Do you know where, say, the Yakima reservation is? Or the Washoe? Or the Blackfoot? Or the Navajo? Or any of more than a couple hundred others, owned and occupied by a nearly-as-large number of recognized tribes? (And that's just within the lower 48 states...)
Those tribes are all sovereign nations, with their own laws, and (depending on treaty terms) usually with their own law enforcement and sometimes with their own armies. (The Iroquois Confederacy, for instance, separately declared war on Germany during WW I - and jumped right into WW II because they'd never signed a peace treaty to end it.)
Until you are able to recite the names and locations of the North American tribes you have nothing to snoot about when some Americans don't concern themselves with the names and locations of all of yours.
Then only reason many of yours rate as "important" to us is your multi-century track record of getting into tribal warfare and then sucking us in to bail you out. You've been making such wars for millennia. Much of the current population of the US are descendants of people who came here to get AWAY from all that - and figure out how to live together in peace without tyrannical rulers and enforced, draconian, social homogenization.
As to whether that law restricts your free speech, the claim is that "hate speech" is not protected by the Constitution, particularly when it interferes with the right of others to worship freely. The logic is that allowing people to threaten religions is implicit State approval of those threats.
"Hate speech" and "hate crimes" are attempts to do an end-run around the constitutional guarantees. I suspect that they will eventually be struck down wherever they're raised up.
"Hate {foo}" is "{foo}" directed against some particular "suspect (of being discriminated against) category" - such as people of particular skin colors, religions, etc.
By creating enhanced punishments for perpetrators who victimize them, compared to perpetrators who victimize ordinary people for more ordinary reasons, "hate %ltfoo%gt" legislation creates privileged classes of people who are more protected by legal sanctions on their attackers. This violates the equal protection clause.
Why should it be a more-penalized crime to bash a black than to bash a white? To bash a gay than to bash a straight? (And please don't say "It's also a hate crime to bash a straight BECAUSE he's straight." because you KNOW it won't be enforced that way.) Why should it be a more-penalized crime to beat and rob an Oriental because he's Oriental than to beat and rob a landlord because he's a landlord? And so on.
Further, by making "religion" one of these categories - especially by making "interfering with a religion" a specific crime - the legislators have violated the First Amendment's "Establishment" clause: They've made organizations that are religious more protected than organizations with similar characteristics that are not.
Why should it be a more-penalized act to interfere with a Catholic group than to interfere with Bhddhists? With Agnostics? With Objectivists?
Finally, "Hate {foo}" crimes are "thought crimes": The same act is punished more or less depending on the ideology of the actor. It's appropriate to punish more for executing a pre-planned attack than for attacking in a temporary burst of outrage, and still less for damage caused by accident due to negligence. But beyond that the motivation is immaterial. Why should killing or maming somebody because "I didn't like his looks." be punished more because the aspect of "his looks" is the color of his skin than it is the twist of his lips? Maiming is maiming. Killing is killing. Robbing is robbing. The courts' time need not be wasted trying to divine the internal state of the perpetrator - or the police departments' time trying to beat it out of him - just to punish some people who "think wrongly" more than others who do the same harm.
When a [...] sheriff showing up with a search warrant [is a] member[] of the cult. [...] When the warrant specifies "documents" but the sheriff leaves with computers including screens, printers and even phones.
And when the sheriff runs the jail where you will cool your heels while waiting for your appeal to be heard...
And when part of the reason you were picketing them in the first place is that you know they declare people "enemies" and attack them extra-legally, and that you have reason to believe they have killed a number of their declared "enemies"...
In such a situation, with such evidence that you believed to be true, would YOU believe you might have a "fatal accident" if you allowed yourself to be taken into custody?
Another problem with most rebate programs is the requirement that it be installed by a licensed contractor - without the exception (available for construction but NOT for the rebates) that allows a homeowner to do the installation himself (with appropriate permits and inspections).
The price difference can easily eat more than the entire "rebate".
There are just about 24 hours left for the public to submit comments against REAL ID.
Just for our information (and inspiration), what is the point of these comments?
Will they have any effect on whether, or how, the law will be enforced? If so, now? Or are they just an opportunity to blow off steam and feel good about having "done something"?
... other libertarians think that the individual unborn child is also sovereign and is deserving of the same human rights as everyone else...
However not just libertarians but people of a large number of other political persuasions recognize the concept that a slave has a right to be free - even if the slaveowner's must be killed to accomplish this liberation.
