One of the projects on Wikibooks that got deleted was a huge number of chemical laboratory research notes that were GFDL'd. It killed me that such a valuable resource was killed (and it certainly had some very interesting information), but the precedent of allowing it was weighed with allowing it to remain and grow.
Other problems with original research is that the original author tends to get into a huff when you start changing the format of the prose, fix grammar, or do other things to the text. Letting people collaboratively write content is one of the key features of a wiki... where publishing original research legitimately should be questioned on a number of levels. Also consider, how do you qualify those that might be considered for updating referenced original research? The citation issue is particularly thorny for those who like to do the more administrative/cleanup stuff on a wiki.
Publishing on Wikipedia is original research (especially if it is something novel or original). That is grounds for immediate deletion on Wikipedia, so while it might get "published", it isn't a good place to do that.
On the whole I support the concept of original research being banned on Wikipedia (and most of the other Wikimedia sister projects... Wikiversity is a narrow exception) as it keeps the kooks off of the site and treats it as a serious compendium of human knowledge. It is most often used to cull UFO research notes, but it does apply in other situations as well like this one.
File a statutory invention registration with the patent office.
I wish I hadn't posted earlier, as this comment deserves to be moded up. IMHO the best idea posted yet and one that actually fits the requirements of what is being asked.
Kudos.... and it is unfortunate this is an AC post.
This would be the best way to go. Once you've published your work (assuming that your work doesn't infringe on other existing patents) it will be in the public domain and should constitute prior art. If someone were able to obtain a patent on your published work (the patent office can't check everything) it would be easy to overturn simply by pointing to whichever journal contains your paper.
This is easier said than done. While this is a legitimate method of trying to protect yourself by publishing a concept on a blog or something else that is clearly available in the public domain, it still won't protect you from hard-core patent trolls.
I wouldn't claim this as the "best way to go", but it clearly is a much cheaper option than the better way, which is to simply file a defensive patent. Once your idea is in the patent system, you are under some sort of protection... and once you have been granted a patent it becomes much harder for somebody to patent a similar concept without significantly narrowing the scope of any future patent.
Once something is published, it becomes "prior art" and someone else can't patent prior art and obvious extensions to prior art.
And also once you publish it, you can't file for a patent on it outside the US, and you can only file for a US patent within a year.
While in theory this is technically true, the reality of it is that filing a patent... even if you never intend to collect royalties or even sue somebody for patent infringement if you discover it in the future... is still the most viable option.
One situation I had with a former employer was an expired patent application that hung in our engineering conference room for years.... where the company was sued by a patent troll who had filed a nearly identical patent application for the very same concept and was claiming prior art. In that case, the troll was hosed (legally speaking) because prior art was clearly established and certified by the USPTO... showing that the patent was clearly invalid and forcing the judge to dismiss the case. The patent attorney hadn't even listed this prior patent as a disclaimer of prior art when a simple search of the patent database would have turned it up.
The company I worked for would have been taken to the cleaners if it wasn't for that patent which had been filed by an earlier employee. Yeah, it was fun to see first hand how valuable defensive patents could be... and it was even funnier to see that plaque temporarily be taken down as it was presented in court as prior art. Yeah, that step wasn't strictly necessary, but it made an impression on the judge as well that proved to be quite positive.
In this case, you need to use the patent system against itself just as the GPL uses the copyright system against itself. The patent system respects itself, but it doesn't think stuff created out of this environment is worth much.... witness some of the idiotic patents that have been filed such as one about ROT-13, one-click shopping, and the LZW algorithm. While all of these had clear prior-art in published journals (like ACM publications), that hasn't been sufficient to prove prior art in a legal sense, unfortunately, and patents were not only granted but enforced.
And no, I don't love the patent system (I wish it were completely abolished), but it is an unfortunate evil in today's engineering environment. I have yet to meet a single individual that I know personally or have been able to shake their hand who has made a single penny off of a patent, yet I know dozens of individuals who have had them granted and have even developed patent-worthy concepts of my own.
I, too, have never understood economics of the Federation and how money has been "eliminated".
It should be noted that the gold-pressed latinum bars were something that came from the Ferengi, who not only involved themselves in commercial relationships but even immortalized the ideas into a sort of religion. Deep Space 9 was a conduit of ideas and goods between the Ferengi and the Federation, so it shouldn't be too surprising that money continued to be use in that context when dealing with space-faring races that hadn't rejected the concept of money.
Even with Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future, it still doesn't explain how the Federation deals with the allocation of scarce resources. Even assuming that the typical Federation citizen has access to nearly infinite quantities of energy (nuclear energy research makes some breath taking advances in the next couple of centuries) and basic resources for living such as food, clothing, and shelter come from automated robotic factories to take care of basic needs, there still be be some things which will be in short supply or you can only obtain a limited number of in a short period of time.
Not every federation citizen can order up a Galaxy-class starship to explore the furthest reaches of the universe at will. No matter what you can tell me about economics of the future, there reaches something that can be bartered and exchanged... and with that you have money. It may not be quite as critical as it is today for even mere existence, but it will be something that will have to happen on some level even assuming a completely egalitarian future for mankind.
Assuming this isn't an April Fool's joke, I would have to agree that there is very little knowledge to be gained here by doing this "study" that hasn't already been done numerous times and in multiple locations.... including multiple locations off of the planet Earth.
Far more credible would be the mission reports from Skylab 4, the various missions to Mir and Salyut, and numerous expeditions to the ISS.
