Free, unlimited 3G internet connection that works anywhere a cell phone works.
This isn't quite true. It may be true in the US (possibly only the continental US?), but if you take it out of the US there is no guarantee that this will work at all.
I don't own a Kindle, but I did have an interesting conversation with someone at Copenhagen Airport who had brought his Kindle with him from the US. He was somewhat angry at Amazon support, as he claimed to have called them before travelling overseas and asking if the download and wiki-bits would still work while in Scandinavia, and they said 'of course'.
First he thought it was because there weren't any 3G-networks available in Denmark, but that's simply not the case.
Obviously the issue is a lack of deals with carriers in other countries, and it may be rectified at some point, but everywhere is exaggerating the capability. Especially when you look at the coverage map that Amazon links to themselves.
Only tangentially related: it has been 20 years, so I shouldn't have been surprised, but seeing Frisch's hair that white was a bit of a shock. Probably because of what it implies about my own age.
That you're 20 years older now than you were 20 years ago.
Well, it's all down to the teachers. Some are dense (just like parents), some are smart enough to know that they don't know something.
My Danish teacher (should really be called literature once you get beyond teaching the basics of the language) once gave me two very different grades on an essay I wrote.
I got an A on the literary quality, grammar, and the use of source materials, but a F on the subject. Once he had graded the paper he gave it to one of his friends who taught the subject at college level, and even at 8th grade level, my essay was rubbish. I can't remember the subject of my essay (I think it was the historical consequences of the Danish wars in the 15th to 17th century), but essentially I had been arguing that while the Earth travels around the sun, it was doing it across the poles instead of the solar equator.
When I got it back I was rather proud of the A, then looked through the pages and noted a ton of markings on the first page and asked about them. So I got the story from my teacher. So much for doing extensive studies on your own;)
Well, obviously the volatile drives aren't much faster than Intel's SSDs. Most SSDs are already starting to bump against the upper limit of what you can get out of SATAII when doing sequential reads.
The first ones I saw were for the PCI-slot and that one is limited to 133 MB/s and 266 MB/s for 64 bit PCI, both of which are lower rates than SATAII.
PCI Express of course starts at 250 MB/s per lane and tops out at 1 GB/s per lane for the latest version. Compare that to DDR3 which peaks at 12.8 GB/s per channel. To saturate a PCIe x16 lane we could settle for three DDR3 channels.
Size is another concern of course, as most of these things tends to go for sockets to plug the memory into.
So, you could try to top out a system with 160 GB of DDR3 RAM (would require 30 blocks), costing $14,099.7. And I'm not entirely sure, how you'd fit 30 blocks of RAM onto a single PCIe card, even if it's full length. This setup would obviously only be performance limited by the PCIe bus and the card's memory controller.
Now, HP StorageWorks' IO Accelerator 'only' provides about 700 MB/s depending on the workload, but only costs slightly more than half of the DDR3 solition at $7,700.
The biggest problem with the PCIe-based volatile solutions is fitting enough memory to be useful and that you're fucked if there's a bad power outage. The non-volatile PCIe solutions' biggest problemt hey're hideously expensive compared to regular SSDs and the only advantage they have to RAID-0'ed SSDs is the IO performance, as raw speed is faster if you raid a few of Intel's SSDs to a good controller.
And all the PCIe based storage mechanisms have one huge problem - non-bootable.
I do have to question the effectiveness in multiple drive scenarios. And they talk about 4 GB of space - how do you avoid getting your page file stored on it? And how quickly will the 4 GB be worn out and read only? From the latest AnandTech article on SSDs:
Intel estimates that even if you wrote 20GB of data to your drive per day, its X25-M would be able to last you at least 5 years. Realistically, thats a value far higher than youll use consistently.
My personal desktop saw about 100GB worth of writes (whether from the OS or elsewhere) to my SSD and my data drive over the past 14 days. Thats a bit over 7GB per day of writes.
7 GB of data, 4 GB of space to store it. And since it's only going to be used as a sort of intelligent cache, you'll have a lot of erasures, as you'll be moving data off of the cache onto the harddrive to make room for new stuff, and back onto the cache again.
They say they'll use SLC, but how quickly will the OEMs demand MLC for lower end models and thus cut the number of write cycles by 10?
