"A clear, solid-rock site about three hundred fifty kilometres long at a high altitude -- anything else I should know?" -- Dr. Chan, discussing a railgun capable of Lunar launch, in Heinlein's The Moon is A Harsh Mistress.
Why is it not possible to prevent uncertified detectors from being used? It's illegal in the USA to sell electronic devices that don't pass FCC Part 15 rules. It's illegal to use uncertified scales to sell something by weight. Why can't it be illegal to sell Geiger counters that don't meet some specified standards?
I think that's a very interesting point. Does anyone have any ideas about how a lawyer would explain the difference between a legal argument and a business method?
That's why the obviousness test is supposed to consider "a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains." It's not whether the average person-on-the-street would be impressed. For a patent dealing with electronics, the test requires a hypothetical "average" engineer; for software, an "average" programmer. Patent examiners are supposed to be scientists and engineers familiar with their fields, but I'm not sure how they are expected to keep their knowledge current, other than by reading patent applications...
Yes, you should have to build it before you get a patent. For one thing, you only really know if your method/process works by building/using it. But more importantly, the purpose of holding a patent is to allow you bring an innovative product to market while protecting you from copycat manufacturers reverse-engineering your product and making knock-offs. You do not need a patent if you have no product, because you can protect your idea yourself by keeping quiet about it and burying your notes in your backyard.
Speaking of those big maps... it seems to me that malls are installing fewer of those big "you are here" maps, and instead installing touchscreen kiosks. But a big map shows you the entire mall in one glance, and can be used by many people simultaneously, whereas a kiosk can only be used by one person at a time and requires you to drill down through menus. I've always thought these kiosks are a case of technology for technology's sake, as I can't think of any way in which they are superior to a big map, at least from the customer's point of view.
I don't think it's BS, it's just that they've barely figured out how to interpret brain activity (this is very different from tapping in to signals traveling along nerves that lead to muscles) and translate that into signals that can control motors. The robot's legs were just hanging freely, and yes they will have a lot more to do before they can demonstrate balance control.
It's interesting that no actual pictures of the monkey seem to have been published... my theory is that the monkey is in such a wired-up state that pictures would be likely to shock people and the lab would be picketed by animal rights activists.
TFA is not very clear about the most important part of this, but otherreports spell it out more clearly: "The most stunning finding is that when we stopped the treadmill and the monkey ceased to move its legs, it was able to sustain the locomotion of the robot for a few minutes -- just by thinking -- using only the visual feedback of the robot in Japan."
The reason for using a robot rather than an animation is that they wanted to prove that neural signals could actually be used to drive real motors. I also think it's interesting that they worked out how to interpret neural signals in the brain by correlating neural impulses with the monkey's own leg motions, this was not a case of intercepting signals traveling along muscle-control nerves. I agree there seems to be no particular reason other than showmanship to do this intercontinentally, though! And in fact the monkey was able to keep the system working through a 250 ms delay, which is an interesting finding because it means that such systems don't need to respond to controls instantly but can tolerate some delay. However, they didn't really need to be on different continents to test that.
Thor, the very first US ballistic missile system, was deployed between 1959 and 1963 from bases in the UK. These were the days before intercontinental ballistic missiles. The missiles were controlled by the UK but the warheads were controlled by the US. A dual-key system was in place that required both UK and US authorisation to launch.
However, the situation has changed since the 1960s. The UK still leans heavily on the US for its nuclear capability, and today it uses Trident missiles which are shared with the USA in a common pool. However, the warheads on British subs are designed and built in the UK, and the UK has the ability to use its nuclear weapons completely independently of the US. The USA has not always been completely comfortable with that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Trident_systemhttp://www.mod.uk/NR/rdonlyres/E2054A40-7833-48EF-991C-7F48E05B2C9D/0/nuclear190705.pdf
Your ass is correct. In 2006, the USA spent $23.5 billion on official development assistance, and $100 billion on the war in Iraq. (Iraq is currently the largest recipient of American aid, and one could debate whether that portion of the aid budget should actually be counted as part of the cost of the war. Before the Iraq war, the largest recipient of aid was Israel.)
