I also knew more than my share of pregnant high school students, and that would imply that at least some of those stories were true to a certain extent... unless I don't understand biological processes very well. While wishful thinking doesn't get you laid, it is hard to conceive a baby as a teen with no money unless you are getting some. The boyfriends involved, of course, claimed that they were using "protection" and trying to avoid the situation too.
OK, instead of "greasing palms" how about a very nice campaign contribution where some fairy god-senator decides to lean on the USPTO in order to get something expedited. There are many "legal" ways to bribe government officials if you really care to make the effort.
Yes, there might be built-in expedition methods within the USPTO as well, but it doesn't hurt if there is some pressure from above as well. It can't be done too often, but for an occasional action out of the millions of patents being issued, I'm sure that at some point or another some political pressure of that nature helps. Besides, when appropriations time comes around I'm sure that same senator would be reminded of his push and be "encouraged" to be more sympathetic for funding requests coming from that agency.
On the other hand, I know of several people who have filed for patents and have spent tens of thousands of dollars for patent filings, only to get absolutely nothing from those efforts.
It would be one thing if I knew nobody (aka a "lesbian") but if I was involved with gay rights groups and never met a gay lesbian inspite of meeting hundreds of self-confessed lesbians of all sorts of racial and ethnic backgrounds, I would start to get suspicious that there might be some kind of correlation involved here... particularly if the general area had a large number of black people in it. That is precisely the situation I'm talking about, where I do know of a great many people including close relatives who have gone through the patent process but with no results. While it may be opinion, it is based upon personal experience and a consistent seeking after people who may have even succeeded so I could figure out what their "secret sauce" might be that got the patent system to work for them.
I do know personally a couple of patent examiners and intellectual law attorneys who seem to make a fairly decent living off of the patent system. Somehow I don't think that is the point, or perhaps it is that the legal system is the real winner here. It certainly isn't the lone inventor attending an "invention workshop" or calling the 1-800 number to get their idea put into the form of a patent. To me, those guys on television are just a legal form of snake oil salesmen from another era.
I have yet to meet a single "garage tinkerer" who made an invention, went through the patent process, and made any money at all much less covered the fees necessary for a decent patent attorney and the filing fees to get the patent in the first place. To me, the whole patent process is simply a major scam that gives false hope to ordinary individuals who are thinking about an invention.
It also is important for anybody to realize that once you patent an idea, that the number of companies who are interested in your idea usually goes down after getting the patent. A typical company is more interested in something that their own employees have invented, as they control the clock in terms of when it gets to the USPTO and they don't typically need to pay a license to their own employee (that is usually covered in the employment contract).
For an established company, for defensive purposes only, I do understand why organizations will file for patents knowing full well that the patent process itself is broken. Microsoft for the longest time avoided patents for a whole bunch of reasons, but is flooding the USPTO now in part to cover their own behinds. That still doesn't explain why a private individual needs to file a patent.
Would the creation of a novel sorting algorithm (presumably something significantly faster than a Quicksort) really help in terms of attracting attention to your product, or would it be better to either publish that algorithm with the ACM Journal (giving you guys prestige and helping with recruiting new employees to you're company.... saying "come work for us where we invent cool stuff") or simply keep it as a trade secret (giving you a competitive advantage).
The largest problem I have with software patents is the business of prior art, where algorithms are patented that have already been invented or are trivial constructs that almost any software developer would have created given the circumstance. The "1-click purchase" button is an example of that.
BTW, I find that it isn't just software patents that are overly generalized but nearly all patents. This is also by design. In theory, the proper role of a patent is to record knowledge for future generations that would otherwise be lost. There are several devices and processes that we know about from history that simply weren't recorded in terms of how they were put together... or in the case of a metallurgical process what the steps were for making the items. A Stradivarius Violin is a prime example, and those are even still in use, as is something like a Damascus Steel. The problem with this philosophy is that I fail to see how the information given in a patent application can ever possibly be used in most cases to recreate the process.... even for somebody "skilled in the technology". I've looked at several software patents over the years and for many I would be at a loss in terms of how to recreate the algorithm that is being described. At best the patent description would only cover a class of algorithms like sort algorithms in general, not something specific like a Quicksort or Bubblesort.
It is a mistaken notion that you can use the technology for an ICBM for orbital spaceflight and the other way around. They are not quite the same engineering domain, and from my experience when you try to design a rocket for one domain (building an ICBM) then apply it to orbital flight, the costs involved skyrocket to the point that the rocket is unusable for anybody but a government entity anyway.
It gets even worse for the use of orbital spacecraft being fit into use as a ICBM, as most orbital spacecraft are explicitly designed so that the general thrust is controlled in such a way that the stress on the payload is kept to a minimum. Most modern launchers will only do an average acceleration of about 5-7 "g's", but ICBMs typically do about 15-30 "g's". A nuclear warhead is usually a pretty sturdy thing that can handle those stresses. This is a critical factor as the spacecraft going up on a more leisurely pace is going to be tracked longer, and can be much more easily intercepted. In addition, other characteristics of the flight profile will make it painfully obvious that the object of the flight is to make it to orbit.... something easy to detect and distinguish from a purely ballistic trajectory.