And at what point can you be certain that the document you've been working on for several hours a day for the two weeks is stored on the laptop's harddrive and not on the cache? It's bad enough when your laptop dies on you and you have to send it in for repairs, but if you cannot be certain that your data is safely tucked away on your removable harddrive... especially if it's the motherboard that developed a failure.
It's a nifty idea, but for stuff like this I'd be worried about data safety more than performance gains. I can get performance gains by putting an SSD into my laptop right now and I know that I can remove the SSD again if the computer needs repairs.
1) It'd probably count as chemical warfare 2) It cannot hit anything nearly as fast or track it as accurately 3) Not everything can be corroded 4) If air for a target in a city with a laser and miss, turn off the laser and that's it.
It isn't like we don't know what is on Mars. We know exactly what Mars is like.
Then please, tell us what is present a meter below the topsoil. How about two meters? How far down does the frost reach?
Yes, the rovers we have and are sending there can do a lot of neat things. But as for figuring out what's hidden just a few feet below the surface you'd be better off with a human with a spade.
Quite a lot of people talk about how the radiation levels are dangerous, and we need huge amounts of protection to help us survive it. It's rather difficult for a robot to test out the radiation shielding effect of the Martian soil compared what a human could do with a spade. Dig a few holes at various depths (say ½, 1, 2 and 4 meters), bury sensors and cover them up again.
The next rover on Mars will weigh 900 kg. By comparison even a small excavator weighs 1,500 kg. A slightly modified one designed for battery power of some sorts would do a much better job at getting below the surface, but without direct human control, it's still pretty much useless up there.
How about the companies give us something first - like a push for a global taxation system, so that companies cannot just set up shell offices in tax havens, or threaten to leave a country/state because some other country/state has cheaper taxes?
But that'd be unfair of course. To the companies I mean.
Obviously one system doesn't fit all - unless it's something that benefits the companies.
I didn't say it wasn't loud. I said there were even louder aircraft that no one wanted to complain about (probably because they didn't have the schism of 'it's super sonic so it must be super loud).
Do you know if Sun, Dell, IBM or any of the other large storage server providers have published anything like it?
One criticism I remember from the Google study was that they were only using the cheapest available drives and not "enterprise" drives, blah blah blah.
You raise an "interesting" train of thought in my mind.
Encoding in 720p x264 you get something like 45 minutes in 1.1 GB. This gives you 60,900 episodes per 4U unit or 609,000 episodes per 40U rack.
In 1080p x264 you get something like 45 minutes in about 2.5 GB. This is 27,000 episodes per 4U unit or 270,000 episodes per 40U rack.
Assuming 22 episodes per season and a five year average run time, you end up with 220 episodes per show (typical science fiction shows). Assuming 5 shows per week, 40 weeks a year, 10 year run time, you end up with 2,000 episodes per show (typical soaps).
So you could easily store 100 full sci-fi shows and 100 full soaps on in one rack (that'd be 222,000 episodes), all stored in glorius 1080p.
452,982 movies released theatrically. 792,565 TV episodes. 75,316 made for TV movies. 61,440 TV series. 77,624 direct to video movies.
Leaving out "TV series" (they average 12.9 episodes/series, which seems reasonable with the amount of cancelled series) I'll make the following assumptions about average run time: Theatrical releases: 120 minutes TV episodes: 35 minutes TV movies: 90 minutes Direct to video: 100 minutes
That's a total of 96,638,455 minutes. Encoding that in 720p would require 2,362,274 GB or 5,315,117 GB for 1080p.
What's my point? Well, for one thing you couldn't ever watch it, as it's 183 years, so no, that wasn't my point;)
That it is entirely within the realm of feasibility to offer downloads of every single movie and tv-show on IMDb from a hardware point of view. One of the complaints I've heard from the production companies is that it would be impossible to set up the hardware needed for it. Even at Sun's prices, you'd "only" need to pay 10 million dollars to store everything in both 720p and 1080p quality. Set up redundant servers in 10 different locations, 5 in the US, 5 in Europe, and you're still only out 100 million dollars.
From a cultural point of view, think of all the things that are lost when the copyright holders let these things rot away on shelves, throw it out or it's lost in some kind of calamity. And this is just movies and tv-shows. Add in music and news and I suspect you could easily get hugely redundant back-ups of it all for 1 billion dollars. Even if you had to replace the storage arrays every 3 years, it's still really really cheap. Figure twice that for maintenance, and we have an annual cost of about a billion dollars - cheap when we're saving all knowledge for our successors. That's roughly the cost of building 125 miles of rural freeway in Michigan. It'd be cheap at 10x the price. And in ten years - we will probably still be using high bit rate encoding (1080p+), but will the cost of storage still be as high? I suspect it'll slowly fall, slightly faster than inflation.
