Yes; hopefully Samsung is going to end up taking a "take no prisoners; leave no field unsalted" approach to this because otherwise Apple is going to get away with a bunch just by using stupid legal blocking tactics with no need to actually justify or win anything.
We're also going to see if Samsung's lawyers are any good. If they're bad, then Apple has an implicit (or worse, explicit) license from Samsung from their manufacturing contracts. If they're good Apple has terminated all it's licenses by suing Samsung and is in for a world of hurt.
I think that popcorn isn't enough for this. I'll be pulling out the beer and putting Champagne in the fridge for later (much, much later I suspect).
Unfortunately it's critical to tablet acceptance in big companies. You always have a big bunch of legacy applications in any such place, designed years ago; which nobody wants to touch; which still act as the gateway to a load of important data. In the minds of CIOs, and thus tablet and smart device manufacturers looking forward to the remaining big market for tablets, this would have been an important feature.
Personally, I think these needs will, in fact, mostly be handled by remote desktop functions anyway; however you never know.
So how do they get power on a week where the sun is mostly blocked by clouds, the wind doesn't blow much and there are only tiny waves? They will buy it from France because solar, tidal and wind are not dependable. Unless you want blackouts, there must in total be enough capacity in dependable energy like oil, gas, coal and nuclear to power everything.
All solar, tidal and wind can buy you is the ability to run your main power infrastructure at less than full capacity on sunny and windy days.
Ahh yes; because the tides stop whenever the wind goes away.
Oil and gas will get more expensive at some point, so really it's down to a single choice: coal or nuclear. Which do you want? Nuclear is the obvious choice to me, and once you've got nuclear up and running, you might as well run it all the time since fuel isn't that expensive, so there's no point in alternative energy.
Your whole post shows a major misunderstanding of the electricity supply system. A nuclear power plant is a more or less stable supply, though, due to the need for extreme safety mechanisms, it may well just suddenly drop of the grid at any time, but when running it has a more or less constant out put no matter what. This makes it a "base load" system. Once you have it heated you basically need to keep generating or you will have problems. In the grid, hower, there is not a constant single level of demand. Demand varies from day to day, from hour to hour and often (e.g. during an important commercial break) from minute to minute. You need a wide ranging mix of power sources. Understand this and you will see that alternative energy sources have some very nice characteristics. Wind power can be stopped in small numbers of seconds simply by adjusting the angle of the blades on the generators; it can be started again almost as quickly. Hydro is extremely quick and reliable to switch on and off which makes it useful to the extent that sometimes there are even systems which take the excess power which the Nuclear plant can't stop generating and use it to pump water back up the hill for later (look up "pump storage" - one of the technologies that I think we should be seriously investing in - as you do so, note that it was invented to make up for the problem of power plants being unable to vary their output).
Really nice about alternative energy is that mostly sunny days tend to be opposite to windy days. In many hot areas, solar power almost exactly matches the need for air-conditioning; Geothermal will work slightly better at night (better cooling). Wave power tends to be noticably delayed compared to strong winds. Having said all that; it's clear that, for economic reasons (it's always cheaper only to handle the 99% case than 100%) you will have some times when energy output from all alternative energy sources falls below what's desirable. What do you want in this case? Well, these drops will be periods several hours long and will be predictable hours/days in advance. This fits the characteristics of Coal (for long periods of cloudy, windless, low rainfall weather with peaks happening at high or low tide) or gas (for shorter, less predictable periods).
The real question is, how much space is there for Nuclear in this picture? To me it seems that the likely answer is "a little". However, the more that I see that every debate about Nuclear gets filled with a bunch of shills supporting the Nuclear industry at the same time as completely failing to get their facts even vaguely right, I think "with these idiots running it; none at all".
Unfortunate, though. Slashdot is usually a great place to find opinions from those with first hand experience. However, when it comes to nuclear power, it might as well be a site for the nuclear lobby. Those with first hand experience are either too intimidated to post or accused of being liars when they do.
There has been two truly serious (someone gets hurt) accidents in the 60-year history of nuclear power: Chernobyl and Fukushima. Chernobyl killed 31 people;
FFS. The official, civilian only because soliders aren't people and don't die anyway, minimised to the hilt, death toll is 4000. Hell, 47 people died of acute radiation poisoning alone. Epidemiological studies have put death tolls up towards 1 million and there are studies that have suggested even more.
That shit like this gets modded up to +4 informative shows either that the Nuclear industry accidentally put in two extra zeros in it's "shills on slashdot" budget or that there are a bunch of people who have a kind of anti-global warming; intelligent design; no facts can influence my thinking; total idiocy and just mod up anything which supports nuclear power.
How can you expect us to take anything you say seriously if you are able to give numbers which are wrong by at least two (if we are being extremely generous) and up to more than four orders of magnitude???
" they do not say "desktop applications" and the reason is that people were assuming that they would make the desktop applications source code portable."
You can run Metro application both on the tablet and on the desktop, so what's your point?
The obvious point should be pretty obvious. You can't run desktop applications on the tablets. Microsoft's main advantage is that it has lots of applications and that upgrading to a new version of the software brings those forward. This means it doesn't.
