Besides, if your innovation is such that it can be copied by a dozen competitiors the very next day, it probably wasn't much of an innovation in the first place.
Someone I know invented a fan with spring-loaded weighted blades which shut flat when the fan wasn't spinning, but tilted so they could drive air while spinning. It was a very simple, but innovative invention. Fans have been placed in windows and bathrooms for close to a hundred years using a separate set of blinds (manually or electrically operated) to block airflow when not in use. Think of a bathroom in winter where you'd like to vent steam out while it's in use, but not let cold air in while it's not in use. This invention immediately made all those old fans obsolete. Yet it was copied the very next day by large companies (in China) who already had the manufacturing lines in place to quickly produce the things, while the actual inventor had to struggle to put together a business and negotiate deals with manufacturing companies. In the end he didn't receive much if anything for his invention.
All inventions are obvious in hindsight. The fact that people made fans with separate blinds for close to a hundred years is more than enough testament that this invention was non-obvious despite how simple it was. Just because an invention is simple to reproduce doesn't automatically mean it was obvious, or was not very innovative. You're making an unsubstantiated assertion in your chain of logic to reach your preconceived conclusion that patents are unnecessary.
Would daddy give his daughter The Little Mermaid on a DVD written with a Sharpie?
Actually that's exactly what I would do. The studios claim the DVD is a license (to view the movie as often as I wish in private), not a physical product (which I could copy or distribute as I wish). But if my daughter were to destroy the physical DVD and I try to get a replacement, suddenly they claim the DVD is a physical product and I must purchase another copy to replace the broken one; the fact that I already paid for a license to view the movie doesn't matter. Which is it? A license or a physical product? No answer? Then of course I'm going to copy every DVD I buy (using a tool they've managed to outlaw as illegal) and only use the copies for viewing while the originals are kept safe from the destructive hands of little children.
The software industry got this right. If you buy a piece of software, you get a license to the software. If you destroy the CD (or DVD), most software companies will send you replacements if you can prove your original purchase. If they ever upgrade the software, they recognize that you've already paid for a license and sell you the upgrade for less than a new copy. I suspect the reason they got it right is because the software industry is populated by people who think logically and reasonably. They treat me fairly, so I gladly pay for the software I use.
Contrast this with the entertainment industry. If you buy a movie/song, you get a license to view/hear the song. If you destroy the CD (or DVD) they require you to buy a new license at full price. If they ever upgrade the movie/song (new media format or an extended release), they require you to buy a new license at full price. This is called trying to have your cake and eat it too. I suspect the reason the entertainment industry does things this way is because it is populated by people who try to screw everyone (even their own artists) out of every dollar they can. Excuse me for not shedding a tear for the woes of such people.
Well, spheres. Put up several things that are big, low-density but deformable (gelatinous), and round. The problem with this debris isn't the size, it's the relative velocity. A bunch of gelatinous spheres could absorb the impacts and imbed the debris within themselves, acting like passive vacuum cleaners to clear out that junk. You want them to be big to maximize the chance of random impacts, you want them to be low-density so the junk is gradually decelerated instead of bouncing or fracturing off more pieces, and round so there are no corners to break off.
Who says all those years of playing AD&D were wasted?
This isn't a judgement... more of a curiosity. I don't understand why "conservative Republicans" are so determined to deny that global warming is happening. It's fairly pervasive, or at least seems to to me. I can't tell if it's just people towing the party line and that line comes from the top, or if there's some aspect of religious doctrination that forces this attitude, or something else.
This isn't a judgement... more of a curiosity. I don't understand why "liberal Democrats" are so determined to deny that nuclear power is beneficial. It's fairly pervasive, or at least seems to to me. I can't tell if it's just people towing the party line and that line comes from the top, or if there's some aspect of quasi-religious environmental doctrination that forces this attitude, or something else.
Case in point, I have relatives who are conservatives. I can't say all of them say this, but I'm surprised at the numbers who believe that global warming is a bunch of bull. I was listening to an NPR Technology podcast about this and a guy called in, identified himself as a conservative Republican, and proceded to state that he didn't believe global warming was happening.
Case in point, I have relatives who are liberals. I can't say all of them say this, but I'm surprised at the numbers who believe that nuclear power is an evil technology. I was listening to a conservative technology podcast about this and a guy called in, identified himself as a liberal Democrat, and proceeded to state that he didn't believe nuclear power had any place in energy production.
I don't get why the skeptisism is drawn by party lines. What am I missing? Is it as simple as the top Republican leadership protecting oil interests and everyone else just follows along, or is there a deeper, more historical context that I'm unaware of?
I don't get why the skepticism is drawn by party lines. What am I missing? Is it as simple as the top environmental leadership protecting their power structure and everyone else just follows along, or is there a deeper, more historical context that I'm unaware of?