Having to reencode everything from time to time, would obviously take a huge amount of time, but that is the price we pay for progress. On the other hand, even with 1:1 encoding time, it'd only take 183 computer-years to do it.
Imagine what it would be like if 25 years from now your kids could, at the touch of a button, gain access to every bit of entertainment and news as from the last 25 years. I don't mean going to Wikipedia and looking up The Terminator but actually watch the film, read all the news about it, as it looked at the time, five years on, seven years on afterTerminator 2: Judgement Day had its effect on the new franchise etc.
Imagine them not having to settle for what history books said happened in the year 2010 or about specific events in that year, but be able to pull up every single news article and tv news report on the subject and make up their own mind, de
The part they specify is a Seagate ST31500341AS [pdf spec sheet]. That says 750,000 hours MTBF. 667 drives leaves you with one drive failing every 1,124 hours or once every 46 days. That comes out as 16 failed drives in 2 years.
That's not entirely bad. The drive has a 5 year limited warrenty, so you'd end up with something like 40 failed drives in that time.
Seagate also claim an annualized failure rate of 0.34%. Going with that, two years down the line you'd expect to have 5 drives fail. And at five years you'd expect to see 12.
To be honest, I actually expected this system to come out a lot worse than that.
As for ZFS, you could probably just install on your own. You won't have Sun support behind you, but wouldn't this be completely feasible?
And there is still a matter of performance and power consumption. I haven't a clue how either the x4550 or this product will fare - but I am curious.
they were both unsustainable "gimmicks" driven by political pissing contests rather than by any actual demand.
I suspect that the biggest issue Concorde faced was that it wasn't allowed to go super sonic anywhere near land.
Keep in mind that London to New York could be done in about 3½ hours (fastest is 2:52:59 from tarmac to tarmac) for a 5,585 km flight. New York to Los Angeles is 3,961 km so you'd expect something like 2:45 for that trip. Los Angeles to Tokyo is 8,830 km so you'd expect a 6 hour flight there. Since the plane is faster than the time zones, you could leave LAX at 10 AM for a 9 AM meeting in Tokyo. Currently the flight alone is 11 hours, and with time zones etc. you're probably looking at something like an 18 hour flight (i.e. leaving at 3 pm the day before). And do you really want to go into an all day meeting right after having spent the last 11 hours in an air plane? Six hours is more manageable. That's a small nap, a movie, and a quick shower and change of clothes.
At this time the Concorde design is more than 40 years old. The main complaint about it was noise, even though aircraft like the Boeing VC-137 were louder. One would think that 40 years of additional engine and aircraft design would allow you to reduce not only take-off and landing noise, but also that of the sonic booms, allowing for super sonic flights over land as well. And there have recent experiments and designs targeted at reducing the sonic boom. As it turns out those experiments points to how to make the Concorde a viable super sonic transport over land areas as well.
So, no - that's not political pissing contests driving development, but political pressure (justified or not) holding development back.
Let's dream up some numbers - imagine you were able to create a viable Concorde v.2010. It's more fuel efficient than the original, so let's up the 17 passenger miles/gallon to 22. That's a 30% improvement through better materials (lighter plane), better aerodynamic design and better engine. This is about 4.1 times worse than a Boeing 747-400.
At the moment a one way ticket (JFK - LAX) booked 14 days in advance is about 300 dollars for a morning flight. The flight is about 6 hours, but only about 3½ hours when you factor in the time difference (but about 9 hours going the other way). I don't fly in the US, so I just used United as my reference.
Enter the above mentioned Concorde v.2010. 3 hour flight time (on the plane), so if you have to be at LAX by 9 AM, you can leave JFK at 9 AM as well. This is currently only doable if you book a hotel at the other end or take a 5 AM flight from New York. To be in New York at 9 AM, you'd have to catch a red-eye or book a hotel the night before. This doesn't change with Concorde v.201, unless you want to leave on a 3 AM flight out of LAX with a Concorde (3 hour flight time, 3 hour time difference).
