Re:How long has Compaq been making magnets?
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Magnet Patent Suits
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· Score: 2
These were exactly my thoughts.
Nobody mentioned makes the magnets, or even the devices that use them. As an example, HP doesn't make CD-Rs and CD-RW drives; they buy them from people like Mitsumi. But Mitsumi doesen't make the magnets either, I imagine.
Unfortunately, from my understanding of patent law, limited as it is, it's within Magnaquench's rights to sue *users* of infringing magnets, not just manufacturers.
That doesn't clarify how retail channels like Best Buy could be sued. Are they going to go after Wal-Mart, too? I can buy HP computers at Wal-Mart!
Don't you mean that newer versions can read data files written by older versions? Once the newer versions are out, I don't know anybody that works on the older stuff they released.
The AD2000 was water- and sand-proof and had a two-week battery life (better than Apple's beasties). Imagine a Newton 2000 that could be dropped onto concrete with no ill effects, and that's what the AD2000 was. The AD2000 was aimed at the telcom field-service people, wasn't offered to the general public and was *expensive*.
I briefly thought about getting one (hey, check my User Page for the reason why), but their cost and bulk made them unattractive, even if it did say "Harris" on it.
Looking through the external Harris pages I can't find much on it; perhaps it's been dropped. I don't work in that area, so I never dealt with it.
Who knew? A judge that uses common sense, which seems to be a scarce commodity nowadays. I would reference today's Doctor Fun (link seems slow) cartoon for what most people think of judges, TV judges being only a part.
It seems obvious that the preditory nature of Rambus' actions in the past regarding synchronous DRAMs is finally coming to light in the courtroom. More power to Infineon!
Olympics is a thing in which we can watch usually very freaky anarexic or extremly fat guys jump on
bars or lift weights
I take umbrage at that remark. Olympic power lifters are without a doubt the strongest people in the world. If you think they're fat, that just tells me that you're not looking closely enough. A few weeks ago I was at the gym and leg-pressed 625 pounds for ten reps. Their biceps are about the size of my hamstrings. Those guys have triceps like my quads. They've got legs like horses. Fat doesn't lift weight. Muscle does.
As far as gymnasts go, I can tell you that they are not "freaky anarexic," but are instead extremely well fit. They work extremely hard for strength, endurance and suppleness. The routines that modern gymnasts perform would not be attainable by athletes of old. Gymnasts today are stronger, faster, more flexible and have greater endurance than ever before.
We used to have a cell phone (was: Re:Pay Phones)
on
Is the Payphone Dead?
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· Score: 1
My wife and I used to have a cell phone. A couple of years ago we signed up with PrimeCo, and even got a little pink alien as a signup bonus.
After almost a year and a half of occasional use, we decided to drop them. We agreed that $25/month could be better spent on other stuff than a phone we didn't use.
Just because we have the money for it doesn't mean we should have to spend it.
Say that the average family is two parents and three kids.
That means that there are 1.2 billion families in the world (assume 6 billion people).
Give each family a half-acre lot to have a house on. That's 600 million acres. According to this link1 acre = 0.0015625 sqare miles, so that 600 million acres is equal to 937.5 thousand square miles, or an area equal to a square 968 miles on a side. It could fit comfortably in the midwest United States.
That's every person in the world, living in a comfortable half-arce lot subdivision. Not crammed into a two-room apartment like sardines.
Now, about that overpopulation problem: where is it?
You forget that the men that least want to go to war are those that actually have to fight it. They don't want advanced weapons so that they can kill more people faster. They want advanced weapons so that they can scare the enemy enough such that the said weapons are never used.
Talk to a soldier or two. Career types are best. They don't want war.
P-3s are NOT spy planes. They're Patrol aircraft, designed for long-time loitering over water looking for submarines. This one had been fitted with radio receivers so that it could record transmissions. If anything, it could be called a surveillance plane, but not a spy plane.
P-3s are NOT spy planes. They're Patrol aircraft, designed for long-time loitering over water looking for submarines. This one had been fitted with radio receivers so that it could record transmissions. If anything, it could be called a surveillance plane, but not a spy plane.
I now see what your detractors see. You share a trait with that Chinese pilot that I didn't pick up until now. Perhaps the three of us share that trait. You're a doofus, and here's why:
Jon, can you tell me what spy plane flap you're talking about? That word, spy implies espionage, covert operations, stealing into enemy territory to spirit away secrets. I don't know of any spy plane "flap" as you say.
Instead, I see a situation where a slothful and lumbering surveillance plane was struck by a much more agile airplane. I don't know where you live, Jon, but around here (Melbourne, FL) we see P-3s all the time. They're large and slow, with four turboprop engines. They're about the size of a medium airliner.
