Yeah, I volunteer the for-profit insurance companies who are motivated to not spend your premiums on health care.
Oh but wait that's never going to happen. So there goes 60 cents on the health-care dollar before it has a chance to provide even the least efficient of health care.
The point is that for a number of quantum phenomena, there exist no analogous phenomena in the classical world view. So while I understand you're trying to dumb it down for the lay men, the reason why your analogy doesn't work is because there is no analogy possible. Not even a bad one. As for the colored marbles, it's possible to perform a number of experiments with them that, when repeated with quantum particles, give very distinct statistical results. For one, marbles don't entangle states.
Of course it's possible to make analogies, even good ones. So what if marbles don't entangle, you can still use them to get correlated results.
If you have two closed bags, one with a red marble and one with black, and you pick one at random and your partner takes the other, you move to an arbitrary distance from them and then look in your bag, you now know both what color marble you have, and what color marble your partner has. Have you communicated any information with your partner in this way? No? Then now you see why you also can't send information with quantum entanglement.
The analogy given maps to the real scenario in every meaningful way. What ways are meaningful? That the final state each person sees is random, and that there is a correlation between the states they each see. What ways are not meaningful? Superposition and the absence of hidden variables, since neither changes the end result of being unable to communicate. They're just the mechanics of how entanglement work, and are no more important to the analogy than the mechanics of coin flipping or opaque marble bags.
After all, it was known that you couldn't send information with quantum entanglement before the hidden variable question was resolved.
The answer to the question "why can't you send information with entanglement?" is "Because the only thing you know is that the state you observe will be correlated with the state they observe, which you already knew when you left." Notice how superposition and hidden variables aren't important to the answer? That's why the analogy works.
"Analagous" does not mean "equivalent". "Has precisely the same statistical outcome" is not the definition of a useful analogy.;)
You're the one calling someone a sociopath for daring to disagree with you and suggest that someone take an actual vacation with their vacation time.
Actually, the "someone" they called a sociopath was a hypothetical someone who ONLY cares about themselves and no one else, and indeed a lack of empathy is what characterizes sociopathy.
After all, they said there's nothing wrong with enjoying the fruits of your labors unless that's ALL you care about.
By the way, for the rest of you who never RTFA, the summary above really contains all the useful information in TFA. There isn't a need to click through in this case.
Because if I was going to unscientifically guess at the number of times I go to Google News and don't see any headlines that garner my interest enough to click, ~50% would have been it. This value would be lower when exciting news is breaking, and higher when it's just more of the same BS about whatever is occupying the current news cycle magnifying glass. "Tiger Woods also revealed to have bunions!"
What's next? "44% of people scan front page headlines of newspaper in newspaper vending machine without making a purchase, clearly indicating that Seven Eleven is stealing revenue from the newspapers." Noooooo, Seven Eleven is making their product more readily available, and if people aren't interested enough to buy it, whose fault is that?
Because, going by my completely subjective metric, Asteroids is a billion times better known than Star Castle so "asteroids-type game" gets the point across quicker and easier?
Don't be silly. It can only see objects the approximate size of desks. For example refrigerators or golf carts, of which there are plenty. No desks have been found yet though.
Umm, no. Yes, I do understand that the Supreme Court has claimed the privilege to be the final arbiter on the Constitutionality of laws. But that is written nowhere in the Constitution.
Actually it is, in Article III, Section 2:
"The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;"
The power to Judge is the power to decide matters of law, including to Judge when two laws are in conflict and when they are which one prevails. Since the Constitution is the highest authority in the land it always overrides legislation.
You can't just search for a term like Judicial Review and when it doesn't show up say the concept is not in the Constitution. "Separation of Powers" appears nowhere in the Constitution, yet it clearly creates said separation.
Yeah. Obviously the pre-flipped coin is not exactly the same as entangled particles (for instance, there is only one coin, and an unflipped coin is not in a superposition of states). That's because it's an analogy, and the only perfectly precise analogy is one that isn't an analogy at all -- "Quantum entanglement is like two particles whose quantum states are entangled..."
The purpose of the analogy is to illustrate why you can't transmit information using quantum entanglement to someone who doesn't understand the physics and thus wouldn't know crap about Bell's Theorem. If they did know, you could explain why you can't transmit information using physics itself.:P
Since having hidden variables or not makes no difference as to whether you can transmit information this way the analogy works perfectly.
Though I actually prefer the analogy of two differently colored marbles randomly chosen but not looked at until later. Again, the presence of the "hidden variable" of the marble's actual color makes no difference on the result -- you don't know anything after looking at the marble that you didn't know before.
They need to send one of these up around the moon and prove the moon lander is there.
I'm not sure how that's supposed to be better evidence than the presence of mirrors for laser range-finding placed there by the astronauts that a variety of institutions around the world have used to measure the earth-moon distance (and of course in the process verifying their presence) would be.
I don't know would be more annoying - finding out its faked or seeing conspiracy theorists reject it as evidence.
Annoying? If the probe provided evidence that the landings were "faked", meaning we could no longer see the landers that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imaged only months ago that wouldn't be annoying. It'd be one of the most baffling mysteries in modern history!
