Well, open source many not have been the bulk of the problem, but they weren't angels either...
Va-linux... Redhat... Transmeta... Caldera (we know what happened to those guys)...
Cobalt Networks (was COBT, died, scooped up by sun)
And then there were the ones that didn't quite make it...
LinuxCare (scraped ipo changed name to levanta)
LynuxWorks (was lynx, tried to cash in, no ipo)
Lineo (scraped ipo)
Turbolinux(scraped ipo)
Suse (???)
Lindows (???)
I recall how some EEs became dismayed at the advent of each generation of new packaging technology (e.g. moving from DIPs to surface mount technology or ball-grid arrays), and each chip integration step (e.g. gates to MSI to LSI to VLSI to SOC) as being the end of the line and signalling obsolesence, but strangely that never happened and even more EEs are required today than yesteryear and the problems seem to be getting harder too...
Assuming you studied EE and don't just have an orcad board layout tool class completion certificate, I wouldn't be worried. Electrons in some sense are just lower frequency phonons instead of photons... The principles are the same, although the engineering is a bit different it's all just like RF stuff and off-the-shelf EEs have managed to do RF since the 40's... Engineering is mostly a matter of putting together well understood components to solve a problem, that doesn't change if the components are chips connected by wires or isolinear chips connected by optical fibre.
But having said that, I'm hoping to retire before quantum transistors become prevalent. That seems like a pretty big nut to crack as opposed to capacitively or optically coupled packaging options. That whole "if you look at it, it will change" aspect of quantum makes me wonder how anything will get debugged. Hooking up the active low-cap Tek scope probe on the board or looking for photon emissison by hot electrons on a chip isn't gonna cut it in the quantum world, but I digress...
Basically, capacitive coupling between components is just 1 "plate" of the capacitor is on one device and the other "plate" is on the other device, so if you draw a circuit diagram, it looks like a capacitor in series in the circuit (AC-coupled). The energy/signal is transmitted by one "plate" charging up (or discharging) and having the resultant electric field cross the gap and cause the opposite charge build up on the other side. Since the plates are finite sized and will eventually charge up to the point where you can't detect a difference on the other side, you can't really send a low frequency (stationary) signal across the gap so there is some sort of signal coding being done (which is some overhead on bandwidth).
Depends on lots of details of the design (e.g. detectable signal-to-noise ratio, interference rejection, desired bandwidth, dielectric permativity, etc) to say how close the "plates" have to be to each other, but my guess is if they want to be really-really close to get the best bandwidth and the lowest signal interference since you want this to be a viable replacement for pins (which is the electromagnetic signal being sent down a metal waveguide which tends to reduce interference instead of broadcasted using an electric field to cross a gap which will tend to broadcast and pickup interference).
As for things that transmit heat, but don't interefere with electric fields, this is not an easy problem. Most things that conduct heat well also conduct or at least distort electric fields meaning they would probably interfere with the capacitively coupled signal. Also, without good heat conductors, disapation usually requires lots of area (which is something this technique was trying to save).
So if we have any magic energy source that powers cars, this wouldn't cause more than a million people a year to die? Like I said in my original post, just moving is a big part of the problem.
If there was no oil, but there was a magic energy source that had 1/2 the energy storage/transport properties of oil don't you think it's likely that the richest man alive would likely have some part of his fortune responsible for it?
Wouldn't countries shape their foriegn policy and possible go to war to get their share or more of this magic energy source?
Isn't it really just civilzation and the fact that there are so many homosapiens and their propensity to want more (resources, technology, speed, power, influence, etc) that causes all these problems?
Flip back the clock a few thousand years and replace oil with food. Hmm...
Ane then flip forward a few thousand years and when the world's cheap/clean drinking water supplies start depleting, and then replace oil for water. This isn't as wacky as it first might seem. Examine the current political situations in Singapore vs Malaysia and water (search it on google)...
And on the natural disaster thing. Think about the US hurricane season when they occasionally evacuate large portions of the south eastern part of the USA. If the oil wasn't in the cars they use for evacuations, how many more people do you think would die? How bout that oil in an ambulance or firetruck or in the trucks that moves food into famine areas to distribute grain? Ahh, those positives don't quite fit your anti-oil agenda so those don't count...
And don't get me started on plastics...
As with any inanimate object, it isn't good or bad. People are most definitly the root of all scummy behavior.
Okay, your turn...
P.S. And on the foreign aid thing, I think the USA gives more aid to Russia and Isreal, neither of which gives the USA very much oil, and one might argue that the countries that have much of the oil don't really like one of those countries very much...
I remember a study they did quite a long time ago about the winter "brown cloud" that was always covering cities. Although, much of the pollutants were things like NxOy, ozone-like and CxOy compounds, more than 30% (by mass) was dust and particulates due to just wind and thing like cars moving around dirty roads and kicking up dust and dirt (especially tires grinding up sand that was put on the road to keep people slipping when it was icy, but later the ice melted) and heavy machinery moving. There were also lots of particulates due to coal (non-gasoline/oil) powered electrial plants.
Although you might argue attribute this to oil (if we didn't have oil, we wouldn't be moving as much), even in the Great plains states during the age of the buffalo herds had a great amount of air pollution due to just moving around during the huge buffalo herd migrations of the era.
Even now, look up "asian dust cloud" on the internet to see how bad just simple dust can be.
So unless you take the extreme position that all the things that are indirectly caused by having oil and gas (including large scale wars that used TNT and other explosives) are attributed to gasoline causing destruction, then maybe you have a point.
But I might take the point that the differential between if we found a completely non-poluting fuel, but did all the same destruction other than emitting CO2, my guess would be that there would be lots of natural phenomena like volcanos that would certainly be the same order of magnitude.
Care to argue your point against volcanos or earthquakes? Or maybe just simple human deforestation in the Asian continent causing dust storms? I think that people that attribute total evil to oil are a bit misguided, human deforestation is a pretty bad thing and has very little to do with oil (other than many folks that are buring forests don't have cooking oil and use charcoal and wood instead). Even simple civilization itself is pretty bad w/o oil.
I'm not saying that everyone should go out and drive SUVs because it doesn't matter, but to blame all the environmental and human destruction on oil isn't right. Civilization causes much destruction w/o the part directly attributed to oil, and if you replace oil with some other magic non-polluting slightly scarse energy resource, if you think that wars wouldn't be fought over that, you probably don't know humanity very well.
And, of course, nature (even the non-cosmic variety) has us poor insignificant humans beat by a long shot...
I'm pretty sure that VC's (venture capitalists) and most Angel investors (people like paul allen that have wheelbarrels full of money and finance other companies) don't need accounting rule changes to figure out the value of stock options. Since they are the major funders of private companies, they will likley continue to favor giving stockoptions to the employees of the small private startup companies that they fund...
However...
Since many private companies want to go public eventually, in the year or so run-up to their IPO (initial public offering), they usually want to normalize their books (startups tend to have wacky books because of various loans and stock warrants that they have to issue along the way). Employees that are hired during this run-up time are likely get screwed in the stock-option lottery since they usually want to show some profit at this time (or at least less of a loss, since the 90's dot-coms extremes are out of fashion). This might make it more difficult for a hot startup to make the transition to a public company making it hard to attract high-quality employees at this time...
Since the IPO is the primary vehicle for these early stock-optionees have to make their expected stock-option windfall, it's still somewhat a concern to early employees if there are additional hurdles to make an IPO more difficult (e.g., I've got quite a bit of startup company wall paper already, making it more likely for stock options to be wall paper will certainly makes it worth less to me in an expected return on investement sense).
