I'm getting tired of all of these posts from people who can't apply simple logic. It's obvious that the only thing that "dropped by 3X" could mean is "dropped by a factor of three," which also means "dropped to a third of its prior value."
If you come across one of these that is truly ambiguous, fine. Complain. The rest of the time, you're just being an annoying, pedantic dipwad.
P.S. I used to be this annoying. I learned the hard way that this kind of behavior just gets on people's nerves. The fact is, human language is inherently ambiguous, which is why legal documents are often so impenetrable, to compensate for that. Listen to what people mean, not what they say. Because even when you don't realize you're doing that, you STILL are.
There is a huge contingent of medical practitioners, particularly nutritionists, who believe that ASD symptoms are the result of the liver being inadequate to filter toxins from the blood. Diet modifications have been documented to alleviate many ASD symptoms.
Try actually involving people who know something about user interface design, usability, etc. Not a bunch of hackers who like to make pretty displays. Develop common and stable APIs, a common UI toolkit, and common IPC protocols. Strive towards uniformity in user interface appearance. Stop "skinning" and develop a standard UI appearance based on actual research.
There is many decades of HCI research that applies to this. You could spend ages leafing through journal and conference proceedings on this stuff. Much of what applies to fixing the Linux desktop was solved long ago. People just need to implement it, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel or assuming that the academics are idiots. Be willing to implement something you disagree with because you MIGHT BE WRONG, or (more likely) what works for you may not work for more typical users or novices or even power users.
Get rid of X11 and switch to Wayland. Yeah, I know. Everyone will cry about the loss of network transparency. You know what? Windows and MacOS do not have network transparency. They use other solutions like VNC. And those other operating systems are successful on the desktop, while Linux is not.
Linux on the desktop is a failure for several reasons. They include: - Unstable APIs and driver ABIs - Too many choices about UI toolkits - Too many inconsistencies between applications, even those part of the same "desktop environment" - Lack of educated and informed leadership - Unwillingness to work on the "boring parts" of software development - Too much infighting among contributors - Etc. etc.
Another thing we need is more open source graphics drivers. The Open Graphics Project started working on solving that problem once and for all, but it didn't get enough financial support. The OGP started before Kickstarter, so perhaps that would have helped. In any case, the graphics card and driver problem needs to be FIXED.
There have been cases of twins who have quite different health problems despite having (nominally) indentical DNA, same home environment, etc., except that one had antibiotics and the other didn't. The role of intestinal flora is still being studied, but the importance is clear. We rely heavily on symbiotic organisms. Taking probiotics helps, but those won't contain all the organisms you need, so doctors occasionally have done a "fecal transplant", moving some feces from a healthy family member to an unhealthy one in order to reintroduce beneficial flora, with significant health benefits.
So, yes, it's entirely plausible that antibiotics can contribute to obesity, because by taking them, you kill off important intestinal organisms.
On the other hand, I wouldn't recommend not taking antibiotics when there's a serious bacterial infection. My daughter would likely have died without them. Just don't take them indiscriminately.
Even if there were some truth to intelligent design, this doesn't obviate the need for a purely naturalistic explanation of evolution. Evolutionary theory, like many scientific theories, is important for actual practical engineering, like bioinformatics and developing new medicines. The main problem with a theory of intelligent design, besides the fact that it's untestable, is that engineers are unable to perform magic of miracles. (Montgomery Scott not withstanding.) For a scientific theory to be potentially useful, it is necessary for a human to potentially be able to reproduce effects. Otherwise you end up with an explanation for a natural phenomenon that is useless because you cannot achieve the effect. (I'm talking about totally impossible, rather than just prohibitively expensive like the LHC. The Higgs Boson is testable.)
Yes, I realize these people are talking about "creationism", not "intelligent design", but they're synonyms, and the creationists all eventually move over to the ID side when backed into the "can't talk about religion" corner. And this is funny, because since they really don't understand any of this stuff, by accepting ID, they admit the fact of evolution. But they accept it because their religious leaders say it's okay because there's God in there somewhere.
