Not a chance for something solar panel getting enough power over a long period of time on the moon. The moon dust (regolith) sticks to everything electrostatically and it's so fine that brushing it off is damn near impossible.
Optimistically, they write...
There's just one problem left to figure out: how to protect the rover from minus 240 F lunar nights. The team is experimenting with different ways to package lithium ion batteries to be able to function after two weeks of exposure to air that is nearly as cold as liquid nitrogen..
Yeah, that moon air might be a problem... do they know what are they talking about?
A solar panel on a moon rover will get covered with regolith in short order and that's all she wrote...
Taking property from a "small" landowner has very few consequences to the elected leaders of a government. Taking patents from a large company (esp a large multi-national congolmerate) can have large consequences to the same elected leader. That's why you don't see the government taking land from large multi-national conglomerates (without paying them large sums of money).
Perhaps you weren't aware that the land is not taken when it is condemned (at least in the US), but traded for something of value (either money or other land). Sometimes larger companies can actually negociate with the elected leaders of a government to have their land condemned voluntarily (making them a larger net profit as they trade the land for some other land that is actually more commercially valuable to them). This sometimes fools the voters into thinking the government isn't really paying for the land, but the company profits from this ignorance.
You might be under the assumption that the elected leaders of a government are operating under a principle where they do things that benefit the public good, when in reality, they often operate under a principle where they do things primarily to benefit their re-election.
Of course the laser beam don't need to curve to tame lightning. Presumably a mirror cheap enough to sacrific to a lightning strike could be moved to the approprate place, right? Even the researcher admits this is...
Kasparian says that in future, Christodoulides's team's work could be combined with his to help aim the laser pulses and plasma channels at specific targets, such as clouds, although he points out that the laser pulses can also be guided using mirrors. "But it would be fun to see curved lightning discharges," he says.
And it might go w/o mentioning that the mythbuster in all of us/.-ers wants to see a curved lightning discharge destroy a $1M laser;^)
This isn't much different than the "must-carry" cable legislation of days past...
Local TV stations wanted to force cable operators to pay to carry their stations, but the cable operators wanted some of the local TV stations, didn't want to pay for all the local TV stations. Of course the small unpopular channels felt they would get left out of the cable operators lineups if cable could choose.
Thus was born the "must-carry" legislation where local TV stations could opt-in to "must-carry" (where the cable operators didn't have to pay, but were forced to carry), or "retransmition-consent" (where local TV stations could negotiate for carriage, but the cable operators weren't forced to carry). Thus the popular local TV stations could get paid for their content, but the small unpopular channels wouldn't get a free ride. In the end, though, I think almost all local TV stations elected "must-carry" and cable was pretty much forced by the legislation to carry just about any TV station that put up a broadcast antenna.
I can see it all coming down to similar legislation in the end if there isn't an agreement. Google better be prepared to be indexing a million left-wing/right-wing/wacko news rags and blogs and updating continuously (they currently claim 25,000 news souces) if they want to continue down this road. Because if most of the small rags elect "must-carry", there will be lots of squeaking wheels to grease if they don't get their 15 minutes of fame....
Was this intrusion of solitude? No, this was a blogger, who was trying to get publicity (albeit under a pseudonym).
Was this a public disclosure of private facts? No, disclosure of identity wasn't publically offensive and it was definitely newsworthy.
Was this false light? No, it wasn't publically offensive, nor was the disclosure of identity misleading.
Was this an appropriation of name or likeness? No, this was identification of writings made by the blogger.
A person doesn't have an absolute right to privacy (otherwise papperazii and credit bureaus wouldn't exist), although it's quite probable that laws, oaths, duties, or contracts were broken in the attempt to pierce this veil of privacy in this particular case.
A possible analogy is like you make a credit card payment with a gas station and the gas station video security system records you typing in your PIN-code and doesn't handle the recording securely. Is that a known issue with the video camera (an inanimate object), or a known issue with the person that put up the security system who is too lazy to secure potentially harmful recordings?
Perhaps we can put this into a bigger question: is there a safe harbor for google to archive things accidentally put on the web forever, or are they required to do something when someone points this out something bad that their creation has done?
As a silly example, is that imagine there was a coal-burning plant built that provided electricity. Some time later it is discovered that mercury was being billowed in the air. Does the plant have the safe harbor that all it was doing was burning coal and providing electricity, both perfectly legal and standard activities and can continue to do this forever? I think not, new information about devastating side effects of their operation have been revealed. They have a duty to change their operations even though it may not have been forseen. If they do not change their operations, they can be held liable... IANAL, but this seems reasonable to me...