By this argument a woman would have an uncontested right to terminate a pregnancy at any time, despite the "unborn child"'s state as a "sovereign individual".
Once the child is capable of independent viability it can be argued that its own rights mandate the MEANS of terminating the pregnancy might be limited to those that attempt to preserve the child's life - within the constraint of not adding risk to the life of the mother.
= = = =
Non-libertarian arguments based on the "personhood" of the fetus/unborn child bring up the question "when does it stop being anonymous tissue and become a person". My own preference for that time is "when the brain begins to function in a human fashion". (Before that you're dealing with either religious arguments over souls or claims that genetic potential = actuality which could justify rape and give cancers human rights.)
A slippery slope that would lead to infanticide and euthanasia of the mentally "sub-par" can be avoided by pushing the cut-point back to the date when the nerve cells of the brain begin to interconnect. (Before that the brain is no more a "person" than a kit of chips and boards is a "computer".)
Interestingly, this occurs about a week into the third trimester - just about the point where the Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, put the cutpoint between the sovereign interests of the mother and her doctor/patient relationship on one hand and the state's interest in preserving the life and rights of a new citizen on the other.
Polywell operates by creating a converging potential well of tens of thousands of volts and dropping ions into it. At roughly 11,000 degrees kelvin per electron volt that's one HELL of a hot spot.
Tens of kilovolts, on the other hand, are easy to handle - in a near vacuum. The trick is to achieve sufficient DENSITY in that near vacuum and keep the particles at that temperature and pressure for enough TIME to end up with more fusion energy harvested than you put in to set uop the system.
If I were to make a site with a tongue in cheek name "The gun murderers hideout" which could contain information about various guns and such should I be arrested for killing someone with a gun?
Of course not.
But if you later were under suspicion for murdering somebody using a gun, you would find it harder to convince a jury that it was an accident rather than premeditation than if you'd called your site "the target shooters' clubhouse".
Bet that the prosecutor will bring it up in the portion of the trial where he's arguing intent.
Americans get squeamish about massive layoffs, but investors certainly do not.
Yet it's Americans that vote.
It's the start of presidential primary season. The hottest issue among the bloggers in the Republican primary is illegal immigration - mainly its effects on blue-collar unemployment levels and pay scales.
Now we have this - and the issues of outsourcing, H1B legal "guest workers", and their effect on white-collar unemployment levels and pay scales.
How nice that this came up NOW, when it can affect the earliest stages of the election. B-)
You are aware of how Indians treat cattle, aren't you?
You mean like the ones who put a wooden collar on a calf so it can't suckle, eat forage, or drink water, thus causing it to starve to death - because they aren't allowed to actually kill it, but CAN eat it if it "dies naturally"?
So IBM has come up with a manufacturing method using self-assembling molecules to produce regular arrays of 20 nanometer objects on the surface of a silicon wafer with near-perfect yeild. (I presume, since "growth" was involved, it would be possible to use it to construct similarly-spaced objects of sizes within a factor of about 3 to 4 of the size they chose for this process.)
And yesterday we saw a slashdot article referencing work at Rice U, Los Almos Labs, and others, where 5 to 8 nanometer quantum dots on the surface of phovoltaic cells could significantly multiply the efficiency (perhaps into the 60% range) by efficiently creating multiple electron-hole pairs per incoming photon.
Seems to me the two are just ASKING to be combined into an inexpensive manufacturing process for high-efficiency solar panels.
Doubling to quadrupling the output of solar panels while keeping the cost in the current ballpark might push photovoltaic past the cost-breakeven point compared to grid power for rural and even suburban housing loads. And that could lead to enough production to bring in additional economies of scale and drive the price point farther.
- Test harnesses are REQUIRED during development (including at unit-test levels) to determine that the program and the individual modules are all working as intended. (I include test passage in the makefile targeting, so a test failure kills the build. This catches introduced bugs from mods right away.)
- Debuggers are allowed only to diagnose why something is failing.
- Each bit of code has to be correctly covered (not just executed) and its correct behavior verified by a test to be considered "finished". Thus:
- Coding tends to resemble a depth-first tree-walk leaving behind debugged code that is almost never revisited. (Like growing a perfect crystal.)
I find that, while debuggers are occasionally handy, with the "prove it's right" test harness in place there's so much visibility that they are usually more trouble than they're worth. When visibility is insufficient, compiling and linking a module-level mod is so quick that it's usually easier to stick in temporary debugging output statements than fire up a debugger.
