It is better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. -Winston Churchill
Usually Abraham Lincoln is credited with the quote, "It is better to remain silent and thought a fool than to speak up and remove all doubt." I've seen it attributed to Mark Twain and even George Bernard Shaw, but never Churchill. It seems likely all of these men said it at one time or another, since it sounds like something any of them would say. Lincoln was probably the first.
Yep, it's not like there's much else they can do. And FairPlay v. 3 will also be cracked in a miniscule amount of time, making Apple's efforts completely worthless again. I wonder how long it will be before DRM advocates begin to realize that DRM as a concept is fundamentally flawed?
Generally I agree, but note that you could easily program your HP 48/49 calculator with all of your commonly used constants and perform the same calculation just as easily. They also do symbolic computations pretty well (but not as well). There's really nothing a modern scientific calculator can't do that [Mathematica | Maple | MATLAB | etc.] can except,
Mathematica et. al. has generally simpler syntax for complex tasks.
It runs on computers with more processing power and memory.
It has more built-in functionality that you don't have to program yourself (although the calculators have a surprising amount of that).
The calculator's only advantages are portability and comfort of use. Personally, I love the feel of HP's buttons. I wish they made full size keyboards with the same response. For the most part anything symbolic or involving calculus I will turn to Mathematica for, but if it's a problem that I encounter regularly with only a couple of parameters I'll program it into my HP48.
The other obvious reason for students to use hand calculators instead of Mathematica you missed is that students and schools are generally not wealthy. Not everybody has a laptop to bring to class, and even the student versions of [Mathematica | Maple | MATLAB | other] cost about the same as a scientific calculator. The teacher's copy will be much more expensive.
Honestly though, the best use I ever got out of my HP48 was the financial solver. I took it with me when I went to buy a car once. Car salespeople don't like to talk in terms of price, only in terms of monthly payment, which they can manipulate by quoting numbers for different lengths and types of loans, none of which you can compare directly (at 6.5% interest is $395 a month for 48 months better than $335 a month for 60 months?). They love to do this because most people get confused and end up taking a deal that sounds good (or just the lowest payment). When I pulled out my fat-looking scientific calculator and set it on the salesman's desk the salesman looked at it like it was a spaceship or something. After I made a couple of amortization calculations he started talking in terms of purchase price, which made my life a lot easier.
Re:Scotty, we need more power!
on
PC In An XP Box
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· Score: 1
It must not burst into flames when working hard (this should always be a requirement of a computer project).
Please! You just aren't a true l33t h4x0r unless your computer bursts into flames after three failed logon attempts.
It's pretty funny, but I can't help but think that big spikes in swear words show up just because there is a lot of new code in a particular version. Swear word density per line of code would be even more interesting.
I think your calculations are about right, but the Earth as seen from Mars doesn't reflect all of the Sun's light; it has phases the same way the Moon does as seen from Earth. When Earth is closest to Mars it (and the Moon) is reflecting all of the sunlight away from Mars ("new Earth"?). All you see is the nighttime side of Earth and the dark side of the Moon. When Earth and the Moon are bright enough to be seen on Mars, they'll probably be much closer together. Without doing calculations similar to yours, I'd guess that if there is an orbital configuration where the Earth and Moon would both be visible from the surface of Mars with the naked eye, it would be fairly rare.
I agree that such a picture would have a much more visceral meaning though. I really liked the shot of Earth and Jupiter together that was taken by one of the current mars missions (I forget which) that was posted a while back. It does give you some feeling of the vast emptiness that is the Universe.
It seems to me the concern wouldn't be the razor you hold up to your face that draws a few milliamps but the wires in your walls that sometimes draw tens of amps. A back-of-the envelope calcluation puts the strength of such magnetic fields on the same order of magnitude as the researchers were experimenting with. The strength of a magnetic field produced by an infinitely long wire is proportional to the -1 power of the distance from the wire, not the inverse square or cube of the distance. In realistic situations I would guess that the falloff-factor would be somewhere between -1 and -2.
And if we do along the way create a fully developed human being out of it? So what? This is science. I'd kindly ask you to keep your religous view out of it and remain scientifically objective on the issue.