This has been beat to death in concept, and excepting studies of what happens to the human body in reduced (not zero) gravity environments, there is nothing of note to gain with such an experiment.... even by Russians who don't trust American scientific reports.
This is a stupid experiment, and appears to ignore the huge wealth of scientific inquiry on this topic from some very well noted medical and scientific journals.
This would make a fun "reality" TV show, but other than that it would be a pointless exercise. Even TV's "Big Brother" does this concept somewhat better anyway.
Considering that Tesla has a full year back order right now, why do they even need to team up with another company for sales support?
I think you mistook what the deal is with Mercedes: Tesla is providing the manufacturing talent and skills for a mass-production battery pack that Mercedes will put into their own vehicles of their own design. This is a sound strategy, and something which Tesla poured a whole bunch of money into that deserves to be sold to other auto manufacturers.
Tesla earlier tried to spin off the battery pack manufacturing into a completely separate division, but the financial crunch with Tesla (and the world economy at the same time) forced Tesla to scale their plans back somewhat in that regard. They figure if Tesla is one of the major manufacturers of automotive battery packs, that they can scale production and offer cheaper batteries to their own customers for what appears to be an emerging market and giving Tesla first mover advantage. Similar deals have been proposed with other auto makers, so this isn't exactly something new.
Mercedes isn't going to be selling Tesla Roadsters or any other such nonsense.... it is just buying something that Tesla seems to be very good at doing.
1) Tesla is trying to peel off the top layers of the market, where the profit margins are greater. Automotive manufacturing is a very cash intensive business, and Tesla simply doesn't have the cash to make a mass consumer model at the moment.
2) I, too, am impressed with the family orientation with the Model S. I don't know if I believe the marketing assertion that this new design has the vehicle storage space of an SUV or a station wagon, but it certainly is larger than the Roadster's room for a bag of golf clubs or a couple sacks of groceries (about 5 ft^3). Keep in mind that the design of the Roadster was for the higher-end luxury sports car market, where storage space and passenger room are more afterthoughts than something integral to the design of the vehicle.
3) The Model S is designed to go more for mass production. It certainly is going to be more than Tesla's current production of 100 Roadsters per month. Even so, getting even to 50k per year takes an incredible amount of capital, which is one of the reasons why Tesla went into a huge cash crunch last year. See my rebuttal to point one above.
4) I don't know how you can make an efficient battery pack much cheaper than what Tesla already is doing. The current battery pack for the Roadster costs between $5k and $10k, and will last somewhere between 5 and 10 years. That sounds pretty close to the $500/year that you are citing here, but it remains to be seen just how long this design will hold out in practice and real world driving. There are no other major production vehicles to compare here, although keep in mind the Roadster's (and the Model S) driving range which is a significant limiting factor on the cost. More driving range on a charge == more battery == more cost for the battery.
I think Tesla has their priorities down pretty well, which does include the "Blue Star" model that is a future design intended to push real hard for the mass consumer market with a 2005 price point of between $25k and $30k. While very little has been said about this vehicle or marketing strategy, it hasn't been invalidated or refuted by Tesla either since it was originally discussed by both Martin Eberhard and Elon Musk.
It certainly is worth reading, and seeing what they plan on doing. This Model S isn't the "affordable" family car, but it is going to be a production full-sized American car worthy of that name. Tesla doesn't have to worry about fuel millage issues to form it into an SUV to get around those requirements, but it certainly is going for that group of customers who are typically called "Soccer Moms" and other suburban demographics.
BTW, I'd love to see the source on Tesla teaming up with Mercedes for anything but doing service for their European customers. This is genuine news to me, and I have some doubts about it owing to the other errors you seem to have about Tesla. I, for one, and incredibly glad they have not gone with a cheap Indian car maker... Tesla has a good reputation of its own that could only get screwed up with somebody who doesn't care about the quality they've put into their vehicles and is only interested in selling their own brand of cars.
By "starting" an electric vehicle (especially a Tesla), the term is actually "booting" the car... as in boot-starting the computers that actually run the car.
It is also a good security feature to have a key that prevents the operation of the vehicle, even if all it does it turn to an "on" position.
Actually, Tesla Roadsters do have gears.... even a "transmission" after a fashion. The original design called for a 2-speed transmission so the car could have an efficient "cruise" range and still be able to reach the target 0-60 mph in under 4 seconds. It turned out the be a bigger mess than it was worth, as trying to shift gears on a transmission when the main engine power supply is going at 15,000 rpm or more is a bit beyond a typical gasoline or even diesel engine rate. The torque of an electric motor was also hell on the transmission.
It was a good thought on Tesla's part, and one of the few really bad screw-ups in the design of the Roadster. It nearly killed the company too. It still uses a transmission to send the energy to the wheels, but the issues with having to engage a clutch and shift gears have been eliminated.
For details about this, see the Tesla blog on this topic:
It might be true that Tesla was "inspired by" the Lotus Elise.... and the Roadster is manufactured by Lotus in the same plant that the Elise is also made.... it really is a completely different design. Tesla didn't simply take the Elise and throw an electric motor into it, but rather did a clean-sheet design from scratch and built a whole new vehicle.
From what I understand, only a small fraction of the components in the Roadster even come from the Lotus supply chain, and that is along the lines of about 10% to 20% (depending on how or what you count). In addition, the final assembly and in particular the engines themselves (which are completely of Tesla's creation and not even a conventional electric motor) are installed in a facility at the company's headquarters in Silicon Valley, California. There may eventually be some full assembly in England for customers in Europe, but that isn't how it is done at the moment as even European-bound cars finish assembly in California.
