What is a bookseller's list or a library catalog if it is not "linking to copyrighted material"? What is an advertisement for a book that contains extracts or information about the contents if it is not a derivative work?
The ultimate revenge of the Internet would indeed be to bar all access to controlled copyright material, and all references to and advertisements for the same. Leave nothing available but material in the public domain, copyleft and suchlike. Such an Internet would be more useful than the present one. No advertisements for anything other than 3D solid products. Quicker and easier search for real information in the public domain, like that from NASA and the NIH. Kids downloading Mozart and Bach recordings by amateur orchestras.
First, the article is mainly about whether the breakup was ultimately caused by over-reliance on automation leaving pilots insufficiently equipped to handle emergencies in manual mode. This business of excessive automation is getting general. As a simple example, my car has front and rear parking sensors. The other day I was parking in a tight space when suddenly I remembered I was in someone else's car, just a few inches from a steel barrier. My parking habits are now quite conditioned to the bleep patterns from front and rear, and switching back to manual mode slowed me right down. On the other hand, I can moor my boat, entirely by eye and feel, in a fifteen-knot sidewind without a bow thruster. It's purely a matter of experience and conditioning.
Second, the US announcement of the two computer failures, neither of which caused an accident, presumably has nothing at all to do with Boeing's recent embarrassment over continuing delays and cancellations to the Dreamliner, and a desire to damage Airbus?
Hit yourself over the head with the complete works of Aristotle till you get the message: There is NO teleology! The human race does not have a purpose. A C Clarke's Childhood's End is just a science fiction novel. Unless you have some weird theology that says that some God who created the Universe did so in order for someone genetically similar to you to go to the Moon, your statement is nonsense. Civilisations rise and fall. While they are in being, people live in them. If they enjoy it, good. But if we never go to the Moon, will that diminish what was done by Caesar or Alexander, Newton or Galileo? Of course not. Hint-they're all dead and nothing anyone can do will affect them in the slightest.
It's amazing how people who think they are modern can adopt ways of thinking that belong with Ozymandias (Shelley - check it out.)
I agree with everything you say, but the younger generation doesn't want to hear it. It's like the "get off the Earth" nutjobs, who think that because the Earth might have its population wiped out, it's worth spending a large proportion of our GDP to send people to inhospitable planets where the colonies are many times more likely to be wiped out. To them I say, read the early history of the colonisation of the US and Australia, and then think about repeating that, going somewhere with NO human-usable natural resources and no prospect of early resupply if something goes wrong. I bet Australopithecus didn't think "We'd better get out of Africa before we're hit by a comet, otherwise Homo Sapiens Sapiens might go extinct". In 20 years time, when hopefully some of these people have actually been involved in some fair size projects, they may start to get a clue.
As for Jane Q. Public, Aldrin may have a doctorate in orbital mechanics. The only person with an equivalent qualification I know (sometime expert on Lagrange points, has worked for NASA) remarked to me not long ago that, going through his old papers, he found his thesis and couldn't understand it. And he's much younger than Aldrin. You cannot use someone's qualifications as a guide to current expertise once they haven't actually been working in the field even for 10 years.
An eagle that can pick up Hobbits at the extreme of its range and return them should be able to manage a magic ring or two on its own. If Lord of the Rings was science fiction, Frodo and the hobbits would have distracted the Nazgul while the eagles disposed of the Ring, it would have been one volume, and I wouldn't have wasted two weeks reading it all when I was 15.
Otherwise I would mod this up. I agree. As soon as I read the article, I found a surprising number of things fell into place. Anecdotally, I have to say this. I am normally handed, and I am fairly deaf in my left ear, since a few years old. I am also regarded by my family as being the unemotional and logical one who often misses when people are arguing from emotion not logic. When I phone my family, I use the left ear. I have occasionally wondered why I do this since there was no apparently rational explanation. But of course, when phoning family the emotional content is what is important.
When I was at school, two kids built a working hydrogen/oxygen fuel cell as part of their Physics A level project- actually working, not a picture. That was shortly before the first moon landing, forty years ago.
It's turned out to be incredibly hard to commercialise fuel cells. Algal conversion is much closer to commercialisation, but it's going to take a long time to scale.
So yes it's good that kids are interested, but no, getting from picture to income is hard. I would be more impressed if he had actually been able to build an algal digester in the lab using Quickfit glassware, because then he would have some notion of the difference between idea and reality.
