I'm not knocking the progress on this optical implant, but it only does greyscale and without serious microsurgery, will never stop being greyscale only. She needs full color to regain what she lost.
There's no reason to believe that fancy microsurgery is required in order to visualize color. As a trivial example, nearly all color digital cameras have color filter arrays embedded over a monochrome sensor (other than foveon/sigma). It's not a big stretch to imagine that a future revision of this chip could have a color filter array and your brain (visual cortex) could learn to recognize different spatial encoding patterns as different colors.
That's similar to what your brain does now (although the retina helps by doing some type of local opponent-color coding). If the color mapping isn't easy for your brain to learn and you need a mapping more like your original mapping, in the worst case, you could even make the sensor configurable (stimulate different nerves for different colors). Although if you did this "simply" the pixels might be slightly scrambled, but that could be compensated for by using a really high resolution sensor (all cameras have multi-megapixel sensors these days), and then recoding to a lower resolution for output to the optic nerve.
All these things can be easily done on the sensor chip itself w/o requiring more advanced surgical techniques... Ah the wonder of silicon technology...
P.S. Dibs on the patents for this (or at least prior-art on the idea)...
...There didn't appear to be any motive for the assault other than a fear of his prothetics...
The apparent motive was that they didn't want to be filmed and were trying to confiscate his camera. Of course many business establishments have a policy against taking pictures or video (under the guise of security and patron/employee privacy, but more likely to avoid any bad publicity).
Unfortunatly, these folks were likely not well trained on how to handle this and as a result even worse publicity will result from this incident.
That doesn't make this event a hate crime against people with prosthetics, though...
My policy: you should be careful not to cry wolf when there isn't really a wolf, because when the wolf comes (and they aways do), people might have already written you off.
I would assume that if you're doing a car-sharing type of arrangement, the insurance will be an important consideration. Before I let some maniac behind the wheel of my Corvette or Cadillac, I'd want to make sure that his insurance will be buying me a new one if he totals it.
Most p2p car sharing services today have a umbrella insurance policy that superceed personal policies during the rental period (which is paid for out of the rental take). This used to be a murky areay of the law (some insurance policies were void if you rent out your car for money), but for many locales, recent changes in the law that require both that 1) insurance companies to accept personal vehicle sharing program insurance covereage w/o voiding their personal coverage, and 2) the personal vehicle sharing program indemnify the owner against civil suits for loss or injury during the rental period.
You wouldn't be relying on "his" isurance to cover, but the company's insurance.
...it's a good thing all participants will be checked for criminal records and tendencies before they're allowed to participate.
Although I suppose you could check for some criminal records (although most juvenile records will be sealed, so that doesn't seem to be too easy), I have no idea how to check for tendencies, But even if you could, I've always thought that there's a fine line between a tendency to want to be a criminal, and to want to be in law enforcement similar to the fine line between a black-hat and a white-hat. Also...
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. --SunTzu
I think this is especially true in the security arena. Many security consultants (computer and otherwize), have dabbled on the other side and often those are the ones that know the threats the best...
Secondly, getting saddled with a relationshp does decrease the tendancy towards crime...
First, one generally doesn't get "saddled" with a relationship (unless that relationship is with a horse, although there might be some exceptions to this). Generally there is a tradeoff involved with any relationship, and generally people get better judgement at making better tradeoffs as they mature. I'd hazzard a guess that the first relationship that you would get the stereotypical hacker into, wouldn't involve the best set of tradeoffs (for either party, or the continued hacking).
Second, it depends on the nature of of the relationship. That whole partners in crime motif is not just in the movies, it (often unfortunatly) happens in real life too...
I think people tend to underestimate the power of endorphins (the thrill response) and the development of the prefrontal cortex (the judgment thought center of the brain) in the whole rational thought process. Just because people that have more to lose tend to commit less crime may just be a correlation. Perhaps developing enough good judgement to be able to achieve a reasonable relationship, car, job, or house requires better judgement already and less crime is merely a consequence of the same underlying cause. Many studies have indicated that maturation of the prefrontal cortex development doesn't really happen before the teens and for most people, doesn't happen until the mid twenties...
So, just getting a hacker into a relationship (or other "saddling?") w/o doing anything to improve judgement is likely not gonna be good for anything. It's like trying to treat all poverty w/ money. If the poverty was from poor judgement like snorting/shooting/drinking, more money isn't gonna help that situation very much...
Okay you found a generic GM car. Now why is this "GM" car special that you want to steal it?
2) Social engineer the car to be a part of this "rental agreement".
