Yes, we all hope theres something better than rocket technology. But right now theres nothing rigorously shown to be theoretical possible even.
Nonsense. Two contenders: lightsails (and relatives like starwisp, etc), and magsails. The former probably requires a launching laser to get to reasonable speed. The latter may not be as fast (unless you're in a region of strong galactic magnetic field) but are more maneuverable.
Of course there's the Alcubierre-van den Broek warp bubble for FTL (and probably doesn't fit your definition of "rigorously"), but so far that still requires at least the energy equivalent of -10kg mass (yes, that's a negative sign) to create, and we're not sure just how to apply that energy if we had it.
But the chess analogy is precisely why it's offensive. Pawns are considered interchangeable, and the first things you sacrifice when it is to your advantage to do so. You put them in a position where they might gain an advantage (and you're happy to take the benefit of that if it happens) but where they're more likely to be squashed (indirectly gaining you advantage somewhere else).
You don't sacrifice them for no reason, but they're the first under the bus when the time comes.
I emailed their support, telling them to fix their broken website, or lose me as a customer,
Telling support doesn't do much good; they probably couldn't give a rat's ass if they lost you as a customer ("great, one less weird browser to support"). You need to tell (at least CC) whoever is in charge of marketing.
You can bet that if marketing gets enough complaints, they'll put pressure on the web site developers to fix it.
No, a derivative work is a modified copy. What you're talking about is an application of the "first sale" doctrine -- after you've bought a legitimate copy, you can do whatever the heck you want with it (including cut it up and resell it) -- except copy it. The original seller only controls the first sale.
(Textbook publishers would love to do away with this because of the potential sales they lose to used copies. Some of them are trying interesting tricks to do this, including "licensing" rather than "selling" the books.)
ask for a web page, the server sends you a web page. How much more bleedingly obvious could it be?
Exactly. Ask for graphics to be drawn on the screen, the (X11) server draws them on the screen. I don't know why people have problems with the concept of the X server running on the application client computer.
after all you can't patent something that has implementations on the market already.
ROTFL! While it may be true that you shouldn't be able to patent something already on the market, take a look at some of the patents that the US Patent Office has actually granted over the past few years.
You just can't record a signal of 1920 x 1080 pixel times 12 bit per pixel times 60 frames per second on a harddisk.
30 frames/second, not 60. Anyway, that's 1920x1080x1.5 bytes/frame, just over 3 megabytes/frame. About 93 megabytes per second with zero compression. Reasonably modern hardware on a RAID 0 or RAID 5 setup should do that easily, or any modern SCSI drive system. Heck, you can buy off-the-shelf Firewire-B external drive systems capable of that. And disk subsystems aren't getting any slower (unless you're saddled with crappy drivers and filesystems at the software level.)
That said, I pretty much agree with your conclusion.
and a contract that said he was to be paid 10% of profits.
That was his mistake. If you're ever in a position to negotiate a deal with Hollywood, never, ever, go for a percentage of the profits (or net). Go for a percentage of gross. Sure, it'll be a smaller percentage, but the number itself would be non-zero. (Consider if Stan Lee had a contract that said he got, say 1/4 % of the gross. He'd be owed $2 millon.)
As others have pointed out, studios have all kinds of creative accounting practises that will reduce the net to zero, if not negative.
3)/bin/rm removes all files, including/lib/libc.so and/bin/rm (remember they are run from memory not disk..
Yes on one, irrelevant on two.
The 'rm' just decrements the link count to the file. As long as a process (any process) still has an open file descriptor for that file, the file is in fact still there. It only really disappears when the link count is zero and no processes still have the file open. True for all 'nixes, AFAIK.
Probably not much. Hard drives have builtin magnets of their own, after all.
