Fo' sure this problem is more wide spread than just tech world. In Scienceland there is a push to start teaching "scientific writing" classes - not so much for spelling - but grammar, clarity, and style. I didn't realize just how bad it was until I had to teach one of these writing classes... Holy crap. I mean I really suck at all things English, but these kids... They had difficulty expressive basic ideas and thoughts. Even worse, they couldn't express themselves verbally either. I often wonder what factors have lead to this and if it is related to the "like syndrome" in which people insert words such as "like" into speech (and writing oddly enough) in an apparent effort to waste them. Perhaps it is because kids today never had to actually write anything. When I was a kid you didn't screw around with extra words because that was extra pencil sharpening time you could be playing Atari with.
Given that I'm one of 2 native English speakers in my lab (of about a dozen people) I also wonder if globalization is impacting grammar in the sciences. For example, in my first years of graduate school when I would turn a paper in, it was often graded by a prof. who spoke English as a second or even third language. The paper always came back very well scrutinized (read ass-handed-to), except for the grammar and spelling. That is, the content was understood and corrected, but it was not uncommon for me to catch horrific English related errors down the road. Sometimes I use this to my advantage and write horribly complicated emails packed full of colloquialisms that only a native American English speaker would understand, and send them to people I know full well aren't going to understand a word of it, simply because I don't want to work with them. What is sad is that I can lose a room full of (mostly) native English speakers by speaking in a similar manner (or talking about stuff from the homework, which they never do). Perhaps I live in the Twilight Zone and it is everyone else's English that is good and I'm really speaking with a series of clicks and whistles...
I don't see any sort of "badge of honor" mentality 'round here, more of a laze faire treatment of the English language; Almost a philosophical belief that English is just something you learn well enough to communicate with, but not well enough to express yourself with. Perhaps it is rooted in computer technology, the ease of so-called spell checkers (MS Word does not know that you can pluralize the word 'oxygen'), IM, or simply the result of the reprioritization of subject matter in primary school? Perhaps this is where the English language is headed? All I know is that most of my friends from college are English/literature/history people with a far better grasp of English (and other languages) than I'll ever have (which they constantly remind me of), but I'm Hemingway in Scienceland because I "write like [I] talk" - which I was taught was the mark of poor writer.
... And BTW sport, the technology behind our troops IS what won WWII. From oil refinement to produce toluene and TNT, to advancements in RADAR and radio communications, to code breaking/making... I mean for crying out loud what do think "industrial capacity" is? Besides which the point is that everyone contributed. The woman that produced the planes in the automotive factories that were converted, the men that stormed the beaches and flew fighter planes, the engineers that designed those planes, the graduate students that dropped their thesis work in place of war related projects... And incidentally the technology surrounding the A-bomb was as important as the bomb itself and very large part of the war boiled down to the race to the bomb. Are you seriously trying to make the case that if Nazi scientists had completed their bomb it wouldn't have made any difference? Because we had more troops? At any rate, your condescending post was totally out of place, completely missed the point, and kinda trollish.
I hear you. I have a lot of friends/family in the armed services and I get caught in the middle of a lot of these sorts of discussions. I think people around here tend to forget that we're all in this together and that remains true no matter what motivates us and how we choose to contribute. Just getting discussions like this happening is important I think becuase it makes people take a step back and look objectively at the situation... At least I hope so : )
Well, although it might seem inhumane, the kids more likely to succeed in life *should* be left alone because they will form the economic and technological backbone of the country in decades to come. Those who are already "poor" and will most likely "fail" while being a drain on society will be better off fighting.
How do you measure that? I grew up on wellfare, went to public school, worked minimum wage jobs, and eventually squeeked out a diploma from a podunk high school. The military recruiters were all over me. In fact, a large portion of my graduating class couldn't attend graduation because they'd left for boot camp already. Why? I suppose because us poor kids have no future and it is easy to say "you want to pump gas or do something productive, oh BTW we'll give you a gun and let you drink yourself stupid when you're off duty". A friend of mine ruled that military aptitude test they forced us to take and the freaking recruiters showed up at his house to try and talk him into becoming an officer. Do you think that would have happened if I went to a Harvard prep school in a richie-rich land? Hell no. (BTW that friend got a full ride to Cal Tech, but that didn't stop the recruiting attempts)
So I ended up attending state university (so maybe my grades weren't so hot in high school) after telling a recruiter "I'd sooner live the rest of my life in a urine soaked cardboard box than join the military" and as it turns out even poor kids can succeed. Eventually the government paid me to get a PhD (my personal thanks to each taxpayer) so I could keep our military on the cutting edge of technology.
I'm not really sure what my point is here, except maybe that I can tell you first hand recruiters really do focus on poor kids regardless of their "potential", probably because some think tank crunched the numbers and found out that the military is a hard sell for even the dumbest rich kid. I think that is a little screwed up because I saw plenty of people in my boat throw their hands up and dive right in, probably because their parents didn't grow up in San Fransisco in the 60's, and now they rotate tires and pump gas... Or die in Iraq depending on which recruiter got to them first.
If I understand correctly from the posts going back and forth in this thread; "If you've served in the military you get automatic respect. If you post on./ (and weren't in the armed forces) you have no right to complain because you're a peace-loving Johnny Complains A Lot"... You know what makes our military great? Technology. You know who creates that technology? Smart-ass people with thin arms that post on Slashdot. We won WWII because our scientists came up with the bomb before Hilter's. That same technology kept the peace between the USSR and the USA through MAD for decades. So next time you go nerd-bashing why don't you stop and ask yourself who is working to provide you with next-gen adaptive camouflage, smart bullets, strength enhancing armor, and force multiplication through technology in general... I have a lot of friends who joined the armed forces, I happen to have a big brain and high blood pressure so I log my time in the lab developing technology they will use, but rest assured there is MUTUAL RESPECCT between my military friends and myself. I'd probably piss myself if I was ever asked to shoot another human being, but WTF do you know about desiging IR adaptive eletrochromic materials that defeat night vision? Mutual respect homie, mutual respect.
Dude, you're way off, at least for the big cities... In Los Angeles there are theaters that regularly charge $14 per ticket, and a few that will charge more because they're trying to throw in some "added value" to the moviegoing experience. (Granted, in these high-priced examples, they don't show ads, and sometimes not trailers...)
I could never figure out why I have to pay $12 to see a movie in Los Angeles. Its bad enough that housing is unaffordable, rent is outrageous, and gas prices are usually the highest in the country, but do movies get more expensive the closer you get to the source or something? Isn't seafood usually cheaper in coastal cities? I mean at that price we might as well pool our funds and just hire the actors to act out the movie with hand puppets.
-Home Theater: Beer.
Theater: soda, for which you pay more than alcoho
And we need any other reasons because...? For that matter someone actually needed to conduct a study to figure this out? Just goes to show you how analysts, marketing executives, and "yes men" gather 'round in an industry-wide ass-sniffing circle until they completely disconnect from the public and are forced to lobby congress for laws to force their business models on us. "Consumers don't want to use new technology - it scares them. They want to drive somewhereto pay $10 for bland over produced Hollywood tripe that we can load with cross-promotions and product placement". "I think you're right, we should get legislation passed to protect them from what they think they think".
narcissism (när's-sz'm) pronunciation also narcism (-sz'm)
n.
1. Excessive love or admiration of oneself. See synonyms at conceit.
2. A psychological condition characterized by self-preoccupation, lack of empathy, and unconscious deficits in self-esteem.
