I think if hydrogen car economy takes off, everyone will have their own refueling station because the only two inputs required are: Electricity and Water. Then you lose some power converting the electricity into hydrogen but being able to store it in fuel tanks as opposed to expensive batteries that wear out makes it nice.
Problem is hydrogen sucks as a fuel. It's not just the density/compression and corrosive problem you described. H2 molecules are tiny - about the smallest molecule there is (only a few monoatomic elements are smaller). Tanks and pipes which are watertight and airtight are not necessarily hydrogentight. Storage tanks, delivery trucks and pipelines, and hoses for fueling your car will all leak hydrogen.
Why deal with hydrogen as a fuel with its huge storage, transportation, and delivery problems? Just combine it with some other elements to get a different molecule which is much more manageable at standard temperature and pressure. Most of the focus right now is on methane, but there are liquid compounds as well. The most common is petroleum (which would bring us full circle), but alcohols have nearly as high energy density as gasoline while burning much more cleanly. And you can create alcohol through decomposition and fermentation of plant matter - biofuels.
Hydrogen makes sense for rocket launches because rockets are extremely weight-sensitive, and hydrogen has extraordinarily high energy density per mass. But its volumetric density, corrosive nature, and tendency to leak represent huge engineering challenges for using it as a general purpose fuel. Why bother? So you can brag you're burning a fuel which only produces water as a byproduct? That's only true if you completely ignore the process by which you generate the energy needed to manufacture the hydrogen fuel in the first place.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Any energy you hope to get out of burning hydrogen as a fuel has to have been put into it first. The key concept you're looking for is Gibbs Free Energy - a measure of the chemical energy potential of a mole of molecules. H2 and O2 have fairly high Gibbs free energies, while water is very low. So combining H2 and O2 to make H2O releases a lot of energy. But converting H2O back into H2 and O2 requires just as much energy as was released (more in fact, due to inefficiencies). There's no shortcut, as that would violate conservation of energy.
The only way to cheaply make H2 for fuel is to use substances which start off with high Gibbs free energies. You're probably familiar with many of them - methane, propane, various petroleum products, as well as alcohols and sugars/wood. Converting these substances to H2 for fuel is pretty much the same as burning them in an internal combustion engine, except with additional intermediate steps and huge storage, transportation,and delivery complications. There's an advantage in that there's no pesky carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur in the second step (hydrogen -> water) so we don't get CO2, nitrous oxides, and sulfides as byproducts. But you still need to deal with those byproducts in the first step (fuel -> hydrogen). So it's questionable whether the tradeoff is worth it.
Incidentally, this is why many people refer to hydrogen as a battery, not a fuel. Raw hydrogen gas is pretty much non-existent on this planet. So you're not getting free energy from the hydrogen. You're taking energy from other sources (burning coal or petroleum, nuclear, hydro, wind, solar) and storing it by converting something into hydrogen gas, then releasing that energy when you burn the hydrogen (well, releasing what's left after efficiency losses). Any energy calculation of the hydrogen economy has to take into account the efficiency losses due to this multi-step conversion process. It's almost bad enough to knock a hydrogen fuel cell car's efficiency down to the efficiency of an ICE gasoline car. (60% efficient fuel cell * 60% efficient hydrolysis = 36% efficiency. Modern ICEs are close to 30% efficient.)
In TFA's case, the energy used to convert aluminum oxide into metallic aluminum is used to liberate the H2 from the H2O (the Al being converted to Al2O3 by the extra oxygen in the process). So it's almost certainly wasting more energy than if you just did straight electrolysis on the water. The only benefit is that aluminum is very compact and easy to handle as a fuel source, much more so than hydrogen or storing electricity in a battery.
That was my experience too. I had a Galaxy S1 phone, but had never looked closely at an iPhone. When the flap over Samsung copying the iPhone started, I looked at low-res versions (so I couldn't read the text) of the iPhone icons for the first time. The only three I correctly guessed were:
- clock (standard universal icon)
- phone (standard universal icon)
- calendar (the icon actually were totally different from my phone's, but was similar to earlier Samsung publicity photos)
None of the other icons were remotely similar enough to help me guess what they were for, although I could guess at the function of a few.
- I guessed the plain envelope icon in iOS was for SMS like it was on the Samsung, but it turns out to be for email on iOS. iOS text icon is a chat bubble. Email icon on Samsung/Android is an open envelope with an @ coming out. And even if they had been identical, an envelope is a standard universal icon anyway.
- The Safari icon looks nothing like the Internet icon
- The photos icon looks nothing like Samsung's gallery icon
- The camera icon (HAL-like pic of a lens head-on) looks nothing like Samsung's camera icon (pic of a camera)
- The Maps icon looks nothing like Samsung's Maps icon
- The calculator icon looks nothing like Samsung's calculator icon
- The notes icon looks nothing like Samsung's Memo icon
- The music icon looks nothing like Samsung's music player icon (which looks like a CD). I suppose you could argue the color is similar
- And the app store icon looks nothing like Google's market icon (briefcase)
My conclusion was that the people claiming Samsung copied Apple's icons had never really taken a close look at the two side-by-side. They just saw a grid of colorful icons and concluded it was copied. i.e. That Apple "owned" the concept of grids of colorful icons.
Social Security has been paying out more than it collects in revenue for a couple years now, and is projected to get worse from here on out (unless our politicians do the grossly unpopular but inevitable thing and raise the retirement age so it keeps pace with increases in life expectancy).
