Each separate knot has six variables with two possible values (I gave three from memory, there are three more) and one with 24 values - colour. Therefore each knot represents a kind of "super byte" which can hold a single value from 0 to 1535. The data is not in the string but in the joins between strings. From a base string, there are multiple strings, with each not having 1536 possible values. From each string, substrings, sub-sub-strings and sub-sub-sub strings may be appended. Each append operation adds another "superbyte". The number of strings is indetermiante, because, as the article says, effectively the data spreads out in 3-space.
Of course, I don't reckon they used it to maximum density, and the use of the bits may well have been representational. But it might be that it in facts encodes a chapter/paragraph/sentence/word structure. Simple sentences ("Fred owes Bill 5 goats") would be base plus one level of attached strings - a fairly simple level of encoding, with a super-byte at each knot. But it would not be diffcult to generalise from this onec it became common. In fact, this would tend to happen automatically if Bill tied all his IOUs onto one "backing string": from spine, substring identifies debtors, sub-substrings identify multiple debts.
No: Selecting one of 24 colours is NOT 24 bits. Each Knot may be wool/cotton, ply/crossply, front/back, and so on, plus black/white/red/green... But for each variable you may have only one of each pair and one of the 24 colours. The article is exactly right if you read it carefully.
At this point there are two options, a single interface that works the same basic way accross ALL devices (so you don't have to learn a different OS to use a microwave and to use a toaster) or each device could have a custom interface that is best suited for efficient use of that device but will require the user to use it differently than other devices. I think most users would rather have continuity than efficiency,
Not sure I agree, if all the single devices appear to be single function. I have no problem that my toaster, my car, my razor, my television have very different UIs. They are all matched to function. The fact that behind some of them there is a microprocessor which, for all I know, is running the same OS is irrelevant. If you want to control many devices from the same physical interface, then I agree that a uniform UI is highly desirable. Thus all peices of software which present themselves on the same screen/mouse/keyboard should have the same UI even if the underlying soretware is running on differnet machines. OTOH, specialised controls can be appropriate to function even if they are running on the same hardware.
The point of the hardware featured in this article is that it is a new input device. I can foreseee an explositon of different input devices, each adapted to function and communicatrion wirelessly with the central computiong resource. Each input device will be essentially a dumb UI capture, which converts button pushes, twists, voice commands, kicks, eye trackers, motion sensors, heart monitors... into action requests, which are sent back to a "headles" computyer system, which actions them, and returns feedback for displays, leds, audio systems, buzzers, actuators of a dozen sorts.
Basically, the computer "disappears", as you say. It becomes the mere "trivial" glue between specialist input devices and specialist output devices (whare actuators and displays are output devices).
E wouldn't expect it to be "possible everywhere". That would be stupid. This would only be necessary for places like the financial services industry, because they are playing with other peoples money. Money is just numbers. Do you want somebody like you - but less honest - installing whatever they like on your bank's computer? If so, watch your account empty. Of course, dealers computers aren't as sensitive as the bank's central database, but they are still making decisions about other people's money.
The same person whould not be dealer and sysadm, even if they have the necessary skills. The banks go to a lot of effort to keep front offs (people who make the deals) and back office (people whe shuffle the paperwork to execute the deals) separate. When they don't, sooner otr later something goes wrong: that is how Barings went down the tubes.
This looks just as if they have taken the Infiniband spec and stripped out a lot of the bells and whistles which that had grown in order to become totally generic. Intel "back burnered" Infiniband about six months ago, so presumably switched there effort to this. It looks a good idea to me - I think we have been waiting too long for tightly-coupled serial links to reach general use. Inmos had them 18 years ago, but they never caught on then (because inmos wouldn't let people buy in to their several good ideas without also buying in to the several more bad ideas).
Serial links make system configuration much easier. They do have the slight downside that they have even wierder failure modes than traditional busses and (IME) have more soft failure modes than busses.
