Deaths per mile traveled are spectacularly higher,... You're "about" four times safer driving on road than biking... roads are for cars and motorcycles, not for bicycles.
Moreover, I think one of the points of TFA is that the bike infrastructures (i.e., bike lanes) is being expanded, which is likely to reduce the accident rate (per bike-mile) by quite a bit.
there will be tracks where the people who cycled before you have crushed the snow to the point where it melts
Compressing the snow will only make it melt if the roads were salted just before the snow fell - which is usually the case here in Netherlands on main cycling routes when freezing temperatures with precipitation are expected. I have cycled plenty of distance over unsalted snowy roads; it's quite doable (even at 20 km/h or 12 mph) as long as you brake well in advance of sharp turns and you don't use knobby tires which are counterproductive with snow. (The tricky bit is when the snow has started to melt and then freezes again, though).
I used to live and bike in Southern Sweden, where often they don't sprinkle salt (less effective at low temperatures), but rather fine gravel, which also works fine.
When you use a fourier transform to put a signal into frequency domain you end up with positive/negative components.
That's more a mathematical artifact of using a complex-valued Fourier transform for real-valued signals; the amplitudes of the positive and negative components are each other's complex conjugate, so there is not really any information in the negative half of the spectrum. For real-valued signals, you can write the Fourier transform in terms of sines and cosines, with only positive frequencies. It's just that it's more work to write it like that.
Owned original HTC Desire and still love it, despite browsing Slashdot on it was soo slow.
Blatant plug: AvantSlash - mobile version of slashdot.org. Works fine even with my wife's HTC Tattoo (Android 1.6, 256 MB RAM) and my old Nokia N82. It's implemented as a kind of proxy, so you'll need to install it on an internet-facing web server (don't all hard-core Slashdot readers have one?)
There are multiple processes available to kill this patent (reexamination, post-grant review, inter partes review). However, they are all fairly expensive.
Normally, a patent application is published 18 months after filing, well before the patent is granted. Why do I never read here about attacking silly patents when they are still an application?
About this patent: when I saw the slashdot summary, I hoped that it was a bit exaggerated and that the patent claims actually were much more narrow. But no, the essential part of claim 1 is actually:
A computer-implemented method for formatting a range of cells according to a spectrum of cell formats,.... for each respective value between the minimum value and the maximum value, causing a processor to apply, to the cells of each respective value, a respective cell format....
In plain English: automatic color-mapping cells based on a range of numeric values corresponding to a range of colors. To me, this sounds rather obvious: I did once search for such a feature in Excel (or was it LibreOffice?) and was irritated that I had to make a verbose list of conditional formatting (if value > 0 and < 1, then green; if value >=1and <2, then cyan, etc.).
But apart from the question of obviousness, which is a bit subjective, I wonder whether the claims cannot be attacked directly for unambiguous prior art. The word 'cell' does not seem to be defined strictly as applying to spreadsheet cells, since the patent summary talks about "cells in spreadsheets, tables, and other computer documents", where the term "document" is not defined. If e.g. MatLab files or finite-element model files can be considered as a special kind of documents, that would immediately invalidate claim 1.
Unfortunately, if you invalidate claim 1, the following claims may still be valid. They treat cases where the numerical value of a cell is not color-coded, but e.g. as little bar or pie charts.
Notch filters are based on multilayer coatings which are (a) expensive and (b) normally designed for a single angle of incidence. The notch wavelength depends on the angle of incidence, so turning a multilayer notch filter into a safety eyewear means that it must block a much wider range of wavelengths.
"a welding helmet with a LCD shutter, as soon as the the photo-voltaic cell detects a bright light, the lcd goes black"
The problem is that most of the danger with laser light is not the power per unit surface, but rather the high degree of collimation that causes the eye to focus the light onto a spot on the retina. A photosensor wouldn't detect the difference between diffuse and collimated light.
Too bad that TFA only mentions "high power", which could mean 5 mW (the highest that is still in the somewhat safe class 3a) or one of the crazy 300 mW handheld lasers which can cause permanent eye damage in a fraction of a second and are legally required to have a keylock.
"mix up a coating to apply to the windows that contains the same dye that laser safety goggles use."