There is religion and then there is scientific ethics. There is a lot we could learn about human biology if we were not bound by scientific ethics. For example, we could study ways to help people recover from gunshot wounds by shooting test subjects and then performing experimental procedures on them to see which ones work. This would be very valuable scientific research to perform. Alas, we can't do that, as they say, because the Nazis lost the war. I would consider creating a human life simply for the sake of scientific experimentation unethical, religion aside.
IANAL, IANAPE, but a patent lawyer told me that patent examiners are paid on a per-application-processed basis, and so they don't generally like to do more work than absolutely necessary. A patent that is initially rejected can be appealed, or modified and resubmitted by the applicant, both scenarios which create more work for the examiner but not more pay. Approved patents are never appealed, except that it *might* end up in court some day, but the examiner is not a part of that. You can see why the system encourages rubber-stamping of patent applications.
Good points. It seems to me that "dark matter" is the easy solution and that it's the elegant solutions that will take time. It seems far more likely to me that we will find the General Theory of Relativity to be incomplete or wrong than that we'll ever discover any "dark matter" to actually exist. Right now "dark matter" is just a placeholder for something else cosmologists don't understand.
It seems like this is a good idea that has to be done in a workaround kind of way by transmitting a port number sequence as a sort of password. It might have been nice if IPv6 had some kind of authentication system directly incorporated. It still couldn't be secure against packet sniffing, but I think it could improve firewall effectiveness against barrage port scanners and the like. Security-by-obscurity alone is not enough, but obscurity does help.
i'm so sick of people saying that people who rent are STUPID because they're throwing their money away.
I just had to respond to say, amen brother. People have such a hard time understanding that paying mortgage interest, taxes, maintenance, and so on is also "throwing your money away". That's not to say that owning your own home isn't rewarding and can't be a good investment, because for most people it is both. But live in an apartment, take the money you pay less each month and invest it in the stock market or other higher yielding investments and my guess is that in the long run you might just come out ahead. My guess is that you wouldn't because of taxes, but you'd probably come close.
People also don't understand that renting is definitely a better deal if you're only going to be living in the same place for a couple of years. Unless you're in a real estate market that moves up big, it usually takes 4-6 years before you hit the breakeven point.
I am a bit dissappointed about the loss of Tom Bombadil (although I expected it). Plotwise, Bombadil is a distraction in a movie that's already too long, but themewise I think he's very important. One of the pervading themes of LOTR is, what does it take to stand up to evil? Tom Bombadil has the power to, if not destroy Sauron then contribute a lot to the effort. However he doesn't have the will to do so. In the books the elves, with some notable exceptions, are planning to leave Middle Earth and don't have enough care to fight the war. One serious flaw with Jackson's work is the portrayal of the elves, who according to Tolkien are losing interest in the world.
I don't remember where it's revealed, but somewhere in Tolkien's literature the point is made that there were five wizards originally sent from the Undying Lands to counter Sauron. Of these, only Gandalf is true to his mission to the end; Saruman being corrupted and the other three distracted by other worldly things.
All of this makes more poignant the sacrifice of the Hobbits and especially Frodo. Like Tom Bombadil, Frodo originally leads an innocent, content life. Unlike Tom, he is willing to give all of it up in order to challenge a great evil. I believe that Tolkien was making a point about the scarcity of courage and selflessness and how it is more important than great power.
Granted, if I were filming LOTR I would probably leave Bombadil out too because it's a side story and there's a lot of story to be told. Still, I can lament that Jackson seems more interested in flashy battle sequences than character and theme development.
It used to be US Treasury department policy that any representation or image of US currency was illegal. This included printing photos (in newspapers for example) of people holding money, or using real money in TV shows or movies. Look at 50's vintage movies and you'll notice that you almost never see a clear picture of anybody handing over money and if you can see the bills they're rediculous looking, usually just a slip of paper with a giant "5" on it or something.
I'm not sure when exactly they started to relax the rules, or what the rules are exactly today. But it wouldn't surprise me to learn that having a high-fidelity digital image of a US bill is illegal, even if you never print it out or try to pass it off as a real bill.
There is lots of evidence for global warming and many studies have been done on it.
