The Matrix has depth? What depth? I had the big secret figured out about 5 minutes into the first Matrix. The rest of the plot is simply a ludicrous framework upon which to show off action sequences. After all, what possible logical reason is there for a completely computer generated world to need kung-fu? ROFL. For a far superior take on virtual reality, see "The 13th Floor".
It takes 30-50 years for cigarettes to kill you. At a pack a day, that's at least 200,000 cigarettes. If a poison takes 200,000 doses to kill you, it is hardly the 'most deadly'. As for 'most addictive', I think watching someone going through heroin withdrawal would convince one that cigarettes are not anywhere near being 'most addictive'.
About 2 out of 3 times I use mapquest it places the spot on the map about.5 to 2 miles away from where it actually is. I find it so unreliable as to be useless. The worst one was when I was trying to find a fedex box given the address on the fedex web site. Mapquest 'located' the box in the middle of a residential area. I wasted half an hour driving around looking for it. The actual box was 2 miles away.
I think Microsoft's approach to patents is simply acquiring a large portfolio of them they can use to defend themselves against other people filing patent claims against them. This works when cross-licensing is possible. It doesn't work if the plaintiff against them has only one patent.
Since the flyer obviously flew forwards relative to the ground from the photo of it in flight, not backwards, it clearly isn't losing that 25mph speed. It isn't flying off of a cliff, either.
What other claimants to first flight have failed in is in providing convincing documentation of their achievements or any contributions at all to aeronautics. They made no further progress, and nothing ever came of or was based on their designs. The Wrights had enough brains to convincingly document every step of the way, including thorough notes, witnesses, photographs, and the machine itself. They steadilly made improvements to their flyers, basing each successive airplane upon lessons learned from the previous. Their fundamental contributions to aeronautical engineering are beyond dispute.
To find out more about what the Wrights accomplished with the original Wright Flyer, see "The Wright Brothers as Engineers, An Appraisal" by Quentin Wald. He credits their achievements as:
1. Identification of control as the primary unsolved problem.
2. Realization that an airplane must bank in order to turn, and invention of the first method of doing that.
3. Recognition of the problem of "adverse yaw" and the first control system to deal with that.
4. The first practical wind tunnel experimental program for determining the lifts of various shapes.
5. The first efficient propellors designed from theoretical considerations, and the first usable propellor theory.
I'll add to that the first practical rudder, and the first modern engineering development program consisting of breaking down the problem of flight into component parts, solving each part using prototypes, and then incorporating the solved components into a working design.
And I bet the Wright Flyer, given enough 'runway', would have lifted off, because the original WF, in flight, had a positive ground speed. All the wind did was make it possible for them to not need much of any runway. There's no doubt that the WF was able to maintain flying airspeed. More significant was its rather dangerous pitch instability problem, which took a while for the Wrights to solve.
Should we also then assert that navy jets are not really airplanes because they cannot get off the carrier deck under their own power and without the carrier steaming full blast into the wind?
Just out of curiosity, I pulled out my ordinary digital camera and took a photograph of the screen. The screen text on the photograph was clearly readable.
Anyone who thinks that DRM on documents makes them secure from unauthorized copying is an idiot. Heck, you don't even need a digital camera, any low tech camera will do.
Can anyone imagine what airplanes would look like today if the early pioneers had had to answer to Congress?
Yes. Check out the Langley "aerodrome", a government financed ($60,000) project to build the first airplane. It promptly fell into the Potomac "like a handful of mortar." It was rebuilt, and another try done, with similar disastrous results. The Langley aerodrome project did not contribute a single innovation, idea, configuration, principle or technique to aviation. Compare that with Langley's contemporaries, the Wright Brothers, who solved the problems of powered flight for $1500 and who's ideas, innovations, etc., can still be found in modern aircraft.
OLE (Object Linking and *Embedding*) is Microsoft prior art. I remember Steve Ballmer demonstrating embedding objects into Excel spreadsheets long before 1994.
is for users to charge $.01 per spam they receive, to be collected by (and split with) their ISP. Users can have 'white lists' which, if the sender is on, means they can send without charge. Users will get docked $.01 for each email they sent to a non-whitelist destination, and creditted $.01 for each email they received from a non-whitelisted customer. ISPs automatically filter out any email that is not on the user's whitelist and comes from an ISP that is not part of the system. ISPs monthly will 'settle up' with each other each month by transferring the balance in cash. ISPs will have an incentive to join this system, both because they'll make money, and because users will patronize ISPs who join.
