Thats all well and good, provided you can find a doctor who will service your sorry ass when it doesn't work right anymore.
There is a move afoot in the medical profession to deny all but emergency services to known civil lawyers. Its the doctors way of fighting back for the $300,000 a year the lawyers have managed to drive their malpractice insurance up to. And frankly, I can't say as I blame the doctors.
It is a 24/7/365 environment. The box itself usually gets uptimes measured in months, and if we discover its gone away, we have catchup scripts that can bring things back uptodate in just a few minutes.
We've considered redoing that script in php so we could run it on one of the linux boxes there, but haven't managed to find a round "tuit" yet:)
Thats the only machine in the place thats still stuck with a bnc type 10BaseT card. Its an elderly 2k, with an FF40 card for brains, a picasso-II video and 32 megs of ram. For all the hoorah about the FF40 card being made without some of the system bus signals, with the version 3.4 Plug-n-go roms for use with os3.1, its been very very bulletproof, for a "migi".
Usually, when we have to reboot it to get thigs back among the living, we have to reboot the NT server its getting its data from because something in the NT networking has a tummy ache too. The news room clients can access it, but the migi can't until the NT box has been rebooted too.:-)
I haven't coded any job in anything but bash recently, but the most productive code I ever wrote or helped write was in ARexx on an amiga. FWIW, nearly 10 years later, that machine is still doing its job at WDTV-5, running an ARexx script I helped write, which itself is being run by a Cron Jim and I also wrote in ARexx, then compiled to standalone binary with rexxplus. You can see its output on the web page at http://www.wdtv.com under the news category. Its converting the rather laughably formatted teleprompter scripts to news stories you can read, as best it can with limited source information.
Surely it (REXX) deserved at least an honorable mention.
No, in then usual cases, the whole tower is the antenna. This is because at the am band, wavelengths are in fact quite long.
Also, as much as possible is usually done to reduce the skywave portion of the radiation and confine it to the ground wave that goes out toward the horizon as oppose to shooting off into the sky, to either go forever in the daytime, or to be reflected back many hundreds of miles away by the changes in the night sky ionization layers, and wrecking havoc with another local station also sharing that frequency. To this end, they are often made 5/8 of a wavelength high since this is the maximum groundwave/least skywave pattern.
But, for small local stations, that gets quite expensive rapidly. My local am'er on 940 khz, would need a tower 654 feet high, well beyond his budget, so a much shorter tower is loaded to make it look longer electrically. Often, its only the so-called clear channel (read higher income) stations that can do that.
From the simplistic description given, this design has hundreds of thousands or prior art examples already sold in the marketplace, and has had for maybe 45 years.
Most any CB'er that wasn't running a full 1/4 wave stick on the roof of his car, and getting it mangled by driving thru any overpass with less than 14 feet of clearance, was using a shortened antenna of this design. They were also a bit narrowband, having extreme difficulties in getting 1.3/1 or better vswr performance over the 40 channels of the cb band.
They alsa radiate a disproportionate amount of their power well above the horizon, reducing the gain in the real world.
New? Yeah, somewhat like me, I'll be 70 in a few months.
I suspect that there are, or were (some having gone on to that big retirement party in the sky held for failed companies or merged into oblivion entities) plenty of patents that will prove prior art, if the patent office wasn't too understaffed and lazy to search for them. Avanti & HiGain are just 2 names that come to mind.
Scuse me while I chuckle at yet another of the patent offices incompetant blunders.
From that, I take it that you are one who would vote no (regardless of its fueling method) on an electricity generating facility in your state/county. And then you have the gall to yelp when the rolling blackouts hit again this summer. Or when the price of importing power skyrockets because the Enrons of this world see a profit opportunity.
When playing the game, one must be willing to pay for the priviledge, or not play. How you pay for it is your choice, TANSTAAFL.
Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Yeah, thats my take on this. I read up on it over a decade back and saw that it had scaling problems out the yang. We're talking timeing accuracies for all beams measured in the amount of time it takes light to move less than a millimeter, and getting 192 lasers marching in that degree of lockstep on a repeatable basis strikes me as some theoretical guys idea, one who has never found out hot to get his hands dirty with the tools.
Here it is, nearly 15 years and probably close to a trillion in it, and only 4 of those 192 lasers have actually been "commissioned"? And it takes 8 hours to recharge them for the next shot? Aww c'mon folks, this project is being done for lots of reasons, but there is no way in hell you can convince me it will ever produce 10x the energy being put in per shot of the lasers. For those that are convinced its for weapons research, you may be somewhat correct, but how are you going to pack that up into a container small enough to deliver to the target?
That thing has turned into a WPA project for otherwise un-employed atomic researchers. But thats a bit of an understatement since the WPA paid subsistence wages in the time of the depression 70 years ago. Now the workers are driving a Lexus or Mercedes. Since its my taxpayer dollars being used to buy that Lexus, am I entitled to drive it? Nahh, donbesilly.
Somethings dreadfully wrong with this picture IMNSHO. Personally, this is the project that should have been canceled back when the SSC was shot down. I feel we would have received far more knowledge and data from the SSC by now, and probably would have done it on 10% of the money this thing has sucked up so far, with no profitable end in sight. They always have to build the next one 10x bigger to 'test their theories', promising that someday it will break even.
It may happen, but I'd have to live another 70 years to see it. That would make me 140, and they will still be playing in the fusion sandbox.
We don't need to test this theory any more, mark it as a failure and start looking for an even better idea.
