Incorrect. Most states that aren't tax dodges (I'm looking at you Delaware) also require some combination of annual reports, corporate bylaws, and principals (often just managing partner).
Yes. I've been data-mining that data for SiteTruth, and it's amusing. No two states have the same format, although there's some similarity. Delaware provides less free info than most states. Some states have deliberate weaknesses in their data. Nevada, for example, doesn't require that changes in corporate officers be reported, so many out of state Nevada corporations have the same guy at a corporation service listed as President.
But that's OK. We're working on recognizing certain common patterns. Like "Incorporation state in low-disclosure states list AND NOT in business directories as having operations in incorporation state AND NOT in SEC Edgar AND NOT registered as foreign corporation in state where doing business IMPLIES slimeball".
Anonymous businesses deserve low search rankings. We're making that happen.
That's not an anonymity problem. That's an authentication problem.
One of the problems with all this "domaining" is that there are far too many domain transactions. The registrars that are "domain-tasting friendly" are worst about this. GoDaddy and ENom, with their multiple pseudo-registrars and affiliates, are heavily into domain-churning sideline businesses. They also have EULA terms much worse than the more legitimate registrars.
This isn't a WHOIS problem. It's a bottom-feeder registrar problem.
Festo does good work. They're an industrial automation company, and they do demos like this for promotional purposes. Check out their videos on YouTube.
The innovation here is not "fluidic muscles". It's their piezoelectric proportional valves. It's been possible for years to do precision control of pneumatics. Twenty years ago, "Pneumatic Valves, Inc." in Palo Alto was doing control like that. But older proportional valves were big and expensive, with a voice coil actuator on the end of a spool valve. Festo has miniaturized the technology with their piezoelectric valves.
Pneumatic systems have traditionally been either force actuators or devices driven to a limit stop. Fine position control was the domain of hydraulics. This is changing.
For pneumatic systems, if the valves can be brought close to the actuator, the valves are fast, position sensors are used, and the control system is well designed, the system becomes quite controllable. That's what Festo is demonstrating here.
You can also do some things with pneumatics you can't do well with electrical drive, such as create springs with variable spring constants. Muscles can be usefully modeled as spring-damper systems, where the spring constant, zero point, and damping constant are
all controllable. This can be emulated with electrical actuators, but emulating a spring in software requires high-powered actuators and loses energy. Legged running work needs something like a variable spring, and pneumatics are currently the closest thing to muscles available.
What do listeners want? They want wallpaper. They want something even and uneventful that they can drive to. 95% of all music listened to these days is listened to in the car. That is what it is sold for. Drivetime radio, or burning iTunes tracks to listen to between 730 to 845 and then again at 530 to 645. Two hours a day.
Exactly.
Not that popular music is any better "live". Clubs today mostly have hard walls, floors, and ceilings, for that murky "empty swimming pool" sound. If it's all about the bass, hall reverb time doesn't matter. In spaces like that, music that isn't all bass sounds awful.
After twenty years of hip hop and house, club owners don't care about room acoustics, just amp power.
So we're stuck. No genre that needs decent room acoustics can get any market share, even in clubs.
The solution to this is to have two printers for the "voter verified paper trail".
Each voting session is randomly printed on one of the two logging printers, and
a window opens to show that result to the voter.
The US doesn't need more engineers. If it did, salaries would be higher. In 1970, engineering and law salaries were about equal, or so says the IEEE. That's certainly changed.
The US doesn't need more engineers because high-tech manufacturing has gone offshore. Where the manufacturing goes, the production engineering must go, and the design engineering follows. Then the brands go. Then top management. Then the financing.
Read the Lenovo story. They're not a spinoff of IBM. They're a successful Chinese PC company that bought IBM's PC business to expand. IBM is just the company to which Lenovo outsources US warranty service.
but the legal principles you articulated seem to be pretty much a part of common law
Unfortunately, no. There's interaction with federal "tort reform" legislation passed in 2005 which favors arbitration. There's a question as to whether federal preemption of state law applies here. The 9th Circuit ruled that it didn't.
The key to this is that California law applies. "Under California law, a contract provision is unenforceable
due to unconscionability only if it is both procedurally
and substantively unconscionable." The "Discover Bank test" applies: "Under
this three-part inquiry, courts are required to determine: (1)
whether the agreement is " 'a consumer contract of adhesion'
" drafted by a party that has superior bargaining power;
(2) whether the agreement occurs " 'in a setting in which disputes
between the contracting parties predictably involve
small amounts of damages' "; and (3) whether " 'it is alleged
that the party with the superior bargaining power has carried
out a scheme to deliberately cheat large numbers of consumers
out of individually small sums of money.' (quoting Discover Bank, 36 Cal. 4th
at 162-63)"
Arbitration clauses aren't being disallowed generally. But when, as the court puts it,
"the party with the superior bargaining power has carried
out a scheme to deliberately cheat large numbers of consumers
out of individually small sums of money", the courts can allow class action suits.
