This story supports my position that tablets are stupid except for a very few vertical business markets, and will go away faster than netbooks once people can see past the hype.
I disagree. Tablets are poised to take over the biggest market in business - eventually they're going to replace clipboards. Why print stuff out and carry it in a clipboard or folder? Why write stuff down on paper, just so you can do double data entry and type it into a computer when you get back at your desk? Just carry a tablet and cut out a step both ways. Such a device is so useful that Fedex and UPS commissioned their own versions for their drivers to carry around while doing deliveries.
It's only when you try to replace general purpose computers/laptops with tablets that you get yourself in trouble. Tablets make a great supplement to a computer, but are not a replacement. The $500+ tablet is a dead end, except as a high-end entertainment device. But the low-end tablets are going to take over the business world. As they approach $100, watch out. They have a real shot at ushering in the oft talked about paperless office.
Which side to believe when both sides are known liars?
Oh come on. Do you really have to ask? Does scientific methodology go out the window whenever it's politically inconvenient?
You can't prove a negative. The FBI cannot prove they're not the source of the leak. Therefore the burden of proof has to be upon Anonymous to prove that they got the files from the FBI.
the 4k standard created by the Japanese (and gosh doesn't that say a lot about the state of the west)
The Japanese are gadget freaks - they were actually at the forefront of HDTV research. They were working on TVs with >1000 lines of resolution as far back as the 1970s. But their HDTV standard was analog. The advances in CPUs and DSPs allowed real-time compression and decompression of 1080i digital video at an affordable price point by the mid-1990s (my 80386 right around 1990 took ~5 sec to decode a 1024x768 JPEG). It rendered the billions of dollars Japan had sunk into analog HDTV obsolete, and the West swooped in with a digital HDTV standard which became what we use today.
So no it doesn't say anything about the state of the West. It was purely a coincidence of timing. The digital revolution happened at just the right time when Japan was reluctant to abandon the billions it had sunk into researching analog HDTV, while the West which had spent very little was free to dive headfirst into digital HDTV. Now that everything is firmly digital, it's not at all surprising that Japan is at the forefront of 4k video R&D.
Most election ballots are counted within a few hours. All within 24 hours. 1-2 weeks is only if there's a discrepancy or a particularly close race, and mandated recounts. The slowest are the absentee (mail) ballots. Most states count election-day ballots first, then only prioritize counting the absentee ballots if a race is close enough for them to change the results. Otherwise they may take a few days to count the absentee votes.
Also, Germany probably has one system of voting and tabulating votes nationwide. In the U.S. each state runs its own elections, then each precinct has their own vote tabulating system (e.g. paper, electronic, whatever). A better comparison is if all countries in Europe decided to hold a joint election. Do you think you could coordinate, count, and tabulate all those votes within 6-10 hours?
Irrelevant. Roth contacted an editor himself, who acknowledged him as the primary source. The editor could make the change, having established to his satisfaction that the person was indeed the author.
And what if Roth later claims otherwise? Then it becomes Roth's word versus the editor's. And by your reasoning, Roth should win that argument even if it contradicts his earlier statement. A policy of "the primary source is always right" simply doesn't work because people have been known to change their minds.
The secondary source requirement forced Roth to make the assertion publicly and recorded permanently before it could be included in the Wiki page. That is how it should work.
This does raise a longstanding question about static sources in academia - basically in the paper world keeping track of corrections and updates and so on was hard. In the internet era it should be easy, but we still cling to the structure of paper journals a lot of places.
The Internet comes with its own new set of problems though. In Googlespace, static sources are manufactured via link farms.
What was the problem with the grade? Wasn't there symbolism, which you missed?
You can't mark someone down just because their perfectly valid answer wasn't the answer you were looking for. Giving the paper a D was punishing the student for the teacher's failure to give clear directions. If the teacher was only going accept an essay on the symbolism of going South on the river as the correct answer, then he should have asked for an essay on the symbolism. We are trying to teach children to be critical thinkers, not psychics.
Does anyone know of any electronics makers who don't abuse another country's willingness to throw its own people under the bus for money?
