Now, we have things that are designed specifically to try and hit the sweet spot between durability and cost
by that definition, my walmart deck lounger is the most precisely engineered piece of equipment in the history of mankind. Whenever I sit down, I feel like it's half a hamburger away from catastrophic failure. (that's one croissant in metric units)
And it *is* precisely engineered. There's always a tradeoff between cost and durability, and shopping at Walmart means strongly favoring low cost. It's as sturdy as possible for its price; the problem is that you didn't pay enough.
Individuals defending against lawsuits from corporations should be given public defenders. The only reason that right isn't in the Constitution is because corporations didn't exist at the time it was written.
I checked the sites you linked, and the McDonald's sandwich you refer to is 9.8oz, while the Panera sandwich you refer to is 14.5oz; they're both about 75 cal/oz. Comparing different serving sizes without mentioning that they're different is dishonest.
Actually, the way the patent system works is kind of perverse. No one ever looks for patents they might infringe on, because if you find one, then it becomes "willful infringement" and you could end up owing triple damages. And patents are so badly written, that if you're doing anything interesting there's probably a dozen overbroad, ambiguous patents that you could be infringing, but can't tell without spending thousands of dollars in legal fees to find out, and which wouldn't hold up in court anyways.
Ok, I spoke imprecisely. The problem is that not all nanotubes are equal, and the most desireable kinds can only be produced in trace amounts, generally by sorting through large quantities of mostly the undesirable kinds. A new process which could produce very long single-walled nanotubes would be immensely valuable; a process which only produced short nanotubes would be less valuable, and that's what's currently available.
The abstract doesn't mention any applications, but there's an obvious one. This brings us a tiny bit closer to being able to manufacture carbon nanotubes, which are very useful but currently impossible to make more than a trace amount of.
A prototype battery made using the new technique could be charged in less than 20 seconds - in comparison to six minutes with an untreated sample of the material.
So it sounds like fast charging has been developed, and it's just a matter of taking orders and tooling the factories at this point.
You're making a lot of assumptions about the wear leveling algorithm that while generally correct, aren't guaranteed. As for me, I find myself very uncomfortable knowing that the reliability of my data depends on a smart controller that uses tricks to extend the life of the parts by many orders of magnitude and that without such tricks, I'd start losing data in hours.
If the tiny chance of failure due to wear worries you, then spinning hard drives should terrify you. Flash disks wearing out is a theoretical problem that doesn't ever happen in practice. Mechanical failure happens all the time. There is always some risk of losing data if you don't have backups, but it's much, much lower with SSDs.
Here's an example. The US government probably prevents you from selling your open source software to Cuba or Iran. If I read section 7 correctly, that counts as a "condition imposed on you". So really you lose all rights to using that code?
You have misread this section. Having a condition imposed on you which prevents you from to distributing to a specific party does not prevent you from fulfilling the conditions of the license, because the license does not obligate you to distribute the program to anyone; rather, the GPL gives the conditions you must follow when you do distribute the program. Since US export restrictions do not prevent you from fulfilling the terms of the GPL when you export to a non-restricted country, the fact that there are parties which you can't distribute the program to is irrelevant.
Note, however, that only a government can enforce export restrictions; the GPL forbids you from taking on that responsibility yourself. So if you send a GPL'ed program to someone in Europe, they could legally send that program to someone in Cuba, and the GPL would forbid you from interfering. If the US were to pass a law which said that you couldn't export something that could possibly be re-exported to a sanctioned country, then that would be a problem for the GPL, but to my knowledge no such law exists.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.
There's enough room under the streets, that we don't need monopolies.
Every time a company needs to install, repair or upgrade wires, it means digging up streets, blocking traffic, tying up local police, and jackhammer noise. For these reasons, cities and towns only give permits to the smallest number of companies they can. In the past, this meant two companies: one for telephone, and one for television. If a third company wanted to offer internet access, they would never succeed in getting permits; thus, a government-mandated duopoly. Now, some companies rent out their wires, so that you can buy internet access from them under different brand names. This creates the illusion of choice, without the benefits of actual competition.
