I agree with you. All I'm pointing out is that when the patent system was created, it was to encourage inventors to share their knowledge. Of course with time the patent system has changed and all you have said have become more important than the public disclosure of inventions aspect of patents.
Patents were created as a means to mitigate that specific problem. If you have no alternative to solve the free rider problem that is better than a well executed patent system (our current one is not well executed), then your argument is a non-starter.
Patents were not created for that purpose. From wikipedia,
In accordance with the original definition of the term "patent", patents are intended to facilitate and encourage disclosure of innovations into the public domain for the common good. If inventors did not have the legal protection of patents, in many cases, they might prefer or tend to keep their inventions secret.[citation needed] Awarding patents generally makes the details of new technology publicly available, for exploitation by anyone after the patent expires, or for further improvement by other inventors. Furthermore, when a patent's term has expired, the public record ensures that the patentee's invention is not lost to humanity.[29][specify]
The word "patent" itself means expose and make accessible. The patent system was created to spread information while keeping the inventor protected. Otherwise, the inventor would not share his method with anyone else.
The free rider problem is a modern problem. The original intention of the patent system was not to solve the free rider problem.
The fact of the matter is that there are far too many people who want faculty positions compared to the number of available positions. I quote directly from our university president, "I can get professors anywhere."
I wonder if that is due to the foreign PhDs. The graduate student TA salaries are horrible and the working hours are excessive but there is absolutely no shortage of willing international graduate students to fill these positions. They in turn get PhDs and then look for professor jobs. This is especially true because professor jobs are not subject to the H1B cap.
Professors in technical areas make large amounts of money, and are guaranteed their salary for life once they've been promoted once (to associate professor).
In my department, at the lowest level - assistant professor (tenure track, but not yet tenured) - they are making well north of 10K dollars a month.
False. I am an assistant professor in mathematics at one of the top universities in the world. Many associate professors here do not have tenure and have no hope of ever receiving tenure. They certainly have not been "guaranteed their salary for life". They can be fired at any moment.
And they don't make "well north of 10K dollars a month". In fact, if you look at the statistics online
http://ams.org/notices/201406/rnoti-p611.pdf
you'll see that the tenure-track assistant professors at large public universities make around 83K per year on average. The assistant professors who aren't tenure-track make even less, of course.
He's talking about engineering.
Math and science are one step below. Arts and humanities are one further step below.
To the non-US citizen anti gun troll: In the US we own arms to protect our families from thugs, and to remind our government that they work for us, not the other way around.
That will change with the use of drones by law enforcement thugs and homeland security and possibly the drug cartels. Too bad you won't have signal jammers to use against the drones.
Remote controlled threats are going to be huge in the next few years. You need signal jammers against those threats in your own home. Though I presume you'll say you will shoot the drones.
Documents look like it's primarily focused at foreign targets with cooperation from other countries. Shouldn't the NSA be doing foreign intelligence collection?
The main question is for what purpose?
Is it for national security or for other reasons? If I had data like this, I could probably make a killing in the stock market or provide lots of insider information for hedge funds.
Another scary situations like the Iran Shah manipulation or mujahadeen in Afghanistan. Powerful agencies being able to manipulate government, countries, regions by manipulating communication. We already know of the Cuba text message uprising and I'm sure its attempted in many other places. It creates civil war and misery for a lot of people for the benefit of a very few by manipulating unstable systems into chaotic situations.
By using FPGAs to accelerate certain specific types of workloads, Intel Xeon customers can reap higher performance for critical functions without translating the majority of their code to OpenCL or bothering to update it for GPGPU.
What? This doesn't make sense. Unless Intel invented a way to automatically generate parallel code (in which case it could also be used in GPUs), somebody would have to rewrite the relevant parts of the program in VHDL, Verilog, OpenCL, or whatever.
I would assume the FPGA part of the CPU would be programmed in VHDL. Once programmed, it would act like a set of custom instruction sets in the CPU.
Simple example. An operation like a bit circling (10010 -> 00101 move the bits one step to the left and move the first bit to the end getting 00101) is very inefficient. You can left shift but the first bit falls of and then you have to and it and then put in the end. A lot of operations. A custom FPGA operation to do just that could be just one instruction and would speed up a lot of programs.
Of course, that is a super super simple example. You could take an algorithm, analyze where it spends most of its time and turn in into "silicon" because FPGAs can be huge in capacity.
I'm assuming here running as single core CPU. Maybe one of the cores will be responsible for the FPGAs and can do parallel execution.
Even driving a 5W tube amp to distortion is ear shattering loud. I don't even know how people can do that to 50W tube amps. Most people use pre-amp distortion or fuzz pedals. I think most people use their tube amps in the non-distortion range.
I'm sure theoretically solid state amps can outperform tube amps but the problem is that is hasn't been implemented that way. I have never ever heard a solid state amp that can sound like a tube amp.
Most digital signal processing uses frequency transformation and this produces artifacts since the signal has to be chopped up to do the processing in real time. You can hear that sharpness and coldness artifacts on those.
Again, I'm sure theoretically, there is a possibility of creating algorithms that can eliminate those artifacts.
