HN user

asmithmd1

3,741 karma
Posts45
Comments803
View on HN
blogs.nasa.gov 4y ago

JWST now launching no earlier than Dec 24th due to communications issue

asmithmd1
9pts1
blogs.nasa.gov 4y ago

Webb Telescope launch delayed at least 4 days

asmithmd1
3pts2
www.youtube.com 4y ago

29 Days on the Edge: The James Webb Space Telescope

asmithmd1
2pts1
www.scientificamerican.com 4y ago

The Nail-Biting Journey of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Is About to Begin

asmithmd1
4pts0
www.space.com 4y ago

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Launch Delayed to December

asmithmd1
120pts72
www.ndbc.noaa.gov 5y ago

Burst pipe shuts National Data Buoy Ctr, no time estimate to restore service

asmithmd1
2pts0
www.ercot.com 5y ago

Clearing price for supplying power to Texas grid –$31.65

asmithmd1
102pts254
www.righto.com 6y ago

Apollo Guidance Computer switching power supply works after 50 years

asmithmd1
234pts78
www.mass.gov 8y ago

System upgrade at MA Registry of Motor Vehicles requires planned 4 day shutdown

asmithmd1
1pts0
www.ca.com 8y ago

Runscope acquired by CA Technologies

asmithmd1
3pts0
dragos.com 9y ago

Dragos Inc. Analysis of CRASHOVERRIDE Threat to Electric Grid Operations [pdf]

asmithmd1
1pts0
www.schneier.com 10y ago

Visiting website without permission is now a US federal crime

asmithmd1
7pts3
www.feld.com 10y ago

Deal Retrades have begun

asmithmd1
1pts0
www.kickstarter.com 10y ago

100MHz Cortex-M4 micro with WiFi, Lua, 2M flash and 128K RAM for $10

asmithmd1
2pts0
www.mass.gov 12y ago

Creating websites now subject to sales tax in MA

asmithmd1
3pts0
www.avc.com 13y ago

The US needs a new spectrum policy

asmithmd1
8pts2
arstechnica.com 13y ago

Sprint agrees to merger with Softbank, 3rd largest Japanese carrier

asmithmd1
3pts0
www.kickstarter.com 13y ago

Zero point energy scam up on Kickstarter

asmithmd1
1pts3
www.cringely.com 13y ago

How stock decimalization killed IPO's and ruined our economy

asmithmd1
2pts0
www.russellbeattie.com 13y ago

The Law of Information Ochlocracy or Why TV is crap and everything else will be

asmithmd1
1pts0
www.bostonmagazine.com 13y ago

End Game - Inside the destruction of 38 Studios and the loss of $75 million

asmithmd1
2pts0
www.quadrigram.com 14y ago

Visual programming environment to gather,shape,and share living data

asmithmd1
3pts0
www.metawatch.org 14y ago

TI Metawatch delayed a month, first pre-release developer documents available

asmithmd1
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

Ask HN: Found security flaw in site, what should I do?

asmithmd1
24pts15
online.wsj.com 15y ago

Why did Google take a $3B loan with $37B already in the bank?

asmithmd1
70pts52
takimag.com 15y ago

Some ideas to save the financial system from quants

asmithmd1
1pts1
www.cringely.com 15y ago

Newspapers aren't dead yet: Re-purpose web printers to make .50/Watt Solar cells

asmithmd1
1pts0
www.debka.com 15y ago

Iran asks for outside help to stop Stuxnet

asmithmd1
4pts0
www.startribune.com 15y ago

Sen. Franken asks Attorney General to study geotags in pictures

asmithmd1
2pts0
scottlocklin.wordpress.com 15y ago

There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it

asmithmd1
139pts111

Did you watch the video? He also says, “we don’t know what’s on the back side of the moon”

I guess we have decided to elect political representatives are just egotistical camera whores, but why should the top decision maker at a technical agency be a complete idiot who is ignorant about many things the agency he runs has done? It would be like the head of the air force saying airplanes fly because of flubber

