This depends an awful lot on your employers sick leave policies. I know of one MAJOR company that has the policy that if you're out sick for 3 days twice, you're fired. (I doubt they can make that stick, but they can certainly cancel promotions, and downgrade your performance record. Still, the policy was as I've reported it.)
I think that "common wisdom" was in reference to a cold, not influenza. At least that's how I've heard it quoted previously. (I also expect that a lot of those "colds" were actually allergy to some pollen or other.) As such, up until anti-histamines were around it was pretty much correct....but, of course, given this interpretation it doesn't say ANYTHING about the flu.
P.S.: Did you ever have the 24-hour flu? One day and you're over it. It was quite "popular" one year. Different flus have very different symptoms...and different durations.
The problem is that H5N1 is rattling around out there, and it can cross-breed with H1N1 strains. So far H5N1 doesn't spread well in humans, but it *is* quite deadly. If someone gets two strains of flu at the same time, they're likely to hybridize. So it's important to keep flu infections to a minimum. Given time, H5N1 will become less deadly as it evolves to live with people, but it needs to have it's numbers kept down until it does. And that means don't give it the genes that H1N1 uses for spreading.
Yeah. There's nothing against cleaning up your image, only against destroying the evidence. Or something that could be construed as evidence. You can generally even supply it to the court under seal, if you don't want your neighbors to know.
(Well, that's civil law. Criminal law might be different. But I doubt it. If you're supplying the evidence rather than having it seized, I think you generally get a lot of control over how widely it's shown.)
This is a good argument for the various on-demand publishers. FWIW, I've got a few APress books, and several books on Ruby. I don't recall *EVER* seeing an ad for his book. So I don't see any reason he should be expected to pay ANYTHING for marketing. I've bought books from LuLu and they did a good job of binding, selling, and shipping. At a *MUCH* lower price in overhead. And I believe the author keeps ALL rights.
Once upon a time there was a reasonable argument for the publishing houses. That time is now well over a decade in the past.
I don't think anything that establishes a monopoly is a good solution, no matter *HOW* you go about establishing the monopoly. Some different way needs to be developed to recompense inventors who make their inventions public. OTOH, when patents are written in such a way that they aren't useful to practitioners of the art covered by the patent, then I don't see ANY justification for the grant of a patent of any kind. And if the laws are such that the practitioners don't dare look at the patents, then there is equally no justification for the existence of patents.
Circumstances alter cases. If development required a lot of up front investment, then there needs to be a reliable way to recoup that investment, plus a bit of extra, because any "recouping" is speculative, and also discounted because it's later.
OTOH, patents shouldn't prevent others from inventing things separately, and then using the invention without paying the original inventor. (But how to prove independent invention can sometimes be quite difficult.)
I believe it's Australian. Why should anyone who isn't Australian have the right to use that patent without paying the license?
(I pretty much agree with your basic argument, but not with the details. If the Australian's paid for it with taxes, then there's a good argument that they should be able to use it without paying patent license fees. This argument, however, doesn't work for someone living in, e.g., the US though.)
A different argument would assert that this entire class of things shouldn't be patentable. I'd be hospitable to that kind of an argument, but "the devil is in the details". I *don't* think the same work should be covered by any two of patent, copyright, DRM. Saying that no patents should be valid, however, is a bit further than I'm willing to go without further evidence. (I *would* go so far as to say, for the US, all patent laws should be thrown out, all extant patents should be invalidated, and the patent system should be recreated from scratch, with no monopoly granted by the patent. Some other mechanism is needed to reward inventors. A royalty seems reasonable, but I can't figure out how to justly set the worth of an invention for such a royalty.)
Possibly now the answer is "isn't profitable". When I looked into it in the past accurate information would have required cooperation of the FBI and various other police groups, and many were refusing to cooperate. (I'm not sure that any were so willing. The study couldn't be done, so if any were willing to cooperate, they didn't have the opportunity.)
E.g., at that time the FBI maintained *the* database of fingerprints. But it was not available to researchers wishing to check for prints being properly recognized. (I don't mean it assert that only the FBI had a database of fingerprints, but rather they had the only one that was generally recognized as authoritative in the US.)
