If you are, or are dealing with, a lawyer, a real-estate agent, or anyone who works with contracts, you exchange the contracts via fax. (Typing your name in e-mail doesn't count as a signature.)
Funny, when I worked with my real estate agent it was as you said with changes faxed back and forth until the final document was barely ledgible, but in the corporate world I've seen with a couple of contract negotiations take places via email and MS Word with track changes turned on.
The final versions were of course read very carefully by both sides and then signed versions were faxed back and forth.
Actually you should have said YES! The grand parent found a place in Florida that was the source, you found a place in Pennsylvania that was saying they were not sending the faxes and that the bad company was in Florida. Seems like they both agree.
considering that the "inventors" are a professor and a student, I think it's safe to say they lack the financial resources to battle it out in court with them, even if it is a guaranteed win.
That all depends on the University of Tusla. Many universities just love to enforce their patents, particularly the ones that have law schools.
I certainly forgot more than one, the list is endless, from the eroding of our personal freedoms to shopping at big box retailers to save a few buck. And having said all this, I am by no means perfect either, I just try to do my best.
In other words, if GE wanted to invent superior cabling, I could buy more stock to fund the project, and thus profit from the super-long suspension bridges that would be built. If NASA invented superior cabling, I get to pay more taxes so they can build a space elevator, which I would then be charged additional money to use.
The problem with this is the vast majority of people are too short sighted to do this, it takes government (tax) money where an immediate profit is not needed to invest in these type of projects. People were shocked when Honda started getting into jet engines and said that the new division would not turn a profit for more than ten years, and that is just refining old technologies, not ground breaking new ones.
Imagine the investor response if GE said "We are going to build a space elevator, it will take us at least 25 years to complete it and cost the majority of our R&D budget for the whole time frame". That investor money would be voluntarily moved to Microsoft where (relatively) short term growth is much more likely.
Rather than say "a dollar spent on NASA pipe dreams is a dollar taken from the public" I would say "A dollar spend on a NASA pipe dream is a dollar invested in the public's future". Not all investments pan out but many do.
The most important thing said in the article was a quote by an analyst "It's impossible to make breakthroughs if all you're funding is immediate, near-term applications".
In society today we all seem to concentrate on short term benefits and ignore the long term consequences, be it government budget deficits, long term research funding, balking at online music distribution, moving jobs off shore or the environment.
I back up my laptop to a server, which then gets backed up to tape. My music collection goes with it. This does not circumvent any copy-protection scheme that I agreed to with apple.
Quality is a different matter. We have SCAD or DVD-Audio for that.
The article is about normal CDs and DVDs, the ones that the RI/MPAA wants us to buy and not make backups of. I know this article is a bit of a dupe but it is not the old CD-R suck so bad they are unreadable before the burn is finished.
I now have a dream that congress will use this to realize that we need our fair use back. I'm not holding my breath.
RTFA, its talking about normal purchased CDs and DVDs, not CD-Rs and DVD-Rs... of course that has been discussed on before Slashdot too. Another argument why we need fair use back.
rilly? Learn something new every day. But what can the SUSPENSION handle? The Prius is a very slight, tiny little thing, from what I've seen. Looks like it's got like 10" wheels. I know what I *can* pull with the Jetta. Thought it *IS* true that VW does not publish a tow-capacity for the car.
The Prius out now is a bigger car than the first generation, it weighs in at 2,890 lbs, not much less than the Golf TDIs 2934lbs. The new Prius also has 15" wheels although they do look small on the car, could be the placement on the car.
Say what? The #1 reason most people give me for justifying an SUV (over a wagon or sedan) is towing capacity. If a half-ton is the limit, then I would expect about zero sales.
