Re:And this is the same for copyrights.
on
Patents That Kill
·
· Score: 1
Then you run into problems where an author claims that a work is derivative or ties-in somehow even when it doesn't.
Look at Asimov, who tried to tie all of his works into the same universe through their various sequels, even though it was kludgy at best. Imagine that being widened out now, where an author like CS Lewis could try to tie his fantasy stories in with his science fiction stories to make one big work. The only author that I've read that has really pulled that off was Piers Anthony, and it was still a little hokey.
Re:And this is the same for copyrights.
on
Patents That Kill
·
· Score: 1
That doesn't explain why they should continue. My job isn't going to pay my family for 18 years after I die - why should yours just because you're a 'creative'?
My pension will, and depending on the circumstances of my death, there could be a work-provided death benefit.
Some of the these systems were created in an era when many people got actual pensions, with guaranteed benefits, that were inheritable. Those that created content generally weren't in a position to get a pension though.
I also disagree with a copyright expiring right on an artist's death, as that's now an incentive for someone with a significant stake in usurping their work to kill them.
Re:And this is the same for copyrights.
on
Patents That Kill
·
· Score: 1
This analogy doesn't work because generally bridges are something that a significant number of people must use, while copyrighted content for entertainment purposes is generally something that one has a choice in the use of. Certainly there are some counter-examples like computer software, where one company has a disproportionate amount of market share to the point that one can't completely avoid them, but for the most part that which can be copyrighted isn't critical.
Re:And this is the same for copyrights.
on
Patents That Kill
·
· Score: 1
Which is exactly why I suggested my lifetime+10 years or else 40 years method. It allows someone to write a work that supports a spouse or progeny for a calculable amount of time after that person's death, so that their dependents have a source of income to tide them over until they're more in a position to support themselves.
Re:And this is the same for copyrights.
on
Patents That Kill
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I think we need reasonable limits on just about all "intellectual property". For copyrights, the content creator's remaining natural life plus ten years, or 40 years total, which ever is longer. For patents, there should be a requirement to produce and sell the idea in the patent after a few years or to demonstrate a reasonable attempt to do so, and that different kinds of inventions should have different lengths of patent protection.
I want people to get paid for their work, but at the same time, if that work has caused significant cultural change then there should be a point when that work is released to that culture, instead of licensed to that culture for a fee.
That's why it'll initially only be tested on worst-case human patients, those with essentially no quality of life or are just about dead already. An uncle-in-law with severe late-stage cancer ended up on some kind of cancer drug test and we're pretty sure that he was in the group with the active drug, as he improved quite a bit and probably got three or four extra good years compared to his initial prognosis. Had he not gotten the drug he'd probably have died within six months of the diagnosis.
For a patient suffering severe dementia and Alzheimer's, they've already mentally died. A coworker's mother-in-law had severe Alzheimer's for a decade; the bulk of her body was incredibly healthy but her brain was messed up and she was a constant and continual source of pain to her family trying to care for her. Her eventual physical deterioration and death was a blessing as now her family had that constant stress taken away. She would have been a perfect candidate for an experimental drug test like this, as an improvement helping her to truly live again would have helped her and her family, even if only for a few more years, and even if she eventually reverted.
With the various contractors, it's difficult to get past the salesman to the actual engineers that can do the system design and the site integration. Admittedly my electric engineering fu is weak, so determining current base load, current demand peak load, how one configures batteries, integrates other sources like generators, and grid intentional detach and resynch on reconnect. Salesmen just want to sell the minimum panel+inverter solution.
Yeah, now that I've had experience with electric power, I wish that our main residential service was more than 120VAC for residential appliances, and that we weren't generally limited to just 240VAC, and then only for bigger things like appliances and tools.
What I'd really like would be three phase, but it's not realistically going to happen. There are some older parts of town though, where electricity and the very earliest HVAC units were introduced around the same time, and three phase power was necessary to power those units, so it's available to residential customers. Great for mills and lathes and other large machinery, but probably more of a headache for normal homeowners now since they have to be careful what they purchase.
We had even inquired about the costs to bring natural gas in, but it'd be about $45,000 to have the lines run from the closest main line. Definitely not worthwhile.
New windows and a 2" layer of insulation on the outside of the house is on the agenda too, but it won't exactly be cheap to do with as many damn windows as we have.
120V service is derived by adding a center-tapped-neutral to a 240V single-phase system. Residential power is calculated based on that 240V number. So, 240V at 200A is my max power capacity before tripping the main breaker.
