I'm not a mathematician, but there are an awful lot of courses on OCW. There are lots of lecture notes, as well as assignments and exams with solutions to provide examples. They're probably not as polished as a good math book, of course, but they look great as a reference....
Having a family is not an excuse for being a coward. If anything, it's a reason not to be a coward, so you can set an example for others and the future.
Also, in this year's World Baseball Classic, Italy made it to the second round (top 8 of 16) and the Netherlands reached the semifinals (top 4). Not a bad showing for the Europeans....
Casual users can stick with their playskool products written by accountants and marketers. In all fairness, I suppose it's not inconceivable that you can have a manager with no technical experience, but one who is still able to create a well-engineered product - I'd think this is very rare. To counter, look at how MS is doing with Balmer at the helm. I'll just stick with engineering products written and managed by actual engineers and other experts in the field, thanks.
And you know what - when Windows slows down after a few months of use, or Steve Jobs' ghost decides to rip even more user privileges from their consumers, we'll enjoy the technical superiority and enhanced freedom of Linux. Since it's not going to disappear any time soon, I don't mind that much at all.
It's a STABLE RELEASE. Stable releases are only good for servers. If you want to use Debian on your desktop (which I imagine is the case, as I can't see why you would want a DE on your server), even running Testing is quite conservative.
I tried running Debian Stable on my laptop back in '08 - I believe it was Etch at the time. I don't think they even had packages for my wireless drivers. Didn't take long to figure out that I had to point apt at Testing instead.
If you don't like it, use non-profit news outlets. I do not use for-profit news sources anymore (CNN, etc.).
Sites like/. don't count - they're not really news sites per se, they're more aggregators, and focus on specific niche areas - I'm talking more in the scope of general daily news sources.
If Microsoft "invented" something before Android, before iPhone, before any current Smartphone, then they have a right to license and protect that IP, period.
For the most part, you are correct.
But they should NOT have the ability to license them under whatever terms they wish, and namely, they have no right keep these agreements under NDA. This gives them entirely disproportionate ability to manipulate market participants. Further, it COMPLETELY contradicts the whole (intended) purpose of patent law, which is NOT to simply encourage innovation, but to do so in a way which ALLOWS PARTICIPANTS TO SHARE THEIR IDEAS (otherwise, we would be perfectly fine with trade secrets). Keeping a patent agreement under NDA is blatantly contradictory to this intended goal, aside from the antitrust and extortionist effects.
An important step towards fixing patent extortion is to require that patent licensing agreements always be made public. This is not an unreasonable mandate: if patents are really supposed to promote innovation (which is a laughable notion, but the people in control seem to wish it so), then there's no reason why the patents in question and their value for each competitor cannot be made public. This is at least a better model than the current "Give me money because I have more money and better lawyers than you."
Even better, it would be best if participants were made to register their agreements with the granting patent office, and the patent office should be entitled to a reasonable fraction of the revenue. This would discourage wrongful patents and put a more reasonable value on their worth, and most importantly, those that are benefiting from the system own an obligation to support it.
Of course, math, software, user interface, and all other imaginary inventions should not be patentable anyways. These are simply facts, though the current legal system is currently ignoring them.
If you look at the history of AT&T you discover there were government officials who intentionally promoted policies that made AT&T a monopoly because it was easier for the government to exert control over a single corporation than it was to exert control over many small regional companies [citation needed]. This same principle was applied to other areas of the economy as well [citation needed].
Those who believe that the government should manage the economy always prefer a few large companies over many small companies because the former is easier to control.
Absolutely false, and a counterexample would be the many airline companies which operate that the FAA has to regulate for operator and passenger safety. The purpose of government regulation is not to manipulate the market as a whole; it is instead to ensure that no single or small number of entities manipulate it for their own personal interests at the expense of consumers. This is why we have privacy probes into Google, apart from the several examples that I mentioned in my initial post, where numerous government agencies which have stepped in to ensure better markets for consumers. Anyone with the slightest understanding of economics understands that the profit motive will drive companies to consolidate, which leads to greater market influence and position, and therefore allows them to parasitically offer fewer services and charge more. It is this VERY purpose that antitrust regulation is meant to prevent.