This caught my interest the other day; I got several gizmos (shake-to-charge flashlight and a "Magnetix" construction kit toy) that contain pretty powerful magnets. My office still has a lot of old magnetic media around -- floppy disks, cassette tapes -- so I had to pay attention to where I put them, but it occurs to me that those are both pretty obsolete media, being replaced by optical or semiconductor (ie flash) memory. I found it interesting that the apparent rise in use of strong magnets in all kinds of gizmos (I even have a cardboard box with a magnetic latch) seems to have coincided with the decline in the use of portable magnetic media.
I don't know if that's deliberate or just fortuitous coincidence.
(BTW, the sensitivity of any magnetic media to stray magnetic fields is somewhat overblown. I've got a bulk eraser that puts out a pretty hefty field and still have had tapes and floppies survive short exposures. OTOH, it only takes a few bad bits in the wrong place to make the media unusable. (Less so with analog recordings, where you just get a noise burst or sound/image degradation).
It dates back to the Norman invasion (no, not Spiney, but 1066). The (primarily Norman French) aristocracy called food by the french words -- boeuf, jambon (hence ham), etc. The stuff the peasants ate, or that nobody ate (eg horse), wasn't.
BTW, the word "poultry" is similar to the french word for chicken -- poulet.
This is not a problem with electric cars the way it is with combustion engines. When the car is stopped, so is the motor, so there's no battery drain (beyond radio, etc). With regenerative braking you can even apply some of the energy you lost in stopping to getting you moving again.
No one else can patent it if is it documented prior art.
I find your naive faith in the Patent Office quaint and charming. Alas, the Patent Office tends to only regard earlier patents as prior art, and even then they've been known to issue what amounts to multiple patents (to different people) for the same thing.
Even if they don't go public with it, if they can prove that they thought of it first, and didn't abandon it, no one else can patent it.
No, the Patent Office goes by first to file, not necessarily first to invent.
Either way, what you'd end up with is somebody else patents it, and anyone wanting to overthrow that patent has to go through long and expensive legal processes, which might be unsuccessful.
A lot of money is spent by BigPharma (in both research and marketting) on things which aren't cures, but are instead on-going treatments.
That's because many of todays "diseases" (really, conditions) aren't necessarily curable, absent retroactive genetic modification.
Take, for example, hypertension (high blood pressure). If I have a genetic predisposition to get high blood pressure given my current lifestyle, I have two choices to change that: change my lifestyle, or take a pill every day. It's not like a virus or bacterial infection where the harmful agent can be killed and the disease goes away (but see below). It's the nature of an individual's metabolism, genetically determined. (And yes, lifestyle changes do work in treating some conditions -- but if I change my lifestyle, am I the same person?)
The same goes for a multitude of conditions that the "bigpharma" sells expensive chemical treatments for; many of those conditions can also be treated (or prevented) by changes in lifestyle (diet, exercise, etc). This indicates that there's no specific causative agent (like a virus) involved, but rather a metabolic condition. (And some lifestyle changes are easier than others).
However: It is also the case that some conditions that were previously thought to be lifestyle-related turn out in fact to have a viral or bacterial cause. Stomach (peptic) ulcers, for example, were long thought to be strictly a physiological result of stress, spicy foods, etc. It turns out that there's a bacterium - Heliobacter pylori - involved in most cases (some ulcers have a different cause), and killing the bacteria really does cure the disease. Human papilloma virus has been linked to cervical cancer, and there's now a vaccine against it. There's evidence to lead some researchers to think that there may be an obesity virus, and/or that heart disease has a bacterial component. (Mind, if the hypothetical obesity virus were a retrovirus, it itself is changing the genetic predisposition of the host.)
We're a long way from using artificial viruses to genetically tweak metabolic pathways. Inserting a missing gene is one thing, subtly changing the trigger level at which certain genes get expressed is another. For example, one fix for high blood pressure is to inhibit angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE). A chemical fix for this via daily drug dose is much simpler than genetic reprogramming (if we even understood all the underlying mechanisms), but it's a treatment, not a cure.