Unfortunately, the problem is human nature. People aren't very receptive to new arguments. Their thinking process seems to be: Preliminary evidence -> quick conclusion -> dismissal of evidence refuting this conclusion -> support of evidence supporting this conclusion. This is not necessarily a bad thing - survival depends on being able to make good conclusions based on insufficient evidence. But it also means that the threshold for unseating an incorrect conclusion is much higher than one would probably like it to be.
'We own 300,000 domains, we make $20 million a year, we have just four employees and some servers in the Caymans.'
If that truly is the economics of the situation, then it is necessarily temporary. The market always adjusts when the opportunity arises to carry off so much wealth for so little actual effort.
A friend of mine does this. There is no market economics involved because domain names are monopolies. If you own a domain name, nobody else does. If someone wishes to advertise on it, they have to pay your terms for it. If someone wishes to buy it, they have to pay whatever price you set for it. It's actually a lot like real estate, except most of the land got bought up by a few hundred individuals when the price was $10 a lot.
Perhaps the adjustment will come in the form of higher DNS fees, since the 'business' in question is so heavily relying on DNS services.
Do that and you 1) kill off most of the web, 2) make multi-millionaires out of whoever runs DNS. Everything relies on DNS.
Perhaps the adjustment will come in the form of higher domain-name registration fees, once the authorities fully grasp the nature of the free-riding involved.
Domain registrars are in a similar business. They offer to make trivial changes in a database for you for an annual fee. Increasing the registration fees just transfers money from the parkers/squatters to the registrars. Increasing the fees registrars pay just transfers money to Network Solutions.
Perhaps the profit per wayward surfer will drop as the sponsoring sites gradually pay less and less per click.
The amounts sponsoring sites pay per click will depend on how many sales they get per click. It has nothing to do with whether or not the domain is being parked/squatted.
Or if this is truly a market failure, then watch for new legislation. (Not that past legislation bothered to wait for a justifying market failure to arise; indeed, the legislature is always willing, and a market failure is just what it needs to explain actions it wanted to take anyway.)
Like I said, there is no market economics in this. It's a side effect of the artificial (but necessary) monopoly created with the concept that a person or corporation can "own" a domain name. The only way to avoid it would be for a central authority or government agency to go through domain-name-space and regularly "clean up" any domains that were obviously just being parked for clickthroughs.
The one idea I've thought of which could prevent this is to make it progressively more expensive to own more domain names. e.g. The first 10 domain names are $10/yr each. Domain names 11-50 are $100/yr each. Domains 50-100 are $1,000/yr each. And so on. There really is no need for any one person to own more than a dozen or two dozen domain names, at least without good financial incentive. True you could set up a sprawling network of shell corporations and paid underlings, but the paperwork necessary to maintain them would quickly become overwhelming without incurring additional costs.
Is that you're assuming that both parties are single-minded, homogeneous entities, and that your side is the champion of goodness and truth, while the other side is the bastion of evil and lies.
The real truth is that when it comes to politics, a portion of the supporters of every party believes winning > fairness. All this talk about hypocrisy is just attempting to hide this fact behind partisan blinders.
But surely the effect on the outcome of the election is the best measure of "severity". If I wave a pointed stick around in a crowded room and kill someone, that is more severe than someone firing an RPG into an empty field.
The key aspect you're missing is that we know Ohio was the swing state in hindsight. Until the ballots were counted, it was unknown (aside from statistical guesswork) where fraud could be most influencial. The corrected analogy is one person waving a pointed stick in the dark, while another fires an RPG into the dark. The fact that it later turns out the pointed stick killed a person while the RPG hit an empty field is purely a consequence of luck. The person firing the RPG committed the greater crime because he had the intent to cause more damage. The person waving the stick just ends up getting more scrutiny because he pisses off more people who might be interested in prosecuting him. We do the country a great disservice if we concentrate on a small threat like that while allowing the guy with the RPG get off free to fire again in the next election.
Low light sensitivity. Digital cameras gain light sensitivity by acting as light buckets. Moreso for CMOS sensors than CCD, but the important thing is that all those sensor pixels are collecting light for their individual pixel simultaneously - in parallel. With a single pixel sensor, this light collection would have to happen in series to achieve the same light sensitivity. If your shutter speed in low light is 1/25 sec with a 5MP traditional digital camera, in order for a single-pixel camera to take the same picture it would need an exposure time of (1/25 sec/pixel)*(5M pixels)*(10% assumed algorithmic efficiency) = 20,000 sec = 5 hours 33 min 20 sec.
Of course since you're doing all this with mirrors, you could set up a megapixel array and have different mirrors shine at different pixels simultaneously (just like a DLP). But that seems to defeat the purpose of the whole rig.
Why do tabs have to be along the top? Why can't they be on the side?
Widescreen monitors and notebooks are becoming the norm rather than the exception.
Even the normal 4:3 aspect ratio is wider than it is tall.
In addition to starting smaller due to aspect ratio, the vertical space in your browser is taken up by the window bar, menu bar, toolbars, tab bar, status bar, and temporary popup info bars. Windows' taskbar defaults to using vertical space as well.