... but they cannot legally disclose it as truth until it has been legally proven to be the truth
Uhm, I don't think that's the case with this one... He was fired for filing false expense reports. Whether or not he actually did file them or not is totally irrelevent, but it still seems that it was the reason he got fired. I'm guessing that if he did not conceded that he filed false expense reports (which is a statement of fact), he would most certainly within his rights to contest this as liable (and prove so in a court of law and win a liable case, or prove he was filed for some other reason like age-ism or sleeping with a janitor or the bosses wife). Or perhaps prove a case of defamation which could encompase a public disclosure of private facts or facts that create a false light.
However, this ruling is apparently on a different point altogether, whether or not Staples released this information maliciously or not. Given how reporters of this era are often very malicious in their pursuits at trying to expose graft and corruption or even just simple indiscretions (e.g., lets expose him by ambushing him walking to his car at his workplace with cameras and papperazzi and coworkers and young children), I'm not surprised many media folks are outraged by this ruling. We live in an adversarial/partisan/outrage society, and there are people with strong incentives to keep it that way. Wasn't there just a story about someone who got out of an arrest because the cop put he was feeling devious on his facebook page?
The sad fact that a lawyer on an archeology expedition found this little nugget of an exception in the law to help his client and this causes a big furor just makes it clear (to me anyhow), that we aren't really a nation of laws and justice, but really a nation run by lawyers generating (and combing through) fine print... That to me is the real tradgey here...
Before we had the internet and (affordable) calculators, people used to buy books that had printed tables of logarithms, sine, and cosines to say 6-8 digits. Often the publishers would introduce small random errors into their tables to enable them to be copyrighted.
Of course back then, it was _still_ a silly thing to do. Often the type for those books were set by hand (imagine some poor slobs computing the proper values on paper or with a calculator into a list deliberatly trying to create some errors, then having some other poor slob typing them up in a typewriter, and then yet another person setting up a printing lines with blocks with digits on them and organizing them row by row for a printing press) and contained much bigger errors as some errors were missed by the people who cross-checked the tables. It was a giant game of "telephone" back in those days...
A company that I left (because I was fed-up with the management) wanted to temporarily get me to consult on a project as a contractor that we hadn't finished yet. Since I had a new day job already, and I didn't really trust them to pay me in a timely manner (since they had stiffed other contractors when I was working there) and I didn't really need the money, I decided to work for barter.
Basically, the arraingment was that after work, I went back to the old company for an hour or two to consult on this project. After those couple of hours, I got to take my ex-coworkers out for a nice dinner on the company (the current employees had to pay and get expense reimbursed for the company and I'm pretty sure they didn't stiff their employees as that would piss them off).
With this scheme, I didn't get a 1099 (no self employment/income tax), got to take my ex-coworkers out for nice dinners every day I consulted on the company dime. Probably cost the company about $200/hour for my time. If later on, I needed a recommendation, I'm pretty I could have coaxed a good recommendation from my ex-coworkers even though the managment wasn't too happy with me for leaving and taking a new job...
Assume you have a $100 processor with 40% gross profit margin, you sell 1,000,000 units and make $40,000,000 Assume you have a $20 processor with 80% gross profit margin, you sell 2,000,000 units and make $32,000,000
Hard to feed the same number of mouths with $32M that you did with $40M, right?
The market needs to be much bigger to support the much lower actual selling price of a $10 chip like atom, rather than a $100 core2 or i7. Even with double the gross profit margin and double the volume, it's hard to see how to get there (and of course lots of those netbook just canabalize the sales of notebook which makes it even harder).
"...But just in case you don't want the cookie, we also include links to the videos to accomidate you."
Hmm, so this is just like an opt-out checkbox instead of an opt-in checkbox on a website. Gee I guess there's never ever anything wrong with that...;^)
This just sounds like google got essentially no-bid contract from the whitehouse. Google/youtube is basically geting a benefit (albeit probably marginal value), from having tracking cookies and being "exclusive". Other competitors probably didn't get a shot at the "business" and currently don't seem have a similar exemption and would not get the benefit from this and it gives the appearance that Google has a slight advantage over some other video streamer (maybe hulu?)
Sadly this seems to be a small backstep from the steps that Obama made to help make the inauguration funding seem less like yet another influence pedaling opportunity (e.g, cap donation to $50K, etc, etc) and seem like Google being able to "buy" access to cookies on a government website. Perhaps if the videos were served from a domain where the information obtained from the cookies are made available under the FOIA that might be okay, but it seems to me that google may have essentially traded some server/storage cost for the ability to send more targetted ads to people that view videos on whitehouse.gov and charge advertizers for that targetting. Clever for them.
