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Isn't this the University of Houston home page?

"When he announced that he intended to produce an electric light that would compete with gaslight, the stock prices of gaslight companies tumbled as their executives panicked. Many people, most notably Sir Joseph Swan, had tried to invent an electric light using an incandescent filament, or wire, enclosed in a glass bulb, but had not been able to create a filament that could withstand intense heat over long enough periods oftime to be practical. Even Edison had a tough time of it, going through a long, trial-and-error process in which he tested thousands of materials. Undaunted by failures, Edison finally found that a scorched cotton thread would work best. When heated in a vacuum, it produced a white glow without melting, evaporating, or breaking. Although Swan came up with a similar light bulb around the same time, Edison patented his idea more aggressively, promoted his product more effectively, and sketched out a practical system of power supply which could support its use on a large scale. On New Year's Eve of 1879, Edisongave a public demonstration of the new bulb, lighting up his laboratory anda half mile of streets in Menlo Park before of thousands of spectators. Edison had not only invented an economical light source, but developed an entire system for generating and distributing electricity from a central power station." "History book"

You say "thousands of deaths every year due to violence"? really? Where are your statistics for the "thousands" figure? I've been in the US for a decade now and keep up with the news and stuff, and out-and-out homicidal crimes are very rare compared to Muslim countries. Lots of robberies and rapes and stuff, but very few actual murders. Show me some reliable facts and figures about violent deaths, individual or en-masse, in the US.

In 2004, the United States reported. . .

16,137 Murders 854,911 cases of Aggravated Assault. 94,635 cases of Forcible Rape

The worst cases of ethnic violence in the US in the past 2 decades have been the Crown Heights riot (Blacks against Jews)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Heights_Riot some 2-3 actually died, LA riots (Blacks against Asians mostly) with some 60 people dead, and this business with Jena Six (one dead). Add the Columbine incident and the Virginia Tech incident and lesser incidents and you have maybe a few hundred actual deaths from ethnic violence in the US in the last 20 years. Even despite this the US enjoys 100% religious freedom. So much so that even $cientologists are allowed to practice. Compare that with Pakistan. Millions of Bengali Hindus and moderate Muslims murdered in 1971, 17,000 Baluch murdered in 1974 alone.

We've been over this. You're trying to compare only recognizable behavioral sets without looking at the bottom line. Why does only ethnic or religious violence count? Why does only violence perpetrated within home borders count? I have already pointed out that the U.S. has been at war with one country or another almost since its inception; the resulting body count is in the millions. The U.S. actions in Vietnam alone was responsible for between one two million deaths of non-Americans, and over three hundred thousand American casualties, (we must not forget that a nations' own troops must be counted among the victims of an oppressive state.) --It should also be mentioned that several of these wars were used to create the infamous banana republics, and various other slave nations all now living and acting in service to the U.S. economy.

I have been trying to figure out why you are putting up so much resistance. --It's certainly not as though I am trying to say that the U.S. is "Worse than Pakistan", although you seem to keep assuming that this is in fact my message. --I don't really know why, as I have several times now made it plain that I feel such comparisons were altogether unhelpful and that there are larger issues at stake. Since I am obviously not getting this message across, I will repeat myself one more time: my intent is to illustrate why it is wrong to point to a country like Pakistan and, by way of that comparison, tell people in effect to stop complaining and be happy with the state of the U.S. Toward this end, I have made efforts to direct attention to following qualities of the United States. . .

1. Violent and oppressive tendencies internally; (see the crime figures posted above, and previous links to current prison population data, (in fact, here's a new item on it which just hit the news), and the hundreds of yet-to-be-filled prison camps built in preparation for some projected eventuality.)
2. Violent and oppressive tendencies externally; (through endless wars on other nations, also linked previously.)

Do you really not understand this? Do you really think I am spending all this energy because I am seeking to somehow diminish Pakistan's tragedies?

The U.S. hasn't experienced any genoci

So the question of maximum temperature is not so silly. There are a number of ways to approach it from various definitions. If we have a few atoms in a large space, then perhaps we can drive those atoms to the speed of light, but no further. If we think of it thermodynamically, as Dr. Lienhard suggests, then we can ask is there an limit to the heat that can be driven between two systems. Such a limit would suggest a maximum temperature if we assume newtons law of cooling, which is itself is approximate, can be applied a large temperature differences, which it probably cannot.

