I'm afraid I don't get you here. Every patent has to be disclosed (aside from some patents with "National Security" implications), when the patent is granted.
Perhaps I should have been more explicit. The point is that there is a difference between inventions which can be used without disclosure, and those which are useless without disclosure. The latter group are disclosed, and thus "promote progress in the useful arts", the instant anyone starts using them; the reverse-auction and one-click shopping are examples. Since little or nothing is gained by granting a monopoly on the latter class of inventions, they should be held to a much higher standard of originality before a patent is granted (if any patent should be granted at all, which I'm not yet willing to concede). --
Would the team of R, S, and A (I don't remember the names offhand) have bothered to make their public-key algorithm, and then to publish it so that the rest of us could check for weaknesses, if they didn't have the promise of profit by license royalties?
I believe that the RSA team published their mathematics before they filed for a patent (perhaps even before they thought of filing for a patent). [There was a huge furor when the spooks tried to suppress the RSA algorithm, but it had already spread too wide before they woke up to it (kind of like DeCSS in that respect).] This suggests that they would have published anyway; the mathematics world operates on the basis of citations and respect, not property rights in concepts.
You might also want to check out some of Bruce Schneier's work to see if he's patented his encryption algorithms. A quick check of counterpane.com turns up this page on Blowfish, indicating that it is now part of OpenBSD (and almost certainly not patented). Even if RSA did patent theirs, it doesn't mean that they set the standard. --
My default score is +2. I use this for pieces that I consider factual/useful (and the occasional slip-up).
I know the difference between a fact and an opinion. When I am posting opinion, I click the "No Score +1 Bonus" box (as I am doing here). I do this because people reading at at a setting of +2 are probably looking for stuff that's highly informative and insightful, not just blowing off steam. Anyone with a +25 karma ought to know that too. (If some moderator believes that this post should be read by people browsing at +2, I suppose that's okay too. It makes precious little difference to me.)
I had nothing to do with jd's moderation, besides suggesting it (obviously, as I have already posted in this discussion and could not moderate here even if I wanted to). I agree with you re: "flamebait" versus "overrated", but that was none of my doing. I think the UI for the moderation system is error-prone, and it may not even have been the moderator's intent.
Maybe we need a few more -1 moderation categories, like "erroneous" or even "clueless". --
Check the Constitution sometime. You'll find that the entire purpose of the patent system is to "promote progress in the useful arts", not to be a gravy train for a certain protected class. The patent system is intended to promote progress by the means of trading disclosure for a temporary monopoly. The monopoly is not the purpose, it is the means.
There are a number of problems with the patent system today. To list a few:
Some patents are granted for inventions that cannot be used without being disclosed (look-and-feel patents, anyone?). Amazon's one-button patent falls into this category. Since the progress in the useful arts is brought about by disclosure, schemes such as the above which cannot be used without being disclosed should be held to a very high level of scrutiny before any patent is granted. This is certainly not true today.
Most of the benefits of many inventions is not in the sales, but in the use. (See open-source software.) Techniques such as wavelet compression are far more useful if they are not patented, because the requirement to negotiate use rights is a barrier to their use, and their value is increased by ubiquity; the promise of "progress in the useful arts" is taken back by the barriers to entry.
The USPTO considers "prior art" to be that which has been previously granted a patent, and precious little else. 'nuff said.
I've got my name on three, count 'em, three software patents. I'd like to see every last one of them invalidated, because I think that everyone should be able to build better stuff without having to jump through hoops to do it or worry about stepping on a legal land mine when they are trying to do engineering. --
I have not seen a bigger display of gross ignorance in a long, long time. Taking just a few points where I have knowledge:
Deep Space 1 used an experimental drive that had failed every single test ever done on Earth
Absolutely wrong. The drive worked fine on Earth, or it would never have been flown. It apparently got a piece of debris stuck between the accelerator grids during launch, causing a short circuit, but that was cleared by pulsing current through it. After that the ion drive was a phenomenal success.
