I don't really even know who watches over-the-air broadcast television, other than people who can't/won't/don't pay for cable BUT still love TV enough to own a set.
Except, of course, for people who watch their local broadcast stations via their cable TV subscription. A good portion of the programs I watch come from the major networks, despite the fact that I have cable TV and a TiVo.
Therefore, almost every single benefit of digital broadcasts are almost entirely irrelevant. Receiving an HD picture on a 13 inch analog television won't look any better (and will cost those consumers $50-$100 to buy the converter). Moreover, those who don't want the advanced features or multitude of channels aren't going to suddenly buy a big-screen HDTV to watch broadcast channels in high definition, just because their black-and-white in the kitchen doesn't receive Maury Povich anymore.
There is the real problem. There simply isn't enough benifit for most people to justify the cost of purchasing new equipment. In practice, I could receive a number of HDTV stations if I put up a reasonable anteanna on the roof. Of course, there is no way I'm going to buy a converter to watch HDTV at normal quality. Nor does the increased quality justify, to me at least, the cost of a decent HDTV set.
While I think it is wise and important to reapportion our available spectrum as new technology becomes available and matures, I doubt the legislative mandate to push analog TV into obsolescence is important or a worthwhile use of our legislative, financial, and technological resources.
A much better idea, IMHO, would have been to allow the two formats to exist independantly for a number of years. This would come at the expense of increased spectrum usage, but last I checked there were a very large number of UHF channels that are compeatly unused in any given market. Those could have been used for HDTV while allowing the analog stations to continue to broadcast. Then, the markets can sort it out. Of course, I think the FCC and some in congress knew what the markets decision would likely have been (Hint: Hardly anybody is buying HDTV equipment now despite the very real possibility that analog TV will be going away in a year-and-a-half.). They knew that the only way to have HDTV implemented at all was to force the change by ending analog TV broadcasts.
(As a side note, isn't broadcast television dying, or just turning into one of the pack, anyway? We are no longer bound to the three-network oligarchy, and I fail to see why we should keep supporting that establishment legislatively).
No, not really. Local stations, in addition to network programming, provide local news and coverage of local events. For broadcast television to die, you would need some viable replacement for this fuction. Possibilities include public access or a local public television cable channel. In either case, however, some significant source of funding would be required to match the quality of the local covereage provided by the network affiliates.
Unfortunetly, if you had the authority and motivation to add the DNC's website to the blocklist, it might be quite easy to justify doing so. If the DNC's website contains, or links to, information on abortion, access to birth control, or non-abstinance based sex. ed, it might meet blocking criteria.
Really, if you can make something that will survive falling from space, shouldn't you just build that around the astronauts so that they can survive too?
I'm not sure how serious you meant this comment to be, but here goes:
The first problem is that electronics can be designed to survive much greater accelerations than can the human body. Remember: Only the small pieces of silicon containing the data need survive the impact for the data to be recoved, but a brief 65g-75g acceleration will scramble one's brain.
The second problem is that, even if you assume that your "black box" design can reduce the accleration of its contents to something survivable, you still have to find a way to make a large-enough black-box to contain the crew without the black-box being too heavy or too big to be launched into space.
At approximately 112000 BTU/gallon of gasoline that's about 33kWh/gal. In California where the prices are about $0.12/kWh electric, it costs you about $4.00/gallon saved. With gas prices at about $2.40 in CA that's about $1.60 extra per gallon saved.
One thing you left out is that automotive internal combustion engines typically have an efficiency of somewhere around 20%. I hope that the charger + batteries + electric motor have a better effeciency that than. I'll pull a number out of the air and say that 40% of the energy supplied to the charger will eventually show up in the energy supplied by the output shaft of the motor. Using these numbers, one gallon of gasoline will give you 6.6kWh at the engine output. Using 40% efficiency of the electric system, you need to purchase 16.5kWh of electricity to provide the same 6.6kWh at the motor output. Using your rates, this ends up being about $1.98 for the same amount of energy as produced by a gallon of gasoline in the engine.
The good news is that not everybody has to pay that much for electricity. Where I live, I only pay about $0.07/kWh. This means that I can buy a gallon's worth of electricity for $1.16, or about half what I paid today for gasoline.
It gets better, though. The power company could charge a different rate for EV battery charging, with the stipulation (enforced at the meter) that current only be drawn during off-peak hours. Or, they could set-up an 'auction' system where I plug my car in and say how much I'm willing to pay to charge my car tonight. My charger will be supplied with power only when rates drop below my price. If I still have 80% of my range unused, I'd only be willing to pay a low price. If I only have 20% of my range remaining, I'll pay a higher price. If I really need to charge the car now, I'll plug it into a standard outlet.
