If you're not deep in debt, take the leap and set up your own shop. You should, if you've been training for it, know the business as well as you ever will. Unless your business is about personal relationships - in which case you'll need to set up in another town - use the clout and know how you have to open your own shop. You not only know the business, you know your father's weaknesses too - and that's your edge.
This is the danger of ever professional corporation in the world - that the people under you fall generally into two camps. The first are work-a-day employees - the bottom 80% - and they come and go. You try and keep the better ones, and let the losers go, but in the end they're just footnotes tot he organization. The second camp are the ones who really get it - those are the ones you have to watch. They are the ones you will either promote and make a partner, or who will leave and become your competition.
Ahhh, and you've put together a coalition of friends with land stretching from major city to major city who are willing to have one of these lines fly through their backyard every 40 minutes, 24 hours a day?
Even ignoring the property acquisition cost, these things are expensive. Standard rail is several million dollars per mile, high speed rail is more expensive (debatable on how much more, but we can pretty much guarantee it's not cheaper).
The US has a fantastic train system, it's just not economical to move humans on it. I would push for autonomous cars at this point.
"I dont have to go get a sound editor. I have the best one open source provides: Audacity."
And there, dear troll, is your problem. You see, while Audacity is great for the money, it is woefully behind the times in the included tools to shape, correct, and modify sounds. I know because I work with vocal tracks on occasion (I sing a cappella with an amateur group), and while you can record, amplify, cut, paste, and do lots of basic operations with Audacity, the results of the more challenging operations are pretty poor. A great example is tempo changes. Try slowing down a track in Audacity - you'll get all sorts of artifacts. It's not something you would want to listen to. Do the same thing in Adobe Audition and you'll get a nice, smooth track out that sounds far better with no (or very very few) artifacts. Slow it down too much and it gets a bit comical. Though I have not worked with it, I believe that more significant changes are better fed through Melodyne, which allows not just pitch correction, but finer grained adjustments like attack speed (which would be necessary on a 50% speed track to avoid the drunk/slurring effect).
Please do not judge the ability of modern audio editing based on Audacity. I use it, too - but only because I know it better than other programs and haven't had the time to learn a more complete software package.
Exactly - they're two entirely different paradigms for user interface. Jelly Bean is made so that you can make it work and feel any way you want. iOS is made so that no matter which iDevice you use or who's iDevice it is, it works the same. You can flail about all you want about how useful the customization is, but it completely misses the point that most of the user base for phones not only doesn't give a rats ass about customization beyond choosing a lock screen photo, but actually benefits from never having to mess with it.
Trust me - I had the uber-custom WM6 phone for a couple of years and it was just plain awesome how I could keep everything I needed right at my fingertips. Custom ROMs, lock screen information, 3D access to customized app pages with detailed configuration data, custom button mappings - you name it. I have an iPhone now, and each time I pick up and Android device to see how it is (or, heaven forbid, have to fix my mother's droid), I'm reminded of all the wasted hours of customization. Are there things I would like to change? YES. Is it worth the added complexity in my life? Not right now...maybe in ten years when I'm not as busy with, well, life.
That would probably have been on the road map if the aliens hadn't killed Jobs. His perfect device would have no interface points whatsoever - just a perfectly smooth, hermetically sealed case. I'd go so far as to say that the front and back would be indistinguishable, save for a slightly luminescent Apple logo on the back. Headphones and portable chargers would be magnetically keyed. Data transfer would be entirely wireless.
It would be exactly like the gadgets advanced beings carried around (and inexplicably lost) in scifi novels we read as kids.
The same reason you would run Windows on a MacBook. If the thing that matters most to you is the screen there are precious few other options in the market, even if you ignore the high resolution. Just finding an IPS laptop that has basic features and doesn't require a furniture dolly to move is hard to find. Also, if you work in both OSX and Linux environments, you are going to want a MacBook. The cases are not numerous, but they're out there.
And that's what makes it so f*cking difficult, or so I'm told. The last time I heard much about scram was in my senior compressible aero class in the early 90s. Back then, only the Russians had gotten combustion, but it still produced negative thrust and it occurred on the downward arc of a ballistic trajectory that resulted in a very deep core sample of the Siberian tundra.
