Comparing a variable named elf_t_arname to one names elf_c_arname is not very convincing. The suffix is generic, the prefix is activity specific, and the middle letter is presumably some datatype indicator. Where it gets dicey is when there are structs and every variable in the struct has a somewhat similarly named variable in the other one. This does arouse suspicion. even if you forget the variable names for a moment, any pattern like bool,real,real, *real, int, *char,*char,*bool,.... that is identical between two structs would be an improbable occurence. and when you see it in back to back structs it becomes nearly impossible to happen by chance.
The key question then is if there is some structural reason why the two might share an identical stuct? for example, is there an elf spec that defines a protocol for communication or the way a record on disk is serialized (i.e. packed)? if so then of course these will occur like this. Or perhaps both are derived from a common BSD ancestor so both vary only slightly.
if the answer is no, there was no reference implementation and no ancestor then I'd say that for examples like 251, Mcbride has some evidence.
However for most of the ones he cites there is no there, there.
Much as I hate these patent cases, perhaps this one has merit. NetApp built it's bussiness being a vendor of NAS systems that had extensible file systems that spanned clever raid structures, and automatic snapshoting and they did this long before ZFS. Those are the key features of ZFS. And when you pair that with NAS, well that's a NetApp in a box. I dont know what NetApps patents claim but what they did was not obvious at the time and they are actively a seller of that, not a patent troll.
lex/flexx are front ends for domain specific languages. they parse things you then have to implement a backend for. THey are great achievements but not stand alone. I think the point here is how you implement the end to end DSL. There have been other books for example that talk about using yacc/lex with objective C to make a complete app.
As for groovy, I've never used it since python and perl I know and they are more mature. But I have to admit when you look at groovy it seem to me to be the holy grail of scripting languages. The one thing all scripting languages lack is a really seamless way to go from your script prototype with duck-typing to a faster compiled version with real static/dynamic typing. All the approaches in python are a kludge (c-python, jython etc...). You can call C or fortran from python and perl (i.e. swig boost, f2py,...) but it's an interface with a deep moat. in groovy the syntax stays almost the same as you move from the script to the compiled java. THe way you import things is so similar it makes tweaking a script into a compiled version trivial and more importantly can be done incrementally as needed. And it comes with all the legacy libraries of Java for free.
It seems like the ideal modern script language. You just have to get over Java-phobia.
First off I totally beleive this is possible. Very often my non-apple phones flicker between 4 bars and no bars.
But what is remarkable about this is that according to Pogue, apple designed the phone to find the "best" cell connection not the strongest. Apparently there is a difference. Naively I could appreciate that a tower that oscillates between 4 and 0 is worse than a steady 2.
Thus is it surprising that given they paid attention to that kind of detail they would get the actual formula wrong.
My guess is that the formula used to pick the cell tower is distinct from formula used to drive the display. Or they did something like add a variance bias to the mean to represent steady weak towers as having more bars.
In any event, assuming their explanation is correct, it does seem to jibe with their other public statements insisting that there is no actual problem, just a perceived one and that all cell phones do this to some extent.
If you put both terminals of the battery on the same end then, like a 9 volt battery, you risk shorting them accidentally. That's why 9v batteries come in individual packages and usually have a plastic protector over the top. I buy AA batteries in bulk and keep them jumbled in big ziplocks. I'd worry about these new ownes shorting together.
The other thing is, How can you use these batteries in an end-to-end configuration rather than parallel?
I admit I have not studied the answer yet. But... the energy release from burning 1 gram of coal is higher than the energy release for burning 1 gram of gas. SO how could it be the gas every beats coal for carbon reduction? I think also that of the two that gases tend to release more methane as well. In which case the greenhouse case is even worse than CO2.
What matters a lot is the time of day, especially on comcast. I had a comcast 12Mbs line and indeed I could get 8MB/sec in the middle of the day. but from 6pm to midnight it was normally 800kbs with bursts of twice that if you were lucky and sometimes droughts too.
Basically when I was home, so was everyone else.
What comcast does not advertise is that they will sell you an economy 1.5Mbs line for half the price of their cheapest "high speed internet". Since all you can actually get is 1Mbs if you are like me it'sall you need.
downgrade today and get what youre paying for.