Pioneers 10 & 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2 all suffered hardware failures - main antenna and/or solar panels
This isn't right. It's not even wrong. For one thing, none of those probes carried any solar panels; they all ran off RTG's. And their main antennas worked just fine, it was Galileo (currently sending back some of the most amazing data about Jupiter we've ever seen) which had the main antenna fail to deploy.
NASA knew about solar winds, and even devised spaceships to travel by them, but neglected to take them into account when positioning Skylab
The solar wind does not penetrate down to the altitudes where Skylab orbited, and thus was never a factor to it. What does happen is that the solar UV increase during the height of the sunspot cycle heats and inflates the upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere, which increases air drag on low-orbiting satellites (of which Skylab was one). The Shuttle, which had been intended for use to re-boost Skylab, was delayed by budget cuts (Congress' fault, not NASA). So Skylab fell down. Not a big deal, it wasn't intended for permanent use anyway.
NASA has lost multiple rockets at a time, when lightning struck one, igniting it's motors and sending it into a second, and then a third, igniting their engines in turn
I'd like to see a reference for this assertion.
The Viking Landers posessed no equiptment for detecting bacteria - Carl Sagan's experiments were removed to keep the project under-budget, and low-cost (but essentially useless) alternatives were fitted to placate the media
If it is not safe enough to land a probe there, we can forget about manned mars missions.
Today. When you've had a radar satellite doing for Mars what has already been done for Venus, and pictures at 10 cm resolution from a number of sun-angles to reveal where every significant hummock, pothole and rock are situated, and a landing system smart enough to set down on one of the known safe spots (like, an expert pilot with good eyeballs, a younger version of Niel Armstrong), it'll be no riskier than the moon missions. --
In the first place, manned vehicles aren't *planned* to smash into the planet at hundreds of miles per hour.
Neither was MPL; the main probe was built to soft-land under rocket thrust (look at the freaking PICTURES!). It was the penetrator probes which were supposed to dig in at ~400 MPH, and they were an entirely independent part of the mission. --
It's hard enough to find a black box in our own oceans (which is still transmitting), getting a signal in from another planet would be practically impossible.
The key being ocean here, not distance. Radio doesn't go through seawater worth a diddly. On the other hand, you can communicate from Mars with half a watt (hell, the Pioneers proved that you can get useful information from well beyond Pluto with about that much). Even that wouldn't be necessary. Since the Mars Polar Orbiter was still up there; it could have done relay duty for an emergency beacon; it was used to listen for signals from MPL and the impactor probes.
The real issue is one of cost vs. capability. An emergency beacon wouldn't do anything useful unless the rest of the mission was a loss. How much money do you want to spend on that? It would have been much more useful to have some low-speed telemetry from the spacecraft from before the point of cruise-bus separation to landing, to tell exactly where any problems occurred. Even that would have been about US$5m, on a US$136m mission. Sacrificing part of the science payload looked like a bad idea at the time.
As for the cost of the project, I wouldn't worry about it. This is pocket change for NASA, and the knowledge acquired while setting up the project won't be a loss.
This is only true so long as Congress (which is populated with the ideological offspring of Sen. William "Golden fleece" Proxmire) doesn't use it as an excuse to chop more out of NASA to make pork for their other constituencies. --
If management won't give you adequate compensation for your time (whether that time is over 12/31 - 1/1 or any other time) it's time to give them the kiss-off. And you should make a point of informing the higher-ups about the abuse you were asked to take, so the managers responsible get their comeuppance. --
While your motivations are no doubt honorable, there have been a number of cases where equipment used to spy on baby sitters has been misused. It is not a black and white issue.
So Ramsey gets raided, tens of thousands of dollars of inventory confiscated, and hauled into court with large legal expenses because some of their customers just might have something other than a bona fide use in mind. Sorry, I do not grant that the government reaction has any legitimate relationship to the alleged harms. --
More of the same. If I covered my entire house with these things, I am entirely within my rights. The only problem is when you cover someone else's space with them. --
Likewise if your equipment has a possible use in surruptitious surveillance you damn well better know it and act accordingly.