Today, the same wires can provide TV, telephone, and internet access all at once, so there is no reason to have even two companies. Gradually, towns will go from having two companies with the permits necessary to provide internet access, to having only one. I want that company to be regulated in the same way that my water, sewer and electricity providers are.
Whoops, I messed up the pricing calculation there; the actual estimated rate should've been $150/minute, one order of magnitude less. That's still three orders of magnitude higher than the typical price for that kind of service, though, so the reasoning stands.
From the article, he was billed at 2 cents/kbyte, which is $20/Mbyte. Based on this rate, and the bill amount of $28,067, he used about 1.4GB of bandwidth. The article says he watched a single game of American football, so assuming that took about 3 hours, the connection speed is about a megabyte/sec, which means that it was billed at... $1,200 per minute.
Under common law, if you request a service for which payment is customary, you are obligated to pay any, even if you were not told that payment was expected or what the price is. The common example is that if you go to a restaurant and order food, you incur a debt even if you never looked at the menu. However, this is only the case when the price charged is "reasonable". A restaurant cannot unexpectedly give you a $1000 bill after you have ordered, even if that price was printed on the menu, and expect payment. While sellers have considerable leeway in defining what is a reasonable price, no court could possibly find that $1,200/minute was a reasonable price for consumer data service anywhere. Therefore, he is not obligated to pay, and if AT&T took him to court over it, they would lose.
Articles on the 'net and magazines are written by reporters, not scientists. If you want to examine the evidence, you need to read things written by actual climate scientists, which are published in academic journals. Most people (even reporters writing about climate change) don't bother, though, because real scientific papers involve more math and physics than they can handle. These people have nothing to contribute, and should not be talking about the subject.
I wonder why the command prompt use the Local Settings reparse point, but the shell can't.
Because commands typed in the command prompt are interpreted the same way as batch files, and many companies have old batch files which assume that Local Settings is a normal directory and manipulate its contents. The Explorer file manager can treat Local Settings differently than directories because it is used interactively, rather than by scripts.
The author of the linked article has completely misunderstood what this research is about. It is NOT about tolerating errors in the output of computations; that would be completely infeasible. It's about tolerating errors in intermediate values, by using redundancy. For example, three adders made out of unreliable transistors plus a control unit to have them vote, may be smaller and use less power than one adder made out of reliable transistors. However, you can't make everything out of unreliable transistors. In particular, the control unit, and the parts that compare results to each other, have to work reliably and can't be duplicated. That is what is meant by "some information was more valuable than other information", not the low-order bits of a numeric computation.
Suppose I witness a robbery or other crime. If I think I can photograph the perpetrator without drawing attention to myself, I will, and I'll give that photo to the police. On the other hand, if my camera makes a noise whenever it takes a picture, I won't, and the police will have one less lead. Catching actual criminals is more important than making life difficult for voyeurs, especially since they could easily find a workaround.
The second of your bullet points ("We must start teaching our children about sex and sex-related diseases - even as early as kindergarten") was a lie, invented by one politician to smear another. No one ever advocated teaching kindergarteners about sex and STDs.
The problem is not the writers, it's the structure in which they work. Games make part of the story unpredictable, through the player's choices. That's actually not such a problem; letting the player choose what to say and do just means more writing. The problem is when the player can choose who to talk to and who comes with him.
Game writers don't know which conversations will happen, when they'll happen, or which characters will be there when it does. NPCs that travel with the player can't say much because their lines have to be optional, and the player can't say much without it feeling forced. The people the player meets can say all they want, but they can only say it to the player, who is almost certainly a stranger to them. The result is a long series of monologues directed at the player, most of which will be skipped or skimmed. That sucks, even if the monologues themselves are top notch.
