Most people hear the word radiation or nuclear and that's it for them, logic never comes into play.
Very true, unfortunately. That's exactly why the medical imaging technology called Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) was renamed. The technique is a variation on an earlier technology called Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR). Someone (probably one of the early MRI manufacturers, like GE) realized that the word "nuclear" would have doomed the product, so they changed the name... along the same lines as renaming "Chinese gooseberries" to "kiwi fruit".
Stiffer penalties for copyright infringement won't change things much. If the public believes that they're not actually doing anything wrong, and that the chances of being caught are slim, they'll keep on doing it. Consider marijauna, for instance; today's drug laws are truly draconian, but there hasn't been much of a dent in pot smoking, has there?
Now that attempting the crime has such severe consequences, who will be the first to go to jail for running a p2p client?
The consequences haven't changed at all -- yet. There's a long way to go from a proposal from the attorney-general to the signing of a law.
IANL, of course, but reverse engineering is perfectly legal under most circumstances. The DMCA creates one exception... it's illegal to perform reverse engineering in order to circumvent a security mechanism, i.e., copy protection.
I think the recorded 'old fasion phone' ring tone that came with the SE-T610 (assuming it's the same for the P800) was the most annoying thing on there (and very quiet).
Probably not the same ring. This one sounds a whole lot like the real thing, and it's loud... the loudest ringtone that comes with the phone, in fact. I had to dial the volume back quite a bit to make it tolerable. These days I have it on ascending volume... the phone first vibrates, then sort of clucks, then starts ringing quietly, slowly getting louder.
Several newer phones (such as my Sony-Ericsson P800) can use any MIDI or MP3 file as a ringtone. No need to do any fancy file manipulation... just upload the.MID or.MP3 file to the phone and that's it. How can the RIAA control that? Sue the cellphone makers? Pretty amusing, seeing as the Sony half of Sony-Ericsson would be suing itself...
BTW, my own ringtone is a recording of an old-fashioned telephone bell... I don't inflict reedy-sounding pop music on innocent bystanders.
Like Nokia, Sony-Ericsson uses Symbian on its top-of-the-line phones (P800 and P900), but they've slapped a completely different user interface called UIQ on them. UIQ is used by a couple of other vendors, too... Motorola and BenQ use it on a couple of their products.
I own both a Nokia 3650 and a Sony-Ericsson P800 and I strongly prefer UIQ. Last I looked Nokia and Sony-Ericsson were competitors. Does this bode well for the future of Symbian/UIQ phones?
so how about reusing the Spirit/Opportunity platform for further robotic missions to Mars?
The Spirit/Opportunity landing system is heavily based on the Pathfinder/Sojourner design. The parachute and airbags had to be beefed up to deal with the additional weight, and some other modifications were made based on what was learned the first time around, but it's basically the same.
I understand that squeezing the much larger Spirit and Opportunity into the lander was not easy, which is why the probes arrive folded up like elaborate origami.
Trilogy relates to 3. Sorry, just being technical.
I think the word you're looking for is "pedantic", not "technical".
You obviously haven't read the books. The fourth and fifth books both have a blurb on the cover that says something like "fourth in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy". It's a joke, very much in keeping with the late author's sense of humor.
as I understand it, our own sun is too small to go supernova.
Quite true, but a supernova is a really, really big bang. A star going supernova within a few light-years will cook us quite nicely. Sirius A, for example, is certainly large enough to supernova, and it's 8.6 light-years away. I don't have the numbers, but I strongly suspect that the gamma-ray flux from something that close would do a whole lot more than just hurt the ozone layer... not to mention the blast of particle radiation, moving at less than C, that would follow some time later.
Why do you think that their methodology was so broadly scoped as to include any arbitrary item such as a tea kettle?
It's pretty ridiculous to assume that there even EXISTS a methodology for TCO of arbitrary items.
Of course it's ridiculous. That's the whole point; Gartner claimed that their TCO methods applied to pretty much any investment, big or small... and produced ridiculous results in most cases. This should have been a clue that the whole idea was flawed.
Perhaps Gartner should hire you so that you can keep their track record of idiocy intact.
And perhaps they should hire you to keep intact their record of spouting half-assed, uninformed opinions as gospel.
