Borders was the last bookstore in downtown Palo Alto, in Silicon Valley, except for a place that sells "collectables". A decade ago, there were three big bookstores and three small ones. Now there are no bookstores, but five phone stores.
The patent will issue on August 2, 2011, as #7,99,1764. See the last entry in the image file wrapper in Public PAIR. The original application was divided by the PTO into a large number of divisional applications (which the PTO does when a patent covers disparate items) and all of those are being pursued. So there's more to come.
I think I see how this got through the USPTO. If you read the application, it sounds like a novel but nutty scheme along the line of one of those "answers" sites where people answer questions submitted by others, but distributed and with some kind of AI system to try to put together what the various people are doing. Here's the abstract:
"A system for transmission, reception and accumulation of the knowledge packets to plurality of channel nodes in the network operating distributedly in a peer to peer environment via installable one or more role active Human Operating System (HOS) applications in a digital devise of each of channel node, a network controller registering and providing desired HOS applications and multiple developers developing advance communication and knowledge management applications and each of subscribers exploiting the said network resources by leveraging and augmenting taxonomically and ontologically classified knowledge classes expressed via plurality search macros and UKID structures facilitating said expert human agents for knowledge invocation and support services and service providers providing information services in the preidentified taxonomical classes, wherein each of channel nodes communicating with the unknown via domain specific supernodes each facilitating social networking and relationships development leading to human grid which is searchable via Universal Desktop Search by black box search module. "
The specification is a long stretch of turgid prose translated from some foreign language. There's pages of stuff like "On the other hand knowledge is by and large is pretty dynamic entity wherein one cannot present knowledge with the rigid boundaries. Human communication in general exploits this very virtue of our brain to express things in the plurality of contextual engagements. " It reads like an old USENET posting from some nut who thinks he has figured out AI.
The problem is that the claims don't just cover such a system. They also may cover something like Facebook, which actually is a distributed system which, among other things, puts together answers to questions through a combination of human input and AI. Nothing in the application leads the examiner to consider that possibility.
The priority date is only 2005, so there's probably prior art. But it will take litigation.
Perhaps there is a line between "terrorist" and "freedom fighter", but it's awfully hard to draw without losing a rosy view of one's own country's history.
True. When Menachem Begin (prime minister of Israel) met Anwar Sadat (premier of Egypt), he greeted him as a "fellow terrorist". Both were hard-line military types. They put together the deal that has kept Israel and Egypt from fighting for almost 40 years now.
No, it doesn't. NASA did little for the semiconductor industry. They were never a big customer. Most NASA stuff is one-offs. Much of the early push for semiconductors came from the USAF, which was a big customer and bought in quantity. NSA and the AEC also played a part; they funded much computer development up to 1970 or so, when the commercial market took off. By the mid-1980s, the commercial market was so much bigger than the government market that Silicon Valley pretty much ignored the government market.
Having worked for a Silicon Valley company that made communications satellites, I don't recall there being any ex-NASA people around. Lots of ex-military people; my own group had a former Navy fighter jock and a former USAF officer. We dealt with the Air Force and the three-letter agencies all the time. NASA never even came up.
This is Sumitomo Electric, annual sales about US$20 billion, not some startup. Their major businesses are wire and cable, which includes fibre optics and associated laser diodes. Looking back at their press releases, there are items like "Arrival of the "Era of High-Temperature Superconducting Wire with 200-A-Class Critical Current", followed a few months later by "World's First In-Grid High-Temperature Superconducting Power Cable System is Now Online at Albany, New York". This company doesn't typically overhype their technology.
Their "celmet" materials have been around for a while, but until recently, they were nickel-based only. They've made some NiMh batteries with this technology, but there wasn't a big win. Now they have an aluminum version, which is more useful for batteries.
The little quadrotors have been around for about 15 years now. The first time I saw one, it was made mostly of Styrofoam and could barely get off the ground. Now they go zooming around, due to better motors and much better batteries. But they still can't carry much load.
