Tilley is nothing but a slick huckster. The only thing he did wrong was get too greedy, and not skip out with the cash while he had the chance. Yes, I said cash. That's where all of the investor money was going.
His little demonstration at the Nashville track last year...the car didn't even make it to theoretical distance available from just the plain car batteries. It had a "problem with the wheel bearing." It was going pretty slow before it stopped, too. Also they'd drive it, stop it to "check on it" and attach a voltmeter so the audience could see that the voltage wasn't going down. In fact, while they had the "voltmeter" terminals connected, the voltage was going up. Proof of an amazing breakthrough I say.
His "explanation" of the "physics" behind his invention is the same "battery-popper" tripe that "alternative energy" scamsters have been pushing all along. They all involve big capacitors periodically pulsing high voltage into the battery at a certain frequency, which taps into some hitherto unknown energy in the atomic forces. Or some such crap. And it works with cheap, available car batteries! Convenient, because then they can keep the car batteries in plain sight.
I'd rather buy a Sundance generator. At least those look kind of cool.
Sorry, maybe you should go work for the Big Cellphone Companies. Because no one is going to give you a worldwide wireless network that you can administer yourself.
Maybe combine this with load-balancing. Each phone has its 150kbps cellular connection, and depending on how many phones are in the WiFi cloud, the phones can distribute collective bandwidth on an as-needed basis.
The key to this is managing the parallel connections intelligently, to avoid the bandwidth hogs. Perhaps it could be tied to a function; if a certain number of phones are in an area, a portion of the 3G bandwith is dedicated to group sharing over WiFi. If there are too few phones, they do not share their 3G connection. This way everyone's bandwidth experience is no less than the full 3G bandwidth allotted to their phone.
White backgrounds are pretty annoying when you spend most of your time working on a black AutoCAD background.
I was shopping for a new monitor a couple weeks ago; I was unable to find anything in the stores I could stand using, no matter how expensive it was. Shadow mask just doesn't cut it. It's like looking through ground glass. Trinitron monitors use the wires, which means the pixel edges are crisp and square. Almost bought a Samsung 19" with good reviews, for $280. But then I decided to check eBay. Found a guy selling 22" Gateway-branded Mitsubishi monitors, VX1120. They use a Diamondtron tube, which is about the same as a Trinitron. It's huge, flat-screen, USB hub, two inputs, sharpest picture I've ever seen. My working resolution is 1600x1200 with no squinting necessary. It cost me $209.99 plus $50 to ship a 75-pound monitor from Texas.
Hrmmm, I was just wondering about this. My Diamondtron monitor has a USB hub, and the two-input-button-switchable doohickey, but doesn't appear to have the same functionality.
I always wondered why two-input monitors didn't also include keyboard and mouse switches. It only seems to make sense, that's all. Why would you want to switch monitors, but not the keyboard? If you had a dual-head setup...um....oh. *slaps head in frustration at what a Windows user might actually do in order to get multiple desktops*
But before you go pointing fingers at Lemelson and his "money-grubbing hangers-ons" (his wife, for instance) you should do a little research into the actual facts of what Lemelson did and what he is doing even now. Check out some of the patents, and see how many fall into the "vacuous, opportunistic" category, or the "inventive and fleshed-out" category.
I am sure a lot of people involved with various corporations have sour feelings toward Lemelson, but the fact remains that the Lemelson Foundation exists, and is currently using 70 million dollars for the purpose of futhering development and education in the areas of science, engineering, and entrepreneurship. That is, 70 million dollars in America alone, disregarding the international programs.
"Well," you might say, "sounds good, but who knows where the money REALLY goes..." It often goes directly to the people who can use it to develop an idea and possibly patent it.
I happen to have spent a few thousand dollars of Lemelson's money, myself. Not that it really made my project a great success, but other projects have really done well. Check out NCIIA for some examples of the things the Lemelson Foundation is helping out with. Nearly everyone involved in an up-to-date engineering school is aware of Lemelson and the possibility that, if they come up with a Great Idea, they might have the opportunity to make it reality.
Some people claimed that it would be advantageous to prohibit a person filing a patent, if they never would or could implement the invention of their own accord.
To me that seems like a huge waste of resources. Sure, there are some people who will try to abuse the system. But others, people with bright minds that never quit dreaming up new concepts and technology, should not be forced to drearily forge out every invention they come up with. If that was the case, then the number of inventions any one person could come up with would be severely limited.
