If there is a lot of personal information about you, and if that information is true (it appears to be - otherwise easy enough to say "that's not me, that's another person called AC"), the person writing that must know you quite well. Otherwise they don't have this information, nor will they go to such great lengths defaming you.
Technically, yes, assuming the drone is big enough to carry the weight. However Sea Shepherd may be pretty aggressive, they will always try to prevent loss of life. That includes lives of whales, but also of people (their own, and the Japanese whalers).
According to the article linked in the summary, last year the Japanese fleet managed to kill less than 200 whales out of a quota of over 1,000. So their mission was pretty successful, and apparently this year they try to do even better.
On a personal note: I don't agree with whaling (it's not a much wanted food source, in contrast to other species of fish), but also don't agree with their often quite aggressive tactics. Yet they do get the headlines, and that may spark more people to think about conservation of our marine life, and with that a major food source.
And now you're mixing up regular "invention-type" patents and design patents as well.
Admittedly I haven't read the design patent, but one thing for sure: they haven't patented "rounded corners". They have patented a complete look, and with that prevent other manufacturers to make one that looks exactly or almost exactly like theirs. They sued Samsung because the Samsung devices look very much like Apple's devices, and Apple thinks it's too close alike.
Apple will not get far suing just anyone using fuel cells. They're surely not stupid enough to even think about that. They can only sue people that use their exact implementation of the fuel cell, and trust me the fuel cell in that taxi will not scale down to anything near laptop size, let alone laptop battery size.
Just like you can not compare the technology of a car battery (lead-acid) with that of a phone battery (Li-ion or NiMH - which are two different types in itself again). Now if you would be able to scale down a lead acid battery and make it suitable for say laptop power supply, now that may very well be patentable (oh and I'm not saying that it is necessarily useful or practical, just patentable).
Sorry to say it a bit bluntly, but you like so many others have obviously not a single clue about what a patent is, and what it is for.
A patent is for very specific inventions. Now of course the idea of "putting a fuel cell in a laptop" is of course not patentable, and that's not what Apple patents. From the first glance that I have the core of the patent revolves around the fuel cell itself, they did something innovative to it to make it suitable for these very small scale applications as for example in laptops. It being Apple, laptops of course are the first application they think of. But the same tech might be used to power your phone, or when scaled the other direction to power your car, who knows. But afaict it's the fuel cell where the invention is in.
There is no way Apple or any other company will be able to patent "fuel cell powered laptop". They can only patent a very specific way of doing this, or a very specific fuel cell implementation, so specific that if a patent is written incorrectly changing the voltage of your implementation may already circumvent it.
That only covers mistakes like typos. The bugs independent systems do not cover are logical and conceptual errors.
I don't agree with that fully: only the parts given by the plane maker who orders the design of the systems is not covered. Logic such as spike detection and input signal validation can be covered this way. In the accident in question apparently all redundant systems used the same algorithm with the same parameters to detect spikes, that imho is an oversight by the designers, possibly too stringent specifications on how a signal should be processed leaving no room for different implementations.
Systems and sensors will fail. No matter how many or how well designed. If two out of three air speed sensors fail for example, then there will be big problems. The point being that there is no 100% safety.
Of course they will fail now and then, that's part of life. It' s not just because there are three sensors, not one. The trick is to detect failure, which in some cases surely can be very difficult.
The way to prevent typos (and with that, bugs) being copied to other systems is to make sure your systems are designed by independent companies. The chance of having the exact same bugs in two independently developed systems is really small. Make that three different systems, and set up a majority vote system to be pretty sure you've got the correct value.
Aircraft are very complex systems indeed. Yet the results of failure are generally pretty bad, and it's hard to make an aircraft fail safe - so everything must be done to have it not fail to begin with.
So not only did they not take the possibility of a second data spike into account (that I'd call an oversight of the engineers that built and designed each individual system), all three systems also used the same memorisation period for spike detection (and that I would call a specification design oversight). Either would have prevented this. I hope it's set up better now.
For starters: what is one's current altitude? What is your reference point? The ground level at that point? Changes quickly when passing over mountainous terrain. Or the height compared to sea level? Which is also tricky, as the earth's gravitational field is not uniform and sea level is far from a perfect flattened sphere around the Earth's centre.
