In a lawsuit following a C&D case of Stephanie Graf vs. MSN Germany, which also claimed IP ownership of customer's material posted on MSN websites, MSN lost.
Stephanie Graf (the ex-tennis-pro) sent a C&D letter to MSN to take off all fabricated nude pictures of her from MSN sites, with a penalty of 300000 DM for each violation. MSN refused the letter, but lost due to their Terms Of Service. The judge ruled, that if MSN is claiming IP rights on the material, then they are responsible also for the damage it causes.
So maybe XTRA should look at the case (even though it is a german one), because if someone posts illegal material using XTRA, XTRA itself is liable for the damage done, if they are continuing to claim IP rights. The reasoning should also be valid under New Zealand's law.
There is a small missunderstanding here. The smallest gap between two primes is 1 (between 2 and 3). But there is only this one pair of primes (2, 3) with such a small gap. But the next smallest gap 2 happens several times, between 3 and 5, 5 and 7, 11 and 13, 17 and 19 etc.pp.
So the question is: Does this happen at very large primes too? Are there primes between 10^50 and 10^55 which are just 2 apart? Note that the primes get more and more seldom, if you move at higher numbers.
The mathematic society knows since a long time that the distance between two neighbouring primes p(n) and p(n+1) is smaller than log(p(n)). But log(p(n)) grows also steadily, even much more slowly than p(n).
The mathematic society knows also that surprisingly small gaps between prime numbers happen von time to time. So the best number known until now was that there is an infinite number of primes p(n), where p(n+1) - p(n) was smaller than log(p(n)) * 0,22... (which grows also, but very, very slowly...)
The breaking news is, that now the factor 0,22... got improved to 0, which doesn't grow at all. That means: there is an infinite number of primes, for which (p(n+1) - p(n))/log(p(n)) is quite close to 0.
This means: There are infinite often pairs of primes whose difference is quite small... It could easily be that the difference is 2 for an infinite number of pairs, which is not proved yet, but at least the minimal distance of two neighbouring primes does not grow beyond a very low number.
The principal problem remains the same (parsing the whole subtree), but with SAX it's just minimized because of the usage of tokens instead of the complete XML structure. It means that SAX just pushes the limits further away, but it finally hits the same barriers.
No, I am suggesting, that in general you have to use a stack machine. Surely you can use degenerated trees instead of fully balanced trees to store your data. And a concatenation of elements is a regular expression (and a degenerated tree). But then you are already making assumptions about the data you get. But with such limiting assumptions you can easily streamline your code. But you are loosing the full power of XML on the way. And you need a grammar that makes sure you don't mix terminals and nonterminals.
It starts out already if you are using escape characters to mark nonterminals and escape those characters with itself to mark them terminal. Those markings are still regular, but you loose already some speed ups. For instance \\ matches \\" and \\\", but one means just \ and the end of the string, and the other one means \" and the string continues. The only way to stay out of the mess is to make sure you are using an only left bound parser, first parse for all escape characters and then for the nonterminals, which makes your parser already a (local) 2-pass-parser.
It is not about the number of elements. It is about the depth you can nestle them. Think about normal algebraic terms (a+b*5-(3*(7-4))). It's often very reasonable to have such terms in XML. But they are unparseable via regexp, because regexp doesn't have a stack and can't count parentheses. And don't reply with RPN (reversed polish notation) and argue that this were parentheses-free. It replaces the parentheses with a fixed number of operator argumentes. And regexp can't count arguments too. Regexp in fact can't count at all (or only until a predefined limit, which is mathematically equivalent).
Comparisons with TeX aren't really appropriate because TeX is a Turing-complete language, and so impossible to parse automatically in 100% of cases (unless you want to allow that your program will sometimes fail to terminate, ie hang, on particular input files). I don't know what you mean by your subject line 'Maybe he should have read Knuth'...
Maybe you should read Knuth also... There are two different things: One is the grammar and the other one is the language. You can write a turing complete language in a regular grammar (Chomsky Type 3), completely parseable with regexp (think: (([linenumber] ((INC|DEC) [register])|JMZ [linenumber])[newline])*). You can also write a primitive-recursive language using a free grammar (Chomsky Type 0) (think: your average english book about primitive-recursive languages), which is unparseable within finite time and memory.
So TeX is a Turing complete language written in a Chomsky Type 1 grammar (It should be LL2, but I am not sure). XML for itself is a turing incomplete way to describe Chomsky Type 2 grammars.
No. It is not. It is about basic computer science.