Also, the SS fund is not separate from the general fund. The money you pay into FICA taxes is not held in a separate interest-bearing account until you retire, then given back to you. It's used to pay for the SS payments of current retirees. When you retire, your SS payments will come from the FICA contributions of the then-current workers. If you treated SS as a pension plan and did a proper accounting of it, it would be a huge red hole since future liabilities far, far exceed revenue collected at any given moment. (This is a side-effect of the way SS was started - retired people in the late 1930s received full SS payments even though they never contributed a dime. People who retired in the 1940s-1970s received full SS payments even though they only contributed during part of their working career.)
The longer people deny the existence of the SS/Medicare problem, the worse it's going to get. Right now SS + Medicare are projected to exceed all Federal tax revenue (average 18% of GDP) some time around 2050 (figures 1-1, B-1). Something needs to be done to rein them in, and the sooner the better.
Canon already has a coupleproduction lenses which use a diffractive optic element. The construction of the diffractive optics is different from TFA, but the principle is the same.
The results have been... mixed. They do yield smaller and lighter lenses, but also introduce new distortions of their own. The tradeoff is worth it in most photographic applications, but for precision astronomical work I think the loss of contrast and sharpness may limit its usefulness.
Also note that DO reduces but does not eliminate chromatic aberrations (different wavelengths of light focus at different distances). Aside from lenses physically distorting due to their weight, that's the biggest advantage of reflectors over refractors. With a reflector, all wavelengths get focused at the same distance.
Adobe alone is $4.5 billion, and Microsoft is $73 billion annually. So I'm pretty sure the $9 billion is only for mobile applications. It's still peanuts compared to PC software, and will be until you can put business-grade software on a phone/tablet.
Touchscreens were obvious long before the iPhone. What the iPhone pioneered was the fully on-screen virtual keyboard. Membrane keyboards have been tried before and generally panned, so it was considerably risky to try a phone with just a virtual keyboard.
That doesn't make it non-obvious though. Unlike Apple which puts out just one model of a phone, Android phones come in versions with real keyboards and with virtual keyboards. If the iPhone had never existed, the presence of both real and virtual keyboard phones on the market would quickly have established that the majority of buyers were OK with virtual keyboards on their phones, and the market would've gravitated that way. There's no innovation here; maybe some good foresight (or good guesswork), but no innovation. i.e. It's obvious now because it's a fact which has been vetted and verified, and would've been vetted and verified if the iPhone had never existed. Not because it was an innovation nobody thought of before. Facts shouldn't be patentable.
And also, on the last day, they showed the pictures of the phones that Samsung made before the iPhone came out and ones that they made after the iPhone came out.
So the decision to exclude evidence (of Samsung's phones in development prior to the iPhone's release) based on a technicality did in fact influence the outcome. Who would've guessed.
As I said before the verdict, the whole purpose of having deadlines in a court case is so that the trial proceeds in a timely manner. Why? So the delays in the trial do not negate the value of any potential outcome. i.e. the cost of achieving justice does not exceed the value of justice. Here we clearly had the opposite case, where the value of justice (billions of dollars either way) obviously would far, far outweigh the cost of a trial delay. The judge erred in disallowing that evidence due to a missed deadline, and I suspect we're going to have to sit through and pay for yet another trial to correct that error.
It's exactly like the DIVX format (the short-lived DVD format pushed by Circuit City, not the codec). You're licensed to use the format for x hours. With DIVX, x = 48 hours. With DRM-encrusted media, x = 60-70 years on average. The only reason people accept it when they rejected DIVX is because by the time x expires, they'll be dead so it won't be their problem.
It's ironic that the greatest invention ever for allowing people to share information with everyone else on the planet has sprouted an industry hell-bent on preventing people from sharing information. I hope within my lifetime, people will finally wisen up and realize we can't put this genie back in its bottle, and the world will actually be a lot better off with the genie out.
I had pinch to zoom (or at least half of it) when I was a kid in the 1970s. It was called Silly Putty. You pressed it on a newspaper comic to transfer the impression to the putty. Then you grabbed two ends and stretched it. You could scrunch it back up to shrink it, though that didn't work quite as well.
It's absolutely mindboggling to me that the bounce animation patent held up. That behavior is a fundamental characteristic of second order (spring-mass-damper) systems. When tuned to be slightly underdamped (between about zeta = 0.4 - 0.7), they will slightly overshoot before stabilizing at the steady state value. The jury has basically given Apple a patent on the graphical representation of one of the fundamental cornerstones of signals and systems engineering. Totally obvious to any undergrad engineering or physics student.
Retina display and multitouch, you're awarding innovation points for taking existing technology and putting it on a new platform. If someone invents a better windshield wiper for planes, is it really innovation if you take that wiper and put it on a car? I think most would agree after the new type of product has been invented, using it on different products is obvious rather than innovative. Maybe risky (will people pay extra for the new wipers on a car vs. regular wipers?), but hardly innovative.
Without going and looking stuff up, can you, personally, name one innovation Samsung has brought to the table in the phone industry in the last 5 years?
Well the most obvious one is AMOLED. Perfect blacks and infinite contrast ratio which will spoil you and make it difficult to ever go back to an LCD (especially in applications where you have to wear polarized sunglasses).
Many phones use Samsung CPUs, most use Samsung memory (both RAM and flash). Lots of innovation improving the performance of those. I've heard they're also heavily involved in the wireless communications technologies, though I haven't looked into that myself. Supposedly that's where the FRAND patents they sued Apple for relate to.
