Education and schools should be paid for with property tax as should the fire department and police. A sales tax can help. Before paying for the military, first reduce its size. Then have sales tax. The only things I believe should pay an income tax are corporations,
How is someone supposed to pay a high property tax (think 5% of the asset value) if they temporarily don't have income? Sell their house? Setting up the tax system as you propose will invoke massive changes in people's behavior. High property taxes will make people want to spend all their income as soon as possible since saving it for later will cost more than the interest, or they will simply keep it as cash. If people spend 50% of their income after 25% taxes on taxable purchases, it means that you need to add roughly 65% sales tax to compensate for removing the income tax. That will lead to an unbelievable black market... Moving income tax to corporations means that they will invent accounting methods that will funnel profits to offshore companies or herds of "freelancers".
About the accountability: in order to get meaningful FON access, you either need to pay by credit card for access, or you have to purchase a FON router. All logins to FON are logged and logs (username, time, date) are available to the owner of the router. FON also keeps track of the MAC addresses. If you are accused of criminal use of your internet connection, it will be pretty easy to trace down the person who used your router.
Remember, with a netbook, you don't gain much by lowering the CPUs power consumption to less than 5 watts or so. The reason for this is simple, the display, ram, hard drives and everything else consume enough power that it won't really help battery life very much.
I once posted some power measurements for my Eee 4G here: http://wiki.eeeuser.com/hardware_power_consumption . The celeron M 620 MHz in there only takes 2.5 W when active (I assume that the idle power is negligible), which is still 25% of the idle power consumption.
You really need a patent attorney, even if you are just going to publish it so it stays in the public domain. This is because, whatever you will write, will not be water tight in a legal sense
For disclosure, you just need to describe the invention in a way that someone else can understand. It is wise to mention as many possible variations on the invention and its applications as you can come up with.
You need a legally water tight description only if you want to file a patent, not if you want to disclose the invention. My limited experience with patent attorneys is that they don't really have the technical knowledge to come up with other applications of the invention than the ones that you present to them. The patent attorney's job is to phrase the description such that it is as general as possible without any overlap with existing patents or prior art. For the disclosure, you don't need to avoid such overlaps.
A good book to read is David Pressman, "Patent it yourself", ISBN 978-1-4133-0516-6.
Besides, as any brewer or baker will tell you, yeast used in brewing is genetically inclined to produce more alcohol than CO2, whereas the yeast used in baking is just the opposite - it produces much more CO2 than alcohol. That's why you don't bake with brewer's yeast, or brew with baker's yeast.
[Citation needed]. The biochemistry of anaerobic conversion of sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide produces a fixed ratio of alcohol to carbon dioxide, independent of the yeast strain. The main difference would be that baker's yeast has to be rapid-growing (the bread has only a few hours to leaven), while brewer's/wine yeast can take more time but must survive under high alcohol concentrations.
For my job I have to use Windows (I hate it). From power on to functional desktop takes really long with all the IT-enforced network scripts, so I tried hibernating for a while. After losing data with MS Word several times (open file on a network drive doesn't seem to like hibernating; even saving all files before hibernation doesn't get rid of the countless errors on reboot) I decided to just keep it running and only switch it off over the weekend.
The performance at low light is ultimately limited by fundamental physics. If you want to take a picture of a scene with brightness L (cd/m2), exposure time t, aperture numebr N, the amount of light reaching the sensor is H = L t/N^2. For example, at 5 cd/m2 (twilight?) and t=0.03 s, N=2.0, we find H = 0.04 lux seconds at the sensor.
That is about 10^16 photons per square meter. Of you cram 10 MP on a 5x5 mm sensor, that is 3000 photons per pixel. Each pixel has a color filter that on the average transmits 25% of the photons, which means 750 photons per pixel. Simple Poisson statistics means that you get a noise that is 1/sqrt(3000) = 4% for these numbers. That is if the sensor has 100% effectivity and no electronic noise.
All Red Hat really needs to do is publish the inventions instead of patenting them. That would create prior art.
That isn't the purpose of a defensive patent. The idea is that if Company X tries to sue Red Hat for patent infringement, then Red Hat can countersue for the infringement of Company X on one of RH's defensive patents. Either that or RH and Company X simply agree on cross-licensing their respective patents to each other.