The question wouldn't be "does this mean we never landed on the moon?", it'd be "who landed on the moon without telling anyone and stole the fucking landers?!"
Oh and obviously if the conspiracy theorists are not satisfied with the existing evidence, they will never be satisfied, because they simply don't want to be satisfied.
Uh what gave you the impression that Disney is now forgiven for their copyright antics?
We're praising them for doing something good. That's all.
If everytime an asshole does something good you tell them to fuck off then they'll never change, except into a bigger asshole. Could this be the tiniest of indications that Disney is heading towards a more open culture, with the result that they would start to allow culture to be open? LOL, I doubt it. It's still a good and exciting thing, though, even if it's the last good thing they ever do.
I find that most of these "ZOMG we hate $entity last week and this week we love them!" thing tends to indicate very binary thinking, that someone/thing can only be good or bad and acknowledging when that is not the case is somehow hypocritical. More like rational. Nuance exists. Embrace it.:)
No, I don't understand. Who decided that The JEDEC DDR SDRAM Specification doesn't rip off RDRAM - you?
No, like I just said RAMBUS decided that. Not every patent RAMBUS holds is an RDRAM patent. I hope that is simple enough to understand.
As far as I know
You mean, of course, as far as your imagination takes you in a swirling void of ignorance.
until the late 2000s when Rambus started winning court cases.
Yeah well on the off chance if you get the sudden and unfamiliar urge to educate yourself, maybe you could start by reading up on what's actually been happening in reality rather than your imagination. Upshot for the lazy ignoramous: They've been winning the anti-trust suits (both the ones against them and against memory makers) but doing very poorly on the patent front.
No, the FISA requires they get a warrant within 72 hours if they want to keep the intercepted data - it does nothing to prevent gathering it in advance of getting a warrant.
Yeah they can get the warrant later, but without that warrant to retro-actively make the search legal, it is retro-actively illegal. So it's still warrant protection. Certainly it pushes the boundaries of the 4th Amendment and I can't say I really like it, but I can kinda see the need and it's way better than the completely warrantless searches that the NSA was performing. I mean damn, if you can't even get a warrant 3 days after the fact from a court that is widely known for rubber stamping every request put in front of them, then that's some damn lousy (and illegal) searching your doing.
Did you read past the first fucking line of the WP page, or would that go against your philosophy of not actually learning what you're talking about? Did you notice how nowhere on that page does it suggest that any memory that uses a double-pumped buss is "DDR", and how every specific instance of a DDR memory is one of the DDR SDRAM specs and how no part of the description other than being double-pumped applies to RDRAM? LOL of course you didn't.
Yes it's a "class" as in there are multiple specs. I.e. DDR, DDR2 and DDR3. Every instance of a member of the "class" of DDR memory is a specific instance DDR SDRAM spec JESD79. NOT RDRAM. The WP page makes this explicit by the 5th paragraph if you can be bothered to read that far.
And if you're still confused and insist that DDR can mean nothing more than "double pumped" even though the WP page says otherwise, let me make it clear: In EVERY CASE in my posts, TFA, and the lawsuits between Rambus, the FTC, and the various memory makers, "DDR" refers to the specific memory implementation of JESD79. Got it?
Rambus never claimed that JESD79 was a verbatim rip-off of RDRAM, just that it used a significant amount of tech from RDRAM.
Why are you still making shit up about a case you know nothing about?! Rambus didn't and couldn't patent "the concept of using both edges of the clock" which as much similarity as exists between DDR and RDRAM. They never claimed that DDR ripped-off RDRAM, because it doesn't. They claimed to have separate patents on technologies implemented in DDR. Do you understand?
Man you are just a big bucket of deliberate ignorance. To express a sentiment I'm sure was shared by many of your teachers and professors: "Why the fuck did I waste my time trying to educate this moron?"
What the fuck? RDRAM IS DDR! RDRAM used both edge of the clock to transfer data, which is the definition of DDR!
LOL, seriously? You think "uses both edge of the clock" is the definition of DDR, and that means RDRAM "is" DDR? Who the hell told you that? I'm guessing nobody, and this is just your imagination posing as an informed argument again.
No, fool, DDR is "defined" as an entire specification for a memory technology based on SDRAM that encompasses a hell of a lot more than just how many data beats per clock pulse there are, and is very different than RDRAM. DDR uses a parallel multi-drop bus interface with bus mastering chip selects, RDRAM uses a serial inline interface
Just using both edges of the clock does not make something "DDR". The idea of using both edges to increase data speeds while alleviating pressure on the clock lines was old and obvious already. By your definition, the EV6 front side bus used by the K7 and the Alpha 21264 is the same as 'DDR'. LOL.
Your whole post makes no sense because while you seem to know everything about the case, you know nothing about the actual technology!
You know nothing about the technology or the case yet you keep pretending you do and it's pathetic.
So their memory may suck, but they're used in two easily available products today.
Well it only sucks for mainstream general-purpose computing.
For embedded applications, RDRAM is actually quite nice, because it gets good performance with a small number of motherboard traces, and in something like a game console having fewer traces and thus maybe being able to have fewer layers on your mobo makes a big difference.
The savings in traces doesn't make much difference in a PC, so the tradeoff there isn't worth it.
