I thought that True Random Number Generators had been built into all newer CPUs. It appears, after a quick Google search, that's not the case. Via provides a TRNG on their C3, AMD provides one on their Geode processor, and Intel provides one on their "Firmware Hub." What's not clear to me is why, given the obvious need for a TRNG, Intel and AMD haven't incorporated one into the mainstream x-86 architecture.
I'm old enough to remember when Apple ran an ad in the NY Times "welcoming" IBM to the PC business. The ensuing competition didn't quite turn out the way Jobs hoped it would.
The article said The PAV could laugh at bad weather and controlled airspace too which got me to thinking about a couple of stories my father told me.
We had a ranch in Northern Arizona and like a lot of ranches in that area, we had a private airstrip. A neighbor misinterpreted his newly minted instrument rating as permission to fly no matter what. He loaded up his family and took off near a thunderhead. The flight lasted just long enough to kill the entire family.
Weather in Arizona can get particularly nasty, even when you're paying full attention. Once, my father inadvertently flew under a thunderhead and survived by pointing the nose at the ground and pouring on full throttle. Even still, he only managed to not gain any altitude while he traversed under the cloud.
I think if these vehicles ever see the light of day, we'll see Darwin step up to the plate in a major way due to people 'laughing at the weather.'
The Minor Planet Mailing List members scan the sky every clear night looking for new asteroids and comets. An area of special interest are the near earth objects which could potentially hit us. The consensus of the group is that it wasn't a meteorite that caused the crater. The reasoning is that there were no reports of a pre-impact sonic boom (people under a meteorite's path will typically hear one) and the shape of the crater is wrong. Meteorite impacts form circular craters with uplifted circumferences. This crater is neither circular nor does it show any signs of uplift around the edges.
The more likely candidate is an explosion caused by ground water coming in contact with magma and boiling. The area is known to have experienced similar explosions in the past.
>..now that they actually have a competent leader.
Putin's a thug. Murdering Russian Journalists and anyone else who dares criticize him are the marks of a mafioso thug, not a statesman. The only reason Russia is resurfacing is the high price of oil. It has very little to do with his leadership.
Communism is evil. A harsh statement, granted. But when you see the 100s of millions of people it has enslaved for the benefit of the few people at the top, there's no other word for it but evil.
The DOE says we use a little less than 400,000,000 gallons of gas every day. The article says that if they get their switch grass process running, it'll produce 2,000 gallons/acre. That means we'll need 200,000 acres of switchgrass a day. 200,000 acres is roughly 1/4 the area of Rhode Island. So we need roughly 80 times the area of Rhode Island to produce our current gasoline needs.
Your argument that we've had years to learn what we know is simply wrong. I'm over 50 but I knew my home street address and phone # when I was a kid. I knew all of my sibling's and parent's birth dates. It was just expected that a child would know those things and we didn't have little crutches to look at if we forgot. We had to admit we'd forgotten something and ask again. Do that a few times and you start to feel pretty stupid so you try a little harder to remember next time. That is, you did that if you didn't want to appear dim.
What really matters is how well you can tie together bits and pieces of knowledge. A good memory just lets you access more bits more quickly than having to look things up.
A lot of folks think you shouldn't waste time memorizing things when you can always look things up. However, if you memorize nothing, then you have no foundation on which to build new knowledge. I teach an advanced middle school math program which mixes rote and synthesis because I believe both skills are crucial.
I can teach my students to memorize things without too much difficulty - it's a natural skill for most children. Especially if they're pre-pubescent. About 1/10 of class time is spent on recitation. What's very, very hard to teach is to get them to tie the little things they've memorized together into something they never knew.
I'm wondering if perhaps Apple wants the phone cracked. AT&T doesn't control activation, Apple does. If the phone is cracked then people could buy an iPhone and if another carrier was willing, activate it with some other carrier than AT&T. There are lots of people out there who can't stand AT&T so it's not as if we're only talking about 2 or 3 hackers doing this.
Jobs could play the innocent claiming that hackers did it all the while happy that yet another iPhone went out the door.
