I'm not downloading Gigabytes of data because IT'S A FREAKIN' PHONE!
I'm not carrying it with me everywhere I go because IT'S A FREAKIN' PHONE!
I'm not sending IMs with it because IT'S A FREAKIN' PHONE!
I'm not reading my email with it because IT'S A FREAKIN' PHONE!
I'm not browsing the web with it because IT'S A FREAKIN' PHONE!
I'm not using it as a PDA because IT'S A FREAKIN' PHONE!
I'm not listening to my music on it because IT'S A FREAKIN' PHONE!
All of the above statements were the typical mindset of people at some point in the past. Technology advances, people's requirements and expectations increase. Given that 3G has been the norm for CDMA providers for 2+ years, and the TDMA providers began rolling out HSDPA late last year, an EDGE-only phone is going to be pretty crippled 6 months to a year from now.
And this impression is absolutely right. As the sanctions damage the economies of the countries in question and perpetuate the strife, the regimes do and will continue to change: from anti-US, aggressive, and violent... to MORE anti-US, MORE aggressive and MORE violent.
Because if you tick off someone enough that they don't want to trade with you, and your economy is in the crapper, obviously it's all THEIR fault. People who think like you describe need to grow up and learn some personal accountability. The U.S. economy makes up less than a quarter of the global economy. If Cuba can't generate a prosperous economy with access to ~75% of the global economy, their problems are their own fault, not because of the U.S. embargo. If one's argument is based on the premise of the same entity simultaneously being the devil ("killing us by not trading!") and savior ("everything would be great if they would trade!") to your problems, something is seriously fubar with your thinking. If they really are your savior, perhaps you need to consider that maybe, just maybe, they're right and you're wrong?
If someone won't trade with you because they don't like you, you have two choices: Either you change yourself so they like you, or you stand by your principles and forfeit that trade. It's completely irrational to expect some universal right to free trade regardless of socio-political differences; that your right to trade trumps their right to decide who they trade with.
Note: I do not personally support the Cuban embargo, but I do support my country's (or any country's) right to choose who it trades with. (I do not support my country trying to extend the embargo by proxy to other countries by pressuring them with it as a "condition" for trade with them.)
The fact that the wing is so strong suggests that it may be being over-designed.
It's probably not be overdesigned per se. Composites tend to exhibit much more strain (deflection under stress) than traditional materials. So a lot of times, the maximum deflection becomes the prevailing design criteria, not the maximum sustainable load. Most likely, the specifications for how much the wing is allowed to deflect under normal load is a more stringent criteria than how much load the wing can support without breaking. So they have to add more material to reduce the deflection, which adds strength as a side effect. (They could probably put additional stringers inside or switch to a sandwich structure to gain stiffness without additional material, but that could complicate fuel capacity and inspections.)
The first time this was really driven home to me was in undergraduate school in '88. A classmate was working on a portable carbon-fiber bridge project for the Army. It had to support the weight of a main battle tank crossing it. In the full-scale test demo, the general overseeing the project commented that you'd get one and only one tank crew to cross the bridge. He felt that after the other tank crews saw how much the bridge flexed, there was no way they'd want to drive on it.
So is it just one group who thinks that indivuals shouldnt be sued and a different group who thinks that the companies should be immune? How should the RIAA protect its intellectual property rights? Is it just a fundamental belief on here that copyright holders should have no recourse against violaters?
There are two things at question here, which are really the same thing.
1. What should Intellectual Property be?
2. How should IP be defended?
If you define IP to be the same as real property (permanent ownership, right of resale, "region free", etc), then it should be defended as such. Theft requires evidence of suspicion that the thief is in possession, which leads to a warrant from a judge, which the police then use to seize evidence used to arrest and convict the thief. Jail time with financial penalties in line with the property loss.
If you define IP to be something less than real property (temporary ownership, license to use, zero cost of duplication), then you can lower the standard (and penalty) for theft. Everyone is pretty much agreed that "property" in World of Warcraft has some value, but it is minimal. Theft of such property is unlikely to bring involvement by the police or legal system, the operators are free to police themselves.
Draw a line between these two and pick a point on it. The problem is the *IAA has been trying to define IP so they get all the benefits of real property, but give purchasers only the rights of virtual property. Yes there should be enforcement and penalties, but they should fit the crime. The *IAA needs to first define the crime in a manner which makes sense compared to completely real and completely virtual property. Not use a definition which cherry picks the best and worst aspects of both so that it favors them in all cases. When they do that, people will get upset no matter how they try to defend themselves -- because depending on which of their definitions of IP you use, you will always be justified in saying that their defense is unjustified.
Read-only access of course. But given the size of computer storage nowadays, it should be pretty simple to make the whole voting record publicly available on the Internet.
The voting machine has a public/private key pair. It generates a random public/private key pair in between votes which stays resident only in memory (is not written to disk). When you vote, your votes are coded. It's then encrypted with the voter's private key and the voting machine's public key. The voter's plaintext vote, an index number, the encrypted vote, his private key, and the voting machine's public key are then printed on a piece of paper the voter can take home. The voting machine then stores the encrypted vote and the voter's public key. Nothing else.
