Hardware patents cover processes -- sets of instructions for completing a task using physical parts -- not just finished products. I don't see the fundamental difference between that and software.
Likewise, the "obvious" factor and bad litigation can be applied to hardware patents as well. Should you be able to patent the wheel? It's been done.
I keep hearing that "software patents" are bad, but "hardware patents" are not. Could someone please explain to me why it's worse to patent software than hardware? As far as I can tell the problem with patents on obvious ideas, and the abuses of patents by people with enough money to bring or withstand a legal challenge are the same for both hardware and software. I'm not saying there aren't problems with the system, I just don't see what software vs. hardware has to do with it.
The remote syslog would have to be compromised for what you suggest; there's no way to seek using the syslog wire protocol -- it's append-only.
But in a more general sense, if you can't trust the log generator and the log host, there's no way to construct this system at all, even with the line printer you suggest. If we're accounting for a compromised syslog on the remote logging host, then it could simply alter or supress the logs in-flight to the printer; a compromised local syslog could do something similar. Or the program generating logs could be altered to not supply certain logging messages.
There's no practical defense against any of those attacks other than trying to ensure general system integrity, and printing to paper doesn't buy you anything you wouldn't get with a generic linear media drive with seek disabled, or (if you can stand the buffering for big sectors) optical write-once media.
To be clear, I shouldn't have said "designed to displace oxygen", as that's not strictly true. But they are dangerous *because* they displace oxygen, regardless of their design or method of fire supression.
Halon-1301 (bromotrifluoromethane) won't kill you either, at least not more than FM-200 (heptaflouropropane). It can be broken down in to hydrogen bromide and hydrogen fluoride, which are more dangerous, but that's uncommon even in exposure to high temperatures.
Both chemicals are as designed to displace oxygen, and therefore both chemicals can cause dizziness and disorientation in small quantities and death in large quantities, but they are both non-toxic and easily dissipated. It's just that Halon-1301 has too high an ozone depletion potential to be legal most places due to the Montreal Protocol.
I'd back him up just on the practicality of construction -- moving parts + thousands of cycles + buried in concrete == bad time. Or you could just look at the loops installed at intersections with a metal-detector type sensors, as they are often visible from the surface, particularly on retro-fit intersections.
Build me a practical prototype and I'll admit to being a Nazi.
Roads are exposed to huge thermal variation, water and other chemicals, impact, friction, sunlight, etc. And the weight loads vary from scooters to 7-axle trucks. It's not a trivial exercise to design a durable, cost-effective, safe road surface even before you consider power generation.
By limiting quantities and the sizes of things that could be used as mixing/pressure vessels, some risk may have been mitigated.
But they didn't do that. I'm still allowed to bring a hard-side plastic or metal case and as many plastic bags or other small containers as I like on to the plane, so long as none of them have liquid in them when I do it.
Don't make excuses for stupid rules -- someone might believe you.
Except officers don't remember exactly where and when they saw each plate for all time. That's the part of this that upsets me -- I don't really mind having plates identified saved if and only if they match some then-current list of stolen cars or criminals. But tracking the daily movements of cars that aren't stolen and people that aren't criminals has an awful potential for abuse.
Yeah, unless I wanted to compare the amount of space I need to dedicate to the energy storage system given two different energy sources. You know, like one might want to do when designing a mobile power system -- I don't know what you drive, but if I needed to increase the size of my gas tank 10,000 times I'd be a little short on leg room.
But it does mean that you don't have acute appendicitis.
The study noted that the symptoms were real, and did not disclaim other causes; all they claimed was the symptoms were unrelated to the EM radiation they generated.
There are benefits to having only one provider -- like consolidated support and supposed interoperability.
There are also costs, like lock-in -- not only are in a position to be taken advantage of by your single provider in terms of price, but you're actually likely to dimiss technically superior solutions if they don't come from your provider, and your solutions will be inflexible outside the bounds set by your provider.
