Some laptops have touchpads built in. My old laptop has an area of space in front of the keyboard dedicated to the touch pad and press buttons which is the same size as a smartphone. It would be very easy to modify a laptop so that the docking/charging port for a smartphone would be in this area.
The problem is that virus writers are coming out with 100,000 plus variants each day. The IT industry is coming to a point where a white-list of permitted applications vs. a black-list of malware is going to be the only way to download safe software. Then the malware battle will shift over to application plugins just like web-browsers.
The current example I can think of is "floating-point textures" for GPU's. 15-20 years ago (1990's, 80287/80387, TMS34082), it was impossible to put all the transistor logic to handle floating-point calculations onto a single chip, let alone a cluster of them, so that concept was patented. Today, it's possible to get off-the-shelf logic cells that implement floating-point calculations, and the size of a GPU core is smaller than a NAND gate of a 6502. But the minute you combine graphics with floating-point, you suddenly become liable to pay-the-troll, even though CPU implementations (software rendering) won't be liable, nor will languages like OpenCL. It's only when you combine floating-point with graphics that the patent applies.
It's all to do with the way your lateral ventricles are wired up. It's almost like have a data center where there are extra fiber-optic cables going from the disk servers/HD video cameras straight to the GPU card, and bypassing the CPU/bridge altogether. You can do some things faster because there is no contextual filtering being applied, but other things slower because there just aren't the connections.
Ironically it was because Intel wouldn't let Acorn computers (of the Archimedes computer and BBC Model A/B) evaluate the 80286 for future markets that Acorn and Apple formed ARM. Since ARM didn't have access to the CPU development tools that the big Silicon Valley companies had, they had to hand-design every CPU, which forced them into the low-power market.
Perhaps there are oil fields in Mars. What used to be trees and dinosaur snacks on Earth is now large pools of hydrocarbons or Kerogen.
The only way you could tell something was DNA, would be through the ratios of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and oxygen:
Kerogen from the Green River Formation oil shale deposit of western North America contains elements in the proportions carbon 215 : hydrogen 330 : oxygen 12 : nitrogen 5 : sulfur 1.[2]
There are some life-forms which can only live in the high pressure environments of ocean sea-beds. Attempts to raise them to the surface (even with identical salinity, temperature, chemical mix) have just led to their death - they simply disintegrate. The high pressure that would crush a human, hold various chemical bonds together.
A "cell" simply consists of a number of "membranes" (outside world/cell, inside cell/nucleus), some scaffolding to keep everything in place, receptor units to send/receive messages from other cells (the biological equivalent of UNIX "sockets"). Then you have the "nucleus" which is like the kernel, and there are the mitochondria areas which convert nutrients into energy as well as pores to dump waste and take in nutrients. We already know that the cell nucleus will actually "cache" genes that are in use. The amino acids that form DNA are actually found throughout the universe. There are only so many different elements that are either completely inert (Neon), stable (Carbon bonds) and extremely reactive (Fluorine).
Moon is actually drifting away from Earth - around 5 cm/year. 50 cm/decade, 500cm/century, 50m/millenium, 50km/million years, 50,000km/billion years, 250,000km/5 billion years. But that extends beyond the age of the solar system.
At the time of the theoretical collision, the Moon was only a third of the distance from Earth than it is today.
I always thought it was the other way round. The great ring of fire (Pacific ocean area) was where the chunk of Earth which was blown into space and became the Moon.
It's cheaper to run traffic over an Internet link that it is to buy a dedicated line. Knew one oil company who wanted to run an RGB composite video cable all the way underwater from an oil rig to the head office, just so the CEO's could see what was happening on the control system offshore. Fortunately, the consultants persuaded him that converting the video signal to digital and running that through the existing fibre-optic network would do just as well.
Couldn't they like have the doctors wear third-eye head-band video cameras so the interns could see what the doctor sees, and watch these videos, or maybe have a virtual simulation system?
You would think that they would be able to automate some of that astronomy work - aiming telescopes, taking photographs, comparing images. Especially since the sky is like one giant Google maps that is being updated in real-time (meaning that there is a vast area to be explored with what are really tiny image fragments that are constantly changing). Like the search for Steve Fossett. They took thousands of pictures of the desert, but his plane actually crashed on a mountain at 10,000 feet.
