Absolutely not. Verizon can have all the patents they want, they just can't use them as a way to prevent another carrier from offering a competing service to their monopoly service.
Personally, I don't think Macrovision should be allowed to enforce patents on the decoding of their protection schemes, as they are using them solely for restraint of trade and have no intent to produce commercial products with them.
I equate this to an automotive company having a patent on the use of gasoline for engines. Or Comcast having a patent for video delivery using baseband analog video signal (wouldn't that fuck up the last meter connection for most of Verizon's IPTV offerings).
I'm not saying that its feasible to do so in the current patent scheme, just that this is not the intent of patent law. Patents are meant to promote progress, not restraint of trade.
Actually, it's this kind of patent use (abuse) - restraint of trade - that should be forbidden. It should be prevented becuase of the monopoly and incumbent carrier status that Verizon holds on the wired telephone market.
They are not using the patents to forward the condition of man, but rather to choke off a competitor in an estabilshed industry with an (effectively) insurmountable cost of entry using traditional methods.
It's no surprise that Verizon is one of the top ten hated corporations.
Bad news...it's not going to be great. There's too much setup involved, even for a simple story like Ender.
Did you happen to read Card's novel of Abyss? without the 100 pages of setup, the movie just doesn't have the background to feel complete. You can't convey the complex systems necessary to fully render a science fiction film in 120 minutes. Fantasy as the same problem - it took LOTR over 9 hours minutes, and there were still gaps.
A good science fiction novel will let you believe you are in a world which is completely different from ours, and you must understand that world to empathise with the characters and plot. Action films put the whole "other world physics" on hold - you get to ignore the believability and instead end up with a commonplace story and cool special effects - add a little nekkid skin or lots of blood and guts, and you've got 120 minutes of mindless entertainment. And mindless entertainment sells.
Even worse...I "upgraded" to a 3.4 P4 in my soon-to-be HT box because it was as far as the MB could go. If I want a faster chip, it means I need a new MB. If I get a new MB, I'll have to change the main video card (AGP to PCI-E) and upgrade the memory, and - just to put a little salt on that potential wound - my MB is an OEM, which means if I swap it out I'll have to buy a new copy of Windows. Makes you wonder why they socket the chips at all instead of soldering them on.
If I had received one of these (and I haven't) this would have been the first thing I would have done. Lawyers are expensive, but they know the legal system. As much as I would like to say that I would have sent a copy to my congressman (no sense in sending it to my senators, they work for the enemy in this case), I probably would have requested my lawyer send them a copy if he felt it was allowable.
I would sum up my thoughts: Don't fuck with the FBI. If you think you want to play games, or feel you need to make a point, make sure have a lawyer (and ideally a federal legislator) involved before you pull their tail.
And that's why you are a contractor. You wouldn't make a "good" (read: shituponable, if that's a word) employee. I'm in the business, too. And I run my own firm because most of the AE houses wanted the free overtime. My employees get paid for overtime because I agree with you. They also work hard and are loyal, and I value that. Most firms, in my experience, don't.
Seriously. Some of the worst jobs have great security and pay well. Look at COBOL programmers - it's probably better to say you're a piano player in a whorehouse than to admit you mind legacy COBOL installations, but I hear that they're pretty darned good jobs. The "coolest" jobs usually pay squat, have lousy hours, are highly competitive, and experience high burnout. (see: Elelctronic Arts).
On the other hand, you can always pursue what you really love, and hope that you happen to get lucky and that your obscure interest is the Next Big Thing (TM). That's how the really great ones did it. Of course, if you did a better job selecting your parents (see: Paris Hilton), the career thing wouldn't really be an issue and you wouldn't be in this boat. So based on your track record, going with the chance part isn't such a good idea for you.
If they can reliably produce a 36" or 42" wide unit that can run with pigment inks at 3-4c/SF in ink cost (5% coverage/black only) for under $2000, they could take over the small architecture and engineering market. Right now, HP sells their cheapest full color 24" unit for almost $2000, and it takes more than 3 minutes per inch. Want 36" or faster output - you're looking at $5k. And laser at this size won't even giv you a sniff below $20k, and you're likely to spend $250/mo in technician costs just keeping it running.
