Too bad God remembered to strip the symbols at that point, because if he had left them in, we wouldn't have this silly evolution vs. intelligent design argument at all, and wouldn't have to figure out everything about our DNA by ourselves.
Who says he stripped the symbols? Or even the comments? There's a LOT of "junk DNA" in there. Maybe we just need to learn the language and/or finish reverse-engineering the load file format.
Shooting at a close wall representing a target far away, and shooting at a target far away are not the same thing, ballistically speaking. [details deleted]
But you can use the same sort of code with, say, eight (or fewer) microphones and locate the gun muzzle in three-D at the moment it discharges. With the two locations you can compute the full trajectory.
Yes they didn't do that here - because they were working with an existing game that only understood the point of aim being at the screen plane, even if the target was rendered in 3-D. But there's no reason a future game/simulation couldn't be written to do the full and correct computation.
You'd also need a head-locater so the image can be corrected for the shooter's eye position. Then it becomes a pseudo-3-D window on the scene.
Meanwhile, since the shooter had an uncorrected view of the scene (which effectively corresponds to being at a known location with respect to the scene) the error from correct trajectory could be adequately approximated (and the game, designed for a player in front of a screen, may already do that).
The other advantage of monogamy over polygyny is that, with polygyny, a few rich guys suck in a lot of the hot babes and the bulk of the males end up with a less desirable partner or none at all.
So if they want the nerds to reproduce and raise rug-nerds to keep the infrastructure running for their heirs to milk, the ruling class needs to give up on, or at least limit the size of, their harems.
Things don't evolve "for a reason". They just evolve.
Sometimes they change into something not so great. Then it's a benefit to turn them off, so they're likely to stay that way (or those that get turned back on are likely to be bread out).
Sometimes they just get turned off randomly. Even if this makes the victims less adapted, if it doesn't kill them outright this might hang around and become the dominant, or only, version just through random chance in a small population. (In humanity's case there's evidence that our predecessors ALMOST went extinct and the current human population diverged from a very small number of survivors.)
Currently inactive DNA was active in the past.
Not necessarily - at least in our ancestors. (Unless you count things like viruses that infected great^500th granddad as "ancestors".) There's no reason that a non-coding region can't evolve without ever being "active". For instance: There's a lot of "junk DNA" that appears to be sequences that tend to be better at being spliced in by repair enzymes than other sequences. With time and DNA damage this stuff tends to pile up an produce more and longer non-coding sections - which then mutate and diverge - without ever coding anything, neither protein nor regulation, or even being otherwise useful (like by occasionally getting spliced into a working gene to modify a protein in a potentially useful way).
There's just no evolutionary pressure for it to be removed, so it sticks around.
Yep. Unless it causes a significant problem, its consumption of a few extra DNA subunits during cell replication is such a minor detriment that it gets lost in the noise.
Basically, the invention here is the inclusion of information that lets third-party programs better understand what to do with the format. You can imagine, for example, if HTML included something like this. The del ('strikethrough') tag might be written:
That code would allow a program that did not natively understand the tag to implement a simple version of it. The idea is to allow new features to be introduced into the format while enabling older versions of the software to use them without updating their code. The necessary code comes with the file.
In other words, it's a way to include executable code in one part of the file, and a call to it in another.
Presuming your characterization is correct, what Microsoft patented is a particular way to build an unpatchable security hole into an XML editor. B-)
What does XML being an open standard have to do with anything?
The fact that it was an open standard FOR REPRESENTING DOCUMENTS AS FILE CONTENTS so they can be MANIPULATED BY COMPUTER PROGRAMS should make it clear that representing a document as a single XML file and writing an editor to edit such documents were explicitly contemplated in the open standard. And the fact that the standard was open constitutes publishing this prior art.
If Microsoft came up with something novel, non-obvious, and useful ABOUT editing a document represented entirely within a single XML file they would be entitled to a patent on THAT ASPECT. But that doesn't constitute inventing the editing of XML document files in general and thus doesn't entitle them to such a patent.
Note that it's entirely possible that the slashdot article misrepresented what was patented. This has happened a lot in the past. So perhaps Microsoft did come up with some cuteness to include in an XML editor and that was what they patented.