By the way: The downside of this methodology is that it's so blazingly fast that it is perceived as slow: I report a finished, debugged component or project in about three times as much time as typical developers report a successful initial (hello-general-outline-world) build or a single debugging iteration. So managers make an apples-and-oranges comparison between my completed projects and others' first-cut efforts and bug-fix cycles. This leads to comments like: "'Rod' took about three times as long as most programmers to come up with a first version - but his first try usually worked." B-(
... here's your stone age hammer. There's a problem over there, try hitting it with the hammer. I'm sure it will look like a nail to you.
What's your point?
I wasn't proposing any solution to anything. I was just poionting out that the previous poster's claim of avoided costs didn't produce an economic incentive on individual decisions.
Dealing with "tragedy of the commons" situations requires group activity: Social pressure, voluntary agreement, a collection of individual moral decisions (finding value in "doing the right thing", even if it costs more unless most other people do it, too), or government action (either to map the hidden costs into real costs or to impose centrally-planned decisions).
Right now we're in the stage of determining if there really is a problem that requires such costs to be borne, with those convinced there is making individual moral decisions and using social pressure.
Don't forget to factor in the externalized costs (air pollution, global warming, terrorism, your children getting sent to Iraq, etc). The price you pay at the pump isn't the only price there is to be paid.
But you don't pay it AT THE PUMP.
And if YOU decide to buy the low-pollution high-price alternative you don't get the benefit of EVERYBODY ELSE doing the same thing. So you still pay the externalized costs AND pay for the "high-priced spread".
The externalized prices are a tragedy of the commons (in the economic-theory sense - the original T.O.T.C. was a fake) and they don't affect individual cost-driven incentives.
I notice oil companies are heavily involved in solar energy, are they securing their future and/or slowing solar tech down?
Oil companies recognized a long time ago that much of their business was selling energy - or the means to obtain usable energy. And long before the whole "global warming" flap (back during the last "here comes an ice age" flap, actually) they recognized that using their products caused pollution, and people were looking for cleaner ways to get energy - which might reduce their market.
It makes sense for them to be able to make money from the big-business end of selling people the means to get usable energy. That way, if the market suddenly shifts to something else, they get to make money off that to compensate for the lost revenue on the old stuff. And if research is needed they had a LOT of money to invest in it - just as they invest in exploration for more oil deposits.
So they did a lot of research on ways to make money by enabling people to make energy OTHER than by pumping, refining, and selling oil.
One of those was photovoltaic panels. ARCO, for instance, did a bunch of work on that, eventually bringing quality modules to market at prices that make them practical in a large number of locations. (That operation has been absorbed into BP Solar if I have my players sorted out correctly.)
They'll be happy to sell you oil to burn in engines. They'll be happy to sell you photovoltaic modules. (They'll probably be happy to sell you fusion engines if they ever work out, too.)
Trying to keep solar energy out of the market does them no good. If somebody else comes up with something practical and they CAN'T stop it, they lose revenue on oil and don't get compensating revenue from the replacement. So their best strategy is to be in that market with a product competitive enough to give them significant market share, at a price that gives them a decent return but doesn't cripple the consumer. (And first company that makes a breakthrough that starts the switchover gets the lion's share of the money to be made.) They're smart enough to realize this.
Pretty much all of the shooters in recent history were known to be mentally unbalanced prior to the shootings. An evaluation of the individual's mental state and school records would clarify if he was a threat or not.
The only effective predictor of future violent behavior is past violent behavior. (And by "violent behavior" I mean real, criminal, violence and credible threats of violence against others - not playing video games, laser tag, or football.) Mass murderers don't "just snap". They build up to wholesale violence in a growing series of acts of retail violence and to large law-breaking in a growing series of smaller law-breakings.
Those shooters had all committed MULTIPLE FELONIES and had no serious consequences. If the law had actually been ENFORCED against them they would not have been in a position to go on their final rampages (assuming they didn't straighten out their act the first time they found that breaking the law had consequences).
There's no need to look for "signs" and omens when some kid worries you. Just look for a pattern of CRIMES. If it's there, bust his butt for what he's actually done.
If not (which it doesn't sound like in this case), you ask them to discontinue the behavior, delete the maps, and go about school as usual. But instead, we give these kids a real reason to hate the faculty. Way to go guys.