Architecture/Engineering firms typically hire everybody, and everybody is in-house, form the mail room to the partners. Of course, everybody but the partners get paid poorly and work long hours without overtime (exempt folks, that is), so it's not like you're getting off scott free. Oh, and layoffs are pretty common as the building market swings up and down. *shrug*
If you're working on a $10M project (and that's not a big project these days) and you get hit by a bus, the information on your desk is worth a lot more than the cash in your wallet, and possibly your car registration. Of course, not to you (at least not anymore), but to your employer it could cost quite a sum in lost hours to recreate your work from a non-standard filing system. Not being a neat freak isn't the end of the world, but the efficiency you realize using a "custom" filing system has to be weighed against the potential expense.
This is probably the most insightful post on the topic so far. The key to productiviy is that the producer must be able to catalog the information for efficient retrieval. Filing cabinets and stacks and folders are all very good storge methods for retrieval, especially when there is more than one individual involved. But for an individual project, someone who can remember where everything is in a "mess" by using their own mental filing index can be just as efficient, and moreso if the retrieval of the information takes less time than waliking to a defined filing area.
The danger of this is that you are zero fault tolerant - one bus (or lottery ticket, for you optimists) is all it takes to cause a significant setback in the project schedule. It also reduces parallelism on projects which require the coordination of many people who must access the information on a regular basis.
I am, admitedly, a piler, and I have a very large desk (3'x8' plus a 3'x4' section for the computer) but I find that beyond a certain level of randomness I lose efficiency. I keep things out so I don't forget about them, but it make it very difficult for the others in my office to find things. I have to let my efficiency suffer a small amount by filing things, but the overall productivity of the office increases when I do so.
Bad news - there are no rocket scientists left at NASA (okay, not many). Ronald Reagan made sure that all NASA corporate knowledge was transferred to the contractors which service NASA. The administration is not mostly a few scattered PIs and engineers, with the bulk of the workforce in contract administrators (though many of those still have engineer in their titles).
NASA as an innovative entity is not really in existance anymore, except in very limited areas.
As the leader, you are responsible for everything that happens below you. That is why you get paid so much, right? Of it it just the pretty face?
Seriously, that's what's wrong with corporate America (well, the world). I happen to be a professional engineer. I run a small company (a corporation). Because I am a licenced professional, the corporation does nothing to shield me from liability if something goes wrong with my designs. If one of my employees screws up and it goes out the door, it's my fault. I go to jail and/or get sued if someone dies. Personal responsibility. I don't care where you are in te chain of command, when somebody underneath you fucks up, it's your fault. If the fuck up happened four layers below you, then there are four fuckups in the chain, but you're still to blame. Even if you never met the IT peon who made the error, you hired the guy who hired the guy who hired the guy who screwed up.
If boards and CxOs were held accountable for all the really big screwups, they'd be a little more concerned about the organization and a little less about maintaining that single digit handicap.
Most of the folks I know who drive hummers (and most big, fuel-inefficient vehicles for that matter) use them for "business use", and though the government is no longer subsidizing 45%+/- of the initial costs of the vehicle through section 179 tax breaks, they still get to deduct the gas and maintenance from their corporate profits (i.e. tax deductible to the point that the vehicle is used for business purposes).
Who cares if you're getting 14mpg on the highway...after taxes it's more like 25mpg - and that's not too bad for a big vehicle, right?
tax tidbit: in a small corporation, often the owner takes a small salary, usu. about 1/3 of the total profit of the business, with the remaining as "owner's draws" which are not salary. For every dollar that gets deducted, the owner doesn't pay about 25-30c of federal tax, 7c state tax (avg), and 15c of FICA - soc. security and medicare. So that $1 that got deducted might actually reduce the tax burden by close to 45% in the final analysis. As the owner of a small business, a $35,000 truck (a real one, not an SUV) at 13mpg would actually cost less out of pocket to buy and operate than a $22,000 prius over the 5 year IRS "life" of the vehicle, even with the limited section 179, after taxes. Odd but true.
That's very true. The retailers want it both ways, too. They want unencumbered product to reduce costs, but they also want the product the big labels market because that's where the money is.
