I see no irony. On the contrary, the ability to post anonymously is an enormous help to free speech.
Of course the law protects your right to free speech - but only protects you from the government, not employers. But it can only protect you from big hassles, not little ones. Very difficult to *prove* why you didn't get that promotion.
Of course, the sayings of an AC deserve less initial credit than those of someone who is prepared to put their name to it, and should be examined more cynically. But. in a rough and ready way, the/. mod system has it right: AC starts behing but can be modded upt to the same level as anyone else.
I heard that the US govenment is subsising anonymous posting for Farsi speakers in Iran - in support of free speech for Iranians.
I think it is very good that ACs can post on thsi sublect - providedly they are clearly marked. Better than them creating throwaway IDs to give the appearance of reality.
Amen to this - I was about to post on the same lines.
In many ways the most sinister bit is towards the bottom, where he tried to get a number of academics to co-sign the paper with him. None felt able to. They all had tenure, which is supposed to allow academics to be free of the pressures that make employees keep quiet about problems, but they were afraid for their funding, which comes from industry and is not tenured. An academic who says the wrong thing may not be out on the street touting for work, but with no research funding in an expensive subject like CS, he is reduced to a schoolteacher.
This is a case where more non-commercial funding is needed. Which usually means goverment funding. But on secutiry issues, the government is also a very interested party and is likely to step on the "wrong sort" of research (e.g. research that might block loopholes used by NSA, but potentially usable by black hats).
Part of the problem is again the size of one giant customer. If the industry were more diviersified commercially (as opposed to technically), a small organisation could take the risk of offending a proportion of the market in order to be seen as frank an knowledgeable by the remainder. But with M$ being the slarges customer for just about anything, as well as the largest supplier, any profit-driven organisation has to think of its opinion.
The half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is hardly relevant anyway. The amount should be fairly constant.
Boy, does this miss the point. If you have system with a steady input, it will after a time achieve a steady state - true.
But if you suddenly massively increase the input, it will achieve a new steady state. The time it takes to do this, and the level in the new state, will be related to the time it takes to absorb the the excess. A system with a quick re-absorbtion time will have a steady state only slightly above the original level; a system with a slow reabsorbtion time will have to rise to a much higher level before absorbtion balances the increased input. That is what we have done - introduced a sudden massive increase in CO2 production. It hasn't stabilised yet, and will not until a few half-lives have passed. But the stable level, for the new input state, will be higher than the preceding stable level.
It is a documented fact that CO2 levels are much higher than they were in prehistoric times - maybe twice as much. This is not in dispute by anybody reasonable. What is in dispute is whether this increased CO2 is causing global warming (maybe it isn't warming, maybe it is the sun, maybe it is cosmic rays...) - though the skeptics are shrinking in number - and whether global warming really matters (maybe it is cheaper to adjust to a warmer world than to spend a fortune cutting fown on something which may not be the problem).
H2O is indeed a greenhous gas. But, while our production of CO2 is of the same order as total natural production of CO2, and CO2 remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, our production of H2O is of the order of a millionth or less of natural producion (evaporation from land, sea, and ocean) and H2O is recycled (falls as rain etc) with a half-life again of the order of 30 days. So the total increase in atmospherice H2O die to burning fuel is tiny, whereas the total increase in atmospheric CO2 is (approx) a doubling.
And yes, increased CO2 levels do speed up plant growth. Which may be good - or not; a recent report said that the larger plants contained no more minerals and vitamins, just more bulk. Good for calories if you ase starving, not good for health if you are on junk food. I heard recently that land plants actually remove almost no CO2 directly. Growing plants absorb it, old plants emit a little, and dead plants rot back to the original amount of C02. The only net absorbers of CO2 are oceanic plankton, which tie up the CO2 in CaCO3 in their shells, which they dump on the depths of the ocean when they die, preventing rerelease.
Unfortunately, this is a long way from LEO capability. This is just vertically up to approximately the height of the lowest LEO possible and down again. For LEO, you need a massive amount of transversal velocity and, if you want to get back down again, to get rid of it afterwards. The first killed Challenger, the second Columbia.
Stop talking out of your arse. To all intents and purposes, coal is carbon. One mole of carbon produces one mole of carbon dioxide and the same amount of energy, wherever the carbon was had from. And it's the oxidation of carbon that makes the greatest contribution to the energy that comes from burning organic fuels.
