Seriously. It blocks as much light as putting up a full blown solar panel that covers 80% of my window, but only produces a fourth as much power.
So let's do the math. A typical solar panel has anywhere from 6% to 20% efficiency. Let's generously assume that this is 20% of the efficiency of a fairly good one, so... sat 4% efficient. 4% of the energy from the sun turns into power.
Now sunlight is about 93 lumens per watt. CFLs only produce about 75 lumens per watt. So even if you had 100% efficient capture of sunlight, the lamps would produce only 81% as much light.
Multiply. This means that for every 100 lumens of light that would ordinarily come into your window, 20 lumens pass through the film. 4 lumens become electricity, and 81% of that, or about 3.24 lumens, is available by the time you convert it back to light. Thus, the total lumens available between the sun and the artificial lighting powered by the solar panel film would be 23.24 lumens.
So assuming that, like most houses, the amount of light you get in the room from sunlight is barely adequate even without this film, then you would need to replace 80 lumens for each 100 lumen window that you cover, at an efficiency of 3.24 lumens per window, which works out to just shy of 25 windows to replace the light provided by a single window. Assuming (for simplicity) that the rooms in your house all have about the same number of windows, this means that you would need a house with 25 unused rooms just to break even.
I can't imagine how you could possibly save enough money on cooling to be make up for the added lighting costs at a paltry 3.24% best-case light-to-light conversion efficiency. It's just not significantly better than draping a thick blanket over the outside of the window and blocking out the sunlight altogether, but doesn't block as much heat as the blanket.
An 80% tint is just insanely dark—darker than the darkest I've ever seen on any building—that's like pimpmobile window tinting dark. Now if you have an electric car and you want your windows darkly tinted, then maybe, though I suspect an 80% tint is illegal in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Not that you care when you're driving along in your tricked-out electric pimpmobile, but.... No, wait....
Followed by "You are horribly out of date. Firefox -2147483648 is three days old. The current version is 2147483648. Would you like to download the update?"
And immediately after the relaunch, "You are horribly out of date. Firefox -2147483648 is three days old. The current version is 2147483648. Would you like to download the update?"
And immediately after the relaunch, "You are horribly out of date. Firefox -2147483648 is three days old. The current version is 2147483648. Would you like to download the update?"
The more traditional fix for that problem is "Whoever brands, produces, or causes to be produced any product that infringes... or, with knowledge of that infringement, willfully imports any product that infringes...".
By using that wording instead, you remove the liability for individual consumers because the product would have been produced whether they bought a single instance of that product or not (possible quantity differences near the end of the production run notwithstanding).
However, the "causes to be produced" part would still prevent a business from hiring (for example) a Chinese firm to manufacture the product beyond the reach of U.S. patent law. And since no company wants to sell a product without branding it, that part also pretty thoroughly fixes the loophole. Finally, the "imports" part ensures that even if they did not brand the product, they could still not import it for sale in the U.S. without being liable unless they had no knowledge of the patent.
Alternatively, instead of requiring knowledge of the patent for infringement by importing, you could put a quantity threshold on imports to prevent liability for individuals importing quantities for personal use.
No, it's relatively easy to fix this broken aspect of patent law. Congress just doesn't care about how patent law impacts the consumer because it doesn't have a financial impact on any of their largest campaign donors. After all, we have the best government money can buy.
Are they suing over a process patent or a utility patent? I would have assumed the latter, in which case that does not apply. Although process patents are often abused to cover software, they are mostly used to protect business processes, such as manufacturing techniques.
Notice how narrowly the first part of that sentence is worded. If you read it in context, you'll see that the passage you are quoting (from 35 U.S.C. 271 (g)) solely protects against attacks on the consumers of products manufactured in ways that infringe patents on the techniques used to make the product. It provides no protection against patent claims arising out of the design of the product itself.
What this means is that, for example, Ford can't sue me for driving my Chevy simply because Ford owns a process patent on assembly lines and Chevrolet stole the idea and used it to make their cars more cheaply. However, if Chevy stole a patented shape for the radiator, Ford can still sue me for driving my Chevy.
