I hope CVTs and other technologys destroy the hybrid over the next decade. The real fuel savings magic will happen in the transmission, not the motor.
You do realize that many hybrids already employ a CVT transmission, right? The technologies are not mutually exclusive. The Honda Insight was the most famous early instance of a hybrid using CVT technology, but it's by far not the only one.
Having said that, I recently bought a Nissan Versa (hatchback, SL) with CVT, and one of the reasons I opted for the CVT is that it supposedly gets even better gas mileage than the manual transmission option. So far, my fuel economy calculations seem to bear out the EPA claims (30 MPG city, 36 highway). I've also noticed a few side benefits of the CVT -- engaging the air conditioning doesn't seem to rob engine power like it did on my old '95 Saturn SL1, and climbing hills and mountains with cruise control engaged doesn't seem to cause a perceptible drop in speed (whereas most other vehicles I've owned would not be able to keep up).
Yeah, I know A/C units in cars are more efficient than they used to be, but the Versa's power plant is really modest. The CVT seems to give the illusion that there's more power than is really there.
Maybe because your "valid concern" isn't actually all that valid. This issue gets raised repeatedly by a certain vocal minority who hate hybrids / electric vehicles. People who stick their fingers in their ears and say "La la la!" loudly every time the obvious rebuttal is brought up: recycling. Toyota and Honda have good battery recycling programs in place for their hybrid vehicles, and my understanding is that the batteries are specifically engineered to be completely recycled in order to reduce environmental impact.
Compare the toxicity of NiMH to conventional lead-acid batteries, and you'll see that the worst offenders are lead, cadmium, and mercury. Nickel is not nearly as toxic (though recycling is obviously still recommended). The next generation Prius will use Lithium-based batteries, which is also what the Chevy Volt is supposed to use. Lithium is one of the least toxic elements you can make batteries with.
When you compare the measures Toyota is taking to keep hybrid batteries out of landfills with the very real problem that over 40,000 metric tons of lead are lost to landfills every year (because it's impossible to recapture and recycle every single lead-acid car battery), you can see the field of "green" battery choices is heavily in favor of the kinds of technology that hybrid manufacturers are already embracing. Even if Toyota didn't bend over backwards to keep NiMH batteries out of landfills, the nickel would still be far less of an environmental problem than lead already is.
Graphical user interfaces, the way menus and windows look on the screen, breach 65. E-mail programs step on 15
OK, so let's look at historical precedent. Microsoft was sued by Apple (unsuccessfully) for infringement of look-and-feel "copyrights" and various UI patents. This case dragged on for years, and resulted in Apple and Microsoft eventually calling a truce.
Then along came Adobe, which sued Macromedia because Adobe had patents on certain types of tool palettes. Adobe then turned around and bought Macromedia. (Yes, some time elapsed between these two events, but still...)
Now Microsoft is alleging that they own intellectual property used in the Linux kernel and various key pieces of software outside the kernel. The above claims are interesting, considering Microsoft's track record of claiming ownership of various UI elements. So far, Apple and Xerox have remained silent, but they may not for much longer. I'm even more curious about the claim of 15 patents in e-mail. After all, e-mail technology has been with us since ARPANet; SMTP and POP are exceedingly well established, and were certainly not invented by Microsoft; I don't even think MS can claim ownership of IMAP. So, what exactly are they claiming ownership of?
To me, this looks like a ploy to "convert" Linux and all of the ancillary GNU programs and FOSS programs that are widely used. By "convert," I mean obtain ownership of. Since Microsoft can't litigate a particular company out of business in order to kill Linux, they're playing a much sneakier game. They've already bought off Novell so as to avoid having to deal with them in any SCO-style lawsuits. How long before the settlement offers start pouring in -- and the settlements basically mean ownership of the code?
As has been pointed out by others, this article really doesn't demonstrate that Microsoft has revealed any more information -- they'd already broken down the number of patent violations by category a couple days ago. But you can bet that Microsoft will make sure to keep this story in the news as often as possible... especially with an Attorney General in office who's willing to push legislation to favor Microsoft.
Ummm, you do know that at the time McCarthy made his accusations, there were Communists actively spying in the government, right?
While that may be true, it's also true (or alleged to be true) that Senator McCarthy held up a blank sheet of paper when he first claimed he had names of Communist conspirators/spies.
Furthermore, many of the people who were publicly humiliated and accused of being Communists were in fact nothing of the sort. Unfortunately, the problem with defamation is that once the slander/libel is out there, it's really hard to retract. Especially if the party making the outrageous claims is a respected Senator who gets to mobilize government resources to harass people. McCarthy's abuse of the system was his way to attack political opponents, not get rid of real Communist spies.
While it's quite probable that there are some real patent violations in the Linux kernel and in the source code of various GNU tools, that's about all you can say. Whether these infringed patents are even valid is another matter -- and you can certainly bet that FOSS authors are going to go after at least some of Microsoft's patent claims on the grounds that the patents are invalid. For each patent that gets invalidated, Microsoft's patent portfolio becomes just a little bit less valuable...
So it's not in Microsoft's interests to divulge just which patents they feel have been infringed. Worst case scenario, they could lose a good chunk of their portfolio and still have nothing to show for it because the remaining patents that withstood scrutiny might be found to not apply; those patents that do apply could be easily worked around with a modest investment of engineering effort.
What makes me wonder is why Microsoft is bothering to take a page from SCO's playbook. It hasn't worked too well for SCO, so why does Microsoft think they'll fare better with the same strategy?
To tie this back to the McCarthy analogy: even if Microsoft is right that there are infringed patents (which is statistically likely), there's no guarantee that Microsoft has done the due dilligence to ascertain which specific patents have been infringed and leave no margin for doubt. Microsoft has broken down the numbers by OS component (kernel, "GUI," etc.) to tell us how many patents they believe have been violated by each component, but again, we only have their word for that. For all we know, Microsoft is trolling and pulled these numbers out of thin air. Kind of like McCarthy's list.
This seems like a pretty obvious fishing expedition. You know, the kind that involves big nets that scrape the sea floor and damage coral reefs, to use yet another tortured metaphor.