The afternoon flights are just as good. At the moment JFK - LAX would have you landing in LAX in the middle of the night, and LAX - JFK are even worse. For the Concorde v.2010 you'd be looking at a 6 pm flight out and arriving at JFK around midnight, or landing in LAX at slightly earlier than you left JFK.
So now, not only do you get to your destination about 2½ times faster, you also save the cost of hotels, AND you get to have all day meetings on different sides of the continent without it ruining the previous and following day.
From a business perspective it'd easily be worth a 10 fold ticket price. Compare 3,000 dollars as a singl
I'll grant you that they don't deem anyone innocent, but by those standards, we could just dream up charges against anyone we don't like for any kind of paedophilia charges, couldn't we?
Would probably be a better society if everyone had been accused of child molestation. Might make everyone think twice before judging them.
How do we know that he doesn't have a security scheme in place in case of death? For all we know he may have a section in his will dedicated to just that.
And at what point does it become okay to open those papers you mention? Is he ten minutes late and his cell phone is dead, but you really want to fix something? On vacation and you really want to fix this now and not wait until he gets back? He needs to stay in the hospital for a few days? Family emergency on the other side of the country?
If you must [write] your passwords down, store them is a secure place and never anywhere in your office.
Great - he's now stored his password in a sealed envelope and he's storing it in a bank vault with instructions left with the bank that in case of death or serious injury they are to hand over the letter to his supervisor.
That's definitely a secure location. Do we know that this isn't the case?
There's a difference between telling your boss "your password" and giving the master passwords to your boss.
Did you miss the bit where he refused to divulge passwords to a group of unknown people? Or just this bit from the policy:
Talking about a password in front of others.
A password, generic, unspecified. Not his password, a password. That doesn't mean "the password to reset the score in Solitaire, but everything else is alright".
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't quite true. It may be true in the US (possibly only the continental US?), but if you take it out of the US there is no guarantee that this will work at all.
I don't own a Kindle, but I did have an interesting conversation with someone at Copenhagen Airport who had brought his Kindle with him from the US. He was somewhat angry at Amazon support, as he claimed to have called them before travelling overseas and asking if the download and wiki-bits would still work while in Scandinavia, and they said 'of course'.
First he thought it was because there weren't any 3G-networks available in Denmark, but that's simply not the case.
Obviously the issue is a lack of deals with carriers in other countries, and it may be rectified at some point, but everywhere is exaggerating the capability. Especially when you look at the coverage map that Amazon links to themselves.
That you're 20 years older now than you were 20 years ago.
Well, it's all down to the teachers. Some are dense (just like parents), some are smart enough to know that they don't know something.
My Danish teacher (should really be called literature once you get beyond teaching the basics of the language) once gave me two very different grades on an essay I wrote.
I got an A on the literary quality, grammar, and the use of source materials, but a F on the subject. Once he had graded the paper he gave it to one of his friends who taught the subject at college level, and even at 8th grade level, my essay was rubbish. I can't remember the subject of my essay (I think it was the historical consequences of the Danish wars in the 15th to 17th century), but essentially I had been arguing that while the Earth travels around the sun, it was doing it across the poles instead of the solar equator.
When I got it back I was rather proud of the A, then looked through the pages and noted a ton of markings on the first page and asked about them. So I got the story from my teacher. So much for doing extensive studies on your own ;)
Well, obviously the volatile drives aren't much faster than Intel's SSDs. Most SSDs are already starting to bump against the upper limit of what you can get out of SATAII when doing sequential reads.
The first ones I saw were for the PCI-slot and that one is limited to 133 MB/s and 266 MB/s for 64 bit PCI, both of which are lower rates than SATAII.
PCI Express of course starts at 250 MB/s per lane and tops out at 1 GB/s per lane for the latest version. Compare that to DDR3 which peaks at 12.8 GB/s per channel. To saturate a PCIe x16 lane we could settle for three DDR3 channels.
Size is another concern of course, as most of these things tends to go for sockets to plug the memory into.
So, you could try to top out a system with 160 GB of DDR3 RAM (would require 30 blocks), costing $14,099.7. And I'm not entirely sure, how you'd fit 30 blocks of RAM onto a single PCIe card, even if it's full length. This setup would obviously only be performance limited by the PCIe bus and the card's memory controller.
Now, HP StorageWorks' IO Accelerator 'only' provides about 700 MB/s depending on the workload, but only costs slightly more than half of the DDR3 solition at $7,700.
