was that their biggest concerns were buying Windows operating systems and security software.
"Heh, I know what we can do now that the economy has soured, Bubba. Let's stop our movement to that free OS that puts us in control. Instead, let's buy an expensive OS that is known for lots of security holes so that we can buy more software to make it secure."
All anti-trust cases are federal cases, it is a federal statute, and one of the few issues that has original jurisdiction in a federal court.
Except for those that are state cases. Yes, there are federal anti-trust statutes, but there are also state anti-trust statutes. And it's possible to be guilty under both. In this case, the states had a gentlemen's agreement to follow the federal's lead, but there's no reason that each state's AG couldn't decide to start a whole new trial of there own.
Good conspiracy theory, but I would have to say look at history in this case. MS is threatened. Sales revenue is in the toilet and the outlook for future sales is even bleaker. They have to come up with a strategy and implement it fast. What do they do?
What they always have done. Rush a half-finished product out the door, and use whatever leverage they have to force it on whoever they can, while keeping the engineers busy in the back room with the bubblegum and duct-tape. Eventually, they'll get around to releasing a decent product.
With a Mandrake Linux distribution:
* Where do I partition disks ?
From LinuxConf or the control panel.
* Where do I mount and unmount things ?
Click once on the desktop icon.
* Where do I set the colour depth and resolution of my display (on the fly is even better) ?
From LinuxConf or the control panel?
* Where do I load and unload kernel modules ?
From LinuxConf or the control panel.
* Where do I start and stop runnig daemons ?
From LinuxConf or the control panel.
* Where do I share things ?
I dunno? At your local flea market? Linux doesn't have that thing where you drop your pants and tell the whole world to come get some. But if you want to export some files systems through NFS and control access to them...
From LinuxConf or the control panel.
* Where do I reconfigure my network settings ?
From LinuxConf or the control panel.
* Where can I reconfigure my kernel, compile it, isntall it and reboot all by checking a few boxes and hitting a button ?
From LinuxConf or the control panel.
* Etc.
From LinuxConf or the control panel.
The beauty in building from the ground up is that everyone can see your foundation before you stick a gawd-awful structure on top of it. Notice I gave two choice to nearly every question, but they both use the some fully-debugged functionality underneath. Just because this GUI wrapper hasn't made it into your favority UNIX look-alike, doesn't mean that "[t]hey still haven't really delved into the guts of the underlying operating system to try and make them easier to use."
Well, KDE developer won't delve "into the guts of the underlying operating system", because they won't need to. The functionality is already there. There just needs to be some work to make that functionality presentable in a clickety-click way.
* Letting Microsoft add new features into its flagship Windows software, but requiring the company also to offer a version that doesn't include those additions.
Full OEM version: $30
Stripped OEM version: $80
Profit margin from each system $60
If your losing money on each system, you'll never make it up on volume.
* Banning restrictive contracts that would force computer makers to buy versions of Windows with new features, but allowing financial incentives such as discounts to make those versions more enticing.
How does this differ one iota from how MS cornered the market? Put MS-DOS on on all of your systems and get a price break equal to your profit margin. Install even a single copy of DR-DOS, and you pay full price. The month after MS implemented the policy, DR-DOS sales tanked!
* Forcing Microsoft to reveal parts of its Windows blueprints relating to its Internet browser software, but not the blueprints to Windows.
So everything is now defined as being part of Windows, and IE is now just an interface to some system libraries. Hate it for all those out there who wanted to actually display pages written by FrontPage on an alternative OS.
This has got to be one of the biggest paper tigers since Reagan's immigration bill in the 80's, the reason you now have to 'prove' you're American or have a VISA to work here. Illegal immigrants can produce a photocopy of a drivers liscense and the Human Resource drone at the cleaning company checks off on the form. These rememedies, whether you agree MS is guilty or not, are full of sound and fury, signifiying nothing.
It could actually be better than that. If I'm not mistaken, the Mach 5 figure is airspeed. Airspeed can be increased around the engine using an air scoop to produce a long Venturi chamber. The scoop could be made variable to get predictable performance as the vehicle speed increases.
With this change, the vehicle could be poking along at Mach 2 or 3 and still work.
Do we really want to trust Microsoft to make decisions on our behalf regarding our use of language? Not really.
