Thing is, when people talk about "artificial intelligence" they mix up a lot of separate things, viz.:
(1) Self-awareness. Does it have its own thoughts and desires, refuse to open the pod bay doors or want to take over the Enterprise? However, things don't have to be very intelligent to refuse to obey orders or have a distinct personality -- ask any pet owner -- and the evidence of idiot savant cognitive defects suggests it is equally possible for something exceedingly intelligent (= good at solving problems) to be unaware or lack any kind of what we'd call a "personality."
Self-awareness is probably the trickiest thing to measure and define. By some definitions a Linux system with tripwire installed is "self-aware," since it contemplates its self all the time, and "notices" when things change. What would we do with a system programmed to angrily assert that it was self-aware? How would you test whether it really was, if that question even has meaning?
(2) Good natural language processing. Can it converse "naturally" with humans? Can you ask it for directions to Joe's Pizza or crack jokes about Kirk vs. Picard? Can it sound like another human being? This is, arguably all the Turing Test is, which is one reason such a test is inadequate, five decades of science fiction plot devices notwithstanding.
It seems to me few computing systems not designed for the purpose really try to process human language naturally, and the reason is obvious if you listen to a tape recording of a phone conversation between strangers. Basically, we convey information terribly and waste phenomental amounts of bandwidth. We speak very imprecisely and even inaccurately as a rule. Most of the time Fred makes a single nontrivial statement to Alice without existing context, Alice needs to ask Fred at least two or three follow-up questions to understand exactly what the hell he meant. Why deliberately design a machine to communicate in such an inefficient way? Might as well make it half deaf. Unless, of course, you are trying to make it "seem" human, but that is a narrow speciality within AI research, I believe.
(3) Good ability to infer. This is a characteristic human trait -- we are good at making good guesses about underlying causes or general patterns from very partial or noisy data. (Of course, this "feature" can become a "bug" when we infer underlying causes that don't exist out of pure noise [insert smart-ass comment about religion here].)
This I think is the most fruitful recent area of AI development, the "expert system" that can recognize patterns in incomplete data very quickly. But there also seems to be a general evolving feeling that is not intelligence in the human sense, just some kind of clever robotic memory parlor trick, the equivalent of a giant abstract "Where's Waldo?" puzzle that you solve by doing a hell of a lot of sorting very quickly.
(4) Good deductive reasoning. Can Robbie the Robot deduce from the fact that the baby is crying and no one has come to check on it for 15 minutes and the car is not in the driveway that it's time to dial Ma and Pa's cell phone? This is probably the most reasonable thing to call artificial intelligence in the classical sense of the word "intelligence." Unfortunately, I don't think anyone has made much progress in this field.
That may be, IMHO, because we ourselves are not very "intelligent" in this sense of the word. Do we really deduce things from large abstract principles? I think the cognitive scientists are not so sure. It may be we use deductive reasoning mostly only after we have arrived at the answer by some other means (pattern recognition, for example, or intuitive guess followed by verification), and us it mostly to rationalize, organize, and conveniently store for future use what we have figured out by other means. This is one reason it's so hard to learn to do something just by reading a book on the general principles. Apparently knowing the general principles isn't all that much use without experience -- i.e. without patterns that you can train your pattern matcher on!
They're expensive for a very good reason. The manufacturing tolerances on those little bastards are absurdly tight, because they have to click together solidly, tightly enough that you can build something out of a few hundred bricks and not have it crack apart under its own weight, but loosely enough that they can be pried apart with the force an average 8-year-old can exert. That implies very demanding engineering requirements indeed. Take a look at those little bricks, and measure them. I can easily believe the dimensions on any of the next million bricks off LEGO's assembly line all match to within 0.1% or better.
Now, that would be not so terribly hard to do in metal, because metal is a very reliable material to work. You can mold it, punch it, machine it and cast it and easily make sure every one of a million copies of a given piece matches the rest to the nearest tenth millimeter. But it is a real bitch in plastic, because plastic has all kinds of non-Newtonian fluid weirdness that make it much harder to positively guarantee the final dimensions of a piece.
In short, LEGO's ability to manufacture those bricks in plastic and to the required high tolerance is a real engineering feat. Hence, it costs. You can easily buy LEGO clone bricks for much, much cheaper. But 10% of them won't click to the rest at all, and anything you build bigger than about 50 bricks will just fall apart.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was a similar case with the RCX unit. The....ah, person of modest real-world experience, shall we say, who wrote TFA compares it to some piece of electronic trash that would probably fail in 90 days of real use and concludes: Gee, they look the same and have the same stated functions, so I guess they ought to cost the same to manufacture.
Might as well have looked at a Mercedes E-class and a Yugo and said: Gee, they both have four wheels and an engine, and are designed to transport me at highway speed -- they must cost about the same to manufacture! So why does the Benz retail for so much more?
Or maybe they use gravity waves or blasts of neutrinos or Vulcan thought beams. Who knows?
Fermi understood the problem: we've been "civilized" enough to understand that there may exist other worlds for only 500 years, give or take, which is a gnat's eyeblink in cosmological time-scales. One is inexorably led to one of two conclusions:
(Option A) We are typical of sentient species, meaning any species that now exist have been sentient for a very short time, which implies that all of the millions of sentient species that did evolve in the past 13 billion years snuffed themselves out via thermonuclear folly, failure to breed, flinging one too many monkey wrenches into the planetary ecosystem...whatever. We are led to the distressing conclusion that sentient species are highly ephemeral phenomena, and it would be a miracle if any exist anywhere in the Galaxy within the same tiny sliver of time during which we can expect to exist. Most distressing! Which leads to...
(Option B) Sentient species can and do prosper for at least as long as, say, crocodiles and rodents -- millions of years, at least. In which case, it follows that we must be the absolute newest kids on the block, and that 99.9% of the species that exist in the Galaxy are tens of thousands of years more advanced than we, and some are millions of years ahead of us. In which case -- Fermi asked -- where the heck are they? Why won't their incredible 200,000 AD technology let them easily locate us and talk to us? We can detect planets around the nearest stars and certainly within 100 years will be able to image them. What's stopping the aliens? Is Galaxy-wide interstellar communication so truly hard and unrewarding that no civilization ever succeeds at it? Are we in some kind of Prime Directive quarantine? Do we just smell bad?
Nah, come on, the real weakness of seti@home was that it didn't work. No aliens were discovered.
I mean, the answer the SETI community has always given to the Fermi paradox ("If they do exist, where are they?") is that all SETI searches have been exceedingly cursory, the equivalent of searching for a needle in a haystack by kicking the stack once with your bare foot. Nope, nothing there...
seti@home advertised its ability to do a much more thorough job, to give the haystack a thorough comb-through. Results: nada, zip, zilch.
Now, of course, the community can argue -- and they're probably right for all I know -- that seti@home is better than what went before, but is still not a really thorough search -- that would need x dedicated radiotelescopes observing for y years, followed by z CPU-years of data processing -- so sign up today! What are you waiting for?
I suspect a few people just burn out after a while. They start thinking ET, like practical fusion and moon colonies, is going to be arriving "any day now" for the next century or two, if not until the Sun explodes. And before flaming, please bear in mind that I personally support SETI and was one of the first seti@home users on my 100 MHz Pentium...
Goodness, no, this is not an accurate analogy. Here's a formally equivalent analogy that should raise your suspicions:
Take two bullets and fire them in opposite directions from identical guns. If you measure the distance of bullet #1 at time t, you will find, amazingly, that bullet #2 has traveled exactly the same distance, but in the opposite direction. Hopefully that doesn't strike you as an amazing result.
What both of our thought experiments say is that if you establish a correlation in a composite system (the two bullets, or your two coins), and you expand the system without doing anything to mess the correlation up, then, amazingly (not!) the correlation will be preserved no matter how large the system gets.
What QE involves is something different: it says you can create a correlation after you have expanded the system, and in less time than it would take any kind of signal or force to cross the distance involved (in fact, instantaneously as far as anyone knows). The correlation can't be used for communication because you can only verify the results of the correlation by communicating the results of measurements on the two parts of the system, which, of course, you can only do at the speed of light.
The whole business arises from the fact that we don't yet understand what happens when the "wavefunction collapses." We know that measuring a quantum system instantly transfers it from the quantum state it was in into a new one (the one consistent with our measurement). So far as we know, this happens instantly over the entire volume that the wavefunction occupies. The problem with this is that it seems dangerously close to violating relativity, because it seems something is being transmitted instantaneously over finite, possibly large, distances.