I think that you are probably one level of paranoia too high here. It is not that they expect their users to be plotting over the IM to rob the company or plan evil deeds, it is keeping a record of what promises/lies/truths were said about a transaction when it goes sour some months later. If a client says "I only bought those securities because the dealer said they were a no-fail bet", you need to be able to recall what the dealer actually did say - whether s/he properly pointed out the risks in a transaction etc.
Generally, I don't think they are protecting against fraud on the day the conversation happens - they are protecting against cover-ups after the fact - when the heavily boosted company goes bust or suchlike. I think that if they were into direct fraud, these dealers would have other ways of doing it.
So you make it a disciplinary offence to install unapproved software on a PC used for financial work - which is what our finance department does. And occasionally sweem pachines for unauthorised executables.
At a certain level, it doesn't make sense to insist that something marginally untrustworth cannot be done. It is not as if installing a new IM client would be a way to instant riches, so there isn't the motivation of theft to make someone do it. A financial services house should have a culture that says that IT should approve all software. If you want play-around machines, they should be separarte from the "trustworthy" machines and firewalled off.
After all, employees could bypass the current email logging by installing hteir own email client, or by posting from a hotmail account or... But they don't.
One thing that can always make a useful project, and which you can make very personal to your team, as some kind of accesibility system. You must have some disabled people around - physical, visual, mental, whatever. And they are usually all slightly different. And specialise gear for the disabled is very, very expensive. So find someone in need of assistance a,d build something custom for them. Might be I/O devices customised to their needs - mouse replacements for different physical disabilities. Or a wheelchair mounted PC with GPS. Could you make a "navigate home" device for the wheelchair? Or a decent centralised lights-audio-curtains-TV controller for someone who can't move. Or.... But be driven by your local needs: have a real project with real success or falure, rather than a theoretical project for some hypothetical disabled person you don't know. reckon to hand over a finished, packaged, archived project at the end of the year.
The analogues you describe - 0/1 to ACGT, bits to codons, arfe very low level. it is possible that we will be able to exploit the huge information packing density of DNA for computation (or, more accurately, storage, purposes). But if we do, it will only add another twist to Moores Law. We will be building determinate state machines using, in the broad sense, "programs". And there is nothing inherently wrong with this - it is just atoms, and the fact that we build them into useful patterns similar to those used by the body is irrelevant.
It is much hihger up the biological level at which new insights, new mechanisms, and new ethical questions might appear. W don't catually know all the levels between DNA and thought. DNA to proteins - yes. Big, but understood.But how proteins build cells, how cells interact, how the body knows which cells ti build, how nerve cells make a brain, how a brain works - these are still very much lost in fog, albeit fog with occasional gaps.
And it is in these level that the possibilities for something different and possibly objectionable lie. But it is not the DNA technologies which matter, it s whart you might call the Turing technologies thatr matter. If I manage to make a computer program which in every possible way simulates you, how does that computer program differ from you? If can simulate the verbal etc. responses, I could also attach actuators. Or you might become quadraplegic. Since the only way that I know that you are alive and feeling and have human rights is from your words and actions, does not something which behaves identically have the same rights.
If you answer yes, or even maybe, to that, what if I chop out a bit of your behaviour and make a robot with it. Maybe you are an expert chicken sexer. If I emulate the bit of your brain which has that knowledge, does it have any of your rights. OK, how if I clone that bit of your brain and copy the re1quisite skills into it? Now it is a bit of clone-you with a fragment of clone-personality. has it human rights, or is it a machine.
So I don't think any problems, or any strtl;ing new effects will come from the low-level mechanical level of biology. From the structural level, however, ther may come enormous novelty. For a start, nature has a far better grip on parallel processing than we can understand. Contingency and fault tolerance are also major features of natural systems.
Not the way I read the article. They claim that the propsed law requires the use of Open Source and locks out Closed Source. Their letter, with which I broadly agree, wants to maintain competition. As well as allowing S Aus to make the best choice, competition is a good thing for Open Source. OS should, and will eventually, win on its merits, not on any legislated advantage. The only thing any legislator needs to do is level the playing field - block Microsoft FUD, sponsor real cost-of-ownership studies.
