The Seasteading Institute's Patri Friedman says the group plans to launch an office park off the San Francisco coast next year, with the first full-time settlements following seven years later.
Like that's going to work.
People have talked about building artificial islands and setting up their own sovereign states. There are areas of the Caribbean where the ocean is so shallow that this is feasible, and there are plenty of submerged and semi-submerged islands around the world. With enough money, barges, and rock, building an island is possible.
But, under current international law, that doesn't yield sovereignty. The Law of the Sea treaty reads "a naturally formed area of land, which is above water at high tide". Nor can countries expand their territory by building artificial islands. (One of Japan's key boundaries is defined by an island that's worn down to the size of a small bedroom. A protective breakwater has been built around it at great expense.)
If do-it-yourself sovereignty were going to work, the oil industry, which puts up many offshore structures, some of which are actual islands, would have done it years ago.
There is exactly one way for SSL certification to be fixed, and that's for browser makers to grow a pair and stop trusting root CAs who do not enforce strict rules for identifiability on all the lesser CAs under them.
Right. CA's are supposed to be financially liable if they issue a cert to a party other than the one they're certifying. Part of the problem is that CAs get to write their own "relying party agreements". We need a tough, standard relying party agreement with a minimum guaranteed liability to get into a browser's approved root cert list.
Once in a while a CA will slip up. Then they pay. That keeps them honest. A CA is an insurance company, and should be regulated as such.
It's nice that they finally got the standard done. But there's so much junk in there. The C++ committee was dominated by people who wanted to do cool things with templates.
Some years ago, someone figured out that it was possible to abuse the C++ template system into doing arbitrary computations at compile time. This developed a fan club. That fan club has dominated the C++ standards committee, because nobody else cared. So now we have a standard for C++ which supports template-based programming a little better.
Current thinking seems to be that,while template programming is too hard for ordinary programmers, the templates will be written by l33t programmers and then be used by the lower classes. Unfortunately, if anything goes wrong, the end user has to look at the innards of the template to find the problem.
We went through this with LISP decades ago. Check out the MIT Loop Macro, That finally became stable about the time LISP died out.
Note what isn't in the new C++. There's no more memory safety than in the old one. (Fans will say that it's safer if you only use the new features. Now try to call some library that doesn't use them.) So the buffer overflow attacks and crashes will continue.
C++ is the only language to offer hiding without memory safety. Hard-compiled languages from Pascal through Go have hiding with safety, as do all the major scripting languages. C has neither hiding nor safety; the pointer manipulations are right there in the source. There have been safe, hard-compiled languages without garbage collection, most notably Ada and the Modula family. Safety and speed are not incompatible.
Remember how CSS was supposed to make web pages more compact, and simplify layout by avoiding old-style table based layout? Look at how that worked out.
As an exercise, I went through and took out all the junk. The actual story, plus all the formatting needed to display the full page in in its original fonts, is 77 lines. So what's the rest? Some of it is links to other stories, but that's under 100 lines. Much of the code is ad-related, even though there are only a few ads. There's a lot of "social related" stuff, which, although it takes up little screen real estate, seems to require far too much on-page code. The "login" mechanism turns out to have all the code for not only "login", but registration of a new account, as part of the page itself. That's on every page served by the Wall Street Journal. There's a vast amount of hidden content, including a "video carousel". There's personalization stuff that would turn on if the user was logged in.
When the people who code crap like that start using HTML 5 with both local storage and connections to the "cloud", it can only get worse.
"It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy."
They have a point. And it's a real problem, because when some new problem comes along, society seems unable to deal with it.
Consider the current messes. Nobody in public life expresses a good understanding of the current economic situation. The political consensus is "it's just a big recession". It might be a permanent situation. (Japan had a real estate crash in 1989, and neither real estate nor the stock market ever came back. To some extent, the current US model of capitalism is broken, yet nobody is proposing a better model. (Should we have a tax model that doesn't favor debt so much? The US taxes companies' dividends but not interest paid on debt, stock buybacks, or executive compensation. As a result, most companies don't pay dividends and borrow too much.)
In the 1930s, it was very different. All sorts of big ideas were proposed to deal with the Great Depression. Some of them were nutty, like Technocracy. Some of them were implemented, like the Works Progress Administration. It was a tough time, but the problems were discussed and solutions tried.
