He has a point though, patents aren't encouraging innovation, they're the club companies use to beat each other over the head. Not being aware of infringement of a patent is one thing, waiting for a competitor to use something vaguely similar to something you patented and using that to destroy any competition is quite another. Vague patents that can be applied across all iterations of a technology shouldn't exist for this very reason.
!!! eye movement is jerky! why oh why would you use eye movement of all things to control a surgical instrament!? good thing that the robot will limit what areas the surgeon can cut
After all, they eat up everything and what comes out?
Hawking radiation. matter isn't destroyed entirely, it still retains properties that must be sonserved, mass, charge and spin for example. blackholes also "shine" via hawking radiation which small blackholes emit more radiation than larger ones do via this mechanism. in the end the blackholes appears to "explode" from an outside observer's viewpoint as the radiation release is inversely porportional to the third power of the mass of the black holes. larger blackholes last for trillions of years and more which is far longer than our universe has been here or for that matter will be here long after every star dies.
-cheers
well he's a programmer after all. the big bang was the beginning of the alpha, blackholes are memory leaks, spatial expansion is feature bloat and the disparity between matter and antimatter resulted because of a calculation error in Excel.
I am no theoretical astrophysicist, but me thinks "Dark Matter" is the name of the current fad stop-gap physics widget which is necessary to balance out equations in their current hypotheses and models.
yes, the concept of dark matter was conceived as a gap filler for a few observations- that the amount of mass in galaxies appeared to exceed the visible quantity by about 10x and that the velocity curves for stars orbiting in galaxies was all wrong. now we have additional observations of areas of very little visible matter but a noticeable gravitational bending of space. large masses warp space around them and light bends as well- we can observe this and when we see light bend where there isn't that much visible matter, we can actually map the dark matter its self. one region in particular contained a halo of dark matter that was wrenched away from the visible in the area.
Does "Dark Matter" cease to be dark if you shine a light on it?
it depends on what it is. if it is baryonic then yes, if it isn't like many of our models show, then maybe not.
F.Y.I the presence of certain amino acids such as glycine can affect the rate at which certain enantiomers of amino acids form- certain chemical synthesis reactions favor one product over another depending solely on the chirality of the catalyst used. zeolites may have even played a role in creating the disparity in chirality of the amino acids. proteins constructed from right handed amino acids work just as well on achiral substrates as the left handed ones do so that's probably not a factor in why we only see one chiral form dominating in biology- it's probably just a relic from 3.5 billion years ago when life first evolved.
blockquote>If you cover up the lens, the cable box goes "Your papers, please." Then you'll have to type your SSN or passport number in with the remote before you can watch TV. then you know what I do? I unplug the fscker, cancel my service [not that I'd deal with comcast in the first place] and go post on slashdot or something. it really isn't that important to watch TV, so why give them any power over you? I mean really why do people put up with this? It's almost as if people are too lazy to defend their privacy and too eager to whine about their problems or something.
since we aren't even close to having boxes with more memory than we actively use
640k should be enough for anyone. you do realize that the fact that computer manufacturers are happy bundling over 2 gigs of RAM in a default install so it runs Vista all prettily gives the linux users of us a fantastic advantage when we don't use anywhere near that on a regular basis. there are already linux distros that are small enough as to be sitting entirely in RAM, some even small enough to run on the L2+3 cache if you like. being able to do things like this is going to be a major advantage.
carbon monoxide isn't the problem, the fact it is hot enough to react methane and water to make carbon monoxide and hydrogen *is*. it is hot enough to melt aluminum and rend any organic compounds with water into various gases, hot enough to destroy any polymer likely to exist in lifeforms.
photosynthesis produces oxygen as a waste product. when oxygen levels in the air became sufficient, it resulted in what is called the oxygen catastrophe because oxygen is quite poisonous to many anaerobic organisms. finding oxygen in the presence of reducing chemicals like methane signals that there is an active process for making oxygen and reducing chemicals and one of the best ways to do this is with active life.
Where do you draw the line between the innocent bystander and the criminal?
you can't look into people's heads so legally, I don't think there is a way to tell the difference. but really at what point are people obligated to actually learn about basic computing skills and stop being shielded because of their willful ignorance? it seems to be a common defense- but but I don't know that! could you imagine how that would work anywhere else? driving? work? taxes?
