It is not bad math, but physics. The congestion you are talking about when a vehicle tries to merge into existing traffic and thus cars a car to slow down and thus causes traffic to back up is caused not by the traffic but the new vehicle trying to enter the traffic. A three lane highway has more capacity, but that doesn't eleviate congestion. LA has six lane highways and during rush hour traffic can come to a stand still. The congestion is not caused by the highway capacity (unless extremely limited) but by the things other drivers are doing or trying to do. The point is, traffic can flow smoothly, it is the other stuff that happens that causes congestion and an automated vehicle such as google's car can't change that.
If you go to your doctor, you will get a thimerosal free shot. If you go to a clinic for flu shots, you won't unless you are pregnant. Without thimerosal, each vial can only be used once, just like other vaccines. Thimerosal enables multi-use vials, where 10 shots can be given from one vial. Obviously, like many products, packaging costs come into play. The single shot vial and the 10 shot vial are the same size and contain the same amount of vaccine. The difference is one can be used 10 times the other can't.
Thimerosal is not bad, to date, nothing else has been proven as safe or effective in producing multi-use vials. Testing on thimerosal also has shown it is safe in the amounts received in a vaccination. The only thing banning it does, is drive up the cost of vaccines, by causing all vaccines to be single use vials.
While I am not trying to dismiss the dangers of mercury, you will receive more mercury in your lifetime from breathing the air near a coal powered electrical plant than you will in a lifetime of vaccinations (each one being about the same amount of mercury as a can of tuna fish).
While everybody has latched on to the use of mercury in some vaccines, what about the mercury amalgam used in most dental work? Like the vaccine mercury, it is not harmful to the patient, but it would be difficult to make amalgam fillings with out it.
IAMNAC....A lot of autism cases have been traced to use of Mercury in vaccines during early childhood. Since Mercury was retired from Baby/Toddlers, cases have started to recede. What makes you believe that mercury would be FORCIBLY injected in bloodstrems of our nation? Mercury makes you more stupid, doesn't have any benefit, stays in the bloodstream for ever. It's also been found that most people have more mercury in their blood than is normal, and today, many are even advising avoiding things like Tuna for this very same reason: the seas have more mercury floating, so fish that lives linger, accumulates more mercury. This is the reason many people look for Fish Oil supplements that have a process for removing most of the mercury, or look for produce from seas that don't (yet) suffer largerly from this problem.
There should be an alternative to Vaccines. We are getting vaccines every year, and the numbers is steadily going up. I don't like injecting Mercury in my blood to avoid a flu once every few years.
Mercury in vaccines and the relationship to autism has been one of the most studied medical items in the past two decades and the results, shown over and over again is that there is 0 link between the two. Better reporting of autism statistics is one of the reason. Another is the definition of autism has been expanded.
Linking autism to mercury in vaccines is just bad math (statistics). There is a very strong relationship to the increase in reported autism cases since the 1960s and the increased consumption of McDonalds french fries over the same period. Both grew at a large rate over the same time period, but nobody claims that french fries cause autism.
It is basic human nature to want to blame somebody else when your child is sick or diagnosed with something like autism. While understandable, blaming the vaccine only discourages others from getting immunized which has a much greater health risk for the population.
It doesn't matter whether you consider it simple for yourself. Drunk driving and sleepy drivers cause a lot of accidents that could be prevented by this sort of automation.
Also, prices drop when a technology starts gaining widespread usage.
You could also pay full attention to the people you're driving with, read, work, etc.
The actual number of non-commercial drivers causing an accident because they are drunk or sleepy/fell asleep is actually quite low as compared to the total number of accidents, which tend to occur on freeways when there is a lot of traffic (ie. rush hour). Second leading cause of accidents is excess speed as compared to road conditions (could be poor pavement or inclement weather).
So, while such a technology may help reduce drunk driving or sleep caused accidents, it will not make a significant reduction in overall accidents. If your goal is to reduce accidents (drunk or otherwise), reducing speed limits would be a much more effective manner, whether the car is automated or not.