The less obvious point is that Microsoft are a bunch of lying bastards who love nothing more than to stab their partners in the gut (from behind). There are a whole load of mobile device CEOs (Nokia's, HTC's etc) who have committed to Windows. They didn't do this because they think Windows is doing well. They did this on the basis of a roadmap. The roadmap said "desktop applications will work on Windows tablet making it the only choice for companies with a legacy installed base*". Now it's turning out they were lied to. Which would be a good lesson if it weren't for the fact that they will get a great bunch of benefits from MS as a Golden hello when their home companies finally realise what they've done and kick them out.
* subject to change; this is the proprietary secret of Microsoft and by looking at the occult images on this presentation you hearby agree to handing over your soul if you breach the terms of this agreement.
Not even plants can harness 100% of the sunlight hitting the earth -- and they've had millions of years to work on the problem. We're not going to do any better.
2/3 the planet is covered with water. We just can't ever plan on putting solar over that. Besides, even if we could, the ecological impact would be immeasurable. Other things need that sunlight.
He said 11,000 times. Now, if we assume plant level efficiency; 11% (that's of total light); and we take your 2/3 we get that there is 806 times as much energy than we need. We would need less than a fifth of a percent of the available land area.
We should note that the grandparent's number seems to be too low by a factor of 50 based on the statement "In 2002, this was more energy in one hour than the world used in one year" which I found in the literature via Wikipedia, but would include also energy that is absorbed before it reaches the surface. He's too low by a factor 25 even if we only take surface incident energy,
In time, solar could probably provide a good source of energy. In time. That time is not today. All we're doing now is rushing out tech that is immature -- we are wasting energy on steam-powered cars for the good of horses, and retarding the emergence of more efficient tech, and blowing a ton of energy and money on crap that we'll just have to blow a ton of energy and money replacing sooner rather than later anyway.
Full scale concentrated solar plants have now been built that are cost effective and efficient. Concentrated solar power with molten salt storage is already at a level of efficiency and usefulness that the Germans should be plastering the countries south of them; especially the large areas of desert in Northern Africa, with such plants. This is the obvious point to start buying up land in Greece in order to a) stabilize their government and b) get plenty of land for solar plants. This would be the ideal moment for such investment to make a real difference to the Environment of Europe, the economics of Northern Africa and Southern Europe. Have a look at the long term effect on the Dutch economy of their infrastructure investments of the 20th century.
Meanwhile, everyone's upset over nuclear power because they don't like the designs that are 50 years old. If you're going by 5-decade-old tech, cars are a bad idea too. Fortunately, there's more modern designs. Unfortunately, NIMBYs don't really care about that, 'cause like, they know it's baaad, man. Nuclear has to be bad, because there's been, like, 2 or 3 serious nuclear accidents, man!
Guess what; in 50 years time the current designs will also be 50 year old designs. The problem is not the engineering; the problem is that the engineers are under pressure to lie and have been shown to do so. Now I don't want to call for a total worldwide stop. Certainly a few large scale modern reactors should be operated on an experimental basis, but we need them to be run by people who have been shown to be seriously trustworthy and without serious budget pressures.
DID YOU KNOW.. that with modern reactor designs, Fukushima wouldn't have really had any problems at all? Now you do. That's a fact. Modern designs output less quantity of waste, which is less radioactive, for a order of magnitude less time. Modern designs can continue circulating coolant through the reactor after a loss of power through *the natural convection* of the coolant, or they may have a control rod design which uses the magic of gravity to drop them in place if there is a loss of power. And hey, if it's the former, that naturally convecting coolant can circulate for 2 weeks without power -- and when it starts getting too hot, the increased temperature of the coolant changes it so that it begins to act as a neutron trap. That means it retards fission naturally and without any human intervention!
Uh yes. The potential for currently economically accessible Wind power alone is five times the total energy currently used by mankind. At large scale, with intercontinental long distance DC power transmission variability problems reduce; at the same time simple storage solutions such as splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen will become possible. Solar power comes out similarly with solutions like molten salt providing a nice stable base-load type of power. If we invested something close to the amount we invest in Nuclear, many energy problems could probably go away.
I think you are basing your ideas on Microsoft's vapourware. There's just been a new announcement and the Windows tablets will in fact be crippled and unable to run desktop apps. I know Microsoft specifically denied this when Intel stated the same, but that's Microsoft for you. Notice, by the way, the way they continue to trick people; “We’ve been very clear since the very first CES demos and forward that the ARM product won’t run any x86 applications,” they do not say "desktop applications" and the reason is that people were assuming that they would make the desktop applications source code portable. They haven't. I guess there are a number of CEOs that have committed to a Windows tablet future and are now starting to wonder what they hell they have done.
That's 100% true. If we continue the PC market analogy, Windows 7/8 looks exactly like IBM's OS/2 and I don't see how Nokia coming in with new proprietary phones can save Windows any more than IBM's MCA saved OS/2. I'm sure that in 15 years there will be loads of MS fans whining about how much better Windows 8 was than than iOS 5 and Android 4, but it was just discriminated against by Apple / Android / whichever wins in the competitive market. As with Windows Mobile, there will be a bunch of anoraks running around telling us how it's the only system which gives you full flexibility and completely ignoring
1) they may be cheating and many have reason think so.
There have been accusations that they find out about orders in advance. In this case when you sell your shares, they sell theirs first (pushing down the price) and then buy yours later (immediately taking your profit). There are even admitted cases (see this document from an HFT company) where this could happen without the HFT company even doing it deliberately, just because they have the advantage of ultra fast trading and your trade happens in an unlucky way which basically gives away information about the trade before it has been completely executed.