Greatest contribution, yes. But not total contribution. If you burn CH4, for each mole of C02 produced, you will produce 2 moles of H20. I don't know what the ratio of the energy from H20 is to that from C02, but it sure as hell non sero. So, for constant C02 output, you get greater energy output from burning CH4 than from burning C. Or turning tround, for constanc energy output, you get less CO2 output - which is what I said.
I did look around the web, and found figures that suggested that the energy yield of coal and natual gas are approxuimately the same per ton. Since coal is 100% c, and methan is only 75%C by weight, methane will release 1/3 less C02 per unit energy generated.
Undoubtedly, CH4 is a more effective greenhouse gas, mole for mole, than CO2. But we burn the CH4, not release it. And CH4 oxidises naturally in the atmosphere with a half-life of about 30 days, so that it never builds up (though, of course, it does end up as CO2)Most of the nasties in the atmosphere actually come from volcanos. And when I say most, I mean significantly more than anything human beings have put there. . The half-life of CO2, due to dissolving or photosynthesis, is not well known, but is certainly in the centurues.
On the contrary - it would reinforce the governments current stance in the War on Terror. You can take whichever opinion you like about the various responses to 9/11 etc, but it would be much easier to get acceptance, and political credit (aka "votes") if there were seen to be terrorists in action.
But there *is* no market in power distribution (as opposed to supply). I a willing to pay, say, a 10% premium on my power, or a $100 annual fee, to cut my power cuts by a factor of 5. To whom can I offer my moeny to buy the premium service I want?
The cost electricity I buy has two components - the manufacturing cost and the delivery cost. This is true for most goods. For most goods, have a choice of goods (own-brand vs Heinz baked beans) and a choice of deliverers (competing supermarket, corner store, bulk discounter). I can make my own decision, route my purchasing dollar, and the market works.
I cannot do this for electricity; I have to buy a bundle, and all the differrent supplier have to use the same delivery provider. So there is no point in talking about market breakdown: for electricity delivery there is no market. Free market theory is simply not applicable.
Not only a small number of big providers, but ones a long way from the consumers - which applies also to most alternative power. As I understand it, all the recent blackouts have been because of faults in the grid tranmitting power from generators to consumers, not in the power stations themselves.
Power generation is very susceptible to economies of scale. A huge power station in the back of beyond burning trainloads/pipelinefulls of fuel is more efficient than lots of little power stations embedded in the community. This is coupled with NIMBY - nobody in the city wants a powerstation in their midst (until the blackout, that is). So power stations move to distan coalfields, nukes on deserted coats, windpower, wavepower...
Which needs a grid to take it to the consumer. But the grid generates no power and pays no bills, so everybody regards it as one of those things upon which you spend as little as possible.
Which means that, whether private or public, there is a good case for regulating the grid very tightly, including statutorily defined minimum overcapacity and maximum failure rates. Then allow a multitude of power companies to supply power; but possible weight their contrubution geographically, so that they get some credit for the number of local people they can continue to supply if the grid goes down.
I think it's expected that nuclear fuel will last longer (on the order of centuries as opposed to decades for coal or oil - look out GWB!:-).
Decades for oil, but not for coal. Last estimates I saw was that there was 400 years worth of coal - probably more than uranium. But coal produces the most CO2 of any fossil, is hard to clean of sulphur, is polluting and dangerous to mine.
But on the nulear issue - I am sure we can create safe powerstations. But they will still volumes of entensly radioactive wast which whil have to be kept safe for ~a million years. Until we have the technology in place and tested to do this, rather than promises that it will be developed before it is needed, nuclear camnnot, IMO, be considered.
So you want/. to be full of posts saying "Neat engineerying - this is trjue nerd cool". Because that is what I thought. But I didn't post it, because it is Redundant. The article really says everything there is to be said. I admired it but I didn't have anything to add. Should I post?
Maybe we want an open ended mod-point system for the original articles. That would actually tell/. editors more about how many people read and/or liked the articles than the number of posts. At the moment, a niche interest post that produces a shouting match between half a dozen posters looks more interesting that a wide interest post that averybody just thinks very interesting.
Re:Patented -- cannot sell or MAKE
on
Build Your Own Segway
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· Score: 2, Informative
No - it is not legal to build it. But there is no right of punitive damages in patent law. You can only sue for the profits you claim you have lost from the sales that the infringer has lost you. So if this guy makes one scooter for his own use, the only loss to Segway is the net profits on the sale of the one of their products that he might have bought, but didn't. Say $500. And no lawyer is going to uncap his pen for that little money. If he were to start to sell them - which he won't - they would almost certainly sue. "De minimis non curat lex" - The law does not care about trifles. As it is, the tone of his article is, I would say, generally good PR for Segway.
