I suppose I ought to post to the article instead of responding to the first post, but this is slashdot and no one reads down that far.
I have seen a lot of posts suggesting prizes similar to the X-prize to stimulate fusion research in the private sector. Prizes are always a great idea if you set the criteria for them properly - after all, if no one meets the criteria, you don't spend the money! I ran a private sector fusion research project from 1994-1999. A prize would have been very helpful as it may have given a reward at a halfway point; sort of lowering the activation energy for success, as it were.
The real problem with fusion research is the extremely large cost/time of experiments. I blame this less on the nature of fusion and lay it squarely on the lack of imagination of the experimenters. Imagine how long it would take to design a working car if each prototype took 10 years to finance and build. We worked in beam-collision fusion (similar to the work of N. Rostoker, but with significant differences) where a prototype could be built in 6-12 months. It made development a lot faster. If we had more money, we could have done a lot more, but we did an awful lot for under $0.5 million.
As far as cold fusion goes, well, I have been watching that situation for a while. The best conclusion I can draw from the evidence is that it is a reaction which probably occurs due to gas pressure in the lattice. I ran experiments involving deuterium beams hitting deuterated titanium plates, and I can tell you we didn't get jack at energies below 5 keV. The reaction cross section is way too low. On the other hand, if you jack the energy up to 150 keV, the neutron flux in the room reaches dangerous levels. I have never seen any convincing evidence of nuclear reactions from CF experiments.
I agree that defining the value of the donation would be an issue. I am sure that the IRS already has ways of dealing with similar problems, or else people would be donating 'art-works' worth $umpteen to charities for the tax writeoff. It should be noted that registered copyrights already have an "intrinsic" value equal to the amount of money paid to register them. This is equivalent to the cost of materials in the 'art-work' example above - which is likely what the IRS allows as the write-off value.
Unfortunately under our current system, all unregistered copyrights are submarine ones. It's sad but true. I don't know how these would be valued. I think the IRS would be the one to set up the rules to prevent abuse - that's their job.
I agree that having the PDF act as a licensing center would be helpful to people trying to license abandonware. Thank you for extending the idea. I don't know that the PDF would ever make enough to give money to other charities. Transaction costs would eat most of the profit. Also, licensing it out, even if cheaply, still does not confer all the advantages to the user of something being in the public domain, such as self-copying and publishing, and not having to sign a license agreement. Licensing it out cheaply just makes it the poor brother to ASCAP or the RIAA. I am sure the RIAA makes donations to charity too. I think that works being donated to the public domain ought to put them in the public domain, not just licensed cheaply. There is a significant difference, especially when you look at more than two parties in the deal. 100,000 libraries and 100,000 works - does licensing each work to each library make sense? Putting them in the public domain I think makes more sense.
2) My bloomers aren't in a bunch over data requirements. I think a database is inevitable and the important thing is to make sure that it is transparent and equally accessed by the public. Power is information and that power shouldn't be locked up by government bureaucrats. If they want to look up my college record, I ought to be able to look up theirs. If they know my SSN, I want to know theirs.
What does get my bloomers in a bunch is the government changing the rules after the fact. There is a statement against such practices in the constitution, ya know, Article I, section 9. Just because worse government abuses occur, should we ignore it when smaller abuses happen? You say that I'm right, that strings ought to be stated up front. Well, then don't take the attitude that they ought to like it when they get screwed because they are taking "the Man's" money. If that's not what you meant, then please clarify it for me.
3) I wasn't calling you a troll. My point was that you may have been in the eyes of the AC who responded to you. Trolling is in the eye of the beholder, is it not? If I thought you were a troll, I wouldn't be wasting a response on you, or at most would respond as an AC. Sometime even I bite at trolls, but when I do, I usually do as AC.
If there exists a tax break for donating to the public domain currently, I don't know about it. What is the public domain's tax exemption number (required for writing off charitable donations on your tax returns)?
I agree with you and Eldred that it would be much better to have a renewed registry for copyrights. The fact is that we don't have one and are unlikely to win that battle in the courts or Congress. So what do we do now?
An additional advantage of a foundation is that it can provide a registry of donated or expired copyrights, so that people can easily look up what copyrights are public domain. Yes, the government should be doing this, but they are not. The status quo is that no one is providing this, and the body of abandonware is growing. Currently if you can't find a copyright owner, you have to assume that they are out there waiting to sue you if you use their work.
Yes, it is a social solution, but it is a social problem.
The idea is to create a tax break for putting IP in the public domain. Not a big one, but a little one, like you get for donating old, used computers to charities.
