I have very seriously considered doing this with my projector. The bulb went about 18 months ago and I discovered the price of replacements had shot up since I bought the pj. The problem is I can't trick the projector into coming on without a bulb in place. A pj bulb draws a substantial amount of power and, in operation, can be quite dangerous. As such it would seem most projectors have safety features to stop one tampering with the unit. I'd be interested to know if you manage to build a DIY unit like this.
Minor correction: larger jets are more efficient than smaller ones hence the reson why airlines push for larger and larger planes. Same with container ships - the bigger you build the better the efficiency. The only problem is finding enough people that want to go from A to B.
They have come up with a disc that will be hard to make a drive for that will fit in a standard drive bay. Why not shave off 1 cm making the disk only 250GB but fit in with every computer in the world.
I'm glad someone has said it and said it well. I think there are quite a few companies, especially ones producing highly specialized software, that would quite like to release Linux versions but they are held back due to the whole "if it's on Linux it must be open" thing. I always felt that the whole OSS movement was more about providing people with free and open tools not completely replacing / removing all closed source software. An open OS fits in with the idea of producing free tools, it's pretty easy to argue that an open source office suite also fits in with those goals but trying to force say a games manufacturer to release the code for their game is just plain silly and likely to hold back the apperance of such things on Linux.
I agree with most of your argument but I also can't help feeling that the lack of closed source development for Linux is hurting the community as a whole. Perhaps companies developing closed source software for Linux won't advance the Linux code base much but having, potentially, tens of thousands of software developers using the libraries and reporting bugs should help improve the to the point where they are far better than any closed source set of libraries.
I think part of the problem companies see with developing for Linux is that it feels like a constantly moving target. Software compiled for Win 95 will probably run on WinXP would software compiled for Linux in 1995 run on a modern Linux box? I doubt it. Most software houses just don't have the resources to constantly patch and recompile their code and like it or not there is a lot of 10 year old code still being run.
I don't know, perhaps the APIs are more stable that I give them credit for - I'm a Java developer so insulated from all that. My one experience of trying to get an old piece of closed source code running on a modern Linux machine was a total failure due to the fact I was running a newer version of the C libraries - that didn't exactly fill me with confidence that Linux would attract closed source development any time soon.
I agree that it appears the police went over the top in this case but I have seen kids damage a tree where arrest would probably have been the correct response. The tree in question was on the high street and is one of only a few trees planted to provide shade and generally make the place look pretty. A group of kids walked up to one of the trees grabbed a substantial low lying branch and broke it off tearing the bark half way down the tree (the tree was probably about 15 to 20 years old - around 7" DBH at a guess). I'm no tree expert but I would say the damage caused gave the tree a 50:50 chance of survival mainly due to increased infection risk and it would certainly be scarred for life.
If that sort of behaviour isn't criminal damage (after all our tax paid for that tree to be planted) then what is it? I think the correct response would be a ticking off and a fine, that the parents are liable for, of ten times the value of the tree and replanting.
The problem with your argument is that it can be used to justify any research no matter how hair brained. It could be used to justify research into perpetual motion machines or ID. I freely admit some money needs to be spent on blue sky research but even that should be justifiable. If the results that we get out of this experiment are nothing more than one researchers opinion then they are worth no more than a (very expensive) work of fiction. It's great that we are probing these things but there comes a point where too many assumptions have been made for the results to have any real worth. I suppose that's why we have peer review though - to keep out the worst of the crack pots.
I wasn't aware that we understood how one black hole worked so how can this team perform a simulation of two coming together and hope to get anything useful out? I admit there is an outside chance they will stumble on the correct result but can they prove it's correct?
The picture you paint might be in place in Germany and a few other places in Europe but it's not the case in the UK. Everyone and their uncle is trying to rip off consumers here with essentially no come back. There are certainly strong laws protecting the consumer but no one is enforcing them and most people have very little understanding of them.
I once had a problem with NTL installing phone and a cable Internet connection. They were charging us ever though it didn't work. To cut a long story short I called the oftel (the organization that is supposed to be the watchdog for phone companies) only to be told that they didn't get involved in individual cases. What use are they then? If you have a problem with the phone company short of suing them you are stuck.
At the end of the day if capitalism really worked we wouldn't need watchdogs because many companies would be fighting it out to provide us with the best service.
