Is the article suggesting that in fifty years there has been little progress in making them more economical to build and run?
The biggest problem is that while specialized parts and materials may become more readily available which should translate into lower prices, regulations and safety requirements have become a whole lot tighter over time and costs associated with that have increased much faster.
You can compare this to the aviation industry where a bolt that would cost $0.10 at the local hardware store if you were allowed to get it from there ends up costing $20 because of certifications. It sounds completely nuts but that's how it is in fields obsessed with safety and regulations... if you watch Mayday (a show/documentary that recreates the story of real crashes and near-catastrophes), there are a few episodes where maintenance engineers ended up with hundreds of deaths or at the very least terrorized passengers on their conscience for things as simple as using the wrong - though seemingly identical - bolts.
What killed Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Miles Island isn't that they were particularly unsafe.
Chernobyl blew up mainly due to a whole bunch of human errors while preparing the reactor for a safety test - preparations were supposed to start nearly a day ahead of time and the chief engineer decided to rush it after preparation got delayed by a government request to run the reactor a few hours longer to accommodate peak hours. In their rush to bring down reactor output to test level, they accidentally radon-poisoned the core, power wouldn't come back up so they started removing control rods beyond GE's safe minimum and then got caught with their pants down in their attempts to restart it when the radon poisoning cleared up and reactor output surged out of control. This highlighted many design issues that could have helped the staff figure out what was happening a little sooner but the fundamental failure was human errors.
Three Mile Island's core issue was a flawed control/indicator pair for a discharge valve where the indicator tracked the control switch's state rather than the valve's actual state which caused the reactor to bleed dry without staff knowing it was happening. This got further complicated by lack of first-degree measurement of water level in the reactor core. How such a fundamental and trivial design flaw ever made it in an actual reactor design is beyond me. Without this vital bit of information, plant engineers had no way to know exactly what was going wrong when nearly every alarm, many of which contradictory, started going off at once.
For Fukushima, the single dumbest mistake and the root cause of most complications there was putting backup generators in floodable areas, causing the loss of nearly all backup power within hours. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the reactors themselves. Most nuclear plants house their backup generators in the turbine building precisely to shelter them from elements but Fukushima had theirs outdoors near sea-level. I'm still scratching my head about how the people who managed the site had the foresight to install wave-breakers off-shore but neglected to protect generators from potential flooding in some way.
Pebble and molten salt reactors still benefit from everything that was learned from past mistakes. If you had a pebble or MSR reactor with Chernobyl-era knowledge and experience, Chernobyl would likely still have happened: still stuck with a massive power surge once radon poisoning clears up. Same for TMI and Fukushima. Pebbles and molten salt may be more convenient and safer to handle and process but there is very little they can do to prevent operator, design and construction errors.
Following the procedures and operating manual would have saved Chernobyl by never allowing it to reach the highly volatile state it was forced into in the first place. A simple direct-observation water level gauge would have saved TMI by providing engineers the single most critical information they needed to know exactly what was happening. Putting generators indoors in a safe location would have saved Fukushima by keeping them safe from the salt-water ingestion that fouled them. Being "obsolete" played little to no part in any of those incidents; all the measures that would have prevented those incidents are very low-tech even for their original construction dates and could have been fixed at little to no cost if someone had simply thought of these being liabilities back then.
If you are going to defend nuclear as a safe energy source, I strongly suggest researching WHY those historic failures occurred before blindly tagging all "obsolete" reactors as intrinsically unsafe; otherwise you are simply contributing to the FUD about it. Old reactors are just about as safe as newer ones once retrofitted to address potential safety hazard as they are identified - and this applies to newer reactors regardless of type as well.
Newer reactors simply have the benefit of decades worth of safety enhancements being built-in from day-1.
Line losses getting it from point A to point B make it not worth doing on a large scale unless you live near, or in the desert
The main problem with molten salt solar (and most other solar and wind renewables) is that every Wh of energy relies on man-made structures for collection and storage with associated on-going maintenance and operating costs which cuts into how large this can cost-effectively scale up to and how much of a transmission loss can be afforded at a given retail price point.