You can patent an innovative assembly of non-innovative parts.
When it comes down to it, everything is made of 92 elements, at most, none of which is patentable. So all patents are, at the bottom, about assembling somthing (except software and business process patants, which sort of suggests that they shouldn't be patents).
How does this scooter, or any other in-line vehicle, stay upright when stationary or travellign dead slow (say 1mph)? That is what the Segway etc. do. Whether that is worth thousands of dollars is questinable, but it is something that bicycles cannot do.
Far from other people stealing your idea, you may put them off. If you have several startups working in secret on essentially the same idea, they'll probably all come to market within a few months of each other. Specially if, as in most cases, it was an idea whose time had come. So they will fragment the market and none will do well.
If you go public, you will probably put others off starting up projects to do the same thing. If you pull your PR bullshit well, you might possibly drive others to pull out. "If they are ready to go public, they must be ahead od us, so we might as well pull out".
If the idea is really original, you shoudl be able to get a patent on it. And a patent is a form of going public, so once you have made your initial filing, shout up. And a patent is likely to impress the VCs too. But if you can't patent, bullshit. It works for evryone else, so why not for techies?
Yes - up to a point. Certainly they won't have a chance of competing with Hollywood whizz-bang effects and shouldn't try. But things have moved on a bit, and expectations are higher. Thery have to be 2000s cheap, not 1970s cheap.
On the other hand, al low budget can be a great stimulator of originality. The TV Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy did very well for cheap, I thought. We need just the right amount of tongue-in-cheek. If they take the great legacy of Dr Who too seriously, it will become pompous, whereas if they take it too lightly, it will become silly.
Having carped on, nevertheless Rejoice!, for the Doctor is returning. Better to try and fail than not to try at all. Daleks on the London Eye, Cybermen in the Eden Project and a blue police box in Downing Street - if we're lucky.
Re:I'm not an American...
on
TIA Project to End
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· Score: 4, Insightful
A legal loophole would allow lets say the US and UK to have an agreement whereby they say "you spy on mine and I'ill spy on yours and we'ill exchange the information"
While, as you say, this might well be legal, the political/PR consequences if it got out would be enormous - far too much risk for the "other" govenrment to take. Look how much fuss there was when the Israelis were found to be collecting relatively samlla amounts of information about the US.
I guess that depends on what you mean by a "great" frequency. In Europe, television has a frequency of 50Hz (it's 60Hz in the US) - even if I've heard that two and two frames are alike, in other words that the frequency is 25 or 30Hz. Movies in theaters are usually run at 24 frames per second, in other words a frequency of 24Hz.
TV has a field rate of 50/50 hz. Fields are alternately the odd and even lines of the picture, so the frame rate is 25/30 hz. The two fields are spatially slightly separated, so even on a still picture they are not the same; the second field gives you more information than the first. But if the original capture mechanism was a video camera, the two fields are captured at different times as well as different places, so it gives better motion display.
There is no real need to have frequencies running much higher than that to watch a movie - since a frequency of 72Hz would just mean that the same picture would be drawn three times over, and thats a waste on a device like this.
You are correct that film is at 24 hz. However, cinema projectors deliberatly flicker the light at 48 hz to give an impression of better movement. Once you get the trick of it, it is quite easy to spot 24-frame film material on TV, and it can become annoying.
50/60 hz field rate, and making a frame out of two fields, are both in fact economy measures. When TV was first invented, high rates were difficult and expensive, and there was a tradeoff between picture quality and cost. In fact, percieved movement quality increases up to frame rates in the low 70s of Hz - hence 80Hz being "as good as you will ever need".
A frame will be displayed 3 times at 72 hz only if it is sourced from a traditional film camers - a breed which is slowly dying out. All news cameras are now electronic, and Lucas is filming the Star Wars series electronically - othere will follow, slowly. Some of the new HDTV standards have 60 true frames, not 60 fields, per second.
As I say, existing TV standards are a compromise for the tradeoffs of an earlier day. We will eventially get newer standards, and hence better pictures. But once a set of standards are embedded in the comsumer marketplace, there is a massive lag in the adoption of new standards.