Not around here, most people seem to buy them for image, ride height, the illusion of safety, cargo room and then towning, in that order. I was mistaken: the 1000lbs value was not from a manufacturer, just rumor; after a little more digging I found that Toyota places the Highlander Hybrid at a more respectable 3,500lbs. The 4WD-i system they have is interesting but I'm not sure how well it would work in off-road conditions.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. Though I don't think it's because they "want a raise" - it's because the big trucking companies buy their fuel on the futures market, and the little guys are getting crowded out of their industry because they have to buy it on the spot market (at the pumps), and it does cut into their profits, and makes their venture uncompetitive with the big trucking companies.
Sorry, I was a bit callous how I said that, I actually have quite a bit of sympathy for the owner-operators.
I think you've hit the nail on the head here. I'm not sure where you got the 18.8Mbps from, as that's lower than what we consider "low but acceptable" quality for SD. It doesn't suprise me that someone would try and compress it that much. For reference, what we consider low quality for SD is MPEG2 or DVCPro at 25Mbps, or MJPEG at 24Mbps. High quality is double those, and that's not including audio or ancilliary data (we store verticle blanking seperately, which adds up to 20% to the bandwidth, but preserves Closed Captioning and the like). I've been told that most broadcasters run at around 15Mbps for SD.
I got the 18.8 from here http://www.cedmagazine.com/ced/9808/9808d.htm and have seen figures in the 18.8-19.4 range thrown around quite a bit. Scientific Atlanta says 19.25, another CED article says it varies a bit depending on content and SD is 2-3Mbps and the ATSC standard caps the HDTV MPEG-2 stream at 19.39 Mbps. OK, I found a FAQ at the FCC that places the max at 19.3 Mbps. Seems low to me too but if they have the time and the right (expensive) equipment that would allow better compression. Still not good enough IMHO.
Also I should note that when we went to 2k operators started to complain that the image was grainy. It turns out that's because they were actually able to see the grain of the film. That can be cleaned up a bit of course, but I think for 4k to really be viable it's going to have to be all digital.
Odd, That slashdot article and other things that I have seen places the resolution of 35mm film at about 4000 lines, but I suspect different films have different grain size.
Related amusing annectdote: When my wife came home after I got done hooking up our HDTV (to our super-crappy AT&T cable) her innitial reaction was "That looks like shit! We paid $1000 for that?!" I had to explain to her that our signal had always looked like shit, it's just that now we had a TV that was good enough that we could tell.
Tell me about it, SD is very disappointing. At least the local comcast cable delivers quite a few HD signals.
But diesel fuel is that which is used by trucks and trains. The LIFE BLOOD of the US economy. (well, that and jet planes). If there's a serious problem with the diesel fuel supply, you can bet there will be a serious noise made by industry lobbyists. And there will be a serious response. I've got the teamsters on MY side in this.
In California truckers are striking as we speak because of high diesel prices (well, because high diesel prices are undercutting their profits, they want a raise).
And as a final reason - the TOWING capacity of a Prius or Civic Hybrid, is something on the order of 600 pounds. I've pulled 2000 lbs in my Jetta TDI at 80 miles an hour. No problemo. Diesel=torque baby.
Diesel=torque baby.
The electric motor on the Prius has 295 lb ft of torque at 1200 rpm, the VW TDI does 155 lb ft at 1900 rpm. Electric motors are great at torque, in fact diesel locomotives use diesel generators to run electric motors. Having said that I have not found the rated tow capacity for either the VW TDI or the Prius, as far as I can tell it seems neither one is rated for towing by their manufacturer. (the new mini-SUV hybrids are reported to have been rated at 1000 lbs towing)
getting rid of losses from the damn torque converter in the damn automatic transmission
I agree that hybrids are in their infancy but the prius doesn't use a toque converter/auto transmission, it uses a planetary gear power splitting device that acts like a CVT, pretty cool.
The toyota prius has a curb weight of 2890 lbs, the VW Gold TDI (the car the grandparent chose over the hybrids) has a curb weight of 2,934 lbs, not a huge difference. Here (hopefully the link works) is a comparison, but the power figures for the Prius is a bit misleading -- it doesn't show the power of the electric motor.
