The video and press images feature both rows and colums that have gone wonky -- clearly (A) the tech isn't quite ready for prime time (heh), and (B) you wouldn't want to bend it all the time, for fear of fatiguing the printed parallel cables that feed/drive it.
If Microsoft knows the patents are being violated, don't they have to prosecute them, or else lose the benefit? (Don't respond that I'm confusing patent and trademark law, I'm not).
Not quite true. All engines have a fixed fuel/energy cost just to turn over -- this is why engine braking works think about it). Smaller engines have smaller "operating" fuel cost. Hybrid drivetrains can size the engine according to the average demand, rather than the peak demand. In addition to lowering the fuel cost of running the damn engine, that also reduces the mass of the engine component and offsets the added mass of the electrical stuff.
Long-haul trucking is about the only application I can think of where hybridizing the drivetrain doesn't make sense. In long haul work on the interstate, aerodynamic and road drag dominate other losses. But general-purpose city and medium-distance driving is great for hybridization -- not only do you reduce engine drag, you increase that sporty feel people like, recapture energy from braking, and even shut down the engine at idle. What's not to like?
The problem is that a group of people made those predictions (some of which were made post facto). There is no mechanical method, reproducible by anyone, for making predictions from the Electric Universe picture. Many of the tenets of EU adherents (e.g. that the Sun is powered by an enormous external electric current) are both easily falsified and ludicrous.
Electric Universe is so incoherent that it doesn't even qualify as physical theory -- it doesn't make any predictions. I know -- I was in the fray on the Wikipedia page for many months. The page was finally deleted.
No need to try and make this into a "prime opportunity" to bash the administration for at least trying.
The thing is, this was done before by the Carter administration, and it didn't work then either. Stupidity is doing the same thing and thinking something different will happen.
The current administration doesn't need a lot of help finding reasons to be bashed. This one is pretty third-rate, compared to the meltdown that is currently happening after a mere 107 days of true congressional oversight. But it's a good example of the administration's modus operandi. Either the stated reasons for the policy were lies, or the administration are pretty damned incompetent. Take your pick, just don't admit to having voted for them.
I think that at some point there has to be a big jump. Small changes do not get you from an organism that swims to an organism that breathes air.
Well, think what you might, but your second sentence is wrong. Ever study lungfish? They form a nice hybrid between fishes and land creatures. Similarly, a nice spectrum of small changes links book gills (found in horseshoe crabs) to book lungs (found in land-based arachnids).
Contrary to your intuition, most "macro-adaptations" can readily be explained in terms of a sequence of "micro-adaptations" each of which marginally improves the survivability of the organism. In fact, this is the case even when another engineering solution would have been better or more economical: vestigial parts, historical accidents, and the evidence of earlier "choices" executed with no forethought for future consequences abound throughout (for example) the human body, from our vestigial toes to our crappily designed carpal tunnels.
The existence of kefir is a good proof-of-concept for accidental transition between single-celled and multicellular organisms. Kefir curds are right on the border of being multicellular -- they are communities of many organisms, who collectively exhibit homeostasis and can reproduce by collective fission. Scrambling a curd in a blender doesn't kill (all) of the component organisms, but it does break the homeostasis.
Slime molds are another type of single/multi straddling organism. Slime molds are collections of single cells that can survive on their own and reproduce by fission. Under the right circumstances they work together to form a fruiting body that reproduces sexually, then they break apart into a population of individuals.
Kcbrown, the weak point in your argument is point (6), which is what Khomar is attacking. He seems to be asserting (and other scholars, such as C.S. Lewis [to whom Khomar referred], have asserted) that there must be a higher purpose to the suffering in the world. Khomar alluded to a possibility that pain may be here to teach us. One who subscribes to that belief would compare God more to a parent who spanks his child, than to a husband who beats his wife.