This may tend to more small startup companies that get bought by big companies (no-ipo exit strategy), and fewer companies that start small and grow up. This would probably be counteracted a bit by bigger companies just paying in restricted shares (or cash bonuses) and small startups being the only way to "roll-the-dice" and gamble on a big payoff.
In the end, these rules will probably change the company landscape a bit (fewer brand-new medium size companies), and force workers that want the big stock option payoffs to take greater risk (kinda like the share holders need to). This would probalbly end the day of money for nothing (e.g., getting lucky) with startups...
I'm sure many employees (remember senior management are still employees) don't like these results since it will probably lock in the have-vs-have-not balance as they only people that want to take this new increased risk are people who have already won the lottery, but that's life...
Instead of fighting the music labels, perhaps what people should lobby billboard magazine to set up an anonymous mp3 download tracker for each "official" mp3 version of a specific song.
Then the labels would then have an incentive for more people to download and listen to a specific "official" version of a song so that their rating points would go higher. This would likely put the appropriate down-pressure on the price of that "official" tagged version of a song (maybe even inspire "free-download" days)...
Note that this is all slightly tongue-in-cheek since the privacy experts will likely frown on this and probably the only reason for stunts like this (and other like prince giving away free cds at concerts) is that someone, somewhere has a weird performance bonus clause written a contract that makes this profitable for them, but of course probably less money from the person on the other side of the contract.
The record business is a pretty low-down business with all sorts of wacky contracts people use to screw each other out of the every shrinking money pie. I doubt it is possible to extrapolate the next wierd behavior before the contract people catch up to it...
Although I'm all for more freely accessible Wifi, it seems to me, that people are all off in a huff when MSFT bundles IE with their OS making it impossible to run a business simply making OS, but people are quick to forgive a company offering bundled wifi with their product making it impossible to run a business selling only wifi.
There is a point to bringing this up (it isn't just flame bait) and a suggestion as to why wifi isn't as prevalent in certain areas as others and suggests a possible business model to use.
In the original "telephone" model in the United States, the telephone was sold in a "bundled" model (local & long-distance), but prices where kept under control using the tarrif business model. Competition was sparse in the long distance space (MCI and Sprint were very small players) and prices were high except for the "bundled" service.
The misnamed "deregulation" in the '80's that resulted in the breakup of MaBell forced the division of the company into regional bell operating companies RBOCs that were forced by new regulations to offer on a fair and non-discriminatory terms, their local access to all the long distance companies, not just AT&T.
The results turned out pretty good, and might be a good model for WiFi... If regulations forces all WiFi access points to "peer" with billing providers, paying for WiFi service would really get a boost. The providers would quickly find that they could offer very wide coverage by just throwing "peering" money to the existing access point providers. You, the customer, would be assured that your provider would try to pay access point providers to get more and more area coverage making the money you pay to them worth it. The people setting up access points would find they could get a reasonable return on their investment by getting access to paying customers.
Amazingly this peering model worked great for cell phone companies and the internet without any regulation at all (because they were all big companies). Sadly, in the Wifi world we are currently in a mode where "peering" isn't a major business model (other than the big access point providers which already peer), precisely because the small mom&pop providers don't see any value in it. This reminds me of some places in upstate pennsylvania in the late 80's after deregulation where they still had lots of mom&pop local phone companies where the rest of the country experienced greater access and lower rates, and it cost more to call your neighbor across town than to Los Angeles and sometimes the call wouldn't even go through. This was often because your local mom&pop teleco had a peering agreement with sprint, but not with the mom&pop teleco in the same town because they weren't forced to peer (because of an exception in the deregulation for small mom&pop telecos)...
(before people go off in a huff about "mom&pops", I don't mean to just suggest small family owned businesses, but colloquially use mom&pop for any small businesses in general)
One of the reasons why mom&pops aren't on board is exactly because of *bundling* (they want to sell something undifferentiated like coffee so they bundle it with something attractive like wifi). While this behavior isn't illegal (you get steak knives with your food processor and you get gift bags with your make-up purchase) it is, however, very anti-competitive (and why it is outlawed in the big scale when the bundle will kill off another business). If we could get the mom&pop Wifi's to compete in a different area without bundling wifi and excluding other carriers, by introducing an industry standard peering agreement, perhaps Wifi will flourish.
Anyhow, just a thought... At least I'm more likely to pay monthly for service if I could get it *everywhere* than if I could only get it at an airport or hotel (which I'm rarely at) because the local Subway is on a different company and I have to buy a softdrink to get access there (yes believe it or not most Subway restaurants are mom&pop family owned small businesses, just franchiseing the Subway name).
For those too lazy to click, basically these systems coil the pipe that goes to the input water feed of your hot water heater around the drain pipe so when hot water goes down the drain (eg. shower, dishwasher, washing machine, etc) some of the heat is exchanged with the cold water coming into the hotwater heater recycling some of the energy...
Current systems can recover up to about 85% of the heat energy that would have gone down the drain. To bad we all aren't using such systems yet...
A stanford professor is making the rounds on the talking head shows reminding people about an experiment he did back in the 70's where they made university graduate students (not joe sixpack) play the roles of prison guards and prisoners for a research project to examine behavior. The experiment was 24/7 for a few weeks (4-5 weeks)and there WERE cameras (both hidden and not-hidden).
Apparently they had to stop the experiment weeks early because of sadistic behavior by the university graduate students playing the prison guards in the experiment to prevent people from getting seriously hurt (physically and mentally). This isn't joe sixpack and this wasn't a real high-pressure situation either.
After about a week, the cameras in this experiment recorded really horrible acts humiliation and nearly all the "prisoners" being stripped down naked and forced into humiliating sexual poses at nearly one time or another and lots of escalating punishment by the "guards" as they tried to out-do each other and seemed to have wanton disregard for the "prisoners" health and safety (the escalation factor was the main reason they gave for stopping the experiment early).
The conclusion of this might be that there's strong evidence that it's probably in our (human) genes to be sadistic and we REALLY need rules (or at least some society pressure) to resist our natural tendancy to fulfill the adage that "absolute power corrupts absolutly" from taking over.
There have been many studies that show how sadistic we can be as a species. Some example of things that people learn as kids: pulling off insect wings, frying ants with magnifing glasses, swallowing goldfish, breaking hamster necks, putting cats in driers, tying nooses around dogs necks, pushing brothers and sisters down flights of stairs, holding funny looking nerds under water, wedgies, atomic wedgies, not to mention unspeakable college hazing incidents. Not to mention parents and teachers that tell impresionable minds that there's a bad side of town and they don't trust people of a certain color or parentage...
Yes we all certainly learn how to treat people fairly as children. NOT! Lord of the flies anyone?
Don't discount training as a way to counteract this. People train all the time to resist their natural instinct and modify their behavior (e.g., personal trainers, therapists, etc). Military training (done correctly) can be a good way to train people in these situations to be aware of natural tendencies and recognize when they should be wary of going with their instincts.
As one of the past judges for the ISF, and occasionally a local judge of some of the "feeder" science fairs that lead up to the ISF, I can say that what passes for science in these fairs (including the granddaddy ISF) is pretty sad...
Of course there are diamonds in the rough (which are the ones that usually win) and there are some a hand full of interesting/entertaining projects that come across from time-to-time, but I'd have to say that +90% of projects...
- are project "kits" sold by toy or science "education" companies
- are done with virtually no research (literature or experimental)
- come to conclusions with no logical, mathematical, or statistical basis
- seem to have forgone conclusions w/o testing a null-hypothesis or have preconceived political motivation
- seem to be mostly products of parents, teachers, or family friends
IMHO, science fairs are one the biggest distortions of realities of science. It seems to me that science is the process of trying lots of things and seeing most of them FAIL... There's no way to expect +90% "clean" experimental data from kitchen sink experiments, but the real value is to see all the things that could go wrong and imagine next experiment that can refine the result or prove your initial result wrong...
