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conaniteon The Girl Who Turned to Bone

Wow. See also "Tupac Shakur and the End of the World", a short story about a similar condition, caused by a latent virus and triggered by minor injuries. Everyone dies.

I hadn't realised when I read it that there was a real-world equivalent ...

http://futurismic.com/2010/03/01/new-fiction-tupac-shakur-an...

by Sandra McDonald

conaniteon What happens when the Secret Service uses a NSL on you

I object to your analogy with test-driven development.

"Test-driven" means we decide what it should do, then we write the corresponding code.

A "test-driven" nation would decide first what the government ought to do, then proceed by writing the corresponding laws.

The system you describe is the exact opposite: let's write some code / law and then see what happens. You have a Cowboy Congress.

You might amend your last sentence to read "Start Test Driven Government" instead.

conaniteon Patents and Innovation: Evidence from Economic History [pdf]

> Generally speaking, the countries with the strongest patent rights produce many of the innovative companies.

The article suggests that the available evidence does not support this conclusion. It seems that in historical technology fairs, countries with a weak or no patent system in place performed as well as other countries, both in terms of numbers of inventions they presented, and awards they received.

The article also describes some instances where patents clearly inhibited innovation - for example in the US in 1916, aircraft production halted due to patent disputes between Wright and Curtiss.

conaniteon Mini Drones: Army Deploys Tiny Helicopters

Coming up next in Afghanistan: giant fly swatters.

conaniteon Something really scary is going on in Germany

My guess is that if newspaper sites lose a big chunk of their traffic they might reconsider who should be paying whom. I'm also guessing that without support from newspapers, the law is less likely to get through.

conaniteon Something really scary is going on in Germany

It would seem that Google could quickly kill this law by de-indexing all the relevant newspapers, right now. Why are they waiting?

conaniteon Deadly 'superbugs' invade U.S. health care facilities

Assuming it is correct to say that antibiotic-resistant bacteria evolve in response to the (over-/ab-)use of antibiotics -

I wonder to what extent opposition to teaching evolution improves the chances of these kind of bacteria evolving. Disbelief in, and/or ignorance of how a process works is effectively giving that process a green light.

Conversely, might the appearance of CRE bacteria might sway the evolution debate?

Or to be more blunt, does a disbelief in evolution increase a nation's chances of collectively qualifying for a Darwin award?

conaniteon Amazon founder Jeff Bezos calls for governments to end patent wars

The article ends with

  Mr Bezos would not be drawn on whether Amazon plans to
  release a smartphone of its own.

Amazon's plans in the smartphone market may be influencing Jeff's argument.

conaniteon How to confuse a moral compass: Survey 'magic trick' causes attitude reversal

Scott Adams (of Dilbert), also inspired by Cialdini, found an excellent use for the consistency principle. See [0] (text possibly nsfw)

[0] http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/03/toda...

conaniteon Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram

They're using T and G for a 1, and A and C for a 0; why not double the density and get two bits from each letter?

  T = 00
  G = 01
  A = 10
  C = 11

for example.

conaniteon Extending Patents for Antibiotics Creates Perverse Incentives

My interpretation of that sentence was that, with limited-time monopoly protection, it's in the producer's interest to sell as much of the stuff as possible before the monopoly ends, after which point it won't be possible to make significant profits from the same product. I haven't yet figured out whether this makes sense.

conaniteon The Use of Computers to Support Oppression

The problem here is the oppression, not the computers. An "Access Control System" is a banal piece of software that decides who to let in and who to keep out. Hotels, banks, golf clubs ... and oppressive regimes, they all use one.

You could also write an article on "The Use of Clothing to Support Oppression", and again, the problem is not with the clothes.

conaniteon Rajat Gupta Convicted of Insider Trading

An alternative in which direction? Like, a nice hotel ... or hanging?

Insider trading is basically theft, only with no specific victim, and no broken windows; a very clean crime. Insider trading is stealing from other shareholders, which might include pension funds of HN readers.

Some discussion of impacts of insider trading here - http://money.howstuffworks.com/insider-trading3.htm

conaniteon Rajat Gupta Convicted of Insider Trading

Wow - Godwin's Law, in reverse!

conaniteon The Defensive Patent License and Other Ways to Beat the Patent System

The idea of a "defensive" patent is that you only ever assert it against another company asserting its patents against you. If you file a patent with the intention of preventing people from using an idea, I suppose you could call that an "aggressive" patent.

> Wasn't protection against copying the original purpose of patents?

The original purpose was to provide an incentive for inventors to (a) invent stuff, and (b) disclose their inventions, so that after a limited time, the invention would be free (as in freedom) to use by any other party.

The problem now is that frivolous patents enable trolls to prevent, discourage, and stifle innovation, and the original purpose of the system is turned on its head.

