My "logic" does not say anything about reciprocity. The difference in this case is Apple sells loads of iPhones and everyone knows what they are, whereas if you ask a random person what does the Samsung Galaxy S look like they won't know (obviously I'm not talking about us at Slashdot). A lot of people care about the iPhone and everyone knows what it is, a few people feel the same way about the Galaxy S.
I understand that Samsung may have very loyal fans in Korea but this story is about Europe. Samsung may not be able to fight off Apple in the US but going and screwing Europeans hardly seems like an appropriate answer.
The problem here is how the patent system is being abused but the end result is millions across Europe may see themselves unable to buy iPhone 5. I couldn't care less, my cell phone does all I need but for some people having the latest gadget is the most important thing. If you see yourself unable to do so and find out the reason is company X put Apple on the courts, the random luser will hate company X, without trying to figure out why it did so in the first place...
I know they're just fighting Apple on the same grounds but... with all the fanboys just waiting for the newest super greatest next product from Apple, won't this just hurt Samsung in the long run? A pissed customer may never come back.
I work in computational chemistry and there's currently two or three codes out there using the GPU. Granted that number will only increase, but at this point having GPUs is almost useless (these codes don't do 10% of what other codes, or a combination of them, can do.
Your mileage may vary, but assuming someone is a moron just because he isn't doing what fits you perfectly is moronic itself.
A patent lasts 20 years, we're not talking copyright here... Of course, when it comes to technology, 20 years is an eternity but mousetraps haven't changed that much in recent years.
It's incredible how you can, not only miss the entire point (by not reading the article) and then say their idea is a total crap, without understanding at all what it is about!
It's NOT a battery system. It's NOT on board storage. It's NOT the typical back to the grid system. Do yourself a favor, go read the fine article and then come back with something to tell us.
I may come a bit late to this discussion, but why is it that 100 degrees between freezing and boiling is just wrong while 180 is better?
Honest question, I see no special reason...
Unlike the summary states the article says: "It also encountered some problems with fog and indistinct road markings."
What can we say... it's Slashdot, actually understanding a text is not a need to submit a piece on it!
They still need to fix a few issues (discussed in the last part of the article (I know, I know, I shouldn't have read it) and the thing ends like this: "The Case Western Reserve University researchers expect to have human-scale artificial lungs in use in clinical trials within a decade." It's not being implanted in humans as we speak.
The reasons for this vary dependent on who is using them and why, but one possibility is someone wanting the mail server on a separate machine than the web server, yet working on a company small enough that it doesn't make sense to have a physical machine for each (in the sense of too much money/power consumption for a machine that will hardly do anything)... You virtualize the two machines and put them running on an actual server.
This allows you to have different access levels and security restrictions for each of the machines, while keeping the costs minimal (just one machine and the electricity to keep that running).
I know you have a 5 digits UID and that should bring you some respect but could you please also respect the scientists at NASA and elsewhere?
"bits of Curiosity getting friend by the descent engine" Are you seriously thinking they couldn't even figure that part out? Is this some sort of amateur first try project at something like shooting a bird at the top of a tree with some rocks and a sling?
"the lander covering Curiosity with a massive amount of dust (...)"
Considering the rover is not using solar energy but actually a RTG Unless it's scientific instruments get totally blocked by dust it should not be a problem. And given that the previous rover attempts (dependent on solar energy) survived Mars dust storms quite fine (they were supposed to last 90 days and they stayed quite a bit longer) I'd say this one should do fine as well. Ah, that reference to Apollo's dust cloud. Well, not only the Apollo lander actually... er, landed unlike in this case where it will float a bit above the surface therefore reducing the dust cloud formed, but in the Moon there is no atmosphere at all and it's only gravity stopping whatever you send up. In Mars, not only the gravity is more than twice as high, but also the atmosphere should increase drag and reduce the cloud dust.