If you extend it beyond phones, AFAIK Samsung was the first company with a handheld device with an all-glass front and touch-sensitive controls. A prototype of that was leaked in 2005 btw.
They also came out with the flat display, rounded corners, silver bezel look before Apple. I'm surprised they aren't applying Apple's threshold for suing and crying foul that Apple basically ripped off the front of their digital picture frame's design to make the iPad.
There's no cognitive dissonance because that's not what would happen. Insurance companies would still cover treatment for non-vaccinated people. They would just charge higher premiums if you choose not to get vaccinated, like they do for smokers. The additional cost to society of foregoing vaccination gets converted into an additional cost the anti-vaxxer has to pay to for medical insurance.
$0.99 is completely relevant. Say 100,000 people share a song via bittorrent. That means 100,000 copies were made (well, technically 99,999, but it's close enough). Which means on average each person made one copy. Which means the average theft (their word, not mine) per person is $0.99.
Thing is, if that's their reasoning, then Tenenbaum being fined $675,000 means everyone who shared files with her is free and clear. That's the hole in the "making available" argument. By definition if x people are sharing files, there are x copies being made, so each person is responsible for just one illegal copy. If you sue an individual as if they were an illegal bootleg CD business to make them are responsible for all those copies, then the people who got CDs from the business didn't commit a crime.
It has to be one or the other. If you make it both like the *AA wants it to be, then the potential total fines for x people each copying a song will be for x^x copies, which is nonsense.
I'd just add that the distributors are not all evil. They're the ones who estimate how much of a product a region will need. They're the ones who pay to have that many of that product shipped to that region. If they overestimate demand, they're the ones who eat the extra cost of shipping stuff back. If they ship too few, they're the ones who have to pay for expedited shipping of stock from other regions to the region where it's sold out.
They relieve the manufacturer and local retailers from having to do this sort of market analysis, demand prediction, and cross-country distribution. The exceptions you mention (Amazon, Walmart) are large enough to do all this themselves. But a mom & pop retail shop or a small local manufacturer would be completely lost trying to do this sort of market analysis and distribution on their own. Yes distributors can and do gouge, but they also add legitimate value to the supply chain.
With Internet shopping and individual-level access to freight services (UPS, Fedex), this is slowly changing. But the distributor will always have an advantage because shipping a pallet of 1000 XBoxes cross-country to for local distribution is cheaper than shipping 1000 individual XBoxes cross-country to individual buyers.
In Europe, for example, import duties (25%+) and VAT (20%+) are added on to the cost of a good you see. When the price tag says $700, you pay $700. Not like North America where it's $500+tax.
Do note that this isn't because North America is backwards when it comes to honest price advertising. It's because of the different tax structures. In Europe, taxes are mostly national. A nationwide retailer can advertise something for 700 Euros (including tax) and that's the price you'll pay out the door at any of their stores. In the U.S., the taxes are mostly local. Each state has their own sales tax, and many counties and cities add their own sales tax on top of it.
Staples cannot advertise something for $540 here (tax included) because my local Staples has to charge 7.75% sales tax, while the Staples 10 minutes away has to charge 8.5% sales tax. The only way to make it work is to advertise $500+tax. (Well, I suppose all Staples could charge everyone the 8.5% rate and the stores in a 7.75% tax zone could pocket the extra 0.75%. But I think I prefer seeing the ad for $500+tax and keeping the extra 0.75% for myself.)
Currency exchange rates. Sony is a Japanese company and operates using JPY. If something costs them 10000 JPY to make and they have a 20% markup, they can't just look at today's exchange rate (USD$0.0126 per JPY) and set the price at 10000*1.2*0.0126 = $151.20. They have to ask themselves, "How much could the USD go down in the time it takes us to ship this inventory there, sell it, then convert it back to JPY?" Usually that's a timespan of 3 months to a year. So the USD price is set based on their worst-case projection for what'll happen to the USD-JPY exchange rate.
When you buy a grey market lens and have it shipped overseas, or you buy software from an overseas retailer and download it, you're only looking at the exchange rate on the single day of the sale. So there's considerably less uncertainty, and the worst case projection is nowhere near as bad.
There is no "reasonable" markup argument when they do region and country price fixing. I can buy any canon lens significantly cheaper from friends in Japan and pay for shipping than at any location in the USA. Canon is marking up HARD the lens prices for other countries.
I'm not excusing Canon's pricing, but the higher prices outside Japan are not completely unwarranted. Being a Japanese company, Canon's budget projections and business decisions are based on Yen. Whenever they sell in a market which uses a different currency, they have to take into account the risk of currency fluctuation. That is, their pricing outside of Japan has to be based on their worst-case projection for what will happen to the local currency in the coming year. Otherwise they could end up in a situation where they're selling lenses for less than it cost them to make.
You OTOH are not looking at an annual operating budget. You're looking at a single snapshot of currency exchange rates on the day you buy. That considerably reduces the window of currency rate movement, and so Canon's markup outside of Japan seems enormous to you. You're only concerned with how much the USD could drop against the JPY in the day it takes your Japanese friend to buy and ship you the lens. Canon is concerned with how much the USD could drop in the year it takes them to sell their inventory, then convert that USD back to JPY.
