No arguments there. There are plenty of such people for any topic.
But here's the thing: for those of us with a genuine hobby in that, they're still more intersting to talk to than with the local "omg, my favourite football team lost against East Bumfuckistan" bore. Sure, maybe he learned all about, say, BSD just to look cool. (I know about at least a co-worker that he switched from "Linux rules" RL trolling to "BSD rules, Linux sucks" just to keep being a better-than-you persecuted minority.) Does it make him a better human than the sports pretender? Nope. Does it make him more interesting to talk to for someone whose genuine interest is BSD or generally OSes? Yes, you bet. That's all.
But for well adjusted adults, I don't get the appeal.
I don't get a lot of other things (e.g., what do some people find in business suits, photography as a hobby, or watching football), but I don't pretend that that gives me the right to dictate what other people should do.
It didn't. It's the myspace part. It would be like a 40 year old guy wearing sunglasses and a trenchcoat to a Chuck E. Cheese. You just kind of assume.
Except in this case there is nothing about MySpace that says "kids only site". We're not talking about adults on some kindergarten's "I like ponies" chatroom (though even there they might have legitimate reasons to be, like making sure what their own kid could see there), we're talking about adults on a site that always had adult profiles too. It was never marketted as a teen-only site, it never had any mention of being a teen-only site, etc. So exactly _what_ warning signs would an adult have to tell them "it's a kid only place, they'll look funny at you if you go there"?
All you have there is some "omg, there are pedos on MySpace" media scare (and even there it's been only a couple of cases), and from there a bunch of people basically seem to extrapolate that everyone else there must be one. Which is a classic extrapolation fallacy, of the kind that goes "cats are mammals, hence all mammals are cats."
Or to put it otherwise, it's as illogical as reading that there was a rape in the central park, and from there assuming that every single male in the central park must be a rapist looking for a victim. Or that there are fraudsters on Ebay, hence everyone using Ebay must be looking for someone to scam. Etc.
As the father of a 4 year old I have made a point to teach him how to interact with people, not computers. I would much rather he grow up to be able to walk up to a stranger and have a good conversation then be able to program in assembly any day.
Noone has forgotten how to talk to a real person. I talk to quite a few every day, and so do most people I know. The Internet hasn't made people forget how to deal with people in person, any more than hand-writing letters has. Just because, say, Shakespeare or Honore de Balzac wrote letters to their friends, doesn't mean they had forgotten how to talk in person.
Plus, you'd be surprised how programming helps there too. By the end of high school I was starting to master what I call "Eliza mode". You know after the infamous pseudo-AI program. You can just take what someone said and rephrase it right back at them after some time. (Hint: make sure you're comfortably past 8 seconds from when they finished saying it, so it gets out of their short term memory buffer.) E.g., if they go on about how some band is a genial mixture of rap and metal, figure out the right moment in conversation to rephrase that right back at them. I don't have half a clue what that band is, but I know what their opinion of it is, and that's what matters.
Try it some day. It takes some time and attention to get it bootstrapped, but you can use it to talk about any topic thereafter. You might even end up their best friend, the guy who _totally_ understands their tastes and shares their preferences.
And it's all based on an idea taken off a short program, so there you go.
Also, there are few reason for these virtual communities. The whole point of them is to meet people you will never actually meet. Want some social interaction. Try striking up a conversation with somebody, that alwasy seesm to work well for me.
I'll give you a damn good reason to be on a virtual community (e.g., you're on Slashdot right now) instead of striking a conversation with your good neighbour Jack Random: common interests. E.g., I'd rather talk or read a post about computers, history, or cats, than listen to the local drone go on and on about football (soccer) and cars.
Frankly, most conversations born out of sheer geographical proximity are fucking boring. There's a whole class of topics that really interest noone that much, like sports or the weather, that exist only as the lowest common denominator for talks between perfect strangers. ("Say, it's cloudy today." Yes, I noticed it, I'm not fucking blind.)
And people who devote a disproportionate amount of their time just to stay on top of such common denominator topics. E.g., sports. There are plenty of people whose only real interest in sports and in following the prowess of a give team, whether they consciously realize it or not, is only really to seem to belong to the local group of Tom, Dick and Harry who seem interested in that team. Bonus points if it's just groupthink, and deep down inside, Tom, Dick and Harry aren't in it for any other reason either.
Me, I'd rather find someone and some topic more interesting than that. On the Internet if that's what it takes.
I'll give you a second one: to stay in touch with old pals. People occasionally do have to move.
Plus, it's not even something new, and you only need to look at history to see how bogus that argument is. The same could be said for snail mail letters, for example. Here, lemme rephrase it for you: "Also, there are few reason for these letters. The whole point of them is to meet people you will never actually meet. Want some social interaction. Try striking up a conversation with somebody, that alwasy seesm to work well for me."
And yet, ever since someone inventing writing on a stone or clay tablet, people have used them to communicate with other people, some they'll likely never meet in person. All sorts of people, including philosophers, novelists, playwrights, statesmen, etc, yes, have often enough preferred to spend an evening writing a letter to an old friend or to someone with similar interests, instead of just going out and striking a random conversation about the weather. For the most famous ones you can even go to the local book store or library and buy a a book or three with transcripts of their correspondence. Those alone would make a nice mountain of evidence that people occasionally do want to socialize with someone more interesting than the locally available Joe and Jane Random. Go figure.
Huh? Excuse me? Since where did 35+ become synonimous with paedophile?
It may be hard to comprehend for someone whose world revolves around a computer in a basement, but most humans are _social_ beings. Yes, I know, mind boggles. There are plenty of reasons for people, even aged 35+, to interact with other people in a real or virtual community, that _don't_ involve looking for 13 year olds to fuck. Like, you know, interacting with other 35+ people.
Perhaps Microsoft could learn from this. they have never been good about deadlines. Not trolling however mabye it is just a business strategy.
MS is only bad at deadlines because they have a policy to never ship with known defects. Yes, they still have undiscovered bugs, etc, but the ones they did discover, they won't ship until they're all fixed.
You may be against MS's monopolistic practices, you may laugh at the quality of their testing/reviewing based on their number of not-yet-known bugs they ship with, etc. But at least from a policy perspective it's already head and shoulders above what 99% of the other companies do. Most of the others will just ship anyway and hope to patch it later. (At least with game publishers it's pretty much the norm, but serious software often works like this too.)
And blimey, of course that makes it harder for MS to meet the deadlines. Between company A who won't ship until they fixed all bugs they can find, and company B who'll just call it released regardless of which state it's in... yeah, big surprise, company B has an easier time with its deadlines. Who would have guessed?
It's not even speciffic to MS. In the games arena too, you can see that, for example, Blizzard always shipped a year too late by insisting to fininsh the work properly, while others kept their deadlines by shipping a buggy unfinished product. Whop-de-do, big surprise there.
And comparing MS to Google is mis-leading anyway, since Google never actually held any deadline. It just wavered all responsibility by calling all its products "betas". I'm sure MS too would have a lot trouble if it could just declare all its products to be perpetually beta, and perpetually tweaked/fixed from one day to the next, instead of trying to fix everything before release.
MS _can't_ possibly have the luxury of operating like that. You have a different set of expectations from a commercial OS than from a free search engine or free email provider. If Google's page rank doesn't work quite right and people exploit it, you've lost nothing except 5 minutes worth of scrolling through blog farms referencing each other. If MS Windows's firewall doesn't work quite right and people exploit it, you get owned by a virus. The exact same code quality doesn't even start to raise eyebrows when it's on Google, but is a major problem when it's in Windows.
Basically comparing MS to Google, or MS's methods to Google methods, is mis-leading because it's not apples-to-apples. They're held to different expectations, must meet different goals, etc. Saying that MS's deadline problem would be better served by adopting Google's methods, is like saying that you should adopt my vaccuum-cleaning technique when you're driving your car, or my swimming technique when you're reading the newspaper.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
Keyword: congress.