There is nothing unusual about methane being detected in the atmosphere of a gas giant, what is unusual is the fact that carbon monoxide is supposed to be more abundant than methane at this temperature. Of course we knew about this over a month ago... btw, methane without water or ammonia or any number of other chemicals required for abiogenesis is utterly unremarkable, they make it sounds like they found DNA in the atmosphere or something equally amazing... sheesh
Why do scientists think they need to communicate science to the general populace?
an educated population is needed for future generations to advance science. Not only that but these same people are going to be making important decisions about our world- decisions that don't just affect them, but everyone around them. Do you really feel comfortable leaving important decisions about pollution, scientific education etc. to the scientifically ignorant?
They are suing because the best the government could find were some mutant seabass due to some environmental regulations.. the good news is that they're ill tempered.
blatant dupery like this lends credence to the idea that the editors are merely shell scripts that cowboyneal hacked together 15 mins before chips'n'dips and never bothered to update any of them...
fines don't mean anything when years of monopolistic business practices are punished by taking about a week's worth of cash from MS. the best solution of them all is to just break the fscking company into many different pieces and make damn sure they don't reassemble like AT&T did. when you have the company producing the OS competing with another that makes applications with another that handles gaming etc. the OS company *could* try locking people into their OS with APIs but the software fragment wouldn't have any of it after all they're competing for resources here.
Look, my main point is that we can't predict revolutions in science and technology. All we can do is say advance x will help with problem y, but that's evolutionary thinking. Revolutions, by their very nature, cause huge changes in what people do and what they think can be done. You can't predict it ahead of time.
exactly. a great deal of the science and technology we now enjoy couldn't possibly have been forseen as it was developed by accident! who would have thought penicillin from a mold could keep millions from dying of bacterial infections? or that gel electrophoresis was developed after a chance observation that clay particles in a liquid environment migrate under an applied electrical field- this is now used for analysis of DNA- it has even lead to the freeing of wrongfully convicted people. sulfanilamide drugs were originally dyes found to have an antibiotic effect. the drug now known as viagra was originally developed to help with heart disease [vasodilator] it didn't help with that but it did help with something completely different... point being that to attempt to predict the next 20 years is idiotic, 50 years is utter lunacy and any list of revolutionary tech fails to account for the fact that a lot of what we have and will have won't be developed on purpose.
Is this so much the top 10 emerging technologies, or what TR find interesting?
the latter. top ten lists like these are subjective by nature. What I may find interesting and worth putting on a top ten list, you may think are not and vice versa. Arguably they glance over *a lot* of tech that has potential to change this whole planet in dramatic ways. protein design and synthetic biology for example. being able to control the properties of a lifeform to the point where it is capable of doing things that biology hasn't evolved in the last 3.5 billion years.
quantum computers that can crack codes in hours rather than the many millenia it takes us now. DNA based data storage- two fold applications- allowing storage of data billions of times that of what is currently possible and the synthetic biology allowing it can be used in biological systems with unimaginable redundancy and capabilities. computationally driven AI- modelling brains from the neuron up such as deep blue which is now modelling a system of 10,000 neurons. space travel with solar sails and air breathing rocket engines with the possibility of taking the cost of launching things into orbit down 10-100 fold. there's a lot more stuff going on that make this list fairly irrelevant.
these cabs require an underground infrastructure [guides in this case] that doesn't exist on most roads/highways that are frequently used by people- no only that but the farther you get out away from populated areas or even connections between populated areas, the less chance there's going to be anything for the cabs to go by as far as navigation is concerned. The whole concept relies on the idea that most roads or at least the ones commonly used will have these markers imbedded beneath the road and that is why it's not going to work for a while.
they can do no harm because they promised to do no harm... if you can create a wiki and give others the power to edit that wiki you're essentially not limited in what you can do.
yes that's assuming that they have any clue. unless it absolutely positively cannot possibly be avoided [paying bills for one] why link anything about you to an online profile????? I really don't know how people can enter their actual information and be utterly shocked that it is possible to serve ads with your name on it... what they don't know can't be used.
yes there is. if you don't buy a windows pre-installed machine you're not feeding cash toward that illegal monopolist *and* by buying linux pre-installed pcs you're supporting companies that don't pre-install windows.
It's not like there's some logo organization that is in charge of approving "Linux-capable" PCs like there is for Vista.
that's because ALL PCs ARE LINUX CAPABLE. YOU DO NOT NEED 2 GIGS OF RAM TO FUNCTION PROPERLY. YOU DO NOT NEED A SUPERCOMPUTER TO USE LINUX.