Why bother?, if you want this particular GM car, just steal it. At a minimum, you probably need the get around having vehicle account verification information to social engineer adding the to the rental system, So if you think you do this, just social engineer Onstar unlock the car instead of adding them to this rental company agreement. That's probably easier to do, since if you want to sign-up, they'll probably will have to send you snail-mail forms you need to fill out and send back to authorize it, where as if you just want them to unlock the car, they probably can just do it right away...
3) "rent" car using the usual fake ID stuff
At this point, I don't think there is much difference between this rental and a typical car rental...
As usual, people making it harder than it needs to be.
Also, social engineering stuff like this isn't as easy as people think it is. In the old days all the call centers were staffed with nice, trusting midwestern USA employees that you can sweet-talk. Nowdays, you are calling into a boiler room where people barely know how to do what they are trained to do (including speaking english) and punt to a supervisor anytime strange comes up since they are rated on how fast they can hand off or terminate the call and are constantly being watched by keystroke loggers, so they generally not interested in being engineered by you, they are more interested in upselling you some additional product.
Has the National Ignition Facility managed to ignite anything yet?
As I understand it, the NIF's original intent wasn't to explore ignition related to practical fusion generators. Original funding for NIF came under the guise of providing experimental data to support nuclear fusion bomb simulation required by the stockpile stewardship program (since we can't just blow up fusion bombs anymore because the test ban treaties).
From what I can tell, the NIC (national ignition campaign) is basically "earmark stimulus" funding by Senator Diane Feinstein (and company in California) to get more money for the NIF facility (located in Livermore, CA). The purported goal of the NIC was to spend additional money in the NIF facilities to actually try to ignite something with positive net energy instead of just plodding along hoping for ignition and collecting data to be used as the basis for fusion weapons simulations.
On ignition, so far... Nada. Although I "hear" the whole effort has been "stimulating" to the local economy;^)
Or maybe they just fired a pre-emptive warning shot across the EPEAT bow to show them who is the real boss...
Kinda reminds me of the threat that Amazon use to bandy over states: don't tax us or we'll pull out of your state. Big organizations always seem to want to flex their muscles to help smooth negotiations out in the long run. Of course any marketing milage they can get out of it in the present is a bonus...
It is my understanding that the higgs mechanism requires some sort of spontaneous symmetry breaking for the proposed higgs field to yield scalar mass. Is this somehow related to symmetry breaking in other fields in the Standard Model (e.g., Spin0/hypercharge)?
Also, might there be a whole spectrum of scalar properties like mass that might exist from symmetry breaking in other Standard Model fields that might be discovered that could explain currently un-unifyable parts of theoretical physics (e.g., matter/antimatter ratio, gravity, dark energy, etc), but still within the general framework of the Standard Model? Or is the Standard Model essentially doomed with respect to these currently un-unifyable observations?
What also happened, in the U.S., was the drive to 4G started, and it got accelerated. Carriers were actually leapfrogging from what they wanted to do with 3G, like HSPA+. They leapfrogged and put a lot of investment into 4G LTE. I think we weren't ready for it. We were busy building our global portfolio. We had a slightly different view on when the LTE rollout would happen. And we made a decision to focus on the rest of the world, which led to some very high numbers, but then, consequently, led to us not being focused on the new, innovative technologies in the U.S. The U.S. regained the lead in mobile technology by doing this. So it was not just that the company was not getting it, it was really that the whole market in the country regained a technology lead in the world. That's a big step.
So if I can paraphrase: We were only ready for baby steps. We thought the USA was silly to take a big steps so fast. So instead we tried to finish our milk(-ing of previous investment). Now we want to take that step to keep from being left behind and we found out whoa... That's a big step.
Lets see, a billion people with how many devices - try censoring that! I'm assuming they aren't using tech to do it per se but people.
Remember, the govenment essentially controls all ISPs and Internet access points in China, those billion devices just can't go anywhere on the internet when in China. Of course in addition to the people employed to do this, the great firewall uses all the advanced tech like deep packet inspection filters to trigger generic URL filtering, DNS poisoning, IP blocking, and TCP connection reset measures.
They have also bullied large companies to self censor their websites as a condition to maintain their licence to do business in China. An unblocked website in China can't just have an open blog or forum w/o the government shutting it down. It certainly isn't 100% effective, but mostly what they are trying to do is filter for the masses, so that protests/insurgencies have a hard time building critical momentum. Your average joe in china isn't doing all their internet surfing through encrypted proxies...
