Not over the internet, or using intetnet protocol, so it's not VOIP
The actual patent says "internet OR computer network", although I give you that the claim indeed explicitly mentions "an internet protocol".
But note that the set of statements in a patent claim can be invalidated by a wider type of prior art. So a claim of using internet for some purpose is invalidated by prior art that does exactly the same thing on a computer network, since internet is just one type of computer network.
So if HAM radio can be considered a computer network, and someone connected HAM radio on both ends to regular phone lines, that would invalidate the patent. Unfortunately, unless it was packet radio (ethernet-like data transfer over radio), it wouldn't be a computer network.
... batteries being tested now will give us an all electric or hybrid which is charged up at night on reduced rate power off the grid, and which can run 200+ miles before a recharge
I was going to write that the grid can't handle any significant fraction of the population doing that, but
actually, it can. Assume that a typical commuter does 20 miles/day in an electric car that otherwise (in weight and aerodynamics) is comparable to a 60 mpg car. Energy-wise you gain a factor 2 since the charging/discharging cycle is more efficient than burning fuel. With these assumptions, it means you would consume just about 5 kWh per day during off-peak hours, which is actually quite realistic.
Mirrors normally only reflect visible light...they don't do much to infrared or UV unless they're specifically designed to reflect those.
Uhh.. no. You might be somewhat right for a typical bathroom silver-on-glass mirror due to the absorption in the glass substrate, but for use in space you would use aluminum-coated mylar film (think potato chips bags: lightweight and cheap). Aluminum reflects >90% all the way from deep IR to UV. With silver, the reflectivity would be a bit higher, 95%, but it would reach only down to about 400 nm (which does include the vast majority of the solar spectrum) and it is harder to evaporate-coat large surface. See Newport mirror specs. (Protection refers to a transparant anti-corrosion layer which is not necessary in space).
If you like my chair and ask me if you can make a copy, should I refuse?
I'm not sure whether you are being sarcastic here. You as the owner wouldn't care maybe, but copying an object is covered by other intellectual-property laws besides copyright. Part of the construction of the chair could be patented, or the design of the chair could have a patent. I'm think patents don't apply for private not-for-profit, but you are certainly not allowed to sell the copy of the chair.
We have a right to copy. The law of copyright is ment to be a deal.. we give up our right to copy and the creators get a short incentive to make productive works. I don't like this deal anymore.. I want out.
I'm not with you. Copyright serves a good purpose. What is wrong with the current system is that the term of the copyright is ridiculous (I think 90 years after publication by companies or life + 70 years for persons). Moreover, DRM takes away the possibility of making a copy after the copyright expires.
if you choose to use Google USA to search but not your local brand it's not my problem, Google makes it easy.
Provide me a reference or example that country-blocking websites will not show up in nationalized versions. Google.nl, google.fr, google.sv, etc. only give a slightly different ordering of the search results (slightly preferring certain TLDs and pages written in the local language).
I block traffic from certain IP's because I know they don't convert, which is the right of all web site owners.
As I said: fine with me if you do that, but the search engines should not be indexing you. And you should not be lying in public about the real reasons for your policy.
no, if you read all the issues, most people could see his site, very few could not because scrapers were coming from those IP's.
I have read the stories about "we have a long list of blocked IP addresses and all the horrible bots are using my bandwidth". Brett Tabke is a liar. I have tried accessing his site from many different (static!) IPs in different/16 blocks and they were all blocked. Tabke's business model is to have an ad-free website and charge $180 per year for access to the site. He wants to attract new paying customers without paying for bandwidth to nonpaying visitors. So he blocked access by nonpaying visitors from Asia and Europe completely because they were not generating enough revenue.
you have to understand that his servers were consistently being spider-ed and his bandwidth cost were way high. kill all spiders was his first thing then he made special changes.
That's all fine with me, but then block Googlebot as well. Allowing Googlebot and not allowing 80% of the world population is called cloaking in my dictionary and Google should have removed the whole site from the index for that reason.
