I was in Hawaii a few years back, and noticed spam sushi pre-packaged under shrink wrap in a convenience store. [Shudder] Little slabs of spam held onto a blob of rice with a piece of nori. The salesdroid said it was a popular item with Japanese tourists.
The explosion isn't really caused by the ruthenium, it's the chlorate anion. Chlorate is an extremely strong oxidizer - damn near anything that isn't already at its highest oxidation state will explode with chlorate.
From the Merck Index
7600. Potassium Chlorate
... Keep out of contact with organic matter or other oxidizable substances. Caution: Explodes with sulfuric acid, inflames with explosion if triturated with any organic substances, sulfur, phosphorus, sulfite, hypophosphite, and other oxidizable substances.
While ruthenium is relatively rare (0.0004 ppm in the Earth's crust), it is an article of commerce used in many different applications: thick film resistors, hardening alloys for pen nibs and electrical contacts, catalysts for many industrial chemical processes, colored ceramic glazes...it's a long list.
The small amount used in the IBM drives will have essentially no effect on availability.
There are plenty of poorly configured servers which either don't add received lines, or which just echo into the received line whatever name was given in the HELO, without recording the actual IP address. Spammer's routinely seek out such servers, to help cover their tracks.
The actual claims in the patent don't mention "Credit card sized".
Sure they do. Quoting from the first patent (4,634,845):
17. The device as claimed in claim 16 in which said device is of a size substantially equal to that of a credit card,
You need to be careful in reading patents; they're structured documents and you need to worry about dependencies. If you follow the links, claim 17 is ultimately dependent on claim 1, which does NOT require a size.
Claim 17 was included by their suits in case the examiner didn't allow claim 1. They'd in essence get claim 1, but with an added requirement of small size. Since they did allow claim 1, no size requirement.
I read the second patent similarly. Although claim 11 requires a size, the preceding claims don't. As long as those claims stand, they don't have a specific size requirement.
I can't imagine reading for pleasure on one!...Good God, the patience you must have!!!
YMMV, but reading on a PDA fills a certain niche for me. At any given point, I'm plowing through between 2 and 8 various books. There's one by my bed, one in my office, one in the kitchen, one next to the comfy chair...and one on my Palm.
The one on the Palm is for when you're locked in some time-wasting mode; whip out the PDA and fill that time with something better than the dentist's 4 year old People mags (or the CEO's annual state of the company address...) It's portable, and most importantly, always with you, because it's hard to predict when you're really going to need something worthwhile to read.
Added bonus: Andrew Lang's colored fairy books are all in the public domain; several are available in DOC format. If you ever need something to read in the dark to a sick 5 year old at 3 AM, a backlit PDA is a blessing. Pretty good stories for adults too, if you're into that sort of thing. They're the originals, before DisneyCo got their saccharin mouseclaws into them.
Chinese has something like 32 different vowel sounds, but Chinese text is ideogram based rather than phoneme based, so you can't easily compare number of "base vowels" in akmed's sense.
There is a standardized way to represent Chinese phonemes in roman characters ("Pinyin"); it uses up to 4 of our letters to represent a single Chinese vowel.
crystalize most metals (remember Arnold and Hasta La Vista Baby?
It is generally accepted that glitzy summer SFX movies are not the best sources of scientific insight. Metals which are room temperture solids are not going to suddenly change their microstructure upon further chilling. Exploding robots notwithstanding, I have plunged steel, glass, ceramics, aluminum and many other materials into liquid nitrogen many times without mishap. Last time I checked, rockets using cryogenic fuels weren't crystallizing and shattering either.
To free somthing to >-200F takes LOT of energy. How do you get the energy? You burn fuel.
While it is true that it takes energy to make LN2, this is true of any stored energy.
It is a Good Thing(tm) when using dirty energy sources like coal & oil to do so in large optimized fixed sites, where you don't have to drag your pollution remediation equipment along with you.