All goggles for 532 nm that I've seen block everything in the range 300--550 nm, which makes them look orange. Most goggles are based on dyes, and those don't come in 10 nm bandwidths.
It would be cheaper to place a few cube corner retroreflectors in the cockpit, to give send the beam back to the guy who's holding the laser.
"This would allow a filing, probably on par with a preliminary patent filing, which would establish a pre-existing prior art."
Such a system already exists, except that there is a nominal fee. It's called Research Disclosures and USPTO examiners are required to search RD publications for prior art. Added advantage is that it allows anonymous publications, for businesses that don't want to disclose to their competitors what they are working on.
Making it zero-cost for the submitter would probably lead to spam, and anyway there is some work/cost involved (writing it with broad claims, making it searchable, storing it indefinitely). For zero cost prior art establishing, you can publish it on a mailing list with publicly accessible archives. A problem is that it's less likely that the examiner finds it there. As we see with Samsung/Apple, invalidating a patent with prior art once the patent is assigned is much more diffucult.
"Adding absorptive finishes to the room will help reduce the reverberant field, which in a best case scenario will buy you 3dB"
I think you are making assumptions here that you don't mention, because those 3 dB are not some fundamental limit. For example, a room with floor/wall/ceiling in concrete and having 95% reflection coefficient. This will amplify the field from sound sources (vacuum cleaner or a small open window) by a factor 20 (i.e. 13 dB). Removing all reverberation would decrease the noise level by 13 dB.
I used to work in a place where the coffee room was like that. It would hurt my ears if the electric water kettle was on and two conversations were going on. Mounting glass fiber absorber panels onto the ceiling made a tremendous difference.
It happened that I wrote down the status of my data usage over the month July, so here is my anecdotal experience for Vodafone Netherlands:
* Android Droidstats usage logger: 369 MB (2012-07-31 22:16h)
* Android "My Data Manager": 337 MB (2012-07-31 22:16h)
* Vodafone online usage monitor: 307 MB (up to 2012-07-30 17:46h)
* Phone bill for July: 343 MB (since a couple of months they actually mention the total; before I needed to use a perl script to parse the PDF invoice and add the data usage of some 200 separate data sessions)
When I asked about the differences a few months ago, the Vodafone customer service told me: "The information on your Vodafone account online is the real usage. Numbers from data usage apps are not reliable." But I highly doubt that I used 36 MB over the last day of the month, so it seems that within Vodafone they have different systems.
My train commute (where I use most of my data) passes through an area with bad coverage, so I would have expected a bigger difference based on the theory that packet loss accounts for most of the difference.
"I suppose if you like paying $100 extra to get an extra 16GB on your phone"
Is this internal memory really equivalent? In three out of three sd-equipped phones in our household over the past 4 years, we have had three failed micro-sd cards. One dead on arrival and two after a year of use. Didn't happen to the internal memory so far. Moreover they seem to be rather slow.
keep the forces manageable by dropping the scan speed much (if any) in the changeover from 300mm to 450mm because everyone would freak out as the whole point is to maximize exposures per second while minimizing wafer exchange time.
Indeed; I guess we would feel sorry if the whole tool needs to be slowed down (reticle stage, source power, metrology) just because the wafer stage cannot keep up. The ambitions should be even higher: by the time that 450 mm tools go to the market, the overlay targets will likely be tighter than they are today - they follow Moore's law.
I do think that other processes will also have some pretty awful trouble getting to 450mm though.
It could very well be that I am underestimating the technological hurdles in the other processes because I hear about ASML's technological challenges every day.:-)
450mm means that you end up with fewer incomplete chips on the edges of your wafer,
A standard die is 26x33 mm, which is much larger than the vast majority of the chips; most dies already contain multiple chips. Therefore, the edge loss is not as big a deal as you would think.
What is more of a cost saver is that most of the processing steps (applying photo resist, developing the resist, etching, ion implantation, annealing, and so on) are relatively easy to scale up to larger wafers, thereby reducing the process costs per unit of wafer area.