It is not a question of working differently at a molecular level. In the thin film that actually ends up on the page, the inks are translucent - think Jello, not paint. Each ink absorbs the light at some frequencise and passes others, which then bounce of the white paper behind - unsess abosrbewd by another ink at the same point. It is not perfect, and in bulk the inks look opaque. But the inks are actually printed over each other.
You are right that, if the dots are really small, the eye will average them out. This is, actually, how screen printing works: there are actually rows of dots in shaded areas. However, they are of the order of 30 times smaller than pixels on even the best screen, so it takes quite a powerfule glass to see them.
What the article doesn't say, but the picture does, is that Cyan+Magenta+Yellow, which should theoretically produce black, actually produces a durty purplish brown. So you need some real black to get a good rendition. Each pixel will have to have four cells.
Grandparent is correct. Because the cells are spatially separate, 100% red will actually only have 25% of the the background red, the rest remaining white. So I would expect a colour display, while having good readability, to be rather flat an uninteresting. The B/W display should be very good. Because it is reflective not emissive technology, it should have excellent readabilty and low poer consumption (but not the zero power consumption of the e-Ink in/. a coupel of weeks ago).
Alternatively, it not the planets themselves but some other factor which correlates with the planes which is affecting you.
To say you cannot, with your current knowledge, understand the cause of an effect, does not mean the effect does not exist. The trouble with astrology is that no-one has demonstrated any consistent effect. It all goes back to "ancient knowledge", but no-one knows how the ancient knowledge was gathered (other than making it up, which the ancients were even more prone to than the moderns).
No. There are, indeed, strains of laboratory mice with "built-in" canacer, to make it easy to do cancer research. But there are plenty of other strains which have not had such things bres into them, and are "normal" - so far as that can apply to lines that are highly inbred for predictability.
Re:Article has nothing to do with RFID tags
on
RFID Hell
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· Score: 1
Provided such tagging or any other punishments are administered in open court with rtoght of defence with skilled representation, I have no problem. Which is what this report is about - these are convicted criminals, not ordinary Joe Publics. To make the jump to people who "have not committed offences" is unreasonable.
While wiping the phone with an alcohol wipe would be beter than nothing, I don't think it would solve the problem. Most medical equipment which contacts the patient ia made smooth and wipeable so that there are no unwipeable cracks to harbour bacteria. Mobile phones are not: bacteria could go down the cracks alonside the buttons etc, and nestle inside the case, to be shaken out later.
I could imagine making a phone safe with a sort of "phone condom" - which could in turn be under a removable, sterilisable case so that it wouldn't look too ugly, but I have never seen such a thing.
The other point is tha thr most usefule thing about mobile is that you always have them on you. If you have to swap for a "safe" mobile on entering the hospital, you might as well use a landline.
A new acronym for AIDS - Audio Induced Disease Syndrome.
And the manufacturers of the gun which they used - which means the NRA shoudl back Sony on this one, for fear of setting a precedent they really wouldn't like.
Yes, you can shine a flashlight through paper from behind. But the losses are horrendous - I woudl ahve though >95%. Consider how close you have to bring the flashlight to see the picture from behind, vs how far away you can take the same flashlight if you are shining from the front. You woudl be much better spending your energy shining a light from the front - and a floodlight is probably much cheaper than an equivalent area of computer backlight.
Horses for courses - if you really want an emissive display, go for the current technologies of LCD or plama. This is something difffernt and, potentially, better. I took my laptop into the garden yesterday - and had great difficulty reading it because of sunlight. This would get easier to read with more light.
Humans are creatures of light; emissive displays are creatures of dark. Putting the two together requires compromises: avoid directt light sources, fear reflections. Turn the light down and your screen becomes more readable but fine print documentation becomes less readable. Turn lhe light up and the screen washes out as the fine print comes into focus. With absorbtive displays, the two become visible together. And reduced power consumption has got to be good. This might make e-books worth having. Battery life greatly increased, because power only consumed when you move the page (system can completely power down between button pushes), readable in a bright light.
Remember LED watches, as mocked in Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy? LCDs (non-lit) wiped those out almost overnight, because using power for a continuous, slowly changing display is ridiculous.
Don't expect new displays to be identical to old - evaluate and exploit their differences. If you analyse them, both CRTs and LCDs are rotten displays - but they are the best we have got, so we use them everywhere. Sometime soon someone is going to come out with a good absorbtive display - maybe this one, maybe another - and that will spread like wildfire.
Slashdot Mirror
I see no irony. On the contrary, the ability to post anonymously is an enormous help to free speech.