I'm not saying that this isn't the state of science in the world today, but I'm not exactly sure that this is the ideal atmosphere that fosters finding of the "next-big-thing" without fooling yourself in the meantime, but instead a big breeding-ground for the next snake-oil product that needs overhyped marketing to sell to the uninformed masses...
But I digress...
It does, however, make a good recruiting tool for these companies...
Eventually, compilers were make sophisticated enough to compile themselves (after a bootstrap). I suppose visual programming will eventually make this transition too, but it will probably be a framework that is unfamilar to many "programmers" (e.g., how many folks that use YACC or BISON really understand pseudo-LALR grammar parser generators).
However, if the USPTO gets to keep all the money collected when a patent is processed, then they have an incentive to allow even more things to be patented...
Prior to the wide spread deployment of the printing press, there was quite a bit of value in hardcopy itself (hard to make), so there wasn't much business in pirate copying (although, there was some form of copyright registration in early chinese history after the development of paper, it wasn't widely used).
The widespread availiablity of the printing press in 15th century europe essentially made hardcopy "cheap" and widely available. It also threatened the government's earlier ability to censor and control information. At the same time, the printers started to form local guilds to protect themselves from competition (basically they would agree distribute the titles among the member printers so they wouldn't be in direct competition with other guild members).
This turned out to be a fortuitious situation for the both parties. The government decided to take advantage of this situation to grant exclusive rights to print a title to a specific printing guild (so they didn't have to compete with other guilds) and if they didn't give a right to print, you couldn't print it (hence copy-right). This basically allowed the royalty to censor titles by giving the rights to a guild that agreed not to print it in exchange for the "juicy" exclusive rights to print another hot title (increasing the printer's profits since they didn't have to compete with other printers). It also gave the government a good single point to collect taxes. Sort of a quid-pro-quo arangement.
Notice that the original author had no say in the original "copy-right" scheme. It was basically the government desire for censorship leading the government to grant specific businesses monopoly powers to achieve their goals. The authors were basically at the whim of the printing guilds and government for payment (usually a statutory fixed fee per book). Because of the copyright monopoly, the customers ended up paying a higher price, none of which went to the author.
It was only later (around the time of the American Revolution), that this system really started to crumble. With increasing trade, the printing monopolies found that they couldn't keep out the "pirate" copies of books from other countries (sometimes copies even authorized by other governments as favors to local printing monopolies) and with increasing communication, governments realized censorship by copyright was a losing cause. About this time the idea that the author was the natural owner of the copyright (instead of the government) started to take hold and the modern form of copyright came about...
One wonders what system would have evolved had governments not used the then fledgling printing guilds to try to enforce monopolies. Printing monopolies may never have evolved. Authors may have even gotten less than their statutory "fees" or even work for free. Who knows it might have evolved to be like the opensource stuff?;^)
Why assume someone is dangerously negligent, when probably all it takes is some ordinary negligence with common practices. Although this is a wild ass speculation, maybe someone bought a "recycled" a computer and found this on a hard-drive partition...
Maybe even a scenaro like this...
Eyal's computer gets upgraded (because he's a bigwig and gets new toys as a perk). Person who recycles computers for Mainsoft either doesn't erase the disk or perhaps only erases the partition that doesn't have this data. The old disk is "recycled". Two years later, someone gets the recycled computer and when looking for credit card numbers and passwords stumbles upon windows source code...
Or, maybe he downloads this on to his laptop and forgets his laptop at an airport security checkpoint after 9/11. Two years later, nobody claims it so it's auctioned by the TSA on e-bay...
Seems to me it could happen pretty innocently these days w/o being dangerously negligent and apparently the service packs that were part of the code are around the 2-year vintage
For what it's worth, they don't use just NANDs in cmos chip design in the real world. The primary primitive is the AND-OR-INVERT (AOI) structure.
In the cmos world, pass-gates are much cheaper than amplifying gates (in the size vs speed vs power tradeoff), although you can't put too many pass gates in a row (signal degradation). So in fact MUX (multiplexor to pass one of the two inputs using the control of a third) and XORS (use input A to pass either !B or B) are used quite a bit.
Some background might be helpful to think about the more complicated AOI struture, though...
In a cmos NAND-gate, the pull-up side is two p-type pass gates in parallel from the output to Vdd (the positive rail) so that if either of the two p-type gates is low, the output is pulled high. For the pull-down side, two n-type pass gates are in series to ground so both n-type gates have to be low before the output is pulled to ground. This gives us a total of 4 transistors for a cmos-nand where the longest pass gate depth is 2 (the pull-down). The pull-down is restricted to be the complement function of the pull-down in CMOS (otherwize either the pull-up and pull-down will fight or nobody will pull causing the output to float and/or oscillate).
A 2-input NOR gate has the p-type in series and the n-type in parallel (for the same # of transistors).
Due to a quirk of semi-conductor technology, n-type transistors are easier to make more powerfull than p-type so usually a NAND is often slightly faster than a NOR (the two series n-types in a NAND gate are better at pulling down than the two series p-types are at pulling up in a NOR gate). However, this isn't the end of the story...
Notice that you can build a 3-input NAND by just adding more p-type transistors in parallel to the pull-up and more n-type in series to the pull-down. You can make even more complicated logic by putting the pull-up and pull-down transistor in combinations of series and parallel configurations. The most interesting cmos configurations are called AOI (and-or-invert) since they are the ones you can make with simple parallel chains of pass transistors in series for pull-up and pull-down.
For most cmos semi-conductor technologies, you are limited to about 4 pass gates in series or parallel before the noise margin starts to kill you and you need to stop using pass gates and just start a new amplifying "gate". Thus most chips are designed to use 4 input AOI gates where possible and smaller gates to finish out the logic implementation.
Thus "everyone" really uses lots of different types of gates (including simple NAND and XORS as well as more complicated AOI).
Metric vs US Customary measurement units seems to me just to be a semi-religious debate.
I really see no difference than the VI vs EMACS, English vs French (substitute your favorite language here), Euros vs Pounds, C vs Java (or C#), Perl vs Python, Floating point vs Fixed point, paper vs plastic...
If the world was so homogeneous, would anyone want to travel anywhere or meet any new people or try to understand their point of view?
Although I have no actual primary source information on this, what I heard is that the safety board that investigated the last space shuttle accident recommended that all future shuttle missions be designed so that they could reach the ISS as a lifeboat (in case some tiles are damaged during takeoff). Apparently designing a mission to visit the Hubble and still go to the ISS is not possible due to their different orbits. The previous (four?) missions to visit the Hubble never had this requirement before.
Of course NASA is free to ignore the safety board's recommendations and develop a new safety procedure for this single SP4 mission (and they had the money for this), but I guess that's a symptom of the "new" NASA. Let's not try if it might make us look bad and we ignore yet another accident board's recommendation (apparently one of the conclusions of the most recent safetly board was that they ignored all the management communication reorganization suggestions of the Challenger board's report).
Don't know who is "right", but I do know that both NASA and the Safety board both seem to be full of excuses these days (either real or convenient excuses)...
Between the 70% of water and the 15% uninhabitable part of the earth, they could probably have separate addresses for your left and right hand (or left and right side of your bed) with addresses to spare...
However, tall apartment buildings, large businesses, and even the NBU (neighborhood box unit for mail) outside my house needs some vertical dimensionality for unique addressing and they aren't likely to do vertical addressing for beds... or will they;^)
There are even tall buildings that have multiple zip+4 "addresses".
