If you've ever seen the results of most government custom-written software projects, you'd be more surprised that the software for ANY satellite works at the time the satellite launches (as opposed to seven years, three more projects and 275 million dollars later), not that this one failed.
I know that most US schools aren't big on teaching history any more unless it can somehow be related to a teacher's pet cause, but hopefully your comment is just a typo and you really meant something like Sherman's march to the sea.
Just in case it isn't clear, Lee led the Southern Armies in the Civil War, he didn't conquer the South.
Just checked one of my FreeBSD servers and it has 88 ports currently installed. In three years of using a desktop with the full x-windows and development everything set of ports (just repurposed the machine a couple of months ago to make room for a Christmas home hardware upgrade, so I can't get an exact port count) I can recall one portupgrade failing due to a new port release. Happily, in that situation portupgrade just doesn't change anything and the next day had a new revision of the specific port that was fixed.
Perhaps you missed that FreeBSD's portupgrade package manages dependencies both directions, to the point of being able to automatically upgrade all ports that the port you want to upgrade depends on as well as upgrading all ports that depend on the port you are upgrading, if desired? And automatically not changing anything if a dependency happens to fail to install for some reason? And automatically using binary packages or compiling from source as appropriate or necessary?
I've been in dependency hell in various Linux distributions before over the years. Typically because someone at some point HAD to have some package that wasn't part of the "approved" set for that distribution, but was available for a mostly compatible distribution. It sucks. I don't ever want to spend hours hunting through rpm listing sites to find the "right" versions to make it all work ever again. I've never had to do that w/FreeBSD, so I'm happy. Maybe Debian/Ubuntu also has that solved, but that doesn't take anything away from the consistency of FreeBSD and the ports collection.
portversion is part of portupgrade. "-c" creates a script for you to run that consists of the portupgrade command with all of your older-than-current-version ports listed in the command line.
It could be easily much more automated, but I like to take 5 minutes and glance through the list of what packages are due to be updated so that if I have concerns over a major one (like MySQL or postfix) I can look at the release notes before running the auto-upgrade through portupgrade.
Maintaining multiple servers is much faster, as presumably you'd have already seen the important release notes for the first server, so each additional server can consist of typing a single command to update everything.
but who'd ever heard of it before Linux stole its thunder?
Anyone who actually worked with the Internet or other large networks/servers in the 80s and early 90s?
When I started my first ISP back in the days of analog dial-up, pretty much everything everyone used was a flavor of BSD. FreeBSD for most of the low budget crowd and BSDi or a similar commercial offering for the rich folks. There were some people using early versions of Windows NT for some server stuff, but Linux was not really part of the internet/server scene at the time.
There were still some people using older main-frame style stuff, but the x86 market was BSD, with Sun/IBM/Compaq/HP/etc... mostly doing their own things at least partially based on BSD code bases.
Even today, the most popular non-MS desktop OS has a large BSD influence in it's userland. Even MS has stolen a lot of BSD stuff over the years, so it's pretty much everywhere.
Stone? Easily chipped or cracked if dropped, low tensile strength, not very portable? No thanks.
Try thin metal plates. A little more difficult to etch by hand (which can be alleviated by using the right malleability of gold), but well worth it for the long-term benefits of damage-resistance and portability.
You're confusing it with the cycle where the sun changes weather patterns on earth and some people pretending to be scientists blame it all on you and demand that you live in a cave (or just die) and give them all political power (since they know best what everyone should do) in order to make up for your evil deeds, such as creating prosperity for everyone.
But don't worry, I'm sure some idiot somewhere will cite these effects as "proof" that corporations control the world's climate. After all, all solar changes are obviously a result of man's interference in outer space.
The estate tax is bad fiscally because it's negative impact on the economy, wasted money spent on estate lawyers/accountants and financial schemes for avoidance, is way out of proportion to the actual tax revenues gathered. In comparison to other taxes, there are virtually no actual revenue benefits, since almost everyone with that kind of money will pay others to legally avoid the tax instead, leaving those affected generally just those who were marginal and didn't expect to be affected.
It's a stupid immoral tax that doesn't really have much in the way of benefits (in terms of revenue), but acts as a large distortion on the economy in the form of putting money in places/legal fictions it wouldn't naturally go otherwise in addition to being wasted in paperwork-type activities that don't contribute to actual wealth building for society.
