And don't forget that we have closer neighbors that can cause us a lot more trouble.
For example Betelgeuse is a read supergiant about 527 lightyears away. (the distance seems to be very unclear, one source says 586, another says 310, Google says 427, but one thing is at least clear IT'S THERE)
Anyway if that star decides to go supernova (or any other in our neighborhood) we will get a slight tan at least... And according to some experts Betelgeuse is ripe for blowing.
So it's likely that we are going to experience a supernova or any other stellar event that affects our world in a much more severe manner than we can do ourselves. The only question is when - and it is no idea to worry about it since we can do very little about it.
If I was a parent I would need to know if the teacher my children had were pro-science or pro-creationism or maybe believer in the little blue rabbit from the outer sector of the left galaxy.
The religious factions has gotten too much power over the education. End result will be that the children will grow up not knowing what makes the light work, how the picture in the TV gets there and assuming that just because the teacher said man was created from the image of God that's the only truth.
But I assume that it's too much to expect from a country that hasn't gone metric yet.
The idea of using a Stirling engine is actually not bad, but you may also be able to run peltier elements backwards, in which case you wouldn't get any mechanical problems related to moving parts.
But even better would be if the energy loss could be decreased in the first place. Heat produced by a computer is actually only annoying.
The Stirling engine was invented by Reverend Dr. Robert Stirling.
Another issue is if you REALLY want to be reanimated as a dead person - you never know what's in that piece of luggage...
Sometimes being declared as dead isn't that bad - you may lose benefits but on the other hand it will get harder to process you other ways too. Taxes, speeding tickets etc. can be a beast to collect from someone that's outside the system. Just fill in the forms when the officer stops you and then later when the ticket is processed the system will just bounce around...
On the other hand the disadvantages may be worser than the advantages.
Regardless of the scope of software patents they are essentially useless and only harms the progress.
If A creates a piece of software and patents it it also means that B can't do it too even if the implementation is completely different and may be more effective unless B also pays A for something that he never will or want to use just because the end result is the same.
The only persons that benefit from the patents are really the patent lawyers. A will waste a lot of time trying to defend patents and B will not be able to ship product in time. This means that A is wasting energy on time that could have been used to improve A:s products and the same goes for B. During that time C appears and shows up with a completely different solution that wipes out A and B.
A software piece that has taken several man-hours for A to implement may have taken B only an afternoon to implement, so the use of patenting the solution for A may be justified by the amount of man-hours put into the project, but it doesn't give any other clue.
Sure software is intellectual property, but it ages far too fast for the legal processes to catch up with all changes and patches that appears. The real intellectual part isn't a particular piece of software, it's the complete solution. A method for counting eggs wouldn't differ much when implemented by A, B or C, but it's rather pointless to have just that part - it also needs to be incorporated in a larger solution and also added to the customer solution and business model. An egg counter may be used to control the packing machine, but customer D may use a 2x3 egg box and sell them by the piece while customer E uses a 8x8 egg box and sell them by the pallet, which means that the rest of the solution is completely different. OK, if B and C steals A:s egg-counter it may be a "loss" for A, but if they in turn contribute back with something else then A has also gained. (Essentially this happens in the background if the same consultant works for A, B and C. Don't expect that consultant to re-code from scratch what he already have handy. He just re-uses and adapts some specific interfaces so it will suit the overall code.)
In the end - software patents is a lot about forcing other parties to re-invent the wheel instead of accepting that there are different wheels using the same base.
The big catch here is that the ones that really have to pay in the end for patent fees and such things are the end customers, i.e. you and me and everyone else. This includes lawyer fees and all the costs added to bring cases to court, either directly by raising the product price or by taxes. This also means that the products will be less competitive and the competition from east Asia will come in and steamroll the whole market instead.
But this seems to indicate that the bid on Yahoo was far below what it should have been.
Maybe this means that the bid on Yahoo should have been $400 billion instead.
But they should also consider the fact that a company is strongly depending on it's employees, and this means that if enough employees disagrees they just leaves and the purchase will be an empty shell.