According to the product's web page, it produces 12L per day. That page says nothing about power consumption, but the article has the (frustratingly imprecise) claim of "about three light bulbs" of power consumption, so assume that means 200W. 200W for a day is about 17MJ, which is about 1.5MJ/L or 400kWh/m^3. By comparison, the best desalination processes cost about 1.5kWh/m^3 and typical processes cost only twice that (source).
In other words, you would only use this if getting pipes run to your house was completely impossible, and digging a well was completely impossible. That means there are only a few places where it could be useful, and most of them happen to be deserts which are probably too dry to use it anyways.
Participating in this project is not only useless, it's actually dangerous. Suppose you come across a pending patent that's similar to something you're working on. If you submit prior art, then that might invalidate the patent, but it might not. However, by submitting prior art you publically reveal the fact that you know about the patent. If that patent is granted, and you are later sued for violating it, it becomes "willful infringement", which means you owe triple damages. Because of the way patents are written and interpreted, you can never know for sure whether you're infringing a particular patent.
Because of this triple-damages risk, every company has its lawyers tell the engineers not to look at or look for patents. It will be exactly the same with this project: your employee agreement will state that you can't ever look at the patents that go through this project, because that creates an unacceptable risk.
And yes, that's really stupid, and defeats the original purpose of patents (which was to encourage people to publish their methods). It also means that you can't do anything to avoid infringing on patents, and turns invention into a legal minefield.
The problem with using a per-game statistic for measuring piracy is that a pirate can play far more games than someone who doesn't pirate, but will play each of them less. If you have 25 pirates and 75 people who pay, and each paying person buys five games but each pirate downloads fifty, then each game will be pirated more than 75% of the time. (All of these numbers are pulled out of the air; I don't know the size of the effect, but economics dictates that the number of distinct games per person is at least somewhat higher for pirates.)
See, now you're way off in tinfoil hat-land. I never said that Obama or his campaign did any of that; I said that the bank did. Your alternative theory, that Obama turned off fraud protection so that foreign donors could use his donation page to launder money, is absurd, mainly because that's a ridiculously inefficient and conspicuous way to launder money and the fraud protection wouldn't have stopped it anyways. I mean, come on; you think someone is going to create thousands of bank accounts so that he can donate $20 from each one, and that no one would notice thousands of bank accounts all receiving funds from a single source and sending them to the same destination, but that in order to do so he needed Obama to disable a system designed to prevent the use of stolen credit cards? You, my friend, have observed two dots, and concluded that they must be the eyes of a T-Rex. You should try connecting them instead.
Actually I'm more than willing to bet Democrats are corrupt as well.
Then you talked about the Republicans for a while. Then you said
Point is, don't assume that because it's not Republican it's not corrupt.
Essentially, your thinking (and it's disappointingly common) goes like this:
I don't know whether or not Democrats are corrupt
I do know that many politicians, including some prominent Republicans, are corrupt
Therefore, I should not give any politician the benefit of the doubt
Reasonable so far, but then there's the implied next step:
Therefore, Democrats are probably corrupt, since they are politicians.
Since both Democrats and Republicans are corrupt, corruption is not a reason to favor one over the other
See the problem? People make the jump from "Democrats could be be corrupt" to "Democrats are corrupt" with little or no evidence. Political ads encourage this by pointing out oddities with perfectly ordinary explanations, and saying "you should investigate this", knowing quite well that normal people don't have time for that kind of investigation, but that they'll fill in the gaps according to their biases.
Basically, having lost an argument, the goal is to convince the public that the argument is still on-going and was never resolved. You can't win by arguing that the Republican party isn't more corrupt, so argue that no one knows which party is more corrupt. You can't win by arguing that global warming isn't man-made, so argue that no one knows whether global warming is man-made. It is one of Karl Rove's most clever and insidious tricks, but we aren't buying it anymore. Sorry.