FUD is a much more accurate description of IBM's tactics in the late-eighties, early-nineties.
To my recollection, it goes back at leas to the late seventies, to the time of "IBM and the Seven Dwarves", when the Seven Dwarves (Honeywell, Univac etc) complained that it was IBM's main selling tactic.
It is an obvious tactic to use when you are overwhelmingly the largest plauyte in the field. IBM then, Microsoft now. An the fact is that there is some truth in it. You know that you will never be totally lost if you fall back into Microsoft's choking embrace. Maybe you could do better by hunting around, but why bother? Many peole prefer mediocrity to risk, even if the payoff may be high.
OTOH, I think it is a very bad signe for the long term propagator of FUD. IBM had a massive fall after years of FUD, and only recovered when it dropped that attitude completely and started competing on its merits. While you use FUD as your main marketing tool instead of excellence, you aren't developing your product properly, and eventually the competition will get far enough ahead that FUD won't work. And when that happens, you are in deep trouble, because you are already far behind. I predict this for Microsoft in 3-4 years time. The chanllenger may, or may not, be Linux. And the crash will take years to happen.
Because people don't all want to travel at the same time. With smaller planes, you can offer a bigger range of departure times, and people will par a bit more for a departure when they want it. The trand has been that way over the Atlantic for quite a while - 747s being replaced by 767/777 or their Airbus equivalents to get more departure times. 747s still needed on the dense routes like Lon-NY because (a) there are that many people and (b) the airports are slot limited, so you want the biggest palne you can get.
The seats are on rails running fore-and-aft, so the airlines could increase/decrease seat pitch on a literally day-by-day basis by taking out a row or two of seats and easing the rest apart. The seat width is determined by Boeing, and as I posted elsewhere, the 7E7 has the space for an extra inch of width per passenger.
One of the features of this aircraft (from other sources) is that the top half of the fusalage (passenger bit) is slightly bigger that the bottom half (cargo bit), rather than a perfect circle (777) or symmetrical double bubble (767). That gives you an inck more seat width per passeger - which, from a tall fat git, matters. Of course, they can also use those inches to give wide aisles for faster turnaround...
I don't think it is different models, it is different market segments. There was a (probably) market for one new huge plane, but not two. Building two A380 class machines would have guaranteed huge losses for both. So Boeing and Airbus arm-wrestled for about eight years to decide who would do it. But actually, it was a one-way bet: Boeing would be cannibalising the market for its 747, whereas Airbus had nothing to fear. The only worry was that Boeing, bysouping up the 747 one more time, could take enough off the bottom of the A380 market that it would not make the break-even volumes. But eventually Airbus jumped, and Boeing backed down.
So where now? They tried the "faser" route, and tha answer was a big yawn. So now they try the cheaper route. Their 757 and 767 are already being beaten up by Airbuses A330/340. It doesn't look as if they would have much market left for those in, say, five years time. I think they are expecting to get something like 20% better mileage-per-seat than the Airbus products - and over the lifetime of an aircraft, that is a lot of fuel.
The alternative, I suppose, would to have been to have gone down a size and replaced the 737 to compete with the Airbus A318/319/320/321 family. But I could believe that there is not so much economy to be screwed out of these short-hoppers by new technology. And if the killed the 737, they would risk losing the "single type" airlines such as Southwest to Airbus.
If they can deliver what they promise, and if Airbus don't manage to retrofit the same technological improvements onto their products, I can see it working for Boing. But the next few years are going to be "Interesting Times" for the company.
The designation 717 was originally reserved for the military version of the 707. But since the military wanted to call it the C-135 (with assorted prefixes), it was never used. And then, as others have posted, it was retrofitted onto the MD-80/90 range that it acquired when it took over McDonnell Douglas.