For everyone that has been working with communication since the early datacom ages Shannon's law has been important. It's still important, and it means that you can't just push everything through, you have to consider the media used.
In a way it can be tweaked a bit, and that has caused a confusion among those that aren't well into the technological difference between Baud (modulation changes per second) and BPS (bits per second).
Anyway - The classical phone modems can have a speed up to 56kbps, but effectively they stay at 28 to 33kbps. And that on a line that actually only provides 3kHz bandwidth. The trick is that in the 3KHz bandwidth you can have a carrier with less than 3000 modulation changes per second, often 2400. In each modulation change you not only have one bit transferred, but multiple bits. This is achieved by having a variation in both phase and amplitude of the signal.
So to utilize the cabling at the extreme speeds that a terabit Ethernet is you may have to resort to the same technique.
There have also been other techniques in use like using multiple carrier frequencies, like what the Telebit Trailblazer modems did. That technology was very resilient to interference compared to the CCITT standards, but it had other disadvantages instead.
There are ways to come to terms with the wild actions on the net, but creating a secondary net isn't going to help.
It's far better if the ISP:s work on trying to handle and catch the really malicious behavior that occurs on the net instead of being the arm of the RIAA or MPAA. Instead of fiddling with throttling of the user's bandwidth for downloads try to catch suspicious volumes on the mail instead. That will be much more effective when it comes to freeing bandwidth in the net.
And the botnets - well that's a hard nut to crack, but there have been successful attempts to detect them. More important is to make sure that infections of clients are hard already from start. The problem today is the near monopoly that Microsoft has - which means that it's the most targeted environment. But the best way is actually not to follow the traffic, but to follow the money.
Of course - there will always be those that creates viruses for the technical challenge, but even if they are an annoyance it's not a really evil intent behind it.
Since the approach to create portals and services have already been tried by a lot of telco:s and it has essentially been a failure.
The services available has been crippled or limited in functionality or even requiring a specific version of a specific brand of web browser to work. And everything has been centered around the telco and not around what the users have been looking for.
Of course - there are services that a telco can provide and some that actually are useful, but the portal era is a blind alley. It's like those multi-function tools that aren't really good at anything, but you can use it if you really have to. And too often a lot of portals and services are crippled to the death by someone that has specified into absurdness that the user interface shall have a certain look&feel. Exactly 7pt Tahoma in grey text on white background. And if it's important it may be bold and 9pt. (Yes I have seen that...)
No consideration at all for those persons that have less than perfect vision or are over 35.
If a Telco shall acquire a company like Youtube or whatever they must be aware that if they start to reconstruct the site they will drive away their customers. It's OK to do some fine-tuning, but try to avoid the general company profile on a well-known service that you buy.
Another thing is that there seems to be no consideration at all for what functions the users really uses. Instead those functions are hidden down in some fourth-level sub-menu accessible only if you know what to look for - especially in the company-specific semantics.
And of course - all the bloating with flash animations are only harming the web users driving them away. It may look funny the first few times, but after a while it becomes tiresome.
The important thing is not the kiosks, but if they also are going to run Silverlight on the publicly accessible parts of their services. In that case they are limiting the access to their records to those that are able to run Silverlight.
The magnetic field of a fluid system like a star or like the inner parts of our earth is constantly changing. A magnetic field is generated by the flows that occurs and in a complex pattern too, which means that it isn't fully predictable.
By not fully predicable I refer to that the flows that occurs are similar to the weather we experience here on Earth. The weather can be predicted with an acceptable accuracy over a week, but longer than that is hard. However the timeframe for magnetic fields are different, so they are predictable over a longer period of time.
Anyway - this means that the flows inside a star can change pattern, or that the electrical currents induced can change (not always the same thing) and they in turn will cause the magnetic field to change. Changes involves flares, sunspots and magnetic field disturbances - even as far as changing the polarity. So if our sun does that it's not surprising that another star with similar properties also exhibits the same behavior.