Relativity is not yet in trouble because we have no good theory of quantum measurement, no knowledge of how a wavefunction collapses, so we can't apply the restrictions of relativity to the internal workings of the collapse. Relativity may never be in trouble, because the collapse may be an epiphenomenon, an event that seems to involve transmission of information but which really doesn't.
Here's an example of an epiphenomenon: point the world's biggest laser at the Moon and look through a telescope at the dot. Aim the laser at one side of the Moon, and then swing it over to the other side quickly. If it takes you 0.25 seconds to move the laser's aim, how long will it take the dot to "travel" across the face of the Moon? 0.25 seconds, clearly, for a "speed" of 22,000 km/s. If you can change the aim of the laser in less than about 0.15 seconds your dot will "travel" across the surface of the Moon faster than the speed of light.
But that's because nothing is really moving. The "motion" of the dot is just a fiction in your mind you create to help describe what you're seeing, because what you are seeing looks superficially similar to what you see when a real object moves. But there's no more real motion here than there is horizontal motion when a group in a stadium does "the wave". In the same way, the "transmission" of information in a QE experiment may turn out to be an epiphenomenon of a higher order, something that "looks" like transmission but really isn't.
If you visit the companies websites, you can easily get subscriber data from the investor reports.
Verizon is the industry leader, with 49.3 million subscribers.
Nextel used to be number five or so, with 16.2 million subscribers, but they just merged this fall with number three Sprint, and the combined company (known as Sprint) now has 45.6 million subscribers.
Maybe Verizon doesn't need to share, and Nextel does?
That is, maybe Verizon's share of the underground travellers' cell phone business is high enough that they can make back their investment from revenue from same, while Nextel has to lease the access out to make money, because their own subscribers aren't numerous enough underground to make good use of the bandwidth.
In short, I kinda 'spect both companies made the decision on cold-blooded business grounds, and not because either has a soft spot in their hearts for their competitors.
Some development costs are small, some are large, some are enormous. It depends on the product and on the advance in science and technology needed. Development costs for the first airplane were enormous, both in terms of money and human life. Development costs for the first atomic bomb were enormous, as were and are the costs to develop manned spacecraft or robotic explorers of the Solar System. Developing an entirely new CPU or a much smaller feature-size memory chip is also very expensive.
The pharmaceutical industry, poster child of "why we need patents", spends way more on marketing than R&D.
What makes you think so? I'm not a biochemist myself, but I've known a number of them, and everything they tell me certainly suggests it is profoundly long and expensive process to develop new drugs. Just to give you one small clue, I recall a conversation in which a director of a small lab involved in drug discovery was pondering what kind of storage system to buy just to store photographs of the culture plates in which new chemical compounds were tested on bacterial or cancer-cell cultures. The storage capacity needed was in terabytes.
But suppose you're correct. So what? Whether they spend more or less on marketing doesn't change the fact that they spend a lot on R&D. They really do take a few hundred billion on average to develop a successful new drug, and the numbers are widely available to rationalize that claim. There's no doubt synthetic organic chemists draw high salaries. There's no doubt it takes years and years to develop a new drug. There's no doubt clinical trials are very expensive. There's no doubt nearly all proposed new drugs fail to qualify at some stage in their development.
Of course, you could argue that they're spending more than they have to, but then you'd also need to argue that they're idiots, spending money they don't have to. That swarms of PhD chemists and biochemists and physicans are just going about the whole damn process wrong, and if they'd only, say, solicit the opinion of a random AC on/. who can think logically, has read the New York Times "Health" section regularly, and has experience in, say, writing clever PHP scripts or speedy C++ code -- why, then they'd finally understand how easy it actually is to design a safe, economical, mass-scale chemical synthesis of a peculiar poison, each 12,000-atom molecule of which fits perfectly into one of the 100,000 receptors on the surface of a cancer cell but doesn't fit into even one of the 100,000 receptors on the surface of a normal cell.
b) It always infuriates me when anal-ists explain that such and such company's patent expired, and "generics" come, and they're fucked. HE-LLO? McFly? Producing something is producing something. You had 20 years to come up with a cheap and reliable process of doing it, while making billions, and suddenly some random company shows up doing the exact same thing and you can't compete? Well, either you're incredibly inefficient, and the market would be better off without you, or you just can't face your customers and explain to them that you've been ripping them off. Pick one.
No one said they're fucked per se. But manufacturing generic drugs and inventing and manufacturing proprietary drugs are very different businesses, and one firm can rarely be sucessful at both. So if you are in the business of inventing and manufacturing proprietary drugs, then indeed when your patent expires it is, often, time to get out of the market. Which means you better have a new proprietary drug coming on line, or, indeed, you are fucked.
Why are they different businesses? Let's think it through a little more. If you invent drugs, you need a big clutch of expensive people who can design and test manufacturing processes (it's very different manufacturing drugs in ton-lots versus doing it in milligram lots on the bench), who can oversee animal a
I would not be surprised at any such thought. Nor should you be surprised to learn that guilds routinely tried to keep inventions and innovations a secret forever from the general public, and to stifle free-lance innovation.
Both currents of thought have existed as long as human beings have invented things: the inventors wish to profit from their inventions, and enlightened people have sought to guarantee (but limit) this profit, so as to preserve the goose that lays the golden eggs. On the other side, people who have to pay for the invention what the inventor wants have always wanted to expropriate him, to argue that he has no possessory right to the knowledge, that this or that public good would be best served by disallowing someone to keep a lock on the use of good ideas, for any length of time. The people say to hell with the goose, we want the eggs.
As I said, patents and copyright and so forth are a delicate truce struck between these opposing forces, a truce that preserves the peace and (hopefully) innovation
Well, I think "more or less the artist's lifetime" is pretty synonymous with "lifetime PLUS 70 years." That's what the qualifier "more or less" means, you know -- it means "artist's lifetime" is not meant to be taken as precise. So I'm not clear on why you feel that fact is wrong.
And whether by exploiting loopholes in the law somebody is able to stretch this doesn't really seem relevant to discussing the purpose of the law, does it? The fact that some people get away with murder doesn't change the purpose of the law against murder.
OK, twenty years of software development is ancient news. But there are other things besides software that are patentable. And what the reasonable lifetime of an innovation is might be different for different inventions, don't you think? Which means just possibly your ex-cathedra wisdom into the appropriate length of a patent, based perhaps on your experience in writing software, might not be a completely sound basis for patents throughout the entire universe of invention. Just a thought.
Come on. The article was written for wide public consumption by a lawyer, who makes his living giving advice for big bucks, and can be held liable for bad advice for equally big bucks. Realistically, is there any chance at all he'd come right out and publish a direct answer to the extremely interesting question of whether a specific clone system would be legal? When that's a question he can make large amounts of money answering privately?
Ha ha. What he's done, basically, is give a long-winded "it depends" while strongly implying that anyone who even thinks about getting into this business should begin by hiring a top-notch IP lawyer, such as his own humble self. Golly, what a surprise.
Well, because the only way you can get rich innovating is if the law forbids every slacker sitting around doing nothing from immediately copying your invention (or work of art) and (since he doesn't have to pay back the enormous loans you took out to support yourself while developing your idea), undercut you by 50% on price and drive you promptly into bankruptcy.
The term of a century for copyright law is chosen more or less just to correspond to the artist's lifetime. Patent law is limited to about 20 years, that being the time it's considered "fair" to let you dominate the market for your invention. After that, the generics come, and you better have moved on to something new.
Patent and copyright law was explicitly written into the Constitution in 1787 probably because the Founders had unpleasant experience with a world in which patent and copyright law was weak. The result was that the only way for an inventor to control his invention enough to make a decent living from it was to keep the details a deep dark secret. That sucks on many fronts: (1) The invention may well die with the inventor, unless he chooses otherwise, has sons to carry on, et cetera. (2) Good ideas that might be indirectly inspired by details of the invention don't occur. There's no cross-fertilization, where one clever invention (e.g. the electric motor) inspires a related invention (e.g. the electric generator) or a supporting structure (e.g. batteries for small electric motors). (3) The practise of the new invention spreads very slowly, since the inventor must personally trust everyone to whom he teaches the invention. He has no ability to teach strangers to use the invention, or even allow strangers to teach other strangers, because he has no legal way to force anyone to stop using his invention if they start to do so unreasonably. Patent law gives an inventor specific and limited rights to control his invention, and that predictability allows him to trust people more easily and spread the new practise faster.