Take Exchange email as an example. It's not a terrible way to do mail folders, and the integrated calendar is handy. But it means that only Outlook can read your mail, and Outlook only runs on Windows machine and Windows only runs on x86 hardware. Those may all be reasonable choices, but it's not reasonable to make them all simply because you want to run Exchange.
I know Exchange supports IMAP, but there are companies (like my current employer) that won't turn on the IMAP interface because it doesn't fit their one-provider toolchain. I develop on a company-provided linux system for a product that runs entirely in linux, but I have to launch a VM to check my email because of single-provider lock-in.
Yes, because that would demonstrate that my seven-year-old was making child-like and sometimes embarrassing decisions about what to say and where to say it. Oh the horror.
I understand there are traditional societal expectations, but being upset about "cursing" is really just as arbitrary and useless as being upset about people that wear blue socks.
This is not a laser-distance-based modeling system. That sort of system tracks along the grove mechanically (without touching, but still moves the lasers, much like a CD) and models the surface by reading the distance from the laser to the disk surface.
This system takes an image of the entire disk surface in one pass, with no moving parts. That image is then processed to construct a 3D model of the surface, and that model can then be processed to follow the groove track, much like the laser-based system physically scans the disk surface.
After the 3D model is constructed both systems work much the same way, but the construction of the model is significantly different. The laser-based system can only play flat disks (not say, wax cylinders), and cannot pre-process the disk to construct an accurate model from pieces of a disk. Also the image-based system could be used with any set of images of a disk sufficient to reconstruct the surface -- it would not be necessary to physically transport the disk in order to process it with such a system, so long as the necessary images can be produced at the disk's current location.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that you can "observe the past" due to the finite speed of light. You can observe things in your "now" that, to a distant observer, might be considered old news. But I'd argue that your "now" and his "long ago" are actually the same moment; so long as all the effects of the event -- light, gravity, etc. -- can only be translated across the universe at the speed of light, saying that the moments are different is a matter of semantics and nomenclature, not of pragmatic or observable phenomenon.
Now if someone shows that quantum entanglement could actually be used to transmit information faster than light, rather than simple show correlation in after-the-fact comparison, that might make things more interesting.
You're right that the change isn't instantaneous on a CRT, but the maximum refresh rate of a CRT is very much related to the decay rate of the phosphors, at least after you adjust for the marketing lies. That's why fixed-frequency 60 Hz monitors (or TVs) don't have huge flicker problems, but a multi-sync monitor with a 180 Hz maximum refresh will put you into seizures if run with a 60 Hz refresh.
I've been living in Iowa, financing my own education -- I just finished ugrad in 2005, and I'm now working and starting my grad degree. I'm not just making this up.
Those figures don't include "Room & Board" because you need "Room & Board" whether you're in school or not, so it's a little silly to pretend that it's a cost related to your education. Even if you include R&B, which is on the order of $6k/year at those schools, you could make that much working a student-wage job for an annual average of 20 hours/week (or 14 hours/week if you work full-time for 12 weeks in the summer).
I agree, and that is a perfectly reasonable choice that many people without the means to pay for a colledge education outright will (and probably should) make. It's a choice I made too, and I'm pretty happy with it.
My point was their choice to not attend the expensive school is not evidence that the tuition cost was sufficient to deny them access, just that the additional value of the education from that school as opposed to a cheaper one is not worth the additional tuition.
Tuition isn't a barrier for anyone who really wants to attend the school; it's an excuse people who aren't dedicated use to rationalize their choice not to attend.
First, it's entirely possible to go to a perfectly respectable in-state school for just a few grand a year. If you're actually poor you can get that much money in grants and interest-free loans from the federal government. I agree that UW-La Crosse doesn't have the same weight as Yale, but if you get your cheap undergrad, then go to work for a few years and save, you could afford to attend whatever graduate program you like, and no one will care where your undergrad degree came from.