3. Erotic pleasure derived from contemplation or admiration of one's own body or self, especially as a fixation on or a regression to an infantile stage of development.
4. The attribute of the human psyche charactized by admiration of oneself but within normal limits.
Why can't we all get along... As the above posts point out Linux and BSD are fundamentally different; different goals, different licenses, different philosophies. I mean you simply can't deny that Linux is fun even if parts of it are hackish and slightly broken. I think of BSD more like a peanutbutter and jelly sandwich; a reliable source of flavor and nutrition in a great many circumstances. Even crappy bread, chemical filled peanutbutter, and too-sweet jelly makes an edible sandwich. Linux is more like a burrito though; you can mix and match the ingredients for a wide variety of flavors, some good, some bad, some lock up your intenstines just after the POST. And since so many people are into burritos now there are all manner of microwave, meatless, bean and cheese, pre-made, mini, gigantic; lots of variety in burritos. I have to say though that the best burritos I've eaten are far superior to the best PB&Js, but burritos really do require fresh ingredients (not a fan of pre-packaged burritos) and quality tortillas and as a result the worst burritos I've had... Well they made me sick and broke some hardware and I certianly can't say that about the worst PB&J... What was I talking about? Now I'm hungry and have a strange desire to put refried beans on my keyboard... Oh, right Linux.. I mean Windows has it's place too. Like potato salad. Man, everyone seems to like that stuff, but I can't stand it. It feels so generic and bland to me (plus I just don't like that much mayo), but it is everywhere and sometimes I have to eat it (at least potatoes are good). Especially when I'm not allowed to eat with my hands, which really precludes to use of either burrito or PB&J, but runs Ubisoft's latest copy protection scheme and since more people like potato salad I can share without a long explanation about why I like burritos and why I would want a pengiun on a T-shirt.
At the end of the day though, I need variety in my diet to survive. These people that eat nothing but PB&J all the time drive me crazy. Especially when they start bad mouthing my burritos... Yeah, never even having tasted my homemade burrito they bash it, comparing it to Taco Bell, while they're using smooth peanutbutter which I don't care for at all. Sometimes I get on the potato salad bashing bandwagon, but then I'm forced to eat potato salad at my folks' house and I realize how much worse it would be if they made burritos instead and how not-right-feeling PB&J for dinner at the folks' house would be. At any rate I see a lot of ideology-based arguments for and against different foods and while I appreciate everyone's desire to share their favorite food, we all have different tastes and prepare our own unique dishes... I guess some of us (after reading the article) are real cocks about our own food preferences and can't see past the end of our own sandiwch though.
This sort of stuff really impresses me, I think fields like this are *so* important to future research. The thing I don't get is why do people protest [slashdot.org] ideas like nano-tech without knowing what the possible beinfits are?
The term "nanotechnology" has entered the public lexicon, much like the word "nuclear" in the middle of the 20th century. As soon as that happens, researchers start calling everything "nanotechnology" because a bunch of senators see a presentation from the RAND corporation that says "nanotechnology" can do this if we fund it at level X or this if we fund it at level Y and they create things like the "nanotechnology" initiative. Now the fields of biochemistry, chemistry, and molecular biology fall under the broad definition of "nanotechnology" and because engineers and physicists want a piece I routinely see slides of micrographs labeled "nano_____". I understand the need for funding, but I'm so @#$% sick of nano- motors, latters, elevators, delivery systems, power plants, putians, pumps, gears, etc. plastered on everyone's research that 4 years ago would have been called supramolecular, polymer, or materials. Its nice to see clever things like this (which BTW is not unique to this lab, there are entire conferences on dendrimers now) that actually seem to work, but aren't really nanotechnology. Sure dendrimers are on the nanometer scale, but if we run around calling everything that is nanscale "nanotechnology" what will the point of words like polymer, protein, macromelecule, or even nanoscale be anymore? Well, maybe I just need to get with the times. All I ever hear from people in suits is how we need to "rebrand chemistry" and start making flashy presentations that will play well in layman's publications. I'd like to roll their ties up and cram them down their far-too-often-open mouths, but I seem to be in the minority as far more people are using pretty pictures and stupid puns, cliches, and analogies to hype their research than adhering to the old "scientists are modest; the research speaks for itself" philosophy.
Now that my rant is done, on with this whole business of idiots protesting stuff they don't understand. Two examples, genetic engineering: ok through artificial selection (tomatoes, chickens, dogs, corn... basically everything humans have domesticated), evil through "cloning" which they don't even know the definition of. Nuclear: bad, bad, bad, unless it is to keep the Reds at bay. Like how Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging was rebranded Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) because (seriously) people wouldn't stick their heads inside something with the word "nuclear" in it (yeah, those processing nuclear spins are going to kill you)... Anyway so thanks to people spreading fear and paranoia under the banner of "nanotechnology" involving tiny robots that consume matter at the atomic level or little nanothingers that enter your body and control your mind, coupled with the desire to pile gobs of scientific research under the same banner (to get funding) we wind up with hippies protesting pants. In some ways paranoia is a good thing becuase it helps us stay skeptical, but c'mon... pants? So the way I see it, that is how dendrimers which don't significantly differ chemically from styrofoam, platic bags, ketchup bottles, or any other man-made macromolecule wind up the inadvertant target public fear, despite having great technological potential. I suppose it is like stem cell research in that ideology (i.e. preconceived notions) trump fact, reality, common sense, and science.
Typically, your analogies are not only laughably poor, but conflate the provision of physical services and goods with copies of mere information.
The whole point of making an analogy between physical gooods and IP is in fact to conflate them... In fact that is sort of the point of making analogies. Anyway, you have clearly closed your mind to any opinion that varies slightly from your socialist view of IP. Our society is built on "mere information" and whether you accept it or not, "information" is what has made the US a superpower. If you take away the incentive for people to create that information, what exactly do you expect to happen?
I agree that people other than the creator of IP should not have the rights to said IP, thus we agree with each other that a business shouldn't exist soley for the purpose of copying information endlessly. I, however, think that the creator of the IP should be compensated when others use their work for profit. You would seem to disagree with that notion, but then I suspect you are not in the business of creating IP. I happen to be a reasearch scientist and really take exception when companies poach our research and profit on it without compensating us for the years of hard work that went into creating it. I did not go through years of schooling to become an oil field of ideas for some monkey in a suit to earn his upper class tax cuts with.
Actually it's very different, because neither the painter nor the carpenter can sell their product over and over and over and over again.
Sort of, except that you do sell houses over and over again, often the exact same design, just not the same physical house. You are still paying the carpenter for the service of converting raw materials into a house which is a marketable skill that carpenters possess. When you sell music, you're selling IP over and over again to different people, but with IP protection you're allowing a composer to sell a service that involves a unique skill. The difference there is that the product the composer's skill generates can be reproduced by people whose only skill is copying things... If I get what you're saying, you think a composer should be able to sell tickets to the first showing of their opera after which each showing should be free? Or should they only maintain the rights over the original parchment used to write the music down? If I invent a low-power consuming light bulb, should I only retain the rights to sell the first bulb? Why should people whose skills create monolithic products that cannot be easily reproduced have the market cornered on making a living and having a career? Do you believe that people who go through years of training/schooling shouldn't be rewarded just because their skill is coming up with concepts or expressions that people without said training can easily reproduce, but cannot create?