If the government regulators had not created the AT&T monopoly by regulating (not by funding) it into existence there would have been no need for them to break it up.
This is completely hypothetical and refuted by the many examples of trusts which were broken up by the government in other examples. To repeat: Net Neutrality, Standard Oil, Microsoft, many price-fixing schemes (DRAM, LCDs).
For that matter there were several times when the withdrawal of government regulatory support for AT&T would have broken its monopoly more effectively than the government's breakup of AT&T.
This is once again completely hypothetical and lacking citation.
I'm not a historian, but I imagine that the USG didn't fund AT&T to create a monopoly. Instead, they invested in AT&T as a private sector contractor to build a telecommunications network which they then managed as a monopoly (perhaps in collusion with a portion of the government). It's still the government/the public/the people's voice (back when it actually was a voice) that broke it up. You can't just trust the private sector to be nice people and do it to themselves. Greedy people are inherently evil.
But now that you bring it up, the internet itself also originated from government funding and development, except that flourished because they gave that money to universities rather than private corporations to build up; and then of course the private sector came in and started managing more and more of the network, and then started consolidating, effectively creating a monopoly/duopoly in pretty much all areas. The Supreme Court's mistake didn't help when they ruled that cable companies don't have to share their lines. Again, if the people had any voice in the US anymore, that horrible mistake could have been fixed by now.
The one thing that never happens as the government regulates ever greater parts of the economy is that the common person benefits.
Really?
So you think it would be better if AT&T still had the telecommunications monopoly in the US? Or Standard Oil the oil monopoly? Do you support Intel's antritrust actions against AMD, or Microsoft's antitrust actions against general computing and IT progress? What if the SEC ceased to exist and business to manipulate markets for their own profit-driven motives and muscling out competitors and small-name investors (in fact, if they were doing a decent job, then there wouldn't be valueless high-frequency trading either)? How about the FCC which has been somewhat preserving net neutrality, and ensuring that electromagnetic devices don't cause interference with other users of the EM spectrum? Does the FAA serve no purpose in ensuring that people can fly safely (you can argue that they go overboard, but it's better than the opposite extreme? Do you think the EPA serves no purpose as well? and the FDA? Do you think the US is better off as it is with an unregulated health insurance industry, compared to (other) developed nations?
It's not unreasonable to think that government regulation in any country is a hassle or is not done properly. But to suggest that all government regulation is bad is stupid.
And finally, if you're so worried about the common man, do consider that unregulated capitalism will pretty much always gravitate towards a concentration of wealth at the top which pathologically exploits and oppresses all other social and wealth classes; at that point, a capitalist economy is indistinguishable from a fascist whatsit.
The onus lies on the patent applicant to do prior art searches.
And in this case, it's not even a question of prior art - everyone knows that Apple's actions are a deliberate troll attempt to impede the viability of competitors. That in itself is a crime.
I have serious doubts that 40% solar panels are ever going to be practical. The only practical application I foresee for 40% cells (generally these are triple-junction films) are for space applications, where they have little competition (in powering satellites that is, not for rocket propulsion).
Making multijunction solar cells is very difficult, and it generally requires very expensive materials (namely Indium) to reach these high efficiencies. It requires carefully tuning two important material properties of the cell's layers, namely that the bandgaps of each layer have to be optimized against the solar spectrum, and the materials joining each other have to match in terms of atomic lattice spacing. Additionally, the materials must have high optical and electronic quality, and the end result is that you're left with a small choice of materials.
Further, since these cells are very thick and have to be fabricated with the highest degree of precision deposition to ensure high optical and electronic quality. I'm too lazy to reference them, but I'm pretty sure that all those record-breaking solar cells used Molecular Beam Epitaxy, which is ridiculously impractical for large-scale applications.
The last sort-of issue is repeatability. Most of the time, these reports merely cherry-pick the best result from a large batch of samples. This is far more problematic in organic solar cells - I don't think it's as large of a concern with inorganics.