But that would not make as big a splash on the Slashdot front page. B-)
According to the Wikipedia article on chapter 11, chapter 11 lets the company run either under a court-appointed trustee or the "debtor in posession", i.e. the original management acting as a trustee and operating under the same rules, behind the shield of the bankruptcy process. And:
Appointment of a trustee requires some wrongdoing or gross mismanagement on the part of existing management and is relatively rare.
Looks like the judge is saying that, while it isn't clear yet whether SCO will be able to emerge from chapter 11 as a viable business or will have to be liquidated under chapter 7, the current management is either grossly mismanaging the company or at least making it appear that they aren't doing as well for the interests of the creditors and stockholders as a trustee would.
Maybe this is the judge's way of putting a watchdog on 'em to make sure they don't run out the door with or (further) destroy the value of some of the remaining assets before things get settled?
(Not only am I NAL but I'm especially NA bankruptcy L.)
I doubt it'll be supported straight out of the box, but when someone hacks this thing to allow the camera and projector to work at the same time, I expect to start seeing all kind of creative shots.
Augmented reality will be even more fun when you can directly augment the actual reality. B-)
I'm always amazed at how little variation there really is in energy production. Really there are only two sources of energy here on earth:
-Solar -Nuclear
Third is inertial: Tidal power, which comes from slowing the Earth's rotation. Some of the energy goes into raising the moon's orbit (or the Earth/Moon system's orbit around the sun) and the rest moves water and air in ways that can be tapped.
I remember updating the HARDWARE of my modem: Changing the swamping resistors to reduce the Q of the filters and broaden the passbands so the Rx side would work at 300 as well as the original 110 baud. B-)
Regen braking systems are about 30% efficient right now. So yes, if each mountain is about a third of the size of the previous one you'll be fine. But don't kid yourself into thinking you're recovering the vast majority of the energy it took to get up.
Anything you recover is fuel you didn't have to burn.
I expect the efficiency of regenerative braking to rise significantly with the deployment of the new fast-charge (low internal loss, high current, high power density) lithium battery technology.
They need a big enough battery to recycle the energy from coming down from a mountain pass to go up the next pass
I really hope you don't mean the second pass being as high as the first.
Yes if you're going generally uphill the batteries will be more depleted by the time you reach the same height (unless you've run the engine to replace the losses). But the power you salvaged by regenerative braking is power you'd otherwise had to supply by burning fuel.
If you're going generally downhill you can generally use the regenerative braking salvaged power to get up the next, lower, pass without running the engine and can thus arrive at the valley floor with more charge than you had at the top of the highest pass, without burning fuel, even if you had to slow in the intermediate valleys until you didn't have the kinetic energy to climb the next hump.
Regenerative braking is about making the engine "see" a load roughly equivalent to a constant speed on a long, constant-slope ramp, though the real cycle is up/down, speed/slow, stop/start.
When you're going DOWN a steep slope you are gaining more kinetic energy from the loss in altitude than you're losing to rolling and air friction. You can throw that extra energy away as heat and sound by using your brakes and engine braking. Or you can save much of it by charging batteries to run a motor later.
Yes your generator / charge controller / battery / inverter / motor system is far from 100% efficient. So your battery will be more depeleted by the time you've run up to the same height later - unless you ran the engine. But every horsepower-minute you recover and apply to the next upslope is one you don't need to get by burning fuel.
They need a big enough battery to recycle the energy from coming down from a mountain pass to go up the next pass (a longer-range analog of recycling power from a full stop for the next start and acceleration) or cruise across the valley. That will also get a range in excess of a hundred miles on the level and in city traffic.
Do this, with enough engine plus electric horsepower to maintain highway speed up a mountain road, and you've got a car that can fully replace a gasoliine vehicle.
Everyone knows that self regulation leads to utopia, much as disbanding our police departments would lead to a lower crime rate.
1) It has been shown that an armed citizenry reduces the crime rate while a generally disarmed citizenry increases it.
2) The citizenry is generally disarmed by laws prohibiting the general carrying of weapons. (What good does it do to OWN a weapon if you don't have it WITH you and in operable condition when a criminal attacks?)