If you don't think it is a valid analogy, how about this analogy; tell a carpenter that he will get paid only for the first house he builds in a subdivision. He must complete every house in the project to get paid for the first house, but he will only get paid for the first. Do you consider that a fair analogy for a composer that spends years working on a piece that he has to perform to profit on, but as soon as he does so it will be copied endlessly without him making a dime?
"This has been a key goal of researchers in this field for nearly 20 years and we have done it.... Molecular electronics are indeed possible, no longer just a futuristic theory."
To mis-quote Confucius: "Man who blow his own horn often play out of tune". This is the same sort of clap trap we heard out of the molecular computing KoolAid drinkers about 7 years ago. It is funny how everytime someone finds a new angle on the "single molecule transistor" they claim it is the biggest break-through in 20 years... Not that this isn't an interesting discovery, but c'mon it is just another cog in the wheel, not the huge breakthrough he is making it out to be... Just like all the others; starting their talks with "molecular electronics has been the Holy Grail for 20 years..." Ugh, show me a funtional circuit that can even compete with Si technology from the 1970s. Until then get off your soapbox and save the schmaltz for your grant proposals.
Again quoting from the article:
His research, to be published in today's edition of the scientific journal Nature, shows that a molecular transistor can be made to control electricity at a minuscule level.
Uh-huh, and I'm sure he submited it to Nature first. Yeah, there is no chance that he submitted it to Science and they kicked it back because it just isn't a breakthrough. BTW are you refering to the theoretical work on molecular rectifiers from the 1970's? Talk about another dead horse... How many single molecules with huge dipoles do people have to trap between gold electrodes, measure picoamp currents, reference the "molecular rectifier" work and claim as a major achievement? Sorry, unrelated personal rant...
So that no one else can produce copies of it.
That shifts the economic profit interest from producing it as cheaply as possible to maximizing sales volume at monopoly pricing level.
Wether or not one can avoid buying it is irrelevant; as long as they are no equivalent replacements there is no competition which results in a monopoly pricing level.
That is specious reasoning. You're implying that The Planets, for example, is a unique product and that an entire industry is responsible for it's sale. The fact of the matter is that there are many other pieces of music you can listen to and the product in question is really the reproduction of that music, not the score itself. It is absurd to think that allowing anyone to run off copies of anyone else's music, perform it when and where they want, and sell recordings without the consent of the composer would do anything but ruin the ability of a composer (especially and independant one) to make a living which is contrary to the entrepreneurial American ideals. Take the example of a research scientist working for GE. Said scientist does not actually own any of the IP he or she creates, however GE retains all the rights which allows them to sell the technology rather than just the product. This allows them to pay researchers about double what they would make as an academic (but intellectually 'free') researcher. If GE was only able to market the products resulting from the technology, they would be undersold by competition that does not have to invest in R&D and their business model would fail. The payoff for the academic, who retains the rights to the work, is the ability to collect royalties when the technology is licensed to the inudstry.
Indeed. Look at Taiwan. In fact, take a generalized approach and look at correlation factors for patents. I did, and it changed my point of view entirely. I no longer believe that IP protection is necessary to recover the huge costs incurred. I've come to the conclusion that the huge costs are a result of IP protection.
Unlike in the countries with strong patent protection where three different labs work on the exact same thing, but only one gets to take the profits?
You must not be an inventor/researcher/artist. The researchers and inventors who create intellectual property recover the least ammount of profit of all. Look how much an executive, whose only job is to sell other people's ideas, makes compared to a senior research scientist. In fact, because of our open system, researchers collaborate. This collaborative system of research is what make the US a superpower whether you want to admit it or not. We don't make our money selling products, we make our money inventing them. Our university system has, for the past century, attracted the best and brightest from all over the world which is where our edge both technologically and economically has come from. The inudstry, which is apparently run by people who share your mindset, is admittedly very secretive in the US, however most (all public) universities have strict policies against secrecy. This forces the industry to share their insights with us in order to collaborate and benefit from our ability to do basic discovery/fundamental research, which is funded largely with government grants. In countries without IP protection and our open system of information sharing, no one shares any preliminary result for fear of a competator snatching it up. You might say "well tough; that's how the market works", but keep in mind that science and business are unrelated to each other. We do not work in a profit-driven world. We work in a knowledge driven world. Trust me on this, most researchers are in the game 75% out of intellectual curiosity and 25% for personal gain. Without that basic passion for knowledge, problem solving, and understanding research seems boring, frustrating, and ungratifying. Researchers, and I'm sure artists of all kinds, detest all the BS that the profit-driven world heaps on us, but recognize it as a necessary evi
By its nature all Intellectual Property (copyrights, patents, trademarks) are a.gov granted monopoly. Repeat after me, monopolies are not illegal. Using a monopoly to force yourself into other markets
I believe it is also illegal (it is certainly unethical) to leverage your monopoly to prevent others from entering your market space. I think it is difficult to prove the "recording industry" has or has not used their monopoly to force themselves into other markets because their market is sort of nebulous. Is using their control over recorded media and distribution to quash the development of competing technologies (like the Internet) and emerging markets (like the Internet) legal? Ethical? At any rate, just because a monopoly isn't illegal does not mean the government couldn't or shouldn't break it up. When, through mergers, a couple of companies control enough of a market to price fix (how many times did they get busted for price-fixing CDs?) and stiffle competition, they need to be broken up. AT&T simply owned all the transmission lines and refused to sell space on them at a reasonable price (as I understand it - I was pretty young when that happened) which lead to crappy service at high prices. The public got angry and their government did something about it.
Oh, and how does IP give the government a monopoly? Are you implying that the USPO should have competition? Like I should be able to patent my invention through GE who will then use their influence to protect it? Or should we do away with IP so that my only compensation for years of research is the gratification I get from seeing my invention make so many people happy... While everyone but me makes money on it.
All intellectual 'property' is by definition monopolies. As such it inherently damages the free market and reduces the total wealth of society by diverting funds from efficient production of desired goods and services into inefficient monopolistic organizations.
That is such a load. A monopoly is when a market is cornered by a single company/organization to the point were they can exclude all competition. You seem to be implying that Gustav Holst cornered The Planets market such that no one else could write the exact same piece and claim it as their own... Anyway giving someone rights over a song they wrote is no different than a painter being able to sell a painting, or a carpenter building and selling houses. Patents and copyrights and by extention the idea of intellectual property were written into the US constitution precicley so a market could be built around music, books, plays, etc. by allowing people to make a living as an artist or inventor or whatever.
Look at Taiwan - the lack of patent law (or enforcement) has lead to a research climate that is so secretive that three different labs could be working on exactly the same thing at the exact same time - thus wasting a butt load of money and effort for fear of someone else marketing their invention or simply claiming it as their own. There are markets all over Eastern Europe and Asia that Western companies won't touch simply because of a lack of reasonable patent law.
That said, there are extremes on both ends. Disney has managed to hold a copyright on the likeness of Mickey Mouse for (about) 90 years now; it legally should have expired after 14 or so. Blocking patents and patent obfuscation are counter productive and anti competative. It is f*cked that even the name and likeness of a band is considered IP that can be bought and sold. It is equally f*cked that an artist can't even perform his or her own songs without licensing them from the label they're signed with.