Labview has the advantage of being easy to learn for
non-computer-savvy people that want to control and read special
hardware (electrical monitoring equipment, servo motors,
etc.). Unfortunately, it rather terrible for complex programs that do
not naturally fit in LabVIEW's paradigm of deterministic data flow
paths from user input to screen or file output. For example, storing
things in persistent variables that are not visible to the end user
are a horrible kludge. Reusing VIs (program modules) in other projects
require you to endlessly draw wires on your screen rather than simply
copy/paste something in an editor. Data processing that involves
anything else than applying a standard library function (such as
searching arrays for special conditions) that would have been 20 lines
of straightforward C code will take you half an hour in LabVIEW, even
if you use the "C formula node" that has no debugging facilities
whatsoever. You will find yourself spending most of your time moving
lines on your screen because there is no free space left on the flow
diagram for that extra feature that you need to implement. Stay away
from Labview if you can. Even Labview representatives will tell you
that more experienced programmers tend to not like Labview so much.
I haven't used Igor myself, but I have watched over other people's
shoulders. You can do quite a bit with it, but the syntax of the
language is quite inconsistent; the central paradigm is that variables
are either scalar or "wave", which is an array that implicitly
represents a row of (x,y) values with fixed steps in x. Wave variables
always have global scope, which makes functions that deal with wave
variables unpleasant, especially if there is recursion.
Myself, I have been a happy Gnuplot (FOSS) user since 1996. Gnuplot
is quite limited in terms of data analysis and dealing with
higher-dimensional datasets, and also has a very inconsistent syntax
due to historical reasons, but the latter doesn't bother since I have
used it as it evolved. For serious (CPU-intensive) data analysis, I
have always written C/C++ programs (with gcc, of course), using
Gnuplot only for plotting.
I have played a bit with R (FOSS) for data analysis and
visualisation, which I liked, but which I have never used apart from
making a few drawings. Octave can be useful if you need to collaborate
with Matlab people.
For hardware control, I also prefer C/C++. Unfortunately you will
likely have to do that under Windows unless you want to write your own
lowlevel drivers for Linux (I tried once and gave up when I had to
read a 200 page document describing the PCI bridge controller to
figure out how to do a DMA transfer).
(I'm out of the academic world now, working at a high-tech company
where I have to work with Microsoft Office most of the time and god I do hate that...)
... pay using your chipcard at the end of the meal. [...] The waiter sends an SMS message to his accomplice, who goes up to make a purchase. Just as you insert your card into the waiter's terminal, the accomplice puts a fake card into the jeweller's terminal.
I call bullshit here. The whole idea of a chip card is that some secret cryptographic data is burned into the chip that will prevent copying the chip card (except by destructive testing using an electron microscope). The communication between the terminal and the chip card needs to verify both that the terminal and the chip are authorized. The only way the above scenario would work is if the accomplice's card is connected with wires to a mobile internet device that sends the electric signals to the cardreader that the victim is using. You would only be able to pull this if the jeweller is an accomplice or so blind that that he doesn't see the wiring. And even then, i doubt that the delays involved with a long-distance data connection will fall within the timing tolerances of the handshake protocol between chip card and card reader.
I read somewhere (probably on slashdot) that even magnetic card readers need to be certified and will disable themselves if they are tampered with. It isn't that easy to create an authorized chip card reader that will leak the keyed-in data or display different numbers on the display than what is actually going on during the transaction.
There are problems associated with running LEDs with AC, even though as a diode it would show up as only half of a sine wave. With a changing voltage you have a changing current, and the relationship...
Use a capacitor in series with an even number of diodes that are connected in parallel in alternating directions. The capacitor will limit the current; the diodes can be run at a higher peak current than their nominal spec since they are only used half of the time. The disadvantage is of course that it will eat a large amount of current that does not transfer actual power. Only suitable for small lights (below a watt or so) therefore.
Standard lines in Japan are 100mbps up/down with 24 people sharing a head-end switch. That switch has 100mbps going back to the ISP.
Is there any QoS in those switches? I mean, what happens to the other 20 people's VoIP connection or PDF download when four people are running bittorrent with 100 open connections each? 100 Mbps shared over 401 TCP connections is 250 kbps per connection.