The fire marshall was (giving the benefit of the doubt) probably thinking that if there was a high voltage conduit, sooner or later somebody would run a high voltage cable through it. Can't have high and low voltage wiring in the same conduit.
(Of course the reasons for all this are probably lost in the mists of time going back to fabric-insulated wires hung on insulators nailed to the studs. You'd think with modern wiring with obvious differences between 12 ga high voltage cable and cat-5e wires it wouldn't matter... but then I've seen some pretty bizarre wiring setups that were "just temporary" or quick hacks, I can just see somebody provide a whole new meaning to "power over ethernet".)
Motor control has progressed a fair amount over the last 25 years. But are the motors themselves that much different?
At the small (DC) end, they certainly have, and that can be scaled up if necessary.
Example: I'm not sure when the change happened, but back when, cheap small electric motors (as used in toys, portable cassette or CD players, etc) were low-powered, largish (0.75 to 1 inch diameter, 1 to 1.5 inches long), and heavy. Most of the culprit was the weak and bulky magnets. Modern rare-earth magnets allow for smaller and more-powerful motors. I just got my kids a cheap R/C airplane that uses two small electric motors (maybe 0.25 by 0.5 inches) that turn tiny props at high speed, with an on-board lithium polymer battery that'll keep the thing flying for about 10 minutes. 25 years ago, between the weight of the motors and the weight of the batteries, there was no way to build an electric airplane. (This is no motor-glider either, it looks a bit like an F-16).
There's a demand for small, powerful motors. Toys aside, every cell phone and pager has one (with an unbalanced flywheel for "vibrate" mode). The market probably isn't there yet for 1/3 horsepower motors as small as could be made with modern magnets (most motors that power and up don't use magnets at all, but coils), but the technology is waiting there for the market to happen.
Who needs household robots when we have cheap illegal-immigrant labor? Who needs farm droids when we have cheap illegal-immigrant labor? Etc, etc. (The first robots capable of making up a bed and cleaning a room would no doubt sell well to the hotel industry. Similarly for robots capable of the kind of stoop labor that many kinds of agriculture need to that industry.)
You want significant advances in robotics? Enforce immigration laws.
There's historical precedent of a sort: the ancient Greeks knew of things like steam power and static electricity, but did nothing with them. Technology didn't really begin to take off until the Black Death and other plagues wiped out such a significant fraction of the population that there was a severe labor shortage (bluntly, there weren't enough slaves/serfs). Eliminate the US's source of similar underpaid labor and you'll create a demand for technological replacements.
They dropped it from 21 to 18, this would have been summer of 1971 (yeah, I'm an old fart), then some years later raised it to 19.
I was at Pet for while during basic. I was at Connaught (near Ottawa) when I worked as bartender, it was during the (annual?) commonwealth forces rifle competitions.
When you enroll to the military, you are NOT allowed to die. That is considered damaging military property.
Not allowed to kill yourself, perhaps. Sometimes dying is hard to prevent. But most militaries have serious rules against self-inflicted injuries (otherwise it's an easy out for e.g. combat duties). Sunburn, btw, is often considered a self-inflicted injury.
There's some logic to this. Not to totally restricting alcohol to those too young to drive, but to lowering the drinking age and raising the driving age.
If your concern is drunk drivers, the problem is not drinkers that don't know how to drive, but drivers who don't know how to drink. Let them learn how to drink (responsibly) first, then let them learn to drive. (Sure, there'll always be a few idiots, with or without alcohol.) Lower the drinking age to say, 16, and raise the age at which you can get a drivers license to 18.
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Yes, we all hope theres something better than rocket technology. But right now theres nothing rigorously shown to be theoretical possible even.
Nonsense. Two contenders: lightsails (and relatives like starwisp, etc), and magsails. The former probably requires a launching laser to get to reasonable speed. The latter may not be as fast (unless you're in a region of strong galactic magnetic field) but are more maneuverable.
