I'm wondering whether there was a deeper purpose to importing counterfeited equipment. If such could be successfully sold into government operations, it could then be used for backdoors if it had been outfitted with modified ICs designed to support that. That the importer was in Virginia normally would not be too important, but Virginia and Maryland being prime areas for government installations makes it more suspicious, if they were going to pose as a local supplier. Then, by cutting their price on bids below normal competitors, they could steer their equipment into specific departments.
I think they ought to open up some of those counterfeits, spend some money de-capping some chips, and take a good look at what's really in them.
The real driving factor is that the prices are set high and then insurance companies bargain them down somewhat, but not nearly low enough. I had a $200,000 hospital visit to ER and ICU, and the insurance company leveled that down to $48,000 by telling the hospital f$^*- no. Hearing aids should be far less expensive but the American medical $y$tem is quite happy to jack them up.
But.. but.. I thought Dancing with the Baby Red Dwarf Stars would be a hit on WB. And then some rightwing politician claimed it was astro-child pornography. You can't win these days.
I have to say I would not buy a car whose dashboard constantly changed the position and size of controls. I do not want to play a videogame, I want to drive. Likewise, I don't want to have to adapt myself to a constantly shifting word processor interface. Microsoft would have been well advised to give users the added option of having a frozen and static interface. It might not be trendy but it would be less frustrating for many to use.
Plus the UI is inconsistent. Specifics: sometimes an icon has accompanying text - and sometimes an icon is small, with barely discernable details and no text label, and it's is hard to know its function. And sometimes, functionality is not even present on the ribbon but instead must be accessed by multiple clicks required to drill down several layers. I found that the ribbon in Word, in many common cases I need to use, adds extra steps and slows me down compared to the straightforward Office 2003 menus. Not just me, some of my clients complain how more difficult it is to do anything not common now. The ribbon is dumbed down UI, not improved UI.
Further, some tasks like 'insertion' are now scattered around through several tabs. They eliminated a clear top menu and replaced it with chow mein. For example, the actions of inserting a page break and inserting a cross-reference and inserting an image are now under different tabs. So you have to rethink your need from 'action-first' (verb first) to 'class of what is acted on-first' (noun-first). I maintain that is not how people think. We think 'I want to do THIS to THIS'. We don't think "I want the car to drive' but 'I want to drive the car'. The Ribbon appears to inconsistently implement the UI, sometimes using a reverse polish notation and sometimes not, which is an idea horrlble.:) That is a key UI semantic issue with this damned Ribbon.
Microsoft has actually caused me more labor in common activities, and may their trendy designers and marketing managers rot in zombie hell for it.
Why buy from a store that opens my purchase and messes with it? For the same reason I keep getting hamburgers at a place that lifts the top bun, spits on the burger, and drops the bun back. Because I hate myself, and like to live dangerously, and have more money than sense, and probably vote for Sarah Palin. Also, I watch Jackass.
I believe Hocking is somewhat wrong. Although judgment of visual, external, expressions can give clues to internal states, emotions work a bit like this: 1) a person has various goals. As he progresses through the present world-state, he experiences success or failure, or partial success or partial failure of progress towards goals. 2) this progress is cognitively monitored by parts of the brain, and a metric (an 'emotion type and intensity value') is mapped and matched to the goal progress. 3) other factors are combined with that metric. For example, if you've lost something but someone is attacking you, you do not feel sadness of loss first but instead anger over the attack. The amygdala is kind of an interrupt prioritizer for this. 4) the person internally decides (moderates) an external expression of the metric. (some of this is done at an unconscious level and rapidly). For example, an expression of anger, happiness, sadness.
Now, a camera and perceptual system might be developed that can measure facial metrics and 'decode' them for that person into likely emotion states IF the system can measure and adapt to that person's particular ways of expression (over time and experience (learning)).
But a key problem is that mere external visual cues do not give a reliable backward mapping to the goals or the internal responses to the goal success or blockage, and certainly not be able to deal with the complexities of various simultaneous emotions rising and perhaps inhibiting each other. In other words, the camera-based perceptual system cannot fully recreate the true internal cognitive states that gave rise to the emotion. It would have to be able to guess at and reason about the person's goals and his internal framework of mental state.
I base this on my own work in AI understanding of emotion, which differs a bit from the accepted AI model of emotion used by Ortony, Clore, and Collins.
Fahrenheit 451's people who memorized books and related them orally thereafter. And now we have come full circle from ancient times when story tradition was aural. I'm going to build fires and gather people around and recite, from memory, Linux documentation.