A lot of concepts can be created out of thin air, but it takes a lot of research and feasibility studies before some major concepts can be implemented. A detailed patent is often representative of a lot of original work, and as such should be protected.
Lemelson certainly was zealous about coming up with new ideas, and holding companies to patent law. He lost many cases, especially when the company was major and had infinite legal resources. But he did come up with many original ideas, and to a company with resources, buying rights can be a great deal. The inventor gets to eat, and the company has an original concept with major considerations worked out.
This may not really be on-topic, but you seemed to have a lot of disdain for anyone who might have a lot of ideas but no resources to carry out those ideas.
I would be too busy grinning about the fact that my daily work commute fuel cost is about 42 cents per gallon (assuming everyone splits the gas costs).
The only way traffic will get better *anywhere* is to have less cars on the road. I've taken to driving during non-standard commuting periods, just to get away from the idiots that clog up the roads with their little mind games and feuds from 7:00 to 8:30.
I don't care if someone is willing to fork over the equivalent of my yearly wages, just so they can drive in the carpool lane. It doesn't do anything to help the traffic problem. The carpool lane should be for carpoolers, and what governments *everywhere* should be doing, is providing incentives to carpool no matter if there is a lane for it or not.
For example, buddy up with four co-workers and get a special group card that gives you a tax break at the gas pump. Maybe not the most workable idea, but you get the point.
I pay taxes to have driveable roads, not maintain a nice little racket run by the state, to squeeze us for all we're worth.
I've never seen a monitor that could do that. It must be really old or a shadow mask monitor, I wouldn't know anything about shadow mask because I can't stand anything less sharp than a Trinitron or Diamondtron tube.
Feel free to rip apart some monitors and try it. I doubt you'll ever get more than 1/8th inch past the bezel, but hey you'll get posted on Slashdot if you succeed.
I've noticed that you can extend the scan outside the borders OF THE PHOSPHOR SURFACE, which means that you can't see any more than what you see through the plastic bezel.
Trust me, the monitor manufacturers don't throw away a single millimeter of diagonal measurement. Neither do they put useless phosphor compounds outside the normal viewing surface.
There is some other software available, which I can't be bothered to look for right now. It works like this: say you have a few pictures of an object, from several known angles. Then the program allows you to define common points and edges on each photo. Since the program knows what angle each photo was taken from, it can do the math to build a 3D mesh of the object.
Don't remember what it was called, but I used it a few years ago. Someone else get some karma and Google up a link.
It actually was an algorithm for "squaring the circle" which was a real head-scratcher back in the day. In order for his algorithm to work, it would indirectly define Pi == 4.
The quack mathematician presented this algorithm to the Indiana legislature, saying that he was going to license it to other states, and Indiana would be getting a major discount. Unfortunately for him, a real mathematician happened to be visiting and got wind of what was going on. He managed to expose the algorithm for what it was, and the bill immediately lost any momentum it might have had.
In their own brand of humor, the legislature passed the bill to the "Committee on Temperance".
I'm only remembering this from a few years back; I went to school in Indiana and we discovered this little tidbit one evening.
For handheld eating, we halve the melon across its axis, then place the cut side down and slice straight down for wedges. When you can't eat it outside (nighttime, too many mosquitoes, raining, etc.) what works best is to just cut it in big round slices and serve on a plate with a spoon.
I mean, what's the deal. So there's a sickness going around that's a little more fiesty than you average 24-hour bug.
Why keep it a secret? No one's going to blame you for it, every country goes through this stuff all the time. Is Communism so fragile that a few extra-heavy-duty flu cases will destroy it?
Seems like if a goverment wants to gain trust and credibility, they should flat-out tell the truth sometimes.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh...kay. Call me strange, I've never really considered a "big pocket of trapped hydrogen gas on Mars" much of a turn-on, but to each his own.
Tilley is nothing but a slick huckster. The only thing he did wrong was get too greedy, and not skip out with the cash while he had the chance. Yes, I said cash. That's where all of the investor money was going.
His little demonstration at the Nashville track last year...the car didn't even make it to theoretical distance available from just the plain car batteries. It had a "problem with the wheel bearing." It was going pretty slow before it stopped, too. Also they'd drive it, stop it to "check on it" and attach a voltmeter so the audience could see that the voltage wasn't going down. In fact, while they had the "voltmeter" terminals connected, the voltage was going up. Proof of an amazing breakthrough I say.