Horizontal space is taken up by the scroll bar, that's it.
Most web content automatically adjusts itself to the width of your browser, but to see excess vertical content you have to scroll.
Many forums I visit already limit the width of their text for legibility, indicating there's excess horizontal space available.
It's already difficult to read text due to the width if you maximize a browser at 1280x1024 or 1280x800 resolution, again indicating there's excess horizontal space available.
Books, newspapers, and magazines are larger in height than width. Browsers attempt to mimic this by allowing you to scroll vertically, but there's something to be said for being able to view a larger vertical chunk of text or images at once.
Pictures in portrait mode are common, and I'd like to be able to view them in a reasonably large size instead of having to always squash them down so they're significantly smaller than pictures in landscape mode.
Most Western text layouts reference the top left corner as the origin. So if you have a tab bar (or any other bar) that pops up along the top or the left, the content shifts forcing you to spend a split second to relocate what you were focusing on. Suddenly the link I clicked on to open the tab is no longer under my mouse pointer. If the bar popped up on the bottom or the right, this would not happen.
All this seems to point to vertical desktop space being overutilized and horizontal desktop space being underutilized. So why force tabs into vertical space? Give me the option to put them on the side(s).
I tried explaining it once, but the person's eyes glazed over once I hit the term 'induction.' Instead, I suggest just asking, "When you microwave bread, does it dry out or get soggy?" That has nothing to do with the real reason you shouldn't do this, but it seems to form a (incorrect) cognitive link which most people find easier to remember.
The 1/sqrt(N) 95% confidence interval is only safe for common phenomena. That is, if the frequency with which you measure something is in the 10%-90% range (or thereabouts). As you get to either extreme, the confidence interval remains the same, but its accuracy in terms of raw numbers decreases.
For example, if your sample is 1000, your 95% confidence interval is 1/sqrt(1000) = +/-3%. So if your 1000 samples showed 250 occurrences, you would know that it's 95% likely that the frequency of occurrence is between 22% and 28%. So the real frequency could be between 220 occurrences or 280 occurrences per thousand. No big deal for year to year comparison purposes. Worst case a 50% drop in sales is measurable because one year you could've been low (220), and the next year high (280/2 = 140), and the change is still statistically significant (outside your confidence interval).
For rare phenomena, this runs into a problem. Say the frequency of occurrence is 0.1%. You take 1000 samples and you measure 1 occurrence. The neophyte statistics student will say "Cool, I meansured 1 occurrence +/- 3%, so I have 95% confidence that the actual rate of occurrences is between 0.97 per thousand and 1.03 per thousand." Unfortunately, that's wrong.
The confidence interval is based on the percentage you measured. Your confidence interval says there's a 95% chance that the actual frequency of occurrence lies between 0% and 3.1%. There is a huge, huge difference between 1 incident in a thousand and 31 incidents in a thousand, especially if you're trying to compare between two samples. One sample (year 2005) you might get 25. Next sample (year 2006) you might get 5. These are both within your confidence interval, but if you're not careful you would erroneously conclude that you have 95% confidence that sales plummeted to just 20% that of the previous year.
Put simply, if you want to accurately measure rare phenomenon, your sample size has to be large enough that your confidence interval is significantly smaller than the rate at which that phenomenon occurs. If iTunes sales account for 0.1% of all credit card sales (which I think is a very high estimate) and you want to compare year to year changes, you probably want an accuracy of at least 1/10th the 0.1%, or a margin of error of +/- 0.01%. Your sample size needs to be large enough that your confidence interval is around the 0.01% range. That is, you need a sample size of a 100 million credit card transactions.
Their EVDO network speed tops out at around 2.5 Mbps. You can burn through 10 MB ($20.48 at $0.002/kB) in about 40 seconds.
So with that in mind, which sounds more reasonable rate for less than a minute's worth of data: 20 cents or $20?
I don't think it's a decimal problem
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Verizon Can't Do Math
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· Score: 2, Informative
From some of the things the CSRs said in the recording, it sounds like part of the problem is that the rate is listed on their computers as simply.002, with no $ or cents to give it context. When you display numbers that way, people tend to get a little unhinged over the units. They start to stick their own convenient units onto the number, which would explain why they're flip-flopping between cents and dollars. You'll notice they always agree that.002 is the correct rate, the only disagreement is over the units.
I ran into this sort of problem just last week, with an otherwise competent employee trying to do some measurements for a recipe. The recipe was given to her over the phone, and the person only specified the numbers. It turned out the numbers were in fluid ounces but her measuring device was labeled in millileters, so she ended up flip-flopping randomly between fl. oz. and ml in her calculations, leading to all sorts of problems.