XML is a grammar of Chomsky Type 2 (context free grammar). So you need a stack machine (or equivalent) to parse the whole (left or right) subtree to get your information. This may be fine for small data (like config files), but it takes a huge amount of memory space if you have real world data like the SWIFT file you have to parse for a special transaction. What he is complaining about is exactly this: Lots of parsing to get a simple datum.
With regexp your parsing is much faster, because you can concentrate on substrings, you can parse them without using a stack, you can use them in stream context. But regexp are Regular Expressions (Chomsky Type 3 grammar), so they are in fact just a subset of XML and not able to parse XML completely.
One of the links in the article points to another rant, where the author wants some regulations for a limited XML. Badly enough the ideas he is proposing are in fact context sensitive and such they are Chomsky Type 1 (context sensitive grammar) and a superset of XML instead of a simplified subset. Someone remembers the Early algorithm with something that can be described as a multi dimensional stack?
Generic XML parsers are memory intensive and can't be as fast as regular expressions. That's just computer science. Deal with it.
Interestingly though the Iraq has basicly nothing to do with Islamic Fundamentalism. Even the US Administration has stopped to make the world believe otherwise. The ruling iraqi Baath party is an arabic-nationalist movement with socialist tendencies, founded by christian arabs back in the 1920ies. About half of Saddam Hussein's cabinet is christian-maronitian, so for instance Tariq Aziz, the foreign minister.
If you look at the origin of most of al-Qaida leaders (and the attackers of 9/11), you will find almost 90% of them are saudi-arabian or egyptian, some of pakistanian origin. But Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan are considered U.S. allies in the current situation. Strange, isn't it?
Even though this is completely offtopic, as far as I am told, the average Texan oil company needs an oil price of at least US$16 per barrel to stay profitable. Even though Iraq (still in the possession of the second largest oil reserves in the world) was basicly forbidden to sell crude oil since 1992, the oil price has dropped to $9 per barrel in the late Nineties.
It seems as if just blocking out Iraq from selling oil didn't helped the oil price too much. So various attempts to crash the venezolan oil industry (5th in the world), threatening of endangering the oil industrie of the the whole Middle East (you don't believe a war in Iraq will stay inside iraqian borders?!) and heating the quarrels between Georgia, Tchetchenya (both oil transit lands) and Russia was necessary to keep the oil price up.
Eigenvalue is only part german. The german word for eigenvalue is Eigenwert (and for eigenvector it's Eigenvektor, with "Wert" just meaning "value", and "Vektor" = "vector" resp.).
The name derives from the german word "Eigenschaft" (property, characteristics), because the eigenvalues characterize an linear operator.
How about defining a blog as a site which uses weblog-specific software?
This is not feasible. Not everyone writing blogs uses blog software. For instance my brother still writes all HTML on his blog by hand. Nonetheless he has a real blog (it is in german, so no link...)
The Library of Congress has a Gutenberg Bible on display (the Bible being, of course, the first book made with a printing press.)
The Bible being the first printed book makes a good legend, but the first book printed by Gutenberg and Faust, his compagnon, was the "Donatus", a latin grammar book quite popular at the time. The 42 lines bible was done more as an advertising instrument for the printing press, showing its capability. After more than 700 "Donatus" were already sold and Gutenberg and Faust got the printing process running smoothly, Gutenberg decided to put all the experience in an ambitious project. Gutenberg later made a new print of the bible with 36 lines per page.
As a matter of fact, Gutenbergs real name was Johannes Gensfleisch. Later, when he became a lackey at the court of Arnold of Hassia-Nassau, he got the name of Johannes Gensfleisch zum Gutenberg.
They had to prove some sort of use for the gene before a patent could be issued, so what they did was that they mixed some substance including the gene into catfood (yes.. catfood). They put up a video camera and waited until Mr Cat preferred eating the modified food, and bang they had their "use", thus their patent.
But if I am using the same gene for, say, dog food, I am not infringing on their patent, because they patented the use of the gene for cat food. I may not be able to patent the use for dog food though, because that would be obvious now to everyone who owns pets.
This may be the next loophole in those patents. They basicly cover the specific use of a discovery. And if the use that is patented, has limited reach, then it's a problem of the one filing the patent, not of the one using the gene for another application.
The true value of Coca Cola is their brand name, not their recipe. The talking about the secret recipe is just made up to support the brand. If you want to clone Coca Cola, just use a chromatograph and analyse the ingredients. But don't assume that producing something that tastes exactly like Coca Cola (which in turn tastes differently in different markets) will hurt Coca Cola too much.
