If you're on the clock at work, then yes, it counts as a work/invention for hire.
Nope. It's still yours in the U.S. Most employers who anticipate any inventing on the job require you to sign an agreement at the time of hire stating that everything you invent is theirs. Some of these agreements are very nice and cover job related stuff, others try to include unrelated stuff you think of in the shower. And even then, you have to sign paperwork to assign an individual invention to the company.
I just don't see the need for it. We have his nieces and nephew any time we get the urge to play with kids or hold a baby. We have tons of friends with kids who are super glad to have us watch their rugrats for a night.
I get it and I don't disagree with your POV. But that is nothing like actually having kids. They change your life in ways you can't imagine. There are pros and cons, and perhaps you think you're getting many of the pros without the cons. If so, you're badly mistaken. The process of raising children is one of the most rewarding things you can do. You get to influence the development of a human being in terms of character, education, wealth, etc from scratch. You can't directly program them, only influence them. Many slashdot readers are into some kind of programming/engineering/product development, but kids are the most advanced thing you could ever hope to work on;-) It can be scary. It requires sacrifice. But I still highly recommend it.
I would also say your impression of the workplace is misguided - or your employer sucks. When a family issue come up (and I don't abuse this for BS) you can usually just say so and walk out the door. People understand. OTOH, since you think it would take two of you at home, perhaps you're just not up to it. I think I smell a chicken;-)
SS will be around when you/we retire. It's a separate tax that goes into a separate fund. That fund is presently about 3 trillion dollars, which is good because for 2 years now it's paying out more than its taking in due to the baby boomers starting to retire. Should the fund ever run dry they will have to stop paying more than is going in, at which point it will truely be the younger people paying for the older people. But it will not go away. I say this because if it goes away entirely they will have to eliminate the taxes that pay for it.V
That said, I suspect Obama wants it to get into trouble sooner rather than later - hence the payroll tax cut which normally goes into social security. He probably figures if it goes bust it will "have to" become part of the normal federal budget. Not sure what the agenda might be, but the rules of the game would change dramatically if it were not separately taxed.
Dell did a lot of work to make sure drivers were solid. Its not cheap to make a laptop have a perfect out of the box experience.
Sure but there are two option here.:
1) Push the changes upstream which means someone can buy the windows laptop and load the OS after the fact.
2) Maintain a fork of the OS and all the repositories etc...
The first of these is inconvenient for users. The second is a show stopper for some of us. I bought an EeePC several years ago with some custom linux disto and that lasted about 2 months before I downloaded and installed a proper version. You just know Dell isn't going to be supporting this for any serious amount of time nor to the extent of upstream.
Intel has done more to support this than Dell ever will, and their changes are all upstream and already included. In fact, I'm curious what Dell has actually done.
I'm all for a more conventional desktop environment, but do any of these alternative use the gnome 3 libraries? Or are we going to basically have 2 versions of gnome installed, one for the UI and one for the apps?
Sure some apps (GIMP in particular) still need the older libraries but the world needs to move to 3.
That plane crash is irrelevant - it was not in control so couldn't take action anyway.
In your later 2 scenarios, my cars job is to protect ME, not some other people with inferior or broken technology. So there is no moral dilemma.
Not sure how that works. I suppose insurance rates might go down then which could offset some of the cost of the vehicle. But the fundamental problem is not the amount of the liability, but that WHO is responsible changes.
The system that has a car about to crash into a bus has already failed, how is one supposed to trust it to make yet another decision and correctly take action? The entire premise of this moral dilemma is flawed.
The funny thing is that most of the time you are in an airplane the autopilot(aka george) is in control.
I'm glad you bring that up - see the recent Air France accident. The plane was flying itself when the air-speed sensor froze, so it gave control back to a human who then crashed the plane (part due to poor training, low experience, and the unavailable speed reading). Lets note that when your power steering or brakes go out on your car today they fail-safe and return to the un-assisted mode of operation. You can still steer, you can still stop, it's just harder to do and you're already at the controls. When the car is driving, those same failures will need to shut off the automatic driver and put a human in control. A human who (in your world) has so little experience driving we may as well say a crash occurs. So to avoid the problem of handing over control to a human, they'll have to implement fully redundant control systems on such vehicles. The cost of that is going to be quite large. And that doesn't address incidents where a properly functioning vehicle is at fault.
