Exactly. Computer systems shouldn't be treated as flawless, because they rarely ever are. At my university, they kept all the records on paper, as well as on the computer system. The paper was the official record. I'm pretty sure they kept back ups of both the paper and digital records. The paper records were computer printed forms that were filled in by hand. Basically, they were aware that computers could have errors, or have changes done to the records that could go unnoticed.
Solar panels create a little bit of toxic waste when you make them. After that, the energy is free from the sun, even if it's only 15% efficient, it's better to use 15% of free energy than 0% of the free energy we have available. Even though there is very little waste from expended nuclear fuel, you are forgetting the amount of waste needed to get at that fuel. The same thing goes for coal, oil, and natural gas. It's sad that everybody mentions the waste materials from producing photovoltaic cells, yet when they talk about other forms of energy, they never seem to think about the amount of waste just necessary in getting the fuel to the power plant. Plus, solar energy is safe enough for everyone to have a few panels on the top of their house. Which may not provide all the power they need, but would take quite a bit of stress off the grid, and would provide adequate power for cooking, lighting and refidgeration on the few times that the power grid shuts down.
And the unions get themselves out of a lot of jobs. At "The Beer Store" in Ontario, the unions have made it such that anyone in the union gets payed to much, so they try their best to make sure that nobody makes it to the unions. Making the union have no power. My brother been working 35+ hours a week at the beer store, for over 3 years, and he's still classified as "Temporary Part Time", so that he doesn't have to get paid at union rates. And he still gets paid a ton, for a retail job, where you don't even have to do anything at all to get people to buy your product. They come in, with the immediate thought of buying something, and they can't go anywhere else.
That's exactly my point. Unions are a good thing when working conditions are horendous. 100 years ago in the US, and many countries now, there is a need for unions. However, I think there is little need for unions in such things as professional sports, where the players get payed millions. There's too many unions who will go on strike, disrupting an entire business, or worse, a public school system, just to get an extra 50 bucks on their pay cheques. Many teachers I talked to thought they got payed way more than enough, and that the strikes were stupid, but they were forced into striking by the unions.
But to extract a years worth of fuel from the earth, you produce a lot of waste. Mostly all the rock where I grew up wasn't uranium. You had to mine 1000 tons of rock to get 1 ton of uranium. The other 999 tons is waste, toxic waste. Just because so little is coming out of the power plants, doesn't mean that there is no waste materials caused by nuclear power.
I grew up in a town that mined uranium. there was 0.1% uranium in the ground. For every tonne of rock they mined, they got a tonne or tailings. Which is a big chemical mess that's still not cleaned up 10 years after the mines are closed. There's a lot of waste created from mining uranium. I've seen lakes full of waste because of this stuff. I wonder if those pushing nuclear power think about this kind of stuff when they tout the advantages of nuclear power.
Yes, you could fit all your music on there. But would you really need to. I'm happy just having a device that carries around 10 hours of music. 15000 songs on a portable device just sounds like too much to me. Is music that bad that you can't listen to a song more than twice in a week? And what's the point of listening to lossless audio formats on earbud headphones, while walking down the street in the city, with tons of other noise interfering with your music. At that point, nobody can tell the difference.
I know Canada's nuclear commission has been airing a lot of TV commercials, hyping up nuclear power, and telling you to visite their website to learn more. Nuclear power has a really bad rap, and most people think it's the worst thing in the world, when really, it's much better than our current approach.
Which brings up a question that's been on my mind. How much nuclear fuel is on earth. If we replaced all the fossil fuels we use, with nuclear fuel, how long would our supplies last? And how much nuclear waste would be created as a result? If nuclear fuel just replaces fossil fuels, and ends up creating the same problems in another 100 years, then we really should be thinking of a solution that works out better in the long term. Like wind, geothermal, and other types of clean, renewable, energy.
iPods don't support any lossless formats, so you are stuck using LAME. At 100 MB per CD, you get 600 CDs on your ipod. 600 CDs takes a long time to rip is a lot of music. Why anybody needs to carry that much music on a portable device is beyond me.
Yeah, Average is a really bad number in this case. If microsoft has 17000 laywers, and 999 companies have 0 lawyers, then the average is 17 lawyers per company. on the other hand, only 0.1% of companies have any lawyers at all. A better number would be the median for the number of lawyers, or the number of lawyers per capita (other employees).