Even the fourth film apparently made it into the cinema
And was so execrable that the director pulled his name from the film (which is why, when I went and saw this turd at the theater -- because I'm a diehard Hellraiser fan -- the credits gave the director as "Alan Smithee," the agreed-upon fake name to use for such circumstances). I guess I should have realized that adding a Sci Fi element to Hellraiser was a mistake. "Hey, it's Hellraiser in space! Cool!" There were plenty of scenes that were shown piecemeal in the trailers which never made it into the final cut of the film, so it's possible there were many last-minute changes the director didn't approve of.
The fifth (Inferno) was actually a decent film, probably better than the fourth, but I believe it was a direct-to-video release. That's about where I stopped watching; I saw the last one (number 8, aka "Hellworld") in the bargain bin at Fry's or Best Buy recently. Didn't even pique my interest. Yet there are still enough fanatics out there willing to buy this stuff that the franchise will live on.
Terminator 3 was a repudiation of everything that James Cameron had to say about free will and choice in the first two Terminator movies, so it's no surprise he bowed out of making a third film. It was really being pushed by Arnold anyway. With the franchise now torn away from its philosophical and artistic roots, it's a lot easier to rob it of the last vestiges of its old self and pimp the results to the buying public. Three more films? That's cake. The Hellraiser film franchise is only one example of making this paradigm work. I could also mention the Prophecy franchise -- those are still being made, now without Christopher Walken. Heck, they even had a crossover between the Hellraiser and Prophecy film franchises!
Most shocking coincidence I've seen thus far: Kari Wuhrer seems to show up in some of the direct-to-video releases late in the life of these franchises. (She shows up in at least one of the later Hellraiser films, and in the fourth Prophecy film.) Anyone taking bets to see if she'll show up in one of these new Terminator films? I wonder if her presence is an indication that a franchise has jumped the shark...?
The idea that the net sum product of the Big Bang is 0 (zero) mass and energy is old, and has been discarded for better theories.
That means for every gram of matter there is a gram of antimatter to offset it. When the two combine they go back to 0. Matter falls into antimatter and vice versa and they cancel each other out.
Except that's not exactly right. Matter and antimatter annihilate, true, but they produce energy as the product of that annihilation. So it's not exactly a zero-sum-game as you seem to think. You may be getting confused by vacuum flux (a real phenomenon that has been experimentally observed), in which pairs of virtual particles and anti-particles are spontaneously created in a vacuum, only to disappear without a trace when they collide again. In that case, you end up with nothing (unless you're talking about a region of space arbitrarily close to the event horizon of a black hole -- that's how Hawking radiation works).
Now that the universe is mature you don't see it anymore since all the matter and antimatter are supposedly far enough away from each other that they don't annihilate anymore. Or at least often.
Try "never." The current standard model in cosmology posits that matter and antimatter were created in nearly equal quantities which condensed out of the energy of the Big Bang. The resultant mass reacted with itself, and the energy produced by these annihilations generated the next wave of particle creation. Eventually, a very slight bias in the production of matter vs. antimatter led to the overwhelming dominance of "normal" baryonic matter in the visible universe.
The idea that there are vast pockets of antimatter out there in the universe has been generally discarded. As for why there was a bias toward "normal" matter and against antimatter, I don't think that has ever been adequately explained, although there are several competing theories. It's interesting to note that in quantum mechanics, you can model antimatter interactions as a sort of time-reversal of matter interactions -- leading to the bizarre notion that antimatter is just normal matter that's "backwards" in time. Perhaps entropy provided enough of a "time arrow" to force a bias in the early universe's composition. (Or, as I sometimes muse, there might be some as-yet-unknown force that is responsible for breaking symmetry in time, and entropy as we understand it is just a product of this force.)
The "antimatter is just matter backwards in time" concept was kind of a shocker to me, taking quantum mechanics classes as a college undergrad. I'd been introduced to the concept by a story or novella that was published in Analog, and had dismissed the idea as hokey... and then one day, I cracked open one of my textbooks and saw a weird little diagram, and asked why there was an electron moving backwards in the time dimension, to which the professor responded, "That's a positron."
there was a "standard" gaming platform in the past - it was called the 3D0.
Actually, it's "3DO" and not "3D0" (the letter O and not the numeral zero). This is an incredibly common mistake, and no true partisan of the platform would have made such a mistake.:-)
As for the reasons for the 3DO's demise, there were many... The licensing structure was set up eventually to share some of the licensing fees with the hardware manufacturers, since they quickly realized that they weren't making money on the hardware. But that revenue sharing model wasn't in place early enough, which caused several of the initial hardware manufacturers to drop out -- some before their hardware made it to market. (AT&T was one of the companies that dropped out of the market before their hardware was even released.)
Eventually, LG dropped out and Matsushita (Panasonic) became the sole provider of 3DO hardware. They then bought the rights to the next generation 3DO chipset and architecture... and then sat on it instead of producing anything resembling a game system. By that point, the games were already drying up.
Another problem was the general quality of the software. The 3DO model lowered the barrier to entry to console development, but Trip Hawkins wasn't selective enough in giving out development licenses, and as a result, some truly awful games made it to market -- not just ports of old PC games, but some truly weak offerings that relied more on FMV than on gameplay.
That's why these rings are spun on their axis (which passes through the center of gravity) to simulate gravity via centripetal acceleration. Some call that "centrifugal force," but my high school physics teacher insisted (as do many textbooks) that this is an erroneous term because the force is "fictitious". (Yeah, being the smart-ass with the top grade in the class, I asked her how she explained the operation of a centrifuge -- especially one large enough to hold people, like certain carnival rides and their even bigger cousins that NASA uses for training of astronauts. The force doesn't feel so fictitious when you're inside the machine.)
There's also a big star in the middle of a ringworld, at least a Niven-style ringworld, so it's even more important not to allow the thing to collapse in on itself; spinning the structure solves this problem, but introduces another. It has been calculated that the substance the ring is made out of, called scrith in Niven's books, needs the tensile strength equivalent to the strong nuclear force to not tear itself apart. But if you can solve that engineering problem, then the ring and anything on its surface will stay ring-like and gravity won't cause everything to fall into the center of mass -- providing you spin the ring.
