And if for whatever reason the schematic cannot be reproduced the schematics for the East German and Russian "illegal" clones can be reproduced without any trouble (sorry, it's been a while so I have forgotten the actual chip numbers).
Laches does not work here because the usual case is:
1. Patent is filed by company A (usually big one), sits in the war chest for 15 years, unused. 2. A couple of years before expiry the patent is sold by the company A IPR licensing department to a patent troll which has done its homework and has noted 20-30 potential targets (or a couple of lucrative ones) which have been violating the patent for 10+ years. 3. Patent troll goes to court with the patent and request for injunctive relief.
The defendant cannot claim laches because the patent troll did not own the patent while the infringement has been going on. It was owned by another company.
And why do you think that supporting payments outside this countries is a good idea?
Online commerce lives on a knife's edge balancing between credit card fraud, click fraud, returned goods fraud, god knows what other fraud, fatwas, protesting fanatics, government censors on one side and legitimate business on the other side.
While it would have been nice to have it as universal, the balance of fraud and regulatory nightmares vs legitimate transactions makes it simply not worth the hassle for anything outside EU/EEA, US, Canada, a couple of the better well off LatAm countries and the developed part of the Far East.
There is nothing illegal in waiting for as long as you want as far as patents are concerned.
It is standard practice to wait for companies that are still developing their business cases and products until they can be visited by the lawyers. The approach is originally attributed to IBM. It left all the PC clone manufacturers start their business, develop it for up to a year or two prior to being visited by two nice guys in suits with a briefcase containing patents, IPR agreement and an NDA which specified that the visit was to be kept secret.
They made a significant portion of their early PC revenue from that racket until they ran into Compaq.
IMO, allowing this practice is one of the problems with the current patent system. Most "trolls" use patents that have been developed by other companies, stayed in the war chest for a decade or so and have been deemed to outlive their usefulness so they can be sold. If there are clear and reasonable timeframes for discovery, filing, etc the entire troll business model will go away. There will be a side benefit that companies will start disclosing what they are actually using internally in their software and hardware to ensure that that they comply to the "disclosure" timeframe and the troll cannot claim "discovery" after the "invention" has been out in the field for 15 years.
Scavenging for desktop parts is the "little devil". Scavenging for people who know how the bloody things work more than 3 years after for IT systems is the real nightmare.
If a system has been in the field for 3+ year nobody knows what are its real dependencies and what does it really take to augment, add capacity or do any changes. The people who knew have left, gone to pastures new or have forgotten what the problems used to be and no documentation can help you here (even if there is any suriviving docs on the design of the system in question). This is valid for almost all classes of IT and telecoms systems and is the real cost factor in IT "maintenance debt". If we use a real-life analogy IT maintenance debt is like a discounted mortgage. You pay virtually nothing for 2-3 years and after that the lender skins your hide.
The iPad, iTunes, AppleTV, etc are aimed at where Microsoft wanted to be, tried to be and failed to be.
Microsoft has been trying to get into the media in the home position for 10+ years now and it has been a long string of minor temporary successes interspersed with epic fails. Media center PC - FAIL, epic FAIL. Why - just look at an original XP media center remote and the answer is there. It has Live TV and DVD on it. NO OPTION FOR RECORDED MEDIA. Yes, that is the way the media companies would like us to consume it. That is however a guaranteed market fail for the product. No wonder that a significant proportion of these are hooked up to MythTV and DIY media center boxes running Linux nowdays. Compared to that Apple remotes worked out of the box and they were designed to deliver what the customer wanted day one. In its early days (and for some people it is still the case) iTunes was more about organising pirated media collections and not buying more iStuff and it did that job brilliantly regardless of what the media corps say.
AppleTV. Microsoft tried to deliver a working embedded media system for nearly 15 years now. WinCE was the original set top box system. It failed. A lot of releases had average uptimes in the few days range.
Zune, various phone varieties of windows - you name it.