First, i'd like to know if your numbers have any real fact to them, or whether its just made up. Also, this kind of made me have a thought. If a patent application gets accepted, then your job is done. But if it gets rejected, it could possibly come back, with feedback from the person filing, about why it really should be valid, when you said it wasn't. You'd then have to either pass it, or go through the trouble of writing up a rebuttal to this, or something of the like. It's probably a lot less work to just let the patents slip through instead of actually researching any prior art and having it come back later to defend the prior art you found. Then again, it would probably just be best to sign Washington Irving on all those patents, and then you'd never have to see them again.
Exactly. Why would anybody need 60 gigs of music. That's 85 full CDs, on a device that doesn't even get 20 hours of battery life. Not to mention the music is compressed, so you can fit tons more than that. Apple says you can fit 15000 songs on the new iPod. That's $15000 if you buy it from iTunes. Nobody has that much music unless it's pirated. There's probably people out there that own 1000 CDs, and therefore own 15000 songs. But even at 10 minutes a disk to rip it, it would take 166 days of straight ripping, no pauses to copy the music to the device. And it probably takes 3 times that amount of time to get a CD onto the thing. Not to mention trying to find a song. I know the interface is good, but how well does it perform when you have 15000 songs to go through. How would you even find anything?
I think most phones have PDAs, they all suck. Few of them sync to your computer, and typing stuff in on the number pad is rediculous. The camera functions are equally bad. The only way to get the pictures off sometimes is to email them to yourself, and then they charge you for the bandwidth.
I think the poor marketing has it all summed up. The Palm Lifedrive looks like it could be a real iPod killer. It can play music, video, view images, has wifi, bluetooth, 4 Gigs of space, which can't hold your entire collection, but easily holds enough data to last you for a good vacation, as well as all the nice PDA functions. Its amazing how useful something like this could be, and how much better it would be to have a device like this than an iPod. Yet they don't market it, don't let people know how truly good it would be, and frankly when people think of music players, the last thing they will think of is a PDA.
I don't get why companies don't understand this. Subscription model is the way to go. With blockbuster, I wouldn't give them $25 a month to rent X number of movies. But with Zip.ca, I will give them $25 per month. With media, which costs so little to reproduce, it seems pointless to try to charge a high price for it, and only get a certain number of people to get your product. Why not let everyone have it, and just charge them a small fee every month. The phone companies have made tons of money from giving people unlimited (local) service, and charging a very small amount. This way, everyone signs up, and you end up making the difference in volume.
The problem is, how do you tell the difference between encrypted data, and random data, or image files containing encrypted data, or anything else for that matter? I don't think enough processing power in the world exists for blocking everything that may be encrypted. Unless they only allow you to pass uppercase ascii characters around the internet. And even that can be bypasses. Base 26 encoding anyone?
If they block the well known applications, the terrorists will just revert to using homegrown stuff. Seriously, all they have to do is have an encrypted message end to end. Pass the stuff over SSL to rouge web sites. Not like they can start blocking all the SSL traffic.
I wonder if slashdot could patent the moderation system. Despite its flaws, and the fact that we always complain about it, it works out as a pretty good way of getting rid of the crap on internet message boards. Have you read any of the posts on non-moderated boards? They are pretty scary sometimes. With slashdot, at least people don't bother posting crap because they know they'll get modded to -1, or the end up getting modded to -1 if they do post crap, and nobody has to see it.
you should learn a bit about significant digits. Obviously not all the numbers are accurate to the same number of decimal points. Also, if this guy patents this, then we can just all start driving our cars more, and change the levels of gases in the atmosphere.
The thing is, for all of us, who are in love with our computers, it's pretty obvious there is prior art. However, for someone not trained in the field, how are they really supposed to know there is prior art. How much time do they give the examiners to check on these things. Maybe, now its apparent to all of us that prior art exists, but think about people who lived in 1997. Would they have thought it was so obvious that there was prior art?
Your analogy is a little flawed. I think its more akin to disbanding the fire department once there is no longer the ability to set houses on fire. How would you feel if your tax dollars were going towards stopping a threat that wasn't really there? Oh, wait... nevermind...