It turns out that N2 is largely produced as a waste product of steel production, and unless demand outstripped the normal supply, you can get LN2 as a free byproduct.
(To make steel, you need O2. LOTS of O2. You get pure O2 by liquifying air, then fractionally distilling it to get the various pure gases. You use the O2 to make steel, sell off some of the exotics, sell as much N2 as you can, and let the rest evaporate.)
Thus while it does cost energy to make LN2, we're probably going to spend that energy whether we use the LN2 or not. (At least until you have a LOT of cars working this way.)
If someone has your old mailing address and your name, the USPS is obligated to provide them with the forwarding information.
I don't accept that argument.
I don't want or expect them to give my new address to anyone. I want the USPS to forward mail sent to my old address to the new one for a limited period of time, which they do in fact do. Based on the forwarded mailstream, I can personally inform selected senders who I want to have the new address.
It's the added "service" of selling a "recently moved" mailing list I object to. Based on my direct experience, I was getting mail not from long-lost corporate friends, but instead targeted junk mailings based on the (incorrect) assumption that I had recently moved.
I have thought about it. My head is intact, as is my opinion of the sleaziness of this practice.
(from the preceding post): As for privacy, the USPS is really good at keeping information safe.
(from the MSNBC article): Federal law prohibits the Postal Service from selling any of its consumer information, and it says it won't share any of the data with a third party
For all practical purposes, USPS sells a list of customers who have recently submitted change of address forms.
I moved about a year ago, and didn't submit a change of address. My snailmail box was blissfully junkmail free for 7 months. At that point, I put in a change of address form, and almost immediately I started getting junk sent directly to my new address, most of it targetted to new home owners or people moving into my area.
USPS has a vested interest in junk mail delivery. I truly believe they will use any available method to sleeze around restrictions on providing customer info to advertisers. In this case, the Privacy Act Note says:
Filing this form is voluntary. However, your mail cannot be forwarded without an order. If filed, your new permanent address will be provided to individuals and companies who request it, but this will occur only when the requester is already in possession of your name and old mailing address.
Since junk mailers already have huge address lists, all they need to do is submit their list, and get back a targeted list of "recently moved" consumers.
This sounds a lot like what Irving Langmuir described as "pathological science". It's well worth reading the transcript of his original lecture on the subject:
Langmuir, I (transcribed by Hall, R), Physics Today, October 1989, p36-48.
I'm not aware of an online version of Langmuir's lecture, but Nick Turro has a nice article on the subject here, which has a sidebar listing Langmuir's key points.
As a gadget-loving, Palm-carrying, multiple-calculator-owning science-geek, I astonish myself at my total lack of desire for a fancy graphing calculator. To me it's just not a useful/useable tool.
If I want to graph something, I use a real graphing environment like Origin, Axum or Kaleidagraph. In a pinch I might do a quick plot with the (marginal at best) graphing capability of Excel.
Graphing calculators strike me as cute toys with little real use. The displays are tiny and horrible to look at. The graphing capabilities are primative at best. The keys are awkwardly small for extended data manipulation.
Calculators work great for arithmetic. For simple one-off arithmetic calculations, they're fast, easy to use and infinitely portable. When you bolt on more and more functions, your great focused tool becomes a mediocre toy.
I dread the day when my (programmable-but-who-cares) HP-15C dies. The new models are cluttered with functions I don't need in a hand-held device, and have crappy displays where to get single pixel addressing the engineers gave up contrast and viewing angle.
Buy the simplest HP you can find, spend 10 minutes learning RPN, then run circles around your classmates in doing fast calculations. Get some data plotting software and spend 30 minutes learning it, and run circles around them again when you need graphs.
