Can someone please explain why a strong gravitational field would require more fuel? Wouldn't a stronger pull require less fuel to get there since the Jovian gravity is pulling you there?
You have to remember that there's no friction in space. Going down a gravity well is easy, but stopping at the bottom requires energy. It's like a roller coaster heading down from a peak, with Jupiter at the bottom. As you approach Jupiter, it's gravity will speed you up (relative to Jupiter). Unless you put in energy to counteract that extra speed, you shoot past and fly right up the other side of the gravity well (up the next peak).
That said, the summary is wrong. Jupiter has lots of moons. You can do the opposite of a gravitational slingshot. Approach the moon from the forward direction, and thereby transfer some of your kinetic energy to the moon. Do it enough times and you're in Jupiter's orbit. That's pretty much how Galileo and Cassini were inserted into orbits around Jupiter and Saturn. You only need fuel or aerobraking to enter into orbit around planets without large moons, like Mars.
Remember the 'valley girl' speech pattern of the 80's? You don't really hear that much anymore.
It didn't go away, it got absorbed into regular American English (and consequently Internet English). Look at the list of example phrases and OMG! you'll see many which are common interjections today. "Like" in particular is now an accepted filler word, used by many people instead of "uh" or "um" or "you know". (You may not notice when people say filler words because it's common for your brain to filter them out. But they're very commonly used when talking - it's an easy way to distinguish TV and movie speech from real speech.)
The affected intonation mostly disappeared, but the phrases got picked up by common culture. Same thing with surfer slang (whoa, awesome, shred, stoked, etc. although I had my bet on bogus entering common English since there isn't a good alternative).
Doesn't this just turn your EV into a less-efficient gasoline-powered vehicle?
There's a common misconception that because an EV puts out no emissions, that it's 100% clean. And that because electric motors are 80%-90% efficient, EVs are 80%-90% efficient.
About 2/3rds of electricity is generated from fossil fuels, burned in power stations operating at about 40% efficiency. So if you can get the efficiency of this gizmo high enough, you could actually exceed the overall efficiency of plug-in EVs. The transition point would be at about 75% efficiency by my back of the envelope calcs. Of course then the question becomes, why not put these in the power plants. (If you're anti-nuclear, about 2/3rds of that remaining 1/3rd comes from nuclear. Only about 1/9th of our electricity comes from renewables. So that transition point shifts down to about 50% efficiency.)
If your fuel source is predominantly biofuel, then that transition point drops even further.
If it's the median, then it means what the summary is implying.
If it's the mean, it could just be that the ones who do commit fraud are skewing the sample. And that if you subtract them, the error rate of the people who don't share is no different than the error rate of those who do share.
Not saying it's one or the other. Just pointing out that in this particular case, it's a very important distinction.
I was wondering about that. Whether the summary was correct in that Facebook worked quickly to fix it because the exploit spread across the Internet, or if it was because someone posted Zuckerberg's private pictures.
The point is that sending aircraft into someone else' airspace without permission is an aggressive act forbidden by international law and treaties that the US is a party to.
It's something that happens allthetime. Usually all that comes from it is the intruding flight gets intercepted and escorted out, then the country later files a diplomatic protest.
Hostilities arising from such intrusions are the exception, not the norm, and almost always happen after visual confirmation of the target by a pilot in a chase plane. A shoot first, ask questions later policy leads to terrible incidents like Iran Air 655 and Korean Air 007. Given the size of the RQ-170 (wingspan estimated at 60-90 feet), it could easily have been a small commercial airliner or a civilian business jet.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, online services were walled gardens. There were of course minor exceptions - BBSes who all exchanged information with each other via FidoNet. But the big names were CompuServe, GEnie, MSN, and (what would eventually become the 900 lb gorilla) America Online. They had their day, until the Internet tore down those walls. Today, all those services are pretty much gone. MSN is no longer a subscription service. AOL is still hanging on, mostly due to monthly service revenue from old people who don't know that they can get their Internet without having to pay AOL.
I think what happens is that when a new type of service/product is created, the initial creators and early copycats end up with most of the market share. Then they try setting up walls to protect their gardens and preserve their market share. Eventually an open alternative comes along which works better and/or is as easy to use, and the walls fall. Arguably, something similar happened in the 1970s/1980s with computer operating systems. Each computer maker had their own OS with its own ecosphere and apps. Eventually, MS-DOS ended up winning the market not because it was the best, but because it (and the PC platform it ran on) was open.
I suppose it's possible that, eventually, some company could "get it right" and preserve their walled garden in perpetuity. I'd argue Facebook is much closer to this than Apple.* But based on history, the safe bet is against any company managing to pull this off. Eventually something bigger and better comes along which consigns the original giant to a niche, if not irrelevance. *(Google is open enough that they allow you to extract the data stored in their services - their walls rather porous.)
The one market where I haven't seen this happening is gaming consoles. But I think that's because the nature of game compatibility/hardware and the refresh cycle forces the entire industry to "reboot" every few years. First it was Atari, then Nintendo, then Sony, and currently it's split between Nintendo (Wii) and Microsoft (Xbox). The amount of time between these reboots is short enough that an open platform can't develop. But the reboots also mean that each company has to start over from scratch every few years to maintain dominance.
"BP-owned toxic lake"
I'll be the last to support our crony commie-capitalist system, but that's pretty far fetched agitprop.
ARCO ran the place until '82, mothballed it, and then BP bought ARCO 18 years later in '00.
Its a "sins of the father afflicting the sons" argument at best. At worst its a "my great-great-great grandfather immigrated here two decades after the civil war ended, therefore I'm liable and should pay restitution to the g-g-g-g-g-g-great grandsons of former slaves.". BP has about as much to do with what happened to this mine, as I do with what happened on plantations in the 1830s.
I'm actually one who does support our crony capitalist system, but you're apologizing too much. One of the tradeoffs of corporate personhood is that since corporations cannot die like a real person (taking their knowledge, skills, and ethics to the grave), their liabilities must be transferred when they're bought and sold. So in this case, BP is in fact liable for the sins of ARCO, and any companies whose liabilities ARCO likewise acquired.
It does bring up an interesting question though. According to TFA, the biologists studying the organisms in the lake patented some of the yeast they found. Shouldn't the patent belong to ARCO/BP, as the progenitor of said yeast? It sounds like a repeat of that spat where some researchers patented some gene derived from a patient's excised cancer tumor, with the patient arguing that the patent rightfully belongs to him since the gene was originally from his body part. "Invention" vs. discovery.
