If you funded the invention of a new crop version and wanted to recoup your hundreds of millions of development costs, you would not want the court to eliminate patent rights for 2nd generation crops.
If on the other hand, you are a farmer, and nearly all beans in your area are patented and then you buying commodity beans from a "feed and seed" place & it means you get mostly patented beans and you plant them, you would not expect to pay a royalty on a "commodity" that you didn't want or order.
This is a tough one. I see the issues on one side and the other.
An asteroid calculated to miss for 1000 orbits can have its orbit gravitationally altered by a close pass with another small but significant mass object in the Kuiper Belt.
At that point, the next pass by Earth may not be "by Earth"...
For a single computer only, it can be fairly inexpensive with 2-3 TB HDs.
1) Clone the entire working drive once every one - two weeks, so I can go back to a working OS if the OS is corrupted as that takes a day to reinstall all OS, Apps & Utilities and migrate data back. Hence, this is a recovery point for the entire HD on the time period one picks.
With cheap 2-3 TB hard drives, one could actually clone the HD every day for a lot of people & then overwrite such that you had a complete 2 weeks of cloned HD contents that continually gets overwritten.
2) Then, daily backups of changed files to a 2-3TB HD that gets swapped with a HD kept in a different location.
Europe lost maybe 20 million people or more to the effects of a multi-decade cooling due to lack of sunspots starting in the time of Galileo who discovered the spots. Snow and ice in summer and ruined crops & created massive starvation.
Until you can accurately predictall the phases of the Sun's output, you are not going to be able to predict long term climate effects. We know the earth has a MASSIVE ice age cycle that occurs every 110,000 years or so due to cyclical orbit changes around the sun. We know for sure that Canada, northern US & Europe and Siberia will again be icebound at some point.
Come up with the predictive models that can show when all the orbit and sun variations actually have occurred and then when they will occur again and we will truly have a basis to judge what is going on.
Right now, all this "climate change" discussion is political to support a particular deindustrialization agenda, as if that will overcome the changes in the Sun which DWARF everything else. The Sun will always rule everything...to the bitter end of life on Earth as a cinder.
I am extremely skeptical of the artificial compounds created in the last 40-50 years that get put in everything from clothing (fire retardants, colorants, softeners, plastics) to foods (too many artificially modified natural foods) to cleansers & cosmetics of all types with God only knows what chemicals in them.
Homo Sapiens evolved over 5 million years of primate evolution and NONE of those ancestors until modern times almost no one came into contact with isolated elements or chemical compounds and only in the last century did people start to ingest artificially modified and created compounds in any volume.
I believe there is reason to suspect numbers of these chemicals (a lot of which are already outlawed once they found problems) but know that complete broad testing of all these chemicals is impossible in humans because we can't feed lots of the chemicals to people and see if they and their children develop "problems" as that is unethical. Hence, chemical firms just test using animal studies and extrapolate what they think they will do to humans.
Heck, processed soy beans have estrogenic compounds in them, so why are we eating this stuff?
We can't identify all potential large asteroids and astrophysicists have estimated those % and they are, as I recall, 10-20% of those in the Kuiper Belt.
Even with the best defensive satellites, we may not detect a big asteroid in time to deflect it. Some significant asteroids approach from the direction of the Sun making them hard to detect.
When the diameter of an asteroid gets twice as large, it takes 8 times the energy to alter its course a given amount and certainly has probably more than 8 times the impact damage.
The amount of energy needed to accomplish the task in a short amount of months seems unrealistic to me, but I admit I am not a physicist. If you have ten passes (near misses) to alter its course maybe you can win. Unfortunately, every time an asteroid comes close to Earth, its orbit changes a bit and who knows it doesn't get closer to some other object away from the earth that then swings the orbit dead on (pardon the expression) to earth, such that your early slight movements were counteracted.
It is certainly iffy. I want to go on a vacation now.
Black Swans: Those events are not as rare as once thought, because smart people are actually getting results.
Several technology breakthroughs have shown promise in articles in Wired and Technology Review in the last week or two.
One was using nanoforrest crystal structures in water with sunlight to produce Hydrogen...obviously as a first step to direct sunlight conversion of water.
The second one was the use a new novel chemical means of storing hydrogen at low pressure.
Both of the above announcements were not "commercial" products, but they are promising, even if they take 5-10 years to become available.
"Less people" is fine later, but right now, many people can generate their own power on a small creek. It doesn't take much to support one house. The generators are inexpensive and the efficiency doesn't have to be high as that is not the most important feature for home use. I grew up on a small creek where a floating water wheel (or whatever you want to call it) could easily produce enough power for a house and not affect the creek in any measurable way.
