>>This patent was first submitted in 2002, which probably means it was turned down and appealed at least twice. I guess it was the year the "inventor" got admitted "Programming 101" and heard about linked-list for the first time. He was sleeping during the subsequent double linked-list lecture... He noticed something must be missing and "invented" the said data structure. Now, he graduates and is about the time to get a patent.:p
>>I bet mandatory ID cards don't sound like such a bad idea now... I guess someone in the government must be waiting for the people to say something like this. I feel it is just a tactic to push for the proposed national ID card in UK. Maybe embedding a IC tag to the back of the head of everyone (like pets) does not seem to be a very far-fetching idea....
Good point. And sometimes the unauthorised access can be accidential...
My friend has a funny story along the same line. He is a computer scientist and his wife is a computer user (who does not really know/ care about how to set things up). When they moved to their new house, my friend had spent quite a bit of time setting up his wifi equipment (wifi driver issue/ encryption etc). But, his wife just got everything right on her laptop in 5 minutes. A couple of hours down the line, my friend gave up, felt a bit embarrassed and checked how his wife config her laptop. It turns out the WinXP picked a neighbouring unprotected access point. If he did not check, his wife would probably stay the way that was...
If that was the case, the reporter would probably become the victim of the man-vs-robot war. btw, I have been to the above conference and been shown the video upon this. The machine is really cool.
I am quite sure the ratio would be the same or even higher if the wiki critic managed to compare published books with existing copyright material. Many so-called experts are no exception to this especially when they are writing "supportive chapters" for their books (e.g. the video hardware technology review for a software research/professor writing a book about OpenGL vs DirectX)....
Yes and no. Light water reactor is very good at generating electricity. But, if the main interest is heat (e.g. for desalination plant or oil refinery), light water reactor may not be the best design. It is not safe enough to feed the coolant water to an external site, nor colocate a chemical plant with it. Pebble bed modular reactor is a more suitable design. Unfortunately, it is still largely on the drawing board....
I am not trying to tone down the significance of Tienamen Square in 1989. But, as a Chinese, I have to say it is just one of the few important large scale protests ("people's movement") in modern Chinese history (amid most westerner thinks it is the most important one because it is actually the first major event unfold in cable news network aka the rise of CNN). In terms of damage/influence, it is no way comparable to Cultural Revolution for example.
Many teens/ young adults in China have no interest in politics. The environment is a factor but we actually need to accept that many people are just not interested in politics. If you ask your girlfriend about say 5 April 1976 in Tienamen Square, she probably does not have much clue either... Now, let's go to an average US high school. Grab the football captain/ ring leader of the cheering team and show them some of the famous Vietnam war news footage. They may have little idea about its context either.
Lik Sang is a for-profit organisation. It did it brillantly in the last few years. After this lawsuit, its owners can have two choice: 1) keep fighting on the legal battle. Needless to say, it is expensive and no one wants to see all the hard earned retaining capital goes to the lawyers. In addition, they would have to consider the real possiblity that Sony and other evil companies trying to sue them for whatever damages. 2) packing up, dissolve the company and grab whatever that's left....
It is not ideal. But, if you consider this from the viewpoint of the company owner, you may come up with the same conclusion.
Have a trust to our mighty god-like leader of Chairman Kim Jing II! The mother of all technology has just developed a cloaking device that hides the entire NK from the evil google spying satellites.
Actually, I like the cooking robot better. I have seen the photo of the robot in some Chinese forum. It was released in a few days ago at the same time as the annual tradeshow in Guangzhou. It looks like a large fridge with two arms. It can do stir fried etc. It has been programmed to cook hundreds of local dishes. While it may not be that advanced in terms of robotics, the idea is just so cool. I would definitely try that out if there is a robot theme restaurant. In the longer run, it can actually be a very sucessful commerical project (just imagine a vending machine style self serve restaurant that operates 24hr in places like airport). I look forward for that.
While we may argue that nuclear weapon is not really that hard to build nowadays, I doubt if NK has the technology to build neutron bomb without going through the atomic/hydrogen bomb stages. Missile and nuclear technology are quite different from each other. But, the failed attempt to fire its improved missiles in July is still a good illustration about the actual capacity of NK...
Even if that's not a chemical explosion, the low yield may well be caused by incomplete/ partially failed nuclear test... According to open material like wikipedia and federation of scientist, for example, using Pu-240 (the more common form of plutonium exists in the spent fuel of civilan reactor) can cause early firing => unexpectedly low yield... It may well be the explanation.
