Range is more interesting for a multibutton trackball because you can use it as a controller to do complex tasks like starting and stopping recording/playback in a DAW from across the room... if it worked. I eventually gave up and bought a TranzPort....
I would think that you would merely need a random one-time pad that is as long as the data you are trying to encrypt. I predict the next evolution in encryption (at least for people who are really, really paranoid) will involve 256GB flash sticks containing random one-time pad data the size of your HD (possibly encrypted), and replaced with new random data every time you write a block. Both data sets in isolation should appear to have very little order to them, but when combined, would suddenly be data.
Besides, unless you are talking about something seriously bad in your encrypted data, even if you are doing something illegal, it probably just has to remain hidden past the statute of limitations. If you're encrypting information about where you hid the body... well, then, you're screwed, but it should be pretty obvious to anybody on Slashdot that today's crypto will probably not remain unbreakable for the rest of your life....
That's just sloppiness, then, if being undetectable is a goal. There's nothing preventing them from adding N pad bytes to the end of the file where N is some random number from 0-511....
I, too have experienced severe range problems, in my case with a Kensington wireless trackball. It often has communication problems even at a mere three or four feet from the receiver (line-of-sight). By contrast, my MacBook can see my iPhone via Bluetooth from almost 28 feet line-of-sight. There's just no comparison. Maybe some of the newer non-Bluetooth wireless devices are less awful, but based on what I've seen with this one, it's Bluetooth or bust for me.
IMHO, it's a lot easier to just do it the way we used to do it. Put the content in a table and use background images for the border. Tile the non-corner pieces in the appropriate direction using background-repeat.
I would argue that the current sad state of the sewing machine industry is a direct result of the "solution" to those patents. If there were fewer patents, imagine how much better these things could be. Instead, there is negligible innovation. There are basically only a couple of companies that make them, and the products are crap and getting worse by the year. They jam constantly, the work needed to thread the needle through the assembly is insanely complicated, the work needed to replace the bobbin underneath is a nightmare, etc. Unfortunately, everybody who could have come up with a better design was thwarted by the Sewing Machine Combination you speak of, and the result is that the entire industry converged to a single bad design that hasn't evolved significantly ever since.
By now, we should have sewing machines that use high end robotics to place the stitch in exactly the right place every time, that hold the thread out of the way for you, that detect jams and shut off instantly, that don't jam constantly, that don't tear the material, etc. Instead, we're stuck with sewing machines that apart from electric motors and some simple stitch pattern functionality are very nearly the same fundamental designs as those a hundred years ago or more. The pace of their evolution is positively glacial by comparison with most technology areas.
Just to share what little additional (potential) insight I may have: I have a couple friends from Mexico who go to school with me. They told me that, in Mexico, people wait until they are very, very sick in order to seek medical care.
For young people, that attitude is doubly true, which further supports the theory that this may peter out in the medium to long term and become more like the seasonal flu (but out of season) at least in terms of its pathogenicity.
IMHO, it is several months too early to definitively conclude that this attacks healthy people harder, whether by cytokine storm or otherwise. Right now, all the people getting hit are young people because this is the very first wave of the illness. People who are most mobile and most social are most likely to be exposed first, so that's who we're seeing getting sick right now.
Almost all the people in the U.S. who have gotten sick are schoolchildren, but that's because they are the most mobile, once again. If you look at that in isolation, you might erroneously conclude that school-aged people in the U.S. are more vulnerable, when in reality, they were merely the first to be exposed.
Only when you look at the data over a long period of time in aggregate can you say for certain that it hits younger people harder. In a few months, if the pattern holds, then we know this resembles bird flu in its behavior. Initially, though, it could just as easily be blamed on mobility, greater probability of living alone (and not seeking health care early enough), or any number of other causes that have nothing (directly) to do with age.