Instead of all the rigmarole of dealing with hybrids, why not go with an all-electric car that draws its power from the road like the old toy slot cars did? Electrify the interstates and be done with it. That way, you don't care if your car with cheap lead-acid batteries only has a 100 mile range because the interstates aren't any further away than that. You power the rails with nuclear power and away goes the demand for 40% of the world's oil. Standardize the nuclear plant designs and you can stamp them out of a factory which makes electricity dirt cheap.
Adding slots adds a few more benefits. Now that the car knows where the slot is, it knows where the road is so you can get on the highway and turn the driving over to the car. You can read, sleep or do whatever on your commute. You get the benefit of trains combined with the flexibility of cars.
Since the power source is not coal or gas, the air in the cities clears. If you ever have seen Los Angeles on a clear day, you know why people wanted to move there in the 30's - it's really, really pretty when you can see 60 miles. The cities would become attractive places to live again.
It just requires the will to electrify the roads and we can tell the Saudis to go to hell. Forget hybrids - give me slot cars instead.
I think the objection is to Microsoft claiming the invention i.e. "Microsoft Surface". The first speaker in the video says "it's the first of its kind..." which is simply not true.
TED, where I first saw the photo enlarging/spinningidea shown, isn't an obscure venue. The idea of putting objects on a touch surface and having them interact I believe was Reactable's The Reactable interface showed up at a Bjork concert. Again, not an obscure venue.
What tweaks a lot of people isn't that ideas evolve but that Microsoft gloms onto them and then claims they came up with the idea and patent it. Microsoft deserves credit for bringing the ideas to market in a different guise but not for innovating.
Murdering dissidents and instigating unrest in various parts of the world.
The question is how we'll finance our side of the war this time around what with Baby Boomers getting ready to suck the federal tit dry and a feckless Congress that can't stick to a war when the going gets tough.
I built a setup like the one featured in the article over a year ago. The noise isn't that bad and I'm sensitive to noise. I use headphones to drown out cubicle noise so treadmill noise isn't a problem.
The bigger problem is learning to type and mouse while you're moving. I had to start with the treadmill running at its lowest setting and even then it was tricky.
A second problem is your feet hurt after standing all day. The treadmill has some give to it so it's not like standing on concrete but my shoes are tighter than they used to be and I've lost weight.
If you build one of these setups, get a good treadmill. Since I was paying for the refurb, I cheaped out and bought mine at Walmart. The treadmill has been a constant nuisance with belts slipping, random speed changes etc. None of those issues would bother you if you're holding the handrail when you're using the treadmill but if you're typing when it happens, it can dump you on your ass.
If YouTube can afford to send me internet-quality video for the few pennies they get from my add revenues, Vudu can afford to send me DVD-quality video for the 10 bucks I'm paying them to buy their movie. You're ignoring some basic limitations. Say they have a million customers and they all want to watch a dvd-quality video. Assuming an average download capacity of 2 Mbs, that's 2 terabits a second you want Vudu to source. That's if they only sell a million copies of their machine. Steve Jobs was boasting about selling 100 million iPods. Sell a 100 million vudu and that 2 terabit stream just mushroomed to 200 terabits. Why should vudu shoulder that cost when the user's bandwidth isn't being used and the cost to the user is zilch?
If Vudu sources 1080p HD streams, it'll completely invert the hd-dvd/bluray fight.
Another method as well
on
Lunar Dustbusters
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Another idea to deal with the dust is to fuse the surface around the habitat. The dust doesn't migrate like it does here on earth because there isn't an atmosphere to waft it. You knock dust loose on the moon, it plummets directly to the ground like a bowling ball. So the idea is to melt the regolith around the habitat so that most of the dust is shed just walking across a paved surface to the habitat. It won't get rid of all the mess, but it'll cut it down.
The Apollo 12 astronauts dealt with the problem in an ad-hoc, but effective, fashion. Gordon, the command module pilot, wouldn't let Bean and Conrad back in until they stripped to buck naked because he didn't want them gunging up their ride home. As they were firing up the engine to leave lunar orbit, one of them joked that if the engine failed, the recovery crew would be wondering why a couple of the astronauts were naked.