Or you can, with very few exceptions, finance your undergraduate education entirely on credit, even with no credit history, no income, and poor parents. When you're done you'll have $125k in debt, but you'll have the degree you sought.
Certainly it's easier for people with access to money to do go to expensive schools -- the risk they take on is lower, the commitment they need is lesser, and the time it takes them to reach their goals is likely reduced. And reasonable people may decided that the addition value of Yale over UW-La Crosse isn't worth the price in money, time, risk or dedication, but it's disingenuous to say that someone couldn't go to a school because it was too expensive.
Vista Media Center was written with the assumption that your PC will become a single-purpose appliance.
Yes, it was. Hence the "Media Center" part of the name. If you a general-purpose OS that can also play video buy the version that doesn't claim to be a single-purpose OS.
It's call the Jikes RVM now, and supports PPC-32, PPC-64, IA-32 and IA-64, though the Java class coverage is still incomplete. But it doesn't bootstrap using some magically JIT technology -- it uses a C program to load a pre-compiled image into memory and executes that.
From their "Build the RVM" page: The boot image runner is a small C program that loads the boot image and transfers control flow into the Jikes RVM.
Actually it's called Jikes RVM now. It doesn't require a second JVM to run, but it does require a C program to bootstrap.
To quote their "Build the RVM" page: The boot image runner is a small C program that loads the boot image and transfers control flow into the Jikes RVM.
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Hardware patents cover processes -- sets of instructions for completing a task using physical parts -- not just finished products. I don't see the fundamental difference between that and software.
Likewise, the "obvious" factor and bad litigation can be applied to hardware patents as well. Should you be able to patent the wheel? It's been done.
I keep hearing that "software patents" are bad, but "hardware patents" are not. Could someone please explain to me why it's worse to patent software than hardware? As far as I can tell the problem with patents on obvious ideas, and the abuses of patents by people with enough money to bring or withstand a legal challenge are the same for both hardware and software. I'm not saying there aren't problems with the system, I just don't see what software vs. hardware has to do with it.
The remote syslog would have to be compromised for what you suggest; there's no way to seek using the syslog wire protocol -- it's append-only.
But in a more general sense, if you can't trust the log generator and the log host, there's no way to construct this system at all, even with the line printer you suggest. If we're accounting for a compromised syslog on the remote logging host, then it could simply alter or supress the logs in-flight to the printer; a compromised local syslog could do something similar. Or the program generating logs could be altered to not supply certain logging messages.
There's no practical defense against any of those attacks other than trying to ensure general system integrity, and printing to paper doesn't buy you anything you wouldn't get with a generic linear media drive with seek disabled, or (if you can stand the buffering for big sectors) optical write-once media.
To be clear, I shouldn't have said "designed to displace oxygen", as that's not strictly true. But they are dangerous *because* they displace oxygen, regardless of their design or method of fire supression.
Halon-1301 (bromotrifluoromethane) won't kill you either, at least not more than FM-200 (heptaflouropropane). It can be broken down in to hydrogen bromide and hydrogen fluoride, which are more dangerous, but that's uncommon even in exposure to high temperatures.
Both chemicals are as designed to displace oxygen, and therefore both chemicals can cause dizziness and disorientation in small quantities and death in large quantities, but they are both non-toxic and easily dissipated. It's just that Halon-1301 has too high an ozone depletion potential to be legal most places due to the Montreal Protocol.
I'd back him up just on the practicality of construction -- moving parts + thousands of cycles + buried in concrete == bad time. Or you could just look at the loops installed at intersections with a metal-detector type sensors, as they are often visible from the surface, particularly on retro-fit intersections.
But the City of Reno has a page about their vehicle sensors:
http://www.cityofreno.com/Index.aspx?page=658
And a quick google turned up many similar examples.
Build me a practical prototype and I'll admit to being a Nazi.