Apple is not going for the enterprise as it does not need to for now. Microsoft has given it plenty of low hanging frit elsewhere. All it takes is to do _PROPER_ UE oriented design, always looking for the end-user in preference to various parasites and midllemen. The business side of things is not any different. If Apple one day decides to take that it now has the resources, it can and it will and the Microsoft of today stands no chance of stopping it.
In the case of Ireland EU was going against the political powers of Ireland and the public opinion there.
In the case of introducing rules on "EU interest" EU will be going along with the public opinion and politics in more than half of the EU countries. The only one to oppose that will probably be Britain and I would not be so sure about that one either.
I have read the paper itself. It is extremely well written with excellent statistical analysis and so far there has been NO answer from the so called "not another old university in cambridge" which did most of the analysis quoted and re-quoted in AGW papers.
Read this. I have read this paper over a bottle of wine with my mom this summer. She is a retired met support officer - initially strategic missile command, after that strategic bomber command and after that 30 years of met support for civilian aviation. She used slightly less "diplomatic language", but the exec summary is: "the guys have a point".
1. At some point this summer FDA started looking into food supplements and actively removing "body builder" supplements which actually were a supplement for that muscle that is not quite muscle tissue and is affected by various sildenafil salts. A lot of SPAM was advertising these semi-legit operations and it is logical for it to reduce in volume as they get closed down.
2. Facebook, LinkedIn and their like have become easier routes than mail with higher success rates.
I would expect SPAM to decrease as a result of both of these even without major operations being taken down.
Reinventing the wheel using Lithium Ion batteries.
I am having some difficulty being convinced that this is much better than taking the good old good trolleybus of the kind which Moscow has been running for nearly 100 years now and adding a 2 mile mini-battery to it.
It would have made much more sense to add some modern "lock/unlock to the cables" tech to a trolleybus system and use the batteries only for the intervals where there is no overhead wires so you can have interrupted coverage. This way you also do not need any of battery swapping and so on. You also pull wires only where it is cost effective and so on.
Even for note taking laptop is a bad idea. You end up loading your brain in parallel via visual with exactly what the prof is saying at the desk. That has long been proven by various cognition studies to be a bad idea. It is similar to what is known amidst presenters as death by powerpoint (putting on slides exactly what you are going to say).
That is besides the point. Only 5% end up using the laptop for notes. Rest will be chatting over IM, updating their facebook pages and so on. As a result the prof ends up teaching to an audience of 90%+ who does not pay attention to what he says. Teaching anything in an environment like this borders on the impossible.
There is a fundamental problem - the stereoscopical position of eyes and the depth perception of a child are different from those of an adult. The reasons for this are purely anatomical - the eyes are positioned differently in the skull.
So you have to generate different content for different ages and probably even take development into account. That is simply beyond the limits of today's tech.
There is no "if" in my case. My results in school and uni have always been a statistical anomaly.
I always used to score nearly 100% on the difficult problems and quite often fail trivial ones (in fact I still do till this day). My test results were also all over the place. While I managed a decent grade at the end of each class I have quite often gone top/bottom/top through the year and so on. I also believe that this is not new. I had a couple of professors pick me up as a target for "special attention" based on similar methods as far back as 20+ years.
Frankly, I am not alone here. All bi-polar people, people with SAD or just people who are a bit nuts will show up as a statistical anomaly.
This technique discriminates against everyone who has a creative spark (call it talent, madness or just plain good old "short bus") and in favour of Joe Mediocre Average who always pulls the same predictable score and will never ever exceed his limitations and achieve anything beyond what is expected from him.
G-Wiz officially is not a car - it is a quadricycle. There is a number of local manufacturers besides G-wiz and at least one of them electric IIRC. Offficially, quadricycle is limited to 40mph, is under some weight limit (different for electric and petrol), etc. It also does not have to pass most of EU car safety tests.
There is a reason why France is the only country in Europe where the so called quadricicles still sell and which continues writing them into the EU rulebook. It is called Paris (not that other french major cities are much better) traffic. You are not accelerating to Jeremy Clarkson (or 70-es Alain Delon film) speeds any time soon. Similarly, if you are hit you are not spilling out anything on the road anytime soon (especially if you got one of the french ones that actually pass car safety tests) because you are most likely to be hit at sub-10mph speeds.
