Sorry chaps, I wrote the headline when I submitted it, it was before I had a coffee this morning my time. The heading is ambiguous and I will endevour to make sure that my headlines are no more so in the future.
Interesting, but not at all. Sunshine wouldn't warm the particles enough to perforate the cell. Secondly, and more importantly, if you suddenly dumped a lethal load of drugs inside red blood cells, the person would die 100-120 days later when the lifecycle of those blood cells came to an end. The only way to do what you suggest would be to keep inserting a small quantity daily, so that no single subset of red cells would cause a lethal dose when the cells expire, but allowed for a trigger to release them all at once. Guess that sort of makes your idea really un-workable.
"The only music that you can hear for free is when the birds sing." That guy has probably never been on the internet before... You know, the place where a bunch of bands are releasing their music for free because they love what they do?
Or because it helps them to make money? It drives their sales?
All the other Big Music people out there who are suddenly left out in the cold with their pants down. Never underestimate a woman scored, but never, ever underestimate what a business or company will do to not have to do work to keep making money.
Our local Member of Parliament was actually present during this (he is quite Christian and was helping out with the collections etc).
The point that I was making (and hope that he listened to) was that we cannot impose our values on others if we expect them to respect ours. The "man and woman" thing is based in Christianity and Islam, but if we expect minorities to respect our mainstream views, how can we not also respect theirs (even if they conflict with our own) and allow them to practise them as they please? Of course there are boundries, ones that directly harm others or teach/incite hate, so no, if one group believes in murder, we shouldn't put that into law saying it is okay, but who are is anyone to say who can and cannot get married based on the mainstream beliefs?
Actually, I think it is becoming more polarized. I am fairly young, but I see more and more people moving into non-practising belief, moving into an agnostic belief system or totally throwing out and declaring atheism. Most people that I know who are religious are quite moderate and totally respect the chosen paths of others, but in this age of instant communication and viral sharing of video/blogs etc I find that many fundamentalists who in previous decades may have only been heard in small secluded places of worship or backroom debates are now able to spout their messages to the masses. This sadly can result in many moderates who may have previously never heard or even seen such messages being taken in and following.
I think globally, we are moving (very slowly) to a much more moderate stance on religion, but there are pockets where small fundamentalist wildfires have started. Hopefully those flames will be doused before they spread into too much of a firestorm.
Living in Australia (which is quite multi-national in ethnicity and religion) I am always utterly amused when fundamentalists of any nature demand to be tolerated for their beliefs while spouting anti-tolerant messages against others the next moment. I can't help myself and weigh in asking that exact sort of question - I started to walk out of church on Easter Sunday just passed (I go to church at Easter and Christmas to appease my parents when I visit) when the priest started spouting about propsed changes to the Australian Law by changing "Marrige to be between two people, rather than a man and a woman" which would lead to "the fall of Christians and civilisation" at which point I was too disgusted to stay for the rest. He saw me walking out and pulled me up on it. I accepted the challenge and politely debated him on the arguments for and against for around ten minutes in front of the entire congregation.
I just had that discussion with someone scared of using MS-based server software. He said -- I just looked at server uptime. Linux? 436 days. Windows? Since last Thursday.
Okay, so now, go to your parents and ask them "What product does Microsoft make?" and follow it up by asking "Now, what product does Canonical make?". Every time that Windows crashes, it is associated with Microsoft. Every time that Ubuntu crashes it is associated with "that other, who was it... Oh, there, it's back up again now..."
All those crashes are attributed to the Microsoft brand name and more non-technical people use it, so it sticks.
I totally disagree. Yes, a few raid controllers work well, like Adaptec Cards, which have for a long time been quite active in making sure that their cards run nicely (which is one of the reasons the last few I have used at home have been such - I take my home media center VERY seriously), but overall, hardware support is much better on Windows.