The "Model S" has much more of a Detroit heritage and is based more on American full-sized cars, and will be manufactured in America as well. Several Detroit-based automotive engineers participated in the design of this new vehicle. The Detroit design studio for Tesla was shut down when the company was restructured, but many of the engineers are still involved in the company. Originally it was supposed to be built in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but Tesla changed their mind and are building it somewhere in California due to some tax incentives.
I wouldn't expect to see too much from any other company involved, other than the engineers are all trained in the same schools and ideas certainly are shared between nearly all automotive manufacturers today. No other "exotic European car manufacturer" like Porsche or Audi are involved except perhaps as peripheral inspiration by automotive geeks who keep up with the competition.
From my own experience on/., most of the time I've been moderated positively when I've made a clear and articulate comment that often includes some new information in the discussion. Rarely, if ever, do I get moderated down for comments of this nature.
On a few occasions, I inject my political opinions into the discussion, and mostly if those are well written they'll either go by unmoderated or get tweaked slightly in a generally positive direction. There are a few/. readers who try to promote their political points of view at the expense of other viewpoints... but I tend to find that an exception to the rule.
I did get severely modded down somewhat recently due to a comment that I think was mostly due to political viewpoints. For me, however, that has been an exception and was an atypical experience for me on slashdot. I'll also be honest and say that it wasn't the best of my prose as well, and I could have avoided the submit button in the first place. Indeed, I've been hitting the cancel button far more lately, even after writing something rather substantial. I just didn't think it was necessary to publish such comments after I reviewed them... using my own standards.
Not all nuclear reactions capable of fission/fusion necessarily produce massive amounts of ionizing radiation. Aneutronic fusion has a number of potential fuel sources, with Boron being the strongest candidate.
While I'm not entirely sure I'd want to stand next to an unshielded reactor using even this fuel, modest shielding in place would protect you leaving radiation levels that would be comparable to being in a concrete building. I'm talking the natural radiation that is emitted from concrete here.... which is certainly not zero.
Robert Bussard did theorize that his Polywell device could be engineered to be installed into the structure of a semi-truck as its primary source of power, and certainly could be made ship-sized for even small vessels (not just air-craft carriers here). Indeed, that is the reason why the U.S. Navy is so interested in the Polywell project... in the hopes that it could mean an all-nuclear Navy.
Sending out an entire task force without having to worry about fuel requirements during the deployment certainly offers some interesting strategic and logistical planning strategies. Oh, re-supply ships and tenders would still be needed, but it would be for things like food, mail, and spare parts that can't be machined in the ship.
The holy grail is indeed a small portable power generator that may even be taken while camping or at least "luggable" in a pick-up truck that could provide power to places that are far from any power grid. I don't know if that will ever happen, but I still don't think Cold Fusion is going to provide that sort of power creation system.
If either of those "energy sources" produce enough power to warm just a cup of coffee, I'll drink every cup ever produced.
Seriously, I consider both of them to be certifiable scams not even worth wasting your time to check out, but I suppose a sucker is born every minute too.
Squeezing energy out of the universe is a little bit harder than you are suggesting here.
I've seen a whole bunch of ignorance here with/. readers about what Cold Fusion actually can bring.
Yeah, I suppose if the fundamental mechanism is discovered and perfected, it could used for some semi-useful devices. I guess the best example to compare this to is super-conduction that happens in materials at very cold temperatures. Even "high temperature super-conductors" are pretty damn cold for most practical application like a superconducting CPU in a home PC. Don't expect to see one soon.
This is an interesting physical science phenomena and certainly deserves scientific research. Something is happening with cold fusion, and it certainly is producing some of the by-products (including neutron emission) of nuclear fusion.
The oil companies have nothing to fear either, as just with the example of super-conductors (especially when they were first discovered), this doesn't produce quantities of energy large enough to be useful for practical energy production. If you want a "Mr. Fusion" device, it is likely to be more along the lines of an Internal Electrostatic Confinement (IEC... aka the "Farnsworth-Hurch Fusor") or the Polywell approaches.
The only practical application that I've heard that would be useful to operate a cold fusion reactor for is to have a neutron source that you can turn on and off with a standard household light switch. There certainly are some people interested in something like that, but the market is pretty small and already filled by commercial IEC devices anyway. This will very likely never amount to anything other than a whole bunch of scientific papers and an interesting Wikipedia article. That is even assuming it is "proven" to be a scientifically valid phenomena.
The problem isn't so much just one single cell, but a whole series of panels that when combined result in some fairly significant current.
The grandparent post here about concern with the circuit design is completely valid here and deserves much more consideration when trying to design something proper for connecting to a household power supply as opposed to something you might design for a simply hobby experiment for running a consumer electronic device.
I am assuming here that setting up an installation for a home is going to involve hundreds if not thousands of cells. Each one by themselves is trivial, but the point is to try and connect all of them together into a combined power supply. This is a similar issue to amateur electricians who put together an amazing Christmas light display without thinking about things like current draw on the outlet designed for ordinary consumer appliances. Sure, a single strand of lights is trivial, but the 40 or so that you have put together makes it a significant power issue.
Even something so mundane as if you are connecting the circuits in series or in parallel (or in various combinations of that) make a huge difference in the design. I certainly see somebody being able to wire together cells of this nature where the voltage potential is in the thousands of volts if done improperly, or forgetting to use the proper wire gauge for something that can carry the current load necessary at that point in the circuit. Burning down the house is hardly an exaggeration if you really think this through.