I did a little research, and figured out the real reason for not doing fraud-checking on donations. It seems that, when criminals steal a credit card, they first test it by making a small donation to a charity, to find out whether or not the card works, before they start using it to buy stuff. This has been going on since long before the presidential race started, affects all charities, and is well known. If the credit card company rejects the test transaction, then the thief throws out that card and tries again with a different one. On the other hand, if the test transaction goes through but the next one gets flagged, then the bank finds out what address the thief tried to have stuff mailed to. What probably happened is that someone at the bank noticed that people were testing stolen cards by donating to the Obama campaign, and decided that it was best to always let the donation go through, but then apply extra scrutiny to the next transaction on that card. The Obama campaign doesn't care (they get a chargeback and no money either way), but the bank saves a lot of money that way.
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And it *is* precisely engineered. There's always a tradeoff between cost and durability, and shopping at Walmart means strongly favoring low cost. It's as sturdy as possible for its price; the problem is that you didn't pay enough.
Individuals defending against lawsuits from corporations should be given public defenders. The only reason that right isn't in the Constitution is because corporations didn't exist at the time it was written.
Not animals. Insects. The distinction does matter.
I checked the sites you linked, and the McDonald's sandwich you refer to is 9.8oz, while the Panera sandwich you refer to is 14.5oz; they're both about 75 cal/oz. Comparing different serving sizes without mentioning that they're different is dishonest.
Actually, the way the patent system works is kind of perverse. No one ever looks for patents they might infringe on, because if you find one, then it becomes "willful infringement" and you could end up owing triple damages. And patents are so badly written, that if you're doing anything interesting there's probably a dozen overbroad, ambiguous patents that you could be infringing, but can't tell without spending thousands of dollars in legal fees to find out, and which wouldn't hold up in court anyways.
Ok, I spoke imprecisely. The problem is that not all nanotubes are equal, and the most desireable kinds can only be produced in trace amounts, generally by sorting through large quantities of mostly the undesirable kinds. A new process which could produce very long single-walled nanotubes would be immensely valuable; a process which only produced short nanotubes would be less valuable, and that's what's currently available.
The abstract doesn't mention any applications, but there's an obvious one. This brings us a tiny bit closer to being able to manufacture carbon nanotubes, which are very useful but currently impossible to make more than a trace amount of.
So it sounds like fast charging has been developed, and it's just a matter of taking orders and tooling the factories at this point.
If the tiny chance of failure due to wear worries you, then spinning hard drives should terrify you. Flash disks wearing out is a theoretical problem that doesn't ever happen in practice. Mechanical failure happens all the time. There is always some risk of losing data if you don't have backups, but it's much, much lower with SSDs.
You have misread this section. Having a condition imposed on you which prevents you from to distributing to a specific party does not prevent you from fulfilling the conditions of the license, because the license does not obligate you to distribute the program to anyone; rather, the GPL gives the conditions you must follow when you do distribute the program. Since US export restrictions do not prevent you from fulfilling the terms of the GPL when you export to a non-restricted country, the fact that there are parties which you can't distribute the program to is irrelevant.
Note, however, that only a government can enforce export restrictions; the GPL forbids you from taking on that responsibility yourself. So if you send a GPL'ed program to someone in Europe, they could legally send that program to someone in Cuba, and the GPL would forbid you from interfering. If the US were to pass a law which said that you couldn't export something that could possibly be re-exported to a sanctioned country, then that would be a problem for the GPL, but to my knowledge no such law exists.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.
Every time a company needs to install, repair or upgrade wires, it means digging up streets, blocking traffic, tying up local police, and jackhammer noise. For these reasons, cities and towns only give permits to the smallest number of companies they can. In the past, this meant two companies: one for telephone, and one for television. If a third company wanted to offer internet access, they would never succeed in getting permits; thus, a government-mandated duopoly. Now, some companies rent out their wires, so that you can buy internet access from them under different brand names. This creates the illusion of choice, without the benefits of actual competition.