And how about GPS based altitude measurements? That's easily accurate to within a few meters, less than the size of the aircraft itself. Should be good enough.
Though such an airliner will have more than one air speed sensor, no? Relying for such a vital piece of information on just one sensor would be crazy. And that makes it to me even more surprising that a single air speed sensor to malfunction causes such a disaster. But then it's the same kind of issue that's been blamed on an Air France jet crashing into the ocean - malfunctioning sensors, in that case ice buildup or so iirc, and as all sensors were of the same design this caused all of them to fail.
Another thing: I remember that when Airbus introduced their fly-by-wire aircraft, they stressed that one of the safety features to prevent problems caused by computer software/hardware bugs, was to have five different flight computer systems built and designed independently by five different companies, using different hardware. So that if one computer has an issue causing it to malfunction, the other four computers would be able to override this. And a majority of those computers should agree with one another before an airplane control action would be undertaken.
I don't recall having received a PGP signed mail where the signature actually checked out. Evolution would always show "invalid signature" on those mails. Whether that is due to reformatting of the message by a mailer en route (in case of maillists) or other reasons such as not having someone's public key I don't know. It just never checks out. And honestly I have never been bothered with it, really.
PGP is just not feasible for the general public. A major issue is key exchange of course: I don't think this can be automated due to security issues, so must be manually. And you will have to manually verify every single key to make sure that key is really from who you think it is - either by having it handed to you in person on say a USB stick, or by calling them up and asking for their key fingerprint.
There are, what is it, about five versions of the iPhone around, and two versions of the iPad. That's it. A very limited number of devices, so it's cheap for a developer to have them all around and run a test version of their app on each model to see whether it works well within the limitations put up by screen size and processing power. If there is an issue it's quick to find and probably quite easy to correct (one could reasonably write a few device-specific lines if really necessary).
On the other hand the Android market has a tad more different devices. There probably a few dozen manufacturers putting out Android based phones and tablets, for a total of easily hundreds of different devices. It is really hard to test on all of them to make sure your app runs smoothly, and whether you don't have any strange artifacts due to screen resolution/ratio/size.
The Yahoo case you mention I don't know about, that sounds quite extreme to me. Using a web site instead of a native app. The thing is of course both iOS and Android have to be developed separately - a lot of the artwork and the layout design can be copied of course, but everything else has to be implemented independently.
The few times I'm watching TV - usually the evening news, the "mute" button is used a lot. When the commercials come, I will mute the noise (by the way this extra loudness is not just in the US, it's a worldwide issue), and usually do something else now and then looking at the screen to see how it is. And unmute when the news is on again. It's irritating, but without muting it's just too noisy to sit through.
Sometimes while watching TV with friends (over a decade ago by now) I would totally surprise them by saying "and now time for commercials", about one second BEFORE the commercials actually started. They would think I'm psychic or so, that I can predict it so exactly.
The trick: I was paying attention to the station logo, which would always fade out a few seconds before the commercials start. Just when you see it fade out, you say "it's time now for commercials", and another second later indeed they switch to the commercials.
As a child my parents would take me to church often. Part of the mass was always the braking and sharing of bread and wine. That's alcoholic of course. And when there was some meeting in the evening it would also be quite common to have wine and beer around. Oh well, different church, different culture as well probably.
I hate flash photography. Not as much for the blinding flash, but it flattens an image. The people nearby are brightly lit (sometimes too bright), the background is black or near so. The whole atmosphere is gone. Most parties (as on the videos shown in TFA) use coloured lights and so: that is all gone as soon as you flash. Photos taken without flash (albeit much harder to do without having them blurred) usually look so much better.
That said: I'd love to see actual real-life results of this beer cooler in action. Not the shots from the videos (which are part of advertising so likely exaggerate), but just some snapshots that are affected by this cooler. I'm interested to see how well it works (or not).
On a more serious note: no. After a flash or two the capacitors are empty and need to recharge from the batteries, which takes a while (seconds at least - more than enough to break the cycle). A flash can't fire often in quick succession.