There's a fundamental assumption that economic growth will continue. That may be incorrect.
Looking ahead, we have big issues. Some major natural resources run out in the next few decades. There's no cheap source of energy even being seriously talked about. No new source of energy has been developed in the last 50 years. (Nuclear reactors and solar cells are now more than 50 years old.)
Demand is going up as China modernizes. Now what? We have no clue how to run a post-oil world with 6 billion people. World oil production peaked in 2005.
At venture capital conferences, I'm not seeing new great ideas. More like endless me-too presentations. (Way too much "social networking". I've seen a pitch for a social network for cats.)
We're seeing regression in developed countries. Israel used to be a modern country dominated by kibbutzim with a strong work ethic, the people who "made the desert bloom". Now, Israeli politics is dominated by the religious right (the "ultra-orthodox"), who are a welfare-supported dead weight on the country. The Islamic world's religious right is at least as bad. (It's amusing to observe how much the Jewish and Islamic right wings resemble each other. Oppress women, check. Anti-education, check. Anti-progress, check. Old Testament mindset, check. Old guys in black with beards in charge, check.)
"stories of theft, underhanded dealings, criminal empires and general unscrupulous play." That's Bitcoin. The Bitcoin world has a story like that about once a week. The entire Bitcoin economy does about the volume of one supermarket.
Apple is claiming to have originated the concept of a rectangular screen with a dark bezel of equal width on all sides and rounded corners on the bezel? That's the standard format of most generic LCD monitors and book-like "e-readers". If you're going to make a touch-screen device, that's the obvious form factor.
That's sad. Motorola was once a great company. They were the only electronics company to successfully transition from tubes to transistors to ICs. They once made the best microprocessors; the 68000 series was way ahead of its time. (If the MMU for the 68000 hadn't been years late and badly designed, the whole PC world would have been powered by 68000 machines.)
But the semiconductor business was spun off as Freescale years ago. After giving up commercial mobile handsets, this leaves Motorola making police radios and related niche items.
The surprising thing is how little Apple actually does. Apple is really a design and marketing firm and a reseller/retailer. They don't make much hardware. (From the annual report: "Substantially all of the Companyâ(TM)s Macs, iPhones, iPads, iPods, logic boards and other assembled products are manufactured by outsourcing partners, primarily in various parts of Asia. A significant concentration of this outsourced manufacturing is currently performed by only a few outsourcing partners of the Company, including Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Ltd. and Quanta Computer, Inc."). They resell music owned by others. They're not a wireless carrier.
I noticed that their (Unladen Swallow) progress seemed to have stopped, is there any official announcement?
Unladen Swallow is an ex-parrot.. "Jeffrey and I have been pulled on to other projects of higher
importance to Google.", writes the former project lead.
When the user gets useful organic search results leading directly to a useful site, the search engine makes nothing. When the search ads are more relevant than the top organic results, the user is likely to click on an ad, making the search engine some money. If some of the top-results are from ad-heavy content farms, leading the user on a detour through made-for-Adsense pages, the search engine profits. Some commentators have said that Google results are "just bad enough" to keep users coming back while driving traffic to the ads.
Then there are ads on third-party pages, what Google calls "AdSense". This is the business that used to be called "DoubleClick", which Google bought in 2007.
Bing has a quality advantage here, because they have no incentive to send traffic to Adsense pages. (Microsoft is considering a "publisher" program of their own, but so far it's just in test. Adsense is 30% of Google's revenue.)
This is a fundamental conflict in the search engine business, creating tension between the "editorial" side of the company and the advertising side.
Google is nowhere near as tough on spam as it could be. Google Adsense funds most of the dreck on the web. Google does not seem to favor AdSense heavy-sites (SEO metrics people watch this closely), but they don't disfavor them, either. Compare Blekko, which takes a hard line on spam, blocking all the major content farms.
That may be why Bing scores higher in Experian's metric.
PyPy solves a very hard problem, but is still slow
on
See the PyPy JIT In Action
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It's an impressive effort that they were able to get this to work at all. Python is really tough to optimize. All bindings are changeable at any time, even from another thread. (The latter is silly, but since it doesn't cost anything to do that in CPython, which is an inefficient naive interpreter that can only run one thread at a time and spends much of its time doing dictionary lookups. Von Rossum defines the language by what CPython can do. There's a huge speed penalty for allowing such extreme dynamism, about 60x over C/C++. The Google team tried to fix that with Unladen Swallow, but gave up when their JIT system was barely faster than CPython.)