Personally, I think it's a bunch of hooey. If we were designed by an Engineer, He sure sucked at it. Anyone who's looked at the "design" of mammals knows something's up. I find it hard to believe in an omniscient, omnipotent (or even quasi-omniscient, quasi-omnipotent), caring deity without also assuming that He spends most of His time high on crack.
Apple recently tried to prevent people from using ipods to transfer music. It is now impossible (using iTunes and the Mac GUI) to pull your music back off your ipod once it is there. But the Mac is built on BSD, and the mp3 files are accessible using the UNIX CLI -- they've just moved them to "/Volumes//Ipod_control/./*.mp3".
Huh? This boggles the imagination. I would have thought they'd have learned about security rings while rebuilding their entire OS from the ground up (as Longhorn was reputed to do).
News flash: silicon isn't a conductor -- it's a semiconductor. Conductive polymers already exist. This is comparable to announcing that the latest Camaro is faster than a Model T, or that a new digital computing device can perform a million floating-point operations per second.
... otherwise there would be no syphilis in the world.
Seriously, there is a pretty direct analogy between (digital epidemiology, computer viruses) and (real epidemiology, real germs). If there were a simple answer to the digital problem, it's a good bet that some population or other would have adopted the analogous strategy to the real epidemiology problem.
STDs offer a good analogy for digital viruses with a Trojan-style (no snickers, please) strategy. In both cases sharing of {data|fluids} yields immediate benefit at some risk. In both cases, populations have adopted reputational strategies to avoid spreading/contracting viruses. In neither case do those strategies work.
Even with near-perfect "antivirus software" (the antibiotic penicillin), the old monsters of syphilis and gonorrhea still remain on the planet, and penicillin-resistant strains have even evolved. One problem is that reputations are hard to establish and not necessarily accurate; another is that most humans tend to discount future risks in favor of immediate benefits.
Interestingly, the reason that the traditional venereal diseases are treated with penicillin injections (and not an oral course) is that, statistically, patients are unlikely to finish the oral course -- a properly completed oral course of penicillin is as effective as the traditional three injections. There is perhaps a lesson to be learned there about how effective corporate data-hygiene strategies are likely to be.
Just stick a mild compressor (3-6 dB) on your CD output, then mix in a cassette recording of your fireplace. Those old CDs will sound GREAT! You'll get the warmth, the soft rush of air^H^H^Hthe vinyl surface, and the soft popping.
No, actually, I just bought 2007 Prius (and not a Hybrid Civic) because it's much more fun to drive. Four doors, a hatchback, all-wheel independent suspension nice nav, and 45 MPG up and down the Rocky Mountains -- what more could you want?
It will take about 80,000 miles in the Prius to make up the difference in cost vs. the Corolla in fuel alone. And that's neglecting interest on the extra money during the time you drive the car.
But then the cars aren't exactly comparable. The Prius (ironically) is much sportier and has high-end features standard, such as four-wheel independent traction control and hands-free bluetooth. You pay extra for those things in the Corolla, and they're not even available for the low end model. It's fairer to compare the $23k Prius with an $18k Corolla, at which point it would take 44,000 miles to equalize the prices.
On the other hand, that assumes fuel stays in the low $2 per gallon range. When I bought my 2001 Prius, folks scoffed because I'd nearly never pay back the difference between that and an Echo -- fuel was $1.40/gal. I ended up making up the difference in the first 30,000 miles. Then I traded it in and was pleasantly surprised at how well it had held its value -- only around $7k of depreciation in 5 years.
--- worksheet:
Toyota Corolla: 30 MPG, $14k Toyota Prius: 50 MPG, $23k
Difference in price: $9k Difference in mileage: 20 MPG
Price of gas: $2.30/gal
Gallons for $9k: 4000 Mileage to equalize cost: 80,000 miles
Semi-loaded Corolla: 30 MPG, $18k Difference: $5k
Gallons for $5k: 2200 Mileage to equalize cost: 44,000 miles
What a coincidence -- I wrote a simulation code with muliply-linked data structures in 2001. The 2006 patent seems to be for data structures that maintain multiple sets of links for traversing the list in different orders as needed. My code sorted simultaneously for numeric node label, neighbor relation, and spatial location.