The music industry almost has a monopoly because an up-and-coming artist (that wants to make a living) really has no choice but to sign with them, as they own all the major distribution channels. The record labels simply refuse to sign them unless they give away all the rights to their first X albums which they are contractually obligated to make. Moreover if a label feels that the band has 2 hit songs they will divide them between two albums and, if the rest of the band's songs suck, refuse to release them as singles... In a "free market" they could simply Wall Mart the competition to death then jack up their prices when the indie labels collapse, merge into one giant corporation, buy Clear Channel, and voila a perfect monopoly... In our crappy "regulated market" they are forbidden from using their capital to undersell smaller labels which is the only reason they can exist. An artist with integridy can starve on an indie label until they catch on, at which point they can sign with a big label (even then keeping all the rights to their songs, the name of their band, and their image is difficult) and get to call the shots because they're proven.
On the one hand you have an industry whos business it is to distribute content, and on the other hand you have the same industry doing its best to shut down, criminalize, and sue out of existance the very distribution channels adopted and eventually preferred by their customers (again, and again, and again.)
Who sues sues their customer base and tries to slit the throat of any threat to their content distribution model? I'll tell you who; a monopoly. Does this remind anyone else of AT&T or Microsoft? Why is our government so not on the side of consumers this time? Oh, right, because it was big-business that complained about ATT and MS, not consumers. Seriously though, if any consortium or company can get away with sueing their customers it means their customers have no alternative! This is the definition of a monopoly and no matter what your view on "piracy" something needs to be done at the government level to address this.
11) Apply RIAA/MPAA math as applicable and complain about the hand that fed you in 'the early days'
..AA math; (n songs/records/movies downloaded) X (highest retail price) = (imaginary profit)
It never ceases to amaze me how they complain about "hundreds of billions of dollars lost to copyright violations" despite any historical evidence of said profit. I think they learned math in the George W. Bush school of applied math.
I completely agree. Most of the music I listen to is obscure old jazz that typically exists in one of three forms. A lot of the time it has gone public domain and downloading MP3s of old records ripped by total fanatics (i.e. great quality) is 100% legal. Most often family members of the artist (who died a long time ago) think they deserve to profit on grandpa's talent... Uhm, screw them... Then there is the worst; when the record company owns the rights. Should Sony be able to profit on grandpa's talents? Hell no. Those bastards routinely con up and comings into signing away the rights to music they created and after they're dead for some strange reason the price of the CDs doesn't drop... Hmmm... Quite often the stupid record company won't even bother releasing it in digital form and the records are out of print, so they just sit on the rights and prevent the music from being reproduced, sold, or sometimes even published (which sucks for us musicians)... Again, screw them.
Now let's take Charlie Hunter as a modern example. He sells his albums in FLAC format (or MP3 or WMA if you prefer) for around $10 through a Bay Area based on-line company as well as distributing CDs on an indie label. So maybe you havn't heard of Charlie Hunter, but he is quite famous in jazz world and makes plenty of money. He's also fairly share-friendly like Phish or the Dead, which has only lead to more people discovering him and his related projects. There is now a whole community of Bay Area musicians that distribute their music this way.
Meanwhile Sony, BMG, AOL-Time Warner, etc. has decided that ripping CDs should be prevented at the hardware level and any digital content needs to be heavily DRMed (and DRM b-b-b-b-blows for us Linux users)... So what possible reason could I have for getting in my car, driving to the store, and plopping down $18 + tax for whatever Boy Band / Blonde Bimbo Shill Disney is propping up this month? If one of the Big 5 signs a band I like (with 98% of the market it is bound to happen) I'd sooner "pirate" the album and mail the band $20. Humph.
Demand for tiny, high-capacity stored power sources has never been greater than today, and the R&D budgets are ever rising, but forecasting when the next serendiptuous discovery of a new technology will occur is not easy...
All the belly aching around here... Sheesh. We're working on it, ok? The DOE, DARPA, Office of Naval Research, Air Force, etc etc etc are handing out money for battery projects and I assure you that the next new battery technology will NOT be serendipitous, rather it will be the result of years of (frustrating) research building on discoveries dating all the way back to wet towels and copper discs.
Battery technology is slow to develope because it is not easy to pack a bunch of electrons in a tiny space wedged up against a huge electron sync and then ask them to not only sit there and like it, but to merrily hop back up the hill after being discharged, then sit around on the electrode until we ask for them again. You can't just stuff them in a box - they repel each other. They are happiest when they can delocalize over a network of big positively charged nuclei, but the problem with electrons is happy = low potential = low half cell potential = the need for many cells = big form factors... You get the idea.
Now take all that and add to it Nature's silly idea of charge balancing. When electrons flow they create a chrage imbalance that must be exactly balanced by positive charges. Now positive charges don't grow on trees like electrons, they tend to be HUGE by comparison and they like to swim. Now batteries with liquid electrolytes just aren't pratical so we have to use various glassy polymers and "gels" (or dry cell or whatever) that are fabulous ion conductors, but crappy electron conductors. It took years of research to find a medium that lithium ions could flow through without getting stuck right away and what we ended up with isn't even that great...
Battery technology will have to move in one of two directions and be coupled with dramatic cuts in power consumption by portable devices. First, fuel cells. These are great because you harvest electrons from REDOX reactions rather than stuffing them into lithium intercalated graphite or whatever hideously unstable electrode configuration is demanded by the charged state. Of course they can't be recharged and right now they suck because, and where have I heard this before, the best ion conductors (which you still need for fuel cell batteries) only perform well at a balmy 80% humidity and (and I'm not 100% sure on this) about 50 deg. C... The other option is "nanotechnology" (hang on, have to smack myself for using a buzzword) which could allow us to tuck thin films or tiny spheres or scrolls or whatever into very small spaces. This is important because it allows us to use very small half cell potentials to produce large open circuit voltages by wiring up thousands of teeny-tiny cells in our "nanobattery" (smack, smack) arrays.
So either go out and invent safe nuclear batteries or tiny hamsters that can fit on tiny hampster wheels that can fit inside my iPod and go weeks without hamster food, or accept the fact that battery technology is a real bugger... I mean we (scientists) aren't that lazy; some problems are just harder than others to solve. Why can't we get all over the electrical engineers to make lower power consumption devices? Can we harp on Taiwan for not trying hard enough to bring OLEDs to market? Maybe we should just build robots that turn us into batteries...
2. You're probably sitting on a highly unstable, very dangerous bomb right now. See that Lithium-Ion battery in your phone? It just happens to be a powerful explosive.
Not to nit pick, but lithium ion batteries are made from inorganic metal complexes (that are not explosive), polymer/electrolyte blends (again not explosive), and graphite (I sure hope that isn't explosive). The "explosive" element comes from the heat generated from rapid discharge, much like car batteries which are made from lead and aqueous sulfuric acid (not even flammable), but will most certainly explode if shorted. The "unstable" aspect arrises from the lithium "fingers" that tend to grow between the electrodes which causes, you guessed it, rapid discharging of the battery. At any rate an equal mass of an actual "powerful explosive" (high explosive if you prefer) would make the battery look like a match flame.
I'm not knocking the nuclear battery idea, just pointing out that ALL modern batteries are explosive, so don't poo on lithium-ion batteries for being batteries - they can't help that.
Hell lets just call Nazis terrorists now. They are pretty much interchangable if you ignore the "short" gap between the end of the second world war and today
You have it all wrong... Terrorists have beards and Nazi's have mustaches, duh. Oh, and Bushies are clean shaven... Except that Bolton guy... Hmmm, maybe he's a Nazi.
Selection isn't just going on with people picking mates for whatever random traits please them. Selection is also happening through advances in medicine... Hospitals are now able to save babies that would have had little or no chance 100 years ago. Doctors can keep alive for far longer people with adverse mutations that would otherwise prove fatal.