The more interesting question, IMHO, is why there have been no U.S. deaths yet except for a small Mexican infant visiting this country. There are several possibilities:
selection bias---often during the early stages of an outbreak, only the most serious cases get noticed because people ignore a mild case of flu. If only a few percent of all the swine flu cases in Mexico were actually reported, the numbers make a lot more sense.
better medical care---Mexico did have shortages of flu medications initially, and this may have cost lives.
better sanitation---Mexico has many areas with poor sanitation. People in those areas could easily experience much greater bacterial exposure there than they might experience in other places. Since deaths among young people from flu are generally caused by secondary bacterial infections, this could increase the risk significantly.
better nutrition---Mexico has a much larger percentage of population living below the poverty line. Poor nutrition can contribute significantly to viral susceptibility.
surprise---Initially, people didn't expect this sort of outbreak and this were less likely to treat this as a serious disease. Delayed treatment can sometimes make the difference between life and death.
genetic immunity---Although most people these days are mutts genetically, Hispanic people do tend to have significantly greater genes from Spanish and Aboriginal American peoples than, for example, your average Caucasian does. Much as some descendants of plague survivors show immunity to HIV, it may be that some virus(es) that people were exposed to hundreds of years ago may have weeded out people with greater susceptibility to this virus in the ancestors of Caucasian populations, but not in the ancestors of Hispanic populations
false positives---The number of swine flu confirmed deaths seems to be dropping. The latest I heard was 8, down from 20 two days ago. It is very possible that the tests initially used to determine the cause of death were wrong. It is also very possible that the person was exposed to swine flu but was sick from something else entirely. For example, somebody might get Ebola and on his/her death bed, might get exposed to swine flu. Guess which one killed that person....
It's way too early to say much about this so far. Right now, there's a lot of speculation and precious little accurate data.
The recent Inspector Gadget movie was by Disney. The original series was by DIC Entertainment, which these days is also a wholly owned property of Disney. So unless WB managed to weasel a deal for rights to remix it, I think it is pretty safe to say they don't own it.
That said, I think it would be rather funny if it turned out it was an unlicensed remix and Disney filed an amicus brief on the side of Lessig....:-D
In that sense, it really is more like poker than strict investment. In an investment, I make money if you make money. In poker, I make money if I can successfully read the other players at the table and act accordingly--even if I don't necessarily have the best hand.
I think you're giving the stock market too much credit. It's not investment at all, at least by the traditional definition. When you buy common stock, if that company files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy (restructuring), your stock becomes worthless. In short, for a small cash outlay, any company (or at least any company in debt) that wants to shed all their liability to the stockholders can do so. You are not buying a portion of a company. You are buying a piece of paper with no intrinsic value. It's monopoly money.
The only way you get money out of stock is if either A. the company buys back the stock, B. the company dissolves and distributes its assets, C. the company does a distribution of dividends, or D. you find somebody else willing to buy that piece of paper. In practice, A. never happens unless the company is in financial trouble and is doing a reverse split to remain on the market. Similarly, B. also almost never happens, and if it does, you will always get far, far less than the market value of the stock. Thus, for companies that pay no dividends, there is no real chance of making money in the stock market that doesn't require somebody else buying in for more money. As a result, the market only really grows significantly when more people buy into it (or when existing investors decide to invest more). Thus, ignoring dividends, the market is fundamentally bounded. In short, It's basically the world's biggest Ponzi scheme.
You'd like to hope that the majority of investment is occurring by the companies themselves, and that this pushes the markets enough to be viable, but that hope is every bit as much of a gamble as any other online gambling scheme....
Of the software I've obtained in the past five years, the only ones I've gotten on physical media have been Mac OS X DVDs and Adobe products, and only because it is so large and thus hard to back it up. Everything else has been a download. And Im not at all atypical in that regard. With reasonable backup technology, the need for buying software is diminishing.
I still use DVDs for movies, but I haven't bought a physical CD in about six years. The only reasons I buy physical DVDs are the bonus features and the price. For first-run movies, the prices are comparable, but for older movies, DVDs tend to be much cheaper than downloads. When those two things change (and I suspect they eventually will), I won't buy DVDs anymore, either. Again, though, we need something better for backups than what we currently have.
