During all of this, I've noticed the slashdot community seems to lean in favor of nuclear power. Not individuals, but the community as a whole - based on the comments that get highest moderation. This is in spite of the fact that the situation there is a total unmitigated disaster. One person held it up as a case in FAVOR of nuclear power, basically saying - look, even with the natural disasters they only released a little radioactive steam. That's just plain ignorant. The building have exploded, 3 reactors are thought have had partial meltdowns (one of them breached), the simple cooling ponds are in trouble (if they were full of water, someone could just walk in there and confirm it - the fact nobody has says the radiation levels are too high to go in because something is wrong), radiation is more than 10 times background 30km away. And regardless of weather you buy all those facts, it is requiring a HUGE effort of man power to prevent it getting worse and there is no solid plan. I did read they're importing 150 tons of boron to dump on it - because well, you need to do that when there is a little steam leak I suppose...
The spent rods are only "spent" in the sense that they are not useful for producing large amounts of electricity. They are still very radioactive and still generating a lot of heat. So they leave then in the pools for a few years with active cooling until they are easier and safer to transport to whatever processing place they go to. You question still seem valid though since one would presume a "fresh" rod would be even hotter. Or are they not hot until subjected to neutrons in large quantity? What's the mechanism there if they don't start out super hot?
This is Google we're talking about. All the managers already had technical skills. So the MBAs will take this as another data point indicating that they don't need to understand the details of the business they're running and continue to do a poor job. Other research has shown that the best run companies promote from within - leading to management that knows what the people are doing and can actually help when asked for direction.
I did a "stateless" CGI othello game back in like '94 that stored the game state in the URL. The difference is that I also displayed a board on the screen via HTML generated on the fly. Automatic reload in X seconds was used to have to computer make its response move. The back button worked too. Of course tons of people on/. did similar things back then too.
First to market is another powerful reward that does not depend on patents.
For the little guy or small company it is. If you need to work with bigger companies to line up production or marketing, the patent prevents them from just taking your design and sending you away. Like the guy who invented intermittent windshield wipers - he needed auto makers to implement it, which they did, but IIRC he had to take them to court (with patent in hand) to force them to pay him. It's much harder to start your own car company claiming one new feature, or even to start an aftermarket retrofit business (which would entail working with others too).
I thought a "submarine patent" was when someone got a patent on an idea approved and then sat on the patent and didn't do anything. They would wait for someone else to come up with a product idea that infringed upon the patent and rather then notify them of the infringement when they were still in the planning stage for the product and could (possibly) make changes in the design to prevent the infringement, deliberately let them make production contracts, invest in building a bunch of widgets and marketing, doing all the actual work involved in bringing an idea from a drafting board to a successful product. Then allowing them to be sold for years. Finally, the patent troll sues them for infringement and takes all the profits they made with much less effort. It was called a submarine patent because it was always there -- you just didn't learn of its existence until it was too late.
Close. They filed for a patent, but rather than let it be issued, they would wait a year or more (the process is too slow) and then file an amendment. By repeatedly filing amendments, they prevent the patent from being issued and available for public view. They were then also able to make modifications to better encompass the legitimate products being developed by others. Once a target was identified, you try to tweak the patent so they infringe, let it get issued, claim you filed the patent years ago, and enjoy 17 years of royalties. Now they have made it 20 years from the date of (first) filing, so you can't lay low indefinitely. There may be a couple other anti-troll measures, but the main thing was fixing span to the date filed rather than issued. It's wasn't a terrible compromise since it usually takes a couple years from filing to issuing.
Cookies are so last millenium. Firefox 4 is pushing that new WebDB or whatever it's called so companies can keep a whole database of info on your local machine. Heck, they won't even need to keep user information in their own database, they can just query your machine any time you visit them. Go ahead, let them ban cookies altogether so we're forced into this new more scalable and flexible replacement.
How does that not add up to more than $500K annually?
If you want to project future sales based on current sales, then you should probably admit that we should consider the amount of time he spent writing the books rather than the time it took amazon or whoever to sell them.
No, the problem is that 350,000 * 99cents * 0.35 = 121K and change, not half a million dollars. You can see a problem without doing any math if you notice that his profits from his 1 dollar books exceeds the number of copies even before you take the 35 percent into account.
So someone cataloged a bunch of data on stars and now one is rechecked because it was interesting. Turns out the data was wrong. How much more bad data is out there that nobody double checked because nobody cared until now?