.. then they started to rot at 3-5 years, in my experience..
Post this again in 100 years, until then, it's just more bullshit marketing.
yes but this one comes with a money back gauretee if you can't read your data in 100 years.
Of course there won't be any software that can read the format. Even if it were unformatted data, We've gone from ebcdic to ascii to unicode is a very short time.
in 100 years logic will all be spintronic coupled quantum states locates in googles tritium powered headquarters on mars. You'll communicate with it by quantum entanglement of the implants added to your brain when you were an infant. The division between thought and recall will not be perceptible and you won't even be aware that information storage actually exists. the idea of possessing a physcial storage device will confuse people, so no one will actually know what it is.
The spinning mirror combined with the assymetric diffuser gives each viewpoint in the horizontal plane a different image just like a real 3d object would. The place where I get lost is they claim they also have a way to make the vertical viewpoints 3d correct. I don't see how.
mod up. this is the first person to notice the Han Solo Shot first. Saying that Apple has unleashed patent armegeddon is a bit much. Apple is not a patent troll who produces no product or innovation but simply sues others with dubious IP. The IP in question here is not dubious or obvious. If it was obvious then why was the late-comer iphone such a run-away hit? others had plenty of time and funds to originate it.
You can of course argue that somethings should nto be patentable or the degree to which patents should matter. But the point is Apple is not abusing the system here like actual patent trolls do.
Is Nokia abusing apple? is HTC abusing apple with it's counter suit? Given that HTC was well aware of Apple's patents why did they choose to run smack into them? well that's pretty obvious: the patented innovations were crucial to success in that market, thus demonstrating precisely why Apple is on solid ground to patent them. They are not dubious innovations they are critical.
One can say the same thing about the Nokia innovations that apple has stepped on. apple knew they existed but chose to template their protocols on Nokia's successful ones presumably because they had proven successful.
I have no doubt that some of these patents are silly or restating past work with small tweaks of language. But It seems pretty clear that Nokia gor where it is, and Apple got where it is on the basis of innovation in highyl cometitive active markets. Thus they have every right to try to protect their crucial innovations that caused their sucess.
Moreover there is likely more sound than fury here. The real issue is cross licensing. What is the relative value of the Nokia patents to apple comared to the Apple patents to Nokia. They obviously could not decide amongst themsleves or at least could not do do quickly enough for market timing, so instead they will measure each other in court. Then settle and cross license. In the end each will get a fair result and everyone else is doomed.
On the other hand, if the sound is great enough and there are enough vested interests this may become political in which case the EU might doi something like force apple to give its patents at less than fair value. Or there could be equivalent pressure from the US on Nokia and HTC. Or HTC might engage some trade leverage from it's home country.
THe problem is thus not the court settlements but potential political ones.
IU was just thinking that you could even quantitate the degree of information being handed over and it's likelihood it identifies you. Some measure like the entropy or the mutual information of the data set correlation might quantify the uniquness. That is how many bits in uncertainty would there be on a user ID. Companies could even Publish this in their privacy statements. e.g. apple might say they rank a 11 privacy bits, meaning that the average user is idenitifed to only one pool of 2048 individuals.
It's not necessarily the same thing that google does.
When you install an app that uses location data then the app almost certainly already knows exactly who you are, no inferences needed. So the question is not if apps are accessing your location data but if apple is downloading it to the mothership and selling this to third parties whose apps you did not purchase. However there that daya may or may not be processed before handing over. For example, if they hand over a string of locations and times you visit (the bagel shop, starbucks, the metro, the work place, the home then that associated sequence probably nails you uniquely. If they instead hand over a historgram of city block vistis that aggregate over all users and don't link the records then this data will be fairly anonymous aside from edge cases (e.g. perhaps they can figure out you are indeed the bridge tender on the brooklyn bridge.) So it depends on what level of correlation they are handing over and if it's to third parties or apps that you installed.
Every time I install a googls chrome plugin I cringe cause it tells me it needs access to my browsing history and bookmarks. But then I relax slightly because at least I'm choosing to install this not have it handed over to third parties. What I worry more about is the google searches themselves. that string of associates goes to google and I suspect they are indeed correlating these.