I followed the case briefly. Rambus allowed JEDEC members to see what they were doing under NDA years before anyone at JEDEC mentioned it.
Holy shit. The thing they revealed under NDA was their RDRAM technology, NOT DDR! Do you understand that these are not even close to the same things?!
So despite your repeated assertion that everyone else had "already thought" of SDR and DDR, no one knows if that is true or not because the NDAs are, well NDAs.
Dude those NDAs are long expired, and information about what was revealed under them has also been revealed in court and in public. It's not an assertion that the technology they were pushing was RDRAM not DDR, it's an established fact! The PDF you yourself linked even shows this, FFS!
That is where we can just stop the arguing.
Yeah, we can stop arguing at the point where you reveal you know nothing about the case, and think we're pitting your imagination of what might have happened versus mine. I refuse to continue talking with someone who thinks deliberate ignorance is a position of rhetorical strength.
The problem is that everything seems obvious in hindsight. If they were entirely useless, why are companies like Nintendo licensing their memory technology?If they were entirely useless, why are companies like Nintendo licensing their memory technology? SCOTUS already ruled that a patent holder cannot sue 3rd party users of a technology for infringement committed by an upstream supplier, so there is no need to license it to protect yourself from lawsuits. Perhaps the technology offers something of value; Nintendo isn't the only one either.
Like I said, RDRAM is decent in embedded apps. This is because it gets relatively high performance for a small number of traces, which is a good tradeoff for a game console but not a PC. And the reason Nintendo is getting a license -- which as you point out would be irrelevant if they were only buying rdram chips -- is because it includes the necessary specs for designing the channel and the IP for the memory controller.
What's "obvious in hindsight" is that RDRAM was a bad choice for the pc industry, and Intel made a mistake by supporting it which they regretted.
But the core issue, I think, is that an American company developed memory technology that foreign corporations desperately wanted to avoid paying royalties for and they colluded to try to bankrupt RAMBUS to increase profits (and screw consumers).
Okay, sorry, it seems you're confused about what Rambus actually invented versus what they had been trying to collect royalties on. There are two technologies in play here: RDRAM and DDR.
Rambus developed RDRAM technology; it is 100% their invention. Nobody ever failed to pay Rambus royalties for this technology. And it was in large part because RDRAM was encumbered by patents and royalty fees that the JEDEC committee decided not to use it. However companies that did make RDRAM, like Samsung, paid them the appropriate royalties.
Rambus did not invent DDR, and they especially did not develop it into a working technology. What Rambus did is listen at the JEDEC meetings as they discussed the new standard, and based on those notes submitted patents that covered exactly what JEDEC was talking about. The technology had already been invented when Rambus got their patent on it, and Rambus did none of the inventing.
The reason Rambus did not receive any royalties for DDR at first was because none of the memory makers knew that Rambus had patents on it. Developing an open, royalty-free memory standard was the whole point of JEDEC, and that's what they thought they were doing while Rambus snuck off and patented the technology without telling any members of JEDEC. If they had informed the committee, then the committee never would have decided on DDR!
Only much later, once it was clear that DDR was going to dominate and that RDRAM was a dead end in the market, did Rambus suddenly reveal their patents and start demanding royalties from the memory makers. This is classic patent troll behavior -- wait until the product implementing the patent is ubiquitous, and the people who unwittingly violated it can't change in any reasonable fashion, then spring it on them and demand extortionate royalties.
That's when the memory makers fought back to try to avoid paying royalties on a technology they never would have used if they thought it had royalties. That's also when they proved themselves to be even bigger assholes than RAMBUS by colluding and price fixing.
I hope that explanation helps. The thing rambus actually invented is not the thing they're receiving royalties for today. However because our patent system is so fucked, by virtue of filing a patent based on what other people were discussing, they get the royalties for it.
I can just imagine if I patented a legitimate invention that the RAMBUS case would give companies like Samsung the idea that they can just bankrupt me, rather than pay royalties.
If you patent something that someone else legitimately invented and then start demanding royalties from them, then I would hope you go bankrupt. But as we can see, this is not how things always play out. The message of the rambus case is clear: Patents matter, inventions don't.
I started typing up a huge line-by-line response to this and it's pointless. Unless you can prove you were at the JEDEC meetings in the 90s (I wasn't), neither of us knows what really went on.
Have you at least been following the case for all these years? Rhetorical question, obviously not. The issues I'm informing you of involving the JEDEC meetings all came out in the lawsuits years ago. See Infineon vs rambus. Rambus never denied that they failed to disclose that they were filing patents related to the memory technology JEDEC was considering, while they were considering it. In the trial it was ruled that rambus had acted in bad faith at JEDEC by concealing their patents, but the appeals court overturned the verdict on the basis that the JEDEC rules were not legally binding and so rambus' bad-faith actions could not constitute fraud.
That this is all apparently new info, and sounds like hearsay to you, is the reason why it's pointless for you to do a line-by-line rebuttal.
Rambus surely did sell some crappy memory, but that wasn't the point - the point of their company was to license their tech to real memory manufacturers because it was good and it was at least a year (probably more like 3 in terms of what was needed to actually implement it) ahead of anyone else.