See, the thing is, willingness to throw its own people under the bus for money is part of the process of how a country rises from an undeveloped to an industrialized nation. If you're a dirt-poor backwater country, you don't have much you can offer to a business. Your infrastructure sucks, your average level of education is sub-par, transportation is non-existent, and there's probably rampant corruption. The only advantageous thing you can offer is cheap labor.
And so that's what countries do to get their foot in the industrialization door. The offer up their labor for cheap. That additional income then gets spent locally, helping to improve infrastructure, transportation, education, hopefully clean up corruption, and raise the local standard of living and wages (China's average salary is already over $1,000/yr, compared to about $100 a couple decades ago). This is one of those strange cases where refusing to "exploit" cheap labor actually harms the country more than "exploiting" it. Go ask the people who live in these countries - they want to work in these factories for what we consider slave-labor wages. Because it's a heckuva lot better than their other prospects.
I'm not saying they should work in these conditions for those wages in perpetuity, I'm not saying companies should manipulate local politics to keep wages in these countries down. I'm saying it's just part of the natural evolution from a subsistence agrarian economy to an affluent manufacturing economy. And if you don't allow countries to take that first step, you consign them to permanent backwater economy status.
This really needs to be handled at the Federal government level. The way it's done right now is ludicrous. You have companies which purport to provide updated tax tables. They have to monitor every municipal government in the country for any new or changes to the sales taxes. Basically the equivalent of polling in CompSci. The thing is, none of them will indemnify you against errors they make. If they screw up and you've been charging the too little tax for a week, you have to pay for the shortfall, not them.
The Federal government should makes a sales tax website. States, counties, and cities report their sales/use tax rates to this website. Businesses can then download the latest tax tables from the site every day. If a local government fails to update their tax rate, then they're responsible for losing out on any uncollected taxes. If a business fails to update its tax tables, then it's responsible for any uncollected taxes. No shifting of liability, no stupid polling, no duplicated work.
That's a cop-out. If there's anything the USB connector can't do, put it on a second connector. That's what other phones do if they have HDMI out. The have a micro-USB port for charging and data transfer, and a micro-HDMI port for HDMI. Simple.
The power unit is probably vital only because the ISS is manned, and having humans aboard means a higher power requirement. The thing about space is that the enormous launch costs (on the order of $5000 per kg at the low end) means many things you take for granted on earth (like a toothbrush and toothpaste) add horrendously to your overall cost. Estimates are that it takes about 2 tons of life support equipment to keep one person alive in space. So sending a single person to space incurs an extra $10 million in cost (ignoring consumables like food, water, and oxygen). For a fraction of that, you can just build your unmanned system with redundant backups for everything, including "vital power units".
e.g. The cost of the manned mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope cost almost as much as building and launching a replacement HST. If we'd had an unmanned launch vehicle other than the Shuttle capable of putting something Hubble's size into orbit, we could've put 3 HSTs into orbit for the cost of one Shuttle-launched HST and one repair mission. Remember the Solar Max repair mission? Ever wonder why aside from Hubble, that was the only repair mission conducted by the Shuttle? Because it was literally cheaper to build and launch a replacement satellite than to send the shuttle up to repair one.
We're trying to run before we can walk. We should kill the manned space program for about 10 years, or at the very least drastically scale it back. Work on lowering launch vehicle costs. Once we get those costs down to about $1000-$2000/kg (Falcon comes close), then restart the manned program. The Shuttle and ISS wasted hundreds of billions of dollars just so we could brag "Look! We have people in space!" If that money had been spent instead on researching and developing cheaper launch vehicles, we could've potentially been putting a dozen people in space for the cost of putting a single person in space today.
It's amusing how easily scientific methodology is discarded for political convenience. You cannot prove a negative. The FBI cannot prove the data did not come from their computers. Even if they found a developer whose database of UDIDs exactly matched the 12 million compromised records, skeptics could always claim the developer had first turned the data over to the FBI, where Anonymous hacked it.
It's impossible for the FBI to prove they're not the source of the data. Therefore the burden of proof is on Anonymous to prove that it did come from the FBI. Simple as that.
