Well, a search on Yahoo Finance for Eolas doesn't turn up any publicly owned companies that include that name.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that Doyle owns a controlling interest in the company. He could be answering to venture capitalists or other private investors and we'd have no way of knowing.
Performance is important in a rural area, he said, especially as the potential and need for telemedicine and distance education applications increases.
I used to work for a company that builds and installs distance education networks in rural areas. With the infrastructure they're referring to in the article, much of the cost of such networks is already taken care of. Why is distance education so important in rural Idaho? Because local schools with small numbers of students can't afford the staff required to teach the state mandated curriculum, much less elective courses such as language or (gasp) high school computer science. Without the ability to share teaching staff across distance education networks, many of the local schools would have to close and the kids would be bused long distances on a daily basis.
So, yeah, it's nice that farmers get to surf the web. But the real benefit is elsewhere.
Actually, just an amendment to the constitution would suffice. Let's not throw out the baby...;)
On a gut level, I would agree with your implication that only a small portion of the US population would understand that any portion of the Constitution can be changed. However, I then came upon a survey result that makes me question my gut. After pondering the question a bit further, I now think that if a survey were done specifically asking the question, we'd find that most of the US population would not find it surprising that any portion of the Constitution can be changed, they just would never have considered it before being asked.
Significant change occurs in only one of two ways:
So slowly that no-one notices it's happening (i.e. the "how to boil a frog" analogy), or
So quickly that no-one saw it coming (i.e. revolution, but not necessarily violent revolution)
The people in power typically have control over the slow method and those not in power over the fast method.
So, no, we're not going to see either the Republican or Democratic parties do anything truly dramatic (though their spin doctors will make it seem so). They'll fight over the political center, which is where their path to power lies, and continue to slowly turn up the heat on the rest of us frogs.
However, occasionally there will be opportunities for real change without revolution. They will typically be when something so shocking has occurred that a general (though usually directionless) unease occurs in the voting population. Jimmy Carter was the result of one of these opportunities...caused by national outrage at the abuse of power by Richard Nixon. Ross Perot capitalized on another. Whether either of these were (or had the potential to be) successful and lasting acts of change I'll leave to another discussion.
I don't see how anything you said shows that the balance of power in the USA has been doing anything but moving from the hands of the states into the hands of the national government. The process began in the late 1700s during the political wrangling that led up to the Constitution (try reading the Federalist Papers and the writings of the Anti-Federalists for original source information) but has been steadily progressing ever since.
BTW, what requires a constitutional amendment and what doesn't is up to the Supreme Court to decide. All your example showed is that the opinion of the Supreme Court has been shifting over the years. Whether that shift in opinion has been the result the shift in power from the states to the national government or has been the cause (i.e. by allowing it to happen) is another question.
Pardon me, but racist? Kindly explain how you got that from my comment!
Anyway, your response indicates that you judge the success of a political system based on economic results. I must point out that the two are not necessarily related. However, since you're the original poster, I'll play on your playing field.
Yes, China is currently growing very quickly. But keep in mind that it's much easier to achieve a high rate of growth when your productivity is lower (in this case, GDP/population).
China is a totalitarian state (political system) that is beginning to realize that capitalism (economic system) works better than communism (economic system) in the real world. We have yet to see whether the economic freedom the Chinese government is beginning to allow will cause the populace to demand political freedom (some form of representative democracy; a family of political systems) as well.
If the USA is considered to be a political-economic experiment at ~225 years, then the political-economic environment in China right now (~10 years old?) certainly qualifies as an early-stage experiment and any assessment of their ultimate success or failure should be considered to be, at best, a guess.
Also note that I mentioned the Soviet Union in my reply to your post. I don't see you touting their growth rate.
You do realize that this is essentially what was used by the Soviet Union and is currently in use by China (except the decision is made by those with party influence, not academic credentials)...don't you? Does it really look like either of those two have done particularly well?
Most other countries do not implement a form of federal government.
We (USA) don't have a federal government, at least not in the pure sense of the word. We have a national government.
