Since the Pteradactyl can't take off under its own power (it has to leap off a cliff or build said catapult), they don't technically expend any energy to achieve altitude.
Well, I don't (didn't...) know much about pterodactyls, but 5 minutes of Googling shows that the current research largely discredits that theory in favor of one of active flight on the order of modern birds. Even so, they very much expend energy to achieve altitude, and climbing is in no way an independent activity when the goal is transportation...
Though I assume the use of present tense for said extinct creatures and the time travel reference means you are writing this from the Cretaceous Period, so I guess you have first hand knowledge and know better than we modern humans...
Just take a look at any bird of prey the next time you see one, they don't flap their wings because they don't need to.
How do they get off the ground? A catapult?;) Same with a glider... gotta expend some energy to get up there. My car can get infinite MPG, too - if I start it at the top of a mountain.
Anyway, sure, things like thermal updrafts, etc can help gain altitude if the aircraft is light enough - but they aren't particularly reliable if your goal is transportation rather than recreation. A glider's velocity needed for lift is caused by a slow, efficient descent, mostly from the potential energy given to it by a plane with an engine. I assume part of the requirement is that it take off under its own power. Though, it will be interesting to see what alternative fuel sources, hybrid/solar technology, etc people can come up with!
Yes, that was my point. Lift offsets gravity. But lift causes drag, which requires thrust to offset. Thrust is produced by the engines, which requires... energy!
Hence my comment, "they have to use additional energy to offset that little force called gravity".
You only are immune to malaria as long as you pay them money by buying their pills and taking them.
Sigh.
That was the whole POINT of the study! They stopped taking the anti-malarial drug, but since they were exposed to the parasite so many times while taking it, they are now immune WITHOUT the drugs.
No, RTFA! (or RTFA *again*) They used an unmodified parasite in the mosquito, while giving the test subjects an anti-malarial drug. This let the subjects build up an immunity to the real parasite while not suffering the effects of a full-blown infection in the process.
There was a separate study referenced briefly in the article using an irradiated parasite, but that had nothing to do with the mosquito vector.
The validity of the court SHOULD be questioned! I mean, they gave summons via *Twitter*! What kind of a kangaroo court is that?
Besides, it's a Dutch court asking a Swedish citizen to appear regarding a Swedish website. If you received a "summons" from a Chinese court to appear for violating their demands that you block all of their citizens from viewing your website, would you appear?
Good points, though of course some problems are more a matter of server design/allocation than any gross inadequacy on the part of the RAID controller. You can always try faster hardware to solve a performance problem, but a lot of time it's just due to bad software/configuration.
For example, no one in their right mind would share physical disks between 10-20 VMs in any application where disk performance is critical - a good server architect builds a system that works with the hardware available. Problem is, plenty of these applications/servers are not built by people in their right mind:)
Apple does not always shoot rainbows out of their ass. They are a moneygrubbing corporation just like any other, and worse than some. (though my main argument would be: what's wrong with a moneygrubbing corporation - that's why they exist! Just don't pretend one is better than another...)
The whole point of jailbreaking IS reverse engineering apple's attempts to lock out other software from working with iPhones/iPods, and it has to be done every time Apple releases a new update and breaks the jailbreak.
He was pointing out that the OP's arguments that the iPod is usable with other software is more or less wrong, since you have to hack it to do so, which is not remotely an option for 95% of users. (Not to mention the ridiculous point claiming iTunes tracks are open "except for some old DRM'ed tracks"... yeah, some old DRMed tracks that still make up the majority of those currently out there, notwithstanding Apple's offer to replace them for an EXTRA per-track fee...)
Oh, come on. The only country with an air force REMOTELY competitive with the US is Russia, and if the US and Russia ever get in a war, a lot of good a few stealth fighters will be. There is a REASON the superpowers haven't fought a real war since WWII. Did you miss the whole Cold War thing?
In terms of AF size, China comes in a distant second (about 1/3 the size of the US, and made up largely of ancient MiG21s)
Plus, the US has *12* nuclear powered supercarriers that can take about 90 aircraft each anywhere in the world. Take just 4 of those carriers and it outnumbers the entire air force of all but about 10 countries worldwide.
Congress made the right decision. We have spent trillions of dollars on mega-defense projects and equipment has largely been totally unnecessary apart from a show of force to the rest of the world. The fact is, US really doesn't need to keep building $140M fighter planes in today's political landscape (the USAF already has over 180 of them!) Which is good, because we can't AFFORD to anyway...