Except for the bouncing animation patent (which seems dubious to me, since bouncing when reaching a limit has been a staple of cartoon animation for decades, and of rubber balls for centuries), the patents in question are design patents. That's the main reason the judge denied the injunction. A design patent (in the U.S.) has to be purely ornamental - e.g. the distinctive shape of a Coca-Cola bottle is purely artistic and serves no function purpose.
To paraphrase the judge, a handheld size, flat rectangular face, and rounded corners are all functional, and cannot be protected by a design patent. Apple might be able to get a design patent on rounded corners of one specific radius on a tablet, but they can't prevent other tablet makers from using any rounded corners at all. I'm not sure how design patents work in Germany (the Netherlands dismissed Apple's lawsuit for the EU in general). But if the current injunction against Samsung in Germany stands, expect everyone there to start taking out design patents on every shape and form you can imagine, and suing anyone making anything with basic shapes like polygons, rectangles, circles, etc. German industry will be crippled.
A laptop i3 will burn close to 30 Watts while running a benchmark. The Tegra 3 peaks at about 2 Watts. So in performance per Watt, the Tegra 3 is about 4x as efficient as your i3.
Or put another way, if you hooked up the Tegra 3 and the i3 to same-size batteries and calculated pi until the battery died, the Tegra 3 would calculate 4x as many digits as the i3. Now which one do you want on your battery-powered phone/tablet?
Assuming an equal distribution of votes, negative mod systems only work well if every topic being modded has an equal number of people for and against. If there are an unequal number of supporters vs. detractors, negative mods become a force multiplier allowing the majority to squelch the minority. To quote from my previous post on it...
Say 4 of 5 people hold a majority view here. Say there are 400 posts representing the majority view, and 100 posts representing the minority view. Say on average there is 1 randomly selected moderator per 10 posters given one mod point, and the moderators' views have the same distribution. And pretend that Slashdot only allowed positive mods.
There are 40 mods giving +1 to 400 majority-view posts, for an average of 40/400 = +0.1 per post.
There are 10 mods giving +1 to the 100 minority-view posts, also for an average of +0.1 per post.
Note how the average rating within each position is the same. Also note that the number of up-mods is proportional to the number of posts supporting each viewpoint. So both viewpoints are represented in proportion to their popularity, and the sum total of their ratings are likewise proportional to their popularity. e.g. if 1 in 50 posts were worthy of a +5 ranking and the rest were +0, the majority view would have 8 +5 posts, the minority view would have 2 +5 posts. Exactly the same 4:1 ratio as the majority-to-minority ratio.
Now toss in negative mods. Say one in five mods gives a -1 to an opposing viewpoint rather than a +1 to their favored viewpoint.
The majority view gets 400 posts, 32 +1 mods, and 2 -1 mods, for an overall average score of 30/400 = +0.075 per post.
The minority view gets 100 posts, 8 +1 mods, and 8 -1 mods, for an overall average score of 0 per post.
If the ratio of negative to positive mods is greater than the ratio of minority to majority views, the posts representing the minority view actually end up with an average negative ranking. Algebraically:
p = % of positive moderations
n = % of negative moderations
A = majority population
B = minority population
Average majority view ranking = Ap - Bn
Average minority view ranking = Bp - An
It's pretty easy to see that if A > B, this skews the majority rankings to be higher than the minority rankings. And if A >> B, B basically has no say in the rankings, and the rankings are almost entirely determined by A's opinions.
In practical terms, this means that if Google allowed user-controlled negative votes on their search rankings, unpopular topics like Linux would be modded down to oblivion by the much larger number of Windows users. Within the scope of Linux, a particular Linux site might be very useful and worthy of a high ranking. But the number of Windows users who accidentally got the site as a search result would probably outnumber the number of Linux users actually looking for the site. Consequently the negative mods from those Windows users who saw it as an irrelevant search result, would outnumber the positive mods from Linux users, and the useful site would wind up with a negative ranking.
It is funny how pretty much your EXACT argument was made some 100+ years ago. Today, in the industrialized world, we have a higher standard of living, on average, than the richest kings did 500, or even 200, years ago.
The problem with your supposition is that opposition to automation does not result in a regression in technological and economic progress. It merely slows it down. So the argument isn't that we have a lower standard of living today than in the past. It's that the standard of living we enjoy today is lower than what it could be if we had embraced automation fully instead of fought against it.
It's a difficult thing to assess because you have to compare reality with a hypothetical. But locally, it can show up more demonstrably. In the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. resisted automation. Consequently, cost of manufacturing in the U.S. was higher than it could have been. When another country (China) was willing to compete seriously in the manufacturing sector with lower labor costs, most of those jobs which were saved in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s ended up moving to China. Had the U.S. embraced automation in past decades, its cost of manufacturing would have been lower, and less manufacturing would have been lost to China. Those who were replaced by machines would have/should have been retrained for other jobs related to maintaining those machines, and many/most of them would still be working in the U.S. had we embraced automation. But because we didn't, we lost those jobs anyway, just to China instead of to automation.
It's not completely one-sided though. Retraining people is a huge undertaking. The transition to automation has to be done gradually enough to allow retraining. And with enough support for the workers' retraining so that they don't prioritize their short-term benefit (keeping their assembly line job) over the long-term benefit (a better job, and cheaper goods) and revolt.
185F is reasonable for the temperature the coffee is prepared at, not the temperature at which it is served.
Bunn (maker of most of the commercial coffee brewing machines in the U.S.) recommends the coffee be held at 175-185F. This is the temperature when it comes out of the serving machine (it is held in the serving machine prior), and the temperature setting which was at issue in the lawsuit. It is the same temperature used by restaurants nationwide, including Starbucks.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit surveyed coffee temperatures at other restaurants nearby, and stated "Other establishments sell coffee at substantially lower temperatures." Note the wording. They didn't give the average temp, nor a range of temps. They simply stated that some restaurants sold their coffee at a much lower temperature. If they had found that McDonalds coffee was unusually hot, they would have stated something more like "most establishments sell coffee at substantially lower temperatures." That they didn't indicates it's just deceptive wording used to take a survey which didn't support their case, and made it appear as if it did.
McDonald's was overheating it so that it would stay hot longer (allowing them to serve it for a longer period, and thus make fewer pots over the day).