This is the new reality that Apple has created. No matter how mundane, obvious, or silly an idea is, you have to patent it to protect yourself. If you don't because you think it's obvious, you could be sued by someone who does patent it. And if the jury is headed by someone who is gung-ho about patents, you could lose. In the coming years, I expect to see squares, rectangles, circles, ovals, triangles, etc. all being patented because the ~$10k filing and attorney's fees are a heckuva lot cheaper than fighting a patent lawsuit.
If you need to grow plants for food/oxygen off-world, that means you have people there.
If you have people there, that means they're going to be doing other stuff.
If they're going to be doing other stuff, that means they're going to need power.
If they're going to need power, you should just have a power generator which pumps out electricity, and channel some of that electricity to the LEDs providing light for your hydroponics lab. There's no need to put an RTG inside each LED.
Especially considering that most of the energy given off by an RTG is thermal (the RTG aboard Curiosity gives off about 2 kW of thermal energy, about 110 W of which is converted to electricity). With an RTG inside each light source, every minor light source is also a major heat source, and your heating/cooling problems become that much more complicated. With all your power centralized in a few places (for redundancy), you can centralize heat pumps which deliver only as much heat only where needed.
The problem I see with that chart is it's comparing macroscopic material properties to microscopic material properties. The stats for kevlar, carbon fiber, and steel (which are in TFA but you omitted) are macroscopic measurements - sizes and lengths you'd use in real-life construction. The stats for CNC and carbon nanotubes are for microscopic samples. The sample crystalline cellulose given in TFA is only 5x300 nm in size.
For comparison, the crystalline grains of steel are a few to a hundred micrometers across - roughly 1000x larger. (Yes, steel is made of crystals.) Most of the properties we associate with steel are due to the way these millions of crystal grains adhere to, stretch, and slide past each other under load; not the actual strength of the crystals themselves (which is much higher, though more brittle). Heat treating steel is simply changing the size of these crystals, which impacts how they move past each other.
Basically, the chart is relevant if you can manufacture CNC crystals several cm in length (about the length of fiberglass chopped strand mat fibers - the lowest tier of structural FRP) at the price point specified in the article (1/10th the cost of kevlar and carbon fiber). But if you can't make them that long, then like carbon nanotubes they're just a laboratory curiosity. The strength of the resin matrix holding the crystals in place will have far more impact on the macroscopic material properties. And I'm willing to bet that plain old wood is pretty optimal in terms of CNC+resin composition, yet results in substantially weaker material properties than steel, carbon fiber, and kevlar.
OP isn't advocating that users pirate movies and music. OP is saying that the poor user-friendliness of the media companies' products drives people to piracy in order to get a better product.
Your Linksys analogy doesn't really work in this context because the end product put out by Linux and Linksys aren't the same. A better analogy would be OS X. It's based on BSD Unix. BSD Unix has a tiny market share compared to other OSes, even compared to Linux. But Apple came along, gussied it up with a pretty GUI like users wanted and suddenly it's the #2 desktop OS.
OP is saying the media companies are like BSD Unix - clinging desperately to the CLI when the customers want a GUI (example argument). And that if they'd just give up their old ways and give users what they wanted, they'd have much better market adoption. It'd be like if BSD refused to license to Apple, but Apple went and used it anyway to make OS X. The success of OS X (relative to BSD) isn't meant to demonstrate that pirating BSD was a good move for Apple (in this hypothetical example). It's meant to demonstrate that there's a tremendous opportunity here that BSD is missing out on because they're stubbornly clinging to their old ways.
They CAN be sued, but I doubt the WorldCon would win the case due to the DMCA (U.S. law). They are granted immunity for implementing procedures to protect copyrighted material (in this case: Doctor Who).
Since when? DMCA doesn't require you to run bots which instantly take down content which the AI thinks is infringing. DMCA only requires you to take down in a timely manner content in response to violation claims by a copyright holder. There's no requirement that this be a bot. It can be a guy reading emails listing video ID numbers and manually disabling them. So long as he completes the task in a timely manner.
If you decide to let the media companies run bots on your servers for their convenience, that's entirely your own decision. And the liability for any screwups by said bots rest entirely with you.
