My company just sold some unused, but very expensive test equipment (~$40K) on eBay. As the buyer and seller were both businesses, we handled payment by having them send us a check. When the check cleared, we sent the equipment out.
This would have been a ridiculous transaction to do on PayPal - why would we want to pay hundreds of dollars to them for there percentage cut, and not have control over the financial transaction?
At the consumer level, being forced to use PayPal is an annoyance - but for the buying and selling of big ticket items, it's simply unworkable.
If you throw as many people at a problem, and as much money, as the United States government threw at the project, you could get just about anything done in record time.
If only this were true. Some problems require enormous resources, of course, but it is naive to think it's ALL that's required. Many billion dollar projects have gone down in flames, and not from lack of resources.
I have a friend who was treated with radioactive iodine because of thyroid cancer (the iodine accumulates in the thyroid, killing all the tissue.) She was radioactive for several days, and was kept away from her young children as a safety precaution.
Just for the record, her patent is here.
What she seems to have invented is a way to make pn junctions in wide bandgap semiconductor with the diffusion of atomic hydrogen diffusion to compensate for impurities.
There's no claim that she invented the blue LED. The question is whether the process used today involves this technique.
In truth, there is never one inventor of something. It's all based on previous work. Nakamura can certainly be called the inventor of the blue LED, but he based, as does every inventor, on previous work.
Silane is used all the time in the semiconductor business. I never heard about it exploding, but it is nasty stuff - I believe it will form glass when it comes in contact with water - say, on the inside of your lungs.
One use is low loss microwave filters. The trick isn't getting to buy into the superconducting technology, but into the idea that the cooling system will provide telecom level reliability.
wouldn't it be far cheaper to run very high current on a small superconducting cable
Superconducting wires have a critical current above which they are no longer superconducting. Given the nature of the measurements alluded to in the article, they probably don't have a good idea of what that value is for his superconductor.
So even with superconducting transmission lines, you still have the incentive to up the voltage as much as possible to increase the power carrying capability of a single line.
My work computer (XP) crashed after an autoupdate a year or two ago. We reinstalled and got it working, but the sound was gone. As I don't really need it, I never fixed it.
There was an old Isaac Asimov short story about a man who steals a bunch of money, and then goes into the future so the statute of limitations runs out. The punchline is "A niche in time saves Stein".
And, of course, in "The restaurant at the end of the universe", by douglas adams, in which patrons pay for their extravagent meals by depositing 1 penny at compound interest before travelling billions of years into the future to the restatrant.
Any trade of the type O(distance) where distance is greater than the lifetime of any players involved is necessarily a non-transaction.
If the merchant travels with the goods, the passage of time in his reference frame can be made arbitrarily short - not even counting the possibility of suspended animation.
I agree with your assessment, that the use of word "piracy" in this article is misleading, and conflates what's happening with copying music.
The basic procedure is:
1) Get schematic or mask layout or actual masks of some hot IC
2) Do quick and dirty production of the IC, don't bother to test it, and mark it like the genuine article
3) Sell it to a distributor willing to look the other way.
Step 1 could be considered "piracy", I suppose, but it's step's 2 and 3 that really do the damage. It's a combination of "piracy" and counterfeiting. In the IC biz, it's called counterfeiting.
My company got burned by it a few years ago. We had an 8 channel DAC (the MAX5308) in our design which didn't have a drop in replacement from another vendor. We needed some parts, and the lead times from Maxim were too long, so we contacted some distributors and found someone who had these parts.
We had a bunch of boards built, and we started getting a high failure rate, which we traced back to the DAC. A closer inspection of the part revealed it had a date code that was before the actual release date of the chip! We contacted Maxim and stopped payment on the parts. Maxim took some parts for evidence (and I believe sent us a few samples to tide us over).
We were building $14000 units that were being deployed in military communications systems.
It turns out the counterfeits were coming from Asia. The distributor in question probably knew that the chips were counterfeit and looked the other way.
Semiconductor companies put a lot of effort in making sure there products are reliable. (If a PC board has 100 parts, what failure rate is acceptable in your chips before you start to have very bad yield issues? What if it's 1000 parts?). We, as a society, have come to count on things being reliable, and real danger can result when their not. It's not as bad as counterfeit pharmaceuticals, but it's not so far off either.
I don't know if this scheme will work or not. But it's a real problem, with real consequences.
A few years ago, a couple we know was going through infertility treatments. Part of these treatments, of course, required the husband to go in and produce a... well, a sample. He found the porn provided unsatisfactory, so he downloaded a bunch of pictures onto his PDA.
And now Steve Jobs wants to stand in the way of all those infertile couples who want to have children!
I played D&D extensively as a teen. My friends and I eventually moved on to RuneQuest, then Call of Cthulu. But D&D was the first. I think the Player's Handbook was the first thing I every bought that cost more than $10.
I haven't thought about playing those games in many years - but I have a ton of fond memories. Thanks, Gary.
As someone who has been commuting at least 45 minutes for most of my career, I've had a lot of time to think about traffic. I've always thought that traffic can be compared to a phase transition, such as ice freezing. Now this is fuzzy, I haven't done mathematical models or anything.