Uh, no. The ONLY time we see a new moon is during an eclipse. Other times the moon is above or below the sun and is too dim to see. A lunar eclipse is when the moon passes into the earth’s shadow and they happens during full moons

Very nice intro. I like how you introduce networking layers. It seems you are starting to go down the path of explaining how computers and servers work - and that is certainly daunting. Maybe just stick with networking and introduce more of that and how real world systems (T1 and Ethernet) are just changing voltages at some point - and can be swapped in or out because of network layers. Then build up packet switched messages TCP, Telnet, HTTP

I try to get back to a real world analogy, think of a bank:

Can you try opening the public door off hours and discover it is locked? Yes, of course.

If the the public door is unlocked, can you now go inside the bank and start trying different combinations to open the safe? No, you will be arrested.

Anytime you move from probing a website with a browser to using other tools, your actions are subject to interpretation

Thanks for the thorough research, not just on-line, but including calling people.

I occasionally go down rabbit holes like this and I have not gotten the helpful responses from officials I have contacted in the New England area. I don't know if I was telegraphing some agenda the officials did not want to further, or if it was because you were dealing with "Minnesota nice" people. I first heard of Minnesota nice when a curmudgeonly co-worker was grumbling about calling Anderson Window, "I hate calling them, they are so effing nice!"

Thanks for sticking with me and engaging.

I agree that design patents should not have a compulsory license. Interesting that Birkins patent expires in 3 years. I will set a calendar reminder to look into knocking them off in a couple years :)

I appreciate your thoughtful disagreement with my assertion that it is possible to set a compulsory license fee that would be "value neutral" between patents as issued today, and patents with a compulsory license. I think there is something that could be done to reform patents along these lines, but it is a harder argument to make and that argument DOES start going into the "value to society" area and is therefore purely political.

Now I understand what you are saying. The only way I see individuals deriving value from scarcity is with brands - not functional patents. Even with technical luxury goods like watches and cars, which may also include patents, the real customer scarcity value comes from showing others they are rich enough to buy and flaunt those goods. Can you think of an example where something purely functional is only valuable because it is scarce? Maybe private jets? If jets dropped in price 50x, private airports would become crowded and destroy much of their benefit. But then the gating luxury good would switch to being a member of a private airport network or something.

I am talking about a change to patents, not copyright and trademarks which are exclusive essentially forever. You can still strut around with a $20k Birkin bag (If they deem you a worthy buyer of course) that delivers the same functionality as a $100 purse. No one will be allowed to make fake Birkins and destroy their exclusivity. But if Hermes patents some new zipper, you would be able to duplicate their zipper and pay them a license fee. You would NOT be allowed to mention their brand. Patents are about function, not color, size, style or ornamentation.

So you are saying price==value? That is not true. The price a company extracts from a customer is de-coupled from the value a customer receives.

If I walk into a store to buy a shirt I saw online only to discover it is on sale for 20% off, I am getting the exact same value as buying it online, but the company captured less of the value they delivered.

If there is one shirt left in the store and the store holds an auction for it that I win for a price 20% higher, again I get the exact same value, but the store captured 20% more of the value.

The goal of any sane economy should be to deliver the most value to the people in it - including the people who own companies.

In short, is all this just fancy BS?

I have been following Simon Wardley on Twitter and read most of his blog posts about mapping and maybe kind of worked through his examples - so I am not any kind of expert and had never used them before. I was introduced by a client to the roof truss industry. Here is a link to one corner of an entire ecosystem: https://www.tpinst.org/

Just to help me make sense of an industry that I was completely unfamiliar with, I mapped it from lumber producers all the way to home owners. I showed the map to my client and just briefly explained what the axis were. He was able to clarify my understanding and point out where other players fit in that he had not mentioned before. By realizing that different players will fight commodification, we could see their likely moves. Time will tell if we are correct.

So my take-away is that it is useful. I went from complete ignorance of an industry that has a new technology being introduced, to making reasonable guesses about the likely moves of incumbents in just 2-3 hours.

