Thanks for posting the PDF link. I'm reading it, and cringing...
‘‘(b) REQUIRED STATEMENTS.—An oath or declara-
tion under subsection (a) shall contain statements that— ..‘‘(1) the application was made or was author- ..ized to be made by the affiant or declarant; and ..‘‘(2) such individual believes himself or herself ..to be the original inventor or an original joint inven- ..tor of a claimed invention in the application. .‘‘(c) ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS.—The Director ..may specify additional information relating to the inventor ..and the invention that is required to be included in an ..oath or declaration under subsection (a).
‘‘(d) SUBSTITUTE STATEMENT.—
‘‘(1) IN GENERAL.—In lieu of executing an oath
or declaration under subsection (a), the applicant for
patent may provide a substitute statement under the
circumstances described in paragraph (2) and such
additional circumstances that the Director may
specify by regulation.
‘‘(2) PERMITTED CIRCUMSTANCES.—A sub-
stitute statement under paragraph (1) is permitted
with respect to any individual who— ..‘‘(A) is unable to file the oath or declara- ..tion under subsection (a) because the indi- ..vidual— ....‘‘(i) is deceased; ....‘‘(ii) is under legal incapacity; or ....'‘(iii) cannot be found or reached after diligent effort; or ..‘‘(B) is under an obligation to assign the ..invention but has refused to make the oath or ..declaration required under subsection (a).
So apparently dead people will be allowed to file for patents, because (obviously) they can be incentivised to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. ugh.
Compare this to car racing. For a typical SCCA single-race weekend, you pay about $300 for your entry fee. That money buys you access to the facility... approximately the same "fuckall" available at Burning Man. You bring your race car, food, water, fuel. You participate in the event - most events require one or more representatives from your team to volunteer as corner workers, timing & scoring, tech inspection, etc. At the end of the event, you pick up your stuff and leave. I have friends who thing racing is categorically insane for the reasons you mention - lots of work to drive around in circles for a weekend.
These events are explicitly transient (both BM and racing.) BM is not a permanent activity that would otherwise be sustainable. And if you don't see the significance and spirituality of the closing event at Burning Man, might I suggest that you just book a room in Vegas instead?
Here on the East Coast, our building codes don't account for earthquakes. Hell, many of our structures pre-date the Louisiana Purchase and the acquisition of most of the southwest from Mexico. Modern construction methods here allow the use of toothpicks and chewing gum as structural components... because "we don't get earthquakes here."
When you experience an earthquake east of the Mississippi, the frog says "get out."
One of my favorite statements - "Your rule-of-law is only as valid as your ability to enforce it at the end of a sharp stick."
This seems to apply here as well. If you intend to declare independence/autonomy, you need to be completely self-sufficient. And honestly, I don't think the US or British Navy is the big threat here. A drug cartel would looove easy pickin's like this. They have "navies" with submarines too.
At the end of the day, TSI's business plan is crap. They have -zero- resources with which to trade. Confinementless aquaculture? Whoops, the delishus fishus seem to have swam off. Damn. Children of the Sea orphanage? "What investment has the highest return of all? It's the human mind. " Profitable only if you harvest *all* the internal organs, not just the brain.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that the iPad Steering Wheel Mount is a prank. Overall, the webste looks like a legitimate business offering. At the bottom of the About page, there's a reference to a patent for Duct Tape. I guess that's the "funny," or possibly the guy gets a good chuckle at irate emails sent to him.
If your body parts are spread out all over the road, you are unlikely to care about the condition of the Thorium containment vessel... or anything else for that matter.
Yes, there would be a crash-rated containment vessel for the Thorium. What? You were planning to store the Thorium pellet in the cup holder between the front seats?
And while we're at it, let's compare the scale of the Fukushima release to that possible from your Thorium-car. Release estimates vary pretty wildly, but let's use a low-end number of 50 million Curies. A Curie is the radioactive decay equivalent of one gram of Radium-226 (decays per second.) So Fukushima released at least the equivalent of 50,000 kg of Radium-226 into the environment. Your 10 g Thorium pellet is, what, 10 orders of magnitude smaller than that?* So for an equivalent Fukushima release, every car on the planet would need to be Thorium powered, and every one would need to simultaneously be involved in a containment-vessel-rupturing accident. I rather like the distributed containment vessel architecture from a safety perspective.