And the techs from Ramsey told the government snoops that they were in the wrong place if they wanted bugging equipment. They refused to volunteer any information which might have helped anyone use their kits for illegal purposes. Isn't that the definition of "acting accordingly"? --
The devices made here did violate US law -- deviced to bug phones and otherwise spy on people.
I just don't see how a kit-built device on the order of a Mister Microphone represents a more serious threat to my privacy than the stuff that's already available in the toy store. If someone wanted to break the law with a Mister Microphone, they could. This doesn't make a Mister Microphone, or a Ramsey kit, a "spy device". The Ramsey kit has more value because it is a kit, which teaches about electronics; the Mister Microphone has no such redeeming qualities. --
But the law isn't wrong in this case. Maybe you think that devices which allow people to spy on each other ought to be legal, but I know I don't want *my* employer putting a spy camera over my desk. You can't tell me that a camera built to look like a wall clock is for "hobbyists".
Maybe you want the spy camera over your desk because you want to find out who's been stealing your granola bars and loose change. Maybe you want the camera in the wall clock because you want to be the next Allen Funt; you do improv comedy with unsuspecting people, and offer them a release form which gives them royalties if their stuff ever makes money.
The equipment is not criminal in any way; it is the use of that equipment which may (repeat, may) be a crime. And until you find that equipment in use, you have no business declaring that a crime has been committed.
I know I don't want *my* disgruntled roommate bugging my phone. I know I don't want someone putting a hidden camera in the locker room and selling pictures of *my* girlfriend changing.
Maybe you want to bug your own phone to record a conversation to give as evidence to the police (someone harassing or threatening you, for example) or you want a hidden camera aimed at the driveway to catch pictures of thieves and vandals. It's not the device, it's the use to which the device is put. --
which states that as the number of messages in a thread increases, the probability of it going around in circles approaches unity.
Call it Sphere's Law. --
Re:What if you get stuck
on
Going Up?
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· Score: 1
Actually, no. The parts that are 20,000 miles up have enough velocity to fall into an orbit that misses the Earth. I'd have to run some numbers to be able to tell you exactly how low you could be on a synchronous skyhook and avoid colliding with the planet if you cut yourself loose, and there remains the fact that parts of the skyhook quite a bit below that could remain in orbit if they just stayed attached to the parts that are higher up. Getting down from there might not be fun or safe, but you'd have better options than a rapid descent to a fiery end.
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You think those are big problems?
on
Green Mars
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· Score: 2
Lack of sunlight.
Mars is (very roughly) twice as far from the sun as the Earth. It gets one quarter as much sunlight.
Mars orbits at about 1.4 AU from Sol, and gets about half as much sunlight. It also has a lot less atmosphere to scatter that incoming light before it reaches the surface (Earth's albedo is what, about 0.5?). Plenty of plants do just fine in partial shade. Or you could just use mirrors to put more light onto the plants.
Unshielded sunlight.
Our atmosphere screens out a lot of the UV and other nastiness produced by the sun. The martian atmosphere won't (it's far too thin). Ionizing radiation (UV and other) will damage the plants' health more rapidly than on Earth.
Since you need a greenhouse anyway, you use a material which filters the problematic wavelengths. Soda glass does a nice job on UV, for example.
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your text about the A320 crash being caused by the flight-control software is just plain wrong. The flight-control software *saved* lives; the pilot had no chance of recovering from the state he stupidly placed the plane
Sorry if I don't trust that; the French authorities were already blaming the pilot immediately after the crash, trying to exonerate their (very expensive, government-financed) aircraft development effort. See RISKS Digest Volume 7 Number 22. It is pointless to argue that the FCS kept the pilot from stalling the aircraft due to its lack of thrust; the fact of the matter is that the FCS refused the commands to throttle up, which caused the lack-of-thrust condition in the first place. --
There is nothing that amazes me more than the number of clearly unconstitutional laws that get passed.
I can't figure out if it is because lawmakers are ignorant, or if they just don't give a damn.