I hate story blurbs that suggest the sinister ('one has to wonder!') when the only news is that apple added yet another trojan to it's list of other trojans. If you wanted to say something intelligent you might instead say something like "is apple the only OS that, at the OS level, has explicit trojan filters?" then you could remark about Linux distro's or various editions of Windows or maybe even Baracudda routers or something. But there is nothing sinister here, it's all good. Reminds me of Aharon AppleMcHater over at TGdaily. always the negative spin!
The gulf is blooming with natural oil eating bacteria that already know how to live among the communities and predators there. Indeed there are so many of them eating the oil right now they say it's removing all the oxygen from the water making a deadzone.
Youre argument is not new. It's old. What do you think people said when the Unions first started. They also pointed out the Train workers took the jobs voluntarily. What do you think Kings said about their Vassal. Their farms would not be safe without my protection. People argumed passionately that the Nergo slave was better off than on his own or even in africa. Give it a rest. These are tired arguments.
Although there were "guilds" in europe for ages, the modern trade union emerged in the US as the train union. At the time train workers were like foxxcon workers. There was no assurance a route would ever return you home. You lived in company towns along the way. And the main fixture there was the bar where you wasted your pay check. Accident rates where high and efficiency or scheduling was low. Since you lost your wages and never saw your family, what were you living for?
The train unions first emerged not to demand better wages but better living conditions. They sold themselves to the train owners as a plan to increase professionalism and public respect. It worked. accident rates did go down. Barrier's to entry and standards increased training, retention of experience, and professional conduct. Workers took pride in their work. Many bars were closed People returned home on time and with money in their pockets.
Today we often see unions as protecting lazy workers form being fired or demanding higher wages via collective bargaining. What we don't see is that these are small perturbations about a dynamic equilibrium between labor and management. That is we no longer have the deprevating working conditions of the 19th century to see what could be the case if management got the upper hand when labor markets were not tight. The excesses of unions we see to day are tracebable to fact that in some markets it's possible for manufacturer's to push along price increases as long as they can gaurenttee the competion pays the same costs. E.g. car manufatuter's would agree to a wage increase at GM as long as there was also one at ford. IN any given port, the same principle allows port owners to pass along long shoremen wage increases.
What we have here in foxconn is a throwback to the same early situation. Workers living in company dorms, shitty pay, long hours and dangerous working conditions. That is to say, no union.
The real problem with this is not the sad plight of those poor workers. But actually because it undermines the status of workers who work in countries with state or union mandated good working conditions. Those jobs get shipped out. There is a push to relax those costly standards to get the jobs back.
The solution to both these problems is not for the FOX conn to unionize. It would be good if they did but until that becomes universal in asia it won't fix the problem, it will just move it. INstead the solution is to put a tarrif on all imports from countries that makes the playing field level.
if your workers have below-OSHA woking conditions then imported goods get a tarrif that is equal to the cost to US companies for maintaining OSHA standards.
this then makes it cost neutral for foxcon to have better condtions because it can outcompete companies that don't do that.
Hi again. Took some time to think about this. I'm actually going to reverse my conclusion that it's fundamentally impossible. Indeed I can now prove it is possible.
Before I do that I'm going to note that 1) I don't buy your explanation 2) and I don't yet buy that this propeller car actually implements what I will describe. Indeed I suspect it may not.
First what's my issue with your explanation. You use a shifting reference frame that confuses forces with simple Lorentz frame shifts. That is, take your explanation and remove the propeller: if I have a wheeled cart on a conveyor belt it can stay in a single place in the frictionless limit. It can even move forward or backward relative to an observer off the conveyor depending with a small push. All the effect you describe apply to this wheeled cart. Now you can glue a propeller on it if you want. But that's not creating a force that causes this effect.
Now here's an actual constructive proof you can do this. The proof takes the form of a gendanken experiment which, if you don't know the term, means a thought experiment that describes something that is idealized and probably not the way you would actually do something practically but simply shows that you can do something or the converse.
