ok, 'nuff schoolyard tactics. This would be a perfectly good thing, if only patent's were granted on a more reasonable basis, and for a shorted time period.
Then we would see companies hurrying up to captialize on their innovations (== happy consumer) rather than sitting on frivolous patents hoping to sue the bejeus out of whomever happened to have the same insight.
lasers are coherent; they have very low beam dispersal. Light beams that cross don't interact. active tracking of targets can acheive excellent great accuracy.
right:
The points about needing to be careful about not blinding someone is well taken; these things are regulated for a reason. Likewise, rain and fog are serious bummers.
That is an excellent idea. You can visualise a system where the network can request a computer to dial in an add aggregate bandwidth. In the era of flat dial-up pricing, this would work wonders.
The only problem is that in order to get decent routing behavior (you want the path through the modems to be transparent) you'll need at least one dedicated server with a good connection to be a routing proxy -- all the modem connected users are masqed behind it, and it forwards packets along the least congested route.
I'm grinning like a fool in love. This is just soo cool. I hereby present you with the Joho prize for coolest idea of the day -- typically presented in the afternoon, but today we make an exception.
Wouldn't surveillance cameras rather be the perfect use for RAIC (s/D/C for camera instead of disk). They're fixed, they're price senstitive, and they're not that picky about size. Multiple cameras with overlapping views should be much cheaper than this sort of top-of-the-line stuff, even after it has come down in price.
This ring might be more feasible. Compressive strength is easier to get (I think, IANAConstructionEngineer) and can be built in parts. You just need a whole lot of parts, as the system is inherently stable.
[long booring rant about wanting to start at a decent altitude (ie not sea level) snipped]
As for governmental stability, I assure that whatever former country was picked to host the base station, that area would be under global control before the project was started. Eminent domain and all that.
Admittedly, it would be swinging wildly several miles up, where there really isn't much to destroy.
As for balance, it should be doable to counterbalance all weight transfers -- all you need is to deploy / reel in a weight spaceward.
More fun is angular momentum. Recall that the top of the tower up in geostationary orbit is moving a lot faster sideways than the bottom. So while the steady state would have the bottom of the tower hanging straight down, regular use will have it curving East, probably quite sharply.
The trick is that the system isn't at balance when not being used, but rather under consciderable stress. You actually put the end station a bit beyond geosynchronous orbit, so that the cable is always taut (sp?).
More advanced designs would have the end station be able to move back and forth along the cable so that you always balance the load being carried by the lifting force in the system.
Re:US leads and the world follows - HA!
on
Lawsuits Suck
·
· Score: 1
anon.penet.fi hrm?
I wouldn't crow too loudly. That said, finland is certainly one of the most civilised countries in the world in that it practices what it preaches and preaches pretty insightfully. For example, it is one of the few to support female emancipation.
Yes, that's the point. Normally you have to set the price and accept that some people will walk away, while some people would have paid more. So to do that well, you need accurate elasticity information. That's one thing they are measuring. The curve of the set of demand vs price points. But if they can generate these curves on a per-demographic basis, they are all set.
On a less preachy note, I can't seem to figure out why the profit is maximised at the meeting point. Instead it should be the point that maximes the area of the rectangle between it and the origin. And I can easily draw a demand curve where that is not at the intersection. Ideas?
A bit of searching should find you an.au clip of RMS singing "Cooperation with RMS is impossible" or something like that. It was a long time ago and I'm too lazy to find it again.
I hadn't fully realised what people meant by the viral nature of the GPL. I must say that I'm not positively suprised. This is on the far side of what I (YMMV) conscider reasonable.
Just to recap my new understanding of the wrangles: RMS's argument has been that
1) because of this, KDE has never actually been GPL'ed
2) hence when they used "real" GPLed code (c.f. readline in parparent) they were violating the GPL then.
3) so now that they are almost out of the woods, the KDE people should apologise for past violations.
From an economic standpoint, amazon are trying to get a handle on the price elasticity of their various goods, perhaps correctly reasoning that tried and true items like Planet of the Apes will be more elastic than hot-off-the-press X-Men (if it's even out yet).
BUT! The normal supply/demand relationships implicitly assume an anonymous purchaser, so the elasticity is some aggregate measure. Of course, that isn't the case when you mix cookies into it (cue ominous strings)
We all know that the seller maximises profit at the intersection of supply/demand vs price curves (elasticity is the slope of the curve). However, for any given price, there are people who are paying "too little". They would gladly pay more for the same product.