And of course don't forget that the instant any such operation starts to do better than breakeven, you can take it to the bank that the California nimby's will get it canceled.
Heck, FM and HAM combined use less then half the spectrum of AM. I know that lower frequencies don't carry as much information, but surely there is a better use for that low frequency space then AM radio
Where did you go to school? Failed math, obviously... That spectrum chart we've all been looking at for 75 years is in logarythmic format, where 1-10 takes up as much space left-right as.1-1 does or 10-100 does. Go check it, I'll wait.
The AM band as used here in the US is from 540khz, to 1790khz, or 1.25 megahertz wide. The FM band all by itself is 20 megahertz wide. Even if you throw in all the ham bands suitable for the various forms of amplitude modulation including SSB commonly used in voice transmissions, you won't come anywhere near matching the bandwidth available for standard FM broadcasting.
As for FM, and teeny little college stations, I've heard them spreading out over a megahertz or more because they didn't either have the money to hire a decent engineer to come in, setup the audio path and compression levels, and superglue it all in place so the so-called PD can't turn it up and make it louder, or they're so broke they don't have any level controlling amps at all. The average 'PD' doesn't understand that they get to use 150khz of bandwidth just like the big boys, and thats all. Its gotta be better if its louder, and 300% distortion coming out of the listeners radio because his station is exceeding that bandwidth must surely be the listeners radios fault.
I'm not saying it should be wide open to anyone, it certainly needs some regulation. I'm saying the existing restrictions on frequency use have gone beyond just protecting the frequences and moved into the realm of monopoly-like power over a critical resource.
In this I think I have to agree. After all, if these "microbroadcasters" want to be heard at the power levels they want to use, to cover lets say a square mile of college campus, they're not going to be running more than 2 or 3 watts, and they are going to do it on a frequency they've monitored for a while and found to be quiet. They know the quickest way to have an inspector and a federal marshal on their doorstep is to step on a local broadcaster with a multi-kilowatt signal.
So they usually operate on what is an otherwise quiet frequency in the area they are in.
I personally could care less if the top stations in any one 10 block area suddenly lose market share because the kid down the block is doing what he knows people really want to hear. Its the big fellows own damned fault for restricting their playlist to this weeks top 20 from Variety or some other music rag with a vested interest in promoting so-and-so this week.
I wouldn't encourage them by buying time if they come around looking for business, unless my business was directly related to their chosen format.
Yes, I've got an fcc ticket, dated from back when there was a real 1st Phone. IMO, they have expanded the legal part of their oversight way past what the comm act of 1934 ever had in mind.
Heck, we've got a local 1KW AM'er with a night license for 50 watts. He doesn't get very far out of town on 50 watts at night, but his listeners are about as loyal as you could imagine for whats basicly a small town mom&pop operation, emphasis on the pop. He also sells enough commercial time to live comfortably, and buy the station the latest toys in a town of about 5000.
He's 100% legal, but if another town that didn't have such an operation suddenly discovered they had local nightime radio, I'd be willing to bet that it would be months before the commission ever heard about it. Maybe even years. And that seems like on balance, its a Good Thing(tm) as long as they do it on an otherwise quiet freguency and with only enough power to cover the intended audience.
Its called competition in that case.
But if you're referring to the guy with a 2kw spread spectrum rig whose only satisfaction is that he has managed to screw up 802.11 for 50 miles around, then cuff and stuff him, and schedule the disposition of his case for sometime in 2038 or so, and no bail. There is an intent difference IMO that makes him the real outlaw.
All very well and no doubt good for the hard drive makers, but what about the price of my fav drink in the stores? Decent stuff is high enough already, and if the drive makers buy it all up, there won't be any left for me (sniff)
Now thats a real stinking attitude fur ya. By tomorrow the cease and desist letters will have been delivered air-mail special delivery. Get it now from any one of at least 3 copies I've seen go by.
I'm like a lot of linux folks, I hate to be enjoined from doing something that used to be legal 50 years ago. To be told that I have to go out and buy a Mac just so I can download whatever crappy music they happen to *think* this old fart should like just tells me to forget it altogether.
There's some very good music out there that cannot get published (use the Hiwaymen before they started dieing off for an example) because the older established artists couldn't buy air time to get heard today. Hell, the only way Willie gets any ink is to duet with Toby! And Johnny had 3 or 4 good ones on American IV, only one of which got any airtime. The Man Comes Around was the best one, but its never been heard on the air.
My point is that I OWN those cd's, and once I've paid for them I should be able to do as I please with the contents with the exception of giving away copies, thats patently sick bird and righteously should get your butt into hot water.
But these fsckers now think that they have a God Given Right to a Per Performance Fee. Its not gonna happen if I can help it, so I'll be voting this May, and this November, for people who claim to want to protect the users rights to make copies, in any format, as long as its for his own use.
You would do well to do the same research, balanceing that against that same persons record of protecting the Bill of Rights here in the USA. Those are more important by far than this, but chances are that someone who protects the Bill of Rights, will also be in our camp on this subject.
It would be nice to be able to read the Nature article, but either Nature is/.ed, or they've taken it down for an empty page, I get a "done" response from that link in about 100 milliseconds.
If they've taken it down, that sucks the big one. Obviously I'm not subscribed to the dead tree version, and at nearly $2 a gallon for gas, I'm sure as hell not gonna drive 65 miles round trip to get to a magazine rack that has it.
All of which is presently true, but in the end, I believe we are preaching to the same choir.
