The Nazi swastika is NOT a satanic symbol. However, there is a satanic, or rather pagan, symbol very closely related to it. If you draw a swastika but reverse the direction that the ends of the arms go (sort of a mirror of the Nazi symbol) you generate this ancient symbol. What does this mean? Beats me.
A point that seems to have been missed in all the postings here is a (not-so?) subtle issue of corporate governance. First note, IANAL, so what follows may be slightly (or wildly?) inaccurate - do your own research, do not rely on my opinion.
So what is my point? Corporate law protects the corporate management from a lot of things. This is known as the "corporate shield". All a manager has to do is act in the - as far as he/she can be reasonably expected to know - legal best interests of the owners of (i.e. shareholders in) the company and the manager is pretty much immune to prosecution or suit. The requirement to act in the best interests of the owners is known as "fiduciary responsibility" and applies to all trusties, including corporate management. If a trusty violates "fiduciary responsibility" that trusty can be PERSONALLY sued for damages incurred.
In the case of a M$ breakup into OS and Apps companies, the failure or the Apps company to exploit a market opportunity solely to boost the OS company is a failure to act in the Apps company's shareholders interests - a violation of "fiduciary responsibility" and the management can be personally sued for any losses incurred. Even if this is a small percentage, it can add up to a lot of money for an individual to have to pay. Also the company legal department cannot legally be used in the defense. This is one very strong reason why so many assume that a breakup will lead to the Apps division supporting more OSes (which it would manifestly have the resources to do). Think about it.
You can't abolish software patents entirely, there really is legitimate innovation (new techniques in wavelet compression, anyone?) in software that is and should remain patentable.
So what? Patents (in the US) are not, and never have been, about "fairness", which is what this sentance suggests to me. The reason the US constitution allows patents is to encourage and accelerate the passage of proprietory knowledge into the public domain. Limited protection is viewed as a means to this end, not as some moral duty to the inventor. There really are two views on patents, one being that the inventor deserves to reap the fruits of his (and let's face it, the powers that be almost certainly think, and mean, "his") labours. The other is that inventors/corporations will not release their secrets unless they get something in return. In the case of patents, that "something" is a government mandated and enforced monopoly. The second view is the constitutional view. Before we try to correct the problems of a system, we really should decide what we are trying to achieve. After all, if you don't know what you want, you almost certainly won't get it.
(Please note, the above views and opinions are just that, IANAL, IMHO, TLA, TTFN...)
One point in the articles was very revealing to me - the pay and bonuses for the patent examiners comes from approved patent applications. This is a serious management mistake. A better approach would be to charge a signinficant fee for an application, refundable on approval but forfit if the application is denied. I doubt it would ever happen but it does strike me as fairer and more efficient.
Fairer because approved applications are presumably a public boon, so it is only fair that they be publicly funded, while denied patents are just a public nuisance consuming public officials time and energy, so it would only be fair to make the applicant pay.
More efficient because they would give the examiners an incentive to deny frivolous applications and fees could be set at a level that would be a disincentive to frivolous applications.
As I said I doubt it will happen, but it appeals to me because it would reverse a system that currently seems to be travelling flat out in the wrong direction.
This discussion on IP (not the TCP kind:-) has me wondering. The argument for patents is that limitted protection encourages innovation. Who is going to spend some arbritrary number of years slaving away to invent something that anyone can steal? Now I can see this applying to individual inventor/innovators, but how many current major products come from such people (I can count the ones that I can think of on the fingers of one foot). The simple fact is that most invention and innovation Today comes from corporations. Indeed, even the individual will usually approach a venture capitalist, form a corporation and take off from there.
So what would happen if corporations didn't have the limited protection of the patent system? Would they all, or most, or even many, just stop investing in innovation or invention? I think not. It's a mean, ugly marketplace out there, and these days those who do not offer constant innovation wither and die. I think patents are irrelevant to the rate of corporate innovation, which is just about all commercial innovation. This may not be true for pharmaceutical companies, but it is certainly true for software,.com companies and consumer goods. Perhaps we would be best served if patents simply did not exist in these areas.
Note that I personally doubt that we could get that to fly, politically, but that may be the actual optimal situation, at least in theory, if we want to encourage innovation.
Any counter opinions or additional thoughts (with reasons, please)?
Does anyone out there know anything more concrete? This article is awfully vague, and besides, would you really trust a journalist who doesn't know the difference between an "order of magnitude" and a "quarter of magnitude". It seems to be talking about electron beam epitaxy (spelling?), which is really old news, but how do they overcome the speed problem (which was always the real and only killer)?
Correct, the main engine produces no chemical pollutants as it burns the hydrogen and lox. Unfortunately, that isn't the end of the story. The atmosphere is mostly Nitrogen and Oxygen, which react with each other quite readily. Fortunately for us this reaction is endothermic (heat absorbing) and is highly thermodynamically unfavored at normal temperatures. However, where there is a ready supply of heat (meteorite trails, lightning bolts and, of yes, rocket exhausts such as the SSME), the two readily combine forming NO, NO2 and various other oxides of nitrogen. Some of these readily decay into, for instance, Ozone. Altogether a nasty brew. So the engine burns clean but the heat in the exhaust produces nasty pollution from the air itself.
Interesting post, but your "other problems" were not that well thought-out.
1) Maybe (big maybe) genetic engineered algae could be an environmental hazard, but the article itself suggested to me that they'd be investigating the potential of other, naturally occuring, algae first. Why bring up the gen-eng bogey-man? As for the "rest phase", just have one batch charging up while another is producing. Just a simple, standard process issue. I doubt if an industrial chemist would even consider eliminating the "rest phase".