Is there any context in which "SEO" isn't a synonym for "worthless slimy huckster"?
SEO usually means "search engine optimization" rather than "search engine optimizer", but even then I see no ethical problem if I give some advice on someone with a one-man-company with a small website. For example I tell him that he should get rid of the flash animation on the home page, should use alt tags on the graphical menu links, mention the name of his company and the product or service that he sells on the home page, have links from each website page back to the home page, and so on, get some links from index pages relevant to his industry sector, and so on.
Not all SEO involves setting up link farms and thousands of keyword-stuffed doorway pages. The proper term for that is search engine spam.
Directed sound in water falls off at a rate of 20logR, meaning that at a distance of 10 meters you are down 20 dB;
No, the intensity decreases by 20 log (R/R0) where R0 is the reference distance for which you are comparing the numbers. Apparently, you took R0=1 m for the 250 dB sonar source you mentioned further down.
the level is down to 210 dB, meaning about the same as a 3m wave passing over your position underwater.... If there IS an impact on marine mammals it is probably from the frequency and the sudden "appearance" of an audible frequency.
I don't know what you are exactly trying to say here, but it sounds to me like claiming that a human has no problem with 30% pressure drop in an airplane and should therefore not rupture their eardrums or die if the same pressure change occurs in a milllisecond (183 dB SPL re 20 Pa) as a bomb explodes a few meters from them.
I got a hall-effect ampmeter for the purpose of measuring power usage.
Alternating current times voltage only equals power if they are in phase, which is the case with resistive loads such as incandescent light bulbs and heaters.
In equipment with transformers (halogen lighting, fluorescent tubes, electronics), and motors (refrigerator, laundry machine), the current is out of phase with the voltage, which means a correction factor ("cos phi") that can be anywhere between 0.6 and 0.9. Especially transformers that are not loaded can have a considerable idle current, but large transformers are not so common in a household setting. Old-fashioned fluorescent tubes with an inductive ballast and engines are bad (cos(phi)=0.7 or so); switched-mode power supplies (in compact fluorescent lamps, computers) are closer to 1.0.
Any web browser written in the last ten years is capable of displaying HTML4 pages correctly. OK, if you do advanced CSS stuff then there might be subtle differences in table border collapse properties or other arcana,
Well, some parts of my website have CSS stuff that failed horribly when I tried viewing them in IE7. I'm not talking about a pixel offset, but completely disappearing DIVs. But you're right that that isn't HTML4 per se.
BTW, there are not four HTML dialects. The basic HTML grammar does not differ between browsers
You're right. I was thinking of HTML4, XHTML-1.0, XHTML-1.1, and XHTML Mobile, but actually there are subdialects strict/transitional as well. Although the basic grammar is mostly the same, there are all kinds of small differences that matter when you want the code to validate. For example, XHTML requires img and br elements to be closed, while that is invalid in HTML 4. Certain elements are valid in html-transitional, but don't exist in html-strict. Linking CSS to a HTML page is done differently in HTML 4 and XHTML Mobile. Presently, the burden is on the person who writes html code to remember which things are allowed in the dialect, which isn't a good thing.
it will display according to the HTML standards on any browser that's not buggy. You can view it in your favourite browser (Firefox, Chrome, whatever) and be fairly sure it will work the same in anyone else's
Yeah right, that covers about 15% of the users. For the other 85%, you have to write workarounds anyway, valid HTML or not.
If the HTML contains errors, then the browser must use heuristics to correct it,
Well, a lot of the HTML validation errors are typically about things like unescaped ampersands in URLs, missing ALT tags on images, missing charset declaration (duh, it's in the HTTP header, and for English-language pages it usually doesn't make a difference anyway). This kind of issues should really be warnings rather than syntax errors since no browser would show unpredictable behavior.
Rather than forcing millions of web content producers (which includes secretaries posting announcements on a company website and MySpace users) to spend hours and hours to learn all the silly syntax rules of four HTML dialects, the developers of the handful of common HTML engines in browsers should simply agree on how nonstandard HTML is handled. If I understand correctly, that is the purpose of HTML5. It will also save a lot of time for programmers who want write code generating HTML for a wide variety of input data if they don't have to worry about an obscure input condition that generates an empty UL../UL list.