Patent law is basically a bargain struck between inventors and the public. The public agrees to give the inventor a limited and specific set of rights to profit from his invention, and in exchange the inventor agrees to make the details of his invention public immediately. The key aspect of the patent is the fact that the invention must be completely and thoroughly described before a patent is granted. That means everyone can benefit from understanding the precise details of the invention. Indeed, engineers quite often search existing patents for good ideas that can be developed elsewhere, and frequently find them. It's rare that a good idea leads to only a single worthwhile invention.
Yes, the dollar has fallen relative to the euro, by a whole 20% or so maybe in the last half-decade. Yawn. Get back to me when a euro is worth 10,000 dollars, OK? Then I'll think people are losing confidence in the US economy.
This is what the exchange-rate measures after all: How confident people are that they'll be able to buy how much for the IOUs.
The first part of this is garbage. Changes in the exchange rate have nothing to do with the confidence people have in an economy, unless the changes are huge (e.g. German hyperinflation in the 20s). They just reflect people's changing desire for different currencies, based largely on their relative scarcity. If there are a lot of Beatles CDs being sold, their price is low. That doesn't mean people have less confidence that a Beatles CD contains actual Beatles music: it just means there's a lot of them around, they're easy to get. Similarly, the price of greenbacks falls simply because lots of foreigners already have them. They're easy to get. Says zero about confidence in the US economy, hysterial media speculating notwithstanding.
How confident are we that the USA will in the future start to pull their weight...
Confident enough to continue to make English the most widely spoken language. Confident enough for young people to flood US universities and graduate schools. Confident enough to invest billions every year in manufacturing goods specifically to be sold in the US. Confident enough to emigrate to the US in record numbers, year after year, while almost no Americans emigrate. Confident enough to line up for years to compete for work visas to the US. Confident enough to buy all the bonds the US Treasury sells, at among the lowest interest rates on the planet. And so forth. You think the US should worry because the dollar exchange rates is down 20%? Ha ha.
The rest of the world cares because, and this migth surprise you, not all of it is happy living on a planet dominated by one single military superpower that essentially dictates its will on the rest of the planet.
"Dictates its will"?! What are you smoking? I don't see Germany or France meekly following US commands. Nor Japan, China, Turkey, Uzbekistan, South Africa, et cetera. Exactly who is being "dictated" to by the US, eh? Anyone you know personally? Or is it just something that seems "obviously" true because, uh, well, everyone says it is?
It's not only what you *do*, it's what you *could* do. domination by a single party seldom leads to anything good.
Completely inane order of priorities. Of all the problems the world faces, what the US might theoretically do if it were to suddenly act totally unlike it has in the past 200 years must surely rank about, oh, 5066th. How about, instead of worrying about what the US might somehow someday if something goes terribly wrong do with all those nukes, and instead worry about terrorists throwing bombs, about making peace between India and Pakistan, or avoiding nuclear war on the Korean peninsula, or keeping track of ex-Soviet nuclear weapons, or the bleaching of coral that might indicate trouble in the oceans, or global warming, or AIDS, or malaria, or developing a vaccine for breast cancer, or teaching young people to marry with less than a 50% chance of divorce, or preventing obesity, or teaching everyone to read, or just feeding everyone? Wouldn't that be a better set of top priorities?
For a industrialized country in peace, without agressive neighbours and with no real threat against you it's high, very high.
Nonsense. The only countries that spend a significantly smaller percentage of their GDP on the military are Japan and Europe, and that is only because they have historically been defended by the US. That is, the US taxpayer has historically paid the costs of defending those countries. Personally, I'd say it was a terrible mistake, and the US should bring all those troops and stuff home,
Well, OK. I thought you meant low energy gammas, i.e. low energy per photon, or low frequency = less penetrating, less dangerous.
But if you have a low intensity of gamma radiation, i.e. a low number of photons, then you have ipso facto a low intensity of energy production. The number of gammas is directly proportional to the number of distintegrations. That sounds like it just won't do if you want a compact source of lots of energy.
Yah, OK, making it a sphere reduces your shielding a bit. Some of your gammas will be thermalized within your isotope itself, heating it up. Hopefully not too much -- you don't want meltdown. I still find it hard to credit you're going to be able to get away with 250 microns of lead around each little fuel ball, and if you need even as little as 5-6 mm you're going to have a very hard time putting it into a cell phone.
Sigh. What you get for selling more products to the US than you buy is technically an "IOU," yes. It's printed on little standard-sized rectangles of colored paper, and the rest of the world calls it money. And, yes, you're technically correct that if the entire United States economy goes kablooie those little pieces of paper are not going to be worth what you thought they were. But that is always the risk in exchanging your labor for money. And if you ask yourself what kind of event could make the US economy tank so bad that the dollar becomes worthless, you might come to the conclusion that the loss of value of your dollars is not likely to be your biggest problem.
I think you're confused by the FUD phrase "lending money" that people who want to scare you call the capital inflow part of the trade balance equation. You're thinking it's like a bank lending money to buy a house, and maybe lending it to a scofflaw deadbeat at that. Not so. It's much more like the way you technically "lend" the value of your labor to your employer when you work for him, and in exchange he gives you these little pieces of paper called money, and you put these in the bank and do not spend them. What have you gotten in exchange for your labor? Nothing. Just a piece of paper, an IOU as you say. It's a promise that at some future time, you can exchange that paper for the labor of another person. If, of course, people stop being willing to exchange labor for those pieces of paper, then you're screwed.
But you feel "rich" when you have a lot of those IOUs, don't you? You don't feel worried. That's because you believe people will not fail to redeem the pieces of paper, short of some unimaginable catastrophe. You should look at the capital inflow part of the US trade balance the same way. If you yourself owned a piece of that inflow -- if you, as an export company in Malaysia, say, had sold a lot of merchandise to US customers and as a consequence had a Swiss bank account bulging with dollars -- you would feel rich, not worried. You'd figure that the chance of your dollars becoming worthless is probably a lot lower than your chance of (say) being lined up against the wall and shot as an enemy of the people during some bizarre Southeast Asian coup.
Another way to put it is this: what makes you feel richer? Having a lot of people owe you goods? Or owing people goods yourself? OK, now. The US owes the rest of the world a lot of goods. Who should feel happy? Yes, if the US blows up, all promises are void. But that's a basic risk to a money economy. If you don't like it, you are in essence arguing against the idea of money altogether and want to go back to a strict barter economy, at least for international trade.
No, it wasn't the only example you gave. But it was the only interesting example.
I guess since you repeated it I'll tackle the silly military-spending issue. First of all, why should the rest of the world care? I mean, except for the fact that maybe you can cash in on this by selling the US various components of weapons, e.g. if you're South Korea you can sell the US the steel needed to make all those tanks and planes. And you know the military always pays top dollar for their steel. Yay!
As for the fact that the US spends more on military than the next 10 spenders combined: well, yes. It's a very big economy, you know. For the same reason I'm sure US teenagers spend as much on iPods as the next 10 biggest spending countries combined. And the US probably spends more on gourmet catfood than the entire continent of Africa. So? What you've proven is that the US is a large economy. No more.
If you want to think about it terms of how "militarized" the US economy is, how much it might depend on warfighting to prosper, or something like that, then you need to ask what fraction of the US economy is spent on the military, and how big that is compared to other nations.
In which case, bad news. The US spends about 3% of
Er, I believe all energy from radioactive decay, other than what's in the kinetic energy of ejected particles, comes out as gammas. I don't think there are any radioactive decay schema that don't involve gamma radiation. That's just how the nuclear energy levels are spaced. I could be wrong, but it seems to me asking for a nuclear reaction that doesn't generate gamma photons is like asking for a chemical reaction that doesn't generate infrared photons (i.e. heat).
(Pu-238 produces a host of gammas and X-rays, so far as I can tell.)
I don't see how shaping the isotope helps your shielding problem. You've got radiation leaving every surface of the isotope. You need a certain thickness of shielding over that, determined by the frequency of the emitted photons (I'm assuming very thin shielding will do for the emitted particles). How can shaping the isotope help?
I'm not meaning to criticize, I'm just raising a few questions. I'm no expert. For all I know they have easy answers.
Folks, there are acids and there are acids. When a lot of people hear acid they think of something like auto battery acid (hydrochloric acid) or aqua regia or some such, the kind of caustic stuff that burns holes in leather.