Consider for a moment the debit card machines that were emplaced at Office Max. Using your criterion as a checklist, you would think debit card machines would be very secure. But they're not secure for reasons having nothing to do with your checklist.
The fact is Diebold branded the voting machines as Diebold machines so they would sell more voting machines. The implied sales pitch was "we make ATMs which you trust so you know you can trust our voting machines." Now that we don't trust their voting machines, the sales pitch is working against their original product which is why they're trying to distance the two products.
The key point is that poorly designed security products are going to be breached. If Diebold couldn't figure out how to design a secure voting architecture, then it's not at all clear they can design a secure ATM architecture.
NASA is going to try to make going to the moon as risk free as possible. This habitat is an example of risk aversion. Caves, though riskier, offer several advantages. They're bigger, they offer better solar storm protection. The downside is finding them and then sealing them. So instead, NASA is choosing to take a little cubicle up that has a higher probability of providing some protection for very few people. What's worse is that as soon as somebody dies there'll be tremendous pressure to shut it down which will encourage NASA to be even more risk averse.
Going to the Moon is risky and is going to require a variety of strategies to succeed and people are going to die. 150 years ago, folks who wanted to come west tried whatever way made sense to them to get out here. Lots of folks died trying to get here but more folks survived and prospered. Had NASA run the western expansion, we'd all still be in New York.
Instead, the billions of dollars NASA will waste would be better spent setting up prizes to get people to risk their necks to get to the moon. The X-Prize showed that you get more people spending more money than the prize value to win the prize. You don't even have to make it all money. Heck Pennsylvania was a land grant that paid off a royal debt. Give people who can settle and produce something on the moon property rights to the land and whatever they produce and we'll see a resurgence of pioneers willing to try it.
Since people can't walk to the moon like some walked to the West, NASA could say "we'll pay $20,000,000 for each settler you safely deliver to the Moon's surface. We'll pay $500,000 for each ton of provisions." and you'd see a wealth of companies spring up to ship people to the moon. If the prices are wrong, NASA could adjust as needed. Instead of 4 or 5 inhabitants for $100 Billion, you'd see 1000's.
You'll see lots of people die just like they have before but you'll see survivors as well. Those are the people who should populate the moon, not government employees.
When I saw that Officemax was stupidly storing atm pins, I gave up. Now, the only machine that sees my atm card is my bank's. And even there, I look at the machine to see that it hasn't been tampered with.
For everyone else, I've reverted to checks and cash.
If/. posted a story that injured someone without checking to ensure that the story is true, I'd think the injured party would be able to claim that they were injured due to/.'s negligence.
I don't know what the facts of this particular story are - this question is more of a hypothetical.
But say a guy got pissed off at his employer and fabricated a story like this. He puts it into/.'s queue and some/. editor posts it without bothering to check the facts. Since a/. employee actually put the story on/.'s front page, wouldn't/. be liable if the story was an outright lie? Wouldn't even have to be a pissed off employee - a competitor could fabricate a similar story to smear the company.
Who knows? If/. was liable, maybe/. editors might actually, you know, start editing?
Flying directly through what's essentially a planet-sized cathode ray tube? Isn't that, you know... The electrons can be more energetic than most crts. Energetic enough to cause x-rays. What's even worse about Branson's idea is that the stronger x-ray flux will be associated with brighter auroras which is when the passengers will get the most visually impressive experience. So the most visually interesting flights will be when the danger is greatest.
Ah forget it, let Darwin sort things out. Darwin can work in mysterious ways - the passengers may show no obvious ill effects but wait a few years until they have kids.
I have no idea whether Qualcomm's idea rose to the ideal patent standard but I'd bet dollars to donuts the jury didn't either. Given the time constraints, they can't possibly learn enough to understand the technology to determine whether Qualcomm had a lousy patent or Broadcom was infringing. Patent enforcement decisions make about as much sense as flipping a coin.
