You're pretty sure about that, are you? One microgram of antimatter reacting with one microgram of matter would liberate as much energy as detonating 43 kg of TNT. About 4 nanograms would liberate as much energy as a hand grenade. I don't know how much antimatter we could "make" until the Sun burns out (that's a pretty long time), but it wouldn't take very much anti-matter to be enough to blow your nose. Something well below the picogram range I would say.
That is so fundamentally wrong as to make me reel in dismay to hear it. First of all, there is no fundamental difference between R and D to any noticeable extent. If that has not been proved time and again by comparing the Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, and Obama (and other) regimes, and by comparing the mess when R's controlled BOTH houses of Congress AND the Presidency, to the equal mess when D's controlled BOTH houses of Congress AND the Presidency, then there is no hope for human powers of observation.
Both D's and R's want to regulate everything: businesses and individuals. Both crave power. Both consist of unusually stupid and self-centered dregs of humanity, passing themselves off as the people's champions. They focus cravenly on trying to gratify everyone while pissing off no one. They both are bought and paid for by corrupt and stifling mega corporations, and in return they reward these mega corporations and mercilessly beat down true free enterprise, which flourishes when small businesses and individuals doing business thrive.
True free enterprise has nothing to do with the yolk of rampant Capitalism as we know it. Oddly, both D's and R's are as repelled by the idea of true free enterprise as are Communists, even though they will ridicule Communism and claim they hate it. Paradoxically, they both operate exactly the same as pragmatic Communists - the Chinese system, with government and mega corporations operating in league. Except that they owe no allegiance whatsoever to their own country, which, unlike the Chinese, they are rapidly destroying.
Both D's and R's are drunk with the idea of micro managing society. Both are inwardly repelled and horrified at the idea of personal freedom. Both are attracted to the idea of making all sorts of harmless conduct into victimless crimes, the way moths are attracted to the flame - except they themselves never get burned. Neither R's nor D's ever address real problems in an effective manner because they fear that to do so would cause short term distress to the voters who they see as baying and lowing cattle. They fear this would lead to "their side" hitting the third rail of politics.
They do not lead in any sense. They poll continually, and pass themselves off as those who will appease the greatest number.
Yes; the despicable horror that is Unity was the only reason I even gave one hour to checking out Gnome3 (much against my better judgement). No more than that. That's an hour of my life I will never get back.
I am disturbed about some trends recently in the linux kernel itself, but as much as the wanton destruction of the perfectly good Gnome2 desktop angers me, I don't really despair for the linux desktop. Xfce only requires a bit more polish to be a good alternative, and there is LXDE if you don't demand much fanciness at all. But for the time being I'm going with KDE.
"As opposed to GTK+, where the project is healthy, the toolkit project is changing rapidly, and GNOME's future is uncertain because the Gnome developers lost their goddam minds and shat out a turd called Gnome3."
Just to elaborate a little on your excellent summary, it wasn't the Allies who broke the Enigma ciphers, and it wasn't in 1940. The Polish Cipher bureau first did it in 1932. Then in 1939 they provided techniques and equipment (actual working reverse engineered Enigma machines, the reverse engineering being helped by theft of secrets) to French and British intelligence. Without that singular act, the war would have been longer, and gone worse for the Allies. And it certainly would have been longer and gone worse, had the British intelligence service and scientific resources been unequal to the herculean task of further evolving the techniques and equipment, and sustaining a decryption effort so demanding that the Germans dismissed it as impossible.
In practice, as you point out, there was not a single "breaking," after which the deed was done and only the crank had to be turned every day. It was a battle to the end to discover new keys as the keys changed constantly, and this battle was mainly done by British intelligence. It was won using enormous intellect, ingenious mechanical machines (the Bombes), and prodigious effort constantly throughout the war. The U.S. contributed some manufacturing capacity but not all that much else to this particular effort.
The Enigma machine itself, particularly the fully evolved Naval version, had the capability to have stymied even the British decryption efforts, but the overconfident and careless German operators sabotaged 99.9...% of the protection of their own Enigma technology due to naive shortcuts in its use.
At the peak of the operation, Enigma intercepts were being routinely deciphered by the British within hours. The routine was not in the sense of turning the crank, however; it was due to the sustained tireless efforts from top to bottom of a sizeable staff, involving intense dedication, amazing cleverness in developing and applying methods of human ingenuity and insight to the problem. Even with the important assistance of the Bombes, it required vast backbreakingly repetitive intellectual labor to break each intercept.
