To comply with international standards and have at least four emergency generators per reactor placed around the reactors with adequate spacing between each of them to prevent common cause failure. For purely geometric reasons (to keep the distance between each other) at least one per reactor would have to have been behind the reactor buildings on higher ground. Which exactly how spacing alone mitigates common cause failure.
This bears repeating to all you engineers and designers out there. If you calculate a failsafe has a 10% chance of failure, you cannot mitigate it to 0.01% by making four of them and calculating the chance of all four failing to be 0.1^4. That statistical calculation only works if all four failsafes are independent. If they are identical, then they are not independent, and an event which causes one to fail can cause all four to fail. Which is what happened at Fukushima Daiichi.
The generators should have been in different locations, at different heights, with separate individual fuel depots, of different makes, etc.
Their unlimited phone data plans haven't changed. It's just the mobile device (e.g. 3G on your tablet) and hotspot plans which are losing unlimited data. For many years now, Sprint's unwritten policy was to cancel your service if you used too much data on a mobile device plan, but you could eat up all the bandwidth you wanted with a phone data plan (people have posted scans of their bills with >100 GB of phone data). So for those two services, this is just making official what's been their unofficial policy for years.
This does represent a change for hotspot plans though. Those used to be truly unlimited to justify their additional price over a regular phone data plan, but now they will be capped. But most people I know who use their phone as a hotspot just root it and use their regular phone data plan.
Female voices span a greater range of the audio frequency spectrum than male voices. So a loud, narrowband background noise (e.g. engine/road/wind noise when driving on the freeway) has a greater chance of making it difficult to hear a male voice, while a female voice cuts right through.
Higher frequency sounds carry more energy for the same amplitude (volume) than low frequency sounds, and drop off more quickly with distance (gets absorbed more readily by the air - why foghorns are low-pitched). So the environment normally has less high frequency background noise.
Lower frequencies require bigger speakers, so it's easier to crank up the volume of a female voice using a smaller speaker.
If world reaction to the death of Steve Jobs vs. Dennis Ritchie is any indication, tell them to go into marketing. I've come to realize that most people never learn who designed the modern toys they use, but they come to idolize the guy who sold it to them. The only reason people remember Edison is because he was as good a marketer as he was an engineer/scientist.
Yeah, I got into an argument about this with some friends. The reason startup times are frequently cited as a metric is that it provides a common reference for comparing different computers. Not everyone's computer has the same software, so if I start raving about how much quicker Photoshop became after installing an SSD, most people are going to have no frame of reference to understand what I'm saying. Nor do most people download and run the same benchmarks (especially with the latest ones pushing over half a gig). But everyone, without exception, boots their computer. So startup times represent a quick and dirty way to compare the performance of different computers.
But startup times for comparing different OSes is rather useless. You can do tricks like what Windows XP did - slap the desktop and pointer on the screen as quickly as possible, but continue the boot process in the background making the computer unusable until it really finishes booting. An OS with fewer features will also boot up quicker. And as you point out, only a very small percentage of people's computer use is actually spent waiting for it to finish booting.
So... this means there's going to be a worldwide ban on coal as a fuel source, burning of trash, medical and hazardous waste incinerators, cement production, and CFL bulbs? Good luck with that.
He also said some downright false things, for example that it had run totally flat and had to be pushed back into the garage by the crew to be recharged before they had finished filming when in reality the car had 20% charge at minimum, as logged by the onboard computer - in other words, they didn't manage to run it flat during the shoot, but the script (which Tesla saw) called for the ending of the piece to show the car "limping" off the track under human propulsion.
This particular episode of Top Gear was the first one I ever saw. I've seen the accusation you're making repeated as if it proves something. You're basically arguing that they ran the car for 30 minutes, brought it back to the garage and had people push it back in to simulate it being out of juice, therefore they lied. Ok, but what if they ran it for 35 minutes until it really ran out of juice, and did the same thing? That would presumably be fair and accurate by your argument, no?
Based on what I saw in the episode, they highlighted a bunch of the positives of the car. Then the highlighted a bunch of the negatives. Whether those negatives were staged for the camera or not is beside the point - the point was that those were real negatives which (due to the short on-track range) has a fair probability of really happening.
Their position on electric cars seems to be "say some nice things, but then make sure we ram home the point that they have batteries that need to be charged, herp derp!".
The thing I took away from that episode was that if you want an electric car for track racing, be prepared to only race for a half hour, then spend a few hours waiting for a recharge. Or buy a second car to use while the first recharges. In contrast, a regular car can gas up in a few minutes and be ready to run around the track again. That seems like a really important point to make for anyone thinking of buying a Tesla Roadster to race around the track. The need to recharge the batteries has a much greater negative impact on the car's viability for this particular application than on a regular commuter vehicle which is charged overnight, and is definitely not something which would have immediately occurred to me had the show not pointed it out. They were right to emphasize it IMHO.