Patents are designed by and implemented by attorneys. They're the beneficiaries of this system, not the public nor the inventor. The inventors and public just end up getting screwed.
If you are being paid to advertise a position, it was never free(libre) speech in the first place. You're confounding the meaning of freedom. The blogger is free to pursue his living as he choses. This legislation marks the blogger, justly or unjustly, as a flak. It also says the government needs to "protect us" because we're too stupid to establish our own sense of whom we trust.
You can't advertise Twinkies as a cure for cancer if you make money selling Twinkies, and society is far better off for having restricted such fraudulent or deceptive speech. It's not at all clear that society is better off. The FDA has set itself up as lord arbiter of Truth in Medicine and as a result, people have died because the FDA denied their Compassionate Use petitions. Here in California, the Federal government insists that it has the power to override a majority vote and keep people with cancer from using marijuana to alleviate their suffering.
The Federal government has already grown too large for our own good. Giving it even more power is a Bad Idea in my opinion.
The grandparent post is correct. Correlation is not causation.
Look closely at Gore's CO2 chart and you'll notice that the CO2 levels can lag the temperature rises. If CO2 was *causing* temperature to rise, CO2 level rises would precede temperature rises.
CO2 is a heat trap as your post suggests (known scientific model...) but water vapor beats the hell out of it in that regard. Rising temperatures lead to more water vaporizing. When water vaporizes, it forms clouds which increase the earth's albedo which reduces insolation which reduces temperature. Climate change is a hell of a lot more complicated than "rising CO2 levels equal higher temperatures."
The climate modelers want you to think they understand earth's climate. But their models have huge lag times between modeling and verification. Contrast the climatologist's problem with the meteorologist's. Both run models as to how the atmosphere is going to behave but the meteorologist's models are constantly being revised in the face of Nature doing something other than what the models predicted. Hell, Katrina hit New Orleans a few days after 6 out of 7 models said she'd harmlessly veer into the Atlantic. It's impressive that even one model made the right call about Katrina but the fact that 6 out 7 "scientific models" were wrong on that particular hurricane should make you cautious about believing forecasts. Climatology models run on much longer cycles and so get much less feedback as to their accuracy. Moreover, climatologists are building their models on very sparse, inaccurate data.
The number of weather reporting stations reached an all time high in the early 90's. When the USSR collapsed, a lot of meteorology stations shut down due to lack of funding. What's interesting is that their data was suspect because due to the USSR's central planning mechanism of allocating fuel based on where the temperature was the coldest, weather stations had an incentive to shade their temperature reports. "Ivan - you wouldn't believe how cold it was here yesterday!" "How cold was it Boris?" "Cold enough to warrant another lump of coal..."
Despite fewer feedback cycles and lousy data, Climatologists claim to be able to forecast global temperatures to the fraction of a degree. It's nonsense and yet a good number of slashdot denizens seem to believe it.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that True Random Number Generators had been built into all newer CPUs. It appears, after a quick Google search, that's not the case. Via provides a TRNG on their C3, AMD provides one on their Geode processor, and Intel provides one on their "Firmware Hub." What's not clear to me is why, given the obvious need for a TRNG, Intel and AMD haven't incorporated one into the mainstream x-86 architecture.
I'm old enough to remember when Apple ran an ad in the NY Times "welcoming" IBM to the PC business. The ensuing competition didn't quite turn out the way Jobs hoped it would.
We had a ranch in Northern Arizona and like a lot of ranches in that area, we had a private airstrip. A neighbor misinterpreted his newly minted instrument rating as permission to fly no matter what. He loaded up his family and took off near a thunderhead. The flight lasted just long enough to kill the entire family.
Weather in Arizona can get particularly nasty, even when you're paying full attention. Once, my father inadvertently flew under a thunderhead and survived by pointing the nose at the ground and pouring on full throttle. Even still, he only managed to not gain any altitude while he traversed under the cloud.
I think if these vehicles ever see the light of day, we'll see Darwin step up to the plate in a major way due to people 'laughing at the weather.'