3) Where such laws do not prevent carrying weapons, and a perceived threat of crime exists, a significant number of citizens chose to arm and train themselves. (This is where the stats on the relationship between citizen gun-carrying rates and crime rates come from.)
4) Such laws are enforced by police departments.
5) Therefore: Should police departments be generally disbanded, reasonable people might expect gun carrying by non-criminals to increase and crime rates to drop as a result.
Note that a significant fraction of the population believes that the Second Amendment bans (purported) laws against carrying weapons for self-protection (and that they are thus "not laws") - but don't carry because of the practical risk from police enforcement of these alleged "non-laws". Thus, in the absense of police enforcement, their self-image as law-abiding citizens would not deter them from carrying weapons for self-protection as they chose to continue obeying those laws they considered valid.
Finally: Alliances between criminals and corrupt police departments lead to massive increases in crime: Corrupt police don't enforce against their partners, the citizens are largely unable to enforce laws themselves because this has been preempted by the corrupted criminal justice system, so the crooks have a field-day operating unopposed. While perhaps the bulk of the police and other criminal justice professionals are honest, it doesn't take many to allow a gang free rein. Most major US cities have a number of incidents of massive police corruption in their history, while the "code of silence" makes it plausible that a far larger number of other crook/police alliances go unreported. The disbanding of a corrupt police department and its replacement by citizen self-protection can be expected to put the skids under such crime waves.
A few years ago I took a trip to Canyonlands national park. According to our guide, it's the most remote part of the continental US. Yet you can get a Verizon signal almost anywhere in the park. So reliably, I was told, that the US park system scrapped an expensive radio system they developed for the park in favor of Verizon cell phones.
But that's a measure of coverage, not reliability. Reliability would involve things like not losing a call or being unable to initiate one in a place that is covered.
I, on the other hand, have a house in a valley near the NV/CA border. It's on AT&T's "last cell" on the edge of their coverage for GSM - and I get all bars and solid service. But Verizon's "last cell" is on the other side of the hill. Despite having three villages and hundreds of houses and the intersection of two main numbered highways, AT&T covers it and Verizon does not. (And on the other side of the hill, at the lake resort village and casino, it's the other way around.)
AT&T has better coverage where I am. Verizon has better coverage on the lake village. Nothing to do with reliability.
Now I've NEVER had AT&T drop a call, or fail to initiate one, at that location. That's a measure of reliability (though a small sample). Here in Silicon Valley I have failed handoffs, failed call initiation, dropped calls, and one-direction-garbled calls rather often. THAT's also measure of (poorer) reliability (though again a small sample). It's also an indication that they need to split the cells in this area because the current arrangement is oversubscribed (except for the half-bad calls which are some other problem).
To free AMD up to outsource to other foundries, to allow GlobalFoundries to take on outside customers, to prevent losses in one area from affecting total company health,...
When times are good for a company like AMD they try to pull their suppliers into a monolith, to insure they can get the supplies they need.
When times are more iffy they may split up, so if one part of the business gets in trouble it doesn't drag the other down.
In turbulent economic times (like now) you see both happening at once:
Companies with iffy situations spinning off a division into a supplier leaving the stockholders with two potentially successful companies and something left if one fails.
Companies with a solid business and financial position on a buying binge to bring suppliers into the mothership's fleet in defense against competitive threats, protecting difficult-to-replace suppliers from economic hardship with cash infusions and business-contact cost savings, and guarding themselves against other supply chain "irregularities" (such as a competitor buying a necessary supplier similarly). (Also: Buying the appropriate unit of a failing competitor - i.e. at a bankruptcy/reorganization sale - to pick up useful parts of the competitors' business at bargain prices.)
If the price of oil stays high, then we switch over to synthesis methods. We could do Fischler Tropf from coal and get the energy from nuclear power.
Also there are a host of biological methods to make fuel from plant waste. (For instance: An organism that lives on cellulose and excretes butanol - a drop-in replacement for gasoline.)
These are not used now because fossil fuels are cheaper. Shift that due to resource exhaustion and some of them will become cheaper than fossil fuels, be put into production.
Once they're in production (and the initial costs are "sunk") they'll be improved until fossil fuel prices would have to drop significantly to recover their price advantage.