So build a hypothetical art like this: you put a huge spinnaker/parachute on the front to act as a wind ratchet (it pulls one way, but collapses and has no drag the other). You also put a dynamo on the wheel that can charge a battery. When the cart is below wind speed the parachute pulls the cart with a strong force, and the dyanmo charges the battery. I can then discharge the battery to drive the cart forward faster than the wind. eventually this battery runs down and the cart slows to below wind speed. I can repeat this cycle to maintain an average speed faster than the wind downwind since I can make the sail as large as I want to get as much energy I want in a fixed interval of time. that is total distance divided by total time can be faster than the wind, including the time it take to charge the battery.
SO far this does not achieve continuous faster than wind speed just an average that is faster than wind speed.
Now I place over this a black box I cannot see though but allows wind to pass with no effect. The black box is very very long and hooked to the cart by some rails that can slide forward and backward on command.
What I do is I carefully slide these rails so that no matter what speed the cart is currently moving, the black box is moving forward at the average speed of the cart. THat is when the cart is moving slower than wind speed it is sliding the rails forward so that the black box covering is moving forawrd relative to the cart. When the cart is moving faster than average, it pulls the rails back to the carts position in the black box moves forward.
Since the black box itself has no mass or wind resistance, we assume it takes no energy to move it.
From the outside all I see is a black box moving at a continus speed that is always faster than the wind. The center of mass of the contraption is not moving on average faster than the wind since the cart is invisibly changing it's position under the black box. But to all observers the exterior is moving faster than the wind perpetually.
SO to recap: yes this us rube goldberg. That's the nature of a gedanken experiment. But the point is it proves that it could be done without violating any laws of physics.
Now is the tested propeller craft actually achieving this? By this I mean both 1) maintaining an average speed faster than the wind 2) Capable of implementing continuous faster than windspeed.
I'd say neither. If you look at the plots of their speed (see the original website). you will see that if you take total distance and divide it by total time the average is less than wind speed. They did get a peak value greater than wind speed not an average value. That is not very impressive since this can be trivially achieved by tappping potential energy stored in the turning wheels and propeller for a brief but unsustainable boost.
thus since (1) is not proven yet (2) is definitely not proven yet.
However my argument shows the idea is not impossible.
FOr business do you really need anything more than XP?
The problem with XP is not that it'snot perfectly satisfactory but that it's not maintained. New software won't be written for it. That's the reason to migrate.
On the other hand one could make a lateral move. Linux is more like XP in feel than even Win 7 is. And software is in production for Linux. So perhaps a lateral move is not so unthinkable in terms of training costs at this particular point in time.
Thanks for pointing me to the longer post. It took me a while to figure out why that explanation does not work.
Now imagine that the vehicle is moving 10 kph with a 10 kph tail wind. The air is no longer moving at all relative to the vehicle. The propeller which was slicing effortlessly through the air with a 10 kph headwind, now has an extra 10 kph relative wind at its back, pushing both forward on the propeller and pushing it around faster (returning some energy to the wheels as forward drive).
That is mistaken logic. If the wind and the vehicle are moving at the same speed then there is no wind at all. In order for the prop to be in the "effortless" state it has to not be moving. That is consider the prop on a non-moving, windless day. If it is moving then it will be pushing on the air and that takes energy.
Here's another way to break this down. decouple everything.
First let's remove the road and wheel. Instead I'll just put a motor on the crank shaft to represent the wheel. I can have this spinning at some rate to simulate the wheel turning against the road. I can also monitor the back-emf in the motor to see if it is spinning freely, doing work or having work done on it.
I now have a completely stationary vehicle. It has a rotating propeller.
If I have no wind blowing with this stationary vehicle this is the same situation as the moving vehicle with a tail wind the same as it's downwind speed.
If the prop is turning then the motor must be doing work since air is being accelerated.
----
Again I note: this discussion only pertains to the case of directly-downwind faster than the wind. Tacking and reaches transverse to the wind are not part of this discussion. Secondly I am not talking about transiently harvesting stored energy in the prop for a temporary gain in speed. And the above only considered travelling at wind speed not the energy storage possibilities of traveling for a time below wind speed.
Slashdot Mirror
The poor thief is being slashdotted.
oops I meant document 331 not 251. (251 is an example of McBride seeing things). 331 is much more interesting.
Comparing a variable named elf_t_arname to one names elf_c_arname is not very convincing. The suffix is generic, the prefix is activity specific, and the middle letter is presumably some datatype indicator.