The Allies did not win WW2 in the West. The Soviet Union did. The invasion of Normandy was of psychological and political importance, the Allied advance kept the Soviet Union out of Italy, Switzerland and France, and part of Germany, but it was the Eastern and the Pacific wars that defeated Germany and Japan.
My father landed Canadian tanks on Juno on the first day of D-Day, and stayed on as a beach controller when his ship was mined, so he knows a bit about what happened, and I've seen the official statistics while researching the background to his story. There were relatively heavy casualties for the forces deployed, but the total number killed on the Allied side in the entire invasion was almost tactical in scale compared to the German/Soviet battles.
If NASA is still having things made on turret lathes and manual mills by machinists, no wonder everything costs so much. This is \., for Pete's sake. Doesn't anybody know how stuff gets made nowadays? CAD/CAM driven workcenters and CNC lathes is how. They don't care what the dimensions are: a Bridgeport doesn't give any special significance to integer dimensions. Numbers in, cut metal out.
Advanced workcenters machining exotic alloys even have force sensors so they can predict when the tools will need changing, and can identify faults such as incorrectly annealed materials. My guess is that in reality this is about not wanting to have to first replace all the drawings, and then recode all the machining tapes. As I note, the machine doesn't care what system of units it is using; they're just numbers.
The father of a friend of mine ran a radar chain during 1945. The local air base was supposed to send up fighters from time to time, usually with cloud cover, to test the radar, but after a disagreement^X^Xfight between personnel at the two establishments, the air base started sending over Mosquitos, which were undetectable.
The solution, in the best traditions of British espionage, was for one of the officers at the radar base to form a liaison with the chief dispatcher, as a result of which she phoned in whenever a mosquito was sent over.
After this had gone on for a month or two, friend's father phoned the air base commander and suggested that "as we seem to be picking everything up, perhaps you could try sending over some Mosquitos"
Quite simple really when you know how. Remind me again what they call a State where corporations and the Government work in close collaboration, Signors Mussolini and Berlusconi?
You can buy smart phones from many different suppliers. There is no monopoly. A monopoly would only arise if one smartphone had a unique and essential feature that none of the others did. There is nothing in capitalism per se that is against vertical integration. If for instance a carrier bought Nokia, it is conceivable that there would be a competition issue in markets where Nokia had a sufficiently large market share, because of the cost of entry of competitors, but if there were several well established suppliers with broadly similar market shares, this would not be anti-competitive.
Since in this case (Palm pre) there are competitors from just about every other manufacturer, and it is a new product, it is not an issue.
The penalty for perjury should in no way be connected to the penalty for the actual case. One is a criminal offense, the other is civil. If the defendant is shown to have lied under oath, there should be a separate trial.
Having said this, in the UK a judge in a civil trial would be more likely just to rule that as the defendant had lied under oath, the weight of the other evidence for the defendant should be largely discounted.
It's the American concept of punitive damages that is wrong. It's a kind of lynch law. The question should be, why do the US courts and juries have this demented desire to punish in civil trials, rather than award what is just? Did the US judicial system (which is based in English common law) fail to adopt the bit about justice and equity?
It's the same problem in the US legal system that now is starting to infest other legal systems: the idea that the rights of a corporation take precedence over the rights of an individual, and that the scale of litigation and punishment should be related to the turnover of the corporation rather than that of the individual.
As a Brit, I'm aware that my own country's legal system has gone rather downhill over the last 30 years. But the thing that strikes a European most about the US legal system is its cruelty. Punitive damages. Unconvicted defendants for white collar crimes going into court with wire ties binding their wrists. Three strikes and you're out for even a trivial third offense. "Humane" systems of execution where executioners spin out the proceedings for hours. Obviously practice varies greatly across the US States, just as some EU countries (ahem, Greece, ahem) have crap legal systems and others like Germany have good ones. But you only have to look at the outcome of the Pirate Bay case in Sweden, and this one, to see the disproportion involved. The effect of the Pirate Bay case on the European elections (and now a German MEP has defected to the Pirate Party) also shows the different levels of popular tolerance involved.
US citizens need to start growing a backbone. You do not have to support criminal activity to demand that corporations not be allowed to take over and distort the legal system.
I have 300, and I can run the refrigerator, my netbook, the toilet, the central heating and the lights for 48 hours before I have to run the engine to recharge. However, carrying around ten tons of steel hulled boat somewhat defeats the portability of a netbook.