Capisci? Your freedom of speech, or press, or whatever, exist _only_ in your relation to congress. Noone else. Not an airline, not your neighbour, not Slashdot, not your employer, etc. If I want to chuck you out of my party because of something you've said, freedom of speech is fully non-applicable and can kiss my ass. Freedom of speech does _not_ give you a right to troll on someone else's property (a message board, an airline, etc), or whatever else you may have imagined.
Yes, the airline is perfectly right there: you may have your freedom of speech over there, not over here. The airline has _no_ obligation to give him any freedom of speech. It doesn't matter if it's dissent or not.
Frankly, it's getting tiresome by now. For a nation so fond of chest-thumping about their freedoms, you'd think people would at least bother learning what those are. But nosiree, bob. Ever since bulletin boards, newsgroups, FIDO, MUDs, etc, were invented, the utterly sad reality pops up again and again that the average people have no freakin' clue.
They imagine that it's some non-existent exact opposite: that they have some sacred right to troll on someone else's property, but it's OK to bend over to the Government. That it's some 1st Ammendment violation if their goatse post on some private board is deleted, but it's OK if the governemnt does it. (After all, duh, it's the government. It's their job to decide what's allowed and whatnot.;) Which is getting it completely wrong.
Learn thy actual rights, lemming. Not knowing them is the first step towards losing them.
So as long as reporters do their job and use the term "breakthrough" appropriately it won't lose its meaning.
That's funny. Ha ha... err... you _are_ kidding, right?
Reporters nowadays do the exact opposite, to the extent where they practically (A) _created_ a whole class of bullshit pseudo-science, and (B) spawned a whole wave of distrust in science as a whole.
Reporters want sensational stuff, they want headlines that sell, they want "breakthroughs", "controversy", etc, to the point where they'll even create one if one doesn't exist. Reporters can't seem to even report something like "Scientist A says he's installed a distributed computing screensaver that searches for a cure for cancer", without turning it into some sensationalist headline like "BREAKTHROUGH IN CANCER TREATMENT!" That's the kind of headlines that sells. Heck, it doesn't even take a scientist or expert. I've seen bogus opinions by quacks, snake oil vendors, conspiracy theorists or lobbies chewed by the press and shit in the form of "BREAKTHROUGH DISCOVERY IN DOMAIN X!"
Or they can't just publish something like "Scientist B says more testing will be needed to determine the new antibiotic's effectiveness in treating MRSA" without turning it into some bogus sensationalist story, along the lines of "MAJOR CONTROVERSY ABOUT NEW MRSA CURE!!!"
Especially controversies are easy to manufacture, and fit neatly with most newspapers' and TV stations sick and twisted idea of "impartiality" and "objectivity". Namely that you're impartial and objective as long as you have two people arguing opposite points of view... even if you had to find an unqualified quack to argue one of the sides. Or both, for that matter. They could host a debate on global warming where one side claims that trees produce most CO2, and the other side claims that global warming is caused by little green aliens with a big magnifying glass, and feel satisfied that they have fulfilled their obligation to be impartial and objective. They had their opposing points of view (even if both are bogus), they didn't take sides, they didn't give one side more space than the other, so it's all perfectly good journalism. Right?
So to wrap this long rant up, expecting journalists to behave responsibly and abstain from sensationalist bullshit... heh. It ranks up there with belief in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
Amen for hilarious. I remember buying a Michael Moore book that was described all over the back cover as hilarious and generally the biggest barrel of laughs ever. (I'm not American, I had no idea who the fuck he is. Must be some humourist, I figured.) Turned out it was non-stop bitter political whine that, far from getting me rolling on the floor laughing, just got tiresome after a while. Like whine usually does.
Now I don't know, maybe he even has a point. I'm not an American, so I can't tell. I can even relate to some of his peeves with the Bush administration, as it's basically the same things that got us in the rest of the world worried. But hilarious? Hmm...
I figure, either it was a retarded editor, or the Americans are _really_ a cheerful and easily amused folk if that counts as hilarious. Or maybe over there the meaning of "hilarious" has changed to mean something completely different. To this day, I have no idea which. Maybe an American wants to enlighten me.
Yeah, 50%, yada yada, but 450 mhz of whatever crap ass cpu they have in their review pc could likely be under 10% on a modern desktop chip.
1. Have a look at some of those "crap ass CPUs" in laptops before shooting your mouth. An old 933 MHz P3 laptop will run circles around a similarly clocked P4 Prescott. The P3 features _much_ higher IPC (instructions per cycle). There's a reason why the Banias and Dothan (Centrino) and later Core/Core2 are based on the P3 core, and not on the P4.
The Prescott still wins on the whole by sheer virtue of being clocked 4 times faster, but the different IPC may still screw your maths up big time. Some 450 MHz wasted on a "crap ass" P3 will mean something like 600+ MHz wasted on a Prescott, which for some desktops can mean 20%-25% wasted on just a funky 3-key keyboard.
2. Even _if_ it were "only" 10%, like you claim, it's still 10% wasted on a stupid 3-key keyboard. But, heck, even if it were a full keyboard, there's no excuse to need that much CPU power. The software should just upload the images to the keyboard and then stay the fuck out of the way. Even complex sound-mixing software and drivers needs less CPU power nowadays. There's no excuse for a keyboard driver to need more.
At any rate, I don't want it taking that kind of CPU time when I'm playing or doing anything else. If I wanted only 90% of the CPU, I'd have bought a CPU clocked at only 90% of the speed in the first place.
So culture has changed, but it won't change again? Makes no sense to me.
Except it often took centuries or even millenia to change again. So we could sit and wait until it changes again for the better, or we could do what works here and now. Dunno about you, but I'll pick the latter.
If that were so there would be no open source.
What, you mean like most of Linux being the work of paid employees of IBM, RedHat, SuSE, Intel, etc? Or like OpenOffice being an ex-closed-source program that's being developped now by paid employees of Sun? Or like Mozilla being paid for by Netscape, then AOL, then Google? Etc. All those are commercial interests at work.
So, sad to say, if you hoped that it will shatter my belief that people do stuff for money, I'll have to disappoint you. Most of the open source nowadays is _not_ the work of idealistic unpaid hackers in their free time, but the battleground of powerful corporations for a slice of the market. It's done for money. Sorry.
In fact there might not be any computers at all if it weren't for the early mathematicians and researchers who had little financial incentive.
Actually, sad to say, they were almost invariably paid for that. Whether it was Konrad Zuse in Germany or the British team working to crack the Enigma codes, they were people who were either paid to do that, or had a financial incentive to do that. Some patents were involved too. E.g., Zuse patented his ideas, and later used those to get capital for his company. (E.g., IBM paid good money for an option on his patents.)
So, again, sorry. Those were _not_ idealists working for pure love of maths, nor for the greater good of society. They may have loved maths and society, but they got paid for what they did. It wasn't a work of love in their free time.
It also presumes people never perform charity work.
Extremely little, by comparison to the sums that work into patent-motivated research. If your hope for progress was charity, you'd have to wait a _lot_ more for new stuff.
I assume there's nothing you do in your free time that's productive or creative.
I do the stuff that interests _me_, yes, not stuff that's necessarily going to get society forward. Guilty as charged, guv'nor. Unfortunately, most of the OSS work done in one's spare time (as opposed to work paid by corporations, motivated by financial incentives) also falls in this category. They're just reinventing the wheel for little benefit, other than the creator's own entertainment, and don't really do much to keep driving technology forward.
Your entire time argument is misleading. The reason things develop so fast now is because of all the previous work to build on. When you're starting from nothing inventions will take a long time to come about. But when you're building on past inventions growth is exponential. Think of how many new (truely new, not building on top of anything) inventions have come about in your lifetime. I can't name one.
I've yet to see any data or coherent theory that says it's easier to invent the LASER than it was to invent, say, the wheel. If you choose to believe in that, more power to you, but I wouldn't base a whole economy on it. Or not until there's a hell of a lot more actual data behind it.
Do not anthropomorphize the actions of a business with 300,000 employees.
