Often the idea comes up that incandescent bulbs are bad at heating a house. The first law of thermodynamics suggests that this can not be true. If you are not sold on the theory consider this discussion of a study where the heating efficiency of incandescent lighting was checked experimentally:
A quote from the document: "With conventional lighting, between 89 to 96 per cent of lighting energy use is converted to heat and contributes to space heating as internal gains."
I have tried various media centreish things over the years. The problem is that for a particular amount of computing power bigger is better. Once you cross the transition to something with a fan then larger fans are quieter. Presently I have a bog standard ATX case in the living room. The large ATX power supply has a large slow turning fan. The CPU has a huge heat sink with a large slow turning fan (I think it is a Golden Orb II). Video is integrated. The result is a lot quieter than the projector it drives, even when the projector is on low mode. That is with the computer sitting right beside the couch. I presently have a dual core Athlon in there. If I run short of CPU I can just add cores. Much simpler than fooling around with hardware acceleration.
Adding a video card with a big heatsink (no fan) gets me a free living room computer using Linux multiseat (which seems to work well now). I control the projector session with one of those wireless multimedia keyboards with a built in trackball. I no longer bother with media centre software or a remote control. That includes recorded TV. It is just a computer that happens to be in the living room. It ends up being a lot simpler.
Research has shown that commercial pilots make lots of errors all the time. These same pilots are really good at catching errors. If you recorded everything they do it would significantly add to pilot workload as they would have to try to anticipate less important things. They would have to try to do everything right the first time. This would reduce pilot effectiveness and thus safety.
I may be insensitive but this strikes me as quite funny. Someone reports a bug. Since the vender is famous for heel dragging the submitter gives them the chance to commit to a reasonable time frame.
Submitter: Here is a significant security vulnerability that you guys have missed for a zillion years.... 3 days of silence...
Vender: Hey! Thanks ever so much for your bug report! We are working really really hard to come up with a response on that 60 day thing! Just give us another 3 days and then we might actually commit! You didn't have anything else better to do with your life anyway right? Have a super day!
Submitter: You seem to be confused here. I do not have to take your crap. Bug disclosed. have a super day!
Vender: Oh no! You never warned us that you were not willing to let us screw around with you indefinitely! How terribly irresponsible of you!
It turns out that the free running human circadian cycle is quite close to 24 hours. There was a study that came up with something like 25 hours. Subsequent experiments did not. A possible reason for the discrepancy (or so the legend goes) was the presence of two 60W light bulbs in the experiment that came up with the 25 hour figure. They were for comfort light during the dim part of the experiment. It is sort of impractical to keep people in total darkness for long periods. These days, people doing this sort of experiment use very low light levels ( 10lux) for the "dark" phase.
For the Linux/BSD using crowd there is Redshift which does more or less the same thing as f.lux. I've been using redshift for a while now. I've noticed that here at my somewhat northern latitude (Winnipeg) that it is not really right for people who want to better regulate their circadian rhythm as it follows what the sun is doing, which of course is part of the problem. I think I am going to have to try setting the latitude to zero.
I admit that the CNN article is one of the better discussions of this topic to come out of a news outlet but I of course like my summary better. It is located here.
... In a signal-enabled environment there can't be any policy that would ensure the deterministic state of the flag, even if you set it explicitly before each flag-dependent operation....
My understanding of this is that the problem occurs when the kernel fails to clear the direction flag before calling the user space handler. I have heard nothing about anything to do with the hardware interrupt that might of originally caused the signal (which seems to be related to the sort of thing you are referring to).
Intel is to blame. The original 8086/8088 instruction set was just
dumb in this respect. Having a global value (the direction bit) that
can determine the behaviour of a class of powerful instructions is a
great way to generate all sorts of subtle intermittent bugs. I have
been personally burned by this (badly) as have many others.
There is a policy you can enforce to try to improve things. You can
try to make everyone leave the direction bit in the most common state
after they are done with their less common use of the string
instructions. This can work if the policy is enforced by something
like a compiler. It won't work if the program is for instance called
by another entity outside the control of the compiler....such as, for
instance, a kernel calling a signal handler... You end up with a state
of affairs where you have to depend on having some other programmer
remember to set the bit to the right state to have your string
instructions work right. You can't test for this as the bit might be
right almost all the time. This is simply a poor approach.