I love it... "Quantum tunneling of some kind." This "fusion catalyst" theory was proposed as a possible mechanism for explaining cold fusion. Granted, the Pons-Fleischmann experiment has been mostly discredited, but I do recall reading an article in Technology Review several years ago (circa 1994) entitled "Cold Fusion Heats Up." Was a pretty good look at some of the advances in the state of our understanding, and a survey of some of the evidence since that historic experiment. (The article, oddly enough, also discussed deficiencies in the MIT attempt to reproduce the Pons-Fleischmann experiment -- apparently, the apparatus wasn't sufficiently insulated from ambient humidity, which can contaminate the heavy water used in the experiment.) Looking at the Wikipedia article on cold fusion shows that research has been ongoing, and in fact the U.S. Navy has done a bit of research in this area since Pons and Fleischmann.
Extreme climates are cause by differences in temperatures. A warmer overall air and ocean temperature would tend to reduce the extremes because water has a great moderating effect on climate. The warm humid air would even out the climate more than the cooler dry air of today. In the US midwest, frost might become rare and things could grow there that cannot grow there now.
Care to cite your sources on this? Because the IPCC report that was published recently suggests almost the opposite. Already warm climates will become warmer and drier, not more humid; in those climates, water tables will drop as soils are dried out (which also contributes to topsoil erosion due to wind).
As someone else said, who cares if you can grow oranges in Alaska if the bread basket can't continue producing enough for everyone?
In Arizona, we've been seeing abbreviated monsoon seasons and dropping water tables for over a decade. Granted, some of this is attributable to the burgeoning population... but somehow, I don't think the reduction of monsoon rains is completely attributable to population growth. We're also seeing fewer hard frosts in the winter, which means some pest populations (like ticks) are growing out of control.
Even if climate gets 30 degF warmer on average over the next 50 years (not likely) we could certainly adapt in what amounts to about a human life time.
Again, care to cite a source or provide an argument to support your claims? Because the IPCC report predicted that, for example, a 2 degree C temperature increase might benefit crop yields in North America overall, but any increase beyond that was almost certain to have a negative impact.
The effects in Africa and Central America are predicted to be the most profound, since agriculture in those areas is tied to rainfall, and rainfall patterns will most certainly be disrupted by higher temperatures. Combine that with drier soils that get blown away, a la the Great Dust Bowl, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Of course, this is starting to get WAAAAY off topic. Bringing it all back to the original article, and to your comments upon it: Yeah, practical fusion may be a long way off, but the technological benefits just from trying to achieve it are going to pay off big-time. I am particularly heartened by the fact that the approach taken by the researchers in TFA is substantially different from the magnetic confinement approach taken by the tokamak proponents (e.g., ITER). More teams trying various different ways of achieving fusion means an increased probability that one of the approaches will bear fruit.
In the meantime, there are other sustainable energy sources we can exploit, and still be carbon-neutral. Yeah, it's possible that humans could adapt to some dramatic climate shifts, but what would happen to most civilizations on our planet? What would happen to our cultures? These impacts need to be weighed too.
Not complaining about the Slashdot article/summary, but the ITworld article linked to. Not that this surprises me, but I noticed that the article:
specifically fails to mention with movie studios back which formats (because that would make Blu-Ray look better, since the vast majority of studios are backing Blu-Ray, and only one studio is exclusively backing HD-DVD)
specifically fails to provide a comprehensive list of companies supporting Blu-Ray, but provides a comprehensive list of companies backing HD-DVD, which strongly skews the picture
cherry-picks which player hardware to mention at the end of the article, making the Blu-Ray and hybrid player options seem more expensive while completely omitting mention of both Sony's PS3 and the Xbox 360 add-on HD-DVD drive
One might draw the conclusion that this article was written by HD-DVD partisans.
Piss off IBM so much they dump Apple as a customer and force Apple to run to PASemi, AMD, and then finally Intel
I realize this has already been modded flamebait, but I just had to point out that Apple dumped IBM, not the other way around. I challenge anyone to cite a credible source that says otherwise. IBM wouldn't deliver the kind of chips Apple wanted (G5 chips usable in mobile applications) without Apple forking over a substantial amount of money to help IBM finish the development cycle. That's assuming IBM ever made much headway on that effort to begin with.
(In fairness to IBM, they couldn't justify making the G5 a high priority and soak up all the R&D costs to make it low-power and fit within a laptop-appropriate thermal envelope. They couldn't justify that because the volume of systems that Apple ships is simply not large enough for IBM.)
Also, while it's true that Apple shopped around to both AMD and Intel, they never sourced processors from AMD, so it's a bit misleading to say that they ran "to [...] AMD, and then finally Intel."
As for delaying the OS because of the iPhone, I don't see that as a major problem. OS X 10.4 is still competitive with Windows, even Vista. There's no reason to rush Leopard (10.5) to market, and the users wouldn't stand for a rushed OS product since, you know, they tend to rely on the stability of their Macs for productivity and so forth. The company has finite engineering and QA resources, and since they pre-announced the iPhone, the clock is ticking on that product. They don't dare slip the iPhone schedule or the competition will eat their lunch, and the iPhone will be stillborn. The consequences of this logic should be obvious.
As a general rule, the buying public is more tolerant of software delays than hardware delays.
Partisan: "an adherent or supporter of a person, group, party, or cause, esp. a person who shows a biased, emotional allegiance"
Don't know where "PR hitmen" came from, but the definition of partisan does seem to more-or-less describe Bruce Perens and a host of other advocates. Bruce might object to the terms "biased" or "emotional," but I think one could objectively point to other opinion pieces he's written where he shows some bias at the very least. Everyone is biased, so this isn't a particularly strong condemnation.
Totally agree: historic architecture needs preservation, but not necessarily the one-room shack where someone made history.
Case in point, MIT built a bunch of throw-away housing (read: barracks) and research buildings during World War II. The buildings were scheduled to be razed, and then that was halted because someone decided that they were a historical landmark -- because that's where RADAR was invented.
The buildings were still an eyesore when I was a student back in 1988-92, though there were ongoing projects to refurbish them and make them not quite so dumpy. ROTC was still using one of the buildings. But it would have been so much better to build some new, modern structures instead of preserving the old ones.
It amazes me that a couple people corrected this guy on the spelling of "Vonage," yet not one person commented that the correct phrase (you know, the one in the subject line) should read: "You reap what you sow." You sow seeds (and then reap the crop when it's harvest time). You sew clothes.
When it is accompanied by a copyright notice? Was copyright information included in the digital audio metatags?
I would think that if the answer is "no", then copyright does not apply.
