Cell phones typically don't use the accelerometer to determine if a person is {...} moving fast.
Please try to explain that to all the people who install podometer-like(*) apps on their smartphones and then feel obligated to post about how much steps(**) they've done in a day, or where and how long they have jogged.
Now that the wii suit has been won, I think all the accelerometers-using apps are next. (And probably they could twist at least some smartwatches manufacturer into it too, for similar reasons)
--- (*) - Yes some app rely on actual separate devices talking over some wireless signal. Other work (less reliably) using only the accelerometers. (**) - on the scale of an average/.-geek, I would presume "walking" *is* "moving fast"
does this mean sterile vodka jello shots could be used to kill cancer?
For a punny understanding of "shots" - yeah that's exactly the idea.
And I'm sure that, although they'll never public admit it, the inventors got the idea while doing actual vodka jello (body?) shots at one of their medical students' wild party.
If I had terminal cancer I'd take highly experimental over certain death, you're only risk averse when it usually ends well. When it'll end badly you're ready for any "Hail Mary" save. {...} but any reasonable experiment I'd be in on...
Also, from what I've heard (disclaimer: oncology is not my speciality), patient close to the end also tend to have altruistic views : even if it doesn't end up saving *them personally*, taking an experimental treatment might still help advance the science and who knows who might end up being saved later thank to what was learned by this experimental treatment. Some are thus happy to save any live, even if it ends up not being their own.
seems like the worst that can happen here is that you get mighty drunk, granted I've had bad hangovers but I'd rather go out drunk as a skunk than wait for the cancer to get me.
The doses needed to be injected without this "gel improvement" are usually massive. It's not only getting drunk/hangover from what leaks in the general blood stream system.
It's alcohol still being at very high level nearby the tumor and destroying healthy tissue and organs around the tumor (painful, problematic and potentially dangerous). Akin to a badly calibrated radiation therapy. i.e.: you're literally burning the patient in this failure mode (though think "chemical" burn rather than garden variety of fire)
The potential of this gel is similar to what computer modelling helped improve radiation therapy. Making sure the treatment arrives exactly where it should, and is only working where needed.
If, as an author or anyone else, want some data to be inaccessible after your death, just strongly encrypt it with a long password you don't write down anywhere.
There might have been a few technical problems with this strategy.
(As his Alzheimer's disease had progressed, Terry was complaining of not being able to type).
Nononono ! Actually let them buy this marketing crap. Them buying the newer TV helps driving the price of the pannels down.
Meaning that soon, you'll be able to have affordable prices on 7 680 x 4 320 PC monitors, on which you'll be able to plug your huge multi-GFX-cards/multi-CPU workstation to get actual 4320p content. (And as a bonus, you'll save on your winter heating bill once you turn your monster-computer on).
- As there is no central authority controlling the transaction, there no one who could block the transaction just because they object to it (eg.: PayPal and Visa could conider pornography amoral and refuse to process the payment. But there's no central "Bitcoin Inc" that could decide what you do with the money. - Just as nobody would prevent you to put cash directly into someone else's hand)
But they open another problem :
- Nearly all cryptocurrencies rely on consensus to validate transaction. Meaning that every single node on the network will have a local entry stating that you paid a certain sum to the sex performer on your webcam. Although you're not mentioned by name/real identity, it's not beyond the capability of some big player (government-level agencies) to recoup the data and manage to guess who you really are. Your privacy is toast (by design of the system). Some 3 letter agency might come knocking at your door and try to blackmail you once they've discovered your irresistible fetish for scatophile midget porn.
And Europe's killer achievement is having managed to have a standard for charging (Mennekes) - to the point that even Tesla, in Europe, provides Mennekes-compatible plugs on its car (but with a proprietary alternative DC charging mode) instead of the weird proprietary stuff they use in the US.
Meaning that instead of relying on 1 single company providing a network of charging stations, like the supercharger network, you see lots of diverse solutions popping up everywhere. Some highway rest area start to feature standardised charging columns (with Mennekes / DC / Chademo tripple compatibility, just to be sure). Parkings start to have dedicated EV spots where you can leave your EV charging while you go shopping / working / etc.
But then again, the fundamental different driving habit are making a significant difference. - in Europe most of the drivers are actually fully aware that they don't drive that much around. Have a diverse charging network slowly growing organically is totally acceptable. (for most of the typical EV uses "I'll just let it charge in parking" is completely acceptable) - in US, people seem obsessed trying to drive ridiculous distances in one go, and the supercharger network has been as much significant as the big batteries in helping fight range anxiety (the network of supercharger has helped show that you can realistically drive a Tesla to travel across the whole country).
I think the problem is that the storm was so huge that they expected possible flooding in the backup sites also.
Actually, the backup site is in Russia. No way a typhoon in Texas would cause any problem in Moscow.
It's the contrary, they decided that the building itself wasn't at risk from the storm (unlike the personnel) and thus the safest thing was to ask the personnel to travel safely there before the storm and stay safely inside during the storm as mission control kept doing the most important and urgent maintenance tasks.
First, ob disclaimer (in Bones' voice) : I'm a doctor, Jim, not an orbital mechanics expert.
all by itself unless acted upon by an outside force.
- That's the whole purpose of the ISS being in such a low orbit : there's still a significant (although extremely tiny) outside force in the form of atmospheric drag. This has the immense benefit that this orbit is more or less cleaned of debris thanks to the drag. But it also means that the ISS needs to regularly do compensations.