Spy planes rely on speed and stealth to carry out their mission. It seems odd, I wrote that very same sentence to a local TV reporter yesterday for exactly the same reasons I write it now. P-3s are neither speedy or stealthy. Spy planes enter enemy airspace and perform their missions there. The P-3 entered Chinese airspace only after sustaining damage by that doofus flying their interceptor/escort plane that made returning to their home base impossible.
Furthermore, what do you think is more likely: (a) Our P-3, plodding along at maybe 250 miles per hour, knocked their interceptor, capable of Mach 2 perhaps, out of the sky, or (b) Some undertrained, overzealous doofus flew his interceptor, capable of Mach 2 perhaps, into our P-3 as it plodded along at maybe 250 miles per hour?
What's all the teary-eyed left-wing mamby-pamby crap about saying, "sorry?" Call a spade a spade, and have the Chinese say, "Our pilot was a doofus!" It's over. Do you think they really care about a pilot? It's China! They've got pilots (and everybody else) out of their ears, or so they think. What's their human rights track record? What about their "one child" policy? Do you think they care about people?
Finally, what makes you think that we don't understand the Chinese? What have honor, face, and responsibility to do with this? If honor, face, and responsibility were truly important, perhaps they'd better train their interceptor pilots. If honor, face, and responsibility were real, perhaps they'd not jail people that lead bible studies other than state-sanctioned ones. If honor, face, and responsibility were real, they'd not need tanks in Bejing. If honor, face, and responsibility were real they'd not detain visitors from the United States of Chinese origin. If honor, face, and responsibility they'd not sell weapons to terrorists. If honor, face, and responsibility they'd be a lot different than they are today.
My wife and I were talking about this the night of the Santee shooting, and we reached the same conclusion.
I preface this by saying that I'm an RF circuits engineer and she's a teacher in a private school that goes pre-K to twelfth grade.
We both are of the opinion that what we're seeing is partly a reflection of the narcissism of the modern classroom. On numerous occasions I've seen reports that rank American high schoolers close to last in the industrialized world for math skills, but they rank themselves as first when polled. For ten years or more we've had this idea of Outcome-Based Education, which is an odd name for a system where the outcome doesn't matter. With OBE, it's how the student feels, not how much they know. We as a society have raised a whole generation of empty egos, and they don't know how to handle anything that might endanger their severely distorted self-concept. I think that the great majority of school violence, from these shootings to inter-class fist fights, stem from this (inherent in kids) over-inflated self concept. Anything that threatens the self-image is more than they can handle, and they lash out.
Also, with more and more kinds coming from two-career families or broken homes we have parents that bend to their kids' every whim out of the parents feelings of guilt. I see some of my wife's colleagues -- teachers no less -- doing this. The incessant cry of, "Gimme!" is never met with a, "no." Children are taught that they deserve and are entitled to whatever they want, without exception. Their little egos are continually puffed up both at home by unwitting parents and at school by institutionallized emotional poisoning.
Is it right? No. What should be done about it? I say, increase the torment! Call it Tough Love. People need to be deflated from time to time so that they don't get these dangerous egos. They need to see how they're not that smart, they're not that tough, they're not that athletic, they're not that pretty, they're not that anything. In a word, they need humility. They need to know that it's ok not to get everything you want; in fact, nobody has ever received everything they wanted. They need to learn not to take themselves so seriously or to be so brittle when things don't go their way.
One thing that's missing from just about every aspect of modern life is humility. To be humble in America is to be weak. To be unimportant. To be laughed at. These are the things that must change.
Technically speaking, virii are not alive. They are simply strands of genetic material in a protien wrapper. We can't, technically, kill a virus.
Here is a link to one man's list of criteria of what makes something "alive." He admits that there is some disagreement among scientists about what "life" is. From his list, virii: (1) don't have cellular organization, and (2) don't grow or have a motabolism but they can (3) spread their genetic information to offspring.
Since it does not possess two of his three required traits, virii aren't alive.
That's too bad, and it's one thing I liked about Amiga software after AmigaOS 2.0 came out.
Each properly-written program for the Amiga included in its binary executable a plaintext ASCII string that told its version and optionally other information. How hard it it to put, at the start of your program's main module something like this:
const char ver[]="VER:MyProgram Version 0.00 1 Apr 2001";
That's all it was! The Amiga c:version command would read the filename given to it as an argument, find this string and print it out. Other programs could just as easily read the string to find out the version of what other programs it was dealing with.
I haven't written a lot lately, but I can tell you that programming the Amiga was a learning experience not to forget.