His "explanation" of the "physics" behind his invention is the same "battery-popper" tripe that "alternative energy" scamsters have been pushing all along. They all involve big capacitors periodically pulsing high voltage into the battery at a certain frequency, which taps into some hitherto unknown energy in the atomic forces. Or some such crap. And it works with cheap, available car batteries! Convenient, because then they can keep the car batteries in plain sight.
I'd rather buy a Sundance generator. At least those look kind of cool.
That's a really great strategy there, how much inventing gets done from a cardboard box in an alley, do you think?
Digital is all fine and dandy, but it just doesn't travel through the air like the good ol' EM we've all grown up with.
I don't quite think you have the slightest idea of what physical difference there is between digital and "regular" radio. Answer: none.
Sorry, maybe you should go work for the Big Cellphone Companies. Because no one is going to give you a worldwide wireless network that you can administer yourself.
Maybe combine this with load-balancing. Each phone has its 150kbps cellular connection, and depending on how many phones are in the WiFi cloud, the phones can distribute collective bandwidth on an as-needed basis.
The key to this is managing the parallel connections intelligently, to avoid the bandwidth hogs. Perhaps it could be tied to a function; if a certain number of phones are in an area, a portion of the 3G bandwith is dedicated to group sharing over WiFi. If there are too few phones, they do not share their 3G connection. This way everyone's bandwidth experience is no less than the full 3G bandwidth allotted to their phone.
White backgrounds are pretty annoying when you spend most of your time working on a black AutoCAD background.
I was shopping for a new monitor a couple weeks ago; I was unable to find anything in the stores I could stand using, no matter how expensive it was. Shadow mask just doesn't cut it. It's like looking through ground glass. Trinitron monitors use the wires, which means the pixel edges are crisp and square. Almost bought a Samsung 19" with good reviews, for $280. But then I decided to check eBay. Found a guy selling 22" Gateway-branded Mitsubishi monitors, VX1120. They use a Diamondtron tube, which is about the same as a Trinitron. It's huge, flat-screen, USB hub, two inputs, sharpest picture I've ever seen. My working resolution is 1600x1200 with no squinting necessary. It cost me $209.99 plus $50 to ship a 75-pound monitor from Texas.
Hrmmm, I was just wondering about this. My Diamondtron monitor has a USB hub, and the two-input-button-switchable doohickey, but doesn't appear to have the same functionality.
I always wondered why two-input monitors didn't also include keyboard and mouse switches. It only seems to make sense, that's all. Why would you want to switch monitors, but not the keyboard? If you had a dual-head setup...um....oh. *slaps head in frustration at what a Windows user might actually do in order to get multiple desktops*
They did manage to get quite a bit of money.
But before you go pointing fingers at Lemelson and his "money-grubbing hangers-ons" (his wife, for instance) you should do a little research into the actual facts of what Lemelson did and what he is doing even now. Check out some of the patents, and see how many fall into the "vacuous, opportunistic" category, or the "inventive and fleshed-out" category.
I am sure a lot of people involved with various corporations have sour feelings toward Lemelson, but the fact remains that the Lemelson Foundation exists, and is currently using 70 million dollars for the purpose of futhering development and education in the areas of science, engineering, and entrepreneurship. That is, 70 million dollars in America alone, disregarding the international programs.
"Well," you might say, "sounds good, but who knows where the money REALLY goes..." It often goes directly to the people who can use it to develop an idea and possibly patent it.
I happen to have spent a few thousand dollars of Lemelson's money, myself. Not that it really made my project a great success, but other projects have really done well. Check out NCIIA for some examples of the things the Lemelson Foundation is helping out with. Nearly everyone involved in an up-to-date engineering school is aware of Lemelson and the possibility that, if they come up with a Great Idea, they might have the opportunity to make it reality.
We had this discussion a week or two ago.
Some people claimed that it would be advantageous to prohibit a person filing a patent, if they never would or could implement the invention of their own accord.
To me that seems like a huge waste of resources. Sure, there are some people who will try to abuse the system. But others, people with bright minds that never quit dreaming up new concepts and technology, should not be forced to drearily forge out every invention they come up with. If that was the case, then the number of inventions any one person could come up with would be severely limited.