Hopefully I have done some slight justice to this most amazing feat without getting too many of the particulars misrepresented. The Enigma machine itself was jaw-droppingly clever for its time, but this was dwarfed by the genius of men like Alan Turing and the almost incomprehensible dedication of a small army of workers, including many women.
For his priceless efforts, Turing was driven to suicide at age 41, nine years after WW II. In 2009, Prime Minister Gordon Brown publically apologized on behalf of the British government for the way Turing was treated after the war.
OK, you're probably not going to like this, but I'll use Wikipedia because you used it. The reason I don't think you're going to like it is because it doesn't say what you claim it says.
All reactors have reactivity feedback mechanisms, but the pebble bed reactor is designed so that this effect is very strong and does not depend on any kind of machinery or moving parts. Because of this, its passive cooling, and because the pebble bed reactor is designed for higher temperatures, the pebble bed reactor can passively reduce to a safe power level in an accident scenario. This is the main passive safety feature of the pebble bed reactor, and it makes the pebble bed design (as well as other very high temperature reactors) unique from conventional light water reactors which require active safety controls.
Passively safe. Does not require electricity pumping cooling fluid through it AFTER shutdown to avoid melting down.
Pebble bed design... The core generates less power as its temperature rises, and therefore cannot have a criticality excursion when the machinery fails, it is power-limited or inherently self controlling due to Doppler broadening. At such low power densities, the reactor can be designed to lose more heat through its walls than it would generate. In order to generate much power it has to be cooled, and then the energy is extracted from the coolant.
Gee that sounds inherently safe to me. Of course, there are no true absolutes, but what is clear is that it is a Hell of a lot safer than the Fukushima type BWR's.
Adams Atomic Engines... AAE's engine is inherently safe, as the engine naturally shuts down due to Doppler broadening, stopping heat generation if the fuel in the engine gets too hot. (The engine also naturally shuts down in the event of a loss of coolant or a loss of coolant flow as well.) This phenomenon suggests that some form of heat removal in the engine, somewhat like a radiator in a motor vehicle, to remove residual heat from the closed engine cooling loop and gas circulation system could be beneficial for the design to work optimally.
Third generation designs improve on early designs by incorporating passive or inherent safety features which require no active controls or (human) operational intervention to avoid accidents in the event of malfunction, and may rely on pressure differentials, gravity, natural convection, or the natural response of materials to high temperatures.
That says the operators all walk away and go home, and all the active mechanisms fail, and it remains safe.
OK, so, as a German of course, do you have any reason - other than pure wishful thinking - to suppose that the fundamental problems with renewable energy even CAN be solved by throwing more money at it and chanting incantations to the wizards of technology and to the great benevolent all-caring government?
The following are plain, unalterable FACTS. Wind is capricious and requires vast area to harness it. Solar completely dies for 50% of every single day, has repeated extreme reductions for periods lasting from days to weeks, and requires vast areas to harness it. Both have extreme fluctuations which would require unimaginable storage capacity. Geothermal is only practical in very particular locations such as Iceland. Tidal and wave energy remains a completely impractical dream.
Yes, nuclear as implemented to date has for the most part been screwed up. The solution is not to recoil in a knee jerk reaction, but to DO IT RIGHT. Uranium is a very limited resource, but thorium reserves are truly vast. Inherently passively safe designs are known for nuclear energy; USE THEM GODDAMIT. And, yes, do not abandon research and development of renewables, but let them compete on an even footing; don't put all your investment in them and pin all your hopes on them. In this matter as in all others, be RATIONAL.
Color me baffled; I have no idea how you can say multiple desktops don't give you more work space. I'm willing to believe it's just one of those little things I don't understand how anyone could look at it that way. I'm not going to tell you you're wrong; I'm just going to say that, yeah, other people find it a fine solution.
What is hard for me to accept is that you can't set up a panning X any more. Just because I could never stand the thought of using it that way shouldn't mean they should take that functionality away. Perhaps the Xorg guys just pointlessly changed the syntax. They've been known to do that.
You are a gentleman and a scholar. None of the users I talked to knew you could do that, nothing I read hinted at it, the wording of the settings screen is cryptic, but it's easy once you know the trick.
Now I have NO reservations about KDE. OK, some of the applets are way underformed, but I am confident THAT can be fixed, even if I have to do it myself.
This is the most insightful of all the comments here and I would mod you +100 if I could. The KDE4 desktop that is not a desktop was a WTF moment from the instant I first saw it. And it is the ONLY thing wrong with KDE4. If only they would just let you TURN IT THE FUCK OFF.