It's because their self-interest is tied to staying in power (as previously noted), and they are free to assail the Constitution in order to play to their constituency. This is only possible because legislators incur no penalty for pushing an un-Constitutional agenda. If they were removed from office when one of their acts was gutted for violating the Constitution (as they should, since their oaths of office require them to uphold it) you'd see a BIG change in their behavior. --
By the way, even this slow-as-hell Explorer was able to get up to freeway speed in time on entrance ramps, so I don't get the merging with traffic argument either.
Really? Can you still merge safely when you are presented with a solid wall of traffic in the right lane and the only clear space is ahead of you, or the blue-hair in front of you decides to pull in at 10 MPH below the limit leaving you blocked by the braking wave already forming behind her?
I see this kind of thing all the time. Just last night I was trying to get onto a freeway, but right ahead of me I had a motorhome followed by an Explorer. Know what I did? I pulled to the shoulder and waited for them to move up the ramp, then I punched it. When I got to the top of the ramp, I was moving at traffic speeds and was safe to merge almost no matter what was coming, but if I'd had to speed a bit to pull ahead into clear space I would have been able to do that too. At least I was safe, because I had options.
If I was forced to have a speed limiter on my car I would be less safe, not more. Unless there are acceleration-increasers on the blue-hairs and space-makers for the masses of traffic in the right lane when you need to merge, limiting speed just takes away one of the essential "outs". --
Of course a government could get away with it! Particularly if they simply didn't tell the citizenry about it.
Exactly how is the government going to keep thousands of automotive engineers, who will be the ones designing, implementing, testing and installing this stuff (and the service techs who service it) from blabbing the secret?
Your tinfoil hat is obviously worn out; I suggest getting a bigger one. --
This would be absolutely sweat-free on any manual transmission car. There is a vehicle speed sensor on the output shaft of the transmission, usually a Hall-effect device next to some toothed wheel. It outputs a logic-level signal (usually 0 to 5 volts) that gives a certain number of pulses per unit distance. Defeat: wire a micro between the sensor and the car computer to limit the pulse rate to some desired maximum. Result: Car computer never knows the car is exceeding the local Vmax, and you can drive as fast as you like.
This would probably not work as well with an automatic transmission because the computer uses the output speed to determine critical things like torque-converter slip and clutch locking. --
Slashdot Mirror
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You might also want to check out some of Bruce Schneier's work to see if he's patented his encryption algorithms. A quick check of counterpane.com turns up this page on Blowfish, indicating that it is now part of OpenBSD (and almost certainly not patented). Even if RSA did patent theirs, it doesn't mean that they set the standard.
--
I know the difference between a fact and an opinion. When I am posting opinion, I click the "No Score +1 Bonus" box (as I am doing here). I do this because people reading at at a setting of +2 are probably looking for stuff that's highly informative and insightful, not just blowing off steam. Anyone with a +25 karma ought to know that too. (If some moderator believes that this post should be read by people browsing at +2, I suppose that's okay too. It makes precious little difference to me.)
I had nothing to do with jd's moderation, besides suggesting it (obviously, as I have already posted in this discussion and could not moderate here even if I wanted to). I agree with you re: "flamebait" versus "overrated", but that was none of my doing. I think the UI for the moderation system is error-prone, and it may not even have been the moderator's intent.
Maybe we need a few more -1 moderation categories, like "erroneous" or even "clueless".
--
There are a number of problems with the patent system today. To list a few:
- Some patents are granted for inventions that cannot be used without being disclosed (look-and-feel patents, anyone?). Amazon's one-button patent falls into this category. Since the progress in the useful arts is brought about by disclosure, schemes such as the above which cannot be used without being disclosed should be held to a very high level of scrutiny before any patent is granted. This is certainly not true today.
- Most of the benefits of many inventions is not in the sales, but in the use. (See open-source software.) Techniques such as wavelet compression are far more useful if they are not patented, because the requirement to negotiate use rights is a barrier to their use, and their value is increased by ubiquity; the promise of "progress in the useful arts" is taken back by the barriers to entry.