A key can be put in your pocket when you leave the car, the ignition lock is (usually) secured to the steering column or somewhere near the dashboard. I think most folks would find it hard to put a dashboard of their car into their pocket (unless it was a matchbox-sized car).
Although some folks take do take larger items like audio system faceplates with them, I don't think they take the ignitionl locking mechanisms of their cars..
that my "old" BMW 3 series has a complicated security mechanism: to open it, you must have access to the door key.
FTFY
Otherwize it might be hard to get back in if you lock the doors if you had to get access to the ignition lock...
Of course on most older cars the door lock and the ignition lock are keyed the same for convenience of carrying one key. The ignition lock on many modern cars are electronic/RF "keyed" and the mechanical part of the composite ignition key (if there is one) is sometimes just for the door or maybe just the glove-compartment/petrol cap since onn higher end cars, the doors can often only be electronic/RF keyed as well...
As I understand it, in this latest experiment, they flew some worms in space, killed them (flash frozen with liquid nitrogen) and compared them with a control group on earth and then "... identified seven genes, which were down-regulated in space and whose inactivation extended lifespan under laboratory conditions..."
>a 10 second 100-meter sprinter could see his time drop by 0.35 seconds If it can increase performance by 100%, he can run it in zero seconds. Math confuses Slashdot editors.
In defense of the submitter and the/. editors, this exact same math mistake was made in the original article (and 0.338...s is still pretty close to 0.35 seconds since 1/(1+x) ~ 1-x as a first order series approx)...
Of course the source website does not have this mistake, nor does it claim that this particular shoe has this specific level of improvement, only that vague "scientific investigations" have shown that tuning a shoe can improve performance as much as 3.5% and that he (luc fusaro) is still tuning his shoe...
Was this a factor leading up to the above ground test ban treaty?
Starfish Prime (as I recally the only successful detonation of operation Fishbowl) was in July 1962 so it was probably a factor. More generally the whole expiration of the moritorium on nuclear testing in 1961 (resulting in the US and USSR getting in to a propaganda "pissing contest" with radiation polluting the atmosphere). The cuban missle crisis which occured later in October 1962, however, was probably the primary factor leading up to the Limited test ban treaty which was signed in 1963.
The test ban treaty probably stopped the development of "shaped" nuclear charges (blasting a city from an explosion in orbit) and other exotic weapons like fission bomb pumped x-ray lasers.
Probably not, for instance research in to nuclear pumped xray laser for the "star-wars" strategic defense initiative continued well into the 1980's...
Oh well, let's hope the Aliens are friendly!
It's quite likely if they if/when the "Aliens" get here they will be in such a fragile craft (because nearly all of the resources of the craft will have been dedicated to interstellar space propulsion) that we won't need any fancy tech like that. However, if by chance they have the tech to super-efficienctly traverse interstellar space they are probably here for our resources (and a few x-ray lasers from us aren't gonna pose too much a threat to them)....
It seems you have not heard the UN was for a significant part set up by the US.
The UN has morphed quite a bit since the original charter. The original goal of the UN was to make sure that Germany and Japan would never start another war. As I recall the UN was supposed to be the political arm of the Allied powers after WWII. Initial membership was offered only to countries that had declared war against either Germany or Japan and the security council struture was restricted to the winners of WWII. My how things have changed...;^)
The League of Nations was supposed to do the same thing and was abandoned after it failed to stop WWII, but somehow the UN has survived and has seemed to fail to stop any wars since it's inception... (although I guess they've achieved their goal in preventing Germany or Japan from starting one so I guess they get a pass for that)...
So it would be really weird if the US as the biggest reason for the present patents mess would refuse to cooperate in finding a solution.
If you want to get technical, patents were started by the europeans (I think in England)... As to who is responsible for the mess, I think every country is equally responsible for the mess. Attitudes like what you are expressing aren't actually helpful. Who got the US to change their patent law from first to invent vs first to file and extend to 20 years? Wasn't that the europeans? The perception that the US is in the center of the issue is that most companies choose to invest in patents in the US (being a big single market for technology and the market with the most standarized legal infrastructure to evaluate patents). Of the top 10 corporate US patent holders, only IBM and Microsoft are in the top 10. Most are japanese companies except samsung and siemens. The EU is a close second and hopes to win more business in patents by unifying their patent law, though the recent turmoil around unitary patents has many folks wondering about how standard things will get in the EU...
These things take time so don't hold our breath...
However, part of solving the problem is identifying the problem. I don't think we have even identified the nature of the problem yet, although many are proposing fixes (e.g, shorten the term, get rid of them, don't allow software patents, don't allow biotech patents, don't allow speculation in patents, etc), yet we don't know what any of these fixes would really fix and what they might break...