They will still claim that the recipe is secret, and you don't want to argue with them due to some competition laws;)
I would expect to be able to sell "Sun Dishwasher Liquid" (although that would be a poor name for a network management system) or to make a movie called "Solaris". You won't be able to call a movie Solaris, because there is already one. The novel "Solaris" from the Sixties by Stanislaw Lem, a polish autor, was made into a movie shortly after.
I guess that's where the Sun people got their inspiration for the new operating system.
Re:Send the Sales VP to California!
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Solar Power Play
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This is certainly true, but two notes: first off, urban areas are a relatively small percentage of the total land mass of the world, and secondly, they make crappy sites for wind farms or solar panel arrays -- most proposals for large farms of solar panels are, like the post above, for conversion of desert, prairie, or similar environments.
Dont underestimate the area urban areas occupy. According to the numbers I have it's between 35% (U.S.), 45% (West and Middle Europe) and up to 95% in some small city states (Monaco, San Marino, Singapur), if you look at industrialized states. Urban area doesn't necessarily mean it's within the boundary of a city. A city has parks and meadows (so it's not all urban area), but on the other hand large shopping malls and industrial areas outside of the town are urbanized too.
But not as old as the Nissan Forgery in Dresden, Germany, Koenigsstrasse. Founded in 1876, as you can see if you walk by. It's still on the gate. Nissan happens to be a common family name wit the sorb people, that live in the eastern part of Saxony.
So all this "my name is older than yours" reminds me of the old aristocratic people, all maintaining huge lists of ancestors to prove that they deserve rights and priviledges. It reminds me of an old joke, where God creates Adam and Eve and then asks them if they wish for anything else. "Yes", replied Adam, "I would like to have the family name of Hardtenstern." God gets angry: "Adam, you are just the second day on earth, and you are already longing for one of the oldest prussian aristocratic names!"
The aristocratic families of old lost their priviledges during a series of revolutions in Europe... shall we wait for the next series to end all the priviledges bound to the names?
As a long time user of a foreign language Windows (Dutch) I can assure you it's almost never a problem. C:\Windows is the same in all language versions, as is C:\Program Files.
No... C:\Program Files is called C:\Programme in some german Versions of Windows. I don't know about current versions (I always use the U.S. Version, as provided by my employer), but I know for sure that Germans tend to have C:\Program Files and C:\Programme on Win95, because installers always forgot about languages.
They do. At least in commercial unices like Solaris. The Solaris group 14 (sysadmin) contains all users that are allowed to add new users and manage software packages.
They are not allowed to edit single files. Just to start the programs that manage users and software packages (eg: the admintool(1M)).
The reason is easy: Your engine does 380 HP at maybe 6000 rpm (or whatever). But rotating at 2000 rpm for an engine with an ideal torque (the same on the whole range) results in a third of 380 HP. So this ideal engine would put out 126 HP at 2000 rpm. Check this with your papers;)
In fact it is slightly higher, because at the maximum power the engine often has only 80-90% of its maximal torque, but you get the idea. If you have a shift stick gear you may try to switch into a gear which allows your engine to run at the limit rpm. Your wheels will start to loose grip, independently of the speed you are going at that moment. The maximum horse power a car of 1000kg mass can put onto the road at 65 mph is about 100 HP. (This was an exercise calculation in a physics course I took. I don't remember the exact value, but it was about this range).
So the actual power you are using from your engine is far less than the maximum the engine is able to put on the motor shaft.
There is a railway going up a steep valley starting in the town I was born in. The town lies at 100metres above sealevel. The next stop is in a town at 400metres above sealevel. The distance is 36km, and the train takes about 40mins to get there. A typical train weighs about 1200 metric tons (30 waggons 40 tons each). To pull this train up the 300m in 40mins, how much kW should the engine of the locomotive at least have?
1,200,000 kg * 300m * 9.81 m sec^-2 / 2400 sec ~ 1,500,000 J/sec = 1500 kW.
That's a typical midrange locomotive. But this one is pulling 100 times the weight of your car, trailer and sailboat! So for pulling up your train at the same speed 15kW would be enough.
In fact a locomotive with a train of 1200 metric tons sucks at terms like acceleration;) To get at a speed of 30m/sec (~110km/h, ~70mph) in 30 secs, you would need at least 1,200,000 kg * 30m/sec * 30m/sec / 30sec = 36,000,000 J/sec = 36,000kW! That's quite a difference compared with the power you need to pull the train up 300m in a reasonable time!
This illustrates what I meant when I said, that hybrid cars may be feasible for pulling heavy loads. You need all the power for accelerating, and if you can get them back by reversing the poles on the electric engine to get the energy back to the batteries, you could easily do with a weak gas engine.
We could get deeper in the details here... but the calculation is somewhat different. You are right if you are assuming that you would use all the power from the freshly loaded batteries.