Another thing I've had to explain countless time is the discrepancy that comes translating a monthly salary into bi-weekly pay periods. For some reason people assume that since there are about 4 weeks in a month, they should get half their monthly pay every two weeks. So if they're paid $36,000 a year, they figure that's $3,000 a month, and $1,500 a pay period. Then they get all upset at me when they're only paid $1384.62, which is 1/26th of their annual pay since there are 52 weeks in a year (which in itself isn't completely accurate either but is only off by 1.25 days).
1. Some of the motions require gripping the controller while simultaneously releasing a button on the controller.
2. Some of the motions are mimicking real-life actions where you release the object (e.g. bowling). So your brain is already pre-wired to let go in the middle of the motion.
Never thought my fishing hobby would ever be relevant to video games.
Don't use Spiderline or any other "high performance" fishing line for this purpose. These lines are high-strength, low-stretch. That means if your controller slips and starts to fly, the line will not stretch and will arrest the controller's motion in a very short distance time. This will create a huge impulse loading which can easily exceed the yield strength of the line. Fishermen like these lines because they let them "feel" the fish nibbling the bait at the other end. But fishermen also use a rod which acts as a shock absorber and eliminates much of this problem of impulse loading.
Instead, you want to use a stretchy line like regular monofilament or tennis racket string. If the line can stretch, it spreads the controller's deceleration over space (and time), resulting on lower load forces on the line, making it less likely to break. It's just like falling onto a soft cushy mat vs. falling onto concrete. Both falls have the same amount of energy, but hitting the mat creates smaller forces than hitting the concrete.
Maybe he can fix the pictures on the page. I was wondering why Firefox was pausing for 1-2 seconds and my CPU meter pegged at 100% when trying to scroll past the pictures. It turns out they're 3264x2176 full-sized JPEGs apparently straight from the camera, which the page dynamically resizes using the img width and height tags to fit your browser.
Either Firefox's implementation of dynamic resizing needs to be tightened up, or (if resizing 3264x2176 images is not how these tags were supposed to be used) the author needs to replace the pictures on the main page with smaller versions, which can open up the larger versions if you click on them.
The tone of the article makes it sound as though ClearType is nothing new, but if you read the details you see that Apple's anti-aliasing uses neighbouring grey pixels to smooth the boundary between black and white (something used in many font systems since), but Microsoft's thing goes a step further and uses the separate R,G,B pixel layout of an LCD to fill in one-third or two-thirds of a pixel horizontally. This wouldn't work with colour televisions or CRT monitors, even if they have a Trinitron-like horizontal layout, because you can't reliably control individual phosphors.
I had the (mis)fortune of paying extra to buy an RGB video card and monitor for my Apple II, instead of using the composite output. So I got subjected first-hand to the consequences of Apple's sub-pixel line-smoothing technology. How you describe ClearType is is almost exactly how Apple's system worked.
You are incorrectly assuming that the display mechanism is a necessary component to this process. ClearType takes advantage of an LCD's layout of R, G, and B subpixels. Apple's version took advantage of the way the Apple II represented the screen image in framebuffer memory. Apple's representation of the display in video memory gave each pixel an intensity, and a color. The color choice was binary (GR or GB), not trinary (RGB) - hey, memory was expensive back then.;) Since there were two types of pixels, they simply alternated at the highest resolution with one pixel being GR, the next being GB, the next GR, GB, etc.
The smoothing came in when you wanted to display white (or gray). Because of the binary pixels, a green line could be rendered at full resolution (your eye has the greatest resolution in green); bur red, blue, or white lines were rendered at half resolution. Apple realized that text was white and the display would look pretty crappy if you rendered it at half the max resolution. Then they realized that white didn't have to mean lighting a GR pixel with the GB pixel to its right. You could also make white by lighting the GB pixel to the left of the GR. And thus was born sub-pixel rendering - although the white pixels were fatter, you could position them more precisely in "half pixel" increments. That's exactly what ClearType does except using RGB (or RBG) subpixels, instead of GR and GB subpixels.
This all worked fine over the composite video output. My misfortune was that my Apple II's RGB card simply broke the pixels into GR+GB blocks, converted the pixel to RGB, and sent it to the monitor (it had a special hi-res mode for green so 80-column green text would render correctly). It would render GR+GB pixel blocks as white, but completely ignored the possibility of a GB+GR block being white. And so my color text was not white, it was white with flanges of color anywhere the sub-pixel addressing of white pixels did not line up with my video card's idea of an RGB pixel. It looked awful and made it nearly impossible to read 40-column text, and was distracting in games any time white was used.
How about a big flat concave surface riding on a pillow of air? You'd completely eliminate skin-drag on the bottom, and then the problem would be the hydrodynamic and turbulence drag around the sides and behind the ship.
You've just described a hovercraft or surface effect ship. Contrary to the grandparent post, wave drag for a ship does not increase as the square of speed. It increases as a complex function of the ship's dimensions vs. speed. It initially loops up sharply with increasing speed, but then dips asymptotically to zero. The initial mathematical research characterizing wave drag for this type of ship was done by L. J. Doctors at the University of Michigan in 1970 for his Ph.D thesis.