* - assuming Radium-226 and Thorium-whatever have equivalent radioactive decay rates, which they don't.
Researcher: The girl-scout-derivative graphene is also delicious. Girl Scout: That's good! Researcher: But it is exceedingly expensive, even compared to the price of your cookies. Girl Scout: That's bad! Researcher: But each short ton of graphene is delivered with a free box of Tagalongs. Girl Scout: That's good! Researcher: The Tagalongs are similarly cursed. Girl Scout: Cursed? Researcher: Delicious but exceedingly expensive. Girl Scout: Oh, that's bad. Researcher: Don't get me started on the Samoas. Girl Scout: Can I go home now?
We're certainly buying the RD-180 engines from the Russians. I don't believe Pratt & Whitney is manufacturing them yet, though they have a license to do so.
Kerosene/RP-1 is much, much easier to handle, and in spite of the lower Isp, presents a more cost effective solution from a system perspective. Optimizing the engine to run on LH2 for maximum Isp imparts an enormous programmatic cost. Would have been more cost effective to use the lower Isp engine. That's a program management failure, because a collection of point-optimized elements rarely results in an optimal system solution.
Autocad is fundamentally a 2-D drawing program, with some 3-D capabilities spackled on top. It excels at 2-D line drawings, like those found in architectural plans (plat view, elevation, etc.) It struggles with 3-D solids, as they are a serious afterthought - move a drilled hole for me, please. Solidworks is 3-D at it's core, so it's a bit clunky to manage 2-D drawings that aren't derived from 3-D sources. You're burdened with the 3-D support overhead when doing a 2-D only drawing.
Autocad is a claw hammer. Solidworks is a ball-pein hammer. They can both "hammer," but each is better for a particular job. You should choose the appropriate tool depending on the objective. Do you need to pull nails, or shape sheet metal? (sorry, no car analogies today.)
I've been using Autocad since about 1985... back when the UI had to be toggled between the text command window and the graphics display window. I also currently use Solidworks.
The last time I paid for pr0n, (needed supplementary materials for my brother's bachelor party,) I made the mistake of paying with a credit card. Within a week, I was receiving rather graphic advertisements in the mail from all manner of adult material suppliers. Apparently I had been classified as "a live one," and every money-grubbing distributor was out to get a cut of the action. It actually felt a bit desperate, honestly, as there were many teaser introductory offers just to get me on the hook. Being single at the time, I really can't say I objected to the additional reading material. However, that was pre-wife and pre-kids. Now, I really don't want the kids retrieving the mail, asking what the white envelope labeled "Up Your Ass Productions" contains.
Selling my purchasing info to *anyone* is a mistake, regardless of the industry, and it pretty much guarantees that you'll lose my future business. Maybe the stats favor the immediate gain over the future "maybe" business, but it changes my "maybe" into a solid "no." I just don't see the folks in the pr0n business having the discipline to pass up the quick buck for a stable business model. So I don't give them my money (i.e. I don't reward bad behavior.) I don't want the follow-up push in this case, and it has nothing to do with social stigma.
However, at the end of the specified term, the work is to enter the public domain for the benefit of all. That part has been stolen from us via creative bait-and-switch legislation. Retroactive copyright extension has made the term effectively "infinity - 1."
For example, I would like to use some artwork from coin-op video games manufactured in 1980. The artwork is a collage of iconic arcade game characters - an original work by me which includes derivative elements. I wish to sell said artwork on a t-shirt. The machines has been out of production since 1981... 30 years ago. Under the current US copyright legislation, another 65 years must pass before Atari can't sue me for copyright infringement. I would be unbelievably fortunate to live that long.