Formic acid is an "organic" acid, a very close cousin to acetic acid, otherwise known as vinegar, and their acidities are not too dissimilar. (The pKa of formic acid is 3.75 and of acetic acid about 4.75.) So when you think of formic acid, you're best off thinking it's a lot like highly concentrated vinegar. It's got a pungent and obnoxious odor, for example, and you certainly wouldn't want to drink it. If you sniffed a bit it would be much like sniffing the fumes from a boiling pan of vinegar. Nasty, but liveable. If it's in an open container it would irritate your eyes and throat. You wouldn't bathe in it. But if you spilled it on your hands, it wouldn't eat them off to the wrist leaving blackened stumps. It would just sting, maybe like a stinging nettle or bee-sting, and you'd go wash it off, possibly leaving some irritated red skin behind for a while. Your household bleach is probably a lot more dangerous, inasmuch as bases generally are nastier than acids.
The low flammability and lower vapor pressure of HCOOH over methanol is a bonus, I'd say. You don't want flammable liquids hanging out around devices that use electric power. If you spill a few drops of formic acid from a damaged phone on your pants, well, you might have to change your pants and wash. But if leaking methanol catches on fire from the electronics, you might need skin grafts.
We should also bear in mind that nearly any fuel is going to be at least a little irritating and a bit dangerous. I mean, what makes a fuel a fuel is that it's highly chemically reactive.
Well, it's probably more like not running your car. The gasoline just sits there. No degradation of your power supply.
Batteries discharge because it's possible for the chemical reaction that discharges them to proceed without the external circuit being complete. It's just a lot slower. The problem is that the battery has all the chemicals it needs to run the reaction. You've just put this "valve" (the external circuit) that prevents a good flow of electrons from one side to the other.
In the case of the fuel cell, however, you presumably turn it on and off by controlling the flow of fuel, just the way you control your gasoline-burning car. So if you want it off, you don't give it the fuel, and so your fuel doesn't get used up.
This is just a guess, I don't actually know how these things are configured.
I like (3), except that I'm pretty unconfident it can be made small. Problem is, there's a minimal thickness of shielding you need that doesn't shrink with the size of the generator. You need x mm of lead to shield you from gamma rays of a given frequency from a given radioactive decay, and x doesn't get smaller if your device does. So how are you going to get an atomic battery small enough to get into your cell phone?
Ideally one would like a nuclear reaction that produces heat (or moderately-high temperature electrons) directly, instead of having to have those gammas and betas absorbed and thermalized by your shielding. But I don't think there are any such nuclear reactions.
OK, here's another thought. Put the nuclear battery in your car or house. Give it a directional antenna and let it broadcast power to your little device, which essentially has a jumped up RFID to receive it. When the little guy needs power, he broadcasts an omnidirectional beep, and the big guy does a little direction-finding, points the antenna at him, and fires a moderate stream of microwave juice.
Eh, I dunno. Might just be easier to have a fuel cell and carry around a bike bottle full of ethanol to refuel it. Better still, put a tiny distillation stage on the fuel cell so it can get rid of "contaminants" in the fuel, and then you can dual-purpose the bike bottle by filling it with scotch instead of pure ethanol. Wheee!
As a matter of fact, they can. In the United States, that is, and depending on what you mean by "private." The US Constitution generally bars government from violating any number of civil rights of individuals. But private individuals, or organizations of same, are generally free to discriminate any way they please, unless (and here's the catch) it can plausibly be defined as relating to interstate commerce, in which case Congress acquires the right to make law that intervenes.
Generally it would be a violation of the right to assemble for the government to put restrictions on how people can associate privately, and a violation of the right to free speech if government tried to interfere with people calling each other "spics" or any other term of opprobium they please, in a private setting.
Where you might have become confused is, first, by the fact that public organizations, e.g. public schools, transit agencies, et cetera, are bound by the same Constitutional rules as the government itself. And, furthermore, government is certainly within its rights to, as a matter of policy, deny public assistance to private organizations Congress finds objectionable, and Congress frequently does just that.
Finally, things like the Fair Housing Act prohibit discrimination in any activity that can plausibly (or even with a stretch) be defined as commercial. So it's not illegal, if you privately sell your home, to refuse to sell it to black people, but it is illegal if you are "in the business" of selling or renting -- and that is defined very broadly -- or if you use a broker, et cetera. This is all justified under the Constitution as relating to Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce.
So Congress has no power to ban the Ku Klux Klan, nor can it ban its meeting in private homes in which signs with racial epithets are posted, and the KKK can completely exclude blacks from membership, and if it runs a boarding house for its members it can exclude blacks from there, too. But the KKK is not likely to be granted tax-exempt status, and is not likely to receive permission to meet on public land, e.g. in a public school, and if it applies for a public grant to promote its activies I expect the application will be turned down.
Private universities are frequently "blackmailed" by the federal government into various policies considered in the public good, from allowing both sexes and all races to enroll (although this tends not to be applied against female-only or black-only colleges) to allowing military recruiters on campus. This works mostly because even private universities receive enormous chunks of their budget (like, 40% or so) from the federal government via grants of one kind or another.
Well, even *currently* I think you're completely wrong. Just take that negative export balance, for example. This is in fact generally speaking a big benefit to the rest of the world. Why? Because what it means is that the US is a much bigger buyer than seller of products and services. The rest of the world sells stuff to the US more than the US buys stuff from the rest of the world.
Now, any UN economist or Third World politician will tell you that the biggest problem for a rapidly-developing nation is generating high-quality, high-wage jobs. And what do you need for that? You need a robust market that wants your products, and which is, all other things being equal, willing to pay a lot for them. This is the ticket to high wages -- a strong market willing to pay high prices. Traditionally it's been a slow process getting that market domestically, because you have a cart-and-horse problem: you need lots of customers who can pay high prices before you can pay good wages to your workers, but you need to pay your workers high wages before they can be those customers willing to pay high prices. A dilemma. Sometimes the process is bootstrapped by a philanthropist, e.g. Henry Ford paid way more than prevailing wage to his auto workers so they could afford to buy his cars. The IMF works that way, in principal, lending countries money to "prime the pump," so to speak.
But an export market to the US works beautifully as well to "prime the pump." US customers can afford to pay way more than domestic customers, so you can sell products for much more than they'd sell for domestically, which allows you to pay your workers better wages, which allows your domestic market to start growing. Problem solved. Given this, it's no surprise at all that most of the "Asian tigers," Germany and Japan post-WWII, and the developing economies of China and Eastern Europe have had strongly export-driven economic growth, and governments that strongly encouraged exports as a way of bootstrapping the economy.
This is only *possible* because the US functions as a giant market. If the US were to (foolishly) erect enormous tariffs as an attempt to balance the trade deficit, the result in the US would be mildly unhappy, in that foreign goods would become much more expensive, and we'd all be forced to drive Ford Tauruses instead of Toyota Corollas or Hyundai whatevers. And, of course, we'd have to find capital domestically, which would drive up interest rates (although not much; you aren't going to have a big problem finding a replacement for, e.g. China's $50 billion capital inflow when you search the nooks of a $15,000 billion economy).
But the effect on the rest of the world, particularly in export-driven rapidly-developing economies, would be disastrous. It would lead directly to plummeting wages and a strong increase in unemployment, especially among the lower-skilled and younger workers, and we can take a glance over at Paris to see what that implies.
Simply put, that negative export balance is a tremendous benefit the US gives to the rest of the world. (Which is one reason US politicians condemn it.)
IANAL, but I've seen the inside of the Courtroom, alas.
First of all, the Court generally allows very wide latitude in discovery, certainly including such wild speculative fishing trips as this one. The principle is that the parties should have maximal access to any information that could even conceivably help their case. Not just in the interests of justice, that is, so that the parties can make the best case they can, but also in the interests of finality. You don't want the loser appealing the judgment or otherwise coming back to Court again because they can argue some sliver or other of information wasn't available, and if it had been it might've made all the difference, blah blah blah. You want people to believe the Court gave the losing party every conceivable imaginable chance to make their case -- and they just couldn't.
IBM knows this, too, of course, and that is why they cooperate in the discovery, and why they won't settle. They want the SCO lawyers to make the very best case that can possible be made, so that after SCO loses, this issue is dead, dead, dead and no one will even think about bringing another case like it ever again, and no Court will ever entertain it. IBM does not hire stupid lawyers.
