Yes, but I live in Florida, and we have this HUGE phosphate strip mining industry that's eating a giant hole in the middle of the state while simultaneously creating huge piles of radon emitting slag next to the port. Without worldwide agricultural dependence on our phosphate production, we'd lose a couple of hundred blue collar jobs amounting maybe 0.1% of the economic impact of tourism. The strip mining would stop, the industrial port traffic would be reduced, all those clouds of sulphuric acid coming from the refineries would stop. Oh, please, please don't stop using our phosphates!
Note that the US, who in principle did not sign the Kyoto protocol, actually reduced emissions significantly (not just reduction in growth, but actual reduction) since 2007 due to the economic recession.
So, we don't want to reduce carbon emissions because it will hurt our economy - but hurt the economy and emissions automatically reduce. Sounds like a vicious cycle that needs a technological exit strategy to me.
Either you are wrong or the article's graph sourced from the US department of energy is. It shows no significant reduction, only a slight dip before a continued upward trend.
That graph is on a 100 year timeframe starting in 1902 and non-specific about when it stops after 2000... I was referring to the numbers quoted in the text for 2007 and beyond. Economically, I hope I don't continue to live in a 2007->2008 trend, but if it continued, we would be significantly reducing emissions year over year. Too lazy to go and re-read, I think the article was predicting a return to 2007 level emissions in 2011, i.e. flat for the last 4 years.
Sure, we need reduction, not flat, but good luck even getting flat emissions out of China without extensive use of nuclear power...
Note that the US, who in principle did not sign the Kyoto protocol, actually reduced emissions significantly
This word "significantly"....I don't think it means what you think it means.
Read the article, I don't care enough to do the math or research, but what I read suggests that actual US reductions in emissions surpassed any target reductions that were being negotiated by the treaty, at least for the timeframe of 2007-2011.
Your WRX is the end-product of roughly 100 years of R&D with billions per year invested in a worldwide competition to build better-cheaper-safer-more appealing vehicles.
I'd guess that electric power is at about 1 to 2% of the total investment of petrol power at this point.
It's like Bill Gates' excuse as to why a pen and notebook is so much more useful than a tablet PC.
Any power density interesting enough to bother building a satellite to "beam down" is not going to be healthy for anything that walks, flies, or swims through the beam. Not saying that it's not preferable to a nuke plant, but the potential for military (ab)use is even greater and more obvious.
If I were taking him seriously, I would have asked if he could photosynthesize. Increased atmospheric CO2 is a little more complex than just making the grass greener. The one that bugs me more than most is increased ocean acidity, kill the corals, and possibly increase sinkhole formation activity - living in Florida is bad enough now with the idiots pumping water for strawberries so hard that they put holes all over the place, including in roads (I-4 had a big one), under houses, etc. But, more sinkholes would fall into the known unknown category, along with heat trapping, etc. The really scary ones are the unknown unknowns.
Note that the US, who in principle did not sign the Kyoto protocol, actually reduced emissions significantly (not just reduction in growth, but actual reduction) since 2007 due to the economic recession.
So, we don't want to reduce carbon emissions because it will hurt our economy - but hurt the economy and emissions automatically reduce. Sounds like a vicious cycle that needs a technological exit strategy to me.
I already know what will happen. Policy measures will be introduced to barely limit emissions worldwide. Eventually this will become a looming problem, and a reasonably sized international body will decide that we will use active measures to counteract the climate change problems.
Nobody wants to cut back on emissions in any meaningful way because it will mean literal death for large numbers of people unable to be supported by non-oil-based agricultural methods, and it will also mean a reduction in the standard of living for everyone else. You know as well as I do that we won't do anything until the last minute, which will be active climate measures.
If we have really reached peak oil, then the cost of oil may fix the problem all by itself... now, we just need to stop digging all the coal from the ground, methane from the deep shale, and other sequestered carbon that could be replaced by nuclear, solar, wind, hamsters on wheels, and all that other green jazz.
Note that the US, who in principle did not sign the Kyoto protocol, actually reduced emissions significantly (not just reduction in growth, but actual reduction) since 2007 due to the economic recession.
So, we don't want to reduce carbon emissions because it will hurt our economy - but hurt the economy and emissions automatically reduce. Sounds like a vicious cycle that needs a technological exit strategy to me.
In the early days of automobiles, a farmer out west developed hydraulic assist power steering in his barn, put it on his model-T, decided it was good, got himself a patent, and drove to Detroit to sell his idea.
