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Counter-example: static typing can reduce your bugs by 15%

It also decreases your productivity by 50%, which is most commonly spent between writing class definitions, untangling inheritance trees and maintaining conversion functions between functionally identical but differently named types.

I disagree. Java allows them to produce something that seems to work, but causes more problems than it solves. These people have negative productivity. "Memory corruption" is not the problem, it is just a symptom. Fixing the symptom does not fix the problem.

Alright, examples, please.

And the same is true for static type safety. It is a crutch. Those that need it cause numerous problems even with it, the problems are just in other areas. Technology cannot fix incompetence.

Counter-example: static typing can reduce your bugs by 15%

And that would be a benefit, because if they had to work in other languages, they would simply get fired for incompetence and be replaced with people that had a clue what they are doing.

No. There aren't enough good programmers in the world. Managers would rather have something that works poorly than doesn't work at all.

Heat flow from the earth's core is 0.08W/m^2, compared with an average solar insolation of 340 W/m^2 (which has been known to trend by 0.5W/m^2 over periods of several decades) and an additional forcing of almost 2 W/m^2 from the CO2 humans have recently added.

So, no, heat from the earth's core is not really a top contender. And why should it be? Even if this number were much larger, there's no reason Earth's core should suddenly warm the earth much faster than it did in previous centuries and millenia ... unless you're suggesting that the souls recently added to Hell from our burgeoning population have caused satan's furnaces to suddenly heat up?

This mindset of yours has been well and truly debunked over the years... yes yes, I know, when you were a kid you had to walk 10 miles to school bare foot in the snow with only a lump of coal for lunch.

There's literally no evidence that people are less intelligent on average now with the advent of calculators and computers. On the contrary, what used to be phd level mathematics a hundred years ago is now taught in high school. Even when I was young it used to be unusual for someone like myself to be learning to program at the age of 12, I was the only one in both schools I'd moved between that could do it - nowadays that's the norm, it's taught in primary school and high school and understood quite thoroughly.

In fact, there was a study just recently finding that calculator use improves kid's maths abilities:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/news-...

You see, the issue is, you're saying that someone is dumb if they can't do a repetitive task like a large basic sum, but the reality is that's not about intelligence, it's about doing a boring basic menial task. So instead, they use a calculator, and use their brain to focus on actual hard problems like implementation of the solution of that sum to solve a problem using even more complex mathematics from fields such as number theory, graph theory, and so on - subjects that were previously viewed as graduate level, but are rapidly moving into the high school.

As a mathematics graduate, one thing I've learnt is that to use the subject effectively it's not about remembering various different algorithms and such off by heart - it's about understanding what algorithms are available to create a toolset of knowledge and then being able to select the appropriate mathematical tool to solve a problem and implement it using a reference if need be. You want kids to be able to do long tedious complex sums without a calculator to no real practical benefit, I want kids to have knowledge of the fact there are various different ways of solving complex problems and to be able to classify a problem to find the appropriate algorithm to solve it - is it a classification problem? a search problem? an optimisation problem? If they can answer that question and choose an appropriate mathematical solution and implement it then it really doesn't matter how many fucking digits they can recite pi to or whatever retarded useless metric you think defines intelligence.

Even with programming you're wrong - there's this archaic view from old school programmers that they're doing more complex stuff because they know assembly and that makes them more intelligent than anyone using a 3rd gen language that is further abstracted from the hardware. As someone who can and has done both I can say with absolute certain that this is complete and utter bullshit. It's FAR easier to write assembly code to work directly with hardware because the amount of things to learn are actually a tiny set, whilst for a web application for example you typically have to know at least 3 actual programming languages, (Javascript, SQL, and some 3GL like Java, PHP, or C#), 2 configuration languages (HTML and CSS), and a shit ton of frameworks for everything from things like JUnit or NUnit for unit testing, to React or Angular for front end development. Believe me, the job of a full stack developer is far more complex and far more difficult than that of an assembly programmer who has no frameworks to understand, one language with a relatively small set of commands, and knowledge of the hardware which is really just domain knowledge as much as any other domain knowledge for any other programming problem be it financial services, or engineering knowledge relevant to the higher level application being built. So you know assembly so what? You're neither more intelligent, nor special.

Because if you think coating the planet in solar panels and wind turbines is going to fix everything, you're delusional.

Agreed, except that you don't need to cover the world. Just a 100 mi x 100 mi plot in the middle of a desert:

I didn't do the maths myself beyond the back of a mental napkin, but these folks have http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/energy/... and apparently the overall space checks out. Its far from the first time that similar scale claims have been made, and no, consolidating our entire solar grid into a single spot wouldn't make much sense from a security standpoint, but its interesting to think that we could get from here to there with no more (or less) effort for the country than, say, the Apollo program took.

