I'm having trouble verifying your assertion. The USPTO site doesn't allow name searches on pending patent applications. They also don't show any valid patents for the inventor name Givert Hyatt.
Doing a few quick searches, I found lots of stories about his most recent claim, and the micro controller patent in the 90s.
Do you have a link with all his patents, or is 2 all of them?
You know, one guy told me once that there was an unofficial policy. That clearly makes it policy, not doesn't it.
If that's how you think the world really does work, then I not only have a man with a bridge to sell you, but a friend of a friend knows this guy who says he has real photos of bigfoot on a UFO.
I doubt it's a stall. There are more likely reasons for it.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. (2001)
Many journalists have fallen for the conspiracy theory of government. I do assure you that they would produce more accurate work if they adhered to the cock-up theory. (1985)
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice (sometime after 1973)
You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity. (1941)
Let us not attribute to malice and cruelty what may be referred to less criminal motives. Do we not often afflict others undesignedly, and, from mere carelessness, neglect to relieve distress? (1812)... misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent. (1774)
And there is no relationship between homeland and fatherland. Of all the things they could have maned DHS, did they really need to Godwin themselves?:)
The addresses are frequently wrong too. Sometimes it's only off by one building. Sometimes it's off by miles. I usually give people coordinates to the entrance.
Of course, Google had to redo maps, removing features I used all the time, like "Drop Coordinates", which would display the coordinates at the point you selected. The distance ruler is gone too. They were beta features, but I used them all the time.
You can still pull the coordinates sometimes. Not always though. Sometimes it'll show in the tag of the location. Otherwise, it's up in the URL, but you have to guess which one it is.
Strange, why would they think the suspect would leave, and then come back for the photos? Most people who would do that know they have very little time to work. Once the car is noticed missing or found, they're done. Sure, they like their trophies, but going back the next day is a huge risk they usually aren't willing to do. It's safer to steal another car for anything they may have forgotten.
No, it's... Oh, ok, it is. The only difference between this and a Death Star is the crunchy center, and a lack of soldiers in white uniforms that can't shoot straight.
I don't think it would ever be built, simply because it's exactly a space based weapon. Aim the beam at a receiving station, and everything is fine. Aim it at a major city, and... well, it won't go very well for anyone there. They say 2 technologies, laser and microwave. We know what happens to things in a residential microwave at just 1,000 watts. Imagine how fast you could make an egg explode under 17,000 terawatts (roughly Earth's energy consumption).
I was going to say there's no laser capable of that kind of energy, but it seems NIF at LLNL did make a 500 terawatt laser, but it only runs for a very small fraction of a second. It would be more accurate to say no laser has been made for continuous use. But that would be one hell of a cutting laser.
I'm sure the SyFy channel will be making a direct-to-cable movie about it soon.:) Maybe they can get the Sharktopus mixed into the script somehow.
That's a pretty good deal. Cause a huge explosion, (probably) kill someone, and blow up a truck, and pay the town off with a pizza and 2 liter.
If *I* caused a huge explosion.. no, lets just say a small explosion, like just the propane truck. Say one person caught a tiny piece of shrapnel that was picked out with tweezers and fixed with a band-aid, I'd be in jail for an awful long time.
Oh, I know the type. Actually, I've seen pretty much all the types.
I've been pretty lucky with the angry drunks. Usually I can talk them down, dodge their punches, or block. In the event I'm hit... well... hopefully I have enough drinks in me to not care. I can take a hit sober or drunk. I just get upset about it if I'm sober.
At one bar, I worked for the owner in another business, and I worked with the bartender at the other business, so all my drinks were free (per the owner). That night I was order a shot of rum, and a double rum and coke chaser. The bartender was amazed. I just kept drinking and talking to people all night. The next day she told me, the rum and coke was eventually just rum with a splash of coke for coloring. She wanted to see how much it would take to get me drunk, but I appeared perfectly sober the whole night. The only difference is that I flirted with her more after quite a few drinks. I told her it was about 4 rounds in I felt it.
But no, I wasn't good to drive. I have the same human metabolism everyone else has. If I had to do a breathalyzer, it would have probably caught on fire. Even though I can look perfectly sober, and act perfectly sober, and my coordination doesn't suffer, that doesn't mean I should drive.
It's a lot cheaper for me to be the designated driver.:) I don't even drink very often any more. It just costs too much. I can find more interesting things to spend money on.
I don't know what fine drinking establishments you've been to. The ones I've been to only cut you off when you can't pay, puke on the floor, or start a fight.
For some of us, there are few visible signs of our intoxication. I'd probably love that real-fake pub. "Nope, not drunk yet, keep trying."