The auto industry's response? "Very nice sir, we're not interested at this time, good luck with that." The year his patent expired, all the major manufacturers introduced power steering on their new models.
Luckily, the digital world moves fast enough that this kind of patent patience doesn't pay anymore... but, it's still an option.
The interesting thing about the post-internet marketplace is that I, never leaving my house or wearing more than my boxer shorts, can, for not much more than poverty level income money, enter the global marketplace and have at least _some chance_ of success with a software or other digitally delivered product.
It is still true that millions of dollars in backing and promotions will almost always win out over the little guy, the question is: do we want to allow the big guys to continue to protect themselves with patents from JimBob in his boxer shorts?
Oh yeah, I forgot about that... Well, then, we just have to get 535 squabbling politicians to get behind this and make it happen... I do hope they surpass my expectations.
That's the loophole in the patent office: application areas. If you're working in a "new field," you can dig up the steam engine and patent the application of the steam engine in your field.
Somehow, a neighbor of mine got a patent on a "passive braking light," the idea being that when you lift your foot off the accelerator, you slow down, and thus, should flash a warning lamp to traffic behind you. Funny thing was, before he even filed the patent, city buses had this feature: both amber turn indicators would illuminate when the driver got off the throttle, seems that engine braking on the buses was both highly effective and frequently used by drivers, so the bus manufacturers just came up with the idea on their own and implemented it. As you might have guessed, his patent issued, first try with no objections about prior art. Of course, if he ever went after the bus manufacturers, they could flick him off with a simple date of their first use of the idea, but I wonder if his estate was ever successful in licensing that patent to somebody who didn't know about the buses.
I think patents make a lot of sense, for some things and not for others.
On balance, there are a lot of really bad software patents, simply because you can sit down with any one of a hundred people "skilled in the art" of whatever area of software and ask them "is this obvious?" and they will almost always say yes, though when you ask "why hasn't it been done before?" the answer comes back a little more murky, usually something about it just not having made sense before because of the user base or available hardware or whatever, and during the period of 1995-2005, the patent office seemed to be in rubber stamp mode for software.
If you go back to something like barbed wire, there were probably a half-dozen wire manufacturers crying "oh, that was so obvious, we were about to do that" when the patents issued, but today with software, you literally have millions of individuals who are capable of implementing these things that are getting patented - it's a different scale, and the standard for obviousness and prior art should be equally higher.
I think we are close to serious patent reform which is going to be good for everyone. Everyone agrees the system is broken and everyone agrees there are insane patents.
Unfortunately, it seems to me like it will take executive (Presidential) action to get reform moving, and I can't see patent reform as an issue worth fighting for, from the perspective of a President running for re-election, or a newly elected President, or even a President in mid-term. It's just not as painful for people as the other issues that currently need addressing.
... too incompetent to judge the quality of patents anymore, especially regarding software and mathematics. There is an infinite amount of work to be discovered/yet undone.
I've always thought that the peer review system would be a good patch for the system. If you want to patent something in a very narrow field, file your application, but know that it will be your competitors reviewing the patent application and pointing out prior art for the final review by the patent office.
Likewise he can't know if it's an invention, or just an incremental change from what already exists.
My favorite personal infringement was "use of XOR to draw a cursor" - wow, like, can I patent the use of a coin in a random game of chance with 50/50 outcome, too?
The only possible benefit of the trolls is that, 17 years after they've done their trolling, it is then clearly in the public domain. That XOR patent expired sometime in the 1990s.
software patents are written by lawyers in a language that software engineers don't even understand.
That's been true across many industries, at least since the 1970s (which is as far back as I ever researched prior art...)
The real indicator of what's broken in the patent system can be read in the patent numbers themselves... in 1992 we were at 5 million and something, since the start of the United States Patent Office, now we're roughly double that number?!
Sorry, everything useful hasn't already been invented, but something is just out of synch. I think an ex-CEO of mine (ex high school football quarterback too) summed up the problem in his own words: "Our competitors were granted 62 patents last year, while we got three, can anybody tell me what that means?" I'm told there was stunned silence in the boardroom. "It means that WE'RE 59 BEHIND, now let's get going!" Patents have been turned into fuel for lawsuits, and they're reaching a scale where even a crappy little $100M/year company can hire a small army of patent attorneys to stock their powder magazine.
Back when Chrome was new, it had some compatibility problems with certain websites, more than FF or IE did (maybe about on par with Opera). That has gotten better and better over the years.