PyPy's most effective optimization to date is that it figures out when numbers don't have to be boxed. This allows generating numeric machine code, rather than grinding through the object machinery for every number. They have to be prepared to discard code when something binding gets changed. This requires a very complex system, involving two interpreters (regular and backup) as well as the JIT compiler.
The PyPy crowd is at last starting on the tougher optimizations, like hoisting some operations out of loops. (FORTRAN compilers were doing this in the 1960s.) That's real progress, but it's very hard to do in such a dynamic language.
Many of the optimizations involve generating run-time code that checks to see if the normal case is occurring, and that no other code has patched the code or changed the data from the outside in a way that invalidates the fast path. Then there's code to unwind what the fast path was doing, and interpret or recompile. Most such code is never executed.
This is Canadian. Canadian and UK law don't have as much baggage attached to the concept of "property" as the US does. Through an accident of legal history, that Blackstone's commentaries were more available in America than other writings on law, American law and the American constitution attaches undue weight to property rights. The "due process" clause in the U.S. Constitution limits due process to "life, liberty, and property", which is part of why it matters so much whether something is "property". A leasehold, for example, is not property.
The US never had feudalism, where the lords owned all the property, and thus never had to get rid of feudalism. In the European countries that did, when feudalism went down, so did the emphasis on property rights. This remains quite real today. In Britain, (but not Scotland) there is a "right to ramble", to walk over undeveloped, uncultivated private land. Squatters in abandoned buildings have rights. Penalties for trespass are very low by US standards. Conversely, the rights of renters are stronger in England than in the US.
Canada generally follows English precedent in this area. "Properly" is not an absolute; it's a bundle of rights established by law and precedent. So that domains are "property" means less than it would in the US.
There are ruggedized phones. Apple just doesn't make one.
For what they charge, the screen should be sapphire, not glass. Sapphire sheet is neither rare nor expensive. Supermarket checkout scanners (and, especially, Home Depot) usually use sapphire windows. You can drag metal cans and tools across those for years without scratching them.
20-50kW per hour? With nonsensical units like that, it's a damn good through you're an anonymous coward.
Right.
Watts, kilowatts, and megawatts are all units of power, not energy. So is horsepower. 1KW = about 1.3 HP. A compact car in efficient cruise uses about 7KW. Formula One cars use about 225KW. The largest modern railroad locomotives are in the 5MW range. A 747 at takeoff uses about 100MW. A typical modern generating plant unit is around 1GW.
Laser-induced fission is quite feasible, and requires far less energy input than laser-induced fusion. Laser fission of thorium has been done on a small scale as a lab experiment. Thorium reactors have been built, with modest success.
A pure thorium reactor won't achieve criticality, because thorium has no isotopes that fission on their own. The fuel has to have uranium or plutonium mixed in to start the nuclear reaction. The laser concept seems to be to use a laser to get things going.
There's been some interest in accelerator-pumped thorium fission. It's been tried in Japan, but that group hasn't reached breakeven.
It's a plausible concept, but so far nobody has been able to figure out a way to make it work.
Incidentally, this is not a "clean" process. It generates radioactive by-products where the accelerator beam hits the thorium, in addition to the usual nuclear reactor fission products. A car-sized version is a fantasy.
I have LinkedIn's outgoing ad emails automatically forwarded to their abuse department, which seems to have helped. I already had "social networking" turned off.
LinkedIn was polluted by "LinkedIn Open Networkers", who accept connections from anybody. It's the same losers who tried to get vast numbers of Facebook friends, years later and older. They're mostly "consultants", sales reps, or spammers.
I've tried asking questions on LinkedIn Answers a few times, with underwhelming results. Questions like "How can I ship 75Kg from Fujian, China to the Western US cheaply with a shipper who will take end to end responsibility" produced results less useful than Google.
Automated expressway driving isn't that hard. If you have lane holding and radar cruise/braking control, both of which have been sold in production vehicles, that's almost enough. Quite a number of groups in both the US and Europe have done it. It's mostly a sensor problem.
The remaining hard problems in automated driving involve objects that aren't cars. Children, enemy troops, trash on the road, potholes, bicycles, low-hanging wires - stuff like that. That requires more situational awareness and object recognition, which is hard. None of this comes up much in expressway driving.