If amazon could work demographics into the elasticity estimate -- and this is why they (and double-click) have been collecting info, not for advertising -- they can make better estimate on the maximum price that an individual would pay for the product.
So what they are doing is trying to determine the price sensitivity to various products for various demographic clusters.
I am absolutely amazed. If this is done on a cross industry basis (so instead of just books, also cars, airfare) this is consumer data that companies will kill for.
Or buy amazon for, now that it is a sellable asset
I'm actually really excited about this. It is soo neat. This is a great hack! Evil, despicable and all that too, but neat!
Difference here being that in this case it is the insurance company deciding how to price their product. If you can find an insurer who doesn't calculate this way you can buy insurance from them instead.
The case with taxes is that you can't go and say "hey, I promise not to pirate, so please don't tax me".
Taxes are law, insurance is a private transaction, and they must be held to different standards.
Mind you, I've not used perl, but I do have some experience in the two other languages.
Every time I want to change python, it is to make it more like scheme; orthogonal, consistent, predictable.
Mostly it boils down to lexical scoping, declaring variables, and closures. syntax is a doddle, love it or hate it, you can pretty easily learn to live with any given syntax. Language features do play a role.
All of which can be hacked around without too much hassle, but the do limit my use of python to a super-scripting language. Filesystem chores, typically in a pipeline with sed and awk preprocessing the input. Anything larger and python's scoping rules tend to start nipping, and then biting.
On the other hand, due to the powerful modules it comes with, python can do quite a lot in a short program.
Slashdot Mirror
the peeling of the bells?
At least keeping our eyes pealed answers the age old question of what the sound of green is.
:-P
yeah? So?
ok, 'nuff schoolyard tactics. This would be a perfectly good thing, if only patent's were granted on a more reasonable basis, and for a shorted time period.
Then we would see companies hurrying up to captialize on their innovations (== happy consumer) rather than sitting on frivolous patents hoping to sue the bejeus out of whomever happened to have the same insight.
Johan
128 bits should get you different IP addresses for each... oh I'll make something up ... cubic micrometer in your immediate surroundings.
hrm.
actually, a 128 address space is large enough to adress every bit of ram ever produced, and ever likely to be produced.
behold the power of two, repeatedly applied.
Scary thing was, I was all set to start taking issue with the order of those lines...
time to shut down and go home.
akamai for the masses?
"excellent great"
wonderful proofreading today.
wrong:
lasers are coherent; they have very low beam dispersal. Light beams that cross don't interact. active tracking of targets can acheive excellent great accuracy.
right:
The points about needing to be careful about not blinding someone is well taken; these things are regulated for a reason. Likewise, rain and fog are serious bummers.
That is an excellent idea. You can visualise a system where the network can request a computer to dial in an add aggregate bandwidth. In the era of flat dial-up pricing, this would work wonders.
The only problem is that in order to get decent routing behavior (you want the path through the modems to be transparent) you'll need at least one dedicated server with a good connection to be a routing proxy -- all the modem connected users are masqed behind it, and it forwards packets along the least congested route.
I'm grinning like a fool in love. This is just soo cool. I hereby present you with the Joho prize for coolest idea of the day -- typically presented in the afternoon, but today we make an exception.
Wouldn't surveillance cameras rather be the perfect use for RAIC (s/D/C for camera instead of disk). They're fixed, they're price senstitive, and they're not that picky about size. Multiple cameras with overlapping views should be much cheaper than this sort of top-of-the-line stuff, even after it has come down in price.
That should be FLA, 'less my math is off today.
(I should have added that most modern subs are mostly titanium, IIRC)
If the barent's sea at a depth of 400 ft will do, the russians have one they'll sell you cheap.
Johan
This ring might be more feasible. Compressive strength is easier to get (I think, IANAConstructionEngineer) and can be built in parts. You just need a whole lot of parts, as the system is inherently stable.
[long booring rant about wanting to start at a decent altitude (ie not sea level) snipped]
As for governmental stability, I assure that whatever former country was picked to host the base station, that area would be under global control before the project was started. Eminent domain and all that.
Admittedly, it would be swinging wildly several miles up, where there really isn't much to destroy.