I was privileged to work for years with a really good HR guy. While he was in charge, no strikes, no industrial action, low staff turnover, and the quiet word in our community (this being politically incorrect years ago) was that gay people would never be subject to embarrassing questions if they applied for jobs. When he retired to grow fruit and win all the golf club trophies till they asked him to stop, he was replaced by a typical corporate drone who within six months had managed to lose two expensive wrongful dismissal cases, upset the union to the point of a strike, and cause several of the better managers to look for new jobs. Stuffing HR with idiots who should be fired is actually more expensive than getting a good HR person to work through the process of getting them legally dismissed.
Your English teacher obviously was not a native user of the language.
We say "100 watt bulb", not 100 watts bulb
We say "100 meter sprint"
Old time carpenters had a "three foot rule" not a three feet rule
Cars have a "fifteen gallon tank" or a "60 litre tank"
Porn actors have an "eleven inch penis"
Spot the rule? When specifying a dimension beginning with the quantity, the quantity name is singular (and has been for very many years.) Thus "100 lumen" is correct.
But when the order is different, the grammar changes:
"This bulb is 100 watts"
"I just ran 200 meters to catch the bus"
"This plank is eight feet six inches"
"This tank holds fifteen gallons"
"Six feet ten inches? Forget the six feet, let's talk about the ten inches" (attr. Mae West)
The 8088 (original version) was actually available and had reasonable memory access. The TI 9989 (another option) had a fast, interesting but weird architecture. By the time the 68000 was introduced, the 8086 had been around for a little time and, as a result, was always somewhat ahead down the price and reliability curves. It was also dead easy to lay out motherboards given its simple physical architecture, and important point at the time. From a manufacturing and volume point of view, the 8088 was a logical decision for IBM.
Also, the number of people with 68000 experience was limited. Many, many programmers were familiar with the base 8 bit architectures and could easily convert. This was important for a cheap product which, in its early years, was mainly doing 8-bit character based stuff, while the 68000 found a lot of early use in relatively high-end systems like workstations and laser printers where the more efficient 16-bit operations could shine.
To use the famous car analogy, Ford would not be two vehicle generations ahead had they decided from the outset to use 4 valve per cylinder DOHC fuel injected engines rather than cooking two valve carb engines. They would be a niche manufacturer.
Many peripherals used to be controlled by dedicated bit-slice processors which were faster at instruction execution than the main CPU. However, they had their operating code in ROM, had a limited instruction set, and had very limited memory. In the days when memory was expensive, this was a sensible tradeoff. Many early 8-bit CPUs were simply not fast enough to control a floppy disc drive and do anything else (hence the Commodore solution.)
Try writing a useful program on one of those bit-slice efforts, though, and you would quickly run into a brick wall. Very limited microcode, no assembly language, no developer tools of any kind. The point about the 6502, the Z80, and even the 8088, was that you could write general purpose programs to run on them, execute them and debug them.
By the time general purpose CPUs were powerful enough to run the floppy, control the display and handle the I/O devices at the same time, it no longer made sense to do so because it was more cost effective (in terms of performance) to hand off the functions to dedicated peripherals even in microcomputers.
Back in the good old days we first had computers that were made out of cased modules. Then we made computers out of PC boards that fitted into racks with backplanes. Then (in our case) we combined 3 CPU/memory boards into one chassis, with common fans and PSU, only we were too young and ignorant back in 1981 to know that Marketing had to call it a "blade system".
Is there really any useful purpose to decoding Sumerian clay tablets, or analysing dockyard records from the 18th Century? One of the things that differentiates civilised human beings from all other living things on this planet is that we study history and preserve things from the past. Perhaps it just doesn't need justification, it is part of what we are.
I begin to wonder if scientists release this stuff just to get attention, or because they're waiting to see how badly it will get reported by the media. Yesterday we had crude CGI on the BBC of the Earth and Mars bumping together in a head-on collision like a pair of billiard balls, with almost no context, and big clouds billowing out (at thousands of kilometres per second) exactly as if the Solar System had a dense atmosphere to constrain them.
Is it any wonder the general public doesn't take science seriously nowadays?
You have to extract the dye from the geranium flowers, then use it to build a continuous dye laser which you modulate with the incoming RF signal. The beam is aimed at a very fast response bolometer which provides rectification. Just amplify the signal from a small current through the bolometer to get audio output.
This is an easy project for a 16 year old provided mummy or daddy is a full professor of physics at Stanford.
The information which today is so readily available in digital or electronic form is usually worth exactly what you pay for it. Schools need access to unbiased, objective information that isn't simply being paid for by commercial shills.