In any case, nature, at least we way that science approaches it, appears to abhor vacuums and black holes, both of which seem to exist, but don't seem to make sense. The question is apt as we have seem that assuming infinities do us little good.

No, really. An iPhone is much more powerful than the Cray-1, and probably significantly more powerful than a Cray X-MP.

The iPhone certainly has much more RAM and storage than they typical early Crays

Actually going to their site does provide a bit more of details since they are not the only university researching this. Lets see...
-They are using a 1 pod system for capturing 3d data. Most imaged based 3d-capture systems use 2 (or more) pods so that the pictures taken are at sufficiently different angles for the 3d reconstruction. This is important since a 1 pod system is probably a more stable system (bumping a 2 pod system can often send it out of alignment, requiring a recalibration).
-They are using an infrared image to remove things like hair and glasses. I know from experience that most image based scanners have problems capturing hair and get screwed up by glasses. The projected light pattern used for the reconstruction gets lost easily in the hair. Glasses distort the light, causing interesting artifacts like spikes shooting from the rims or the lenses caving into the face.

not offtopic, please. this link discusses issues such as rigidization of flexible structures if the structure is compromised. relates to tfa. this isn't what i read originally, but has some details about micrometeor protection systems including some stuff about asbestos foam and gelatin resin... true, all for a vacuum environment, but plenty of stuff starts with space research before getting to the general public. link: http://www.sicsa.uh.edu/index.php?option=com_docma n&task=doc_view&gid=26

They were looking to a new cost efficient low orbit altitude vehicle with an environmental appeal.

I'm a thirtysomething Ph.D. candidate in computer science. I travel a lot for conferences and meet a lot of undergraduates, both from top-tier schools and from small places nobody's ever heard of. I have yet to see any substantial difference in the undergraduate programs.

Let me repeat that: I have yet to see any substantial difference. On the other hand, I've seen tons of difference in undergraduates themselves.

When I was a high school senior I wanted to get into MIT. When I didn't get into MIT, I was crushed. After all, MIT was the place to be, right? It was a dynamic environment, it was the world leader in everything I wanted, it had luminaries like Ron Rivest, it was... etcetera. But I didn't understand the reason why MIT was all those things. MIT is what it is primarily because they do an excellent job of recruiting dynamic students, hard chargers who will self-organize, who will aggressively pursue excellence, who will do their own outside research, who don't settle for just getting good grades, who are willing to put in the hard work required to make all of this a reality.

And guess what? There are hundreds of thousands of highly dynamic students in undergraduate programs across the nation. All that you have to do is (a) be highly dynamic, and (b) seek out other highly dynamic students. Then you'll form the nerdcore of your department, and as long as you keep that nerdcore alive, great things can happen.

I started off at the University of Houston before transferring to a small liberal-arts college in the Midwest (Cornell, which is older than Cornell University). From there I got into the graduate program at the University of Iowa. None of these sound like top-tier schools, right?

And yet I've spoken at Black Hat, at CodeCon, at OSCON. I've been recognized by international organizations as a first-class expert in my field. My cell phone speed dial reads like a Who's Who of computer security. Not once has anyone, anyone, given a damn where I did my studies. All they've ever cared about is whether I'm dynamic, whether I've done my research, and whether I've got integrity.

You say you got into CMU? Congratulations. It's a good school. Here's what you should do to begin a path to success. First, figure out who your advisor is going to be. Send him or her an email as soon as you find out and ask for a meeting. At this meeting, talk to your advisor about your interests, about what you'd like to do, about things you know you don't like, about the whole nine yards. Your advisor will probably smile and nod and give you some good, if generic, advice.

Then come back two weeks later and do it again. This time, show your advisor something you've done in the last couple of weeks, something that wasn't assigned to you for class. Repeat this process every couple of weeks. Sooner or later your advisor will say "you know... you seem to really be interested in this. There's a research project I'm working on which could use some help. Would you be interested?"

And once that happens, brother, you are in. Throw yourself into the research. Ninety-five percent of the time it'll be boring crap, but five percent of the time it can be truly excellent. Plus, the lab will give you the chance to get practical, hands-on experience with the stuff that your classmates will only know from books. By the time you're a senior, you'll have your name on a couple of academic papers. You'll have traveled to a few conferences. You'll have met a lot of interesting people and you'll have some good contacts.