Could they have been from other states? If not, I stand corrected, the info I had was on a Mercedes Benz TD (see article). I did find thisTDI FAQ, but it is not clear on the current situation and for onw I'm out of time.
They "fixed" the flow by changing it to a 4 in circumference in order to see if anything actually could happen. So when someone can piss as wide as their dick, it aint gonna happen. If you watch the show, when the bust a myth, they then go to extremes to see if they can recreate the results, not recreate the variables.
This tells us to not let our horses piss on the third rail. Now we all know what happened to Mr. Ed.
Toyota say that the hybrid battery is supposed to be isolated if the airbag activates. So it's fuss over nothing.
The fuss is about what happens when the accident damages the battery isolation system? The article quoted a a service training instructor from Toyota saying "[after something goes wrong] There should not be high voltage in those cables, but I'm not going to stand up and say there isn't." Accidents are messy and things can really go wrong.
In the US we only have 'dirty' diesel fuel available. The turbo diesels are much much better than before, but they still have worse emissions than gasoline engines, especially hybrid ones. They are only allowed in 45 states, places like California and New York will not allow them until low-sulphur clean diesel is available in 2006. Biodiesel will be a nice alternative, but we do not have enough of it to replace more than about 5% of our current fuel use and it has high NOx emissions. Biodiesel can currently be found in the midwest but it typically blended with dirty diesel (I've seen reports that it is usually on 20% biodiesel). Having said all that diesel's CO and C02 emissions are very good, and they now have clean diesel fuel available in Europe.
Hybrids I think will be our stepping stone to the next generation of transport technology (some sort of full electric would be my guess, hydrogen if we get a cheap efficient way to get hydrogen) - we have the infrastructure to support it (gas stations are everywhere, diesel is no where near as prevalent) and hybrid technology is young, the efficiency should be improving nicely with time.
Seriously though, I understand the desire to own the best, but where do these folks think they're going to get 1080p content? To my knowledge nobody broadcasts 1080p, if for no other reason than that it really sucks when your $75k video server is suddenly reduced to one play/record channel (unless you want to sell your firstborn to upgrade to 2GB fibrechannel, and even then, well, I haven't tested it myself).
No body broadcasts that now, but they would like to de-interlace the 1080i content so that it looks 'better' (for the same reason we currently deinterlace 480i DVDs to 480p). 1080p @ 30Hz is in the ATSC standard and has the same datarate as 1080i @ 60hz (1.244Gbs uncompressed, 18.8 Mbs compressed), 1080p @ 60Hz would double the uncompressed stream and probably be only 50-60% larger than the compressed stream. Working with raw data real time would be hard, but working with compressed data would be reasable. As you said though the upgrade processes would not be pleasant.
I'll be the first to admit that *philes do dent to go overboard but I do really enjoy watching HDTV now and still see room for improvement. In the future I'm sure we will have higher resolution content, currently they are scanning in films at much higher resultions (4000 lines, progrssive), partially to alow for new, better formats.
I've heard rumor of a 1080p DLP chip comsumer TV a while ago, that would be nice (but not for me, I can see the DLP 'rainbows', sucks).
Of course having said all that I think the main problem with current HDTV is not resolution but overcompression. I can see way too many motion artifacts when the camera pans fast or other fast moving scenes.
Is there someone out there with an EE* type background that can explain why, with pixel addressability of 1920 x 1080 we're not seeing any LCDs that can be used at this resolution as computer monitors?
Odds are it is not a 1080i native HDTV, just 720p native (err - close to 720p native) and converts 1080i to its native format. For most video TV content you will not notice it, but boy will you see it when you try that with the small text and fine lines of computer output. Also, as someone else mentioned 1080i is interlaced and not all video cards can do that, not to mention how bad interlaced computer output looks.
* I don't have a complete EE background, just a HDTV/computer hobbiest.
