Thunderbolt is designed more to replace eSATA and FireWire than USB.
Neither one of which has taken the world by storm... Frankly we don't really need a replacement for either of those. They're fine but niche. There is more to having a successful interface than transfer rates. Cost to manufacture, legacy hardware compatibility, current equipment needs, licensing terms, customer demand and more all play a role. The opportunity for Thunderbolt is if it can combine the video (usually VGA/DVI/HDMI) and peripheral ports (usually USB) into a single interface. USB replaces several types of cables but it isn't quite capable enough to replace dedicated video cables. It's not clear that USB3 will be fast enough either. If Thunderbolt is cheap enough to manufacture and has a performance advantage that lets people further reduce the number of different cables they need, then it will have a chance.
What is wanted is something that is fast, cheap, compatible, reliable, easy to configure and minimizes the number of different cables we need. Frankly most PCs should ideally have no more than two cable types - one high power cable to power the device (when needed) and one type of data cable that can also handle low voltage DC power needs. Nothing wrong with using specialized cables for specific performance needs but that doesn't apply to most of us most of the time. I don't really care if the data cable is USB, Firewire, Thunderbolt or something else entirely but there is a lot to be gained by standardizing on a suitable general purpose data cable. USB comes closest to this ideal right now. (Yes Firewire could do the job but it's too expensive and lost that battle with USB long ago) Perhaps Thunderbolt will take it the next step. Only time will tell.
Wrong, it was the decision of accountants. You see, they decided, and management OK'd
You contradicted your own argument. If "management OK'd" then that is management's decision. Accountants do not have the authority to do anything without management approval. They may want to do it but management can say no and management gets the final word. Management apparently did not say no in this case. That might (or might not) be a stupid decision but the responsibility for EVERYTHING in a company falls to management ultimately. Accounting has no more authority to take engineering equipment than engineering has the authority to take accounting gear unless management approves.
The accountants might have won the argument but it is management's decision at the end of the day. Good, bad or indifferent.
Since accounting gets the salary paid, the bills signed and so on, without management there, they'd be able to do this anyway, therefore management were not necessary.
Accountants do not (normally) sign the checks - management does. In fact letting an accountant sign the checks is a REALLY bad idea. (Can you say embezzlement? I knew you could) Except for the smallest companies accountants normally have their duties separated into dedicated functions to prevent fraud. Accountants do not have any authority aside from what they are granted by management. They can make recommendations which might be self serving but management ultimately makes the decisions. If they countermand the decisions of management, that is grounds for dismissal.
If the company is so tight fisted that they can't splurge $150-$180 for another monitor, then it's time to move to another company.
You've never worked for a startup I take it? I've been in plenty of companies where $150 might make the difference between meeting payroll or firing staff. Cash can be really tight in a small company and there might not be any excess to spend on equipment that might be nice but not absolutely necessary. Not saying that is the case with this particular company but it isn't remotely hard to find examples where there isn't any excess money for optional equipment.
Wrong. That is a decision of management. Unless the manager and the accountant are the same person (rarely a good idea) fiascoes like the one you outline cannot happen because of accountants. The sole job of an accountant is to keep track of how the money in the company is spent. Their job is NOT to decide how to spend the money. That is the role of management. If the two jobs get combined, that is a potential recipe for problems and an indication the company is poorly structured but it isn't a problem with accounting per-se.
At a certain point, the accountants can become people who mostly specialize in making sure you have to expend ridiculous energy justifying what it is you do in order to do your job.
That just makes them bad at their job. That has nothing to do with accounting or accountants in general. The job of an accountant is to keep track of the money. This can be done efficiently or inefficiently just like any other job. A good accountant is incredibly valuable and a real asset to the company. A bad one... well, you know how that goes.
Oh, and I should mention that sometimes accountants ask you for information for very good reasons which you may not fully understand. Just like they don't really fully comprehend your job, don't think for a moment you fully comprehend theirs. Part of the job of an accountant is to watch for fraud and waste. I've seen plenty of cases where departments try to game the budgeting system to get resources they don't really need. The more departments try to game the system, the unfortunate but natural response is additional red tape. Obviously it's quite possible have too much bureaucracy but it is also just as bad to have too little. It's a balance that is sometimes hard to get right.
Disclosure: I am both a degreed engineer and a certified accountant. I happen to know both sides of this classic conflict quite well. A tip I give all engineers is to learn as much accounting as you can. It's FAR easier to get the equipment and resources you want if you can speak the language of finance.
Because, like securities, patents are by definition an asset. Assets can be bought and sold. Doesn't matter what kind of asset either. You can sell receivables, inventory, property, securities, debt, and any other kind of asset you care to mention. There is absolutely no reason to make a distinction for patents.
They should be non-transferable unless the case is one of a certain company buying another.
Nonsense. Patents are an asset. If they are more valuable to someone else than to me I should have every right to sell or license that asset to another party. Don't conflate how an asset is used with whether it should be allowed to be sold. There is nothing wrong with buying a knife to use for cooking. Use it for stabbing someone else and now we have a problem. Same with patents - what matters is how they are used, not how they are acquired. A patent troll who's sole "product" is litigation is to my mind like the person who buys a knife with the intent to stab someone rather than to cook.