Your using bad math. Most of our highways are massively too small for the amount of traffic on them. Most of them could not support the number of cars we have now if people actually left the proper cushions. I point back to my examples above. On a wide empty road, you can be as stupid as you want, and you won't slow me down. When traffic is already bumper to bumper, a dozen cars trying to merge on from an on ramp will cause congestion, even if they do it perfectly.
Actually, you are arguing my point. The congestion is not caused by the cars moving down the road, but something that disrupts that smooth flow (cars merging in your example). Think of a freight train, there are 100 freight cars all moving at the same speed on one very narrow lane. As soon as the engine applies it's brakes, all the rest of the cars bunch up behind it, even as their brakes are applied.
The same thing happens on a highway. The number of vehicles on the highway can be a lot higher than what we would normally think, if they all flow at the same speed and there are no variances (surprises). You could have cars spaced every two feet if you wanted. However, as soon as one of the cars does something unexpected, the rest will bunch up, like the freight cars, or worse wreck, like the indy race in Las Vegas.
The volume of cars on any given stretch of highway contributes to safety issues, but does not cause congestion in and off itself. Congestion is caused by something (another car, an animal, road conditions) that disrupts the smooth flow of those cars. Traffic on a highway follows the physics of fluid in a pipe. Kinking the pipe causes turbulence (congestion) adding more fluid doesn't. It is true, though that any pipe or highway can only handle so much fluid/traffic - however, the bottleneck occurs at what is feeding the pipe/highway. So, if traffic were at maximum capacity, say 70mph with two feet between each vehicle, the bottleneck/congestion would be at the on-ramp trying to enter the highway, but not the highway itself.
Don't give millions of government employees access to confidential documents. The Manning documents were likely already in the possession of all major powers.
That may very well be true. However, that isn't what he is really in trouble about. He's in trouble because he was instrumental in the documents being released to the public !
No, congestion is caused by having too many cars for the the amount of road. If you are on an 8 lane highway, a there is some dumbass swerving back and forth across the lanes, and you and him are the only people on the road, there will be no congestion. Conversely, if you are driving on a two lane highway that is at full capacity. Adding hundreds of extra cars will cause congestion even if everyone driving perfectly.
Yes, people doing dumb things can be the final straw, but the idea that roads can take an infinate amount of traffic as long as people don't do dumb things is a myth.
Congestion is not caused by too many cars on the road, it is caused by what any individual car is doing. Look at the Indy wreck at Las Vegas. While the cars were all traveling around in the pack, things were tight, but not congested in the traffic sense of slowed traffic. It wasn't until one car did something that caused another car to shift that problems tragically began.
Traffic follows fluid dynamics, just like water through a pipe. Yes theoretically a highway or a pipe can only suppor so much, but for highways we don't reach that. For instance, a 100 mile straight highway with no exits can support how many cars? Assuming that there are no unexpected events, the cars can be quite close together and still move like a block.
However, in the real world is where we drive and theory falls apart. It is precisely the person cutting across lanes that is going to cause congestion as the lead cars will need to brake and the cars behind them and the cars behind them, etc., etc. That is why, unless most cars are the google cars, there will still be congestion. The google car can't eliminate that, it can only adjust for it.
Buying a $40,000 vehicle to save on $50 taxi rides doesn't seem to offer a good ROI.
Say you're right, that the self-driving car was $40k. According to Toyota's website, **BASE** price for a Prius is $24k. So, if you were even contemplating a new car purchase, you'd only really have to justify the extra $16k for the self-driving option.
$16k at $50/taxi ride is 320 rides that you'd have to eliminate for the feature to pay for itself. If you only use the self-drive feature when you're going out drinking, and go drinking one night per week, the feature pays for itself in 320 weeks. That's 6.15 years. (6 years, 8 weeks) -- Certainly not an unreasonable expectation of the car's useful lifetime. Last several cars I've had lasted > 10 years before they either died or were replaced for other reasons.