Of course there's the Alcubierre-van den Broek warp bubble for FTL (and probably doesn't fit your definition of "rigorously"), but so far that still requires at least the energy equivalent of -10kg mass (yes, that's a negative sign) to create, and we're not sure just how to apply that energy if we had it.
But the chess analogy is precisely why it's offensive. Pawns are considered interchangeable, and the first things you sacrifice when it is to your advantage to do so. You put them in a position where they might gain an advantage (and you're happy to take the benefit of that if it happens) but where they're more likely to be squashed (indirectly gaining you advantage somewhere else).
You don't sacrifice them for no reason, but they're the first under the bus when the time comes.
I emailed their support, telling them to fix their broken website, or lose me as a customer,
Telling support doesn't do much good; they probably couldn't give a rat's ass if they lost you as a customer ("great, one less weird browser to support"). You need to tell (at least CC) whoever is in charge of marketing.
You can bet that if marketing gets enough complaints, they'll put pressure on the web site developers to fix it.
"Derivative works" is I believe the term.
No, a derivative work is a modified copy. What you're talking about is an application of the "first sale" doctrine -- after you've bought a legitimate copy, you can do whatever the heck you want with it (including cut it up and resell it) -- except copy it. The original seller only controls the first sale.
(Textbook publishers would love to do away with this because of the potential sales they lose to used copies. Some of them are trying interesting tricks to do this, including "licensing" rather than "selling" the books.)
Exactly. Ask for graphics to be drawn on the screen, the (X11) server draws them on the screen. I don't know why people have problems with the concept of the X server running on the application client computer.
after all you can't patent something that has implementations on the market already.
ROTFL! While it may be true that you shouldn't be able to patent something already on the market, take a look at some of the patents that the US Patent Office has actually granted over the past few years.
Or did I miss your "<sarcasm>" tag?
So who do you think was really behind the crack?
</tinfoil-hat>
You just can't record a signal of 1920 x 1080 pixel times 12 bit per pixel times 60 frames per second on a harddisk.
30 frames/second, not 60. Anyway, that's 1920x1080x1.5 bytes/frame, just over 3 megabytes/frame. About 93 megabytes per second with zero compression. Reasonably modern hardware on a RAID 0 or RAID 5 setup should do that easily, or any modern SCSI drive system. Heck, you can buy off-the-shelf Firewire-B external drive systems capable of that. And disk subsystems aren't getting any slower (unless you're saddled with crappy drivers and filesystems at the software level.)
That said, I pretty much agree with your conclusion.
and a contract that said he was to be paid 10% of profits.
That was his mistake. If you're ever in a position to negotiate a deal with Hollywood, never, ever, go for a percentage of the profits (or net). Go for a percentage of gross. Sure, it'll be a smaller percentage, but the number itself would be non-zero. (Consider if Stan Lee had a contract that said he got, say 1/4 % of the gross. He'd be owed $2 millon.)
As others have pointed out, studios have all kinds of creative accounting practises that will reduce the net to zero, if not negative.
I seem to recall a fish on the dime for a while -- or was that the centennial version?
;-)
Or has my medication worn off?
You're talking about the Heechee Saga, of which "Gateway" was the first book. They're by Frederik Pohl, not Poul Anderson.
;-)
(You got it half right, phonetically at least
Good stories.
3) /bin/rm removes all files, including /lib/libc.so and /bin/rm (remember they are run from memory not disk..
Yes on one, irrelevant on two.
The 'rm' just decrements the link count to the file. As long as a process (any process) still has an open file descriptor for that file, the file is in fact still there. It only really disappears when the link count is zero and no processes still have the file open. True for all 'nixes, AFAIK.
(You probably know this, other readers may not.)
Probably not much. Hard drives have builtin magnets of their own, after all.