- There might still be other outside force that are necessary : I suppose that once in a while, ISS must dosmall correction of its orbit to be sure not to be on a collision course if the debris observation network notices one not yet cleared debris of significant mass/size. (Now, I don't have the faintest idea how much time in advance are these dangerous objects detected, and thus how long is the window of opportunity to do the manoeuvre so that later, once the ISS and the debris are in close vicinity, the risks of collision have been successfully reduced under the acceptable limit by the earlier manoeuvre).
- Last but not least : I'm pretty sure that the maintenance of the complex equipment (including all the various life support systems) is not just a lone astronaut's job but is a big team collaboration involving all the people directly in the station AND all lots of people on the ground. The non availability of ground crew can probably make some class of problems that might happen much more difficult to solve for the small crew currently in orbit.
What we haven't seen to date, though, is a company other than Tesla who can actually deliver a production electric vehicle that people really want to drive.
Like Renault ? Who's been putting electric vehicles on the market for quite some time (cooperating with Nissan) (Covering a whole range of uses cases: Twizzy, Zoe, Megan, Kangoo) Like Citroen ? Whose electric truck have been used by French postal services since the 90s ? (who needs extreme range when 20km is about as far as a your regular delivery route goes ?)
On the other hand: all of the above are European manufacturer, and Europe's densely populated cities are just ripe for EV (even back when these used to have ridiculously short ranges), and lots of country have electricity production that doesn't even rely on burning fossils.
What Tesla managed is to find a way to make it marketable in the US, mostly by a combination of getting around US' "range anxiety" problems (mostly using off-the-shelf cells for the batteries, and integrating as much as possible the production to keep the costs low even with the ginormous battery) and doing very well executed marketing campaign (they managed to make the cars look sexy in their consumers' minds).
- these classes of methods are generic. With very few problems (it's not relying on killing the patient slower than killing the cancer. It's about specifically targetting the cancer) Eventually this method could be adapted to other cancers as well. so the fact that they used it against leukemia isn't a major drawback for brain cancer. (Unlike chemotherapies which rely a lot on the general charecteristics of the cancer, to find a way to poison it with a drug faster than the drug posions the rest of the patient. Different type of cancer = different type of characteristics. Poisons will therefore work differently)
- because leukemia is well studied and has already lots of studies done with other treatment, that gives a lot data point to compare against, and to combine with.
- leukemia happens to be a slightly lower hanging fruit here. (everything happens in the blood stream, which is where you'd be injecting the modified cells). (but again, all fruits *on the same tree*. Not an entirely different tree like chemotherapies).
These are reasons to take it as a first target, before expanding to other cancers.
Most of the individual steps that are involved rely on knowledge that has been published in scientific articles and spoken about in conference (I was there !) and thus constitutes "prior art".
The most expensive part (due to regulation, certification, approval, guarantee, etc.) is putting all the steps together into a process. And that about the only thing that they can patent (because that one specifically might not have been published) the exact specific steps this process relies on.
Meaning that if such patent-trolling happens, it doesn't prevent any other company to putting together the necessary key steps (which again, are already available published knowledged, not patented) into a slightly different process (and do it enough slightly differently so that it's not covered by the above process) that can be used.
Lastly, TFS make it seem rather simple ("Hey just fix a gene in the white cell, inject it back and problem solved !") whereas in practice, it's extremely complicated and tedious steps. e.g.: it takes a lot of cultures and trial-and-error until you get the "perfect antibody" that will work, that you can then CISPR-splice back into the patients' white sells. It's not something that is quickly cobbled by a technician in a clinic's lab, it something that require a crew of biology/immunology university scientists and a whole bio-informatics division (= computers are used to detect potential best targets to accelerate the work of the lab team).
Meaning it's an expensive process. Meaning that the company that decides to implement this on a large scale commercially has still lots of money to earn (they'll be basically selling the "service" of doing all this tedious steps per patient). It's *definitely not* going to insta-kill the big pharma's golden-eggs-laying goose. Just replace one goose (chemotherapies manufacturing and selling) by another (service of adapting gene/cell therapies).
Last time I was looking up lab-created diamonds they still seemed absurdly expensive. At best I've seen quarter or half the price of mined diamonds, not 1/10. Where do you get your diamond prices from?
I was comparing both extreme of the range :
On one hand the 1:4 priced lab grown diamonds that you can find in a few on-line shops that specialize in cheap lab diamonds (the one you mention having seen).
Compared to the over-expensive marked-up things from big brands (the Tiffany, Cartier, etc.) who sell you the whole "experience of entering [brand's name] shop". They have marketing department that are even more devilish than Apple and have managed to persuade a sizeable portion of the population that it's worth paying ~ x2 (*) for the same product that has the same atoms of carbon in the same place (compared to less known other brands selling mined diamonds)
That gives you my total approximation of 1:10. Again for the same lattice of carbon atoms. No physical/chemical differences. Only the "a lab made it by carbon deposition" (with better control of what goes in. If you put the right price you can get the exact (lack-of) colour that you would want) vs "compressed by high pressure deep in the Earth and then extracted by an-almost slave whose probably going to eventually die while working in the mine" and "we slaped it inside a box with our magic trademarked name on it, that we sell in special shop that have our magic trademarked name on them, by staff that gives you our copyrighted smile".. But the end product is the same with the same arrangement of carbon atoms. But somehow one is worth time time more than the other.
Thank you marketing.
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(*) not my numbers. There are some guys who managed to get a hidden camera, get the characteristics, and compare the market prices.
I figure if clear gem diamonds actually cost a few bucks to make in a lab, we'd be able to buy it for less than 5k$ / carat from china.
Marketing.