Disclaimer: I am not a nuclear scientist despite of my nickname....
The yield of the claimed nuclear test is something like 0.5kT. Fertiliser explosion is less powerful than TNT. Say, it needs 1kT fertiliser.... 1000ton is just 25 road truck worth of fertilisers (you won't move that around with a van/ute).... Consider the testing region has many mines, just 25 truck movement across several months won't be that noticable.
The Bush administration has failed twice in military action: invade a country that has little point for the action, and leave a lunatic free to buy his bomb (and possibly sell that in black market). If US bombed the North Korea nuclear facilities in 2003, I have strong doubt whether NK can rebuild them (consider its isolation and weak industrial base). A lot of these facilities are modification to the original Soviet research reactor built in 1960s.... http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/NK/index.ht ml
Of course, people would talk about the China factor as if China really wants to protect NK. Let's face it China has zero reason for a NK armed with nuke (as this triggers Japan, S Korea or even Taiwan to have nuke). The fact is China just does not want US Army to station right next to its border. It is the sort of communication that can be established before hand. For a surgical operation like the one in 1981 in Iraq (Israel bombed Iraq reactor), no one will really care. In fact, I don't think it is too late to do something like that now...
The movie star kidnapping event is a pretty conclusive case to illustrate Kim Jong-il is clinically a psychopath. Anyone in the society who did that will send to the mental ward.... Saddam Hussein etc are just despot: they may torture people, they may be brutal, they may indulge themselves with luxury, women etc. But, not in the same way.
Nukes are the most useless weapon any country can have
This statement applies to every single nation (e.g. Iran, Iraq, Syria or even semi-nation) in the planet apart from North Korea. He is the second worse person than Bin Laden to own a nuke. Kim may not be schizophrenia, but really has some serious personality defect. From all those kidnap deals in the 1980 (including the most brazen case in which he captured a South Korean movie star because he watched a movie....) you can have a glimpse of his crazy dark mind. This type of person has a mentality that he is on top of the world and should not bound by rules. He may be deadly rational, but his goal can be very dark (like maximise his own definition of fun -- like manipulation, power and damage). Suppose he knows he has got cancer tomorrow, he probably will just push the nuke button just for the sake/fun of it.
>> Why is it taking everyone else so long to innitiate a recall? Simple reason: you need a real world victim to force Sony to foot the bill. Or else, Sony will act as if nothing has happened.
According to various chinese news media, the significant of EAST experimental reactor is two fold: first it is all super conducting, second, it adopts a toroid with a non-circular cross section. So far, EAST's reactor design is most similar to ITER. Yes, its role is kind of supportive and serves as training ground/ testbed for ITER.
The Intel competition is not really targetting for amateur, but companies who are already in the field. They probably want someone to make a cool but not necessary odd-looking box... Many generic PC cases are produced in China by small factories. A set of customised machine tools cost big money. Generic biege boxes allow a lot of standardisation. A lot of small components (e.g. the cover of the DVD slot, various plug and sockets) can be bought from the factory next door.
For something like the shuttle PC case, small factories do not have the resources to manufacture because of the tooling issue. Intel wants to see if anyone has this sort of cool idea in mind. If so, their prize money can possibly help launching a new line of PC product.
In general, I agree with the statement about racing to the bottom in terms of production cost. On the other hand, we are talking about just one culprit here: Sony. Putting a Sony battery in does not seem to be a cost saving measure... Failed quality control in Sony is another matter.
On the other hand, if you are talking about fuel cell for laptop, you don't really want to use anhydrous ammonia. It is damned lethal esp in confined space (read: in aircraft)... Many people seem to overlook the danger of ammnonia because they've handled diluted (5-10%) ammnonia solution at home. But, in gaseous form, it is even more toxic than carbon monoxide. The concentration that is Immediately Dangerous to Life and Health (IDLH) for ammmonia is 500ppm whereas it is 1200ppm for carbon monoxide.
The smell of ammonia is a good warning. However, it does not always mean you can run away quickly... Once upon a time, I was almost choked by a small amount of ammonia when I spent my summer working in an industrial control lab. Some guy tripped the fuse when I was working in the fume hood. I inhaled the stream of ammonia released by the reaction before realising that. I could barely speak for almost five minutes afterwards.
