Then it will be using 0 watts. Much less than using standby.
A desktop computer in standby mode consumes about 35.5 watts. If left in standby mode for 1 year, this comes to about 310 kilowatt-hours, which costs about $27 per year at my local rate. Since I frequently have my computer in use for a couple hours a day, my actual savings would not be more than $25/year (To keep things in perspective, this is less than 3% of my electricity usage). If you assume that it takes about 2 minutes a day to turn my computer on, and you assume that my time is worth more than $2.25/hour, I'm losing money by turning my computer off when not in use.
Seriously, if everyone in this country who currently leaves their computers on at all times turned them off while not in use, no one would notice.
Sounds like they probably use a hydroscopic compound such as calcium chloride and then you some type of ion replacement to recover the water (precipitate calcium metal and some other non-soluable salt, such as Fe(III)Cl.
Quick! To the Patent Office! That'll teach them to keep their methods secret.
I don't think you understand what testable means. It doesn't mean that "there is conceptually an observation that could be made that might suggest the hypothesis might be true", it means there is an unambiguous and repeatable test that could be conducted which could clearly and unambiguously show the hypothesis to fail in its prediction that would be expected to succeed if and only if the hypothesis was correct, or at least a better explanation for the underlying process that what went before. And not merely that its "possible to develop" such experiments, but that one is developed. Until and unless such an experiment is developed, the conjecture is just an untestable conjecture. Once you have test, its a testable hypothesis. Once its been tested, it might be a theory, if all goes well.
I damned well do know what testable means, apparently a lot better than you do. For starters, it means "able to be tested", not "has already been tested".
You're confusing "hypothesis" and "theory", and they're not the same thing, and a hypothesis certainly does not become a theory after it has been tested. A hypothesis is a prediction about the outcome of an experiment. A theory is a predictive model of reality which is used to derive hypotheses. So the first step in designing an experiment is to come up with a hypothesis that, if it is not true, will invalidate the theory. The experiment, however, can only directly test the hypothesis, not the theory. This is the basis of the term "falsifiable", because an experiment can only prove a theory to be false, it can never prove it to be true.
So, in our specific case of String Theory, we have a hypothesis: At certain, predicted, energy densities achievable through the collision of subatomic particles, supersymmetric counterparts to known particles should be detectable. If there is no supersymmetry, String Theory is wrong. Is this hypothesis testable? Of course, and that's why physicists are in the process of developing the experiments to test it. Will confirmation of supersymmetry prove String Theory? Of course not, no experiment has ever proven a theory to be true. But "theory" doesn't mean that it's true, "theory" doesn't even mean that it's not known to be false, "theory" just means a predictive model that can be falsified through those predictions.
String Theory makes a lot of other predictions, too, it's just that those predictions which have been tested are the same predictions that the Standard Model makes (which makes sense, you don't want a Theory of Everything that can't explain everything), so there is no way to distinguish between the theories yet (or any other theory that is out there).
String theory is at the moment, philosophy. As soon as someone comes up with a way of testing it, it will become science.
Contrary to what a lot of people around here seem to think, there are testable predictions from String Theory, the obvious one being supersymmetry. If supersymmetric particles do not exist, String Theory is false. Since supersymmetry also predicts the mass of supersymmetric particles, it's quite possible to develop experiments that, over time, will either detect these particles or establish beyond reasonable doubt that nothing is there.
Sure, hitting a 10% milestone is great, but is there something inherently special about it? The article claims that it will indicate greater traction with corporations, but I suspect 10% has more to do with the number of fingers on most people's hands than any real economic theory of adoption.
It's traditional to ignore something until it hits the 10% mark. At that point, convention dictates that you are no longer on the fringes and have become a significant influence. It has as much to do with the number of fingers on your hand as anything else, but it affects public perception, and economic theory strongly suggests that public perception determines reality.
The RIAA suing filesharers == someone taking something prohibitive and making it free
GPL developers suing people who steal their code out of compliance == someone taking something free and making it prohibitive.
There's a fundamental difference in that those stealing GPL code are stealing from EVERYONE, not just from the author.
If I break the window to your car, hotwire it, and then leave it in the middle of downtown so that anyone else can drive it, too, I'm taking something prohibitive and making it free, but that doesn't make it right. Using "free" and "prohibitive" really doesn't answer the underlying question of why one author's wishes should be respected, and another author's wishes should be ignored.
The only reasons that I know of why a thing should be free are because it has no value, because it costs nothing to produce, or because the owner chooses to give it away. Neither software nor music is worthless, and both cost money and time to produce. Therefore, neither one should be considered free without the consent of the copyright owner.