I got burned by this a few years back. I took a cross-border job in Canada at near my then-current salary converted to CAD (about USD$0.97 at the time). The first few months were great - the CAD went up to USD$1.07, meaning I'd essentially gotten a 10% pay raise. But then a little over a year later it crashed, dropping to below USD$0.80. None of this affected my Canadian co-workers, since their living expenses were in CAD. But I had to convert my paycheck to USD to pay my bills, so it hit me hard. Any time you're conducting long-term business which involves currency exchange rates, you have to factor in potential movements in exchange rates. (I kept most of my pay in a Canadian bank until the CAD eventually went back up to around USD$1.00. But the money I had to transfer to pay bills at the time was "locked in" at ~USD$0.78. It's a loss I'm never getting back because I didn't consider the possibility of the currency value changing as much as it did during my employment.)
No; most of the US has a single cable and phone company because wire infrastructure is insanely expensive to install and maintain. The municipal monopoly deals say things like "if you service the center of town, you also have to service every house in the far edges". Getting rid of those monopolies would mean one or (in large cities) maybe two cable companies serving rich, densely populated regions, and zero companies servicing the rest.
That's a separate issue, easily dealt with like we deal with electrical and gas lines. You have one publicly regulated company which owns the pipes, but are prohibited from selling what the pipes carry. Any other company is allowed to sell what's carried over the pipes. The regulated company is then required to provide 99% coverage, but are unable to leverage that ownership into a service monopoly. Service providers just see flat access to customers, with the differences in costs of the pipes to each customer hidden.
Don't believe me? Surely some libertarian utopia in Texas or New Hampshire has gotten rid of cable monopolies; show me how great their cable and phone options are.
No need for hypothetical utopias. Just look at most of Europe. Their cable/phone line owners are required to sell service at-cost to competitors. Consequently most Europeans have dozens of choices of ISP. There's no fuss over net neutrality because no sane ISP would try to restrict your service that way, and in addition they get lower prices than we do.
Actually, you touch upon the real issue here. Whether Samsung is copying from Apple, whether Apple copied Knight-Ridder, whether Joe is violating the Beatles' IP rights by making a mix CD, etc. is beside the point. The entire rationale for protection of ideas (books, music, movies, software, designs) is that it spurs creative and technological innovation. That is, there's a certain rate of creative innovation if there's no IP protection, and there's a certain rate of creative innovation if there's ironclad IP protection. But in between, with a limited amount of IP protection, the rate of creative innovation exceeds either of these two extremes.
Our focus should be on finding where this rate reaches its maximum and trying to position ourselves as close to it as possible. Blindly focusing on one extreme by mischaracterizing this as "copying = bad" misses the whole point. Too much copying is bad, but too little copying is also bad. An argument based on the assumption that all copying is bad is fundamentally flawed. All this stuff about copyrights, patents, creators holding monopolies over their ideas, etc. are just a means to a goal. The goal itself is increased creative innovation, and frequently that can be accomplished with more copying, not less. When you start putting the means ahead of the goal, you're contradicting the very justification for the existence of IP law.
Actually, both positions are logically pro net-neutrality. They just differ in how it's accomplished.
In Obama's case, he's probably for government regulation of telecommunications. Government regulation is why most of the U.S. has a single cable company and a single phone company as their only choices for Internet service. Municipal governments have granted local cable and phone monopolies. Because of this artificial duopoly, government-enforced net neutrality is needed.
In Romney's case, he's against government regulation. Presumably this includes telecommunications. So no government mandated duopolies - any cable or phone company could compete to offer you service. In such a highly competitive environment, the government does not need to enforce net neutrality because any ISP which artificially restricts or slows down customers' Internet service in an annoying way will quickly find their customers switching service to a competitor who offers net neutrality.
It's just the greedy idiots running the duopoly cable and phone services who are logically inconsistent. They want government interference of the market when it comes to them getting a duopoly. But they oppose government interference when it comes to net neutrality. The only reason they think they can get away with demanding ransom payments from Google et al for access to their customers is because they know their customers can't switch. (Romney may actually fall in this category; I can't say for sure since I don't know his position on government granted phone/cable monopolies.)
I've been saying since March of last year, it really looks like a case of probability analysis failure, like happened with the O-rings in the shuttle's boosters. In the boosters, they noticed sometimes the propellant could burn through two O-rings. So they added a third O-ring, on the theory that if there's a 1 in 100 chance of burning through two O-rings, then each O-ring has a 1 in 10 chance of burning through, and there's a 1 in 1000 chance of burning through three O-rings.
That ain't how it works. For the probabilities to multiply like that and provide redundancy, the vulnerabilities have to be independent events. Burning through O-rings isn't an independent event. A condition which causes one O-ring to leak and burn through (cold weather) is highly likely to affect subsequent O-rings. So you aren't really making things safer by adding an extra O-ring.
At Fukushima, it looks like they had a dozen or so backup generators on the theory that if one has a (say) 1 in 10 chance of failing, then the chance of all of them failing is 1 in 10^12. But nearly all of them were located in the same place, so a single event (a tsunami) which took out one generator took out all of them. Having multiple generators situated this way did not provide redundancy because they weren't vulnerable to independent events. They were vulnerable to the same event.
What they needed to do was put the generators in different locations, with different fuel sources, probably even different manufacturers and fuel types. That way an event which affected one would not affect the others, making their vulnerabilities independent events. The generators at reactors 5-6 were located further uphill, and thus survived the tsunami intact and were able to keep the fuel storage tanks there cooled.