Bzzt. Wrong. That is exactly what you do when you use a thesaurus. You give another, supposed authority, control over your choice of words because you do not feel that your grasp of the language is comprehensive enough. Most professionals authors accept that there are others who know more about the language than themselves, and thus defer to the more authoritative source.
That being said, this news should simply be a data point in deciding if M$' online thesaurus is as authoritative as something like Webster's.
Does your car still work if the transmission is damaged or half the engine has been riddled with bullet holes?
If the transmission is damaged, should the tire go flat for good measure?
Again, a very unexpected and unnatural scenario. How well do cars function when they run out of fuel?
How the hell is running out of feul or disk space unnatural or unexpected? By your analysis, if you run out of fuel, your car should explode and the manufacturer could just say, "Heh, he let it run out of gas. He should've gotten a bigger tank."
But how well would your refrigerator react if you treated it shoddily such as by leaving it outdoors intermuitently or diconnecting and reconnecting the power several times a day?
I take it outside, the pretty white paint turns yellow. I unplug it, frozen stuff melts...eventually. But I would be PISSED if I unplugged it and the door fell off.
We can expect more intelligence from computer software, because computer software is more intelligent. A program can take reasonable precautions to check if a step succeeded before trying to use the results of that step, and then give a reasonable error message or take an alternative course if the results were unexpected. Instead we get even less with software than we do with other things. If my car won't start, I can have my wife try to crank it while I listen for strange noises under the hood. If my Windows computer won't start I just get a message about an unexpected operation. (My Mandrake-Linux boxen tell all sorts of things about what's going on as they boot up, so I was easily able to find that IPForwarding wasn't working because I hadn't compiled the correct modules.)
That said, I've found that the commercial software I've used just dies without ever telling me anything, so I usually have no clue what happened or how to fix it. OSS tends to report a ton of cryptic garbage that I can do a grep on the source code with. I'd be no better off with OSS in most case if it wasn't for the fact that I'm a software engineer by trade.
Re:Interesting use of statistics here..
on
Microsoft's Future
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The point of the graph is to show what the article pointed out, that the profits are not rapidly increasing at a rapid rate. Microsoft's stock price is maintained at a ridiculous level by rapidly increasing profits. Loss of a rapid increase indicates that a market is maturing or stagnating, which means that the stock value will not rapidly increase in the near future, which means that you might not want to pay much more that what the stock is actually worth.
The graph wasn't there to point out that profits weren't increasing. The graph meant to show that profit increase was slowing down. If you wait till profits are falling before you sell your stock, you will not be optimizing your return.
No I'm not comparing 640x480 to 1600x1200. I'm comparing a crappy 640x480 snapshot to a crappy celluloid snapshot.
I have a crappy snapshot of the 'bosses day' stunt we pulled on the best manager I ever had. Only a year old and already yellowed. But who cares, it's stuck to a cubicle wall with tack pins, for the love of... Why would I care if it was stuck on a website at only '640x480'? Hell, I thought it was cool in '92 when I moved from CGA to a 640x480 monitor and could look at 'high resolution' porn.
Besides, it's the color depth that I usually notice anyway.
And water doesn't *want* to flow downhill, but I wouldn't stand in front of the next flashflood if I were you.
The anthropomorphism is accurate. Once information starts to pass from one person to another, it is very difficult to stop the spread. How many movies are based upon the plot mechanism of a murderer having to kill more and more people to keep his secret? Keeping secrets is a very difficult business, because INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE!!
Excuse me for just a moment while I rant, but every time we get a story about some sort of technology that deals with human perception such as sound or sight, we have to have someone who steps up to the plate and explain how the quality sucks.
For instance, in nearly every article about MP3s, we have people telling us how badly the MP3 format trashes CD quality; blithly ignoring the fact that the majority of the people out there listen to those MP3 out of $10 speakers stuck to the side of their monitors which are fed by a $5 SB(arely)Live chipset stuck on their motherboard.
Heh, buddy, here's a clue. Nobody gives a shit!!