So yeah, get rid of it permanently. Why would anyone want to keep it? As some sort of symbolic "Ha ha, we screwed a couple or rich heirs whose parents didn't donate enough to lawyers and accountants!" measure?
It would be much better for all that avoidance money to be spent on something that produces wealth for us all, rather than on useless paperwork.
This is only on DirecTV. Don't have DirecTV? You ain't gonna see it.
Of course, similar content has been available in high definition 24x7x365 on GamePlay HD via Voom and Dishnetwork for over a year, so while the story makes this sound like some DirecTV breakthrough, it's actually them just starting to play a little catchup with Dishnetwork.
The game tournaments are fun to watch if you like the strategy elements. It helps a LOT if you've played the particular game that they're playing in the tournament, because it's tough to actually appreciate what you are watching otherwise.
I never said that the magnetic field got "used up", I said that the energy generated when you create electricity from a magnetic field (be it a transformer or a rare-earth magnet setup) doesn't come from nowhere.
In the case of a transformer, the energy generated in the second coil comes from the source of the magnetism in the first coil, the electric current running through the first coil.
If it didn't, all you'd have to do is setup a third coil next to the first one and you'd magically double your energy output. That doesn't work, as the the 2nd and third coils now just get 1/2 the energy they got before, which not coincidently corresponds nicely with the energy input of the first coil.
In the case of a rare earth magnet electricity creating device (which many of these supposedly law of conservation breaking devices utilize), it's been shown that as you generate electricty from the magnetic field of the rare earth magnet, a little extra energy is produced by the changing of the physical structure of the magnet. The magnet slowly demagnatizes as part of the process.
Yes, if you make a generator from rare earth magnets and spin it around, most of the electricity generated (or energy produced by the system) comes from the motion involved, but there are devices which in that situation (with a near frictionless setup) produce slightly more energy than is put into the system to create the movement. The extra energy comes from the energy freed by the process of slowly demagnetizing/unaligning the rare earth magnets involved.
Most rare earth magnets aren't found naturally, but produced using the right materials and an electromagnet. It can be amazing how much power it can take to create one. They're actually batteries, in a very slow-to-discharge-and-hard-to-use-practically sense of the word.
Magnets, particulalry permenant magnets, are indeed a reservoir of magnetic potential energy.
This energy is small. Like, really small. I'm involved with calculations on magnetic materials, and we typically use units of meV (milli electron Volts) for a magnetic interaction coefficent. That's 1.602 x 10^-22 Joules. Values are typically between around 2 up to maybe 30. Might be higher with the special rare-earths, dunno.
Iron has 8 interactions per atom. Thus, a magnetic energy of the order of 2 * 10^-20 J per atom. One mole of iron will therefore have of the order of 2 * 10^-20 * Avagadro's number = 2 * 10^-20 * 6 * 10^23 = 12 * 10^3 J. That's 12 kJ of magnetic energy, in 55g of the stuff.
As a bonus related fun fact, electrons don't move through wires at the speed of light when current travels through the wires (I know, if you are a physicist instead of an engineer, the holes move instead of the electrons). The actual speed is more in the range of millimetres/second, depending highly on the material and voltage used. It's the wavefront that moves super fast, like a garden hose when you turn the water on. The pressure wave pushes water out the end much, much faster than the water actually moves from the faucet to the end.
The process (assuming it work as described based on their publicised info) appears to have a simple energy source, magnetic fields.
Of course, any first year electronics or physics student should be able to tell you that when you pull/use energy from a magnetic field, it still comes from somewhere else rather than being created from nothingness.
In an electrical transformer, that source is the current passing through the wires and creating the magnetic field. In a rare earth magnet, the energy has been used to properly line up the atomic structure and gradually demagnitizes the source as it's used up. In the case of the very weak Earth's magnetic field, the main source is the Earth's rotation and the magnetic contents that are thus flowing/rotating inside. The Earth's magnetic field has decayed about 10-15% over the last 150 years, so I wouldn't count on that as a long-term source of free energy anyway.
The location of this judgement is a popular one for patent trolls, since juries in this area side with patent holders about 40% more than the "average" US jury does.
Of course, this particular injunction was immediately stopped by a higher court:
EchoStar Announces Federal Circuit Blocks Tivo Injunction
ENGLEWOOD, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 18, 2006--EchoStar Communications Corporation (NASDAQ: DISH) issued the following statement regarding recent developments in the Tivo Inc. v. EchoStar Communications Corp. lawsuit:
"We are pleased that this morning, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. temporarily blocked an injunction issued by a Texas Court, while it considers a longer-term stay of that injunction.