It wasn't unmanned. Unfortunately, the janitor was onboard and didn't get out in time. However, during the flight, cosmic rays altered his genes and he now turns green and shouts "me rompe!" when he gets angry about the cost of cable TV. You don't want see Jose when he gets angry.
@Baranczac: I don't have to work, I have SysAdmins for the Universe for that. I spend most of my time online now surfing for ecclesiastical porn, and Googling for My name.
@danbert8: It is not possible for me to make a stone so heavy I cannot lift it, because I can turn off gravity, and there is no comment so awesome I cannot modpoint it to infinity, raising its poster to Sainthood.
Given that both pharmacies and pizza delivery have for decades told people electronically (i.e. by phone) when something will be ready for pickup or will arrive, merely moving the communications medium to the Internet does not make the idea new.
A Mr. F. Flintstone of Bedrock writes in to say: "But... we had these when I was a kid and stored movies on them. Only they were flat, and on cave walls."
Movies have a structure (the skeleton) and a style (muscles and flesh) applied on top of the skeleton to smooth it out.
Movies can have the same skeleton and yet a far different appearance just as two women can have a similar skeleton but one is a tub of lard and the other is Olivia Wilde.
Thus, so what if many movies have the Joseph Campbell Hero's Journey structure.
I have a question. The worst-case received power a cell phone is designed for doesn't really say what peak emitted power a cell tower emits. Even with inverse-square law, what are the actual numbers for tower antenna radiation? I don't any good numbers available but believe it's around 35 to 100 watts per bay at phone frequencies. How much at harmonics of 800 MHz? How much at frequencies caused by nonlinear rectification by corroded materials? I don't know. Need more info. Can''t sleep, clowns will eat me. Clowns with phones.
I went to make sure I used the right definition. And lo! I correct myself. Breaking the bond in ionic materials is dissociation and not ionization. But in common in ionization and dissociation is that energy causes the action. Certainly UV can have enough energy to do either, in the right cases.
Now, going back to the original issue, some RF energy can most certainly ionize although it depends on the frequency and power level. A simple example is in the semiconductor industry where RF applied to plasma chambers excites gases creating a plasma. Of course cell phone peak power levels are not that high nor around the same frequencies. But the contention in play was that because cell phone RF does not provide ionizing energy levels and frequencies nor high enough thermal energy, it cannot interact with tissues. But that premise is not true. For example, RF applied to a wire on a microscope visibly causes causes paramecia to react to the energy. Ants can align with microwave energy, because their (organic) antennae are about the right wavelength and energy couples into their nervous systems. Bees have been shown to react to cell phone frequency energy. That's pretty much demonstration that RF at non-ionizing levels can affect tissues sometimes. So then the next question would be what does that energy do and to what molecules? Obviously it can couple into nervous system tissue, and the brain is nervous system tissue. To what extend can energy coupled into organic conductors affect chemical processes such as DNA replication or repair? One may not have to break bonds in order to disrupt sensitive processes, merely make the processes have one critical error once in awhile.
Guys, I was illustrating flawed thinking - my whole post was about flaws. I was not asserting that UV cannot deliver enough energy to break bonds. Of course it can.
Imagine this statement: "Sunlight is not ionizing radiation therefore it is unthinkable that it can cause cancer."
On another topic, the study is flawed in that it only tracked children over a limited period even though that was several years, and therefore cannot make assertions that something does not cause cancer, as it omits long-term development triggered many years before. It is clear from chemical environmental studies that carcinogens can take long times to produce effect.
Also, the study took place where (lower than USA) European radiation standards are in place, and therefore does not cover effects of higher output phones in other countries, nor of pervasively high-density US towers.
And finally the study by using only cancer for a claim that phones do not cause problems omits the effects of RF on childrens' brain development, a wholly different issue but not an insignificant one
It is so utterly, completely obvious that the taxonomic ignification is merely a matter of sorting the knowledge packets according to chromulence, distification, and relevactory mystilience. I therefore award this patent to these geniuses, void all prior art, and entitle them to billions in ransom. Let it be known that this East Texas court is a fair and honest place where all may come and get their just rewards.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm wondering whether there was a deeper purpose to importing counterfeited equipment. If such could be successfully sold into government operations, it could then be used for backdoors if it had been outfitted with modified ICs designed to support that. That the importer was in Virginia normally would not be too important, but Virginia and Maryland being prime areas for government installations makes it more suspicious, if they were going to pose as a local supplier. Then, by cutting their price on bids below normal competitors, they could steer their equipment into specific departments.
