Now, if ABC owns the original rights in what it broadcasts, the story is different. In that case it can sue as the holder as the copyright, rather than the holder of merely a license. Even then, arguably ABC has granted everyone with access to broadcasted content an implied license to view it, and forward the content to another location as apparently Aereo does.
Granting everyone a license to view it doesn't mean anyone can rebroadcast it. Think of open source - anyone is allowed to use it, but by the license you can only redistribute modifications you make to it if you share your source code. Giving everyone a license to use it does not imply a free license to redistribute.
What Aereo would then be doing is merely a "fair use" of that broadcasted content, which is specifically permitted by the copyright statutes.
Well, that's what the Supreme Court is going to decide.
My take on it is a bit different. My first reply is certainly how the broadcasters are going to argue it. That's natural - they see themselves (content creators) as the pinnacle of creation that copyright law is primarily intended to protect. In their eyes, the raison d'etre of Copyright is to give them exclusive control over any and all distribution of their works.
That's not what copyright is for though. Its purpose is "to promote the sciences and useful arts." That's the primary purpose; protecting content creators is merely a means of accomplishing that purpose. A means which made sense with the old broadcast over airwaves model, but may not make sense with the Internet. The way I see this playing out, a decision against Aereo will consign the U.S. to a future where broadcasters are free to geographically restrict their content in a world where content can be distributed free from borders. The U.S. content industry will then diminish because people outside of the geographically restricted areas will be unable to see it. Content from other countries will begin to dominate simply by virtue of being more freely distributed. Americans will start watching more time-shifted content from abroad, rather than bend their schedules to the whims of the local broadcasters.
Consequently, the decision which fulfills Copyright's primary purpose of promoting the useful arts is one which allows Aereo.
I wonder what Nintendo is going to do with these patents they weren't infringing on in the first place (and thus should be null and void from their standpoint)
Unfortunately, Nintendo isn't the one who gets to decide if the patents are null and void. A court and frequently a jury does. Juries can be misled, judges can be biased. Any patent case is to some extent a gamble. Why gamble on someone else buying the patents and continuing the lawsuits and some judge/jury coming to a silly but legally binding decision that Nintendo infringed, when they can just buy up the patents themselves thus guaranteeing that they won't be used against them in the future?
To borrow a saying from global warming proponents, transient localized phenomena are just weather and not indicative of any long-term trend.
Over the long-term, certain areas of North America are conducive to wind or solar. Certain areas of Europe are conducive to wind or (to a lesser extent) solar. You should never pick a solution because it's popular or trendy or because it works (worked) somewhere else (especially if only for a brief while). You should pick it because it makes the most sense for your region over the long-term.
Hah. My uncle's print shop has a $20,000 laser film printer whose manufacturer folded in the early 1990s. The only drivers that work are for Windows 3.0 and Mac OS 7 (also works on 9, but not 10). So his fancy new graphics design computers send their output to an ancient Power Mac 8100 (with all of 32 MB of RAM) for printing silkscreens. It's so old that last time I visited to fix a problem he was having, the power button snapped off because the plastic had become brittle with age.
Nice to know he's not the only one in this type of situation. Software people need to realize that constantly updating is sometimes not an option, and for certain applications (like dedicated hardware drivers) you need to treat the software like an embedded system and make it as robust as you can out the box. Software may be obsolete in 3 years, but hardware can frequently last for 25+ years. (It prints onto roll film that's about 28 inches wide for printing posters, so please don't say just buy a new printer from Staples. Replacements are currently about $2500+ for inkjet, $10k+ for laser.)
The hydrogen explosions at Fukushima were inside the containment building (basically to protect everything from the weather), not the reactor chamber. If it had been inside the reactor chamber, the fissile materials would've been exposed to the atmosphere and we'd be talking about Chernobyl 2 with the current evacuation zone off-limits to human habitation for decades if not a century. The possibility that there could be a hydrogen explosion inside the reactor chamber was what made Three Mile Island such a big deal, even though it turned out not to have been.
Hydrogen gas is a very small molecule, and is able to get through all sorts of seals and cracks that other molecules cannot get through. Something that is watertight and airtight (and tight against radionuclides) usually isn't hydrogen-tight. So its egress out of the reactor chamber is to be expected. There are supposed to be systems in place which vent out or harmlessly oxidize hydrogen which makes it into the containment building, before it builds up in sufficient concentration to cause an explosion. I never did get straight why these did not work (maybe loss of power affected them?) or were not present (this was a first gen reactor design).
Essentially they are one and the same. Anonymity helps hide both false negatives and false positives. The main distinguishing factor (from a legal standpoint) is that the injured party in one case (the business) suffers tangible harm (loses business) due to statistical averaging (dozens or hundreds of customers may avoid the business, resulting in a real, measurable drop in revenue). In the other case the injured party (the customer) suffers intangible harm (doesn't get what he expected) due to there being no averaging (only visits the one establishment).
Or put another way, false negatives concentrate their negative impact onto a single business. False positives spread out their negative impact across multiple customers. Both are wrong, but the latter type is just harder to find, enforce, and punish because its effect is distributed. It's the reason spam still persists. It's not because the judge wants to protect businesses but not customers.
