The Fermi Paradox cannot be so easily dismissed. Assuming that ANY extraterrestrial civilization within our galaxy achieves interstellar travel, it just shouldn't take that long (in geologic time) for them to colonize the entire galaxy. Once ships from the civilization leave their home star, it becomes very difficult for that civilization to become extinct due to some local catastrophe. Therefore it becomes hard to avoid the conclusion that there are few if any such space traveling civilizations - and most likely none in this galaxy.
Perhaps interstellar travel is just simply harder than we think it is - although it is difficult to see exactly how that might be the case; and some civilizations may well forgo it simply because of the expense and time spans involved with the easier forms of it. But again, it only takes one space faring civilization to colonize the entire galaxy.
Personally I find the Fermi Paradox a very strong argument, but it's important to note that it only implies that the probability of space faring civilizations must be low. It says nothing about the probability of life on other planets (intelligence may be very rare in the universe - it certainly is among earthly species), or about the probability of intelligent life with a fairly advanced civilization that is short of being a space faring civilization. The latter is the only kind we'd be likely to find with SETI (since true space faring civilizations are apparently almost nonexistent) and it's that latter type of civilization that would be most vulnerable to extinction due to some local catastrophe - in fact, it's a good guess that that's why we haven't seen any.
Therefore it is hard to avoid the conclusion that either (1) we are very likely alone in the galaxy, although quite possibly not alone in the Universe (though it would be extremely difficult to detect civilizations in other galaxies), or (2) technological civilizations are almost always relatively short-lived. Obviously these possibilities are not mutually exclusive, but in either case SETI must be rated as an extreme long shot. Still it's probably worth funding at some level, simply because if we do get lucky the scientific and other implications can be tremendous.
Maybe I have a warped sense of humor, but surely I am not the only one here who would think it a lot of fun to take one of the various small-aircraft / flying insectoid toys on the market (or a home-built one for that matter) and fly it over such a gathering (of whatever political persuasion) where there would be guaranteed to be a certain percentage of the attendees who spend much of their time convinced that there is some kind of Vast (Left/Right/Whatever) Wing Conspiracy, and that they are likely to be one of its targets. Make sure that your toy is seen by a lot of people, and if possible especially by reporters. Then sit back and wait for the fun to begin.
Yeah, I was a bit of a smart alec as kid. But I still think it would be a lot of fun. Wonder if that's what happened here.:-)
My thought was that these people are probably witnessing cicadas.
This is an interesting thought. So far I haven't seen much about this incident except that "some people" thought that these things looked "too big" to be real "dragonflies". This is very much hearsay evidence, which is to say, not much evidence at all. My father was an entomologist, so I've gotten to see a lot of insects of all all sizes and shapes. A lot of people, when they first encounter something like a cicada or one of the larger species of dragonflies, can hardly believe they're seeing a real insect, but of course they are - and these are just rare enough that many people just simply have never noticed them before.
I have no idea if people really saw this or what the logic would be of using such a device at a war protest, but to say that such a device is impossible with not only today's consumer technology, but expensive, secret military technology seems mighty foolish to me.
I don't think the main problem for such devices is flight - it's control, and putting a useful payload on the device given the degree of control attainable. Everyone seems to be assuming video, and that it must be sending high-resolution pictures of everyone at the protest to some big central database. This seems unrealistic to me - at best, such a small device is likely to have relatively poor resolution pictures (remember, it must not be not taking them from very close up since nobody could get a good look at it). Telephoto lenses only help if you can keep the platform stable - otherwise you quickly lose your target when the platform gets caught by a puff of air. Wide-angle crowd shots still might be useful for generalized crowd management - for example, if some madman like the guy at VA Tech pulls out a gun, it might help locate him - but they aren't going to be very useful for identifying individuals unless they're pretty high resolution.
But there are lots of other payloads that might be more useful - sniffers (for explosives or for radioactivity), or audio come immediately to mind - and these do not have the very severe directional and distance problems that video does. For many kinds of surveillance they are even more useful than most video would be.
But, again, given that this is DC in the summer it's likely to be.... just a dragonfly. Even if the CIA has thousands of these things, that's a tiny fraction of the number of real dragonflies in DC.
The CIA's museum entry is almost certainly fake. That thing looks way too realistic and it's thirty years in the past.
All it would take to make such a device look superficially "realistic" like that is a bit of plastic to build up an external shell. Not a big deal at all, and well within the capabilities of the time.
What would have been much more of a problem (and most likely still is) would be control. At the time they did not have fast or small chips, so any control circuitry outside the most elementary would have to be off-platform - which means either wires or radio-controlled, both of which pose other problems (power, distance, etc) which would have been hard to surmount in those days on such a small platform.
The article says nothing about payload - which is the most interesting question, especially since a lot of miniaturized electronics (by modern standards, anyway) were not available at that time. As I've said elsewhere in this thread I think (useful) pictures (whether still or video) would be very difficult even today, unless the idea was to "land" the thing on a ledge somewhere to take the pictures - and for reasons I've already outlined I don't think an analog camera would solve the problem. For audio surveillance, engine and other noise would be a problem, again unless the thing landed first. The article does not say what the exact point was, or if they even got to the point of trying to figure out what payloads might work.