Secondary flashes (or however they're called properly) are used for a very long time: usually in photo shoots where the camera of the photographer shoots a flash aimed at the ceiling, triggering the real flash (or multiple flashlights) that are positioned around the model to provide even lighting. This is the exact same principle, just with the secondary flash aimed at the camera instead.
You should be able to easily build this into your car if you would want to. Put the flash detector in an appropriate spot, set up the flash light, and you're done. But whether it's legal or a good idea - I don't think so.
You don't have to be an idiot for a picture to be a problem. After all, there was the somewhat recent case (even featured here on Slashdot, sorry I'm too lazy to dig up links) of the kindergarten teacher that was fired over a photo of her at a party, drinking from a cup that allegedly contained alcohol (gasp). She was of course legal, and was doing nothing unusual, merely smiling and drinking, but it was deemed "inappropriate" for her position, whatever the fuck that means.
Sounds more like an employer finding an excuse to get rid of a person they considered either not good at her job, or with whom they simply could not get along personally.
I was talking about his Facebook identity. Which seems useless to me - as it's not him, why would real-life friends want to keep in touch with that Facebook identity? And extending that a little: why would he maintain such a Facebook account to begin with? To me the only reason to use Facebook is because it's an extension of real-life relations - a way to keep in touch with people. But that's the actual ME keeping in touch, not an alter-ego that's just posting "lies and fabrications" and "is NOT ME".
What kheldan posts on his Facebook account are "lies and fabrications", and that it "is NOT ME". Sounds to me like he makes a great, useful and trustworthy friend.
Makes me wonder what that brings to you... if it's not the real you... just an actor... then those friends are not your real friends... sounds like a total and utter waste of time. I use Facebook to connect with actual friends, to discuss actual life events, and to arrange for having fun together in real life and so.
Slashdot Mirror
If there is a lot of personal information about you, and if that information is true (it appears to be - otherwise easy enough to say "that's not me, that's another person called AC"), the person writing that must know you quite well. Otherwise they don't have this information, nor will they go to such great lengths defaming you.
Everything is copyrighted. Including your comment, and this comment.
Technically, yes, assuming the drone is big enough to carry the weight. However Sea Shepherd may be pretty aggressive, they will always try to prevent loss of life. That includes lives of whales, but also of people (their own, and the Japanese whalers).
According to the article linked in the summary, last year the Japanese fleet managed to kill less than 200 whales out of a quota of over 1,000. So their mission was pretty successful, and apparently this year they try to do even better.
On a personal note: I don't agree with whaling (it's not a much wanted food source, in contrast to other species of fish), but also don't agree with their often quite aggressive tactics. Yet they do get the headlines, and that may spark more people to think about conservation of our marine life, and with that a major food source.
And now you're mixing up regular "invention-type" patents and design patents as well.
Admittedly I haven't read the design patent, but one thing for sure: they haven't patented "rounded corners". They have patented a complete look, and with that prevent other manufacturers to make one that looks exactly or almost exactly like theirs. They sued Samsung because the Samsung devices look very much like Apple's devices, and Apple thinks it's too close alike.
Apple will not get far suing just anyone using fuel cells. They're surely not stupid enough to even think about that. They can only sue people that use their exact implementation of the fuel cell, and trust me the fuel cell in that taxi will not scale down to anything near laptop size, let alone laptop battery size.
Just like you can not compare the technology of a car battery (lead-acid) with that of a phone battery (Li-ion or NiMH - which are two different types in itself again). Now if you would be able to scale down a lead acid battery and make it suitable for say laptop power supply, now that may very well be patentable (oh and I'm not saying that it is necessarily useful or practical, just patentable).
Sorry to say it a bit bluntly, but you like so many others have obviously not a single clue about what a patent is, and what it is for.
A patent is for very specific inventions. Now of course the idea of "putting a fuel cell in a laptop" is of course not patentable, and that's not what Apple patents. From the first glance that I have the core of the patent revolves around the fuel cell itself, they did something innovative to it to make it suitable for these very small scale applications as for example in laptops. It being Apple, laptops of course are the first application they think of. But the same tech might be used to power your phone, or when scaled the other direction to power your car, who knows. But afaict it's the fuel cell where the invention is in.