But in fact they get constantly recharged from the gas engine. So the calculation would be this:
Lets say, the efficency of the gas engine recharging the batteries is about 90%. No, that's not the energy efficency of the used gas, this would be between 30% and 40%. But 90% of the energy you get from the motor shaft. The electric engines drive the wheels at another 90% efficiency. So a typical 4-cyl-engine running with 110 HP (80kW) would constantly load the batteries with 72kW. After one hour it has charged the batteries with 72kWh.
Let's say, the height difference you are climbing is about 1000metes (~3200ft). With a mass of your complete train of about 10000kg (~22000pound) you have to put in a mechanical workload of 10^3*10^4*9,81 kg*m^2/s^2 ~ 10^8 J ~ 30kWh.
So moving up 10 metric tons of weight 1000 metres in an hour requires 30kW mechanical power. You can get about 65kW at your wheels without loosing battery charge. This means, about 35kW to waste on things like air resistance.
So either your engine doesn't run at its peak power (which is for most engines at the rpm limit), or the whole train has a very high air resistance, or it weighs considerably more than 10 metric tons.
Unless there was something very unusual about the '94-'95 diesel Passats, there's no way they could have gotten 70 MPG in US units. Perhaps 70 MPG in imperial gallons, which is ~58.3 MPG in US gallons, but that's still pretty high.
No, it is not about messing up units. When the first TDI engine was testrun back in 1991 (it was a five cylinder 2.5litre engine from the Audi 100, which was sold as Audi 4000 in the U.S.), the testers made a driving along Europe's country roads. With one refill of diesel (20 gallons ~ 74 litres), they got about 4170km (2600mls), thus having a mileage of 130mpg. The car was driving at an average speed of 60km/h (slightly less than 40mph).
Of course this was done under test conditions (higher tyre pressure, no speeding, no traffic jams), but it is good to show the potential.
Towing a boat up to the lakes is another example, although a less extreme one, since most small powerboats only weigh about a ton, including trailer. Sailboats are much heavier.
You may be wrong here. Some of the first hybrids that were going around were hybrid trolley busses. Downtown, where they had a dense net of bus lines they ran on electricity from the cables above. In the outer parts of the town, where the line net got thinner, they ran on gas, supported by the batteries. Often the gas engine was a small car engine of about 50 HP, running all the time at the most efficient rpm (somewhere between the point of highest torque and the point of highest power), thus constantly recharge the batteries.
The actual driving was still done with the electrical engines, often in the 150-200 kW (~200-270 HP) range. But because a bus uses the full power of its engine very seldom (basicly only for acceleration and on steep roads), the 50HP gas engine was big enough to keep the bus running.
So it is not the peak power that's limiting the use of hybrid cars.
There are two big disadvantages from those technologies: a) the complete engine is quite heavy (electrical engine, batteries, gas engine, different gears, generator) and b) It was ok for town busses which returned regularily to the cables downtown and thus additionally refreshened their batteries. It may be not ok for cars outside of the towns;)
But those were the experiments about 40 years ago. That was the time when generating electrical energy from braking was not fully usable. That was the time when electronically administered gas engines were unfeasible.
Today the tradeoff is this: If we want smaller gas powered engines in the hybrids, we need larger batteries and vice versa. If we want the cars climbing steep and long roads into the mountains, we need either larger gas engines or larger batteries. Batteries are just the puffers used to smooth out the actual power requirements and thus allowing smaller engines.
In other words, Nintendo asked distributors in Germany to bear the cost of their marketing and other expenses in Germany instead of buying from distributors in France and the UK and forcing Nintendo to charge higher prices there to recoup the money spent in Germany.
There is always an incentive for a company to have different prices at different places. This is not per se a Bad Thing [tm]. It always happens, because conditions are different in different regions. It may also be neccessary to have different prices just to recover from the different conditions. There is no law in the EU forbidding that. And the EU doesn't have an issue with companies charging different prices.
But to break local monopolies which prevent competition in the retail market because of closed supply chains, the EU looks into enforcing transparent pricing for grossellers and retailers. If Nintendo would have been able to prove, that their pricing was somewhat connected to the costs they had in shipping, advertising and other expenses, they wouldn't have been charged 149m EUR. No, Nintendo was subsidizing prices in some markets at the cost of other markets to gain competitive advantages. This is called price dumping and is forbidden under all sensitive legislation I know of.
With your `solution' in place, Nintendo now has to raise prices in France and the UK, or else stop spending more money in Germany, leaving their distributors there in the lurch.