Jimmy Wales doesn't have nearly so much influence on Wikipedia as he once did. Owing to the fact that he can no longer "pull the plug" and turn the site off, nor really do much of anything other than voice his opinion on the Wikimedia board of trustees. Even that vote is being questioned.
This said, previous "community standards" on Wikipedia... which Mr. Wales did help to set... are generally anti-censorship and support the free distribution of knowledge. While this particular incident with the Australian government and this silly restriction of free speech is new, censorship of Wikipedia pages is hardly something new, nor is the host of teen-aged administrators on Wikipedia either.
Dealing with teens and young 20-somethings who think they know all there is to know about Wikipedia is a continual problem on Wikipedia. This shows up with the impatience of trying to resolve an issue in a short period of time (1 week is rather typical on Wikipedia) and some of the hot tempered turf wars that happen. Life experience is also something many of the Wikipedia admins seem to lack (not all of them), and that shows up with policy discussions and how they treat new users.
This said, I'd rather be dealing with a bunch of teens than a bunch of senior citizens.
This is still a mandatory tax. Yes, there are similar sorts of licensing fees that show up for using some content in the USA... the most obvious off the top of my head is the licensing fees for internet broadcasting that are collected through the Library of Congress.
BTW, I still call this a tax (in both cases), as it is mandated by official government legislation and can be enforced by government agents, up to and including the Royal Army (if you become enough of a prick).
What really throws a monkey into the independent organization bit is how the BBC has acted during war time efforts, particularly during World War II. It really did act as a branch of the British government and openly involved itself into the war effort in a number of ways, not the least of which was being directly involved with communications systems of the British foreign intelligence service. Sure, AT&T did some similar kinds of quasi-government actions as well during the same period (as well as during the Cold War... and even arguably during the "war on terrorism").
I suppose that the BBC views themselves as a branch of the British government. Yes, I know that it is supposedly an "independent" organization, but it is fully-funded by taxpayers in the UK.
Then again, would many people consider a similar investigation by the U.S. Department of Defense or Department of Justice to be legit?
Real monetary damages can be calculated here as well, as depreciation value and CPU time... not to mention access to network resoruces are certainly not "free" for the taking. Furthermore, technician time spent to remove these bot program, scanner software required to find this stuff.... removing this software is likely to be the more expensive part.
Assuming â100 per computer that was infected (a rather low estimate), that would be around â200,000 that this reporter has potentially set up his company for liability damages.
The role of copyright is linked with mechanical reproduction and mass distribution of artistic expression. While the printing press wasn't invented in 1709, it took Johannes Gutenberg's invention (which was an adaptation of an idea originally made by the Chinese) a while to work its way through European society. We all know that the legal profession is one of the last to adapt to and adjust to new technology concepts and this is but one more example.
As a matter of fact, writers and artists prior to the invention of copyright (and the printing press) were primarily patronage jobs where some very wealthy benefactor (usually a "government" leader like a king or duke... although the Medici family did support some Renaissance-era artists) would sponsor the artists. One of the roles of copyright is to provide an alternative means of allowing artists/content creators to support themselves by selling their works to people of much more limited means in the era of mass production of artistic works.
As somebody whose livelihood depends upon writing professionally (in my case computer software), I do need some sort of legal protection to enforce attribution, and to allow me to prevent others from both claiming my work as their own as well as providing a useful means to earn money from the sales of what I make.
Where I have a problem with copyright law is how it has been extended to the point of absurdity. I'm talking most of the derivative rights and the insanely long periods of protection. If I wanted to write a story about how Han Solo and Jean-Luc Picard met on Trantor so they could figure out how to wipe out the Cylons, I really don't see why in this case four different groups of people have to give me permission to use these cultural icons in what is arguably an original story. Philip Jose Farmer wrote some fusion stories like this (notably the Riverworld series), and Robert Heinlein even went so far as to appropriate characters from Frank Baums' land of Oz into a couple of his stories. In both cases these were "legal" because the works these authors "borrowed" from were in the public domain. Much more could be said about this point, and perhaps some limited derivative rights make sense, but the whole package of "rights" to what is covered under copyright law does go over the top.
That gets to my other point about the insanely long copyright terms. While I may need a few years to try and market my stuff, I certainly don't need to have my children or grandchildren (4 generations removed or more?) making money off of what I wrote 75 years after I die. Not only is it going to be irrelevant nearly a century after I write the stuff (especially computer software), I sure would like to let somebody else have a crack at trying to fix any problems that may have come along the way. For myself, I wouldn't mind a copyright term of about 20 years.... and I would dare even most major film studios to document why they need more than that period of time to recoup their production costs. Any film still making money for the studio 20 years after it was made has long since paid off any production costs. Yes, this would make the original Star Wars movie trilogy put into the public domain... like George Lucas wasn't able to make money off of those films and would be inspired to make more/better films due to money he is earning _**NOW**_ off of the original 1977 Star Wars movie?
The classic example of why extended copyright protection is needed is in reference to Ulysses S. Grant (former U.S. President/Civil War era general) who wrote his memoirs as a means to support his wife after he died. This was a noble gesture on his behalf, and certainly in this case a post-mortem copyright does have some value. Even here, I fail to see why a copyright term longer than a couple of decades was necessary. His memoirs, while valuable even today, certainly didn't earn much money for his wife 20 years after they were originally published.
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One of the projects on Wikibooks that got deleted was a huge number of chemical laboratory research notes that were GFDL'd. It killed me that such a valuable resource was killed (and it certainly had some very interesting information), but the precedent of allowing it was weighed with allowing it to remain and grow.