And no, I do not have a MacBook Air, but my reasons for not buying one have nothing to do with lack of an optical drive and everything to do with my substantial dependence on FireWire.
Nah. Democrats don't fear Republicans because they are in no danger of becoming Republicans. Humans tend to fear two things: that which threatens to destroy them---external threats to their existence---and that which threatens to consume them---their own inner desires. Democrats have no reason to destroy the Republicans. In Star Trek terms, "Without the darkness, how would we recognize the light?" Without the Republicans, there would be no overwhelming reason to vote for a Democrat, and the two party system would evolve into a largely party-free system. Nor are the Democrats in any danger of becoming Republicans, for basically the same reason.
When someone bashes out of hatred or fear, obvious political posturing aside, you have to carefully consider whether they fear out of a sense of self-preservation or a sense of self-deprecation. For example, the biggest gay bashers seem to almost invariably end up getting caught with their pants down, so to speak. Draw your own conclusions about those who irrationally fear pedophiles, rednecks, low IQ Presidents, and terrorists. It certainly gives new meaning to the words "think of the children" when you look at it that way....
Yes, and like all optical storage in the past, by the time it reaches price parity with hard drives, it will take so many of them to back up a single hard drive that it will be near useless. Remember when DVD-R seemed like it had promise? Well by the time I could afford to do a backup of my collection of HDs, I had to order two spools of a hundred to do it. BD-R is still only down to about $0.18/gig (and double that if you want 50 GB discs), so it still has to drop in half to reach parity, but the sweet spot for hard drives is 1TB, and it would take 40 of the 25 GB discs to back up one drive. That makes it very nearly useless for backups because you can't automate dozens of disc changes. So it still hasn't reached price parity and it is already way, way beyond impractical as a backup medium.
For optical media to really matter to me, burners would need to be available at consumer prices this year so that they would be starting to make their way into mainstream computers by two years from now. That way it will only take 4-8 discs to back up an average hard drive by the time the burners are broadly available. Unfortunately, this is still in the laboratory stage, which means that it probably won't be in consumers' hands for at least five years. Assuming HD density continues to increase at somewhere approaching current levels, this will likely take over a hundred discs to back up a typical hard drive by the time consumers get it, making it even farther behind than Blu-Ray is today, and nearly as bad as DVDs are today. And ten cents a gig would be okay right now. By five years from now, that will be about 50 times more expensive per gig than hard drives, so roughly on par with Blu-Ray today cost-wise. Thus, by the time this comes out, the cost to back up a typical hard drive with this technology will be about 2.5x more expensive than it is today using Blu-Ray.
Unless something changes fairly dramatically, I'd expect flash to make optical media completely obsolete within about five years. Optical media is already impractical for backups, for carrying around data with you, etc. and Internet downloads are rapidly becoming a viable replacement for physical media for movies and music. It's a shame; optical seemed like it had a lot of potential two decades ago, but the industry got way behind and can't seem to catch up. If anything, they seem to be rapidly falling farther behind.
A 500W panel produces 500W continuously when in full sunlight. It thus produces 500 Watt-hours every hour. A 100 MW plant produces 100MWh / hour. If you think of a watt-hour as just being multiplication of two units, it all makes sense---the "hour" part cancels out when you look at it "per hour", so 100 MW*hour/hour = 100 MW.
So a 100MW plant might, for example produce maybe 400-500 MWh of power per day assuming the equivalent of 4-5 full sun hours at that location, or 146-182.5 GWh per year.
Just a follow-on, that study of pigs with ARDS showed that cimetidine (Tagamet) has a significant effect, but the best efficacy involved combining it with diphenhydramine (Benadryl) and Ibuprofen (Advil). For you folks playing at home, the allergy medication is an H1 histamine blocker, the heartburn medicine is an H2 histamine blocker, and Ibuprofen reduces inflammation.