2) many think so
Your shares are worth what people think they are worth. If people believe the HFT companies are cheating then this causes the other people not to joint the market. The key currency of the stock market is trust and right now people don't trust it. This means your shares are worth less than they would be otherwise. Importantly, this means that companies can get less investment by putting out shares, so it means there is less money to be made from the stock market generally.
In other words; perception is reality; HFT damages perception, so HFT damages reality.
So wait; we have a choice between a set of power sources which provide indefinite quantities of energy; where the installation, once done, is pretty much forever and just needs small scale maintenance; where the major influence on the environment is extremely localised and quite easy to understand and reduce and another power source which provides energy now but where later we have to look after nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years. Where the major cost is decommissioning and clean up which happens at the end and where almost all cost estimates basically assume the tax payer covers that for free.
That sounds great, what energy source is that? Because people living on the east coast of the US would sure like to get all those nasty polluting coal plants in the west shut down. The ones that put so much sulpher in the air that the acid rain makes the limestone bubble? Similar to the ones in Japan where you can develop photographs in some of the lakes?
Please let us know what power source you are talking about, because "Clean Coal" is an advertising slogan, not a reality. The technology to capture the SO2 and CO2 would raise the cost higher than buying politicians.
The energy source I am talking about are renewables. Wind, wave, tidal, hydro and solar power and probably biomass. I'm not even thinking of suggesting further investment in coal. We should probably accept a reduction in living standards rather than doing that.
N.B. I'm not saying that these are all viable yet. Wind and hydro clearly; wave and solar just becoming so. Tidal probably only in special cases. However I am saying that now is the time for people thinking even a little bit "long term" to be putting really heavy investment into developing these power sources.
Some CAs will offer to generate a key pair for you, so you don't have to create a CSR - they send you a private key and a certificate. It is not how x509 is supposed to work, but....
Interesting; but without a specific list of what you mean by "some CAs" not very useful. Does anyone have a list?
I'm sure that they had inertial navigation as you described. Probably that would be enough for most situations and they simply made a decision to return in order to be sure not to get into needless trouble. However, this was a spy plane; it should have pretty much top end GPS equipment and it is high up. In that situation, it should be easy to use a directionally selective GPS antenna which ignores Satellites in the direction of the jamming signal (e.g. below the horizon). It's a pretty major problem if they are unable to do that and definitely suggests that ground teams that might rely on GPS and won't be able to carry a good enough intertial navigation system will be very vulnerable.
Incidentally, I've noticed that a friend's car seems to have intertial navigation built into it's GPS nowadays (the system continues functioning in his underground garage. That is really cool.
I think you are absolutely right. In a Civil case negative inferences can be drawn from the fact that you refuse to decrypt the partition. Still, it's probably a good idea in any case. a) You may have a chance to negotiate the access to data on your computer so that it protects your privacy other than for the case in court; if the data is unencrypted that will probably happen too late. b) If your computer is swept up during searching for your friend's data but you aren't included in the case then you may not have to answer about what is there.
The encryption is unlikely to help you if you are included as a defendant in a copyright case (though if you have done something else that might be "misunderstood" then you might still decide that losing such a case is better than showing what's on your hard disk) but there are many other situations where it may help.
There is a difference between the lifespan of an individual wind generator and the lifespan of a wind farm; the same applies to PV electrical generation. Actually this is a general fact. Nuclear power generators also have turbine blades which have a lower lifespan than the plant; these also get inspected and replaced. The difference is that, when a solar panel decreases in efficiency below the level that it's economic to keep, you simply pull it out and put in a new one. In the case of wind this is mostly done when the wind tower fails and it will be replaced with a newer, bigger and more efficient one. Nuclear power plants are large integrated units which wear out as a whole (both through conventional wear and tear and gradual radiation damage, particularly from neutrons) and simply become unsafe to repair after a time. This leads to a more or less fixed lifespan of a few decades.
Remember that, in the case of wind especially, but generally in the case of power generation, the grid connection, planning and reorganisation around building the plant are a large part of the cost. Being able to keep a single location going with continual long term upgrades is a great advantage.
First, you say that patent filing and innovation are unrelated. I think most people would disagree. Perhaps you and I differ on the definition of innovation. You say, “you don’t need to patent.” Protection of intellectual property has been recognized nearly globally for hundreds of years. It costs a great deal more to develop then replicate. Compare, for example, the cost to create a new video game to the cost to duplicate same. If there is no compensation for creators, then innovation would slow to a tiny trickle. Some people are OK with that, but that is not the current system.
I think you are confusing copyright with patents (that's an unfortunate side effect of using the term "intellectual property"; the two are not the same). The game would be protected under copyright without any need for patents. The effort of duplicating a game without infringing copyright would be almost as much as doing the game in the first place. Typically patent licensing would have very little influence on this.
The “micro-entity” applies to the first four patents per inventor. Most inventors are prolific, so that isn’t worth much either way. It’s a nice token, however. I doubt there are any effective “single patent” patent trolls. It’s just not economical.