I have to look at both while-running max load and have to consider startup demand. Breakers for individual circuits are supposed to be sized for startup demand (though apparently there's a tiny bit of room for fudge here, with slower-acting breakers so that a peak draw at startup could theoretically exceed a breaker rating for a very short time without either tripping the breaker or being especially dangerous) but by and large, that's what I have to do. I can rule-of-thumb the breakers for the 240V devices to figure out approximate max startup demand if everything kicked on at the same time.
If I add up the startup demand for the three HVAC units, the two hot water heaters, and probably 20A for all of the various residential 120V circuits for lighting and devices, I'm well over the 50A of a solar system, and I expect that with all of that running at the same time I'm probably over 50A there as well. That's the biggest concern, and I know that I've had all three HVAC units running at the same time before. The air compressor doesn't run very often, but it also draws 30A while it does.
We're probably going to put a couple inches of foam insulation on the outside of the house and have it stuccoed, and we're going to change the windows. Unfortunately there are a lot of windows to change, and it'll be close to five figures to change them all.
Unfortunately the house's layout and structure isn't terribly well suited to passive solar, and there's no natural gas service either, so I'd have to have propane delivered, and then there's the issue of the water heaters being inside, so then ventilation has to be changed.
We've put a timer on one of the units, we'll probably put one on the other one some day, once I find a programmable unit that does what I want.
I'm not in a McMansion, but I am in a very nice house on an appropriately-sized piece of land that was fairly well designed for the desert climate that I live in. Back patio is on the north side, the South side has 10' worth of eave/overhang, and the flat-roof portion has parapet walls on the South and West sides to reduce the sun exposure on it. About a third of the house is in the finished basement fully below grade, and the two HVAC units on the house are split between the daytime living space (kitchen, dining room, family room) and the evening spaces (library, basement media room, all the bedrooms, all the bathrooms) to reduce the need to run both simultaneously.
The third unit on on the 1000sqft workshop, which was the main reason we bought the house in the first place. I like having a shop, and I cool the shop to 86ÂF in the summer and heat it to 60ÂF in the winter, to keep the batteries, chemicals, and plastic stuff from going bad. My geekiness extends to hobbies that need a shop, including mechanical stuff and occasional woodworking. Thus I have to deal with the expenses that go with that in the heat of the summer if I want my hobbies to work out year-round.
I have enough roof space for quite a bit more solar generating capability than I could use, if I covered the non-flat South-facing portion of my roof in addition to the flat roof on the workshop and the flat roof portion of the West side of the house. The biggest stumbling-block is that the power company wants to charge me so much for any extra power that I generate that it's not really worthwhile trying to sell back power to them. What's stupid is that this extra power is generated exactly when they have the highest demand, in the afternoons when HVAC units at home and at offices are all running a full load. If we all had solar then the power company wouldn't have to run much in the way of expensive demand-based natural gas plants, and could concentrate on base-load power like nuke, hydro, or even coal, as opposed to ramping up and spinning down CNG.
Well, as bad as it was, I expect that there was both electronic monitoring notice and obvious sound and mechanical speed notice before the device finally failed, so there'd be time to get away.
My bigger worry would be shrapnel or debris hitting other units, causing them to then fail. Granted these aren't usually close enough together to make that terribly likely, but I wouldn't think it completely impossible either.
Still far cheaper than the cleanup from Chernobyl #4 or from that plant in Sendai, Japan though.
We're looking into Solar right now, and I'm considering everything from a leased system that only provides daytime power offset, to a full system with battery bank and generator capable of intentional islanding off-grid for those few times that the power goes out. Trouble is trying to size the thing, one estimate suggested we only get 12.5kW, but with three HVAC units and two hot water heaters, plus the air compressor and other things down the road like a welder I don't think that the ~50A from such a system would really be enough given that the property is sized for 200A service and I have an outbuilding to support. I can buy a propane-powered 20kW generator for about $4000, so I'm wondering if I'd be better off sizing solar to be similar.
Even costing more than other non-fossil-fuel sources, solar appeals because it's something that I can do at home. I can't really do wind, there's probably not enough thermal gradient to do geothermal, there's no stream or river to do hydro, and obviously nuclear is out. That pretty much leaves me with solar.
I'm disappointed that codes for new construction haven't started mandating the installation of solar. Integrated into the design of a house it could probably fit aestetically better than a retrofit, and the cost to purchase such a system when rolled into the 30 year loan would probably make it more feasible for most to have it. On top of that, wider adoption would serve to drive costs down for everyone else, including possible retrofits like mine.