Okay first rambus never sold memory because they never had any manufacturing, they only sold their technology to memory makers like samsung.
Second, yes they were ahead with their RDRAM technology, but so what? RDRAM was a bad choice for the industry compared to DDR, and Rambus was not any farther ahead on DDR development despite their submarine patent because they weren't developing it. They wanted the industry to switch to RDRAM, not DDR, and they are quite different technologies.
If you're saying that there is no value in that because someone else would have thought of it later, then we should just agree to disagree.
Are you even reading what I'm writing? I don't know how many times I can tell you that everyone had already thought of SDR and DDR. The thing rambus invented, RDRAM, was crap so who cares if nobody thought of it? There may be a time for serial memory technology, but that time still has yet to arrive.
Rambus did nothing for the industry. They tried their damnedest to harm it, and succeeded. This is what I'm saying. Try to understand what actually happened, and then we can agree or disagree.
Your conclusions are wrong. If you can send information instantly, then given a couple spaceships, it's possible to send a message from one spaceship to the other, and then back again, such that the message arrives back at the first ship before the first ship sent it. Effect before cause.
Relativity does not exclude the possibility of things happening simultaneously, it's just that different reference frames will disagree on when things happened so if something appeared to happen simultaneously to you, they wouldn't necessarily to someone else. Your example doesn't really address this in a meaningful way.
so why cant he tell them 'at precisely 12o'clock, I will make my end collapse, measure it after that..'
You can tell them that before you part company. And then at 12:01 they can, under the assumption that you kept your word, measure the state of their entangled particle. But since you cannot in any way choose what the waveform will collapse into, and because they already knew that whatever state they observe you will see the opposite, what can they possibly learn from this? Even if they "know" that you must have already observed your particle and destroyed the entanglement, they still cannot tell that you've done this from their side.
So, in short, that measurement still won't result in any information transfer.
The motivation of the patent system is to encourage people to do research and develop products now, today that will benefit the consumer, rather than "at some point later". That the industry was "already headed in the direction of DDR regardless of what rambus did" is just an anecdote about how technology evolves.
No, it's the fact of the situation that the industry was headed there at the time of rambus' participation in jedec, without rambus' input. Because they didn't give any.
RAMBUS' technology, as described by their patents, had no impact on the JEDEC standards because they did not disclose these patents to the committee in violation of the rules. They were able to abuse a standards committee by tweaking their patents to cover exactly what a standards body was already deciding upon. These facts are not in dispute, the only thing that saves rambus is that these rules were not legally binding. So just like Microsoft, Rambus got to abuse a standards body with no repercussions. That doesn't mean they didn't do anything wrong.
Rambus made it evolve faster under the assumption that they could get some money by licensing it, but they got nothing (until now).
No they didn't, they didn't evolve anything but their own proprietary memory standard. They didn't invent SDR or DDR memory. Or they did invent DDR, but many other people in the industry did too because it's so obvious and they didn't think to patent it. What RAMBUS tried to do was not advance the state of the art in industry. What they tried to do was charge extortionate license fees for DDR, such that their more expensive yet lower performing memory technology would be end up being the cheaper choice.
No other manufacturer has any incentive to move from EDO DRAM to synchronous DRAM, and maybe DDR takes 10 years longer to reach the consumer. This is obviously all hypothetical, of course, but the point is, Rambus made the industry change sooner, rather than later.
Please! The industry was already switching to SDRAM, and already agreeing on the DDR standard, while RAMBUS was still going around with nothing more than a powerpoint slide about how awesome their memory would be if someone actually manufactured it! All the memory manufacturers have a strong incentive to move to faster memory technologies as fast as they are economically feasible, which is how we got EDO DRAM in the first place. Then for the eight years after DDR that RDRAM was of no import, we still got DDR2 and DDR3. Trust me, just like CPU vendors have every incentive to improve performance as fast as they can, memory makers do as well though they also have a strong drive towards increasing density.
This is obviously all hypothetical, of course, but the point is, Rambus made the industry change sooner, rather than later.
"Hypothetical" as in "might have been what happened, if you don't know otherwise".
It's called competition, and Rambus was a perfect example of it in action.
Rambus is a horrible example of "competition". An underperforming and overpriced memory technology that the only way they could try to get the market to move in their direction was by IP extortion is hardly competition at its best. Intel went with rdram because they liked its proprietary nature and it fit their marketing-over-performance architecture. That decision cost them severely and handed AMD a huge market advantage for several years.
Then a bunch of greedy corporations ruined it, admitted to doing so, and yet we still have people like you on Slashdot defending them. I don't get it.
Dude, read some of my other comments in this story. I'm not defending the dram makers for their anti-competitive business practices. To repeat myself, they're a bunch of assholes, without a doubt, who responded to rambus' submarine patent ploy by colluding to lock rambus out of the industry. Rambus is guilty of their own bad behavior too, though, and this "oh they invented the memory technology you're using today" bullshit is exactly that. They didn't do shit to help the industry. They only failed to lock it into a proprietary technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Any volunteers to take a pay cut?
Yeah, I volunteer the for-profit insurance companies who are motivated to not spend your premiums on health care.