Even if they are noit deactivates, what privacy issues are not handled by requiring that the RFID be clearly identified on a tag which can be easily snipped off? Like those paper tags hels on thin plastic threads which run through clothing, You usually have to take two ir three of those off clothes when you get them home.Ir, for anything which is sold in packaging, put the tag in the packaging, not the item.
While I agree that we need to keep up awareness, I think there is a lot of paranois about this subject.If it takes off, there will be such a deluge of data that it woil be difficult and expensive for Big Brother to use it. Dio you know how many consumer items are sold each and every day? Literally billions. Not impossible of course - given govenment budgets, it could be done. But sufficiently expensive that there would almost certainly bea easier ways of doing it.
The REAL consumer issue I see here is the additional cost of RFID tagging
The shops claime that there will be a net saving. Firstly, in theft - which costs shops something like 5% of turnover. Some of it walks out the door with customers, so could be stopped at the door. Some "dfalls off the abck of lorries", and could be traced back to the larcenous lorry driver (half of such thefts are bnelievced to be by staff). If it were to halve that, 5c per item would payoff massively. Secondly, in better stock control. You can "ask" a shelf how many items it has on it, so you will never be out of stock but nt have to send someone to count the stock.And you can track inventory without needing a droid to scan bar codes - a whole fork-lift full of stock is automatically inventoried as it goes out the door.
Once the system gets universal, I could these making real net savings which, in a truly competitive environment, will get passed back to the consumer.
If you take advice marked thus and get into legal trouble, you are entirely on your own. Mind you, anybody who takes legal advice from the Web/Usenet is a workd class fool anyway.
Also, what is fragging?
Literally, killing with a fragmentation grenade - a means occasionally used to get rid of disliked officers.NCOs in the Vietnam war.
What could the counterparty to SCO possibly gain by agreeing to this?
Money. The counterparty would presumable be being employed as an Expert Witness in the lawsuit. Fees for such witnesses are normally very lucrative. >$1000/day plus expenses for the research phase (reading the code) and more for attendance in court are the figures I have heard.
Could you triangulate with three satellites in geostationary? Roughly speaking, they are all going to be in a line - and a line isn't a triangle. Of course, you could put them off-equator, so they nod up and down, but there is still going to be plenty of time when the trianle is very long and thin, thus giving pretty poor accuracy. I think the GPS satellites are in fairly tilted (near-polar) orbits, so that (a) thya cover polar areas efficeingly, and (b) you can always get a nice fat triangle from visible satellites.
Long, long ago, I set up a really cheap and crappy stereo system in a really perfect room - the library of a stately home. The wallw sere lined with books - acoustically absorbing but not dead. The wall behind was coverd with curtains. teh room was large (say 50 ft by 40) and exactly symmetrical, and with a sofa at the optimum listening position.
This cheap stereo system (high street retailers cheapest "got everything" model) sounded absolutely marvellous. Like kit costing fity times as much.
Ever since then, I have been of the opinion that it is not worth spending a fortune on hi-fi kit if you intend to install it in a room in which you intend to Have a Life. The necessary compromises to live in a room - particularly if you share with other people - will cancel out all the advantages of super-duper kit. If you are prepared to set up a special listeneing room, it might be worth investing in this kit. Until then, buy more music or more beer.
H-bonds don-t work for this purpose. H-bonds only bond H to H, so unless the surface you want to climb has been treated in some way to cover it wil dangling Hs, there is nothing for you to bond to. Van der Waals force works between any two reasonably flat surfaces - and any surface is flat on a small enough scale, which is what this tape is exploiting.
Mostly, they just observe what happens to be above as the earth turns. They can effectively move the viewing position by two degrees either way by moging the position of the receiver across the focus, and the tilt of the earths axis "nods" the view up and down over the year, so in a year they get to see about half the total sky. Lokk at the maps on the Seti@home page to see what they can see.
For many purposes, Arecibo is quite restrictive; for seti@home, it is excellent - unless, of course, ET lives due north or south.
