I'm saying that a number of the JEDEC members had prior non-disclosure agreements with Rambus regarding technology created by and patented by Rambus. Those JEDEC members knew quite well that the technologies they were pushing into the standard were already patented by Rambus. They knew this prior to inviting Rambus.
Can you provide perhaps a link to a reputable source for this? I've never heard that version of events and it doesn't jibe with the facts as I've seen them so far. How about a patent number for this NDA exposed IP that Rambus supposedly had involuntarily included? Don't say "patent 5,243,703", because that one, though applied for in 1990, was amended numerous times over 6 years to make it apply to SDRAM.
Furthermore, while at JEDEC Rambus did not influence what was put into the standard, or even propose technologies for inclusion. They were basically observers. It is interesting to note that they did vote 4 times, all against inclusion of technology that appeared to come from their IP... Perhaps Rambus could have behaved better and argued against using IP-violating technologies
Voting against inclusion isn't good enough. The appropriate way to protect one's IP is to say "doing it that way might collide with some of our patents". Saying "Rambus could have bahaved better" is soft-pedaling the issue. Rambus could have ethically and pointed out the IP (this assuming they actually had any patents yet).
Rambus was invited to join JEDEC as a way to get their IP put into the standard so that the memory makers would not need to license the technology.
That's not how it works. Just because something is included in a standard doesn't mean it becomes public domain. The problem with your take on it is that Rambus didn't really have any IP that applied to SDRAM until after it started attending JEDEC meetings. What it had was a fairly generic RAM patent filed in 1990 that they began amending in 1992, the year they joined JEDEC. They continued to amend it, making it conform ever-closer to aspects of the SDRAM standard, even after leaving JEDEC in 1995. The post-1995 amendments were made using information emailed to them anonymously. This doesn't sound suspicious? This is the way a small, honest company behaves? Pfff...
This is actually correct. I think that if the Slashdot crowd would look at ALL the facts regarding this situation, they would see that Rambus IS a victim here. Rambus made a lot of mistakes with their behavior that can not be excused, but the evidence indicates that Rambus was invited to be part of JEDEC so that their technology could be taken.
What? Everyone who's invited to participate in JEDEC is there so their technology can be "taken". Taken, that is, and put into an industry wide standard for all to use! If you're suggesting that RAMBUS reps at JEDEC didn't know that they were developing a standard at the meetings and were "tricked" into letting their as-yet-unapproved patent for memory into the standard, then you're an idiot.
It only takes about 20-30 minute drive to reach Pasadena from downtown LA on non-rush hour traffic. Take the 101.
But nobody lives downtown, and when is it not rush hour on the 101 over the hill? I live 20-30 minutes from orange county via the 405 in "non rush hour traffic", but since I never have to go there at 3am on a sunday, it takes me at least 45 minutes. Driving an hour to Arcadia to play video games is a waste of effort anyway. I can get drunk and play games at home.
Life is always a matter of perspective. If we were talking about a whore instead of UNIX code, do you really thing we'd all care?
If many of us were whoremongers, or users of cheap whores, or did a little whoring ourselves on the side for fun, then yes we'd all care. The fact that our perspective as a community (such as it is) has a lot of focus on free software in general and Linux very specifically, it's no surprise that we care. I'm not sure what your whore analogy is supposed to say, other than the blindingly obvious "we only care about things we care about".
Maybe I'm a bit confused but who gets 1.25 to 4.25 to work. WTF is the minimum wage out there?
most states have a "special" lower minimum wage specifically for wait-staff, under the supposition that most of their income is in tips so they don't NEED a decent hourly rate. yeah, sure.
There's going to be new D&B near Los Angeles by late this year. It'll be located in Arcadia (there's also Santa Anita race track) right next to Pasadena.
Dude, Los Angeles City is HUGE. Orange county and Ontario already qualify as "near Los Angeles", but unless you live at the outer edge of the city, anything outside is too damn far.
Shrek was by DreamWorks. But I assume they must have gotten permission from Disney for all the obvious references to Disney characters and Disney themeparks... much of Shrek appears to be satirizing Disney.