99% of fixed pixel HDTVs (LCD, Plasma, DLP, LCOS) do 720p (1280x720, the p stands for progressive) natively. They will convert 1080i (1920 x 1080, i for interlaced) content to 720p so that it can be viewed. Both 720p and 1080i use 60Hz refresh, although 1080i only gets a complete new frame at 30Hz as it is interlaced.
One caveat to be aware of is that video and computer hardware use different levels for what absolute back and white are. If you have a mismatch of video and computer devices the color space and contrast range can appear 'squashed' or you lose detail in the very dark or very light areas. This happend most recently with the Samsung HD931 DVD player and many HDTVs. The TVs used the video standard, Samsung botched the player and used the computer standard.
The panasonic LCD rear projection HDTV can be used as a monitor fine, in fact it has 1 DVI input and 2 DB-15 VGA connectors and a special computer setting. The Sony equivalent (GWIII series) has a better image but no where near the connection options and no computer monitor setting.
I believe toshiba had a LCOS tv that could do 1080p, but it had other problems that caused Toshiba to remove it from the market. That is the ultimate goal for many HD fanatics though - 1080 progressive. There are 1080x1920 LCD monitors, but no off the shelf 1080i HDTV solutions.
As an interesing side note, the data rates for 720p and 1080i are very close. In fact for high motion content 720p actually ends up with a higher perceived resolution than 1080i bacause of 1080i's interlacing.
RSI isn't new, its just affecting more people, and getting more press now. People that have manual repetitive jobs like dismembering chickens get it, as do many musicians. IIRC many of the wind instruments are particularly bad as they have awkward hand positions.
It does exists. You can get a subscription to patent journals (or read them in a library) and then send notes to the patent office, including prior art and/or'duh, that is obvious' comments.
The US is a big country, just because one school uses them doesn't mean they all do. The only time I had multiple choice bubble tests were SATs (and their grade-school equivalent).
Slashdot Mirror
G5 servers would have handled the load much better than the G4 they seem to be using.
Funny, when I worked with my real estate agent it was as you said with changes faxed back and forth until the final document was barely ledgible, but in the corporate world I've seen with a couple of contract negotiations take places via email and MS Word with track changes turned on.
The final versions were of course read very carefully by both sides and then signed versions were faxed back and forth.
Actually you should have said YES! The grand parent found a place in Florida that was the source, you found a place in Pennsylvania that was saying they were not sending the faxes and that the bad company was in Florida. Seems like they both agree.
That all depends on the University of Tusla. Many universities just love to enforce their patents, particularly the ones that have law schools.
I certainly forgot more than one, the list is endless, from the eroding of our personal freedoms to shopping at big box retailers to save a few buck. And having said all this, I am by no means perfect either, I just try to do my best.
The problem with this is the vast majority of people are too short sighted to do this, it takes government (tax) money where an immediate profit is not needed to invest in these type of projects. People were shocked when Honda started getting into jet engines and said that the new division would not turn a profit for more than ten years, and that is just refining old technologies, not ground breaking new ones.
Imagine the investor response if GE said "We are going to build a space elevator, it will take us at least 25 years to complete it and cost the majority of our R&D budget for the whole time frame". That investor money would be voluntarily moved to Microsoft where (relatively) short term growth is much more likely.
Rather than say "a dollar spent on NASA pipe dreams is a dollar taken from the public" I would say "A dollar spend on a NASA pipe dream is a dollar invested in the public's future". Not all investments pan out but many do.
In society today we all seem to concentrate on short term benefits and ignore the long term consequences, be it government budget deficits, long term research funding, balking at online music distribution, moving jobs off shore or the environment.
Quality is a different matter. We have SCAD or DVD-Audio for that.
I now have a dream that congress will use this to realize that we need our fair use back. I'm not holding my breath.