What's the difference? Whether power resides primarily on the state or national level. A federal government represents and is controlled by a federation of smaller political entities (states, in the USA) where the true power resides. A national government represents and is controlled by a single national political entity that might or might not be comprised of smaller political entities.
The single best way to determine whether you have a federal or national government is where the primary power of taxation resides since a government can do nothing without revenue. The political struggle between the federalists and anti-federalists in the USA centered mainly around this point. Oddly enough, there was the same confusion between the terms "federal" and "national" back then. Apparently, the Federalist marketers got their mits onto that confusion first, because the Federalists were actually for a national government and the Anti-Federalists for a federal government.
FYI, the text you quoted was from Michael. Michael wasn't the one who submitted the article...he took it from the submission pile and posted it. The article was submitted by an Anonymous Coward. The text in italics are from the submitter and those in plain text are from the poster. Usually, the submitter supplies the extensive comments and the poster adds a quick comment or two.
Clearly, Michael thought it more important to get the post up quickly than spend a lot of time poring over the text of the judgement just to come up with some pithy comment. If you want to comment on the article, RTFA! Don't get on Michael's case for serving the slashdot community better by prioritizing his work.
Not if they're going to market this product for displays in harsh environments. Admittedly, the fine points of color might not matter if you need an informational display near a blast furnace. But honest marketing (yes yes, an oxymoron in most cases) would have touted "reduced impact from environmental temperature swings" or "greater range of operating temperatures", etc.
Ah yes, you finally grasp the point of my original question about how they were planning to generate white light from a single pixel when they had access to only single colors via interference (white light being generated by the simultaneous presence of multiple frequencies/colors of light)!
Since then, I've realized (as you've pointed out in other threads) that they're using only bistable pixels and not taking advantage of the possibility of continuously variable interference layer thickness, so my original question is moot, anyway.:(
VERY funny. Yes, I understand how RGB monitors work. However, with optical interference you can get a fairly continuous selection of wavelength (i.e. color...at least the dominant aspect of color) as long as you have fine enough control over the layer thickness.
Iridigm's technology, which it calls an interferometric modulator, or I-mod, works by fine-tuning the gap between reflective surfaces. I-mod pixels (the dots that make up the display) are tiny paired mirrors, and the distance between these mirrors can be adjusted to one of four settings. Three of these settings correspond to the primary colours red, green and blue, from which all other colours can be constructed. The fourth is "closed", which means that no light can be reflected, and so the pixel, and thus that part of the image, is black.
Apparently, they'll be generating all colors (including white) by using RGB (plus black) combinations
...the technology has one main advantage: it can emits any visible frequency.
But not all (or at least multiple) visible frequencies at the same time, which is what white light is. How will they get around this? Coordinating neighboring pixels to combine to white? Might be possible since they're apparently able to get higher pixel densities using this technology.
Looks like they might be giving up some of the lower voltage benefits in order to get higher pixel density. Hence their claims about glossy magazine appearance?
They claim that since the entire display is inorganic, it's insensitive to temperature variations. Looks like the marketing folks have gone a bit too far on this one. Metal and glass have very different coefficients of thermal expansion. That suggests that the metal layer will be under tension at cold temperatures and under compression at high temperatures. This should affect the interference layer thickness achieved at a particular voltage. I expect that this will, at the very least, affect the display colors since interference wavelength is very sensitive to the thickness of the interference layer.
The company's website reports microsecond response times for their iMOD elements. Ten microseconds would support 100 FPS, which should be fine for gaming (isn't TV interlaced 50 FPS?)
Actually, the hysteresis in the MEMS position suggests that a residual image might be maintained if power is lost. It just won't retain the original colors.
This has very little to do with anything real except control. What do most people do when they believe they need to be in control but don't understand what's going on? They exert control over the trivial things they do understand.
Client has no clue about whether your graphical design is good but needs to show they're in control of the project? That red is a bit too bright. Soften it a bit.
Manager has no clue about how long it really takes to write decent software but needs to show they're in control of the project? That's taking entirely too long. Cut everything by half and forget about testing.