Other problems with original research is that the original author tends to get into a huff when you start changing the format of the prose, fix grammar, or do other things to the text. Letting people collaboratively write content is one of the key features of a wiki... where publishing original research legitimately should be questioned on a number of levels. Also consider, how do you qualify those that might be considered for updating referenced original research? The citation issue is particularly thorny for those who like to do the more administrative/cleanup stuff on a wiki.
Publishing on Wikipedia is original research (especially if it is something novel or original). That is grounds for immediate deletion on Wikipedia, so while it might get "published", it isn't a good place to do that.
On the whole I support the concept of original research being banned on Wikipedia (and most of the other Wikimedia sister projects... Wikiversity is a narrow exception) as it keeps the kooks off of the site and treats it as a serious compendium of human knowledge. It is most often used to cull UFO research notes, but it does apply in other situations as well like this one.
File a statutory invention registration with the patent office.
I wish I hadn't posted earlier, as this comment deserves to be moded up. IMHO the best idea posted yet and one that actually fits the requirements of what is being asked.
Kudos.... and it is unfortunate this is an AC post.
This would be the best way to go. Once you've published your work (assuming that your work doesn't infringe on other existing patents) it will be in the public domain and should constitute prior art. If someone were able to obtain a patent on your published work (the patent office can't check everything) it would be easy to overturn simply by pointing to whichever journal contains your paper.
This is easier said than done. While this is a legitimate method of trying to protect yourself by publishing a concept on a blog or something else that is clearly available in the public domain, it still won't protect you from hard-core patent trolls.
I wouldn't claim this as the "best way to go", but it clearly is a much cheaper option than the better way, which is to simply file a defensive patent. Once your idea is in the patent system, you are under some sort of protection... and once you have been granted a patent it becomes much harder for somebody to patent a similar concept without significantly narrowing the scope of any future patent.
Once something is published, it becomes "prior art" and someone else can't patent prior art and obvious extensions to prior art.
And also once you publish it, you can't file for a patent on it outside the US, and you can only file for a US patent within a year.
While in theory this is technically true, the reality of it is that filing a patent... even if you never intend to collect royalties or even sue somebody for patent infringement if you discover it in the future... is still the most viable option.
One situation I had with a former employer was an expired patent application that hung in our engineering conference room for years.... where the company was sued by a patent troll who had filed a nearly identical patent application for the very same concept and was claiming prior art. In that case, the troll was hosed (legally speaking) because prior art was clearly established and certified by the USPTO... showing that the patent was clearly invalid and forcing the judge to dismiss the case. The patent attorney hadn't even listed this prior patent as a disclaimer of prior art when a simple search of the patent database would have turned it up.
The company I worked for would have been taken to the cleaners if it wasn't for that patent which had been filed by an earlier employee. Yeah, it was fun to see first hand how valuable defensive patents could be... and it was even funnier to see that plaque temporarily be taken down as it was presented in court as prior art. Yeah, that step wasn't strictly necessary, but it made an impression on the judge as well that proved to be quite positive.
In this case, you need to use the patent system against itself just as the GPL uses the copyright system against itself. The patent system respects itself, but it doesn't think stuff created out of this environment is worth much.... witness some of the idiotic patents that have been filed such as one about ROT-13, one-click shopping, and the LZW algorithm. While all of these had clear prior-art in published journals (like ACM publications), that hasn't been sufficient to prove prior art in a legal sense, unfortunately, and patents were not only granted but enforced.
And no, I don't love the patent system (I wish it were completely abolished), but it is an unfortunate evil in today's engineering environment. I have yet to meet a single individual that I know personally or have been able to shake their hand who has made a single penny off of a patent, yet I know dozens of individuals who have had them granted and have even developed patent-worthy concepts of my own.
Only a mathematician would put an uncountably infinite number of things into a bag.
Try putting uncountably infinite items into a Kline bottle. That would do the trick!
Would that be a +0 or -0?
Yes, it does make a difference. One of my first software bugs was trying to root out a negative zero. (Yes, it was a one's compliment machine BTW).
I, too, have never understood economics of the Federation and how money has been "eliminated".
It should be noted that the gold-pressed latinum bars were something that came from the Ferengi, who not only involved themselves in commercial relationships but even immortalized the ideas into a sort of religion. Deep Space 9 was a conduit of ideas and goods between the Ferengi and the Federation, so it shouldn't be too surprising that money continued to be use in that context when dealing with space-faring races that hadn't rejected the concept of money.
Even with Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future, it still doesn't explain how the Federation deals with the allocation of scarce resources. Even assuming that the typical Federation citizen has access to nearly infinite quantities of energy (nuclear energy research makes some breath taking advances in the next couple of centuries) and basic resources for living such as food, clothing, and shelter come from automated robotic factories to take care of basic needs, there still be be some things which will be in short supply or you can only obtain a limited number of in a short period of time.
Not every federation citizen can order up a Galaxy-class starship to explore the furthest reaches of the universe at will. No matter what you can tell me about economics of the future, there reaches something that can be bartered and exchanged... and with that you have money. It may not be quite as critical as it is today for even mere existence, but it will be something that will have to happen on some level even assuming a completely egalitarian future for mankind.
Assuming this isn't an April Fool's joke, I would have to agree that there is very little knowledge to be gained here by doing this "study" that hasn't already been done numerous times and in multiple locations.... including multiple locations off of the planet Earth.
Far more credible would be the mission reports from Skylab 4, the various missions to Mir and Salyut, and numerous expeditions to the ISS.