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. Computer systems shouldn't be treated as flawless, because they rarely ever are. At my university, they kept all the records on paper, as well as on the computer system. The paper was the official record. I'm pretty sure they kept back ups of both the paper and digital records. The paper records were computer printed forms that were filled in by hand. Basically, they were aware that computers could have errors, or have changes done to the records that could go unnoticed.
Solar panels create a little bit of toxic waste when you make them. After that, the energy is free from the sun, even if it's only 15% efficient, it's better to use 15% of free energy than 0% of the free energy we have available. Even though there is very little waste from expended nuclear fuel, you are forgetting the amount of waste needed to get at that fuel. The same thing goes for coal, oil, and natural gas. It's sad that everybody mentions the waste materials from producing photovoltaic cells, yet when they talk about other forms of energy, they never seem to think about the amount of waste just necessary in getting the fuel to the power plant. Plus, solar energy is safe enough for everyone to have a few panels on the top of their house. Which may not provide all the power they need, but would take quite a bit of stress off the grid, and would provide adequate power for cooking, lighting and refidgeration on the few times that the power grid shuts down.
If you have 10 employees, and 9 lawyers, you are no longer a tech company.
And the unions get themselves out of a lot of jobs. At "The Beer Store" in Ontario, the unions have made it such that anyone in the union gets payed to much, so they try their best to make sure that nobody makes it to the unions. Making the union have no power. My brother been working 35+ hours a week at the beer store, for over 3 years, and he's still classified as "Temporary Part Time", so that he doesn't have to get paid at union rates. And he still gets paid a ton, for a retail job, where you don't even have to do anything at all to get people to buy your product. They come in, with the immediate thought of buying something, and they can't go anywhere else.
That's exactly my point. Unions are a good thing when working conditions are horendous. 100 years ago in the US, and many countries now, there is a need for unions. However, I think there is little need for unions in such things as professional sports, where the players get payed millions. There's too many unions who will go on strike, disrupting an entire business, or worse, a public school system, just to get an extra 50 bucks on their pay cheques. Many teachers I talked to thought they got payed way more than enough, and that the strikes were stupid, but they were forced into striking by the unions.
But to extract a years worth of fuel from the earth, you produce a lot of waste. Mostly all the rock where I grew up wasn't uranium. You had to mine 1000 tons of rock to get 1 ton of uranium. The other 999 tons is waste, toxic waste. Just because so little is coming out of the power plants, doesn't mean that there is no waste materials caused by nuclear power.
Even worse than a nuclear reactor is a uranium mine. It producues much more waste, which is generally just as toxic, if not worse.
I grew up in a town that mined uranium. there was 0.1% uranium in the ground. For every tonne of rock they mined, they got a tonne or tailings. Which is a big chemical mess that's still not cleaned up 10 years after the mines are closed. There's a lot of waste created from mining uranium. I've seen lakes full of waste because of this stuff. I wonder if those pushing nuclear power think about this kind of stuff when they tout the advantages of nuclear power.
Yes, you could fit all your music on there. But would you really need to. I'm happy just having a device that carries around 10 hours of music. 15000 songs on a portable device just sounds like too much to me. Is music that bad that you can't listen to a song more than twice in a week? And what's the point of listening to lossless audio formats on earbud headphones, while walking down the street in the city, with tons of other noise interfering with your music. At that point, nobody can tell the difference.
I know Canada's nuclear commission has been airing a lot of TV commercials, hyping up nuclear power, and telling you to visite their website to learn more. Nuclear power has a really bad rap, and most people think it's the worst thing in the world, when really, it's much better than our current approach.
Which brings up a question that's been on my mind. How much nuclear fuel is on earth. If we replaced all the fossil fuels we use, with nuclear fuel, how long would our supplies last? And how much nuclear waste would be created as a result? If nuclear fuel just replaces fossil fuels, and ends up creating the same problems in another 100 years, then we really should be thinking of a solution that works out better in the long term. Like wind, geothermal, and other types of clean, renewable, energy.
iPods don't support any lossless formats, so you are stuck using LAME. At 100 MB per CD, you get 600 CDs on your ipod. 600 CDs takes a long time to rip is a lot of music. Why anybody needs to carry that much music on a portable device is beyond me.
Yeah, Average is a really bad number in this case. If microsoft has 17000 laywers, and 999 companies have 0 lawyers, then the average is 17 lawyers per company. on the other hand, only 0.1% of companies have any lawyers at all. A better number would be the median for the number of lawyers, or the number of lawyers per capita (other employees).