Try to get a *non-chemistry geek* girl friend to accept the idea of a lab-grown engagement ring. Even if you can produce lab-grown diamond that are "more perfect" (better color, less structural defects) than mined, at 1/4 of the price on the final ring (last time I checked), she'll be somehow persuaded that these are "different" and "not the real deal".
Then even have a look at the "big brands", like Tiffany, Cartier, etc. who sell you even more expensive rings - still the same quality of diamond in the ring, but they sell it for even more than other mined diamond because they sell you their "brand's experience". These guys are even more devilish than Apple.
Even if we produce objects whose carbon atoms are all exactly in the same place (and in real life: actually in sosmewhat "better places", given that you can control better the impurities and can guarantee 100% carbon - i.e.: better color), the marketing department selling you the "going to [brand's anme] shop experience" will still manage to convince that they are the "only real deal".
It's literally 1:10 price difference for the same carbon atoms in the same position betwen a lab diamond bought from the internet and the same in a big brand's shop. But somehow part of the population has been brainwashed to prefer the latter.
(Oh, and by the way, the labs that grow the diamond seem for now to all be in the occident. Asia is where the diamond are getting cut and where most of the buying selling market is happening).
extremely important question : - does this one also support the Graffiti 1 alphabet (100% single-stroke letters ? i.e.: "T" is written as a left-handed reversed gamma, "K" has the shape of an alpha/fish, "X" has the shape of an left-facing reversed alpha/a fish, etc. and "A" has a "/\" triangle shape) - or is it only Graffiti 2 alphabet (the thing that Palm release during the PalmOS 5 due to an ongoing suit over "jot" and which used multi-stroke letters, i.e.: "T" is written as "-" and "|", "K" is written as "|" and "<", "X" is written as "/" and "\", etc. and "A" has a cumbersome "a" shape).
Overwriting PalmOS 5.x's Graffiti 2 libraries, with PalmOS 5.0 Graffiti 1 has always been the first thing I'd do after acquiring a device (or after resetting the RAM storage).
I owned a few Palms. Never had one with a physical keyboard.
During the PDA-era, most PalmOS devices and all Palm-made device were using Graffiti as an input. (There *was* some Psion-shaped text processor featuring a hardware keyboard and very wide screen. Some Sony Clie had a clamshell design revealing a keypad) The only hardware keyboard where the various W-shaped foldable by Stowaway/ThinkOutside - officially supported by palm and some even branded. (I love them, I still use the bluetooth one with my modern Jolla smartphone).
It's during the smartphone-era that Palm started to make keyboards : Thungsten W, then the various Centros, and subsequently their Windows-powered smartphones. (all having physical keypad in the place normally reserved for Graffiti)
The webOS-powered smartphone had all vertical sliding keyboards.
When the iPhone came out, to me it just looked like a tiny, spruced up Palm. Never thought it would be the killer device it turned out to be.
Specially since at the beginning, Apple insisted on keeping their platform close, not allowing 3rd party developpers, and insisting that all needed to by webapps accessed on-line from within the browser. Whereas Palm had a very vibrant ecosystem of 3rd party PalmOS applications. (To the point that during the Motorola 68k to ARM transition, Palm made sure to keep back compatibility, and when they designed webOS, Palm made sure to have the "Classic" emulator - except by then the platform started to dwindle).
But on the other hand, it's Apple. They have such a huge fanboi userbase, coupled with geniuses in the marketing department : they'll be able to take over any market just by slapping their logo on the product. And the people will be praising them for "inventing" the decade-old product that they replaced.
Love them, hate them, defend them to death, but their OS was primitive even by Windows Mobile 2002 standards;
Which OS are you talking about ? PalmOS - which of course was much older than Windows Mobile, so it's more a Captain Obvious quote than anything. But which was still extremely quick and responsive for the tasks that the PDAs covered (calendar, notes, etc.)
or webOS - which basically was a full blown GNU/Linux under the hood, with a nice UI with a very practical "stack of card" metaphor to manage the multitasking. Supporting both heavy Linux apps with direct gfx (SDL), or lightweight web-apps written in HTML and Javascript and running locally.
It didn't work for Nokia (Microsoft put its shil in to kill it) and it didn't work for Microsoft (microsoft mobile phone is dead).
The comparison is very valid :
- Nokia did fire their engineers (the guys responsible for the Maemo/Meego platform, and the N700/N800/N900/N9 line of devices), Microsoft basically acquired them for the brand name recognition. And the upcoming return of "Nokia"-branded phone have only the name "Nokia" in common.
- webOS technology is lost somewhere in the meandre of LG's smart TVs. (And that's not even mentionning Palm Source's OS which we haven't heard much about since their "Access Linux Platform") These upcoming phone have only the brand name "Palm" in common.
But barring a wide variety of apps in the palm ecosystem (not exactly the device's fault),
Actually it was the devs slight oversight.
They were pretty much aware that being part of an app ecosystem is critical. (The success of Palm devices was partly due of the incredible success of PalmOS apps - the switch from Motorola 68k to ARM did pay attention to keep backward compatibility for this exact reason).
It's just that, back when they started developing webOS, Android was still a small emerging platform, and iOS, hadn't even started to allow 3rd party apps (it was all about having only web-apps opening in the browser). On the other hand PalmOS was still a major relevant platform. So they did build support for major app ecosystems : the first webOS was to support an emulator (called "Classic") able to run PalmOS apps.
It's just that, by the time webOS device started to get market presence, PalmOS wasn't relevant anymore, and Android started to gain traction as the common app ecosystem. HP/Palm did eventually try to get support for android apps by contracting OpenMobile. But then HP decided to pull the plug on the whole webOS thing and the rest is history.