These cameras won't be used for artclass. They'll be used by drunk-assed people to take pictures of their mates at company parties. Would you want ultra-clarity in THAT picture? Most people take their drugstore developed snapshots and cram them in a shoebox at the bottom of a mouldy closet for years before ever looking at them. Do you think they give a shit that their yellowed picture of their college graduate when he was standing at the plate in little-league is a little grainy? Here's a little help with the question. NO!!! Hell, they want to remember that he was the one who won the league championship for the team, instead of what he really did which was act as lead benchwarmer. (The great thing about memories is that they get better with the fading 8*)
So take your chitzy "I work for an imaging company..." ass out of here, along with your "MP3s sound bad" buddies, because the rest of us have priorities that rank 'trying to decide if a pic is 150lpi vs 160lpi' right there at the bottom with 'trying to decide if I should rip at 128 or 146 bit.'
I really can't envision Microsoft making a EU compliant Windows sans IE, Windows Media, Chat, etc., for them and a bundled Windows for the rest of the world.
Why? I work in telecom. We make equipment that supports Sonet in Europe and SDH in the US. You have products everywhere that are customized for target markets. The EU is a HUGE, why would M$ flinch at a customized version for such a HUGE market especially when they already have customized version for French, German, Spanish,...?
No, the problem is that the devices that use the fiber are expensive and there is currently a glut of bandwidth. Oh, stop your screaming. It used to be that you'd pay $20/month for 64k of rarely used bandwidth. 64k is the nominal bandwidth assigned to a phone call in modern digital networks. If you made a long distance call (one that traversed central offices), you paid more and by the minute.
An always-on, connect instantly to anywhere in the world, ADSL line has several hundred K of bandwidth, and people scream at anything above $49.95/month. There currently is a glut of supply driving down prices. These next generation inventions will only see production if they can supply more bandwith at the same equipment cost.
In any case, the dark fiber will remain so until someone can light it really cheaply, or someone is willing to pay for the laser.
Do the same thing that they're starting to do for candy and pastry wrappings. Apply a thin layer of aluminum. It only takes a few microns. Check out the wrapping the next time you eat a PopTart.
In a later press release the scientist were quoted as saying, "Ooops! We thought we saw starts BILLIONS of miles away that had been magnified through a gravitational lense, but what we actually saw were some stains from an interns habit of dribbling coffee."
Excuse my cynicism (and my poor spelling), but they're trying to tell us that they're capturing light that was generated billions of years ago. Enough light to charge an optical receiver. I'm currently working on a project that has to generate laser light down a fiber, and pick up the signal after on a few miles, and we're having problems doing that. Occam's Razor applies here, and in my mind there are a mountain of explanations that fit better. Simple noise would be the first one. A body that is much closer but shrouded by some sort of haze is another. Even if space were nearly completely empty, wouldn't there be enough dust after a few zillion miles to make it opaque.
Just how much can we trust people claiming to see ghost (things that may very well be there, but no one else can see them)?
Films are full of hackers who sit in from of brightly colored GUIs and watch as graphical representations of doors open to them as they break into secret computer systems. Out here in the real world, we know that cracking a system can take days, weeks or even months (that's cracking a system, not hacking a VB worm), and the work is boring text.
In the real world, criminals can easily use one-time-pad, unbreakable encryption that'll never be broken in the 30min allowed for a Hollywood plot, and they would never resort to public key technology that the rest of us want to simply make it harder for the gov to spy on us.
Do our representatives have any concept of what real computer work, and real cracking consists of? Do they have a clue of how encryption can work? How would I educate my reps that killing public key tech would do nothing to hurt mafia/Bin Laden types?
Agreed. But it matters at your first job. It determines whether they're jumping at you, or whether they're considering using you to fill in some holes. It makes a difference whether you're invited to IBM's exclusive job fairs like I was and then given first pick at openings for new grads, or having to go through the cattle line with everyone else.
A good first job can make all the difference in a career. 8*)
-Most of the waste in a standard battery is highly toxic, regardless of which battery technology you choose, with the only differentiating factor being how deadly. The only waste from one of these fuel cells will be a little platic canister that may take eons to degrade, but environmentally will resemble a rock.
-Buy a pack of batteries and let them sit 6 months before you put them to use. How often do you use that flashlight? Do you check to batteries regularly to make sure that it will work when needed? Assuming a reliable enclosure system, methane cells will easily have a shelf life of something bordering on FOREVER!
-Batteries are damned inneficient. AC power is produced from burning fossil fuels, travels over miles of cables, gets stepped down through several transformers, converted to a DC and then very innefficiently charges the battery. Even when your not using you device, the charge slowly drains from the battery due to internal currents. Methane cells will deliver all the energy straight to the device, and energy isn't lost during storage.