Thanks; I had forgotten the details of this distinction. The patent trolls are often, I think, just single or very small number of patent companies. They typically haven't designed it themselves, but rather just been spun out of a parent company for the specific aim of running lawsuits with that particular patent or formed by a group of patent lawyers with the specific aim of buying and enforcing a particular patent or patent family. These current ones aren't related to your imagined situation, but I can imagine that in future companies would like to immediately spin off a new company for each patent application they make. Possibly this would be done by spinning off research groups into small companies and then selling them on from one entity to the next as the four patent limit was reached. Hopefully there's something in the bill that will block that.
You are 100% right. I even looked this up and there was a 62% increase in patenting. However interestingly patents from "small entities" seems to have been stable. I'm not sure what is the difference between that and "individual inventors". Anyway, overall my point about this not being a tax increase seems to be wrong.
So wait; we have a choice between a set of power sources which provide indefinite quantities of energy; where the installation, once done, is pretty much forever and just needs small scale maintenance; where the major influence on the environment is extremely localised and quite easy to understand and reduce and another power source which provides energy now but where later we have to look after nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years. Where the major cost is decommissioning and clean up which happens at the end and where almost all cost estimates basically assume the tax payer covers that for free.
Let's be absolutely clear where we are in clean energy at the present moment. The cost of wind power ($97 / levelised MWh)* , which has been a practical power source only in the last decade or two, is already lower than the cost of nuclear energy ($113.9 / levelised MWh)*. Whilst nuclear is a mature generation technology which has been optimised since the 1960s, wind development is barely started. Further, since wind is simply available for free in many locations there is no clear absolute natural reason why there should be any particular cost level. The questions are simply technological development.
What's important to realise is that China has now realised this and is doing the sensible thing; investing strongly at this point in the development of green energy sources. At the same time, by increasing rare earth costs, they are attempting to reduce other people's lead in green energy by putting those companies out of business. This becomes essentially an economic war to see who can be the first to get green energy costs so far below conventional energy prices that the other sources become useless. My guess would be that this will come about in about the next five years.
We've also all heard that the argument that wind energy is intermittent; that it doesn't produce sufficient power when needed. That is, in part true, but what's not understood is that it's an opportunity. The price given above (levelised MWh) already includes this; more wind turbines are installed than required and this is done in many different locations then at the moment of need enough power is available with the same or better availability characteristics as a conventional plant (N.B. the whole point of a large scale power grid is the fact that power sources can and do go offline unexpectedly). However, once we have done this install, what are we left with? Extremely cheap power supply in local areas at certain times. Very simple and somewhat inefficient power storage schemes, such as converting electricity to hydrogen, storing it suddenly become entirely sensible. If you do this next to the wind generators then at times of high wind you can make hydrogen; at times of low wind and high power demand you can burn the hydrogen for profit. This is the kind of scheme Slashdot readers should be thinking about.
By getting into the green energy game strongly, Germany becomes the logical place to develop these technologies. Long term, say over the next 100 years, this is really clever. The accusation that the Germans aren't thinking long term is clearly wrong.
* these numbers come from a DOE study which you can find broken down on Wikipedia's Cost of electricity by source page. Note that these figures are somewhat biased against wind since they include very high transmission costs. This is only true because new wind tends to be differently located from existing nuclear and conventional plants. Conventional plants claim cheap costs simply by pretending to be reusing the existing connections. In fact, if capacity is to be expanded then new connections have to be built somewhere. You will notice that sometimes nuclear is presented as cheaper than wind by
one needs only to look at the sales numbers of iPads vs absolutely-fucking-anything to realize that they're having no trouble moving them.
Nobody's denying that. What the grandparent post is saying is that if the Samsung would have been on sale then Apple would have sold less. And if Apple hadn't been running around the whole phone and touchpad market threatening people then a whole bunch of other devices better than the Samsung would have been on the market earlier. Apple is directly hurting the consumer by stopping the production of any device which is better than their own.
So now someone can invent something, but the first to file it gets all rights? how is that better??
example case:
- it costs $15.000 to file a patent
small guy invents something (e.g algorithm)
small guy doesnt has $15.000 to file the patent, and his not sure yet if his invention is worth it
small guy tries to make some money with the invention (u know like, creating google, facebook)
before the small guy has enough money to file patent, a patent troll sees the potential and files the patent
patent troll sues small guy
If the guy could learn the algorithm from the small guy then that means the small guy published it. That will count as prior art. The guy who is willing to cheat and claim that he didn't learn that from prior art would be able to cheat worse in the current system.
small guy invents something (e.g algorithm)
small guy doesnt has $15.000 to file the patent, and his not sure yet if his invention is worth it
small guy tries to make some money with the invention (u know like, creating google, facebook)
before the small guy has enough money to file patent, a patent troll sees the potential and files the patent claiming an invention date almost one year before the filing date
patent troll sues small guy and is almost certain to win
Now there are many things that are wrong with this bill, but it seems to me that your post can't be right and is self contradictory in a sense anyway.
Firstly: this is not a tax on innovation, it is a tax on patent filing. The two things are unrelated. If you innovate, then just publish your innovation on your web site or release it in a product and you don't need to patent.
Secondly, I believe this actually reduces fees for very small inventors, allowing 75% reductions for "micro entities". That means that it pushes more of the costs towards big corporations. Actually, to me it sounds quite specifically directed to increase the number of single patent patent troll companies.
Thirdly, you claim this will increase taxes because fees will increase by and then claim that applications will drop by 50%. That seems to me to be a 42.5% reduction in taxation (1 - (1.15 * 0.5 )).