Everyone knows we hit peak oil in the 1970s. That's why we have to walk everywhere, and those antique internal combustion vehicles are cluttering our landfills.
Like the next AC said.. If someone wants good guns, it's easier to hit a police station, gun store, pawn shop, or the local national guard armory. Police stations can be rough, except the "office" stations, which are basically unmanned outside of normal business hours.
Gun stores are suppose to vault all their weapons after hours. When I've talked to some, they depend on their building security, considering the entire building to be the "vault", including the sales floor.
One gun store was shut down recently, and it made it *real* easy for the state police to empty it. They picked the lock on the front door, disabled the alarm, and moved all the weapons out in a U-Haul. Since they were cleaning the place out, they took their time, and took all the computers and records. It took about an hour.
If they're feeling ungraceful, a ram can give them access in seconds.
Me, being well armed as an individual, is nothing in comparison to any of the above mentioned facilities.
Still, some criminals are dumb. They'll hit a gas station for the cash in the drawer (frequently under $100), rather than the bank or check cashing store next door.
You do know that statistics like that are complete and total BS.
If someone were to encourage an intruder to leave quickly (with no shots fired), there is no accountability nor paper trail. Not everything should turn into a complaint to law enforcement. A lot of those potential intruders learn from their mistake.
If, as another example, the local hoodlums knew someone was well armed, they may choose to avoid trouble with that person. Again, no shots fired. No police reports.
Some of us have a very safe zone around our homes, because the word does get out that we're well armed. It's a smaller scale on the idea of "peace through strength".
I think part of the issue is, sure GE will replace them, but who is going to install them.
Most of the time, building maintenance will handle changing out a bad ballast. Telling them to go change *all* of them is a pretty big deal.
In one building I worked in, they swapped all the florescent for LED fixtures. They worked every night for about a month, changing fixtures. It was a hired contractor who did the work, changing *all* the fixtures is way beyond the abilities of a handful of maintenance people.
I don't see any indication here that they have a good way to identify *which* ballasts are bad. It's just "small number of its UltraMax ballasts". It may only require changing a couple dozen, instead of a couple thousand. It may only be the set closest to the windows on one side of the building. It may just be some on a few suites that were recently renovated.
It doesn't sound like Verizon or the FCC has volunteered to do any additional work to mitigate the situation, like sending someone with a spectrum analyzer to identify which ones are faulty.
I know there are other exchanges out there. Even if they all went down today, more would come up shortly after, as long as there is a demand for them.
BTC is a fad. It's becoming more accepted, but not well enough to say it will survive the test of time. It has an inherent flaw. There can only be 21 million bitcoins. If someone holding them loses their wallet, they're lost. They aren't reissued by anyone, since there is no central authority to do it. I've touched on that in the past about reissuing gov't seized or fraudulently taken BTC.
At the current exchange rate, that's only $14,530,000,000 USD. While that's a lot to me, it's insignificant as a global currency. According to the federal reserve, approximately $1,230,000,000,000 USD are in circulation as of Feb 5, 2014. Another reference said that 63% of the world currency is USD.
So, we can extrapolate that to be $1,685,100,000,000 ($1.685 trillion) in circulation. At best, at current exchange rates, that would account for 0.86% of the global currency. While $14.530B is nothing to sneeze at, it doesn't count for much of anything in the grand scale.
Another way to look at it would be, if 21 million people world wide each had 1 BTC, and never did anything with it, that would mean 0.29% of the population would hold that currency. In time, since the wallet loss and reissue situations exist, the amount of currency in circulation will drop, meaning significantly less than 1% will have anything.
I'm playing along with the fad though. I have miners going, and I will be setting up more. I'll let them run as long as there is something to mine, and I will exchange it out for viable long-term currency.
It is possible that BTC will adjust for the cap that it's rapidly reaching. Other virtual currencies may take it's place. As long as they have the cap that limits their usefulness, they will in time die also. Maybe one will be BTCv6, which will be lovingly implemented just like we have all migrated from IPv4 to IPv6. Oh.
Well... someone can always set up a new exchange elsewhere. It's not like it's black magic. You just need to have the funding in both currencies to be able to support the exchange. There are lots of private currency exchanges, who will happily convert national currencies. If they trusted in BTC, they could easily add that to their portfolio.
I could set up the better BTC/USD exchange tomorrow, but since I only have (checks wallet) 0.00000889 BTC, and almost a comparable amount of US currency, I wouldn't work very well. I'm sure others could provide such a service.
If Mt. Gox never handles BTC again, someone else will. At least for a while until the BTC fad dies.