There are advantages to miniature feul cells that go far beyond convience.
With team projects that I have experienced, the professors always expect to step back and give one final grade across the group. I usually ended up just doing the damn project, because that was a lot easier than trying to teach the lamers I was stuck with how to code. The lamers didn't mind, 'cause it was an easy A for them (I graduated with a 3.89 GPA). The situation always pissed me off. I paid to be taught, not to babysit lamers. But I wasn't about to let my GPA suffer out of spite.
The way it should have gone was that the professor should break the project down into parts, and each student would be primarily responsible for his/her own part, with some portion of the grade coming from the overall completeness/quality of the end project. Lamers would then be responsible for themselves, and some actual communication would have to occur, because the lamers would have to ask more than, "Is it working yet?" Of course, this would require the professor to accept the role of a manager, and would require at least a cursory participation in each group. Which is why this doesn't happen.
How expensive is the material to create these small batteries? It's a ceramic, so would it be feasible to create bricks which could be used to line or even build smokestacks? Could this be a replacement for solar cells (the article indicates a temperature gradient as a power source, and those are everywhere). Obviously, these don't produce much energy, but ceramics are notoriously easy to mass produce and fashion into all sorts of artsy shapes.
After some thought, there are some things that I would do:
1)Put real doors on cockpit cabins.
2)Make sure at least one steward or crew person could benchpress at least 250lbs.
3)Make 'stun-gloves' available to the crew and stewards/stewards. This would be a device that worked exactly like a stun gun, except the contacts are embeded in a glove so that the holder is not easily disarmed.
None of these simple solutions involve disrupting the lives of passengers or relinquishing power to the state, but they would all have done a hell of a lot more than a box sitting around going off about suspected terrorist every five minutes. If you're going to pick a solution, pick on that will make the situation better.
Slashdot Mirror
I already have a 6 pack, its just hidden by my case of 24.
I prefer to carry my beverage by the keg.
was that their biggest concerns were buying Windows operating systems and security software.
"Heh, I know what we can do now that the economy has soured, Bubba. Let's stop our movement to that free OS that puts us in control. Instead, let's buy an expensive OS that is known for lots of security holes so that we can buy more software to make it secure."
All anti-trust cases are federal cases, it is a federal statute, and one of the few issues that has original jurisdiction in a federal court.
Except for those that are state cases. Yes, there are federal anti-trust statutes, but there are also state anti-trust statutes. And it's possible to be guilty under both. In this case, the states had a gentlemen's agreement to follow the federal's lead, but there's no reason that each state's AG couldn't decide to start a whole new trial of there own.
Good conspiracy theory, but I would have to say look at history in this case. MS is threatened. Sales revenue is in the toilet and the outlook for future sales is even bleaker. They have to come up with a strategy and implement it fast. What do they do?
What they always have done. Rush a half-finished product out the door, and use whatever leverage they have to force it on whoever they can, while keeping the engineers busy in the back room with the bubblegum and duct-tape. Eventually, they'll get around to releasing a decent product.
Course, I won't be buying it then either. 8*)
Sorry, I don't use FreeBSD, BUuut...
With a Mandrake Linux distribution:
* Where do I partition disks ?
From LinuxConf or the control panel.
* Where do I mount and unmount things ?
Click once on the desktop icon.
* Where do I set the colour depth and resolution of my display (on the fly is even better) ?
From LinuxConf or the control panel?
* Where do I load and unload kernel modules ?
From LinuxConf or the control panel.
* Where do I start and stop runnig daemons ?
From LinuxConf or the control panel.
* Where do I share things ?
I dunno? At your local flea market? Linux doesn't have that thing where you drop your pants and tell the whole world to come get some. But if you want to export some files systems through NFS and control access to them...
From LinuxConf or the control panel.
* Where do I reconfigure my network settings ?
From LinuxConf or the control panel.
* Where can I reconfigure my kernel, compile it, isntall it and reboot all by checking a few boxes and hitting a button ?
From LinuxConf or the control panel.
* Etc.
From LinuxConf or the control panel.