The problem is that student loans are a demand-side distortion of the market. By providing student loans, you actually encourage the price of tuition to rise by increasing the amount people are willing/able to pay. That is why tuition has been far outstripping the rate of inflation. Normally prices are kept in check by how much an individual is able to afford at this moment in time. But loans allow one to time-shift money from the future into the present, thus providing a great amount of money in the present, but in exchange for decades if not a lifetime of debt. Most people are very bad at making decisions regarding this types of trade-off between money now vs. future debt (witness the number of people who continually carry a balance on their credit cards). Schools are exploiting this weakness in human rationality to run up the cost of tuition, and cheap student loans just exacerbate it.
Education needs to be subsidized with supply-side distortions. Take the money currently provided as unrestricted student loans (leave the low-income assistance), and dump it into public universities. That should help lower the tuition at public unis, making them affordable to people who otherwise couldn't attend without student loans, while also exerting downward competitive price pressure on private universities and colleges. Normally I (as a fiscal conservative) wouldn't be for this - you're subsidizing a public "corporation" which competes directly with private corporations (universities and colleges). But the decades of student loans has so distorted the market that the private schools are swimming in money (which forces public universities to offer higher salaries to compete, thus raising their costs as well), and there's a lot of fat which needs to be trimmed to revert the college/graduate education market back to normal.
Here's a pic of the Motorola 3200 circa 1992, one of the original "brick" mobile phones. Note the colors of the buttons - green to send a call, red to end it. They even have a phone handset icon very similar to what's still used today.
The other worrying thing is that with Apple winning injunctions based on generic design patents, while Samsung loses them based on its patents being licensed under FRAND, in the future companies are going to be much less willing to license any patent under FRAND. They're going to want to save the real, beefy tech patents to protect them against "your widget is a circle" type patents.
It will be much harder to set standards, much less get companies to follow them. Products will be less compatible, leading to greater vendor lock-in. Smaller companies which used to pay the same licensing fee for FRAND patents as big companies, will suddenly find themselves paying much higher rates as they don't have the clout to negotiate as good a deal as a megacorp. Competition will decrease, and the rate of technological progress will slow down. This is a very worrying path we're heading down due to the courts (even if not deliberately) prioritizing form over function.
And for people bringing up the Coke bottle as an example of a design patent, the defining characteristic of a design patent in the U.S. is that it is ornamental. That is, the characteristic form being patented serves no functional purpose. The big Apple logo which lights up on the lid of a Macbook is a good example of something which qualifies for a design patent. So is (unnecessary) glass on the back side of a phone. A tablet has to be flat and rectangular due to its screen, and it needs to have rounded corners and edges to be comfortable and safe to hold and carry. These are all functional purposes, and do not (should not) qualify for a design patent.
Can Samsung's UX team point out exactly how they designed all of Samsung's hardware and software?
Take a step back and just listen to what you're saying:
Why do their icons look that way? Why have the sheen/gloss instead of a flat look?
Apple is the only company in the world allowed to make icons with a sheen/glossy look?
Why not make the icons circular vignettes instead of rounded squares?
Apple is the only company in the world allowed to make icons with rounded squares?
Why taper the back of your device just so?
Apple is the only company in the world allowed to sell products with beveled edges?
Here's an analogy that even a closed-minded geek can understand. You have a Wii, XBox 360, and a PS3. Which one of them looks like the other? They all have an optical drive and a bunch of A/V output ports. Could you, at a glance, mistake one for another?
Here's a better analogy. You have a Sony LCD TV, a Samsung LCD TV, and a Sharp LCD TV. Which one of them looks like the other? They all have a big display, power button, channel and volume controls, a bunch of A/V input puts. Could you, at a glance, mistake one for the other? When you make a device which is dominated by the display, they all end up looking pretty similar to each other.
Rectangular shapes to phones and tablets (and HDTVs) are inevitable because displays are rectangular (due to it being more processor-efficient to address pixels in rectangular arrays.
Rounded corners are inevitable because people don't like sharp corners poking into them through their pockets.
Adding highlights and drop shadows to give 2-dimensional drawings a more 3-dimensional look is a centuries-old artist's trick.
Icons started off square, then started gaining rounded edges around 2000. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple kicked off the trend, but Windows XP had a prominent bubbly look to it too.
Beveled and rounded edges have been used in designs for handheld products for decades because sharp corners hurt when you hold them in your hand for a long time.
While most of these design aspects are characteristic of Apple's designs, and I will grant you in some cases Apple started the trend in the industry to use them, none of them are new nor innovative nor ornamental. They are either implementations of age-old artistic designs, or a natural consequence of form following function (which would disqualify them from a design patent).
Sure. Software-patent on swipe to unlock. They sued Samsung in the Netherlands over this., software patent on scroll bouncing and other effects. Effects that have been around for decades.