This is a routine decision based on California law; there are about a half dozen cases so far based on Discover Bank. Read the decision.
The Speed of Light limitation is in regards to Matter, i.e. something with Mass.
Actually, no. Relativity limits the speed of information transmission, too. At least if you want to keep causality. If you can transmit information faster than the speed of light, you can in theory violate causality.
CD caddies were a good idea that was botched. Early players enclosed the disk in a thin box, a "CD Caddy", with a sliding access door for reading, like a 3.5" floppy. But for some idiotic reason, the caddies sold for about $10 each. So each disk didn't come in a caddy.
Caddies were built to be openable, so you could change the disk inside. The caddy format was standardized, so all players used the same caddies.
The first version of audio CD packaging involved tall boxes, about a foot tall. The idea was that these would fit in retail racks sized for 12" vinyl records, offering backwards compatibility to retailers. (Not to end users; extracting the disk required destroying the box.) "Jewel box" retail packaging came years later.
If the caddy had been used as the retail packaging and the storage case, the media would have been much better protected and the whole system would have generated less trash. But for historical reasons, that didn't happen.
I will not launch applications from the browser. I will not launch applications from the browser. I will not launch applications from the browser. I will not launch applications from the browser. I will not launch applications from the browser. I will not launch applications from the browser.
This is no big deal. Plaintiff moved for summary judgment prematurely, and the motion was denied. The case is still alive, and the parties have to meet and confer on scheduling and discovery issues. The idea is to take care of any issues on which the parties are not in disagreement before the judge has to deal with them. See Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 16.
That's the terminology used in the intelligence community. The organizations that act on intelligence, and make requests for it, typically DoD units, are called "customers".
A basic concept in filmmaking is that the endpoint of a motion is predetermined. Directors think in terms of "here, then here, then there". The path desired is quite likely to be physically unrealistic, and may have to be pieced together from several shots.
A real physics simulator just isn't "directable" enough. What's used in practice is a combination of hand animation, piecing together motion capture, a collection of clever tricks to make real-world objects go where you want them, and lots of cuts to hide discontinuities. The MTV-style "one cut per second" approach to action scenes makes it even easier.
Much the same thing happens in games, except that you have to allow a user with limited control to drive a character with too many degrees of freedom and not enough embedded smarts to manage movement against real-world physics. This is why, in most sports games, you see beautiful motion-captured motion interspersed with strange jerks as motions are blended in ways that are continuous but nonphysical.
In most driving games, the physics is totally unrealistic. The wheel adhesion is huge, the CG is very low (often below the ground) and it's very common to lock roll rate once the vehicle is tilted beyond recovery angle, so that the vehicle rolls all the way over and lands upright. Driving a full sized car through a remote joystick works badly (we tried this with our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle once, then immediately bought a MoMo steering wheel and interfaced it) and game controller joysticks are even worse. So the vehicle model has to be incredibly forgiving.
There is a classic of computational Hollywood physics worth noting. In the Bond movie, "The Man with the Golden Gun" (1974), a car is driven over a ruined arch bridge at high speed, executes a 360 degree roll, and lands on the far side. It really did do that. The dynamics were calculated by the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory (now CALSPAN) and the ramp was constructed to make it happen consistently if the vehicle was driven at the correct speed. But there's a cheat there, too. The car had a fifth, solid wheel underneath which hit a rail on the launch ramp to initiate the roll. It wasn't possible to induce enough roll rate fast enough through the vehicle suspension.
Most of Roland the Plogger's "exclusive pictures" can be seen on the Neptec web site and other NASA-related sites. Someone commented on Roland's site, "Exclusive? Other than the fact that I've seen them on every news channel in the USA?"
The Neptec site is more useful, because it has the scaling info, showing how deeply the tile is damaged. The hole is through to the orbiter's skin underneath.
Rammed-earth construction has its advantages, but there are downsides. The traditional version is strong in compression and very heavy, but weak in tension. This is a bad combination in earthquake country. This outfit has some ways to give the stuff tensile strength, involving reinforced concrete banding.
This approach requires very solid foundations. So there are problems using this for residential construction in areas where bedrock is a long way down. Expansive soils, where the soil expands and contracts with the weather, are unsuitable without extensive foundation work.