I also miss LCD screens that worked in direct sunlight. I take that over colour any day.
Tapwave's Zodiac screen was exceptionally good from this point of view. - a CFL-lit colour LCD, giving a nice picture in indoor conditions. - the best ever screen readibility in the sun. Yes, the colours weren't that much distinguishable under strong light, but the screen was perfectly readable.
(It's the kind of sun-compatible screens that was used at some point in time by Nintendo for the GBA).
Yes, Palm (back when they were working on Palm OS 5) did buy BeOS as a potential source of technology and component for future OSes. But back then, they ended up only using it for the background(*) music-playing capability. And that part of the company (developpers of Palm OS 5) was then spun of as a separate entity (Palm Source) which went on trying to develop further OSes (spent time failing to make "Cobalt", then developped "Access Linux Platfrom" which hasn't seen much use)
As HP did buy *Palm*, I don't know if there's any asset of BeOS that they got acquired there. Also buy now, BeOS is extremely old tech that didn't see much development. Haiku is as close as it gets to a modernized BeOS.
Meanwhile Linux (either as parts of GNU/Linux stacks, like SailfishOS, or Google's weird Andoid userspace) has proven to work and is what chipset manufacturer are targetting when releasing their drivers (i.e.: crappy binary forks of whatever happened to be the kernel version in the android du jour). So even if HP did still have BeOS assets and did decide to use them to develop a smartphone OS, they will have to develop everything from the ground up including all the drivers.
Over all, webOS was a very decent OS. In my personnal experience (Palm Pre, then HP Pre3) - the problems weren't as much the OS it self, as that it needed a decent hardware to manifest itself. (the first Pre had a little bit limited memory and would be very restricted if you didn't enable compressed swap. CPU wasn't that powerful either which did complicate matter a bit, specially when most apps are actually web apps written in HTML and Javascript). Pre3 was finally a decent platform where the OS could shine. Only HP decided to shut down everyting a mere few days after the european-only release. But on Pre3 webOS did indeed shine.
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(*) Note: PalmOS was an almost single-task only OS - task switching was actually "state saving, closing app, starting another app, reload its saved state" - helped a lot by the fact that devices back then only used flash for the boot rom and were 100% (battery-) RAM for everything else. Yes, long before all this "non-volatile RAM" revolution, we already had OS using byte addressable storage. That's unlike WebOS which was a full blown GNU/Linux, with full multi-tasking capability, and a nice visual interface based on a "stack of cards" metaphore to help organise it. (Back at a time where iOS and Android had respectively either no 3rd party apps or basically the same approach to app switching as PalmOS) Modern-day SailfishOS is about the only smartphone OS that did a similar good job on multi-tasking (and BTW uses the same "light weight" approach to apps : most are QML+Javscript). But unlike webOS hasn't found an elegant solution to the "two-levels of multitasking" (i.e.: individual apps vs. tabs inside the app) - webOS 2 had a nice solution. Everything is a separate card *including down to the tabs themselves*. But by default, those tabs are grouped in "hands of cards" (but still can be moved around). Meaning that the same metaphore of getting around between tasks is used to get between tabs in tasks (with the added benefit that you can freely move cards around, meaning you could actually group together tabs belonging to different tasks). This is unlike every other modern smartphone OS, in which you use one metaphor to manage apps themselves (a grid in Sailfish OS and Windows, cards in iOS and Android), and then need to use whatever tabbing system the app themselves use.
They're hungry. If they weren't, they wouldn't have ordered a pizza. Odds are that they'll walk out to the curb to get it.
On the other hand, they didn't go take the pizza themselves from some take-away (= actually very popular here around at several italian restaurants. much better quality than Domino, btw).
Instead they specifically order that the food be brought to their place.
The reasons that they choose not to go out to a take-away might still apply and be reasons not to get to the car.
e.g.: they live in an upper floor of a stairs-only/no-elevator appartment complex, or the elevator is broken, and they can't walk easily (one leg still in a plaster cast after some accident).
I can see several situations where "you need to walk out to the car" defies the whole idea of getting your food delivered to your door.
what's to stop logitech (or whoever) from making a keyboard / mouse that allows programmable functions?
Answer: Hardware cost.
Nearly* all modern keyboard with "programmable macros" are actually plain fucking stupid bland keyboard with a few extra hardware keys, and it's the driver that came on the CD which was packed with it that installs a Windows-only software on the PC that handles the macros.
i.e.: plug the exact same keyboard on Linux (or any console which supports USB keyboards), and you won't get your recorded macros, you'll simply get a "extended key 145 pressed" signal on your OS.
Now nothing prevents you from using a keybinding system to do macros on *that* platform (there are certainly key macros software for GNU/Linux and Android).
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* : But I've actually have seen keyboard with HW macros. The most complicated I've ever seens was a macro board from Saitek that was able to read barcodes printed on the back of the paper keyboard overlay and automatically upload new macro settings. That one would work with any console accepting its PS/2 connector (e.g.: DreamCast) or a PS2-to-USB converter box (e.g.: a Wii with the updated firmware supporting USB keyboards)
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Did Thinkpad die?
Yes, around the time IBM decided to branch it off and sell it to Lenovo.
(Though, the thinkpads themselve didn't. They are all still running. They'll probably survive a nuclear holocaust).
Cell phones typically don't use the accelerometer to determine if a person is {...} moving fast.
Please try to explain that to all the people who install podometer-like(*) apps on their smartphones and then feel obligated to post about how much steps(**) they've done in a day, or where and how long they have jogged.