This caught my interest the other day; I got several gizmos (shake-to-charge flashlight and a "Magnetix" construction kit toy) that contain pretty powerful magnets. My office still has a lot of old magnetic media around -- floppy disks, cassette tapes -- so I had to pay attention to where I put them, but it occurs to me that those are both pretty obsolete media, being replaced by optical or semiconductor (ie flash) memory. I found it interesting that the apparent rise in use of strong magnets in all kinds of gizmos (I even have a cardboard box with a magnetic latch) seems to have coincided with the decline in the use of portable magnetic media.
I don't know if that's deliberate or just fortuitous coincidence.
(BTW, the sensitivity of any magnetic media to stray magnetic fields is somewhat overblown. I've got a bulk eraser that puts out a pretty hefty field and still have had tapes and floppies survive short exposures. OTOH, it only takes a few bad bits in the wrong place to make the media unusable. (Less so with analog recordings, where you just get a noise burst or sound/image degradation).
Why do we call "pig" ham and "cow" beef?
It dates back to the Norman invasion (no, not Spiney, but 1066). The (primarily Norman French) aristocracy called food by the french words -- boeuf, jambon (hence ham), etc. The stuff the peasants ate, or that nobody ate (eg horse), wasn't.
BTW, the word "poultry" is similar to the french word for chicken -- poulet.
Stop and go traffic
This is not a problem with electric cars the way it is with combustion engines. When the car is stopped, so is the motor, so there's no battery drain (beyond radio, etc). With regenerative braking you can even apply some of the energy you lost in stopping to getting you moving again.
We can tax them based on the size and/or fuel-efficiency of their vehicle, and, [...] "let the market work."
Taxes are not market forces, they are a form of government interference with market forces.
As you probably well know, but you don't want to let the facts get in the way of your rhetoric.
I thought MiB was a secret organization dedicated to keeping tabs on extraterrestrials living on Earth?
Is GiB their informal name (guys in black), or what the female members (gals in black) go by?
No one else can patent it if is it documented prior art.
I find your naive faith in the Patent Office quaint and charming. Alas, the Patent Office tends to only regard earlier patents as prior art, and even then they've been known to issue what amounts to multiple patents (to different people) for the same thing.
Even if they don't go public with it, if they can prove that they thought of it first, and didn't abandon it, no one else can patent it.
No, the Patent Office goes by first to file, not necessarily first to invent.
Either way, what you'd end up with is somebody else patents it, and anyone wanting to overthrow that patent has to go through long and expensive legal processes, which might be unsuccessful.
A lot of money is spent by BigPharma (in both research and marketting) on things which aren't cures, but are instead on-going treatments.
That's because many of todays "diseases" (really, conditions) aren't necessarily curable, absent retroactive genetic modification.
Take, for example, hypertension (high blood pressure). If I have a genetic predisposition to get high blood pressure given my current lifestyle, I have two choices to change that: change my lifestyle, or take a pill every day. It's not like a virus or bacterial infection where the harmful agent can be killed and the disease goes away (but see below). It's the nature of an individual's metabolism, genetically determined. (And yes, lifestyle changes do work in treating some conditions -- but if I change my lifestyle, am I the same person?)
The same goes for a multitude of conditions that the "bigpharma" sells expensive chemical treatments for; many of those conditions can also be treated (or prevented) by changes in lifestyle (diet, exercise, etc). This indicates that there's no specific causative agent (like a virus) involved, but rather a metabolic condition. (And some lifestyle changes are easier than others).
However: It is also the case that some conditions that were previously thought to be lifestyle-related turn out in fact to have a viral or bacterial cause. Stomach (peptic) ulcers, for example, were long thought to be strictly a physiological result of stress, spicy foods, etc. It turns out that there's a bacterium - Heliobacter pylori - involved in most cases (some ulcers have a different cause), and killing the bacteria really does cure the disease. Human papilloma virus has been linked to cervical cancer, and there's now a vaccine against it. There's evidence to lead some researchers to think that there may be an obesity virus, and/or that heart disease has a bacterial component. (Mind, if the hypothetical obesity virus were a retrovirus, it itself is changing the genetic predisposition of the host.)