As a result of the stay EchoStar can continue to sell, and provide to consumers, all of its digital video recorder models. We continue to believe the Texas decision was wrong, and should be reversed on appeal. We also continue to work on modifications to our new DVRs, and to our DVRs in the field, intended to avoid future alleged infringement."
About EchoStar
EchoStar Communications Corporation (NASDAQ: DISH) serves more than 12.46 million satellite TV customers through its DISH Network(TM), the fastest growing U.S. provider of advanced digital television services in the last five years. DISH Network offers hundreds of video and audio channels, Interactive TV, HDTV, sports and international programming, together with professional installation and 24-hour customer service.
I know some of these are probably among the usual suspects, but maybe she won't have already thought of them as "scientists", since there seem to be a lot of more recent "hard" scientists in the ones people are listing.
Benjamin Franklin, one of our early US true scientists who has tons of fun stories about his life.
Thomas Jefferson, who seems to have invented some sort of improvement to just about everything he came into contact with, from windows to agriculture.
Ludwig Von Mises and Friedrich Hayek for their contributions to economics and social philosophy. Von Mises scientifically/mathmatically predicted that the roaring 20's would end in a crash and depression and also the final reasons for the economic demise of the Socialist/Communist model long before his theories became popular after the fact.
Tesla is always fun, if only for all the fun/weird stuff.
If they don't already have them (they likely do most of them), then Adam Smith, Isaac Newton, Stephen Hawking, James Maxwell, Robert Boyle, Robert Hook, Bernoulli, Gottfried Leibniz.
The main difference between communism, and co-ops/families/other similar organizations is that participation in the latter is voluntary, while communism is predicated on forcing everyone to work together after you steal the physical means of production.
Sure, lots of voluntary organizations succeed when there are sufficient volunteers interested to make them work. In that way they are more like a corporation or a traditional business. Those who start and/or continue to run the organization have a choice about participating or not. A shareholder can sell their stock, a volunteer youth soccer ref or coach and stop volunteering if they don't like the direction of the organization, etc... If enough shareholders want to "leave" or enough volunteers want to "leave" the organization fails, or at least becomes severely devalued. Having alternatives available (a better local youth soccer league, a similar company that is better run) speeds up the whole process and results in better current results through competition for whose organization is going to be run the best.
In a free society (commonly described as a free market environment) if you made it so that employees vote instead of shareholders, then that will reduce your pool of potential shareholders. Presuming your company needs shareholders to start or to operate, it will fail. If you attempt to legislate (change corporate law) the idea into existance, all you'd do is get rid of corporations altogether. What even semi-rational person would take the risk of being a shareholder at the start of a company? It'd be hard enough for existing companies who promise to actually pay some returns, at least they'd have a track record of making it possible to get some invested money back. To tell someone "We're starting a company. We'll get paid as the employees. We'll make all the decisions, you'll have no say in anything that happens. By law, we can't promise you anything else. How much money would you like to invest?" isn't likely to get a big response in terms of cash investment.
In the US, the vast, vast majority of "safe" locations for guardrails had them put into place years ago. The problem we have right now is that there are too many guardrails out there causing more auto accident injuries and fatalities, which is why they're slowly removing many of them.
Don't just consider the size of the leading edge vs. the length. Consider also that cars typically travel towards the leading edge and parallel to the length. Either via impact with another car, or falling asleep, or drunk driving, or whatever, more people end up driving along the edge of the road than veer directly towards the side of the road. This leads to little physics facts like cars are much more likely to hit the leading edge in an accident than you apparently think they are.
Then when they do hit the "length" of the rail, what actual experience with the things has found is that when involved in a higher speed impact with a vehicle (which most of them are), the rail naturally bends forward at the top, but is less bent closer to the bottom (since that's where the posts attach it to the ground) and thus the ramp turns into a nicely inclined short launching ramp for the vehicle to send it flying into the air instead of letting it continue along the ground.
So sure, for the small minority of "low speed, into the side of the siderail" impact cases, it's great, but most of the time it just increases the risk of injury and death.
putting up guard rails around roads with drop-offs that don't have them we would save thousands more lives
Spent that way, you'd likely cause more severe injuries and cost more lives. At least the laser system is less likely to actually cause as much additional harm.
