Apart from the geek/sex jokes that the physical only contact you're going to get with a girl is in the handshake position, or the one that the mouse better be on your lap rather than on your desk since that's a far more natural position when pronning, the handshake position is all wrong.
For most people, the keyboard is still a significant UI and key-tomouse transitions won't be facilitated by having to go through a flat (keyboard) to vertical (mouse) sequence.
Perhaps a more natural thing would be to to use your feet under the desk or something like that.
When people snow you with jargin they're trying to tell you something:"Cycling of the tanks with cryogenic propellants - in fact, [super-cold] liquid hydrogen, because we don't see this problem with liquid oxygen - causes or exacerbates voids in the bond between the foam insulation and the tank and produces cracks in the foam. If and when those cracks propagate to the surface, with a crack connecting a void to the surface, then you have a mechanism for cryopumping. When the tank is cold, air is ingested. It liquefies and goes into the voids. Then as the tank empties and the [air] warms up and evaporates, the resulting pressure blows the foam off."
modern American cars. Makes you think! Still, there's are some basic laws of thermodynamics getting in the way of huge improvements (>100mpg) without significant changes in what folks consider to be cars.
Changing to electric power only moves the problem (burn more coal/oil to make electricity).
The lawyers love the current system. They make money filing patents and if one goes to the courts its a jackpot! Uncle Sam also likes the patent system since it generates a nice pile of money with no risk.
So, if the patent system is going to be reviewed who'll be doing the reviewing? A few "experts" will be called in. They'll be USPTO staff and lawyers. Niether of these want the system to change (unless it is to make it even better [from their perspective]; hint: not everyone else's perspective).
The same goes for any beurocratic function that keeps the practitioners employed. The tax system won't get simplified if the tax accountants can keep it complicated.
It might take you into studying electronics later, but it does not build your understanding (== technical IQ) while you're a kid. Dismantling older radio that is built with valves or transistors and variable capacitors etc will teach you a lot more than popping open a modern radio where there's only a single sythesiser/tuner/amp chip.
I recently dismantled an old (germanium transistor-based) radio with my kids. It used OC45s! We were able to reverse engineer some of the schematics to see how some of it worked. We pulled out the germanium diodes and looked at them under a magnifying glass. The kids could see that they were just minature versions of the cats-whisker + galena detectors we made. Try do that with a modern radio. Gee there's an IC with a few surface mounted components that might be inductors, caps or resistors.
When I was a kid (~40 years ago), I had a bunch of technical stuff like steam engines, radios etc that I could take apart and understand (OK they didn't always work again afterwards). The radios had valves (tubes in American) that glowed and you could see stuff happening. I built crystal sets which worked fine with MW radio. Now most things that kids get are electronic gizzmos that are stuffed with ICs. No hope of really learning and understanding anything there.
Even people like Lego (who really fostered creativity a few years back) are now focussing on selling theme toys (Harry Potter etc) that the kids build according to instruction and seldom reassemble in any new way.
If Amtrack crashed one out of every 100 trips (more or less, I could not be bothered doing the calcs), killing everyone on board, you can bet the Feds would step in. If Amtracks cost were so high & reliability were so low that basic transportations functions were not being performed, the Feds would step in.
It's sobering to reflect that more than 20 years after the first shuttle flights there are still no reliable, inexpensive modes of space flight from NASA.
Like the "artists" that dump some rusty old cars in a pile and call it "art", are NASA dumping their junk as "experiments". Maybe they learnt it from the Japanse whalers who're still hunting whales in the interests of science.
Space belongs to everybody. Anyone dumping junk should be forced to clean it up. Once an experiment has served its purpose it should be collected. Maybe it costs a lot, but that is the true costof doing these experiments.
It is to kill Win98! Somewhere along the chain I expect there's going to be a compatability issue that forces people to upgrade from Win98 to XP or whatever.
MS makes no money out of dev tools and only use it as a power lever.
To Bill a problem is anything that is not making money. I don't track them well enough to know if they've found a way to make money out of spam yet. Maybe some MS fanboys can say.
