Hmm, perhaps that's why the reception on DTV and UHF (channels 14 and up) is so lousy where I am. VHF and radio can be received fairly well, but UHF is hard to watch even after plenty of antenna tweaking. I don't have a digital tuner, but given the quality of the signal, I'm not about to shell out so much as $25 just to find out for sure.
It also won't be completely empty. Analogue devices (video games, VCRs, cable TV, etc) produce substantial (up to perhaps a few watts) amounts of E/M radiation if poorly wired or hooked up to an antenna (quite easy considering that your average person is not a trained electrician and that such a setup will work much like an R/F switch - it's happened to me once). Generally (but not always) not enough to interfere with a 50 kW TV signal or Wi-Fi, but sometimes enough to make the band unreliable for stuff like emergency services.
What do you do when you go on vacation? Snail mail can be left for a week or two, and there shouldn't be any problems. If your bills are pre-paid, as I've seen people do when they go on very long vacations, then it can be left to pile up at the Post Office for even longer.
My issue with e-mail (and snail mail) is that advertising can get me very angry. I don't like to be reminded about it too often. If my e-mail inbox didn't have ads in it, then I wouldn't mind checking it every time I log on.
We don't need much salt to live - less than a gram a day. That can easily be obtained from the sea. In fact, we eat so much salt in our modern diets that it's quite poisonous and we'd be better off with far less of the stuff.
On the other hand, without metals (lithium, iron, manganese, silver, aluminum, etc), modern technology and industrialization would be impossible.
"High Fructose Corn Syrup - while it's cheaper than cane sugar and other sweeteners, HFCS makes type II diabetics out of people. And we've adulterated the food supply with the damn stuff."
Sadly enough, corn syrup isn't even cheaper than cane sugar - it's over twice the cost to make calorie for calorie. The only reason its market price is lower is because the US imposes hefty tariffs on imported cane sugar and heavily subsidizes corn production.
"4. Colleges want student email so they can eliminate paper communications (save on postage) for "official" communications."
Considering how rarely I check e-mail (about once a month - and it's a big task considering how much junk piles up in that time), I sure hope they don't send anything time-sensitive via that. It could be over a month before I read it, and then there's a chance that I'll miss it after that 1000th junk e-mail.
The only reason I even use an e-mail account at all is that it's needed by a lot of websites for registration and blogs to post, which is probably where that junk comes from in the first place.
Communist theory forbids IP as it is private property of a most despicable sort, but last I checked China has copyright, patent, and trademark laws (even if not enforced too much), making them hypocrites, just like they are in saying that they represent the people.
Of course, the US is far worse in this regard, but then again they don't claim to be communist.
Basic economic theory says that it's inefficient to do this - it results in more machines being sold than would be ideal, just like selling printers for a time a dozen encourages people to junk perfectly functional printers while going to great lengths to avoid wasting what should be very cheap ink.
The proper price for the machine is cost + reasonable profit, and the proper price for games is cost + reasonable profit. The legal system should be enforcing that via the anti-trust department, not doing the opposite as they now do.
Of course it's wrong. It makes a total mockery of our legal system which is supposed to serve 'the people' after all. Perhaps people in the US stands for the same thing that is stands for in the 'People's Republic of China?'
And I'm sure it'll work on any input, including random data.
Then again, considering what has been issued by the Patent Office in the past, I wouldn't be surprised if you get the patent, but I will be about as shocked if it works as if entropy were shown to be false.
My code doesn't always invoke quicksort. Since I'm only concerned about best case performance (to make my 'up to' claim sound better), I wouldn't mind using a bubble sort for the other cases as it wouldn't change it a bit. Quicksort is part of the standard C libraries, so that's why I used it.
Read my code carefully, and remember that I'm comparing best cases, not average or worst cases. Since the words 'up to' were used in the original 'up to 10x' claim, it's my choice to make.
This algorithm has a best case of O(1), which is better than mergesort (best case is log(n)). Somehow the 'up to' part in 'up to 10x faster' doesn't instill much confidence.
Considering how large a strain TOR puts on the system vs. straight P2P, I'd only use it for very high risk stuff. In the current climate, your average illegal downloads/uploads just don't cut it ( 1 in 10M chance of getting caught, and the punishment is nowhere near what you get for things like political dissent in some places). Perhaps if the risk goes up it will be a worthwhile tradeoff though.
I was not suggesting removing the chip cover, though if you wanted to, I don't see why you couldn't keep your specimen in the dark or illuminated only by infrared light. After all, electron microscopes don't need light and light (of energies above the work function of the material) might even interfere.
What I was thinking of was ablating a tiny (a few micrometers or so at the chip surface) portion of the cover with the laser and use that information combined with the layout of the chip (garnered from a sacrificial chip if the information isn't publicly available) to zero in on the spot. Once you drill your hole in the right spot, you can use a tunnelling electron microscope to read the data (it will show up as variations in the tunnelling rate) with minimal interference. Your odds of hitting one of their sensors is close to nil and, if properly calibrated, the electrons lost to your probe will be less than background noise so any current/impedance sensors would be foiled too.