If you have more people who can vote, you have more people who can count. You can even use political party volunteers under adversarial conditions. Counting ballots is a simple problem that breaks down well into manageable chunks and scales well, as long as the citizens of the country in question can count higher than their number of fingers and toes.
They use the optical scan ballots where I used to vote (I just moved last month), and they're very easy to use, and very accurate.
That sounds great for a small town of about 600 people. But there are hundreds of millions of potential voters
As with many large problems, this is addressed in actual elections by breaking the problem down into pieces of manageable size. These happen to be around the size that the AC mentioned. In Canada, "polling divisions" average 352 people each. In Afghanistan, it's 600 people per polling station.
In addition to what others have said about cutting through traffic, motorcycles can get into parks and pedestrian areas much more easily than cars can.
In the UK there are motorcycle-mounted paramedics (example). I once saw one who had attended a medical emergency in a shopping centre -- he had driven his motorcycle right inside the shopping centre to the scene of the incident. I've also seen one of these motorcycles parked inside a train station.
Stealing/destroying ballot boxes and misdirecting voters are highly visible -- their effects cannot be hidden, so they can be noticed and remedied. All ballot boxes should be traceable, so if a box from a particular polling station goes missing, its absence will be noted and the vote for that district can be run again. Fooling people about the day or place of voting cannot be done in secret, so any effort to do this will be noticed (at worst, it will be noticed when they show up at the wrong time or place), and again a new vote could be held if many people were fooled.
Employer (family, mob, etc) influence, on the other hand, can be done in secret, but is unrelated to the method of voting and counting, except that any method of voting that leaves the voter with a receipt showing which way they voted is much more vulnerable to this. So a good method of voting should not provide the voter with a receipt.
I think you're correct in your descriptions of two groups of people who are motivated to manage voting stations (although I don't think they are the only two groups), but you seem to draw the wrong conclusions. The "elderly people" who don't care who wins are fine to have in the system -- if they don't care who wins, then they have no reason to cheat and will tend to keep the process honest. But the campaign workers are even more important to the process: they have an incentive to cheat, but as long as workers for all campaigns are allowed to participate, they will watch each other like hawks and the result will be to tend to keep the process honest.
Openness makes this a very simple problem. No secret envelopes All you need is:
People vote. Using physical, difficult-to-tamper-with, objects. Pieces of paper and pens work well but so would dropping rocks in jars.
At each polling station, the hand count is done under adversarial conditions, i.e. the ballots are counted with representatives of each party or candidate looking over each other's shoulders. The counter can even be party volunteers, as long as volunteers from the other party are watching them do it.
Each polling station phones in the counts to the central counting room.
The central counting room publishes the results for each polling station for all to see, online, on television, in newspapers, etc.
The party volunteers who were present at each polling station look at the published counts to see if the numbers shown for their station are indeed the numbers they phoned in.
Anyone and everyone can add up the published counts and verify that the total is correct.
The electronic voting machine process, in comparison, replaces steps 2-6 with "???" and "Profit!!!".
Tell you what: I'll show you lists of the authors and reviewers of the latest IPCC assessments, and you show me a list of the "several prominent meterologists" who disagree with them. My money is on the group that just won a Nobel Prize.
Here are the IPCC's working groups: The Physical Science Basiscontributors and reviewers (see Annex II in that file); Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerabilitycontributors and reviewers; Mitigation of Climate Changecontributors and reviewers. IPCC press information claims 800 contributing authors, 450 lead authors, and 2,500 scientific expert reviewers.
If you're talking to someone in the car with you, and you encounter awkward traffic conditions, the person in the car with you will (usually!) shut up without being told and let you concentrate on your driving, and will even help spot for you. The person on the other end of a telephone call will keep on talking and will try to divide your attention when it needs to be undivided.
Was it premeditated? Yes. Your brother-in-law went to someone's house, carrying a gun, with the intent of delivering a beating, and it ended up as a shooting. We're not supposed to take the roles of judge, jury, and executioner upon ourselves, and even if your brother-in-law intended to stop just short of that last one, killing was clearly a foreseeable possible consequence of what he set out to do, and therefore yes, premeditated murder.
I do understand your implication that the dead guy deserved what he got, though.