I think it is rather fascinating to read about such beneficial side effects in these three common over-the-counter medications.:-)
One scary thought: if the current working theory is correct---if the fatality rate is higher than normal due to cytokine storms in otherwise healthy individuals---then a lot of common flu treatments (e.g. elderberry extracts) have the potential to make things worse instead of better. Of course, until this particular strain is isolated and somebody does (at minimum) tests in lab mice with this strain and such an extract, no one can really say for certain. This is more speculation than anything else.
There are, however, a couple of commonly available OTC products that might well reduce the cytokine storm significantly, and with relatively few/minor side effects and drug interactions. I'd be curious to hear the thoughts of someone with a medical background on this subject after reading the relevant studies. Here are the two that seem the most promising to me:
Cimetidine (Tagamet) boosts proinflammatory cytokines, so for ordinary flu it would make you get well sooner. More interestingly, it also suppresses the anti-inflammatory cytokines. I'm not completely clear on the details, but I get the impression that a cytokine storm involves excessive levels of both pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines. I don't know what research has been done in this area, but at least one study seems to corroborate that theory:
I have no way to guess whether this would be true for other causes of ARDS, though.
Curcumin (a Turmeric extract) also inhibits TNF (in large doses) and may have similar benefits in preventing or diminishing a cytokine storm. More info here:
No, when you have an open source app used by some hospitals, it will be trivial for closed source companies to reverse engineer the open formats, but also trivial for them to write apps that import data from that format but don't support exporting data... just like proprietary app vendors have done with dozens of other open standards in the past. Without laws that require hospitals to use software that provides both import and export support for open standards, we aren't really any better off than we are now.
In fact, if anything, we'll be in a worse position if this law pushes open source without mandatory input and output support for open data interchange standards. RIght now, when a patient moves from one hospital to another, big and small hospitals are inconvenienced almost equally. With open source at the smaller hospitals, the bigger hospitals would be able to quickly import data when they take patients away from the smaller hospitals, but the reverse might not be true. This would leave the smaller hospitals at a rather significant competitive disadvantage, leading to further monopolization of the health care industry, which would lead to higher prices for consumers and poorer quality of service....
I'm glad you pointed that out. This decision is legally indefensible and utterly inexcusable. One of the key requirements for something being a trade secret is that it must, in fact, still be a secret. Once knowledge enters into public knowledge through reverse engineering, it is no longer secret, and is no longer legally eligible for trade secret protection.
The disturbing thing is that this is a critical case as far as defining the boundaries for the DMCA and reverse engineering, fair use rights, etc., but because those devious lawyers from the DVD CCA got their way, a significant portion of this important case will be stricken from the public record. This is, of course, what they want. This has nothing to do with protecting any trade secrets and everything to do with hiding their smoke and mirrors from licensees in the hope that they'll keep buying the snake oil^W^WDRM.
Unfortunately, sealing a case like this also does a very serious disservice to the public in this case, and I hope that the EFF and other organizations are taking steps to get this case unsealed again. It is the American people's right to know what is going on behind closed doors in cases dealing with our fundamental fair use rights.
I'll believe it when I see it. Until we actually see Medicare requiring that all patient records be stored in a standardized, patent-free, open interchange format, we're going to have the same mess we do now, only in a few years, some of those messes will be open source messes.
Simple. Dell's warranty is fundamentally flawed. IANAL, but even I was able to spot three parts of their warranty that seem to be legally noncompliant in a quick one minute skim. It's pretty sad, really.
Products are warranted based on date of manufacture, not date of customer sale. From their warranty info:
The warranty period for a Product is a specified, fixed period commencing on the original date of shipment from Dell to the Purchaser of the Product.
If I read that correctly, then when Dell sold it to the original reseller, the warranty began. I'm not certain, but such a warranty period probably runs afoul of Magnuson-Moss. At least in my mind, that clearly qualifies as a deceptive warranty term---a warranty that appears to provide coverage, but does not actually provide any coverage in some cases. It would be nice for some big company like Dell to get the crap sued out of them to set a precedent against warranty periods that start on the date of manufacture. It would be somewhat ironic if a dirtbag company like TigerDirect ended up being on the right side of such a suit, though.:-)
Dell explicitly doesn't extend product warranties if they repair the machine, but IIRC, California law requires them to extend the warranty for every day the product is out of the customer's hands.