Heh. I'm happy for the IAU to take its sweet time on this. In the already small impact that space science has on daily life, the definition of a particular pair of bodies that themselves don't care a whit what people about 35AU is just about completely meaningless.
Oh, I hate blue LEDs. When they first came out I thought they were so awesome, then I mistakenly bought an alarmclock that had a blue display. Two layers of automotive window tint later and I still couldn't stand it, had to switch back to red. The blue one now lives out in the tool shed so that its radio can be used while doing yard work.
As to the astronauts' problems, I expect that between the hum of equipment, the extremely short orbital period the station has, the feeling of weightlessness from a sensory perspective, and the effects of weightlessness from a biological perspective probably all make it much harder to sleep. Until we get some kind of centripetal acceleration thing going and get a station up into something closer to geostationary orbit it's probably not going to get any better.
And yes, I am aware of how expensive it is to send mass up to geostationary as opposed to low earth orbit. That doesn't change the need to do that to get our space program out of danger of just falling out of the sky.
Usually the X. number is a family of related versions, and sometimes the #.X is also a family of related versions. When this is used it's much easier to know to support all of X.# or Y.X.# because of similarity. To apply this to Firefox specifically, 29-31 would be one X.X.# or X.# if grouped logically.
I'd given this some thought since the FOSS docs discussion at the beginning of the week, and I think that we're already post-FOSS.
FOSS' heyday was in the nineties. GNU modelled its documentation on BSD, which in turn modeled its documentation on commercial UNIX. Through the nineties developers and those that maintained distributions honored this, continuing to write their documentation like the UNIX world did, and it was easy (relatively speaking) to make the software do everything that it could do and everything that the user or sysadmin wanted it to do within those capabilities.
Unfortunately 20 years out, rot has set-in. Projects and distributions are no longer thoroughly documented. The barrier to entry or to re-entry with anything more than using the default setup from the distribution is very, very high, much moreso than even the days when one had to do a lot more by hand.
We're not emerging-FOSS, were already post-FOSS, at least for as long as the crappy state of sysadmin and end-user documentation is concerned, as less and less individuals will be able to make new software do what they need or want it to do. If the software won't cooperate, then commercial software suddenly becomes more attractive.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you run into problems where an author claims that a work is derivative or ties-in somehow even when it doesn't.
Look at Asimov, who tried to tie all of his works into the same universe through their various sequels, even though it was kludgy at best. Imagine that being widened out now, where an author like CS Lewis could try to tie his fantasy stories in with his science fiction stories to make one big work. The only author that I've read that has really pulled that off was Piers Anthony, and it was still a little hokey.
My pension will, and depending on the circumstances of my death, there could be a work-provided death benefit.
Some of the these systems were created in an era when many people got actual pensions, with guaranteed benefits, that were inheritable. Those that created content generally weren't in a position to get a pension though.
I also disagree with a copyright expiring right on an artist's death, as that's now an incentive for someone with a significant stake in usurping their work to kill them.
This analogy doesn't work because generally bridges are something that a significant number of people must use, while copyrighted content for entertainment purposes is generally something that one has a choice in the use of. Certainly there are some counter-examples like computer software, where one company has a disproportionate amount of market share to the point that one can't completely avoid them, but for the most part that which can be copyrighted isn't critical.
Which is exactly why I suggested my lifetime+10 years or else 40 years method. It allows someone to write a work that supports a spouse or progeny for a calculable amount of time after that person's death, so that their dependents have a source of income to tide them over until they're more in a position to support themselves.
I think we need reasonable limits on just about all "intellectual property". For copyrights, the content creator's remaining natural life plus ten years, or 40 years total, which ever is longer. For patents, there should be a requirement to produce and sell the idea in the patent after a few years or to demonstrate a reasonable attempt to do so, and that different kinds of inventions should have different lengths of patent protection.
I want people to get paid for their work, but at the same time, if that work has caused significant cultural change then there should be a point when that work is released to that culture, instead of licensed to that culture for a fee.
...Robert Patrick simply smiled impishly as he replied, "no comment."
It'd be like first pass downloading interlaced porn from the BBS days...
For those that don't know what I'm talking about...
That's why it'll initially only be tested on worst-case human patients, those with essentially no quality of life or are just about dead already. An uncle-in-law with severe late-stage cancer ended up on some kind of cancer drug test and we're pretty sure that he was in the group with the active drug, as he improved quite a bit and probably got three or four extra good years compared to his initial prognosis. Had he not gotten the drug he'd probably have died within six months of the diagnosis.