This is not "just another part." A driverless car is taking the place of the biggest accident-causing factor, and thus assuming liability for all of those potentially bad decisions that drivers make.
A driverless car is assuming liability for all of those correct decisions that drivers make. It amazes me how tech lovers think computers will be better at driving than humans and how soon people think that will be possible. Another thing is that when the system detects a fault it will most certainly want to hand control back over to the driver. And as we've seen in aerospace (air France), giving control back to a human who hasn't been paying attention right at the moment of need is a recipe for disaster.
No, but I can imagine a change to the legal system limiting the liability of the manufacturers of self-driving cars.
If we could know that self-driving cars reduce accidents by 95% (a not unrealistic amount), it would be morally wrong for us to not put them on the road. If the only hurdle the manufacturers had left was the liability issue, then it would be morally wrong for Congress to not change the laws.
How is it morally right to limit the compensation for someone who has been wronged?
But I'll play along. Hypothetically lets say they eliminate punitive damages. And lets also go with your supposition that they reduce accidents by 95 percent. And now lets extend that to eliminating fatal accidents by 95 percent. And lets not worry about non-fatal accidents and say they'll replace your car for free. So now 5 percent of the 40,000 traffic fatalities in the US each year will go to court. And lets use the (was it EPA?) statistical value of human life of about 8 million dollars and say they pay that out for each of the 2000 deaths each years. We're now looking at 16 Billion dollars a year in the US alone, spread across the industry. And remember, when every car is driverless then someone in the industry WILL be at fault for every fatality. And we've made some fairly impressive assumptions about the capability of these things.
The question will be "which company DOESN'T charge a fee for a mandatory yearly check-up"?
Annual checkups will just increase the liability - yes your honor, this car was re-certified by the manufacturer just 3 months ago...
Even when the cars crash 1/10 as often as humans all of the incidents will be blamed on the manufacturer. Even this fine article asks the question "If your driverless car is about to crash into a bus, should it veer off a bridge?" My response: Why the fuck would my driverless car be about to crash into a presumably driverless bus? And given that something in the system or software has already gone horribly wrong, why do they even ask the question of what action to take next - the system ALREADY FAILED.
What we now need is to discover some process which shows the SM to be incomplete.
Why are physicists so eager to show the standard model to be lacking? Every few months now we see articles telling how better experiments are confirming the standard model and eliminating some of the alternatives. Just because the standard model isn't new or built on a spiffy new foundation like "string theory" doesn't mean we should want to kill it. In fact, some of those things probably don't deserve use of the term "theory" since they are more complex and haven't been experimentally confirmed in any way (except to the extent they match the simpler "standard model").
Patents are done very poorly at present, but they aren't the reason that we haven't been able to cure much in the way of cancer.
I would assert that within the US they detract research dollars away from anything that might not be patentable. This follows from a lack of government funding compared to corporate funding, along with researchers wanting to earn a living. Some of those researchers have even stated this.
Companies that have downloaded our product from one of the many free download sites have a question they want answered, so they call our support line.
If they download it from some random site, where do they get the idea that you offer support? Any other site that points to yours should probably say "paid support available from..." or "for those willing to pay for product support see...". I would hope anyone pointing to your company would be willing to change their wording in order to change peoples expectations prior to calling. The same should be true of your own web site or advertising. IMHO you need to change the expectations prior to them calling. Honest advertising in other words.
Researchers say that RNA vaccines are particularly attractive because, unlike proposed DNA vaccines, it is impossible for RNA to be spliced into the human genome, therefore cutting the risk that it could disrupt normal genetic behavior.
So they do realize the danger of making heritable genetic changes. And then at the end they suggest giving it to children. How about just giving it to people who already reproduced? That would include old people who are some of the most at risk from the flu and possibly enough middle-aged people to stop it altogether. I'm all for eradication, but still sceptical of putting even RNA into everyone in the population. OTOH they're a long way from that still.