...it doesn't matter that Americans are losing their rights due to over-regulating. But it's definitely too much to expect that the American populace would turn to being self-responsible isn't it?
Actually, it is too much to expect. Global climate change is a classic example of the Tragedy of the Commons. Local incentives (in the form of cheap energy from burning hydrocarbons) conflict with global incentives (to keep a large environment habitable).
Much though we might like free markets, local/global incentive inversion is a known problem with such marketes. It is not reasonable to expect free actors to be "self-responsible" in such cases -- history proves that they aren't. Regulation works by introducing strong local disincentives from the destructive behavior (for example, people tend to speed less through construction zones, in states that raise traffic fines in those zones).
Americans aren't special in that way -- they're just as human as anyone else.
This increases their planning overhead, their budget overhead, and possibly their coordination overhead.
No it doesn't. Instead of having to prepare and deploy dozens of suicide pilots, they can work in secret safety on figuring out the control protocol, and make the attack wirelessly from the safety of a suburban house.
Great -- we are worried about brute-force attackers taking over an airplane and flying it into a building. So we build in a back door that can be cracked over the radio, allowing attackers to fly ALL AIRPLANES CURRENTLY IN FLIGHT into buildings. Nice one, Boeing.
... and if a significant amount of energy is to be generated it will have to come from additional force by the astronauts. Work = force times distance. Scavenging microscopic amounts of energy probably won't be noticeable; scavenging even rather small but nontrivial amounts of energy would get annoying fast.
The only way around this that I see is if they are trying to harness the "inflation force" in the suits -- current suits tend to want to inflate into fully-extended balloons, and it takes force to bend the joints (thereby reducing the pressurized volume of the suit a little bit) -- that requires the astronaut to fight the internal pressure of the suit. Relaxing one's arm outward again wastes energy that I suppose could be recovered...
But rather than waste effort trying to scavenge that mechanical energy (which tires out the astronauts and makes their motions clumsy and awkward), it would almost certainly be better to adopt constant-volume bellows joints in the spacesuits. Astronauts make lousy fuel cells -- the fuel for them (food) requires a lot more finicky care and packaging than other types of fuel cell, and they're not very energy-dense.
Toughness is a measure of the amount of energy necessary to break a material. Hardness is a measure of the amount of pressure required to deform it. The two are not the same. In fact, diamond is not a particularly tough material -- which is one reason why folks are discouraged from wearing diamond jewelry when, say, rock climbing. It's easy to fracture a diamond by bashing it against something even moderately hard -- even though no mineral is harder than the diamond, good ol' granite is much tougher.
The problems with subscription newsletters are twofold: (1) abuse by companies who won't unsubscribe you or who make you jump through hoops to unsubscribe (compare to private mailman(1) or majordomo(1) mailing lists, where you can unsubscribe just by sending the command "unsubscribe" -- most commercial newsletters do not allow that), and (2) the huge noise-to-signal ratio in corporate/commercial e-mail.
Any corporation with half a brain should be on a "pull" system with a web newsletter.
The problem with the article is that Business newsletters and "legitimate" marketing are spam.
I don't want them and I am glad if my mail filter gets rid of them.
Remember, the grandaddy GREEN CARD spam that started the whole evil mess was itself "legitimate" -- the guy who sent it to every USENET newsgroup simultaneously did indeed have an above-the-board business to promote, and I presume that some people responded and even got green cards as a result of a then-current government amnesty program. At the time, people complained about USENET commercial postings even if they were legitimate -- comparing them to trying to hold a conversation while salesmen keep sticking their heads in the door: "Hey, ya want a nice LASER DIODE?" or whatever they had. It's impossible -- like a scene from, say, Monty Python. Now why does that sound familiar?...