This thing looks like a nice tradeoff. There's more structure to carry around, and you only get 8 minutes of flight time, but it's not as fragile as most quadrotors. Those things are going to be popular with soldiers and cops.
It looks like the interior isn't finished. The right third of the dashboard is still open, with cables hanging out, and there's a keyboard stuffed in. So they're still debugging. When he parks the thing and closes the canopy, it gets quieter, so the turbine noise is being dumped into the cockpit. No wonder he wears noise-cancelling headphones.
Sounds like Facebook's business plan. Originally you had to go to a good school to get onto Facebook. Now they let anybody in, then use the anal probe.
Now this really dates me. But in 1975, I got a tour of Xerox PARC when I was taking a summer course in computer architecture at UC Santa Cruz. Alan Kay showed us some of the early Alto machines. They were still having trouble getting a smooth phosphor coating on the custom-made page-sized CRTs. We saw the PARC 3mb/s Ethernet, which Kay described as "an Alohanet with a captive ether," the first networked file server, and the first networked laser printer. It was clear this was the future, if the price could come down by about a factor of 10. Kay was hoping that some day a workstation might cost as little as a grand piano.
At Ford Aerospace, I was responsible for putting in the first Ethernet, around 1981. It was mostly "thick Ethernet" at 10mb/s. Ethernet cables weren't standard items, but Ford Aerospace routinely built cables for satellite ground stations, so we had the appropriate cables made up and pulled through the telephone ducts run through the building's concrete floors. I checked out a time-domain reflectometer from the measurement equipment pool and took a look at the cable. Cables ended in PL-239 coax connectors, and sections were joined with a barrel. The Ethernet tranceivers had SO-239 connectors on both ends, so the cable went through them. We used a vampire tap once or twice, but it didn't work out as well.
The TDR showed a transceiver as generating almost no reflections. But bending the cable tighter than a 1' radius caused a noticeable impedance mismatch.
We were bothered that coax Ethernet wasn't a balanced system. There's a DC component to the signal, which means you can't use decoupling capacitors between sections to get rid of hum. We spent time on grounding issues and looked at the cable signal with scopes a lot. Repeaters were very expensive then, and we were trying to avoid them.
The network interfaces were mostly 3Com boards. Our original network consisted of a PDP 11/70, a PDP 11/45, a VAX 11/780, and a PDP 11/34 used as a gateway to a 9600 baud leased line "backbone link" to Ford HQ in Dearborn MI. We later added four Sun 2 workstations and a Sun server. Everything ran TCP/IP. Ford HQ had a similar link to Ford Aerospace in Colorado Springs,which had an ARPANET IMP. So we could get to the ARPANET over a 9600 baud shared backbone. We could FTP files instead of mailing tapes! I used to Telnet into Stanford's machines over that link.
I did a lot of work on 3COM's TCP/IP implementation, which originally was totally incapable of coping with a mix of speeds in the network. That's why I have those RFCs on network congestion with my name on them. This was before telephone de-regulation, and that 9600 baud leased line was expensive.
The article mentions that "There used to be a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt surrounding the performance impact of collisions." There was a period around 1984-1990 when coax Ethernet performance in practice was much worse than theory predicted. The problem was finally figured out by Wes Irish at Xerox PARC. It turns out that the defective design of a SEEQ Ethernet interface chip was causing the problem. As the state machine of the chip transitioned at the end of receiving a packet, there was a period of a few nanoseconds when the chip momentarily turned on the transmitter power, jamming the coax for a few nanoseconds. This reset the "quiet time" timer on all the other stations on the cable, causing them to ignore any following packet for several microseconds, after which they dropped back to the proper "look for sync" state. Back-to-back packets thus lost the second packet, which caused retransmissions and killed performance, but didn't show up as a "collision" to the controll
I suspect that the margins on their current pricing were set to be small enough to snuff out Blockbuster.
Right. Now that they're the dominant company, they can start screwing their customers and make some real money. At least until Comcast and AT&T start competing with them.
Blockbuster was going to get into streaming years ago. Unfortunately, they partnered with Enron for bandwidth.