If the patent is worthwhile, the engineer will have no trouble securing funding for a new company dedicated to producing the solar cell.
As someone who has been involved with fund raising for startup businesses I feel comfortable saying that is nonsense. Just because you have a good idea does not even remotely ensure that securing funding will be easy or ensure a return on investment. Even if you can raise the money that doesn't ensure you'll get the money on favorable terms.
It was an agonizing moment: a developer arrived at work to realize his second monitor had been taken (given to the accounting dept., to add insult to injury).
Why the needless troll for accountants? You don't think keeping track of the money in a company is an important task? You really should wake up to the notion that business is a team sport and ALL the jobs matter. Accounting, maintenance, marketing, sales, production, engineering and the rest ALL matter. Only an idiot thinks that their job is somehow the only one that matters.
But is this just the posturing of pampered coders, or is this much screen real estate really a requirement for today's developers?"
Is it needed? No. Is it useful? Frequently. It also depends on how high the resolution of your primary monitor is. If you have a 2560X1920 monitor, odds are a second monitor is more or less superfluous. If you have a 1024x768 monitor, a second monitor could be very very helpful.
Nevertheless, the idea of physically carrying all of your data and associated programs with you in a compact format that you can access anywhere is a very appealing idea.
Agreed but we already have that or something heading quickly in that direction with smartphones. Just being mobile isn't enough. I can carry all my applications on a USB flash drive but that doesn't make them especially useful. I had a Nokia "smartphone" (an E70) that theoretically could do almost everything an iPhone could do but the interface was so bad that it was basically useless for any real work. The interface matters. Smartphones are going to continue to get more powerful and should serve exactly the purpose you outline above presuming they don't already.
They don't need to have both if one device really will serve both needs.
You left out the word "well". It needs to serve both needs well. My smartphone already is (theoretically) capable of pretty much everything this device could do AND it makes phone calls. In time your phone probably will be able to plug into a much larger monitor. Furthermore Windows was very much NOT designed to be used on a 4 inch screen. I've got really good eyesight and can't imaging doing anything productive on it that my smartphone can't already do.
The iPods already have a prescident for this. There's a sort of "tablet" shell that you can buy for an iPod that will give it a bigger tablet-like screen.
Even taking your word for it I have never seen on in person or know of anyone who has such a device. I can't even think of a reason why anyone would want an oversized iPod. I wanted that sort of a thing I'd just buy an iPad which has the larger screen and does more besides.
We are already carrying around more "smarts" in our phones than we used to have on our overpowered PCs.
Which is why things are converging to the phone and not to the PC.
Costs too much for what is a niche product to begin with. Every option that is offered costs extra to produce and we're not talking small amounts of money either. Part of the reason Apple is able to be so profitable is because they offer relatively few variations and so don't incur the manufacturing, testing, support, logistics and marketing costs.
A computer that could be plugged into a more powerful computer, where it would either use the more powerful comuter's resources or just the more powerful computer's display and input features.
Why not just use a more powerful computer to begin with? To work you would need bigger displays available in every location you plan to visit which just isn't likely to happen. Want to work from the local coffee shop? A laptop immediately becomes a better option. You probably are already carrying a smartphone anyway so why carry a redundant compact device that can't make calls?
I can already plug my netbook into a much higher resolution screen and connect a keyboard and mouse. If I need real horsepower of a genuinely powerful desktop machine I'm not going to waste time (and additional $) with some bizarre quasi-mobile form factor. I just can't see this sort of device being an improvement over what is already available for anybody,
That would be very cool.
It just sounds cool. In reality it would be fairly limiting with little benefit over existing technology for all but a very few people.
It could possibly serve as a business person's primary PC upon which the employee simply connect this device up to larger peripherals when in the office and simply uses it as a hand held device on the go.
They'll need to have a cell phone and a computer anyway so why use this when you could either have a laptop or a desktop at work and use your cell phone on the go? This idea provides lots of limitations and design compromises without any significant advantages over what is already available. There might be a few teeny tiny niche markets for this sort of device but frankly I don't see much point to it. If I must run Windows, a netbook is pretty damn portable and can be plugged into a larger monitor/keyboard. I actually do that and it works great but is still pretty usable when I'm carrying it. I can't really see a Windows machine with a 4 inch screen improving on what I can do with my smartphone and netbook.
And I've heard that it's possible to make your own HDMI cable, just like you can make your own Ethernet cable, which would probably be even cheaper.
You can make almost any cable if you are willing to invest in the tooling. You won't save any money doing it however unless you do it for a living. Just buy your HDMI cables over the internet for reasonable amounts of $ and you'll be fine.
Unfortunately, if you want cables et al that are not complete junk, you often have no choice except for the "audiophile" stuff.
Bullshit. If you think that then you almost certainly don't understand the engineering involved. I do the accounting and some engineering at a wire harness manufacturer. The "audiophile" cables are always hugely overpriced and normally over engineered compared to what is actually needed.
Not everyone who buys that stuff is an idiot, some just want a solid cable that will last for 20 years and will not break during normal use.
No, just 99.9999% of them are idiots. I've got cables that are older than I am that continue to work just fine "during normal use" and aren't made of unobtanium and unicorn farts.
