There is nothing that software can do that a physical implementation of the model cannot do. See Turing for details.

No, not all inventions can be described in the form of mathematical algorithms. Only computable ones are reducible to such a form and only computable problems with a unique solution will reduce to the -same- mathematical algorithms.

To use the example of an elevator, if you vary the shape, mass, composition, dimensions, enclosure, counterweights, or medium travelled through, you have changed the system of equations. Thus, an elevator in the abstract cannot be reduced to a mathematical description, only a specific elevator in a specific context can.

Where is the inventor? The algorithm already existed, and had done so a few milliseconds after the Big Bang. That's very much prior art.

All anyone does, when they play with mathematical systems, is record the properties the system already had. The observer has added nothing and has invented nothing.

I can see certain merits to copyrighting a specific implementation, and expecting trivial variants to be covered. That is no different from writing a book and having rights over translations.

But a patent goes beyond a specific implementation and restricts ALL algorithms that are functionally equivalent. Patents are not supposed to ban all competition, just unfair competition.

I don't see how that's a problem. I don't even see how that's a surprise, given that Turing and von Neumann were saying the same thing before there was a computer industry and back when biotech meant experiments with mould.

You can patent an elevator because you invented it. You cannot patent gravity because you didn't.

Everything that ever was, is or ever will be, in mathematics, always has been and always will be. Nothing in mathematics is invented, only discovered. (You cannot patent Antarctica, either.)

You can patent an elevator because it isn't obvious. You cannot patent a spring because it is.

Everything in mathematics is ultimately obvious. See "Spiked Maths" for details. Or, if you prefer, consider the fact that everything is built from statements already proven to reduce to fundamental axioms. Everything in mathematics is ultimately true, though not necessarily at the same time. There is no innovation, no creation. Nothing has been added. All you have done is taken two truths and constructed a composite truth. You can add whatever physical theory you like to gravity, you will never construct an elevator.

You can patent an elevator because there are multiple solutions to the same problem. You cannot patent sodium chloride because there is only one chemical that is sodium chloride, it is unique.

Any two mathematical statements which yield identical results (which implies both operate over the same domain and range) are provably identical. Thus, there is a unique solution to a given problem.

You can patent an elevator because it is man-made, artificial. You cannot patent a star because it is not.

Ok, this is my one controversial statement. However, those who disagree are wrong, so I don't care. Mathematics is natural. It exists in the same form throughout the universe. If multiple universes exist, mathematics will be the same in all of them. Including the ones in which no life can exist to make use of it. There are bits of mathematics that cannot coexist, ensuring it cannot be both complete and correct (blame Godel), but there's lots in the natural world like that. That's normal for the natural world.

But ultimately nothing to see here.

No wrongdoing was acknowledged and it was settled, so there's no case law involved. The police have long since become a corporate entity rather than a public service, so this is just marked up as cost of doing business. The police have been sued before for precisely this kind of retaliation and it hasn't made any difference yet.

No, if you want law enforcement to change, you have to eliminate the market economy within it. You get nothing for issuing fines, you get no rewards for arrests made or cases closed. You should get penalties for things undone, but nothing for doing what you should be doing to begin with.

You also have to demilitarize it. Guns should be limited or eliminated. Using fear and intimidation to control should be banned entirely. The use of violence of any kind should be limited or eliminated - there is almost never any need and if you're a cop, you have no business claiming you were in fear. Cops are paid to go into danger. If you're so wimpy you have to go in guns blazing, you're not a cop, you're a wimp with a badge.

I've no interest in people telling me I've not been there, I've not been paid to walk into the lion's den in a long time. And when I have, I went. Sane, rational and sober. Which, apparently, US police aren't capable of being.

If you're not cut out to face danger and the possibility of death at any time, don't even bother going to a motor race.

...why?

Your outermost gateway should be a simple NAT/port-forwarder/load balancer and a honeypot server. Web traffic goes to the front-end servers, all else goes to the honeypot server. There should be no live DNS. Computers don't need readable names, strings are often where mistakes are made and replying to an IP doesn't require name resolution. The NAT/load balancing would be per-inbound-packet at this level, not per-session or per-time-interval. That means attacks on server resources (if they get through at all) are divided across your cluster evenly. Buys the machines time to detect and counter the problem.

Your front-end servers should be not much more than static content delivery systems, proxying the rest through your outer defences. OpenBSD is ideal for this - fast, simple, bullet-proof. Middle level defences should be a very basic firewall (maximum stability and maximum throughput) and an Active NIDS running in parallel (so as not to slow down traffic).

Inside that, you have at least two load-balancers, one on hot standby, farming dynamic requests to mainline servers. Mainline servers have no static content, only dynamic content. If dynamic content changes slowly (eg: BBC), have a cache server sitting in front of the actual content server. No point regenerating unchanged content.

Content servers send through another firewall (it can also be simple) to your database servers. Unrelated data should be on distinct servers for security and seek time. Since the content servers are read-only, they need hit only database cache servers with actual databases behind those. If you absolutely have to have FQDNs, zone transfer the critical stuff. Bounce all other DNS requests via the internal network to the regular DNS source. That way, your at-risk gateway doesn't contain stupid holes in the wall.

