Yeah, it sounds like many people would enjoy this. My question is why if this was granted in 1999 is it not in production today? Is there some FDA-like approval he needs to get? Is he having trouble finding capital? Is he unable to convince people it will work? A fabrication issue? Doesn't make sense to me.
It is in small-scale production and has been for a few years. The patent is for the lens itself and was probably granted based on a hand-assembled prototype; from there, you need to develop the entire glasses system, figure out how to manufacture them in quantity, and get the word out that the product exists. The twenty-year duration of patents makes sense for physical objects when you realize that you're probably going to spend ten of those years going from "patentable prototype" to "product in the stores".
Do we need or want it to? I know I don't. PDFs are a useful format for interchange and storage of documents while preserving formatting.
I don't want embedded flash, or any of the other bullshit features listed on that page as standards. The first one (for example) claims to support the long-term preservation of digital documents - perhaps they use extra long-lasting bits to store the data?
Archival PDF (the "long-term preservation" you mention) is exactly what you describe in the first paragraph: a format for interchange and storage of documents while preserving formatting. The format explicitly does not support things like Javascript or Flash, and an archival PDF has no external dependancies: all the fonts, images, and so on are embedded in the file, and the format is completely specified. That's what makes it suitable for long-term preservation: it will continue to render the same even if ECMA drops "document.write()" from the Javascript spec or the last copy of "Comic Sans" is lost.
And you don't think part of investing in your own future is buying and destroying any competing technology?
Not when buying and operating the competing technology is more profitable. If Big Oil can turn an acre of land anywhere in the world into a $50/bbl oil-production facility, they've got the oil-producing countries over a, well, barrel.
Being able to produce their own oil gives the oil companies all sorts of benefits. They no longer need to explore for new oil reserves, they can tell OPEC to suck on it if negotiations aren't going well, they don't need to worry about Venezuela nationalizing the oil industry, and so on.
We can fix the mechanical damage to the bones and ligaments, but the current best-practice treatment for the nerve damage consists of waiting to see how bad it is, followed by physical therapy. After hundreds of years of research, we haven't found anything more effective, which is what makes this such big news.
Pick your favorite large dirigible, and study how short its life was and what happened to it.
I'll pick three: three of the last four airships built by Luftschiffbau Zeppelin
#1 LZ-127, the Graf Zeppelin: 11 years of safe, reliable operation, including a flight around the world and a million miles of passenger service. Scrapped at the beginning of World War II. #2 LZ-126/ZR-3, the USS Los Angeles: 10 years of safe, reliable operation. Scrapped at the beginning of World War II. #3 LZ-130, the Graf Zeppelin II: two years of safe, reliable operation. Scrapped at the beginning of World War II.
The big threat to properly-designed rigid airships seems to be World War II. Now that it's over, new airships shouldn't have any trouble.
A few weeks back, I watched an entire wind farm go by on a single train. Blimps are more maneuverable than trains and are better at accessing remote country, sure, but you just can't get the same sort of throughput.
This is another silly case of using something not because it's well suited, but simply because it is there. A conversation with an avatar? A "Professor" reading a script? How crazy is that? Think about how different that is from a RL consultation where the doctor has to *look at* and *listen to* the patient. Why not act those in RL? The same with making a virtual OR when they could just show them a real one.
Thinking back on one of my recent encounters with the medical profession (a dentist visit to diagnose a persistent toothache), SecondLife would have been nearly perfect for training the dentist for this. With the exception of the visual examination of the affected tooth, the interview and diagnostic tests (tap test, cold test, x-ray) could have been simulated just fine using a combination of SecondLife's voice chat and image support.
(Now, the assistant's job would have needed a real patient to practice on. How do you do an x-ray when the tooth normally used to hold the film in place is the one that hurts?)
Fonts are positively tiny compared to bitmap images of text rendered in the same font, which is what is being used now.
Just wait until some clueless web designer embeds Code2000 or another font with high Unicode coverage. Images (even Windows bitmaps) are small compared to the 8-10MB of Code2000.