Another distinguishing feature about an ICBM is that it must be ready to fly in a short notice (mostly on the order of about a half hour or less) and must either be fueled very rapidly or have something like a solid rocket motor that is explicitly designed to spend years or even decades in a "ready" state. A spacecraft on the other hand has no ned to be concerned with long-terms anti-corrosion measures, and if it takes an hour or two for the launch to happen it isn't that big of a deal. Solid fuel engines are generally discouraged for spaceflight and are only used for auxillary purposes... mostly because of cost. The Space Shuttle is quite unusual in this aspect and it should be pointed out that the Shuttle is considered overly complicated and not really cost effective either.
My point is that if a "terrorist group" somehow was able to get the plans for a SpaceX Falcon 9 and decides to use that rocket as an ICBM..... my hat is off to them both for getting the money together necessary to reproduce the efforts that SpaceX has made, overcome the quality assurance problems found with any sort of new rocket project, and even once it gets into the air it will be a cinch for the U.S. Air Force to shoot the thing down with existing technology like the Patriot missiles. In short I say "bring it on" in terms of any terrorist group wanting to build such a missile and good luck with that. They certainly aren't going to be building such a rocket covertly or without the express permission of whatever country they happen to be in. In short, orbital launch rockets are not a threat to national security at all.
With America becoming a communist country and China becoming a free-market capitalist country... there may be a point to what you are saying here. Time will tell just how effective they will be.
I'm not really talking legal frameworks here, but rather what has generally be true for most engineers that I've had to deal with in the past. I've had my share of both Chinese, European, South African, and even Indian engineers that I've worked with as well as Americans. If anything, I'm far more concerned about India than China, and the one part of the world that is consistently ignored that could really blossom is South America for most of the same reasons why North America prospered in the 20th Century.
What I am trying to say is that the ability to innovate and create is directly tied to the degree of freedom that the people involved have in their daily lives and how little influence the government has in their lives. America's strength in the past has been a government that basically stayed out of your face for the most part and let you do whatever it is that you wanted. The unfortunate thing is that such a government no longer exists in America and increasingly it is becoming a police state in America instead. No, I'm not thrilled by that either.
The only major movie studio involved with the creation of the DVD video standard was Time-Warner (aka "Warner Brothers"). There was some consultation with the MPAA, but the RIAA was explicitly ignored (to the detriment of DVD) when the standard was established.
The MPEG-2 video spec, which is used on DVD discs, is an international specification that had participants on nearly every continent of the Earth... including Antarctica. The main repository was in Italy for the discussions, but meetings were held just about everywhere else. I suppose that "Hollywood" was involved in its creation as the intent for MPEG-2 was to display high resolution video on computers, but it most certainly was not something invented by a bunch of software developers in Los Angeles County, California. That you might find a couple of developers there may be true, but many more were from Northern California (Silicon Valley) instead.
DVD as a data storage medium was only a secondary characteristic of the format and likely would never have been made except for the ability to use it as a delivery medium for movies. Iomega certainly was making competing storage devices at the time DVD was introduces, as were other concepts too. 4.77 GB of data (per side and not counting a dual layer DVD) was a whole lot of data to be delivered at once, so it certainly did have the advantage at the time for high density data storage, but it wasn't the only potential storage medium.
It is also the training and philosophical base that determines the rate of innovation. America has or at least had a general philosophy of freedom of expression that encouraged the development of new ideas and giving you the freedom to create those ideas and freely associate with others to get those ideas made.
China is a much more hierarchial society where the engineers involved only do what they are told and don't come up with original ideas. Doing something original makes you stand out, which also causes you to be struck down when that happens. The Cultural Revolution under Mao really had a negative impact in terms of wiping out an entire generation of innovators and thinkers... as they were "dangerous" to the regime. Only now has there arisen a generation that even begins to challenge the status quo, and the events at Tianimen Square in the 1990s showed even the recent generations that they can only go so far before they get thrown into prison again. It has been embedded into their culture to not step out of the box or do something new that hasn't been tried before.
I would take a dozen American engineers over a hundred Chinese engineers any day in terms of actually building something new or original. If I wanted to build another bridge or network router, I would take the Chinese engineers instead.... and still have the Americans look over the designs when they are done to make sure that not too many corners have been cut in the design that will cause it to fail.
Some space technology company lobbying against ITAR as they would've otherwise made more money...
Sorry, I don't buy that. There's a reason for why technology exports are regulated. If that comes at the cost of a bit less money to the aerospace companies then so be it.
However, if it's really a dumb regulation - then it should be rethought. I don't think this is the case though.
More money? At one time America had 100% of the commercial rocket launcher business, and now it is less than 10% of the world market... substantially less if you believe some reports.
This is absolutely killing American commercial rocketry to the point that American rocket builders are only selling to the U.S. military or other government agencies. It is so bad that organizations like NASA are now building foreign rockets to put up payloads, including astronauts. Starting next year, the only way that an American astronaut is going to be able to get into space is on a Soviet-designed vehicle launched in Kazhakstan. I hardly call that progress or just "a bit less money to the aerospace companies". American companies are now turning to foreign launchers because the price structure for domestic launchers is too high.... SpaceX being the sole exception at the moment.
I should also point out that the characteristics that make a very good ICBM and things which make a good orbital spacecraft really are quite different. The engineering domains are not the same nor are the system requirements. Yes, you can put stuff into orbit on an ICBM and you can launch a nuclear warhead on a vehicle designed originally for orbital spaceflight. You can also put a nuclear warhead next to Manhattan with a rowboat on the Hudson. Does this mean we need to stop rowboat construction in America too?
