I can imagine you might feel that Apple should be sorry for having sued a company for using rounded corners instead of just competing on features, but I disagree that they should be sorry for having claimed that Samsung copied Apple's design.
Sure, Apple has copied a fair bit as well, and it seems wrong to patent little obvious details like the often misquoted rounded corners, but just look at the big picture: Apple comes out with the iPhone, everyone's jaw drops on the floor, wow, we've never seen anything like it before, and then some time later Samsung comes out with a device that looks almost identical and everybody's like "o, well but that's obviously the only way you can make a phone, they didn't copy Apple, how can you patent rounded corners, etcetera".
Come on, look at them side by side. Samsung copied the design. Now how you acually prove that in a court room, is a different story. Apparently you need silly design patents for that since common sense does not exist in court. And in the UK they failed to prove their point, but really, can you deny the similarity if you set aside your love/hate for those respective companies?
Of course, in hindsight, their lawsuits didn't get them very far so they might be sorry for that, but sorry for claiming that Samsung blatantly copied them? Nah.
I wouldn't be surprised (and even mildly amused) if the judge would now require them to make it a click-through page. Whenever you go to apple.co.uk, the message is displayed (automatically resized to fill the whole window, using Javascript), and you have to scroll down to a button to continue to the main page:-)
Or worse, they might just have been recruiting winners of the International Obfuscated Code Contest. How big is this software package? There's probably plenty of room to slip in a hard to find security hole.
Maybe try googling for "radioactive coal" and check how many reputable sites are confirming this little urban myth. Scientific American had an article about it in 2007, which I admit was exaggerating a bit by calling (unshielded) fly ash more dangerous than (properly shielded) radioactive waste, which is of course a ridiculous comparison, but the fact seems to remain that the environment receives more radiation from a coal plant than from a nuclear plant with all the latter's shielding and other safety precautions taken into account.
The reason why fly ash is (slightly) radioactive, is because even though the coal itself might contain less radioactive material than sand, most of the coal is burnt and the radioactive isotopes are therefore concentrated in the fly ash.
The wikipedia article on "Radioactive waste" has quite a bit of useful details about the issue. Not something to lose sleep over, I admit, but not an urban myth either.
You're right, putting a human inside of the robot is better. After all, he will be much more inclined to do anything possible to bring his personal enclosure back home safely than someone in a cozy office would for a remote controlled robot.
If you look at the images we got from robots inside the reactor building, and the amount of static on them because of the radiation, I think it's safe to say that there's some kind of negative influence, be it in the electronics or in the actual transmission.
5% of Japan's territory just for the Fukushima site? And Japan has at least 18 other nuclear sites as well, so that wouldn't leave much space for other things.
I suspect there's something wrong in your calculation.
Maybe you meant the entire Fukushima prefecture, but not all of it is contaminated to such a degree that it has become uninhabitable (certainly not for 40 years or more), and in any case that's not what the suit is for. That's just for the actual nuclear site.
I'm beginning to suspect that some science fiction authors stumbled upon a time machine and have been warning us about the future they saw by writing "fictional" stories about it.
Your argument about ABS and isurers is flawed because it is based on the assumption that insurers are rational, intelligent beings. They are not. They probably just go "hey, this car has an extra safety device, the manufacturer says it's great, so we'll give a discount for it".
That does not mean that I disagree with the conclusion, though: ABS is probably a good thing overall because most people don't know how to brake properly.
There are many different types of Electronic Stability Control. Unfortunately, most car builders just take the cheapest and most basic one available. If I compare the ESC in my wife's Prius with the one in my Merc, it's a world of difference. When you turn into a street with the Prius (with lots of gas because there's traffic coming), as soon as the front wheels start spinning a bit, the ESC kicks in and goes "oh, my, understeer, that's mighty dangerous!" and slams on the brakes. What the f*** do I care about understeer, there's traffic coming! I don't care if the turn is slightly wider! My Merc, on the other hand, will happily allow even a little bit of oversteer before, very briefly, making a small correction using one of the brakes while continuing to accellerate. You really have to go overboard before it makes a drastic correction, and trust me, that means you needed it.
I just love driving my Merc in winter. With everything on, it makes you feel like you're the best driver in the world. Of course it's more fun with it off, if you want to do doughnuts and things like that, but I've never felt less safe with it on. And trust me, I'm no wuss on the road.
My bicycle is about two orders of magnitude slower than a Bugatti Veyron, but with an aerodynamic coating and further development, it could one day be faster!
Yeah, Slashdot still thinks Unicode is some fancy new fangled craze that will blow away. So the a with the funny cup on top gets stripped away.
But what I'm wondering is: how exactly do you use the coanda effect on a spinning saucer? Things spinning around a horizontal axis, like a ping pong ball with backspin, sure, they can provide lift. But spinning around a vertical axis? How does that work? I would think you would need to use blades on the edge or maybe diagonal holes through the spinning part, but I don't see those in the picture.
Good thing you chose a nun and not an imam. Expect to be sued by the International Hockey Federation, though. And maybe a bunch of animal rights groups. J.M. Smucker will probably be OK with it, but you never know.
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I can imagine you might feel that Apple should be sorry for having sued a company for using rounded corners instead of just competing on features, but I disagree that they should be sorry for having claimed that Samsung copied Apple's design.