Indeed I would not exist right now if the cesarian insection hadn't been invented first, and I most certainly would have died shortly after birth if it were not for modern medicine. Even if I had survived birth in pre-historic times, my eyesite is so poor I would have been weeded out by natural selection anyway... So medicine is propping us sick-o's up on both ends... Perhaps the very existance of the modern geek is an artifact of technology and artificial selection? I mean can you think of anything with less chance of survival in the wild than a power-nerd? I'd be running after the villiage hunters trying to stabilize my Sousaphone while yelling "Hey, wait up guys... I dropped my glasses..."
Because you can't predict any of these things, it's much better NOT to reduce our genetic diversity by artificial selection rules:
We've been performing artificial selection on humans for thousands of years. In much the same way that modern corn, chickens, tomatoes, etc. were created by selecting the offspring with the most desireable features, we have been selecting ourselves for seemingly random traits from the get go. Making that process more "scientific" by looking at the genetic code of people before their born isn't that much different, given that genetics (at least this particular application) is almost entirely guesswork anyway. When obesity kills off a huge segment of the population that, for whatever reason, just can't say no to the tripple butter dipped deep-fried Crisco burger we may find that the same people are geniuses at accounting and the worlds' economies will collapse... It's all guesswork; that's what makes life so fun.
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Fo' sure this problem is more wide spread than just tech world. In Scienceland there is a push to start teaching "scientific writing" classes - not so much for spelling - but grammar, clarity, and style. I didn't realize just how bad it was until I had to teach one of these writing classes... Holy crap. I mean I really suck at all things English, but these kids... They had difficulty expressive basic ideas and thoughts. Even worse, they couldn't express themselves verbally either. I often wonder what factors have lead to this and if it is related to the "like syndrome" in which people insert words such as "like" into speech (and writing oddly enough) in an apparent effort to waste them. Perhaps it is because kids today never had to actually write anything. When I was a kid you didn't screw around with extra words because that was extra pencil sharpening time you could be playing Atari with.
Given that I'm one of 2 native English speakers in my lab (of about a dozen people) I also wonder if globalization is impacting grammar in the sciences. For example, in my first years of graduate school when I would turn a paper in, it was often graded by a prof. who spoke English as a second or even third language. The paper always came back very well scrutinized (read ass-handed-to), except for the grammar and spelling. That is, the content was understood and corrected, but it was not uncommon for me to catch horrific English related errors down the road. Sometimes I use this to my advantage and write horribly complicated emails packed full of colloquialisms that only a native American English speaker would understand, and send them to people I know full well aren't going to understand a word of it, simply because I don't want to work with them. What is sad is that I can lose a room full of (mostly) native English speakers by speaking in a similar manner (or talking about stuff from the homework, which they never do). Perhaps I live in the Twilight Zone and it is everyone else's English that is good and I'm really speaking with a series of clicks and whistles...
I don't see any sort of "badge of honor" mentality 'round here, more of a laze faire treatment of the English language; Almost a philosophical belief that English is just something you learn well enough to communicate with, but not well enough to express yourself with. Perhaps it is rooted in computer technology, the ease of so-called spell checkers (MS Word does not know that you can pluralize the word 'oxygen'), IM, or simply the result of the reprioritization of subject matter in primary school? Perhaps this is where the English language is headed? All I know is that most of my friends from college are English/literature/history people with a far better grasp of English (and other languages) than I'll ever have (which they constantly remind me of), but I'm Hemingway in Scienceland because I "write like [I] talk" - which I was taught was the mark of poor writer.
... And BTW sport, the technology behind our troops IS what won WWII. From oil refinement to produce toluene and TNT, to advancements in RADAR and radio communications, to code breaking/making... I mean for crying out loud what do think "industrial capacity" is? Besides which the point is that everyone contributed. The woman that produced the planes in the automotive factories that were converted, the men that stormed the beaches and flew fighter planes, the engineers that designed those planes, the graduate students that dropped their thesis work in place of war related projects... And incidentally the technology surrounding the A-bomb was as important as the bomb itself and very large part of the war boiled down to the race to the bomb. Are you seriously trying to make the case that if Nazi scientists had completed their bomb it wouldn't have made any difference? Because we had more troops? At any rate, your condescending post was totally out of place, completely missed the point, and kinda trollish.
I hear you. I have a lot of friends/family in the armed services and I get caught in the middle of a lot of these sorts of discussions. I think people around here tend to forget that we're all in this together and that remains true no matter what motivates us and how we choose to contribute. Just getting discussions like this happening is important I think becuase it makes people take a step back and look objectively at the situation... At least I hope so : )
Gee, you're right if Nazi scientists had completed the bomb they would have been powerless against our waves of troops..?
How do you measure that? I grew up on wellfare, went to public school, worked minimum wage jobs, and eventually squeeked out a diploma from a podunk high school. The military recruiters were all over me. In fact, a large portion of my graduating class couldn't attend graduation because they'd left for boot camp already. Why? I suppose because us poor kids have no future and it is easy to say "you want to pump gas or do something productive, oh BTW we'll give you a gun and let you drink yourself stupid when you're off duty". A friend of mine ruled that military aptitude test they forced us to take and the freaking recruiters showed up at his house to try and talk him into becoming an officer. Do you think that would have happened if I went to a Harvard prep school in a richie-rich land? Hell no. (BTW that friend got a full ride to Cal Tech, but that didn't stop the recruiting attempts)
So I ended up attending state university (so maybe my grades weren't so hot in high school) after telling a recruiter "I'd sooner live the rest of my life in a urine soaked cardboard box than join the military" and as it turns out even poor kids can succeed. Eventually the government paid me to get a PhD (my personal thanks to each taxpayer) so I could keep our military on the cutting edge of technology.
I'm not really sure what my point is here, except maybe that I can tell you first hand recruiters really do focus on poor kids regardless of their "potential", probably because some think tank crunched the numbers and found out that the military is a hard sell for even the dumbest rich kid. I think that is a little screwed up because I saw plenty of people in my boat throw their hands up and dive right in, probably because their parents didn't grow up in San Fransisco in the 60's, and now they rotate tires and pump gas... Or die in Iraq depending on which recruiter got to them first.
If I understand correctly from the posts going back and forth in this thread; "If you've served in the military you get automatic respect. If you post on ./ (and weren't in the armed forces) you have no right to complain because you're a peace-loving Johnny Complains A Lot"... You know what makes our military great? Technology. You know who creates that technology? Smart-ass people with thin arms that post on Slashdot. We won WWII because our scientists came up with the bomb before Hilter's. That same technology kept the peace between the USSR and the USA through MAD for decades. So next time you go nerd-bashing why don't you stop and ask yourself who is working to provide you with next-gen adaptive camouflage, smart bullets, strength enhancing armor, and force multiplication through technology in general... I have a lot of friends who joined the armed forces, I happen to have a big brain and high blood pressure so I log my time in the lab developing technology they will use, but rest assured there is MUTUAL RESPECCT between my military friends and myself. I'd probably piss myself if I was ever asked to shoot another human being, but WTF do you know about desiging IR adaptive eletrochromic materials that defeat night vision? Mutual respect homie, mutual respect.
I could never figure out why I have to pay $12 to see a movie in Los Angeles. Its bad enough that housing is unaffordable, rent is outrageous, and gas prices are usually the highest in the country, but do movies get more expensive the closer you get to the source or something? Isn't seafood usually cheaper in coastal cities? I mean at that price we might as well pool our funds and just hire the actors to act out the movie with hand puppets.