When about 30 years worth are on the books the energy companies have no incentive to spend money now to explore for more that won't be used for decades. So we've been at something like 30 years known reserves for a century or so.
Except for the occasional bump above that when somebody makes a giant find.
There are many reasons to migrate from fossil fuels, the most compelling being that they're going to run out very soon.
If they really are going to run out soon the market will handle it. Prices will rise as the fuels become scarce and the miners/drillers have to go after less accessible sources.
Fossil fuels are used instead of a host of other energy supplies primarily because they're cheaper. Shift that balance and the users will migrate away on their own with no need for legislation. And usage will taper off so there will continue to be a small amount available at a high price for other, non-fuel uses that are sufficiently important to command the price.
On the other hand my impression is that the fossil fuels will NOT be exhausted any time soon. 500 years or more at the current rate (including much acceleration due to industrialization of third-world countries) seems reasonable.
Don't be fooled by "known reserves". Those are the ones that have been explored for, proved out, and claimed. When about 30 years worth are on the books the energy companies have no incentive to spend money now to explore for more that won't be used for decades. So we've been at something like 30 years known reserves for a century or so.
Of course people who don't understand that are always raising a panic by assuming "known reserves" are "all there is" and we're going to suddenly hit the wall in a few years. (In fact, before the discovery of petroleum fuels, there was a similar concern over running out of whale oil if the poor kept earning enough in the factories to finally afford lamps...)
The Judge will instruct the jury as to the law, and the jury then decides if the facts of the case fit into that law.
The supreme court disagrees with you on this. This is what judges try to sell to juries but it's not the law.
Busy now so I won't bother posting links. Go to Wikipedia and search for "jury nullification" and "fully informed jury". Then check out www.fija.org for a (partisan but clear) statement of the issue.
Slashdot Mirror
DNA is released under the GPL. You have to distribute the source with the end product.
Nope. Just the executable object (loaded and running).
Too bad God remembered to strip the symbols at that point, because if he had left them in, we wouldn't have this silly evolution vs. intelligent design argument at all, and wouldn't have to figure out everything about our DNA by ourselves.
Who says he stripped the symbols? Or even the comments? There's a LOT of "junk DNA" in there. Maybe we just need to learn the language and/or finish reverse-engineering the load file format.
The RSA private keys inside are generated by the card during personalisation, and are not extractable. I dare you try to create a false one.
What's hard about that? You generate a new card with its OWN RSA private key.
Shooting at a close wall representing a target far away, and shooting at a target far away are not the same thing, ballistically speaking. [details deleted]
But you can use the same sort of code with, say, eight (or fewer) microphones and locate the gun muzzle in three-D at the moment it discharges. With the two locations you can compute the full trajectory.
Yes they didn't do that here - because they were working with an existing game that only understood the point of aim being at the screen plane, even if the target was rendered in 3-D. But there's no reason a future game/simulation couldn't be written to do the full and correct computation.
You'd also need a head-locater so the image can be corrected for the shooter's eye position. Then it becomes a pseudo-3-D window on the scene.
Meanwhile, since the shooter had an uncorrected view of the scene (which effectively corresponds to being at a known location with respect to the scene) the error from correct trajectory could be adequately approximated (and the game, designed for a player in front of a screen, may already do that).
The other advantage of monogamy over polygyny is that, with polygyny, a few rich guys suck in a lot of the hot babes and the bulk of the males end up with a less desirable partner or none at all.
So if they want the nerds to reproduce and raise rug-nerds to keep the infrastructure running for their heirs to milk, the ruling class needs to give up on, or at least limit the size of, their harems.
So applying the antibiotic topically (read "like spermicidal foam/gel) should reactivate the gene in a woman's naughtybits and so fight the virus.
Focused on the woman - good idea. But how does science focus on the man?
Suppositories.
= = = =
Was tempted to end it there and go for "funny". But it's really too serious for that. So:
Suppositories (for M->M) and lubes and jock-itch preparations (for F->M, which it tougher to handle adequately).
If we have it, it must have evolved for a reason.
Things don't evolve "for a reason". They just evolve.
Sometimes they change into something not so great. Then it's a benefit to turn them off, so they're likely to stay that way (or those that get turned back on are likely to be bread out).