/. mod system has it right: AC starts behing but can be modded upt to the same level as anyone else.
Of course the law protects your right to free speech - but only protects you from the government, not employers. But it can only protect you from big hassles, not little ones. Very difficult to *prove* why you didn't get that promotion.
Of course, the sayings of an AC deserve less initial credit than those of someone who is prepared to put their name to it, and should be examined more cynically. But. in a rough and ready way, the
I heard that the US govenment is subsising anonymous posting for Farsi speakers in Iran - in support of free speech for Iranians.
I think it is very good that ACs can post on thsi sublect - providedly they are clearly marked. Better than them creating throwaway IDs to give the appearance of reality.
Amen to this - I was about to post on the same lines.
In many ways the most sinister bit is towards the bottom, where he tried to get a number of academics to co-sign the paper with him. None felt able to. They all had tenure, which is supposed to allow academics to be free of the pressures that make employees keep quiet about problems, but they were afraid for their funding, which comes from industry and is not tenured. An academic who says the wrong thing may not be out on the street touting for work, but with no research funding in an expensive subject like CS, he is reduced to a schoolteacher.
This is a case where more non-commercial funding is needed. Which usually means goverment funding. But on secutiry issues, the government is also a very interested party and is likely to step on the "wrong sort" of research (e.g. research that might block loopholes used by NSA, but potentially usable by black hats).
Part of the problem is again the size of one giant customer. If the industry were more diviersified commercially (as opposed to technically), a small organisation could take the risk of offending a proportion of the market in order to be seen as frank an knowledgeable by the remainder. But with M$ being the slarges customer for just about anything, as well as the largest supplier, any profit-driven organisation has to think of its opinion.
The half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is hardly relevant anyway. The amount should be fairly constant.
Boy, does this miss the point. If you have system with a steady input, it will after a time achieve a steady state - true.
But if you suddenly massively increase the input, it will achieve a new steady state. The time it takes to do this, and the level in the new state, will be related to the time it takes to absorb the the excess. A system with a quick re-absorbtion time will have a steady state only slightly above the original level; a system with a slow reabsorbtion time will have to rise to a much higher level before absorbtion balances the increased input. That is what we have done - introduced a sudden massive increase in CO2 production. It hasn't stabilised yet, and will not until a few half-lives have passed. But the stable level, for the new input state, will be higher than the preceding stable level.
It is a documented fact that CO2 levels are much higher than they were in prehistoric times - maybe twice as much. This is not in dispute by anybody reasonable. What is in dispute is whether this increased CO2 is causing global warming (maybe it isn't warming, maybe it is the sun, maybe it is cosmic rays...) - though the skeptics are shrinking in number - and whether global warming really matters (maybe it is cheaper to adjust to a warmer world than to spend a fortune cutting fown on something which may not be the problem).
H2O is indeed a greenhous gas. But, while our production of CO2 is of the same order as total natural production of CO2, and CO2 remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, our production of H2O is of the order of a millionth or less of natural producion (evaporation from land, sea, and ocean) and H2O is recycled (falls as rain etc) with a half-life again of the order of 30 days. So the total increase in atmospherice H2O die to burning fuel is tiny, whereas the total increase in atmospheric CO2 is (approx) a doubling.
And yes, increased CO2 levels do speed up plant growth. Which may be good - or not; a recent report said that the larger plants contained no more minerals and vitamins, just more bulk. Good for calories if you ase starving, not good for health if you are on junk food. I heard recently that land plants actually remove almost no CO2 directly. Growing plants absorb it, old plants emit a little, and dead plants rot back to the original amount of C02. The only net absorbers of CO2 are oceanic plankton, which tie up the CO2 in CaCO3 in their shells, which they dump on the depths of the ocean when they die, preventing rerelease.
Unfortunately, this is a long way from LEO capability. This is just vertically up to approximately the height of the lowest LEO possible and down again. For LEO, you need a massive amount of transversal velocity and, if you want to get back down again, to get rid of it afterwards. The first killed Challenger, the second Columbia.
Stop talking out of your arse. To all intents and purposes, coal is carbon. One mole of carbon produces one mole of carbon dioxide and the same amount of energy, wherever the carbon was had from. And it's the oxidation of carbon that makes the greatest contribution to the energy that comes from burning organic fuels.
Greatest contribution, yes. But not total contribution. If you burn CH4, for each mole of C02 produced, you will produce 2 moles of H20. I don't know what the ratio of the energy from H20 is to that from C02, but it sure as hell non sero. So, for constant C02 output, you get greater energy output from burning CH4 than from burning C. Or turning tround, for constanc energy output, you get less CO2 output - which is what I said.