The only fix that can work reliably for your code is to have the
compiler insure that the state of the direction bit is known before
any string instructions are executed. If I am for instance using a C
compiler I should not have to hear about the 8086/8088 string
direction bit....ever...
The kernel people should fix their failure to respect the ABI
policy. The GCC people should revert to the old more deterministic
handling of string instructions. The almost negligible optimization
here is simply not worth generating a lot of intermittent, hard to
find problems (there are likely more out there). If other compilers do
not make their string functions entirely deterministic in the face
of all external influences then those other compilers are doing it
wrong. We can't fix the hardware architecture so this is a case where
defensive programming is the best that can be done.
I see it as the sort of thing that one would want for people who you
ordinarily would like to get on some sort of an Apple product. My
sister was banned from her teenage son's computer. She allegedly had a
knack for picking up viruses and malware. Ubuntu on her son's castoff
crummy old Emachines computer seems to have solved the problem. Not
having to try to find the pirated version of Windows for the month (I
don't know if they ever had install disks) has made my life a lot
nicer too. Automatix makes it so she can engage in viral video
distribution with her friends with little effort on my part. She seems
to have no particular problem using the Gnome desktop that comes
default with Ubuntu with the notable exception of needing a tutorial
on how to highlight text in the browser with the mouse. The Freecell
comes with it. What more could anyone want?
So... Ubuntu, the distribution for the rest of you...:)
Having said that, the next time I need some software for a computer
illiterate I am going to try what seems to me to be the up and coming
Debian based distribution for the desktop. It's, err, Debian. Debian
Etch (testing) to be exact. I've recently done a default desktop from
the working Etch installer disk and it was very slick. The Gnome
desktop that resulted from mostly pounding the enter key was quite
complete and usable. All that is needed is Debian Etch support for
Automatix and my life becomes simple. Debian for pretty much
everything...
Let's say you are a dominant player in a particular industry. Let's
also say that your continued dominance depends on control of some sort
of proprietary interface. Things are not so bad if competitors try to
reverse engineer your interface. You just change things enough from
time to time to keep them at a disadvantage. That's all fine and
proper but sometimes your customers will be bad. They might conspire
with your competitors to lessen your control of your market by
proposing some soft of open standard that you have no direct control
over.
Fortunately there is a fix available. What you do is start another
open standard. Use your influence in the industry to promote this
standard for all you are worth. Claim that you have seen the error of
your ways. Get a bunch of pet suppliers and/or dominant players in
related industries together and form a "Industry Association". Go to
conferences. Give speeches. Actually support this new standard with
your new products. Complete interoperability is just around the
corner and you don't even have to switch suppliers if you don't want.
Inevitably the momentum will swing towards your open standard. Timing
is critical here. You have to anticipate. Just as it seems clear to
everyone which way to go suddenly back off on your support of your
open standard. If it seems like you were a bit late simply start
supporting and promoting the other open standard. The key here is
balance. Keep both standards relevant for as long as it takes.
The effects on your customers will be grave. They will end up having
to support 3 or more standards because they will still have a lot of the
old stuff you made. Your customers deserve all this of course. They
were disloyal. Eventually everyone will yearn for the old days of
single source contracts. The open standards effort will eventually die
on its own and the industry will have learned that open standards just
don't work. There are just too many of them.
Repeat as needed and remember that this isn't just for things like the
computer industry. It works for more traditional businesses as
well. Microsoft didn't invent this stuff. They are just good at
applying it
For a counter measure how about some sort of chain mail like suit made entirely of corner reflectors (3 surfaces at right angles)? The wavelength of this beam is mere millimetres. The reflectors could be quite small. That way the reflected energy would end up going back to the source. Less chance of your reflected radiation hurting someone in your group. An an added bonus, advanced fashion technology could possibly even make the wearer look nice in their suit. Good all around...