Long distances work well for (very) large hydro projects: Hydro-Quebec has ~16GW of production at James Bay, ~800km from the nearest major citirs and Quebec still gets some of the lowest retail power rates in NA despite having some of the longest transmission lines in the world since on-going production costs are very low thanks to nature doing 99.9% of the job on its own. Doesn't work so well for smaller plants of any type with much higher on-going production costs per MW.
Get one of those recently announced 20-24" i5-based all-in-ones with touchscreens and sit in a yoga position with feet soles facing up and AIO on top. Problem solved!
Where are the brilliant creativity and programming tools for Tablets?
Give it some time. Most tablets have nowhere near the RAM and storage requirements for most serious productivity and multitasking stuff yet. Processing power is also a few notches short from optimal for many interactions.
The real beginning for tablet-centric computing is still two years away - that's when tablets will have enough of everything to run things like uncut Eclipse ports well enough to be worth considering.
Most of that "2.4X" comes from being quad-core with HT instead of a plain dual core. That does not help much with today's still mostly lightly threaded desktop apps. Yes, modern apps often have 20-150 threads but 90-99% of CPU load is often generated by a single thread in that lot since the other threads are mostly from application framework and API background stuff.
I still use good old HDDs for boot and storage - I only reboot my PC about once a month and rarely close programs after launching them so boot/launch times rarely bother me.
Some programs/games have horribly long load times regardless of how good your PC is. I recently re-installed HL2 just for the heck of it to see how much faster my current PC can load it and it still feels like it takes forever even when re-loading from disk cache.
Processing power, RAM and SSDs cannot overcome bad software design - at least not always.
Every time they say "the PC is dying", they conveniently neglect to specify form factors.
Few people need the encumberment and expansion potential of traditional 'tower' form factor so an increasingly large chunk of the market will be looking at non-traditional form factors for their next PC. Also, since there hasn't been much performance improvements on CPUs over the past four years, most people who already own a tower or laptop have little to no reason to upgrade those and choose to get tablets instead for convenience.
Based on the proliferation of touch-enabled LCDs with embedded PCs, it seems like the old Tablet-PC concept that miserably failed about 10 years ago is coming back to life with a vengeance... if it gets priced right on this round.
Simply making it known that new models can be remotely disabled when reported stolen will drastically reduce the resale value of unknown-source goods.
As for dismantling for parts, everything has microcontrollers in them these days so it would not be too hard to add a crypto-microcontroller in the RF chipset, CPU, display controller, etc., and network them together to propagate kill switches when detected. This could also be used to detect and disable unauthorized components from stolen devices... or if they wanted to be more strict/evil about it, it could lock a given set of components together so they cannot be used with any other components without the crypto keys to re-program them.
humans are at least semi-monogamous; frequently pair-bonding, if not for life, at least for the relatively long period for offspring to be born and reach self-sufficient maturity.
Are human truly naturally monogamous to any significant extent? Most of our society, religions, laws, entertainment, etc "strongly" encourage or even enforce it while similarly attempting to discourage polygamy.
In such a heavily biased environment with sentience getting in nature's way at every opportunity, it is very difficult to tell if the root cause is nature or the environment... in nature, most males would jump on a female in heat flashing her goods with minimal encouragement (known to occur even with mated pairs) while with humans, most guys would resist the temptation due to fear of legal, health and various external repercussions. I remember reading an article about 10 years ago where about 30% of guys will accept an offer for sex vs 10% for women. I suspect those percentages would be much higher if we did not have to worry about future consequences.
I strongly suspect the researchers' perception that humans are monogamous in nature is heavily skewed.
If they wanted to study true human nature, they would have to raise kids in total isolation from the outside world and its norms/cultures/influences to see what happens without any reference or interference to skew things anywhich way.
No. Moore's law is about transistors per die. More transistors may translate into extra storage, extra features, integration, lower power, higher efficiency or other things that may not necessarily relate to computing power.
With Haswell, we have even reached a point where Intel can even afford to put the VRM on-die - one of the last things I was expecting to happen until news of it leaked out... I was certain they would integrate the IO Hub / South-Bridge first but this will come with Broadwell or Skylake.