If not, just leave him the heck alone. He invested a lot of his time building that game level. It's HIS PROPERTY. Force him to delete the maps and you've stolen something from him that cost him months of his life to create - for no purpose than to ease your mind. That, too, will give him a reason to actually, and validly, hate the school authorities.
If you believe you must take his work and destroy it "for a public purpose" (such as calming the hysterics on the school board) the "takings" clause of the Fifth Amendment says you must PAY him for it. What's a fair price? What could such a video game or plug-in bring on the national market?
Meanwhile, there's a very important point to keep in mind: It is NORMAL for people (especially adolescent boys) to fantasize about subjects that include violence, revenge, and war. It's part of deciding how to behave, of surviving threats, and of understanding the world, society, and his place in them. What is NOT normal is to ACT OUT these fantasies outside of the social and legal boundaries. THAT is the distinction between a criminal (including the criminally insane) and normal, law-abiding, upstanding citizens.
Aren't they basically the same thing? If it's obvious, there will probably be prior art, just because of its obviousness.
No, they're not.
"Prior art" means it's already been done that way, or exactly that way of doing it has been described publicly.
"Obvious" means that if a person "skilled in the art" sets out to actually do it, he's likely to come up with that way of doing it as one of his design options. It does NOT mean:
- It's already been done that way.
- That way of doing it has already been described.
There are a number of reasons an "obvious" invention would not be prior art. One of the biggest is that the technology might not have gotten to the point were it's practical to practice such an invention. Another is that the business environment may not yet make use of the invention a good business plan. Once these externalities are resolved and people are set to do the task, the "obvious" inventions are then detail-designed and implemented. Sometimes, once it becomes clear that they WILL be resolved, people begin planning and publishing.
Both of these apply here.
Once these externalities are resolved and people are set to do the task, the "obvious" inventions are then detail-designed and implemented. Sometimes, once it becomes clear that they WILL be resolved, people begin planning and publishing - for instance: in academia, or in standards organizations.
Both of these have happened here.
But if "obvious" is abandoned and "prior art" required, it becomes possible for an alert businessman to lock up the obvious ways of doing things by rushing to the patent office with a flurry of applications for every obvious solution that nobody has happened to have published on or done - often because it's so obvious they thought there was no point in mentioning it.
Think about it: What's "the internet way to build a phone company"?
- Use a stock streaming VoIP protocol to carry calls on the internet.
- Use VOIP/POTS bridge servers at price-convenient locations when you need to contact to a POTS phone (or connect two POTS phones to each other over your IP service).
- Use a database (such as DNS) to translate user identification information to routing information - which includes:
a) Phone number and preferred VoIP/POTS bridge address(es) when the called phone is on the POTS side.
b) Multiple possible sites and the preferred order for trying them (call forwarding)
c) A registration entry made by a portable wireless phone when it associated access point as it moved into range.
- Also use databases to authorize calls and record billing information when calls are made.
Obvious, right? If somebody set you to do this that's what YOU'D do, right?
Well a), b), and c) are what Verizon claimed are their non-obvious inventions - and got the patent office and a lower court to agree and almost KILL Vonage by blocking them from doing anything like it.
(I think they also claimed tying authorization and billing for VoIP or VoIP/POTS bridged calls into database authorization/billing systems, too.)
And TFA isn't about building anything up above the roadway, it's about using the air movement created by the cars themselves.
Which is the point of my followup.
There's much more to be had by going just a few feet higher, capturing ambient wind rather than stealing energy from the already-inefficient automobile power plants. Given the costs of constructing the bases, building a little higher give far more bang per buck.
So the scheme as contemplated is hair-brained, but a slight variant might be terrific. Enough to power the cars and trucks on the road with surplus to sell to the grid for stationary structures.
Slashdot Mirror
They've been around at LEAST since Ricochet (1994).
Spoken like a true American.
There's a world out there! Get to know it!
Well, Mr Globalist Hotshot:
Do you know where, say, the Yakima reservation is? Or the Washoe? Or the Blackfoot? Or the Navajo? Or any of more than a couple hundred others, owned and occupied by a nearly-as-large number of recognized tribes? (And that's just within the lower 48 states...)
Those tribes are all sovereign nations, with their own laws, and (depending on treaty terms) usually with their own law enforcement and sometimes with their own armies. (The Iroquois Confederacy, for instance, separately declared war on Germany during WW I - and jumped right into WW II because they'd never signed a peace treaty to end it.)