I agree on population, except...politicians have made so many promises to deliver goodies to future citizens, that failure to grow population will literally cause a revolution when the money runs out as the the population seriously slows or sinks. Hence the desire by some politicians to want to let in foreigners without going through any supervised immigration process.
Social Security (an oxymoron if there ever was one) is merely a promise to pay older people by taking cash from younger people...who are declining as a % of the older population. Medicare is the same. Citizens have come to view these goodies as a "right", but in fact they are laws that can be changed or repealed...and if they are not, there will be inflation that collapses the purchasing power of retirees.
Europe is in the midst of near bankruptcy in 4-5 countries (Greek debt holders will get only about 25% on their bonds...how about that for retirees who invested in 'safe' Greek bonds) SIMPLY because they promised more than they can deliver!
SOLUTION: Do not rely on the government to save you or your family. Save, invest and grow your own little community as best you can. That is the American way that always led to success.
Dictatorial government actions often start by "limiting voices", regardless of the country.
This is not a good omen for getting the best solutions for a critical issue.
The list of government witnesses in prior hearings were "officials" of various departments, meaning they are managers of employees.
Eliminating Bruce Schneier from the witness list means they really do NOT want any experts in front of the committee as that could bring up troubling "FACTS".
Load up your special software on at least 2 iPads and then make sure you don't allow updates if the software company loses the suit or caves in.
Find a hacker to jailbreak your iPad to make sure you can transfer the software if and when your iPad goes poof.
Sooner or later dedicated hardware is going to disappear, just like so many devices already have done and just like newspapers are quickly disappearing. The world has moved on. If the hardware maker is smart they will may a low cost App before they lose a patent suit.
The words "Fireproof Safe" is by the definition of Underwriter Labs. It merely refers to being fire resistive for a given amount of hours in a typical fire "for paper".
Forget DVDs and CDs and any hard drives surviving a fire in one of these "fireproof" devices. They are designed to release steam to keep the temperature at 212 def F until the fireproofing material exhausts all its water at which time the temperature goes up and, well...you can imagine what.
People have different needs. Some needs are imposed by either employers or the wonderful US Govt. for mandatory data retention. Others are your life's design work that you want to retain until you die. Other data you want to pass to your kids. If you can't afford to lose it keep multiple backups on multiple media in multiple locations. Books & pamphlets have been written on this. Transfer the data to new media once a year or two or three & keep all working drives.
No single storage device local or remote is immune from disaster. The Alexandria Library succumbed and took with it countless early human treasures. Wars have done in archives all over the world. Lightning, outages and power surges can defeat the best protections even when electronic equipment is turned off, but still plugged in (laptops are better when left unplugged, which is actually a great asset).
Backup is one thing; recovery is another and it can be GUT WRENCHING. The recovery process needs as much thought as backup.
A Clue or Two: A business partner had his MBPro backed up to 2 external HDs. Not great, but OK. Said MBPro crashed on the Lion upgrade. No way to know whether it was hardware or software and the MBPro should have at that point been off limits for use until carefully checked out. He happens to live in an area subject to lightning and outages which can affect anyone (even with a UPS). However, he reinstalled the Snow Leopard and plugged the first BU HD in an attempt to reload the data; HD became corrupted. Should have stopped, but then the 2nd HD was corrupted. Moral of the story; Recover data from a backup to an external HD running on another computer than the one that got mucked up.
The cost of 3-4 external 2-3 Terabyte hard drives and a couple cases or RAID box is dirt cheap compared to the value of the hours you put in on your computer each year as are Blue Ray drives & disks.
Caution: Someone on this list mentioned putting drives and disks in a "fireproof safe" or "fireproof file cabinet"; wrong! The UL approved boxes are designed only to protect "paper" for a given amount of time in a typical fire by releasing steam (212 deg. F = goodbye DVD/BR disks). Once the fireproof agent uses up its water...Farenheight 456 takes care of all contents...permanently. This is why multiple locations are needed.
If you worry about caffeine, then you have to avoid other vegetables that have small amounts of caffeine in them, but most of all you have to avoid Red Bull.
Governments have a hard time keeping up. Doesn't matter what they do. Military might be an exception only since they spend so much.
And yet...governments want us to believe, yes I say believe that they offer solutions for every problem that ails ye in River City...because they KNOW what is best for you.
To quote George Dyson: unpredictability means you can never have a complete digital dictatorship with one government or company controlling our digital lives—not because of politics but because of mathematics. There will always be codes that do unpredictable things.