It is important to note that guardrail had frequently ranked as among the highest sources of injury and fatality in a fixed-object crash (1). Among the primary reasons for this is the type of treatment used at the leading end of the guardrail, which faces the oncoming traffic. Most end treatment designs will either deflect, absorb, or launch the vehicle. Deflection causes the vehicle to be redirected back into traffic -- particularly dangerous on undivided roadways, for the vehicle may travel into oncoming traffic. Absorption is when the force of impact is directly transferred between the vehicle and guardrail, which may cause the end treatment to puncture the vehicle. Lastly, a vehicle can become airborne upon striking a guardrail's end treatment, which may negate the purpose of the guardrail should the vehicle continue beyond the guardrail and conflict with the danger that the guardrail was intended to protect. Additionally, an airborne vehicle is more likely to collide in a manner that the vehicle was not designed to handle, increasing the risk of failure in the vehicle's collision safety systems.
Due to these risks, transportation engineers are increasingly limiting the use of guardrail as much as possible, for guardrail should only be placed when the roadside conditions pose a greater threat than the guardrail itself. In addition to new research into end treatments, public awareness among both drivers and engineers has been gradually reducing injuries and fatalities due to guardrail.
Contrary to some common belief systems, when the government decides to spend lots of money on some big project to "keep people safe" (or some other similar noble sounding purpose, like "eliminating poverty"), like your $9 Billion on guard rails, usually what they actually accomplish is to make the problem worse.
... And to think I thought my comment was almost too obvious to make a good joke...
Don't these kids even have TVland or something like that? Maybe after Mark Cuban get's tired of Hogan's Heros and Charlie's Angels, HDNET can add some more shows....
Network filtering would be useful as a proactive preventative, but that's going to cause a serious network slowdown in most large environments while at the same time not catching the root causes of the problem.
Of course, storing the information again and then searching it is pretty silly. You don't want to know what used to be out there, you want to know what's currently out there and as a bonus, it's already taking up storage space somewhere, so why duplicate it? In order to "copy" it, you're going to take just as many resources as if you look at it in place and process it once, so what's the point?
Just create an optimized process (since this is where all the work will be done it's useful to spend a lot of time optimizing it) to scan file shares and database tables (why use http when you can bulk access the html via a file system?) for your "security-breach" signatures. Write some good regexps and even grep is fairly fast. Then, just set the process to start over at the first file system once it's completed scanning the last one. Make sure that you reduce the priority for the process and give it appropriate bandwidth/resource limits so that it's using "extra" resources instead of interfering with normal work and you're all set. If you can get your scanning process to run at a low cpu priority on the actual storage hosts, that'll be even better because it'll limit your bandwidth usage even more.
Have you factored into your equation how many people will die if say, carbon dioxide limits (as apparently desired by the human-caused global warming proponants) were implemented around the globe in sufficient levels to level off the temperatures based on their climate models?
Even if this version of their climate model projections are accurate (since many previous versions are now considered false, I suppose we'd have to take that on faith, or at least with the sort of probability of accuracy that you describe), sometimes the "cure" may be worse than the disease. There are millions, if not billions, or lives at stake the other direction as well.
So my net question is, how many deaths that we are 99% sure of (see widely understood economics and how these kind of financial costs impacts human life expectations) is your stated 10% probability of the current human-caused global warming theory worth to you? How many deaths is a 20% probability worth to you? 50% probability? 80% probability?
Exactly. One of the problems is that in the case of corporate fraud, it's the company's stockholders that get hurt.
The point of SOX is not to protect the public, it's to protect the subset of the public that are stockholders from being defrauded by the company's management/employees. The problem is that stockholders in general, because of the added costs to their company that SOX creates, are being hurt more by SOX, the supposed cure, than by the previous occasional fraud.
It's like going into the hospital because you have a wart and the doctors deciding that the cure was to dip your whole body in acid. Sure, the wart may go away, but the cure is a bit more painful than the original problem.
Special Liabilities? Yes, go to your local computer repair shop. Pick up one of their service forms with all the legalese and take it in to your corporate counsel and have them copy it. Hand it to the contractor/employee to sign at some point prior to the first time you go to work on their computer.
You do realize that there are lots of people who actually do what you are describing for a living, right? One upon a time about 10 years ago I managed such a shop. Your resistance to the feasibility of the idea seems to argue against you considering that all you are doing is basic PC work, just like lots of other people in your town do every day. There's nothing special legally in this case about the fact that you have an additional contractual relationship with the people you are doing the PC work for.