Perhaps things have changed. (Computers might well cause that to happen. At the time I mention that database images weren't computerized.)
What's the rate of false positives? If you say there aren't any, I'll know you're lying.
The correct answer is "Nobody knows, and the research to calculate it isn't allowed."
For normal finger prints this could have been calculated decades ago, but the necessary agencies have consistently refused to permit their techniques to be evaluated. (Others have said that informal estimates show up to a 20% error rate [varies with the lab and the time period...low estimate was 3%]. I think was was being investigated was false negatives, though. I don't know the study, so I can't say for sure. This was reported to be based on voluntary cooperation of the fingerprinting labs, though, so the real numbers are probably higher.)
(OTOH, the study reports may be someone's invention. I haven't seen it. I do know that there had been no official evaluation the last time I looked into the matter [a few years ago].)
I, personally, and for the suite of applications that I consider of significance, don't fine Wine at all satisfactory. (I'll admit that MSWindXP wouldn't be satisfactory either. The applications that I need are dependent on MSWind95, and will run with timing problems under MSWind98.)
I'll grant that my needs are conditioned by "these are the applications that I haven't been able to transition to Linux" and "I stopped using MS after they updated their EULA in 2000", so they aren't typical. By Wine isn't all that great for my needs. Even VMs don't seem to work very well.
I don't think it's even arguable. Linux has been used in embedded devices for nearly a decade now...perhaps longer. X-Window, now. Perhaps *that* isn't designed for embedded devices. (Don't know. Never encountered one doesn't mean it's not a design consideration.)
That's where an ion rocket would be a good idea. It's slow, but it doesn't use resources quickly. It should be automated, so it wouldn't need a life-support system that would add weight and not much value.
And if you need more thrust than an ion can supply... well, you might look at the plasma rocket.
There are lots of choices if you don't need something with strong acceleration.
Hey, it was good enough for "When Worlds Collide" (movie version).
I'd bet that when it comes to where it gets built, pork will trump praticality. If Colorado has a Senator on the right committee, then a mountain lauch will win, otherwise...well... the California Sierras are pretty tall, and sereral states have peaks in the Rockies. (Up the side of Pike's Peak?) But most places don't have the right mountains.
Or perhaps we should get a foreign contractor. The Himalayas get pretty high...
Actually, what I really like about a mountain launch is that the angle is steeper, so the velocity is closer to the direction you want it to have. For that purpose a deep pit would work nearly as well...but such pits tend to collapse. And you'd need to somehow ensure that the mountain was sturdy enough to survive the stresses of launch.
Fuel isn't explosive. Not if kept separated. Use separate launches for the oxidizer and the reducer and there's no problem.
Water is heavy, but easily handles acceleration.
My expectation is that even a frozen TV dinner would survive, if somewhat mangled.
And anything sufficiently small would scarcely be affected. Most discrete electronics should be safe...if the shock isn't too strong. It wouldn't be the gravity, but it's higher order components that would be dangerous. dx/d(t^4) and up. An acceleration of 1600 g's wouldn't phase most discrete electronics, but a sudden impact has lots of higher order components. Don't know what an air gun would do. So electronics might need to be specially packaged. (It's doable, but it sure adds to the cost.)
And, of course, air wouldn't be adversely affected.
Not sure what this would do to a warm steak. It might do nothing. It might tenderize it. I'm pretty sure that we experience equivalent accelerations (in our feet, at least) when jumping off a chair and landing on a cement floor. But it doesn't last very long. It's rather hard to imagine what it would be like if it endured for more than a small fraction of a second.
A railgun isn't a mass driver unless it's being used to propel the thing it's attached to. What makes a railgun a mass driver is that it's being used as a kind of rocket engine...only without the chemistry.
IOW, even if it *were* a railgun you couldn't call this a mass-driver because that's not how it's being used. OTOH a rocket engine is a kind of mass driver, i.e., it drives you by throwing mass away.
Have you ever heard of air friction? Hitting escape velocity with any significant amount of air above you won't suffice to allow you to escape.
This thing doesn't get things moving quite that fast. I expect that there'll be inefficiencies that he hasn't calculated, etc. So my expectation is that the rocket booster will be needed to achieve ANY kind of orbit. Doesn't make this a bad idea, though. It sounds like the cheapest sky-hook (well, not really) around.