You could make an argument that multiple false positives result in a tangible harm to any individual customer. But to prosecute that you'd have to show that it's the same person/people making the false positive reviews. Whereas in the business case a single false negative review can drive away multiple customers. That opens up the temptation to sue Yelp for allowing the false positive reviews in the first place. But that's too close to shooting the messenger for me to feel comfortable doing.
The point is, once automated cars are statistically safer than human drivers, then having a human as a backup is just gravy. Any situation the human can help recover will improve safety, while the computer will prevent safety from dropping below the level it was at when cars were 100% human-controlled.
e.g. If humans are safe drivers 98% of the time, and automated cars are safe 99% of the time, then having a human as a backup just improves safety over 99%. If the human is bored and inattentive it may be 99.1%, but it's still better than 99.0%. And if the human is attentive it may rise to 99.9%. Either way, it's still safer than 98% and 99% so you're still coming out ahead no matter how bad or inattentive the driver.
The only thing you have to watch out for is that people's incorrect use of the "manual override" does not degrade automated safety below the 99% if there were no override.
Yeah, that's the biggest impediment I see to traffic flow outside of traffic jams. Particularly bad are the drivers who feel the urge to speed up to pass a truck, but once they're in front of the truck they are no longer pressured and slow down, matching speeds with the truck which is now just behind them on the right. This results in a huge jam of cars behind them since they are now blocking the only passing lane around the truck.
Germany solved that on the Autobahn by making a law requiring you to move over to the right (if possible) if a car approaches you from behind. Failure to do so can result in being ticketed. From the driving I did there, it works very well at keeping different-speed traffic flowing.
A former boss of mine had a bad habit of hitting Reply instead of Compose when writing new emails. I noticed I'd get emails from her which were totally unrelated to the mail she'd hit Reply on. I warned her several times that that could be dangerous since hitting reply automatically includes the previous email(s) as a quote.
Then one day it happened. She decided to send out a mass email to all staff, and composed it by hitting Reply on one of my emails. I got into work, checked my email, and did the biggest head-desk of my life. She had replied to one of my emails where we'd been discussing employee bonuses and pay raises, including extensive deliberation over what we were going to tell certain employees in their annual performance review. That lengthy discussion was quoted and got sent to the entire staff. Fortunately the damage wasn't as severe as it could have been - the four employees we'd discussed in the email thread were all good employees so most of our comments had been positive.
On the up side, it broke her habit. She never composed a new email by hitting Reply again.
They've had sustained profits for many years, but yet there's still not enough bandwidth.
In this case, bandwidth is limited by frequency allocated by the FCC for this purpose, times the capability of technology (2G, then 3G, now 4G) which is itself limited by the Shannon limit, divided by the number of customers simultaneously seeking to use that bandwidth. The distribution and spacing of cell towers comes into play too, but the above is pretty much it.
This isn't like wired bandwidth where each house can have their own pipe. The mobile bandwidth you use interferes with and reduces the bandwidth available to others. You can make legitimate complaints about the cost of the bandwidth or the amount of backhaul bandwidth, but the total available over-the-air bandwidth is dictated by physics and math, and out of the cellular companies' hands.
This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Net neutrality mostly applies to unlimited data plans. The customer has paid the service provider for unlimited bandwidth. The service provider then turns around and charges the website for the same bandwidth. The service provider thus gets double-paid while providing no additional product. Orthogonal to this, one website pays and another doesn't. The two still get the same total bandwidth, one just gets more of it. Again, the service provider gets paid extra for the exact same total product.
In this case, we're talking about bandwidth with a per-kB charge. Either the customer pays for it, or the website pays for it. There is no double-charging going on between the customer and website (unless everyone would've stayed within their monthly bandwidth limit - but if that were the case there is no need for the website to participate in this program). And the service provider doesn't get paid extra if one website decides to subsidize their users' mobile data costs while another doesn't.
Kodak died because film is a consumable - you have to continuously buy more as you use it. They weren't late to digital - they invented digital photography with the first working digital camera in the 1970s, and the first digital SLRs in the 1990s when a consumer digital camera had 0.25 MP and cost over $1000. But the digital sensor means you can take almost infinite pictures with a single purchase. Furthermore, the rapid advancements in electronic tech meant that the cost of the sensor quickly plummeted to almost nothing.
This shifted the economic emphasis away from the film/sensor which was Kodak's specialty, and to the camera/optics. Whereas before a casual photographer might spend 50% of his lifetime equipment costs on the camera/lenses and 50% film, he will now spend 100% of his costs on the camera/lenses about 1% of which is the sensor cost. Consequently, companies which specialized in making cameras (Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Sony, etc) or lenses (Canon, Nikon, Zeiss, Tamron, Tokina, etc) are doing fine. Companies which specialized in making film (Kodak, Polaroid, Fuji) suffered greatly. Fuji only managed to survive because they branched out into making point and shoot cameras in the closing days of film - they now have a line of half-decent digital cameras. Kodak used to make cameras but pretty much gave up after the disc camera. Their most successful camera in the last half century was the disposable camera - not much need for that in the digital age. Polaroid's camera was entirely a delivery system for their instant film.
For a while Kodak was hanging on with sales of movie film. But their number was up when movies finally made the transition to digital.
Normal use is around 35 watts (as measured by a Kill-A-Watt), although it will spike as high as 50 when powering up. It's not as competitive on that front, but it makes up for it in expandability. You can easily slap a couple of HDDs into it and have it fill NAS duties without the cost of a separate NAS.