Roads are exposed to huge thermal variation, water and other chemicals, impact, friction, sunlight, etc. And the weight loads vary from scooters to 7-axle trucks. It's not a trivial exercise to design a durable, cost-effective, safe road surface even before you consider power generation.
By limiting quantities and the sizes of things that could be used as mixing/pressure vessels, some risk may have been mitigated.
But they didn't do that. I'm still allowed to bring a hard-side plastic or metal case and as many plastic bags or other small containers as I like on to the plane, so long as none of them have liquid in them when I do it.
Don't make excuses for stupid rules -- someone might believe you.
Except officers don't remember exactly where and when they saw each plate for all time. That's the part of this that upsets me -- I don't really mind having plates identified saved if and only if they match some then-current list of stolen cars or criminals. But tracking the daily movements of cars that aren't stolen and people that aren't criminals has an awful potential for abuse.
The gasoline energy density is irrelevant
Yeah, unless I wanted to compare the amount of space I need to dedicate to the energy storage system given two different energy sources. You know, like one might want to do when designing a mobile power system -- I don't know what you drive, but if I needed to increase the size of my gas tank 10,000 times I'd be a little short on leg room.
Not on TV.
But it does mean that you don't have acute appendicitis.
The study noted that the symptoms were real, and did not disclaim other causes; all they claimed was the symptoms were unrelated to the EM radiation they generated.
Religion is a choice too, but we decided it's not reasonable to discriminate on that basis.
Does it also sicken you to compare religious oppression to racial oppression?
There are benefits to having only one provider -- like consolidated support and supposed interoperability.
There are also costs, like lock-in -- not only are in a position to be taken advantage of by your single provider in terms of price, but you're actually likely to dimiss technically superior solutions if they don't come from your provider, and your solutions will be inflexible outside the bounds set by your provider.
Take Exchange email as an example. It's not a terrible way to do mail folders, and the integrated calendar is handy. But it means that only Outlook can read your mail, and Outlook only runs on Windows machine and Windows only runs on x86 hardware. Those may all be reasonable choices, but it's not reasonable to make them all simply because you want to run Exchange.
I know Exchange supports IMAP, but there are companies (like my current employer) that won't turn on the IMAP interface because it doesn't fit their one-provider toolchain. I develop on a company-provided linux system for a product that runs entirely in linux, but I have to launch a VM to check my email because of single-provider lock-in.
Yes, because that would demonstrate that my seven-year-old was making child-like and sometimes embarrassing decisions about what to say and where to say it. Oh the horror.
I understand there are traditional societal expectations, but being upset about "cursing" is really just as arbitrary and useless as being upset about people that wear blue socks.
No, not improved. Just totally different.
This is not a laser-distance-based modeling system. That sort of system tracks along the grove mechanically (without touching, but still moves the lasers, much like a CD) and models the surface by reading the distance from the laser to the disk surface.
This system takes an image of the entire disk surface in one pass, with no moving parts. That image is then processed to construct a 3D model of the surface, and that model can then be processed to follow the groove track, much like the laser-based system physically scans the disk surface.
After the 3D model is constructed both systems work much the same way, but the construction of the model is significantly different. The laser-based system can only play flat disks (not say, wax cylinders), and cannot pre-process the disk to construct an accurate model from pieces of a disk. Also the image-based system could be used with any set of images of a disk sufficient to reconstruct the surface -- it would not be necessary to physically transport the disk in order to process it with such a system, so long as the necessary images can be produced at the disk's current location.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that you can "observe the past" due to the finite speed of light. You can observe things in your "now" that, to a distant observer, might be considered old news. But I'd argue that your "now" and his "long ago" are actually the same moment; so long as all the effects of the event -- light, gravity, etc. -- can only be translated across the universe at the speed of light, saying that the moments are different is a matter of semantics and nomenclature, not of pragmatic or observable phenomenon.
Now if someone shows that quantum entanglement could actually be used to transmit information faster than light, rather than simple show correlation in after-the-fact comparison, that might make things more interesting.