Gold electroplating doesn't add a whole lot to the cost, although it's often used as an excuse to jack up the prices.
I'm an accountant in a company that makes wire harnesses so I'm more qualified than most to comment on this. Gold plated contacts typically cost 3-4X the more mundane alternatives in most cases. At retail the prices get so jacked up that you probably won't notice the difference but gold contacts are quite a bit more expensive at wholesale.
Oh, and for the VAST majority of applications gold contacts are a complete waste of money.
...coal is actually WORSE than nuclear in both radiation output and toxic byproducts that need disposal
Ummm, not under a meltdown condition it isn't. That's only true if both types of plants are functioning properly.
Yes absent a Fukushima type disaster, coal is in many respects dirtier than nuclear, particularly on a climatic level. The problem is that nuclear accidents can and do occur and the local severity of those can be FAR worse than any disaster from a malfunctioning coal plant. So until cleaner sources can scale up (solar, wind) or be developed (fusion) your choice is either a slow poisoning and climatic change by coal or the risk of a nuclear catastrophe. Some choice...
I don't see any anti-nuclear idiot bitching about coal.
You haven't read much of the environmental movement's literature have you? Coal, oil, gas and nuclear are all bad as far as they are concerned. And to be honest, they have a point. Each of our major sources of electric power comes with significant environmental (not to mention geopolitical) problems. The only way I see to really clean up our power sources is to heavily utilize solar and wind and develop fusion (yeah, yeah, I know...) for the base load. Battery technology will need to improve as well. We would still need hydrocarbons for other purposes (manufacturing, lubricants, lots of other products) but we want to minimize its use as much as possible. Same with fission.
Until we replace them with modern, safer reactor designs or forms of renewable energy, there will be a danger of another Fukushima/Chernobyl type of catastrophe.
All fission plants carry significant risks no matter how "modern" the design. They might be potentially safer but they won't be perfectly safe. Newer designs have the potential to be every bit as dangerous as older designs without adequate risk management. The only difference is that the failure modes change.
The risk can never be zero so the question becomes what level of risk is acceptable? Then based on the level of assumed risk, what mitigation plans are to be used? Fukushima occurred because the risk assessment and mitigation plans were inadequate. The plant (even with its older design) could have been adequately safeguarded even from a natural disaster of this scale. Our engineers have that ability. It survived the earthquake just fine but they failed to adequately protect against large tsunamis and the design of their seawall and backup generators did not adequately account for that risk.
Does this further erode the argument that Fukushima was just an isolated incident in the 'modern' nuclear power age?"
The principles of reliable and robust engineering and risk management do not change no matter how "modern" the device. Fukushima was fundamentally not a failure of technology but one of risk assessment and mitigation. They knew that an earthquake and tsunami combination was a virtual inevitability but they failed to build the seawall protections and backup generator system to withstand the most severe events that could reasonably occur. 9.0 earthquakes occur fairly regularly along the Pacific rim. It was absolutely possible for engineers to build adequate protections but for various reasons (cost undoubtedly among them) they chose not to. Despite the design being an older design the problems at Fukushima still could have been prevented with adequate backup systems and/or improved seawalls.
When auditing risks you evaluate three things: Frequency, Severity, and Detectability. When talking about nuclear plants severe events are fairly rare but the potential severity is extremely high. That's potentially ok if the risk is detectible but as Fukushima illustrates, sometimes flaws are only obvious to the people looking after the fact. Complexity typically increases frequency of problems and decreases their detectability. Nuclear plants are unquestionably complex and some parts of them are difficult to evaluate for problems.
The problem with the analysis is that it's still possible to underestimate or even completely miss a failure mode. The engineers at Fukushima clearly understood the severity part of the equation but they seem to have underestimated the frequency or likelihood of a 15 meter high tsunami and then failed to develop adequate mitigation plans. Sadly this sort of mistake is all too common in every human endeavor.
These are old reactors and due to "environmentalist" blocking of building new (safe) ones they are kept functioning. Is it strange they start to rot?
There is no such thing as a 100% safe nuclear (fission) plant. These plants are designed by people and even the best intentioned people make mistakes. We might decide the risks are acceptable but there will be risks. Newer designs have the potential to be safer (safer not safe) but without adequate risk analysis and maintenance, they can be every bit as dangerous as older designs.
I post on Facebook what I choose to post. Therefore, Facebook posts are not a privacy violation...
Unless you choose to post something about ME without my permission. What? You thought your feelings on what is private are the only ones that matter? Your postings can affect other peoples privacy too so it isn't just as simple as what you think. I really don't want to have to police your postings to ensure my privacy.
Yes, stupid people will post stupid things that allow others to invade their privacy, but you can't legislate away stupidity.
In the case of Facebook you absolutely can legislate away stupidity by shutting Facebook down. A terrible solution but it would work.
By contrast, I don't choose what information my water meter collects.
Sure you do. You decide when to turn the water on and off.
Disclosure of private information should require explicit consent.
So when are you going to get my consent to post a picture of me on Facebook?
Actually, I can't figure out why a mouse beat out something like this: I mean, schools dropping handwriting is stupid, but that being a reason for this being a failure is equally stupid.