To me this is like Intuit getting permission to mail out government income tax forms to taxpayers and inserting a coupon for turbo-tax. I'm sure H&R block or Hewitt wouldn't be too happy about Intuit getting a no-bid contract to access to the names and home mailing addresses of people who request forms from the IRS and do taxes themselves, (rather than do their taxes on-line or send the to a professional tax preparer) for the price of printing and sending out some bulk-mail. This type of targetting advertizing would probably be much better !/$ than sending out junk mail.
The government is allegedly getting something for free in both cases, but that's just because it's giving away something of value to get it which doesn't happen to be money. To make it worse, it didn't give all the players the same opportunity. What's the problem, you say... Well rename google to halliburton and think about Halliburton's no-bid contracts in Iraq. Sure there aren't many companies that wanted to do some of the work (and in the case of putting out oil field fires, not many companies actually qualified to do it), but people were screaming bloody murder about the fact it was no-bid.
Yeah but Spock got to transfer his katra first and actually had a body. Khan didn't have this ability and vaporized himself in an act of sheer spite.
Don't underestimate desperate star trek writers to rewrite history. Apparently that katra scene was grafted into the end of wrath of khan despite the apparent protest of the director (nicholas meyers), that it would ruin the movie. Also, they never really explained how baby spock (the "body") came to be on that genesis planet... In STNG, Riker had a transporter duplicate (Thomas), and in ST-Nemesis, Picard was cloned, perhaps a deperate ST writer, maybe could have conjoured up a baby Khan with enhanced memory eugenics there as well...
who doesn't RTFA, how can light have momentum if momentum is mass*velocity. Do Photons have mass?
Short answer photons do not have mass.
The confusion for newbies is that p=m*v isn't the whole story. Photons always travel at the speed of light in a medium or inertial frame (whatever that may be). However, photons have no rest mass (or intrinsic mass which is what allows photons to travel at the speed of light given finite acceleration), but they do have momentum when they are moving at the speed of light. That's part of the wacky world of special relativity.
A more enlightening formulation to see how this works is E^2 = (p*c)^2 + (m0*c^2)^2. (p is the variable physicist usually use to indicate momentum)
In this formulation describing the conservation of energy, even things with no mass (like a photon) can have various amounts of momentum and take part in interactions that conserve energy.
Incidentally this formulation also simplifies to the famous E=m*c^2 for objects that don't have momentum.
Also to short circuit the next typical newbie question, the speed of light depends on the medium and isn't a universal constant (except the one that is quoted as speed of light in a vaccum). There are various interpretations about how light slows down in other medum(photons hit other objects and transfer momentum when not in a vaccum, are affected by various other localized electromagnetic fields of atoms, or take a non-linear path in those mediums), but these different speeds in different medium have nothing to do with momentum of a photon in a vaccum. Such a photon is always travelling at the speed of light in a vaccum and can still have any of a continuous range of momentum (ignoring quantum mechanics for a moment), yet the photon still has zero rest mass.
Note that some textbooks try to refer to apparent variability in mass as "relativistic inertial mass" which changes with velocity with a lorentz factor. A fudge-factor concept like relativistic non-constant mass has some attractive properties for objects that have non-zero rest mass, but unfortunatly it sort of turns into a zero divided-by zero handwave for something like a photon and is probably something to be best avoided if you want to understand how an object which has zero rest mass can still have momentum.
So, I say, cut these people some slack. Go buy a OLPC, and see what all the talk is about.
Ironically, this is probably the crux of the problem. I can't just go out and buy and OLPC, I have to go through some hokey G1G1 dance at amazon, oops wait, it ended Dec 31, too late, sorry...
Please note: The Give One Get One program ended on Dec 31st. The link on this page is a donation only and provides a laptop to a child in a developing country. You will not receive a laptop.
That's hard to cut someone some slack about since it's spitting distance to something like ooh your not part of the "club" you can't invest in this Madoff fund even though I know you really want to, but if you can wait just a little while, an opportuntity might come up later where you can invest, but you can't ask any questions...
That kind of crap just doesn't pass the smell test with me...
In a theory of everything that tries to explain things 100% in terms of fields, there is no mass and everything is accounted for in the energy of fields generated sub-atomic particles.