Where it gets dicey is when there are structs and every variable in the struct has a somewhat similarly named variable in the other one. This does arouse suspicion. even if you forget the variable names for a moment, any pattern like bool,real,real, *real, int, *char,*char,*bool,.... that is identical between two structs would be an improbable occurence. and when you see it in back to back structs it becomes nearly impossible to happen by chance.
The key question then is if there is some structural reason why the two might share an identical stuct? for example, is there an elf spec that defines a protocol for communication or the way a record on disk is serialized (i.e. packed)? if so then of course these will occur like this. Or perhaps both are derived from a common BSD ancestor so both vary only slightly.
if the answer is no, there was no reference implementation and no ancestor then I'd say that for examples like 251, Mcbride has some evidence.
However for most of the ones he cites there is no there, there.
Much as I hate these patent cases, perhaps this one has merit. NetApp built it's bussiness being a vendor of NAS systems that had extensible file systems that spanned clever raid structures, and automatic snapshoting and they did this long before ZFS. Those are the key features of ZFS. And when you pair that with NAS, well that's a NetApp in a box. I dont know what NetApps patents claim but what they did was not obvious at the time and they are actively a seller of that, not a patent troll.
lex/flexx are front ends for domain specific languages. they parse things you then have to implement a backend for. THey are great achievements but not stand alone. I think the point here is how you implement the end to end DSL. There have been other books for example that talk about using yacc/lex with objective C to make a complete app.
As for groovy, I've never used it since python and perl I know and they are more mature. But I have to admit when you look at groovy it seem to me to be the holy grail of scripting languages. The one thing all scripting languages lack is a really seamless way to go from your script prototype with duck-typing to a faster compiled version with real static/dynamic typing. All the approaches in python are a kludge (c-python, jython etc...). You can call C or fortran from python and perl (i.e. swig boost, f2py, ...) but it's an interface with a deep moat. in groovy the syntax stays almost the same as you move from the script to the compiled java. THe way you import things is so similar it makes tweaking a script into a compiled version trivial and more importantly can be done incrementally as needed. And it comes with all the legacy libraries of Java for free.
It seems like the ideal modern script language. You just have to get over Java-phobia.
First off I totally beleive this is possible. Very often my non-apple phones flicker between 4 bars and no bars.
But what is remarkable about this is that according to Pogue, apple designed the phone to find the "best" cell connection not the strongest. Apparently there is a difference. Naively I could appreciate that a tower that oscillates between 4 and 0 is worse than a steady 2.
Thus is it surprising that given they paid attention to that kind of detail they would get the actual formula wrong.
My guess is that the formula used to pick the cell tower is distinct from formula used to drive the display. Or they did something like add a variance bias to the mean to represent steady weak towers as having more bars.
In any event, assuming their explanation is correct, it does seem to jibe with their other public statements insisting that there is no actual problem, just a perceived one and that all cell phones do this to some extent.
If you put both terminals of the battery on the same end then, like a 9 volt battery, you risk shorting them accidentally. That's why 9v batteries come in individual packages and usually have a plastic protector over the top. I buy AA batteries in bulk and keep them jumbled in big ziplocks. I'd worry about these new ownes shorting together.
The other thing is, How can you use these batteries in an end-to-end configuration rather than parallel?
I admit I have not studied the answer yet. But... the energy release from burning 1 gram of coal is higher than the energy release for burning 1 gram of gas. SO how could it be the gas every beats coal for carbon reduction? I think also that of the two that gases tend to release more methane as well. In which case the greenhouse case is even worse than CO2.
What matters a lot is the time of day, especially on comcast. I had a comcast 12Mbs line and indeed I could get 8MB/sec in the middle of the day. but from 6pm to midnight it was normally 800kbs with bursts of twice that if you were lucky and sometimes droughts too.
Basically when I was home, so was everyone else.
What comcast does not advertise is that they will sell you an economy 1.5Mbs line for half the price of their cheapest "high speed internet". Since all you can actually get is 1Mbs if you are like me it'sall you need.
downgrade today and get what youre paying for.
.. then they started to rot at 3-5 years, in my experience..
Post this again in 100 years, until then, it's just more bullshit marketing.
yes but this one comes with a money back gauretee if you can't read your data in 100 years.