My RSS "subscriptions" are all on my yahoo/google "homepages" - not sure if that would scratch your itch or not, works for me, in every browser on every desk - which is another nice feature of Chrome, synchronized bookmarks - I live by the little bookmark bar, erasing the names so I can fit about 20 icons one-click away... in Chrome those bookmarks are synchronized between home, work and various notebook PCs, very nice.
Listen - I have to restart my browser about once a day.
Short answer: switch to Chrome. I couldn't get my wife to switch until she was getting a virus a day from Facebook via Firefox, that convinced her to try it, and she loves it now. Somebody will target Chrome with a successful virus sooner or later, but the real point is: Chrome is good, Chrome is newer (fresher) than Firefox, and, for the moment, it's worth trying.
...things like MIS, did about a tenth of the work the Engineers do, and have job prospects nearly as good as we do.
It's economic realities like that drawing a lot of the best and brightest away from Engineering.
If that's the case, companies must be profiting from putting these bodies, at great expense, into things like MIS.
There's a particular tech field, MRI pulse sequence programming, that's very high end technical - mostly post-doc Physics majors doing the work there... they're a dime a dozen, supply and demand - sure it's harder to learn than being a Pharmacist, but for whatever reason, lots of people learn it, so they're competing themselves out of a decent living - Pharmacists not so much.
I have a friend who used to drive a truck, good honest work, problem is, in his words "Truck drivers are all idiots." They compete each other down until all they can afford is to live in a trailer in BFE with their wife working at the diner to make ends meet. If half the truck drivers in this country suddenly went back to school and learned to do anything else, the remaining half could demand much better compensation.
What I have noticed in engineering is an oversupply of engineering degrees attached to people who can't do the work very well, if at all. Companies are willing to pay for talented engineers, if you can somehow demonstrate that you are one, and negotiate your way out of the peon pay that, frankly, so many "engineers" deserve. Not saying all these people are a waste of good breathing air, but many of them would be better utilized in sales, "application engineering," or even project management, instead of trying to write software, design circuits, mechanical parts, or industrial processes.
Slashdot Mirror
sarcasm
Yes, but I live in Florida, and we have this HUGE phosphate strip mining industry that's eating a giant hole in the middle of the state while simultaneously creating huge piles of radon emitting slag next to the port. Without worldwide agricultural dependence on our phosphate production, we'd lose a couple of hundred blue collar jobs amounting maybe 0.1% of the economic impact of tourism. The strip mining would stop, the industrial port traffic would be reduced, all those clouds of sulphuric acid coming from the refineries would stop. Oh, please, please don't stop using our phosphates!
/sarcasm
Note that the US, who in principle did not sign the Kyoto protocol, actually reduced emissions significantly (not just reduction in growth, but actual reduction) since 2007 due to the economic recession.
So, we don't want to reduce carbon emissions because it will hurt our economy - but hurt the economy and emissions automatically reduce. Sounds like a vicious cycle that needs a technological exit strategy to me.
Either you are wrong or the article's graph sourced from the US department of energy is. It shows no significant reduction, only a slight dip before a continued upward trend.
That graph is on a 100 year timeframe starting in 1902 and non-specific about when it stops after 2000... I was referring to the numbers quoted in the text for 2007 and beyond. Economically, I hope I don't continue to live in a 2007->2008 trend, but if it continued, we would be significantly reducing emissions year over year. Too lazy to go and re-read, I think the article was predicting a return to 2007 level emissions in 2011, i.e. flat for the last 4 years.
Sure, we need reduction, not flat, but good luck even getting flat emissions out of China without extensive use of nuclear power...
Note that the US, who in principle did not sign the Kyoto protocol, actually reduced emissions significantly
This word "significantly"....I don't think it means what you think it means.
Read the article, I don't care enough to do the math or research, but what I read suggests that actual US reductions in emissions surpassed any target reductions that were being negotiated by the treaty, at least for the timeframe of 2007-2011.
Let's just hope that all the "Day after tomorrow" whiplash reaction from the Earth predictions are wrong.
Your WRX is the end-product of roughly 100 years of R&D with billions per year invested in a worldwide competition to build better-cheaper-safer-more appealing vehicles.
I'd guess that electric power is at about 1 to 2% of the total investment of petrol power at this point.
It's like Bill Gates' excuse as to why a pen and notebook is so much more useful than a tablet PC.
Any power density interesting enough to bother building a satellite to "beam down" is not going to be healthy for anything that walks, flies, or swims through the beam. Not saying that it's not preferable to a nuke plant, but the potential for military (ab)use is even greater and more obvious.