As an entertainment delivery system, the PC may be on the way out. As something used to get work done, handheld devices are just too weak on the input side. For passive consumers of information (i.e. most of the US population), the home PC may be on the way out. But anybody in school or with a job that requires originating anything needs something with a keyboard.
Admittedly, not many people today really do much computing on their desktop. I've been running Autodesk Inventor and SprutCAM lately, and it's impressive what can be done with today's solid modelling and graphics power. Especially with Inventor, which actually uses a 12 CPU core machine usefully. You used to have to struggle to work with a sizable model in a CAD system. Now all the sluggishness is gone, and you don't need to cut up the model into sections to get it to fit.
It's interesting that Apple still assumes that i[phone]|[pad]|[pod] owners have a PC-type system available for activation, synchronization, and updates. You'd think they would have cut the cord by now, but no.
The great thing about television is that it's so passive. - Ted Turner.
There have been Hiphone phones for years now. The first one wasn't very good, but by the Hiphone 4, they were getting halfway decent reviews.
It doesn't integrate with Apple's overpriced ecosystem. It's a straightforward unlocked GSM smartphone. And, unlike with Apple, you can replace the battery.
Here's the actual decision. First, the company's request for an injunction to stop the mail campaign, denied by the district court, is still denied. The claim under the Computer Fraud and Abuse act goes back to the district court, and can proceed there, but the appellate court makes no comment on the merits of that claim. The appellate court was only dealing with the issue of whether the Norris-LaGuardia act, which gives jurisdiction to the National Labor Relations Board when the behavior involved arises out of a labor dispute, preempted the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act . The appeals court decided that this isn't an NLRB matter, and goes back to the district court.
Slashdot Mirror
The Seasteading Institute's Patri Friedman says the group plans to launch an office park off the San Francisco coast next year, with the first full-time settlements following seven years later.
Like that's going to work.
People have talked about building artificial islands and setting up their own sovereign states. There are areas of the Caribbean where the ocean is so shallow that this is feasible, and there are plenty of submerged and semi-submerged islands around the world. With enough money, barges, and rock, building an island is possible.
But, under current international law, that doesn't yield sovereignty. The Law of the Sea treaty reads "a naturally formed area of land, which is above water at high tide". Nor can countries expand their territory by building artificial islands. (One of Japan's key boundaries is defined by an island that's worn down to the size of a small bedroom. A protective breakwater has been built around it at great expense.)
If do-it-yourself sovereignty were going to work, the oil industry, which puts up many offshore structures, some of which are actual islands, would have done it years ago.
There is exactly one way for SSL certification to be fixed, and that's for browser makers to grow a pair and stop trusting root CAs who do not enforce strict rules for identifiability on all the lesser CAs under them.
Right. CA's are supposed to be financially liable if they issue a cert to a party other than the one they're certifying. Part of the problem is that CAs get to write their own "relying party agreements". We need a tough, standard relying party agreement with a minimum guaranteed liability to get into a browser's approved root cert list.
Once in a while a CA will slip up. Then they pay. That keeps them honest. A CA is an insurance company, and should be regulated as such.
It's nice that they finally got the standard done. But there's so much junk in there. The C++ committee was dominated by people who wanted to do cool things with templates.
Some years ago, someone figured out that it was possible to abuse the C++ template system into doing arbitrary computations at compile time. This developed a fan club. That fan club has dominated the C++ standards committee, because nobody else cared. So now we have a standard for C++ which supports template-based programming a little better.
Current thinking seems to be that,while template programming is too hard for ordinary programmers, the templates will be written by l33t programmers and then be used by the lower classes. Unfortunately, if anything goes wrong, the end user has to look at the innards of the template to find the problem. We went through this with LISP decades ago. Check out the MIT Loop Macro, That finally became stable about the time LISP died out.
Note what isn't in the new C++. There's no more memory safety than in the old one. (Fans will say that it's safer if you only use the new features. Now try to call some library that doesn't use them.) So the buffer overflow attacks and crashes will continue.
C++ is the only language to offer hiding without memory safety. Hard-compiled languages from Pascal through Go have hiding with safety, as do all the major scripting languages. C has neither hiding nor safety; the pointer manipulations are right there in the source. There have been safe, hard-compiled languages without garbage collection, most notably Ada and the Modula family. Safety and speed are not incompatible.