Breaking or other external factors (an accident or flashing lights by the side of the road) can certainly precipitate a change from a swiftly moving flow to a slow moving flow. However, they only cause a transition when the density is high enough. If there's an accident during a low traffic time, you whiz by it. If they close two lanes out of four, and it's low traffic, you get a little backup, but it reaches a modest steady state size in low traffic. In high traffic you get a "wave" - the backup moves steadily backwards from the scene of an accident, and remains after the accident clears.
I often tell my wife that I can tell if a slowdown is just due to high volume or an accident by the abruptness of the slow down. An abrupt slowdown, I think, means heavy traffic "precipitated" into a jam by an external event.
So braking as described may be a precipitating event, but it's the sensitivity of the traffic flow to it that is the fundamental issue. I'd guess that even if people didn't brake so much, in those sensitive conditions a fender bender by the side of the road could cause a major backup.
Slashdot Mirror
This would have been a ridiculous transaction to do on PayPal - why would we want to pay hundreds of dollars to them for there percentage cut, and not have control over the financial transaction?
At the consumer level, being forced to use PayPal is an annoyance - but for the buying and selling of big ticket items, it's simply unworkable.
It would be even funnier if Dawkins ended up inspiring Christianity...
Satellite link installer training
I thought the same thing a half second before I read your comment...
I have a friend who was treated with radioactive iodine because of thyroid cancer (the iodine accumulates in the thyroid, killing all the tissue.) She was radioactive for several days, and was kept away from her young children as a safety precaution.
There's no claim that she invented the blue LED. The question is whether the process used today involves this technique.
In truth, there is never one inventor of something. It's all based on previous work. Nakamura can certainly be called the inventor of the blue LED, but he based, as does every inventor, on previous work.
Silane is used all the time in the semiconductor business. I never heard about it exploding, but it is nasty stuff - I believe it will form glass when it comes in contact with water - say, on the inside of your lungs.
One use is low loss microwave filters. The trick isn't getting to buy into the superconducting technology, but into the idea that the cooling system will provide telecom level reliability.
So even with superconducting transmission lines, you still have the incentive to up the voltage as much as possible to increase the power carrying capability of a single line.
My work computer (XP) crashed after an autoupdate a year or two ago. We reinstalled and got it working, but the sound was gone. As I don't really need it, I never fixed it.
And, of course, in "The restaurant at the end of the universe", by douglas adams, in which patrons pay for their extravagent meals by depositing 1 penny at compound interest before travelling billions of years into the future to the restatrant.
The basic procedure is :
1) Get schematic or mask layout or actual masks of some hot IC
2) Do quick and dirty production of the IC, don't bother to test it, and mark it like the genuine article
3) Sell it to a distributor willing to look the other way.
Step 1 could be considered "piracy", I suppose, but it's step's 2 and 3 that really do the damage. It's a combination of "piracy" and counterfeiting. In the IC biz, it's called counterfeiting.
My company got burned by it a few years ago. We had an 8 channel DAC (the MAX5308) in our design which didn't have a drop in replacement from another vendor. We needed some parts, and the lead times from Maxim were too long, so we contacted some distributors and found someone who had these parts.
We had a bunch of boards built, and we started getting a high failure rate, which we traced back to the DAC. A closer inspection of the part revealed it had a date code that was before the actual release date of the chip! We contacted Maxim and stopped payment on the parts. Maxim took some parts for evidence (and I believe sent us a few samples to tide us over).
We were building $14000 units that were being deployed in military communications systems.
It turns out the counterfeits were coming from Asia. The distributor in question probably knew that the chips were counterfeit and looked the other way.
Semiconductor companies put a lot of effort in making sure there products are reliable. (If a PC board has 100 parts, what failure rate is acceptable in your chips before you start to have very bad yield issues? What if it's 1000 parts?). We, as a society, have come to count on things being reliable, and real danger can result when their not. It's not as bad as counterfeit pharmaceuticals, but it's not so far off either.
I don't know if this scheme will work or not. But it's a real problem, with real consequences.
And now Steve Jobs wants to stand in the way of all those infertile couples who want to have children!
No time is wasted, if you enjoy being with yourself.
I haven't thought about playing those games in many years - but I have a ton of fond memories. Thanks, Gary.
Breaking or other external factors (an accident or flashing lights by the side of the road) can certainly precipitate a change from a swiftly moving flow to a slow moving flow. However, they only cause a transition when the density is high enough. If there's an accident during a low traffic time, you whiz by it. If they close two lanes out of four, and it's low traffic, you get a little backup, but it reaches a modest steady state size in low traffic. In high traffic you get a "wave" - the backup moves steadily backwards from the scene of an accident, and remains after the accident clears.
I often tell my wife that I can tell if a slowdown is just due to high volume or an accident by the abruptness of the slow down. An abrupt slowdown, I think, means heavy traffic "precipitated" into a jam by an external event.
So braking as described may be a precipitating event, but it's the sensitivity of the traffic flow to it that is the fundamental issue. I'd guess that even if people didn't brake so much, in those sensitive conditions a fender bender by the side of the road could cause a major backup.
(Clearly, I've thought about this WAY too much.)
Don't be such a homonymephobe.
I think the issue is the Blu-Ray disk you bought to watch in the living room on the big screen, that you then want to take with you.