If California wasn't basically broke I might believe this hype (not really), but a better solution might be to set up a cost effective textbook publishing operation. Publishing is one of the areas where you are dependent on heavy fixed plant which has well defined operating costs. Therefore, competition can tend to raise prices because of the costs involved in marketing, sales, administration and (ahem) kickbacks, which are multiplied across every entrant. How about competitive tender to write textbooks, and competitive tender to print them? And, when the concept is proven, competitive tender to make them available on-line?
The screen of an iPhone is roughly 1/8 the size of a netbook. The quoted video life is 7 hours. The battery is approx. 5WH. So 1/8 of the screen for 1/3 of the guy's wanted 20 hour life requires 1/4 of the battery of a typical netbook.
In other words, my calculations are roughly correct - to get what he wants in a basic netbook format would need a screen roughly four times more efficient than the one on an iPhone.
Millions of Apple fanboys may be laughing at me, but that's because they don't understand basic physics - and nor do you,low userid or not.
Slashdot Mirror
The ultimate revenge of the Internet would indeed be to bar all access to controlled copyright material, and all references to and advertisements for the same. Leave nothing available but material in the public domain, copyleft and suchlike. Such an Internet would be more useful than the present one. No advertisements for anything other than 3D solid products. Quicker and easier search for real information in the public domain, like that from NASA and the NIH. Kids downloading Mozart and Bach recordings by amateur orchestras.
Thinking about it, I want it.
Second, the US announcement of the two computer failures, neither of which caused an accident, presumably has nothing at all to do with Boeing's recent embarrassment over continuing delays and cancellations to the Dreamliner, and a desire to damage Airbus?
It's amazing how people who think they are modern can adopt ways of thinking that belong with Ozymandias (Shelley - check it out.)
As for Jane Q. Public, Aldrin may have a doctorate in orbital mechanics. The only person with an equivalent qualification I know (sometime expert on Lagrange points, has worked for NASA) remarked to me not long ago that, going through his old papers, he found his thesis and couldn't understand it. And he's much younger than Aldrin. You cannot use someone's qualifications as a guide to current expertise once they haven't actually been working in the field even for 10 years.
An eagle that can pick up Hobbits at the extreme of its range and return them should be able to manage a magic ring or two on its own. If Lord of the Rings was science fiction, Frodo and the hobbits would have distracted the Nazgul while the eagles disposed of the Ring, it would have been one volume, and I wouldn't have wasted two weeks reading it all when I was 15.
Otherwise I would mod this up. I agree. As soon as I read the article, I found a surprising number of things fell into place. Anecdotally, I have to say this. I am normally handed, and I am fairly deaf in my left ear, since a few years old. I am also regarded by my family as being the unemotional and logical one who often misses when people are arguing from emotion not logic. When I phone my family, I use the left ear. I have occasionally wondered why I do this since there was no apparently rational explanation. But of course, when phoning family the emotional content is what is important.
It's turned out to be incredibly hard to commercialise fuel cells. Algal conversion is much closer to commercialisation, but it's going to take a long time to scale.
So yes it's good that kids are interested, but no, getting from picture to income is hard. I would be more impressed if he had actually been able to build an algal digester in the lab using Quickfit glassware, because then he would have some notion of the difference between idea and reality.
My father landed Canadian tanks on Juno on the first day of D-Day, and stayed on as a beach controller when his ship was mined, so he knows a bit about what happened, and I've seen the official statistics while researching the background to his story. There were relatively heavy casualties for the forces deployed, but the total number killed on the Allied side in the entire invasion was almost tactical in scale compared to the German/Soviet battles.
Advanced workcenters machining exotic alloys even have force sensors so they can predict when the tools will need changing, and can identify faults such as incorrectly annealed materials. My guess is that in reality this is about not wanting to have to first replace all the drawings, and then recode all the machining tapes. As I note, the machine doesn't care what system of units it is using; they're just numbers.
The solution, in the best traditions of British espionage, was for one of the officers at the radar base to form a liaison with the chief dispatcher, as a result of which she phoned in whenever a mosquito was sent over.
After this had gone on for a month or two, friend's father phoned the air base commander and suggested that "as we seem to be picking everything up, perhaps you could try sending over some Mosquitos"
Quite simple really when you know how. Remind me again what they call a State where corporations and the Government work in close collaboration, Signors Mussolini and Berlusconi?
Since in this case (Palm pre) there are competitors from just about every other manufacturer, and it is a new product, it is not an issue.
Having said this, in the UK a judge in a civil trial would be more likely just to rule that as the defendant had lied under oath, the weight of the other evidence for the defendant should be largely discounted.