Actually, this is an excellent example. The card I recently upgraded to is a 6805 which gives me a lovely Raid5 and I have 7 3TB drives running in it. Now, I popped the card in, flicked on the PC and followed the quick setup instructions to get into the controller card just after the bios ticked over. It let me add the drives into the raid and set it up correctly. I then loaded up into my desktop, fumbled around for a while to get the additional StorMan software installed (so that I could actually do anything useful with the new Raid). While Adaptec said the offer Ubuntu support (oh, Natty (11.04 is around a year old now) is still their newest supported version), it takes some serious mucking around to get it to run. Their version of "support" means offering a.rpm file, which well isn't something that you can just install. So, I flipped into a terminal to convert it with Alien. Unsurprisingly, there were packages missing, so that needed fixing. After some kung fu, I finally got it running. Now, to do anything useful in this software, you need to log in as root. Of course Ubuntu has root disabled by default (The lovely "Pretend Root" doesn't cut the mustard), so flip back into terminal, enable root account, use the Storman software to set everything up as needed, then disable the root account in terminal again.
Now, it works, and I do like Linux for a number of reasons, but I must say that for the average joe, doing all of that would have likely resulted in a trip back to the store to return the product. I am not going to start on stories about graphics cards, flash performance, printers or all the other hardware gripes that we have.
I prefer to use this simple description of hardware support in *nix Vs Windows: I can do it in *nix, but I can guide my parents over the phone to do it in Windows. I love Linux, but I have to admit that in terms of "Plug and Play" windows does it better to a "non admin user" which is what I would consider most of the world.
The problem was proprietary extensions, which to some degree were intended to replace the standards.
At the time IE6 was released, yes, all browsers were pretty much "rubbish" when compared to the versions that are out there today. Having said that, I totally agree with the AC here. What Microsoft did was to make, and strongly push, their own products through somewhat insidious means. That horror called Sharepoint for example, ONLY worked with Internet Explorer. As Sharepoint was often sold to businesses who weren't that tech savvy, their users were forced into using IE. Sharepoint STILL does this today. While certain features do work cross browser these days, Sharepoint is still not by any means a web standards supporting CMS.
I think that is the crux of it right there, but for most people, perhaps not so much the/.'ers but rather mainstream media, they get snitchy with Microsoft because they are associated with "My Computer crashed again, damn Microsoft!". Microsoft does get a big bunch of bad press - or rather stories that they are involved with might get a bit more of a sour take due to their association with problems, lets face it, if a PC crashes right before the sales rep finishes putting that sales presentation together - and then has nothing to show, the sales rep will remember that and blame Microsoft. Google, Facebook and the likes don't have this problem. It might be argued that they offer a better service then, but that would be comparing apples to oranges.
I am not taking the side of Microsoft here, they piss me off as much as the next guy, but more for the fact that they abused their power greatly, they acted in amazingly un-ethical ways, especially in the early days, their (in my opinion) abuse of their operating system to push out other inferior products (Hello IE, I'm looking at you!). When it comes to the Windows side of it, I have to say that I am both in awe and loathing over the product. It is terribly unstable, though getting better with Win 7, the security is poor compared to *nix - but when you look at just how much hardware they support, and how well it works, any techie will have to say that it is amazing that it works. Slap any old or new hardware together and you can load Windows. It might not be terribly efficient, and bloat up, but it fricken works.
So, to sum up, I agree with They deserve it but not for the reasons that most people do.
Neither and both. This is the final stage in the law-making process. It has passed through both houses of the state, which means that all the folks have agreed to it as it is. While the Govenor *could* veto it, even not signing it means it passes into law. While it is possible that this falls over through a veto, it is one of those one in a million chance things. So, effectively, you can say once both hosues agree, it has passed, but is still awaiting the formality of the boss' signature.
It's not really an invasion of privacy if you hand over the information yourself.
No, it simply makes it an abuse of power. You NEED this job eh? Right, well as we have a few people to pick from, how about we pay you half the going rate, but hire you today? That's another abuse of power. No different really. People in a tight place will do just about anything to get out and sadly there are many people quite happy to use that to their own advantage.
If your bank removed all of the fraudulent charges, then you do not have a loss.