Furthermore, the GPL is not a case of taking something free and making it prohibitive. There is a cost to distributing the source code along with the binaries, so it's not free to use. Secondly, nothing that a company can do will prevent you from getting the code from another source, so there is no "stealing from EVERYONE".
The real issue with GPL violations is using copyrighted material to create a derivative work without permission from the copyright holders, which is quite distinct from theft. Theft requires depriving someone of something of value. In a loose sense, music file-sharing is theft, because there would normally be an exchange of money for the right to have a permanent copy of the music, and by downloading the music, you deprive the artist of the money that they should get from this transaction. For GPL'd software, there is an explicit statement that the author does not expect any money in exchange for the right to use the code, so no theft is possible.
I am not buying language as an object of biological evolution at all. At best, it seems to be an expressed meme, rather than a genetic advancement, or a trait that can be selected for.
Available observational data that suggests otherwise. For example, deaf children in Nicaragua spontaneously developed a new language when they were brought together in a group. Likewise, hearing children of deaf parents have been known to spontaneously develop a spoken language (sorry, I can't find a link that doesn't require registration). While it would be highly unethical to conduct an experiment to truly test, available evidence suggests that two or more children who grow up together without any external social interaction will spontaneously develop language.
You didn't read the article, did you? "And by 2008, most Americans who visit Canada won't be able to re-enter their country without a passport." You sure *will* need a passport to come home. I don't know what will happen if you don't have it, but you can bet it won't be pleasant or speedy.
Wow, not only did the joke go over your head, but the heads of 3 moderators as well!
You didn't read the post, did you? You only need a passport if the border agents know that you are entering the country!
Per-capita GDP and per-capita income are two different things and not necessarily tied, are they? It might be that California has a greater per-capita GDP while France has a greater per-capita income.
In a model economy, they would be the same thing. In a real economy, there is some deviation, but not enough to overcome a 60% higher GDP in California than France.
I'm sorry, but the parent post is just nutso. France alone is the 4th largest economy on the planet, comparing more closely to California than lowly Alabama. Have you ever seen what a newly constructed French house looks like? Compare the quality to new housing in the states.
Before you go flaming people about their understanding of global economics, you might want to take some time to understand it yourself, or at least bother to read their comment completely. The parent poster was talking about per capita GDP, which means that it's population-averaged.
California has a GDP of $1.4 trillion and a population of 35.4 million, which is a per capita GDP of nearly $40,000. France has a GDP of $1.5 trillion and a population of 59.8 million, which is a per capita GDP of roughly $25,000 (All numbers are approximate, and come from the most recent data I could find). Even adjusting for the recent devaluation of the Dollar vs the Euro, this clearly gives the average Californian a much greater income than the average French citizen.
Medical and other services are included in GDP, so the degree of socialization of these services does not directly affect the GDP (i.e., the doctor still has to get paid, it doesn't matter if it's done by the government, the patient, or the insurance company). However, GDP does not adjust for cost basis, so it's possible that, if the real cost of medicine or housing is higher in California than in France (or vice versa), that this additional cost would result in a higher per capita GDP without delivering additional value.
Actually I believe this would be the preferred way of arranging the sentence:
hackers using keyloggers were foiled by police.
This places the modifier after a single subject, completely removing ambiguity.
"Police folied hackers who were using keyboards" is the preferred construction. The use of the Passive Voice is generally discouraged, as this feature has been deprecated in favor of the Active Voice, and is provided only for compatiblility with previous versions of the English language, and may be removed in a future release.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Hoffstadt confirmed the arrest was the first criminal case brought against an individual sending spam over IM.
First of all, this is a paraphrase of the attorney's words, not a direct quote, so there is the possibility of a misinterpretation on the part of the reporter. Also, if you read close, this quote doesn't say that the criminal charges are for spam over IM, it just says that the charges are against an individial who was sending spam over IM. There's a difference.
BTW, since the site has been blasted by Slashdotters, I can't get read it, but her guess is that Gollum has dissociative identity disorder. I'll be interested to see what the article says.
The site seems to be back up, but for those too lazy to read the article, the final diagnosis is schizoid personality disorder.
Dissociative Identity Disorder (in the article, referred to as multiple personality disorder) was ruled out because his two personalities are aware of each other and are present simultaneously and have conversations with each other. In DID, only one personality will manifest itself at a time, and the personalities are unaware of each other.
Schizophrenia was ruled out because he does not show evidence of delusions.
I have worked utility construction, and yes that stuff does happen from time to time...This sounds to me like a complaint of a competitor desperately trying to stop progress.