Thing is, they don't really have that much leverage against the labels because the labels have a monopoly on their products. You can't just go somewhere else and pay for the latest Beyonce hit like you can go buy corn or beef. Right now the retailers would prefer no DRM, because they think that would make them the most money. Labels want DRM because they think that's how they will make the most - and no amount of whining by the retailers is going to change their minds if they keep getting checks at the end of the month.
This store is taking a realistic look at their support costs, and has determined that a particular "feature" is costing them a lot of money.
Woohoo. Great. Little happy dance. Big fucking deal.
They aren't the ones who are pushing DRM. They ahve it because without it they wouldn't get the major label tracks which (I presume) form the bulk of their income. This isn't hurting the labels who are requiring the DRM, its simply sqishing the middle players. Now, this is certainly better than just squishing the consumer, but it's still a far cry from leverage to affect change where the change can actually occur.
No analog tape makes perfect copies, not even with $8k platinum snake oil interconnects. It can, however, make very good danalog copies. Digital tape (excuse me: digital data recorded to a tape) is a perfect copy of the bits, but is just as susceptable to damage as other magnetically encoded digital storage. If you lose enough bits on a digital tape, the whole thing is gone. Losing a random 25% of your digital data is usually impossible to recover from, losing a random 25% of analog audio data is not. The dead sea scrolls could be said to have lost well over 99% of their data, but are being reconstructed because they were analog and had an external timecode (i.e., lines and pages).
Actually, this can still be played in favor of Google.
Rather than pointing out that "Viacom is breaking the law, too," they will note that Viacom, via iFilm, is also practicing the industry standard which relys upon the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA. Even if iFilm changes its stance, Google can point out that they were all operating under the same expectation of safe harbor, and the Viacom has only recently changed their policies in order to try and unilaterally change the industry standards. The damage is done. iFilm can try and change their operating procedure, but it can be made to look like a political move by a good defense team.
I just reread that and I sound like an anti-ethanol nazi. I'm not, but ethanol is competing with gasoline, which is just a rip-roaring fuel to use in our IC engines, and everything is built around gasoline. I'd love to see cheap ethanol (sugarbeet? grasses?) take over as a renewable energy source, but there needs to be a compelling reason to switch for most consumers - and I just don't see it happening any time soon.
Actually, the nice thing about energy capacity of a fuel is that it is easy to compare with others on a pure thermal efficiency basis. Per the Wiki article "Ethanol consumption in an engine is approximately 34% higher than that of gasoline (the BTUs per gallon are 34% lower)". This presumes an engine setup with similar thermal efficiencies. Since we're all effectively working from the same Tc, the Th is what makes the difference, and material properties are limiting factors in too much of an increase. Now, that's carnot, which isn't the ICE cycle, but it is an analog here since I don't have the time to grab my thermo book and its too many years removed to remember the ICE cycle by heart (otto, I believe).
Anyway, with very special controls and in a lab setup, they managed to get a super-high compression engine as thermally efficient with ethanol as they have gotten with diesel fuel, which apparently can put it on par with a non-research gasoline engine. I read this as they can tweak the efficiency up by 50% so that it's only a 40% milage penalty over a similarly tweaked diesel engine. (hmmm, maybe deisel is otto cycle - damned it's been too long). What they don't say is what they've had to give up. Diesels generally give up power for torque, and while the economy consumer is willing to live with the trade offs, I'm not sure the 400HP Excursion Soccer Mom crowd is going to say anything except that it has lousy power at highway speed. Giving people less (mileage, power) for more (money, complexity) is a sure way to get shoved off as a niche product. Just ask the Volkswagen TDI folks - 60mpg, but no mainstream acceptance. Oh, and as a bonus ethonol cars need help starting in cold weather - another "flaw" that makes diesel a niche in the passenger auto market.
The tape had analog data on it. Analog, as we all know from years of television and radio, is very forgiving of damage. CDs are digital data. There is error correction, but for normal playback/reading devices there is a limit beyond which they simply give up trying. The data is perfect or its gone for those machines.
Sad to say, tape dies too.