RTFA, its talking about normal purchased CDs and DVDs, not CD-Rs and DVD-Rs ... of course that has been discussed on before Slashdot too. Another argument why we need fair use back.
The Prius out now is a bigger car than the first generation, it weighs in at 2,890 lbs, not much less than the Golf TDIs 2934lbs. The new Prius also has 15" wheels although they do look small on the car, could be the placement on the car.
Say what? The #1 reason most people give me for justifying an SUV (over a wagon or sedan) is towing capacity. If a half-ton is the limit, then I would expect about zero sales.
Not around here, most people seem to buy them for image, ride height, the illusion of safety, cargo room and then towning, in that order. I was mistaken: the 1000lbs value was not from a manufacturer, just rumor; after a little more digging I found that Toyota places the Highlander Hybrid at a more respectable 3,500lbs. The 4WD-i system they have is interesting but I'm not sure how well it would work in off-road conditions.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. Though I don't think it's because they "want a raise" - it's because the big trucking companies buy their fuel on the futures market, and the little guys are getting crowded out of their industry because they have to buy it on the spot market (at the pumps), and it does cut into their profits, and makes their venture uncompetitive with the big trucking companies.
Sorry, I was a bit callous how I said that, I actually have quite a bit of sympathy for the owner-operators.
I got the 18.8 from here http://www.cedmagazine.com/ced/9808/9808d.htm and have seen figures in the 18.8-19.4 range thrown around quite a bit. Scientific Atlanta says 19.25, another CED article says it varies a bit depending on content and SD is 2-3Mbps and the ATSC standard caps the HDTV MPEG-2 stream at 19.39 Mbps. OK, I found a FAQ at the FCC that places the max at 19.3 Mbps. Seems low to me too but if they have the time and the right (expensive) equipment that would allow better compression. Still not good enough IMHO.
Also I should note that when we went to 2k operators started to complain that the image was grainy. It turns out that's because they were actually able to see the grain of the film. That can be cleaned up a bit of course, but I think for 4k to really be viable it's going to have to be all digital.
Odd, That slashdot article and other things that I have seen places the resolution of 35mm film at about 4000 lines, but I suspect different films have different grain size.
Related amusing annectdote: When my wife came home after I got done hooking up our HDTV (to our super-crappy AT&T cable) her innitial reaction was "That looks like shit! We paid $1000 for that?!" I had to explain to her that our signal had always looked like shit, it's just that now we had a TV that was good enough that we could tell.
Tell me about it, SD is very disappointing. At least the local comcast cable delivers quite a few HD signals.
In California truckers are striking as we speak because of high diesel prices (well, because high diesel prices are undercutting their profits, they want a raise).
And as a final reason - the TOWING capacity of a Prius or Civic Hybrid, is something on the order of 600 pounds. I've pulled 2000 lbs in my Jetta TDI at 80 miles an hour. No problemo. Diesel=torque baby. Diesel=torque baby.
The electric motor on the Prius has 295 lb ft of torque at 1200 rpm, the VW TDI does 155 lb ft at 1900 rpm. Electric motors are great at torque, in fact diesel locomotives use diesel generators to run electric motors. Having said that I have not found the rated tow capacity for either the VW TDI or the Prius, as far as I can tell it seems neither one is rated for towing by their manufacturer. (the new mini-SUV hybrids are reported to have been rated at 1000 lbs towing)
getting rid of losses from the damn torque converter in the damn automatic transmission
I agree that hybrids are in their infancy but the prius doesn't use a toque converter/auto transmission, it uses a planetary gear power splitting device that acts like a CVT, pretty cool.
The toyota prius has a curb weight of 2890 lbs, the VW Gold TDI (the car the grandparent chose over the hybrids) has a curb weight of 2,934 lbs, not a huge difference. Here (hopefully the link works) is a comparison, but the power figures for the Prius is a bit misleading -- it doesn't show the power of the electric motor.