Actually, since you are paying the extra $16,000 up front vs the $50 over the six years, assuming a 3% annual interest rate, you would need 382 trips for the car to break even. At one trip per week, that comes out to 7.35 years which is well above the average time most people keep vehicles. Also at 7 years a prius will most likely need a new battery pack to have any decent resell value. If you are going to have to finance the extra $16,000, then the ROI is even worse.
Unless all cars, or at least the vast majority of cars, are google cars, then it is hard to see how there will be reduced congestion on the highways. Congestion isn't caused by a bunch of people doing stupid things, just a few and then everybody else has to react to it.
I wouldn't claim the machine is smarter then the smartest humans, but I would be willing to bet it is smarter then the average human (Just look around walmart, what you see represents the majority of the people on the road).
I would bet the machine is dumber than sh*t. It might be able to react quicker, but it isn't smart. All it will do is analyze a bunch of algorithms and choose what it is programmed to choose as the best one. That doesn't make it smart, just efficient.
Besides, Mr. Spock was definitely smarter than Captain Kirk, but Kirk seemed to excel at making the better choice.
You must have never hit a deer at speed. Your car will stop whether you hit the brakes or not. Then the guy behind you will still hit you if you are following to closely. Plowing through an accident works in NASCAR, but not so much on a public highway.
What distribution are we supposed to use now? Ubuntu has given up on its users, and is turning into an interface for the elderly, the disabled and netbook people.
I'd rather have my advanced UI that lets me do whatever I want with my workstation, thank you very much.
One could always install XFCE, KDE, LXDE, Enlightenment, Openbox, Fluxbox etc., etc.
While I was not/am not a big Unity fan, I do notice that a lot of things are being developed around the Unity interface (and to a lesser extent gnome-shell). Seems like the target audience isn't the elderly, disabled or netbook people, but the group that just wants to get things done. Besides, Unity and gnome-shell are about how to access programs. It's in the launched programs that the real work occurs, whether on linux, windows, osx.
In the Windows and OsX world, the desktop metaphor is quickly becoming just an application launcher. Ubuntu (and Gnome) decided to be proactive to remain relevant. Even KDE has their netbook interface that many people run on the desktop.
The design choices are really about trying to determine what the general public might want, not the average slashdotter, developer, linux guru. There is a whole generation that has grown up and adapted to a smart phone kind of interface. Unity and gnome-shell are just an extension of that way to launch applications.
One wonders if the price on the newer inhalers will come down, since there will be volume efficiencies when more of them are made.
Short answer is "No." CFC inhalers for prescription inhalers has been banned in the US for several years, the price has not gone down. There is no reason to expect over the counter inhalers will go down. When the prescription ones dropped CFC as the propellant, they received new patents now they are protected. This was nothing more than the pharmaceutical companies getting the OTC banned from competing with them.
What is the advantage of using an SSD in this configuration? Granted, if the power went out, the SSD would retain the data versus a standard ram cache, but then again, the hard drive isn't spinning to accept the data. Also, SSDs tend to wear out in a few years, even with error correction. Now, most likely, the system would realize that and default back to the HD without the SSD, but again, a standard cache wouldn't have that problem, or at least not as soon.
The only advantage I see is that an 128GB SSD is a lot smaller than 128GB ram, but I don't know if it has to be that way. With a ram cache being volatile, a cmos style battery can mitigate that problem, too.
So, I ask, again, what is the big advantage to using an SSD for this?
While first to file is about to become a reality in the US, if the patent is for something that you don't hold a license or copyright for, how can you patent it? Unlike the person sitting at home who develops something and somebody copies it (or even a corporation), Intel states specifically that it needs to be released as open source (which would imply something like GPL). Code under a GPL license doesn't grant the user the right to patent it. Just like if I broke into a research facility and stole their designs or ideas does not give me a right to patent them, even with a first to file patent system.