In my experience, Satanically-trained flesh-eating lawyer-accountant hybrids are all over tax breaks. The point is that we have to have a solution which manipulates them (the evil accountants) into thinking that it is better to have a $5 tax break today than to keep an asset which is worth nothing, costs nothing, and (who knows?) might be worth something someday so they better keep it around for all 70+ years. Right now there is no financial incentive to donate IP to the public domain.
I did not recieve a tax break when I let my last patent lapse (through not paying the renewal fee, due every few years). It is now in the public domain, and I don't mind, as I was never going to make any money off of it. If it had been a copyright rather than a patent, it would now be an abandoned copyright, and I would probably forget I even owned it in a decade or two. My heirs would certainly not know anything about it (why would I mention a null asset in my will?). Yet copyright lasts 70 years after the authors death. I could declare the copyright public domain, but as you ask, what's the incentive for that.
The whole point of the foundation is to give a financial incentive for declaring something public domain before its normal lapse time. Right now there is NO financial incentive to do so.
I think the idea of licensing it to give money misses the point. We are talking about copyrights which no one wants to spend money to license. If people are willing to spend money to license it, it shouldn't be abandoned.
Maybe the above AC just don't want to waste a "real" post on replying to someone they saw as a troll. "Real" posts are stored in your record of responses, and affect your karma. Who wants to have a profile full of responses to trolls instead of +5 Insightfuls? If I were going to respond to someone I saw as a troll, I'd probably do it as an AC.
I am not the AC who responded to you above, but if a lot of your responses are from AC's, the above may be part of the reason why.
In response to your original post, I should point out that with respect to private colleges, your justification that some of their money comes from the government means that the government can ask what they will has a serious problem. Government subsidisizes an awful lot of things these days (I agree with you that they shouldn't subsidize things willy-nilly), from tax-free shopping days to mortgage exemptions. Should the government have the ability to require any one who receives any subsidy to jump through whatever hoops they require? If so, shouldn't those requirements be stated up front, so the subsidy can be refused if the conditions aren't palatable? According to your logic, the government could say that anyone who claims a homeowners exemption grants the police right to search their home without a warrant. After all, you take the Man's money...
When I ran a business, we never applied for any DOE money because we didn't like the strings attached (we tried for NIST money, but never got any). I'd have been pissed if those strings appeared ~after~ we took the money and based our business on it. I'm sure that colleges would feel the same way.
I'm not so sure about your voucher idea. It would need some restrictions to prevent abuses, and I think a lot more adults would use a free voucher than 5%. If you give away free bread, people will take it even if they are not hungry.
However, I really, really like the idea of separating evaluation from teaching. In theory, evaluation of the students lets the teacher know where the student is deficient and thus where they need to focus. In practice, combining teaching and evaluation results in focus upon evaluation rather than material. What do you think the ratio of class questions about evaluation methods ("Is this going to be on the test?" "Can we put off the homework to next week?" "What is my grade currently?") is to questions about the material ("Could you go over magnetic permeability one more time?") in a typical class? I wouldn't say that combining evaluation and teaching is what results in "teaching to the test" - that is a natural result of testing having consequences. Separating evaluation won't change that if the test still has important consequences ("Is this on the state exam?"). However, having testing separated from teaching enables focus upon test making, which should result in a test which better measures actual education.
Also, the big (huge) advantage to separating evaluation and teaching is that you won't have to sit through a class which you already know in order to pass it. What a waste that is! AFAIK, CLEP tests are currently the only separated evaluation means in the US college system, and they certainly don't go far enough. Every class you've ever taken that was an "easy A" was probably a waste of yours and the school's time. You should have just been evaluated and moved on to the things you don't already know. This would probably cut a year off the average college education. That alone could easily make this system pay for itself.
Well, I don't know if this is "technical", but here's an idea:
A copyright Goodwill, or Salvation Army.
Let's say we call it the "Public Domain Foundation" or somesuch. When people are done with their intellectual property, and have squeezed every last dollar from "Doom 2, Electric Boogaloo", they can donate it to the PDF and get some tax writeoff. Just like people donate their old sneakers to Goodwill. Then the PDF declares the IP to be public domain.
Just like with the used goods charities, not everyone will donate their used stuff. A lot of people throw out their old clothes. But an awful lot do donate. Given a little PR campaign about "Recycle and reuse, get a tax break", I think a fair number of old works would be donated by publishing houses and other IP holders. Maybe the practice of donating older works to the Public Domain might catch on, and become a standard practice in industries...?