How about anthropomorphising _humans_, "you moron"? Because IBM's decisions aren't taken by a computer or resulting from laws of physics, but are taken by human managers. Precisely _because_ it is a corporation, it's composed of humans and decisions at every level are taken by humans. Somewhere at IBM there were one or more humans who got the information of what SCO is doing, and took a decision.
And if all else fails there was a CEO and a board of directors who could have vetoed the whole thing, if they would have rather paid. What those want, is in a nutshell "what IBM wants".
Basically, I can understand riling against anthropomorphising a computer, a car or the weather. But you're arguing here against anthropomorphising human beings. Which is as fucking stupid as it can possibly get. What next would you recommend? To not treat a cat like a cat either? Not treat a house like it's a house? Or what?
No, just being hidden behind an impersonal abstract entity does _not_ absolve one of one's very humanity. Just being a boss in a corporation doesn't make one some kind of abstract machine that shouldn't be anthropomorphised. Good or bad, that's still a human. Good or bad, the decisions that run that abstract entity are nevertheless the decisions of humans. You don't just somehow cease being a human just because you're working at a corporation.
Great works of art were created for thousands of years before copyright law and great inventions were created for thousands of years before patent law. IP law exists to create an added incentive and let people make their living by inventing. That does not mean there would be no progress without it.
If you look at history, yes, there were inventions before... at the rate of 2-3 per century at best. E.g., it's easy to look at the ancient Greece period and see how many new things they invented, and all that maths and philosophy progress. The dumb part is when you notice that they're stretched across _millenia_.
(And in other times and places not much happened for millenia. E.g., while Egypt invented a bunch of stuff in its first two millenia or so, by the last millenium a lot of the stuff had basically been frozen in time. Medicine, for example, had been rolled into something that was medicine, religion and malpractice insurance rolled in one, and noone even tried something else any more. The lack of incentive to invent something new, meant people didn't take the risks of even trying either. But we'll get back to that idea later.)
By comparison, in modern times, even after discarding all the trivial, bogus and "business method" patents, we're still doing orders of mangnitude better. Yes, the old way didn't score a clean zero, but it can nevertheless score far worse than the patent and copyright period. I'll take the modern way, if you don't mind.
The other problem is one of culture. The societies that did well before were the ones who could motivate their citizens and communities to research anyway. E.g., ancient Greece could afford to have a whole third of its population dedicate their time to philosophy and art between wars. The motivation there was the culture which placed an emphasis on intellectual and artistic pursuits, and made it a thing of prestige to have such interests and achievements.
The societies and periods which lacked such motivation (e.g., see medicine in late ancient Egypt again) just stagnated.
What I'm getting at? That sadly in our contemporary culture the only motivator is money. You can't just ask people and communities to invest in research just for prestige any more. They just won't do it. Go to your boss and tell him that you want a third of the company to just do research and explore new ideas and possibilities. Oh, and without any patenting or business plans. Just for the greater good of society. If you're lucky, he'll only laugh at you.
You can't expect modern society to keep working like ancient Greece and ancient China did. Heck, not even like during the Renaissance. The culture has changed, and capitalism is now irreversibly wedged into everyone's brains. If you don't give companies or individuals a _financial_ incentive to do anything, most just won't do it. Unless you can present a business plan that says "we stand to gain X million dollars out of it", the accountants and management won't even look at your great plan, no matter how good you may think it is for the progress of society as a whole.
I'm not saying it's necessarily either good or bad. Good arguments can be made for both sides. It may be regarded as good that there's a reality check there, and we don't waste everyone's resources on pointless projects that benefit noone. It may be regarded as bad that stuff with no immediate benefit doesn't get done or researched at all, as a result. Pick your side, or something in between. But that's how it works nowadays. With no financial incentive, nothing gets done.
So here and now, patents and copyright are such an incentive. They make it a lot easier to come up with a plan that includes an "and that's how we'll make money out of it" part. Be it by being the only ones who'll manufacture that, or by licensing it to others, or by being a litigious bastard, or whatever. But it helps put some dollar signs next to the proposal to research something.
Sure, we can dream about doing it just for prestige and glory instead, like in the good old days. But it just doesn't work that way any more.
I'm a programmer, and TBH I'm _for_ software patents, as long as we get rid of the generic "business method" patents.
See, patents were supposed to do two things, in this order:
1. First and foremost, to make sure we're getting the exact recipe to make something, instead of ending up buried somewhere out of reach. Sure, you get your monopoly on sewing machines, Mr Singer (for example), but in return society gets the _exact_ recipe and description of how it works. After 20 years, we get that in the public domain.
2. To stimulate innovation. Go research something already. If someone else patented it, well, research something else.
The current non-patented programming fuck-up serves neither point. We have millions of monkeys who don't invent anything, and don't share anything. They just copy-and-paste (even via memory, but copy-and-paste nevertheless) someone else's algorithms, and never invent anything new. Ever. And the results of even that unoriginal copied-and-pasted work remains buried somewhere behind a wall of NDAs, on some old tape in a steel safe.
Sorry, people, that's not how technological progress works. What we have here is stagnation and waste of resources.
You're affraid that patents will put your company out of business? Well then how about said company starts investing in research already? How about inventing something new already? How many people does your company pay to research new algorithms? No, seriously. Be honest. Zero, perchance? No, that's not innovation, that's not progress, it's just copying someone else's work, over and over again.
Yes, software patents do carry the stigma of having been abused and mis-used by patent-trolls. There were a lot of bullshit and obvious patents snuck through just because the patent office got disoriented by anything that mentioned "in software" or "on a computer". Ooh, it's the same old volume knob, only now "on a computer"... that sounds soo high-tech, let's patent it. Duly noted, and I too wish we'd be rid of _those_ already.
But there are lots of things which aren't trivial at all. And blimey, I'd love to see more of those researched and documented.
E.g., to give the old (and now expired) whine about the LZW patent, how about you invent a compression algorithm from scratch, if you think compression is trivial. Yes, LZW (and LZSS and arithmetic compression and everything else) seems trivial when you just copy it (even via memory) from someone else's book. Sure, copying is easy. Now you try _inventing_ a new one, then tell me how trivial that was. If you're not damn good at maths, I doubt that you'll even know where to start. No offense. I tried and didn't know either.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck... I don't know about you, but my guess would be that maybe it's not a fish. In this case, if it "acts like a capacitor", then it _is_ a capacitor.
In fact, if you RTFP (Read The F***ing Patent), it _is_ a fancy capacitor, plus circuitry to get a constant voltage out of it. In fact, it's downright the most classical kind of a capacitor, with two surfaces separated by a thin dielectric material. Only they use a fine powder to achieve lots of surface.
So, yes, it _is_ a capacitor.
At any rate, if it "acts like a capacitor" then it's fair to compare it to the best ultra-capacitors available. And if what they're proposing ends up having to be 80 times better than the best existing ultra-capacitors, then I'm getting a tad suspicious. Sure, it could be that they're geniuses, but I'll hold the celebrations until I hear something about a working prototype.
Well, I was calculating at 0.1 $/kWh, that's where the 90 kWh figure came from. But 52 kWh isn't really that much better, because noone ever made ultracapacitors that can store more than 5 Wh/kg. So even with their numbers it would be more than 10 metric tons at today's technology.
Packing that in 152 kg? Ooer. That still requires a 70-80 times improvement in capacitor technology, compared to the best of the best ultracapacitors available today. It's a jump from being 10 times worse than a chemical battery to being 7-8 times better.
I'm sure you'll understand that I'm skeptical of such ridiculously high jumps. It could happen, but I'll want to see it actually working before I get all excited about it.
Plus, here's another thing that makes me suspicious: why tie it to electric cars? If someone could make such capacitors, they wouldn't just make cars with them, they'd pretty much own the market for any kind of battery, including laptops, iPods, car batteries, etc. I mean, seriously, think a battery which gives you 7-8 times more hours on your laptop at the same weight as your current battery. Because that's the kind of improvement they're claiming there. Fuck cars, I'd want one in my laptop right now.