Productivity-oriented "Tablet PCs" on the other hand will likely continue carrying increasing processing power and other resources at least until they catch up with laptops. That's where things will start getting interesting.
People laughed at the Tablet PC concept ~10 years ago... I laughed at it too mainly due to the ~$3000 price tag back then.
Things sure have come a long way from then and I would not be surprised if the Tablet PC concept came back with a vengeance over the next 2-3 years. Intel's intention to make most of Broadwell's lineup BGA-only next year sounds like they are going to be making a big push for embedded/all-in-one/NUC form factors in 2014-2015.
Two problems with shorter patents are that R&D costs for many modern inventions are growing exponentially and many of them are 10+ years in the making from initial concept research to first completed prototype.
Patents do not do you much good if they do not last long enough to have a reasonable chance of generating enough revenue to justify the effort before expiring. Companies may choose to opt for industrial secret which has no expiration date other than the time it takes others to figure it out instead, at which point you can still sue them for corporate espionage, plagiarism, DMCA or other infringement claims which would be just about as nasty as our everyday patent claims today if someone duplicates your invention suspiciously quickly.
However, I do not think software (actual written code) itself should be patentable - it is already covered by copyright. What should be patentable about software is the collection of principles and new algorithms it implements - the actual new intellectual work they represent - if they are genuinely innovative and non-trivial since all inventions are ultimately intellectual creations. Trivial cosmetic stuff (ex.: boot animations on Windows, Android, PS2, PS3, etc.) would still be trademarkable which would still let people duplicate the general concept as long as the resulting output looks and behaves different enough that it clearly stands as its own, unmistakable for the original.
But I agree that PTOs definitely need to clarify and raise the bar on patentability for both intellectual and physical inventions. They should hire engineering graduates along with subject matter experts to get a weighed opinion on obviousness from both ends of the experience spectrum.
Try paying attention to overhead signs when you get cut off by vehicles doing lane changes half a car length in front of you and in front of each-other. Over or under the speed limit would have made very little difference, I would still have missed the panels.
If it were only about whether or not something could be "reduced to maths" and fundamental sciences then just about nothing would be patentable. One thing to keep in mind is that back when PTOs were invented, the cost of intellectual inventions was negligible and could be taught/replicated in a matter of minutes, maybe days. Today, those inventions are a trillion-dollar industry spanning years or sometimes decades of research and development.
While I am generally against software patents due to how much they have been abused for countless stupid things, breakthrough non-obvious algorithms (stuff that is well beyond what is considered "fundamental" at the time of invention) should still be patent-worty. Why? Because if they aren't, then there is a high probability that research will remain locked behind closed doors as an industrial secret rather than get published for all to see and possibly get inspiration from for something else. That's assuming the prospect of losing your invention due to non-patentability does not discourage you from researching it in the first place. Reducing the risk of not getting rightful compensation for your inventions is the fundamental reason why patents were created in the first place.
With patents, you can try licensing new and existing technologies from the moment they are published or worst case, wait 20 years for the patents to expire instead of re-inventing/reverse-engineering them and still risk getting sued for espionage, plagiarism and any other backup infringement claims. With closed-door research, there is also no guarantee any of it will ever make it out the door.
As for historic names behind most of today's fundamental maths and sciences, a large chunk of them were bankrolled by nobles, kings, aristocrats, etc. who were mainly interested in attaching their names to upcoming bright minds for fame on relatively modest budgets if their family wasn't rich/noble to start with. Not at all the same thing as today's tens/hundreds of millions dollar research by private or publicly traded companies that need to get a reasonable return on that research to justify it and stay in business - very few people (outside academia) and businesses today can afford to bankroll major research efforts for fame only the way it used to be.
Junk/trivial/frivolous software patents may have tarnished the concept of software patents beyond repair and that would be a bad thing for people and companies who have genuine software/algorithmic inventions.
In any case, PTOs need to clarify and raise the bar on the cut-off of what is and isn't patentable.
The unwritten rules of "safe driving" can get somewhat crazy in some cities.