Have these really been around for decades? I mean, it looks totally obvious when you see it (which is the point of implementing it this way) but very often what looks totally obvious and the only right way to do it with hindsight is everything else than obvious before that.
The bouncing effects are based on cartoon effects which have been around since at least the 1940s. Back in the 1980s when the first 3D animations were being done, they found that rendering a solid 3D object hitting and bouncing off the ground or a wall looked "fake" even though the physics were correct. Only when you distorted it by squashing it in a completely unrealistic manner (a la cartoons) did it start to look "real". The (pirated) version of 3D Studio I played around with as a kid in the early 1990s has a pretty good introduction to it in the tutorials. This type of exaggeration along with rubber banding to emphasize certain motions and actions has been around almost a century now (think back to the Saturday morning cartoons you watched as a kid), and applying it to animation in computer UIs should be considered obvious.
If there was a non-obvious part to this in UIs, it was the concept of giving a window momentum and friction as you scroll it up and down. Once you think of that, all the bouncing animations are obvious.
Swipe to unlock being patentable is asinine. It's a graphical representation of a sliding door latch. Completely obvious. If it's patentable, then anything that's existed in the physical world for centuries or millennia is patentable simply by adding the words "on a computer UI" to it.
Monetize is the wrong word (and I hate it because it's an unnecessary made up marketing word to boot). The correct word is exploit. Companies have become very customer hostile, while continuing to play up marketing that tells you how fantastic they are and how wonderful your life will be if you use their services. So there's also issues of hypocrisy and false advertising.
No, from an advertising standpoint, this is customer-friendly. Assuming you're going to be showered by ads anyway in today's media, do you want to be showered by ads 90% of which don't interest you? Or do you want ads which interest you 75% of the time? I buy a lot of computers for client businesses. I want to be informed when Dell or some other major manufacturer holds a sale. Being able to better target ads is customer-friendly - it's win/win. It's not hypocritical, nor is it false advertising (indeed, showering you with ads saying all these products will make your life better, when 90% of them don't even interest you is more false).
Where this is customer-hostile is on the issue of privacy; nothing to do with the advertising. If I want to be informed of certain types of ads, I should have to give my consent to be tracked that way. Making it the default is making violating my privacy the default.
What dumb ass "creative professional" does all their work on a laptop screen? You want either a desktop machine or a macbook plugged into a desktop monitor and keyboard.
That's circular reasoning. Once upon a time, you could do professional work on a laptop screen. The older Macbooks and the IBM Thinkpads had options for matte hi-res IPS panels with color rendition as good as if not better than you could get with a desktop monitor. They were great if you were at a photo shoot on location and wanted to preview, check lighting, do some quick touch-up work to see if you'd be able to correct a flaw later, etc.
Since then, Apple has switched to mostly TN panels in their laptops, and Thinkpads now cater to the mainstream consumer, making them unsuitable for professional work. This forces professionals to stick to desktop monitors for their work. Which is the whole point of TFA.
However, as a wanna-be physicist, I know(?) that color is NOT just the simple mixture of three (or more) primaries; that is in Real Life(tm) it is a continuos spectrum and that film cameras (I think) capture it with some chemicals that are not just sensitive to a narrow slice of this spectrum. I compare this to modern CMOS based cameras in which the sensors, even if they are similarly "broadband", probably have different responses to light than say Kodachrome.
Film won't reproduce the spectral response of the objects you're filming. It takes the spectral response of those objects under that particular lighting, and maps it onto the spectral response of the film. Just like digital maps it to an RGB color space. So whether you're shooting film or digital, you're not getting the original spectral response anyway.
But this is a moot point. The whole point of photos/movies is to reproduce the spectral response achieved under the lighting of the scene at the time you shot it. You don't want the image to look different when viewed with sunlight coming in the windows, vs. a halogen lamp lighting the ceiling at night. You want to lock in the spectral response of the objects at the time of the original shoot, which both film and digital do.
The only time you want to try to duplicate the original spectral response of the objects is if you're trying to reproduce the actual color and texture. Paints, fabrics, chalks, etc. need to worry about it. Film and digital photos and movies do not.
So, does this account for why some people say digital looks different than film? Can it corrected? Do people care? I worked in compression not color but I guess I should have learned this.:(
Imitating the color response of different films is mostly trivial. There have been photoshop actions to do it since the early 1990s. It can get a bit dicey if the film is sensitive to a wavelength the camera sensor is not (e.g. UV), but for the most part you can digitally make a pretty close approximation to most films.
Glad to see that there are NO electronics engineers or other people that have a clue as to what they are doing.
Two paragraphs after the one you quoted from TFA: "However, one bright spark managed to cobble together a new converter that downstepped the 12 volt supply directly to five volts much more efficiently, using mail-order parts and a bit of ingenuity."