Next, I'd like to find intelligent design theories of physics and chemistry. That aught to be a hoot.
I saw this slashdot post really late, so I'm concerned you won't see it. But anyhow, I did precisely what you are looking to do. I worked for 9 years then got a PhD and now have a job at Binghamton University doing research in computer architecture. I'm finally getting to do for my day job what I had been doing as a hobby. Below is my not-quite-finished faculty page. Contact me if you want to discuss this further.
Absolutely. If you're a crook, then you'll take the money and run. From the sociopath's perspective, there's little or nothing to be gained by doing the actual work. Oracle, like any other big company, is sociopathic.
People go on and on about how sex determination, with respect to competition, is a complex issue because sex is not well-defined. (Nor are gender identity or sexual orientation for that matter, but that's not important here.) I can think of a few ways to deal with this.
If we insist on sex being a category, then create a third catetory for those people who are ambiguous. That may not be very interesting, however, because of the relative rarity of intersex conditions. "And now we move on to the intersex event, with competitors from three countries"
An alternative is to not use sex but rather other physical characteristics, like weight categories in martial arts. Men vs. women in tai quon do would be just fine becuase it's not just brute strength but speed, agility, mental quickness, etc.
Not to say that Oracle database doesn't already suck, but now Oracle is being forced to maintain their database for a platform they see as unprofitable. Oracle cares only about profit, remember, and Itanium is, objectively, not a profitable platform. And not to say that they already have much incentive to do a good job, but now for Itanium, they have even LESS incentive to do a good job. So if you thought Oracle was a nightmare already, just wait until you see what a horror show it'll evolve into over the next few years on Itanium. Oracle for Itanium will consistently lag behind on security patches and new features. Even old features will mysteriously exhibit buggy behavior that never existed on other platforms. Oracle will be able to weasel out of any definitive claim that they're doing a bad job, and they won't care about what it does to their reputation because few customers buy Oracle for Itanium in the first place. Dollars to donuts, Oracle is going to act like a passive-aggresive three-year-old.
But I really don't blame them. By court order, they're being forced to invest in development that will cost more than it earns. So they're going to cut corners as much as possible, within the letter of the law. I don't like to waste my time, despite the fact that I have some altruism, and Oracle, being a psychopathic corporation, REALLY doesn't want to waste its time. I have complaints about Oracle's handling of Sun's assets like SPARC, Solaris, Java, and OpenOffice. In many ways, these are mind-share assets that can make people have positive feelings about a corporation that ultimately lead to more profit, because people are more likely to buy your profitable products. Oracle has squandered this opportunity. But in the case of Itanium, the whole thing is a completely pointless exercise. There is nothing to be gained by supporting it.
I find most rock and pop to be repetition and boring, but out of every decade is a few really excellent, timeless songs. I like them because (I think) they are different, innovative, and stand out. Did this study examine this 1% of songs for comparison or just mash all of pop and rock together so that the good ones are drowned out by the junk?
I don't want to pick on this too much. There are plenty of cool things that this developer did that are intesting in their own right. For instance, the image processing. But it looks like this machine is mostly manual. Doesn't it seem obvious to make it crank out the cards automatically? And couldn't the pictures be taken more quickly? And aren't there more efficient ways of detecting the holes in the cards? It's an interesting machine, but it's definitely not an efficient solution for this specific problem.
Yeah. Let's take some asshole hacker who obviously lacks any basic ethical grounding and reward him by duping some unsuspecting young lady into having sex with him. Sure. Meanwhile, let's also overlook those geeky guys who haven't committed any crimes, because, what they don't need girlfriends?
As one other commenter said, this is retarded. And for lots of reasons. We don't reward stupidity, they should be in jail, and if they're amoral enough to spend so much time hacking, they're likely to not treat their girlfriends well.
But then I categorize as 'geek' anyone with sufficiently deep and detailed knowledge of a subject that they can write intelligently on a topic. That includes charismatic lawyers.