Isn't satire is one of the "outs" with regard to copyright?
OK, so granted, there are a lot of languages disappearing(new scientist article). And granted, there may be some bits of insight in ancient sanskrit text (panini & CS paper) with application to computer language design. I fail, however, to see the connection. The submitter doesn't appear to have RTFA (the panini one) he linked to! It's not about finding insight in sanskrit itself, it's about finding insight in the writings of someone USING sanskrit. Now, being that most of the languages falling by the wayside are small dialects in backwater areas, I suspect that a) they don't have a lot of linguistic analysts in their ancestry, and b) even if they did, there are no written recordes to study!
*All* of the fire control circuitry will have been removed. And without that, a missile won't launch in anything other than a randowm direction, if at all.
Unless it's an AIM-9 Sidewinder. They require almost no fire control circuitry beyond a power-on switch, a trigger, and a feed to the pilot's earphones. From some web site:
In order to fire a missile, the pilot listens in his headset for the signals of the missile. As soon as the missile is uncaged, the pilots hears a 'seeking tone'. As soon as the missile has acquired a target, the tone changes into a 'growl', varying in pitch according to the quality of the lock.
At that point, it just needs to be fired. Of course, anyone observed firing a sidewinder over the US like that is probably not going to get a chance to fire a second one, so you might as well just ram your target with the F-18 directly and get it over with.
Looking at the minimun bid of $1 mil, that means that there have, so far, been 7 people willing to fork over $1,000,000 for something. Now, looking at the feedback for these people, I can't possibly see how some of them could pay for this. wtmahan has bought repair manuals for a 1995 Nissan Protege. Anybody who drives one of those, and wants to fix it him/herself probably cannot afford an F/A-18. The current high bidder has bought a bunch of shirts and a $15,000 Porche, not cheap, but not a car for a person who can spend $1mil on an airplane kit.
The high bidder now apparently sells juggling clubs for $20 a pop. He can't possibly be serious. The guy who was high bidder this morning at least had among his past purchases a pilot's carry-on bag, a wooden model of a twin engine Cessna, and some sort of "pilot training on CD" software.
What does "better"mean, exactly? Both are brilliant 'planes, but the Hornet (while a more high performance machine) didn't break ANY engineering ground with its design.
The Wright Flyer broke all kinds of engineering ground with its design, and it's certainly not, by any definition of the word, "better". Innovation is highly time sensitive. Performance is a pretty static reference point. When people say "better" they're usually referring to hard metrics like "performance".
it could possibly cost LESS for a private citizen.
I was able to buy a toilet seat for ten bucks instead of six grand.
Can we let the $500 hammer, $10,000 coffee maker, and the $6K toilet seat myths go now? If you want to understand the REAL scam behind this stuff, this is a good overview of exactly how the money gets wasted. For those who don't follow links, here's the explaination of "overpriced" parts:
So the total cost of the project is something like $22.5 Billion (over 5 or 10 years)....that $250 toilet seat or hammer you have heard about... The way they calculate that is to divide the entire cost of the project (including all the fixed costs and so on) over every part or tool on the entire project. And what still hasn't been mentioned is that in many "above board" projects, they had to pad the budgets enough to cover all the black-projects costs. So really a lot of the costs were for part of another program! This would be about as accurate as dividing your total income, by how many times you wipe your butt per year, and figuring that each flush costs you $136. In other words -- it never existed"
So the "pays for Area 51" comments are probably accurate, but anyone who tries to pay their income taxes by dragging a Mr. Coffee and a used toilet seat into the IRS office and asking for two hammers in change is an idiot.
didnt wired have a piece a few years ago abou how Wozniak got 888-888-8888?
The 888 toll-free prefix is pretty new. he had an 800 number. Quote from rotten.com bio of Woz: "Cloud 9 also had the coolest phone number, ever (long since gone): 1-800-999-9999. When Cloud 9 finally choked it down, Wozniak did what Wozniak does: give the number away to a teen runaway line, where desperate youth could grab any payphone and press the 9 key over and over until someone could speak to them. For publicity? For a good name? No, because Woz is just that cool."