For a patient suffering severe dementia and Alzheimer's, they've already mentally died. A coworker's mother-in-law had severe Alzheimer's for a decade; the bulk of her body was incredibly healthy but her brain was messed up and she was a constant and continual source of pain to her family trying to care for her. Her eventual physical deterioration and death was a blessing as now her family had that constant stress taken away. She would have been a perfect candidate for an experimental drug test like this, as an improvement helping her to truly live again would have helped her and her family, even if only for a few more years, and even if she eventually reverted.
No gas service unfortunately.
With the various contractors, it's difficult to get past the salesman to the actual engineers that can do the system design and the site integration. Admittedly my electric engineering fu is weak, so determining current base load, current demand peak load, how one configures batteries, integrates other sources like generators, and grid intentional detach and resynch on reconnect. Salesmen just want to sell the minimum panel+inverter solution.
Yeah, now that I've had experience with electric power, I wish that our main residential service was more than 120VAC for residential appliances, and that we weren't generally limited to just 240VAC, and then only for bigger things like appliances and tools.
What I'd really like would be three phase, but it's not realistically going to happen. There are some older parts of town though, where electricity and the very earliest HVAC units were introduced around the same time, and three phase power was necessary to power those units, so it's available to residential customers. Great for mills and lathes and other large machinery, but probably more of a headache for normal homeowners now since they have to be careful what they purchase.
We had even inquired about the costs to bring natural gas in, but it'd be about $45,000 to have the lines run from the closest main line. Definitely not worthwhile.
New windows and a 2" layer of insulation on the outside of the house is on the agenda too, but it won't exactly be cheap to do with as many damn windows as we have.
120V service is derived by adding a center-tapped-neutral to a 240V single-phase system. Residential power is calculated based on that 240V number. So, 240V at 200A is my max power capacity before tripping the main breaker.
I have to look at both while-running max load and have to consider startup demand. Breakers for individual circuits are supposed to be sized for startup demand (though apparently there's a tiny bit of room for fudge here, with slower-acting breakers so that a peak draw at startup could theoretically exceed a breaker rating for a very short time without either tripping the breaker or being especially dangerous) but by and large, that's what I have to do. I can rule-of-thumb the breakers for the 240V devices to figure out approximate max startup demand if everything kicked on at the same time.
If I add up the startup demand for the three HVAC units, the two hot water heaters, and probably 20A for all of the various residential 120V circuits for lighting and devices, I'm well over the 50A of a solar system, and I expect that with all of that running at the same time I'm probably over 50A there as well. That's the biggest concern, and I know that I've had all three HVAC units running at the same time before. The air compressor doesn't run very often, but it also draws 30A while it does.
We're probably going to put a couple inches of foam insulation on the outside of the house and have it stuccoed, and we're going to change the windows. Unfortunately there are a lot of windows to change, and it'll be close to five figures to change them all.
Unfortunately the house's layout and structure isn't terribly well suited to passive solar, and there's no natural gas service either, so I'd have to have propane delivered, and then there's the issue of the water heaters being inside, so then ventilation has to be changed.
We've put a timer on one of the units, we'll probably put one on the other one some day, once I find a programmable unit that does what I want.
I'm not in a McMansion, but I am in a very nice house on an appropriately-sized piece of land that was fairly well designed for the desert climate that I live in. Back patio is on the north side, the South side has 10' worth of eave/overhang, and the flat-roof portion has parapet walls on the South and West sides to reduce the sun exposure on it. About a third of the house is in the finished basement fully below grade, and the two HVAC units on the house are split between the daytime living space (kitchen, dining room, family room) and the evening spaces (library, basement media room, all the bedrooms, all the bathrooms) to reduce the need to run both simultaneously.
The third unit on on the 1000sqft workshop, which was the main reason we bought the house in the first place. I like having a shop, and I cool the shop to 86ÂF in the summer and heat it to 60ÂF in the winter, to keep the batteries, chemicals, and plastic stuff from going bad. My geekiness extends to hobbies that need a shop, including mechanical stuff and occasional woodworking. Thus I have to deal with the expenses that go with that in the heat of the summer if I want my hobbies to work out year-round.