The real problem here is that most MP's not only don't know nothing about the issues here, they don't know that there is an issue at all. This copyright reform stuff is presented as a routine update of a body of law that has become technologically outdated. The petition is important in that it implies that there is some sort of public policy issue lurking somewhere.
I suspect that the petitions with 100k+ signatures were related to popular issues. The copyright reform thing is invisible right now. I have my petition printed out and will be asking people to sign it over the next few weeks. In many cases this will lead to a discussion. This sort of discussion might be more important than the actual petition. This thing will not be won in the hearts and minds of Canadian politicians. It will be won in the hearts and minds of Canadians. If it gets to the point that people start writing letters about this it's over and the forces of light will have won.
...and who do you think is going to collect this money to pay the patent holders? VLC is GPL and thus in a sense belongs to the world. I'm in the world. You can send the money to me if you want....or some other random location. Your call. Software patents are simply insane. This is but one example of this insanity...
I'm a free speech supporter, but child porn on my computer? I just
can't get there.
The stuff on any particular Freenet node is encrypted right? So in
what sense would you have child porn on your computer? This all seems
philosophical to me. Trees falling in the forest and all. In the
absence of the key are any the encrypted files child porn? All of
them? Do you have child porn on your computer now encrypted with an
unknown encryption method? If someone uses a existing file from your
computer and uses that file as a key to encrypt child porn, then
destroys the original child porn, then where does the child porn now
reside? After all, the file from your computer might be very much
longer than the encrypted child porn. Maybe the file on your computer
is actually the child porn and the other file is just the key. In the
Freenet system where does the property of child porn-ness exist?
Perhaps the key is the actual child porn. After all, the child porn can
not exist without the key. Perhaps the people who are in possession of
the keys for child porn are the ones that the powers that be should be
spending taxes tracking down....or maybe you need to have both pieces.
For a related (but perhaps more fundamental) argument, if someone
interprets a whole bunch of bits in such a way as to see abused
children, then do they not share part of the blame for the
interpretation? Some anti child porn laws forbid mere possession. I
don't see how that can be proved in any meaningful sense in a case
where someone has to interpret the bits. At least in the case of
distribution you have more than one entity agreeing on that
interpretation but that case only seems somewhat better defined. Any
question considered long and hard enough becomes philosophical, but
this question gets philosophical real fast no matter where you
start...
There was once a time in my part of the world when copper suddenly became very valuable. This created a bit of a hysteria, people in the country had their copper washtubs disappear more or less overnight. People would throw a chain around a telephone cable, attach the chain to a truck and just drive. People with hacksaws would climb down into man holes and cut away all the cables flush with the walls. Things got kind of desperate, telco employees who did not do something like park the truck near the manhole would sometimes encounter law enforcement types with drawn weapons on their way out of the manhole.
In their pursuit of beer money, the copper thieves damaged a lot of valuable infrastructure. An armed response to the theft of a few dollars of copper seems disproportionate but as a society we had become desperate. A few hundred telephone subscribers out of service for 6 hours is not all that bad a deal. The problem was that if the informal copper recycling biz had continued to increase in popularity there would soon be no phone service anywhere. Spammers are a lot like the copper thieves. If we do not deter spammers somehow, email and most any other sort of computer mediated communications is dead. It's as simple as that...
The funnest console player program I've encountered so far is juke. I'll often fire up an xterm just so i can run it, even if I am in X. It's a pure jukebox prog, no fixed play lists. It just plays then in the order you pick them. The fast browsing with the arrow keys lets you pick lots of music fast, so it makes it sort of a game.
Free space loss for radio transmissions (in dB):
L(f,d)=20.log(f*d)+92.5
...
So obviously L(2.4GHz,d) > L(0.9GHz,d). Meaning lower frequency leads to less loss (further reach).
Which is true, but misleading. Fascinating RF engineering trivia
follows;
The variable L is often called "free space path loss". This sort of path loss
increases with frequency. But where is the actual loss? This is supposed to be in free
space, i.e. vacuum. Since there isn't anything in vacuum to heat up or
whatever the loss can't be in the actual path between the antennas
(which is why the "path loss" bit is misleading).
