Uh, anything someone with a clue can't catch with a manual scan isn't going to be detected by realtime AV either.
Boot up a trusted machine (could run Linux/OpenBSD/whatever if you want), have the suspect drive attached, copy the files, scan them with a trusted scanner(s), if you're paranoid you could double-check with something like VirusTotal (check hashes and upload the really suspicious files).
I don't see how realtime AV is going to do better. Esp if the system gets pwned and rootkitted so that the installed AV can't see the malware.
BTW if you're doing it for forensics you'd need more expensive hardware that is certified to prevent writes and so that any evidence gathered looks better in court.
I'd argue its because Microsoft has access to their own source-code
I doubt that's the real reason, because both Norton and McAfee used to be good. Then they started to be bigger resource hogs than most viruses they were protecting you against (yes there's other evil stuff that viruses do but keep reading...).
I definitely recall Norton/Symantec making systems more unstable or causing problems: 1) Years ago someone had problems fetching email, turns out Norton/Symantec was intercepting the POP3 connections to scan for viruses (ok fine), but some email was causing it to _crash_ (extremely not fine- especially if it turns out to be an exploitable code-injection bug).
A virus-signature update delivered automatically to users on Friday about 1:00 a.m. Beijing time to Symantec's antivirus scanning engine mistook two critical system files of the Simplified Chinese edition of Windows XP Service Pack 2 for a Trojan horse. The two files -- netapi32.dll and lsasrv.dll -- were falsely quarantined, which in turn crippled Windows. If an affected PC was rebooted, Windows failed on start-up and showed only a blue screen.
3) On 28 January 2010, Symantec's antivirus software marked Spotify as a Trojan horse, disabling the software across millions of computers
Nowadays depending on the situation I use Avira, MSE or "no antivirus". My personal home machine has no AV installed. My browser runs as a different user process. If I have something that I think is suspicious, I check it with VirusTotal ( https://www.virustotal.com/ ). So far I have had no problems doing things this way, so I don't see the point of constantly incurring the extra CPU/resource costs by installing a real-time virus scanner on my machine. For the past few decades my personal machines have never been infected by a virus. I may have downloaded viruses or malware, but I have not been infected by them. And yes I do know how to check.
A dedicated attacker might be able to put malware on my machine, but they'd know how to use virustotal or similar too, and still be able to plant malware on my machine even if I was running AV software (and wasting resources).
The machine my parents use on the other hand has AV software installed (not Symantec, nor McAfee).
AV software is not needed everywhere and in some cases if installed, it indicates someone is doing something wrong: http://xkcd.com/463/
Given my track record vs Symantec's track record, I would prefer to take the bet that Symantec is more likely to screw up my system than a virus. There have been other antivirus vendors with similar screw ups too.
On a related note, Trend screwed up notoriously - albeit with its antispam product, blocking the letter "p".
For these reasons production servers and other important machines that are well secured and managed should NOT have antivirus software installed.
If they are so poorly managed that the operators are much more likely to screw up than the AV vendors, then sure, install AV, but that means you are doing something wrong.
19 years is very long. Is the 19 years for all 7 towers? The Burj Khalifa, Taipei 101 and Petronas Twin Towers all took about 6-7 years, and they cost less than USD2 billion.
In our most basic sense, no one needs more than food, water, and shelter. Everything else is optional but sales people try to convince us of otherwise.
1) That's not true for most humans. Most humans need "intangibles" like hope. Otherwise they wouldn't bother surviving to the next day just to find enough food, water and shelter to survive another day and so on till they eventually die... 2) It's not even true from an evolutionary perspective. If the entire human species was satisfied with mere food, water and shelter it would go extinct. You can say the urge to reproduce is only a want. But then the urge to breathe[1] is only a want, you eventually need to breathe if not you die, whether or not you feel the urge.
3) Need and want is often not that "black and white". There are people who have a very strong "need" to never ever have to eat from garbage dump again, they might rather die first. So do we "need" that much $$$? If we're posting on slashdot it's very likely that billions in the world survive on less than we have. But if we "need" that much $$$, then clearly we need to find people who "need" something we can give them or do for them so that we can get our $$$.