It will never happen and for one very good reason. There just isn't enough energy hitting the roof of even a moderate office block to power the aircon irrespective of the price of solar cells. Energy from the sun totals about 1kW per sq m. Look at amount of unused space on the roof mostoffice blocks. The amount of power you can generate simply isn't enough to power the aircon even if solar cells were 100% efficient. Even the best solar cell is 20% efficient and that drops with time (not counting the fact that huge amounts of power go into making a solar cell int he first place).
Solar cells have a loooooong way to go before they are worth it. Wind turbines on the other hand are nearly there.
I can't believe this. It feels like some one making a (bad) bid for funding rather than a realistic theory. The biggest problem I can see is that snakes don't eat humans, in fact snakes seem to pretty much go out of their way to avoid humans most of the time. Perhaps some of the very small primates are prey for snakes and as such their evolution would be partially guided by snakes. Humans evolved from fairly large primates; primates that are far to large for even a large snake to swallow. Ergo a snake wouldn't prey on those primates - theres just no point. Hence the current situation where snakes and humans just leave each other alone.
While I agree you are technically correct it should be pointed out that at room temperature petrol has a fairly high vapour pressure. As such it ignites very easily. Lit matches brought into proximity with liquid petrol will almost always result in a very bad fire.
I admit the copyright hold wouldn't be happy with that but why does the copyright holder have a say in what you do with the work once you have purchased it? If you bought bricks from a brick maker would you expect them to tell you want you can and can't build with them? The idea is just bizzare.
I fully admit we need copyright law. I don't agree with the way it is now spreading to cover the way we interact with things we have bought. If you buy a copyright work you should be able to then dispose of that one copy however you see fit. You shouldn't be able to pass it off as you own and you shouldn't be able to sell more than one copy. The one you own should be yours to do with as you please though.
...this is just plain stupid. A decision such as this should be applicable to all copyright work so try the mental exercise of applying it to a book as it is the oldest form of copyrighted media. You buy a book and a pen. You scribble out a few words and perhaps write in a couple of your own sentences. You sell the book on. Have you breached copyright? Perhaps, if you claimed that the whole work was produced by you but I didn't hear anyone saying they wrote the book / film whatever. Yeah they defaced the work and sold it on but that's a totally different matter and not something for the courts to be involved in.
Going back to the book example. What if your kid scribbled on the pages? What if your dog ate part of the book (that happened to me once while at school)? As far as I am concerned the copyright holder gets to sell the work to you once. What you do with it after that is you own concern.
I certainly identified that as an issue but I don't believe it was the primary cause. The area I was in (aquatics equipment) doesn't have much of a second hand market for a number of reasons (many items are one use only, problems with transferring infections, etc) therefore my main competitors were other resellers.
I quite agree. It became apparent quite quickly that there was little money to be made as a reseller. I'm not at all surprised - it is what I expected the Internet to do. Manufacturers needed distributers and resellers before the Internet because they couldn't hope to reach all their customers any other way. That's not so much the case anymore. I imagine we will see more and more manufacturers selling their own products direct to customers via the web.
My next venture will actually involve me manufacturing something. I just have to decide what:o)
Well said, I too ran a mainly eBay business and found exactly the same problems. The nickle and dime death is the biggest problem. The fees are at the level where there is virtually no profit. I gave what I feel was very good service and I had people coming back on a fairly regular basis. Even so I would often be making £30 sale. By profit I mean what's left after shipping and fees. That £1 then had to pay for premises and other business expenses and provide me with a wage. I struggle to see how any business can make money on eBay anymore. It's great for getting rid of one off items that would probably end up in the bin but thats about it.
I was running my own business up until early this year and I can confirm it is possible to make (some) money on eBay. I have come to see eBay as the business equivalent of a hidden reef for shipping. At first glance it appears to be a good way to get to customers and make some money but once you have taken into account all the factors the profit margin is tiny. I worked out that if I did nothing but pack boxes all day I could just about turn a profit over all.
The problem is that every company is trying to grab their portion of the market and they all do it by having the lowest price. There were times when I would look at items for sale and consider bidding on them myself because they were going for less than I could get them from my supplier (and I felt I had a good deal from my supplier). Six months or a year after first appearing most companies have vanished, presumably because they have burnt through their seed money trying to grab a portion of the market.
I'm not saying this situation is wrong, it's capitalism in action and it's great for the shoppers. It is, however, causing a lot of businesses to go to the wall and using up a lot of people life savings on route.