So besides everything else this is also a subsidy to local manufacturers as most people will not go for G-wiz but for one of the local ones.
Having a site in a language different from English is one thing. Having a state policy to enforce the language on all websites is another.
In any case, the first to try to put a policy along these lines are not the chinese. If my memory serves me right the first country to try a national language policy for the internet and mandatory translations are actually the French more than 10 years ago. AFAIK they did not get very far... Plenty of sites with mixed language and plenty of English language sites under.fr.
A good engine especially diesel eats nearly nothing in idle
I no longer remember the exact number, but idle consumption in the US alone is a considerable amount of fuel. So reduction of this consumption is a worthy goal and should not be hand waved and ignored
US != the rest of the world and vice versa
US is automatic and customary automatic and unless you put it into Neutral at the red lights it is not true unloaded idle. There is load on the engine which causes it burn WAY more fuel than an average EU manual car (especially a diesel).
So the figures for consumption are not surprising. No need to stop it by the way. Just fully separating the clutch when break is pressed even if the car is not in neutral should do the job.
Start/Stop causes extra wear and tear on the engine block. Additionally, you need to ensure that the engine block retains heat longer which in most cases means bigger and heavier engine block. Similarly, you may need some extra work on the cat and emission control to keep the entire system warm and ensure you stay within pollution limits. On top of that you need a beefier starter motor and a beefier battery or a supercapacitor system to ensure you get the cranking current for it so that the engine starts up straight away. And so on. All of this adds weight which in turn costs in performance.
It also does not solve the biggest problem with in-traffic economy. A good engine especially diesel eats nearly nothing in idle (especially with manual). Now acceleration is what really eats fuel - from stop to going.
All in all you get worse pollution (and nastier - particles and unburned/partially burned hydrocarbons), worse economy and worse performance than an smaller and "weaker" normal engine with an electric boost similar to the one on the Honda, Mercedes and a few others.
Training a dog to find explosives takes a lot of time and is quite expensive as well. A dog can work only a couple of hours, requires a handler needs rests and breaks, etc. You can apply it only if there is a reasonable suspicion or for a spot check on a small fraction of the travelling millions.
Funnily enough the same is valid for gas-mass (aka machine sniffers). Columns, ionisations chambers, etc have a limited lifetime. You simply cannot put one to sit and sniff everyone and everything all over without putting a surcharge on the ticket which will make most customers refuse to travel. Same as a dog - they should be used only if there is a reasonable suspicion that there is something wrong. In that case they work and they detect not just explosives. They detect drugs, illegal food imports, etc.
In any case - declaring everyone guilty before proven innocent is an expensive business and the audit shows that quite clearly.
If you would like it not to be a crime, your rightful place is amidst the Taleban and in Saudi.
If you would like to live in a civilised society where privacy is a respected right, you have to live with the fact that _EVERYONE_ has a right to privacy. That includes your wife. It also includes the special case where you are sysadminning your home network. The fact that you have access to the mail log and to su and sudo does not suddenly give you the right to treat you wife as if she is wearing a burka and break into her $HOME.
Same goes the other way around with the minor difference that there are not that many matriarchical societies out there to be given as an example.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep.
And if for whatever reason the schematic cannot be reproduced the schematics for the East German and Russian "illegal" clones can be reproduced without any trouble (sorry, it's been a while so I have forgotten the actual chip numbers).
No, that is what we call "This Perfect Day".
Laches does not work here because the usual case is:
1. Patent is filed by company A (usually big one), sits in the war chest for 15 years, unused.
2. A couple of years before expiry the patent is sold by the company A IPR licensing department to a patent troll which has done its homework and has noted 20-30 potential targets (or a couple of lucrative ones) which have been violating the patent for 10+ years.