So given these issues, I think it's reasonable to suggest that these types of cells will never be feasible for terrestrial applications. And for the record, the last time I checked (1-2 years ago), 3 groups claimed the world record of about 41%-43%, all using slightly different methods to test. It probably hasn't changed much since.
Personally, I'm a big believer in solar-thermal plants (essentially where sunlight is highly concentrated and stored at thermal energy in molten substances, making it easy to transport to a plant for conversion to electrical energy) which operate continuously, even through the night and are estimated to reach OVER 70% EFFICIENCY and operate at a pithy cost of roughly.06 USD/kWh. There are virtually no drawbacks to these technologies (that I know of, feel free to inform me). I have absolutely no idea why this technology isn't being adopted more, and can only assume that it's due to the lack of investment, partially due to heavy lobbying influence from the anti-progress energy industries.
There are many classes of solar panels and researchers like to keep track of records for each class, then report the record without making any note of which kind it is, just to report that they have a record.
Quickly scanning the article you posted, I didn't see any reference to which type of cell they used, but most likely it's single-layer monocrystalline silicon (the link is very misleading in this respect). Single-layer solar cells have a maximum possible efficiency of about 30%, but the highest achievable result in labs has generally been close to 20%. This figure can be boosted very slightly (1-2%) by introducing quantum wells, which give you a slight boost in sub-bandgap quantum efficiency (ie. you capture some additional photons below the band-gap while maintaining the cell's overall open circuit voltage), and this is probably what the vendors in this article are doing. While the increase in efficiency seems slight to me, I imagine that it does make a significant gain from an economical point of view.
The gotcha with these kinds of cells, is the careful deposition that it takes to deliver monocrystalline films, and at the conventional thickness of this type of cell at roughly 1mm (I might be off by an order of magnitude, but it hardly matters), it becomes a very expensive process.
Other technologies include multijunction cells (as referenced by GP), inorganic thin-films (lower efficiency, much lower cost using a wide variety of materials such as multicrystalline silicon, amorphous silicon, and Copper-Indium-Gallium-Selenide, usually single-junction), and organics (which have absolutely no chance of ever being practical except in maybe some very tiny niche applications).
In terms of which have the greatest chance of going mainstream, I would say thin-films for small scale applications and the kind in the article you posted for large-scale adoption. But these are just my musings, and I haven't kept up much in this area.
Yes, this is just another knee-jerk reaction from an M$ hater who will gladly blame them for anything ranging from greed, to politics, to disease and famine.
But you could legitimately argue that they have a motivation in this. Look at all the fake reports MS has published saying that Linux has a higher TCO. And the outright lies they trained Best Buy drones to tell people And the constant shills that they dish out on all kinds of websites, this very one included. I'm sure that there are hundreds of other, more obvious and egregious examples, which escape me at the moment.
But MS has a vested interest in tarnishing Linux's brand image, and the facts have shown that it is exactly what they do. But that's okay, they can keep doing it because eventually, people will eventually (if they haven't already) realize that Linux is lightyears ahead of MS's products, and that is what is causing (present tense!) an exodus from their awful platform. Linux has been growing from its very inception, and there's no reason why that should stop.
I'm not going so far as to say that this is all their fault, but you can't disagree that they haven't had a part in this, one based on a malicious, ulterior motive. And regardless, I don't think the whole issue present by TFA is problematic anyways. People use Linux cause it works, not cause it's sexy. And that's just fine.
Slashdot Mirror
Dammit, the link didn't show up.
here it is: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-075-advanced-calculus-for-engineers-fall-2004/exams/
I'm not a mathematician, but there are an awful lot of courses on OCW. There are lots of lecture notes, as well as assignments and exams with solutions to provide examples. They're probably not as polished as a good math book, of course, but they look great as a reference....
Yes, but Japan makes the US copyright industry happy, so they're not terrists.
Having a family is not an excuse for being a coward. If anything, it's a reason not to be a coward, so you can set an example for others and the future.
I think clip is available here: http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20130420&content_id=45278350&vkey=news_mlb&c_id=mlb - you can clearly see the runner trotting off the field before he realizes that he's not out and safely reaches first.