It's because of
the antennas. An efficient omnidirectional transmitting antenna will
radiate pretty much all the power you feed it. An omnidirectional
receiving antenna will receive power proportional to it's
size. Obviously larger antennas will collect more power. Rather than
giving each antenna a separate transmit gain and receive gain
the RF engineering types just fudge it with the idea of "free space
path loss".
So yes, you will end up with more signal at the
receive antenna of a 0.9GHz as opposed to a 2,4GHz phone. The formula
is correct in that. After all the receive antenna is 2.7 times
bigger. That's a whole 8 dB more signal. Of course the larger antenna
will receive noise that much better too (and there tends to be a lot
at 900MHz). The 900 MHz antenna will probably be so large that you
will only be able to get one in a handset (some 900MHz phones actually
have an extendable antenna). If the 2.4GHz faction puts more than one
antenna in their handset and then has the phone pick the one with the
best signal, they will probably win in practice.
Real
path loss caused by things like building materials and trees
does tend to go up with frequency. OTOH higher frequency
signals can squeeze though smaller holes. It's all a bit
complicated. I personally suspect that free space path loss isn't a
significant factor in the actual range you end up with.
What happened here is that there wasn't actually any real settlement value. Letting an entity use some sort of intellectual property for stuff like this is just silly. The court could just as well have allowed the losing party to paint a nice picture, value it at millions of dollars, then contribute the picture. Microsoft did the same sort of thing by supplying software to schools as part of a settlement. Good deal if you can get it.
The original poster said that learning Forth would help you understand how computers work, not just the CPU bit.
Since doing stuff with the Forth environment involves lots of interaction with bits you tend to learn a whole lot about binary math/logic quickly. Since the virtual machine is understandably simple and different from traditional computer architectures you end up at a place to start thinking about computer architectures. Since Forth is a reasonably productive programming environment you learn that a lot of the stuff they teach you in Computer Science is probably wrong...
You were talking about the "what" of computers. Exposure to non-traditional environments like Forth gives you a start on the "why" which is a hard thing to come by in the somewhat dogmatic world of computers.
I had a quick look. Software patents are apparently not allowed in Canada. Patents on things that can really only be practically be done on a computer seem to be fine. I did a quick search and found a compression patent, followed by an encryption and watermarking patent. I intererpert that to mean that software patents are OK but the Canadian patent office would prefer to disgise the fact for some reason.
The really "out there" part of Green platform is that they want to limit the term of software patents to 7 years. That's a remarkably obscure position to take. My impression is that the more popular parties are pretty much totally ignorant of any sort of IP issues. If you get to see some non-Green party federal wannabes this election, a fun question might be "But what is your position on some of the important industrial policy issues, for example the Green proposal to limit the term of software patents?". Assign extra points to those who actually admit that they don't have the faintest idea...
As for ghosts and teleoperators, the test is simply a statutory violation on the balance of probabilites.
I'm not sure I understand this in context. Are you saying that a Canadian civil court might find that both the uploader and downloader have infringed a copyright in the case of P2P? How else could the question of who actually did the copy be unimportant?
Note that people who are skilled in the art of networking computers find some of the distinctions make in the copyright act pointless. Excessive deconstruction of the ideas found in such a statue is simply well deserved mockery.
Slashdot Mirror
A quote from the document: "With conventional lighting, between 89 to 96 per cent of lighting energy use is converted to heat and contributes to space heating as internal gains."
I have tried various media centreish things over the years. The problem is that for a particular amount of computing power bigger is better. Once you cross the transition to something with a fan then larger fans are quieter. Presently I have a bog standard ATX case in the living room. The large ATX power supply has a large slow turning fan. The CPU has a huge heat sink with a large slow turning fan (I think it is a Golden Orb II). Video is integrated. The result is a lot quieter than the projector it drives, even when the projector is on low mode. That is with the computer sitting right beside the couch. I presently have a dual core Athlon in there. If I run short of CPU I can just add cores. Much simpler than fooling around with hardware acceleration.