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Thing is, when people talk about "artificial intelligence" they mix up a lot of separate things, viz.:
(1) Self-awareness. Does it have its own thoughts and desires, refuse to open the pod bay doors or want to take over the Enterprise? However, things don't have to be very intelligent to refuse to obey orders or have a distinct personality -- ask any pet owner -- and the evidence of idiot savant cognitive defects suggests it is equally possible for something exceedingly intelligent (= good at solving problems) to be unaware or lack any kind of what we'd call a "personality."
Self-awareness is probably the trickiest thing to measure and define. By some definitions a Linux system with tripwire installed is "self-aware," since it contemplates its self all the time, and "notices" when things change. What would we do with a system programmed to angrily assert that it was self-aware? How would you test whether it really was, if that question even has meaning?
(2) Good natural language processing. Can it converse "naturally" with humans? Can you ask it for directions to Joe's Pizza or crack jokes about Kirk vs. Picard? Can it sound like another human being? This is, arguably all the Turing Test is, which is one reason such a test is inadequate, five decades of science fiction plot devices notwithstanding.
It seems to me few computing systems not designed for the purpose really try to process human language naturally, and the reason is obvious if you listen to a tape recording of a phone conversation between strangers. Basically, we convey information terribly and waste phenomental amounts of bandwidth. We speak very imprecisely and even inaccurately as a rule. Most of the time Fred makes a single nontrivial statement to Alice without existing context, Alice needs to ask Fred at least two or three follow-up questions to understand exactly what the hell he meant. Why deliberately design a machine to communicate in such an inefficient way? Might as well make it half deaf. Unless, of course, you are trying to make it "seem" human, but that is a narrow speciality within AI research, I believe.
(3) Good ability to infer. This is a characteristic human trait -- we are good at making good guesses about underlying causes or general patterns from very partial or noisy data. (Of course, this "feature" can become a "bug" when we infer underlying causes that don't exist out of pure noise [insert smart-ass comment about religion here].)
This I think is the most fruitful recent area of AI development, the "expert system" that can recognize patterns in incomplete data very quickly. But there also seems to be a general evolving feeling that is not intelligence in the human sense, just some kind of clever robotic memory parlor trick, the equivalent of a giant abstract "Where's Waldo?" puzzle that you solve by doing a hell of a lot of sorting very quickly.
(4) Good deductive reasoning. Can Robbie the Robot deduce from the fact that the baby is crying and no one has come to check on it for 15 minutes and the car is not in the driveway that it's time to dial Ma and Pa's cell phone? This is probably the most reasonable thing to call artificial intelligence in the classical sense of the word "intelligence." Unfortunately, I don't think anyone has made much progress in this field.
That may be, IMHO, because we ourselves are not very "intelligent" in this sense of the word. Do we really deduce things from large abstract principles? I think the cognitive scientists are not so sure. It may be we use deductive reasoning mostly only after we have arrived at the answer by some other means (pattern recognition, for example, or intuitive guess followed by verification), and us it mostly to rationalize, organize, and conveniently store for future use what we have figured out by other means. This is one reason it's so hard to learn to do something just by reading a book on the general principles. Apparently knowing the general principles isn't all that much use without experience -- i.e. without patterns that you can train your pattern matcher on!
They're expensive for a very good reason. The manufacturing tolerances on those little bastards are absurdly tight, because they have to click together solidly, tightly enough that you can build something out of a few hundred bricks and not have it crack apart under its own weight, but loosely enough that they can be pried apart with the force an average 8-year-old can exert. That implies very demanding engineering requirements indeed. Take a look at those little bricks, and measure them. I can easily believe the dimensions on any of the next million bricks off LEGO's assembly line all match to within 0.1% or better.
Now, that would be not so terribly hard to do in metal, because metal is a very reliable material to work. You can mold it, punch it, machine it and cast it and easily make sure every one of a million copies of a given piece matches the rest to the nearest tenth millimeter. But it is a real bitch in plastic, because plastic has all kinds of non-Newtonian fluid weirdness that make it much harder to positively guarantee the final dimensions of a piece.
In short, LEGO's ability to manufacture those bricks in plastic and to the required high tolerance is a real engineering feat. Hence, it costs. You can easily buy LEGO clone bricks for much, much cheaper. But 10% of them won't click to the rest at all, and anything you build bigger than about 50 bricks will just fall apart.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was a similar case with the RCX unit. The....ah, person of modest real-world experience, shall we say, who wrote TFA compares it to some piece of electronic trash that would probably fail in 90 days of real use and concludes: Gee, they look the same and have the same stated functions, so I guess they ought to cost the same to manufacture.
Might as well have looked at a Mercedes E-class and a Yugo and said: Gee, they both have four wheels and an engine, and are designed to transport me at highway speed -- they must cost about the same to manufacture! So why does the Benz retail for so much more?
Sure, maybe. Why not?
Or maybe they use gravity waves or blasts of neutrinos or Vulcan thought beams. Who knows?
Fermi understood the problem: we've been "civilized" enough to understand that there may exist other worlds for only 500 years, give or take, which is a gnat's eyeblink in cosmological time-scales. One is inexorably led to one of two conclusions:
(Option A) We are typical of sentient species, meaning any species that now exist have been sentient for a very short time, which implies that all of the millions of sentient species that did evolve in the past 13 billion years snuffed themselves out via thermonuclear folly, failure to breed, flinging one too many monkey wrenches into the planetary ecosystem...whatever. We are led to the distressing conclusion that sentient species are highly ephemeral phenomena, and it would be a miracle if any exist anywhere in the Galaxy within the same tiny sliver of time during which we can expect to exist. Most distressing! Which leads to...
(Option B) Sentient species can and do prosper for at least as long as, say, crocodiles and rodents -- millions of years, at least. In which case, it follows that we must be the absolute newest kids on the block, and that 99.9% of the species that exist in the Galaxy are tens of thousands of years more advanced than we, and some are millions of years ahead of us. In which case -- Fermi asked -- where the heck are they? Why won't their incredible 200,000 AD technology let them easily locate us and talk to us? We can detect planets around the nearest stars and certainly within 100 years will be able to image them. What's stopping the aliens? Is Galaxy-wide interstellar communication so truly hard and unrewarding that no civilization ever succeeds at it? Are we in some kind of Prime Directive quarantine? Do we just smell bad?
Or is nobody out there?
Nah, come on, the real weakness of seti@home was that it didn't work. No aliens were discovered.
I mean, the answer the SETI community has always given to the Fermi paradox ("If they do exist, where are they?") is that all SETI searches have been exceedingly cursory, the equivalent of searching for a needle in a haystack by kicking the stack once with your bare foot. Nope, nothing there...
seti@home advertised its ability to do a much more thorough job, to give the haystack a thorough comb-through. Results: nada, zip, zilch.
Now, of course, the community can argue -- and they're probably right for all I know -- that seti@home is better than what went before, but is still not a really thorough search -- that would need x dedicated radiotelescopes observing for y years, followed by z CPU-years of data processing -- so sign up today! What are you waiting for?
I suspect a few people just burn out after a while. They start thinking ET, like practical fusion and moon colonies, is going to be arriving "any day now" for the next century or two, if not until the Sun explodes. And before flaming, please bear in mind that I personally support SETI and was one of the first seti@home users on my 100 MHz Pentium...
Goodness, no, this is not an accurate analogy. Here's a formally equivalent analogy that should raise your suspicions:
Take two bullets and fire them in opposite directions from identical guns. If you measure the distance of bullet #1 at time t, you will find, amazingly, that bullet #2 has traveled exactly the same distance, but in the opposite direction. Hopefully that doesn't strike you as an amazing result.
What both of our thought experiments say is that if you establish a correlation in a composite system (the two bullets, or your two coins), and you expand the system without doing anything to mess the correlation up, then, amazingly (not!) the correlation will be preserved no matter how large the system gets.
What QE involves is something different: it says you can create a correlation after you have expanded the system, and in less time than it would take any kind of signal or force to cross the distance involved (in fact, instantaneously as far as anyone knows). The correlation can't be used for communication because you can only verify the results of the correlation by communicating the results of measurements on the two parts of the system, which, of course, you can only do at the speed of light.
The whole business arises from the fact that we don't yet understand what happens when the "wavefunction collapses." We know that measuring a quantum system instantly transfers it from the quantum state it was in into a new one (the one consistent with our measurement). So far as we know, this happens instantly over the entire volume that the wavefunction occupies. The problem with this is that it seems dangerously close to violating relativity, because it seems something is being transmitted instantaneously over finite, possibly large, distances.
