I had such a prodigy as a friend during my undergraduate education at the University of Texas. He took honors math classes and science classes at UT in the mornings and attended regular high school classes in the afternoons. He was a fantastic kid and I believe had great experiences at both UT and at his high school. He is now a law professor because a law professor advised him at one time that if he wanted have a carreer that maximized his time to explore what ever the heck he wanted then he should be a law professor.
Faith and science are fundamentally opposite approaches to determining truth. Religion and Science are 'not always in conflict' because religion slowly adapts when it must. Religion is just a reactionary drag on progress in understanding our universe. In Gallileo's time, people were expected to accept on faith that the earth was the center of the universe. The Catholic Church tortured Gallileo for having evidence to the contrary. Today there is no conflict because the Catholic Church adapted to the reality that the sun is the center of the solar system.
We had a physics guest lecturer back in the early 80's that predicted something like this, wish I could remember her name. If neutrinos are solitons and interact with nulcei as solitons, then the neutrino that leaves the nucleus leaves the instant the other neutrino arrived. Sort of like when one billiard ball strikes two balls in contact and the second ball flies away. The nucleon density of the earth would determine the percentage of the distance that would be 'skipped' when transisting the earth. An idea of this factor can be obtained by looking at the silicon atom. The ratio of the radius of the silicon nucleus to the size of the silicon atom is about(3.7x10^(-15)) / (111x10^(-12)) or.00034%.
It is not a closed system, however the concentration of the desicant would be expected to be constant on average. Otherwise you would wind up with dry salt instead of a slurry. So the moisture absorbed during the cooling process would be expected to be equal to the moisture lost by the heating process.
"NREL has patented the DEVap concept... Eventually, NREL will license the technology to industry"
I thought that inventions that we all paid for with our taxes were public domain. How is it that this government lab will be licensing this technology?
Much of this is not new. I beleive that the British figured most of this out in the 1930s or earlier. I found information about iron and coal deposits in Afghanistan at the beginning of the war. I don't remember seeing anything about lithium though, but it was 10 years ago when I did that research.
The U.S. Army has had this information for a couple of years. It would be nice to know what the objective is of this release. I suspect that this is either part of a psy op to put it in the minds of the tribal leaders that they can be Saudi rich if they just cooperate and behave for a few years or this is psy op for U.S. consumption to make it clear that Afghanistan is not a lost cause... or both.
Afghanistan is not resource poor -- it is just extremely mismanaged.
We had a Bank of America business account. We live in Austin, TX and someone in intercepted one of our two cards in transit, probably at the point of shipping and sent it to London where it was used to clean out our account. Yes BoA put all of the money back immediately, but apparently they do not have a lock-out policy on PIN tries. There were thousands of PIN tries executed by some computer in London before they got the PIN and then cleaned out the account. When I called, the person looking at the logs simply said "Oh boy, someone was sure trying hard to remember the PIN, oh..." and then they apologized and promised the return of the money. I was absolutely shocked that there was a way to access the PIN validation system that allowed this.
It is rules like those currently proposed that led us to exclusive use of asbestos in many applications such as all of our schools. Because instead of specifying the desired ourcome, they specified the materials to use. The rules should state the end objectives and not the details of how those objectives should be met.
The building codes are necessarily formulaic in that a high-school graduate building inspector in a small town needs to be able to evaluate if a given structure is being correctly constructed. So I am fine with examples of approaches that provide satisfactory results being included in the building codes. I just think it is a bad idea that the codes be written such that this is the only way that this can be acheived. If a company hires architects and experts or wants to apply a new technique developed at a university there should be room for this. Most municipalities or states simply take these codes and make them the law, so it can be next to impossible to work around short comings once they are made laws unless they are propperly written in the first place.
If California wrote a law that automatically rejected any textbook accepted by Texas, then there would be at least 2 choices for the rest of the country. It would be entertaining at least to try and get a law like this passed. Who is going to stand up and defend the Texas process in California? It is also possible to generate open source text books and convince states that these are worthy of formal acceptance. Getting a nobel laureate to sign up as one of the editors of your open source textbook would probably grease the acceptance process. The great thing about an open source textbook is that the final product is much more that just a book. It would also come with the accumulated discussions as to how it reached its final form and its evolution over time would be visible. California has started this with one World History textbook and has (apparently very modest) plans to expand this to their full curiculum. California Open Source Textbook Project .