First of all, what was found is a particle with the same MASS as that predicted by the standard model. They haven't yet confirmed spin or other properties. But what this amounts to is confirmation of what was already suspected. Unfortunately, this isn't all that helpful, because we already know that the standard model doesn't predict everything correctly. If we hadn't found the Higgs Boson, then perhaps it would have helped us to fix the standard model. As it is, this can't help us improve the standard model. In other words, this is great, and it's nice to know that brilliant scientists in the past century were right, but it isn't any kind of revolutionary progress.
Oh, I know. I was just talking about the beliefs they profess. Dianetics and all that. I wonder how many higher-ups actually believe any of it. Are the mostly in it for the money, or do the thing they're doing some good?
I live in Columbus, OH. Absolutely every storm of any significance here, and plenty of seeminly minor ones, results in a power outage.
It seems evident to me that AEP does not invest in preventative maintenance. If they did, there would still be outages in major storms, but the effects wouldn't be nearly so wide-spread, and the repair times would be much shorter. The problem is that with an undermaintained infrastructure, minor damages and weaknesses accumulate, leading to more weak links that are more easily damaged in a storm.
So why don't they invest in preventative maintenance? Money. If they did better up-keep it would reduce their profit margin, and as a highly regulated monopoly, they are very constrained on how much they can raise rates for any purpose. So they pinch every penny.
On the other hand, if they wait for catastrophic failure, they can whine to state and federal governments for emergency aid money. Now, they can perform the repairs, but they don't have to pay for it. We do, out of tax money, rather than our electricity bill, so it doesn't affect AEP's bottom line.
To make matters worse, light bulbs don't last more than a week here, due to ubiquitous voltage spikes. We have surge protectors on electronics, but the surge protectors get damaged periodically. We have to mail-order 130V light bulbs just to get a little extra life out of them. (Yes, the CFLs get fried too.) I can't even begin to estimate the real costs of being an AEP customer, but they don't stop at the energy bill.
Well, I'm 38, and one of the things I did, after working in industry for 9 years, was to go back to school and get a PhD. I'll be starting as an assistant prof this autumn. However, YMMV on more education.
The fact is, whenever someone invents something cool, if they don't have some kind of legal protection, then someone else will come along and make a cheap knock-off. See many TiVos around? They spent R&D money developing the DVR market, and then they basically get run out of business because other companies made their cheaper (and generally much crapper) versions. That isn't exactly great encouragement for companies to invest time and money into developing new technologies. And despite what some people seem to want to imply, the FOSS approach doesn't solve every problem, because some kinds of development require specialized expertise, and that can be expensive.
The simple fact is, really good innovation doesn't pop out of a vaccuum. It requires a great deal of expertise, time, and money. For a business or individual to invest those resources, it is of great value for them to have some kind of control over who deploys similar technology. For a time. Also note that many VCs won't even look at your business plan unless they see that it will generate a significant amount of patentable technology. SOMEONE has to pay for this development, and it isn't going to be me or you, because we can't afford it.
We all know that patents, in their original spirit, would be great for innovation. They help encourage inventors to invest significant up-front time, money, and other resources into development, because they know that the legal system provides them an imporant aid to getting a positive return on their investment. And so the fact that some report says that some patents in certain fields have aided innovation is redundant.
The problem that we're all on about is that the patent SYSTEM is rife with ABUSE, because there are flaws in the way patents are acquired and litigated. It is not the general concept of patents that is problematic but the stifling dark side that has arisen in the over-loaded, under-funded USPTO.
Saying that patents need to be abolished because companies abuse the system is analogous to saying that science should be abolished because there are lots of idiots out there calling themselves scientists but falsifying results and/or just doing generally poor excuses for science.
A Turing machine is defined by a tape and a manipulator, and a state machine defining how those tape symbols are manipulated. The former is visible in the video. The latter is not. It appears they're using a mindstorm (itself a microcomputer) to perform the function of the state machine. I think this is cheating.
In fact, the whole state machine part of the Turing machine has always been rather nebulous to me. Yes, I understand the state transitions, but no physical mechanism is described (in CS theory texts) to implement it. The only physical parts of the TM are the tape and manipulator, while the state machine is left as an exercise for the imagination of the reader. In a way, I think that's cheating too.