One other thing: When it comes to charging a battery, there isn't anything magical about 120/240VAC @ 50/60Hz. It's entirely possible that the power company could provide a seperate, lower quality of service, line for battery charging and simialr uses where the voltage and frequency could vary +/-30% without breaking anything. The same logic means it should be easier to charge your EV from off-grid sources than to power your house from an off-grid source.
That's like saying you should be able to remove QT or whatever other windowing toolkit you use from your system, but still be able to run anything that uses that API to produce its windows.
Actually, its more like saying you should be able to remove Motif or whatever outher windowing toolkit you use from your system, but still be able to run anything that uses that API to produce its windows, provided that you have installed a competing, compatible API such as Lesstif.
As I understand it, what the EU wants is for Microsoft to allow vendors to ship PC's with media-players other than WMP, and have the replacement player provide the same set of functions as WMP (to the extent that the replacement player supports/provides those functions).
This is different from codecs...that's one step above what we're talking about here. The wmplayer API components allow the application developers to play video with a "black box" so to speak. Instead of processing the video file directly, decoding the math, or parsing 4CC codes or headers and then calling the relevant decoder APIs directly, they can call WMPlayerComponent.playVideo(filename) and have it all taken care of for them. That's an important function, and I don't know of very many substitutes to it, especially ones that will work out-of-the-box with those same API calls.
This is exactly the point. The application should be able to call MediaPlayerComponent.playVideo(filename) and have it work (again, to the extent that the replacement media player supports the format/encoding of the file). The key here is that if somebody writes a third-party player with a compatible API, Microsoft should not throw any legal or techinical hurdles in front of anybody (OEM or consumer) who wants to remove WMP and install the replacement.
Further, almost every 911 dispatch center has a non-911 number through which they can be reached. Everywhere I've lived, this number can be found in the phone book on the same page as the other emergency numbers. If you are a Vonage (or other VOIP) suscriber, you should probably keep this number handy.
Of course, the call-taker probably won't automatically have access to your name and address this way, but you will be able to speak directly with the appropriate dispatch center.
you can't know if there has been some patents applied that haven't been published yet.
Actually, I think a good improvement for the patent system would go like this:
1. Every patent application is kept secret for a certain period of time (the same time for every patent in a particular field).
2. At the end of that period, the patent is either issued or rejected.
3. If someone else invents the same thing within the secrecy period, it is evidance that the subject of the patent application is obvious to somebody skilled in the art.
The downside of this, of course, is that if you attempt to sell your invention or incorporate it in a product prior to the expiration of the secrecy period, somebody else could copy it and invalidate your patent.
If consumers have to abide by FCC rulings and can be taken to court if they don't follow them then why would consumers not be allowed to take their rulings to court?
IANAL, but I believe the FCC rules regarding the broadcast flag apply to device manufacturers, not comsumers. As a result, Joe Citizen may not have the legal standing to challenge it. However, I think that this particular rule has enough effect on consumers that they should have the right to challenge it.
In my "opinion", sales tax should work by the seller charging for sales tax based on the physical location of that business. So if someon from like Oregon buys cigarettes from like Florida, the Oregonian would be paying Floridian sales tax.
The problem with this is that Oregon (this does not apply specifically to either Oregon or cigarrettes) would still want to charge their use tax on anything bought from out of state by Oregon residents. The result is that most everybody would pay twice the tax on all items purchased from another state. I doubt that anybody (outside of state government) would see this as an improvement.
Along side your regular AC house wiring, you should run DC wiring. You could install a single transformer running at the highest DC voltage you wish to supply, then install voltage dividers at each wall outlet, so that you can select the voltage you want at point of use.
What does this mean? NO MORE WALL WARTS! Also, you'll save quite a bit of power because the wall warts are very inefficient and burn power (1-5 watts) even when nothing is plugged into them. In a modern (esp. geek) house, those multiple small loads running 24/7 add up really fast.
I'm sorry, but this won't work the way you think it will. The problem lies in your suggestion to use voltage dividers to adjust the voltage to each load. The problem here is two-fold. First, voltage dividers simply dissipate the excess power as heat. Second, a voltage divider will only work at a particular current. Unless the load is very constant, you're likely to have large swings in voltage.
A better way to do this would be to pick a single DC voltage, such as 100VDC - 150VDC, and then install a DC-to-DC converter at each point-of-load. Each DC-to-DC converter could then be designed to operate very efficiently at its particular output voltage and current requirements, thereby accomplishing the goal of saving energy relative to a series of wall-worts.
There are a number of groups, primarily amateur radio clubs and the like, that run vacuum tube banks. The idea is that people who have extra tubes donate them to the tube bank, and those who need a specific tube for a piece of equipment can they can receive a tube from the bank.