This confirms (for me, at least) Amory Lovins' assertion that the US will never build another nuclear plant because there's no way it will ever be cost effective, even when most of the liability risk is assumed by the government. This WSJ article is snake oil being sold by some would-be investors (or sellers of investments).
Actually the WSJ article is by a professor of physics at UC Berkeley. And he is spot on about the huge mischaracterization of the risk assigned to nuclear power (including by insurance adjusters). People in general suck at rationally analyzing extremely rare events with huge consequences. For nuclear power, fear of another Chernobyl overwhelms the rational fact that historically it's the safest power source man has ever invented. For lotteries, the desire to hit the jackpot overwhelms the rational fact that nearly everyone who plays loses money, and even on average you lose money.
Surely marking a number as unlisted in the subscriber database is a once-off 30 activity of at most 5 minutes. So who's being paid $720 an hour for doing it?
The market value of something is based on two things: How much it costs to provide, and how much people are willing to pay for it. In this case an unlisted number is worth more than $60/yr for some people, so they're willing to pay for it.
Normally, competition would drive the market price down to just above the cost to provide the service. But since our government has done such a wonderful job granting local monopolies to all the phone companies, the price remains up at near what people are willing to pay for it.
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The problem with the 55 MPH speed limit was that it assumes saving fuel is always more important than saving time. That's not always true.
Problem is hydrogen sucks as a fuel. It's not just the density/compression and corrosive problem you described. H2 molecules are tiny - about the smallest molecule there is (only a few monoatomic elements are smaller). Tanks and pipes which are watertight and airtight are not necessarily hydrogentight. Storage tanks, delivery trucks and pipelines, and hoses for fueling your car will all leak hydrogen.
Why deal with hydrogen as a fuel with its huge storage, transportation, and delivery problems? Just combine it with some other elements to get a different molecule which is much more manageable at standard temperature and pressure. Most of the focus right now is on methane, but there are liquid compounds as well. The most common is petroleum (which would bring us full circle), but alcohols have nearly as high energy density as gasoline while burning much more cleanly. And you can create alcohol through decomposition and fermentation of plant matter - biofuels.
Hydrogen makes sense for rocket launches because rockets are extremely weight-sensitive, and hydrogen has extraordinarily high energy density per mass. But its volumetric density, corrosive nature, and tendency to leak represent huge engineering challenges for using it as a general purpose fuel. Why bother? So you can brag you're burning a fuel which only produces water as a byproduct? That's only true if you completely ignore the process by which you generate the energy needed to manufacture the hydrogen fuel in the first place.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Any energy you hope to get out of burning hydrogen as a fuel has to have been put into it first. The key concept you're looking for is Gibbs Free Energy - a measure of the chemical energy potential of a mole of molecules. H2 and O2 have fairly high Gibbs free energies, while water is very low. So combining H2 and O2 to make H2O releases a lot of energy. But converting H2O back into H2 and O2 requires just as much energy as was released (more in fact, due to inefficiencies). There's no shortcut, as that would violate conservation of energy.
The only way to cheaply make H2 for fuel is to use substances which start off with high Gibbs free energies. You're probably familiar with many of them - methane, propane, various petroleum products, as well as alcohols and sugars/wood. Converting these substances to H2 for fuel is pretty much the same as burning them in an internal combustion engine, except with additional intermediate steps and huge storage, transportation,and delivery complications. There's an advantage in that there's no pesky carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur in the second step (hydrogen -> water) so we don't get CO2, nitrous oxides, and sulfides as byproducts. But you still need to deal with those byproducts in the first step (fuel -> hydrogen). So it's questionable whether the tradeoff is worth it.
Incidentally, this is why many people refer to hydrogen as a battery, not a fuel. Raw hydrogen gas is pretty much non-existent on this planet. So you're not getting free energy from the hydrogen. You're taking energy from other sources (burning coal or petroleum, nuclear, hydro, wind, solar) and storing it by converting something into hydrogen gas, then releasing that energy when you burn the hydrogen (well, releasing what's left after efficiency losses). Any energy calculation of the hydrogen economy has to take into account the efficiency losses due to this multi-step conversion process. It's almost bad enough to knock a hydrogen fuel cell car's efficiency down to the efficiency of an ICE gasoline car. (60% efficient fuel cell * 60% efficient hydrolysis = 36% efficiency. Modern ICEs are close to 30% efficient.)
In TFA's case, the energy used to convert aluminum oxide into metallic aluminum is used to liberate the H2 from the H2O (the Al being converted to Al2O3 by the extra oxygen in the process). So it's almost certainly wasting more energy than if you just did straight electrolysis on the water. The only benefit is that aluminum is very compact and easy to handle as a fuel source, much more so than hydrogen or storing electricity in a battery.
Work on multi-touch and mutli-touch gestures date as far back as the 1980s and 1990s.
That was my experience too. I had a Galaxy S1 phone, but had never looked closely at an iPhone. When the flap over Samsung copying the iPhone started, I looked at low-res versions (so I couldn't read the text) of the iPhone icons for the first time. The only three I correctly guessed were:
- clock (standard universal icon)
- phone (standard universal icon)
- calendar (the icon actually were totally different from my phone's, but was similar to earlier Samsung publicity photos)
None of the other icons were remotely similar enough to help me guess what they were for, although I could guess at the function of a few.
- I guessed the plain envelope icon in iOS was for SMS like it was on the Samsung, but it turns out to be for email on iOS. iOS text icon is a chat bubble. Email icon on Samsung/Android is an open envelope with an @ coming out. And even if they had been identical, an envelope is a standard universal icon anyway.