[1] BTW I guess breathable air comes under shelter?
Speaking of Tolkien and the future, if Tolkien was alive today, perhaps he shouldn't be writing books, but creating a LoTR wiki - he can then create and add all the mythology he wants, all the stories, background, poems etc. I might actually pay to read that:).
I found his books very slow. But I wouldn't say they were written in low quality prose.
Don't forget it's politics. He can't do everything he wants. He might want to do "X" and he might want to stop "SOPA". BUT the other politicians may say to him, we'll kill "X" if you kill "SOPA". So it's a matter of which battles he can fight and how many he can get on his side.
The voters are a big part of problem. Think about it, a politician getting lots of campaign money does not force you to vote for that politician. You can vote for someone else, or even be a candidate.
But maybe many actually do like voting for politicians who get the most campaign money. That's democracy for you.
No it's not working. What I see is a system that rewards people/companies who patent obvious crap.
Jim gets a monopoly on cheese sandwiches, Jane gets a monopoly on tomato sandwiches, Joe licenses from both and gets a monopoly on cheese and tomato sandwiches. They cross license with each other, and nobody else gets to sell those sandwiches. For what benefit to society? All when any cook could come up with the idea and make any of those sandwiches if the situation ever demanded it.
Any intelligent programmer, with the idea, could probably do it pretty easily.
So which is it: a) Patents drive innovation because, by encouraging disclosure, other innovators don't have to waste time re-inventing the same things over and over. b) Patents stop others from copying our "obvious" stuff so _easily_.
Someone was claiming a) while you're claiming b). If b) was true, it won't cost much time and $$$ to re-invent the same thing.
Nowadays it seems for most patents, the actual technical cost (time+money) of reinvention is much lower than the cost of fighting patent lawsuits, or paying licensing fees. Too often they've already independently reinvented your noninnovative stuff, maybe even before you released your product.
The real impedance to progress is someone managed to patent it first and collect toll from everyone else.
Sometimes the idea is the hard part
When it comes to most modern-day patents, the idea certainly isn't the hard part.
Do you really think NONE of the people who came up with the "A" to "B" routing stuff on Google Maps ever thought of something like this? For fun they already came up with '"kayak" across the pacific ocean' years ago.
Maybe you need to hang around more with very intelligent and creative people. To them, ideas are not rare gems that only appear once or twice in their lifetimes. They have more good ideas than they can ever implement. Just because they didn't do it or patent it doesn't mean they didn't think of it. They may have 100+ other ideas to do first, or the "idea" might be just some obvious step to them that they wouldn't bother noting down.
The obvious ideas you talk about are the equivalent of the "crack eggs and separate egg contents from shells" step when making a cake.
apply historical data of clustered activities rather than current data of discrete activities to impact that weighting?
And you call that innovation worthy of a government granted monopoly? Method of making a sandwich with aged cheese instead of sliced fresh tomato. So the next patent could be on a cheese and tomato sandwich (using both historical data AND current data)? Ridiculous.
Do you still not get it? "historical data of clustered activities" is the same thing as "obstacle"/"terrain" once you've collected that data. You add and weight the numbers up however you think fit, plonk the results on a map.
Any intelligent programmer would do that so that he/she can reuse all the fancy routing algorithms that smart people have worked out decades ago. Or in most cases reuse the existing routing code that programmer already has written;).
Just because nobody has patented it or done it before doesn't mean nobody has thought of it before, or that someone should be able to get a monopoly on it.
What next, someone else gets a different patent on routing algorithm to avoid an area with a historically high amount of clustered bullshit? Ridiculous.
Sure, but that's what prizes like the Nobel prize are for.
They don't do the same thing. Go ask Obama what Nobel prizes are for. He should know. He got one.
They've already innovated by the time they apply for a patent
In so many cases that's not true. Just go look at the Slashdot stories every now and then.
Patents drive innovation because, by encouraging disclosure, other innovators don't have to waste time re-inventing the same things over and over.
So which is it: a) Patents drive innovation because, by encouraging disclosure, other innovators don't have to waste time re-inventing the same things over and over. b) Patents stop the evil chinese and others from copying our stuff so _easily_.