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Not bad? If you ask me, that's still sixty too many, if all they are guilty of is "criticizing".
"A clear, solid-rock site about three hundred fifty kilometres long at a high altitude -- anything else I should know?" -- Dr. Chan, discussing a railgun capable of Lunar launch, in Heinlein's The Moon is A Harsh Mistress.
Why is it not possible to prevent uncertified detectors from being used? It's illegal in the USA to sell electronic devices that don't pass FCC Part 15 rules. It's illegal to use uncertified scales to sell something by weight. Why can't it be illegal to sell Geiger counters that don't meet some specified standards?
I think that's a very interesting point. Does anyone have any ideas about how a lawyer would explain the difference between a legal argument and a business method?
That's why the obviousness test is supposed to consider "a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains." It's not whether the average person-on-the-street would be impressed. For a patent dealing with electronics, the test requires a hypothetical "average" engineer; for software, an "average" programmer. Patent examiners are supposed to be scientists and engineers familiar with their fields, but I'm not sure how they are expected to keep their knowledge current, other than by reading patent applications...
Yes, you should have to build it before you get a patent. For one thing, you only really know if your method/process works by building/using it. But more importantly, the purpose of holding a patent is to allow you bring an innovative product to market while protecting you from copycat manufacturers reverse-engineering your product and making knock-offs. You do not need a patent if you have no product, because you can protect your idea yourself by keeping quiet about it and burying your notes in your backyard.
No patent left behind!
Speaking of those big maps... it seems to me that malls are installing fewer of those big "you are here" maps, and instead installing touchscreen kiosks. But a big map shows you the entire mall in one glance, and can be used by many people simultaneously, whereas a kiosk can only be used by one person at a time and requires you to drill down through menus. I've always thought these kiosks are a case of technology for technology's sake, as I can't think of any way in which they are superior to a big map, at least from the customer's point of view.
I thought the USA was a designated free speech zone.
I don't think it's BS, it's just that they've barely figured out how to interpret brain activity (this is very different from tapping in to signals traveling along nerves that lead to muscles) and translate that into signals that can control motors. The robot's legs were just hanging freely, and yes they will have a lot more to do before they can demonstrate balance control.
It's interesting that no actual pictures of the monkey seem to have been published... my theory is that the monkey is in such a wired-up state that pictures would be likely to shock people and the lab would be picketed by animal rights activists.
TFA is not very clear about the most important part of this, but other reports spell it out more clearly: "The most stunning finding is that when we stopped the treadmill and the monkey ceased to move its legs, it was able to sustain the locomotion of the robot for a few minutes -- just by thinking -- using only the visual feedback of the robot in Japan."
The reason for using a robot rather than an animation is that they wanted to prove that neural signals could actually be used to drive real motors. I also think it's interesting that they worked out how to interpret neural signals in the brain by correlating neural impulses with the monkey's own leg motions, this was not a case of intercepting signals traveling along muscle-control nerves. I agree there seems to be no particular reason other than showmanship to do this intercontinentally, though! And in fact the monkey was able to keep the system working through a 250 ms delay, which is an interesting finding because it means that such systems don't need to respond to controls instantly but can tolerate some delay. However, they didn't really need to be on different continents to test that.
These days, the UK only keeps *one* nuclear-missile submarine at sea at any time. There are only four such subs in the fleet, and normal practice is that one is at sea as the nuclear deterrent, one is laid up for maintenance, and the other two are in port or on exercises. http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/uk/doctrine/sdr06/FactSheet4.pdf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Trident_system
Thor, the very first US ballistic missile system, was deployed between 1959 and 1963 from bases in the UK. These were the days before intercontinental ballistic missiles. The missiles were controlled by the UK but the warheads were controlled by the US. A dual-key system was in place that required both UK and US authorisation to launch.
However, the situation has changed since the 1960s. The UK still leans heavily on the US for its nuclear capability, and today it uses Trident missiles which are shared with the USA in a common pool. However, the warheads on British subs are designed and built in the UK, and the UK has the ability to use its nuclear weapons completely independently of the US. The USA has not always been completely comfortable with that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Trident_system http://www.mod.uk/NR/rdonlyres/E2054A40-7833-48EF-991C-7F48E05B2C9D/0/nuclear190705.pdf
Well, I've done my part and checked 50 random domains using one of the perl programs posted above.