You still have to legally own what you are trying to patent, regardless of the system in place.
On another note, I do agree that the first to patent change is going to screw up an already screwed up system even more.
As others have commented, first to file doesn't apply if the research has been made public. Since universities rely on publish or perish, the most likely scenario is that anything produced through Intel funding will be considered prior art when an outside party then tries to patent it. Assuming that the software is GPL'd, then it must include the GPL required headers, etc. So, if somebody does try to usurp it, then the university can sue them for license violations.
What Intel is proposing is how Universities used to operate prior to the 1980s. Somebody did research, presented a paper at a conference, others picked it up and expanded on that research and then presented at another conference, etc., etc. There were no patents and information flowed relatively freely and knowledge expanded. That is how the university system was designed to work.
Come the 1980s and tax law changes, universities focused more on monetarizing their research to fund other things (not necessarily a bad thing), but the way it played out was that the patents were then sold to other companies who then used them to build war chests and limit competition.
Intel is every bit in its right to insist that if you want to use their money for research, these are the stipulations. If a university doesn't like having to make the fruits of the research public and available to all, they are free to use the money from somebody else.
It is interesting to note that the biggest advances in science, at least in the US, came under systems in which the information was freely shared. Since keeping research private and seeking patents, the US has gone from being a leader int he scientific community to a follower. But at least somebody made a bunch of money of them.
I wish the US government would take a similar approach -- any royalties a university receives should go back to the government in the proportion of the funding provided. If a university payed for research costs with 50% from the government then royalties from the patent should be split 50% with the government. If the government provided 100% funding, then 100% of the royalties should go beck to the government. In doing this, then the government is truly investing in research instead of just paying the bills.
I also would include corporations, too. If the government provides x% of funding for the creation of a new drug, then x% of the profits should come back to the government, since it is the taxpayer that footed the bill in the first place.
The other alternative is what Intel is proposing -- we will pay for the research, but everybody has the right to benefit from it.
The real issue is that the law does/did nothing to protect students from predatory teachers. Missouri also has a law that if a sign is posted banning hand guns in a facility, then you can't bring them in. Like the facebook law, this law also does nothing to protect people from somebody intent on doing harm (maybe the signs are made out of kevlar).
The real problem with these types of laws are that they are emotional based to give the appearance that something is being done, when in reality, they provide little if any protections to the people they purport to protect. With regards to the facebook law, now only did it not add any real protection, but it was a poorly crafted/worded law and banned all kinds of electronic communications between teachers and students, far more than friending somebody on FB.
Ironically, under the law as it stood, it was a criminal offense to email a student or former student but not send them an actual letter. Interestingly, since the law applied to all school personnel, not just teachers, it also meant that guidance counselors, nurses, etc., could not communicate with the students electronically. Makes it kind of hard to send out information regarding scholarships, too.
The law could have avoided all of this by only restricting communications that would not be outside of the realm of what constitutes normal communications between a school employee and a student. That way, a counselor creating a FB page regarding scholarships information or when recruiters will be at the high school would not be illegal.
In effect, that is what the legislative committee is recommending -- that these types of decisions (ie acceptable use of electronic communications) be set on the local level by local authorities.
It may take a village to raise a child, but it doesn't require the government to do so.
I wonder what the results would have been on something like debian or arch or fedora? It is well known that Canonical's implementation of linux in Ubuntu is one of the slowest commercial distributions out there. They trade speed for features (or bloat depending on your perspective).
While Ubuntu is probably the most popular distro, which would make it valid to test, that doesn't mean it is representative of linux in general and therefore, the article should be about how 3D gaming is faster on BSD than on Ubuntu, not on Linux -- at least not until there is actual data to support that conclusion.