IIRC, California law requires that all new consumer electronics products have a minimum of a 90 day warranty from when the customer receives the product. There are a number of products that would run short by several days, depending on shipping time, and in the case of products sold through a reseller like Tiger Direct, the warranty could actually be zero....
I think it's long past time for consumers to revolt against such abusive warranties. Warranties should, by law, start when the consumer receives the product. Anything else is unethical, and quite probably illegal.
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Well, I'm not sure about #1....
Range is more interesting for a multibutton trackball because you can use it as a controller to do complex tasks like starting and stopping recording/playback in a DAW from across the room... if it worked. I eventually gave up and bought a TranzPort....
The difference is that Colbert is actively mocking his stage persona.... Rush Limbaugh, by contrast was always just a pig.
Hey! Maybe we could call it the Limbaugh Flu....
I would think that you would merely need a random one-time pad that is as long as the data you are trying to encrypt. I predict the next evolution in encryption (at least for people who are really, really paranoid) will involve 256GB flash sticks containing random one-time pad data the size of your HD (possibly encrypted), and replaced with new random data every time you write a block. Both data sets in isolation should appear to have very little order to them, but when combined, would suddenly be data.
Besides, unless you are talking about something seriously bad in your encrypted data, even if you are doing something illegal, it probably just has to remain hidden past the statute of limitations. If you're encrypting information about where you hid the body... well, then, you're screwed, but it should be pretty obvious to anybody on Slashdot that today's crypto will probably not remain unbreakable for the rest of your life....
That's just sloppiness, then, if being undetectable is a goal. There's nothing preventing them from adding N pad bytes to the end of the file where N is some random number from 0-511....
I, too have experienced severe range problems, in my case with a Kensington wireless trackball. It often has communication problems even at a mere three or four feet from the receiver (line-of-sight). By contrast, my MacBook can see my iPhone via Bluetooth from almost 28 feet line-of-sight. There's just no comparison. Maybe some of the newer non-Bluetooth wireless devices are less awful, but based on what I've seen with this one, it's Bluetooth or bust for me.
IMHO, it's a lot easier to just do it the way we used to do it. Put the content in a table and use background images for the border. Tile the non-corner pieces in the appropriate direction using background-repeat.
I would argue that the current sad state of the sewing machine industry is a direct result of the "solution" to those patents. If there were fewer patents, imagine how much better these things could be. Instead, there is negligible innovation. There are basically only a couple of companies that make them, and the products are crap and getting worse by the year. They jam constantly, the work needed to thread the needle through the assembly is insanely complicated, the work needed to replace the bobbin underneath is a nightmare, etc. Unfortunately, everybody who could have come up with a better design was thwarted by the Sewing Machine Combination you speak of, and the result is that the entire industry converged to a single bad design that hasn't evolved significantly ever since.
By now, we should have sewing machines that use high end robotics to place the stitch in exactly the right place every time, that hold the thread out of the way for you, that detect jams and shut off instantly, that don't jam constantly, that don't tear the material, etc. Instead, we're stuck with sewing machines that apart from electric motors and some simple stitch pattern functionality are very nearly the same fundamental designs as those a hundred years ago or more. The pace of their evolution is positively glacial by comparison with most technology areas.
For young people, that attitude is doubly true, which further supports the theory that this may peter out in the medium to long term and become more like the seasonal flu (but out of season) at least in terms of its pathogenicity.
IMHO, it is several months too early to definitively conclude that this attacks healthy people harder, whether by cytokine storm or otherwise. Right now, all the people getting hit are young people because this is the very first wave of the illness. People who are most mobile and most social are most likely to be exposed first, so that's who we're seeing getting sick right now.