The biggest problem with the PCIe-based volatile solutions is fitting enough memory to be useful and that you're fucked if there's a bad power outage. The non-volatile PCIe solutions' biggest problemt hey're hideously expensive compared to regular SSDs and the only advantage they have to RAID-0'ed SSDs is the IO performance, as raw speed is faster if you raid a few of Intel's SSDs to a good controller.
And all the PCIe based storage mechanisms have one huge problem - non-bootable.
Let me wiki that for you: Magnetic charge
Hybrid drives are a few years old, but apparently not very popular.
Samsung makes some with 256 MB of on drive NAND flash.
I do have to question the effectiveness in multiple drive scenarios. And they talk about 4 GB of space - how do you avoid getting your page file stored on it? And how quickly will the 4 GB be worn out and read only? From the latest AnandTech article on SSDs:
7 GB of data, 4 GB of space to store it. And since it's only going to be used as a sort of intelligent cache, you'll have a lot of erasures, as you'll be moving data off of the cache onto the harddrive to make room for new stuff, and back onto the cache again.
They say they'll use SLC, but how quickly will the OEMs demand MLC for lower end models and thus cut the number of write cycles by 10?
And at what point can you be certain that the document you've been working on for several hours a day for the two weeks is stored on the laptop's harddrive and not on the cache? It's bad enough when your laptop dies on you and you have to send it in for repairs, but if you cannot be certain that your data is safely tucked away on your removable harddrive ... especially if it's the motherboard that developed a failure.
It's a nifty idea, but for stuff like this I'd be worried about data safety more than performance gains. I can get performance gains by putting an SSD into my laptop right now and I know that I can remove the SSD again if the computer needs repairs.
Which city are you talking about and which country are you comparing it to?
Yes, I'm fairly certain that New York City has more cell towers than a place like Monaco or Liechtenstein, but I'm curious what you were referring to.
Well, there are a few issues with that.
1) It'd probably count as chemical warfare
2) It cannot hit anything nearly as fast or track it as accurately
3) Not everything can be corroded
4) If air for a target in a city with a laser and miss, turn off the laser and that's it.
Now, if you think it's bad when unexploded cluster bomblets look like food rations (picture here), imagine the reaction when a few kg of an insanely corrosive lands in the middle of a market place or playground.
What's wrong with that? Unless you're complaining about the use of Wikipedia, everything in that sentence is perfectly within norms.
A typical American household uses about 11,000 kWh per year.
A very simple use of Google's calculator function will tell you that this equals 1,255 Wh per hour.
This in turn is 4.52 megajoule. Expended over 5 seconds, this is 904 kW. Pretty close to a megawatt laser.
Perhaps they're expecting a failure rate of ~33%?
Then please, tell us what is present a meter below the topsoil. How about two meters? How far down does the frost reach?
Yes, the rovers we have and are sending there can do a lot of neat things. But as for figuring out what's hidden just a few feet below the surface you'd be better off with a human with a spade.
Quite a lot of people talk about how the radiation levels are dangerous, and we need huge amounts of protection to help us survive it. It's rather difficult for a robot to test out the radiation shielding effect of the Martian soil compared what a human could do with a spade. Dig a few holes at various depths (say ½, 1, 2 and 4 meters), bury sensors and cover them up again.
The next rover on Mars will weigh 900 kg. By comparison even a small excavator weighs 1,500 kg. A slightly modified one designed for battery power of some sorts would do a much better job at getting below the surface, but without direct human control, it's still pretty much useless up there.
How about the companies give us something first - like a push for a global taxation system, so that companies cannot just set up shell offices in tax havens, or threaten to leave a country/state because some other country/state has cheaper taxes?
But that'd be unfair of course. To the companies I mean.
Obviously one system doesn't fit all - unless it's something that benefits the companies.
I didn't say it wasn't loud. I said there were even louder aircraft that no one wanted to complain about (probably because they didn't have the schism of 'it's super sonic so it must be super loud).
Do you know if Sun, Dell, IBM or any of the other large storage server providers have published anything like it?
One criticism I remember from the Google study was that they were only using the cheapest available drives and not "enterprise" drives, blah blah blah.
You raise an "interesting" train of thought in my mind.
Encoding in 720p x264 you get something like 45 minutes in 1.1 GB. This gives you 60,900 episodes per 4U unit or 609,000 episodes per 40U rack.