Also, in this year's World Baseball Classic, Italy made it to the second round (top 8 of 16) and the Netherlands reached the semifinals (top 4). Not a bad showing for the Europeans....
Phew - for a moment I read that as Mr. Fred Rogers, which would have forced me to stop believing in anything left in the world.
Casual users can stick with their playskool products written by accountants and marketers. In all fairness, I suppose it's not inconceivable that you can have a manager with no technical experience, but one who is still able to create a well-engineered product - I'd think this is very rare. To counter, look at how MS is doing with Balmer at the helm. I'll just stick with engineering products written and managed by actual engineers and other experts in the field, thanks.
And you know what - when Windows slows down after a few months of use, or Steve Jobs' ghost decides to rip even more user privileges from their consumers, we'll enjoy the technical superiority and enhanced freedom of Linux. Since it's not going to disappear any time soon, I don't mind that much at all.
I take back what I said. Apparently, even unstable is still on 4.8. Sheesh!
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/xfce/
Nevertheless, it's not that nontrivial to pull 4.10 from experimental.
It's a STABLE RELEASE. Stable releases are only good for servers. If you want to use Debian on your desktop (which I imagine is the case, as I can't see why you would want a DE on your server), even running Testing is quite conservative.
I tried running Debian Stable on my laptop back in '08 - I believe it was Etch at the time. I don't think they even had packages for my wireless drivers. Didn't take long to figure out that I had to point apt at Testing instead.
If you don't like it, use non-profit news outlets. I do not use for-profit news sources anymore (CNN, etc.).
Sites like /. don't count - they're not really news sites per se, they're more aggregators, and focus on specific niche areas - I'm talking more in the scope of general daily news sources.
Highly unlikely, Scrabble bags don't have a 1/4 chance of producing a Z.
(okay, maybe Polish Scrabble bags do)
If Microsoft "invented" something before Android, before iPhone, before any current Smartphone, then they have a right to license and protect that IP, period.
For the most part, you are correct.
But they should NOT have the ability to license them under whatever terms they wish, and namely, they have no right keep these agreements under NDA. This gives them entirely disproportionate ability to manipulate market participants. Further, it COMPLETELY contradicts the whole (intended) purpose of patent law, which is NOT to simply encourage innovation, but to do so in a way which ALLOWS PARTICIPANTS TO SHARE THEIR IDEAS (otherwise, we would be perfectly fine with trade secrets). Keeping a patent agreement under NDA is blatantly contradictory to this intended goal, aside from the antitrust and extortionist effects.
An important step towards fixing patent extortion is to require that patent licensing agreements always be made public. This is not an unreasonable mandate: if patents are really supposed to promote innovation (which is a laughable notion, but the people in control seem to wish it so), then there's no reason why the patents in question and their value for each competitor cannot be made public. This is at least a better model than the current "Give me money because I have more money and better lawyers than you."
Even better, it would be best if participants were made to register their agreements with the granting patent office, and the patent office should be entitled to a reasonable fraction of the revenue. This would discourage wrongful patents and put a more reasonable value on their worth, and most importantly, those that are benefiting from the system own an obligation to support it.
Of course, math, software, user interface, and all other imaginary inventions should not be patentable anyways. These are simply facts, though the current legal system is currently ignoring them.
I suggest that they add speed holes. I say they'll make the computer go faster.
If you look at the history of AT&T you discover there were government officials who intentionally promoted policies that made AT&T a monopoly because it was easier for the government to exert control over a single corporation than it was to exert control over many small regional companies [citation needed]. This same principle was applied to other areas of the economy as well [citation needed].
Those who believe that the government should manage the economy always prefer a few large companies over many small companies because the former is easier to control.
