I think it would be difficult to do a company like HP. Any additional chip means additional cost, and HP would notice this right away. It would have to be a company that collaborates in the design stage.
Intel has their own network-facing backdoor built into their chips. HP uses them in its laptops - and HP's outsouced-IT service organization supplies these machines to the companies which hire them.
Look up "Intel AMT" on the web. There's lots of stuff on it available there. It's a "feature" intended for large companies' IT operations to use to remotely administer the workers' laptop and desktop machines: Remote update software, detect malware, cut misbehaving machines off the LAN or shut them down, monitor workers' behavior,...
It is "below" the main CPU(s) and OS. It runs even if the main machine is off. It is a man-in-the-middle on the network interface, accepting its own connections from the "mother ship" and configurable to "phone home" when on the road. It can monitor and twiddle all the network traffic, monitor all the I/O (including keystroke logging), access the hard drive, stop the processor, monitor applications for watchdog events and shut them down if they "misbehave", halt and restart the main processors, yadda yadda yadda.
It can also present one of its own intercepted connections-from-afar to the main processor as if it were a terminal interface on another chip. The recommended way to configure Linux or Unix on the box is for this interface to be given a login process with root login privileges.
How do you know if it's disabled? The BIOS TELLS you it's disabled. (If you believe that, especially after the next BIOS firmware update, would you be interested in some land in Nevada?)
Moore's law is about quantity of transistors, not speed of computing, the two just tend to be highly correlated.
However if you go with the alternative speed formulation of "popular Moore's Law", this will be right on the curve if the first large-scale products, with speeds about like the current lab rates, come out in about three years. And it will track the curve for at least another three or four years if the expected speed improvements work out and take that long to deploy, and the limits are where expected.
(There's also a price/performance alternate formulation. No idea how this fits there. But if the process doesn't foul the clean-chambers too badly it looks like it could drop right into the chip fabrication facility upgrade cycle.)
What will get more interesting is if you can stack it up (say with a few hundred atom thick layers of diamond between layers) and do a 3-D structure. (Diamond conducts heat very well - don't know about graphine itself. And multi-bonded carbon can survive very high temperatures if you keep the oxygen away.) By doing that you should be able to follow the transistor-count curve a LONG way out, or spike it upward, for parallelizeable stuff.
That last sounds almost like McClary's "Preposterous Scale Integration" scenario from the early '70s or so. B-)
If there is someone powerful enough to break those systems *and* keep the discovery secret, they're waaay above the league where they'd be interested in your SSH connections. That is, unless you work for the military of a major world power and are known to be transmitting valuable intel.
Or if you work for a hi-tech company with, say, technology that China (for example) wants badly enough to put their version of the NSA to work cracking you and then handing the company's designs to (for example) Huawei.
The company I work for would qualify.
The problem with the tunnel is that it can turn a successful attack on one end into a successful attack on the other. Taking it down when not using it reduces the window of exploitable time. (Which probably still doesn't make a lot of difference for attackers of major-power-intelligence-community level, so never mind. B-) )
A laughable but realistic line from Blazing Saddles: "OK, we'll take the niggers and the chinks, but NOT THE IRISH!"
It's also a western state old-timer in joke. The Irish immigrants actually WERE at the bottom of the social totem pole, below blacks and Chinese.
Oops. Was rushed and didn't read the previous post all the way thorough. This was addressed. But it didn't get it quite right - it had the Chinese below the Irish. In fact in the old west the Irish WERE below the Chinese - and most of the Indians (depending on tribe, location, period, rank, and individual merit - many American Indians were quite high status).
As I understand it (from my wife, a descendant of the settlers), the issue was that the Irish immigration wave was perceived as a very large number of extremely poor religious fanatics who took over the local governments and imposed their religion by law. Thus were seen as a threat to the freedom of those around them. (Much of Oregon, for instance, was settled by people who moved en masse from Boston, after a government driven by the Irish instituted pro-Catholic religious persecution and book censorship - in that former bastion of revolutionary freedom.)