Of course there won't be any software that can read the format. Even if it were unformatted data, We've gone from ebcdic to ascii to unicode is a very short time.
in 100 years logic will all be spintronic coupled quantum states locates in googles tritium powered headquarters on mars. You'll communicate with it by quantum entanglement of the implants added to your brain when you were an infant. The division between thought and recall will not be perceptible and you won't even be aware that information storage actually exists. the idea of possessing a physcial storage device will confuse people, so no one will actually know what it is.
The spinning mirror combined with the assymetric diffuser gives each viewpoint in the horizontal plane a different image just like a real 3d object would. The place where I get lost is they claim they also have a way to make the vertical viewpoints 3d correct. I don't see how.
So, Nokia sues Apple, who kicks the dog (htc)?
mod up. this is the first person to notice the Han Solo Shot first. Saying that Apple has unleashed patent armegeddon is a bit much. Apple is not a patent troll who produces no product or innovation but simply sues others with dubious IP. The IP in question here is not dubious or obvious. If it was obvious then why was the late-comer iphone such a run-away hit? others had plenty of time and funds to originate it.
You can of course argue that somethings should nto be patentable or the degree to which patents should matter. But the point is Apple is not abusing the system here like actual patent trolls do.
Is Nokia abusing apple? is HTC abusing apple with it's counter suit? Given that HTC was well aware of Apple's patents why did they choose to run smack into them? well that's pretty obvious: the patented innovations were crucial to success in that market, thus demonstrating precisely why Apple is on solid ground to patent them. They are not dubious innovations they are critical.
One can say the same thing about the Nokia innovations that apple has stepped on. apple knew they existed but chose to template their protocols on Nokia's successful ones presumably because they had proven successful.
I have no doubt that some of these patents are silly or restating past work with small tweaks of language. But It seems pretty clear that Nokia gor where it is, and Apple got where it is on the basis of innovation in highyl cometitive active markets. Thus they have every right to try to protect their crucial innovations that caused their sucess.
Moreover there is likely more sound than fury here. The real issue is cross licensing. What is the relative value of the Nokia patents to apple comared to the Apple patents to Nokia. They obviously could not decide amongst themsleves or at least could not do do quickly enough for market timing, so instead they will measure each other in court. Then settle and cross license. In the end each will get a fair result and everyone else is doomed.
On the other hand, if the sound is great enough and there are enough vested interests this may become political in which case the EU might doi something like force apple to give its patents at less than fair value. Or there could be equivalent pressure from the US on Nokia and HTC. Or HTC might engage some trade leverage from it's home country.
THe problem is thus not the court settlements but potential political ones.
IU was just thinking that you could even quantitate the degree of information being handed over and it's likelihood it identifies you. Some measure like the entropy or the mutual information of the data set correlation might quantify the uniquness. That is how many bits in uncertainty would there be on a user ID. Companies could even Publish this in their privacy statements. e.g. apple might say they rank a 11 privacy bits, meaning that the average user is idenitifed to only one pool of 2048 individuals.
It's not necessarily the same thing that google does.
When you install an app that uses location data then the app almost certainly already knows exactly who you are, no inferences needed. So the question is not if apps are accessing your location data but if apple is downloading it to the mothership and selling this to third parties whose apps you did not purchase. However there that daya may or may not be processed before handing over. For example, if they hand over a string of locations and times you visit (the bagel shop, starbucks, the metro, the work place, the home then that associated sequence probably nails you uniquely. If they instead hand over a historgram of city block vistis that aggregate over all users and don't link the records then this data will be fairly anonymous aside from edge cases (e.g. perhaps they can figure out you are indeed the bridge tender on the brooklyn bridge.) So it depends on what level of correlation they are handing over and if it's to third parties or apps that you installed.
Every time I install a googls chrome plugin I cringe cause it tells me it needs access to my browsing history and bookmarks. But then I relax slightly because at least I'm choosing to install this not have it handed over to third parties. What I worry more about is the google searches themselves. that string of associates goes to google and I suspect they are indeed correlating these.
Hey laughed at windows 2.0 too.
but they did have it in the notes. the article is wrong.