Google for 'Tube Bank' and you should find a number of such groups. Find one in your area and drop them an e-mail.
While it is primarily aimed at test and measurement applications, anything that can be done in a general purpose programming language can be done in LabView.
but that would be very complicated
It's not overly complicated. In some ways, it is significantly less complicated that text-based languages. For example, if you have a function (VI is labview terminology) that is blocked, it will automatically run other code that does not depend on the output from the blocked function. I don't have to think about threading or setting up a polling loop since it is handled automatically. Also, things like 'Do I need to make a copy of this data?' are handled by the compiler rather than being explicitly specified by the programmer.
and slow to use
With regard to speed, I have a couple of reasonably complex LabView programs that are running on PII's in the 300MHz range with no issues at all. Labview complies to machine code, so there is no issue of interpreting the graphical language at run-time.
If you can figure out how to write something like this that creates large applications like Firefox, Word, or Visual Studio, you'd stand to make a fortune.
Well, at a previous employer, we had a LabView application that queried data from a SQL database based on user-specified criteria, pulled statistical data from the results and wrote it into a report, and the created an excel spreadsheet from the queried data. I'm not sure that LabView is the best language for that sort of thing, but it will work.
As far as the fortune bit, at $2000+ for the development environment, I imagine that NI makes a tidy profit off of LabView. Add to that hardware sales for embedded systems and real-time controllers capable of running LabView programs and I have to think that 'fortune' is probably a good description.
The least among these is that the ionosphere somehow regains and replenishes itself with charged particles.
The "somehow" is, IIRC, primarily ultraviolet light which can break the bonds between between atoms in O2, N2, etc. As long as you continue to have sunlight and O2/N2, you will have an ionosphere.
The worst is that a "leak" in the ionosphere leads to a complete destruction of the radiation-blocking area that keeps us alive.
Here is my thought on one way the patent system should work:
The combination of existing inventions to perform a task is not innovative.
1. Using this standard, if StuffIt invented the algorithm used, they should be able patent that specific algorithm.
2. If StuffIt optimized an existing algorithm, they might be able to patent their optimizations.
For example, if they found that the WhizBangZip algorithm with modified parameters A,B, and C is excellent for compressing JPEG data, then they can patent the use of the WhizBangZip algorithm with parameters A,B, and C. If I later find that changing A, B, or C to different values yields even better compression of JPEG data, then my use of the new parameters wouldn't violate StuffIt's patent.
.
3. If they simply took a known algorithm and applied used it to compress JPEG data, then they shouldn't be allowed to patent the combination, since JPEG compression has prior art, and the algorithm they use to further compress the JPEG data also has prior art. There is nothing new to patent.
Here in Ireland (and in the rest of the EU) your tax is automatically taken out of your paycheck
It works the same way here in the US. Income and other taxes are automatically deducted from my paycheck. However, since income tax is not a flat percent of gross pay, what they deduct from the check will seldom match exactly with what you actually owe in taxes.
and you don't need to worry about filling in tax returns every year unless you run a business.
If you don't plan to take a number of itemized deductions, you can fill out the simple tax form, which basically requires you to add up how much money you made, look up in a table how much you owe in taxes on that amount, and then subtract the total amount taken in income taxes from your pay. It took me all of about 10 minutes to do my taxes last year, which included the time to add up the income from four sources.
Of course, owing to the special-interest and loop-hole filled mess which is the US tax code, you can often pay a bit less in taxes if you take the time to figure out all the deductions you're allowed to take and fill out the longer version of the tax form which lets you itemize your deductions. This can take quite a bit longer.
As a result, we've got upper- and lower-case flags doing completely different operations (-r and -R for "remove" and "restore," for example), we've got case-sentitive filenames which just make it so easy to tell the difference between "Index," "iNdex," "inDex," "indEx" and "indeX."
While it is certainly a questionable practice to intentionally create files whose names differ only by the case of a character or two, I see no reason why the OS should prevent me from doing so.
As a result, there's no way from looking at the filename to tell what program the file should be processed with.
Nor, I would argue, does there need to be. For the most part common file types can be detected from their contents. (See the 'file' utility). In any case, most users will simply name their PNG files with a.png extension. Again, if I really want to name my PNG files with the extension.XXX, the operating system shouldn't stop me.
When I read the newsgroups, I still see tips on how to do things that involve piping a file through 17 filters to do something that can be done on Windows with four mouse clicks.
If there is a tool that will let me do a particular operation in four mouse clicks, I'm all for it. However, pipes are a powerful tool and are useful for performing tasks that aren't common enough to justify a GUI interface. For instance:
I use Gentoo on my desktop. Let's say I want a list of all of the homepages listed for ebuilds (package files) where the homepage is hosted under the.cx country code:
Now that task (searching for ebuild homepages by domain-name country-code) is not something that anybody is going to bother to build into a GUI. However, it doesn't take much work to come up with right commands and type them on the command line.