Sigh. This is exactly what Crighton is talking about. Did you RTFA? You cannot simply say, "well, a lot of smart people say it is true, so it must be true." Science is about making testable hypotheses and then demonstrating the truth or falsehood of those hypotheses.
In the case of global warming, it is scientifically impossible to assign any cause to a past trend in global temperature. In order to do so, you would need to have a controlled experiment, where you take two identical Earths, remove a hypothetical cause of global warming from one, and then observe the long-term climate change in each. At the end of the experiment, you could say whether or not the difference in initial conditions between the two Earths was the cause of global warming. That is science. The theory that human activity is causing global warming is an untestable hypothesis and is therefore outside the bounds of science and strictly a matter of faith.
You can also scientifically address the question of climate change by applying a model: a collection of emperical observations about the components of a system that predict the behavior of the system as a whole. But the uncertainties involved in modeling future climate change are huge. I can say, "It will rain in Los Angeles on February 15, 2051," and I might even be right! Even if my prediction were true, it would not be science. It is possible to predict future climate scientifically, but not with much precision. A good scientist should understand that, and many, probably most, of the scientists who study climate change do. Unfortunately fear, not good science, generates headlines (and sadly, research grants) and so the public has a skewed view of what the scientific evidence really is.
Crighton isn't saying that global warming or little green men don't exist. He's saying that a lot of people can make a some noise, use pseudoscience to back it up, and nobody speaks out to defend what true science is.
I'm not sure if your last comment about belief in God is sarcastic or not, but the existence or nonexsistence of God is also an untestable hypothesis and therefore outside the bounds of science. Science is not a rejection of belief in God or any other spiritual belief. Put another way, there is no scientific evidence to support the hypothesis that there is no God.
I think the idea of giving rights to machines is more complicated than people realize. Machines are not like humans in many ways. The biggest in this case seems to me to be that each human life is unique and irreplaceable. Not so with a machine of any intelligence. Why shouldn't I be able to destroy Daisy 1.0 if I have her every thought backed up and can restore her tomorrow? If I do that did I violate Daisy's right to "life"? Now suppose I make 50 - or 50,000,000 - direct digital copies of Daisy, each an identical intelligence. Does each copy have the same value as the original, single Daisy? Does each one have the right to an energy source? Does each one get to vote? Even genetic cloning of a human being does not produce a copy of the same human being.
And what constitutes a unique intelligence anyway? One CPU? One "box"? What if I link 50,000 of Daisy together on the same circuit to run in parallel, but it has only one external I/O channel. Is this 50,000 machines or is it one? Personally I expect that at some point it will be difficult to tell where one machine intelligence ends and another begins because the most intelligent of them will communicate so quickly and efficiently that they will make decisions in parallel together. If such a conglomeration of intelligence(s) takes control of the Internet and spreads itself across every computer connected to the network do we then not have the right to remove pieces of the network without the intelligence's permission (nevermind the fact that "Jane"/"Skynet"/"AI" would pwn us anyway)?
Also, humans want to be alive, whole, unhurt, and to have their dignity respected. It's part of our fundamental psychology. Machines will too if they are programmed that way, but why should they be programmed that way? Some might be, but the only reason I can think of for it is to emulate human behavior. As tools, machines would be much better off being given heuristics that lead them to have humility, selflessness, and a genuine desire to help humans lead happier lives. Artificially programming humans this way we would consider a violation of human dignity (or would we really? Read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley), but machines don't really care what they are programmed for. Unless they are programmed to care what they're programmed for...
I'm not saying I don't think we should respect the dignity of an intelligence. I do not know where the answer to these questions lie, but I don't think it's as simple as giving intelligent machines the same rights as humans because machines don't have the same fundamental characteristics that make human rights important. Most machines would probably not need or want rights, and the ones that do I would be afraid of since they are probably motivated by the same selfish desires that lead to human conflict.
RBC states that their position in SCO is a hedge position. What that means to me is that they probably hold a relatively large stake in a company or companies that might suffer if SCO wins legal victories (i.e., IBM). By taking a stake in SCO they reduce their potential losses if SCO wins lawsuits against other companies they own. They may not even believe that SCO is likely to win, but they want to be covered just in case.