This isn't quite a sky-hook, and wouldn't reduce costs quite as much. Close, though, even if I do expect that there are costs and inefficiencies he's overlooked. (I haven't looked at his projections, and I wouldn't expect to catch the mistakes either. But I'd bet they're there.)
I think that once you get to LEO an ion rocket could provide enough propulsion to get you higher. It would take awhile, but you were talking about a period of years.
Yeah, after posting I realized I should have remembered more carefully. I remembered the portable, but...
Still, it *does* depend on what's being embedded into what. An elevator controller using a 386 chip could run basic or python and still meet the speed requirements. This clearly isn't being what it considered, as his prior language was C++ and he's talking about "emulating embedded hardware on Windows. " I can read that in a couple of different ways. It could be (most probable) that he's writing a program to run on MSWind and emulate the action of hardware. If that's the correct reading, then Python wouldn't be a totally inappropriate choice. Of course, that raises the question of why the library needs to be portable, but he might be looking to port the code in the future.
So my answer wasn't totally inappropriate even with fuller consideration.
If, on the other hand, he meant to emulate running hardware connected to, or, perhaps, running a MSWind OS... then the only answer that occurs is Qt...and I don't know if that handles what he needs.
That's not really a bad suggestion. Ruby, Python, even some dialects of Basic would work.
Also consider Pascal. There are dialects of Pascal that have strongly attempted to be identical across platform boundaries.
Additionally, anything that's running on a virtual machine would be a reasonable consideration. That includes qemu and xen, not just Java, Python, etc.
What's at question are "What are the requirements??". Without knowing that, there's no way to know which, if any, of these suggestions are reasonable. Given that the initial language is C++, I'd expect that Pascal is the best replacement, with Java a close second. But if speed isn't a limiting factor than the other suggestions should be given consideration.
Of course, what he's asking it probably more readily answered by something like FLTK, but it's hard to know, since we don't know exactly which features he needs to be handled by his library. FLTK is platform independent, and callable from C++, but pretty much only handles the graphic interface. If that's all he needs, then it's a good answer, but we don't know what his needs are.
You *LIKE* the US patent system??? It wasn't anything great before Reagan, but Reagan is the one who decided to make it a profit center by increasing the rate of patent grants.
You *LIKE* the extended copyright terms? Sonny Bono didn't do it himself, but the extension of copyrights before the DMCA was dedicated to Sonny Bono.
And Schwarzenegger??
Being an entertainer gives you an idea of how to be popular. It doesn't mean that you're a bumbling idiot, but it does mean that you're completely untrustworthy on policy decisions. Entertainers work on and with image. Substance is something that they don't even consider important.
Actually chlorine in drinking water probably is a bad thing. That's why so many places have switched over to oxygen. Chlorine is just better than not doing anything... but lots of chlorine residues are damaging. Not at damaging as, say, cholera, but still damaging in a minor way over the long term. Oxygen seems to be much safer.
(I didn't hear his rant, so I have no idea whether he was being reasonable or not. My guess is not. But just because he was being stupid and unreasonable doesn't mean that there wasn't a valid argument under there.)
Vaccine refusers aren't idiots. Each person is safer if they aren't vaccinated, but everyone else is. So what vaccine refusers are isn't idiots, it's selfish bastards.
Actually, there's a bit of confusion. The H1N1 swine flu that they're vaccinating against (as soon as the vaccines are prepared) isn't that much worse than the ordinary seasonal flu. It's the H5N1 that's the reputed killer. And that one isn't spreading widely. (Doesn't seem to be spreading widely?) So this seems to mean that we currently have 3 flu strains in circulation.
The problem is that if someone gets multiple flus at the same time, the genes are likely to do some swapping. This could easily result in a flu that spreads as easily as the seasonal flu and is as deadly as H5N1 (bird flu). So this year it's especially important to keep the level of flu in the population as low as possible.
Well, at least that's how I understand it. If someone connected with the health profession could correct any errors, it would probably be beneficial.
