If anybody could have thought of it why didn't they?
They did. My dining room table has rounded edge. So did my old TV. So does my keyboard. They all predated the iPad. Apple patented "round corners on a table form factor". They weren't the first ones to think of it, just the first ones to patent it.
(And since Apple fans seem to always point this out, here's what the back looks like. Obviously it's different since it's not a tablet, but it's still very similar. The point isn't that Samsung invented the iPad before the iPad. It's that the design elements Apple is claiming ownership of in tablet-space were all widely used elsewhere before the iPad, and thus shouldn't be worthy of protection in tablet-space.)
It matters because future Samsung products will be designed to not look so identical to an iPad that their own lawyers can't even tell them apart (in court they couldn't tell the difference between their own products and an iPad).
Seems the Apple reality distortion field didn't die with Jobs. What really happened is that the lawyers the judge was questioning said he couldn't tell them apart, but when the judge asked if the others could, another quickly supplied the correct answer. In other words, they could tell the difference.
Koh frequently remarked on the similarity between each company's tablets. At one point during the hearing, she held one black glass tablet in each hand above her head, and asked Sullivan if she could identify which company produced which.
"Not at this distance your honor," said Sullivan, who stood at a podium roughly ten feet away.
"Can any of Samsung's lawyers tell me which one is Samsung and which one is Apple?" Koh asked. A moment later, one of the lawyers supplied the right answer.
But of course what really happened is rather inconvenient for Apple fans' theory that the Galaxy Tab's design must be a ripoff of the iPad, instead of taking its design cues from another Samsung product. So that last sentence gets cut out from their retelling of the story, thus creating an alternate reality which better fits their predetermined view.
As for the lawyer who couldn't tell them apart, she's in her mid 50s, so probably doesn't have the best eyesight.
In my, NOT so humble opinion, the person who builds a successful business contributes more to society than most charities and than any government.
In general I agree with you about businesses contributing more to society. I am, however, a bit more discerning.
The way businesses contribute to society is by improving productivity - whether by increased efficiency, or by inventing new methods of doing things. That's the bottom line. A person used to be able to till one acre of land a day. Businesses (or rather, people working through business trade) have added tractors, fertilizers, irrigation, seed cultivation, and a host of other improvements to where that single person can now till several hundred acres a day. That's what gives him the additional income (also a representation of productivity) to afford a car, widescreen TV, go on vacations, etc.
Not all trade increases productivity however. The economics of a free market work best when the players make rational decisions regarding their purchases. But people by nature aren't completely rational. They can be seduced, confused, mislead, or pressured into a sub-optimal buying decision. Generally we call these people swindlers, con artists, scammers. But there's one profession which straddles the line - marketing.
When marketing informs people of a useful product they didn't know about before, that improves productivity. When marketing misleads, seduces, or pressures people into buying a sub-optimal choice, that reduces productivity. I look at people paying huge premiums to own Apple products, who are convinced they're the best when they can't even answer a single question about the capabilities of a competing product, and I have to think there's a lot of the latter going on. Are people who buy Apple products really more productive than those who buy competing products? Other than a placebo effect from the feel-good factor, I haven't seen any conclusive evidence that they are. In which case the huge gobs of money Apple is making as profit could've better served society if spent more rationally elsewhere, instead of stuffing Apple's coffers.
I don't begrudge people's freedom of choice. If they want to buy something glitzy which is overpriced, I believe it's completely their choice to do so. What I'm saying is that people's frequently irrational choices means that a successful business does not automatically equate to an improvement of society (increased productivity). It is possible to have a successful business which detracts from society.
Just another reason to kick these jerks out of office. If you don't like a law then change it, if your job is to enforce the law and you don't like it then don't run for the job of enforcing the law you don't like, and can't change.
No, that's one of the checks and balances built into the system. For a law to be effective, all three branches of government have to be on board - the legislative, judicial, and executive. If the legislature doesn't like a law, they simply don't pass it. If the judicial doesn't like a law, they simply invalidate it. And if the executive doesn't like a law, they simply don't enforce it. The last thing you want is for the people whose job it is to enforce the law to rubber-stamp whatever the legislative and judicial branches of government decide.
A comfortable setting for backlight brightness depends on the ambient lighting. A moderate setting for indoor use is woefully inadequate in sunlight. And a setting which is moderately usable in sunlight will be blinding indoors. In that respect, you cannot have a backlight which is "too bright" unless it's brighter than sunlight. In other lighting, you can simply turn it down.
i.e. Don't think of backlight brightness as "how bright is the screen". Think of it as "How wide a variety of lighting conditions can I use this device comfortably?"
Even with tax supported subsidies, gas isn't cheap.
On average, a gallon of gas receives about 2 cents in subsidies. And on average, federal, state, and local fuel taxes on gasoline are about 50 cents per gallon in the U.S. The subsidies are negligible, and the taxes significantly increase the cost of gas. (Not that they're unwarranted.)
Gas shill Luddites would have us using a hundred year old technology instead of solving the technological problems that new technology always presents, all the while denying that there can be any negative consequences from any technology filling the coffers of right wing bloviating ignoramuses.
Just because something is new doesn't automatically mean it's better. I've been following EVs pretty closely. (Back when hybrids were first introduced, I was one of the few voices supporting them due to their increased efficiency. The environmental groups opposed them because they were still 100% gasoline vehicles, instead of electric like they wanted.) I'd suggest checking your political slant at the door before delving into what is fundamentally a technical problem.
EVs are still nowhere near solving the problem of energy density. If you look at the amount of usable energy in gasoline (i.e. factor in the ICE's ~30% efficiency), and try to match that with batteries, you're still looking at batteries needing about 25x the weight to match gasoline. And even if you solve the weight problem, charging is still a huge issue. Imagine the energy of two cars traveling at 60 mph colliding head-on. That's the amount of energy which passes through the hose every second when you refuel at a gas station. If you try to pump that much energy that quickly through an electric cable the size of a gas pump hose, it will melt. Something radical will have to be developed to enable recharging to be as quick and convenient as filling up at a gas station.
As an engineer, it seems far more likely to me that biofuels are going to win out in the end. For transportation, energy density is king. And unless there's some huge breakthrough in battery tech, it will be decades if not a century before battery energy density and recharging rates approach that of simply sloshing around a few gallons of liquid chemical fuel. The corn ethanol scam notwithstanding, alcohol-based fuels are easily derived from the sugars in plant matter, as our ancestors have done for millenia making alcoholic beverages. Right now plants high in sugar are the focus (which is why corn sucks), but if we can do something like cultivate the bacteria in termite guts which break down cellulose, that opens up all plant matter (cellulose is basically a really long sugar molecule). And except for the problem of alcohol dissolving current seals, modern ICE designs can easily be adapted to run off of alcohol.