A big exception here is the lithography process, which gets significantly harder for bigger wafers, since it involves rapidly moving a wafer around with nanometer accuracy. A bigger wafer requires a bigger, stiffer, and therefore heavier wafer stage. ASML manufactures lithography tools that can do up to 175 wafers per hour (300 mm diameter) per hour, with an accuracy ("overlay") of 5.5 nm; that is about 3 dies per second. To give an idea of the scale: imagine that a vehicle is moving at 100 km/h, making multiple sharp turns per second, and tracks the ideal trajectory within 500 nm. And then the customer says: nice that you can do that with a sports car, but it's too small; can you build a heavy SUV that can do the same thing? (So there, a car analogy)
This is why Intel, TSMC, and Samsung have invested into ASML to speed up the development of 450 mm litho tools.
Disclosure: I work for ASML, but the above opinions are my own.
Lux for Android is an auto-screen dimmer, but it also has a 'night' mode with red hues. The red mode is not in the free version, so it will set you back 1 or 2 dollars.
That said, in the evening, I usually read in bed from my Android screen with low brightness and the lights off, and usually I will fall asleep within half an hour; I don't use the 'red mode' for that.
Friends come over and want to play a song on their fancy-pants phone, and they're already on my WLAN, but we have to hear the song through a singular tinny phone speaker because doing it any other way is a pain in the ass. It shouldn't be that way (and, no, DLNA is not the answer, but is instead part of the problem).
Why is DLNA not an option? I have a DLNA-capable receiver with decent loudspeakers, an old laptop running MiniDLNA for my music collection, and there are several Android apps that can stream music from the phone to the receiver using DLNA. (I don't use that feature, but I tested it and it works)
And the big surprise was that this receiver (Yamaha RXV473) could actually decode Ogg Vorbis streams, even though that was not advertised.
"the population (of Scotland) is small and the land is large."
I have been in Norway many times, including at remote places well above the arctic circle, which are at least as sparsely populated and it was better than here, although I sometimes had to stand upright rather than lie flat in my tent. At least I wasn't surrounded by steel.
Are you sure your phone is fully compatible with all the non-US frequencies?
I live in Netherlands, so I guess it is. I have always been curious to know at which frequency my phone is operating with various providers, but I couldn't find any Android apps that do this; apparently, the inner working of the phone radio is shielded from the user-facing APIs.
You should definitely have no problem at all in Edinburgh
It's less of a problem here in Edinburgh, indeed, but inside old-town buildings (pubs etc.) the coverage is sometimes bad. I don't know how thick the walls of those are. But it could also be a problem with my home provider (Vodafone Netherlands), which seemed to be in the Dutch news yesterday because of mobile internet disturbances - maybe also affecting customers abroad.
and through most of central Scotland. 3G is certainly patchy in the Highlands... aside from the tops of mountains
I'm not sure which definition of Central Scotland you use, but I guess the Highlands is where I spent most of my holiday. My complaints are mainly about Pitlochry, Plockton, Kyle of Lochalsh, Fort William, the connections in between, and the train trip from Fort William to Glasgow).
My wife has a different phone and, although she is not trying to get internet access all the time, noticed the same thing: it's her first holiday destination since long with such unreliable mobile-phone coverage.
The map on Sensorly is misleading. I don't know how the gather data but,
They gather data from handsets running the Sensorly app in conjunction with GPS. Therefore you only get data for locations where there are or have been people and that tends to be along roads. In sparsely populated areas like Scotland, the data can be based on just one or two people.
If I need a box of M10x40 socket head cap screws in type 316 stainless steel, I'll go to a fastener store.
Others have already challenged the validity of this statement from the consumer's point of view. But how does the owner of the hardware store know what articles to keep on stock and from which suppliers to order them? With hardware stores, you might argue that it is a business where the products don't change much. But imagine that you are selling TVs, photo cameras, clothes, or home decoration products. You will have to visit trade fairs nad read business magazines, both of which are forms of advertising.