People pay Gartner for worse... managers and marketing people are always looking for pre-digested "facts" to allow them to make decisions without doing any real research. I used to work as a technical marketing manager, and dealt with Gartner (and other analysts) frequently. Their level of expertise is suspect, and they issue definitive statements with questionable data.
Remember their noises about "Total Cost of Ownership" a few years ago? I applied their methodology to a teakettle, and established that the TCO of said teakettle was well over $4,000.
A more interesting issue is what about anything climbing on the ribbon when it breaks.
Well, it would fall, of course, along with the cable. If it's high enough it'll either come down fast and burn up, or leave the atmosphere altogether. At lower altitudes it'd fall back to earth with the cable... and since it would fall along the equator it's unlikely it'll fall on land, and if it did, it's very unlikely it'd fall on anything that would object to being fallen upon.
I wouldn't want to be in that pod when the cable goes, of course... the chances of survival range from poor to zero, with a nice side order of slow starvation or running out of oxygen if it should happen to reach escape velocity and go flying off to nowhere.
Not to mention remote manupulator devices, of the sort often used in nuclear experiments... they're often called "waldoes", a reference to a Heinlein story called, simply, "Waldo", where he introduced the concept.
Carbon nanofibers are made our of carbon. Carbon reacts with oxygen to form carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and a tiny quantity of more exotic carbon compounds. A burning carbon nanotube is about as environmentally dangerous as a burning candle... probably less so, because candles have all sorts of stuff in them besides carbon.
You're not going to see sliced up half-corpses littering the city streets, either. Yes, science fiction is full of things that can slice through people... but this isn't one of them. A large structure like a space elevator would be fabricated from bundles or ribbons of carbon fiber, which would be about as sharp and dangerous as a piece of clothesline.
What would happen to a space elevator cable whose counterweight broke away? If left untended, it would eventually start to fall to earth, wrapping itself around the equator. Upper portions would fall faster, in effect cracking like a giant whip, with the end of the cable moving at large multiples of the speed of sound. This isn't likely to be as bad as it sounds, though... while the cable is likely to be strong enough in tension to deal with its life as a space elevator, it's unlikely to be strong enough to resist the stresses of orbital entry... most of it will break off and either fly away, go into some sort of orbit, or burn up. The part that doesn't break off will mostly burn up long before it hits the ground... remember, this is CARBON.
If you insist on visualizing the sort of disaster that you're worried about, read Kim Stanley Robinson's) "Mars" series... in one of the books he describes a structurally massive space elevator crashing down to the Martian equator with devastating results.
I happened to wander into the Sony Store on Michigan Avenue in Chicago a couple of weeks ago, and they had racks full of 128Mb Memory Stick Duos. I bought one immediately, of course. Bad news? They're $89.99 each.
But the driving percentages are skewed to those under the influence, age, speeding... etc. If you follow the rules of the road (and drive a vehicle with good safety) you're quite safe.
So the bottom line is that you don't mind a much higher probability of being killed, as long as you're the guy in charge when the excrement impacts the ventilating apparatus?
I'm hearing a lot more of this sort of thing lately. It seems to me that we're creating a world full of people who don't know how to assess risk. To many (most?), an airline disaster is a reason not to fly, despite the fact that they're far more likely to die if they drive to their destination. Or a story about a shark attack is a reason never to go swimming in the ocean. Or a novel respiratory disease that affect a tiny fraction of the population of a far-off country is sufficient reason to avoid contact with any member of that country's ethnic community (and no precautions are taken to avoid far more common and probably more dangerous well-known pathogens).
Why is this happening? Media hype, I think, particularly with respect to local TV news. Not a day goes by without a lurid story exposing the hidden dangers of hotel bedspreads, or the life-threatening hazards of defective electric can openers. They're always presented the same way, too. A teaser is presented early in the newscast, promising to reveal all about a vaguely described, previously unknown danger... but not until the end of the broadcast, ensuring that they audience will stick around. At each commercial break they throw in another hysterical teaser, each more disturbing than the last. When they finally get around to talking about it, it's usually a minor hazard presented as a mortal danger.
Saturday Night Live did a dead-on parody of this a few months ago (fake anchorman: "Hint! It's *not* in your kitchen!").
Or we could do something even more efficient... throw stuff out the back at high speed and let the reaction provide propulsion. Hell, if you can throw it fast enough, it doesn't have to be heavy...
Oh, wait... that's been done, too. It's called a rocket.