I have first-hand experience of how driving slower than rest of traffic usually does on a given stretch of highway is more dangerous than going (further) over the speed limit... totaled a car (indirectly) due to going only 20km/h over the limit somewhere I knew most drivers usually drive 40-60km/h over.
As long as Internet Explorer can play embedded Youtube videos, Microsoft can simply make a re-skinned IE and embedded video interface tailored to Youtube and use that instead, then all Google would see is just another IE client accessing Youtube, which would give them even less information than what they are getting now. This revised embedded player may still have ad-skipping and video download features.
Would Google end up requesting that Microsoft strip embedded video capabilities from IE?
Youtube is a publicly accessible service. There isn't much that Google can do to forbid anyone from accessing it for legit purposes.
Software may be mathematics but the research, engineering and creative thinking that went into bringing the software from concept to actual code isn't.
If I invented a new artificial intelligence algorithm that has distinctive advantages over every currently known alternative, I believe the principles behind it would still be very much patent-worthy. The exact software implementation is pointless since others would likely be able to rewrite their own alternate implementation from principles and my own implementation would already be covered under copyright anyway.
The big problem with software patents is the endless volume of different filings about different methods of doing generally trivial stuff like drawing lines and countless other things most programmers consider obvious, take for granted, is purely cosmetic and non-essential (ex.: end-of-list bounce), etc. so we get countless lawsuits about things nobody other than the patent troll and its victims care about aside from being outraged the patent was ever granted in the first place.
I'm not sure it's understood to be truly 'infinite', but 'so damned big as to be infinite for purposes of discussion'.
In terms of boundaries, it probably is... but maybe someday radio-telescopes will discover something from beyond the cosmic background radiation that will reveal that our universe is not what we thought it was. Maybe we will discover that our universe is just some kid's world-in-a-jar science project in a higher-order universe or something.
In terms of mass, the Big Bang Theory does imply that the universe has finite mass, however unimaginable it may be at least with our current understanding of matter and the universe.
An equally interesting theory that goes with the BBT is the Big Crunch: will the outward kinetic energy from the Big Bang propel galaxies so far that gravitational pull toward the center of the universe will never yank all matter back or will the universe as we know it eventually lose momentum and collapse unto itself? If the BCT is right, wherever you go to escape Earth's demise (if we do not blow it up while we're still on it before then), physics will catch up with you in 20+ trillion years!
If those servers earn you so little money per unit that you need to seriously consider moving due to power and cooling cost, you can probably get away with telling your customers that your service will be down for a few hours while you switch over to new servers next time you need to upgrade them.
The likelihood of finding a datacenter with P&C costs low enough to justify the expense of moving servers for that reason alone is pretty low so the decision to move would require additional motives in most cases.
At the very least, every watt that comes in the building also needs to come out so the power price needs to include the cost of getting rid of the resulting heat. This adds another 20-30% to power cost after you factor in the amortization, operating and maintenance cost of cooling equipment and the datacenter needs to make a profit off of that too on top of the underlying power utilities' own profit to justify the expense. We're already half-way to doubling the utility rate if the datacenter does not further process power such as conditioning to add further value.
In any case, datacenters do not have a monopoly on the server hosting business. If your current datacenter's power rates are high enough to become a deal-breaker for you, taking your servers elsewhere is always an option to consider - at least until datacenters end up under common ownership and become an actual mono/oligpoly.
How else would Autocomplete know what is offensive (or not) to you?
Since what constitutes "offensive" material varies wildly from person to person and also depending on the reason/motives people have to do any particular search, I doubt there is any way for autocomplete to comply.
I bet the plaintiff would consider my post defending autocomplete's cluenessless offensive.
How does a drunk driver killing bystanders or other drivers/passengers but surviving the crash himself help through natural selection? Same goes for random guys going on killing sprees.
Natural selection implies that the victim did something to earn a premature demise. Victims of killing sprees, terrorist attacks, drunk driving, etc. are usually only guilty of being at the wrong place at the wrong time through no fault of their own.
Slashdot Mirror
Is the article suggesting that in fifty years there has been little progress in making them more economical to build and run?
The biggest problem is that while specialized parts and materials may become more readily available which should translate into lower prices, regulations and safety requirements have become a whole lot tighter over time and costs associated with that have increased much faster.