A lot of concepts can be created out of thin air, but it takes a lot of research and feasibility studies before some major concepts can be implemented. A detailed patent is often representative of a lot of original work, and as such should be protected.
Lemelson certainly was zealous about coming up with new ideas, and holding companies to patent law. He lost many cases, especially when the company was major and had infinite legal resources. But he did come up with many original ideas, and to a company with resources, buying rights can be a great deal. The inventor gets to eat, and the company has an original concept with major considerations worked out.
This may not really be on-topic, but you seemed to have a lot of disdain for anyone who might have a lot of ideas but no resources to carry out those ideas.
$20 a year? I wish!
I would be too busy grinning about the fact that my daily work commute fuel cost is about 42 cents per gallon (assuming everyone splits the gas costs).
I don't care how much they are willing to pay.
The only way traffic will get better *anywhere* is to have less cars on the road. I've taken to driving during non-standard commuting periods, just to get away from the idiots that clog up the roads with their little mind games and feuds from 7:00 to 8:30.
I don't care if someone is willing to fork over the equivalent of my yearly wages, just so they can drive in the carpool lane. It doesn't do anything to help the traffic problem. The carpool lane should be for carpoolers, and what governments *everywhere* should be doing, is providing incentives to carpool no matter if there is a lane for it or not.
For example, buddy up with four co-workers and get a special group card that gives you a tax break at the gas pump. Maybe not the most workable idea, but you get the point.
I pay taxes to have driveable roads, not maintain a nice little racket run by the state, to squeeze us for all we're worth.
SHUT UP!!!!
Don't you EVER do that again!
Giving ideas to Microsoft, sheesh. I hope you learned your lesson.
I've never seen a monitor that could do that. It must be really old or a shadow mask monitor, I wouldn't know anything about shadow mask because I can't stand anything less sharp than a Trinitron or Diamondtron tube.
Feel free to rip apart some monitors and try it. I doubt you'll ever get more than 1/8th inch past the bezel, but hey you'll get posted on Slashdot if you succeed.
I've noticed that you can extend the scan outside the borders OF THE PHOSPHOR SURFACE, which means that you can't see any more than what you see through the plastic bezel.
Trust me, the monitor manufacturers don't throw away a single millimeter of diagonal measurement. Neither do they put useless phosphor compounds outside the normal viewing surface.
Uh, not really. Noticed how tube size vs. viewable image is usually different? The tube itself is wider than what shows through the bezel.
Actually, nine licenses.
;-)
And no, you didn't even have to read the article to find that out. Just the Slashdot blurb would have been fine.
They should have named it "FreeCrap."
Legos is already Latin...for "to put together."
Surprising how many people don't know that.
There is some other software available, which I can't be bothered to look for right now. It works like this: say you have a few pictures of an object, from several known angles. Then the program allows you to define common points and edges on each photo. Since the program knows what angle each photo was taken from, it can do the math to build a 3D mesh of the object.
Don't remember what it was called, but I used it a few years ago. Someone else get some karma and Google up a link.
It actually was an algorithm for "squaring the circle" which was a real head-scratcher back in the day. In order for his algorithm to work, it would indirectly define Pi == 4.
The quack mathematician presented this algorithm to the Indiana legislature, saying that he was going to license it to other states, and Indiana would be getting a major discount. Unfortunately for him, a real mathematician happened to be visiting and got wind of what was going on. He managed to expose the algorithm for what it was, and the bill immediately lost any momentum it might have had.
In their own brand of humor, the legislature passed the bill to the "Committee on Temperance".
I'm only remembering this from a few years back; I went to school in Indiana and we discovered this little tidbit one evening.
For handheld eating, we halve the melon across its axis, then place the cut side down and slice straight down for wedges. When you can't eat it outside (nighttime, too many mosquitoes, raining, etc.) what works best is to just cut it in big round slices and serve on a plate with a spoon.
Thank you (and the previous poster). That was kind of my point; what harm could announcing simple facts cause, to a stable government....
I mean, what's the deal. So there's a sickness going around that's a little more fiesty than you average 24-hour bug.
Why keep it a secret? No one's going to blame you for it, every country goes through this stuff all the time. Is Communism so fragile that a few extra-heavy-duty flu cases will destroy it?
Seems like if a goverment wants to gain trust and credibility, they should flat-out tell the truth sometimes.