Today, the same wires can provide TV, telephone, and internet access all at once, so there is no reason to have even two companies. Gradually, towns will go from having two companies with the permits necessary to provide internet access, to having only one. I want that company to be regulated in the same way that my water, sewer and electricity providers are.
Whoops, I messed up the pricing calculation there; the actual estimated rate should've been $150/minute, one order of magnitude less. That's still three orders of magnitude higher than the typical price for that kind of service, though, so the reasoning stands.
From the article, he was billed at 2 cents/kbyte, which is $20/Mbyte. Based on this rate, and the bill amount of $28,067, he used about 1.4GB of bandwidth. The article says he watched a single game of American football, so assuming that took about 3 hours, the connection speed is about a megabyte/sec, which means that it was billed at... $1,200 per minute.
Under common law, if you request a service for which payment is customary, you are obligated to pay any, even if you were not told that payment was expected or what the price is. The common example is that if you go to a restaurant and order food, you incur a debt even if you never looked at the menu. However, this is only the case when the price charged is "reasonable". A restaurant cannot unexpectedly give you a $1000 bill after you have ordered, even if that price was printed on the menu, and expect payment. While sellers have considerable leeway in defining what is a reasonable price, no court could possibly find that $1,200/minute was a reasonable price for consumer data service anywhere. Therefore, he is not obligated to pay, and if AT&T took him to court over it, they would lose.
Articles on the 'net and magazines are written by reporters, not scientists. If you want to examine the evidence, you need to read things written by actual climate scientists, which are published in academic journals. Most people (even reporters writing about climate change) don't bother, though, because real scientific papers involve more math and physics than they can handle. These people have nothing to contribute, and should not be talking about the subject.
Because commands typed in the command prompt are interpreted the same way as batch files, and many companies have old batch files which assume that Local Settings is a normal directory and manipulate its contents. The Explorer file manager can treat Local Settings differently than directories because it is used interactively, rather than by scripts.
The author of the linked article has completely misunderstood what this research is about. It is NOT about tolerating errors in the output of computations; that would be completely infeasible. It's about tolerating errors in intermediate values, by using redundancy. For example, three adders made out of unreliable transistors plus a control unit to have them vote, may be smaller and use less power than one adder made out of reliable transistors. However, you can't make everything out of unreliable transistors. In particular, the control unit, and the parts that compare results to each other, have to work reliably and can't be duplicated. That is what is meant by "some information was more valuable than other information", not the low-order bits of a numeric computation.
Suppose I witness a robbery or other crime. If I think I can photograph the perpetrator without drawing attention to myself, I will, and I'll give that photo to the police. On the other hand, if my camera makes a noise whenever it takes a picture, I won't, and the police will have one less lead. Catching actual criminals is more important than making life difficult for voyeurs, especially since they could easily find a workaround.
The second of your bullet points ("We must start teaching our children about sex and sex-related diseases - even as early as kindergarten") was a lie, invented by one politician to smear another. No one ever advocated teaching kindergarteners about sex and STDs.
The problem is not the writers, it's the structure in which they work. Games make part of the story unpredictable, through the player's choices. That's actually not such a problem; letting the player choose what to say and do just means more writing. The problem is when the player can choose who to talk to and who comes with him.
Game writers don't know which conversations will happen, when they'll happen, or which characters will be there when it does. NPCs that travel with the player can't say much because their lines have to be optional, and the player can't say much without it feeling forced. The people the player meets can say all they want, but they can only say it to the player, who is almost certainly a stranger to them. The result is a long series of monologues directed at the player, most of which will be skipped or skimmed. That sucks, even if the monologues themselves are top notch.
According to the product's web page, it produces 12L per day. That page says nothing about power consumption, but the article has the (frustratingly imprecise) claim of "about three light bulbs" of power consumption, so assume that means 200W. 200W for a day is about 17MJ, which is about 1.5MJ/L or 400kWh/m^3. By comparison, the best desalination processes cost about 1.5kWh/m^3 and typical processes cost only twice that (source).