First, i'd like to know if your numbers have any real fact to them, or whether its just made up. Also, this kind of made me have a thought. If a patent application gets accepted, then your job is done. But if it gets rejected, it could possibly come back, with feedback from the person filing, about why it really should be valid, when you said it wasn't. You'd then have to either pass it, or go through the trouble of writing up a rebuttal to this, or something of the like. It's probably a lot less work to just let the patents slip through instead of actually researching any prior art and having it come back later to defend the prior art you found. Then again, it would probably just be best to sign Washington Irving on all those patents, and then you'd never have to see them again.
Exactly. Why would anybody need 60 gigs of music. That's 85 full CDs, on a device that doesn't even get 20 hours of battery life. Not to mention the music is compressed, so you can fit tons more than that. Apple says you can fit 15000 songs on the new iPod. That's $15000 if you buy it from iTunes. Nobody has that much music unless it's pirated. There's probably people out there that own 1000 CDs, and therefore own 15000 songs. But even at 10 minutes a disk to rip it, it would take 166 days of straight ripping, no pauses to copy the music to the device. And it probably takes 3 times that amount of time to get a CD onto the thing. Not to mention trying to find a song. I know the interface is good, but how well does it perform when you have 15000 songs to go through. How would you even find anything?
I think most phones have PDAs, they all suck. Few of them sync to your computer, and typing stuff in on the number pad is rediculous. The camera functions are equally bad. The only way to get the pictures off sometimes is to email them to yourself, and then they charge you for the bandwidth.
I think the poor marketing has it all summed up. The Palm Lifedrive looks like it could be a real iPod killer. It can play music, video, view images, has wifi, bluetooth, 4 Gigs of space, which can't hold your entire collection, but easily holds enough data to last you for a good vacation, as well as all the nice PDA functions. Its amazing how useful something like this could be, and how much better it would be to have a device like this than an iPod. Yet they don't market it, don't let people know how truly good it would be, and frankly when people think of music players, the last thing they will think of is a PDA.
I don't get why companies don't understand this. Subscription model is the way to go. With blockbuster, I wouldn't give them $25 a month to rent X number of movies. But with Zip.ca, I will give them $25 per month. With media, which costs so little to reproduce, it seems pointless to try to charge a high price for it, and only get a certain number of people to get your product. Why not let everyone have it, and just charge them a small fee every month. The phone companies have made tons of money from giving people unlimited (local) service, and charging a very small amount. This way, everyone signs up, and you end up making the difference in volume.
The problem is, how do you tell the difference between encrypted data, and random data, or image files containing encrypted data, or anything else for that matter? I don't think enough processing power in the world exists for blocking everything that may be encrypted. Unless they only allow you to pass uppercase ascii characters around the internet. And even that can be bypasses. Base 26 encoding anyone?
If they block the well known applications, the terrorists will just revert to using homegrown stuff. Seriously, all they have to do is have an encrypted message end to end. Pass the stuff over SSL to rouge web sites. Not like they can start blocking all the SSL traffic.
Would someone mod this guy as "Redundant"?
DOMDocument Objects = Document Object Model Document Objects
I wonder if slashdot could patent the moderation system. Despite its flaws, and the fact that we always complain about it, it works out as a pretty good way of getting rid of the crap on internet message boards. Have you read any of the posts on non-moderated boards? They are pretty scary sometimes. With slashdot, at least people don't bother posting crap because they know they'll get modded to -1, or the end up getting modded to -1 if they do post crap, and nobody has to see it.
you should learn a bit about significant digits. Obviously not all the numbers are accurate to the same number of decimal points. Also, if this guy patents this, then we can just all start driving our cars more, and change the levels of gases in the atmosphere.
The thing is, for all of us, who are in love with our computers, it's pretty obvious there is prior art. However, for someone not trained in the field, how are they really supposed to know there is prior art. How much time do they give the examiners to check on these things. Maybe, now its apparent to all of us that prior art exists, but think about people who lived in 1997. Would they have thought it was so obvious that there was prior art?
Your analogy is a little flawed. I think its more akin to disbanding the fire department once there is no longer the ability to set houses on fire. How would you feel if your tax dollars were going towards stopping a threat that wasn't really there? Oh, wait... nevermind...