As someone who has had a fraudulent charge on my account, and as the person who submitted this story, I am amazed by your statement. I chased my (previous) bank for three weeks, made numerous phone calls and had to go into a branch twice to get my account re-imbursed the charges. If you can call that "no loss" then you must clearly place exceptionally little value on your own time and effort. Even if the bank reimbursed me for my time at my normal salary-per-hour rate, it would have been substancially more than the measly $200 that Heartland paid out to these 11 "valid" claims.
I am also quite curious about how you can claim that out of 130,000,000 credit card details that were stolen, a $2,000 settlement to victims who were really "found" is okay. People who pinch credit card details don't do it because they are bored. They don't do it to see if they can. Someone clever enough to do this sort of operation is very much likely going to sit on the cards for a while, then charge them $1 each with a statement comment of "interest fee" or "aministration fee", sell them to others for a pittance in bunches and have them see what they can rifle through before they are caught (which means that countless individuals again go through a laborious process of showing that it wasn't them spending the cash) or any other number of means to money without getting caught. I would have hoped that this class action case would have been a resounding "Pay attention to security of your customers, else it will cost you a LOT of money" message to all the other merchants out there, but sadly it has been much more of a "Meh, you win some, you lose some, you still foot the bill to the customers in the long run..." message. It is nothing short of shameful.
Of course patent chests are there to stave off the attacks of other massive companies - heck, look at the Facebook response to Yahoo's patent attack - it snaps up a quick 800 patents and uses the new ones against yahoo in retalliation - but they are also used (probably much less noticably) to swat at the small flies that the big boys want to get rid of.
What better way to make some easy cash, when a start-up has a good idea, point out that your patents invariably make their product "infringe" then come out with their product under your own name - and possibly use your new patents to broker another settlement with some other big player in THEIR new emerging technology.
As far as I can tell, the only thing you're missing is the leader cult.
Given their last bunch of leaders... Obama, too polar, you either love him or hate him, sort of the Apple of the political world. Bush W, even Americans knew he had more teeth than IQ. Clinton, bit too liberal to make for a leader cult, also lost his chance by getting caught dipping his cigar into the local ashtray - big no-no for the bible belt. Bush Senior, had a rockin chance with close to 90% approval ratings, blew it by making new taxes and being caught up in the econimic slump. Regan, elected too early before Americans were really ready for a leader cult - was elected in a time when being "American" still meant working hard, taking it on the chin and wearing bowboy hats.
Maybe the next election, one comes along, though Obama will still be much too polarizing of the population and from what I have seen, none of the other candidates really stand a chance - too old, too dumb, too radical or too dumb - do you see what I did there?
Or find out that is has been building castles in the sky...
Keep in mind, that for Monsato to have such utter control means that the government is giving that control away. I don't think that the US government wants to give up that sort of power.
I quickly did the math. MegaUpload has around 25 PB of data on the servers. IBM's biggest backup cart is 4TB in size and costs around $234 a pop. That makes for a cost of $1,467,500 just for the blank media - then you add the writers, the time it takes in manhours to swap all the carts, and install and run all the software to back everything up. It very quickly ends up a steep bill indeed.
Tape backup is cheap once you have the media and occasionally need to replace old cartridges. It's not cheap if it is a once off copy and backup.
Hydrogen stored under pressure has a considerably lower energy density compared to hydrocarbons that we use. Hydrogen is great when you look at the energy by weight, but if a tank is sitting in the back of a car, it doesn't matter whether it weighs an extra twenty kilos, what matters is how far a tank can make a car drive.
Like I said, don't get me wrong, I think it is a fantastic breakthrough to have - a cheap, clean and sustainable way to make Hydrogen gas, but a lot of work still needs to be done before we can all whizz around in clean cars and certainly before we have large scale power stations powered by burning Hydrogen.
Having said that, burning Hydrogen makes water, this process turns water into Hydrogen. It would make for a wonderful closed circuit...
That is true, but isn't one of the big problems with Hydrogen storing it, not just producing it? I mean, don't get me wrong, it is excellent to see that part of this "we want to use hydrogen" problem solved, but a lot more still needs to be done.
They didn't wait for it to be adapted as such. A large majority of manufacturers rightfully accept the patents involved. See this comment I posted above for a more detailed explanation.