Basicly, because the field moves so fast, the ability to patent, particularly when it applies to a 10 line snippet of src code as a method, locking that up for however long patents run today (is it still 17 years?) becomes an intolerable drag on the writing of new software.
TBH, it will restrict writing software to only M$ because they will be the only ones able to pay for the patent research, which they probably won't do because they will be the only bull left in this china shop. This will also cause the price of new software to be 100x what it is now even if the research isn't done based on that excuse. Do you want to pay $69,995 for a copy of Windows 2010?
I think not. If BG thinks he has a piracy problem now, "why, you ain't seen nuthin yet".
But he'll have these dreams of grandure at the thought of obtaining that tight a monopoly on writing software. Bet the farm on that. You can't lose.
While I can feel for you in that situation, to me, that is exactly why we have copyrights. Albeit the copyright situation has gotten absolutely out of hand with the latest Bono extensions, to the point where the much of the public in general, now feels no real reason to honor musical copyrights in particular. We know whats fair and whats not, and if we are treated fairly, the the copyright holder will also profit. Heck for software, even the original period of (IIRC) 7 years is too long. The entire field moves so fast, that the ideal software copyright should not be in excess of 3 or 4 years, at which point all or nearly all of the profit will have been milked out of it anyway so it should become public domain, free for the decompilers to take a look and maybe further the art of writing code. Each succeeding generation of code should be built on the experience of the last generation. Any attempts to code around a patent will invariably result in poorer, less stable code unless the patented code is clearly flawed. That can be the case by the way.
Comp sci profs should be free to go teach a class and throw a 30 line snippet of such code on the screen and say, this is one way to do it, can you do it even better? Only by making such information public domain at the end of a reasonable copyright period, to be used as learning tools by all concerned, can the art itself be improved with each generation of the typical program.
This "clean room" is the key issue I think. If the guy saw your mousetrap, and then expanded upon the same basic idea, or even just plain copied it, then yes, thats a violation.
But if he set out to make a better mousetrap without ever seeing yours, then there can be no taint of copying involved even if the basic design is similar since he's looked at mousetraps in the stores for 40 years already. Kind of like calling a copy machine a Xerox or vice versa. But he, knowing there were production shortcuts in most such devices, decided to put ball bearings in the pan and bail pivots? I don't think thats a violation because he clearly did think it out and attempt to make that "better mousetrap".
To software: Because the actual code to add 2 numbers together is, at the machine level:
LDA register 1, number 1's location in memory LDA register 2, number 2's location in memory ADD register 1,2 (assuming the result goes back into register 1 here, often the case) STA register 1, result location in memory
To allow the patenting of that sequence is totally assinine because its already been used historically speaking, since back in the 50's when all that was actually done with relays and/or 12AU7's and the output went to punched tape, which in turn went to the printer. The basic algorythm hasn't changed in 50+ years, and if some patent office dweeb thought that was patentable, there are at least 50 billion lines of code demonstrating prior art written since then.
Under those conditions, the only one making a paycheck will be the attorney who finally convinces said dweeb to withdraw the patent. But in lots of cases the time elapsed to clear the thing measures in years, instead of the two weeks that make the difference between a good time to market and sales success, and 2 weeks later somebody else has his foot in that same markets door.
I'm reminded of a situation in my field, broadcasting, where the FCC and other agencies got together and mandated a new public notification method whereby the pair of tones that used to tell you an alert or test was being broadcast, and which is now those rather raucous digital streams you hear. That noise contains the whole message!
Some jerk overheard a conversation about it in a restaurant, copied it all down on a napkin, and went running to the patent office with it, and got it! There was enough prior art in that to sink the staten island ferry if it was all put on paper and loaded into the hold. We, as broadcasters, ignored the legal firms letters while screaming bloody murder to the various agencies and our senators and reps. Our attitude was, and rightly so IMO, that we were damned if we were gonna pay anybody any patent royalties on equipment and methods that were mandated to us by the feds. If anybody paid, it should be the feds for not investigating it fully and makeing sure it was un-emcumbered. Just the equipment and training to make the new system work cost each and every one of us in excess of $5,000, and is an ongoing nominal expense for paper and other supplies. The hoorah has now gone away just like the company that was trying to sue us, but I've no idea if in their infinite wisdom, the patent was actually withdrawn by the USTPO.
First, we kill all the lawyers. (William Shakespear)
Then maybe we'ed have some common sense in this world, something thats damned uncommon now it seems.
Software corporations spend BILLIONS of dollars and employ thousands and thousands of programmers to create patentable IP. If you guys had your way, all of this money would be thrown away and the world of software would be thrown back into the stone ages. Face it, guys, the time for patenting software is NOW
You are missing the entire point of this discussion! Do you think that all this software is written solely to the patentable aspect of it?
Sorry, good software is written to do the job at hand, and if you do it good enough while working for a commercial corp like M$, then the reward will be sales beyond your wildest dreams and a handy raise for you.
But to prevent, by patents, some person from writing, in a clean room environment, never having seen your commercial code, a program that runs as well, or better than yours, is downright immoral. The instruction set for the cpu is essentialy public domain, and must remain so in order to entice coders to code for that particular cpu.
Having the ability to say that a certain sequence of these instructions is patentable, when the instructions themselves are freely available, absolutely boggles the mind.
We have proved prior art for almost any patent that exists only to enrich the corporate coffers of some group of leechs (and that is the right word) who exist not to write more patentable code, which they will never do because they don't know how, but exist only to extort others with their legal dept because they bought this quoted patent.