Ok, so its not as good as reducing copyright terms, but if the law is going to treat copyrights as property which effectively last forever (I'd love a car which lasts 70 years past its builder's death), we ought to play by the rules on the field. It's better than letting the copyrights go into the limbo they currently go into when their users are done with them.
Maybe digitalhermit dreams of someone giving a spin to the moon? Sure, it's a lot of energy and angular momentum, but are time machines which can visit the Big Bang any less possible?
Besides, who knows what boondoggle projects the Solar Congress of 2470 will be involved with? Properly terraforming Venus might involve speeding up the planet's rotation. If you consider changing the rotation of a planet to be impossible, calculate the relative magnitudes of the angular momentum of its spin, and of its orbit around the sun. Moving some of the anglular momentum from the orbit to the spin can change a planet's orbit slightly while changing its spin drastically. This process can either release energy or require it, depending upon the direction of change. If the process releases energy, it might be used as a power source in 2470...
Actually, for something like bullets, you could want something which spreads the force, rather than something which absorbs the energy. This is only true if you don't mind the bullet reflecting/ricocheting, which can be a problem under some circumstances...;)
The reason why you want an energy absorber with a bike helmet or a car is that it is presumed that the object you will be making a collision with will likely be more massive than yourself (such as a tree or the road). In such a case, the object which will be reflecting is you, and human bodies don't change velocity suddenly very well. However, with a bullet the object has a much smaller mass, so if the force is spread over a large area, it is very possible to reflect the bullet with minimal effect on the body. If you don't think this is true, then how is the bullet accelerated in the first place? Reflecting a bullet only requires twice the impulse of accelerating it, and many people's shoulders can handle the kick of a rifle. Of course, a rifle has additional mass to help with the kick, but spreading the impact over a larger area than the shoulder can help compensate for this. If a material were to become entirely rigid AND had enough strength to resist penetration AND the body behind it retains its shape (i.e. the rigid material ought to entirely surround the body), then the majority of the energy will be reflected back into the bullet. Of course, absorbing the energy works too, but is not the only way. Either way, you do not want the energy to be absorbed by your body when it hits you.
This is why I have had myself encased entirely in steel. Except, of course, for my fingers which I use for typing on Slashdot. Alas, my only weakness;).
I have to take exception to your analysis of the data presented by the CBO. Good data link, but I think your analysis is wrong.
Under Bush, the national debt has fallen from 49.5% GDP at Clinton's highest point to 36.1% in 2003.
No, that drop occurred under CLINTON, largely between 1995 and 1999. The debt was at 49.5% GDP in 1993, just after Clinton took office. When he left office in 2000, it was at 35.1% GDP. Under Bush, the public debt as a percent of GDP has floated between 33.1 % and 36.1% - pretty much about the same as when he took office.
You will also note that the public debt value listed does include social security. When social security is excluded (see the column labeled "on budget"), you see that, as a percentage of GDP, under Clinton the yearly operating deficit of the government fell from a 1992 value of 5.5% to a 1999 value of less than 0.05%, while under Bush it has risen to 5.0% of GDP.
If you look at the numbers, you'll see that Social Security has seen a bigger surplus in the first 4 years under Bush than it saw under all 8 years of Clinton.
True - it has. This was to be expected as the Baby Boomers haven't retired yet. That money will be needed for their retirement benefits later. If you think that Social Security ought to be counted towards whether the government has a surplus or deficit, I hope you aren't expecting checks when you get older. I don't know if you remember Gore talking about a "lock box", but that is exactly what he was talking about. As you can see, the money ~is~ being spent now, and will have to be borrowed back later to pay the Baby Boomers.
I'm afraid I haven't heard of the experiment you described, but you may find the article "Swimming in Spacetime", by J. Wisdom, Science 2003 Mar 21 interesting. It addresses the possible change in motion caused by distortions or spinning of a body in a curved spacetime (gravitational field).
The effects calculated by Dr. Wisdom (what a great name!) are very small, but I believe that they could be increased to measurable quantities by changing the model used from a distorting mode to a very radidly spinning mode.
Of course it won't work if only a single institution tries to get others to follow it. Language is a networked process, and a single entity changing its use to non-standard results in a penalty for the entity. A broad consensus would need to be reached before instituting the change nation- or world-wide. The best place to start would probably be something like a teacher's union or confederation of English teachers, who would be both the people who would see the greatest need for it and also the ones most likely to be able to implement the change.
An interesting anecdote about the Chicago Tribune, thank you.