The only total solution to this is a completely open source GPU. Ah, but the Open Graphics Project tried that and failed! But no. They actually produced and sold real hardware. It just wasn't sustainable, because the FOSS community didn't step up, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. In any case, the OGP isn't dead. They've recently started moving again, this time with much more realistic goals, which is to develop a complete working GPU module that can be licensed. If they make the BEST GPU, then companies will license it. If not, they'll have the best GPU model for academic research into GPUs, which is also, as it turns out, their PRIMARY goal.
Maybe things have changed, but the last time I checked out the Atom floor plan, about half the chip area was cache (which is normal), about a quarter was the actual computation back-end of the CPU, and the remaining quarter was the x86-to-RISC translation front-end. Like all modern x86 processors (as well as PowerPC and probably some other architectures), the CISC instruction set (well, more complex RISC in the case of PPC) is translated dynamically to a simpler RISC-like code that is easier to execute. In a Sandy Bridge, the translator is tiny compared to the rest of the huge 4-issue superscalar massively out-of-order back end. But Atoms are simple 2-issue in-order pipelines, which makes them very small and energy-efficient (albeit a lot slower), but there's not much we can do about that front-end.
Hearing aids are expensive for the same reason that all medical devices are expensive. They are magnets for law suits. To offset the costs of inevitable litigation, medical device makers put more money into product testing (sometimes) and insurance.
This American sue culture applies to airline food too. If a plane crashes, every vendor that put anything into the plane gets sued, including the caterers.
More income for ambulance-chasing lawyers.
Interestingly, in the U.S., if someone is injured by a product, even if it's due to amazing stupidity on the part of the user, in complete violation of a clearly-posted warning, the courts usually find in favor of the consumer. Because the vendor has deeper pockets.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm getting tired of all of these posts from people who can't apply simple logic. It's obvious that the only thing that "dropped by 3X" could mean is "dropped by a factor of three," which also means "dropped to a third of its prior value."
If you come across one of these that is truly ambiguous, fine. Complain. The rest of the time, you're just being an annoying, pedantic dipwad.
P.S. I used to be this annoying. I learned the hard way that this kind of behavior just gets on people's nerves. The fact is, human language is inherently ambiguous, which is why legal documents are often so impenetrable, to compensate for that. Listen to what people mean, not what they say. Because even when you don't realize you're doing that, you STILL are.
There is a huge contingent of medical practitioners, particularly nutritionists, who believe that ASD symptoms are the result of the liver being inadequate to filter toxins from the blood. Diet modifications have been documented to alleviate many ASD symptoms.
Try actually involving people who know something about user interface design, usability, etc. Not a bunch of hackers who like to make pretty displays. Develop common and stable APIs, a common UI toolkit, and common IPC protocols. Strive towards uniformity in user interface appearance. Stop "skinning" and develop a standard UI appearance based on actual research.
There is many decades of HCI research that applies to this. You could spend ages leafing through journal and conference proceedings on this stuff. Much of what applies to fixing the Linux desktop was solved long ago. People just need to implement it, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel or assuming that the academics are idiots. Be willing to implement something you disagree with because you MIGHT BE WRONG, or (more likely) what works for you may not work for more typical users or novices or even power users.
Get rid of X11 and switch to Wayland. Yeah, I know. Everyone will cry about the loss of network transparency. You know what? Windows and MacOS do not have network transparency. They use other solutions like VNC. And those other operating systems are successful on the desktop, while Linux is not.
Linux on the desktop is a failure for several reasons. They include:
- Unstable APIs and driver ABIs
- Too many choices about UI toolkits
- Too many inconsistencies between applications, even those part of the same "desktop environment"
- Lack of educated and informed leadership
- Unwillingness to work on the "boring parts" of software development
- Too much infighting among contributors
- Etc. etc.
Another thing we need is more open source graphics drivers. The Open Graphics Project started working on solving that problem once and for all, but it didn't get enough financial support. The OGP started before Kickstarter, so perhaps that would have helped. In any case, the graphics card and driver problem needs to be FIXED.