I agree almost across the board. My only issue is that I think Gwenview is a piece of crap from a UI standpoint compared to the old Kuickshow. Kuickshow was an inspired PERFECT app. You can still compile kuickshow under KDE4, and it still works perfectly. I just don't understand why they refuse to maintain it as a fully supporteds piece of KDE4.
I don't think KDE4 is overblown except in one respect. If you could just can that imbecilic desktop and replace it with a single simple folder view like in KDE3 and Gnome2, where you can put launchers and objects, KDE4 is basically perfect. Now, I haven't been able to figure out how to rip out that crippling piece of garbage from KDE, but I am sure the KDE team could easily add a single radio button to allow the user to just enable or disable it. It's like how they let you switch the start menu to the normal, useful "classic style," instead of the godawful new style which copies one of the most HATED and DESPISED "innovations" of Vista.
In all other respects, I see no fundamental flaw with KDE4. I find it in no way mysteriously slower or more ponderous than KDE3. I am just perplexed when people claim this. Obviously, the first thing you do when you bring it up is completely turn off all the "desktop effects" horse shit, and then it works fine.
And as far as I can see KDE has some wonderful apps. Kate, for example, is a superb multi-document text editor. Gnome has nothing remotely comparable. I know of no standalone one that is better. KDE Office would be a wonder if we weren't spoiled by Open Office, so I admit I don't use much of it. Obviously, I use Firefox instead of Konqueror (usually). But I see no way in which the KDE guys have built a less than first class API for 3rd partiesa to properly integrate with. If they won't do it, and instead use the GTK horror, it's hardly KDE's fault. KDE's is vastly superior in every way.
Konsole is so many orders of magnitude better than Gnome terminal or anything else, that it is like the adults vs the kindergarten to compare them.
If you really and truly want a bare desktop with no cruft at all, you just use Xfce or LXDE. But I must warn you that they have substandard "little things." The clock cannot be adequately customized. The other applets are similarly deficient. I suppose we could port forward all the superb Gnome2 applets if we had the energy, but gosh darn it, I just want to USE a desktop that is neither INSANE nor DEFICIENT as it is.
He may be a Gnome guy and simply doesn't realize that the KDE structure isn't designed by totalitarian bastards who KNOW what is BEST FOR YOU and damn sure won't be caught dead giving you the CONTROLS to actually TUNE IT.
You're right. Actually your screen is NOT 1920 x 1200 - it's unlimited x unlimited because of multiple desktops. Your DISPLAY is a 1920 x 1200 WINDOW into this unlimited screen. These multiple desktops give you a SINGLE control to access all the information that is there. This is far better than a multitude of idiosyncratic 3D widgets on a single desktop, each of which contain separately hidden information (IMPOSSIBLE to discover without reading help systems I might add), with access SEPARATELY controlled by each of the multitude of widgets.
I'm with you. It AIN'T busted, the BEST solution has already been in place for a long time, DON'T try to "fix" it, kiddies.
Yeah, I just found out the other day that a high power white LED can incinerate cardboard rapidly. It's not because the LED itself is that hot. It's hard to wrap yourself around the knowledge that there can be a lot of energy in a beam of light not from the Sun.
The issue is not what Google knows or does not know. The issue is that Ebay can identify what they know to be their plans implemented at Google, immediately after two of Ebay's personnel move to Google.
Non disclosures and the like (in the US as I know them at least) do not codify what will happen to you if you break them. They simply restrict what you may do. If you break one after signing it, you are violating contract law, plain and simple. The remedy is bringing suit in civil court.
Google has the pockets. Much bigger than the pockets of the two new Google personnel. You always sue the pockets. They will simply allege Google is in on a conspiracy.
The title is bullshit. Ebay is not suing because Google is using their trade secrets. As far as I know, any trade secret you can reverse engineer legitimately is fair game. Ebay is suing because Google grabbed two of ebay's key personnel and ebay has information that these key personnel have revealed ebay's secrets to Google and Google is using this illicitly obtained information - despite both non-compete and non-disclosure clauses.
This way, the suit actually makes sense instead of being a WTF moment.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite often actually.
[Crap added due to lame slashdot dupe filter.]
Is "camera" pronounced came-ee-ra because there are only single consonants between the vowels?
Ignore post misplaced due to busted slashdot interface
Is "camera" pronounced came-ee-ra because there are only single consonants between the vowels?
Ahem, that's 328.083989501 ft. Let's get the conversion straight.