Since when is a Blu-ray or DVD player made in America? I have yet to see at least the major components made by an American manufacturing company. The specification itself is of Japanese origin (Toshiba wrote the original DVD spec), so what is American except for the patents and lawyers involved with the whole thing?
While this post is incredibly racist and offensive, I happen to agree with the sentiment that the primary role of ITAR is to keep the Muslim nations from obtaining the technology necessary to go into space.
Not that it is working or really effective at doing so anyway. The information about going into space isn't exactly rocket science.... well perhaps it is but it isn't exactly all that difficult. Besides, as is pointed out in the main article the law is hardly stopping "friendly countries" from exporting that technology once those countries figure out how to make the parts themselves. The largest problem with building a rocket is mainly plumbing, and more importantly building a decent high power pump that is both lightweight and can work with cryogenic fuels and can hopefully be fueled by the same energy source that powers the main rocket itself. Pumps aren't exactly a new invention to mankind either. Getting something to burn is basic chemistry that a teenager can figure out on their own.
The gold standard for scientific accuracy in a movie still is 2001: A Space Odyssey Its sequel, 2010, had many more inaccurate aspects even though I thought it was a real fun movie too.
While there are aspects to spaceflight that are exciting, something like most of what happens during an EVA is usually as boring as it can get and makes watching paint dry look exciting.
I don't know if any prominent Hollywood director will ever take those kind of efforts to realistically portray science fiction in such a manner again. I suppose there is the movie Apollo 13 that re-created the weightless scenes by using the Vomit Comet and real microgravity environments, but shy of that I don't know how accurate you can get. Apollo 13 was also a historical re-creation, so I wouldn't put it in the same category as a Science Fiction movie that was trying to be serious in its realism.
Most rocks that come this close to Earth are in orbits tied to Earth's and will come close again every few years. If we wanted to put a probe (or a manned lander) onto one of these, we could target one we've spotted before and arrange to intercept it on a future visit. There's no obvious incentive to visit one the moment we spot it.
Surprisingly, the Obama administration is proposing a manned mission to some of these smaller chunks of rock. Lockheed-Martin wrote a white paper on a proposed mission to an asteroid using the Orion spacecraft that can be accessed here:
The missing planning is still at a very early stage and there is no reason to believe that Congress will necessarily fund such a project, but it seems like this is a cheaper option than going to the Moon or to Mars, and at the very least would help to prove deep-space manned spaceflight capabilities for missions to other places.
While there won't be an incentive to visit an asteroid right after it is spotted, there are some smaller asteroids that have already been spotted that might make some interesting targets in the future.
Even as dead as it is, it still is the best alternative to Wikipedia... provided you want to have access to the content and use it under some sort of copyleft license instead of a purely proprietary license. Even this Standford "encyclopedia" is not available under a copyleft license and can only be viewed from this one website alone.... or something published by Standford.
However this "rule" puts the onus of action upon the person performing the action... where they can opt not to do something that may be harmful to themselves.
Isaac Asimov's rules of robotics IMHO do an even better job of coming up with a basic moral philosophy that avoids many of the problems which are alluded to here in terms of causing or inflicting harm upon somebody else. Those rules of robotics don't address issues related to unquestioned subservience, and have many other problems.
Keep in mind that the "Golden Rule" was also put into a context that the Decalogue would be widely acknowledges and generally followed by most people with only aberrant exceptions that were largely discouraged anyway. Pulling that concept out of that environment, as it being done here, does not properly address how this "rule" was to be followed in the first place.
In contemporary analytic philosophy, actualism is a position on the ontological status of possible worlds that holds that everything that exists (i.e., everything there is) is actual.
The denial of actualism is possibilism, the thesis that there are some entities that are merely possible: these entities exist (in the same way that ordinary objects around us do) but are not to be found in the actual world. One famous version of possibilism is David Lewis's modal realism.
I agree.... they simply need to get to the point and explain the topic. BTW, I love the lead paragraph guidelines for Wikipedia, and think they end up improving the articles involved when they are followed.
This lead paragraph from the Stanford Encyclopedia makes my head ache simply reading it too.
Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.
That gets rid of the problems you mentioned here with molestation and assault, but it also introduces other problems such as trying to determine what exactly it is that the other person wants you do really be doing, or if you really want to do what they want you to do to them.
Of course this is a good way to start a philosophical argument too.
Whether one way is better than the other remains to be seen, but I don't really see the conflict - there is plenty of space on the net for Wikipedia, Scholarpedia, Stanford Encyclopedia etc. Arguing that there should be only one encyclopedia is like arguing that there should only be one newspaper.
What I see as a problem with efforts to substantially increase standards with the development of an encyclopedia is this: how do you keep the information from getting stale? The 1911 Encyclopedia Brittianica is a wonderful source of information but the information in it is a century out of date. For some things that isn't too bad, although a century of scientific discovery has made much of that publication obsolete or at least not something to reference when even doing an initial survey of a topic.
Efforts like Nupedia likely could have succeeded over time with a whole lot of persistence, but the contents of those articles would quickly go stale without some persistent re-writing of the article from time to time. Essentially, over a certain period of time (roughly 10-20 years) you need to essentially rewrite the entire encyclopedia. How do you accomplish that task with high standards?