What's amazing to me is how distorted people's perception of money and value becomes when it comes to iProducts. I helped low-income friends buy a computer. They passed on $350 laptops, $300 laptops. They finally jumped on a $260 Sandy Bridge i3 refurb laptop I managed to find. They were that price-sensitive. Then a couple weeks later I find they're sporting a 64GB iPad 2. Apparently the need to be trendy is worth hundreds of dollars in price premium.
The public thinks they are purchasing the same thing they did when they bought a CD but now it's digital, it's smaller, compact, more elegant, etc. But that's not true, you're missing a whole bunch of rights that came with buying a CD including the ability to pass a single copy of the CD on to your daughter or liquidate it in the estate sale.
I'm in the process of setting up my parents' belongings in some sort of trust for when they eventually pass. That way my sister and I can inherit it without us having to do nasty things like sell off the their house so we can split the money evenly. The whole process got me thinking about digital downloads.
What if instead of buying material off iTunes for yourself, you set up trust to do the buying. When you pass, your ownership of the media you've bought off iTunes does not evaporate while Apple and the *AA rub their hands in glee. The trust survives, retains ownership, and is able to pass that ownership onto another party.
The problem of being able to parcel out and sell individual songs/movies remains. But I believe this would take care of the overall issue of inheriting digital content. Just make sure the account username and password are owned by an entity which never dies, like a trust, and pass control of the trust over to the other party. Corporate personhood screws over the little guy in so many ways. Here's a way where it can be made to work to his advantage.
Whatever you use it's going to be SLOW on 5TB of data. You can probably eliminate 90% of the work just by:
a) Looking at file sizes, then
b) Looking at the first few bytes of files with the same size.
I have a file server with about 3 TB of data. Backing it up to an external RAID 0 storage bay takes about 18 hours. If this guy is waiting over a week for a dedupe to finish, it's not because accessing 5 TB is slow.
more than 20 years ago, scientists put two groups of rhesus monkeys (which have an average life span of about 27 years) on skimpy rations. In 2009, researchers reported in Science that a group of monkeys [...] was reaping the benefits of the diet. Eating less cut rates of cancer and heart disease by half, for example. More than 50% of the animals were still alive, but the team detected a survival trend. Although overall mortality was the same, only 13% of the calorically restricted monkeys had died from age-related conditions, versus 37% of the control animals.
So the unanswered question is... what's killing off the low-calorie monkeys at a higher rate than the control monkeys? e.g. If they're succumbing to fractured bones and injuries complicated by poor diet, then the opposite of what you say is true. You'd be more likely to end up decrepit in a nursing home sooner due to a low-calorie diet.
In service, Concorde made plenty of profit for British Airways (no idea about Air France)
Concorde as a plane made a profit. As an aircraft model, it did not. The problem was its huge operating cost for a trans-Atlantic flight (somewhere between $1500-$2500 per passenger - if the crash hadn't killed it, the spike in fuel prices in 2007-2008 would have). That meant your clientele were only a thin sliver of the overall market, and most of them were concentrated on a few routes (between major economic centers, or an economic center and major resort destination). On top of that, a few planes completely saturated your market on a route. That's fine if you're the only carrier which flies the plane on one of those golden routes. But if you were hoping to sell hundreds of the planes to recoup the billions of pounds/francs spent developing the aircraft, you're totally screwed.
Yeah if you got one of the $100 HP Touchpads during its closeout sale, it was hugely profitable for you. But the fact that HP never recouped its huge investment in developing the device means it was a financial failure.
and the clientele that flew on it loved it - it had a smooth, quiet ride and engine noise was not an issue for those in the cabin (the engines are set back toward the very end of the cabin and some distance from the fuselage, not to mention underneath a wing).
Concorde seat width was 17.8". Most economy class seats are 17"-18". Seat pitch was 37" which is slightly better than the 31"-34" norm for economy, but not by much. You basically paid first class price for an economy-plus class seat. But the service, speed, and experience were top-notch. I'm sad I never got a chance to fly it, but don't kid yourself - it simply wasn't economically competitive with regular air travel.