Slashdot Mirror
The video and press images feature both rows and colums that have gone wonky -- clearly (A) the tech isn't quite ready for prime time (heh), and (B) you wouldn't want to bend it all the time, for fear of fatiguing the printed parallel cables that feed/drive it.
If Microsoft knows the patents are being violated, don't they have to prosecute them, or else lose the benefit? (Don't respond that I'm confusing patent and trademark law, I'm not).
Not quite true. All engines have a fixed fuel/energy cost just to turn over -- this is why engine braking works think about it). Smaller engines have smaller "operating" fuel cost. Hybrid drivetrains can size the engine according to the average demand, rather than the peak demand. In addition to lowering the fuel cost of running the damn engine, that also reduces the mass of the engine component and offsets the added mass of the electrical stuff.
Long-haul trucking is about the only application I can think of where hybridizing the drivetrain doesn't make sense. In long haul work on the interstate, aerodynamic and road drag dominate other losses. But general-purpose city and medium-distance driving is great for hybridization -- not only do you reduce engine drag, you increase that sporty feel people like, recapture energy from braking, and even shut down the engine at idle. What's not to like?
The problem is that a group of people made those predictions (some of which were made post facto). There is no mechanical method, reproducible by anyone, for making predictions from the Electric Universe picture. Many of the tenets of EU adherents (e.g. that the Sun is powered by an enormous external electric current) are both easily falsified and ludicrous.
Electric Universe is so incoherent that it doesn't even qualify as physical theory -- it doesn't make any predictions. I know -- I was in the fray on the Wikipedia page for many months. The page was finally deleted.
The thing is, this was done before by the Carter administration, and it didn't work then either. Stupidity is doing the same thing and thinking something different will happen.
The current administration doesn't need a lot of help finding reasons to be bashed. This one is pretty third-rate, compared to the meltdown that is currently happening after a mere 107 days of true congressional oversight. But it's a good example of the administration's modus operandi. Either the stated reasons for the policy were lies, or the administration are pretty damned incompetent. Take your pick, just don't admit to having voted for them.
Well, think what you might, but your second sentence is wrong. Ever study lungfish? They form a nice hybrid between fishes and land creatures. Similarly, a nice spectrum of small changes links book gills (found in horseshoe crabs) to book lungs (found in land-based arachnids).
Contrary to your intuition, most "macro-adaptations" can readily be explained in terms of a sequence of "micro-adaptations" each of which marginally improves the survivability of the organism. In fact, this is the case even when another engineering solution would have been better or more economical: vestigial parts, historical accidents, and the evidence of earlier "choices" executed with no forethought for future consequences abound throughout (for example) the human body, from our vestigial toes to our crappily designed carpal tunnels.
The existence of kefir is a good proof-of-concept for accidental transition between single-celled and multicellular organisms. Kefir curds are right on the border of being multicellular -- they are communities of many organisms, who collectively exhibit homeostasis and can reproduce by collective fission. Scrambling a curd in a blender doesn't kill (all) of the component organisms, but it does break the homeostasis.
Slime molds are another type of single/multi straddling organism. Slime molds are collections of single cells that can survive on their own and reproduce by fission. Under the right circumstances they work together to form a fruiting body that reproduces sexually, then they break apart into a population of individuals.
Kcbrown, the weak point in your argument is point (6), which is what Khomar is attacking. He seems to be asserting (and other scholars, such as C.S. Lewis [to whom Khomar referred], have asserted) that there must be a higher purpose to the suffering in the world. Khomar alluded to a possibility that pain may be here to teach us. One who subscribes to that belief would compare God more to a parent who spanks his child, than to a husband who beats his wife.