I do not work for NASA or any other space agency, I'm not even American, but I think we can trust them a bit more. They seem to be able to hit a planet that far away (occasionally having problems with unit conversion), remembering to place the exhausts from the descent engines away from the probes should be within their capabilities...
Smallpox transmits like a flu, through inhalation of the airborne virus. Polio transmits through fecal-oral or oral-oral mechanisms.
If "enhanced sanitary conditions" were the reason for these to be erased (from the entire world in the case of smallpox, let's not forget that) then AIDS would be a minor problem nowadays with its harder infection mechanism (contact with body fluids of an infected person) and diseases like malaria would have been eradicated as well (especially with the efforts involved in killing the mosquito for such long periods. Perhaps the fact that the vaccine for smallpox was first developed at the end of the 18th century and people were consistently vaccinated against it (the 30% mortality rate made it a big, noticeable problem) has something to do with it disappearing... more than just people learning to wash their hands!
I have no statistics on caches disappearing, but several of the travel bugs I followed ended up missing, one of them twice! Caches disappear constantly, even if they are out of public areas... what's the point of putting it in the middle of a commercial district? Just to make sure it doesn't even last two weeks? While on the meantime screwing up dozens of potential nice spots, based on the rule "no caches within a certain range of another"...
I wonder if these people have never heard of significant digits... what is the point of going to the first decimal? Are they trying to tell me their four year away prediction is that accurate?
What does the USA have to do with this?
The guy wrote bad stuff about the Thai king and was caught years later while in Thailand... what did you want the US to do before he was caught? Overthrow the Thai king so that this guy could go on and get medical care? Use your brain, at least to make the title...
There you go... not that anyone should read it, this being Slashdot and all...
First 'habitable' exoplanet confirmed
Tuesday, 17 May 2011
Agence France-Presse
PARIS: A rocky world orbiting a nearby star was confirmed as the first planet outside our Solar System to meet key requirements for sustaining life.
Modelling of planet Gliese 581d shows it has the potential to be warm and wet enough to nurture Earth-like life, scientists have said. It orbits a red dwarf star called Gliese 581, located around 20 light years from Earth, which makes it one of our closest neighbours.
Gliese 581d orbits on the outer fringes of the star's 'Goldilocks zone', where it is not so hot that water boils away, nor so cold that water is perpetually frozen. Instead, the temperature is just right for water to exist in liquid form.
Zarmina's World
"With a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere - a likely scenario on such a large planet - the climate of Gliese 581d is not only stable against collapse but warm enough to have oceans, clouds and rainfall," France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) said.
More than 500 planets orbiting other stars have been recorded since 1995, detected mostly by a tiny wobble in stellar light. Exoplanets are named after their star and listed alphabetically, in order of discovery.
Until now, the big interest in Gliese 581's roster of planets focussed on Gliese 581g. It leapt into the headlines last year as 'Zarmina's World', after its observers announced it had roughly the same mass as Earth's and was also close to the Goldilocks zone.
No doubt that it exists
But that discovery has since been discounted by many. Indeed, some experts suspect that the Gliese 581g may not even exist but was simply a hiccup in starlight.
Its big brother, Gliese 581d, has a mass at least seven times that of Earth and is about twice our planet's size, according to the new study, which appears in a British publication, The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The planet, spotted in 2007, had initially been dismissed as a candidate in the hunt for life. It receives less than a third of the solar radiation Earth gets, and may be "tidally locked", meaning that one side of it always faces the Sun, which would give it permanent dayside and nightside.
300,000 years to get there
But the new model, devised by CNRS climate scientists Robin Wordsworth, Francois Forget and colleagues, showed surprising potential. Its atmosphere would store heat well, thanks to its dense CO2, a greenhouse gas. And the red light from the star would also penetrate the atmosphere and warm the surface.
"In all cases, the temperatures allow for the presence of liquid water on the surface," said the researchers.