Duly noted, but it still won't help that much there. The maximum charge speed for one capacitor being 1750 W/kg, you still need about 600 kg of them in parallel to be able to take 1.08 MW as input. (They did say it would charge in 5min.) Series connection won't help you much there, since basically the real limitation is the current there and connecting them series doesn't help with that.
So you have 18000 kg worth of capacitors, and 600kg of them will need to be be in parallel. That means that at most you can have 3 banks in series, which raises your voltage to a whole 2.7 * 3 = 8.1V. So now instead of 400 kA you "only" need 133 kA to charge it. Not that much of an improvement, eh?
Here's some hard data: these things are low voltage devices. E.g., Maxwell's data says 2.7V for theirs. They also have crap power density: 3-5 Wh/kg. (Yes, I didn't miss a "k" there.) They may have high capacity, but Q = C*V, so low voltage still puts a limit on it.
So if you want to store about 90 kWh in a bank of those, you'd need anywhwere between 18,000 and 30,000 kg worth of ultra-capacitors. Yes, between 18 and 30 metric _tons_. Not quite a commuter car, you know? I'll also go on a limb and say that buying whole tons of them will cost a pretty penny.
Also, transferring 90 kWh in 5 minutes means 1080kW power. More that 1 MW. So, yeah, I don't think your average power socket can do that. At 2.7V that means 400,000 A, too.
So, basically, it's just snake oil. It ranks up there with the promises to make energy out of water by changing the orbits of electrons in hydrogen. Some fraudster figured that he can get tens of millions of dollars VC to pretend to make such a thing. And given the IQ of some VC these days, they probably will too.
It gets better. According to Maxwell Technologies, their biggest model tops at 2.7V. So now do the same maths at 2.7V and you'd need over 400000A to charge the damn thing.
And no, you can't have several in series to rise the voltage, because with capacitors that reduces the capacity. So if you have a 2600 Farrad capacitor, two of them in series will only give you 1300.
Now also think that the output power of these things is also limited. According to, say, Honda's graphs, the best they can get out of theirs is about 1750W/kg. Let's say a new and improved model comes which can do 2000 W/kg. (Mostly to work with round numbers.) To charge 90kWh in 5 minutes you need 1080kW, or a bit over 1 MW. At 2kW/kg, you'd need over 500 kg worth of ultracapacitors just to take that.
But even that's not the funniest part. It gets better.
Now also think that the maximum stored energy density for the best ultra-capacitors atm is 3-5Wh/kg. Let's take 5. We want the best of the best here. And we want to store 90kWh there. So 90000/5=18000kg worth of ultra-capacitors. Yup, 18 tons.
The energy density in W*h/kg for the best ultracapacitors is about 10 times lower than for a battery. Which in turn was crappy enough to make gasoline remain the better option. Among other things, because these are very low voltage devices. They may come in 2600 Farrad versions, but they also top at 2.7 volt. (Both values taken straight off Maxwell Technologies site, for their biggest ultracapacitor.) So the stored charge is, basically, crap.
So basically take all the hideous weight/Watt-hour problems of an electrical car and multiply them by 10. By now you're spending most of the energy into just moving the batteries/capacitors around. Basically think driving a pickup truck full of batteries/capacitors, just to haul yourself to work and back. Whee.
So basically I smell yet another fraudster hyping something they can't possibly deliver. But it sounds high-tech, revolutionary, etc, and some idiot will give them tens of millions VC to pretend they're working on it.
See, the dog just sees you as the alpha dog of the pack. Not as "god", not as "owner", but like a bigger and more powerful dog, and usually therefore the pack leader. Since wolves hunt in packs, they're programmed to follow the leader. That's all the "love" you're getting there. No more, no less.
Note that you're not even automatically always the pack leader there. I really mean it that to the dog you're just another dog. Sure, you're the bigger and more dangerous one, and thus a natural choice for the alpha... until it looks like they could challenge you to a fight for the leadership. Especially in males around the age of 2 you can see basically starting to disobey and even show their aggressive side, as part of establishing who's the alpha.
Especially being a very bad pack leader, from the dog's point of view, can precipitate a very real fight for leadership. E.g., my brother got a hole through his palm like Jesus from such a fight gone badly. A dog's tooth can perforate through flesh unsurprisingly easily. (If it makes any difference, though, I still think the dog would have made a better pack leader there;)
But other people have ended up with a relationship where basically the dog is the alpha without involving an actual fight. If the dog can get to do what he wants by sheer virtue that you're not going to assert your power to stop him, congrats, the dog is now the alpha anyway.
I don't know what your relationship with God is, but I don't think it involves "you know, maybe I could challenge God to a fight to determine who's the boss and who's the follower. I could be the next God myself if I win." Try talking about such plans with your local priest, and you'll get some very funny looks.
Well, here's an idea for you: if you're going to selectively breed cats lacking Fel D1, then you can test them _before_ you buy them. It would be pretty stupid to buy a million cats and kill those with lots of the allergen, when you can buy just those without it in the first place.
The Fel D1 protein will be all over the cat's fur and in her saliva, so you only need a little hair or saliva to determine how much of it does it produce. Since the fur will be the most problem for people with allergies (due to shedding and sheer surface), you can just clip a few hairs from the candidate kitty and test them. If it makes the grade, buy it to breed hypoallergenic kittens, if not, best of luck to him/her getting sold the old fashioned way.
Ditto for the kittens produced in the intermediate steps of the breeding programme. You can still sell/donate the kittens who don't make the grade to people without allergies.
Plus, it seems to me that such a programme can actually mean saving cats as opposed to some kitten genocide. There are millions of abandoned cats being killed every year. Someone could just go to some shelters and rescue the cats which test better in that aspect. Can't see anything inherently inhuman or cruel with that.
The typical Siberian weighs between 10 and 15 pounds for the females, and between 15 and 20 for the males. They also tend to keep growing until they're 5 years old, which when they reach the weights above.
So, yes, I'm not that surprised if yours is a female (you say, "she") and I'll guess something like only 1-2 years old, since you say her parents were bigger. Well, that's just the thing: these cats keep growing. Yours will very likely get bigger too.
It's not intended as an insult or anything, but basically just a gentle reminder: you can't assume that all breeds act the same, or that what you know from normal moggies applies to Siberians too. The average moggie stops growing, so you don't really expect it to get bigger than she was at 1 year old. The Siberian keeps growing for another 4 years.
Still, OK, females are "only" 2-3 times the weight of a normal lap cat even when fully grown up.
But, if you want to dispute my calling them huge, try a fully grown up male sometimes. I don't know what you'd call a 20 pound cat, but in my book that's one huge cat. By house cat standards, anyway. Mind you, I'm not saying it's as big as a tiger or jaguar, or anything similarly silly, but... well, put one of those next to an average moggie and you tell me if it's not huge.
As for your allergies, another gentle reminder: there's more than one kind of allergy out there, and there are degrees of allergy. I personally know someone who's allergic to _anything_ with fur, including dogs and rabbits, for example. Those don't have the Fel D1 protein anyway, since it's a felide-only protein. Also, on the other axis, there are allergies and allergies, ranging from mild irritation, to extreme cases where even tiny allergen doses cause extreme reactions.
Heck, as an example of how much human reactions can vary, some people's allergy to "cats" can be as deviant from the norm as being really an allergy to pollen. The cat goes outside, comes back with pollen in the fur, the owner cuddles and strokes the cat, you can guess what happens next.
Basically you can't extrapolate your experience to _everyone_. Most people will basically have an experience similar to yours, yes, but not everyone. I'm glad that your allergy isn't tripped by a Siberian, and I wish you all the happiness in the world with your new cat. But other people's mileage may vary. Some will be tripped by a different allergen, and some do react even to the tiny Fel D1 quantities that a Siberian produces.
Well, this is obviously good news anyway for people who don't want a Siberian.
1. Have you seen a Siberian? The Siberian isn't just another body shape or fur pattern, it's something as big as your arm. It's a _huge_ cat. It's bigger than some dog breeds. (And legends have it that some are also actually able to function as a dog, because at that size it feels a lot less threatened by someone human sized. So it _can_ defend its territory from a human, if needed. I wouldn't know if it's myth or not, though.)