If Apple retains their tablet advantage for a few years I'd expect them to start getting looked at from an anti-trust standpoint.
Apple has continuously been losing tablet market share, it's just that the enamored press isn't reporting it. When the iPad first came out, its tablet market share was over 90%. Since then, most references I'd seen put it at 75%. The latest figures (once you dig through the "I love Apple; Apple is lord" spin) puts it at just 63%. The numbers are all there, but the press is so busy fawning over Apple that you have to do your own market analysis to see what's going on. Ignore the editorializing and just look at the raw numbers.
So a couple years ago I was recollecting to a friend who is in the U.S. Coast Guard about a science program I had seen on TV about a new boat the CG was experimenting with which used hydrofoils to lift the main hull clear of the water when the boat was at speed. I asked him whatever happened to that program as it looked super interesting and promising for high speed water craft. He said they were abandoned because they would routinely be cruising along and strike a submerged log floating in the water which would rip one or more of the hydro foil skis off, and that would be the end of that boat. It happened *all* the time.
The Navy had a bigger hydrofoil project - the Pegasus class, built by Boeing. Hitting a submerged log is a euphemism. The story I heard (from some of the guys who helped design and test it for the Navy) was that they were averaging one whale strike a year per ship.
Boeing even took that into consideration with its design. The foils need to rotate up anyway for slow-speed operation in shallow harbors. So on the front foil, they added what they called a structural fuse. Like an electrical fuse is designed to burn out before the wiring does, they added a big metal bar to the linkage holding the foils in place. The bar was designed to break before the foil or its mounting points on the hull if the foil struck anything (a whale or a log). Once the bar broke, the foil would be free to collapse upward. The ship wouldn't be very operational afterwards and would suffer minor damage, but at least it wouldn't sink and an expensive foil wouldn't be ripped off. From what I was told, it worked pretty well. But the frequency of whale strikes*, and the downtime associated with recovering and repairing the ship after one, was just too much and they canceled the program.
Boeing adapted most of the technology into a passenger hydrofoil which I believe is still in service in a few areas around the world. They eventually sold the design and rights to Kawasaki Heavy Industries. I got to ride one when I visited Japan, and it feels more like flying in a plane that it does riding a ship. There's a slight rocking motion, but it's very muted compared to a regular monohull or catamaran. The hull is above the waves and swells, so the ship is mostly unaffected by them.
* The foils are basically wings "flying" underwater and are bound by much of the same physics as aircraft wings. If you go too slowly, they stall and the ship sinks bank into the water. A twist though is that you can get cavitation along the top of the foil. In the air, a wing creates a low pressure zone on top, causing the air underneath to lift the plane. In the water, this low pressure zone can drop so much in pressure that the water boils into vapor and cavitates. Once it cavitates, the water flow is disrupted and the foil loses its lift. (Same problem that propellers suffer, unless they're designed to supercavitate - generate thrust despite cavitating.)
However, since water increases in pressure rapidly with depth, this can be solved by simply running the foils at a deeper depth. Beyond a certain depth, the ambient water pressure is enough to prevent cavitation. This does mean though that you cannot simply "fly" the ship along the top of the water thus minimizing the danger from whale strikes. The minimum depth of the foils will be determined by their geometry and the weight of the ship. So the foils are usually running several meters underwater, making a whale strike a catastrophic event.
As soon as the US got to the moon, they rested, they waited. While space will be conquered by those who are moving forward.
You call what we're doing today resting? Voyager, Galileo, Cassini, Spirit, Opportunity, and soon Curiosity. Yeah, we're totally waiting, completely stopped all space exploration after reaching the moon./sarcasm
Let me draw a tech analogy. When I was in my 20s, flush with cash from a new job, I wanted a new gaming computer. I didn't want a regular computer like my parents would use, I wanted a badass gaming computer which would blow all others away. I looked at everything which was available and put together a list of parts I wanted. Top of the line CPU, SCSI drives instead of RLL or ESDI, this new thing called SDRAM which was a few % faster than regular RAM, etc. The guy at the shop where I ordered the parts looked at the list, gave a whistle, and said "Damn this is going to be a nice system." And it was. It set me back $3800, but it totally beat everything my friends were using to game on.
For 6 months. In 6 months, technology had progressed to where it was no longer top of the line. In 12 months, the average computer you could buy for $1500 could beat it. In 18 months luddites like my parents could buy a faster system for $1000 at Best Buy. And in 24 months a $750 discount system would blow my computer away. I learned a very expensive lesson about living on the bleeding edge.
Getting to the moon in the 1960s was all about living on the bleeding edge. We paid a crapload of money to beat the Soviets to the moon. It was an interesting high water mark, especially for the time, but not a very productive one. You don't like manned space exploration being deprecated so you deliberately pick definitions which show us slacking ("number of people who have walked on another world"). You completely ignore the other things we're doing in space.
I remember as a kid looking at blurry photos of Jupiter and Saturn shot from the Palomar telescope (at the time the largest telescope in the world). You could make out the bands, some structure in the clouds, and a few gaps in the rings. That was it. Better than what you could see through a backyard telescope, but not by much. The first photos from Pioneer and Voyager were mind-blowing. Like the focus knob on a badly adjusted slide projector had been turned and suddenly everything was clear. Each successive mission answered long-standing questions, and some we hadn't even asked. Why was Iapetus sometimes black, sometimes white? What exactly were the rings of Saturn? Did Titan really have an atmosphere? There are volcanoes on Io!?! Then Hubble was launched and everything in the night sky was new again. And just when I didn't think it could get any better, we had rovers on Mars taking microscopic photos of rock samples, a lander taking photos from the ground on Titan, and multiple spacecraft visiting comets and asteroids with one even managing to land. In a few years we're even going to get data from a probe visiting Pluto. The furthest planet which was barely more than a dot in even the largest telescopes when I was a kid.
The last 3 decades of space science and exploration have been the most productive, most exciting in the few thousand years of civilization. I count myself very fortunate to have lived through them. But because we're not on the bleeding edge anymore, spending nearly 1% of GDP on sending a test pilot to plant a flag on the moon, you claim we're resting, waiting, not moving forward. Well, there's no pleasing some people I guess.
Minimum wage in this country is a joke, and while raising it to be a living wage would, indeed, cause some short-term loss of jobs, over the longer term, as the poorest working people were measurably better off and able to spend more money, it would contribute greatly to the country's economy.
This is so misguided. You're putting morality ahead of reality.
Making the minimum wage a living wage is equivalent to saying anything you can be paid for doing, you should be able to do for a living. Now think about that. I pay kids to shovel the sidewalk for me in winter. Should an adult be able to make a living doing nothing but that all his life? The economy is full of different kinds of jobs, ranging from difficult ones which pay a lot, to easy ones which pay a little but are good working experience. If you raise the minimum wage to where it's a living wage, you're not making life easier for those in those low-end jobs, you're eliminating those jobs from existence.