2) Watts are already a measure of energy (or work) per unit time. Watts per hour is therefore a rate of acceleration of energy useage - not what you meant, methinks. On the land useage issue, I think you've set a widely pessimistic upper limit on the requirement. Consider: How often do you run you truck eight hours a day at absolutely maximum power? Also, the 22% for solar panels is ignoring the losses going from the panel to the vehicle (probably via electrolysis).
3) Not an issue - consider deserts, deep ocean (largely lifeless), Antarctica (but deeply politically sensitive) or, probably most practical of all, city industrial flat rooftops.
This whole story is really depressing. Not the news, but the quality of ideas and presentation. First the article itself, with a slew of real bone-headed nonsense. What does "a single, small commercial pond could produce enough hydrogen gas to meet the weekly fuel needs of a dozen or so automobiles" mean? Didn't anyone notice that the two quantities being compared are in different units and dimensions? (How long does it take to produce enough hydrogen of several cars for a week?). Then there's that incredible peice of non-sense: "What has been lacking is a renewable source of hydrogen". Duh... This is either incredibly self-serving or unbelievably ignorant (ever heard of Solar Cells and Electrolysis?). These aren't the only flaws in a very depressingly badly written paper - as others have pointed out.
Then the/.'ers strike - two standard issue idiot-paranoid "oil companies will suppress" postings. Gee folks, who would manufacture the hydrogen, distribute it and retail it at the gas stations (yes, where else do you think it would go?)? Maybe the oil companies? Ever think that perhaps their profits would go UP if we switched to a hydrogen economy? (They wouldn't have to pay Arabs, Hispanics and Russians for the nationalized oil reserves).
Then we get Toby here with the hydrogen fuel on the Hindenberg (Sorry, Toby, nothing personal, I was just full to bursting when I hit your posting). Q: How much hydrogen fuel was there on the Hindenberg? A: None. All the hydrogen was in the lift cells, none was burned. Q: How many people in the Hindenberg disaster were killed by Hydrogen flames? A: Probably none. A number were killed by the fall and structural collapse. Many were fatally burned, but (near as we can tell) they were all burned by the fuel - the Deisel Oil fuel. The hydrogen was to light and just went straight up - very fast.
Come on, folks, you can do better than this! (or am I just having a really bad day)?
They are clean - as I mentioned elsewhere, they only produce Carbon Dioxide (plus water, which doesn't count), and much less than ICEs do. No sulphur compounds, particulates, carbon monoxide, etc.
Well, uh, no. Actually, fuel cells themselves run of hydrogen and oxygen (in this case from the air) and produce only water. For so-called methanol fuel cells, the original fuel is methanol, but the fuel cells still use only hydrogen. There is an additional catalytic cracker that liberates the needed hydrogen from the methanol, converting oxygen and methanol into (mostly) carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Like most any chemical reaction, though, it is not perfect and if there's sulphor in the methanol, there will be sulphor in the output. A bigger worry is that the conversion process produces trace amounts of carbon monoxide which can poison the fuel cell.
The only problem currently is the cost of the fuel cells (currently much more than an equally powered ICE), but with the research that is going into minimising this, several major car companies are planning to release models running on fuel cells around 2003.
See my previous post for another problem (methanol converters can poison the PEM in the actual fuel cell). For pure hydrogen fuel cells, the big problem is storage. Hydrogen has this annoying tendancy to leak out of most container while sticking a little too well to others. The economics are actually starting to look quite good for fuel cells, it is the technical problems that are currently show-stoppers (though they are expected to be solved in the next year or two).
Ok, sorry I shouted, but no, no, no, no, no, (emphatic enough?), the point of patents is not "to protect" ANYONE. The point of patents is to encourage invention and innovation. They do this (in theory) BY protecting the patent holder, but this is a means, not an end. If you doubt this, read the US constitution.
However, these days the highly competitive marketplace for most things does a far better job of encouraging invention and innovation (stagnation == death), so large organisations do not need patents for this purpose and individual inventors cannot afford to file and protect patents anyway.
To make matters worse, large corporations now use patents very cynically, as bargaining chips or means of preventing competition, meaning only the very biggest can play in some fields and invention and innovation are suppressed. The entire patent business has become a perverse mirror of its original intention. Personally, I say scrap the whole darn fiasco. We don't need 'em or can't afford 'em and they don't do the ordinary folk any good whatsoever. Get rid of them all, the sooner the better.
Laws in the US do seem to have trouble keeping up with technology. I think that blaming lawyers or lawmakers misses the point, though. There is a strong tradition in America to legislate by regulating. Laws try to detail every possible event and situation and then proscribe the allowable actions in those events/situations. This whole approach is vulnerable to any kind of change (as well as all-too-human failure to think of every possible thing). The result is laws that are ludicrously out of date before they are enacted and aganecy procedures that increase pollution and keep possibly life-saving drugs out of the hands of dying people (oops, sorry, didn't think of that one... give us a decade or two while we re-write the relevant laws).
The constitution is a wonderful document because it mostly sticks to principles avoids the details. This is good law, and works because it is mostly fair and is deliberately hard to change.
So why does a country with a very good constitution regularly create such stupidly detailed (and thus bad) statutory laws? My theory, for what its worth, is that most americans deeply value the rule of law (and rightly so, in my view) but mistakenly think that detailed regulation is necessary for this.
This is partly a matter of seeking balance between desirable goals that are mutually contradictory. Clarity in law is very desirable, as the clearer a law is, the less discretion the legal establishment has and so the less room there is for corruption and petty oppression there is. Few laws are clearer than detailed regulations. On the other hand, laws are better if they deal with abiding principles rather than changeable details. This calls for a degree of abstraction and abstraction tend to be fuzzy. These two goals are necessarily in tension.