I ask because the increase in CAFE standards has been mirrored by an increase in truck sales vs. car sales (light trucks fall under a lower CAFE requirement, so can be built bigger, or rather, be built as big as cars of yesteryear). If you do a few calcs on the spreadsheet, you see the percentage of truck sales holds fairly steady from 1930-1970 at 15%-20%.
Then right around the time when CAFE was implemented (1975) truck sales start picking up, to where they now comprise about half or more of all personal vehicle sales. It's possible this shift in vehicle buying habits (I'm guessing due to CAFE causing cars to become smaller/lighter, though it's certainly debatable) could completely offset any benefit to CAFE. All the historical stats I find seem to list average MPG for cars, not average MPG for cars + trucks.
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I disagree. Tablets are poised to take over the biggest market in business - eventually they're going to replace clipboards. Why print stuff out and carry it in a clipboard or folder? Why write stuff down on paper, just so you can do double data entry and type it into a computer when you get back at your desk? Just carry a tablet and cut out a step both ways. Such a device is so useful that Fedex and UPS commissioned their own versions for their drivers to carry around while doing deliveries.
It's only when you try to replace general purpose computers/laptops with tablets that you get yourself in trouble. Tablets make a great supplement to a computer, but are not a replacement. The $500+ tablet is a dead end, except as a high-end entertainment device. But the low-end tablets are going to take over the business world. As they approach $100, watch out. They have a real shot at ushering in the oft talked about paperless office.
Oh come on. Do you really have to ask? Does scientific methodology go out the window whenever it's politically inconvenient?
You can't prove a negative. The FBI cannot prove they're not the source of the leak. Therefore the burden of proof has to be upon Anonymous to prove that they got the files from the FBI.
The Japanese are gadget freaks - they were actually at the forefront of HDTV research. They were working on TVs with >1000 lines of resolution as far back as the 1970s. But their HDTV standard was analog. The advances in CPUs and DSPs allowed real-time compression and decompression of 1080i digital video at an affordable price point by the mid-1990s (my 80386 right around 1990 took ~5 sec to decode a 1024x768 JPEG). It rendered the billions of dollars Japan had sunk into analog HDTV obsolete, and the West swooped in with a digital HDTV standard which became what we use today.
So no it doesn't say anything about the state of the West. It was purely a coincidence of timing. The digital revolution happened at just the right time when Japan was reluctant to abandon the billions it had sunk into researching analog HDTV, while the West which had spent very little was free to dive headfirst into digital HDTV. Now that everything is firmly digital, it's not at all surprising that Japan is at the forefront of 4k video R&D.
Most election ballots are counted within a few hours. All within 24 hours. 1-2 weeks is only if there's a discrepancy or a particularly close race, and mandated recounts. The slowest are the absentee (mail) ballots. Most states count election-day ballots first, then only prioritize counting the absentee ballots if a race is close enough for them to change the results. Otherwise they may take a few days to count the absentee votes.
Also, Germany probably has one system of voting and tabulating votes nationwide. In the U.S. each state runs its own elections, then each precinct has their own vote tabulating system (e.g. paper, electronic, whatever). A better comparison is if all countries in Europe decided to hold a joint election. Do you think you could coordinate, count, and tabulate all those votes within 6-10 hours?
And what if Roth later claims otherwise? Then it becomes Roth's word versus the editor's. And by your reasoning, Roth should win that argument even if it contradicts his earlier statement. A policy of "the primary source is always right" simply doesn't work because people have been known to change their minds.
The secondary source requirement forced Roth to make the assertion publicly and recorded permanently before it could be included in the Wiki page. That is how it should work.
The Internet comes with its own new set of problems though. In Googlespace, static sources are manufactured via link farms.
You can't mark someone down just because their perfectly valid answer wasn't the answer you were looking for. Giving the paper a D was punishing the student for the teacher's failure to give clear directions. If the teacher was only going accept an essay on the symbolism of going South on the river as the correct answer, then he should have asked for an essay on the symbolism. We are trying to teach children to be critical thinkers, not psychics.