Because the U.S. patent system is fundamentally and completely broken. Patents cover the manufacture, distribution, or use of a patented technology. What, you didn't really think you owned that Wi-Fi access point, did you?
The only reason this complete joke of a scheme hasn't led to public outcry is that the patent trolls haven't managed to screw over a broad enough segment of the population to make any real impact. If strict application of patent law were to allow some dirtbag company like this to take away the country's Internet connections, however, I predict all of Washington D.C. would be burning within the hour, sure as if Congress canceled Monday Night Football.
As for this company, I vote we just go ahead and declare them to be enemy combatants and get it over with. It'll save everyone the trouble of dealing with the rioting and looting later. Just saying.
As an aside, other than putting their money under a mattress, it is impossible for the wealthy (or anyone else) to "hoard" money: as soon as their money is placed in a bank, or on a stock market, or purchases bonds, or is used to purchase something, or start a business, it's back in the economy.
That used to be at least ostensibly true back before the banks became so terrified of the high default rate that they stopped lending it out.
These days, putting money in the bank is effectively taking money out of circulation; it's tantamount to burning the bills in your fireplace except that burning money takes it out of circulation permanently, and thus increases the value of the currency as a whole, where banking the money doesn't because in theory it might someday be used.
Yeah, but you can carry a butane lighter on a plane and nuke the contents of the platters in the lavatory. I don't recommend trying that with thermite.... No, wait....
*mutters something about getting tackled and thrown off a plane for trying to light a hard drive platter*
Frigging post-9/11 paranoia. Spoils all the fun of erasing a hard drive.
Actually, now that I think about it, nuking the platters would probably do the trick, too. Microwave ovens FTW.
On a scale of 1 to 10, this post has been rated 12 by the Internet Sarcasm Meter.
Sitting in a lab isn't the same thing as directed instruction.
When I was in elementary school, educational games were the new "cool" way to teach, and teachers deployed them. The kids found them were fun and exciting at first, but after a few years, everybody just wanted to play Oregon Trail. It lost a lot of its power to captivate when people got used to it.
Christians dodge the bullet wrt Great Flood etc by claiming that it's all allegorical
Not necessarily even allegorical. For a civilization whose idea of the "whole world" is probably a few thousand miles wide, the notion of the "whole world" being flooded is actually pretty plausible.
Time Machine is great until something goes wrong and you find out that your entire iPhoto Library never got backed up at all (as happened to a coworker of mine). In other words, don't trust Time Machine as your only backup solution unless you have inspected the Time Machine backup volume on another machine and confirmed that everything you think is in there actually is.
For photos and video clips, the simplest backup is to never delete the originals. Flash is cheap. Memories are priceless. Never wipe your flash cards. The odds of both your hard drive and a flash card failing at the same time are pretty minimal, and the odds of your hard drive, a flash card, and your Time Machine backup failing are close enough to zero that it probably isn't worth worrying about. For added security, back them up to an online photo sharing site.
For non-media files, since they are usually fairly small, you can probably keep a backup copy on a flash drive.
Of course, you should take my paranoia with a grain of salt. After a hard drive crash cost me a fair amount of work on a novel I was writing, I've been rather insane about keeping backups:
A fireproof hard drive attached to an Airport Extreme stores my Time Machine backups.
Important data files are backed up periodically (by hand) as I modify them to either my home file server or a flash drive in my pocket, depending on whether I'm online.
Media (photos, video) are also kept on their original flash cards or tapes (no wiping).
Media files are also backed up by uploading them to my home server for photo sharing.
Every night, my home server automatically uploads a copy of any newly uploaded media files to a second web server in another state for faster web sharing and even more backup.
So at any given point in time, pretty much every photo that matters to me exists on at least one flash card and four different hard drives in two different states, one of which is in a fireproof enclosure. I'm protected in the event of nuclear armageddon. Are you?:-D
If they had done that two years ago, sure. At this point, Amazon has already figured out how to hit that price point, so HP has no prayer of competing unless they are willing to sell at a loss to undercut Amazon. HP took too long to get its act together, and now it's simply too late to fix things. The wedding party arrived and the doors were closed while they were out getting oil for their lanterns.