- The Safari icon looks nothing like the Internet icon
- The photos icon looks nothing like Samsung's gallery icon
- The camera icon (HAL-like pic of a lens head-on) looks nothing like Samsung's camera icon (pic of a camera)
- The Maps icon looks nothing like Samsung's Maps icon
- The calculator icon looks nothing like Samsung's calculator icon
- The notes icon looks nothing like Samsung's Memo icon
- The music icon looks nothing like Samsung's music player icon (which looks like a CD). I suppose you could argue the color is similar
- And the app store icon looks nothing like Google's market icon (briefcase)
My conclusion was that the people claiming Samsung copied Apple's icons had never really taken a close look at the two side-by-side. They just saw a grid of colorful icons and concluded it was copied. i.e. That Apple "owned" the concept of grids of colorful icons.
Social Security has been paying out more than it collects in revenue for a couple years now, and is projected to get worse from here on out (unless our politicians do the grossly unpopular but inevitable thing and raise the retirement age so it keeps pace with increases in life expectancy).
Also, the SS fund is not separate from the general fund. The money you pay into FICA taxes is not held in a separate interest-bearing account until you retire, then given back to you. It's used to pay for the SS payments of current retirees. When you retire, your SS payments will come from the FICA contributions of the then-current workers. If you treated SS as a pension plan and did a proper accounting of it, it would be a huge red hole since future liabilities far, far exceed revenue collected at any given moment. (This is a side-effect of the way SS was started - retired people in the late 1930s received full SS payments even though they never contributed a dime. People who retired in the 1940s-1970s received full SS payments even though they only contributed during part of their working career.)
The longer people deny the existence of the SS/Medicare problem, the worse it's going to get. Right now SS + Medicare are projected to exceed all Federal tax revenue (average 18% of GDP) some time around 2050 (figures 1-1, B-1). Something needs to be done to rein them in, and the sooner the better.
Canon already has a couple production lenses which use a diffractive optic element. The construction of the diffractive optics is different from TFA, but the principle is the same.
The results have been... mixed. They do yield smaller and lighter lenses, but also introduce new distortions of their own. The tradeoff is worth it in most photographic applications, but for precision astronomical work I think the loss of contrast and sharpness may limit its usefulness.
Also note that DO reduces but does not eliminate chromatic aberrations (different wavelengths of light focus at different distances). Aside from lenses physically distorting due to their weight, that's the biggest advantage of reflectors over refractors. With a reflector, all wavelengths get focused at the same distance.
Adobe alone is $4.5 billion, and Microsoft is $73 billion annually. So I'm pretty sure the $9 billion is only for mobile applications. It's still peanuts compared to PC software, and will be until you can put business-grade software on a phone/tablet.
Touchscreens were obvious long before the iPhone. What the iPhone pioneered was the fully on-screen virtual keyboard. Membrane keyboards have been tried before and generally panned, so it was considerably risky to try a phone with just a virtual keyboard.
That doesn't make it non-obvious though. Unlike Apple which puts out just one model of a phone, Android phones come in versions with real keyboards and with virtual keyboards. If the iPhone had never existed, the presence of both real and virtual keyboard phones on the market would quickly have established that the majority of buyers were OK with virtual keyboards on their phones, and the market would've gravitated that way. There's no innovation here; maybe some good foresight (or good guesswork), but no innovation. i.e. It's obvious now because it's a fact which has been vetted and verified, and would've been vetted and verified if the iPhone had never existed. Not because it was an innovation nobody thought of before. Facts shouldn't be patentable.
So the decision to exclude evidence (of Samsung's phones in development prior to the iPhone's release) based on a technicality did in fact influence the outcome. Who would've guessed.
As I said before the verdict, the whole purpose of having deadlines in a court case is so that the trial proceeds in a timely manner. Why? So the delays in the trial do not negate the value of any potential outcome. i.e. the cost of achieving justice does not exceed the value of justice. Here we clearly had the opposite case, where the value of justice (billions of dollars either way) obviously would far, far outweigh the cost of a trial delay. The judge erred in disallowing that evidence due to a missed deadline, and I suspect we're going to have to sit through and pay for yet another trial to correct that error.
It's exactly like the DIVX format (the short-lived DVD format pushed by Circuit City, not the codec). You're licensed to use the format for x hours. With DIVX, x = 48 hours. With DRM-encrusted media, x = 60-70 years on average. The only reason people accept it when they rejected DIVX is because by the time x expires, they'll be dead so it won't be their problem.
It's ironic that the greatest invention ever for allowing people to share information with everyone else on the planet has sprouted an industry hell-bent on preventing people from sharing information. I hope within my lifetime, people will finally wisen up and realize we can't put this genie back in its bottle, and the world will actually be a lot better off with the genie out.
I had pinch to zoom (or at least half of it) when I was a kid in the 1970s. It was called Silly Putty. You pressed it on a newspaper comic to transfer the impression to the putty. Then you grabbed two ends and stretched it. You could scrunch it back up to shrink it, though that didn't work quite as well.
It's absolutely mindboggling to me that the bounce animation patent held up. That behavior is a fundamental characteristic of second order (spring-mass-damper) systems. When tuned to be slightly underdamped (between about zeta = 0.4 - 0.7), they will slightly overshoot before stabilizing at the steady state value. The jury has basically given Apple a patent on the graphical representation of one of the fundamental cornerstones of signals and systems engineering. Totally obvious to any undergrad engineering or physics student.