Slashdot readers should note that rammed-earth walls are hard to wire. You can build in rigid-wall conduit, or put the wiring in the floors, or put in drywall interior walls.
If you like thick, heavy walls, other options are slip-form rock/cement construction, cinder block, and reinforced concrete.
Actually, the worst losses come from the 16-bit linear range of CDs, not the bit rate. The dynamic range isn't big enough. When you're listening to a soft passage, you're really listening to 8-bit audio or worse, because the high bits are all zero.
This doesn't affect rock or hip-hop much, but it can be heard on symphonic works.
This isn't about taking pictures.
This is a door to door commission sales scheme. The "Business Referral Representative" gives a handout to the business owner, encouraging them to sign up with Google. "As a Google Business Referral Representative, you'll visit local businesses to collect information (such as hours of operation, types of payment accepted, etc.) for Google Maps, and tell them about Google Maps and Google AdWords." Google pays $2 for each sales call, and $8 for each sale.
Door to door selling is hard. It's classified as a hazardous occupation by the U.S. Department of Labor. In some areas it's illegal; in others you need a license. Almost nobody does business to business sales door to door, anyway; you call first and try to set up an appointment. And there's no point in calling on any retail outlet that's part of a chain; their advertising will be purchased centrally.
At $2 per sales call and $8 per sale, this is a lose. If you have enough talent for selling to make it doing this, you can get far better commission sales jobs.
Worse, there are no territories and no scheduling. You have no idea if someone else already
tried to sell an area until you go there, which from a sales rep perspective means there are days
when you make nothing. Plus, that approach to sales really annoys customers; multiple visits make the selling company look clueless.
They're preparing you for the day when they start data usage charges. "Unlimited usage" might be just an introductory rate plan. The telcos want to charge you for every download, and clearly they have the billing system in place to do it. You think they went to all the trouble to implement that when it doesn't generate revenue?
Slashdot Mirror
Incorrect. Most states that aren't tax dodges (I'm looking at you Delaware) also require some combination of annual reports, corporate bylaws, and principals (often just managing partner).
Yes. I've been data-mining that data for SiteTruth, and it's amusing. No two states have the same format, although there's some similarity. Delaware provides less free info than most states. Some states have deliberate weaknesses in their data. Nevada, for example, doesn't require that changes in corporate officers be reported, so many out of state Nevada corporations have the same guy at a corporation service listed as President.
But that's OK. We're working on recognizing certain common patterns. Like "Incorporation state in low-disclosure states list AND NOT in business directories as having operations in incorporation state AND NOT in SEC Edgar AND NOT registered as foreign corporation in state where doing business IMPLIES slimeball".
Anonymous businesses deserve low search rankings. We're making that happen.
That's not an anonymity problem. That's an authentication problem.
One of the problems with all this "domaining" is that there are far too many domain transactions. The registrars that are "domain-tasting friendly" are worst about this. GoDaddy and ENom, with their multiple pseudo-registrars and affiliates, are heavily into domain-churning sideline businesses. They also have EULA terms much worse than the more legitimate registrars.
This isn't a WHOIS problem. It's a bottom-feeder registrar problem.
Festo does good work. They're an industrial automation company, and they do demos like this for promotional purposes. Check out their videos on YouTube.
The innovation here is not "fluidic muscles". It's their piezoelectric proportional valves. It's been possible for years to do precision control of pneumatics. Twenty years ago, "Pneumatic Valves, Inc." in Palo Alto was doing control like that. But older proportional valves were big and expensive, with a voice coil actuator on the end of a spool valve. Festo has miniaturized the technology with their piezoelectric valves.
Pneumatic systems have traditionally been either force actuators or devices driven to a limit stop. Fine position control was the domain of hydraulics. This is changing. For pneumatic systems, if the valves can be brought close to the actuator, the valves are fast, position sensors are used, and the control system is well designed, the system becomes quite controllable. That's what Festo is demonstrating here.
You can also do some things with pneumatics you can't do well with electrical drive, such as create springs with variable spring constants. Muscles can be usefully modeled as spring-damper systems, where the spring constant, zero point, and damping constant are all controllable. This can be emulated with electrical actuators, but emulating a spring in software requires high-powered actuators and loses energy. Legged running work needs something like a variable spring, and pneumatics are currently the closest thing to muscles available.
Huh?
What do listeners want? They want wallpaper. They want something even and uneventful that they can drive to. 95% of all music listened to these days is listened to in the car. That is what it is sold for. Drivetime radio, or burning iTunes tracks to listen to between 730 to 845 and then again at 530 to 645. Two hours a day.
Exactly.