I'm on holiday in the UK (Scotland, that is) and I have been rather unimpressed by the cell phone coverage here. Since I'm roaming, I can see the coverage for various providers (Vodafone, T-Mobile, O2, Orange). From within buses and trains on the countryside, most of the time there is zero coverage for any provider. In villages and small towns, Vodafone/O2/Orange have 2G coverage (at crawling 1 kbyte/s-or-less speeds), but only if you are outdoors in the right street; indoors and just around the corner, the signal may drop to zero bars. T-mobile has 3G, but even in fewer places than the other ones (I suppose 3G has inherently a smaller range from the tower). And I won't talk about using a cell phone while walking on a trail in the mountains/hills/shore... Even while walking around in the center of Edinburgh, I regularly get zero bars.
The good thing about it is that in the trains, buses, and restaurants, the other people are not bothering me with their phone conversations.:-)
There's a website that collects coverage data through an Android app and publishes them online: Sensorly, which confirms that it's mostly 2G in Scotland. Regarding spatial coverage, it suffers a bit from undersampling, though.
Note: my experience is from an HTC Desire S phone in a silicone rubber casing; I noticed in the past that the silicon reduces the GPS sensitivity, but I never noticed a difference for 2G/3G signals.
Slashdot Mirror
I would like to see a source for that. One of the first pages that I found on Google reads: "However, there is no reliable source of exposure data to really answer this question: we don't know how many miles bicyclists travel each year, and we don't know how long it takes them to cover these miles (and thus how long they are exposed to motor vehicle traffic).".
Moreover, I think one of the points of TFA is that the bike infrastructures (i.e., bike lanes) is being expanded, which is likely to reduce the accident rate (per bike-mile) by quite a bit.
Compressing the snow will only make it melt if the roads were salted just before the snow fell - which is usually the case here in Netherlands on main cycling routes when freezing temperatures with precipitation are expected. I have cycled plenty of distance over unsalted snowy roads; it's quite doable (even at 20 km/h or 12 mph) as long as you brake well in advance of sharp turns and you don't use knobby tires which are counterproductive with snow. (The tricky bit is when the snow has started to melt and then freezes again, though).
I used to live and bike in Southern Sweden, where often they don't sprinkle salt (less effective at low temperatures), but rather fine gravel, which also works fine.
That's more a mathematical artifact of using a complex-valued Fourier transform for real-valued signals; the amplitudes of the positive and negative components are each other's complex conjugate, so there is not really any information in the negative half of the spectrum. For real-valued signals, you can write the Fourier transform in terms of sines and cosines, with only positive frequencies. It's just that it's more work to write it like that.
Blatant plug: AvantSlash - mobile version of slashdot.org. Works fine even with my wife's HTC Tattoo (Android 1.6, 256 MB RAM) and my old Nokia N82. It's implemented as a kind of proxy, so you'll need to install it on an internet-facing web server (don't all hard-core Slashdot readers have one?)
Normally, a patent application is published 18 months after filing, well before the patent is granted. Why do I never read here about attacking silly patents when they are still an application?
About this patent: when I saw the slashdot summary, I hoped that it was a bit exaggerated and that the patent claims actually were much more narrow. But no, the essential part of claim 1 is actually:
In plain English: automatic color-mapping cells based on a range of numeric values corresponding to a range of colors. To me, this sounds rather obvious: I did once search for such a feature in Excel (or was it LibreOffice?) and was irritated that I had to make a verbose list of conditional formatting (if value > 0 and < 1, then green; if value >=1and <2, then cyan, etc.).
But apart from the question of obviousness, which is a bit subjective, I wonder whether the claims cannot be attacked directly for unambiguous prior art. The word 'cell' does not seem to be defined strictly as applying to spreadsheet cells, since the patent summary talks about "cells in spreadsheets, tables, and other computer documents", where the term "document" is not defined. If e.g. MatLab files or finite-element model files can be considered as a special kind of documents, that would immediately invalidate claim 1.
Unfortunately, if you invalidate claim 1, the following claims may still be valid. They treat cases where the numerical value of a cell is not color-coded, but e.g. as little bar or pie charts.
Notch filters are based on multilayer coatings which are (a) expensive and (b) normally designed for a single angle of incidence. The notch wavelength depends on the angle of incidence, so turning a multilayer notch filter into a safety eyewear means that it must block a much wider range of wavelengths.