There are a number of languages which are written in a similar manner (Hebrew is a good example). Perhaps one of the students on that team writes one of those languages. I don't think that a change in writing of this manner is really desirable for English ("pck'p th bt? Do y'mn boot, boat, bat, bet?") as the shortest possible way in general is highly non-regular.
However, I can think of a way to change English writing which would have huge savings - make it actually phoenetic! Imagine cutting a year off the time it takes for every child to learn how to read and write. Wouldn't that be worth the cost and bother of a change? Of course, we might need new letters for th, ch, and sh, but isn't it worth it to get rid of the current spelling of "through"? Think how much time kids spend learning how to spell - why shouldn't they be able to spell any word they have heard? The non-phoenetic spelling of English makes learning to read and write English twice as hard as it needs to be.
I agree, there is a serious problem with the attitude of "if you think it's insecure, just don't use it". I've run into this same attitude with regards to touchscreen electronic voting machines. I have been told that if I don't trust the ES&S systems, I should just vote by absentee ballot. It doesn't matter if I use a known secure voting apparatus if the other people who are voting do not. It doesn't help that my vote gets counted accuratly if someone can add an arbitrary number of votes for the candidate of their choice.
Hypothetical Example: 1000 people eligible to vote. 600 actually vote: 200 use secure method. They vote 150 for candidate A, 50 for candidate B. 400 use insecure method. They vote 220 for candidate A, 180 for candidate B.
Total legitimate votes: 370 for A, 230 for B.
Now Mr. Vote-Hack adds 200 phantom votes for B, through the insecure method.
Did anyone's vote count, aside from Mr. Vote-Hack?
In some systems, unless the entire system is secure, securing parts of it doesn't really matter.
My favorite book on Apollo 11 was given to me by my grandmother. She was a journalist covering the launch for Florida Today (the local paper here on the Space Coast).
It's the Apollo 11 Press Kit.
I'm pretty lucky to have it. I loved looking through it when I was 13. I don't know where someone else could get a copy of one nowadays... hm, google...
Apparently someone just sold one for $200 dollars , so I guess you could buy one.
Or you could download the 9 MB.pdf file of it from the aforementioned Apollo Lunar Surface Journal (thanks for the informative link, snake_dad!)
AMENDMENT PURPOSE: An amendment numbered two printed in the Congressional Record to add a new section to the bill prohibiting funds from being made available to make an application under section 501 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 for an order requiring the production of library circulation records, library patron lists, library Internet records, book sales records, or book customer lists.
Essentially, it would block the funds of the activity they wanted to block, thus making it unable to be done. An old Congress trick.
A much better idea, in the US, is to apply for a Provisional Patent. Look it up on www.uspto.gov. Basically, it establishes patent rights for 1 year, during which you must apply for a patent if you want one. At the end of the year, the information you disclosed becomes public knowledge, if the patent has not been applied for. It's relatively cheap (compared to a regular utility patent), at $80 for a "small entity" (like an individual inventor). The prov pat has much more legal standing than a sealed and dated envelope.
In defense of Tim Draper, I have presented a proposal to DFJ (Draper Fisher Jurvetson) without a non-disclosure statement or any other form of IP protection. He merely gave us his word of honor. Maybe I was stupid, but our idea was technical enough that he could not have reproduced our work without a few years of his own work. I was under the impression that discussing ideas without a form of IP protection is standard operating procedure at DFJ. They basically use their reputation as backing.
Of course, we got funded, so YMMV.
I would be interested to see any verifiable stories of DFJ backstabbing someone in such a way. I worked with Tim for 5+ years and I just don't see him doing that.
I'm not too surprised to see Tim doing something like this. He has a lot of energy and is always trying some new idea. Supposedly he is the one who came up with the idea of putting the little blurb at the bottom of free email (Hotmail) in order to get more people to try it. That got buzzworded as "viral marketing".
Does this mean we only have another ~10 years before the backlash gets us out of "regulation hell"? Or should we count from some other regulation, perhaps the IICA Hatch is proposing?/raises his glass of free as in beer to the next 14 years of Prohibition
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose I ought to post to the article instead of responding to the first post, but this is slashdot and no one reads down that far.
I have seen a lot of posts suggesting prizes similar to the X-prize to stimulate fusion research in the private sector. Prizes are always a great idea if you set the criteria for them properly - after all, if no one meets the criteria, you don't spend the money! I ran a private sector fusion research project from 1994-1999. A prize would have been very helpful as it may have given a reward at a halfway point; sort of lowering the activation energy for success, as it were.