Americans appear to have a far greater appetite, in general, for clarity than they do for principle, as if the constitution has fully satisfied their demand. The result is a very heavy status book and a constant conflict between law and reality. There are periodic attempts to reign in the problem, but there is little point in trying to "cut the red-tape" with the red-tape machine still producing more at full throttle.
So long as the American public continue to demand regulated solutions to real and percieved problems, the law will be "a ass, a idiot". If you don't think you are part of the problem, ask yourself when was the last time that you criticized a politician for having too much detail in his/her legislation rather than having the details wrong.
- If firms just would release those specs my guess would be that they could fire all of their driver developers for linux. The community would take care of that for them. Which in turn would save them some money!
Well, not quite. There's a chicken-and-egg problem here - once some hardware is popular, there will be a lot of people who are willing to (want to?) support it. But how will it become popular if there are no drivers? This situation will become more pronounced if (when?) windows retires (un)gracefully from the scene. So there will still be work for paid driver developers, I hope - 'cause I am one.
I have to agree that (state laws not withstanding), the man in question deserve not one penny back. But this isn't worth getting all worked up over, the market place can easily correct this one. If it happens too often, the Credit Card companies will just cut off casinos. The only member of the public who will suffer will be responsible people who want to use their CCs to gamble - or put another way, nobody.
Sure, some casino staff might lose their jobs, but I have about as much sympathy there as I do for Tobacco workers who become redundant when smokers quit (for me that's some, but not much, you may feel differently). Oh, and a few owners and managers who deserve no sympathy whatsoever.
"More sites on the Internet use IIS and Windows NT than other other OS/Server combinations, even Solaris*".
Well, definitely misleading, probably deliberately, and therefore a lie, but not necessarily literally false. What Apache/OS combo scores higher? Apache/Linux? Apache/Solaris? Apache AIX? Apache/HpUX? Apache/FreeBSD? Apache/OpenBSD?... and so on and so on. Like the Mindcraft tests, M$ has carefully chosen a special case where they look better and ignored the general case where they look like *sh!t*. This seems to be the M$ standard way of dealing with OSS, the comunity need to learn to expose the misdirection rather than just claim falsehood (which seems to be frequently absent).
Re:I really don't believe in this whole Zen concep
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Interface Zen
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Well, everyone else has argued that what you don't believe in actually does exist, so I'll look at something else. This discussion has a supreme irony that no-one else seems to have noted. What TC described (and everyone else here) is actually the exact opposite of a Zen trance. It is actually much more like a yoga trance. In the yoga trance state the participant becomes oblivious to the outside world. In a true Zen trance, the participant becomes totally and unconditionally aware.
I read about an experiment (sorry, no references - too long ago) that studied these mental states. It involved three groups, on of untranced subjects, one of Zen-tranced subjects and one of yoga-tranced subjects. The experimenters measured brain activity with an EEG and then exposed the subjects to a series of loud surprise noises. In the untranced, the measured startle response was large for the first noise but died down and then died out with repitition - normal acclimatization. In the yoga-tranced, there was no measured reaction, even to the first loud noise. The big surprise was the Zen-tranced group who showed the same, large response as the untranced on the first loud noise and an unchanged response on each subsequent loud noise. Not only did the Zen-tranced respond to the sound, they did not acclimatize to it.
I believe I have experienced a similar state exactly once in my life. I was in Amsterdam in a video arcade, playing space invaders (yes, a *long* time ago). I had just bought a learning Dutch book and was having the game of my life. I definitely entered some kind of trance and became aware of everyone around me and on the street, as well as everything happening in the game. I was already way beyond my previous personal best when a Dutch youth quietly snatched my book and started to slip away. Normally I would not have noticed, but in this state I was able to take two steps and surprise the life out of him by clapping my hand down on his shoulder. He apologized, rather subdued, as he handed the book back. That was the end of the game, though, and that's what I really resented. Still, I didn't feel anything from my knees down for a good half-hour.
So, these altered states DO happen. Mystical? Bullshit! A combination of a severe addrenalin high and other neurological factors that I for one do not know or understand (and I suspect that applies for everyone else at the moment). You don't believe in unexplained but natural, if wierd, effects? Well, I'm sorry for you, Horation, but there are more things in Heaven and Earth than there are in your philosophy.
It's easy to confuse, because 1 kB = 1024 bytes and 1 MB = 1024 kB, but that's just because the original computer geeks had some strange facination with powers of two.
Actually, not that strange. The original propeller-heads (though they weren't called that, 'cause propeller beanies hadn't made it big time yet) thought in hardware terms and each time you added an address line to your memory chip/block you ratcheted maximum capacity up to the next power of 2 level. Now, unless you were a misplaced HR manager or some flavour of Arts/Humanities grad., in the old you'ld never consider releasing a part with less than the maximum possible capacity, hence the universal power of two fetish. OK, there was the decatron tube, but once engineers got over the base 10 obsession, they went whole hog and the world has never been the same!
Of course, units of frequency were defined by physicists, not engineers. This probably says something, but just what I leave as an exercise for the reader.
One, next time, don't forget to turn off those *!!@@**!!! italics:-)
Two, IIRC (IANAL etc.) Brits (of whom I am/was one - now expat) do always have a right to trial by jury, but they can waive this if the case is trivial and within the jurisdiction of a magistrate. This is usually done as these are petty crime and the defendant trusts the magistrate's discretion or is guilty and knows there is no defence. In the latter case, a higher court (where the case would be tried by jury) would almost certainly impose a stiffer penalty than the magistrate would/could.
Standard disclaimer: IANAL Non-standard disclaimer: IANAUSC
There are two totally seperate issues here:
Is the tool user liable for the destructive use of a tool? Is the tool producer liable for the destructive use of a tool?