Absolutely false, and a counterexample would be the many airline companies which operate that the FAA has to regulate for operator and passenger safety. The purpose of government regulation is not to manipulate the market as a whole; it is instead to ensure that no single or small number of entities manipulate it for their own personal interests at the expense of consumers. This is why we have privacy probes into Google, apart from the several examples that I mentioned in my initial post, where numerous government agencies which have stepped in to ensure better markets for consumers. Anyone with the slightest understanding of economics understands that the profit motive will drive companies to consolidate, which leads to greater market influence and position, and therefore allows them to parasitically offer fewer services and charge more. It is this VERY purpose that antitrust regulation is meant to prevent.
If the government regulators had not created the AT&T monopoly by regulating (not by funding) it into existence there would have been no need for them to break it up.
This is completely hypothetical and refuted by the many examples of trusts which were broken up by the government in other examples. To repeat: Net Neutrality, Standard Oil, Microsoft, many price-fixing schemes (DRAM, LCDs).
For that matter there were several times when the withdrawal of government regulatory support for AT&T would have broken its monopoly more effectively than the government's breakup of AT&T.
This is once again completely hypothetical and lacking citation.
I'm not a historian, but I imagine that the USG didn't fund AT&T to create a monopoly. Instead, they invested in AT&T as a private sector contractor to build a telecommunications network which they then managed as a monopoly (perhaps in collusion with a portion of the government). It's still the government/the public/the people's voice (back when it actually was a voice) that broke it up. You can't just trust the private sector to be nice people and do it to themselves. Greedy people are inherently evil.
But now that you bring it up, the internet itself also originated from government funding and development, except that flourished because they gave that money to universities rather than private corporations to build up; and then of course the private sector came in and started managing more and more of the network, and then started consolidating, effectively creating a monopoly/duopoly in pretty much all areas. The Supreme Court's mistake didn't help when they ruled that cable companies don't have to share their lines. Again, if the people had any voice in the US anymore, that horrible mistake could have been fixed by now.
The one thing that never happens as the government regulates ever greater parts of the economy is that the common person benefits.
Really?
So you think it would be better if AT&T still had the telecommunications monopoly in the US? Or Standard Oil the oil monopoly? Do you support Intel's antritrust actions against AMD, or Microsoft's antitrust actions against general computing and IT progress? What if the SEC ceased to exist and business to manipulate markets for their own profit-driven motives and muscling out competitors and small-name investors (in fact, if they were doing a decent job, then there wouldn't be valueless high-frequency trading either)? How about the FCC which has been somewhat preserving net neutrality, and ensuring that electromagnetic devices don't cause interference with other users of the EM spectrum? Does the FAA serve no purpose in ensuring that people can fly safely (you can argue that they go overboard, but it's better than the opposite extreme? Do you think the EPA serves no purpose as well? and the FDA? Do you think the US is better off as it is with an unregulated health insurance industry, compared to (other) developed nations?
It's not unreasonable to think that government regulation in any country is a hassle or is not done properly. But to suggest that all government regulation is bad is stupid.
And finally, if you're so worried about the common man, do consider that unregulated capitalism will pretty much always gravitate towards a concentration of wealth at the top which pathologically exploits and oppresses all other social and wealth classes; at that point, a capitalist economy is indistinguishable from a fascist whatsit.
It's not a crime in law. That doesn't mean that it's not a crime!
Have you been outside America at all?
The onus lies on the patent applicant to do prior art searches.
And in this case, it's not even a question of prior art - everyone knows that Apple's actions are a deliberate troll attempt to impede the viability of competitors. That in itself is a crime.
I have serious doubts that 40% solar panels are ever going to be practical. The only practical application I foresee for 40% cells (generally these are triple-junction films) are for space applications, where they have little competition (in powering satellites that is, not for rocket propulsion).
Making multijunction solar cells is very difficult, and it generally requires very expensive materials (namely Indium) to reach these high efficiencies. It requires carefully tuning two important material properties of the cell's layers, namely that the bandgaps of each layer have to be optimized against the solar spectrum, and the materials joining each other have to match in terms of atomic lattice spacing. Additionally, the materials must have high optical and electronic quality, and the end result is that you're left with a small choice of materials.
Further, since these cells are very thick and have to be fabricated with the highest degree of precision deposition to ensure high optical and electronic quality. I'm too lazy to reference them, but I'm pretty sure that all those record-breaking solar cells used Molecular Beam Epitaxy, which is ridiculously impractical for large-scale applications.