When tallying the votes, each machine runs through its stored votes, decrypting the record of encrypted votes using each voter's public key and the machine's private key. All this information is then sent to a central vote tallying database. The unencrypted votes are used for the official tally. The encrypted votes are used as proof against tampering. The index is used to allow voters to query the database.
Once home, the voter can log into the vote tally web site. He can query the database to make sure it's recorded his vote right. He asks it to send the vote recorded with his index number. It takes the unencrypted vote, encrypts it with the voting machine's private key and the public key associated with that index and sends it to him. His computer then uses the voting machine's public key and his private key to decrypt it. If all went well, it should match what's on his printout.
The system does not record who voted which way. The only way to link a vote with the voter is via the index number and private key printed on the voter's slip, which he is free to shred, eat, burn, whatever. I think it may even be possible to validate that the votes match by comparing the encrypted votes, without ever looking at the plaintext vote. It's been a while since I did the RSA key pair stuff.
Nobody can tamper with the votes in the database because the encrypted version is encrypted with the voter's private key, and only he has a copy of that key. If someone modifies his vote, they need to use a new public/private key pair. The voter's private key will no longer work against the returned result when he queries the vote counting database, tipping him off that something fishy is going on.
The voter cannot tamper with his printout to fake vote counting fraud. To change it so his plaintext vote and the encrypted vote match, he needs the voting machine's private key.
By virtue of the previous two bullets, if there is a discrepancy, you can localize where the problem occurred. The voter needs the voting machine's private key to alter his vote. The vote tallying people need the voter's private key to alter his vote (the encoded and unencoded vote on his paper would be encrypted with the voting machine's private key, authenticating that his printout is genuine).
Don't do anything stupid like seed the RNGs in all the voting machines with the same seed, so they all generate the same key pairs. Include something like the millisecond the vote was cast in the seed.
The only way I can think of to commit vote fraud against this system would be by stuffing the ballot box with false votes. And even there you could do a sanity check by comparing the number of votes cast by the number of voters the precinct operators counted (they mark off your name after you vote, so it's fairly easy to count how many names they've marked off).
I mean it's a fun question to ponder over from a technical standpoint, but it kinda misses the greater philosophical message of the story. What does it mean to be an android? What does it mean to be human? Are they really that different? Roy's eloquent speech at the end where he fears his memories would be "lost like tears in rain" applies equally as well to humans. The movie is a study on the nature of being (and consequently death).
The real answer to "Is Deckard a replicant?" is "Does it matter?" The movie works better if you don't know for sure. Even the director's cut, which strongly hinted that he was, didn't make it certain; it just drew more attention to the possibility, whereas in the theatrical release many audience members might have missed the possibility entirely.
When a company decides to use someone's creative (copyrightable) work, they have several options.
The most common option is what's known as a "work for hire". The company hires the individual as an employee. The company assumes all the risk in the endeavor - the individual will get paid regardless of whether or not the product succeeds. In exchange, the copyright belongs to the company, not the individual who created the work.
The second popular route is to purchase reproduction rights from a freelance copyright holder. The freelancer assumes the risk in the endeavor (he can't feed himself if he can't sell enough photos), but he retains the copyright. In these, the feelancer negotiates a fixed payment and sometimes royalties for each copy made. The important thing to note is that pricing varies depending on many factors, including size of the photo to be reproduced (full size back cover of the magazine is worth more than quarter panel buried in the back pages), where it will be reproduced (National Geographic is more prestigious than the National Enquirer), and approximately how many copies will be made. So yes, it really does matter in what media the photo will be reproduced. It's unusual but not unheard of for a company to be granted unlimited use, usually in the form of an exclusive license (e.g. Slesinger owns the marketing rights to Winnie the Pooh in the U.S. and Canada). But that's always done with the full knowledge of both parties that unlimited use is being granted. A more typical license grants reproduction not to exceed X number of copies. In the case of a periodical the number of copies is assumed based on the distribution of the periodical, and sometimes a limited number of reproductions. These contracts do not explicitly prohibit future reproduction because that's the whole point of copyright law - to prohibit reproduction unless the copyright holder agrees.
Without knowing the details of the case, it seems National Geographic wasn't very diligent in their contract negotiations. They should have foreseen the possibility of future anthologies and placed a term covering that in their contracts. The reason the "work for hire" exception to copyright was made was precisely to avoid this type of problem. Say I were making a game for the PC. I would hire coders, artists, marketers, maybe some play testers. In all I'm probably looking at 20-100 people involved in the project, all producing copyrightable work. The game gets finished, everyone goes their merry way. 2 years later, I decide to port the game to the Mac. I want to re-use as much of the code, art, and marketing materials as possible, so I need to secure new copyright releases for the new game. Now I'm faced with the daunting task of tracking down 20-100 different people who all hold copyright over the material who have had 2 years to disperse themselves among 6.5 billion people. Producing copyrightable materials under "work for hire" avoids this entire mess. Being a monthly publication with pre-assigned stories, NG should have employed photographers as "work for hire" or negotiated future anthologies in their contracts. (In fairness, the oversight could also be the fault of the freelancer, who did not specify that the photo could be reproduced in on the magazine and a limited number of republications.)