Finally, it seems to me that the main set of patents which will not come out are patents on already published inventions. In particular, there's no way for a person to hear another persons idea, make a fake logbook and claim to have invented it before the other person published. A reduction in the number of patents in that way can hardly be seen as damaging to innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes; hopefully Samsung is going to end up taking a "take no prisoners; leave no field unsalted" approach to this because otherwise Apple is going to get away with a bunch just by using stupid legal blocking tactics with no need to actually justify or win anything.
We're also going to see if Samsung's lawyers are any good. If they're bad, then Apple has an implicit (or worse, explicit) license from Samsung from their manufacturing contracts. If they're good Apple has terminated all it's licenses by suing Samsung and is in for a world of hurt.
I think that popcorn isn't enough for this. I'll be pulling out the beer and putting Champagne in the fridge for later (much, much later I suspect).
Unfortunately it's critical to tablet acceptance in big companies. You always have a big bunch of legacy applications in any such place, designed years ago; which nobody wants to touch; which still act as the gateway to a load of important data. In the minds of CIOs, and thus tablet and smart device manufacturers looking forward to the remaining big market for tablets, this would have been an important feature.
Personally, I think these needs will, in fact, mostly be handled by remote desktop functions anyway; however you never know.
So how do they get power on a week where the sun is mostly blocked by clouds, the wind doesn't blow much and there are only tiny waves? They will buy it from France because solar, tidal and wind are not dependable. Unless you want blackouts, there must in total be enough capacity in dependable energy like oil, gas, coal and nuclear to power everything.
All solar, tidal and wind can buy you is the ability to run your main power infrastructure at less than full capacity on sunny and windy days.
Ahh yes; because the tides stop whenever the wind goes away.
Oil and gas will get more expensive at some point, so really it's down to a single choice: coal or nuclear. Which do you want? Nuclear is the obvious choice to me, and once you've got nuclear up and running, you might as well run it all the time since fuel isn't that expensive, so there's no point in alternative energy.
Your whole post shows a major misunderstanding of the electricity supply system. A nuclear power plant is a more or less stable supply, though, due to the need for extreme safety mechanisms, it may well just suddenly drop of the grid at any time, but when running it has a more or less constant out put no matter what. This makes it a "base load" system. Once you have it heated you basically need to keep generating or you will have problems. In the grid, hower, there is not a constant single level of demand. Demand varies from day to day, from hour to hour and often (e.g. during an important commercial break) from minute to minute. You need a wide ranging mix of power sources. Understand this and you will see that alternative energy sources have some very nice characteristics. Wind power can be stopped in small numbers of seconds simply by adjusting the angle of the blades on the generators; it can be started again almost as quickly. Hydro is extremely quick and reliable to switch on and off which makes it useful to the extent that sometimes there are even systems which take the excess power which the Nuclear plant can't stop generating and use it to pump water back up the hill for later (look up "pump storage" - one of the technologies that I think we should be seriously investing in - as you do so, note that it was invented to make up for the problem of power plants being unable to vary their output).
Really nice about alternative energy is that mostly sunny days tend to be opposite to windy days. In many hot areas, solar power almost exactly matches the need for air-conditioning; Geothermal will work slightly better at night (better cooling). Wave power tends to be noticably delayed compared to strong winds. Having said all that; it's clear that, for economic reasons (it's always cheaper only to handle the 99% case than 100%) you will have some times when energy output from all alternative energy sources falls below what's desirable. What do you want in this case? Well, these drops will be periods several hours long and will be predictable hours/days in advance. This fits the characteristics of Coal (for long periods of cloudy, windless, low rainfall weather with peaks happening at high or low tide) or gas (for shorter, less predictable periods).
The real question is, how much space is there for Nuclear in this picture? To me it seems that the likely answer is "a little". However, the more that I see that every debate about Nuclear gets filled with a bunch of shills supporting the Nuclear industry at the same time as completely failing to get their facts even vaguely right, I think "with these idiots running it; none at all".
Arrggghh. Dammit; a leak of interesting facts polluting my Slashdot discussion.
Thanks anyway.. I'm sure the brain mutations this causes will be for the best of the species anyway.
There has been two truly serious (someone gets hurt) accidents in the 60-year history of nuclear power: Chernobyl and Fukushima. Chernobyl killed 31 people;
FFS. The official, civilian only because soliders aren't people and don't die anyway, minimised to the hilt, death toll is 4000. Hell, 47 people died of acute radiation poisoning alone. Epidemiological studies have put death tolls up towards 1 million and there are studies that have suggested even more.
That shit like this gets modded up to +4 informative shows either that the Nuclear industry accidentally put in two extra zeros in it's "shills on slashdot" budget or that there are a bunch of people who have a kind of anti-global warming; intelligent design; no facts can influence my thinking; total idiocy and just mod up anything which supports nuclear power.
How can you expect us to take anything you say seriously if you are able to give numbers which are wrong by at least two (if we are being extremely generous) and up to more than four orders of magnitude???
" they do not say "desktop applications" and the reason is that people were assuming that they would make the desktop applications source code portable."
You can run Metro application both on the tablet and on the desktop, so what's your point?
The obvious point should be pretty obvious. You can't run desktop applications on the tablets. Microsoft's main advantage is that it has lots of applications and that upgrading to a new version of the software brings those forward. This means it doesn't.