You're pretty sure about that, are you? One microgram of antimatter reacting with one microgram of matter would liberate as much energy as detonating 43 kg of TNT. About 4 nanograms would liberate as much energy as a hand grenade. I don't know how much antimatter we could "make" until the Sun burns out (that's a pretty long time), but it wouldn't take very much anti-matter to be enough to blow your nose. Something well below the picogram range I would say.
Er, actually each bit of information doubles (not halves) your uniqueness.
That is so fundamentally wrong as to make me reel in dismay to hear it. First of all, there is no fundamental difference between R and D to any noticeable extent. If that has not been proved time and again by comparing the Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, and Obama (and other) regimes, and by comparing the mess when R's controlled BOTH houses of Congress AND the Presidency, to the equal mess when D's controlled BOTH houses of Congress AND the Presidency, then there is no hope for human powers of observation.
Both D's and R's want to regulate everything: businesses and individuals. Both crave power. Both consist of unusually stupid and self-centered dregs of humanity, passing themselves off as the people's champions. They focus cravenly on trying to gratify everyone while pissing off no one. They both are bought and paid for by corrupt and stifling mega corporations, and in return they reward these mega corporations and mercilessly beat down true free enterprise, which flourishes when small businesses and individuals doing business thrive.
True free enterprise has nothing to do with the yolk of rampant Capitalism as we know it. Oddly, both D's and R's are as repelled by the idea of true free enterprise as are Communists, even though they will ridicule Communism and claim they hate it. Paradoxically, they both operate exactly the same as pragmatic Communists - the Chinese system, with government and mega corporations operating in league. Except that they owe no allegiance whatsoever to their own country, which, unlike the Chinese, they are rapidly destroying.
Both D's and R's are drunk with the idea of micro managing society. Both are inwardly repelled and horrified at the idea of personal freedom. Both are attracted to the idea of making all sorts of harmless conduct into victimless crimes, the way moths are attracted to the flame - except they themselves never get burned. Neither R's nor D's ever address real problems in an effective manner because they fear that to do so would cause short term distress to the voters who they see as baying and lowing cattle. They fear this would lead to "their side" hitting the third rail of politics.
They do not lead in any sense. They poll continually, and pass themselves off as those who will appease the greatest number.
Yes; the despicable horror that is Unity was the only reason I even gave one hour to checking out Gnome3 (much against my better judgement). No more than that. That's an hour of my life I will never get back.
I am disturbed about some trends recently in the linux kernel itself, but as much as the wanton destruction of the perfectly good Gnome2 desktop angers me, I don't really despair for the linux desktop. Xfce only requires a bit more polish to be a good alternative, and there is LXDE if you don't demand much fanciness at all. But for the time being I'm going with KDE.
I'll fix it for you:
"As opposed to GTK+, where the project is healthy, the toolkit project is changing rapidly, and GNOME's future is uncertain because the Gnome developers lost their goddam minds and shat out a turd called Gnome3."
Just to elaborate a little on your excellent summary, it wasn't the Allies who broke the Enigma ciphers, and it wasn't in 1940. The Polish Cipher bureau first did it in 1932. Then in 1939 they provided techniques and equipment (actual working reverse engineered Enigma machines, the reverse engineering being helped by theft of secrets) to French and British intelligence. Without that singular act, the war would have been longer, and gone worse for the Allies. And it certainly would have been longer and gone worse, had the British intelligence service and scientific resources been unequal to the herculean task of further evolving the techniques and equipment, and sustaining a decryption effort so demanding that the Germans dismissed it as impossible.
In practice, as you point out, there was not a single "breaking," after which the deed was done and only the crank had to be turned every day. It was a battle to the end to discover new keys as the keys changed constantly, and this battle was mainly done by British intelligence. It was won using enormous intellect, ingenious mechanical machines (the Bombes), and prodigious effort constantly throughout the war. The U.S. contributed some manufacturing capacity but not all that much else to this particular effort.
The Enigma machine itself, particularly the fully evolved Naval version, had the capability to have stymied even the British decryption efforts, but the overconfident and careless German operators sabotaged 99.9...% of the protection of their own Enigma technology due to naive shortcuts in its use.
At the peak of the operation, Enigma intercepts were being routinely deciphered by the British within hours. The routine was not in the sense of turning the crank, however; it was due to the sustained tireless efforts from top to bottom of a sizeable staff, involving intense dedication, amazing cleverness in developing and applying methods of human ingenuity and insight to the problem. Even with the important assistance of the Bombes, it required vast backbreakingly repetitive intellectual labor to break each intercept.