More interesting stellar objects to study would be red stars like the Betelgeuze star or giant blue stars like Rigel. Since they are much larger they can offer different results. Same goes for white dwarfs. Some stars are very strong in their radiation and can provide a great deal of information from a distance, but not everything. There may still be surprises waiting for us!
is always to avoid paying out money and to aggregate money to build profit.
An insurance is a way for the insured to get an acceptable cover for risks and an insurance company also has to take a reasonable risk. Even if a certain genetic predisposition exists doesn't mean that it actually is triggered in an individual.
Probably it will keep the name... It's just an upgrade. (Yes I'm boring).
If they were to rename it - why not do it in honor of someone instead. Unfortunately Carl Sagan has already been honored, but there are other persons too...
A removed seat should never be a useful piece of evidence if the seat is found in a plausible place like the garage or so. If it's found in a dump filled with blood of the victim it's sure a different case, but it's still not conclusive evidence. Any use of circumstantial evidence has to be loaded with a statistical probability of it being caused by the person's normal behavior or if it was part of the crime.
Just go figure that a seat removal has occurred to transport something and that he later on never had gotten through with reattaching the seat due to other things with higher priority. There are things that can be left undone for a long time...
It's hard to take on a decision of guilt here - I don't have any opinion yet about his guilt or innocence but I hope that the court can get to a decision about the case in the correct way. The reasonable doubt clause is important. But being intelligent doesn't mean that you are smart enough to hide the evidence or better enough to avoid creating it in the first place. Especially in crimes of the moment the intelligence is often strongly suppressed. No matter how geeky you are - sometimes the reptilian instinct takes over.
It's not surprising at all that military aircrafts has some accidents now and then. They are designed to be the leading edge in technology to gain an advantage.
In this case no one died, and the situation doesn't call for any immediate use of that plane so it's no big issue that the fleet is grounded.
It's also important to consider that much of the technology that is developed for military aircraft will find its way into civilian aircraft in one way or another. Fly-by-wire, composite materials, titanium details etc. are all a result from the military development. And if the accidents happens with military aircraft where there usually is an ejection seat available it also means that the risk of killing a lot of people is decreased. OK, the ejection seat can fail, it can eject at the wrong moment or the plane can crash into a bad position and kill people. But if a flaw with a design feature can be found on such an aircraft and not be put into the next generation of passenger super-aircraft it can mean a lot.
Of course it's bad that an expensive aircraft crashes, but it's still just money - and essentially the money is already paid and has already looped through the system a few times since. Leading edge tech is always expensive, but usually there are a lot of spinoffs coming through. Otherwise we would still be using artificial limbs using wood and hooks instead of carbon fiber structures, servo motors and computers for our handicapped. (OK, not everyone gets it but its coming through)
Then you may ask what the use there is for a B2 bomber in the end. It is useful in some cases, but the original intent spurned from the cold war is actually no longer there. It sure is a long way better at what it is designed for than the B52, but the B2 is a highly specialized craft while the B52 actually has found some other secondary uses too, which I suspect that the B2 will never achieve. And don't forget that the stealth aircraft business is always a developing part - which means that as soon as someone is able to spot the B2 as easy as a B52 then it will effectively be as obsolete as the B52 - or actually even worse. So in that case the B2 has to be replaced with something new. And I suspect that such work is already in progress regardless of what is said.
As for future military aircraft there is a high probability that they will be unmanned weapons carriers that gets updates from remote systems while still being able to function mostly autonomous. Such solutions will be cheaper per unit and still being able to pack a considerable punch. The disadvantage with such systems is that the picture sometimes changes by the minute in a battle and that means that they can end up doing the completely wrong thing. "Friendly fire - isn't". Of course - humans can also do that mistake so it's no real safeguard to have manned aircraft.
But in all - in today's world the use for heavy weapons is very limited since most conflicts of today are no longer on the scale of nations but reduced to conflicts within nations or even small groups as terrorists and using a bomber in such situations is like using a sledge to eradicate cockroaches in a kitchen. The collateral damage will be too great. And it doesn't matter how great an army you have if you don't have the information to use that army. Failure to get the correct intelligence about your enemy is just leading to overall failure.