I did look around the web, and found figures that suggested that the energy yield of coal and natual gas are approxuimately the same per ton. Since coal is 100% c, and methan is only 75%C by weight, methane will release 1/3 less C02 per unit energy generated.
Undoubtedly, CH4 is a more effective greenhouse gas, mole for mole, than CO2. But we burn the CH4, not release it. And CH4 oxidises naturally in the atmosphere with a half-life of about 30 days, so that it never builds up (though, of course, it does end up as CO2)Most of the nasties in the atmosphere actually come from volcanos. And when I say most, I mean significantly more than anything human beings have put there.
. The half-life of CO2, due to dissolving or photosynthesis, is not well known, but is certainly in the centurues.
On the contrary - it would reinforce the governments current stance in the War on Terror. You can take whichever opinion you like about the various responses to 9/11 etc, but it would be much easier to get acceptance, and political credit (aka "votes") if there were seen to be terrorists in action.
But there *is* no market in power distribution (as opposed to supply). I a willing to pay, say, a 10% premium on my power, or a $100 annual fee, to cut my power cuts by a factor of 5. To whom can I offer my moeny to buy the premium service I want?
The cost electricity I buy has two components - the manufacturing cost and the delivery cost. This is true for most goods. For most goods, have a choice of goods (own-brand vs Heinz baked beans) and a choice of deliverers (competing supermarket, corner store, bulk discounter). I can make my own decision, route my purchasing dollar, and the market works.
I cannot do this for electricity; I have to buy a bundle, and all the differrent supplier have to use the same delivery provider. So there is no point in talking about market breakdown: for electricity delivery there is no market. Free market theory is simply not applicable.
Not only a small number of big providers, but ones a long way from the consumers - which applies also to most alternative power. As I understand it, all the recent blackouts have been because of faults in the grid tranmitting power from generators to consumers, not in the power stations themselves.
Power generation is very susceptible to economies of scale. A huge power station in the back of beyond burning trainloads/pipelinefulls of fuel is more efficient than lots of little power stations embedded in the community. This is coupled with NIMBY - nobody in the city wants a powerstation in their midst (until the blackout, that is). So power stations move to distan coalfields, nukes on deserted coats, windpower, wavepower...
Which needs a grid to take it to the consumer. But the grid generates no power and pays no bills, so everybody regards it as one of those things upon which you spend as little as possible.
Which means that, whether private or public, there is a good case for regulating the grid very tightly, including statutorily defined minimum overcapacity and maximum failure rates. Then allow a multitude of power companies to supply power; but possible weight their contrubution geographically, so that they get some credit for the number of local people they can continue to supply if the grid goes down.
I think it's expected that nuclear fuel will last longer (on the order of centuries as opposed to decades for coal or oil - look out GWB! :-).
Decades for oil, but not for coal. Last estimates I saw was that there was 400 years worth of coal - probably more than uranium. But coal produces the most CO2 of any fossil, is hard to clean of sulphur, is polluting and dangerous to mine.
But on the nulear issue - I am sure we can create safe powerstations. But they will still volumes of entensly radioactive wast which whil have to be kept safe for ~a million years. Until we have the technology in place and tested to do this, rather than promises that it will be developed before it is needed, nuclear camnnot, IMO, be considered.
So you want /. to be full of posts saying "Neat engineerying - this is trjue nerd cool". Because that is what I thought. But I didn't post it, because it is Redundant. The article really says everything there is to be said. I admired it but I didn't have anything to add. Should I post?
/. editors more about how many people read and/or liked the articles than the number of posts. At the moment, a niche interest post that produces a shouting match between half a dozen posters looks more interesting that a wide interest post that averybody just thinks very interesting.
Maybe we want an open ended mod-point system for the original articles. That would actually tell
No - it is not legal to build it. But there is no right of punitive damages in patent law. You can only sue for the profits you claim you have lost from the sales that the infringer has lost you. So if this guy makes one scooter for his own use, the only loss to Segway is the net profits on the sale of the one of their products that he might have bought, but didn't. Say $500. And no lawyer is going to uncap his pen for that little money. If he were to start to sell them - which he won't - they would almost certainly sue. "De minimis non curat lex" - The law does not care about trifles. As it is, the tone of his article is, I would say, generally good PR for Segway.