Hopefully I have done some slight justice to this most amazing feat without getting too many of the particulars misrepresented. The Enigma machine itself was jaw-droppingly clever for its time, but this was dwarfed by the genius of men like Alan Turing and the almost incomprehensible dedication of a small army of workers, including many women.
For his priceless efforts, Turing was driven to suicide at age 41, nine years after WW II. In 2009, Prime Minister Gordon Brown publically apologized on behalf of the British government for the way Turing was treated after the war.
OK, you're probably not going to like this, but I'll use Wikipedia because you used it. The reason I don't think you're going to like it is because it doesn't say what you claim it says.
[Pebble bed] Safety features
All reactors have reactivity feedback mechanisms, but the pebble bed reactor is designed so that this effect is very strong and does not depend on any kind of machinery or moving parts. Because of this, its passive cooling, and because the pebble bed reactor is designed for higher temperatures, the pebble bed reactor can passively reduce to a safe power level in an accident scenario. This is the main passive safety feature of the pebble bed reactor, and it makes the pebble bed design (as well as other very high temperature reactors) unique from conventional light water reactors which require active safety controls.
Passively safe. Does not require electricity pumping cooling fluid through it AFTER shutdown to avoid melting down.
Pebble ped design
Pebble bed design ... The core generates less power as its temperature rises, and therefore cannot have a criticality excursion when the machinery fails, it is power-limited or inherently self controlling due to Doppler broadening. At such low power densities, the reactor can be designed to lose more heat through its walls than it would generate. In order to generate much power it has to be cooled, and then the energy is extracted from the coolant.
Gee that sounds inherently safe to me. Of course, there are no true absolutes, but what is clear is that it is a Hell of a lot safer than the Fukushima type BWR's.
Adams Atomic Engines ... AAE's engine is inherently safe, as the engine naturally shuts down due to Doppler broadening, stopping heat generation if the fuel in the engine gets too hot. (The engine also naturally shuts down in the event of a loss of coolant or a loss of coolant flow as well.) This phenomenon suggests that some form of heat removal in the engine, somewhat like a radiator in a motor vehicle, to remove residual heat from the closed engine cooling loop and gas circulation system could be beneficial for the design to work optimally.
Examples of passive safety in operation
Third generation designs improve on early designs by incorporating passive or inherent safety features which require no active controls or (human) operational intervention to avoid accidents in the event of malfunction, and may rely on pressure differentials, gravity, natural convection, or the natural response of materials to high temperatures.
That says the operators all walk away and go home, and all the active mechanisms fail, and it remains safe.
OK, so, as a German of course, do you have any reason - other than pure wishful thinking - to suppose that the fundamental problems with renewable energy even CAN be solved by throwing more money at it and chanting incantations to the wizards of technology and to the great benevolent all-caring government?
The following are plain, unalterable FACTS. Wind is capricious and requires vast area to harness it. Solar completely dies for 50% of every single day, has repeated extreme reductions for periods lasting from days to weeks, and requires vast areas to harness it. Both have extreme fluctuations which would require unimaginable storage capacity. Geothermal is only practical in very particular locations such as Iceland. Tidal and wave energy remains a completely impractical dream.
Yes, nuclear as implemented to date has for the most part been screwed up. The solution is not to recoil in a knee jerk reaction, but to DO IT RIGHT. Uranium is a very limited resource, but thorium reserves are truly vast. Inherently passively safe designs are known for nuclear energy; USE THEM GODDAMIT. And, yes, do not abandon research and development of renewables, but let them compete on an even footing; don't put all your investment in them and pin all your hopes on them. In this matter as in all others, be RATIONAL.
What could possibly go wrong with such a grand idea?
Color me baffled; I have no idea how you can say multiple desktops don't give you more work space. I'm willing to believe it's just one of those little things I don't understand how anyone could look at it that way. I'm not going to tell you you're wrong; I'm just going to say that, yeah, other people find it a fine solution.
What is hard for me to accept is that you can't set up a panning X any more. Just because I could never stand the thought of using it that way shouldn't mean they should take that functionality away. Perhaps the Xorg guys just pointlessly changed the syntax. They've been known to do that.
Kind sir, a thousand times thank you! I searched and asked and couldn't find that simple fact
I now have NO reservations about KDE. Once you know 1 or 2 tricks; this one being the absolutely critical one, there is no reason to despair.
You are a gentleman and a scholar. None of the users I talked to knew you could do that, nothing I read hinted at it, the wording of the settings screen is cryptic, but it's easy once you know the trick.