Sure, Apple has copied a fair bit as well, and it seems wrong to patent little obvious details like the often misquoted rounded corners, but just look at the big picture: Apple comes out with the iPhone, everyone's jaw drops on the floor, wow, we've never seen anything like it before, and then some time later Samsung comes out with a device that looks almost identical and everybody's like "o, well but that's obviously the only way you can make a phone, they didn't copy Apple, how can you patent rounded corners, etcetera".
Come on, look at them side by side. Samsung copied the design. Now how you acually prove that in a court room, is a different story. Apparently you need silly design patents for that since common sense does not exist in court. And in the UK they failed to prove their point, but really, can you deny the similarity if you set aside your love/hate for those respective companies?
Of course, in hindsight, their lawsuits didn't get them very far so they might be sorry for that, but sorry for claiming that Samsung blatantly copied them? Nah.
I wouldn't be surprised (and even mildly amused) if the judge would now require them to make it a click-through page. Whenever you go to apple.co.uk, the message is displayed (automatically resized to fill the whole window, using Javascript), and you have to scroll down to a button to continue to the main page :-)
OK, they may make more of them, but they're certainly not as cool.
Or to download them illegally to begin with, instead of actually paying for watermarked movies.
Yeah, we just watch them for the hidden codes, it's what turns us on.
Or worse, they might just have been recruiting winners of the International Obfuscated Code Contest. How big is this software package? There's probably plenty of room to slip in a hard to find security hole.
Maybe try googling for "radioactive coal" and check how many reputable sites are confirming this little urban myth. Scientific American had an article about it in 2007, which I admit was exaggerating a bit by calling (unshielded) fly ash more dangerous than (properly shielded) radioactive waste, which is of course a ridiculous comparison, but the fact seems to remain that the environment receives more radiation from a coal plant than from a nuclear plant with all the latter's shielding and other safety precautions taken into account.
The reason why fly ash is (slightly) radioactive, is because even though the coal itself might contain less radioactive material than sand, most of the coal is burnt and the radioactive isotopes are therefore concentrated in the fly ash.
The wikipedia article on "Radioactive waste" has quite a bit of useful details about the issue. Not something to lose sleep over, I admit, but not an urban myth either.
Exactly! If we can have solar sails, there's no reason we can't have solar windmills.
Not to mention the radioactivity those coal plants produce.
This is the prequel. They haven't discovered dilithium yet.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to just switch off the cooling and let it blow itself up?
I've asked myself the same question, and one night the answer came to me in a dream.
Too bad I forgot the dream so now I still don't know.
You're right, putting a human inside of the robot is better. After all, he will be much more inclined to do anything possible to bring his personal enclosure back home safely than someone in a cozy office would for a remote controlled robot.
If you look at the images we got from robots inside the reactor building, and the amount of static on them because of the radiation, I think it's safe to say that there's some kind of negative influence, be it in the electronics or in the actual transmission.
5% of Japan's territory just for the Fukushima site? And Japan has at least 18 other nuclear sites as well, so that wouldn't leave much space for other things.
I suspect there's something wrong in your calculation.
Maybe you meant the entire Fukushima prefecture, but not all of it is contaminated to such a degree that it has become uninhabitable (certainly not for 40 years or more), and in any case that's not what the suit is for. That's just for the actual nuclear site.
I'm beginning to suspect that some science fiction authors stumbled upon a time machine and have been warning us about the future they saw by writing "fictional" stories about it.
Your argument about ABS and isurers is flawed because it is based on the assumption that insurers are rational, intelligent beings. They are not. They probably just go "hey, this car has an extra safety device, the manufacturer says it's great, so we'll give a discount for it".
That does not mean that I disagree with the conclusion, though: ABS is probably a good thing overall because most people don't know how to brake properly.
There are many different types of Electronic Stability Control. Unfortunately, most car builders just take the cheapest and most basic one available. If I compare the ESC in my wife's Prius with the one in my Merc, it's a world of difference. When you turn into a street with the Prius (with lots of gas because there's traffic coming), as soon as the front wheels start spinning a bit, the ESC kicks in and goes "oh, my, understeer, that's mighty dangerous!" and slams on the brakes. What the f*** do I care about understeer, there's traffic coming! I don't care if the turn is slightly wider! My Merc, on the other hand, will happily allow even a little bit of oversteer before, very briefly, making a small correction using one of the brakes while continuing to accellerate. You really have to go overboard before it makes a drastic correction, and trust me, that means you needed it.
I just love driving my Merc in winter. With everything on, it makes you feel like you're the best driver in the world. Of course it's more fun with it off, if you want to do doughnuts and things like that, but I've never felt less safe with it on. And trust me, I'm no wuss on the road.
He didn't go there to drink, only to get blasted.
So the latter is allowed while the former isn't? At least in muslim logic, apparently.
My bicycle is about two orders of magnitude slower than a Bugatti Veyron, but with an aerodynamic coating and further development, it could one day be faster!
And where does the Coanda effect come in?
Never mind, I just RTFWA you gave and it's explained in there.
Yeah, Slashdot still thinks Unicode is some fancy new fangled craze that will blow away. So the a with the funny cup on top gets stripped away.
But what I'm wondering is: how exactly do you use the coanda effect on a spinning saucer? Things spinning around a horizontal axis, like a ping pong ball with backspin, sure, they can provide lift. But spinning around a vertical axis? How does that work? I would think you would need to use blades on the edge or maybe diagonal holes through the spinning part, but I don't see those in the picture.
Good thing you chose a nun and not an imam. Expect to be sued by the International Hockey Federation, though. And maybe a bunch of animal rights groups. J.M. Smucker will probably be OK with it, but you never know.