When my boys were growing up, they were constantly stealing my underwear. I made them do their own laundry but they didn't get to that chore as often as they should have so they felt free, despite my protests, to dip into my underwear drawer. Nothing worked until I died my shorts pink.
My girlfriend thought it was funny but I was just happy to be able to rely on having a clean stash of underwear.
People adapt to their phones to optimize their signal. Just as you stand where the signal's strongest, you adjust your grip so the signal is strongest. It's just not that big a deal when you actually use the phone.
I can now make and receive calls from locations that I couldn't before I got the phone and the call is cleaner. In exchange, I had to learn to hold my phone slightly differently than I used to. I can live with that. If you can't, don't get an iPhone.
He's smoking some ambiguity crack. That's the kind that lets you make a joke based on an ambiguity that leaves open an alternative interpretation to a discussion. For example...
The tour was for show because it sidestepped the key points. That is,
How with all that testing did they miss the obvious test of just touching the antenna?
Why did they ignore their internal memos that flagged the issue early on?
If they knew about the issue, why didn't they insulate the antenna to begin with?
I believe they knew about the issue early on. I further believe it's quite possible the engineers had intended to coat the antenna but Jobs didn't like the look of a coated antenna. When it came down to "what are we going to do about this?" the logic that prevailed was "It only affects a minority (left-handed customers) so we'll put the bumpers out there and charge extra. That'll address the problem and bump our ROI on the phone. Problem solved." They failed to anticipate how the decision would blow up in their face and since it's probably Jobs who made the call, it's taken this long for the rest of Apple to convince him he had to acknowledge the mistake.
It's true that Apple ranks style very high and Nokia are noted for their antenna skills.
However I am not convinced that Nokia "prioritizes 'antenna performance over physical design if they are ever in conflict.'" It's my understanding that the old rod-style antennas perform better than the now common internal antennas. The antennas disappeared into the phone to gain style points, not to improve overall reception.
...gravity is a manifestation of space-time curvature..
I thought it was the other way around, that is, gravity results in space-time curvature. How does matter warp space-time if it isn't using gravity (whatever that is) to do it?
...the state can't actually lay off any of the workers due to union protections.
Don't know where you got that idea. Several state agencies have been laying off workers for the past couple of years. The problem the unions pose is that layoff notices are handed to the most recently hired workers, not the least competent workers.
Batteries are not DVDs. Batteries have been a stumbling block for EVs ever since EVs were invented in the late 1800s. It has not been for want of investment that batteries haven't managed to store more than a 50th the amount of energy that's in gasoline.
Back in the early 80's, HP published a paper on random bit errors in RAM. They looked at chips from a variety of vendors and determined that the RAM coming out of Japan was the most reliable. That paper caused a lot of US RAM vendors to shutter their doors as there was a sea change in purchasing habits.
A few years later, I ran into John Scully while we were waiting for a flight. I mentioned the paper to him and asked him how Apple could seriously expect to sell a Macintosh specifically aimed at the Scientific community if it didn't have ECC. He blithely said "it's not a problem..." 20+ years hence and most of us still don't have ECC so it seems he was right.
The USGS has website where they collect "did you feel it" information. By gathering information as to how severe and widespread the shaking is, they can figure out how future quakes will affect various parts of the country. That in turn affects making informed decisions as to how rigorous building codes need to be.
According to Open Secrets Reid was the #1 campaign funds recipient from alternative energy. At $52,730 he garnered over 4 times as much as the second place recipient, Barbara Boxer.
Perhaps that has something to do with Mr. Reid's sudden interest in geothermal energy.
This article is a great background article on the trials Hayabusa endured on it's way, while it was there and on its return to Earth. Read the article and be amazed that the probe made it home at all.
Reminded me of Apollo 13's problems and the hacks necessary to deal with them.
None of the explanations I've seen here make any sense. I've spent too many hours on a bike running ahead of a tail wind and trimming my speed so that the relative wind is zero to believe someone can somehow extract energy from a net-zero, much less a net-negative, tailwind.
You'll notice in the pictures that there aren't any wind indicators other than the wind strip on the craft itself so it's not clear what the wind is actually doing. It appears as if they start off with a tailwind, the wind turns 180 degrees and they're heading upwind. To me, it looks like they've just figured out a way to tack straight upwind which is different than sailing downwind faster than the wind.
I won't believe these guys until they publish blueprints that someone else can use to build another craft and replicate what these guys are claiming. If they're legit, that's what they'll do. If they scamming folks, they'll claim that their design is a trade secret and for some strange reason never get around to manufacturing these things so that other people can do the same thing.