Nowadays it seems for most patents, the actual technical cost (time+money) of reinvention is much lower than the cost of fighting patent lawsuits. Too often they've already independently reinvented your noninnovative stuff, maybe even before you released your product, the real impedance to progress is you managed to patent it first.
The "innovation" is applying it to public crime data, which functions quite a bit differently from traffic/construction avoidance which is much more discrete in nature.
So tell me how's it actually going to be different when it comes to the algorithm? Have you never heard of "weighting"? Have you never seen Google maps provide multiple alternative routes from A to B? Go think how they might do that.
Have you never seen stuff in games navigate across different types of terrain through different types of obstacles?
why has no device or online mapping tool provided the functionality?
1) The difficulty is getting real-time or timely enough crime statistics. If you don't have good crime statistics you might as well fall-back to the gang territory and "bad neighbourhood" maps. Or not even bother in the first place.
There is no difficulty in this "innovation". The difficulty is in implementation and execution. There is no big difficulty in making a sandwich once bread is invented (the difficulty is getting the credit for inventing it;) ). There's no difficulty in making a bullshit sandwich once sandwiches have been invented.
2) There may not actually be a big enough demand for it yet. This patent could just be to stop others from doing it if there turns out to be a demand for it.
Patents too often allow people to impede others who might be able to implement it better, or actually implement it ("real" patent trolls don't actually implement anything).
Developing routing algorithms to adjust based on public crime reports
If you understand routing algorithms you'd know that there's no big difference between avoiding X because it's blocked and avoiding Y because "it's in a bad neighbourhood" or "has a huge traffic jam" or "a crime just occurred" or whatever. Plenty of algorithms and even code written years ago.
So tell me again what innovation Microsoft came up with? Fooling patent examiners doesn't count.
I personally think patents are costing society more than the benefit they provide. Sure a few patents might be worthwhile, but when most of them are crap, what's the point? It's as stupid as throwing money at a game which provides worse odds than most casinos. A few wins don't make up for all the losses.
You want to reward and encourage _people_ for innovating? Award Prizes for Innovation instead. It's always easier to see if something was innovative and valid from hindsight than from an overworked patent examiner's POV. You could have different areas and different categories, some chosen by "randomly selected citizens", and some chosen by "experts in the field". A bit like the Hugo and Nebula awards. That way you get some balance.
A good rule of thumb is the RPMs where the petrol engine is at its maximum efficiency are the RPMs where it can produce the highest torque.
Most automatic transmissions will do a kick-down if you "pedal-to-metal". But if you aren't towing stuff, you won't need to do pedal-to-the-metal to get the car quickly to those max torque RPMs. So it probably doesn't matter that much compared to losses due to braking and wind-resistance, or even taking a wrong/inefficient route;).
But to tell this story as if suggesting that sometimes it saves lives to not wear ur seatbelt is irresponsible. Because it gives stupid people an excuse to continue stupid behaviour.
In my last line I said: "But on average it's safer to wear a seatbelt..."
So it should be clear that I'm telling my story just to give stupid people an excuse to post stupid replies.
0) Your mistake is assuming/implying when I say "I don't think" it means I'm not thinking. Read the rest of my post including the second line, AND the rest of the thread I'm replying to for context. I was claiming that there's not going to be a big difference in MPG between slow and fast acceleration, despite common assumptions about "jack-rabbit" starts.
1) I said modern, so the transmission slippage loss is about 5% not 10%. And nowadays there's these new fangled things you may not have heard of, called lock-up clutches: http://www.autoshop101.com/forms/AT02.pdf
to prevent this, and to reduce fuel consumption, the lockâ'up clutch mechanically connects the impeller and the turbine when the vehicle speed is about 37 mph
Below that speed you get the "slippage" loss whether you're accelerating slow or fast. If it's 4% (slow) vs 5% (fast) it's not going to make a big difference to your MPG, which was my point (hard acceleration vs slow).