Now that the wii suit has been won, I think all the accelerometers-using apps are next.
(And probably they could twist at least some smartwatches manufacturer into it too, for similar reasons)
--- /.-geek, I would presume "walking" *is* "moving fast"
(*) - Yes some app rely on actual separate devices talking over some wireless signal. Other work (less reliably) using only the accelerometers.
(**) - on the scale of an average
does this mean sterile vodka jello shots could be used to kill cancer?
For a punny understanding of "shots" - yeah that's exactly the idea.
And I'm sure that, although they'll never public admit it, the inventors got the idea while doing actual vodka jello (body?) shots at one of their medical students' wild party.
(ah.... brings fond memory of my studies...)
If I had terminal cancer I'd take highly experimental over certain death, you're only risk averse when it usually ends well. When it'll end badly you're ready for any "Hail Mary" save. {...} but any reasonable experiment I'd be in on...
Also, from what I've heard (disclaimer: oncology is not my speciality), patient close to the end also tend to have altruistic views :
even if it doesn't end up saving *them personally*, taking an experimental treatment might still help advance the science and who knows who might end up being saved later thank to what was learned by this experimental treatment.
Some are thus happy to save any live, even if it ends up not being their own.
seems like the worst that can happen here is that you get mighty drunk, granted I've had bad hangovers but I'd rather go out drunk as a skunk than wait for the cancer to get me.
The doses needed to be injected without this "gel improvement" are usually massive.
It's not only getting drunk/hangover from what leaks in the general blood stream system.
It's alcohol still being at very high level nearby the tumor and destroying healthy tissue and organs around the tumor
(painful, problematic and potentially dangerous).
Akin to a badly calibrated radiation therapy.
i.e.: you're literally burning the patient in this failure mode (though think "chemical" burn rather than garden variety of fire)
The potential of this gel is similar to what computer modelling helped improve radiation therapy.
Making sure the treatment arrives exactly where it should, and is only working where needed.
Re:systemd here we come!
All we need now is Wayland
Congratulation, you've successfully described Jolla's Sailfish OS....
and the Unity desktop
...and Canonical's attempts at Ubuntu Touch.
If, as an author or anyone else, want some data to be inaccessible after your death, just strongly encrypt it with a long password you don't write down anywhere.
There might have been a few technical problems with this strategy.
(As his Alzheimer's disease had progressed, Terry was complaining of not being able to type).
Keep your money people.
Nononono ! Actually let them buy this marketing crap.
Them buying the newer TV helps driving the price of the pannels down.
Meaning that soon, you'll be able to have affordable prices on 7 680 x 4 320 PC monitors,
on which you'll be able to plug your huge multi-GFX-cards/multi-CPU workstation to get actual 4320p content.
(And as a bonus, you'll save on your winter heating bill once you turn your monster-computer on).
Crypto currencies help solve one problem :
- As there is no central authority controlling the transaction, there no one who could block the transaction just because they object to it (eg.: PayPal and Visa could conider pornography amoral and refuse to process the payment. But there's no central "Bitcoin Inc" that could decide what you do with the money. - Just as nobody would prevent you to put cash directly into someone else's hand)
But they open another problem :
- Nearly all cryptocurrencies rely on consensus to validate transaction. Meaning that every single node on the network will have a local entry stating that you paid a certain sum to the sex performer on your webcam. Although you're not mentioned by name/real identity, it's not beyond the capability of some big player (government-level agencies) to recoup the data and manage to guess who you really are.
Your privacy is toast (by design of the system).
Some 3 letter agency might come knocking at your door and try to blackmail you once they've discovered your irresistible fetish for scatophile midget porn.
And Europe's killer achievement is having managed to have a standard for charging (Mennekes) - to the point that even Tesla, in Europe, provides Mennekes-compatible plugs on its car (but with a proprietary alternative DC charging mode) instead of the weird proprietary stuff they use in the US.
Meaning that instead of relying on 1 single company providing a network of charging stations, like the supercharger network, you see lots of diverse solutions popping up everywhere.
Some highway rest area start to feature standardised charging columns (with Mennekes / DC / Chademo tripple compatibility, just to be sure).
Parkings start to have dedicated EV spots where you can leave your EV charging while you go shopping / working / etc.
But then again, the fundamental different driving habit are making a significant difference.
- in Europe most of the drivers are actually fully aware that they don't drive that much around. Have a diverse charging network slowly growing organically is totally acceptable. (for most of the typical EV uses "I'll just let it charge in parking" is completely acceptable)
- in US, people seem obsessed trying to drive ridiculous distances in one go, and the supercharger network has been as much significant as the big batteries in helping fight range anxiety (the network of supercharger has helped show that you can realistically drive a Tesla to travel across the whole country).
I think the problem is that the storm was so huge that they expected possible flooding in the backup sites also.
Actually, the backup site is in Russia. No way a typhoon in Texas would cause any problem in Moscow.
It's the contrary, they decided that the building itself wasn't at risk from the storm (unlike the personnel) and thus the safest thing was to ask the personnel to travel safely there before the storm and stay safely inside during the storm as mission control kept doing the most important and urgent maintenance tasks.
First, ob disclaimer (in Bones' voice) : I'm a doctor, Jim, not an orbital mechanics expert.
all by itself unless acted upon by an outside force.
- That's the whole purpose of the ISS being in such a low orbit : there's still a significant (although extremely tiny) outside force in the form of atmospheric drag.
This has the immense benefit that this orbit is more or less cleaned of debris thanks to the drag.