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Each separate knot has six variables with two possible values (I gave three from memory, there are three more) and one with 24 values - colour. Therefore each knot represents a kind of "super byte" which can hold a single value from 0 to 1535. The data is not in the string but in the joins between strings. From a base string, there are multiple strings, with each not having 1536 possible values. From each string, substrings, sub-sub-strings and sub-sub-sub strings may be appended. Each append operation adds another "superbyte". The number of strings is indetermiante, because, as the article says, effectively the data spreads out in 3-space.
Of course, I don't reckon they used it to maximum density, and the use of the bits may well have been representational. But it might be that it in facts encodes a chapter/paragraph/sentence/word structure. Simple sentences ("Fred owes Bill 5 goats") would be base plus one level of attached strings - a fairly simple level of encoding, with a super-byte at each knot. But it would not be diffcult to generalise from this onec it became common. In fact, this would tend to happen automatically if Bill tied all his IOUs onto one "backing string": from spine, substring identifies debtors, sub-substrings identify multiple debts.
No: Selecting one of 24 colours is NOT 24 bits. Each Knot may be wool/cotton, ply/crossply, front/back, and so on, plus black/white/red/green... But for each variable you may have only one of each pair and one of the 24 colours. The article is exactly right if you read it carefully.
At this point there are two options, a single interface that works the same basic way accross ALL devices (so you don't have to learn a different OS to use a microwave and to use a toaster) or each device could have a custom interface that is best suited for efficient use of that device but will require the user to use it differently than other devices. I think most users would rather have continuity than efficiency,
Not sure I agree, if all the single devices appear to be single function. I have no problem that my toaster, my car, my razor, my television have very different UIs. They are all matched to function. The fact that behind some of them there is a microprocessor which, for all I know, is running the same OS is irrelevant. If you want to control many devices from the same physical interface, then I agree that a uniform UI is highly desirable. Thus all peices of software which present themselves on the same screen/mouse/keyboard should have the same UI even if the underlying soretware is running on differnet machines. OTOH, specialised controls can be appropriate to function even if they are running on the same hardware.
The point of the hardware featured in this article is that it is a new input device. I can foreseee an explositon of different input devices, each adapted to function and communicatrion wirelessly with the central computiong resource. Each input device will be essentially a dumb UI capture, which converts button pushes, twists, voice commands, kicks, eye trackers, motion sensors, heart monitors... into action requests, which are sent back to a "headles" computyer system, which actions them, and returns feedback for displays, leds, audio systems, buzzers, actuators of a dozen sorts.
Basically, the computer "disappears", as you say. It becomes the mere "trivial" glue between specialist input devices and specialist output devices (whare actuators and displays are output devices).
E wouldn't expect it to be "possible everywhere". That would be stupid. This would only be necessary for places like the financial services industry, because they are playing with other peoples money. Money is just numbers. Do you want somebody like you - but less honest - installing whatever they like on your bank's computer? If so, watch your account empty. Of course, dealers computers aren't as sensitive as the bank's central database, but they are still making decisions about other people's money.
The same person whould not be dealer and sysadm, even if they have the necessary skills. The banks go to a lot of effort to keep front offs (people who make the deals) and back office (people whe shuffle the paperwork to execute the deals) separate. When they don't, sooner otr later something goes wrong: that is how Barings went down the tubes.
This looks just as if they have taken the Infiniband spec and stripped out a lot of the bells and whistles which that had grown in order to become totally generic. Intel "back burnered" Infiniband about six months ago, so presumably switched there effort to this. It looks a good idea to me - I think we have been waiting too long for tightly-coupled serial links to reach general use. Inmos had them 18 years ago, but they never caught on then (because inmos wouldn't let people buy in to their several good ideas without also buying in to the several more bad ideas).
Serial links make system configuration much easier. They do have the slight downside that they have even wierder failure modes than traditional busses and (IME) have more soft failure modes than busses.