Adding a video card with a big heatsink (no fan) gets me a free living room computer using Linux multiseat (which seems to work well now). I control the projector session with one of those wireless multimedia keyboards with a built in trackball. I no longer bother with media centre software or a remote control. That includes recorded TV. It is just a computer that happens to be in the living room. It ends up being a lot simpler.
The original poster was talking about "Indian civil society". I am not sure what events in some other random country have to do with this.
Research has shown that commercial pilots make lots of errors all the time. These same pilots are really good at catching errors. If you recorded everything they do it would significantly add to pilot workload as they would have to try to anticipate less important things. They would have to try to do everything right the first time. This would reduce pilot effectiveness and thus safety.
I may be insensitive but this strikes me as quite funny. Someone reports a bug. Since the vender is famous for heel dragging the submitter gives them the chance to commit to a reasonable time frame.
Submitter: Here is a significant security vulnerability that you guys have missed for a zillion years. ... 3 days of silence ...
Vender: Hey! Thanks ever so much for your bug report! We are working really really hard to come up with a response on that 60 day thing! Just give us another 3 days and then we might actually commit! You didn't have anything else better to do with your life anyway right? Have a super day!
Submitter: You seem to be confused here. I do not have to take your crap. Bug disclosed. have a super day!
Vender: Oh no! You never warned us that you were not willing to let us screw around with you indefinitely! How terribly irresponsible of you!
Sounds like a happy ending to me...
It turns out that the free running human circadian cycle is quite close to 24 hours. There was a study that came up with something like 25 hours. Subsequent experiments did not. A possible reason for the discrepancy (or so the legend goes) was the presence of two 60W light bulbs in the experiment that came up with the 25 hour figure. They were for comfort light during the dim part of the experiment. It is sort of impractical to keep people in total darkness for long periods. These days, people doing this sort of experiment use very low light levels ( 10lux) for the "dark" phase.
For the Linux/BSD using crowd there is Redshift which does more or less the same thing as f.lux. I've been using redshift for a while now. I've noticed that here at my somewhat northern latitude (Winnipeg) that it is not really right for people who want to better regulate their circadian rhythm as it follows what the sun is doing, which of course is part of the problem. I think I am going to have to try setting the latitude to zero.
I admit that the CNN article is one of the better discussions of this topic to come out of a news outlet but I of course like my summary better. It is located here.
My understanding of this is that the problem occurs when the kernel fails to clear the direction flag before calling the user space handler. I have heard nothing about anything to do with the hardware interrupt that might of originally caused the signal (which seems to be related to the sort of thing you are referring to).
Bruce
Intel is to blame. The original 8086/8088 instruction set was just dumb in this respect. Having a global value (the direction bit) that can determine the behaviour of a class of powerful instructions is a great way to generate all sorts of subtle intermittent bugs. I have been personally burned by this (badly) as have many others.
There is a policy you can enforce to try to improve things. You can try to make everyone leave the direction bit in the most common state after they are done with their less common use of the string instructions. This can work if the policy is enforced by something like a compiler. It won't work if the program is for instance called by another entity outside the control of the compiler. ...such as, for
instance, a kernel calling a signal handler... You end up with a state
of affairs where you have to depend on having some other programmer
remember to set the bit to the right state to have your string
instructions work right. You can't test for this as the bit might be
right almost all the time. This is simply a poor approach.
The only fix that can work reliably for your code is to have the compiler insure that the state of the direction bit is known before any string instructions are executed. If I am for instance using a C compiler I should not have to hear about the 8086/8088 string direction bit. ...ever...
The kernel people should fix their failure to respect the ABI policy. The GCC people should revert to the old more deterministic handling of string instructions. The almost negligible optimization here is simply not worth generating a lot of intermittent, hard to find problems (there are likely more out there). If other compilers do not make their string functions entirely deterministic in the face of all external influences then those other compilers are doing it wrong. We can't fix the hardware architecture so this is a case where defensive programming is the best that can be done.