Region codes are effectively affecting everybody since they also are a way to keep prices up and limit the availability of movies to the types they "think" is the right for the given market.
I wonder if not the region coding could be considered an unduly limitation of freedom of speech?
Wouldn't the lawsuit be counter-productive and trigger a drop in market share price? Even if it's short-term the funds may actually gain by buying shares then and even if the lawsuit is dismissed they have made a gain?
Seems to be some kind of inside affair tweak in the public.
The Lawyer gets the same penalty as the person he/she represents.
Never mind - the problem is that there should be a rule stating that any writing that can't be understood by an average person should be declared invalid.
A patent troll is a company or person that holds on to patents but never uses them except to cause problems and attempt to extort money from thriving businesses after they have been in action for several years.
The fabled Trolls were often just collecting gold and never really used it, modern patent trolls are collecting patents and use that collection to collect gold.
Effectively they are parasites that abuses the system.
Slashdot Mirror
For example Betelgeuse is a read supergiant about 527 lightyears away. (the distance seems to be very unclear, one source says 586, another says 310, Google says 427, but one thing is at least clear IT'S THERE)
Anyway if that star decides to go supernova (or any other in our neighborhood) we will get a slight tan at least... And according to some experts Betelgeuse is ripe for blowing.
So it's likely that we are going to experience a supernova or any other stellar event that affects our world in a much more severe manner than we can do ourselves. The only question is when - and it is no idea to worry about it since we can do very little about it.
The religious factions has gotten too much power over the education. End result will be that the children will grow up not knowing what makes the light work, how the picture in the TV gets there and assuming that just because the teacher said man was created from the image of God that's the only truth.
But I assume that it's too much to expect from a country that hasn't gone metric yet.
But even better would be if the energy loss could be decreased in the first place. Heat produced by a computer is actually only annoying.
The Stirling engine was invented by Reverend Dr. Robert Stirling.
Sometimes being declared as dead isn't that bad - you may lose benefits but on the other hand it will get harder to process you other ways too. Taxes, speeding tickets etc. can be a beast to collect from someone that's outside the system. Just fill in the forms when the officer stops you and then later when the ticket is processed the system will just bounce around...
On the other hand the disadvantages may be worser than the advantages.
Add a bluetooth headset and you are set.
If A creates a piece of software and patents it it also means that B can't do it too even if the implementation is completely different and may be more effective unless B also pays A for something that he never will or want to use just because the end result is the same.
The only persons that benefit from the patents are really the patent lawyers. A will waste a lot of time trying to defend patents and B will not be able to ship product in time. This means that A is wasting energy on time that could have been used to improve A:s products and the same goes for B. During that time C appears and shows up with a completely different solution that wipes out A and B.
A software piece that has taken several man-hours for A to implement may have taken B only an afternoon to implement, so the use of patenting the solution for A may be justified by the amount of man-hours put into the project, but it doesn't give any other clue.
Sure software is intellectual property, but it ages far too fast for the legal processes to catch up with all changes and patches that appears. The real intellectual part isn't a particular piece of software, it's the complete solution. A method for counting eggs wouldn't differ much when implemented by A, B or C, but it's rather pointless to have just that part - it also needs to be incorporated in a larger solution and also added to the customer solution and business model. An egg counter may be used to control the packing machine, but customer D may use a 2x3 egg box and sell them by the piece while customer E uses a 8x8 egg box and sell them by the pallet, which means that the rest of the solution is completely different. OK, if B and C steals A:s egg-counter it may be a "loss" for A, but if they in turn contribute back with something else then A has also gained. (Essentially this happens in the background if the same consultant works for A, B and C. Don't expect that consultant to re-code from scratch what he already have handy. He just re-uses and adapts some specific interfaces so it will suit the overall code.)
In the end - software patents is a lot about forcing other parties to re-invent the wheel instead of accepting that there are different wheels using the same base.
The big catch here is that the ones that really have to pay in the end for patent fees and such things are the end customers, i.e. you and me and everyone else. This includes lawyer fees and all the costs added to bring cases to court, either directly by raising the product price or by taxes. This also means that the products will be less competitive and the competition from east Asia will come in and steamroll the whole market instead.