When my cat plays with reflected lights dancing on the floor, she may well be in violation of somebody's patent.

When you see Google/Apple/Microsoft spending giga$ to acquire patent portfolios, it's not because they're short on brains: they need these patents to play the patent game. And that's so much money that's not being spent making better software for you and me.

conaniteon The Defensive Patent License and Other Ways to Beat the Patent System

Aha, thanks for the clarification. The article stated RPX "promises to never use [its patent portfolio] offensively against its customers". Never, ever, against anybody ... that's quite nice, actually :)

conaniteon The Defensive Patent License and Other Ways to Beat the Patent System

Private, for-profit companies also provide various ways to navigate the patent system. For example, RPX allows companies to buy into its large patent portfolio, which it promises to never use offensively against its customers.

So you give RPX protection money and they leave you alone. This is what Intellectual Ventures does. Why is it ok for RPX? (never heard of RPX before btw)

Or have I missed something obvious?

See also: Twitter Patent Agreement http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3853949

conaniteon Show HN: The most beautiful places on earth

Using safari (5.1.5) on mac, I can't click on any of the place links (works ok in chrome)

conaniteon Try Haxe

Hey, it has macros! But it doesn't compile to coffeescript ... yet ...

http://haxe.org/manual/macros

conaniteon GNU Emacs 24.1 released

Yes, this is pretty radical. More info from the manual:

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Usi...

from http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Lex... -

Such code is also much more friendly to concurrency, which we want to add to Emacs in the near future.

Exciting times ahead ...

conaniteon U.N. could tax U.S.-based Web sites

Aha ... in the other (longer) linked document, the T-word is mentioned:

National authorities are free to impose taxes on all telecommunications traffic, whether incoming or outgoing.

I don't know how to interpret this document, particularly as it's a work in progress, and looks like the output of a human-powered diff process. But it's hard to conclude that it specifically targets Google or Apple, or the U.S., or even just websites. It's about telecommunications.

conaniteon U.N. could tax U.S.-based Web sites

From one of the linked documents:

Operating Agencies shall endeavour to provide sufficient telecommunications facilities to meet requirements of and demand for international telecommunication services. For this purpose, and to ensure an adequate return on investment in high bandwidth infrastructures, operating agencies shall negotiate commercial agreements to achieve a sustainable system of fair compensation for telecommunications services and, where appropriate, respecting the principle of sending party network pays

What's the "sending party network pays" principle? I get that if I make a phone call, I pay, not the receiver. But if someone in a village in Africa consults google, _that_ person is the initiator, not google. So I'm not sure what way around this is supposed to work.

Besides, each party is already paying for bandwidth on each end.

"operating agencies shall negotiate commercial agreements" - this doesn't sound like "tax" (in that governments are not the beneficiaries), it sounds like granting new powers to bandwidth providers. I'm guessing the T-word is linkbait, even if the proposal is horrible anyway.

conaniteon 5 Million Farmers Sue Monsanto for $7.7 Billion

Monsanto: the MAFIAA and patent trolls of agriculture. May the farmers win. And may your amaranth grow and prosper. [0]

[0] http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Monsanto_defeated_by_herbicide_resis...

conaniteon Is Gaydar Real? Absolutely.

The 60% accuracy is for a 50ms glimpse of a photo "mostly devoid of cultural cues". In real life you get much richer information for much more time, so it seems reasonable to conclude that 60% is a lower-bound for real-world gaydar accuracy.

conaniteon Charity asked to pay just to link to newspaper websites

There's a lot of greed in copyright, and there's a lot of stupidity, but this is an example of both combined in one place. What kind of colossal misunderstanding does it take to confuse linking and copying?

conaniteon Self-driving Volvos cover 200km of busy Spanish motorway

The 6-metre distance between cars is probably to strongly discourage other drivers from attempting to cut in, which would banjax their laser finders and other stuff.

With the lead truck sending instructions, this is a client-server setup, compared to google's independent peer-to-peer approach. It's not self-driving, it's remote-control of a train of cars behind you. The volvo experiment seems much less ambitious than google's, and might be more successful in the narrow case of long-distance motorway travel. But I don't see how to generalise it to everyday driving.

Add an ad-hoc mesh network to google's cars and anything could become possible.

conaniteon The Open Goldberg Variations

See also http://musopen.org/ ... initally funded by kickstarter, they use donations to produce pro recordings of classical music which are then released to the public for free.

conaniteon Github: United States Code

The Court is the VM

conaniteon The Facebook Fallacy - Without an earth-changing idea, it will collapse

The article proposes that the ad-supported web will collapse along with FB after prices have dropped to beyond unsustainable ... what would the post-ad web look like? I'm looking forward to all the content farms, endless plagiarism, and constant attention-seeking going away; what else will happen?