Mice are cheaper to make and work very well as a pointing device. A pen serves both as a pointing device and data input device, but does neither exceptionally well for many uses. A pen/styles was designed for a different technology (paper) which works very well but is not (usually) better as a pointing device for a computer, nor is it (usually) better for (non-math) data entry than a keyboard. Computers use two devices which are individually better at certain tasks than a pen/stylus when the interface is designed for them. A pen centric interface could be designed but the economics of such a device remain unproven.
That said, I'd love to see some well designed smart pens that aren't A) huge, B) require special paper, C) work with tablet like the iPad. I think a device like the iPad would be ideal for students (and pretty useful in the professional world) if you could take notes on it with a pen/stylus. However no one has come up with a device optimized for that purpose. The Windows TabletPCs were not optimized for pen input and the current touchscreen tablets are designed for fingers. Both useful in their way but hard to take good notes in a physics class with them.
how many here have had to create an electronic signature with a mouse?
Why would I do that?
Or, for that matter, wanted to draw or trace something in, say, Gimp?
GIMP isn't designed for drawing. Sure you can do some crude drawing but it's not what it is for. There are plenty of applications which are meant for drawing if that is what you want to do.
Government forces Baltimore Gas&Electric to share its electrical system with other companies, thereby giving me multiple choices.
Power is essential. Living without power is possible but highly uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous. Cable TV is entertainment. You can live without cable TV. I have for nearly a decade now and quite frankly have little interest in contributing tax dollars to support your TV viewing habits.
Or the government could own the 50-fiber bundle itself, in the same way government owns the road
Governments frequently do not own the road. Many roads, bridges, rail lines, airports, power and telecom lines, and other critical infrastructure is privately owned and (sometimes) regulated. When governments do own infrastructure, they do not do so because it is cost effective, they do it because no one else can or will. There (usually) is no money to be made in owning roads unless it is a toll road. There is obviously plenty of money to be made in cable television. The fact that you want a better price is unsurprising and also irrelevant.
A 50 fiber bundle is unbelievably wasteful and expensive. I'm pretty sure you have no idea what you are talking about with that proposal. That is a VAST amount of bandwidth. A single fiber cable carries a tremendous amount of data - far more than most people actually will use.
Just as we have a free market with cars, we could have a free market with CATV providers.
I have at least 4 TV service providers available to me where I live. (Comcast, Dish Network, DirectTV and AT&T) Plus I have access to the full content of the internet and a variety of pay-per-use services like Netflix. While it isn't as competitive as I'd like it to be, it's hardly the single provider monopoly of yesterday.
Easy, just sue the cable company for fraud if they do choke it off.
And by the time the wheels of justice have spun, Netflix would very likely be out of business. Lawsuits take years to accomplish and it's not uncommon for the injured party to go bankrupt before a verdict can be rendered.
I'm 35, German and can't recall a power outage because I never experienced one.
I don't know much about the German grid but a few facts come to mind.
Germany is roughly 357,000 km^2 which is a bit larger than New Mexico and smaller in area than 4 US states. The sheer area the US grid has to cover is vastly larger and the population density is far lower in the US. This means wires have to go farther to reach each person and each person is more expensive to serve on average. For cost reasons, much of the US power grid is necessarily more exposed than it might otherwise be.
Many areas of the US are significantly more prone to severe weather than Germany. Hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, are regular occurrences in some parts of the US. Some areas also experience normal conditions much more severe than anything in Germany - there is no German equivalent to the Sonora or Mojave deserts in the southwest US. Germany does have some of the Alps but that is not nearly as high or vast as the Rocky mountains. Combined with the distances mentioned above, reliable service is necessarily more challenging.
Germany's grid was basically rebuilt after WWII whereas parts of the US grid are notably older.
I'm not sure of this but Germany apparently has separated electricity production from electricity distribution. In the US, the two are typically owned by the same company. This creates a disincentive for US power companies to invest in improving infrastructure because that is expensive.
Perhaps you have never experienced a power outage (I'm dubious of your claim but perhaps it is true) but if you are going to compare the US grid to the German grid, you need to understand the differences in what the engineers on this side of the pond face.
That depends where you live. Around here the power is rarely out for more than a moment, and even those times are infrequent.
Power in general is quite reliable in most of the US in the sense that power outages are infrequent and normally short - rarely more than a few hours a year most places absent a major natural disaster. Nevertheless, I am not aware of any location in the US that is not subject to periodic power outages and (primarily due to cost) much of the infrastructure is not installed in the most reliable methods possible. I've had two power outages of several hours duration (due to storms) in the last 9 months and at least a dozen short power interruptions of a few seconds. Those could have been avoided with buried cables but buried cables are expensive so the more vulnerable above ground system is used. It's a tradeoff but it's unclear if the cost/benefit ratio is optimized.
My point isn't that the power in the US is bad - it's actually amazingly good. Rather, my point is that the power system in the US isn't nearly as good as it could be. Our currently available technology significantly exceeds the capability of the vast majority of our electrical grid. Remote monitoring equipment is only fairly recently getting rolled out. My place now is the first place I've lived where I don't have sometime come out to read the meter. The sophistication of the equipment in most houses, businesses as well as at the utilities to monitor and adjust usage is positively archaic and only very slowly improving.