This is because China stopped allowing undocumented domain registration. Registering a domain in China now requires a national ID and a business license. GoDaddy then stopped registering ".cn" domains, probably a good thing.
Microtransactions and social gaming are independent. There are MMORPGs without microtransactions, and paid upgrades for single-player games. Putting them together allows social pressures to induce people into spending. This works only on a fraction of the population, but that fraction is big enough to be profitable.
The same mindset can be seen in the slots department of low-end casinos. It's striking to watch a whole room of people in zombie mode, putting money into machines and pushing the buttons. Especially since the net expectation is negative and almost all of them lose.
There is a zombie mode involved. I've watched bus groups come into a Vegas hotel. the people get off the bus and head directly for the slot machines. You'd think they'd check into their rooms, maybe take a shower, find out what shows are in town. No. Straight to the slots.
Which reminds me. Whatever happened to that Asus subnotebook with Linux pre-installed which was talked up on Slashdot a month ago? The models mentioned are only available with Windows 7 Starter.
stems from the misconception that Bitcoin is a Ponzi, pyramid or other type of scheme designed with the intent to defraud later adopters. That is not the design intent of bitcoin.
That wasn't the original intent. That's just how it turned out.
The concept was supposed to be that Bitcoin would be a widely used currency for micropayments. In practice, the Bitcoin world is mostly speculators and "miners"; its use as a medium of exchange is trivial.
It takes about $100,000 per day in new cash to keep up the price of Bitcoins as more are "mined". So there's considerable interest among current holders in finding new suckers before the whole thing goes bust.
Although space gets most of the attention, arctic and ocean exploration is way down, too. In the 1960s, there was talk of "undersea cities' and "cities under the ice". A few small underwater habitats were even built. The only one still operating, at Key West, is being used as a hotel for divers. No manned submarine has been down in the Marianas Trench since Trieste, in the 1960s.
See NMAtv's take on gadget envy. This is from Taiwan's biggest fast-turnaround animation house. (Apple fanboys will hate this.)
From a corporate perspective, a big advantage of the Blackberry is that, in corporate configurations, it has an encrypted link to the corporate servers, with the keys held only by the company, not the carrier. For a large number of business users, this is an essential feature. No device slaved to a carrier can be trusted in today's market.
In the black and white world of "you're either with us or against us", you are either for this bill and against child pornography or you are against this bill and for child pornography. If you try bringing some sanity into it, they will pound that point and make it seem you're eluding it.
Previously, the big excuse for surveillance was "terrorism". Now that a SEAL team not only killed bin Laden, but captured all his records, it's clear that he hadn't been accomplishing much besides hiding out for years. So the surveillance lobby has to fall back on kiddie porn again.
The biggest current threats to the United States are the Mississippi River system, the Federal deficit, and white-collar crime in the financial sector.
shouldnt block gmail/yahoo/hotmail or other big mail servers.
It's useful to have a penalty in your spam filter for free email services. Google's inbound spam filtering is good. Outbound spam filtering, not so much.
Related to this, the use of free hosting services as spam targets continues. Google spreadsheets, of all things, are widely used to support phishing scams. Here's a Microsoft Webmail Activation Form" embedded in a Google spreadsheet. Because the related phishing emails contain a Google URL, they tend not to be tagged as spam by spam filters. The strange thing about that example (one of 124 such in PhishTank today) is that Google's spam blocking, as used by Firefox, knows that's a phishing page. The anti-phishing part of Google isn't talking to their own abuse department.
We've been tracking this at SiteTruth for years. The Google spreadsheet scam is less than a year old, and is now the most popular attack we see. Some free hosting services (mostly "t35.com", "piczo.com", "webs.com") still get hit, but Google is now #1.
Basic truth: if you offer free hosting or free URL redirection, you must have an automatic cross-check with phishing data sources like PhishTank and the APWG, or you will be pwned by phishers. Free hosting includes spreadsheets, forms, and polls. If the user can put HTML into it, it can be used for phishing.