I actually built my own NAS/server using a quad core i5-2400. With 16 GB RAM, 3x2 TB green drives, and a 512 GB SSD, it draws about 35 Watts idle, 97 Watts at load (as measured by a Kill-A-Watt).
I found a lot of variance in power consumption depending on the OS. Windows was actually the best, coming in just above 30 Watts idle. Ubuntu was worst at 55 Watts. I eventually settled on ESXi running a bunch of virtual machines, which ran at 35 Watts idle. The idle power of modern CPUs is pretty amazing, if the OS takes advantage of it.
The optimal pitch and angle of the keys can be easily found using a structured search.
A structured key pitch and angle search wouldn't have resulted in Blackberry's keyboard.
The (marginally) non-obvious innovation here was the realization that people type on mobile devices differently than on a full keyboard. If you hold a mobile device like the original Blackberry with two hands, you notice the base of the thumbs are towards the lower end of the device (closer to the body). Consequently, the thumbs point upward at an angle as they rest on the keyboard. By angling the keys as Blackberry did, the keys present the largest target perpendicular to the thumbs, but can be slimmed down in the other axis so as to reduce the keyboard's width without increasing the chances of inadvertently hitting two keys (check out their earlier devices - the keys are not square).
For your search to have stumbled upon Blackberry's keyboard design, it would've needed to search key pitch, aspect ratio, and angle. I'm not sure if this is patent-worthy, but it's pretty clear Blackberry put a lot of thought into creating a functional keyboard design. A helluva lot more than rounded corners. A full-size keyboard analogue would be the natural keyboards, where the left and right halves are angled to meet the diagonal caused by your elbows. I'm pretty sure someone has a patent on that as well.
That happened at the hotel I used to work at. One of the tour buses entering hit and knocked over a gate, which hit an electric utility pole. I never got the next part of the story straight, and probably nobody knows for sure. But the underground piling holding the gate bent and burst an unmarked gas line as it shifted underground, and somehow a spark from it or the power pole lit the gas.
The ensuing fire required 2 fire trucks, 4 Gas Company trucks, and one Edison truck on-site as they tried to figure out what to do. The hotel was over 100 years old and the break was before the meter so in a section of pipe that was the Gas Company's responsibility. They couldn't find any records of where they had originally installed the gas lines, so they couldn't simply go upstream and turn a valve to shut off the gas, at least not without shutting off gas to the entire neighborhood. They had to bring in special equipment to trace the pipe underground several hundred feet upstream to the main pipe under the road. They determined no shutoff valve had been installed when the line was first constructed. So they picked a good spot between the fire and the road, dug down (with shovels so as not to cause another break), and spliced in a new shutoff valve. The fire burned for over 2 days while they did all this. The gate was ruined. The power pole was a write-off and Edison had to install a new one. I spoke with the Gas Company guy in charge of the whole thing and he said this was the biggest incident he'd ever been involved in in his 30 year career, and it was the main topic of discussion for several days among all the Gas Company branches in the entire Southwest U.S. We were just fortunate the fire was in a remote location and didn't spread.
The USAF would have wanted that even when the Shuttles were in operation.
Kennedy is situated near the equator (28 degrees latitude) to take advantage of the additional velocity of the Earth's rotation in an Eastward launch. This reduces the delta-v you need to achieve orbit, meaning less fuel, less cost, and more payload. Unfortunately launching to the East limits you to equatorial orbits which pass over only about the middle +/- 28-62 degrees of latitude. That's good enough coverage of the Earth's surface for most purposes, but not all.
Most spy satellites and Earth-monitoring satellites (like Landsat) launch from Vandenberg AFB in California. Launches there are to the South, yielding the high orbital inclination (polar orbit) needed to cover most or all of the Earth's surface. The original plan for the Shuttle was for occasional launches from Vandenberg. The USAF even spent a huge amount of money outfitting one of Vandenberg's launch sites for the Shuttle. After the Challenger disaster, the site was reassessed and plans to launch the Shuttle from there were canceled. The USAF still had (has) no way to put a manned mission into polar orbit.
Here's hoping that he actually has some proof that they do. If so, this is a very smart move. If they say "yes we do", Congress will be forced to react immediately in some way, at least for PR reasons.
There is nothing to "react immediately" to. This isn't some rogue NSA operation. The House and Senate already knew NSA was doing this, or at least part of them did. The Intelligence Committees of the House and Senate are the ones who are tasked with deciding which classified projects are created and approved, and sit in the classified briefings where progress on such programs is discussed. They're the ones who created this program and steered challenges to it through the FISA court so that it would remain secret and legal.
Sander's isn't doing this because he has some big reveal he's hiding. He's just using this as a way of skirting the taboo against senators directly criticizing other senators, by instead criticizing the program those on the Intelligence Committees approved. In all likelihood the answer to his question is yes, unless the phone company has some special database entry which flags which phone numbers belong to members of Congress so their metadata is not included in that sent to the NSA.
In the bigger scheme, this is just a part of the whitewalling to dump the fallout from this onto the NSA in the mind of the public. By acting shocked and dismayed at the program, the politicians in Congress and the White House can appear to be innocent in all this when in fact they were the ones who created this program and created the laws which made this program legal (albeit Constitutionally sketchy).