Remember how CSS was supposed to make web pages more compact, and simplify layout by avoiding old-style table based layout? Look at how that worked out.
Here's a single article from the Wall Street Journal. It's 3299 lines of HTML. That doesn't include anything pulled in from style sheets.
As an exercise, I went through and took out all the junk. The actual story, plus all the formatting needed to display the full page in in its original fonts, is 77 lines. So what's the rest? Some of it is links to other stories, but that's under 100 lines. Much of the code is ad-related, even though there are only a few ads. There's a lot of "social related" stuff, which, although it takes up little screen real estate, seems to require far too much on-page code. The "login" mechanism turns out to have all the code for not only "login", but registration of a new account, as part of the page itself. That's on every page served by the Wall Street Journal. There's a vast amount of hidden content, including a "video carousel". There's personalization stuff that would turn on if the user was logged in.
When the people who code crap like that start using HTML 5 with both local storage and connections to the "cloud", it can only get worse.
From the article
"It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy."
They have a point. And it's a real problem, because when some new problem comes along, society seems unable to deal with it.
Consider the current messes. Nobody in public life expresses a good understanding of the current economic situation. The political consensus is "it's just a big recession". It might be a permanent situation. (Japan had a real estate crash in 1989, and neither real estate nor the stock market ever came back. To some extent, the current US model of capitalism is broken, yet nobody is proposing a better model. (Should we have a tax model that doesn't favor debt so much? The US taxes companies' dividends but not interest paid on debt, stock buybacks, or executive compensation. As a result, most companies don't pay dividends and borrow too much.)
In the 1930s, it was very different. All sorts of big ideas were proposed to deal with the Great Depression. Some of them were nutty, like Technocracy. Some of them were implemented, like the Works Progress Administration. It was a tough time, but the problems were discussed and solutions tried.
There's a fundamental assumption that economic growth will continue. That may be incorrect. Looking ahead, we have big issues. Some major natural resources run out in the next few decades. There's no cheap source of energy even being seriously talked about. No new source of energy has been developed in the last 50 years. (Nuclear reactors and solar cells are now more than 50 years old.) Demand is going up as China modernizes. Now what? We have no clue how to run a post-oil world with 6 billion people. World oil production peaked in 2005.
At venture capital conferences, I'm not seeing new great ideas. More like endless me-too presentations. (Way too much "social networking". I've seen a pitch for a social network for cats.)
We're seeing regression in developed countries. Israel used to be a modern country dominated by kibbutzim with a strong work ethic, the people who "made the desert bloom". Now, Israeli politics is dominated by the religious right (the "ultra-orthodox"), who are a welfare-supported dead weight on the country. The Islamic world's religious right is at least as bad. (It's amusing to observe how much the Jewish and Islamic right wings resemble each other. Oppress women, check. Anti-education, check. Anti-progress, check. Old Testament mindset, check. Old guys in black with beards in charge, check.)
Before Reagan, not in the US, either. Today, the advertising costs of prescription exceed their manufacturing costs.
"stories of theft, underhanded dealings, criminal empires and general unscrupulous play." That's Bitcoin. The Bitcoin world has a story like that about once a week. The entire Bitcoin economy does about the volume of one supermarket.
Apple is claiming to have originated the concept of a rectangular screen with a dark bezel of equal width on all sides and rounded corners on the bezel? That's the standard format of most generic LCD monitors and book-like "e-readers". If you're going to make a touch-screen device, that's the obvious form factor.
This is just getting silly. Are those guys elected, appointed, hired by Google, or what?
That's sad. Motorola was once a great company. They were the only electronics company to successfully transition from tubes to transistors to ICs. They once made the best microprocessors; the 68000 series was way ahead of its time. (If the MMU for the 68000 hadn't been years late and badly designed, the whole PC world would have been powered by 68000 machines.)
But the semiconductor business was spun off as Freescale years ago. After giving up commercial mobile handsets, this leaves Motorola making police radios and related niche items.
The surprising thing is how little Apple actually does. Apple is really a design and marketing firm and a reseller/retailer. They don't make much hardware. (From the annual report: "Substantially all of the Companyâ(TM)s Macs, iPhones, iPads, iPods, logic boards and other assembled products are manufactured by outsourcing partners, primarily in various parts of Asia. A significant concentration of this outsourced manufacturing is currently performed by only a few outsourcing partners of the Company, including Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Ltd. and Quanta Computer, Inc."). They resell music owned by others. They're not a wireless carrier.