Hovercraft and SESes as well as smaller watercraft which can get "on plane" take advantage of this - once you get over the initial hump, you are traveling fast enough that the water doesn't have time to react to the pressure of the ship on top of it. The water doesn't have time to try to "get out of the way" thereby creating waves which sap away energy. The water behaves almost as a solid, generating very little wave drag. At these high speeds, most of your drag comes from skin friction and air resistance.
I should note that TFA refers to methods of making the bubbles "stick" to the hull, rather than using overpressure to release a steady stream of bubbles (air lubrication) or contain a single large bubble (hovercraft or SES).
Heat, in thermodynamic terms, refers to temperature; or more succinctly, the average kinetic energy of the molecules that make up something. Objects that you heat up increase their average kinetic energy. Some molecules also emit photons in the infrared band as a consequence, but that's not what the Second Law of Thermodynamics is referring to as entropy. Entropy is the state of disorder - as the average kinetic energy of molecules flying in random directions increases, its disorder increases.
If your waste heat is localized, then it can still be used to do work. All you need is a reservoir of water or air which is colder. Put a motor between the two and as the heat energy flows from the hot side to the cold side, and you get energy that can be put to work.
The reason this is no big deal is that the energy you get from such a mechanism is simply energy that the original heat generator did not use. i.e. the original generator was inefficiently cooled, and more efficient cooling would've allowed it to do more work for the same amount of fuel consumed. In the case of hot air blowing out of a computer, if the CPU and case had been more efficiently cooled, its operating temperature would've been lower, allowing you to run the CPU at the same frequency at a lower voltage and for less energy in. Except in certain cases (cars, where you want the whole system to be mobile, or CPUs which are all set to run at the same voltage regardless of individual case temp), the effort you put into recovering wasted heat energy would be better spent just making the system more efficient in the first place.
I'm just saying that this is bringing to forefront the fact that people are going to need to change in the future how they think about work and ownership.
This has already happened in photography. The ease which which you can scan and print photos has turned the professional photography business on end. At the high end, the large publishing companies are trying to stick with the old model and respect copyright. But occasionally copied or misattributed photos do slip through.
At the low end, photographers are giving up on the old model (payment per photograph) and migrating to a new model (payment for services rendered). For example, wedding photographers used to shoot weddings for no or minimal charge, then make the bulk of their money on the sales of the photos. Now many of them are charging for the wedding up-front, and giving the photos for free or little charge.
It's not ideal, but it seems to be working, at least in this specific case. I'm a little puzzled that companies who owe their very existence to a capitalistic market seem so reluctant to trust capitalism to find a new business model which works in the face of free (or near-free) digital copies. The business models which will arise will be different, but I think it's naive and hypocritical to assume that they won't arise. In the music industry for example, most bands already make most of their income from concerts. That won't change, it's just the distributors and middlemen who will be squeezed out.
The problem with the "more money" solution
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More A's, More Pay
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· Score: 2
Is that the intent of the additional money is to bring in higher value. You have a poorly performing system, let's say it's a car repair shop. You pay them $X on average for repairs. They do a poor job and your car is repeatedly breaking down. So you decide to solve the problem by throwing more money into repairs. Lets say you're now willing to pay on average $X+$Y for each repair. Do you now go back to the same repair shop and say "I will give you $Y more money, now please do a better job fixing my car"? No, you go to a different, better repair shop, one who refused to fix your car for $X but is willing to do it for $X+$Y.
Now, translate this back to the education problem. You have a bunch of teachers who are willing to work for $X. If you decide that lack of pay is part of the problem, the solution isn't to give the current batch of teachers $X+$Y in pay. The solution is to fire the current batch of teachers, and hire new ones who weren't willing to work for $X but are willing to work for $X+$Y. Unfortunately the teachers' unions want to hear nothing of the sort. In other words, it's not enough to throw more money at the system, you have to be willing to create major changes within the system with that money.
The idea of selective pay bonuses for measurable achievement is just a variation on this principle which avoids the huge negative of the "fire everyone" step. You're trying to find the teachers who are working for $X but are probably worth $X+$Y, and selectively increase their pay. So in a way, this idea is increasing the education budget.
What I would love to see would be an analysys of the number of highway deaths that accured becase more people drove and are driving futher and more often since 9/11.
A good example of a similar phenomenon is what happened after United flight 232 crashed. The MO for small children was for parents to hold the child in their lap or under the seat in front in the event of a crash. The NTSB's rationale was that if parents were forced to buy a seat for their children, they might choose to drive instead of fly. The death rate per passenger mile for driving is much higher than for flying, even if the child is held in the lap during the flight.
Unfortunately, United #232 generated a heart-wrenching story about a parent losing a child because the child did not have a seat. This has resulted in a surviving flight attendant lobbying fiercely to require small children to have seats on flights. Her cause has gotten the support of other flight attendants and the NTSB. While her intentions are benevolent, if she succeeds the change will result in more small children (and their parents) dying in auto accidents.