Retina display and multitouch, you're awarding innovation points for taking existing technology and putting it on a new platform. If someone invents a better windshield wiper for planes, is it really innovation if you take that wiper and put it on a car? I think most would agree after the new type of product has been invented, using it on different products is obvious rather than innovative. Maybe risky (will people pay extra for the new wipers on a car vs. regular wipers?), but hardly innovative.
Well the most obvious one is AMOLED. Perfect blacks and infinite contrast ratio which will spoil you and make it difficult to ever go back to an LCD (especially in applications where you have to wear polarized sunglasses).
Many phones use Samsung CPUs, most use Samsung memory (both RAM and flash). Lots of innovation improving the performance of those. I've heard they're also heavily involved in the wireless communications technologies, though I haven't looked into that myself. Supposedly that's where the FRAND patents they sued Apple for relate to.
If you extend it beyond phones, AFAIK Samsung was the first company with a handheld device with an all-glass front and touch-sensitive controls. A prototype of that was leaked in 2005 btw.
They also came out with the flat display, rounded corners, silver bezel look before Apple. I'm surprised they aren't applying Apple's threshold for suing and crying foul that Apple basically ripped off the front of their digital picture frame's design to make the iPad.
There's no cognitive dissonance because that's not what would happen. Insurance companies would still cover treatment for non-vaccinated people. They would just charge higher premiums if you choose not to get vaccinated, like they do for smokers. The additional cost to society of foregoing vaccination gets converted into an additional cost the anti-vaxxer has to pay to for medical insurance.
$0.99 is completely relevant. Say 100,000 people share a song via bittorrent. That means 100,000 copies were made (well, technically 99,999, but it's close enough). Which means on average each person made one copy. Which means the average theft (their word, not mine) per person is $0.99.
Thing is, if that's their reasoning, then Tenenbaum being fined $675,000 means everyone who shared files with her is free and clear. That's the hole in the "making available" argument. By definition if x people are sharing files, there are x copies being made, so each person is responsible for just one illegal copy. If you sue an individual as if they were an illegal bootleg CD business to make them are responsible for all those copies, then the people who got CDs from the business didn't commit a crime.
It has to be one or the other. If you make it both like the *AA wants it to be, then the potential total fines for x people each copying a song will be for x^x copies, which is nonsense.
They relieve the manufacturer and local retailers from having to do this sort of market analysis, demand prediction, and cross-country distribution. The exceptions you mention (Amazon, Walmart) are large enough to do all this themselves. But a mom & pop retail shop or a small local manufacturer would be completely lost trying to do this sort of market analysis and distribution on their own. Yes distributors can and do gouge, but they also add legitimate value to the supply chain.
With Internet shopping and individual-level access to freight services (UPS, Fedex), this is slowly changing. But the distributor will always have an advantage because shipping a pallet of 1000 XBoxes cross-country to for local distribution is cheaper than shipping 1000 individual XBoxes cross-country to individual buyers.
Do note that this isn't because North America is backwards when it comes to honest price advertising. It's because of the different tax structures. In Europe, taxes are mostly national. A nationwide retailer can advertise something for 700 Euros (including tax) and that's the price you'll pay out the door at any of their stores. In the U.S., the taxes are mostly local. Each state has their own sales tax, and many counties and cities add their own sales tax on top of it.
Staples cannot advertise something for $540 here (tax included) because my local Staples has to charge 7.75% sales tax, while the Staples 10 minutes away has to charge 8.5% sales tax. The only way to make it work is to advertise $500+tax. (Well, I suppose all Staples could charge everyone the 8.5% rate and the stores in a 7.75% tax zone could pocket the extra 0.75%. But I think I prefer seeing the ad for $500+tax and keeping the extra 0.75% for myself.)
Currency exchange rates. Sony is a Japanese company and operates using JPY. If something costs them 10000 JPY to make and they have a 20% markup, they can't just look at today's exchange rate (USD$0.0126 per JPY) and set the price at 10000*1.2*0.0126 = $151.20. They have to ask themselves, "How much could the USD go down in the time it takes us to ship this inventory there, sell it, then convert it back to JPY?" Usually that's a timespan of 3 months to a year. So the USD price is set based on their worst-case projection for what'll happen to the USD-JPY exchange rate.
When you buy a grey market lens and have it shipped overseas, or you buy software from an overseas retailer and download it, you're only looking at the exchange rate on the single day of the sale. So there's considerably less uncertainty, and the worst case projection is nowhere near as bad.
I'm not excusing Canon's pricing, but the higher prices outside Japan are not completely unwarranted. Being a Japanese company, Canon's budget projections and business decisions are based on Yen. Whenever they sell in a market which uses a different currency, they have to take into account the risk of currency fluctuation. That is, their pricing outside of Japan has to be based on their worst-case projection for what will happen to the local currency in the coming year. Otherwise they could end up in a situation where they're selling lenses for less than it cost them to make.
You OTOH are not looking at an annual operating budget. You're looking at a single snapshot of currency exchange rates on the day you buy. That considerably reduces the window of currency rate movement, and so Canon's markup outside of Japan seems enormous to you. You're only concerned with how much the USD could drop against the JPY in the day it takes your Japanese friend to buy and ship you the lens. Canon is concerned with how much the USD could drop in the year it takes them to sell their inventory, then convert that USD back to JPY.