For budding travellers, though, Gliese 581d would "still be a pretty strange place to visit", the CNRS said. "The denser air and thick clouds would keep the surface in a perpetual murky red twilight, and its large mass means that surface gravity would be around double that on Earth."
Getting to the planet would still require a sci-fi breakthrough in travel for earthlings. A spaceship travelling close to light speed would take more than 20 years to get there, while our present rocket technology would take 300,000 years.
However, humanity has already tried to make contact with the new planet. During Australia's National Science Week in August 2009, Cosmos magazine partnered with the Australian government, NASA and the CSIRO to run a 13-day campaign to collect goodwill messages from the public to be sent to Gliese 581d.
The initiative, known as Hello From Earth, collected 26,000 messages, which were transmitted by NASA's Tidbinbilla facility. The signal is not due to arrive until January 2030.
I kinda wish they'd do an Office for Linux; but only if they put at least the amount of effort into it as they do into the Mac client.
Quite frankly, if they put that much effort into the Office for Linux, might as well just stick with OpenOffice. Office for Mac works, but just above the passable level. Lots of hangs, lots of shitty behavior on Excel and inconsistencies in interaction between the Windows and Mac versions.
Office for Mac is way worse than the Windows version, thank god I didn't have to pay for it and get it from my employer.
Tritium decays into He-3, so in the end you get He-3 anyway. Granted, at 12 years half-life it's not like you're going to get really fast into the He-3, but at least it's not millions of years.
Charging more for majors that usually pay more doesn't have any kind of relationship to the cost of actually providing the education.
They would not be charging more to students who will get more in the future, but to students who cost more in the present. It then has a bit of a relation to reality (even though it may be a bad one).
Slashdot Mirror
My "logic" does not say anything about reciprocity. The difference in this case is Apple sells loads of iPhones and everyone knows what they are, whereas if you ask a random person what does the Samsung Galaxy S look like they won't know (obviously I'm not talking about us at Slashdot). A lot of people care about the iPhone and everyone knows what it is, a few people feel the same way about the Galaxy S.
I understand that Samsung may have very loyal fans in Korea but this story is about Europe. Samsung may not be able to fight off Apple in the US but going and screwing Europeans hardly seems like an appropriate answer.
The problem here is how the patent system is being abused but the end result is millions across Europe may see themselves unable to buy iPhone 5. I couldn't care less, my cell phone does all I need but for some people having the latest gadget is the most important thing. If you see yourself unable to do so and find out the reason is company X put Apple on the courts, the random luser will hate company X, without trying to figure out why it did so in the first place...
I know they're just fighting Apple on the same grounds but... with all the fanboys just waiting for the newest super greatest next product from Apple, won't this just hurt Samsung in the long run?
A pissed customer may never come back.
I work in computational chemistry and there's currently two or three codes out there using the GPU. Granted that number will only increase, but at this point having GPUs is almost useless (these codes don't do 10% of what other codes, or a combination of them, can do.
Your mileage may vary, but assuming someone is a moron just because he isn't doing what fits you perfectly is moronic itself.
A patent lasts 20 years, we're not talking copyright here...
Of course, when it comes to technology, 20 years is an eternity but mousetraps haven't changed that much in recent years.
It's incredible how you can, not only miss the entire point (by not reading the article) and then say their idea is a total crap, without understanding at all what it is about!
It's NOT a battery system. It's NOT on board storage. It's NOT the typical back to the grid system. Do yourself a favor, go read the fine article and then come back with something to tell us.
I may come a bit late to this discussion, but why is it that 100 degrees between freezing and boiling is just wrong while 180 is better?
Honest question, I see no special reason...
Unlike the summary states the article says: "It also encountered some problems with fog and indistinct road markings."
What can we say... it's Slashdot, actually understanding a text is not a need to submit a piece on it!
They still need to fix a few issues (discussed in the last part of the article (I know, I know, I shouldn't have read it) and the thing ends like this: "The Case Western Reserve University researchers expect to have human-scale artificial lungs in use in clinical trials within a decade." It's not being implanted in humans as we speak.