McDonalds set the temperature that high because people complained about it getting too cold by the time they got home or to work. After the lawsuit they tried lowering the temperature, but too many people complained and they raised it again. Today, McDonalds follows Bunn's 175-185 F recommendation. The lawsuit changed nothing about how coffee is served.
And how do you figure hotter coffee leads to brewing fewer pots each day? These machines are temperature regulated. If you set it at 185F, it will keep the coffee at 185F all day. If you set it at 165F, it'll keep the coffee at 165F all day. You don't brew it, use it until it cools, then throw the rest out once it gets too cool. If anything, hotter coffee would lead to brewing more coffee, as the water and aromatics will evaporate more quickly at higher temperature.
If you take the number of burns reported from spilled McDonalds coffee, and divide it by the number of cups of coffee McDonalds sold in the same time period of those spills, you'll arrive at an accident rate for McDonalds coffee. If you then compare that accident rate to other accident rates, you discover a funny thing. If you drive 5 miles round trip to buy your McDonalds coffee, you are actually more likely to die in an auto accident buying your cup of coffee, than you are to be burned from spilling it on yourself.
Nice subtle job of mis-framing, there. Lemme fix that for you: since corporations are in fact already comprised of people who individually are already represented in Congress, why should those people receive twice the representation as anyone who doesn't work for said corporation, by allowing the corporation itself explicit representation?
So then tax the people who work for said corporation, instead of taxing the corporation. Oh wait, we already tax the people working at corporations, so by your reasoning they are being double-taxed.
So a guy tries to extort a jov from a big corporation and gets busted. Meanwhile, corporate extortion is alive and well.
If you cannot see the difference between these two, then you are suffering from an entitlement mentality. He is not entitled to a job at Marriott. Illinois is not entitled to have any company (or person) stay within their borders. If he does something to coerce Marriott to give him a job which they don't want to give him, that is fraud. If Illinois does something to coerce the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to stay in the state when they want to leave, that is fraud.
If he were already employed by Marriott and decided to quit, then there is nothing wrong with that. Likewise, if the Chicago Mercantile decides to quit residing in Illinois, there is nothing wrong with that.
Now we see two large Illinois companies use their real power to skip out on their corporate responsibility to support the state. They consume a lot of state resources, and they use their political influence to be parasites and free loaders.
Ever hear of the phrase "No taxation without representation"? It was one of the battle cries of the colonists during the U.S. Revolutionary War. Britain taxed them, but didn't give them representation in government (they didn't get a vote), so they had no say in how those taxes were spent. They felt that was fundamentally unjust, and was something worth fighting and dying for to correct.
Since you're ok with taxing corporations, and in fact see it as their responsibility to help support the state, then surely you must agree that corporations should have representation in government? No? Why not? You agree it's wrong to tax people while denying them representation, right? Our founding fathers were justified in their rebellion, right? But somehow some people have arrived at the belief that corporations should not be considered persons, and should not have any say in government, yet they should be taxed. If that's your belief, then it sounds more like it's government which is the parasite freeloading off of corporations.
It's the same phenomenon as which keeps us using fossil fuels, makes people think gun control is a simple solution, makes them think electric vehicles will save the environment, makes them fear nuclear power, and made invading Iraq look like a good idea. Now that I've pissed off pretty much everyone, let me explain.
When United 232 crash landed in Iowa, flight attendant Jan Lohr had told a parent that their lap child (an infant flying without a paid ticket, and consequently no seat) should be placed underneath the seat in front like a carry-on bag. The parents survived the crash, the baby did not. Ms. Lohr was so affected by the incident that she spent the next two decades tirelessly lobbying the NTSB and FAA to require all flying children to have a ticketed seat.
The FAA recently declined her proposal. Why? At first glance her proposal sounds pretty reasonable. If all children and infants had a seat, then they'd all stand a better chance of surviving a plane crash. What's not to like?
The FAA's decision was also based on saving children's lives. Flying is much safer than driving. If parents are forced to buy a third ticket to bring along their child on a trip, they may opt to drive instead. And a child in a car is much more likely to be killed due to a car crash than a lap child is due to a plane crash. Yes lap children have an increased risk of dying in a plane crash. But that increase is small compared to the increased risk of death by moving them out of the plane and into a car.
All too often when considering a decision, people only consider the direct effects. If your kid died because he was the one in a million a vaccine kills, then the vaccine was at fault.
Meanwhile, the indirect effects get blamed on something else. If your kid who wasn't vaccinated died because he caught the measles, it was the measles which was at fault. The decision not to vaccinate is discounted because the death was an indirect effect of the decision not to vaccinate.
A comprehensive appraisal of the decision to vaccinate or not vaccinate must equally consider both these direct and indirect effects. But people's psychology makes them emphasize the direct effect while de-emphasizing the indirect effects. We love fossil fuels for the energy they give, while blaming the harm they cause on "pollution" rather than fossil fuels themselves. Gun deaths get blamed on the gun, rather than on the homicidal individual. People think electric vehicles represent 100% clean transportation, when 70% of the U.S.' electricity comes from fossil fuels. Deaths from radiation get blamed on nuclear power, while deaths from dam bursts, wind turbines, and solar panels get blamed on drowning and falling (off the roof for solar). Bush got us into Iraq because he thought getting rid of Saddam would solve a lot of problems, without fully considering the myriad of problems which would be caused by the invasion and occupation. And lap children killed in plane crashes get blamed on the lap child policy, while children killed in car crashes get blamed on the car crash.
"very few users would gamble with multitasking under Win9x (except for things like running an IRC client, an MP3 player and a web browser at the same time). "
Sounds like actual, genuine multitasking to me
All regular versions of Windows prior to Windows 2000 used cooperative multitasking. That's where the OS tells the IRC client, "OK, you have the CPU. Be nice and tell me when you're done with it so I can give it to the MP3 player next." A single misbehaved app which never gave back the CPU (or more frequently, crashed in a manner which didn't give back the CPU) could hang your system. Effectively the same thing as a crash (BSOD), back in those days. The place where this showed up the most was in time-critical I/O tasks which didn't have a dedicated coprocessor. Those couldn't afford to give up the CPU. Reading/writing to a floppy was the big one. If you started reading/writing a floppy on Windows 9x, you basically couldn't do anything else and had to wait for it to finish.