The other problem with stepping 12V DC down to 5V is that often, the only charger people have for their phone is the proprietary AC one. The industry has standardized on mini/micro USB lately, but most older phones will only charge with an AC adapter. And almost nobody will be willing to chop up their laptop's AC adapter plug to be able to hook it up to straight DC. So the universal power supply remains 120/240 V AC.
I do have to wonder though, given this report is from San Francisco and the type of people drawn to OWS, why hasn't anyone thought to set up a windmill or some sort of solar array (about 4-5 m^2 @ 0.15 capacity factor should generate as much power as people taking turns cycling 24/7). PV solar sucks in comparison to other electricity sources, but it's forte is off-the-grid applications like this.
Change you can believe in right? I'm not a republican...
There's a tendency for people who visit slashdot to oversimplify and equate Democrat=good and Republican=evil. The truth is much more complex. In particular, The movie, TV, and record industry has always been squarely behind Democrats, and the publishing industry shifted that way during the Bush years (scroll down to the Party Split graphs).
This isn't a Democrat administration doing something with a copyright issue which you'd never expect, something you'd only expect from a Republican administration. It's a Democrat administration doing exactly what you'd expect it to do with a copyright issue. If you voted for Obama expecting him to side with the people instead of copyright holders, you need to do a better job researching political contributions next time. We have wonderful tools now which make it dirt simple compared to 15 years ago when we had to have it spoon-fed to us by the media, and you're remiss not to take advantage of them.
Personally I think it was the right choice - banking and finance reform was more important. But I knew it would mean copyright would shift the "wrong" way (in favor of content producers).
Correct. Speech recognition has been around since the 1990s. The more sophisticated natural language processing is what's new here. I wouldn't go so far to call it revolutionary yet. It's a possible solution to the "the phone is too frikkin small to use icons/menus" problem. One characteristic of this problem is that on phones, your apps are scattered across multiple pages which you must scroll through to find the one you want. That's not so much the case on the desktop where you have a lot more screen real estate and finer control with the mouse.
Whether it turns out to a revolutionary solution to this problem remains to be seen. It could be, or it could be a flash in the pan (typing and gesturing does not disturb others the way talking does), or most likely it'll fall somewhere in the middle and find use in certain niche areas without displacing the current icon/menu systems. That's what happened to the initial voice recognition systems. At first people were all excited about them because they could act as a drop-in replacement for the command line, menus, etc. In the end they ended up filling the niche roles of word processor dictation, and automatically routing phone calls at call-in support offices.
It works well for hands-free and display-less operation. i.e. the traditional telephone functions plus some menu navigation functionality. But many if not most new smartphone apps involve interacting with graphics like a map or photo. In those cases, pointing, dragging, and gesturing is generally far superior. "Enhance 224 to 176. Enhance, stop. Move in, stop. Pull out, track right, stop. Center in, pull back. Stop. Track 45 right. Stop. Center and stop. Enhance 34 to 36. Pan right and pull back. Stop. Enhance 34 to 46. Pull back. Wait a minute, go right, stop. Enhance 57 to 19. Track 45 left. Stop. Enhance 15 to 23." is a really inefficient and noisy way to navigate around a photo.
Once you make your opinions public, you can be charged with libel and malicious defamation of character in most countries. Especially in a case like this where many ISPs use Spahaus' lists so there are real, direct socio-economic consequences for wrongly blacklisting someone. (Not saying that's what happened here.)
DoD insists that they be allowed to override intellectual property laws when they want to use a technology without paying for patent rights first.
Are you sure? It sounds more like they just want to preserve the Bayh-Dole Act, meaning if the government helps fund the R&D for a product, they get non-exclusive royalty-free rights to any IP generated from it. I know the DoD has some overreaching powers over IP when it comes to national secrecy or times of war, but I haven't heard of them being able to just use someone's independently-developed patent outright without paying for it (aside from the regular government indemnification from being sued).
As a general rule, I'd say that cleaning up at least part of the spilled oil before breaking it up would always be better. I say that as an environmentalist, not as a scientist (my studies were in a different field), but I would think that leaving less released toxins in the environment would usually be the better choice.:)
The problem with that rule is that the toxicity is proportional to concentration. The ocean ecosystem has the ability to naturally break down crude oil. Natural oil seeps in the Gulf of Mexico are estimated to release about as much oil as the BP spill every year. It's just that the seeps are scattered and have a much lower flowrate, so the oil is much less concentrated, and the ecosystem is much better able to cope with it. That was the point of using dispersants (aka soap, for all you folks who are upset about releasing "chemicals" into the ocean): To prevent the oil from building up on the 2-dimensional surface and especially the 1-dimensional shorelines, and distributing it more evenly within the 3-dimensional ocean where it has a much lower concentration. That's the reason oil is still found along parts of the shoreline in Alaska more than 2 decades after the Vadez spill - once it reaches the 1-dimensional shoreline, it's highly concentrated (very small surface area per volume of oil), meaning it takes decades for bacteria to break it down naturally.