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This depends an awful lot on your employers sick leave policies. I know of one MAJOR company that has the policy that if you're out sick for 3 days twice, you're fired. (I doubt they can make that stick, but they can certainly cancel promotions, and downgrade your performance record. Still, the policy was as I've reported it.)
I think that "common wisdom" was in reference to a cold, not influenza. At least that's how I've heard it quoted previously. (I also expect that a lot of those "colds" were actually allergy to some pollen or other.) As such, up until anti-histamines were around it was pretty much correct....but, of course, given this interpretation it doesn't say ANYTHING about the flu.
P.S.: Did you ever have the 24-hour flu? One day and you're over it. It was quite "popular" one year. Different flus have very different symptoms...and different durations.
The problem is that H5N1 is rattling around out there, and it can cross-breed with H1N1 strains. So far H5N1 doesn't spread well in humans, but it *is* quite deadly. If someone gets two strains of flu at the same time, they're likely to hybridize. So it's important to keep flu infections to a minimum. Given time, H5N1 will become less deadly as it evolves to live with people, but it needs to have it's numbers kept down until it does. And that means don't give it the genes that H1N1 uses for spreading.
Yeah. There's nothing against cleaning up your image, only against destroying the evidence. Or something that could be construed as evidence. You can generally even supply it to the court under seal, if you don't want your neighbors to know.
(Well, that's civil law. Criminal law might be different. But I doubt it. If you're supplying the evidence rather than having it seized, I think you generally get a lot of control over how widely it's shown.)
This is a good argument for the various on-demand publishers. FWIW, I've got a few APress books, and several books on Ruby. I don't recall *EVER* seeing an ad for his book. So I don't see any reason he should be expected to pay ANYTHING for marketing. I've bought books from LuLu and they did a good job of binding, selling, and shipping. At a *MUCH* lower price in overhead. And I believe the author keeps ALL rights.
Once upon a time there was a reasonable argument for the publishing houses. That time is now well over a decade in the past.
I'm leaning more towards the AGPLv3. But it's because of terms that the GPLv3 doesn't have, not because of terms that it does.
I don't think anything that establishes a monopoly is a good solution, no matter *HOW* you go about establishing the monopoly. Some different way needs to be developed to recompense inventors who make their inventions public. OTOH, when patents are written in such a way that they aren't useful to practitioners of the art covered by the patent, then I don't see ANY justification for the grant of a patent of any kind. And if the laws are such that the practitioners don't dare look at the patents, then there is equally no justification for the existence of patents.
Circumstances alter cases. If development required a lot of up front investment, then there needs to be a reliable way to recoup that investment, plus a bit of extra, because any "recouping" is speculative, and also discounted because it's later.
OTOH, patents shouldn't prevent others from inventing things separately, and then using the invention without paying the original inventor. (But how to prove independent invention can sometimes be quite difficult.)
I believe it's Australian. Why should anyone who isn't Australian have the right to use that patent without paying the license?
(I pretty much agree with your basic argument, but not with the details. If the Australian's paid for it with taxes, then there's a good argument that they should be able to use it without paying patent license fees. This argument, however, doesn't work for someone living in, e.g., the US though.)
A different argument would assert that this entire class of things shouldn't be patentable. I'd be hospitable to that kind of an argument, but "the devil is in the details". I *don't* think the same work should be covered by any two of patent, copyright, DRM. Saying that no patents should be valid, however, is a bit further than I'm willing to go without further evidence. (I *would* go so far as to say, for the US, all patent laws should be thrown out, all extant patents should be invalidated, and the patent system should be recreated from scratch, with no monopoly granted by the patent. Some other mechanism is needed to reward inventors. A royalty seems reasonable, but I can't figure out how to justly set the worth of an invention for such a royalty.)
Possibly now the answer is "isn't profitable". When I looked into it in the past accurate information would have required cooperation of the FBI and various other police groups, and many were refusing to cooperate. (I'm not sure that any were so willing. The study couldn't be done, so if any were willing to cooperate, they didn't have the opportunity.)
E.g., at that time the FBI maintained *the* database of fingerprints. But it was not available to researchers wishing to check for prints being properly recognized.
(I don't mean it assert that only the FBI had a database of fingerprints, but rather they had the only one that was generally recognized as authoritative in the US.)