Getting the thing to fly is one of the least of your problems. In order to have something that's useful for (visual) surveillance, it's also necessary to be able to control where it flies and to have a stable enough platform to get useful pictures - not simply pictures that aren't blurred, but pictures that are of what you want rather than something that's 25 feet away. These are much harder tasks - to which the CIA site alludes when it says that their device did not have enough stability in a "cross-wind" (and I suspect in other situations as well).
I suspect that the CIA's capabilities have improved significantly since then, but it's still a hard problem - and if all you want to do is to get some mug shots of some of the participants in a domestic public protest (and in DC for crying out loud, which is already crawling with spooks), there are MUCH easier and more reliable ways to do so.
You're forgetting the video processing problems of such a device, which pose difficulties of their own.
* Difficulty focusing the optics on a target because of the motion of the platform;
* Small size optics and CCD's making decent resolution pictures difficult;
* Likewise the small size makes it necessary to choose between decent resolution pictures that don't show a very large field, or wide-angle pictures that are very fuzzy.
The third point has been difficult for them to solve even for the much larger "hang glider size" drones used in Iraq and Afganistan - and clearly there would be a higher priority to solve it for them than for something that was being used for crowd surveillance. One would think that the next step would not be a dragonfly-sized device, but a robin-sized device; the problems would still be difficult but should be much easier to solve.
It's barely possible that something like this has been deployed, but I suspect that the point would not be so much for identifying individuals but to look for visual or chemical signatures of weapons, which wouldn't require nearly so much resolution. Even there, pictures or video are a problem because of the problems of trying to aim what's likely to be a "soda-straw" view through the camera. Traditional small cameras on trees and other fixed points, plus plainclothes agents (both wired and unwired), would be far more effective both for crowd safety and for the identification of individuals.
For what it's worth I've seen some really big dragonflies - some with bodies over 4" long - in marshy places, for which DC certainly qualifies. Sometimes the most prosaic explanation is the correct one, and I suspect that this is one of those times.
I'm not so sure that the original article has been fairly represented. If the claim were that the mineral removed radioactivity in general or radioactive substances in general, I would be very skeptical (as noted by numerous other posters, this is a very difficult thing to do, and each isotope would require a different removal procedure) - but the original article says that:
It can absorb radioactivity from liquid nuclear waste.
(Emphasis added). This is a very different proposition - it's not nearly so hard to imagine some kind of filter or series of filters that might preferentially remove some of the most dangerous elements that were common in nuclear waste such as might be produced by a power plant. Yes, it would remove the non-radioactive isotopes as well (unless you wanted to send the various elemental fractions through cascades of centrifuges or filters that would preferentially remove the heavier isotopes - a very laborious proposition) - except for those elements that are heavy enough that they are always radioactive, of course. But even that could still be a very useful property - though I'd think it would hardly be big news, there are already plenty of chemical ways to separate many such elements that have radioactive isotopes that might be present in dangerous quantities in the waste from a nuclear plant. This compound, if it exists, probably just adds another pathway or two for that to be accomplished.
I suspect that whatever might have been found, the journalist didn't describe it very clearly, and then the Slashdot article further garbled the story... sort of like a game of "telephone."
The problem isn't that you can't get this testimony in front of the court, but that the plaintiffs can also put up expert witnesses of their own, and in a highly technical field the judge and jury may not be very well prepared to tell who's telling the truth and who's blowing smoke - especially since everyone will likely be seen to have their own axe to grind.
yes, but it's a cure you can charge 500+ times the price.
Possibly. It would depend on a number of factors: How good are the long-term treatment options? How expensive are they? What's the expected life span of those who have the disease, given both options? What are the side effects and risks associated with each treatment? If it's a disease that happens late in life - like Alzheimer's - and there are treatment options that aren't too awful (not the case right now with Alzheimer's, I know, but taking it as an example of a disease that primarily affects the elderly), then people - that is, insurance companies and Medicare - may be less willing to plunk down a huge chunk of change for someone who may only have a few years left. But even if that multiplication factor is excessive, you're certainly correct that in general there would be a willingness to pay more - possibly even a lot more - for a cure than there would for long-term treatment.
Even if there is a chance the company will make a lot more money in 17 years, it still requires the people running, and the shareholders, to put off immediate greater personal gain.
Anyone looking at the company's books - which will naturally include any serious investors - will be looking at the combined Net Present Value of their intellectual property, as well as risks to it from potential competitors, lawsuits, etc. Certainly everyone would like to go for the immediate big win, but in fact most drugs aren't in that category and it's quite routine for pharmaceutical companies and investors to be looking at the expected revenue streams from their portfolio of products and for those to be factored into the company's overall valuation.
I don't think we disagree very much - I just don't think it's quite as cut-and-dried as you make it sound. But clearly the posters who are claiming that drug companies are unwilling to look for cures because it's "bad for business" need to take some courses in basic economics and investing.
These are all good points, but they don't tell the whole story.
In many cases, a curative drug will require more ground-breaking research than one that's merely an improvement on existing treatment; therefore the curative drug is likely to cost more to develop than one that's merely an improved long-term treatment. Of course, in the case of Alzheimer's, where we don't even have good treatment options, this point is moot. Nevertheless curative drugs can and have been very profitable for the pharmaceutical industry.
For those who still don't understand, look up the Excel spreadsheet function NPV (Net Present Value), which computes the net present value of an annuity. In this case the annuity in question would be the long-term return from selling a treatment-oriented drug. If you can sell a cure for the same or greater price than the "present value" of that treatment annuity, that's a good business decision - especially since you'll never have the risk of losing most of the remaining value of the annuity because someone else developed a better drug.