Woz rules. He truly is the opposite of that prick Jobs.
Two weeks ago a private EMS service got off the elevator with a gurney in tow, walked through our office, grabbed one of our employees, and wheeled her out. Their explanation: "she is having a heart attack, although she doesn't know it yet". Pretty weird experience.
So no, I don't think your rationalization is valid.
Fair enough, but if she'd been two levels down in a parking garage by herself she'd have had to call for help herself or hope someone else was nearby. Or if she'd been where she was without attached EKG telemetry, how much longer would it have taken to notice said heart attack? It's really such an unusual occurance anyway that it hardly merits significant policy beyond the posting of signs like "cellular doesn't work in this building".
Moreover, the topic is about handheld momentary jammers-- not the sort of thing that'd be turned on for long enough to really affect anyone but the intended target. Personally, being ham licensed and familiar with such issues, I don't think active jamming-- even spot jamming-- is at all kosher. At the same time, though, I don't think 7-sigma (very rare) cases like the cellular telemedicine incident you cite should justify the outlawing of things like passive shielding. I just get a little tired of what appears to be typical rude-prick cell shouters saying they should be allowed to use their cell phones anywhere and anytime they please because someone, somewhere, might have to dial 911 from a theater.
Your argument sounds good except that you say intellectual property isn't property because it is shareable.
No, what I said was that it fails the definition of property because sharing doesn't diminish it. If I share a kilo of flour with 9 other people, I only have 10% of what I had before. If I share my idea for a better fireplace with 9 other people, we all have the idea. I'm not reduced to making a "10% better fireplace", or only making "10% of a fireplace" because I shared the idea.
Also, scarcity doesn't diminish the fact that something is property. I don't know where you get your strange assumptions from.
And I don't know where you got the idea that I said scarcity diminishes property status. What I said was that ideas, unlike real property, cannot suffer from scarcity in that they are infinitely replicable using no physical resources.
Now, we're also not talking about government granted monopolies: if you look at your dear US constitution, you'll find that patents and copyrights are provided by the people for the people for the purposes of advancement of technology and science.
You do know that patents and copyrights are monopolies (albeit for limited times) granted by the government, don't you. A monopoly need not be perpetual. If no one else can copy my invention for 20 years, I have a 20 year monopoly on that invention. I'm not saying that they should be abolished, only that they should be reasonable.
Re:I jam cell phone conversation MY WAY
on
Cell-Phone Wars
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· Score: 1
The idea of hiding behind some pocket-jammer would only appeal to some passive-aggressive control freak anyway. If it's worth getting upset about, it's worth actually being ASSERTIVE about. If you don't have the balls to be assertive, then quit whining.
What if you don't have the physical size or strength for such assertivity to be effective? Does the 6'6" 250lb angry mook shouting obnoxiously into his cell get to do it because no one is strong enough to challenge him?
Amusing as it would be I'll break the fingers of the first person cellphone jamming I see.
Thing is, a jammer doesn't have to be held up against your head and shouted into to make it work, so you won't know who's doing it. Anyone nearby with their hand in their pocket could be doing it.
So, the next call you might jam could be some heart paitent's ECG telling his cardiologist that he's having a heart attack,
If the cardiologist is far enough away to need telemetry via cellular to tell him about the heart attack, there's nothing he can do about it. Anyone close enough to help is going to see him clutch his left arm and keel over.
or somebody's Saab saying that it's airbag has gone off in an accident
Nobody installs a jammer in the middle of nowhere. The only place OnStar (or the like) really needs cellular to report an airbag deployment is the middle of nowhere. Any place you'd find a jammer, you'd find people.
perhaps it is just a cell call, and it's just the hospital trying to get their neurosurgeon in.
Hospitals nostly use pagers rather than cell phones to summon on-call physicians. Cell isn't reliable enough.