It's cheaper than buying a dedicated Linux machine.
no it's not. Dell's linux pre-installed PCs cost at least 50$ less than the same machine with Windows defective by design installed. it gets better when you realize that since ubuntu isn't the memory hog that Vista is, you don't need that extra gig of RAM- that's 30-40$$ saved right there. or antivirus software or antispyware etc..... *and* it's 50$ that Gates isn't going to be enjoying.
the next time you feel the need to post tripe like that at least bother to do basic research.
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He has a point though, patents aren't encouraging innovation, they're the club companies use to beat each other over the head. Not being aware of infringement of a patent is one thing, waiting for a competitor to use something vaguely similar to something you patented and using that to destroy any competition is quite another. Vague patents that can be applied across all iterations of a technology shouldn't exist for this very reason.
!!! eye movement is jerky! why oh why would you use eye movement of all things to control a surgical instrament!? good thing that the robot will limit what areas the surgeon can cut
well he's a programmer after all. the big bang was the beginning of the alpha, blackholes are memory leaks, spatial expansion is feature bloat and the disparity between matter and antimatter resulted because of a calculation error in Excel.
F.Y.I the presence of certain amino acids such as glycine can affect the rate at which certain enantiomers of amino acids form- certain chemical synthesis reactions favor one product over another depending solely on the chirality of the catalyst used. zeolites may have even played a role in creating the disparity in chirality of the amino acids. proteins constructed from right handed amino acids work just as well on achiral substrates as the left handed ones do so that's probably not a factor in why we only see one chiral form dominating in biology- it's probably just a relic from 3.5 billion years ago when life first evolved.
blockquote>If you cover up the lens, the cable box goes "Your papers, please." Then you'll have to type your SSN or passport number in with the remote before you can watch TV. then you know what I do? I unplug the fscker, cancel my service [not that I'd deal with comcast in the first place] and go post on slashdot or something. it really isn't that important to watch TV, so why give them any power over you? I mean really why do people put up with this? It's almost as if people are too lazy to defend their privacy and too eager to whine about their problems or something.
carbon monoxide isn't the problem, the fact it is hot enough to react methane and water to make carbon monoxide and hydrogen *is*. it is hot enough to melt aluminum and rend any organic compounds with water into various gases, hot enough to destroy any polymer likely to exist in lifeforms.
photosynthesis produces oxygen as a waste product. when oxygen levels in the air became sufficient, it resulted in what is called the oxygen catastrophe because oxygen is quite poisonous to many anaerobic organisms. finding oxygen in the presence of reducing chemicals like methane signals that there is an active process for making oxygen and reducing chemicals and one of the best ways to do this is with active life.
There is nothing unusual about methane being detected in the atmosphere of a gas giant, what is unusual is the fact that carbon monoxide is supposed to be more abundant than methane at this temperature. Of course we knew about this over a month ago... btw, methane without water or ammonia or any number of other chemicals required for abiogenesis is utterly unremarkable, they make it sounds like they found DNA in the atmosphere or something equally amazing... sheesh
They are suing because the best the government could find were some mutant seabass due to some environmental regulations.. the good news is that they're ill tempered.
blatant dupery like this lends credence to the idea that the editors are merely shell scripts that cowboyneal hacked together 15 mins before chips'n'dips and never bothered to update any of them...
fines don't mean anything when years of monopolistic business practices are punished by taking about a week's worth of cash from MS. the best solution of them all is to just break the fscking company into many different pieces and make damn sure they don't reassemble like AT&T did. when you have the company producing the OS competing with another that makes applications with another that handles gaming etc. the OS company *could* try locking people into their OS with APIs but the software fragment wouldn't have any of it after all they're competing for resources here.
didn't we just have an article nearly exactly like this a few days ago?
Quick! someone tag this: whatcouldpossiblygowrong
these cabs require an underground infrastructure [guides in this case] that doesn't exist on most roads/highways that are frequently used by people- no only that but the farther you get out away from populated areas or even connections between populated areas, the less chance there's going to be anything for the cabs to go by as far as navigation is concerned. The whole concept relies on the idea that most roads or at least the ones commonly used will have these markers imbedded beneath the road and that is why it's not going to work for a while.
they can do no harm because they promised to do no harm... if you can create a wiki and give others the power to edit that wiki you're essentially not limited in what you can do.
yes that's assuming that they have any clue. unless it absolutely positively cannot possibly be avoided [paying bills for one] why link anything about you to an online profile????? I really don't know how people can enter their actual information and be utterly shocked that it is possible to serve ads with your name on it... what they don't know can't be used.