Sometimes they just get turned off randomly. Even if this makes the victims less adapted, if it doesn't kill them outright this might hang around and become the dominant, or only, version just through random chance in a small population. (In humanity's case there's evidence that our predecessors ALMOST went extinct and the current human population diverged from a very small number of survivors.)
Currently inactive DNA was active in the past.
Not necessarily - at least in our ancestors. (Unless you count things like viruses that infected great^500th granddad as "ancestors".) There's no reason that a non-coding region can't evolve without ever being "active". For instance: There's a lot of "junk DNA" that appears to be sequences that tend to be better at being spliced in by repair enzymes than other sequences. With time and DNA damage this stuff tends to pile up an produce more and longer non-coding sections - which then mutate and diverge - without ever coding anything, neither protein nor regulation, or even being otherwise useful (like by occasionally getting spliced into a working gene to modify a protein in a potentially useful way).
There's just no evolutionary pressure for it to be removed, so it sticks around.
Yep. Unless it causes a significant problem, its consumption of a few extra DNA subunits during cell replication is such a minor detriment that it gets lost in the noise.
Basically, the invention here is the inclusion of information that lets third-party programs better understand what to do with the format. You can imagine, for example, if HTML included something like this. The del ('strikethrough') tag might be written:
That code would allow a program that did not natively understand the tag to implement a simple version of it. The idea is to allow new features to be introduced into the format while enabling older versions of the software to use them without updating their code. The necessary code comes with the file.
In other words, it's a way to include executable code in one part of the file, and a call to it in another.
Presuming your characterization is correct, what Microsoft patented is a particular way to build an unpatchable security hole into an XML editor. B-)
What does XML being an open standard have to do with anything?
The fact that it was an open standard FOR REPRESENTING DOCUMENTS AS FILE CONTENTS so they can be MANIPULATED BY COMPUTER PROGRAMS should make it clear that representing a document as a single XML file and writing an editor to edit such documents were explicitly contemplated in the open standard. And the fact that the standard was open constitutes publishing this prior art.
If Microsoft came up with something novel, non-obvious, and useful ABOUT editing a document represented entirely within a single XML file they would be entitled to a patent on THAT ASPECT. But that doesn't constitute inventing the editing of XML document files in general and thus doesn't entitle them to such a patent.
Note that it's entirely possible that the slashdot article misrepresented what was patented. This has happened a lot in the past. So perhaps Microsoft did come up with some cuteness to include in an XML editor and that was what they patented.
But that would not make as big a splash on the Slashdot front page. B-)
Looks like that might be it.
According to the Wikipedia article on chapter 11, chapter 11 lets the company run either under a court-appointed trustee or the "debtor in posession", i.e. the original management acting as a trustee and operating under the same rules, behind the shield of the bankruptcy process. And:
Looks like the judge is saying that, while it isn't clear yet whether SCO will be able to emerge from chapter 11 as a viable business or will have to be liquidated under chapter 7, the current management is either grossly mismanaging the company or at least making it appear that they aren't doing as well for the interests of the creditors and stockholders as a trustee would.
However, the judge's reasoning is far from clear.
Maybe this is the judge's way of putting a watchdog on 'em to make sure they don't run out the door with or (further) destroy the value of some of the remaining assets before things get settled?
(Not only am I NAL but I'm especially NA bankruptcy L.)
I doubt it'll be supported straight out of the box, but when someone hacks this thing to allow the camera and projector to work at the same time, I expect to start seeing all kind of creative shots.
Augmented reality will be even more fun when you can directly augment the actual reality. B-)
I'm always amazed at how little variation there really is in energy production. Really there are only two sources of energy here on earth:
-Solar
-Nuclear
Third is inertial: Tidal power, which comes from slowing the Earth's rotation. Some of the energy goes into raising the moon's orbit (or the Earth/Moon system's orbit around the sun) and the rest moves water and air in ways that can be tapped.
I remember updating the HARDWARE of my modem: Changing the swamping resistors to reduce the Q of the filters and broaden the passbands so the Rx side would work at 300 as well as the original 110 baud. B-)
Regen braking systems are about 30% efficient right now. So yes, if each mountain is about a third of the size of the previous one you'll be fine. But don't kid yourself into thinking you're recovering the vast majority of the energy it took to get up.