If I were taking him seriously, I would have asked if he could photosynthesize. Increased atmospheric CO2 is a little more complex than just making the grass greener. The one that bugs me more than most is increased ocean acidity, kill the corals, and possibly increase sinkhole formation activity - living in Florida is bad enough now with the idiots pumping water for strawberries so hard that they put holes all over the place, including in roads (I-4 had a big one), under houses, etc. But, more sinkholes would fall into the known unknown category, along with heat trapping, etc. The really scary ones are the unknown unknowns.
Note that the US, who in principle did not sign the Kyoto protocol, actually reduced emissions significantly (not just reduction in growth, but actual reduction) since 2007 due to the economic recession.
So, we don't want to reduce carbon emissions because it will hurt our economy - but hurt the economy and emissions automatically reduce. Sounds like a vicious cycle that needs a technological exit strategy to me.
I already know what will happen. Policy measures will be introduced to barely limit emissions worldwide. Eventually this will become a looming problem, and a reasonably sized international body will decide that we will use active measures to counteract the climate change problems.
Nobody wants to cut back on emissions in any meaningful way because it will mean literal death for large numbers of people unable to be supported by non-oil-based agricultural methods, and it will also mean a reduction in the standard of living for everyone else. You know as well as I do that we won't do anything until the last minute, which will be active climate measures.
If we have really reached peak oil, then the cost of oil may fix the problem all by itself... now, we just need to stop digging all the coal from the ground, methane from the deep shale, and other sequestered carbon that could be replaced by nuclear, solar, wind, hamsters on wheels, and all that other green jazz.
More food for plants right?
Yeah, are you a vegetable?
Yeah, my older relatives are in the waterfront property, I invested inland at 25 feet above current sea level.
Note that the US, who in principle did not sign the Kyoto protocol, actually reduced emissions significantly (not just reduction in growth, but actual reduction) since 2007 due to the economic recession.
So, we don't want to reduce carbon emissions because it will hurt our economy - but hurt the economy and emissions automatically reduce. Sounds like a vicious cycle that needs a technological exit strategy to me.
In the early days of automobiles, a farmer out west developed hydraulic assist power steering in his barn, put it on his model-T, decided it was good, got himself a patent, and drove to Detroit to sell his idea.
The auto industry's response? "Very nice sir, we're not interested at this time, good luck with that." The year his patent expired, all the major manufacturers introduced power steering on their new models.
Luckily, the digital world moves fast enough that this kind of patent patience doesn't pay anymore... but, it's still an option.
The interesting thing about the post-internet marketplace is that I, never leaving my house or wearing more than my boxer shorts, can, for not much more than poverty level income money, enter the global marketplace and have at least _some chance_ of success with a software or other digitally delivered product.
It is still true that millions of dollars in backing and promotions will almost always win out over the little guy, the question is: do we want to allow the big guys to continue to protect themselves with patents from JimBob in his boxer shorts?
Oh yeah, I forgot about that... Well, then, we just have to get 535 squabbling politicians to get behind this and make it happen... I do hope they surpass my expectations.
Yes, lots of talk, but when it comes to making it actually happen... I hope they're better than their records suggest.
That's the loophole in the patent office: application areas. If you're working in a "new field," you can dig up the steam engine and patent the application of the steam engine in your field.
Somehow, a neighbor of mine got a patent on a "passive braking light," the idea being that when you lift your foot off the accelerator, you slow down, and thus, should flash a warning lamp to traffic behind you. Funny thing was, before he even filed the patent, city buses had this feature: both amber turn indicators would illuminate when the driver got off the throttle, seems that engine braking on the buses was both highly effective and frequently used by drivers, so the bus manufacturers just came up with the idea on their own and implemented it. As you might have guessed, his patent issued, first try with no objections about prior art. Of course, if he ever went after the bus manufacturers, they could flick him off with a simple date of their first use of the idea, but I wonder if his estate was ever successful in licensing that patent to somebody who didn't know about the buses.
I think patents make a lot of sense, for some things and not for others.
On balance, there are a lot of really bad software patents, simply because you can sit down with any one of a hundred people "skilled in the art" of whatever area of software and ask them "is this obvious?" and they will almost always say yes, though when you ask "why hasn't it been done before?" the answer comes back a little more murky, usually something about it just not having made sense before because of the user base or available hardware or whatever, and during the period of 1995-2005, the patent office seemed to be in rubber stamp mode for software.