Yes - typically any flame front in a medium moving faster than the speed of sound within that medium is usually considered a "detonation". I'm honestly not familiar enough with the internals to say what actually occurs or how they make the whole thing viable.
It's not about flying that fast, it's about operating a supersonic combustion engine to produce positive net thrust. Anyone can stick a rocket on the back of a tube and fly fast, but you have to carry all of your oxidizer with you (or use a monopropellant). With this you just carry the fuel and let the shock transition form the compressor for your jet engine. Of course, it's not quite that simple, since you can't slow down the flow to be subsonic and still achieve + thrust, so you've got to make combustion occur in a flow that's faster than the speed of sound.
I suspect they have very little to lose. Patents on these things, while important today, will have very little bearing in 5 years. With a litigation cycle extending that long (and sometimes longer), simply litigating can protect your IP for its entire useful life regardless of its actual validity. All the while, you are using it and actively preventing (or impeding) your competitors.
Winning or losing doesn't really matter that much - sure, it would be nice to win, but just a good, long show meets the performance goals of the tactic.
And that's the challenge with examining patents for prior art. It appears that many of these ideas are not just available in the previous year but instead were put forth decade(s) before the patent was filed - in a time before the need to patent everything was SOP.
What this captures is a competitive patent condition where technology may be developing in close parallel and is co-opted by another, but ignores the patenting of older ideas which were considered either too trivial, economically unfeasible, or simply not worth of patent protection (whether too obvious or not commercially viable) at the time.
Yeah, it depends on whether that's $172M/blimp or $500M in development and $6M/blimp. The current 787/A350 aircraft development costs were in the $10B+ range, with per-unit prices in the $150M-$190M range. With development costs running 70x a production unit, that would come out very close to the $497M/$7M for the cost of the airship.
That's terribly interesting. Given the current candidates, which one do you believe will be far more lenient on whistle blowers who expose their own dark secrets and pet programs?
Easy - this is his personal music, photo, and movie collection - most mp3 and older digital camera files are 3MB, and BR discs are about 20-25GB when ripped to HD.
I'm at about 9TB at the moment (well, 7TB actual usage, 11TB total disc space, 2TB of which is parity) and I have a fairly small collection. With thousands of RAW family photos, several thousand music tracks (most from a 30 year collection of CDs), and about 400 DVDs & BR discs I've ripped, it's not hard to see how I've ended up with 7TB. I know many movie collectors with libraries several times the size of mine.
I presume he has a bunch of old HDs he can put into USB enclosures or a docking station - perhaps having upgraded from a 16-20 disc 1-2TB/disc NAS to a 6x4TB NAS. There are several people on the unRaid forums with larger arrays. Rather than pitch the old hardware, they could be used for a backup.
Then again, I'm a practicing engineer. I moved from hard stuff (aerospace) to easy stuff (structural) 'cause I'm lazy and I wanted to live where there were few aero firms.
I use the results of calculus every day, but I don't have to do calculus longhand. I have done basic spreadsheet modeling and a very, very small bit of programming to ensure that I don't have to do calculus - but without learning it and understanding the concepts there's no way I could have built the tools I use. Further, the mere understanding of calculus means that I can mentally estimate faster and realize how the various materials will interact without having to put a pencil on paper. In other words - I can solve most problems in my head, with very few numbers. Now, that may not seem useful in a profession where answers on paper are my meal ticket, but think of it this way: I only have to write down my problem and solution once rather than trying several different options because I already know what the correct answer will look like.
You won't use 99% of what you learn on a day to day basis, but the ability to understand and be able to apply that broad background is the difference between a $30/hr technician and a $150/hr professional. Now, if you plan on managing people or money, your skill set will need to be entirely different, but that 99% rule will still apply.
Reminds me a bit of playing VGA planets. You had two strategies when taking over a planet - suck the inhabitants dry as quickly as possible and take what you could (essentially make the place unusable for another player), or keep them just barely happy enough not to riot in order to maximize the resources. Of course, there was the option of keeping everybody super-happy and then using that good will to generate butt-loads of resources for a short period, but that wasn't nearly as useful as the other two strategies.