This has been beat to death in concept, and excepting studies of what happens to the human body in reduced (not zero) gravity environments, there is nothing of note to gain with such an experiment.... even by Russians who don't trust American scientific reports.
This is a stupid experiment, and appears to ignore the huge wealth of scientific inquiry on this topic from some very well noted medical and scientific journals.
This would make a fun "reality" TV show, but other than that it would be a pointless exercise. Even TV's "Big Brother" does this concept somewhat better anyway.
Considering that Tesla has a full year back order right now, why do they even need to team up with another company for sales support?
I think you mistook what the deal is with Mercedes: Tesla is providing the manufacturing talent and skills for a mass-production battery pack that Mercedes will put into their own vehicles of their own design. This is a sound strategy, and something which Tesla poured a whole bunch of money into that deserves to be sold to other auto manufacturers.
Tesla earlier tried to spin off the battery pack manufacturing into a completely separate division, but the financial crunch with Tesla (and the world economy at the same time) forced Tesla to scale their plans back somewhat in that regard. They figure if Tesla is one of the major manufacturers of automotive battery packs, that they can scale production and offer cheaper batteries to their own customers for what appears to be an emerging market and giving Tesla first mover advantage. Similar deals have been proposed with other auto makers, so this isn't exactly something new.
Mercedes isn't going to be selling Tesla Roadsters or any other such nonsense.... it is just buying something that Tesla seems to be very good at doing.
1) Tesla is trying to peel off the top layers of the market, where the profit margins are greater. Automotive manufacturing is a very cash intensive business, and Tesla simply doesn't have the cash to make a mass consumer model at the moment.
2) I, too, am impressed with the family orientation with the Model S. I don't know if I believe the marketing assertion that this new design has the vehicle storage space of an SUV or a station wagon, but it certainly is larger than the Roadster's room for a bag of golf clubs or a couple sacks of groceries (about 5 ft^3). Keep in mind that the design of the Roadster was for the higher-end luxury sports car market, where storage space and passenger room are more afterthoughts than something integral to the design of the vehicle.
3) The Model S is designed to go more for mass production. It certainly is going to be more than Tesla's current production of 100 Roadsters per month. Even so, getting even to 50k per year takes an incredible amount of capital, which is one of the reasons why Tesla went into a huge cash crunch last year. See my rebuttal to point one above.
4) I don't know how you can make an efficient battery pack much cheaper than what Tesla already is doing. The current battery pack for the Roadster costs between $5k and $10k, and will last somewhere between 5 and 10 years. That sounds pretty close to the $500/year that you are citing here, but it remains to be seen just how long this design will hold out in practice and real world driving. There are no other major production vehicles to compare here, although keep in mind the Roadster's (and the Model S) driving range which is a significant limiting factor on the cost. More driving range on a charge == more battery == more cost for the battery.
I think Tesla has their priorities down pretty well, which does include the "Blue Star" model that is a future design intended to push real hard for the mass consumer market with a 2005 price point of between $25k and $30k. While very little has been said about this vehicle or marketing strategy, it hasn't been invalidated or refuted by Tesla either since it was originally discussed by both Martin Eberhard and Elon Musk.
The general business plan is here:
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog2/?p=8
It certainly is worth reading, and seeing what they plan on doing. This Model S isn't the "affordable" family car, but it is going to be a production full-sized American car worthy of that name. Tesla doesn't have to worry about fuel millage issues to form it into an SUV to get around those requirements, but it certainly is going for that group of customers who are typically called "Soccer Moms" and other suburban demographics.
BTW, I'd love to see the source on Tesla teaming up with Mercedes for anything but doing service for their European customers. This is genuine news to me, and I have some doubts about it owing to the other errors you seem to have about Tesla. I, for one, and incredibly glad they have not gone with a cheap Indian car maker... Tesla has a good reputation of its own that could only get screwed up with somebody who doesn't care about the quality they've put into their vehicles and is only interested in selling their own brand of cars.
By "starting" an electric vehicle (especially a Tesla), the term is actually "booting" the car... as in boot-starting the computers that actually run the car.
It is also a good security feature to have a key that prevents the operation of the vehicle, even if all it does it turn to an "on" position.
Actually, Tesla Roadsters do have gears.... even a "transmission" after a fashion. The original design called for a 2-speed transmission so the car could have an efficient "cruise" range and still be able to reach the target 0-60 mph in under 4 seconds. It turned out the be a bigger mess than it was worth, as trying to shift gears on a transmission when the main engine power supply is going at 15,000 rpm or more is a bit beyond a typical gasoline or even diesel engine rate. The torque of an electric motor was also hell on the transmission.
It was a good thought on Tesla's part, and one of the few really bad screw-ups in the design of the Roadster. It nearly killed the company too. It still uses a transmission to send the energy to the wheels, but the issues with having to engage a clutch and shift gears have been eliminated.
For details about this, see the Tesla blog on this topic:
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog4/?p=67
It might be true that Tesla was "inspired by" the Lotus Elise.... and the Roadster is manufactured by Lotus in the same plant that the Elise is also made.... it really is a completely different design. Tesla didn't simply take the Elise and throw an electric motor into it, but rather did a clean-sheet design from scratch and built a whole new vehicle.
From what I understand, only a small fraction of the components in the Roadster even come from the Lotus supply chain, and that is along the lines of about 10% to 20% (depending on how or what you count). In addition, the final assembly and in particular the engines themselves (which are completely of Tesla's creation and not even a conventional electric motor) are installed in a facility at the company's headquarters in Silicon Valley, California. There may eventually be some full assembly in England for customers in Europe, but that isn't how it is done at the moment as even European-bound cars finish assembly in California.