The effect of the Sandia device is not to eliminate the boundary layer, as the article says, but to make it much thinner, as the PDF says. The thermal resistance of the boundary layer is approximately proportional to its thickness, so the heat transfer goes up by the same ratio. That moves the heat into the air between the impeller fins, which then proceeds to carry it overboard.
That's what is so impressive about this work. A spinning, finned heat sink isn't new. Combining it with a thermally efficient coupling to a stationary heat source is.
It's not perfect, but dry cask storage in Yucca Mountain is way better than rods in spent fuel pools in power plants.
There's been worry about shipping spent fuel rods around, but the casks are very tough (they will survive being hit by a locomotive), and the worst cases are far, far less dangerous than a failed spent fuel pool at a power plant, as we now know.
It's a reasonable language in its modern form. It has a reasonable, if not great, syntax. (Compare Perl.) Someone wrote that it doesn't support recursion. Yes, it does. It even supports closures. The object model is adequate, if not inspired. It's a memory-safe language. About the only thing it doesn't support is concurrency.
The current generation of JIT compilers do a reasonably good job on performance. Free implementations are easily available. So there's no problem running it.
The problem with Javascript is mostly that the code quality seen on many web pages is appallingly bad. (Or, alternatively, the source code has been run through some obfusicator/compressor.) That's not the fault of the language. Javascript's interface to browsers is also rather clunky; the primitives for manipulating the DOM were ill-chosen. But, again, that's not a language problem.
We have a standard that says everything has to use the same HDMI connector. Then Apple tries to sleaze around it and introduce their own, incompatible connector. The problem is Apple, not the HDMI consortium. Apple just needs to get with the program.
Slashdot Mirror
Borders was the last bookstore in downtown Palo Alto, in Silicon Valley, except for a place that sells "collectables". A decade ago, there were three big bookstores and three small ones. Now there are no bookstores, but five phone stores.
The patent will issue on August 2, 2011, as #7,99,1764. See the last entry in the image file wrapper in Public PAIR. The original application was divided by the PTO into a large number of divisional applications (which the PTO does when a patent covers disparate items) and all of those are being pursued. So there's more to come.
I think I see how this got through the USPTO. If you read the application, it sounds like a novel but nutty scheme along the line of one of those "answers" sites where people answer questions submitted by others, but distributed and with some kind of AI system to try to put together what the various people are doing. Here's the abstract:
"A system for transmission, reception and accumulation of the knowledge packets to plurality of channel nodes in the network operating distributedly in a peer to peer environment via installable one or more role active Human Operating System (HOS) applications in a digital devise of each of channel node, a network controller registering and providing desired HOS applications and multiple developers developing advance communication and knowledge management applications and each of subscribers exploiting the said network resources by leveraging and augmenting taxonomically and ontologically classified knowledge classes expressed via plurality search macros and UKID structures facilitating said expert human agents for knowledge invocation and support services and service providers providing information services in the preidentified taxonomical classes, wherein each of channel nodes communicating with the unknown via domain specific supernodes each facilitating social networking and relationships development leading to human grid which is searchable via Universal Desktop Search by black box search module. "
The specification is a long stretch of turgid prose translated from some foreign language. There's pages of stuff like "On the other hand knowledge is by and large is pretty dynamic entity wherein one cannot present knowledge with the rigid boundaries. Human communication in general exploits this very virtue of our brain to express things in the plurality of contextual engagements. " It reads like an old USENET posting from some nut who thinks he has figured out AI.
The problem is that the claims don't just cover such a system. They also may cover something like Facebook, which actually is a distributed system which, among other things, puts together answers to questions through a combination of human input and AI. Nothing in the application leads the examiner to consider that possibility.
The priority date is only 2005, so there's probably prior art. But it will take litigation.
Perhaps there is a line between "terrorist" and "freedom fighter", but it's awfully hard to draw without losing a rosy view of one's own country's history.