Now that Amazon is in the game, about the only two things HP can realistically do with WebOS that might hope to make money are:
Sell it as a replacement OS for Android tablets with some easy-to-use installer.
So what this tells us is that out of 115 million TV households, about 5.3 million households (average; 7.751 million viewers on average; source: ESPN MediaZone) were watching sports that day. That's only 4.6% of TV households, and probably somewhere around 15-20% of all the TVs that were turned on at the time (though that's just a guess based on typical Saturday evening viewing numbers; I can't find the share numbers, which are the statistic you actually need for these purposes).
In truth, I think the total number of folks who watch sports is a bit higher than that—somewhere around 25-30% of TV viewers who watch sports at least occasionally, with probably 10-15% who watch sports on a regular basis (daily or weekly). It's definitely nowhere near half, and it isn't dramatically more popular than any other major category of content (e.g. drama, news, etc.).
Depends on whether you really mean viewers or simply the number of people who are willing to pay extra money for the ability to view it when they want to do so.
If SyFy (new name; ugh) were provided a la carte, the sorts of folks who watch pro wrestling would probably not want to pay the extra fee for a sci-fi channel just to watch one wrestling show per week, which means that it would go back to being a sci-fi channel instead of burning some of its hours on unrelated mass-market crap.
I don't think it would fold unless they found that they couldn't make enough money off of ad revenue and subscriber revenue to cover their costs, which doesn't seem very likely to me. What seems likely is that the number of subscribers would drop to about half its current levels, and the per-subscriber cost would double, and they would break even, while going back to being a channel that sci-fi fans actually want to watch instead of one that they cringe about.
The problem is that it's relatively easy to conclude that a trademark is descriptive. It's relatively hard, unless you are an expert in a very narrow field, to cut through the B.S. of a typical patent, figure out what it is really supposed to cover, and realize that IBM already did it back in 1963.
Really? Yikes. That's just poor design. Even my $25 DVD player has a backup firmware zone so that there is always one known good copy of the data. I would have assumed that a solid state drive would keep at least one previous copy of something as critical as its page mapping tables....
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Doesn't mean it can't do 64-bit math. Just use uint64_t or unsigned long long.
Seriously. It blocks as much light as putting up a full blown solar panel that covers 80% of my window, but only produces a fourth as much power.
So let's do the math. A typical solar panel has anywhere from 6% to 20% efficiency. Let's generously assume that this is 20% of the efficiency of a fairly good one, so... sat 4% efficient. 4% of the energy from the sun turns into power.
Now sunlight is about 93 lumens per watt. CFLs only produce about 75 lumens per watt. So even if you had 100% efficient capture of sunlight, the lamps would produce only 81% as much light.
Multiply. This means that for every 100 lumens of light that would ordinarily come into your window, 20 lumens pass through the film. 4 lumens become electricity, and 81% of that, or about 3.24 lumens, is available by the time you convert it back to light. Thus, the total lumens available between the sun and the artificial lighting powered by the solar panel film would be 23.24 lumens.
So assuming that, like most houses, the amount of light you get in the room from sunlight is barely adequate even without this film, then you would need to replace 80 lumens for each 100 lumen window that you cover, at an efficiency of 3.24 lumens per window, which works out to just shy of 25 windows to replace the light provided by a single window. Assuming (for simplicity) that the rooms in your house all have about the same number of windows, this means that you would need a house with 25 unused rooms just to break even.
I can't imagine how you could possibly save enough money on cooling to be make up for the added lighting costs at a paltry 3.24% best-case light-to-light conversion efficiency. It's just not significantly better than draping a thick blanket over the outside of the window and blocking out the sunlight altogether, but doesn't block as much heat as the blanket.
An 80% tint is just insanely dark—darker than the darkest I've ever seen on any building—that's like pimpmobile window tinting dark. Now if you have an electric car and you want your windows darkly tinted, then maybe, though I suspect an 80% tint is illegal in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Not that you care when you're driving along in your tricked-out electric pimpmobile, but.... No, wait....
Followed by "You are horribly out of date. Firefox -2147483648 is three days old. The current version is 2147483648. Would you like to download the update?"