The less obvious point is that Microsoft are a bunch of lying bastards who love nothing more than to stab their partners in the gut (from behind). There are a whole load of mobile device CEOs (Nokia's, HTC's etc) who have committed to Windows. They didn't do this because they think Windows is doing well. They did this on the basis of a roadmap. The roadmap said "desktop applications will work on Windows tablet making it the only choice for companies with a legacy installed base*". Now it's turning out they were lied to. Which would be a good lesson if it weren't for the fact that they will get a great bunch of benefits from MS as a Golden hello when their home companies finally realise what they've done and kick them out.
* subject to change; this is the proprietary secret of Microsoft and by looking at the occult images on this presentation you hearby agree to handing over your soul if you breach the terms of this agreement.
Not even plants can harness 100% of the sunlight hitting the earth -- and they've had millions of years to work on the problem. We're not going to do any better.
2/3 the planet is covered with water. We just can't ever plan on putting solar over that. Besides, even if we could, the ecological impact would be immeasurable. Other things need that sunlight.
He said 11,000 times. Now, if we assume plant level efficiency; 11% (that's of total light); and we take your 2/3 we get that there is 806 times as much energy than we need. We would need less than a fifth of a percent of the available land area.
We should note that the grandparent's number seems to be too low by a factor of 50 based on the statement "In 2002, this was more energy in one hour than the world used in one year" which I found in the literature via Wikipedia, but would include also energy that is absorbed before it reaches the surface. He's too low by a factor 25 even if we only take surface incident energy,
In time, solar could probably provide a good source of energy. In time. That time is not today. All we're doing now is rushing out tech that is immature -- we are wasting energy on steam-powered cars for the good of horses, and retarding the emergence of more efficient tech, and blowing a ton of energy and money on crap that we'll just have to blow a ton of energy and money replacing sooner rather than later anyway.
Full scale concentrated solar plants have now been built that are cost effective and efficient. Concentrated solar power with molten salt storage is already at a level of efficiency and usefulness that the Germans should be plastering the countries south of them; especially the large areas of desert in Northern Africa, with such plants. This is the obvious point to start buying up land in Greece in order to a) stabilize their government and b) get plenty of land for solar plants. This would be the ideal moment for such investment to make a real difference to the Environment of Europe, the economics of Northern Africa and Southern Europe. Have a look at the long term effect on the Dutch economy of their infrastructure investments of the 20th century.
Meanwhile, everyone's upset over nuclear power because they don't like the designs that are 50 years old. If you're going by 5-decade-old tech, cars are a bad idea too. Fortunately, there's more modern designs. Unfortunately, NIMBYs don't really care about that, 'cause like, they know it's baaad, man. Nuclear has to be bad, because there's been, like, 2 or 3 serious nuclear accidents, man!
Guess what; in 50 years time the current designs will also be 50 year old designs. The problem is not the engineering; the problem is that the engineers are under pressure to lie and have been shown to do so. Now I don't want to call for a total worldwide stop. Certainly a few large scale modern reactors should be operated on an experimental basis, but we need them to be run by people who have been shown to be seriously trustworthy and without serious budget pressures.
DID YOU KNOW.. that with modern reactor designs, Fukushima wouldn't have really had any problems at all? Now you do. That's a fact. Modern designs output less quantity of waste, which is less radioactive, for a order of magnitude less time. Modern designs can continue circulating coolant through the reactor after a loss of power through *the natural convection* of the coolant, or they may have a control rod design which uses the magic of gravity to drop them in place if there is a loss of power. And hey, if it's the former, that naturally convecting coolant can circulate for 2 weeks without power -- and when it starts getting too hot, the increased temperature of the coolant changes it so that it begins to act as a neutron trap. That means it retards fission naturally and without any human intervention!
How do you know when a Nuclear apologist is l
Uh yes. The potential for currently economically accessible Wind power alone is five times the total energy currently used by mankind. At large scale, with intercontinental long distance DC power transmission variability problems reduce; at the same time simple storage solutions such as splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen will become possible. Solar power comes out similarly with solutions like molten salt providing a nice stable base-load type of power. If we invested something close to the amount we invest in Nuclear, many energy problems could probably go away.
I think you are basing your ideas on Microsoft's vapourware. There's just been a new announcement and the Windows tablets will in fact be crippled and unable to run desktop apps. I know Microsoft specifically denied this when Intel stated the same, but that's Microsoft for you. Notice, by the way, the way they continue to trick people; “We’ve been very clear since the very first CES demos and forward that the ARM product won’t run any x86 applications,” they do not say "desktop applications" and the reason is that people were assuming that they would make the desktop applications source code portable. They haven't. I guess there are a number of CEOs that have committed to a Windows tablet future and are now starting to wonder what they hell they have done.
Ignoring what? Douchebags who can't finish their sentences?
No, no, ignoring trolls unless we find them so sad their funny. Anyway, thanks for pointing out the missing statement...
... ignoring the fact that it needed a proper equitable eco-system and reasonably open software development model to have a chance of succeeding.