If they don't enforce their patents, they effectively become public domain. They will probably not sue Hadop, but will try to arrange for some official acknowledgment from Hadop of Google's patent rights and grant them some sort of license explicitly for open source projects. This will strengthen Google's claim. They did not fight their way through 4 rejections and hundreds of thousands of dollars of attorney fees to not enforce this patent.
The software technique is obvious and has been used many times in the last 50 years. The use of key/value pairs for storing state is mundane. The use of sets of key/value pairs to partition work across multiple processing steps is equally mundane. Scaling a parallelizable process to multiple processors is obvious. So what is patentable about this claim?
You should have asked ACME which head hunters they have the most success getting candidates from. Ask this at every interview. A pattern will likely emerge with respect to the headhunters and the jobs you think are a good fit. These are the headhunters you should be working with.
The physics behind the bomb has been widely known for over 60 years. There are at least tens of thousands of people in this country have the knowledge to make a fission bomb. There are probably people in nearly every country of the world who have this knowledge. The hard part really is having a government willing to spend the incredible resources to create the material for a bomb. Iran's government is obviously willing to make the investment.
A couple of years ago, we had a clan of wanna-be-travelers 'renting' the house across the street for three months. Their deposit check bounced and they never paid any rent and then disapeared. The four adults worked as a make-ready crew for apartment complexes, or at least claimed to. There were 5 children aged 16 to 8, the sixteen year old being pregnant and because Texas has no regulations regarding home schooling they were able to not send any of these kids to school. Instead they had the 16 year old pregnant girl baby sitting the other 4 all day long and they called this 'home schooling'. These people were creating the next generation of criminals right before our eyes and there was nothing anyone would do about it. At some point the state has to make some minimal regulations as to what a normal child of given age is supposed to know and have a way of verifying this.
My understanding is the technology you are referring to was their mechanism of adding semantic markup inside of an existing document using an additional schema. For instance, it might recognize that in some cases Washington is a place and bracket Washington with the tag Washington in other cases it might notice that Washington was part of a name: George Washington. Semantic web researches have been marking up text in various ways like this even before the existence of XML. When i4i filed their patent on marking up text, I am sure their clever attorneys practiced the process of 'claim broadening'. First the attorneys translate your technical design into almost unreadable legalese and then they semantically start widening the claims to see what they can get away with. I once had a patent on a device like the popular Cirque technologies touch pad that is on every laptop today. Through the process of claim broadening and a clueless patent examiner, we were granted a patent on our last and broadest claim which was measuring capacitance by draining a capacitor through a resistor and timing how long it took to get to half the original charge. This is lab #4 in electrical engineering for non-majors. I am sure that the attorney who wrote the claim had no clue how ridiculous the claim was. He had simply been playing a game with words when he came up with this claim. I laughed when I first saw it and was informed that this is the way the patent process works and we would probably get axed on all claims greater than 20. Then we were granted all claims!
It sounds to me like anyone who writes code that inserts tags with a different namespace into an existing document violates this patent. That is just plain silly, and acusing Microsoft of pinching this 'technology' is an insult to the word technology.
Many of our peers here are the ones designing databases with SSN keys. Stop doing that! Hash the SSNs with a seed using MD5 or a stronger algorithm (or weaker if there is the possiblity that on rare occasions you will need to brute force the original SSN out). If you are required to validate against a subset of the number, store that hashed also. Done consistently you can use the hash to uniquely identify your customer without having to store the SSN in plain text.
The U.S. Government should tax the storage of SSN numbers. We could start at 2 cents per day per instance. Once the tax is enacted, it will be a perpetual risk for businesses that this tax rate will go up and there will be an obvious business case for coming up with other methods for identifying customers.
I've seen some pretty flimsy Stirling Engine implementations. Some even have foam pistons, but you are probably still right about the P/W ratio. I've never seen the flimsy ones do much more than turn. Attaining 5m/sec = 300m/min with an engine capable of turning at 1200 rpm would mean that the engine would have to be capable of lifting itself.25m =~ 8 inches per turn. This does not seem like an impossible number, but it doesn't sound easy either. It would probably be necessary to put it into motion at the start, but that does not seem unreasonable to me as clearly there is power available at the launch site.