The RIAA members hold copyrights over the RECORDINGS of the songs. The songwriters that put pencil to staff and put notes on paper own the copyright to the MUSIC.
That's why ASCAP and BMI go to the authors of the songs, not the recording companies.
As long as you pay your ASCAP and BMI for the songs you record, please feel free to cover popular songs and put them up for download. The RIAA has no control over that.
Fine, but the guy seemed to indicate some kind of danger inherent in the ions. Perhaps I misunderstood.
RF signals are usually measured by power rather than voltage, however. It's hard to define what an "RF voltage" is and how it would be measured. Power is much easier to measure. Perhaps you meant that these traps require hundreds of kilowatts of power?
Also, 100 MHz is extremely low frequency. That's a three meter wavelength in air/vacuum. Wouldn't an atomic containment system want a shorter wavelength and therefore a smaller location probability region? c=l*f.
I assume that these Paul Traps look kinda like standing wave tubes pumped at a relatively high-order mode, and the ion is held at a local voltage max or min?
Silicone computers? I've been inside plenty of boxes, but I've not yet seen any RTV or breast implants;)
Perhaps you meant Silicon, without the "e."
Remember, there are other semiconductors other than Silicon. Gallium Arsenide (GaAs), for instance, is used extensively in MMIC (Microwave Monolithic Integrated Circut) chips, where Silicon would not perform as well.
Why do you need EM containment fields for the ions? Why not just neutralize them? wave a big grounded conductor around in there and *poof*, no more ions.
Ions are not magic, they're just electrically charged atoms. I've got four tubes of ions right over my head; I use them to light my office. Electric arc are visible because of the ionization of the air and the recombination of the ions with the free electrons. The Sun is a ball of ionized gas.
Here at work we have desk-top ionizers to reduce the chance of ESD damage to electronic components. They emit a spray of charged particles that are good at slowly, safely dissapating static charges on nearby objects.
Ions are not dangerous. Beta-particle radiation, which is of course merely helium nuclei, are +2 ions. They don't penetrate the human body past the first few layers of skin. A piece of paper is an adequate shield against beta radiation.
Oh-- how many of you drink Gatoraid or other salt-containing drinks? In what form does one find NaCl dissolved in water? Here's a hint: NaCl contains an ionic bond between the atoms. In water, the sodium and the chlorine atoms disassociate and become free ions.
I'm going to go now and drink my ion-laden sports drink;)
Actually, it was first-century Israel. Most, if not all, of the book of Revelation occurred in the first century AD, and culminates with the destruction of the temple in AD 70 (ish).
Hooray! I was about to say that, but you beat me to the punch! I wish people like Agilent and Ansoft would learn these little facts.
I love some of Ansoft's error messages I get when using Maxwell. "A port has two vertices that have the same coordinates. Please fix it." Which port? If they're the same, can't you just remove one? What's the deal, Ansoft?!?
Christian Science is not a denomination, either, but a Christian-based cult. Kinda like the Branch Dividians with no Waco. Kinda like the Mormons (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints).
I do agree, however, that Scientology has nothing to do with any of them. Scientologists have got about as much in common with those guys as the Wiccans.
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Nobody mentioned makes the magnets, or even the devices that use them. As an example, HP doesn't make CD-Rs and CD-RW drives; they buy them from people like Mitsumi. But Mitsumi doesen't make the magnets either, I imagine.
Unfortunately, from my understanding of patent law, limited as it is, it's within Magnaquench's rights to sue *users* of infringing magnets, not just manufacturers.
That doesn't clarify how retail channels like Best Buy could be sued. Are they going to go after Wal-Mart, too? I can buy HP computers at Wal-Mart!
Don't you mean that newer versions can read data files written by older versions? Once the newer versions are out, I don't know anybody that works on the older stuff they released.
The AD2000 was water- and sand-proof and had a two-week battery life (better than Apple's beasties). Imagine a Newton 2000 that could be dropped onto concrete with no ill effects, and that's what the AD2000 was. The AD2000 was aimed at the telcom field-service people, wasn't offered to the general public and was *expensive*.
I briefly thought about getting one (hey, check my User Page for the reason why), but their cost and bulk made them unattractive, even if it did say "Harris" on it.
Looking through the external Harris pages I can't find much on it; perhaps it's been dropped. I don't work in that area, so I never dealt with it.
You're still ahead of me and my sixty shares of Commodore Business Machines, Limited I bought in 1992.
Who knew? A judge that uses common sense, which seems to be a scarce commodity nowadays. I would reference today's Doctor Fun (link seems slow) cartoon for what most people think of judges, TV judges being only a part. It seems obvious that the preditory nature of Rambus' actions in the past regarding synchronous DRAMs is finally coming to light in the courtroom. More power to Infineon!