The current state is that as a consumer or musician, it is just a good rule of thumb to choose analog over digital. I know digital provides a gazillion benefits but it never sounds warm. Theoretically, I'm sure digital can sound as warm as analog but the problem is that there is something lacking in the production of digital gear that doesn't achieve this. Whatever techniques engineers have used to put "warmth" in their gear hasn't worked so far.
How would YouTube go about determining whether a particular video is a "music video" by a "music label"? If I compose and record original music to accompany a video that I have produced, and I upload the video to YouTube, does that make me a "label" and make the video a "music video", thus requiring me to formally release its soundtrack?
You're making this too complicated. This has nothing to do with definitions of "music videos" or "labels."
IF you want to upload a video of whatever to YouTube and show it for free, you are still free to do so. Nothing about that has changed.
IF, on the other hand, you want YouTube to pay you money from ad revenue it makes, you need to negotiate a license with Google/YouTube. Some labels and Google can't agree on terms, so Google has simply decided to walk away from the old licenses.
The old license terms gave the labels some ad revenue in exchange for YouTube having permission to show the (commercial) videos. If Google no longer agrees to the payment scheme, if can no longer show the videos, according to the old licenses. Therefore, it must take them down.
Nothing is preventing the independent labels (or artists themselves) from posting anything they want to for free. It's only if they are restricting the playing of videos so that they must receive shares in YouTube's profits in exchange that this matters.
I think this is the narrowest definition of what Google is saying.
Google uses content ID to figure out who owns copyright to music. So, if a video is uploaded that they know is owned by a copyright owner that has not negotiated with them, they can block the video saying that they have no license with the copyright holder and thus, nobody can upload that content.
This effectively allows Google to block all content from the indie labels, uploaded by anyone and monetized or not.
Google is not being clear about what they will do but the worst case is that they can block every indie music from youtube that has not licensed with them. Of course, they want to negotiate and want to scare the indies into signing for their service.
From what I have read, most musicians consider YouTube as a promotional platform and not a revenue stream from videos. Google's threat is that they will eliminate Youtube as a promotional platform. You can choose to believe that they meant only as a revenue stream and not as a promotional platform but there certainly isn't any guarantee from Google about that.
It's comparable to the resurgence of interest in vinyl records. The only worthy attraction is in the sheer retro-ness of it. It certainly isn't in the quality;
This is just dumb dumb dumb. The thing about analog sound devices have always been that they sound warm and pleasant under most settings. Of course, digital can be as good and better but the problem with digital gear has always has been there are many many settings in which it sounds horrible and only small zones where it sounds amazing.
Musicians still use a lot of analog gear and eschew digital as being a massive PITA to get right. With analog gear, you plug it in and it produces wonderful sounds. You move a few knobs around and you're done. With digital, you tweak and tweak and tweak.
Up until the current generation of DSLRs, I always felt that I wasn't *quite* there. But today, I literally have no reason to look back. I have to hand it to Canon, Nikon, etc... they've done a great job. Between the quality obtainable, the ability to go out and shoot a thousand *good* images without changing "film", the incredible range of usable ISO (sensitivity to light), in-camera preview -- and disposal -- so you actually know what you have while you're still on-site and able to try again, to readily available histograms and after-the-fact white balance... and then "developing" with Aperture or Lightroom... I'll take a DSLR every time.
I am not a huge photographer but this is my experience from all the photographs I have taken.
DLSRs can produce great images but there are so many times it produces cold, lifeless images. You can take hundreds of images and choose the best.
When I used film, a cheapo camera produced more brilliant pictures per shots. Yeah, you have to wait and have them developed but in every reel there were always some amazing shots. Now, with DLSR there are thousands of lifeless images and you edit them and enhance them until they are good. There is just so much rubbish and then a good one among them.
Maybe it speaks to my skill as a photographer but there are some film shots that are absolutely perfect to me - like something out of a magazine. I have perhaps 100 times more digital images but most are horrible and only a few that are amazing mostly because of the composition and I would probably have to set up a professional lighting to achieve that perfect shot I got a few times with film.
The internet of things is nothing but a marketers (and hackers) wet dream. I've said it before, and I'll say it again - there is no reason what so ever for each device to be directly connected to the internet, or have internet access, for that matter. The refrigerator doesn't need access to the internet, neither does the washer and drier, toaster, or even the thermostat. One home router and a single control unit is all that's needed, or both in one unit. Let that control your food, soap and dryer sheet inventory. Each unit can tell the control system when a unit of measure is used, and it can keep track. Access to the internet is limited to that one device and there aren't 20 different ways to hack into my network. Of course, this will never fly. Each manufacturer will want to hold the patents on the standards, so they can charge for what should be a free and open standard. No one will ever play nicely so the general public can benefit rather than the elite corporations.
Fuck them, I'm glad I have the skills and knowledge to do this on my own, without all their patent encumbered, insecure crap. Of course, my washer and drier, refrigerator and oven will remain dumb, as they should.
Just because you can't envision a use doesn't mean there aren't any. For example, for the refrigerator, you could change the settings by calculating the time and settings required to get the food to a certain temperature. Perhaps there is an optimal temperature you want your food or drink to get to and you want that at 7pm when the guests arrive.