Would this be resistant to physically probing the chip (though how you stick a probe into a wire that's less than 100 nm wide and sealed in a casing would be far beyond my capabilities - perhaps with the use of pulsed lasers and a scanning electron microscope?)?
How do you know that r is small? If you know how to crack one box, then the information can be passed around and plenty more player keys cracked and released.
How large can r get before there's some serious performance issues (either filling up the disc or requiring a long boot-up time)?
Coming from a writer I'm not surprised. It's like expecting an auto worker to say that cars are ruining our climate or a casino operator to say that his business is ruining families. A few might, but the vast majority won't.
Given a very clear and compelling argument I'll listen to them, but in this case it's just hot air.
And why is copyright automatically trotted out as the best way of getting it paid for?
Copyright is extremely inefficient. It deters other innovation (generally by smaller and more creative people and firms) by making borrowing material very hard. Copyright sends many times (about 10x) more money to middlemen (CEOs, advertising, lawyers, trade groups, profits, retailers, etc) than to production. Copyright also leads to monopolies and censorship - both commercial and government. Copyright also leads to more advertising by restricting alternative distribution (compare TV via P2P and over the air), and advertising is a terrible way to raise money for anything.
Just about any other system, including having a free-for-all, is going to work better than the current system.
Solar panel manufacturers use lower grade silicon wafers than do chip makers. It makes sense, considering the price of a square meter of CPUs (around $10M) vs. the price of a square meter of solar panels (around $1K).
Don't forget that with this type of business, there is essentially zero economies of scale, but plenty of bureaucratic bloat. Over half the cost of an average installation is in labor and parts other than the solar panel. Those things do not scale in the least (labor, because of its nature, and many of the parts because they are already produced in bulk for other industries).
And let's not forget the interest rates that CC-rated (which is what I would rate such debt) bonds carry. Solar power is extremely capital intensive, and that is the last place a risky start-up should be investing money.
I've read up on it, and it appears to indeed be a big scam. Established solar panel producers are having a very hard time buying silicon at any price (most of what they do get is on long-term contracts), no less at the discount prices needed for the whole scheme to work.
I'm guessing the factory will never be built and the scammers will pocket the money instead.
PS: About solar hot water, the payback does indeed work out a heck of a lot better.
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The legal costs to get a patent in the first place are around $30,000 for an average patent. The maintenance fees are chump change.
Hmm, perhaps that's why the reception on DTV and UHF (channels 14 and up) is so lousy where I am. VHF and radio can be received fairly well, but UHF is hard to watch even after plenty of antenna tweaking. I don't have a digital tuner, but given the quality of the signal, I'm not about to shell out so much as $25 just to find out for sure.
It also won't be completely empty. Analogue devices (video games, VCRs, cable TV, etc) produce substantial (up to perhaps a few watts) amounts of E/M radiation if poorly wired or hooked up to an antenna (quite easy considering that your average person is not a trained electrician and that such a setup will work much like an R/F switch - it's happened to me once). Generally (but not always) not enough to interfere with a 50 kW TV signal or Wi-Fi, but sometimes enough to make the band unreliable for stuff like emergency services.
Why not take back the digital TV channels and let the networks keep the analog ones? The analog ones do get a lot more use.
What do you do when you go on vacation? Snail mail can be left for a week or two, and there shouldn't be any problems. If your bills are pre-paid, as I've seen people do when they go on very long vacations, then it can be left to pile up at the Post Office for even longer.
My issue with e-mail (and snail mail) is that advertising can get me very angry. I don't like to be reminded about it too often. If my e-mail inbox didn't have ads in it, then I wouldn't mind checking it every time I log on.
We don't need much salt to live - less than a gram a day. That can easily be obtained from the sea. In fact, we eat so much salt in our modern diets that it's quite poisonous and we'd be better off with far less of the stuff.
On the other hand, without metals (lithium, iron, manganese, silver, aluminum, etc), modern technology and industrialization would be impossible.
"High Fructose Corn Syrup - while it's cheaper than cane sugar and other sweeteners, HFCS makes type II diabetics out of people. And we've adulterated the food supply with the damn stuff."
Sadly enough, corn syrup isn't even cheaper than cane sugar - it's over twice the cost to make calorie for calorie. The only reason its market price is lower is because the US imposes hefty tariffs on imported cane sugar and heavily subsidizes corn production.
"4. Colleges want student email so they can eliminate paper communications (save on postage) for "official" communications."
Considering how rarely I check e-mail (about once a month - and it's a big task considering how much junk piles up in that time), I sure hope they don't send anything time-sensitive via that. It could be over a month before I read it, and then there's a chance that I'll miss it after that 1000th junk e-mail.
The only reason I even use an e-mail account at all is that it's needed by a lot of websites for registration and blogs to post, which is probably where that junk comes from in the first place.
Communist theory forbids IP as it is private property of a most despicable sort, but last I checked China has copyright, patent, and trademark laws (even if not enforced too much), making them hypocrites, just like they are in saying that they represent the people.
Of course, the US is far worse in this regard, but then again they don't claim to be communist.