I've seen the 1989 solar storm for myself. That created a glowing green + shape on a point diametrically opposite where the Sun was. Faint green bands of light that filled the entire visible night time for seconds at a time, at intervals of ten-fifteen seconds (These might have been visibly stronger if there wasn't street lighting). From the East coast of Scotland, we actually started hearing Norwegian FM radio stations (with stereo!) from about 2pm - 3pm.
Undoubtedly that chronicle report summarizes a years worth of events in a single entry. Weather conditions travel from Western Europe to the UK. So if the Vikings had been hit by bad weather, that weather would have been experienced by the UK three days later.
I've got a seven-year-old laptop - it's good enough to surf the web (even Google streetview) and watch HD videos. I was planning to buy a new laptop, but needed a new phone. A latest-model smartphone can do all the internet related things a laptop can do, as well as 3D graphics with texture-mapping (still blows me away - what used to be the exclusive domain of a SGI Extreme is now done by a mobile phone).
Sometimes the authors of paper aren't assertive about what the original contribution of their paper is within the abstract. They will just state what they write about in the paper. Is it a new algorithm, a comparison of existing algorithms, modification of an existing method, an optimization to reduce memory usage, processing time or improve accuracy? Another type of paper is the STAR (State-of-The-Art-Report), usually submitted by the head of the committee.
It's s a shame, but it's true. Like the invention of the combustion engine. The first working model would be considered noisy, fuel inefficient, and extremely environmentally unfriendly with soot and oil in the exhaust, but the paper published would have been considered seminal. Successive papers would document how to improve airflow, air-mixing, reduce turbulence, reduce noise, improve burn rate, improve fuel inefficiency, but they wouldn't be considered as ground-breaking.
If you had a monopoly on all the research on that field and could afford to wait 5 to 10 years, then you could put together all the improvements and that would appear to be a completely revolutionary engine.
There has been a study on how research group leaders tend to cross-reference each others work. That's the only way they can keep publishing. It's known as "citation analysis". Depending on the field of science or industry these are known as "Collaboration graphs", "citation graphs" or "Hollywood graphs" (for movies actors have starred in - some actors can form a natural inspiration for each other, like Laurel and Hardy, or The Three Stooges). For academics, they co-author papers together because they are experts in the same field.
Had one of my papers blocked for publication around 2004/2005 only to see the exact same paper published from California. That sucks.
Somebody once posted that they got a telling off by the teacher for resizing a window without permission by changing the column width and font size..
"Now, did anyone ask you to resize that window? Do you think it is fair that you have a window that is larger than everyone else? Don't you think it would be fairer if you resized that window back to the same size as everyone else?"
1986 - my school had a couple of Apple ]['s - one had a color screen, the other a monochrome one, each on distant ends of the campus. Both only had floppy disk drives. You would only get to use them if you did Sixth Year Studies Mathematics (equivalent of first year university). By that time, everyone else by that time had their own home computers (ZX Spectrums, Commodore 64's, BBC model B's, Oric's, Dragon 32's, Atari's) with modems.
The school tried to get back up to date by getting a network of BBC model B's as were the universities. One department actually used a network of computers that were tied together using some sort of serial cable daisy chain. If you switched your PC off, the whole network went down. Even worse, the hardware engineering department had us use AIM-65's.
Slashdot Mirror
Delightful night-time reading - nothing violent or scary. About the greatest hazard are the triangular buildings with sharp corners.
Some laptops have touchpads built in. My old laptop has an area of space in front of the keyboard dedicated to the touch pad and press buttons which is the same size as a smartphone. It would be very easy to modify a laptop so that the docking/charging port for a smartphone would be in this area.
The problem is that virus writers are coming out with 100,000 plus variants each day. The IT industry is coming to a point where a white-list of permitted applications vs. a black-list of malware is going to be the only way to download safe software. Then the malware battle will shift over to application plugins just like web-browsers.