The Minor Planet Mailing List members scan the sky every clear night looking for new asteroids and comets. An area of special interest are the near earth objects which could potentially hit us. The consensus of the group is that it wasn't a meteorite that caused the crater. The reasoning is that there were no reports of a pre-impact sonic boom (people under a meteorite's path will typically hear one) and the shape of the crater is wrong. Meteorite impacts form circular craters with uplifted circumferences. This crater is neither circular nor does it show any signs of uplift around the edges.
The more likely candidate is an explosion caused by ground water coming in contact with magma and boiling. The area is known to have experienced similar explosions in the past.
>..now that they actually have a competent leader.
Putin's a thug. Murdering Russian Journalists and anyone else who dares criticize him are the marks of a mafioso thug, not a statesman. The only reason Russia is resurfacing is the high price of oil. It has very little to do with his leadership.
Communism is evil. A harsh statement, granted. But when you see the 100s of millions of people it has enslaved for the benefit of the few people at the top, there's no other word for it but evil.
The DOE says we use a little less than 400,000,000 gallons of gas every day. The article says that if they get their switch grass process running, it'll produce 2,000 gallons/acre. That means we'll need 200,000 acres of switchgrass a day. 200,000 acres is roughly 1/4 the area of Rhode Island. So we need roughly 80 times the area of Rhode Island to produce our current gasoline needs.
Your argument that we've had years to learn what we know is simply wrong. I'm over 50 but I knew my home street address and phone # when I was a kid. I knew all of my sibling's and parent's birth dates. It was just expected that a child would know those things and we didn't have little crutches to look at if we forgot. We had to admit we'd forgotten something and ask again. Do that a few times and you start to feel pretty stupid so you try a little harder to remember next time. That is, you did that if you didn't want to appear dim.
What really matters is how well you can tie together bits and pieces of knowledge. A good memory just lets you access more bits more quickly than having to look things up.
A lot of folks think you shouldn't waste time memorizing things when you can always look things up. However, if you memorize nothing, then you have no foundation on which to build new knowledge. I teach an advanced middle school math program which mixes rote and synthesis because I believe both skills are crucial.
I can teach my students to memorize things without too much difficulty - it's a natural skill for most children. Especially if they're pre-pubescent. About 1/10 of class time is spent on recitation. What's very, very hard to teach is to get them to tie the little things they've memorized together into something they never knew.
I'm wondering if perhaps Apple wants the phone cracked. AT&T doesn't control activation, Apple does. If the phone is cracked then people could buy an iPhone and if another carrier was willing, activate it with some other carrier than AT&T. There are lots of people out there who can't stand AT&T so it's not as if we're only talking about 2 or 3 hackers doing this.
Jobs could play the innocent claiming that hackers did it all the while happy that yet another iPhone went out the door.
The IRS now taxes cell phones issued to you by your employer. If they tax cell phones, why not this? Dosen't your wife want to know where you are?
Instead of all the rigmarole of dealing with hybrids, why not go with an all-electric car that draws its power from the road like the old toy slot cars did? Electrify the interstates and be done with it. That way, you don't care if your car with cheap lead-acid batteries only has a 100 mile range because the interstates aren't any further away than that. You power the rails with nuclear power and away goes the demand for 40% of the world's oil. Standardize the nuclear plant designs and you can stamp them out of a factory which makes electricity dirt cheap.
Adding slots adds a few more benefits. Now that the car knows where the slot is, it knows where the road is so you can get on the highway and turn the driving over to the car. You can read, sleep or do whatever on your commute. You get the benefit of trains combined with the flexibility of cars.
Since the power source is not coal or gas, the air in the cities clears. If you ever have seen Los Angeles on a clear day, you know why people wanted to move there in the 30's - it's really, really pretty when you can see 60 miles. The cities would become attractive places to live again.
It just requires the will to electrify the roads and we can tell the Saudis to go to hell. Forget hybrids - give me slot cars instead.
I think the objection is to Microsoft claiming the invention i.e. "Microsoft Surface". The first speaker in the video says "it's the first of its kind..." which is simply not true.