You are 100% correct that Google does help clean up it's searches.
Hmm, I always had the impression that they use the feedback to seed a database of pages to test their spam-removal algorithms on. They claim that they "prefer automated solutions rather than manual removal".
One of my big annoyances is sites that are spidered by Google but require mere mortal visitors to purchase a subscription. For example, searches on certain technical subjects often return pages with IEEE publications - purchase this article for US$ 20. And for a long time, webmasterworld.com had been blocking most of the world except the US. Extremely annoying, to search for any webmaster-related subject and WMW is the #1 hit and being unable to see the page. I reported this type of sites several times, but they were never removed.
I see, you're talking about high gain for the transmitter rather than the receiver. (I forgot that both go hand-in-hand) In that case it's an arms race that will only help as long as you're the only one, and at a cost of your neighbors who will have even worse reception.
Now, other things to do, turn off the broadcast SSID. Setup the MAC Address Filter and only include the MAC addresses of devices that you want to allow to connect. You can now even setup your own local DNS and statically assigned DHCP addresses for devices (in other words, your device still does the normal DHCP request, but you always get the a specified address for that device, useful if you have any kind of file sharing or network server).
This is about network security and has nothing to do with RF interference between devices sharing the same channel. If you're afraid of people using your network, use WPA encryption. MAC filtering and cloaked SSID broadcasting and even WEP encryption will only help against casual (nonintentional) use, but can be circumvented by anyone with wireless network sniffer software.
I personally have a 16 dbi omni on my wireless router.
High-gain omnidirectional antennae don't help very much against a congested ether. The problem isn't that the desired signal is to weak, but that the background signal is too strong compared to the desired signal. An omni antenna will amplify both of them. A better approach is a directional antenna, both on the access point and on the connected computer.
Nevermind the readily observeable information that while not only Earth's climate is getting warmer, so is Mar's - due to the rotational temperature changes in the Sun.
Realclimate: Global warming on Mars?. The Mars argument is already two years old and a connection between the factors affecting the Mars climate and those affecting Earth climate is not supported by scientific evidence.
A single volcanic erruption releases more CO2 than humanity has since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
Why does this nonsense keep turning up here? If you had taken 1 minute to Google for it, you would have found that human CO2 emissions are about 150 times bigger than all volcanic activity on earth.
I don't want a company car, I don't want a company shuttle, I don't want a company apartment, I don't want free food, I don't want free beverages.
If you value money more than perks, how about this? You have a commuting distance of 20 mi. By using the shuttle you save about $1000/year on fuel and 200 hours/year on driving. The shuttle might be comparable in time to driving yourself since it uses the carpool lanes. And rather than just stare at the car in front of you, you can check your email, surf the web, read a book, or take a nap. Of course, some people love to drive, but for others using the commuting time for other purposes might be worth $10 per hour (or whatever). For this example, a shuttle service that costs the employer $2000 per year could have a value of $3000 per year for certain employees, while the alternative was that the employer paid $2000 extra salary (minus taxes).
Similar for the food. You have to eat anyway. If they raise your salary and cut the free meals so that you can buy your own lunch you might very well end up with the same money in your wallet but with a tray of fast food rather than a decent meal.
Finally, it is in the interest of the employer to create an atmosphere where the employees feel part of a big happy family rather than that everyone is just minding their own business.
It's probably way more expensive than that. In Europe, you would pay around EUR 1400 per year as an individual for a 30 km commute in ordinary public transport. (I checked Netherlands and Sweden) A quick check at the Caltrain website suggests that something equivalent in California would be $1200 per year. Now I don't know how the government subsidizes public transport and how exactly that would compare to Google setting up their own transport (roads are also government-subsidized), but I'm pretty sure that shuttles with on-board wifi, laptop connections, and leather seats would be considerably more expensive than ordinary public transport.
the water could pull the board downward faster than 9.8m/s/s due to surface tension. The board is somewhat 'stuck' to the surface of the water.