Actually, not too likely. The CSIRO is one of the few genuine research and development companies out there. The research they do is very useful to many Australians - and they do a considerable amount of work assisting third world countries with farming, food production and water sanitation. While they are taxpayer funded (being a government organisation), a good part of their research dollars come from patents on stuff they come up with. In this case, this is a patent that has been recognised by almost all the companies that make products with it as this snippet from Wikipedia explains:
In late November 2007, CSIRO won a lawsuit against Buffalo Technology, with an injunction that Buffalo must stop supplying AirStation products that infringe on the 802.11 patent.
On 19 September 2008, the Federal Circuit ruled in Buffalo’s favour and remanded the case to the district court ruling that the district court’s Summary Judgement was insufficient on the merits of obviousness of CSIRO’s patent. Therefore, this case was to be tried again before the district court. In this connection Buffalo was hopeful that it would shortly be permitted to, once again, sell IEEE 802.11a and 802.11g compliant products in the United States. On 13 July 2009 Buffalo announced the settlement of the patent infringement action.
As of 23 April 2009, the CSIRO has obtained settlements from most of the other organisations involved, including Dell, Intel, Microsoft, Asus, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard, Nintendo, Toshiba, Netgear, D-Link, Belkin, SMC, Accton and 3Com.
A large number of patents by many companies are used in 802.11 standard. In 1992 and 1996, Australian organisation the CSIRO obtained patents for a method later used in Wi-Fi to "unsmear" the signal. In April 2009, 14 tech companies agreed to pay CSIRO for infringements on the CSIRO patents. This lead to WiFi being attributed as an Australian invention.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry chaps, I wrote the headline when I submitted it, it was before I had a coffee this morning my time. The heading is ambiguous and I will endevour to make sure that my headlines are no more so in the future.
Interesting, but not at all. Sunshine wouldn't warm the particles enough to perforate the cell. Secondly, and more importantly, if you suddenly dumped a lethal load of drugs inside red blood cells, the person would die 100-120 days later when the lifecycle of those blood cells came to an end. The only way to do what you suggest would be to keep inserting a small quantity daily, so that no single subset of red cells would cause a lethal dose when the cells expire, but allowed for a trigger to release them all at once. Guess that sort of makes your idea really un-workable.
"The only music that you can hear for free is when the birds sing." That guy has probably never been on the internet before... You know, the place where a bunch of bands are releasing their music for free because they love what they do?
Or because it helps them to make money? It drives their sales?
Why do the two have to be mutually exclusive?
The problem is... where?
All the other Big Music people out there who are suddenly left out in the cold with their pants down. Never underestimate a woman scored, but never, ever underestimate what a business or company will do to not have to do work to keep making money.
Our local Member of Parliament was actually present during this (he is quite Christian and was helping out with the collections etc).
The point that I was making (and hope that he listened to) was that we cannot impose our values on others if we expect them to respect ours. The "man and woman" thing is based in Christianity and Islam, but if we expect minorities to respect our mainstream views, how can we not also respect theirs (even if they conflict with our own) and allow them to practise them as they please? Of course there are boundries, ones that directly harm others or teach/incite hate, so no, if one group believes in murder, we shouldn't put that into law saying it is okay, but who are is anyone to say who can and cannot get married based on the mainstream beliefs?
The world is rapidly going the other way.
Actually, I think it is becoming more polarized. I am fairly young, but I see more and more people moving into non-practising belief, moving into an agnostic belief system or totally throwing out and declaring atheism. Most people that I know who are religious are quite moderate and totally respect the chosen paths of others, but in this age of instant communication and viral sharing of video/blogs etc I find that many fundamentalists who in previous decades may have only been heard in small secluded places of worship or backroom debates are now able to spout their messages to the masses. This sadly can result in many moderates who may have previously never heard or even seen such messages being taken in and following.
I think globally, we are moving (very slowly) to a much more moderate stance on religion, but there are pockets where small fundamentalist wildfires have started. Hopefully those flames will be doused before they spread into too much of a firestorm.