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It is not bad math, but physics. The congestion you are talking about when a vehicle tries to merge into existing traffic and thus cars a car to slow down and thus causes traffic to back up is caused not by the traffic but the new vehicle trying to enter the traffic. A three lane highway has more capacity, but that doesn't eleviate congestion. LA has six lane highways and during rush hour traffic can come to a stand still. The congestion is not caused by the highway capacity (unless extremely limited) but by the things other drivers are doing or trying to do. The point is, traffic can flow smoothly, it is the other stuff that happens that causes congestion and an automated vehicle such as google's car can't change that.
If you go to your doctor, you will get a thimerosal free shot. If you go to a clinic for flu shots, you won't unless you are pregnant. Without thimerosal, each vial can only be used once, just like other vaccines. Thimerosal enables multi-use vials, where 10 shots can be given from one vial. Obviously, like many products, packaging costs come into play. The single shot vial and the 10 shot vial are the same size and contain the same amount of vaccine. The difference is one can be used 10 times the other can't.
Thimerosal is not bad, to date, nothing else has been proven as safe or effective in producing multi-use vials. Testing on thimerosal also has shown it is safe in the amounts received in a vaccination. The only thing banning it does, is drive up the cost of vaccines, by causing all vaccines to be single use vials.
While I am not trying to dismiss the dangers of mercury, you will receive more mercury in your lifetime from breathing the air near a coal powered electrical plant than you will in a lifetime of vaccinations (each one being about the same amount of mercury as a can of tuna fish).
While everybody has latched on to the use of mercury in some vaccines, what about the mercury amalgam used in most dental work? Like the vaccine mercury, it is not harmful to the patient, but it would be difficult to make amalgam fillings with out it.
IAMNAC....A lot of autism cases have been traced to use of Mercury in vaccines during early childhood. Since Mercury was retired from Baby/Toddlers, cases have started to recede. What makes you believe that mercury would be FORCIBLY injected in bloodstrems of our nation? Mercury makes you more stupid, doesn't have any benefit, stays in the bloodstream for ever. It's also been found that most people have more mercury in their blood than is normal, and today, many are even advising avoiding things like Tuna for this very same reason: the seas have more mercury floating, so fish that lives linger, accumulates more mercury. This is the reason many people look for Fish Oil supplements that have a process for removing most of the mercury, or look for produce from seas that don't (yet) suffer largerly from this problem.
There should be an alternative to Vaccines. We are getting vaccines every year, and the numbers is steadily going up. I don't like injecting Mercury in my blood to avoid a flu once every few years.
Mercury in vaccines and the relationship to autism has been one of the most studied medical items in the past two decades and the results, shown over and over again is that there is 0 link between the two. Better reporting of autism statistics is one of the reason. Another is the definition of autism has been expanded.
Linking autism to mercury in vaccines is just bad math (statistics). There is a very strong relationship to the increase in reported autism cases since the 1960s and the increased consumption of McDonalds french fries over the same period. Both grew at a large rate over the same time period, but nobody claims that french fries cause autism.
It is basic human nature to want to blame somebody else when your child is sick or diagnosed with something like autism. While understandable, blaming the vaccine only discourages others from getting immunized which has a much greater health risk for the population.
It doesn't matter whether you consider it simple for yourself. Drunk driving and sleepy drivers cause a lot of accidents that could be prevented by this sort of automation.
Also, prices drop when a technology starts gaining widespread usage.
You could also pay full attention to the people you're driving with, read, work, etc.
The actual number of non-commercial drivers causing an accident because they are drunk or sleepy/fell asleep is actually quite low as compared to the total number of accidents, which tend to occur on freeways when there is a lot of traffic (ie. rush hour). Second leading cause of accidents is excess speed as compared to road conditions (could be poor pavement or inclement weather).
So, while such a technology may help reduce drunk driving or sleep caused accidents, it will not make a significant reduction in overall accidents. If your goal is to reduce accidents (drunk or otherwise), reducing speed limits would be a much more effective manner, whether the car is automated or not.
Your using bad math. Most of our highways are massively too small for the amount of traffic on them. Most of them could not support the number of cars we have now if people actually left the proper cushions. I point back to my examples above. On a wide empty road, you can be as stupid as you want, and you won't slow me down. When traffic is already bumper to bumper, a dozen cars trying to merge on from an on ramp will cause congestion, even if they do it perfectly.