So how would I fix these problems?
Well, I'd leave the low-level features alone, leave it up to the applications to enforce your suggestions. If you were writing a file manager or other application for casual users, you might warn them if they are about to create a filename that is capitalized in a strange way or which has an extension that doesn't match the content. If you're aiming your application at casual users, leave out the 80% of the options that casual users don't user. If you're aiming your application at power users, you will need to implement more of the options.
Just please don't abolish the more powerful features simply because casual users might be confused by them.
To be fair, the problem of stolen passports is not unique to passports incorporating RFID's. I think it's safe to assume, barring strong encryption, that a thief who steals any document will be able to read all the information it contains.
Passports already contain enough information to present a problem if stolen. Adding biometrics may increase the damage that can be done if the passport is stolen, but this is true however the biometric inforamtion is encoded.
As far as using strong encryption on the passport, that really isn't practical. The problem is that everybody who has a valid reason to read the passport must have a copy of the decryption key. The security of the encrypted data relies on nobody accidentally or intentioanlly leaking the decryption key. Since it is very unlikely that the decryption key would remain secret for long, it would really be pretty pointless to ecrypt the data on the passport.
Barcodes can't truly store information, and they misread all the time.
I disagree. 2-D barcodes can very easily be used to store information, rather than just a key to some seperate database. At a past employer, most parts had a 2-D barcode which, besides for encoding the serial number (i.e. key to an external database), encoded important part parameters. Often, these parts were sold in matched sets. Encoding the data on the part allowed the customer to choose a replacement part with the correct parameters should they need to replace one of a set of parts.
As far as misreading the barcode, it sounds like your library made a poor choice with regard to which barcode and/or readers to use. Most barcodes formats have parity/check characters built into the specification. This allows the reader to detect when it has misread a bar code. (Most of the time. It's possible that the original barcode and the misread bar code are both valid some small fraction of the time.) It's also possible, space permitting, to include a 16-bit or 32-bit checksum in the encoded data. This further reduces the chance of reading a valid, but incorrect, barcode.
The wizard presents a menu of reading documentation, running the X Server from the CD and installing the software to the hard drive
So, does it run completely from cd or not?
Since one of the options is "running the X Server from the CD", I think it can run completely from the cd. You just have the additional option to installed the software if you want.
The bar has been set pretty low, especially for basic usage. I use OrCad Capture and Layout at work for fairly simple circuits (Generally small circuits for test fixtures and one-off projects). Way too often, I find myself wondering how Cadence manages to get close to $10,000 for two programs with as many bugs and quirks. For example, there is only rudimentary copy-and-paste functionality in Layout, and Layout doesn't always recognize a disconnected pin as a design-rule error. Capture insists on writing to the installation directory when options are changed, rather than a per-user configuration file.
To be fair, you get some good features for that price, except that the casual user probably doesn't make extensive use of high-end features like autorouting or the ability to route on an extreme number of layers.
First, the developer's insistance that power pins on logic IC's be hardwired, in the symbol, to the nets 'VCC' 'VDD' 'VSS' 'GND' as appropriate. Heaven forbid I have a mixed voltage design or have multiple ground nodes.
Second, there seems to be no concept of scale to the components, or agreement as to how large a resistor should be relative to a transitor relative to the connection spacing on an IC. Capacitors and resistors appear larger than inductors, while all the descrite components, IMHO, are way to large compared to the connection spacing on IC's. This makes it hard to create a schematic that is clear and easy to read.
While the interface is really pretty good, they need to put quite a bit of work into the symbol library to make it especially useful.
Is this the end of tampering-capable hardware (e.g. machines where you can modify the kernel, bypass DRM-systems etc) that some people have long foreseen?
Not necessarily. There is no indication of what is meant by "hardware in support of security". It could be instructions to speed-up asymmetric encrytion, a processor serial number, a special unit that must cryptographically activated for certain instructions to function, or something else entirely. It does not imply that only signed bootloaders/kernels/OS's will be able to be run, nor does it imply that use of the support will be manditory. The ability to reject unsigned OS's or programs would be useful for a game console, but would generally not help sell *nix workstations.
I've seen the words 'codes' used quite frequently to refer to multipel variants of a given algorithm. This is especially the case with FEA analysis where there might there might be different versions of an algorithm depending on what type(s) of symmentry are exploited to simplify the problem and whether or not the analysis requires the use of complex numbers.
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I don't really even know who watches over-the-air broadcast television, other than people who can't/won't/don't pay for cable BUT still love TV enough to own a set.
Except, of course, for people who watch their local broadcast stations via their cable TV subscription. A good portion of the programs I watch come from the major networks, despite the fact that I have cable TV and a TiVo.