The "Model S" has much more of a Detroit heritage and is based more on American full-sized cars, and will be manufactured in America as well. Several Detroit-based automotive engineers participated in the design of this new vehicle. The Detroit design studio for Tesla was shut down when the company was restructured, but many of the engineers are still involved in the company. Originally it was supposed to be built in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but Tesla changed their mind and are building it somewhere in California due to some tax incentives.
I wouldn't expect to see too much from any other company involved, other than the engineers are all trained in the same schools and ideas certainly are shared between nearly all automotive manufacturers today. No other "exotic European car manufacturer" like Porsche or Audi are involved except perhaps as peripheral inspiration by automotive geeks who keep up with the competition.
From my own experience on /., most of the time I've been moderated positively when I've made a clear and articulate comment that often includes some new information in the discussion. Rarely, if ever, do I get moderated down for comments of this nature.
On a few occasions, I inject my political opinions into the discussion, and mostly if those are well written they'll either go by unmoderated or get tweaked slightly in a generally positive direction. There are a few /. readers who try to promote their political points of view at the expense of other viewpoints... but I tend to find that an exception to the rule.
I did get severely modded down somewhat recently due to a comment that I think was mostly due to political viewpoints. For me, however, that has been an exception and was an atypical experience for me on slashdot. I'll also be honest and say that it wasn't the best of my prose as well, and I could have avoided the submit button in the first place. Indeed, I've been hitting the cancel button far more lately, even after writing something rather substantial. I just didn't think it was necessary to publish such comments after I reviewed them... using my own standards.
Not all nuclear reactions capable of fission/fusion necessarily produce massive amounts of ionizing radiation. Aneutronic fusion has a number of potential fuel sources, with Boron being the strongest candidate.
While I'm not entirely sure I'd want to stand next to an unshielded reactor using even this fuel, modest shielding in place would protect you leaving radiation levels that would be comparable to being in a concrete building. I'm talking the natural radiation that is emitted from concrete here.... which is certainly not zero.
Robert Bussard did theorize that his Polywell device could be engineered to be installed into the structure of a semi-truck as its primary source of power, and certainly could be made ship-sized for even small vessels (not just air-craft carriers here). Indeed, that is the reason why the U.S. Navy is so interested in the Polywell project... in the hopes that it could mean an all-nuclear Navy.
Sending out an entire task force without having to worry about fuel requirements during the deployment certainly offers some interesting strategic and logistical planning strategies. Oh, re-supply ships and tenders would still be needed, but it would be for things like food, mail, and spare parts that can't be machined in the ship.
The holy grail is indeed a small portable power generator that may even be taken while camping or at least "luggable" in a pick-up truck that could provide power to places that are far from any power grid. I don't know if that will ever happen, but I still don't think Cold Fusion is going to provide that sort of power creation system.
If either of those "energy sources" produce enough power to warm just a cup of coffee, I'll drink every cup ever produced.
Seriously, I consider both of them to be certifiable scams not even worth wasting your time to check out, but I suppose a sucker is born every minute too.
Squeezing energy out of the universe is a little bit harder than you are suggesting here.
I've seen a whole bunch of ignorance here with /. readers about what Cold Fusion actually can bring.
Yeah, I suppose if the fundamental mechanism is discovered and perfected, it could used for some semi-useful devices. I guess the best example to compare this to is super-conduction that happens in materials at very cold temperatures. Even "high temperature super-conductors" are pretty damn cold for most practical application like a superconducting CPU in a home PC. Don't expect to see one soon.
This is an interesting physical science phenomena and certainly deserves scientific research. Something is happening with cold fusion, and it certainly is producing some of the by-products (including neutron emission) of nuclear fusion.
The oil companies have nothing to fear either, as just with the example of super-conductors (especially when they were first discovered), this doesn't produce quantities of energy large enough to be useful for practical energy production. If you want a "Mr. Fusion" device, it is likely to be more along the lines of an Internal Electrostatic Confinement (IEC... aka the "Farnsworth-Hurch Fusor") or the Polywell approaches.
The only practical application that I've heard that would be useful to operate a cold fusion reactor for is to have a neutron source that you can turn on and off with a standard household light switch. There certainly are some people interested in something like that, but the market is pretty small and already filled by commercial IEC devices anyway. This will very likely never amount to anything other than a whole bunch of scientific papers and an interesting Wikipedia article. That is even assuming it is "proven" to be a scientifically valid phenomena.
No, he just stood behind the curtain.
Of course, you are supposed to ignore the man behind the curtain.
The problem isn't so much just one single cell, but a whole series of panels that when combined result in some fairly significant current.
The grandparent post here about concern with the circuit design is completely valid here and deserves much more consideration when trying to design something proper for connecting to a household power supply as opposed to something you might design for a simply hobby experiment for running a consumer electronic device.
I am assuming here that setting up an installation for a home is going to involve hundreds if not thousands of cells. Each one by themselves is trivial, but the point is to try and connect all of them together into a combined power supply. This is a similar issue to amateur electricians who put together an amazing Christmas light display without thinking about things like current draw on the outlet designed for ordinary consumer appliances. Sure, a single strand of lights is trivial, but the 40 or so that you have put together makes it a significant power issue.