Could they have been from other states? If not, I stand corrected, the info I had was on a Mercedes Benz TD (see article). I did find thisTDI FAQ, but it is not clear on the current situation and for onw I'm out of time.
This tells us to not let our horses piss on the third rail. Now we all know what happened to Mr. Ed.
The fuss is about what happens when the accident damages the battery isolation system? The article quoted a a service training instructor from Toyota saying "[after something goes wrong] There should not be high voltage in those cables, but I'm not going to stand up and say there isn't." Accidents are messy and things can really go wrong.
Very true, but the accident could break the breaker, so to speak.
Hybrids I think will be our stepping stone to the next generation of transport technology (some sort of full electric would be my guess, hydrogen if we get a cheap efficient way to get hydrogen) - we have the infrastructure to support it (gas stations are everywhere, diesel is no where near as prevalent) and hybrid technology is young, the efficiency should be improving nicely with time.
No body broadcasts that now, but they would like to de-interlace the 1080i content so that it looks 'better' (for the same reason we currently deinterlace 480i DVDs to 480p). 1080p @ 30Hz is in the ATSC standard and has the same datarate as 1080i @ 60hz (1.244Gbs uncompressed, 18.8 Mbs compressed), 1080p @ 60Hz would double the uncompressed stream and probably be only 50-60% larger than the compressed stream. Working with raw data real time would be hard, but working with compressed data would be reasable. As you said though the upgrade processes would not be pleasant.
I'll be the first to admit that *philes do dent to go overboard but I do really enjoy watching HDTV now and still see room for improvement. In the future I'm sure we will have higher resolution content, currently they are scanning in films at much higher resultions (4000 lines, progrssive), partially to alow for new, better formats.
I've heard rumor of a 1080p DLP chip comsumer TV a while ago, that would be nice (but not for me, I can see the DLP 'rainbows', sucks).
Of course having said all that I think the main problem with current HDTV is not resolution but overcompression. I can see way too many motion artifacts when the camera pans fast or other fast moving scenes.
Odds are it is not a 1080i native HDTV, just 720p native (err - close to 720p native) and converts 1080i to its native format. For most video TV content you will not notice it, but boy will you see it when you try that with the small text and fine lines of computer output. Also, as someone else mentioned 1080i is interlaced and not all video cards can do that, not to mention how bad interlaced computer output looks.
* I don't have a complete EE background, just a HDTV/computer hobbiest.
One caveat to be aware of is that video and computer hardware use different levels for what absolute back and white are. If you have a mismatch of video and computer devices the color space and contrast range can appear 'squashed' or you lose detail in the very dark or very light areas. This happend most recently with the Samsung HD931 DVD player and many HDTVs. The TVs used the video standard, Samsung botched the player and used the computer standard.
The panasonic LCD rear projection HDTV can be used as a monitor fine, in fact it has 1 DVI input and 2 DB-15 VGA connectors and a special computer setting. The Sony equivalent (GWIII series) has a better image but no where near the connection options and no computer monitor setting.
I believe toshiba had a LCOS tv that could do 1080p, but it had other problems that caused Toshiba to remove it from the market. That is the ultimate goal for many HD fanatics though - 1080 progressive. There are 1080x1920 LCD monitors, but no off the shelf 1080i HDTV solutions.
As an interesing side note, the data rates for 720p and 1080i are very close. In fact for high motion content 720p actually ends up with a higher perceived resolution than 1080i bacause of 1080i's interlacing.
RSI isn't new, its just affecting more people, and getting more press now. People that have manual repetitive jobs like dismembering chickens get it, as do many musicians. IIRC many of the wind instruments are particularly bad as they have awkward hand positions.
It does exists. You can get a subscription to patent journals (or read them in a library) and then send notes to the patent office, including prior art and/or'duh, that is obvious' comments.
The US is a big country, just because one school uses them doesn't mean they all do. The only time I had multiple choice bubble tests were SATs (and their grade-school equivalent).