In 1080p x264 you get something like 45 minutes in about 2.5 GB. This is 27,000 episodes per 4U unit or 270,000 episodes per 40U rack.
Assuming 22 episodes per season and a five year average run time, you end up with 220 episodes per show (typical science fiction shows).
Assuming 5 shows per week, 40 weeks a year, 10 year run time, you end up with 2,000 episodes per show (typical soaps).
So you could easily store 100 full sci-fi shows and 100 full soaps on in one rack (that'd be 222,000 episodes), all stored in glorius 1080p.
IMDb lists the following statistics:
Leaving out "TV series" (they average 12.9 episodes/series, which seems reasonable with the amount of cancelled series) I'll make the following assumptions about average run time:
Theatrical releases: 120 minutes
TV episodes: 35 minutes
TV movies: 90 minutes
Direct to video: 100 minutes
That's a total of 96,638,455 minutes. Encoding that in 720p would require 2,362,274 GB or 5,315,117 GB for 1080p.
What's my point? Well, for one thing you couldn't ever watch it, as it's 183 years, so no, that wasn't my point ;)
That it is entirely within the realm of feasibility to offer downloads of every single movie and tv-show on IMDb from a hardware point of view. One of the complaints I've heard from the production companies is that it would be impossible to set up the hardware needed for it. Even at Sun's prices, you'd "only" need to pay 10 million dollars to store everything in both 720p and 1080p quality. Set up redundant servers in 10 different locations, 5 in the US, 5 in Europe, and you're still only out 100 million dollars.
From a cultural point of view, think of all the things that are lost when the copyright holders let these things rot away on shelves, throw it out or it's lost in some kind of calamity. And this is just movies and tv-shows. Add in music and news and I suspect you could easily get hugely redundant back-ups of it all for 1 billion dollars. Even if you had to replace the storage arrays every 3 years, it's still really really cheap. Figure twice that for maintenance, and we have an annual cost of about a billion dollars - cheap when we're saving all knowledge for our successors. That's roughly the cost of building 125 miles of rural freeway in Michigan. It'd be cheap at 10x the price. And in ten years - we will probably still be using high bit rate encoding (1080p+), but will the cost of storage still be as high? I suspect it'll slowly fall, slightly faster than inflation.
Having to reencode everything from time to time, would obviously take a huge amount of time, but that is the price we pay for progress. On the other hand, even with 1:1 encoding time, it'd only take 183 computer-years to do it.
Imagine what it would be like if 25 years from now your kids could, at the touch of a button, gain access to every bit of entertainment and news as from the last 25 years. I don't mean going to Wikipedia and looking up The Terminator but actually watch the film, read all the news about it, as it looked at the time, five years on, seven years on after Terminator 2: Judgement Day had its effect on the new franchise etc.
Imagine them not having to settle for what history books said happened in the year 2010 or about specific events in that year, but be able to pull up every single news article and tv news report on the subject and make up their own mind, de
The part they specify is a Seagate ST31500341AS [pdf spec sheet]. That says 750,000 hours MTBF. 667 drives leaves you with one drive failing every 1,124 hours or once every 46 days. That comes out as 16 failed drives in 2 years.
That's not entirely bad. The drive has a 5 year limited warrenty, so you'd end up with something like 40 failed drives in that time.
Seagate also claim an annualized failure rate of 0.34%. Going with that, two years down the line you'd expect to have 5 drives fail. And at five years you'd expect to see 12.
To be honest, I actually expected this system to come out a lot worse than that.
As for ZFS, you could probably just install on your own. You won't have Sun support behind you, but wouldn't this be completely feasible?
And there is still a matter of performance and power consumption. I haven't a clue how either the x4550 or this product will fare - but I am curious.
How do the remaining 15.7 million people get their cellphones recharged?
As someone else mentioned, the cuckoo clock was invented in Germany. Velcro on the other hand, IS a Swiss invention. As is LSD, the scanning tunneling microscope, the Trieste (dived to 10,900 meters) and of course the Swiss Army knife - arguably one of the most important inventions for geeks and handymen all over the world, as it is the forefather of the Leatherman and other multi-tools.
I suspect that the biggest issue Concorde faced was that it wasn't allowed to go super sonic anywhere near land.