The reasons for this vary dependent on who is using them and why, but one possibility is someone wanting the mail server on a separate machine than the web server, yet working on a company small enough that it doesn't make sense to have a physical machine for each (in the sense of too much money/power consumption for a machine that will hardly do anything)... You virtualize the two machines and put them running on an actual server.
This allows you to have different access levels and security restrictions for each of the machines, while keeping the costs minimal (just one machine and the electricity to keep that running).
I know you have a 5 digits UID and that should bring you some respect but could you please also respect the scientists at NASA and elsewhere?
"bits of Curiosity getting friend by the descent engine"
Are you seriously thinking they couldn't even figure that part out? Is this some sort of amateur first try project at something like shooting a bird at the top of a tree with some rocks and a sling?
"the lander covering Curiosity with a massive amount of dust (...)"
Considering the rover is not using solar energy but actually a RTG Unless it's scientific instruments get totally blocked by dust it should not be a problem. And given that the previous rover attempts (dependent on solar energy) survived Mars dust storms quite fine (they were supposed to last 90 days and they stayed quite a bit longer) I'd say this one should do fine as well. Ah, that reference to Apollo's dust cloud. Well, not only the Apollo lander actually... er, landed unlike in this case where it will float a bit above the surface therefore reducing the dust cloud formed, but in the Moon there is no atmosphere at all and it's only gravity stopping whatever you send up. In Mars, not only the gravity is more than twice as high, but also the atmosphere should increase drag and reduce the cloud dust.
I do not work for NASA or any other space agency, I'm not even American, but I think we can trust them a bit more. They seem to be able to hit a planet that far away (occasionally having problems with unit conversion), remembering to place the exhausts from the descent engines away from the probes should be within their capabilities...
So tell us your solution then. You seem to be much better at it than NASA...
Smallpox transmits like a flu, through inhalation of the airborne virus.
Polio transmits through fecal-oral or oral-oral mechanisms.
If "enhanced sanitary conditions" were the reason for these to be erased (from the entire world in the case of smallpox, let's not forget that) then AIDS would be a minor problem nowadays with its harder infection mechanism (contact with body fluids of an infected person) and diseases like malaria would have been eradicated as well (especially with the efforts involved in killing the mosquito for such long periods. Perhaps the fact that the vaccine for smallpox was first developed at the end of the 18th century and people were consistently vaccinated against it (the 30% mortality rate made it a big, noticeable problem) has something to do with it disappearing... more than just people learning to wash their hands!
I have no statistics on caches disappearing, but several of the travel bugs I followed ended up missing, one of them twice! Caches disappear constantly, even if they are out of public areas... what's the point of putting it in the middle of a commercial district? Just to make sure it doesn't even last two weeks? While on the meantime screwing up dozens of potential nice spots, based on the rule "no caches within a certain range of another"...
So it will indeed be forever...
I wonder if these people have never heard of significant digits... what is the point of going to the first decimal? Are they trying to tell me their four year away prediction is that accurate?
Try running on a more decent browser. Others suggest running on Firefox 3.5 sucks, but Firefox 4 is fine. I'm getting 33-35 fps on Firefox 5.
then eventually run out of credible major version number and just plain look stupid...
Anything wrong with 10, 11, 15, 70, 200?
What does the USA have to do with this?
The guy wrote bad stuff about the Thai king and was caught years later while in Thailand... what did you want the US to do before he was caught? Overthrow the Thai king so that this guy could go on and get medical care? Use your brain, at least to make the title...
Yes, I can clearly see my mom running that on her laptop...
This is a problem for the random user, not for the geeks who know what ps, grep and piping are used for.
There you go... not that anyone should read it, this being Slashdot and all...
First 'habitable' exoplanet confirmed
Tuesday, 17 May 2011
Agence France-Presse
PARIS: A rocky world orbiting a nearby star was confirmed as the first planet outside our Solar System to meet key requirements for sustaining life.