This is what I was thinking as soon as I read the article. Even if it works (and the theory seems valid if they could do it on a massive enough scale, but it would have to be MASSSIVE) what else are you screwing up by doing this? What place do hurricanes occupy in the ecosystem of the east coast of the US?
Just off the top of my head, eliminating Atlantic hurricanes will 1) Cause long-term droughts in Appalacia and the Midwest, possibly drying them to the point of resembling the Great Plains (Kentucky, for example, gets the majority of its rain from hurricane remnants). 2) Cause the East Coast to dry up somewhat (the coast is less dependant on hurricanes for rainfall). 3) Cool central Canada, reducing the growing season.
Possible additional impacts: * Cooling northern Europe (hurricanes move a lot of heat northward). * Reduce the severity of tornadoes in the Midwest and Great Plains (less humid air means fewer thunderstorms).
Considering that I was driving from SF to Anchorage, without any particular route in mind besides "drive to Las Vegas, then approximately northish", I don't really want to think about how many paper maps I would have needed to procure in order to get that sort of detail.
San Francisco to Anchorage via Los Vegas? State maps of California, Nevada, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska, province maps of British Columbia and Alberta, a guidebook to the Alaska Highway (I'd get this one even with a GPS), and city maps for Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Boise, Butte, Seattle, Portland, Spokane, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, and Anchorage. Do you really need street-level detail for places like Brady, Montana, with 16 streets and maybe 200 people?
(Actually, I'd go with the state maps except for the Montana one, and buy the others on an as-needed basis.)
It all sounds good but in practice will never work because too many people are idiots or dickheads.
You aren't thinking far enough outside the box. Consider a world with 10,000 square miles of terrain and a million NPCs:
If you implement an ecosystem someone will kill every last rabbit and break the food chain so that everything dies.
You've spent the day killing off every rabbit in this square mile. You move on to the next one, and in the meantime, the rabbits are breeding like, well, rabbits, and fill in the empty area.
The dragon in your example would be led to the newbie spawn area about 41 seconds after it appeared.
Don't start people as weaklings, start them as specialists: if someone leads the dragon to the newbie area, a swarm of newbie archers (who are every bit as good with a bow as a top player, even if they suck with a sword) will take it down in seconds.
Every town in the game would be razed.
Don't make the guards wimps. If a town guard is the equal of a player in one-on-one combat, razing a city would make a hundred-man raid in WoW look easy.
You've given the artist a thumbs-up at least once, then. If you give an artist thumbs-down on at least two songs, that artist is removed from the station unless either a) you've given a thumbs-up to one of that artist's songs, or b) you've used that artist or one of their songs as a station seed.
I'll base this on the house where I grew up: a 2000-square-foot single-story house on the outskirts of Seattle:
190 square meters of roof. Assume that only the south-facing side is usable: 85 square meters of sun-facing surface. That's 85kW of sunlight, which at 15% is about 13kW of electricity. Since this is Seattle, assume four usable hours of sunlight a day: 52kWH per day, or about 1560kWH per month. Unless you've got electric baseboard heating (you do find that in the Seattle area), that's more than you're going to need.
Not to belittle this accomplishment, but I'd prefer to see an increase in average efficiency. According to the article the peak efficiency is found when panels are exposed to light 500 times that of normal light. How does that translate to efficiency under normal operating conditions (such as a semi-cloudy day in the midwest)?
It translates into an acre of cheap mirrors instead of an acre of expensive solar panels.
30%? 40%? Efficiency only matters if you're constrained by space (airplanes) or by weight (satellites). 15%-efficient solar cells are good enough that you can power your house with them by covering your roof -- or would be, if they were produced cheaply and in quantity.
If you think the DVD and the Blu-Ray of "Lawrence of Arabia" are of the same quality then there is no point in continuing this discussion.
If you think the most important attribute in determining the quality of Lawrence of Arabia is the ability to count the hairs in the main character's eyebrows, I agree.
Most people have an EZ-pass equivalent in their car.
Really? Where do you live? I think there's a toll bridge across the Columbia at Portland, 400 road miles from me. If not, I know there are some in San Francisco (1000 road miles) and there's a toll road in the Chicago area (1800 miles). Somehow, I doubt anybody around here has one of those things.