Oh but wait that's never going to happen. So there goes 60 cents on the health-care dollar before it has a chance to provide even the least efficient of health care.
I dunno, I'm pretty interested in finding out what errors Intel could have made with regards to the Underpants Bomber. Is it related to the FDIV bug?
The point is that for a number of quantum phenomena, there exist no analogous phenomena in the classical world view. So while I understand you're trying to dumb it down for the lay men, the reason why your analogy doesn't work is because there is no analogy possible. Not even a bad one. As for the colored marbles, it's possible to perform a number of experiments with them that, when repeated with quantum particles, give very distinct statistical results. For one, marbles don't entangle states.
Of course it's possible to make analogies, even good ones. So what if marbles don't entangle, you can still use them to get correlated results.
If you have two closed bags, one with a red marble and one with black, and you pick one at random and your partner takes the other, you move to an arbitrary distance from them and then look in your bag, you now know both what color marble you have, and what color marble your partner has. Have you communicated any information with your partner in this way? No? Then now you see why you also can't send information with quantum entanglement.
The analogy given maps to the real scenario in every meaningful way. What ways are meaningful? That the final state each person sees is random, and that there is a correlation between the states they each see. What ways are not meaningful? Superposition and the absence of hidden variables, since neither changes the end result of being unable to communicate. They're just the mechanics of how entanglement work, and are no more important to the analogy than the mechanics of coin flipping or opaque marble bags.
After all, it was known that you couldn't send information with quantum entanglement before the hidden variable question was resolved.
The answer to the question "why can't you send information with entanglement?" is "Because the only thing you know is that the state you observe will be correlated with the state they observe, which you already knew when you left." Notice how superposition and hidden variables aren't important to the answer? That's why the analogy works.
"Analagous" does not mean "equivalent". "Has precisely the same statistical outcome" is not the definition of a useful analogy. ;)
You're the one calling someone a sociopath for daring to disagree with you and suggest that someone take an actual vacation with their vacation time.
Actually, the "someone" they called a sociopath was a hypothetical someone who ONLY cares about themselves and no one else, and indeed a lack of empathy is what characterizes sociopathy.
After all, they said there's nothing wrong with enjoying the fruits of your labors unless that's ALL you care about.
By the way, for the rest of you who never RTFA, the summary above really contains all the useful information in TFA. There isn't a need to click through in this case.
*suspicious glare*
How'd you figure that out?
Because if I was going to unscientifically guess at the number of times I go to Google News and don't see any headlines that garner my interest enough to click, ~50% would have been it. This value would be lower when exciting news is breaking, and higher when it's just more of the same BS about whatever is occupying the current news cycle magnifying glass. "Tiger Woods also revealed to have bunions!"
What's next? "44% of people scan front page headlines of newspaper in newspaper vending machine without making a purchase, clearly indicating that Seven Eleven is stealing revenue from the newspapers." Noooooo, Seven Eleven is making their product more readily available, and if people aren't interested enough to buy it, whose fault is that?
Because, going by my completely subjective metric, Asteroids is a billion times better known than Star Castle so "asteroids-type game" gets the point across quicker and easier?
Don't be silly. It can only see objects the approximate size of desks. For example refrigerators or golf carts, of which there are plenty. No desks have been found yet though.
Umm, no. Yes, I do understand that the Supreme Court has claimed the privilege to be the final arbiter on the Constitutionality of laws. But that is written nowhere in the Constitution.
Actually it is, in Article III, Section 2:
"The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;"
The power to Judge is the power to decide matters of law, including to Judge when two laws are in conflict and when they are which one prevails. Since the Constitution is the highest authority in the land it always overrides legislation.
You can't just search for a term like Judicial Review and when it doesn't show up say the concept is not in the Constitution. "Separation of Powers" appears nowhere in the Constitution, yet it clearly creates said separation.
Yeah. Obviously the pre-flipped coin is not exactly the same as entangled particles (for instance, there is only one coin, and an unflipped coin is not in a superposition of states). That's because it's an analogy, and the only perfectly precise analogy is one that isn't an analogy at all -- "Quantum entanglement is like two particles whose quantum states are entangled..."
The purpose of the analogy is to illustrate why you can't transmit information using quantum entanglement to someone who doesn't understand the physics and thus wouldn't know crap about Bell's Theorem. If they did know, you could explain why you can't transmit information using physics itself. :P
Since having hidden variables or not makes no difference as to whether you can transmit information this way the analogy works perfectly.
Though I actually prefer the analogy of two differently colored marbles randomly chosen but not looked at until later. Again, the presence of the "hidden variable" of the marble's actual color makes no difference on the result -- you don't know anything after looking at the marble that you didn't know before.
They need to send one of these up around the moon and prove the moon lander is there.
I'm not sure how that's supposed to be better evidence than the presence of mirrors for laser range-finding placed there by the astronauts that a variety of institutions around the world have used to measure the earth-moon distance (and of course in the process verifying their presence) would be.
I don't know would be more annoying - finding out its faked or seeing conspiracy theorists reject it as evidence.
Annoying? If the probe provided evidence that the landings were "faked", meaning we could no longer see the landers that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imaged only months ago that wouldn't be annoying. It'd be one of the most baffling mysteries in modern history!