The Citizendium is about the best alternative to Wikipedia that I've seen, and even that project has some serious problems getting itself going... and relies upon Wikipedia for a great amount of its content as well. Sticking strictly to "featured articles" and perhaps including the "Good Articles", Wikipedia has been able to produce about 15,000 articles that are of a pretty high quality that are comparable to a professional encyclopedia. These articles do need to be peer-reviewed (as in a Wikipedia peer, not necessarily an academic peer) in order to get this classification. That is the sum total of all of the articles that Citizendium is even working on, including new starts that may not likely ever get finished.
Compared to the 1200 articles produced by the Standford effort, it seems to pale in comparison.
I'm glad to see that there is some effort to make a difference and at least try to make an improvement in the process, but count me as a skeptic in terms of if there might be some real difference with these alternative and their having better success than Wikipedia. Nupedia ultimately bombed, and I don't see this effort by Stanford to be any different.
First of all, it isn't an encyclopedia in terms of "drilling down" on a topic with depth. I know World Book did have some authors with its "supplements" that had a few articles that went into greater depth than a typical encyclopedia article. Still, those were still articles of general interest that were written for ordinary people to learn more about a topic that had broad readership. Those articles were more akin to something you would see in a National Geographic, Scientific American, or New Yorker Magazine.
There is this wonderful invention called.... a library. You ought to check it out. People can write books in depth on a specific topic and is wonderful for somebody studying that topic with post-graduate work. Believe it or not, there are even electronic libraries that have quite a bit to grab on-line if you want to obtain that knowledge without going to a physical building.
Getting away from being so silly here, I should point out that Nupedia tried this same approach in terms of having some peer-reviewed articles go through "subject experts" to review the articles for factual errors and to have some very high standards for publication. After two years they published just over a hundred article and the rate of submission actually went down over time. This little side project about a year into the effort using a technology called a "wiki" was used to supplement the Nupedia project and to give non-experts the chance to write some articles that wouldn't pass muster with Nupedia realizing that sometimes non-experts could put something together worthy of publication too. Oh yeah, the project was named "Wikipedia".
If you honestly think both efforts can co-exist and that some more intensive effort can be done, at least those involved need to find some model different than what Nupedia used. Otherwise, you would be forced into using something more like how encyclopedias created articles: paying experts some pretty good money to write the articles and making the encyclopedia proprietary. The question is how do you raise the money to be able to pay for that effort or make a business model that "works" with on-line content?
I look around to various internet forums and not only do I see "new trails" being blazed, but some incredible things that simply wouldn't have happened years ago without the internet and connections via teleconferencing of a great many projects. Perhaps the most prominent as a broad group is the "open source" movement with the plethora of projects associated with that concept including a major operating system (Linux) although that is hardly the only major thing accomplish.
As far as scams are concerned... people have been plotting scams and getting suckered for as long as there have been people. The only thing that changes is how those scams are done, and even then you can find analogs to earlier efforts.
If you think the internet and public forums are such a bad thing, try staying off for awhile. It might do you and everybody else a whole lot of good.
When I see somebody complaining about Wikipedia because of either poorly written articles or something else that has to do with a content issue, my automatic response is: Fix the bloody thing and shut up about it. Content issues are something that is incredibly easy to deal with.
What makes Wikipedia frustrating to work with are the people issues, where some obsessive-compulsive editor who "owns" some article to the point they won't let you contribute any reasonable edit and thin-skinned administrators who swing hard with account blocks merely because you reverted an edit they made... or other things of a similar nature.
Yes, there are problems with Wikipedia, but the issues mainly come from people who are not willing to act in a collaborative manner and don't "get it" in terms of what the whole project is about.
One of the worst professors I ever had was a Physics professor who was so stuck on himself that he was trying to show off his brilliance and intellect instead of actually trying to teach the class.
You can get people who have learned stuff 20-40 years ago to be able to express that to you in a clear way, but they've got to humble themselves to the point that they are willing to listen, to talk, and to try and understand what it is that the students are struggling with to come up with a different solution to acquiring knowledge.
What somebody like a professor on the bleeding edge of scientific research can provide is a guide to help know what is important and perhaps not important in order to get to where he is now. I've done that with my own kids (admittedly with their grade school/jr. high school homework) where I've had to point out that some of the homework they are doing now is going to be important in the future when they start dealing with even harder problems. When you've learned a whole lot more, you get to see the larger picture as well and can act as a sort of guide through that knowledge.
Somebody who just barely learned a concept or have just recently covered the material doesn't necessarily have that kind of perspective and often will lead you to paths that don't necessarily get you to that frontier of knowledge that is necessary. Then again, perhaps that professor of science doesn't want any competition and is deliberately leading you astray while the student TA is just a couple of years ahead of you and doesn't have any axe to grind if you succeed either. It is a two edged sword here.
My problem with the TAs was that those who spoke English (in America) usually were able to find work outside of the University (internships/"real work") and so they didn't need the TA jobs. Instead those went to foreign students who could barely speak the language and certainly didn't have the cultural background to be able to relate to the undergraduates they were serving. In fact, the TA jobs were viewed mostly as a graduate level kind of scholarship and they weren't really expected to do much of anything other than show up to the learning sessions.
On a rare occasion I found a teaching assistant who cared about what it was they were doing and actually wanted to make a difference. Sometimes even these foreign-born students would learn enough about American culture to be able to relate to their students (aka they "partied" and went to various social events at the expense of their academics).