In other words, the impact of an oil spill and the duration of contamination is greatly multiplied by oil's tendency to float on the surface, and multiplied even more by its tendency to build up on shorelines. If you can cause it to remain mixed in the water, the overall impact of the spill isn't much greater than that from natural seeps. Of course there's a stronger local impact (anoxic plumes underwater as bacteria break down the oil), but these decisions have to be made by comparing the possible solutions to each other, not by comparing a solution to the pristine state if there were no spill.
So a decision about dispersing vs. collecting has to be made taking into account both the efficacy of collection and the exaggerated impact of allowing oil to reach the surface and shorelines. If dispersing can cause 90% of the oil to be consumed by bacteria within a year with none left after 5 years; then it is a superior solution to collecting 50% of it from the surface, 20% evaporating, while the remaining 30% coats the shorelines with 20% remaining after a year, and 5% left after 10 years. (Numbers made up for illustration. I have no idea what the actual rates are.)
Maybe we need a fourth qualifier for patents: New, useful, non-obvioius, and comprehensible. If the patent examiner can't understand what you're describing, the patent application is rejected.
If this is what I think it is, then the accounts DOSed themselves. Most people use the same username and password on different accounts. The spate of "hacked" gaming accounts I've read about recently were mostly due to people signing up for a gaming site or gold buying site. That site gets hacked or sells its username/password list to thieves, who then try the same usernames/passwords to login to various games.
If Sony detects this sort of login behavior (multiple failed login attempts to many different accounts coming from the same IP), the correct response is to lock the account with a message saying that their password has been compromised, and to request a password reset.
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This bears repeating to all you engineers and designers out there. If you calculate a failsafe has a 10% chance of failure, you cannot mitigate it to 0.01% by making four of them and calculating the chance of all four failing to be 0.1^4. That statistical calculation only works if all four failsafes are independent. If they are identical, then they are not independent, and an event which causes one to fail can cause all four to fail. Which is what happened at Fukushima Daiichi.
The generators should have been in different locations, at different heights, with separate individual fuel depots, of different makes, etc.
Their unlimited phone data plans haven't changed. It's just the mobile device (e.g. 3G on your tablet) and hotspot plans which are losing unlimited data. For many years now, Sprint's unwritten policy was to cancel your service if you used too much data on a mobile device plan, but you could eat up all the bandwidth you wanted with a phone data plan (people have posted scans of their bills with >100 GB of phone data). So for those two services, this is just making official what's been their unofficial policy for years.
This does represent a change for hotspot plans though. Those used to be truly unlimited to justify their additional price over a regular phone data plan, but now they will be capped. But most people I know who use their phone as a hotspot just root it and use their regular phone data plan.
If world reaction to the death of Steve Jobs vs. Dennis Ritchie is any indication, tell them to go into marketing. I've come to realize that most people never learn who designed the modern toys they use, but they come to idolize the guy who sold it to them. The only reason people remember Edison is because he was as good a marketer as he was an engineer/scientist.
Yeah, I got into an argument about this with some friends. The reason startup times are frequently cited as a metric is that it provides a common reference for comparing different computers. Not everyone's computer has the same software, so if I start raving about how much quicker Photoshop became after installing an SSD, most people are going to have no frame of reference to understand what I'm saying. Nor do most people download and run the same benchmarks (especially with the latest ones pushing over half a gig). But everyone, without exception, boots their computer. So startup times represent a quick and dirty way to compare the performance of different computers.
But startup times for comparing different OSes is rather useless. You can do tricks like what Windows XP did - slap the desktop and pointer on the screen as quickly as possible, but continue the boot process in the background making the computer unusable until it really finishes booting. An OS with fewer features will also boot up quicker. And as you point out, only a very small percentage of people's computer use is actually spent waiting for it to finish booting.
So... this means there's going to be a worldwide ban on coal as a fuel source, burning of trash, medical and hazardous waste incinerators, cement production, and CFL bulbs? Good luck with that.
This particular episode of Top Gear was the first one I ever saw. I've seen the accusation you're making repeated as if it proves something. You're basically arguing that they ran the car for 30 minutes, brought it back to the garage and had people push it back in to simulate it being out of juice, therefore they lied. Ok, but what if they ran it for 35 minutes until it really ran out of juice, and did the same thing? That would presumably be fair and accurate by your argument, no?
Based on what I saw in the episode, they highlighted a bunch of the positives of the car. Then the highlighted a bunch of the negatives. Whether those negatives were staged for the camera or not is beside the point - the point was that those were real negatives which (due to the short on-track range) has a fair probability of really happening.