From an engineering point of view, any type of fancy incineration/ oxidation/ thermal cracking process has to solve two problems. First, some toxic materials are toxic in elemental form (e.g. heavy metal). High temperature alone is not a solution (unless you are talking about nuclear fusion sort of high temperature;-) ). Second, many chlorinated/ fluorinated organic compound (PVC, Telfon etc) may be broken down to simple molecules at high temperature. But, the can readily recombine to something more nasty in the flue. The linked article does not provide enough details to judge whether the proposed system has already solve these two problems.
I agree thermal cracking type of approach may be the best way to deal with waste dispoal problem. I've been a seminar offered by one of chief scientist from US Naval Research Laboratory. It was about the safe disposal of out-of-date (and possibly leaking) chemical weapon. One of the leading method is by thermal cracking using oxygen-rich steam (reacting with steam + O2 at high pressure and >1000C is no different from very efficient burning...). Due to the fact that the leaking chemical weapon are very nasty to start with, we don't really care the by-product of some polychlorinated compound.... but, the large volume of not-so-toxic household waste is another matter that we need to evaluate what is the better alternative (landfill vs the proposed method).
And the funny point is Sony Vaio seems to have no battery problem. Are they using IBM battery of something??? I am glad that Apple now recall the laptop batteries. Now, it is quite obvious that it is not the Dell engineers, but Sony who is at fault.
Apart from the prestigious factor, I don't think the quality justify Sony's price tag nowadays. The playstation series is still good. Other than that, Sony is a tech and trend follower rather than leader. Its quality is really just so and so (btw, we got to add one more recent recalls for Sony product: it is their CCD array for digital camera. My friend is doing research in computer vision which uses high end firewire camera (£500 per unit). It uses Sony CCD but the camera body was manufactured by some specialist company. The cameras are used in pretty controlled indoor environment. Since he started his project, the cameras failed one after another one. Every single day in the last 12 months, at least one or a few of his cameras were taken off-line for repair... At the end, they figured that was Sony's fault (again). CCDs are now replaced and life back to normal...
Slashdot Mirror
The Register people seems to be a bit more clue up than the techworld people.
m /
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/23/rvd_syste
Obviously, Yes! However, how many techies have the necessary organisation and human skill to climb up the corporate ladder?
>>This patent was first submitted in 2002, which probably means it was turned down and appealed at least twice. :p
I guess it was the year the "inventor" got admitted "Programming 101" and heard about linked-list for the first time. He was sleeping during the subsequent double linked-list lecture... He noticed something must be missing and "invented" the said data structure. Now, he graduates and is about the time to get a patent.
>>I bet mandatory ID cards don't sound like such a bad idea now...
I guess someone in the government must be waiting for the people to say something like this. I feel it is just a tactic to push for the proposed national ID card in UK. Maybe embedding a IC tag to the back of the head of everyone (like pets) does not seem to be a very far-fetching idea....
Good point. And sometimes the unauthorised access can be accidential...
My friend has a funny story along the same line. He is a computer scientist and his wife is a computer user (who does not really know/ care about how to set things up). When they moved to their new house, my friend had spent quite a bit of time setting up his wifi equipment (wifi driver issue/ encryption etc). But, his wife just got everything right on her laptop in 5 minutes. A couple of hours down the line, my friend gave up, felt a bit embarrassed and checked how his wife config her laptop. It turns out the WinXP picked a neighbouring unprotected access point. If he did not check, his wife would probably stay the way that was...
At first, I think they are talking about this:f
http://www.araa.asn.au/acra/acra2003/papers/12.pd
If that was the case, the reporter would probably become the victim of the man-vs-robot war. btw, I have been to the above conference and been shown the video upon this. The machine is really cool.
I am quite sure the ratio would be the same or even higher if the wiki critic managed to compare published books with existing copyright material. Many so-called experts are no exception to this especially when they are writing "supportive chapters" for their books (e.g. the video hardware technology review for a software research/professor writing a book about OpenGL vs DirectX)....
Yes and no. Light water reactor is very good at generating electricity. But, if the main interest is heat (e.g. for desalination plant or oil refinery), light water reactor may not be the best design. It is not safe enough to feed the coolant water to an external site, nor colocate a chemical plant with it. Pebble bed modular reactor is a more suitable design. Unfortunately, it is still largely on the drawing board....