Until you are able to recite the names and locations of the North American tribes you have nothing to snoot about when some Americans don't concern themselves with the names and locations of all of yours.
Then only reason many of yours rate as "important" to us is your multi-century track record of getting into tribal warfare and then sucking us in to bail you out. You've been making such wars for millennia. Much of the current population of the US are descendants of people who came here to get AWAY from all that - and figure out how to live together in peace without tyrannical rulers and enforced, draconian, social homogenization.
As to whether that law restricts your free speech, the claim is that "hate speech" is not protected by the Constitution, particularly when it interferes with the right of others to worship freely. The logic is that allowing people to threaten religions is implicit State approval of those threats.
"Hate speech" and "hate crimes" are attempts to do an end-run around the constitutional guarantees. I suspect that they will eventually be struck down wherever they're raised up.
"Hate {foo}" is "{foo}" directed against some particular "suspect (of being discriminated against) category" - such as people of particular skin colors, religions, etc.
By creating enhanced punishments for perpetrators who victimize them, compared to perpetrators who victimize ordinary people for more ordinary reasons, "hate %ltfoo%gt" legislation creates privileged classes of people who are more protected by legal sanctions on their attackers. This violates the equal protection clause.
Why should it be a more-penalized crime to bash a black than to bash a white? To bash a gay than to bash a straight? (And please don't say "It's also a hate crime to bash a straight BECAUSE he's straight." because you KNOW it won't be enforced that way.) Why should it be a more-penalized crime to beat and rob an Oriental because he's Oriental than to beat and rob a landlord because he's a landlord? And so on.
Further, by making "religion" one of these categories - especially by making "interfering with a religion" a specific crime - the legislators have violated the First Amendment's "Establishment" clause: They've made organizations that are religious more protected than organizations with similar characteristics that are not.
Why should it be a more-penalized act to interfere with a Catholic group than to interfere with Bhddhists? With Agnostics? With Objectivists?
Finally, "Hate {foo}" crimes are "thought crimes": The same act is punished more or less depending on the ideology of the actor. It's appropriate to punish more for executing a pre-planned attack than for attacking in a temporary burst of outrage, and still less for damage caused by accident due to negligence. But beyond that the motivation is immaterial. Why should killing or maming somebody because "I didn't like his looks." be punished more because the aspect of "his looks" is the color of his skin than it is the twist of his lips? Maiming is maiming. Killing is killing. Robbing is robbing. The courts' time need not be wasted trying to divine the internal state of the perpetrator - or the police departments' time trying to beat it out of him - just to punish some people who "think wrongly" more than others who do the same harm.
And we all know this because it's a secret right?
We know it because a few people who got that far said "this is bull****" and quit.
And those that survive are mostly trying to hide from the cult's retaliation.
When a [...] sheriff showing up with a search warrant [is a] member[] of the cult. [...] When the warrant specifies "documents" but the sheriff leaves with computers including screens, printers and even phones.
And when the sheriff runs the jail where you will cool your heels while waiting for your appeal to be heard...
And when part of the reason you were picketing them in the first place is that you know they declare people "enemies" and attack them extra-legally, and that you have reason to believe they have killed a number of their declared "enemies"...
In such a situation, with such evidence that you believed to be true, would YOU believe you might have a "fatal accident" if you allowed yourself to be taken into custody?
Another problem with most rebate programs is the requirement that it be installed by a licensed contractor - without the exception (available for construction but NOT for the rebates) that allows a homeowner to do the installation himself (with appropriate permits and inspections).
The price difference can easily eat more than the entire "rebate".
Thank you. Those are very good reasons to spend the time on making reasoned comments.
There are just about 24 hours left for the public to submit comments against REAL ID.
Just for our information (and inspiration), what is the point of these comments?
Will they have any effect on whether, or how, the law will be enforced? If so, now? Or are they just an opportunity to blow off steam and feel good about having "done something"?
... other libertarians think that the individual unborn child is also sovereign and is deserving of the same human rights as everyone else...
However not just libertarians but people of a large number of other political persuasions recognize the concept that a slave has a right to be free - even if the slaveowner's must be killed to accomplish this liberation.
By this argument a woman would have an uncontested right to terminate a pregnancy at any time, despite the "unborn child"'s state as a "sovereign individual".