The referenced article is very interesting; there may well be a fair number of misdiagnoses.
However the estimates in the article seem to indicate that the incidence of CJD that has been misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's cannot be much higher than around 10-15% of dementia-related deaths, and likely much lower, possibly even in the 1-2% range. So I would doubt that misdiagnosis of CJD would have a huge effect on the reported rate of Alzheimer's. Still that's potentially a lot of people dying from CJD, far higher than the rate that's usually been taken for granted, and translates to thousands of deaths per year rather than a couple hundred.
We don't do routine autopsies any more but we do enough so that if the proportion of CJD deaths were very high - say, 40-50% or more of dementia-related deaths - we'd know about it by now. We'd even be likely to know it if the percentage were only 15-20%. But there are few enough of the CJD deaths that it might be possible to miss some important trends relating to that disease.
What I found more interesting were some of the indications that Alzheimer's itself might also be a prion-induced disease. Generally the disease course in Alzheimer's is quite a bit slower than with either classic CJD or new variant CJD (aka "mad cow" disease) and the neuropathologies are different (although sometimes overlapping), so it seems probable that it isn't caused by the same agent although they could certainly share similarities.
Could many currently mysterious chronic diseases in fact be prion-related?
A cure is one-shot deal. Once you're cured, you're cured and no longer cash cow. Bad for business. [...] when you're comparing a cure and treatment it's pretty obvious which makes good deal more money. One injection, or one daily for twenty years?
There isn't even a particularly useful treatment, pharmaceutical or otherwise, for Alzheimer's, let alone a cure - so your argument is specious on its face.
Besides, the pharmaceutical industry as a whole is by no means averse to producing curative drugs; that's what antibiotics and vaccines are, for example. The pharmaceutical industry isn't a single monolithic company or some kind of corporate cooperative; if one of them can produce a drug that's useful, they stand to make a good deal of money from it even if it just requires a one-time dose (the price of the drug will probably just be set higher in that case).
You can argue that they often prefer to fund development for drugs that are treatment-oriented rather than cure-oriented, and there may be a wee bit of truth in that, but if they have a treatment-oriented product and their competitor in the next city or halfway around the world comes up with a cure (or even just a significantly better treatment) the value of their product has just gone almost to zero overnight. Where's the profit in that!?
Besides, they don't always have the luxury of making a conscious decision about whether a new product will be curative or merely long-term treatment; they have to follow where the science is leading. If current research is suggesting a likely approach for cure, it would be stupid for a company to abandon work on curative drugs in favor of drugs that were long-term treatment only, because as noted above as soon as the curative treatment (pharmaceutical or otherwise) became available, most of the value of their investment would be wiped out overnight.
I think if you take off your tinfoil hat you'll find that the world doesn't work the way you think it does. Very rarely can you find these vast conspiracies that you imply.
First of all, as far as I've seen the vaccine is NOT a cure in the sense of reversing the effects and restoring lost mental function, but at most of halting the progression - though even that is still under evaluation, since it's by no means clear that simply removing the plaque is enough to stop the disease process. Not that a treatment that halted the progression of the disease wouldn't be a very good thing, but it's not the same thing as a cure.
Secondly, the vaccine has NOT been abandoned, as far as I can find; instead there is work ongoing to try to reduce potentially dangerous side effects such as inflammation.
Thirdly, in what sense would a cure be "bad for business"?! Pharmaceutical firms are not even in the nursing home business which is the primary cost of care for end-stage Alzheimer's. In fact they could stand to make a good deal of money if a cure could be found!
Exactly what makes you think that most of the "sameness" of every day at a nursing home isn't caused by diseases such as Alzheimer's?! True, many of the residents have serious physical problems that may preclude their living alone, but physical disabilities don't prevent you from doing a lot of interesting and varied activities that just don't require a lot of physical activity - reading, talking, playing Scrabble, even surfing the Net (yes there are some older adults who do exactly that).
Sorry if this sounds too rude, but your post sounds as if you haven't spent much time around older people who have found themselves in that situation.
Unfortunately the "obvious idea" approach to invalidating a patent is often difficult - in general you won't be going before a judge or jury who actually knows about software development from the standpoint of a professional. Most of them won't know any more about professional software development than your grandmother, and you're at their mercy about whether they believe your expert witnesses or those of the plaintiffs.
In contrast, if you can exhibit prior art then it becomes much easier. It's hard to argue that the idea is truly novel when you have prior art staring you in the face.
Wouldn't that question be closed by the time you won the first case -- their suit against you?
Not likely - the bar would be considerably higher than merely whether the patent was invalid. You would have to show, for example, that the patent was filed fraudulently or in bad faith; or that the suit was brought even though the plaintiffs knew that they had no reasonable hope of prevailing on the merits. That's a much higher standard than merely whether the patent had been upheld by the prior ruling: The presumption would be that the mere fact that a patent had been granted would have been sufficient justification for a belief on the part of the plaintiffs that their suit might be able prevail on its merits.
As for whether there has been enough prior art exhibited on Slashdot to invalidate the patent, as far as I've seen that's not yet established. Clearly there is prior art for the most obvious implementations of email autoresponders - these have existed since the early 80's at least. But the patent does reference at least some of that prior art, so the claims must be a little more specific than such a general interpretation as what everyone seems to be assuming. There are around 60 separate claims in the patent, and all that's necessary is for one or two of them to be found to be novel in order for the patent to hold up at least partially.