Personally, I think it's a bunch of hooey. If we were designed by an Engineer, He sure sucked at it. Anyone who's looked at the "design" of mammals knows something's up. I find it hard to believe in an omniscient, omnipotent (or even quasi-omniscient, quasi-omnipotent), caring deity without also assuming that He spends most of His time high on crack.
Looks like the slashdot parser mangled my path -- it should be: "/Volumes/[your-ipod-name]/Ipod_control/.[mumble]/ *.mp3"
Apple recently tried to prevent people from using ipods to transfer music. It is now impossible (using iTunes and the Mac GUI) to pull your music back off your ipod once it is there. But the Mac is built on BSD, and the mp3 files are accessible using the UNIX CLI -- they've just moved them to "/Volumes//Ipod_control/./*.mp3".
Huh? This boggles the imagination. I would have thought they'd have learned about security rings while rebuilding their entire OS from the ground up (as Longhorn was reputed to do).
News flash: silicon isn't a conductor -- it's a semiconductor. Conductive polymers already exist. This is comparable to announcing that the latest Camaro is faster than a Model T, or that a new digital computing device can perform a million floating-point operations per second.
... otherwise there would be no syphilis in the world.
Seriously, there is a pretty direct analogy between (digital epidemiology, computer viruses) and (real epidemiology, real germs). If there were a simple answer to the digital problem, it's a good bet that some population or other would have adopted the analogous strategy to the real epidemiology problem.
STDs offer a good analogy for digital viruses with a Trojan-style (no snickers, please) strategy. In both cases sharing of {data|fluids} yields immediate benefit at some risk. In both cases, populations have adopted reputational strategies to avoid spreading/contracting viruses. In neither case do those strategies work.
Even with near-perfect "antivirus software" (the antibiotic penicillin), the old monsters of syphilis and gonorrhea still remain on the planet, and penicillin-resistant strains have even evolved. One problem is that reputations are hard to establish and not necessarily accurate; another is that most humans tend to discount future risks in favor of immediate benefits.
Interestingly, the reason that the traditional venereal diseases are treated with penicillin injections (and not an oral course) is that, statistically, patients are unlikely to finish the oral course -- a properly completed oral course of penicillin is as effective as the traditional three injections. There is perhaps a lesson to be learned there about how effective corporate data-hygiene strategies are likely to be.
Just stick a mild compressor (3-6 dB) on your CD output, then mix in a cassette recording of your fireplace. Those old CDs will sound GREAT! You'll get the warmth, the soft rush of air^H^H^Hthe vinyl surface, and the soft popping.
No, actually, I just bought 2007 Prius (and not a Hybrid Civic) because it's much more fun to drive. Four doors, a hatchback, all-wheel independent suspension nice nav, and 45 MPG up and down the Rocky Mountains -- what more could you want?
It will take about 80,000 miles in the Prius to make up the difference in cost vs. the Corolla in fuel alone. And that's neglecting interest on the extra money during the time you drive the car.
But then the cars aren't exactly comparable. The Prius (ironically) is much sportier and has high-end features standard, such as four-wheel independent traction control and hands-free bluetooth. You pay extra for those things in the Corolla, and they're not even available for the low end model. It's fairer to compare the $23k Prius with an $18k Corolla, at which point it would take 44,000 miles to equalize the prices.
On the other hand, that assumes fuel stays in the low $2 per gallon range. When I bought my 2001 Prius, folks scoffed because I'd nearly never pay back the difference between that and an Echo -- fuel was $1.40/gal. I ended up making up the difference in the first 30,000 miles. Then I traded it in and was pleasantly surprised at how well it had held its value -- only around $7k of depreciation in 5 years.
--- worksheet:
Toyota Corolla: 30 MPG, $14k
Toyota Prius: 50 MPG, $23k
Difference in price: $9k
Difference in mileage: 20 MPG
Price of gas: $2.30/gal
Gallons for $9k: 4000
Mileage to equalize cost: 80,000 miles
Semi-loaded Corolla: 30 MPG, $18k
Difference: $5k
Gallons for $5k: 2200
Mileage to equalize cost: 44,000 miles
What a coincidence -- I wrote a simulation code with muliply-linked data structures in 2001. The 2006 patent seems to be for data structures that maintain multiple sets of links for traversing the list in different orders as needed. My code sorted simultaneously for numeric node label, neighbor relation, and spatial location.