Software becomes an employer's market and upper management needs to show those uppity coders who's in control (in preparation for adding 20 hours to your workweek)? There's a new dress code. No exceptions.
True, that is a convenience issue. Strides are being made by some states in the analagous realm of phone spam. Do Not Call lists being the example here. When we reach that point (and it's just a matter of getting legislation for it...though the international nature of it might cause fits), then there will be a single-source opt-out for email spam as well.
But remember, robots.txt is still enforced only by voluntary compliance. There are many spiders and bots that do not honor robots.txt and are cruising the web and scraping information from pages (email addresses being the obvious example). In that sense, robots.txt is more of a request than anything else (i.e. "Please Don't Tresspass"). Until and unless these opt-out options are enforced by legislation that provides substantial and enforceable penalties, we're still relying on the good will of the businesses involved.
Both of them are identical in that both are opt-out systems that rely on the honor of the implementer to be effective.
Are you suggesting that spammers have less honor than search engine companies? Where's my Pocket Lawyer(tm)...;)
But seriously, the problem with the robots.txt file is not that search engines don't honor it...they do. The problem is that it's not simple enough for the average person posting a personal website to use properly. To some, it's downright daunting. Until using robots.txt is as easy as clicking an opt-out link or dialing a telephone number, it's really not an effective method of securing personal privacy.
Caveat: I'm still reading about both sides of this case and trying not to give in to my visceral distaste of what Search King seems to be doing, so please bear with me.
The portion of Mr. King's comment you post refers to "express permission." robots.txt is an opt out system. In opt-out systems, permission is implied unless expressly forbidden. So, the presence of a robots.txt option does not address Mr. King's comment.
As an aside, it seems a bit disingenuous for a member of the Slashdot crowd to point to it as a fine solution when there have been reams of complaints about spammers who offer opt-out links.
A question to the poster: Do you really feel that an opt-out system is adequate in this case? If so, how is it fundamentally different than opt-out spammers?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, a search on Yahoo Finance for Eolas doesn't turn up any publicly owned companies that include that name.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that Doyle owns a controlling interest in the company. He could be answering to venture capitalists or other private investors and we'd have no way of knowing.
...appears later in the article
Performance is important in a rural area, he said, especially as the potential and need for telemedicine and distance education applications increases.
I used to work for a company that builds and installs distance education networks in rural areas. With the infrastructure they're referring to in the article, much of the cost of such networks is already taken care of. Why is distance education so important in rural Idaho? Because local schools with small numbers of students can't afford the staff required to teach the state mandated curriculum, much less elective courses such as language or (gasp) high school computer science. Without the ability to share teaching staff across distance education networks, many of the local schools would have to close and the kids would be bused long distances on a daily basis.
So, yeah, it's nice that farmers get to surf the web. But the real benefit is elsewhere.
Actually, just an amendment to the constitution would suffice. Let's not throw out the baby... ;)
On a gut level, I would agree with your implication that only a small portion of the US population would understand that any portion of the Constitution can be changed. However, I then came upon a survey result that makes me question my gut. After pondering the question a bit further, I now think that if a survey were done specifically asking the question, we'd find that most of the US population would not find it surprising that any portion of the Constitution can be changed, they just would never have considered it before being asked.
Significant change occurs in only one of two ways:
The people in power typically have control over the slow method and those not in power over the fast method.
So, no, we're not going to see either the Republican or Democratic parties do anything truly dramatic (though their spin doctors will make it seem so). They'll fight over the political center, which is where their path to power lies, and continue to slowly turn up the heat on the rest of us frogs.
However, occasionally there will be opportunities for real change without revolution. They will typically be when something so shocking has occurred that a general (though usually directionless) unease occurs in the voting population. Jimmy Carter was the result of one of these opportunities...caused by national outrage at the abuse of power by Richard Nixon. Ross Perot capitalized on another. Whether either of these were (or had the potential to be) successful and lasting acts of change I'll leave to another discussion.