I gave the bank X dollars. I have not withdrawn any money. They owe me X dollars.
My business gave the bank X dollars. My business has not withdrawn any money. They owe my business X dollars.
Fixed.
IANAL, but as I understand it the question is the definition of "my business" in the withdrawn case. When it is a person, it is much clearer if you have authorized the money to be withdrawn because of the way the law is written. If it is a business, it isn't a statute thing, it is often a matter of the uniform commercial code or a business to business contract or the charter to your business (e.g., is the "treasurer" allowed, is a "sales-person" allowed, or third party "accountant" is allowed, or my "niece" is allowed to use a checking account), thus these facts sometimes need to be discovered in a court to determine if there is actual fraud, or if the company is instead required to sue the person who took the money (instead of the bank that authorized the transaction).
For example, if a bookkeeper employeed by a company wanted to embezzle money from the company and gave his password to his aunt in russia to do the deed, the company would probably have to sue the ex-employee and the uncle and the bank would be off the hook since to the bank, the bookeeper was authorized to take the money.
In this case, it was clearly the bank's fault, but that's not always the case in business (which is one of the reason business accounts are different than individual accounts).
Apparently the issue is that although individuals are protected against fraud by legal statutes, businesses are not. Specifically at issue is the authorization of commerical ACH (automated clearing house) transactions to the account (when you use your debit card it's authorized under the EFTA or electronic funds transfers act).
In this case the bank so egregiously ignored it's own security measures (authorized transactions even though it's internal fraud alert systems was warning against the transaction) that it was clear the bank was in the wrong...
If you look at W and Z bosons, they first found neutral current tracks in a bubble chamber that were consistent with the theory, and later they figured out the mass of the theorized Z boson with a collider experiment. That is the test drive of the theory. For Higgs, they seem to have talked about the mass first, but I'm not aware of the results of prior experiments (other than the general "things-have-mass" reality we are experiencing) that would have validated the Higgs theory. Perhaps they will release such things later, but that would be the test drive.
And this would be the first 0 spin boson i think -- fact check me on that.
That is my understanding as well. If there was an experiment to see if a particle that looked to have the mass of the higgs was determined to not have spin, that might be a very good testdrive to me... In order to do that you probably have to look at the spin statistics of the decay products from a bunch of presumed Higgs particle's decay. Perhaps they are running these statistics on the current data, or maybe they need a new experiment targetted at this. AFAIK, they have only released results about the energy, not any spin decay statistics.
Also the Higgs is the first tachyon -- NOT FTL - just an inconsistency in a field.
Although I'm just a layperson, I don't think this is strictly true... As I understand it, the "trick" that physicist use is to hypothesize a gauge invariant field that can generate mass is to have something about the field that spontaneously breaks symmetry (perhaps this is what you are called inconsistency). The simplest potential energy density field model that would have this property is the sombrero-like field. Near the center at low energy is a local maximum so this potential field will push things in the "wrong" direction away from the center, but at higher energy, the expected (aka average) value would still be in the center. As I understand it, this minima around this local maxima allows the field to generate non-zero mass (a non-zero expectation value for mass anyhow).
You might interpret this initial "wrong" direction away from the average as the boson that mediates this field somehow having imaginary mass (the second derivative of the potential field squared around the local maximum is negative, so that makes the apparent mass squared negative, and the "mass" as imaginary) and thus call that boson a tachyon, but I don't think that's really the right way to look at this. Probably a better way to look at this is to say the Higgs field is tachyonic (which implies it is locally is unstable, not inconsistent) although I see on the internet, the more confusing Higgs particle is a tachyon is more prevalent. Oh well... I guess that's because it's technically no longer a Higgs when falls away from the hypothesized unstable energy density local maxima...
Other things have a similar tachyonic-like field interpretation, but they are just quasi particle, not "real" particles (e.g., phonons, polaritons, etc). As I recall, one example might be the phonons involved in superconductivity, and nobody is describing phonons as quasi-tachyons, but I guess we'll have to live with the Higgs being classified as a tachyon...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not knocking the progress on this optical implant, but it only does greyscale and without serious microsurgery, will never stop being greyscale only. She needs full color to regain what she lost.
There's no reason to believe that fancy microsurgery is required in order to visualize color. As a trivial example, nearly all color digital cameras have color filter arrays embedded over a monochrome sensor (other than foveon/sigma). It's not a big stretch to imagine that a future revision of this chip could have a color filter array and your brain (visual cortex) could learn to recognize different spatial encoding patterns as different colors.