I think they ought to open up some of those counterfeits, spend some money de-capping some chips, and take a good look at what's really in them.
The real driving factor is that the prices are set high and then insurance companies bargain them down somewhat, but not nearly low enough. I had a $200,000 hospital visit to ER and ICU, and the insurance company leveled that down to $48,000 by telling the hospital f$^*- no. Hearing aids should be far less expensive but the American medical $y$tem is quite happy to jack them up.
If you magnify the image, you can see Stanley Kubrick sitting in a director's chair in a crater.
Oh wait. (rubbing my LCD screen) Dead pixels.
Having seen the movie Yellow Submarine, I fully believe in Apple Boppers.
"Open the door! Steve Jobs' Apple Police! Or we'll make fruit salad out of you. Also, we have Axe Cop with us!"
And there's absolutely no military use of technology that can capture an asteroid and divert its path!
But.. but .. I thought Dancing with the Baby Red Dwarf Stars would be a hit on WB. And then some rightwing politician claimed it was astro-child pornography. You can't win these days.
I have to say I would not buy a car whose dashboard constantly changed the position and size of controls. I do not want to play a videogame, I want to drive. Likewise, I don't want to have to adapt myself to a constantly shifting word processor interface. Microsoft would have been well advised to give users the added option of having a frozen and static interface. It might not be trendy but it would be less frustrating for many to use.
Plus the UI is inconsistent. Specifics: sometimes an icon has accompanying text - and sometimes an icon is small, with barely discernable details and no text label, and it's is hard to know its function. And sometimes, functionality is not even present on the ribbon but instead must be accessed by multiple clicks required to drill down several layers. I found that the ribbon in Word, in many common cases I need to use, adds extra steps and slows me down compared to the straightforward Office 2003 menus. Not just me, some of my clients complain how more difficult it is to do anything not common now. The ribbon is dumbed down UI, not improved UI.
Further, some tasks like 'insertion' are now scattered around through several tabs. They eliminated a clear top menu and replaced it with chow mein. For example, the actions of inserting a page break and inserting a cross-reference and inserting an image are now under different tabs. So you have to rethink your need from 'action-first' (verb first) to 'class of what is acted on-first' (noun-first). I maintain that is not how people think. We think 'I want to do THIS to THIS'. We don't think "I want the car to drive' but 'I want to drive the car'. The Ribbon appears to inconsistently implement the UI, sometimes using a reverse polish notation and sometimes not, which is an idea horrlble. :) That is a key UI semantic issue with this damned Ribbon.
Microsoft has actually caused me more labor in common activities, and may their trendy designers and marketing managers rot in zombie hell for it.
Why buy from a store that opens my purchase and messes with it? For the same reason I keep getting hamburgers at a place that lifts the top bun, spits on the burger, and drops the bun back. Because I hate myself, and like to live dangerously, and have more money than sense, and probably vote for Sarah Palin. Also, I watch Jackass.
I believe Hocking is somewhat wrong. Although judgment of visual, external, expressions can give clues to internal states, emotions work a bit like this: 1) a person has various goals. As he progresses through the present world-state, he experiences success or failure, or partial success or partial failure of progress towards goals. 2) this progress is cognitively monitored by parts of the brain, and a metric (an 'emotion type and intensity value') is mapped and matched to the goal progress. 3) other factors are combined with that metric. For example, if you've lost something but someone is attacking you, you do not feel sadness of loss first but instead anger over the attack. The amygdala is kind of an interrupt prioritizer for this. 4) the person internally decides (moderates) an external expression of the metric. (some of this is done at an unconscious level and rapidly). For example, an expression of anger, happiness, sadness.
Now, a camera and perceptual system might be developed that can measure facial metrics and 'decode' them for that person into likely emotion states IF the system can measure and adapt to that person's particular ways of expression (over time and experience (learning)).
But a key problem is that mere external visual cues do not give a reliable backward mapping to the goals or the internal responses to the goal success or blockage, and certainly not be able to deal with the complexities of various simultaneous emotions rising and perhaps inhibiting each other. In other words, the camera-based perceptual system cannot fully recreate the true internal cognitive states that gave rise to the emotion. It would have to be able to guess at and reason about the person's goals and his internal framework of mental state.
I base this on my own work in AI understanding of emotion, which differs a bit from the accepted AI model of emotion used by Ortony, Clore, and Collins.
Fahrenheit 451's people who memorized books and related them orally thereafter. And now we have come full circle from ancient times when story tradition was aural. I'm going to build fires and gather people around and recite, from memory, Linux documentation.