I'd suggest he research rio virus to see if there is hope for use against his type of tumor. Unfortunately the links in the summary do not provide a place to add to the 200,000 responses so far. There IS a nifty little list/chart of key words which does not currently include Rio or Virus. OTOH outside of a clinical trial I don't know how one would deliver such virus in his case - it's not like you can have a kid with a cold spit on your brain;-)
A 100% effective treatment for a specific cancer would be a multi-billion dollar a year drug, and would earn that revenue for years to come.
Unless that treatment were to be a simple virus either injected into a tumor or an IV drip. Then there wouldn't be much money for that treatment now would there? As you google the rio virus and other possible virus treatments for cancer you should notice a trend. All the companies that are doing clinical trials have tried to *modify* the virus in some way in order to make in "novel" so they can patent it. The goal is NOT to find a cure for any type of cancer - it is to find a "novel" cure that can be patented.
Recently I read another article about a researcher who had a potential cure in his lab, but since he had already published his work it was no longer patentable, so they needed to find a way to make it novel before any serious funding (needed for more research and then clinical trials) could be had. He claimed he was not unique, there are many researchers that have something that works in certain conditions (rats, specific scenarios, etc) but it's hard enough to figure out who to fund without the problems of making sure the result is proprietary.
It's not clear to me what the solution to this is other than funding the researchers who are actually doing worthwhile research instead of trying to figure out a way to modify existing drugs in order to get another 20 years of patent protection on a new variant.
Isn't that right next to a volcano? Didn't they observe a sharp rise a few years ago? The claims are interesting and all, but I think they chose to show a plot from an observation point that is exceptional.
Rep-rap and the like should not worry too much. IANAL but upon reading the patent claims (all of which expand on claim 1) the primary innovation seems to be curing the resin to a lesser degree to create weak points in the support structure. If you're extruding plastic from a nozzle this IMHO does not apply. So I looked at the Form1 website and indeed they are curing a resin to create solid objects. Bummer, cause that method is in may ways better than extruding melted plastic and only requires a single axis machine. Lithography != Extrusion/deposition.
Did you not read the European Parliament's ECHELON investigation in 2001
That was a secret thing because it was illegal. If your snooping powers are illegal, you'll do it anyway when it's really really important. There's always the risk of getting caught or bad PR or losing your job etc. But once you enshrine the snooping in law and sidestep constitutional protections, it become ripe for abuse. So yes, it has always been going on but they're now trying to take it to another level.
In a Newtonian universe, light will follow the same path backwards if it's direction is reversed (bounced perfectly normal to a mirror). My question is "does this hold under relativity?". I thought the answer was yes, but IANAPhysicist so don't know if that's the accepted answer. If it does hold then there are some very interesting consequences that are never talked about.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. It's still yours in the U.S. Most employers who anticipate any inventing on the job require you to sign an agreement at the time of hire stating that everything you invent is theirs. Some of these agreements are very nice and cover job related stuff, others try to include unrelated stuff you think of in the shower. And even then, you have to sign paperwork to assign an individual invention to the company.
I get it and I don't disagree with your POV. But that is nothing like actually having kids. They change your life in ways you can't imagine. There are pros and cons, and perhaps you think you're getting many of the pros without the cons. If so, you're badly mistaken. The process of raising children is one of the most rewarding things you can do. You get to influence the development of a human being in terms of character, education, wealth, etc from scratch. You can't directly program them, only influence them. Many slashdot readers are into some kind of programming/engineering/product development, but kids are the most advanced thing you could ever hope to work on ;-) It can be scary. It requires sacrifice. But I still highly recommend it.