I you wanted to write a book on the pop-culture impact of the Coca Cola soda bottle (no pun intended,) you'd still need to get copyright permission from Coca Cola to use the imagery, short of technical schematics. You can't create your own "pop culture" art from the era as an alternative. Writing a PhD thesis would be fine - it's an academic use - but as soon as you publish it in exchange for money, you run afoul of our busted copyright system. And this bustedness will persist until 100 or so years after you and I are dead.
Copyright is supposed to be a contract between we-the-people and authors/artists/performers. They get a limited-time monopoly to control their work, then it reverts to the public domain to benefit everyone. So, exactly, when to we benefit from our part of the bargain?
You put the fire extinguisher in your house by choice... or you may choose to throw them out. You still have the freedom to make that choice, no matter how irrational I or the gub'ment may think it is.
However, there is an analogous intrusion creeping into home building. Many municipalities, mine included, now require the installation of a residential sprinkler system with new construction. That *is* the TSA-intrusion-equivalent forced onto us by the government. You must have this sprinkler system or you are denied a building permit. Hey looky, that URL is disturbingly familiar...
Picard: Mr. LaForge, we're having trouble receiving the signal from the Very Far Away Observatory. Can you boost the signal. LaForge (v.o.): Sir, we're already using a holographic multi-modal optical receiver.We're operating near the theoretical limit. Picard: Prehaps you could route secondary power through the replicators in the galley on deck 12. LaForge (v.o.): Uhm... yeah... I'll get right on that. LaForge out.
Power v. Bandwidth is always one of the spacecraft design tradeoffs. For signals with really low power at the receiver, smaller bandwidth can be beneficial because you can use filters (physical and DSP) to improve your SNR and your chances of recovering your data. Generally, you can't evaluate each piece in the comm link individually. The trick is to find a solution that meets your power budget, link budget, bandwidth objective, mass budget, volume budget... all simultaneously.
If you want some interesting docs on space communications, check out the pubs from the CDSDS.
Private Joker: Any women or children?
Door Gunner: Sometimes!
Private Joker: How can you shoot women or children?
Door Gunner: Easy! Ya just don't lead 'em so much! Ain't war hell?
So the raw audio telemetry collected from a singing performance is "raw data," is certainly factual, and cannot be copyrighted? I believe the entire recording industry would disagree with you.
As for my driving being a "performance," my passengers certainly think so. They often shout adulations such as "My god, you're going to get us all killed!"
Like advertisements, if we ignore them, they'll disappear.
Advertisements and spam will only go away if the cost to the originator damages his business case. Ignoring the problem is an attempt at symptomatic relief, and does nothing about the root cause of the problem.
Don't forget to include the part about the car dealership being able to park their cars on private property anywhere in the county - the first 10-12 feet of "right of way" along the road doesn't really belong to you any more, though you're obligated to pay taxes for it and to maintain it. In my parents' community, the local cable company was granted eminent domain by the city government to run buried cable services *anywhere* on private property, at the cable company's discretion (i.e. to cost-shift installation expenses onto the private land owner with no compensation.) So there's a five foot strip of land across their back yard they're prohibited from using (no fences, no outbuildings, no digging) because of the cable install. The city treats it like a municipal utility, when in fact it is *very* not.
If it makes you feel any better, I'm crying for me too. There are many, many of us who would like you and the rest of the Technology Fetishists to take your "richer experience" and go play somewhere else. I don't want a multimedia "experience" when I'm looking for an owner's manual on the Sears website. I don't want you shoving GPU-assisted targeted advertising at me at every possible juncture.
The forced upgrade march is also unwelcome, for reasons that should be obvious, but apparently aren't. I've upgraded software tools, only to discover that the new version has abandoned compatibility with an older version, which is a catastrophe if that older version is part of a currently-shipping product or service. My production lifecycles exceed typical software lifecycles by an order of magnitude. XP? Yep, still running that along side of several Win2K machines. You may find that unpalatable, but upgrading to Win7 would break functionality (and has been demonstrated in a sandbox, so that last part isn't just conjecture.)