The beauty in building from the ground up is that everyone can see your foundation before you stick a gawd-awful structure on top of it. Notice I gave two choice to nearly every question, but they both use the some fully-debugged functionality underneath. Just because this GUI wrapper hasn't made it into your favority UNIX look-alike, doesn't mean that "[t]hey still haven't really delved into the guts of the underlying operating system to try and make them easier to use."
Well, KDE developer won't delve "into the guts of the underlying operating system", because they won't need to. The functionality is already there. There just needs to be some work to make that functionality presentable in a clickety-click way.
how this is ANY different from every previous release of Windows?
Hell, even Linux distributions are starting to follow this trend.
...signifying nothing.
* Letting Microsoft add new features into its flagship Windows software, but requiring the company also to offer a version that doesn't include those additions.
Full OEM version: $30
Stripped OEM version: $80
Profit margin from each system $60
If your losing money on each system, you'll never make it up on volume.
* Banning restrictive contracts that would force computer makers to buy versions of Windows with new features, but allowing financial incentives such as discounts to make those versions more enticing.
How does this differ one iota from how MS cornered the market? Put MS-DOS on on all of your systems and get a price break equal to your profit margin. Install even a single copy of DR-DOS, and you pay full price. The month after MS implemented the policy, DR-DOS sales tanked!
* Forcing Microsoft to reveal parts of its Windows blueprints relating to its Internet browser software, but not the blueprints to Windows.
So everything is now defined as being part of Windows, and IE is now just an interface to some system libraries. Hate it for all those out there who wanted to actually display pages written by FrontPage on an alternative OS.
This has got to be one of the biggest paper tigers since Reagan's immigration bill in the 80's, the reason you now have to 'prove' you're American or have a VISA to work here. Illegal immigrants can produce a photocopy of a drivers liscense and the Human Resource drone at the cleaning company checks off on the form. These rememedies, whether you agree MS is guilty or not, are full of sound and fury, signifiying nothing.
It could actually be better than that. If I'm not mistaken, the Mach 5 figure is airspeed. Airspeed can be increased around the engine using an air scoop to produce a long Venturi chamber. The scoop could be made variable to get predictable performance as the vehicle speed increases.
With this change, the vehicle could be poking along at Mach 2 or 3 and still work.
Do we really want to trust Microsoft to make decisions on our behalf regarding our use of language? Not really.
Bzzt. Wrong. That is exactly what you do when you use a thesaurus. You give another, supposed authority, control over your choice of words because you do not feel that your grasp of the language is comprehensive enough. Most professionals authors accept that there are others who know more about the language than themselves, and thus defer to the more authoritative source.
That being said, this news should simply be a data point in deciding if M$' online thesaurus is as authoritative as something like Webster's.
Does your car still work if the transmission is damaged or half the engine has been riddled with bullet holes?
If the transmission is damaged, should the tire go flat for good measure?
Again, a very unexpected and unnatural scenario. How well do cars function when they run out of fuel?
How the hell is running out of feul or disk space unnatural or unexpected? By your analysis, if you run out of fuel, your car should explode and the manufacturer could just say, "Heh, he let it run out of gas. He should've gotten a bigger tank."
But how well would your refrigerator react if you treated it shoddily such as by leaving it outdoors intermuitently or diconnecting and reconnecting the power several times a day?
I take it outside, the pretty white paint turns yellow. I unplug it, frozen stuff melts...eventually. But I would be PISSED if I unplugged it and the door fell off.
We can expect more intelligence from computer software, because computer software is more intelligent. A program can take reasonable precautions to check if a step succeeded before trying to use the results of that step, and then give a reasonable error message or take an alternative course if the results were unexpected. Instead we get even less with software than we do with other things. If my car won't start, I can have my wife try to crank it while I listen for strange noises under the hood. If my Windows computer won't start I just get a message about an unexpected operation. (My Mandrake-Linux boxen tell all sorts of things about what's going on as they boot up, so I was easily able to find that IPForwarding wasn't working because I hadn't compiled the correct modules.)
That said, I've found that the commercial software I've used just dies without ever telling me anything, so I usually have no clue what happened or how to fix it. OSS tends to report a ton of cryptic garbage that I can do a grep on the source code with. I'd be no better off with OSS in most case if it wasn't for the fact that I'm a software engineer by trade.