Therefore, almost every single benefit of digital broadcasts are almost entirely irrelevant. Receiving an HD picture on a 13 inch analog television won't look any better (and will cost those consumers $50-$100 to buy the converter). Moreover, those who don't want the advanced features or multitude of channels aren't going to suddenly buy a big-screen HDTV to watch broadcast channels in high definition, just because their black-and-white in the kitchen doesn't receive Maury Povich anymore.
There is the real problem. There simply isn't enough benifit for most people to justify the cost of purchasing new equipment. In practice, I could receive a number of HDTV stations if I put up a reasonable anteanna on the roof. Of course, there is no way I'm going to buy a converter to watch HDTV at normal quality. Nor does the increased quality justify, to me at least, the cost of a decent HDTV set.
While I think it is wise and important to reapportion our available spectrum as new technology becomes available and matures, I doubt the legislative mandate to push analog TV into obsolescence is important or a worthwhile use of our legislative, financial, and technological resources.
A much better idea, IMHO, would have been to allow the two formats to exist independantly for a number of years. This would come at the expense of increased spectrum usage, but last I checked there were a very large number of UHF channels that are compeatly unused in any given market. Those could have been used for HDTV while allowing the analog stations to continue to broadcast. Then, the markets can sort it out. Of course, I think the FCC and some in congress knew what the markets decision would likely have been (Hint: Hardly anybody is buying HDTV equipment now despite the very real possibility that analog TV will be going away in a year-and-a-half.). They knew that the only way to have HDTV implemented at all was to force the change by ending analog TV broadcasts.
(As a side note, isn't broadcast television dying, or just turning into one of the pack, anyway? We are no longer bound to the three-network oligarchy, and I fail to see why we should keep supporting that establishment legislatively).
No, not really. Local stations, in addition to network programming, provide local news and coverage of local events. For broadcast television to die, you would need some viable replacement for this fuction. Possibilities include public access or a local public television cable channel. In either case, however, some significant source of funding would be required to match the quality of the local covereage provided by the network affiliates.
Unfortunetly, if you had the authority and motivation to add the DNC's website to the blocklist, it might be quite easy to justify doing so. If the DNC's website contains, or links to, information on abortion, access to birth control, or non-abstinance based sex. ed, it might meet blocking criteria.
Really, if you can make something that will survive falling from space, shouldn't you just build that around the astronauts so that they can survive too?
I'm not sure how serious you meant this comment to be, but here goes:
The first problem is that electronics can be designed to survive much greater accelerations than can the human body. Remember: Only the small pieces of silicon containing the data need survive the impact for the data to be recoved, but a brief 65g-75g acceleration will scramble one's brain.
The second problem is that, even if you assume that your "black box" design can reduce the accleration of its contents to something survivable, you still have to find a way to make a large-enough black-box to contain the crew without the black-box being too heavy or too big to be launched into space.
At approximately 112000 BTU/gallon of gasoline that's about 33kWh/gal. In California where the prices are about $0.12/kWh electric, it costs you about $4.00/gallon saved. With gas prices at about $2.40 in CA that's about $1.60 extra per gallon saved.
One thing you left out is that automotive internal combustion engines typically have an efficiency of somewhere around 20%. I hope that the charger + batteries + electric motor have a better effeciency that than. I'll pull a number out of the air and say that 40% of the energy supplied to the charger will eventually show up in the energy supplied by the output shaft of the motor. Using these numbers, one gallon of gasoline will give you 6.6kWh at the engine output. Using 40% efficiency of the electric system, you need to purchase 16.5kWh of electricity to provide the same 6.6kWh at the motor output. Using your rates, this ends up being about $1.98 for the same amount of energy as produced by a gallon of gasoline in the engine.
The good news is that not everybody has to pay that much for electricity. Where I live, I only pay about $0.07/kWh. This means that I can buy a gallon's worth of electricity for $1.16, or about half what I paid today for gasoline.
It gets better, though. The power company could charge a different rate for EV battery charging, with the stipulation (enforced at the meter) that current only be drawn during off-peak hours. Or, they could set-up an 'auction' system where I plug my car in and say how much I'm willing to pay to charge my car tonight. My charger will be supplied with power only when rates drop below my price. If I still have 80% of my range unused, I'd only be willing to pay a low price. If I only have 20% of my range remaining, I'll pay a higher price. If I really need to charge the car now, I'll plug it into a standard outlet.
One other thing: When it comes to charging a battery, there isn't anything magical about 120/240VAC @ 50/60Hz. It's entirely possible that the power company could provide a seperate, lower quality of service, line for battery charging and simialr uses where the voltage and frequency could vary +/-30% without breaking anything. The same logic means it should be easier to charge your EV from off-grid sources than to power your house from an off-grid source.