Modelling of planet Gliese 581d shows it has the potential to be warm and wet enough to nurture Earth-like life, scientists have said. It orbits a red dwarf star called Gliese 581, located around 20 light years from Earth, which makes it one of our closest neighbours.
Gliese 581d orbits on the outer fringes of the star's 'Goldilocks zone', where it is not so hot that water boils away, nor so cold that water is perpetually frozen. Instead, the temperature is just right for water to exist in liquid form.
Zarmina's World
"With a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere - a likely scenario on such a large planet - the climate of Gliese 581d is not only stable against collapse but warm enough to have oceans, clouds and rainfall," France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) said.
More than 500 planets orbiting other stars have been recorded since 1995, detected mostly by a tiny wobble in stellar light. Exoplanets are named after their star and listed alphabetically, in order of discovery.
Until now, the big interest in Gliese 581's roster of planets focussed on Gliese 581g. It leapt into the headlines last year as 'Zarmina's World', after its observers announced it had roughly the same mass as Earth's and was also close to the Goldilocks zone.
No doubt that it exists
But that discovery has since been discounted by many. Indeed, some experts suspect that the Gliese 581g may not even exist but was simply a hiccup in starlight.
Its big brother, Gliese 581d, has a mass at least seven times that of Earth and is about twice our planet's size, according to the new study, which appears in a British publication, The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The planet, spotted in 2007, had initially been dismissed as a candidate in the hunt for life. It receives less than a third of the solar radiation Earth gets, and may be "tidally locked", meaning that one side of it always faces the Sun, which would give it permanent dayside and nightside.
300,000 years to get there
But the new model, devised by CNRS climate scientists Robin Wordsworth, Francois Forget and colleagues, showed surprising potential. Its atmosphere would store heat well, thanks to its dense CO2, a greenhouse gas. And the red light from the star would also penetrate the atmosphere and warm the surface.
"In all cases, the temperatures allow for the presence of liquid water on the surface," said the researchers.
For budding travellers, though, Gliese 581d would "still be a pretty strange place to visit", the CNRS said. "The denser air and thick clouds would keep the surface in a perpetual murky red twilight, and its large mass means that surface gravity would be around double that on Earth."
Getting to the planet would still require a sci-fi breakthrough in travel for earthlings. A spaceship travelling close to light speed would take more than 20 years to get there, while our present rocket technology would take 300,000 years.
However, humanity has already tried to make contact with the new planet. During Australia's National Science Week in August 2009, Cosmos magazine partnered with the Australian government, NASA and the CSIRO to run a 13-day campaign to collect goodwill messages from the public to be sent to Gliese 581d.
The initiative, known as Hello From Earth, collected 26,000 messages, which were transmitted by NASA's Tidbinbilla facility. The signal is not due to arrive until January 2030.
I kinda wish they'd do an Office for Linux; but only if they put at least the amount of effort into it as they do into the Mac client.
Quite frankly, if they put that much effort into the Office for Linux, might as well just stick with OpenOffice. Office for Mac works, but just above the passable level. Lots of hangs, lots of shitty behavior on Excel and inconsistencies in interaction between the Windows and Mac versions.
Office for Mac is way worse than the Windows version, thank god I didn't have to pay for it and get it from my employer.
Actually, IIRC it can either be He-3 or Tritium
Tritium decays into He-3, so in the end you get He-3 anyway. Granted, at 12 years half-life it's not like you're going to get really fast into the He-3, but at least it's not millions of years.
Charging more for majors that usually pay more doesn't have any kind of relationship to the cost of actually providing the education.
They would not be charging more to students who will get more in the future, but to students who cost more in the present. It then has a bit of a relation to reality (even though it may be a bad one).
I heard most geeks are like that because (...)
The problem is clearly not in the geeks If you are gullible to the point of believing everything you hear.