USA defence budget for 2011 = $708 - $695.7 billion (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/06/defense-spending-fact-of-the-day_n_1746685.html, http://www.defense.gov/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=13281)
USA defence budget for 2007 = $740 billion (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/spending.htm)
NASA budget has varied between $33.514 billion in 1968 to $17 billion these days (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA)
One years USA defence spending exceeds the entire NASA budget for 50 years.
The current example I can think of is "floating-point textures" for GPU's. 15-20 years ago (1990's, 80287/80387, TMS34082), it was impossible to put all the transistor logic to handle floating-point calculations onto a single chip, let alone a cluster of them, so that concept was patented. Today, it's possible to get off-the-shelf logic cells that implement floating-point calculations, and the size of a GPU core is smaller than a NAND gate of a 6502. But the minute you combine graphics with floating-point, you suddenly become liable to pay-the-troll, even though CPU implementations (software rendering) won't be liable, nor will languages like OpenCL. It's only when you combine floating-point with graphics that the patent applies.
Give them a brain scan. Or alternatively, one of those SAT example papers would be a good way of finding out .
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2218611/How-differences-brains-autistic-people-explain-difficulties--shed-light-unique-talents.html
It's all to do with the way your lateral ventricles are wired up. It's almost like have a data center where there are extra fiber-optic cables going from the disk servers/HD video cameras straight to the GPU card, and bypassing the CPU/bridge altogether. You can do some things faster because there is no contextual filtering being applied, but other things slower because there just aren't the connections.
Ironically it was because Intel wouldn't let Acorn computers (of the Archimedes computer and BBC Model A/B) evaluate the 80286 for future markets that Acorn and Apple formed ARM. Since ARM didn't have access to the CPU development tools that the big Silicon Valley companies had, they had to hand-design every CPU, which forced them into the low-power market.
Perhaps there are oil fields in Mars. What used to be trees and dinosaur snacks on Earth is now large pools of hydrocarbons or Kerogen.
The only way you could tell something was DNA, would be through the ratios of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and oxygen:
Kerogen from the Green River Formation oil shale deposit of western North America contains elements in the proportions carbon 215 : hydrogen 330 : oxygen 12 : nitrogen 5 : sulfur 1.[2]
There are some life-forms which can only live in the high pressure environments of ocean sea-beds. Attempts to raise them to the surface (even with identical salinity, temperature, chemical mix) have just led to their death - they simply disintegrate. The high pressure that would crush a human, hold various chemical bonds together.
A "cell" simply consists of a number of "membranes" (outside world/cell, inside cell/nucleus), some scaffolding to keep everything in place, receptor units to send/receive messages from other cells (the biological equivalent of UNIX "sockets"). Then you have the "nucleus" which is like the kernel, and there are the mitochondria areas which convert nutrients into energy as well as pores to dump waste and take in nutrients. We already know that the cell nucleus will actually "cache" genes that are in use. The amino acids that form DNA are actually found throughout the universe. There are only so many different elements that are either completely inert (Neon), stable (Carbon bonds) and extremely reactive (Fluorine).
Moon is actually drifting away from Earth - around 5 cm/year. 50 cm/decade, 500cm/century, 50m/millenium, 50km/million years, 50,000km/billion years, 250,000km/5 billion years. But that extends beyond the age of the solar system.
At the time of the theoretical collision, the Moon was only a third of the distance from Earth than it is today.
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110803/full/news.2011.456.html
I always thought it was the other way round. The great ring of fire (Pacific ocean area) was where the chunk of Earth which was blown into space and became the Moon.
Though I found this link (depth of Earth's crust) http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/structure/crust/index.php, and do wonder whether the Earth could have
expanded due to nuclear fission.
Always wondered how the rock and mountains in Afghanistan are over 70 miles deep.
It's cheaper to run traffic over an Internet link that it is to buy a dedicated line. Knew one oil company who wanted to run an RGB composite video cable all the way underwater from an oil rig to the head office, just so the CEO's could see what was happening on the control system offshore. Fortunately, the consultants persuaded him that converting the video signal to digital and running that through the existing fibre-optic network would do just as well.
Couldn't they like have the doctors wear third-eye head-band video cameras so the interns could see what the doctor sees, and watch these videos, or maybe have a virtual simulation system?