I am not trying to tone down the significance of Tienamen Square in 1989. But, as a Chinese, I have to say it is just one of the few important large scale protests ("people's movement") in modern Chinese history (amid most westerner thinks it is the most important one because it is actually the first major event unfold in cable news network aka the rise of CNN). In terms of damage/influence, it is no way comparable to Cultural Revolution for example.
Many teens/ young adults in China have no interest in politics. The environment is a factor but we actually need to accept that many people are just not interested in politics. If you ask your girlfriend about say 5 April 1976 in Tienamen Square, she probably does not have much clue either... Now, let's go to an average US high school. Grab the football captain/ ring leader of the cheering team and show them some of the famous Vietnam war news footage. They may have little idea about its context either.
Lik Sang is a for-profit organisation. It did it brillantly in the last few years. After this lawsuit, its owners can have two choice: 1) keep fighting on the legal battle. Needless to say, it is expensive and no one wants to see all the hard earned retaining capital goes to the lawyers. In addition, they would have to consider the real possiblity that Sony and other evil companies trying to sue them for whatever damages. 2) packing up, dissolve the company and grab whatever that's left....
It is not ideal. But, if you consider this from the viewpoint of the company owner, you may come up with the same conclusion.
Have a trust to our mighty god-like leader of Chairman Kim Jing II! The mother of all technology has just developed a cloaking device that hides the entire NK from the evil google spying satellites.
Actually, I like the cooking robot better. I have seen the photo of the robot in some Chinese forum. It was released in a few days ago at the same time as the annual tradeshow in Guangzhou. It looks like a large fridge with two arms. It can do stir fried etc. It has been programmed to cook hundreds of local dishes. While it may not be that advanced in terms of robotics, the idea is just so cool. I would definitely try that out if there is a robot theme restaurant. In the longer run, it can actually be a very sucessful commerical project (just imagine a vending machine style self serve restaurant that operates 24hr in places like airport). I look forward for that.
s ts_Develop_Improved_Cooking_Robot_999.html
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Chinese_Scienti
While we may argue that nuclear weapon is not really that hard to build nowadays, I doubt if NK has the technology to build neutron bomb without going through the atomic/hydrogen bomb stages. Missile and nuclear technology are quite different from each other. But, the failed attempt to fire its improved missiles in July is still a good illustration about the actual capacity of NK...
Even if that's not a chemical explosion, the low yield may well be caused by incomplete/ partially failed nuclear test... According to open material like wikipedia and federation of scientist, for example, using Pu-240 (the more common form of plutonium exists in the spent fuel of civilan reactor) can cause early firing => unexpectedly low yield... It may well be the explanation.
Disclaimer: I am not a nuclear scientist despite of my nickname....
The yield of the claimed nuclear test is something like 0.5kT. Fertiliser explosion is less powerful than TNT. Say, it needs 1kT fertiliser.... 1000ton is just 25 road truck worth of fertilisers (you won't move that around with a van/ute).... Consider the testing region has many mines, just 25 truck movement across several months won't be that noticable.
The Bush administration has failed twice in military action: invade a country that has little point for the action, and leave a lunatic free to buy his bomb (and possibly sell that in black market). If US bombed the North Korea nuclear facilities in 2003, I have strong doubt whether NK can rebuild them (consider its isolation and weak industrial base). A lot of these facilities are modification to the original Soviet research reactor built in 1960s....t ml
http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/NK/index.h
Of course, people would talk about the China factor as if China really wants to protect NK. Let's face it China has zero reason for a NK armed with nuke (as this triggers Japan, S Korea or even Taiwan to have nuke). The fact is China just does not want US Army to station right next to its border. It is the sort of communication that can be established before hand. For a surgical operation like the one in 1981 in Iraq (Israel bombed Iraq reactor), no one will really care. In fact, I don't think it is too late to do something like that now...
The movie star kidnapping event is a pretty conclusive case to illustrate Kim Jong-il is clinically a psychopath. Anyone in the society who did that will send to the mental ward.... Saddam Hussein etc are just despot: they may torture people, they may be brutal, they may indulge themselves with luxury, women etc. But, not in the same way.
7 197.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/190
This statement applies to every single nation (e.g. Iran, Iraq, Syria or even semi-nation) in the planet apart from North Korea. He is the second worse person than Bin Laden to own a nuke. Kim may not be schizophrenia, but really has some serious personality defect. From all those kidnap deals in the 1980 (including the most brazen case in which he captured a South Korean movie star because he watched a movie....) you can have a glimpse of his crazy dark mind. This type of person has a mentality that he is on top of the world and should not bound by rules. He may be deadly rational, but his goal can be very dark (like maximise his own definition of fun -- like manipulation, power and damage). Suppose he knows he has got cancer tomorrow, he probably will just push the nuke button just for the sake/fun of it.