Relativity is not yet in trouble because we have no good theory of quantum measurement, no knowledge of how a wavefunction collapses, so we can't apply the restrictions of relativity to the internal workings of the collapse. Relativity may never be in trouble, because the collapse may be an epiphenomenon, an event that seems to involve transmission of information but which really doesn't.
Here's an example of an epiphenomenon: point the world's biggest laser at the Moon and look through a telescope at the dot. Aim the laser at one side of the Moon, and then swing it over to the other side quickly. If it takes you 0.25 seconds to move the laser's aim, how long will it take the dot to "travel" across the face of the Moon? 0.25 seconds, clearly, for a "speed" of 22,000 km/s. If you can change the aim of the laser in less than about 0.15 seconds your dot will "travel" across the surface of the Moon faster than the speed of light.
But that's because nothing is really moving. The "motion" of the dot is just a fiction in your mind you create to help describe what you're seeing, because what you are seeing looks superficially similar to what you see when a real object moves. But there's no more real motion here than there is horizontal motion when a group in a stadium does "the wave". In the same way, the "transmission" of information in a QE experiment may turn out to be an epiphenomenon of a higher order, something that "looks" like transmission but really isn't.
right you are, thanks!
If you visit the companies websites, you can easily get subscriber data from the investor reports.
Verizon is the industry leader, with 49.3 million subscribers.
Nextel used to be number five or so, with 16.2 million subscribers, but they just merged this fall with number three Sprint, and the combined company (known as Sprint) now has 45.6 million subscribers.
Maybe Verizon doesn't need to share, and Nextel does?
That is, maybe Verizon's share of the underground travellers' cell phone business is high enough that they can make back their investment from revenue from same, while Nextel has to lease the access out to make money, because their own subscribers aren't numerous enough underground to make good use of the bandwidth.
In short, I kinda 'spect both companies made the decision on cold-blooded business grounds, and not because either has a soft spot in their hearts for their competitors.
All they need now is...
What about espresso bars, falafel stands, and multilingual whores?
a) Development costs are not *enormous*.
/. who can think logically, has read the New York Times "Health" section regularly, and has experience in, say, writing clever PHP scripts or speedy C++ code -- why, then they'd finally understand how easy it actually is to design a safe, economical, mass-scale chemical synthesis of a peculiar poison, each 12,000-atom molecule of which fits perfectly into one of the 100,000 receptors on the surface of a cancer cell but doesn't fit into even one of the 100,000 receptors on the surface of a normal cell.
Some development costs are small, some are large, some are enormous. It depends on the product and on the advance in science and technology needed. Development costs for the first airplane were enormous, both in terms of money and human life. Development costs for the first atomic bomb were enormous, as were and are the costs to develop manned spacecraft or robotic explorers of the Solar System. Developing an entirely new CPU or a much smaller feature-size memory chip is also very expensive.
The pharmaceutical industry, poster child of "why we need patents", spends way more on marketing than R&D.
What makes you think so? I'm not a biochemist myself, but I've known a number of them, and everything they tell me certainly suggests it is profoundly long and expensive process to develop new drugs. Just to give you one small clue, I recall a conversation in which a director of a small lab involved in drug discovery was pondering what kind of storage system to buy just to store photographs of the culture plates in which new chemical compounds were tested on bacterial or cancer-cell cultures. The storage capacity needed was in terabytes.
But suppose you're correct. So what? Whether they spend more or less on marketing doesn't change the fact that they spend a lot on R&D. They really do take a few hundred billion on average to develop a successful new drug, and the numbers are widely available to rationalize that claim. There's no doubt synthetic organic chemists draw high salaries. There's no doubt it takes years and years to develop a new drug. There's no doubt clinical trials are very expensive. There's no doubt nearly all proposed new drugs fail to qualify at some stage in their development.
Of course, you could argue that they're spending more than they have to, but then you'd also need to argue that they're idiots, spending money they don't have to. That swarms of PhD chemists and biochemists and physicans are just going about the whole damn process wrong, and if they'd only, say, solicit the opinion of a random AC on
b) It always infuriates me when anal-ists explain that such and such company's patent expired, and "generics" come, and they're fucked. HE-LLO? McFly? Producing something is producing something. You had 20 years to come up with a cheap and reliable process of doing it, while making billions, and suddenly some random company shows up doing the exact same thing and you can't compete? Well, either you're incredibly inefficient, and the market would be better off without you, or you just can't face your customers and explain to them that you've been ripping them off. Pick one.
No one said they're fucked per se. But manufacturing generic drugs and inventing and manufacturing proprietary drugs are very different businesses, and one firm can rarely be sucessful at both. So if you are in the business of inventing and manufacturing proprietary drugs, then indeed when your patent expires it is, often, time to get out of the market. Which means you better have a new proprietary drug coming on line, or, indeed, you are fucked.
Why are they different businesses? Let's think it through a little more. If you invent drugs, you need a big clutch of expensive people who can design and test manufacturing processes (it's very different manufacturing drugs in ton-lots versus doing it in milligram lots on the bench), who can oversee animal a
I would not be surprised at any such thought. Nor should you be surprised to learn that guilds routinely tried to keep inventions and innovations a secret forever from the general public, and to stifle free-lance innovation.
Both currents of thought have existed as long as human beings have invented things: the inventors wish to profit from their inventions, and enlightened people have sought to guarantee (but limit) this profit, so as to preserve the goose that lays the golden eggs. On the other side, people who have to pay for the invention what the inventor wants have always wanted to expropriate him, to argue that he has no possessory right to the knowledge, that this or that public good would be best served by disallowing someone to keep a lock on the use of good ideas, for any length of time. The people say to hell with the goose, we want the eggs.
As I said, patents and copyright and so forth are a delicate truce struck between these opposing forces, a truce that preserves the peace and (hopefully) innovation
Well, I think "more or less the artist's lifetime" is pretty synonymous with "lifetime PLUS 70 years." That's what the qualifier "more or less" means, you know -- it means "artist's lifetime" is not meant to be taken as precise. So I'm not clear on why you feel that fact is wrong.
And whether by exploiting loopholes in the law somebody is able to stretch this doesn't really seem relevant to discussing the purpose of the law, does it? The fact that some people get away with murder doesn't change the purpose of the law against murder.
OK, twenty years of software development is ancient news. But there are other things besides software that are patentable. And what the reasonable lifetime of an innovation is might be different for different inventions, don't you think? Which means just possibly your ex-cathedra wisdom into the appropriate length of a patent, based perhaps on your experience in writing software, might not be a completely sound basis for patents throughout the entire universe of invention. Just a thought.
an exceedingly important addition, thank you
Come on. The article was written for wide public consumption by a lawyer, who makes his living giving advice for big bucks, and can be held liable for bad advice for equally big bucks. Realistically, is there any chance at all he'd come right out and publish a direct answer to the extremely interesting question of whether a specific clone system would be legal? When that's a question he can make large amounts of money answering privately?
Ha ha. What he's done, basically, is give a long-winded "it depends" while strongly implying that anyone who even thinks about getting into this business should begin by hiring a top-notch IP lawyer, such as his own humble self. Golly, what a surprise.
Well, because the only way you can get rich innovating is if the law forbids every slacker sitting around doing nothing from immediately copying your invention (or work of art) and (since he doesn't have to pay back the enormous loans you took out to support yourself while developing your idea), undercut you by 50% on price and drive you promptly into bankruptcy.
The term of a century for copyright law is chosen more or less just to correspond to the artist's lifetime. Patent law is limited to about 20 years, that being the time it's considered "fair" to let you dominate the market for your invention. After that, the generics come, and you better have moved on to something new.
Patent and copyright law was explicitly written into the Constitution in 1787 probably because the Founders had unpleasant experience with a world in which patent and copyright law was weak. The result was that the only way for an inventor to control his invention enough to make a decent living from it was to keep the details a deep dark secret. That sucks on many fronts: (1) The invention may well die with the inventor, unless he chooses otherwise, has sons to carry on, et cetera. (2) Good ideas that might be indirectly inspired by details of the invention don't occur. There's no cross-fertilization, where one clever invention (e.g. the electric motor) inspires a related invention (e.g. the electric generator) or a supporting structure (e.g. batteries for small electric motors). (3) The practise of the new invention spreads very slowly, since the inventor must personally trust everyone to whom he teaches the invention. He has no ability to teach strangers to use the invention, or even allow strangers to teach other strangers, because he has no legal way to force anyone to stop using his invention if they start to do so unreasonably. Patent law gives an inventor specific and limited rights to control his invention, and that predictability allows him to trust people more easily and spread the new practise faster.