The doctoral thesis explaining the techniques upon which this detection technology relies can be found here

The paper has been available as a preprint for awhile now, and my lab has discussed it internally and I've also paid attention to outside coverage. The key issue that the paper reports is that false positive rates are two high for most existing software WHEN using a specific type of test under a specific set of conditions. They show that voxelwise familywise error (FWE) correction actually seems to work reasonably or even conservatively. Cluster level FWE correction (looking for groups of voxels that are active) fails when using a very liberal cluster-defining threshold, but works reasonably well when using a more stringent cluster defining threshold. It also says nothing about the performance of another very common correction method that is frequently used in fMRI studies (false discovery rate or FDR).

I'm not really sure how extensive the group of findings that these issues actually affect is, but it's certainly not 40,000 as is claimed in the paper's significance section. Many of the earlier papers (and even more recent) likely used uncorrected statistical tests, so are suspect for entirely different reasons from this issue. Of the ones that use correction, the findings in this paper only call into question the results for those that are using FWE cluster correction with a cluster defining threshold that is too liberal (likely > 0.001, the paper's findings suggest that at 0.001 the familywise error rate is in the ballpark of the desired 5%). Those using a cluster defining threshold of p=0.001 or lower are likely fine, and those using a different correction method like FDR are unknown as to my knowledge there isn't currently any similar paper on that correction method.

You can also check out this technical report by some other big names in imaging that basically says that this result is known and expected for overly liberal cluster defining thresholds:
http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/s...

Sloan specifically mentions the question of fire.

RES: And that requires a greater food base which can't be more insolation, but the additive effect of super-abundant carbon dioxide would certainly have this effect. One of the problems that people have always suggested about these high levels of oxygen at various times in the past, is that this is comparable to what you have in an oxygen tent in a hospital. And what about wildfires? What they forget is that the reason for this high oxygen is that there is also a high carbon dioxide level. We are talking about carbon dioxide levels 6 to 10 times the present carbon dioxide level. And that is more than enough to essentially combat wildfires.

“We find that CO2 emissions [during the Cretaceous] resulting from super-plume tectonics could have produced atmospheric CO2 levels from 3.7 to 14.7 times the modern pre-industrial value of 285 ppm.” http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/...

Until the past two centuries, the concentrations of CO2 ... had never exceeded about 280 ppm... Current concentrations of CO2 are about 390 ppm... http://www.acs.org/content/acs...

“We are talking about carbon dioxide levels 6 to 10 times the present carbon dioxide level. When you have high amounts of carbon dioxide in an atmosphere up to a certain limit, which is considerably higher than it is now, the result is green plants grow very much better... And it is precisely at this time that the recovery from the first dinosaur extinction takes place. When the super plumes come and carbon dioxide increases, and the oxygen correspondingly increases as a result of photosynthesis... And yet the super plumes did not last forever and they started to die at the end of Cretaceous.... In any event, large dinosaurs really required to be living in an oxygen tent. An atmosphere in the neighborhood of 35 percent oxygen would be considerably more compatible with large dinosaurs than one in the neighborhood of 28. And so this suggested to me that this was perhaps a significant reason for the first dinosaur extinction, and probably one of the major factors in the second, the terminal dinosaur extinction, other than the birds. It also neatly tied together all of the really bizarre features about the Cretaceous... The Cretaceous is clearly a green house period as opposed to the present ice house that we have... 72 percent of the world's petroleum supply comes from Cretaceous rocks. Well, the rich carbon dioxide of course provides for a much greater biogenic diversity... [The Cretaceous supported] 8 or 9 tropic levels, which cannot be supported today.” http://www.ucl.ac.uk/.../sloan...

“The earth is currently in an icehouse stage, as ice sheets are present on both poles and glacial periods have occurred at regular intervals over the past million years... Earth is more commonly placed in a greenhouse state throughout the epochs, and the Earth has been in this state for approximately 80% of the past 500 million years... Permanent ice is actually a rare phenomenon in the history of the Earth, occurring only during the 20% of the time that the planet is under an icehouse effect.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

You might want to take a look at some of the known attacks against EMV.