And then one day at a conference you'll bump into this little gnome of a man with an impish grin and a very quiet, friendly demeanor, and you'll talk shop for twenty minutes. He'll smile--he never stops smiling, really--and during small talk over lunch you'll mention something about your undergraduate days at Slippery Rock U

http://www.uh.edu/infotech/news/story.php?story_id =95

From http://uh.edu/engines/epi179.htm:

"Three years later Tesla went to work for Edison in the United States. He tried to interest Edison in AC but was told that the idea was downright un-American. Tesla and Edison soon parted company. Tesla managed to get funding from the financier J.P. Morgan, and he issued a series of AC patents starting in 1887. He soon convinced George Westinghouse to put his money into the development of AC power systems.

Edison's response was downright maniacal. He launched an appalling campaign to discredit Westinghouse and Tesla. The idea was to show that AC was too dangerous to use. He invited reporters to demonstrations where stray dogs and cats were placed on metal sheets and electrocuted with 1000 volts of AC."

Using dcraw and the Radiance (HDR) file format, it should be trivial to convert any digicam or SLR's raw image to an HDR.

For manually-captured bracketed images, there's AHDRIC (disclaimer: I wrote this). As long as the EXIF info is intact and the only thing that changes between shots is the shutterspeed, this should do the trick. A related tool (AHDRIA) lets you capture HDRs automatically by controlling a digicam via USB (Canon digicams only, sorry). This process can take 20-120 seconds, depending on the quality required.

The "components" snake oil has been around ever since Eli Whitney duped Congress with a faked demo in 1808. "No one realized it then, but Whitney was faking it. He'd carefully hand-crafted each part so they'd fit together. Whitney sold the government a huge contract for four thousand muskets. He took eight years to deliver them and then the parts weren't interchangeable after all."

But, you will say, they eventually did get it to work. True. But "software components" have been advertised as the cure for what ails software development since about 1989, and I haven't seen any evidence of a vigorous market in useful software components.

Is your company's mission-critical software written in VB using ActiveX controls obtained from a dozen different vendors? I don't think so.

Even as basic a component as the standard C library can't be trusted. Circa 1998 we had our product, shipping for four years, suddenly develop a very obscure bug. It turned out that the vendor's C library had a faulty implementation of strcmp. It was optimized in an oh-so-clever way that was intended to insure that as much of the comparison as possible was made four bytes at a time, with bunches of special cases for various string lengths and memory alignments. It had worked properly until some code changes put the strings to be compared at different memory locations than they had formerly been, and then under some particular cases if the non-matching characters happened to be a certain memory locations modulo 4, strcmp would return -1 when it should have been returning +1. I reported it to the vendor, but we had to ship--and so, well, I wrote my own implementation of strcmp. A dead-simple implementation that did the byte-by-byte comparison in the obvous way. And lived happily ever after.

The vendor never did fix strcmp, by the way.

Oh, and I have read that quote many times before. Some rich guy telling his buddies that he wants to help his party is different from vote rigging. Think about it; would you have made that statement if you were trying to commit fraud? If I had his job and were trying to defraud voters I would have donated $2000 (maximum donation) to Kerry and joined MoveOn.org. When you read this, remember the GP. I do not think electronic voting is the best option but I do not believe that there is a massive conspiracy out there to get us.

1. That 17 USC 602(a)(2) by its own language is limited to the import prohibition in subsection (a); the prohibition in subsection (b) remains in force.
2. That copies and phonorecords are defined in 17 USC 101 as being material objects, which means that no physical object in Russia can be moved to the US via the Internet, making section 602 a red herring.
3. That the courts have stated that unauthorized downloading of copyrighted works is an infringement of the reproduction right of the copyright holder. See e.g. Napster and Intellectual Reserve.
4. That the courts will generally assign liability for the reproduction infringement to the downloader, barring unusual circumstances, like downloads that were in fact caused by a hacker, and not the user of the computer. See e.g. Netcom.
5. That the standard of proof used in a civil copyright case (e.g. one brought by the RIAA) is the preponderance of the evidence standard, which results in the defendant being liable if thinks that there was as little as a 51% chance that he actually did it, even if they entertain reasonable doubts (e.g. the presence of an open WAP, that there are other people able to use the computer).
6. That 17 USC 1008 is inapplicable, because it does not cover downloading. See e.g. Napster and Diamond. Also see the important definitions in sections 1001 and 101 and what the law would require if 1008 were applicable to computers, per sections 1002 and 1003.
7. That just because RIAA has not sued someone yet does not mean that they cannot or will not. See e.g. the suits against Napster (which started in 1999) and the suits against users (which started in 2003). Tactical concerns, such as how to use the limited budget for legal action in the most effective way, or which

if you invent something that nobody in the universe would have figured out in the next 25 years