Not that popular music is any better "live". Clubs today mostly have hard walls, floors, and ceilings, for that murky "empty swimming pool" sound. If it's all about the bass, hall reverb time doesn't matter. In spaces like that, music that isn't all bass sounds awful. After twenty years of hip hop and house, club owners don't care about room acoustics, just amp power.
So we're stuck. No genre that needs decent room acoustics can get any market share, even in clubs.
The solution to this is to have two printers for the "voter verified paper trail". Each voting session is randomly printed on one of the two logging printers, and a window opens to show that result to the voter.
The US doesn't need more engineers. If it did, salaries would be higher. In 1970, engineering and law salaries were about equal, or so says the IEEE. That's certainly changed.
The US doesn't need more engineers because high-tech manufacturing has gone offshore. Where the manufacturing goes, the production engineering must go, and the design engineering follows. Then the brands go. Then top management. Then the financing.
Read the Lenovo story. They're not a spinoff of IBM. They're a successful Chinese PC company that bought IBM's PC business to expand. IBM is just the company to which Lenovo outsources US warranty service.
Research reveals that 100% of the end-users surveyed use e-mail
Let me guess. They did the survey via e-mail.
but the legal principles you articulated seem to be pretty much a part of common law
Unfortunately, no. There's interaction with federal "tort reform" legislation passed in 2005 which favors arbitration. There's a question as to whether federal preemption of state law applies here. The 9th Circuit ruled that it didn't.
Note that nowhere in Skype's announcement does the word "Microsoft" appear.
It's very striking how, when some major vulnerability appears, Microsoft's name doesn't appear prominently in news releases.
It also reminds you that Redmond has the power to reboot most of the computers in the world remotely. What if, one day, they didn't come back up?
The key to this is that California law applies. "Under California law, a contract provision is unenforceable due to unconscionability only if it is both procedurally and substantively unconscionable." The "Discover Bank test" applies: "Under this three-part inquiry, courts are required to determine: (1) whether the agreement is " 'a consumer contract of adhesion' " drafted by a party that has superior bargaining power; (2) whether the agreement occurs " 'in a setting in which disputes between the contracting parties predictably involve small amounts of damages' "; and (3) whether " 'it is alleged that the party with the superior bargaining power has carried out a scheme to deliberately cheat large numbers of consumers out of individually small sums of money.' (quoting Discover Bank, 36 Cal. 4th at 162-63)"
Arbitration clauses aren't being disallowed generally. But when, as the court puts it, "the party with the superior bargaining power has carried out a scheme to deliberately cheat large numbers of consumers out of individually small sums of money", the courts can allow class action suits.
This is a routine decision based on California law; there are about a half dozen cases so far based on Discover Bank. Read the decision.
Skip the ad-trolling blogodreck, and go to the U.S. Army Future Combat Systems page, which has better info. Video, even. Very dramatic.
The Speed of Light limitation is in regards to Matter, i.e. something with Mass.
Actually, no. Relativity limits the speed of information transmission, too. At least if you want to keep causality. If you can transmit information faster than the speed of light, you can in theory violate causality.
Causality, relativity, FTL - pick two.
CD caddies were a good idea that was botched. Early players enclosed the disk in a thin box, a "CD Caddy", with a sliding access door for reading, like a 3.5" floppy. But for some idiotic reason, the caddies sold for about $10 each. So each disk didn't come in a caddy. Caddies were built to be openable, so you could change the disk inside. The caddy format was standardized, so all players used the same caddies.
The first version of audio CD packaging involved tall boxes, about a foot tall. The idea was that these would fit in retail racks sized for 12" vinyl records, offering backwards compatibility to retailers. (Not to end users; extracting the disk required destroying the box.) "Jewel box" retail packaging came years later.
If the caddy had been used as the retail packaging and the storage case, the media would have been much better protected and the whole system would have generated less trash. But for historical reasons, that didn't happen.
Here's the simulation software used to plan that jump, back in 1974. Versions are still available and in use.
Write 100 times on the whiteboard:
I will not launch applications from the browser.
I will not launch applications from the browser.
I will not launch applications from the browser.
I will not launch applications from the browser.
I will not launch applications from the browser.
I will not launch applications from the browser.
This is no big deal. Plaintiff moved for summary judgment prematurely, and the motion was denied. The case is still alive, and the parties have to meet and confer on scheduling and discovery issues. The idea is to take care of any issues on which the parties are not in disagreement before the judge has to deal with them. See Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 16.
That's the terminology used in the intelligence community. The organizations that act on intelligence, and make requests for it, typically DoD units, are called "customers".