But it also means that the ISS needs to regularly do compensations.
- There might still be other outside force that are necessary :
I suppose that once in a while, ISS must do small correction of its orbit to be sure not to be on a collision course if the debris observation network notices one not yet cleared debris of significant mass/size.
(Now, I don't have the faintest idea how much time in advance are these dangerous objects detected, and thus how long is the window of opportunity to do the manoeuvre so that later, once the ISS and the debris are in close vicinity, the risks of collision have been successfully reduced under the acceptable limit by the earlier manoeuvre).
- Last but not least : I'm pretty sure that the maintenance of the complex equipment (including all the various life support systems) is not just a lone astronaut's job but is a big team collaboration involving all the people directly in the station AND all lots of people on the ground. The non availability of ground crew can probably make some class of problems that might happen much more difficult to solve for the small crew currently in orbit.
What we haven't seen to date, though, is a company other than Tesla who can actually deliver a production electric vehicle that people really want to drive.
Like Renault ? Who's been putting electric vehicles on the market for quite some time (cooperating with Nissan) (Covering a whole range of uses cases: Twizzy, Zoe, Megan, Kangoo)
Like Citroen ? Whose electric truck have been used by French postal services since the 90s ? (who needs extreme range when 20km is about as far as a your regular delivery route goes ?)
On the other hand: all of the above are European manufacturer, and Europe's densely populated cities are just ripe for EV (even back when these used to have ridiculously short ranges), and lots of country have electricity production that doesn't even rely on burning fossils.
What Tesla managed is to find a way to make it marketable in the US, mostly by a combination of getting around US' "range anxiety" problems (mostly using off-the-shelf cells for the batteries, and integrating as much as possible the production to keep the costs low even with the ginormous battery) and doing very well executed marketing campaign (they managed to make the cars look sexy in their consumers' minds).
Hint: check the literal meaning of "ballistic".
(here's another hint: SpaceX)
The thing is :
- these classes of methods are generic. With very few problems (it's not relying on killing the patient slower than killing the cancer. It's about specifically targetting the cancer) Eventually this method could be adapted to other cancers as well.
so the fact that they used it against leukemia isn't a major drawback for brain cancer.
(Unlike chemotherapies which rely a lot on the general charecteristics of the cancer, to find a way to poison it with a drug faster than the drug posions the rest of the patient. Different type of cancer = different type of characteristics. Poisons will therefore work differently)
- because leukemia is well studied and has already lots of studies done with other treatment, that gives a lot data point to compare against, and to combine with.
- leukemia happens to be a slightly lower hanging fruit here. (everything happens in the blood stream, which is where you'd be injecting the modified cells).
(but again, all fruits *on the same tree*. Not an entirely different tree like chemotherapies).
These are reasons to take it as a first target, before expanding to other cancers.
and a patent is awarded,
Most of the individual steps that are involved rely on knowledge that has been published in scientific articles and spoken about in conference (I was there !) and thus constitutes "prior art".
The most expensive part (due to regulation, certification, approval, guarantee, etc.) is putting all the steps together into a process.
And that about the only thing that they can patent (because that one specifically might not have been published) the exact specific steps this process relies on.
Meaning that if such patent-trolling happens, it doesn't prevent any other company to putting together the necessary key steps (which again, are already available published knowledged, not patented) into a slightly different process (and do it enough slightly differently so that it's not covered by the above process) that can be used.
Lastly, TFS make it seem rather simple ("Hey just fix a gene in the white cell, inject it back and problem solved !") whereas in practice, it's extremely complicated and tedious steps.
e.g.: it takes a lot of cultures and trial-and-error until you get the "perfect antibody" that will work, that you can then CISPR-splice back into the patients' white sells.
It's not something that is quickly cobbled by a technician in a clinic's lab, it something that require a crew of biology/immunology university scientists and a whole bio-informatics division (= computers are used to detect potential best targets to accelerate the work of the lab team).
Meaning it's an expensive process.
Meaning that the company that decides to implement this on a large scale commercially has still lots of money to earn (they'll be basically selling the "service" of doing all this tedious steps per patient).
It's *definitely not* going to insta-kill the big pharma's golden-eggs-laying goose. Just replace one goose (chemotherapies manufacturing and selling) by another (service of adapting gene/cell therapies).
Last time I was looking up lab-created diamonds they still seemed absurdly expensive. At best I've seen quarter or half the price of mined diamonds, not 1/10. Where do you get your diamond prices from?
I was comparing both extreme of the range :
On one hand the 1:4 priced lab grown diamonds that you can find in a few on-line shops that specialize in cheap lab diamonds (the one you mention having seen).
Compared to the over-expensive marked-up things from big brands (the Tiffany, Cartier, etc.) who sell you the whole "experience of entering [brand's name] shop".
They have marketing department that are even more devilish than Apple and have managed to persuade a sizeable portion of the population that it's worth paying ~ x2 (*) for the same product that has the same atoms of carbon in the same place (compared to less known other brands selling mined diamonds)
That gives you my total approximation of 1:10.
Again for the same lattice of carbon atoms. No physical/chemical differences.
Only the "a lab made it by carbon deposition" (with better control of what goes in. If you put the right price you can get the exact (lack-of) colour that you would want) vs "compressed by high pressure deep in the Earth and then extracted by an-almost slave whose probably going to eventually die while working in the mine" and "we slaped it inside a box with our magic trademarked name on it, that we sell in special shop that have our magic trademarked name on them, by staff that gives you our copyrighted smile"..
But the end product is the same with the same arrangement of carbon atoms.
But somehow one is worth time time more than the other.