"a welding helmet with a LCD shutter, as soon as the the photo-voltaic cell detects a bright light, the lcd goes black"
The problem is that most of the danger with laser light is not the power per unit surface, but rather the high degree of collimation that causes the eye to focus the light onto a spot on the retina. A photosensor wouldn't detect the difference between diffuse and collimated light.
Too bad that TFA only mentions "high power", which could mean 5 mW (the highest that is still in the somewhat safe class 3a) or one of the crazy 300 mW handheld lasers which can cause permanent eye damage in a fraction of a second and are legally required to have a keylock.
"mix up a coating to apply to the windows that contains the same dye that laser safety goggles use."
All goggles for 532 nm that I've seen block everything in the range 300--550 nm, which makes them look orange. Most goggles are based on dyes, and those don't come in 10 nm bandwidths.
It would be cheaper to place a few cube corner retroreflectors in the cockpit, to give send the beam back to the guy who's holding the laser.
"This would allow a filing, probably on par with a preliminary patent filing, which would establish a pre-existing prior art."
Such a system already exists, except that there is a nominal fee. It's called Research Disclosures and USPTO examiners are required to search RD publications for prior art. Added advantage is that it allows anonymous publications, for businesses that don't want to disclose to their competitors what they are working on.
Making it zero-cost for the submitter would probably lead to spam, and anyway there is some work/cost involved (writing it with broad claims, making it searchable, storing it indefinitely). For zero cost prior art establishing, you can publish it on a mailing list with publicly accessible archives. A problem is that it's less likely that the examiner finds it there. As we see with Samsung/Apple, invalidating a patent with prior art once the patent is assigned is much more diffucult.
"Adding absorptive finishes to the room will help reduce the reverberant field, which in a best case scenario will buy you 3dB"
I think you are making assumptions here that you don't mention, because those 3 dB are not some fundamental limit. For example, a room with floor/wall/ceiling in concrete and having 95% reflection coefficient. This will amplify the field from sound sources (vacuum cleaner or a small open window) by a factor 20 (i.e. 13 dB). Removing all reverberation would decrease the noise level by 13 dB.
I used to work in a place where the coffee room was like that. It would hurt my ears if the electric water kettle was on and two conversations were going on. Mounting glass fiber absorber panels onto the ceiling made a tremendous difference.
* Android Droidstats usage logger: 369 MB (2012-07-31 22:16h)
* Android "My Data Manager": 337 MB (2012-07-31 22:16h)
* Vodafone online usage monitor: 307 MB (up to 2012-07-30 17:46h)
* Phone bill for July: 343 MB (since a couple of months they actually mention the total; before I needed to use a perl script to parse the PDF invoice and add the data usage of some 200 separate data sessions)
When I asked about the differences a few months ago, the Vodafone customer service told me: "The information on your Vodafone account online is the real usage. Numbers from data usage apps are not reliable." But I highly doubt that I used 36 MB over the last day of the month, so it seems that within Vodafone they have different systems.
My train commute (where I use most of my data) passes through an area with bad coverage, so I would have expected a bigger difference based on the theory that packet loss accounts for most of the difference.
"I suppose if you like paying $100 extra to get an extra 16GB on your phone"
Is this internal memory really equivalent? In three out of three sd-equipped phones in our household over the past 4 years, we have had three failed micro-sd cards. One dead on arrival and two after a year of use. Didn't happen to the internal memory so far. Moreover they seem to be rather slow.
Indeed; I guess we would feel sorry if the whole tool needs to be slowed down (reticle stage, source power, metrology) just because the wafer stage cannot keep up. The ambitions should be even higher: by the time that 450 mm tools go to the market, the overlay targets will likely be tighter than they are today - they follow Moore's law.
It could very well be that I am underestimating the technological hurdles in the other processes because I hear about ASML's technological challenges every day. :-)
A standard die is 26x33 mm, which is much larger than the vast majority of the chips; most dies already contain multiple chips. Therefore, the edge loss is not as big a deal as you would think.
What is more of a cost saver is that most of the processing steps (applying photo resist, developing the resist, etching, ion implantation, annealing, and so on) are relatively easy to scale up to larger wafers, thereby reducing the process costs per unit of wafer area.