In the case of this experiment, the "color" lattice fields of QCD make up most of the field energy and account for most of what would normally be attributed to mass. Earlier compuatations of quark field energy were able to account for all but about 10% of the "mass-effects" in field energy, but didn't take into consideration virtual particles (quark/anti-quark pairs) created in the energy and interaction of the QCD lattice. Apparenty with this new more sophisticated computation, they got the mass-effects accounted for in quantum chromo lattice field energy down to 2% (the rest of the observed effects being accounted for a scalar mass value).
So basically the verified that most, but not allof the missing mass (~8%/10%) can be accounted for by quark/anti-quark virtual particles. Maybe higgs bosons and the higgs scalar field account for the rest of the effects that manifest themselves as mass, maybe not. Or maybe they just forgot about another particle and another non-scalar quantum field and there is no higgs, and no missing missing mass. Or maybe they made a math mistake. We don't know yet, but at least we are getting closer to accounting for things.
I'm guessing that if the IRS determines that the Mozilla foundation is being operated so that there is significant self-dealing with their substantial-contributors (e.g., google), the mozilla foundation will likely get penalized for this. This would be like if microsoft contributed to a charity and that charity turned around and bought and excessive amount of microsoft software. Here's the IRS page on this subject.
In addition, there are several restrictions and requirements on private foundations, including:
1. restrictions on self-dealing between private foundations and their substantial contributors and other disqualified persons; 2. requirements that the foundation annually distribute income for charitable purposes; 3. limits on their holdings in private businesses; 4. provisions that investments must not jeopardize the carrying out of exempt purposes; and 5. provisions to assure that expenditures further exempt purposes.
I don't see how your definition of being a mark to a con-man because of greed and just being kind to a liar is any different.
The action(s) performed are done in both cases are generally under your own free will. The perceived harm is in the eye of the beholder (it's either charity or the sting of being conned).
If the only difference is in the "heart" of the mark before it happens, perhaps there is something objective. But that isn't something you can be always sure you know about you need to just trust sometimes. If the only difference is in your heart after it happens, then it is only subjective distinction.
Think for example, about a case where someone running an opensource project asks you to donate some time coding for a project and later parts of that project are fed into some closed source project. Basically, you are being charitable and the people running the project are cons.
However, if you never find out about the later action, and you made the donation of your effort being kind under your own free will, are you a mark? Or are you greedy for wanting your donation of time and effort to go to opensource only? Are you stupid for trusting the people running the project or are you stupid for thinking it's impossible for your donation to ever fall into a closed source project? Is it stupid to fully trust anyone? Are you really con-ned even though you aren't aware of the later action? Why would it change if found out much later?
Or maybe perhaps someone is playing on your sense of charity (and not greed) and your trust that they are what they appear to represent to con you (even if you didn't know it)?
That is why it's called a con (short for confidence). People running "cons" gain your con-fidence, then take advantage when you aren't expecting it. Greed isn't always required. But some level of trust is required for a con and we (as a species) appear to be trusting perhaps more than we should be in some circumstances.
You can call it being kind liars if it allows you to sleep at night, though;^)
I also doubt them moving to China very much, since they are one of the few eco-conscious companies out there.
Although Lego is still a danish company, I believe they moved all their production operations from Billund, Denmark and the US into the Czech Republic and Mexico back in 2006... So for what it's worth, maybe not China, but Czech republic and Mexico aren't known as hot-spots of eco-consciousness either...
Pretty soon we'll hear about a proposed bailout package for political comedian/satirists. What comedian would want to touch BO and risk naacp, aclu, and 18-29 oprah watcher back-lash? I don't see a comedy script treatment entitled "That's my BO!" making the rounds anytime soon;^)
Because if the rest of the world likes you, they might stop thinking up ways to blow you up.
I don't know what kind of world you live in, but it isn't like the Spainiards and the Francos are trying to blow us up (at least I don't think so)... And if you think who we elect as president will change the opinion of those that actually are thinking about ways of blowing us up, well, I think that teardrop at the bottom of your empty latte cup doesn't qualify as it being half full...
Of course it's always better to have more friends, but no matter what you do, your enemies are usually still your enemies...
The Outer Space Treaty which is the first basic attempt to regulate space is pretty much like the concept behind International Waters. The gist of Articles 6 and 7 are that governments are responsible for their citizens and corporate entities operation in outer space. If you need an analogy, this is sort of like how your parents are legally responsible for your actions when you are a child.
As for the equipment just floating around and something going catestrophically wrong, well, just look at the junk floating around earth's orbit, you don't have to imagine it, it's already real. In many respects it's no different than the great pacific garbage patch.