As was said in the eminently quotable Star Trek II... "He is intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates two dimensional thinking."
Yeah that's a stretch, but according to US national statistics about 16.5 people per 100,000 people die from cars, but only 13.7 people per 100,000 people die from firearms.
In both categories accidents outnumbered homicides, but of course most of the car deaths were accidental (about 90%) where the deaths from firearms were only about 58% accidental unless you count drunk driving as a non-accidental homicide from a car.
So perhaps we take from this that in the good ol' US of A, owning a car (or bicycle) as a weapon may be protected by the US constitution, but of course using your car (or bicycle) may or may not be legal...;^)
Then again all this car stuff is happening in the UK. Some folks in europe express that they're often glad that US laws don't apply there. Well, there is no constitution in the UK and can pass whatever laws they see fit and the government can do whatever they want to do:^p
OTOH, in the UK, where gun ownership is highly regulated, I'll bet homicides with the car as a weapon greatly outnumber gun homicides... and you don't have any rights to cars or guns...
Shooting missles backwards means the cruise missile (which is more like a slow speed plane, than a missile), doesn't immediately experience forward airspeed faster than what it was designed to handle. This was especially important for the Soviet backfire bomber (Tu22M3) which could go supersonic during a bombing run and there aren't too many supersonic cruise missiles, but of course the Tu22M3, never got ALCM (air launched cruise missile) ordinance, and just dropped dumb bombs and short range attack missles. The newer bear H (Tu95MS) and blackjack (Tu160) pulled the ALCM duty and were forward launch.
Some people have speculated that the back launch capabilities were to avoid supersonic slip-stream issues when firing missiles (the missiles could be fired backwards and turn around and go forwards...), but of course who knows why they did what they did in SOVIET RUSSIA;^)
I'm also in favor of the decision to let the photographer go, however, you should also aware that this kind of augmented reality place all the time in video, although not in the same way. Simple examples of temporal editing of video can create a false reality even when no pixels are doctored (this is an extension of this transgression, where the two pictures are real, but the composite is not).
An all too common practice is a video interview technique called the "reaction shot". The way this interview production technique works is when you are interviewing someone, mostly the camera is on the interviewee, but sometimes you want the image to switch back you you while the interviewee is still talking (this is called an "reaction shot"). It can be certainly be used to manipulate the emotions of the viewer (imagine a picture of the interviewer rolling their eyes, or glaring angrily, etc, etc).
When you see this on tv, one might think that there are two cameras and this is a contemporaneous view of you "reacting" while the interviewee is talking, but it isn't usually the case. Most reaction shots are filmed before or after the interview in the studio when the interviewee is not there since usually only one camera is used and the reaction shots are "insert-edited" with a contiguous audio track to lend the appearence of contemporaneous action.
Ahh, the magic of television. Reaction shots are done to improve composition and production values (staring at the interviewee for a long time can make you turn the channel in boredom, and a wide pan with a single camera will get you sick like a ping-pong match). You might say that since the audio track is unedited, this is a fair representation of what occured during the interview, but it's easy to see how this can be a slippery slope. In fact in the hollywood movie, Broadcast News, they have an all too true scene about the reaction shot where William Hurt tries a few times to fake tears to improve a reaction shot.
Although you might think that this "reaction shot" stuff is just a lot of hype, but during the Nixon-Kennedy presidential debates, it's widely thought that the reaction shots of Nixon fidgetting and sweating while Kennedy was talking likely contributed to Kennedy winning the presidency. Polling data taken after the debate seemed to give the edge to Nixon among those who heard the debate on radio, where the tv watchers gave the edge to Kennedy. You can thank Don Hewitt technical director in charge of the television switcher at the debates (who went on to be the executive producer of 60 Minutes).
Here's a quote from a Boston Globe article which explored the question if this type of insert editing was "ethical" journalism. Something to think about when you are watching the evening news...
In 1962, CBS president William Paley complimented correspondent Daniel Schorr on his interview with an East German leader. "What impressed me most," Paley said, "was how coolly you sat looking at hm while he talked to you like that."
Schorr laughed. "Mr. Paley," he said, "surely you know that those were reaction shots, which were done later?"
Paley, it seemed, didn't know. "Is that honest?" he asked.
"That's a funny question," said Schorr. "I'm unconfortable answering it. But no, it's not."
At Paley's instruction, CBS News established a policy prohibiting after-the-fact reaction shots. The policy was soon ignored.
Source: Bruce McCabe, "A Hollywood Version of TV News and the Industry's Reaction to It," Boston Globe, 3 January 1988, p. B3.
Note you can always sue anyone so "can't" almost always never is the case (unless someone indemnifies you against being sued). However, if the person suing has no basis for the suit, it can get thrown out very fast.
There is always the issue with injuctive relief of patent infringment (stop ship/recall) so almost everyone is subject to that. However I think when people think about "sue" most people are worried about the "money" thing (you always have to pay your lawyer which isn't me, but that's another topic).
Techically a patent isn't "violated" until it's actually "practiced". Remember a patent is mostly on a "mechanism" or a "procedure", you can't patent a mathematical algorithm.
Designing something that might violates a patent if it was used in a certain way isn't against the law (for the most part unless that was your intent or computer keyboard manufacturers and monitors would most certainly be out of business). However, building it, distributing it, or selling it to someone who actually uses in the way that "practices" the patent potentially opens you up to some liabilty to economic damage, and patent law is a funky thing on economic damage.
The weird part is that the patent infringer's profit is not recoverable in economic damage (not that this matters much for OSS folks). One measure of economic damage is "reasonable royalty" which is likely to be zero for a OSS project (since the seller wouldn't have reasonably paid anything to licence the patent). Much more troublesome is the other way to compute economic damage is the lost profit of the patent holder (how much they would have made had the product not been made). For computing lost profit there's this thing called the "Panduit" test (after the case that set the precedent) for what must be established...
- what the demand for the product is - impact of marketable non-infringing substitutes - the patent holder had the means (marketing and manufacturing capacity) to exploit the demand - the amount of profit (not revenue) that was lost
So regardless of the amount of money the OSS developer made (which is usually zero), someone can be liable for a bunch of damages if the patent holder chooses to assert lost profits. There's also the issue of supplemental damages (how much the infringement cost in other areas of the patent holder's business) which is really where the money is.
The 64,000 dollar question is who is liable...
Technically, only the violator of the patent is liable (end user that executes the code that the patent covers), but there is a legal theory of "contributory infringement" that make other people in the chain from developer to user liable for some of it.
There is also weird legal theory that exploits a loophole in certain intellectual property statutes that contributory infringment requires at least some direct infringment. This theory was designed to protect the "middle-men" that unknowingly contribute to infringement but don't really benefit from it. I don't know how this could be applied, but conceivably a good lawyer might make the case that there was no direct infringement except possibly by the end user and the specific OSS developer who wrote the infringing lines of code.
Even though the end user is technically liable for the infringment, if the patent holder has an opportunity to, but fails to, stop the distributor or manufacturer from getting the infringing product to the end user before the end user ends up "infringing", the end user is generally protected from being sued first (the patent holder would have to go against the OSS developer first, before going against the end user). The user doesn't have a case until the patent holder sues the the OSS developer so it's all up to the patent holder's lawyer.
The short story is there's nothing anyone can due to prevent a patent holder suing everyone for injunctive relief, and if the OSS developers have some $$$, you would likely expect a good lawyer to sue for some economic damage as well. On the legal theory of "you can't get blood out of a turnip", the patent holder tries to goes against the person with the most money, the likely hood of being sued for monetary damage (instead of just going for injunctive relief) is pretty small unless you have some money. But it's technically possible to get sued and the OSS developer that wrote the infringing lines of code is probably the only person that they can actually sue first without it getting thrown out of court.