In the cloud, a smart system can store a single copy of any given file and some pointers to it. That way stuff that gets passed around via email, or even multiple people "downloading" stuff from someplace don't actually create copies in the cloud. Everyone just thinks they have their own copy stored in the cloud. Even online "content" can be compressed since every "news outlet" just copies a blurb from someone else - this is a bit more complicated since they usually make a couple minor edits to inject their own opinion. I think with efficient storage like this, the entire net should fit on a couple 2TB drives;-)
Agreed. It assumes the republican position on global warming is wrong (I rather like it to be honest) then claims the republicans are against science in general without any other evidence. It's a complete political blathering with little basis in fact - much like the behaviour it claims to be against.
The semiconductor fab guys exceeded the "theoretical limit" for photo-lithography years ago. I'm writing this post with a processor with 45nm features and I believe Intel is planning 22nm this year. Not sure how the technique compares to the microscope, but people have been using light for things much "smaller" than light for quite some time now.
No, actually I am not the problem with physics. I'm not even involved. I read headlines about dark matter and I follow up by going to Wikipedia and find that the "expected" rotation curve is one that would be predicted by Keplers laws if start orbit the center of the galaxy and have no interaction with each other. That's clearly WRONG. I (being an engineer) write a simple program to plot the rotation curve assuming a uniform star distribution where everything interacts and I get the opposite problem for observation. That makes me happy because I know my simple model is wrong too - the distribution is not uniform like I assumed. So then I look at some of the information about how the real curves are measured - looks OK at first, so I don't dig deeper. I suppose the cosmologists who know better are too busy looking for wacked out shit to update the Wikipedia page with real information on the "expected" curve. I see stuff (here on/.) where they say something can be explained by a spherical diistribution of dark matter enveloping a galaxy. OMFG why would dark matter gravitationally effect normal matter but not end up with a similar distribution?
No sir, I am not the problem with physics. I am an engineer who first exhausts the tools I have to explain something before looking for exotic new shit to explain it. Occams Razor and all that - you know, simple explanations. The problem with physics is that ever since relativity, quantum mechanics, and the good old wave-particle duality (non of which I dispute BTW) nobody in physics seems to want a normal explanation for anything. I can not set the straight as you suggest, but I can insight a lively discussion of the problem on slashdot from time to time.
Also, altough the mass distribution of an spiral galaxy isn't very similar to a point mass, eliptical ones are quite well approximated by a point.
No. No they are not. A perfectly flat disk is not even approximated well by a point. Yes, the distribution of "flux" is symmetric about 1 rotation axis, but the flux density and hence the gravitational pull is not uniform in all directions at the same distance. This means an object won't orbit the disk at the same speed it would a point mass at the centre. That is exactly what I meant by misinterpretation of the divergence theorem - the total flux through a surface enclosing the mass is the same as that of a point mass, but the distribution is only uniform for certain distributions (like spherical).
It's not enough to find the Higgs and confirm the standard model. No, we must always be looking for strange new shit that violates the laws of physics as we know them. New particles, new types of matter, dark energy, broken symmetry, anything unusual. And if it can't be proven so much the better. Yes, I'm still waiting for them to realize that Keplers laws do not apply to galaxies, and the galactic rotation curve does not require dark matter to explain. Some of them also fail at application of the divergence theorem when it come to gravity (they basically assume any mass distribution can be treated as a point mass). Let's get the fundamentals right first before we run off looking for actual violations of the laws of physics please.
Sure, I've wanted something like that for years. The problem is that we all need a fixed IP address so we can get to our server from anywhere, and so email can be sent directly to it P-to-P, and so our little OSS distributed facebook profile can be linked from outside (i.e. from our friends FB server).
Apple tried to sue Microsoft in the 90's for copying the "look and feel" of the Macintosh. Microsoft fought hard an won on the grounds that Copyright only covers the actual CODE and not the look and feel of a program. This is one thing we really can thank Microsoft for - legal precedent in the field of software on this major issue. It should be obvious to people, but apparently it's not. He didn't COPY the tetris program - just made his own that works similarly.
This "harmoization" of US law with other countries is getting really old. We need to decide what we stand for and do it. Others can do as they wish. Why don't we just dump our whole government and put the states under some other one? Since we think adopting all their rules is a good idea... That is the stupidest reason I've ever seen for changing a law, and it gets used more often than a stupid idea should come up.
Couldn't he just have spray canned it with some reflective paint??
In middle school back in the 70's my brother covered the underside of an umbrella with aluminium foil, turned it over, mounted a grate on the handle/shaft near the focus, and grilled hot dogs using sunlight. It can be made much quicker.