The examples that people trot out of "Farmer Brown" as you say, had the farmers lose in court as they were deliberately and knowingly taking GMO seeds.
Have you actually read the case? Schmeiser lost because he was indeed using Monsanto's seed without a license, but was fined only $1 because he did not benefit from the GMO seed in any way. He used RoundUp to kill weeds in the ditches surrounding his crop, but not on the crop itself. There was no motive for him to "deliberately and knowingly take GMO seeds." That's just the way Monsanto's PR spun the case.
Essentially the case established a precedent (in Canada) that the burden of preventing accidental spread is on the farmer - even if you're just farming with no intent of using GMOs, you must pay to test your seeds to insure that you weren't accidentally contaminated. IMHO this is contradictory to a fundamental tenet of responsibility most of us learned in grade school - if you make something and benefit (profit) from its positive aspects, you are also responsible for its negative effects. If Monsanto is benefiting from selling GMOs, they should be the ones paying to prevent its unwanted spread, not the farmers.
Monsanto will in fact, pay farmers for any crops contaminated via cross pollination for farms that do not have an agreement.
Interesting. First I've heard of it. Do you have a reference? The last I heard on the topic was that Monsanto's lawyers had gotten a combined cross-contamination case thrown out of court because the plaintiff (an organic farmers organization) lacked standing (were not the directly injured party - the farmers were). A quick google search only turns up cases of Monsanto suing farmers for cross-contamination, or promising not to sue if the contamination is "slight" and squelching any legal attempts to assign a definite amount.
Do not compare Manning to Snowden. Manning was a fool and most likely a traitor. He threw out the baby with the bathwater. Just because some of what he leaked turned out to have been leak-worthy does not justify leaking everything he could get his hands on. If you save a dozen people from a burning building but in the process doom a hundred to die, you are still culpable for the deaths of the hundred. He is correctly incarcerated and his rights justifiably curtailed.
Snowden has been careful to leak only what he thinks was unconstitutional. I disagree with some of this definitions of what's unconstitutional, but I respect that he's trying to leak only the materials which are leak-worthy.
there are companies working on it, like Dragon, but they're not there yet
Is Dragon actually still working on it? The original authors who were the true R&D geniuses behind the technology were locked out of improving the product (and pretty much the industry) because of copyright after the botched sale of their company. The recent demonstrations of the software I've seen look like not much has improved since 2000 except computers have gotten faster.
you see a lot more [tablets] than you did five years ago, when it seemed like Bill Gates was the only person who had one, which he tried to show off as often as he could
The problem with Microsoft's tablet vision is that they saw it as an driving force for Windows sales. They tried to make sure every tablet they sold was also another sale of Windows. Consequently your low-end laptop cost $750 (back then), the average laptop around $1300, and a Tablet PC cost north of $2000.
The early success of netbooks should've been a huge clue that there was a lot of pent-up demand for a low-cost simple (i.e. no complicated or expensive Windows) consumption-only device. The early netbooks tapped into that (before Microsoft successfully converted them into full-blown Windows machines, after which they died). So did the iPad.
I'd been using Tablet PCs since around 2004. I first bought one for a client (he wanted it for data entry at his veterinary clinic without having to take notes, then re-enter them into a desktop computer). I was so impressed I bought one for myself. So I got to see the benefits and the warts first-hand long before the iPad. I correctly predicted a simple tablet would be successful if it hit the $500 mark (and incorrectly predicted Apple would price theirs around $800). Unlike a lot of naysayers, I thought the format had a lot of potential. UPS and FedEx custom-designing their own tablet-scanner type devices for their delivery personnel was a pretty strong indicator.
IMHO tablets will really take off when they hit ~$100-$150. That's about the point where the price is negligible for businesses, and tablets will begin to take over their true competition - not laptops but clipboards. Like my client in 2004, the real benefit here is eliminating double data entry. Why write stuff on a clipboard, then enter it into a database later, when you can just enter it straight into the database while you're walking around the workplace? Why print out a bunch of stuff and carry the papers around in a folder/clipboard, when you can just view the files directly on a tablet? That's the real "killer app" tablets bring to the game. Being able to browse the web like a laptop is just a fringe benefit.
But after five years the teenagers are getting out of their teens and those entering the teens once again need to find their own space.
Bingo. People who were 13-19 years old when Facebook really started to pick up steam (about 2006) are now 20-26 years old. The teens today are different people, and more than likely they want to trod a different path just for the sake of trodding a different path. Kinda like how my generation bought SUVs and minivans because we didn't want to be like our parents and own a station wagon. By the way, I noticed the awful over-sized glasses from the 1970s are back in style again...
No, he's mostly correct. The Earth is also moving around the galactic core with the sun, so the relative motion is just the Earth's orbit around the sun.
The distinction here is between linear and rotational movement. The sun's movement for the year (i.e. relative to background stars) is a linear movement (changes in relative position between observer and subject) and thus is affected by relativity and the 8.3 min travel time of light. Since it's only traversing a bit less than one degree per day (360 degrees in 365.24 days), this motion is very small. In 8.3 minutes the sun's actual position changes an almost imperceptible 0.0057 degrees.