The question wouldn't be "does this mean we never landed on the moon?", it'd be "who landed on the moon without telling anyone and stole the fucking landers?!"
Oh and obviously if the conspiracy theorists are not satisfied with the existing evidence, they will never be satisfied, because they simply don't want to be satisfied.
No, as opposed to ones that failed to little consequence, obviously. Lots of games fail without killing or crippling the studio developing them.
Uh what gave you the impression that Disney is now forgiven for their copyright antics?
We're praising them for doing something good. That's all.
If everytime an asshole does something good you tell them to fuck off then they'll never change, except into a bigger asshole. Could this be the tiniest of indications that Disney is heading towards a more open culture, with the result that they would start to allow culture to be open? LOL, I doubt it. It's still a good and exciting thing, though, even if it's the last good thing they ever do.
I find that most of these "ZOMG we hate $entity last week and this week we love them!" thing tends to indicate very binary thinking, that someone/thing can only be good or bad and acknowledging when that is not the case is somehow hypocritical. More like rational. Nuance exists. Embrace it. :)
Given the choice, I'd take the needles.
No, I don't understand. Who decided that The JEDEC DDR SDRAM Specification doesn't rip off RDRAM - you?
No, like I just said RAMBUS decided that. Not every patent RAMBUS holds is an RDRAM patent. I hope that is simple enough to understand.
As far as I know
You mean, of course, as far as your imagination takes you in a swirling void of ignorance.
until the late 2000s when Rambus started winning court cases.
Yeah well on the off chance if you get the sudden and unfamiliar urge to educate yourself, maybe you could start by reading up on what's actually been happening in reality rather than your imagination. Upshot for the lazy ignoramous: They've been winning the anti-trust suits (both the ones against them and against memory makers) but doing very poorly on the patent front.
No, the FISA requires they get a warrant within 72 hours if they want to keep the intercepted data - it does nothing to prevent gathering it in advance of getting a warrant.
Yeah they can get the warrant later, but without that warrant to retro-actively make the search legal, it is retro-actively illegal. So it's still warrant protection. Certainly it pushes the boundaries of the 4th Amendment and I can't say I really like it, but I can kinda see the need and it's way better than the completely warrantless searches that the NSA was performing. I mean damn, if you can't even get a warrant 3 days after the fact from a court that is widely known for rubber stamping every request put in front of them, then that's some damn lousy (and illegal) searching your doing.
Did you read past the first fucking line of the WP page, or would that go against your philosophy of not actually learning what you're talking about? Did you notice how nowhere on that page does it suggest that any memory that uses a double-pumped buss is "DDR", and how every specific instance of a DDR memory is one of the DDR SDRAM specs and how no part of the description other than being double-pumped applies to RDRAM? LOL of course you didn't.
Yes it's a "class" as in there are multiple specs. I.e. DDR, DDR2 and DDR3. Every instance of a member of the "class" of DDR memory is a specific instance DDR SDRAM spec JESD79. NOT RDRAM. The WP page makes this explicit by the 5th paragraph if you can be bothered to read that far.
And if you're still confused and insist that DDR can mean nothing more than "double pumped" even though the WP page says otherwise, let me make it clear: In EVERY CASE in my posts, TFA, and the lawsuits between Rambus, the FTC, and the various memory makers, "DDR" refers to the specific memory implementation of JESD79. Got it?
Rambus never claimed that JESD79 was a verbatim rip-off of RDRAM, just that it used a significant amount of tech from RDRAM.
Why are you still making shit up about a case you know nothing about?! Rambus didn't and couldn't patent "the concept of using both edges of the clock" which as much similarity as exists between DDR and RDRAM. They never claimed that DDR ripped-off RDRAM, because it doesn't. They claimed to have separate patents on technologies implemented in DDR. Do you understand?
Man you are just a big bucket of deliberate ignorance. To express a sentiment I'm sure was shared by many of your teachers and professors: "Why the fuck did I waste my time trying to educate this moron?"
HAND.
What the fuck? RDRAM IS DDR! RDRAM used both edge of the clock to transfer data, which is the definition of DDR!
LOL, seriously? You think "uses both edge of the clock" is the definition of DDR, and that means RDRAM "is" DDR? Who the hell told you that? I'm guessing nobody, and this is just your imagination posing as an informed argument again.
No, fool, DDR is "defined" as an entire specification for a memory technology based on SDRAM that encompasses a hell of a lot more than just how many data beats per clock pulse there are, and is very different than RDRAM. DDR uses a parallel multi-drop bus interface with bus mastering chip selects, RDRAM uses a serial inline interface
Just using both edges of the clock does not make something "DDR". The idea of using both edges to increase data speeds while alleviating pressure on the clock lines was old and obvious already. By your definition, the EV6 front side bus used by the K7 and the Alpha 21264 is the same as 'DDR'. LOL.
Your whole post makes no sense because while you seem to know everything about the case, you know nothing about the actual technology!
You know nothing about the technology or the case yet you keep pretending you do and it's pathetic.
So their memory may suck, but they're used in two easily available products today.
Well it only sucks for mainstream general-purpose computing.