And immediately after the relaunch, "You are horribly out of date. Firefox -2147483648 is three days old. The current version is 2147483648. Would you like to download the update?"
And immediately after the relaunch, "You are horribly out of date. Firefox -2147483648 is three days old. The current version is 2147483648. Would you like to download the update?"
The more traditional fix for that problem is "Whoever brands, produces, or causes to be produced any product that infringes... or, with knowledge of that infringement, willfully imports any product that infringes...".
By using that wording instead, you remove the liability for individual consumers because the product would have been produced whether they bought a single instance of that product or not (possible quantity differences near the end of the production run notwithstanding).
However, the "causes to be produced" part would still prevent a business from hiring (for example) a Chinese firm to manufacture the product beyond the reach of U.S. patent law. And since no company wants to sell a product without branding it, that part also pretty thoroughly fixes the loophole. Finally, the "imports" part ensures that even if they did not brand the product, they could still not import it for sale in the U.S. without being liable unless they had no knowledge of the patent.
Alternatively, instead of requiring knowledge of the patent for infringement by importing, you could put a quantity threshold on imports to prevent liability for individuals importing quantities for personal use.
No, it's relatively easy to fix this broken aspect of patent law. Congress just doesn't care about how patent law impacts the consumer because it doesn't have a financial impact on any of their largest campaign donors. After all, we have the best government money can buy.
Are they suing over a process patent or a utility patent? I would have assumed the latter, in which case that does not apply. Although process patents are often abused to cover software, they are mostly used to protect business processes, such as manufacturing techniques.
Notice how narrowly the first part of that sentence is worded. If you read it in context, you'll see that the passage you are quoting (from 35 U.S.C. 271 (g)) solely protects against attacks on the consumers of products manufactured in ways that infringe patents on the techniques used to make the product. It provides no protection against patent claims arising out of the design of the product itself.
What this means is that, for example, Ford can't sue me for driving my Chevy simply because Ford owns a process patent on assembly lines and Chevrolet stole the idea and used it to make their cars more cheaply. However, if Chevy stole a patented shape for the radiator, Ford can still sue me for driving my Chevy.
Because the U.S. patent system is fundamentally and completely broken. Patents cover the manufacture, distribution, or use of a patented technology. What, you didn't really think you owned that Wi-Fi access point, did you?
The only reason this complete joke of a scheme hasn't led to public outcry is that the patent trolls haven't managed to screw over a broad enough segment of the population to make any real impact. If strict application of patent law were to allow some dirtbag company like this to take away the country's Internet connections, however, I predict all of Washington D.C. would be burning within the hour, sure as if Congress canceled Monday Night Football.
As for this company, I vote we just go ahead and declare them to be enemy combatants and get it over with. It'll save everyone the trouble of dealing with the rioting and looting later. Just saying.
How bad do the fans actually get? What's your most bizarre anecdote about annoying Trek fans?
That used to be at least ostensibly true back before the banks became so terrified of the high default rate that they stopped lending it out.
These days, putting money in the bank is effectively taking money out of circulation; it's tantamount to burning the bills in your fireplace except that burning money takes it out of circulation permanently, and thus increases the value of the currency as a whole, where banking the money doesn't because in theory it might someday be used.
Even more curious, Safari shows the content, but does not show the lock icon in the corner of the window. Filed a bug.
Yeah, but you can carry a butane lighter on a plane and nuke the contents of the platters in the lavatory. I don't recommend trying that with thermite.... No, wait....
*mutters something about getting tackled and thrown off a plane for trying to light a hard drive platter*
Frigging post-9/11 paranoia. Spoils all the fun of erasing a hard drive.
Actually, now that I think about it, nuking the platters would probably do the trick, too. Microwave ovens FTW.
On a scale of 1 to 10, this post has been rated 12 by the Internet Sarcasm Meter.
A blowtorch should do the same job and is a heck of a lot more practical....
Sitting in a lab isn't the same thing as directed instruction.
When I was in elementary school, educational games were the new "cool" way to teach, and teachers deployed them. The kids found them were fun and exciting at first, but after a few years, everybody just wanted to play Oregon Trail. It lost a lot of its power to captivate when people got used to it.