Nearly all of the sun's "movement" across the sky is caused by the Earth's rotation (change in orientation of the observer) and thus is not affected by relativity and the 8.3 min travel time of light. The sun is where it appears to be right now, even though the sun appears to have moved 2.1 degrees in the sky during the 8.3 minutes it takes its light to reach us. If this weren't the case, if you spun around 360 degrees in 1 second, a star 1 million light years away would have traveled 2*pi*1 million light years in 1 second, far exceeding the speed of light.
There is no absolute reference frame for linear motion. If I'm on a spaceship moving at 10 km/s relative to your spaceship, we cannot tell if I'm stationary and you're moving at 10 km/s, or if you're stationary and I'm moving at 10 km/s. But there is an absolute reference frame for rotation. If I'm rotating I'll experience centrifugal (centripetal) forces, which disappear when I'm no longer rotating.
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Granting everyone a license to view it doesn't mean anyone can rebroadcast it. Think of open source - anyone is allowed to use it, but by the license you can only redistribute modifications you make to it if you share your source code. Giving everyone a license to use it does not imply a free license to redistribute.
Well, that's what the Supreme Court is going to decide.
My take on it is a bit different. My first reply is certainly how the broadcasters are going to argue it. That's natural - they see themselves (content creators) as the pinnacle of creation that copyright law is primarily intended to protect. In their eyes, the raison d'etre of Copyright is to give them exclusive control over any and all distribution of their works.
That's not what copyright is for though. Its purpose is "to promote the sciences and useful arts." That's the primary purpose; protecting content creators is merely a means of accomplishing that purpose. A means which made sense with the old broadcast over airwaves model, but may not make sense with the Internet. The way I see this playing out, a decision against Aereo will consign the U.S. to a future where broadcasters are free to geographically restrict their content in a world where content can be distributed free from borders. The U.S. content industry will then diminish because people outside of the geographically restricted areas will be unable to see it. Content from other countries will begin to dominate simply by virtue of being more freely distributed. Americans will start watching more time-shifted content from abroad, rather than bend their schedules to the whims of the local broadcasters.
Consequently, the decision which fulfills Copyright's primary purpose of promoting the useful arts is one which allows Aereo.
Unfortunately, Nintendo isn't the one who gets to decide if the patents are null and void. A court and frequently a jury does. Juries can be misled, judges can be biased. Any patent case is to some extent a gamble. Why gamble on someone else buying the patents and continuing the lawsuits and some judge/jury coming to a silly but legally binding decision that Nintendo infringed, when they can just buy up the patents themselves thus guaranteeing that they won't be used against them in the future?
To borrow a saying from global warming proponents, transient localized phenomena are just weather and not indicative of any long-term trend.
Over the long-term, certain areas of North America are conducive to wind or solar. Certain areas of Europe are conducive to wind or (to a lesser extent) solar. You should never pick a solution because it's popular or trendy or because it works (worked) somewhere else (especially if only for a brief while). You should pick it because it makes the most sense for your region over the long-term.
Hah. My uncle's print shop has a $20,000 laser film printer whose manufacturer folded in the early 1990s. The only drivers that work are for Windows 3.0 and Mac OS 7 (also works on 9, but not 10). So his fancy new graphics design computers send their output to an ancient Power Mac 8100 (with all of 32 MB of RAM) for printing silkscreens. It's so old that last time I visited to fix a problem he was having, the power button snapped off because the plastic had become brittle with age.
Nice to know he's not the only one in this type of situation. Software people need to realize that constantly updating is sometimes not an option, and for certain applications (like dedicated hardware drivers) you need to treat the software like an embedded system and make it as robust as you can out the box. Software may be obsolete in 3 years, but hardware can frequently last for 25+ years. (It prints onto roll film that's about 28 inches wide for printing posters, so please don't say just buy a new printer from Staples. Replacements are currently about $2500+ for inkjet, $10k+ for laser.)
The hydrogen explosions at Fukushima were inside the containment building (basically to protect everything from the weather), not the reactor chamber. If it had been inside the reactor chamber, the fissile materials would've been exposed to the atmosphere and we'd be talking about Chernobyl 2 with the current evacuation zone off-limits to human habitation for decades if not a century. The possibility that there could be a hydrogen explosion inside the reactor chamber was what made Three Mile Island such a big deal, even though it turned out not to have been.
Hydrogen gas is a very small molecule, and is able to get through all sorts of seals and cracks that other molecules cannot get through. Something that is watertight and airtight (and tight against radionuclides) usually isn't hydrogen-tight. So its egress out of the reactor chamber is to be expected. There are supposed to be systems in place which vent out or harmlessly oxidize hydrogen which makes it into the containment building, before it builds up in sufficient concentration to cause an explosion. I never did get straight why these did not work (maybe loss of power affected them?) or were not present (this was a first gen reactor design).
Essentially they are one and the same. Anonymity helps hide both false negatives and false positives. The main distinguishing factor (from a legal standpoint) is that the injured party in one case (the business) suffers tangible harm (loses business) due to statistical averaging (dozens or hundreds of customers may avoid the business, resulting in a real, measurable drop in revenue). In the other case the injured party (the customer) suffers intangible harm (doesn't get what he expected) due to there being no averaging (only visits the one establishment).
Or put another way, false negatives concentrate their negative impact onto a single business. False positives spread out their negative impact across multiple customers. Both are wrong, but the latter type is just harder to find, enforce, and punish because its effect is distributed. It's the reason spam still persists. It's not because the judge wants to protect businesses but not customers.