As far as gymnasts go, I can tell you that they are not "freaky anarexic," but are instead extremely well fit. They work extremely hard for strength, endurance and suppleness. The routines that modern gymnasts perform would not be attainable by athletes of old. Gymnasts today are stronger, faster, more flexible and have greater endurance than ever before.
After almost a year and a half of occasional use, we decided to drop them. We agreed that $25/month could be better spent on other stuff than a phone we didn't use.
Just because we have the money for it doesn't mean we should have to spend it.
Say that the average family is two parents and three kids.
That means that there are 1.2 billion families in the world (assume 6 billion people).
Give each family a half-acre lot to have a house on. That's 600 million acres. According to this link1 acre = 0.0015625 sqare miles, so that 600 million acres is equal to 937.5 thousand square miles, or an area equal to a square 968 miles on a side. It could fit comfortably in the midwest United States.
That's every person in the world, living in a comfortable half-arce lot subdivision. Not crammed into a two-room apartment like sardines.
Now, about that overpopulation problem: where is it?
Talk to a soldier or two. Career types are best. They don't want war.
- U-2s are spy planes
- SR-71s are spy planes
P-3s are NOT spy planes. They're Patrol aircraft, designed for long-time loitering over water looking for submarines. This one had been fitted with radio receivers so that it could record transmissions. If anything, it could be called a surveillance plane, but not a spy plane.- U-2s are spy planes
- SR-71s are spy planes
P-3s are NOT spy planes. They're Patrol aircraft, designed for long-time loitering over water looking for submarines. This one had been fitted with radio receivers so that it could record transmissions. If anything, it could be called a surveillance plane, but not a spy plane.I now see what your detractors see. You share a trait with that Chinese pilot that I didn't pick up until now. Perhaps the three of us share that trait. You're a doofus, and here's why:
Jon, can you tell me what spy plane flap you're talking about? That word, spy implies espionage, covert operations, stealing into enemy territory to spirit away secrets. I don't know of any spy plane "flap" as you say.
Instead, I see a situation where a slothful and lumbering surveillance plane was struck by a much more agile airplane. I don't know where you live, Jon, but around here (Melbourne, FL) we see P-3s all the time. They're large and slow, with four turboprop engines. They're about the size of a medium airliner.
Spy planes rely on speed and stealth to carry out their mission. It seems odd, I wrote that very same sentence to a local TV reporter yesterday for exactly the same reasons I write it now. P-3s are neither speedy or stealthy. Spy planes enter enemy airspace and perform their missions there. The P-3 entered Chinese airspace only after sustaining damage by that doofus flying their interceptor/escort plane that made returning to their home base impossible.
Furthermore, what do you think is more likely: (a) Our P-3, plodding along at maybe 250 miles per hour, knocked their interceptor, capable of Mach 2 perhaps, out of the sky, or (b) Some undertrained, overzealous doofus flew his interceptor, capable of Mach 2 perhaps, into our P-3 as it plodded along at maybe 250 miles per hour?
What's all the teary-eyed left-wing mamby-pamby crap about saying, "sorry?" Call a spade a spade, and have the Chinese say, "Our pilot was a doofus!" It's over. Do you think they really care about a pilot? It's China! They've got pilots (and everybody else) out of their ears, or so they think. What's their human rights track record? What about their "one child" policy? Do you think they care about people? Finally, what makes you think that we don't understand the Chinese? What have honor, face, and responsibility to do with this? If honor, face, and responsibility were truly important, perhaps they'd better train their interceptor pilots. If honor, face, and responsibility were real, perhaps they'd not jail people that lead bible studies other than state-sanctioned ones. If honor, face, and responsibility were real, they'd not need tanks in Bejing. If honor, face, and responsibility were real they'd not detain visitors from the United States of Chinese origin. If honor, face, and responsibility they'd not sell weapons to terrorists. If honor, face, and responsibility they'd be a lot different than they are today.
Care to cite where "monkeyboy Bush (...) encourage the harassment of anyone different?"
I preface this by saying that I'm an RF circuits engineer and she's a teacher in a private school that goes pre-K to twelfth grade.
We both are of the opinion that what we're seeing is partly a reflection of the narcissism of the modern classroom. On numerous occasions I've seen reports that rank American high schoolers close to last in the industrialized world for math skills, but they rank themselves as first when polled. For ten years or more we've had this idea of Outcome-Based Education, which is an odd name for a system where the outcome doesn't matter. With OBE, it's how the student feels, not how much they know. We as a society have raised a whole generation of empty egos, and they don't know how to handle anything that might endanger their severely distorted self-concept. I think that the great majority of school violence, from these shootings to inter-class fist fights, stem from this (inherent in kids) over-inflated self concept. Anything that threatens the self-image is more than they can handle, and they lash out.