Not necessarily true. Modern copyright law that is in accord with the Berne convention does not require an explicit copyright notice for copyright protection to be granted. Of course, copyright notices help cement your claim of copyright, but they are not required. Merely publishing something is all that is required, and "publish" is a very broad word that can mean a lot of things. (Distributing some data in just about any medium can constitute publication.)
One of the reasons that explicit copyright notices are no longer required is that it's hard to come up with boilerplate language that will be understandable in all territories, where different languages come into play for example. Another reason is that the internationally recognized C-in-circle copyright symbol is not available in every computer font and on every typewriter and printer in existence; many computer programmers use (C) as an approximation of this symbol, but it is not legally equivalent to the standard C-in-circle symbol.
IANAL, but I am fairly certain of my assertions, at least in regard to United States copyright law. I am pretty sure this understanding extends to the basic laws of aligned nations. See also the Wikipedia entry on the Berne Convention, specifically the section entitled "The content of the agreement." According to this section,
Copyright under the Berne Convention must be automatic; it is prohibited to require formal registration [...] More detailed information is available here, which explains:
Notice was required under the 1976 Copyright Act. This requirement was eliminated when the United States adhered to the Berne Convention, effective March 1, 1989.
Of further interest, I noticed the following from the same source:
The "C in a circle" notice is used only on "visually perceptible copies." Certain kinds of works--for example, musical, dramatic, and literary works--may be fixed not in "copies" but by means of sound in an audio recording. Since audio recordings such as audio tapes and phonograph disks are "phonorecords" and not "copies," the "C in a circle" notice is not used to indicate protection of the underlying musical, dramatic, or literary work that is recorded.
The very next section explains the proper way to apply a copyright notice to a sound recording; again, this is not absolutely required.
The author of the HardOCP article wrote such a harsh conclusion that the Editor felt obligated to immediately follow the article's conclusion with his own disclaimer:
Editor's Note: The fact is that Vista is far from "unfit for any user," and this statement by the author is simply incorrect. If you read the discussion thread linked below you will find there are many Vista users that are having positive experiences. The author's experiences are his own and I think a great look into just some of the complications that can come with upgrading to Vista. Some have had worse experiences and some have had better.
Gee, think maybe they're worried about getting review copies of software from MSFT in the future? Granted, the author of the article should have qualified his "unfit for any user" statement with the usual "in my opinion" boilerplate language, but then again, reviews are always at least partially subjective.
From another perspective, the Editor is technically correct: what might be unacceptable to one user might be perfectly acceptable to another user. For casual users who just want to play games or surf the web, occasional mysterious reboots or data loss might be perfectly fine. For users working on mission critical projects, though, I'd be willing to bet that none would tolerate data loss -- no matter how infrequent.
What ever happened to the notion that system crashes and bad system behavior are exceptional circumstances, rather than business as usual? I don't just blame Microsoft for this -- it seems the whole computer industry is complicit.
Don't forget Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. There's another example of a book where the author feared the SciFi stigma, so she insisted it wasn't science fiction. Never mind that she won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for it.
Actually, I had a different experience of the whole "Doctor as a woman" thing. I'd never heard of Curse of Fatal Death before (sorry, not a die-hard Dr. Who fan), but when I was an undergrad, MITSFS ran a marathon for incoming freshmen which included some amusing fan-produced "episodes" of various shows. There was an entire tape full of episodes featuring a female Doctor, though I don't remember who played the role. It was fun, though, with production values that approached those of the real show. I guess this is something that gets passed around at science fiction conventions. I know, hardly canon, but then CoFD doesn't sound like it's considered canon either.
According to this article, it looks as though Russell T. Davies is considering Sigourney Weaver for such a role, though I can't imagine having a Yank on the show would go over well with UK audiences.
Mostly agreed, though I'm not quite as "down" on nu-metal as some purists are. (Disturbed appeals to me for some reason, and a lot of folks classify them as nu-metal.)
What got me into metal was the neo-classical rock movement (Yngwie Malmsteen, older Tony MacAlpine before he became more jazz-influenced). Malmsteen combined Paganini and heavy metal; MacAlpine did similar things with Chopin. Cool stuff IMHO. Definitely not to everyone's liking.
Older Metallica is likewise technically very good, and you can tell these guys had some classical training. I am talking about the Master of Puppets era.
Sadly, I didn't discover any of this stuff until my college days. Once I did, though, it was a case of, "Where have you been all my life?"
If they start copying the visual aspects too closely, they are in danger of infringing on MS's copyrights on the look and feel. If not truely infringing, they may get close enough to get tied up in lawsuits for... forever.
You mean like how Apple prevailed in its L&F lawsuits against Microsoft that dragged on for years? Oh wait, Apple didn't prevail, and eventually the two companies called a truce (with some money changing hands in the process). I seem to recall the EFF and/or FSF advocating boycotts on Apple products for years because of the bad legal precedent that "look-and-feel copyright" would have created.
Then again, Adobe had more success suing Macromedia over various patented UI elements -- but in this case, the elements in question had the force of patent law and not mere copyright law.
The upshot of what I'm saying is, the whole notion of a copyright on look-and-feel didn't hold up historically in courts, and the only way to successfully sue over infringing someone's L&F is to complain about "trade dress" infringement (related to trademark law IIRC) or violation of patents. The patent approach seems to work best.
This misconception has caused no end of headaches for one company I used to do consulting work for. The company was outfitting fleets of cement trucks with CDPD tracker modems -- these devices had a fully-featured GPS receiver, and could be configured to transmit latitude and longitude to a specific IP address on a specific port at a specified interval. (Nuts-and-bolts: the data was typically sent as UDP packets, so no guarantee of delivery, and CDPD is an older standard for data transmission over digital cell networks, with a max throughput of maybe 64 kbps.) We had software that would aggregate the GPS data for the entire fleet at a server, and then client software which would talk to the server and show real-time reports on the fleet, as well as determine who was at a job site and how long they were there, etc.
Unlike what another poster stated regarding cell phones, the tracker devices we used did all the GPS processing on-board, so what was sent via UDP was either a NMEA string (easily parsed) or some simple proprietary binary format. We would do further corrections at the server to account for various map books and which USGS survey data they were based off of.
Anyway, the problem we has was the truck drivers and their misconception of how GPS worked. Many of the more paranoid truck drivers (and there were a lot of them) were absolutely convinced that we were beaming personal data about the drivers themselves to GPS satellites, forwarding it to who knows where. Trying to explain to these folks that GPS doesn't work that way only resulted in angry confrontations. When I started working on a badging project so that our client could further track the comings-and-goings of the drivers, the hostility and resistance reached alarming levels, to the point where I almost couldn't get work done.