Actually, it is too much to expect. Global climate change is a classic example of the Tragedy of the Commons. Local incentives (in the form of cheap energy from burning hydrocarbons) conflict with global incentives (to keep a large environment habitable).
Much though we might like free markets, local/global incentive inversion is a known problem with such marketes. It is not reasonable to expect free actors to be "self-responsible" in such cases -- history proves that they aren't. Regulation works by introducing strong local disincentives from the destructive behavior (for example, people tend to speed less through construction zones, in states that raise traffic fines in those zones).
Americans aren't special in that way -- they're just as human as anyone else.
No it doesn't. Instead of having to prepare and deploy dozens of suicide pilots, they can work in secret safety on figuring out the control protocol, and make the attack wirelessly from the safety of a suburban house.
Just ask Captain Video...
Great -- we are worried about brute-force attackers taking over an airplane and flying it into a building. So we build in a back door that can be cracked over the radio, allowing attackers to fly ALL AIRPLANES CURRENTLY IN FLIGHT into buildings. Nice one, Boeing.
... and if a significant amount of energy is to be generated it will have to come from additional force by the astronauts. Work = force times distance. Scavenging microscopic amounts of energy probably won't be noticeable; scavenging even rather small but nontrivial amounts of energy would get annoying fast.
The only way around this that I see is if they are trying to harness the "inflation force" in the suits -- current suits tend to want to inflate into fully-extended balloons, and it takes force to bend the joints (thereby reducing the pressurized volume of the suit a little bit) -- that requires the astronaut to fight the internal pressure of the suit. Relaxing one's arm outward again wastes energy that I suppose could be recovered...
But rather than waste effort trying to scavenge that mechanical energy (which tires out the astronauts and makes their motions clumsy and awkward), it would almost certainly be better to adopt constant-volume bellows joints in the spacesuits. Astronauts make lousy fuel cells -- the fuel for them (food) requires a lot more finicky care and packaging than other types of fuel cell, and they're not very energy-dense.
Toughness is a measure of the amount of energy necessary to break a material. Hardness is a measure of the amount of pressure required to deform it. The two are not the same. In fact, diamond is not a particularly tough material -- which is one reason why folks are discouraged from wearing diamond jewelry when, say, rock climbing. It's easy to fracture a diamond by bashing it against something even moderately hard -- even though no mineral is harder than the diamond, good ol' granite is much tougher.
The problems with subscription newsletters are twofold: (1) abuse by companies who won't unsubscribe you or who make you jump through hoops to unsubscribe (compare to private mailman(1) or majordomo(1) mailing lists, where you can unsubscribe just by sending the command "unsubscribe" -- most commercial newsletters do not allow that), and (2) the huge noise-to-signal ratio in corporate/commercial e-mail.
Any corporation with half a brain should be on a "pull" system with a web newsletter.
The problem with the article is that Business newsletters and "legitimate" marketing are spam.
I don't want them and I am glad if my mail filter gets rid of them.
Remember, the grandaddy GREEN CARD spam that started the whole evil mess was itself "legitimate" -- the guy who sent it to every USENET newsgroup simultaneously did indeed have an above-the-board business to promote, and I presume that some people responded and even got green cards as a result of a then-current government amnesty program. At the time, people complained about USENET commercial postings even if they were legitimate -- comparing them to trying to hold a conversation while salesmen keep sticking their heads in the door: "Hey, ya want a nice LASER DIODE?" or whatever they had. It's impossible -- like a scene from, say, Monty Python. Now why does that sound familiar?...
bloody vikings....