Seriously, though, why do you say a rocket is "flawed and wasteful"? What makes you think that throwing rocks at a spacecraft would work better (or at all)? Have you done any math to substantiate it? Is it, just maybe, possible that all those rocket scientists might know what they're doing?
Sometime in the 80's Coca-Cola decided that they'd try to promote Coke as an office beverage, directly competing with coffee. Towards that end they developed the Breakmate, a little self-contained soda fountain about the size of a large microwave oven.
The basic machine attaches to a water line and draws 110V from a wall outlet, and that's all that you have to hook up (you can even buy an accessory water tank, eliminating the water line). Inside the machine is a little refrigerator, a small CO2 cylinder, and space for three 1-litre syrup boxes.
The thing actually mixes pretty decent soda, but apparently there were reliability and maintenance problems. In any case, the whole program flopped,and Coca-Cola no longer manufactures the Breakmate. They still make supplies, though, and you can buy a used Breakmate for $200-$300 on Ebay or through vendors like this one.
Drawbacks? Well, you're restricted to a short list of Coca-Cola beverages... Pepsi and others are out of the question. The syrup packs are relatively expensive... each pack makes about 30 glasses of soda and costs $8-$10, so you'll pay about $0.25-$0.35 per glass. More bad news: the little CO2 cylinder doesn't go very far (many Breakmates have been modified to use larger cylinders); fortunately, they're refillable, and CO2 is cheap. Despite the drawbacks it might be worthwhile; the machine does work, it's a lot cheaper and simpler to install and use, and it's sorta cool besides.
Yes, fine, of course it is, but that doesn't mean that all the things that go with it (software, guides, UI, etc) aren't important. Without them you don't have a product, and of course they're just as patentable as the machine's primary function. Just as they would with the primary function, a competitor will have to either create alternate, non-infringing versions of them, or they'll have to licence them from Tivo (or fight the patents).
In any case, while I'm not a lawyer, it seems to me that at least one of Tivo's patents covers the whole idea of a PVR... or at least one broad set of implementations.
Certainly having the software record shows that I haven't selected isn't a feature I want.
So turn it off. It's not like it's compulsory.
Or are you referring to the occasional marketing message? Those messages are stored in a reserved area and don't cut into the advertised capacity of the machine... and they're unobtrusive enough (a single line of text at the bottom of the main menu) to ignore if you're not interested.
SonicBlue is exactly what I was thinking of when I suggested that the Sony pvr might not be using any of tivo's technology or patents.
SonicBlue and Tivo had a patent lawsuit fight a year or two ago, and the two parties settled with each other for undisclosed terms. It wouldn't at all surprise me if both companies licensed patents from each other.
I should hope that neither tivo nor sonicblue was able to patent recording tv broadcast to a hard drive. It's been done before either, IIRC.
There's a lot more to a PVR than recording video to disk!
I imagine it's not based on tivo technology other than the fact that it's recording broadcast to disk. I don't believe Tivo patented this.
Actually, they may have. Tivo holds 20-odd patents covering many aspects of its DVR technology... see this , this and this, for example. They've tried to enforce them, too.
And what Tivo hasn't patented, SonicBlue/Replay probably has. Granted, SonicBlue won't exist much longer, but someone is bound to buy the patent rights, and they'll probably try to enforce them.
Tivo has a history of supporting reasonable hacks, and as a result the hack forums (such as Tivo Underground) generally support Tivo. Most of the forums strictly forbid discussions that revolve around attempts to copy Tivo content to removable media.
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IANL, of course, but reverse engineering is perfectly legal under most circumstances. The DMCA creates one exception... it's illegal to perform reverse engineering in order to circumvent a security mechanism, i.e., copy protection.
Probably not the same ring. This one sounds a whole lot like the real thing, and it's loud... the loudest ringtone that comes with the phone, in fact. I had to dial the volume back quite a bit to make it tolerable. These days I have it on ascending volume... the phone first vibrates, then sort of clucks, then starts ringing quietly, slowly getting louder.
No, it isn't me. I was liberated from Cubeland years ago. You, however, might want to cut back a little on the Jolt.
BTW, my own ringtone is a recording of an old-fashioned telephone bell... I don't inflict reedy-sounding pop music on innocent bystanders.
Damn, I'm old.