Once the child is capable of independent viability it can be argued that its own rights mandate the MEANS of terminating the pregnancy might be limited to those that attempt to preserve the child's life - within the constraint of not adding risk to the life of the mother.
= = = =
Non-libertarian arguments based on the "personhood" of the fetus/unborn child bring up the question "when does it stop being anonymous tissue and become a person". My own preference for that time is "when the brain begins to function in a human fashion". (Before that you're dealing with either religious arguments over souls or claims that genetic potential = actuality which could justify rape and give cancers human rights.)
A slippery slope that would lead to infanticide and euthanasia of the mentally "sub-par" can be avoided by pushing the cut-point back to the date when the nerve cells of the brain begin to interconnect. (Before that the brain is no more a "person" than a kit of chips and boards is a "computer".)
Interestingly, this occurs about a week into the third trimester - just about the point where the Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, put the cutpoint between the sovereign interests of the mother and her doctor/patient relationship on one hand and the state's interest in preserving the life and rights of a new citizen on the other.
No, it's not.
Polywell operates by creating a converging potential well of tens of thousands of volts and dropping ions into it. At roughly 11,000 degrees kelvin per electron volt that's one HELL of a hot spot.
Tens of kilovolts, on the other hand, are easy to handle - in a near vacuum. The trick is to achieve sufficient DENSITY in that near vacuum and keep the particles at that temperature and pressure for enough TIME to end up with more fusion energy harvested than you put in to set uop the system.
If I were to make a site with a tongue in cheek name "The gun murderers hideout" which could contain information about various guns and such should I be arrested for killing someone with a gun?
Of course not.
But if you later were under suspicion for murdering somebody using a gun, you would find it harder to convince a jury that it was an accident rather than premeditation than if you'd called your site "the target shooters' clubhouse".
Bet that the prosecutor will bring it up in the portion of the trial where he's arguing intent.
Americans get squeamish about massive layoffs, but investors certainly do not.
Yet it's Americans that vote.
It's the start of presidential primary season. The hottest issue among the bloggers in the Republican primary is illegal immigration - mainly its effects on blue-collar unemployment levels and pay scales.
Now we have this - and the issues of outsourcing, H1B legal "guest workers", and their effect on white-collar unemployment levels and pay scales.
How nice that this came up NOW, when it can affect the earliest stages of the election. B-)
... if you read the linked story, you'll see that Cringely is quoting his "many friends" at IBM.
That's not what news people would term a reliable source.
It's what the mainstream media would call "confirmed by multiple sources". THEY'd consider it reliable if they were the ones publishing these "leaks".
You are aware of how Indians treat cattle, aren't you?
You mean like the ones who put a wooden collar on a calf so it can't suckle, eat forage, or drink water, thus causing it to starve to death - because they aren't allowed to actually kill it, but CAN eat it if it "dies naturally"?
Calling it "Pirate Bay" was just asking for lawsuits.
So IBM has come up with a manufacturing method using self-assembling molecules to produce regular arrays of 20 nanometer objects on the surface of a silicon wafer with near-perfect yeild. (I presume, since "growth" was involved, it would be possible to use it to construct similarly-spaced objects of sizes within a factor of about 3 to 4 of the size they chose for this process.)
And yesterday we saw a slashdot article referencing work at Rice U, Los Almos Labs, and others, where 5 to 8 nanometer quantum dots on the surface of phovoltaic cells could significantly multiply the efficiency (perhaps into the 60% range) by efficiently creating multiple electron-hole pairs per incoming photon.
Seems to me the two are just ASKING to be combined into an inexpensive manufacturing process for high-efficiency solar panels.
Doubling to quadrupling the output of solar panels while keeping the cost in the current ballpark might push photovoltaic past the cost-breakeven point compared to grid power for rural and even suburban housing loads. And that could lead to enough production to bring in additional economies of scale and drive the price point farther.
This could be big.
Sorry, got bwk and Fred Thompson mixed. B-(
I use a personal methodology where:
- Test harnesses are REQUIRED during development (including at unit-test levels) to determine that the program and the individual modules are all working as intended. (I include test passage in the makefile targeting, so a test failure kills the build. This catches introduced bugs from mods right away.)
- Debuggers are allowed only to diagnose why something is failing.
- Each bit of code has to be correctly covered (not just executed) and its correct behavior verified by a test to be considered "finished". Thus:
- Coding tends to resemble a depth-first tree-walk leaving behind debugged code that is almost never revisited. (Like growing a perfect crystal.)