Unix, AmigaOS, OS/2, and Windows NT (the enterprise version of Windows which eventually became Win2k) used pre-emptive multitasking. That's where the OS determines how much CPU time each process gets, and takes it away afterwards. The process can request time, but the OS decides when and how much it gets, not the process. With pre-emptive multitasking, you could, among other things, read/write a floppy and continue using the computer as if the floppy access wasn't happening. (And if you're curious, MacOS used cooperative multitasking and stuck with it even longer than Windows did.)
So if you were doing anything critical in Windows 9x, you simply didn't multitask. You couldn't risk bringing your mission-critical app down because the MP3 player or IRC client hung. When people say "genuine multitasking", they're referring to pre-emptive multitasking, where the OS controls CPU allocation, not each application.
The video from a good quality DE-15 VGA cable of reasonable length is nearly indistinguishable from that of a lossless digital connection such as DVI when using sane resolutions. It is mainly when you are utilizing substandard cables
The culprit can be the card too. Several years ago I bought a work desktop for the secretary (from Dell, hah), and the output when plugged into the 17" 1280x1024 monitor via VGA was a blurry mess - nearly as bad as the ad in TFA. I figured it was the cable and swapped it, but got the same results. After the monitor tested ok with the output from a laptop, the only conclusion was that the integrated video card was at fault. I sprung $25 for a low-end video card, plugged it into the monitor via DVI, and all was good.
And PernMUSH was one of the first of them, starting just a couple years after TinyMUD. All text of course. The "book and imagination" analogue to the 3D MMOs we have today.
Pretty much agreed. I've been recommending low-end AMD and i3 systems for my clients because honestly that's more computer than they really need. An SSD helps them more than a better processor.
But I'm also seeing an inversion of the old rule of thumb about the price-performance curve. In the past, a plot of the price (y) vs. performance (x) curve would track a diagonal line, and above a certain point the curve would shoot up vertically. For a small gain in performance, the price would skyrocket up.
Now what I'm seeing is that below a certain point the curve flattens horizontally. That is, you can get large increases in performance for very little increase in price. It's for this reason I've mostly avoided the first two iterations of Brazos. The C50 and E350 simply aren't worth it when for $100 or even $50 more you can get an i3 system which draws as little power while idle, but when pressed can perform 5x better. Unless the person is extremely price-constrained, I've generally been suggesting i3 systems over Brazos. Sabine looked like it might've been a good alternative, but the reports I've been reading say (aside from low-level gaming) it hasn't been able to match the i3 at price-performance.
Key difference I think is that no anti-virus software is 100% effective at their primary task. If Kaspersky or NOD32 or (snort) Norton can catch more viruses, then there's compelling reason to upgrade even if Microsoft includes their anti-virus for free.
When it came to disk compression built-in to the OS, once Microsoft included it, that was it. Game over for Stacker. While the feature arguably did belong in the OS, since Stac Software had patents on it, Microsoft should've licensed from them (which is what they eventually did after the lawsuits). Not just implement it on their own shutting out Stac. Doing it that way was a thinly veiled attempt to box Stac into a position of "license to us or die", and Microsoft deservedly lost that lawsuit.
Browsers are kind of a middle ground. Like anti-virus, there's lots of room for competition (e.g. Firefox) to beat out the built-in browser. But at the same time they're not a passive app like disk compression. Microsoft was using IE not just as a browser, but to extend HTML in ways only they could support. That would be kinda like Microsoft including their own anti-virus, then releasing viruses which only their anti-virus could block.
If a coal power plants fails, it is just a big fire, annoying and hard to put out BUT controllable.
There are approximately 2300 coal plants worldwide. Pollution from coal plants is estimated to kill 1 million people worldwide each year, or 435 per plant per year. Chernobyl is estimated by the World Health Organization to have caused/will cause 4,000 long-term deaths. So on average, a coal plant operating normally (without any big fires) will kill as many people as Chernobyl every 9 years.
A hydro dam that breaks will NOT cause the water to shoot up stream.
Chernobyl and Fukishama have now both shown that nuclear incidents are ALWAYS worse then estimated and even worse then admitted to afterwards by the nuclear lobby. You can build again on a flood plain, but radiated soil will be unusable for decades.
Have you looked at the land requirements for the different technologies? Japan has about 47.3 GW of nuclear power generating capacity. Nuclear has a capacity factor of 0.9, meaning it generates an average 42.6 GW for them throughout the year.
Solar has a capacity factor of about 0.15. If you're using 15% efficient panels (125 W/m^2), that means you're getting an average 19 W/m^2 throughout the year. To get an average 42.6 GW throughout the year, you'd need to cover 2.27 billion square meters of solar panels, or 2270 km^2. The evacuation zone around Fukushima is pi*(20km)^2 = 1256 km^2. If Japan replaced their nuclear capacity with solar, it would permanently make more land unusable for agriculture than the Fukushima accident.
Three Gorges Dam in China generates about 80 TWh per year, which works out to an average of 9.1 GW. The reservoir behind it is 1045 km^2. So for every GW of power it generates, that's 115 km^2 of land was flooded and made permanently unusable for agriculture. Dividing Fukushima's evacuation zone by Japan's nuclear power generation comes up with only 29 km^2 of land made unusable per GW of power generated.
So if your concern is km^2 of soil being made unusable for agriculture, you should be even more critical of solar and hydro than nuclear.
It is not as nuclear technology can't be made safe but since about the only argument in the past has been that it is cheap, costs are going to have to be cut in the hope that "it" never happens. That is not a very reliable method to prevent accidents.
The safety of any technology has to be assessed based on the severity of the danger(s), multiplied by the likelihood of accident, normalized by the amount of power generated. This can be simplified to number of people killed per unit of energy generated. The exoticness of the death is not a factor. Whether you're killed by radiation poisoning, a thrown turbine blade, a wall of water, or lung cancer, you're still dead.
When you analyze safety this way, nuclear turns out to be the safest power source. i.e. If you wish to generate X amount of energy generated, the technology which can do so with the fewest casualties is nuclear.
The notion that nuclear power is dangerous and we can't make it safe is a myth. Its incredible power density and the exotic nature of its dangers mean we are much more careful with it than with other technologies. This has resulted in (based on statistics from decades of operation) the safest form of power generation man has ever invented. If you use a different measure of safety, like number of people inj
they can choose to use suppliers who do not pollute, and people can decide not to shop with a company that uses suppliers who pollute.