Perhaps things have changed. (Computers might well cause that to happen. At the time I mention that database images weren't computerized.)
What's the rate of false positives? If you say there aren't any, I'll know you're lying.
The correct answer is "Nobody knows, and the research to calculate it isn't allowed."
For normal finger prints this could have been calculated decades ago, but the necessary agencies have consistently refused to permit their techniques to be evaluated. (Others have said that informal estimates show up to a 20% error rate [varies with the lab and the time period...low estimate was 3%]. I think was was being investigated was false negatives, though. I don't know the study, so I can't say for sure. This was reported to be based on voluntary cooperation of the fingerprinting labs, though, so the real numbers are probably higher.)
(OTOH, the study reports may be someone's invention. I haven't seen it. I do know that there had been no official evaluation the last time I looked into the matter [a few years ago].)
I, personally, and for the suite of applications that I consider of significance, don't fine Wine at all satisfactory. (I'll admit that MSWindXP wouldn't be satisfactory either. The applications that I need are dependent on MSWind95, and will run with timing problems under MSWind98.)
I'll grant that my needs are conditioned by "these are the applications that I haven't been able to transition to Linux" and "I stopped using MS after they updated their EULA in 2000", so they aren't typical. By Wine isn't all that great for my needs. Even VMs don't seem to work very well.
I don't think it's even arguable. Linux has been used in embedded devices for nearly a decade now...perhaps longer. X-Window, now. Perhaps *that* isn't designed for embedded devices. (Don't know. Never encountered one doesn't mean it's not a design consideration.)
That's where an ion rocket would be a good idea. It's slow, but it doesn't use resources quickly. It should be automated, so it wouldn't need a life-support system that would add weight and not much value.
And if you need more thrust than an ion can supply ... well, you might look at the plasma rocket.
There are lots of choices if you don't need something with strong acceleration.
Hey, it was good enough for "When Worlds Collide" (movie version).
I'd bet that when it comes to where it gets built, pork will trump praticality. If Colorado has a Senator on the right committee, then a mountain lauch will win, otherwise ...well ... the California Sierras are pretty tall, and sereral states have peaks in the Rockies. (Up the side of Pike's Peak?) But most places don't have the right mountains.
Or perhaps we should get a foreign contractor. The Himalayas get pretty high...
Actually, what I really like about a mountain launch is that the angle is steeper, so the velocity is closer to the direction you want it to have. For that purpose a deep pit would work nearly as well...but such pits tend to collapse. And you'd need to somehow ensure that the mountain was sturdy enough to survive the stresses of launch.
Fuel isn't explosive. Not if kept separated. Use separate launches for the oxidizer and the reducer and there's no problem.
Water is heavy, but easily handles acceleration.
My expectation is that even a frozen TV dinner would survive, if somewhat mangled.
And anything sufficiently small would scarcely be affected. Most discrete electronics should be safe...if the shock isn't too strong. It wouldn't be the gravity, but it's higher order components that would be dangerous. dx/d(t^4) and up. An acceleration of 1600 g's wouldn't phase most discrete electronics, but a sudden impact has lots of higher order components. Don't know what an air gun would do. So electronics might need to be specially packaged. (It's doable, but it sure adds to the cost.)
And, of course, air wouldn't be adversely affected.
Not sure what this would do to a warm steak. It might do nothing. It might tenderize it. I'm pretty sure that we experience equivalent accelerations (in our feet, at least) when jumping off a chair and landing on a cement floor. But it doesn't last very long. It's rather hard to imagine what it would be like if it endured for more than a small fraction of a second.
A railgun isn't a mass driver unless it's being used to propel the thing it's attached to. What makes a railgun a mass driver is that it's being used as a kind of rocket engine...only without the chemistry.
IOW, even if it *were* a railgun you couldn't call this a mass-driver because that's not how it's being used. OTOH a rocket engine is a kind of mass driver, i.e., it drives you by throwing mass away.
Have you ever heard of air friction? Hitting escape velocity with any significant amount of air above you won't suffice to allow you to escape.