I find that, while debuggers are occasionally handy, with the "prove it's right" test harness in place there's so much visibility that they are usually more trouble than they're worth. When visibility is insufficient, compiling and linking a module-level mod is so quick that it's usually easier to stick in temporary debugging output statements than fire up a debugger.
By the way: The downside of this methodology is that it's so blazingly fast that it is perceived as slow: I report a finished, debugged component or project in about three times as much time as typical developers report a successful initial (hello-general-outline-world) build or a single debugging iteration. So managers make an apples-and-oranges comparison between my completed projects and others' first-cut efforts and bug-fix cycles. This leads to comments like: "'Rod' took about three times as long as most programmers to come up with a first version - but his first try usually worked." B-(
... here's your stone age hammer. There's a problem over there, try hitting it with the hammer. I'm sure it will look like a nail to you.
What's your point?
I wasn't proposing any solution to anything. I was just poionting out that the previous poster's claim of avoided costs didn't produce an economic incentive on individual decisions.
Dealing with "tragedy of the commons" situations requires group activity: Social pressure, voluntary agreement, a collection of individual moral decisions (finding value in "doing the right thing", even if it costs more unless most other people do it, too), or government action (either to map the hidden costs into real costs or to impose centrally-planned decisions).
Right now we're in the stage of determining if there really is a problem that requires such costs to be borne, with those convinced there is making individual moral decisions and using social pressure.
Don't forget to factor in the externalized costs (air pollution, global warming, terrorism, your children getting sent to Iraq, etc). The price you pay at the pump isn't the only price there is to be paid.
But you don't pay it AT THE PUMP.
And if YOU decide to buy the low-pollution high-price alternative you don't get the benefit of EVERYBODY ELSE doing the same thing. So you still pay the externalized costs AND pay for the "high-priced spread".
The externalized prices are a tragedy of the commons (in the economic-theory sense - the original T.O.T.C. was a fake) and they don't affect individual cost-driven incentives.
I notice oil companies are heavily involved in solar energy, are they securing their future and/or slowing solar tech down?
Oil companies recognized a long time ago that much of their business was selling energy - or the means to obtain usable energy. And long before the whole "global warming" flap (back during the last "here comes an ice age" flap, actually) they recognized that using their products caused pollution, and people were looking for cleaner ways to get energy - which might reduce their market.
It makes sense for them to be able to make money from the big-business end of selling people the means to get usable energy. That way, if the market suddenly shifts to something else, they get to make money off that to compensate for the lost revenue on the old stuff. And if research is needed they had a LOT of money to invest in it - just as they invest in exploration for more oil deposits.
So they did a lot of research on ways to make money by enabling people to make energy OTHER than by pumping, refining, and selling oil.
One of those was photovoltaic panels. ARCO, for instance, did a bunch of work on that, eventually bringing quality modules to market at prices that make them practical in a large number of locations. (That operation has been absorbed into BP Solar if I have my players sorted out correctly.)
They'll be happy to sell you oil to burn in engines. They'll be happy to sell you photovoltaic modules. (They'll probably be happy to sell you fusion engines if they ever work out, too.)
Trying to keep solar energy out of the market does them no good. If somebody else comes up with something practical and they CAN'T stop it, they lose revenue on oil and don't get compensating revenue from the replacement. So their best strategy is to be in that market with a product competitive enough to give them significant market share, at a price that gives them a decent return but doesn't cripple the consumer. (And first company that makes a breakthrough that starts the switchover gets the lion's share of the money to be made.) They're smart enough to realize this.
Pretty much all of the shooters in recent history were known to be mentally unbalanced prior to the shootings. An evaluation of the individual's mental state and school records would clarify if he was a threat or not.
The only effective predictor of future violent behavior is past violent behavior. (And by "violent behavior" I mean real, criminal, violence and credible threats of violence against others - not playing video games, laser tag, or football.) Mass murderers don't "just snap". They build up to wholesale violence in a growing series of acts of retail violence and to large law-breaking in a growing series of smaller law-breakings.
Those shooters had all committed MULTIPLE FELONIES and had no serious consequences. If the law had actually been ENFORCED against them they would not have been in a position to go on their final rampages (assuming they didn't straighten out their act the first time they found that breaking the law had consequences).
There's no need to look for "signs" and omens when some kid worries you. Just look for a pattern of CRIMES. If it's there, bust his butt for what he's actually done.