Patents and histroy books often only give credit to one person, but history is full of examples where the same ideas are being worked on by many people. This sums it up: (emphasis mine)

Still, we don't want to deny Bell's brilliance. He produced a robust and viable telephone, and he had the force of personality to sell it to a skeptical public. But to do that, he did what all inventors do. He built on the combined wisdom of others -- just as Reis had built on the work of Bourseul before him.

would you like to be uncredited for inventing it ?

Actually, change "decades" to "centuries." http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi3.htm So the Wright brothers were the ones who moved flight out of the Middle-Ages.

Some of those have possibilities, and others just sound perposterous. However, it is amazing how fast the world can change.

It took roughtly 100 years to go from building the first car to lading on the moon. Considering that, and thanks to cures for many diseases, better healthcare, and a wider teaching of knowledge, not to mention population growth, science is probably moving ahead at a near exponential rate, so some of the events from the last one ("Google Is God") could be possible.

Regardless, Google does seem to have unlimited potential. As a company, it only has almost 8 years. Comparatively, Microsoft is 30 years old; Apple is 29; Yahoo! is 11. (numbers from Wikipedia.) But in the short time that it has existed, it has accomplished so much and spread into so many areas. Now that Google is a public company, and thus responsible to their shareholders, it is iffy if they can stick to their "do no evil" catchphrase, but they certainly seem to stay on the straight road without problems.

Sir Isaac Newton once said that if he had achieved anything with his work, such as his laws of motion and gravity, it was "by standing on the shoulders of giants." The scientific vision and achievements of those before brought Newton metaphorically to a higher ground that allowed him to "see" further into the nature of the physical world.

Honestly I am sick and tired of people ranting about '4 year degrees' from India and incompetent or unqualified programmers/workers from India. The very same people whose ideas about India are pretty much restricted to the Taj Mahal and Bangalore in spite of the fact that they could not point out both their locations on a map of India the size of the empire state building with both places marked in 2000pt arial black.

4 year degrees in India are _not_ like 2 year boot camps, they are quite focused, well designed and well executed programs, and I did not even go to an IIT or a tier 1 school in India! Education in India is quite difficult, simply because of the extreme competition every student faces from the 100 million other students, the fact that the coursework is tougher does play some part though. Parents are focused on education and education only, hence the complete insignificance of college/university level sports and/or other activities. The problem you guys face is that its too damn expensive here. My entire college expenses, including living away from home was approx. $1200. As a result almost anybody who can make the cut can afford it. So dont blame the Indian education system for the lack of a job inspite of your expensive education.

Regarding incompetent, inexperienced workers, well considering the large number of qualified workers produced, per the law of averages quite a few will be bad programmers, and stating that its an Indian issue, is not only unfair, its blatantly uninformed. The same statistics apply everywhere. The number of absolutely incompetent American/western programmers I have seen is quite unbelievable considering their '$100,000' education. At least Indian universities do not charge that much for a job screwed up (well some do, but they are usually reserved to educate Indians residing in the US).

Re: Only drudge work gets outsourced, of course on /. you only hear about programming/IT outsourcing, but if you actually watched some 'news' instead of relying on a bunch of bloggers alone, you might realize that its not just call centers and programming shops, a whole bunch of financial analytics work, medical diagnostic work, even Hollywood animation stuff gets outsourced to India. And oh btw re: the comment about paralegals and drudge work, find out how much a paralegal with your experience makes, and you will realize the futility of your chosen vocation to provide you with a reasonable income.

I agree that quite a few outsourcing projects failed miserably. However AFAIK in most cases they fail not because of incompetent Indian workers but simply because the it being applied to the wrong fucking problem. You cant just use a tool/process willy-nilly because its inexpensive and expect it succeed. On the other hand I know of quite a few that succeeded in spite of that. Go figure!

The comment regarding the infrastructure issues are correct, however that does not seem to have stopped organizations from delivering. BPO providers have usually figured out ways to deal with government incompetence, and will continue to do so until the Indian govt. gets off their lazy asses and does something about it. Fortunately or unfortunately we have a _real_ multi-party democracy which means things get done slowly but when they get done they get done right.