What is more interesting is the use of compression (and rights management, though if your originals are encrypted you deserve to get screwed - physical security comes first). With analog and simple stream encoding of time domain data (such as audio recordings) much data can be recovered using an external benchmark for the time code. Compress that data and lose your parity and you're totally hosed.
I've never been a proponent of compressed or encoded backups. Sure they save space and add a layer of "security", but that comes at the cost of flexibility should damage occur.
Of course, as has certainly already been mentioned - with digital data, you have the luxury of making multiple perfect copies as well as the ability to perform automated checks of that data, mostly possible without user interaction necessary.
Othwise, stone tablets have the best track record so far, though the storage density is a bit on the light (or should I say heavy?) side.
I read it, and the panel that awarded the fees basically took the content industries' recommendations for the new fee structure verbatim, with only one exception (they also wanted a 25% add-on to the fee for any broadcast terminating at a mobile device). It's like two people going to a required mediator, and one party asking for $1000, and the other suggesting that they can afford $50, and the judge saying "$1000 sounds good to me!"
Ethanol is not as efficient (in mpg) as gasoline, even in perfectly tuned vehicles. Why? because the energy content of the fuel is only about 2/3 that of gasoline, and only 3/5 that of Diesel fuel. One source is the ubiquitous wikipedia entry on gasoline.
Flex fuel cars suck balls on ethanol because ethanol sucks balls when it comes to stored energy. As for cars taking more than 15% ethanol, there are several vechles on the market that run on 85% ethanol (aka E85 vehicles), though most are work trucks, iirc.
Fact is, ethonol is more expensive to produce and produces less energy per unit volume than is currently the case with petroleum fuels. So that $3.00 ethanol really is like buying $4.50 gasoline, or $5.00 diesel fuel. Not that that'sa bad thing, but people, and Americans in particular, have a very hard time figuring out that kind of math to make an informed decision. That's lucky for the ethanol folks who just want to sell us gallons of ethanol in place of gallons of gas, but it's particularly bad for them on a PR level because people will associate ethanol with shitty gas mileage (and lumped into the perception of "shitty performance").
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Absolutely not. Verizon can have all the patents they want, they just can't use them as a way to prevent another carrier from offering a competing service to their monopoly service.
Personally, I don't think Macrovision should be allowed to enforce patents on the decoding of their protection schemes, as they are using them solely for restraint of trade and have no intent to produce commercial products with them.
I equate this to an automotive company having a patent on the use of gasoline for engines. Or Comcast having a patent for video delivery using baseband analog video signal (wouldn't that fuck up the last meter connection for most of Verizon's IPTV offerings).
I'm not saying that its feasible to do so in the current patent scheme, just that this is not the intent of patent law. Patents are meant to promote progress, not restraint of trade.
Actually, it's this kind of patent use (abuse) - restraint of trade - that should be forbidden. It should be prevented becuase of the monopoly and incumbent carrier status that Verizon holds on the wired telephone market.
They are not using the patents to forward the condition of man, but rather to choke off a competitor in an estabilshed industry with an (effectively) insurmountable cost of entry using traditional methods.
It's no surprise that Verizon is one of the top ten hated corporations.
Bad news...it's not going to be great. There's too much setup involved, even for a simple story like Ender.
Did you happen to read Card's novel of Abyss? without the 100 pages of setup, the movie just doesn't have the background to feel complete. You can't convey the complex systems necessary to fully render a science fiction film in 120 minutes. Fantasy as the same problem - it took LOTR over 9 hours minutes, and there were still gaps.
A good science fiction novel will let you believe you are in a world which is completely different from ours, and you must understand that world to empathise with the characters and plot. Action films put the whole "other world physics" on hold - you get to ignore the believability and instead end up with a commonplace story and cool special effects - add a little nekkid skin or lots of blood and guts, and you've got 120 minutes of mindless entertainment. And mindless entertainment sells.
Even worse...I "upgraded" to a 3.4 P4 in my soon-to-be HT box because it was as far as the MB could go. If I want a faster chip, it means I need a new MB. If I get a new MB, I'll have to change the main video card (AGP to PCI-E) and upgrade the memory, and - just to put a little salt on that potential wound - my MB is an OEM, which means if I swap it out I'll have to buy a new copy of Windows. Makes you wonder why they socket the chips at all instead of soldering them on.