Seriously, upwards of 99% of the time I type in a password, I'm the only person in the room and the door is closed. Does displaying bullets (or worse, nothing) really improve security? If I can see the password as I type it, I can write an epic passpoem that's almost impossible to guess, because I can see the typos I make. If I can't, I'm limited to about 30 lowercase alphanumerics, or ten random characters: beyond that, tyops are too common.
Telephone taxes (higher than the bill portion of my land line)
You might want to take a close look at those "taxes": many of them are actually service fees or are otherwise returned to the phone company.
For example, my monthly phone bill is about $24, of which $12.50 is for phone service. However, the second-largest part of the bill is a $7.50 fee named and described as if it were a tax, but it's actually what I'm paying the phone company for access to their network -- the government doesn't see one penny of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Ten lumens. The only way that projector will annoy you in a movie theater is if the idiot operating it is pointing it at your face.
It is in small-scale production and has been for a few years. The patent is for the lens itself and was probably granted based on a hand-assembled prototype; from there, you need to develop the entire glasses system, figure out how to manufacture them in quantity, and get the word out that the product exists. The twenty-year duration of patents makes sense for physical objects when you realize that you're probably going to spend ten of those years going from "patentable prototype" to "product in the stores".
Archival PDF (the "long-term preservation" you mention) is exactly what you describe in the first paragraph: a format for interchange and storage of documents while preserving formatting. The format explicitly does not support things like Javascript or Flash, and an archival PDF has no external dependancies: all the fonts, images, and so on are embedded in the file, and the format is completely specified. That's what makes it suitable for long-term preservation: it will continue to render the same even if ECMA drops "document.write()" from the Javascript spec or the last copy of "Comic Sans" is lost.
Not when buying and operating the competing technology is more profitable. If Big Oil can turn an acre of land anywhere in the world into a $50/bbl oil-production facility, they've got the oil-producing countries over a, well, barrel.
Being able to produce their own oil gives the oil companies all sorts of benefits. They no longer need to explore for new oil reserves, they can tell OPEC to suck on it if negotiations aren't going well, they don't need to worry about Venezuela nationalizing the oil industry, and so on.
We can fix the mechanical damage to the bones and ligaments, but the current best-practice treatment for the nerve damage consists of waiting to see how bad it is, followed by physical therapy. After hundreds of years of research, we haven't found anything more effective, which is what makes this such big news.
I'll pick three: three of the last four airships built by Luftschiffbau Zeppelin
#1 LZ-127, the Graf Zeppelin : 11 years of safe, reliable operation, including a flight around the world and a million miles of passenger service. Scrapped at the beginning of World War II.
#2 LZ-126/ZR-3, the USS Los Angeles : 10 years of safe, reliable operation. Scrapped at the beginning of World War II.
#3 LZ-130, the Graf Zeppelin II : two years of safe, reliable operation. Scrapped at the beginning of World War II.
The big threat to properly-designed rigid airships seems to be World War II. Now that it's over, new airships shouldn't have any trouble.
A few weeks back, I watched an entire wind farm go by on a single train. Blimps are more maneuverable than trains and are better at accessing remote country, sure, but you just can't get the same sort of throughput.
Forget passive sonar: if someone is close enough to detect your wifi network, they're close enough to detect you by touch.
Thinking back on one of my recent encounters with the medical profession (a dentist visit to diagnose a persistent toothache), SecondLife would have been nearly perfect for training the dentist for this. With the exception of the visual examination of the affected tooth, the interview and diagnostic tests (tap test, cold test, x-ray) could have been simulated just fine using a combination of SecondLife's voice chat and image support.
(Now, the assistant's job would have needed a real patient to practice on. How do you do an x-ray when the tooth normally used to hold the film in place is the one that hurts?)
Just wait until some clueless web designer embeds Code2000 or another font with high Unicode coverage. Images (even Windows bitmaps) are small compared to the 8-10MB of Code2000.
Undoubtedly. One of the main ways of making nanotubes is to generate a bunch of soot, then separate out the tubes.