Maybe this means that the bid on Yahoo should have been $400 billion instead.
But they should also consider the fact that a company is strongly depending on it's employees, and this means that if enough employees disagrees they just leaves and the purchase will be an empty shell.
In a way it can be tweaked a bit, and that has caused a confusion among those that aren't well into the technological difference between Baud (modulation changes per second) and BPS (bits per second).
Anyway - The classical phone modems can have a speed up to 56kbps, but effectively they stay at 28 to 33kbps. And that on a line that actually only provides 3kHz bandwidth. The trick is that in the 3KHz bandwidth you can have a carrier with less than 3000 modulation changes per second, often 2400. In each modulation change you not only have one bit transferred, but multiple bits. This is achieved by having a variation in both phase and amplitude of the signal.
So to utilize the cabling at the extreme speeds that a terabit Ethernet is you may have to resort to the same technique.
There have also been other techniques in use like using multiple carrier frequencies, like what the Telebit Trailblazer modems did. That technology was very resilient to interference compared to the CCITT standards, but it had other disadvantages instead.
It's far better if the ISP:s work on trying to handle and catch the really malicious behavior that occurs on the net instead of being the arm of the RIAA or MPAA. Instead of fiddling with throttling of the user's bandwidth for downloads try to catch suspicious volumes on the mail instead. That will be much more effective when it comes to freeing bandwidth in the net.
And the botnets - well that's a hard nut to crack, but there have been successful attempts to detect them. More important is to make sure that infections of clients are hard already from start. The problem today is the near monopoly that Microsoft has - which means that it's the most targeted environment. But the best way is actually not to follow the traffic, but to follow the money.
Of course - there will always be those that creates viruses for the technical challenge, but even if they are an annoyance it's not a really evil intent behind it.
The services available has been crippled or limited in functionality or even requiring a specific version of a specific brand of web browser to work. And everything has been centered around the telco and not around what the users have been looking for.
Of course - there are services that a telco can provide and some that actually are useful, but the portal era is a blind alley. It's like those multi-function tools that aren't really good at anything, but you can use it if you really have to. And too often a lot of portals and services are crippled to the death by someone that has specified into absurdness that the user interface shall have a certain look&feel. Exactly 7pt Tahoma in grey text on white background. And if it's important it may be bold and 9pt. (Yes I have seen that...)
No consideration at all for those persons that have less than perfect vision or are over 35.
If a Telco shall acquire a company like Youtube or whatever they must be aware that if they start to reconstruct the site they will drive away their customers. It's OK to do some fine-tuning, but try to avoid the general company profile on a well-known service that you buy.
Another thing is that there seems to be no consideration at all for what functions the users really uses. Instead those functions are hidden down in some fourth-level sub-menu accessible only if you know what to look for - especially in the company-specific semantics.
And of course - all the bloating with flash animations are only harming the web users driving them away. It may look funny the first few times, but after a while it becomes tiresome.
But you will have to do a fsck first.
The important thing is not the kiosks, but if they also are going to run Silverlight on the publicly accessible parts of their services. In that case they are limiting the access to their records to those that are able to run Silverlight.
By not fully predicable I refer to that the flows that occurs are similar to the weather we experience here on Earth. The weather can be predicted with an acceptable accuracy over a week, but longer than that is hard. However the timeframe for magnetic fields are different, so they are predictable over a longer period of time.
Anyway - this means that the flows inside a star can change pattern, or that the electrical currents induced can change (not always the same thing) and they in turn will cause the magnetic field to change. Changes involves flares, sunspots and magnetic field disturbances - even as far as changing the polarity. So if our sun does that it's not surprising that another star with similar properties also exhibits the same behavior.
More interesting stellar objects to study would be red stars like the Betelgeuze star or giant blue stars like Rigel. Since they are much larger they can offer different results. Same goes for white dwarfs. Some stars are very strong in their radiation and can provide a great deal of information from a distance, but not everything. There may still be surprises waiting for us!