That's similar to what your brain does now (although the retina helps by doing some type of local opponent-color coding). If the color mapping isn't easy for your brain to learn and you need a mapping more like your original mapping, in the worst case, you could even make the sensor configurable (stimulate different nerves for different colors). Although if you did this "simply" the pixels might be slightly scrambled, but that could be compensated for by using a really high resolution sensor (all cameras have multi-megapixel sensors these days), and then recoding to a lower resolution for output to the optic nerve.
All these things can be easily done on the sensor chip itself w/o requiring more advanced surgical techniques... Ah the wonder of silicon technology...
P.S. Dibs on the patents for this (or at least prior-art on the idea)...
damn preview timer, messed up the quote tags.. Oh well...
...There didn't appear to be any motive for the assault other than a fear of his prothetics...
The apparent motive was that they didn't want to be filmed and were trying to confiscate his camera. Of course many business establishments have a policy against taking pictures or video (under the guise of security and patron/employee privacy, but more likely to avoid any bad publicity).
Unfortunatly, these folks were likely not well trained on how to handle this and as a result even worse publicity will result from this incident.
That doesn't make this event a hate crime against people with prosthetics, though...
My policy: you should be careful not to cry wolf when there isn't really a wolf, because when the wolf comes (and they aways do), people might have already written you off.
I would assume that if you're doing a car-sharing type of arrangement, the insurance will be an important consideration. Before I let some maniac behind the wheel of my Corvette or Cadillac, I'd want to make sure that his insurance will be buying me a new one if he totals it.
Most p2p car sharing services today have a umbrella insurance policy that superceed personal policies during the rental period (which is paid for out of the rental take). This used to be a murky areay of the law (some insurance policies were void if you rent out your car for money), but for many locales, recent changes in the law that require both that 1) insurance companies to accept personal vehicle sharing program insurance covereage w/o voiding their personal coverage, and 2) the personal vehicle sharing program indemnify the owner against civil suits for loss or injury during the rental period.
You wouldn't be relying on "his" isurance to cover, but the company's insurance.
...it's a good thing all participants will be checked for criminal records and tendencies before they're allowed to participate.
Although I suppose you could check for some criminal records (although most juvenile records will be sealed, so that doesn't seem to be too easy), I have no idea how to check for tendencies, But even if you could, I've always thought that there's a fine line between a tendency to want to be a criminal, and to want to be in law enforcement similar to the fine line between a black-hat and a white-hat. Also...
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. --SunTzu
I think this is especially true in the security arena. Many security consultants (computer and otherwize), have dabbled on the other side and often those are the ones that know the threats the best...
Secondly, getting saddled with a relationshp does decrease the tendancy towards crime...
First, one generally doesn't get "saddled" with a relationship (unless that relationship is with a horse, although there might be some exceptions to this). Generally there is a tradeoff involved with any relationship, and generally people get better judgement at making better tradeoffs as they mature. I'd hazzard a guess that the first relationship that you would get the stereotypical hacker into, wouldn't involve the best set of tradeoffs (for either party, or the continued hacking).
Second, it depends on the nature of of the relationship. That whole partners in crime motif is not just in the movies, it (often unfortunatly) happens in real life too...
I think people tend to underestimate the power of endorphins (the thrill response) and the development of the prefrontal cortex (the judgment thought center of the brain) in the whole rational thought process. Just because people that have more to lose tend to commit less crime may just be a correlation. Perhaps developing enough good judgement to be able to achieve a reasonable relationship, car, job, or house requires better judgement already and less crime is merely a consequence of the same underlying cause. Many studies have indicated that maturation of the prefrontal cortex development doesn't really happen before the teens and for most people, doesn't happen until the mid twenties...
So, just getting a hacker into a relationship (or other "saddling?") w/o doing anything to improve judgement is likely not gonna be good for anything. It's like trying to treat all poverty w/ money. If the poverty was from poor judgement like snorting/shooting/drinking, more money isn't gonna help that situation very much...
1) Find car you'd like to steal or strip.
Okay you found a generic GM car. Now why is this "GM" car special that you want to steal it?
2) Social engineer the car to be a part of this "rental agreement".
Why bother?, if you want this particular GM car, just steal it. At a minimum, you probably need the get around having vehicle account verification information to social engineer adding the to the rental system, So if you think you do this, just social engineer Onstar unlock the car instead of adding them to this rental company agreement. That's probably easier to do, since if you want to sign-up, they'll probably will have to send you snail-mail forms you need to fill out and send back to authorize it, where as if you just want them to unlock the car, they probably can just do it right away...