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I also knew more than my share of pregnant high school students, and that would imply that at least some of those stories were true to a certain extent... unless I don't understand biological processes very well. While wishful thinking doesn't get you laid, it is hard to conceive a baby as a teen with no money unless you are getting some. The boyfriends involved, of course, claimed that they were using "protection" and trying to avoid the situation too.
OK, instead of "greasing palms" how about a very nice campaign contribution where some fairy god-senator decides to lean on the USPTO in order to get something expedited. There are many "legal" ways to bribe government officials if you really care to make the effort.
Yes, there might be built-in expedition methods within the USPTO as well, but it doesn't hurt if there is some pressure from above as well. It can't be done too often, but for an occasional action out of the millions of patents being issued, I'm sure that at some point or another some political pressure of that nature helps. Besides, when appropriations time comes around I'm sure that same senator would be reminded of his push and be "encouraged" to be more sympathetic for funding requests coming from that agency.
correction.... that was a "black lesbian" instead of a "gay lesbian"..... yeah, I hit submit before I checked it through.
On the other hand, I know of several people who have filed for patents and have spent tens of thousands of dollars for patent filings, only to get absolutely nothing from those efforts.
It would be one thing if I knew nobody (aka a "lesbian") but if I was involved with gay rights groups and never met a gay lesbian inspite of meeting hundreds of self-confessed lesbians of all sorts of racial and ethnic backgrounds, I would start to get suspicious that there might be some kind of correlation involved here... particularly if the general area had a large number of black people in it. That is precisely the situation I'm talking about, where I do know of a great many people including close relatives who have gone through the patent process but with no results. While it may be opinion, it is based upon personal experience and a consistent seeking after people who may have even succeeded so I could figure out what their "secret sauce" might be that got the patent system to work for them.
I do know personally a couple of patent examiners and intellectual law attorneys who seem to make a fairly decent living off of the patent system. Somehow I don't think that is the point, or perhaps it is that the legal system is the real winner here. It certainly isn't the lone inventor attending an "invention workshop" or calling the 1-800 number to get their idea put into the form of a patent. To me, those guys on television are just a legal form of snake oil salesmen from another era.
I have yet to meet a single "garage tinkerer" who made an invention, went through the patent process, and made any money at all much less covered the fees necessary for a decent patent attorney and the filing fees to get the patent in the first place. To me, the whole patent process is simply a major scam that gives false hope to ordinary individuals who are thinking about an invention.
It also is important for anybody to realize that once you patent an idea, that the number of companies who are interested in your idea usually goes down after getting the patent. A typical company is more interested in something that their own employees have invented, as they control the clock in terms of when it gets to the USPTO and they don't typically need to pay a license to their own employee (that is usually covered in the employment contract).
For an established company, for defensive purposes only, I do understand why organizations will file for patents knowing full well that the patent process itself is broken. Microsoft for the longest time avoided patents for a whole bunch of reasons, but is flooding the USPTO now in part to cover their own behinds. That still doesn't explain why a private individual needs to file a patent.
Would the creation of a novel sorting algorithm (presumably something significantly faster than a Quicksort) really help in terms of attracting attention to your product, or would it be better to either publish that algorithm with the ACM Journal (giving you guys prestige and helping with recruiting new employees to you're company.... saying "come work for us where we invent cool stuff") or simply keep it as a trade secret (giving you a competitive advantage).
The largest problem I have with software patents is the business of prior art, where algorithms are patented that have already been invented or are trivial constructs that almost any software developer would have created given the circumstance. The "1-click purchase" button is an example of that.
BTW, I find that it isn't just software patents that are overly generalized but nearly all patents. This is also by design. In theory, the proper role of a patent is to record knowledge for future generations that would otherwise be lost. There are several devices and processes that we know about from history that simply weren't recorded in terms of how they were put together... or in the case of a metallurgical process what the steps were for making the items. A Stradivarius Violin is a prime example, and those are even still in use, as is something like a Damascus Steel. The problem with this philosophy is that I fail to see how the information given in a patent application can ever possibly be used in most cases to recreate the process.... even for somebody "skilled in the technology". I've looked at several software patents over the years and for many I would be at a loss in terms of how to recreate the algorithm that is being described. At best the patent description would only cover a class of algorithms like sort algorithms in general, not something specific like a Quicksort or Bubblesort.
It is a mistaken notion that you can use the technology for an ICBM for orbital spaceflight and the other way around. They are not quite the same engineering domain, and from my experience when you try to design a rocket for one domain (building an ICBM) then apply it to orbital flight, the costs involved skyrocket to the point that the rocket is unusable for anybody but a government entity anyway.
It gets even worse for the use of orbital spacecraft being fit into use as a ICBM, as most orbital spacecraft are explicitly designed so that the general thrust is controlled in such a way that the stress on the payload is kept to a minimum. Most modern launchers will only do an average acceleration of about 5-7 "g's", but ICBMs typically do about 15-30 "g's". A nuclear warhead is usually a pretty sturdy thing that can handle those stresses. This is a critical factor as the spacecraft going up on a more leisurely pace is going to be tracked longer, and can be much more easily intercepted. In addition, other characteristics of the flight profile will make it painfully obvious that the object of the flight is to make it to orbit.... something easy to detect and distinguish from a purely ballistic trajectory.