I've often wondered if the downturn in CD sales is not at all due to piracy, but simply to boomers aging and not being particularly interested in new music. By now, boomers have already replaced their old 60's and 70's vinyl records with CDs, and so aren't buying any more. Gen X and younger are a smaller number of people, they have no vinyl to replace, and so ongoing sales will be smaller.
What I do is stuff all the computer equipment in a closet. The shelves are made of wire, so the air can circulate freely. The wires for keyboard/monitor just come under the door. Works great, cuts the noise by about 90%. The interior of the closet gets warmer than the room by 5 degrees or so, not enough to be a problem.
For more or hotter equipment, I'd cut a hole in the floor and put the equipment in the basement, running the kvm cables through the hole. Another solution would be to install a bathroom style exhaust fan in the closet.
I got the idea from a friend who had an "equipment room", and his desk was on the other side of the wall. KVM cables came through a hole poked in the wall.
Such enhancement could have credibility if there were a bunch of independent "enhancers" around the country. Two are selected by lottery, and the raw data sent to them. Each does their enhancement independently in a clean room environment, knowing nothing about the crime, suspect, etc.
The same system is used for "matching" the enhanced print with the suspect's print, using a double blind system similar to the way drug research is done.
Such a system would reduce both the probability of error and the possibility of bias, intentional and unintentional.
For the first manned, powered and controlled flight. Pearson's "flight", if indeed he did fly, was obviously uncontrolled. Even if his flight was controlled, it's irrelevant because he failed to document it and all corroboration has, of course, vanished.
The Wrights developed the very first theory of propellors, and theirs was 70% efficient. Quite remarkable. The Wrights built their own engine from scratch, did not employ skilled engineers for their first airplane, and devised the first wind tunnel to test airfoil sections.
The Wrights did make a survey of all available information on building airplanes, and found what little existed to be totally wrong (such as Lilienthal's data). They did what was likely the first modern R&D program (building successive prototypes, each building on the results from the previous, all targetted at powered flight). The Wrights did it all from scratch.
I'm convinced that makers of Windows games for toddlers have never playtested those games with toddlers. Set one down in front of a PC with a game in it, and they will try out every key. Invariably, they wind up bringing up the system menu or such, inadvertantly exit the game, and start deleting icons, etc.
Sensible kid games would:
1) Disable ALL input other than what the game controls.
2) Make it hard to exit the game, so that only the parent can do it.
3) Make EVERY keystroke and mouse button event do something interesting for the toddler.
The solution is to charge users $.01 for every email sent. That will make spamming uneconomic, while having no perceptible impact on normal email usage.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that, apparently whenever you unplug it to move it or your power goes out, it reverts to its spamming behavior.
The Matrix has depth? What depth? I had the big secret figured out about 5 minutes into the first Matrix. The rest of the plot is simply a ludicrous framework upon which to show off action sequences. After all, what possible logical reason is there for a completely computer generated world to need kung-fu? ROFL. For a far superior take on virtual reality, see "The 13th Floor".
It takes 30-50 years for cigarettes to kill you. At a pack a day, that's at least 200,000 cigarettes. If a poison takes 200,000 doses to kill you, it is hardly the 'most deadly'. As for 'most addictive', I think watching someone going through heroin withdrawal would convince one that cigarettes are not anywhere near being 'most addictive'.
I'm going to patent the two click search and the three click search!
Copper against steel certainly will cause galvanic corrosion. That's why you don't use iron nails with copper flashing on your roof.
About 2 out of 3 times I use mapquest it places the spot on the map about .5 to 2 miles away from where it actually is. I find it so unreliable as to be useless. The worst one was when I was trying to find a fedex box given the address on the fedex web site. Mapquest 'located' the box in the middle of a residential area. I wasted half an hour driving around looking for it. The actual box was 2 miles away.
I think Microsoft's approach to patents is simply acquiring a large portfolio of them they can use to defend themselves against other people filing patent claims against them. This works when cross-licensing is possible. It doesn't work if the plaintiff against them has only one patent.
santos-dumont
They flew 4 times that day.
What other claimants to first flight have failed in is in providing convincing documentation of their achievements or any contributions at all to aeronautics. They made no further progress, and nothing ever came of or was based on their designs. The Wrights had enough brains to convincingly document every step of the way, including thorough notes, witnesses, photographs, and the machine itself. They steadilly made improvements to their flyers, basing each successive airplane upon lessons learned from the previous. Their fundamental contributions to aeronautical engineering are beyond dispute.