You can compare this to the aviation industry where a bolt that would cost $0.10 at the local hardware store if you were allowed to get it from there ends up costing $20 because of certifications. It sounds completely nuts but that's how it is in fields obsessed with safety and regulations... if you watch Mayday (a show/documentary that recreates the story of real crashes and near-catastrophes), there are a few episodes where maintenance engineers ended up with hundreds of deaths or at the very least terrorized passengers on their conscience for things as simple as using the wrong - though seemingly identical - bolts.
What killed Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Miles Island isn't that they were particularly unsafe.
Chernobyl blew up mainly due to a whole bunch of human errors while preparing the reactor for a safety test - preparations were supposed to start nearly a day ahead of time and the chief engineer decided to rush it after preparation got delayed by a government request to run the reactor a few hours longer to accommodate peak hours. In their rush to bring down reactor output to test level, they accidentally radon-poisoned the core, power wouldn't come back up so they started removing control rods beyond GE's safe minimum and then got caught with their pants down in their attempts to restart it when the radon poisoning cleared up and reactor output surged out of control. This highlighted many design issues that could have helped the staff figure out what was happening a little sooner but the fundamental failure was human errors.
Three Mile Island's core issue was a flawed control/indicator pair for a discharge valve where the indicator tracked the control switch's state rather than the valve's actual state which caused the reactor to bleed dry without staff knowing it was happening. This got further complicated by lack of first-degree measurement of water level in the reactor core. How such a fundamental and trivial design flaw ever made it in an actual reactor design is beyond me. Without this vital bit of information, plant engineers had no way to know exactly what was going wrong when nearly every alarm, many of which contradictory, started going off at once.
For Fukushima, the single dumbest mistake and the root cause of most complications there was putting backup generators in floodable areas, causing the loss of nearly all backup power within hours. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the reactors themselves. Most nuclear plants house their backup generators in the turbine building precisely to shelter them from elements but Fukushima had theirs outdoors near sea-level. I'm still scratching my head about how the people who managed the site had the foresight to install wave-breakers off-shore but neglected to protect generators from potential flooding in some way.
Pebble and molten salt reactors still benefit from everything that was learned from past mistakes. If you had a pebble or MSR reactor with Chernobyl-era knowledge and experience, Chernobyl would likely still have happened: still stuck with a massive power surge once radon poisoning clears up. Same for TMI and Fukushima. Pebbles and molten salt may be more convenient and safer to handle and process but there is very little they can do to prevent operator, design and construction errors.
Following the procedures and operating manual would have saved Chernobyl by never allowing it to reach the highly volatile state it was forced into in the first place. A simple direct-observation water level gauge would have saved TMI by providing engineers the single most critical information they needed to know exactly what was happening. Putting generators indoors in a safe location would have saved Fukushima by keeping them safe from the salt-water ingestion that fouled them. Being "obsolete" played little to no part in any of those incidents; all the measures that would have prevented those incidents are very low-tech even for their original construction dates and could have been fixed at little to no cost if someone had simply thought of these being liabilities back then.
If you are going to defend nuclear as a safe energy source, I strongly suggest researching WHY those historic failures occurred before blindly tagging all "obsolete" reactors as intrinsically unsafe; otherwise you are simply contributing to the FUD about it. Old reactors are just about as safe as newer ones once retrofitted to address potential safety hazard as they are identified - and this applies to newer reactors regardless of type as well.
Newer reactors simply have the benefit of decades worth of safety enhancements being built-in from day-1.
Line losses getting it from point A to point B make it not worth doing on a large scale unless you live near, or in the desert
The main problem with molten salt solar (and most other solar and wind renewables) is that every Wh of energy relies on man-made structures for collection and storage with associated on-going maintenance and operating costs which cuts into how large this can cost-effectively scale up to and how much of a transmission loss can be afforded at a given retail price point.
Long distances work well for (very) large hydro projects: Hydro-Quebec has ~16GW of production at James Bay, ~800km from the nearest major citirs and Quebec still gets some of the lowest retail power rates in NA despite having some of the longest transmission lines in the world since on-going production costs are very low thanks to nature doing 99.9% of the job on its own. Doesn't work so well for smaller plants of any type with much higher on-going production costs per MW.