Again, IANAL, consult a real laywer if you want real legal advice!
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Well, open source many not have been the bulk of the problem, but they weren't angels either...
... ... ...
Va-linux
Redhat
Transmeta
Caldera (we know what happened to those guys)...
Cobalt Networks (was COBT, died, scooped up by sun)
And then there were the ones that didn't quite make it...
LinuxCare (scraped ipo changed name to levanta)
LynuxWorks (was lynx, tried to cash in, no ipo)
Lineo (scraped ipo)
Turbolinux(scraped ipo)
Suse (???)
Lindows (???)
Without the crash, it might have been worse...
I recall how some EEs became dismayed at the advent of each generation of new packaging technology (e.g. moving from DIPs to surface mount technology or ball-grid arrays), and each chip integration step (e.g. gates to MSI to LSI to VLSI to SOC) as being the end of the line and signalling obsolesence, but strangely that never happened and even more EEs are required today than yesteryear and the problems seem to be getting harder too...
Assuming you studied EE and don't just have an orcad board layout tool class completion certificate, I wouldn't be worried. Electrons in some sense are just lower frequency phonons instead of photons... The principles are the same, although the engineering is a bit different it's all just like RF stuff and off-the-shelf EEs have managed to do RF since the 40's... Engineering is mostly a matter of putting together well understood components to solve a problem, that doesn't change if the components are chips connected by wires or isolinear chips connected by optical fibre.
But having said that, I'm hoping to retire before quantum transistors become prevalent. That seems like a pretty big nut to crack as opposed to capacitively or optically coupled packaging options. That whole "if you look at it, it will change" aspect of quantum makes me wonder how anything will get debugged. Hooking up the active low-cap Tek scope probe on the board or looking for photon emissison by hot electrons on a chip isn't gonna cut it in the quantum world, but I digress...
Anyhow...
Basically, capacitive coupling between components is just 1 "plate" of the capacitor is on one device and the other "plate" is on the other device, so if you draw a circuit diagram, it looks like a capacitor in series in the circuit (AC-coupled). The energy/signal is transmitted by one "plate" charging up (or discharging) and having the resultant electric field cross the gap and cause the opposite charge build up on the other side. Since the plates are finite sized and will eventually charge up to the point where you can't detect a difference on the other side, you can't really send a low frequency (stationary) signal across the gap so there is some sort of signal coding being done (which is some overhead on bandwidth).
Depends on lots of details of the design (e.g. detectable signal-to-noise ratio, interference rejection, desired bandwidth, dielectric permativity, etc) to say how close the "plates" have to be to each other, but my guess is if they want to be really-really close to get the best bandwidth and the lowest signal interference since you want this to be a viable replacement for pins (which is the electromagnetic signal being sent down a metal waveguide which tends to reduce interference instead of broadcasted using an electric field to cross a gap which will tend to broadcast and pickup interference).
As for things that transmit heat, but don't interefere with electric fields, this is not an easy problem. Most things that conduct heat well also conduct or at least distort electric fields meaning they would probably interfere with the capacitively coupled signal. Also, without good heat conductors, disapation usually requires lots of area (which is something this technique was trying to save).
So if we have any magic energy source that powers cars, this wouldn't cause more than a million people a year to die? Like I said in my original post, just moving is a big part of the problem.
If there was no oil, but there was a magic energy source that had 1/2 the energy storage/transport properties of oil don't you think it's likely that the richest man alive would likely have some part of his fortune responsible for it?
Wouldn't countries shape their foriegn policy and possible go to war to get their share or more of this magic energy source?
Isn't it really just civilzation and the fact that there are so many homosapiens and their propensity to want more (resources, technology, speed, power, influence, etc) that causes all these problems?
Flip back the clock a few thousand years and replace oil with food. Hmm...
Ane then flip forward a few thousand years and when the world's cheap/clean drinking water supplies start depleting, and then replace oil for water. This isn't as wacky as it first might seem. Examine the current political situations in Singapore vs Malaysia and water (search it on google)...
And on the natural disaster thing. Think about the US hurricane season when they occasionally evacuate large portions of the south eastern part of the USA. If the oil wasn't in the cars they use for evacuations, how many more people do you think would die? How bout that oil in an ambulance or firetruck or in the trucks that moves food into famine areas to distribute grain? Ahh, those positives don't quite fit your anti-oil agenda so those don't count...
And don't get me started on plastics...
As with any inanimate object, it isn't good or bad. People are most definitly the root of all scummy behavior.
Okay, your turn...
P.S. And on the foreign aid thing, I think the USA gives more aid to Russia and Isreal, neither of which gives the USA very much oil, and one might argue that the countries that have much of the oil don't really like one of those countries very much...
I remember a study they did quite a long time ago about the winter "brown cloud" that was always covering cities. Although, much of the pollutants were things like NxOy, ozone-like and CxOy compounds, more than 30% (by mass) was dust and particulates due to just wind and thing like cars moving around dirty roads and kicking up dust and dirt (especially tires grinding up sand that was put on the road to keep people slipping when it was icy, but later the ice melted) and heavy machinery moving. There were also lots of particulates due to coal (non-gasoline/oil) powered electrial plants.
Although you might argue attribute this to oil (if we didn't have oil, we wouldn't be moving as much), even in the Great plains states during the age of the buffalo herds had a great amount of air pollution due to just moving around during the huge buffalo herd migrations of the era.
Even now, look up "asian dust cloud" on the internet to see how bad just simple dust can be.
So unless you take the extreme position that all the things that are indirectly caused by having oil and gas (including large scale wars that used TNT and other explosives) are attributed to gasoline causing destruction, then maybe you have a point.
But I might take the point that the differential between if we found a completely non-poluting fuel, but did all the same destruction other than emitting CO2, my guess would be that there would be lots of natural phenomena like volcanos that would certainly be the same order of magnitude.
Care to argue your point against volcanos or earthquakes? Or maybe just simple human deforestation in the Asian continent causing dust storms? I think that people that attribute total evil to oil are a bit misguided, human deforestation is a pretty bad thing and has very little to do with oil (other than many folks that are buring forests don't have cooking oil and use charcoal and wood instead). Even simple civilization itself is pretty bad w/o oil.
I'm not saying that everyone should go out and drive SUVs because it doesn't matter, but to blame all the environmental and human destruction on oil isn't right. Civilization causes much destruction w/o the part directly attributed to oil, and if you replace oil with some other magic non-polluting slightly scarse energy resource, if you think that wars wouldn't be fought over that, you probably don't know humanity very well.
And, of course, nature (even the non-cosmic variety) has us poor insignificant humans beat by a long shot...
Okay, now your turn...
I'm pretty sure that VC's (venture capitalists) and most Angel investors (people like paul allen that have wheelbarrels full of money and finance other companies) don't need accounting rule changes to figure out the value of stock options. Since they are the major funders of private companies, they will likley continue to favor giving stockoptions to the employees of the small private startup companies that they fund...
However...
Since many private companies want to go public eventually, in the year or so run-up to their IPO (initial public offering), they usually want to normalize their books (startups tend to have wacky books because of various loans and stock warrants that they have to issue along the way). Employees that are hired during this run-up time are likely get screwed in the stock-option lottery since they usually want to show some profit at this time (or at least less of a loss, since the 90's dot-coms extremes are out of fashion). This might make it more difficult for a hot startup to make the transition to a public company making it hard to attract high-quality employees at this time...