Not only isn't it the first touchscreen with a keyboard, it's not even the first with a wireless keyboard, or a standalone that can add a keyboard, or a tablet-keyboard combination that can be separated, or a tablet running a mobile operating system which can have an optional keyboard. Or even a tablet with rounded corners running a mobile operating system which connects to an optional, integrated keyboard that adds functionality other than just a keyboard.
No, attaching a keyboard to an otherwise standalone tablet. See, just as it was innovative to remove the keyboard from a laptop and give a device a touchscreen, it's just as innovative, novel, and unintuitive to a practitioner in the field of tablets to add a keyboard. You may as well have developed a way to take credit card payments online - it's a complete game changer that nobody saw coming.
This is sliced bread and steering wheel level stuff here - not some me-too pseudo-discovery.
The lawyers will probably know where the judge is leaning and have the transfer documentation ready to go at a moments notice. They'll sell/reassign the patent and fold in the time it takes to process the request.
And piercing the corporate veil? Good luck with that - the standards are exceptionally high for getting at the original investors through multiple corporations, and these are not just corporations but lawyers with nothing better to do than cover their own asses. I don't see it happening.
but for every kind of mix of the two there's a sport to excel in.
No, actually there isn't. You need only to go to any adolescent training area to see that the very top athletes do not come from the ranks of those who have neither inherent strength, agility, and/or flexibility, and yet train with the masters. It would be like saying that anyone can become a nobel prize winning scientist if they simply studied more, or one of the top two or three musicians on an instrument/voice in the world by just practicing at an early age. It's not that easy or we would all be masters of our craft.
Genetics plays a primary role in selection of the top 1e-8 fraction of athletes in the world. I'll agree that without proper training, that'll get you no more than a spot in your local rec league, but without the proper genetic mix you can probably forget about multiple olympic gold medals no matter how hard you train.
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If you're not deep in debt, take the leap and set up your own shop. You should, if you've been training for it, know the business as well as you ever will. Unless your business is about personal relationships - in which case you'll need to set up in another town - use the clout and know how you have to open your own shop. You not only know the business, you know your father's weaknesses too - and that's your edge.
This is the danger of ever professional corporation in the world - that the people under you fall generally into two camps. The first are work-a-day employees - the bottom 80% - and they come and go. You try and keep the better ones, and let the losers go, but in the end they're just footnotes tot he organization. The second camp are the ones who really get it - those are the ones you have to watch. They are the ones you will either promote and make a partner, or who will leave and become your competition.
Rule #3: when you make more than you need...HA! I'm just kidding - see rule #1.
Ahhh, and you've put together a coalition of friends with land stretching from major city to major city who are willing to have one of these lines fly through their backyard every 40 minutes, 24 hours a day?
Even ignoring the property acquisition cost, these things are expensive. Standard rail is several million dollars per mile, high speed rail is more expensive (debatable on how much more, but we can pretty much guarantee it's not cheaper).
The US has a fantastic train system, it's just not economical to move humans on it. I would push for autonomous cars at this point.
That's fine, but please don't pick you toes in public.
It's linux: write your own and quit whining, you leach.
"I dont have to go get a sound editor. I have the best one open source provides:
Audacity."
And there, dear troll, is your problem. You see, while Audacity is great for the money, it is woefully behind the times in the included tools to shape, correct, and modify sounds. I know because I work with vocal tracks on occasion (I sing a cappella with an amateur group), and while you can record, amplify, cut, paste, and do lots of basic operations with Audacity, the results of the more challenging operations are pretty poor. A great example is tempo changes. Try slowing down a track in Audacity - you'll get all sorts of artifacts. It's not something you would want to listen to. Do the same thing in Adobe Audition and you'll get a nice, smooth track out that sounds far better with no (or very very few) artifacts. Slow it down too much and it gets a bit comical. Though I have not worked with it, I believe that more significant changes are better fed through Melodyne, which allows not just pitch correction, but finer grained adjustments like attack speed (which would be necessary on a 50% speed track to avoid the drunk/slurring effect).
Please do not judge the ability of modern audio editing based on Audacity. I use it, too - but only because I know it better than other programs and haven't had the time to learn a more complete software package.