These happenings are perhaps one of the best illustrations of the Tragedy of the Commons effect. There are many sides to this argument about the commons. Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves;^)
Perhaps that's why we are conditioned to view people with shifty eyes with mistrust. Perhaps they are self medicating their psyche after being involved with (or having done) things that they'd rather forget and humans evolved a way to detect this.
Slashdot Mirror
Not a chance for something solar panel getting enough power over a long period of time on the moon.
The moon dust (regolith) sticks to everything electrostatically and it's so fine that brushing it off is damn near impossible.
Optimistically, they write...
Yeah, that moon air might be a problem... do they know what are they talking about?
A solar panel on a moon rover will get covered with regolith in short order and that's all she wrote...
This is an easy one. Fear of consequences.
Taking property from a "small" landowner has very few consequences to the elected leaders of a government.
Taking patents from a large company (esp a large multi-national congolmerate) can have large consequences to the same elected leader. That's why you don't see the government taking land from large multi-national conglomerates (without paying them large sums of money).
Perhaps you weren't aware that the land is not taken when it is condemned (at least in the US), but traded for something of value (either money or other land). Sometimes larger companies can actually negociate with the elected leaders of a government to have their land condemned voluntarily (making them a larger net profit as they trade the land for some other land that is actually more commercially valuable to them). This sometimes fools the voters into thinking the government isn't really paying for the land, but the company profits from this ignorance.
You might be under the assumption that the elected leaders of a government are operating under a principle where they do things that benefit the public good, when in reality, they often operate under a principle where they do things primarily to benefit their re-election.
Of course the laser beam don't need to curve to tame lightning. Presumably a mirror cheap enough to sacrific to a lightning strike could be moved to the approprate place, right? Even the researcher admits this is...
And it might go w/o mentioning that the mythbuster in all of us /.-ers wants to see a curved lightning discharge destroy a $1M laser ;^)
This isn't much different than the "must-carry" cable legislation of days past...
Local TV stations wanted to force cable operators to pay to carry their stations, but the cable operators wanted some of the local TV stations, didn't want to pay for all the local TV stations. Of course the small unpopular channels felt they would get left out of the cable operators lineups if cable could choose.
Thus was born the "must-carry" legislation where local TV stations could opt-in to "must-carry" (where the cable operators didn't have to pay, but were forced to carry), or "retransmition-consent" (where local TV stations could negotiate for carriage, but the cable operators weren't forced to carry). Thus the popular local TV stations could get paid for their content, but the small unpopular channels wouldn't get a free ride. In the end, though, I think almost all local TV stations elected "must-carry" and cable was pretty much forced by the legislation to carry just about any TV station that put up a broadcast antenna.
I can see it all coming down to similar legislation in the end if there isn't an agreement. Google better be prepared to be indexing a million left-wing/right-wing/wacko news rags and blogs and updating continuously (they currently claim 25,000 news souces) if they want to continue down this road. Because if most of the small rags elect "must-carry", there will be lots of squeaking wheels to grease if they don't get their 15 minutes of fame....
Was this intrusion of solitude? No, this was a blogger, who was trying to get publicity (albeit under a pseudonym).
Was this a public disclosure of private facts? No, disclosure of identity wasn't publically offensive and it was definitely newsworthy.
Was this false light? No, it wasn't publically offensive, nor was the disclosure of identity misleading.
Was this an appropriation of name or likeness? No, this was identification of writings made by the blogger.
A person doesn't have an absolute right to privacy (otherwise papperazii and credit bureaus wouldn't exist), although it's quite probable that laws, oaths, duties, or contracts were broken in the attempt to pierce this veil of privacy in this particular case.
A possible analogy is like you make a credit card payment with a gas station and the gas station video security system records you typing in your PIN-code and doesn't handle the recording securely. Is that a known issue with the video camera (an inanimate object), or a known issue with the person that put up the security system who is too lazy to secure potentially harmful recordings?
Perhaps we can put this into a bigger question: is there a safe harbor for google to archive things accidentally put on the web forever, or are they required to do something when someone points this out something bad that their creation has done?
As a silly example, is that imagine there was a coal-burning plant built that provided electricity. Some time later it is discovered that mercury was being billowed in the air. Does the plant have the safe harbor that all it was doing was burning coal and providing electricity, both perfectly legal and standard activities and can continue to do this forever? I think not, new information about devastating side effects of their operation have been revealed. They have a duty to change their operations even though it may not have been forseen. If they do not change their operations, they can be held liable... IANAL, but this seems reasonable to me...