Another distinguishing feature about an ICBM is that it must be ready to fly in a short notice (mostly on the order of about a half hour or less) and must either be fueled very rapidly or have something like a solid rocket motor that is explicitly designed to spend years or even decades in a "ready" state. A spacecraft on the other hand has no ned to be concerned with long-terms anti-corrosion measures, and if it takes an hour or two for the launch to happen it isn't that big of a deal. Solid fuel engines are generally discouraged for spaceflight and are only used for auxillary purposes... mostly because of cost. The Space Shuttle is quite unusual in this aspect and it should be pointed out that the Shuttle is considered overly complicated and not really cost effective either.
My point is that if a "terrorist group" somehow was able to get the plans for a SpaceX Falcon 9 and decides to use that rocket as an ICBM..... my hat is off to them both for getting the money together necessary to reproduce the efforts that SpaceX has made, overcome the quality assurance problems found with any sort of new rocket project, and even once it gets into the air it will be a cinch for the U.S. Air Force to shoot the thing down with existing technology like the Patriot missiles. In short I say "bring it on" in terms of any terrorist group wanting to build such a missile and good luck with that. They certainly aren't going to be building such a rocket covertly or without the express permission of whatever country they happen to be in. In short, orbital launch rockets are not a threat to national security at all.
With America becoming a communist country and China becoming a free-market capitalist country... there may be a point to what you are saying here. Time will tell just how effective they will be.
I'm not really talking legal frameworks here, but rather what has generally be true for most engineers that I've had to deal with in the past. I've had my share of both Chinese, European, South African, and even Indian engineers that I've worked with as well as Americans. If anything, I'm far more concerned about India than China, and the one part of the world that is consistently ignored that could really blossom is South America for most of the same reasons why North America prospered in the 20th Century.
What I am trying to say is that the ability to innovate and create is directly tied to the degree of freedom that the people involved have in their daily lives and how little influence the government has in their lives. America's strength in the past has been a government that basically stayed out of your face for the most part and let you do whatever it is that you wanted. The unfortunate thing is that such a government no longer exists in America and increasingly it is becoming a police state in America instead. No, I'm not thrilled by that either.
The only major movie studio involved with the creation of the DVD video standard was Time-Warner (aka "Warner Brothers"). There was some consultation with the MPAA, but the RIAA was explicitly ignored (to the detriment of DVD) when the standard was established.
The MPEG-2 video spec, which is used on DVD discs, is an international specification that had participants on nearly every continent of the Earth... including Antarctica. The main repository was in Italy for the discussions, but meetings were held just about everywhere else. I suppose that "Hollywood" was involved in its creation as the intent for MPEG-2 was to display high resolution video on computers, but it most certainly was not something invented by a bunch of software developers in Los Angeles County, California. That you might find a couple of developers there may be true, but many more were from Northern California (Silicon Valley) instead.
DVD as a data storage medium was only a secondary characteristic of the format and likely would never have been made except for the ability to use it as a delivery medium for movies. Iomega certainly was making competing storage devices at the time DVD was introduces, as were other concepts too. 4.77 GB of data (per side and not counting a dual layer DVD) was a whole lot of data to be delivered at once, so it certainly did have the advantage at the time for high density data storage, but it wasn't the only potential storage medium.
It is also the training and philosophical base that determines the rate of innovation. America has or at least had a general philosophy of freedom of expression that encouraged the development of new ideas and giving you the freedom to create those ideas and freely associate with others to get those ideas made.
China is a much more hierarchial society where the engineers involved only do what they are told and don't come up with original ideas. Doing something original makes you stand out, which also causes you to be struck down when that happens. The Cultural Revolution under Mao really had a negative impact in terms of wiping out an entire generation of innovators and thinkers... as they were "dangerous" to the regime. Only now has there arisen a generation that even begins to challenge the status quo, and the events at Tianimen Square in the 1990s showed even the recent generations that they can only go so far before they get thrown into prison again. It has been embedded into their culture to not step out of the box or do something new that hasn't been tried before.
I would take a dozen American engineers over a hundred Chinese engineers any day in terms of actually building something new or original. If I wanted to build another bridge or network router, I would take the Chinese engineers instead.... and still have the Americans look over the designs when they are done to make sure that not too many corners have been cut in the design that will cause it to fail.
Some space technology company lobbying against ITAR as they would've otherwise made more money...
Sorry, I don't buy that.
There's a reason for why technology exports are regulated. If that comes at the cost of a bit less money to the aerospace companies then so be it.
However, if it's really a dumb regulation - then it should be rethought. I don't think this is the case though.
More money? At one time America had 100% of the commercial rocket launcher business, and now it is less than 10% of the world market... substantially less if you believe some reports.
This is absolutely killing American commercial rocketry to the point that American rocket builders are only selling to the U.S. military or other government agencies. It is so bad that organizations like NASA are now building foreign rockets to put up payloads, including astronauts. Starting next year, the only way that an American astronaut is going to be able to get into space is on a Soviet-designed vehicle launched in Kazhakstan. I hardly call that progress or just "a bit less money to the aerospace companies". American companies are now turning to foreign launchers because the price structure for domestic launchers is too high.... SpaceX being the sole exception at the moment.
I should also point out that the characteristics that make a very good ICBM and things which make a good orbital spacecraft really are quite different. The engineering domains are not the same nor are the system requirements. Yes, you can put stuff into orbit on an ICBM and you can launch a nuclear warhead on a vehicle designed originally for orbital spaceflight. You can also put a nuclear warhead next to Manhattan with a rowboat on the Hudson. Does this mean we need to stop rowboat construction in America too?