Since the IPO is the primary vehicle for these early stock-optionees have to make their expected stock-option windfall, it's still somewhat a concern to early employees if there are additional hurdles to make an IPO more difficult (e.g., I've got quite a bit of startup company wall paper already, making it more likely for stock options to be wall paper will certainly makes it worth less to me in an expected return on investement sense).
This may tend to more small startup companies that get bought by big companies (no-ipo exit strategy), and fewer companies that start small and grow up. This would probably be counteracted a bit by bigger companies just paying in restricted shares (or cash bonuses) and small startups being the only way to "roll-the-dice" and gamble on a big payoff.
In the end, these rules will probably change the company landscape a bit (fewer brand-new medium size companies), and force workers that want the big stock option payoffs to take greater risk (kinda like the share holders need to). This would probalbly end the day of money for nothing (e.g., getting lucky) with startups...
I'm sure many employees (remember senior management are still employees) don't like these results since it will probably lock in the have-vs-have-not balance as they only people that want to take this new increased risk are people who have already won the lottery, but that's life...
Instead of fighting the music labels, perhaps what people should lobby billboard magazine to set up an anonymous mp3 download tracker for each "official" mp3 version of a specific song.
Then the labels would then have an incentive for more people to download and listen to a specific "official" version of a song so that their rating points would go higher. This would likely put the appropriate down-pressure on the price of that "official" tagged version of a song (maybe even inspire "free-download" days)...
Note that this is all slightly tongue-in-cheek since the privacy experts will likely frown on this and probably the only reason for stunts like this (and other like prince giving away free cds at concerts) is that someone, somewhere has a weird performance bonus clause written a contract that makes this profitable for them, but of course probably less money from the person on the other side of the contract.
The record business is a pretty low-down business with all sorts of wacky contracts people use to screw each other out of the every shrinking money pie. I doubt it is possible to extrapolate the next wierd behavior before the contract people catch up to it...
Although I'm all for more freely accessible Wifi, it seems to me, that people are all off in a huff when MSFT bundles IE with their OS making it impossible to run a business simply making OS, but people are quick to forgive a company offering bundled wifi with their product making it impossible to run a business selling only wifi.
There is a point to bringing this up (it isn't just flame bait) and a suggestion as to why wifi isn't as prevalent in certain areas as others and suggests a possible business model to use.
In the original "telephone" model in the United States, the telephone was sold in a "bundled" model (local & long-distance), but prices where kept under control using the tarrif business model. Competition was sparse in the long distance space (MCI and Sprint were very small players) and prices were high except for the "bundled" service.
The misnamed "deregulation" in the '80's that resulted in the breakup of MaBell forced the division of the company into regional bell operating companies RBOCs that were forced by new regulations to offer on a fair and non-discriminatory terms, their local access to all the long distance companies, not just AT&T.
The results turned out pretty good, and might be a good model for WiFi... If regulations forces all WiFi access points to "peer" with billing providers, paying for WiFi service would really get a boost. The providers would quickly find that they could offer very wide coverage by just throwing "peering" money to the existing access point providers. You, the customer, would be assured that your provider would try to pay access point providers to get more and more area coverage making the money you pay to them worth it. The people setting up access points would find they could get a reasonable return on their investment by getting access to paying customers.
Amazingly this peering model worked great for cell phone companies and the internet without any regulation at all (because they were all big companies). Sadly, in the Wifi world we are currently in a mode where "peering" isn't a major business model (other than the big access point providers which already peer), precisely because the small mom&pop providers don't see any value in it. This reminds me of some places in upstate pennsylvania in the late 80's after deregulation where they still had lots of mom&pop local phone companies where the rest of the country experienced greater access and lower rates, and it cost more to call your neighbor across town than to Los Angeles and sometimes the call wouldn't even go through. This was often because your local mom&pop teleco had a peering agreement with sprint, but not with the mom&pop teleco in the same town because they weren't forced to peer (because of an exception in the deregulation for small mom&pop telecos)...
(before people go off in a huff about "mom&pops", I don't mean to just suggest small family owned businesses, but colloquially use mom&pop for any small businesses in general)
One of the reasons why mom&pops aren't on board is exactly because of *bundling* (they want to sell something undifferentiated like coffee so they bundle it with something attractive like wifi). While this behavior isn't illegal (you get steak knives with your food processor and you get gift bags with your make-up purchase) it is, however, very anti-competitive (and why it is outlawed in the big scale when the bundle will kill off another business). If we could get the mom&pop Wifi's to compete in a different area without bundling wifi and excluding other carriers, by introducing an industry standard peering agreement, perhaps Wifi will flourish.
Anyhow, just a thought... At least I'm more likely to pay monthly for service if I could get it *everywhere* than if I could only get it at an airport or hotel (which I'm rarely at) because the local Subway is on a different company and I have to buy a softdrink to get access there (yes believe it or not most Subway restaurants are mom&pop family owned small businesses, just franchiseing the Subway name).
Didn't anyone see the capricorn one? It was on AMC this weekend?
One of the emerging technologies in preheating water are the drainwater heat recovery (DHR) systems...
l /h c_drain_water_heat_recovery.html
D =2 134&CategoryID=1402
http://www.eere.energy.gov/consumerinfo/heatcoo
http://www.toolbase.org/tertiaryT.asp?DocumentI
http://gfxtechnology.com/
For those too lazy to click, basically these systems coil the pipe that goes to the input water feed of your hot water heater around the drain pipe so when hot water goes down the drain (eg. shower, dishwasher, washing machine, etc) some of the heat is exchanged with the cold water coming into the hotwater heater recycling some of the energy...
Current systems can recover up to about 85% of the heat energy that would have gone down the drain. To bad we all aren't using such systems yet...
A stanford professor is making the rounds on the talking head shows reminding people about an experiment he did back in the 70's where they made university graduate students (not joe sixpack) play the roles of prison guards and prisoners for a research project to examine behavior. The experiment was 24/7 for a few weeks (4-5 weeks)and there WERE cameras (both hidden and not-hidden).
Apparently they had to stop the experiment weeks early because of sadistic behavior by the university graduate students playing the prison guards in the experiment to prevent people from getting seriously hurt (physically and mentally). This isn't joe sixpack and this wasn't a real high-pressure situation either.
After about a week, the cameras in this experiment recorded really horrible acts humiliation and nearly all the "prisoners" being stripped down naked and forced into humiliating sexual poses at nearly one time or another and lots of escalating punishment by the "guards" as they tried to out-do each other and seemed to have wanton disregard for the "prisoners" health and safety (the escalation factor was the main reason they gave for stopping the experiment early).
The conclusion of this might be that there's strong evidence that it's probably in our (human) genes to be sadistic and we REALLY need rules (or at least some society pressure) to resist our natural tendancy to fulfill the adage that "absolute power corrupts absolutly" from taking over.
There have been many studies that show how sadistic we can be as a species. Some example of things that people learn as kids: pulling off insect wings, frying ants with magnifing glasses, swallowing goldfish, breaking hamster necks, putting cats in driers, tying nooses around dogs necks, pushing brothers and sisters down flights of stairs, holding funny looking nerds under water, wedgies, atomic wedgies, not to mention unspeakable college hazing incidents. Not to mention parents and teachers that tell impresionable minds that there's a bad side of town and they don't trust people of a certain color or parentage...
Yes we all certainly learn how to treat people fairly as children. NOT! Lord of the flies anyone?
Don't discount training as a way to counteract this. People train all the time to resist their natural instinct and modify their behavior (e.g., personal trainers, therapists, etc). Military training (done correctly) can be a good way to train people in these situations to be aware of natural tendencies and recognize when they should be wary of going with their instincts.
Some additional information:
LA == Lucknow, Avadh, India...
