You might want to skip the raw hamburger. A relative of mine died from his lifelong habit of consuming raw hamburger. Eat your steaks rare if you like, but cook the burgers unless the cow was butchered just for you.
Actually, not all glass is silica based. Some lasers are based on phosphate glass rather than silica glass, for example. The material properties are similar to silica glass, although it is typically not as hard. It doesn't flow at room temperature, and I'm not sure I would call anything that flows at room temperature 'glass'. The gp is correct in complaining about people talking about 'glass' as if it were a single material with well-defined properties, but I think he is off base in asserting that there exists a 'glass' that flows at room temperature.
Be aware too that the term 'glass' has an even more generic meaning, referring to any solid that is not crystalline. You can buy amorphous metal foil, for example. This material is technically a glass.
One might argue that when a copyright owner puts a work on the Web, they are intentionally making it available to the public, and this produces an implied license to copy the work for purposes of displaying it (e.g. in a user's browser), and to index it for purposes of supporting the search technology that allows users to find the page in the first place.
This might be different with books, where the copyright owner's expectations are different.
You can get a free viewer that works fine with Firefox here. The viewer also works fine for TIFF images other than the USPTO's.
Note also that according to the USPTO page above the Image links only work for a couple hours after the search that produced the patent page. After that time you have to do a fresh search to generate a new page with working image links.
The problem is that the patent office uses a relatively odd TIFF structure, that they are bound to by international agreements. You can get a free viewer for Windows here. Choose option 3: standard web browser plug-in (Netscape style). It works fine in Firefox (although older versions failed to install automagically and had to be manually moved fo Firefox's plugins directory.)
Firefox's automatic plugin finder is unlikely to work because even though the patent images meet the TIFF standard their format is not recognized by most TIFF viewers.
That's true, but it seems to be normal practice (even with non-software patents) to start with overly broad claims and work down to specific claims, so as to ensure coverage if the most specific claim or claims fail due to prior art. One doesn't necessarily expect the broadest claims in the patent to be upheld by themselves. They exist to provide the foundation for the more specific claims.
The problem with radioactive waste storage is not the shielding, it's how to prevent groundwater over hundreds or thousands of years from getting into the storage facility and dissolving/carrying off radioactive material into the water table. This is the big concern holding back the real planned waste storage facility, which is in a deep, dry hole in the middle of nowhere. They need to prove first that whatever they put there will stay put for tens or hundreds of thousands of years.
To be fair, despite its popularity with the wackos, the idea that oil may not come from decaying biological matter after all does have some scientific merit. It's still (AFAIK) a controversial hypothesis, but not a completely baseless one.
We used to think that all 'organic' compounds were organic in origin. We were wrong. 'Organic' compounds have been observed in space and on other planets. It's not a huge stretch (especially given other evidence) to wonder if these vast pools of hydrocarbons under the Earth's crust might be from some source other than decaying vegetation. That doesn't mean we have an unlimited supply of course .
Maybe they will now. Up to now, solar collectors have been too expensive (per Watt) to pay off except in places like California that get a lot of sun year-round. The price has to come down a lot and the efficiency has to go up to make them more widely viable. Maybe this is the beginning of that. Photovoltaics have been getting cheaper and more efficient too. Someday we'll all have them on our roofs. Maybe even on our cars.
Actually, I think desert ecosystems are among the most fragile of all ecosystems on the planet. One should not assume that just because it's desert nobody is going to care about paving it over for solar collectors.
I do wonder, though, about the hypocrisy of environmentalists who would rather pave vast tracts of wilderness than put up one nuclear plant and a suitable long-term storage facility for the waste.
Actually, no, because the candidate with CTS wisely doesn't mention her condition in the interview, and the interviewer is forbidden by law from asking about it.
I don't think that really works. You can't make someone know less by just telling them something,
No, not really. The article writer has written a bit of exaggerated fluff to give a general audience a flavor of what this new discovery means. Most science reporting works this way. Presumably it does work with atoms and other simple systems: you can store information in a simple system and "remove" some of it by transferring "negative information" into the system.
Yeah, but it's still one less thing in the landfill that way. The plastics go through the consumer market twice, but only one of the two consumer products eventually ends up in the landfill. Net result: the amount of plastic in the landfill is cut in half.
I should make myself artifically poor today based on the chance of some economic disruption in the future?
Pretty much. Same concept as insurance: you make yourself a little poorer now to offset a small chance of catastrophe.
The market is wonderful, but it's not perfect. People make foolish decisions, and sometimes do so collectively as well as individually. Not everything actually does get built into the price of a commodity.
This seems to be a lot of the difference between pro- and anti-conservation people. Those who are in favor of conservation see a clear deadline looming. We may not be sure exactly when it will come, but that doesn't really matter. Those who are opposed just don't see the threat.
To use your example, if you're not sure you have enough money to make it to payday, wouldn't you at least consider economizing to make sure you make it? To pro-conservation people, anti-conservation people seem like the guy who doesn't know how much money he has left, doesn't know when his next payday is, and doesn't really care. He'll just keep spending until he runs out of cash. Foolish.
Be careful what you wish for. If scarcity comes on too fast the rise in prices for essential resources can certainly create an economic catastrophe. Yes, we will not completely exhaust the resource, but in the worst case the consequences could make the 1930's seem like a utopia.