Since when is a Blu-ray or DVD player made in America? I have yet to see at least the major components made by an American manufacturing company. The specification itself is of Japanese origin (Toshiba wrote the original DVD spec), so what is American except for the patents and lawyers involved with the whole thing?
While this post is incredibly racist and offensive, I happen to agree with the sentiment that the primary role of ITAR is to keep the Muslim nations from obtaining the technology necessary to go into space.
Not that it is working or really effective at doing so anyway. The information about going into space isn't exactly rocket science.... well perhaps it is but it isn't exactly all that difficult. Besides, as is pointed out in the main article the law is hardly stopping "friendly countries" from exporting that technology once those countries figure out how to make the parts themselves. The largest problem with building a rocket is mainly plumbing, and more importantly building a decent high power pump that is both lightweight and can work with cryogenic fuels and can hopefully be fueled by the same energy source that powers the main rocket itself. Pumps aren't exactly a new invention to mankind either. Getting something to burn is basic chemistry that a teenager can figure out on their own.
The gold standard for scientific accuracy in a movie still is 2001: A Space Odyssey Its sequel, 2010, had many more inaccurate aspects even though I thought it was a real fun movie too.
While there are aspects to spaceflight that are exciting, something like most of what happens during an EVA is usually as boring as it can get and makes watching paint dry look exciting.
I don't know if any prominent Hollywood director will ever take those kind of efforts to realistically portray science fiction in such a manner again. I suppose there is the movie Apollo 13 that re-created the weightless scenes by using the Vomit Comet and real microgravity environments, but shy of that I don't know how accurate you can get. Apollo 13 was also a historical re-creation, so I wouldn't put it in the same category as a Science Fiction movie that was trying to be serious in its realism.
Most rocks that come this close to Earth are in orbits tied to Earth's and will come close again every few years. If we wanted to put a probe (or a manned lander) onto one of these, we could target one we've spotted before and arrange to intercept it on a future visit. There's no obvious incentive to visit one the moment we spot it.
Surprisingly, the Obama administration is proposing a manned mission to some of these smaller chunks of rock. Lockheed-Martin wrote a white paper on a proposed mission to an asteroid using the Orion spacecraft that can be accessed here:
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/data/assets/ssc/Orion/Toolkit/OrionAsteroidMissionWhitePaperAug2010.pdf
The missing planning is still at a very early stage and there is no reason to believe that Congress will necessarily fund such a project, but it seems like this is a cheaper option than going to the Moon or to Mars, and at the very least would help to prove deep-space manned spaceflight capabilities for missions to other places.
While there won't be an incentive to visit an asteroid right after it is spotted, there are some smaller asteroids that have already been spotted that might make some interesting targets in the future.
Even as dead as it is, it still is the best alternative to Wikipedia... provided you want to have access to the content and use it under some sort of copyleft license instead of a purely proprietary license. Even this Standford "encyclopedia" is not available under a copyleft license and can only be viewed from this one website alone.... or something published by Standford.
However this "rule" puts the onus of action upon the person performing the action... where they can opt not to do something that may be harmful to themselves.
Isaac Asimov's rules of robotics IMHO do an even better job of coming up with a basic moral philosophy that avoids many of the problems which are alluded to here in terms of causing or inflicting harm upon somebody else. Those rules of robotics don't address issues related to unquestioned subservience, and have many other problems.
Keep in mind that the "Golden Rule" was also put into a context that the Decalogue would be widely acknowledges and generally followed by most people with only aberrant exceptions that were largely discouraged anyway. Pulling that concept out of that environment, as it being done here, does not properly address how this "rule" was to be followed in the first place.
I think this works a whole lot better:
In contemporary analytic philosophy, actualism is a position on the ontological status of possible worlds that holds that everything that exists (i.e., everything there is) is actual.
The denial of actualism is possibilism, the thesis that there are some entities that are merely possible: these entities exist (in the same way that ordinary objects around us do) but are not to be found in the actual world. One famous version of possibilism is David Lewis's modal realism.
I agree.... they simply need to get to the point and explain the topic. BTW, I love the lead paragraph guidelines for Wikipedia, and think they end up improving the articles involved when they are followed.
This lead paragraph from the Stanford Encyclopedia makes my head ache simply reading it too.
A corollary to the "golden rule" is this:
Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.
That gets rid of the problems you mentioned here with molestation and assault, but it also introduces other problems such as trying to determine what exactly it is that the other person wants you do really be doing, or if you really want to do what they want you to do to them.
Of course this is a good way to start a philosophical argument too.
Whether one way is better than the other remains to be seen, but I don't really see the conflict - there is plenty of space on the net for Wikipedia, Scholarpedia, Stanford Encyclopedia etc. Arguing that there should be only one encyclopedia is like arguing that there should only be one newspaper.
What I see as a problem with efforts to substantially increase standards with the development of an encyclopedia is this: how do you keep the information from getting stale? The 1911 Encyclopedia Brittianica is a wonderful source of information but the information in it is a century out of date. For some things that isn't too bad, although a century of scientific discovery has made much of that publication obsolete or at least not something to reference when even doing an initial survey of a topic.
Efforts like Nupedia likely could have succeeded over time with a whole lot of persistence, but the contents of those articles would quickly go stale without some persistent re-writing of the article from time to time. Essentially, over a certain period of time (roughly 10-20 years) you need to essentially rewrite the entire encyclopedia. How do you accomplish that task with high standards?