As for the URL bar... "Hey! I was using that!" I use my browser for much more than just surfing the net for pr0n. My local firewall and router have admin interfaces that require a dotted-quad entry in the URL bar. No, I can't just click the "Microsoft Networks" icon and find them... funny, they're not Microsoft products. Similarly, I can force a SFTP session to my file server by typing into the URL bar. Often times, I'll manually edit the displayd URL to rapidly traverse the directory tree. Just because you find it irrelevant, doesn't mean I do.
Slashdot Mirror
So apparently dead people will be allowed to file for patents, because (obviously) they can be incentivised to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. ugh.
God Mode + shoot-anything-that-moves = catharsis
What, the currently-implemented hand signals aren't effective enough?
Compare this to car racing. For a typical SCCA single-race weekend, you pay about $300 for your entry fee. That money buys you access to the facility ... approximately the same "fuckall" available at Burning Man. You bring your race car, food, water, fuel. You participate in the event - most events require one or more representatives from your team to volunteer as corner workers, timing & scoring, tech inspection, etc. At the end of the event, you pick up your stuff and leave. I have friends who thing racing is categorically insane for the reasons you mention - lots of work to drive around in circles for a weekend.
These events are explicitly transient (both BM and racing.) BM is not a permanent activity that would otherwise be sustainable. And if you don't see the significance and spirituality of the closing event at Burning Man, might I suggest that you just book a room in Vegas instead?
Beaus and their Debutantes?
Here on the East Coast, our building codes don't account for earthquakes. Hell, many of our structures pre-date the Louisiana Purchase and the acquisition of most of the southwest from Mexico. Modern construction methods here allow the use of toothpicks and chewing gum as structural components ... because "we don't get earthquakes here."
When you experience an earthquake east of the Mississippi, the frog says "get out."
One of my favorite statements - "Your rule-of-law is only as valid as your ability to enforce it at the end of a sharp stick."
This seems to apply here as well. If you intend to declare independence/autonomy, you need to be completely self-sufficient. And honestly, I don't think the US or British Navy is the big threat here. A drug cartel would looove easy pickin's like this. They have "navies" with submarines too.
At the end of the day, TSI's business plan is crap. They have -zero- resources with which to trade. Confinementless aquaculture? Whoops, the delishus fishus seem to have swam off. Damn. Children of the Sea orphanage? "What investment has the highest return of all? It's the human mind. " Profitable only if you harvest *all* the internal organs, not just the brain.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that the iPad Steering Wheel Mount is a prank. Overall, the webste looks like a legitimate business offering. At the bottom of the About page, there's a reference to a patent for Duct Tape. I guess that's the "funny," or possibly the guy gets a good chuckle at irate emails sent to him.
If your body parts are spread out all over the road, you are unlikely to care about the condition of the Thorium containment vessel ... or anything else for that matter.
Yes, there would be a crash-rated containment vessel for the Thorium. What? You were planning to store the Thorium pellet in the cup holder between the front seats?
And while we're at it, let's compare the scale of the Fukushima release to that possible from your Thorium-car. Release estimates vary pretty wildly, but let's use a low-end number of 50 million Curies. A Curie is the radioactive decay equivalent of one gram of Radium-226 (decays per second.) So Fukushima released at least the equivalent of 50,000 kg of Radium-226 into the environment. Your 10 g Thorium pellet is, what, 10 orders of magnitude smaller than that?* So for an equivalent Fukushima release, every car on the planet would need to be Thorium powered, and every one would need to simultaneously be involved in a containment-vessel-rupturing accident. I rather like the distributed containment vessel architecture from a safety perspective.
* - assuming Radium-226 and Thorium-whatever have equivalent radioactive decay rates, which they don't.
Researcher: The girl-scout-derivative graphene is also delicious.
Girl Scout: That's good!
Researcher: But it is exceedingly expensive, even compared to the price of your cookies.
Girl Scout: That's bad!
Researcher: But each short ton of graphene is delivered with a free box of Tagalongs.
Girl Scout: That's good!
Researcher: The Tagalongs are similarly cursed.
Girl Scout: Cursed?
Researcher: Delicious but exceedingly expensive.