Actually, you are arguing my point. The congestion is not caused by the cars moving down the road, but something that disrupts that smooth flow (cars merging in your example). Think of a freight train, there are 100 freight cars all moving at the same speed on one very narrow lane. As soon as the engine applies it's brakes, all the rest of the cars bunch up behind it, even as their brakes are applied.
The same thing happens on a highway. The number of vehicles on the highway can be a lot higher than what we would normally think, if they all flow at the same speed and there are no variances (surprises). You could have cars spaced every two feet if you wanted. However, as soon as one of the cars does something unexpected, the rest will bunch up, like the freight cars, or worse wreck, like the indy race in Las Vegas.
The volume of cars on any given stretch of highway contributes to safety issues, but does not cause congestion in and off itself. Congestion is caused by something (another car, an animal, road conditions) that disrupts the smooth flow of those cars. Traffic on a highway follows the physics of fluid in a pipe. Kinking the pipe causes turbulence (congestion) adding more fluid doesn't. It is true, though that any pipe or highway can only handle so much fluid/traffic - however, the bottleneck occurs at what is feeding the pipe/highway. So, if traffic were at maximum capacity, say 70mph with two feet between each vehicle, the bottleneck/congestion would be at the on-ramp trying to enter the highway, but not the highway itself.
Don't give millions of government employees access to confidential documents. The Manning documents were likely already in the possession of all major powers.
That may very well be true. However, that isn't what he is really in trouble about. He's in trouble because he was instrumental in the documents being released to the public !
No, congestion is caused by having too many cars for the the amount of road. If you are on an 8 lane highway, a there is some dumbass swerving back and forth across the lanes, and you and him are the only people on the road, there will be no congestion. Conversely, if you are driving on a two lane highway that is at full capacity. Adding hundreds of extra cars will cause congestion even if everyone driving perfectly.
Yes, people doing dumb things can be the final straw, but the idea that roads can take an infinate amount of traffic as long as people don't do dumb things is a myth.
Congestion is not caused by too many cars on the road, it is caused by what any individual car is doing. Look at the Indy wreck at Las Vegas. While the cars were all traveling around in the pack, things were tight, but not congested in the traffic sense of slowed traffic. It wasn't until one car did something that caused another car to shift that problems tragically began.
Traffic follows fluid dynamics, just like water through a pipe. Yes theoretically a highway or a pipe can only suppor so much, but for highways we don't reach that. For instance, a 100 mile straight highway with no exits can support how many cars? Assuming that there are no unexpected events, the cars can be quite close together and still move like a block.
However, in the real world is where we drive and theory falls apart. It is precisely the person cutting across lanes that is going to cause congestion as the lead cars will need to brake and the cars behind them and the cars behind them, etc., etc. That is why, unless most cars are the google cars, there will still be congestion. The google car can't eliminate that, it can only adjust for it.
Buying a $40,000 vehicle to save on $50 taxi rides doesn't seem to offer a good ROI.
Say you're right, that the self-driving car was $40k. According to Toyota's website, **BASE** price for a Prius is $24k. So, if you were even contemplating a new car purchase, you'd only really have to justify the extra $16k for the self-driving option.
$16k at $50/taxi ride is 320 rides that you'd have to eliminate for the feature to pay for itself. If you only use the self-drive feature when you're going out drinking, and go drinking one night per week, the feature pays for itself in 320 weeks. That's 6.15 years. (6 years, 8 weeks) -- Certainly not an unreasonable expectation of the car's useful lifetime. Last several cars I've had lasted > 10 years before they either died or were replaced for other reasons.
Actually, since you are paying the extra $16,000 up front vs the $50 over the six years, assuming a 3% annual interest rate, you would need 382 trips for the car to break even. At one trip per week, that comes out to 7.35 years which is well above the average time most people keep vehicles. Also at 7 years a prius will most likely need a new battery pack to have any decent resell value. If you are going to have to finance the extra $16,000, then the ROI is even worse.