I agree. There is certainly something wrong with someone who is viewing images of this nature regardless of whether they are of real people or 100% computer generated. I struggle, however, to see why the viewing of computer generated images is a crime - it really is a victimless crime*. I suppose you could argue that viewing these images causes people to be more likely to commit offences in the future but then we would be criminalizing people for what they might do.
It's an interesting problem and one that I don't think has a solution that the majority of people will support. The real problem, in my view, is that we can't talk openly about the problem. That results in the extremists taking over and passing dangerous legislation.
* I also struggle with the concept of viewing images of real people being a crime. Yes, the person who took the photographs commited a crime. The person who distributed the images commited a crime as well (although that is fraught with problems as many unsuspecting parties might be involved in the distribution). The person who viewed the photographs though... that's a tough one. I suppose you could claim it was a crime if you could prove intent to seek out the images e.g. the person paid for them. Just viewing the image shouldn't be a crime though.
In the UK computer generated porn is classified in law exactly the same way as regular digital / wet photography. AFAIK the same is true of drawings and paints as well.
Some of the sequences they get patents for are for gene therapy. The sequence is in essence the "drug". If you don't provide them with an incentive to find the relevant sequences (which is very very expensive) they aren't going to do it.
If I needed to destroy a the data on a drive in seconds I would simply heat it well above the curie temperature for the magnetic material being used. If you are feeling really paranoid add a variable field strength magnet as well - once above the curie temperature you wouldn't need much of a magnet to make sure things were well scrambled.
I mainly agree with points one and two but we need to provide some incentive for companies to research genomes. It costs huge amounts of money to find useful gene sequences and a company isn't going to do that if another company could just come along and use the results. Note, however, that I am not saying patenting the sequence is the right way to protect it.
As for number three again I mainly agree but we need some provision for inventions that can't currently have a working example built due to cost / current technological progrees. If a working example can be provided then the patent should be issued. If a working example can't be provided the application should be peer reviewed. If relevent experts agree that there is a good chance the invention would work the patent should be issued. In order for it to be peer reviewed detailed information would be required including plans on how to build the device. This would / should stop people patenting the warp drive as there are far to many unanswered questions.
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I have very seriously considered doing this with my projector. The bulb went about 18 months ago and I discovered the price of replacements had shot up since I bought the pj. The problem is I can't trick the projector into coming on without a bulb in place. A pj bulb draws a substantial amount of power and, in operation, can be quite dangerous. As such it would seem most projectors have safety features to stop one tampering with the unit. I'd be interested to know if you manage to build a DIY unit like this.
It seems to still be available in e format - not that I have the faintest clue what it's going on about.
Minor correction: larger jets are more efficient than smaller ones hence the reson why airlines push for larger and larger planes. Same with container ships - the bigger you build the better the efficiency. The only problem is finding enough people that want to go from A to B.
They have come up with a disc that will be hard to make a drive for that will fit in a standard drive bay. Why not shave off 1 cm making the disk only 250GB but fit in with every computer in the world.
I'm glad someone has said it and said it well. I think there are quite a few companies, especially ones producing highly specialized software, that would quite like to release Linux versions but they are held back due to the whole "if it's on Linux it must be open" thing. I always felt that the whole OSS movement was more about providing people with free and open tools not completely replacing / removing all closed source software. An open OS fits in with the idea of producing free tools, it's pretty easy to argue that an open source office suite also fits in with those goals but trying to force say a games manufacturer to release the code for their game is just plain silly and likely to hold back the apperance of such things on Linux.
I agree with most of your argument but I also can't help feeling that the lack of closed source development for Linux is hurting the community as a whole. Perhaps companies developing closed source software for Linux won't advance the Linux code base much but having, potentially, tens of thousands of software developers using the libraries and reporting bugs should help improve the to the point where they are far better than any closed source set of libraries.
I think part of the problem companies see with developing for Linux is that it feels like a constantly moving target. Software compiled for Win 95 will probably run on WinXP would software compiled for Linux in 1995 run on a modern Linux box? I doubt it. Most software houses just don't have the resources to constantly patch and recompile their code and like it or not there is a lot of 10 year old code still being run.
I don't know, perhaps the APIs are more stable that I give them credit for - I'm a Java developer so insulated from all that. My one experience of trying to get an old piece of closed source code running on a modern Linux machine was a total failure due to the fact I was running a newer version of the C libraries - that didn't exactly fill me with confidence that Linux would attract closed source development any time soon.