If not (which it doesn't sound like in this case), you ask them to discontinue the behavior, delete the maps, and go about school as usual. But instead, we give these kids a real reason to hate the faculty. Way to go guys.
If not, just leave him the heck alone. He invested a lot of his time building that game level. It's HIS PROPERTY. Force him to delete the maps and you've stolen something from him that cost him months of his life to create - for no purpose than to ease your mind. That, too, will give him a reason to actually, and validly, hate the school authorities.
If you believe you must take his work and destroy it "for a public purpose" (such as calming the hysterics on the school board) the "takings" clause of the Fifth Amendment says you must PAY him for it. What's a fair price? What could such a video game or plug-in bring on the national market?
Meanwhile, there's a very important point to keep in mind: It is NORMAL for people (especially adolescent boys) to fantasize about subjects that include violence, revenge, and war. It's part of deciding how to behave, of surviving threats, and of understanding the world, society, and his place in them. What is NOT normal is to ACT OUT these fantasies outside of the social and legal boundaries. THAT is the distinction between a criminal (including the criminally insane) and normal, law-abiding, upstanding citizens.
Ok, so this is going back to the lower courts and the SC managed to side-step the deeper aspects of this case...
Seems to me they hit the nail squarely on the head.
so it would be interesting to hear from the legal experts as to what broader ramifications we could expect to see from a Vonage win in a re-trial...
IANAL but it seems to me that SCOTUS just pulled the rug out from under all the bogus "do this well-understood thing but ON THE INTERNET" patents.
Verizon vs. Vonage might be the snowball that starts the avalanche.
Aren't they basically the same thing? If it's obvious, there will probably be prior art, just because of its obviousness.
No, they're not.
"Prior art" means it's already been done that way, or exactly that way of doing it has been described publicly.
"Obvious" means that if a person "skilled in the art" sets out to actually do it, he's likely to come up with that way of doing it as one of his design options. It does NOT mean:
- It's already been done that way.
- That way of doing it has already been described.
There are a number of reasons an "obvious" invention would not be prior art. One of the biggest is that the technology might not have gotten to the point were it's practical to practice such an invention. Another is that the business environment may not yet make use of the invention a good business plan. Once these externalities are resolved and people are set to do the task, the "obvious" inventions are then detail-designed and implemented. Sometimes, once it becomes clear that they WILL be resolved, people begin planning and publishing.
Both of these apply here.
Once these externalities are resolved and people are set to do the task, the "obvious" inventions are then detail-designed and implemented. Sometimes, once it becomes clear that they WILL be resolved, people begin planning and publishing - for instance: in academia, or in standards organizations.
Both of these have happened here.
But if "obvious" is abandoned and "prior art" required, it becomes possible for an alert businessman to lock up the obvious ways of doing things by rushing to the patent office with a flurry of applications for every obvious solution that nobody has happened to have published on or done - often because it's so obvious they thought there was no point in mentioning it.
Think about it: What's "the internet way to build a phone company"?
- Use a stock streaming VoIP protocol to carry calls on the internet.
- Use VOIP/POTS bridge servers at price-convenient locations when you need to contact to a POTS phone (or connect two POTS phones to each other over your IP service).
- Use a database (such as DNS) to translate user identification information to routing information - which includes:
a) Phone number and preferred VoIP/POTS bridge address(es) when the called phone is on the POTS side.
b) Multiple possible sites and the preferred order for trying them (call forwarding)
c) A registration entry made by a portable wireless phone when it associated access point as it moved into range.
- Also use databases to authorize calls and record billing information when calls are made.
Obvious, right? If somebody set you to do this that's what YOU'D do, right?
Well a), b), and c) are what Verizon claimed are their non-obvious inventions - and got the patent office and a lower court to agree and almost KILL Vonage by blocking them from doing anything like it.
(I think they also claimed tying authorization and billing for VoIP or VoIP/POTS bridged calls into database authorization/billing systems, too.)
And TFA isn't about building anything up above the roadway, it's about using the air movement created by the cars themselves.
Which is the point of my followup.
There's much more to be had by going just a few feet higher, capturing ambient wind rather than stealing energy from the already-inefficient automobile power plants. Given the costs of constructing the bases, building a little higher give far more bang per buck.
So the scheme as contemplated is hair-brained, but a slight variant might be terrific. Enough to power the cars and trucks on the road with surplus to sell to the grid for stationary structures.