This raises the question of climate change. It should be conveyed and understood that we are in a phase of âoeicehouse earthâ that is abnormally cool for the planet. While this phase has lasted the entirety of human civilization and would have drastic consequences for many species should it end, it must be understood that temperatures and CO2 levels have normally been far higher. âoeWe find that CO2 emissions [during the Cretaceous] resulting from super-plume tectonics could have produced atmospheric CO2 levels from 3.7 to 14.7 times the modern pre-industrial value of 285 ppm.â http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/... âoeWe are talking about carbon dioxide levels 6 to 10 times the present carbon dioxide level. When you have high amounts of carbon dioxide in an atmosphere up to a certain limit, which is considerably higher than it is now, the result is green plants grow very much better... And it is precisely at this time that the recovery from the first dinosaur extinction takes place. When the super plumes come and carbon dioxide increases, and the oxygen correspondingly increases as a result of photosynthesis... And yet the super plumes did not last forever and they started to die at the end of Cretaceous.... In any event, large dinosaurs really required to be living in an oxygen tent. An atmosphere in the neighborhood of 35 percent oxygen would be considerably more compatible with large dinosaurs than one in the neighborhood of 28. And so this suggested to me that this was perhaps a significant reason for the first dinosaur extinction, and probably one of the major factors in the second, the terminal dinosaur extinction, other than the birds. It also neatly tied together all of the really bizarre features about the Cretaceous... The Cretaceous is clearly a green house period as opposed to the present ice house that we have... Well, the rich carbon dioxide of course provides for a much greater biogenic diversity.â http://www.ucl.ac.uk/.../sloan... âoeThe earth is currently in an icehouse stage, as ice sheets are present on both poles and glacial periods have occurred at regular intervals over the past million years... Earth is more commonly placed in a greenhouse state throughout the epochs, and the Earth has been in this state for approximately 80% of the past 500 million years... Permanent ice is actually a rare phenomenon in the history of the Earth, occurring only during the 20% of the time that the planet is under an icehouse effect.â https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

"No, my argument against your unnamed "study" (undoubtedly made by someone who got the result they were looking for and who published their study in a journal refereed by their fellow travelers) is that they had thumbs on the scale the whole way."

So on one hand you're complaining about not being given the study, but on the other you're professing to be able to discredit it anyway? I know UKIPers like you are anti-intellectual, but must you really persist in arguments that don't make sense? There isn't just one study, there are many:

Oxford University's Migration Analysis Centre:
http://www.migrationobservator...

University College London's Migration Research Centre:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/new...

I know it's inconvenient to your foreigner hating viewpoint, but these aren't fly by night vested interests. These are real actual top of the league table universities doing real actual analysis into the causes, impacts, and effects of immigration across the globe. The whole point in their existence is to analyse the facts of migration, whether it's positive or negative.

Once again, your entire argument boils down to "I hate foreigners so everyone that has studied this properly is wrong because I say so.".

Even outside of academia, there are corporations doing similar studies and that want the facts so that they can guide their business:

https://www.rapidformations.co...

For them it's not about some political leaning, it's about profit.

Like it or not, you're wrong and you're a typical UKIPer- you simply cannot accept the fact that the real problem is that you are a xenophobic hatemonger so instead you just tell yourself people who have actually put effort into it, rather than people like you that have just decided, are wrong, because that makes you feel uncomfortable and ruins your attempt at blame gaming.

For those of you who doubt the veracity of Connie St. Louis' claims, they are backed up by credible witnesses (Deborah Blum and Ivan Oransky), including members of the Korean Federation of Women's Science and Technology Association. KOFWST released an open letter demanding an apology from Tim Hunt:

"At a luncheon hosted by the Korea Federation of Women’s Science and Technology Associations (KOFWST) during the World Conference of Science Journalists in Seoul on June 8, 2015, Nobel Laureate Sir Tim Hunt made some inappropriate remarks over which KOFWST would like to express its very strong regrets. ... This unfortunate incident must not be portrayed as a private story told as a joke. We cannot accept sexist remarks that threaten to reverse the gains made towards equality for women scientists, and women in the wider society." (Press Release)

Furthermore, Tim Hunt's career isn't over because he lost his "honorary appointment" at UCL. For this of you who don't know, an honorary appointment is NOT a real job. It's a title without pay. In other words, it's not a real job. And the UCL Provost has reaffirmed the position that Tim Hunt's comments (UCL Provost Statement)

So Tim Hunt got called out on really stupid remarks and non-apology (“I did mean the part about having trouble with girls.”). He lost a title and his desk at UCL. Sounds about right. What's the lesson to be drawn here? It's time to get over your sexist attitudes about women in science. If that's lost on you, then, at the very least, keep your sexist comments to yourself.

The RAM to go in my own battlestation* cost more than that. I find, even at about five grand all told (so far+), it's still cheaper (and more achievable) than piloting any of these bad boys in the real world. Let along things that actually leave the ground.

The Xbox and Playstation compatibility is probably more to do with standards that any actual work that went into making it so.

* Not my actual battlestation, but a pretty fair example of what I'm talking about.
* I live in a country where we pay about twice as much for hardware as in the US, too, which doesn't help.

It's legal. This is the UK. There is no constitution.

I can't believe this has been modded informative when it is blatantly, and even legally, wrong.