I kept seeing my logs grow due to attempts on my port 22. So I just picked a nonstandard port, and voila, no more attacks.
There have been cases of twins who have quite different health problems despite having (nominally) indentical DNA, same home environment, etc., except that one had antibiotics and the other didn't. The role of intestinal flora is still being studied, but the importance is clear. We rely heavily on symbiotic organisms. Taking probiotics helps, but those won't contain all the organisms you need, so doctors occasionally have done a "fecal transplant", moving some feces from a healthy family member to an unhealthy one in order to reintroduce beneficial flora, with significant health benefits.
So, yes, it's entirely plausible that antibiotics can contribute to obesity, because by taking them, you kill off important intestinal organisms.
On the other hand, I wouldn't recommend not taking antibiotics when there's a serious bacterial infection. My daughter would likely have died without them. Just don't take them indiscriminately.
Even if there were some truth to intelligent design, this doesn't obviate the need for a purely naturalistic explanation of evolution. Evolutionary theory, like many scientific theories, is important for actual practical engineering, like bioinformatics and developing new medicines. The main problem with a theory of intelligent design, besides the fact that it's untestable, is that engineers are unable to perform magic of miracles. (Montgomery Scott not withstanding.) For a scientific theory to be potentially useful, it is necessary for a human to potentially be able to reproduce effects. Otherwise you end up with an explanation for a natural phenomenon that is useless because you cannot achieve the effect. (I'm talking about totally impossible, rather than just prohibitively expensive like the LHC. The Higgs Boson is testable.)
Yes, I realize these people are talking about "creationism", not "intelligent design", but they're synonyms, and the creationists all eventually move over to the ID side when backed into the "can't talk about religion" corner. And this is funny, because since they really don't understand any of this stuff, by accepting ID, they admit the fact of evolution. But they accept it because their religious leaders say it's okay because there's God in there somewhere.
Next, I'd like to find intelligent design theories of physics and chemistry. That aught to be a hoot.
I saw this slashdot post really late, so I'm concerned you won't see it. But anyhow, I did precisely what you are looking to do. I worked for 9 years then got a PhD and now have a job at Binghamton University doing research in computer architecture. I'm finally getting to do for my day job what I had been doing as a hobby. Below is my not-quite-finished faculty page. Contact me if you want to discuss this further.
http://www2.binghamton.edu/watson/programs/academic-departments/computer-science/people/tmiller.html
Absolutely. If you're a crook, then you'll take the money and run. From the sociopath's perspective, there's little or nothing to be gained by doing the actual work. Oracle, like any other big company, is sociopathic.
People go on and on about how sex determination, with respect to competition, is a complex issue because sex is not well-defined. (Nor are gender identity or sexual orientation for that matter, but that's not important here.) I can think of a few ways to deal with this.
If we insist on sex being a category, then create a third catetory for those people who are ambiguous. That may not be very interesting, however, because of the relative rarity of intersex conditions. "And now we move on to the intersex event, with competitors from three countries"
An alternative is to not use sex but rather other physical characteristics, like weight categories in martial arts. Men vs. women in tai quon do would be just fine becuase it's not just brute strength but speed, agility, mental quickness, etc.
Not to say that Oracle database doesn't already suck, but now Oracle is being forced to maintain their database for a platform they see as unprofitable. Oracle cares only about profit, remember, and Itanium is, objectively, not a profitable platform. And not to say that they already have much incentive to do a good job, but now for Itanium, they have even LESS incentive to do a good job. So if you thought Oracle was a nightmare already, just wait until you see what a horror show it'll evolve into over the next few years on Itanium. Oracle for Itanium will consistently lag behind on security patches and new features. Even old features will mysteriously exhibit buggy behavior that never existed on other platforms. Oracle will be able to weasel out of any definitive claim that they're doing a bad job, and they won't care about what it does to their reputation because few customers buy Oracle for Itanium in the first place. Dollars to donuts, Oracle is going to act like a passive-aggresive three-year-old.