The same could be said about nokia
That's 100% true. If we continue the PC market analogy, Windows 7/8 looks exactly like IBM's OS/2 and I don't see how Nokia coming in with new proprietary phones can save Windows any more than IBM's MCA saved OS/2. I'm sure that in 15 years there will be loads of MS fans whining about how much better Windows 8 was than than iOS 5 and Android 4, but it was just discriminated against by Apple / Android / whichever wins in the competitive market. As with Windows Mobile, there will be a bunch of anoraks running around telling us how it's the only system which gives you full flexibility and completely ignoring
Right; you just don't have the killer instinct it takes.
badda da booom
Thanks folks I'll be here all week. Just drop by and take in the show.
Now you see what's so great about this. Already, just by getting these guys involved, the price of the networking kit needed has fallen by $100M!
There are two issues.
1) they may be cheating and many have reason think so.
There have been accusations that they find out about orders in advance. In this case when you sell your shares, they sell theirs first (pushing down the price) and then buy yours later (immediately taking your profit). There are even admitted cases (see this document from an HFT company) where this could happen without the HFT company even doing it deliberately, just because they have the advantage of ultra fast trading and your trade happens in an unlucky way which basically gives away information about the trade before it has been completely executed.
2) many think so
Your shares are worth what people think they are worth. If people believe the HFT companies are cheating then this causes the other people not to joint the market. The key currency of the stock market is trust and right now people don't trust it. This means your shares are worth less than they would be otherwise. Importantly, this means that companies can get less investment by putting out shares, so it means there is less money to be made from the stock market generally.
In other words; perception is reality; HFT damages perception, so HFT damages reality.
So wait; we have a choice between a set of power sources which provide indefinite quantities of energy; where the installation, once done, is pretty much forever and just needs small scale maintenance; where the major influence on the environment is extremely localised and quite easy to understand and reduce and another power source which provides energy now but where later we have to look after nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years. Where the major cost is decommissioning and clean up which happens at the end and where almost all cost estimates basically assume the tax payer covers that for free.
That sounds great, what energy source is that? Because people living on the east coast of the US would sure like to get all those nasty polluting coal plants in the west shut down. The ones that put so much sulpher in the air that the acid rain makes the limestone bubble? Similar to the ones in Japan where you can develop photographs in some of the lakes?
Please let us know what power source you are talking about, because "Clean Coal" is an advertising slogan, not a reality. The technology to capture the SO2 and CO2 would raise the cost higher than buying politicians.
The energy source I am talking about are renewables. Wind, wave, tidal, hydro and solar power and probably biomass. I'm not even thinking of suggesting further investment in coal. We should probably accept a reduction in living standards rather than doing that.
N.B. I'm not saying that these are all viable yet. Wind and hydro clearly; wave and solar just becoming so. Tidal probably only in special cases. However I am saying that now is the time for people thinking even a little bit "long term" to be putting really heavy investment into developing these power sources.
Some CAs will offer to generate a key pair for you, so you don't have to create a CSR - they send you a private key and a certificate. It is not how x509 is supposed to work, but....
Interesting; but without a specific list of what you mean by "some CAs" not very useful. Does anyone have a list?
Incidentally, I've noticed that a friend's car seems to have intertial navigation built into it's GPS nowadays (the system continues functioning in his underground garage. That is really cool.
I think you are absolutely right. In a Civil case negative inferences can be drawn from the fact that you refuse to decrypt the partition. Still, it's probably a good idea in any case. a) You may have a chance to negotiate the access to data on your computer so that it protects your privacy other than for the case in court; if the data is unencrypted that will probably happen too late. b) If your computer is swept up during searching for your friend's data but you aren't included in the case then you may not have to answer about what is there.
The encryption is unlikely to help you if you are included as a defendant in a copyright case (though if you have done something else that might be "misunderstood" then you might still decide that losing such a case is better than showing what's on your hard disk) but there are many other situations where it may help.
There is a difference between the lifespan of an individual wind generator and the lifespan of a wind farm; the same applies to PV electrical generation. Actually this is a general fact. Nuclear power generators also have turbine blades which have a lower lifespan than the plant; these also get inspected and replaced. The difference is that, when a solar panel decreases in efficiency below the level that it's economic to keep, you simply pull it out and put in a new one. In the case of wind this is mostly done when the wind tower fails and it will be replaced with a newer, bigger and more efficient one. Nuclear power plants are large integrated units which wear out as a whole (both through conventional wear and tear and gradual radiation damage, particularly from neutrons) and simply become unsafe to repair after a time. This leads to a more or less fixed lifespan of a few decades.
Remember that, in the case of wind especially, but generally in the case of power generation, the grid connection, planning and reorganisation around building the plant are a large part of the cost. Being able to keep a single location going with continual long term upgrades is a great advantage.
Thanks for asking.
First, you say that patent filing and innovation are unrelated. I think most people would disagree. Perhaps you and I differ on the definition of innovation. You say, “you don’t need to patent.” Protection of intellectual property has been recognized nearly globally for hundreds of years. It costs a great deal more to develop then replicate. Compare, for example, the cost to create a new video game to the cost to duplicate same. If there is no compensation for creators, then innovation would slow to a tiny trickle. Some people are OK with that, but that is not the current system.
I think you are confusing copyright with patents (that's an unfortunate side effect of using the term "intellectual property"; the two are not the same). The game would be protected under copyright without any need for patents. The effort of duplicating a game without infringing copyright would be almost as much as doing the game in the first place. Typically patent licensing would have very little influence on this.
The “micro-entity” applies to the first four patents per inventor. Most inventors are prolific, so that isn’t worth much either way. It’s a nice token, however. I doubt there are any effective “single patent” patent trolls. It’s just not economical.