The real problem with fusion research is the extremely large cost/time of experiments. I blame this less on the nature of fusion and lay it squarely on the lack of imagination of the experimenters. Imagine how long it would take to design a working car if each prototype took 10 years to finance and build. We worked in beam-collision fusion (similar to the work of N. Rostoker, but with significant differences) where a prototype could be built in 6-12 months. It made development a lot faster. If we had more money, we could have done a lot more, but we did an awful lot for under $0.5 million.
As far as cold fusion goes, well, I have been watching that situation for a while. The best conclusion I can draw from the evidence is that it is a reaction which probably occurs due to gas pressure in the lattice. I ran experiments involving deuterium beams hitting deuterated titanium plates, and I can tell you we didn't get jack at energies below 5 keV. The reaction cross section is way too low. On the other hand, if you jack the energy up to 150 keV, the neutron flux in the room reaches dangerous levels. I have never seen any convincing evidence of nuclear reactions from CF experiments.
I agree that defining the value of the donation would be an issue. I am sure that the IRS already has ways of dealing with similar problems, or else people would be donating 'art-works' worth $umpteen to charities for the tax writeoff. It should be noted that registered copyrights already have an "intrinsic" value equal to the amount of money paid to register them. This is equivalent to the cost of materials in the 'art-work' example above - which is likely what the IRS allows as the write-off value.
Unfortunately under our current system, all unregistered copyrights are submarine ones. It's sad but true. I don't know how these would be valued. I think the IRS would be the one to set up the rules to prevent abuse - that's their job.
I agree that having the PDF act as a licensing center would be helpful to people trying to license abandonware. Thank you for extending the idea. I don't know that the PDF would ever make enough to give money to other charities. Transaction costs would eat most of the profit. Also, licensing it out, even if cheaply, still does not confer all the advantages to the user of something being in the public domain, such as self-copying and publishing, and not having to sign a license agreement. Licensing it out cheaply just makes it the poor brother to ASCAP or the RIAA. I am sure the RIAA makes donations to charity too. I think that works being donated to the public domain ought to put them in the public domain, not just licensed cheaply. There is a significant difference, especially when you look at more than two parties in the deal. 100,000 libraries and 100,000 works - does licensing each work to each library make sense? Putting them in the public domain I think makes more sense.
1) I agree. Read point 2.
2) My bloomers aren't in a bunch over data requirements. I think a database is inevitable and the important thing is to make sure that it is transparent and equally accessed by the public. Power is information and that power shouldn't be locked up by government bureaucrats. If they want to look up my college record, I ought to be able to look up theirs. If they know my SSN, I want to know theirs.
What does get my bloomers in a bunch is the government changing the rules after the fact. There is a statement against such practices in the constitution, ya know, Article I, section 9. Just because worse government abuses occur, should we ignore it when smaller abuses happen? You say that I'm right, that strings ought to be stated up front. Well, then don't take the attitude that they ought to like it when they get screwed because they are taking "the Man's" money. If that's not what you meant, then please clarify it for me.
3) I wasn't calling you a troll. My point was that you may have been in the eyes of the AC who responded to you. Trolling is in the eye of the beholder, is it not? If I thought you were a troll, I wouldn't be wasting a response on you, or at most would respond as an AC. Sometime even I bite at trolls, but when I do, I usually do as AC.
If there exists a tax break for donating to the public domain currently, I don't know about it. What is the public domain's tax exemption number (required for writing off charitable donations on your tax returns)?
I agree with you and Eldred that it would be much better to have a renewed registry for copyrights. The fact is that we don't have one and are unlikely to win that battle in the courts or Congress. So what do we do now?
An additional advantage of a foundation is that it can provide a registry of donated or expired copyrights, so that people can easily look up what copyrights are public domain. Yes, the government should be doing this, but they are not. The status quo is that no one is providing this, and the body of abandonware is growing. Currently if you can't find a copyright owner, you have to assume that they are out there waiting to sue you if you use their work.
Yes, it is a social solution, but it is a social problem.
The idea is to create a tax break for putting IP in the public domain. Not a big one, but a little one, like you get for donating old, used computers to charities.
In my experience, Satanically-trained flesh-eating lawyer-accountant hybrids are all over tax breaks. The point is that we have to have a solution which manipulates them (the evil accountants) into thinking that it is better to have a $5 tax break today than to keep an asset which is worth nothing, costs nothing, and (who knows?) might be worth something someday so they better keep it around for all 70+ years. Right now there is no financial incentive to donate IP to the public domain.
Um, the tax break for the donation.