Uhm, I don't think that's the case with this one... He was fired for filing false expense reports. Whether or not he actually did file them or not is totally irrelevent, but it still seems that it was the reason he got fired. I'm guessing that if he did not conceded that he filed false expense reports (which is a statement of fact), he would most certainly within his rights to contest this as liable (and prove so in a court of law and win a liable case, or prove he was filed for some other reason like age-ism or sleeping with a janitor or the bosses wife). Or perhaps prove a case of defamation which could encompase a public disclosure of private facts or facts that create a false light.
However, this ruling is apparently on a different point altogether, whether or not Staples released this information maliciously or not. Given how reporters of this era are often very malicious in their pursuits at trying to expose graft and corruption or even just simple indiscretions (e.g., lets expose him by ambushing him walking to his car at his workplace with cameras and papperazzi and coworkers and young children), I'm not surprised many media folks are outraged by this ruling. We live in an adversarial/partisan/outrage society, and there are people with strong incentives to keep it that way. Wasn't there just a story about someone who got out of an arrest because the cop put he was feeling devious on his facebook page?
The sad fact that a lawyer on an archeology expedition found this little nugget of an exception in the law to help his client and this causes a big furor just makes it clear (to me anyhow), that we aren't really a nation of laws and justice, but really a nation run by lawyers generating (and combing through) fine print... That to me is the real tradgey here...
Before we had the internet and (affordable) calculators, people used to buy books that had printed tables of logarithms, sine, and cosines to say 6-8 digits. Often the publishers would introduce small random errors into their tables to enable them to be copyrighted.
Of course back then, it was _still_ a silly thing to do. Often the type for those books were set by hand (imagine some poor slobs computing the proper values on paper or with a calculator into a list deliberatly trying to create some errors, then having some other poor slob typing them up in a typewriter, and then yet another person setting up a printing lines with blocks with digits on them and organizing them row by row for a printing press) and contained much bigger errors as some errors were missed by the people who cross-checked the tables. It was a giant game of "telephone" back in those days...
Gee, I miss my slide rule ;^)
A company that I left (because I was fed-up with the management) wanted to temporarily get me to consult on a project as a contractor that we hadn't finished yet. Since I had a new day job already, and I didn't really trust them to pay me in a timely manner (since they had stiffed other contractors when I was working there) and I didn't really need the money, I decided to work for barter.
Basically, the arraingment was that after work, I went back to the old company for an hour or two to consult on this project. After those couple of hours, I got to take my ex-coworkers out for a nice dinner on the company (the current employees had to pay and get expense reimbursed for the company and I'm pretty sure they didn't stiff their employees as that would piss them off).
With this scheme, I didn't get a 1099 (no self employment/income tax), got to take my ex-coworkers out for nice dinners every day I consulted on the company dime. Probably cost the company about $200/hour for my time. If later on, I needed a recommendation, I'm pretty I could have coaxed a good recommendation from my ex-coworkers even though the managment wasn't too happy with me for leaving and taking a new job...
Assume you have a $100 processor with 40% gross profit margin, you sell 1,000,000 units and make $40,000,000
Assume you have a $20 processor with 80% gross profit margin, you sell 2,000,000 units and make $32,000,000
Hard to feed the same number of mouths with $32M that you did with $40M, right?
The market needs to be much bigger to support the much lower actual selling price of a $10 chip like atom, rather than a $100 core2 or i7. Even with double the gross profit margin and double the volume, it's hard to see how to get there (and of course lots of those netbook just canabalize the sales of notebook which makes it even harder).
Hmm, so this is just like an opt-out checkbox instead of an opt-in checkbox on a website. Gee I guess there's never ever anything wrong with that... ;^)
This just sounds like google got essentially no-bid contract from the whitehouse. Google/youtube is basically geting a benefit (albeit probably marginal value), from having tracking cookies and being "exclusive". Other competitors probably didn't get a shot at the "business" and currently don't seem have a similar exemption and would not get the benefit from this and it gives the appearance that Google has a slight advantage over some other video streamer (maybe hulu?)
Sadly this seems to be a small backstep from the steps that Obama made to help make the inauguration funding seem less like yet another influence pedaling opportunity (e.g, cap donation to $50K, etc, etc) and seem like Google being able to "buy" access to cookies on a government website. Perhaps if the videos were served from a domain where the information obtained from the cookies are made available under the FOIA that might be okay, but it seems to me that google may have essentially traded some server/storage cost for the ability to send more targetted ads to people that view videos on whitehouse.gov and charge advertizers for that targetting. Clever for them.