;-)
I would also say your impression of the workplace is misguided - or your employer sucks. When a family issue come up (and I don't abuse this for BS) you can usually just say so and walk out the door. People understand. OTOH, since you think it would take two of you at home, perhaps you're just not up to it. I think I smell a chicken
SS will be around when you/we retire. It's a separate tax that goes into a separate fund. That fund is presently about 3 trillion dollars, which is good because for 2 years now it's paying out more than its taking in due to the baby boomers starting to retire. Should the fund ever run dry they will have to stop paying more than is going in, at which point it will truely be the younger people paying for the older people. But it will not go away. I say this because if it goes away entirely they will have to eliminate the taxes that pay for it.V
That said, I suspect Obama wants it to get into trouble sooner rather than later - hence the payroll tax cut which normally goes into social security. He probably figures if it goes bust it will "have to" become part of the normal federal budget. Not sure what the agenda might be, but the rules of the game would change dramatically if it were not separately taxed.
And Maxima. Matlab/Octave are not real CAS.
And now we know why Taco left.
Sure but there are two option here.:
1) Push the changes upstream which means someone can buy the windows laptop and load the OS after the fact.
2) Maintain a fork of the OS and all the repositories etc...
The first of these is inconvenient for users. The second is a show stopper for some of us. I bought an EeePC several years ago with some custom linux disto and that lasted about 2 months before I downloaded and installed a proper version. You just know Dell isn't going to be supporting this for any serious amount of time nor to the extent of upstream.
Intel has done more to support this than Dell ever will, and their changes are all upstream and already included. In fact, I'm curious what Dell has actually done.
I'm all for a more conventional desktop environment, but do any of these alternative use the gnome 3 libraries? Or are we going to basically have 2 versions of gnome installed, one for the UI and one for the apps?
Sure some apps (GIMP in particular) still need the older libraries but the world needs to move to 3.
That plane crash is irrelevant - it was not in control so couldn't take action anyway.
In your later 2 scenarios, my cars job is to protect ME, not some other people with inferior or broken technology. So there is no moral dilemma.
Not sure how that works. I suppose insurance rates might go down then which could offset some of the cost of the vehicle. But the fundamental problem is not the amount of the liability, but that WHO is responsible changes.
The system that has a car about to crash into a bus has already failed, how is one supposed to trust it to make yet another decision and correctly take action? The entire premise of this moral dilemma is flawed.
I'm glad you bring that up - see the recent Air France accident. The plane was flying itself when the air-speed sensor froze, so it gave control back to a human who then crashed the plane (part due to poor training, low experience, and the unavailable speed reading). Lets note that when your power steering or brakes go out on your car today they fail-safe and return to the un-assisted mode of operation. You can still steer, you can still stop, it's just harder to do and you're already at the controls. When the car is driving, those same failures will need to shut off the automatic driver and put a human in control. A human who (in your world) has so little experience driving we may as well say a crash occurs. So to avoid the problem of handing over control to a human, they'll have to implement fully redundant control systems on such vehicles. The cost of that is going to be quite large. And that doesn't address incidents where a properly functioning vehicle is at fault.
A driverless car is assuming liability for all of those correct decisions that drivers make. It amazes me how tech lovers think computers will be better at driving than humans and how soon people think that will be possible. Another thing is that when the system detects a fault it will most certainly want to hand control back over to the driver. And as we've seen in aerospace (air France), giving control back to a human who hasn't been paying attention right at the moment of need is a recipe for disaster.
How is it morally right to limit the compensation for someone who has been wronged?
But I'll play along. Hypothetically lets say they eliminate punitive damages. And lets also go with your supposition that they reduce accidents by 95 percent. And now lets extend that to eliminating fatal accidents by 95 percent. And lets not worry about non-fatal accidents and say they'll replace your car for free. So now 5 percent of the 40,000 traffic fatalities in the US each year will go to court. And lets use the (was it EPA?) statistical value of human life of about 8 million dollars and say they pay that out for each of the 2000 deaths each years. We're now looking at 16 Billion dollars a year in the US alone, spread across the industry. And remember, when every car is driverless then someone in the industry WILL be at fault for every fatality. And we've made some fairly impressive assumptions about the capability of these things.
Annual checkups will just increase the liability - yes your honor, this car was re-certified by the manufacturer just 3 months ago...