In my understanding - lay understanding, not educated or professional understanding - they both turn on two questions:
Did the party know or could be reasonably expected to know the possible results? Did the party intend the results?
If there was knowledge without intent, then negligance has occured. If there is knowledge with intent then there is full, unmitigated, guilt. I believe this is the (US) legal test, and it is a fair moral test as well.
So, if the user knows the tool can cause harm and uses it with the intent of causing harm (intent without knowledge is pretty much logically impossible), the user is guilty and responsible, providing he or she is fully competent. Acting under duress or compulsion caused by mental incapacity is mitigating, although society has a right to demand restraint and treatment of those who cannot control themselves.
On the other hand, if the tool maker knows or could reasonably be expected to know that the tool is potentially dangerous and does not take reasonable precautions, the tool maker is negligent. Also, if the tool maker intended the tool to be used for mallicious purposes, the tool maker is directly guilty.
One thing should be remembered here: The guilt of one party in no way diminishes the guilt of the other, either morally or criminally. Cicil damages are an exception to this rule - they are split amongst the guilty parties according to degree of responsibility, as assessed by the court. On the other hand if a crime is committed with a standard 1 year prison sentence and the tool maker and tool user are both found guilty, they will both get 1 year, not 6 months each.
So there you have it, the answer is that both are responsible, or neither, or either one, depending on the intent of and knowledge, possesssed by or reasonable expected of, each party. Don't you just love simple answers:-)
Well, half seriously thinking about it, I figure you could make a case for $50 for the software. Then with time to download patches and the occasional damage done by the vir{us/es/ii/a/i/um/doh/take your pick} you could justify another $100-$200. So whose going to go through the hassle of a court case that will drag on for years (decades?). A lawyer wouldn't bother unless there was serious money at stake, which means at least 10^5 people. Who is going to find them all? Apathy alone will probably win for M$.
On the other hand, the government could use the public nuisance statutes to sue on behalf of everyone affected, with or without their permission. Let's see, that's $100 a pop (to be very conservative) times say 20 million (ditto) over say 5 years (again) for a total of $10 billion, again with tripple damages possible. I think the feds. might just be tempted. I'm sure some states (California, hint, hint) would. Like you said, just something to think about.
BTW, you *have* been busy on this thread, haven't you.:-)
OK, I know it was a joke, but really... There just isn't enough damage to an individual to warrant an action, class or not. On the other hand, the (Federal?) "Public Nuisance" legislation is designed explicitly to handle the case of, well, nuisances, who do a small amount of damage to a large number of people. A letter to your State Attorney, suggesting an encore for the anti-trust case, anyone? (:-) {- maybe???}
With all the ridiculous nuisance patents that are being issued these days, I have started wondering about US IP law viz-a-viz the US constitution (where the US goes, there goes the world...). We all know by now that the constitution explicitly permits patent and copyright legislation. It also clearly and unambiguously states the objective of such legislation. Something about encouraging invention and increasing the public good (exact quote, anyone?). Now, large companies get patents so that they can play trading games with everyone else and small companies are bullied out of markets by these nuisance patents, even when they are bogus, small companies being unable to afford a court challenge. Does this not inhibit invention/innovation and directly harm the public as a result? Is this not a violation of the constitution's stated (in the constitution itself) intent and as this is a direct consequence of current IP legislation, does that not make said IP legislation unconstitutional?
If so, should the/. (or other concerned) community launch a collective challenge of the IP legislation - particularly as it applies to software.
Even if a case can be made for software patents per se, is there any conceivable justification for their duration? It seems to me that any large organization can produce a product that works around and avoids any particular patent in at most 2 years. Should that not be the life of a software patent (if you accept that such a patent is justified at all)?
Am I on to anything here, or am I just another poor/deluded/evil M$ propagandist fool?
Never got anywhere with IBM?? Sure they did - the justice department forced IBM to open up the mechanical tabulator market, which they totally dominated, which lead them to reconsider enterring the nascent programmable electronic computer market (Watson had vetoed their entry before the DOJ suit), which lead to their domination of this new industry, which lead to a new DOJ case... Ah wait, I see. You're talking about the *second* anti-trust suit against IBM...
This reads very strangely to me. You seem to be saying that it's wrong for a democratically elected government to enforce laws that are open, known and which were established with due process in a constitutional manner, in the name of "not seizing the assets of private citizens" - even though no-one has mentioned asset seizure as a remedy and the "victim" is a corporation, not a private citizen.
Yet somehow, you are quite happy that that corporation, which is effectively ultimately controlled by a single, self-elected despot, forcing virtually every user to pay maybe hundreds of dollars directly and in oportunity costs for lost time due to unnecessary system failures. I would use other, more reliable and cheaper, programs, but Miscrosoft has made this unpractical with totally unnecessary "extensions" that give me no useful additional functionality but do make documents, web-pages etc unuseable without Microsoft products. Why is it wrong for accountable governments to enforce the rule of law, but OK for corporation to rip me off?
Well, bear in mind that it's still very early days in the e-commerce game. A better analogy than the browser wars might be the video wars. At a similar stage in the video tape market development, Beta was clearly ahead, but VHS was much more open (i.e. it was to some degree open and license-able, whereas Beta was purely proprietory). The result was that everyone else chose VHS and it boiled down to Sony versus the world. Guess what, the world won.
Now, the current battle could shape up similarly. Anyone joining the fray now would probably not try to develop their own standards - too late, *much* too costly, so they would either go HP - open, free, willing to take everyone into account, to some extent - or sign up with one of the leader - proprietory, costly and definitely second fiddle. Which would you choose? A similarly choice faces anyone falling too far behind but not willing to abandon the market. So the endgame should look one or a few front runners versus the whole rest of the world on e-talk. Very interesting, and far from an obvious lose for HP.