Finally you might be surprised to know that there are Americans interning in India:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/10/business/in tern.php
http://www.uh.edu/ednews/2005/nytimes/200508/20050 810india.htm
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,47435,00 .html

So before you go off on India and Indians take step back and actually bother to find out wtf you are talking about, even if you are posting on /.

What people (bloggers and their fans) don't understand is that journalism deals with being able to write coherently, using facts, and as little bias as possible.

I'm not sure if I should mod you + funny, or if you are really serious.

I'm not able to mod you - stupid because I don't have an account, but it seems you are really seriously stupid. The fact that there are bad journalists who don't practice journalism competently doesn't mean the concept of journalism doesn't exist.

War articles ... ignore any progress in order to focus on the latest body count.

Agreed that the media spends way too much time obsessing over what's really a tiny body count, but the "progress" in Iraq has been in the negative direction since Saddam was pulled out of his hole. Pro-Iran terrorists are taking over the Iraqi government, stuff keeps blowing up everywhere, general standard of living is down since Saddam (yes, "The Iraqi People Were Better Off Under Saddam") and even the Green Zone isn't safe anymore.

Walter Cronkite may have gotten away with that back when Ted Kennedy was learning how to walk away from drowning victim

Did somebody mention Ted Kennedy? Is Ted Kennedy a journalist? What does Ted Kennedy have to do with any of this? You could have just as easily said "back in the day" or "back during Vietnam", but for no apparent reason whatsoever, you felt a need to add an out of-context dig at Ted Kennedy. You should go see a shrink about your Ted Kennedy fixation. My quick diagnosis: you associate those hateful values of coherency, using facts, and minimal bias with Ted Kennedy.

Abandoning any pretense of objectivity, Wally actually came on the TV news and told us he opposed Vietnam and that we were doomed

What Cronkite said was that Vietnam was a stalemate and the US should make a deal with the Vietcong instead of trying to defeat them. His report was biased and full of errors, but much less so than the official military reports of the past several years which had been painting things as rosy. Lyndon Johnson wouldn't run for reelection because people had realized that he and his whole administration had been lying about Vietnam from the start.

(that helped us win, huh?)

Irrelevant and a sign of mental disease that you'd imagine journalists have any responsibility to help their home countries win wars, especially a journalist from the United States which is an elected republic. Journalists report on wars, they don't fight them. Their job is to inform the people so that the people and their representatives can make the right decisions, which might in some cases include unilaterally deciding to stop fighting an ongoing war.

People can only be made to believe bullshit when they have no competing source of information.

Not true. Many people will believe bullshit over facts if the bullshit is what they wanted or expected to hear. Look at how popular "intelligent design" is, for instance, or all the people who insist that they have no drinking problem.

Those days are coming to an end, fortunately,

Actually, what seems to be happening is that people are clustering around propaganda outfits like Democratic Underground and Red State where they backslap each other and censor opposing viewpoints so they only hear what they want to hear.

the partisan lies and manipulation of MSM are now too obvious to miss.

Agreed. It's obvious by now that the MSM, at least in the US, is a tool of the right wing of the Republican Party.

Here is a really ugly link giving an example.

Interesting example, and it seems like Bilal Hussei

I know this is a little different when talking about computer security, but just as the Romans couldn't even imagine in their wildest dreams a B2 bomber, let alone how it could possible get past their impenetrable wall, we can't conceive of the technology that could be used to "infect" our computers.

Anyway, this case is a little different--the previous poster noted that there's logical fallacy involved: two steps, each of which has to happen before the other. That's a little more concrete than "I can't imagine a giant flying machine." It's more like "I can't imagine how two things could each happen before the other in the same place."

Come to think of it, it's exactly like that.

So, let me guess... If (and that's theoretical - http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1098.htm) an American had invented the phone, the US should have retained control of telephony ? I mean, there's a number of infrastructures that have been created, not all of them are american, and the country the inventions originated from didn't retain control. Oh wait, come to think of it, it looks like decent transport was invented in Europe, and we obviously retained control of it, considering the state of US railways. Ah well, maybe you do have point.

Copyright, however, is not designed to afford consumer protection or convenience but, rather, to protect the copyrightholders' property interests.