"iOS does not compete at all with Jellybean"
Exactly - they're two entirely different paradigms for user interface. Jelly Bean is made so that you can make it work and feel any way you want. iOS is made so that no matter which iDevice you use or who's iDevice it is, it works the same. You can flail about all you want about how useful the customization is, but it completely misses the point that most of the user base for phones not only doesn't give a rats ass about customization beyond choosing a lock screen photo, but actually benefits from never having to mess with it.
Trust me - I had the uber-custom WM6 phone for a couple of years and it was just plain awesome how I could keep everything I needed right at my fingertips. Custom ROMs, lock screen information, 3D access to customized app pages with detailed configuration data, custom button mappings - you name it. I have an iPhone now, and each time I pick up and Android device to see how it is (or, heaven forbid, have to fix my mother's droid), I'm reminded of all the wasted hours of customization. Are there things I would like to change? YES. Is it worth the added complexity in my life? Not right now...maybe in ten years when I'm not as busy with, well, life.
That would probably have been on the road map if the aliens hadn't killed Jobs. His perfect device would have no interface points whatsoever - just a perfectly smooth, hermetically sealed case. I'd go so far as to say that the front and back would be indistinguishable, save for a slightly luminescent Apple logo on the back. Headphones and portable chargers would be magnetically keyed. Data transfer would be entirely wireless.
It would be exactly like the gadgets advanced beings carried around (and inexplicably lost) in scifi novels we read as kids.
The same reason you would run Windows on a MacBook. If the thing that matters most to you is the screen there are precious few other options in the market, even if you ignore the high resolution. Just finding an IPS laptop that has basic features and doesn't require a furniture dolly to move is hard to find. Also, if you work in both OSX and Linux environments, you are going to want a MacBook. The cases are not numerous, but they're out there.
And that's what makes it so f*cking difficult, or so I'm told. The last time I heard much about scram was in my senior compressible aero class in the early 90s. Back then, only the Russians had gotten combustion, but it still produced negative thrust and it occurred on the downward arc of a ballistic trajectory that resulted in a very deep core sample of the Siberian tundra.
Yes - typically any flame front in a medium moving faster than the speed of sound within that medium is usually considered a "detonation". I'm honestly not familiar enough with the internals to say what actually occurs or how they make the whole thing viable.
It's not about flying that fast, it's about operating a supersonic combustion engine to produce positive net thrust. Anyone can stick a rocket on the back of a tube and fly fast, but you have to carry all of your oxidizer with you (or use a monopropellant). With this you just carry the fuel and let the shock transition form the compressor for your jet engine. Of course, it's not quite that simple, since you can't slow down the flow to be subsonic and still achieve + thrust, so you've got to make combustion occur in a flow that's faster than the speed of sound.
I suspect they have very little to lose. Patents on these things, while important today, will have very little bearing in 5 years. With a litigation cycle extending that long (and sometimes longer), simply litigating can protect your IP for its entire useful life regardless of its actual validity. All the while, you are using it and actively preventing (or impeding) your competitors.
Winning or losing doesn't really matter that much - sure, it would be nice to win, but just a good, long show meets the performance goals of the tactic.
And that's the challenge with examining patents for prior art. It appears that many of these ideas are not just available in the previous year but instead were put forth decade(s) before the patent was filed - in a time before the need to patent everything was SOP.
What this captures is a competitive patent condition where technology may be developing in close parallel and is co-opted by another, but ignores the patenting of older ideas which were considered either too trivial, economically unfeasible, or simply not worth of patent protection (whether too obvious or not commercially viable) at the time.
Yeah, it depends on whether that's $172M/blimp or $500M in development and $6M/blimp. The current 787/A350 aircraft development costs were in the $10B+ range, with per-unit prices in the $150M-$190M range. With development costs running 70x a production unit, that would come out very close to the $497M/$7M for the cost of the airship.
That's terribly interesting. Given the current candidates, which one do you believe will be far more lenient on whistle blowers who expose their own dark secrets and pet programs?
He fights for the little guy every time!
(Of course, that's because their meat is usually more tender and goes well with a Pernod-Ricard Perrier-Jouet)
Easy - this is his personal music, photo, and movie collection - most mp3 and older digital camera files are 3MB, and BR discs are about 20-25GB when ripped to HD.