>I would say 20" is a bit out there, but there >are 15 and 16 inch laptop screens. Larger LCDs >with larger production volumes will mean someone >is gonna test the waters sooner or later. There's nothing that special about making a 20/30/40" LCD - the technology of the display itself really doesn't need to change that much. What's impressive is to be able to be able to get high enough yields to make it economically viable. Area of the display goes up as x^2. If you assume a constant defect rate per unit area, yields go south pretty fast.
Slashdot Mirror
I was in Hawaii a few years back, and noticed spam sushi pre-packaged under shrink wrap in a convenience store. [Shudder] Little slabs of spam held onto a blob of rice with a piece of nori. The salesdroid said it was a popular item with Japanese tourists.
From the Merck Index
The small amount used in the IBM drives will have essentially no effect on availability.
There are plenty of poorly configured servers which either don't add received lines, or which just echo into the received line whatever name was given in the HELO, without recording the actual IP address. Spammer's routinely seek out such servers, to help cover their tracks.
Sure they do. Quoting from the first patent (4,634,845):
17. The device as claimed in claim 16 in which said device is of a size substantially equal to that of a credit card,
You need to be careful in reading patents; they're structured documents and you need to worry about dependencies. If you follow the links, claim 17 is ultimately dependent on claim 1, which does NOT require a size.
Claim 17 was included by their suits in case the examiner didn't allow claim 1. They'd in essence get claim 1, but with an added requirement of small size. Since they did allow claim 1, no size requirement.
I read the second patent similarly. Although claim 11 requires a size, the preceding claims don't. As long as those claims stand, they don't have a specific size requirement.
YMMV, but reading on a PDA fills a certain niche for me. At any given point, I'm plowing through between 2 and 8 various books. There's one by my bed, one in my office, one in the kitchen, one next to the comfy chair...and one on my Palm.
The one on the Palm is for when you're locked in some time-wasting mode; whip out the PDA and fill that time with something better than the dentist's 4 year old People mags (or the CEO's annual state of the company address...) It's portable, and most importantly, always with you, because it's hard to predict when you're really going to need something worthwhile to read.
Added bonus: Andrew Lang's colored fairy books are all in the public domain; several are available in DOC format. If you ever need something to read in the dark to a sick 5 year old at 3 AM, a backlit PDA is a blessing. Pretty good stories for adults too, if you're into that sort of thing. They're the originals, before DisneyCo got their saccharin mouseclaws into them.
There is a standardized way to represent Chinese phonemes in roman characters ("Pinyin"); it uses up to 4 of our letters to represent a single Chinese vowel.
One word: Avantgo
I browse selected web content on a 1 bit deep Palm Pilot display. I appreciate high contrast sites.
This turns out not to be the case.
Aldrich prices:
Diamond, synthetic, monocrystalline powder, ca. 50 micron, 99.9% $23.10/g
Carbon nanotubes, single-walled, CarboLex SE grade, 12-15 angstrom diameter $3248/g
$178/g crude grade, $3248/g purified.
Aldrich Chemical
product numbers 519308 and 519316.
ISS is NOT in geostationary orbit. There's a very good reason for that. The #*$&% shuttle is incapable of reaching geostationary orbit.
Our wonderful space shuttle fleet will take you anywhere you want to go, as long as where you want to go is low Earth orbit. *sigh*
ZOW!
crystalize most metals (remember Arnold and Hasta La Vista Baby?
It is generally accepted that glitzy summer SFX movies are not the best sources of scientific insight. Metals which are room temperture solids are not going to suddenly change their microstructure upon further chilling. Exploding robots notwithstanding, I have plunged steel, glass, ceramics, aluminum and many other materials into liquid nitrogen many times without mishap. Last time I checked, rockets using cryogenic fuels weren't crystallizing and shattering either.
To free somthing to >-200F takes LOT of energy. How do you get the energy? You burn fuel.
While it is true that it takes energy to make LN2, this is true of any stored energy.
It is a Good Thing(tm) when using dirty energy sources like coal & oil to do so in large optimized fixed sites, where you don't have to drag your pollution remediation equipment along with you.