Sorry about any confusion. Nothing to see here, please move along and continue your offshoring/outsourcing, nothing to see here...
As one of the past judges for the ISF, and occasionally a local judge of some of the "feeder" science fairs that lead up to the ISF, I can say that what passes for science in these fairs (including the granddaddy ISF) is pretty sad...
Of course there are diamonds in the rough (which are the ones that usually win) and there are some a hand full of interesting/entertaining projects that come across from time-to-time, but I'd have to say that +90% of projects...
- are project "kits" sold by toy or science "education" companies
- are done with virtually no research (literature or experimental)
- come to conclusions with no logical, mathematical, or statistical basis
- seem to have forgone conclusions w/o testing a null-hypothesis or have preconceived political motivation
- seem to be mostly products of parents, teachers, or family friends
IMHO, science fairs are one the biggest distortions of realities of science. It seems to me that science is the process of trying lots of things and seeing most of them FAIL... There's no way to expect +90% "clean" experimental data from kitchen sink experiments, but the real value is to see all the things that could go wrong and imagine next experiment that can refine the result or prove your initial result wrong...
I'm not saying that this isn't the state of science in the world today, but I'm not exactly sure that this is the ideal atmosphere that fosters finding of the "next-big-thing" without fooling yourself in the meantime, but instead a big breeding-ground for the next snake-oil product that needs overhyped marketing to sell to the uninformed masses...
But I digress...
It does, however, make a good recruiting tool for these companies...
Eventually, compilers were make sophisticated enough to compile themselves (after a bootstrap). I suppose visual programming will eventually make this transition too, but it will probably be a framework that is unfamilar to many "programmers" (e.g., how many folks that use YACC or BISON really understand pseudo-LALR grammar parser generators).
However, if the USPTO gets to keep all the money collected when a patent is processed, then they have an incentive to allow even more things to be patented...
Prior to the wide spread deployment of the printing press, there was quite a bit of value in hardcopy itself (hard to make), so there wasn't much business in pirate copying (although, there was some form of copyright registration in early chinese history after the development of paper, it wasn't widely used).
;^)
The widespread availiablity of the printing press in 15th century europe essentially made hardcopy "cheap" and widely available. It also threatened the government's earlier ability to censor and control information. At the same time, the printers started to form local guilds to protect themselves from competition (basically they would agree distribute the titles among the member printers so they wouldn't be in direct competition with other guild members).
This turned out to be a fortuitious situation for the both parties. The government decided to take advantage of this situation to grant exclusive rights to print a title to a specific printing guild (so they didn't have to compete with other guilds) and if they didn't give a right to print, you couldn't print it (hence copy-right). This basically allowed the royalty to censor titles by giving the rights to a guild that agreed not to print it in exchange for the "juicy" exclusive rights to print another hot title (increasing the printer's profits since they didn't have to compete with other printers). It also gave the government a good single point to collect taxes. Sort of a quid-pro-quo arangement.
Notice that the original author had no say in the original "copy-right" scheme. It was basically the government desire for censorship leading the government to grant specific businesses monopoly powers to achieve their goals. The authors were basically at the whim of the printing guilds and government for payment (usually a statutory fixed fee per book). Because of the copyright monopoly, the customers ended up paying a higher price, none of which went to the author.
It was only later (around the time of the American Revolution), that this system really started to crumble. With increasing trade, the printing monopolies found that they couldn't keep out the "pirate" copies of books from other countries (sometimes copies even authorized by other governments as favors to local printing monopolies) and with increasing communication, governments realized censorship by copyright was a losing cause. About this time the idea that the author was the natural owner of the copyright (instead of the government) started to take hold and the modern form of copyright came about...
One wonders what system would have evolved had governments not used the then fledgling printing guilds to try to enforce monopolies. Printing monopolies may never have evolved. Authors may have even gotten less than their statutory "fees" or even work for free. Who knows it might have evolved to be like the opensource stuff?
Why assume someone is dangerously negligent, when probably all it takes is some ordinary negligence with common practices. Although this is a wild ass speculation, maybe someone bought a "recycled" a computer and found this on a hard-drive partition...
Maybe even a scenaro like this...
Eyal's computer gets upgraded (because he's a bigwig and gets new toys as a perk). Person who recycles computers for Mainsoft either doesn't erase the disk or perhaps only erases the partition that doesn't have this data. The old disk is "recycled". Two years later, someone gets the recycled computer and when looking for credit card numbers and passwords stumbles upon windows source code...
Or, maybe he downloads this on to his laptop and forgets his laptop at an airport security checkpoint after 9/11. Two years later, nobody claims it so it's auctioned by the TSA on e-bay...
Seems to me it could happen pretty innocently these days w/o being dangerously negligent and apparently the service packs that were part of the code are around the 2-year vintage
For what it's worth, they don't use just NANDs in cmos chip design in the real world. The primary primitive is the AND-OR-INVERT (AOI) structure.
In the cmos world, pass-gates are much cheaper than amplifying gates (in the size vs speed vs power tradeoff), although you can't put too many pass gates in a row (signal degradation). So in fact MUX (multiplexor to pass one of the two inputs using the control of a third) and XORS (use input A to pass either !B or B) are used quite a bit.
Some background might be helpful to think about the more complicated AOI struture, though...
In a cmos NAND-gate, the pull-up side is two p-type pass gates in parallel from the output to Vdd (the positive rail) so that if either of the two p-type gates is low, the output is pulled high. For the pull-down side, two n-type pass gates are in series to ground so both n-type gates have to be low before the output is pulled to ground. This gives us a total of 4 transistors for a cmos-nand where the longest pass gate depth is 2 (the pull-down). The pull-down is restricted to be the complement function of the pull-down in CMOS (otherwize either the pull-up and pull-down will fight or nobody will pull causing the output to float and/or oscillate).
A 2-input NOR gate has the p-type in series and the n-type in parallel (for the same # of transistors).
Due to a quirk of semi-conductor technology, n-type transistors are easier to make more powerfull than p-type so usually a NAND is often slightly faster than a NOR (the two series n-types in a NAND gate are better at pulling down than the two series p-types are at pulling up in a NOR gate). However, this isn't the end of the story...
Notice that you can build a 3-input NAND by just adding more p-type transistors in parallel to the pull-up and more n-type in series to the pull-down. You can make even more complicated logic by putting the pull-up and pull-down transistor in combinations of series and parallel configurations. The most interesting cmos configurations are called AOI (and-or-invert) since they are the ones you can make with simple parallel chains of pass transistors in series for pull-up and pull-down.
For most cmos semi-conductor technologies, you are limited to about 4 pass gates in series or parallel before the noise margin starts to kill you and you need to stop using pass gates and just start a new amplifying "gate". Thus most chips are designed to use 4 input AOI gates where possible and smaller gates to finish out the logic implementation.
Thus "everyone" really uses lots of different types of gates (including simple NAND and XORS as well as more complicated AOI).
Metric vs US Customary measurement units seems to me just to be a semi-religious debate.
I really see no difference than the VI vs EMACS, English vs French (substitute your favorite language here), Euros vs Pounds, C vs Java (or C#), Perl vs Python, Floating point vs Fixed point, paper vs plastic...
If the world was so homogeneous, would anyone want to travel anywhere or meet any new people or try to understand their point of view?
What a boring place that would be...
Although I have no actual primary source information on this, what I heard is that the safety board that investigated the last space shuttle accident recommended that all future shuttle missions be designed so that they could reach the ISS as a lifeboat (in case some tiles are damaged during takeoff). Apparently designing a mission to visit the Hubble and still go to the ISS is not possible due to their different orbits. The previous (four?) missions to visit the Hubble never had this requirement before.