No. Nintendo would have been forced to charge fair prices in France and the UK and thus not gaining the competitional advantages they got against other local competitors. So German customers are no longer forced to pay for driving companies out of the french or UK market.
Slashdot Mirror
In a lawsuit following a C&D case of Stephanie Graf vs. MSN Germany, which also claimed IP ownership of customer's material posted on MSN websites, MSN lost.
Stephanie Graf (the ex-tennis-pro) sent a C&D letter to MSN to take off all fabricated nude pictures of her from MSN sites, with a penalty of 300000 DM for each violation. MSN refused the letter, but lost due to their Terms Of Service. The judge ruled, that if MSN is claiming IP rights on the material, then they are responsible also for the damage it causes.
So maybe XTRA should look at the case (even though it is a german one), because if someone posts illegal material using XTRA, XTRA itself is liable for the damage done, if they are continuing to claim IP rights. The reasoning should also be valid under New Zealand's law.
Very easy. 1 is not a prime number. So the gap between 1 and 2 is irrelevant.
There is a small missunderstanding here. The smallest gap between two primes is 1 (between 2 and 3). But there is only this one pair of primes (2, 3) with such a small gap. But the next smallest gap 2 happens several times, between 3 and 5, 5 and 7, 11 and 13, 17 and 19 etc.pp.
So the question is: Does this happen at very large primes too? Are there primes between 10^50 and 10^55 which are just 2 apart? Note that the primes get more and more seldom, if you move at higher numbers.
The mathematic society knows since a long time that the distance between two neighbouring primes p(n) and p(n+1) is smaller than log(p(n)). But log(p(n)) grows also steadily, even much more slowly than p(n).
The mathematic society knows also that surprisingly small gaps between prime numbers happen von time to time. So the best number known until now was that there is an infinite number of primes p(n), where p(n+1) - p(n) was smaller than log(p(n)) * 0,22... (which grows also, but very, very slowly...)
The breaking news is, that now the factor 0,22... got improved to 0, which doesn't grow at all.
That means: there is an infinite number of primes, for which (p(n+1) - p(n))/log(p(n)) is quite close to 0.
This means: There are infinite often pairs of primes whose difference is quite small... It could easily be that the difference is 2 for an infinite number of pairs, which is not proved yet, but at least the minimal distance of two neighbouring primes does not grow beyond a very low number.
The principal problem remains the same (parsing the whole subtree), but with SAX it's just minimized because of the usage of tokens instead of the complete XML structure. It means that SAX just pushes the limits further away, but it finally hits the same barriers.
No, I am suggesting, that in general you have to use a stack machine. Surely you can use degenerated trees instead of fully balanced trees to store your data. And a concatenation of elements is a regular expression (and a degenerated tree). But then you are already making assumptions about the data you get. But with such limiting assumptions you can easily streamline your code. But you are loosing the full power of XML on the way. And you need a grammar that makes sure you don't mix terminals and nonterminals.
It starts out already if you are using escape characters to mark nonterminals and escape those characters with itself to mark them terminal. Those markings are still regular, but you loose already some speed ups. For instance \\ matches \\" and \\\", but one means just \ and the end of the string, and the other one means \" and the string continues. The only way to stay out of the mess is to make sure you are using an only left bound parser, first parse for all escape characters and then for the nonterminals, which makes your parser already a (local) 2-pass-parser.
It is not about the number of elements. It is about the depth you can nestle them. Think about normal algebraic terms (a+b*5-(3*(7-4))). It's often very reasonable to have such terms in XML. But they are unparseable via regexp, because regexp doesn't have a stack and can't count parentheses. And don't reply with RPN (reversed polish notation) and argue that this were parentheses-free. It replaces the parentheses with a fixed number of operator argumentes. And regexp can't count arguments too. Regexp in fact can't count at all (or only until a predefined limit, which is mathematically equivalent).
Comparisons with TeX aren't really appropriate because TeX is a Turing-complete language, and so impossible to parse automatically in 100% of cases (unless you want to allow that your program will sometimes fail to terminate, ie hang, on particular input files). I don't know what you mean by your subject line 'Maybe he should have read Knuth'...
Maybe you should read Knuth also... There are two different things: One is the grammar and the other one is the language. You can write a turing complete language in a regular grammar (Chomsky Type 3), completely parseable with regexp (think: (([linenumber] ((INC|DEC) [register])|JMZ [linenumber])[newline])*). You can also write a primitive-recursive language using a free grammar (Chomsky Type 0) (think: your average english book about primitive-recursive languages), which is unparseable within finite time and memory.
So TeX is a Turing complete language written in a Chomsky Type 1 grammar (It should be LL2, but I am not sure). XML for itself is a turing incomplete way to describe Chomsky Type 2 grammars.