Simple UV exposure can be effectively eliminated with simple paint.
An extra dose of UV blockers/stabilizers in the top resin coat(s) can do most of the job too.
Get one of those recently announced 20-24" i5-based all-in-ones with touchscreens and sit in a yoga position with feet soles facing up and AIO on top. Problem solved!
Where are the brilliant creativity and programming tools for Tablets?
Give it some time. Most tablets have nowhere near the RAM and storage requirements for most serious productivity and multitasking stuff yet. Processing power is also a few notches short from optimal for many interactions.
The real beginning for tablet-centric computing is still two years away - that's when tablets will have enough of everything to run things like uncut Eclipse ports well enough to be worth considering.
Most of that "2.4X" comes from being quad-core with HT instead of a plain dual core. That does not help much with today's still mostly lightly threaded desktop apps. Yes, modern apps often have 20-150 threads but 90-99% of CPU load is often generated by a single thread in that lot since the other threads are mostly from application framework and API background stuff.
I still use good old HDDs for boot and storage - I only reboot my PC about once a month and rarely close programs after launching them so boot/launch times rarely bother me.
Some programs/games have horribly long load times regardless of how good your PC is. I recently re-installed HL2 just for the heck of it to see how much faster my current PC can load it and it still feels like it takes forever even when re-loading from disk cache.
Processing power, RAM and SSDs cannot overcome bad software design - at least not always.
Every time they say "the PC is dying", they conveniently neglect to specify form factors.
Few people need the encumberment and expansion potential of traditional 'tower' form factor so an increasingly large chunk of the market will be looking at non-traditional form factors for their next PC. Also, since there hasn't been much performance improvements on CPUs over the past four years, most people who already own a tower or laptop have little to no reason to upgrade those and choose to get tablets instead for convenience.
Based on the proliferation of touch-enabled LCDs with embedded PCs, it seems like the old Tablet-PC concept that miserably failed about 10 years ago is coming back to life with a vengeance... if it gets priced right on this round.
Simply making it known that new models can be remotely disabled when reported stolen will drastically reduce the resale value of unknown-source goods.
As for dismantling for parts, everything has microcontrollers in them these days so it would not be too hard to add a crypto-microcontroller in the RF chipset, CPU, display controller, etc., and network them together to propagate kill switches when detected. This could also be used to detect and disable unauthorized components from stolen devices... or if they wanted to be more strict/evil about it, it could lock a given set of components together so they cannot be used with any other components without the crypto keys to re-program them.
humans are at least semi-monogamous; frequently pair-bonding, if not for life, at least for the relatively long period for offspring to be born and reach self-sufficient maturity.
Are human truly naturally monogamous to any significant extent? Most of our society, religions, laws, entertainment, etc "strongly" encourage or even enforce it while similarly attempting to discourage polygamy.
In such a heavily biased environment with sentience getting in nature's way at every opportunity, it is very difficult to tell if the root cause is nature or the environment... in nature, most males would jump on a female in heat flashing her goods with minimal encouragement (known to occur even with mated pairs) while with humans, most guys would resist the temptation due to fear of legal, health and various external repercussions. I remember reading an article about 10 years ago where about 30% of guys will accept an offer for sex vs 10% for women. I suspect those percentages would be much higher if we did not have to worry about future consequences.
I strongly suspect the researchers' perception that humans are monogamous in nature is heavily skewed.
If they wanted to study true human nature, they would have to raise kids in total isolation from the outside world and its norms/cultures/influences to see what happens without any reference or interference to skew things anywhich way.
> Moore's law is about computing power.
No. Moore's law is about transistors per die. More transistors may translate into extra storage, extra features, integration, lower power, higher efficiency or other things that may not necessarily relate to computing power.
With Haswell, we have even reached a point where Intel can even afford to put the VRM on-die - one of the last things I was expecting to happen until news of it leaked out... I was certain they would integrate the IO Hub / South-Bridge first but this will come with Broadwell or Skylake.