Quite. Most NZ companies won't have a Chief Information Officer etc who'd be able to answer questions like "Do you use OpenSource". Instead, the question is probably answered by the accountant or somebody that's not knowledgable. The mrket in NZ is pretty small and probably most companies get their tech support from retailers rather than
All the electronic engineering/firmware development people I talk to use gcc for developing at least some of their products. Some use Linux in their products. Some run Linux n their desktops. Most/all of the universities use OSS in their computer science and other programs.
NZ has actually produced quite a bit of OSS code that is in wide usage throughout the world including Koha (http://www.koha.org/), YAFFS (http://www.aleph1.co.uk/yaffs/), much of the KDevelop/gdb interface and many others. The Ozzies are no slouches either.
A few years back IBM got a grilling for supplying accounting machines to the Nazis for organising their Jew-processing "facilities" (http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/).
A listed company has an obligation to maximise value to their shareholders. However, some of that value must surely be moral value and not just $$$$. If you make money out of a company that exploits people, then you are just exploiting those people yourself.
Don't be duped. Bill has provided, and continues to provide, evidence that he's ruthless and uncaring when his Microsoft hat is on. If Bill was tuely philanthropic, then he'd be making anonymous contributions. Nope, they're nice and public.
The $20M he gave to a University library buys him naming rights. $20M to Bill Gates is pocket change. How much "hurt" did he feel making that contribution? About as much as a regular guy would feel if he gave a quarter to charity. To Bill, $20M to see your name written over a prestigeous library entrance is cheap.
When he makes big donations in Inda or whatever it is a nice way of buying a good impression and some positive hype when they want to staff up Microsoft India. It is also a nice way of imposing some control. Don't piss off the guy with the dough or he might take his favors elsewhere.
A passenger aircraft cannot go much slower than a 747 and attract passengers. This thing has a bunch of things that will make it a dud as a passenger carrier. It will be too slow. A fast aircraft needs a pretty rigid skin to prevent distortion/ripping.
Even though it is not filled with hydrogen, people will still have Hindenberg images in their heads when they buy their tickets.
Although these things are designed to be landed like airplanes, they can't tolerate morer than 30knots of crosswind. That's pathetic. You can't operate a passenger service that will require complicated docking procedures above 30 knots.
That's the level of caring most people have to any liberty issues.
About the only people being effective at addressing liberty issues are the National Rifle Association who spend almost all their money and effort on lobbying their causes and they only just manage to keep their causes out of the "don't care" bucket. They represent the minimum level of commitment to prevent liberty erosion.
The devices being used for this work are typically $10K+ units using RTK, as opposed to general purpose GPS (like the Garmins etc you might use for hiking). They also use very good antennas which provide good coverage. RTK receivers can measure down to 20mm (yes less than 1 inch) and can thus provide measurements of flexing and slumping and thus things like the tsunami energy and stresses that often signal pending earthquakes or volcanic activity. GPS has a long history (many years) in monitoring fault lines etc in places like California, Japan and New Zealand. These units are perminantly mounted at monitoring stations, so aquisition time is a non-issue.
Broadband over power lines can interfere with ham signals, so everyone tells us. Probably just the folks in Texas just emailing a jpeg of a space probe picture.
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This product probably does not work anywhere where SPF10 sunscreen works. Here Down Under (SPF 30 land) it will work a treat.
For most people, the keyboard is still a significant UI and key-tomouse transitions won't be facilitated by having to go through a flat (keyboard) to vertical (mouse) sequence.
Perhaps a more natural thing would be to to use your feet under the desk or something like that.
I do a lot of interesting embedded and OS level stuff. I could wear a tie and crank VB/SQL for government/corporate operators for a lot more money.
FDA lobbying begins: US Dental Assocaition vs Energizer Bunny!
You're too dumb to understand. fsck off.
Still, there's are some basic laws of thermodynamics getting in the way of huge improvements (>100mpg) without significant changes in what folks consider to be cars.
Changing to electric power only moves the problem (burn more coal/oil to make electricity).
Bambi would be getting a bit tough by now.