3) "rent" car using the usual fake ID stuff
At this point, I don't think there is much difference between this rental and a typical car rental...
As usual, people making it harder than it needs to be.
Also, social engineering stuff like this isn't as easy as people think it is. In the old days all the call centers were staffed with nice, trusting midwestern USA employees that you can sweet-talk. Nowdays, you are calling into a boiler room where people barely know how to do what they are trained to do (including speaking english) and punt to a supervisor anytime strange comes up since they are rated on how fast they can hand off or terminate the call and are constantly being watched by keystroke loggers, so they generally not interested in being engineered by you, they are more interested in upselling you some additional product.
Has the National Ignition Facility managed to ignite anything yet?
As I understand it, the NIF's original intent wasn't to explore ignition related to practical fusion generators. Original funding for NIF came under the guise of providing experimental data to support nuclear fusion bomb simulation required by the stockpile stewardship program (since we can't just blow up fusion bombs anymore because the test ban treaties).
From what I can tell, the NIC (national ignition campaign) is basically "earmark stimulus" funding by Senator Diane Feinstein (and company in California) to get more money for the NIF facility (located in Livermore, CA). The purported goal of the NIC was to spend additional money in the NIF facilities to actually try to ignite something with positive net energy instead of just plodding along hoping for ignition and collecting data to be used as the basis for fusion weapons simulations.
On ignition, so far... Nada. Although I "hear" the whole effort has been "stimulating" to the local economy ;^)
Or maybe they just fired a pre-emptive warning shot across the EPEAT bow to show them who is the real boss...
Kinda reminds me of the threat that Amazon use to bandy over states: don't tax us or we'll pull out of your state. Big organizations always seem to want to flex their muscles to help smooth negotiations out in the long run. Of course any marketing milage they can get out of it in the present is a bonus...
It is my understanding that the higgs mechanism requires some sort of spontaneous symmetry breaking for the proposed higgs field to yield scalar mass.
Is this somehow related to symmetry breaking in other fields in the Standard Model (e.g., Spin0/hypercharge)?
Also, might there be a whole spectrum of scalar properties like mass that might exist from symmetry breaking in other Standard Model fields that might be discovered that could explain currently un-unifyable parts of theoretical physics (e.g., matter/antimatter ratio, gravity, dark energy, etc), but still within the general framework of the Standard Model? Or is the Standard Model essentially doomed with respect to these currently un-unifyable observations?
640mph ought to be enough speed for anyone... ;^)
RIM CEO Thorsten Heins...
What also happened, in the U.S., was the drive to 4G started, and it got accelerated. Carriers were actually leapfrogging from what they wanted to do with 3G, like HSPA+. They leapfrogged and put a lot of investment into 4G LTE. I think we weren't ready for it. We were busy building our global portfolio. We had a slightly different view on when the LTE rollout would happen. And we made a decision to focus on the rest of the world, which led to some very high numbers, but then, consequently, led to us not being focused on the new, innovative technologies in the U.S. The U.S. regained the lead in mobile technology by doing this. So it was not just that the company was not getting it, it was really that the whole market in the country regained a technology lead in the world. That's a big step.
So if I can paraphrase: We were only ready for baby steps. We thought the USA was silly to take a big steps so fast. So instead we tried to finish our milk(-ing of previous investment). Now we want to take that step to keep from being left behind and we found out whoa... That's a big step.
Lets see, a billion people with how many devices - try censoring that! I'm assuming they aren't using tech to do it per se but people.
Remember, the govenment essentially controls all ISPs and Internet access points in China, those billion devices just can't go anywhere on the internet when in China. Of course in addition to the people employed to do this, the great firewall uses all the advanced tech like deep packet inspection filters to trigger generic URL filtering, DNS poisoning, IP blocking, and TCP connection reset measures.
They have also bullied large companies to self censor their websites as a condition to maintain their licence to do business in China. An unblocked website in China can't just have an open blog or forum w/o the government shutting it down. It certainly isn't 100% effective, but mostly what they are trying to do is filter for the masses, so that protests/insurgencies have a hard time building critical momentum. Your average joe in china isn't doing all their internet surfing through encrypted proxies...
Also from suntzu...
A military operation involves deception. Even though you are competent, appear to be incompetent. Though effective, appear to be ineffective.
Some may argue that microsoft is appears incompetent and ineffective, so perhaps they are taking the suntzu strategy to heart ;^)
key != lock
A key can be put in your pocket when you leave the car, the ignition lock is (usually) secured to the steering column or somewhere near the dashboard. I think most folks would find it hard to put a dashboard of their car into their pocket (unless it was a matchbox-sized car).