If their suit claims that all email autoresponder systems infringe on the patent, that's just plain silly and with any luck the suit will be dismissed quickly - but I doubt that their claims are that broad.
That said, given the amount of experience there has been with autoresponders over the last 30 years, I would expect that there would be prior art for so many possible actions and designs that the valid portion of the patent (if any) would have to have a pretty narrow scope - so it should be easy to design most systems so that they didn't infringe.
Why is it so hard to prove these obvious patent trolls? Slashdot just provided reams of prior art, isn't that enough?
Sigh. The problem is that so many of these patents have such a laundry list of claims, and as noted above in order for at least part of the patent to hold up, all that's necessary is for one of the claims to hold up. You usually can't just look at the "executive summary" of the patent and have a good idea of whether the patent might have some valid scope. I certainly share the frustration but once the software patent genie is out of the bottle, you're stuck with trying to knock down each patent and each claim within each patent much like the whack-a-mole games at the fair.
I don't think it's that simple! At least in the US, as a defendant you do NOT automatically get all of your legal expenses and opportunity costs paid for even if you prevail. Very often the court will award your out-of-pocket expenses to you, but it's not a guarantee; but your opportunity costs as well as any penalties are difficult to determine and would require that you file a counter suit which might well not prevail. For example, you would have to show, among other things, that the plaintiffs knowingly filed a suit which had no merit - ie, legal harassment. This would be difficult to prove if the USPTO had indeed granted a patent and you had in fact infringed on the patent, leaving open only the question of the validity of said patent.
For a small business it may well not be worth the risk especially in terms of loss of opportunity costs and distractions from their core business.
I remember using primitive email systems even back in the 70's - and automated email reply bots came not too much later, in the very early 80's at the latest. I haven't read through the entire list of claims carefully, so it's possible that there is some little bit of innovation in there somewhere, though by 1998 when the patent was filed the basic concept was old, old technology (even Netscape had been out since 1994) and I doubt that there was much room left by that time for any innovation whose application was so broad that it could cover very many of the possible designs and uses for email bots.
However what interests me more is the statement that implies that there have been other lawsuits over this same issue and that they have already been "settled." This implies that the patent has already been tested in court, though the previous cases may have already been settled out of court. Since this new lawsuit is aimed at some of the "big names" in the industry it would appear that the point is to try to use these previous lawsuits as case law for the new lawsuit. This is a typical tactic of the patent troll - try to get some case law established against small fish who would rather settle than fight (because they don't have the resources or incentive for a massive court battle) and if that goes your way then go for the big score against the big fish. Does anyone know whether those cases were settled out of court or whether they actually went to judgement? If the latter then the legal situation is a bit stickier for the defendants. If the patent was upheld in previous cases it would also be interesting to know whether the whole patent was upheld or only parts of it, and on what basis.
Actually spiders do have 10 appendages - 8 legs and 2 pedipalps, which are used for eating and (in male spiders) for mating. The pedipalps are sometimes leg-like in appearance.
The diagram in the review appears to show both 5 pairs of legs and a single (!) pedipalp, though it's hard to be sure since the diagram is rather unclear - given the angle it's possible that there's another pedipalp hidden behind one of the legs, and/or that what appears to be a single pedipalp is in fact an extension from one of the segments of the pedipalp/"leg" behind it (which can occur both in some modern and some fossil species). So I'm not fully convinced that the diagram is intended to show a "10-legged spider" if by that is meant a spider with 10 legs as well as two pedipalps.
Regardless of all that, the diagram is nonsense - and in fact the review does not make a point about the number of legs on the "spider;" that appears to be entirely commentary from Slashdot. As PZ Myers says, spiders (more properly, chelicerata, since we're presumably looking at Privar's proposed primitive ancestor of the entire subphylum) are not descended in any simple way from the coelenterates (corals, anemones, etc) but rather from the arthropods and so would be much more closely allied with insects and crustaceans.
I have not seen the book, but if these examples are representative then calling the theory 'crackpot' would be entirely justified. Strangely I can't find that word in the review either, although some of the blogger comments on the review page do use terms similar to that - has that word been edited out of the review?
In many parts of the world radon contamination is also a real possibility; it might preferentially affect one building if, for example, materials used either in the initial construction or during renovations of that specific building were contaminated with the radioactive precursors to it. This should however be very easy to check - and I would hope that it has been, because that can be a very significant risk factor for cancer.
Just to give a few examples of possible alternative causes that could cause such a cluster:
Some kind of chemical agent dispersed through the buildings air ducts, possibly during renovations;
Some kind of biological agent that infected the air ducts (both of these may no longer be at easily detectable levels after a year or two from the initial exposure)
Familial or other clusters that may explain the anomaly though common lifestyle or heredity (These clusters may well affect only one building out of a number of buildings, and need to be eliminated).
That's just a starter list. You can't just assume that "well, all these buildings superficially look alike, therefore they are alike." The real world doesn't work that way.
unfortunately i cant trust statistics, law, courts, common belief or anything else
Good! You're on your way to wisdom.
Look, I've spent a number of years of my career providing statistical analysis support for epidemiological researchers, and I'd be the first to tell you that statistics can be treacherous: At best they can be highly suggestive, and even sometimes identify a causative agent, but they don't usually tell you much of anything about the mechanisms involved and/or the best thing to do about them (unless you're able to identify an agent that can be easily avoided). At worst they can be used by the unscrupulous or ignorant for the most misguided purposes.