The parent poster is right. This issue was already decided in UMG vs. MP3.com, the case about whether My.MP3.com was legal or not. The judge decided that MP3.com was in violation of copyrights, and that its use was NOT fair, since it was copying entire works and doing so for commercial purposes. This is a pretty clear precedent. Using Google Print may be fair use, but operating Google Print is not: Google is copying entire works for commercial purposes.

Google's lawyers must be hitting the bong if they think they'll win any case brought against them. The precedent is clear.

Checking books out from a library does not involve copyright law, as you're not making a copy of anything.

There are four factors to US Fair Use law. The differences between Google's copying and library photocopying are:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

   Google's use is commercial (see the judge's argument in the my.mp3.com case). Most use at a library is usually educational, but it may not be.

2. the nature of the copyrighted work

   No difference

3. Amount and substantiality

   Google is copying 100% of the books. It's fairly well established that it's not legal to copy an entire book in your library's copier, that it's only legal to copy some subset of the pages.

4. Effect upon work's value

   No difference

Sorry, but you are wrong, according to all the case law. See, e.g., UMG Recordings Inc. v. MP3.com Inc., 92 F. Supp. 2d 349 (S.D.N.Y. 2000).

He's referring to Falwell vs. Hustler, in which Falwell sued Larry Flynt for publishing an ad-parody "featuring" the good reverend - one of the cases protecting the right to parody in the USA.

Nuclear power plants are far, far less polluting than coal-fired plants, and they conveniently store *all* of their pollution in spent fuel rods rather than tossing it willy-nilly into the atmosphere.

And those fuel rods still need to be stored somewhere, millions of years and not the 10,000 the government says, before they aren't dangerous. And disposal of them is just one of the ways the government subsidizes the nuclear power industry.

Hydropower is even less polluting than that, but it commits the blaspheming act of *altering the environment to satisfy human needs*, an unforgivable crime in environmental circles.

Hydro power can does do that but it also can do much more. Because of China's Three River Gorge Dam millions are being forcibly relocated. Dam projects in India are forcing others to be relocated as well. The World Bank which finances or financed many dams has found that they can have significant social impacts. Dams may provide benefits, the WB admits however without proper provisions being made, these dams can also cause considerable damage to upstream and downstream ecosystems.

Environmentalists go on and on about "alternative" sources of energy, conveniently ignoring the fact that it isn't possible to power the entire economy on solar or wind, nor is it practical in many places

You're right, there are places solar or wind isn't possible but where one isn't the other may be. Where neither are feasible there are other possibilities, clean coal perhaps being one. Biodiesel and hydrogen may work as well. While it may be some years before hydrogen and fuel cells are ready, biodiesel is here now. Rudolph Diesel designed his diesel engine to run on most any vegetable and seed oil. On his Iron Mountain Estate Henry Ford designed and built a car that both used hemp in it's construction and was fueled by methanol made from hemp.

solar cells have an extremely dirty and poisonous manufacturing process, something greenies never seem to think is worth mentioning

This is something I've been thinking about for some tyme, but I have yet to come to any conclusion. Maybe the waste from the manufacture of PV cells can be used as input for another manufacturer.

Hell, even wind power is being blasted by some environmentalists because wind farms occasionally kill birds.

Older wind genies earned the rep for killing birds, however many of those spun relatively fast whereas new wind genie designs are proving to generate as much power at slower blade speeds than older ones and at slower speeds birds aren't at as high a risk of being killed. Other measures are being taken to reduce the hazzard to birds as well. There's also the NAMBY factor.

And if there were a true 'free market' in power generation, the plants would be even cheaper. And less safe, as well. But certainly cheaper than an equal power production capacity in gas, oil, or coal. Transportation savings alone would be enormous.

Even if they do prove safer, the new designs may not necessarily be cheaper. By the reckoning of the International Energy Agency (IEA), which has just produced a new analysis of the economics of nuclear power*, the capital cost for today's nuclear designs runs at about $2,000 per kW, against about $1,200 per kW for coal and just $500 per kW for a combined-cycle gas plant. History also suggests that not everything goes as planned when turning clever paper designs into real-life nuclear plants. What is more, the debts of any new plants, unlike the debts of existing plants, will not be written off. In fact, the t

Y e a h.

First factor -- "the purpose and character of the use". The use is commercial. Same with my.mp3.com, even if they don't charge a fee, it's still commercial.

Google doesn't add no new "new aesthetics, new insights and understandings" to the original music recordings it copies.