The situation with the New York Times is a bit different. News happens all over the place, and often the person there to take photographs is just some Joe who happened to be there with a camera, not a press photographer. So it's inevitable that they have to use freelance work. But even here they should've had the foresight to see republication or potential means of redistribution in the future and put it in the contract. It seems to me what's really going on here is that these media companies are, under the auspices of the impossibility of finding the tens or hundreds of thousands of copyright holders who have contributed to their product, asking the court for relief from having to pay the copyright holders they have found.
The AC on an average passenger car can consume as much as 5HP and is horribly unlikely to consume less than 3. that's 2.2 to 3.7 kilowatts.
A friend and I were discussing this. 3.7 kW is more than a one-ton central air conditioning unit. In a electrically powered AC, that's enough to cool a 600-700 square foot apartment/room. A car is typically 100 sq ft or less. Why the heck does it need so much cooling? Yes a large portion of its perimeter is windows, but houses and apartments have much larger windows. Car windows are probably less than 4 m^2 when measured perpendicular to a single direction. Sunlight is about 800 W/m^2 on a sunny day at noon, so at most the sun is pumping in 3200 Watts into your car. A heat pump like an AC should be able to handle that easily while consuming less power. (And remember, this is a worst case estimate.)
Our guess was that a lot of the energy in a car AC is wasted. A car normally doesn't have much electrical energy available. So power-hungry systems like the AC are run via other means. The AC is run off vacuum pressure drawn from the engine. It's not the most efficient way to harness energy, but it takes advantage of energy that would otherwise be wasted. So our guess was that between the HP generated at the shaft, transferring to vacuum pressure, then to mechanical energy running the compressor for the AC, you're losing a lot of energy. This inflates the AC's energy consumption up to 5 HP.
Assuming we're right, the whole picture changes with electric or hybrid vehicles. They'll be able to provide large amounts of electric power. Room and central ACs already run off electrical power, and we know they can be pretty darn efficient. So an electric vehicle could conceivably air condition your car with much less power than a gasoline or diesel car requires.
One of the big issues in redistricting is minority representation (or non-representation), which leads to districts that consist of urban regions connected by a thin corridor or other similarly bogus shapes. Instead of artificially trying to group minorities (or party strongholds, or whatever) into specific geographical areas, though, why not remove that layer and replace it with a system that inherently represents various groups proportionally?
Using a single transferable vote system like that used for Cambridge (MA) municipal elections could work quite well. In the city council race, there are 9 seats, and any group capable of generating at least 10% of the total votes can elect a councillor of their own, even if that group is spread from one end of Cambridge to the other. Some councillors do have unofficial "districts" where their support is strongest, but this is not a requirement in any way.
STV elections also avoid the "wasted vote" problem with independent or smaller-party candidates, since voters can put one of those as their #1 choice, and if they don't win, those votes transfer down the ballot to the #2 or later choice as necessary.
You can't create a perfectly fair vote tallying system. Gerrymandering is just one problem facet of one voting system. All voting systems you can come up with will have problems, just on different facets. Yes some systems might be "better" than others, but proving that means an exhaustive mathematical search of the solution space to verify that their problems are indeed fewer than another system's. An anecdote describing how the proposed system is better in one specific situation doesn't cut it. Absent such proof, different election systems are just that - different. And settling on one means you just have to live with the consequences when the results contradict common sense.
Even if it were possible to design a perfect election system, there's another problem completely independent of how you tally the votes. Power is not proportional to number of votes. An example of an extreme case would be where a stockholder holds 50.1% of the shares in a company. When things come up for a vote, even though everyone else holds almost half the votes, they have zero power. The person with 50.1% of the votes holds 100% of the power.
You can design systems which mathematically try to equate power to number of votes, so that e.g. a party with 8% of the vote would on average affect the outcomes of 8% of the issues that come up for vote. But doing this breaks the X votes = 1 representative rule that seems ingrained in everyone's mind as "fair".
The chart is very clearly focused on a small set of features related to key differentiators of the iPhone. It's designed to attract people, to make them want to learn more about the iPhone. People who are curious will explore the feature set of the relative devices beyond this little chart.
Exactly. In other words, it's an advertisement, not a comparison.
A giant chart with every feature of all devices would not attract nor interest anyone.
It doesn't have to be the entire feature chart. But let's take thinness as an example. Typically, a listing of a dimension specification includes all three dimensions and usually the weight. The fact that those are missing (and the iPhone doesn't fare the best in those measures) is a pretty big tip-off that this is an ad first, a comparison second.
Your use of the term "fanboy" is unnecessary, as no actual fanboy performing actual fanboy stunts is cited.
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine who the fanboys are.;)
Thankfully they seem to have gone out of vogue, but they were ubiquitous back in the 70's and 80's. Basically a product's marketer would take the spec sheets for their product and their competitors' products. Then they'd go through and cherry-pick all the features where their product was the best. Then they'd make an ad based on it. It was incredibly annoying because you'd see ads for a half dozen competing products all (semi-truthfully) claiming to be the BEST in bold letters with the details hidden in the fine print. "This cereal is the BEST! (has 100% recommended dietary allowance of niacin)." "No, this cereal is the BEST! (has 100% recommended dietary allowance of vitamin C)." etc. This was in direct contradiction to the common accepted definition of "best" which implies that only one product can qualify.
The fanboys would also pick up on it too, trying to think of excuses why their list wasn't a list of features that made their chosen product look good compared to the competition, but rather was a list features that mattered. I see nothing has changed in that regard.