I was a bike racer for a long time. At my best I could generate about 350 watts continuously for an hour. A decent computer would suck that dry.
350 W is nearly half a horsepower. A fit individual can generate a sustained 0.3 horsepower. I'd guess that a sedentary geek could generate a sustained 0.15 horsepower (110 W). About enough to power a high-power laptop, but that's it.
Slashdot Mirror
All inventions are obvious in hindsight. The fact that people made fans with separate blinds for close to a hundred years is more than enough testament that this invention was non-obvious despite how simple it was. Just because an invention is simple to reproduce doesn't automatically mean it was obvious, or was not very innovative. You're making an unsubstantiated assertion in your chain of logic to reach your preconceived conclusion that patents are unnecessary.
The software industry got this right. If you buy a piece of software, you get a license to the software. If you destroy the CD (or DVD), most software companies will send you replacements if you can prove your original purchase. If they ever upgrade the software, they recognize that you've already paid for a license and sell you the upgrade for less than a new copy. I suspect the reason they got it right is because the software industry is populated by people who think logically and reasonably. They treat me fairly, so I gladly pay for the software I use.
Contrast this with the entertainment industry. If you buy a movie/song, you get a license to view/hear the song. If you destroy the CD (or DVD) they require you to buy a new license at full price. If they ever upgrade the movie/song (new media format or an extended release), they require you to buy a new license at full price. This is called trying to have your cake and eat it too. I suspect the reason the entertainment industry does things this way is because it is populated by people who try to screw everyone (even their own artists) out of every dollar they can. Excuse me for not shedding a tear for the woes of such people.
Who says all those years of playing AD&D were wasted?
Unfortunately, the problem is human nature. People aren't very receptive to new arguments. Their thinking process seems to be: Preliminary evidence -> quick conclusion -> dismissal of evidence refuting this conclusion -> support of evidence supporting this conclusion. This is not necessarily a bad thing - survival depends on being able to make good conclusions based on insufficient evidence. But it also means that the threshold for unseating an incorrect conclusion is much higher than one would probably like it to be.
The one idea I've thought of which could prevent this is to make it progressively more expensive to own more domain names. e.g. The first 10 domain names are $10/yr each. Domain names 11-50 are $100/yr each. Domains 50-100 are $1,000/yr each. And so on. There really is no need for any one person to own more than a dozen or two dozen domain names, at least without good financial incentive. True you could set up a sprawling network of shell corporations and paid underlings, but the paperwork necessary to maintain them would quickly become overwhelming without incurring additional costs.
The real truth is that when it comes to politics, a portion of the supporters of every party believes winning > fairness. All this talk about hypocrisy is just attempting to hide this fact behind partisan blinders.
The key aspect you're missing is that we know Ohio was the swing state in hindsight. Until the ballots were counted, it was unknown (aside from statistical guesswork) where fraud could be most influencial. The corrected analogy is one person waving a pointed stick in the dark, while another fires an RPG into the dark. The fact that it later turns out the pointed stick killed a person while the RPG hit an empty field is purely a consequence of luck. The person firing the RPG committed the greater crime because he had the intent to cause more damage. The person waving the stick just ends up getting more scrutiny because he pisses off more people who might be interested in prosecuting him. We do the country a great disservice if we concentrate on a small threat like that while allowing the guy with the RPG get off free to fire again in the next election.
Of course since you're doing all this with mirrors, you could set up a megapixel array and have different mirrors shine at different pixels simultaneously (just like a DLP). But that seems to defeat the purpose of the whole rig.
All this seems to point to vertical desktop space being overutilized and horizontal desktop space being underutilized. So why force tabs into vertical space? Give me the option to put them on the side(s).
I tried explaining it once, but the person's eyes glazed over once I hit the term 'induction.' Instead, I suggest just asking, "When you microwave bread, does it dry out or get soggy?" That has nothing to do with the real reason you shouldn't do this, but it seems to form a (incorrect) cognitive link which most people find easier to remember.
For example, if your sample is 1000, your 95% confidence interval is 1/sqrt(1000) = +/-3%. So if your 1000 samples showed 250 occurrences, you would know that it's 95% likely that the frequency of occurrence is between 22% and 28%. So the real frequency could be between 220 occurrences or 280 occurrences per thousand. No big deal for year to year comparison purposes. Worst case a 50% drop in sales is measurable because one year you could've been low (220), and the next year high (280/2 = 140), and the change is still statistically significant (outside your confidence interval).
For rare phenomena, this runs into a problem. Say the frequency of occurrence is 0.1%. You take 1000 samples and you measure 1 occurrence. The neophyte statistics student will say "Cool, I meansured 1 occurrence +/- 3%, so I have 95% confidence that the actual rate of occurrences is between 0.97 per thousand and 1.03 per thousand." Unfortunately, that's wrong.