But if the cake is a lie, as soon as you try to interact with it, it'll turn into an 'm' and start attacking you.
Just off the top of my head, eliminating Atlantic hurricanes will
1) Cause long-term droughts in Appalacia and the Midwest, possibly drying them to the point of resembling the Great Plains (Kentucky, for example, gets the majority of its rain from hurricane remnants).
2) Cause the East Coast to dry up somewhat (the coast is less dependant on hurricanes for rainfall).
3) Cool central Canada, reducing the growing season.
Possible additional impacts:
* Cooling northern Europe (hurricanes move a lot of heat northward).
* Reduce the severity of tornadoes in the Midwest and Great Plains (less humid air means fewer thunderstorms).
San Francisco to Anchorage via Los Vegas? State maps of California, Nevada, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska, province maps of British Columbia and Alberta, a guidebook to the Alaska Highway (I'd get this one even with a GPS), and city maps for Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Boise, Butte, Seattle, Portland, Spokane, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, and Anchorage. Do you really need street-level detail for places like Brady, Montana, with 16 streets and maybe 200 people?
(Actually, I'd go with the state maps except for the Montana one, and buy the others on an as-needed basis.)
You aren't thinking far enough outside the box. Consider a world with 10,000 square miles of terrain and a million NPCs:
You've spent the day killing off every rabbit in this square mile. You move on to the next one, and in the meantime, the rabbits are breeding like, well, rabbits, and fill in the empty area.
Don't start people as weaklings, start them as specialists: if someone leads the dragon to the newbie area, a swarm of newbie archers (who are every bit as good with a bow as a top player, even if they suck with a sword) will take it down in seconds.
Don't make the guards wimps. If a town guard is the equal of a player in one-on-one combat, razing a city would make a hundred-man raid in WoW look easy.
You've given the artist a thumbs-up at least once, then. If you give an artist thumbs-down on at least two songs, that artist is removed from the station unless either a) you've given a thumbs-up to one of that artist's songs, or b) you've used that artist or one of their songs as a station seed.
If you ignore the five screens of Javascript at the top of each page, Slashdot is actually more usable in Mosaic than it is in other browsers.
I'll base this on the house where I grew up: a 2000-square-foot single-story house on the outskirts of Seattle:
190 square meters of roof. Assume that only the south-facing side is usable: 85 square meters of sun-facing surface. That's 85kW of sunlight, which at 15% is about 13kW of electricity. Since this is Seattle, assume four usable hours of sunlight a day: 52kWH per day, or about 1560kWH per month. Unless you've got electric baseboard heating (you do find that in the Seattle area), that's more than you're going to need.
It translates into an acre of cheap mirrors instead of an acre of expensive solar panels.
30%? 40%? Efficiency only matters if you're constrained by space (airplanes) or by weight (satellites). 15%-efficient solar cells are good enough that you can power your house with them by covering your roof -- or would be, if they were produced cheaply and in quantity.
If you think the most important attribute in determining the quality of Lawrence of Arabia is the ability to count the hairs in the main character's eyebrows, I agree.
Huh. There's a toll road in Denver. I guess that puts the nearest transponder system only 1100 miles from me.
Really? Where do you live? I think there's a toll bridge across the Columbia at Portland, 400 road miles from me. If not, I know there are some in San Francisco (1000 road miles) and there's a toll road in the Chicago area (1800 miles). Somehow, I doubt anybody around here has one of those things.
Only person in room.
Seriously, upwards of 99% of the time I type in a password, I'm the only person in the room and the door is closed. Does displaying bullets (or worse, nothing) really improve security? If I can see the password as I type it, I can write an epic passpoem that's almost impossible to guess, because I can see the typos I make. If I can't, I'm limited to about 30 lowercase alphanumerics, or ten random characters: beyond that, tyops are too common.
You might want to take a close look at those "taxes": many of them are actually service fees or are otherwise returned to the phone company.
For example, my monthly phone bill is about $24, of which $12.50 is for phone service. However, the second-largest part of the bill is a $7.50 fee named and described as if it were a tax, but it's actually what I'm paying the phone company for access to their network -- the government doesn't see one penny of it.