It's done on TVall the time and nobody complains (chrominance is separated from luminance and often transmitted at much lower resolution). As has been pointed out below, your eyes are made up of rods (which see black and white) and cones (which see color), and only a fraction of those cones are devoted to each individual red, green, or blue spectrum. So your color resolution is already significantly lower than your luminance resolution. You can even see photos demonstrating this with a 9x decrease in color resolution (3x in each linear direction). You're most sensitive to green, which is why the Bayer sensors commonly used in digital cameras divide each 4 pixels into GRGB.
Gah, everything else in your comment is spot on but people always bring the McCoffee thing up as an example of a frivolous lawsuit when it actually wasn't. The coffee was very hot, enough to cause serious burns (she needed skin grafts).
The coffee was at the industry standard temperature. All they managed to do was make McDonalds serve their coffee at a lower temperature than recommended by the coffee trade groups. This is a product which is intended to be served in a state which is dangerous if mishandled. The world is not a perfectly safe place.
First the "facts" of the case as presented by the lawyers state that McDonalds held their coffee ready to serve at 180-190 F. I have found no evidence to substantiate their claim that other establishments served their coffee at 135-140 F prior to the lawsuit. You'll notice the page glosses over the temperature with a couple "factual" statements, then spends the rest of its time describing the burns and what temperatures are required to avoid them completely ignoring any requirements imposed by the coffee. That's the strategy they used during the trial to sway the jury.
The National Coffee Association of the U.S recommends the coffee be maintained at 180-185 F.
The Specialty Coffee Association of America recommends the coffee be held at 175-185 F (you have to buy their guidebooks to see the actual numbers so the link is not to their site).
Bunn, a major producer of coffee brewing and serving equipment recommends a holding temperature of 175-185 F and in fact recommends any coffee below 175 F be re-heated before serving. They also note that many of the aromatics will not evaporate at 150 F, thus depriving the coffee of its characteristic smell. This would appear to contradict the claim that other establishments served coffee at 135-140 F.
The same manufacturer, DeLonghi produces a unit with a 150-200 F temperature setting, indicating the 155 F recommended by the lawyers' site is at the extreme bottom of preferred coffee serving temperatures, and IMHO unsuitably cool for coffee served at a drive-through which in most cases will not be consumed until after a 5-15 minute drive to a destination.
I'll repeat, this is a product which is meant to be served in a state which is dangerous if mishandled. What's next, airlines being sued because their planes fly at a speed which is fatal if there's an accident? Or power companies being sued because electrical lines can cause severe burns or fatality if mishandled? The lawsuit points out that 700 people were also burned by McDonalds coffee in the 10 years prior. But McDonalds served tens of billions of cups of coffee during the same time, leading to an incident rate of one in 24 million. If I were a safety engineer and my product had an incident rate of one in 24 million, I'd be ecstatic at how safe it was!
This is an explicit writ authorizing anyone the legal right to record any and all information that passes through the RAM on their computer. I.E. if I own webserver X, I am within my legal right to log all information, or a portion thereof, that passes through my system, by virtue that it will reside, however briefly, in that system's RAM.
So if I'm hearing you right, this means I can make copies of all those DVDs, CDs, ebooks, and music files I play on my computer, regardless of whatever DRM restrictions the manufacturers have placed on them. After all I'm not copying the DVD, I'm just copying the contents of what's in my RAM. (Yes I'm being facetious, but the judge started it.)
If this thing is DOA, no app development, and a lot of other lock in restrictions. I am not sure who the customers of those things should be the technical crowd definitely is not.
And lots of other usual apple customers probably are shied away by the contract enforcements connected to this thing.
I assume it will be the crowd who wants to have the latest shiny toy. I am not sure if this thing will be able to stand on its own after some initial success. Apple could have had a winner on this thing if they wouldnt have played Sony or Nintendo in trying to lock the user of this thing down!
I'm not sure it's Apple that's doing all the locking. What does Apple gain by limiting the wi-fi? Nothing. In fact they lose a lot of potential customers who see the iPhone as a PDA first, phone second. What does AT&T gain? It forces all purchasers to buy an expensive data plan (which was already required), and requires that they stay on that data plan if they want their iPhone to be able to connect to a regular network. It seems to me this is much more likely to be something AT&T requested if not demanded that Apple do.
Are, the 2+ parties involved cannot or refuse to resolve their differences otherwise, and the perceived benefit of war is assessed to be greater than the suffering and death the war will cause. In other words, the suffering and death that will likely happen if you don't go to war would exceed the certain suffering and death of the war itself. Pretty much everyone agrees fighting WWII with a chance to win was a better choice than rolling over and letting Hitler take over Europe.
I completely agree there are wars started by psychopaths who just want to spread death and destruction while profiting as a consequence (both monetarily and through conquest). But the question then becomes, how exactly do you stop such a psychopath if not through war?
Wow, I get to play the Hitler card and still be on topic.
Why would we jail someone for spamming? They are non-violent offenders.
I agree. He shouldn't go to jail. He sent 50,000 spams to 1.277 million email addresses (albeit AOL addresses). His punishment should be to have to hand-sort through 63,850,000,000 of AOL's spam reject emails looking for false positives. Sprinkle in a couple hundred legit emails to check to make sure he's really trying. When he finds them all, he's free to go.