But the waves themselves are gravity-driven and the water surface can not drop faster than g. What probably happened is that the surfer inadvertently made an upward jump while the surfboard was accelerating downwards. Normally, you need a lot of force to make a jump, but if the floor is going down at 0.9 g, you feel like your body is only 0.1 times its normal weight and the little tension that you still had in your slightly bent legs is enough to make you go ballistic.
Next time you are in a high building with a fast elevator (the kind that does 30 floors in 20 seconds), try going down and jump while it's accelerating downwards, or go up and jump just before it stops. You will feel like Superman. Make sure that you don't knock your head into the ceiling, though.:-)
Especially with large appliances, cars, and the like, you typically save a hell of a lot more energy by continually repairing it and by not buying a newer, more efficient model
As of 2005, the energy cost of manufacturing a car is 3 MWh (0.6 tons of CO2 equivalent), partially thanks to the fact that many parts of a car are recycled. Your mileage my vary, but that is equivalent to burning about 300 liters of gasoline. Replacing a gas-guzzling SUV (12 liters per 100 km) by a compact (6 liters per 100 km) will pay back in just 5000 km, energy-wise.
dynamos by definition produce DC current (generators produce AC).
Dynamo definition: "The dynamo uses electromagnetic principles to convert mechanical rotation into an alternating electric current.". Whatever you call it, a conventional bicycle generator generates AC current.
I couldn't find a food source that would provide you the energy to convert into . . . energy . . . economically even if you were paying 25 cents/kWh for your electrical power.
Indeed... food oil: 2 euros per liter, provides about 35 MJ of energy. That's about 10 kWh. Unfortunately the conversion efficiency of a human is about 25%, which means 2.5 kWh (65 ct) worth of electricity.
A normal bicycle dynamo will deliver nominally 0.5 amps at 6 V. You could rectify it and connect it directly to a pair of 1.2 V NiMH cells of say 2500 mAh. You won't get more than about 700 mA of current regardless of how fast you cycle, so to recharge those NiMHs would take you about 4 hours. I have actually done this during cycling holidays. With NiMHs you can just count the hours; the current from the dynamo is fairly independent of your speed. I wouldn't try charging Li-ion batteries; the charging circuit might not like a rectified AC voltage that fluctuates between 0 and 9 volts.
Of course you could try to send the dynamo output through a transformer (lower voltage, higher current) before rectifying.
Quiet acquiescence solves nothing. If a website screws up its fonts, complain. I'm a web developer, and I'd hate to think people were silently putting up with mistakes I made instead of telling me about it.
I actually have a website with a small community that had been running with 100% fonts for quite some time. It turned out that several people didn't like my layout and used one of the forum-software-supplied default style because my fonts were too big and setting the browser defaults +smaller makes the rest of the web too small. When I changed the fonts to 82% (14px) I surely got a complaint that it was too small. I ended up giving users the option to switch font size.
At the same time, I set my browser defaut to 14 px rather than 12 px. It really saved me a lot of headache since most websites render in a much more consistant manner without me having to hit the zoom key all the time.
screens are a lot bigger these days. I don't need to cram everything down to the smallest size possible. So I started using the default settings. And you know what? I could read stuff a lot smaller, but it's a lot faster and easier on the eyes to have it at a sensible size. And despite what you think, that doesn't mean I am visually handicapped.
Actually I think you are above 45 years old and are postponing the purchase of reading glasses and instead increasing the distance between your eyes and your screen beyond normal reading distance.:-) Screens are indeed bigger nowadays, but most consumer-grade big 19- or 20-inch screens are still 1280x1024 pixels, just like the 17-inch screens have been for quite a few years, so increasing font size does cost you screen real estate.
If you don't believe me, compare it to the font size in your word processor, mail client and other applications.