If I had received one of these (and I haven't) this would have been the first thing I would have done. Lawyers are expensive, but they know the legal system. As much as I would like to say that I would have sent a copy to my congressman (no sense in sending it to my senators, they work for the enemy in this case), I probably would have requested my lawyer send them a copy if he felt it was allowable.
I would sum up my thoughts: Don't fuck with the FBI. If you think you want to play games, or feel you need to make a point, make sure have a lawyer (and ideally a federal legislator) involved before you pull their tail.
And that's why you are a contractor. You wouldn't make a "good" (read: shituponable, if that's a word) employee. I'm in the business, too. And I run my own firm because most of the AE houses wanted the free overtime. My employees get paid for overtime because I agree with you. They also work hard and are loyal, and I value that. Most firms, in my experience, don't.
Seriously. Some of the worst jobs have great security and pay well. Look at COBOL programmers - it's probably better to say you're a piano player in a whorehouse than to admit you mind legacy COBOL installations, but I hear that they're pretty darned good jobs. The "coolest" jobs usually pay squat, have lousy hours, are highly competitive, and experience high burnout. (see: Elelctronic Arts).
On the other hand, you can always pursue what you really love, and hope that you happen to get lucky and that your obscure interest is the Next Big Thing (TM). That's how the really great ones did it. Of course, if you did a better job selecting your parents (see: Paris Hilton), the career thing wouldn't really be an issue and you wouldn't be in this boat. So based on your track record, going with the chance part isn't such a good idea for you.
If they can reliably produce a 36" or 42" wide unit that can run with pigment inks at 3-4c/SF in ink cost (5% coverage/black only) for under $2000, they could take over the small architecture and engineering market. Right now, HP sells their cheapest full color 24" unit for almost $2000, and it takes more than 3 minutes per inch. Want 36" or faster output - you're looking at $5k. And laser at this size won't even giv you a sniff below $20k, and you're likely to spend $250/mo in technician costs just keeping it running.
Architecture/Engineering firms typically hire everybody, and everybody is in-house, form the mail room to the partners. Of course, everybody but the partners get paid poorly and work long hours without overtime (exempt folks, that is), so it's not like you're getting off scott free. Oh, and layoffs are pretty common as the building market swings up and down. *shrug*
If you're working on a $10M project (and that's not a big project these days) and you get hit by a bus, the information on your desk is worth a lot more than the cash in your wallet, and possibly your car registration. Of course, not to you (at least not anymore), but to your employer it could cost quite a sum in lost hours to recreate your work from a non-standard filing system. Not being a neat freak isn't the end of the world, but the efficiency you realize using a "custom" filing system has to be weighed against the potential expense.
This is probably the most insightful post on the topic so far. The key to productiviy is that the producer must be able to catalog the information for efficient retrieval. Filing cabinets and stacks and folders are all very good storge methods for retrieval, especially when there is more than one individual involved. But for an individual project, someone who can remember where everything is in a "mess" by using their own mental filing index can be just as efficient, and moreso if the retrieval of the information takes less time than waliking to a defined filing area.
The danger of this is that you are zero fault tolerant - one bus (or lottery ticket, for you optimists) is all it takes to cause a significant setback in the project schedule. It also reduces parallelism on projects which require the coordination of many people who must access the information on a regular basis.
I am, admitedly, a piler, and I have a very large desk (3'x8' plus a 3'x4' section for the computer) but I find that beyond a certain level of randomness I lose efficiency. I keep things out so I don't forget about them, but it make it very difficult for the others in my office to find things. I have to let my efficiency suffer a small amount by filing things, but the overall productivity of the office increases when I do so.
Bad news - there are no rocket scientists left at NASA (okay, not many). Ronald Reagan made sure that all NASA corporate knowledge was transferred to the contractors which service NASA. The administration is not mostly a few scattered PIs and engineers, with the bulk of the workforce in contract administrators (though many of those still have engineer in their titles).
NASA as an innovative entity is not really in existance anymore, except in very limited areas.
As the leader, you are responsible for everything that happens below you. That is why you get paid so much, right? Of it it just the pretty face?