For embedded applications, RDRAM is actually quite nice, because it gets good performance with a small number of motherboard traces, and in something like a game console having fewer traces and thus maybe being able to have fewer layers on your mobo makes a big difference.
The savings in traces doesn't make much difference in a PC, so the tradeoff there isn't worth it.
I followed the case briefly. Rambus allowed JEDEC members to see what they were doing under NDA years before anyone at JEDEC mentioned it.
Holy shit. The thing they revealed under NDA was their RDRAM technology, NOT DDR! Do you understand that these are not even close to the same things?!
So despite your repeated assertion that everyone else had "already thought" of SDR and DDR, no one knows if that is true or not because the NDAs are, well NDAs.
Dude those NDAs are long expired, and information about what was revealed under them has also been revealed in court and in public. It's not an assertion that the technology they were pushing was RDRAM not DDR, it's an established fact! The PDF you yourself linked even shows this, FFS!
That is where we can just stop the arguing.
Yeah, we can stop arguing at the point where you reveal you know nothing about the case, and think we're pitting your imagination of what might have happened versus mine. I refuse to continue talking with someone who thinks deliberate ignorance is a position of rhetorical strength.
The problem is that everything seems obvious in hindsight. If they were entirely useless, why are companies like Nintendo licensing their memory technology?If they were entirely useless, why are companies like Nintendo licensing their memory technology? SCOTUS already ruled that a patent holder cannot sue 3rd party users of a technology for infringement committed by an upstream supplier, so there is no need to license it to protect yourself from lawsuits. Perhaps the technology offers something of value; Nintendo isn't the only one either.
Like I said, RDRAM is decent in embedded apps. This is because it gets relatively high performance for a small number of traces, which is a good tradeoff for a game console but not a PC. And the reason Nintendo is getting a license -- which as you point out would be irrelevant if they were only buying rdram chips -- is because it includes the necessary specs for designing the channel and the IP for the memory controller.
What's "obvious in hindsight" is that RDRAM was a bad choice for the pc industry, and Intel made a mistake by supporting it which they regretted.
But the core issue, I think, is that an American company developed memory technology that foreign corporations desperately wanted to avoid paying royalties for and they colluded to try to bankrupt RAMBUS to increase profits (and screw consumers).
Okay, sorry, it seems you're confused about what Rambus actually invented versus what they had been trying to collect royalties on. There are two technologies in play here: RDRAM and DDR.
Rambus developed RDRAM technology; it is 100% their invention. Nobody ever failed to pay Rambus royalties for this technology. And it was in large part because RDRAM was encumbered by patents and royalty fees that the JEDEC committee decided not to use it. However companies that did make RDRAM, like Samsung, paid them the appropriate royalties.
Rambus did not invent DDR, and they especially did not develop it into a working technology. What Rambus did is listen at the JEDEC meetings as they discussed the new standard, and based on those notes submitted patents that covered exactly what JEDEC was talking about. The technology had already been invented when Rambus got their patent on it, and Rambus did none of the inventing.
The reason Rambus did not receive any royalties for DDR at first was because none of the memory makers knew that Rambus had patents on it. Developing an open, royalty-free memory standard was the whole point of JEDEC, and that's what they thought they were doing while Rambus snuck off and patented the technology without telling any members of JEDEC. If they had informed the committee, then the committee never would have decided on DDR!
Only much later, once it was clear that DDR was going to dominate and that RDRAM was a dead end in the market, did Rambus suddenly reveal their patents and start demanding royalties from the memory makers. This is classic patent troll behavior -- wait until the product implementing the patent is ubiquitous, and the people who unwittingly violated it can't change in any reasonable fashion, then spring it on them and demand extortionate royalties.
That's when the memory makers fought back to try to avoid paying royalties on a technology they never would have used if they thought it had royalties. That's also when they proved themselves to be even bigger assholes than RAMBUS by colluding and price fixing.
I hope that explanation helps. The thing rambus actually invented is not the thing they're receiving royalties for today. However because our patent system is so fucked, by virtue of filing a patent based on what other people were discussing, they get the royalties for it.
I can just imagine if I patented a legitimate invention that the RAMBUS case would give companies like Samsung the idea that they can just bankrupt me, rather than pay royalties.
If you patent something that someone else legitimately invented and then start demanding royalties from them, then I would hope you go bankrupt. But as we can see, this is not how things always play out. The message of the rambus case is clear: Patents matter, inventions don't.
I started typing up a huge line-by-line response to this and it's pointless. Unless you can prove you were at the JEDEC meetings in the 90s (I wasn't), neither of us knows what really went on.
Have you at least been following the case for all these years? Rhetorical question, obviously not. The issues I'm informing you of involving the JEDEC meetings all came out in the lawsuits years ago. See Infineon vs rambus. Rambus never denied that they failed to disclose that they were filing patents related to the memory technology JEDEC was considering, while they were considering it. In the trial it was ruled that rambus had acted in bad faith at JEDEC by concealing their patents, but the appeals court overturned the verdict on the basis that the JEDEC rules were not legally binding and so rambus' bad-faith actions could not constitute fraud.
That this is all apparently new info, and sounds like hearsay to you, is the reason why it's pointless for you to do a line-by-line rebuttal.