You could make an argument that multiple false positives result in a tangible harm to any individual customer. But to prosecute that you'd have to show that it's the same person/people making the false positive reviews. Whereas in the business case a single false negative review can drive away multiple customers. That opens up the temptation to sue Yelp for allowing the false positive reviews in the first place. But that's too close to shooting the messenger for me to feel comfortable doing.
The point is, once automated cars are statistically safer than human drivers, then having a human as a backup is just gravy. Any situation the human can help recover will improve safety, while the computer will prevent safety from dropping below the level it was at when cars were 100% human-controlled.
e.g. If humans are safe drivers 98% of the time, and automated cars are safe 99% of the time, then having a human as a backup just improves safety over 99%. If the human is bored and inattentive it may be 99.1%, but it's still better than 99.0%. And if the human is attentive it may rise to 99.9%. Either way, it's still safer than 98% and 99% so you're still coming out ahead no matter how bad or inattentive the driver.
The only thing you have to watch out for is that people's incorrect use of the "manual override" does not degrade automated safety below the 99% if there were no override.
Yeah, that's the biggest impediment I see to traffic flow outside of traffic jams. Particularly bad are the drivers who feel the urge to speed up to pass a truck, but once they're in front of the truck they are no longer pressured and slow down, matching speeds with the truck which is now just behind them on the right. This results in a huge jam of cars behind them since they are now blocking the only passing lane around the truck.
Germany solved that on the Autobahn by making a law requiring you to move over to the right (if possible) if a car approaches you from behind. Failure to do so can result in being ticketed. From the driving I did there, it works very well at keeping different-speed traffic flowing.
A former boss of mine had a bad habit of hitting Reply instead of Compose when writing new emails. I noticed I'd get emails from her which were totally unrelated to the mail she'd hit Reply on. I warned her several times that that could be dangerous since hitting reply automatically includes the previous email(s) as a quote.
Then one day it happened. She decided to send out a mass email to all staff, and composed it by hitting Reply on one of my emails. I got into work, checked my email, and did the biggest head-desk of my life. She had replied to one of my emails where we'd been discussing employee bonuses and pay raises, including extensive deliberation over what we were going to tell certain employees in their annual performance review. That lengthy discussion was quoted and got sent to the entire staff. Fortunately the damage wasn't as severe as it could have been - the four employees we'd discussed in the email thread were all good employees so most of our comments had been positive.
On the up side, it broke her habit. She never composed a new email by hitting Reply again.
In this case, bandwidth is limited by frequency allocated by the FCC for this purpose, times the capability of technology (2G, then 3G, now 4G) which is itself limited by the Shannon limit, divided by the number of customers simultaneously seeking to use that bandwidth. The distribution and spacing of cell towers comes into play too, but the above is pretty much it.
This isn't like wired bandwidth where each house can have their own pipe. The mobile bandwidth you use interferes with and reduces the bandwidth available to others. You can make legitimate complaints about the cost of the bandwidth or the amount of backhaul bandwidth, but the total available over-the-air bandwidth is dictated by physics and math, and out of the cellular companies' hands.
This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Net neutrality mostly applies to unlimited data plans. The customer has paid the service provider for unlimited bandwidth. The service provider then turns around and charges the website for the same bandwidth. The service provider thus gets double-paid while providing no additional product. Orthogonal to this, one website pays and another doesn't. The two still get the same total bandwidth, one just gets more of it. Again, the service provider gets paid extra for the exact same total product.
In this case, we're talking about bandwidth with a per-kB charge. Either the customer pays for it, or the website pays for it. There is no double-charging going on between the customer and website (unless everyone would've stayed within their monthly bandwidth limit - but if that were the case there is no need for the website to participate in this program). And the service provider doesn't get paid extra if one website decides to subsidize their users' mobile data costs while another doesn't.
Kodak died because film is a consumable - you have to continuously buy more as you use it. They weren't late to digital - they invented digital photography with the first working digital camera in the 1970s, and the first digital SLRs in the 1990s when a consumer digital camera had 0.25 MP and cost over $1000. But the digital sensor means you can take almost infinite pictures with a single purchase. Furthermore, the rapid advancements in electronic tech meant that the cost of the sensor quickly plummeted to almost nothing.
This shifted the economic emphasis away from the film/sensor which was Kodak's specialty, and to the camera/optics. Whereas before a casual photographer might spend 50% of his lifetime equipment costs on the camera/lenses and 50% film, he will now spend 100% of his costs on the camera/lenses about 1% of which is the sensor cost. Consequently, companies which specialized in making cameras (Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Sony, etc) or lenses (Canon, Nikon, Zeiss, Tamron, Tokina, etc) are doing fine. Companies which specialized in making film (Kodak, Polaroid, Fuji) suffered greatly. Fuji only managed to survive because they branched out into making point and shoot cameras in the closing days of film - they now have a line of half-decent digital cameras. Kodak used to make cameras but pretty much gave up after the disc camera. Their most successful camera in the last half century was the disposable camera - not much need for that in the digital age. Polaroid's camera was entirely a delivery system for their instant film.
For a while Kodak was hanging on with sales of movie film. But their number was up when movies finally made the transition to digital.