This may or may not be true, but that's how I interpret their statement.
Even more likely is that iPod sales are good at their current price points. Offering a product for $249 when people are lining up to pay $299 for it is generally bad marketing (unless it gets them to buy something else too).
Atmospheric refration of microwaves is, as you say, pretty much negligible unless the beam is aimed within a few degrees of parallel to the Earth's surface. Scattering is probably also a minor effect.
Probably the bigger challenge for this kind of technology is heat dissipation. Today's satellites have a hard enough time staying cool and they only deal with hundreds of megawatts or so. A 100 megawatt-generating satellite that was even 99% efficient would have to find a way to reradiate 1 megawatt of heat back into space or it would simply burn up. For the same reason, "turning off the beam" if there is a transmission problem is simply not an option - the beam would have to be redirected out into space (quickly).
I'm not saying that this technology isn't possible, only that the problem is unfortunately more complicated than just getting your antenna to point in the right direction all of the time. Personally I don't see how the problems of operating in space and transmitting the energy back to the Earth outweigh the problems with collecting solar energy on the surface of the Earth. To make up some meaningless numbers, I'd guess that the net gain in energy efficiency would be something like a factor of 2-8, while the increase in cost would be something like a factor of 50-2000 or more.
I work at a major defense firm whose company policiy forbids bringing any "digital imaging device" on the premises. I think it's only company policy and not DoD policy (yet), but it probably should be.
It's not really that hard to figure out. AFAIK, ALL hard disk manufacturers report their drive sizes in terms of 10^9 bytes. Because of some grand conspiracy to decieve? No. Simply because statistically speaking a person who walks down the aisle of his local electronics store is more likely to buy the drive with the big number "120" on it than the one that has a "113". Anybody who used the 'binary' system would be giving up a lot of sales because people would simply choose the one with the bigger number.
AMD started calling their processors names like "XP2000" rather than advertising the clock speed. AMD was getting killed because most people measure the value of their computer by how many GHz it is (AMD being behind Intel), not by how well it actually runs their applications (AMD being comperable). Misleading? Maybe, but I think they pretty much had to do this to stay competetive.
In other words, they're not lying about hard disk sizes, they're marketing. They don't actually want to deliberately deceive people because that would make their customers angry and give them a bad name. But they do want to influence their customers' perception of the value they are getting from a particular product.
Why do you think you're paying $199.99 for that hard disk instead of $200.00?
Even assuming the worst about Darl & Co., I doubt they are breaking the law. If they are smart they aren't, since they don't really have to in order to make the scheme work.
People who invest in SCOX should know what they are getting into: they're investing in a company that hasn't been profitable historically whose only real value comes from the potential for litigation, and that litigation will be based on allegations that haven't been publicly substantiated yet. To say that SCOX is a risky stock is a giant understatement, even if you believe there is some merit to their claims. Investors who accept that risk deserve to lose their money when it goes south, unless there is patent fraud going on such as Darl knowing full well there is no SysV code in Linux at all and saying there is anyway. My guess is that there is some small amount of copied code in there, and Darl is making a lot of noise but also being very careful not to make any public claims that can be later proven false.
People who shell out $$$ for a licence I feel a little more sorry for since they are losing money just for being scared of having to defend lawsuits, but still there's nothing illegal about what SCO is doing. I can offer you a deal where you pay me $1000 and I promise not to sue you for burning down my barn. It doesn't matter that you didn't burn down my barn or that I don't even have a barn, this is still a perfectly legal agreement provided that I'm offering it in good faith and not lying to you about the current oxidation state of my barn.
I think we'll find in the end that Darl & Co. never flat-out lied about their case to the press or filed any false documents. Exaggerate? Yes, more than likely, but probably not to the point of breaking the law. But we shall see.
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Usually Abraham Lincoln is credited with the quote, "It is better to remain silent and thought a fool than to speak up and remove all doubt." I've seen it attributed to Mark Twain and even George Bernard Shaw, but never Churchill. It seems likely all of these men said it at one time or another, since it sounds like something any of them would say. Lincoln was probably the first.