Now I have NO reservations about KDE. OK, some of the applets are way underformed, but I am confident THAT can be fixed, even if I have to do it myself.
This is the most insightful of all the comments here and I would mod you +100 if I could. The KDE4 desktop that is not a desktop was a WTF moment from the instant I first saw it. And it is the ONLY thing wrong with KDE4. If only they would just let you TURN IT THE FUCK OFF.
I agree almost across the board. My only issue is that I think Gwenview is a piece of crap from a UI standpoint compared to the old Kuickshow. Kuickshow was an inspired PERFECT app. You can still compile kuickshow under KDE4, and it still works perfectly. I just don't understand why they refuse to maintain it as a fully supporteds piece of KDE4.
I don't think KDE4 is overblown except in one respect. If you could just can that imbecilic desktop and replace it with a single simple folder view like in KDE3 and Gnome2, where you can put launchers and objects, KDE4 is basically perfect. Now, I haven't been able to figure out how to rip out that crippling piece of garbage from KDE, but I am sure the KDE team could easily add a single radio button to allow the user to just enable or disable it. It's like how they let you switch the start menu to the normal, useful "classic style," instead of the godawful new style which copies one of the most HATED and DESPISED "innovations" of Vista.
In all other respects, I see no fundamental flaw with KDE4. I find it in no way mysteriously slower or more ponderous than KDE3. I am just perplexed when people claim this. Obviously, the first thing you do when you bring it up is completely turn off all the "desktop effects" horse shit, and then it works fine.
And as far as I can see KDE has some wonderful apps. Kate, for example, is a superb multi-document text editor. Gnome has nothing remotely comparable. I know of no standalone one that is better. KDE Office would be a wonder if we weren't spoiled by Open Office, so I admit I don't use much of it. Obviously, I use Firefox instead of Konqueror (usually). But I see no way in which the KDE guys have built a less than first class API for 3rd partiesa to properly integrate with. If they won't do it, and instead use the GTK horror, it's hardly KDE's fault. KDE's is vastly superior in every way.
Konsole is so many orders of magnitude better than Gnome terminal or anything else, that it is like the adults vs the kindergarten to compare them.
If you really and truly want a bare desktop with no cruft at all, you just use Xfce or LXDE. But I must warn you that they have substandard "little things." The clock cannot be adequately customized. The other applets are similarly deficient. I suppose we could port forward all the superb Gnome2 applets if we had the energy, but gosh darn it, I just want to USE a desktop that is neither INSANE nor DEFICIENT as it is.
He may be a Gnome guy and simply doesn't realize that the KDE structure isn't designed by totalitarian bastards who KNOW what is BEST FOR YOU and damn sure won't be caught dead giving you the CONTROLS to actually TUNE IT.
You're right. Actually your screen is NOT 1920 x 1200 - it's unlimited x unlimited because of multiple desktops. Your DISPLAY is a 1920 x 1200 WINDOW into this unlimited screen. These multiple desktops give you a SINGLE control to access all the information that is there. This is far better than a multitude of idiosyncratic 3D widgets on a single desktop, each of which contain separately hidden information (IMPOSSIBLE to discover without reading help systems I might add), with access SEPARATELY controlled by each of the multitude of widgets.
I'm with you. It AIN'T busted, the BEST solution has already been in place for a long time, DON'T try to "fix" it, kiddies.
Yeah, I just found out the other day that a high power white LED can incinerate cardboard rapidly. It's not because the LED itself is that hot. It's hard to wrap yourself around the knowledge that there can be a lot of energy in a beam of light not from the Sun.
The issue is not what Google knows or does not know. The issue is that Ebay can identify what they know to be their plans implemented at Google, immediately after two of Ebay's personnel move to Google.
Non disclosures and the like (in the US as I know them at least) do not codify what will happen to you if you break them. They simply restrict what you may do. If you break one after signing it, you are violating contract law, plain and simple. The remedy is bringing suit in civil court.
Google has the pockets. Much bigger than the pockets of the two new Google personnel. You always sue the pockets. They will simply allege Google is in on a conspiracy.
The title is bullshit. Ebay is not suing because Google is using their trade secrets. As far as I know, any trade secret you can reverse engineer legitimately is fair game. Ebay is suing because Google grabbed two of ebay's key personnel and ebay has information that these key personnel have revealed ebay's secrets to Google and Google is using this illicitly obtained information - despite both non-compete and non-disclosure clauses.
This way, the suit actually makes sense instead of being a WTF moment.