And by corollary, there are forces exerted by individuals and corporations and other countries that counter the forces of any government.
Solyndra failed because its technology (indeed some with patents) was advanced at one time, but then technologically behind newer entrants and the price of polysilicon fell dramatically with increased supply. Picking winners early on is almost impossible.
Even picking a winning solar farm is iffy. If it pays itself off and returns capital to investors, it is likely to take many years or a decade.
Just because a solar farm succeeded in year one doesn't mean they will even be remembered in year 5 except by their creditors and shareholders who failed to sell out when the handwriting was on the wall.
Read the article and it immediately came to mind of all the recent solar failures like Solyndra.
Twin Creeks illustrates perfectly why no government can be the one to pick a "successful" technology, because it never is known who the winners will be until later.
Make the acceleration track a helix and see if you can keep the gs down to 3gs with a reasonable diameter on the helix. I don't know, but I am not going to take a ride on it in my lifetime.
The interesting part of the pneumonia equation is that a great deal of any internal organ failure (other than a suddon stoppage of blood to the heart or lungs) often results in lung failure via pneumonia, as the other organ conditions cause lung problems, some of which you note above.
This "pneumonia clue" is why doctors worldwide almost universally pick up the stethoscope to hear the lung sounds and heart sounds as an easy clue to internal organ problems.
If we can commercialize the treatment AT LOW COST, it will bring about a major new medical treatment industry, and it will allow millions of people to remain productive. That is the good part.
Hopefully it doesn't make the various worldwide retirement systems go bankrupt (though some will anyway because citizens allow governments to erect Ponzi schemes).
With fewer cancer deaths Pneumonia will take the lives of even more people, not that we will be able to do anything about that.
In other words, we are still guaranteed to die of something.
Slashdot Mirror
If you funded the invention of a new crop version and wanted to recoup your hundreds of millions of development costs, you would not want the court to eliminate patent rights for 2nd generation crops.
If on the other hand, you are a farmer, and nearly all beans in your area are patented and then you buying commodity beans from a "feed and seed" place & it means you get mostly patented beans and you plant them, you would not expect to pay a royalty on a "commodity" that you didn't want or order.
This is a tough one. I see the issues on one side and the other.
I did very poor editing/proofreading. Dang.
This leads me to be very skeptical.
Whew.
I find it very unusual that the college's article did not mention anything about the traditional engineering measurements on such systems.
It is always energy in versus energy out and the % efficiency and then the energy cost of recycling the zinc.
This leads me to be very speculative.
Sorry, the word should have been "beyond" or out and beyond.
Some objects appear to have periods of hundreds of years from what I remember reading.
That puts predictions on a whole new plane.
An asteroid calculated to miss for 1000 orbits can have its orbit gravitationally altered by a close pass with another small but significant mass object in the Kuiper Belt.
At that point, the next pass by Earth may not be "by Earth"...
For a single computer only, it can be fairly inexpensive with 2-3 TB HDs.
1) Clone the entire working drive once every one - two weeks, so I can go back to a working OS if the OS is corrupted as that takes a day to reinstall all OS, Apps & Utilities and migrate data back. Hence, this is a recovery point for the entire HD on the time period one picks.
With cheap 2-3 TB hard drives, one could actually clone the HD every day for a lot of people & then overwrite such that you had a complete 2 weeks of cloned HD contents that continually gets overwritten.
2) Then, daily backups of changed files to a 2-3TB HD that gets swapped with a HD kept in a different location.
Europe lost maybe 20 million people or more to the effects of a multi-decade cooling due to lack of sunspots starting in the time of Galileo who discovered the spots. Snow and ice in summer and ruined crops & created massive starvation.
Until you can accurately predictall the phases of the Sun's output, you are not going to be able to predict long term climate effects. We know the earth has a MASSIVE ice age cycle that occurs every 110,000 years or so due to cyclical orbit changes around the sun. We know for sure that Canada, northern US & Europe and Siberia will again be icebound at some point.
Come up with the predictive models that can show when all the orbit and sun variations actually have occurred and then when they will occur again and we will truly have a basis to judge what is going on.
Right now, all this "climate change" discussion is political to support a particular deindustrialization agenda, as if that will overcome the changes in the Sun which DWARF everything else. The Sun will always rule everything...to the bitter end of life on Earth as a cinder.
I am extremely skeptical of the artificial compounds created in the last 40-50 years that get put in everything from clothing (fire retardants, colorants, softeners, plastics) to foods (too many artificially modified natural foods) to cleansers & cosmetics of all types with God only knows what chemicals in them.