TED, where I first saw the photo enlarging/spinningidea shown, isn't an obscure venue. The idea of putting objects on a touch surface and having them interact I believe was Reactable's The Reactable interface showed up at a Bjork concert. Again, not an obscure venue.
What tweaks a lot of people isn't that ideas evolve but that Microsoft gloms onto them and then claims they came up with the idea and patent it. Microsoft deserves credit for bringing the ideas to market in a different guise but not for innovating.
Lies? Care to document them? What exactly did Colin Powell lie about in his speech to the U.N.?
...same as the Cold War.
Murdering dissidents and instigating unrest in various parts of the world.
The question is how we'll finance our side of the war this time around what with Baby Boomers getting ready to suck the federal tit dry and a feckless Congress that can't stick to a war when the going gets tough.
I built a setup like the one featured in the article over a year ago. The noise isn't that bad and I'm sensitive to noise. I use headphones to drown out cubicle noise so treadmill noise isn't a problem.
The bigger problem is learning to type and mouse while you're moving. I had to start with the treadmill running at its lowest setting and even then it was tricky.
A second problem is your feet hurt after standing all day. The treadmill has some give to it so it's not like standing on concrete but my shoes are tighter than they used to be and I've lost weight.
If you build one of these setups, get a good treadmill. Since I was paying for the refurb, I cheaped out and bought mine at Walmart. The treadmill has been a constant nuisance with belts slipping, random speed changes etc. None of those issues would bother you if you're holding the handrail when you're using the treadmill but if you're typing when it happens, it can dump you on your ass.
If Vudu sources 1080p HD streams, it'll completely invert the hd-dvd/bluray fight.
Another idea to deal with the dust is to fuse the surface around the habitat. The dust doesn't migrate like it does here on earth because there isn't an atmosphere to waft it. You knock dust loose on the moon, it plummets directly to the ground like a bowling ball. So the idea is to melt the regolith around the habitat so that most of the dust is shed just walking across a paved surface to the habitat. It won't get rid of all the mess, but it'll cut it down.
The Apollo 12 astronauts dealt with the problem in an ad-hoc, but effective, fashion. Gordon, the command module pilot, wouldn't let Bean and Conrad back in until they stripped to buck naked because he didn't want them gunging up their ride home. As they were firing up the engine to leave lunar orbit, one of them joked that if the engine failed, the recovery crew would be wondering why a couple of the astronauts were naked.
Consider for a moment the debit card machines that were emplaced at Office Max. Using your criterion as a checklist, you would think debit card machines would be very secure. But they're not secure for reasons having nothing to do with your checklist.
The fact is Diebold branded the voting machines as Diebold machines so they would sell more voting machines. The implied sales pitch was "we make ATMs which you trust so you know you can trust our voting machines." Now that we don't trust their voting machines, the sales pitch is working against their original product which is why they're trying to distance the two products.
The key point is that poorly designed security products are going to be breached. If Diebold couldn't figure out how to design a secure voting architecture, then it's not at all clear they can design a secure ATM architecture.
NASA is going to try to make going to the moon as risk free as possible. This habitat is an example of risk aversion. Caves, though riskier, offer several advantages. They're bigger, they offer better solar storm protection. The downside is finding them and then sealing them. So instead, NASA is choosing to take a little cubicle up that has a higher probability of providing some protection for very few people. What's worse is that as soon as somebody dies there'll be tremendous pressure to shut it down which will encourage NASA to be even more risk averse.
Going to the Moon is risky and is going to require a variety of strategies to succeed and people are going to die. 150 years ago, folks who wanted to come west tried whatever way made sense to them to get out here. Lots of folks died trying to get here but more folks survived and prospered. Had NASA run the western expansion, we'd all still be in New York.
Instead, the billions of dollars NASA will waste would be better spent setting up prizes to get people to risk their necks to get to the moon. The X-Prize showed that you get more people spending more money than the prize value to win the prize. You don't even have to make it all money. Heck Pennsylvania was a land grant that paid off a royal debt. Give people who can settle and produce something on the moon property rights to the land and whatever they produce and we'll see a resurgence of pioneers willing to try it.