Actually I think there will be some interesting improvements coming down the road if plug-in hybrid autos catch on like I think they will. Some improvements will come very naturally as power companies try to keep costs in line. Other improvements will probably require a bit of prodding by our government and by consumers to take place, such as emissions regulation. Power companies don't make money by getting you to consume less energy so they have a built in disincentive to make certain types of efficiency improvements.
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Thunderbolt is designed more to replace eSATA and FireWire than USB.
Neither one of which has taken the world by storm... Frankly we don't really need a replacement for either of those. They're fine but niche. There is more to having a successful interface than transfer rates. Cost to manufacture, legacy hardware compatibility, current equipment needs, licensing terms, customer demand and more all play a role. The opportunity for Thunderbolt is if it can combine the video (usually VGA/DVI/HDMI) and peripheral ports (usually USB) into a single interface. USB replaces several types of cables but it isn't quite capable enough to replace dedicated video cables. It's not clear that USB3 will be fast enough either. If Thunderbolt is cheap enough to manufacture and has a performance advantage that lets people further reduce the number of different cables they need, then it will have a chance.
What is wanted is something that is fast, cheap, compatible, reliable, easy to configure and minimizes the number of different cables we need. Frankly most PCs should ideally have no more than two cable types - one high power cable to power the device (when needed) and one type of data cable that can also handle low voltage DC power needs. Nothing wrong with using specialized cables for specific performance needs but that doesn't apply to most of us most of the time. I don't really care if the data cable is USB, Firewire, Thunderbolt or something else entirely but there is a lot to be gained by standardizing on a suitable general purpose data cable. USB comes closest to this ideal right now. (Yes Firewire could do the job but it's too expensive and lost that battle with USB long ago) Perhaps Thunderbolt will take it the next step. Only time will tell.
Wrong, it was the decision of accountants. You see, they decided, and management OK'd
You contradicted your own argument. If "management OK'd" then that is management's decision. Accountants do not have the authority to do anything without management approval. They may want to do it but management can say no and management gets the final word. Management apparently did not say no in this case. That might (or might not) be a stupid decision but the responsibility for EVERYTHING in a company falls to management ultimately. Accounting has no more authority to take engineering equipment than engineering has the authority to take accounting gear unless management approves.
The accountants might have won the argument but it is management's decision at the end of the day. Good, bad or indifferent.
Since accounting gets the salary paid, the bills signed and so on, without management there, they'd be able to do this anyway, therefore management were not necessary.
Accountants do not (normally) sign the checks - management does. In fact letting an accountant sign the checks is a REALLY bad idea. (Can you say embezzlement? I knew you could) Except for the smallest companies accountants normally have their duties separated into dedicated functions to prevent fraud. Accountants do not have any authority aside from what they are granted by management. They can make recommendations which might be self serving but management ultimately makes the decisions. If they countermand the decisions of management, that is grounds for dismissal.
If the company is so tight fisted that they can't splurge $150-$180 for another monitor, then it's time to move to another company.
You've never worked for a startup I take it? I've been in plenty of companies where $150 might make the difference between meeting payroll or firing staff. Cash can be really tight in a small company and there might not be any excess to spend on equipment that might be nice but not absolutely necessary. Not saying that is the case with this particular company but it isn't remotely hard to find examples where there isn't any excess money for optional equipment.
...This was the decision of accountants.
Wrong. That is a decision of management. Unless the manager and the accountant are the same person (rarely a good idea) fiascoes like the one you outline cannot happen because of accountants. The sole job of an accountant is to keep track of how the money in the company is spent. Their job is NOT to decide how to spend the money. That is the role of management. If the two jobs get combined, that is a potential recipe for problems and an indication the company is poorly structured but it isn't a problem with accounting per-se.
At a certain point, the accountants can become people who mostly specialize in making sure you have to expend ridiculous energy justifying what it is you do in order to do your job.
That just makes them bad at their job. That has nothing to do with accounting or accountants in general. The job of an accountant is to keep track of the money. This can be done efficiently or inefficiently just like any other job. A good accountant is incredibly valuable and a real asset to the company. A bad one... well, you know how that goes.
Oh, and I should mention that sometimes accountants ask you for information for very good reasons which you may not fully understand. Just like they don't really fully comprehend your job, don't think for a moment you fully comprehend theirs. Part of the job of an accountant is to watch for fraud and waste. I've seen plenty of cases where departments try to game the budgeting system to get resources they don't really need. The more departments try to game the system, the unfortunate but natural response is additional red tape. Obviously it's quite possible have too much bureaucracy but it is also just as bad to have too little. It's a balance that is sometimes hard to get right.
Disclosure: I am both a degreed engineer and a certified accountant. I happen to know both sides of this classic conflict quite well. A tip I give all engineers is to learn as much accounting as you can. It's FAR easier to get the equipment and resources you want if you can speak the language of finance.
why can they be bought and sold like securities?
Because, like securities, patents are by definition an asset. Assets can be bought and sold. Doesn't matter what kind of asset either. You can sell receivables, inventory, property, securities, debt, and any other kind of asset you care to mention. There is absolutely no reason to make a distinction for patents.
They should be non-transferable unless the case is one of a certain company buying another.