Now I'm all for large cats myself, but I can also see why someone would want a standard 5 pound lap cat instead.
2. The Siberian isn't anywhere near allergen-free. In fact, no natural cat breed is, from moggie to lions and tigers. The Siberian does produce a lot less allergen, but for some people it's still too much. So producing cats with even less, would still be welcome news for a lot of people.
3. The Siberian only has less of the cat-speciffic protein. I.e., it won't help anyone whose allergy is to something else. E.g., someone with a generic allergy to fur, will still be just as allergic to the Siberian as to any other cat breed. Basically, if holding a rabbit or petting a dog also gives you an allergy, getting a Siberian won't help at all.
I don't know if this new breed addresses this third point, but it IS one area where improvement is possible.
Slashdot Mirror
No arguments there. There are plenty of such people for any topic.
But here's the thing: for those of us with a genuine hobby in that, they're still more intersting to talk to than with the local "omg, my favourite football team lost against East Bumfuckistan" bore. Sure, maybe he learned all about, say, BSD just to look cool. (I know about at least a co-worker that he switched from "Linux rules" RL trolling to "BSD rules, Linux sucks" just to keep being a better-than-you persecuted minority.) Does it make him a better human than the sports pretender? Nope. Does it make him more interesting to talk to for someone whose genuine interest is BSD or generally OSes? Yes, you bet. That's all.
I don't get a lot of other things (e.g., what do some people find in business suits, photography as a hobby, or watching football), but I don't pretend that that gives me the right to dictate what other people should do.
Except in this case there is nothing about MySpace that says "kids only site". We're not talking about adults on some kindergarten's "I like ponies" chatroom (though even there they might have legitimate reasons to be, like making sure what their own kid could see there), we're talking about adults on a site that always had adult profiles too. It was never marketted as a teen-only site, it never had any mention of being a teen-only site, etc. So exactly _what_ warning signs would an adult have to tell them "it's a kid only place, they'll look funny at you if you go there"?
All you have there is some "omg, there are pedos on MySpace" media scare (and even there it's been only a couple of cases), and from there a bunch of people basically seem to extrapolate that everyone else there must be one. Which is a classic extrapolation fallacy, of the kind that goes "cats are mammals, hence all mammals are cats."
Or to put it otherwise, it's as illogical as reading that there was a rape in the central park, and from there assuming that every single male in the central park must be a rapist looking for a victim. Or that there are fraudsters on Ebay, hence everyone using Ebay must be looking for someone to scam. Etc.
Noone has forgotten how to talk to a real person. I talk to quite a few every day, and so do most people I know. The Internet hasn't made people forget how to deal with people in person, any more than hand-writing letters has. Just because, say, Shakespeare or Honore de Balzac wrote letters to their friends, doesn't mean they had forgotten how to talk in person.
Plus, you'd be surprised how programming helps there too. By the end of high school I was starting to master what I call "Eliza mode". You know after the infamous pseudo-AI program. You can just take what someone said and rephrase it right back at them after some time. (Hint: make sure you're comfortably past 8 seconds from when they finished saying it, so it gets out of their short term memory buffer.) E.g., if they go on about how some band is a genial mixture of rap and metal, figure out the right moment in conversation to rephrase that right back at them. I don't have half a clue what that band is, but I know what their opinion of it is, and that's what matters.
Try it some day. It takes some time and attention to get it bootstrapped, but you can use it to talk about any topic thereafter. You might even end up their best friend, the guy who _totally_ understands their tastes and shares their preferences.
And it's all based on an idea taken off a short program, so there you go.
I'll give you a damn good reason to be on a virtual community (e.g., you're on Slashdot right now) instead of striking a conversation with your good neighbour Jack Random: common interests. E.g., I'd rather talk or read a post about computers, history, or cats, than listen to the local drone go on and on about football (soccer) and cars.
Frankly, most conversations born out of sheer geographical proximity are fucking boring. There's a whole class of topics that really interest noone that much, like sports or the weather, that exist only as the lowest common denominator for talks between perfect strangers. ("Say, it's cloudy today." Yes, I noticed it, I'm not fucking blind.)
And people who devote a disproportionate amount of their time just to stay on top of such common denominator topics. E.g., sports. There are plenty of people whose only real interest in sports and in following the prowess of a give team, whether they consciously realize it or not, is only really to seem to belong to the local group of Tom, Dick and Harry who seem interested in that team. Bonus points if it's just groupthink, and deep down inside, Tom, Dick and Harry aren't in it for any other reason either.
Me, I'd rather find someone and some topic more interesting than that. On the Internet if that's what it takes.
I'll give you a second one: to stay in touch with old pals. People occasionally do have to move.
Plus, it's not even something new, and you only need to look at history to see how bogus that argument is. The same could be said for snail mail letters, for example. Here, lemme rephrase it for you: "Also, there are few reason for these letters. The whole point of them is to meet people you will never actually meet. Want some social interaction. Try striking up a conversation with somebody, that alwasy seesm to work well for me."
And yet, ever since someone inventing writing on a stone or clay tablet, people have used them to communicate with other people, some they'll likely never meet in person. All sorts of people, including philosophers, novelists, playwrights, statesmen, etc, yes, have often enough preferred to spend an evening writing a letter to an old friend or to someone with similar interests, instead of just going out and striking a random conversation about the weather. For the most famous ones you can even go to the local book store or library and buy a a book or three with transcripts of their correspondence. Those alone would make a nice mountain of evidence that people occasionally do want to socialize with someone more interesting than the locally available Joe and Jane Random. Go figure.
Huh? Excuse me? Since where did 35+ become synonimous with paedophile?
It may be hard to comprehend for someone whose world revolves around a computer in a basement, but most humans are _social_ beings. Yes, I know, mind boggles. There are plenty of reasons for people, even aged 35+, to interact with other people in a real or virtual community, that _don't_ involve looking for 13 year olds to fuck. Like, you know, interacting with other 35+ people.
MS is only bad at deadlines because they have a policy to never ship with known defects. Yes, they still have undiscovered bugs, etc, but the ones they did discover, they won't ship until they're all fixed.
You may be against MS's monopolistic practices, you may laugh at the quality of their testing/reviewing based on their number of not-yet-known bugs they ship with, etc. But at least from a policy perspective it's already head and shoulders above what 99% of the other companies do. Most of the others will just ship anyway and hope to patch it later. (At least with game publishers it's pretty much the norm, but serious software often works like this too.)
And blimey, of course that makes it harder for MS to meet the deadlines. Between company A who won't ship until they fixed all bugs they can find, and company B who'll just call it released regardless of which state it's in... yeah, big surprise, company B has an easier time with its deadlines. Who would have guessed?
It's not even speciffic to MS. In the games arena too, you can see that, for example, Blizzard always shipped a year too late by insisting to fininsh the work properly, while others kept their deadlines by shipping a buggy unfinished product. Whop-de-do, big surprise there.
And comparing MS to Google is mis-leading anyway, since Google never actually held any deadline. It just wavered all responsibility by calling all its products "betas". I'm sure MS too would have a lot trouble if it could just declare all its products to be perpetually beta, and perpetually tweaked/fixed from one day to the next, instead of trying to fix everything before release.
MS _can't_ possibly have the luxury of operating like that. You have a different set of expectations from a commercial OS than from a free search engine or free email provider. If Google's page rank doesn't work quite right and people exploit it, you've lost nothing except 5 minutes worth of scrolling through blog farms referencing each other. If MS Windows's firewall doesn't work quite right and people exploit it, you get owned by a virus. The exact same code quality doesn't even start to raise eyebrows when it's on Google, but is a major problem when it's in Windows.
Basically comparing MS to Google, or MS's methods to Google methods, is mis-leading because it's not apples-to-apples. They're held to different expectations, must meet different goals, etc. Saying that MS's deadline problem would be better served by adopting Google's methods, is like saying that you should adopt my vaccuum-cleaning technique when you're driving your car, or my swimming technique when you're reading the newspaper.