Of course NASA is free to ignore the safety board's recommendations and develop a new safety procedure for this single SP4 mission (and they had the money for this), but I guess that's a symptom of the "new" NASA. Let's not try if it might make us look bad and we ignore yet another accident board's recommendation (apparently one of the conclusions of the most recent safetly board was that they ignored all the management communication reorganization suggestions of the Challenger board's report).
Don't know who is "right", but I do know that both NASA and the Safety board both seem to be full of excuses these days (either real or convenient excuses)...
Between the 70% of water and the 15% uninhabitable part of the earth, they could probably have separate addresses for your left and right hand (or left and right side of your bed) with addresses to spare...
;^)
However, tall apartment buildings, large businesses, and even the NBU (neighborhood box unit for mail) outside my house needs some vertical dimensionality for unique addressing and they aren't likely to do vertical addressing for beds... or will they
There are even tall buildings that have multiple zip+4 "addresses".
As was said in the eminently quotable Star Trek II... "He is intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates two dimensional thinking."
In both categories accidents outnumbered homicides, but of course most of the car deaths were accidental (about 90%) where the deaths from firearms were only about 58% accidental unless you count drunk driving as a non-accidental homicide from a car.
So perhaps we take from this that in the good ol' US of A, owning a car (or bicycle) as a weapon may be protected by the US constitution, but of course using your car (or bicycle) may or may not be legal... ;^)
Then again all this car stuff is happening in the UK. Some folks in europe express that they're often glad that US laws don't apply there. Well, there is no constitution in the UK and can pass whatever laws they see fit and the government can do whatever they want to do :^p
OTOH, in the UK, where gun ownership is highly regulated, I'll bet homicides with the car as a weapon greatly outnumber gun homicides... and you don't have any rights to cars or guns...
Shooting missles backwards means the cruise missile (which is more like a slow speed plane, than a missile), doesn't immediately experience forward airspeed faster than what it was designed to handle. This was especially important for the Soviet backfire bomber (Tu22M3) which could go supersonic during a bombing run and there aren't too many supersonic cruise missiles, but of course the Tu22M3, never got ALCM (air launched cruise missile) ordinance, and just dropped dumb bombs and short range attack missles. The newer bear H (Tu95MS) and blackjack (Tu160) pulled the ALCM duty and were forward launch.
;^)
Some people have speculated that the back launch capabilities were to avoid supersonic slip-stream issues when firing missiles (the missiles could be fired backwards and turn around and go forwards...), but of course who knows why they did what they did in SOVIET RUSSIA
An all too common practice is a video interview technique called the "reaction shot". The way this interview production technique works is when you are interviewing someone, mostly the camera is on the interviewee, but sometimes you want the image to switch back you you while the interviewee is still talking (this is called an "reaction shot"). It can be certainly be used to manipulate the emotions of the viewer (imagine a picture of the interviewer rolling their eyes, or glaring angrily, etc, etc).
When you see this on tv, one might think that there are two cameras and this is a contemporaneous view of you "reacting" while the interviewee is talking, but it isn't usually the case. Most reaction shots are filmed before or after the interview in the studio when the interviewee is not there since usually only one camera is used and the reaction shots are "insert-edited" with a contiguous audio track to lend the appearence of contemporaneous action.
Ahh, the magic of television. Reaction shots are done to improve composition and production values (staring at the interviewee for a long time can make you turn the channel in boredom, and a wide pan with a single camera will get you sick like a ping-pong match). You might say that since the audio track is unedited, this is a fair representation of what occured during the interview, but it's easy to see how this can be a slippery slope. In fact in the hollywood movie, Broadcast News, they have an all too true scene about the reaction shot where William Hurt tries a few times to fake tears to improve a reaction shot.
Although you might think that this "reaction shot" stuff is just a lot of hype, but during the Nixon-Kennedy presidential debates, it's widely thought that the reaction shots of Nixon fidgetting and sweating while Kennedy was talking likely contributed to Kennedy winning the presidency. Polling data taken after the debate seemed to give the edge to Nixon among those who heard the debate on radio, where the tv watchers gave the edge to Kennedy. You can thank Don Hewitt technical director in charge of the television switcher at the debates (who went on to be the executive producer of 60 Minutes).
Here's a quote from a Boston Globe article which explored the question if this type of insert editing was "ethical" journalism. Something to think about when you are watching the evening news...
IANAL, and this is not legal advice...
Note you can always sue anyone so "can't" almost always never is the case (unless someone indemnifies you against being sued). However, if the person suing has no basis for the suit, it can get thrown out very fast.
There is always the issue with injuctive relief of patent infringment (stop ship/recall) so almost everyone is subject to that. However I think when people think about "sue" most people are worried about the "money" thing (you always have to pay your lawyer which isn't me, but that's another topic).
Techically a patent isn't "violated" until it's actually "practiced". Remember a patent is mostly on a "mechanism" or a "procedure", you can't patent a mathematical algorithm.
Designing something that might violates a patent if it was used in a certain way isn't against the law (for the most part unless that was your intent or computer keyboard manufacturers and monitors would most certainly be out of business). However, building it, distributing it, or selling it to someone who actually uses in the way that "practices" the patent potentially opens you up to some liabilty to economic damage, and patent law is a funky thing on economic damage.
The weird part is that the patent infringer's profit is not recoverable in economic damage (not that this matters much for OSS folks). One measure of economic damage is "reasonable royalty" which is likely to be zero for a OSS project (since the seller wouldn't have reasonably paid anything to licence the patent). Much more troublesome is the other way to compute economic damage is the lost profit of the patent holder (how much they would have made had the product not been made). For computing lost profit there's this thing called the "Panduit" test (after the case that set the precedent) for what must be established...
- what the demand for the product is
- impact of marketable non-infringing substitutes
- the patent holder had the means (marketing and manufacturing capacity) to exploit the demand
- the amount of profit (not revenue) that was lost
So regardless of the amount of money the OSS developer made (which is usually zero), someone can be liable for a bunch of damages if the patent holder chooses to assert lost profits.
There's also the issue of supplemental damages (how much the infringement cost in other areas of the patent holder's business) which is really where the money is.
The 64,000 dollar question is who is liable...
Technically, only the violator of the patent is liable (end user that executes the code that the patent covers), but there is a legal theory of "contributory infringement" that make other people in the chain from developer to user liable for some of it.
There is also weird legal theory that exploits a loophole in certain intellectual property statutes that contributory infringment requires at least some direct infringment. This theory was designed to protect the "middle-men" that unknowingly contribute to infringement but don't really benefit from it. I don't know how this could be applied, but conceivably a good lawyer might make the case that there was no direct infringement except possibly by the end user and the specific OSS developer who wrote the infringing lines of code.
Even though the end user is technically liable for the infringment, if the patent holder has an opportunity to, but fails to, stop the distributor or manufacturer from getting the infringing product to the end user before the end user ends up "infringing", the end user is generally protected from being sued first (the patent holder would have to go against the OSS developer first, before going against the end user). The user doesn't have a case until the patent holder sues the the OSS developer so it's all up to the patent holder's lawyer.
The short story is there's nothing anyone can due to prevent a patent holder suing everyone for injunctive relief, and if the OSS developers have some $$$, you would likely expect a good lawyer to sue for some economic damage as well. On the legal theory of "you can't get blood out of a turnip", the patent holder tries to goes against the person with the most money, the likely hood of being sued for monetary damage (instead of just going for injunctive relief) is pretty small unless you have some money. But it's technically possible to get sued and the OSS developer that wrote the infringing lines of code is probably the only person that they can actually sue first without it getting thrown out of court.
Again, IANAL, consult a real laywer if you want real legal advice!