The thing I took away from that episode was that if you want an electric car for track racing, be prepared to only race for a half hour, then spend a few hours waiting for a recharge. Or buy a second car to use while the first recharges. In contrast, a regular car can gas up in a few minutes and be ready to run around the track again. That seems like a really important point to make for anyone thinking of buying a Tesla Roadster to race around the track. The need to recharge the batteries has a much greater negative impact on the car's viability for this particular application than on a regular commuter vehicle which is charged overnight, and is definitely not something which would have immediately occurred to me had the show not pointed it out. They were right to emphasize it IMHO.
Saddam Hussein was captured alive, tried, and executed. Did it really change anything compared to if he'd just been killed when they first found him?
The problem is that student loans are a demand-side distortion of the market. By providing student loans, you actually encourage the price of tuition to rise by increasing the amount people are willing/able to pay. That is why tuition has been far outstripping the rate of inflation. Normally prices are kept in check by how much an individual is able to afford at this moment in time. But loans allow one to time-shift money from the future into the present, thus providing a great amount of money in the present, but in exchange for decades if not a lifetime of debt. Most people are very bad at making decisions regarding this types of trade-off between money now vs. future debt (witness the number of people who continually carry a balance on their credit cards). Schools are exploiting this weakness in human rationality to run up the cost of tuition, and cheap student loans just exacerbate it.
Education needs to be subsidized with supply-side distortions. Take the money currently provided as unrestricted student loans (leave the low-income assistance), and dump it into public universities. That should help lower the tuition at public unis, making them affordable to people who otherwise couldn't attend without student loans, while also exerting downward competitive price pressure on private universities and colleges. Normally I (as a fiscal conservative) wouldn't be for this - you're subsidizing a public "corporation" which competes directly with private corporations (universities and colleges). But the decades of student loans has so distorted the market that the private schools are swimming in money (which forces public universities to offer higher salaries to compete, thus raising their costs as well), and there's a lot of fat which needs to be trimmed to revert the college/graduate education market back to normal.
Here's a pic of the Motorola 3200 circa 1992, one of the original "brick" mobile phones. Note the colors of the buttons - green to send a call, red to end it. They even have a phone handset icon very similar to what's still used today.
The other worrying thing is that with Apple winning injunctions based on generic design patents, while Samsung loses them based on its patents being licensed under FRAND, in the future companies are going to be much less willing to license any patent under FRAND. They're going to want to save the real, beefy tech patents to protect them against "your widget is a circle" type patents.
It will be much harder to set standards, much less get companies to follow them. Products will be less compatible, leading to greater vendor lock-in. Smaller companies which used to pay the same licensing fee for FRAND patents as big companies, will suddenly find themselves paying much higher rates as they don't have the clout to negotiate as good a deal as a megacorp. Competition will decrease, and the rate of technological progress will slow down. This is a very worrying path we're heading down due to the courts (even if not deliberately) prioritizing form over function.
And for people bringing up the Coke bottle as an example of a design patent, the defining characteristic of a design patent in the U.S. is that it is ornamental. That is, the characteristic form being patented serves no functional purpose. The big Apple logo which lights up on the lid of a Macbook is a good example of something which qualifies for a design patent. So is (unnecessary) glass on the back side of a phone. A tablet has to be flat and rectangular due to its screen, and it needs to have rounded corners and edges to be comfortable and safe to hold and carry. These are all functional purposes, and do not (should not) qualify for a design patent.
Take a step back and just listen to what you're saying:
Apple is the only company in the world allowed to make icons with a sheen/glossy look?
Apple is the only company in the world allowed to make icons with rounded squares?
Apple is the only company in the world allowed to sell products with beveled edges?
Here's a better analogy. You have a Sony LCD TV, a Samsung LCD TV, and a Sharp LCD TV. Which one of them looks like the other? They all have a big display, power button, channel and volume controls, a bunch of A/V input puts. Could you, at a glance, mistake one for the other? When you make a device which is dominated by the display, they all end up looking pretty similar to each other.
Rectangular shapes to phones and tablets (and HDTVs) are inevitable because displays are rectangular (due to it being more processor-efficient to address pixels in rectangular arrays.
Rounded corners are inevitable because people don't like sharp corners poking into them through their pockets.
Adding highlights and drop shadows to give 2-dimensional drawings a more 3-dimensional look is a centuries-old artist's trick.
Icons started off square, then started gaining rounded edges around 2000. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple kicked off the trend, but Windows XP had a prominent bubbly look to it too.
Beveled and rounded edges have been used in designs for handheld products for decades because sharp corners hurt when you hold them in your hand for a long time.
While most of these design aspects are characteristic of Apple's designs, and I will grant you in some cases Apple started the trend in the industry to use them, none of them are new nor innovative nor ornamental. They are either implementations of age-old artistic designs, or a natural consequence of form following function (which would disqualify them from a design patent).