There is no way Apple or any other company will be able to patent "fuel cell powered laptop". They can only patent a very specific way of doing this, or a very specific fuel cell implementation, so specific that if a patent is written incorrectly changing the voltage of your implementation may already circumvent it.
That only covers mistakes like typos. The bugs independent systems do not cover are logical and conceptual errors.
I don't agree with that fully: only the parts given by the plane maker who orders the design of the systems is not covered. Logic such as spike detection and input signal validation can be covered this way. In the accident in question apparently all redundant systems used the same algorithm with the same parameters to detect spikes, that imho is an oversight by the designers, possibly too stringent specifications on how a signal should be processed leaving no room for different implementations.
Systems and sensors will fail. No matter how many or how well designed. If two out of three air speed sensors fail for example, then there will be big problems. The point being that there is no 100% safety.
Of course they will fail now and then, that's part of life. It' s not just because there are three sensors, not one. The trick is to detect failure, which in some cases surely can be very difficult.
The way to prevent typos (and with that, bugs) being copied to other systems is to make sure your systems are designed by independent companies. The chance of having the exact same bugs in two independently developed systems is really small. Make that three different systems, and set up a majority vote system to be pretty sure you've got the correct value.
Aircraft are very complex systems indeed. Yet the results of failure are generally pretty bad, and it's hard to make an aircraft fail safe - so everything must be done to have it not fail to begin with.
So if you need to fly, how do you get to the airport? In one of those safe, human-operated cars?
Rest assured that your ride to the airport is far more risky than the time you spend in the aircraft.
Interesting.
So not only did they not take the possibility of a second data spike into account (that I'd call an oversight of the engineers that built and designed each individual system), all three systems also used the same memorisation period for spike detection (and that I would call a specification design oversight). Either would have prevented this. I hope it's set up better now.
Interesting one indeed. Could be a tough measure.
For starters: what is one's current altitude? What is your reference point? The ground level at that point? Changes quickly when passing over mountainous terrain. Or the height compared to sea level? Which is also tricky, as the earth's gravitational field is not uniform and sea level is far from a perfect flattened sphere around the Earth's centre.
And how about GPS based altitude measurements? That's easily accurate to within a few meters, less than the size of the aircraft itself. Should be good enough.
Agreed, valid but inaccurate.
Though such an airliner will have more than one air speed sensor, no? Relying for such a vital piece of information on just one sensor would be crazy. And that makes it to me even more surprising that a single air speed sensor to malfunction causes such a disaster. But then it's the same kind of issue that's been blamed on an Air France jet crashing into the ocean - malfunctioning sensors, in that case ice buildup or so iirc, and as all sensors were of the same design this caused all of them to fail.
Another thing: I remember that when Airbus introduced their fly-by-wire aircraft, they stressed that one of the safety features to prevent problems caused by computer software/hardware bugs, was to have five different flight computer systems built and designed independently by five different companies, using different hardware. So that if one computer has an issue causing it to malfunction, the other four computers would be able to override this. And a majority of those computers should agree with one another before an airplane control action would be undertaken.
I now and then received PGP signed mails.
I don't recall having received a PGP signed mail where the signature actually checked out. Evolution would always show "invalid signature" on those mails. Whether that is due to reformatting of the message by a mailer en route (in case of maillists) or other reasons such as not having someone's public key I don't know. It just never checks out. And honestly I have never been bothered with it, really.
PGP is just not feasible for the general public. A major issue is key exchange of course: I don't think this can be automated due to security issues, so must be manually. And you will have to manually verify every single key to make sure that key is really from who you think it is - either by having it handed to you in person on say a USB stick, or by calling them up and asking for their key fingerprint.
There are, what is it, about five versions of the iPhone around, and two versions of the iPad. That's it. A very limited number of devices, so it's cheap for a developer to have them all around and run a test version of their app on each model to see whether it works well within the limitations put up by screen size and processing power. If there is an issue it's quick to find and probably quite easy to correct (one could reasonably write a few device-specific lines if really necessary).