Slashdot Mirror
You are overlooking time.
The Fermi Paradox cannot be so easily dismissed. Assuming that ANY extraterrestrial civilization within our galaxy achieves interstellar travel, it just shouldn't take that long (in geologic time) for them to colonize the entire galaxy. Once ships from the civilization leave their home star, it becomes very difficult for that civilization to become extinct due to some local catastrophe. Therefore it becomes hard to avoid the conclusion that there are few if any such space traveling civilizations - and most likely none in this galaxy.
Perhaps interstellar travel is just simply harder than we think it is - although it is difficult to see exactly how that might be the case; and some civilizations may well forgo it simply because of the expense and time spans involved with the easier forms of it. But again, it only takes one space faring civilization to colonize the entire galaxy.
Personally I find the Fermi Paradox a very strong argument, but it's important to note that it only implies that the probability of space faring civilizations must be low. It says nothing about the probability of life on other planets (intelligence may be very rare in the universe - it certainly is among earthly species), or about the probability of intelligent life with a fairly advanced civilization that is short of being a space faring civilization. The latter is the only kind we'd be likely to find with SETI (since true space faring civilizations are apparently almost nonexistent) and it's that latter type of civilization that would be most vulnerable to extinction due to some local catastrophe - in fact, it's a good guess that that's why we haven't seen any.
Therefore it is hard to avoid the conclusion that either (1) we are very likely alone in the galaxy, although quite possibly not alone in the Universe (though it would be extremely difficult to detect civilizations in other galaxies), or (2) technological civilizations are almost always relatively short-lived. Obviously these possibilities are not mutually exclusive, but in either case SETI must be rated as an extreme long shot. Still it's probably worth funding at some level, simply because if we do get lucky the scientific and other implications can be tremendous.
Maybe I have a warped sense of humor, but surely I am not the only one here who would think it a lot of fun to take one of the various small-aircraft / flying insectoid toys on the market (or a home-built one for that matter) and fly it over such a gathering (of whatever political persuasion) where there would be guaranteed to be a certain percentage of the attendees who spend much of their time convinced that there is some kind of Vast (Left/Right/Whatever) Wing Conspiracy, and that they are likely to be one of its targets. Make sure that your toy is seen by a lot of people, and if possible especially by reporters. Then sit back and wait for the fun to begin.
Yeah, I was a bit of a smart alec as kid. But I still think it would be a lot of fun. Wonder if that's what happened here. :-)
My thought was that these people are probably witnessing cicadas.
This is an interesting thought. So far I haven't seen much about this incident except that "some people" thought that these things looked "too big" to be real "dragonflies". This is very much hearsay evidence, which is to say, not much evidence at all. My father was an entomologist, so I've gotten to see a lot of insects of all all sizes and shapes. A lot of people, when they first encounter something like a cicada or one of the larger species of dragonflies, can hardly believe they're seeing a real insect, but of course they are - and these are just rare enough that many people just simply have never noticed them before.
I have no idea if people really saw this or what the logic would be of using such a device at a war protest, but to say that such a device is impossible with not only today's consumer technology, but expensive, secret military technology seems mighty foolish to me.
I don't think the main problem for such devices is flight - it's control, and putting a useful payload on the device given the degree of control attainable. Everyone seems to be assuming video, and that it must be sending high-resolution pictures of everyone at the protest to some big central database. This seems unrealistic to me - at best, such a small device is likely to have relatively poor resolution pictures (remember, it must not be not taking them from very close up since nobody could get a good look at it). Telephoto lenses only help if you can keep the platform stable - otherwise you quickly lose your target when the platform gets caught by a puff of air. Wide-angle crowd shots still might be useful for generalized crowd management - for example, if some madman like the guy at VA Tech pulls out a gun, it might help locate him - but they aren't going to be very useful for identifying individuals unless they're pretty high resolution.
But there are lots of other payloads that might be more useful - sniffers (for explosives or for radioactivity), or audio come immediately to mind - and these do not have the very severe directional and distance problems that video does. For many kinds of surveillance they are even more useful than most video would be.
But, again, given that this is DC in the summer it's likely to be .... just a dragonfly. Even if the CIA has thousands of these things, that's a tiny fraction of the number of real dragonflies in DC.
The CIA's museum entry is almost certainly fake. That thing looks way too realistic and it's thirty years in the past.
All it would take to make such a device look superficially "realistic" like that is a bit of plastic to build up an external shell. Not a big deal at all, and well within the capabilities of the time.
What would have been much more of a problem (and most likely still is) would be control. At the time they did not have fast or small chips, so any control circuitry outside the most elementary would have to be off-platform - which means either wires or radio-controlled, both of which pose other problems (power, distance, etc) which would have been hard to surmount in those days on such a small platform.
The article says nothing about payload - which is the most interesting question, especially since a lot of miniaturized electronics (by modern standards, anyway) were not available at that time. As I've said elsewhere in this thread I think (useful) pictures (whether still or video) would be very difficult even today, unless the idea was to "land" the thing on a ledge somewhere to take the pictures - and for reasons I've already outlined I don't think an analog camera would solve the problem. For audio surveillance, engine and other noise would be a problem, again unless the thing landed first. The article does not say what the exact point was, or if they even got to the point of trying to figure out what payloads might work.