No. It is not. It is about basic computer science.
XML is a grammar of Chomsky Type 2 (context free grammar). So you need a stack machine (or equivalent) to parse the whole (left or right) subtree to get your information. This may be fine for small data (like config files), but it takes a huge amount of memory space if you have real world data like the SWIFT file you have to parse for a special transaction. What he is complaining about is exactly this: Lots of parsing to get a simple datum.
With regexp your parsing is much faster, because you can concentrate on substrings, you can parse them without using a stack, you can use them in stream context. But regexp are Regular Expressions (Chomsky Type 3 grammar), so they are in fact just a subset of XML and not able to parse XML completely.
One of the links in the article points to another rant, where the author wants some regulations for a limited XML. Badly enough the ideas he is proposing are in fact context sensitive and such they are Chomsky Type 1 (context sensitive grammar) and a superset of XML instead of a simplified subset. Someone remembers the Early algorithm with something that can be described as a multi dimensional stack?
Generic XML parsers are memory intensive and can't be as fast as regular expressions. That's just computer science. Deal with it.
Interestingly though the Iraq has basicly nothing to do with Islamic Fundamentalism. Even the US Administration has stopped to make the world believe otherwise. The ruling iraqi Baath party is an arabic-nationalist movement with socialist tendencies, founded by christian arabs back in the 1920ies. About half of Saddam Hussein's cabinet is christian-maronitian, so for instance Tariq Aziz, the foreign minister.
If you look at the origin of most of al-Qaida leaders (and the attackers of 9/11), you will find almost 90% of them are saudi-arabian or egyptian, some of pakistanian origin. But Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan are considered U.S. allies in the current situation. Strange, isn't it?
Even though this is completely offtopic, as far as I am told, the average Texan oil company needs an oil price of at least US$16 per barrel to stay profitable. Even though Iraq (still in the possession of the second largest oil reserves in the world) was basicly forbidden to sell crude oil since 1992, the oil price has dropped to $9 per barrel in the late Nineties.
:)
It seems as if just blocking out Iraq from selling oil didn't helped the oil price too much. So various attempts to crash the venezolan oil industry (5th in the world), threatening of endangering the oil industrie of the the whole Middle East (you don't believe a war in Iraq will stay inside iraqian borders?!) and heating the quarrels between Georgia, Tchetchenya (both oil transit lands) and Russia was necessary to keep the oil price up.
Of course this is pure speculation.
Eigenvalue is only part german. The german word for eigenvalue is Eigenwert (and for eigenvector it's Eigenvektor, with "Wert" just meaning "value", and "Vektor" = "vector" resp.).
The name derives from the german word "Eigenschaft" (property, characteristics), because the eigenvalues characterize an linear operator.
How about defining a blog as a site which uses weblog-specific software?
This is not feasible. Not everyone writing blogs uses blog software. For instance my brother still writes all HTML on his blog by hand. Nonetheless he has a real blog (it is in german, so no link...)
The Bible being the first printed book makes a good legend, but the first book printed by Gutenberg and Faust, his compagnon, was the "Donatus", a latin grammar book quite popular at the time. The 42 lines bible was done more as an advertising instrument for the printing press, showing its capability. After more than 700 "Donatus" were already sold and Gutenberg and Faust got the printing process running smoothly, Gutenberg decided to put all the experience in an ambitious project. Gutenberg later made a new print of the bible with 36 lines per page.
As a matter of fact, Gutenbergs real name was Johannes Gensfleisch. Later, when he became a lackey at the court of Arnold of Hassia-Nassau, he got the name of Johannes Gensfleisch zum Gutenberg.
But if I am using the same gene for, say, dog food, I am not infringing on their patent, because they patented the use of the gene for cat food. I may not be able to patent the use for dog food though, because that would be obvious now to everyone who owns pets.
This may be the next loophole in those patents. They basicly cover the specific use of a discovery. And if the use that is patented, has limited reach, then it's a problem of the one filing the patent, not of the one using the gene for another application.
The true value of Coca Cola is their brand name, not their recipe. The talking about the secret recipe is just made up to support the brand. If you want to clone Coca Cola, just use a chromatograph and analyse the ingredients. But don't assume that producing something that tastes exactly like Coca Cola (which in turn tastes differently in different markets) will hurt Coca Cola too much.
;)
They will still claim that the recipe is secret, and you don't want to argue with them due to some competition laws
I would expect to be able to sell "Sun Dishwasher Liquid" (although that would be a poor name for a network management system) or to make a movie called "Solaris".