True. When Menachem Begin (prime minister of Israel) met Anwar Sadat (premier of Egypt), he greeted him as a "fellow terrorist". Both were hard-line military types. They put together the deal that has kept Israel and Egypt from fighting for almost 40 years now.
Silicon valley owes its life to NASA.
No, it doesn't. NASA did little for the semiconductor industry. They were never a big customer. Most NASA stuff is one-offs. Much of the early push for semiconductors came from the USAF, which was a big customer and bought in quantity. NSA and the AEC also played a part; they funded much computer development up to 1970 or so, when the commercial market took off. By the mid-1980s, the commercial market was so much bigger than the government market that Silicon Valley pretty much ignored the government market.
Having worked for a Silicon Valley company that made communications satellites, I don't recall there being any ex-NASA people around. Lots of ex-military people; my own group had a former Navy fighter jock and a former USAF officer. We dealt with the Air Force and the three-letter agencies all the time. NASA never even came up.
The actual press release is rather conservative.
This is Sumitomo Electric, annual sales about US$20 billion, not some startup. Their major businesses are wire and cable, which includes fibre optics and associated laser diodes. Looking back at their press releases, there are items like "Arrival of the "Era of High-Temperature Superconducting Wire with 200-A-Class Critical Current", followed a few months later by "World's First In-Grid High-Temperature Superconducting Power Cable System is Now Online at Albany, New York". This company doesn't typically overhype their technology.
Their "celmet" materials have been around for a while, but until recently, they were nickel-based only. They've made some NiMh batteries with this technology, but there wasn't a big win. Now they have an aluminum version, which is more useful for batteries.
This might actually work.
The little quadrotors have been around for about 15 years now. The first time I saw one, it was made mostly of Styrofoam and could barely get off the ground. Now they go zooming around, due to better motors and much better batteries. But they still can't carry much load.
This thing looks like a nice tradeoff. There's more structure to carry around, and you only get 8 minutes of flight time, but it's not as fragile as most quadrotors. Those things are going to be popular with soldiers and cops.
Youtube video of the thing. Very nice.
It looks like the interior isn't finished. The right third of the dashboard is still open, with cables hanging out, and there's a keyboard stuffed in. So they're still debugging. When he parks the thing and closes the canopy, it gets quieter, so the turbine noise is being dumped into the cockpit. No wonder he wears noise-cancelling headphones.
Sounds like Facebook's business plan. Originally you had to go to a good school to get onto Facebook. Now they let anybody in, then use the anal probe.
Now this really dates me. But in 1975, I got a tour of Xerox PARC when I was taking a summer course in computer architecture at UC Santa Cruz. Alan Kay showed us some of the early Alto machines. They were still having trouble getting a smooth phosphor coating on the custom-made page-sized CRTs. We saw the PARC 3mb/s Ethernet, which Kay described as "an Alohanet with a captive ether," the first networked file server, and the first networked laser printer. It was clear this was the future, if the price could come down by about a factor of 10. Kay was hoping that some day a workstation might cost as little as a grand piano.
At Ford Aerospace, I was responsible for putting in the first Ethernet, around 1981. It was mostly "thick Ethernet" at 10mb/s. Ethernet cables weren't standard items, but Ford Aerospace routinely built cables for satellite ground stations, so we had the appropriate cables made up and pulled through the telephone ducts run through the building's concrete floors. I checked out a time-domain reflectometer from the measurement equipment pool and took a look at the cable. Cables ended in PL-239 coax connectors, and sections were joined with a barrel. The Ethernet tranceivers had SO-239 connectors on both ends, so the cable went through them. We used a vampire tap once or twice, but it didn't work out as well. The TDR showed a transceiver as generating almost no reflections. But bending the cable tighter than a 1' radius caused a noticeable impedance mismatch.
We were bothered that coax Ethernet wasn't a balanced system. There's a DC component to the signal, which means you can't use decoupling capacitors between sections to get rid of hum. We spent time on grounding issues and looked at the cable signal with scopes a lot. Repeaters were very expensive then, and we were trying to avoid them.