I own both a Nokia 3650 and a Sony-Ericsson P800 and I strongly prefer UIQ. Last I looked Nokia and Sony-Ericsson were competitors. Does this bode well for the future of Symbian/UIQ phones?
The Spirit/Opportunity landing system is heavily based on the Pathfinder/Sojourner design. The parachute and airbags had to be beefed up to deal with the additional weight, and some other modifications were made based on what was learned the first time around, but it's basically the same. I understand that squeezing the much larger Spirit and Opportunity into the lander was not easy, which is why the probes arrive folded up like elaborate origami.
The series first aired in 1978, so if you're less than 25 years old it would indeed have been before you were born.
I was 17 at the time. God, I feel old.
I think the word you're looking for is "pedantic", not "technical".
You obviously haven't read the books. The fourth and fifth books both have a blurb on the cover that says something like "fourth in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy". It's a joke, very much in keeping with the late author's sense of humor.
Quite true, but a supernova is a really, really big bang. A star going supernova within a few light-years will cook us quite nicely. Sirius A, for example, is certainly large enough to supernova, and it's 8.6 light-years away. I don't have the numbers, but I strongly suspect that the gamma-ray flux from something that close would do a whole lot more than just hurt the ozone layer... not to mention the blast of particle radiation, moving at less than C, that would follow some time later.
Of course it's ridiculous. That's the whole point; Gartner claimed that their TCO methods applied to pretty much any investment, big or small... and produced ridiculous results in most cases. This should have been a clue that the whole idea was flawed.
Perhaps Gartner should hire you so that you can keep their track record of idiocy intact.
And perhaps they should hire you to keep intact their record of spouting half-assed, uninformed opinions as gospel.
People pay Gartner for worse... managers and marketing people are always looking for pre-digested "facts" to allow them to make decisions without doing any real research. I used to work as a technical marketing manager, and dealt with Gartner (and other analysts) frequently. Their level of expertise is suspect, and they issue definitive statements with questionable data.
Remember their noises about "Total Cost of Ownership" a few years ago? I applied their methodology to a teakettle, and established that the TCO of said teakettle was well over $4,000.
Well, it would fall, of course, along with the cable. If it's high enough it'll either come down fast and burn up, or leave the atmosphere altogether. At lower altitudes it'd fall back to earth with the cable... and since it would fall along the equator it's unlikely it'll fall on land, and if it did, it's very unlikely it'd fall on anything that would object to being fallen upon.
I wouldn't want to be in that pod when the cable goes, of course... the chances of survival range from poor to zero, with a nice side order of slow starvation or running out of oxygen if it should happen to reach escape velocity and go flying off to nowhere.
Not to mention remote manupulator devices, of the sort often used in nuclear experiments... they're often called "waldoes", a reference to a Heinlein story called, simply, "Waldo", where he introduced the concept.
You're not going to see sliced up half-corpses littering the city streets, either. Yes, science fiction is full of things that can slice through people... but this isn't one of them. A large structure like a space elevator would be fabricated from bundles or ribbons of carbon fiber, which would be about as sharp and dangerous as a piece of clothesline.
What would happen to a space elevator cable whose counterweight broke away? If left untended, it would eventually start to fall to earth, wrapping itself around the equator. Upper portions would fall faster, in effect cracking like a giant whip, with the end of the cable moving at large multiples of the speed of sound. This isn't likely to be as bad as it sounds, though... while the cable is likely to be strong enough in tension to deal with its life as a space elevator, it's unlikely to be strong enough to resist the stresses of orbital entry... most of it will break off and either fly away, go into some sort of orbit, or burn up. The part that doesn't break off will mostly burn up long before it hits the ground... remember, this is CARBON.
If you insist on visualizing the sort of disaster that you're worried about, read Kim Stanley Robinson's) "Mars" series... in one of the books he describes a structurally massive space elevator crashing down to the Martian equator with devastating results.
I happened to wander into the Sony Store on Michigan Avenue in Chicago a couple of weeks ago, and they had racks full of 128Mb Memory Stick Duos. I bought one immediately, of course. Bad news? They're $89.99 each.
So the bottom line is that you don't mind a much higher probability of being killed, as long as you're the guy in charge when the excrement impacts the ventilating apparatus?