Although some folks take do take larger items like audio system faceplates with them, I don't think they take the ignitionl locking mechanisms of their cars..
that my "old" BMW 3 series has a complicated security mechanism: to open it, you must have access to the door key .
FTFY
Otherwize it might be hard to get back in if you lock the doors if you had to get access to the ignition lock ...
Of course on most older cars the door lock and the ignition lock are keyed the same for convenience of carrying one key. The ignition lock on many modern cars are electronic/RF "keyed" and the mechanical part of the composite ignition key (if there is one) is sometimes just for the door or maybe just the glove-compartment/petrol cap since onn higher end cars, the doors can often only be electronic/RF keyed as well...
I thought they figured this stuff out already for birds...
Some references here and here...
As I understand it, in this latest experiment, they flew some worms in space, killed them (flash frozen with liquid nitrogen) and compared them with a control group on earth and then
"... identified seven genes, which were down-regulated in space and whose inactivation extended lifespan under laboratory conditions..."
You can read more here.
However, more amazing than worm just living longer, is how worms survived the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster (their progeny were discovered in the wreckage a few weeks later)...
>a 10 second 100-meter sprinter could see his time drop by 0.35 seconds
If it can increase performance by 100%, he can run it in zero seconds.
Math confuses Slashdot editors.
In defense of the submitter and the /. editors, this exact same math mistake was made in the original article (and 0.338...s is still pretty close to 0.35 seconds since 1/(1+x) ~ 1-x as a first order series approx)...
Of course the source website does not have this mistake, nor does it claim that this particular shoe has this specific level of improvement, only that vague "scientific investigations" have shown that tuning a shoe can improve performance as much as 3.5% and that he (luc fusaro) is still tuning his shoe...
EMP cannons (non-nuclear variety) are now no longer fiction...
Although they still have the fictional variety for our amusement...
Was this a factor leading up to the above ground test ban treaty?
Starfish Prime (as I recally the only successful detonation of operation Fishbowl) was in July 1962 so it was probably a factor. More generally the whole expiration of the moritorium on nuclear testing in 1961 (resulting in the US and USSR getting in to a propaganda "pissing contest" with radiation polluting the atmosphere). The cuban missle crisis which occured later in October 1962, however, was probably the primary factor leading up to the Limited test ban treaty which was signed in 1963.
The test ban treaty probably stopped the development of "shaped" nuclear charges (blasting a city from an explosion in orbit) and other exotic weapons like fission bomb pumped x-ray lasers.
Probably not, for instance research in to nuclear pumped xray laser for the "star-wars" strategic defense initiative continued well into the 1980's...
Oh well, let's hope the Aliens are friendly!
It's quite likely if they if/when the "Aliens" get here they will be in such a fragile craft (because nearly all of the resources of the craft will have been dedicated to interstellar space propulsion) that we won't need any fancy tech like that. However, if by chance they have the tech to super-efficienctly traverse interstellar space they are probably here for our resources (and a few x-ray lasers from us aren't gonna pose too much a threat to them)....
It seems you have not heard the UN was for a significant part set up by the US.
The UN has morphed quite a bit since the original charter. The original goal of the UN was to make sure that Germany and Japan would never start another war. As I recall the UN was supposed to be the political arm of the Allied powers after WWII. Initial membership was offered only to countries that had declared war against either Germany or Japan and the security council struture was restricted to the winners of WWII. My how things have changed... ;^)
The League of Nations was supposed to do the same thing and was abandoned after it failed to stop WWII, but somehow the UN has survived and has seemed to fail to stop any wars since it's inception... (although I guess they've achieved their goal in preventing Germany or Japan from starting one so I guess they get a pass for that)...
So it would be really weird if the US as the biggest reason for the present patents mess would refuse to cooperate in finding a solution.
If you want to get technical, patents were started by the europeans (I think in England)... As to who is responsible for the mess, I think every country is equally responsible for the mess. Attitudes like what you are expressing aren't actually helpful. Who got the US to change their patent law from first to invent vs first to file and extend to 20 years? Wasn't that the europeans? The perception that the US is in the center of the issue is that most companies choose to invest in patents in the US (being a big single market for technology and the market with the most standarized legal infrastructure to evaluate patents). Of the top 10 corporate US patent holders, only IBM and Microsoft are in the top 10. Most are japanese companies except samsung and siemens. The EU is a close second and hopes to win more business in patents by unifying their patent law, though the recent turmoil around unitary patents has many folks wondering about how standard things will get in the EU...