The confidence interval is based on the percentage you measured. Your confidence interval says there's a 95% chance that the actual frequency of occurrence lies between 0% and 3.1%. There is a huge, huge difference between 1 incident in a thousand and 31 incidents in a thousand, especially if you're trying to compare between two samples. One sample (year 2005) you might get 25. Next sample (year 2006) you might get 5. These are both within your confidence interval, but if you're not careful you would erroneously conclude that you have 95% confidence that sales plummeted to just 20% that of the previous year.
Put simply, if you want to accurately measure rare phenomenon, your sample size has to be large enough that your confidence interval is significantly smaller than the rate at which that phenomenon occurs. If iTunes sales account for 0.1% of all credit card sales (which I think is a very high estimate) and you want to compare year to year changes, you probably want an accuracy of at least 1/10th the 0.1%, or a margin of error of +/- 0.01%. Your sample size needs to be large enough that your confidence interval is around the 0.01% range. That is, you need a sample size of a 100 million credit card transactions.
Their EVDO network speed tops out at around 2.5 Mbps. You can burn through 10 MB ($20.48 at $0.002/kB) in about 40 seconds. So with that in mind, which sounds more reasonable rate for less than a minute's worth of data: 20 cents or $20?
I ran into this sort of problem just last week, with an otherwise competent employee trying to do some measurements for a recipe. The recipe was given to her over the phone, and the person only specified the numbers. It turned out the numbers were in fluid ounces but her measuring device was labeled in millileters, so she ended up flip-flopping randomly between fl. oz. and ml in her calculations, leading to all sorts of problems.
Another thing I've had to explain countless time is the discrepancy that comes translating a monthly salary into bi-weekly pay periods. For some reason people assume that since there are about 4 weeks in a month, they should get half their monthly pay every two weeks. So if they're paid $36,000 a year, they figure that's $3,000 a month, and $1,500 a pay period. Then they get all upset at me when they're only paid $1384.62, which is 1/26th of their annual pay since there are 52 weeks in a year (which in itself isn't completely accurate either but is only off by 1.25 days).
2. Some of the motions are mimicking real-life actions where you release the object (e.g. bowling). So your brain is already pre-wired to let go in the middle of the motion.
Don't use Spiderline or any other "high performance" fishing line for this purpose. These lines are high-strength, low-stretch. That means if your controller slips and starts to fly, the line will not stretch and will arrest the controller's motion in a very short distance time. This will create a huge impulse loading which can easily exceed the yield strength of the line. Fishermen like these lines because they let them "feel" the fish nibbling the bait at the other end. But fishermen also use a rod which acts as a shock absorber and eliminates much of this problem of impulse loading.
Instead, you want to use a stretchy line like regular monofilament or tennis racket string. If the line can stretch, it spreads the controller's deceleration over space (and time), resulting on lower load forces on the line, making it less likely to break. It's just like falling onto a soft cushy mat vs. falling onto concrete. Both falls have the same amount of energy, but hitting the mat creates smaller forces than hitting the concrete.
Either Firefox's implementation of dynamic resizing needs to be tightened up, or (if resizing 3264x2176 images is not how these tags were supposed to be used) the author needs to replace the pictures on the main page with smaller versions, which can open up the larger versions if you click on them.
I had the (mis)fortune of paying extra to buy an RGB video card and monitor for my Apple II, instead of using the composite output. So I got subjected first-hand to the consequences of Apple's sub-pixel line-smoothing technology. How you describe ClearType is is almost exactly how Apple's system worked.
You are incorrectly assuming that the display mechanism is a necessary component to this process. ClearType takes advantage of an LCD's layout of R, G, and B subpixels. Apple's version took advantage of the way the Apple II represented the screen image in framebuffer memory. Apple's representation of the display in video memory gave each pixel an intensity, and a color. The color choice was binary (GR or GB), not trinary (RGB) - hey, memory was expensive back then. ;) Since there were two types of pixels, they simply alternated at the highest resolution with one pixel being GR, the next being GB, the next GR, GB, etc.
The smoothing came in when you wanted to display white (or gray). Because of the binary pixels, a green line could be rendered at full resolution (your eye has the greatest resolution in green); bur red, blue, or white lines were rendered at half resolution. Apple realized that text was white and the display would look pretty crappy if you rendered it at half the max resolution. Then they realized that white didn't have to mean lighting a GR pixel with the GB pixel to its right. You could also make white by lighting the GB pixel to the left of the GR. And thus was born sub-pixel rendering - although the white pixels were fatter, you could position them more precisely in "half pixel" increments. That's exactly what ClearType does except using RGB (or RBG) subpixels, instead of GR and GB subpixels.