Getting the thing to fly is one of the least of your problems. In order to have something that's useful for (visual) surveillance, it's also necessary to be able to control where it flies and to have a stable enough platform to get useful pictures - not simply pictures that aren't blurred, but pictures that are of what you want rather than something that's 25 feet away. These are much harder tasks - to which the CIA site alludes when it says that their device did not have enough stability in a "cross-wind" (and I suspect in other situations as well).
I suspect that the CIA's capabilities have improved significantly since then, but it's still a hard problem - and if all you want to do is to get some mug shots of some of the participants in a domestic public protest (and in DC for crying out loud, which is already crawling with spooks), there are MUCH easier and more reliable ways to do so.
* Difficulty focusing the optics on a target because of the motion of the platform;
* Small size optics and CCD's making decent resolution pictures difficult;
* Likewise the small size makes it necessary to choose between decent resolution pictures that don't show a very large field, or wide-angle pictures that are very fuzzy.
The third point has been difficult for them to solve even for the much larger "hang glider size" drones used in Iraq and Afganistan - and clearly there would be a higher priority to solve it for them than for something that was being used for crowd surveillance. One would think that the next step would not be a dragonfly-sized device, but a robin-sized device; the problems would still be difficult but should be much easier to solve.
It's barely possible that something like this has been deployed, but I suspect that the point would not be so much for identifying individuals but to look for visual or chemical signatures of weapons, which wouldn't require nearly so much resolution. Even there, pictures or video are a problem because of the problems of trying to aim what's likely to be a "soda-straw" view through the camera. Traditional small cameras on trees and other fixed points, plus plainclothes agents (both wired and unwired), would be far more effective both for crowd safety and for the identification of individuals.
For what it's worth I've seen some really big dragonflies - some with bodies over 4" long - in marshy places, for which DC certainly qualifies. Sometimes the most prosaic explanation is the correct one, and I suspect that this is one of those times.
I'm not so sure that the original article has been fairly represented. If the claim were that the mineral removed radioactivity in general or radioactive substances in general, I would be very skeptical (as noted by numerous other posters, this is a very difficult thing to do, and each isotope would require a different removal procedure) - but the original article says that:
It can absorb radioactivity from liquid nuclear waste.
(Emphasis added). This is a very different proposition - it's not nearly so hard to imagine some kind of filter or series of filters that might preferentially remove some of the most dangerous elements that were common in nuclear waste such as might be produced by a power plant. Yes, it would remove the non-radioactive isotopes as well (unless you wanted to send the various elemental fractions through cascades of centrifuges or filters that would preferentially remove the heavier isotopes - a very laborious proposition) - except for those elements that are heavy enough that they are always radioactive, of course. But even that could still be a very useful property - though I'd think it would hardly be big news, there are already plenty of chemical ways to separate many such elements that have radioactive isotopes that might be present in dangerous quantities in the waste from a nuclear plant. This compound, if it exists, probably just adds another pathway or two for that to be accomplished.
I suspect that whatever might have been found, the journalist didn't describe it very clearly, and then the Slashdot article further garbled the story ... sort of like a game of "telephone."
Well, you can, obviously :-).
The problem isn't that you can't get this testimony in front of the court, but that the plaintiffs can also put up expert witnesses of their own, and in a highly technical field the judge and jury may not be very well prepared to tell who's telling the truth and who's blowing smoke - especially since everyone will likely be seen to have their own axe to grind.
Possibly. It would depend on a number of factors: How good are the long-term treatment options? How expensive are they? What's the expected life span of those who have the disease, given both options? What are the side effects and risks associated with each treatment? If it's a disease that happens late in life - like Alzheimer's - and there are treatment options that aren't too awful (not the case right now with Alzheimer's, I know, but taking it as an example of a disease that primarily affects the elderly), then people - that is, insurance companies and Medicare - may be less willing to plunk down a huge chunk of change for someone who may only have a few years left. But even if that multiplication factor is excessive, you're certainly correct that in general there would be a willingness to pay more - possibly even a lot more - for a cure than there would for long-term treatment.
Even if there is a chance the company will make a lot more money in 17 years, it still requires the people running, and the shareholders, to put off immediate greater personal gain.Anyone looking at the company's books - which will naturally include any serious investors - will be looking at the combined Net Present Value of their intellectual property, as well as risks to it from potential competitors, lawsuits, etc. Certainly everyone would like to go for the immediate big win, but in fact most drugs aren't in that category and it's quite routine for pharmaceutical companies and investors to be looking at the expected revenue streams from their portfolio of products and for those to be factored into the company's overall valuation.
I don't think we disagree very much - I just don't think it's quite as cut-and-dried as you make it sound. But clearly the posters who are claiming that drug companies are unwilling to look for cures because it's "bad for business" need to take some courses in basic economics and investing.
These are all good points, but they don't tell the whole story.
In many cases, a curative drug will require more ground-breaking research than one that's merely an improvement on existing treatment; therefore the curative drug is likely to cost more to develop than one that's merely an improved long-term treatment. Of course, in the case of Alzheimer's, where we don't even have good treatment options, this point is moot. Nevertheless curative drugs can and have been very profitable for the pharmaceutical industry.