With that kind of restrictions, no more code can ever be written except in darkened rooms and distributed by clandestin means.
If M$ wants to dominate the world, then let them write better code instead of virus and worm magnets. Free, or commercial, the code should stand on its own merits.
Now go warsh yur mouth out with a bar of Grandma's Lie soap, and no, thats not miss-spelled...
The The only people who should be able to lobby a parliament are the citizens who voted said parliament into office.
I like that, its the best idea I've heard promulgated here in at least a coons age.
Now how do we get such a lobbying limitation to pass when every lobbiest in the world will draw a bead on that puppy? Take it to the bank that you'll never get it passed short of a citizen revolt in the form of petitions with enough signatures on them to get it setup as a constitutional amendment voted on in the next general election in all 50 states.
I don't think the average Joe Sixpack is too dumb to understand what it is he is voting on either. Its a hell of an idea, lets go for it! But put enough teeth in the enforcement that its continuation just isn't palatable to the lobbiest type. He can go back to ambulance chasing for a living IMO. I hear thats pretty good where the limits on malpractice haven't been lowered to the point of contingency fees not really buying the groceries...
and the OSS crowd turns their back on them almost over night
Damn, the history books have been revised again. I hate it when that happens. Not overnight folks, never was anything but history once it happened.
Sun's reputation among the OSS crowd went in the toilet and was thoroughly flushed when they tried to convince the world that the output of the Blackdown Group in developing the java runtime was their own work, back in what, 1999, maybe even 2000 when that brouhaha lit up the posts here on/. and other places on the net? People who considered themselves to be 'principled' vis-a-vis giving credit where credit is due literally stood in line to verbally piss in Sun's cherios at the time.
That was so microsoftish an attitude, with McNealy playing the NIH syndrome to the hilt, and only slightly mollified me when they finally did admit that Blackdown had something to do with it. That admission struck me as being exactly what MS would have done, and soured me on Sun for a long time. I suspect that much of the OSS crowd has a memory, and has a wait and see attitude because of that incident. Obviously, enough of that and sales go in the toilet too.
IMO Sun has no one to blame but Sun. Yes I applauded them in their battles with MS, and they could (and IMO should) have won rather handily if we had a working court system in this country, but sadly, we've amply demonstrated we don't when it jumps to do dubya's bidding within a month of his taking office.
Anyway, I sincerely hope the laid off people can find other equally well paid work in a timely manner.
Bah. Its Easter Sunday, and supposed to be a joyous occasion. So be joyous, thats an order now, y'all hear?
Oh the wonders of science! With such loose ethics, why not make children smarter before they are born?
Most of your rant, while well meaning to you, is still a rant. I'm personally ambivalent about this new grass. On the one hand, I'd love to have something that would crowd out the moss that tends to overtake everything in this neighborhood. OTOH, it will spread because somewhere, someplace, it will bloom and infect someplace thats not tended. And then you have first a local pandemic like kudzu, and eventually a planetary problem.
But back to the quoted line above about smart kids. Thats not at all hard according to some experiments made, most in russia IIRC, about 10-20 years ago where they put the mother into a hyperbaric chamber during her last trimester, and ran the partial pressure of the chambers oxygen up by 2x or a bit more.
The children born were then tested as they matured, and many of them were doing the IQ tests at 150 and above by the time they were school age.
However, it appears that the 'breakup' of the USSR has probably ended the funding for such work as there haven't been any stories in the scientific magazines about this work in several years.
Sometimes the problem IS censorship. Look at the story of Jane Akre and Steve Wilson,
I must have slept thru that one, can someone bring me up to speed?
That said, the obvious bias occasionally shown, and the "don't cover that, its either verboten or so far off the beaten path its not worth the ink" thats so obvious from the big 6's network news operations. The big 6 being CBS,ABC,NBC,CNN,FOX and PBS.
None of those organizations exist for *any* reason but to sell commercial time, with 4 to 6 commercials in between every story. A 1 hour news program often has only 18 to 20 minutes of real news, driving one to run down the remotes batteries at this residence because my "commercials in a row" tolerance is plumb used up at the end of 2 and the clicker plumb drowns out Jimmy Mays regardless of where in the block he is. I sometimes wonder if the people who hire him really understand just how obnoxious he really is?
Even the local news gets a fair bit of censorship. Just how far do you think a news story that involves a major advertising client is going to get? No place at all, sometimes even if the local paper gets it into ink, but thats rare, because that same client is also spending a goodly amount of his adv budget with the paper too. Doing so would be finacial hari-kari when that client, and 4 of his friends each pull 50k$ a month off the air.
As far as real news, I have NDI where to get it. Frankly, with your bull shit filters in place and tuned up, slashdot comes as close as any other place I scan for my nightly hit of information that covers the things I'm interested in. My hat is often doffed, with a short bow in your direction over something I've read, or found the link to, here on/. So keep on keeping on folks, its a winner IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Become a lawyer
2. Profit
Thats all well and good, provided you can find a doctor who will service your sorry ass when it doesn't work right anymore.
There is a move afoot in the medical profession to deny all but emergency services to known civil lawyers. Its the doctors way of fighting back for the $300,000 a year the lawyers have managed to drive their malpractice insurance up to. And frankly, I can't say as I blame the doctors.
Cheers, Gene
It is a 24/7/365 environment. The box itself usually gets uptimes measured in months, and if we discover its gone away, we have catchup scripts that can bring things back uptodate in just a few minutes.