I got curious as to how Foxconn's suicide rate compared to other groups. The United States' suicide rate is 11.1 per 100,000 people. Foxconn employs somewhere around 800,000 people(!) which means by the end of the year, you'd expect a death count by suicide of around 90 people.
If the current rates holds, there'll be 50 more Foxconn employees alive at year's end than there will be Americans from a comparably sized city.
Do you have a reference that FB had no role in yanking the page? This article says:
Pakistan lifted a ban on Facebook on Monday after officials from the social networking site apologized for a page deemed offensive to Muslims and removed its contents, a top information technology official said.
Further in, it continues:
Facebook assured the Pakistani government that "nothing of this sort will happen in the future," Malik said. Officials from the website could not immediately be reached for comment. They said earlier the contents of the "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!" page did not violate Facebook's terms.
Maybe Malik got his facts wrong or he's outright lying but given FB's recent mendacity about what is and isn't private, it's hard to know who is telling the truth.
In 1977, a small disk controller company in the San Fernando Valley that I went to work for a few years later had an assembly line populated by women who were wire wrapping backplanes for a disk controller the size of a refrigerator. I can assure you, there wasn't a single vacuum tube to be found in that 1977 box - it was all discrete transistors, capacitors and resistors connected by a rat's maze of wiring.
Had the company survived, the next model was going to include a new chip from another relatively young company called Intel that would eliminate some of the wire wrapping job. We were, however, going to keep the company's proprietary CPU because it could execute one of its seven instructions on a 36 bit-wide bus within half a microsecond whereas the 'advanced' Intel chip required something on the order of 10 microseconds to shuffle 8 bits. It was the first RISC CPU I ever saw way before the term RISC became popular. Had the company switched to building the CPU as a chip and sold it instead of disk controllers, it might have beat Intel.
One application is to reduce the cost of fiber to the home. If you can eliminate the $150 transceiver that converts fiber to ethernet, you've lowered the cost of entry into that market. Getting that cost down will help new companies and neighborhood coops make ftth more common.
Admittedly, the biggest cost for fiber to the home is the labor required to string fiber but even that cost is rapidly declining as various technologies have appeared that allow digging holes without tearing up a street have shown up.
Nonetheless, multiply the $150 by the number of households you have to serve to start up a cable operation and you're looking at some serious change.
I'm not a fan of class action lawsuits because they usually result in pennies for the consumer and millions for the attorneys. They're basically lawyer-enrichment actions.
For this suit to be any different, the best outcome would be to give Sony an option.
Restore the Linux implementation and purchase full page ads in the NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post advertising they have done so along with a mea culpa and a promise never to disable functionality again.
Refund the full purchase price to any purchaser who wishes to return the unit and purchase ads as above advertising the availability of the refund with a mea culpa.
Give the attorneys a few million for their time whichever choice Sony takes and the outcome will serve as a warning to companies that they can't put whatever they wish into EULAs because consumers will bite back.
Android has always been a predominantly Java platform and that's been known since day one.
True.
iPhone has never, ever, supported Java in any form (since Javascript is not Java as you point out) and that's also been known since day one.
True.
Nothing has changed besides a growing animosity between the companies.
False. Apple just decreed that any app written for the iPhone must be written in C, Objective-C or C++. Google has tools that translate Java into JavaScript that runs correctly on any platform. Translating Java to Objective C or C++ isn't a stretch. Apple's *new* policy disallows Google from doing that.
How anyone who isn't an Apple employee can defend that policy eludes me.
John McPhee's book, Rising From The Plains, documents his time spent with John Love in Montana. Love was one of the pre-eminent geologists of the 20th century and the primary author of two state geologic maps of Montana. During the Uranium Boom of the 50's, Love was offered a job paying a million dollars/year because he was so good at finding uranium. He repeatedly found deposits where other geologists had said there wouldn't be any.
During their travels around Montana, Love described how uranium easily dissolves in rain water, is carried by same until the water encounters coal where the carbon filters the uranium out of solution. Love then pointed to a nearby coal burning power plant and said the uranium goes up the smokestack and was dispersed to the east.
Neither McPhee nor Love had any reason to spread bullshit about uranium contaminating coal.
So perhaps the samples you inspected didn't come from coal fields that are near uranium deposits like the coal in Montana is.
As for the Scientific American, it's been spewing crap at least since Omni went tits up.
Slashdot Mirror
When my boys were growing up, they were constantly stealing my underwear. I made them do their own laundry but they didn't get to that chore as often as they should have so they felt free, despite my protests, to dip into my underwear drawer. Nothing worked until I died my shorts pink.