I'm at about 9TB at the moment (well, 7TB actual usage, 11TB total disc space, 2TB of which is parity) and I have a fairly small collection. With thousands of RAW family photos, several thousand music tracks (most from a 30 year collection of CDs), and about 400 DVDs & BR discs I've ripped, it's not hard to see how I've ended up with 7TB. I know many movie collectors with libraries several times the size of mine.
I presume he has a bunch of old HDs he can put into USB enclosures or a docking station - perhaps having upgraded from a 16-20 disc 1-2TB/disc NAS to a 6x4TB NAS. There are several people on the unRaid forums with larger arrays. Rather than pitch the old hardware, they could be used for a backup.
Then again, I'm a practicing engineer. I moved from hard stuff (aerospace) to easy stuff (structural) 'cause I'm lazy and I wanted to live where there were few aero firms.
I use the results of calculus every day, but I don't have to do calculus longhand. I have done basic spreadsheet modeling and a very, very small bit of programming to ensure that I don't have to do calculus - but without learning it and understanding the concepts there's no way I could have built the tools I use. Further, the mere understanding of calculus means that I can mentally estimate faster and realize how the various materials will interact without having to put a pencil on paper. In other words - I can solve most problems in my head, with very few numbers. Now, that may not seem useful in a profession where answers on paper are my meal ticket, but think of it this way: I only have to write down my problem and solution once rather than trying several different options because I already know what the correct answer will look like.
You won't use 99% of what you learn on a day to day basis, but the ability to understand and be able to apply that broad background is the difference between a $30/hr technician and a $150/hr professional. Now, if you plan on managing people or money, your skill set will need to be entirely different, but that 99% rule will still apply.
I suspect the conversation went something like this:
General: Team, we need to find a way to double the range of these drones, but I don't have any additional design money for this project.
Senior Engineer: There's no room in the flight profile to double the energy storage - it would require a complete redesign.
Manager: It can't be done; we can't do this for free.
.
.
.
Junior Engineer: What if it didn't need to return?
Reminds me a bit of playing VGA planets. You had two strategies when taking over a planet - suck the inhabitants dry as quickly as possible and take what you could (essentially make the place unusable for another player), or keep them just barely happy enough not to riot in order to maximize the resources. Of course, there was the option of keeping everybody super-happy and then using that good will to generate butt-loads of resources for a short period, but that wasn't nearly as useful as the other two strategies.
...since it's a civil issue and the US Gov't won't bother to pursue it.
It's a shame we can't get together, as taxpayers, and sue on behalf of the gov't.
Not only isn't it the first touchscreen with a keyboard, it's not even the first with a wireless keyboard, or a standalone that can add a keyboard, or a tablet-keyboard combination that can be separated, or a tablet running a mobile operating system which can have an optional keyboard. Or even a tablet with rounded corners running a mobile operating system which connects to an optional, integrated keyboard that adds functionality other than just a keyboard.
No, attaching a keyboard to an otherwise standalone tablet. See, just as it was innovative to remove the keyboard from a laptop and give a device a touchscreen, it's just as innovative, novel, and unintuitive to a practitioner in the field of tablets to add a keyboard. You may as well have developed a way to take credit card payments online - it's a complete game changer that nobody saw coming.
This is sliced bread and steering wheel level stuff here - not some me-too pseudo-discovery.
The lawyers will probably know where the judge is leaning and have the transfer documentation ready to go at a moments notice. They'll sell/reassign the patent and fold in the time it takes to process the request.
And piercing the corporate veil? Good luck with that - the standards are exceptionally high for getting at the original investors through multiple corporations, and these are not just corporations but lawyers with nothing better to do than cover their own asses. I don't see it happening.
but for every kind of mix of the two there's a sport to excel in.
No, actually there isn't. You need only to go to any adolescent training area to see that the very top athletes do not come from the ranks of those who have neither inherent strength, agility, and/or flexibility, and yet train with the masters. It would be like saying that anyone can become a nobel prize winning scientist if they simply studied more, or one of the top two or three musicians on an instrument/voice in the world by just practicing at an early age. It's not that easy or we would all be masters of our craft.
Genetics plays a primary role in selection of the top 1e-8 fraction of athletes in the world. I'll agree that without proper training, that'll get you no more than a spot in your local rec league, but without the proper genetic mix you can probably forget about multiple olympic gold medals no matter how hard you train.