The laser light that hits the solar cell may be converted at 50%, but you also waste a lot of energy in producing the laser beam.
Wouldn't a two piston Sterling Engline designed such that it flipped itself over on each cycle be a much better energy down converter than solar cells? Even if your laser is tuned to the solar cell band gap, the amount of energy that you put into the power transfer is a fraction of what you would get as useful energy to the crawler. With a Sterling Engine you could just use mirrors to focus sunlight to power the device.
This is a social phenomenon to which you are observing Microsoft's reaction. Corporate policies rarely create trends, more often than not they reflect them. This is essentially the same phenomenom that has parents thinking there is a predator around every corner -- the shrinking of the information globe and increased exposure to bad things happening 'somewhere' makes people react in statistically irrational ways.
I have to agree. When I was 19 and interning in the accounting department at a chemical plant, I was asked to add a new field to one of their systems because I knew FORTRAN. I looked at their code, told them that it was not FORTRAN, but I thought I understood what was going on. They said fine. After a couple of hours of monkey-see-monkey-do I had made the change and verified that the field showed up on the screen that they wanted it on, saved the values as expected and showed up in the modified reports where they wanted. It was not until over 20 years later that I looked inside a COBOL book and realized that I had been unknowingly 'tainted'. It was that easy.
The topic is fusion, not fission and the point is we are failing misserably at making a fusion reactor. The only current way we have of creating a net power producing fusion reaction is with a bomb. What is your source for the Russian reactor? Did they use paraffin or another material? The point of the enourmous amount of paraffin is to absorb the energy. There would be little pressure on the granite, but the thermal changes would take their toll over time. You would produce a fair amount of deuterium, tritium and some carbon-13 this way, so containment would be very important.
A back of the envelope calculation says that a paraffin sphere with a 200m radius can absorb the energy of a 2 megaton hydrogen bomb by melting. So we build ourselves a nice strong containment vessel out of a granite mountain, fill the hole with paraffin and set off a bomb, melt paraffin, boil water for a couple of months and then repeat. There is probably a better material than paraffin, but the basic idea is the same. Just a few minor engineering issues to work out and we could have one of these suckers in production in a couple of years. Or we could just start making better use of the monster fusion reactor that is already in the neighborhood.
I have driven on reverted roads like this and if they do a cheap job of it and do not soften up the road bed, it can be like driving on a thin layer of ball bearings. Your stopping distance becomes very very long. A thin layer of gravel over something hard is much worse than a normal gravel road. As a teenager I learned this lesson. Fortunately the only thing damaged while I learned this lesson was a couple of innocent shrubberies.
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I had such a prodigy as a friend during my undergraduate education at the University of Texas. He took honors math classes and science classes at UT in the mornings and attended regular high school classes in the afternoons. He was a fantastic kid and I believe had great experiences at both UT and at his high school. He is now a law professor because a law professor advised him at one time that if he wanted have a carreer that maximized his time to explore what ever the heck he wanted then he should be a law professor.
Faith and science are fundamentally opposite approaches to determining truth. Religion and Science are 'not always in conflict' because religion slowly adapts when it must. Religion is just a reactionary drag on progress in understanding our universe. In Gallileo's time, people were expected to accept on faith that the earth was the center of the universe. The Catholic Church tortured Gallileo for having evidence to the contrary. Today there is no conflict because the Catholic Church adapted to the reality that the sun is the center of the solar system.
We had a physics guest lecturer back in the early 80's that predicted something like this, wish I could remember her name. If neutrinos are solitons and interact with nulcei as solitons, then the neutrino that leaves the nucleus leaves the instant the other neutrino arrived. Sort of like when one billiard ball strikes two balls in contact and the second ball flies away. The nucleon density of the earth would determine the percentage of the distance that would be 'skipped' when transisting the earth. An idea of this factor can be obtained by looking at the silicon atom. The ratio of the radius of the silicon nucleus to the size of the silicon atom is about(3.7x10^(-15)) / (111x10^(-12)) or .00034%.
It is not a closed system, however the concentration of the desicant would be expected to be constant on average. Otherwise you would wind up with dry salt instead of a slurry. So the moisture absorbed during the cooling process would be expected to be equal to the moisture lost by the heating process.