See, the thing is, willingness to throw its own people under the bus for money is part of the process of how a country rises from an undeveloped to an industrialized nation. If you're a dirt-poor backwater country, you don't have much you can offer to a business. Your infrastructure sucks, your average level of education is sub-par, transportation is non-existent, and there's probably rampant corruption. The only advantageous thing you can offer is cheap labor.
And so that's what countries do to get their foot in the industrialization door. The offer up their labor for cheap. That additional income then gets spent locally, helping to improve infrastructure, transportation, education, hopefully clean up corruption, and raise the local standard of living and wages (China's average salary is already over $1,000/yr, compared to about $100 a couple decades ago). This is one of those strange cases where refusing to "exploit" cheap labor actually harms the country more than "exploiting" it. Go ask the people who live in these countries - they want to work in these factories for what we consider slave-labor wages. Because it's a heckuva lot better than their other prospects.
I'm not saying they should work in these conditions for those wages in perpetuity, I'm not saying companies should manipulate local politics to keep wages in these countries down. I'm saying it's just part of the natural evolution from a subsistence agrarian economy to an affluent manufacturing economy. And if you don't allow countries to take that first step, you consign them to permanent backwater economy status.
This really needs to be handled at the Federal government level. The way it's done right now is ludicrous. You have companies which purport to provide updated tax tables. They have to monitor every municipal government in the country for any new or changes to the sales taxes. Basically the equivalent of polling in CompSci. The thing is, none of them will indemnify you against errors they make. If they screw up and you've been charging the too little tax for a week, you have to pay for the shortfall, not them.
The Federal government should makes a sales tax website. States, counties, and cities report their sales/use tax rates to this website. Businesses can then download the latest tax tables from the site every day. If a local government fails to update their tax rate, then they're responsible for losing out on any uncollected taxes. If a business fails to update its tax tables, then it's responsible for any uncollected taxes. No shifting of liability, no stupid polling, no duplicated work.
Has a computer security firm ever said things have gotten safer? No? Then it's safe to ignore them.
All men claim to be big endian, even if they're little endian.
That's a cop-out. If there's anything the USB connector can't do, put it on a second connector. That's what other phones do if they have HDMI out. The have a micro-USB port for charging and data transfer, and a micro-HDMI port for HDMI. Simple.
The power unit is probably vital only because the ISS is manned, and having humans aboard means a higher power requirement. The thing about space is that the enormous launch costs (on the order of $5000 per kg at the low end) means many things you take for granted on earth (like a toothbrush and toothpaste) add horrendously to your overall cost. Estimates are that it takes about 2 tons of life support equipment to keep one person alive in space. So sending a single person to space incurs an extra $10 million in cost (ignoring consumables like food, water, and oxygen). For a fraction of that, you can just build your unmanned system with redundant backups for everything, including "vital power units".
e.g. The cost of the manned mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope cost almost as much as building and launching a replacement HST. If we'd had an unmanned launch vehicle other than the Shuttle capable of putting something Hubble's size into orbit, we could've put 3 HSTs into orbit for the cost of one Shuttle-launched HST and one repair mission. Remember the Solar Max repair mission? Ever wonder why aside from Hubble, that was the only repair mission conducted by the Shuttle? Because it was literally cheaper to build and launch a replacement satellite than to send the shuttle up to repair one.
We're trying to run before we can walk. We should kill the manned space program for about 10 years, or at the very least drastically scale it back. Work on lowering launch vehicle costs. Once we get those costs down to about $1000-$2000/kg (Falcon comes close), then restart the manned program. The Shuttle and ISS wasted hundreds of billions of dollars just so we could brag "Look! We have people in space!" If that money had been spent instead on researching and developing cheaper launch vehicles, we could've potentially been putting a dozen people in space for the cost of putting a single person in space today.
It's amusing how easily scientific methodology is discarded for political convenience. You cannot prove a negative. The FBI cannot prove the data did not come from their computers. Even if they found a developer whose database of UDIDs exactly matched the 12 million compromised records, skeptics could always claim the developer had first turned the data over to the FBI, where Anonymous hacked it.
It's impossible for the FBI to prove they're not the source of the data. Therefore the burden of proof is on Anonymous to prove that it did come from the FBI. Simple as that.