Which puts them at a competitive disadvantage against companies/people who decide to ignore the pollution and shop there or use suppliers from there anyway. Which causes such conscientious companies/people to diminish in economic size, thus rendering their ecological stance moot. Which is why government has to step in and establish environmental regulatory standards.
Which brings us back full circle to China not giving a damn about its environment, and it not really being the fault of the companies who do business there.
The patent dates to 1998, so I seriously doubt that there's prior art. Certainly the mobile networks simply did not exist, and the web itself was still getting started.
Whoa, slow down. The web got started (in the public's eye) in 1994/1995, when a TCP/IP stack was added to Windows 95. Mobile data networks have been around since the 1970s.
But all that is irrelevant. The problem here is that somehow, the USPTO has decided that a mobile packet data network is different from a regular packet data network, and so all the ideas which have already been thought of and invented for use over regular data networks are suddenly worthy of new patents when you send the 1s and 0s over a mobile (wireless) network.
That is utter idiocy. The packets don't care if they're being transmitted over cables or airwaves. Nearly any application which can run over a wired network can also run over a wireless network. There are some time-sensitive applications which would have problems with the lower reliability of a wireless network, and I can see some patents being granted for how to cope with that. But again, the wired/wireless distinction is irrelevant. The same algorithms will work on wired networks with low signal-to-noise ratio. The "mobile" adjective is simply irrelevant and sticking it in front of an idea should not make it patent-worthy.
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You have to remember that there's no friction in space. Going down a gravity well is easy, but stopping at the bottom requires energy. It's like a roller coaster heading down from a peak, with Jupiter at the bottom. As you approach Jupiter, it's gravity will speed you up (relative to Jupiter). Unless you put in energy to counteract that extra speed, you shoot past and fly right up the other side of the gravity well (up the next peak).
That said, the summary is wrong. Jupiter has lots of moons. You can do the opposite of a gravitational slingshot. Approach the moon from the forward direction, and thereby transfer some of your kinetic energy to the moon. Do it enough times and you're in Jupiter's orbit. That's pretty much how Galileo and Cassini were inserted into orbits around Jupiter and Saturn. You only need fuel or aerobraking to enter into orbit around planets without large moons, like Mars.
It didn't go away, it got absorbed into regular American English (and consequently Internet English). Look at the list of example phrases and OMG! you'll see many which are common interjections today. "Like" in particular is now an accepted filler word, used by many people instead of "uh" or "um" or "you know". (You may not notice when people say filler words because it's common for your brain to filter them out. But they're very commonly used when talking - it's an easy way to distinguish TV and movie speech from real speech.)
The affected intonation mostly disappeared, but the phrases got picked up by common culture. Same thing with surfer slang (whoa, awesome, shred, stoked, etc. although I had my bet on bogus entering common English since there isn't a good alternative).
There's a common misconception that because an EV puts out no emissions, that it's 100% clean. And that because electric motors are 80%-90% efficient, EVs are 80%-90% efficient.
About 2/3rds of electricity is generated from fossil fuels, burned in power stations operating at about 40% efficiency. So if you can get the efficiency of this gizmo high enough, you could actually exceed the overall efficiency of plug-in EVs. The transition point would be at about 75% efficiency by my back of the envelope calcs. Of course then the question becomes, why not put these in the power plants. (If you're anti-nuclear, about 2/3rds of that remaining 1/3rd comes from nuclear. Only about 1/9th of our electricity comes from renewables. So that transition point shifts down to about 50% efficiency.)
If your fuel source is predominantly biofuel, then that transition point drops even further.
If it's the median, then it means what the summary is implying.
If it's the mean, it could just be that the ones who do commit fraud are skewing the sample. And that if you subtract them, the error rate of the people who don't share is no different than the error rate of those who do share.
Not saying it's one or the other. Just pointing out that in this particular case, it's a very important distinction.
I was wondering about that. Whether the summary was correct in that Facebook worked quickly to fix it because the exploit spread across the Internet, or if it was because someone posted Zuckerberg's private pictures.
It's something that happens all the time. Usually all that comes from it is the intruding flight gets intercepted and escorted out, then the country later files a diplomatic protest.
Hostilities arising from such intrusions are the exception, not the norm, and almost always happen after visual confirmation of the target by a pilot in a chase plane. A shoot first, ask questions later policy leads to terrible incidents like Iran Air 655 and Korean Air 007. Given the size of the RQ-170 (wingspan estimated at 60-90 feet), it could easily have been a small commercial airliner or a civilian business jet.
All of this will happen again.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, online services were walled gardens. There were of course minor exceptions - BBSes who all exchanged information with each other via FidoNet. But the big names were CompuServe, GEnie, MSN, and (what would eventually become the 900 lb gorilla) America Online. They had their day, until the Internet tore down those walls. Today, all those services are pretty much gone. MSN is no longer a subscription service. AOL is still hanging on, mostly due to monthly service revenue from old people who don't know that they can get their Internet without having to pay AOL.
I think what happens is that when a new type of service/product is created, the initial creators and early copycats end up with most of the market share. Then they try setting up walls to protect their gardens and preserve their market share. Eventually an open alternative comes along which works better and/or is as easy to use, and the walls fall. Arguably, something similar happened in the 1970s/1980s with computer operating systems. Each computer maker had their own OS with its own ecosphere and apps. Eventually, MS-DOS ended up winning the market not because it was the best, but because it (and the PC platform it ran on) was open.
I suppose it's possible that, eventually, some company could "get it right" and preserve their walled garden in perpetuity. I'd argue Facebook is much closer to this than Apple.* But based on history, the safe bet is against any company managing to pull this off. Eventually something bigger and better comes along which consigns the original giant to a niche, if not irrelevance. *(Google is open enough that they allow you to extract the data stored in their services - their walls rather porous.)
The one market where I haven't seen this happening is gaming consoles. But I think that's because the nature of game compatibility/hardware and the refresh cycle forces the entire industry to "reboot" every few years. First it was Atari, then Nintendo, then Sony, and currently it's split between Nintendo (Wii) and Microsoft (Xbox). The amount of time between these reboots is short enough that an open platform can't develop. But the reboots also mean that each company has to start over from scratch every few years to maintain dominance.
I'm actually one who does support our crony capitalist system, but you're apologizing too much. One of the tradeoffs of corporate personhood is that since corporations cannot die like a real person (taking their knowledge, skills, and ethics to the grave), their liabilities must be transferred when they're bought and sold. So in this case, BP is in fact liable for the sins of ARCO, and any companies whose liabilities ARCO likewise acquired.