Thank you marketing.
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(*) not my numbers. There are some guys who managed to get a hidden camera, get the characteristics, and compare the market prices.
I figure if clear gem diamonds actually cost a few bucks to make in a lab, we'd be able to buy it for less than 5k$ / carat from china.
Marketing.
Try to get a *non-chemistry geek* girl friend to accept the idea of a lab-grown engagement ring.
Even if you can produce lab-grown diamond that are "more perfect" (better color, less structural defects) than mined, at 1/4 of the price on the final ring (last time I checked), she'll be somehow persuaded that these are "different" and "not the real deal".
Then even have a look at the "big brands", like Tiffany, Cartier, etc. who sell you even more expensive rings - still the same quality of diamond in the ring, but they sell it for even more than other mined diamond because they sell you their "brand's experience". These guys are even more devilish than Apple.
Even if we produce objects whose carbon atoms are all exactly in the same place (and in real life: actually in sosmewhat "better places", given that you can control better the impurities and can guarantee 100% carbon - i.e.: better color), the marketing department selling you the "going to [brand's anme] shop experience" will still manage to convince that they are the "only real deal".
It's literally 1:10 price difference for the same carbon atoms in the same position betwen a lab diamond bought from the internet and the same in a big brand's shop. But somehow part of the population has been brainwashed to prefer the latter.
(Oh, and by the way, the labs that grow the diamond seem for now to all be in the occident. Asia is where the diamond are getting cut and where most of the buying selling market is happening).
extremely important question :
- does this one also support the Graffiti 1 alphabet (100% single-stroke letters ? i.e.: "T" is written as a left-handed reversed gamma, "K" has the shape of an alpha/fish, "X" has the shape of an left-facing reversed alpha/a fish, etc. and "A" has a "/\" triangle shape)
- or is it only Graffiti 2 alphabet (the thing that Palm release during the PalmOS 5 due to an ongoing suit over "jot" and which used multi-stroke letters, i.e.: "T" is written as "-" and "|", "K" is written as "|" and "<", "X" is written as "/" and "\", etc. and "A" has a cumbersome "a" shape).
Overwriting PalmOS 5.x's Graffiti 2 libraries, with PalmOS 5.0 Graffiti 1 has always been the first thing I'd do after acquiring a device (or after resetting the RAM storage).
I owned a few Palms. Never had one with a physical keyboard.
During the PDA-era, most PalmOS devices and all Palm-made device were using Graffiti as an input.
(There *was* some Psion-shaped text processor featuring a hardware keyboard and very wide screen.
Some Sony Clie had a clamshell design revealing a keypad)
The only hardware keyboard where the various W-shaped foldable by Stowaway/ThinkOutside - officially supported by palm and some even branded.
(I love them, I still use the bluetooth one with my modern Jolla smartphone).
It's during the smartphone-era that Palm started to make keyboards :
Thungsten W, then the various Centros, and subsequently their Windows-powered smartphones.
(all having physical keypad in the place normally reserved for Graffiti)
The webOS-powered smartphone had all vertical sliding keyboards.
When the iPhone came out, to me it just looked like a tiny, spruced up Palm. Never thought it would be the killer device it turned out to be.
Specially since at the beginning, Apple insisted on keeping their platform close, not allowing 3rd party developpers, and insisting that all needed to by webapps accessed on-line from within the browser.
Whereas Palm had a very vibrant ecosystem of 3rd party PalmOS applications. (To the point that during the Motorola 68k to ARM transition, Palm made sure to keep back compatibility, and when they designed webOS, Palm made sure to have the "Classic" emulator - except by then the platform started to dwindle).
But on the other hand, it's Apple. They have such a huge fanboi userbase, coupled with geniuses in the marketing department : they'll be able to take over any market just by slapping their logo on the product. And the people will be praising them for "inventing" the decade-old product that they replaced.
Love them, hate them, defend them to death, but their OS was primitive even by Windows Mobile 2002 standards;
Which OS are you talking about ?
PalmOS - which of course was much older than Windows Mobile, so it's more a Captain Obvious quote than anything.
But which was still extremely quick and responsive for the tasks that the PDAs covered (calendar, notes, etc.)
or webOS - which basically was a full blown GNU/Linux under the hood, with a nice UI with a very practical "stack of card" metaphor to manage the multitasking. Supporting both heavy Linux apps with direct gfx (SDL), or lightweight web-apps written in HTML and Javascript and running locally.
It didn't work for Nokia (Microsoft put its shil in to kill it) and it didn't work for Microsoft (microsoft mobile phone is dead).
The comparison is very valid :
- Nokia did fire their engineers (the guys responsible for the Maemo/Meego platform, and the N700/N800/N900/N9 line of devices), Microsoft basically acquired them for the brand name recognition.
And the upcoming return of "Nokia"-branded phone have only the name "Nokia" in common.
- webOS technology is lost somewhere in the meandre of LG's smart TVs. (And that's not even mentionning Palm Source's OS which we haven't heard much about since their "Access Linux Platform")
These upcoming phone have only the brand name "Palm" in common.
But barring a wide variety of apps in the palm ecosystem (not exactly the device's fault),
Actually it was the devs slight oversight.
They were pretty much aware that being part of an app ecosystem is critical. (The success of Palm devices was partly due of the incredible success of PalmOS apps - the switch from Motorola 68k to ARM did pay attention to keep backward compatibility for this exact reason).
It's just that, back when they started developing webOS, Android was still a small emerging platform, and iOS, hadn't even started to allow 3rd party apps (it was all about having only web-apps opening in the browser). On the other hand PalmOS was still a major relevant platform.