To put the $1 billion in perspective, the net revenue for all music sales in 2006 in the U.S. reported by the RIAA was only $11.5 billion. That's revenue, not profit.
If DRM didn't exist, there would be *no* online media from the BBC.
I disagree. That's what the media companies would like to believe. However, the fact remains that news and entertainment programming dissemination is gradually moving from push-based broadcast-based media to online pull-based media (where the viewer requests what they're interested in). If a company refuses to put their media online, they will quickly find themselves becoming irrelevant, and someone else will step in to fill in the void. Like what happened to Encyclopedia Britannica.
It should go without saying that if you're going to compare an open-box item from one manufacturer, you should compare an open-box item from the other.
Sorry, didn't notice it was open box. I just picked the lowest priced MBP and A8JS from Newegg. Here's the regular version of the A8JS for $1450. If I had gone with the highest priced version, the comparison gets even worse for the Mac. $1600 vs. $2450 with similar feature set upgrades.
The MAC also has 802.11n. It/does/ have VGA out (via the included adapter). I don't know if you can use VGA, LCD, and DVI on the Asus (though it would be pretty cool if you could) but if you can't, that makes it irrelevant.
The ASUS has both VGA and DVI built in. I generally don't consider "features" where you have to carry around an external adapter. Too often it'll be left at home or lost. I mean if you wanted to argue it, you could say that any laptop has all features by virtue of an adapter that fits into its expansion slot. The Asus will run with any one or two of the three outputs (VGA, LCD, DVI). I think this may be a limitation of the nVidia driver though, as it does recognize that all three monitors are connected at once.
A nice bonus I found about the nVidia 7700 is that it has separate LUTs for each output. That means I can display simultaneously with two color profiles, meaning both my displays can be color calibrated simultaneously.
MacBook Pro 15.4"
Processor Intel Core 2 Duo T7400(2.16GHz)
Memory 1GB DDR2
Screen Size 15.4"
Resolution 1440 x 900
ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 128 MB
Hard Drive 120GB 5400 RPM
Optical Drive DVD±R/RW 6x
LAN 10/100/1000Mbps
WLAN 802.11g Wireless LAN
Bluetooth Bluetooth 2.0+EDR
Card slot 1 x ExpressCard/34 slot
USB Two 480-Mbps USB 2.0 ports
FireWire One FireWire 400 port at up to 400 Mbps
Video Port 1 x DVI (VGA output using included DVI to VGA adapter)
Audio Port Combined optical digital input/audio line in (minijack)
Webcam Built-in iSight Camera
Dimension 14.1" x 9.6" x 1.0"
Weight 5.6 lbs. Currenly $1965 at Newegg
Asus A8JS
Processor Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 2.00G
Memory 1GB DDR2
Hard Drive 120GB 5400 RPM
Optical Drive DVD±R/RW 8x
NVIDIA GeForce Go 7700 512MB (about 25%-40% faster than the x1600, which is underclocked on the Mac)
Screen Size 14"
Resolution 1440 x 900
LAN 10/100/1000Mbps
WLAN 802.11a/b/g Wireless LAN
IRDA Yes
Card Slot 1 x Express Card
USB 5
IEEE 1394 1 (aka firewire)
Video Port 1 x VGA, 1 x DVI, 1 x S-Video TV-out
Audio Ports 1 x Headphone-out jack (SPDIF)
Card Reader MMC, SD, MS, MS PRO
Webcam 0.35 Mega-Pixel web-cam
Dimensions 13.19" x 9.65" x 1.37-1.46"
Weight 5.25 lbs. Current $1380 at Newegg
Yes the screen is smaller but the resolution is the same and the laptop is an inch more compact in width as a result. Otherwise, the only major factors in the Mac's favor were the thinness, better construction, bluetooth (a $50 option I didn't need on the Asus), and an imperceptibly faster CPU. Everything else went in favor of the Asus. The price difference is currently about $600. At the time I was $700 ($1500 vs. $2200) or 46% higher for the Mac for a worse video card, no VGA out, no TV out, fewer USB slots, no memory card slot, and a bigger, heavier computer. There was just no comparison.
Comparing to Dell's web prices is misleading. Dell frequently gives out coupons that give $500-$1000 or 25%-40% discounts on their systems and laptops. Everyone knows Sony is way overpriced. That said, the high end MacBooks are premium computers and are priced in-line with other premium computers. If you're OK with paying extra for a premium computer, then that's fine. But if you do a little searching, you can find better notebooks for less, they just won't be well-known brands. If Apple doesn't fall egregiously behind (their new Santa Rosa MacBook will use an nVidia 8600 GT, which looks like it'll be a solid graphics card), my next notebook will probably be a MacBook so I can run OS/X.
Say you strip out a narrow band of blue light. I imagine your eye would still perceive the light to be "white". Now using only filters between you and that "white" lightsource, display that shade of blue that's missing.
That's very easy to do. The different "shades" of colors you see are not caused by seeing a specific frequency of light. They're caused by the red, green, and blue receptors in your eyes receiving different amounts of stimulation in a specific proportion. Each receptor will respond to a broad band of frequencies, but their response varies by frequency. This means the easiest way to cause your eyes to see a certain shade is with a narrow band of light at a specific frequency. But that shade can be duplicated (to the best of your eyes' ability to distinguish) by multiple narrow bands centered at 2 or more frequencies (with 3 at red, green, and blue being most effective). It's just a linear equation with three variables you can adjust to match an ouput. Three variables with one equation has an infinite number of possible solutions.