Basic economic theory says that it's inefficient to do this - it results in more machines being sold than would be ideal, just like selling printers for a time a dozen encourages people to junk perfectly functional printers while going to great lengths to avoid wasting what should be very cheap ink.
The proper price for the machine is cost + reasonable profit, and the proper price for games is cost + reasonable profit. The legal system should be enforcing that via the anti-trust department, not doing the opposite as they now do.
Of course it's wrong. It makes a total mockery of our legal system which is supposed to serve 'the people' after all. Perhaps people in the US stands for the same thing that is stands for in the 'People's Republic of China?'
And I'm sure it'll work on any input, including random data.
Then again, considering what has been issued by the Patent Office in the past, I wouldn't be surprised if you get the patent, but I will be about as shocked if it works as if entropy were shown to be false.
He could always get LED lamps. Not as cheap as CFLs, but I don't see how they could possibly cause seizures.
My code doesn't always invoke quicksort. Since I'm only concerned about best case performance (to make my 'up to' claim sound better), I wouldn't mind using a bubble sort for the other cases as it wouldn't change it a bit. Quicksort is part of the standard C libraries, so that's why I used it.
Read my code carefully, and remember that I'm comparing best cases, not average or worst cases. Since the words 'up to' were used in the original 'up to 10x' claim, it's my choice to make.
And here's a sort that can be up to infinity times faster than mergesort:
void (linked_list * list)
{
if (!list->sorted)
{
qsort(...);
list->sorted = TRUE;
}
}
This algorithm has a best case of O(1), which is better than mergesort (best case is log(n)). Somehow the 'up to' part in 'up to 10x faster' doesn't instill much confidence.
Why not filter queries with the words 'democracy' and 'human rights' while we're at it? I'm sure that the Chinese government would agree with me.
Considering how large a strain TOR puts on the system vs. straight P2P, I'd only use it for very high risk stuff. In the current climate, your average illegal downloads/uploads just don't cut it ( 1 in 10M chance of getting caught, and the punishment is nowhere near what you get for things like political dissent in some places). Perhaps if the risk goes up it will be a worthwhile tradeoff though.
I was not suggesting removing the chip cover, though if you wanted to, I don't see why you couldn't keep your specimen in the dark or illuminated only by infrared light. After all, electron microscopes don't need light and light (of energies above the work function of the material) might even interfere.
What I was thinking of was ablating a tiny (a few micrometers or so at the chip surface) portion of the cover with the laser and use that information combined with the layout of the chip (garnered from a sacrificial chip if the information isn't publicly available) to zero in on the spot. Once you drill your hole in the right spot, you can use a tunnelling electron microscope to read the data (it will show up as variations in the tunnelling rate) with minimal interference. Your odds of hitting one of their sensors is close to nil and, if properly calibrated, the electrons lost to your probe will be less than background noise so any current/impedance sensors would be foiled too.
Would this be resistant to physically probing the chip (though how you stick a probe into a wire that's less than 100 nm wide and sealed in a casing would be far beyond my capabilities - perhaps with the use of pulsed lasers and a scanning electron microscope?)?
How do you know that r is small? If you know how to crack one box, then the information can be passed around and plenty more player keys cracked and released.
How large can r get before there's some serious performance issues (either filling up the disc or requiring a long boot-up time)?
Coming from a writer I'm not surprised. It's like expecting an auto worker to say that cars are ruining our climate or a casino operator to say that his business is ruining families. A few might, but the vast majority won't.
Given a very clear and compelling argument I'll listen to them, but in this case it's just hot air.
And why is copyright automatically trotted out as the best way of getting it paid for?
Copyright is extremely inefficient. It deters other innovation (generally by smaller and more creative people and firms) by making borrowing material very hard. Copyright sends many times (about 10x) more money to middlemen (CEOs, advertising, lawyers, trade groups, profits, retailers, etc) than to production. Copyright also leads to monopolies and censorship - both commercial and government. Copyright also leads to more advertising by restricting alternative distribution (compare TV via P2P and over the air), and advertising is a terrible way to raise money for anything.
Just about any other system, including having a free-for-all, is going to work better than the current system.
Solar panel manufacturers use lower grade silicon wafers than do chip makers. It makes sense, considering the price of a square meter of CPUs (around $10M) vs. the price of a square meter of solar panels (around $1K).
Don't forget that with this type of business, there is essentially zero economies of scale, but plenty of bureaucratic bloat. Over half the cost of an average installation is in labor and parts other than the solar panel. Those things do not scale in the least (labor, because of its nature, and many of the parts because they are already produced in bulk for other industries).
And let's not forget the interest rates that CC-rated (which is what I would rate such debt) bonds carry. Solar power is extremely capital intensive, and that is the last place a risky start-up should be investing money.
I've read up on it, and it appears to indeed be a big scam. Established solar panel producers are having a very hard time buying silicon at any price (most of what they do get is on long-term contracts), no less at the discount prices needed for the whole scheme to work.
I'm guessing the factory will never be built and the scammers will pocket the money instead.
PS: About solar hot water, the payback does indeed work out a heck of a lot better.