The network interfaces were mostly 3Com boards. Our original network consisted of a PDP 11/70, a PDP 11/45, a VAX 11/780, and a PDP 11/34 used as a gateway to a 9600 baud leased line "backbone link" to Ford HQ in Dearborn MI. We later added four Sun 2 workstations and a Sun server. Everything ran TCP/IP. Ford HQ had a similar link to Ford Aerospace in Colorado Springs,which had an ARPANET IMP. So we could get to the ARPANET over a 9600 baud shared backbone. We could FTP files instead of mailing tapes! I used to Telnet into Stanford's machines over that link.
I did a lot of work on 3COM's TCP/IP implementation, which originally was totally incapable of coping with a mix of speeds in the network. That's why I have those RFCs on network congestion with my name on them. This was before telephone de-regulation, and that 9600 baud leased line was expensive.
The article mentions that "There used to be a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt surrounding the performance impact of collisions." There was a period around 1984-1990 when coax Ethernet performance in practice was much worse than theory predicted. The problem was finally figured out by Wes Irish at Xerox PARC. It turns out that the defective design of a SEEQ Ethernet interface chip was causing the problem. As the state machine of the chip transitioned at the end of receiving a packet, there was a period of a few nanoseconds when the chip momentarily turned on the transmitter power, jamming the coax for a few nanoseconds. This reset the "quiet time" timer on all the other stations on the cable, causing them to ignore any following packet for several microseconds, after which they dropped back to the proper "look for sync" state. Back-to-back packets thus lost the second packet, which caused retransmissions and killed performance, but didn't show up as a "collision" to the controll
NMAtv, the animation house in Taiwan, has their say on the Netflix price increase.
They're starting to overlap Slashdot coverage, and they're much better at it.
I suspect that the margins on their current pricing were set to be small enough to snuff out Blockbuster.
Right. Now that they're the dominant company, they can start screwing their customers and make some real money. At least until Comcast and AT&T start competing with them.
Blockbuster was going to get into streaming years ago. Unfortunately, they partnered with Enron for bandwidth.
This is because China stopped allowing undocumented domain registration. Registering a domain in China now requires a national ID and a business license. GoDaddy then stopped registering ".cn" domains, probably a good thing.
Microtransactions and social gaming are independent. There are MMORPGs without microtransactions, and paid upgrades for single-player games. Putting them together allows social pressures to induce people into spending. This works only on a fraction of the population, but that fraction is big enough to be profitable.
The same mindset can be seen in the slots department of low-end casinos. It's striking to watch a whole room of people in zombie mode, putting money into machines and pushing the buttons. Especially since the net expectation is negative and almost all of them lose.
There is a zombie mode involved. I've watched bus groups come into a Vegas hotel. the people get off the bus and head directly for the slot machines. You'd think they'd check into their rooms, maybe take a shower, find out what shows are in town. No. Straight to the slots.
That's Zynga's target market.
Which reminds me. Whatever happened to that Asus subnotebook with Linux pre-installed which was talked up on Slashdot a month ago? The models mentioned are only available with Windows 7 Starter.
stems from the misconception that Bitcoin is a Ponzi, pyramid or other type of scheme designed with the intent to defraud later adopters. That is not the design intent of bitcoin.
That wasn't the original intent. That's just how it turned out.
The concept was supposed to be that Bitcoin would be a widely used currency for micropayments. In practice, the Bitcoin world is mostly speculators and "miners"; its use as a medium of exchange is trivial.
It takes about $100,000 per day in new cash to keep up the price of Bitcoins as more are "mined". So there's considerable interest among current holders in finding new suckers before the whole thing goes bust.
Although space gets most of the attention, arctic and ocean exploration is way down, too. In the 1960s, there was talk of "undersea cities' and "cities under the ice". A few small underwater habitats were even built. The only one still operating, at Key West, is being used as a hotel for divers. No manned submarine has been down in the Marianas Trench since Trieste, in the 1960s.
That field, too, has been taken over by robots.
See NMAtv's take on gadget envy. This is from Taiwan's biggest fast-turnaround animation house. (Apple fanboys will hate this.)