I am curious to if this has anything to do with the US Gov't saying they were going to cash out all of Ulbricht's seized BTC for real currency. That would be a quick way to cripple an exchange.
It's the same concern, which has historically to real-world banks. Banks rarely, if ever, hold enough currency to convert funds in accounts to currency. HSBC is the latest in this, refusing large cash withdrawals. When the US currency backed by gold or silver. In theory the metals were available somewhere, but not at the banks.
It brings back the question, what is currency anyways. Why does my piece of paper, or number in an electronic transfer really correspond to a loaf of bread?
I got lucky with Second Life, way back when it was an interesting little site. I "bought" "land" in-game, and sat on it for a while. A while later, I "sold" the "land" for significantly more. Well, a large percentage. Not a lot of money. Why was that currency exchangeable for US dollars, or even the "land" worth anything, since it was never a physical property?
Thankfully, most never really took off, except for the WYSIWYG HTML editors. I still hate it when people who make their entire WYSIWYG site, and then ask me to go make "simple" changes. Sure. 3 hours to reformat the HTML itself and strip out extraneous crap, and 5 minutes to make the change....like...
<font color='#FFFFFF'><font color='#ff33dd'><font color='#000000'><i><span style='color:#0cd'><b><font face="Book Antiqua, Times New Roman, Times"><a href='C:\My Documents\FP98 Examples\homepage.htm'></a></font></b></span></i></font></font></font>
I don't mind charging the time to do it, but I hate doing the work. Sometimes I'm actually stunned how much crap can be shoved into code, that does absolutely nothing.
It happens in real coding too. I've found thousands of lines of unused functions, or even
/* disabled for now, fix tomorrow. */ /* John - Feb 13, 1998 */ if (0){ ... // 500 lines later }
Ya, they'll keep polluting the comments with this crap for a few days. Then Slashdot will or won't go with the new format. They done a couple pushes to go to new formats. There was less bitching, but they still never went with them.
Well, if you ever actually logged in and gave useful participation, you'd know that mod points are given to anyone who logs in and gives useful participation.
If you don't like the way things are moderated, it's up to you to do a better job.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm having trouble verifying your assertion. The USPTO site doesn't allow name searches on pending patent applications. They also don't show any valid patents for the inventor name Givert Hyatt.
Doing a few quick searches, I found lots of stories about his most recent claim, and the micro controller patent in the 90s.
Do you have a link with all his patents, or is 2 all of them?
You know, one guy told me once that there was an unofficial policy. That clearly makes it policy, not doesn't it.
If that's how you think the world really does work, then I not only have a man with a bridge to sell you, but a friend of a friend knows this guy who says he has real photos of bigfoot on a UFO.
I doubt it's a stall. There are more likely reasons for it.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. (2001)
Many journalists have fallen for the conspiracy theory of government. I do assure you that they would produce more accurate work if they adhered to the cock-up theory. (1985)
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice (sometime after 1973)
You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity. (1941)
Let us not attribute to malice and cruelty what may be referred to less criminal motives. Do we not often afflict others undesignedly, and, from mere carelessness, neglect to relieve distress? (1812) ... misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent. (1774)
And there is no relationship between homeland and fatherland. Of all the things they could have maned DHS, did they really need to Godwin themselves? :)
The addresses are frequently wrong too. Sometimes it's only off by one building. Sometimes it's off by miles. I usually give people coordinates to the entrance.
Of course, Google had to redo maps, removing features I used all the time, like "Drop Coordinates", which would display the coordinates at the point you selected. The distance ruler is gone too. They were beta features, but I used them all the time.
You can still pull the coordinates sometimes. Not always though. Sometimes it'll show in the tag of the location. Otherwise, it's up in the URL, but you have to guess which one it is.
The agency abbreviation is USSS. It doesn't help that everyone knows them as "Secret Service", which is intuitively abbreviated to SS.
Strange, why would they think the suspect would leave, and then come back for the photos? Most people who would do that know they have very little time to work. Once the car is noticed missing or found, they're done. Sure, they like their trophies, but going back the next day is a huge risk they usually aren't willing to do. It's safer to steal another car for anything they may have forgotten.
Well, it's been nice knowing you. Agents will be at your house shortly.
No, it's ... Oh, ok, it is. The only difference between this and a Death Star is the crunchy center, and a lack of soldiers in white uniforms that can't shoot straight.
I don't think it would ever be built, simply because it's exactly a space based weapon. Aim the beam at a receiving station, and everything is fine. Aim it at a major city, and ... well, it won't go very well for anyone there. They say 2 technologies, laser and microwave. We know what happens to things in a residential microwave at just 1,000 watts. Imagine how fast you could make an egg explode under 17,000 terawatts (roughly Earth's energy consumption).