Homo Sapiens evolved over 5 million years of primate evolution and NONE of those ancestors until modern times almost no one came into contact with isolated elements or chemical compounds and only in the last century did people start to ingest artificially modified and created compounds in any volume.
I believe there is reason to suspect numbers of these chemicals (a lot of which are already outlawed once they found problems) but know that complete broad testing of all these chemicals is impossible in humans because we can't feed lots of the chemicals to people and see if they and their children develop "problems" as that is unethical. Hence, chemical firms just test using animal studies and extrapolate what they think they will do to humans.
Heck, processed soy beans have estrogenic compounds in them, so why are we eating this stuff?
"Modern" foods may not be the best dinner choice.
We can't identify all potential large asteroids and astrophysicists have estimated those % and they are, as I recall, 10-20% of those in the Kuiper Belt.
Even with the best defensive satellites, we may not detect a big asteroid in time to deflect it. Some significant asteroids approach from the direction of the Sun making them hard to detect.
When the diameter of an asteroid gets twice as large, it takes 8 times the energy to alter its course a given amount and certainly has probably more than 8 times the impact damage.
The amount of energy needed to accomplish the task in a short amount of months seems unrealistic to me, but I admit I am not a physicist. If you have ten passes (near misses) to alter its course maybe you can win. Unfortunately, every time an asteroid comes close to Earth, its orbit changes a bit and who knows it doesn't get closer to some other object away from the earth that then swings the orbit dead on (pardon the expression) to earth, such that your early slight movements were counteracted.
It is certainly iffy. I want to go on a vacation now.
Black Swans: Those events are not as rare as once thought, because smart people are actually getting results.
Several technology breakthroughs have shown promise in articles in Wired and Technology Review in the last week or two.
One was using nanoforrest crystal structures in water with sunlight to produce Hydrogen...obviously as a first step to direct sunlight conversion of water.
The second one was the use a new novel chemical means of storing hydrogen at low pressure.
Both of the above announcements were not "commercial" products, but they are promising, even if they take 5-10 years to become available.
"Less people" is fine later, but right now, many people can generate their own power on a small creek. It doesn't take much to support one house. The generators are inexpensive and the efficiency doesn't have to be high as that is not the most important feature for home use. I grew up on a small creek where a floating water wheel (or whatever you want to call it) could easily produce enough power for a house and not affect the creek in any measurable way.
I agree on population, except...politicians have made so many promises to deliver goodies to future citizens, that failure to grow population will literally cause a revolution when the money runs out as the the population seriously slows or sinks. Hence the desire by some politicians to want to let in foreigners without going through any supervised immigration process.
Social Security (an oxymoron if there ever was one) is merely a promise to pay older people by taking cash from younger people...who are declining as a % of the older population. Medicare is the same. Citizens have come to view these goodies as a "right", but in fact they are laws that can be changed or repealed...and if they are not, there will be inflation that collapses the purchasing power of retirees.
Europe is in the midst of near bankruptcy in 4-5 countries (Greek debt holders will get only about 25% on their bonds...how about that for retirees who invested in 'safe' Greek bonds) SIMPLY because they promised more than they can deliver!
SOLUTION: Do not rely on the government to save you or your family. Save, invest and grow your own little community as best you can. That is the American way that always led to success.
Dictatorial government actions often start by "limiting voices", regardless of the country.
This is not a good omen for getting the best solutions for a critical issue.
The list of government witnesses in prior hearings were "officials" of various departments, meaning they are managers of employees.
Eliminating Bruce Schneier from the witness list means they really do NOT want any experts in front of the committee as that could bring up troubling "FACTS".
Load up your special software on at least 2 iPads and then make sure you don't allow updates if the software company loses the suit or caves in.
Find a hacker to jailbreak your iPad to make sure you can transfer the software if and when your iPad goes poof.
Sooner or later dedicated hardware is going to disappear, just like so many devices already have done and just like newspapers are quickly disappearing. The world has moved on. If the hardware maker is smart they will may a low cost App before they lose a patent suit.
The words "Fireproof Safe" is by the definition of Underwriter Labs. It merely refers to being fire resistive for a given amount of hours in a typical fire "for paper".
Forget DVDs and CDs and any hard drives surviving a fire in one of these "fireproof" devices. They are designed to release steam to keep the temperature at 212 def F until the fireproofing material exhausts all its water at which time the temperature goes up and, well...you can imagine what.