But I really don't blame them. By court order, they're being forced to invest in development that will cost more than it earns. So they're going to cut corners as much as possible, within the letter of the law. I don't like to waste my time, despite the fact that I have some altruism, and Oracle, being a psychopathic corporation, REALLY doesn't want to waste its time. I have complaints about Oracle's handling of Sun's assets like SPARC, Solaris, Java, and OpenOffice. In many ways, these are mind-share assets that can make people have positive feelings about a corporation that ultimately lead to more profit, because people are more likely to buy your profitable products. Oracle has squandered this opportunity. But in the case of Itanium, the whole thing is a completely pointless exercise. There is nothing to be gained by supporting it.
I find most rock and pop to be repetition and boring, but out of every decade is a few really excellent, timeless songs. I like them because (I think) they are different, innovative, and stand out. Did this study examine this 1% of songs for comparison or just mash all of pop and rock together so that the good ones are drowned out by the junk?
I don't want to pick on this too much. There are plenty of cool things that this developer did that are intesting in their own right. For instance, the image processing. But it looks like this machine is mostly manual. Doesn't it seem obvious to make it crank out the cards automatically? And couldn't the pictures be taken more quickly? And aren't there more efficient ways of detecting the holes in the cards? It's an interesting machine, but it's definitely not an efficient solution for this specific problem.
Yeah. Let's take some asshole hacker who obviously lacks any basic ethical grounding and reward him by duping some unsuspecting young lady into having sex with him. Sure. Meanwhile, let's also overlook those geeky guys who haven't committed any crimes, because, what they don't need girlfriends?
As one other commenter said, this is retarded. And for lots of reasons. We don't reward stupidity, they should be in jail, and if they're amoral enough to spend so much time hacking, they're likely to not treat their girlfriends well.
But then I categorize as 'geek' anyone with sufficiently deep and detailed knowledge of a subject that they can write intelligently on a topic. That includes charismatic lawyers.
First of all, what was found is a particle with the same MASS as that predicted by the standard model. They haven't yet confirmed spin or other properties. But what this amounts to is confirmation of what was already suspected. Unfortunately, this isn't all that helpful, because we already know that the standard model doesn't predict everything correctly. If we hadn't found the Higgs Boson, then perhaps it would have helped us to fix the standard model. As it is, this can't help us improve the standard model. In other words, this is great, and it's nice to know that brilliant scientists in the past century were right, but it isn't any kind of revolutionary progress.
Oh, I know. I was just talking about the beliefs they profess. Dianetics and all that. I wonder how many higher-ups actually believe any of it. Are the mostly in it for the money, or do the thing they're doing some good?
Yeah, if you piss off the Muslims, they just kill you. The Scientologists are much worse. They'll sue you and ruin you financially!
[Note: I am not an apologist for Scientology. I'm being ironic. Scientology is a goofball religion just like all the rest of them.]
I live in Columbus, OH. Absolutely every storm of any significance here, and plenty of seeminly minor ones, results in a power outage.
It seems evident to me that AEP does not invest in preventative maintenance. If they did, there would still be outages in major storms, but the effects wouldn't be nearly so wide-spread, and the repair times would be much shorter. The problem is that with an undermaintained infrastructure, minor damages and weaknesses accumulate, leading to more weak links that are more easily damaged in a storm.
So why don't they invest in preventative maintenance? Money. If they did better up-keep it would reduce their profit margin, and as a highly regulated monopoly, they are very constrained on how much they can raise rates for any purpose. So they pinch every penny.
On the other hand, if they wait for catastrophic failure, they can whine to state and federal governments for emergency aid money. Now, they can perform the repairs, but they don't have to pay for it. We do, out of tax money, rather than our electricity bill, so it doesn't affect AEP's bottom line.
To make matters worse, light bulbs don't last more than a week here, due to ubiquitous voltage spikes. We have surge protectors on electronics, but the surge protectors get damaged periodically. We have to mail-order 130V light bulbs just to get a little extra life out of them. (Yes, the CFLs get fried too.) I can't even begin to estimate the real costs of being an AEP customer, but they don't stop at the energy bill.