As for balance, it should be doable to counterbalance all weight transfers -- all you need is to deploy / reel in a weight spaceward.
More fun is angular momentum. Recall that the top of the tower up in geostationary orbit is moving a lot faster sideways than the bottom. So while the steady state would have the bottom of the tower hanging straight down, regular use will have it curving East, probably quite sharply.
The trick is that the system isn't at balance when not being used, but rather under consciderable stress. You actually put the end station a bit beyond geosynchronous orbit, so that the cable is always taut (sp?).
More advanced designs would have the end station be able to move back and forth along the cable so that you always balance the load being carried by the lifting force in the system.
anon.penet.fi hrm?
I wouldn't crow too loudly. That said, finland is certainly one of the most civilised countries in the world in that it practices what it preaches and preaches pretty insightfully. For example, it is one of the few to support female emancipation.
seals? The cute, swim on their backs and make wavey little things with their flippers? The Dennis Leary cute-approved ones? Nah.
orca. Oh, and polar bears love 'em too, but the commute's a bitch.
walk away
Yes, that's the point. Normally you have to set the price and accept that some people will walk away, while some people would have paid more. So to do that well, you need accurate elasticity information. That's one thing they are measuring. The curve of the set of demand vs price points. But if they can generate these curves on a per-demographic basis, they are all set.
On a less preachy note, I can't seem to figure out why the profit is maximised at the meeting point. Instead it should be the point that maximes the area of the rectangle between it and the origin. And I can easily draw a demand curve where that is not at the intersection. Ideas?
A bit of searching should find you an .au clip of RMS singing "Cooperation with RMS is impossible" or something like that. It was a long time ago and I'm too lazy to find it again.
Thanks!
I hadn't fully realised what people meant by the viral nature of the GPL. I must say that I'm not positively suprised. This is on the far side of what I (YMMV) conscider reasonable.
Just to recap my new understanding of the wrangles: RMS's argument has been that
1) because of this, KDE has never actually been GPL'ed
2) hence when they used "real" GPLed code (c.f. readline in parparent) they were violating the GPL then.
3) so now that they are almost out of the woods, the KDE people should apologise for past violations.
OK. It makes more sense now.
From an economic standpoint, amazon are trying to get a handle on the price elasticity of their various goods, perhaps correctly reasoning that tried and true items like Planet of the Apes will be more elastic than hot-off-the-press X-Men (if it's even out yet).
BUT! The normal supply/demand relationships implicitly assume an anonymous purchaser, so the elasticity is some aggregate measure. Of course, that isn't the case when you mix cookies into it (cue ominous strings)
We all know that the seller maximises profit at the intersection of supply/demand vs price curves (elasticity is the slope of the curve). However, for any given price, there are people who are paying "too little". They would gladly pay more for the same product.
If amazon could work demographics into the elasticity estimate -- and this is why they (and double-click) have been collecting info, not for advertising -- they can make better estimate on the maximum price that an individual would pay for the product.
So what they are doing is trying to determine the price sensitivity to various products for various demographic clusters.
I am absolutely amazed. If this is done on a cross industry basis (so instead of just books, also cars, airfare) this is consumer data that companies will kill for.
Or buy amazon for, now that it is a sellable asset
I'm actually really excited about this. It is soo neat. This is a great hack! Evil, despicable and all that too, but neat!
Difference here being that in this case it is the insurance company deciding how to price their product. If you can find an insurer who doesn't calculate this way you can buy insurance from them instead.
The case with taxes is that you can't go and say "hey, I promise not to pirate, so please don't tax me".
Taxes are law, insurance is a private transaction, and they must be held to different standards.
... but wait I digress.
That has to be the inimitable groucho. Or perhaps he isn't?
Mind you, I've not used perl, but I do have some experience in the two other languages.
Every time I want to change python, it is to make it more like scheme; orthogonal, consistent, predictable.
Mostly it boils down to lexical scoping, declaring variables, and closures. syntax is a doddle, love it or hate it, you can pretty easily learn to live with any given syntax. Language features do play a role.
All of which can be hacked around without too much hassle, but the do limit my use of python to a super-scripting language. Filesystem chores, typically in a pipeline with sed and awk preprocessing the input. Anything larger and python's scoping rules tend to start nipping, and then biting.
On the other hand, due to the powerful modules it comes with, python can do quite a lot in a short program.