Think of how, say, the Wahabis are viewed now by the intolerant. Now imagine their poorest, driven by famine, immigrating in large numbers, setting up ghetto gangs and staging gang warfare, then flooding a major east-coast city with enough to vote in the next city council, passing a Wahabi-style version of Islamic Law as a city ordinance (including anti-"blasphemy" laws and a censorship board that purges both religious books - including bible versions - they don't agree with and "pornographic" books they don't like), followed by mobs burning the publishers of such books and chasing women who didn't cover their hair when going to church. Then a bunch of them are hired as cheap labor by a major corporation and start showing up in YOUR neighborhood, taking all the industrial jobs and flooding the downtown. Now switch the image of the typical individual from a thin ascetic to a big, strong, alcoholic, street-mob brawler. THAT is how the Irish were perceived.
Code under an open-source license is still copyrighted, but with a permissive license that allows one to do some things normally reserved only for the work's copyright holder. By contrast, a work in the public domain is not covered by copyright law at all.
Actually PD is covered by copyright law: It's free to modify it and assert a copyright on the "derived work" cwith the full set of copyright restrictions. Ditto to combine it with other works - PD or not - and copyright the collection.
What this means for software is that if you PD it:
- Somebody else can fix a bug or add a feature, copyright the fixed version, and then NOBODY ELSE, including YOU, can fix that bug or add that feature in YOUR version.
- Somebody can make a distribution consisting of your PD software combined with that of others, copyright THAT, and then NOBODY ELSE, including YOU and the rest of the authors of the pieces, can produce a distribution structured like the copyrighted one.
So the open source licenses generally retain copyright over the original work and require the additions to be made open (for some value of open) as well, as "payment" for using the underlying work. Some of them also try to more things (like push for as much software as possible to be opened), but this is the main point.
If copyright wasn't applicable to software the open source licenses wouldn't be needed to defend against these threats. (We'd lose the requirement for the source to go out, but gain the ability to reverse-engineer everything and publish the "recovered source".)
I'm curious about the strength of such a coating; there doesn't not appear to be any suggestion that the glass is bonded to the surface by anything stronger than van der Waals forces.
If the short-chains bond to each other, some of them might bond to the surface (if its structure is appropriate).
Even if not, unless the surface is mirror-smooth it will have irregularities. A liquid that cross-links into a solid will wrap such irregularities and form a mechanical interference bond - like a surface wrapped under a rivet, a mushroom-shaped extension into a void, or a root into a crack.
Van der Walls forces are not trivial - especially between form-fitted irregularly-shaped solids. And if the "glass" and its substrate have any charge asymmetry the setting glass will also tend to settle into place with opposite charges nearby, forming something like a hydrogen bond.
There's a lot of evidence that they are acting out of normal and fairly standard psychological patterns. Humans are less likely to help in large groups. This is known as the bystander effect.
I think this one is a bit beyond the bystander effect.
This was a gang rape. The witnesses may have had a justified fear of violent retaliation if they were to turn in the rapists.
Actually it's a variant of "misprison of felony" - which (for a long time) England had and the US did not.
And it's a massive expansion of the power of the state. It requires witnesses of crimes to put their lives at risk (from retaliation by the crooks, especially organized gangs) to perform an involuntary service to the state for the state's own purposes (enforcing the law to maintain domestic tranquility).
As such it should be vulnerable to a challenge as a violation of the 13th amendment.
1) Defend the borders & provide for basic public saftey. 2) Deliver the mail 3) Build the roads 4) _Maybe_ provide public education 5) Collect enough tax renevue to do ONLY the above.
Delete 2) and 4). Both can be (and have been) provided by private enterprise and 4) also by voluntary organizations.
Add "settle disputes (including contract performance and interpretation) between parties who can't agree on a voluntary remedy or voluntary binding-mediation agency (or terms for a duel B-) )". (Presuming you didn't intend to include that in "public safety".)
Reminds me of a story my wife tells about her early career.
She was doing database for a bookstore at a warehouse in a neighborhood with a lot of what we now call "homeless". Came in one morning to find the door blocked by one of the drunks sleeping in the doorway. She called dispatch for police help in getting him to move on.
Dispatch wanted to know if he was an accident victim. She facetiously replied that he'd only been "hit by a Night Train" ("Night Train" being a really cheap fortified wine).
Apparently the dispatcher wasn't familiar with the idiom. A couple paramedics arrived minutes later looking for the victim of the train accident. They had a good laugh when she told them what she'd told the dispatcher and finally managed to get the drunk to move on by threatening him with a trip to detox.