Compare Panama to Guatemala or Honduras.
Panama GDP:
- Total $26.250 billion (105th)
- Per capita $8,000 (83rd)
Guatemala GDP:
- Total $62.78 billion (71st)
- Per capita $4,155 (116th)
Honduras GDP:
- Total $21.74 billion (107th)
- Per capita $3,009 (124th)
I'm not saying Panama is a great place to live, but it's not doing so bad economically compared to its neighbors.
You're right that the change isn't instantaneous on a CRT, but the maximum refresh rate of a CRT is very much related to the decay rate of the phosphors, at least after you adjust for the marketing lies. That's why fixed-frequency 60 Hz monitors (or TVs) don't have huge flicker problems, but a multi-sync monitor with a 180 Hz maximum refresh will put you into seizures if run with a 60 Hz refresh.
I've been living in Iowa, financing my own education -- I just finished ugrad in 2005, and I'm now working and starting my grad degree. I'm not just making this up.
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This fall total tuition and fees for most majors at Iowa State is $3080.66 / semester:
http://www.iastate.edu/~registrar/fees/tuition070
Minnesota: $4705 / semester
http://admissions.tc.umn.edu/costsaid/tuition.htm
Wisconsin: $3365 / semester
http://www.admissions.wisc.edu/costs.php
Those figures don't include "Room & Board" because you need "Room & Board" whether you're in school or not, so it's a little silly to pretend that it's a cost related to your education. Even if you include R&B, which is on the order of $6k/year at those schools, you could make that much working a student-wage job for an annual average of 20 hours/week (or 14 hours/week if you work full-time for 12 weeks in the summer).
I agree, and that is a perfectly reasonable choice that many people without the means to pay for a colledge education outright will (and probably should) make. It's a choice I made too, and I'm pretty happy with it.
My point was their choice to not attend the expensive school is not evidence that the tuition cost was sufficient to deny them access, just that the additional value of the education from that school as opposed to a cheaper one is not worth the additional tuition.
Tuition isn't a barrier for anyone who really wants to attend the school; it's an excuse people who aren't dedicated use to rationalize their choice not to attend.
First, it's entirely possible to go to a perfectly respectable in-state school for just a few grand a year. If you're actually poor you can get that much money in grants and interest-free loans from the federal government. I agree that UW-La Crosse doesn't have the same weight as Yale, but if you get your cheap undergrad, then go to work for a few years and save, you could afford to attend whatever graduate program you like, and no one will care where your undergrad degree came from.
Or you can, with very few exceptions, finance your undergraduate education entirely on credit, even with no credit history, no income, and poor parents. When you're done you'll have $125k in debt, but you'll have the degree you sought.
Certainly it's easier for people with access to money to do go to expensive schools -- the risk they take on is lower, the commitment they need is lesser, and the time it takes them to reach their goals is likely reduced. And reasonable people may decided that the addition value of Yale over UW-La Crosse isn't worth the price in money, time, risk or dedication, but it's disingenuous to say that someone couldn't go to a school because it was too expensive.
Vista Media Center was written with the assumption that your PC will become a single-purpose appliance.
Yes, it was. Hence the "Media Center" part of the name. If you a general-purpose OS that can also play video buy the version that doesn't claim to be a single-purpose OS.
It's call the Jikes RVM now, and supports PPC-32, PPC-64, IA-32 and IA-64, though the Java class coverage is still incomplete. But it doesn't bootstrap using some magically JIT technology -- it uses a C program to load a pre-compiled image into memory and executes that.
From their "Build the RVM" page: The boot image runner is a small C program that loads the boot image and transfers control flow into the Jikes RVM.
Actually it's called Jikes RVM now. It doesn't require a second JVM to run, but it does require a C program to bootstrap.
To quote their "Build the RVM" page: The boot image runner is a small C program that loads the boot image and transfers control flow into the Jikes RVM.