:)
:-)
We've considered redoing that script in php so we could run it on one of the linux boxes there, but haven't managed to find a round "tuit" yet
Thats the only machine in the place thats still stuck with a bnc type 10BaseT card. Its an elderly 2k, with an FF40 card for brains, a picasso-II video and 32 megs of ram. For all the hoorah about the FF40 card being made without some of the system bus signals, with the version 3.4 Plug-n-go roms for use with os3.1, its been very very bulletproof, for a "migi".
Usually, when we have to reboot it to get thigs back among the living, we have to reboot the NT server its getting its data from because something in the NT networking has a tummy ache too. The news room clients can access it, but the migi can't until the NT box has been rebooted too.
I haven't coded any job in anything but bash recently, but the most productive code I ever wrote or helped write was in ARexx on an amiga. FWIW, nearly 10 years later, that machine is still doing its job at WDTV-5, running an ARexx script I helped write, which itself is being run by a Cron Jim and I also wrote in ARexx, then compiled to standalone binary with rexxplus. You can see its output on the web page at http://www.wdtv.com under the news category. Its converting the rather laughably formatted teleprompter scripts to news stories you can read, as best it can with limited source information.
Surely it (REXX) deserved at least an honorable mention.
Cheers, Gene
Yup. I do like your tagline though. :-)
Cheers, Gene
No, in then usual cases, the whole tower is the antenna. This is because at the am band, wavelengths are in fact quite long.
Also, as much as possible is usually done to reduce the skywave portion of the radiation and confine it to the ground wave that goes out toward the horizon as oppose to shooting off into the sky, to either go forever in the daytime, or to be reflected back many hundreds of miles away by the changes in the night sky ionization layers, and wrecking havoc with another local station also sharing that frequency. To this end, they are often made 5/8 of a wavelength high since this is the maximum groundwave/least skywave pattern.
But, for small local stations, that gets quite expensive rapidly. My local am'er on 940 khz, would need a tower 654 feet high, well beyond his budget, so a much shorter tower is loaded to make it look longer electrically. Often, its only the so-called clear channel (read higher income) stations that can do that.
Cheers, Gene
From the simplistic description given, this design has hundreds of thousands or prior art examples already sold in the marketplace, and has had for maybe 45 years.
Most any CB'er that wasn't running a full 1/4 wave stick on the roof of his car, and getting it mangled by driving thru any overpass with less than 14 feet of clearance, was using a shortened antenna of this design. They were also a bit narrowband, having extreme difficulties in getting 1.3/1 or better vswr performance over the 40 channels of the cb band.
They alsa radiate a disproportionate amount of their power well above the horizon, reducing the gain in the real world.
New? Yeah, somewhat like me, I'll be 70 in a few months.
I suspect that there are, or were (some having gone on to that big retirement party in the sky held for failed companies or merged into oblivion entities) plenty of patents that will prove prior art, if the patent office wasn't too understaffed and lazy to search for them. Avanti & HiGain are just 2 names that come to mind.
Scuse me while I chuckle at yet another of the patent offices incompetant blunders.
Cheers, Gene
From that, I take it that you are one who would vote no (regardless of its fueling method) on an electricity generating facility in your state/county. And then you have the gall to yelp when the rolling blackouts hit again this summer. Or when the price of importing power skyrockets because the Enrons of this world see a profit opportunity.
When playing the game, one must be willing to pay for the priviledge, or not play. How you pay for it is your choice, TANSTAAFL.
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
15 years? Nothing to actually show?
Yeah, thats my take on this. I read up on it over a decade back and saw that it had scaling problems out the yang. We're talking timeing accuracies for all beams measured in the amount of time it takes light to move less than a millimeter, and getting 192 lasers marching in that degree of lockstep on a repeatable basis strikes me as some theoretical guys idea, one who has never found out hot to get his hands dirty with the tools.
Here it is, nearly 15 years and probably close to a trillion in it, and only 4 of those 192 lasers have actually been "commissioned"? And it takes 8 hours to recharge them for the next shot? Aww c'mon folks, this project is being done for lots of reasons, but there is no way in hell you can convince me it will ever produce 10x the energy being put in per shot of the lasers. For those that are convinced its for weapons research, you may be somewhat correct, but how are you going to pack that up into a container small enough to deliver to the target?
That thing has turned into a WPA project for otherwise un-employed atomic researchers. But thats a bit of an understatement since the WPA paid subsistence wages in the time of the depression 70 years ago. Now the workers are driving a Lexus or Mercedes. Since its my taxpayer dollars being used to buy that Lexus, am I entitled to drive it? Nahh, donbesilly.
Somethings dreadfully wrong with this picture IMNSHO. Personally, this is the project that should have been canceled back when the SSC was shot down. I feel we would have received far more knowledge and data from the SSC by now, and probably would have done it on 10% of the money this thing has sucked up so far, with no profitable end in sight. They always have to build the next one 10x bigger to 'test their theories', promising that someday it will break even.
It may happen, but I'd have to live another 70 years to see it. That would make me 140, and they will still be playing in the fusion sandbox.
We don't need to test this theory any more, mark it as a failure and start looking for an even better idea.
And of course don't forget that the instant any such operation starts to do better than breakeven, you can take it to the bank that the California nimby's will get it canceled.
Cheers, Gene
Heck, FM and HAM combined use less then half the spectrum of AM. I know that lower frequencies don't carry as much information, but surely there is a better use for that low frequency space then AM radio
.1-1 does or 10-100 does. Go check it, I'll wait.