Its intent is obviously to criminalize witnesses who do not intervene... and a poorly-thought-out law it is.
No, not at all. It's intent is to criminalize failure to report crimes you witness, not failure to intervene in crimes you witness.
Actually it's probably a reaction to the reluctance of disarmed Californians to report gang activity for fear of gang retaliation against witnesses (along with the gang-supported "don't be a snitch" propaganda). The police can't or won't protect them and they aren't allowed to protect themselves. So reporting possibly gang-related crimes (or those by lone-wolf crooks willing to beat or kill a witness) can be a major health hazard.
Hee hee. My high school chemistry teacher pulled this on at the start of the class:
- Intro that this test was about carefully following instructions.
- First instruction to read all the instructions before doing any.
- Page of fine print instructions involving things like filling in all the "o"s in a line,
- Final instruction to ignore others and just sign name on the top. I was the only one who got it.
Rather than turn it when done I completed it and sat at my seat with folded hands so as to give the others a chance for an "Aha!" moment. This lasted for many minutes, while others gradually noticed I wasn't doing anything while they were slaving away and gave me dirty looks.
Given the way the first and last instructions were worded I could have claimed that the right thing to do was then to go back and do the middle ones. But the point of the test was clear.
This guy liked perfection on tests and would treat a student to an ice cream sundae for getting a perfect score on an exam and an ice cream cone for ditto on a quiz (reserving a section of the blackboard for a list of names of people who had "joined" the "sundae club" and "cone core"). This motivated his students amazingly well. I felt like I'd betrayed him when I only got 790 out of 800 on the chemistry section of the college boards. B-(
Now while this could theoretically be used to censor regions of users, it could not be used to expose you (since it isn't the complete IP address)
Sure it could expose me. I have my own Class-Cs - two of 'em. When I'm on one the first three octets point straight to me.
When I'm running from my DSL I have an eight-IP address block (broadcast / broken-broadcast / modem / five-usable) so first three octets point to a group of 32 of which I'm one. For DSL users with one-usable it points to a group of 64 users of which they're one. For unfettered PPP (such as dialup), where the IP addresses can be arbitrary, it's still one-in-256.
Sorry, guys. One-in-64 (or even one-in-256) is too close to home for me.
Doubly so because, once it's down to one-in-256, some governments will be willing to bust up to 255 innocents to get one guy they REALLY don't like. I don't like the idea, when I'm on the road, of being one of the innocent up-to-255 when some terrorist, spy, or whatever uses a dialup and we "win the lottery" and end up with the same first-three-octets.
(Much as I hate to do anything that might appear to support patent trolls...)
Patent trolls use the law to redress injuries that would not exist were it not possible to obtain "relief" through the courts. This is not the case for patent holders who produce actual products using the patents, because infringers take money away from the patent holder's business. Patent trolls have no revenue or prospect of revenue save what they can obtain through lawsuits. Therefore the "injury" they suffer by infringement is a legal fiction.
Infringement of a patent while the patent holder is trying to arrange to put the invention into production is also a real injury, with real damages to real inventors / patent holders. Perhaps it's an even larger one than infringement when a patent holder has already gotten over the hump and into production - because it cuts off his opportunity to exploit his invention at all, hits him when he's weak and resource poor, and when he has a hard time demonstrating the damage because he doesn't have a track record of building a profitable product.
The difference between a real inventor trying to exploit an invention and a patent troll is solely a matter of intent: Does the plaintiff intend to actually exploit the invention or license it to others to do so? Or does he intend solely to wait until others re-invent and exploit the invention, then extort them? The latter is "rent-seeking behavior" and well recognized by economists as a bad thing. But the law doesn't currently distinguish the two cases and would have a hard time doing so if the legislatures and courts tried.
... they passed a DC current through the thing, which caused the small engine beam to expand, causing it to heat up and move the mass. The piezoelectric effect causes the resistance in the small engine beam to change, which causes the beam to cool down and move the mass back with help from the larger spring beam. Rinse, repeat. Effectively a thermoelectric buzzer.... Am I understanding the paper correctly?
As far as you went.