We're a long way from using artificial viruses to genetically tweak metabolic pathways. Inserting a missing gene is one thing, subtly changing the trigger level at which certain genes get expressed is another. For example, one fix for high blood pressure is to inhibit angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE). A chemical fix for this via daily drug dose is much simpler than genetic reprogramming (if we even understood all the underlying mechanisms), but it's a treatment, not a cure.
The fire marshall was (giving the benefit of the doubt) probably thinking that if there was a high voltage conduit, sooner or later somebody would run a high voltage cable through it. Can't have high and low voltage wiring in the same conduit.
... but then I've seen some pretty bizarre wiring setups that were "just temporary" or quick hacks, I can just see somebody provide a whole new meaning to "power over ethernet".)
(Of course the reasons for all this are probably lost in the mists of time going back to fabric-insulated wires hung on insulators nailed to the studs. You'd think with modern wiring with obvious differences between 12 ga high voltage cable and cat-5e wires it wouldn't matter
Motor control has progressed a fair amount over the last 25 years. But are the motors themselves that much different?
At the small (DC) end, they certainly have, and that can be scaled up if necessary.
Example: I'm not sure when the change happened, but back when, cheap small electric motors (as used in toys, portable cassette or CD players, etc) were low-powered, largish (0.75 to 1 inch diameter, 1 to 1.5 inches long), and heavy. Most of the culprit was the weak and bulky magnets. Modern rare-earth magnets allow for smaller and more-powerful motors. I just got my kids a cheap R/C airplane that uses two small electric motors (maybe 0.25 by 0.5 inches) that turn tiny props at high speed, with an on-board lithium polymer battery that'll keep the thing flying for about 10 minutes. 25 years ago, between the weight of the motors and the weight of the batteries, there was no way to build an electric airplane. (This is no motor-glider either, it looks a bit like an F-16).
There's a demand for small, powerful motors. Toys aside, every cell phone and pager has one (with an unbalanced flywheel for "vibrate" mode). The market probably isn't there yet for 1/3 horsepower motors as small as could be made with modern magnets (most motors that power and up don't use magnets at all, but coils), but the technology is waiting there for the market to happen.
Who needs household robots when we have cheap illegal-immigrant labor? Who needs farm droids when we have cheap illegal-immigrant labor? Etc, etc. (The first robots capable of making up a bed and cleaning a room would no doubt sell well to the hotel industry. Similarly for robots capable of the kind of stoop labor that many kinds of agriculture need to that industry.)
You want significant advances in robotics? Enforce immigration laws.
There's historical precedent of a sort: the ancient Greeks knew of things like steam power and static electricity, but did nothing with them. Technology didn't really begin to take off until the Black Death and other plagues wiped out such a significant fraction of the population that there was a severe labor shortage (bluntly, there weren't enough slaves/serfs). Eliminate the US's source of similar underpaid labor and you'll create a demand for technological replacements.
They dropped it from 21 to 18, this would have been summer of 1971 (yeah, I'm an old fart), then some years later raised it to 19.
I was at Pet for while during basic. I was at Connaught (near Ottawa) when I worked as bartender, it was during the (annual?) commonwealth forces rifle competitions.
When you enroll to the military, you are NOT allowed to die. That is considered damaging military property.
Not allowed to kill yourself, perhaps. Sometimes dying is hard to prevent. But most militaries have serious rules against self-inflicted injuries (otherwise it's an easy out for e.g. combat duties). Sunburn, btw, is often considered a self-inflicted injury.
There's some logic to this. Not to totally restricting alcohol to those too young to drive, but to lowering the drinking age and raising the driving age.
If your concern is drunk drivers, the problem is not drinkers that don't know how to drive, but drivers who don't know how to drink. Let them learn how to drink (responsibly) first, then let them learn to drive. (Sure, there'll always be a few idiots, with or without alcohol.) Lower the drinking age to say, 16, and raise the age at which you can get a drivers license to 18.