You sound like a communist: "property should be free", wake up and realise that in this capitalist system that property is not free.
Don't be a dope. He didn't say that property should be free, he said that "intellectual property" isn't property. He's also quite correct. The term itself was concocted in the 19th century to make the ownership of ideas sound less absurd. Ideas can't be property, as their very nature fails the definitions of property. First and foremost, they cannot be scarce; i.e. if I you express your idea to me, we both have the idea-- sharing doesn't diminish it. What we have currently is a system of [patents/copyright/etc] that allows intangible things like ideas, music, and stories to be treated as if they were property. This is provably true: when one buys song from its writer, what you're transferring is the copyright-- you likely already have the song. Same thing with patents. This isn't about capitalism vs. communism. It's about free market vs. gov't granted monopolies. There has to be a balance and currently the USPTO isn't doing a good job.
Sure a DJ can mix together some tracks and make a "song," but it's all stuff that other people, ACTUAL musicians created and put on a record for him to mix together.
Most of those "actual musicians" you refer to are DJs themselves. Also, the music on the records is rarely complex enough to stand on it's own. This is intentional. It's meant to be mixed with other music. The skill is in knowing what goes with what, and being able to mix it in at the right time. Besides, would you call a pianist who plays a Franz Liszt an actual musician? All he's doing is reading sheet music and translating it into keypresses on the piano.
Why do we want to use a number to contact a specific phone instead of alphanumerics to contact a person like an email address?
Because existing phones are designed to dial numbers. Making everyone with an old POTS phone upgrade to a QWERTY keyboard with Display type phone is stupid when there's really nothing wrong with the "old way".
When we use a phone, are we trying to contact another phone, or a person? Unless it's a business line, isn't it usually a specific person we're trying to reach?
We're usually trying to reach a person, but in reality we're dialing in the address of a particular phone instrument and hoping that the person is near it. Until phones are implanted in people's heads the paradigm will remain the same. It makes more sense to stick with numbered addressing for phone instruments as there's no way to guarantee that dialing "jsmith@phone.address.whatever" will get you John Smith-- you're only getting his phone.
No, it's not a dupe. Let me quote from the story you link:
"The FCC will be holding an Open Commission Meeting [PDF] Thursday. Number one on the agenda is a 'Petition for Declaratory Ruling that Pulver.com's Free World Dialup is neither Telecommunications nor a Telecommunications Service.'"
Notice the future tense. The FCC hadn't ruled yet. They were going to make a decision. This story is abut the decision they made. Whether the ruling was a foregone conclusion is debatable, but that doesn't make it a dupe. Get a clue.
There is an old cliche, "It is time to shoot the engineers and move into production:
And yes, I AM AN Engineer, and like all engineers, I have the same tendency:---->
Fact of life: Many engineers, given the chance, will keep polishing the helmet because there is another speck of dust on it.
My father, an engineer, worked for Hughes Aircraft as a project manager for years. What he most often had to tell the engineers he managed was "better is the enemy of good enough". Engineers...always trying to make it a little better.
Frankly, I'd like to see where that 30% figure came from. I don't believe that takes solar energy into account
You're right. It doesn't. True, it would take 100gal diesel fuel to make 75gal biodiesel, but that's not the point. The "30% more" argument is a red herring here, because we're not talking about converting the corn to biodiesel to run the tractor that grows the corn, we're talking about using the corn to produce electricity and/or hydrogen. The diesel tractor is the problem, not the corn. We need to look at ways to replace the stupid inefficient tractor. Saying ethanol isn't a viable solution because tractors currently suck is a pretty dumb position.