1. Identification of control as the primary unsolved problem.
2. Realization that an airplane must bank in order to turn, and invention of the first method of doing that.
3. Recognition of the problem of "adverse yaw" and the first control system to deal with that.
4. The first practical wind tunnel experimental program for determining the lifts of various shapes.
5. The first efficient propellors designed from theoretical considerations, and the first usable propellor theory.
I'll add to that the first practical rudder, and the first modern engineering development program consisting of breaking down the problem of flight into component parts, solving each part using prototypes, and then incorporating the solved components into a working design.
And I bet the Wright Flyer, given enough 'runway', would have lifted off, because the original WF, in flight, had a positive ground speed. All the wind did was make it possible for them to not need much of any runway. There's no doubt that the WF was able to maintain flying airspeed. More significant was its rather dangerous pitch instability problem, which took a while for the Wrights to solve.
Should we also then assert that navy jets are not really airplanes because they cannot get off the carrier deck under their own power and without the carrier steaming full blast into the wind?
Finally, somebody noticed that sales might be down because the boomers have finished upgrading their vinyl & cassette collections to CD.
Just out of curiosity, I pulled out my ordinary digital camera and took a photograph of the screen. The screen text on the photograph was clearly readable.
Anyone who thinks that DRM on documents makes them secure from unauthorized copying is an idiot. Heck, you don't even need a digital camera, any low tech camera will do.
The other holy grail of biomimetics is to replicate photosynthesis - turning sunlight directly into fuel.
Yes. Check out the Langley "aerodrome", a government financed ($60,000) project to build the first airplane. It promptly fell into the Potomac "like a handful of mortar." It was rebuilt, and another try done, with similar disastrous results. The Langley aerodrome project did not contribute a single innovation, idea, configuration, principle or technique to aviation. Compare that with Langley's contemporaries, the Wright Brothers, who solved the problems of powered flight for $1500 and who's ideas, innovations, etc., can still be found in modern aircraft.
OLE (Object Linking and *Embedding*) is Microsoft prior art. I remember Steve Ballmer demonstrating embedding objects into Excel spreadsheets long before 1994.
is for users to charge $.01 per spam they receive, to be collected by (and split with) their ISP. Users can have 'white lists' which, if the sender is on, means they can send without charge. Users will get docked $.01 for each email they sent to a non-whitelist destination, and creditted $.01 for each email they received from a non-whitelisted customer. ISPs automatically filter out any email that is not on the user's whitelist and comes from an ISP that is not part of the system. ISPs monthly will 'settle up' with each other each month by transferring the balance in cash. ISPs will have an incentive to join this system, both because they'll make money, and because users will patronize ISPs who join.
I've often wondered if the downturn in CD sales is not at all due to piracy, but simply to boomers aging and not being particularly interested in new music. By now, boomers have already replaced their old 60's and 70's vinyl records with CDs, and so aren't buying any more. Gen X and younger are a smaller number of people, they have no vinyl to replace, and so ongoing sales will be smaller.
For more or hotter equipment, I'd cut a hole in the floor and put the equipment in the basement, running the kvm cables through the hole. Another solution would be to install a bathroom style exhaust fan in the closet.
I got the idea from a friend who had an "equipment room", and his desk was on the other side of the wall. KVM cables came through a hole poked in the wall.
The same system is used for "matching" the enhanced print with the suspect's print, using a double blind system similar to the way drug research is done.
Such a system would reduce both the probability of error and the possibility of bias, intentional and unintentional.
The Wrights developed the very first theory of propellors, and theirs was 70% efficient. Quite remarkable. The Wrights built their own engine from scratch, did not employ skilled engineers for their first airplane, and devised the first wind tunnel to test airfoil sections. The Wrights did make a survey of all available information on building airplanes, and found what little existed to be totally wrong (such as Lilienthal's data). They did what was likely the first modern R&D program (building successive prototypes, each building on the results from the previous, all targetted at powered flight). The Wrights did it all from scratch.
I'm convinced that makers of Windows games for toddlers have never playtested those games with toddlers. Set one down in front of a PC with a game in it, and they will try out every key. Invariably, they wind up bringing up the system menu or such, inadvertantly exit the game, and start deleting icons, etc. Sensible kid games would: 1) Disable ALL input other than what the game controls. 2) Make it hard to exit the game, so that only the parent can do it. 3) Make EVERY keystroke and mouse button event do something interesting for the toddler.
The solution is to charge users $.01 for every email sent. That will make spamming uneconomic, while having no perceptible impact on normal email usage.