Then again, the whole reason for the software's existence in the first place was to provide documentary proof of the misconduct of drivers. Things like guys taking half-hour naps in their trucks after finishing a job site, or over-slumping their load of concrete so they can sell some excess concrete to a buddy finishing his driveway... We implemented autmated job-site entry and exit discovery because we found that giving drivers a set of pushbuttons to signal when they were starting or stopping a job was just a recipe for abuse. (Funny enough, we kept the pushbuttons to see just how big the discrepancies were between when drivers said they were working and when the GPS claimed they were working. It was eye-opening.)
The drivers were unionized in most cases, so a high standard of proof had to be met. I'm sure that contributed to the air of hostility. But it's also true that many drivers were using fake credentials (many being undocumented immigrants), so the paranoia over a potential loss of privacy and transmission of personal data to a "big bird in the sky" wasn't just because people were worried about getting caught napping on company time.
Not mentioning the names of any companies (nor any specific geographic place names) to avoid legal hassles.
Actually, it was called "The Great Global Warming Swindle," and was mentioned by several other folks commenting here. One other commenter was kind enough to point out that RealClimate has a response to this documentary, and you owe it to yourself to read the response. Particularly, one of the climate scientists who appeared in the documentary claims that he was quoted severely out of context, and his e-mail follow-up is in the comments (number 109, though it says it's comment number 108 in an edit near the top of the article) on the RealClimate page I linked.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that many hybrids already employ a CVT transmission, right? The technologies are not mutually exclusive. The Honda Insight was the most famous early instance of a hybrid using CVT technology, but it's by far not the only one.
Having said that, I recently bought a Nissan Versa (hatchback, SL) with CVT, and one of the reasons I opted for the CVT is that it supposedly gets even better gas mileage than the manual transmission option. So far, my fuel economy calculations seem to bear out the EPA claims (30 MPG city, 36 highway). I've also noticed a few side benefits of the CVT -- engaging the air conditioning doesn't seem to rob engine power like it did on my old '95 Saturn SL1, and climbing hills and mountains with cruise control engaged doesn't seem to cause a perceptible drop in speed (whereas most other vehicles I've owned would not be able to keep up).
Yeah, I know A/C units in cars are more efficient than they used to be, but the Versa's power plant is really modest. The CVT seems to give the illusion that there's more power than is really there.
Maybe because your "valid concern" isn't actually all that valid. This issue gets raised repeatedly by a certain vocal minority who hate hybrids / electric vehicles. People who stick their fingers in their ears and say "La la la!" loudly every time the obvious rebuttal is brought up: recycling. Toyota and Honda have good battery recycling programs in place for their hybrid vehicles, and my understanding is that the batteries are specifically engineered to be completely recycled in order to reduce environmental impact.
Compare the toxicity of NiMH to conventional lead-acid batteries, and you'll see that the worst offenders are lead, cadmium, and mercury. Nickel is not nearly as toxic (though recycling is obviously still recommended). The next generation Prius will use Lithium-based batteries, which is also what the Chevy Volt is supposed to use. Lithium is one of the least toxic elements you can make batteries with.
When you compare the measures Toyota is taking to keep hybrid batteries out of landfills with the very real problem that over 40,000 metric tons of lead are lost to landfills every year (because it's impossible to recapture and recycle every single lead-acid car battery), you can see the field of "green" battery choices is heavily in favor of the kinds of technology that hybrid manufacturers are already embracing. Even if Toyota didn't bend over backwards to keep NiMH batteries out of landfills, the nickel would still be far less of an environmental problem than lead already is.
OK, so let's look at historical precedent. Microsoft was sued by Apple (unsuccessfully) for infringement of look-and-feel "copyrights" and various UI patents. This case dragged on for years, and resulted in Apple and Microsoft eventually calling a truce.
Then along came Adobe, which sued Macromedia because Adobe had patents on certain types of tool palettes. Adobe then turned around and bought Macromedia. (Yes, some time elapsed between these two events, but still...)
Now Microsoft is alleging that they own intellectual property used in the Linux kernel and various key pieces of software outside the kernel. The above claims are interesting, considering Microsoft's track record of claiming ownership of various UI elements. So far, Apple and Xerox have remained silent, but they may not for much longer. I'm even more curious about the claim of 15 patents in e-mail. After all, e-mail technology has been with us since ARPANet; SMTP and POP are exceedingly well established, and were certainly not invented by Microsoft; I don't even think MS can claim ownership of IMAP. So, what exactly are they claiming ownership of?
To me, this looks like a ploy to "convert" Linux and all of the ancillary GNU programs and FOSS programs that are widely used. By "convert," I mean obtain ownership of. Since Microsoft can't litigate a particular company out of business in order to kill Linux, they're playing a much sneakier game. They've already bought off Novell so as to avoid having to deal with them in any SCO-style lawsuits. How long before the settlement offers start pouring in -- and the settlements basically mean ownership of the code?
As has been pointed out by others, this article really doesn't demonstrate that Microsoft has revealed any more information -- they'd already broken down the number of patent violations by category a couple days ago. But you can bet that Microsoft will make sure to keep this story in the news as often as possible... especially with an Attorney General in office who's willing to push legislation to favor Microsoft.
Not in the United States. In the U.S., first-to-invent is the rule, not first-to-file.
While that may be true, it's also true (or alleged to be true) that Senator McCarthy held up a blank sheet of paper when he first claimed he had names of Communist conspirators/spies.
Furthermore, many of the people who were publicly humiliated and accused of being Communists were in fact nothing of the sort. Unfortunately, the problem with defamation is that once the slander/libel is out there, it's really hard to retract. Especially if the party making the outrageous claims is a respected Senator who gets to mobilize government resources to harass people. McCarthy's abuse of the system was his way to attack political opponents, not get rid of real Communist spies.
While it's quite probable that there are some real patent violations in the Linux kernel and in the source code of various GNU tools, that's about all you can say. Whether these infringed patents are even valid is another matter -- and you can certainly bet that FOSS authors are going to go after at least some of Microsoft's patent claims on the grounds that the patents are invalid. For each patent that gets invalidated, Microsoft's patent portfolio becomes just a little bit less valuable...