And we need any other reasons because...? For that matter someone actually needed to conduct a study to figure this out? Just goes to show you how analysts, marketing executives, and "yes men" gather 'round in an industry-wide ass-sniffing circle until they completely disconnect from the public and are forced to lobby congress for laws to force their business models on us. "Consumers don't want to use new technology - it scares them. They want to drive somewhereto pay $10 for bland over produced Hollywood tripe that we can load with cross-promotions and product placement". "I think you're right, we should get legislation passed to protect them from what they think they think".
narcissism (när's-sz'm) pronunciation also narcism (-sz'm) n.
1. Excessive love or admiration of oneself. See synonyms at conceit.
2. A psychological condition characterized by self-preoccupation, lack of empathy, and unconscious deficits in self-esteem.
3. Erotic pleasure derived from contemplation or admiration of one's own body or self, especially as a fixation on or a regression to an infantile stage of development.
4. The attribute of the human psyche charactized by admiration of oneself but within normal limits.
Why can't we all get along... As the above posts point out Linux and BSD are fundamentally different; different goals, different licenses, different philosophies. I mean you simply can't deny that Linux is fun even if parts of it are hackish and slightly broken. I think of BSD more like a peanutbutter and jelly sandwich; a reliable source of flavor and nutrition in a great many circumstances. Even crappy bread, chemical filled peanutbutter, and too-sweet jelly makes an edible sandwich. Linux is more like a burrito though; you can mix and match the ingredients for a wide variety of flavors, some good, some bad, some lock up your intenstines just after the POST. And since so many people are into burritos now there are all manner of microwave, meatless, bean and cheese, pre-made, mini, gigantic; lots of variety in burritos. I have to say though that the best burritos I've eaten are far superior to the best PB&Js, but burritos really do require fresh ingredients (not a fan of pre-packaged burritos) and quality tortillas and as a result the worst burritos I've had... Well they made me sick and broke some hardware and I certianly can't say that about the worst PB&J... What was I talking about? Now I'm hungry and have a strange desire to put refried beans on my keyboard... Oh, right Linux.. I mean Windows has it's place too. Like potato salad. Man, everyone seems to like that stuff, but I can't stand it. It feels so generic and bland to me (plus I just don't like that much mayo), but it is everywhere and sometimes I have to eat it (at least potatoes are good). Especially when I'm not allowed to eat with my hands, which really precludes to use of either burrito or PB&J, but runs Ubisoft's latest copy protection scheme and since more people like potato salad I can share without a long explanation about why I like burritos and why I would want a pengiun on a T-shirt.
At the end of the day though, I need variety in my diet to survive. These people that eat nothing but PB&J all the time drive me crazy. Especially when they start bad mouthing my burritos... Yeah, never even having tasted my homemade burrito they bash it, comparing it to Taco Bell, while they're using smooth peanutbutter which I don't care for at all. Sometimes I get on the potato salad bashing bandwagon, but then I'm forced to eat potato salad at my folks' house and I realize how much worse it would be if they made burritos instead and how not-right-feeling PB&J for dinner at the folks' house would be. At any rate I see a lot of ideology-based arguments for and against different foods and while I appreciate everyone's desire to share their favorite food, we all have different tastes and prepare our own unique dishes... I guess some of us (after reading the article) are real cocks about our own food preferences and can't see past the end of our own sandiwch though.
The term "nanotechnology" has entered the public lexicon, much like the word "nuclear" in the middle of the 20th century. As soon as that happens, researchers start calling everything "nanotechnology" because a bunch of senators see a presentation from the RAND corporation that says "nanotechnology" can do this if we fund it at level X or this if we fund it at level Y and they create things like the "nanotechnology" initiative. Now the fields of biochemistry, chemistry, and molecular biology fall under the broad definition of "nanotechnology" and because engineers and physicists want a piece I routinely see slides of micrographs labeled "nano_____". I understand the need for funding, but I'm so @#$% sick of nano- motors, latters, elevators, delivery systems, power plants, putians, pumps, gears, etc. plastered on everyone's research that 4 years ago would have been called supramolecular, polymer, or materials. Its nice to see clever things like this (which BTW is not unique to this lab, there are entire conferences on dendrimers now) that actually seem to work, but aren't really nanotechnology. Sure dendrimers are on the nanometer scale, but if we run around calling everything that is nanscale "nanotechnology" what will the point of words like polymer, protein, macromelecule, or even nanoscale be anymore? Well, maybe I just need to get with the times. All I ever hear from people in suits is how we need to "rebrand chemistry" and start making flashy presentations that will play well in layman's publications. I'd like to roll their ties up and cram them down their far-too-often-open mouths, but I seem to be in the minority as far more people are using pretty pictures and stupid puns, cliches, and analogies to hype their research than adhering to the old "scientists are modest; the research speaks for itself" philosophy.
Now that my rant is done, on with this whole business of idiots protesting stuff they don't understand. Two examples, genetic engineering: ok through artificial selection (tomatoes, chickens, dogs, corn... basically everything humans have domesticated), evil through "cloning" which they don't even know the definition of. Nuclear: bad, bad, bad, unless it is to keep the Reds at bay. Like how Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging was rebranded Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) because (seriously) people wouldn't stick their heads inside something with the word "nuclear" in it (yeah, those processing nuclear spins are going to kill you)... Anyway so thanks to people spreading fear and paranoia under the banner of "nanotechnology" involving tiny robots that consume matter at the atomic level or little nanothingers that enter your body and control your mind, coupled with the desire to pile gobs of scientific research under the same banner (to get funding) we wind up with hippies protesting pants. In some ways paranoia is a good thing becuase it helps us stay skeptical, but c'mon... pants? So the way I see it, that is how dendrimers which don't significantly differ chemically from styrofoam, platic bags, ketchup bottles, or any other man-made macromolecule wind up the inadvertant target public fear, despite having great technological potential. I suppose it is like stem cell research in that ideology (i.e. preconceived notions) trump fact, reality, common sense, and science.
The whole point of making an analogy between physical gooods and IP is in fact to conflate them... In fact that is sort of the point of making analogies. Anyway, you have clearly closed your mind to any opinion that varies slightly from your socialist view of IP. Our society is built on "mere information" and whether you accept it or not, "information" is what has made the US a superpower. If you take away the incentive for people to create that information, what exactly do you expect to happen?
I agree that people other than the creator of IP should not have the rights to said IP, thus we agree with each other that a business shouldn't exist soley for the purpose of copying information endlessly. I, however, think that the creator of the IP should be compensated when others use their work for profit. You would seem to disagree with that notion, but then I suspect you are not in the business of creating IP. I happen to be a reasearch scientist and really take exception when companies poach our research and profit on it without compensating us for the years of hard work that went into creating it. I did not go through years of schooling to become an oil field of ideas for some monkey in a suit to earn his upper class tax cuts with.
Sort of, except that you do sell houses over and over again, often the exact same design, just not the same physical house. You are still paying the carpenter for the service of converting raw materials into a house which is a marketable skill that carpenters possess. When you sell music, you're selling IP over and over again to different people, but with IP protection you're allowing a composer to sell a service that involves a unique skill. The difference there is that the product the composer's skill generates can be reproduced by people whose only skill is copying things... If I get what you're saying, you think a composer should be able to sell tickets to the first showing of their opera after which each showing should be free? Or should they only maintain the rights over the original parchment used to write the music down? If I invent a low-power consuming light bulb, should I only retain the rights to sell the first bulb? Why should people whose skills create monolithic products that cannot be easily reproduced have the market cornered on making a living and having a career? Do you believe that people who go through years of training/schooling shouldn't be rewarded just because their skill is coming up with concepts or expressions that people without said training can easily reproduce, but cannot create?