You would think that they would be able to automate some of that astronomy work - aiming telescopes, taking photographs, comparing images.
Especially since the sky is like one giant Google maps that is being updated in real-time (meaning that there is a vast area to be explored with what are really tiny image fragments that are constantly changing). Like the search for Steve Fossett. They took thousands of pictures of the desert, but his plane actually crashed on a mountain at 10,000 feet.
I've seen the 1989 solar storm for myself. That created a glowing green + shape on a point diametrically opposite where the Sun was. Faint green bands of light that filled the entire visible night time for seconds at a time, at intervals of ten-fifteen seconds (These might have been visibly stronger if there wasn't street lighting). From the East coast of Scotland, we actually started hearing Norwegian FM radio stations (with stereo!) from about 2pm - 3pm.
Seeing crosses or crucifixes hasn't been the first time:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/06/28/1356230/has-a-biochem-undergrad-solved-a-cosmic-radiation-mystery
Undoubtedly that chronicle report summarizes a years worth of events in a single entry. Weather conditions travel from Western Europe to the UK. So if the Vikings had been hit by bad weather, that weather would have been experienced by the UK three days later.
Intel could argue that ARM is now their main competitor.
I've got a seven-year-old laptop - it's good enough to surf the web (even Google streetview) and watch HD videos. I was planning to buy a new laptop, but needed a new phone. A latest-model smartphone can do all the internet related things a laptop can do, as well as 3D graphics with texture-mapping (still blows me away - what used to be the exclusive domain of a SGI Extreme is now done by a mobile phone).
Sometimes the authors of paper aren't assertive about what the original contribution of their paper is within the abstract. They will just state what they write about in the paper. Is it a new algorithm, a comparison of existing algorithms, modification of an existing method, an optimization to reduce memory usage, processing time or improve accuracy? Another type of paper is the STAR (State-of-The-Art-Report), usually submitted by the head of the committee.
It's s a shame, but it's true. Like the invention of the combustion engine. The first working model would be considered noisy, fuel inefficient, and extremely environmentally unfriendly with soot and oil in the exhaust, but the paper published would have been considered seminal. Successive papers would document how to improve airflow, air-mixing, reduce turbulence, reduce noise, improve burn rate, improve fuel inefficiency, but they wouldn't be considered as ground-breaking.
If you had a monopoly on all the research on that field and could afford to wait 5 to 10 years, then you could put together all the improvements and that would appear to be a completely revolutionary engine.
There has been a study on how research group leaders tend to cross-reference each others work. That's the only way they can keep publishing. It's known as "citation analysis". Depending on the field of science or industry these are known as "Collaboration graphs", "citation graphs" or "Hollywood graphs" (for movies actors have starred in - some actors can form a natural inspiration for each other, like Laurel and Hardy, or The Three Stooges). For academics, they co-author papers together because they are experts in the same field.
Had one of my papers blocked for publication around 2004/2005 only to see the exact same paper published from California. That sucks.
Somebody once posted that they got a telling off by the teacher for resizing a window without permission by changing the column width and font size..
"Now, did anyone ask you to resize that window? Do you think it is fair that you have a window that is larger than everyone else? Don't you think it would be fairer if you resized that window back to the same size as everyone else?"
1986 - my school had a couple of Apple ]['s - one had a color screen, the other a monochrome one, each on distant ends of the campus. Both only had floppy disk drives. You would only get to use them if you did Sixth Year Studies Mathematics (equivalent of first year university). By that time, everyone else by that time had their own home computers (ZX Spectrums, Commodore 64's, BBC model B's, Oric's, Dragon 32's, Atari's) with modems.
The school tried to get back up to date by getting a network of BBC model B's as were the universities. One department actually used a network of computers that were tied together using some sort of serial cable daisy chain. If you switched your PC off, the whole network went down. Even worse, the hardware engineering department had us use AIM-65's.
127.0.0.1
And if he had told the joke that was so funny it could kill, he would have been arrested under the Official Secrets act:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhmnOpoGAPw
I thought it was the international investors and bankers - if there is anyone the MP's are scared of upsetting it is those two.