On the other hand the Android market has a tad more different devices. There probably a few dozen manufacturers putting out Android based phones and tablets, for a total of easily hundreds of different devices. It is really hard to test on all of them to make sure your app runs smoothly, and whether you don't have any strange artifacts due to screen resolution/ratio/size.
The Yahoo case you mention I don't know about, that sounds quite extreme to me. Using a web site instead of a native app. The thing is of course both iOS and Android have to be developed separately - a lot of the artwork and the layout design can be copied of course, but everything else has to be implemented independently.
The few times I'm watching TV - usually the evening news, the "mute" button is used a lot. When the commercials come, I will mute the noise (by the way this extra loudness is not just in the US, it's a worldwide issue), and usually do something else now and then looking at the screen to see how it is. And unmute when the news is on again. It's irritating, but without muting it's just too noisy to sit through.
Sometimes while watching TV with friends (over a decade ago by now) I would totally surprise them by saying "and now time for commercials", about one second BEFORE the commercials actually started. They would think I'm psychic or so, that I can predict it so exactly.
The trick: I was paying attention to the station logo, which would always fade out a few seconds before the commercials start. Just when you see it fade out, you say "it's time now for commercials", and another second later indeed they switch to the commercials.
As a child my parents would take me to church often. Part of the mass was always the braking and sharing of bread and wine. That's alcoholic of course. And when there was some meeting in the evening it would also be quite common to have wine and beer around. Oh well, different church, different culture as well probably.
I hate flash photography. Not as much for the blinding flash, but it flattens an image. The people nearby are brightly lit (sometimes too bright), the background is black or near so. The whole atmosphere is gone. Most parties (as on the videos shown in TFA) use coloured lights and so: that is all gone as soon as you flash. Photos taken without flash (albeit much harder to do without having them blurred) usually look so much better.
That said: I'd love to see actual real-life results of this beer cooler in action. Not the shots from the videos (which are part of advertising so likely exaggerate), but just some snapshots that are affected by this cooler. I'm interested to see how well it works (or not).
LOL
On a more serious note: no. After a flash or two the capacitors are empty and need to recharge from the batteries, which takes a while (seconds at least - more than enough to break the cycle). A flash can't fire often in quick succession.
This is old technology in a new packing.
Secondary flashes (or however they're called properly) are used for a very long time: usually in photo shoots where the camera of the photographer shoots a flash aimed at the ceiling, triggering the real flash (or multiple flashlights) that are positioned around the model to provide even lighting. This is the exact same principle, just with the secondary flash aimed at the camera instead.
You should be able to easily build this into your car if you would want to. Put the flash detector in an appropriate spot, set up the flash light, and you're done. But whether it's legal or a good idea - I don't think so.
You don't have to be an idiot for a picture to be a problem. After all, there was the somewhat recent case (even featured here on Slashdot, sorry I'm too lazy to dig up links) of the kindergarten teacher that was fired over a photo of her at a party, drinking from a cup that allegedly contained alcohol (gasp). She was of course legal, and was doing nothing unusual, merely smiling and drinking, but it was deemed "inappropriate" for her position, whatever the fuck that means.
Sounds more like an employer finding an excuse to get rid of a person they considered either not good at her job, or with whom they simply could not get along personally.
According to TFS, he was sending links to posts on the blog to her family, friends, and co-workers.
I was talking about his Facebook identity. Which seems useless to me - as it's not him, why would real-life friends want to keep in touch with that Facebook identity? And extending that a little: why would he maintain such a Facebook account to begin with? To me the only reason to use Facebook is because it's an extension of real-life relations - a way to keep in touch with people. But that's the actual ME keeping in touch, not an alter-ego that's just posting "lies and fabrications" and "is NOT ME".
What kheldan posts on his Facebook account are "lies and fabrications", and that it "is NOT ME". Sounds to me like he makes a great, useful and trustworthy friend.
Makes me wonder what that brings to you... if it's not the real you... just an actor... then those friends are not your real friends... sounds like a total and utter waste of time. I use Facebook to connect with actual friends, to discuss actual life events, and to arrange for having fun together in real life and so.