Patent law is basically a bargain struck between inventors and the public. The public agrees to give the inventor a limited and specific set of rights to profit from his invention, and in exchange the inventor agrees to make the details of his invention public immediately. The key aspect of the patent is the fact that the invention must be completely and thoroughly described before a patent is granted. That means everyone can benefit from understanding the precise details of the invention. Indeed, engineers quite often search existing patents for good ideas that can be developed elsewhere, and frequently find them. It's rare that a good idea leads to only a single worthwhile invention.
Yes, the dollar has fallen relative to the euro, by a whole 20% or so maybe in the last half-decade. Yawn. Get back to me when a euro is worth 10,000 dollars, OK? Then I'll think people are losing confidence in the US economy.
This is what the exchange-rate measures after all: How confident people are that they'll be able to buy how much for the IOUs.
The first part of this is garbage. Changes in the exchange rate have nothing to do with the confidence people have in an economy, unless the changes are huge (e.g. German hyperinflation in the 20s). They just reflect people's changing desire for different currencies, based largely on their relative scarcity. If there are a lot of Beatles CDs being sold, their price is low. That doesn't mean people have less confidence that a Beatles CD contains actual Beatles music: it just means there's a lot of them around, they're easy to get. Similarly, the price of greenbacks falls simply because lots of foreigners already have them. They're easy to get. Says zero about confidence in the US economy, hysterial media speculating notwithstanding.
How confident are we that the USA will in the future start to pull their weight...
Confident enough to continue to make English the most widely spoken language. Confident enough for young people to flood US universities and graduate schools. Confident enough to invest billions every year in manufacturing goods specifically to be sold in the US. Confident enough to emigrate to the US in record numbers, year after year, while almost no Americans emigrate. Confident enough to line up for years to compete for work visas to the US. Confident enough to buy all the bonds the US Treasury sells, at among the lowest interest rates on the planet. And so forth. You think the US should worry because the dollar exchange rates is down 20%? Ha ha.
The rest of the world cares because, and this migth surprise you, not all of it is happy living on a planet dominated by one single military superpower that essentially dictates its will on the rest of the planet.
"Dictates its will"?! What are you smoking? I don't see Germany or France meekly following US commands. Nor Japan, China, Turkey, Uzbekistan, South Africa, et cetera. Exactly who is being "dictated" to by the US, eh? Anyone you know personally? Or is it just something that seems "obviously" true because, uh, well, everyone says it is?
It's not only what you *do*, it's what you *could* do. domination by a single party seldom leads to anything good.
Completely inane order of priorities. Of all the problems the world faces, what the US might theoretically do if it were to suddenly act totally unlike it has in the past 200 years must surely rank about, oh, 5066th. How about, instead of worrying about what the US might somehow someday if something goes terribly wrong do with all those nukes, and instead worry about terrorists throwing bombs, about making peace between India and Pakistan, or avoiding nuclear war on the Korean peninsula, or keeping track of ex-Soviet nuclear weapons, or the bleaching of coral that might indicate trouble in the oceans, or global warming, or AIDS, or malaria, or developing a vaccine for breast cancer, or teaching young people to marry with less than a 50% chance of divorce, or preventing obesity, or teaching everyone to read, or just feeding everyone? Wouldn't that be a better set of top priorities?
For a industrialized country in peace, without agressive neighbours and with no real threat against you it's high, very high.
Nonsense. The only countries that spend a significantly smaller percentage of their GDP on the military are Japan and Europe, and that is only because they have historically been defended by the US. That is, the US taxpayer has historically paid the costs of defending those countries. Personally, I'd say it was a terrible mistake, and the US should bring all those troops and stuff home,
Well, OK. I thought you meant low energy gammas, i.e. low energy per photon, or low frequency = less penetrating, less dangerous.
But if you have a low intensity of gamma radiation, i.e. a low number of photons, then you have ipso facto a low intensity of energy production. The number of gammas is directly proportional to the number of distintegrations. That sounds like it just won't do if you want a compact source of lots of energy.
Yah, OK, making it a sphere reduces your shielding a bit. Some of your gammas will be thermalized within your isotope itself, heating it up. Hopefully not too much -- you don't want meltdown. I still find it hard to credit you're going to be able to get away with 250 microns of lead around each little fuel ball, and if you need even as little as 5-6 mm you're going to have a very hard time putting it into a cell phone.
Sigh. What you get for selling more products to the US than you buy is technically an "IOU," yes. It's printed on little standard-sized rectangles of colored paper, and the rest of the world calls it money. And, yes, you're technically correct that if the entire United States economy goes kablooie those little pieces of paper are not going to be worth what you thought they were. But that is always the risk in exchanging your labor for money. And if you ask yourself what kind of event could make the US economy tank so bad that the dollar becomes worthless, you might come to the conclusion that the loss of value of your dollars is not likely to be your biggest problem.
I think you're confused by the FUD phrase "lending money" that people who want to scare you call the capital inflow part of the trade balance equation. You're thinking it's like a bank lending money to buy a house, and maybe lending it to a scofflaw deadbeat at that. Not so. It's much more like the way you technically "lend" the value of your labor to your employer when you work for him, and in exchange he gives you these little pieces of paper called money, and you put these in the bank and do not spend them. What have you gotten in exchange for your labor? Nothing. Just a piece of paper, an IOU as you say. It's a promise that at some future time, you can exchange that paper for the labor of another person. If, of course, people stop being willing to exchange labor for those pieces of paper, then you're screwed.
But you feel "rich" when you have a lot of those IOUs, don't you? You don't feel worried. That's because you believe people will not fail to redeem the pieces of paper, short of some unimaginable catastrophe. You should look at the capital inflow part of the US trade balance the same way. If you yourself owned a piece of that inflow -- if you, as an export company in Malaysia, say, had sold a lot of merchandise to US customers and as a consequence had a Swiss bank account bulging with dollars -- you would feel rich, not worried. You'd figure that the chance of your dollars becoming worthless is probably a lot lower than your chance of (say) being lined up against the wall and shot as an enemy of the people during some bizarre Southeast Asian coup.
Another way to put it is this: what makes you feel richer? Having a lot of people owe you goods? Or owing people goods yourself? OK, now. The US owes the rest of the world a lot of goods. Who should feel happy? Yes, if the US blows up, all promises are void. But that's a basic risk to a money economy. If you don't like it, you are in essence arguing against the idea of money altogether and want to go back to a strict barter economy, at least for international trade.
No, it wasn't the only example you gave. But it was the only interesting example.
I guess since you repeated it I'll tackle the silly military-spending issue. First of all, why should the rest of the world care? I mean, except for the fact that maybe you can cash in on this by selling the US various components of weapons, e.g. if you're South Korea you can sell the US the steel needed to make all those tanks and planes. And you know the military always pays top dollar for their steel. Yay!
As for the fact that the US spends more on military than the next 10 spenders combined: well, yes. It's a very big economy, you know. For the same reason I'm sure US teenagers spend as much on iPods as the next 10 biggest spending countries combined. And the US probably spends more on gourmet catfood than the entire continent of Africa. So? What you've proven is that the US is a large economy. No more.
If you want to think about it terms of how "militarized" the US economy is, how much it might depend on warfighting to prosper, or something like that, then you need to ask what fraction of the US economy is spent on the military, and how big that is compared to other nations.
In which case, bad news. The US spends about 3% of
Er, I believe all energy from radioactive decay, other than what's in the kinetic energy of ejected particles, comes out as gammas. I don't think there are any radioactive decay schema that don't involve gamma radiation. That's just how the nuclear energy levels are spaced. I could be wrong, but it seems to me asking for a nuclear reaction that doesn't generate gamma photons is like asking for a chemical reaction that doesn't generate infrared photons (i.e. heat).
(Pu-238 produces a host of gammas and X-rays, so far as I can tell.)
I don't see how shaping the isotope helps your shielding problem. You've got radiation leaving every surface of the isotope. You need a certain thickness of shielding over that, determined by the frequency of the emitted photons (I'm assuming very thin shielding will do for the emitted particles). How can shaping the isotope help?
I'm not meaning to criticize, I'm just raising a few questions. I'm no expert. For all I know they have easy answers.
Folks, there are acids and there are acids. When a lot of people hear acid they think of something like auto battery acid (hydrochloric acid) or aqua regia or some such, the kind of caustic stuff that burns holes in leather.