I was going to say there's no laser capable of that kind of energy, but it seems NIF at LLNL did make a 500 terawatt laser, but it only runs for a very small fraction of a second. It would be more accurate to say no laser has been made for continuous use. But that would be one hell of a cutting laser.
I'm sure the SyFy channel will be making a direct-to-cable movie about it soon. :) Maybe they can get the Sharktopus mixed into the script somehow.
Miles, kilometers, what's it matter. It's not rocket science... ... oh ...
That's a pretty good deal. Cause a huge explosion, (probably) kill someone, and blow up a truck, and pay the town off with a pizza and 2 liter.
If *I* caused a huge explosion.. no, lets just say a small explosion, like just the propane truck. Say one person caught a tiny piece of shrapnel that was picked out with tweezers and fixed with a band-aid, I'd be in jail for an awful long time.
That doesn't quite seem fair.
hahahah.. and eewww..
Oh, I know the type. Actually, I've seen pretty much all the types.
I've been pretty lucky with the angry drunks. Usually I can talk them down, dodge their punches, or block. In the event I'm hit ... well ... hopefully I have enough drinks in me to not care. I can take a hit sober or drunk. I just get upset about it if I'm sober.
At one bar, I worked for the owner in another business, and I worked with the bartender at the other business, so all my drinks were free (per the owner). That night I was order a shot of rum, and a double rum and coke chaser. The bartender was amazed. I just kept drinking and talking to people all night. The next day she told me, the rum and coke was eventually just rum with a splash of coke for coloring. She wanted to see how much it would take to get me drunk, but I appeared perfectly sober the whole night. The only difference is that I flirted with her more after quite a few drinks. I told her it was about 4 rounds in I felt it.
But no, I wasn't good to drive. I have the same human metabolism everyone else has. If I had to do a breathalyzer, it would have probably caught on fire. Even though I can look perfectly sober, and act perfectly sober, and my coordination doesn't suffer, that doesn't mean I should drive.
It's a lot cheaper for me to be the designated driver. :) I don't even drink very often any more. It just costs too much. I can find more interesting things to spend money on.
I don't know what fine drinking establishments you've been to. The ones I've been to only cut you off when you can't pay, puke on the floor, or start a fight.
For some of us, there are few visible signs of our intoxication. I'd probably love that real-fake pub. "Nope, not drunk yet, keep trying."
Everyone knows we hit peak oil in the 1970s. That's why we have to walk everywhere, and those antique internal combustion vehicles are cluttering our landfills.
And you're supporting the Orwellian idea that we should want cameras pointed at us 24/7, and never have a negative reaction to it.
Like the next AC said.. If someone wants good guns, it's easier to hit a police station, gun store, pawn shop, or the local national guard armory. Police stations can be rough, except the "office" stations, which are basically unmanned outside of normal business hours.
Gun stores are suppose to vault all their weapons after hours. When I've talked to some, they depend on their building security, considering the entire building to be the "vault", including the sales floor.
One gun store was shut down recently, and it made it *real* easy for the state police to empty it. They picked the lock on the front door, disabled the alarm, and moved all the weapons out in a U-Haul. Since they were cleaning the place out, they took their time, and took all the computers and records. It took about an hour.
If they're feeling ungraceful, a ram can give them access in seconds.
Me, being well armed as an individual, is nothing in comparison to any of the above mentioned facilities.
Still, some criminals are dumb. They'll hit a gas station for the cash in the drawer (frequently under $100), rather than the bank or check cashing store next door.
You do know that statistics like that are complete and total BS.
If someone were to encourage an intruder to leave quickly (with no shots fired), there is no accountability nor paper trail. Not everything should turn into a complaint to law enforcement. A lot of those potential intruders learn from their mistake.
If, as another example, the local hoodlums knew someone was well armed, they may choose to avoid trouble with that person. Again, no shots fired. No police reports.
Some of us have a very safe zone around our homes, because the word does get out that we're well armed. It's a smaller scale on the idea of "peace through strength".
I think part of the issue is, sure GE will replace them, but who is going to install them.
Most of the time, building maintenance will handle changing out a bad ballast. Telling them to go change *all* of them is a pretty big deal.
In one building I worked in, they swapped all the florescent for LED fixtures. They worked every night for about a month, changing fixtures. It was a hired contractor who did the work, changing *all* the fixtures is way beyond the abilities of a handful of maintenance people.
I don't see any indication here that they have a good way to identify *which* ballasts are bad. It's just "small number of its UltraMax ballasts". It may only require changing a couple dozen, instead of a couple thousand. It may only be the set closest to the windows on one side of the building. It may just be some on a few suites that were recently renovated.