But the alternating heating/cooling doesn't have to come from current through the material. It could come from alternating heating/cooling of its environment, for instance. Like by periodically-varying temperature changes in a fluid or high-intensity illumination.
Thermoacoustic machinery operates by using very high intensity sound - high enough that it makes major periodic temperature changes in the working fluid due to compression and rarefaction. This is used to build heat engines and heat pumps, sometimes with no moving parts but a gas. And it can operate at small scales and high frequencies.
It will be interesting to see if arrays of devices using this technology can make a better electrical interface for pulling power out of or putting it into a thermoacoustic device than piezoelectric devices working just on mechanical coupling to the motion of the working fluid.
TFA states that they're using back-breeding techniques to breed something that resembles an Aurochs, NOT doing nuclear transfer of existing Aurochs DNA.
However if the measure of "resemblence" is "matching the recovered DNA" rather than "having the same internal and external morphology" it's as "correct" as transferring the DNA for that part of the genome which was recovered.
Possibly better, because the result is likely to have DNA for the missing parts that is the same as, or very close to, the original (and guaranteed not to have an organism-aborting interaction with the part that was recovered and "bred-to-match").
"researchers in Poland are working on the same problem."
Problem?
As in "problems at the end of the chapter to be solved by the student".
I.e. task where the person(s) doing it may not have all the information and/or understanding up front and thus needs to do some skull sweat and/or research to get it right.
Then they have some previously lost genes and gene-combinations to breed into domestic cattle.
Most of the lost genes will probably be things that got bred out because the alternatives make a better domestic animal. But some of 'em might be useful "better" stuff that just got lost by chance.
Once it's all sorted out we should end up with some new and improved breeds of cattle containing a few genetic "lost treasures"
Slashdot Mirror
I think it would be difficult to do a company like HP. Any additional chip means additional cost, and HP would notice this right away. It would have to be a company that collaborates in the design stage.
Intel has their own network-facing backdoor built into their chips. HP uses them in its laptops - and HP's outsouced-IT service organization supplies these machines to the companies which hire them.
Look up "Intel AMT" on the web. There's lots of stuff on it available there. It's a "feature" intended for large companies' IT operations to use to remotely administer the workers' laptop and desktop machines: Remote update software, detect malware, cut misbehaving machines off the LAN or shut them down, monitor workers' behavior, ...
It is "below" the main CPU(s) and OS. It runs even if the main machine is off. It is a man-in-the-middle on the network interface, accepting its own connections from the "mother ship" and configurable to "phone home" when on the road. It can monitor and twiddle all the network traffic, monitor all the I/O (including keystroke logging), access the hard drive, stop the processor, monitor applications for watchdog events and shut them down if they "misbehave", halt and restart the main processors, yadda yadda yadda.
It can also present one of its own intercepted connections-from-afar to the main processor as if it were a terminal interface on another chip. The recommended way to configure Linux or Unix on the box is for this interface to be given a login process with root login privileges.
How do you know if it's disabled? The BIOS TELLS you it's disabled. (If you believe that, especially after the next BIOS firmware update, would you be interested in some land in Nevada?)
Moore's law is about quantity of transistors, not speed of computing, the two just tend to be highly correlated.
However if you go with the alternative speed formulation of "popular Moore's Law", this will be right on the curve if the first large-scale products, with speeds about like the current lab rates, come out in about three years. And it will track the curve for at least another three or four years if the expected speed improvements work out and take that long to deploy, and the limits are where expected.
(There's also a price/performance alternate formulation. No idea how this fits there. But if the process doesn't foul the clean-chambers too badly it looks like it could drop right into the chip fabrication facility upgrade cycle.)
What will get more interesting is if you can stack it up (say with a few hundred atom thick layers of diamond between layers) and do a 3-D structure. (Diamond conducts heat very well - don't know about graphine itself. And multi-bonded carbon can survive very high temperatures if you keep the oxygen away.) By doing that you should be able to follow the transistor-count curve a LONG way out, or spike it upward, for parallelizeable stuff.
That last sounds almost like McClary's "Preposterous Scale Integration" scenario from the early '70s or so. B-)
If there is someone powerful enough to break those systems *and* keep the discovery secret, they're waaay above the league where they'd be interested in your SSH connections. That is, unless you work for the military of a major world power and are known to be transmitting valuable intel.