The whole point of paying people for a job is that the value you get from them doing the job (the productivity they generate) exceeds what you're paying them. I pay the kid with the shovel $8/hr because I can use that hour I save to earn more than $8 (or I value the free hour I get to spend with my family more than $8). You pay the burger flipper $8/hr because by selling the burgers you can net more than $8/hr in earnings. If you can't net more than you're paying them for their labor, there is no point having them do the job. You'd lose money doing it. In other words, it would detract from the country's economy, not contribute to it.
e.g. If you raise the minimum wage to give the janitor a better living, he doesn't get a better living. The company which hired him to clean the offices once every week? It's no longer cost-effective to have him clean every week. The clean office was worth (say) $80/wk, and they were paying him $64/day to clean once a week. Now you raise his wage to $100/day. What's going to happen? It's no longer worth it to clean once a week. So they reschedule him to clean every other week. He's making more money per hour, but he (and all other janitors) are working fewer hours. They'd be the same or worse off than before, and everyone's offices are dirtier. All because you've artificially priced labor above what it's really worth.
Don't get me wrong; I completely support a minimum wage to prohibit exploitative labor wages. But people have got to shake ridiculous the notion that somehow every job is something that an adult should be able to make a living doing, and thus the minimum wage should be a living wage.
Fundamentally, this is an issue of rights vs. practicality. Ideally the author should have exclusive right to distribution of their work. Practically this was easy to do in the old days of printed books and stamped vinyl records. Today, books and music are so easy to copy that completely enforcing authors' rights to control distribution of their work would require creating a legal and enforcement infrastructure whose cost far exceeds the value all authors combined contribute to society (not to mention turns 90%+ of society into criminals). It's completely impractical.
However, since the right in question isn't a human right, but rather an artificial right granted for economic expedience, some compromise can easily resolve the situation. In the old days, wedding photographers used to charge little for the wedding shoot, but would charge a lot for the prints. The wedding shoot itself only took a few hours with small hand-portable equipment. Printing represented the majority of the cost - requiring large equipment and expensive materials, and frequently hours of arduous work retouching to make the picture just right. So this cost structure made sense.
Today the situation has reversed. The most difficult/creative part of the process is the wedding shoot itself. Retouching can be done in a few minutes to a few seconds on a computer, and prints are literally a dime a dozen. Technology has realigned the cost structure to where most of the cost is in the original shoot. Consequently, most wedding photographs today charge a lot of the wedding shoot, and very little for the prints or even give the prints for free. Times changed, and they adapted.
This is what needs to happen to music. The Constitution was written when reproduction and distribution were a large if not the largest cost in the process of getting creative ideas out to the public. Therefore it made sense give authors exclusive control of reproduction/distribution. But today, reproduction/distribution have gotten so cheap it almost can't be measured (200 GB monthly data cap for $50 works out to 0.1 cents per 4 MB MP3). Insisting that authors retain control of reproduction/distribution doesn't reflect the reality of these price changes, and will lead to huge economic inefficiencies if allowed to persist. 100 years from now when everyone could potentially own a solar powered car by printing it on a 3D printer for $500 dollars (2012 dollars), do you really want the automakers holding the copyright on the design charging $30,000 per copy for "distribution"?
The nearly zero cost of reproduction and distribution is why the industry is trying to hold onto traditional copyright law. By all rights, you should be paid for work you do. And when a lot of work was involved in making duplicate copies of your work and distributing them around the country, you deserved to be paid a lot for it. But now that those costs of dropped to near zero, the industry sees a huge profit opportunity - being paid per copy, while paying nearly nothing to make copies. No other industry works like this. If I construct a computer for a client, I get paid for that one computer. If I prepare a meal for a customer, I get paid for that one meal. If I stitch a tear in a shirt, I get paid for that one shirt. Only in the copyrighted industries do we have the concept that a person can work once, then get paid for it over and over without ever lifting a finger again. That idea made sense in old times because reproducing and distributing a work required much effort than lifting a finger. But now that it requires less effort than that, the law needs to change to reflect that economic reality.
You missed easy synchronization of playlists between your computer and the device. That was the biggest improvement IMHO, slightly ahead of the scroll wheel UI. Before the iPod, you pretty much had to be a computer geek to create playlists on your computer and transfer them over to your MP3 player. The iPod put it within reach of ordinary people. Given a choice between an expensive product missing features but which is easy to use, or a cheap product which can do everything but you can't figure out how to use, most regular folks are going to get the expensive one.
The headline implies that US students have more difficulty with reasoning skills than other students as a whole, or that this difficulty is unique to students from the US.
The way I interpreted it is that they only tested U.S. students, so it'd be premature to assume the results extrapolate to students elsewhere. If you have a bunch of green and red apples, and you try a few of the green ones and they taste bad, the correct declarative statement would be "The green apples taste bad." It implies nothing about the red apples - they could taste good or bad, they could even taste worse. Generalizing it to "The apples taste bad" would be premature, and throwing away one of the distinguishing characteristics of your data set (you ate only the green ones).
A big problem I see among people getting caught up in flame wars and internet debates (especially political) is that when they read a statement with multiple possible interpretations, they tend to pick the interpretation which most offends them. I dunno if this is learned or innate, or is self-selection bias (those who are offended tend to speak up more). I think I notice it more because I usually assume most people are nice folks, and thus the least offensive interpretation is what the author intended.
US monetary and political support for Israel dwarfs all other countries combined.
Chicken and egg. The U.S. supports Israel disproportionately because it's a (flawed) democracy which a bunch of people have repeatedly tried to wipe off the map. When someone tried to wipe South Vietnam, South Korea, and Western Europe off the map, we threw disproportionate support their way as well.
After a couple decades of watching everything that goes on there and in the U.S., the conclusion I've reached is that it's the repressive governments there which promote it. Now, the U.S. has been no saint, preferring to support dictators to block the spread of Communism (the Shah), then supporting even worse dictators to block the spread of Islamic Fundamentalism (Saddam Hussein). But the governments there, even in the absence of U.S. support, are pretty fascist and repressive. By most accounts Assad is as bad as if not worse than Hussein, so the supposition that Iraq would've been better off if the U.S. had not supported Hussein in the 1980s is rather speculative IMHO. There's a strong probability that had Hussein not had U.S. support, whover overthrew him would've been just as bad.
When you're doing a bunch of stuff to your own people which would make them hate you and want to overthrow you, what's the best way to control them? Divert their attention to an external threat. Nothing brings people together under the banner of nationalism like a common external threat. The U.S. happens to be pretty convenient because it's the only remaining superpower, and a staunch supporter of Israel. If the populace is growing restless and upset over your domestic policies, unemployment, the cost of milk, whatever, air a few news broadcasts about how terrible the U.S. is for supporting Israel to distract em.