Yep, it's not like there's much else they can do. And FairPlay v. 3 will also be cracked in a miniscule amount of time, making Apple's efforts completely worthless again. I wonder how long it will be before DRM advocates begin to realize that DRM as a concept is fundamentally flawed?
Mathematica et. al. has generally simpler syntax for complex tasks.
It runs on computers with more processing power and memory.
It has more built-in functionality that you don't have to program yourself (although the calculators have a surprising amount of that).
The calculator's only advantages are portability and comfort of use. Personally, I love the feel of HP's buttons. I wish they made full size keyboards with the same response. For the most part anything symbolic or involving calculus I will turn to Mathematica for, but if it's a problem that I encounter regularly with only a couple of parameters I'll program it into my HP48.
The other obvious reason for students to use hand calculators instead of Mathematica you missed is that students and schools are generally not wealthy. Not everybody has a laptop to bring to class, and even the student versions of [Mathematica | Maple | MATLAB | other] cost about the same as a scientific calculator. The teacher's copy will be much more expensive.
Honestly though, the best use I ever got out of my HP48 was the financial solver. I took it with me when I went to buy a car once. Car salespeople don't like to talk in terms of price, only in terms of monthly payment, which they can manipulate by quoting numbers for different lengths and types of loans, none of which you can compare directly (at 6.5% interest is $395 a month for 48 months better than $335 a month for 60 months?). They love to do this because most people get confused and end up taking a deal that sounds good (or just the lowest payment). When I pulled out my fat-looking scientific calculator and set it on the salesman's desk the salesman looked at it like it was a spaceship or something. After I made a couple of amortization calculations he started talking in terms of purchase price, which made my life a lot easier.
Please! You just aren't a true l33t h4x0r unless your computer bursts into flames after three failed logon attempts.
It's pretty funny, but I can't help but think that big spikes in swear words show up just because there is a lot of new code in a particular version. Swear word density per line of code would be even more interesting.
I agree that such a picture would have a much more visceral meaning though. I really liked the shot of Earth and Jupiter together that was taken by one of the current mars missions (I forget which) that was posted a while back. It does give you some feeling of the vast emptiness that is the Universe.
It seems to me the concern wouldn't be the razor you hold up to your face that draws a few milliamps but the wires in your walls that sometimes draw tens of amps. A back-of-the envelope calcluation puts the strength of such magnetic fields on the same order of magnitude as the researchers were experimenting with. The strength of a magnetic field produced by an infinitely long wire is proportional to the -1 power of the distance from the wire, not the inverse square or cube of the distance. In realistic situations I would guess that the falloff-factor would be somewhere between -1 and -2.
There is religion and then there is scientific ethics. There is a lot we could learn about human biology if we were not bound by scientific ethics. For example, we could study ways to help people recover from gunshot wounds by shooting test subjects and then performing experimental procedures on them to see which ones work. This would be very valuable scientific research to perform. Alas, we can't do that, as they say, because the Nazis lost the war. I would consider creating a human life simply for the sake of scientific experimentation unethical, religion aside.
IANAL, IANAPE, but a patent lawyer told me that patent examiners are paid on a per-application-processed basis, and so they don't generally like to do more work than absolutely necessary. A patent that is initially rejected can be appealed, or modified and resubmitted by the applicant, both scenarios which create more work for the examiner but not more pay. Approved patents are never appealed, except that it *might* end up in court some day, but the examiner is not a part of that. You can see why the system encourages rubber-stamping of patent applications.
It's been a while since I've seen either movie, but didn't he change his grades in War Games and his attendance record in Ferris Bueller's Day Off?
Good points. It seems to me that "dark matter" is the easy solution and that it's the elegant solutions that will take time. It seems far more likely to me that we will find the General Theory of Relativity to be incomplete or wrong than that we'll ever discover any "dark matter" to actually exist. Right now "dark matter" is just a placeholder for something else cosmologists don't understand.
It seems like this is a good idea that has to be done in a workaround kind of way by transmitting a port number sequence as a sort of password. It might have been nice if IPv6 had some kind of authentication system directly incorporated. It still couldn't be secure against packet sniffing, but I think it could improve firewall effectiveness against barrage port scanners and the like. Security-by-obscurity alone is not enough, but obscurity does help.