Exactly. And one of the reasons that drugs are so much more expensive in the US is that the companies are afraid other countries will ignore their patents and just produce the drugs generically. So the US healthcare system pays for much of this innovation, and many other countries get a free lunch - which is one of the reasons the US healthcare system is so expensive and broken. But take away that source and no one gets lunch...
Read the claims, they didn't develop any technology
Read my post, I clearly said the patent in the article was absurd (I think my exact words were: "the example patent in this article is absurd!")
I was responding to the OP's claim that there should be no patents on medical technology anywhere, ever. And my argument is just that it's not remotely practical... if medical research had no significant costs or could effectively be funded by the govt/public without sacrificing basic human services, sounds great!
But I don't think that patents have any place in heathcare, ever. Aside from that, these observational patents are the most odious and absurd. These sorts of things are the realm of science, not commerce. Scientists have no need to patent discoveries, doing so undermines the very nature of science. When you apply that to medicine, you are causing some real human damage. This is absolutely unacceptable behavior and needs to be stopped ASAFP in my opinion.
Well - it's pretty misleading to claim that a company is "CAUSING human damage" by charging a lot of money to receive access to a medical technology that THEY developed in the first place. What's better - developing a cure for a fatal disease that is so prohibitively expensive that only 10% of the population can afford it, or not developing it at all and letting everyone who has the disease die? At least with the first option, there is potential for making the technology cheaper over time (as has happened for so many existing "basic services" it's pointless to count), leading to additional discoveries, etc. Besides, "scientists" rarely patent discoveries (or end up owning the patent). The companies who spend all the money building the labs and paying the scientists own the patents.
I agree it is a touchy subject (and the example patent in this article is absurd!) - but given that opinion, how would you realistically propose a source of funding/support for a multi-million dollar drug (or other medical technology) development effort? And "have the government pay for it" is obviously not going to work. The US govt can't even figure out how to provide BASIC health care for those who need it, let alone fund and manage the development of cutting edge experimental medical technology.
That doesn't mean the government can't figure out a better way to regulate the industry while preserving innovation... but currently patents are one of the few existing legal mechanisms a company has to recover the massive R&D costs incurred.
Nah, the best Belgian beers are brewed by monks. The monks won't care what happens to the Belgian government, and the Belgian government, while having no problems with picking on some US Internet company, will think twice before interrupting a major revenue stream of the Catholic Church!
Google is failing me now finding the video... but I remember reading about something SO much better almost 10 years ago.
A Japanese engineer designed an integrated alarm clock bed for a contest his company put on. The bed would go through a series of increasing "motivations" to wake up, including:
1. a normal alarm 2. a recording of his boss yelling "Wake up! You're going to be late!" 3. water spraying on his face 4. a hydraulic lift that slowly raises the head of the bed until the apparently ridiculously sound sleeper gets dumped on the floor
And this was back when creating said device was an actual embedded system, not just plugging a serial cable from your computer into a big motor and writing a few lines of code to make it go...
Guaranteed karma points to anyone who can find the video...
If HTML5 had required Theora support, there'd be two or three months delay and then all the ASICs you could shake a stick at would be there.
It's not nearly that "trivial"...
These days it's not about simple decoders/ASIC chips, it's about complex SoCs that require a huge amount of development, testing, reference software/drivers, etc (not to mention manufacturing, marketing, sales/design wins, and application development/integration before it gets into a CE device...)
And those SoCs with H.264 support are already in literally hundreds of millions of set-top boxes, phones, portable media players, Blu-Ray players, and even connected TVs and receivers. It would be a joke trying to push a "standard" requiring Theora that immediately shuts out that many existing devices.
Then again, I don't think H.264, Theora, or any other specific implementation of a video codec should be required in an HTML standard...
But what if you wanted that secret to keep for more than one year?
Yeah, hence the comment:
"it's clearly not complex enough for truly sensitive data (ie anything worth either waiting a year or spending a few million bucks to decrypt)."
Anyway, I wasn't trying to say a 64 bit key is good enough for much these days, I was just trying to point out that there is a significant difference between a 56 and 64 bit key, since the OP was a bit off (or 8 bits off) in the details...
2^64 was solved by the EFF over a decade ago for less than $250K. Trivially by raw brute force.
Actually, it was DES they cracked, which uses 56 bit keys, not 64. A 64 bit key would take 256 times longer. That 56 hours Deep Crack took would be 597 days for a 64 bit key, which is not "trivial".