Bruce
I see it as the sort of thing that one would want for people who you ordinarily would like to get on some sort of an Apple product. My sister was banned from her teenage son's computer. She allegedly had a knack for picking up viruses and malware. Ubuntu on her son's castoff crummy old Emachines computer seems to have solved the problem. Not having to try to find the pirated version of Windows for the month (I don't know if they ever had install disks) has made my life a lot nicer too. Automatix makes it so she can engage in viral video distribution with her friends with little effort on my part. She seems to have no particular problem using the Gnome desktop that comes default with Ubuntu with the notable exception of needing a tutorial on how to highlight text in the browser with the mouse. The Freecell comes with it. What more could anyone want?
So... Ubuntu, the distribution for the rest of you... :)
Having said that, the next time I need some software for a computer illiterate I am going to try what seems to me to be the up and coming Debian based distribution for the desktop. It's, err, Debian. Debian Etch (testing) to be exact. I've recently done a default desktop from the working Etch installer disk and it was very slick. The Gnome desktop that resulted from mostly pounding the enter key was quite complete and usable. All that is needed is Debian Etch support for Automatix and my life becomes simple. Debian for pretty much everything...
Bruce
Fortunately there is a fix available. What you do is start another open standard. Use your influence in the industry to promote this standard for all you are worth. Claim that you have seen the error of your ways. Get a bunch of pet suppliers and/or dominant players in related industries together and form a "Industry Association". Go to conferences. Give speeches. Actually support this new standard with your new products. Complete interoperability is just around the corner and you don't even have to switch suppliers if you don't want.
Inevitably the momentum will swing towards your open standard. Timing is critical here. You have to anticipate. Just as it seems clear to everyone which way to go suddenly back off on your support of your open standard. If it seems like you were a bit late simply start supporting and promoting the other open standard. The key here is balance. Keep both standards relevant for as long as it takes.
The effects on your customers will be grave. They will end up having to support 3 or more standards because they will still have a lot of the old stuff you made. Your customers deserve all this of course. They were disloyal. Eventually everyone will yearn for the old days of single source contracts. The open standards effort will eventually die on its own and the industry will have learned that open standards just don't work. There are just too many of them.
Repeat as needed and remember that this isn't just for things like the computer industry. It works for more traditional businesses as well. Microsoft didn't invent this stuff. They are just good at applying it
For a counter measure how about some sort of chain mail like suit made entirely of corner reflectors (3 surfaces at right angles)? The wavelength of this beam is mere millimetres. The reflectors could be quite small. That way the reflected energy would end up going back to the source. Less chance of your reflected radiation hurting someone in your group. An an added bonus, advanced fashion technology could possibly even make the wearer look nice in their suit. Good all around...
I suspect that the petitions with 100k+ signatures were related to popular issues. The copyright reform thing is invisible right now. I have my petition printed out and will be asking people to sign it over the next few weeks. In many cases this will lead to a discussion. This sort of discussion might be more important than the actual petition. This thing will not be won in the hearts and minds of Canadian politicians. It will be won in the hearts and minds of Canadians. If it gets to the point that people start writing letters about this it's over and the forces of light will have won.
...and who do you think is going to collect this money to pay the patent holders? VLC is GPL and thus in a sense belongs to the world. I'm in the world. You can send the money to me if you want. ...or some other random location. Your call. Software patents are simply insane. This is but one example of this insanity...
Ob: Of course none of these things are ipods...
For a related (but perhaps more fundamental) argument, if someone interprets a whole bunch of bits in such a way as to see abused children, then do they not share part of the blame for the interpretation? Some anti child porn laws forbid mere possession. I don't see how that can be proved in any meaningful sense in a case where someone has to interpret the bits. At least in the case of distribution you have more than one entity agreeing on that interpretation but that case only seems somewhat better defined. Any question considered long and hard enough becomes philosophical, but this question gets philosophical real fast no matter where you start...
There was once a time in my part of the world when copper suddenly became very valuable. This created a bit of a hysteria, people in the country had their copper washtubs disappear more or less overnight. People would throw a chain around a telephone cable, attach the chain to a truck and just drive. People with hacksaws would climb down into man holes and cut away all the cables flush with the walls. Things got kind of desperate, telco employees who did not do something like park the truck near the manhole would sometimes encounter law enforcement types with drawn weapons on their way out of the manhole.