>> Why is it taking everyone else so long to innitiate a recall?
Simple reason: you need a real world victim to force Sony to foot the bill. Or else, Sony will act as if nothing has happened.
According to various chinese news media, the significant of EAST experimental reactor is two fold: first it is all super conducting, second, it adopts a toroid with a non-circular cross section. So far, EAST's reactor design is most similar to ITER. Yes, its role is kind of supportive and serves as training ground/ testbed for ITER.
The Intel competition is not really targetting for amateur, but companies who are already in the field. They probably want someone to make a cool but not necessary odd-looking box... Many generic PC cases are produced in China by small factories. A set of customised machine tools cost big money. Generic biege boxes allow a lot of standardisation. A lot of small components (e.g. the cover of the DVD slot, various plug and sockets) can be bought from the factory next door.
For something like the shuttle PC case, small factories do not have the resources to manufacture because of the tooling issue. Intel wants to see if anyone has this sort of cool idea in mind. If so, their prize money can possibly help launching a new line of PC product.
You miss the point: it is just another type of advertisment board.
In general, I agree with the statement about racing to the bottom in terms of production cost. On the other hand, we are talking about just one culprit here: Sony. Putting a Sony battery in does not seem to be a cost saving measure... Failed quality control in Sony is another matter.
On the other hand, if you are talking about fuel cell for laptop, you don't really want to use anhydrous ammonia. It is damned lethal esp in confined space (read: in aircraft)... Many people seem to overlook the danger of ammnonia because they've handled diluted (5-10%) ammnonia solution at home. But, in gaseous form, it is even more toxic than carbon monoxide. The concentration that is Immediately Dangerous to Life and Health (IDLH) for ammmonia is 500ppm whereas it is 1200ppm for carbon monoxide.
The smell of ammonia is a good warning. However, it does not always mean you can run away quickly... Once upon a time, I was almost choked by a small amount of ammonia when I spent my summer working in an industrial control lab. Some guy tripped the fuse when I was working in the fume hood. I inhaled the stream of ammonia released by the reaction before realising that. I could barely speak for almost five minutes afterwards.
From an engineering point of view, any type of fancy incineration/ oxidation/ thermal cracking process has to solve two problems. First, some toxic materials are toxic in elemental form (e.g. heavy metal). High temperature alone is not a solution (unless you are talking about nuclear fusion sort of high temperature ;-) ). Second, many chlorinated/ fluorinated organic compound (PVC, Telfon etc) may be broken down to simple molecules at high temperature. But, the can readily recombine to something more nasty in the flue. The linked article does not provide enough details to judge whether the proposed system has already solve these two problems.
I agree thermal cracking type of approach may be the best way to deal with waste dispoal problem. I've been a seminar offered by one of chief scientist from US Naval Research Laboratory. It was about the safe disposal of out-of-date (and possibly leaking) chemical weapon. One of the leading method is by thermal cracking using oxygen-rich steam (reacting with steam + O2 at high pressure and >1000C is no different from very efficient burning...). Due to the fact that the leaking chemical weapon are very nasty to start with, we don't really care the by-product of some polychlorinated compound.... but, the large volume of not-so-toxic household waste is another matter that we need to evaluate what is the better alternative (landfill vs the proposed method).
And the funny point is Sony Vaio seems to have no battery problem. Are they using IBM battery of something??? I am glad that Apple now recall the laptop batteries. Now, it is quite obvious that it is not the Dell engineers, but Sony who is at fault.
Apart from the prestigious factor, I don't think the quality justify Sony's price tag nowadays. The playstation series is still good. Other than that, Sony is a tech and trend follower rather than leader. Its quality is really just so and so (btw, we got to add one more recent recalls for Sony product: it is their CCD array for digital camera. My friend is doing research in computer vision which uses high end firewire camera (£500 per unit). It uses Sony CCD but the camera body was manufactured by some specialist company. The cameras are used in pretty controlled indoor environment. Since he started his project, the cameras failed one after another one. Every single day in the last 12 months, at least one or a few of his cameras were taken off-line for repair... At the end, they figured that was Sony's fault (again). CCDs are now replaced and life back to normal...