Girl Scout: Oh, that's bad.
Researcher: Don't get me started on the Samoas.
Girl Scout: Can I go home now?
We're certainly buying the RD-180 engines from the Russians. I don't believe Pratt & Whitney is manufacturing them yet, though they have a license to do so.
Kerosene/RP-1 is much, much easier to handle, and in spite of the lower Isp, presents a more cost effective solution from a system perspective. Optimizing the engine to run on LH2 for maximum Isp imparts an enormous programmatic cost. Would have been more cost effective to use the lower Isp engine. That's a program management failure, because a collection of point-optimized elements rarely results in an optimal system solution.
Autocad is fundamentally a 2-D drawing program, with some 3-D capabilities spackled on top. It excels at 2-D line drawings, like those found in architectural plans (plat view, elevation, etc.) It struggles with 3-D solids, as they are a serious afterthought - move a drilled hole for me, please. Solidworks is 3-D at it's core, so it's a bit clunky to manage 2-D drawings that aren't derived from 3-D sources. You're burdened with the 3-D support overhead when doing a 2-D only drawing.
... back when the UI had to be toggled between the text command window and the graphics display window. I also currently use Solidworks.
Autocad is a claw hammer. Solidworks is a ball-pein hammer. They can both "hammer," but each is better for a particular job. You should choose the appropriate tool depending on the objective. Do you need to pull nails, or shape sheet metal? (sorry, no car analogies today.)
I've been using Autocad since about 1985
The last time I paid for pr0n, (needed supplementary materials for my brother's bachelor party,) I made the mistake of paying with a credit card. Within a week, I was receiving rather graphic advertisements in the mail from all manner of adult material suppliers. Apparently I had been classified as "a live one," and every money-grubbing distributor was out to get a cut of the action. It actually felt a bit desperate, honestly, as there were many teaser introductory offers just to get me on the hook. Being single at the time, I really can't say I objected to the additional reading material. However, that was pre-wife and pre-kids. Now, I really don't want the kids retrieving the mail, asking what the white envelope labeled "Up Your Ass Productions" contains.
Selling my purchasing info to *anyone* is a mistake, regardless of the industry, and it pretty much guarantees that you'll lose my future business. Maybe the stats favor the immediate gain over the future "maybe" business, but it changes my "maybe" into a solid "no." I just don't see the folks in the pr0n business having the discipline to pass up the quick buck for a stable business model. So I don't give them my money (i.e. I don't reward bad behavior.) I don't want the follow-up push in this case, and it has nothing to do with social stigma.
The availability of books/etc is not the "benefit" in question. It is *a* benefit, and is explicitly called out as an objective of the copyright legislation - "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
... 30 years ago. Under the current US copyright legislation, another 65 years must pass before Atari can't sue me for copyright infringement. I would be unbelievably fortunate to live that long.
However, at the end of the specified term, the work is to enter the public domain for the benefit of all. That part has been stolen from us via creative bait-and-switch legislation. Retroactive copyright extension has made the term effectively "infinity - 1."
For example, I would like to use some artwork from coin-op video games manufactured in 1980. The artwork is a collage of iconic arcade game characters - an original work by me which includes derivative elements. I wish to sell said artwork on a t-shirt. The machines has been out of production since 1981
I you wanted to write a book on the pop-culture impact of the Coca Cola soda bottle (no pun intended,) you'd still need to get copyright permission from Coca Cola to use the imagery, short of technical schematics. You can't create your own "pop culture" art from the era as an alternative. Writing a PhD thesis would be fine - it's an academic use - but as soon as you publish it in exchange for money, you run afoul of our busted copyright system. And this bustedness will persist until 100 or so years after you and I are dead.
Copyright is supposed to be a contract between we-the-people and authors/artists/performers. They get a limited-time monopoly to control their work, then it reverts to the public domain to benefit everyone. So, exactly, when to we benefit from our part of the bargain?
You put the fire extinguisher in your house by choice ... or you may choose to throw them out. You still have the freedom to make that choice, no matter how irrational I or the gub'ment may think it is.