In other words, you don't need to duplicate the exact spectrum of light to duplicate the color it appears to be. You only need to duplicate the exact spectrum if you want the objects being illuminated by that light to appear the same color.
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"We had to destroy the freedom in order to protect freedom."
I'm not sending IMs with it because IT'S A FREAKIN' PHONE!
I'm not reading my email with it because IT'S A FREAKIN' PHONE!
I'm not browsing the web with it because IT'S A FREAKIN' PHONE!
I'm not using it as a PDA because IT'S A FREAKIN' PHONE! I'm not listening to my music on it because IT'S A FREAKIN' PHONE!
All of the above statements were the typical mindset of people at some point in the past. Technology advances, people's requirements and expectations increase. Given that 3G has been the norm for CDMA providers for 2+ years, and the TDMA providers began rolling out HSDPA late last year, an EDGE-only phone is going to be pretty crippled 6 months to a year from now.
The U.S. is hypocritical for putting an embargo on Cuba for being communist, but not on China which is also communist.
Critics of the U.S. are hypocritical for criticizing the U.S. for trading with China, yet also criticizing the U.S. for not trading with Cuba.
If someone won't trade with you because they don't like you, you have two choices: Either you change yourself so they like you, or you stand by your principles and forfeit that trade. It's completely irrational to expect some universal right to free trade regardless of socio-political differences; that your right to trade trumps their right to decide who they trade with.
Note: I do not personally support the Cuban embargo, but I do support my country's (or any country's) right to choose who it trades with. (I do not support my country trying to extend the embargo by proxy to other countries by pressuring them with it as a "condition" for trade with them.)
The first time this was really driven home to me was in undergraduate school in '88. A classmate was working on a portable carbon-fiber bridge project for the Army. It had to support the weight of a main battle tank crossing it. In the full-scale test demo, the general overseeing the project commented that you'd get one and only one tank crew to cross the bridge. He felt that after the other tank crews saw how much the bridge flexed, there was no way they'd want to drive on it.
1. What should Intellectual Property be?
2. How should IP be defended?
If you define IP to be the same as real property (permanent ownership, right of resale, "region free", etc), then it should be defended as such. Theft requires evidence of suspicion that the thief is in possession, which leads to a warrant from a judge, which the police then use to seize evidence used to arrest and convict the thief. Jail time with financial penalties in line with the property loss.
If you define IP to be something less than real property (temporary ownership, license to use, zero cost of duplication), then you can lower the standard (and penalty) for theft. Everyone is pretty much agreed that "property" in World of Warcraft has some value, but it is minimal. Theft of such property is unlikely to bring involvement by the police or legal system, the operators are free to police themselves.
Draw a line between these two and pick a point on it. The problem is the *IAA has been trying to define IP so they get all the benefits of real property, but give purchasers only the rights of virtual property. Yes there should be enforcement and penalties, but they should fit the crime. The *IAA needs to first define the crime in a manner which makes sense compared to completely real and completely virtual property. Not use a definition which cherry picks the best and worst aspects of both so that it favors them in all cases. When they do that, people will get upset no matter how they try to defend themselves -- because depending on which of their definitions of IP you use, you will always be justified in saying that their defense is unjustified.
The voting machine has a public/private key pair. It generates a random public/private key pair in between votes which stays resident only in memory (is not written to disk). When you vote, your votes are coded. It's then encrypted with the voter's private key and the voting machine's public key. The voter's plaintext vote, an index number, the encrypted vote, his private key, and the voting machine's public key are then printed on a piece of paper the voter can take home. The voting machine then stores the encrypted vote and the voter's public key. Nothing else.
When tallying the votes, each machine runs through its stored votes, decrypting the record of encrypted votes using each voter's public key and the machine's private key. All this information is then sent to a central vote tallying database. The unencrypted votes are used for the official tally. The encrypted votes are used as proof against tampering. The index is used to allow voters to query the database.
Once home, the voter can log into the vote tally web site. He can query the database to make sure it's recorded his vote right. He asks it to send the vote recorded with his index number. It takes the unencrypted vote, encrypts it with the voting machine's private key and the public key associated with that index and sends it to him. His computer then uses the voting machine's public key and his private key to decrypt it. If all went well, it should match what's on his printout.
The only way I can think of to commit vote fraud against this system would be by stuffing the ballot box with false votes. And even there you could do a sanity check by comparing the number of votes cast by the number of voters the precinct operators counted (they mark off your name after you vote, so it's fairly easy to count how many names they've marked off).
That's all I can think of off the top of my head.
The real answer to "Is Deckard a replicant?" is "Does it matter?" The movie works better if you don't know for sure. Even the director's cut, which strongly hinted that he was, didn't make it certain; it just drew more attention to the possibility, whereas in the theatrical release many audience members might have missed the possibility entirely.
The most common option is what's known as a "work for hire". The company hires the individual as an employee. The company assumes all the risk in the endeavor - the individual will get paid regardless of whether or not the product succeeds. In exchange, the copyright belongs to the company, not the individual who created the work.