I did not recieve a tax break when I let my last patent lapse (through not paying the renewal fee, due every few years). It is now in the public domain, and I don't mind, as I was never going to make any money off of it. If it had been a copyright rather than a patent, it would now be an abandoned copyright, and I would probably forget I even owned it in a decade or two. My heirs would certainly not know anything about it (why would I mention a null asset in my will?). Yet copyright lasts 70 years after the authors death. I could declare the copyright public domain, but as you ask, what's the incentive for that.
The whole point of the foundation is to give a financial incentive for declaring something public domain before its normal lapse time. Right now there is NO financial incentive to do so.
I think the idea of licensing it to give money misses the point. We are talking about copyrights which no one wants to spend money to license. If people are willing to spend money to license it, it shouldn't be abandoned.
Maybe the above AC just don't want to waste a "real" post on replying to someone they saw as a troll. "Real" posts are stored in your record of responses, and affect your karma. Who wants to have a profile full of responses to trolls instead of +5 Insightfuls? If I were going to respond to someone I saw as a troll, I'd probably do it as an AC.
I am not the AC who responded to you above, but if a lot of your responses are from AC's, the above may be part of the reason why.
In response to your original post, I should point out that with respect to private colleges, your justification that some of their money comes from the government means that the government can ask what they will has a serious problem. Government subsidisizes an awful lot of things these days (I agree with you that they shouldn't subsidize things willy-nilly), from tax-free shopping days to mortgage exemptions. Should the government have the ability to require any one who receives any subsidy to jump through whatever hoops they require? If so, shouldn't those requirements be stated up front, so the subsidy can be refused if the conditions aren't palatable? According to your logic, the government could say that anyone who claims a homeowners exemption grants the police right to search their home without a warrant. After all, you take the Man's money...
When I ran a business, we never applied for any DOE money because we didn't like the strings attached (we tried for NIST money, but never got any). I'd have been pissed if those strings appeared ~after~ we took the money and based our business on it. I'm sure that colleges would feel the same way.
Ben,
I'm not so sure about your voucher idea. It would need some restrictions to prevent abuses, and I think a lot more adults would use a free voucher than 5%. If you give away free bread, people will take it even if they are not hungry.
However, I really, really like the idea of separating evaluation from teaching. In theory, evaluation of the students lets the teacher know where the student is deficient and thus where they need to focus. In practice, combining teaching and evaluation results in focus upon evaluation rather than material. What do you think the ratio of class questions about evaluation methods ("Is this going to be on the test?" "Can we put off the homework to next week?" "What is my grade currently?") is to questions about the material ("Could you go over magnetic permeability one more time?") in a typical class? I wouldn't say that combining evaluation and teaching is what results in "teaching to the test" - that is a natural result of testing having consequences. Separating evaluation won't change that if the test still has important consequences ("Is this on the state exam?"). However, having testing separated from teaching enables focus upon test making, which should result in a test which better measures actual education.
Also, the big (huge) advantage to separating evaluation and teaching is that you won't have to sit through a class which you already know in order to pass it. What a waste that is! AFAIK, CLEP tests are currently the only separated evaluation means in the US college system, and they certainly don't go far enough. Every class you've ever taken that was an "easy A" was probably a waste of yours and the school's time. You should have just been evaluated and moved on to the things you don't already know. This would probably cut a year off the average college education. That alone could easily make this system pay for itself.
Well, I don't know if this is "technical", but here's an idea:
A copyright Goodwill, or Salvation Army.
Let's say we call it the "Public Domain Foundation" or somesuch. When people are done with their intellectual property, and have squeezed every last dollar from "Doom 2, Electric Boogaloo", they can donate it to the PDF and get some tax writeoff. Just like people donate their old sneakers to Goodwill. Then the PDF declares the IP to be public domain.
Just like with the used goods charities, not everyone will donate their used stuff. A lot of people throw out their old clothes. But an awful lot do donate. Given a little PR campaign about "Recycle and reuse, get a tax break", I think a fair number of old works would be donated by publishing houses and other IP holders. Maybe the practice of donating older works to the Public Domain might catch on, and become a standard practice in industries...?
Ok, so its not as good as reducing copyright terms, but if the law is going to treat copyrights as property which effectively last forever (I'd love a car which lasts 70 years past its builder's death), we ought to play by the rules on the field. It's better than letting the copyrights go into the limbo they currently go into when their users are done with them.
Maybe digitalhermit dreams of someone giving a spin to the moon? Sure, it's a lot of energy and angular momentum, but are time machines which can visit the Big Bang any less possible?