Almost all the people in the U.S. who have gotten sick are schoolchildren, but that's because they are the most mobile, once again. If you look at that in isolation, you might erroneously conclude that school-aged people in the U.S. are more vulnerable, when in reality, they were merely the first to be exposed.
Only when you look at the data over a long period of time in aggregate can you say for certain that it hits younger people harder. In a few months, if the pattern holds, then we know this resembles bird flu in its behavior. Initially, though, it could just as easily be blamed on mobility, greater probability of living alone (and not seeking health care early enough), or any number of other causes that have nothing (directly) to do with age.
The more interesting question, IMHO, is why there have been no U.S. deaths yet except for a small Mexican infant visiting this country. There are several possibilities:
It's way too early to say much about this so far. Right now, there's a lot of speculation and precious little accurate data.
The recent Inspector Gadget movie was by Disney. The original series was by DIC Entertainment, which these days is also a wholly owned property of Disney. So unless WB managed to weasel a deal for rights to remix it, I think it is pretty safe to say they don't own it.
That said, I think it would be rather funny if it turned out it was an unlicensed remix and Disney filed an amicus brief on the side of Lessig.... :-D
I think you're giving the stock market too much credit. It's not investment at all, at least by the traditional definition. When you buy common stock, if that company files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy (restructuring), your stock becomes worthless. In short, for a small cash outlay, any company (or at least any company in debt) that wants to shed all their liability to the stockholders can do so. You are not buying a portion of a company. You are buying a piece of paper with no intrinsic value. It's monopoly money.
The only way you get money out of stock is if either A. the company buys back the stock, B. the company dissolves and distributes its assets, C. the company does a distribution of dividends, or D. you find somebody else willing to buy that piece of paper. In practice, A. never happens unless the company is in financial trouble and is doing a reverse split to remain on the market. Similarly, B. also almost never happens, and if it does, you will always get far, far less than the market value of the stock. Thus, for companies that pay no dividends, there is no real chance of making money in the stock market that doesn't require somebody else buying in for more money. As a result, the market only really grows significantly when more people buy into it (or when existing investors decide to invest more). Thus, ignoring dividends, the market is fundamentally bounded. In short, It's basically the world's biggest Ponzi scheme.
You'd like to hope that the majority of investment is occurring by the companies themselves, and that this pushes the markets enough to be viable, but that hope is every bit as much of a gamble as any other online gambling scheme....
Of the software I've obtained in the past five years, the only ones I've gotten on physical media have been Mac OS X DVDs and Adobe products, and only because it is so large and thus hard to back it up. Everything else has been a download. And Im not at all atypical in that regard. With reasonable backup technology, the need for buying software is diminishing.
I still use DVDs for movies, but I haven't bought a physical CD in about six years. The only reasons I buy physical DVDs are the bonus features and the price. For first-run movies, the prices are comparable, but for older movies, DVDs tend to be much cheaper than downloads. When those two things change (and I suspect they eventually will), I won't buy DVDs anymore, either. Again, though, we need something better for backups than what we currently have.
And no, I do not have a MacBook Air, but my reasons for not buying one have nothing to do with lack of an optical drive and everything to do with my substantial dependence on FireWire.
It's a good thing. She'd probably kick your butt. Now fighting his grammar....
Nah. Democrats don't fear Republicans because they are in no danger of becoming Republicans. Humans tend to fear two things: that which threatens to destroy them---external threats to their existence---and that which threatens to consume them---their own inner desires. Democrats have no reason to destroy the Republicans. In Star Trek terms, "Without the darkness, how would we recognize the light?" Without the Republicans, there would be no overwhelming reason to vote for a Democrat, and the two party system would evolve into a largely party-free system. Nor are the Democrats in any danger of becoming Republicans, for basically the same reason.
When someone bashes out of hatred or fear, obvious political posturing aside, you have to carefully consider whether they fear out of a sense of self-preservation or a sense of self-deprecation. For example, the biggest gay bashers seem to almost invariably end up getting caught with their pants down, so to speak. Draw your own conclusions about those who irrationally fear pedophiles, rednecks, low IQ Presidents, and terrorists. It certainly gives new meaning to the words "think of the children" when you look at it that way....