Most of the time I use
xterm: 12x6 font - I'm usually not staring at the commandline for hours, and this is a good compromise between screen real-estate and ease of readability. My email client runs in an xterm.
emacs: 13x7 font - slightly bigger since I do spend hours working with emacs
Opera web browser: I prefer about 12 px for regular text. I've set my default to 14 px and it works reasonably with CSS-aware websites that set the font to 80%. This includes presumably knowledgeable sites such as http://alistapart.com/ .
Now you don't know my screen resolution, but the distance between my eyes an my screen is about 40 cm and the 10 pt fonts in the newspaper correspond to roughly 11 px on the screen. Either you have your screen all the way on the other side of your desk, or you also prefer to read books for visually handicapped people and small children.
I agree that it would have been nicer if all web browsers had defaulted to 14 px, with people like me setting it to 12 px and people like you setting it to 16 px, and all websites using a default font size of 100%. But that's not the case unfortunately and setting your default of 125% of your real preference is the best alternative.
how long is it going to take some of you people to realise that not everybody can read your gorgeous 8 pt font,
I was getting annoyed myself about small fonts on websites including the Slashdot redesign of a couple of months ago. But then I discovered that somehow all major browsers default to 16px font sizes which is HUGE for the majority of people, which forces webdesigners to either specify an absolute fontsize or a relative font size of 70 to 85 percent. But if you do the sensible thing and set your web browser to a default font size of 12 or 13 px, most websites will end up in extremely small print.
Slashdot Mirror
The actual patent says "internet OR computer network", although I give you that the claim indeed explicitly mentions "an internet protocol".
But note that the set of statements in a patent claim can be invalidated by a wider type of prior art. So a claim of using internet for some purpose is invalidated by prior art that does exactly the same thing on a computer network, since internet is just one type of computer network.
So if HAM radio can be considered a computer network, and someone connected HAM radio on both ends to regular phone lines, that would invalidate the patent. Unfortunately, unless it was packet radio (ethernet-like data transfer over radio), it wouldn't be a computer network.
I was going to write that the grid can't handle any significant fraction of the population doing that, but actually, it can. Assume that a typical commuter does 20 miles/day in an electric car that otherwise (in weight and aerodynamics) is comparable to a 60 mpg car. Energy-wise you gain a factor 2 since the charging/discharging cycle is more efficient than burning fuel. With these assumptions, it means you would consume just about 5 kWh per day during off-peak hours, which is actually quite realistic.
Uhh.. no. You might be somewhat right for a typical bathroom silver-on-glass mirror due to the absorption in the glass substrate, but for use in space you would use aluminum-coated mylar film (think potato chips bags: lightweight and cheap). Aluminum reflects >90% all the way from deep IR to UV. With silver, the reflectivity would be a bit higher, 95%, but it would reach only down to about 400 nm (which does include the vast majority of the solar spectrum) and it is harder to evaporate-coat large surface. See Newport mirror specs. (Protection refers to a transparant anti-corrosion layer which is not necessary in space).
I'm not sure whether you are being sarcastic here. You as the owner wouldn't care maybe, but copying an object is covered by other intellectual-property laws besides copyright. Part of the construction of the chair could be patented, or the design of the chair could have a patent. I'm think patents don't apply for private not-for-profit, but you are certainly not allowed to sell the copy of the chair.
I'm not with you. Copyright serves a good purpose. What is wrong with the current system is that the term of the copyright is ridiculous (I think 90 years after publication by companies or life + 70 years for persons). Moreover, DRM takes away the possibility of making a copy after the copyright expires.
Provide me a reference or example that country-blocking websites will not show up in nationalized versions. Google.nl, google.fr, google.sv, etc. only give a slightly different ordering of the search results (slightly preferring certain TLDs and pages written in the local language).
As I said: fine with me if you do that, but the search engines should not be indexing you. And you should not be lying in public about the real reasons for your policy.
I have read the stories about "we have a long list of blocked IP addresses and all the horrible bots are using my bandwidth". Brett Tabke is a liar. I have tried accessing his site from many different (static!) IPs in different /16 blocks and they were all blocked. Tabke's business model is to have an ad-free website and charge $180 per year for access to the site. He wants to attract new paying customers without paying for bandwidth to nonpaying visitors. So he blocked access by nonpaying visitors from Asia and Europe completely because they were not generating enough revenue.