So it's not in Microsoft's interests to divulge just which patents they feel have been infringed. Worst case scenario, they could lose a good chunk of their portfolio and still have nothing to show for it because the remaining patents that withstood scrutiny might be found to not apply; those patents that do apply could be easily worked around with a modest investment of engineering effort.
What makes me wonder is why Microsoft is bothering to take a page from SCO's playbook. It hasn't worked too well for SCO, so why does Microsoft think they'll fare better with the same strategy?
To tie this back to the McCarthy analogy: even if Microsoft is right that there are infringed patents (which is statistically likely), there's no guarantee that Microsoft has done the due dilligence to ascertain which specific patents have been infringed and leave no margin for doubt. Microsoft has broken down the numbers by OS component (kernel, "GUI," etc.) to tell us how many patents they believe have been violated by each component, but again, we only have their word for that. For all we know, Microsoft is trolling and pulled these numbers out of thin air. Kind of like McCarthy's list.
This seems like a pretty obvious fishing expedition. You know, the kind that involves big nets that scrape the sea floor and damage coral reefs, to use yet another tortured metaphor.
And was so execrable that the director pulled his name from the film (which is why, when I went and saw this turd at the theater -- because I'm a diehard Hellraiser fan -- the credits gave the director as "Alan Smithee," the agreed-upon fake name to use for such circumstances). I guess I should have realized that adding a Sci Fi element to Hellraiser was a mistake. "Hey, it's Hellraiser in space! Cool!" There were plenty of scenes that were shown piecemeal in the trailers which never made it into the final cut of the film, so it's possible there were many last-minute changes the director didn't approve of.
The fifth (Inferno) was actually a decent film, probably better than the fourth, but I believe it was a direct-to-video release. That's about where I stopped watching; I saw the last one (number 8, aka "Hellworld") in the bargain bin at Fry's or Best Buy recently. Didn't even pique my interest. Yet there are still enough fanatics out there willing to buy this stuff that the franchise will live on.
Terminator 3 was a repudiation of everything that James Cameron had to say about free will and choice in the first two Terminator movies, so it's no surprise he bowed out of making a third film. It was really being pushed by Arnold anyway. With the franchise now torn away from its philosophical and artistic roots, it's a lot easier to rob it of the last vestiges of its old self and pimp the results to the buying public. Three more films? That's cake. The Hellraiser film franchise is only one example of making this paradigm work. I could also mention the Prophecy franchise -- those are still being made, now without Christopher Walken. Heck, they even had a crossover between the Hellraiser and Prophecy film franchises!
Most shocking coincidence I've seen thus far: Kari Wuhrer seems to show up in some of the direct-to-video releases late in the life of these franchises. (She shows up in at least one of the later Hellraiser films, and in the fourth Prophecy film.) Anyone taking bets to see if she'll show up in one of these new Terminator films? I wonder if her presence is an indication that a franchise has jumped the shark...?
The idea that the net sum product of the Big Bang is 0 (zero) mass and energy is old, and has been discarded for better theories.
Except that's not exactly right. Matter and antimatter annihilate, true, but they produce energy as the product of that annihilation. So it's not exactly a zero-sum-game as you seem to think. You may be getting confused by vacuum flux (a real phenomenon that has been experimentally observed), in which pairs of virtual particles and anti-particles are spontaneously created in a vacuum, only to disappear without a trace when they collide again. In that case, you end up with nothing (unless you're talking about a region of space arbitrarily close to the event horizon of a black hole -- that's how Hawking radiation works).
Try "never." The current standard model in cosmology posits that matter and antimatter were created in nearly equal quantities which condensed out of the energy of the Big Bang. The resultant mass reacted with itself, and the energy produced by these annihilations generated the next wave of particle creation. Eventually, a very slight bias in the production of matter vs. antimatter led to the overwhelming dominance of "normal" baryonic matter in the visible universe.
The idea that there are vast pockets of antimatter out there in the universe has been generally discarded. As for why there was a bias toward "normal" matter and against antimatter, I don't think that has ever been adequately explained, although there are several competing theories. It's interesting to note that in quantum mechanics, you can model antimatter interactions as a sort of time-reversal of matter interactions -- leading to the bizarre notion that antimatter is just normal matter that's "backwards" in time. Perhaps entropy provided enough of a "time arrow" to force a bias in the early universe's composition. (Or, as I sometimes muse, there might be some as-yet-unknown force that is responsible for breaking symmetry in time, and entropy as we understand it is just a product of this force.)
The "antimatter is just matter backwards in time" concept was kind of a shocker to me, taking quantum mechanics classes as a college undergrad. I'd been introduced to the concept by a story or novella that was published in Analog, and had dismissed the idea as hokey... and then one day, I cracked open one of my textbooks and saw a weird little diagram, and asked why there was an electron moving backwards in the time dimension, to which the professor responded, "That's a positron."
Actually, it's "3DO" and not "3D0" (the letter O and not the numeral zero). This is an incredibly common mistake, and no true partisan of the platform would have made such a mistake.
As for the reasons for the 3DO's demise, there were many... The licensing structure was set up eventually to share some of the licensing fees with the hardware manufacturers, since they quickly realized that they weren't making money on the hardware. But that revenue sharing model wasn't in place early enough, which caused several of the initial hardware manufacturers to drop out -- some before their hardware made it to market. (AT&T was one of the companies that dropped out of the market before their hardware was even released.)
Eventually, LG dropped out and Matsushita (Panasonic) became the sole provider of 3DO hardware. They then bought the rights to the next generation 3DO chipset and architecture... and then sat on it instead of producing anything resembling a game system. By that point, the games were already drying up.
Another problem was the general quality of the software. The 3DO model lowered the barrier to entry to console development, but Trip Hawkins wasn't selective enough in giving out development licenses, and as a result, some truly awful games made it to market -- not just ports of old PC games, but some truly weak offerings that relied more on FMV than on gameplay.
That's why these rings are spun on their axis (which passes through the center of gravity) to simulate gravity via centripetal acceleration. Some call that "centrifugal force," but my high school physics teacher insisted (as do many textbooks) that this is an erroneous term because the force is "fictitious". (Yeah, being the smart-ass with the top grade in the class, I asked her how she explained the operation of a centrifuge -- especially one large enough to hold people, like certain carnival rides and their even bigger cousins that NASA uses for training of astronauts. The force doesn't feel so fictitious when you're inside the machine.)