I agree that innovation is not a sustainable strategy. So given that as a strategy, you must not help the competition. Once they catch up it's an even race. GE is selling engine tech to China because China does not yet have it. However they're obtaining it by making the big players compete for some short-term business. We're teaching them to fish rather than selling them a fish because we're too greedy. We're focused on tactical deals in an economic game of strategy.
Slashdot Mirror
During all of this, I've noticed the slashdot community seems to lean in favor of nuclear power. Not individuals, but the community as a whole - based on the comments that get highest moderation. This is in spite of the fact that the situation there is a total unmitigated disaster. One person held it up as a case in FAVOR of nuclear power, basically saying - look, even with the natural disasters they only released a little radioactive steam. That's just plain ignorant. The building have exploded, 3 reactors are thought have had partial meltdowns (one of them breached), the simple cooling ponds are in trouble (if they were full of water, someone could just walk in there and confirm it - the fact nobody has says the radiation levels are too high to go in because something is wrong), radiation is more than 10 times background 30km away. And regardless of weather you buy all those facts, it is requiring a HUGE effort of man power to prevent it getting worse and there is no solid plan. I did read they're importing 150 tons of boron to dump on it - because well, you need to do that when there is a little steam leak I suppose...
The spent rods are only "spent" in the sense that they are not useful for producing large amounts of electricity. They are still very radioactive and still generating a lot of heat. So they leave then in the pools for a few years with active cooling until they are easier and safer to transport to whatever processing place they go to. You question still seem valid though since one would presume a "fresh" rod would be even hotter. Or are they not hot until subjected to neutrons in large quantity? What's the mechanism there if they don't start out super hot?
The "diet" drink don't have HFC - that would be too many calories. They use chemical sweeteners instead! Yum...
This is Google we're talking about. All the managers already had technical skills. So the MBAs will take this as another data point indicating that they don't need to understand the details of the business they're running and continue to do a poor job. Other research has shown that the best run companies promote from within - leading to management that knows what the people are doing and can actually help when asked for direction.
You must have both.
I did a "stateless" CGI othello game back in like '94 that stored the game state in the URL. The difference is that I also displayed a board on the screen via HTML generated on the fly. Automatic reload in X seconds was used to have to computer make its response move. The back button worked too. Of course tons of people on /. did similar things back then too.
For the little guy or small company it is. If you need to work with bigger companies to line up production or marketing, the patent prevents them from just taking your design and sending you away. Like the guy who invented intermittent windshield wipers - he needed auto makers to implement it, which they did, but IIRC he had to take them to court (with patent in hand) to force them to pay him. It's much harder to start your own car company claiming one new feature, or even to start an aftermarket retrofit business (which would entail working with others too).
Close. They filed for a patent, but rather than let it be issued, they would wait a year or more (the process is too slow) and then file an amendment. By repeatedly filing amendments, they prevent the patent from being issued and available for public view. They were then also able to make modifications to better encompass the legitimate products being developed by others. Once a target was identified, you try to tweak the patent so they infringe, let it get issued, claim you filed the patent years ago, and enjoy 17 years of royalties. Now they have made it 20 years from the date of (first) filing, so you can't lay low indefinitely. There may be a couple other anti-troll measures, but the main thing was fixing span to the date filed rather than issued. It's wasn't a terrible compromise since it usually takes a couple years from filing to issuing.
Cookies are so last millenium. Firefox 4 is pushing that new WebDB or whatever it's called so companies can keep a whole database of info on your local machine. Heck, they won't even need to keep user information in their own database, they can just query your machine any time you visit them. Go ahead, let them ban cookies altogether so we're forced into this new more scalable and flexible replacement.
If you want to project future sales based on current sales, then you should probably admit that we should consider the amount of time he spent writing the books rather than the time it took amazon or whoever to sell them.
No, the problem is that 350,000 * 99cents * 0.35 = 121K and change, not half a million dollars. You can see a problem without doing any math if you notice that his profits from his 1 dollar books exceeds the number of copies even before you take the 35 percent into account.
So someone cataloged a bunch of data on stars and now one is rechecked because it was interesting. Turns out the data was wrong. How much more bad data is out there that nobody double checked because nobody cared until now?
In the cloud, a smart system can store a single copy of any given file and some pointers to it. That way stuff that gets passed around via email, or even multiple people "downloading" stuff from someplace don't actually create copies in the cloud. Everyone just thinks they have their own copy stored in the cloud. Even online "content" can be compressed since every "news outlet" just copies a blurb from someone else - this is a bit more complicated since they usually make a couple minor edits to inject their own opinion. I think with efficient storage like this, the entire net should fit on a couple 2TB drives ;-)
Agreed. It assumes the republican position on global warming is wrong (I rather like it to be honest) then claims the republicans are against science in general without any other evidence. It's a complete political blathering with little basis in fact - much like the behaviour it claims to be against.