I'm not sure most companies particularly want to hire someone who can't complete the application process and then posts about it in a national public forum.
I mean, "I couldn't use the application kiosk" doesn't exactly scream "competent employee!"
Maybe if he figured out how to get the thing fixed (who to call, whatever), or fixed it himself (assuming it's really a problem with the machine), he'd be a lot more attractive as an employee who can solve problems for the company instead of creating them.
Slashdot Mirror
If you've ever seen the results of most government custom-written software projects, you'd be more surprised that the software for ANY satellite works at the time the satellite launches (as opposed to seven years, three more projects and 275 million dollars later), not that this one failed.
Lee conquering the south?
I know that most US schools aren't big on teaching history any more unless it can somehow be related to a teacher's pet cause, but hopefully your comment is just a typo and you really meant something like Sherman's march to the sea.
Just in case it isn't clear, Lee led the Southern Armies in the Civil War, he didn't conquer the South.
Just checked one of my FreeBSD servers and it has 88 ports currently installed. In three years of using a desktop with the full x-windows and development everything set of ports (just repurposed the machine a couple of months ago to make room for a Christmas home hardware upgrade, so I can't get an exact port count) I can recall one portupgrade failing due to a new port release. Happily, in that situation portupgrade just doesn't change anything and the next day had a new revision of the specific port that was fixed.
Perhaps you missed that FreeBSD's portupgrade package manages dependencies both directions, to the point of being able to automatically upgrade all ports that the port you want to upgrade depends on as well as upgrading all ports that depend on the port you are upgrading, if desired? And automatically not changing anything if a dependency happens to fail to install for some reason? And automatically using binary packages or compiling from source as appropriate or necessary?
I've been in dependency hell in various Linux distributions before over the years. Typically because someone at some point HAD to have some package that wasn't part of the "approved" set for that distribution, but was available for a mostly compatible distribution. It sucks. I don't ever want to spend hours hunting through rpm listing sites to find the "right" versions to make it all work ever again. I've never had to do that w/FreeBSD, so I'm happy. Maybe Debian/Ubuntu also has that solved, but that doesn't take anything away from the consistency of FreeBSD and the ports collection.
Based on your comments, I'm going to assume that you somehow missed the advent of cvsup-without-gui and portupgrade?
/usr/local/etc/cvsup/sup/ /usr/ports /usr/local/etc/cvsup/ /usr/local/etc/cvsup/port_updates.sh to update all ports."
"Keeping up" in FreeBSD for me consists of running the following script (could be cron'd easily):
> cat update_ports.ksh
#!/usr/local/bin/ksh
cd
cvsup -g -L 2 ports-supfile
cd
portsdb -uU
cd
portversion -v
portversion -c >port_updates.sh
echo "Run
portversion is part of portupgrade. "-c" creates a script for you to run that consists of the portupgrade command with all of your older-than-current-version ports listed in the command line.
It could be easily much more automated, but I like to take 5 minutes and glance through the list of what packages are due to be updated so that if I have concerns over a major one (like MySQL or postfix) I can look at the release notes before running the auto-upgrade through portupgrade.
Maintaining multiple servers is much faster, as presumably you'd have already seen the important release notes for the first server, so each additional server can consist of typing a single command to update everything.
Anyone who actually worked with the Internet or other large networks/servers in the 80s and early 90s?
When I started my first ISP back in the days of analog dial-up, pretty much everything everyone used was a flavor of BSD. FreeBSD for most of the low budget crowd and BSDi or a similar commercial offering for the rich folks. There were some people using early versions of Windows NT for some server stuff, but Linux was not really part of the internet/server scene at the time.
There were still some people using older main-frame style stuff, but the x86 market was BSD, with Sun/IBM/Compaq/HP/etc... mostly doing their own things at least partially based on BSD code bases.
Even today, the most popular non-MS desktop OS has a large BSD influence in it's userland. Even MS has stolen a lot of BSD stuff over the years, so it's pretty much everywhere.
Stone? Easily chipped or cracked if dropped, low tensile strength, not very portable? No thanks.
Try thin metal plates. A little more difficult to etch by hand (which can be alleviated by using the right malleability of gold), but well worth it for the long-term benefits of damage-resistance and portability.
If it did fail, the post wouldn't be moderated up (could be moderated down) and thus unless you habitually read at -1, you wouldn't see it fail.
:)
So of course in this case, if it did in fact fail, you would expect most readers to "not see it fail."