The last sort-of issue is repeatability. Most of the time, these reports merely cherry-pick the best result from a large batch of samples. This is far more problematic in organic solar cells - I don't think it's as large of a concern with inorganics.
So given these issues, I think it's reasonable to suggest that these types of cells will never be feasible for terrestrial applications. And for the record, the last time I checked (1-2 years ago), 3 groups claimed the world record of about 41%-43%, all using slightly different methods to test. It probably hasn't changed much since.
Personally, I'm a big believer in solar-thermal plants (essentially where sunlight is highly concentrated and stored at thermal energy in molten substances, making it easy to transport to a plant for conversion to electrical energy) which operate continuously, even through the night and are estimated to reach OVER 70% EFFICIENCY and operate at a pithy cost of roughly .06 USD/kWh. There are virtually no drawbacks to these technologies (that I know of, feel free to inform me). I have absolutely no idea why this technology isn't being adopted more, and can only assume that it's due to the lack of investment, partially due to heavy lobbying influence from the anti-progress energy industries.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy#System_designs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower
http://www.nrel.gov/solar/parabolic_trough.html
There are many classes of solar panels and researchers like to keep track of records for each class, then report the record without making any note of which kind it is, just to report that they have a record.
Quickly scanning the article you posted, I didn't see any reference to which type of cell they used, but most likely it's single-layer monocrystalline silicon (the link is very misleading in this respect). Single-layer solar cells have a maximum possible efficiency of about 30%, but the highest achievable result in labs has generally been close to 20%. This figure can be boosted very slightly (1-2%) by introducing quantum wells, which give you a slight boost in sub-bandgap quantum efficiency (ie. you capture some additional photons below the band-gap while maintaining the cell's overall open circuit voltage), and this is probably what the vendors in this article are doing. While the increase in efficiency seems slight to me, I imagine that it does make a significant gain from an economical point of view.
The gotcha with these kinds of cells, is the careful deposition that it takes to deliver monocrystalline films, and at the conventional thickness of this type of cell at roughly 1mm (I might be off by an order of magnitude, but it hardly matters), it becomes a very expensive process.
Other technologies include multijunction cells (as referenced by GP), inorganic thin-films (lower efficiency, much lower cost using a wide variety of materials such as multicrystalline silicon, amorphous silicon, and Copper-Indium-Gallium-Selenide, usually single-junction), and organics (which have absolutely no chance of ever being practical except in maybe some very tiny niche applications).
In terms of which have the greatest chance of going mainstream, I would say thin-films for small scale applications and the kind in the article you posted for large-scale adoption. But these are just my musings, and I haven't kept up much in this area.
Sorry, but that's Windows CE, my friend.
Yes, this is just another knee-jerk reaction from an M$ hater who will gladly blame them for anything ranging from greed, to politics, to disease and famine.
But you could legitimately argue that they have a motivation in this. Look at all the fake reports MS has published saying that Linux has a higher TCO. And the outright lies they trained Best Buy drones to tell people
And the constant shills that they dish out on all kinds of websites, this very one included. I'm sure that there are hundreds of other, more obvious and egregious examples, which escape me at the moment.
But MS has a vested interest in tarnishing Linux's brand image, and the facts have shown that it is exactly what they do. But that's okay, they can keep doing it because eventually, people will eventually (if they haven't already) realize that Linux is lightyears ahead of MS's products, and that is what is causing (present tense!) an exodus from their awful platform. Linux has been growing from its very inception, and there's no reason why that should stop.
I'm not going so far as to say that this is all their fault, but you can't disagree that they haven't had a part in this, one based on a malicious, ulterior motive. And regardless, I don't think the whole issue present by TFA is problematic anyways. People use Linux cause it works, not cause it's sexy. And that's just fine.
Free will, eh?
But of course. Nobody in the US has ever acted irrationally before.
Redmond is gonna blame OEMs for this one too eh?
(Reference: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/24/windows_8_blame_game/)