Thanks; I had forgotten the details of this distinction. The patent trolls are often, I think, just single or very small number of patent companies. They typically haven't designed it themselves, but rather just been spun out of a parent company for the specific aim of running lawsuits with that particular patent or formed by a group of patent lawyers with the specific aim of buying and enforcing a particular patent or patent family. These current ones aren't related to your imagined situation, but I can imagine that in future companies would like to immediately spin off a new company for each patent application they make. Possibly this would be done by spinning off research groups into small companies and then selling them on from one entity to the next as the four patent limit was reached. Hopefully there's something in the bill that will block that.
Oh; and thanks for the rest of the explanation.
You are 100% right. I even looked this up and there was a 62% increase in patenting. However interestingly patents from "small entities" seems to have been stable. I'm not sure what is the difference between that and "individual inventors". Anyway, overall my point about this not being a tax increase seems to be wrong.
So wait; we have a choice between a set of power sources which provide indefinite quantities of energy; where the installation, once done, is pretty much forever and just needs small scale maintenance; where the major influence on the environment is extremely localised and quite easy to understand and reduce and another power source which provides energy now but where later we have to look after nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years. Where the major cost is decommissioning and clean up which happens at the end and where almost all cost estimates basically assume the tax payer covers that for free.
Let's be absolutely clear where we are in clean energy at the present moment. The cost of wind power ($97 / levelised MWh)* , which has been a practical power source only in the last decade or two, is already lower than the cost of nuclear energy ($113.9 / levelised MWh)*. Whilst nuclear is a mature generation technology which has been optimised since the 1960s, wind development is barely started. Further, since wind is simply available for free in many locations there is no clear absolute natural reason why there should be any particular cost level. The questions are simply technological development.
What's important to realise is that China has now realised this and is doing the sensible thing; investing strongly at this point in the development of green energy sources. At the same time, by increasing rare earth costs, they are attempting to reduce other people's lead in green energy by putting those companies out of business. This becomes essentially an economic war to see who can be the first to get green energy costs so far below conventional energy prices that the other sources become useless. My guess would be that this will come about in about the next five years.
We've also all heard that the argument that wind energy is intermittent; that it doesn't produce sufficient power when needed. That is, in part true, but what's not understood is that it's an opportunity. The price given above (levelised MWh) already includes this; more wind turbines are installed than required and this is done in many different locations then at the moment of need enough power is available with the same or better availability characteristics as a conventional plant (N.B. the whole point of a large scale power grid is the fact that power sources can and do go offline unexpectedly). However, once we have done this install, what are we left with? Extremely cheap power supply in local areas at certain times. Very simple and somewhat inefficient power storage schemes, such as converting electricity to hydrogen, storing it suddenly become entirely sensible. If you do this next to the wind generators then at times of high wind you can make hydrogen; at times of low wind and high power demand you can burn the hydrogen for profit. This is the kind of scheme Slashdot readers should be thinking about.
By getting into the green energy game strongly, Germany becomes the logical place to develop these technologies. Long term, say over the next 100 years, this is really clever. The accusation that the Germans aren't thinking long term is clearly wrong.
* these numbers come from a DOE study which you can find broken down on Wikipedia's Cost of electricity by source page. Note that these figures are somewhat biased against wind since they include very high transmission costs. This is only true because new wind tends to be differently located from existing nuclear and conventional plants. Conventional plants claim cheap costs simply by pretending to be reusing the existing connections. In fact, if capacity is to be expanded then new connections have to be built somewhere. You will notice that sometimes nuclear is presented as cheaper than wind by
one needs only to look at the sales numbers of iPads vs absolutely-fucking-anything to realize that they're having no trouble moving them.
Nobody's denying that. What the grandparent post is saying is that if the Samsung would have been on sale then Apple would have sold less. And if Apple hadn't been running around the whole phone and touchpad market threatening people then a whole bunch of other devices better than the Samsung would have been on the market earlier. Apple is directly hurting the consumer by stopping the production of any device which is better than their own.
So now someone can invent something, but the first to file it gets all rights? how is that better??
example case: - it costs $15.000 to file a patent
If the guy could learn the algorithm from the small guy then that means the small guy published it. That will count as prior art. The guy who is willing to cheat and claim that he didn't learn that from prior art would be able to cheat worse in the current system.
Now there are many things that are wrong with this bill, but it seems to me that your post can't be right and is self contradictory in a sense anyway.
Firstly: this is not a tax on innovation, it is a tax on patent filing. The two things are unrelated. If you innovate, then just publish your innovation on your web site or release it in a product and you don't need to patent.
Secondly, I believe this actually reduces fees for very small inventors, allowing 75% reductions for "micro entities". That means that it pushes more of the costs towards big corporations. Actually, to me it sounds quite specifically directed to increase the number of single patent patent troll companies.
Thirdly, you claim this will increase taxes because fees will increase by and then claim that applications will drop by 50%. That seems to me to be a 42.5% reduction in taxation (1 - (1.15 * 0.5 )).
Finally, it seems to me that the main set of patents which will not come out are patents on already published inventions. In particular, there's no way for a person to hear another persons idea, make a fake logbook and claim to have invented it before the other person published. A reduction in the number of patents in that way can hardly be seen as damaging to innovation.
Please explain what I'm missing here.