(To make steel, you need O2. LOTS of O2. You get pure O2 by liquifying air, then fractionally distilling it to get the various pure gases. You use the O2 to make steel, sell off some of the exotics, sell as much N2 as you can, and let the rest evaporate.)
Thus while it does cost energy to make LN2, we're probably going to spend that energy whether we use the LN2 or not. (At least until you have a LOT of cars working this way.)
Just so you know... The first movie was RELEASED as "Star Wars". It was renamed SW:ANH upon re-release.
I don't accept that argument.
I don't want or expect them to give my new address to anyone. I want the USPS to forward mail sent to my old address to the new one for a limited period of time, which they do in fact do. Based on the forwarded mailstream, I can personally inform selected senders who I want to have the new address.
It's the added "service" of selling a "recently moved" mailing list I object to. Based on my direct experience, I was getting mail not from long-lost corporate friends, but instead targeted junk mailings based on the (incorrect) assumption that I had recently moved.
I have thought about it. My head is intact, as is my opinion of the sleaziness of this practice.
As for privacy, the USPS is really good at keeping information safe.
(from the MSNBC article):
Federal law prohibits the Postal Service from selling any of its consumer information, and it says it won't share any of the data with a third party
For all practical purposes, USPS sells a list of customers who have recently submitted change of address forms.
I moved about a year ago, and didn't submit a change of address. My snailmail box was blissfully junkmail free for 7 months. At that point, I put in a change of address form, and almost immediately I started getting junk sent directly to my new address, most of it targetted to new home owners or people moving into my area.
USPS has a vested interest in junk mail delivery. I truly believe they will use any available method to sleeze around restrictions on providing customer info to advertisers. In this case, the Privacy Act Note says:
Since junk mailers already have huge address lists, all they need to do is submit their list, and get back a targeted list of "recently moved" consumers.
Hmm. Not sure I'd like that. I normally supress referrers on privacy grounds.
Require a referrer, and unless your content/products are pretty compelling and unique, you lose my business.
Hey, if the NSA comes knocking at your door, I'm sure they'd listen to Reason.
This sounds a lot like what Irving Langmuir described as "pathological science". It's well worth reading the transcript of his original lecture on the subject:
Langmuir, I (transcribed by Hall, R), Physics Today, October 1989, p36-48.
I'm not aware of an online version of Langmuir's lecture, but Nick Turro has a nice article on the subject here, which has a sidebar listing Langmuir's key points.
If I want to graph something, I use a real graphing environment like Origin, Axum or Kaleidagraph. In a pinch I might do a quick plot with the (marginal at best) graphing capability of Excel.
Graphing calculators strike me as cute toys with little real use. The displays are tiny and horrible to look at. The graphing capabilities are primative at best. The keys are awkwardly small for extended data manipulation.
Calculators work great for arithmetic. For simple one-off arithmetic calculations, they're fast, easy to use and infinitely portable. When you bolt on more and more functions, your great focused tool becomes a mediocre toy.
I dread the day when my (programmable-but-who-cares) HP-15C dies. The new models are cluttered with functions I don't need in a hand-held device, and have crappy displays where to get single pixel addressing the engineers gave up contrast and viewing angle.
Buy the simplest HP you can find, spend 10 minutes learning RPN, then run circles around your classmates in doing fast calculations. Get some data plotting software and spend 30 minutes learning it, and run circles around them again when you need graphs.
Or get a TI graphing toy and fiddle around.
>I would say 20" is a bit out there, but there >are 15 and 16 inch laptop screens. Larger LCDs >with larger production volumes will mean someone >is gonna test the waters sooner or later. There's nothing that special about making a 20/30/40" LCD - the technology of the display itself really doesn't need to change that much. What's impressive is to be able to be able to get high enough yields to make it economically viable. Area of the display goes up as x^2. If you assume a constant defect rate per unit area, yields go south pretty fast.