It does bring up an interesting question though. According to TFA, the biologists studying the organisms in the lake patented some of the yeast they found. Shouldn't the patent belong to ARCO/BP, as the progenitor of said yeast? It sounds like a repeat of that spat where some researchers patented some gene derived from a patient's excised cancer tumor, with the patient arguing that the patent rightfully belongs to him since the gene was originally from his body part. "Invention" vs. discovery.
Except for the bouncing animation patent (which seems dubious to me, since bouncing when reaching a limit has been a staple of cartoon animation for decades, and of rubber balls for centuries), the patents in question are design patents. That's the main reason the judge denied the injunction. A design patent (in the U.S.) has to be purely ornamental - e.g. the distinctive shape of a Coca-Cola bottle is purely artistic and serves no function purpose.
To paraphrase the judge, a handheld size, flat rectangular face, and rounded corners are all functional, and cannot be protected by a design patent. Apple might be able to get a design patent on rounded corners of one specific radius on a tablet, but they can't prevent other tablet makers from using any rounded corners at all. I'm not sure how design patents work in Germany (the Netherlands dismissed Apple's lawsuit for the EU in general). But if the current injunction against Samsung in Germany stands, expect everyone there to start taking out design patents on every shape and form you can imagine, and suing anyone making anything with basic shapes like polygons, rectangles, circles, etc. German industry will be crippled.
A laptop i3 will burn close to 30 Watts while running a benchmark. The Tegra 3 peaks at about 2 Watts. So in performance per Watt, the Tegra 3 is about 4x as efficient as your i3.
Or put another way, if you hooked up the Tegra 3 and the i3 to same-size batteries and calculated pi until the battery died, the Tegra 3 would calculate 4x as many digits as the i3. Now which one do you want on your battery-powered phone/tablet?
Assuming an equal distribution of votes, negative mod systems only work well if every topic being modded has an equal number of people for and against. If there are an unequal number of supporters vs. detractors, negative mods become a force multiplier allowing the majority to squelch the minority. To quote from my previous post on it...
Say 4 of 5 people hold a majority view here. Say there are 400 posts representing the majority view, and 100 posts representing the minority view. Say on average there is 1 randomly selected moderator per 10 posters given one mod point, and the moderators' views have the same distribution. And pretend that Slashdot only allowed positive mods.
There are 40 mods giving +1 to 400 majority-view posts, for an average of 40/400 = +0.1 per post.
There are 10 mods giving +1 to the 100 minority-view posts, also for an average of +0.1 per post.
Note how the average rating within each position is the same. Also note that the number of up-mods is proportional to the number of posts supporting each viewpoint. So both viewpoints are represented in proportion to their popularity, and the sum total of their ratings are likewise proportional to their popularity. e.g. if 1 in 50 posts were worthy of a +5 ranking and the rest were +0, the majority view would have 8 +5 posts, the minority view would have 2 +5 posts. Exactly the same 4:1 ratio as the majority-to-minority ratio.
Now toss in negative mods. Say one in five mods gives a -1 to an opposing viewpoint rather than a +1 to their favored viewpoint.
The majority view gets 400 posts, 32 +1 mods, and 2 -1 mods, for an overall average score of 30/400 = +0.075 per post.
The minority view gets 100 posts, 8 +1 mods, and 8 -1 mods, for an overall average score of 0 per post.
If the ratio of negative to positive mods is greater than the ratio of minority to majority views, the posts representing the minority view actually end up with an average negative ranking. Algebraically:
p = % of positive moderations
n = % of negative moderations
A = majority population
B = minority population
Average majority view ranking = Ap - Bn
Average minority view ranking = Bp - An
It's pretty easy to see that if A > B, this skews the majority rankings to be higher than the minority rankings. And if A >> B, B basically has no say in the rankings, and the rankings are almost entirely determined by A's opinions.
In practical terms, this means that if Google allowed user-controlled negative votes on their search rankings, unpopular topics like Linux would be modded down to oblivion by the much larger number of Windows users. Within the scope of Linux, a particular Linux site might be very useful and worthy of a high ranking. But the number of Windows users who accidentally got the site as a search result would probably outnumber the number of Linux users actually looking for the site. Consequently the negative mods from those Windows users who saw it as an irrelevant search result, would outnumber the positive mods from Linux users, and the useful site would wind up with a negative ranking.
The problem with your supposition is that opposition to automation does not result in a regression in technological and economic progress. It merely slows it down. So the argument isn't that we have a lower standard of living today than in the past. It's that the standard of living we enjoy today is lower than what it could be if we had embraced automation fully instead of fought against it.
It's a difficult thing to assess because you have to compare reality with a hypothetical. But locally, it can show up more demonstrably. In the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. resisted automation. Consequently, cost of manufacturing in the U.S. was higher than it could have been. When another country (China) was willing to compete seriously in the manufacturing sector with lower labor costs, most of those jobs which were saved in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s ended up moving to China. Had the U.S. embraced automation in past decades, its cost of manufacturing would have been lower, and less manufacturing would have been lost to China. Those who were replaced by machines would have/should have been retrained for other jobs related to maintaining those machines, and many/most of them would still be working in the U.S. had we embraced automation. But because we didn't, we lost those jobs anyway, just to China instead of to automation.
It's not completely one-sided though. Retraining people is a huge undertaking. The transition to automation has to be done gradually enough to allow retraining. And with enough support for the workers' retraining so that they don't prioritize their short-term benefit (keeping their assembly line job) over the long-term benefit (a better job, and cheaper goods) and revolt.
Bunn (maker of most of the commercial coffee brewing machines in the U.S.) recommends the coffee be held at 175-185F. This is the temperature when it comes out of the serving machine (it is held in the serving machine prior), and the temperature setting which was at issue in the lawsuit. It is the same temperature used by restaurants nationwide, including Starbucks.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit surveyed coffee temperatures at other restaurants nearby, and stated "Other establishments sell coffee at substantially lower temperatures." Note the wording. They didn't give the average temp, nor a range of temps. They simply stated that some restaurants sold their coffee at a much lower temperature. If they had found that McDonalds coffee was unusually hot, they would have stated something more like "most establishments sell coffee at substantially lower temperatures." That they didn't indicates it's just deceptive wording used to take a survey which didn't support their case, and made it appear as if it did.