For those who still don't understand, look up the Excel spreadsheet function NPV (Net Present Value), which computes the net present value of an annuity. In this case the annuity in question would be the long-term return from selling a treatment-oriented drug. If you can sell a cure for the same or greater price than the "present value" of that treatment annuity, that's a good business decision - especially since you'll never have the risk of losing most of the remaining value of the annuity because someone else developed a better drug.
The referenced article is very interesting; there may well be a fair number of misdiagnoses.
However the estimates in the article seem to indicate that the incidence of CJD that has been misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's cannot be much higher than around 10-15% of dementia-related deaths, and likely much lower, possibly even in the 1-2% range. So I would doubt that misdiagnosis of CJD would have a huge effect on the reported rate of Alzheimer's. Still that's potentially a lot of people dying from CJD, far higher than the rate that's usually been taken for granted, and translates to thousands of deaths per year rather than a couple hundred.
We don't do routine autopsies any more but we do enough so that if the proportion of CJD deaths were very high - say, 40-50% or more of dementia-related deaths - we'd know about it by now. We'd even be likely to know it if the percentage were only 15-20%. But there are few enough of the CJD deaths that it might be possible to miss some important trends relating to that disease.
What I found more interesting were some of the indications that Alzheimer's itself might also be a prion-induced disease. Generally the disease course in Alzheimer's is quite a bit slower than with either classic CJD or new variant CJD (aka "mad cow" disease) and the neuropathologies are different (although sometimes overlapping), so it seems probable that it isn't caused by the same agent although they could certainly share similarities.
Could many currently mysterious chronic diseases in fact be prion-related?
There isn't even a particularly useful treatment, pharmaceutical or otherwise, for Alzheimer's, let alone a cure - so your argument is specious on its face.
Besides, the pharmaceutical industry as a whole is by no means averse to producing curative drugs; that's what antibiotics and vaccines are, for example. The pharmaceutical industry isn't a single monolithic company or some kind of corporate cooperative; if one of them can produce a drug that's useful, they stand to make a good deal of money from it even if it just requires a one-time dose (the price of the drug will probably just be set higher in that case).
You can argue that they often prefer to fund development for drugs that are treatment-oriented rather than cure-oriented, and there may be a wee bit of truth in that, but if they have a treatment-oriented product and their competitor in the next city or halfway around the world comes up with a cure (or even just a significantly better treatment) the value of their product has just gone almost to zero overnight. Where's the profit in that!?
Besides, they don't always have the luxury of making a conscious decision about whether a new product will be curative or merely long-term treatment; they have to follow where the science is leading. If current research is suggesting a likely approach for cure, it would be stupid for a company to abandon work on curative drugs in favor of drugs that were long-term treatment only, because as noted above as soon as the curative treatment (pharmaceutical or otherwise) became available, most of the value of their investment would be wiped out overnight.
I think if you take off your tinfoil hat you'll find that the world doesn't work the way you think it does. Very rarely can you find these vast conspiracies that you imply.
First of all, as far as I've seen the vaccine is NOT a cure in the sense of reversing the effects and restoring lost mental function, but at most of halting the progression - though even that is still under evaluation, since it's by no means clear that simply removing the plaque is enough to stop the disease process. Not that a treatment that halted the progression of the disease wouldn't be a very good thing, but it's not the same thing as a cure.
Secondly, the vaccine has NOT been abandoned, as far as I can find; instead there is work ongoing to try to reduce potentially dangerous side effects such as inflammation.
Thirdly, in what sense would a cure be "bad for business"?! Pharmaceutical firms are not even in the nursing home business which is the primary cost of care for end-stage Alzheimer's. In fact they could stand to make a good deal of money if a cure could be found!
Exactly what makes you think that most of the "sameness" of every day at a nursing home isn't caused by diseases such as Alzheimer's?! True, many of the residents have serious physical problems that may preclude their living alone, but physical disabilities don't prevent you from doing a lot of interesting and varied activities that just don't require a lot of physical activity - reading, talking, playing Scrabble, even surfing the Net (yes there are some older adults who do exactly that).
Sorry if this sounds too rude, but your post sounds as if you haven't spent much time around older people who have found themselves in that situation.
Unfortunately the "obvious idea" approach to invalidating a patent is often difficult - in general you won't be going before a judge or jury who actually knows about software development from the standpoint of a professional. Most of them won't know any more about professional software development than your grandmother, and you're at their mercy about whether they believe your expert witnesses or those of the plaintiffs.
In contrast, if you can exhibit prior art then it becomes much easier. It's hard to argue that the idea is truly novel when you have prior art staring you in the face.
Not likely - the bar would be considerably higher than merely whether the patent was invalid. You would have to show, for example, that the patent was filed fraudulently or in bad faith; or that the suit was brought even though the plaintiffs knew that they had no reasonable hope of prevailing on the merits. That's a much higher standard than merely whether the patent had been upheld by the prior ruling: The presumption would be that the mere fact that a patent had been granted would have been sufficient justification for a belief on the part of the plaintiffs that their suit might be able prevail on its merits.
As for whether there has been enough prior art exhibited on Slashdot to invalidate the patent, as far as I've seen that's not yet established. Clearly there is prior art for the most obvious implementations of email autoresponders - these have existed since the early 80's at least. But the patent does reference at least some of that prior art, so the claims must be a little more specific than such a general interpretation as what everyone seems to be assuming. There are around 60 separate claims in the patent, and all that's necessary is for one or two of them to be found to be novel in order for the patent to hold up at least partially.