A big exception here is the lithography process, which gets significantly harder for bigger wafers, since it involves rapidly moving a wafer around with nanometer accuracy. A bigger wafer requires a bigger, stiffer, and therefore heavier wafer stage. ASML manufactures lithography tools that can do up to 175 wafers per hour (300 mm diameter) per hour, with an accuracy ("overlay") of 5.5 nm; that is about 3 dies per second. To give an idea of the scale: imagine that a vehicle is moving at 100 km/h, making multiple sharp turns per second, and tracks the ideal trajectory within 500 nm. And then the customer says: nice that you can do that with a sports car, but it's too small; can you build a heavy SUV that can do the same thing? (So there, a car analogy)
This is why Intel, TSMC, and Samsung have invested into ASML to speed up the development of 450 mm litho tools.
Disclosure: I work for ASML, but the above opinions are my own.
I wondered about that, too. I don't get any EP results, even if I search for an EP number. For example the patents listed on some Espacenet query, do not return any results on google.
Source: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/qs/ope/fee092611.htm#maintain
"Make patents renewable with a growing charge associated for each additional renewal"
Good news for you: this is already the case in most countries.
Lux for Android is an auto-screen dimmer, but it also has a 'night' mode with red hues. The red mode is not in the free version, so it will set you back 1 or 2 dollars.
That said, in the evening, I usually read in bed from my Android screen with low brightness and the lights off, and usually I will fall asleep within half an hour; I don't use the 'red mode' for that.
Why is DLNA not an option? I have a DLNA-capable receiver with decent loudspeakers, an old laptop running MiniDLNA for my music collection, and there are several Android apps that can stream music from the phone to the receiver using DLNA. (I don't use that feature, but I tested it and it works)
And the big surprise was that this receiver (Yamaha RXV473) could actually decode Ogg Vorbis streams, even though that was not advertised.
"the population (of Scotland) is small and the land is large."
I have been in Norway many times, including at remote places well above the arctic circle, which are at least as sparsely populated and it was better than here, although I sometimes had to stand upright rather than lie flat in my tent. At least I wasn't surrounded by steel.
Now in Edinburgh trying to post this over 3.5G...
I live in Netherlands, so I guess it is. I have always been curious to know at which frequency my phone is operating with various providers, but I couldn't find any Android apps that do this; apparently, the inner working of the phone radio is shielded from the user-facing APIs.
It's less of a problem here in Edinburgh, indeed, but inside old-town buildings (pubs etc.) the coverage is sometimes bad. I don't know how thick the walls of those are. But it could also be a problem with my home provider (Vodafone Netherlands), which seemed to be in the Dutch news yesterday because of mobile internet disturbances - maybe also affecting customers abroad.
I'm not sure which definition of Central Scotland you use, but I guess the Highlands is where I spent most of my holiday. My complaints are mainly about Pitlochry, Plockton, Kyle of Lochalsh, Fort William, the connections in between, and the train trip from Fort William to Glasgow).
My wife has a different phone and, although she is not trying to get internet access all the time, noticed the same thing: it's her first holiday destination since long with such unreliable mobile-phone coverage.
They gather data from handsets running the Sensorly app in conjunction with GPS. Therefore you only get data for locations where there are or have been people and that tends to be along roads. In sparsely populated areas like Scotland, the data can be based on just one or two people.
Others have already challenged the validity of this statement from the consumer's point of view. But how does the owner of the hardware store know what articles to keep on stock and from which suppliers to order them? With hardware stores, you might argue that it is a business where the products don't change much. But imagine that you are selling TVs, photo cameras, clothes, or home decoration products. You will have to visit trade fairs nad read business magazines, both of which are forms of advertising.
The good thing about it is that in the trains, buses, and restaurants, the other people are not bothering me with their phone conversations. :-)
There's a website that collects coverage data through an Android app and publishes them online: Sensorly, which confirms that it's mostly 2G in Scotland. Regarding spatial coverage, it suffers a bit from undersampling, though.
Note: my experience is from an HTC Desire S phone in a silicone rubber casing; I noticed in the past that the silicon reduces the GPS sensitivity, but I never noticed a difference for 2G/3G signals.