Nonsense. Patents are an asset. If they are more valuable to someone else than to me I should have every right to sell or license that asset to another party. Don't conflate how an asset is used with whether it should be allowed to be sold. There is nothing wrong with buying a knife to use for cooking. Use it for stabbing someone else and now we have a problem. Same with patents - what matters is how they are used, not how they are acquired. A patent troll who's sole "product" is litigation is to my mind like the person who buys a knife with the intent to stab someone rather than to cook.
If the patent is worthwhile, the engineer will have no trouble securing funding for a new company dedicated to producing the solar cell.
As someone who has been involved with fund raising for startup businesses I feel comfortable saying that is nonsense. Just because you have a good idea does not even remotely ensure that securing funding will be easy or ensure a return on investment. Even if you can raise the money that doesn't ensure you'll get the money on favorable terms.
It was an agonizing moment: a developer arrived at work to realize his second monitor had been taken (given to the accounting dept., to add insult to injury).
Why the needless troll for accountants? You don't think keeping track of the money in a company is an important task? You really should wake up to the notion that business is a team sport and ALL the jobs matter. Accounting, maintenance, marketing, sales, production, engineering and the rest ALL matter. Only an idiot thinks that their job is somehow the only one that matters.
But is this just the posturing of pampered coders, or is this much screen real estate really a requirement for today's developers?"
Is it needed? No. Is it useful? Frequently. It also depends on how high the resolution of your primary monitor is. If you have a 2560X1920 monitor, odds are a second monitor is more or less superfluous. If you have a 1024x768 monitor, a second monitor could be very very helpful.
Nevertheless, the idea of physically carrying all of your data and associated programs with you in a compact format that you can access anywhere is a very appealing idea.
Agreed but we already have that or something heading quickly in that direction with smartphones. Just being mobile isn't enough. I can carry all my applications on a USB flash drive but that doesn't make them especially useful. I had a Nokia "smartphone" (an E70) that theoretically could do almost everything an iPhone could do but the interface was so bad that it was basically useless for any real work. The interface matters. Smartphones are going to continue to get more powerful and should serve exactly the purpose you outline above presuming they don't already.
They don't need to have both if one device really will serve both needs.
You left out the word "well". It needs to serve both needs well. My smartphone already is (theoretically) capable of pretty much everything this device could do AND it makes phone calls. In time your phone probably will be able to plug into a much larger monitor. Furthermore Windows was very much NOT designed to be used on a 4 inch screen. I've got really good eyesight and can't imaging doing anything productive on it that my smartphone can't already do.
The iPods already have a prescident for this. There's a sort of "tablet" shell that you can buy for an iPod that will give it a bigger tablet-like screen.
Even taking your word for it I have never seen on in person or know of anyone who has such a device. I can't even think of a reason why anyone would want an oversized iPod. I wanted that sort of a thing I'd just buy an iPad which has the larger screen and does more besides.
We are already carrying around more "smarts" in our phones than we used to have on our overpowered PCs.
Which is why things are converging to the phone and not to the PC.
Cut to the chase and offer custom sizes.
Costs too much for what is a niche product to begin with. Every option that is offered costs extra to produce and we're not talking small amounts of money either. Part of the reason Apple is able to be so profitable is because they offer relatively few variations and so don't incur the manufacturing, testing, support, logistics and marketing costs.
A computer that could be plugged into a more powerful computer, where it would either use the more powerful comuter's resources or just the more powerful computer's display and input features.
Why not just use a more powerful computer to begin with? To work you would need bigger displays available in every location you plan to visit which just isn't likely to happen. Want to work from the local coffee shop? A laptop immediately becomes a better option. You probably are already carrying a smartphone anyway so why carry a redundant compact device that can't make calls?
I can already plug my netbook into a much higher resolution screen and connect a keyboard and mouse. If I need real horsepower of a genuinely powerful desktop machine I'm not going to waste time (and additional $) with some bizarre quasi-mobile form factor. I just can't see this sort of device being an improvement over what is already available for anybody,
That would be very cool.
It just sounds cool. In reality it would be fairly limiting with little benefit over existing technology for all but a very few people.
It could possibly serve as a business person's primary PC upon which the employee simply connect this device up to larger peripherals when in the office and simply uses it as a hand held device on the go.
They'll need to have a cell phone and a computer anyway so why use this when you could either have a laptop or a desktop at work and use your cell phone on the go? This idea provides lots of limitations and design compromises without any significant advantages over what is already available. There might be a few teeny tiny niche markets for this sort of device but frankly I don't see much point to it. If I must run Windows, a netbook is pretty damn portable and can be plugged into a larger monitor/keyboard. I actually do that and it works great but is still pretty usable when I'm carrying it. I can't really see a Windows machine with a 4 inch screen improving on what I can do with my smartphone and netbook.
And I've heard that it's possible to make your own HDMI cable, just like you can make your own Ethernet cable, which would probably be even cheaper.
You can make almost any cable if you are willing to invest in the tooling. You won't save any money doing it however unless you do it for a living. Just buy your HDMI cables over the internet for reasonable amounts of $ and you'll be fine.
Unfortunately, if you want cables et al that are not complete junk, you often have no choice except for the "audiophile" stuff.