The UK certainly does have a Constitution, and in fact our political system is termed a 'Constitutional monarchy'.

I'm sorry, but this is taught early on at in British Secondary Schools.Anyone who's been to school in the UK should know this. Any UK immigrant who's passed the UK citizenship test will know this.

The laws which the security services are alleged to have broken form part of that constitution.

I don't think this is at all special. There have been tons of space-matter-abiogenesis experiments that have been done, with similar results. For example, it's been shown that Titan's atmosphere can produce at least 16 amino acids and all five nucleotide bases, and we've already detected organic molecules over 10000 daltons there.

Nature likes to produce rather complex mixtures of organic chemicals without any help from life, nobody should doubt this any more, there's been way too much evidence that it happens. Nature is more than happy to continously rain down vast amounts of varied, complex organics given the right situation, providing both potential organic catalysts to develop into early life and "food" that they can scavenge. The question that needs to be answered next is, from a random diverse mix of organics, how does a hypercycle get started, wherein some chemicals / mixtures of chemicals / families of chemicals begin to encourage the creation of more chemicals "like" them, increasing the odds that there will be more produced of whatever is needed to keep the cycle going. Once you get to that point, you have the potential for evolution to take hold - first by a simple race to produce the most exact copies of the most efficiently-catalyzing chemicals and the poisoning of competing chemicals, up to the development of membranes to provide defense/hoarde resources/survive adverse situations/etc (the first "ur-cells").

For a second I thought my intellectual property had been stolen before I could publish. The ultimate developer keyboard is actually no keyboard at all but an apparatus that reads the mind of the software developer and writes all the code for them in the language best suited for the task.

No typos! Unless the developer's mind wanders, then things could get real interesting.

Wait ... What? Aww

Correct. you can do this in Orbiter Space Flight Simulator by playing with the Camera settings and speeding up the time dilation.

Far Side "Earth Liberation" Instructions:

• - Hit F4 to bring up the Main Menu
• - Click Camera
• - Set Target to Moon
• - Click Apply
• - Hold Z to reduce the FoV down to the lowest degree, then pan out with the mouse wheel
• - Make sure View Mode is set to "target-relative" (indication in the upper left) if not, hit F2 until it does
• - Rotate your view around to the far side of the moon until you see the Earth.
• - Speed up time dilation by hitting T

Near Side "Moon Liberation" instructions are similar:

• - Hit F4 to bring up the Main Menu
• - Click Camera
• - Set Target to Earth
• - Click Apply
• - Click Track
• - Set Target to Moon (click Target to...)
• - Scroll mouse wheel until the camera pans all the way into the Earth and you see the other side (you should see the moon)
• - Make sure View Mode is set to "absolute-direction"
• - Speed up time dilation by hitting T

Their presentation is much better though, especially for the Moon Liberation because the FoV in Orbiter is limited to 10 degrees as a minimum. Saving your scenario and editing the file (it's all text files), might work around that.

The simulator uses mathematical models that are true to life, I forget the names of them but they're well known models that are used to predict things like eclipses and planet locations in planetarium software.

That's bullshit. Obese people have pretty much the same metabolism as skinny people. It's not your "metabolism" that makes you obese, it's how much and what you eat.

No, it really is quite dependent on biology. There are numerous studies on twins that clearly show that it's governed by far more than just calories in == calories out. http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/~p... , http://www.nytimes.com/1990/05...

Biology and related sciences? At my uni (not in the US, but I think our two countries are comparable) hemistry (at UG and PG level, perhaps less so above because it will take time to filter through) is 50/50. Similarly for stats and the medical schools, among others. Source: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/srs/stati...

UK has a constitution, it's just not written down in one document (plus amendments). See: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/constitut... for more information.

The tiny sums mentioned in the article were a surprise. If it can be that cheap to make significant progress on such an intractable problem, imagine what some serious dough could do! Christopher and Dana Reeve foundation have some resources.

That might not be the total cost. I tried to find what that was, and who funded it, but can't. I got as far as the sources of support for the research department: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ion/depa... -- but the actual operation was done in Poland, and I think going further might require reading Polish.

I agree with you that the U.S. handles birth control education and birth control availability badly compared to all other developed nations.

I stumbled on the fact that Britain had a similarly bad rate back in 2004 (about 40% unplanned) so they are doing something right.

But then I stumbled on more indicating that unplanned births are aborted at a high rate in Britain these days- so they may still be getting pregnant at a higher rate- and just aborting a lot more.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news...

Still, even with only 16%, it's about 140,000 unplanned pregnancies that were born.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-2...

Recreational sex results in about 1/3 of the net population growth of ~400,000 for the country making it "one of the fastest growing populations in the EU."

(for all this I'm ignoring the cases where people are planning on having a baby and have recreational sex...)