My girlfriend thought it was funny but I was just happy to be able to rely on having a clean stash of underwear.
People adapt to their phones to optimize their signal. Just as you stand where the signal's strongest, you adjust your grip so the signal is strongest. It's just not that big a deal when you actually use the phone.
I can now make and receive calls from locations that I couldn't before I got the phone and the call is cleaner. In exchange, I had to learn to hold my phone slightly differently than I used to. I can live with that. If you can't, don't get an iPhone.
He's smoking some ambiguity crack. That's the kind that lets you make a joke based on an ambiguity that leaves open an alternative interpretation to a discussion. For example...
The tour was for show because it sidestepped the key points. That is,
I believe they knew about the issue early on. I further believe it's quite possible the engineers had intended to coat the antenna but Jobs didn't like the look of a coated antenna. When it came down to "what are we going to do about this?" the logic that prevailed was "It only affects a minority (left-handed customers) so we'll put the bumpers out there and charge extra. That'll address the problem and bump our ROI on the phone. Problem solved." They failed to anticipate how the decision would blow up in their face and since it's probably Jobs who made the call, it's taken this long for the rest of Apple to convince him he had to acknowledge the mistake.
It's true that Apple ranks style very high and Nokia are noted for their antenna skills.
However I am not convinced that Nokia "prioritizes 'antenna performance over physical design if they are ever in conflict.'" It's my understanding that the old rod-style antennas perform better than the now common internal antennas. The antennas disappeared into the phone to gain style points, not to improve overall reception.
Perhaps an RF engineer could comment?
So a guy [p3droid] few know posts a speculative comment
and /. takes it as fact? At least p3droid has the courtesy to warn his readers what a conjecture is and that's all his post is.
The gravity abstract says:
I thought it was the other way around, that is, gravity results in space-time curvature. How does matter warp space-time if it isn't using gravity (whatever that is) to do it?
I was hoping this was a treatment for presbyopia. I'd give a lot to be able to see as well as Chuck Yaeger did when he was in his teens.
...the state can't actually lay off any of the workers due to union protections.
Don't know where you got that idea. Several state agencies have been laying off workers for the past couple of years. The problem the unions pose is that layoff notices are handed to the most recently hired workers, not the least competent workers.
Batteries are not DVDs. Batteries have been a stumbling block for EVs ever since EVs were invented in the late 1800s. It has not been for want of investment that batteries haven't managed to store more than a 50th the amount of energy that's in gasoline.
My hunch is that as oil supplies wind down we'll end up manufacturing hydrocarbons because of their energy density. Moreover, manufacturing hydrocarbons will mitigate the advantage that China has accrued in cornering the rare earth market.
Back in the early 80's, HP published a paper on random bit errors in RAM. They looked at chips from a variety of vendors and determined that the RAM coming out of Japan was the most reliable. That paper caused a lot of US RAM vendors to shutter their doors as there was a sea change in purchasing habits.
A few years later, I ran into John Scully while we were waiting for a flight. I mentioned the paper to him and asked him how Apple could seriously expect to sell a Macintosh specifically aimed at the Scientific community if it didn't have ECC. He blithely said "it's not a problem..." 20+ years hence and most of us still don't have ECC so it seems he was right.
The USGS has website where they collect "did you feel it" information. By gathering information as to how severe and widespread the shaking is, they can figure out how future quakes will affect various parts of the country. That in turn affects making informed decisions as to how rigorous building codes need to be.
According to Open Secrets Reid was the #1 campaign funds recipient from alternative energy. At $52,730 he garnered over 4 times as much as the second place recipient, Barbara Boxer.
Perhaps that has something to do with Mr. Reid's sudden interest in geothermal energy.
This article is a great background article on the trials Hayabusa endured on it's way, while it was there and on its return to Earth. Read the article and be amazed that the probe made it home at all.
Reminded me of Apollo 13's problems and the hacks necessary to deal with them.
You missed that it was a Timothy post. He tends to fall for PR flak nonsense.
None of the explanations I've seen here make any sense. I've spent too many hours on a bike running ahead of a tail wind and trimming my speed so that the relative wind is zero to believe someone can somehow extract energy from a net-zero, much less a net-negative, tailwind.
You'll notice in the pictures that there aren't any wind indicators other than the wind strip on the craft itself so it's not clear what the wind is actually doing. It appears as if they start off with a tailwind, the wind turns 180 degrees and they're heading upwind. To me, it looks like they've just figured out a way to tack straight upwind which is different than sailing downwind faster than the wind.