If you go back to something like barbed wire, there were probably a half-dozen wire manufacturers crying "oh, that was so obvious, we were about to do that" when the patents issued, but today with software, you literally have millions of individuals who are capable of implementing these things that are getting patented - it's a different scale, and the standard for obviousness and prior art should be equally higher.
I think we are close to serious patent reform which is going to be good for everyone. Everyone agrees the system is broken and everyone agrees there are insane patents.
Unfortunately, it seems to me like it will take executive (Presidential) action to get reform moving, and I can't see patent reform as an issue worth fighting for, from the perspective of a President running for re-election, or a newly elected President, or even a President in mid-term. It's just not as painful for people as the other issues that currently need addressing.
... too incompetent to judge the quality of patents anymore, especially regarding software and mathematics. There is an infinite amount of work to be discovered/yet undone.
I've always thought that the peer review system would be a good patch for the system. If you want to patent something in a very narrow field, file your application, but know that it will be your competitors reviewing the patent application and pointing out prior art for the final review by the patent office.
Likewise he can't know if it's an invention, or just an incremental change from what already exists.
My favorite personal infringement was "use of XOR to draw a cursor" - wow, like, can I patent the use of a coin in a random game of chance with 50/50 outcome, too?
The only possible benefit of the trolls is that, 17 years after they've done their trolling, it is then clearly in the public domain. That XOR patent expired sometime in the 1990s.
software patents are written by lawyers in a language that software engineers don't even understand.
That's been true across many industries, at least since the 1970s (which is as far back as I ever researched prior art...)
The real indicator of what's broken in the patent system can be read in the patent numbers themselves... in 1992 we were at 5 million and something, since the start of the United States Patent Office, now we're roughly double that number?!
Sorry, everything useful hasn't already been invented, but something is just out of synch. I think an ex-CEO of mine (ex high school football quarterback too) summed up the problem in his own words: "Our competitors were granted 62 patents last year, while we got three, can anybody tell me what that means?" I'm told there was stunned silence in the boardroom. "It means that WE'RE 59 BEHIND, now let's get going!" Patents have been turned into fuel for lawsuits, and they're reaching a scale where even a crappy little $100M/year company can hire a small army of patent attorneys to stock their powder magazine.
Back when Chrome was new, it had some compatibility problems with certain websites, more than FF or IE did (maybe about on par with Opera). That has gotten better and better over the years.
My RSS "subscriptions" are all on my yahoo/google "homepages" - not sure if that would scratch your itch or not, works for me, in every browser on every desk - which is another nice feature of Chrome, synchronized bookmarks - I live by the little bookmark bar, erasing the names so I can fit about 20 icons one-click away... in Chrome those bookmarks are synchronized between home, work and various notebook PCs, very nice.
Qt (basis of Safari, IIRC) would seem to be a good place to start something like this....
Listen - I have to restart my browser about once a day.
Short answer: switch to Chrome. I couldn't get my wife to switch until she was getting a virus a day from Facebook via Firefox, that convinced her to try it, and she loves it now. Somebody will target Chrome with a successful virus sooner or later, but the real point is: Chrome is good, Chrome is newer (fresher) than Firefox, and, for the moment, it's worth trying.
...things like MIS, did about a tenth of the work the Engineers do, and have job prospects nearly as good as we do.
It's economic realities like that drawing a lot of the best and brightest away from Engineering.
If that's the case, companies must be profiting from putting these bodies, at great expense, into things like MIS.
There's a particular tech field, MRI pulse sequence programming, that's very high end technical - mostly post-doc Physics majors doing the work there... they're a dime a dozen, supply and demand - sure it's harder to learn than being a Pharmacist, but for whatever reason, lots of people learn it, so they're competing themselves out of a decent living - Pharmacists not so much.
I have a friend who used to drive a truck, good honest work, problem is, in his words "Truck drivers are all idiots." They compete each other down until all they can afford is to live in a trailer in BFE with their wife working at the diner to make ends meet. If half the truck drivers in this country suddenly went back to school and learned to do anything else, the remaining half could demand much better compensation.
What I have noticed in engineering is an oversupply of engineering degrees attached to people who can't do the work very well, if at all. Companies are willing to pay for talented engineers, if you can somehow demonstrate that you are one, and negotiate your way out of the peon pay that, frankly, so many "engineers" deserve. Not saying all these people are a waste of good breathing air, but many of them would be better utilized in sales, "application engineering," or even project management, instead of trying to write software, design circuits, mechanical parts, or industrial processes.