It surprised me how intensely people want to believe that birth control is totally reliable.

It's quite likely a local university will run evening courses for the general public - random example: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/phys/admi...

I see no real argument for saying that the PETM had significant ocean acidification yet this isn't the first it's been trotted out as an example of the dire effects of ocean acidification. [khallow]

Rapid Acidification of the Ocean During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

Rapid and sustained surface ocean acidification during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

Ocean acidification and surface water carbonate production across the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum

Yes, as a matter of fact it is.

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/media/library/intglass

The albedo of anything means you'll lose something but if you can divide out the heat causing wavelengths from the useful light ones, you can just counteract this with more light. So you lose 10%, get 100% more light and you won't notice. It means you need a larger roof or a reflector into it, but still it would be nicely useful. Whether you could use such a thing to divide the heat and the light and use the heat for condensed solar and the light for PV isn't something I care to speculate on. But, it's all generally theoretically possible.

But again, the stupid car moving and running over my cat is going to pretty much a deal killer. Unless your car port moves without the potential to kill fluffy, it's DOA. And even then it seems pretty silly. Just slapping a solar panel on top though is such low hanging fruit that that part is gold..

The article wasn't written by Daniel Miller, rather a journalist that rewrote it to make it seem more interesting. If you want to see what he really wrote, and his thoughts about the whole thing, here: http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/social-networking/2013/12/30/scholarship-integrity-and-going-viral/

It took some backtracking, but I think what the Telegraph article was referring to was this: http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/social-networking/2013/11/24/what-will-we-learn-from-the-fall-of-facebook/

For starters, unless I'm mistaken about which article they're talking about, the study wasn't conducted in 8 countries, but one: namely, the UK.

I don't know about the rest of the world, but in the small bubble where I live, my friends and I still regularly use Facebook as a means of interaction (I'm currently 16). Sure, we also use Instagram and Tumblr and Snapchat - those are all there (but for the life of me I have yet to figure out why Snapchat is as popular as it is...). But Facebook is still the primary method of chatting, sharing information, posting pictures, whatever. And yeah, we have Twitter accounts, but Twitter is more for public broadcasting, whereas Facebook has the ability for targeted posting... kind of. In any case, I wouldn't say Facebook is DEAD. My friends all across the country (US) do say that they use Facebook more than other methods of communication out of sheer ease of use.

They are well aware of the carbon-free nature of nuclear power, and that if it would be managed safely, it could be highly beneficial.

Both your sources come from the UCS themselves. Of course they're going to say that they aren't anti-nuke!

I take it you've never heard of the phrase "damning with faint praise"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damning_with_faint_praise

Here's a paper on the phenomenon. From the university of my home town no less

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lagnado-lab/publications/harris/FPconference.pdf

crap. Something came to me right after I hit post "doh".

"Just because they say it has good points doesn't mean that they actually believe that it has good points." That should have gone as the last line of my previous comment.

That was posted on Astronomy Picture of the Day long ago.

You mean this completely different video of the same event?

Another poster posted a link to a youtube clip of these contact lenses. They come with built-in fake irises, so only the pupil appears dark. Regarding the definition of near infrared: the standard range of visible light is assumed to be up to 740 nm, but I have worked with 800 nm near-IR lasers for many years and they are still visible, although a 1 watt beam appears to be comparable to that of a 1 mW laser pointer at 675 nm. See for yourself here for the sensitivity curve: http://cvrl.ioo.ucl.ac.uk/cvrlfunctions.htm (under fundamental spectra or luminous efficiency).

Atom processors are notoriously slow. You can't play 3d video games on them.

Yes, you can. :-)

I managed to play Orbiter on a reasonable resolution (1280x1024x16) and got an acceptable (barely, I admit) framerate on my Atom 330 box. That it's my Media Center and torrent server, by the way.

Granted, the Game of the Year will not run on this setup. :-)

First off, prions are infectious pathogens. It doesn't matter what the mechanism for infection is, just that the infection happens. Viruses have a different mechanism for infecting hosts than do bacteria, but we still refer to variants as strains. Soda cans generally aren't considered pathogens, so I don't refer to their variants as strains.

You're implying that the only difference are the host's proteins and all the variance is accounted for by the host's genetic variations. But just like other pathogens, genetic variations in hosts result in different levels of susceptibility from different strains.

You seem to have you panties in a knot about the use of the word "strain" to describe prion isoforms. Sorry to bust your pedantic bubble, but strain is commonly used in literature about prions. Of course, since you're posting on Slashdot, you must be a subject matter expert and know must know better than everyone else.

Because it is conversion of the host prion proteins, the only 'strain' that exists is the host.