It doesn't sound like Verizon or the FCC has volunteered to do any additional work to mitigate the situation, like sending someone with a spectrum analyzer to identify which ones are faulty.
I think AC got most of what I was going to say. :)
I know there are other exchanges out there. Even if they all went down today, more would come up shortly after, as long as there is a demand for them.
BTC is a fad. It's becoming more accepted, but not well enough to say it will survive the test of time. It has an inherent flaw. There can only be 21 million bitcoins. If someone holding them loses their wallet, they're lost. They aren't reissued by anyone, since there is no central authority to do it. I've touched on that in the past about reissuing gov't seized or fraudulently taken BTC.
At the current exchange rate, that's only $14,530,000,000 USD. While that's a lot to me, it's insignificant as a global currency. According to the federal reserve, approximately $1,230,000,000,000 USD are in circulation as of Feb 5, 2014. Another reference said that 63% of the world currency is USD.
So, we can extrapolate that to be $1,685,100,000,000 ($1.685 trillion) in circulation. At best, at current exchange rates, that would account for 0.86% of the global currency. While $14.530B is nothing to sneeze at, it doesn't count for much of anything in the grand scale.
Another way to look at it would be, if 21 million people world wide each had 1 BTC, and never did anything with it, that would mean 0.29% of the population would hold that currency. In time, since the wallet loss and reissue situations exist, the amount of currency in circulation will drop, meaning significantly less than 1% will have anything.
I'm playing along with the fad though. I have miners going, and I will be setting up more. I'll let them run as long as there is something to mine, and I will exchange it out for viable long-term currency.
It is possible that BTC will adjust for the cap that it's rapidly reaching. Other virtual currencies may take it's place. As long as they have the cap that limits their usefulness, they will in time die also. Maybe one will be BTCv6, which will be lovingly implemented just like we have all migrated from IPv4 to IPv6. Oh.
Well ... someone can always set up a new exchange elsewhere. It's not like it's black magic. You just need to have the funding in both currencies to be able to support the exchange. There are lots of private currency exchanges, who will happily convert national currencies. If they trusted in BTC, they could easily add that to their portfolio.
I could set up the better BTC/USD exchange tomorrow, but since I only have (checks wallet) 0.00000889 BTC, and almost a comparable amount of US currency, I wouldn't work very well. I'm sure others could provide such a service.
If Mt. Gox never handles BTC again, someone else will. At least for a while until the BTC fad dies.
I am curious to if this has anything to do with the US Gov't saying they were going to cash out all of Ulbricht's seized BTC for real currency. That would be a quick way to cripple an exchange.
It's the same concern, which has historically to real-world banks. Banks rarely, if ever, hold enough currency to convert funds in accounts to currency. HSBC is the latest in this, refusing large cash withdrawals. When the US currency backed by gold or silver. In theory the metals were available somewhere, but not at the banks.
It brings back the question, what is currency anyways. Why does my piece of paper, or number in an electronic transfer really correspond to a loaf of bread?
I got lucky with Second Life, way back when it was an interesting little site. I "bought" "land" in-game, and sat on it for a while. A while later, I "sold" the "land" for significantly more. Well, a large percentage. Not a lot of money. Why was that currency exchangeable for US dollars, or even the "land" worth anything, since it was never a physical property?
Nah, their code works. It's just the user experience is (from the comments I've seen) undesirable.
I didn't look at beta long enough to form an opinion. I just gave up on figuring it out, and came back to the good ol' interface. :)
I do recall some attempts at "graphical coding", where a function was an icon that you could drag into your code, and other such nonsense.
Wikipedia has a whole list of them.
Thankfully, most never really took off, except for the WYSIWYG HTML editors. I still hate it when people who make their entire WYSIWYG site, and then ask me to go make "simple" changes. Sure. 3 hours to reformat the HTML itself and strip out extraneous crap, and 5 minutes to make the change. ...like...
I don't mind charging the time to do it, but I hate doing the work. Sometimes I'm actually stunned how much crap can be shoved into code, that does absolutely nothing.
It happens in real coding too. I've found thousands of lines of unused functions, or even
Ya, they'll keep polluting the comments with this crap for a few days. Then Slashdot will or won't go with the new format. They done a couple pushes to go to new formats. There was less bitching, but they still never went with them.
At least this one never stuck. :)
http://www.metlin.org/content/blog/omgponies.jpg
Well, if you ever actually logged in and gave useful participation, you'd know that mod points are given to anyone who logs in and gives useful participation.
If you don't like the way things are moderated, it's up to you to do a better job.