Besides, who knows what boondoggle projects the Solar Congress of 2470 will be involved with? Properly terraforming Venus might involve speeding up the planet's rotation. If you consider changing the rotation of a planet to be impossible, calculate the relative magnitudes of the angular momentum of its spin, and of its orbit around the sun. Moving some of the anglular momentum from the orbit to the spin can change a planet's orbit slightly while changing its spin drastically. This process can either release energy or require it, depending upon the direction of change. If the process releases energy, it might be used as a power source in 2470...
Actually, for something like bullets, you could want something which spreads the force, rather than something which absorbs the energy. This is only true if you don't mind the bullet reflecting/ricocheting, which can be a problem under some circumstances... ;)
;).
The reason why you want an energy absorber with a bike helmet or a car is that it is presumed that the object you will be making a collision with will likely be more massive than yourself (such as a tree or the road). In such a case, the object which will be reflecting is you, and human bodies don't change velocity suddenly very well. However, with a bullet the object has a much smaller mass, so if the force is spread over a large area, it is very possible to reflect the bullet with minimal effect on the body. If you don't think this is true, then how is the bullet accelerated in the first place? Reflecting a bullet only requires twice the impulse of accelerating it, and many people's shoulders can handle the kick of a rifle. Of course, a rifle has additional mass to help with the kick, but spreading the impact over a larger area than the shoulder can help compensate for this. If a material were to become entirely rigid AND had enough strength to resist penetration AND the body behind it retains its shape (i.e. the rigid material ought to entirely surround the body), then the majority of the energy will be reflected back into the bullet. Of course, absorbing the energy works too, but is not the only way. Either way, you do not want the energy to be absorbed by your body when it hits you.
This is why I have had myself encased entirely in steel. Except, of course, for my fingers which I use for typing on Slashdot. Alas, my only weakness
I have to take exception to your analysis of the data presented by the CBO. Good data link, but I think your analysis is wrong.
Under Bush, the national debt has fallen from 49.5% GDP at Clinton's highest point to 36.1% in 2003.
No, that drop occurred under CLINTON, largely between 1995 and 1999. The debt was at 49.5% GDP in 1993, just after Clinton took office. When he left office in 2000, it was at 35.1% GDP. Under Bush, the public debt as a percent of GDP has floated between 33.1 % and 36.1% - pretty much about the same as when he took office.
You will also note that the public debt value listed does include social security. When social security is excluded (see the column labeled "on budget"), you see that, as a percentage of GDP, under Clinton the yearly operating deficit of the government fell from a 1992 value of 5.5% to a 1999 value of less than 0.05%, while under Bush it has risen to 5.0% of GDP.
If you look at the numbers, you'll see that Social Security has seen a bigger surplus in the first 4 years under Bush than it saw under all 8 years of Clinton.
True - it has. This was to be expected as the Baby Boomers haven't retired yet. That money will be needed for their retirement benefits later. If you think that Social Security ought to be counted towards whether the government has a surplus or deficit, I hope you aren't expecting checks when you get older. I don't know if you remember Gore talking about a "lock box", but that is exactly what he was talking about. As you can see, the money ~is~ being spent now, and will have to be borrowed back later to pay the Baby Boomers.
I'd say that works for railguns, cannons, etc...
I'm afraid I haven't heard of the experiment you described, but you may find the article "Swimming in Spacetime", by J. Wisdom, Science 2003 Mar 21 interesting. It addresses the possible change in motion caused by distortions or spinning of a body in a curved spacetime (gravitational field).
The effects calculated by Dr. Wisdom (what a great name!) are very small, but I believe that they could be increased to measurable quantities by changing the model used from a distorting mode to a very radidly spinning mode.
Of course it won't work if only a single institution tries to get others to follow it. Language is a networked process, and a single entity changing its use to non-standard results in a penalty for the entity. A broad consensus would need to be reached before instituting the change nation- or world-wide. The best place to start would probably be something like a teacher's union or confederation of English teachers, who would be both the people who would see the greatest need for it and also the ones most likely to be able to implement the change.
An interesting anecdote about the Chicago Tribune, thank you.
There are a number of languages which are written in a similar manner (Hebrew is a good example). Perhaps one of the students on that team writes one of those languages. I don't think that a change in writing of this manner is really desirable for English ("pck'p th bt? Do y'mn boot, boat, bat, bet?") as the shortest possible way in general is highly non-regular.