Since people can't walk to the moon like some walked to the West, NASA could say "we'll pay $20,000,000 for each settler you safely deliver to the Moon's surface. We'll pay $500,000 for each ton of provisions." and you'd see a wealth of companies spring up to ship people to the moon. If the prices are wrong, NASA could adjust as needed. Instead of 4 or 5 inhabitants for $100 Billion, you'd see 1000's.
You'll see lots of people die just like they have before but you'll see survivors as well. Those are the people who should populate the moon, not government employees.
When I saw that Officemax was stupidly storing atm pins, I gave up. Now, the only machine that sees my atm card is my bank's. And even there, I look at the machine to see that it hasn't been tampered with.
For everyone else, I've reverted to checks and cash.
Negligence.
/. posted a story that injured someone without checking to ensure that the story is true, I'd think the injured party would be able to claim that they were injured due to /.'s negligence.
If
I am not an attorney so this is pure conjecture.
I don't know what the facts of this particular story are - this question is more of a hypothetical.
/.'s queue and some /. editor posts it without bothering to check the facts. Since a /. employee actually put the story on /.'s front page, wouldn't /. be liable if the story was an outright lie? Wouldn't even have to be a pissed off employee - a competitor could fabricate a similar story to smear the company.
/. was liable, maybe /. editors might actually, you know, start editing?
But say a guy got pissed off at his employer and fabricated a story like this. He puts it into
Who knows? If
I have no idea whether Qualcomm's idea rose to the ideal patent standard but I'd bet dollars to donuts the jury didn't either. Given the time constraints, they can't possibly learn enough to understand the technology to determine whether Qualcomm had a lousy patent or Broadcom was infringing. Patent enforcement decisions make about as much sense as flipping a coin.
Patents are designed by and implemented by attorneys. They're the beneficiaries of this system, not the public nor the inventor. The inventors and public just end up getting screwed.
The Federal government has already grown too large for our own good. Giving it even more power is a Bad Idea in my opinion.
The grandparent post is correct. Correlation is not causation.
Look closely at Gore's CO2 chart and you'll notice that the CO2 levels can lag the temperature rises. If CO2 was *causing* temperature to rise, CO2 level rises would precede temperature rises.
CO2 is a heat trap as your post suggests (known scientific model...) but water vapor beats the hell out of it in that regard. Rising temperatures lead to more water vaporizing. When water vaporizes, it forms clouds which increase the earth's albedo which reduces insolation which reduces temperature. Climate change is a hell of a lot more complicated than "rising CO2 levels equal higher temperatures."
The climate modelers want you to think they understand earth's climate. But their models have huge lag times between modeling and verification. Contrast the climatologist's problem with the meteorologist's. Both run models as to how the atmosphere is going to behave but the meteorologist's models are constantly being revised in the face of Nature doing something other than what the models predicted. Hell, Katrina hit New Orleans a few days after 6 out of 7 models said she'd harmlessly veer into the Atlantic. It's impressive that even one model made the right call about Katrina but the fact that 6 out 7 "scientific models" were wrong on that particular hurricane should make you cautious about believing forecasts. Climatology models run on much longer cycles and so get much less feedback as to their accuracy. Moreover, climatologists are building their models on very sparse, inaccurate data.
The number of weather reporting stations reached an all time high in the early 90's. When the USSR collapsed, a lot of meteorology stations shut down due to lack of funding. What's interesting is that their data was suspect because due to the USSR's central planning mechanism of allocating fuel based on where the temperature was the coldest, weather stations had an incentive to shade their temperature reports. "Ivan - you wouldn't believe how cold it was here yesterday!" "How cold was it Boris?" "Cold enough to warrant another lump of coal..."
Despite fewer feedback cycles and lousy data, Climatologists claim to be able to forecast global temperatures to the fraction of a degree. It's nonsense and yet a good number of slashdot denizens seem to believe it.