The problem is with those that have been omitted, and the simple fact that as a non-expert on the topic, you will likely never even know that something is missing.
Do you have examples?
There are plenty of subjects that I'm not an expert in where I can spot nonsense (opinions of editors, marketing material) when I read Wikipedia to inform myself. If you have a critical eye for such things, you can simply click [Edit] and add {{fact}} after the dubious statement to warn future readers.
Most of us know which newspapers have good reporting and which ones don't.
WP merges everything. That means loss of differentiation. Someone decides which version is "true", maybe because he doesn't know the others.
The ideal Wikipedia article provides a source for every disputable statement from which the reader can judge how reliable the statement is.
Maybe temporarily to transfer data off to a new harddrive.
Consumer-grade hard drives are not sealed; they have a breathing hole (with a dust filter) so that the casing doesn't have to deal with pressure changes (the pressure drop in an airplane would cause a force equivalent to about 30 kg weight load). It is highly unlikely that a hard disk in a digital video recorder could survive immersion.
P.S. dilute concentration means that you dilute the 5% solution from the bottle with a factor 100 or so. And don't forget to rinse with clean/distilled water afterwards.
Bleach (chlorine) is a very bad idea. It will oxidize the metals very badly. Chlorine is incredibly corrosive.
Bleach is sodium hypochlorite, which is a mild oxidizer in dilute concentrations. I wouldn't recommend soaking stuff for hours in sodium hypochlorite, but a few minutes is probably enough to kill molds without attacking metal parts. I never tried it with electronics, though.
Slashdot Mirror
How is someone supposed to pay a high property tax (think 5% of the asset value) if they temporarily don't have income? Sell their house? Setting up the tax system as you propose will invoke massive changes in people's behavior. High property taxes will make people want to spend all their income as soon as possible since saving it for later will cost more than the interest, or they will simply keep it as cash. If people spend 50% of their income after 25% taxes on taxable purchases, it means that you need to add roughly 65% sales tax to compensate for removing the income tax. That will lead to an unbelievable black market... Moving income tax to corporations means that they will invent accounting methods that will funnel profits to offshore companies or herds of "freelancers".
Says who? Their electricity consumption doesn't vary that much, only the light output for the first few minutes.
About the accountability: in order to get meaningful FON access, you either need to pay by credit card for access, or you have to purchase a FON router. All logins to FON are logged and logs (username, time, date) are available to the owner of the router. FON also keeps track of the MAC addresses. If you are accused of criminal use of your internet connection, it will be pretty easy to trace down the person who used your router.
I once posted some power measurements for my Eee 4G here: http://wiki.eeeuser.com/hardware_power_consumption . The celeron M 620 MHz in there only takes 2.5 W when active (I assume that the idle power is negligible), which is still 25% of the idle power consumption.
For disclosure, you just need to describe the invention in a way that someone else can understand. It is wise to mention as many possible variations on the invention and its applications as you can come up with.
You need a legally water tight description only if you want to file a patent, not if you want to disclose the invention. My limited experience with patent attorneys is that they don't really have the technical knowledge to come up with other applications of the invention than the ones that you present to them. The patent attorney's job is to phrase the description such that it is as general as possible without any overlap with existing patents or prior art. For the disclosure, you don't need to avoid such overlaps.
A good book to read is David Pressman, "Patent it yourself", ISBN 978-1-4133-0516-6.
[Citation needed]. The biochemistry of anaerobic conversion of sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide produces a fixed ratio of alcohol to carbon dioxide, independent of the yeast strain. The main difference would be that baker's yeast has to be rapid-growing (the bread has only a few hours to leaven), while brewer's/wine yeast can take more time but must survive under high alcohol concentrations.
For my job I have to use Windows (I hate it). From power on to functional desktop takes really long with all the IT-enforced network scripts, so I tried hibernating for a while. After losing data with MS Word several times (open file on a network drive doesn't seem to like hibernating; even saving all files before hibernation doesn't get rid of the countless errors on reboot) I decided to just keep it running and only switch it off over the weekend.
That is about 10^16 photons per square meter. Of you cram 10 MP on a 5x5 mm sensor, that is 3000 photons per pixel. Each pixel has a color filter that on the average transmits 25% of the photons, which means 750 photons per pixel. Simple Poisson statistics means that you get a noise that is 1/sqrt(3000) = 4% for these numbers. That is if the sensor has 100% effectivity and no electronic noise.