Also, with more and more kinds coming from two-career families or broken homes we have parents that bend to their kids' every whim out of the parents feelings of guilt. I see some of my wife's colleagues -- teachers no less -- doing this. The incessant cry of, "Gimme!" is never met with a, "no." Children are taught that they deserve and are entitled to whatever they want, without exception. Their little egos are continually puffed up both at home by unwitting parents and at school by institutionallized emotional poisoning.
Is it right? No. What should be done about it? I say, increase the torment! Call it Tough Love. People need to be deflated from time to time so that they don't get these dangerous egos. They need to see how they're not that smart, they're not that tough, they're not that athletic, they're not that pretty, they're not that anything. In a word, they need humility. They need to know that it's ok not to get everything you want; in fact, nobody has ever received everything they wanted. They need to learn not to take themselves so seriously or to be so brittle when things don't go their way.
One thing that's missing from just about every aspect of modern life is humility. To be humble in America is to be weak. To be unimportant. To be laughed at. These are the things that must change.
Here is a link to one man's list of criteria of what makes something "alive." He admits that there is some disagreement among scientists about what "life" is. From his list, virii: (1) don't have cellular organization, and (2) don't grow or have a motabolism but they can (3) spread their genetic information to offspring.
Since it does not possess two of his three required traits, virii aren't alive.
That's too bad, and it's one thing I liked about Amiga software after AmigaOS 2.0 came out.
Each properly-written program for the Amiga included in its binary executable a plaintext ASCII string that told its version and optionally other information. How hard it it to put, at the start of your program's main module something like this:
That's all it was! The Amiga c:version command would read the filename given to it as an argument, find this string and print it out. Other programs could just as easily read the string to find out the version of what other programs it was dealing with.I haven't written a lot lately, but I can tell you that programming the Amiga was a learning experience not to forget.
The RIAA members hold copyrights over the RECORDINGS of the songs. The songwriters that put pencil to staff and put notes on paper own the copyright to the MUSIC.
That's why ASCAP and BMI go to the authors of the songs, not the recording companies.
As long as you pay your ASCAP and BMI for the songs you record, please feel free to cover popular songs and put them up for download. The RIAA has no control over that.
RF signals are usually measured by power rather than voltage, however. It's hard to define what an "RF voltage" is and how it would be measured. Power is much easier to measure. Perhaps you meant that these traps require hundreds of kilowatts of power?
Also, 100 MHz is extremely low frequency. That's a three meter wavelength in air/vacuum. Wouldn't an atomic containment system want a shorter wavelength and therefore a smaller location probability region? c=l*f.
I assume that these Paul Traps look kinda like standing wave tubes pumped at a relatively high-order mode, and the ion is held at a local voltage max or min?
Perhaps you meant Silicon, without the "e."
Remember, there are other semiconductors other than Silicon. Gallium Arsenide (GaAs), for instance, is used extensively in MMIC (Microwave Monolithic Integrated Circut) chips, where Silicon would not perform as well.
Ions are not magic, they're just electrically charged atoms. I've got four tubes of ions right over my head; I use them to light my office. Electric arc are visible because of the ionization of the air and the recombination of the ions with the free electrons. The Sun is a ball of ionized gas.
Here at work we have desk-top ionizers to reduce the chance of ESD damage to electronic components. They emit a spray of charged particles that are good at slowly, safely dissapating static charges on nearby objects.
Ions are not dangerous. Beta-particle radiation, which is of course merely helium nuclei, are +2 ions. They don't penetrate the human body past the first few layers of skin. A piece of paper is an adequate shield against beta radiation.
Oh-- how many of you drink Gatoraid or other salt-containing drinks? In what form does one find NaCl dissolved in water? Here's a hint: NaCl contains an ionic bond between the atoms. In water, the sodium and the chlorine atoms disassociate and become free ions.
I'm going to go now and drink my ion-laden sports drink ;)
I didn't think Apple had that kind of manufacturing facilities.
Actually, it was first-century Israel. Most, if not all, of the book of Revelation occurred in the first century AD, and culminates with the destruction of the temple in AD 70 (ish).
I love some of Ansoft's error messages I get when using Maxwell. "A port has two vertices that have the same coordinates. Please fix it." Which port? If they're the same, can't you just remove one? What's the deal, Ansoft?!?
I do agree, however, that Scientology has nothing to do with any of them. Scientologists have got about as much in common with those guys as the Wiccans.