3. Patent troll goes to court with the patent and request for injunctive relief.
The defendant cannot claim laches because the patent troll did not own the patent while the infringement has been going on. It was owned by another company.
And why do you think that supporting payments outside this countries is a good idea?
Online commerce lives on a knife's edge balancing between credit card fraud, click fraud, returned goods fraud, god knows what other fraud, fatwas, protesting fanatics, government censors on one side and legitimate business on the other side.
While it would have been nice to have it as universal, the balance of fraud and regulatory nightmares vs legitimate transactions makes it simply not worth the hassle for anything outside EU/EEA, US, Canada, a couple of the better well off LatAm countries and the developed part of the Far East.
There is nothing illegal in waiting for as long as you want as far as patents are concerned.
It is standard practice to wait for companies that are still developing their business cases and products until they can be visited by the lawyers. The approach is originally attributed to IBM. It left all the PC clone manufacturers start their business, develop it for up to a year or two prior to being visited by two nice guys in suits with a briefcase containing patents, IPR agreement and an NDA which specified that the visit was to be kept secret.
They made a significant portion of their early PC revenue from that racket until they ran into Compaq.
IMO, allowing this practice is one of the problems with the current patent system. Most "trolls" use patents that have been developed by other companies, stayed in the war chest for a decade or so and have been deemed to outlive their usefulness so they can be sold. If there are clear and reasonable timeframes for discovery, filing, etc the entire troll business model will go away. There will be a side benefit that companies will start disclosing what they are actually using internally in their software and hardware to ensure that that they comply to the "disclosure" timeframe and the troll cannot claim "discovery" after the "invention" has been out in the field for 15 years.
The problem is not so much with politicians. It is not the job of the politicos to be technically literate in every area of the human knowledge.
The problem is mostly with people who advise them. These are the actual technically illiterate "yes men" in this and many other cases.
Depends on the level of "bespoke" in your house.
Scavenging for desktop parts is the "little devil". Scavenging for people who know how the bloody things work more than 3 years after for IT systems is the real nightmare.
If a system has been in the field for 3+ year nobody knows what are its real dependencies and what does it really take to augment, add capacity or do any changes. The people who knew have left, gone to pastures new or have forgotten what the problems used to be and no documentation can help you here (even if there is any suriviving docs on the design of the system in question). This is valid for almost all classes of IT and telecoms systems and is the real cost factor in IT "maintenance debt". If we use a real-life analogy IT maintenance debt is like a discounted mortgage. You pay virtually nothing for 2-3 years and after that the lender skins your hide.
The iPad, iTunes, AppleTV, etc are aimed at where Microsoft wanted to be, tried to be and failed to be.
Microsoft has been trying to get into the media in the home position for 10+ years now and it has been a long string of minor temporary successes interspersed with epic fails. Media center PC - FAIL, epic FAIL. Why - just look at an original XP media center remote and the answer is there. It has Live TV and DVD on it. NO OPTION FOR RECORDED MEDIA. Yes, that is the way the media companies would like us to consume it. That is however a guaranteed market fail for the product. No wonder that a significant proportion of these are hooked up to MythTV and DIY media center boxes running Linux nowdays. Compared to that Apple remotes worked out of the box and they were designed to deliver what the customer wanted day one. In its early days (and for some people it is still the case) iTunes was more about organising pirated media collections and not buying more iStuff and it did that job brilliantly regardless of what the media corps say.
AppleTV. Microsoft tried to deliver a working embedded media system for nearly 15 years now. WinCE was the original set top box system. It failed. A lot of releases had average uptimes in the few days range.
Zune, various phone varieties of windows - you name it.
Apple is not going for the enterprise as it does not need to for now. Microsoft has given it plenty of low hanging frit elsewhere. All it takes is to do _PROPER_ UE oriented design, always looking for the end-user in preference to various parasites and midllemen. The business side of things is not any different. If Apple one day decides to take that it now has the resources, it can and it will and the Microsoft of today stands no chance of stopping it.
That was the point of view about 5 years back.