Well, I'm 38, and one of the things I did, after working in industry for 9 years, was to go back to school and get a PhD. I'll be starting as an assistant prof this autumn. However, YMMV on more education.
The fact is, whenever someone invents something cool, if they don't have some kind of legal protection, then someone else will come along and make a cheap knock-off. See many TiVos around? They spent R&D money developing the DVR market, and then they basically get run out of business because other companies made their cheaper (and generally much crapper) versions. That isn't exactly great encouragement for companies to invest time and money into developing new technologies. And despite what some people seem to want to imply, the FOSS approach doesn't solve every problem, because some kinds of development require specialized expertise, and that can be expensive.
The simple fact is, really good innovation doesn't pop out of a vaccuum. It requires a great deal of expertise, time, and money. For a business or individual to invest those resources, it is of great value for them to have some kind of control over who deploys similar technology. For a time. Also note that many VCs won't even look at your business plan unless they see that it will generate a significant amount of patentable technology. SOMEONE has to pay for this development, and it isn't going to be me or you, because we can't afford it.
We all know that patents, in their original spirit, would be great for innovation. They help encourage inventors to invest significant up-front time, money, and other resources into development, because they know that the legal system provides them an imporant aid to getting a positive return on their investment. And so the fact that some report says that some patents in certain fields have aided innovation is redundant.
The problem that we're all on about is that the patent SYSTEM is rife with ABUSE, because there are flaws in the way patents are acquired and litigated. It is not the general concept of patents that is problematic but the stifling dark side that has arisen in the over-loaded, under-funded USPTO.
Saying that patents need to be abolished because companies abuse the system is analogous to saying that science should be abolished because there are lots of idiots out there calling themselves scientists but falsifying results and/or just doing generally poor excuses for science.
A Turing machine is defined by a tape and a manipulator, and a state machine defining how those tape symbols are manipulated. The former is visible in the video. The latter is not. It appears they're using a mindstorm (itself a microcomputer) to perform the function of the state machine. I think this is cheating.
In fact, the whole state machine part of the Turing machine has always been rather nebulous to me. Yes, I understand the state transitions, but no physical mechanism is described (in CS theory texts) to implement it. The only physical parts of the TM are the tape and manipulator, while the state machine is left as an exercise for the imagination of the reader. In a way, I think that's cheating too.
The only total solution to this is a completely open source GPU. Ah, but the Open Graphics Project tried that and failed! But no. They actually produced and sold real hardware. It just wasn't sustainable, because the FOSS community didn't step up, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. In any case, the OGP isn't dead. They've recently started moving again, this time with much more realistic goals, which is to develop a complete working GPU module that can be licensed. If they make the BEST GPU, then companies will license it. If not, they'll have the best GPU model for academic research into GPUs, which is also, as it turns out, their PRIMARY goal.
Maybe things have changed, but the last time I checked out the Atom floor plan, about half the chip area was cache (which is normal), about a quarter was the actual computation back-end of the CPU, and the remaining quarter was the x86-to-RISC translation front-end. Like all modern x86 processors (as well as PowerPC and probably some other architectures), the CISC instruction set (well, more complex RISC in the case of PPC) is translated dynamically to a simpler RISC-like code that is easier to execute. In a Sandy Bridge, the translator is tiny compared to the rest of the huge 4-issue superscalar massively out-of-order back end. But Atoms are simple 2-issue in-order pipelines, which makes them very small and energy-efficient (albeit a lot slower), but there's not much we can do about that front-end.
Hearing aids are expensive for the same reason that all medical devices are expensive. They are magnets for law suits. To offset the costs of inevitable litigation, medical device makers put more money into product testing (sometimes) and insurance.
This American sue culture applies to airline food too. If a plane crashes, every vendor that put anything into the plane gets sued, including the caterers.
More income for ambulance-chasing lawyers.
Interestingly, in the U.S., if someone is injured by a product, even if it's due to amazing stupidity on the part of the user, in complete violation of a clearly-posted warning, the courts usually find in favor of the consumer. Because the vendor has deeper pockets.