I noticed that their (Unladen Swallow) progress seemed to have stopped, is there any official announcement?
Unladen Swallow is an ex-parrot.. "Jeffrey and I have been pulled on to other projects of higher importance to Google.", writes the former project lead.
When the user gets useful organic search results leading directly to a useful site, the search engine makes nothing. When the search ads are more relevant than the top organic results, the user is likely to click on an ad, making the search engine some money. If some of the top-results are from ad-heavy content farms, leading the user on a detour through made-for-Adsense pages, the search engine profits. Some commentators have said that Google results are "just bad enough" to keep users coming back while driving traffic to the ads.
Then there are ads on third-party pages, what Google calls "AdSense". This is the business that used to be called "DoubleClick", which Google bought in 2007. Bing has a quality advantage here, because they have no incentive to send traffic to Adsense pages. (Microsoft is considering a "publisher" program of their own, but so far it's just in test. Adsense is 30% of Google's revenue.)
This is a fundamental conflict in the search engine business, creating tension between the "editorial" side of the company and the advertising side. Google is nowhere near as tough on spam as it could be. Google Adsense funds most of the dreck on the web. Google does not seem to favor AdSense heavy-sites (SEO metrics people watch this closely), but they don't disfavor them, either. Compare Blekko, which takes a hard line on spam, blocking all the major content farms.
That may be why Bing scores higher in Experian's metric.
It's an impressive effort that they were able to get this to work at all. Python is really tough to optimize. All bindings are changeable at any time, even from another thread. (The latter is silly, but since it doesn't cost anything to do that in CPython, which is an inefficient naive interpreter that can only run one thread at a time and spends much of its time doing dictionary lookups. Von Rossum defines the language by what CPython can do. There's a huge speed penalty for allowing such extreme dynamism, about 60x over C/C++. The Google team tried to fix that with Unladen Swallow, but gave up when their JIT system was barely faster than CPython.)
PyPy's most effective optimization to date is that it figures out when numbers don't have to be boxed. This allows generating numeric machine code, rather than grinding through the object machinery for every number. They have to be prepared to discard code when something binding gets changed. This requires a very complex system, involving two interpreters (regular and backup) as well as the JIT compiler.
The PyPy crowd is at last starting on the tougher optimizations, like hoisting some operations out of loops. (FORTRAN compilers were doing this in the 1960s.) That's real progress, but it's very hard to do in such a dynamic language.
Many of the optimizations involve generating run-time code that checks to see if the normal case is occurring, and that no other code has patched the code or changed the data from the outside in a way that invalidates the fast path. Then there's code to unwind what the fast path was doing, and interpret or recompile. Most such code is never executed.
This is Canadian. Canadian and UK law don't have as much baggage attached to the concept of "property" as the US does. Through an accident of legal history, that Blackstone's commentaries were more available in America than other writings on law, American law and the American constitution attaches undue weight to property rights. The "due process" clause in the U.S. Constitution limits due process to "life, liberty, and property", which is part of why it matters so much whether something is "property". A leasehold, for example, is not property.
The US never had feudalism, where the lords owned all the property, and thus never had to get rid of feudalism. In the European countries that did, when feudalism went down, so did the emphasis on property rights. This remains quite real today. In Britain, (but not Scotland) there is a "right to ramble", to walk over undeveloped, uncultivated private land. Squatters in abandoned buildings have rights. Penalties for trespass are very low by US standards. Conversely, the rights of renters are stronger in England than in the US.
Canada generally follows English precedent in this area. "Properly" is not an absolute; it's a bundle of rights established by law and precedent. So that domains are "property" means less than it would in the US.
There are ruggedized phones. Apple just doesn't make one.
For what they charge, the screen should be sapphire, not glass. Sapphire sheet is neither rare nor expensive. Supermarket checkout scanners (and, especially, Home Depot) usually use sapphire windows. You can drag metal cans and tools across those for years without scratching them.
Then there's the whole silliness of needing a case to protect an iPhone. If the thing was designed right, you wouldn't need a case to protect it. There are phones that work fine after being run over by a car. There are rugged smartphones.
But none of them are made by Hon Hai, a/k/a Foxconn, a/k/a Apple.