If you don't think it is a valid analogy, how about this analogy; tell a carpenter that he will get paid only for the first house he builds in a subdivision. He must complete every house in the project to get paid for the first house, but he will only get paid for the first. Do you consider that a fair analogy for a composer that spends years working on a piece that he has to perform to profit on, but as soon as he does so it will be copied endlessly without him making a dime?
From the article:
To mis-quote Confucius: "Man who blow his own horn often play out of tune". This is the same sort of clap trap we heard out of the molecular computing KoolAid drinkers about 7 years ago. It is funny how everytime someone finds a new angle on the "single molecule transistor" they claim it is the biggest break-through in 20 years... Not that this isn't an interesting discovery, but c'mon it is just another cog in the wheel, not the huge breakthrough he is making it out to be... Just like all the others; starting their talks with "molecular electronics has been the Holy Grail for 20 years..." Ugh, show me a funtional circuit that can even compete with Si technology from the 1970s. Until then get off your soapbox and save the schmaltz for your grant proposals.
Again quoting from the article:
Uh-huh, and I'm sure he submited it to Nature first. Yeah, there is no chance that he submitted it to Science and they kicked it back because it just isn't a breakthrough.
BTW are you refering to the theoretical work on molecular rectifiers from the 1970's? Talk about another dead horse... How many single molecules with huge dipoles do people have to trap between gold electrodes, measure picoamp currents, reference the "molecular rectifier" work and claim as a major achievement? Sorry, unrelated personal rant...
That shifts the economic profit interest from producing it as cheaply as possible to maximizing sales volume at monopoly pricing level.
Wether or not one can avoid buying it is irrelevant; as long as they are no equivalent replacements there is no competition which results in a monopoly pricing level.
That is specious reasoning. You're implying that The Planets, for example, is a unique product and that an entire industry is responsible for it's sale. The fact of the matter is that there are many other pieces of music you can listen to and the product in question is really the reproduction of that music, not the score itself. It is absurd to think that allowing anyone to run off copies of anyone else's music, perform it when and where they want, and sell recordings without the consent of the composer would do anything but ruin the ability of a composer (especially and independant one) to make a living which is contrary to the entrepreneurial American ideals.
Take the example of a research scientist working for GE. Said scientist does not actually own any of the IP he or she creates, however GE retains all the rights which allows them to sell the technology rather than just the product. This allows them to pay researchers about double what they would make as an academic (but intellectually 'free') researcher. If GE was only able to market the products resulting from the technology, they would be undersold by competition that does not have to invest in R&D and their business model would fail. The payoff for the academic, who retains the rights to the work, is the ability to collect royalties when the technology is licensed to the inudstry.
Indeed. Look at Taiwan. In fact, take a generalized approach and look at correlation factors for patents. I did, and it changed my point of view entirely. I no longer believe that IP protection is necessary to recover the huge costs incurred. I've come to the conclusion that the huge costs are a result of IP protection. Unlike in the countries with strong patent protection where three different labs work on the exact same thing, but only one gets to take the profits?
You must not be an inventor/researcher/artist. The researchers and inventors who create intellectual property recover the least ammount of profit of all. Look how much an executive, whose only job is to sell other people's ideas, makes compared to a senior research scientist. In fact, because of our open system, researchers collaborate. This collaborative system of research is what make the US a superpower whether you want to admit it or not. We don't make our money selling products, we make our money inventing them. Our university system has, for the past century, attracted the best and brightest from all over the world which is where our edge both technologically and economically has come from. The inudstry, which is apparently run by people who share your mindset, is admittedly very secretive in the US, however most (all public) universities have strict policies against secrecy. This forces the industry to share their insights with us in order to collaborate and benefit from our ability to do basic discovery/fundamental research, which is funded largely with government grants. In countries without IP protection and our open system of information sharing, no one shares any preliminary result for fear of a competator snatching it up. You might say "well tough; that's how the market works", but keep in mind that science and business are unrelated to each other. We do not work in a profit-driven world. We work in a knowledge driven world. Trust me on this, most researchers are in the game 75% out of intellectual curiosity and 25% for personal gain. Without that basic passion for knowledge, problem solving, and understanding research seems boring, frustrating, and ungratifying. Researchers, and I'm sure artists of all kinds, detest all the BS that the profit-driven world heaps on us, but recognize it as a necessary evi
I believe it is also illegal (it is certainly unethical) to leverage your monopoly to prevent others from entering your market space. I think it is difficult to prove the "recording industry" has or has not used their monopoly to force themselves into other markets because their market is sort of nebulous. Is using their control over recorded media and distribution to quash the development of competing technologies (like the Internet) and emerging markets (like the Internet) legal? Ethical? At any rate, just because a monopoly isn't illegal does not mean the government couldn't or shouldn't break it up. When, through mergers, a couple of companies control enough of a market to price fix (how many times did they get busted for price-fixing CDs?) and stiffle competition, they need to be broken up. AT&T simply owned all the transmission lines and refused to sell space on them at a reasonable price (as I understand it - I was pretty young when that happened) which lead to crappy service at high prices. The public got angry and their government did something about it.
Oh, and how does IP give the government a monopoly? Are you implying that the USPO should have competition? Like I should be able to patent my invention through GE who will then use their influence to protect it? Or should we do away with IP so that my only compensation for years of research is the gratification I get from seeing my invention make so many people happy... While everyone but me makes money on it.
That is such a load. A monopoly is when a market is cornered by a single company/organization to the point were they can exclude all competition. You seem to be implying that Gustav Holst cornered The Planets market such that no one else could write the exact same piece and claim it as their own... Anyway giving someone rights over a song they wrote is no different than a painter being able to sell a painting, or a carpenter building and selling houses. Patents and copyrights and by extention the idea of intellectual property were written into the US constitution precicley so a market could be built around music, books, plays, etc. by allowing people to make a living as an artist or inventor or whatever.
Look at Taiwan - the lack of patent law (or enforcement) has lead to a research climate that is so secretive that three different labs could be working on exactly the same thing at the exact same time - thus wasting a butt load of money and effort for fear of someone else marketing their invention or simply claiming it as their own. There are markets all over Eastern Europe and Asia that Western companies won't touch simply because of a lack of reasonable patent law.
That said, there are extremes on both ends. Disney has managed to hold a copyright on the likeness of Mickey Mouse for (about) 90 years now; it legally should have expired after 14 or so. Blocking patents and patent obfuscation are counter productive and anti competative. It is f*cked that even the name and likeness of a band is considered IP that can be bought and sold. It is equally f*cked that an artist can't even perform his or her own songs without licensing them from the label they're signed with.
The music industry almost has a monopoly because an up-and-coming artist (that wants to make a living) really has no choice but to sign with them, as they own all the major distribution channels. The record labels simply refuse to sign them unless they give away all the rights to their first X albums which they are contractually obligated to make. Moreover if a label feels that the band has 2 hit songs they will divide them between two albums and, if the rest of the band's songs suck, refuse to release them as singles... In a "free market" they could simply Wall Mart the competition to death then jack up their prices when the indie labels collapse, merge into one giant corporation, buy Clear Channel, and voila a perfect monopoly... In our crappy "regulated market" they are forbidden from using their capital to undersell smaller labels which is the only reason they can exist. An artist with integridy can starve on an indie label until they catch on, at which point they can sign with a big label (even then keeping all the rights to their songs, the name of their band, and their image is difficult) and get to call the shots because they're proven.