Bullshit. If you think that then you almost certainly don't understand the engineering involved. I do the accounting and some engineering at a wire harness manufacturer. The "audiophile" cables are always hugely overpriced and normally over engineered compared to what is actually needed.
Not everyone who buys that stuff is an idiot, some just want a solid cable that will last for 20 years and will not break during normal use.
No, just 99.9999% of them are idiots. I've got cables that are older than I am that continue to work just fine "during normal use" and aren't made of unobtanium and unicorn farts.
Gold electroplating doesn't add a whole lot to the cost, although it's often used as an excuse to jack up the prices.
I'm an accountant in a company that makes wire harnesses so I'm more qualified than most to comment on this. Gold plated contacts typically cost 3-4X the more mundane alternatives in most cases. At retail the prices get so jacked up that you probably won't notice the difference but gold contacts are quite a bit more expensive at wholesale.
Oh, and for the VAST majority of applications gold contacts are a complete waste of money.
...coal is actually WORSE than nuclear in both radiation output and toxic byproducts that need disposal
Ummm, not under a meltdown condition it isn't. That's only true if both types of plants are functioning properly.
Yes absent a Fukushima type disaster, coal is in many respects dirtier than nuclear, particularly on a climatic level. The problem is that nuclear accidents can and do occur and the local severity of those can be FAR worse than any disaster from a malfunctioning coal plant. So until cleaner sources can scale up (solar, wind) or be developed (fusion) your choice is either a slow poisoning and climatic change by coal or the risk of a nuclear catastrophe. Some choice...
I don't see any anti-nuclear idiot bitching about coal.
You haven't read much of the environmental movement's literature have you? Coal, oil, gas and nuclear are all bad as far as they are concerned. And to be honest, they have a point. Each of our major sources of electric power comes with significant environmental (not to mention geopolitical) problems. The only way I see to really clean up our power sources is to heavily utilize solar and wind and develop fusion (yeah, yeah, I know...) for the base load. Battery technology will need to improve as well. We would still need hydrocarbons for other purposes (manufacturing, lubricants, lots of other products) but we want to minimize its use as much as possible. Same with fission.
Until we replace them with modern, safer reactor designs or forms of renewable energy, there will be a danger of another Fukushima/Chernobyl type of catastrophe.
All fission plants carry significant risks no matter how "modern" the design. They might be potentially safer but they won't be perfectly safe. Newer designs have the potential to be every bit as dangerous as older designs without adequate risk management. The only difference is that the failure modes change.
The risk can never be zero so the question becomes what level of risk is acceptable? Then based on the level of assumed risk, what mitigation plans are to be used? Fukushima occurred because the risk assessment and mitigation plans were inadequate. The plant (even with its older design) could have been adequately safeguarded even from a natural disaster of this scale. Our engineers have that ability. It survived the earthquake just fine but they failed to adequately protect against large tsunamis and the design of their seawall and backup generators did not adequately account for that risk.
Does this further erode the argument that Fukushima was just an isolated incident in the 'modern' nuclear power age?"
The principles of reliable and robust engineering and risk management do not change no matter how "modern" the device. Fukushima was fundamentally not a failure of technology but one of risk assessment and mitigation. They knew that an earthquake and tsunami combination was a virtual inevitability but they failed to build the seawall protections and backup generator system to withstand the most severe events that could reasonably occur. 9.0 earthquakes occur fairly regularly along the Pacific rim. It was absolutely possible for engineers to build adequate protections but for various reasons (cost undoubtedly among them) they chose not to. Despite the design being an older design the problems at Fukushima still could have been prevented with adequate backup systems and/or improved seawalls.
When auditing risks you evaluate three things: Frequency, Severity, and Detectability. When talking about nuclear plants severe events are fairly rare but the potential severity is extremely high. That's potentially ok if the risk is detectible but as Fukushima illustrates, sometimes flaws are only obvious to the people looking after the fact. Complexity typically increases frequency of problems and decreases their detectability. Nuclear plants are unquestionably complex and some parts of them are difficult to evaluate for problems.
The problem with the analysis is that it's still possible to underestimate or even completely miss a failure mode. The engineers at Fukushima clearly understood the severity part of the equation but they seem to have underestimated the frequency or likelihood of a 15 meter high tsunami and then failed to develop adequate mitigation plans. Sadly this sort of mistake is all too common in every human endeavor.
These are old reactors and due to "environmentalist" blocking of building new (safe) ones they are kept functioning. Is it strange they start to rot?
There is no such thing as a 100% safe nuclear (fission) plant. These plants are designed by people and even the best intentioned people make mistakes. We might decide the risks are acceptable but there will be risks. Newer designs have the potential to be safer (safer not safe) but without adequate risk analysis and maintenance, they can be every bit as dangerous as older designs.
They record your energy usage at set intervals, which data can then be used to *guess* how you may be using it.
A statistically significant collection of guesses frequently turns out to be remarkable accurate way to measure behavior.
I post on Facebook what I choose to post. Therefore, Facebook posts are not a privacy violation...
Unless you choose to post something about ME without my permission. What? You thought your feelings on what is private are the only ones that matter? Your postings can affect other peoples privacy too so it isn't just as simple as what you think. I really don't want to have to police your postings to ensure my privacy.