- The USPTO considers "prior art" to be that which has been previously granted a patent, and precious little else. 'nuff said.
I've got my name on three, count 'em, three software patents. I'd like to see every last one of them invalidated, because I think that everyone should be able to build better stuff without having to jump through hoops to do it or worry about stepping on a legal land mine when they are trying to do engineering.--
Absolutely wrong. The drive worked fine on Earth, or it would never have been flown. It apparently got a piece of debris stuck between the accelerator grids during launch, causing a short circuit, but that was cleared by pulsing current through it. After that the ion drive was a phenomenal success.
This isn't right. It's not even wrong. For one thing, none of those probes carried any solar panels; they all ran off RTG's. And their main antennas worked just fine, it was Galileo (currently sending back some of the most amazing data about Jupiter we've ever seen) which had the main antenna fail to deploy.
The solar wind does not penetrate down to the altitudes where Skylab orbited, and thus was never a factor to it. What does happen is that the solar UV increase during the height of the sunspot cycle heats and inflates the upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere, which increases air drag on low-orbiting satellites (of which Skylab was one). The Shuttle, which had been intended for use to re-boost Skylab, was delayed by budget cuts (Congress' fault, not NASA). So Skylab fell down. Not a big deal, it wasn't intended for permanent use anyway.
I'd like to see a reference for this assertion.
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The real issue is one of cost vs. capability. An emergency beacon wouldn't do anything useful unless the rest of the mission was a loss. How much money do you want to spend on that? It would have been much more useful to have some low-speed telemetry from the spacecraft from before the point of cruise-bus separation to landing, to tell exactly where any problems occurred. Even that would have been about US$5m, on a US$136m mission. Sacrificing part of the science payload looked like a bad idea at the time.
This is only true so long as Congress (which is populated with the ideological offspring of Sen. William "Golden fleece" Proxmire) doesn't use it as an excuse to chop more out of NASA to make pork for their other constituencies.--
Okay, which one of you is Terrence and which is Phillip?
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I have a feeling that it'll never appear.
--
If management won't give you adequate compensation for your time (whether that time is over 12/31 - 1/1 or any other time) it's time to give them the kiss-off. And you should make a point of informing the higher-ups about the abuse you were asked to take, so the managers responsible get their comeuppance.
--
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... Buffalo policemen don't have balls.
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The equipment is not criminal in any way; it is the use of that equipment which may (repeat, may) be a crime. And until you find that equipment in use, you have no business declaring that a crime has been committed.
Maybe you want to bug your own phone to record a conversation to give as evidence to the police (someone harassing or threatening you, for example) or you want a hidden camera aimed at the driveway to catch pictures of thieves and vandals. It's not the device, it's the use to which the device is put.--
Call it Sphere's Law.
--
Actually, no. The parts that are 20,000 miles up have enough velocity to fall into an orbit that misses the Earth. I'd have to run some numbers to be able to tell you exactly how low you could be on a synchronous skyhook and avoid colliding with the planet if you cut yourself loose, and there remains the fact that parts of the skyhook quite a bit below that could remain in orbit if they just stayed attached to the parts that are higher up. Getting down from there might not be fun or safe, but you'd have better options than a rapid descent to a fiery end.
"
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I see this kind of thing all the time. Just last night I was trying to get onto a freeway, but right ahead of me I had a motorhome followed by an Explorer. Know what I did? I pulled to the shoulder and waited for them to move up the ramp, then I punched it. When I got to the top of the ramp, I was moving at traffic speeds and was safe to merge almost no matter what was coming, but if I'd had to speed a bit to pull ahead into clear space I would have been able to do that too. At least I was safe, because I had options.
If I was forced to have a speed limiter on my car I would be less safe, not more. Unless there are acceleration-increasers on the blue-hairs and space-makers for the masses of traffic in the right lane when you need to merge, limiting speed just takes away one of the essential "outs".
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Your tinfoil hat is obviously worn out; I suggest getting a bigger one.
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This would probably not work as well with an automatic transmission because the computer uses the output speed to determine critical things like torque-converter slip and clutch locking.
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