Rambus surely did sell some crappy memory, but that wasn't the point - the point of their company was to license their tech to real memory manufacturers because it was good and it was at least a year (probably more like 3 in terms of what was needed to actually implement it) ahead of anyone else.
Okay first rambus never sold memory because they never had any manufacturing, they only sold their technology to memory makers like samsung.
Second, yes they were ahead with their RDRAM technology, but so what? RDRAM was a bad choice for the industry compared to DDR, and Rambus was not any farther ahead on DDR development despite their submarine patent because they weren't developing it. They wanted the industry to switch to RDRAM, not DDR, and they are quite different technologies.
If you're saying that there is no value in that because someone else would have thought of it later, then we should just agree to disagree.
Are you even reading what I'm writing? I don't know how many times I can tell you that everyone had already thought of SDR and DDR. The thing rambus invented, RDRAM, was crap so who cares if nobody thought of it? There may be a time for serial memory technology, but that time still has yet to arrive.
Rambus did nothing for the industry. They tried their damnedest to harm it, and succeeded. This is what I'm saying. Try to understand what actually happened, and then we can agree or disagree.
Your conclusions are wrong. If you can send information instantly, then given a couple spaceships, it's possible to send a message from one spaceship to the other, and then back again, such that the message arrives back at the first ship before the first ship sent it. Effect before cause.
Relativity does not exclude the possibility of things happening simultaneously, it's just that different reference frames will disagree on when things happened so if something appeared to happen simultaneously to you, they wouldn't necessarily to someone else. Your example doesn't really address this in a meaningful way.
so why cant he tell them 'at precisely 12o'clock, I will make my end collapse, measure it after that..'
You can tell them that before you part company. And then at 12:01 they can, under the assumption that you kept your word, measure the state of their entangled particle. But since you cannot in any way choose what the waveform will collapse into, and because they already knew that whatever state they observe you will see the opposite, what can they possibly learn from this? Even if they "know" that you must have already observed your particle and destroyed the entanglement, they still cannot tell that you've done this from their side.
So, in short, that measurement still won't result in any information transfer.
The motivation of the patent system is to encourage people to do research and develop products now, today that will benefit the consumer, rather than "at some point later". That the industry was "already headed in the direction of DDR regardless of what rambus did" is just an anecdote about how technology evolves.
No, it's the fact of the situation that the industry was headed there at the time of rambus' participation in jedec, without rambus' input. Because they didn't give any.
RAMBUS' technology, as described by their patents, had no impact on the JEDEC standards because they did not disclose these patents to the committee in violation of the rules. They were able to abuse a standards committee by tweaking their patents to cover exactly what a standards body was already deciding upon. These facts are not in dispute, the only thing that saves rambus is that these rules were not legally binding. So just like Microsoft, Rambus got to abuse a standards body with no repercussions. That doesn't mean they didn't do anything wrong.
Rambus made it evolve faster under the assumption that they could get some money by licensing it, but they got nothing (until now).
No they didn't, they didn't evolve anything but their own proprietary memory standard. They didn't invent SDR or DDR memory. Or they did invent DDR, but many other people in the industry did too because it's so obvious and they didn't think to patent it. What RAMBUS tried to do was not advance the state of the art in industry. What they tried to do was charge extortionate license fees for DDR, such that their more expensive yet lower performing memory technology would be end up being the cheaper choice.
No other manufacturer has any incentive to move from EDO DRAM to synchronous DRAM, and maybe DDR takes 10 years longer to reach the consumer. This is obviously all hypothetical, of course, but the point is, Rambus made the industry change sooner, rather than later.
Please! The industry was already switching to SDRAM, and already agreeing on the DDR standard, while RAMBUS was still going around with nothing more than a powerpoint slide about how awesome their memory would be if someone actually manufactured it! All the memory manufacturers have a strong incentive to move to faster memory technologies as fast as they are economically feasible, which is how we got EDO DRAM in the first place. Then for the eight years after DDR that RDRAM was of no import, we still got DDR2 and DDR3. Trust me, just like CPU vendors have every incentive to improve performance as fast as they can, memory makers do as well though they also have a strong drive towards increasing density.
This is obviously all hypothetical, of course, but the point is, Rambus made the industry change sooner, rather than later.
"Hypothetical" as in "might have been what happened, if you don't know otherwise".
It's called competition, and Rambus was a perfect example of it in action.
Rambus is a horrible example of "competition". An underperforming and overpriced memory technology that the only way they could try to get the market to move in their direction was by IP extortion is hardly competition at its best. Intel went with rdram because they liked its proprietary nature and it fit their marketing-over-performance architecture. That decision cost them severely and handed AMD a huge market advantage for several years.
Then a bunch of greedy corporations ruined it, admitted to doing so, and yet we still have people like you on Slashdot defending them. I don't get it.
Dude, read some of my other comments in this story. I'm not defending the dram makers for their anti-competitive business practices. To repeat myself, they're a bunch of assholes, without a doubt, who responded to rambus' submarine patent ploy by colluding to lock rambus out of the industry. Rambus is guilty of their own bad behavior too, though, and this "oh they invented the memory technology you're using today" bullshit is exactly that. They didn't do shit to help the industry. They only failed to lock it into a proprietary technology.