I hate story blurbs that suggest the sinister ('one has to wonder!') when the only news is that apple added yet another trojan to it's list of other trojans. If you wanted to say something intelligent you might instead say something like "is apple the only OS that, at the OS level, has explicit trojan filters?" then you could remark about Linux distro's or various editions of Windows or maybe even Baracudda routers or something. But there is nothing sinister here, it's all good. Reminds me of Aharon AppleMcHater over at TGdaily. always the negative spin!
The gulf is blooming with natural oil eating bacteria that already know how to live among the communities and predators there. Indeed there are so many of them eating the oil right now they say it's removing all the oxygen from the water making a deadzone.
Youre argument is not new. It's old. What do you think people said when the Unions first started. They also pointed out the Train workers took the jobs voluntarily. What do you think Kings said about their Vassal. Their farms would not be safe without my protection. People argumed passionately that the Nergo slave was better off than on his own or even in africa. Give it a rest. These are tired arguments.
Although there were "guilds" in europe for ages, the modern trade union emerged in the US as the train union. At the time train workers were like foxxcon workers. There was no assurance a route would ever return you home. You lived in company towns along the way. And the main fixture there was the bar where you wasted your pay check. Accident rates where high and efficiency or scheduling was low. Since you lost your wages and never saw your family, what were you living for?
The train unions first emerged not to demand better wages but better living conditions. They sold themselves to the train owners as a plan to increase professionalism and public respect. It worked. accident rates did go down. Barrier's to entry and standards increased training, retention of experience, and professional conduct. Workers took pride in their work. Many bars were closed People returned home on time and with money in their pockets.
Today we often see unions as protecting lazy workers form being fired or demanding higher wages via collective bargaining. What we don't see is that these are small perturbations about a dynamic equilibrium between labor and management. That is we no longer have the deprevating working conditions of the 19th century to see what could be the case if management got the upper hand when labor markets were not tight. The excesses of unions we see to day are tracebable to fact that in some markets it's possible for manufacturer's to push along price increases as long as they can gaurenttee the competion pays the same costs. E.g. car manufatuter's would agree to a wage increase at GM as long as there was also one at ford. IN any given port, the same principle allows port owners to pass along long shoremen wage increases.
What we have here in foxconn is a throwback to the same early situation. Workers living in company dorms, shitty pay, long hours and dangerous working conditions. That is to say, no union.
The real problem with this is not the sad plight of those poor workers. But actually because it undermines the status of workers who work in countries with state or union mandated good working conditions. Those jobs get shipped out. There is a push to relax those costly standards to get the jobs back.
The solution to both these problems is not for the FOX conn to unionize. It would be good if they did but until that becomes universal in asia it won't fix the problem, it will just move it. INstead the solution is to put a tarrif on all imports from countries that makes the playing field level.
if your workers have below-OSHA woking conditions then imported goods get a tarrif that is equal to the cost to US companies for maintaining OSHA standards.
this then makes it cost neutral for foxcon to have better condtions because it can outcompete companies that don't do that.
Hi again. Took some time to think about this. I'm actually going to reverse my conclusion that it's fundamentally impossible. Indeed I can now prove it is possible.
Before I do that I'm going to note that 1) I don't buy your explanation 2) and I don't yet buy that this propeller car actually implements what I will describe. Indeed I suspect it may not.
First what's my issue with your explanation. You use a shifting reference frame that confuses forces with simple Lorentz frame shifts. That is, take your explanation and remove the propeller: if I have a wheeled cart on a conveyor belt it can stay in a single place in the frictionless limit. It can even move forward or backward relative to an observer off the conveyor depending with a small push. All the effect you describe apply to this wheeled cart. Now you can glue a propeller on it if you want. But that's not creating a force that causes this effect.
Now here's an actual constructive proof you can do this. The proof takes the form of a gendanken experiment which, if you don't know the term, means a thought experiment that describes something that is idealized and probably not the way you would actually do something practically but simply shows that you can do something or the converse.
So build a hypothetical art like this: you put a huge spinnaker/parachute on the front to act as a wind ratchet (it pulls one way, but collapses and has no drag the other). You also put a dynamo on the wheel that can charge a battery. When the cart is below wind speed the parachute pulls the cart with a strong force, and the dyanmo charges the battery. I can then discharge the battery to drive the cart forward faster than the wind. eventually this battery runs down and the cart slows to below wind speed. I can repeat this cycle to maintain an average speed faster than the wind downwind since I can make the sail as large as I want to get as much energy I want in a fixed interval of time. that is total distance divided by total time can be faster than the wind, including the time it take to charge the battery.