Where did you go to school? Failed math, obviously... That spectrum chart we've all been looking at for 75 years is in logarythmic format, where 1-10 takes up as much space left-right as
The AM band as used here in the US is from 540khz, to 1790khz, or 1.25 megahertz wide. The FM band all by itself is 20 megahertz wide. Even if you throw in all the ham bands suitable for the various forms of amplitude modulation including SSB commonly used in voice transmissions, you won't come anywhere near matching the bandwidth available for standard FM broadcasting.
As for FM, and teeny little college stations, I've heard them spreading out over a megahertz or more because they didn't either have the money to hire a decent engineer to come in, setup the audio path and compression levels, and superglue it all in place so the so-called PD can't turn it up and make it louder, or they're so broke they don't have any level controlling amps at all. The average 'PD' doesn't understand that they get to use 150khz of bandwidth just like the big boys, and thats all. Its gotta be better if its louder, and 300% distortion coming out of the listeners radio because his station is exceeding that bandwidth must surely be the listeners radios fault.
Yeah, sure, excuse me while I go pin his coax.
Cheers, Gene
I'm not saying it should be wide open to anyone, it certainly needs some regulation. I'm saying the existing restrictions on frequency use have gone beyond just protecting the frequences and moved into the realm of monopoly-like power over a critical resource.
In this I think I have to agree. After all, if these "microbroadcasters" want to be heard at the power levels they want to use, to cover lets say a square mile of college campus, they're not going to be running more than 2 or 3 watts, and they are going to do it on a frequency they've monitored for a while and found to be quiet. They know the quickest way to have an inspector and a federal marshal on their doorstep is to step on a local broadcaster with a multi-kilowatt signal.
So they usually operate on what is an otherwise quiet frequency in the area they are in.
I personally could care less if the top stations in any one 10 block area suddenly lose market share because the kid down the block is doing what he knows people really want to hear. Its the big fellows own damned fault for restricting their playlist to this weeks top 20 from Variety or some other music rag with a vested interest in promoting so-and-so this week.
I wouldn't encourage them by buying time if they come around looking for business, unless my business was directly related to their chosen format.
Yes, I've got an fcc ticket, dated from back when there was a real 1st Phone. IMO, they have expanded the legal part of their oversight way past what the comm act of 1934 ever had in mind.
Heck, we've got a local 1KW AM'er with a night license for 50 watts. He doesn't get very far out of town on 50 watts at night, but his listeners are about as loyal as you could imagine for whats basicly a small town mom&pop operation, emphasis on the pop. He also sells enough commercial time to live comfortably, and buy the station the latest toys in a town of about 5000.
He's 100% legal, but if another town that didn't have such an operation suddenly discovered they had local nightime radio, I'd be willing to bet that it would be months before the commission ever heard about it. Maybe even years. And that seems like on balance, its a Good Thing(tm) as long as they do it on an otherwise quiet freguency and with only enough power to cover the intended audience.
Its called competition in that case.
But if you're referring to the guy with a 2kw spread spectrum rig whose only satisfaction is that he has managed to screw up 802.11 for 50 miles around, then cuff and stuff him, and schedule the disposition of his case for sometime in 2038 or so, and no bail. There is an intent difference IMO that makes him the real outlaw.
Cheers, Gene
All very well and no doubt good for the hard drive makers, but what about the price of my fav drink in the stores? Decent stuff is high enough already, and if the drive makers buy it all up, there won't be any left for me (sniff)
Cheers, Gene
Now thats a real stinking attitude fur ya. By tomorrow the cease and desist letters will have been delivered air-mail special delivery. Get it now from any one of at least 3 copies I've seen go by.
I'm like a lot of linux folks, I hate to be enjoined from doing something that used to be legal 50 years ago. To be told that I have to go out and buy a Mac just so I can download whatever crappy music they happen to *think* this old fart should like just tells me to forget it altogether.
There's some very good music out there that cannot get published (use the Hiwaymen before they started dieing off for an example) because the older established artists couldn't buy air time to get heard today. Hell, the only way Willie gets any ink is to duet with Toby! And Johnny had 3 or 4 good ones on American IV, only one of which got any airtime. The Man Comes Around was the best one, but its never been heard on the air.
My point is that I OWN those cd's, and once I've paid for them I should be able to do as I please with the contents with the exception of giving away copies, thats patently sick bird and righteously should get your butt into hot water.
But these fsckers now think that they have a God Given Right to a Per Performance Fee. Its not gonna happen if I can help it, so I'll be voting this May, and this November, for people who claim to want to protect the users rights to make copies, in any format, as long as its for his own use.
You would do well to do the same research, balanceing that against that same persons record of protecting the Bill of Rights here in the USA.
Those are more important by far than this, but chances are that someone who protects the Bill of Rights, will also be in our camp on this subject.
Cheers, Gene
It would be nice to be able to read the Nature article, but either Nature is /.ed, or they've taken it down for an empty page, I get a "done" response from that link in about 100 milliseconds.
If they've taken it down, that sucks the big one. Obviously I'm not subscribed to the dead tree version, and at nearly $2 a gallon for gas, I'm sure as hell not gonna drive 65 miles round trip to get to a magazine rack that has it.
Has anybody got a cache of it?
No Cheers this time, Gene
And even I (shudder) can be wrong, obviously its "Aspirin"
Thats what I get for letting my mind outrun my fingers on the keyboard. At my age, a fast typing session is too much exersize and I get winded...
Cheers, Gene
Except thats its actually spelled Asperin...
Cheers, Gene
Priceless!