I won't believe these guys until they publish blueprints that someone else can use to build another craft and replicate what these guys are claiming. If they're legit, that's what they'll do. If they scamming folks, they'll claim that their design is a trade secret and for some strange reason never get around to manufacturing these things so that other people can do the same thing.
What makes the choice of OS X over Win 7 even odder is that Safari was the first browser to fall at last March's pwn2own.
I got curious as to how Foxconn's suicide rate compared to other groups. The United States' suicide rate is 11.1 per 100,000 people. Foxconn employs somewhere around 800,000 people(!) which means by the end of the year, you'd expect a death count by suicide of around 90 people.
If the current rates holds, there'll be 50 more Foxconn employees alive at year's end than there will be Americans from a comparably sized city.
Do you have a reference that FB had no role in yanking the page? This article says:
Pakistan lifted a ban on Facebook on Monday after officials from the social networking site apologized for a page deemed offensive to Muslims and removed its contents, a top information technology official said.
Further in, it continues:
Facebook assured the Pakistani government that "nothing of this sort will happen in the future," Malik said.
Officials from the website could not immediately be reached for comment. They said earlier the contents of the "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!" page did not violate Facebook's terms.
Maybe Malik got his facts wrong or he's outright lying but given FB's recent mendacity about what is and isn't private, it's hard to know who is telling the truth.
First Facebook redefines its privacy policies making private data public.
Now it yanks a political expression page because the page offends another group.
One might be inclined to think Facebook Zucks.
In 1977, a small disk controller company in the San Fernando Valley that I went to work for a few years later had an assembly line populated by women who were wire wrapping backplanes for a disk controller the size of a refrigerator. I can assure you, there wasn't a single vacuum tube to be found in that 1977 box - it was all discrete transistors, capacitors and resistors connected by a rat's maze of wiring.
Had the company survived, the next model was going to include a new chip from another relatively young company called Intel that would eliminate some of the wire wrapping job. We were, however, going to keep the company's proprietary CPU because it could execute one of its seven instructions on a 36 bit-wide bus within half a microsecond whereas the 'advanced' Intel chip required something on the order of 10 microseconds to shuffle 8 bits. It was the first RISC CPU I ever saw way before the term RISC became popular. Had the company switched to building the CPU as a chip and sold it instead of disk controllers, it might have beat Intel.
One application is to reduce the cost of fiber to the home. If you can eliminate the $150 transceiver that converts fiber to ethernet, you've lowered the cost of entry into that market. Getting that cost down will help new companies and neighborhood coops make ftth more common.
Admittedly, the biggest cost for fiber to the home is the labor required to string fiber but even that cost is rapidly declining as various technologies have appeared that allow digging holes without tearing up a street have shown up.
Nonetheless, multiply the $150 by the number of households you have to serve to start up a cable operation and you're looking at some serious change.
I'm not a fan of class action lawsuits because they usually result in pennies for the consumer and millions for the attorneys. They're basically lawyer-enrichment actions.
For this suit to be any different, the best outcome would be to give Sony an option.
Give the attorneys a few million for their time whichever choice Sony takes and the outcome will serve as a warning to companies that they can't put whatever they wish into EULAs because consumers will bite back.
Android has always been a predominantly Java platform and that's been known since day one.
True.
iPhone has never, ever, supported Java in any form (since Javascript is not Java as you point out) and that's also been known since day one.
True.
Nothing has changed besides a growing animosity between the companies.
False. Apple just decreed that any app written for the iPhone must be written in C, Objective-C or C++. Google has tools that translate Java into JavaScript that runs correctly on any platform. Translating Java to Objective C or C++ isn't a stretch. Apple's *new* policy disallows Google from doing that.
How anyone who isn't an Apple employee can defend that policy eludes me.
John McPhee's book, Rising From The Plains, documents his time spent with John Love in Montana. Love was one of the pre-eminent geologists of the 20th century and the primary author of two state geologic maps of Montana. During the Uranium Boom of the 50's, Love was offered a job paying a million dollars/year because he was so good at finding uranium. He repeatedly found deposits where other geologists had said there wouldn't be any.
During their travels around Montana, Love described how uranium easily dissolves in rain water, is carried by same until the water encounters coal where the carbon filters the uranium out of solution. Love then pointed to a nearby coal burning power plant and said the uranium goes up the smokestack and was dispersed to the east.
Neither McPhee nor Love had any reason to spread bullshit about uranium contaminating coal.
So perhaps the samples you inspected didn't come from coal fields that are near uranium deposits like the coal in Montana is.
As for the Scientific American, it's been spewing crap at least since Omni went tits up.