You won't be able to call a movie Solaris, because there is already one. The novel "Solaris" from the Sixties by Stanislaw Lem, a polish autor, was made into a movie shortly after.
I guess that's where the Sun people got their inspiration for the new operating system.
This is certainly true, but two notes: first off, urban areas are a relatively small percentage of the total land mass of the world, and secondly, they make crappy sites for wind farms or solar panel arrays -- most proposals for large farms of solar panels are, like the post above, for conversion of desert, prairie, or similar environments.
Dont underestimate the area urban areas occupy. According to the numbers I have it's between 35% (U.S.), 45% (West and Middle Europe) and up to 95% in some small city states (Monaco, San Marino, Singapur), if you look at industrialized states. Urban area doesn't necessarily mean it's within the boundary of a city. A city has parks and meadows (so it's not all urban area), but on the other hand large shopping malls and industrial areas outside of the town are urbanized too.
But not as old as the Nissan Forgery in Dresden, Germany, Koenigsstrasse. Founded in 1876, as you can see if you walk by. It's still on the gate. Nissan happens to be a common family name wit the sorb people, that live in the eastern part of Saxony.
So all this "my name is older than yours" reminds me of the old aristocratic people, all maintaining huge lists of ancestors to prove that they deserve rights and priviledges. It reminds me of an old joke, where God creates Adam and Eve and then asks them if they wish for anything else. "Yes", replied Adam, "I would like to have the family name of Hardtenstern." God gets angry: "Adam, you are just the second day on earth, and you are already longing for one of the oldest prussian aristocratic names!"
The aristocratic families of old lost their priviledges during a series of revolutions in Europe... shall we wait for the next series to end all the priviledges bound to the names?
As a long time user of a foreign language Windows (Dutch) I can assure you it's almost never a problem. C:\Windows is the same in all language versions, as is C:\Program Files.
No... C:\Program Files is called C:\Programme in some german Versions of Windows. I don't know about current versions (I always use the U.S. Version, as provided by my employer), but I know for sure that Germans tend to have C:\Program Files and C:\Programme on Win95, because installers always forgot about languages.
They do. At least in commercial unices like Solaris.
The Solaris group 14 (sysadmin) contains all users that are allowed to add new users and manage software packages.
They are not allowed to edit single files. Just to start the programs that manage users and software packages (eg: the admintool(1M)).
The reason is easy: Your engine does 380 HP at maybe 6000 rpm (or whatever). But rotating at 2000 rpm for an engine with an ideal torque (the same on the whole range) results in a third of 380 HP. So this ideal engine would put out 126 HP at 2000 rpm. Check this with your papers ;)
;) To get at a speed of 30m/sec (~110km/h, ~70mph) in 30 secs, you would need at least 1,200,000 kg * 30m/sec * 30m/sec / 30sec = 36,000,000 J/sec = 36,000kW! That's quite a difference compared with the power you need to pull the train up 300m in a reasonable time!
In fact it is slightly higher, because at the maximum power the engine often has only 80-90% of its maximal torque, but you get the idea. If you have a shift stick gear you may try to switch into a gear which allows your engine to run at the limit rpm. Your wheels will start to loose grip, independently of the speed you are going at that moment. The maximum horse power a car of 1000kg mass can put onto the road at 65 mph is about 100 HP. (This was an exercise calculation in a physics course I took. I don't remember the exact value, but it was about this range).
So the actual power you are using from your engine is far less than the maximum the engine is able to put on the motor shaft.
There is a railway going up a steep valley starting in the town I was born in. The town lies at 100metres above sealevel. The next stop is in a town at 400metres above sealevel. The distance is 36km, and the train takes about 40mins to get there. A typical train weighs about 1200 metric tons (30 waggons 40 tons each). To pull this train up the 300m in 40mins, how much kW should the engine of the locomotive at least have?
1,200,000 kg * 300m * 9.81 m sec^-2 / 2400 sec ~ 1,500,000 J/sec = 1500 kW.
That's a typical midrange locomotive. But this one is pulling 100 times the weight of your car, trailer and sailboat! So for pulling up your train at the same speed 15kW would be enough.
In fact a locomotive with a train of 1200 metric tons sucks at terms like acceleration
This illustrates what I meant when I said, that hybrid cars may be feasible for pulling heavy loads. You need all the power for accelerating, and if you can get them back by reversing the poles on the electric engine to get the energy back to the batteries, you could easily do with a weak gas engine.
We could get deeper in the details here... but the calculation is somewhat different. You are right if you are assuming that you would use all the power from the freshly loaded batteries.