It's the American concept of punitive damages that is wrong. It's a kind of lynch law. The question should be, why do the US courts and juries have this demented desire to punish in civil trials, rather than award what is just? Did the US judicial system (which is based in English common law) fail to adopt the bit about justice and equity?
As a Brit, I'm aware that my own country's legal system has gone rather downhill over the last 30 years. But the thing that strikes a European most about the US legal system is its cruelty. Punitive damages. Unconvicted defendants for white collar crimes going into court with wire ties binding their wrists. Three strikes and you're out for even a trivial third offense. "Humane" systems of execution where executioners spin out the proceedings for hours. Obviously practice varies greatly across the US States, just as some EU countries (ahem, Greece, ahem) have crap legal systems and others like Germany have good ones. But you only have to look at the outcome of the Pirate Bay case in Sweden, and this one, to see the disproportion involved. The effect of the Pirate Bay case on the European elections (and now a German MEP has defected to the Pirate Party) also shows the different levels of popular tolerance involved.
US citizens need to start growing a backbone. You do not have to support criminal activity to demand that corporations not be allowed to take over and distort the legal system.
I have 300, and I can run the refrigerator, my netbook, the toilet, the central heating and the lights for 48 hours before I have to run the engine to recharge. However, carrying around ten tons of steel hulled boat somewhat defeats the portability of a netbook.
I was privileged to work for years with a really good HR guy. While he was in charge, no strikes, no industrial action, low staff turnover, and the quiet word in our community (this being politically incorrect years ago) was that gay people would never be subject to embarrassing questions if they applied for jobs. When he retired to grow fruit and win all the golf club trophies till they asked him to stop, he was replaced by a typical corporate drone who within six months had managed to lose two expensive wrongful dismissal cases, upset the union to the point of a strike, and cause several of the better managers to look for new jobs. Stuffing HR with idiots who should be fired is actually more expensive than getting a good HR person to work through the process of getting them legally dismissed.
Spot the rule? When specifying a dimension beginning with the quantity, the quantity name is singular (and has been for very many years.) Thus "100 lumen" is correct.
But when the order is different, the grammar changes:
There. Does that help?
Also, the number of people with 68000 experience was limited. Many, many programmers were familiar with the base 8 bit architectures and could easily convert. This was important for a cheap product which, in its early years, was mainly doing 8-bit character based stuff, while the 68000 found a lot of early use in relatively high-end systems like workstations and laser printers where the more efficient 16-bit operations could shine.
To use the famous car analogy, Ford would not be two vehicle generations ahead had they decided from the outset to use 4 valve per cylinder DOHC fuel injected engines rather than cooking two valve carb engines. They would be a niche manufacturer.
Try writing a useful program on one of those bit-slice efforts, though, and you would quickly run into a brick wall. Very limited microcode, no assembly language, no developer tools of any kind. The point about the 6502, the Z80, and even the 8088, was that you could write general purpose programs to run on them, execute them and debug them.
By the time general purpose CPUs were powerful enough to run the floppy, control the display and handle the I/O devices at the same time, it no longer made sense to do so because it was more cost effective (in terms of performance) to hand off the functions to dedicated peripherals even in microcomputers.
Back in the good old days we first had computers that were made out of cased modules. Then we made computers out of PC boards that fitted into racks with backplanes. Then (in our case) we combined 3 CPU/memory boards into one chassis, with common fans and PSU, only we were too young and ignorant back in 1981 to know that Marketing had to call it a "blade system".
Is there really any useful purpose to decoding Sumerian clay tablets, or analysing dockyard records from the 18th Century? One of the things that differentiates civilised human beings from all other living things on this planet is that we study history and preserve things from the past. Perhaps it just doesn't need justification, it is part of what we are.
Is it any wonder the general public doesn't take science seriously nowadays?
This is an easy project for a 16 year old provided mummy or daddy is a full professor of physics at Stanford.
If California wasn't basically broke I might believe this hype (not really), but a better solution might be to set up a cost effective textbook publishing operation. Publishing is one of the areas where you are dependent on heavy fixed plant which has well defined operating costs. Therefore, competition can tend to raise prices because of the costs involved in marketing, sales, administration and (ahem) kickbacks, which are multiplied across every entrant. How about competitive tender to write textbooks, and competitive tender to print them? And, when the concept is proven, competitive tender to make them available on-line?
In other words, my calculations are roughly correct - to get what he wants in a basic netbook format would need a screen roughly four times more efficient than the one on an iPhone.
Millions of Apple fanboys may be laughing at me, but that's because they don't understand basic physics - and nor do you,low userid or not.