This is the new reality that Apple has created. No matter how mundane, obvious, or silly an idea is, you have to patent it to protect yourself. If you don't because you think it's obvious, you could be sued by someone who does patent it. And if the jury is headed by someone who is gung-ho about patents, you could lose. In the coming years, I expect to see squares, rectangles, circles, ovals, triangles, etc. all being patented because the ~$10k filing and attorney's fees are a heckuva lot cheaper than fighting a patent lawsuit.
Oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
If you need to grow plants for food/oxygen off-world, that means you have people there.
If you have people there, that means they're going to be doing other stuff.
If they're going to be doing other stuff, that means they're going to need power.
If they're going to need power, you should just have a power generator which pumps out electricity, and channel some of that electricity to the LEDs providing light for your hydroponics lab. There's no need to put an RTG inside each LED.
Especially considering that most of the energy given off by an RTG is thermal (the RTG aboard Curiosity gives off about 2 kW of thermal energy, about 110 W of which is converted to electricity). With an RTG inside each light source, every minor light source is also a major heat source, and your heating/cooling problems become that much more complicated. With all your power centralized in a few places (for redundancy), you can centralize heat pumps which deliver only as much heat only where needed.
The problem I see with that chart is it's comparing macroscopic material properties to microscopic material properties. The stats for kevlar, carbon fiber, and steel (which are in TFA but you omitted) are macroscopic measurements - sizes and lengths you'd use in real-life construction. The stats for CNC and carbon nanotubes are for microscopic samples. The sample crystalline cellulose given in TFA is only 5x300 nm in size.
For comparison, the crystalline grains of steel are a few to a hundred micrometers across - roughly 1000x larger. (Yes, steel is made of crystals.) Most of the properties we associate with steel are due to the way these millions of crystal grains adhere to, stretch, and slide past each other under load; not the actual strength of the crystals themselves (which is much higher, though more brittle). Heat treating steel is simply changing the size of these crystals, which impacts how they move past each other.
Basically, the chart is relevant if you can manufacture CNC crystals several cm in length (about the length of fiberglass chopped strand mat fibers - the lowest tier of structural FRP) at the price point specified in the article (1/10th the cost of kevlar and carbon fiber). But if you can't make them that long, then like carbon nanotubes they're just a laboratory curiosity. The strength of the resin matrix holding the crystals in place will have far more impact on the macroscopic material properties. And I'm willing to bet that plain old wood is pretty optimal in terms of CNC+resin composition, yet results in substantially weaker material properties than steel, carbon fiber, and kevlar.
OP isn't advocating that users pirate movies and music. OP is saying that the poor user-friendliness of the media companies' products drives people to piracy in order to get a better product.
Your Linksys analogy doesn't really work in this context because the end product put out by Linux and Linksys aren't the same. A better analogy would be OS X. It's based on BSD Unix. BSD Unix has a tiny market share compared to other OSes, even compared to Linux. But Apple came along, gussied it up with a pretty GUI like users wanted and suddenly it's the #2 desktop OS.
OP is saying the media companies are like BSD Unix - clinging desperately to the CLI when the customers want a GUI (example argument). And that if they'd just give up their old ways and give users what they wanted, they'd have much better market adoption. It'd be like if BSD refused to license to Apple, but Apple went and used it anyway to make OS X. The success of OS X (relative to BSD) isn't meant to demonstrate that pirating BSD was a good move for Apple (in this hypothetical example). It's meant to demonstrate that there's a tremendous opportunity here that BSD is missing out on because they're stubbornly clinging to their old ways.
Since when? DMCA doesn't require you to run bots which instantly take down content which the AI thinks is infringing. DMCA only requires you to take down in a timely manner content in response to violation claims by a copyright holder. There's no requirement that this be a bot. It can be a guy reading emails listing video ID numbers and manually disabling them. So long as he completes the task in a timely manner.
If you decide to let the media companies run bots on your servers for their convenience, that's entirely your own decision. And the liability for any screwups by said bots rest entirely with you.