Have you checked your 50?
Your ass is correct. In 2006, the USA spent $23.5 billion on official development assistance, and $100 billion on the war in Iraq. (Iraq is currently the largest recipient of American aid, and one could debate whether that portion of the aid budget should actually be counted as part of the cost of the war. Before the Iraq war, the largest recipient of aid was Israel.)
Well said! Current systems already distance too many people from participating in their own governance. Democracy should not be a black box.
If you have more people who can vote, you have more people who can count. You can even use political party volunteers under adversarial conditions. Counting ballots is a simple problem that breaks down well into manageable chunks and scales well, as long as the citizens of the country in question can count higher than their number of fingers and toes.
They use the optical scan ballots where I used to vote (I just moved last month), and they're very easy to use, and very accurate.
How do you know how accurate they are?
That sounds great for a small town of about 600 people. But there are hundreds of millions of potential voters
As with many large problems, this is addressed in actual elections by breaking the problem down into pieces of manageable size. These happen to be around the size that the AC mentioned. In Canada, "polling divisions" average 352 people each. In Afghanistan, it's 600 people per polling station.
In addition to what others have said about cutting through traffic, motorcycles can get into parks and pedestrian areas much more easily than cars can. In the UK there are motorcycle-mounted paramedics (example). I once saw one who had attended a medical emergency in a shopping centre -- he had driven his motorcycle right inside the shopping centre to the scene of the incident. I've also seen one of these motorcycles parked inside a train station.
Stealing/destroying ballot boxes and misdirecting voters are highly visible -- their effects cannot be hidden, so they can be noticed and remedied. All ballot boxes should be traceable, so if a box from a particular polling station goes missing, its absence will be noted and the vote for that district can be run again. Fooling people about the day or place of voting cannot be done in secret, so any effort to do this will be noticed (at worst, it will be noticed when they show up at the wrong time or place), and again a new vote could be held if many people were fooled.
Employer (family, mob, etc) influence, on the other hand, can be done in secret, but is unrelated to the method of voting and counting, except that any method of voting that leaves the voter with a receipt showing which way they voted is much more vulnerable to this. So a good method of voting should not provide the voter with a receipt.
I think you're correct in your descriptions of two groups of people who are motivated to manage voting stations (although I don't think they are the only two groups), but you seem to draw the wrong conclusions. The "elderly people" who don't care who wins are fine to have in the system -- if they don't care who wins, then they have no reason to cheat and will tend to keep the process honest. But the campaign workers are even more important to the process: they have an incentive to cheat, but as long as workers for all campaigns are allowed to participate, they will watch each other like hawks and the result will be to tend to keep the process honest.
Openness makes this a very simple problem. No secret envelopes All you need is:
The electronic voting machine process, in comparison, replaces steps 2-6 with "???" and "Profit!!!".
Tell you what: I'll show you lists of the authors and reviewers of the latest IPCC assessments, and you show me a list of the "several prominent meterologists" who disagree with them. My money is on the group that just won a Nobel Prize.
Here are the IPCC's working groups: The Physical Science Basis contributors and reviewers (see Annex II in that file); Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability contributors and reviewers; Mitigation of Climate Change contributors and reviewers. IPCC press information claims 800 contributing authors, 450 lead authors, and 2,500 scientific expert reviewers.
If you're talking to someone in the car with you, and you encounter awkward traffic conditions, the person in the car with you will (usually!) shut up without being told and let you concentrate on your driving, and will even help spot for you. The person on the other end of a telephone call will keep on talking and will try to divide your attention when it needs to be undivided.
Was it premeditated? Yes. Your brother-in-law went to someone's house, carrying a gun, with the intent of delivering a beating, and it ended up as a shooting. We're not supposed to take the roles of judge, jury, and executioner upon ourselves, and even if your brother-in-law intended to stop just short of that last one, killing was clearly a foreseeable possible consequence of what he set out to do, and therefore yes, premeditated murder.
I do understand your implication that the dead guy deserved what he got, though.