It wasn't unmanned. Unfortunately, the janitor was onboard and didn't get out in time. However, during the flight, cosmic rays altered his genes and he now turns green and shouts "me rompe!" when he gets angry about the cost of cable TV. You don't want see Jose when he gets angry.
@Baranczac: I don't have to work, I have SysAdmins for the Universe for that. I spend most of my time online now surfing for ecclesiastical porn, and Googling for My name.
@danbert8: It is not possible for me to make a stone so heavy I cannot lift it, because I can turn off gravity, and there is no comment so awesome I cannot modpoint it to infinity, raising its poster to Sainthood.
This is God. I have a Slashdot account. Because even I get bored.
You can take my vacuum-tube equipped PC from my cold dead hands! Now you kids get your damned hoverboards off my front lawn!
Given that both pharmacies and pizza delivery have for decades told people electronically (i.e. by phone) when something will be ready for pickup or will arrive, merely moving the communications medium to the Internet does not make the idea new.
"Hello, I see you're trying to figure out why your car is on fire. Do you want to write a letter to the manufacturer?"
A Mr. F. Flintstone of Bedrock writes in to say: "But ... we had these when I was a kid and stored movies on them. Only they were flat, and on cave walls."
Movies have a structure (the skeleton) and a style (muscles and flesh) applied on top of the skeleton to smooth it out.
Movies can have the same skeleton and yet a far different appearance just as two women can have a similar skeleton but one is a tub of lard and the other is Olivia Wilde.
Thus, so what if many movies have the Joseph Campbell Hero's Journey structure.
I have a question. The worst-case received power a cell phone is designed for doesn't really say what peak emitted power a cell tower emits. Even with inverse-square law, what are the actual numbers for tower antenna radiation? I don't any good numbers available but believe it's around 35 to 100 watts per bay at phone frequencies. How much at harmonics of 800 MHz? How much at frequencies caused by nonlinear rectification by corroded materials? I don't know. Need more info. Can''t sleep, clowns will eat me. Clowns with phones.
I went to make sure I used the right definition. And lo! I correct myself. Breaking the bond in ionic materials is dissociation and not ionization. But in common in ionization and dissociation is that energy causes the action. Certainly UV can have enough energy to do either, in the right cases.
Now, going back to the original issue, some RF energy can most certainly ionize although it depends on the frequency and power level. A simple example is in the semiconductor industry where RF applied to plasma chambers excites gases creating a plasma. Of course cell phone peak power levels are not that high nor around the same frequencies.
But the contention in play was that because cell phone RF does not provide ionizing energy levels and frequencies nor high enough thermal energy, it cannot interact with tissues. But that premise is not true. For example, RF applied to a wire on a microscope visibly causes causes paramecia to react to the energy. Ants can align with microwave energy, because their (organic) antennae are about the right wavelength and energy couples into their nervous systems. Bees have been shown to react to cell phone frequency energy. That's pretty much demonstration that RF at non-ionizing levels can affect tissues sometimes. So then the next question would be what does that energy do and to what molecules? Obviously it can couple into nervous system tissue, and the brain is nervous system tissue. To what extend can energy coupled into organic conductors affect chemical processes such as DNA replication or repair? One may not have to break bonds in order to disrupt sensitive processes, merely make the processes have one critical error once in awhile.
But in ionic solids ionization IS breaking of bonds.
Guys, I was illustrating flawed thinking - my whole post was about flaws. I was not asserting that UV cannot deliver enough energy to break bonds. Of course it can.
Imagine this statement: "Sunlight is not ionizing radiation therefore it is unthinkable that it can cause cancer."
On another topic, the study is flawed in that it only tracked children over a limited period even though that was several years, and therefore cannot make assertions that something does not cause cancer, as it omits long-term development triggered many years before. It is clear from chemical environmental studies that carcinogens can take long times to produce effect.
Also, the study took place where (lower than USA) European radiation standards are in place, and therefore does not cover effects of higher output phones in other countries, nor of pervasively high-density US towers.
And finally the study by using only cancer for a claim that phones do not cause problems omits the effects of RF on childrens' brain development, a wholly different issue but not an insignificant one
It is so utterly, completely obvious that the taxonomic ignification is merely a matter of sorting the knowledge packets according to chromulence, distification, and relevactory mystilience. I therefore award this patent to these geniuses, void all prior art, and entitle them to billions in ransom. Let it be known that this East Texas court is a fair and honest place where all may come and get their just rewards.