McDonalds set the temperature that high because people complained about it getting too cold by the time they got home or to work. After the lawsuit they tried lowering the temperature, but too many people complained and they raised it again. Today, McDonalds follows Bunn's 175-185 F recommendation. The lawsuit changed nothing about how coffee is served.
And how do you figure hotter coffee leads to brewing fewer pots each day? These machines are temperature regulated. If you set it at 185F, it will keep the coffee at 185F all day. If you set it at 165F, it'll keep the coffee at 165F all day. You don't brew it, use it until it cools, then throw the rest out once it gets too cool. If anything, hotter coffee would lead to brewing more coffee, as the water and aromatics will evaporate more quickly at higher temperature.
If you take the number of burns reported from spilled McDonalds coffee, and divide it by the number of cups of coffee McDonalds sold in the same time period of those spills, you'll arrive at an accident rate for McDonalds coffee. If you then compare that accident rate to other accident rates, you discover a funny thing. If you drive 5 miles round trip to buy your McDonalds coffee, you are actually more likely to die in an auto accident buying your cup of coffee, than you are to be burned from spilling it on yourself.
So then tax the people who work for said corporation, instead of taxing the corporation. Oh wait, we already tax the people working at corporations, so by your reasoning they are being double-taxed.
If you cannot see the difference between these two, then you are suffering from an entitlement mentality. He is not entitled to a job at Marriott. Illinois is not entitled to have any company (or person) stay within their borders. If he does something to coerce Marriott to give him a job which they don't want to give him, that is fraud. If Illinois does something to coerce the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to stay in the state when they want to leave, that is fraud.
If he were already employed by Marriott and decided to quit, then there is nothing wrong with that. Likewise, if the Chicago Mercantile decides to quit residing in Illinois, there is nothing wrong with that.
Ever hear of the phrase "No taxation without representation"? It was one of the battle cries of the colonists during the U.S. Revolutionary War. Britain taxed them, but didn't give them representation in government (they didn't get a vote), so they had no say in how those taxes were spent. They felt that was fundamentally unjust, and was something worth fighting and dying for to correct.
Since you're ok with taxing corporations, and in fact see it as their responsibility to help support the state, then surely you must agree that corporations should have representation in government? No? Why not? You agree it's wrong to tax people while denying them representation, right? Our founding fathers were justified in their rebellion, right? But somehow some people have arrived at the belief that corporations should not be considered persons, and should not have any say in government, yet they should be taxed. If that's your belief, then it sounds more like it's government which is the parasite freeloading off of corporations.
It's the same phenomenon as which keeps us using fossil fuels, makes people think gun control is a simple solution, makes them think electric vehicles will save the environment, makes them fear nuclear power, and made invading Iraq look like a good idea. Now that I've pissed off pretty much everyone, let me explain.
When United 232 crash landed in Iowa, flight attendant Jan Lohr had told a parent that their lap child (an infant flying without a paid ticket, and consequently no seat) should be placed underneath the seat in front like a carry-on bag. The parents survived the crash, the baby did not. Ms. Lohr was so affected by the incident that she spent the next two decades tirelessly lobbying the NTSB and FAA to require all flying children to have a ticketed seat.
The FAA recently declined her proposal. Why? At first glance her proposal sounds pretty reasonable. If all children and infants had a seat, then they'd all stand a better chance of surviving a plane crash. What's not to like?
The FAA's decision was also based on saving children's lives. Flying is much safer than driving. If parents are forced to buy a third ticket to bring along their child on a trip, they may opt to drive instead. And a child in a car is much more likely to be killed due to a car crash than a lap child is due to a plane crash. Yes lap children have an increased risk of dying in a plane crash. But that increase is small compared to the increased risk of death by moving them out of the plane and into a car.
All too often when considering a decision, people only consider the direct effects. If your kid died because he was the one in a million a vaccine kills, then the vaccine was at fault.
Meanwhile, the indirect effects get blamed on something else. If your kid who wasn't vaccinated died because he caught the measles, it was the measles which was at fault. The decision not to vaccinate is discounted because the death was an indirect effect of the decision not to vaccinate.
A comprehensive appraisal of the decision to vaccinate or not vaccinate must equally consider both these direct and indirect effects. But people's psychology makes them emphasize the direct effect while de-emphasizing the indirect effects. We love fossil fuels for the energy they give, while blaming the harm they cause on "pollution" rather than fossil fuels themselves. Gun deaths get blamed on the gun, rather than on the homicidal individual. People think electric vehicles represent 100% clean transportation, when 70% of the U.S.' electricity comes from fossil fuels. Deaths from radiation get blamed on nuclear power, while deaths from dam bursts, wind turbines, and solar panels get blamed on drowning and falling (off the roof for solar). Bush got us into Iraq because he thought getting rid of Saddam would solve a lot of problems, without fully considering the myriad of problems which would be caused by the invasion and occupation. And lap children killed in plane crashes get blamed on the lap child policy, while children killed in car crashes get blamed on the car crash.
All regular versions of Windows prior to Windows 2000 used cooperative multitasking. That's where the OS tells the IRC client, "OK, you have the CPU. Be nice and tell me when you're done with it so I can give it to the MP3 player next." A single misbehaved app which never gave back the CPU (or more frequently, crashed in a manner which didn't give back the CPU) could hang your system. Effectively the same thing as a crash (BSOD), back in those days. The place where this showed up the most was in time-critical I/O tasks which didn't have a dedicated coprocessor. Those couldn't afford to give up the CPU. Reading/writing to a floppy was the big one. If you started reading/writing a floppy on Windows 9x, you basically couldn't do anything else and had to wait for it to finish.
Unix, AmigaOS, OS/2, and Windows NT (the enterprise version of Windows which eventually became Win2k) used pre-emptive multitasking. That's where the OS determines how much CPU time each process gets, and takes it away afterwards. The process can request time, but the OS decides when and how much it gets, not the process. With pre-emptive multitasking, you could, among other things, read/write a floppy and continue using the computer as if the floppy access wasn't happening. (And if you're curious, MacOS used cooperative multitasking and stuck with it even longer than Windows did.)
So if you were doing anything critical in Windows 9x, you simply didn't multitask. You couldn't risk bringing your mission-critical app down because the MP3 player or IRC client hung. When people say "genuine multitasking", they're referring to pre-emptive multitasking, where the OS controls CPU allocation, not each application.