Seriously, that's what's wrong with corporate America (well, the world). I happen to be a professional engineer. I run a small company (a corporation). Because I am a licenced professional, the corporation does nothing to shield me from liability if something goes wrong with my designs. If one of my employees screws up and it goes out the door, it's my fault. I go to jail and/or get sued if someone dies. Personal responsibility. I don't care where you are in te chain of command, when somebody underneath you fucks up, it's your fault. If the fuck up happened four layers below you, then there are four fuckups in the chain, but you're still to blame. Even if you never met the IT peon who made the error, you hired the guy who hired the guy who hired the guy who screwed up.
If boards and CxOs were held accountable for all the really big screwups, they'd be a little more concerned about the organization and a little less about maintaining that single digit handicap.
Most of the folks I know who drive hummers (and most big, fuel-inefficient vehicles for that matter) use them for "business use", and though the government is no longer subsidizing 45%+/- of the initial costs of the vehicle through section 179 tax breaks, they still get to deduct the gas and maintenance from their corporate profits (i.e. tax deductible to the point that the vehicle is used for business purposes).
Who cares if you're getting 14mpg on the highway...after taxes it's more like 25mpg - and that's not too bad for a big vehicle, right?
tax tidbit: in a small corporation, often the owner takes a small salary, usu. about 1/3 of the total profit of the business, with the remaining as "owner's draws" which are not salary. For every dollar that gets deducted, the owner doesn't pay about 25-30c of federal tax, 7c state tax (avg), and 15c of FICA - soc. security and medicare. So that $1 that got deducted might actually reduce the tax burden by close to 45% in the final analysis. As the owner of a small business, a $35,000 truck (a real one, not an SUV) at 13mpg would actually cost less out of pocket to buy and operate than a $22,000 prius over the 5 year IRS "life" of the vehicle, even with the limited section 179, after taxes. Odd but true.
That's very true. The retailers want it both ways, too. They want unencumbered product to reduce costs, but they also want the product the big labels market because that's where the money is.
Thing is, they don't really have that much leverage against the labels because the labels have a monopoly on their products. You can't just go somewhere else and pay for the latest Beyonce hit like you can go buy corn or beef. Right now the retailers would prefer no DRM, because they think that would make them the most money. Labels want DRM because they think that's how they will make the most - and no amount of whining by the retailers is going to change their minds if they keep getting checks at the end of the month.
Toyota isn't losing $29X,000 per vehicle, so where is that money coming from?
This store is taking a realistic look at their support costs, and has determined that a particular "feature" is costing them a lot of money.
Woohoo. Great. Little happy dance. Big fucking deal.
They aren't the ones who are pushing DRM. They ahve it because without it they wouldn't get the major label tracks which (I presume) form the bulk of their income. This isn't hurting the labels who are requiring the DRM, its simply sqishing the middle players. Now, this is certainly better than just squishing the consumer, but it's still a far cry from leverage to affect change where the change can actually occur.
No analog tape makes perfect copies, not even with $8k platinum snake oil interconnects. It can, however, make very good danalog copies. Digital tape (excuse me: digital data recorded to a tape) is a perfect copy of the bits, but is just as susceptable to damage as other magnetically encoded digital storage. If you lose enough bits on a digital tape, the whole thing is gone. Losing a random 25% of your digital data is usually impossible to recover from, losing a random 25% of analog audio data is not. The dead sea scrolls could be said to have lost well over 99% of their data, but are being reconstructed because they were analog and had an external timecode (i.e., lines and pages).
Actually, this can still be played in favor of Google.
Rather than pointing out that "Viacom is breaking the law, too," they will note that Viacom, via iFilm, is also practicing the industry standard which relys upon the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA. Even if iFilm changes its stance, Google can point out that they were all operating under the same expectation of safe harbor, and the Viacom has only recently changed their policies in order to try and unilaterally change the industry standards. The damage is done. iFilm can try and change their operating procedure, but it can be made to look like a political move by a good defense team.
I just reread that and I sound like an anti-ethanol nazi. I'm not, but ethanol is competing with gasoline, which is just a rip-roaring fuel to use in our IC engines, and everything is built around gasoline. I'd love to see cheap ethanol (sugarbeet? grasses?) take over as a renewable energy source, but there needs to be a compelling reason to switch for most consumers - and I just don't see it happening any time soon.