There's also a big star in the middle of a ringworld, at least a Niven-style ringworld, so it's even more important not to allow the thing to collapse in on itself; spinning the structure solves this problem, but introduces another. It has been calculated that the substance the ring is made out of, called scrith in Niven's books, needs the tensile strength equivalent to the strong nuclear force to not tear itself apart. But if you can solve that engineering problem, then the ring and anything on its surface will stay ring-like and gravity won't cause everything to fall into the center of mass -- providing you spin the ring.
I love it... "Quantum tunneling of some kind." This "fusion catalyst" theory was proposed as a possible mechanism for explaining cold fusion. Granted, the Pons-Fleischmann experiment has been mostly discredited, but I do recall reading an article in Technology Review several years ago (circa 1994) entitled "Cold Fusion Heats Up." Was a pretty good look at some of the advances in the state of our understanding, and a survey of some of the evidence since that historic experiment. (The article, oddly enough, also discussed deficiencies in the MIT attempt to reproduce the Pons-Fleischmann experiment -- apparently, the apparatus wasn't sufficiently insulated from ambient humidity, which can contaminate the heavy water used in the experiment.) Looking at the Wikipedia article on cold fusion shows that research has been ongoing, and in fact the U.S. Navy has done a bit of research in this area since Pons and Fleischmann.
Care to cite your sources on this? Because the IPCC report that was published recently suggests almost the opposite. Already warm climates will become warmer and drier, not more humid; in those climates, water tables will drop as soils are dried out (which also contributes to topsoil erosion due to wind).
As someone else said, who cares if you can grow oranges in Alaska if the bread basket can't continue producing enough for everyone?
In Arizona, we've been seeing abbreviated monsoon seasons and dropping water tables for over a decade. Granted, some of this is attributable to the burgeoning population... but somehow, I don't think the reduction of monsoon rains is completely attributable to population growth. We're also seeing fewer hard frosts in the winter, which means some pest populations (like ticks) are growing out of control.
Again, care to cite a source or provide an argument to support your claims? Because the IPCC report predicted that, for example, a 2 degree C temperature increase might benefit crop yields in North America overall, but any increase beyond that was almost certain to have a negative impact.
The effects in Africa and Central America are predicted to be the most profound, since agriculture in those areas is tied to rainfall, and rainfall patterns will most certainly be disrupted by higher temperatures. Combine that with drier soils that get blown away, a la the Great Dust Bowl, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Of course, this is starting to get WAAAAY off topic. Bringing it all back to the original article, and to your comments upon it: Yeah, practical fusion may be a long way off, but the technological benefits just from trying to achieve it are going to pay off big-time. I am particularly heartened by the fact that the approach taken by the researchers in TFA is substantially different from the magnetic confinement approach taken by the tokamak proponents (e.g., ITER). More teams trying various different ways of achieving fusion means an increased probability that one of the approaches will bear fruit.
In the meantime, there are other sustainable energy sources we can exploit, and still be carbon-neutral. Yeah, it's possible that humans could adapt to some dramatic climate shifts, but what would happen to most civilizations on our planet? What would happen to our cultures? These impacts need to be weighed too.
One might draw the conclusion that this article was written by HD-DVD partisans.
I realize this has already been modded flamebait, but I just had to point out that Apple dumped IBM, not the other way around. I challenge anyone to cite a credible source that says otherwise. IBM wouldn't deliver the kind of chips Apple wanted (G5 chips usable in mobile applications) without Apple forking over a substantial amount of money to help IBM finish the development cycle. That's assuming IBM ever made much headway on that effort to begin with.
(In fairness to IBM, they couldn't justify making the G5 a high priority and soak up all the R&D costs to make it low-power and fit within a laptop-appropriate thermal envelope. They couldn't justify that because the volume of systems that Apple ships is simply not large enough for IBM.)
Also, while it's true that Apple shopped around to both AMD and Intel, they never sourced processors from AMD, so it's a bit misleading to say that they ran "to [...] AMD, and then finally Intel."
As for delaying the OS because of the iPhone, I don't see that as a major problem. OS X 10.4 is still competitive with Windows, even Vista. There's no reason to rush Leopard (10.5) to market, and the users wouldn't stand for a rushed OS product since, you know, they tend to rely on the stability of their Macs for productivity and so forth. The company has finite engineering and QA resources, and since they pre-announced the iPhone, the clock is ticking on that product. They don't dare slip the iPhone schedule or the competition will eat their lunch, and the iPhone will be stillborn. The consequences of this logic should be obvious.
As a general rule, the buying public is more tolerant of software delays than hardware delays.
Partisan: "an adherent or supporter of a person, group, party, or cause, esp. a person who shows a biased, emotional allegiance"
Don't know where "PR hitmen" came from, but the definition of partisan does seem to more-or-less describe Bruce Perens and a host of other advocates. Bruce might object to the terms "biased" or "emotional," but I think one could objectively point to other opinion pieces he's written where he shows some bias at the very least. Everyone is biased, so this isn't a particularly strong condemnation.
Totally agree: historic architecture needs preservation, but not necessarily the one-room shack where someone made history.
Case in point, MIT built a bunch of throw-away housing (read: barracks) and research buildings during World War II. The buildings were scheduled to be razed, and then that was halted because someone decided that they were a historical landmark -- because that's where RADAR was invented.
The buildings were still an eyesore when I was a student back in 1988-92, though there were ongoing projects to refurbish them and make them not quite so dumpy. ROTC was still using one of the buildings. But it would have been so much better to build some new, modern structures instead of preserving the old ones.
It amazes me that a couple people corrected this guy on the spelling of "Vonage," yet not one person commented that the correct phrase (you know, the one in the subject line) should read: "You reap what you sow." You sow seeds (and then reap the crop when it's harvest time). You sew clothes.
Not necessarily true. Modern copyright law that is in accord with the Berne convention does not require an explicit copyright notice for copyright protection to be granted. Of course, copyright notices help cement your claim of copyright, but they are not required. Merely publishing something is all that is required, and "publish" is a very broad word that can mean a lot of things. (Distributing some data in just about any medium can constitute publication.)