If their suit claims that all email autoresponder systems infringe on the patent, that's just plain silly and with any luck the suit will be dismissed quickly - but I doubt that their claims are that broad.
That said, given the amount of experience there has been with autoresponders over the last 30 years, I would expect that there would be prior art for so many possible actions and designs that the valid portion of the patent (if any) would have to have a pretty narrow scope - so it should be easy to design most systems so that they didn't infringe.
Why is it so hard to prove these obvious patent trolls? Slashdot just provided reams of prior art, isn't that enough?Sigh. The problem is that so many of these patents have such a laundry list of claims, and as noted above in order for at least part of the patent to hold up, all that's necessary is for one of the claims to hold up. You usually can't just look at the "executive summary" of the patent and have a good idea of whether the patent might have some valid scope. I certainly share the frustration but once the software patent genie is out of the bottle, you're stuck with trying to knock down each patent and each claim within each patent much like the whack-a-mole games at the fair.
I don't think it's that simple! At least in the US, as a defendant you do NOT automatically get all of your legal expenses and opportunity costs paid for even if you prevail. Very often the court will award your out-of-pocket expenses to you, but it's not a guarantee; but your opportunity costs as well as any penalties are difficult to determine and would require that you file a counter suit which might well not prevail. For example, you would have to show, among other things, that the plaintiffs knowingly filed a suit which had no merit - ie, legal harassment. This would be difficult to prove if the USPTO had indeed granted a patent and you had in fact infringed on the patent, leaving open only the question of the validity of said patent.
For a small business it may well not be worth the risk especially in terms of loss of opportunity costs and distractions from their core business.
I remember using primitive email systems even back in the 70's - and automated email reply bots came not too much later, in the very early 80's at the latest. I haven't read through the entire list of claims carefully, so it's possible that there is some little bit of innovation in there somewhere, though by 1998 when the patent was filed the basic concept was old, old technology (even Netscape had been out since 1994) and I doubt that there was much room left by that time for any innovation whose application was so broad that it could cover very many of the possible designs and uses for email bots.
However what interests me more is the statement that implies that there have been other lawsuits over this same issue and that they have already been "settled." This implies that the patent has already been tested in court, though the previous cases may have already been settled out of court. Since this new lawsuit is aimed at some of the "big names" in the industry it would appear that the point is to try to use these previous lawsuits as case law for the new lawsuit. This is a typical tactic of the patent troll - try to get some case law established against small fish who would rather settle than fight (because they don't have the resources or incentive for a massive court battle) and if that goes your way then go for the big score against the big fish. Does anyone know whether those cases were settled out of court or whether they actually went to judgement? If the latter then the legal situation is a bit stickier for the defendants. If the patent was upheld in previous cases it would also be interesting to know whether the whole patent was upheld or only parts of it, and on what basis.
LOL. Yes, I saw that - to me it appears to be a parody review making fun of the book.
The diagram in the review appears to show both 5 pairs of legs and a single (!) pedipalp, though it's hard to be sure since the diagram is rather unclear - given the angle it's possible that there's another pedipalp hidden behind one of the legs, and/or that what appears to be a single pedipalp is in fact an extension from one of the segments of the pedipalp/"leg" behind it (which can occur both in some modern and some fossil species). So I'm not fully convinced that the diagram is intended to show a "10-legged spider" if by that is meant a spider with 10 legs as well as two pedipalps.
Regardless of all that, the diagram is nonsense - and in fact the review does not make a point about the number of legs on the "spider;" that appears to be entirely commentary from Slashdot. As PZ Myers says, spiders (more properly, chelicerata, since we're presumably looking at Privar's proposed primitive ancestor of the entire subphylum) are not descended in any simple way from the coelenterates (corals, anemones, etc) but rather from the arthropods and so would be much more closely allied with insects and crustaceans.
I have not seen the book, but if these examples are representative then calling the theory 'crackpot' would be entirely justified. Strangely I can't find that word in the review either, although some of the blogger comments on the review page do use terms similar to that - has that word been edited out of the review?
In many parts of the world radon contamination is also a real possibility; it might preferentially affect one building if, for example, materials used either in the initial construction or during renovations of that specific building were contaminated with the radioactive precursors to it. This should however be very easy to check - and I would hope that it has been, because that can be a very significant risk factor for cancer.
- Some kind of chemical agent dispersed through the buildings air ducts, possibly during renovations;
- Some kind of biological agent that infected the air ducts (both of these may no longer be at easily detectable levels after a year or two from the initial exposure)
- Familial or other clusters that may explain the anomaly though common lifestyle or heredity (These clusters may well affect only one building out of a number of buildings, and need to be eliminated).
That's just a starter list. You can't just assume that "well, all these buildings superficially look alike, therefore they are alike." The real world doesn't work that way.Good! You're on your way to wisdom.
Look, I've spent a number of years of my career providing statistical analysis support for epidemiological researchers, and I'd be the first to tell you that statistics can be treacherous: At best they can be highly suggestive, and even sometimes identify a causative agent, but they don't usually tell you much of anything about the mechanisms involved and/or the best thing to do about them (unless you're able to identify an agent that can be easily avoided). At worst they can be used by the unscrupulous or ignorant for the most misguided purposes.
Ditto that for the courts.
Take care,
Actually it looks like 26 bits in a row, all ones! Something must be really wrong with /dev/urandom! LOL :-)