Come back in 5 billion years and we have the answer.
An insurance is a way for the insured to get an acceptable cover for risks and an insurance company also has to take a reasonable risk. Even if a certain genetic predisposition exists doesn't mean that it actually is triggered in an individual.
If they were to rename it - why not do it in honor of someone instead. Unfortunately Carl Sagan has already been honored, but there are other persons too...
Of course - even more interesting is WHO has a cellphone on Jupiter!
Just go figure that a seat removal has occurred to transport something and that he later on never had gotten through with reattaching the seat due to other things with higher priority. There are things that can be left undone for a long time...
It's hard to take on a decision of guilt here - I don't have any opinion yet about his guilt or innocence but I hope that the court can get to a decision about the case in the correct way. The reasonable doubt clause is important. But being intelligent doesn't mean that you are smart enough to hide the evidence or better enough to avoid creating it in the first place. Especially in crimes of the moment the intelligence is often strongly suppressed. No matter how geeky you are - sometimes the reptilian instinct takes over.
In this case no one died, and the situation doesn't call for any immediate use of that plane so it's no big issue that the fleet is grounded.
It's also important to consider that much of the technology that is developed for military aircraft will find its way into civilian aircraft in one way or another. Fly-by-wire, composite materials, titanium details etc. are all a result from the military development. And if the accidents happens with military aircraft where there usually is an ejection seat available it also means that the risk of killing a lot of people is decreased. OK, the ejection seat can fail, it can eject at the wrong moment or the plane can crash into a bad position and kill people. But if a flaw with a design feature can be found on such an aircraft and not be put into the next generation of passenger super-aircraft it can mean a lot.
Of course it's bad that an expensive aircraft crashes, but it's still just money - and essentially the money is already paid and has already looped through the system a few times since. Leading edge tech is always expensive, but usually there are a lot of spinoffs coming through. Otherwise we would still be using artificial limbs using wood and hooks instead of carbon fiber structures, servo motors and computers for our handicapped. (OK, not everyone gets it but its coming through)
Then you may ask what the use there is for a B2 bomber in the end. It is useful in some cases, but the original intent spurned from the cold war is actually no longer there. It sure is a long way better at what it is designed for than the B52, but the B2 is a highly specialized craft while the B52 actually has found some other secondary uses too, which I suspect that the B2 will never achieve. And don't forget that the stealth aircraft business is always a developing part - which means that as soon as someone is able to spot the B2 as easy as a B52 then it will effectively be as obsolete as the B52 - or actually even worse. So in that case the B2 has to be replaced with something new. And I suspect that such work is already in progress regardless of what is said.
As for future military aircraft there is a high probability that they will be unmanned weapons carriers that gets updates from remote systems while still being able to function mostly autonomous. Such solutions will be cheaper per unit and still being able to pack a considerable punch. The disadvantage with such systems is that the picture sometimes changes by the minute in a battle and that means that they can end up doing the completely wrong thing. "Friendly fire - isn't". Of course - humans can also do that mistake so it's no real safeguard to have manned aircraft.
But in all - in today's world the use for heavy weapons is very limited since most conflicts of today are no longer on the scale of nations but reduced to conflicts within nations or even small groups as terrorists and using a bomber in such situations is like using a sledge to eradicate cockroaches in a kitchen. The collateral damage will be too great. And it doesn't matter how great an army you have if you don't have the information to use that army. Failure to get the correct intelligence about your enemy is just leading to overall failure.
I wonder if not the region coding could be considered an unduly limitation of freedom of speech?
Seems to be some kind of inside affair tweak in the public.
Considering that there are legal download and streaming alternatives now. And there will be more in the future...
Who is going to decide?
I'll probably be modded down for this - or have this little post killed by the scientologists.
The Lawyer gets the same penalty as the person he/she represents.
Never mind - the problem is that there should be a rule stating that any writing that can't be understood by an average person should be declared invalid.
The fabled Trolls were often just collecting gold and never really used it, modern patent trolls are collecting patents and use that collection to collect gold.
Effectively they are parasites that abuses the system.