The internal corporate network would have a firewall and switch linking up to the content servers and cache servers, then a different firewall to the database servers. These would be heavier-duty firewalls as the traffic is more complex. Logins of any kind should be permitted only over an IPSec tunnel. All unused ports should be closed.

For the outermost systems, logins should be by IPSec only from a cache server. (Content servers have three Ethernet connections, none going to the firewall.)

This arrangement will take punishment. The arrangements where everything (database included) is in the DMZ with no shielding against coding errors, THOSE are the ones that fall over when people sneeze.

Ok, so my topology would cost a few thousand more. To Amazon, the BBC, any of the online banks, any of the online nuclear power stations - a few thousand might be spent on an executive lunch, but considerably more than a few thousand would certainly be spent and/or lost in a disaster. My layout gives security and performance, though the better corporate giants might be able to do better in both departments.

Doesn't matter if they can. What matters is that nobody at that level should be less secure than this. This is your minimal standard.

The diameter is 2.3x. The mass is around 20x. The density is about 1.5x. The length of year is a shade under 1/3. The surface temperature is estimated at 10x. The gravity is around 4x. The magnetic field at Earth's current age was probably 3.375x. Tea time is a universal constant.

At 11 billion years of age, it clearly hosts one of the oldest civilizations in the universe. At an apparent mass of 20x Earth, which is quite impossible for a planet of this vintage, it is clearly a Dyson sphere built round a black hole constructed by the stellar engineer Omega as a power source for Rassilon's space-time capsules.

The reason it is in Draco is that it was shunted from its original universe into ours during the Third Time War.

Ha! Fooled you! I never post short answers!

Seriously, I have used IT skills in archaeology. You are basically examining a system where some components are black-box and some are white-box, where you have fragments of state information at given points in time, a library of studies into systems containing similar components, and another library of studies into system dynamics.

Archaeologists trained only in archaeology have only recently started to grasp the importance of systems analysis and reverse engineering. They are still not too clued-up on how to perform rigorous testing of black-box environments, which is why most of them view the subject as a pure humanity and haven't quite figured out that pure humanities don't actually exist.

They are also not very good at understanding how to store, retrieve or correctly associate vast amounts of information. A rather essential skill, one might think, when you can be gathering hundreds - sometimes thousands - of fragments in a relatively small area. It's why reassembled objects tend to be rare, even though pieces that fit together are a lot more common. The data is incompletely collected or never examined for patterns.

I do not recommend barging in and telling them how to do their job. Even though sometimes I wish someone would. Not Invented Here Syndrome and the usual evil of Office Politics applies just as much to the Mediocre Outdoors as to the Even More Mediocre Indoors.

On the other hand, applying the skills, making the necessary observations, making the necessary records, installing a database with just a tad more oomph than Microsoft Access (though leave the basic card entry screen) - that will help you not miss the blindingly obvious.

Hardware Engineer? Pffft! It is not that complex to convert the Open Source hardware spectrometer into an Open Source hardware thermoluminescence ceramic dating device. Might not be as good as the high-end commercial rigs, but high-end commercial rigs are very expensive to buy time on and archaeologists don't have the cash to even afford a decent hat and bull whip any more. But if you can, through decent approximation, show that there's something interesting going on, cash will materialize.

Please bear in mind, though, that although it's not complex to do the conversion, it's not hard to screw it up either. Do test things and do use a better camera than the one the prefab kit comes with.

If you're wanting to get out of Dodge, what could be better than removing Dodge?

The calculation was done by NASA and published in a peer-reviewed paper in New Scientist in 1988, I think. As best as I can recall, the solar sail was assumed to also have an initial mass of 5 Kg and to gain mass at a constant rate (since the remnants of the accretion disk should be thinner the further out you go, but you travel through more of it per unit time). I forget what the rate was. As I recall, the paper noted that there would be extreme difficulty in having a sail of such a size that was structurally capable of withstanding impacts at the velocities involved within the permissible mass.

Space is filled with dust, so yes, as you travel away from the sun, as the solar sail cools (since less heat is reaching it, inverse square law) it does indeed get heavier. It also gets heavier as it accelerates, due to relativity. It would be interesting to determine what the precise function is. The density of space dust is given in Carl Sagan's book, Cosmos, that was a companion to the series.

...beats a blipvert.

There are two sorts of solar sail, those that work off photons (and, no, you don't need a mirror, since you can't afford the extra mass) and those that work off ionized particles being emitted from the sun. Ionized particles have much more momentum and are generally considered superior.

A solar sail that is 50 Km in diameter, attached to a 5 Kg probe, would accelerate that probe to 25% light speed by the time you reached the edge of the solar system.

If you built a car whose headlights could accelerate the car in reverse with photonic pressure, the headlights would vaporize a considerable chunk of the planet in front of you. You can do the calculation yourself. The equations are at http://www.physicsforums.com/s...