That isn't the purpose of a defensive patent. The idea is that if Company X tries to sue Red Hat for patent infringement, then Red Hat can countersue for the infringement of Company X on one of RH's defensive patents. Either that or RH and Company X simply agree on cross-licensing their respective patents to each other.
So what happens if you put 4 devices of 500 mA each to an unpowered USB hub?
Labview has the advantage of being easy to learn for non-computer-savvy people that want to control and read special hardware (electrical monitoring equipment, servo motors, etc.). Unfortunately, it rather terrible for complex programs that do not naturally fit in LabVIEW's paradigm of deterministic data flow paths from user input to screen or file output. For example, storing things in persistent variables that are not visible to the end user are a horrible kludge. Reusing VIs (program modules) in other projects require you to endlessly draw wires on your screen rather than simply copy/paste something in an editor. Data processing that involves anything else than applying a standard library function (such as searching arrays for special conditions) that would have been 20 lines of straightforward C code will take you half an hour in LabVIEW, even if you use the "C formula node" that has no debugging facilities whatsoever. You will find yourself spending most of your time moving lines on your screen because there is no free space left on the flow diagram for that extra feature that you need to implement. Stay away from Labview if you can. Even Labview representatives will tell you that more experienced programmers tend to not like Labview so much.
I haven't used Igor myself, but I have watched over other people's shoulders. You can do quite a bit with it, but the syntax of the language is quite inconsistent; the central paradigm is that variables are either scalar or "wave", which is an array that implicitly represents a row of (x,y) values with fixed steps in x. Wave variables always have global scope, which makes functions that deal with wave variables unpleasant, especially if there is recursion.
Myself, I have been a happy Gnuplot (FOSS) user since 1996. Gnuplot is quite limited in terms of data analysis and dealing with higher-dimensional datasets, and also has a very inconsistent syntax due to historical reasons, but the latter doesn't bother since I have used it as it evolved. For serious (CPU-intensive) data analysis, I have always written C/C++ programs (with gcc, of course), using Gnuplot only for plotting.
I have played a bit with R (FOSS) for data analysis and visualisation, which I liked, but which I have never used apart from making a few drawings. Octave can be useful if you need to collaborate with Matlab people.
For hardware control, I also prefer C/C++. Unfortunately you will likely have to do that under Windows unless you want to write your own lowlevel drivers for Linux (I tried once and gave up when I had to read a 200 page document describing the PCI bridge controller to figure out how to do a DMA transfer).
(I'm out of the academic world now, working at a high-tech company where I have to work with Microsoft Office most of the time and god I do hate that...)
I call bullshit here. The whole idea of a chip card is that some secret cryptographic data is burned into the chip that will prevent copying the chip card (except by destructive testing using an electron microscope). The communication between the terminal and the chip card needs to verify both that the terminal and the chip are authorized. The only way the above scenario would work is if the accomplice's card is connected with wires to a mobile internet device that sends the electric signals to the cardreader that the victim is using. You would only be able to pull this if the jeweller is an accomplice or so blind that that he doesn't see the wiring. And even then, i doubt that the delays involved with a long-distance data connection will fall within the timing tolerances of the handshake protocol between chip card and card reader.
I read somewhere (probably on slashdot) that even magnetic card readers need to be certified and will disable themselves if they are tampered with. It isn't that easy to create an authorized chip card reader that will leak the keyed-in data or display different numbers on the display than what is actually going on during the transaction.
Use a capacitor in series with an even number of diodes that are connected in parallel in alternating directions. The capacitor will limit the current; the diodes can be run at a higher peak current than their nominal spec since they are only used half of the time. The disadvantage is of course that it will eat a large amount of current that does not transfer actual power. Only suitable for small lights (below a watt or so) therefore.
Is there any QoS in those switches? I mean, what happens to the other 20 people's VoIP connection or PDF download when four people are running bittorrent with 100 open connections each? 100 Mbps shared over 401 TCP connections is 250 kbps per connection.
SEO usually means "search engine optimization" rather than "search engine optimizer", but even then I see no ethical problem if I give some advice on someone with a one-man-company with a small website. For example I tell him that he should get rid of the flash animation on the home page, should use alt tags on the graphical menu links, mention the name of his company and the product or service that he sells on the home page, have links from each website page back to the home page, and so on, get some links from index pages relevant to his industry sector, and so on.