Living in Australia (which is quite multi-national in ethnicity and religion) I am always utterly amused when fundamentalists of any nature demand to be tolerated for their beliefs while spouting anti-tolerant messages against others the next moment. I can't help myself and weigh in asking that exact sort of question - I started to walk out of church on Easter Sunday just passed (I go to church at Easter and Christmas to appease my parents when I visit) when the priest started spouting about propsed changes to the Australian Law by changing "Marrige to be between two people, rather than a man and a woman" which would lead to "the fall of Christians and civilisation" at which point I was too disgusted to stay for the rest. He saw me walking out and pulled me up on it. I accepted the challenge and politely debated him on the arguments for and against for around ten minutes in front of the entire congregation.
Anything ActiveX for a start, but seriously, run a quick google, you might learn something.
I just had that discussion with someone scared of using MS-based server software. He said -- I just looked at server uptime. Linux? 436 days. Windows? Since last Thursday.
Okay, so now, go to your parents and ask them "What product does Microsoft make?" and follow it up by asking "Now, what product does Canonical make?". Every time that Windows crashes, it is associated with Microsoft. Every time that Ubuntu crashes it is associated with "that other, who was it... Oh, there, it's back up again now..."
All those crashes are attributed to the Microsoft brand name and more non-technical people use it, so it sticks.
Hardware was always better supported on *n*x.
I totally disagree. Yes, a few raid controllers work well, like Adaptec Cards, which have for a long time been quite active in making sure that their cards run nicely (which is one of the reasons the last few I have used at home have been such - I take my home media center VERY seriously), but overall, hardware support is much better on Windows.
Actually, this is an excellent example. The card I recently upgraded to is a 6805 which gives me a lovely Raid5 and I have 7 3TB drives running in it. Now, I popped the card in, flicked on the PC and followed the quick setup instructions to get into the controller card just after the bios ticked over. It let me add the drives into the raid and set it up correctly. I then loaded up into my desktop, fumbled around for a while to get the additional StorMan software installed (so that I could actually do anything useful with the new Raid). While Adaptec said the offer Ubuntu support (oh, Natty (11.04 is around a year old now) is still their newest supported version), it takes some serious mucking around to get it to run. Their version of "support" means offering a .rpm file, which well isn't something that you can just install. So, I flipped into a terminal to convert it with Alien. Unsurprisingly, there were packages missing, so that needed fixing. After some kung fu, I finally got it running. Now, to do anything useful in this software, you need to log in as root. Of course Ubuntu has root disabled by default (The lovely "Pretend Root" doesn't cut the mustard), so flip back into terminal, enable root account, use the Storman software to set everything up as needed, then disable the root account in terminal again.
Now, it works, and I do like Linux for a number of reasons, but I must say that for the average joe, doing all of that would have likely resulted in a trip back to the store to return the product. I am not going to start on stories about graphics cards, flash performance, printers or all the other hardware gripes that we have.
I prefer to use this simple description of hardware support in *nix Vs Windows: I can do it in *nix, but I can guide my parents over the phone to do it in Windows. I love Linux, but I have to admit that in terms of "Plug and Play" windows does it better to a "non admin user" which is what I would consider most of the world.
The problem was proprietary extensions, which to some degree were intended to replace the standards.
At the time IE6 was released, yes, all browsers were pretty much "rubbish" when compared to the versions that are out there today. Having said that, I totally agree with the AC here. What Microsoft did was to make, and strongly push, their own products through somewhat insidious means. That horror called Sharepoint for example, ONLY worked with Internet Explorer. As Sharepoint was often sold to businesses who weren't that tech savvy, their users were forced into using IE. Sharepoint STILL does this today. While certain features do work cross browser these days, Sharepoint is still not by any means a web standards supporting CMS.