The latest managerial fad is to have everyone colocated so travel and commuting instead of telecommuting are firmly back on the menu.
Japan did not do the copying after WW2. The big "copy the west" operation happened 50 years prior to that at the turn of the century.
It is Japan from around 1890 to 1940 which is the worrying analogy with today's china, not post-WW2 japan.
You are missing the point.
In the case of Ireland EU was going against the political powers of Ireland and the public opinion there.
In the case of introducing rules on "EU interest" EU will be going along with the public opinion and politics in more than half of the EU countries. The only one to oppose that will probably be Britain and I would not be so sure about that one either.
And that is 10 times more worrisome because the right analogy is still there in history. It is not USA, it is Japan.
That is an analogy that is making me shudder for a moment.
Here you go:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/17/russian_data_cherrypicked_says_sceptic/
I have read the paper itself. It is extremely well written with excellent statistical analysis and so far there has been NO answer from the so called "not another old university in cambridge" which did most of the analysis quoted and re-quoted in AGW papers.
Actually, I beg to differ here.
The current AGW protagonists have been caught redhanded to cherry pick the data for a large portion of the northern hemisphere.
http://www.iea.ru/article/kioto_order/15.12.2009.pdf
Read this. I have read this paper over a bottle of wine with my mom this summer. She is a retired met support officer - initially strategic missile command, after that strategic bomber command and after that 30 years of met support for civilian aviation. She used slightly less "diplomatic language", but the exec summary is: "the guys have a point".
1. At some point this summer FDA started looking into food supplements and actively removing "body builder" supplements which actually were a supplement for that muscle that is not quite muscle tissue and is affected by various sildenafil salts. A lot of SPAM was advertising these semi-legit operations and it is logical for it to reduce in volume as they get closed down.
2. Facebook, LinkedIn and their like have become easier routes than mail with higher success rates.
I would expect SPAM to decrease as a result of both of these even without major operations being taken down.
Reinventing the wheel using Lithium Ion batteries.
I am having some difficulty being convinced that this is much better than taking the good old good trolleybus of the kind which Moscow has been running for nearly 100 years now and adding a 2 mile mini-battery to it.
It would have made much more sense to add some modern "lock/unlock to the cables" tech to a trolleybus system and use the batteries only for the intervals where there is no overhead wires so you can have interrupted coverage. This way you also do not need any of battery swapping and so on. You also pull wires only where it is cost effective and so on.
Even for note taking laptop is a bad idea. You end up loading your brain in parallel via visual with exactly what the prof is saying at the desk. That has long been proven by various cognition studies to be a bad idea. It is similar to what is known amidst presenters as death by powerpoint (putting on slides exactly what you are going to say).
That is besides the point. Only 5% end up using the laptop for notes. Rest will be chatting over IM, updating their facebook pages and so on. As a result the prof ends up teaching to an audience of 90%+ who does not pay attention to what he says. Teaching anything in an environment like this borders on the impossible.
It is not the lazy eye which is the problem here.
There is a fundamental problem - the stereoscopical position of eyes and the depth perception of a child are different from those of an adult. The reasons for this are purely anatomical - the eyes are positioned differently in the skull.
So you have to generate different content for different ages and probably even take development into account. That is simply beyond the limits of today's tech.
There is no "if" in my case. My results in school and uni have always been a statistical anomaly.
I always used to score nearly 100% on the difficult problems and quite often fail trivial ones (in fact I still do till this day). My test results were also all over the place. While I managed a decent grade at the end of each class I have quite often gone top/bottom/top through the year and so on. I also believe that this is not new. I had a couple of professors pick me up as a target for "special attention" based on similar methods as far back as 20+ years.
Frankly, I am not alone here. All bi-polar people, people with SAD or just people who are a bit nuts will show up as a statistical anomaly.
This technique discriminates against everyone who has a creative spark (call it talent, madness or just plain good old "short bus") and in favour of Joe Mediocre Average who always pulls the same predictable score and will never ever exceed his limitations and achieve anything beyond what is expected from him.