I used to do animation tools for physically based animation, and got some idea of the Hollywood view of dynamics.
A basic concept in filmmaking is that the endpoint of a motion is predetermined. Directors think in terms of "here, then here, then there". The path desired is quite likely to be physically unrealistic, and may have to be pieced together from several shots.
A real physics simulator just isn't "directable" enough. What's used in practice is a combination of hand animation, piecing together motion capture, a collection of clever tricks to make real-world objects go where you want them, and lots of cuts to hide discontinuities. The MTV-style "one cut per second" approach to action scenes makes it even easier.
Much the same thing happens in games, except that you have to allow a user with limited control to drive a character with too many degrees of freedom and not enough embedded smarts to manage movement against real-world physics. This is why, in most sports games, you see beautiful motion-captured motion interspersed with strange jerks as motions are blended in ways that are continuous but nonphysical.
In most driving games, the physics is totally unrealistic. The wheel adhesion is huge, the CG is very low (often below the ground) and it's very common to lock roll rate once the vehicle is tilted beyond recovery angle, so that the vehicle rolls all the way over and lands upright. Driving a full sized car through a remote joystick works badly (we tried this with our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle once, then immediately bought a MoMo steering wheel and interfaced it) and game controller joysticks are even worse. So the vehicle model has to be incredibly forgiving.
There is a classic of computational Hollywood physics worth noting. In the Bond movie, "The Man with the Golden Gun" (1974), a car is driven over a ruined arch bridge at high speed, executes a 360 degree roll, and lands on the far side. It really did do that. The dynamics were calculated by the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory (now CALSPAN) and the ramp was constructed to make it happen consistently if the vehicle was driven at the correct speed. But there's a cheat there, too. The car had a fifth, solid wheel underneath which hit a rail on the launch ramp to initiate the roll. It wasn't possible to induce enough roll rate fast enough through the vehicle suspension.
DHS's idea of a "backup plan" will probably be to build a huge fenced area into which to dump arriving passengers when their systems are down.
Most of Roland the Plogger's "exclusive pictures" can be seen on the Neptec web site and other NASA-related sites. Someone commented on Roland's site, "Exclusive? Other than the fact that I've seen them on every news channel in the USA?"
The Neptec site is more useful, because it has the scaling info, showing how deeply the tile is damaged. The hole is through to the orbiter's skin underneath.
Rammed-earth construction has its advantages, but there are downsides. The traditional version is strong in compression and very heavy, but weak in tension. This is a bad combination in earthquake country. This outfit has some ways to give the stuff tensile strength, involving reinforced concrete banding.
This approach requires very solid foundations. So there are problems using this for residential construction in areas where bedrock is a long way down. Expansive soils, where the soil expands and contracts with the weather, are unsuitable without extensive foundation work.
Slashdot readers should note that rammed-earth walls are hard to wire. You can build in rigid-wall conduit, or put the wiring in the floors, or put in drywall interior walls.
If you like thick, heavy walls, other options are slip-form rock/cement construction, cinder block, and reinforced concrete.
Actually, the worst losses come from the 16-bit linear range of CDs, not the bit rate. The dynamic range isn't big enough. When you're listening to a soft passage, you're really listening to 8-bit audio or worse, because the high bits are all zero.
This doesn't affect rock or hip-hop much, but it can be heard on symphonic works.
This isn't about taking pictures. This is a door to door commission sales scheme. The "Business Referral Representative" gives a handout to the business owner, encouraging them to sign up with Google. "As a Google Business Referral Representative, you'll visit local businesses to collect information (such as hours of operation, types of payment accepted, etc.) for Google Maps, and tell them about Google Maps and Google AdWords." Google pays $2 for each sales call, and $8 for each sale.
Door to door selling is hard. It's classified as a hazardous occupation by the U.S. Department of Labor. In some areas it's illegal; in others you need a license. Almost nobody does business to business sales door to door, anyway; you call first and try to set up an appointment. And there's no point in calling on any retail outlet that's part of a chain; their advertising will be purchased centrally.
At $2 per sales call and $8 per sale, this is a lose. If you have enough talent for selling to make it doing this, you can get far better commission sales jobs.
Worse, there are no territories and no scheduling. You have no idea if someone else already tried to sell an area until you go there, which from a sales rep perspective means there are days when you make nothing. Plus, that approach to sales really annoys customers; multiple visits make the selling company look clueless.
They're preparing you for the day when they start data usage charges. "Unlimited usage" might be just an introductory rate plan. The telcos want to charge you for every download, and clearly they have the billing system in place to do it. You think they went to all the trouble to implement that when it doesn't generate revenue?