That's all fine with me, but then block Googlebot as well. Allowing Googlebot and not allowing 80% of the world population is called cloaking in my dictionary and Google should have removed the whole site from the index for that reason.
Hmm, I always had the impression that they use the feedback to seed a database of pages to test their spam-removal algorithms on. They claim that they "prefer automated solutions rather than manual removal".
One of my big annoyances is sites that are spidered by Google but require mere mortal visitors to purchase a subscription. For example, searches on certain technical subjects often return pages with IEEE publications - purchase this article for US$ 20. And for a long time, webmasterworld.com had been blocking most of the world except the US. Extremely annoying, to search for any webmaster-related subject and WMW is the #1 hit and being unable to see the page. I reported this type of sites several times, but they were never removed.
I see, you're talking about high gain for the transmitter rather than the receiver. (I forgot that both go hand-in-hand) In that case it's an arms race that will only help as long as you're the only one, and at a cost of your neighbors who will have even worse reception.
This is about network security and has nothing to do with RF interference between devices sharing the same channel. If you're afraid of people using your network, use WPA encryption. MAC filtering and cloaked SSID broadcasting and even WEP encryption will only help against casual (nonintentional) use, but can be circumvented by anyone with wireless network sniffer software.
High-gain omnidirectional antennae don't help very much against a congested ether. The problem isn't that the desired signal is to weak, but that the background signal is too strong compared to the desired signal. An omni antenna will amplify both of them. A better approach is a directional antenna, both on the access point and on the connected computer.
Realclimate: Global warming on Mars?. The Mars argument is already two years old and a connection between the factors affecting the Mars climate and those affecting Earth climate is not supported by scientific evidence.
Why does this nonsense keep turning up here? If you had taken 1 minute to Google for it, you would have found that human CO2 emissions are about 150 times bigger than all volcanic activity on earth.
If you value money more than perks, how about this? You have a commuting distance of 20 mi. By using the shuttle you save about $1000/year on fuel and 200 hours/year on driving. The shuttle might be comparable in time to driving yourself since it uses the carpool lanes. And rather than just stare at the car in front of you, you can check your email, surf the web, read a book, or take a nap. Of course, some people love to drive, but for others using the commuting time for other purposes might be worth $10 per hour (or whatever). For this example, a shuttle service that costs the employer $2000 per year could have a value of $3000 per year for certain employees, while the alternative was that the employer paid $2000 extra salary (minus taxes).
Similar for the food. You have to eat anyway. If they raise your salary and cut the free meals so that you can buy your own lunch you might very well end up with the same money in your wallet but with a tray of fast food rather than a decent meal.
Finally, it is in the interest of the employer to create an atmosphere where the employees feel part of a big happy family rather than that everyone is just minding their own business.
It's probably way more expensive than that. In Europe, you would pay around EUR 1400 per year as an individual for a 30 km commute in ordinary public transport. (I checked Netherlands and Sweden) A quick check at the Caltrain website suggests that something equivalent in California would be $1200 per year. Now I don't know how the government subsidizes public transport and how exactly that would compare to Google setting up their own transport (roads are also government-subsidized), but I'm pretty sure that shuttles with on-board wifi, laptop connections, and leather seats would be considerably more expensive than ordinary public transport.
But the waves themselves are gravity-driven and the water surface can not drop faster than g. What probably happened is that the surfer inadvertently made an upward jump while the surfboard was accelerating downwards. Normally, you need a lot of force to make a jump, but if the floor is going down at 0.9 g, you feel like your body is only 0.1 times its normal weight and the little tension that you still had in your slightly bent legs is enough to make you go ballistic.