Yes, stupid people will post stupid things that allow others to invade their privacy, but you can't legislate away stupidity.
In the case of Facebook you absolutely can legislate away stupidity by shutting Facebook down. A terrible solution but it would work.
By contrast, I don't choose what information my water meter collects.
Sure you do. You decide when to turn the water on and off.
Disclosure of private information should require explicit consent.
So when are you going to get my consent to post a picture of me on Facebook?
Actually, I can't figure out why a mouse beat out something like this: I mean, schools dropping handwriting is stupid, but that being a reason for this being a failure is equally stupid.
Mice are cheaper to make and work very well as a pointing device. A pen serves both as a pointing device and data input device, but does neither exceptionally well for many uses. A pen/styles was designed for a different technology (paper) which works very well but is not (usually) better as a pointing device for a computer, nor is it (usually) better for (non-math) data entry than a keyboard. Computers use two devices which are individually better at certain tasks than a pen/stylus when the interface is designed for them. A pen centric interface could be designed but the economics of such a device remain unproven.
That said, I'd love to see some well designed smart pens that aren't A) huge, B) require special paper, C) work with tablet like the iPad. I think a device like the iPad would be ideal for students (and pretty useful in the professional world) if you could take notes on it with a pen/stylus. However no one has come up with a device optimized for that purpose. The Windows TabletPCs were not optimized for pen input and the current touchscreen tablets are designed for fingers. Both useful in their way but hard to take good notes in a physics class with them.
how many here have had to create an electronic signature with a mouse?
Why would I do that?
Or, for that matter, wanted to draw or trace something in, say, Gimp?
GIMP isn't designed for drawing. Sure you can do some crude drawing but it's not what it is for. There are plenty of applications which are meant for drawing if that is what you want to do.
Government forces Baltimore Gas&Electric to share its electrical system with other companies, thereby giving me multiple choices.
Power is essential. Living without power is possible but highly uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous. Cable TV is entertainment. You can live without cable TV. I have for nearly a decade now and quite frankly have little interest in contributing tax dollars to support your TV viewing habits.
Or the government could own the 50-fiber bundle itself, in the same way government owns the road
Governments frequently do not own the road. Many roads, bridges, rail lines, airports, power and telecom lines, and other critical infrastructure is privately owned and (sometimes) regulated. When governments do own infrastructure, they do not do so because it is cost effective, they do it because no one else can or will. There (usually) is no money to be made in owning roads unless it is a toll road. There is obviously plenty of money to be made in cable television. The fact that you want a better price is unsurprising and also irrelevant.
A 50 fiber bundle is unbelievably wasteful and expensive. I'm pretty sure you have no idea what you are talking about with that proposal. That is a VAST amount of bandwidth. A single fiber cable carries a tremendous amount of data - far more than most people actually will use.
Just as we have a free market with cars, we could have a free market with CATV providers.
I have at least 4 TV service providers available to me where I live. (Comcast, Dish Network, DirectTV and AT&T) Plus I have access to the full content of the internet and a variety of pay-per-use services like Netflix. While it isn't as competitive as I'd like it to be, it's hardly the single provider monopoly of yesterday.
Easy, just sue the cable company for fraud if they do choke it off.
And by the time the wheels of justice have spun, Netflix would very likely be out of business. Lawsuits take years to accomplish and it's not uncommon for the injured party to go bankrupt before a verdict can be rendered.
I'm 35, German and can't recall a power outage because I never experienced one.
I don't know much about the German grid but a few facts come to mind.
Perhaps you have never experienced a power outage (I'm dubious of your claim but perhaps it is true) but if you are going to compare the US grid to the German grid, you need to understand the differences in what the engineers on this side of the pond face.
That depends where you live. Around here the power is rarely out for more than a moment, and even those times are infrequent.
Power in general is quite reliable in most of the US in the sense that power outages are infrequent and normally short - rarely more than a few hours a year most places absent a major natural disaster. Nevertheless, I am not aware of any location in the US that is not subject to periodic power outages and (primarily due to cost) much of the infrastructure is not installed in the most reliable methods possible. I've had two power outages of several hours duration (due to storms) in the last 9 months and at least a dozen short power interruptions of a few seconds. Those could have been avoided with buried cables but buried cables are expensive so the more vulnerable above ground system is used. It's a tradeoff but it's unclear if the cost/benefit ratio is optimized.
My point isn't that the power in the US is bad - it's actually amazingly good. Rather, my point is that the power system in the US isn't nearly as good as it could be. Our currently available technology significantly exceeds the capability of the vast majority of our electrical grid. Remote monitoring equipment is only fairly recently getting rolled out. My place now is the first place I've lived where I don't have sometime come out to read the meter. The sophistication of the equipment in most houses, businesses as well as at the utilities to monitor and adjust usage is positively archaic and only very slowly improving.
Actually I think there will be some interesting improvements coming down the road if plug-in hybrid autos catch on like I think they will. Some improvements will come very naturally as power companies try to keep costs in line. Other improvements will probably require a bit of prodding by our government and by consumers to take place, such as emissions regulation. Power companies don't make money by getting you to consume less energy so they have a built in disincentive to make certain types of efficiency improvements.