This could validate the GPL in a way (at least to the suits) that the Open/Free software community never could. Even if none of that community gets involved, the directly interested commercial parties should have tremendous development resources to throw at this market.
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The Nazi swastika is NOT a satanic symbol. However, there is a satanic, or rather pagan, symbol very closely related to it. If you draw a swastika but reverse the direction that the ends of the arms go (sort of a mirror of the Nazi symbol) you generate this ancient symbol. What does this mean? Beats me.
A point that seems to have been missed in all the postings here is a (not-so?) subtle issue of corporate governance. First note, IANAL, so what follows may be slightly (or wildly?) inaccurate - do your own research, do not rely on my opinion.
So what is my point? Corporate law protects the corporate management from a lot of things. This is known as the "corporate shield". All a manager has to do is act in the - as far as he/she can be reasonably expected to know - legal best interests of the owners of (i.e. shareholders in) the company and the manager is pretty much immune to prosecution or suit. The requirement to act in the best interests of the owners is known as "fiduciary responsibility" and applies to all trusties, including corporate management. If a trusty violates "fiduciary responsibility" that trusty can be PERSONALLY sued for damages incurred.
In the case of a M$ breakup into OS and Apps companies, the failure or the Apps company to exploit a market opportunity solely to boost the OS company is a failure to act in the Apps company's shareholders interests - a violation of "fiduciary responsibility" and the management can be personally sued for any losses incurred. Even if this is a small percentage, it can add up to a lot of money for an individual to have to pay. Also the company legal department cannot legally be used in the defense. This is one very strong reason why so many assume that a breakup will lead to the Apps division supporting more OSes (which it would manifestly have the resources to do). Think about it.
You can't abolish software patents entirely, there really is legitimate innovation (new techniques in wavelet compression, anyone?) in software that is and should remain patentable.
So what? Patents (in the US) are not, and never have been, about "fairness", which is what this sentance suggests to me. The reason the US constitution allows patents is to encourage and accelerate the passage of proprietory knowledge into the public domain. Limited protection is viewed as a means to this end, not as some moral duty to the inventor. There really are two views on patents, one being that the inventor deserves to reap the fruits of his (and let's face it, the powers that be almost certainly think, and mean, "his") labours. The other is that inventors/corporations will not release their secrets unless they get something in return. In the case of patents, that "something" is a government mandated and enforced monopoly. The second view is the constitutional view. Before we try to correct the problems of a system, we really should decide what we are trying to achieve. After all, if you don't know what you want, you almost certainly won't get it.
(Please note, the above views and opinions are just that, IANAL, IMHO, TLA, TTFN...)
One point in the articles was very revealing to me - the pay and bonuses for the patent examiners comes from approved patent applications. This is a serious management mistake. A better approach would be to charge a signinficant fee for an application, refundable on approval but forfit if the application is denied. I doubt it would ever happen but it does strike me as fairer and more efficient.
Fairer because approved applications are presumably a public boon, so it is only fair that they be publicly funded, while denied patents are just a public nuisance consuming public officials time and energy, so it would only be fair to make the applicant pay.
More efficient because they would give the examiners an incentive to deny frivolous applications and fees could be set at a level that would be a disincentive to frivolous applications.
As I said I doubt it will happen, but it appeals to me because it would reverse a system that currently seems to be travelling flat out in the wrong direction.
This discussion on IP (not the TCP kind :-) has me wondering. The argument for patents is that limitted protection encourages innovation. Who is going to spend some arbritrary number of years slaving away to invent something that anyone can steal? Now I can see this applying to individual inventor/innovators, but how many current major products come from such people (I can count the ones that I can think of on the fingers of one foot). The simple fact is that most invention and innovation Today comes from corporations. Indeed, even the individual will usually approach a venture capitalist, form a corporation and take off from there.
.com companies and consumer goods. Perhaps we would be best served if patents simply did not exist in these areas.
So what would happen if corporations didn't have the limited protection of the patent system? Would they all, or most, or even many, just stop investing in innovation or invention? I think not. It's a mean, ugly marketplace out there, and these days those who do not offer constant innovation wither and die. I think patents are irrelevant to the rate of corporate innovation, which is just about all commercial innovation. This may not be true for pharmaceutical companies, but it is certainly true for software,
Note that I personally doubt that we could get that to fly, politically, but that may be the actual optimal situation, at least in theory, if we want to encourage innovation.
Any counter opinions or additional thoughts (with reasons, please)?
Does anyone out there know anything more concrete? This article is awfully vague, and besides, would you really trust a journalist who doesn't know the difference between an "order of magnitude" and a "quarter of magnitude". It seems to be talking about electron beam epitaxy (spelling?), which is really old news, but how do they overcome the speed problem (which was always the real and only killer)?
Any info welcome.
Correct, the main engine produces no chemical pollutants as it burns the hydrogen and lox. Unfortunately, that isn't the end of the story. The atmosphere is mostly Nitrogen and Oxygen, which react with each other quite readily. Fortunately for us this reaction is endothermic (heat absorbing) and is highly thermodynamically unfavored at normal temperatures. However, where there is a ready supply of heat (meteorite trails, lightning bolts and, of yes, rocket exhausts such as the SSME), the two readily combine forming NO, NO2 and various other oxides of nitrogen. Some of these readily decay into, for instance, Ozone. Altogether a nasty brew. So the engine burns clean but the heat in the exhaust produces nasty pollution from the air itself.
Interesting post, but your "other problems" were not that well thought-out.
1) Maybe (big maybe) genetic engineered algae could be an environmental hazard, but the article itself suggested to me that they'd be investigating the potential of other, naturally occuring, algae first. Why bring up the gen-eng bogey-man? As for the "rest phase", just have one batch charging up while another is producing. Just a simple, standard process issue. I doubt if an industrial chemist would even consider eliminating the "rest phase".