I'm hearing a lot more of this sort of thing lately. It seems to me that we're creating a world full of people who don't know how to assess risk. To many (most?), an airline disaster is a reason not to fly, despite the fact that they're far more likely to die if they drive to their destination. Or a story about a shark attack is a reason never to go swimming in the ocean. Or a novel respiratory disease that affect a tiny fraction of the population of a far-off country is sufficient reason to avoid contact with any member of that country's ethnic community (and no precautions are taken to avoid far more common and probably more dangerous well-known pathogens).
Why is this happening? Media hype, I think, particularly with respect to local TV news. Not a day goes by without a lurid story exposing the hidden dangers of hotel bedspreads, or the life-threatening hazards of defective electric can openers. They're always presented the same way, too. A teaser is presented early in the newscast, promising to reveal all about a vaguely described, previously unknown danger... but not until the end of the broadcast, ensuring that they audience will stick around. At each commercial break they throw in another hysterical teaser, each more disturbing than the last. When they finally get around to talking about it, it's usually a minor hazard presented as a mortal danger. Saturday Night Live did a dead-on parody of this a few months ago (fake anchorman: "Hint! It's *not* in your kitchen!").
Oh, wait, it's been done... it's called Project Orion .
Or we could do something even more efficient... throw stuff out the back at high speed and let the reaction provide propulsion. Hell, if you can throw it fast enough, it doesn't have to be heavy...
Oh, wait... that's been done, too. It's called a rocket.
Seriously, though, why do you say a rocket is "flawed and wasteful"? What makes you think that throwing rocks at a spacecraft would work better (or at all)? Have you done any math to substantiate it? Is it, just maybe, possible that all those rocket scientists might know what they're doing?
The basic machine attaches to a water line and draws 110V from a wall outlet, and that's all that you have to hook up (you can even buy an accessory water tank, eliminating the water line). Inside the machine is a little refrigerator, a small CO2 cylinder, and space for three 1-litre syrup boxes.
The thing actually mixes pretty decent soda, but apparently there were reliability and maintenance problems. In any case, the whole program flopped,and Coca-Cola no longer manufactures the Breakmate. They still make supplies, though, and you can buy a used Breakmate for $200-$300 on Ebay or through vendors like this one.
Drawbacks? Well, you're restricted to a short list of Coca-Cola beverages... Pepsi and others are out of the question. The syrup packs are relatively expensive... each pack makes about 30 glasses of soda and costs $8-$10, so you'll pay about $0.25-$0.35 per glass. More bad news: the little CO2 cylinder doesn't go very far (many Breakmates have been modified to use larger cylinders); fortunately, they're refillable, and CO2 is cheap. Despite the drawbacks it might be worthwhile; the machine does work, it's a lot cheaper and simpler to install and use, and it's sorta cool besides.
Yes, fine, of course it is, but that doesn't mean that all the things that go with it (software, guides, UI, etc) aren't important. Without them you don't have a product, and of course they're just as patentable as the machine's primary function. Just as they would with the primary function, a competitor will have to either create alternate, non-infringing versions of them, or they'll have to licence them from Tivo (or fight the patents).
In any case, while I'm not a lawyer, it seems to me that at least one of Tivo's patents covers the whole idea of a PVR... or at least one broad set of implementations.
Certainly having the software record shows that I haven't selected isn't a feature I want.
So turn it off. It's not like it's compulsory.
Or are you referring to the occasional marketing message? Those messages are stored in a reserved area and don't cut into the advertised capacity of the machine... and they're unobtrusive enough (a single line of text at the bottom of the main menu) to ignore if you're not interested.
SonicBlue and Tivo had a patent lawsuit fight a year or two ago, and the two parties settled with each other for undisclosed terms. It wouldn't at all surprise me if both companies licensed patents from each other.
I should hope that neither tivo nor sonicblue was able to patent recording tv broadcast to a hard drive. It's been done before either, IIRC.
There's a lot more to a PVR than recording video to disk!
Actually, they may have. Tivo holds 20-odd patents covering many aspects of its DVR technology... see this , this and this, for example. They've tried to enforce them, too.
And what Tivo hasn't patented, SonicBlue/Replay probably has. Granted, SonicBlue won't exist much longer, but someone is bound to buy the patent rights, and they'll probably try to enforce them.
Tivo has a history of supporting reasonable hacks, and as a result the hack forums (such as Tivo Underground) generally support Tivo. Most of the forums strictly forbid discussions that revolve around attempts to copy Tivo content to removable media.