I actually built my own NAS/server using a quad core i5-2400. With 16 GB RAM, 3x2 TB green drives, and a 512 GB SSD, it draws about 35 Watts idle, 97 Watts at load (as measured by a Kill-A-Watt).
I found a lot of variance in power consumption depending on the OS. Windows was actually the best, coming in just above 30 Watts idle. Ubuntu was worst at 55 Watts. I eventually settled on ESXi running a bunch of virtual machines, which ran at 35 Watts idle. The idle power of modern CPUs is pretty amazing, if the OS takes advantage of it.
A structured key pitch and angle search wouldn't have resulted in Blackberry's keyboard.
The (marginally) non-obvious innovation here was the realization that people type on mobile devices differently than on a full keyboard. If you hold a mobile device like the original Blackberry with two hands, you notice the base of the thumbs are towards the lower end of the device (closer to the body). Consequently, the thumbs point upward at an angle as they rest on the keyboard. By angling the keys as Blackberry did, the keys present the largest target perpendicular to the thumbs, but can be slimmed down in the other axis so as to reduce the keyboard's width without increasing the chances of inadvertently hitting two keys (check out their earlier devices - the keys are not square).
For your search to have stumbled upon Blackberry's keyboard design, it would've needed to search key pitch, aspect ratio, and angle. I'm not sure if this is patent-worthy, but it's pretty clear Blackberry put a lot of thought into creating a functional keyboard design. A helluva lot more than rounded corners. A full-size keyboard analogue would be the natural keyboards, where the left and right halves are angled to meet the diagonal caused by your elbows. I'm pretty sure someone has a patent on that as well.
Generally:
Correct = bring sub-standard vision up to normal standards.
Augment = enhance vision above normal standards.
That happened at the hotel I used to work at. One of the tour buses entering hit and knocked over a gate, which hit an electric utility pole. I never got the next part of the story straight, and probably nobody knows for sure. But the underground piling holding the gate bent and burst an unmarked gas line as it shifted underground, and somehow a spark from it or the power pole lit the gas.
The ensuing fire required 2 fire trucks, 4 Gas Company trucks, and one Edison truck on-site as they tried to figure out what to do. The hotel was over 100 years old and the break was before the meter so in a section of pipe that was the Gas Company's responsibility. They couldn't find any records of where they had originally installed the gas lines, so they couldn't simply go upstream and turn a valve to shut off the gas, at least not without shutting off gas to the entire neighborhood. They had to bring in special equipment to trace the pipe underground several hundred feet upstream to the main pipe under the road. They determined no shutoff valve had been installed when the line was first constructed. So they picked a good spot between the fire and the road, dug down (with shovels so as not to cause another break), and spliced in a new shutoff valve. The fire burned for over 2 days while they did all this. The gate was ruined. The power pole was a write-off and Edison had to install a new one. I spoke with the Gas Company guy in charge of the whole thing and he said this was the biggest incident he'd ever been involved in in his 30 year career, and it was the main topic of discussion for several days among all the Gas Company branches in the entire Southwest U.S. We were just fortunate the fire was in a remote location and didn't spread.
Always document your work.
The USAF would have wanted that even when the Shuttles were in operation.
Kennedy is situated near the equator (28 degrees latitude) to take advantage of the additional velocity of the Earth's rotation in an Eastward launch. This reduces the delta-v you need to achieve orbit, meaning less fuel, less cost, and more payload. Unfortunately launching to the East limits you to equatorial orbits which pass over only about the middle +/- 28-62 degrees of latitude. That's good enough coverage of the Earth's surface for most purposes, but not all.
Most spy satellites and Earth-monitoring satellites (like Landsat) launch from Vandenberg AFB in California. Launches there are to the South, yielding the high orbital inclination (polar orbit) needed to cover most or all of the Earth's surface. The original plan for the Shuttle was for occasional launches from Vandenberg. The USAF even spent a huge amount of money outfitting one of Vandenberg's launch sites for the Shuttle. After the Challenger disaster, the site was reassessed and plans to launch the Shuttle from there were canceled. The USAF still had (has) no way to put a manned mission into polar orbit.
We've already done that. Most of the titanium used in the A-12 and SR-71 was covertly acquired by the CIA from the Soviet Union.
There is nothing to "react immediately" to. This isn't some rogue NSA operation. The House and Senate already knew NSA was doing this, or at least part of them did. The Intelligence Committees of the House and Senate are the ones who are tasked with deciding which classified projects are created and approved, and sit in the classified briefings where progress on such programs is discussed. They're the ones who created this program and steered challenges to it through the FISA court so that it would remain secret and legal.
Sander's isn't doing this because he has some big reveal he's hiding. He's just using this as a way of skirting the taboo against senators directly criticizing other senators, by instead criticizing the program those on the Intelligence Committees approved. In all likelihood the answer to his question is yes, unless the phone company has some special database entry which flags which phone numbers belong to members of Congress so their metadata is not included in that sent to the NSA.
In the bigger scheme, this is just a part of the whitewalling to dump the fallout from this onto the NSA in the mind of the public. By acting shocked and dismayed at the program, the politicians in Congress and the White House can appear to be innocent in all this when in fact they were the ones who created this program and created the laws which made this program legal (albeit Constitutionally sketchy).