RTFA (Read The Fucking Amendment)
" Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
Keyword: congress.
Capisci? Your freedom of speech, or press, or whatever, exist _only_ in your relation to congress. Noone else. Not an airline, not your neighbour, not Slashdot, not your employer, etc. If I want to chuck you out of my party because of something you've said, freedom of speech is fully non-applicable and can kiss my ass. Freedom of speech does _not_ give you a right to troll on someone else's property (a message board, an airline, etc), or whatever else you may have imagined.
Yes, the airline is perfectly right there: you may have your freedom of speech over there, not over here. The airline has _no_ obligation to give him any freedom of speech. It doesn't matter if it's dissent or not.
Frankly, it's getting tiresome by now. For a nation so fond of chest-thumping about their freedoms, you'd think people would at least bother learning what those are. But nosiree, bob. Ever since bulletin boards, newsgroups, FIDO, MUDs, etc, were invented, the utterly sad reality pops up again and again that the average people have no freakin' clue.
They imagine that it's some non-existent exact opposite: that they have some sacred right to troll on someone else's property, but it's OK to bend over to the Government. That it's some 1st Ammendment violation if their goatse post on some private board is deleted, but it's OK if the governemnt does it. (After all, duh, it's the government. It's their job to decide what's allowed and whatnot.;) Which is getting it completely wrong.
Learn thy actual rights, lemming. Not knowing them is the first step towards losing them.
That's funny. Ha ha... err... you _are_ kidding, right?
Reporters nowadays do the exact opposite, to the extent where they practically (A) _created_ a whole class of bullshit pseudo-science, and (B) spawned a whole wave of distrust in science as a whole.
Reporters want sensational stuff, they want headlines that sell, they want "breakthroughs", "controversy", etc, to the point where they'll even create one if one doesn't exist. Reporters can't seem to even report something like "Scientist A says he's installed a distributed computing screensaver that searches for a cure for cancer", without turning it into some sensationalist headline like "BREAKTHROUGH IN CANCER TREATMENT!" That's the kind of headlines that sells. Heck, it doesn't even take a scientist or expert. I've seen bogus opinions by quacks, snake oil vendors, conspiracy theorists or lobbies chewed by the press and shit in the form of "BREAKTHROUGH DISCOVERY IN DOMAIN X!"
Or they can't just publish something like "Scientist B says more testing will be needed to determine the new antibiotic's effectiveness in treating MRSA" without turning it into some bogus sensationalist story, along the lines of "MAJOR CONTROVERSY ABOUT NEW MRSA CURE!!!"
Especially controversies are easy to manufacture, and fit neatly with most newspapers' and TV stations sick and twisted idea of "impartiality" and "objectivity". Namely that you're impartial and objective as long as you have two people arguing opposite points of view... even if you had to find an unqualified quack to argue one of the sides. Or both, for that matter. They could host a debate on global warming where one side claims that trees produce most CO2, and the other side claims that global warming is caused by little green aliens with a big magnifying glass, and feel satisfied that they have fulfilled their obligation to be impartial and objective. They had their opposing points of view (even if both are bogus), they didn't take sides, they didn't give one side more space than the other, so it's all perfectly good journalism. Right?
So to wrap this long rant up, expecting journalists to behave responsibly and abstain from sensationalist bullshit... heh. It ranks up there with belief in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
Amen for hilarious. I remember buying a Michael Moore book that was described all over the back cover as hilarious and generally the biggest barrel of laughs ever. (I'm not American, I had no idea who the fuck he is. Must be some humourist, I figured.) Turned out it was non-stop bitter political whine that, far from getting me rolling on the floor laughing, just got tiresome after a while. Like whine usually does.
Now I don't know, maybe he even has a point. I'm not an American, so I can't tell. I can even relate to some of his peeves with the Bush administration, as it's basically the same things that got us in the rest of the world worried. But hilarious? Hmm...
I figure, either it was a retarded editor, or the Americans are _really_ a cheerful and easily amused folk if that counts as hilarious. Or maybe over there the meaning of "hilarious" has changed to mean something completely different. To this day, I have no idea which. Maybe an American wants to enlighten me.
1. Have a look at some of those "crap ass CPUs" in laptops before shooting your mouth. An old 933 MHz P3 laptop will run circles around a similarly clocked P4 Prescott. The P3 features _much_ higher IPC (instructions per cycle). There's a reason why the Banias and Dothan (Centrino) and later Core/Core2 are based on the P3 core, and not on the P4.
The Prescott still wins on the whole by sheer virtue of being clocked 4 times faster, but the different IPC may still screw your maths up big time. Some 450 MHz wasted on a "crap ass" P3 will mean something like 600+ MHz wasted on a Prescott, which for some desktops can mean 20%-25% wasted on just a funky 3-key keyboard.
2. Even _if_ it were "only" 10%, like you claim, it's still 10% wasted on a stupid 3-key keyboard. But, heck, even if it were a full keyboard, there's no excuse to need that much CPU power. The software should just upload the images to the keyboard and then stay the fuck out of the way. Even complex sound-mixing software and drivers needs less CPU power nowadays. There's no excuse for a keyboard driver to need more.
At any rate, I don't want it taking that kind of CPU time when I'm playing or doing anything else. If I wanted only 90% of the CPU, I'd have bought a CPU clocked at only 90% of the speed in the first place.
Except it often took centuries or even millenia to change again. So we could sit and wait until it changes again for the better, or we could do what works here and now. Dunno about you, but I'll pick the latter.
What, you mean like most of Linux being the work of paid employees of IBM, RedHat, SuSE, Intel, etc? Or like OpenOffice being an ex-closed-source program that's being developped now by paid employees of Sun? Or like Mozilla being paid for by Netscape, then AOL, then Google? Etc. All those are commercial interests at work.
So, sad to say, if you hoped that it will shatter my belief that people do stuff for money, I'll have to disappoint you. Most of the open source nowadays is _not_ the work of idealistic unpaid hackers in their free time, but the battleground of powerful corporations for a slice of the market. It's done for money. Sorry.
Actually, sad to say, they were almost invariably paid for that. Whether it was Konrad Zuse in Germany or the British team working to crack the Enigma codes, they were people who were either paid to do that, or had a financial incentive to do that. Some patents were involved too. E.g., Zuse patented his ideas, and later used those to get capital for his company. (E.g., IBM paid good money for an option on his patents.)
So, again, sorry. Those were _not_ idealists working for pure love of maths, nor for the greater good of society. They may have loved maths and society, but they got paid for what they did. It wasn't a work of love in their free time.
Extremely little, by comparison to the sums that work into patent-motivated research. If your hope for progress was charity, you'd have to wait a _lot_ more for new stuff.
I do the stuff that interests _me_, yes, not stuff that's necessarily going to get society forward. Guilty as charged, guv'nor. Unfortunately, most of the OSS work done in one's spare time (as opposed to work paid by corporations, motivated by financial incentives) also falls in this category. They're just reinventing the wheel for little benefit, other than the creator's own entertainment, and don't really do much to keep driving technology forward.
I've yet to see any data or coherent theory that says it's easier to invent the LASER than it was to invent, say, the wheel. If you choose to believe in that, more power to you, but I wouldn't base a whole economy on it. Or not until there's a hell of a lot more actual data behind it.
How about anthropomorphising _humans_, "you moron"? Because IBM's decisions aren't taken by a computer or resulting from laws of physics, but are taken by human managers. Precisely _because_ it is a corporation, it's composed of humans and decisions at every level are taken by humans. Somewhere at IBM there were one or more humans who got the information of what SCO is doing, and took a decision.
And if all else fails there was a CEO and a board of directors who could have vetoed the whole thing, if they would have rather paid. What those want, is in a nutshell "what IBM wants".
Basically, I can understand riling against anthropomorphising a computer, a car or the weather. But you're arguing here against anthropomorphising human beings. Which is as fucking stupid as it can possibly get. What next would you recommend? To not treat a cat like a cat either? Not treat a house like it's a house? Or what?