It's available to people with a bit of technical expertise and about $10k hardware budget as of maybe 3-5 years ago. It took them a few days then.
From their site, in 2007 (2 years ago) it took an average or 6.4 days. Use Moore's law and knock that down to, say 36 hours today. That's still over a year for a 64 bit key.
Look--I don't know what you consider reasonable--but calling 2^64 "about as hard as is reasonable". Maybe it isn't reasonable with your expertise, or on your desktop, or without a bit of dedicated budget--but it isn't just reasonable...it's *trivial* in a cryptographic context.
Over a year to decrypt a message is not trivial... though yeah, it's clearly not complex enough for truly sensitive data (ie anything worth either waiting a year or spending a few million bucks to decrypt).
Ok, yes, you can't just eat what you want. However, it's not as simple as just "more calories".
Fiber will flush calories.
No it doesn't. A calorie is a unit of heat. Fiber may prevent absorption of certain carbohydrates in the intestines, etc, but nothing can "flush heat".
Protein builds muscle, and muscle burns more calories than fat.
Protein doesn't build muscle, muscle is made of protein. That's like saying bricks build buildings. Working out stimulates your body to build muscle, and having more available protein makes it more efficient. If you don't exercise, that protein will just be turned into fat like anything else (just less effiiciently).
Small snacks throughout the day, and especially a proper breakfast, help your metabolism go faster.
That one I agree with:) Though aerobic exercise in the morning will do a lot more.
Anyway, sure, what you eat makes a difference, but the OP is right that in the end the number one way to lose weight is to ingest fewer calories... there was an AMAZING study (scarcasm) done this year that came to the conclusion that given a half dozen different diets, in the end WHAT you eat is completely secondary to HOW MUCH...
Slashdot Mirror
[One Million BC Filter (Raquel Welch Version, of course) Applied]
Sorry. Can't talk. Under attack from large winged lizard driving a Delorean.
Since the Pteradactyl can't take off under its own power (it has to leap off a cliff or build said catapult), they don't technically expend any energy to achieve altitude.
Well, I don't (didn't...) know much about pterodactyls, but 5 minutes of Googling shows that the current research largely discredits that theory in favor of one of active flight on the order of modern birds. Even so, they very much expend energy to achieve altitude, and climbing is in no way an independent activity when the goal is transportation...
Though I assume the use of present tense for said extinct creatures and the time travel reference means you are writing this from the Cretaceous Period, so I guess you have first hand knowledge and know better than we modern humans...
Just take a look at any bird of prey the next time you see one, they don't flap their wings because they don't need to.
How do they get off the ground? A catapult? ;) Same with a glider... gotta expend some energy to get up there. My car can get infinite MPG, too - if I start it at the top of a mountain.
Anyway, sure, things like thermal updrafts, etc can help gain altitude if the aircraft is light enough - but they aren't particularly reliable if your goal is transportation rather than recreation. A glider's velocity needed for lift is caused by a slow, efficient descent, mostly from the potential energy given to it by a plane with an engine. I assume part of the requirement is that it take off under its own power. Though, it will be interesting to see what alternative fuel sources, hybrid/solar technology, etc people can come up with!
Yes, that was my point. Lift offsets gravity. But lift causes drag, which requires thrust to offset. Thrust is produced by the engines, which requires... energy!
Hence my comment, "they have to use additional energy to offset that little force called gravity".
Aircraft have an advantage in that they have no ground friction to deal with.
Yeah, but they have to use additional energy to offset that little force called gravity ;)
You only are immune to malaria as long as you pay them money by buying their pills and taking them.
Sigh.
That was the whole POINT of the study! They stopped taking the anti-malarial drug, but since they were exposed to the parasite so many times while taking it, they are now immune WITHOUT the drugs.
No, RTFA! (or RTFA *again*) They used an unmodified parasite in the mosquito, while giving the test subjects an anti-malarial drug. This let the subjects build up an immunity to the real parasite while not suffering the effects of a full-blown infection in the process.
There was a separate study referenced briefly in the article using an irradiated parasite, but that had nothing to do with the mosquito vector.
The validity of the court SHOULD be questioned! I mean, they gave summons via *Twitter*! What kind of a kangaroo court is that?
Besides, it's a Dutch court asking a Swedish citizen to appear regarding a Swedish website. If you received a "summons" from a Chinese court to appear for violating their demands that you block all of their citizens from viewing your website, would you appear?