Yes, and like all optical storage in the past, by the time it reaches price parity with hard drives, it will take so many of them to back up a single hard drive that it will be near useless. Remember when DVD-R seemed like it had promise? Well by the time I could afford to do a backup of my collection of HDs, I had to order two spools of a hundred to do it. BD-R is still only down to about $0.18/gig (and double that if you want 50 GB discs), so it still has to drop in half to reach parity, but the sweet spot for hard drives is 1TB, and it would take 40 of the 25 GB discs to back up one drive. That makes it very nearly useless for backups because you can't automate dozens of disc changes. So it still hasn't reached price parity and it is already way, way beyond impractical as a backup medium.
For optical media to really matter to me, burners would need to be available at consumer prices this year so that they would be starting to make their way into mainstream computers by two years from now. That way it will only take 4-8 discs to back up an average hard drive by the time the burners are broadly available. Unfortunately, this is still in the laboratory stage, which means that it probably won't be in consumers' hands for at least five years. Assuming HD density continues to increase at somewhere approaching current levels, this will likely take over a hundred discs to back up a typical hard drive by the time consumers get it, making it even farther behind than Blu-Ray is today, and nearly as bad as DVDs are today. And ten cents a gig would be okay right now. By five years from now, that will be about 50 times more expensive per gig than hard drives, so roughly on par with Blu-Ray today cost-wise. Thus, by the time this comes out, the cost to back up a typical hard drive with this technology will be about 2.5x more expensive than it is today using Blu-Ray.
Unless something changes fairly dramatically, I'd expect flash to make optical media completely obsolete within about five years. Optical media is already impractical for backups, for carrying around data with you, etc. and Internet downloads are rapidly becoming a viable replacement for physical media for movies and music. It's a shame; optical seemed like it had a lot of potential two decades ago, but the industry got way behind and can't seem to catch up. If anything, they seem to be rapidly falling farther behind.
A 500W panel produces 500W continuously when in full sunlight. It thus produces 500 Watt-hours every hour. A 100 MW plant produces 100MWh / hour. If you think of a watt-hour as just being multiplication of two units, it all makes sense---the "hour" part cancels out when you look at it "per hour", so 100 MW*hour/hour = 100 MW.
So a 100MW plant might, for example produce maybe 400-500 MWh of power per day assuming the equivalent of 4-5 full sun hours at that location, or 146-182.5 GWh per year.
Just a follow-on, that study of pigs with ARDS showed that cimetidine (Tagamet) has a significant effect, but the best efficacy involved combining it with diphenhydramine (Benadryl) and Ibuprofen (Advil). For you folks playing at home, the allergy medication is an H1 histamine blocker, the heartburn medicine is an H2 histamine blocker, and Ibuprofen reduces inflammation.
I think it is rather fascinating to read about such beneficial side effects in these three common over-the-counter medications. :-)
One scary thought: if the current working theory is correct---if the fatality rate is higher than normal due to cytokine storms in otherwise healthy individuals---then a lot of common flu treatments (e.g. elderberry extracts) have the potential to make things worse instead of better. Of course, until this particular strain is isolated and somebody does (at minimum) tests in lab mice with this strain and such an extract, no one can really say for certain. This is more speculation than anything else.
There are, however, a couple of commonly available OTC products that might well reduce the cytokine storm significantly, and with relatively few/minor side effects and drug interactions. I'd be curious to hear the thoughts of someone with a medical background on this subject after reading the relevant studies. Here are the two that seem the most promising to me:
Cimetidine (Tagamet) boosts proinflammatory cytokines, so for ordinary flu it would make you get well sooner. More interestingly, it also suppresses the anti-inflammatory cytokines. I'm not completely clear on the details, but I get the impression that a cytokine storm involves excessive levels of both pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines. I don't know what research has been done in this area, but at least one study seems to corroborate that theory:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3112984
I have no way to guess whether this would be true for other causes of ARDS, though.