I have enough roof space for quite a bit more solar generating capability than I could use, if I covered the non-flat South-facing portion of my roof in addition to the flat roof on the workshop and the flat roof portion of the West side of the house. The biggest stumbling-block is that the power company wants to charge me so much for any extra power that I generate that it's not really worthwhile trying to sell back power to them. What's stupid is that this extra power is generated exactly when they have the highest demand, in the afternoons when HVAC units at home and at offices are all running a full load. If we all had solar then the power company wouldn't have to run much in the way of expensive demand-based natural gas plants, and could concentrate on base-load power like nuke, hydro, or even coal, as opposed to ramping up and spinning down CNG.
Well, as bad as it was, I expect that there was both electronic monitoring notice and obvious sound and mechanical speed notice before the device finally failed, so there'd be time to get away.
My bigger worry would be shrapnel or debris hitting other units, causing them to then fail. Granted these aren't usually close enough together to make that terribly likely, but I wouldn't think it completely impossible either.
Still far cheaper than the cleanup from Chernobyl #4 or from that plant in Sendai, Japan though.
We're looking into Solar right now, and I'm considering everything from a leased system that only provides daytime power offset, to a full system with battery bank and generator capable of intentional islanding off-grid for those few times that the power goes out. Trouble is trying to size the thing, one estimate suggested we only get 12.5kW, but with three HVAC units and two hot water heaters, plus the air compressor and other things down the road like a welder I don't think that the ~50A from such a system would really be enough given that the property is sized for 200A service and I have an outbuilding to support. I can buy a propane-powered 20kW generator for about $4000, so I'm wondering if I'd be better off sizing solar to be similar.
Even costing more than other non-fossil-fuel sources, solar appeals because it's something that I can do at home. I can't really do wind, there's probably not enough thermal gradient to do geothermal, there's no stream or river to do hydro, and obviously nuclear is out. That pretty much leaves me with solar.
I'm disappointed that codes for new construction haven't started mandating the installation of solar. Integrated into the design of a house it could probably fit aestetically better than a retrofit, and the cost to purchase such a system when rolled into the 30 year loan would probably make it more feasible for most to have it. On top of that, wider adoption would serve to drive costs down for everyone else, including possible retrofits like mine.
When the overspeed clutch fails they do...
Video
Heh. I'm happy for the IAU to take its sweet time on this. In the already small impact that space science has on daily life, the definition of a particular pair of bodies that themselves don't care a whit what people about 35AU is just about completely meaningless.
Microsoft has better documentation.
Oh, I hate blue LEDs. When they first came out I thought they were so awesome, then I mistakenly bought an alarmclock that had a blue display. Two layers of automotive window tint later and I still couldn't stand it, had to switch back to red. The blue one now lives out in the tool shed so that its radio can be used while doing yard work.
As to the astronauts' problems, I expect that between the hum of equipment, the extremely short orbital period the station has, the feeling of weightlessness from a sensory perspective, and the effects of weightlessness from a biological perspective probably all make it much harder to sleep. Until we get some kind of centripetal acceleration thing going and get a station up into something closer to geostationary orbit it's probably not going to get any better.
And yes, I am aware of how expensive it is to send mass up to geostationary as opposed to low earth orbit. That doesn't change the need to do that to get our space program out of danger of just falling out of the sky.
Maybe there's some sort of protective coating that we could put on the ocean surface to prevent this from happening...
Yep.
Usually the X. number is a family of related versions, and sometimes the #.X is also a family of related versions. When this is used it's much easier to know to support all of X.# or Y.X.# because of similarity. To apply this to Firefox specifically, 29-31 would be one X.X.# or X.# if grouped logically.
I call this the, "keep your mouth shut," approach.
I'd given this some thought since the FOSS docs discussion at the beginning of the week, and I think that we're already post-FOSS.
FOSS' heyday was in the nineties. GNU modelled its documentation on BSD, which in turn modeled its documentation on commercial UNIX. Through the nineties developers and those that maintained distributions honored this, continuing to write their documentation like the UNIX world did, and it was easy (relatively speaking) to make the software do everything that it could do and everything that the user or sysadmin wanted it to do within those capabilities.
Unfortunately 20 years out, rot has set-in. Projects and distributions are no longer thoroughly documented. The barrier to entry or to re-entry with anything more than using the default setup from the distribution is very, very high, much moreso than even the days when one had to do a lot more by hand.
We're not emerging-FOSS, were already post-FOSS, at least for as long as the crappy state of sysadmin and end-user documentation is concerned, as less and less individuals will be able to make new software do what they need or want it to do. If the software won't cooperate, then commercial software suddenly becomes more attractive.
Firefox will have some competition for version numbering again!