You're confusing it with the cycle where the sun changes weather patterns on earth and some people pretending to be scientists blame it all on you and demand that you live in a cave (or just die) and give them all political power (since they know best what everyone should do) in order to make up for your evil deeds, such as creating prosperity for everyone.
But don't worry, I'm sure some idiot somewhere will cite these effects as "proof" that corporations control the world's climate. After all, all solar changes are obviously a result of man's interference in outer space.
The estate tax is bad fiscally because it's negative impact on the economy, wasted money spent on estate lawyers/accountants and financial schemes for avoidance, is way out of proportion to the actual tax revenues gathered. In comparison to other taxes, there are virtually no actual revenue benefits, since almost everyone with that kind of money will pay others to legally avoid the tax instead, leaving those affected generally just those who were marginal and didn't expect to be affected.
It's a stupid immoral tax that doesn't really have much in the way of benefits (in terms of revenue), but acts as a large distortion on the economy in the form of putting money in places/legal fictions it wouldn't naturally go otherwise in addition to being wasted in paperwork-type activities that don't contribute to actual wealth building for society.
So yeah, get rid of it permanently. Why would anyone want to keep it? As some sort of symbolic "Ha ha, we screwed a couple or rich heirs whose parents didn't donate enough to lawyers and accountants!" measure?
It would be much better for all that avoidance money to be spent on something that produces wealth for us all, rather than on useless paperwork.
Of course, similar content has been available in high definition 24x7x365 on GamePlay HD via Voom and Dishnetwork for over a year, so while the story makes this sound like some DirecTV breakthrough, it's actually them just starting to play a little catchup with Dishnetwork.
The game tournaments are fun to watch if you like the strategy elements. It helps a LOT if you've played the particular game that they're playing in the tournament, because it's tough to actually appreciate what you are watching otherwise.
I never said that the magnetic field got "used up", I said that the energy generated when you create electricity from a magnetic field (be it a transformer or a rare-earth magnet setup) doesn't come from nowhere.
In the case of a transformer, the energy generated in the second coil comes from the source of the magnetism in the first coil, the electric current running through the first coil.
If it didn't, all you'd have to do is setup a third coil next to the first one and you'd magically double your energy output. That doesn't work, as the the 2nd and third coils now just get 1/2 the energy they got before, which not coincidently corresponds nicely with the energy input of the first coil.
In the case of a rare earth magnet electricity creating device (which many of these supposedly law of conservation breaking devices utilize), it's been shown that as you generate electricty from the magnetic field of the rare earth magnet, a little extra energy is produced by the changing of the physical structure of the magnet. The magnet slowly demagnatizes as part of the process.
Yes, if you make a generator from rare earth magnets and spin it around, most of the electricity generated (or energy produced by the system) comes from the motion involved, but there are devices which in that situation (with a near frictionless setup) produce slightly more energy than is put into the system to create the movement. The extra energy comes from the energy freed by the process of slowly demagnetizing/unaligning the rare earth magnets involved.
Most rare earth magnets aren't found naturally, but produced using the right materials and an electromagnet. It can be amazing how much power it can take to create one. They're actually batteries, in a very slow-to-discharge-and-hard-to-use-practically sense of the word.
To quote from http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10418
As a bonus related fun fact, electrons don't move through wires at the speed of light when current travels through the wires (I know, if you are a physicist instead of an engineer, the holes move instead of the electrons). The actual speed is more in the range of millimetres/second, depending highly on the material and voltage used. It's the wavefront that moves super fast, like a garden hose when you turn the water on. The pressure wave pushes water out the end much, much faster than the water actually moves from the faucet to the end.
The process (assuming it work as described based on their publicised info) appears to have a simple energy source, magnetic fields.
Of course, any first year electronics or physics student should be able to tell you that when you pull/use energy from a magnetic field, it still comes from somewhere else rather than being created from nothingness.
In an electrical transformer, that source is the current passing through the wires and creating the magnetic field. In a rare earth magnet, the energy has been used to properly line up the atomic structure and gradually demagnitizes the source as it's used up. In the case of the very weak Earth's magnetic field, the main source is the Earth's rotation and the magnetic contents that are thus flowing/rotating inside. The Earth's magnetic field has decayed about 10-15% over the last 150 years, so I wouldn't count on that as a long-term source of free energy anyway.
The location of this judgement is a popular one for patent trolls, since juries in this area side with patent holders about 40% more than the "average" US jury does.