2) Watts are already a measure of energy (or work) per unit time. Watts per hour is therefore a rate of acceleration of energy useage - not what you meant, methinks. On the land useage issue, I think you've set a widely pessimistic upper limit on the requirement. Consider: How often do you run you truck eight hours a day at absolutely maximum power? Also, the 22% for solar panels is ignoring the losses going from the panel to the vehicle (probably via electrolysis).
3) Not an issue - consider deserts, deep ocean (largely lifeless), Antarctica (but deeply politically sensitive) or, probably most practical of all, city industrial flat rooftops.
This whole story is really depressing. Not the news, but the quality of ideas and presentation. First the article itself, with a slew of real bone-headed nonsense. What does "a single, small commercial pond could produce enough hydrogen gas to meet the weekly fuel needs of a dozen or so automobiles" mean? Didn't anyone notice that the two quantities being compared are in different units and dimensions? (How long does it take to produce enough hydrogen of several cars for a week?). Then there's that incredible peice of non-sense: "What has been lacking is a renewable source of hydrogen". Duh... This is either incredibly self-serving or unbelievably ignorant (ever heard of Solar Cells and Electrolysis?). These aren't the only flaws in a very depressingly badly written paper - as others have pointed out.
Then the
Then we get Toby here with the hydrogen fuel on the Hindenberg (Sorry, Toby, nothing personal, I was just full to bursting when I hit your posting). Q: How much hydrogen fuel was there on the Hindenberg? A: None. All the hydrogen was in the lift cells, none was burned. Q: How many people in the Hindenberg disaster were killed by Hydrogen flames? A: Probably none. A number were killed by the fall and structural collapse. Many were fatally burned, but (near as we can tell) they were all burned by the fuel - the Deisel Oil fuel. The hydrogen was to light and just went straight up - very fast.
Come on, folks, you can do better than this! (or am I just having a really bad day)?
They are clean - as I mentioned elsewhere, they only produce Carbon Dioxide (plus water, which doesn't count), and much less than ICEs do. No sulphur compounds, particulates, carbon monoxide, etc.
Well, uh, no. Actually, fuel cells themselves run of hydrogen and oxygen (in this case from the air) and produce only water. For so-called methanol fuel cells, the original fuel is methanol, but the fuel cells still use only hydrogen. There is an additional catalytic cracker that liberates the needed hydrogen from the methanol, converting oxygen and methanol into (mostly) carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Like most any chemical reaction, though, it is not perfect and if there's sulphor in the methanol, there will be sulphor in the output. A bigger worry is that the conversion process produces trace amounts of carbon monoxide which can poison the fuel cell.
The only problem currently is the cost of the fuel cells (currently much more than an equally powered ICE), but with the research that is going into minimising this, several major car companies are planning to release models running on fuel cells around 2003.
See my previous post for another problem (methanol converters can poison the PEM in the actual fuel cell). For pure hydrogen fuel cells, the big problem is storage. Hydrogen has this annoying tendancy to leak out of most container while sticking a little too well to others. The economics are actually starting to look quite good for fuel cells, it is the technical problems that are currently show-stoppers (though they are expected to be solved in the next year or two).
Ok, sorry I shouted, but no, no, no, no, no, (emphatic enough?), the point of patents is not "to protect" ANYONE. The point of patents is to encourage invention and innovation. They do this (in theory) BY protecting the patent holder, but this is a means, not an end. If you doubt this, read the US constitution.
However, these days the highly competitive marketplace for most things does a far better job of encouraging invention and innovation (stagnation == death), so large organisations do not need patents for this purpose and individual inventors cannot afford to file and protect patents anyway.
To make matters worse, large corporations now use patents very cynically, as bargaining chips or means of preventing competition, meaning only the very biggest can play in some fields and invention and innovation are suppressed. The entire patent business has become a perverse mirror of its original intention. Personally, I say scrap the whole darn fiasco. We don't need 'em or can't afford 'em and they don't do the ordinary folk any good whatsoever. Get rid of them all, the sooner the better.
Laws in the US do seem to have trouble keeping up with technology. I think that blaming lawyers or lawmakers misses the point, though. There is a strong tradition in America to legislate by regulating. Laws try to detail every possible event and situation and then proscribe the allowable actions in those events/situations. This whole approach is vulnerable to any kind of change (as well as all-too-human failure to think of every possible thing). The result is laws that are ludicrously out of date before they are enacted and aganecy procedures that increase pollution and keep possibly life-saving drugs out of the hands of dying people (oops, sorry, didn't think of that one... give us a decade or two while we re-write the relevant laws).
The constitution is a wonderful document because it mostly sticks to principles avoids the details. This is good law, and works because it is mostly fair and is deliberately hard to change.
So why does a country with a very good constitution regularly create such stupidly detailed (and thus bad) statutory laws? My theory, for what its worth, is that most americans deeply value the rule of law (and rightly so, in my view) but mistakenly think that detailed regulation is necessary for this.
This is partly a matter of seeking balance between desirable goals that are mutually contradictory. Clarity in law is very desirable, as the clearer a law is, the less discretion the legal establishment has and so the less room there is for corruption and petty oppression there is. Few laws are clearer than detailed regulations. On the other hand, laws are better if they deal with abiding principles rather than changeable details. This calls for a degree of abstraction and abstraction tend to be fuzzy. These two goals are necessarily in tension.
Americans appear to have a far greater appetite, in general, for clarity than they do for principle, as if the constitution has fully satisfied their demand. The result is a very heavy status book and a constant conflict between law and reality. There are periodic attempts to reign in the problem, but there is little point in trying to "cut the red-tape" with the red-tape machine still producing more at full throttle.