The more democratized Muslim countries (e.g. Indonesia, Turkey, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan) don't seem to have the bloodthirsty hatred of the U.S. that the more repressive ones have.
The Romans used something like that to cool their homes. The room itself doesn't need to be long and skinny (though it helps). All that really matters is that air enters at one end, and exits at the other. You run the incoming air through a long underground pipe which cools the air using the ground (which stays fairly cool in hot weather). Heated air at the other end naturally rises out a vent on the ceiling, drawing in cool air from the pipe. Basically it's like a passive geothermal heat exchanger.
I believe it's time to apply the Sherman Antitrust act. Time to break-up Comcast, Cox, and other monopolies
There's nothing to break up. Those cable companies have local monopolies because the local governments gave it to them. The monopoly problems in the cable industry were caused by government interference with the free market. They granted monopolies in exchange for certain guarantees (like 99.8% of the population had to be covered, or payments made to the city). Take away the government-granted monopolies and the problem fixes itself, no need to break up companies.
The Boston suburb I lived in during grad school was one of those which granted a cable monopoly. The year before I moved, they reconsidered and allowed a second cable company to offer service. My cable bill immediately dropped $10/mo without me even having to switch.
turn-over control of the fiber optic bundles to the Member State government's roads authority, and then LEASE the lines to whatever company each customer chooses (Comcast, Apple, Honda, GM, Microsoft, Walmart, etc).
Well, turning over privately-owned hardware to the State is Communism. But your intentions are in the right place, if poorly expressed. Basically, the companies which own the lines should be prohibited from selling what's carried over the lines. That's an obvious conflict of interest. I've felt the same is true of the mobile phone industry. The phone manufacturers should sell you a phone, the carriers should sell you a service plan, and the carriers should "build" a network by leasing towers from other companies which own the towers. Having one company own the towers, provide the plan, and sell you the phone is too stifling for the free market.
Dunno about Telus in particular, but the way it usually works is:
Google releases new version of Android, gives it to phone manufacturers.
Phone manufacturer has to adopt it to their devices (add drivers, make tweaks like Sense or Touchwiz), gives it to carriers.
Carrier adds their own modifications (pre-installed apps you can't uninstall, disabling certain features like tethering, etc).
Update is rolled out to you.
I'm guessing Telus is a CDMA carrier? Google dropped its level of support for the CDMA Nexus S due to a quirk with the way CDMA operates. Basically, with the GSM versions, Google can give you ICS directly (which was the whole point of the Nexus S). With the CDMA versions, it has to go through the carrier.
Quite the opposite is true for Japan. The real fears were that rolling blackouts would start to affect their manufacturing industry and that it would give rise to a second major crash in their economy.
That doesn't even take into account what happens to a nation which is unable to run cooling or heating. Treating people suffering a condition is many times less efficient on resources than preventing the condition from taking place in the first place.
This is going to sound heartless, but given Japan's population distribution (largest elderly population of any country), universal health care, perennial budget deficits, and massive debt (over 200% of GDP, higher than Greece, Ireland, and Italy), a summer without air conditioning would probably improve their economy by causing a massive die-off of (economically speaking) non-productive members of their society.
What needs to happen is for someone to patent some innocuous plant gene, let it spread throughout the world, then sue everyone. The sheer stupidity of suing people for nature running its course will then become apparent, and we'll get some court precedents established which lay waste to Monsanto's patent licensing model.
I'm a fiscal conservative so normally I'm on the free market side of things like this. But I agree with OP. The problem here is you have a buyer and a seller, and a middleman. The buyer announces he wants to buy something. Before his announcement reaches the seller, a middleman gets his announcement, gets to the seller first, buys him out, then sells to the buyer. There really is nothing of value being added except a few microseconds.
If the buyer never would've found the seller, then yes there's value being added by the middleman. But that's not the case here - the buyer would've found the seller after a second or two. The only reason he doesn't find the seller is because the middleman interfered by buying him out, and so you end up with the middleman justifying his existence by "solving" a problem he himself created. It's circular reasoning.
I don't think the solution is making it illegal though. There's too much overhead figuring which trades were affected this way. As others have suggested, just insert a random delay of a few seconds into trades. Or you could make it so a trader has to hold onto shares he bought for 15 minutes before he's allowed to resell them.
That's the distinction... If Thomas was only a leecher and never uploaded copies, then she could make a reasonable argument about $1. But once she distributed, then she's into the "reasonable royalties and license fees" range.
Nope. That is an artificial distinction crafted to fit the terminology of copyright law. The copyright holder can legally control distribution, so to be a copyright violation the accused must be distributing - i.e. uploading. The RIAA plays it up for all its worth because that's the only legal leg they have to stand on.
If a million people share a song, by definition there are 1 million downloads, and 1 million uploads. On average each filesharer is responsible for one upload.
Put another way, say Thomas shared the song with 100,000 other people. The RIAA's current legal theory is that she is responsible for those 100,000 uploads. So they sue her, win, and somehow extract damages from her. By their argument, the other 100,000 filesharers are innocent of any wrongdoing. They caught the one person responsible for uploading the song to those 100,000 other people who downloaded the song. Since the guilty party in those 100,000 uploads has been convicted and punished, there is no further crime. Those 100,000 other file sharers are free and clear.
So which will it be? Each file sharer is responsible for one upload? Or one filesharer is responsible for all uploads and everyone else is innocent? You can't have it both ways, where among 100,001 filesharers, each and every sharer is responsible for the crimes of the other 100,000. This incidentally is why their damage figures are so unrealistic. If a $1 song is shared n times, damage should be $1*n. But the way they're calculating it, it works out to $1*n*(n-1), which quickly exceeds the GDP of the world. n is the number of filesharers, and (n-1) is the number of people they uploaded to.
The multi-year delay for Galileo following the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion is what's believed to have caused its high gain antenna to get stuck in the closed position. When you have a million parts designed to start being used in 9 months, a 2 year delay introduces all sorts of unforeseen possible modes of failure. The drill is not the only experiment aboard Curiosity. At some point, a risk assessment was made which concluded that launching it with the faulty drill was a better option than delaying the whole mission by 26 months until the next launch window and potentially jeopardizing all the other equipment aboard.
These landers and any probes which might impact a planet/moon are sterilized before being sent to minimize the risk of biological contamination. So yeah, having a man there to troubleshoot the drill on the spot would clearly be an inferior process.
Why didn't someone say, "Presume the test is positive -- let's shoot holes in it." them iterate proving the test until there are no more holes they can think of.
Is that so hard before you spend billions?