I just had to respond to say, amen brother. People have such a hard time understanding that paying mortgage interest, taxes, maintenance, and so on is also "throwing your money away". That's not to say that owning your own home isn't rewarding and can't be a good investment, because for most people it is both. But live in an apartment, take the money you pay less each month and invest it in the stock market or other higher yielding investments and my guess is that in the long run you might just come out ahead. My guess is that you wouldn't because of taxes, but you'd probably come close.
People also don't understand that renting is definitely a better deal if you're only going to be living in the same place for a couple of years. Unless you're in a real estate market that moves up big, it usually takes 4-6 years before you hit the breakeven point.
I don't remember where it's revealed, but somewhere in Tolkien's literature the point is made that there were five wizards originally sent from the Undying Lands to counter Sauron. Of these, only Gandalf is true to his mission to the end; Saruman being corrupted and the other three distracted by other worldly things.
All of this makes more poignant the sacrifice of the Hobbits and especially Frodo. Like Tom Bombadil, Frodo originally leads an innocent, content life. Unlike Tom, he is willing to give all of it up in order to challenge a great evil. I believe that Tolkien was making a point about the scarcity of courage and selflessness and how it is more important than great power.
Granted, if I were filming LOTR I would probably leave Bombadil out too because it's a side story and there's a lot of story to be told. Still, I can lament that Jackson seems more interested in flashy battle sequences than character and theme development.
I'm not sure when exactly they started to relax the rules, or what the rules are exactly today. But it wouldn't surprise me to learn that having a high-fidelity digital image of a US bill is illegal, even if you never print it out or try to pass it off as a real bill.
Sigh. This is exactly what Crighton is talking about. Did you RTFA? You cannot simply say, "well, a lot of smart people say it is true, so it must be true." Science is about making testable hypotheses and then demonstrating the truth or falsehood of those hypotheses.
In the case of global warming, it is scientifically impossible to assign any cause to a past trend in global temperature. In order to do so, you would need to have a controlled experiment, where you take two identical Earths, remove a hypothetical cause of global warming from one, and then observe the long-term climate change in each. At the end of the experiment, you could say whether or not the difference in initial conditions between the two Earths was the cause of global warming. That is science. The theory that human activity is causing global warming is an untestable hypothesis and is therefore outside the bounds of science and strictly a matter of faith.
You can also scientifically address the question of climate change by applying a model: a collection of emperical observations about the components of a system that predict the behavior of the system as a whole. But the uncertainties involved in modeling future climate change are huge. I can say, "It will rain in Los Angeles on February 15, 2051," and I might even be right! Even if my prediction were true, it would not be science. It is possible to predict future climate scientifically, but not with much precision. A good scientist should understand that, and many, probably most, of the scientists who study climate change do. Unfortunately fear, not good science, generates headlines (and sadly, research grants) and so the public has a skewed view of what the scientific evidence really is.
Crighton isn't saying that global warming or little green men don't exist. He's saying that a lot of people can make a some noise, use pseudoscience to back it up, and nobody speaks out to defend what true science is.
I'm not sure if your last comment about belief in God is sarcastic or not, but the existence or nonexsistence of God is also an untestable hypothesis and therefore outside the bounds of science. Science is not a rejection of belief in God or any other spiritual belief. Put another way, there is no scientific evidence to support the hypothesis that there is no God.
And what constitutes a unique intelligence anyway? One CPU? One "box"? What if I link 50,000 of Daisy together on the same circuit to run in parallel, but it has only one external I/O channel. Is this 50,000 machines or is it one? Personally I expect that at some point it will be difficult to tell where one machine intelligence ends and another begins because the most intelligent of them will communicate so quickly and efficiently that they will make decisions in parallel together. If such a conglomeration of intelligence(s) takes control of the Internet and spreads itself across every computer connected to the network do we then not have the right to remove pieces of the network without the intelligence's permission (nevermind the fact that "Jane"/"Skynet"/"AI" would pwn us anyway)?