I agree that it appears the police went over the top in this case but I have seen kids damage a tree where arrest would probably have been the correct response. The tree in question was on the high street and is one of only a few trees planted to provide shade and generally make the place look pretty. A group of kids walked up to one of the trees grabbed a substantial low lying branch and broke it off tearing the bark half way down the tree (the tree was probably about 15 to 20 years old - around 7" DBH at a guess). I'm no tree expert but I would say the damage caused gave the tree a 50:50 chance of survival mainly due to increased infection risk and it would certainly be scarred for life.
If that sort of behaviour isn't criminal damage (after all our tax paid for that tree to be planted) then what is it? I think the correct response would be a ticking off and a fine, that the parents are liable for, of ten times the value of the tree and replanting.
The problem with your argument is that it can be used to justify any research no matter how hair brained. It could be used to justify research into perpetual motion machines or ID. I freely admit some money needs to be spent on blue sky research but even that should be justifiable. If the results that we get out of this experiment are nothing more than one researchers opinion then they are worth no more than a (very expensive) work of fiction. It's great that we are probing these things but there comes a point where too many assumptions have been made for the results to have any real worth. I suppose that's why we have peer review though - to keep out the worst of the crack pots.
I wasn't aware that we understood how one black hole worked so how can this team perform a simulation of two coming together and hope to get anything useful out? I admit there is an outside chance they will stumble on the correct result but can they prove it's correct?
The picture you paint might be in place in Germany and a few other places in Europe but it's not the case in the UK. Everyone and their uncle is trying to rip off consumers here with essentially no come back. There are certainly strong laws protecting the consumer but no one is enforcing them and most people have very little understanding of them.
I once had a problem with NTL installing phone and a cable Internet connection. They were charging us ever though it didn't work. To cut a long story short I called the oftel (the organization that is supposed to be the watchdog for phone companies) only to be told that they didn't get involved in individual cases. What use are they then? If you have a problem with the phone company short of suing them you are stuck.
At the end of the day if capitalism really worked we wouldn't need watchdogs because many companies would be fighting it out to provide us with the best service.
It will never happen and for one very good reason. There just isn't enough energy hitting the roof of even a moderate office block to power the aircon irrespective of the price of solar cells. Energy from the sun totals about 1kW per sq m. Look at amount of unused space on the roof mostoffice blocks. The amount of power you can generate simply isn't enough to power the aircon even if solar cells were 100% efficient. Even the best solar cell is 20% efficient and that drops with time (not counting the fact that huge amounts of power go into making a solar cell int he first place).
Solar cells have a loooooong way to go before they are worth it. Wind turbines on the other hand are nearly there.
I can't believe this. It feels like some one making a (bad) bid for funding rather than a realistic theory. The biggest problem I can see is that snakes don't eat humans, in fact snakes seem to pretty much go out of their way to avoid humans most of the time. Perhaps some of the very small primates are prey for snakes and as such their evolution would be partially guided by snakes. Humans evolved from fairly large primates; primates that are far to large for even a large snake to swallow. Ergo a snake wouldn't prey on those primates - theres just no point. Hence the current situation where snakes and humans just leave each other alone.
While I agree you are technically correct it should be pointed out that at room temperature petrol has a fairly high vapour pressure. As such it ignites very easily. Lit matches brought into proximity with liquid petrol will almost always result in a very bad fire.
I admit the copyright hold wouldn't be happy with that but why does the copyright holder have a say in what you do with the work once you have purchased it? If you bought bricks from a brick maker would you expect them to tell you want you can and can't build with them? The idea is just bizzare.
I fully admit we need copyright law. I don't agree with the way it is now spreading to cover the way we interact with things we have bought. If you buy a copyright work you should be able to then dispose of that one copy however you see fit. You shouldn't be able to pass it off as you own and you shouldn't be able to sell more than one copy. The one you own should be yours to do with as you please though.
...this is just plain stupid. A decision such as this should be applicable to all copyright work so try the mental exercise of applying it to a book as it is the oldest form of copyrighted media. You buy a book and a pen. You scribble out a few words and perhaps write in a couple of your own sentences. You sell the book on. Have you breached copyright? Perhaps, if you claimed that the whole work was produced by you but I didn't hear anyone saying they wrote the book / film whatever. Yeah they defaced the work and sold it on but that's a totally different matter and not something for the courts to be involved in.