The flip side is spending tens of millions thinking of all the possible ways the test could provide a false positive, designing them out of the test, then sending Viking to Mars and having the test come out negative. Then you get criticized or wasting all that money coming up with a test which would generate a foolproof positive result, forgetting that the result could be negative.
Science is like filling an empty map. If you blindly concentrate all your resources in one area of the map, you could end up knowing a lot about an uninteresting place (like say, the middle of the ocean). But if you use a shotgun strategy and first spend minimal resources in lots of locations, you can see where the interesting parts of the map are and concentrate your resources on exploring those in the future.
Viking was the first Mars lander. By no means was it planned to be the last. They put a simple experiment (along with several others) on board which would provide a quick answer to a "gee I wonder what happens if..." question. If it came back negative, oh well. Since it came back positive, then they could spend millions scrutinizing the result and planning a better test for future landers.
I used the MAIL and MM programs all the time, they were called "mail" or sometimes even "electronic mail", but the term "email" (at first usually hyphenated as "e-mail") didn't become widespread til the 80's and seemed like an annoying neologism to me at that time.
If the term "electronic mail" were used before Ayyadurai , I think e-mail as an abbreviation would've been obvious to anyone with a chemistry or physics background. The shorthand notation for 'electron' is e-. All of this was before my time, but that was the first thing that crossed my mind when a college classmate called it e-mail in the late 1980s. I figured it was a clever abbreviation of "electron"-ic mail, which is also a double entendre since the mail is literally composed of electrons rather than paper and ink. Not an abbreviation because 'electronic' starts with the letter 'e'.
Anyway, does it really matter who did the abbreviation first? Do you know who first shortened "motor hotel" to "motel"? Or "remote control" to "remote"? Or "television" to "TV"? Do you care? It might be of some interest to a linguist writing a paper on the development of language, but technically and socially it doesn't matter.
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Heck, even Samsung thought of it before the iPad. They just didn't think of patenting it.
(And since Apple fans seem to always point this out, here's what the back looks like. Obviously it's different since it's not a tablet, but it's still very similar. The point isn't that Samsung invented the iPad before the iPad. It's that the design elements Apple is claiming ownership of in tablet-space were all widely used elsewhere before the iPad, and thus shouldn't be worthy of protection in tablet-space.)
Seems the Apple reality distortion field didn't die with Jobs. What really happened is that the lawyers the judge was questioning said he couldn't tell them apart, but when the judge asked if the others could, another quickly supplied the correct answer. In other words, they could tell the difference.
But of course what really happened is rather inconvenient for Apple fans' theory that the Galaxy Tab's design must be a ripoff of the iPad, instead of taking its design cues from another Samsung product. So that last sentence gets cut out from their retelling of the story, thus creating an alternate reality which better fits their predetermined view.
As for the lawyer who couldn't tell them apart, she's in her mid 50s, so probably doesn't have the best eyesight.
In general I agree with you about businesses contributing more to society. I am, however, a bit more discerning.
The way businesses contribute to society is by improving productivity - whether by increased efficiency, or by inventing new methods of doing things. That's the bottom line. A person used to be able to till one acre of land a day. Businesses (or rather, people working through business trade) have added tractors, fertilizers, irrigation, seed cultivation, and a host of other improvements to where that single person can now till several hundred acres a day. That's what gives him the additional income (also a representation of productivity) to afford a car, widescreen TV, go on vacations, etc.
Not all trade increases productivity however. The economics of a free market work best when the players make rational decisions regarding their purchases. But people by nature aren't completely rational. They can be seduced, confused, mislead, or pressured into a sub-optimal buying decision. Generally we call these people swindlers, con artists, scammers. But there's one profession which straddles the line - marketing.
When marketing informs people of a useful product they didn't know about before, that improves productivity. When marketing misleads, seduces, or pressures people into buying a sub-optimal choice, that reduces productivity. I look at people paying huge premiums to own Apple products, who are convinced they're the best when they can't even answer a single question about the capabilities of a competing product, and I have to think there's a lot of the latter going on. Are people who buy Apple products really more productive than those who buy competing products? Other than a placebo effect from the feel-good factor, I haven't seen any conclusive evidence that they are. In which case the huge gobs of money Apple is making as profit could've better served society if spent more rationally elsewhere, instead of stuffing Apple's coffers.
I don't begrudge people's freedom of choice. If they want to buy something glitzy which is overpriced, I believe it's completely their choice to do so. What I'm saying is that people's frequently irrational choices means that a successful business does not automatically equate to an improvement of society (increased productivity). It is possible to have a successful business which detracts from society.
No, that's one of the checks and balances built into the system. For a law to be effective, all three branches of government have to be on board - the legislative, judicial, and executive. If the legislature doesn't like a law, they simply don't pass it. If the judicial doesn't like a law, they simply invalidate it. And if the executive doesn't like a law, they simply don't enforce it. The last thing you want is for the people whose job it is to enforce the law to rubber-stamp whatever the legislative and judicial branches of government decide.
A comfortable setting for backlight brightness depends on the ambient lighting. A moderate setting for indoor use is woefully inadequate in sunlight. And a setting which is moderately usable in sunlight will be blinding indoors. In that respect, you cannot have a backlight which is "too bright" unless it's brighter than sunlight. In other lighting, you can simply turn it down.
i.e. Don't think of backlight brightness as "how bright is the screen". Think of it as "How wide a variety of lighting conditions can I use this device comfortably?"
On average, a gallon of gas receives about 2 cents in subsidies. And on average, federal, state, and local fuel taxes on gasoline are about 50 cents per gallon in the U.S. The subsidies are negligible, and the taxes significantly increase the cost of gas. (Not that they're unwarranted.)
Just because something is new doesn't automatically mean it's better. I've been following EVs pretty closely. (Back when hybrids were first introduced, I was one of the few voices supporting them due to their increased efficiency. The environmental groups opposed them because they were still 100% gasoline vehicles, instead of electric like they wanted.) I'd suggest checking your political slant at the door before delving into what is fundamentally a technical problem.
EVs are still nowhere near solving the problem of energy density. If you look at the amount of usable energy in gasoline (i.e. factor in the ICE's ~30% efficiency), and try to match that with batteries, you're still looking at batteries needing about 25x the weight to match gasoline. And even if you solve the weight problem, charging is still a huge issue. Imagine the energy of two cars traveling at 60 mph colliding head-on. That's the amount of energy which passes through the hose every second when you refuel at a gas station. If you try to pump that much energy that quickly through an electric cable the size of a gas pump hose, it will melt. Something radical will have to be developed to enable recharging to be as quick and convenient as filling up at a gas station.