I don't see how anything you said shows that the balance of power in the USA has been doing anything but moving from the hands of the states into the hands of the national government. The process began in the late 1700s during the political wrangling that led up to the Constitution (try reading the Federalist Papers and the writings of the Anti-Federalists for original source information) but has been steadily progressing ever since.
BTW, what requires a constitutional amendment and what doesn't is up to the Supreme Court to decide. All your example showed is that the opinion of the Supreme Court has been shifting over the years. Whether that shift in opinion has been the result the shift in power from the states to the national government or has been the cause (i.e. by allowing it to happen) is another question.
Pardon me, but racist? Kindly explain how you got that from my comment!
Anyway, your response indicates that you judge the success of a political system based on economic results. I must point out that the two are not necessarily related. However, since you're the original poster, I'll play on your playing field.
Yes, China is currently growing very quickly. But keep in mind that it's much easier to achieve a high rate of growth when your productivity is lower (in this case, GDP/population).
China is a totalitarian state (political system) that is beginning to realize that capitalism (economic system) works better than communism (economic system) in the real world. We have yet to see whether the economic freedom the Chinese government is beginning to allow will cause the populace to demand political freedom (some form of representative democracy; a family of political systems) as well.
If the USA is considered to be a political-economic experiment at ~225 years, then the political-economic environment in China right now (~10 years old?) certainly qualifies as an early-stage experiment and any assessment of their ultimate success or failure should be considered to be, at best, a guess.
Also note that I mentioned the Soviet Union in my reply to your post. I don't see you touting their growth rate.
...or mod him down as hopelessly naive!
You do realize that this is essentially what was used by the Soviet Union and is currently in use by China (except the decision is made by those with party influence, not academic credentials)...don't you? Does it really look like either of those two have done particularly well?
Most other countries do not implement a form of federal government.
We (USA) don't have a federal government, at least not in the pure sense of the word. We have a national government.
What's the difference? Whether power resides primarily on the state or national level. A federal government represents and is controlled by a federation of smaller political entities (states, in the USA) where the true power resides. A national government represents and is controlled by a single national political entity that might or might not be comprised of smaller political entities.
The single best way to determine whether you have a federal or national government is where the primary power of taxation resides since a government can do nothing without revenue. The political struggle between the federalists and anti-federalists in the USA centered mainly around this point. Oddly enough, there was the same confusion between the terms "federal" and "national" back then. Apparently, the Federalist marketers got their mits onto that confusion first, because the Federalists were actually for a national government and the Anti-Federalists for a federal government.
FYI, the text you quoted was from Michael. Michael wasn't the one who submitted the article...he took it from the submission pile and posted it. The article was submitted by an Anonymous Coward. The text in italics are from the submitter and those in plain text are from the poster. Usually, the submitter supplies the extensive comments and the poster adds a quick comment or two.
Clearly, Michael thought it more important to get the post up quickly than spend a lot of time poring over the text of the judgement just to come up with some pithy comment. If you want to comment on the article, RTFA! Don't get on Michael's case for serving the slashdot community better by prioritizing his work.
Not if they're going to market this product for displays in harsh environments. Admittedly, the fine points of color might not matter if you need an informational display near a blast furnace. But honest marketing (yes yes, an oxymoron in most cases) would have touted "reduced impact from environmental temperature swings" or "greater range of operating temperatures", etc.
Ah yes, you finally grasp the point of my original question about how they were planning to generate white light from a single pixel when they had access to only single colors via interference (white light being generated by the simultaneous presence of multiple frequencies/colors of light)!
Since then, I've realized (as you've pointed out in other threads) that they're using only bistable pixels and not taking advantage of the possibility of continuously variable interference layer thickness, so my original question is moot, anyway. :(
VERY funny. Yes, I understand how RGB monitors work. However, with optical interference you can get a fairly continuous selection of wavelength (i.e. color...at least the dominant aspect of color) as long as you have fine enough control over the layer thickness.
Do you really know that many people who should know better and actually do? ;)
Well, the Economist article reproduced on the Iridigm website indirectly answers this question.