Duh. Or is Redhat going to dump all the source files into a single dir too? Somehow I think that would be more trouble than it's worth for them.
And since they'll be searching a single diff instead of a lot of patches, it may actually be easier ;-)
The semiconductor fab guys exceeded the "theoretical limit" for photo-lithography years ago. I'm writing this post with a processor with 45nm features and I believe Intel is planning 22nm this year. Not sure how the technique compares to the microscope, but people have been using light for things much "smaller" than light for quite some time now.
No, actually I am not the problem with physics. I'm not even involved. I read headlines about dark matter and I follow up by going to Wikipedia and find that the "expected" rotation curve is one that would be predicted by Keplers laws if start orbit the center of the galaxy and have no interaction with each other. That's clearly WRONG. I (being an engineer) write a simple program to plot the rotation curve assuming a uniform star distribution where everything interacts and I get the opposite problem for observation. That makes me happy because I know my simple model is wrong too - the distribution is not uniform like I assumed. So then I look at some of the information about how the real curves are measured - looks OK at first, so I don't dig deeper. I suppose the cosmologists who know better are too busy looking for wacked out shit to update the Wikipedia page with real information on the "expected" curve. I see stuff (here on /.) where they say something can be explained by a spherical diistribution of dark matter enveloping a galaxy. OMFG why would dark matter gravitationally effect normal matter but not end up with a similar distribution?
No sir, I am not the problem with physics. I am an engineer who first exhausts the tools I have to explain something before looking for exotic new shit to explain it. Occams Razor and all that - you know, simple explanations. The problem with physics is that ever since relativity, quantum mechanics, and the good old wave-particle duality (non of which I dispute BTW) nobody in physics seems to want a normal explanation for anything. I can not set the straight as you suggest, but I can insight a lively discussion of the problem on slashdot from time to time.
Thanks for playing.
No. No they are not. A perfectly flat disk is not even approximated well by a point. Yes, the distribution of "flux" is symmetric about 1 rotation axis, but the flux density and hence the gravitational pull is not uniform in all directions at the same distance. This means an object won't orbit the disk at the same speed it would a point mass at the centre. That is exactly what I meant by misinterpretation of the divergence theorem - the total flux through a surface enclosing the mass is the same as that of a point mass, but the distribution is only uniform for certain distributions (like spherical).
It's not enough to find the Higgs and confirm the standard model. No, we must always be looking for strange new shit that violates the laws of physics as we know them. New particles, new types of matter, dark energy, broken symmetry, anything unusual. And if it can't be proven so much the better. Yes, I'm still waiting for them to realize that Keplers laws do not apply to galaxies, and the galactic rotation curve does not require dark matter to explain. Some of them also fail at application of the divergence theorem when it come to gravity (they basically assume any mass distribution can be treated as a point mass). Let's get the fundamentals right first before we run off looking for actual violations of the laws of physics please.
Or put rockets on an orbiting shuttle and send it interplanetary. Add some tundra tires and land it on Mars!
Sure, I've wanted something like that for years. The problem is that we all need a fixed IP address so we can get to our server from anywhere, and so email can be sent directly to it P-to-P, and so our little OSS distributed facebook profile can be linked from outside (i.e. from our friends FB server).
Apple tried to sue Microsoft in the 90's for copying the "look and feel" of the Macintosh. Microsoft fought hard an won on the grounds that Copyright only covers the actual CODE and not the look and feel of a program. This is one thing we really can thank Microsoft for - legal precedent in the field of software on this major issue. It should be obvious to people, but apparently it's not. He didn't COPY the tetris program - just made his own that works similarly.
This "harmoization" of US law with other countries is getting really old. We need to decide what we stand for and do it. Others can do as they wish. Why don't we just dump our whole government and put the states under some other one? Since we think adopting all their rules is a good idea... That is the stupidest reason I've ever seen for changing a law, and it gets used more often than a stupid idea should come up.
In middle school back in the 70's my brother covered the underside of an umbrella with aluminium foil, turned it over, mounted a grate on the handle/shaft near the focus, and grilled hot dogs using sunlight. It can be made much quicker.
I agree that innovation is not a sustainable strategy. So given that as a strategy, you must not help the competition. Once they catch up it's an even race. GE is selling engine tech to China because China does not yet have it. However they're obtaining it by making the big players compete for some short-term business. We're teaching them to fish rather than selling them a fish because we're too greedy. We're focused on tactical deals in an economic game of strategy.