As an engineer, it seems far more likely to me that biofuels are going to win out in the end. For transportation, energy density is king. And unless there's some huge breakthrough in battery tech, it will be decades if not a century before battery energy density and recharging rates approach that of simply sloshing around a few gallons of liquid chemical fuel. The corn ethanol scam notwithstanding, alcohol-based fuels are easily derived from the sugars in plant matter, as our ancestors have done for millenia making alcoholic beverages. Right now plants high in sugar are the focus (which is why corn sucks), but if we can do something like cultivate the bacteria in termite guts which break down cellulose, that opens up all plant matter (cellulose is basically a really long sugar molecule). And except for the problem of alcohol dissolving current seals, modern ICE designs can easily be adapted to run off of alcohol.
Apple has continuously been losing tablet market share, it's just that the enamored press isn't reporting it. When the iPad first came out, its tablet market share was over 90%. Since then, most references I'd seen put it at 75%. The latest figures (once you dig through the "I love Apple; Apple is lord" spin) puts it at just 63%. The numbers are all there, but the press is so busy fawning over Apple that you have to do your own market analysis to see what's going on. Ignore the editorializing and just look at the raw numbers.
The Navy had a bigger hydrofoil project - the Pegasus class, built by Boeing. Hitting a submerged log is a euphemism. The story I heard (from some of the guys who helped design and test it for the Navy) was that they were averaging one whale strike a year per ship.
Boeing even took that into consideration with its design. The foils need to rotate up anyway for slow-speed operation in shallow harbors. So on the front foil, they added what they called a structural fuse. Like an electrical fuse is designed to burn out before the wiring does, they added a big metal bar to the linkage holding the foils in place. The bar was designed to break before the foil or its mounting points on the hull if the foil struck anything (a whale or a log). Once the bar broke, the foil would be free to collapse upward. The ship wouldn't be very operational afterwards and would suffer minor damage, but at least it wouldn't sink and an expensive foil wouldn't be ripped off. From what I was told, it worked pretty well. But the frequency of whale strikes*, and the downtime associated with recovering and repairing the ship after one, was just too much and they canceled the program.
Boeing adapted most of the technology into a passenger hydrofoil which I believe is still in service in a few areas around the world. They eventually sold the design and rights to Kawasaki Heavy Industries. I got to ride one when I visited Japan, and it feels more like flying in a plane that it does riding a ship. There's a slight rocking motion, but it's very muted compared to a regular monohull or catamaran. The hull is above the waves and swells, so the ship is mostly unaffected by them.
* The foils are basically wings "flying" underwater and are bound by much of the same physics as aircraft wings. If you go too slowly, they stall and the ship sinks bank into the water. A twist though is that you can get cavitation along the top of the foil. In the air, a wing creates a low pressure zone on top, causing the air underneath to lift the plane. In the water, this low pressure zone can drop so much in pressure that the water boils into vapor and cavitates. Once it cavitates, the water flow is disrupted and the foil loses its lift. (Same problem that propellers suffer, unless they're designed to supercavitate - generate thrust despite cavitating.)
However, since water increases in pressure rapidly with depth, this can be solved by simply running the foils at a deeper depth. Beyond a certain depth, the ambient water pressure is enough to prevent cavitation. This does mean though that you cannot simply "fly" the ship along the top of the water thus minimizing the danger from whale strikes. The minimum depth of the foils will be determined by their geometry and the weight of the ship. So the foils are usually running several meters underwater, making a whale strike a catastrophic event.
You call what we're doing today resting? Voyager, Galileo, Cassini, Spirit, Opportunity, and soon Curiosity. Yeah, we're totally waiting, completely stopped all space exploration after reaching the moon. /sarcasm
Let me draw a tech analogy. When I was in my 20s, flush with cash from a new job, I wanted a new gaming computer. I didn't want a regular computer like my parents would use, I wanted a badass gaming computer which would blow all others away. I looked at everything which was available and put together a list of parts I wanted. Top of the line CPU, SCSI drives instead of RLL or ESDI, this new thing called SDRAM which was a few % faster than regular RAM, etc. The guy at the shop where I ordered the parts looked at the list, gave a whistle, and said "Damn this is going to be a nice system." And it was. It set me back $3800, but it totally beat everything my friends were using to game on.
For 6 months. In 6 months, technology had progressed to where it was no longer top of the line. In 12 months, the average computer you could buy for $1500 could beat it. In 18 months luddites like my parents could buy a faster system for $1000 at Best Buy. And in 24 months a $750 discount system would blow my computer away. I learned a very expensive lesson about living on the bleeding edge.
Getting to the moon in the 1960s was all about living on the bleeding edge. We paid a crapload of money to beat the Soviets to the moon. It was an interesting high water mark, especially for the time, but not a very productive one. You don't like manned space exploration being deprecated so you deliberately pick definitions which show us slacking ("number of people who have walked on another world"). You completely ignore the other things we're doing in space.
I remember as a kid looking at blurry photos of Jupiter and Saturn shot from the Palomar telescope (at the time the largest telescope in the world). You could make out the bands, some structure in the clouds, and a few gaps in the rings. That was it. Better than what you could see through a backyard telescope, but not by much. The first photos from Pioneer and Voyager were mind-blowing. Like the focus knob on a badly adjusted slide projector had been turned and suddenly everything was clear. Each successive mission answered long-standing questions, and some we hadn't even asked. Why was Iapetus sometimes black, sometimes white? What exactly were the rings of Saturn? Did Titan really have an atmosphere? There are volcanoes on Io!?! Then Hubble was launched and everything in the night sky was new again. And just when I didn't think it could get any better, we had rovers on Mars taking microscopic photos of rock samples, a lander taking photos from the ground on Titan, and multiple spacecraft visiting comets and asteroids with one even managing to land. In a few years we're even going to get data from a probe visiting Pluto. The furthest planet which was barely more than a dot in even the largest telescopes when I was a kid.
The last 3 decades of space science and exploration have been the most productive, most exciting in the few thousand years of civilization. I count myself very fortunate to have lived through them. But because we're not on the bleeding edge anymore, spending nearly 1% of GDP on sending a test pilot to plant a flag on the moon, you claim we're resting, waiting, not moving forward. Well, there's no pleasing some people I guess.
This is so misguided. You're putting morality ahead of reality.
Making the minimum wage a living wage is equivalent to saying anything you can be paid for doing, you should be able to do for a living. Now think about that. I pay kids to shovel the sidewalk for me in winter. Should an adult be able to make a living doing nothing but that all his life? The economy is full of different kinds of jobs, ranging from difficult ones which pay a lot, to easy ones which pay a little but are good working experience. If you raise the minimum wage to where it's a living wage, you're not making life easier for those in those low-end jobs, you're eliminating those jobs from existence.