Anything you recover is fuel you didn't have to burn.
I expect the efficiency of regenerative braking to rise significantly with the deployment of the new fast-charge (low internal loss, high current, high power density) lithium battery technology.
They need a big enough battery to recycle the energy from coming down from a mountain pass to go up the next pass
I really hope you don't mean the second pass being as high as the first.
Yes if you're going generally uphill the batteries will be more depleted by the time you reach the same height (unless you've run the engine to replace the losses). But the power you salvaged by regenerative braking is power you'd otherwise had to supply by burning fuel.
If you're going generally downhill you can generally use the regenerative braking salvaged power to get up the next, lower, pass without running the engine and can thus arrive at the valley floor with more charge than you had at the top of the highest pass, without burning fuel, even if you had to slow in the intermediate valleys until you didn't have the kinetic energy to climb the next hump.
Regenerative braking is about making the engine "see" a load roughly equivalent to a constant speed on a long, constant-slope ramp, though the real cycle is up/down, speed/slow, stop/start.
You misunderstand what energy I want to recycle.
When you're going DOWN a steep slope you are gaining more kinetic energy from the loss in altitude than you're losing to rolling and air friction. You can throw that extra energy away as heat and sound by using your brakes and engine braking. Or you can save much of it by charging batteries to run a motor later.
Yes your generator / charge controller / battery / inverter / motor system is far from 100% efficient. So your battery will be more depeleted by the time you've run up to the same height later - unless you ran the engine. But every horsepower-minute you recover and apply to the next upslope is one you don't need to get by burning fuel.
They need a big enough battery to recycle the energy from coming down from a mountain pass to go up the next pass (a longer-range analog of recycling power from a full stop for the next start and acceleration) or cruise across the valley. That will also get a range in excess of a hundred miles on the level and in city traffic.
Do this, with enough engine plus electric horsepower to maintain highway speed up a mountain road, and you've got a car that can fully replace a gasoliine vehicle.
Everyone knows that self regulation leads to utopia, much as disbanding our police departments would lead to a lower crime rate.
1) It has been shown that an armed citizenry reduces the crime rate while a generally disarmed citizenry increases it.
2) The citizenry is generally disarmed by laws prohibiting the general carrying of weapons. (What good does it do to OWN a weapon if you don't have it WITH you and in operable condition when a criminal attacks?)
3) Where such laws do not prevent carrying weapons, and a perceived threat of crime exists, a significant number of citizens chose to arm and train themselves. (This is where the stats on the relationship between citizen gun-carrying rates and crime rates come from.)
4) Such laws are enforced by police departments.
5) Therefore: Should police departments be generally disbanded, reasonable people might expect gun carrying by non-criminals to increase and crime rates to drop as a result.
Note that a significant fraction of the population believes that the Second Amendment bans (purported) laws against carrying weapons for self-protection (and that they are thus "not laws") - but don't carry because of the practical risk from police enforcement of these alleged "non-laws". Thus, in the absense of police enforcement, their self-image as law-abiding citizens would not deter them from carrying weapons for self-protection as they chose to continue obeying those laws they considered valid.
Finally: Alliances between criminals and corrupt police departments lead to massive increases in crime: Corrupt police don't enforce against their partners, the citizens are largely unable to enforce laws themselves because this has been preempted by the corrupted criminal justice system, so the crooks have a field-day operating unopposed. While perhaps the bulk of the police and other criminal justice professionals are honest, it doesn't take many to allow a gang free rein. Most major US cities have a number of incidents of massive police corruption in their history, while the "code of silence" makes it plausible that a far larger number of other crook/police alliances go unreported. The disbanding of a corrupt police department and its replacement by citizen self-protection can be expected to put the skids under such crime waves.
A few years ago I took a trip to Canyonlands national park. According to our guide, it's the most remote part of the continental US. Yet you can get a Verizon signal almost anywhere in the park. So reliably, I was told, that the US park system scrapped an expensive radio system they developed for the park in favor of Verizon cell phones.
But that's a measure of coverage, not reliability. Reliability would involve things like not losing a call or being unable to initiate one in a place that is covered.