The advantage of conservation is that it gives us some control of the rolloff of resources that are near depletion, and allows us to ensure that alternatives are in place in time to take over as prices for existing resources become too high.
If we fail on this front, you or your children may well end up starving to death someday.
On the other hand, there is some merit in just keeping the stuff out of landfills even if no other benefit is achieved. In urban areas at least, there is a finite amount of good landfill space available, and keeping recyclable plastics out of the landfill can make trash disposal significantly cheaper in the long run. If that cost savings is more than the difference between the cost of recycling plastic and the cost of making new plastic, we come out ahead.
You've missed the fact that low-volume printing is a very large market. There are a lot of home users who print few enough pages per month that an inkjet is more economical than a laser printer, especially since many of those home users want to be able to print in color now and then, and may want to print photos.
Slashdot Mirror
It's all the same. If you modulate a carrier faster, the spectral bandwidth used by the signal gets wider.
You might want to skip the raw hamburger. A relative of mine died from his lifelong habit of consuming raw hamburger. Eat your steaks rare if you like, but cook the burgers unless the cow was butchered just for you.
Be aware too that the term 'glass' has an even more generic meaning, referring to any solid that is not crystalline. You can buy amorphous metal foil, for example. This material is technically a glass.
Diamond burns quite readily. The ignition temperature is around 800C.
This might be different with books, where the copyright owner's expectations are different.
No, I didn't know about this when I posted the original comment. I just saw it by accident today.
You can get a free viewer that works fine with Firefox here. The viewer also works fine for TIFF images other than the USPTO's.
Note also that according to the USPTO page above the Image links only work for a couple hours after the search that produced the patent page. After that time you have to do a fresh search to generate a new page with working image links.
Firefox's automatic plugin finder is unlikely to work because even though the patent images meet the TIFF standard their format is not recognized by most TIFF viewers.
IANAL.
The problem with radioactive waste storage is not the shielding, it's how to prevent groundwater over hundreds or thousands of years from getting into the storage facility and dissolving/carrying off radioactive material into the water table. This is the big concern holding back the real planned waste storage facility, which is in a deep, dry hole in the middle of nowhere. They need to prove first that whatever they put there will stay put for tens or hundreds of thousands of years.
We used to think that all 'organic' compounds were organic in origin. We were wrong. 'Organic' compounds have been observed in space and on other planets. It's not a huge stretch (especially given other evidence) to wonder if these vast pools of hydrocarbons under the Earth's crust might be from some source other than decaying vegetation. That doesn't mean we have an unlimited supply of course .
Maybe they will now. Up to now, solar collectors have been too expensive (per Watt) to pay off except in places like California that get a lot of sun year-round. The price has to come down a lot and the efficiency has to go up to make them more widely viable. Maybe this is the beginning of that. Photovoltaics have been getting cheaper and more efficient too. Someday we'll all have them on our roofs. Maybe even on our cars.
I do wonder, though, about the hypocrisy of environmentalists who would rather pave vast tracts of wilderness than put up one nuclear plant and a suitable long-term storage facility for the waste.
Actually, no, because the candidate with CTS wisely doesn't mention her condition in the interview, and the interviewer is forbidden by law from asking about it.
No, not really. The article writer has written a bit of exaggerated fluff to give a general audience a flavor of what this new discovery means. Most science reporting works this way. Presumably it does work with atoms and other simple systems: you can store information in a simple system and "remove" some of it by transferring "negative information" into the system.
Yeah, but it's still one less thing in the landfill that way. The plastics go through the consumer market twice, but only one of the two consumer products eventually ends up in the landfill. Net result: the amount of plastic in the landfill is cut in half.
Pretty much. Same concept as insurance: you make yourself a little poorer now to offset a small chance of catastrophe.
The market is wonderful, but it's not perfect. People make foolish decisions, and sometimes do so collectively as well as individually. Not everything actually does get built into the price of a commodity.
Think gasoline will hit $3 per gallon this year? How much next year? Would a $1 per year increase for the next decade or two be 'gradual'?
To use your example, if you're not sure you have enough money to make it to payday, wouldn't you at least consider economizing to make sure you make it? To pro-conservation people, anti-conservation people seem like the guy who doesn't know how much money he has left, doesn't know when his next payday is, and doesn't really care. He'll just keep spending until he runs out of cash. Foolish.
How do you figure? If anything, conservation drives the development of new technology.
The advantage of conservation is that it gives us some control of the rolloff of resources that are near depletion, and allows us to ensure that alternatives are in place in time to take over as prices for existing resources become too high.
If we fail on this front, you or your children may well end up starving to death someday.
And postponing Doomsday is bad why, exactly?
And what's wrong with extending the time until a finite resource is expended? It gives us more time to come up with other options...
On the other hand, there is some merit in just keeping the stuff out of landfills even if no other benefit is achieved. In urban areas at least, there is a finite amount of good landfill space available, and keeping recyclable plastics out of the landfill can make trash disposal significantly cheaper in the long run. If that cost savings is more than the difference between the cost of recycling plastic and the cost of making new plastic, we come out ahead.
You've missed the fact that low-volume printing is a very large market. There are a lot of home users who print few enough pages per month that an inkjet is more economical than a laser printer, especially since many of those home users want to be able to print in color now and then, and may want to print photos.