Even something so mundane as if you are connecting the circuits in series or in parallel (or in various combinations of that) make a huge difference in the design. I certainly see somebody being able to wire together cells of this nature where the voltage potential is in the thousands of volts if done improperly, or forgetting to use the proper wire gauge for something that can carry the current load necessary at that point in the circuit. Burning down the house is hardly an exaggeration if you really think this through.
Jimmy Wales doesn't have nearly so much influence on Wikipedia as he once did. Owing to the fact that he can no longer "pull the plug" and turn the site off, nor really do much of anything other than voice his opinion on the Wikimedia board of trustees. Even that vote is being questioned.
This said, previous "community standards" on Wikipedia... which Mr. Wales did help to set... are generally anti-censorship and support the free distribution of knowledge. While this particular incident with the Australian government and this silly restriction of free speech is new, censorship of Wikipedia pages is hardly something new, nor is the host of teen-aged administrators on Wikipedia either.
Dealing with teens and young 20-somethings who think they know all there is to know about Wikipedia is a continual problem on Wikipedia. This shows up with the impatience of trying to resolve an issue in a short period of time (1 week is rather typical on Wikipedia) and some of the hot tempered turf wars that happen. Life experience is also something many of the Wikipedia admins seem to lack (not all of them), and that shows up with policy discussions and how they treat new users.
This said, I'd rather be dealing with a bunch of teens than a bunch of senior citizens.
This is still a mandatory tax. Yes, there are similar sorts of licensing fees that show up for using some content in the USA... the most obvious off the top of my head is the licensing fees for internet broadcasting that are collected through the Library of Congress.
BTW, I still call this a tax (in both cases), as it is mandated by official government legislation and can be enforced by government agents, up to and including the Royal Army (if you become enough of a prick).
What really throws a monkey into the independent organization bit is how the BBC has acted during war time efforts, particularly during World War II. It really did act as a branch of the British government and openly involved itself into the war effort in a number of ways, not the least of which was being directly involved with communications systems of the British foreign intelligence service. Sure, AT&T did some similar kinds of quasi-government actions as well during the same period (as well as during the Cold War... and even arguably during the "war on terrorism").
I suppose that the BBC views themselves as a branch of the British government. Yes, I know that it is supposedly an "independent" organization, but it is fully-funded by taxpayers in the UK.
Then again, would many people consider a similar investigation by the U.S. Department of Defense or Department of Justice to be legit?
Real monetary damages can be calculated here as well, as depreciation value and CPU time... not to mention access to network resoruces are certainly not "free" for the taking. Furthermore, technician time spent to remove these bot program, scanner software required to find this stuff.... removing this software is likely to be the more expensive part.
Assuming â100 per computer that was infected (a rather low estimate), that would be around â200,000 that this reporter has potentially set up his company for liability damages.
The role of copyright is linked with mechanical reproduction and mass distribution of artistic expression. While the printing press wasn't invented in 1709, it took Johannes Gutenberg's invention (which was an adaptation of an idea originally made by the Chinese) a while to work its way through European society. We all know that the legal profession is one of the last to adapt to and adjust to new technology concepts and this is but one more example.
As a matter of fact, writers and artists prior to the invention of copyright (and the printing press) were primarily patronage jobs where some very wealthy benefactor (usually a "government" leader like a king or duke... although the Medici family did support some Renaissance-era artists) would sponsor the artists. One of the roles of copyright is to provide an alternative means of allowing artists/content creators to support themselves by selling their works to people of much more limited means in the era of mass production of artistic works.
As somebody whose livelihood depends upon writing professionally (in my case computer software), I do need some sort of legal protection to enforce attribution, and to allow me to prevent others from both claiming my work as their own as well as providing a useful means to earn money from the sales of what I make.
Where I have a problem with copyright law is how it has been extended to the point of absurdity. I'm talking most of the derivative rights and the insanely long periods of protection. If I wanted to write a story about how Han Solo and Jean-Luc Picard met on Trantor so they could figure out how to wipe out the Cylons, I really don't see why in this case four different groups of people have to give me permission to use these cultural icons in what is arguably an original story. Philip Jose Farmer wrote some fusion stories like this (notably the Riverworld series), and Robert Heinlein even went so far as to appropriate characters from Frank Baums' land of Oz into a couple of his stories. In both cases these were "legal" because the works these authors "borrowed" from were in the public domain. Much more could be said about this point, and perhaps some limited derivative rights make sense, but the whole package of "rights" to what is covered under copyright law does go over the top.
That gets to my other point about the insanely long copyright terms. While I may need a few years to try and market my stuff, I certainly don't need to have my children or grandchildren (4 generations removed or more?) making money off of what I wrote 75 years after I die. Not only is it going to be irrelevant nearly a century after I write the stuff (especially computer software), I sure would like to let somebody else have a crack at trying to fix any problems that may have come along the way. For myself, I wouldn't mind a copyright term of about 20 years.... and I would dare even most major film studios to document why they need more than that period of time to recoup their production costs. Any film still making money for the studio 20 years after it was made has long since paid off any production costs. Yes, this would make the original Star Wars movie trilogy put into the public domain... like George Lucas wasn't able to make money off of those films and would be inspired to make more/better films due to money he is earning _**NOW**_ off of the original 1977 Star Wars movie?
The classic example of why extended copyright protection is needed is in reference to Ulysses S. Grant (former U.S. President/Civil War era general) who wrote his memoirs as a means to support his wife after he died. This was a noble gesture on his behalf, and certainly in this case a post-mortem copyright does have some value. Even here, I fail to see why a copyright term longer than a couple of decades was necessary. His memoirs, while valuable even today, certainly didn't earn much money for his wife 20 years after they were originally published.