Of course I do not know, but he should have come clean. "Hey, I can't find this case in WestLaw, but chatGPT found it and produced it". Instead he just submitted it as-is right out of chatGPT. Alarm bells had to be going off in his mind that a federal court decision in a lawsuit was less than 5 pages

a lot of the value comes from the exclusivity of it

I think you are confusing value and price. Auctions precisely determine something's value. Companies sometimes can use scarcity to capture more money in price than they deliver in value - but that is a bug in our economic system, not a desired feature

The problem is companies can just ignore your request to license a patent. Did you know the reason any artist can "cover" another artist's song is that Congress added "compulsory licensing" to copyright law? For 9.1 cents per copy of a song, you can record your own version and sell it. We need to do the same thing for patent claims. Set a floor of, IDK, $100 per copy of a patent claim infringement. As it is now, damages are completely, un-capped and you have to pay for a lawsuit to get a jury to decide how much a patent is worth.

I agree patent trolls are a problem. And I agree we want to incentivize people to innovate. I am citing an example with copyright how Congress chose to strike a balance and I think it could be applied to patents.

I have several patents that were issued to both large companies and start-ups. The patent system right now only works for large companies and is actively stopping innovation by small companies. What changes do you think would help?

Currently, in trade for publicly disclosing how their invention works, we give patent holders an exclusive right to make, sell, or use their invention for 20 years. A patent holder can say no one other than me can use my invention for 20 years. I think inventions are more important than songs, yet Congress decided there must be some way to force the author of a song to allow anyone to play that song - and we will decide how much you get in compensation. I am saying we do the same thing for inventions. Don't like the deal? You are free to keep your invention secret. The formula for Coke is a classic example of how they chose to protect their invention.

No, I can't republish a song and call it mine, and I can't use someone else's recording of a song without their permission. What I can do is record my version of their song and sell it and I can publicly play their song and charge people - but I have to cut them author of the song in for 9.1 cents for each instance.

Yeah, devil is in the details. Currently a patent gives exclusive use for 20 years and music copyright gives control for 100 years, but anyone can license it. The trick is to strike a balance that gets the most economic benefit. Set the claim fee high at first and tinker with it. I would think companies that innovate would be happy to know there is a ceiling to their liabilities instead of being at the mercy of a jury. And do we really want an inventor to be able to lock up any use of a technology for 20 years. Imagine a solo inventor cracks low-temperature fusion and sells their patent to Saudi Arabia for $1B - who sits on it for 20 years and sues anyone who tries to use it. Here is the public framing: "We need to pass the 'Freedom to Innovate' act passed to stop evil foreign companies from locking up American inventions that would benefit all hard-working Americans!"

Music is not as easy as it seems. How much should an artist get for a ring tone? For a stream? How much should artists get paid for longer songs? There is a 3 judge panel that adjudicates all these things: https://www.crb.gov/index.html

Do you know why musicians are allowed to "cover" any song they like? It is because Congress decided music is so important no one artists should be able to lock it up for themselves so they passed a law for "compulsory licensing" of copyrighted music. We need to do the same for patents. The compulsory license for a recorded song is 9.1 cents per song, Set some fee per patent claim.

I agree mixed government wins. I moved to Massachusetts almost 20 years ago and I don't understand why it isn't held up as an example for other states. Everyone thinks MA is deep blue, and it is on social issues. It was the first state to allow same sex marriage. It has the toughest gun law enforcement in the US (break the law and you are going to jail for 2 years) and consequently has the lowest gun death rate in the US - 80% lower than many red states!

But MA also elects Republican governors on the regular. Mitt Romney was Governor from 2002-2006. Republican Charlie Baker ran the state so well that by the end of his second term the state's "rainy day" fund hit the legal max of 15% of the state's annual budget, so last fall every taxpayer in MA got a check for 13% of their previous years state taxes! And state income taxes are not high, basically a 5% flat tax. I would argue this frequent election of people who have run businesses is what also keeps the state at the top of the list of states in per capita GDP.