Unless all cars, or at least the vast majority of cars, are google cars, then it is hard to see how there will be reduced congestion on the highways. Congestion isn't caused by a bunch of people doing stupid things, just a few and then everybody else has to react to it.
I wouldn't claim the machine is smarter then the smartest humans, but I would be willing to bet it is smarter then the average human (Just look around walmart, what you see represents the majority of the people on the road).
I would bet the machine is dumber than sh*t. It might be able to react quicker, but it isn't smart. All it will do is analyze a bunch of algorithms and choose what it is programmed to choose as the best one. That doesn't make it smart, just efficient.
Besides, Mr. Spock was definitely smarter than Captain Kirk, but Kirk seemed to excel at making the better choice.
You must have never hit a deer at speed. Your car will stop whether you hit the brakes or not. Then the guy behind you will still hit you if you are following to closely. Plowing through an accident works in NASCAR, but not so much on a public highway.
Wouldn't it be simpler not to just get drunk/wasted? Buying a $40,000 vehicle to save on $50 taxi rides doesn't seem to offer a good ROI.
"The goal is that the technology will help reduce congestion, fuel waste, and accidents."
The goal is to make Google a lot of money.
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up to a 5.
What distribution are we supposed to use now?
Ubuntu has given up on its users, and is turning into an interface for the elderly, the disabled and netbook people.
I'd rather have my advanced UI that lets me do whatever I want with my workstation, thank you very much.
One could always install XFCE, KDE, LXDE, Enlightenment, Openbox, Fluxbox etc., etc.
While I was not/am not a big Unity fan, I do notice that a lot of things are being developed around the Unity interface (and to a lesser extent gnome-shell). Seems like the target audience isn't the elderly, disabled or netbook people, but the group that just wants to get things done. Besides, Unity and gnome-shell are about how to access programs. It's in the launched programs that the real work occurs, whether on linux, windows, osx.
In the Windows and OsX world, the desktop metaphor is quickly becoming just an application launcher. Ubuntu (and Gnome) decided to be proactive to remain relevant. Even KDE has their netbook interface that many people run on the desktop.
The design choices are really about trying to determine what the general public might want, not the average slashdotter, developer, linux guru. There is a whole generation that has grown up and adapted to a smart phone kind of interface. Unity and gnome-shell are just an extension of that way to launch applications.
Just my opinion, YMMV.
One wonders if the price on the newer inhalers will come down, since there will be volume efficiencies when more of them are made.
Short answer is "No." CFC inhalers for prescription inhalers has been banned in the US for several years, the price has not gone down. There is no reason to expect over the counter inhalers will go down. When the prescription ones dropped CFC as the propellant, they received new patents now they are protected. This was nothing more than the pharmaceutical companies getting the OTC banned from competing with them.
Not really. Right now inhalers are among the most significant remaining sources of CFCs.
The other remaining source is Halon fire suppression systems. Halon is no longer produced, but remaining stocks are still in use.
Of course they are, because every other source has been eliminated.
What is the advantage of using an SSD in this configuration? Granted, if the power went out, the SSD would retain the data versus a standard ram cache, but then again, the hard drive isn't spinning to accept the data. Also, SSDs tend to wear out in a few years, even with error correction. Now, most likely, the system would realize that and default back to the HD without the SSD, but again, a standard cache wouldn't have that problem, or at least not as soon.
The only advantage I see is that an 128GB SSD is a lot smaller than 128GB ram, but I don't know if it has to be that way. With a ram cache being volatile, a cmos style battery can mitigate that problem, too.
So, I ask, again, what is the big advantage to using an SSD for this?
The title says it all.