Keep in mind that London to New York could be done in about 3½ hours (fastest is 2:52:59 from tarmac to tarmac) for a 5,585 km flight. New York to Los Angeles is 3,961 km so you'd expect something like 2:45 for that trip. Los Angeles to Tokyo is 8,830 km so you'd expect a 6 hour flight there. Since the plane is faster than the time zones, you could leave LAX at 10 AM for a 9 AM meeting in Tokyo. Currently the flight alone is 11 hours, and with time zones etc. you're probably looking at something like an 18 hour flight (i.e. leaving at 3 pm the day before). And do you really want to go into an all day meeting right after having spent the last 11 hours in an air plane? Six hours is more manageable. That's a small nap, a movie, and a quick shower and change of clothes.
And the Concorde was almost as efficient as a Gulfstream G550 business jet which is almost 30 years older.
At this time the Concorde design is more than 40 years old. The main complaint about it was noise, even though aircraft like the Boeing VC-137 were louder. One would think that 40 years of additional engine and aircraft design would allow you to reduce not only take-off and landing noise, but also that of the sonic booms, allowing for super sonic flights over land as well. And there have recent experiments and designs targeted at reducing the sonic boom. As it turns out those experiments points to how to make the Concorde a viable super sonic transport over land areas as well.
So, no - that's not political pissing contests driving development, but political pressure (justified or not) holding development back.
Let's dream up some numbers - imagine you were able to create a viable Concorde v.2010. It's more fuel efficient than the original, so let's up the 17 passenger miles/gallon to 22. That's a 30% improvement through better materials (lighter plane), better aerodynamic design and better engine. This is about 4.1 times worse than a Boeing 747-400.
At the moment a one way ticket (JFK - LAX) booked 14 days in advance is about 300 dollars for a morning flight. The flight is about 6 hours, but only about 3½ hours when you factor in the time difference (but about 9 hours going the other way). I don't fly in the US, so I just used United as my reference.
Enter the above mentioned Concorde v.2010. 3 hour flight time (on the plane), so if you have to be at LAX by 9 AM, you can leave JFK at 9 AM as well. This is currently only doable if you book a hotel at the other end or take a 5 AM flight from New York. To be in New York at 9 AM, you'd have to catch a red-eye or book a hotel the night before. This doesn't change with Concorde v.201, unless you want to leave on a 3 AM flight out of LAX with a Concorde (3 hour flight time, 3 hour time difference).
The afternoon flights are just as good. At the moment JFK - LAX would have you landing in LAX in the middle of the night, and LAX - JFK are even worse. For the Concorde v.2010 you'd be looking at a 6 pm flight out and arriving at JFK around midnight, or landing in LAX at slightly earlier than you left JFK.
So now, not only do you get to your destination about 2½ times faster, you also save the cost of hotels, AND you get to have all day meetings on different sides of the continent without it ruining the previous and following day.
From a business perspective it'd easily be worth a 10 fold ticket price. Compare 3,000 dollars as a singl
Someone has patented DATA VALIDATION?!?!?
How the fuck does that not have prior art since ... well, pretty much since databases were first made?
And to some extent, there's no harm in asking the same question for copyright and trademark laws respectively.
And don't lump them all together in a reply - specify why this is (not) the case for the three subjects.
I'll grant you that they don't deem anyone innocent, but by those standards, we could just dream up charges against anyone we don't like for any kind of paedophilia charges, couldn't we?
Would probably be a better society if everyone had been accused of child molestation. Might make everyone think twice before judging them.
How do we know that he doesn't have a security scheme in place in case of death? For all we know he may have a section in his will dedicated to just that.
And at what point does it become okay to open those papers you mention? Is he ten minutes late and his cell phone is dead, but you really want to fix something? On vacation and you really want to fix this now and not wait until he gets back? He needs to stay in the hospital for a few days? Family emergency on the other side of the country?
In fact the password policy for San Francisco [57 page pdf] states the following:
Great - he's now stored his password in a sealed envelope and he's storing it in a bank vault with instructions left with the bank that in case of death or serious injury they are to hand over the letter to his supervisor.
That's definitely a secure location. Do we know that this isn't the case?
Did you miss the bit where he refused to divulge passwords to a group of unknown people? Or just this bit from the policy:
A password, generic, unspecified. Not his password, a password. That doesn't mean "the password to reset the score in Solitaire, but everything else is alright".
Could be worse. They could have hired the Nerd Herd ... imagine Jeff and Lester trying to handle the network.