Of course, this particular injunction was immediately stopped by a higher court:
EchoStar Announces Federal Circuit Blocks Tivo Injunction
ENGLEWOOD, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 18, 2006--EchoStar Communications Corporation (NASDAQ: DISH) issued the following statement regarding recent developments in the Tivo Inc. v. EchoStar Communications Corp. lawsuit:
"We are pleased that this morning, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. temporarily blocked an injunction issued by a Texas Court, while it considers a longer-term stay of that injunction.
As a result of the stay EchoStar can continue to sell, and provide to consumers, all of its digital video recorder models. We continue to believe the Texas decision was wrong, and should be reversed on appeal. We also continue to work on modifications to our new DVRs, and to our DVRs in the field, intended to avoid future alleged infringement."
About EchoStar
EchoStar Communications Corporation (NASDAQ: DISH) serves more than 12.46 million satellite TV customers through its DISH Network(TM), the fastest growing U.S. provider of advanced digital television services in the last five years. DISH Network offers hundreds of video and audio channels, Interactive TV, HDTV, sports and international programming, together with professional installation and 24-hour customer service.
CONTACT: EchoStar Communications Corporation
Kathie Gonzalez, 720-514-5351
press@echostar.com
SOURCE: EchoStar Communications Corporation
I know some of these are probably among the usual suspects, but maybe she won't have already thought of them as "scientists", since there seem to be a lot of more recent "hard" scientists in the ones people are listing.
Benjamin Franklin, one of our early US true scientists who has tons of fun stories about his life.
Thomas Jefferson, who seems to have invented some sort of improvement to just about everything he came into contact with, from windows to agriculture.
Ludwig Von Mises and Friedrich Hayek for their contributions to economics and social philosophy. Von Mises scientifically/mathmatically predicted that the roaring 20's would end in a crash and depression and also the final reasons for the economic demise of the Socialist/Communist model long before his theories became popular after the fact.
Tesla is always fun, if only for all the fun/weird stuff.
If they don't already have them (they likely do most of them), then Adam Smith, Isaac Newton, Stephen Hawking, James Maxwell, Robert Boyle, Robert Hook, Bernoulli, Gottfried Leibniz.
The main difference between communism, and co-ops/families/other similar organizations is that participation in the latter is voluntary, while communism is predicated on forcing everyone to work together after you steal the physical means of production.
Sure, lots of voluntary organizations succeed when there are sufficient volunteers interested to make them work. In that way they are more like a corporation or a traditional business. Those who start and/or continue to run the organization have a choice about participating or not. A shareholder can sell their stock, a volunteer youth soccer ref or coach and stop volunteering if they don't like the direction of the organization, etc... If enough shareholders want to "leave" or enough volunteers want to "leave" the organization fails, or at least becomes severely devalued. Having alternatives available (a better local youth soccer league, a similar company that is better run) speeds up the whole process and results in better current results through competition for whose organization is going to be run the best.
In a free society (commonly described as a free market environment) if you made it so that employees vote instead of shareholders, then that will reduce your pool of potential shareholders. Presuming your company needs shareholders to start or to operate, it will fail. If you attempt to legislate (change corporate law) the idea into existance, all you'd do is get rid of corporations altogether. What even semi-rational person would take the risk of being a shareholder at the start of a company? It'd be hard enough for existing companies who promise to actually pay some returns, at least they'd have a track record of making it possible to get some invested money back. To tell someone "We're starting a company. We'll get paid as the employees. We'll make all the decisions, you'll have no say in anything that happens. By law, we can't promise you anything else. How much money would you like to invest?" isn't likely to get a big response in terms of cash investment.
In the US, the vast, vast majority of "safe" locations for guardrails had them put into place years ago. The problem we have right now is that there are too many guardrails out there causing more auto accident injuries and fatalities, which is why they're slowly removing many of them.
Don't just consider the size of the leading edge vs. the length. Consider also that cars typically travel towards the leading edge and parallel to the length. Either via impact with another car, or falling asleep, or drunk driving, or whatever, more people end up driving along the edge of the road than veer directly towards the side of the road. This leads to little physics facts like cars are much more likely to hit the leading edge in an accident than you apparently think they are.
Then when they do hit the "length" of the rail, what actual experience with the things has found is that when involved in a higher speed impact with a vehicle (which most of them are), the rail naturally bends forward at the top, but is less bent closer to the bottom (since that's where the posts attach it to the ground) and thus the ramp turns into a nicely inclined short launching ramp for the vehicle to send it flying into the air instead of letting it continue along the ground.