While first to file is about to become a reality in the US, if the patent is for something that you don't hold a license or copyright for, how can you patent it? Unlike the person sitting at home who develops something and somebody copies it (or even a corporation), Intel states specifically that it needs to be released as open source (which would imply something like GPL). Code under a GPL license doesn't grant the user the right to patent it. Just like if I broke into a research facility and stole their designs or ideas does not give me a right to patent them, even with a first to file patent system.
You still have to legally own what you are trying to patent, regardless of the system in place.
On another note, I do agree that the first to patent change is going to screw up an already screwed up system even more.
As others have commented, first to file doesn't apply if the research has been made public. Since universities rely on publish or perish, the most likely scenario is that anything produced through Intel funding will be considered prior art when an outside party then tries to patent it. Assuming that the software is GPL'd, then it must include the GPL required headers, etc. So, if somebody does try to usurp it, then the university can sue them for license violations.
What Intel is proposing is how Universities used to operate prior to the 1980s. Somebody did research, presented a paper at a conference, others picked it up and expanded on that research and then presented at another conference, etc., etc. There were no patents and information flowed relatively freely and knowledge expanded. That is how the university system was designed to work.
Come the 1980s and tax law changes, universities focused more on monetarizing their research to fund other things (not necessarily a bad thing), but the way it played out was that the patents were then sold to other companies who then used them to build war chests and limit competition.
Intel is every bit in its right to insist that if you want to use their money for research, these are the stipulations. If a university doesn't like having to make the fruits of the research public and available to all, they are free to use the money from somebody else.
It is interesting to note that the biggest advances in science, at least in the US, came under systems in which the information was freely shared. Since keeping research private and seeking patents, the US has gone from being a leader int he scientific community to a follower. But at least somebody made a bunch of money of them.
I wish the US government would take a similar approach -- any royalties a university receives should go back to the government in the proportion of the funding provided. If a university payed for research costs with 50% from the government then royalties from the patent should be split 50% with the government. If the government provided 100% funding, then 100% of the royalties should go beck to the government. In doing this, then the government is truly investing in research instead of just paying the bills.
I also would include corporations, too. If the government provides x% of funding for the creation of a new drug, then x% of the profits should come back to the government, since it is the taxpayer that footed the bill in the first place.
The other alternative is what Intel is proposing -- we will pay for the research, but everybody has the right to benefit from it.
The real issue is that the law does/did nothing to protect students from predatory teachers. Missouri also has a law that if a sign is posted banning hand guns in a facility, then you can't bring them in. Like the facebook law, this law also does nothing to protect people from somebody intent on doing harm (maybe the signs are made out of kevlar).
The real problem with these types of laws are that they are emotional based to give the appearance that something is being done, when in reality, they provide little if any protections to the people they purport to protect. With regards to the facebook law, now only did it not add any real protection, but it was a poorly crafted/worded law and banned all kinds of electronic communications between teachers and students, far more than friending somebody on FB.
Ironically, under the law as it stood, it was a criminal offense to email a student or former student but not send them an actual letter. Interestingly, since the law applied to all school personnel, not just teachers, it also meant that guidance counselors, nurses, etc., could not communicate with the students electronically. Makes it kind of hard to send out information regarding scholarships, too.
The law could have avoided all of this by only restricting communications that would not be outside of the realm of what constitutes normal communications between a school employee and a student. That way, a counselor creating a FB page regarding scholarships information or when recruiters will be at the high school would not be illegal.
In effect, that is what the legislative committee is recommending -- that these types of decisions (ie acceptable use of electronic communications) be set on the local level by local authorities.
It may take a village to raise a child, but it doesn't require the government to do so.
I wonder what the results would have been on something like debian or arch or fedora? It is well known that Canonical's implementation of linux in Ubuntu is one of the slowest commercial distributions out there. They trade speed for features (or bloat depending on your perspective).
While Ubuntu is probably the most popular distro, which would make it valid to test, that doesn't mean it is representative of linux in general and therefore, the article should be about how 3D gaming is faster on BSD than on Ubuntu, not on Linux -- at least not until there is actual data to support that conclusion.