No, they lost to a German wearing a polyurethane suit and then declared they wouldn't race any more until the suits are banned.
Good points, though of course some problems are more a matter of server design/allocation than any gross inadequacy on the part of the RAID controller. You can always try faster hardware to solve a performance problem, but a lot of time it's just due to bad software/configuration.
For example, no one in their right mind would share physical disks between 10-20 VMs in any application where disk performance is critical - a good server architect builds a system that works with the hardware available. Problem is, plenty of these applications/servers are not built by people in their right mind :)
Yep, DurendalMAC, that's my point.
Apple does not always shoot rainbows out of their ass. They are a moneygrubbing corporation just like any other, and worse than some. (though my main argument would be: what's wrong with a moneygrubbing corporation - that's why they exist! Just don't pretend one is better than another...)
The whole point of jailbreaking IS reverse engineering apple's attempts to lock out other software from working with iPhones/iPods, and it has to be done every time Apple releases a new update and breaks the jailbreak.
He was pointing out that the OP's arguments that the iPod is usable with other software is more or less wrong, since you have to hack it to do so, which is not remotely an option for 95% of users. (Not to mention the ridiculous point claiming iTunes tracks are open "except for some old DRM'ed tracks"... yeah, some old DRMed tracks that still make up the majority of those currently out there, notwithstanding Apple's offer to replace them for an EXTRA per-track fee...)
Oh, come on. The only country with an air force REMOTELY competitive with the US is Russia, and if the US and Russia ever get in a war, a lot of good a few stealth fighters will be. There is a REASON the superpowers haven't fought a real war since WWII. Did you miss the whole Cold War thing?
In terms of AF size, China comes in a distant second (about 1/3 the size of the US, and made up largely of ancient MiG21s)
Plus, the US has *12* nuclear powered supercarriers that can take about 90 aircraft each anywhere in the world. Take just 4 of those carriers and it outnumbers the entire air force of all but about 10 countries worldwide.
Congress made the right decision. We have spent trillions of dollars on mega-defense projects and equipment has largely been totally unnecessary apart from a show of force to the rest of the world. The fact is, US really doesn't need to keep building $140M fighter planes in today's political landscape (the USAF already has over 180 of them!) Which is good, because we can't AFFORD to anyway...
I agree with the GP, medicine should be treated just as mathematics is today
(US) yearly budget for mathematics research: ~$500M
yearly budget for medical research: ~$100B
If we treated medicine like mathematics, we'd still be rubbing bread mold on our open cuts...
Exactly. And one of the reasons that drugs are so much more expensive in the US is that the companies are afraid other countries will ignore their patents and just produce the drugs generically. So the US healthcare system pays for much of this innovation, and many other countries get a free lunch - which is one of the reasons the US healthcare system is so expensive and broken. But take away that source and no one gets lunch...
Read the claims, they didn't develop any technology
Read my post, I clearly said the patent in the article was absurd (I think my exact words were: "the example patent in this article is absurd!")
I was responding to the OP's claim that there should be no patents on medical technology anywhere, ever. And my argument is just that it's not remotely practical... if medical research had no significant costs or could effectively be funded by the govt/public without sacrificing basic human services, sounds great!
But I don't think that patents have any place in heathcare, ever. Aside from that, these observational patents are the most odious and absurd. These sorts of things are the realm of science, not commerce. Scientists have no need to patent discoveries, doing so undermines the very nature of science. When you apply that to medicine, you are causing some real human damage. This is absolutely unacceptable behavior and needs to be stopped ASAFP in my opinion.
Well - it's pretty misleading to claim that a company is "CAUSING human damage" by charging a lot of money to receive access to a medical technology that THEY developed in the first place. What's better - developing a cure for a fatal disease that is so prohibitively expensive that only 10% of the population can afford it, or not developing it at all and letting everyone who has the disease die? At least with the first option, there is potential for making the technology cheaper over time (as has happened for so many existing "basic services" it's pointless to count), leading to additional discoveries, etc. Besides, "scientists" rarely patent discoveries (or end up owning the patent). The companies who spend all the money building the labs and paying the scientists own the patents.
I agree it is a touchy subject (and the example patent in this article is absurd!) - but given that opinion, how would you realistically propose a source of funding/support for a multi-million dollar drug (or other medical technology) development effort? And "have the government pay for it" is obviously not going to work. The US govt can't even figure out how to provide BASIC health care for those who need it, let alone fund and manage the development of cutting edge experimental medical technology.