One of the reasons that explicit copyright notices are no longer required is that it's hard to come up with boilerplate language that will be understandable in all territories, where different languages come into play for example. Another reason is that the internationally recognized C-in-circle copyright symbol is not available in every computer font and on every typewriter and printer in existence; many computer programmers use (C) as an approximation of this symbol, but it is not legally equivalent to the standard C-in-circle symbol.
IANAL, but I am fairly certain of my assertions, at least in regard to United States copyright law. I am pretty sure this understanding extends to the basic laws of aligned nations. See also the Wikipedia entry on the Berne Convention, specifically the section entitled "The content of the agreement." According to this section, Copyright under the Berne Convention must be automatic; it is prohibited to require formal registration [...] More detailed information is available here, which explains:
Of further interest, I noticed the following from the same source:The very next section explains the proper way to apply a copyright notice to a sound recording; again, this is not absolutely required.
From another perspective, the Editor is technically correct: what might be unacceptable to one user might be perfectly acceptable to another user. For casual users who just want to play games or surf the web, occasional mysterious reboots or data loss might be perfectly fine. For users working on mission critical projects, though, I'd be willing to bet that none would tolerate data loss -- no matter how infrequent.
What ever happened to the notion that system crashes and bad system behavior are exceptional circumstances, rather than business as usual? I don't just blame Microsoft for this -- it seems the whole computer industry is complicit.
Don't forget Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. There's another example of a book where the author feared the SciFi stigma, so she insisted it wasn't science fiction. Never mind that she won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for it.
Or a mini-series. Maybe two mini-series, one for each trilogy.
Actually, I had a different experience of the whole "Doctor as a woman" thing. I'd never heard of Curse of Fatal Death before (sorry, not a die-hard Dr. Who fan), but when I was an undergrad, MITSFS ran a marathon for incoming freshmen which included some amusing fan-produced "episodes" of various shows. There was an entire tape full of episodes featuring a female Doctor, though I don't remember who played the role. It was fun, though, with production values that approached those of the real show. I guess this is something that gets passed around at science fiction conventions. I know, hardly canon, but then CoFD doesn't sound like it's considered canon either.
According to this article, it looks as though Russell T. Davies is considering Sigourney Weaver for such a role, though I can't imagine having a Yank on the show would go over well with UK audiences.
Mostly agreed, though I'm not quite as "down" on nu-metal as some purists are. (Disturbed appeals to me for some reason, and a lot of folks classify them as nu-metal.)
What got me into metal was the neo-classical rock movement (Yngwie Malmsteen, older Tony MacAlpine before he became more jazz-influenced). Malmsteen combined Paganini and heavy metal; MacAlpine did similar things with Chopin. Cool stuff IMHO. Definitely not to everyone's liking.
Older Metallica is likewise technically very good, and you can tell these guys had some classical training. I am talking about the Master of Puppets era.
Sadly, I didn't discover any of this stuff until my college days. Once I did, though, it was a case of, "Where have you been all my life?"
You mean like how Apple prevailed in its L&F lawsuits against Microsoft that dragged on for years? Oh wait, Apple didn't prevail, and eventually the two companies called a truce (with some money changing hands in the process). I seem to recall the EFF and/or FSF advocating boycotts on Apple products for years because of the bad legal precedent that "look-and-feel copyright" would have created.
Then again, Adobe had more success suing Macromedia over various patented UI elements -- but in this case, the elements in question had the force of patent law and not mere copyright law.
The upshot of what I'm saying is, the whole notion of a copyright on look-and-feel didn't hold up historically in courts, and the only way to successfully sue over infringing someone's L&F is to complain about "trade dress" infringement (related to trademark law IIRC) or violation of patents. The patent approach seems to work best.
This misconception has caused no end of headaches for one company I used to do consulting work for. The company was outfitting fleets of cement trucks with CDPD tracker modems -- these devices had a fully-featured GPS receiver, and could be configured to transmit latitude and longitude to a specific IP address on a specific port at a specified interval. (Nuts-and-bolts: the data was typically sent as UDP packets, so no guarantee of delivery, and CDPD is an older standard for data transmission over digital cell networks, with a max throughput of maybe 64 kbps.) We had software that would aggregate the GPS data for the entire fleet at a server, and then client software which would talk to the server and show real-time reports on the fleet, as well as determine who was at a job site and how long they were there, etc.
Unlike what another poster stated regarding cell phones, the tracker devices we used did all the GPS processing on-board, so what was sent via UDP was either a NMEA string (easily parsed) or some simple proprietary binary format. We would do further corrections at the server to account for various map books and which USGS survey data they were based off of.
Anyway, the problem we has was the truck drivers and their misconception of how GPS worked. Many of the more paranoid truck drivers (and there were a lot of them) were absolutely convinced that we were beaming personal data about the drivers themselves to GPS satellites, forwarding it to who knows where. Trying to explain to these folks that GPS doesn't work that way only resulted in angry confrontations. When I started working on a badging project so that our client could further track the comings-and-goings of the drivers, the hostility and resistance reached alarming levels, to the point where I almost couldn't get work done.
Then again, the whole reason for the software's existence in the first place was to provide documentary proof of the misconduct of drivers. Things like guys taking half-hour naps in their trucks after finishing a job site, or over-slumping their load of concrete so they can sell some excess concrete to a buddy finishing his driveway... We implemented autmated job-site entry and exit discovery because we found that giving drivers a set of pushbuttons to signal when they were starting or stopping a job was just a recipe for abuse. (Funny enough, we kept the pushbuttons to see just how big the discrepancies were between when drivers said they were working and when the GPS claimed they were working. It was eye-opening.)
The drivers were unionized in most cases, so a high standard of proof had to be met. I'm sure that contributed to the air of hostility. But it's also true that many drivers were using fake credentials (many being undocumented immigrants), so the paranoia over a potential loss of privacy and transmission of personal data to a "big bird in the sky" wasn't just because people were worried about getting caught napping on company time.
Not mentioning the names of any companies (nor any specific geographic place names) to avoid legal hassles.
Actually, it was called "The Great Global Warming Swindle," and was mentioned by several other folks commenting here. One other commenter was kind enough to point out that RealClimate has a response to this documentary, and you owe it to yourself to read the response. Particularly, one of the climate scientists who appeared in the documentary claims that he was quoted severely out of context, and his e-mail follow-up is in the comments (number 109, though it says it's comment number 108 in an edit near the top of the article) on the RealClimate page I linked.