YMMV.
Anything significantly different from what people are used to will have this effect because things that are novel tend to capture people's attention.
In twenty years, when everybody has a 3D TV set, I doubt it will have nearly the same effect.
Not necessarily even allegorical. For a civilization whose idea of the "whole world" is probably a few thousand miles wide, the notion of the "whole world" being flooded is actually pretty plausible.
Time Machine is great until something goes wrong and you find out that your entire iPhoto Library never got backed up at all (as happened to a coworker of mine). In other words, don't trust Time Machine as your only backup solution unless you have inspected the Time Machine backup volume on another machine and confirmed that everything you think is in there actually is.
For photos and video clips, the simplest backup is to never delete the originals. Flash is cheap. Memories are priceless. Never wipe your flash cards. The odds of both your hard drive and a flash card failing at the same time are pretty minimal, and the odds of your hard drive, a flash card, and your Time Machine backup failing are close enough to zero that it probably isn't worth worrying about. For added security, back them up to an online photo sharing site.
For non-media files, since they are usually fairly small, you can probably keep a backup copy on a flash drive.
Of course, you should take my paranoia with a grain of salt. After a hard drive crash cost me a fair amount of work on a novel I was writing, I've been rather insane about keeping backups:
So at any given point in time, pretty much every photo that matters to me exists on at least one flash card and four different hard drives in two different states, one of which is in a fireproof enclosure. I'm protected in the event of nuclear armageddon. Are you? :-D
If they had done that two years ago, sure. At this point, Amazon has already figured out how to hit that price point, so HP has no prayer of competing unless they are willing to sell at a loss to undercut Amazon. HP took too long to get its act together, and now it's simply too late to fix things. The wedding party arrived and the doors were closed while they were out getting oil for their lanterns.
Now that Amazon is in the game, about the only two things HP can realistically do with WebOS that might hope to make money are:
Don't know, but the numbers I've seen for computer users who watch sports are generally in about the 20% range, too.
So what this tells us is that out of 115 million TV households, about 5.3 million households (average; 7.751 million viewers on average; source: ESPN MediaZone) were watching sports that day. That's only 4.6% of TV households, and probably somewhere around 15-20% of all the TVs that were turned on at the time (though that's just a guess based on typical Saturday evening viewing numbers; I can't find the share numbers, which are the statistic you actually need for these purposes).
In truth, I think the total number of folks who watch sports is a bit higher than that—somewhere around 25-30% of TV viewers who watch sports at least occasionally, with probably 10-15% who watch sports on a regular basis (daily or weekly). It's definitely nowhere near half, and it isn't dramatically more popular than any other major category of content (e.g. drama, news, etc.).
Depends on whether you really mean viewers or simply the number of people who are willing to pay extra money for the ability to view it when they want to do so.
If SyFy (new name; ugh) were provided a la carte, the sorts of folks who watch pro wrestling would probably not want to pay the extra fee for a sci-fi channel just to watch one wrestling show per week, which means that it would go back to being a sci-fi channel instead of burning some of its hours on unrelated mass-market crap.
I don't think it would fold unless they found that they couldn't make enough money off of ad revenue and subscriber revenue to cover their costs, which doesn't seem very likely to me. What seems likely is that the number of subscribers would drop to about half its current levels, and the per-subscriber cost would double, and they would break even, while going back to being a channel that sci-fi fans actually want to watch instead of one that they cringe about.
You have to have multiple drives in a RAFD array....
That would assume, however, that they actually want to improve things.... :-)
The problem is that it's relatively easy to conclude that a trademark is descriptive. It's relatively hard, unless you are an expert in a very narrow field, to cut through the B.S. of a typical patent, figure out what it is really supposed to cover, and realize that IBM already did it back in 1963.
I'm really hoping for a pony. And unicorns. Just saying.
Really? Yikes. That's just poor design. Even my $25 DVD player has a backup firmware zone so that there is always one known good copy of the data. I would have assumed that a solid state drive would keep at least one previous copy of something as critical as its page mapping tables....
Oh, and the best part is that you'll never see it coming.