People have different needs. Some needs are imposed by either employers or the wonderful US Govt. for mandatory data retention. Others are your life's design work that you want to retain until you die. Other data you want to pass to your kids. If you can't afford to lose it keep multiple backups on multiple media in multiple locations. Books & pamphlets have been written on this. Transfer the data to new media once a year or two or three & keep all working drives.
No single storage device local or remote is immune from disaster. The Alexandria Library succumbed and took with it countless early human treasures. Wars have done in archives all over the world. Lightning, outages and power surges can defeat the best protections even when electronic equipment is turned off, but still plugged in (laptops are better when left unplugged, which is actually a great asset).
Backup is one thing; recovery is another and it can be GUT WRENCHING. The recovery process needs as much thought as backup.
A Clue or Two: A business partner had his MBPro backed up to 2 external HDs. Not great, but OK. Said MBPro crashed on the Lion upgrade. No way to know whether it was hardware or software and the MBPro should have at that point been off limits for use until carefully checked out. He happens to live in an area subject to lightning and outages which can affect anyone (even with a UPS). However, he reinstalled the Snow Leopard and plugged the first BU HD in an attempt to reload the data; HD became corrupted. Should have stopped, but then the 2nd HD was corrupted. Moral of the story; Recover data from a backup to an external HD running on another computer than the one that got mucked up.
The cost of 3-4 external 2-3 Terabyte hard drives and a couple cases or RAID box is dirt cheap compared to the value of the hours you put in on your computer each year as are Blue Ray drives & disks.
Caution: Someone on this list mentioned putting drives and disks in a "fireproof safe" or "fireproof file cabinet"; wrong! The UL approved boxes are designed only to protect "paper" for a given amount of time in a typical fire by releasing steam (212 deg. F = goodbye DVD/BR disks). Once the fireproof agent uses up its water...Farenheight 456 takes care of all contents...permanently. This is why multiple locations are needed.
Death of 2 known brands, MSWinPhone & Nokia, is underway.
The article's discussion of the facts is straightforward and looks like a death spiral.
Once they nail libraries, they will try to charge book buyers based on how many people are in the family.
Then they will put a little BT 4.0 ineractive lock on the book and charge you every time you open the cover.
What happened to the concept of private ownership?
Absolutely true.
If you worry about caffeine, then you have to avoid other vegetables that have small amounts of caffeine in them, but most of all you have to avoid Red Bull.
Governments have a hard time keeping up. Doesn't matter what they do. Military might be an exception only since they spend so much.
And yet...governments want us to believe, yes I say believe that they offer solutions for every problem that ails ye in River City...because they KNOW what is best for you.
To quote George Dyson: unpredictability means you can never have a complete digital dictatorship with one government or company controlling our digital lives—not because of politics but because of mathematics. There will always be codes that do unpredictable things.
And by corollary, there are forces exerted by individuals and corporations and other countries that counter the forces of any government.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/02/ff_dysonqa/2/
Solyndra failed because its technology (indeed some with patents) was advanced at one time, but then technologically behind newer entrants and the price of polysilicon fell dramatically with increased supply. Picking winners early on is almost impossible.
Even picking a winning solar farm is iffy. If it pays itself off and returns capital to investors, it is likely to take many years or a decade.
Just because a solar farm succeeded in year one doesn't mean they will even be remembered in year 5 except by their creditors and shareholders who failed to sell out when the handwriting was on the wall.
Read the article and it immediately came to mind of all the recent solar failures like Solyndra.
Twin Creeks illustrates perfectly why no government can be the one to pick a "successful" technology, because it never is known who the winners will be until later.
Make the acceleration track a helix and see if you can keep the gs down to 3gs with a reasonable diameter on the helix. I don't know, but I am not going to take a ride on it in my lifetime.
Tell me that Google couldn't do a better job than that.
5 minutes? What sort of coding knowledge does Google have anyway.
The interesting part of the pneumonia equation is that a great deal of any internal organ failure (other than a suddon stoppage of blood to the heart or lungs) often results in lung failure via pneumonia, as the other organ conditions cause lung problems, some of which you note above.
This "pneumonia clue" is why doctors worldwide almost universally pick up the stethoscope to hear the lung sounds and heart sounds as an easy clue to internal organ problems.
If we can commercialize the treatment AT LOW COST, it will bring about a major new medical treatment industry, and it will allow millions of people to remain productive. That is the good part.
Hopefully it doesn't make the various worldwide retirement systems go bankrupt (though some will anyway because citizens allow governments to erect Ponzi schemes).
With fewer cancer deaths Pneumonia will take the lives of even more people, not that we will be able to do anything about that.
In other words, we are still guaranteed to die of something.