I got burned by this a few years back. I took a cross-border job in Canada at near my then-current salary converted to CAD (about USD$0.97 at the time). The first few months were great - the CAD went up to USD$1.07, meaning I'd essentially gotten a 10% pay raise. But then a little over a year later it crashed, dropping to below USD$0.80. None of this affected my Canadian co-workers, since their living expenses were in CAD. But I had to convert my paycheck to USD to pay my bills, so it hit me hard. Any time you're conducting long-term business which involves currency exchange rates, you have to factor in potential movements in exchange rates. (I kept most of my pay in a Canadian bank until the CAD eventually went back up to around USD$1.00. But the money I had to transfer to pay bills at the time was "locked in" at ~USD$0.78. It's a loss I'm never getting back because I didn't consider the possibility of the currency value changing as much as it did during my employment.)
That's a separate issue, easily dealt with like we deal with electrical and gas lines. You have one publicly regulated company which owns the pipes, but are prohibited from selling what the pipes carry. Any other company is allowed to sell what's carried over the pipes. The regulated company is then required to provide 99% coverage, but are unable to leverage that ownership into a service monopoly. Service providers just see flat access to customers, with the differences in costs of the pipes to each customer hidden.
No need for hypothetical utopias. Just look at most of Europe. Their cable/phone line owners are required to sell service at-cost to competitors. Consequently most Europeans have dozens of choices of ISP. There's no fuss over net neutrality because no sane ISP would try to restrict your service that way, and in addition they get lower prices than we do.
Actually, you touch upon the real issue here. Whether Samsung is copying from Apple, whether Apple copied Knight-Ridder, whether Joe is violating the Beatles' IP rights by making a mix CD, etc. is beside the point. The entire rationale for protection of ideas (books, music, movies, software, designs) is that it spurs creative and technological innovation. That is, there's a certain rate of creative innovation if there's no IP protection, and there's a certain rate of creative innovation if there's ironclad IP protection. But in between, with a limited amount of IP protection, the rate of creative innovation exceeds either of these two extremes.
Our focus should be on finding where this rate reaches its maximum and trying to position ourselves as close to it as possible. Blindly focusing on one extreme by mischaracterizing this as "copying = bad" misses the whole point. Too much copying is bad, but too little copying is also bad. An argument based on the assumption that all copying is bad is fundamentally flawed. All this stuff about copyrights, patents, creators holding monopolies over their ideas, etc. are just a means to a goal. The goal itself is increased creative innovation, and frequently that can be accomplished with more copying, not less. When you start putting the means ahead of the goal, you're contradicting the very justification for the existence of IP law.
Actually, both positions are logically pro net-neutrality. They just differ in how it's accomplished.
In Obama's case, he's probably for government regulation of telecommunications. Government regulation is why most of the U.S. has a single cable company and a single phone company as their only choices for Internet service. Municipal governments have granted local cable and phone monopolies. Because of this artificial duopoly, government-enforced net neutrality is needed.
In Romney's case, he's against government regulation. Presumably this includes telecommunications. So no government mandated duopolies - any cable or phone company could compete to offer you service. In such a highly competitive environment, the government does not need to enforce net neutrality because any ISP which artificially restricts or slows down customers' Internet service in an annoying way will quickly find their customers switching service to a competitor who offers net neutrality.
It's just the greedy idiots running the duopoly cable and phone services who are logically inconsistent. They want government interference of the market when it comes to them getting a duopoly. But they oppose government interference when it comes to net neutrality. The only reason they think they can get away with demanding ransom payments from Google et al for access to their customers is because they know their customers can't switch. (Romney may actually fall in this category; I can't say for sure since I don't know his position on government granted phone/cable monopolies.)
That ain't how it works. For the probabilities to multiply like that and provide redundancy, the vulnerabilities have to be independent events. Burning through O-rings isn't an independent event. A condition which causes one O-ring to leak and burn through (cold weather) is highly likely to affect subsequent O-rings. So you aren't really making things safer by adding an extra O-ring.
At Fukushima, it looks like they had a dozen or so backup generators on the theory that if one has a (say) 1 in 10 chance of failing, then the chance of all of them failing is 1 in 10^12. But nearly all of them were located in the same place, so a single event (a tsunami) which took out one generator took out all of them. Having multiple generators situated this way did not provide redundancy because they weren't vulnerable to independent events. They were vulnerable to the same event.
What they needed to do was put the generators in different locations, with different fuel sources, probably even different manufacturers and fuel types. That way an event which affected one would not affect the others, making their vulnerabilities independent events. The generators at reactors 5-6 were located further uphill, and thus survived the tsunami intact and were able to keep the fuel storage tanks there cooled.
Actually the WSJ article is by a professor of physics at UC Berkeley. And he is spot on about the huge mischaracterization of the risk assigned to nuclear power (including by insurance adjusters). People in general suck at rationally analyzing extremely rare events with huge consequences. For nuclear power, fear of another Chernobyl overwhelms the rational fact that historically it's the safest power source man has ever invented. For lotteries, the desire to hit the jackpot overwhelms the rational fact that nearly everyone who plays loses money, and even on average you lose money.
The market value of something is based on two things: How much it costs to provide, and how much people are willing to pay for it. In this case an unlisted number is worth more than $60/yr for some people, so they're willing to pay for it.
Normally, competition would drive the market price down to just above the cost to provide the service. But since our government has done such a wonderful job granting local monopolies to all the phone companies, the price remains up at near what people are willing to pay for it.