"NREL has patented the DEVap concept ... Eventually, NREL will license the technology to industry"
I thought that inventions that we all paid for with our taxes were public domain. How is it that this government lab will be licensing this technology?
But is a lot of money to a few warlords.
Much of this is not new. I beleive that the British figured most of this out in the 1930s or earlier. I found information about iron and coal deposits in Afghanistan at the beginning of the war. I don't remember seeing anything about lithium though, but it was 10 years ago when I did that research.
... or both.
The U.S. Army has had this information for a couple of years. It would be nice to know what the objective is of this release. I suspect that this is either part of a psy op to put it in the minds of the tribal leaders that they can be Saudi rich if they just cooperate and behave for a few years or this is psy op for U.S. consumption to make it clear that Afghanistan is not a lost cause
Afghanistan is not resource poor -- it is just extremely mismanaged.
We had a Bank of America business account. We live in Austin, TX and someone in intercepted one of our two cards in transit, probably at the point of shipping and sent it to London where it was used to clean out our account. Yes BoA put all of the money back immediately, but apparently they do not have a lock-out policy on PIN tries. There were thousands of PIN tries executed by some computer in London before they got the PIN and then cleaned out the account. When I called, the person looking at the logs simply said "Oh boy, someone was sure trying hard to remember the PIN, oh ..." and then they apologized and promised the return of the money. I was absolutely shocked that there was a way to access the PIN validation system that allowed this.
It is rules like those currently proposed that led us to exclusive use of asbestos in many applications such as all of our schools. Because instead of specifying the desired ourcome, they specified the materials to use. The rules should state the end objectives and not the details of how those objectives should be met.
The building codes are necessarily formulaic in that a high-school graduate building inspector in a small town needs to be able to evaluate if a given structure is being correctly constructed. So I am fine with examples of approaches that provide satisfactory results being included in the building codes. I just think it is a bad idea that the codes be written such that this is the only way that this can be acheived. If a company hires architects and experts or wants to apply a new technique developed at a university there should be room for this. Most municipalities or states simply take these codes and make them the law, so it can be next to impossible to work around short comings once they are made laws unless they are propperly written in the first place.
If California wrote a law that automatically rejected any textbook accepted by Texas, then there would be at least 2 choices for the rest of the country. It would be entertaining at least to try and get a law like this passed. Who is going to stand up and defend the Texas process in California? It is also possible to generate open source text books and convince states that these are worthy of formal acceptance. Getting a nobel laureate to sign up as one of the editors of your open source textbook would probably grease the acceptance process. The great thing about an open source textbook is that the final product is much more that just a book. It would also come with the accumulated discussions as to how it reached its final form and its evolution over time would be visible. California has started this with one World History textbook and has (apparently very modest) plans to expand this to their full curiculum. California Open Source Textbook Project .
If they don't enforce their patents, they effectively become public domain. They will probably not sue Hadop, but will try to arrange for some official acknowledgment from Hadop of Google's patent rights and grant them some sort of license explicitly for open source projects. This will strengthen Google's claim. They did not fight their way through 4 rejections and hundreds of thousands of dollars of attorney fees to not enforce this patent.
The software technique is obvious and has been used many times in the last 50 years. The use of key/value pairs for storing state is mundane. The use of sets of key/value pairs to partition work across multiple processing steps is equally mundane. Scaling a parallelizable process to multiple processors is obvious. So what is patentable about this claim?
You should have asked ACME which head hunters they have the most success getting candidates from. Ask this at every interview. A pattern will likely emerge with respect to the headhunters and the jobs you think are a good fit. These are the headhunters you should be working with.
The physics behind the bomb has been widely known for over 60 years. There are at least tens of thousands of people in this country have the knowledge to make a fission bomb. There are probably people in nearly every country of the world who have this knowledge. The hard part really is having a government willing to spend the incredible resources to create the material for a bomb. Iran's government is obviously willing to make the investment.
A couple of years ago, we had a clan of wanna-be-travelers 'renting' the house across the street for three months. Their deposit check bounced and they never paid any rent and then disapeared. The four adults worked as a make-ready crew for apartment complexes, or at least claimed to. There were 5 children aged 16 to 8, the sixteen year old being pregnant and because Texas has no regulations regarding home schooling they were able to not send any of these kids to school. Instead they had the 16 year old pregnant girl baby sitting the other 4 all day long and they called this 'home schooling'. These people were creating the next generation of criminals right before our eyes and there was nothing anyone would do about it. At some point the state has to make some minimal regulations as to what a normal child of given age is supposed to know and have a way of verifying this.