SO far this does not achieve continuous faster than wind speed just an average that is faster than wind speed.
Now I place over this a black box I cannot see though but allows wind to pass with no effect. The black box is very very long and hooked to the cart by some rails that can slide forward and backward on command.
What I do is I carefully slide these rails so that no matter what speed the cart is currently moving, the black box is moving forward at the average speed of the cart. THat is when the cart is moving slower than wind speed it is sliding the rails forward so that the black box covering is moving forawrd relative to the cart. When the cart is moving faster than average, it pulls the rails back to the carts position in the black box moves forward.
Since the black box itself has no mass or wind resistance, we assume it takes no energy to move it.
From the outside all I see is a black box moving at a continus speed that is always faster than the wind. The center of mass of the contraption is not moving on average faster than the wind since the cart is invisibly changing it's position under the black box. But to all observers the exterior is moving faster than the wind perpetually.
SO to recap: yes this us rube goldberg. That's the nature of a gedanken experiment. But the point is it proves that it could be done without violating any laws of physics.
Now is the tested propeller craft actually achieving this? By this I mean both
1) maintaining an average speed faster than the wind
2) Capable of implementing continuous faster than windspeed.
I'd say neither. If you look at the plots of their speed (see the original website). you will see that if you take total distance and divide it by total time the average is less than wind speed. They did get a peak value greater than wind speed not an average value. That is not very impressive since this can be trivially achieved by tappping potential energy stored in the turning wheels and propeller for a brief but unsustainable boost.
thus since (1) is not proven yet (2) is definitely not proven yet.
However my argument shows the idea is not impossible.
What's funny is that WAY more people use Twitter on a daily basis than have ever looked at the NYT.
Uh no. Let me squirt over some historical data do you. The Ny times has seen lots of new words come and go.
Isn't this a bit of pinhead angel counting? Who holds a phone 12 inches from their face when looking at anything where pixelation matters a hoot.
If you hold it like a book in your lap or on a table top when you sit it's about 2 feet.
FOr business do you really need anything more than XP?
The problem with XP is not that it'snot perfectly satisfactory but that it's not maintained. New software won't be written for it. That's the reason to migrate.
On the other hand one could make a lateral move. Linux is more like XP in feel than even Win 7 is. And software is in production for Linux. So perhaps a lateral move is not so unthinkable in terms of training costs at this particular point in time.
Thanks for pointing me to the longer post. It took me a while to figure out why that explanation does not work.
Now imagine that the vehicle is moving 10 kph with a 10 kph tail wind. The air is no longer moving at all relative to the vehicle. The propeller which was slicing effortlessly through the air with a 10 kph headwind, now has an extra 10 kph relative wind at its back, pushing both forward on the propeller and pushing it around faster (returning some energy to the wheels as forward drive).
That is mistaken logic. If the wind and the vehicle are moving at the same speed then there is no wind at all. In order for the prop to be in the "effortless" state it has to not be moving. That is consider the prop on a non-moving, windless day. If it is moving then it will be pushing on the air and that takes energy.
Here's another way to break this down. decouple everything.
First let's remove the road and wheel. Instead I'll just put a motor on the crank shaft to represent the wheel. I can have this spinning at some rate to simulate the wheel turning against the road. I can also monitor the back-emf in the motor to see if it is spinning freely, doing work or having work done on it.
I now have a completely stationary vehicle. It has a rotating propeller.
If I have no wind blowing with this stationary vehicle this is the same situation as the moving vehicle with a tail wind the same as it's downwind speed.
If the prop is turning then the motor must be doing work since air is being accelerated.
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Again I note: this discussion only pertains to the case of directly-downwind faster than the wind. Tacking and reaches transverse to the wind are not part of this discussion. Secondly I am not talking about transiently harvesting stored energy in the prop for a temporary gain in speed. And the above only considered travelling at wind speed not the energy storage possibilities of traveling for a time below wind speed.