So, if the patent system is going to be reviewed who'll be doing the reviewing? A few "experts" will be called in. They'll be USPTO staff and lawyers. Niether of these want the system to change (unless it is to make it even better [from their perspective]; hint: not everyone else's perspective).
The same goes for any beurocratic function that keeps the practitioners employed. The tax system won't get simplified if the tax accountants can keep it complicated.
I recently dismantled an old (germanium transistor-based) radio with my kids. It used OC45s! We were able to reverse engineer some of the schematics to see how some of it worked. We pulled out the germanium diodes and looked at them under a magnifying glass. The kids could see that they were just minature versions of the cats-whisker + galena detectors we made. Try do that with a modern radio. Gee there's an IC with a few surface mounted components that might be inductors, caps or resistors.
Even people like Lego (who really fostered creativity a few years back) are now focussing on selling theme toys (Harry Potter etc) that the kids build according to instruction and seldom reassemble in any new way.
It's sobering to reflect that more than 20 years after the first shuttle flights there are still no reliable, inexpensive modes of space flight from NASA.
Space belongs to everybody. Anyone dumping junk should be forced to clean it up. Once an experiment has served its purpose it should be collected. Maybe it costs a lot, but that is the true costof doing these experiments.
Now where's my Nobel Prize for mdicine?
MS makes no money out of dev tools and only use it as a power lever.
To Bill a problem is anything that is not making money. I don't track them well enough to know if they've found a way to make money out of spam yet. Maybe some MS fanboys can say.
All the electronic engineering/firmware development people I talk to use gcc for developing at least some of their products. Some use Linux in their products. Some run Linux n their desktops. Most/all of the universities use OSS in their computer science and other programs.
NZ has actually produced quite a bit of OSS code that is in wide usage throughout the world including Koha (http://www.koha.org/), YAFFS (http://www.aleph1.co.uk/yaffs/), much of the KDevelop/gdb interface and many others. The Ozzies are no slouches either.
Was the picture taken on the beach? Does the subject looked tanned? Yup. Well odds-on chance of skin cancer for the Southern Hemisphere anyway!
A listed company has an obligation to maximise value to their shareholders. However, some of that value must surely be moral value and not just $$$$. If you make money out of a company that exploits people, then you are just exploiting those people yourself.
The $20M he gave to a University library buys him naming rights. $20M to Bill Gates is pocket change. How much "hurt" did he feel making that contribution? About as much as a regular guy would feel if he gave a quarter to charity. To Bill, $20M to see your name written over a prestigeous library entrance is cheap.
When he makes big donations in Inda or whatever it is a nice way of buying a good impression and some positive hype when they want to staff up Microsoft India. It is also a nice way of imposing some control. Don't piss off the guy with the dough or he might take his favors elsewhere.
It will be too slow. A fast aircraft needs a pretty rigid skin to prevent distortion/ripping.
Even though it is not filled with hydrogen, people will still have Hindenberg images in their heads when they buy their tickets.
Although these things are designed to be landed like airplanes, they can't tolerate morer than 30knots of crosswind. That's pathetic. You can't operate a passenger service that will require complicated docking procedures above 30 knots.
Jeez guys post something new for a change.
In chemicalese that is
About the only people being effective at addressing liberty issues are the National Rifle Association who spend almost all their money and effort on lobbying their causes and they only just manage to keep their causes out of the "don't care" bucket. They represent the minimum level of commitment to prevent liberty erosion.
The devices being used for this work are typically $10K+ units using RTK, as opposed to general purpose GPS (like the Garmins etc you might use for hiking). They also use very good antennas which provide good coverage. RTK receivers can measure down to 20mm (yes less than 1 inch) and can thus provide measurements of flexing and slumping and thus things like the tsunami energy and stresses that often signal pending earthquakes or volcanic activity. GPS has a long history (many years) in monitoring fault lines etc in places like California, Japan and New Zealand. These units are perminantly mounted at monitoring stations, so aquisition time is a non-issue.
Broadband over power lines can interfere with ham signals, so everyone tells us. Probably just the folks in Texas just emailing a jpeg of a space probe picture.