That's like saying you should be able to remove QT or whatever other windowing toolkit you use from your system, but still be able to run anything that uses that API to produce its windows.
Actually, its more like saying you should be able to remove Motif or whatever outher windowing toolkit you use from your system, but still be able to run anything that uses that API to produce its windows, provided that you have installed a competing, compatible API such as Lesstif.
As I understand it, what the EU wants is for Microsoft to allow vendors to ship PC's with media-players other than WMP, and have the replacement player provide the same set of functions as WMP (to the extent that the replacement player supports/provides those functions).
This is different from codecs...that's one step above what we're talking about here. The wmplayer API components allow the application developers to play video with a "black box" so to speak. Instead of processing the video file directly, decoding the math, or parsing 4CC codes or headers and then calling the relevant decoder APIs directly, they can call WMPlayerComponent.playVideo(filename) and have it all taken care of for them. That's an important function, and I don't know of very many substitutes to it, especially ones that will work out-of-the-box with those same API calls.
This is exactly the point. The application should be able to call MediaPlayerComponent.playVideo(filename) and have it work (again, to the extent that the replacement media player supports the format/encoding of the file). The key here is that if somebody writes a third-party player with a compatible API, Microsoft should not throw any legal or techinical hurdles in front of anybody (OEM or consumer) who wants to remove WMP and install the replacement.
Further, almost every 911 dispatch center has a non-911 number through which they can be reached. Everywhere I've lived, this number can be found in the phone book on the same page as the other emergency numbers. If you are a Vonage (or other VOIP) suscriber, you should probably keep this number handy.
Of course, the call-taker probably won't automatically have access to your name and address this way, but you will be able to speak directly with the appropriate dispatch center.
you can't know if there has been some patents applied that haven't been published yet.
Actually, I think a good improvement for the patent system would go like this:
1. Every patent application is kept secret for a certain period of time (the same time for every patent in a particular field).
2. At the end of that period, the patent is either issued or rejected.
3. If someone else invents the same thing within the secrecy period, it is evidance that the subject of the patent application is obvious to somebody skilled in the art.
The downside of this, of course, is that if you attempt to sell your invention or incorporate it in a product prior to the expiration of the secrecy period, somebody else could copy it and invalidate your patent.
If consumers have to abide by FCC rulings and can be taken to court if they don't follow them then why would consumers not be allowed to take their rulings to court?
IANAL, but I believe the FCC rules regarding the broadcast flag apply to device manufacturers, not comsumers. As a result, Joe Citizen may not have the legal standing to challenge it. However, I think that this particular rule has enough effect on consumers that they should have the right to challenge it.
In my "opinion", sales tax should work by the seller charging for sales tax based on the physical location of that business. So if someon from like Oregon buys cigarettes from like Florida, the Oregonian would be paying Floridian sales tax.
The problem with this is that Oregon (this does not apply specifically to either Oregon or cigarrettes) would still want to charge their use tax on anything bought from out of state by Oregon residents. The result is that most everybody would pay twice the tax on all items purchased from another state. I doubt that anybody (outside of state government) would see this as an improvement.
Along side your regular AC house wiring, you should run DC wiring. You could install a single transformer running at the highest DC voltage you wish to supply, then install voltage dividers at each wall outlet, so that you can select the voltage you want at point of use.
What does this mean? NO MORE WALL WARTS! Also, you'll save quite a bit of power because the wall warts are very inefficient and burn power (1-5 watts) even when nothing is plugged into them. In a modern (esp. geek) house, those multiple small loads running 24/7 add up really fast.
I'm sorry, but this won't work the way you think it will. The problem lies in your suggestion to use voltage dividers to adjust the voltage to each load. The problem here is two-fold. First, voltage dividers simply dissipate the excess power as heat. Second, a voltage divider will only work at a particular current. Unless the load is very constant, you're likely to have large swings in voltage.
A better way to do this would be to pick a single DC voltage, such as 100VDC - 150VDC, and then install a DC-to-DC converter at each point-of-load. Each DC-to-DC converter could then be designed to operate very efficiently at its particular output voltage and current requirements, thereby accomplishing the goal of saving energy relative to a series of wall-worts.
This is one of a class of patents which I don't think should be allowed, desipite possibly being useful, novel, and non-obvious:
This is simply the combination of existing inventions:
1. Using a base-N number to decrease the number of characters required to represent some quantity.
2. Representing geographical locations using a 2-D coordinate system.
Both of these have been done before, and no new invention is required to use them in combination.
There are a number of groups, primarily amateur radio clubs and the like, that run vacuum tube banks. The idea is that people who have extra tubes donate them to the tube bank, and those who need a specific tube for a piece of equipment can they can receive a tube from the bank.