The bouncing effects are based on cartoon effects which have been around since at least the 1940s. Back in the 1980s when the first 3D animations were being done, they found that rendering a solid 3D object hitting and bouncing off the ground or a wall looked "fake" even though the physics were correct. Only when you distorted it by squashing it in a completely unrealistic manner (a la cartoons) did it start to look "real". The (pirated) version of 3D Studio I played around with as a kid in the early 1990s has a pretty good introduction to it in the tutorials. This type of exaggeration along with rubber banding to emphasize certain motions and actions has been around almost a century now (think back to the Saturday morning cartoons you watched as a kid), and applying it to animation in computer UIs should be considered obvious.
If there was a non-obvious part to this in UIs, it was the concept of giving a window momentum and friction as you scroll it up and down. Once you think of that, all the bouncing animations are obvious.
Swipe to unlock being patentable is asinine. It's a graphical representation of a sliding door latch. Completely obvious. If it's patentable, then anything that's existed in the physical world for centuries or millennia is patentable simply by adding the words "on a computer UI" to it.
No, from an advertising standpoint, this is customer-friendly. Assuming you're going to be showered by ads anyway in today's media, do you want to be showered by ads 90% of which don't interest you? Or do you want ads which interest you 75% of the time? I buy a lot of computers for client businesses. I want to be informed when Dell or some other major manufacturer holds a sale. Being able to better target ads is customer-friendly - it's win/win. It's not hypocritical, nor is it false advertising (indeed, showering you with ads saying all these products will make your life better, when 90% of them don't even interest you is more false).
Where this is customer-hostile is on the issue of privacy; nothing to do with the advertising. If I want to be informed of certain types of ads, I should have to give my consent to be tracked that way. Making it the default is making violating my privacy the default.
That's circular reasoning. Once upon a time, you could do professional work on a laptop screen. The older Macbooks and the IBM Thinkpads had options for matte hi-res IPS panels with color rendition as good as if not better than you could get with a desktop monitor. They were great if you were at a photo shoot on location and wanted to preview, check lighting, do some quick touch-up work to see if you'd be able to correct a flaw later, etc.
Since then, Apple has switched to mostly TN panels in their laptops, and Thinkpads now cater to the mainstream consumer, making them unsuitable for professional work. This forces professionals to stick to desktop monitors for their work. Which is the whole point of TFA.
Film won't reproduce the spectral response of the objects you're filming. It takes the spectral response of those objects under that particular lighting, and maps it onto the spectral response of the film. Just like digital maps it to an RGB color space. So whether you're shooting film or digital, you're not getting the original spectral response anyway.
But this is a moot point. The whole point of photos/movies is to reproduce the spectral response achieved under the lighting of the scene at the time you shot it. You don't want the image to look different when viewed with sunlight coming in the windows, vs. a halogen lamp lighting the ceiling at night. You want to lock in the spectral response of the objects at the time of the original shoot, which both film and digital do.
The only time you want to try to duplicate the original spectral response of the objects is if you're trying to reproduce the actual color and texture. Paints, fabrics, chalks, etc. need to worry about it. Film and digital photos and movies do not.
Imitating the color response of different films is mostly trivial. There have been photoshop actions to do it since the early 1990s. It can get a bit dicey if the film is sensitive to a wavelength the camera sensor is not (e.g. UV), but for the most part you can digitally make a pretty close approximation to most films.
Samsung came out with this baby 4 years before the iPad.
Two paragraphs after the one you quoted from TFA: "However, one bright spark managed to cobble together a new converter that downstepped the 12 volt supply directly to five volts much more efficiently, using mail-order parts and a bit of ingenuity."
The other problem with stepping 12V DC down to 5V is that often, the only charger people have for their phone is the proprietary AC one. The industry has standardized on mini/micro USB lately, but most older phones will only charge with an AC adapter. And almost nobody will be willing to chop up their laptop's AC adapter plug to be able to hook it up to straight DC. So the universal power supply remains 120/240 V AC.
I do have to wonder though, given this report is from San Francisco and the type of people drawn to OWS, why hasn't anyone thought to set up a windmill or some sort of solar array (about 4-5 m^2 @ 0.15 capacity factor should generate as much power as people taking turns cycling 24/7). PV solar sucks in comparison to other electricity sources, but it's forte is off-the-grid applications like this.
There's a tendency for people who visit slashdot to oversimplify and equate Democrat=good and Republican=evil. The truth is much more complex. In particular, The movie, TV, and record industry has always been squarely behind Democrats, and the publishing industry shifted that way during the Bush years (scroll down to the Party Split graphs).
This isn't a Democrat administration doing something with a copyright issue which you'd never expect, something you'd only expect from a Republican administration. It's a Democrat administration doing exactly what you'd expect it to do with a copyright issue. If you voted for Obama expecting him to side with the people instead of copyright holders, you need to do a better job researching political contributions next time. We have wonderful tools now which make it dirt simple compared to 15 years ago when we had to have it spoon-fed to us by the media, and you're remiss not to take advantage of them.