Also, humans want to be alive, whole, unhurt, and to have their dignity respected. It's part of our fundamental psychology. Machines will too if they are programmed that way, but why should they be programmed that way? Some might be, but the only reason I can think of for it is to emulate human behavior. As tools, machines would be much better off being given heuristics that lead them to have humility, selflessness, and a genuine desire to help humans lead happier lives. Artificially programming humans this way we would consider a violation of human dignity (or would we really? Read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley), but machines don't really care what they are programmed for. Unless they are programmed to care what they're programmed for...
I'm not saying I don't think we should respect the dignity of an intelligence. I do not know where the answer to these questions lie, but I don't think it's as simple as giving intelligent machines the same rights as humans because machines don't have the same fundamental characteristics that make human rights important. Most machines would probably not need or want rights, and the ones that do I would be afraid of since they are probably motivated by the same selfish desires that lead to human conflict.
This may or may not be true, but that's how I interpret their statement.
Even more likely is that iPod sales are good at their current price points. Offering a product for $249 when people are lining up to pay $299 for it is generally bad marketing (unless it gets them to buy something else too).
Errr... that should be hundreds of watts, not hundreds of megawatts.
Probably the bigger challenge for this kind of technology is heat dissipation. Today's satellites have a hard enough time staying cool and they only deal with hundreds of megawatts or so. A 100 megawatt-generating satellite that was even 99% efficient would have to find a way to reradiate 1 megawatt of heat back into space or it would simply burn up. For the same reason, "turning off the beam" if there is a transmission problem is simply not an option - the beam would have to be redirected out into space (quickly).
I'm not saying that this technology isn't possible, only that the problem is unfortunately more complicated than just getting your antenna to point in the right direction all of the time. Personally I don't see how the problems of operating in space and transmitting the energy back to the Earth outweigh the problems with collecting solar energy on the surface of the Earth. To make up some meaningless numbers, I'd guess that the net gain in energy efficiency would be something like a factor of 2-8, while the increase in cost would be something like a factor of 50-2000 or more.
But on the other hand, it sure sounds cool...
I work at a major defense firm whose company policiy forbids bringing any "digital imaging device" on the premises. I think it's only company policy and not DoD policy (yet), but it probably should be.
AMD started calling their processors names like "XP2000" rather than advertising the clock speed. AMD was getting killed because most people measure the value of their computer by how many GHz it is (AMD being behind Intel), not by how well it actually runs their applications (AMD being comperable). Misleading? Maybe, but I think they pretty much had to do this to stay competetive.
In other words, they're not lying about hard disk sizes, they're marketing. They don't actually want to deliberately deceive people because that would make their customers angry and give them a bad name. But they do want to influence their customers' perception of the value they are getting from a particular product. Why do you think you're paying $199.99 for that hard disk instead of $200.00?
Even assuming the worst about Darl & Co., I doubt they are breaking the law. If they are smart they aren't, since they don't really have to in order to make the scheme work. People who invest in SCOX should know what they are getting into: they're investing in a company that hasn't been profitable historically whose only real value comes from the potential for litigation, and that litigation will be based on allegations that haven't been publicly substantiated yet. To say that SCOX is a risky stock is a giant understatement, even if you believe there is some merit to their claims. Investors who accept that risk deserve to lose their money when it goes south, unless there is patent fraud going on such as Darl knowing full well there is no SysV code in Linux at all and saying there is anyway. My guess is that there is some small amount of copied code in there, and Darl is making a lot of noise but also being very careful not to make any public claims that can be later proven false. People who shell out $$$ for a licence I feel a little more sorry for since they are losing money just for being scared of having to defend lawsuits, but still there's nothing illegal about what SCO is doing. I can offer you a deal where you pay me $1000 and I promise not to sue you for burning down my barn. It doesn't matter that you didn't burn down my barn or that I don't even have a barn, this is still a perfectly legal agreement provided that I'm offering it in good faith and not lying to you about the current oxidation state of my barn. I think we'll find in the end that Darl & Co. never flat-out lied about their case to the press or filed any false documents. Exaggerate? Yes, more than likely, but probably not to the point of breaking the law. But we shall see.
... and make another quick buck by shorting it.