In their pursuit of beer money, the copper thieves damaged a lot of valuable infrastructure. An armed response to the theft of a few dollars of copper seems disproportionate but as a society we had become desperate. A few hundred telephone subscribers out of service for 6 hours is not all that bad a deal. The problem was that if the informal copper recycling biz had continued to increase in popularity there would soon be no phone service anywhere. Spammers are a lot like the copper thieves. If we do not deter spammers somehow, email and most any other sort of computer mediated communications is dead. It's as simple as that...
The funnest console player program I've encountered so far is juke. I'll often fire up an xterm just so i can run it, even if I am in X. It's a pure jukebox prog, no fixed play lists. It just plays then in the order you pick them. The fast browsing with the arrow keys lets you pick lots of music fast, so it makes it sort of a game.
The variable L is often called "free space path loss". This sort of path loss increases with frequency. But where is the actual loss? This is supposed to be in free space, i.e. vacuum. Since there isn't anything in vacuum to heat up or whatever the loss can't be in the actual path between the antennas (which is why the "path loss" bit is misleading).
It's because of the antennas. An efficient omnidirectional transmitting antenna will radiate pretty much all the power you feed it. An omnidirectional receiving antenna will receive power proportional to it's size. Obviously larger antennas will collect more power. Rather than giving each antenna a separate transmit gain and receive gain the RF engineering types just fudge it with the idea of "free space path loss".
So yes, you will end up with more signal at the receive antenna of a 0.9GHz as opposed to a 2,4GHz phone. The formula is correct in that. After all the receive antenna is 2.7 times bigger. That's a whole 8 dB more signal. Of course the larger antenna will receive noise that much better too (and there tends to be a lot at 900MHz). The 900 MHz antenna will probably be so large that you will only be able to get one in a handset (some 900MHz phones actually have an extendable antenna). If the 2.4GHz faction puts more than one antenna in their handset and then has the phone pick the one with the best signal, they will probably win in practice.
Real path loss caused by things like building materials and trees does tend to go up with frequency. OTOH higher frequency signals can squeeze though smaller holes. It's all a bit complicated. I personally suspect that free space path loss isn't a significant factor in the actual range you end up with.
What happened here is that there wasn't actually any real settlement value. Letting an entity use some sort of intellectual property for stuff like this is just silly. The court could just as well have allowed the losing party to paint a nice picture, value it at millions of dollars, then contribute the picture. Microsoft did the same sort of thing by supplying software to schools as part of a settlement. Good deal if you can get it.
Since doing stuff with the Forth environment involves lots of interaction with bits you tend to learn a whole lot about binary math/logic quickly. Since the virtual machine is understandably simple and different from traditional computer architectures you end up at a place to start thinking about computer architectures. Since Forth is a reasonably productive programming environment you learn that a lot of the stuff they teach you in Computer Science is probably wrong...
You were talking about the "what" of computers. Exposure to non-traditional environments like Forth gives you a start on the "why" which is a hard thing to come by in the somewhat dogmatic world of computers.
Patent1
Canadian Patent Search
So sorry, Canada has software patents...
The really "out there" part of Green platform is that they want to limit the term of software patents to 7 years. That's a remarkably obscure position to take. My impression is that the more popular parties are pretty much totally ignorant of any sort of IP issues. If you get to see some non-Green party federal wannabes this election, a fun question might be "But what is your position on some of the important industrial policy issues, for example the Green proposal to limit the term of software patents?". Assign extra points to those who actually admit that they don't have the faintest idea...
http://zebra.fh-weingarten.de/~maxi/html/mplayer-d ev-eng/2003-10/msg00262.html
http://zebra.fh-weingarten.de/~maxi/html/mplayer-d ev-eng/2003-10/msg00495.html
I'm not sure I understand this in context. Are you saying that a Canadian civil court might find that both the uploader and downloader have infringed a copyright in the case of P2P? How else could the question of who actually did the copy be unimportant?
Note that people who are skilled in the art of networking computers find some of the distinctions make in the copyright act pointless. Excessive deconstruction of the ideas found in such a statue is simply well deserved mockery.