Even when the cars crash 1/10 as often as humans all of the incidents will be blamed on the manufacturer. Even this fine article asks the question "If your driverless car is about to crash into a bus, should it veer off a bridge?" My response: Why the fuck would my driverless car be about to crash into a presumably driverless bus? And given that something in the system or software has already gone horribly wrong, why do they even ask the question of what action to take next - the system ALREADY FAILED.
Why are physicists so eager to show the standard model to be lacking? Every few months now we see articles telling how better experiments are confirming the standard model and eliminating some of the alternatives. Just because the standard model isn't new or built on a spiffy new foundation like "string theory" doesn't mean we should want to kill it. In fact, some of those things probably don't deserve use of the term "theory" since they are more complex and haven't been experimentally confirmed in any way (except to the extent they match the simpler "standard model").
I would assert that within the US they detract research dollars away from anything that might not be patentable. This follows from a lack of government funding compared to corporate funding, along with researchers wanting to earn a living. Some of those researchers have even stated this.
If they download it from some random site, where do they get the idea that you offer support? Any other site that points to yours should probably say "paid support available from..." or "for those willing to pay for product support see...". I would hope anyone pointing to your company would be willing to change their wording in order to change peoples expectations prior to calling. The same should be true of your own web site or advertising. IMHO you need to change the expectations prior to them calling. Honest advertising in other words.
So they do realize the danger of making heritable genetic changes. And then at the end they suggest giving it to children. How about just giving it to people who already reproduced? That would include old people who are some of the most at risk from the flu and possibly enough middle-aged people to stop it altogether. I'm all for eradication, but still sceptical of putting even RNA into everyone in the population. OTOH they're a long way from that still.
I'd suggest he research rio virus to see if there is hope for use against his type of tumor. Unfortunately the links in the summary do not provide a place to add to the 200,000 responses so far. There IS a nifty little list/chart of key words which does not currently include Rio or Virus. OTOH outside of a clinical trial I don't know how one would deliver such virus in his case - it's not like you can have a kid with a cold spit on your brain ;-)
Unless that treatment were to be a simple virus either injected into a tumor or an IV drip. Then there wouldn't be much money for that treatment now would there? As you google the rio virus and other possible virus treatments for cancer you should notice a trend. All the companies that are doing clinical trials have tried to *modify* the virus in some way in order to make in "novel" so they can patent it. The goal is NOT to find a cure for any type of cancer - it is to find a "novel" cure that can be patented.
Recently I read another article about a researcher who had a potential cure in his lab, but since he had already published his work it was no longer patentable, so they needed to find a way to make it novel before any serious funding (needed for more research and then clinical trials) could be had. He claimed he was not unique, there are many researchers that have something that works in certain conditions (rats, specific scenarios, etc) but it's hard enough to figure out who to fund without the problems of making sure the result is proprietary.
It's not clear to me what the solution to this is other than funding the researchers who are actually doing worthwhile research instead of trying to figure out a way to modify existing drugs in order to get another 20 years of patent protection on a new variant.
Isn't that right next to a volcano? Didn't they observe a sharp rise a few years ago? The claims are interesting and all, but I think they chose to show a plot from an observation point that is exceptional.
Rep-rap and the like should not worry too much. IANAL but upon reading the patent claims (all of which expand on claim 1) the primary innovation seems to be curing the resin to a lesser degree to create weak points in the support structure. If you're extruding plastic from a nozzle this IMHO does not apply. So I looked at the Form1 website and indeed they are curing a resin to create solid objects. Bummer, cause that method is in may ways better than extruding melted plastic and only requires a single axis machine. Lithography != Extrusion/deposition.
So they're almost finished then?
That was a secret thing because it was illegal. If your snooping powers are illegal, you'll do it anyway when it's really really important. There's always the risk of getting caught or bad PR or losing your job etc. But once you enshrine the snooping in law and sidestep constitutional protections, it become ripe for abuse. So yes, it has always been going on but they're now trying to take it to another level.
In a Newtonian universe, light will follow the same path backwards if it's direction is reversed (bounced perfectly normal to a mirror). My question is "does this hold under relativity?". I thought the answer was yes, but IANAPhysicist so don't know if that's the accepted answer. If it does hold then there are some very interesting consequences that are never talked about.