Wrong. From the UCL Institute of Neurology MRC Prion Clinic:

Although prions do not carry genetic material, they also come in several different forms - again known as strains. If prions are just proteins, how can they come in different strains? This has been a very important question. It is now clear that there is not just one rogue form of PrP that causes prion disease but there several distinct rogue forms.

Oh look, they also use the word "strain" on that page, the horror!

Aside from the authors I cited and the MRC Prion Clinic, a quick search shows hundreds of examples. They all must be wrong too, huh? Anyway, I'm going to go with the credentialed neurologists and researchers on this, as opposed to some random arrogant Slashdot pedant.

Good old Jeremy Bentham makes an entertaining visit...

But is it utilitarian?

Good old Jeremy Bentham makes an entertaining visit...

His only expertise is as the judge of a case then the court transcripts are the entirety of the evidence.

According to this article:

He started practice at the Intellectual Property Bar in 1967. From 1976 to 1981 he was the Junior Counsel for the Comptroller of Patents and for all Government departments in intellectual property.

Perhaps working in IP for 14 years, five of which as a IP council for the government, might make him an expert. Check out his books, articles and lectures. Yeah, this judge is an expert. UCL seems to think he is an expert too.

You might want to at least put his name into Google before making statements.

His only expertise is as the judge of a case then the court transcripts are the entirety of the evidence.

According to this article:

He started practice at the Intellectual Property Bar in 1967. From 1976 to 1981 he was the Junior Counsel for the Comptroller of Patents and for all Government departments in intellectual property.

Perhaps working in IP for 14 years, five of which as a IP council for the government, might make him an expert. Check out his books, articles and lectures. Yeah, this judge is an expert. UCL seems to think he is an expert too.

You might want to at least put his name into Google before making statements.

Orbiter has no issues with fling on Venus.

I remember successfully getting from Venus surface to low orbit with the delta cliper after fighting the super dense atmosphere for half an hour while almost running out of fuel in the process. :)

http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/
Realistic space flight simulator. The most fun way of learning orbital mechanics ever!

Firstly, please don't confuse standards essential RAND patents with other RAND patents. The two issues do not have to be in any way linked. For example IETF standards typically do not involve RAND at all. They try to avoid patents, but if they can't they leave the licensing up to the people who need them. At the same time there are often RAND licenses for multi-media encoding patents that can be worked around but help greatly with efficiency.

Secondly, RAND doesn't actually have a clear definition. Instead, each standards body defines their own set of RAND licensing processes or just leaves RAND to be worked out between the different standards implementers.

Thirdly this actually has no effect whatsoever on the patent its self. It is still completely possible and reasonable to license a RAND patent entirely outside the RAND process. This is very typical with e.g. Qualcomm CDMA patents where Qualcomm has not been involved in various CDMA based standards but still, later, allowed licensing.

Fourthly, there's no "low" about it. Reasonable is extremely difficult to pin down, however there's a presentation from the Jevons Institute for Competition law and Economics which should help. Wikipedia also has some articles which don't seem obviously wrong.

Basically there is no clear legal definition of "reasonable" and there have been few lawsuits about it but, it more or less comes down to "the price should not be more than it would be if the patent wasn't part of a standard". Various precedents talk about having the same result as a fair auction against other equivalent patent holders. Others talk about charging no more than the incremental value of the patent over the next best alternative.

What this means is that a patent that was the only way to achieve a particular thing in a standard could be seen as providing the entire value of the system which is being delivered according to the standard. In this case "reasonable" could mean 95% of the value of the item or a fixed fee of a hundred thousand dollars per item, or whatever the patent holder wished as long as it still allowed those products to be produced by someone for profit.

In the end, what you have to understand, is that the patent system as a whole is incredibly dangerous and should be vastly cut down. Certainly all patents on software or all other abstract inventions should be clearly disallowed. Definitely patents on technology should have more limited terms. Certainly anti-monopoly laws should be applied more strictly to them. RAND patent agreements which disallow free software implementations should certainly be treated as illegal cartels.

Unfortunately we have the patent law we currently have, and in this situation Motorola and Samsung are in the right and Apple and Microsoft are clearly setting out to abuse their good will and cooperation to get benefits they should never be allowed.

Horses were first domesticated around 4000 BC, and were considered to be widely domesticated by 3000 BC.

Considered by who? Googling around, I see stuff like:

Horses were introduced into Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period (about 1700-1550 BC).

That's around a millennium after the construction of the Pyramids.

And metal horseshoes, which considerably increased the endurance and value of horses, weren't apparently invented until some time between the 2nd century BC and 500 AD.

It really doesn't make sense to claim that human slaves are cheaper than horses. And your claims about history simply don't support your argument.