2) For modern engines whether you accelerate fast or slow doesn't make a big difference to the efficiency of the engine, unless you're red-lining them. In fact the maximum engine efficiency for many cars is not between 1000-2000rpm, but higher - even 4000+rpm for some cars (Ford Focus). The OP's car is a turbocharged GTI, I won't be surprised if it's more efficient at higher RPMs. For such cars if you accelerate very slowly, you'd be operating the engine at the lower efficiency band for a longer time, so it's not going to be so much more efficient than accelerating hard even if accelerating hard means staying in 2nd gear for longer. Hence it's not going to make a big difference to your MPG, which was my point.
3) About 30 years ago[1] apparently BMW did some research where they found that brisk acceleration was more efficient than slow acceleration. Some hypermilers claim this still applies.
that for some reason people wait until the car in front of them moves a specific distance, and then slam down on the gas.
That's often because they are busy doing something else other than driving, then only notice that the lights are green;)... The other reason is some people just can't control the throttle well- no small differences in throttle position for them.. For a similar reason they often can't drive at a steady speed.
The silly stuff I noticed is some drivers brake very often for no apparent reason. They're far from the car ahead, they could just lift off to slow down, but they brake instead. That's a waste of energy, plus it means I have to stay much further back from them so that I don't waste fuel.
I don't think modern engines and transmissions waste that much energy on acceleration.
So if you accelerate fast (not till you spin your tyres), but don't brake unnecessarily or go way over speed limits (thus increasing wind resistance losses), you shouldn't be lowering your mpg that much.
If there are enough people willing to pay 250% of the prices, why should IT retail companies sell stuff lower? They aren't charities.
In a theoretical world they each would now have 25% fewer hard drives to sell each month, that means fewer entire computer systems sold, which means lower total profits. Meanwhile they still have to pay the same rents to the landlords, the same salaries to their workers. So guess who they'll try to get the money from? Those who need hard drives badly enough. In the real world it'll be even worse and messier than that.
BUT if not enough people are willing to buy, the prices will go down, and the retailers will just have to make less or lose money. In my area, rumour is a large retailer has thousands of unsold drives so they will be reducing the prices to try to get rid of them before production gets back on track.
Imagine there's just about enough oxygen for everyone in the world, and everyone normally paid about USD1 per day. Assume also it's a free market capitalist world.
Suddenly there's a disaster and there's only enough oxygen for 75% of the world. How do you decide who dies? The evil socialists might have some committee do it and thus kill 25% off. But the free market capitalists will let the market decide - and so the price will go up, and likely more than 25% will die (the rich being able to easily afford USD10/day and more). Is that still considered gouging? Maybe. But is it cartel pricing? No - there is no need for a cartel to raise the prices.
I'm no expert, but whether I'm hiring programmers or artists I'll ask them the same sort of questions:
1) What have you coded/created that's somewhat related to the job you're applying for that you are proud of, or at least think it's decent? 2) What made it/them good in your opinion? 3) Do you have any examples you can show us? A brief sketch would do.
Past good performance is not always indicative of future success, but those who did good stuff in the past are still more likely to continue doing good stuff than those who didn't do a single good thing in the past.
And IMO it's much better than asking programmers/artists stupid questions like "where do you see yourself in 5 years?"...
I'd be tempted to answer "in front of a mirror", or "still stuck in this gravity well".
Apparently a friend of mine was going quite fast, lost control somehow, hit a tree, flew out of his car (because he wasn't wearing his seat belt), and his car wrapped itself around another tree. He was dazed for quite a while, but survived with no major injuries.
So in this case if he was wearing a seatbelt he would be dead, inside his car that was wrapped around a tree.
You won't be disposing the top bit every 90 seconds. It takes 90 seconds to sterilize the $900 keyboard, after that you will be contaminating/using it for however long it takes to type what you want/need to type which could be many minutes or even an hour, after that it might be unused for a while. Users aren't going to wait 90 seconds between each keypress.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, anything someone with a clue can't catch with a manual scan isn't going to be detected by realtime AV either.
Boot up a trusted machine (could run Linux/OpenBSD/whatever if you want), have the suspect drive attached, copy the files, scan them with a trusted scanner(s), if you're paranoid you could double-check with something like VirusTotal (check hashes and upload the really suspicious files).
I don't see how realtime AV is going to do better. Esp if the system gets pwned and rootkitted so that the installed AV can't see the malware.