Second factor -- "the nature of the copyrighted work" -- the creative recordings here being copied are "close[] to the core of intended copyright protection". Okay, the copied-in-their-entirety is only happening internally to Google in this case, that's the biggest difference between my.mp3.com and google, but AFAIK, the internal copying alone is enough to be declared illegal.

Regarding the third factor -- "the amount and substantiality of the portion [of the copyrighted work] use [by the copier] in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole" -- it is undisputed that defendant copies, and replays, the entirety of the copyrighted works here in issue, thus again negating any claim of fair use.

Regarding the fourth factor -- "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work" -- defendant's activities on their face invade plaintiffs' statutory right to license their copyrighted sound recordings to others for reproduction. (in that companies probably didn't give Google a license for many internal copies of each book)

Okay, IANAL, and half of this doesn't make sense to me. But the four items don't look to be any different for google.

It's language like this in the opinion that makes me think the problem was more with internal copying than with external copying:

To make good on this offer, defendant purchased tens of thousands of popular CDs in which plaintiffs held the copyrights, and, without authorization, copied their recordings onto its computer servers so as to be able to replay the [*3] recordings for its subscribers.

In the case of mp3.com, they were supplying a copy of music that wasn't taken from your purchased copy.

Right, but even the initial internal copy, I think, was ruled to not fall within the rights of fair use. (though the external copies were also a problem too)

Especially regarding the arguments, I think more focus was on the total number of CD's ripped, not on the total number of mp3's sent to individuals.

http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi984.htm

For a single machine, improved fuel efficiency lowers the cost of fuel consumption. Historically the number of fuel-consuming devices in a particular industry usually increases as the costs decline. Each individual machine is more efficient then earlier technology, but overall fuel consumption rises when their increased numbers outstrip the individual fuel savings.

The article also mentions the failures of government enterprise (an oxymoron, IMHO) to solve these problems in the 1980's. Energy is the single most important factor for standard-of-living, so I question the agenda of anyone that wants to strangle the energy economy with taxes, regulation, etc.

Ultimately, the possible ways to structure the energy economy has two extremes: rely on centralized decision making from "government intelligence" or rely on the unregulated and distributed decision making of "market intelligence." (The many options along this spectrum include nationalization, public corporations, regulation, tax structuring, etc.) The expectation that "market forces" are preferable to "government control" has been ascendant for the last few decades, and I expect it will continue to be so for a good part of the 21st Century. For more on this point, I redirect you to a well-known public corporation:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/

Anyone remember Streambox?

I don't think Real was whining about the DMCA then.

I live in Chicago and just recently attended the Wired NextFest, where there was a demo for a "Power Assist Suite" (see a picture here: http://www.vcl.uh.edu/~pavlidis/nextfest/photos/Fi gure%2017.JPG). It was cool in concept, but I was rather let down having seen the thing in action; it was extremely cumbersome and took a good ten minutes to prepare.

The device here looks much more appropriate, while having many of the same features as the one presented at NextFest.

Missing PS2 "features"/hype:

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9909/14/ps2.idg/
- Type III PC slot
- "new distribution system for music and video"; internet music service

http://www.stp.uh.edu/vol65/47/features/features-i ndex.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/09/13/sony_puts_ playstation/
- PS2 will have an ethernet port
- download games online
- online delivery of music and movies
- ability to connect digital cameras and other media devices

http://arstechnica.com/cpu/1q99/playstation2-io.ht ml
- claims 100% backwards compatible

Do I really have to go back and find you quotes on the number of systems they claimed would be available on launch, the library of titles they claimed they would have, how they repeatedly said it would be 6 times faster than the fastest Pentium III, how they claimed it was capable of rendering movie quality graphics in realtime, etc, etc, etc.

They threw out much more crap than this, but it is difficult to hunt down content from 1999 and 2000 that still exists...

http://www.uh.edu/engines/qualitytechnology.pdf

read up.. numerical evidence proving this

the article talks about distributed computing on large scale which is not very feasible for all the above mentioned reasons like
a) companies wouldn't spend money on building this into the console
b) most consumers cannot be bothered
There will be people who'd be interested though. I'd try it if I had a ps3... However with more and more use of clustered smaller machines in place of large supercomputers, clusters of consoles have been built in unis and research labs (for example here or here. There are a few advantages to using consoles:
a) they are cheaper
b) they are small form factor
c) they have hardware optimised for computation (at least ps2 does and ps3 will).
Sony had released linux on ps2 and word is they will be releasing linux for ps3 with extensions for the Cell's SPUs. Once ps3 has a fully featured OS any scientific app can be ported and modified to run on it. Now M$ on the other hand, well, I don't see them releasing any OS for XBOX 2*Pi but maybe the xbox linux crowd will take care of that.