The Citizendium is about the best alternative to Wikipedia that I've seen, and even that project has some serious problems getting itself going... and relies upon Wikipedia for a great amount of its content as well. Sticking strictly to "featured articles" and perhaps including the "Good Articles", Wikipedia has been able to produce about 15,000 articles that are of a pretty high quality that are comparable to a professional encyclopedia. These articles do need to be peer-reviewed (as in a Wikipedia peer, not necessarily an academic peer) in order to get this classification. That is the sum total of all of the articles that Citizendium is even working on, including new starts that may not likely ever get finished.
Compared to the 1200 articles produced by the Standford effort, it seems to pale in comparison.
I'm glad to see that there is some effort to make a difference and at least try to make an improvement in the process, but count me as a skeptic in terms of if there might be some real difference with these alternative and their having better success than Wikipedia. Nupedia ultimately bombed, and I don't see this effort by Stanford to be any different.
First of all, it isn't an encyclopedia in terms of "drilling down" on a topic with depth. I know World Book did have some authors with its "supplements" that had a few articles that went into greater depth than a typical encyclopedia article. Still, those were still articles of general interest that were written for ordinary people to learn more about a topic that had broad readership. Those articles were more akin to something you would see in a National Geographic, Scientific American, or New Yorker Magazine.
There is this wonderful invention called.... a library. You ought to check it out. People can write books in depth on a specific topic and is wonderful for somebody studying that topic with post-graduate work. Believe it or not, there are even electronic libraries that have quite a bit to grab on-line if you want to obtain that knowledge without going to a physical building.
Getting away from being so silly here, I should point out that Nupedia tried this same approach in terms of having some peer-reviewed articles go through "subject experts" to review the articles for factual errors and to have some very high standards for publication. After two years they published just over a hundred article and the rate of submission actually went down over time. This little side project about a year into the effort using a technology called a "wiki" was used to supplement the Nupedia project and to give non-experts the chance to write some articles that wouldn't pass muster with Nupedia realizing that sometimes non-experts could put something together worthy of publication too. Oh yeah, the project was named "Wikipedia".
If you honestly think both efforts can co-exist and that some more intensive effort can be done, at least those involved need to find some model different than what Nupedia used. Otherwise, you would be forced into using something more like how encyclopedias created articles: paying experts some pretty good money to write the articles and making the encyclopedia proprietary. The question is how do you raise the money to be able to pay for that effort or make a business model that "works" with on-line content?
I look around to various internet forums and not only do I see "new trails" being blazed, but some incredible things that simply wouldn't have happened years ago without the internet and connections via teleconferencing of a great many projects. Perhaps the most prominent as a broad group is the "open source" movement with the plethora of projects associated with that concept including a major operating system (Linux) although that is hardly the only major thing accomplish.
As far as scams are concerned... people have been plotting scams and getting suckered for as long as there have been people. The only thing that changes is how those scams are done, and even then you can find analogs to earlier efforts.
If you think the internet and public forums are such a bad thing, try staying off for awhile. It might do you and everybody else a whole lot of good.
When I see somebody complaining about Wikipedia because of either poorly written articles or something else that has to do with a content issue, my automatic response is: Fix the bloody thing and shut up about it. Content issues are something that is incredibly easy to deal with.
What makes Wikipedia frustrating to work with are the people issues, where some obsessive-compulsive editor who "owns" some article to the point they won't let you contribute any reasonable edit and thin-skinned administrators who swing hard with account blocks merely because you reverted an edit they made... or other things of a similar nature.
Yes, there are problems with Wikipedia, but the issues mainly come from people who are not willing to act in a collaborative manner and don't "get it" in terms of what the whole project is about.
One of the worst professors I ever had was a Physics professor who was so stuck on himself that he was trying to show off his brilliance and intellect instead of actually trying to teach the class.
You can get people who have learned stuff 20-40 years ago to be able to express that to you in a clear way, but they've got to humble themselves to the point that they are willing to listen, to talk, and to try and understand what it is that the students are struggling with to come up with a different solution to acquiring knowledge.
What somebody like a professor on the bleeding edge of scientific research can provide is a guide to help know what is important and perhaps not important in order to get to where he is now. I've done that with my own kids (admittedly with their grade school/jr. high school homework) where I've had to point out that some of the homework they are doing now is going to be important in the future when they start dealing with even harder problems. When you've learned a whole lot more, you get to see the larger picture as well and can act as a sort of guide through that knowledge.
Somebody who just barely learned a concept or have just recently covered the material doesn't necessarily have that kind of perspective and often will lead you to paths that don't necessarily get you to that frontier of knowledge that is necessary. Then again, perhaps that professor of science doesn't want any competition and is deliberately leading you astray while the student TA is just a couple of years ahead of you and doesn't have any axe to grind if you succeed either. It is a two edged sword here.
My problem with the TAs was that those who spoke English (in America) usually were able to find work outside of the University (internships/"real work") and so they didn't need the TA jobs. Instead those went to foreign students who could barely speak the language and certainly didn't have the cultural background to be able to relate to the undergraduates they were serving. In fact, the TA jobs were viewed mostly as a graduate level kind of scholarship and they weren't really expected to do much of anything other than show up to the learning sessions.
On a rare occasion I found a teaching assistant who cared about what it was they were doing and actually wanted to make a difference. Sometimes even these foreign-born students would learn enough about American culture to be able to relate to their students (aka they "partied" and went to various social events at the expense of their academics).