The point of the graph is to show what the article pointed out, that the profits are not rapidly increasing at a rapid rate. Microsoft's stock price is maintained at a ridiculous level by rapidly increasing profits. Loss of a rapid increase indicates that a market is maturing or stagnating, which means that the stock value will not rapidly increase in the near future, which means that you might not want to pay much more that what the stock is actually worth.
The graph wasn't there to point out that profits weren't increasing. The graph meant to show that profit increase was slowing down. If you wait till profits are falling before you sell your stock, you will not be optimizing your return.
Actually, you are quite right. If the tables were turned and it was Sony trying to enter the market with this tactic, it would be called 'dumping'.
No I'm not comparing 640x480 to 1600x1200. I'm comparing a crappy 640x480 snapshot to a crappy celluloid snapshot.
I have a crappy snapshot of the 'bosses day' stunt we pulled on the best manager I ever had. Only a year old and already yellowed. But who cares, it's stuck to a cubicle wall with tack pins, for the love of... Why would I care if it was stuck on a website at only '640x480'? Hell, I thought it was cool in '92 when I moved from CGA to a 640x480 monitor and could look at 'high resolution' porn.
Besides, it's the color depth that I usually notice anyway.
And water doesn't *want* to flow downhill, but I wouldn't stand in front of the next flashflood if I were you.
The anthropomorphism is accurate. Once information starts to pass from one person to another, it is very difficult to stop the spread. How many movies are based upon the plot mechanism of a murderer having to kill more and more people to keep his secret? Keeping secrets is a very difficult business, because INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE!!
My GAWD!!
Excuse me for just a moment while I rant, but every time we get a story about some sort of technology that deals with human perception such as sound or sight, we have to have someone who steps up to the plate and explain how the quality sucks.
For instance, in nearly every article about MP3s, we have people telling us how badly the MP3 format trashes CD quality; blithly ignoring the fact that the majority of the people out there listen to those MP3 out of $10 speakers stuck to the side of their monitors which are fed by a $5 SB(arely)Live chipset stuck on their motherboard.
Heh, buddy, here's a clue. Nobody gives a shit!!
These cameras won't be used for artclass. They'll be used by drunk-assed people to take pictures of their mates at company parties. Would you want ultra-clarity in THAT picture? Most people take their drugstore developed snapshots and cram them in a shoebox at the bottom of a mouldy closet for years before ever looking at them. Do you think they give a shit that their yellowed picture of their college graduate when he was standing at the plate in little-league is a little grainy? Here's a little help with the question. NO!!! Hell, they want to remember that he was the one who won the league championship for the team, instead of what he really did which was act as lead benchwarmer. (The great thing about memories is that they get better with the fading 8*)
So take your chitzy "I work for an imaging company..." ass out of here, along with your "MP3s sound bad" buddies, because the rest of us have priorities that rank 'trying to decide if a pic is 150lpi vs 160lpi' right there at the bottom with 'trying to decide if I should rip at 128 or 146 bit.'
I really can't envision Microsoft making a EU compliant Windows sans IE, Windows Media, Chat, etc., for them and a bundled Windows for the rest of the world.
Why? I work in telecom. We make equipment that supports Sonet in Europe and SDH in the US. You have products everywhere that are customized for target markets. The EU is a HUGE, why would M$ flinch at a customized version for such a HUGE market especially when they already have customized version for French, German, Spanish,...?
No, the problem is that the devices that use the fiber are expensive and there is currently a glut of bandwidth. Oh, stop your screaming. It used to be that you'd pay $20/month for 64k of rarely used bandwidth. 64k is the nominal bandwidth assigned to a phone call in modern digital networks. If you made a long distance call (one that traversed central offices), you paid more and by the minute.
An always-on, connect instantly to anywhere in the world, ADSL line has several hundred K of bandwidth, and people scream at anything above $49.95/month. There currently is a glut of supply driving down prices. These next generation inventions will only see production if they can supply more bandwith at the same equipment cost.
In any case, the dark fiber will remain so until someone can light it really cheaply, or someone is willing to pay for the laser.
Do the same thing that they're starting to do for candy and pastry wrappings. Apply a thin layer of aluminum. It only takes a few microns. Check out the wrapping the next time you eat a PopTart.
In a later press release the scientist were quoted as saying, "Ooops! We thought we saw starts BILLIONS of miles away that had been magnified through a gravitational lense, but what we actually saw were some stains from an interns habit of dribbling coffee."