Please tell me how you will plow your farm, plant your corn, harvest it, process it and transport it to the ethanol plant, what you'll make your fertilizer from and how you'll get your ethanol to your hydrogen plant all without using any fossil fuels
Just because all those systems are currently fed by fossil fuels does not mean they require fossil fuels. Initially, it'll all run on fossil fuels, but this is merely a step in the process of bootstrapping ourselves away from the current system. The materials needed to build the first steam railroad were hauled by horse. Does this mean that steam railroads require horses forever? Obviously not. Same situation here. If we can build up enough processing capability to make the system self-feeding, we can dump the diesel tractors for hydrogen ones, or run the processing plants on ethanol cell electricity rather than oil or gas fired electricity. See how it works? You can't unilaterally reject the possibility for change based on the fact that the change is not instantaneous.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you provide perhaps a link to a reputable source for this? I've never heard that version of events and it doesn't jibe with the facts as I've seen them so far. How about a patent number for this NDA exposed IP that Rambus supposedly had involuntarily included? Don't say "patent 5,243,703", because that one, though applied for in 1990, was amended numerous times over 6 years to make it apply to SDRAM.
Furthermore, while at JEDEC Rambus did not influence what was put into the standard, or even propose technologies for inclusion. They were basically observers. It is interesting to note that they did vote 4 times, all against inclusion of technology that appeared to come from their IP... Perhaps Rambus could have behaved better and argued against using IP-violating technologies
Voting against inclusion isn't good enough. The appropriate way to protect one's IP is to say "doing it that way might collide with some of our patents". Saying "Rambus could have bahaved better" is soft-pedaling the issue. Rambus could have ethically and pointed out the IP (this assuming they actually had any patents yet).
Rambus was invited to join JEDEC as a way to get their IP put into the standard so that the memory makers would not need to license the technology.
That's not how it works. Just because something is included in a standard doesn't mean it becomes public domain. The problem with your take on it is that Rambus didn't really have any IP that applied to SDRAM until after it started attending JEDEC meetings. What it had was a fairly generic RAM patent filed in 1990 that they began amending in 1992, the year they joined JEDEC. They continued to amend it, making it conform ever-closer to aspects of the SDRAM standard, even after leaving JEDEC in 1995. The post-1995 amendments were made using information emailed to them anonymously. This doesn't sound suspicious? This is the way a small, honest company behaves? Pfff...
What? Everyone who's invited to participate in JEDEC is there so their technology can be "taken". Taken, that is, and put into an industry wide standard for all to use! If you're suggesting that RAMBUS reps at JEDEC didn't know that they were developing a standard at the meetings and were "tricked" into letting their as-yet-unapproved patent for memory into the standard, then you're an idiot.
But nobody lives downtown, and when is it not rush hour on the 101 over the hill? I live 20-30 minutes from orange county via the 405 in "non rush hour traffic", but since I never have to go there at 3am on a sunday, it takes me at least 45 minutes. Driving an hour to Arcadia to play video games is a waste of effort anyway. I can get drunk and play games at home.
If many of us were whoremongers, or users of cheap whores, or did a little whoring ourselves on the side for fun, then yes we'd all care. The fact that our perspective as a community (such as it is) has a lot of focus on free software in general and Linux very specifically, it's no surprise that we care. I'm not sure what your whore analogy is supposed to say, other than the blindingly obvious "we only care about things we care about".
most states have a "special" lower minimum wage specifically for wait-staff, under the supposition that most of their income is in tips so they don't NEED a decent hourly rate. yeah, sure.
Dude, Los Angeles City is HUGE. Orange county and Ontario already qualify as "near Los Angeles", but unless you live at the outer edge of the city, anything outside is too damn far.
Isn't satire is one of the "outs" with regard to copyright?
OK, so granted, there are a lot of languages disappearing(new scientist article). And granted, there may be some bits of insight in ancient sanskrit text (panini & CS paper) with application to computer language design. I fail, however, to see the connection. The submitter doesn't appear to have RTFA (the panini one) he linked to! It's not about finding insight in sanskrit itself, it's about finding insight in the writings of someone USING sanskrit. Now, being that most of the languages falling by the wayside are small dialects in backwater areas, I suspect that a) they don't have a lot of linguistic analysts in their ancestry, and b) even if they did, there are no written recordes to study!