You could many many cheap sensors inside but right now it's useless because there is no simple user interface to use those sensors.
For the oven, you have heating elements on the top and bottom and they can be changed in intensity. Right not there is just a general temperature you can set it to. A complex recipe could call for precise application of the top heating element until the food temperature reached a certain point and then use the bottom heating element until the internal temperature is reached. Plus, allow for multiple temperature sensors and it can self calibrate much easier.
Imagine getting a turkey from the store for thanksgiving. The store sells it with the encoded weight and rough dimensions of the turkey. You want to keep it frozen until a few days before thanksgiving. You transfer it to a different section of the fridge and it will change the settings so that it gets it to 30 degrees throughout in 2 days because it knows the weight and dimensions of the turkey. It knows you set your house temperature at 65 and calculates how long you would put it outside to reach room temperature before you put it in the oven. In the oven, it will adjust a known baking recipe to your turkey's weight and dimensions and get the turkey cooked to the right temperatures.
It will take a huge hassle out of cooking and food preparation. Or, you could always eat a pre-cooked turkey product or drive to a restaurant to eat out - health and food quality be dammed.
This sounds like the foundation of the "Paleo" diet. And while this makes sense, I'm not sure there have been many good studies demonstrating the benefits of this approach. Part of the problem is establishing what "paleo" humans actually ate.
I think the Paleo diet is more about what the "paleo" humans didn't eat. As you said, they didn't eat processed and refined foods.
What Paleo and other health food people would not agree on is grains. They would say "paleo" humans didn't eat grains. Other group would say whole grains are natural and healthy.
I think the problem today is that there are few sources of "original" food sources available. As a species we've domesticated most of the plants and animals we eat, changing them over time. So it's hard to rely on the concept of "eat what we ate a million years ago". The best we can do to determine optimal nutrtion now is try to conduct solid double-blind studies based on the foods we have available. Unfortunately that is expensive to do and most of the money in nutrition research comes from the food industry, which has a vested interest in the outcomes of the research they fund.
We are in the midst of an obesity epidemic and no two person can agree on what is the cause of it. Optimal nutrition through double blind experimental science has let us badly down here.
We are in amidst the largest uncontrolled diet experiment and along with a computer revolution where we store every minute piece of data. Maybe we should shelve these expensive double blind experiments and just analyze the cheap data out there of what people are eating and their health status. Taking a picture of every meal with your phone diet is a thing and millions of people are collecting data on their food habits.
Anyway, paleo diets or natural diets are not really meant to stand scientific scrutiny. They are all general guidelines for someone to follow on what to eat and what not to eat. They aren't meant to be an "optimal" nutrition framework.
In 2003, a thorough analysis of the incidence and available mortality statistics among Inuit populations in Greenland, Canada and Alaska by Bjerregaard et al, also concluded that the totality of evidence from various Northern areas makes a strong argument for high presence of CVD in Eskimos (Appendix A in Supplementary Materials).
Is the current Eskimo diet the same as the traditional Eskimo diet?
Do the Inuits in Greenland still eat blubber and not eat pizza, sugary drinks, hamburgers and chocolate whatsoever.
If saturated fat CVD theory were right, the Eskimo diet would have significantly more CVD than the general population. However, it seems about the same. So, the saturated fats is bad for you part is still questionable even. Now, the whole Omega-3 is heart healthy is the one being put on question.
Depending on how well it can separate subjects, this could be quite useful in an airport for (non-descriminative) screening.
You've got one guy walking through whose heartrate is abnormally high, there's a decent change he's up to something inappropriate (smuggling, terrorism). The other possibility is that he has a fear of flying, but secondary screening should hopefully be able to determine that.
Even better, have an airport security person walk by him or just look him in the eye and smile, then see if his heart-rate goes up even more. Sudden jump in vitals... bingo!
I'm pretty sure the smuggler who figures out how to keep his heart rate low can suddenly be super effective. Then, this will give the incentive to create methods to learn how to control your heart-rate and it will be soon mastered by many smugglers.
However, a normal person who has a high heart rate for whatever reason (a text from an old girlfriend, a cryptic e-mail from the boss etc) will be endlessly harassed.
The pros will get around it because they will encounter it everyday. The only people who will suffer is the ordinary people who will encounter it occasionally and have no way to know what to do and get fucked by the elaborate system setup for terrorists.
The bitrot will change the checksums and cause the files to show up as modified.
Moreover, what will you do about a reported bitrotted file unless you have genuine archival backups somewhere else?
Bitrot happens when the error correcting can't catch the error because there is a say 1e-10 chance of a bunch of bits flipping and the error correcting not catching it. Yes, add checksum and what not over it and you push the error chance to say 1e-20 but there is still chance of bitrot. There is still a pattern of bit flips that will bypass the checksum as well.
You can always make the error correction stronger to make the error probability as small as possible but over years and gigabytes later, there will be one bit that will be flipped. However, you will lose performance by going with such a strong error correction/checksum system.
The one day you'd sell your soul for something, souls are a glut.