Personally I think it was the right choice - banking and finance reform was more important. But I knew it would mean copyright would shift the "wrong" way (in favor of content producers).
Correct. Speech recognition has been around since the 1990s. The more sophisticated natural language processing is what's new here. I wouldn't go so far to call it revolutionary yet. It's a possible solution to the "the phone is too frikkin small to use icons/menus" problem. One characteristic of this problem is that on phones, your apps are scattered across multiple pages which you must scroll through to find the one you want. That's not so much the case on the desktop where you have a lot more screen real estate and finer control with the mouse.
Whether it turns out to a revolutionary solution to this problem remains to be seen. It could be, or it could be a flash in the pan (typing and gesturing does not disturb others the way talking does), or most likely it'll fall somewhere in the middle and find use in certain niche areas without displacing the current icon/menu systems. That's what happened to the initial voice recognition systems. At first people were all excited about them because they could act as a drop-in replacement for the command line, menus, etc. In the end they ended up filling the niche roles of word processor dictation, and automatically routing phone calls at call-in support offices.
It works well for hands-free and display-less operation. i.e. the traditional telephone functions plus some menu navigation functionality. But many if not most new smartphone apps involve interacting with graphics like a map or photo. In those cases, pointing, dragging, and gesturing is generally far superior. "Enhance 224 to 176. Enhance, stop. Move in, stop. Pull out, track right, stop. Center in, pull back. Stop. Track 45 right. Stop. Center and stop. Enhance 34 to 36. Pan right and pull back. Stop. Enhance 34 to 46. Pull back. Wait a minute, go right, stop. Enhance 57 to 19. Track 45 left. Stop. Enhance 15 to 23." is a really inefficient and noisy way to navigate around a photo.
Once you make your opinions public, you can be charged with libel and malicious defamation of character in most countries. Especially in a case like this where many ISPs use Spahaus' lists so there are real, direct socio-economic consequences for wrongly blacklisting someone. (Not saying that's what happened here.)
Are you sure? It sounds more like they just want to preserve the Bayh-Dole Act, meaning if the government helps fund the R&D for a product, they get non-exclusive royalty-free rights to any IP generated from it. I know the DoD has some overreaching powers over IP when it comes to national secrecy or times of war, but I haven't heard of them being able to just use someone's independently-developed patent outright without paying for it (aside from the regular government indemnification from being sued).
The problem with that rule is that the toxicity is proportional to concentration. The ocean ecosystem has the ability to naturally break down crude oil. Natural oil seeps in the Gulf of Mexico are estimated to release about as much oil as the BP spill every year. It's just that the seeps are scattered and have a much lower flowrate, so the oil is much less concentrated, and the ecosystem is much better able to cope with it. That was the point of using dispersants (aka soap, for all you folks who are upset about releasing "chemicals" into the ocean): To prevent the oil from building up on the 2-dimensional surface and especially the 1-dimensional shorelines, and distributing it more evenly within the 3-dimensional ocean where it has a much lower concentration. That's the reason oil is still found along parts of the shoreline in Alaska more than 2 decades after the Vadez spill - once it reaches the 1-dimensional shoreline, it's highly concentrated (very small surface area per volume of oil), meaning it takes decades for bacteria to break it down naturally.
In other words, the impact of an oil spill and the duration of contamination is greatly multiplied by oil's tendency to float on the surface, and multiplied even more by its tendency to build up on shorelines. If you can cause it to remain mixed in the water, the overall impact of the spill isn't much greater than that from natural seeps. Of course there's a stronger local impact (anoxic plumes underwater as bacteria break down the oil), but these decisions have to be made by comparing the possible solutions to each other, not by comparing a solution to the pristine state if there were no spill.
So a decision about dispersing vs. collecting has to be made taking into account both the efficacy of collection and the exaggerated impact of allowing oil to reach the surface and shorelines. If dispersing can cause 90% of the oil to be consumed by bacteria within a year with none left after 5 years; then it is a superior solution to collecting 50% of it from the surface, 20% evaporating, while the remaining 30% coats the shorelines with 20% remaining after a year, and 5% left after 10 years. (Numbers made up for illustration. I have no idea what the actual rates are.)
Maybe we need a fourth qualifier for patents: New, useful, non-obvioius, and comprehensible. If the patent examiner can't understand what you're describing, the patent application is rejected.
If this is what I think it is, then the accounts DOSed themselves. Most people use the same username and password on different accounts. The spate of "hacked" gaming accounts I've read about recently were mostly due to people signing up for a gaming site or gold buying site. That site gets hacked or sells its username/password list to thieves, who then try the same usernames/passwords to login to various games.
If Sony detects this sort of login behavior (multiple failed login attempts to many different accounts coming from the same IP), the correct response is to lock the account with a message saying that their password has been compromised, and to request a password reset.