No, just being hidden behind an impersonal abstract entity does _not_ absolve one of one's very humanity. Just being a boss in a corporation doesn't make one some kind of abstract machine that shouldn't be anthropomorphised. Good or bad, that's still a human. Good or bad, the decisions that run that abstract entity are nevertheless the decisions of humans. You don't just somehow cease being a human just because you're working at a corporation.
If you look at history, yes, there were inventions before... at the rate of 2-3 per century at best. E.g., it's easy to look at the ancient Greece period and see how many new things they invented, and all that maths and philosophy progress. The dumb part is when you notice that they're stretched across _millenia_.
(And in other times and places not much happened for millenia. E.g., while Egypt invented a bunch of stuff in its first two millenia or so, by the last millenium a lot of the stuff had basically been frozen in time. Medicine, for example, had been rolled into something that was medicine, religion and malpractice insurance rolled in one, and noone even tried something else any more. The lack of incentive to invent something new, meant people didn't take the risks of even trying either. But we'll get back to that idea later.)
By comparison, in modern times, even after discarding all the trivial, bogus and "business method" patents, we're still doing orders of mangnitude better. Yes, the old way didn't score a clean zero, but it can nevertheless score far worse than the patent and copyright period. I'll take the modern way, if you don't mind.
The other problem is one of culture. The societies that did well before were the ones who could motivate their citizens and communities to research anyway. E.g., ancient Greece could afford to have a whole third of its population dedicate their time to philosophy and art between wars. The motivation there was the culture which placed an emphasis on intellectual and artistic pursuits, and made it a thing of prestige to have such interests and achievements.
The societies and periods which lacked such motivation (e.g., see medicine in late ancient Egypt again) just stagnated.
What I'm getting at? That sadly in our contemporary culture the only motivator is money. You can't just ask people and communities to invest in research just for prestige any more. They just won't do it. Go to your boss and tell him that you want a third of the company to just do research and explore new ideas and possibilities. Oh, and without any patenting or business plans. Just for the greater good of society. If you're lucky, he'll only laugh at you.
You can't expect modern society to keep working like ancient Greece and ancient China did. Heck, not even like during the Renaissance. The culture has changed, and capitalism is now irreversibly wedged into everyone's brains. If you don't give companies or individuals a _financial_ incentive to do anything, most just won't do it. Unless you can present a business plan that says "we stand to gain X million dollars out of it", the accountants and management won't even look at your great plan, no matter how good you may think it is for the progress of society as a whole.
I'm not saying it's necessarily either good or bad. Good arguments can be made for both sides. It may be regarded as good that there's a reality check there, and we don't waste everyone's resources on pointless projects that benefit noone. It may be regarded as bad that stuff with no immediate benefit doesn't get done or researched at all, as a result. Pick your side, or something in between. But that's how it works nowadays. With no financial incentive, nothing gets done.
So here and now, patents and copyright are such an incentive. They make it a lot easier to come up with a plan that includes an "and that's how we'll make money out of it" part. Be it by being the only ones who'll manufacture that, or by licensing it to others, or by being a litigious bastard, or whatever. But it helps put some dollar signs next to the proposal to research something.
Sure, we can dream about doing it just for prestige and glory instead, like in the good old days. But it just doesn't work that way any more.
I'm a programmer, and TBH I'm _for_ software patents, as long as we get rid of the generic "business method" patents.
See, patents were supposed to do two things, in this order:
1. First and foremost, to make sure we're getting the exact recipe to make something, instead of ending up buried somewhere out of reach. Sure, you get your monopoly on sewing machines, Mr Singer (for example), but in return society gets the _exact_ recipe and description of how it works. After 20 years, we get that in the public domain.
2. To stimulate innovation. Go research something already. If someone else patented it, well, research something else.
The current non-patented programming fuck-up serves neither point. We have millions of monkeys who don't invent anything, and don't share anything. They just copy-and-paste (even via memory, but copy-and-paste nevertheless) someone else's algorithms, and never invent anything new. Ever. And the results of even that unoriginal copied-and-pasted work remains buried somewhere behind a wall of NDAs, on some old tape in a steel safe.
Sorry, people, that's not how technological progress works. What we have here is stagnation and waste of resources.
You're affraid that patents will put your company out of business? Well then how about said company starts investing in research already? How about inventing something new already? How many people does your company pay to research new algorithms? No, seriously. Be honest. Zero, perchance? No, that's not innovation, that's not progress, it's just copying someone else's work, over and over again.
Yes, software patents do carry the stigma of having been abused and mis-used by patent-trolls. There were a lot of bullshit and obvious patents snuck through just because the patent office got disoriented by anything that mentioned "in software" or "on a computer". Ooh, it's the same old volume knob, only now "on a computer"... that sounds soo high-tech, let's patent it. Duly noted, and I too wish we'd be rid of _those_ already.
But there are lots of things which aren't trivial at all. And blimey, I'd love to see more of those researched and documented.
E.g., to give the old (and now expired) whine about the LZW patent, how about you invent a compression algorithm from scratch, if you think compression is trivial. Yes, LZW (and LZSS and arithmetic compression and everything else) seems trivial when you just copy it (even via memory) from someone else's book. Sure, copying is easy. Now you try _inventing_ a new one, then tell me how trivial that was. If you're not damn good at maths, I doubt that you'll even know where to start. No offense. I tried and didn't know either.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck... I don't know about you, but my guess would be that maybe it's not a fish. In this case, if it "acts like a capacitor", then it _is_ a capacitor.
In fact, if you RTFP (Read The F***ing Patent), it _is_ a fancy capacitor, plus circuitry to get a constant voltage out of it. In fact, it's downright the most classical kind of a capacitor, with two surfaces separated by a thin dielectric material. Only they use a fine powder to achieve lots of surface.
So, yes, it _is_ a capacitor.
At any rate, if it "acts like a capacitor" then it's fair to compare it to the best ultra-capacitors available. And if what they're proposing ends up having to be 80 times better than the best existing ultra-capacitors, then I'm getting a tad suspicious. Sure, it could be that they're geniuses, but I'll hold the celebrations until I hear something about a working prototype.
Well, I was calculating at 0.1 $/kWh, that's where the 90 kWh figure came from. But 52 kWh isn't really that much better, because noone ever made ultracapacitors that can store more than 5 Wh/kg. So even with their numbers it would be more than 10 metric tons at today's technology.
Packing that in 152 kg? Ooer. That still requires a 70-80 times improvement in capacitor technology, compared to the best of the best ultracapacitors available today. It's a jump from being 10 times worse than a chemical battery to being 7-8 times better.
I'm sure you'll understand that I'm skeptical of such ridiculously high jumps. It could happen, but I'll want to see it actually working before I get all excited about it.
Plus, here's another thing that makes me suspicious: why tie it to electric cars? If someone could make such capacitors, they wouldn't just make cars with them, they'd pretty much own the market for any kind of battery, including laptops, iPods, car batteries, etc. I mean, seriously, think a battery which gives you 7-8 times more hours on your laptop at the same weight as your current battery. Because that's the kind of improvement they're claiming there. Fuck cars, I'd want one in my laptop right now.
Duly noted, but it still won't help that much there. The maximum charge speed for one capacitor being 1750 W/kg, you still need about 600 kg of them in parallel to be able to take 1.08 MW as input. (They did say it would charge in 5min.) Series connection won't help you much there, since basically the real limitation is the current there and connecting them series doesn't help with that.
So you have 18000 kg worth of capacitors, and 600kg of them will need to be be in parallel. That means that at most you can have 3 banks in series, which raises your voltage to a whole 2.7 * 3 = 8.1V. So now instead of 400 kA you "only" need 133 kA to charge it. Not that much of an improvement, eh?
Here's some hard data: these things are low voltage devices. E.g., Maxwell's data says 2.7V for theirs. They also have crap power density: 3-5 Wh/kg. (Yes, I didn't miss a "k" there.) They may have high capacity, but Q = C*V, so low voltage still puts a limit on it.