The whole point of paying people for a job is that the value you get from them doing the job (the productivity they generate) exceeds what you're paying them. I pay the kid with the shovel $8/hr because I can use that hour I save to earn more than $8 (or I value the free hour I get to spend with my family more than $8). You pay the burger flipper $8/hr because by selling the burgers you can net more than $8/hr in earnings. If you can't net more than you're paying them for their labor, there is no point having them do the job. You'd lose money doing it. In other words, it would detract from the country's economy, not contribute to it.
e.g. If you raise the minimum wage to give the janitor a better living, he doesn't get a better living. The company which hired him to clean the offices once every week? It's no longer cost-effective to have him clean every week. The clean office was worth (say) $80/wk, and they were paying him $64/day to clean once a week. Now you raise his wage to $100/day. What's going to happen? It's no longer worth it to clean once a week. So they reschedule him to clean every other week. He's making more money per hour, but he (and all other janitors) are working fewer hours. They'd be the same or worse off than before, and everyone's offices are dirtier. All because you've artificially priced labor above what it's really worth.
Don't get me wrong; I completely support a minimum wage to prohibit exploitative labor wages. But people have got to shake ridiculous the notion that somehow every job is something that an adult should be able to make a living doing, and thus the minimum wage should be a living wage.
Fundamentally, this is an issue of rights vs. practicality. Ideally the author should have exclusive right to distribution of their work. Practically this was easy to do in the old days of printed books and stamped vinyl records. Today, books and music are so easy to copy that completely enforcing authors' rights to control distribution of their work would require creating a legal and enforcement infrastructure whose cost far exceeds the value all authors combined contribute to society (not to mention turns 90%+ of society into criminals). It's completely impractical.
However, since the right in question isn't a human right, but rather an artificial right granted for economic expedience, some compromise can easily resolve the situation. In the old days, wedding photographers used to charge little for the wedding shoot, but would charge a lot for the prints. The wedding shoot itself only took a few hours with small hand-portable equipment. Printing represented the majority of the cost - requiring large equipment and expensive materials, and frequently hours of arduous work retouching to make the picture just right. So this cost structure made sense.
Today the situation has reversed. The most difficult/creative part of the process is the wedding shoot itself. Retouching can be done in a few minutes to a few seconds on a computer, and prints are literally a dime a dozen. Technology has realigned the cost structure to where most of the cost is in the original shoot. Consequently, most wedding photographs today charge a lot of the wedding shoot, and very little for the prints or even give the prints for free. Times changed, and they adapted.
This is what needs to happen to music. The Constitution was written when reproduction and distribution were a large if not the largest cost in the process of getting creative ideas out to the public. Therefore it made sense give authors exclusive control of reproduction/distribution. But today, reproduction/distribution have gotten so cheap it almost can't be measured (200 GB monthly data cap for $50 works out to 0.1 cents per 4 MB MP3). Insisting that authors retain control of reproduction/distribution doesn't reflect the reality of these price changes, and will lead to huge economic inefficiencies if allowed to persist. 100 years from now when everyone could potentially own a solar powered car by printing it on a 3D printer for $500 dollars (2012 dollars), do you really want the automakers holding the copyright on the design charging $30,000 per copy for "distribution"?
The nearly zero cost of reproduction and distribution is why the industry is trying to hold onto traditional copyright law. By all rights, you should be paid for work you do. And when a lot of work was involved in making duplicate copies of your work and distributing them around the country, you deserved to be paid a lot for it. But now that those costs of dropped to near zero, the industry sees a huge profit opportunity - being paid per copy, while paying nearly nothing to make copies. No other industry works like this. If I construct a computer for a client, I get paid for that one computer. If I prepare a meal for a customer, I get paid for that one meal. If I stitch a tear in a shirt, I get paid for that one shirt. Only in the copyrighted industries do we have the concept that a person can work once, then get paid for it over and over without ever lifting a finger again. That idea made sense in old times because reproducing and distributing a work required much effort than lifting a finger. But now that it requires less effort than that, the law needs to change to reflect that economic reality.
You missed easy synchronization of playlists between your computer and the device. That was the biggest improvement IMHO, slightly ahead of the scroll wheel UI. Before the iPod, you pretty much had to be a computer geek to create playlists on your computer and transfer them over to your MP3 player. The iPod put it within reach of ordinary people. Given a choice between an expensive product missing features but which is easy to use, or a cheap product which can do everything but you can't figure out how to use, most regular folks are going to get the expensive one.
The way I interpreted it is that they only tested U.S. students, so it'd be premature to assume the results extrapolate to students elsewhere. If you have a bunch of green and red apples, and you try a few of the green ones and they taste bad, the correct declarative statement would be "The green apples taste bad." It implies nothing about the red apples - they could taste good or bad, they could even taste worse. Generalizing it to "The apples taste bad" would be premature, and throwing away one of the distinguishing characteristics of your data set (you ate only the green ones).
A big problem I see among people getting caught up in flame wars and internet debates (especially political) is that when they read a statement with multiple possible interpretations, they tend to pick the interpretation which most offends them. I dunno if this is learned or innate, or is self-selection bias (those who are offended tend to speak up more). I think I notice it more because I usually assume most people are nice folks, and thus the least offensive interpretation is what the author intended.
Chicken and egg. The U.S. supports Israel disproportionately because it's a (flawed) democracy which a bunch of people have repeatedly tried to wipe off the map. When someone tried to wipe South Vietnam, South Korea, and Western Europe off the map, we threw disproportionate support their way as well.
After a couple decades of watching everything that goes on there and in the U.S., the conclusion I've reached is that it's the repressive governments there which promote it. Now, the U.S. has been no saint, preferring to support dictators to block the spread of Communism (the Shah), then supporting even worse dictators to block the spread of Islamic Fundamentalism (Saddam Hussein). But the governments there, even in the absence of U.S. support, are pretty fascist and repressive. By most accounts Assad is as bad as if not worse than Hussein, so the supposition that Iraq would've been better off if the U.S. had not supported Hussein in the 1980s is rather speculative IMHO. There's a strong probability that had Hussein not had U.S. support, whover overthrew him would've been just as bad.
When you're doing a bunch of stuff to your own people which would make them hate you and want to overthrow you, what's the best way to control them? Divert their attention to an external threat. Nothing brings people together under the banner of nationalism like a common external threat. The U.S. happens to be pretty convenient because it's the only remaining superpower, and a staunch supporter of Israel. If the populace is growing restless and upset over your domestic policies, unemployment, the cost of milk, whatever, air a few news broadcasts about how terrible the U.S. is for supporting Israel to distract em.
The more democratized Muslim countries (e.g. Indonesia, Turkey, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan) don't seem to have the bloodthirsty hatred of the U.S. that the more repressive ones have.
The Romans used something like that to cool their homes. The room itself doesn't need to be long and skinny (though it helps). All that really matters is that air enters at one end, and exits at the other. You run the incoming air through a long underground pipe which cools the air using the ground (which stays fairly cool in hot weather). Heated air at the other end naturally rises out a vent on the ceiling, drawing in cool air from the pipe. Basically it's like a passive geothermal heat exchanger.