Going back to the book example. What if your kid scribbled on the pages? What if your dog ate part of the book (that happened to me once while at school)? As far as I am concerned the copyright holder gets to sell the work to you once. What you do with it after that is you own concern.
I certainly identified that as an issue but I don't believe it was the primary cause. The area I was in (aquatics equipment) doesn't have much of a second hand market for a number of reasons (many items are one use only, problems with transferring infections, etc) therefore my main competitors were other resellers.
I quite agree. It became apparent quite quickly that there was little money to be made as a reseller. I'm not at all surprised - it is what I expected the Internet to do. Manufacturers needed distributers and resellers before the Internet because they couldn't hope to reach all their customers any other way. That's not so much the case anymore. I imagine we will see more and more manufacturers selling their own products direct to customers via the web.
My next venture will actually involve me manufacturing something. I just have to decide what :o)
Well said, I too ran a mainly eBay business and found exactly the same problems. The nickle and dime death is the biggest problem. The fees are at the level where there is virtually no profit. I gave what I feel was very good service and I had people coming back on a fairly regular basis. Even so I would often be making £30 sale. By profit I mean what's left after shipping and fees. That £1 then had to pay for premises and other business expenses and provide me with a wage. I struggle to see how any business can make money on eBay anymore. It's great for getting rid of one off items that would probably end up in the bin but thats about it.
I was running my own business up until early this year and I can confirm it is possible to make (some) money on eBay. I have come to see eBay as the business equivalent of a hidden reef for shipping. At first glance it appears to be a good way to get to customers and make some money but once you have taken into account all the factors the profit margin is tiny. I worked out that if I did nothing but pack boxes all day I could just about turn a profit over all.
The problem is that every company is trying to grab their portion of the market and they all do it by having the lowest price. There were times when I would look at items for sale and consider bidding on them myself because they were going for less than I could get them from my supplier (and I felt I had a good deal from my supplier). Six months or a year after first appearing most companies have vanished, presumably because they have burnt through their seed money trying to grab a portion of the market.
I'm not saying this situation is wrong, it's capitalism in action and it's great for the shoppers. It is, however, causing a lot of businesses to go to the wall and using up a lot of people life savings on route.
I agree. There is certainly something wrong with someone who is viewing images of this nature regardless of whether they are of real people or 100% computer generated. I struggle, however, to see why the viewing of computer generated images is a crime - it really is a victimless crime*. I suppose you could argue that viewing these images causes people to be more likely to commit offences in the future but then we would be criminalizing people for what they might do.
It's an interesting problem and one that I don't think has a solution that the majority of people will support. The real problem, in my view, is that we can't talk openly about the problem. That results in the extremists taking over and passing dangerous legislation.
* I also struggle with the concept of viewing images of real people being a crime. Yes, the person who took the photographs commited a crime. The person who distributed the images commited a crime as well (although that is fraught with problems as many unsuspecting parties might be involved in the distribution). The person who viewed the photographs though... that's a tough one. I suppose you could claim it was a crime if you could prove intent to seek out the images e.g. the person paid for them. Just viewing the image shouldn't be a crime though.
In the UK computer generated porn is classified in law exactly the same way as regular digital / wet photography. AFAIK the same is true of drawings and paints as well.
Some of the sequences they get patents for are for gene therapy. The sequence is in essence the "drug". If you don't provide them with an incentive to find the relevant sequences (which is very very expensive) they aren't going to do it.
If I needed to destroy a the data on a drive in seconds I would simply heat it well above the curie temperature for the magnetic material being used. If you are feeling really paranoid add a variable field strength magnet as well - once above the curie temperature you wouldn't need much of a magnet to make sure things were well scrambled.
I mainly agree with points one and two but we need to provide some incentive for companies to research genomes. It costs huge amounts of money to find useful gene sequences and a company isn't going to do that if another company could just come along and use the results. Note, however, that I am not saying patenting the sequence is the right way to protect it.
As for number three again I mainly agree but we need some provision for inventions that can't currently have a working example built due to cost / current technological progrees. If a working example can be provided then the patent should be issued. If a working example can't be provided the application should be peer reviewed. If relevent experts agree that there is a good chance the invention would work the patent should be issued. In order for it to be peer reviewed detailed information would be required including plans on how to build the device. This would / should stop people patenting the warp drive as there are far to many unanswered questions.
I hope it supports flash block at least.