MS has so thoroughly pissed me off
I think that is the crux of it right there, but for most people, perhaps not so much the /.'ers but rather mainstream media, they get snitchy with Microsoft because they are associated with "My Computer crashed again, damn Microsoft!". Microsoft does get a big bunch of bad press - or rather stories that they are involved with might get a bit more of a sour take due to their association with problems, lets face it, if a PC crashes right before the sales rep finishes putting that sales presentation together - and then has nothing to show, the sales rep will remember that and blame Microsoft. Google, Facebook and the likes don't have this problem. It might be argued that they offer a better service then, but that would be comparing apples to oranges.
I am not taking the side of Microsoft here, they piss me off as much as the next guy, but more for the fact that they abused their power greatly, they acted in amazingly un-ethical ways, especially in the early days, their (in my opinion) abuse of their operating system to push out other inferior products (Hello IE, I'm looking at you!). When it comes to the Windows side of it, I have to say that I am both in awe and loathing over the product. It is terribly unstable, though getting better with Win 7, the security is poor compared to *nix - but when you look at just how much hardware they support, and how well it works, any techie will have to say that it is amazing that it works. Slap any old or new hardware together and you can load Windows. It might not be terribly efficient, and bloat up, but it fricken works.
So, to sum up, I agree with They deserve it but not for the reasons that most people do.
Which is it?
Neither and both. This is the final stage in the law-making process. It has passed through both houses of the state, which means that all the folks have agreed to it as it is. While the Govenor *could* veto it, even not signing it means it passes into law. While it is possible that this falls over through a veto, it is one of those one in a million chance things. So, effectively, you can say once both hosues agree, it has passed, but is still awaiting the formality of the boss' signature.
It's not really an invasion of privacy if you hand over the information yourself.
No, it simply makes it an abuse of power. You NEED this job eh? Right, well as we have a few people to pick from, how about we pay you half the going rate, but hire you today? That's another abuse of power. No different really. People in a tight place will do just about anything to get out and sadly there are many people quite happy to use that to their own advantage.
If your bank removed all of the fraudulent charges, then you do not have a loss.
As someone who has had a fraudulent charge on my account, and as the person who submitted this story, I am amazed by your statement. I chased my (previous) bank for three weeks, made numerous phone calls and had to go into a branch twice to get my account re-imbursed the charges. If you can call that "no loss" then you must clearly place exceptionally little value on your own time and effort. Even if the bank reimbursed me for my time at my normal salary-per-hour rate, it would have been substancially more than the measly $200 that Heartland paid out to these 11 "valid" claims.
I am also quite curious about how you can claim that out of 130,000,000 credit card details that were stolen, a $2,000 settlement to victims who were really "found" is okay. People who pinch credit card details don't do it because they are bored. They don't do it to see if they can. Someone clever enough to do this sort of operation is very much likely going to sit on the cards for a while, then charge them $1 each with a statement comment of "interest fee" or "aministration fee", sell them to others for a pittance in bunches and have them see what they can rifle through before they are caught (which means that countless individuals again go through a laborious process of showing that it wasn't them spending the cash) or any other number of means to money without getting caught. I would have hoped that this class action case would have been a resounding "Pay attention to security of your customers, else it will cost you a LOT of money" message to all the other merchants out there, but sadly it has been much more of a "Meh, you win some, you lose some, you still foot the bill to the customers in the long run..." message. It is nothing short of shameful.
Of course patent chests are there to stave off the attacks of other massive companies - heck, look at the Facebook response to Yahoo's patent attack - it snaps up a quick 800 patents and uses the new ones against yahoo in retalliation - but they are also used (probably much less noticably) to swat at the small flies that the big boys want to get rid of.
What better way to make some easy cash, when a start-up has a good idea, point out that your patents invariably make their product "infringe" then come out with their product under your own name - and possibly use your new patents to broker another settlement with some other big player in THEIR new emerging technology.
Hmmmmm the more I think about it, the more it makes sense.
Dammit, how come most the time when I go for +Funny, I end up with +Insightful.
As far as I can tell, the only thing you're missing is the leader cult.