...
However, there is an analogous intrusion creeping into home building. Many municipalities, mine included, now require the installation of a residential sprinkler system with new construction. That *is* the TSA-intrusion-equivalent forced onto us by the government. You must have this sprinkler system or you are denied a building permit. Hey looky, that URL is disturbingly familiar
[INT. ENTERPRISE BRIDGE]
... yeah ... I'll get right on that. LaForge out.
... all simultaneously.
Picard: Mr. LaForge, we're having trouble receiving the signal from the Very Far Away Observatory. Can you boost the signal.
LaForge (v.o.): Sir, we're already using a holographic multi-modal optical receiver.We're operating near the theoretical limit.
Picard: Prehaps you could route secondary power through the replicators in the galley on deck 12.
LaForge (v.o.): Uhm
Power v. Bandwidth is always one of the spacecraft design tradeoffs. For signals with really low power at the receiver, smaller bandwidth can be beneficial because you can use filters (physical and DSP) to improve your SNR and your chances of recovering your data. Generally, you can't evaluate each piece in the comm link individually. The trick is to find a solution that meets your power budget, link budget, bandwidth objective, mass budget, volume budget
If you want some interesting docs on space communications, check out the pubs from the CDSDS.
Private Joker: Any women or children?
Door Gunner: Sometimes!
Private Joker: How can you shoot women or children?
Door Gunner: Easy! Ya just don't lead 'em so much! Ain't war hell?
"Anthropomorphic Climate Change" ... Mother Nature is not amused.
So the raw audio telemetry collected from a singing performance is "raw data," is certainly factual, and cannot be copyrighted? I believe the entire recording industry would disagree with you.
As for my driving being a "performance," my passengers certainly think so. They often shout adulations such as "My god, you're going to get us all killed!"
My driving "performance" is a copyrighted work. 'Nuff said.
Advertisements and spam will only go away if the cost to the originator damages his business case. Ignoring the problem is an attempt at symptomatic relief, and does nothing about the root cause of the problem.
Don't forget to include the part about the car dealership being able to park their cars on private property anywhere in the county - the first 10-12 feet of "right of way" along the road doesn't really belong to you any more, though you're obligated to pay taxes for it and to maintain it. In my parents' community, the local cable company was granted eminent domain by the city government to run buried cable services *anywhere* on private property, at the cable company's discretion (i.e. to cost-shift installation expenses onto the private land owner with no compensation.) So there's a five foot strip of land across their back yard they're prohibited from using (no fences, no outbuildings, no digging) because of the cable install. The city treats it like a municipal utility, when in fact it is *very* not.
I can certainly use a bookmark ... once I've typed the dotted-quad into the URL bar. Getting it in there in the first place is the issue.
If it makes you feel any better, I'm crying for me too. There are many, many of us who would like you and the rest of the Technology Fetishists to take your "richer experience" and go play somewhere else. I don't want a multimedia "experience" when I'm looking for an owner's manual on the Sears website. I don't want you shoving GPU-assisted targeted advertising at me at every possible juncture.
... "Hey! I was using that!" I use my browser for much more than just surfing the net for pr0n. My local firewall and router have admin interfaces that require a dotted-quad entry in the URL bar. No, I can't just click the "Microsoft Networks" icon and find them ... funny, they're not Microsoft products. Similarly, I can force a SFTP session to my file server by typing into the URL bar. Often times, I'll manually edit the displayd URL to rapidly traverse the directory tree. Just because you find it irrelevant, doesn't mean I do.
The forced upgrade march is also unwelcome, for reasons that should be obvious, but apparently aren't. I've upgraded software tools, only to discover that the new version has abandoned compatibility with an older version, which is a catastrophe if that older version is part of a currently-shipping product or service. My production lifecycles exceed typical software lifecycles by an order of magnitude. XP? Yep, still running that along side of several Win2K machines. You may find that unpalatable, but upgrading to Win7 would break functionality (and has been demonstrated in a sandbox, so that last part isn't just conjecture.)
As for the URL bar