Who sues sues their customer base and tries to slit the throat of any threat to their content distribution model? I'll tell you who; a monopoly. Does this remind anyone else of AT&T or Microsoft? Why is our government so not on the side of consumers this time? Oh, right, because it was big-business that complained about ATT and MS, not consumers. Seriously though, if any consortium or company can get away with sueing their customers it means their customers have no alternative! This is the definition of a monopoly and no matter what your view on "piracy" something needs to be done at the government level to address this.
It never ceases to amaze me how they complain about "hundreds of billions of dollars lost to copyright violations" despite any historical evidence of said profit. I think they learned math in the George W. Bush school of applied math.
I completely agree. Most of the music I listen to is obscure old jazz that typically exists in one of three forms. A lot of the time it has gone public domain and downloading MP3s of old records ripped by total fanatics (i.e. great quality) is 100% legal. Most often family members of the artist (who died a long time ago) think they deserve to profit on grandpa's talent... Uhm, screw them... Then there is the worst; when the record company owns the rights. Should Sony be able to profit on grandpa's talents? Hell no. Those bastards routinely con up and comings into signing away the rights to music they created and after they're dead for some strange reason the price of the CDs doesn't drop... Hmmm... Quite often the stupid record company won't even bother releasing it in digital form and the records are out of print, so they just sit on the rights and prevent the music from being reproduced, sold, or sometimes even published (which sucks for us musicians)... Again, screw them.
Now let's take Charlie Hunter as a modern example. He sells his albums in FLAC format (or MP3 or WMA if you prefer) for around $10 through a Bay Area based on-line company as well as distributing CDs on an indie label. So maybe you havn't heard of Charlie Hunter, but he is quite famous in jazz world and makes plenty of money. He's also fairly share-friendly like Phish or the Dead, which has only lead to more people discovering him and his related projects. There is now a whole community of Bay Area musicians that distribute their music this way.
Meanwhile Sony, BMG, AOL-Time Warner, etc. has decided that ripping CDs should be prevented at the hardware level and any digital content needs to be heavily DRMed (and DRM b-b-b-b-blows for us Linux users)... So what possible reason could I have for getting in my car, driving to the store, and plopping down $18 + tax for whatever Boy Band / Blonde Bimbo Shill Disney is propping up this month? If one of the Big 5 signs a band I like (with 98% of the market it is bound to happen) I'd sooner "pirate" the album and mail the band $20. Humph.
All the belly aching around here... Sheesh. We're working on it, ok? The DOE, DARPA, Office of Naval Research, Air Force, etc etc etc are handing out money for battery projects and I assure you that the next new battery technology will NOT be serendipitous, rather it will be the result of years of (frustrating) research building on discoveries dating all the way back to wet towels and copper discs.
Battery technology is slow to develope because it is not easy to pack a bunch of electrons in a tiny space wedged up against a huge electron sync and then ask them to not only sit there and like it, but to merrily hop back up the hill after being discharged, then sit around on the electrode until we ask for them again. You can't just stuff them in a box - they repel each other. They are happiest when they can delocalize over a network of big positively charged nuclei, but the problem with electrons is happy = low potential = low half cell potential = the need for many cells = big form factors... You get the idea.
Now take all that and add to it Nature's silly idea of charge balancing. When electrons flow they create a chrage imbalance that must be exactly balanced by positive charges. Now positive charges don't grow on trees like electrons, they tend to be HUGE by comparison and they like to swim. Now batteries with liquid electrolytes just aren't pratical so we have to use various glassy polymers and "gels" (or dry cell or whatever) that are fabulous ion conductors, but crappy electron conductors. It took years of research to find a medium that lithium ions could flow through without getting stuck right away and what we ended up with isn't even that great...
Battery technology will have to move in one of two directions and be coupled with dramatic cuts in power consumption by portable devices. First, fuel cells. These are great because you harvest electrons from REDOX reactions rather than stuffing them into lithium intercalated graphite or whatever hideously unstable electrode configuration is demanded by the charged state. Of course they can't be recharged and right now they suck because, and where have I heard this before, the best ion conductors (which you still need for fuel cell batteries) only perform well at a balmy 80% humidity and (and I'm not 100% sure on this) about 50 deg. C... The other option is "nanotechnology" (hang on, have to smack myself for using a buzzword) which could allow us to tuck thin films or tiny spheres or scrolls or whatever into very small spaces. This is important because it allows us to use very small half cell potentials to produce large open circuit voltages by wiring up thousands of teeny-tiny cells in our "nanobattery" (smack, smack) arrays.
So either go out and invent safe nuclear batteries or tiny hamsters that can fit on tiny hampster wheels that can fit inside my iPod and go weeks without hamster food, or accept the fact that battery technology is a real bugger... I mean we (scientists) aren't that lazy; some problems are just harder than others to solve. Why can't we get all over the electrical engineers to make lower power consumption devices? Can we harp on Taiwan for not trying hard enough to bring OLEDs to market? Maybe we should just build robots that turn us into batteries...
Not to nit pick, but lithium ion batteries are made from inorganic metal complexes (that are not explosive), polymer/electrolyte blends (again not explosive), and graphite (I sure hope that isn't explosive). The "explosive" element comes from the heat generated from rapid discharge, much like car batteries which are made from lead and aqueous sulfuric acid (not even flammable), but will most certainly explode if shorted. The "unstable" aspect arrises from the lithium "fingers" that tend to grow between the electrodes which causes, you guessed it, rapid discharging of the battery. At any rate an equal mass of an actual "powerful explosive" (high explosive if you prefer) would make the battery look like a match flame.
I'm not knocking the nuclear battery idea, just pointing out that ALL modern batteries are explosive, so don't poo on lithium-ion batteries for being batteries - they can't help that.
You have it all wrong... Terrorists have beards and Nazi's have mustaches, duh. Oh, and Bushies are clean shaven... Except that Bolton guy... Hmmm, maybe he's a Nazi.
Indeed I would not exist right now if the cesarian insection hadn't been invented first, and I most certainly would have died shortly after birth if it were not for modern medicine. Even if I had survived birth in pre-historic times, my eyesite is so poor I would have been weeded out by natural selection anyway... So medicine is propping us sick-o's up on both ends... Perhaps the very existance of the modern geek is an artifact of technology and artificial selection? I mean can you think of anything with less chance of survival in the wild than a power-nerd? I'd be running after the villiage hunters trying to stabilize my Sousaphone while yelling "Hey, wait up guys... I dropped my glasses..."
We've been performing artificial selection on humans for thousands of years. In much the same way that modern corn, chickens, tomatoes, etc. were created by selecting the offspring with the most desireable features, we have been selecting ourselves for seemingly random traits from the get go. Making that process more "scientific" by looking at the genetic code of people before their born isn't that much different, given that genetics (at least this particular application) is almost entirely guesswork anyway. When obesity kills off a huge segment of the population that, for whatever reason, just can't say no to the tripple butter dipped deep-fried Crisco burger we may find that the same people are geniuses at accounting and the worlds' economies will collapse... It's all guesswork; that's what makes life so fun.