To me this is like Intuit getting permission to mail out government income tax forms to taxpayers and inserting a coupon for turbo-tax. I'm sure H&R block or Hewitt wouldn't be too happy about Intuit getting a no-bid contract to access to the names and home mailing addresses of people who request forms from the IRS and do taxes themselves, (rather than do their taxes on-line or send the to a professional tax preparer) for the price of printing and sending out some bulk-mail. This type of targetting advertizing would probably be much better !/$ than sending out junk mail.
The government is allegedly getting something for free in both cases, but that's just because it's giving away something of value to get it which doesn't happen to be money. To make it worse, it didn't give all the players the same opportunity. What's the problem, you say... Well rename google to halliburton and think about Halliburton's no-bid contracts in Iraq. Sure there aren't many companies that wanted to do some of the work (and in the case of putting out oil field fires, not many companies actually qualified to do it), but people were screaming bloody murder about the fact it was no-bid.
Don't underestimate desperate star trek writers to rewrite history. Apparently that katra scene was grafted into the end of wrath of khan despite the apparent protest of the director (nicholas meyers), that it would ruin the movie. Also, they never really explained how baby spock (the "body") came to be on that genesis planet... In STNG, Riker had a transporter duplicate (Thomas), and in ST-Nemesis, Picard was cloned, perhaps a deperate ST writer, maybe could have conjoured up a baby Khan with enhanced memory eugenics there as well...
Of course it's all totally moot now...
Now you've definitely got me there... ;^)
Short answer photons do not have mass.
The confusion for newbies is that p=m*v isn't the whole story. Photons always travel at the speed of light in a medium or inertial frame (whatever that may be). However, photons have no rest mass (or intrinsic mass which is what allows photons to travel at the speed of light given finite acceleration), but they do have momentum when they are moving at the speed of light. That's part of the wacky world of special relativity.
A more enlightening formulation to see how this works is E^2 = (p*c)^2 + (m0*c^2)^2. (p is the variable physicist usually use to indicate momentum)
In this formulation describing the conservation of energy, even things with no mass (like a photon) can have various amounts of momentum and take part in interactions that conserve energy.
Incidentally this formulation also simplifies to the famous E=m*c^2 for objects that don't have momentum.
Also to short circuit the next typical newbie question, the speed of light depends on the medium and isn't a universal constant (except the one that is quoted as speed of light in a vaccum). There are various interpretations about how light slows down in other medum(photons hit other objects and transfer momentum when not in a vaccum, are affected by various other localized electromagnetic fields of atoms, or take a non-linear path in those mediums), but these different speeds in different medium have nothing to do with momentum of a photon in a vaccum. Such a photon is always travelling at the speed of light in a vaccum and can still have any of a continuous range of momentum (ignoring quantum mechanics for a moment), yet the photon still has zero rest mass.
Note that some textbooks try to refer to apparent variability in mass as "relativistic inertial mass" which changes with velocity with a lorentz factor. A fudge-factor concept like relativistic non-constant mass has some attractive properties for objects that have non-zero rest mass, but unfortunatly it sort of turns into a zero divided-by zero handwave for something like a photon and is probably something to be best avoided if you want to understand how an object which has zero rest mass can still have momentum.
Ironically, this is probably the crux of the problem. I can't just go out and buy and OLPC, I have to go through some hokey G1G1 dance at amazon, oops wait, it ended Dec 31, too late, sorry...
That's hard to cut someone some slack about since it's spitting distance to something like ooh your not part of the "club" you can't invest in this Madoff fund even though I know you really want to, but if you can wait just a little while, an opportuntity might come up later where you can invest, but you can't ask any questions...
That kind of crap just doesn't pass the smell test with me...
You can use your Deterministic Oncological Generating box ;^)
or perhaps take advantage of another type of dog...
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/01/0112_060112_dog_cancer.html
Apparently this more common type of dog can be trained to smell certain types of existing cancer (instead of deteriministically generating them) ;^)
In a theory of everything that tries to explain things 100% in terms of fields, there is no mass and everything is accounted for in the energy of fields generated sub-atomic particles.
In the case of this experiment, the "color" lattice fields of QCD make up most of the field energy and account for most of what would normally be attributed to mass. Earlier compuatations of quark field energy were able to account for all but about 10% of the "mass-effects" in field energy, but didn't take into consideration virtual particles (quark/anti-quark pairs) created in the energy and interaction of the QCD lattice. Apparenty with this new more sophisticated computation, they got the mass-effects accounted for in quantum chromo lattice field energy down to 2% (the rest of the observed effects being accounted for a scalar mass value).