Google for 'Tube Bank' and you should find a number of such groups. Find one in your area and drop them an e-mail.
I suppose one could produce a graphical version of a current programming language, but that would be very complicated and slow to use.
Take a look at LabView at some point
While it is primarily aimed at test and measurement applications, anything that can be done in a general purpose programming language can be done in LabView.
but that would be very complicated
It's not overly complicated. In some ways, it is significantly less complicated that text-based languages. For example, if you have a function (VI is labview terminology) that is blocked, it will automatically run other code that does not depend on the output from the blocked function. I don't have to think about threading or setting up a polling loop since it is handled automatically. Also, things like 'Do I need to make a copy of this data?' are handled by the compiler rather than being explicitly specified by the programmer.
and slow to use
With regard to speed, I have a couple of reasonably complex LabView programs that are running on PII's in the 300MHz range with no issues at all. Labview complies to machine code, so there is no issue of interpreting the graphical language at run-time. If you can figure out how to write something like this that creates large applications like Firefox, Word, or Visual Studio, you'd stand to make a fortune.
Well, at a previous employer, we had a LabView application that queried data from a SQL database based on user-specified criteria, pulled statistical data from the results and wrote it into a report, and the created an excel spreadsheet from the queried data. I'm not sure that LabView is the best language for that sort of thing, but it will work.
As far as the fortune bit, at $2000+ for the development environment, I imagine that NI makes a tidy profit off of LabView. Add to that hardware sales for embedded systems and real-time controllers capable of running LabView programs and I have to think that 'fortune' is probably a good description.
The least among these is that the ionosphere somehow regains and replenishes itself with charged particles.
t ml for a basic overview of the ionosphere as it relates to communications.
The "somehow" is, IIRC, primarily ultraviolet light which can break the bonds between between atoms in O2, N2, etc. As long as you continue to have sunlight and O2/N2, you will have an ionosphere.
The worst is that a "leak" in the ionosphere leads to a complete destruction of the radiation-blocking area that keeps us alive.
SNGH (Simply Not Going to Happen). See above.
For a basic look at the ionoshere, take a look at http://www.qsl.net/ki0eg/propagation/propprimer.h
Here is my thought on one way the patent system should work:
The combination of existing inventions to perform a task is not innovative.
1. Using this standard, if StuffIt invented the algorithm used, they should be able patent that specific algorithm.
2. If StuffIt optimized an existing algorithm, they might be able to patent their optimizations. For example, if they found that the WhizBangZip algorithm with modified parameters A,B, and C is excellent for compressing JPEG data, then they can patent the use of the WhizBangZip algorithm with parameters A,B, and C. If I later find that changing A, B, or C to different values yields even better compression of JPEG data, then my use of the new parameters wouldn't violate StuffIt's patent.
. 3. If they simply took a known algorithm and applied used it to compress JPEG data, then they shouldn't be allowed to patent the combination, since JPEG compression has prior art, and the algorithm they use to further compress the JPEG data also has prior art. There is nothing new to patent.
AFAIK/IANAL/YMMV: If A released their software before B filed the patent, then it would be prior art that C could use to challenge the patent.
Here in Ireland (and in the rest of the EU) your tax is automatically taken out of your paycheck
It works the same way here in the US. Income and other taxes are automatically deducted from my paycheck. However, since income tax is not a flat percent of gross pay, what they deduct from the check will seldom match exactly with what you actually owe in taxes.
and you don't need to worry about filling in tax returns every year unless you run a business.
If you don't plan to take a number of itemized deductions, you can fill out the simple tax form, which basically requires you to add up how much money you made, look up in a table how much you owe in taxes on that amount, and then subtract the total amount taken in income taxes from your pay. It took me all of about 10 minutes to do my taxes last year, which included the time to add up the income from four sources.
Of course, owing to the special-interest and loop-hole filled mess which is the US tax code, you can often pay a bit less in taxes if you take the time to figure out all the deductions you're allowed to take and fill out the longer version of the tax form which lets you itemize your deductions. This can take quite a bit longer.
While it is certainly a questionable practice to intentionally create files whose names differ only by the case of a character or two, I see no reason why the OS should prevent me from doing so.
As a result, there's no way from looking at the filename to tell what program the file should be processed with.
Nor, I would argue, does there need to be. For the most part common file types can be detected from their contents. (See the 'file' utility). In any case, most users will simply name their PNG files with a
When I read the newsgroups, I still see tips on how to do things that involve piping a file through 17 filters to do something that can be done on Windows with four mouse clicks.