Curcumin (a Turmeric extract) also inhibits TNF (in large doses) and may have similar benefits in preventing or diminishing a cytokine storm. More info here:
http://www.flutrackers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6943
Ironically, curcumin diminishes the effectiveness of cimetidine (an acid reducer) by increasing stomach acid.... :-)
Thoughts?
No, when you have an open source app used by some hospitals, it will be trivial for closed source companies to reverse engineer the open formats, but also trivial for them to write apps that import data from that format but don't support exporting data... just like proprietary app vendors have done with dozens of other open standards in the past. Without laws that require hospitals to use software that provides both import and export support for open standards, we aren't really any better off than we are now.
In fact, if anything, we'll be in a worse position if this law pushes open source without mandatory input and output support for open data interchange standards. RIght now, when a patient moves from one hospital to another, big and small hospitals are inconvenienced almost equally. With open source at the smaller hospitals, the bigger hospitals would be able to quickly import data when they take patients away from the smaller hospitals, but the reverse might not be true. This would leave the smaller hospitals at a rather significant competitive disadvantage, leading to further monopolization of the health care industry, which would lead to higher prices for consumers and poorer quality of service....
I'm glad you pointed that out. This decision is legally indefensible and utterly inexcusable. One of the key requirements for something being a trade secret is that it must, in fact, still be a secret. Once knowledge enters into public knowledge through reverse engineering, it is no longer secret, and is no longer legally eligible for trade secret protection.
The disturbing thing is that this is a critical case as far as defining the boundaries for the DMCA and reverse engineering, fair use rights, etc., but because those devious lawyers from the DVD CCA got their way, a significant portion of this important case will be stricken from the public record. This is, of course, what they want. This has nothing to do with protecting any trade secrets and everything to do with hiding their smoke and mirrors from licensees in the hope that they'll keep buying the snake oil^W^WDRM.
Unfortunately, sealing a case like this also does a very serious disservice to the public in this case, and I hope that the EFF and other organizations are taking steps to get this case unsealed again. It is the American people's right to know what is going on behind closed doors in cases dealing with our fundamental fair use rights.
I'll believe it when I see it. Until we actually see Medicare requiring that all patient records be stored in a standardized, patent-free, open interchange format, we're going to have the same mess we do now, only in a few years, some of those messes will be open source messes.
No, like this. (Skip to 2 minutes and 5 seconds in.)
Simple. Dell's warranty is fundamentally flawed. IANAL, but even I was able to spot three parts of their warranty that seem to be legally noncompliant in a quick one minute skim. It's pretty sad, really.
Products are warranted based on date of manufacture, not date of customer sale. From their warranty info:
If I read that correctly, then when Dell sold it to the original reseller, the warranty began. I'm not certain, but such a warranty period probably runs afoul of Magnuson-Moss. At least in my mind, that clearly qualifies as a deceptive warranty term---a warranty that appears to provide coverage, but does not actually provide any coverage in some cases. It would be nice for some big company like Dell to get the crap sued out of them to set a precedent against warranty periods that start on the date of manufacture. It would be somewhat ironic if a dirtbag company like TigerDirect ended up being on the right side of such a suit, though. :-)
Dell explicitly doesn't extend product warranties if they repair the machine, but IIRC, California law requires them to extend the warranty for every day the product is out of the customer's hands.
IIRC, California law requires that all new consumer electronics products have a minimum of a 90 day warranty from when the customer receives the product. There are a number of products that would run short by several days, depending on shipping time, and in the case of products sold through a reseller like Tiger Direct, the warranty could actually be zero....
I think it's long past time for consumers to revolt against such abusive warranties. Warranties should, by law, start when the consumer receives the product. Anything else is unethical, and quite probably illegal.
There's an obligatory Futurama line here. I can just feel it.
I think in this case it ends with "You know what, forget the hookers... and the bingo."