586 karma · joined December 5, 2009
We are still very much an alpha site, but we are bootstrapped and breaking even. We hope to add transparency to an otherwise obscured industry and to generally give people a chance to get writing help from experts.
Society needs a system to ensure that innovations are not lost. Abolishing it is in someways similar to the idea of abolishing scientific publications. If you do that, how will breakthroughs be communicated to future generations? Or are you saying that having such a mechanism in place is a bad thing?
Just because a problem is hard and a solution hasn't been found doesn't mean that the idea motivating it is flawed.
I think that the existing implementation of the idea and where it has lead has numerous problems, but the fact of the matter is that it is beneficial for a society to have mechanisms like patents in place.
The article argues that things would still be done, which is true, but in the case of inventions, the problem is that they wouldn't be shared and companies would probably work hard to obscure any innovations that they did make to make it harder for competitors to copy them.
The argument for getting rid of trademarks is also kinda weak. The end user should be able to easily understand what it is they are buying. You shouldn't have to worry that some sneaky guy is selling cow manure in a box and calling it cheerios.
Beyond that, the point that removing IP restrictions everywhere else would only have a positive effect is something that I tend to agree with.
First off what I'm saying is that while fancy pictures of high end lab equipment might look impressive, it doesn't mean that it is the best way to design things, even when the people doing it are really good.
Secondly, while I understand that the intent of this is to tell people something along the lines of, "We didn't give you a defective device, we really did a great job testing it first, look at our facility", it can easily be spun as, "well you can't have done that good a job because even with all this fancy equipment you still released a product that has a design issue"
Then at Princeton, where they were in the same room, the machine (which was much less fancy) produced much more information because people saw what was going on as it was running.
Seems to me that this could easily be something of the case. Fancy test facility with no grounding in anything.
Furthermore isn't it kinda more embarrassing when, instead of admitting there was a problem, they just say that the phone was tested. It seems to imply that the issue is intentional.
This would be the equivilent of building a "quick preview gui" for lillypad.
Color me skeptical.
Like even if a lot of people were searching it, you might not want to be inadvertently suggesting morally questionable queries to people who don't want to see them.
As such, it seems like they err on the side of caution with it. Like there are no suggestions for the word "fuck" despite the fact that it is a wildly popular query.
Their algorithm probably just ends up tagging "is my son gay" as a query that people can enter on their own if they want to search it.
It's something I also wanted to do, but was unable to find a group of friends that were willing.
The other problem is that they act like gyroscopes. Which means that depending on how you mount them, will either constantly exert a precessional force on your vehical, or really protest you making sharp turns at high speeds.
It looks like there is some machining on there that he probably had his dad or dad's friend do.
Doesn't make it less cool though.
Back then the real alure was that computers could compute things amazingly quickly, and later, that through the internet, we could organize information on computer networks. And that everything could scale really quickly.
We may be entering an era of basement labs, but that doesn't mean that these breakthroughs will necessarily be life changing.
IT is working on the problems of organizing people and information. This will likely produce many more people working on solving human maladies. But all these things being done in basements without any regulation or standards may lead to some health risks for first movers.
The "real musicians" have a longer history, and thus there is more to learn, which is why school is more necessary to be qualified.
I.e. the best violinists come out of conservatories, whereas the best d.j.s can easily be self taught.
If you are good enough, it doesn't matter how much money you have, someone else will throw money at you to ensure that you keep doing what your doing.
Science, like music or art, is one of those things that you do because you decide that you like the rewards it brings more than the struggle that is required to achieve success. If you are rich, the risks of doing it are lower, but being poor hardly stops you.
If you do any of those in order to produce finacial gain, it is pretty dumb, as there are easier ways to make way more money if you have the potential to be successful in those feilds.
The professor saw that the guy didn't have any real passion for science, and thus told him to do something else.
The real quote i disagree with is "This is the basic theory behind the practice of tenure of professors in American universities. First, a recent PhD graduate must first steel oneself and complete 5 years of hard work. Afterwards, if you are picked by the group of tenured professors and one day pass their requirements, then for the rest of your life you will never have to worry about making a living again. At that point you can wholeheartedly devote your time to research and study. Naturally the school also knows that the overwhelming majority of these tenured professors have no research potential left in them. Equally impotent are the lowly menial workers of the research laboratory. However, out of the vast numbers of tenured professors a few stand out from the crowd that actually have talent and contribute positively to the economy."
Science today needs a lot more menial laborers than professors directing research, because it works on grants and doesn't generate its own income, professors are perfectly happy to take people who are not really interested in the work, but will be methodical and will work for very low pay (like asian PhD students) because they need a lot of hands to run these tedious experiments. That doesn't mean that once a professor becomes a professor they are useless or lack talent. It seems as though he confuses positive economic contributions with positive intellectual ones (which might only be capatalized on decades later).
Those actually physically have the light reflect to your eye from different positions in the "z" direction.
They seem to have a number of techical problems though that would prevent them from being ubiquitous.
Also, this misses the fact that society just doesn't give too much funding for people doing the type of science that goes on at fermilab. The people that those kids saw were generally those that made it.
There are tons of people that study to be scientists and then end up not making the cut and having to spend the time afterwards working a science job like any other, often without much of the initial passion and curiosity.
Thats not to say that it might be better to (as a society) push people to learn about how the world works, than about something like buisness. At least science gives you some training in thinking.
However, it seems to me that these would actually be better because they would make your eyes change thier depth of focus more.
Looking at sterograms can actually improve your vision by strengthening eye muscles that aren't frequently used in our computer - don't go outside and change focus much - age.