So they did build support for major app ecosystems : the first webOS was to support an emulator (called "Classic") able to run PalmOS apps.
It's just that, by the time webOS device started to get market presence, PalmOS wasn't relevant anymore, and Android started to gain traction as the common app ecosystem.
HP/Palm did eventually try to get support for android apps by contracting OpenMobile.
But then HP decided to pull the plug on the whole webOS thing and the rest is history.
I also miss LCD screens that worked in direct sunlight. I take that over colour any day.
Tapwave's Zodiac screen was exceptionally good from this point of view.
- a CFL-lit colour LCD, giving a nice picture in indoor conditions.
- the best ever screen readibility in the sun. Yes, the colours weren't that much distinguishable under strong light, but the screen was perfectly readable.
(It's the kind of sun-compatible screens that was used at some point in time by Nintendo for the GBA).
Yes, Palm (back when they were working on Palm OS 5) did buy BeOS as a potential source of technology and component for future OSes.
But back then, they ended up only using it for the background(*) music-playing capability.
And that part of the company (developpers of Palm OS 5) was then spun of as a separate entity (Palm Source) which went on trying to develop further OSes (spent time failing to make "Cobalt", then developped "Access Linux Platfrom" which hasn't seen much use)
As HP did buy *Palm*, I don't know if there's any asset of BeOS that they got acquired there.
Also buy now, BeOS is extremely old tech that didn't see much development. Haiku is as close as it gets to a modernized BeOS.
Meanwhile Linux (either as parts of GNU/Linux stacks, like SailfishOS, or Google's weird Andoid userspace) has proven to work and is what chipset manufacturer are targetting when releasing their drivers (i.e.: crappy binary forks of whatever happened to be the kernel version in the android du jour).
So even if HP did still have BeOS assets and did decide to use them to develop a smartphone OS, they will have to develop everything from the ground up including all the drivers.
Over all, webOS was a very decent OS. In my personnal experience (Palm Pre, then HP Pre3) - the problems weren't as much the OS it self, as that it needed a decent hardware to manifest itself.
(the first Pre had a little bit limited memory and would be very restricted if you didn't enable compressed swap.
CPU wasn't that powerful either which did complicate matter a bit, specially when most apps are actually web apps written in HTML and Javascript).
Pre3 was finally a decent platform where the OS could shine. Only HP decided to shut down everyting a mere few days after the european-only release.
But on Pre3 webOS did indeed shine.
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(*) Note: PalmOS was an almost single-task only OS - task switching was actually "state saving, closing app, starting another app, reload its saved state" - helped a lot by the fact that devices back then only used flash for the boot rom and were 100% (battery-) RAM for everything else. Yes, long before all this "non-volatile RAM" revolution, we already had OS using byte addressable storage.
That's unlike WebOS which was a full blown GNU/Linux, with full multi-tasking capability, and a nice visual interface based on a "stack of cards" metaphore to help organise it. (Back at a time where iOS and Android had respectively either no 3rd party apps or basically the same approach to app switching as PalmOS)
Modern-day SailfishOS is about the only smartphone OS that did a similar good job on multi-tasking (and BTW uses the same "light weight" approach to apps : most are QML+Javscript).
But unlike webOS hasn't found an elegant solution to the "two-levels of multitasking" (i.e.: individual apps vs. tabs inside the app) - webOS 2 had a nice solution. Everything is a separate card *including down to the tabs themselves*. But by default, those tabs are grouped in "hands of cards" (but still can be moved around). Meaning that the same metaphore of getting around between tasks is used to get between tabs in tasks (with the added benefit that you can freely move cards around, meaning you could actually group together tabs belonging to different tasks).
This is unlike every other modern smartphone OS, in which you use one metaphor to manage apps themselves (a grid in Sailfish OS and Windows, cards in iOS and Android), and then need to use whatever tabbing system the app themselves use.
They're hungry. If they weren't, they wouldn't have ordered a pizza. Odds are that they'll walk out to the curb to get it.
On the other hand, they didn't go take the pizza themselves from some take-away (= actually very popular here around at several italian restaurants. much better quality than Domino, btw).
Instead they specifically order that the food be brought to their place.
The reasons that they choose not to go out to a take-away might still apply and be reasons not to get to the car.
e.g.: they live in an upper floor of a stairs-only/no-elevator appartment complex, or the elevator is broken, and they can't walk easily (one leg still in a plaster cast after some accident).
I can see several situations where "you need to walk out to the car" defies the whole idea of getting your food delivered to your door.
what's to stop logitech (or whoever) from making a keyboard / mouse that allows programmable functions?
Answer: Hardware cost.
Nearly* all modern keyboard with "programmable macros" are actually plain fucking stupid bland keyboard with a few extra hardware keys,
and it's the driver that came on the CD which was packed with it that installs a Windows-only software on the PC that handles the macros.
i.e.:
plug the exact same keyboard on Linux (or any console which supports USB keyboards),
and you won't get your recorded macros, you'll simply get a "extended key 145 pressed" signal on your OS.
Now nothing prevents you from using a keybinding system to do macros on *that* platform (there are certainly key macros software for GNU/Linux and Android).
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* : But I've actually have seen keyboard with HW macros.
The most complicated I've ever seens was a macro board from Saitek that was able to read barcodes printed on the back of the paper keyboard overlay and automatically upload new macro settings.
That one would work with any console accepting its PS/2 connector (e.g.: DreamCast) or a PS2-to-USB converter box (e.g.: a Wii with the updated firmware supporting USB keyboards)