Not all SEO involves setting up link farms and thousands of keyword-stuffed doorway pages. The proper term for that is search engine spam.
No, the intensity decreases by 20 log (R/R0) where R0 is the reference distance for which you are comparing the numbers. Apparently, you took R0=1 m for the 250 dB sonar source you mentioned further down.
I don't know what you are exactly trying to say here, but it sounds to me like claiming that a human has no problem with 30% pressure drop in an airplane and should therefore not rupture their eardrums or die if the same pressure change occurs in a milllisecond (183 dB SPL re 20 Pa) as a bomb explodes a few meters from them.
Alternating current times voltage only equals power if they are in phase, which is the case with resistive loads such as incandescent light bulbs and heaters.
In equipment with transformers (halogen lighting, fluorescent tubes, electronics), and motors (refrigerator, laundry machine), the current is out of phase with the voltage, which means a correction factor ("cos phi") that can be anywhere between 0.6 and 0.9. Especially transformers that are not loaded can have a considerable idle current, but large transformers are not so common in a household setting. Old-fashioned fluorescent tubes with an inductive ballast and engines are bad (cos(phi)=0.7 or so); switched-mode power supplies (in compact fluorescent lamps, computers) are closer to 1.0.
Well, some parts of my website have CSS stuff that failed horribly when I tried viewing them in IE7. I'm not talking about a pixel offset, but completely disappearing DIVs. But you're right that that isn't HTML4 per se.
You're right. I was thinking of HTML4, XHTML-1.0, XHTML-1.1, and XHTML Mobile, but actually there are subdialects strict/transitional as well. Although the basic grammar is mostly the same, there are all kinds of small differences that matter when you want the code to validate. For example, XHTML requires img and br elements to be closed, while that is invalid in HTML 4. Certain elements are valid in html-transitional, but don't exist in html-strict. Linking CSS to a HTML page is done differently in HTML 4 and XHTML Mobile. Presently, the burden is on the person who writes html code to remember which things are allowed in the dialect, which isn't a good thing.
Yeah right, that covers about 15% of the users. For the other 85%, you have to write workarounds anyway, valid HTML or not.
Well, a lot of the HTML validation errors are typically about things like unescaped ampersands in URLs, missing ALT tags on images, missing charset declaration (duh, it's in the HTTP header, and for English-language pages it usually doesn't make a difference anyway). This kind of issues should really be warnings rather than syntax errors since no browser would show unpredictable behavior.
Rather than forcing millions of web content producers (which includes secretaries posting announcements on a company website and MySpace users) to spend hours and hours to learn all the silly syntax rules of four HTML dialects, the developers of the handful of common HTML engines in browsers should simply agree on how nonstandard HTML is handled. If I understand correctly, that is the purpose of HTML5. It will also save a lot of time for programmers who want write code generating HTML for a wide variety of input data if they don't have to worry about an obscure input condition that generates an empty UL../UL list.
Do you have examples?
There are plenty of subjects that I'm not an expert in where I can spot nonsense (opinions of editors, marketing material) when I read Wikipedia to inform myself. If you have a critical eye for such things, you can simply click [Edit] and add {{fact}} after the dubious statement to warn future readers.
The ideal Wikipedia article provides a source for every disputable statement from which the reader can judge how reliable the statement is.
Consumer-grade hard drives are not sealed; they have a breathing hole (with a dust filter) so that the casing doesn't have to deal with pressure changes (the pressure drop in an airplane would cause a force equivalent to about 30 kg weight load). It is highly unlikely that a hard disk in a digital video recorder could survive immersion.
It's for preventing corrosin. I fail to see how a water repellent would undo water-related corrosion (oxidation).
P.S. dilute concentration means that you dilute the 5% solution from the bottle with a factor 100 or so. And don't forget to rinse with clean/distilled water afterwards.
Bleach is sodium hypochlorite, which is a mild oxidizer in dilute concentrations. I wouldn't recommend soaking stuff for hours in sodium hypochlorite, but a few minutes is probably enough to kill molds without attacking metal parts. I never tried it with electronics, though.