So sure, for the small minority of "low speed, into the side of the siderail" impact cases, it's great, but most of the time it just increases the risk of injury and death.
Spent that way, you'd likely cause more severe injuries and cost more lives. At least the laser system is less likely to actually cause as much additional harm.
From wikipeda:
Contrary to some common belief systems, when the government decides to spend lots of money on some big project to "keep people safe" (or some other similar noble sounding purpose, like "eliminating poverty"), like your $9 Billion on guard rails, usually what they actually accomplish is to make the problem worse.
... And to think I thought my comment was almost too obvious to make a good joke ...
....
Don't these kids even have TVland or something like that? Maybe after Mark Cuban get's tired of Hogan's Heros and Charlie's Angels, HDNET can add some more shows
So how much will $6 million get me in terms of these new bionic prosthetic limbs?
Network filtering would be useful as a proactive preventative, but that's going to cause a serious network slowdown in most large environments while at the same time not catching the root causes of the problem.
Of course, storing the information again and then searching it is pretty silly. You don't want to know what used to be out there, you want to know what's currently out there and as a bonus, it's already taking up storage space somewhere, so why duplicate it? In order to "copy" it, you're going to take just as many resources as if you look at it in place and process it once, so what's the point?
Just create an optimized process (since this is where all the work will be done it's useful to spend a lot of time optimizing it) to scan file shares and database tables (why use http when you can bulk access the html via a file system?) for your "security-breach" signatures. Write some good regexps and even grep is fairly fast. Then, just set the process to start over at the first file system once it's completed scanning the last one. Make sure that you reduce the priority for the process and give it appropriate bandwidth/resource limits so that it's using "extra" resources instead of interfering with normal work and you're all set. If you can get your scanning process to run at a low cpu priority on the actual storage hosts, that'll be even better because it'll limit your bandwidth usage even more.
Have you factored into your equation how many people will die if say, carbon dioxide limits (as apparently desired by the human-caused global warming proponants) were implemented around the globe in sufficient levels to level off the temperatures based on their climate models?
Even if this version of their climate model projections are accurate (since many previous versions are now considered false, I suppose we'd have to take that on faith, or at least with the sort of probability of accuracy that you describe), sometimes the "cure" may be worse than the disease. There are millions, if not billions, or lives at stake the other direction as well.
So my net question is, how many deaths that we are 99% sure of (see widely understood economics and how these kind of financial costs impacts human life expectations) is your stated 10% probability of the current human-caused global warming theory worth to you? How many deaths is a 20% probability worth to you? 50% probability? 80% probability?
What can we do? I dunno, write-up and ask slashdot that names them all so that all the technical people in the world avoid them in the future?
Of course, that'll only kill about 10% of their business. The rest of it comes from the clueless PHB set.
Exactly. One of the problems is that in the case of corporate fraud, it's the company's stockholders that get hurt.
The point of SOX is not to protect the public, it's to protect the subset of the public that are stockholders from being defrauded by the company's management/employees. The problem is that stockholders in general, because of the added costs to their company that SOX creates, are being hurt more by SOX, the supposed cure, than by the previous occasional fraud.
It's like going into the hospital because you have a wart and the doctors deciding that the cure was to dip your whole body in acid. Sure, the wart may go away, but the cure is a bit more painful than the original problem.
Special Liabilities? Yes, go to your local computer repair shop. Pick up one of their service forms with all the legalese and take it in to your corporate counsel and have them copy it. Hand it to the contractor/employee to sign at some point prior to the first time you go to work on their computer.
You do realize that there are lots of people who actually do what you are describing for a living, right? One upon a time about 10 years ago I managed such a shop. Your resistance to the feasibility of the idea seems to argue against you considering that all you are doing is basic PC work, just like lots of other people in your town do every day. There's nothing special legally in this case about the fact that you have an additional contractual relationship with the people you are doing the PC work for.
I'm not sure most companies particularly want to hire someone who can't complete the application process and then posts about it in a national public forum.
I mean, "I couldn't use the application kiosk" doesn't exactly scream "competent employee!"
Maybe if he figured out how to get the thing fixed (who to call, whatever), or fixed it himself (assuming it's really a problem with the machine), he'd be a lot more attractive as an employee who can solve problems for the company instead of creating them.