In other words, you would only use this if getting pipes run to your house was completely impossible, and digging a well was completely impossible. That means there are only a few places where it could be useful, and most of them happen to be deserts which are probably too dry to use it anyways.
Participating in this project is not only useless, it's actually dangerous. Suppose you come across a pending patent that's similar to something you're working on. If you submit prior art, then that might invalidate the patent, but it might not. However, by submitting prior art you publically reveal the fact that you know about the patent. If that patent is granted, and you are later sued for violating it, it becomes "willful infringement", which means you owe triple damages. Because of the way patents are written and interpreted, you can never know for sure whether you're infringing a particular patent.
Because of this triple-damages risk, every company has its lawyers tell the engineers not to look at or look for patents. It will be exactly the same with this project: your employee agreement will state that you can't ever look at the patents that go through this project, because that creates an unacceptable risk.
And yes, that's really stupid, and defeats the original purpose of patents (which was to encourage people to publish their methods). It also means that you can't do anything to avoid infringing on patents, and turns invention into a legal minefield.
The problem with using a per-game statistic for measuring piracy is that a pirate can play far more games than someone who doesn't pirate, but will play each of them less. If you have 25 pirates and 75 people who pay, and each paying person buys five games but each pirate downloads fifty, then each game will be pirated more than 75% of the time. (All of these numbers are pulled out of the air; I don't know the size of the effect, but economics dictates that the number of distinct games per person is at least somewhat higher for pirates.)
See, now you're way off in tinfoil hat-land. I never said that Obama or his campaign did any of that; I said that the bank did. Your alternative theory, that Obama turned off fraud protection so that foreign donors could use his donation page to launder money, is absurd, mainly because that's a ridiculously inefficient and conspicuous way to launder money and the fraud protection wouldn't have stopped it anyways. I mean, come on; you think someone is going to create thousands of bank accounts so that he can donate $20 from each one, and that no one would notice thousands of bank accounts all receiving funds from a single source and sending them to the same destination, but that in order to do so he needed Obama to disable a system designed to prevent the use of stolen credit cards? You, my friend, have observed two dots, and concluded that they must be the eyes of a T-Rex. You should try connecting them instead.
See what you just did? You said
Then you talked about the Republicans for a while. Then you said
Essentially, your thinking (and it's disappointingly common) goes like this:
Reasonable so far, but then there's the implied next step:
See the problem? People make the jump from "Democrats could be be corrupt" to "Democrats are corrupt" with little or no evidence. Political ads encourage this by pointing out oddities with perfectly ordinary explanations, and saying "you should investigate this", knowing quite well that normal people don't have time for that kind of investigation, but that they'll fill in the gaps according to their biases.
Basically, having lost an argument, the goal is to convince the public that the argument is still on-going and was never resolved. You can't win by arguing that the Republican party isn't more corrupt, so argue that no one knows which party is more corrupt. You can't win by arguing that global warming isn't man-made, so argue that no one knows whether global warming is man-made. It is one of Karl Rove's most clever and insidious tricks, but we aren't buying it anymore. Sorry.
I did a little research, and figured out the real reason for not doing fraud-checking on donations. It seems that, when criminals steal a credit card, they first test it by making a small donation to a charity, to find out whether or not the card works, before they start using it to buy stuff. This has been going on since long before the presidential race started, affects all charities, and is well known. If the credit card company rejects the test transaction, then the thief throws out that card and tries again with a different one. On the other hand, if the test transaction goes through but the next one gets flagged, then the bank finds out what address the thief tried to have stuff mailed to. What probably happened is that someone at the bank noticed that people were testing stolen cards by donating to the Obama campaign, and decided that it was best to always let the donation go through, but then apply extra scrutiny to the next transaction on that card. The Obama campaign doesn't care (they get a chargeback and no money either way), but the bank saves a lot of money that way.