It sounds to me like anyone who writes code that inserts tags with a different namespace into an existing document violates this patent. That is just plain silly, and acusing Microsoft of pinching this 'technology' is an insult to the word technology.
Many of our peers here are the ones designing databases with SSN keys. Stop doing that! Hash the SSNs with a seed using MD5 or a stronger algorithm (or weaker if there is the possiblity that on rare occasions you will need to brute force the original SSN out). If you are required to validate against a subset of the number, store that hashed also. Done consistently you can use the hash to uniquely identify your customer without having to store the SSN in plain text.
The U.S. Government should tax the storage of SSN numbers. We could start at 2 cents per day per instance. Once the tax is enacted, it will be a perpetual risk for businesses that this tax rate will go up and there will be an obvious business case for coming up with other methods for identifying customers.
I've seen some pretty flimsy Stirling Engine implementations. Some even have foam pistons, but you are probably still right about the P/W ratio. I've never seen the flimsy ones do much more than turn. Attaining 5m/sec = 300m/min with an engine capable of turning at 1200 rpm would mean that the engine would have to be capable of lifting itself .25m =~ 8 inches per turn. This does not seem like an impossible number, but it doesn't sound easy either. It would probably be necessary to put it into motion at the start, but that does not seem unreasonable to me as clearly there is power available at the launch site.
The laser light that hits the solar cell may be converted at 50%, but you also waste a lot of energy in producing the laser beam.
Wouldn't a two piston Sterling Engline designed such that it flipped itself over on each cycle be a much better energy down converter than solar cells? Even if your laser is tuned to the solar cell band gap, the amount of energy that you put into the power transfer is a fraction of what you would get as useful energy to the crawler. With a Sterling Engine you could just use mirrors to focus sunlight to power the device.
This is a social phenomenon to which you are observing Microsoft's reaction. Corporate policies rarely create trends, more often than not they reflect them. This is essentially the same phenomenom that has parents thinking there is a predator around every corner -- the shrinking of the information globe and increased exposure to bad things happening 'somewhere' makes people react in statistically irrational ways.
I have to agree. When I was 19 and interning in the accounting department at a chemical plant, I was asked to add a new field to one of their systems because I knew FORTRAN. I looked at their code, told them that it was not FORTRAN, but I thought I understood what was going on. They said fine. After a couple of hours of monkey-see-monkey-do I had made the change and verified that the field showed up on the screen that they wanted it on, saved the values as expected and showed up in the modified reports where they wanted. It was not until over 20 years later that I looked inside a COBOL book and realized that I had been unknowingly 'tainted'. It was that easy.
You are right, thanks for the link. I had not heard of this proposal.
The topic is fusion, not fission and the point is we are failing misserably at making a fusion reactor. The only current way we have of creating a net power producing fusion reaction is with a bomb. What is your source for the Russian reactor? Did they use paraffin or another material? The point of the enourmous amount of paraffin is to absorb the energy. There would be little pressure on the granite, but the thermal changes would take their toll over time. You would produce a fair amount of deuterium, tritium and some carbon-13 this way, so containment would be very important.
A back of the envelope calculation says that a paraffin sphere with a 200m radius can absorb the energy of a 2 megaton hydrogen bomb by melting. So we build ourselves a nice strong containment vessel out of a granite mountain, fill the hole with paraffin and set off a bomb, melt paraffin, boil water for a couple of months and then repeat. There is probably a better material than paraffin, but the basic idea is the same. Just a few minor engineering issues to work out and we could have one of these suckers in production in a couple of years. Or we could just start making better use of the monster fusion reactor that is already in the neighborhood.
I have driven on reverted roads like this and if they do a cheap job of it and do not soften up the road bed, it can be like driving on a thin layer of ball bearings. Your stopping distance becomes very very long. A thin layer of gravel over something hard is much worse than a normal gravel road. As a teenager I learned this lesson. Fortunately the only thing damaged while I learned this lesson was a couple of innocent shrubberies.