I think that you are probably one level of paranoia too high here. It is not that they expect their users to be plotting over the IM to rob the company or plan evil deeds, it is keeping a record of what promises/lies/truths were said about a transaction when it goes sour some months later. If a client says "I only bought those securities because the dealer said they were a no-fail bet", you need to be able to recall what the dealer actually did say - whether s/he properly pointed out the risks in a transaction etc.
Generally, I don't think they are protecting against fraud on the day the conversation happens - they are protecting against cover-ups after the fact - when the heavily boosted company goes bust or suchlike. I think that if they were into direct fraud, these dealers would have other ways of doing it.
So you make it a disciplinary offence to install unapproved software on a PC used for financial work - which is what our finance department does. And occasionally sweem pachines for unauthorised executables.
At a certain level, it doesn't make sense to insist that something marginally untrustworth cannot be done. It is not as if installing a new IM client would be a way to instant riches, so there isn't the motivation of theft to make someone do it. A financial services house should have a culture that says that IT should approve all software. If you want play-around machines, they should be separarte from the "trustworthy" machines and firewalled off.
After all, employees could bypass the current email logging by installing hteir own email client, or by posting from a hotmail account or... But they don't.
One thing that can always make a useful project, and which you can make very personal to your team, as some kind of accesibility system. You must have some disabled people around - physical, visual, mental, whatever. And they are usually all slightly different. And specialise gear for the disabled is very, very expensive. So find someone in need of assistance a,d build something custom for them. Might be I/O devices customised to their needs - mouse replacements for different physical disabilities. Or a wheelchair mounted PC with GPS. Could you make a "navigate home" device for the wheelchair? Or a decent centralised lights-audio-curtains-TV controller for someone who can't move. Or.... But be driven by your local needs: have a real project with real success or falure, rather than a theoretical project for some hypothetical disabled person you don't know. reckon to hand over a finished, packaged, archived project at the end of the year.
The analogues you describe - 0/1 to ACGT, bits to codons, arfe very low level. it is possible that we will be able to exploit the huge information packing density of DNA for computation (or, more accurately, storage, purposes). But if we do, it will only add another twist to Moores Law. We will be building determinate state machines using, in the broad sense, "programs". And there is nothing inherently wrong with this - it is just atoms, and the fact that we build them into useful patterns similar to those used by the body is irrelevant.
It is much hihger up the biological level at which new insights, new mechanisms, and new ethical questions might appear. W don't catually know all the levels between DNA and thought. DNA to proteins - yes. Big, but understood.But how proteins build cells, how cells interact, how the body knows which cells ti build, how nerve cells make a brain, how a brain works - these are still very much lost in fog, albeit fog with occasional gaps.
And it is in these level that the possibilities for something different and possibly objectionable lie. But it is not the DNA technologies which matter, it s whart you might call the Turing technologies thatr matter. If I manage to make a computer program which in every possible way simulates you, how does that computer program differ from you? If can simulate the verbal etc. responses, I could also attach actuators. Or you might become quadraplegic. Since the only way that I know that you are alive and feeling and have human rights is from your words and actions, does not something which behaves identically have the same rights.
If you answer yes, or even maybe, to that, what if I chop out a bit of your behaviour and make a robot with it. Maybe you are an expert chicken sexer. If I emulate the bit of your brain which has that knowledge, does it have any of your rights. OK, how if I clone that bit of your brain and copy the re1quisite skills into it? Now it is a bit of clone-you with a fragment of clone-personality. has it human rights, or is it a machine.
So I don't think any problems, or any strtl;ing new effects will come from the low-level mechanical level of biology. From the structural level, however, ther may come enormous novelty. For a start, nature has a far better grip on parallel processing than we can understand. Contingency and fault tolerance are also major features of natural systems.
Not the way I read the article. They claim that the propsed law requires the use of Open Source and locks out Closed Source. Their letter, with which I broadly agree, wants to maintain competition. As well as allowing S Aus to make the best choice, competition is a good thing for Open Source. OS should, and will eventually, win on its merits, not on any legislated advantage. The only thing any legislator needs to do is level the playing field - block Microsoft FUD, sponsor real cost-of-ownership studies.