Low-end tablets sold as client devices, sure.
Productivity-oriented "Tablet PCs" on the other hand will likely continue carrying increasing processing power and other resources at least until they catch up with laptops. That's where things will start getting interesting.
People laughed at the Tablet PC concept ~10 years ago... I laughed at it too mainly due to the ~$3000 price tag back then.
Things sure have come a long way from then and I would not be surprised if the Tablet PC concept came back with a vengeance over the next 2-3 years. Intel's intention to make most of Broadwell's lineup BGA-only next year sounds like they are going to be making a big push for embedded/all-in-one/NUC form factors in 2014-2015.
Two problems with shorter patents are that R&D costs for many modern inventions are growing exponentially and many of them are 10+ years in the making from initial concept research to first completed prototype.
Patents do not do you much good if they do not last long enough to have a reasonable chance of generating enough revenue to justify the effort before expiring. Companies may choose to opt for industrial secret which has no expiration date other than the time it takes others to figure it out instead, at which point you can still sue them for corporate espionage, plagiarism, DMCA or other infringement claims which would be just about as nasty as our everyday patent claims today if someone duplicates your invention suspiciously quickly.
However, I do not think software (actual written code) itself should be patentable - it is already covered by copyright. What should be patentable about software is the collection of principles and new algorithms it implements - the actual new intellectual work they represent - if they are genuinely innovative and non-trivial since all inventions are ultimately intellectual creations. Trivial cosmetic stuff (ex.: boot animations on Windows, Android, PS2, PS3, etc.) would still be trademarkable which would still let people duplicate the general concept as long as the resulting output looks and behaves different enough that it clearly stands as its own, unmistakable for the original.
But I agree that PTOs definitely need to clarify and raise the bar on patentability for both intellectual and physical inventions. They should hire engineering graduates along with subject matter experts to get a weighed opinion on obviousness from both ends of the experience spectrum.
Try paying attention to overhead signs when you get cut off by vehicles doing lane changes half a car length in front of you and in front of each-other. Over or under the speed limit would have made very little difference, I would still have missed the panels.
If it were only about whether or not something could be "reduced to maths" and fundamental sciences then just about nothing would be patentable. One thing to keep in mind is that back when PTOs were invented, the cost of intellectual inventions was negligible and could be taught/replicated in a matter of minutes, maybe days. Today, those inventions are a trillion-dollar industry spanning years or sometimes decades of research and development.
While I am generally against software patents due to how much they have been abused for countless stupid things, breakthrough non-obvious algorithms (stuff that is well beyond what is considered "fundamental" at the time of invention) should still be patent-worty. Why? Because if they aren't, then there is a high probability that research will remain locked behind closed doors as an industrial secret rather than get published for all to see and possibly get inspiration from for something else. That's assuming the prospect of losing your invention due to non-patentability does not discourage you from researching it in the first place. Reducing the risk of not getting rightful compensation for your inventions is the fundamental reason why patents were created in the first place.
With patents, you can try licensing new and existing technologies from the moment they are published or worst case, wait 20 years for the patents to expire instead of re-inventing/reverse-engineering them and still risk getting sued for espionage, plagiarism and any other backup infringement claims. With closed-door research, there is also no guarantee any of it will ever make it out the door.
As for historic names behind most of today's fundamental maths and sciences, a large chunk of them were bankrolled by nobles, kings, aristocrats, etc. who were mainly interested in attaching their names to upcoming bright minds for fame on relatively modest budgets if their family wasn't rich/noble to start with. Not at all the same thing as today's tens/hundreds of millions dollar research by private or publicly traded companies that need to get a reasonable return on that research to justify it and stay in business - very few people (outside academia) and businesses today can afford to bankroll major research efforts for fame only the way it used to be.
Junk/trivial/frivolous software patents may have tarnished the concept of software patents beyond repair and that would be a bad thing for people and companies who have genuine software/algorithmic inventions.
In any case, PTOs need to clarify and raise the bar on the cut-off of what is and isn't patentable.
The unwritten rules of "safe driving" can get somewhat crazy in some cities.