Have you actually read the case? Schmeiser lost because he was indeed using Monsanto's seed without a license, but was fined only $1 because he did not benefit from the GMO seed in any way. He used RoundUp to kill weeds in the ditches surrounding his crop, but not on the crop itself. There was no motive for him to "deliberately and knowingly take GMO seeds." That's just the way Monsanto's PR spun the case.
Essentially the case established a precedent (in Canada) that the burden of preventing accidental spread is on the farmer - even if you're just farming with no intent of using GMOs, you must pay to test your seeds to insure that you weren't accidentally contaminated. IMHO this is contradictory to a fundamental tenet of responsibility most of us learned in grade school - if you make something and benefit (profit) from its positive aspects, you are also responsible for its negative effects. If Monsanto is benefiting from selling GMOs, they should be the ones paying to prevent its unwanted spread, not the farmers.
Interesting. First I've heard of it. Do you have a reference? The last I heard on the topic was that Monsanto's lawyers had gotten a combined cross-contamination case thrown out of court because the plaintiff (an organic farmers organization) lacked standing (were not the directly injured party - the farmers were). A quick google search only turns up cases of Monsanto suing farmers for cross-contamination, or promising not to sue if the contamination is "slight" and squelching any legal attempts to assign a definite amount.
Do not compare Manning to Snowden. Manning was a fool and most likely a traitor. He threw out the baby with the bathwater. Just because some of what he leaked turned out to have been leak-worthy does not justify leaking everything he could get his hands on. If you save a dozen people from a burning building but in the process doom a hundred to die, you are still culpable for the deaths of the hundred. He is correctly incarcerated and his rights justifiably curtailed.
Snowden has been careful to leak only what he thinks was unconstitutional. I disagree with some of this definitions of what's unconstitutional, but I respect that he's trying to leak only the materials which are leak-worthy.
Is Dragon actually still working on it? The original authors who were the true R&D geniuses behind the technology were locked out of improving the product (and pretty much the industry) because of copyright after the botched sale of their company. The recent demonstrations of the software I've seen look like not much has improved since 2000 except computers have gotten faster.
The problem with Microsoft's tablet vision is that they saw it as an driving force for Windows sales. They tried to make sure every tablet they sold was also another sale of Windows. Consequently your low-end laptop cost $750 (back then), the average laptop around $1300, and a Tablet PC cost north of $2000.
The early success of netbooks should've been a huge clue that there was a lot of pent-up demand for a low-cost simple (i.e. no complicated or expensive Windows) consumption-only device. The early netbooks tapped into that (before Microsoft successfully converted them into full-blown Windows machines, after which they died). So did the iPad.
I'd been using Tablet PCs since around 2004. I first bought one for a client (he wanted it for data entry at his veterinary clinic without having to take notes, then re-enter them into a desktop computer). I was so impressed I bought one for myself. So I got to see the benefits and the warts first-hand long before the iPad. I correctly predicted a simple tablet would be successful if it hit the $500 mark (and incorrectly predicted Apple would price theirs around $800). Unlike a lot of naysayers, I thought the format had a lot of potential. UPS and FedEx custom-designing their own tablet-scanner type devices for their delivery personnel was a pretty strong indicator.
IMHO tablets will really take off when they hit ~$100-$150. That's about the point where the price is negligible for businesses, and tablets will begin to take over their true competition - not laptops but clipboards. Like my client in 2004, the real benefit here is eliminating double data entry. Why write stuff on a clipboard, then enter it into a database later, when you can just enter it straight into the database while you're walking around the workplace? Why print out a bunch of stuff and carry the papers around in a folder/clipboard, when you can just view the files directly on a tablet? That's the real "killer app" tablets bring to the game. Being able to browse the web like a laptop is just a fringe benefit.
Bingo. People who were 13-19 years old when Facebook really started to pick up steam (about 2006) are now 20-26 years old. The teens today are different people, and more than likely they want to trod a different path just for the sake of trodding a different path. Kinda like how my generation bought SUVs and minivans because we didn't want to be like our parents and own a station wagon. By the way, I noticed the awful over-sized glasses from the 1970s are back in style again...
No, he's mostly correct. The Earth is also moving around the galactic core with the sun, so the relative motion is just the Earth's orbit around the sun.
The distinction here is between linear and rotational movement. The sun's movement for the year (i.e. relative to background stars) is a linear movement (changes in relative position between observer and subject) and thus is affected by relativity and the 8.3 min travel time of light. Since it's only traversing a bit less than one degree per day (360 degrees in 365.24 days), this motion is very small. In 8.3 minutes the sun's actual position changes an almost imperceptible 0.0057 degrees.
Nearly all of the sun's "movement" across the sky is caused by the Earth's rotation (change in orientation of the observer) and thus is not affected by relativity and the 8.3 min travel time of light. The sun is where it appears to be right now, even though the sun appears to have moved 2.1 degrees in the sky during the 8.3 minutes it takes its light to reach us. If this weren't the case, if you spun around 360 degrees in 1 second, a star 1 million light years away would have traveled 2*pi*1 million light years in 1 second, far exceeding the speed of light.
There is no absolute reference frame for linear motion. If I'm on a spaceship moving at 10 km/s relative to your spaceship, we cannot tell if I'm stationary and you're moving at 10 km/s, or if you're stationary and I'm moving at 10 km/s. But there is an absolute reference frame for rotation. If I'm rotating I'll experience centrifugal (centripetal) forces, which disappear when I'm no longer rotating.