From a corporate perspective, a big advantage of the Blackberry is that, in corporate configurations, it has an encrypted link to the corporate servers, with the keys held only by the company, not the carrier. For a large number of business users, this is an essential feature. No device slaved to a carrier can be trusted in today's market.
In the black and white world of "you're either with us or against us", you are either for this bill and against child pornography or you are against this bill and for child pornography. If you try bringing some sanity into it, they will pound that point and make it seem you're eluding it.
Previously, the big excuse for surveillance was "terrorism". Now that a SEAL team not only killed bin Laden, but captured all his records, it's clear that he hadn't been accomplishing much besides hiding out for years. So the surveillance lobby has to fall back on kiddie porn again.
The biggest current threats to the United States are the Mississippi River system, the Federal deficit, and white-collar crime in the financial sector.
shouldnt block gmail/yahoo/hotmail or other big mail servers.
It's useful to have a penalty in your spam filter for free email services. Google's inbound spam filtering is good. Outbound spam filtering, not so much.
Related to this, the use of free hosting services as spam targets continues. Google spreadsheets, of all things, are widely used to support phishing scams. Here's a Microsoft Webmail Activation Form" embedded in a Google spreadsheet. Because the related phishing emails contain a Google URL, they tend not to be tagged as spam by spam filters. The strange thing about that example (one of 124 such in PhishTank today) is that Google's spam blocking, as used by Firefox, knows that's a phishing page. The anti-phishing part of Google isn't talking to their own abuse department.
We've been tracking this at SiteTruth for years. The Google spreadsheet scam is less than a year old, and is now the most popular attack we see. Some free hosting services (mostly "t35.com", "piczo.com", "webs.com") still get hit, but Google is now #1.
Basic truth: if you offer free hosting or free URL redirection, you must have an automatic cross-check with phishing data sources like PhishTank and the APWG, or you will be pwned by phishers. Free hosting includes spreadsheets, forms, and polls. If the user can put HTML into it, it can be used for phishing.
The effect of the Sandia device is not to eliminate the boundary layer, as the article says, but to make it much thinner, as the PDF says. The thermal resistance of the boundary layer is approximately proportional to its thickness, so the heat transfer goes up by the same ratio. That moves the heat into the air between the impeller fins, which then proceeds to carry it overboard.
That's what is so impressive about this work. A spinning, finned heat sink isn't new. Combining it with a thermally efficient coupling to a stationary heat source is.
It appears to be using similar principles and design to Tesla's turbine!
No, that's quite different. This thing has blades. It's a centrifugal pump for air.
It's not perfect, but dry cask storage in Yucca Mountain is way better than rods in spent fuel pools in power plants.
There's been worry about shipping spent fuel rods around, but the casks are very tough (they will survive being hit by a locomotive), and the worst cases are far, far less dangerous than a failed spent fuel pool at a power plant, as we now know.
It's a reasonable language in its modern form. It has a reasonable, if not great, syntax. (Compare Perl.) Someone wrote that it doesn't support recursion. Yes, it does. It even supports closures. The object model is adequate, if not inspired. It's a memory-safe language. About the only thing it doesn't support is concurrency.
The current generation of JIT compilers do a reasonably good job on performance. Free implementations are easily available. So there's no problem running it.
The problem with Javascript is mostly that the code quality seen on many web pages is appallingly bad. (Or, alternatively, the source code has been run through some obfusicator/compressor.) That's not the fault of the language. Javascript's interface to browsers is also rather clunky; the primitives for manipulating the DOM were ill-chosen. But, again, that's not a language problem.
I have two invitations in my inbox. None accepted. All this exclusivity BS is IMO BS.
Agreed. The first time I got a "Google+" ad, I wrote back to the person who sent it asking if they knew Google was spamming using their name.
We have a standard that says everything has to use the same HDMI connector. Then Apple tries to sleaze around it and introduce their own, incompatible connector. The problem is Apple, not the HDMI consortium. Apple just needs to get with the program.