So long as the American public continue to demand regulated solutions to real and percieved problems, the law will be "a ass, a idiot". If you don't think you are part of the problem, ask yourself when was the last time that you criticized a politician for having too much detail in his/her legislation rather than having the details wrong.
- If firms just would release those specs my guess would be that they could fire all of their driver developers for linux. The community would take care of that for them. Which in turn would save them some money!
Well, not quite. There's a chicken-and-egg problem here - once some hardware is popular, there will be a lot of people who are willing to (want to?) support it. But how will it become popular if there are no drivers? This situation will become more pronounced if (when?) windows retires (un)gracefully from the scene. So there will still be work for paid driver developers, I hope - 'cause I am one.
I have to agree that (state laws not withstanding), the man in question deserve not one penny back. But this isn't worth getting all worked up over, the market place can easily correct this one. If it happens too often, the Credit Card companies will just cut off casinos. The only member of the public who will suffer will be responsible people who want to use their CCs to gamble - or put another way, nobody.
Sure, some casino staff might lose their jobs, but I have about as much sympathy there as I do for Tobacco workers who become redundant when smokers quit (for me that's some, but not much, you may feel differently). Oh, and a few owners and managers who deserve no sympathy whatsoever.
"More sites on the Internet use IIS and Windows NT than other other OS/Server combinations, even Solaris*".
... and so on and so on. Like the Mindcraft tests, M$ has carefully chosen a special case where they look better and ignored the general case where they look like *sh!t*. This seems to be the M$ standard way of dealing with OSS, the comunity need to learn to expose the misdirection rather than just claim falsehood (which seems to be frequently absent).
Well, definitely misleading, probably deliberately, and therefore a lie, but not necessarily literally false. What Apache/OS combo scores higher? Apache/Linux? Apache/Solaris? Apache AIX? Apache/HpUX? Apache/FreeBSD? Apache/OpenBSD?
Well, everyone else has argued that what you don't believe in actually does exist, so I'll look at something else. This discussion has a supreme irony that no-one else seems to have noted. What TC described (and everyone else here) is actually the exact opposite of a Zen trance. It is actually much more like a yoga trance. In the yoga trance state the participant becomes oblivious to the outside world. In a true Zen trance, the participant becomes totally and unconditionally aware.
I read about an experiment (sorry, no references - too long ago) that studied these mental states. It involved three groups, on of untranced subjects, one of Zen-tranced subjects and one of yoga-tranced subjects. The experimenters measured brain activity with an EEG and then exposed the subjects to a series of loud surprise noises. In the untranced, the measured startle response was large for the first noise but died down and then died out with repitition - normal acclimatization. In the yoga-tranced, there was no measured reaction, even to the first loud noise. The big surprise was the Zen-tranced group who showed the same, large response as the untranced on the first loud noise and an unchanged response on each subsequent loud noise. Not only did the Zen-tranced respond to the sound, they did not acclimatize to it.
I believe I have experienced a similar state exactly once in my life. I was in Amsterdam in a video arcade, playing space invaders (yes, a *long* time ago). I had just bought a learning Dutch book and was having the game of my life. I definitely entered some kind of trance and became aware of everyone around me and on the street, as well as everything happening in the game. I was already way beyond my previous personal best when a Dutch youth quietly snatched my book and started to slip away. Normally I would not have noticed, but in this state I was able to take two steps and surprise the life out of him by clapping my hand down on his shoulder. He apologized, rather subdued, as he handed the book back. That was the end of the game, though, and that's what I really resented. Still, I didn't feel anything from my knees down for a good half-hour.
So, these altered states DO happen. Mystical? Bullshit! A combination of a severe addrenalin high and other neurological factors that I for one do not know or understand (and I suspect that applies for everyone else at the moment). You don't believe in unexplained but natural, if wierd, effects? Well, I'm sorry for you, Horation, but there are more things in Heaven and Earth than there are in your philosophy.
It's easy to confuse, because 1 kB = 1024 bytes and 1 MB = 1024 kB, but that's just because the original computer geeks had some strange facination with powers of two.
Actually, not that strange. The original propeller-heads (though they weren't called that, 'cause propeller beanies hadn't made it big time yet) thought in hardware terms and each time you added an address line to your memory chip/block you ratcheted maximum capacity up to the next power of 2 level. Now, unless you were a misplaced HR manager or some flavour of Arts/Humanities grad., in the old you'ld never consider releasing a part with less than the maximum possible capacity, hence the universal power of two fetish. OK, there was the decatron tube, but once engineers got over the base 10 obsession, they went whole hog and the world has never been the same!
Of course, units of frequency were defined by physicists, not engineers. This probably says something, but just what I leave as an exercise for the reader.
Two points:
:-)
One, next time, don't forget to turn off those *!!@@**!!! italics
Two, IIRC (IANAL etc.) Brits (of whom I am/was one - now expat) do always have a right to trial by jury, but they can waive this if the case is trivial and within the jurisdiction of a magistrate. This is usually done as these are petty crime and the defendant trusts the magistrate's discretion or is guilty and knows there is no defence. In the latter case, a higher court (where the case would be tried by jury) would almost certainly impose a stiffer penalty than the magistrate would/could.
Standard disclaimer: IANAL
:-)
Non-standard disclaimer: IANAUSC
There are two totally seperate issues here:
Is the tool user liable for the destructive use of a tool?
Is the tool producer liable for the destructive use of a tool?
In my understanding - lay understanding, not educated or professional understanding - they both turn on two questions:
Did the party know or could be reasonably expected to know the possible results?
Did the party intend the results?
If there was knowledge without intent, then negligance has occured. If there is knowledge with intent then there is full, unmitigated, guilt. I believe this is the (US) legal test, and it is a fair moral test as well.