Unless it's an AIM-9 Sidewinder. They require almost no fire control circuitry beyond a power-on switch, a trigger, and a feed to the pilot's earphones. From some web site:
At that point, it just needs to be fired. Of course, anyone observed firing a sidewinder over the US like that is probably not going to get a chance to fire a second one, so you might as well just ram your target with the F-18 directly and get it over with.The high bidder now apparently sells juggling clubs for $20 a pop. He can't possibly be serious. The guy who was high bidder this morning at least had among his past purchases a pilot's carry-on bag, a wooden model of a twin engine Cessna, and some sort of "pilot training on CD" software.
The Wright Flyer broke all kinds of engineering ground with its design, and it's certainly not, by any definition of the word, "better". Innovation is highly time sensitive. Performance is a pretty static reference point. When people say "better" they're usually referring to hard metrics like "performance".
Can we let the $500 hammer, $10,000 coffee maker, and the $6K toilet seat myths go now? If you want to understand the REAL scam behind this stuff, this is a good overview of exactly how the money gets wasted. For those who don't follow links, here's the explaination of "overpriced" parts:
So the "pays for Area 51" comments are probably accurate, but anyone who tries to pay their income taxes by dragging a Mr. Coffee and a used toilet seat into the IRS office and asking for two hammers in change is an idiot.The 888 toll-free prefix is pretty new. he had an 800 number. Quote from rotten.com bio of Woz:
"Cloud 9 also had the coolest phone number, ever (long since gone): 1-800-999-9999. When Cloud 9 finally choked it down, Wozniak did what Wozniak does: give the number away to a teen runaway line, where desperate youth could grab any payphone and press the 9 key over and over until someone could speak to them. For publicity? For a good name? No, because Woz is just that cool."
Woz rules. He truly is the opposite of that prick Jobs.
Fair enough, but if she'd been two levels down in a parking garage by herself she'd have had to call for help herself or hope someone else was nearby. Or if she'd been where she was without attached EKG telemetry, how much longer would it have taken to notice said heart attack? It's really such an unusual occurance anyway that it hardly merits significant policy beyond the posting of signs like "cellular doesn't work in this building".
Moreover, the topic is about handheld momentary jammers-- not the sort of thing that'd be turned on for long enough to really affect anyone but the intended target. Personally, being ham licensed and familiar with such issues, I don't think active jamming-- even spot jamming-- is at all kosher. At the same time, though, I don't think 7-sigma (very rare) cases like the cellular telemedicine incident you cite should justify the outlawing of things like passive shielding. I just get a little tired of what appears to be typical rude-prick cell shouters saying they should be allowed to use their cell phones anywhere and anytime they please because someone, somewhere, might have to dial 911 from a theater.
No, what I said was that it fails the definition of property because sharing doesn't diminish it. If I share a kilo of flour with 9 other people, I only have 10% of what I had before. If I share my idea for a better fireplace with 9 other people, we all have the idea. I'm not reduced to making a "10% better fireplace", or only making "10% of a fireplace" because I shared the idea.
Also, scarcity doesn't diminish the fact that something is property. I don't know where you get your strange assumptions from.
And I don't know where you got the idea that I said scarcity diminishes property status. What I said was that ideas, unlike real property, cannot suffer from scarcity in that they are infinitely replicable using no physical resources.
Now, we're also not talking about government granted monopolies: if you look at your dear US constitution, you'll find that patents and copyrights are provided by the people for the people for the purposes of advancement of technology and science.
You do know that patents and copyrights are monopolies (albeit for limited times) granted by the government, don't you. A monopoly need not be perpetual. If no one else can copy my invention for 20 years, I have a 20 year monopoly on that invention. I'm not saying that they should be abolished, only that they should be reasonable.
What if you don't have the physical size or strength for such assertivity to be effective? Does the 6'6" 250lb angry mook shouting obnoxiously into his cell get to do it because no one is strong enough to challenge him?
Thing is, a jammer doesn't have to be held up against your head and shouted into to make it work, so you won't know who's doing it. Anyone nearby with their hand in their pocket could be doing it.