BTW if you're doing it for forensics you'd need more expensive hardware that is certified to prevent writes and so that any evidence gathered looks better in court.
I'd argue its because Microsoft has access to their own source-code
I doubt that's the real reason, because both Norton and McAfee used to be good. Then they started to be bigger resource hogs than most viruses they were protecting you against (yes there's other evil stuff that viruses do but keep reading...).
I definitely recall Norton/Symantec making systems more unstable or causing problems:
1) Years ago someone had problems fetching email, turns out Norton/Symantec was intercepting the POP3 connections to scan for viruses (ok fine), but some email was causing it to _crash_ (extremely not fine- especially if it turns out to be an exploitable code-injection bug).
2) In 2007: http://www.pcworld.com/article/132050/millions_of_chinese_hit_by_symantec_foulup.html
A virus-signature update delivered automatically to users on Friday about 1:00 a.m. Beijing time to Symantec's antivirus scanning engine mistook two critical system files of the Simplified Chinese edition of Windows XP Service Pack 2 for a Trojan horse. The two files -- netapi32.dll and lsasrv.dll -- were falsely quarantined, which in turn crippled Windows. If an affected PC was rebooted, Windows failed on start-up and showed only a blue screen.
3) On 28 January 2010, Symantec's antivirus software marked Spotify as a Trojan horse, disabling the software across millions of computers
Nowadays depending on the situation I use Avira, MSE or "no antivirus". My personal home machine has no AV installed. My browser runs as a different user process. If I have something that I think is suspicious, I check it with VirusTotal ( https://www.virustotal.com/ ). So far I have had no problems doing things this way, so I don't see the point of constantly incurring the extra CPU/resource costs by installing a real-time virus scanner on my machine. For the past few decades my personal machines have never been infected by a virus. I may have downloaded viruses or malware, but I have not been infected by them. And yes I do know how to check.
A dedicated attacker might be able to put malware on my machine, but they'd know how to use virustotal or similar too, and still be able to plant malware on my machine even if I was running AV software (and wasting resources).
The machine my parents use on the other hand has AV software installed (not Symantec, nor McAfee).
AV software is not needed everywhere and in some cases if installed, it indicates someone is doing something wrong: http://xkcd.com/463/
Given my track record vs Symantec's track record, I would prefer to take the bet that Symantec is more likely to screw up my system than a virus. There have been other antivirus vendors with similar screw ups too.
On a related note, Trend screwed up notoriously - albeit with its antispam product, blocking the letter "p".
For these reasons production servers and other important machines that are well secured and managed should NOT have antivirus software installed.
If they are so poorly managed that the operators are much more likely to screw up than the AV vendors, then sure, install AV, but that means you are doing something wrong.
19 years is very long. Is the 19 years for all 7 towers? The Burj Khalifa, Taipei 101 and Petronas Twin Towers all took about 6-7 years, and they cost less than USD2 billion.
Not expecting it to be this fast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdpf-MQM9vY
But if it's 19 years for one or two towers, it is crazy.
In our most basic sense, no one needs more than food, water, and shelter. Everything else is optional but sales people try to convince us of otherwise.
1) That's not true for most humans. Most humans need "intangibles" like hope. Otherwise they wouldn't bother surviving to the next day just to find enough food, water and shelter to survive another day and so on till they eventually die...
2) It's not even true from an evolutionary perspective. If the entire human species was satisfied with mere food, water and shelter it would go extinct. You can say the urge to reproduce is only a want. But then the urge to breathe[1] is only a want, you eventually need to breathe if not you die, whether or not you feel the urge.
3) Need and want is often not that "black and white". There are people who have a very strong "need" to never ever have to eat from garbage dump again, they might rather die first. So do we "need" that much $$$? If we're posting on slashdot it's very likely that billions in the world survive on less than we have. But if we "need" that much $$$, then clearly we need to find people who "need" something we can give them or do for them so that we can get our $$$.
[1] BTW I guess breathable air comes under shelter?
Speaking of Tolkien and the future, if Tolkien was alive today, perhaps he shouldn't be writing books, but creating a LoTR wiki - he can then create and add all the mythology he wants, all the stories, background, poems etc. I might actually pay to read that :).