Excuse my cynicism (and my poor spelling), but they're trying to tell us that they're capturing light that was generated billions of years ago. Enough light to charge an optical receiver. I'm currently working on a project that has to generate laser light down a fiber, and pick up the signal after on a few miles, and we're having problems doing that. Occam's Razor applies here, and in my mind there are a mountain of explanations that fit better. Simple noise would be the first one. A body that is much closer but shrouded by some sort of haze is another. Even if space were nearly completely empty, wouldn't there be enough dust after a few zillion miles to make it opaque.
Just how much can we trust people claiming to see ghost (things that may very well be there, but no one else can see them)?
Films are full of hackers who sit in from of brightly colored GUIs and watch as graphical representations of doors open to them as they break into secret computer systems. Out here in the real world, we know that cracking a system can take days, weeks or even months (that's cracking a system, not hacking a VB worm), and the work is boring text.
In the real world, criminals can easily use one-time-pad, unbreakable encryption that'll never be broken in the 30min allowed for a Hollywood plot, and they would never resort to public key technology that the rest of us want to simply make it harder for the gov to spy on us.
Do our representatives have any concept of what real computer work, and real cracking consists of? Do they have a clue of how encryption can work? How would I educate my reps that killing public key tech would do nothing to hurt mafia/Bin Laden types?
GPA only matters at your first job.
Agreed. But it matters at your first job. It determines whether they're jumping at you, or whether they're considering using you to fill in some holes. It makes a difference whether you're invited to IBM's exclusive job fairs like I was and then given first pick at openings for new grads, or having to go through the cattle line with everyone else.
A good first job can make all the difference in a career. 8*)
Don't forget the most important propertis.
-Most of the waste in a standard battery is highly toxic, regardless of which battery technology you choose, with the only differentiating factor being how deadly. The only waste from one of these fuel cells will be a little platic canister that may take eons to degrade, but environmentally will resemble a rock.
-Buy a pack of batteries and let them sit 6 months before you put them to use. How often do you use that flashlight? Do you check to batteries regularly to make sure that it will work when needed? Assuming a reliable enclosure system, methane cells will easily have a shelf life of something bordering on FOREVER!
-Batteries are damned inneficient. AC power is produced from burning fossil fuels, travels over miles of cables, gets stepped down through several transformers, converted to a DC and then very innefficiently charges the battery. Even when your not using you device, the charge slowly drains from the battery due to internal currents. Methane cells will deliver all the energy straight to the device, and energy isn't lost during storage.
There are advantages to miniature feul cells that go far beyond convience.
With team projects that I have experienced, the professors always expect to step back and give one final grade across the group. I usually ended up just doing the damn project, because that was a lot easier than trying to teach the lamers I was stuck with how to code. The lamers didn't mind, 'cause it was an easy A for them (I graduated with a 3.89 GPA). The situation always pissed me off. I paid to be taught, not to babysit lamers. But I wasn't about to let my GPA suffer out of spite.
The way it should have gone was that the professor should break the project down into parts, and each student would be primarily responsible for his/her own part, with some portion of the grade coming from the overall completeness/quality of the end project. Lamers would then be responsible for themselves, and some actual communication would have to occur, because the lamers would have to ask more than, "Is it working yet?" Of course, this would require the professor to accept the role of a manager, and would require at least a cursory participation in each group. Which is why this doesn't happen.
How expensive is the material to create these small batteries? It's a ceramic, so would it be feasible to create bricks which could be used to line or even build smokestacks? Could this be a replacement for solar cells (the article indicates a temperature gradient as a power source, and those are everywhere). Obviously, these don't produce much energy, but ceramics are notoriously easy to mass produce and fashion into all sorts of artsy shapes.
After some thought, there are some things that I would do:
1)Put real doors on cockpit cabins.
2)Make sure at least one steward or crew person could benchpress at least 250lbs.
3)Make 'stun-gloves' available to the crew and stewards/stewards. This would be a device that worked exactly like a stun gun, except the contacts are embeded in a glove so that the holder is not easily disarmed.
None of these simple solutions involve disrupting the lives of passengers or relinquishing power to the state, but they would all have done a hell of a lot more than a box sitting around going off about suspected terrorist every five minutes. If you're going to pick a solution, pick on that will make the situation better.