You can patent an innovative assembly of non-innovative parts.
When it comes down to it, everything is made of 92 elements, at most, none of which is patentable. So all patents are, at the bottom, about assembling somthing (except software and business process patants, which sort of suggests that they shouldn't be patents).
How does this scooter, or any other in-line vehicle, stay upright when stationary or travellign dead slow (say 1mph)? That is what the Segway etc. do. Whether that is worth thousands of dollars is questinable, but it is something that bicycles cannot do.
Far from other people stealing your idea, you may put them off. If you have several startups working in secret on essentially the same idea, they'll probably all come to market within a few months of each other. Specially if, as in most cases, it was an idea whose time had come. So they will fragment the market and none will do well.
If you go public, you will probably put others off starting up projects to do the same thing. If you pull your PR bullshit well, you might possibly drive others to pull out. "If they are ready to go public, they must be ahead od us, so we might as well pull out".
If the idea is really original, you shoudl be able to get a patent on it. And a patent is a form of going public, so once you have made your initial filing, shout up. And a patent is likely to impress the VCs too. But if you can't patent, bullshit. It works for evryone else, so why not for techies?
If it is not cheap then it is not Doctor Who.
Yes - up to a point. Certainly they won't have a chance of competing with Hollywood whizz-bang effects and shouldn't try. But things have moved on a bit, and expectations are higher. Thery have to be 2000s cheap, not 1970s cheap.
On the other hand, al low budget can be a great stimulator of originality. The TV Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy did very well for cheap, I thought. We need just the right amount of tongue-in-cheek. If they take the great legacy of Dr Who too seriously, it will become pompous, whereas if they take it too lightly, it will become silly.
Having carped on, nevertheless Rejoice!, for the Doctor is returning. Better to try and fail than not to try at all. Daleks on the London Eye, Cybermen in the Eden Project and a blue police box in Downing Street - if we're lucky.
A legal loophole would allow lets say the US and UK to have an agreement whereby they say "you spy on mine and I'ill spy on yours and we'ill exchange the information"
While, as you say, this might well be legal, the political/PR consequences if it got out would be enormous - far too much risk for the "other" govenrment to take. Look how much fuss there was when the Israelis were found to be collecting relatively samlla amounts of information about the US.
I guess that depends on what you mean by a "great" frequency. In Europe, television has a frequency of 50Hz (it's 60Hz in the US) - even if I've heard that two and two frames are alike, in other words that the frequency is 25 or 30Hz. Movies in theaters are usually run at 24 frames per second, in other words a frequency of 24Hz.
TV has a field rate of 50/50 hz. Fields are alternately the odd and even lines of the picture, so the frame rate is 25/30 hz. The two fields are spatially slightly separated, so even on a still picture they are not the same; the second field gives you more information than the first. But if the original capture mechanism was a video camera, the two fields are captured at different times as well as different places, so it gives better motion display.
There is no real need to have frequencies running much higher than that to watch a movie - since a frequency of 72Hz would just mean that the same picture would be drawn three times over, and thats a waste on a device like this.
You are correct that film is at 24 hz. However, cinema projectors deliberatly flicker the light at 48 hz to give an impression of better movement. Once you get the trick of it, it is quite easy to spot 24-frame film material on TV, and it can become annoying.
50/60 hz field rate, and making a frame out of two fields, are both in fact economy measures. When TV was first invented, high rates were difficult and expensive, and there was a tradeoff between picture quality and cost. In fact, percieved movement quality increases up to frame rates in the low 70s of Hz - hence 80Hz being "as good as you will ever need".
A frame will be displayed 3 times at 72 hz only if it is sourced from a traditional film camers - a breed which is slowly dying out. All news cameras are now electronic, and Lucas is filming the Star Wars series electronically - othere will follow, slowly. Some of the new HDTV standards have 60 true frames, not 60 fields, per second.
As I say, existing TV standards are a compromise for the tradeoffs of an earlier day. We will eventially get newer standards, and hence better pictures. But once a set of standards are embedded in the comsumer marketplace, there is a massive lag in the adoption of new standards.
It is not a question of working differently at a molecular level. In the thin film that actually ends up on the page, the inks are translucent - think Jello, not paint. Each ink absorbs the light at some frequencise and passes others, which then bounce of the white paper behind - unsess abosrbewd by another ink at the same point. It is not perfect, and in bulk the inks look opaque. But the inks are actually printed over each other.
/. a coupel of weeks ago).