Better safety regulation doesn't naturally flow from more economic opportunity

That's not based on actual history. Every place which has increased its standard of living invariably has improved safety regulations as well. It's really quite simple. When the value of a person is low, then there's not much reason to have safety regulations. When the value of a person is high, then that is something worth protecting and we see subsequent regulation to that effect.

The United States has the largest GDP of any country. It consistently ranks dead last amongst the so-called "first world" countries in worker rights

This is a little bit of doublespeak. "Worker rights" have little to do with actual benefits to workers.

As the wealth disparity gap grew, our GDP growth year over year fell. Eventually, the middle class imploded, triggering a global economic crisis that continues to this day. We didn't chase the money away -- we let it walk out the front door to the sound of applause.

Well, it should be obvious that if the supply of labor increases, then the amounts paid for that labor will drop. That's what we've seen. The "implosion" of the middle class? That hasn't been seen, although it's interesting how much destructive political policy has been directed to making that happen.

As I see it, when labor is under threat from cheaper labor, one is extremely foolish to make that labor more expensive (and of course, even less competitive) by creating taxes and regulations (such as the alleged "worker rights") that make that labor more expensive and by driving up the costs of living (for example, the expenses of housing, health care, and education). Or by ignoring or actively harming the businesses that employ most people.

Generating electricity with existing RTG technology is about 5% efficient. This paper mentions phosphored white LEDs efficiencies at 55 Lm/W. This paper says "The efficiency of the color phosphors was experimentally compared within the range up to 90 Lm/W for green, up to 30 Lm/Watt for blue, and up to 35 Lm/Wt for red color at 14 kV." [In this case kV are keV since they were shooting electrons]. This site says the decay energy of a Gd-148 alpha particle is about 3.271 MeV.

Doing the math, 1 Gd-148 alpha decay is about 5.24E-13 Joules, so 1.9E+12 decays/sec would deliver 1 Watt.

Given an alpha particle power output of 1 Watt , converting it to electricity at 5% efficiency then running LEDs at 55Lm/W would result in 2.75 Lm of light. The same alpha flux directed on the phosphors would result in a minimum of 30 Lm in the blue part of the spectrum, 90 Lm in green, and 35 Lm in red.

This paper is one of my favorites - it states, "A ~0.2 kg block of pure Gd148 (~1 inch3) initially yields ~120 watts, sufficient in theory to meet the complete basal power needs of an entire human body for ~1 century...". That's an awful lot of power packed into a tiny 1 in^3 package!

Fascinating stuff.

I understand your complaint. You and others, versed far more in orbital mechanics, assure the rest of us fools that, based on your admittedly superior knowledge and training, that what you propose is safe.

My knowledge of orbital mechanics is limited to what I learned by playing with the Orbiter simulator. It's pretty lackluster. The point is that when I see an article that is not in my area of expertise, I don't pretend that it is and start attacking the people in the field. They know more than I do, and anything I can come up with as a possible danger is either not a legitimate danger, or something they have considered to greater detail than it would be possible for me to without knowledge and experience in the field. When something in my area of expertise comes up (modeling and simulation of electronics), and I see a problem, then I will ask the people involved, "how are you dealing with this issue?" Even then, people usually come back to me with very reasonable and interesting answers because, they've actually been working on the problem.

However, human history in the technological age has proven, time and time again, that reassurances of safety and no ill effects from domain experts is fraught with danger. Let's just run down through the list of things proclaimed to be safe, that we the luddites were wrong...

I'm not saying that whenever a new technology article comes up that we should all believe there will be no ill effects and things will be 100% safe. I'm saying the risk is acceptable. For every single thing in your list, the benefits far outweighed the cost. I don't care if planes crashed, DDT and windmills killed birds, or that coal is unclean. We live in a better world because we have planes, we saved a lot of people from malaria because of DDT, fossil fuels have allowed us to have a thriving civilization, and windmills might be killing birds but are they preferable to coal?

I'm not asking you to believe there will be no problems. I'm asking you to stop chasing the zero-risk path. We're better off today because we've taken risks, because we've made sacrifices, because we've had groups of visionaries taking us where we weren't certain that we could go. Sometimes thinks didn't work out at all, but we still learned something from the disasters behind us to build bigger and better things. When you look at Fukushima, you see a disaster, when I look at it, I see a success story. When the thing got hit by a tsunami larger than what it was designed to handle, the people involved still mitigated what could have been a much larger disaster. There were essentially no long-term ill effects from the whole thing, it was most certainly not another Chernobyl. This is human beings at their best. It's not that bad things won't happen, it's that when they do, we can handle it.

So yes, its not anti-technology at all, its anti-let's take a big frigging risk and abolish any common sense that says pushing a dinosaur killer closer to earth might be a bad fricking idea by deluding ourselves into pretending we know all the variables involved, when we can't.