The culprit can be the card too. Several years ago I bought a work desktop for the secretary (from Dell, hah), and the output when plugged into the 17" 1280x1024 monitor via VGA was a blurry mess - nearly as bad as the ad in TFA. I figured it was the cable and swapped it, but got the same results. After the monitor tested ok with the output from a laptop, the only conclusion was that the integrated video card was at fault. I sprung $25 for a low-end video card, plugged it into the monitor via DVI, and all was good.
And PernMUSH was one of the first of them, starting just a couple years after TinyMUD. All text of course. The "book and imagination" analogue to the 3D MMOs we have today.
Pretty much agreed. I've been recommending low-end AMD and i3 systems for my clients because honestly that's more computer than they really need. An SSD helps them more than a better processor.
But I'm also seeing an inversion of the old rule of thumb about the price-performance curve. In the past, a plot of the price (y) vs. performance (x) curve would track a diagonal line, and above a certain point the curve would shoot up vertically. For a small gain in performance, the price would skyrocket up.
Now what I'm seeing is that below a certain point the curve flattens horizontally. That is, you can get large increases in performance for very little increase in price. It's for this reason I've mostly avoided the first two iterations of Brazos. The C50 and E350 simply aren't worth it when for $100 or even $50 more you can get an i3 system which draws as little power while idle, but when pressed can perform 5x better. Unless the person is extremely price-constrained, I've generally been suggesting i3 systems over Brazos. Sabine looked like it might've been a good alternative, but the reports I've been reading say (aside from low-level gaming) it hasn't been able to match the i3 at price-performance.
Key difference I think is that no anti-virus software is 100% effective at their primary task. If Kaspersky or NOD32 or (snort) Norton can catch more viruses, then there's compelling reason to upgrade even if Microsoft includes their anti-virus for free.
When it came to disk compression built-in to the OS, once Microsoft included it, that was it. Game over for Stacker. While the feature arguably did belong in the OS, since Stac Software had patents on it, Microsoft should've licensed from them (which is what they eventually did after the lawsuits). Not just implement it on their own shutting out Stac. Doing it that way was a thinly veiled attempt to box Stac into a position of "license to us or die", and Microsoft deservedly lost that lawsuit.
Browsers are kind of a middle ground. Like anti-virus, there's lots of room for competition (e.g. Firefox) to beat out the built-in browser. But at the same time they're not a passive app like disk compression. Microsoft was using IE not just as a browser, but to extend HTML in ways only they could support. That would be kinda like Microsoft including their own anti-virus, then releasing viruses which only their anti-virus could block.
Heresy! Why, Congress might be moved to pass some sort of net neturality legislation if that were to happen!
There are approximately 2300 coal plants worldwide. Pollution from coal plants is estimated to kill 1 million people worldwide each year, or 435 per plant per year. Chernobyl is estimated by the World Health Organization to have caused/will cause 4,000 long-term deaths. So on average, a coal plant operating normally (without any big fires) will kill as many people as Chernobyl every 9 years.
The worst power-generation related accident in history was the failure of a series of hydroelectric dams. Nearly a quarter million people killed. Equal to about 50 Chernobyls.
Have you looked at the land requirements for the different technologies? Japan has about 47.3 GW of nuclear power generating capacity. Nuclear has a capacity factor of 0.9, meaning it generates an average 42.6 GW for them throughout the year.
Solar has a capacity factor of about 0.15. If you're using 15% efficient panels (125 W/m^2), that means you're getting an average 19 W/m^2 throughout the year. To get an average 42.6 GW throughout the year, you'd need to cover 2.27 billion square meters of solar panels, or 2270 km^2. The evacuation zone around Fukushima is pi*(20km)^2 = 1256 km^2. If Japan replaced their nuclear capacity with solar, it would permanently make more land unusable for agriculture than the Fukushima accident.
Three Gorges Dam in China generates about 80 TWh per year, which works out to an average of 9.1 GW. The reservoir behind it is 1045 km^2. So for every GW of power it generates, that's 115 km^2 of land was flooded and made permanently unusable for agriculture. Dividing Fukushima's evacuation zone by Japan's nuclear power generation comes up with only 29 km^2 of land made unusable per GW of power generated.
So if your concern is km^2 of soil being made unusable for agriculture, you should be even more critical of solar and hydro than nuclear.
The safety of any technology has to be assessed based on the severity of the danger(s), multiplied by the likelihood of accident, normalized by the amount of power generated. This can be simplified to number of people killed per unit of energy generated. The exoticness of the death is not a factor. Whether you're killed by radiation poisoning, a thrown turbine blade, a wall of water, or lung cancer, you're still dead.
When you analyze safety this way, nuclear turns out to be the safest power source. i.e. If you wish to generate X amount of energy generated, the technology which can do so with the fewest casualties is nuclear.
The notion that nuclear power is dangerous and we can't make it safe is a myth. Its incredible power density and the exotic nature of its dangers mean we are much more careful with it than with other technologies. This has resulted in (based on statistics from decades of operation) the safest form of power generation man has ever invented. If you use a different measure of safety, like number of people inj
Which puts them at a competitive disadvantage against companies/people who decide to ignore the pollution and shop there or use suppliers from there anyway. Which causes such conscientious companies/people to diminish in economic size, thus rendering their ecological stance moot. Which is why government has to step in and establish environmental regulatory standards.
Which brings us back full circle to China not giving a damn about its environment, and it not really being the fault of the companies who do business there.
Whoa, slow down. The web got started (in the public's eye) in 1994/1995, when a TCP/IP stack was added to Windows 95. Mobile data networks have been around since the 1970s.
But all that is irrelevant. The problem here is that somehow, the USPTO has decided that a mobile packet data network is different from a regular packet data network, and so all the ideas which have already been thought of and invented for use over regular data networks are suddenly worthy of new patents when you send the 1s and 0s over a mobile (wireless) network.
That is utter idiocy. The packets don't care if they're being transmitted over cables or airwaves. Nearly any application which can run over a wired network can also run over a wireless network. There are some time-sensitive applications which would have problems with the lower reliability of a wireless network, and I can see some patents being granted for how to cope with that. But again, the wired/wireless distinction is irrelevant. The same algorithms will work on wired networks with low signal-to-noise ratio. The "mobile" adjective is simply irrelevant and sticking it in front of an idea should not make it patent-worthy.