I found his books very slow. But I wouldn't say they were written in low quality prose.
Don't forget it's politics. He can't do everything he wants. He might want to do "X" and he might want to stop "SOPA". BUT the other politicians may say to him, we'll kill "X" if you kill "SOPA". So it's a matter of which battles he can fight and how many he can get on his side.
The voters are a big part of problem. Think about it, a politician getting lots of campaign money does not force you to vote for that politician. You can vote for someone else, or even be a candidate.
But maybe many actually do like voting for politicians who get the most campaign money. That's democracy for you.
No it's not working. What I see is a system that rewards people/companies who patent obvious crap.
Jim gets a monopoly on cheese sandwiches, Jane gets a monopoly on tomato sandwiches, Joe licenses from both and gets a monopoly on cheese and tomato sandwiches. They cross license with each other, and nobody else gets to sell those sandwiches. For what benefit to society? All when any cook could come up with the idea and make any of those sandwiches if the situation ever demanded it.
Any intelligent programmer, with the idea, could probably do it pretty easily.
So which is it:
a) Patents drive innovation because, by encouraging disclosure, other innovators don't have to waste time re-inventing the same things over and over.
b) Patents stop others from copying our "obvious" stuff so _easily_.
Someone was claiming a) while you're claiming b). If b) was true, it won't cost much time and $$$ to re-invent the same thing.
Nowadays it seems for most patents, the actual technical cost (time+money) of reinvention is much lower than the cost of fighting patent lawsuits, or paying licensing fees. Too often they've already independently reinvented your noninnovative stuff, maybe even before you released your product.
The real impedance to progress is someone managed to patent it first and collect toll from everyone else.
Sometimes the idea is the hard part
When it comes to most modern-day patents, the idea certainly isn't the hard part.
Do you really think NONE of the people who came up with the "A" to "B" routing stuff on Google Maps ever thought of something like this? For fun they already came up with '"kayak" across the pacific ocean' years ago.
Maybe you need to hang around more with very intelligent and creative people. To them, ideas are not rare gems that only appear once or twice in their lifetimes. They have more good ideas than they can ever implement. Just because they didn't do it or patent it doesn't mean they didn't think of it. They may have 100+ other ideas to do first, or the "idea" might be just some obvious step to them that they wouldn't bother noting down.
The obvious ideas you talk about are the equivalent of the "crack eggs and separate egg contents from shells" step when making a cake.
apply historical data of clustered activities rather than current data of discrete activities to impact that weighting?
And you call that innovation worthy of a government granted monopoly? Method of making a sandwich with aged cheese instead of sliced fresh tomato. So the next patent could be on a cheese and tomato sandwich (using both historical data AND current data)? Ridiculous.
Do you still not get it? "historical data of clustered activities" is the same thing as "obstacle"/"terrain" once you've collected that data. You add and weight the numbers up however you think fit, plonk the results on a map.
Any intelligent programmer would do that so that he/she can reuse all the fancy routing algorithms that smart people have worked out decades ago. Or in most cases reuse the existing routing code that programmer already has written ;).
Just because nobody has patented it or done it before doesn't mean nobody has thought of it before, or that someone should be able to get a monopoly on it.
What next, someone else gets a different patent on routing algorithm to avoid an area with a historically high amount of clustered bullshit? Ridiculous.
Sure, but that's what prizes like the Nobel prize are for.
They don't do the same thing. Go ask Obama what Nobel prizes are for. He should know. He got one.
They've already innovated by the time they apply for a patent
In so many cases that's not true. Just go look at the Slashdot stories every now and then.
Patents drive innovation because, by encouraging disclosure, other innovators don't have to waste time re-inventing the same things over and over.
So which is it:
a) Patents drive innovation because, by encouraging disclosure, other innovators don't have to waste time re-inventing the same things over and over.
b) Patents stop the evil chinese and others from copying our stuff so _easily_.
Nowadays it seems for most patents, the actual technical cost (time+money) of reinvention is much lower than the cost of fighting patent lawsuits. Too often they've already independently reinvented your noninnovative stuff, maybe even before you released your product, the real impedance to progress is you managed to patent it first.
The "innovation" is applying it to public crime data, which functions quite a bit differently from traffic/construction avoidance which is much more discrete in nature.