The second popular route is to purchase reproduction rights from a freelance copyright holder. The freelancer assumes the risk in the endeavor (he can't feed himself if he can't sell enough photos), but he retains the copyright. In these, the feelancer negotiates a fixed payment and sometimes royalties for each copy made. The important thing to note is that pricing varies depending on many factors, including size of the photo to be reproduced (full size back cover of the magazine is worth more than quarter panel buried in the back pages), where it will be reproduced (National Geographic is more prestigious than the National Enquirer), and approximately how many copies will be made. So yes, it really does matter in what media the photo will be reproduced. It's unusual but not unheard of for a company to be granted unlimited use, usually in the form of an exclusive license (e.g. Slesinger owns the marketing rights to Winnie the Pooh in the U.S. and Canada). But that's always done with the full knowledge of both parties that unlimited use is being granted. A more typical license grants reproduction not to exceed X number of copies. In the case of a periodical the number of copies is assumed based on the distribution of the periodical, and sometimes a limited number of reproductions. These contracts do not explicitly prohibit future reproduction because that's the whole point of copyright law - to prohibit reproduction unless the copyright holder agrees.
Without knowing the details of the case, it seems National Geographic wasn't very diligent in their contract negotiations. They should have foreseen the possibility of future anthologies and placed a term covering that in their contracts. The reason the "work for hire" exception to copyright was made was precisely to avoid this type of problem. Say I were making a game for the PC. I would hire coders, artists, marketers, maybe some play testers. In all I'm probably looking at 20-100 people involved in the project, all producing copyrightable work. The game gets finished, everyone goes their merry way. 2 years later, I decide to port the game to the Mac. I want to re-use as much of the code, art, and marketing materials as possible, so I need to secure new copyright releases for the new game. Now I'm faced with the daunting task of tracking down 20-100 different people who all hold copyright over the material who have had 2 years to disperse themselves among 6.5 billion people. Producing copyrightable materials under "work for hire" avoids this entire mess. Being a monthly publication with pre-assigned stories, NG should have employed photographers as "work for hire" or negotiated future anthologies in their contracts. (In fairness, the oversight could also be the fault of the freelancer, who did not specify that the photo could be reproduced in on the magazine and a limited number of republications.)
The situation with the New York Times is a bit different. News happens all over the place, and often the person there to take photographs is just some Joe who happened to be there with a camera, not a press photographer. So it's inevitable that they have to use freelance work. But even here they should've had the foresight to see republication or potential means of redistribution in the future and put it in the contract. It seems to me what's really going on here is that these media companies are, under the auspices of the impossibility of finding the tens or hundreds of thousands of copyright holders who have contributed to their product, asking the court for relief from having to pay the copyright holders they have found.
Our guess was that a lot of the energy in a car AC is wasted. A car normally doesn't have much electrical energy available. So power-hungry systems like the AC are run via other means. The AC is run off vacuum pressure drawn from the engine. It's not the most efficient way to harness energy, but it takes advantage of energy that would otherwise be wasted. So our guess was that between the HP generated at the shaft, transferring to vacuum pressure, then to mechanical energy running the compressor for the AC, you're losing a lot of energy. This inflates the AC's energy consumption up to 5 HP.
Assuming we're right, the whole picture changes with electric or hybrid vehicles. They'll be able to provide large amounts of electric power. Room and central ACs already run off electrical power, and we know they can be pretty darn efficient. So an electric vehicle could conceivably air condition your car with much less power than a gasoline or diesel car requires.
Even if it were possible to design a perfect election system, there's another problem completely independent of how you tally the votes. Power is not proportional to number of votes. An example of an extreme case would be where a stockholder holds 50.1% of the shares in a company. When things come up for a vote, even though everyone else holds almost half the votes, they have zero power. The person with 50.1% of the votes holds 100% of the power.
You can design systems which mathematically try to equate power to number of votes, so that e.g. a party with 8% of the vote would on average affect the outcomes of 8% of the issues that come up for vote. But doing this breaks the X votes = 1 representative rule that seems ingrained in everyone's mind as "fair".
The fanboys would also pick up on it too, trying to think of excuses why their list wasn't a list of features that made their chosen product look good compared to the competition, but rather was a list features that mattered. I see nothing has changed in that regard.
It's done on TV all the time and nobody complains (chrominance is separated from luminance and often transmitted at much lower resolution). As has been pointed out below, your eyes are made up of rods (which see black and white) and cones (which see color), and only a fraction of those cones are devoted to each individual red, green, or blue spectrum. So your color resolution is already significantly lower than your luminance resolution. You can even see photos demonstrating this with a 9x decrease in color resolution (3x in each linear direction). You're most sensitive to green, which is why the Bayer sensors commonly used in digital cameras divide each 4 pixels into GRGB.
First the "facts" of the case as presented by the lawyers state that McDonalds held their coffee ready to serve at 180-190 F. I have found no evidence to substantiate their claim that other establishments served their coffee at 135-140 F prior to the lawsuit. You'll notice the page glosses over the temperature with a couple "factual" statements, then spends the rest of its time describing the burns and what temperatures are required to avoid them completely ignoring any requirements imposed by the coffee. That's the strategy they used during the trial to sway the jury.