Since August, nearly 200 water, sewer and reclaimed water lines have been broken across the county. Those breaks have affected nearly 3,000 customers, leaving some with sewage and water spewing through their front yards, others with ripped-up driveways and streets, and some dealing with a boil-water notice as a health precaution.
This is more than a "from time to time" problem. That's an average of roughly 2 line breaks a day, with a total repair cost so far of over $100,000 (from the article).
Also from the article:
``They were right to do it, though, because they're concerned about all that's happened and about the inconvenience to their customers, and we are, too,''
[Spokesman for Verizon Bob] Elek said. ``We wish all the problems that have happened wouldn't have happened.''
Not exactly the wording I would expect from Verizon if a competitor was desperately trying to stop progress. In short, RTFA!
I'm sure that they could ask Microsoft to stop doing this (assuming that there's any basis to this story in the first place) and reimburse Google for all appropriate damages, but I also suppose that it's completely naive to think Microsoft will comply with anything less than a lawsuit. Which means that the only logical interpretations of your apparently sarcastic comment are:
You aren't being sarcastic, and you mean that Google would be protecting their rights without resorting to violence, and that's the American Way, or
you don't understand the importance of the courts and lawsuits in allowing private citizens and corporations to protect their rights in a non-violent manner.
Sears sent out Christmas catalogs based on past purchases; thus, it is prior art. Anything you could buy is in the catalog and anything bought at sears is in the catalog. Further more, this is a case whereby Sears provides a means of purchasing products via past purchases.
Sears isn't prior art for a couple reasons:
Sears catalogs are not customized to the desires of the individual shopper. This customization greatly increases the probability of an extra sale, thus satisfying the "usefulness" patent requirement.
The Sears process for sending out catalogs involves humans compiling data on who has made purchases into a mailing list. The Cendant process (presumably, I haven't actually read it) involves analyzing the purchase data of all its customers and using algorithms to determine that a given customer is likely to desire specific products because of similar purchasing patterns. These two processes are completely different, satisfying the "novelty" patent requirement.
Similarly, the algorithms for predicting which products a customer will want do not obviously derive from the Sears process, satisfying the "non-obviousness" patent requirement.
Of course, these points only apply to Sears catalogs. There may be other prior art that uses computers to run purchase-predicting algorithms (which would undermine the "useful" and "novel" claims unless Cendant's process had significant advantages over the prior art). There could even be prior art that used humans to process the same algorithms as Cendant, in which case the move to computers could be an "obvious" transition. The algorithm gives the process firm legal ground for the patent, because it's something that required effort to develop.
It succeeded long enough for Borland to make Delphi 2005. I've always preferred Delphi to C++, because it has almost all of the features of C++ (the most notable lack being macros), plus it has much better enumeration and set handling (mainly, because it has enumeration and set handling).
Nothing is broken, google just broke the copy save and print features so that they didnt work anymore. That's not breaking something!
Broken implies something is not working according to spec. The Javascript model for both IE and Firefox/Mozilla explicitly allow disabling of right-click menus (functionality that can be disabled). The right-click functionality spec explicitly states that the background image is not selectable when a foreground image is right-clicked. All Google did is take advantage of these explicitly specified features.
While I agree it would be nice to fix this from a convenience point of view, and a "it's my computer - it'll do what I want" point of view, how is this a security risk? How do I get a trojan, or lose files, because of an inability to copy & paste on a particular page?
There isn't even anything broken. All Google is doing is disabling the context menus through Javascript, and then displaying the page as a background image in a table cell, overlayed with a transparent gif to keep you from right-clicking on the background image. It's mildly clever on Google's part, but it hardly constitutes breaking the functionality or security of your browser.
Slashdot Mirror
A desktop computer in standby mode consumes about 35.5 watts. If left in standby mode for 1 year, this comes to about 310 kilowatt-hours, which costs about $27 per year at my local rate. Since I frequently have my computer in use for a couple hours a day, my actual savings would not be more than $25/year (To keep things in perspective, this is less than 3% of my electricity usage). If you assume that it takes about 2 minutes a day to turn my computer on, and you assume that my time is worth more than $2.25/hour, I'm losing money by turning my computer off when not in use.
Seriously, if everyone in this country who currently leaves their computers on at all times turned them off while not in use, no one would notice.
I damned well do know what testable means, apparently a lot better than you do. For starters, it means "able to be tested", not "has already been tested".