But in fact they get constantly recharged from the gas engine. So the calculation would be this:
Lets say, the efficency of the gas engine recharging the batteries is about 90%. No, that's not the energy efficency of the used gas, this would be between 30% and 40%. But 90% of the energy you get from the motor shaft. The electric engines drive the wheels at another 90% efficiency. So a typical 4-cyl-engine running with 110 HP (80kW) would constantly load the batteries with 72kW. After one hour it has charged the batteries with 72kWh.
Let's say, the height difference you are climbing is about 1000metes (~3200ft). With a mass of your complete train of about 10000kg (~22000pound) you have to put in a mechanical workload of 10^3*10^4*9,81 kg*m^2/s^2 ~ 10^8 J ~ 30kWh.
So moving up 10 metric tons of weight 1000 metres in an hour requires 30kW mechanical power. You can get about 65kW at your wheels without loosing battery charge. This means, about 35kW to waste on things like air resistance.
So either your engine doesn't run at its peak power (which is for most engines at the rpm limit), or the whole train has a very high air resistance, or it weighs considerably more than 10 metric tons.
Unless there was something very unusual about the '94-'95 diesel Passats, there's no way they could have gotten 70 MPG in US units. Perhaps 70 MPG in imperial gallons, which is ~58.3 MPG in US gallons, but that's still pretty high.
No, it is not about messing up units. When the first TDI engine was testrun back in 1991 (it was a five cylinder 2.5litre engine from the Audi 100, which was sold as Audi 4000 in the U.S.), the testers made a driving along Europe's country roads. With one refill of diesel (20 gallons ~ 74 litres), they got about 4170km (2600mls), thus having a mileage of 130mpg. The car was driving at an average speed of 60km/h (slightly less than 40mph).
Of course this was done under test conditions (higher tyre pressure, no speeding, no traffic jams), but it is good to show the potential.
Towing a boat up to the lakes is another example, although a less extreme one, since most small powerboats only weigh about a ton, including trailer. Sailboats are much heavier.
;)
You may be wrong here. Some of the first hybrids that were going around were hybrid trolley busses. Downtown, where they had a dense net of bus lines they ran on electricity from the cables above. In the outer parts of the town, where the line net got thinner, they ran on gas, supported by the batteries. Often the gas engine was a small car engine of about 50 HP, running all the time at the most efficient rpm (somewhere between the point of highest torque and the point of highest power), thus constantly recharge the batteries.
The actual driving was still done with the electrical engines, often in the 150-200 kW (~200-270 HP) range. But because a bus uses the full power of its engine very seldom (basicly only for acceleration and on steep roads), the 50HP gas engine was big enough to keep the bus running.
So it is not the peak power that's limiting the use of hybrid cars.
There are two big disadvantages from those technologies: a) the complete engine is quite heavy (electrical engine, batteries, gas engine, different gears, generator) and b) It was ok for town busses which returned regularily to the cables downtown and thus additionally refreshened their batteries. It may be not ok for cars outside of the towns
But those were the experiments about 40 years ago. That was the time when generating electrical energy from braking was not fully usable. That was the time when electronically administered gas engines were unfeasible.
Today the tradeoff is this: If we want smaller gas powered engines in the hybrids, we need larger batteries and vice versa. If we want the cars climbing steep and long roads into the mountains, we need either larger gas engines or larger batteries. Batteries are just the puffers used to smooth out the actual power requirements and thus allowing smaller engines.
In other words, Nintendo asked distributors in Germany to bear the cost of their marketing and other expenses in Germany instead of buying from distributors in France and the UK and forcing Nintendo to charge higher prices there to recoup the money spent in Germany.
There is always an incentive for a company to have different prices at different places. This is not per se a Bad Thing [tm]. It always happens, because conditions are different in different regions. It may also be neccessary to have different prices just to recover from the different conditions. There is no law in the EU forbidding that. And the EU doesn't have an issue with companies charging different prices.
But to break local monopolies which prevent competition in the retail market because of closed supply chains, the EU looks into enforcing transparent pricing for grossellers and retailers. If Nintendo would have been able to prove, that their pricing was somewhat connected to the costs they had in shipping, advertising and other expenses, they wouldn't have been charged 149m EUR. No, Nintendo was subsidizing prices in some markets at the cost of other markets to gain competitive advantages. This is called price dumping and is forbidden under all sensitive legislation I know of.
With your `solution' in place, Nintendo now has to raise prices in France and the UK, or else stop spending more money in Germany, leaving their distributors there in the lurch.
No. Nintendo would have been forced to charge fair prices in France and the UK and thus not gaining the competitional advantages they got against other local competitors. So German customers are no longer forced to pay for driving companies out of the french or UK market.