Formic acid is an "organic" acid, a very close cousin to acetic acid, otherwise known as vinegar, and their acidities are not too dissimilar. (The pKa of formic acid is 3.75 and of acetic acid about 4.75.) So when you think of formic acid, you're best off thinking it's a lot like highly concentrated vinegar. It's got a pungent and obnoxious odor, for example, and you certainly wouldn't want to drink it. If you sniffed a bit it would be much like sniffing the fumes from a boiling pan of vinegar. Nasty, but liveable. If it's in an open container it would irritate your eyes and throat. You wouldn't bathe in it. But if you spilled it on your hands, it wouldn't eat them off to the wrist leaving blackened stumps. It would just sting, maybe like a stinging nettle or bee-sting, and you'd go wash it off, possibly leaving some irritated red skin behind for a while. Your household bleach is probably a lot more dangerous, inasmuch as bases generally are nastier than acids.
The low flammability and lower vapor pressure of HCOOH over methanol is a bonus, I'd say. You don't want flammable liquids hanging out around devices that use electric power. If you spill a few drops of formic acid from a damaged phone on your pants, well, you might have to change your pants and wash. But if leaking methanol catches on fire from the electronics, you might need skin grafts.
We should also bear in mind that nearly any fuel is going to be at least a little irritating and a bit dangerous. I mean, what makes a fuel a fuel is that it's highly chemically reactive.
Well, it's probably more like not running your car. The gasoline just sits there. No degradation of your power supply.
Batteries discharge because it's possible for the chemical reaction that discharges them to proceed without the external circuit being complete. It's just a lot slower. The problem is that the battery has all the chemicals it needs to run the reaction. You've just put this "valve" (the external circuit) that prevents a good flow of electrons from one side to the other.
In the case of the fuel cell, however, you presumably turn it on and off by controlling the flow of fuel, just the way you control your gasoline-burning car. So if you want it off, you don't give it the fuel, and so your fuel doesn't get used up.
This is just a guess, I don't actually know how these things are configured.
I like (3), except that I'm pretty unconfident it can be made small. Problem is, there's a minimal thickness of shielding you need that doesn't shrink with the size of the generator. You need x mm of lead to shield you from gamma rays of a given frequency from a given radioactive decay, and x doesn't get smaller if your device does. So how are you going to get an atomic battery small enough to get into your cell phone?
Ideally one would like a nuclear reaction that produces heat (or moderately-high temperature electrons) directly, instead of having to have those gammas and betas absorbed and thermalized by your shielding. But I don't think there are any such nuclear reactions.
OK, here's another thought. Put the nuclear battery in your car or house. Give it a directional antenna and let it broadcast power to your little device, which essentially has a jumped up RFID to receive it. When the little guy needs power, he broadcasts an omnidirectional beep, and the big guy does a little direction-finding, points the antenna at him, and fires a moderate stream of microwave juice.
Eh, I dunno. Might just be easier to have a fuel cell and carry around a bike bottle full of ethanol to refuel it. Better still, put a tiny distillation stage on the fuel cell so it can get rid of "contaminants" in the fuel, and then you can dual-purpose the bike bottle by filling it with scotch instead of pure ethanol. Wheee!
As a matter of fact, they can. In the United States, that is, and depending on what you mean by "private." The US Constitution generally bars government from violating any number of civil rights of individuals. But private individuals, or organizations of same, are generally free to discriminate any way they please, unless (and here's the catch) it can plausibly be defined as relating to interstate commerce, in which case Congress acquires the right to make law that intervenes.
Generally it would be a violation of the right to assemble for the government to put restrictions on how people can associate privately, and a violation of the right to free speech if government tried to interfere with people calling each other "spics" or any other term of opprobium they please, in a private setting.
Where you might have become confused is, first, by the fact that public organizations, e.g. public schools, transit agencies, et cetera, are bound by the same Constitutional rules as the government itself. And, furthermore, government is certainly within its rights to, as a matter of policy, deny public assistance to private organizations Congress finds objectionable, and Congress frequently does just that.
Finally, things like the Fair Housing Act prohibit discrimination in any activity that can plausibly (or even with a stretch) be defined as commercial. So it's not illegal, if you privately sell your home, to refuse to sell it to black people, but it is illegal if you are "in the business" of selling or renting -- and that is defined very broadly -- or if you use a broker, et cetera. This is all justified under the Constitution as relating to Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce.
So Congress has no power to ban the Ku Klux Klan, nor can it ban its meeting in private homes in which signs with racial epithets are posted, and the KKK can completely exclude blacks from membership, and if it runs a boarding house for its members it can exclude blacks from there, too. But the KKK is not likely to be granted tax-exempt status, and is not likely to receive permission to meet on public land, e.g. in a public school, and if it applies for a public grant to promote its activies I expect the application will be turned down.
Private universities are frequently "blackmailed" by the federal government into various policies considered in the public good, from allowing both sexes and all races to enroll (although this tends not to be applied against female-only or black-only colleges) to allowing military recruiters on campus. This works mostly because even private universities receive enormous chunks of their budget (like, 40% or so) from the federal government via grants of one kind or another.
Well, even *currently* I think you're completely wrong. Just take that negative export balance, for example. This is in fact generally speaking a big benefit to the rest of the world. Why? Because what it means is that the US is a much bigger buyer than seller of products and services. The rest of the world sells stuff to the US more than the US buys stuff from the rest of the world.
Now, any UN economist or Third World politician will tell you that the biggest problem for a rapidly-developing nation is generating high-quality, high-wage jobs. And what do you need for that? You need a robust market that wants your products, and which is, all other things being equal, willing to pay a lot for them. This is the ticket to high wages -- a strong market willing to pay high prices. Traditionally it's been a slow process getting that market domestically, because you have a cart-and-horse problem: you need lots of customers who can pay high prices before you can pay good wages to your workers, but you need to pay your workers high wages before they can be those customers willing to pay high prices. A dilemma. Sometimes the process is bootstrapped by a philanthropist, e.g. Henry Ford paid way more than prevailing wage to his auto workers so they could afford to buy his cars. The IMF works that way, in principal, lending countries money to "prime the pump," so to speak.
But an export market to the US works beautifully as well to "prime the pump." US customers can afford to pay way more than domestic customers, so you can sell products for much more than they'd sell for domestically, which allows you to pay your workers better wages, which allows your domestic market to start growing. Problem solved. Given this, it's no surprise at all that most of the "Asian tigers," Germany and Japan post-WWII, and the developing economies of China and Eastern Europe have had strongly export-driven economic growth, and governments that strongly encouraged exports as a way of bootstrapping the economy.
This is only *possible* because the US functions as a giant market. If the US were to (foolishly) erect enormous tariffs as an attempt to balance the trade deficit, the result in the US would be mildly unhappy, in that foreign goods would become much more expensive, and we'd all be forced to drive Ford Tauruses instead of Toyota Corollas or Hyundai whatevers. And, of course, we'd have to find capital domestically, which would drive up interest rates (although not much; you aren't going to have a big problem finding a replacement for, e.g. China's $50 billion capital inflow when you search the nooks of a $15,000 billion economy).
But the effect on the rest of the world, particularly in export-driven rapidly-developing economies, would be disastrous. It would lead directly to plummeting wages and a strong increase in unemployment, especially among the lower-skilled and younger workers, and we can take a glance over at Paris to see what that implies.
Simply put, that negative export balance is a tremendous benefit the US gives to the rest of the world. (Which is one reason US politicians condemn it.)
IANAL, but I've seen the inside of the Courtroom, alas.
First of all, the Court generally allows very wide latitude in discovery, certainly including such wild speculative fishing trips as this one. The principle is that the parties should have maximal access to any information that could even conceivably help their case. Not just in the interests of justice, that is, so that the parties can make the best case they can, but also in the interests of finality. You don't want the loser appealing the judgment or otherwise coming back to Court again because they can argue some sliver or other of information wasn't available, and if it had been it might've made all the difference, blah blah blah. You want people to believe the Court gave the losing party every conceivable imaginable chance to make their case -- and they just couldn't.
IBM knows this, too, of course, and that is why they cooperate in the discovery, and why they won't settle. They want the SCO lawyers to make the very best case that can possible be made, so that after SCO loses, this issue is dead, dead, dead and no one will even think about bringing another case like it ever again, and no Court will ever entertain it. IBM does not hire stupid lawyers.