So tell me how's it actually going to be different when it comes to the algorithm? Have you never heard of "weighting"? Have you never seen Google maps provide multiple alternative routes from A to B? Go think how they might do that.
Have you never seen stuff in games navigate across different types of terrain through different types of obstacles?
why has no device or online mapping tool provided the functionality?
1) The difficulty is getting real-time or timely enough crime statistics. If you don't have good crime statistics you might as well fall-back to the gang territory and "bad neighbourhood" maps. Or not even bother in the first place.
There is no difficulty in this "innovation". The difficulty is in implementation and execution. There is no big difficulty in making a sandwich once bread is invented (the difficulty is getting the credit for inventing it ;) ). There's no difficulty in making a bullshit sandwich once sandwiches have been invented.
2) There may not actually be a big enough demand for it yet. This patent could just be to stop others from doing it if there turns out to be a demand for it.
Patents too often allow people to impede others who might be able to implement it better, or actually implement it ("real" patent trolls don't actually implement anything).
Developing routing algorithms to adjust based on public crime reports
If you understand routing algorithms you'd know that there's no big difference between avoiding X because it's blocked and avoiding Y because "it's in a bad neighbourhood" or "has a huge traffic jam" or "a crime just occurred" or whatever. Plenty of algorithms and even code written years ago.
So tell me again what innovation Microsoft came up with? Fooling patent examiners doesn't count.
Oops the first link should be: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=109207396431294085739.00000112583e7047c0070
Copy and paste fail...
Google maps already has a feature that allows you to avoid tolls or "by foot" versions.
Add info from stuff like this:
http://www.nwgangs.com/gang-territory-maps.html
http://maps.google.com/maps/user?uid=200807321660978094818&hl=en&gl=us&ptab=2
And so where's the innovation?
I personally think patents are costing society more than the benefit they provide. Sure a few patents might be worthwhile, but when most of them are crap, what's the point? It's as stupid as throwing money at a game which provides worse odds than most casinos. A few wins don't make up for all the losses.
You want to reward and encourage _people_ for innovating? Award Prizes for Innovation instead. It's always easier to see if something was innovative and valid from hindsight than from an overworked patent examiner's POV. You could have different areas and different categories, some chosen by "randomly selected citizens", and some chosen by "experts in the field". A bit like the Hugo and Nebula awards. That way you get some balance.
A good rule of thumb is the RPMs where the petrol engine is at its maximum efficiency are the RPMs where it can produce the highest torque.
;).
Most automatic transmissions will do a kick-down if you "pedal-to-metal". But if you aren't towing stuff, you won't need to do pedal-to-the-metal to get the car quickly to those max torque RPMs. So it probably doesn't matter that much compared to losses due to braking and wind-resistance, or even taking a wrong/inefficient route
But to tell this story as if suggesting that sometimes it saves lives to not wear ur seatbelt is irresponsible. Because it gives stupid people an excuse to continue stupid behaviour.
In my last line I said: "But on average it's safer to wear a seatbelt..."
So it should be clear that I'm telling my story just to give stupid people an excuse to post stupid replies.
That was your first mistake
0) Your mistake is assuming/implying when I say "I don't think" it means I'm not thinking. Read the rest of my post including the second line, AND the rest of the thread I'm replying to for context. I was claiming that there's not going to be a big difference in MPG between slow and fast acceleration, despite common assumptions about "jack-rabbit" starts.
1) I said modern, so the transmission slippage loss is about 5% not 10%. And nowadays there's these new fangled things you may not have heard of, called lock-up clutches: http://www.autoshop101.com/forms/AT02.pdf
to prevent this, and to reduce fuel consumption, the lockâ'up clutch mechanically connects the impeller and the turbine when the vehicle speed is about 37 mph
Below that speed you get the "slippage" loss whether you're accelerating slow or fast. If it's 4% (slow) vs 5% (fast) it's not going to make a big difference to your MPG, which was my point (hard acceleration vs slow).