If the cardiologist is far enough away to need telemetry via cellular to tell him about the heart attack, there's nothing he can do about it. Anyone close enough to help is going to see him clutch his left arm and keel over.
or somebody's Saab saying that it's airbag has gone off in an accident
Nobody installs a jammer in the middle of nowhere. The only place OnStar (or the like) really needs cellular to report an airbag deployment is the middle of nowhere. Any place you'd find a jammer, you'd find people.
perhaps it is just a cell call, and it's just the hospital trying to get their neurosurgeon in.
Hospitals nostly use pagers rather than cell phones to summon on-call physicians. Cell isn't reliable enough.
Don't be a dope. He didn't say that property should be free, he said that "intellectual property" isn't property. He's also quite correct. The term itself was concocted in the 19th century to make the ownership of ideas sound less absurd. Ideas can't be property, as their very nature fails the definitions of property. First and foremost, they cannot be scarce; i.e. if I you express your idea to me, we both have the idea-- sharing doesn't diminish it. What we have currently is a system of [patents/copyright/etc] that allows intangible things like ideas, music, and stories to be treated as if they were property. This is provably true: when one buys song from its writer, what you're transferring is the copyright-- you likely already have the song. Same thing with patents. This isn't about capitalism vs. communism. It's about free market vs. gov't granted monopolies. There has to be a balance and currently the USPTO isn't doing a good job.
Most of those "actual musicians" you refer to are DJs themselves. Also, the music on the records is rarely complex enough to stand on it's own. This is intentional. It's meant to be mixed with other music. The skill is in knowing what goes with what, and being able to mix it in at the right time. Besides, would you call a pianist who plays a Franz Liszt an actual musician? All he's doing is reading sheet music and translating it into keypresses on the piano.
Because existing phones are designed to dial numbers. Making everyone with an old POTS phone upgrade to a QWERTY keyboard with Display type phone is stupid when there's really nothing wrong with the "old way".
When we use a phone, are we trying to contact another phone, or a person? Unless it's a business line, isn't it usually a specific person we're trying to reach?
We're usually trying to reach a person, but in reality we're dialing in the address of a particular phone instrument and hoping that the person is near it. Until phones are implanted in people's heads the paradigm will remain the same. It makes more sense to stick with numbered addressing for phone instruments as there's no way to guarantee that dialing "jsmith@phone.address.whatever" will get you John Smith-- you're only getting his phone.
"The FCC will be holding an Open Commission Meeting [PDF] Thursday. Number one on the agenda is a 'Petition for Declaratory Ruling that Pulver.com's Free World Dialup is neither Telecommunications nor a Telecommunications Service.'"
Notice the future tense. The FCC hadn't ruled yet. They were going to make a decision. This story is abut the decision they made. Whether the ruling was a foregone conclusion is debatable, but that doesn't make it a dupe. Get a clue.
My father, an engineer, worked for Hughes Aircraft as a project manager for years. What he most often had to tell the engineers he managed was "better is the enemy of good enough". Engineers...always trying to make it a little better.
You're right. It doesn't. True, it would take 100gal diesel fuel to make 75gal biodiesel, but that's not the point. The "30% more" argument is a red herring here, because we're not talking about converting the corn to biodiesel to run the tractor that grows the corn, we're talking about using the corn to produce electricity and/or hydrogen. The diesel tractor is the problem, not the corn. We need to look at ways to replace the stupid inefficient tractor. Saying ethanol isn't a viable solution because tractors currently suck is a pretty dumb position.
Just because all those systems are currently fed by fossil fuels does not mean they require fossil fuels. Initially, it'll all run on fossil fuels, but this is merely a step in the process of bootstrapping ourselves away from the current system. The materials needed to build the first steam railroad were hauled by horse. Does this mean that steam railroads require horses forever? Obviously not. Same situation here. If we can build up enough processing capability to make the system self-feeding, we can dump the diesel tractors for hydrogen ones, or run the processing plants on ethanol cell electricity rather than oil or gas fired electricity. See how it works? You can't unilaterally reject the possibility for change based on the fact that the change is not instantaneous.