However, I can think of a way to change English writing which would have huge savings - make it actually phoenetic! Imagine cutting a year off the time it takes for every child to learn how to read and write. Wouldn't that be worth the cost and bother of a change? Of course, we might need new letters for th, ch, and sh, but isn't it worth it to get rid of the current spelling of "through"? Think how much time kids spend learning how to spell - why shouldn't they be able to spell any word they have heard? The non-phoenetic spelling of English makes learning to read and write English twice as hard as it needs to be.
I agree, there is a serious problem with the attitude of "if you think it's insecure, just don't use it". I've run into this same attitude with regards to touchscreen electronic voting machines. I have been told that if I don't trust the ES&S systems, I should just vote by absentee ballot. It doesn't matter if I use a known secure voting apparatus if the other people who are voting do not. It doesn't help that my vote gets counted accuratly if someone can add an arbitrary number of votes for the candidate of their choice.
Hypothetical Example:
1000 people eligible to vote.
600 actually vote:
200 use secure method. They vote 150 for candidate A, 50 for candidate B.
400 use insecure method. They vote 220 for candidate A, 180 for candidate B.
Total legitimate votes: 370 for A, 230 for B.
Now Mr. Vote-Hack adds 200 phantom votes for B, through the insecure method.
Did anyone's vote count, aside from Mr. Vote-Hack?
In some systems, unless the entire system is secure, securing parts of it doesn't really matter.
You mean you haven't heard the old joke in fusion research?:
Fusion is the power supply of the future, and always will be!
(I heard that joke early in my first decade of fusion research)
My favorite book on Apollo 11 was given to me by my grandmother. She was a journalist covering the launch for Florida Today (the local paper here on the Space Coast).
.pdf file of it from the aforementioned Apollo Lunar Surface Journal (thanks for the informative link, snake_dad!)
It's the Apollo 11 Press Kit.
I'm pretty lucky to have it. I loved looking through it when I was 13. I don't know where someone else could get a copy of one nowadays... hm, google...
Apparently someone just sold one for $200 dollars , so I guess you could buy one.
Or you could download the 9 MB
cheers,
krysith
Yeah, it confused the heck out of me too. It was an amendment to a Bill about funding security services. The amendment was (cut and paste):
H.AMDT.652 (A021)
Amends: H.R.4754
Sponsor: Rep Sanders, Bernard [VT] (offered 7/8/2004)
AMENDMENT PURPOSE:
An amendment numbered two printed in the Congressional Record to add a new section to the bill prohibiting funds from being made available to make an application under section 501 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 for an order requiring the production of library circulation records, library patron lists, library Internet records, book sales records, or book customer lists.
Essentially, it would block the funds of the activity they wanted to block, thus making it unable to be done. An old Congress trick.
Your representatives' votes are here!
Check out how they voted and let your representative know how you feel about this issue: find yours here (requires knowlege of where you live)
A much better idea, in the US, is to apply for a Provisional Patent. Look it up on www.uspto.gov. Basically, it establishes patent rights for 1 year, during which you must apply for a patent if you want one. At the end of the year, the information you disclosed becomes public knowledge, if the patent has not been applied for. It's relatively cheap (compared to a regular utility patent), at $80 for a "small entity" (like an individual inventor). The prov pat has much more legal standing than a sealed and dated envelope.
In defense of Tim Draper, I have presented a proposal to DFJ (Draper Fisher Jurvetson) without a non-disclosure statement or any other form of IP protection. He merely gave us his word of honor. Maybe I was stupid, but our idea was technical enough that he could not have reproduced our work without a few years of his own work. I was under the impression that discussing ideas without a form of IP protection is standard operating procedure at DFJ. They basically use their reputation as backing.
Of course, we got funded, so YMMV.
I would be interested to see any verifiable stories of DFJ backstabbing someone in such a way. I worked with Tim for 5+ years and I just don't see him doing that.
I'm not too surprised to see Tim doing something like this. He has a lot of energy and is always trying some new idea. Supposedly he is the one who came up with the idea of putting the little blurb at the bottom of free email (Hotmail) in order to get more people to try it. That got buzzworded as "viral marketing".
a former CEO of a DFJ startup (Fiat Lux Research)
Prohibition lasted 14 years.
/raises his glass of free as in beer to the next 14 years of Prohibition
The DMCA was 4 years ago.
Does this mean we only have another ~10 years before the backlash gets us out of "regulation hell"? Or should we count from some other regulation, perhaps the IICA Hatch is proposing?
I wonder who will be our generation's Al Capone?
Ian,
/.
I have just added you to my quote file, right below such classics as:
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Information wants to be anthropomorphized. - Golias,
(BTW, if anyone feels I have attributed wrongly, please let me know).