2) For modern engines whether you accelerate fast or slow doesn't make a big difference to the efficiency of the engine, unless you're red-lining them. In fact the maximum engine efficiency for many cars is not between 1000-2000rpm, but higher - even 4000+rpm for some cars (Ford Focus). The OP's car is a turbocharged GTI, I won't be surprised if it's more efficient at higher RPMs. For such cars if you accelerate very slowly, you'd be operating the engine at the lower efficiency band for a longer time, so it's not going to be so much more efficient than accelerating hard even if accelerating hard means staying in 2nd gear for longer. Hence it's not going to make a big difference to your MPG, which was my point.
3) About 30 years ago[1] apparently BMW did some research where they found that brisk acceleration was more efficient than slow acceleration. Some hypermilers claim this still applies.
[1] http://goo.gl/7kwJd
that for some reason people wait until the car in front of them moves a specific distance, and then slam down on the gas.
That's often because they are busy doing something else other than driving, then only notice that the lights are green ;)... The other reason is some people just can't control the throttle well- no small differences in throttle position for them.. For a similar reason they often can't drive at a steady speed.
The silly stuff I noticed is some drivers brake very often for no apparent reason. They're far from the car ahead, they could just lift off to slow down, but they brake instead. That's a waste of energy, plus it means I have to stay much further back from them so that I don't waste fuel.
Doesn't that depend a lot on your airconditioner, your airconditioner settings, how hot the day is and how fast you are travelling?
I don't think modern engines and transmissions waste that much energy on acceleration.
So if you accelerate fast (not till you spin your tyres), but don't brake unnecessarily or go way over speed limits (thus increasing wind resistance losses), you shouldn't be lowering your mpg that much.
First learn something about economics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand
If there are enough people willing to pay 250% of the prices, why should IT retail companies sell stuff lower? They aren't charities.
In a theoretical world they each would now have 25% fewer hard drives to sell each month, that means fewer entire computer systems sold, which means lower total profits. Meanwhile they still have to pay the same rents to the landlords, the same salaries to their workers. So guess who they'll try to get the money from? Those who need hard drives badly enough. In the real world it'll be even worse and messier than that.
BUT if not enough people are willing to buy, the prices will go down, and the retailers will just have to make less or lose money. In my area, rumour is a large retailer has thousands of unsold drives so they will be reducing the prices to try to get rid of them before production gets back on track.
Imagine there's just about enough oxygen for everyone in the world, and everyone normally paid about USD1 per day. Assume also it's a free market capitalist world.
Suddenly there's a disaster and there's only enough oxygen for 75% of the world. How do you decide who dies? The evil socialists might have some committee do it and thus kill 25% off. But the free market capitalists will let the market decide - and so the price will go up, and likely more than 25% will die (the rich being able to easily afford USD10/day and more). Is that still considered gouging? Maybe. But is it cartel pricing? No - there is no need for a cartel to raise the prices.
I'm no expert, but whether I'm hiring programmers or artists I'll ask them the same sort of questions:
1) What have you coded/created that's somewhat related to the job you're applying for that you are proud of, or at least think it's decent?
2) What made it/them good in your opinion?
3) Do you have any examples you can show us? A brief sketch would do.
Past good performance is not always indicative of future success, but those who did good stuff in the past are still more likely to continue doing good stuff than those who didn't do a single good thing in the past.
And IMO it's much better than asking programmers/artists stupid questions like "where do you see yourself in 5 years?"...
I'd be tempted to answer "in front of a mirror", or "still stuck in this gravity well".
Apparently a friend of mine was going quite fast, lost control somehow, hit a tree, flew out of his car (because he wasn't wearing his seat belt), and his car wrapped itself around another tree. He was dazed for quite a while, but survived with no major injuries.
So in this case if he was wearing a seatbelt he would be dead, inside his car that was wrapped around a tree.
But on average it's safer to wear a seatbelt...
If they made more money out of that than they lost, it's not a bug but a feature.
The slightly smarter ones use forklifts and trucks. That way they can take their time to break into the ATM.
You won't be disposing the top bit every 90 seconds. It takes 90 seconds to sterilize the $900 keyboard, after that you will be contaminating/using it for however long it takes to type what you want/need to type which could be many minutes or even an hour, after that it might be unused for a while. Users aren't going to wait 90 seconds between each keypress.