I, on the other hand, have a house in a valley near the NV/CA border. It's on AT&T's "last cell" on the edge of their coverage for GSM - and I get all bars and solid service. But Verizon's "last cell" is on the other side of the hill. Despite having three villages and hundreds of houses and the intersection of two main numbered highways, AT&T covers it and Verizon does not. (And on the other side of the hill, at the lake resort village and casino, it's the other way around.)
AT&T has better coverage where I am. Verizon has better coverage on the lake village. Nothing to do with reliability.
Now I've NEVER had AT&T drop a call, or fail to initiate one, at that location. That's a measure of reliability (though a small sample). Here in Silicon Valley I have failed handoffs, failed call initiation, dropped calls, and one-direction-garbled calls rather often. THAT's also measure of (poorer) reliability (though again a small sample). It's also an indication that they need to split the cells in this area because the current arrangement is oversubscribed (except for the half-bad calls which are some other problem).
To free AMD up to outsource to other foundries, to allow GlobalFoundries to take on outside customers, to prevent losses in one area from affecting total company health, ...
When times are good for a company like AMD they try to pull their suppliers into a monolith, to insure they can get the supplies they need.
When times are more iffy they may split up, so if one part of the business gets in trouble it doesn't drag the other down.
In turbulent economic times (like now) you see both happening at once:
Companies with iffy situations spinning off a division into a supplier leaving the stockholders with two potentially successful companies and something left if one fails.
Companies with a solid business and financial position on a buying binge to bring suppliers into the mothership's fleet in defense against competitive threats, protecting difficult-to-replace suppliers from economic hardship with cash infusions and business-contact cost savings, and guarding themselves against other supply chain "irregularities" (such as a competitor buying a necessary supplier similarly). (Also: Buying the appropriate unit of a failing competitor - i.e. at a bankruptcy/reorganization sale - to pick up useful parts of the competitors' business at bargain prices.)
If the price of oil stays high, then we switch over to synthesis methods. We could do Fischler Tropf from coal and get the energy from nuclear power.
Also there are a host of biological methods to make fuel from plant waste. (For instance: An organism that lives on cellulose and excretes butanol - a drop-in replacement for gasoline.)
These are not used now because fossil fuels are cheaper. Shift that due to resource exhaustion and some of them will become cheaper than fossil fuels, be put into production.
Once they're in production (and the initial costs are "sunk") they'll be improved until fossil fuel prices would have to drop significantly to recover their price advantage.
When about 30 years worth are on the books the energy companies have no incentive to spend money now to explore for more that won't be used for decades. So we've been at something like 30 years known reserves for a century or so.
Except for the occasional bump above that when somebody makes a giant find.
There are many reasons to migrate from fossil fuels, the most compelling being that they're going to run out very soon.
If they really are going to run out soon the market will handle it. Prices will rise as the fuels become scarce and the miners/drillers have to go after less accessible sources.
Fossil fuels are used instead of a host of other energy supplies primarily because they're cheaper. Shift that balance and the users will migrate away on their own with no need for legislation. And usage will taper off so there will continue to be a small amount available at a high price for other, non-fuel uses that are sufficiently important to command the price.
On the other hand my impression is that the fossil fuels will NOT be exhausted any time soon. 500 years or more at the current rate (including much acceleration due to industrialization of third-world countries) seems reasonable.
Don't be fooled by "known reserves". Those are the ones that have been explored for, proved out, and claimed. When about 30 years worth are on the books the energy companies have no incentive to spend money now to explore for more that won't be used for decades. So we've been at something like 30 years known reserves for a century or so.
Of course people who don't understand that are always raising a panic by assuming "known reserves" are "all there is" and we're going to suddenly hit the wall in a few years. (In fact, before the discovery of petroleum fuels, there was a similar concern over running out of whale oil if the poor kept earning enough in the factories to finally afford lamps...)
The Judge is always the judge/decider on the law.
The Judge will instruct the jury as to the law, and the jury then decides if the facts of the case fit into that law.
The supreme court disagrees with you on this. This is what judges try to sell to juries but it's not the law.
Busy now so I won't bother posting links. Go to Wikipedia and search for "jury nullification" and "fully informed jury". Then check out www.fija.org for a (partisan but clear) statement of the issue.