Given their last bunch of leaders... Obama, too polar, you either love him or hate him, sort of the Apple of the political world. Bush W, even Americans knew he had more teeth than IQ. Clinton, bit too liberal to make for a leader cult, also lost his chance by getting caught dipping his cigar into the local ashtray - big no-no for the bible belt. Bush Senior, had a rockin chance with close to 90% approval ratings, blew it by making new taxes and being caught up in the econimic slump. Regan, elected too early before Americans were really ready for a leader cult - was elected in a time when being "American" still meant working hard, taking it on the chin and wearing bowboy hats.
Maybe the next election, one comes along, though Obama will still be much too polarizing of the population and from what I have seen, none of the other candidates really stand a chance - too old, too dumb, too radical or too dumb - do you see what I did there?
Or find out that is has been building castles in the sky...
Keep in mind, that for Monsato to have such utter control means that the government is giving that control away. I don't think that the US government wants to give up that sort of power.
I quickly did the math. MegaUpload has around 25 PB of data on the servers. IBM's biggest backup cart is 4TB in size and costs around $234 a pop. That makes for a cost of $1,467,500 just for the blank media - then you add the writers, the time it takes in manhours to swap all the carts, and install and run all the software to back everything up. It very quickly ends up a steep bill indeed.
Tape backup is cheap once you have the media and occasionally need to replace old cartridges. It's not cheap if it is a once off copy and backup.
Isn't there a War on Piracy? (Given that there seems to be a "War" on just about everything else...)
If the politicians are calling it that, then you might be able to argue that as well.
Hydrogen stored under pressure has a considerably lower energy density compared to hydrocarbons that we use. Hydrogen is great when you look at the energy by weight, but if a tank is sitting in the back of a car, it doesn't matter whether it weighs an extra twenty kilos, what matters is how far a tank can make a car drive.
Like I said, don't get me wrong, I think it is a fantastic breakthrough to have - a cheap, clean and sustainable way to make Hydrogen gas, but a lot of work still needs to be done before we can all whizz around in clean cars and certainly before we have large scale power stations powered by burning Hydrogen.
Having said that, burning Hydrogen makes water, this process turns water into Hydrogen. It would make for a wonderful closed circuit...
Finally, a source of clean hydrogen.
That is true, but isn't one of the big problems with Hydrogen storing it, not just producing it? I mean, don't get me wrong, it is excellent to see that part of this "we want to use hydrogen" problem solved, but a lot more still needs to be done.
They didn't wait for it to be adapted as such. A large majority of manufacturers rightfully accept the patents involved. See this comment I posted above for a more detailed explanation.
Actually, not too likely. The CSIRO is one of the few genuine research and development companies out there. The research they do is very useful to many Australians - and they do a considerable amount of work assisting third world countries with farming, food production and water sanitation. While they are taxpayer funded (being a government organisation), a good part of their research dollars come from patents on stuff they come up with. In this case, this is a patent that has been recognised by almost all the companies that make products with it as this snippet from Wikipedia explains:
In late November 2007, CSIRO won a lawsuit against Buffalo Technology, with an injunction that Buffalo must stop supplying AirStation products that infringe on the 802.11 patent.
On 19 September 2008, the Federal Circuit ruled in Buffalo’s favour and remanded the case to the district court ruling that the district court’s Summary Judgement was insufficient on the merits of obviousness of CSIRO’s patent. Therefore, this case was to be tried again before the district court. In this connection Buffalo was hopeful that it would shortly be permitted to, once again, sell IEEE 802.11a and 802.11g compliant products in the United States. On 13 July 2009 Buffalo announced the settlement of the patent infringement action.
As of 23 April 2009, the CSIRO has obtained settlements from most of the other organisations involved, including Dell, Intel, Microsoft, Asus, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard, Nintendo, Toshiba, Netgear, D-Link, Belkin, SMC, Accton and 3Com.
Furthermore, even this article on WIFI on Wikipedia has very explanatory information:
A large number of patents by many companies are used in 802.11 standard. In 1992 and 1996, Australian organisation the CSIRO obtained patents for a method later used in Wi-Fi to "unsmear" the signal. In April 2009, 14 tech companies agreed to pay CSIRO for infringements on the CSIRO patents. This lead to WiFi being attributed as an Australian invention.
Goddamit, I just found my </i>, must have dropped it...