These things take time so don't hold our breath...
However, part of solving the problem is identifying the problem. I don't think we have even identified the nature of the problem yet, although many are proposing fixes (e.g, shorten the term, get rid of them, don't allow software patents, don't allow biotech patents, don't allow speculation in patents, etc), yet we don't know what any of these fixes would really fix and what they might break...
I don't see why it's any more complicated than:
I gave the bank X dollars. I have not withdrawn any money. They owe me X dollars.
My business gave the bank X dollars. My business has not withdrawn any money. They owe my business X dollars.
Fixed.
IANAL, but as I understand it the question is the definition of "my business" in the withdrawn case. When it is a person, it is much clearer if you have authorized the money to be withdrawn because of the way the law is written. If it is a business, it isn't a statute thing, it is often a matter of the uniform commercial code or a business to business contract or the charter to your business (e.g., is the "treasurer" allowed, is a "sales-person" allowed, or third party "accountant" is allowed, or my "niece" is allowed to use a checking account), thus these facts sometimes need to be discovered in a court to determine if there is actual fraud, or if the company is instead required to sue the person who took the money (instead of the bank that authorized the transaction).
For example, if a bookkeeper employeed by a company wanted to embezzle money from the company and gave his password to his aunt in russia to do the deed, the company would probably have to sue the ex-employee and the uncle and the bank would be off the hook since to the bank, the bookeeper was authorized to take the money.
In this case, it was clearly the bank's fault, but that's not always the case in business (which is one of the reason business accounts are different than individual accounts).
RTFA.
Apparently the issue is that although individuals are protected against fraud by legal statutes, businesses are not. Specifically at issue is the authorization of commerical ACH (automated clearing house) transactions to the account (when you use your debit card it's authorized under the EFTA or electronic funds transfers act).
In this case the bank so egregiously ignored it's own security measures (authorized transactions even though it's internal fraud alert systems was warning against the transaction) that it was clear the bank was in the wrong...
So you never get that test drive.
If you look at W and Z bosons, they first found neutral current tracks in a bubble chamber that were consistent with the theory, and later they figured out the mass of the theorized Z boson with a collider experiment. That is the test drive of the theory. For Higgs, they seem to have talked about the mass first, but I'm not aware of the results of prior experiments (other than the general "things-have-mass" reality we are experiencing) that would have validated the Higgs theory. Perhaps they will release such things later, but that would be the test drive.
And this would be the first 0 spin boson i think -- fact check me on that.
That is my understanding as well. If there was an experiment to see if a particle that looked to have the mass of the higgs was determined to not have spin, that might be a very good testdrive to me... In order to do that you probably have to look at the spin statistics of the decay products from a bunch of presumed Higgs particle's decay. Perhaps they are running these statistics on the current data, or maybe they need a new experiment targetted at this. AFAIK, they have only released results about the energy, not any spin decay statistics.
Also the Higgs is the first tachyon -- NOT FTL - just an inconsistency in a field.
Although I'm just a layperson, I don't think this is strictly true... As I understand it, the "trick" that physicist use is to hypothesize a gauge invariant field that can generate mass is to have something about the field that spontaneously breaks symmetry (perhaps this is what you are called inconsistency). The simplest potential energy density field model that would have this property is the sombrero-like field. Near the center at low energy is a local maximum so this potential field will push things in the "wrong" direction away from the center, but at higher energy, the expected (aka average) value would still be in the center. As I understand it, this minima around this local maxima allows the field to generate non-zero mass (a non-zero expectation value for mass anyhow).
You might interpret this initial "wrong" direction away from the average as the boson that mediates this field somehow having imaginary mass (the second derivative of the potential field squared around the local maximum is negative, so that makes the apparent mass squared negative, and the "mass" as imaginary) and thus call that boson a tachyon, but I don't think that's really the right way to look at this. Probably a better way to look at this is to say the Higgs field is tachyonic (which implies it is locally is unstable, not inconsistent) although I see on the internet, the more confusing Higgs particle is a tachyon is more prevalent. Oh well... I guess that's because it's technically no longer a Higgs when falls away from the hypothesized unstable energy density local maxima...
Other things have a similar tachyonic-like field interpretation, but they are just quasi particle, not "real" particles (e.g., phonons, polaritons, etc). As I recall, one example might be the phonons involved in superconductivity, and nobody is describing phonons as quasi-tachyons, but I guess we'll have to live with the Higgs being classified as a tachyon...