Or if you work for a hi-tech company with, say, technology that China (for example) wants badly enough to put their version of the NSA to work cracking you and then handing the company's designs to (for example) Huawei.
The company I work for would qualify.
The problem with the tunnel is that it can turn a successful attack on one end into a successful attack on the other. Taking it down when not using it reduces the window of exploitable time. (Which probably still doesn't make a lot of difference for attackers of major-power-intelligence-community level, so never mind. B-) )
Oops. Was rushed and didn't read the previous post all the way thorough. This was addressed. But it didn't get it quite right - it had the Chinese below the Irish. In fact in the old west the Irish WERE below the Chinese - and most of the Indians (depending on tribe, location, period, rank, and individual merit - many American Indians were quite high status).
As I understand it (from my wife, a descendant of the settlers), the issue was that the Irish immigration wave was perceived as a very large number of extremely poor religious fanatics who took over the local governments and imposed their religion by law. Thus were seen as a threat to the freedom of those around them. (Much of Oregon, for instance, was settled by people who moved en masse from Boston, after a government driven by the Irish instituted pro-Catholic religious persecution and book censorship - in that former bastion of revolutionary freedom.)
Think of how, say, the Wahabis are viewed now by the intolerant. Now imagine their poorest, driven by famine, immigrating in large numbers, setting up ghetto gangs and staging gang warfare, then flooding a major east-coast city with enough to vote in the next city council, passing a Wahabi-style version of Islamic Law as a city ordinance (including anti-"blasphemy" laws and a censorship board that purges both religious books - including bible versions - they don't agree with and "pornographic" books they don't like), followed by mobs burning the publishers of such books and chasing women who didn't cover their hair when going to church. Then a bunch of them are hired as cheap labor by a major corporation and start showing up in YOUR neighborhood, taking all the industrial jobs and flooding the downtown. Now switch the image of the typical individual from a thin ascetic to a big, strong, alcoholic, street-mob brawler. THAT is how the Irish were perceived.
A laughable but realistic line from Blazing Saddles: "OK, we'll take the niggers and the chinks, but NOT THE IRISH!"
It's also a western state old-timer in joke. The Irish immigrants actually WERE at the bottom of the social totem pole, below blacks and Chinese.
Code under an open-source license is still copyrighted, but with a permissive license that allows one to do some things normally reserved only for the work's copyright holder. By contrast, a work in the public domain is not covered by copyright law at all.
Actually PD is covered by copyright law: It's free to modify it and assert a copyright on the "derived work" cwith the full set of copyright restrictions. Ditto to combine it with other works - PD or not - and copyright the collection.
What this means for software is that if you PD it:
- Somebody else can fix a bug or add a feature, copyright the fixed version, and then NOBODY ELSE, including YOU, can fix that bug or add that feature in YOUR version.
- Somebody can make a distribution consisting of your PD software combined with that of others, copyright THAT, and then NOBODY ELSE, including YOU and the rest of the authors of the pieces, can produce a distribution structured like the copyrighted one.
So the open source licenses generally retain copyright over the original work and require the additions to be made open (for some value of open) as well, as "payment" for using the underlying work. Some of them also try to more things (like push for as much software as possible to be opened), but this is the main point.
If copyright wasn't applicable to software the open source licenses wouldn't be needed to defend against these threats. (We'd lose the requirement for the source to go out, but gain the ability to reverse-engineer everything and publish the "recovered source".)
No fees is sanity? Shouldn't the RIAA have to pay for bringing what seems to be an essentially frivolous lawsuit?
Worse: dismissed without prejudice.
In other words the RIAA can rinse and repeat... B-b
I'm curious about the strength of such a coating; there doesn't not appear to be any suggestion that the glass is bonded to the surface by anything stronger than van der Waals forces.
If the short-chains bond to each other, some of them might bond to the surface (if its structure is appropriate).
Even if not, unless the surface is mirror-smooth it will have irregularities. A liquid that cross-links into a solid will wrap such irregularities and form a mechanical interference bond - like a surface wrapped under a rivet, a mushroom-shaped extension into a void, or a root into a crack.
Van der Walls forces are not trivial - especially between form-fitted irregularly-shaped solids. And if the "glass" and its substrate have any charge asymmetry the setting glass will also tend to settle into place with opposite charges nearby, forming something like a hydrogen bond.