Cheers, Gene
All of which is presently true, but in the end, I believe we are preaching to the same choir.
Basicly, because the field moves so fast, the ability to patent, particularly when it applies to a 10 line snippet of src code as a method, locking that up for however long patents run today (is it still 17 years?) becomes an intolerable drag on the writing of new software.
TBH, it will restrict writing software to only M$ because they will be the only ones able to pay for the patent research, which they probably won't do because they will be the only bull left in this china shop. This will also cause the price of new software to be 100x what it is now even if the research isn't done based on that excuse. Do you want to pay $69,995 for a copy of Windows 2010?
I think not. If BG thinks he has a piracy problem now, "why, you ain't seen nuthin yet".
But he'll have these dreams of grandure at the thought of obtaining that tight a monopoly on writing software. Bet the farm on that. You can't lose.
Cheers, Gene
While I can feel for you in that situation, to me, that is exactly why we have copyrights. Albeit the copyright situation has gotten absolutely out of hand with the latest Bono extensions, to the point where the much of the public in general, now feels no real reason to honor musical copyrights in particular. We know whats fair and whats not, and if we are treated fairly, the the copyright holder will also profit. Heck for software, even the original period of (IIRC) 7 years is too long. The entire field moves so fast, that the ideal software copyright should not be in excess of 3 or 4 years, at which point all or nearly all of the profit will have been milked out of it anyway so it should become public domain, free for the decompilers to take a look and maybe further the art of writing code. Each succeeding generation of code should be built on the experience of the last generation. Any attempts to code around a patent will invariably result in poorer, less stable code unless the patented code is clearly flawed. That can be the case by the way.
Comp sci profs should be free to go teach a class and throw a 30 line snippet of such code on the screen and say, this is one way to do it, can you do it even better? Only by making such information public domain at the end of a reasonable copyright period, to be used as learning tools by all concerned, can the art itself be improved with each generation of the typical program.
Cheers, Gene
This "clean room" is the key issue I think. If the guy saw your mousetrap, and then expanded upon the same basic idea, or even just plain copied it, then yes, thats a violation.
But if he set out to make a better mousetrap without ever seeing yours, then there can be no taint of copying involved even if the basic design is similar since he's looked at mousetraps in the stores for 40 years already. Kind of like calling a copy machine a Xerox or vice versa. But he, knowing there were production shortcuts in most such devices, decided to put ball bearings in the pan and bail pivots? I don't think thats a violation because he clearly did think it out and attempt to make that "better mousetrap".
To software:
Because the actual code to add 2 numbers together is, at the machine level:
LDA register 1, number 1's location in memory
LDA register 2, number 2's location in memory
ADD register 1,2 (assuming the result goes back into register 1 here, often the case)
STA register 1, result location in memory
To allow the patenting of that sequence is totally assinine because its already been used historically speaking, since back in the 50's when all that was actually done with relays and/or 12AU7's and the output went to punched tape, which in turn went to the printer. The basic algorythm hasn't changed in 50+ years, and if some patent office dweeb thought that was patentable, there are at least 50 billion lines of code demonstrating prior art written since then.
Under those conditions, the only one making a paycheck will be the attorney who finally convinces said dweeb to withdraw the patent. But in lots of cases the time elapsed to clear the thing measures in years, instead of the two weeks that make the difference between a good time to market and sales success, and 2 weeks later somebody else has his foot in that same markets door.
I'm reminded of a situation in my field, broadcasting, where the FCC and other agencies got together and mandated a new public notification method whereby the pair of tones that used to tell you an alert or test was being broadcast, and which is now those rather raucous digital streams you hear. That noise contains the whole message!
Some jerk overheard a conversation about it in a restaurant, copied it all down on a napkin, and went running to the patent office with it, and got it! There was enough prior art in that to sink the staten island ferry if it was all put on paper and loaded into the hold. We, as broadcasters, ignored the legal firms letters while screaming bloody murder to the various agencies and our senators and reps. Our attitude was, and rightly so IMO, that we were damned if we were gonna pay anybody any patent royalties on equipment and methods that were mandated to us by the feds. If anybody paid, it should be the feds for not investigating it fully and makeing sure it was un-emcumbered. Just the equipment and training to make the new system work cost each and every one of us in excess of $5,000, and is an ongoing nominal expense for paper and other supplies. The hoorah has now gone away just like the company that was trying to sue us, but I've no idea if in their infinite wisdom, the patent was actually withdrawn by the USTPO.
First, we kill all the lawyers. (William Shakespear)
Then maybe we'ed have some common sense in this world, something thats damned uncommon now it seems.
Cheers, Gene
Software corporations spend BILLIONS of dollars and employ thousands and thousands of programmers to create patentable IP. If you guys had your way, all of this money would be thrown away and the world of software would be thrown back into the stone ages. Face it, guys, the time for patenting software is NOW
You are missing the entire point of this discussion! Do you think that all this software is written solely to the patentable aspect of it?
Sorry, good software is written to do the job at hand, and if you do it good enough while working for a commercial corp like M$, then the reward will be sales beyond your wildest dreams and a handy raise for you.
But to prevent, by patents, some person from writing, in a clean room environment, never having seen your commercial code, a program that runs as well, or better than yours, is downright immoral. The instruction set for the cpu is essentialy public domain, and must remain so in order to entice coders to code for that particular cpu.
Having the ability to say that a certain sequence of these instructions is patentable, when the instructions themselves are freely available, absolutely boggles the mind.