FUD is a much more accurate description of IBM's tactics in the late-eighties, early-nineties.
To my recollection, it goes back at leas to the late seventies, to the time of "IBM and the Seven Dwarves", when the Seven Dwarves (Honeywell, Univac etc) complained that it was IBM's main selling tactic.
It is an obvious tactic to use when you are overwhelmingly the largest plauyte in the field. IBM then, Microsoft now. An the fact is that there is some truth in it. You know that you will never be totally lost if you fall back into Microsoft's choking embrace. Maybe you could do better by hunting around, but why bother? Many peole prefer mediocrity to risk, even if the payoff may be high.
OTOH, I think it is a very bad signe for the long term propagator of FUD. IBM had a massive fall after years of FUD, and only recovered when it dropped that attitude completely and started competing on its merits. While you use FUD as your main marketing tool instead of excellence, you aren't developing your product properly, and eventually the competition will get far enough ahead that FUD won't work. And when that happens, you are in deep trouble, because you are already far behind. I predict this for Microsoft in 3-4 years time. The chanllenger may, or may not, be Linux. And the crash will take years to happen.
Because people don't all want to travel at the same time. With smaller planes, you can offer a bigger range of departure times, and people will par a bit more for a departure when they want it. The trand has been that way over the Atlantic for quite a while - 747s being replaced by 767/777 or their Airbus equivalents to get more departure times. 747s still needed on the dense routes like Lon-NY because (a) there are that many people and (b) the airports are slot limited, so you want the biggest palne you can get.
The seats are on rails running fore-and-aft, so the airlines could increase/decrease seat pitch on a literally day-by-day basis by taking out a row or two of seats and easing the rest apart. The seat width is determined by Boeing, and as I posted elsewhere, the 7E7 has the space for an extra inch of width per passenger.
One of the features of this aircraft (from other sources) is that the top half of the fusalage (passenger bit) is slightly bigger that the bottom half (cargo bit), rather than a perfect circle (777) or symmetrical double bubble (767). That gives you an inck more seat width per passeger - which, from a tall fat git, matters. Of course, they can also use those inches to give wide aisles for faster turnaround...
I don't think it is different models, it is different market segments. There was a (probably) market for one new huge plane, but not two. Building two A380 class machines would have guaranteed huge losses for both. So Boeing and Airbus arm-wrestled for about eight years to decide who would do it. But actually, it was a one-way bet: Boeing would be cannibalising the market for its 747, whereas Airbus had nothing to fear. The only worry was that Boeing, bysouping up the 747 one more time, could take enough off the bottom of the A380 market that it would not make the break-even volumes. But eventually Airbus jumped, and Boeing backed down.
So where now? They tried the "faser" route, and tha answer was a big yawn. So now they try the cheaper route. Their 757 and 767 are already being beaten up by Airbuses A330/340. It doesn't look as if they would have much market left for those in, say, five years time. I think they are expecting to get something like 20% better mileage-per-seat than the Airbus products - and over the lifetime of an aircraft, that is a lot of fuel.
The alternative, I suppose, would to have been to have gone down a size and replaced the 737 to compete with the Airbus A318/319/320/321 family. But I could believe that there is not so much economy to be screwed out of these short-hoppers by new technology. And if the killed the 737, they would risk losing the "single type" airlines such as Southwest to Airbus.
If they can deliver what they promise, and if Airbus don't manage to retrofit the same technological improvements onto their products, I can see it working for Boing. But the next few years are going to be "Interesting Times" for the company.
The designation 717 was originally reserved for the military version of the 707. But since the military wanted to call it the C-135 (with assorted prefixes), it was never used. And then, as others have posted, it was retrofitted onto the MD-80/90 range that it acquired when it took over McDonnell Douglas.
Even if they are noit deactivates, what privacy issues are not handled by requiring that the RFID be clearly identified on a tag which can be easily snipped off? Like those paper tags hels on thin plastic threads which run through clothing, You usually have to take two ir three of those off clothes when you get them home.Ir, for anything which is sold in packaging, put the tag in the packaging, not the item.