What's amazing to me is how distorted people's perception of money and value becomes when it comes to iProducts. I helped low-income friends buy a computer. They passed on $350 laptops, $300 laptops. They finally jumped on a $260 Sandy Bridge i3 refurb laptop I managed to find. They were that price-sensitive. Then a couple weeks later I find they're sporting a 64GB iPad 2. Apparently the need to be trendy is worth hundreds of dollars in price premium.
I'm in the process of setting up my parents' belongings in some sort of trust for when they eventually pass. That way my sister and I can inherit it without us having to do nasty things like sell off the their house so we can split the money evenly. The whole process got me thinking about digital downloads.
What if instead of buying material off iTunes for yourself, you set up trust to do the buying. When you pass, your ownership of the media you've bought off iTunes does not evaporate while Apple and the *AA rub their hands in glee. The trust survives, retains ownership, and is able to pass that ownership onto another party.
The problem of being able to parcel out and sell individual songs/movies remains. But I believe this would take care of the overall issue of inheriting digital content. Just make sure the account username and password are owned by an entity which never dies, like a trust, and pass control of the trust over to the other party. Corporate personhood screws over the little guy in so many ways. Here's a way where it can be made to work to his advantage.
I have a file server with about 3 TB of data. Backing it up to an external RAID 0 storage bay takes about 18 hours. If this guy is waiting over a week for a dedupe to finish, it's not because accessing 5 TB is slow.
So the unanswered question is... what's killing off the low-calorie monkeys at a higher rate than the control monkeys? e.g. If they're succumbing to fractured bones and injuries complicated by poor diet, then the opposite of what you say is true. You'd be more likely to end up decrepit in a nursing home sooner due to a low-calorie diet.
Concorde as a plane made a profit. As an aircraft model, it did not. The problem was its huge operating cost for a trans-Atlantic flight (somewhere between $1500-$2500 per passenger - if the crash hadn't killed it, the spike in fuel prices in 2007-2008 would have). That meant your clientele were only a thin sliver of the overall market, and most of them were concentrated on a few routes (between major economic centers, or an economic center and major resort destination). On top of that, a few planes completely saturated your market on a route. That's fine if you're the only carrier which flies the plane on one of those golden routes. But if you were hoping to sell hundreds of the planes to recoup the billions of pounds/francs spent developing the aircraft, you're totally screwed.
Yeah if you got one of the $100 HP Touchpads during its closeout sale, it was hugely profitable for you. But the fact that HP never recouped its huge investment in developing the device means it was a financial failure.
Concorde seat width was 17.8". Most economy class seats are 17"-18". Seat pitch was 37" which is slightly better than the 31"-34" norm for economy, but not by much. You basically paid first class price for an economy-plus class seat. But the service, speed, and experience were top-notch. I'm sad I never got a chance to fly it, but don't kid yourself - it simply wasn't economically competitive with regular air travel.
I ask because the increase in CAFE standards has been mirrored by an increase in truck sales vs. car sales (light trucks fall under a lower CAFE requirement, so can be built bigger, or rather, be built as big as cars of yesteryear). If you do a few calcs on the spreadsheet, you see the percentage of truck sales holds fairly steady from 1930-1970 at 15%-20%.
Then right around the time when CAFE was implemented (1975) truck sales start picking up, to where they now comprise about half or more of all personal vehicle sales. It's possible this shift in vehicle buying habits (I'm guessing due to CAFE causing cars to become smaller/lighter, though it's certainly debatable) could completely offset any benefit to CAFE. All the historical stats I find seem to list average MPG for cars, not average MPG for cars + trucks.
Year - trucks as % of all vehicle sales
2010 - 52.13%
2009 - 49.05%
2008 - 49.83%
2007 - 54.06%
2006 - 54.47%
2005 - 56.09%
2004 - 56.74%
2003 - 55.47%
2002 - 53.08%
2001 - 52.20%
2000 - 50.72%
1999 - 50.40%
1998 - 49.37%
1997 - 46.98%
1996 - 45.14%
1995 - 42.97%
1994 - 41.66%
1993 - 40.01%
1992 - 37.39%
1991 - 34.78%
1981 - 21.24%
1971 - 16.99%
1961 - 13.64%
1951 - 17.71%
1941 - 19.34%
1931 - 14.70%