You're confusing "hypothesis" and "theory", and they're not the same thing, and a hypothesis certainly does not become a theory after it has been tested. A hypothesis is a prediction about the outcome of an experiment. A theory is a predictive model of reality which is used to derive hypotheses. So the first step in designing an experiment is to come up with a hypothesis that, if it is not true, will invalidate the theory. The experiment, however, can only directly test the hypothesis, not the theory. This is the basis of the term "falsifiable", because an experiment can only prove a theory to be false, it can never prove it to be true.
So, in our specific case of String Theory, we have a hypothesis: At certain, predicted, energy densities achievable through the collision of subatomic particles, supersymmetric counterparts to known particles should be detectable. If there is no supersymmetry, String Theory is wrong. Is this hypothesis testable? Of course, and that's why physicists are in the process of developing the experiments to test it. Will confirmation of supersymmetry prove String Theory? Of course not, no experiment has ever proven a theory to be true. But "theory" doesn't mean that it's true, "theory" doesn't even mean that it's not known to be false, "theory" just means a predictive model that can be falsified through those predictions.
String Theory makes a lot of other predictions, too, it's just that those predictions which have been tested are the same predictions that the Standard Model makes (which makes sense, you don't want a Theory of Everything that can't explain everything), so there is no way to distinguish between the theories yet (or any other theory that is out there).
The only reasons that I know of why a thing should be free are because it has no value, because it costs nothing to produce, or because the owner chooses to give it away. Neither software nor music is worthless, and both cost money and time to produce. Therefore, neither one should be considered free without the consent of the copyright owner.
Furthermore, the GPL is not a case of taking something free and making it prohibitive. There is a cost to distributing the source code along with the binaries, so it's not free to use. Secondly, nothing that a company can do will prevent you from getting the code from another source, so there is no "stealing from EVERYONE".
The real issue with GPL violations is using copyrighted material to create a derivative work without permission from the copyright holders, which is quite distinct from theft. Theft requires depriving someone of something of value. In a loose sense, music file-sharing is theft, because there would normally be an exchange of money for the right to have a permanent copy of the music, and by downloading the music, you deprive the artist of the money that they should get from this transaction. For GPL'd software, there is an explicit statement that the author does not expect any money in exchange for the right to use the code, so no theft is possible.
Wow, not only did the joke go over your head, but the heads of 3 moderators as well!
You didn't read the post, did you? You only need a passport if the border agents know that you are entering the country!
Before you go flaming people about their understanding of global economics, you might want to take some time to understand it yourself, or at least bother to read their comment completely. The parent poster was talking about per capita GDP, which means that it's population-averaged.
California has a GDP of $1.4 trillion and a population of 35.4 million, which is a per capita GDP of nearly $40,000. France has a GDP of $1.5 trillion and a population of 59.8 million, which is a per capita GDP of roughly $25,000 (All numbers are approximate, and come from the most recent data I could find). Even adjusting for the recent devaluation of the Dollar vs the Euro, this clearly gives the average Californian a much greater income than the average French citizen.
Medical and other services are included in GDP, so the degree of socialization of these services does not directly affect the GDP (i.e., the doctor still has to get paid, it doesn't matter if it's done by the government, the patient, or the insurance company). However, GDP does not adjust for cost basis, so it's possible that, if the real cost of medicine or housing is higher in California than in France (or vice versa), that this additional cost would result in a higher per capita GDP without delivering additional value.
The site seems to be back up, but for those too lazy to read the article, the final diagnosis is schizoid personality disorder.
Dissociative Identity Disorder (in the article, referred to as multiple personality disorder) was ruled out because his two personalities are aware of each other and are present simultaneously and have conversations with each other. In DID, only one personality will manifest itself at a time, and the personalities are unaware of each other.
Schizophrenia was ruled out because he does not show evidence of delusions.
This is more than a "from time to time" problem. That's an average of roughly 2 line breaks a day, with a total repair cost so far of over $100,000 (from the article).
Also from the article:
Not exactly the wording I would expect from Verizon if a competitor was desperately trying to stop progress. In short, RTFA!
Sears isn't prior art for a couple reasons:
Of course, these points only apply to Sears catalogs. There may be other prior art that uses computers to run purchase-predicting algorithms (which would undermine the "useful" and "novel" claims unless Cendant's process had significant advantages over the prior art). There could even be prior art that used humans to process the same algorithms as Cendant, in which case the move to computers could be an "obvious" transition. The algorithm gives the process firm legal ground for the patent, because it's something that required effort to develop.
For more information, read this.
I'm waiting for the study on who wrote the technical study on who wrote the infamous Sobig worm.
It succeeded long enough for Borland to make Delphi 2005. I've always preferred Delphi to C++, because it has almost all of the features of C++ (the most notable lack being macros), plus it has much better enumeration and set handling (mainly, because it has enumeration and set handling).