The National Coffee Association of the U.S recommends the coffee be maintained at 180-185 F.
The Specialty Coffee Association of America recommends the coffee be held at 175-185 F (you have to buy their guidebooks to see the actual numbers so the link is not to their site).
Bunn, a major producer of coffee brewing and serving equipment recommends a holding temperature of 175-185 F and in fact recommends any coffee below 175 F be re-heated before serving. They also note that many of the aromatics will not evaporate at 150 F, thus depriving the coffee of its characteristic smell. This would appear to contradict the claim that other establishments served coffee at 135-140 F.
Starbucks sells coffee dispensing equipment which puts out coffee at 180 F.
The same manufacturer, DeLonghi produces a unit with a 150-200 F temperature setting, indicating the 155 F recommended by the lawyers' site is at the extreme bottom of preferred coffee serving temperatures, and IMHO unsuitably cool for coffee served at a drive-through which in most cases will not be consumed until after a 5-15 minute drive to a destination.
I'll repeat, this is a product which is meant to be served in a state which is dangerous if mishandled. What's next, airlines being sued because their planes fly at a speed which is fatal if there's an accident? Or power companies being sued because electrical lines can cause severe burns or fatality if mishandled? The lawsuit points out that 700 people were also burned by McDonalds coffee in the 10 years prior. But McDonalds served tens of billions of cups of coffee during the same time, leading to an incident rate of one in 24 million . If I were a safety engineer and my product had an incident rate of one in 24 million, I'd be ecstatic at how safe it was!
I completely agree there are wars started by psychopaths who just want to spread death and destruction while profiting as a consequence (both monetarily and through conquest). But the question then becomes, how exactly do you stop such a psychopath if not through war?
Wow, I get to play the Hitler card and still be on topic.
What's that? He'd prefer to go to jail you say?
To put the $1 billion in perspective, the net revenue for all music sales in 2006 in the U.S. reported by the RIAA was only $11.5 billion. That's revenue, not profit.
A nice bonus I found about the nVidia 7700 is that it has separate LUTs for each output. That means I can display simultaneously with two color profiles, meaning both my displays can be color calibrated simultaneously.
MacBook Pro 15.4"
Processor Intel Core 2 Duo T7400(2.16GHz)
Memory 1GB DDR2
Screen Size 15.4"
Resolution 1440 x 900
ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 128 MB
Hard Drive 120GB 5400 RPM
Optical Drive DVD±R/RW 6x
LAN 10/100/1000Mbps
WLAN 802.11g Wireless LAN
Bluetooth Bluetooth 2.0+EDR
Card slot 1 x ExpressCard/34 slot
USB Two 480-Mbps USB 2.0 ports
FireWire One FireWire 400 port at up to 400 Mbps
Video Port 1 x DVI (VGA output using included DVI to VGA adapter)
Audio Port Combined optical digital input/audio line in (minijack)
Webcam Built-in iSight Camera
Dimension 14.1" x 9.6" x 1.0"
Weight 5.6 lbs.
Currenly $1965 at Newegg
Asus A8JS
Processor Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 2.00G
Memory 1GB DDR2
Hard Drive 120GB 5400 RPM
Optical Drive DVD±R/RW 8x
NVIDIA GeForce Go 7700 512MB (about 25%-40% faster than the x1600, which is underclocked on the Mac)
Screen Size 14"
Resolution 1440 x 900
LAN 10/100/1000Mbps
WLAN 802.11a/b/g Wireless LAN
IRDA Yes
Card Slot 1 x Express Card
USB 5
IEEE 1394 1 (aka firewire)
Video Port 1 x VGA, 1 x DVI, 1 x S-Video TV-out
Audio Ports 1 x Headphone-out jack (SPDIF)
Card Reader MMC, SD, MS, MS PRO
Webcam 0.35 Mega-Pixel web-cam
Dimensions 13.19" x 9.65" x 1.37-1.46"
Weight 5.25 lbs.
Current $1380 at Newegg
Yes the screen is smaller but the resolution is the same and the laptop is an inch more compact in width as a result. Otherwise, the only major factors in the Mac's favor were the thinness, better construction, bluetooth (a $50 option I didn't need on the Asus), and an imperceptibly faster CPU. Everything else went in favor of the Asus. The price difference is currently about $600. At the time I was $700 ($1500 vs. $2200) or 46% higher for the Mac for a worse video card, no VGA out, no TV out, fewer USB slots, no memory card slot, and a bigger, heavier computer. There was just no comparison.
Comparing to Dell's web prices is misleading. Dell frequently gives out coupons that give $500-$1000 or 25%-40% discounts on their systems and laptops. Everyone knows Sony is way overpriced. That said, the high end MacBooks are premium computers and are priced in-line with other premium computers. If you're OK with paying extra for a premium computer, then that's fine. But if you do a little searching, you can find better notebooks for less, they just won't be well-known brands. If Apple doesn't fall egregiously behind (their new Santa Rosa MacBook will use an nVidia 8600 GT, which looks like it'll be a solid graphics card), my next notebook will probably be a MacBook so I can run OS/X.
In other words, you don't need to duplicate the exact spectrum of light to duplicate the color it appears to be. You only need to duplicate the exact spectrum if you want the objects being illuminated by that light to appear the same color.