I understand that, lacking any knowledge of orbital mechanics, you would think, "asteroid near earth, if it gets close enough, our gravity can pull it in." I think it's reasonable for you to ask the question, "just how dangerous is this? Convince me that the risk is acceptable." It's not, however, reasonable for you to assume you can judge the risk better than the people who are in the field. I recommend you play a bit with Orbiter yourself. It won't make you an expert, but it should be enough to give you a feel for how things actually work, and you're going to realize hitting the Earth while trying to put something in orbit is a lot harder than you think it is.

Also, not every asteroid that doesn't burn up in the atmosphere is a dinosaur killer. There is pretty larg

Kepler observes transits of planets. For simplicity's sake, let's just talk about one planet. As the planet passes in front of the star, the shape of the light curve tells you the ratio of the radii of the planet and the star, and some good constraints on the inclination of the system; that's it. If you make some assumptions about the underlying star, you can make a good estimate for the radius of the star and then get the radius of the planet. As AC points out, if you assume a density, you can get a "mass" measurement. That's like asking someone on the internet how tall they are and guessing their weight from it; it can get you an ok answer, but the real range of variation is tremendous and interesting.

In order to then get a real, measured mass of the planet, you need radial velocity measurements which tells you the ratio of the mass of the planet and the star. Again, if you know some things about the star, you can then make a good estimate for it's mass and then get the mass of the planet. NASA buys a share of time from the Keck telescopes, and the vast majority of time has been eaten up by followup observations of Kepler candidates ever since it launched. For the smallest planets, you need precision on a scale that most observatories can not provide at this time; for an Earth-like planet around an Earth-like star the radial velocity precision required is on the order of cm/s, which is fantastically hard to do. I'm not actually sure anyone has produced anything real along those lines, though there are plenty of ideas and plans.

If you're technically minded, there's a decent review from a few years ago available. If you're looking for something simpler, try this.

As Teancum points out, you can detect and infer some other stuff by looking at the variations of the transit times and see if there is something else tugging on the system; that's a whole different ballgame, and David Kipping is the most prominent person I can think of leading that charge.

Anyone have it converted to texture format for orbiter yet?

http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/

Moving around in space is nothing like flying around in the air or scratching around on the surface of the Earth. And in combat, regardless of its form, it's all about movement and positioning. The key always lays there from the most basic form of hand to hand combat to the most advanced stealth jet fighter combat.

If you are serious about getting an Idea about how a space battle would look like, I suggest the following. Get the Orbiter space flight simulator and try it out a little. Figure how you move around in space. Search around a little and do the tutorials.

My guess is that, like most people, you'll get bored after the first 2 days waiting to reach a target... you'll quickly (or rather very slowly and longingly) notice that space travel is slow and complex. When most people think of in-flight combat, they think about dogfight, with quick instant maneuvers to evade immediate danger or quickly engage a target. Space, its another business. Orbits are planned months ahead, years or even decades in advance for some satellite. Even on very short term missions, you do small precise maneuvers that will have noticeable impacts hours or days later.

The most accurate movie depiction of space combat is probably 2001: A Space Odyssey... sort of. There's just no combat, but it wouldn't feel any different.

I don't see why a drone couldn't be fitted with a special receiver for a laser signal sent from a satellite. Pretty hard to jam a signal from above.A nuclear satellite...

Yeah, put a satellite (and a nuclear one, no less) on geo-stat orbit over Iran... to save a RC airplane model... makes perfect sense (if it's not geo-sync, most of the time the signal won't come from above)

I can't see a viable strategy for jamming laser UV or X-Rays. These types of lasers can even transmit through clouds.

What the hell are you smoking? UV is blocked by the clouds, dispersed by dust, bent/distorted by inhomogeneous atmosphere. As for the Xaser, you imagine them operating in a continuous beam? Sorry to disappoint, 1-100 pico-sec pulses is what you get - you don't have mirrors for X-ray frequency. Not to mention that after 1 to 15 m in air, X-ray is attenuated to approx 37%.

I don't know exactly what hardware you want to emulate, so I will describe my emulation needs and solutions.

I use a modded Sony's PS2 to play Sega Genesis, Atari and SNES games. The PS2 is pretty silent, and the emulators are not that bad.

I don't play N64 or newer (or less older) games, but I can (barely) play Orbiter http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/ on an Atom 330 with 2GB RAM and a 5400 Samsung EcoGreen HD, so I presume that it's possible that this box can handle these emulators. I will check this soon and post the results.

The Atom330 is nice because it's TDP is around 2.5W. While I'm using a traditional fan heatsink, I think that with a so low TDP it's possible to use a Peltier processor cooler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_cooling (I saw one once for a Pentium M333 some years ago).

This will not work nice on environments with high humidity because of the risk of water condensation.