Actually, the nice thing about energy capacity of a fuel is that it is easy to compare with others on a pure thermal efficiency basis. Per the Wiki article "Ethanol consumption in an engine is approximately 34% higher than that of gasoline (the BTUs per gallon are 34% lower)". This presumes an engine setup with similar thermal efficiencies. Since we're all effectively working from the same Tc, the Th is what makes the difference, and material properties are limiting factors in too much of an increase. Now, that's carnot, which isn't the ICE cycle, but it is an analog here since I don't have the time to grab my thermo book and its too many years removed to remember the ICE cycle by heart (otto, I believe).
Anyway, with very special controls and in a lab setup, they managed to get a super-high compression engine as thermally efficient with ethanol as they have gotten with diesel fuel, which apparently can put it on par with a non-research gasoline engine. I read this as they can tweak the efficiency up by 50% so that it's only a 40% milage penalty over a similarly tweaked diesel engine. (hmmm, maybe deisel is otto cycle - damned it's been too long). What they don't say is what they've had to give up. Diesels generally give up power for torque, and while the economy consumer is willing to live with the trade offs, I'm not sure the 400HP Excursion Soccer Mom crowd is going to say anything except that it has lousy power at highway speed. Giving people less (mileage, power) for more (money, complexity) is a sure way to get shoved off as a niche product. Just ask the Volkswagen TDI folks - 60mpg, but no mainstream acceptance. Oh, and as a bonus ethonol cars need help starting in cold weather - another "flaw" that makes diesel a niche in the passenger auto market.
The tape had analog data on it. Analog, as we all know from years of television and radio, is very forgiving of damage. CDs are digital data. There is error correction, but for normal playback/reading devices there is a limit beyond which they simply give up trying. The data is perfect or its gone for those machines.
Sad to say, tape dies too.
What is more interesting is the use of compression (and rights management, though if your originals are encrypted you deserve to get screwed - physical security comes first). With analog and simple stream encoding of time domain data (such as audio recordings) much data can be recovered using an external benchmark for the time code. Compress that data and lose your parity and you're totally hosed.
I've never been a proponent of compressed or encoded backups. Sure they save space and add a layer of "security", but that comes at the cost of flexibility should damage occur.
Of course, as has certainly already been mentioned - with digital data, you have the luxury of making multiple perfect copies as well as the ability to perform automated checks of that data, mostly possible without user interaction necessary.
Othwise, stone tablets have the best track record so far, though the storage density is a bit on the light (or should I say heavy?) side.
Absolutely. Tape backups never drop bits - and nobody has ever had a tape go bad - as we all know. Except maybe that $38B thing in Alaska.
You didn't read the ruling, did you?
I read it, and the panel that awarded the fees basically took the content industries' recommendations for the new fee structure verbatim, with only one exception (they also wanted a 25% add-on to the fee for any broadcast terminating at a mobile device). It's like two people going to a required mediator, and one party asking for $1000, and the other suggesting that they can afford $50, and the judge saying "$1000 sounds good to me!"
Ethanol is not as efficient (in mpg) as gasoline, even in perfectly tuned vehicles. Why? because the energy content of the fuel is only about 2/3 that of gasoline, and only 3/5 that of Diesel fuel. One source is the ubiquitous wikipedia entry on gasoline.
Flex fuel cars suck balls on ethanol because ethanol sucks balls when it comes to stored energy. As for cars taking more than 15% ethanol, there are several vechles on the market that run on 85% ethanol (aka E85 vehicles), though most are work trucks, iirc.
Fact is, ethonol is more expensive to produce and produces less energy per unit volume than is currently the case with petroleum fuels. So that $3.00 ethanol really is like buying $4.50 gasoline, or $5.00 diesel fuel. Not that that'sa bad thing, but people, and Americans in particular, have a very hard time figuring out that kind of math to make an informed decision. That's lucky for the ethanol folks who just want to sell us gallons of ethanol in place of gallons of gas, but it's particularly bad for them on a PR level because people will associate ethanol with shitty gas mileage (and lumped into the perception of "shitty performance").