So if you want to store about 90 kWh in a bank of those, you'd need anywhwere between 18,000 and 30,000 kg worth of ultra-capacitors. Yes, between 18 and 30 metric _tons_. Not quite a commuter car, you know? I'll also go on a limb and say that buying whole tons of them will cost a pretty penny.
Also, transferring 90 kWh in 5 minutes means 1080kW power. More that 1 MW. So, yeah, I don't think your average power socket can do that. At 2.7V that means 400,000 A, too.
So, basically, it's just snake oil. It ranks up there with the promises to make energy out of water by changing the orbits of electrons in hydrogen. Some fraudster figured that he can get tens of millions of dollars VC to pretend to make such a thing. And given the IQ of some VC these days, they probably will too.
It gets better. According to Maxwell Technologies, their biggest model tops at 2.7V. So now do the same maths at 2.7V and you'd need over 400000A to charge the damn thing.
And no, you can't have several in series to rise the voltage, because with capacitors that reduces the capacity. So if you have a 2600 Farrad capacitor, two of them in series will only give you 1300.
Now also think that the output power of these things is also limited. According to, say, Honda's graphs, the best they can get out of theirs is about 1750W/kg. Let's say a new and improved model comes which can do 2000 W/kg. (Mostly to work with round numbers.) To charge 90kWh in 5 minutes you need 1080kW, or a bit over 1 MW. At 2kW/kg, you'd need over 500 kg worth of ultracapacitors just to take that.
But even that's not the funniest part. It gets better.
Now also think that the maximum stored energy density for the best ultra-capacitors atm is 3-5Wh/kg. Let's take 5. We want the best of the best here. And we want to store 90kWh there. So 90000/5=18000kg worth of ultra-capacitors. Yup, 18 tons.
Does it smell like a scam yet?
The energy density in W*h/kg for the best ultracapacitors is about 10 times lower than for a battery. Which in turn was crappy enough to make gasoline remain the better option. Among other things, because these are very low voltage devices. They may come in 2600 Farrad versions, but they also top at 2.7 volt. (Both values taken straight off Maxwell Technologies site, for their biggest ultracapacitor.) So the stored charge is, basically, crap.
So basically take all the hideous weight/Watt-hour problems of an electrical car and multiply them by 10. By now you're spending most of the energy into just moving the batteries/capacitors around. Basically think driving a pickup truck full of batteries/capacitors, just to haul yourself to work and back. Whee.
So basically I smell yet another fraudster hyping something they can't possibly deliver. But it sounds high-tech, revolutionary, etc, and some idiot will give them tens of millions VC to pretend they're working on it.
See, the dog just sees you as the alpha dog of the pack. Not as "god", not as "owner", but like a bigger and more powerful dog, and usually therefore the pack leader. Since wolves hunt in packs, they're programmed to follow the leader. That's all the "love" you're getting there. No more, no less.
Note that you're not even automatically always the pack leader there. I really mean it that to the dog you're just another dog. Sure, you're the bigger and more dangerous one, and thus a natural choice for the alpha... until it looks like they could challenge you to a fight for the leadership. Especially in males around the age of 2 you can see basically starting to disobey and even show their aggressive side, as part of establishing who's the alpha.
Especially being a very bad pack leader, from the dog's point of view, can precipitate a very real fight for leadership. E.g., my brother got a hole through his palm like Jesus from such a fight gone badly. A dog's tooth can perforate through flesh unsurprisingly easily. (If it makes any difference, though, I still think the dog would have made a better pack leader there;)
But other people have ended up with a relationship where basically the dog is the alpha without involving an actual fight. If the dog can get to do what he wants by sheer virtue that you're not going to assert your power to stop him, congrats, the dog is now the alpha anyway.
I don't know what your relationship with God is, but I don't think it involves "you know, maybe I could challenge God to a fight to determine who's the boss and who's the follower. I could be the next God myself if I win." Try talking about such plans with your local priest, and you'll get some very funny looks.
Well, here's an idea for you: if you're going to selectively breed cats lacking Fel D1, then you can test them _before_ you buy them. It would be pretty stupid to buy a million cats and kill those with lots of the allergen, when you can buy just those without it in the first place.
The Fel D1 protein will be all over the cat's fur and in her saliva, so you only need a little hair or saliva to determine how much of it does it produce. Since the fur will be the most problem for people with allergies (due to shedding and sheer surface), you can just clip a few hairs from the candidate kitty and test them. If it makes the grade, buy it to breed hypoallergenic kittens, if not, best of luck to him/her getting sold the old fashioned way.
Ditto for the kittens produced in the intermediate steps of the breeding programme. You can still sell/donate the kittens who don't make the grade to people without allergies.
Plus, it seems to me that such a programme can actually mean saving cats as opposed to some kitten genocide. There are millions of abandoned cats being killed every year. Someone could just go to some shelters and rescue the cats which test better in that aspect. Can't see anything inherently inhuman or cruel with that.
The typical Siberian weighs between 10 and 15 pounds for the females, and between 15 and 20 for the males. They also tend to keep growing until they're 5 years old, which when they reach the weights above.
So, yes, I'm not that surprised if yours is a female (you say, "she") and I'll guess something like only 1-2 years old, since you say her parents were bigger. Well, that's just the thing: these cats keep growing. Yours will very likely get bigger too.
It's not intended as an insult or anything, but basically just a gentle reminder: you can't assume that all breeds act the same, or that what you know from normal moggies applies to Siberians too. The average moggie stops growing, so you don't really expect it to get bigger than she was at 1 year old. The Siberian keeps growing for another 4 years.
Still, OK, females are "only" 2-3 times the weight of a normal lap cat even when fully grown up.
But, if you want to dispute my calling them huge, try a fully grown up male sometimes. I don't know what you'd call a 20 pound cat, but in my book that's one huge cat. By house cat standards, anyway. Mind you, I'm not saying it's as big as a tiger or jaguar, or anything similarly silly, but... well, put one of those next to an average moggie and you tell me if it's not huge.
As for your allergies, another gentle reminder: there's more than one kind of allergy out there, and there are degrees of allergy. I personally know someone who's allergic to _anything_ with fur, including dogs and rabbits, for example. Those don't have the Fel D1 protein anyway, since it's a felide-only protein. Also, on the other axis, there are allergies and allergies, ranging from mild irritation, to extreme cases where even tiny allergen doses cause extreme reactions.
Heck, as an example of how much human reactions can vary, some people's allergy to "cats" can be as deviant from the norm as being really an allergy to pollen. The cat goes outside, comes back with pollen in the fur, the owner cuddles and strokes the cat, you can guess what happens next.
Basically you can't extrapolate your experience to _everyone_. Most people will basically have an experience similar to yours, yes, but not everyone. I'm glad that your allergy isn't tripped by a Siberian, and I wish you all the happiness in the world with your new cat. But other people's mileage may vary. Some will be tripped by a different allergen, and some do react even to the tiny Fel D1 quantities that a Siberian produces.
Well, this is obviously good news anyway for people who don't want a Siberian.
1. Have you seen a Siberian? The Siberian isn't just another body shape or fur pattern, it's something as big as your arm. It's a _huge_ cat. It's bigger than some dog breeds. (And legends have it that some are also actually able to function as a dog, because at that size it feels a lot less threatened by someone human sized. So it _can_ defend its territory from a human, if needed. I wouldn't know if it's myth or not, though.)
Now I'm all for large cats myself, but I can also see why someone would want a standard 5 pound lap cat instead.
2. The Siberian isn't anywhere near allergen-free. In fact, no natural cat breed is, from moggie to lions and tigers. The Siberian does produce a lot less allergen, but for some people it's still too much. So producing cats with even less, would still be welcome news for a lot of people.
3. The Siberian only has less of the cat-speciffic protein. I.e., it won't help anyone whose allergy is to something else. E.g., someone with a generic allergy to fur, will still be just as allergic to the Siberian as to any other cat breed. Basically, if holding a rabbit or petting a dog also gives you an allergy, getting a Siberian won't help at all.
I don't know if this new breed addresses this third point, but it IS one area where improvement is possible.