While I agree that we need to keep up awareness, I think there is a lot of paranois about this subject.If it takes off, there will be such a deluge of data that it woil be difficult and expensive for Big Brother to use it. Dio you know how many consumer items are sold each and every day? Literally billions. Not impossible of course - given govenment budgets, it could be done. But sufficiently expensive that there would almost certainly bea easier ways of doing it.
The REAL consumer issue I see here is the additional cost of RFID tagging
The shops claime that there will be a net saving. Firstly, in theft - which costs shops something like 5% of turnover. Some of it walks out the door with customers, so could be stopped at the door. Some "dfalls off the abck of lorries", and could be traced back to the larcenous lorry driver (half of such thefts are bnelievced to be by staff). If it were to halve that, 5c per item would payoff massively. Secondly, in better stock control. You can "ask" a shelf how many items it has on it, so you will never be out of stock but nt have to send someone to count the stock.And you can track inventory without needing a droid to scan bar codes - a whole fork-lift full of stock is automatically inventoried as it goes out the door.
Once the system gets universal, I could these making real net savings which, in a truly competitive environment, will get passed back to the consumer.
What is IANAL?
I Am Not A Lawyer.
If you take advice marked thus and get into legal trouble, you are entirely on your own. Mind you, anybody who takes legal advice from the Web/Usenet is a workd class fool anyway.
Also, what is fragging?
Literally, killing with a fragmentation grenade - a means occasionally used to get rid of disliked officers.NCOs in the Vietnam war.
Figuratively - destroying with great force.
What could the counterparty to SCO possibly gain by agreeing to this?
Money. The counterparty would presumable be being employed as an Expert Witness in the lawsuit. Fees for such witnesses are normally very lucrative. >$1000/day plus expenses for the research phase (reading the code) and more for attendance in court are the figures I have heard.
Could you triangulate with three satellites in geostationary? Roughly speaking, they are all going to be in a line - and a line isn't a triangle. Of course, you could put them off-equator, so they nod up and down, but there is still going to be plenty of time when the trianle is very long and thin, thus giving pretty poor accuracy. I think the GPS satellites are in fairly tilted (near-polar) orbits, so that (a) thya cover polar areas efficeingly, and (b) you can always get a nice fat triangle from visible satellites.
Long, long ago, I set up a really cheap and crappy stereo system in a really perfect room - the library of a stately home. The wallw sere lined with books - acoustically absorbing but not dead. The wall behind was coverd with curtains. teh room was large (say 50 ft by 40) and exactly symmetrical, and with a sofa at the optimum listening position.
This cheap stereo system (high street retailers cheapest "got everything" model) sounded absolutely marvellous. Like kit costing fity times as much.
Ever since then, I have been of the opinion that it is not worth spending a fortune on hi-fi kit if you intend to install it in a room in which you intend to Have a Life. The necessary compromises to live in a room - particularly if you share with other people - will cancel out all the advantages of super-duper kit. If you are prepared to set up a special listeneing room, it might be worth investing in this kit. Until then, buy more music or more beer.
So how much "sticky tape" can one have to certain weights/newtons?
Article says 1 sq cm will support 1 kg.
H-bonds don-t work for this purpose. H-bonds only bond H to H, so unless the surface you want to climb has been treated in some way to cover it wil dangling Hs, there is nothing for you to bond to. Van der Waals force works between any two reasonably flat surfaces - and any surface is flat on a small enough scale, which is what this tape is exploiting.
Mostly, they just observe what happens to be above as the earth turns. They can effectively move the viewing position by two degrees either way by moging the position of the receiver across the focus, and the tilt of the earths axis "nods" the view up and down over the year, so in a year they get to see about half the total sky. Lokk at the maps on the Seti@home page to see what they can see.
For many purposes, Arecibo is quite restrictive; for seti@home, it is excellent - unless, of course, ET lives due north or south.