This might stick on to many surfaces very well.
There's a lot of evidence that they are acting out of normal and fairly standard psychological patterns. Humans are less likely to help in large groups. This is known as the bystander effect.
I think this one is a bit beyond the bystander effect.
This was a gang rape. The witnesses may have had a justified fear of violent retaliation if they were to turn in the rapists.
The California law is a variant duty to rescue.
Actually it's a variant of "misprison of felony" - which (for a long time) England had and the US did not.
And it's a massive expansion of the power of the state. It requires witnesses of crimes to put their lives at risk (from retaliation by the crooks, especially organized gangs) to perform an involuntary service to the state for the state's own purposes (enforcing the law to maintain domestic tranquility).
As such it should be vulnerable to a challenge as a violation of the 13th amendment.
Delete 2) and 4). Both can be (and have been) provided by private enterprise and 4) also by voluntary organizations.
Add "settle disputes (including contract performance and interpretation) between parties who can't agree on a voluntary remedy or voluntary binding-mediation agency (or terms for a duel B-) )". (Presuming you didn't intend to include that in "public safety".)
Reminds me of a story my wife tells about her early career.
She was doing database for a bookstore at a warehouse in a neighborhood with a lot of what we now call "homeless". Came in one morning to find the door blocked by one of the drunks sleeping in the doorway. She called dispatch for police help in getting him to move on.
Dispatch wanted to know if he was an accident victim. She facetiously replied that he'd only been "hit by a Night Train" ("Night Train" being a really cheap fortified wine).
Apparently the dispatcher wasn't familiar with the idiom. A couple paramedics arrived minutes later looking for the victim of the train accident. They had a good laugh when she told them what she'd told the dispatcher and finally managed to get the drunk to move on by threatening him with a trip to detox.
Actually it's probably a reaction to the reluctance of disarmed Californians to report gang activity for fear of gang retaliation against witnesses (along with the gang-supported "don't be a snitch" propaganda). The police can't or won't protect them and they aren't allowed to protect themselves. So reporting possibly gang-related crimes (or those by lone-wolf crooks willing to beat or kill a witness) can be a major health hazard.
Won't work, of course.
Hee hee. My high school chemistry teacher pulled this on at the start of the class:
- Intro that this test was about carefully following instructions.
- First instruction to read all the instructions before doing any.
- Page of fine print instructions involving things like filling in all the "o"s in a line,
- Final instruction to ignore others and just sign name on the top.
I was the only one who got it.
Rather than turn it when done I completed it and sat at my seat with folded hands so as to give the others a chance for an "Aha!" moment. This lasted for many minutes, while others gradually noticed I wasn't doing anything while they were slaving away and gave me dirty looks.
Given the way the first and last instructions were worded I could have claimed that the right thing to do was then to go back and do the middle ones. But the point of the test was clear.
This guy liked perfection on tests and would treat a student to an ice cream sundae for getting a perfect score on an exam and an ice cream cone for ditto on a quiz (reserving a section of the blackboard for a list of names of people who had "joined" the "sundae club" and "cone core"). This motivated his students amazingly well. I felt like I'd betrayed him when I only got 790 out of 800 on the chemistry section of the college boards. B-(
Now while this could theoretically be used to censor regions of users, it could not be used to expose you (since it isn't the complete IP address)
Sure it could expose me. I have my own Class-Cs - two of 'em. When I'm on one the first three octets point straight to me.
When I'm running from my DSL I have an eight-IP address block (broadcast / broken-broadcast / modem / five-usable) so first three octets point to a group of 32 of which I'm one. For DSL users with one-usable it points to a group of 64 users of which they're one. For unfettered PPP (such as dialup), where the IP addresses can be arbitrary, it's still one-in-256.
Sorry, guys. One-in-64 (or even one-in-256) is too close to home for me.
Doubly so because, once it's down to one-in-256, some governments will be willing to bust up to 255 innocents to get one guy they REALLY don't like. I don't like the idea, when I'm on the road, of being one of the innocent up-to-255 when some terrorist, spy, or whatever uses a dialup and we "win the lottery" and end up with the same first-three-octets.
... when there is a slashvertisement, everyone bitches. ...