This all worked fine over the composite video output. My misfortune was that my Apple II's RGB card simply broke the pixels into GR+GB blocks, converted the pixel to RGB, and sent it to the monitor (it had a special hi-res mode for green so 80-column green text would render correctly). It would render GR+GB pixel blocks as white, but completely ignored the possibility of a GB+GR block being white. And so my color text was not white, it was white with flanges of color anywhere the sub-pixel addressing of white pixels did not line up with my video card's idea of an RGB pixel. It looked awful and made it nearly impossible to read 40-column text, and was distracting in games any time white was used.
You've just described a hovercraft or surface effect ship. Contrary to the grandparent post, wave drag for a ship does not increase as the square of speed. It increases as a complex function of the ship's dimensions vs. speed. It initially loops up sharply with increasing speed, but then dips asymptotically to zero. The initial mathematical research characterizing wave drag for this type of ship was done by L. J. Doctors at the University of Michigan in 1970 for his Ph.D thesis.
Hovercraft and SESes as well as smaller watercraft which can get "on plane" take advantage of this - once you get over the initial hump, you are traveling fast enough that the water doesn't have time to react to the pressure of the ship on top of it. The water doesn't have time to try to "get out of the way" thereby creating waves which sap away energy. The water behaves almost as a solid, generating very little wave drag. At these high speeds, most of your drag comes from skin friction and air resistance.
I should note that TFA refers to methods of making the bubbles "stick" to the hull, rather than using overpressure to release a steady stream of bubbles (air lubrication) or contain a single large bubble (hovercraft or SES).
Air lubricated hulls were the origins of the hovercraft. First patents on it were filed in 1877
If your waste heat is localized, then it can still be used to do work. All you need is a reservoir of water or air which is colder. Put a motor between the two and as the heat energy flows from the hot side to the cold side, and you get energy that can be put to work.
The reason this is no big deal is that the energy you get from such a mechanism is simply energy that the original heat generator did not use. i.e. the original generator was inefficiently cooled, and more efficient cooling would've allowed it to do more work for the same amount of fuel consumed. In the case of hot air blowing out of a computer, if the CPU and case had been more efficiently cooled, its operating temperature would've been lower, allowing you to run the CPU at the same frequency at a lower voltage and for less energy in. Except in certain cases (cars, where you want the whole system to be mobile, or CPUs which are all set to run at the same voltage regardless of individual case temp), the effort you put into recovering wasted heat energy would be better spent just making the system more efficient in the first place.
This has already happened in photography. The ease which which you can scan and print photos has turned the professional photography business on end. At the high end, the large publishing companies are trying to stick with the old model and respect copyright. But occasionally copied or misattributed photos do slip through.
At the low end, photographers are giving up on the old model (payment per photograph) and migrating to a new model (payment for services rendered). For example, wedding photographers used to shoot weddings for no or minimal charge, then make the bulk of their money on the sales of the photos. Now many of them are charging for the wedding up-front, and giving the photos for free or little charge.
It's not ideal, but it seems to be working, at least in this specific case. I'm a little puzzled that companies who owe their very existence to a capitalistic market seem so reluctant to trust capitalism to find a new business model which works in the face of free (or near-free) digital copies. The business models which will arise will be different, but I think it's naive and hypocritical to assume that they won't arise. In the music industry for example, most bands already make most of their income from concerts. That won't change, it's just the distributors and middlemen who will be squeezed out.
Now, translate this back to the education problem. You have a bunch of teachers who are willing to work for $X. If you decide that lack of pay is part of the problem, the solution isn't to give the current batch of teachers $X+$Y in pay. The solution is to fire the current batch of teachers, and hire new ones who weren't willing to work for $X but are willing to work for $X+$Y. Unfortunately the teachers' unions want to hear nothing of the sort. In other words, it's not enough to throw more money at the system, you have to be willing to create major changes within the system with that money.
The idea of selective pay bonuses for measurable achievement is just a variation on this principle which avoids the huge negative of the "fire everyone" step. You're trying to find the teachers who are working for $X but are probably worth $X+$Y, and selectively increase their pay. So in a way, this idea is increasing the education budget.
A good example of a similar phenomenon is what happened after United flight 232 crashed. The MO for small children was for parents to hold the child in their lap or under the seat in front in the event of a crash. The NTSB's rationale was that if parents were forced to buy a seat for their children, they might choose to drive instead of fly. The death rate per passenger mile for driving is much higher than for flying, even if the child is held in the lap during the flight.
Unfortunately, United #232 generated a heart-wrenching story about a parent losing a child because the child did not have a seat. This has resulted in a surviving flight attendant lobbying fiercely to require small children to have seats on flights. Her cause has gotten the support of other flight attendants and the NTSB. While her intentions are benevolent, if she succeeds the change will result in more small children (and their parents) dying in auto accidents.
United Airlines flight 232 - Lessons learned
Safety of infants on aeroplanes
350 W is nearly half a horsepower. A fit individual can generate a sustained 0.3 horsepower. I'd guess that a sedentary geek could generate a sustained 0.15 horsepower (110 W). About enough to power a high-power laptop, but that's it.