Iridigm's technology, which it calls an interferometric modulator, or I-mod, works by fine-tuning the gap between reflective surfaces. I-mod pixels (the dots that make up the display) are tiny paired mirrors, and the distance between these mirrors can be adjusted to one of four settings. Three of these settings correspond to the primary colours red, green and blue, from which all other colours can be constructed. The fourth is "closed", which means that no light can be reflected, and so the pixel, and thus that part of the image, is black.
Apparently, they'll be generating all colors (including white) by using RGB (plus black) combinations
But not all (or at least multiple) visible frequencies at the same time, which is what white light is. How will they get around this? Coordinating neighboring pixels to combine to white? Might be possible since they're apparently able to get higher pixel densities using this technology.
Looks like they might be giving up some of the lower voltage benefits in order to get higher pixel density. Hence their claims about glossy magazine appearance?
They claim that since the entire display is inorganic, it's insensitive to temperature variations. Looks like the marketing folks have gone a bit too far on this one. Metal and glass have very different coefficients of thermal expansion. That suggests that the metal layer will be under tension at cold temperatures and under compression at high temperatures. This should affect the interference layer thickness achieved at a particular voltage. I expect that this will, at the very least, affect the display colors since interference wavelength is very sensitive to the thickness of the interference layer.
Anyone care to do the math?
They claim years of operation. Of course, this is marketing literature.
It needs a front light but only in dark environments. Apparently, the reflectivity of the surface is sufficient for normal lighted environments
The company's website reports microsecond response times for their iMOD elements. Ten microseconds would support 100 FPS, which should be fine for gaming (isn't TV interlaced 50 FPS?)
Actually, the hysteresis in the MEMS position suggests that a residual image might be maintained if power is lost. It just won't retain the original colors.
This has very little to do with anything real except control. What do most people do when they believe they need to be in control but don't understand what's going on? They exert control over the trivial things they do understand.
Client has no clue about whether your graphical design is good but needs to show they're in control of the project? That red is a bit too bright. Soften it a bit.
Manager has no clue about how long it really takes to write decent software but needs to show they're in control of the project? That's taking entirely too long. Cut everything by half and forget about testing.
Software becomes an employer's market and upper management needs to show those uppity coders who's in control (in preparation for adding 20 hours to your workweek)? There's a new dress code. No exceptions.
True, that is a convenience issue. Strides are being made by some states in the analagous realm of phone spam. Do Not Call lists being the example here. When we reach that point (and it's just a matter of getting legislation for it...though the international nature of it might cause fits), then there will be a single-source opt-out for email spam as well.
But remember, robots.txt is still enforced only by voluntary compliance. There are many spiders and bots that do not honor robots.txt and are cruising the web and scraping information from pages (email addresses being the obvious example). In that sense, robots.txt is more of a request than anything else (i.e. "Please Don't Tresspass"). Until and unless these opt-out options are enforced by legislation that provides substantial and enforceable penalties, we're still relying on the good will of the businesses involved.
Both of them are identical in that both are opt-out systems that rely on the honor of the implementer to be effective.
Are you suggesting that spammers have less honor than search engine companies? Where's my Pocket Lawyer(tm)... ;)
But seriously, the problem with the robots.txt file is not that search engines don't honor it...they do. The problem is that it's not simple enough for the average person posting a personal website to use properly. To some, it's downright daunting. Until using robots.txt is as easy as clicking an opt-out link or dialing a telephone number, it's really not an effective method of securing personal privacy.
It's called robots.txt. Learn it. Use it.
Caveat: I'm still reading about both sides of this case and trying not to give in to my visceral distaste of what Search King seems to be doing, so please bear with me.
The portion of Mr. King's comment you post refers to "express permission." robots.txt is an opt out system. In opt-out systems, permission is implied unless expressly forbidden. So, the presence of a robots.txt option does not address Mr. King's comment.
As an aside, it seems a bit disingenuous for a member of the Slashdot crowd to point to it as a fine solution when there have been reams of complaints about spammers who offer opt-out links.
A question to the poster: Do you really feel that an opt-out system is adequate in this case? If so, how is it fundamentally different than opt-out spammers?