You are right that, if the dots are really small, the eye will average them out. This is, actually, how screen printing works: there are actually rows of dots in shaded areas. However, they are of the order of 30 times smaller than pixels on even the best screen, so it takes quite a powerfule glass to see them.
What the article doesn't say, but the picture does, is that Cyan+Magenta+Yellow, which should theoretically produce black, actually produces a durty purplish brown. So you need some real black to get a good rendition. Each pixel will have to have four cells.
Grandparent is correct. Because the cells are spatially separate, 100% red will actually only have 25% of the the background red, the rest remaining white. So I would expect a colour display, while having good readability, to be rather flat an uninteresting. The B/W display should be very good. Because it is reflective not emissive technology, it should have excellent readabilty and low poer consumption (but not the zero power consumption of the e-Ink in
Alternatively, it not the planets themselves but some other factor which correlates with the planes which is affecting you.
To say you cannot, with your current knowledge, understand the cause of an effect, does not mean the effect does not exist. The trouble with astrology is that no-one has demonstrated any consistent effect. It all goes back to "ancient knowledge", but no-one knows how the ancient knowledge was gathered (other than making it up, which the ancients were even more prone to than the moderns).
No. There are, indeed, strains of laboratory mice with "built-in" canacer, to make it easy to do cancer research. But there are plenty of other strains which have not had such things bres into them, and are "normal" - so far as that can apply to lines that are highly inbred for predictability.
Provided such tagging or any other punishments are administered in open court with rtoght of defence with skilled representation, I have no problem. Which is what this report is about - these are convicted criminals, not ordinary Joe Publics. To make the jump to people who "have not committed offences" is unreasonable.
While wiping the phone with an alcohol wipe would be beter than nothing, I don't think it would solve the problem. Most medical equipment which contacts the patient ia made smooth and wipeable so that there are no unwipeable cracks to harbour bacteria. Mobile phones are not: bacteria could go down the cracks alonside the buttons etc, and nestle inside the case, to be shaken out later.
I could imagine making a phone safe with a sort of "phone condom" - which could in turn be under a removable, sterilisable case so that it wouldn't look too ugly, but I have never seen such a thing.
The other point is tha thr most usefule thing about mobile is that you always have them on you. If you have to swap for a "safe" mobile on entering the hospital, you might as well use a landline.
A new acronym for AIDS - Audio Induced Disease Syndrome.
And the manufacturers of the gun which they used - which means the NRA shoudl back Sony on this one, for fear of setting a precedent they really wouldn't like.
Actually, one or two ideas might come out of this.
If you don't need to change very often, use light-power: a tiny solar cel trickle charging won't cost much.
Packaging which goes black at use-by date.
Medical packaging which points an arrow at the pills you should be taking now, for the elderly and absent-minded.
Self-discounting packages: price drops if not sold in time. Barcodes and sticker change at the same time.
Packaging that says STOLEN if the RFID detects you taking it out of the shop without paying for it. (Whoop! Whoop! Privacy Alert).
Yes, you can shine a flashlight through paper from behind. But the losses are horrendous - I woudl ahve though >95%. Consider how close you have to bring the flashlight to see the picture from behind, vs how far away you can take the same flashlight if you are shining from the front. You woudl be much better spending your energy shining a light from the front - and a floodlight is probably much cheaper than an equivalent area of computer backlight.
Horses for courses - if you really want an emissive display, go for the current technologies of LCD or plama. This is something difffernt and, potentially, better. I took my laptop into the garden yesterday - and had great difficulty reading it because of sunlight. This would get easier to read with more light.
Humans are creatures of light; emissive displays are creatures of dark. Putting the two together requires compromises: avoid directt light sources, fear reflections. Turn the light down and your screen becomes more readable but fine print documentation becomes less readable. Turn lhe light up and the screen washes out as the fine print comes into focus. With absorbtive displays, the two become visible together. And reduced power consumption has got to be good. This might make e-books worth having. Battery life greatly increased, because power only consumed when you move the page (system can completely power down between button pushes), readable in a bright light.
Remember LED watches, as mocked in Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy? LCDs (non-lit) wiped those out almost overnight, because using power for a continuous, slowly changing display is ridiculous.
Don't expect new displays to be identical to old - evaluate and exploit their differences. If you analyse them, both CRTs and LCDs are rotten displays - but they are the best we have got, so we use them everywhere. Sometime soon someone is going to come out with a good absorbtive display - maybe this one, maybe another - and that will spread like wildfire.