We have proved prior art for almost any patent that exists only to enrich the corporate coffers of some group of leechs (and that is the right word) who exist not to write more patentable code, which they will never do because they don't know how, but exist only to extort others with their legal dept because they bought this quoted patent.
With that kind of restrictions, no more code can ever be written except in darkened rooms and distributed by clandestin means.
If M$ wants to dominate the world, then let them write better code instead of virus and worm magnets. Free, or commercial, the code should stand on its own merits.
Now go warsh yur mouth out with a bar of Grandma's Lie soap, and no, thats not miss-spelled...
Cheers, Gene
The The only people who should be able to lobby a parliament are the citizens who voted said parliament into office.
I like that, its the best idea I've heard promulgated here in at least a coons age.
Now how do we get such a lobbying limitation to pass when every lobbiest in the world will draw a bead on that puppy? Take it to the bank that you'll never get it passed short of a citizen revolt in the form of petitions with enough signatures on them to get it setup as a constitutional amendment voted on in the next general election in all 50 states.
I don't think the average Joe Sixpack is too dumb to understand what it is he is voting on either.
Its a hell of an idea, lets go for it! But put enough teeth in the enforcement that its continuation just isn't palatable to the lobbiest type. He can go back to ambulance chasing for a living IMO. I hear thats pretty good where the limits on malpractice haven't been lowered to the point of contingency fees not really buying the groceries...
Cheers, Gene
and the OSS crowd turns their back on them almost over night
/. and other places on the net? People who considered themselves to be 'principled' vis-a-vis giving credit where credit is due literally stood in line to verbally piss in Sun's cherios at the time.
Damn, the history books have been revised again. I hate it when that happens. Not overnight folks, never was anything but history once it happened.
Sun's reputation among the OSS crowd went in the toilet and was thoroughly flushed when they tried to convince the world that the output of the Blackdown Group in developing the java runtime was their own work, back in what, 1999, maybe even 2000 when that brouhaha lit up the posts here on
That was so microsoftish an attitude, with McNealy playing the NIH syndrome to the hilt, and only slightly mollified me when they finally did admit that Blackdown had something to do with it. That admission struck me as being exactly what MS would have done, and soured me on Sun for a long time. I suspect that much of the OSS crowd has a memory, and has a wait and see attitude because of that incident. Obviously, enough of that and sales go in the toilet too.
IMO Sun has no one to blame but Sun. Yes I applauded them in their battles with MS, and they could (and IMO should) have won rather handily if we had a working court system in this country, but sadly, we've amply demonstrated we don't when it jumps to do dubya's bidding within a month of his taking office.
Anyway, I sincerely hope the laid off people can find other equally well paid work in a timely manner.
Bah. Its Easter Sunday, and supposed to be a joyous occasion. So be joyous, thats an order now, y'all hear?
Cheers, Gene
I was gonna see if I could make the first post on that topic, but I see you and the next poster have beat me to it.
I was gonna volunteer my ex-wife. But, I don't care how you freeze dried her, there's no way you could get that much lard down to 10kg.
Besides, I don't have the 6 mill either... Damnit.
Cheers, Gene
Oh the wonders of science! With such loose ethics, why not make children smarter before they are born?
Most of your rant, while well meaning to you, is still a rant. I'm personally ambivalent about this new grass. On the one hand, I'd love to have something that would crowd out the moss that tends to overtake everything in this neighborhood. OTOH, it will spread because somewhere, someplace, it will bloom and infect someplace thats not tended. And then you have first a local pandemic like kudzu, and eventually a planetary problem.
But back to the quoted line above about smart kids. Thats not at all hard according to some experiments made, most in russia IIRC, about 10-20 years ago where they put the mother into a hyperbaric chamber during her last trimester, and ran the partial pressure of the chambers oxygen up by 2x or a bit more.
The children born were then tested as they matured, and many of them were doing the IQ tests at 150 and above by the time they were school age.
However, it appears that the 'breakup' of the USSR has probably ended the funding for such work as there haven't been any stories in the scientific magazines about this work in several years.
But its an interesting concept nontheless.
Cheers, Gene
Sometimes the problem IS censorship. Look at the story of Jane Akre and Steve Wilson,
/. So keep on keeping on folks, its a winner IMO.
I must have slept thru that one, can someone bring me up to speed?
That said, the obvious bias occasionally shown, and the "don't cover that, its either verboten or so far off the beaten path its not worth the ink" thats so obvious from the big 6's network news operations. The big 6 being CBS,ABC,NBC,CNN,FOX and PBS.
None of those organizations exist for *any* reason but to sell commercial time, with 4 to 6 commercials in between every story. A 1 hour news program often has only 18 to 20 minutes of real news, driving one to run down the remotes batteries at this residence because my "commercials in a row" tolerance is plumb used up at the end of 2 and the clicker plumb drowns out Jimmy Mays regardless of where in the block he is. I sometimes wonder if the people who hire him really understand just how obnoxious he really is?
Even the local news gets a fair bit of censorship. Just how far do you think a news story that involves a major advertising client is going to get? No place at all, sometimes even if the local paper gets it into ink, but thats rare, because that same client is also spending a goodly amount of his adv budget with the paper too. Doing so would be finacial hari-kari when that client, and 4 of his friends each pull 50k$ a month off the air.
As far as real news, I have NDI where to get it. Frankly, with your bull shit filters in place and tuned up, slashdot comes as close as any other place I scan for my nightly hit of information that covers the things I'm interested in. My hat is often doffed, with a short bow in your direction over something I've read, or found the link to, here on
Cheers, Gene