If there is a tool that will let me do a particular operation in four mouse clicks, I'm all for it. However, pipes are a powerful tool and are useful for performing tasks that aren't common enough to justify a GUI interface. For instance:
I use Gentoo on my desktop. Let's say I want a list of all of the homepages listed for ebuilds (package files) where the homepage is hosted under the
Now that task (searching for ebuild homepages by domain-name country-code) is not something that anybody is going to bother to build into a GUI. However, it doesn't take much work to come up with right commands and type them on the command line.
So how would I fix these problems?
Well, I'd leave the low-level features alone, leave it up to the applications to enforce your suggestions. If you were writing a file manager or other application for casual users, you might warn them if they are about to create a filename that is capitalized in a strange way or which has an extension that doesn't match the content. If you're aiming your application at casual users, leave out the 80% of the options that casual users don't user. If you're aiming your application at power users, you will need to implement more of the options.
Just please don't abolish the more powerful features simply because casual users might be confused by them.
To be fair, the problem of stolen passports is not unique to passports incorporating RFID's. I think it's safe to assume, barring strong encryption, that a thief who steals any document will be able to read all the information it contains.
Passports already contain enough information to present a problem if stolen. Adding biometrics may increase the damage that can be done if the passport is stolen, but this is true however the biometric inforamtion is encoded.
As far as using strong encryption on the passport, that really isn't practical. The problem is that everybody who has a valid reason to read the passport must have a copy of the decryption key. The security of the encrypted data relies on nobody accidentally or intentioanlly leaking the decryption key. Since it is very unlikely that the decryption key would remain secret for long, it would really be pretty pointless to ecrypt the data on the passport.
Barcodes can't truly store information, and they misread all the time.
I disagree. 2-D barcodes can very easily be used to store information, rather than just a key to some seperate database. At a past employer, most parts had a 2-D barcode which, besides for encoding the serial number (i.e. key to an external database), encoded important part parameters. Often, these parts were sold in matched sets. Encoding the data on the part allowed the customer to choose a replacement part with the correct parameters should they need to replace one of a set of parts.
As far as misreading the barcode, it sounds like your library made a poor choice with regard to which barcode and/or readers to use. Most barcodes formats have parity/check characters built into the specification. This allows the reader to detect when it has misread a bar code. (Most of the time. It's possible that the original barcode and the misread bar code are both valid some small fraction of the time.) It's also possible, space permitting, to include a 16-bit or 32-bit checksum in the encoded data. This further reduces the chance of reading a valid, but incorrect, barcode.
The wizard presents a menu of reading documentation, running the X Server from the CD and installing the software to the hard drive
So, does it run completely from cd or not?
Since one of the options is "running the X Server from the CD", I think it can run completely from the cd. You just have the additional option to installed the software if you want.
The bar has been set pretty low, especially for basic usage. I use OrCad Capture and Layout at work for fairly simple circuits (Generally small circuits for test fixtures and one-off projects). Way too often, I find myself wondering how Cadence manages to get close to $10,000 for two programs with as many bugs and quirks. For example, there is only rudimentary copy-and-paste functionality in Layout, and Layout doesn't always recognize a disconnected pin as a design-rule error. Capture insists on writing to the installation directory when options are changed, rather than a per-user configuration file.
To be fair, you get some good features for that price, except that the casual user probably doesn't make extensive use of high-end features like autorouting or the ability to route on an extreme number of layers.
about gSchem:
First, the developer's insistance that power pins on logic IC's be hardwired, in the symbol, to the nets 'VCC' 'VDD' 'VSS' 'GND' as appropriate. Heaven forbid I have a mixed voltage design or have multiple ground nodes.
Second, there seems to be no concept of scale to the components, or agreement as to how large a resistor should be relative to a transitor relative to the connection spacing on an IC. Capacitors and resistors appear larger than inductors, while all the descrite components, IMHO, are way to large compared to the connection spacing on IC's. This makes it hard to create a schematic that is clear and easy to read.
While the interface is really pretty good, they need to put quite a bit of work into the symbol library to make it especially useful.
Is this the end of tampering-capable hardware (e.g. machines where you can modify the kernel, bypass DRM-systems etc) that some people have long foreseen?
Not necessarily. There is no indication of what is meant by "hardware in support of security". It could be instructions to speed-up asymmetric encrytion, a processor serial number, a special unit that must cryptographically activated for certain instructions to function, or something else entirely. It does not imply that only signed bootloaders/kernels/OS's will be able to be run, nor does it imply that use of the support will be manditory. The ability to reject unsigned OS's or programs would be useful for a game console, but would generally not help sell *nix workstations.
I've seen the words 'codes' used quite frequently to refer to multipel variants of a given algorithm. This is especially the case with FEA analysis where there might there might be different versions of an algorithm depending on what type(s) of symmentry are exploited to simplify the problem and whether or not the analysis requires the use of complex numbers.