So basically the verified that most, but not allof the missing mass (~8%/10%) can be accounted for by quark/anti-quark virtual particles. Maybe higgs bosons and the higgs scalar field account for the rest of the effects that manifest themselves as mass, maybe not. Or maybe they just forgot about another particle and another non-scalar quantum field and there is no higgs, and no missing missing mass. Or maybe they made a math mistake. We don't know yet, but at least we are getting closer to accounting for things.
I'm guessing that if the IRS determines that the Mozilla foundation is being operated so that there is significant self-dealing with their substantial-contributors (e.g., google), the mozilla foundation will likely get penalized for this. This would be like if microsoft contributed to a charity and that charity turned around and bought and excessive amount of microsoft software. Here's the IRS page on this subject.
http://www.irs.gov/charities/charitable/article/0,,id=96114,00.html
In addition, there are several restrictions and requirements on private foundations, including:
1. restrictions on self-dealing between private foundations and their substantial contributors and other disqualified persons;
2. requirements that the foundation annually distribute income for charitable purposes;
3. limits on their holdings in private businesses;
4. provisions that investments must not jeopardize the carrying out of exempt purposes; and
5. provisions to assure that expenditures further exempt purposes.
I don't see how your definition of being a mark to a con-man because of greed and just being kind to a liar is any different.
The action(s) performed are done in both cases are generally under your own free will.
The perceived harm is in the eye of the beholder (it's either charity or the sting of being conned).
If the only difference is in the "heart" of the mark before it happens, perhaps there is something objective. But that isn't something you can be always sure you know about you need to just trust sometimes. If the only difference is in your heart after it happens, then it is only subjective distinction.
Think for example, about a case where someone running an opensource project asks you to donate some time coding for a project and later parts of that project are fed into some closed source project. Basically, you are being charitable and the people running the project are cons.
However, if you never find out about the later action, and you made the donation of your effort being kind under your own free will, are you a mark? Or are you greedy for wanting your donation of time and effort to go to opensource only? Are you stupid for trusting the people running the project or are you stupid for thinking it's impossible for your donation to ever fall into a closed source project? Is it stupid to fully trust anyone? Are you really con-ned even though you aren't aware of the later action? Why would it change if found out much later?
Or maybe perhaps someone is playing on your sense of charity (and not greed) and your trust that they are what they appear to represent to con you (even if you didn't know it)?
That is why it's called a con (short for confidence). People running "cons" gain your con-fidence, then take advantage when you aren't expecting it. Greed isn't always required. But some level of trust is required for a con and we (as a species) appear to be trusting perhaps more than we should be in some circumstances.
You can call it being kind liars if it allows you to sleep at night, though ;^)
Although Lego is still a danish company, I believe they moved all their production operations from Billund, Denmark and the US into the Czech Republic and Mexico back in 2006... So for what it's worth, maybe not China, but Czech republic and Mexico aren't known as hot-spots of eco-consciousness either...
I'm afraid the original options for 1x1 were square and round...
Flat came much, much later...
Seriously.
Pretty soon we'll hear about a proposed bailout package for political comedian/satirists. What comedian would want to touch BO and risk naacp, aclu, and 18-29 oprah watcher back-lash? I don't see a comedy script treatment entitled "That's my BO!" making the rounds anytime soon ;^)
I don't know what kind of world you live in, but it isn't like the Spainiards and the Francos are trying to blow us up (at least I don't think so)... And if you think who we elect as president will change the opinion of those that actually are thinking about ways of blowing us up, well, I think that teardrop at the bottom of your empty latte cup doesn't qualify as it being half full...
Of course it's always better to have more friends, but no matter what you do, your enemies are usually still your enemies...
The Outer Space Treaty which is the first basic attempt to regulate space is pretty much like the concept behind International Waters. The gist of Articles 6 and 7 are that governments are responsible for their citizens and corporate entities operation in outer space. If you need an analogy, this is sort of like how your parents are legally responsible for your actions when you are a child.
As for the equipment just floating around and something going catestrophically wrong, well, just look at the junk floating around earth's orbit, you don't have to imagine it, it's already real. In many respects it's no different than the great pacific garbage patch.
These happenings are perhaps one of the best illustrations of the Tragedy of the Commons effect. There are many sides to this argument about the commons. Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves ;^)
Perhaps that's why we are conditioned to view people with shifty eyes with mistrust. Perhaps they are self medicating their psyche after being involved with (or having done) things that they'd rather forget and humans evolved a way to detect this.