20-50kW per hour? With nonsensical units like that, it's a damn good through you're an anonymous coward.
Right.
Watts, kilowatts, and megawatts are all units of power, not energy. So is horsepower. 1KW = about 1.3 HP. A compact car in efficient cruise uses about 7KW. Formula One cars use about 225KW. The largest modern railroad locomotives are in the 5MW range. A 747 at takeoff uses about 100MW. A typical modern generating plant unit is around 1GW.
Actual web site of promoter. Even worse car-related web site of promoter. He's been plugging this since 2009 or so.
Laser-induced fission is quite feasible, and requires far less energy input than laser-induced fusion. Laser fission of thorium has been done on a small scale as a lab experiment. Thorium reactors have been built, with modest success.
A pure thorium reactor won't achieve criticality, because thorium has no isotopes that fission on their own. The fuel has to have uranium or plutonium mixed in to start the nuclear reaction. The laser concept seems to be to use a laser to get things going.
There's been some interest in accelerator-pumped thorium fission. It's been tried in Japan, but that group hasn't reached breakeven. It's a plausible concept, but so far nobody has been able to figure out a way to make it work.
Incidentally, this is not a "clean" process. It generates radioactive by-products where the accelerator beam hits the thorium, in addition to the usual nuclear reactor fission products. A car-sized version is a fantasy.
From the article:
A 250 MW unit weighing about 500 lbs. (227 kg) would be small and light enough to drop under the hood of a car, he says.
250 megawatts? Somebody is just making up numbers. Takeoff power for a 747 is about 100MW.
Google paid Apple $100 million a year to be the search provider on the iPhone.
I have LinkedIn's outgoing ad emails automatically forwarded to their abuse department, which seems to have helped. I already had "social networking" turned off.
LinkedIn was polluted by "LinkedIn Open Networkers", who accept connections from anybody. It's the same losers who tried to get vast numbers of Facebook friends, years later and older. They're mostly "consultants", sales reps, or spammers.
I've tried asking questions on LinkedIn Answers a few times, with underwhelming results. Questions like "How can I ship 75Kg from Fujian, China to the Western US cheaply with a shipper who will take end to end responsibility" produced results less useful than Google.
Automated expressway driving isn't that hard. If you have lane holding and radar cruise/braking control, both of which have been sold in production vehicles, that's almost enough. Quite a number of groups in both the US and Europe have done it. It's mostly a sensor problem.
The remaining hard problems in automated driving involve objects that aren't cars. Children, enemy troops, trash on the road, potholes, bicycles, low-hanging wires - stuff like that. That requires more situational awareness and object recognition, which is hard. None of this comes up much in expressway driving.
As an entertainment delivery system, the PC may be on the way out. As something used to get work done, handheld devices are just too weak on the input side. For passive consumers of information (i.e. most of the US population), the home PC may be on the way out. But anybody in school or with a job that requires originating anything needs something with a keyboard.
Admittedly, not many people today really do much computing on their desktop. I've been running Autodesk Inventor and SprutCAM lately, and it's impressive what can be done with today's solid modelling and graphics power. Especially with Inventor, which actually uses a 12 CPU core machine usefully. You used to have to struggle to work with a sizable model in a CAD system. Now all the sluggishness is gone, and you don't need to cut up the model into sections to get it to fit.
It's interesting that Apple still assumes that i[phone]|[pad]|[pod] owners have a PC-type system available for activation, synchronization, and updates. You'd think they would have cut the cord by now, but no.
The great thing about television is that it's so passive. - Ted Turner.
There have been Hiphone phones for years now. The first one wasn't very good, but by the Hiphone 4, they were getting halfway decent reviews.
It doesn't integrate with Apple's overpriced ecosystem. It's a straightforward unlocked GSM smartphone. And, unlike with Apple, you can replace the battery.
Here's the actual decision. First, the company's request for an injunction to stop the mail campaign, denied by the district court, is still denied. The claim under the Computer Fraud and Abuse act goes back to the district court, and can proceed there, but the appellate court makes no comment on the merits of that claim. The appellate court was only dealing with the issue of whether the Norris-LaGuardia act, which gives jurisdiction to the National Labor Relations Board when the behavior involved arises out of a labor dispute, preempted the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act . The appeals court decided that this isn't an NLRB matter, and goes back to the district court.