I have first-hand experience of how driving slower than rest of traffic usually does on a given stretch of highway is more dangerous than going (further) over the speed limit... totaled a car (indirectly) due to going only 20km/h over the limit somewhere I knew most drivers usually drive 40-60km/h over.
If you just want to disable them, a can of spray paint is probably your best bet. But you'll still need a ladder and some time.
Two words: paintball gun
No ladder required, takes seconds and relatively quiet.
As long as Internet Explorer can play embedded Youtube videos, Microsoft can simply make a re-skinned IE and embedded video interface tailored to Youtube and use that instead, then all Google would see is just another IE client accessing Youtube, which would give them even less information than what they are getting now. This revised embedded player may still have ad-skipping and video download features.
Would Google end up requesting that Microsoft strip embedded video capabilities from IE?
Youtube is a publicly accessible service. There isn't much that Google can do to forbid anyone from accessing it for legit purposes.
Software may be mathematics but the research, engineering and creative thinking that went into bringing the software from concept to actual code isn't.
If I invented a new artificial intelligence algorithm that has distinctive advantages over every currently known alternative, I believe the principles behind it would still be very much patent-worthy. The exact software implementation is pointless since others would likely be able to rewrite their own alternate implementation from principles and my own implementation would already be covered under copyright anyway.
The big problem with software patents is the endless volume of different filings about different methods of doing generally trivial stuff like drawing lines and countless other things most programmers consider obvious, take for granted, is purely cosmetic and non-essential (ex.: end-of-list bounce), etc. so we get countless lawsuits about things nobody other than the patent troll and its victims care about aside from being outraged the patent was ever granted in the first place.
I'm not sure it's understood to be truly 'infinite', but 'so damned big as to be infinite for purposes of discussion'.
In terms of boundaries, it probably is... but maybe someday radio-telescopes will discover something from beyond the cosmic background radiation that will reveal that our universe is not what we thought it was. Maybe we will discover that our universe is just some kid's world-in-a-jar science project in a higher-order universe or something.
In terms of mass, the Big Bang Theory does imply that the universe has finite mass, however unimaginable it may be at least with our current understanding of matter and the universe.
An equally interesting theory that goes with the BBT is the Big Crunch: will the outward kinetic energy from the Big Bang propel galaxies so far that gravitational pull toward the center of the universe will never yank all matter back or will the universe as we know it eventually lose momentum and collapse unto itself? If the BCT is right, wherever you go to escape Earth's demise (if we do not blow it up while we're still on it before then), physics will catch up with you in 20+ trillion years!
If those servers earn you so little money per unit that you need to seriously consider moving due to power and cooling cost, you can probably get away with telling your customers that your service will be down for a few hours while you switch over to new servers next time you need to upgrade them.
The likelihood of finding a datacenter with P&C costs low enough to justify the expense of moving servers for that reason alone is pretty low so the decision to move would require additional motives in most cases.
At the very least, every watt that comes in the building also needs to come out so the power price needs to include the cost of getting rid of the resulting heat. This adds another 20-30% to power cost after you factor in the amortization, operating and maintenance cost of cooling equipment and the datacenter needs to make a profit off of that too on top of the underlying power utilities' own profit to justify the expense. We're already half-way to doubling the utility rate if the datacenter does not further process power such as conditioning to add further value.
In any case, datacenters do not have a monopoly on the server hosting business. If your current datacenter's power rates are high enough to become a deal-breaker for you, taking your servers elsewhere is always an option to consider - at least until datacenters end up under common ownership and become an actual mono/oligpoly.
How else would Autocomplete know what is offensive (or not) to you?
Since what constitutes "offensive" material varies wildly from person to person and also depending on the reason/motives people have to do any particular search, I doubt there is any way for autocomplete to comply.
I bet the plaintiff would consider my post defending autocomplete's cluenessless offensive.
Natural selection?
How does a drunk driver killing bystanders or other drivers/passengers but surviving the crash himself help through natural selection? Same goes for random guys going on killing sprees.
Natural selection implies that the victim did something to earn a premature demise. Victims of killing sprees, terrorist attacks, drunk driving, etc. are usually only guilty of being at the wrong place at the wrong time through no fault of their own.