DTP can also be Direct To Plate, a printing method :-)
http://www.uh.edu/~jwaite/DTOPLATE.html

Yes it absolutely does. This, more than anything else I'm aware of, is a fundamental violation of the seperation of Church and state.

The reason our "founding fathers" created the seperation of church and state is because England forced religious beliefs on people and if they did not switch or start believing, they were dealt with swiftly. Read up on the War of the Roses which was one of the reasons behind the "seperation of church and state" due to Protestantism. Again, seperation of church and state does means the State cannot force you to choose a certain religion. Generally people nowadays seem to take it way out of context. I mean this country was founded on a Judeo-Christian belief system, but it was not FORCED upon ANYONE (except by extremists of course which are in any religion). Anyways, please get your facts straight (google is your friend and is referenced on Slashdot twice a day sometimes ;P) before spouting "Christian brutality!". It was actually because of Protestants in England.

Do people honestly think that putting "In God We Trust" on currency is forcing people or brainwashing people to believe in a certain religion?

No, but that isn't the point. The point is that that is clearly an endorsement by the state of god.

Yeah, must be why the government only allows Christians to work for them too. Please...

Is there any reason for it? Does it serve any potential good purpose?

Well, if your argument was based on your misconception of "seperation of church and state", I would have to say no and no.

Of course not. It is there solely because religious people wanted to shove their beliefs down other people's throats.

As I said, if you feel that "In God We Trust" is being forced down your throat, I'll be more than happy to assist you in protesting - send all your cash and coin to me, start doing direct deposit at work, and start using using a debit or credit card only. I'm certainly not arguing that forcing religion down someone's throat is a bad thing, but that was not the real debate. The debate is how the words "seperation of church and state" are being interpreted today as opposed to what they were truly based on.

Lathe of Heaven was by Ursula K LeGuin and did not have an SE in it. "The Fountains of Paradise" is Clarke's SE novel and Charles Sheffileld's was "The Web Between the Worlds"

http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi859.htm

See Electronic Books and Texts of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources directory. For two more free online books, see: the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals and the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography . The second work has three sections on e-books.

See Electronic Books and Texts of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources directory. For two more free online books, see: the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals and the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography . The second work has three sections on e-books.

See Electronic Books and Texts of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources directory. For two more free online books, see: the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals and the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography . The second work has three sections on e-books.

See Electronic Books and Texts of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources directory. For two more free online books, see: the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals and the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography . The second work has three sections on e-books.

See Electronic Books and Texts of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources directory. For two more free online books, see: the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals and the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography . The second work has three sections on e-books.

If you can do something with .rm ... consider Engines of our Ingenuity to fill out the first (or last) minutes of a thoughtful commute.

It's cool and high tech to be sure. But how is this cheaper faster or better than regular quonset huts. Don't tell me it's the acoustics. All kinds of modern insulating or defensive material can be added to the outside of a quonset.

Actually a "Nissen" hut, and apparently the Quonset hut is an improvement on the Nissen,, but they're both half-cylinders. They come with a front and back door.

And there we have it.. free free free..

That's the entire point of the system! Patents are utilitarian, and the utility involved is that of the public. It's not something that inventors just naturally deserve.

I'm not saying to get rid of patents. I think they can be very useful for society. I'm just saying that patent laws should be written purely to fulfill social goals, and that this may result in not allowing some things to be patentable, increasing disclosures, etc.

I would agree if you said "that's not all patents are supposed to do."

I'm sure you would, but you don't know what patents are for. I've explained it. It's purely social policy. It's not for inventors' sake.

I think even a child understands that my statement pertains to the wishes of an author with regards to the usage of his creation. The statement is not bizarre, and I am concerned about your wishes with regards to your creations, no car though. Of course, infantile as your riposte is I suppose I would suggest you word your terms of use to read something like " you may copy this text if you buy me a new car"

Well, I suggest you read this case regarding copyright. Basically, because you used a computer to read my post, you did copy it as far as copyright law is concerned. Now car me, if you're so concerned about my wishes.