You are missing something.
G-Wiz officially is not a car - it is a quadricycle. There is a number of local manufacturers besides G-wiz and at least one of them electric IIRC. Offficially, quadricycle is limited to 40mph, is under some weight limit (different for electric and petrol), etc. It also does not have to pass most of EU car safety tests.
There is a reason why France is the only country in Europe where the so called quadricicles still sell and which continues writing them into the EU rulebook. It is called Paris (not that other french major cities are much better) traffic. You are not accelerating to Jeremy Clarkson (or 70-es Alain Delon film) speeds any time soon. Similarly, if you are hit you are not spilling out anything on the road anytime soon (especially if you got one of the french ones that actually pass car safety tests) because you are most likely to be hit at sub-10mph speeds.
So besides everything else this is also a subsidy to local manufacturers as most people will not go for G-wiz but for one of the local ones.
Minor difference.
Having a site in a language different from English is one thing. Having a state policy to enforce the language on all websites is another.
In any case, the first to try to put a policy along these lines are not the chinese. If my memory serves me right the first country to try a national language policy for the internet and mandatory translations are actually the French more than 10 years ago. AFAIK they did not get very far... Plenty of sites with mixed language and plenty of English language sites under .fr.
A good engine especially diesel eats nearly nothing in idle
I no longer remember the exact number, but idle consumption in the US alone is a considerable amount of fuel. So reduction of this consumption is a worthy goal and should not be hand waved and ignored
US != the rest of the world and vice versa
US is automatic and customary automatic and unless you put it into Neutral at the red lights it is not true unloaded idle. There is load on the engine which causes it burn WAY more fuel than an average EU manual car (especially a diesel).
So the figures for consumption are not surprising. No need to stop it by the way. Just fully separating the clutch when break is pressed even if the car is not in neutral should do the job.
_WRONG_. It costs in performance.
Start/Stop causes extra wear and tear on the engine block. Additionally, you need to ensure that the engine block retains heat longer which in most cases means bigger and heavier engine block. Similarly, you may need some extra work on the cat and emission control to keep the entire system warm and ensure you stay within pollution limits. On top of that you need a beefier starter motor and a beefier battery or a supercapacitor system to ensure you get the cranking current for it so that the engine starts up straight away. And so on. All of this adds weight which in turn costs in performance.
It also does not solve the biggest problem with in-traffic economy. A good engine especially diesel eats nearly nothing in idle (especially with manual). Now acceleration is what really eats fuel - from stop to going.
All in all you get worse pollution (and nastier - particles and unburned/partially burned hydrocarbons), worse economy and worse performance than an smaller and "weaker" normal engine with an electric boost similar to the one on the Honda, Mercedes and a few others.
Training a dog to find explosives takes a lot of time and is quite expensive as well. A dog can work only a couple of hours, requires a handler needs rests and breaks, etc. You can apply it only if there is a reasonable suspicion or for a spot check on a small fraction of the travelling millions.
Funnily enough the same is valid for gas-mass (aka machine sniffers). Columns, ionisations chambers, etc have a limited lifetime. You simply cannot put one to sit and sniff everyone and everything all over without putting a surcharge on the ticket which will make most customers refuse to travel. Same as a dog - they should be used only if there is a reasonable suspicion that there is something wrong. In that case they work and they detect not just explosives. They detect drugs, illegal food imports, etc.
In any case - declaring everyone guilty before proven innocent is an expensive business and the audit shows that quite clearly.
It is unless your spouse is your property.
If you would like it not to be a crime, your rightful place is amidst the Taleban and in Saudi.
If you would like to live in a civilised society where privacy is a respected right, you have to live with the fact that _EVERYONE_ has a right to privacy. That includes your wife. It also includes the special case where you are sysadminning your home network. The fact that you have access to the mail log and to su and sudo does not suddenly give you the right to treat you wife as if she is wearing a burka and break into her $HOME.
Same goes the other way around with the minor difference that there are not that many matriarchical societies out there to be given as an example.