Next time you are in a high building with a fast elevator (the kind that does 30 floors in 20 seconds), try going down and jump while it's accelerating downwards, or go up and jump just before it stops. You will feel like Superman. Make sure that you don't knock your head into the ceiling, though. :-)
As of 2005, the energy cost of manufacturing a car is 3 MWh (0.6 tons of CO2 equivalent), partially thanks to the fact that many parts of a car are recycled. Your mileage my vary, but that is equivalent to burning about 300 liters of gasoline. Replacing a gas-guzzling SUV (12 liters per 100 km) by a compact (6 liters per 100 km) will pay back in just 5000 km, energy-wise.
Another site says that 94% of the CO2 emissions of a car are related to fuel production and consumption.
Dynamo definition: "The dynamo uses electromagnetic principles to convert mechanical rotation into an alternating electric current.". Whatever you call it, a conventional bicycle generator generates AC current.
Indeed... food oil: 2 euros per liter, provides about 35 MJ of energy. That's about 10 kWh. Unfortunately the conversion efficiency of a human is about 25%, which means 2.5 kWh (65 ct) worth of electricity.
A normal bicycle dynamo will deliver nominally 0.5 amps at 6 V. You could rectify it and connect it directly to a pair of 1.2 V NiMH cells of say 2500 mAh. You won't get more than about 700 mA of current regardless of how fast you cycle, so to recharge those NiMHs would take you about 4 hours. I have actually done this during cycling holidays. With NiMHs you can just count the hours; the current from the dynamo is fairly independent of your speed. I wouldn't try charging Li-ion batteries; the charging circuit might not like a rectified AC voltage that fluctuates between 0 and 9 volts.
Of course you could try to send the dynamo output through a transformer (lower voltage, higher current) before rectifying.
I actually have a website with a small community that had been running with 100% fonts for quite some time. It turned out that several people didn't like my layout and used one of the forum-software-supplied default style because my fonts were too big and setting the browser defaults +smaller makes the rest of the web too small. When I changed the fonts to 82% (14px) I surely got a complaint that it was too small. I ended up giving users the option to switch font size.
At the same time, I set my browser defaut to 14 px rather than 12 px. It really saved me a lot of headache since most websites render in a much more consistant manner without me having to hit the zoom key all the time.
Actually I think you are above 45 years old and are postponing the purchase of reading glasses and instead increasing the distance between your eyes and your screen beyond normal reading distance. :-) Screens are indeed bigger nowadays, but most consumer-grade big 19- or 20-inch screens are still 1280x1024 pixels, just like the 17-inch screens have been for quite a few years, so increasing font size does cost you screen real estate.
Most of the time I use
- xterm: 12x6 font - I'm usually not staring at the commandline for hours, and this is a good compromise between screen real-estate and ease of readability. My email client runs in an xterm.
- emacs: 13x7 font - slightly bigger since I do spend hours working with emacs
- Opera web browser: I prefer about 12 px for regular text. I've set my default to 14 px and it works reasonably with CSS-aware websites that set the font to 80%. This includes presumably knowledgeable sites such as http://alistapart.com/ .
Now you don't know my screen resolution, but the distance between my eyes an my screen is about 40 cm and the 10 pt fonts in the newspaper correspond to roughly 11 px on the screen. Either you have your screen all the way on the other side of your desk, or you also prefer to read books for visually handicapped people and small children.I agree that it would have been nicer if all web browsers had defaulted to 14 px, with people like me setting it to 12 px and people like you setting it to 16 px, and all websites using a default font size of 100%. But that's not the case unfortunately and setting your default of 125% of your real preference is the best alternative.
I was getting annoyed myself about small fonts on websites including the Slashdot redesign of a couple of months ago. But then I discovered that somehow all major browsers default to 16px font sizes which is HUGE for the majority of people, which forces webdesigners to either specify an absolute fontsize or a relative font size of 70 to 85 percent. But if you do the sensible thing and set your web browser to a default font size of 12 or 13 px, most websites will end up in extremely small print.
Where did you find that link? If I follow it I'm redirected to the multi-page version.