This thing doesn't get things moving quite that fast. I expect that there'll be inefficiencies that he hasn't calculated, etc. So my expectation is that the rocket booster will be needed to achieve ANY kind of orbit. Doesn't make this a bad idea, though. It sounds like the cheapest sky-hook (well, not really) around.
This isn't quite a sky-hook, and wouldn't reduce costs quite as much. Close, though, even if I do expect that there are costs and inefficiencies he's overlooked. (I haven't looked at his projections, and I wouldn't expect to catch the mistakes either. But I'd bet they're there.)
I think that once you get to LEO an ion rocket could provide enough propulsion to get you higher. It would take awhile, but you were talking about a period of years.
Yeah, after posting I realized I should have remembered more carefully. I remembered the portable, but ...
Still, it *does* depend on what's being embedded into what. An elevator controller using a 386 chip could run basic or python and still meet the speed requirements. This clearly isn't being what it considered, as his prior language was C++ and he's talking about "emulating embedded hardware on Windows. " I can read that in a couple of different ways. It could be (most probable) that he's writing a program to run on MSWind and emulate the action of hardware. If that's the correct reading, then Python wouldn't be a totally inappropriate choice. Of course, that raises the question of why the library needs to be portable, but he might be looking to port the code in the future.
So my answer wasn't totally inappropriate even with fuller consideration.
If, on the other hand, he meant to emulate running hardware connected to, or, perhaps, running a MSWind OS ... then the only answer that occurs is Qt...and I don't know if that handles what he needs.
That's not really a bad suggestion. Ruby, Python, even some dialects of Basic would work.
Also consider Pascal. There are dialects of Pascal that have strongly attempted to be identical across platform boundaries.
Additionally, anything that's running on a virtual machine would be a reasonable consideration. That includes qemu and xen, not just Java, Python, etc.
What's at question are "What are the requirements??". Without knowing that, there's no way to know which, if any, of these suggestions are reasonable. Given that the initial language is C++, I'd expect that Pascal is the best replacement, with Java a close second. But if speed isn't a limiting factor than the other suggestions should be given consideration.
Of course, what he's asking it probably more readily answered by something like FLTK, but it's hard to know, since we don't know exactly which features he needs to be handled by his library. FLTK is platform independent, and callable from C++, but pretty much only handles the graphic interface. If that's all he needs, then it's a good answer, but we don't know what his needs are.
You *LIKE* the US patent system??? It wasn't anything great before Reagan, but Reagan is the one who decided to make it a profit center by increasing the rate of patent grants.
You *LIKE* the extended copyright terms? Sonny Bono didn't do it himself, but the extension of copyrights before the DMCA was dedicated to Sonny Bono.
And Schwarzenegger??
Being an entertainer gives you an idea of how to be popular. It doesn't mean that you're a bumbling idiot, but it does mean that you're completely untrustworthy on policy decisions. Entertainers work on and with image. Substance is something that they don't even consider important.
If you were being sarcastic, then I apologize.
Actually chlorine in drinking water probably is a bad thing. That's why so many places have switched over to oxygen. Chlorine is just better than not doing anything ... but lots of chlorine residues are damaging. Not at damaging as, say, cholera, but still damaging in a minor way over the long term. Oxygen seems to be much safer.
(I didn't hear his rant, so I have no idea whether he was being reasonable or not. My guess is not. But just because he was being stupid and unreasonable doesn't mean that there wasn't a valid argument under there.)
Vaccine refusers aren't idiots. Each person is safer if they aren't vaccinated, but everyone else is. So what vaccine refusers are isn't idiots, it's selfish bastards.
Actually, there's a bit of confusion. The H1N1 swine flu that they're vaccinating against (as soon as the vaccines are prepared) isn't that much worse than the ordinary seasonal flu. It's the H5N1 that's the reputed killer. And that one isn't spreading widely. (Doesn't seem to be spreading widely?) So this seems to mean that we currently have 3 flu strains in circulation.
The problem is that if someone gets multiple flus at the same time, the genes are likely to do some swapping. This could easily result in a flu that spreads as easily as the seasonal flu and is as deadly as H5N1 (bird flu). So this year it's especially important to keep the level of flu in the population as low as possible.
Well, at least that's how I understand it. If someone connected with the health profession could correct any errors, it would probably be beneficial.