There's nothing to break up. Those cable companies have local monopolies because the local governments gave it to them. The monopoly problems in the cable industry were caused by government interference with the free market. They granted monopolies in exchange for certain guarantees (like 99.8% of the population had to be covered, or payments made to the city). Take away the government-granted monopolies and the problem fixes itself, no need to break up companies.
The Boston suburb I lived in during grad school was one of those which granted a cable monopoly. The year before I moved, they reconsidered and allowed a second cable company to offer service. My cable bill immediately dropped $10/mo without me even having to switch.
Well, turning over privately-owned hardware to the State is Communism. But your intentions are in the right place, if poorly expressed. Basically, the companies which own the lines should be prohibited from selling what's carried over the lines. That's an obvious conflict of interest. I've felt the same is true of the mobile phone industry. The phone manufacturers should sell you a phone, the carriers should sell you a service plan, and the carriers should "build" a network by leasing towers from other companies which own the towers. Having one company own the towers, provide the plan, and sell you the phone is too stifling for the free market.
Dunno about Telus in particular, but the way it usually works is:
Google releases new version of Android, gives it to phone manufacturers.
Phone manufacturer has to adopt it to their devices (add drivers, make tweaks like Sense or Touchwiz), gives it to carriers.
Carrier adds their own modifications (pre-installed apps you can't uninstall, disabling certain features like tethering, etc).
Update is rolled out to you.
I'm guessing Telus is a CDMA carrier? Google dropped its level of support for the CDMA Nexus S due to a quirk with the way CDMA operates. Basically, with the GSM versions, Google can give you ICS directly (which was the whole point of the Nexus S). With the CDMA versions, it has to go through the carrier.
This is going to sound heartless, but given Japan's population distribution (largest elderly population of any country), universal health care, perennial budget deficits, and massive debt (over 200% of GDP, higher than Greece, Ireland, and Italy), a summer without air conditioning would probably improve their economy by causing a massive die-off of (economically speaking) non-productive members of their society.
What needs to happen is for someone to patent some innocuous plant gene, let it spread throughout the world, then sue everyone. The sheer stupidity of suing people for nature running its course will then become apparent, and we'll get some court precedents established which lay waste to Monsanto's patent licensing model.
I'm a fiscal conservative so normally I'm on the free market side of things like this. But I agree with OP. The problem here is you have a buyer and a seller, and a middleman. The buyer announces he wants to buy something. Before his announcement reaches the seller, a middleman gets his announcement, gets to the seller first, buys him out, then sells to the buyer. There really is nothing of value being added except a few microseconds.
If the buyer never would've found the seller, then yes there's value being added by the middleman. But that's not the case here - the buyer would've found the seller after a second or two. The only reason he doesn't find the seller is because the middleman interfered by buying him out, and so you end up with the middleman justifying his existence by "solving" a problem he himself created. It's circular reasoning.
I don't think the solution is making it illegal though. There's too much overhead figuring which trades were affected this way. As others have suggested, just insert a random delay of a few seconds into trades. Or you could make it so a trader has to hold onto shares he bought for 15 minutes before he's allowed to resell them.
Nope. That is an artificial distinction crafted to fit the terminology of copyright law. The copyright holder can legally control distribution, so to be a copyright violation the accused must be distributing - i.e. uploading. The RIAA plays it up for all its worth because that's the only legal leg they have to stand on.
If a million people share a song, by definition there are 1 million downloads, and 1 million uploads. On average each filesharer is responsible for one upload.
Put another way, say Thomas shared the song with 100,000 other people. The RIAA's current legal theory is that she is responsible for those 100,000 uploads. So they sue her, win, and somehow extract damages from her. By their argument, the other 100,000 filesharers are innocent of any wrongdoing. They caught the one person responsible for uploading the song to those 100,000 other people who downloaded the song. Since the guilty party in those 100,000 uploads has been convicted and punished, there is no further crime. Those 100,000 other file sharers are free and clear.
So which will it be? Each file sharer is responsible for one upload? Or one filesharer is responsible for all uploads and everyone else is innocent? You can't have it both ways, where among 100,001 filesharers, each and every sharer is responsible for the crimes of the other 100,000. This incidentally is why their damage figures are so unrealistic. If a $1 song is shared n times, damage should be $1*n. But the way they're calculating it, it works out to $1*n*(n-1), which quickly exceeds the GDP of the world. n is the number of filesharers, and (n-1) is the number of people they uploaded to.
The multi-year delay for Galileo following the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion is what's believed to have caused its high gain antenna to get stuck in the closed position. When you have a million parts designed to start being used in 9 months, a 2 year delay introduces all sorts of unforeseen possible modes of failure. The drill is not the only experiment aboard Curiosity. At some point, a risk assessment was made which concluded that launching it with the faulty drill was a better option than delaying the whole mission by 26 months until the next launch window and potentially jeopardizing all the other equipment aboard.
These landers and any probes which might impact a planet/moon are sterilized before being sent to minimize the risk of biological contamination. So yeah, having a man there to troubleshoot the drill on the spot would clearly be an inferior process.
The flip side is spending tens of millions thinking of all the possible ways the test could provide a false positive, designing them out of the test, then sending Viking to Mars and having the test come out negative. Then you get criticized or wasting all that money coming up with a test which would generate a foolproof positive result, forgetting that the result could be negative.
Science is like filling an empty map. If you blindly concentrate all your resources in one area of the map, you could end up knowing a lot about an uninteresting place (like say, the middle of the ocean). But if you use a shotgun strategy and first spend minimal resources in lots of locations, you can see where the interesting parts of the map are and concentrate your resources on exploring those in the future.
Viking was the first Mars lander. By no means was it planned to be the last. They put a simple experiment (along with several others) on board which would provide a quick answer to a "gee I wonder what happens if..." question. If it came back negative, oh well. Since it came back positive, then they could spend millions scrutinizing the result and planning a better test for future landers.
If the term "electronic mail" were used before Ayyadurai , I think e-mail as an abbreviation would've been obvious to anyone with a chemistry or physics background. The shorthand notation for 'electron' is e-. All of this was before my time, but that was the first thing that crossed my mind when a college classmate called it e-mail in the late 1980s. I figured it was a clever abbreviation of "electron"-ic mail, which is also a double entendre since the mail is literally composed of electrons rather than paper and ink. Not an abbreviation because 'electronic' starts with the letter 'e'.
Anyway, does it really matter who did the abbreviation first? Do you know who first shortened "motor hotel" to "motel"? Or "remote control" to "remote"? Or "television" to "TV"? Do you care? It might be of some interest to a linguist writing a paper on the development of language, but technically and socially it doesn't matter.