That doesn't mean the government can't figure out a better way to regulate the industry while preserving innovation... but currently patents are one of the few existing legal mechanisms a company has to recover the massive R&D costs incurred.
TANSTAAFL.
Nah, the best Belgian beers are brewed by monks. The monks won't care what happens to the Belgian government, and the Belgian government, while having no problems with picking on some US Internet company, will think twice before interrupting a major revenue stream of the Catholic Church!
It's good to know their system is able to handle $23 quadrillion charges, now I just need to get them to raise my limit a bit.
Google is failing me now finding the video... but I remember reading about something SO much better almost 10 years ago.
A Japanese engineer designed an integrated alarm clock bed for a contest his company put on. The bed would go through a series of increasing "motivations" to wake up, including:
1. a normal alarm
2. a recording of his boss yelling "Wake up! You're going to be late!"
3. water spraying on his face
4. a hydraulic lift that slowly raises the head of the bed until the apparently ridiculously sound sleeper gets dumped on the floor
And this was back when creating said device was an actual embedded system, not just plugging a serial cable from your computer into a big motor and writing a few lines of code to make it go...
Guaranteed karma points to anyone who can find the video...
RF version of Pandora? Cool! What's the frequency? And how to I create new stations and rate the songs?
If HTML5 had required Theora support, there'd be two or three months delay and then all the ASICs you could shake a stick at would be there.
It's not nearly that "trivial"...
These days it's not about simple decoders/ASIC chips, it's about complex SoCs that require a huge amount of development, testing, reference software/drivers, etc (not to mention manufacturing, marketing, sales/design wins, and application development/integration before it gets into a CE device...)
And those SoCs with H.264 support are already in literally hundreds of millions of set-top boxes, phones, portable media players, Blu-Ray players, and even connected TVs and receivers. It would be a joke trying to push a "standard" requiring Theora that immediately shuts out that many existing devices.
Then again, I don't think H.264, Theora, or any other specific implementation of a video codec should be required in an HTML standard...
But what if you wanted that secret to keep for more than one year?
Yeah, hence the comment:
"it's clearly not complex enough for truly sensitive data (ie anything worth either waiting a year or spending a few million bucks to decrypt)."
Anyway, I wasn't trying to say a 64 bit key is good enough for much these days, I was just trying to point out that there is a significant difference between a 56 and 64 bit key, since the OP was a bit off (or 8 bits off) in the details...
2^64 was solved by the EFF over a decade ago for less than $250K. Trivially by raw brute force.
Actually, it was DES they cracked, which uses 56 bit keys, not 64. A 64 bit key would take 256 times longer. That 56 hours Deep Crack took would be 597 days for a 64 bit key, which is not "trivial".
It's available to people with a bit of technical expertise and about $10k hardware budget as of maybe 3-5 years ago. It took them a few days then.
From their site, in 2007 (2 years ago) it took an average or 6.4 days. Use Moore's law and knock that down to, say 36 hours today. That's still over a year for a 64 bit key.
Look--I don't know what you consider reasonable--but calling 2^64 "about as hard as is reasonable". Maybe it isn't reasonable with your expertise, or on your desktop, or without a bit of dedicated budget--but it isn't just reasonable...it's *trivial* in a cryptographic context.
Over a year to decrypt a message is not trivial... though yeah, it's clearly not complex enough for truly sensitive data (ie anything worth either waiting a year or spending a few million bucks to decrypt).
Well... not entirely true, either...
Not entirely true.
Ok, yes, you can't just eat what you want. However, it's not as simple as just "more calories".
Fiber will flush calories.
No it doesn't. A calorie is a unit of heat. Fiber may prevent absorption of certain carbohydrates in the intestines, etc, but nothing can "flush heat".
Protein builds muscle, and muscle burns more calories than fat.
Protein doesn't build muscle, muscle is made of protein. That's like saying bricks build buildings. Working out stimulates your body to build muscle, and having more available protein makes it more efficient. If you don't exercise, that protein will just be turned into fat like anything else (just less effiiciently).
Small snacks throughout the day, and especially a proper breakfast, help your metabolism go faster.
That one I agree with :) Though aerobic exercise in the morning will do a lot more.
Anyway, sure, what you eat makes a difference, but the OP is right that in the end the number one way to lose weight is to ingest fewer calories... there was an AMAZING study (scarcasm) done this year that came to the conclusion that given a half dozen different diets, in the end WHAT you eat is completely secondary to HOW MUCH...