This guy sidesteps, and everyone is complaining
Also: There are people bitching about it being a slashvertisement ANYHOW. B-b
(Much as I hate to do anything that might appear to support patent trolls ...)
Patent trolls use the law to redress injuries that would not exist were it not possible to obtain "relief" through the courts. This is not the case for patent holders who produce actual products using the patents, because infringers take money away from the patent holder's business. Patent trolls have no revenue or prospect of revenue save what they can obtain through lawsuits. Therefore the "injury" they suffer by infringement is a legal fiction.
Infringement of a patent while the patent holder is trying to arrange to put the invention into production is also a real injury, with real damages to real inventors / patent holders. Perhaps it's an even larger one than infringement when a patent holder has already gotten over the hump and into production - because it cuts off his opportunity to exploit his invention at all, hits him when he's weak and resource poor, and when he has a hard time demonstrating the damage because he doesn't have a track record of building a profitable product.
The difference between a real inventor trying to exploit an invention and a patent troll is solely a matter of intent: Does the plaintiff intend to actually exploit the invention or license it to others to do so? Or does he intend solely to wait until others re-invent and exploit the invention, then extort them? The latter is "rent-seeking behavior" and well recognized by economists as a bad thing. But the law doesn't currently distinguish the two cases and would have a hard time doing so if the legislatures and courts tried.
What does Chuck has more that we don't have ? ... Something biometric ... oh probably Chuck Norris doesn't need biometrics to enter something ..
If the terminal has biometric sensors he doesn't have to enter anything to log in. It detects that he's Chuck Norris and immediately surrenders.
... they passed a DC current through the thing, which caused the small engine beam to expand, causing it to heat up and move the mass. The piezoelectric effect causes the resistance in the small engine beam to change, which causes the beam to cool down and move the mass back with help from the larger spring beam. Rinse, repeat. Effectively a thermoelectric buzzer. ... Am I understanding the paper correctly?
As far as you went.
But the alternating heating/cooling doesn't have to come from current through the material. It could come from alternating heating/cooling of its environment, for instance. Like by periodically-varying temperature changes in a fluid or high-intensity illumination.
Thermoacoustic machinery operates by using very high intensity sound - high enough that it makes major periodic temperature changes in the working fluid due to compression and rarefaction. This is used to build heat engines and heat pumps, sometimes with no moving parts but a gas. And it can operate at small scales and high frequencies.
It will be interesting to see if arrays of devices using this technology can make a better electrical interface for pulling power out of or putting it into a thermoacoustic device than piezoelectric devices working just on mechanical coupling to the motion of the working fluid.
Going back to the grandparent poster's question:
Of those who DON'T do regular tape backups, a lot of them would LOVE to if the tape capacities were higher and cost per bit lower.
This looks like a case of re-enabling technology.
Actually, I meant that "Chuck Norris" is only a universal password if the person entering it is Chuck Norris.
TFA states that they're using back-breeding techniques to breed something that resembles an Aurochs, NOT doing nuclear transfer of existing Aurochs DNA.
However if the measure of "resemblence" is "matching the recovered DNA" rather than "having the same internal and external morphology" it's as "correct" as transferring the DNA for that part of the genome which was recovered.
Possibly better, because the result is likely to have DNA for the missing parts that is the same as, or very close to, the original (and guaranteed not to have an organism-aborting interaction with the part that was recovered and "bred-to-match").
But it's a lot more work than gene splicing.
"researchers in Poland are working on the same problem."
Problem?
As in "problems at the end of the chapter to be solved by the student".
I.e. task where the person(s) doing it may not have all the information and/or understanding up front and thus needs to do some skull sweat and/or research to get it right.
What if they do succeed? What happens then?
Then they have some previously lost genes and gene-combinations to breed into domestic cattle.
Most of the lost genes will probably be things that got bred out because the alternatives make a better domestic animal. But some of 'em might be useful "better" stuff that just got lost by chance.
Once it's all sorted out we should end up with some new and improved breeds of cattle containing a few genetic "lost treasures"
Come on, it's not Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee is dead. The new password MUST be Jack Bauer.
Close but no cigar.
"Jack Bauer" might work for physical access. But for password access to databases and encrypted files it's "Chloe O'Brian".