There's a big difference between rejecting your unrealistic and therefore useless and/or disastrous* options in and "keeping the status quo". You've failed to distinguish once again, and in doing so demonstrate binary thinking.
Reality is not binary. Reality is nuanced.
I do recognize the corruption in the major parties, but that does not make all candidates "exactly the same". That you infer from my rejection of that illogical statement that I also do not recognize political corruption or acknowledge third parties just shows your binary un-nuanced thinking. But in reality, I've voted for 3rd parties whenever I thought they had a decent candidate, which has mostly been for state and local positions but this is the best place for a 3rd party to gain support**.
I just haven't ever voted for Ron Paul, who would be a shit President, and by the way is a Republican. So therefore he's really exactly the same as every other Republican, and every Democrat because they're exactly the same too! Right?
No, he's a "radical". And rather than try to brake and steer the car away from the cliff in a controlled fashion, he'd demand an instantaneous cessation of all forward velocity and refuse to accept anything less. And you think this is "choosing not to be executed" rather than "Choosing a method of avoiding execution guaranteed to fail." Sorry, I'd rather pursue a method that might actually work, even if -- due to it involving 'reality' -- it might also fail.
* Disaster which I did define, thank you for not reading. I mean why bother reading if you're not going to bother distinguishing?
** Shooting for the Presidency first with the Electoral College system still in place, and with no significant presence in lesser offices, is just plain foolish.
I've worked in a patent-heavy industry. There was no 'innovation' being protected, because every company had to cross-license their patents with every other company in order to remain in business. The only things the patents did were keep more efficient competitors out of the market and keep patent lawyers well paid.
.
Same here. And I've been told directly by corporate patent lawyers not to see if anything I'm inventing might infringe on someone else's patents, because 1) something involved in what I'm making almost certainly does and 2) if you do a patent search that can show willful violation which is treble damages and screws up the "we both infringe each other so let's create a sharing agreement based on the relative value of our portfolios" negotiations.
As you say, the main real effect is to create an artificial barrier to entry into an industry when it's a minefield of patents.
The other real effect is to give patent trolls free reign to ruin the real innovation that these patent-holding corporations are engaging in because they're immune to the "well you're infringing too so let's just strike a deal and get on with business" tactic, having no products of their own.