So, if the user knows the tool can cause harm and uses it with the intent of causing harm (intent without knowledge is pretty much logically impossible), the user is guilty and responsible, providing he or she is fully competent. Acting under duress or compulsion caused by mental incapacity is mitigating, although society has a right to demand restraint and treatment of those who cannot control themselves.
On the other hand, if the tool maker knows or could reasonably be expected to know that the tool is potentially dangerous and does not take reasonable precautions, the tool maker is negligent. Also, if the tool maker intended the tool to be used for mallicious purposes, the tool maker is directly guilty.
One thing should be remembered here: The guilt of one party in no way diminishes the guilt of the other, either morally or criminally. Cicil damages are an exception to this rule - they are split amongst the guilty parties according to degree of responsibility, as assessed by the court. On the other hand if a crime is committed with a standard 1 year prison sentence and the tool maker and tool user are both found guilty, they will both get 1 year, not 6 months each.
So there you have it, the answer is that both are responsible, or neither, or either one, depending on the intent of and knowledge, possesssed by or reasonable expected of, each party. Don't you just love simple answers
Just something to think about. :-)
:-)
Well, half seriously thinking about it, I figure you could make a case for $50 for the software. Then with time to download patches and the occasional damage done by the vir{us/es/ii/a/i/um/doh/take your pick} you could justify another $100-$200. So whose going to go through the hassle of a court case that will drag on for years (decades?). A lawyer wouldn't bother unless there was serious money at stake, which means at least 10^5 people. Who is going to find them all? Apathy alone will probably win for M$.
On the other hand, the government could use the public nuisance statutes to sue on behalf of everyone affected, with or without their permission . Let's see, that's $100 a pop (to be very conservative) times say 20 million (ditto) over say 5 years (again) for a total of $10 billion, again with tripple damages possible. I think the feds. might just be tempted. I'm sure some states (California, hint, hint) would. Like you said, just something to think about.
BTW, you *have* been busy on this thread, haven't you.
Class action lawsuit, anybody? :-)
OK, I know it was a joke, but really... There just isn't enough damage to an individual to warrant an action, class or not. On the other hand, the (Federal?) "Public Nuisance" legislation is designed explicitly to handle the case of, well, nuisances, who do a small amount of damage to a large number of people. A letter to your State Attorney, suggesting an encore for the anti-trust case, anyone? (:-) {- maybe???}
{Standard disclaimers, IANAL and all that}
/. (or other concerned) community launch a collective challenge of the IP legislation - particularly as it applies to software.
With all the ridiculous nuisance patents that are being issued these days, I have started wondering about US IP law viz-a-viz the US constitution (where the US goes, there goes the world...). We all know by now that the constitution explicitly permits patent and copyright legislation. It also clearly and unambiguously states the objective of such legislation. Something about encouraging invention and increasing the public good (exact quote, anyone?). Now, large companies get patents so that they can play trading games with everyone else and small companies are bullied out of markets by these nuisance patents, even when they are bogus, small companies being unable to afford a court challenge. Does this not inhibit invention/innovation and directly harm the public as a result? Is this not a violation of the constitution's stated (in the constitution itself) intent and as this is a direct consequence of current IP legislation, does that not make said IP legislation unconstitutional?
If so, should the
Even if a case can be made for software patents per se, is there any conceivable justification for their duration? It seems to me that any large organization can produce a product that works around and avoids any particular patent in at most 2 years. Should that not be the life of a software patent (if you accept that such a patent is justified at all)?
Am I on to anything here, or am I just another poor/deluded/evil M$ propagandist fool?
Never got anywhere with IBM?? Sure they did - the justice department forced IBM to open up the mechanical tabulator market, which they totally dominated, which lead them to reconsider enterring the nascent programmable electronic computer market (Watson had vetoed their entry before the DOJ suit), which lead to their domination of this new industry, which lead to a new DOJ case ... Ah wait, I see. You're talking about the *second* anti-trust suit against IBM...
This reads very strangely to me. You seem to be saying that it's wrong for a democratically elected government to enforce laws that are open, known and which were established with due process in a constitutional manner, in the name of "not seizing the assets of private citizens" - even though no-one has mentioned asset seizure as a remedy and the "victim" is a corporation, not a private citizen.
Yet somehow, you are quite happy that that corporation, which is effectively ultimately controlled by a single, self-elected despot, forcing virtually every user to pay maybe hundreds of dollars directly and in oportunity costs for lost time due to unnecessary system failures. I would use other, more reliable and cheaper, programs, but Miscrosoft has made this unpractical with totally unnecessary "extensions" that give me no useful additional functionality but do make documents, web-pages etc unuseable without Microsoft products.
Why is it wrong for accountable governments to enforce the rule of law, but OK for corporation to rip me off?
Well, bear in mind that it's still very early days in the e-commerce game. A better analogy than the browser wars might be the video wars. At a similar stage in the video tape market development, Beta was clearly ahead, but VHS was much more open (i.e. it was to some degree open and license-able, whereas Beta was purely proprietory). The result was that everyone else chose VHS and it boiled down to Sony versus the world. Guess what, the world won.
Now, the current battle could shape up similarly. Anyone joining the fray now would probably not try to develop their own standards - too late, *much* too costly, so they would either go HP - open, free, willing to take everyone into account, to some extent - or sign up with one of the leader - proprietory, costly and definitely second fiddle. Which would you choose? A similarly choice faces anyone falling too far behind but not willing to abandon the market. So the endgame should look one or a few front runners versus the whole rest of the world on e-talk. Very interesting, and far from an obvious lose for HP.
This could validate the GPL in a way (at least to the suits) that the Open/Free software community never could. Even if none of that community gets involved, the directly interested commercial parties should have tremendous development resources to throw at this market.